Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  They encountered more survivors as they tried to reach Virginia Beach. Some of the survivors hadn’t seen any gang members, or hadn’t been willing to admit to it; others had been lucky to escape with their lives. One man's wife had been torn from him and added to a slave camp of women, run by the Neo-Draka Gang. He had been forced to flee for his life; his wife’s screams followed him as he fled. Fardell didn’t know much about the Neo-Draka, but he already knew that they were going to suffer when the battlesuits caught up with them; they sent the survivors back towards the support formations and headed further into the city.

  “The skyline is not what it used to be,” Lieutenant Gunnard Fredrickson said. His voice was awed; the onboard computer in the suit projected an image of the entire area as it had been, a day before. The skyscraper skyline had been altered; some of the skyscrapers had fallen, others had remaining, but looked utterly ruined; he glanced at them through his telescopic visor and saw broken windows – which the designers had sworn blind couldn’t be shattered, he thought irrelevantly - and damaged buildings. “I think that…”

  A shot cracked out and bounced off the armour. Hostile-engagement programs immediately snapped into life; the sniper was pinpointed as hiding inside a ruined building on the very edge of town, risking his life to shoot at the soldiers. The computers suggested that the weapon used had been a light hunting rifle, practically little more than a kid’s toy; he was almost tempted not to respond.

  He remembered the crying husband and fought down temptation. “O’Malley, take it out,” he ordered. O’Malley needed something to do besides collecting information that terrified everyone who heard it. The soldier lifted his plasma cannon and fired a single plasma pulse into the building, which shattered with an overwhelming burst of fire and force; Fardell guessed that the gang-bangers had stored some of their ammunition in the building. “Good shot…”

  He activated his loudspeakers. “THIS IS THE UNITED STATES ARMY, OPERATING IN AN EMERGENCY ZONE,” he thundered. Every schoolchild was taught those words, along with what they had meant, and still meant whenever there was a major emergency. Looters and criminals would not be tolerated in an emergency zone; Fardell would be quite within his rights to shoot them all on sight. “YOU ARE ORDERED TO COME OUT UNARMED WITH YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR. YOU WILL NOT GET A SECOND CHANCE!”

  There was a long pause. Another building started to spit bullets at them. “Take it out,” Fardell ordered shortly. Fredrickson did the honours. “COME OUT UNARMED OR YOU WILL ALL BE KILLED!”

  He saw the first man – no, a boy; he couldn’t have been more than fourteen – advance slowly with his hands in the air. Fardell felt nothing, but contempt; the boy had doubtless enjoyed the chance to push people around, but had folded at the first real challenge and would spend the rest of his youth breaking rocks in a jail. Maybe some of them would be offered the chance to join the army, but he doubted it; they might well be too far gone for any real development. They trembled as they walked forward; he wondered how they would have felt if they had been ordered to come out naked, as had happened during some stages of the Wrecker War. Suicide bombers had posed too much of a threat to worry about male and female dignity.

  “You, you and you, guard them,” Fardell ordered, using the speakers on his suit to ensure that the prisoners heard them. “If they give you any trouble, mow them down at once.”

  The prisoners looked cowed as their guards ordered them to remain on the ground with their hands firmly on their heads. After one prisoner started to protest and was shot, the others reminded quiet…and shaking in their shoes. Fardell left them under guard and led the remainder of his men probing forward into what had once been an industrial estate before the waves had come. They found the women sitting in a hall, their hands handcuffed to railings, but otherwise unhurt; the Neo-Draka hadn’t had any time to carry out the more violent aspects of their repulsive philosophy. They hated women, they believed that women existed purely to serve the strongest men; whoever the original Draka had been, he was sure they had been nothing like their future counterparts.

  “We’re the army,” he announced, to general cheers. “You’re safe now!”

  They waited long enough for the remains of the police force to appear and drag the gang members off, before advancing further into the ruins. The Neo-Draka hadn’t been the only gang to try to use the devastation for their own advantage; some of the gang members they encountered sounded almost astonished that the army had reacted so quickly to their challenge to the government. Fardell didn’t tell them that their orders hadn’t been cut with the gangs in mind, although it was one solution that everyone might have liked; a force of battlesuits could have cleared out the gangs without much bother. If some had been caught earlier…

  The rain broke with a crack of thunder; moments later, they were almost swimming through mud as the rain fell down, splashing everywhere and making movement almost impossible. He’d never seen so much rain before; he wanted to pull his entire unit out of the city before the sudden changes in the weather caused more devastation. The visibility fell sharply as the company fell back, finding clear ground before encountering a FEMA truck that had somehow survived the tidal wave and had been deployed with an escort of armed soldiers. The specialists had established a protective tent; he took the chance to take a break from his suit. The suit remained to one side; he wasn't worried about someone trying to steal it with the armed guards and the suit’s own security measures.

  “Have some soup,” Mitchell Sartin said. The FEMA officer had introduced himself, and then returned to his work of trying to coordinate the rescue and recovery operation, something that seemed almost impossible in the chaos. Fardell sipped the chicken broth gratefully. “You did well with the gangs.”

