Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  Something exploded far too close to him. Blackness descended for a long timeless moment, and then he realised that he was flying through the air, seconds before he landed with a bump. He’d used his reflexes, automatically put his forelegs first as he’d been trained, but his left foreleg had been shattered by the impact and he found himself crashing helplessly to the ground. Implanted pain-assistance units in his body started to dampen the agony as much as possible, but he knew he wouldn’t be going anywhere; without both forelegs, an Oghaldzon was about as mobile as a human with one leg broken. If his side won the day, he might survive, but it was far more likely that he would die in the next few moments.

  His sonar clicked once, revealing the presence of an armoured human, hidden inside one of their cursed suits, coming up to him. Warag looked up, too tired to run even if he had been able to move, and saw nothing but a featureless visor. It wouldn’t have mattered; the suit couldn’t be penetrated by sonar, and he couldn’t read human expressions anyway. He’d come over seven Light Cycles to die at the hands of a misshapen creature from a nightmare.

  He raised five of his hands anyway; the sixth hung limp and useless.

  * * *

  Fardell had only seen the Donkey through sheer luck as the camp burned to death around them. The alien had been badly mangled by the blast – he could see small trickles of alien blood glittering on the side of its body – but it was alive, dark eyes looking up at him. There was no sign of a weapon; the alien was helpless, one leg bent at an angle that made Fardell feel weak at the knees. That leg had to be broken, which meant…

  Prisoners wanted, Fardell remembered. He looked down at the alien for a long moment; the alien seemed to look back, and then it raised five of its hands in the air. The hands were repulsive and…weird, looking like nothing on Earth; he had the strangest sense that the alien was begging for help. Donkey expressions were nothing like human expressions, but he was certain; he could either try to take the alien prisoner, or he could be merciful and shoot the alien in the head. Respect and duty warred, and duty won out.

  “Get a stretcher,” he snapped. It would be hard moving the alien even with a stretcher; looking at it, the alien might not survive the journey. They’d sent a brief microburst warning to high command that they had destroyed the alien outpost, but if they sent a second one, high command would almost certainly order them to bring back the prisoner, whatever happened. “I want this guy taken back alive.”

  Browning peered down at it. “Are you sure it’s worth the effort?” He asked. “There could be any number of tracking devices embedded in the flesh.”

  “Orders are orders,” Fardell snapped. It was not a standard comment for the US Army, but it was understandable under the circumstances. “Fredrickson, O’Malley; you’re the other half of the team, help us get the alien onto the stretcher.”

  The alien was trying to cooperate; Fardell snapped an order for the music to stop before it gave the alien permanent damage…if it gave the alien permanent damage. He saw what looked like an earplug in the alien’s ear and wondered if the alien had been smart enough to hide from the noise, or if it was merely a communications system like the one in his own ear. With a little help, the alien staggered onto the stretcher, which the bearers quickly picked up and started to carry out of the camp.

  Fardell glanced around as recovery teams quickly entered the camp, hunting desperately for more pieces of alien technology. The bodies, he noted with a sick feeling, had been destroyed as always; the aliens didn’t let their dead fall into the hands of their enemies. Some of the technology was obviously broken beyond repair but other pieces had survived, including a laser rifle that had obviously belonged to the wounded alien.

  “Check for other wounded aliens,” Fardell ordered shortly. The camp was searched quickly; they found one other alien, cowering in a manner that reminded him of a dog. There were more wounds on the alien’s body, strange wounds that reminded him of burns or laser damage; he wondered what had happened to the alien to make him or her so wounded. At Fardell’s command, the second alien was taken out of the camp as well.

  He glanced towards the east, towards Washington. The noise of battle was growing louder all around them; he looked towards the silver line stretching up into the sky and wondered if it would be cut by the end of the day, or, perhaps, if the battle would end with humanity controlling the space elevator. Someone had even suggested running a nuke up it and blowing the shit out of the anchor at the end.

  He turned back to the remainder of his team.

  There was still work to do.

  Chapter Forty: Counterattack, Take Four

  Near Washington, DC

  Colonel Garth checked his watch briefly as the seconds ticked down to zero. It was the most dangerous part of the plan, and the one most likely to hurt the aliens badly if they reacted in time. The aliens hadn’t located the bunkers under Washington; Colonel Garth wasn’t sure if that had been because they were less curious, on the whole, than humanity, or they hadn’t bothered to look because they were confident that any bunkers had to have been destroyed in the fighting. They wouldn’t have been exactly wrong; a handful of KEW missiles targeted on various defence strong points had punched through into the bunker network, causing damage that might have led to fatal cave-ins if the aliens had investigated.

  They hadn’t, for whatever reason they had in their alien minds, and the bunkers and tunnels remained intact. Hundreds of Special Forces soldiers had used them from time to time, ghosting through the remains of Washington, but keeping well away from the aliens. Washington had once had the most advanced security infrastructure in the world, apart from some of the former rogue states; the aliens had been seemingly unaware of the thousands of sensors and surveillance systems that had been scattered around the city despite the ACLU’s loud complaints. It had provided Intelligence a perfect opportunity to observe the aliens in their activities, using what parts of the network remained, and it had provided valuable targeting data. They’d used it to mark the two main alien strongholds in the city; their barracks and some of their smaller facilities. The only issue had been to keep the aliens from using their stranglehold on the city and their barracks to counter-attack before it was too late.

