Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Cutting Out

  Ted stood outside Betsy’s, drawing the smell of autumn into his lungs. It was already deadly cold at night, nights could be bone chilling even during the summer for that matter, but now the trees had lost most of their leaves and people were burning the litter - some people still used wood for heating around here, the autumn scents of wood and leaf smoke were familiar and homey. He looked around, wishing he could see as well as he had as a young man. He often regretted the fading of his eyesight at this time of day, he could no longer enjoy the beauty of the early evening, could only remember it.

  He needed to think of the beauty of the past in this bitter present. Ted still couldn’t decide if he regretted teaching Paul Richards how to fly helicopters, somehow he knew it was related, but he couldn’t associate Paul with the murderous actions of whoever was in possession of Ship Plateau. He did regret not pressing forward with his concerns after Aristide Industries focus had obviously shifted away from the canal project. Regretted not pushing Paul harder the last time they had met, and then not talking to Mike about his concerns when Paul had left.

  But at the time so much of what he had speculated about had seemed sheer fantasy. Now fantasy had turned enigmatically lethal.

  A car moved down the street, a State Police cruiser; at least that’s what Ted assumed from what he could see. He flipped his frequency shifting glasses down and confirmed the guess. The glasses, thin titanium frames with tiny bottle glass lenses, shifted the frequencies of light his eyes could no longer detect into the bands he could. They only helped to a certain extent and they translated the world to red gray shadows, but they did make it possible for him to get about in less than perfect lighting.

  “Hey Ted.” He turned to find Betsy standing next to him, a thick padded jacket over the 50’s diner waitress outfit she wore downstairs, her arms folded tightly under her breasts as she looked down the street towards the crossroads where all the law enforcement types had set up camp, along with her husband Mike. She shivered, “Be nice if we had some customers, can’t go on like this too much longer.” Her voice was soft, unfocused, Ted was sure she was worried about Mike, not the Diner.

  He reached out to touch her arm, “It’s a restaurant, a good one but just a store, we’ve got a good reputation and we work well together. I’ve got money set aside, so have you. If needs be we’ll fold up here, move back towards Salt Lake - one of the outer ring towns - we’ll do even better there than we did here. Either that or we’ll move to one of the tourist towns.”

  She looked at him and even in his red gray dusk he saw the smile light her face. Then she was looking skyward to the south with a frown, “What the heck?”

  He followed her glance. Expecting to see little, he was startled by the bright streak falling from the sky. Before he had a chance to fully understand what he was seeing it plunged into the bluff. The world was lit as if the sun had come up from the wrong location. He staggered back, covering his eyes. Betsy cried out in pain and fear.

  Ted pulled his hands away from his eyes, watching the boiling cloud of fire rising above the bluff. He tried to decide what had happened, another aircraft shoot down? Then came the sound, an awesome crackling roar ripped across them, followed by a faint seismic shiver. His stomach lurched, what could have done that? A jumbo jet hitting the ground?

  Betsy was leaning against the lamppost rubbing her eyes, “What…what was that Ted?”

  Ted turned shaking his head, “I don’t know - some kind of aircraft crash?”

  Then the sky behind them lit up, Betsy cried out, Ted twisted to see a double impact to the south. And his tacticians mind finally locked onto the locations and the pattern. He felt a sick lurch, “The bastards just destroyed the highways out of town, God damn them. They must be making sure no reinforcements come down this evening….maybe they’re trying to stop anyone leaving town?”

  “Oh god above Ted…Mike…Mike’s south.” She was turning when he grabbed her. Betsy sobbed, pulled at his arm, “Ted let go,” anything else she said - or would have said - was drowned by the terrible thunder of the second, closer impact.

  Ted waited for the sound to pass, “Stay here Betsy, they fell miles away from the crossroads, you need to stay here there’s nothing we can do right now.”

  He heard the sirens of police cars, the fire and rescue people as well. He looked upwards, his hand holding Betsy tightly. The military tactician in his head had already told him another likely target. The sparks confirming his guess appeared, he held onto his friend, the woman he thought of as his daughter, and prayed for her husband. The third impact was the worst, the whole sky to the south seemed to burn for an instant and the sound seemed to come in the same moment, painfully loud, but a small part of his mind noted that there was no seismic shiver this time.

  Betsy was yelling and struggling as the emergency vehicles screamed past in a wailing stream. Ted held on grimly, “Stay here Betsy, Mike’s probably OK, he’s smart enough to get out of the way, and he’ll have seen it coming. Stay here, the people who can help are already on their way.”