  Fardell nodded. Sartin looked old enough to have served in Florida during the aftermath of Hurricane Erica, a Category Five storm that had cut a swath from Miami to Pensacola in September 2082. It had been the worst natural disaster to hit the US in half a century, as measured by cost and deaths, and its chaos had almost made the asteroid strike look normal. Almost. There was real strength hidden in his body, but his hair was thinning and Fardell privately placed his age in the late forties. Florida had been ugly, the northern Miami suburbs in particular; Cuban gangs had fought black and Haitian factions before the then-President had overruled the State Government and sent in the Marines. The nightmare had still lasted months.

  “Thanks,” he said. He wanted more soup, but there was very little to spare; the armoured soldiers would be returning to the disaster area – the untamed area – as soon as they were refreshed. The aliens might not have intended the strikes, but they had overloaded all of the emergency procedures carefully planned during the Wrecker War. They would be lucky if there wasn't mass starvation in the days ahead; they’d pulled thousands of people out of the wreckage, right along the coast, which meant that millions might have died, or had been swept out to see, or…the rain kept pounding down, almost deafening him. “How bad is it elsewhere?”

  “Bad,” Sartin said shortly. “That said, it’s not as bad as Florida; most areas are pulling themselves together pretty well to try to organise emergency services before they collapse completely, and a lot of people are managing to help others, as long as there are no gangs around. It’s going to be bad, but we can save a few thousand people who would otherwise have died…”

  Something echoed though the sky as the rain slowly started to fade away. There were still clouds, and the unnatural heat, but Fardell was sure that there was something else out there, something oppressive. He pulled himself upwards and staggered to the edge of the tent, looking out up towards the dark skies, which had started to glow. He wondered, grimly, if someone had fired a nuke, but instead there were strange lights flickering in the sky, strange powerful lights that seemed to be coming closer…

  He could hear them now, a roaring sound that beat at his ears until his implants automatically stepped down their reception; all around him, men and w
omen fell to the ground, covering their ears, though some tried to remain upright as the sound beat down on them. He ran for his suit, opened it and climbed in as the sound started to change; he was sure, now, that there was movement within the lights, strange shapes coming down towards the coastline.

  “Now, that’s not fair,” he protested, screaming at an uncaring sky. There was no way that anyone could doubt what was happening. “Oh, come fucking on…”

  The aliens had begun their invasion.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Aftermath, Take Two

  Camp David, Maryland

  Washington had been hammered.

  The President had watched alone, unwilling to face others, as the images were beamed down into the bunker. He had known – he had always known – that one day he might be in the bunker, safe from attack, while a Wrecker nuke or a global war devastated the city above, but the asteroid had been worse. He had ordered people to remain in their homes; millions of American citizens had just died…and it had all been his fault. He could have issued orders for people to flee to high ground, he could have had refugee camps prepared…hindsight showed him, all too clearly, just what he had failed to do.

  My fault, his mind chanted, time and time again. My fault…

  He wasn't sure how long he had sat in the comfortable office – even in the bunker, the government insisted on keeping Cardona in comfort – staring at the nightmare. Millions of people had died, millions more rendered homeless; the President knew that America could feed the refugees, but he didn’t know where they could house them, or even if the aliens would let them have the time to move people before they invaded, or before they decided there were plenty more asteroids that could be dropped on Earth. The handful of weather reports he'd heard suggested that the weather was going crazy; the President had read enough classified reports to suggest the entire world would be swept by wind, rain, and worse. The only possible advantage was that it might make it easier to operate without the aliens seeing; cloud cover would provide some camouflage from prying alien eyes.

  A picture of Michelle and their two children sat on the desk; his family had been sent to one of the command bunkers out in Nevada as the aliens approached. Michelle had wanted to remain with him, but he’d insisted… but right now he wanted her back with him, or even to hear her voice. Radio and satellite communications were down; the landlines were being devoted to trying to pull the nation back together and gaining some reports from the rest of the world. James Cardona perversely half-hoped that America had taken the worst of it; that way, the other Great Powers would still be available to fight the aliens. He doubted it; if an asteroid had come down in the Mediterranean, both Europe and the Caliphate would have taken a beating, while a Pacific Ocean strike would have hit China, India, Australia and the West Coast of the Americas. The death toll could be in the billions.

  A voice, at the door to his office. “Mr. President?”

  He looked up. Colonel Garth looked haggard; his face tired and worn. “Yes?” the President asked shortly. “What’s happened?”

  “We have some basic reports from the rest of the world and FEMA,” Garth said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  Cardona nodded and followed Garth through one of the main control centres and into the briefing room. The control room looked overwhelmed; the big map of America was covered with red blotches, while the overall world map was dull and dark. Information would have normally flowed in from satellites, but the aliens had killed them all; America had been blinded as never before since the dawn of the space age. The Taiwan Conflict hadn’t wreaked anywhere near as much damage. The operators seemed to be talking to each other in hushed voices, trying to drag up information that might not exist any longer, or had simply not come in yet. There were hundreds of thousands of sensors around the country, but the aliens had destroyed many of them.

