Invasion: The complete three book set

by J. F. Holmes

  “Roy, opposite doorway; Epstein, get to work. Dev, see if there’s any way you can raise comms with command. If not, Jonas, haul ass back to the shuttle and tell them we’re secure and have control of the Gate control room, give them the lowdown on our electronics. Get some spares.” Padilla stationed himself by the hole to the cafeteria, watching to see if anyone followed them through.

  Like many Special Forces soldiers, Jake Jonas was a sparely-built man. In his mid-twenties when the Ivy came, a decade of hard rations and hard living had made him whipcord thin and pure muscle. He was the best runner on the team, and thoroughly competent. Shedding his pack, he nodded as he passed Padilla, and made his way cautiously back through the area they had demolished.

  Even the best, though, sometimes make mistakes. In his eagerness to fix a bad situation, he failed to completely clear as he stepped through the breach. Half-blinded by the harsh sunlight, some sixth sense warned him just before the Wolverine leaped from behind a rock a few feet away. It hit him broadside as he turned to fire, both of them falling into the dust, ripping claw stabbing deeply into his stomach. The CEF soldier grabbed at his knife as the jaws closed on his face, and he stabbed upward, over and over again.

  After a minute, two corpses lay embraced together in the harsh sunlight, red human blood and darker red Invy blood intermixing in a growing pool. Team Two was cut off, at least for now.

  In the control room, Doctor Morano ran her hands over the console almost lovingly. “Hey, Doc,” called Devereaux, “don’t be a fucking creep. It’s just a machine.”

  She shot the soldier a cold look of displeasure at being interrupted but said, “Yes, but what a machine it is! This is a hundred years more advanced than anything I’ve come across on Earth. Why, the physics alone is…”

  “Can you operate it?” called Padilla.

  “Of course not, you idiot, I’m a xenobiologist, not a physicist!” said Morano.

  “Then why the hell did we bring you?” asked the Team leader angrily.

  “Probably because those intellectually-stunted dwarves you call leadership just assumed I could, and never asked,” she replied.

  Padilla wiped his hand across his face. “Roy, you were a physics major in college. See what you can do. Dev, cover that door.”

  “Got it,” said the Cajun, while drawing a hand across her throat in the direction of the scientist. Morano, however, was already busy looking at the dead Invy corpses.

  Specialist Roy started examining the controls, slowly tracing his fingers across the Invy script. “I dunno, Chief, the Doc might be right. Me trying to understand this is kinda like trying to teach Corporal Thog how to read. The capacity is there, but I might not have enough of a general understanding of the concept.”

  “Just do what you can,” said his boss, and they sat and waited.

  Chapter 118

  The reactor building, housed in twenty-foot-thick walls, left no option for Team Three but to go up and over. To go through the front door, so to speak, would be to enter into the funnel of a kill zone, with overlapping baffles built to contain any explosion. Instead, the plan was to go through the thinner roof, which was designed to blow off and vent any explosion straight up. Of course, if it blew while you were sitting on it, what was left of your body would probably achieve orbital velocity.

  Sergeant Major Shimada lifted the directional EMP when they were five hundred meters away and set it wide angle. He set it on his shoulder, aimed at the middle of the building, and pressed the trigger. In theory, every sensor within a forty-five-degree arc for a couple hundred meters would short out. In theory.

  There was no need to speak, everyone had worked as a team for years. They moved out in a dead run, piling up against the wall. Two pulled security on each side, and Shimada uncoiled a rope with a grapnel. Three twirls, and he threw it, needing two tries to make a catch. He pulled tight and leaned all his weight on it. Ikeda grabbed hold, clipped on a rachet, and started pulling himself up, hand over hand. Each click of the rachet stopped him from falling back, and two feet from the top, he stopped and pulled out a drone, the same type as Ahmed’s. A quick flick over the edge, and it whirred into life. The video feed showed nothing, and he pulled himself up onto the roof. The team quickly followed him, lifting a heavy package up on ropes. Two men went to opposite sides of the roof with sniper rifles as the sergeant major emplaced the package on one corner. Beside him, Corporal Abe anchored pitons into the ceramic and concrete roof, attaching ropes.

