Invasion: The complete three book set

by J. F. Holmes

  Ahead, the massive doors concealed in the side of the mountain slowly slid open, revealing the last rays of sunset. She would have preferred the sight of a rising sun, but this would have to do. The pilot slowly increased her thrust, rolling the plane forward, gently working the rudder pedals and brakes to line up with the now wide-open doorway.

  When the fighter plane cleared the entrance, she pushed the throttles forward while standing on the brakes. As much as the fighter pilot in her wanted to hit afterburners and rocket down the highway, Kiyomi Ichijou knew that it would be a waste of precious fuel. Instead, once all seven planes of her flight, two F-22s and five of the Japanese version of the venerable F-16, called that they were clear of the doors, she let the brakes go and increased thrust.

  The vibration of the engines coursed through her body, and acceleration pushed her back in her seat. She yelled with joy as the front wheels left the ground, and that blissful feeling of being airborne again enveloped her, back in her true element.

  Behind her, one of the F-16s suddenly dropped out of the air, several hundred feet off the ground and at several hundred miles per hour. It crashed in a fireball of burning jet fuel, and no chute appeared. Her joy was tempered by their first casualty as she watched it in her rear facing camera, and she said a silent prayer for the man, another good friend.

  They flew low over the ocean, at an easy six hundred knots, towards what had been dubbed “Yankee Station”, the place where the submarines were to launch. She wished desperately for an AWACS radar plane to vector them in. Even as they approached, she saw the first series of contrails leaping from the ocean as the missiles reached up for the Invy orbital.

  Her call was the first radio traffic to have been heard on Earth in more than a decade. "For your Empress, for our ancestors, and for us all, let’s do this! Sixteen element, stay and cover the submarines. Remember, their interceptors are not really designed for atmosphere. We can out maneuver them. KEEP THEM OFF THE SUBS! Meinu,” she called to her wingman, “follow me on high altitude intercept.”

  The Raptor leapt upwards, finally set free, almost wingtip to wingtip with her partner. Climbing higher and higher, the sky started to darken before they tipped over and leveled out. She activated the AN/APG-77 radar, giving up the F-22’s stealth advantage out of necessity, and immediately got a return, 327 km out, approaching at a closing speed of almost three thousand kph.

  “TALLYHO! Six, no, eight Invy approaching at angels 30! Vector 195 degrees, engaging!” The call was for the benefit of the older F-16s, which didn’t have the data link the F-22s shared.

  Captain Kiyomi Ichijou, set free from the burden of being Empress, dove at the enemy of her world with a fierce, exultant joy in her heart. Even as she did, far to the southwest, another sun blazed forth, and she screamed "BANZAI!!!!" into the radio, and loosed a pair of AMRAAM missiles, the first shots of taking back Earth, or dying out as a race.

  Never mind that it was a nuclear weapon; she had her Rising Sun.

  Chapter 53

  When you pull a high G turn, things happen to your body. Depending on which way you’re turning, blood is forced to your head, or down to your feet. Either way, you can black out, from too much blood, or not enough. G suits help, squeezing the blood back up to your body, to your heart. So does clamping down on your muscles, grunting with effort as you try to wrestle with the controls of your plane. Fighting the stick, while trying to keep situational awareness, watching your radar for the enemy. Scanning X, Y, Z axis and time, calculating fuel, listening to your computer scream warnings in your ear about the damage your plane has suffered.

  “Jiko, he’s on my ass and my ailerons are damaged!” called her wingman.

  “Hold tight, Meinu, I’m on my way. Give me a scissor left to drag him into my sights!”

  Captain Kiyomi Ichijou slammed her F-22 hard right, gaining speed as she tilted downward, lining up for the shot as blue plasma bolts zipped past her canopy. Her wingman rolled desperately, trying to lead the Invy fighter into Ichijou’s sights. She held it a bit too long, and the plane disappeared in a fire ball, just as her commander blew the tail off the Invy fighter.