  She settled down a little and Ted herded her back inside, figuring it would be easier to keep her under control inside. As they went inside the big old-fashioned looking phone on the end of the counter was ringing. Betsy leapt at it and sobbed as she heard the voice on the other end, “Oh Mike! I was so afraid…you’re OK?” she listened, nodded “Yes…I suppose…that’s what Ted said, I wanted to come down there but he stopped me.” She glanced up and he was relieved to see the faint fold in the corner of her mouth before she looked away again.

  -o-

  Betsy’s was busy an hour later, people had flocked into the street to look up and speculate after the strikes. There was no communication with the outside world, phone and internet were down and radio bands were being jammed. Some of the people had drifted onto Main Street and then into Betsy’s for a warm cup of coffee and then for some comfort food. Ted had the two assistant cooks he’d been about to send home an hour before cranking stuff out on an assembly line. They had two big urns setup on the boardwalk with paper cups. Going out to make sure they were full he was startled to see a basket full of dollar bills sitting on top of the urn, people paying for the coffee without being asked, Ted realized that his fellow countrymen still had the ability to make him feel proud.

  There was a bit of a crowd inside but the rest of the crowd had moved along. High Noon, the saloon on the corner was doing a roaring business right now. Ted figured they would fade soon.

  “Hey Ted.” A familiar voice said quietly.

  Ted turned, to find Mike standing in the shadows beside the diner’s window, “Hey Mike, what about the mess at the crossroads?”

  The Sheriff flinched then grunted, “Bad, very bad.” He glanced around, used his chin to point back inside, “Betsy in?”

  “Yeah, she’s doing fine now she’s busy.”

  Mike nodded and smiled faintly, “In a minute can you go in and tell her I’ll meet her out back?” Ted nodded, waiting, Mike nodded, waved around, “You seen any of the folks who used to work up on the Plateau?”

  Ted shook his head after an instant’s thought, “No, seen a few of the guys who work on the canal itself, but none of the engineers or administrative types from the tech center.” He pointed at his glasses, “But I’m not the best one to ask you know, you have to get pretty close for me to recognize you, even under the lights, at night.”

  Mike nodded unsmiling, “Sorry - forgot, and Ted, thanks for keeping Betsy from running out there. She wouldn’t have liked what she saw, and she doesn’t need that fueling nightmares for years to come.” His face was bleak.

  Ted hesitated, “Any idea what’s going on Mike? I know a lot of people who work up on the plateau, there aren’t any of them who I’d have thought would let this happen, let alone take part.”

  The Sheriff grimaced, “I know, and I don’t think it’s any of the folks we know…I…well I think the
y may be in as much or more trouble than the rest of us.”

  Ted jerked a nod, “They developed some kind of new propulsion system didn’t they? Then someone else, someone very unpleasant, found out about it and moved in on them?”

  Mike had been looking around, getting ready to walk back to the alley that led around back, at this he stopped short; he turned to look at the shorter, older man, “That sounds like more than a guess Ted. Let me have what you know.”

  “You know that young guy that came into town a few times, Paul Richards?”

  “Met him, Betsy told me you and he seemed to enjoy yakking?”

  “I taught him to fly helicopters, or at least simulators Mike. And though he would never say much I got the impression that he used that training to get onto the flight crew for whatever it was they built. More recently he hasn’t been happy about what was going on up there. Wouldn’t really say much, but you could tell it was eating at him. I figured it was some kind of big cargo blimp or the like. Then he said something that left me guessing it might be some kind of spacecraft. Guess that was it, only way they’d have orbital bombardment weapons to burn, knocking out roads.”

  “You think Richards is working for them?”

  Ted grimaced, “I hope not, but possibly, though AI security was all over him for spending time with me the last couple of times we met.”

  Mike looked at Ted with brooding eyes, “Let’s chat about it sometime, hopefully after this is all over. For now stay inside, hopefully this’ll be over tonight.”

  Ted shrugged and nodded, pitching his voice even lower, “Figured as much. I hope the Fed’s aren’t stupid enough to try and make a stand, these people are professionals with a hell of a lot of firepower at their back.”

  Mike shook his head, “We hope they just want to clean out Ship Plateau.”

  Ted nodded.

