Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  She watched as the missiles started to reveal their targets, some of them picked off and destroyed by the point defences, some of them lancing towards their targets and entering final assault trajectories. The computers, running faster than her mind could follow, automatically updated the point defence; lasers and rail guns were reprioritised as the targets became clear. The humans had launched two waves of missiles; the first wave had been targeted on the anchor ships holding the end of the space elevators, the second had been targeted on the orbital weapons platforms themselves. The computers knew the danger; before Fanaya had even comprehended it, they ordered the defences to ignore everything, even self-preservation, and concentrate on keeping the anchors safe. Losing the space elevators would be… irritating. It had been hard enough to establish them in Earth’s chaotic weather conditions.

  The battle was raging and all she could see was the rapidly updating screen as orbital weapons platforms started to die, some dying with enough of an explosion to cause electromagnetic disruptions to nearby systems. The computers issued more orders; warships that had been holding station away from the planet started to move towards LEO as missiles started to rise from the surface, joined by lasers and even a handful of makeshift missiles launched from mass drivers. Those had been left intact as war booty; the commander of the defences issued orders and the warships started to engage with kinetic weapons. Moments later, all of the mass drivers and laser weapons had been killed; the smaller missile launchers could be taken out at any moment. The defences had taken a battering, but it looked as if the humans had shot their bolt…

  And then a second alarm sounded.

  * * *

  “Now,” Marina snapped. “Engage the drive, now!”

  The entire ship shook as if it had been kicked in its metaphorical ass. Just for a few moments, the aliens would be looking in the wrong direction – a direction, Marina was certain, seeing the amount of firepower the aliens were bringing to bear on the missiles, that she devoutly hoped they would keep looking in, just for a few minutes longer. The Stalingrad was pushing forward as fast as it could, the other ships in the small force accelerating behind it, and, ahead of them, their target was becoming aware of their existence.

  Part of her hated to destroy it; part of her knew that there was no choice. The alien motherships were massive, each one larger than some countries; they could carry hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of aliens apiece. They were probably targeting alien civilians, or what passed for civilians among the aliens, and she felt a moment of shame, before remembering how many human civilians had been slaughtered by the aliens. It wasn’t just the Motherland, she remembered; now, all of Earth was the Motherland, and she had suffered terribly. They’d seen enough of the effects of the asteroids to know just how badly she had suffered.

  “The alien warships are altering course,” the tactical officer reported, her voice grim. Marina nodded; that was not unexpected, although the alien manoeuvres were quicker organised than she would have expected. One force was going to round the planet, the other was going to break and try to trap her in a pincer manoeuvre. It was impressive… and showed that someone, somewhere, was thinking what their… well, whatever the aliens used for brains. They might have been surprised, but they would ensure that her gains were limited. “I estimate ten minutes until Force One can engage us, seventeen minutes before Force Two can get back into range.”

  Marina smiled. The defence of the mothership – the motherships – was squarely in the hands of the handful of ships that had remained with them, their automated platforms and their own point defences. It might be enough, it might not be; whatever happened, the aliens’ confidence was about to take a major blow.

  “Firing sequence one,” she ordered. The feeling of finally hitting back was overwhelming. “You are authorised to open fire.”

  The Stalingrad shook as it launched a spread of missiles; half targeted on the mothership; the others were targeted on the defending warships, which were moving up slowly to block her advance. She guessed they were reluctant to use their own fusion flames so close to the mothership; the only advantage it gave them was that she couldn’t be exactly sure where their position was, but it didn’t matter. Unless the aliens were prepared to sacrifice the mothership and everyone on board, they would have to commit everything to its defence…

  “The aliens are returning fire,” the tactical officer said. Marina nodded grimly; the disadvantage of their current position, heading slightly at an angle to the motherships, rather than right at them, was that the aliens would have a much larger target to aim at. The advantage was that the aliens would have to run their missiles ragged to have even a slight chance at hitting her. They might do it, but they would have to work at it. “Impact of our missiles in nine…eight…”

  The aliens did well; they killed all of the missiles aimed at the mothership, at the cost of losing three of their smaller warships. “Launch second sequence,” Marina ordered. There was no time for anything, but killing. “Fire.”

  The ship shook again. “Missiles away,” the tactical officer said. “Point defence is engaging the enemy missiles.”

  Marina nodded once. “Helm, alter course; tactical, prepare for third firing sequence,” she ordered. The enemy would be pushing their own engines as fast as they could now; it was only a matter of time until she scored a hit on one of the motherships, if not more than one. A single nuke might not destroy a ship that size, but she would have bet her virginity that it would seriously mess the aliens up. “Spin ships; engage the enemy.”

  “Missiles locked and ready,” the tactical officer said. Her voice broke off as a new icon flashed briefly on the display. “The Leningrad has been destroyed.”

