Fifth Under Captain Third Assault insisted Jayla begin teaching English lessons immediately after the Over Sergeant’s funeral, and all of the soldiers in the squad joined in, sitting around her on the ground in front of their craft, small drones on watch circling the skies around them.
After an hour of naming things and having the soldiers repeat them, Jayla ran out of things to say. She had no preparation to teach a foreigner her language. She didn’t even know how well she knew it herself.
Stumped, she fell silent. She started to cry a little and the Under Captain jumped up and put his arms around her. He waved the others off.
“Okay,” he whispered over and over again. At least he’d learned one word.
After lunch, Fifth Under Captain took her out past the craft, into the hills, with one of the small, Hrwang weapons the soldiers carried. He held it up and pointed at an old fence post and pulled the trigger. Jayla jumped as the weapon fired. When a cloud of smoke cleared, she saw the top of the fence post was gone.
He handed her the weapon, making sure it was pointed away from both of them.
Jayla raised it, aimed it at the remains of the fence post, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened and Fifth Under Captain began chuckling. He pulled his tablet out of his combat uniform leg pocket and spoke into it. The tablet translated.
“Only members of Fifth Under Captain’s squad may fire weapons under his command.”
“A biometric gun lock,” Jayla said. “We have those, too.”
Fifth Under Captain shook his head, not understanding her. She handed him the gun back.
He didn’t take it. He held up his tablet instead, then placed his hand with splayed fingers on it. Then he placed his face over it and spoke in Malakshian. He pulled the tablet away from his face, then spoke into it again and it translated once more.
“You must do as the Fifth Under Captain did, then say your designation in Malakshian.” The tablet then told her how to say Second Under Private Third Assault and she practiced it several times until Fifth Under Captain nodded vigorously that she’d gotten it right.
She placed her hand on the tablet as he did, then put her face up to it closely, watching tiny red dots resolve themselves in an outline of what the tablet saw, and repeated the words she’d learned. The tablet responded in Malakshian and Fifth Under Captain nodded again and pointed at the weapon, then toward the remains of the fence post.
Jayla aimed it again and squeezed the grip.
The gun had no recoil, but the next two feet of post disappeared behind a cloud of smoke.
“Wow,” Jayla said and started to move the weapon to inspect it closer but Fifth Under Captain’s hand shot out and grabbed it, keeping it pointed away from both of them.
“Peligroso,” he said and although she didn’t know what the word meant, she understood his actions.
“I’m sorry,” she said and started to let go of the gun, but he insisted she keep a hold of it and fire again.
Jayla destroyed the rest of the fence post and Fifth Under Captain smiled in congratulations. He showed her how to safe the weapon and they returned to the squad.
She tried to teach more English in the afternoon, but the men became as frustrated as she was at her lack of ability. A pilot running up to them saved her further embarrassment. He spoke rapidly with Fifth Under Captain and the captain transitioned quickly from student to officer, calling out commands to his men.
They cleaned up camp and loaded it into the combat craft, all the circling drones returning, and were ready to depart in less than ten minutes. Jayla had just finished buckling her seat harness as the engines wound up and she felt a little lurch as the craft appeared in the middle of the air and the engines caught. The pilots guided it to a landing and Fifth Under Captain indicated she should stay put as he left the craft with the tablet from the receptacle next to the hatch. Jayla peeked out the hatch as it cycled open, but she didn’t recognize the building outside. They weren’t at Griffith Observatory this time.
Fifth Under Captain ran toward the building and the hatch cycled shut.
The remaining soldiers checked weapons or instrumentation. Jayla felt useless. She wished she knew what was happening. She wished the Hrwang had had the foresight to teach English to more than one soldier. They really were alien sometimes.
She looked at the empty seat the Over Sergeant had normally occupied and she missed him.
The captain returned, placing the tablet back in its spot. He spoke with the pilots, then the other members of his unit. When he finished, a couple of questions were asked, which he answered, then he sat next to Jayla. He spoke into his personal tablet, which translated.
“We have an assignment. We must wait.”
“How long?”
The tablet translated for Jayla and the Under Captain answered through it, “Thirty-two point four minutes.”