  There was a whistle from above, it dopplered past and faded, Ted looked up but saw nothing, but he saw Mike’s head tracking something. He glanced back at Ted, “Tell Betsy to stay inside, I think it’s starting, tell her I’ll keep my head down. We aren’t going to do anything stupid.” With that he was gone.

  Ted turned to go back inside; several people were coming out, “Back inside folks, the Sheriff wants people off the streets.”

  -o-

  Colonel Bill Borachev sat in his ‘Kirk Chair’ between and behind the pilot and copilot of the AL-1D. The big ex-Boeing 747-F freighter had been converted into an AL-1A a decade earlier entering service with the mission of killing tactical ballistic missiles in boost phase. It had been rebuilt to D standard this year. Now his command, semi officially ‘Light Saber Three’, could hit, and destroy, just about any target it could get a line of sight on. Secondary defensive laser directors provided spherical coverage against aircraft, missiles, even anti aircraft artillery - so at least in theory, he could fight his way into enemy airspace. No one had ever had a good reason to put the theory to the test.

  Bill figured that he might have the opportunity today. But they wouldn’t be fighting their way into enemy territory; they’d be fighting their way into nominally US airspace, airspace that the US no longer controlled. The main laser pointing head mounted in the nose was still masked though the laser was warmed up and on standby. Five big spotter turrets on the hull restlessly scanned the outside world for threats and targets.

  The Light Saber nickname for the AL-ID, Airborne Laser System had been inevitable but Bill wasn’t happy about it. His command was essentially a commercial freighter that had been painted with visions of sci-fi combat grandeur. Against a conventional enemy Bill was fairly confident his command and its crew of ten air force geeks would acquit themselves well. Against someone with better or even equivalent weapons the Light Saber was likely to end up like Obi Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars, only quicker.

  There were only seven Light Sabers in the world; they were deployed in groups of two or three to provide twenty-four hour coverage wherever they were stationed. At least two, and often three were ‘in the shop’ either being fixed or updated. Bill’s command had been ‘in the shop’ until four hours earlier having one of it’s engines replaced after it had swallowed most of a flock of seagulls on takeoff from their base in Texas.

  The four operational aircraft were all on their way home from their various assignments worldwide and the ship with its engines being replaced was probably heaving like a disturbed anthill right now. But for this instant in time Airborne Laser System, Light Saber Three, was the last best hope of the US military to interdict the space borne invaders who had apparently taken over a little town in the heart of Utah.

  Bill looked at the big flat screen monitor angled to his right so he could still look out forward over the shoulders of the pilot and copilot. The screen showed the tactical situation. Primus Junction, Utah was almost a hundred miles to his south. At their current altitude the sensors could ‘see’ the town and he ‘dominated’ the airspace over it and for a hundred miles south, theoretically at least.

  A couple of AWACS were circling nearby and a squadron’s worth of F-22 Raptors loaded for bear circled even closer to the town. With all this firepower he still felt exposed.

  “Alpha Lima Three this is Quick Bat One do you read me?” The soft southern drawl was a pleasure to the ear. General Carol Burns wasn’t quite the peach her voice signaled but she wasn’t bad for a tough, no nonsense scrapper, who had fought her way through, and to a degree into, the Air Force’s old boy network.

  Bill tapped his comm pad, “Quick Bat One, Alpha Lima Three reads you clear.”

  “Bill you ready?” There was tension in the soft voice.

  “Yes General.” His stomach flip-flopped.

  “Then you’re an idiot, boy,” she snarled back.

  That reply made him laugh, “Always was, way back to my days at the Academy, General.”

  “So I read in your records Bill.” A sigh, “Fortunately I don’t have to tell you to go in. I’ve convinced the big stars that we can do just as much from here as from closer in. Perhaps more. From here we’ll see if we can spot their landers coming in. We already know we can spot them and the fighters, at least sometimes. The landers appear to have better stealth than the fighters. We don’t know if they have some kind of bomber as well or if the fighters are also the bombers, it could even be the landers considering how hard to spot they are.”

  “We have rules of engagement General.” He interrupted gently.

  “Yeah, you should have them on the data link Colonel. You have permission to shoot down anything descending into the Junction; anything taking off you are strictly prohibited from shooting. We think their intent is to pick up civilians, possibly collaborators, but possibly innocents and hostages.”

  Bill leaned back, “Kind of tight restriction General, that means anything already down is hands off.” He glanced at the tactical screen, red flickers indicating bogeys flitted above the town. “What about the fighters already there General? They don’t seem to have landed and it doesn’t make sense that they’d have anyone other than bad guys aboard?”

