Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  “The aliens don’t shoot at stealth helicopters,” Captain Schaefer explained, as they walked quickly down the long corridors. Cardona realised numbly why Captain Schaefer hadn’t saluted the General; he was convinced that they were already in a combat zone. The Tomb Guards kept their weapons slung over their shoulders, but he was sure that they could draw them and lay down a hail of fire at the slightest notice. “We tested this with a series of flights well away from the alien landing zone; they just seem to ignore them. We have Air Force Five in a secure location; the only problem remains getting you to it.”

  Cardona found himself gasping for breath, but forced himself to move faster; he’d never been this far down in the complex before and couldn’t help but notice how the lighting flickered on and off as they passed a series of proximity sensors. There were a dozen questions on his tongue, but he held them down; there was no time to waste.

  They reached a door with enough armour to hold back a tank. “The Tomb Guards were ordered to prepare a plan to assist in the emergency evacuation of Washington of People of Extreme Importance by President Culpepper, back in the days following New York,” Captain Schaefer explained, as they entered a room with a dark tunnel at one end.

  Cardona stared at it, and then blinked as a hatch opened, revealing an armoured jeep; one of the soldiers jumped into the driving section, while Captain Schaefer encouraged the President into the rear seat. Two more jeeps appeared; one went ahead, the other followed behind them, closing the doors as they moved. “The VIP would be taken down these tunnels to a secret bunker, where they would be flown at once to the National Command Centre, or alternatively one of the Secondary Command Centres. If everything goes to plan, we should be well on our way by the time the aliens break into Washington.”

  The President looked up at him. “What happens if we are not on our way by then?”

  “I don’t know,” Captain Schaefer admitted. “You can get away with a great deal during the chaos of an invasion, just as we found out in Iraq and Mexico; we might manage to escape anyway. If not, then we – you – might fall into enemy hands. If that happens, then I don’t know what they would want with you.”

  The jeeps sped on into the darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Fall of Washington

  Washington, DC

  “Here’s the situation, as we understand it,” a tired-looking officer said. Captain Christopher Fardell leaned forward and tried to show interest, but they were all exhausted; they’d been fighting all day when they encountered aliens on their attempt to reunite with other American forces. The aliens had accidentally trapped thousands of American soldiers behind enemy lines – adding insult to injury as most of those soldiers had been scattered from their units, or wounded, or trying to assist with recovery operations – and many of them had tried to fight their way out. Judging from the relatively few soldiers to the south of Washington, not all of them had made it. “The aliens are launching a three-prong attack on Washington.”

  The map had been drawn on, rather than a computer display; the map itself had been taken from a schoolhouse, something that more than anything else showed just how badly the United States had been hit. In theory, every soldier was supposed to carry a terminal that would link him into the military's secured internet; in practice, the alien attack had disrupted everything. It didn’t help that the soldiers gathered near Quantico were a mixed bag, from Marines and Regular Army soldiers, to National Guardsmen and even a few hundred volunteers from the civilians who professed some kind of military training. There hadn’t been any time to check references; as long as they had weapons, they had been allowed to join the defence.

  The officer, Colonel Harrison, looked around at them. “The first prong is coming from the north, the second more or less from the east, launched through Ocean City, and the third coming up from Fredericksburg. At last report, the aliens had sealed off Fredericksburg, but have not tried to take the city directly; a shame, since we had at least ten thousand armed people within the city. Reports are vague, but it looks as if the aliens have detained any human they meet, ordering them to strip and then placing them in hastily established concentration camps. It doesn’t look as if they are actually harmed, but any form of resistance or misbehaviour is punished by death.”

  Fardell scowled to himself, an expression he knew was shared by most of the othersThe United States had invented the Carrera Protocols, which included ordering surrendered citizens to strip completely – women were allowed to keep their panties – in order to ensure that none of them were trying to carry a bomb up to the soldiers and blow them up, and it seemed that the aliens agreed. How tight a control would they keep on their captive humans? Naked men and naked women didn’t go well together in a stressful situation; he remembered the Neo-Draka and wondered what had happened to them and the FEMA team. The thought of subjecting American women to such treatment was horrifying; American women generally didn’t commit suicide bombings.