Jayla chuckled. A minute was a different period of time on Hrwang than it was on Earth. She didn’t remember the conversion, but Hrwang had a hundred minutes in their hours, which were just a little longer than Earth hours, so their minutes were a little shorter. The tablet always tried to do an exact conversion. Fifth Under Captain had probably said, “Forty-five minutes,” or something like that.
“What do we do until then?” she asked.
“We wait,” Fifth Under Captain replied, then added without translation, “You learning us English.”
“You teaching us English,” Jayla corrected and made him repeat it. He did and Jayla started another impromptu lesson that lasted thirty-two point four minutes, interrupted when the pilots spun the engines up.
For the first time since she had joined the Hrwang squad, their combat craft flew to a location rather than simply jumping there. It was close by, and soldiers quickly engaged weapon systems on some unseen enemy below. She couldn’t see much of the action out the cockpit window, but she saw other Hrwang combat craft and thought perhaps she saw army tanks outside.
She decided the aliens must be fighting human soldiers in tanks below.
The craft bucked and shuddered as they fought, and the men with no duties just sat grimly within. Jayla kept her mouth shut. She felt a sudden shift and found herself floating against her seat harness.
“Are we in space again?” she cried.
Fifth Under Captain pointed forward. The view out the cockpit window was black.
“Is the battle over?” she asked.
Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple fidgeted in his command seat, waiting impatiently for the supply truck to finish refueling his formerly mothballed M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. The last time the vehicle had been used was during a desert war fought before Derek’s parents were born. The aliens had destroyed almost everything else with meteors.
Meteor bombardment proved to be the ultimate artillery, destroying bases, wrecking supply depots, and devastating rally points. Wherever two or three military units gathered, alien meteors fell.
Derek’s actual expertise, helicopter engine maintenance, quickly became a useless speciality when alien combat craft entered the atmosphere and anything in the air was shot out of the sky.
Then the aliens cratered his duty station.
He had found his way to the remnants of the Marine First Combat Regiment, where supply and logistics officers cobbled together a counterattack. An alien presence on the ground had been reported just outside of Los Angeles, and the marines were finally going to get an opportunity to fight back. Their main battle tanks, hovercraft capable of over two hundred klicks per hour, spearheaded the assault, while recommissioned equipment, like Derek’s Abrams, followed.
Derek and his crew studied their vehicle as they raced behind at a paltry seventy kilometers per hour. They practiced firing sequences when they stopped to refuel. Everything they did was academic, though. Old ammunition for the old combat vehicles was difficult to find, and Derek had only been given six rounds. The
y couldn’t afford to waste a single one. Every shot needed to count.
In the end, their slowness saved them from the trap at Griffith Observatory.
The lead elements converged on the hilltop building to find the aliens gone, the location suddenly deserted. Confused by how quickly the aliens had escaped, the soldiers sat in their vehicles waiting for someone to figure out what to do next.
A meteor appeared in the sky, visible miles away to the group of older vehicles Derek belonged to, the ones lagging the advance. The flaming rock struck the observatory, obliterating the mountain it sat on and all the marines with it, raining debris and destruction on everything in a twenty mile radius.
After that disaster, the marines came up with a new tactic.
Keep moving and stay as far apart as possible, no matter what.
A woman with a baby they rescued from a collapsed house told them that a federal agent had told her before he had left that the aliens were moving to Hearst Castle and that she and the others should flee south. No one had listened to the agent, because they had nowhere to go. Rumors were that San Diego was much worse off than Los Angeles.
Surviving officers conferred, then brought all of their tank commanders into the discussion. A first lieutenant, his eyes and attitude older than his years, conducted the briefing as the newest senior ranking officer of the Marine First Combat Regiment, ad hoc.
“According to a single, unconfirmed report, the aliens have moved to this location.” He pointed out Hearst Castle on a gasoline station road map. “It’s just over three hundred and fifty clicks from here. If the highway is still intact, we can make it there in less than eight hours, even in these old relics.”
“Do we have enough fuel, sir?” an older sergeant asked.
“Barely,” a second lieutenant responded. “If we don’t get stuck somewhere and have to idle.”
The manual in Derek’s tank told him that his M1A1 Abrams drained its five hundred gallon tank every eight hours, regardless of its speed.
“How reliable is the report of the alien’s new location?” another sergeant asked.