  “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” Shimada called as he set the timer. All five scouts ran to the opposite corner, opened their mouths, and put their hands over their ears. With a thunderous CRACK! the shaped charge detonated, blowing a four-foot-wide hole in the roof. The team ran back, and Shimada and Ikeda snapped onto the ropes. They launched themselves face fist into the dust filling the crater.

  On their way to the Eastern Coast of the US for this mission, the JDF Scout team had stopped at the ruins of San Francisco. A helo had taken them to the destroyed Invy base at the Presidio, and they had spent hours walking though the remains of the two antimatter reactors there, marveling at the holes punched through the concrete by the big guns, and saluting the Missouri as her new captain frantically readied it for battle. The general consensus was that they were all built to a standard pattern, and they had based their attack on that. If they were wrong, well, now would not be the time to find out.

  They were, in this case, right. Beneath the hole, about ten feet down, were the shattered remains of a crosswalk used to access the top of the reactor. Below that was the floor of a large open room. In essence, the entire building was just a containment unit for the reactor itself. It was, as the Americans liked to say, “like shooting fish in a barrel”. They swept the room, being careful to avoid the reactor housing itself, gunning down Octos and other alien species, not a Wolverine or Dragon in sight.

  “You know what to do,” said Ikeda, after they’d secured the only exit. Two men, Sergeant Yimisha and Corporal Abe, were to secure the only entranceway. Sergeant Major Shimada and Technical Specialist Ito rushed to the controls and started to try to gain mastery of them.

  Ikeda himself went back to the top of the stairs and pulled himself up onto the roof; radio coms were almost impossible through the twenty-foot walls. He tuned into the teams’ net to hear Agostine call his report in and waited to see if there was anything further. Then he keyed the mic and said, “Team Three, objective secured.”

  He moved to the parapet and flipped up the magnification on his sight. A kilometer away, Team Four was digging in. He tried to focus on the main barracks building, but it was beyond the shortened horizon. A column of smoke had started to rise in that direction; further on, he saw a stream of tracers drift lazily down through the air, though he knew he was only seeing one in three of the supersonic depleted-uranium rounds. In return, as the Empress pulled out of her diving gun run and rose higher, plasma weapons on the edges of the crater reached out toward her. Ikeda held his breath, heart pounding, looking to see the flash of her ship being hit and disintegrating, but nothing came. Though his spirit cried out, he knew she would have to fight her battle alone. A satisfied “HAI!” came to his lips, though, as an enormous explosion lit up the sky from the direction of the airfield.

  He turned and slid back down the rope to the reactor and hurried down to where Shimada and Ito were trying to work the controls. They only had a very rough idea, though Ito could speak Dragon and read the Invy writing. “Do you need any help?” he asked them, knowing that to give orders would only annoy the competent professionals.

  “Yes, Major, keep an eye on this gauge here,” said Ito. “If it goes to orange, please tell me.”

  “What should I do after that?” asked Ikeda.

  Both Shimada and Ito laughed, and the tech said, “Kiss your ass goodbye!”

  “Thank you for those instructions, Technician Ito. I will keep it in mind.”

  “Of course, Sir. Anything to be of service.”

>   The whole time they were talking, both of his soldiers had kept working, punching in commands on the unfamiliar keyboard. At one point, things DID start flashing red, and Ikeda noticed that Ito had sweat forming on his brow. The younger man punched a key, the lights turned green again, and he smiled weakly.

  The next command, however, was even more disturbing. When Shimada punched ENTER, the artificial gravity disappeared, to be replaced by the moon’s one sixth of Earth normal. They all felt it, and there was a shout from the doorway. Shimada hit another key, and the gravity instantly turned to what felt like five times Earth normal, causing Ikeda to crash to the floor. His face was smushed into the remains of a dead Octo, and the smell made him gag.

  “Quit…screwing…around!” he grunted as Ito, the least heavily encumbered, managed to reach the keyboard and enter something. Gravity returned to Earth normal, and all three men clambered back up, Ikeda wiping at his face.