  “Our mission is to stall the aliens as long as we can,” Colonel Harrison said. He’d already sent a set of men with deer rifles and other hunting weapons into Prince William National Park to see if they could form the beginnings of a resistance movement. “Once we get the retreat order, we are to fall back to bases inside the continental United States, abandoning this area for the time being.”

  Fardell winced and knew that others were sharing the same response; retreat? Hell, we just got here! On the other hand, the aliens had taken one hell of a bite out of the entire military position; perhaps it was better to reform and regroup somewhere well-hidden while preparing for the counter-attack. He would have been happier launching his own counter-attack, but that was out of the question until the forces had been gathered and something – anything – had been done about the alien control of space.

  The area hadn’t been that badly devastated by the waves, but the weather had turned entire sections into a sea of mud, somewhere that could be used to camouflage an entire infantry division. The small defence force had spread out; lacking the manpower to hold off one prong for long, the defenders had intended to bleed the aliens and fall back in good order, among the most dangerous manoeuvres any military force could be asked to carry out. Failure would be disastrous; Fardell didn’t know how the aliens would treat military prisoners, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  Time passed slowly. The alien jamming field, transmitting static and occasionally strange clicking sounds that made no sense at all, kept the scratch division out of its normal extensive contact with the internet. More microburst transmitters had survived further from the coast, so they had some communications; Colonel Harrison seemed to believe that the aliens were gathering their forces to launch their attack simultaneously. He might have been a pen-pusher, although he had to have some experience, but Fardell could find no reason to dispute his logic. The aliens would certainly try to put the boot in as hard as they could.

  He glanced over towards a broken warehouse, damaged first by the tidal wave and then army engineers, hiding the massive Petraeus tank that had been one of three survivors of an armoured division. From what he’d heard from the tank crewmen, they had been lucky to survive; the aliens had struck the division from orbit, missed a handful of tanks, and when the weather had changed, they had moved to firing positions. The crewmen were braver than Fardell considered himself; the Petraeus might be massive and proof against almost anything the Wreckers could bring to bear, but alien KEWs would smash it with ease. It wasn’t the only regular weapons system that had become more dangerous to the users than to the enemy; the entire set of plasma cannons had been removed and set up for an automated firing sequence, just to prevent the aliens using it as a targeting indicator. They'd get in a handful of blows…and then the aliens would destroy the cannons with ease.

  “They’re coming,” Colonel Harrison said. He’d found a high-ground position to observe the entire battle; he’d taken to it more than he would have taken to the more normal bunker with com
puter feeds reporting every time a tanker farted on his seat. Fardell’s lips twitched at the black humour; the REMFs would have to get used to thousands of changes in the way the army did business, the only question was how many soldiers would have to die before they learned that lesson. “Fire when you see the whites of their eyes, unless they open fire…”

  Fardell waited as the aliens came closer. The human forces had dug in carefully, but there was no way they could protect themselves from a KEW without digging too deep to actually fight. The aliens would have to be close enough to make striking the human positions from orbit difficult…assuming, of course, that the aliens cared about their own lives. The Army had plenty of experience with radical fanatics of one stripe or another who hadn’t cared about their own lives, but most of them had taken very little effort to kill; they’d been that eager to die. How much did the aliens care?

  He tensed. Any closer and the alien tankers would see them, or the skimmers would go somewhere where they could see something that would alert them…what was strange for an alien, anyway? No Russian or Chinese commander would have moved at them like that, but then, the Russians or the Chinese would not have had the advantages the aliens possessed, they would have been fighting on even terms. It was hard for any soldier to accept; a day ago, the US Army had been the most powerful force on the surface of the planet, now it was trapped into fighting a guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly powerful force. Whatever happened, it was going to hurt…

  “Fire,” Colonel Harrison snapped.