The commanding first lieutenant stared straight at the NCO, his eyes challenging the older man.
“It’s the only report we have,” the lieutenant said with steel in his voice. “This may be our last chance to strike at the enemy. It could be another set up, but we’ll be ready this time. We. Are. Marines!”
“Ooh Rah!” someone yelled. Others took up the battle cry. “Ooh Rah!”
The grizzled sergeant looked away, disgusted.
“Ooh Rah!” the commanding first lieutenant cried and his soldiers responded, chanting for a few minutes, then saluting him. They broke up to ready their unit for departure. Marine First Combat Regiment, ad hoc, moved out two hours later, heading north, eager for another chance at battle.
They kept moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, heading up PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, toward Hearst Castle.
Fuel trucks ran low.
The marines staggered refueling to prevent too many vehicles grouping together and presenting a target. They weren’t sure how effectively the aliens could target small groups, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Griffith Observatory had clearly been a trap, and Hearst Castle could be another, but it was unlikely they’d get another shot at the enemy like this. Soon they would have no fuel to go anywhere else anyway. If the enemy’d gone to Hearst, they were going to hit him there, trap or no trap.
The tsunami that had destroyed the West Coast had pummeled PCH, leaving much of the highway unsafe. One fuel truck, trying to pass a tank that hugged the inside of the lane, tumbled into the ocean when the pavement gave out below it. Derek stayed on the shoulder when he could.
North of Santa Barbara, the unit took Highway 154.
His tank handled the hills remarkably well, and although they didn’t travel as fast as hovercraft tanks, Derek thought they made good time. If they could strike Hearst before the aliens had time to settle in, they had a chance.
They passed the turnoff to Vandenberg Air Force Base. According to reports, the entire base had been destroyed by the flood waters and nothing remained. No one tried to raise anyone on a radio there. Too dangerous anyway. The aliens were probably listening.
A few onlookers cheered them at Santa Maria. It made Derek proud and gave him hope in the human race.
If they could just strike the aliens, do something to fight back, things would change. Humanity could win this war.
The fuel trucks emptied what they had left into the fighting vehicles at Moro Bay. Forced to follow the coastal highway at that point, only the tracked vehicles could negotiate what remained of the ruined roadway. Derek asked for a fuel level check. Two hundred and forty gallons. Just enough to get to Hearst and fight for a couple of hours.
Ammunition would run out before fuel.
The lead vehicles slowed at washed-out portions of the highway, going off road and driving through rugged hills. Derek made his driver monitor the fuel gauge closely, reporting levels to him every fifteen minutes. He also watched the sky for meteors.
The Abrams consumed fuel at the same rate no matter how quickly they traveled, and now that they traveled slower, Derek calculated he would only have an hour’s fuel left for fighting when they arrived. It would be close.
He fretted. Maybe he could just drive up the side of something, drop his six shells on the place, then run with his crew for the hills. Maybe they could make it back to Santa Maria on foot. There hadn’t seemed to be any aliens there.
Although Derek felt more alert than he ever had before, trying to prepare himself mentally for his first live combat, to prepare himself to potentially take actions that would lead men to their deaths, he wasn’t prepared for what happened while they were on a good stretch of highway north of Cambria.
Eight alien aircraft appeared out of nowhere, electricity flowing from them, enveloping the tanks in front of Derek’s, fingers of power licking out to his vehicle. The tanks didn’t explode as he half expected, but caromed wildly out of control, two running into each other and a third plowing into them.
He tried to yell at his driver over his headset, but the comm system had gone dead. Suddenly his tank peeled left and headed straight for the side of the road and toward the ocean.
Derek banged on the roof of the tank, but there was no response. The Abrams crossed scrub brush, its engines whining. He looked behind him and another tank slewed right, heading into the foothills. Another tank slammed into the pileup of armored vehicles.
Derek looked up into the skies. The alien aircraft were gone. Whatever they had done had wreaked sufficient havoc on the armored column, and they hadn’t stuck around.
Derek’s tank continued rolling. He hoped his driver would stop soon.
He popped his head inside.
“He’s lost control,” a panicked private yelled at Derek. “I think he’s dead.”