  “I think I have it now!” said Ito, and he brought up a holographic display of the base. Stabbing his finger at each of the four plasma cannons displayed caused them to turn from green to red. Ikeda breathed a sigh of relief and hoped they weren’t too late.

  Chapter 119

  On the nose of the Tigershark, someone had painted a picture of her pilot, anime style, with huge eyes and a flashing sword, charging forward. Underneath was scrawled, in English, “Divine Wind”. She had thought to paint it out, since she had no intention of crashing herself into anything, but in the end, she’d left it. After all, it had a much older association.

  Right now, the fighter pilot needed all the divine help she could get, and she prayed desperately as she fought the unfamiliar controls. The Tigershark should more properly have been named “the Committee”, because it flew like it was designed by one. The gun of an A-10, mounted to the body of a space-based Manta bomber, given wings to operate in atmosphere. It handled like a frigging pig, especially at the low speeds needed to do gun runs. Several times she’d felt like the ship was going to actually stall and fall out of the air when she fired the 30mm cannon.

  Her missiles had failed to launch after the first two, probably affected by the sudden temperature changes from space to atmosphere. The gun, though, had worked to perfection, shattering the parked Invy shuttle craft lined up in a neat row on the field. What she’d missed, though, was the two interceptors on a separate lift pad. Both had lifted off as she passed overhead.

  Flipping over, she dove at them head on, unleashing the cannon in a quick snap shot. One had gone down, but the other was on her ass. Streaks of plasma shot past her as she desperately swung the pig of a craft from side to side, trying to avoid as well as gain an advantage. She wished desperately for her lost F-22, which could have outmaneuvered the Invy interceptor in its sleep. Instead, she was forced into the unfamiliar role of being the quarry. “Think, think, think,” she ordered herself as a hole was blown through her starboard wing. The thinking pilot often won over the instinctual one, if you could plan far enough ahead.

  Besides the fighter on her tail, there were four batteries of anti-ship cannon which had reoriented away from space and were taking potshots at both of them. Not very accurate against a small interceptor, but then accurate didn’t matter of they got lucky. Apparently they didn’t give a shit about their own ship, either, blazing away at both human and Invy.

  She threw herself into a high G turn, then momentarily she felt everything go light in her hands. The sensation threw her situational awareness off, then it stopped, to be replaced by an enormous pull that yanked the controls out of her hands. The Tigershark went into a flat spin, and she grunted with effort, just trying to hold on. Her hand tried to reach the ejection levers over her head, but she was pinned to the side of the cockpit by both the spin and the increase in gravity. The world flipped crazily between the grey lunar surface and the stars overhead, then suddenly she was floating, gravity back to normal, and her ship responding to the controls.

  No shouts of joy this time, plasma was reaching up at her from one of the ground-based defenses, and now single rifle shots were laying a barrage in front of her plane. Somewhere out there, too, was the other interceptor. She craned her neck around, looking, and instinctively threw her ship to one side. Then, pulling back hard on the stick, the Empress dumped fuel into her afterburners and rocketed straight up. It was time to end this foolishness with the other Invy craft; the guys on the ground needed her to be something more than a distraction. She watched the altimeter spinning up, counting off in meters. Glancing behind her, she saw that the interceptor was gaining behind her, catching up on full burners itself. “Come on, you shit bird, let’s go. Come and get me.”

  The Tigershark was heavy and ungainly, and slowly losing the race. She fought the urge to swerve from side to side, wanting the Invy to think she was running for space. She cut the engines off and on, trying to play the wounded animal. Closer…

  “NOW!” she yelled at herself, completely cutting the engines, using the nose thrusters to spin the aircraft around in the low air pressure, and ramming the throttle up to maximum. She was slammed back against her seat, unable to move as she slowed. For a moment, she felt the same feeling she had gotten when, minutes earlier, she’d gone through the gravitic barrier. Then as she slowed, she passed through the shield and was out in the darkness of free space.