  General William Denny met them as they entered the conference room. “Mr. President,” he said, shortly. Cardona wondered if his friend blamed him for the millions of deaths; he blamed himself for them. He half-wished that he had died with them. “We have some information uploaded now, and it’s not good.”

  The President had expected that much. “Forget formalities,” he said, as he took his seat. The handful of officers and political advisors sat down with him. “Just give me the full facts, or at least as much as we know.”

  Denny nodded once. “Thebases and facilities across America and the handful of facilities we have outside the country, along with the space-based defences, upload a status report every four hours to the Pentagon’s computers,” he said. “That information is then shared with the military internet and placed on open access for cleared personnel. The aliens might have wiped out the satellites, but we maintain secure landlines with most of the bases; regretfully, I must confirm that every space-based system that we deployed – and the others deployed by the Great Powers – has been destroyed by the aliens.”

  He paused. “The information makes it clear that we have been targeted directly on Earth,” he continued. “At last update, twenty minutes ago, most USAF and USSF bases were targeted and destroyed from orbit, we think with KEW weapons comparable to our own designs. Bases that actually launched missiles or engaged with laser weapons were targeted first; ground-based radars and airbases were targeted second. Uploaded information from the FAA makes it clear that civilian airfields were targeted as well; Kennedy Airport has been devastated by a strike, along with every other major airport in the country. We believe that these steps are only a prelude to a full-scale invasion.”

  His hand traced a line over the map. “The impact of the asteroids caused considerable damage,” he said, his voice quavering for the first time. “Further alien strikes have been reported; a handful of obvious army bases, including Fort Hood, were struck from orbit; the remainder seem to have been left untouched. The aliens have, however, struck at both road and rail transport networks; there are very clear reports of alien weapons striking the handful of aircraft we had in the air. I have ordered the USAF to deploy a handful of stealth fighters to determine if the aliens can actually track them.”

  The President winced inwardly. The pilots might be swatted without ever knowing what had struck them, but they needed – desperately – the information that they might provide. So many had died already; would it not be a better choice to husband what assets they had remaining to prepare for the invasion? And he said as much.

  “We need to know, as soon as possible, just how capable the aliens are,” Denny assured him. “We can’t track one of the latest stealth fighters with space-based radars; the aliens might be advanced, but they’re not that advanced over us.”

  “I see,” Cardona said. He felt weak; how had Roosevelt, Lincoln, Bush or Culpepper felt when they took the nation into war? How had they coped? “What happened in orbit?”

  Denny looked at Admiral Oshiro, who looked down. There was the tiniest trace of despair in his voice as he spoke. “They kicked our asses,” he said, his eyes grim. He’d lost hundreds of his people; the combined space forces of the Great Powers had fought in place, killed, and had been killed. “They landed a handful of sneaky blows through low-powered missiles coasting in on a ballistic course, and then engaged us directly. A handful of their large craft proved to be carriers for smaller warships; we experimented with the concept, but saw no reason to actually build a working model. It was planned for perhaps the next twenty years, when we had more in the outer solar system to protect.”

  The President smiled humourlessly. “The horse has firmly bolted on this issue,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Everyone fought bravely; no one ran or broke,” Oshiro said. “The aliens hacked away at the defences with several weapons we knew, but never deployed, including rail guns targeted on targets that couldn’t change their course or speed, and mass drivers launching kinetic weapons against the asteroids. Alien radars and lasers are better than ours; their lasers, in particular, are much more powerful and efficient than any
thing we were ever able to deploy. The net result was that the aliens gained control of LEO.”

  He looked up and met Cardona’s eyes. “They fired on the space habitats,” he said, his voice stunned. No one had seriously considered firing on the habitats; everyone knew that if it went wrong, it would be a massive own goal. “Some of them, such as Orbit One, shattered and scattered thousands of pieces of junk through space, most of which fell down into the atmosphere and burnt up. Larger chunks made it through the atmosphere and fell over Earth; I’ll let FEMA brief you on those. The asteroid habitats either shattered or fell out of orbit; at least four asteroids struck Earth largely intact.

  “The overall situation is simple,” he concluded. “The aliens control LEO and have cut us off from the moon, as well as destroying our orbital factories. We have a weak laser link to the moon, but the aliens are jamming radio, although atmospheric conditions may be playing their own role in disrupting radio signals. In short, the aliens can hit us on the planet where they like…and land wherever they like.”

  Cardona looked over at the FEMA representative. “Do I want to know?”

  “No, but you need to know,” Rosie Boyd said. She was older than the President, in her early sixties but still going strong. She’d spent time as the American liaison officer to the United Nations Global Disaster Committee; he knew she’d been trying to raise her old contacts to find out what the rest of the world was like. “It’s not good news.”