  The Petraeus tank fired first, a single shell that arced through the air and struck an alien tank head-on, blowing it up in the same eerie flickering light he’d seen before, when the aliens actually landed. The crewmen fled from the warehouse as the tank fired again, and again, firing on automatic as the automated plasma cannons opened fire, seconds before…something streaked down from orbit and shattered the warehouse and tank alike. The plasma cannons drew fire next; a single line of KEWs fell from orbit and detonated them, just after they struck several alien targets and destroyed them. An alien infantryman, too close to a near miss, ran around burning moments before someone snapped off a shot and put the alien out of his misery. The aliens seemed surprised…

  But they recovered quickly. The red flickering lights of their lasers flickered through the smoke, seeking targets, and death followed in their wake. Flames flickered into life as laser beams ran across hedgerows and planted gardens; Fardell remembered the people who had had to leave their homes and hoped they wouldn’t be upset about the devastation of their homes, even as the battlesuits moved forward to add to the chaos. He lifted his hand cannon, took careful aim, and sprayed a hail of bullets across the alien foot soldiers as they advanced; they danced back and returned fire. The battle was eerie; one moment there would be nothing, then the flickering light of a laser weapon, and then nothing again. The aliens had changed too many rules…

  “Fall back,” he snapped, as the aliens brought up their own heavy weapons. He took a chance and gambled, standing up long enough to fire a burst from his hand cannon at one of the alien tanks, cursing as he saw the bullets bounce off. It wasn't that much of a surprise – he’d seen the same happen during exercises with Petraeus tanks – but Fardell found it irritating. Their normal weapon for dealing with enemy tanks was to use plasma weapons, which might as well as been calling the aliens to get on with killing the defenders; they would have to find other weapons to handle the aliens. One of them, mines, had been scattered throughout the streets, but he saw the aliens sweeping the ground with lasers and cursed again; the mines were being detonated before the alien tanks hovered over them. “Get to the second defence line…”

  Virginia and Maryland National Guardsmen had dug into Dumfries; the aliens now hit their positions, fighting the Guardsmen hand-to-hand in the town. Some of the guardsmen had come from the town; they knew much more about it than the aliens could ever hope to know. The aliens took losses, fell back, and Colonel Harrison ordered the Guardsmen to retreat. Before they could retreat, if they had been disposed to obeying an order many of them would have considered to be treacherous in the extreme, alien weapons fell from orbit and devastated most of the town.

  “Bastards,” O’Malley hissed, as the smoke and dust rose, revealing the aliens advancing carefully through the town. Their concern for civilian lives, assuming that they had ever had any, had vanished; they charged through the debris and reached the second defence line. The battlesuits engaged again, fell back, engaged…but they couldn’t slow the invaders. A MLRS belonging to the National Guard launched its entire load of missiles before the aliens could take it out from orbit; Fardell watched in horror as alien lasers swept most of the projectiles out of the air before they could do any real damage. A handful landed on alien vehicles and killed them; most had been completely useless.

  “Drones,” he snapped, as he felt the presence of a handful of alien drones ghosting over the city. His targeting systems went to work, targeting the drones with his hand cannon; one of the drones fell to the ground and sparked out in a small explosion, the others danced away, moments before he started to run. Seconds later, a KEW impacted, barely far enough from him to avoid causing any real damage.

  “Sir, are you okay?” O’Malley asked sharply. Fardell felt as if he had been kicked in the ass by a particularly large quarterback he remembered from high school. “Sir?”

  “I’m fine,” Fardell barked out. The question hurt somehow. “Get back to kicking those alien bastards off this damned planet!”

  Colonel Harrison broke into the conversation. “We have to bug out, now,” he snapped. Fardell opened his mouth to protest. “They’ve broken though the defences in the north, they’re going to enter Washington at any moment, and we have to get out of here before they pocket us and destroy us.”