  Marina scowled; one ship, ten people, a twelfth of the remains of the Russian Space Fleet… gone. The Russians had hoped to keep their point defence network together, but once they had started to launch missiles it was much harder to keep everyone moving in the same general direction. The Stalingrad was rotating now, launching missiles from each of its tubes as they came to bear on the enemy, but it meant that the point defence network was much weaker…

  “Hit,” the tactical officer snapped. A mothership had been hit; judging from the massive wave of escaping air, they’d mortally wounded the ship. If it was built like a bridge ship, some of the passengers and crew might survive, but maybe not for long. The spin that normally gave the ship its gravity was tearing it apart in glorious slow motion. The wreckage alone would make alien operations in near-Earth space difficult. “We killed one of the bastards!”

  There was a small cheer.

  “Maintain firing pattern,” Marina snapped. They had only moments left before the aliens came to extract revenge. They would put everything they had into exterminating her force, perhaps even trying to chase them as far as the Asteroid Belt. They would want her dead, whatever it took; no one had hurt them like that before. “Helm, stand by to…”

  “Incoming,” the tactical officer snapped. Marina realised in a flash of sudden peace that their luck had just run out. “Incoming missile…”

  The alien missile detonated and wiped the Stalingrad out of existence.

  Marina died with a smile on her face.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Counterattack, Take Two

  Near Washington, DC

  “Ten minutes to planned time of attack, General,” his aide said. “All vehicles and launchers are reporting ready and waiting to engage on your command.

  General Harrison glared down at the display, which was updating rapidly with information from the various units that had been deployed in a wide range of positions surrounding the alien-occupied territories. The only advantage the delays had given them was that it had allowed them to set up additional microburst relay stations, allowing the battle to be actually coordinated, as opposed to being a series of desperate encounters with alien forces without rhyme or reason. In theory, he could actually run it directly from the hidden command vehicle; in prac
tice, a great deal would depend upon the superb professionalism and training of the junior and middle-ranking officers in the units that were preparing to go on the offensive.

  He didn’t like the timing. The Russian plan – and he had to admit that it might just make the entire operation workable – depended on too many factors, some outside his control. There was little point at fighting at any time other than dawn – the aliens’ sonar kept them fighting in the dark without apparent loss of efficiency, but they seemed to lose a little during the dawn – but the time was ticking away. If they waited too long, they would lose whatever advantages the dawn gave them…such as they were. Harrison wasn’t convinced that the aliens could be incapacitated enough by the dawn to make a difference. If they reacted quickly, thousands of good American men and women were about to die.

  There were hundreds of thousands of Americans in the alien prison camps, millions more in cities and towns that had been in the direct path of the alien advance. It stunned him, whenever he thought about it; the aliens had killed tens of millions of Americans right along the seacoast, but hundreds of thousands had remained alive, trying to pull their lives back together. Even without the aliens, the damage caused by the asteroids would have been difficult to handle; the aliens, just by occupying where they were, had made the recovery process impossible. New York City had been reduced to ruins again; historic cities like Boston, Philadelphia and Washington had been crushed like bugs. Once the aliens started to expand into the countryside, further west, they would start to establish their authority past the Eastern Seaboard and, eventually, destroy the United States as an entity.

  He knew what was at stake; if they lost, the United States as a whole would be gone. There were already rumblings of trouble in what remained of Latin and South America; some governors from Argentina had claimed that the asteroids were an Anglo plot to cut down on the number of South Americans and Hispanics in the Americas. Nearly seventy years of development, careful investment and the occasional bloodbath was being washed away by the aliens; the good governance that had finally been created down south had been damaged by alien might.

  It didn’t seem fair, somehow; the people had lived through so much that the last seventy years might come to be seen as a golden age. Would the aliens succour such movements, as they had agreed to support the moon, or would they push the rebels aside? Who knew?

  “Five minutes, sir,” his aide said.

  Everything depends upon things we can’t control, Harrison thought coldly. He had an entire force of semi-expendable units – expendable in the sense that there was no way to preserve them once the aliens got their act together – ready and waiting for the call to action. If the aliens were not distracted, they would have a field day picking off targets; they had already picked off far too many vehicles as they tried to advance towards the battle area’s forward edge. It was maddening; they’d struck targets with the precision of a surgeon, each KEW damaging and chipping away at American morale still further. The only advantage the Americans had was numbers, but as the aliens started to use their space elevator, they could start flooding people down to Earth… and that would be the beginning of the end…

  …And no one knew how many aliens there were on the ships.

  An alarm shrilled. “Sir, we have several nuclear detonations in orbit,” his aide said, as various consoles lit up with their alerts. The one advantage they had was the ability to observe orbit – LEO – through telescopes and other sensors, passive sensors, that belonged to the USAF. The Russian attack hadn’t failed; it had succeeded enough to make the aliens fear for the existence of their space anchors. It sounded like something out of a bad children’s science-fiction novel, but he had been assured that it made sense; the space elevators needed something in orbit to hold them taut, or all hell would break loose. Harrison could only hope that the aliens had taken a few safety precautions; he didn’t want to find out the hard way what would happen if the cable slashed down against the surface of the planet. “The Russians are moving.”