Derek stood back up in the command hatch and looked in front of them. The cliff he saw didn’t appear to be high. Only fifteen or twenty feet. But it was dead ahead and they weren’t stopping.
“Hang on to something,” he yelled and tried to pull the hatch shut and himself inside as he felt the sixty-three ton vehicle tipping forward.
Fifth Under Captain Third Assault held up his tablet and Jayla repeated her question.
“Is the battle over?”
The tablet translated and Fifth Under Captain nodded. Jayla decided it must not have gone well for whoever had been in the tanks. The combat had been too quick.
“Can we stay in space a few minutes? Can I look out the window?” she asked, wanting to think about anything else other than what had just happened.
But the sensation of falling didn’t go away.
The ship tipped forward and faced the Earth and Jayla knew she wasn’t going to get to look around. The now familiar feeling
of reentry began again and she closed her eyes.
The Abrams fell more gracefully into the water than Marine Lance Corporal Derek Temple could have hoped, and he and his gunner and loader were still alive when the tank settled on the bottom, right side up. Water began leaking in.
The driver appeared to be dead or unconscious. Either way, they couldn’t get to him. The personnel door wouldn’t open.
More water leaked in.
The tank groaned.
The three looked around them, then looked up at the roof. Derek felt like he was in a submarine movie.
The Abrams shifted.
“We can’t stay in here forever,” the gunner said.
“How deep are we?” Derek asked.
The other two shrugged. “Deep enough,” the gunner said.
“We should just be able to drive out,” the loader said.
“Okay, let’s try the driver’s door again.”
The three heaved at the door, but the driver either had it locked from the inside, which he shouldn’t have done, or the compartment was filled with something heavy.
Water.
“Okay. Let’s get out quickly and see where we’re at. Maybe his hatch is open and he already escaped.”
The loader went to the main personnel door.
“Wait,” Derek ordered. “Hold on somewhere. A lot of water’s going to come in when you drop that door.” The M1A1 rear door was designed to fall down heavily, making a ramp. Signs around the door told them to make sure no one was behind the vehicle. A door falling on someone would kill them.
He and the gunner braced themselves against the walls of the tank. The loader stood to the side, like he was going to get a jump on the water outside, and opened the combat lock. He cranked the door handle, but the ramp wouldn’t move.
“Water pressure,” the gunner said. “We have to give it a shove.”
He moved forward without thinking and shoved against the door. It gave partially way then stopped, trapped against something.
But he never see what. Seawater rushed in, shoving him to the ground and filling the compartment quickly. The loader stayed out of the way and the men couldn’t hear each other over the noise.
Derek watched the compartment fill.
“Shove harder,” he screamed and rushed the door, pushing on it as hard as he could. It wouldn’t budge.
“Is it all the way open?” he cried at the loader. The man cranked on the handle.
“That’s it.”
The gunner got back to his feet and shoved on the door. The compartment was half full. Derek figured they had less than a minute.
“We go out the hatch.”
“One at a time,” someone yelled.
Derek pointed at the gunner first, then the loader. The loader was younger. He should be able to hold his breath longer.
The gunner shook his head. “You’ll never make it.”
Derek smiled. He had an idea.
Floating in the corner of the compartment, the water was up to Derek’s chest now, was the toilet bucket. He sluiced it in the water to clean anything that may have been in it, and he turned it upside down, trapping air in it.
“I’ll be fine,” he shouted.
The gunner shook his head at him again.
The hatch wouldn’t budge; the water pushing down on it too heavy. They’d have to wait until the compartment filled and they were out of air. Then the pressures would match, and the hatch could open.
The loader’s eyes gave away his panic and Derek drew his sidearm. He wouldn’t fit out of the hatch with it holstered anyway.
“If you don’t go immediately, I’m shooting you,” he screamed over the rushing water.
The man nodded understanding.
Derek held the gun on him anyway.
Derek hoped his plan would work, but as less and less air remained, he felt less confidence. He’d done this before, in a swimming pool with a sand bucket, but there had been no consequence for failure then. His life was on the line now.
For a wild second he thought about shooting the other two crewmen and leaving the hatch on his own.
But in his remorse, he’d just kill himself anyway. Better to let the enemy do it, if it came to that.
Derek prayed physics still worked.