  The Invy fighter wasn’t so lucky. It plowed into the barrier at greater than a thousand KPH, exploding in a blinding glare. She gently eased her ship back through the divide and dove at the base, gradually gaining speed, letting gravity do the acceleration. As she fell, she looked for concentrations of Invy troops or armor. The antiaircraft had stopped firing, but she still fell like a leaf, swaying from side to side in an unpredictable pattern, just as she had done entering Chinese airspace over the Spratlys.

  Before she’d descended halfway, still over fifty kilometers in the air, her sharp eyes detected movement headed toward the occupied buildings. More than a dozen vehicles, including what looked like armor and troop transports. This was what the Tigershark had been built for, and she smiled to herself as she set about the methodical act of killing.

  In her heads-up display, she placed the pip of the main gun aiming spot at the head of the column and watched as her gunsight slowly rose to meet it. She covered the distance in less than a minute, and ground fire started to reach up toward her, flashing by. Individual Wolverines with rifles, riding in open-cabbed trucks, no doubt civilian, so to speak.

  The pip lit green, and she squeezed the trigger on her stick. Again, the ship seemed to stagger in the air, and a tongue of flame erupted from the nose. She felt her seat shake and watched as the lead tank exploded, followed by two APCs and a truck. She banked right, arching up and around, and a plasma bolt got a one in a million hit on her left fuel tank. It exploded, shredding her wing and sending the craft into a spin.

  “Dammit, not AGAIN!” she cursed, and grabbed the ejection handles. Unlike a regular aircraft, the Tigershark blew out the entire cockpit section, a feature copied from the old F-111 Aardvark. The explosive bolts detonated, and a roaring flame lit under the cockpit, hurling it sideways as the plane disintegrated. It lasted long enough for gyros to stabilize horizontally, then cut off. Captain Ichijou fell weightless toward the Moon, not in control of anything. Chutes deployed a thousand feet off the ground, then a retro rocket set her gently on the surface.

  She unlatched the canopy, disconnected from the interface, and unlatched her survival kit, followed by an M-6 carbine. “Better than the ocean,” she muttered, and climbed up on top of the wreckage to see where she was.

  In the distance, she could see a column of smoke from where the Mavericks had hit the barracks. To the right, much further away, was more smoke from the airfield. Opening a map of the crater, she drew out and figured the angle between the two. That put her at this spot, placing a finger on the map and then looking south. She could barely see, just behind a small rise, the top of the reactor building, about three kilome
ters away. That meant Team Four would be on that rise. She reached for her radio, only to find the cord to the handset broken off. “Piece of shit lowest bidder!” she cursed and started jogging.

  Chapter 120

  “I can’t believe I’m on the fookin’ Moon, mate.” Private Atkins took a can of compressed air and blew away the shitty dust that seemed to be sticking to everything, making sure the Barret was clean.

  “Be happy you aren’t shooting in one-sixth gravity,” answered Sergeant Vlonski.

  Atkins put some more oil on the bolt, then wiped it clean. “That would just mean I could bloody hit targets six times further away.”

  “Aye, you’re a cocky bastard,” said Sergeant McClellan, scanning ahead through a small periscope to see over the crest of the rise. “Captain, I’ve got movement from yon barracks. Looks like two tanks, two APCs, couple of trucks. Call it a company-sized element.”

  His boss motioned for McClellan to hand the scope over, watched intently, and then listened. “There’s the Jappo doing her thing,” he said as the Tigershark screamed down from on high. “Like a bloody banshee, that one.”

  “I don’t give a shite what she is, as long as she kills more of them bastards.” The look in McClellan’s eyes held a depth of hate that Captain MacIvers knew would drive him insane, if he lived long enough. Still, a dead wife and child…

  He watched with satisfaction as the long tongue of flame erased the first three vehicles, the long BRAPPPPPPPPP echoing off the crater walls. She curved up and away as individual plasma bolts tried to track her, but he knew hitting a moving plane with a rifle was almost impos- “SHIT!” he exclaimed. “They got her!”

  Despite not wanting to give their position away, all five members of the team, even Thog, stood to watch the ship come apart. They actually cheered when the cockpit separated in a jet of flame, and Thog thumped his chest. It fell rapidly, and they barely saw the chutes deploy before the retros fired and it hit the ground behind a small rise.