  “With no way of really knowing, the answer is no, Colonel. I agree with you but the big stars don’t want to risk it. I didn’t want to point out that anything we do succeed in shooting down may crash on someone’s head, pretty sure they’d have called the whole damn thing off.” The voice was bitter. These days collateral damage or friendly fire accidents were more deadly, to one’s career at least, than enemy fire.

  A soft tone focused his attention on his screen. He looked at the upper cross section of the sky above the surface map; both showed an angry red triangle. He checked altitude and cross referenced it to the surface map, “One of the landers apparently General, coming almost straight down.”

  “Roger that…Going to combat stations General, talk to you later.” He pulled his helmet off its stand behind his head and put it on. All through the Light Saber the rest of the crew did the same. />
  Another tone, another red triangle, low down this time, “Another one, just took off from the Plateau.”

  “Colonel, the fighters look like they’re lifting out of the valley to cover the landing!”

  In the cavernous cargo deck two ultra-lightweight, ultra-high-power-density gas turbines spun up to speed, then huge clutches engaged and the rotors of the super-chilled superconducting generators began to spin feeding tens of thousands of solid-state lasers that would pump coherent light into the main beam. The whole assemblage ate up a significant fraction of its design life just in starting. Complex ducting vented exhaust overboard, appreciably accelerating Light Saber Three.

  A few seconds later nearly ten megawatts of laser power was online and the shield over the laser director slid aside and the big telescope lined up on the falling enemy spacecraft. Somehow the enemy knew what was coming, the enemy fighters were accelerating, the tactical display blossomed with red dots, the threat caller yodeled, “viper, viper, viper, missiles in the air.”

  A voice came over the general line, General Burns, “Weapons free, anyone shooting at us is a legitimate target. Go get them.”

  In the Light Saber’s belly the two secondary laser directors that could bear unmasked and started tracking the missiles. They were obviously late model weapons, zooming for altitude to stoop down from the edge of space on their selected target.

  Bill noted with surprise that he wasn’t the main target, most appeared to be targeting the Raptors; apparently the enemy could spot the stealth fighters at longer range than current doctrine taught. But six weapons were coming his way. A couple headed for each of the AWACS, which were already turning and diving away from the sudden threat. He counted twenty weapons in the air.

  The defensive lasers fired, five second bursts each before they had to go through a cooling cycle. He swore under his breath, only one missile faded from the screen, the rest coasted up, their main engines had already burnt out. The lasers fired again, this time two targets began to blink as they tumbled and then self destructed.

  Bill pulled his eyes away from that battle. The main laser was tracking, well within range and fully powered. He pulled the dual triggers on the main weapon and heard the crack of the laser beam pouring through its beam channel. A moment later Light Saber Three shivered then bucked under him, thrashing him around as, alarms howled, the pilot side of the cockpit blew out, peeled back, there was a thunderous roar of decompression. Bill was flung around in his seat, for a moment he thought he was going to be blown out the gaping wound. But then the world settled down, to a degree, the cockpit was full of sound, and he was still being battered by wind but it was no longer strong enough to make him feel like a rag doll in the hands of a mad giant.

  The side of the cockpit was ripped open just below the windscreen to behind his seat; he could see the night sky clearly through the hole. The pilot was gone with his seat and most of the instrument panel on that side. The copilot was sagging sideways in her seat, unmoving.

  Somehow the aircraft was still flying, at least it felt that way from where he was sitting, but things had to be spiraling out of control. What instruments he could see on the flight engineers panel were lit up red. The lieutenant at the panel was struggling to get out of his belts. Bill tapped his comm button, “Jack, what’s the status,”

  The lieutenant’s helmet jerked around, “Critical Colonel. I think we took at least four hits. One of the engines is gone or dead, the other one on that side’s on fire. I’ve got structural warnings aft; I think we took a hit on the rudder. We’re toast.”

  Bill tapped the general alert button, “Abandon, abandon, abandon, hit the silk everyone.” He fought his own belts off as he tapped another button, figuring the comm link had to be gone, “General Burns.”

  He was surprised again, “Bill! What’s your situation?”

  “On fire and going down General, we hit several of the missiles but they hit me with lasers before we could pot the lander. Sorry General.”

  “Get out man, now! I need live leaders not dead heroes.”

  “Roger that Ma’am, on my way, out.”

  He could feel the big freighter twisting in the air now, the autopilot losing control as systems died.