  The Empress cursed, rolling hard and hitting afterburners, diving towards the sea as more plasma bolts ripped by her. At the bottom of her dive, she leveled out barely ten feet above the waves, then cursed at herself. The Invy fighter worked on antigravity, and had no intakes to ingest spray and flame out. On the other hand, they weren’t as maneuverable as the fifth generation fighter plane, and she screamed again with joy as the alien ship failed to level out and plowed into the sea.

  Hauling back on the stick, she searched the skies and her display at the same time. In the distance, a hundred kilometers away, radar showed multiple tracks as her F-16’s tried to keep the remaining Invy off the submarines. Watching her fuel gauge, she made up her mind. Her plane was worth far less than one of the few precious subs, still firing their payload of surface to space nukes at the orbital stations. She pushed the throttle down, dumping fuel into the engines, and rocketed forward, already far past the speed of sound.

  The radio crackled into life as she launched her last AMRAAM from fifty klicks out. It leapt away from her plane and tracked unerringly into the second to last Invy, leaving just one alien ship in the sky, and one Japanese fighter. The area was covered in smoke from the surface to space missiles fired by the American submarines, and she lined up to take the shot as it disappeared in to the clouds. Her HUD display showed the infrared signature of the ship, not as hot as a jet, but bleeding red from the air friction on the edges of its wings. Behind it and above was the white hot flare of a CEF fighter.

  “Jiko, I’m out of missiles, and Winchester on guns,” called the F-16 pilot.

  The F-22 started to vibrate, almost imperceptibly at first, then growing noticeably. The first Invy interceptor she had tagged had scored a plasma bolt in the head on pass, and bits of her plane’s skin had been shedding throughout the fight. Now, at supercruise, more than a thousand miles per hour, structural members were being exposed, and her airstream was being disturbed, creating a vicious loop that tore away more of her fuselage.

  Closer. Closer. Closer. She didn’t know the range of the plasma cannon they had jury rigged in the nose of her fighter, but she assumed it was line of sight. Her first rounds tracked towards the ship as it headed towards the center of the ring of subs, and she grinned slightly, the exaltation of the kill and victory coursing through her veins.

  With the third shot, the cannon stopped firing, and the emergency overheat lights flashed on her HUD, along with the other warnings. The plane was vibrating like crazy, and she dropped her speed below the sound barrier as the shaking got worse. Even as she broke through the clouds of smoke, she saw the Invy ship in front of her.

  “Empress,” called the F-16 pilot as his plane arched over in a dive that far exceeded the max speed of the fifty year old fighter, “I go to glory! Remember me!”

  “I shall, Hayoto, I shall,” she whispered into the radio.

  A glowing light dropped from the Invy interceptor and fell in an arc towards the ocean, even as the last F-16 plowed into it, and both exploded in a flash of antimatter. The light hit the water, sank for a few seconds, and then the surface of the sea leapt upwards, a huge circle a kilometer across rose up for her plane.

  Ichijou broke left, for Japan and home, dumping fuel into her afterburners and clawing for altitude. There was a loud BANG! from behind her, and alarms started to scream. Glancing at the rear view plasma screen, through the flickering image she saw that she had left the circle of disturbed water behind. Ichijou leveled the plane out as the vibration turned into a violent shaking.

  Hitting full flaps to bleed off speed, the veteran pilot waited until the air speed indicator read only three hundred knots, despite the violent shaking, despite the desperate desire to punch out as fast as possible. Reaching one hand down between her legs and tucking the other in tight, she felt around for the ejection handle, grip
ped it, and pulled. The canopy bolts blew and the airstream hammered into her, even as the rocket under the seat ignited. She grunted as the seat was blasted upward, arched, and then she fell outward and away, the drogue chute pulling the main out.

  As the Empress drifted downward, she looked toward the sky, and thanked the gods that her helmet visor was down. In the blueness flashed a light bright enough to compete with the sun overhead. It was followed by an even bigger explosion, as the main antimatter reactor on the Invy orbital went critical and detonated.

  Time. They had given the ground forces time.

  Chapter 54

  Being Empress of Japan doesn’t really do squat for you when you’re floating in a life raft, hundreds of miles out to sea, thought Captain Ichijou. She laughed to herself, thinking of the airs she had sometimes put on when it had gone to her head.