  Fardell wanted to believe that it wasn’t possible, but he knew how fast the aliens could move and just how dangerous they could be. “Yes, sir,” he said, reluctantly. He started to issue orders to his troop, trusting them not to argue; they had to avoid presenting a target for the aliens as they started to slowly strangle Washington. “We’re moving now.”

  The battlesuits all held maps of the area; it was easy enough to break contact and find their way to one of the pre-positioned caches of supplies they had taken the precaution of scattering around the area. Fardell wondered just how the planned resistance movement would go; there had been very little time to set anything up, mainly using whoever was willing take part with a handful of regulars and National Guardsmen as stiffeners. Behind them, the aliens completed the destruction of Dumfries and advanced carefully towards Washington. They would be there within hours at most.

  * * *

  The human capital city was ugly; it seemed to be a dominant feature of human construction. The researchers had tried to explain that Washington was only the capital of one particular human subset, but the infantry hadn’t really understood, any more than they had understood the determination the humans had shown in holding what was, in the end, a worthless patch of land. Parts of Washington had been held by determined opposition, so determined that the Oghaldzon had pulled back and struck the location from orbit, other parts had been held by gangs of young men who had been abusing their fellow citizens when the Oghaldzon encountered them. They had simply been mown down and their bodies left to rot.

  Warag-Soldier-Infantry advanced carefully through the burning city. The humans had had the opportunity to leave traps set for the advancing aliens, including a very nasty trick with a spring and fanged edges that was apparently designed to trap an Oghaldzon-like creature on Earth. Warag and his comrades had learned rapidly; anything that looked remotely suspicious was blasted with laser fire from a safe distance, although the "safe distance" hadn’t always been safe enough. Tripwires, exploding devices hidden in the ground, the occasionally human who had sacrificed himself to kill a handful of Oghaldzon…all had taken a toll. The city would be in rubble by the time the last human
had been killed, driven out, or captured. The flames alone would consume much of the city; the only plus was that it would destroy much of the cover the human soldiers had used to such good advantage. If the Oghaldzon hadn’t had their body armour…

  He dismissed the thought; philosophy in a fight tended to mean that the Oghaldzon doing the thinking was about to die. He concentrated as they marched through the remains of a cemetery, made even more gruesome by the remains of humans who had dug in and fought to the death to hold the burial ground. The Oghaldzon didn’t bury their dead; Warag didn’t care that the humans did this, but their willingness to die to save a handful of bodies from the Oghaldzon surprised him, not least because the Oghaldzon were hardly going to do anything to the bodies. The bridges across the river had been shattered, either by the waves or by the human defenders; they waited for a troop transport and a series of tanks to arrive and transport them across the river, towards a large white building. Oddly, it was the first pretty piece of human architecture they'd yet seen, even though most of its windows had been shattered by the waves.

  His earpiece buzzed. “That is the centre of human government,” the coordinator said. “Approach with extreme caution.”

  Warag would have hesitated if he could have done so; almost every Oghaldzon who became infected with MemeKill became convinced that he or she was invincible, or a tactical genius, or something like that. It didn’t help that many of them had a grasp of how their opponents thought through some strange arcane process. The infected person would remain in the centre of their power, blithely confident they couldn’t be hurt, until the sane soldiers broke in and arrested them. The human President could be inside the building, preparing his final stand, surrounded by his most fanatical followers…

  He issued orders quickly as other companies came forward to join him, searching the White House lawn for traces of enemy activity before surrounding and attacking the White House itself. Missiles took out parts of the wall; the infantry moved forwards, weapons raised, and saw…nothing. The building had been damaged by the waves, and then by the missiles, but he had expected opposition. Had they all been killed? The evidence suggested against it; the infantry kept moving, heading through the building, searching for any humans. They encountered a handful of small traps, killing seven infantry, but no humans.