  “Good,” Harrison said. There was no time to lose; the USSF had run simulations and concluded that the odds were vastly against the Russians even pulling off the second part of their plan. The bombardment would last as long as it took the aliens to wipe out all the missiles; that might take them hours, or it might take them minutes at most. Their radars were powerful and they would have no need to remain stealthy; he bet that there would be a window of twenty minutes, at most. Harrison knew that they needed ten minutes; any time after that would be a bonus. “Send the signal.”

  He paused. “Order all units to open fire and engage the enemy,” he said. The tension in his body had finally found a release. Whatever happened, he and his people would give the plan their best shot…and the aliens would be shaken out of their complacency. “May God be with us on this day.”

  * * *

  Master Sergeant Billy Graham glanced down once at the message as it blinked up on his terminal, then shouted the order to the crew on the truck as he picked up the remote control. The heavily-camouflaged Multiple Launch Rocket System launcher had been moved as close as they dared to an alien outpost, bare kilometres as the crow flew, while the launcher itself had been modified for rapid fire. Graham knew that their only hope was to get the missiles away and start running; the aliens would respond almost at once to the attack. The only question was how long it would take them to recover from whatever was happening in orbit and start dropping KEWs everywhere.

  “Ready, Top,” one of his men shouted. Graham nodded; they’d stood everything down that could possibly be detected, from the engines to the crew’s personal devices, just on the off-chance that the aliens could detect them through their drones. A handful of drones had passed overhead, watching for trouble, but they had apparently missed the MLRS. Graham couldn’t believe that the aliens would have left them there if they had known about them; the only answer that made any kind of sense was that the aliens didn’t know they were there. “Sir?”

  He ignored the attempt to annoy him – sergeants were never called "sir" except by raw recruits and, very rarely, their nominal commanding officers – and checked the firing sequence. The targeting had been confirmed a long time ago; there might be no way any longer that they could use GPS, but they had other ways to calculate their engagement patterns. It wouldn’t be long at all.

  “Everyone out,” he snapped, as he keyed in the first firing code. “Move, you lazy bastards!”

  The crew jumped out and scattered; they knew the risks. The massive rear of the truck – seemingly a completely innocent, harmless, civilian truck – was rising up, exposing the missiles hidden within the launcher. A competent alien, watching from high above, could hardly fail to notice them; Graham was too much of a pessimist by nature to believe that either the attack in orbit or the hail of ground-to-space missiles launched from right across the globe would distract him for long. They would have enough people on duty to spread the workload; it was what he would have done in the same situation.

  He keyed the second code into the remote control. “Fire,” he bellowed, and twisted the key. The noise was deafening, almost at once; he turned and fled from the MLRS as if it was about to explode any second, running for his life as the scream of launching missiles echoed out behind him. The whoosh of missiles in flight replaced it as the MLRS emptied its racks as fast as it could. He tried to count, but lost count almost at once; it was impossible to tell where one missile ended and another began. He knew that it took nearly three minutes to unload the entire MLRS missile stock…

  The ground shook violently. He fell to the ground as the shockwave passed over his head. His men were scattered around him as a fireball rose amidst the trees, some trees toppling over as the impact of the alien KEW worked its deadly magic. He’d seen the results before; trees trying to escape the alien touch. The MLRS had gotten off most of its missiles before the aliens had destroyed it; he could only hope it had done enough.

  “Hey, Top,” one of
his men said, his face alight with the joy of survival. “I haven’t run so fast since the bomb disposal dude said ‘oh shit’ and jumped out of the window.”

  Graham found himself laughing. “I guess we survived,” he agreed. He glanced down once at the map he’d strapped to his knee; there was little point in trying to advance against the aliens on their own, no matter how much he hated the thought. Their orders had been simple; launch the missiles, run for your lives, and return to the rendezvous point for further orders. “Come on; we have to get back to the meeting point and then get stuck into the Donkeys.”

  His men followed him as he strode off into the woods.

  * * *

  The United States forces had moved hundreds of guns, MLRS vehicles, and single-shot hypersonic missile launchers into the combat zone. On General Harrison’s command, they all fired simultaneously, launching their deadly cargo into the area occupied by the Oghaldzon. The Oghaldzon orbital defences, already under attack by the Russian force as it raced towards the motherships, had little time to react; the launchers had been designated as targets, but there could be no in-flight interception of the weapons from the orbital platforms. Their priority was to defend the anchors and the motherships; everything else had suddenly been reclassified as expandable. Ground-based missiles were targeted only if they posed a threat to orbital installations; the Oghaldzon bases on the ground had to look after themselves. The space-based defences had their own priorities.