  The raft in question was floating in a sea of dead and stunned fish, for which she was grateful. A phobia of sharks had followed her since watching “Jaws” as a child, and she had scrambled up into the raft almost before her flight suit had soaked through. To her sorrow, she also saw many dead dolphins, and in the distance, the bodies of several whales bobbed to the surface. The concussive effect of the anti-matter depth charge must have been enormous, and she wondered about the submarines.

  In the sky overhead, the afterglow of the station detonating had vanished, but she still had to worry about sunburn when the sun rose. Next step was inventory of what she had in order to survive. Water, of course. She had about a gallon of it tucked in various pockets, and there was a distiller in the survival kit. Food wouldn’t be a problem for a while with all the dead fish.

  She pulled out the clicker, a metal object about the length of her middle finger that, when twisted, would make a CLICK that would be audible for miles underwater, calling any dolphins nearby. Called a “Burrill”, it had been named after its inventor, a US Navy C-130 crewman who had transitioned to working with the Cetaceans. She had never had to use it before, although some of the Scout teams did to call them in to the shore. In addition there was a battery powered sonar pinger to guide any subs to her position. For some reason the dolphins always ignored them, like they did many electrical powered devices.

  Looking around at all the dead mammals, she zipped the Burrill back in her pocket, deployed the sonar beacon, and sat trying to figure out how far from the epicenter she had travelled before bailing out. More than fifty kilometers, more or less, at the speed she had been going. Hopefully some of the submarines had made it out OK; there was still a war to be fought.

  Overhead, she watched as first one orbital crested the sky, and then disappeared. It was followed almost an hour later by another, so that meant there were two surviving. Who held them, she had no idea, but she thought she saw, before the second one disappeared over the eastern horizon, the telltale sparks of orbital strikes entering the atmosphere. When next they came around, there was nothing to see, just the lights moving through the sky.

  Eventually, Ichijou found herself, well, bored. She floated on the gentle swells and a slight breeze pushed her eastward, away from the coast of Japan, hundreds of miles to the northwest. Every now and then the pilot placed the Burrill in the water and clicked it, but no response. She had come down from the adrenaline rush of air combat, and now, always the fighter pilot, grew restless, and actually concerned. If any kind of storm sprang up, the one man raft would be useless, and she would quickly drown. Ichijou would have given anything to know how the battle had gone, and was angry that she might die without knowing.

  Suddenly, there was a bump on the bottom of the raft, and panic ran through her at the thought of a shark. The image of the little boy in Jaws flashed through her mind, getting swallowed whole on his raft by a giant Great White.

  Instead, a grey, grinning head popped out of the sea, and started clicking and squealing furiously. Around the dolphins’ body was a harness, with several odd bits of equipment strapped to it. She wondered if this was one of the US Navy’s accompanying Cetaceans, and it was confirmed by a sleek tattoo on its skin, showing, of all things, Popeye the Sailor Man. In fact, the dolphin was covered in tattoos, now that she looked, some of them very crude. The mammal rolled over on (his?) side, displaying a box with a button, and the English language letters, “PUSH AND HOLD TO TALK.”

  She leaned over the raft, being careful not to slip out, and pushed. The dolphin burst out in an excited chatter, and the words sprang from a speaker. “HUMANS COME SKYBIRD FLY HUMANS COME DARWIN HEARS COME SOON MAKE READY!”

  “Thank you, Darwin,” she said, and clicks and squeals came back out of the box, but in her own voice. “Domo, Darwin. May you play forever in the seas!”

  “KILL MANY MANY FAR SKY PEOPLES DARWIN FAMILY HELP ALL WHERE CAN!” came the reply, and her ally slipped beneath the waves.

  Twenty minutes later, she heard it herself, the drone of airplane propellers, and her heart leapt inside her. The pilot took a pen flare from her harness, held it skyward, and fired it. The light arched up into the sky, and the pitch of the rotors changed. In a moment, a huge shape appeared in the darkness, a school bus sized fuselage slung between two enormous propellers.