  “The aliens seem to be using the buildings they’ve erected near the White House as a base,” the intelligence officer had said. “It is important that those buildings be destroyed, along with the defensive stations, before they use them to coordinate a defence.”

  The minutes became seconds, the seconds ticked down…

  An alarm shrilled. “Incoming,” one of the sensor officers snapped. The ground shook violently, and then again, and again; Colonel Garth blinked in surprise. There had only been two targets marked out for the attentions of the unlucky USAF pilot and he suspected that the third explosion had been bad news. “Sir, we have our window.”

  A whistle blew. “Go, go, go,” Colonel Garth shouted, sending the cry along the troops waiting patiently in sewers and other pipes that had been connected to the tunnel network, something that would have surprised most Washington residents, who thought of the sewers as nothing more than smelly pipes with rats and the occasional alligator. “Everyone go, now!”

  He followed as quickly as he could, scrambling up a long ladder into one of the higher sublevels, and then on to the surface, wondering at how bright it all seemed as the dawn rose above Washington. Grim-faced men wearing BDUs ran past him, their weapons spitting fire as they engaged a handful of surprised aliens, who wheeled around and tried to return fire with their strange lasers. It was too late; most of them had been looking in the wrong direction, towards the west. Just for a second too long, they hesitated; undecided on whether to worry about the incoming stream of death, or the human insurgents as they fanned out and charged towards the larger alien buildings.

  “Sir, keep down,” Sergeant Cady snapped, as the firing grew louder. The aliens seemed to have maintained a certain reserve in Washington anyway, outside the ba
rracks that had been struck from the air, or maybe they’d simply ordered them out into the human buildings when the first missiles had been launched. Something –Garth didn’t know what – had been done to distract the aliens in orbit, but he was under no illusion it would last. The sky was lit up with missile trails and explosions; the aliens would slowly gain control over the battlespace again. His job was to ensure that they had no time to react before it was too late.

  “Don’t mind me,” Garth snapped back at him. A SEAL ran up and nodded once, brusquely; saluting was forbidden in the middle of a combat zone. It was unlikely that the aliens knew what a salute was, and there was no sign that they used similar protocol themselves, but there was no point in taking chances. The entire battle was dangerous enough as it was. “Report!”

  “The main alien buildings are surrounded,” the SEAL said. “The teams would like permission to launch the main assault.”

  Colonel Garth didn’t hesitate. “Launch the assault,” he ordered. “Remember; prisoners, if possible.”

  The SEALs moved at once, running rapidly towards the alien building while antitank weapons and even a handful of grenades cleared the war, stripping the alien walls of their automated defences. The teams attacked quickly, moving like lightning; they knew that there was not only a time limit, but they were literally moving into the unknown. Some of the buildings were defended; a building where they had seen human POWs taken in and out of proved to be too heavily defended to take, even with the combined firepower of a SEAL team. The walls, whatever they were made of, were tough; Colonel Garth guessed that they would need plasma warheads, if not nuclear ones, to damage them. He saw a missile strike the wall and explode, leaving only – only – a black scar on the wall.

  The interiors of the captured buildings were much larger than he had expected; the corridors were generally twice as wide, reflecting the size and nature of the aliens. They had seen aliens running easily at speeds that would have defeated any human runner, but they were far less agile; the size of the corridors reflected that nature. They might even have problems climbing up some human stairs; his lips twitched involuntarily as he thought of a group of aliens encountering a staircase and realising that their plan to conquer the universe was buggered.

  Another explosion echoed out in the distance, loud enough to be heard; he saw a streak of light, like a pointing finger, in the sky, pointing down towards a target on the ground. He guessed, from the billowing fireball, that the target had been a human advance of some kind; the aliens had to have been getting their act back together as quickly as they could. The assault teams were falling back; a handful of them escorting alien prisoners, others carrying loot and other possibly interesting artefacts, including as much alien technology as they could pick up. One of the soldiers was carrying an alien book, whose markings reminded Colonel Garth of a book for the blind; he was tempted to tell the soldier to leave it before remembering that it might help the intelligence staff to understand the aliens.

  “Time to fall back,” he said, as some of his soldiers deployed small man-portable surface-to-surface missile launchers. The shoulder-mounted weapons could be targeted on known alien coordinates nearer to their base, or on the lower end of the space elevator. There might be no better chance to hurt the aliens, so the soldiers launched the missiles rapidly. Some of them fell to the remaining alien point defence weapons, while others hit targets. “I think…”

  A noise drew his attention. He had expected to see a major alien counterattack as soon as possible; it was why he had deployed a couple of hundred men to slow that counterattack long enough for the main teams to make their escape. The alien gunships heading towards them were no surprise – they had been expected and planned for – but it was the sight further to the east that filled him with awe…and fear.