The ground shook suddenly, the tank vibrated madly, and Derek felt massive heat. The compartment turned into a sauna.
The three men gasped last breaths, warm, moist water turning to steam and making breathing difficult, and Derek hoped again his bucket remained filled with air. He held it knowing his life depended on it.
With the compartment full of water, the gunner opened the hatch, shoving hard against it. It opened.
If the howitzer had pivoted in the fall, it could block the hatch, but it hadn’t and the gunner pushed up through it.
Derek didn’t have to worry about the loader chickening out and not going up. The man’s head took several booted kicks as he squirmed up behind the gunner, not giving his crewmate time to get out.
Derek ducked and put his head inside the bucket, his face up as much as possible. His nose seemed to come free of the water and he breathed out a little air.
He inhaled gratefully, ignoring the urine and feces smell that made him want to gag. He took several measured breaths, then breathed as deep as he could. The air smelled putrid and his stomach roiled. But his lungs had air.
He cast aside the bucket and climbed up to the hatch.
He quickly felt lightheaded and he wanted to breathe. He knew he couldn’t, but he wanted to.
Climbing out of the hatch seemed impossible, water pushing and pulling him, the heat of it sapping his strength, telling him to give up.
He lifted his body out and tried to cock his knee on the edge, but his boot got trapped inside. He tugged and it wouldn’t move. He thought about going back down, but he had dropped the bucket. There was no turning back.
He straightened his leg and pulled up and got his boot on the edge of the hatch. He pushed off and up and the water seemed too deep and he wouldn’t make it and then he broke the surface, gulping hot air that reeked of burnt grass and fuel. The land appeared to be on fire.
“Here, Corporal,” he heard a voice yell, and he turned and saw the two crewmen. He swam roughly toward them, his boots heavy and awkward.
“Get on this,” the gunner said. The two men stood on the top of the Abrams turret, their heads just above the surface, their arms moving on top of the water to keep their balance.
“What happened?” Derek asked, relieved not to have to tread water.
“They blasted us with something big,” the gunner said, then swore. He ducked under the water, pulling the other two down with him. Derek resisted the urge to fight and went down, slipping on the turret. He got his footing, then went back up cautiously for air.
An alien craft circled the area.
“Report no surviving combat vehicles,” Fifth Under Captain instructed his pilot. He sat back in his jump seat, a grim but satisfied expression on his face. His tablet, in some kind of automatic translation mode, repeated his words in English. He angrily shut it off.
Jayla didn’t know what to feel or what to think. She just sat next to him, foreboding thoughts frightening her.
Derek led his men, the gunner and the loader, through the wilderness south, keeping his bearings by the sound of surf in the distance. They hid during the day and moved at night, stumbling and cursing in the dark, but grateful for the clouds that covered the skies and hid the moon.
By the third day, they were desperate enough for food and water that the gunner considered drinking from the ocean.
“It’ll be your funeral,” he told the man.
“Why? It’s water.”
“It’s too salty.”
“Soup is salty. I like it that way. Why isn’t the ocean the same? Just like a really salty soup?”
/>
“It’s different,” was all Derek could say.
“Why?” the gunner screamed, catching Derek off guard.
“I don’t know,” Derek shouted back and the man left them, heading in the direction of the ocean. Derek watched him for a while, not actually believing he would try to drink seawater, but when he didn’t look like he would give up, Derek chased after him, grabbing his arm. The gunner shrugged him off and continued into the waves.
He drank the water, spitting it out.
“It tastes dirty,” he cried and Derek thought, Good. He’ll be done with it. But the man drank more. “But I could get used to it.”
The loader moved toward the surf and Derek ran to him, getting between him and the water.
“We’ll find something,” he promised. “Don’t be an idiot.”
The loader looked at him, looked at the gunner enjoying himself in the water, then back at Derek.
“Don’t,” Derek pleaded.
The man’s shoulders slumped. He turned away and walked.
Derek ran back to the gunner but the man slugged him, knocking him down. The gunner stayed in the water and drank a little more.
“We’re leaving,” Derek yelled over the noise of the waves. The gunner turned away from him. Derek knew he was leaving the man to his death, to his suicide, but didn’t know what to do about it. He trudged out of the waves and soft sand and when he got to firmer ground, ran to catch up to the loader.
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