  The MV-22 Osprey slowed and rotated its wings to assume VTOL mode, and gently spun so that its rear facing ramp hovered over her. An orange clad para-rescue crewman swung down in a harness, to slowly settle into the water next to her.

  “Are you injured?” he yelled over the rotor wash, and she shook her head no. He helped her put another harness under her shoulders, and the two were slowly winched upward and onto the ramp.

  Another crewman helped her take the harness off, and there, standing on the deck, holding out a blanket, was Major Takara Ikeda. She let him wrap the blanket around her, and maybe leaned into him a little too hard, reveling in human contact. For a second, he dared to return the embrace, then seemed to awaken, hurriedly helping her strap in. As they climbed towards cruising speed, the Scout Team leader filled her in on the tactical and strategic situation.

  As she changed out of her wet clothes, putting on a dry spare uniform, the Osprey thundered northward, forty year old airframe rattling like a garbage can being blown by a hurricane. Ichijou and Ikeda each plugged into the intercom, and Ikeda started talking.

  “Two destroyed, one, well, disabled, one functional and in Invy control,” he said, and watched for her reaction. She had none, just waited for him to continue.

  “Station One you saw, I assume. Station Four blew to hell when the British tried to board it. Station Two is under control of the Americans, but the Invy scrambled the CPU, and locked it. So they can’t operate any of the weapons systems. Their shuttle was holed, so they’re stuck until one of two things happen.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, they have pilots, but no shuttles. We have two shuttles that we’ve captured, but…”

  She finished for him, “No one qualified for Trans-atmospheric operations.”

  “Except yourself. Meanwhile, Station Four is still active. We either take our tech people to Station Two, or try to take Station Four.”

  At that, she looked directly at him. “Operation Dover?” she asked.

  “The fake radio transmitters absorbed most of the missiles, but they also took out all the communications at the Cascades base, except the ansible. So they can’t talk to the ground units in the Western US.”

  “I don’t really care about that. The ground war in other parts of the world is not, right now, our problem. I am only concerned about Japan.”

  He said nothing, only looked away. “Tell me,” she said, “Your Empress orders you.”

  Sighing, he answered, “Headquarters took over fifteen orbital strikes, heavies. It’s gone. Maybe some of the lower levels, but the hangar is gone, and half the mountain collapsed inward.”

  Her people. Never mind the facility. Her people. “And now? What are they hitting now? The villages? How many have we taken?”

  “Out of seventy eight Invy
villages in Japan, eleven have reported secure. Fighting continues in thirty two, and we have no communication with seven. The remaining villages are in Invy hands.”

  “Civilian casualties?” Her people.

  “Unknown at this time. Light, hopefully.”

  “Hope is not a plan, Takara, as the Americans say. Why no more orbital strikes?”

  “We think they’re out of weapons. The Americans have observed activity at Tyco crater, it’s possible they are preparing to re-arm, probably within three hours.”

  “So we must stop them. And I am tired already.” She leaned her head against the Major’s shoulder, and in a moment, was fast asleep. He dared not move for the rest of the trip.

  Chapter 55

  They landed at a captured Invy space field, directly across from several Invy shuttles. Of the five originally there, two were smoking wrecks, one was missing, and two sat side by side. Around them lay bodies of Wolverines and Japanese CEF Main Force soldiers. With a jolt, the Osprey set down, and it woke up Ichijou. She sat up and looked wildly around before realizing where she was. Sheepishly, she wiped off some drool from her face, noticing that it had soaked into the Major’s uniform.

  “So, you see I am only human after all, Takara,” she laughed.

  He smiled, and said, “I never thought you were anything BUT human, Empress.” He held her gaze, but flushed all the same. Her green eyes, so unusual for a pure Japanese, held him, and he felt himself grow hot.

  “I forget myself, sometimes. Thank you,” she said, and reached out to touch his face. Then it was her turn to grow flustered, and she turned and walked off down the ramp, hoping that he hadn’t seen her own skin grow darker with a rush of blood. She felt like an idiot teenager.