  * * *

  Yatha-Soldier-Command had been having a difficult time trying to keep track of the different human angles of attack as they materialised. He had been fairly confident that he could hold the occupied area as long as necessary, not least because he had full-spectrum coverage of the area through observation platforms and KEW launchers based in orbit. He had been looking forward to the rapid expansion of the base on the ground and powerful thrusts north into the areas the humans called New York and New England, or perhaps heading down toward Florida. He would have preferred Florida, himself, but it depended on the general course of the war; either would have brought them into contact with larger human populations and required them to start feeding and supporting them as a prelude to reshaping and rebuilding their society. It was a mission that he enthusiastically supported; he had already been establishing the foundations of food production and water-cleansing facilities on the remains of the city the humans called Washington. Now…

  Now, there were at least three major human forces – infantry forces – advancing against his positions, all of which were too close to the Oghaldzon forces to allow them to be destroyed from orbit, although they had gone after what targets appeared when they could. The human bombardment hadn’t lasted long before the KEWs silenced the last human gun, but the shells had had a nasty effect, not least through the noise they made. Some thrillkilling human had come up with the idea of adding screamers to the shells; when they plummeted down to earth, they made a terrible noise that couldn’t help but irritate his troopers. His point defence lasers had been targeted for special attention; apart from the human forces that had silenced most of the weapons in Washington, they had knocked out far too many of the point defence systems through their shellfire. The Oghaldzon had never invented long-range guns like that; they had known in theory what they could do, but the practice was something else.

  To add to the chaos, analysis of the plume of flame as one missile vaporised under laser bombardment suggested that the missile had been carrying a nuclear warhead, something unthinkable at such close quarters. The Oghaldzon had used nice clean dumb bombs dropped from orbit for years; nuclear explosions were best kept out in space where they belonged. They would have understood using them against an isolated Oghaldzon formation; using them in such close confines would have been disastrous.

  He had to prioritise, somehow. “Withdraw forces from the main points of contact,” he ordered. He had been forming up support columns to reinforce the units on the ground that were taking a pounding from human forces, his columns mainly composed of flying tanks and support vehicles. The tankers were used to operating in conditions where they were partially blind; the human use of weapons to attack the Oghaldzon through their sonar was unforgivable. “Prepare to engage using heavy KEW bombardment.”

  His mind clicked cold thoughts for a moment. “Order reaction forces to suppress the enemy units in Washington,” he added. A nasty thought occurred to him and he smiled an Oghaldzon smile. A human soldier would have recognised it – or at least the mindset behind it – at once. The humans had obviously remained hidden in their tunnels under the city; that had been a minor problem until they had mounted an attack on the city. Leaving them alone had obviously been a mistake.

  “Call one of the pilots,” he ordered. “This is what I want them to do…”

  * * *

  In common with every other pilot, Seeyah-Pilot-Shuttle was confident that he was the best of the best, a delusion that served a functional purpose. Seeyah had actually had very little to do since the fleet had entered Earth orbit; the life of a shuttle pilot was often quite boring. He had transported a handful of additional soldiers, technicians and researchers down to the surface; he had later transported them back to the starships high overhead. The idea of actually entering combat had never crossed his mind… until the humans had opened fire on the spaceport that had been rapidly constructed on the ruins of Virginia Beach.

  “Here are your orders,” the headset buzzed. Seeyah had been nervous enough when the human shellfire had started to come in towards them, even if the point defences had been able to handle it, but the new orders almost made him want to refuse. He didn’t refus
e; he might not have been a soldier, but everyone on the fleet was a volunteer who knew the risks if the humans caught up with the Oghaldzon technologically. “Launch at once along the course indicated and carry out the mission.”

  Seeyah’s first thought had been that the planner had been insane; careful plans were a requirement for any form of operation… and there had been no careful plan for the mission, just a handful of half-crazy requirements. Any number of things could go wrong, from a reaction in the fusion drive to humans launching surface-to-air missiles at the shuttle, but there was no choice; he triggered the drive and launched the shuttle into the air, following a slow course to give the defenders a chance to see him coming and identify him clearly as a friendly shuttle. The ruins of Washington, smouldering again, grew on his display; he chose his target and lowered the shuttle towards it, drive flaring brightly.

  Like all shuttles, the shuttle that Seeyah flew was a simple cone, launched into orbit on a pillar of fusion flame. The flame was hot enough to melt almost anything; the only thing that had prevented the Oghaldzon – and humanity, for that matter – from turning it into a weapon had been that it relied too much on the target cooperating. As no one wanted a fusion flame in the face…

  * * *

  Colonel Garth saw the shuttle and knew instantly what it intended to do; he couldn’t have said how, but he was as certain of it as he had been of anything. He shouted a warning, hoping that one of the soldiers had a surface-to-air missile that could be used to shoot down the alien craft, but there was no time. The glowing cone lowered itself, the flame so bright that he could barely look at it before his eyes started to hurt; it was like looking into the fires of the sun itself. The pillar of flame touched the remains of Washington… and, to his horror, those ruins began to melt.