  The escape system for the cockpit crew was a slide like a laundry chute that led to a hole in the ships belly, the only safe avenue of escape in the air. Somehow the engineer and Bill got the copilots flaccid body to the chute. He hit the wounded button on her chute buckle to start the auto timer and let her go; the helmeted head vanished in an instant. He waved the engineer down; the younger man was gone in a second as well. With a last look around Bill stepped over the slides threshold and let go.

  The bang on the side of the head as he exited the hull was the next thing he remembered. Suddenly he was tumbling end over end; it took a few seconds for him to spread his arms and legs to stabilize his fall. He was no skydiver; as soon as he was stable Bill pulled the ring and was immensely relieved when he was almost jerked out of his flight boots by the canopy opening.

  It was only then that he looked around to see his command. He saw the last few seconds of Light Saber Three’s existence, a flaming meteor plunging towards the desert floor. He was a little shocked to realize how close the ground was; he’d not had a great deal of time left. The great yellow bubble of flame rising from his command’s exit point emphasized the closeness of the call. He prayed he hadn’t lost too many of his crew for so little gain.

  -o-

  In the end Light Saber Three lost three, the pilot was found still strapped to his seat a few miles from the crash site, the copilot had already been dead when they carried her to the escape slide, the third was a tech sergeant who’d thought his parachute was too much of a pain to wear, and who then panicked and jumped out his escape hatch without putting one on.

  The only other fatality was a Raptor pilot unlucky enough to be hit by one of the missiles launched in the first barrage. They lost four Raptors to missiles and two to space fighter lasers but the other pilots ejected safely. The battle had made it obvious that the future of aerospace combat was laser dominated, and for now it was advantage enemy.

  -o-

  The Sheriff and Federal Marshal Captain stood on the boardwalk looking at ‘Band Park’ where a small crowd had gathered. Someone was standing on the steps of the concrete gazebo-bandstand holding forth on the evils of technology and how they could be saved.

  Martin grunted, “At least he isn’t a rabble rouser.”

  The Sheriff shrugged, “Some of the Tech’s students are over by the AI facility fence line, they’ve started a couple of bonfires, say they’re holding a vigil, and some of the locals have joined them. The over flights have people spooked and angry. Looking for someone to blame, too many folks work on the Canal for them to be a target. I just hope they don’t come up with some scapegoat, things could get ugly fast.”

  Martin nodded but before he could say anything the thumps of supersonic shockwaves followed by the shrieks of fast hulls tearing through the air told everyone in the town that things were happening. A few moments later Martin’s radio toned, “Movement at the plateau! Something climbing out.” Came from his shoulder speaker, then it started to crackle and whine. A voice could be heard trying to say something but no sense got through. The sound rapidly became painful, “Jamming!”

  The Sheriff grunted, his radio gear had been all but useless for hours; the cell phone network had still been up so he’d been using that. The Marshal’s communication network used the cell bands so they had also continued to work. Now the enemy was obviously shutting down all communications.

  The Sheriff pulled out his cell phone and pulled out its battery pack before tucking it away. Martin did the same with his cell and radio pod. Even jammed the cell phones and radios were beacons to anyone with the right equipment.

  Bright white comets leapt up from the direction of the plateau. “Missiles!” the Sherrif
f spat it like a curse.

  “Who the hell are they shooting at?” Martin snarled,

  “Air Force? I’d guess Washington’s had enough time to call them in.” Ted said from behind them.

  One of the deputies trotted over the street. “Mike, I checked Charley Harker’s house. His neighbors say his family packed up as if going on vacation three days ago. His daughter’s been absent from Junior High the last two days.”

  The Sheriff waved his thanks, looked at Martin, “Charley was the canal’s concrete fabrication plant manager. He owns one of the Victorian homes in the center of town, he and his wife had it renovated when he moved here, his wife’s been working on it ever since, it’s a show place.”

  There was a movement behind them, “Sheriff!” an urgent voice spoke.

  “Cliff?” Mike and Ted said almost in unison seeing Cliff Samson standing back in the shadows.

  The red haired man looked gaunt, cold and disheveled, “Look I don’t think I have much time, you have to believe me none of us ever wanted, understood what they were willing to do.”

  “Who is doing this Cliff?” Ted asked.

  “Not Aristide, at least I don’t think so; I’m not sure how much he knew about some of what was going on. We took orders from Conrad for most of the last year, and Olarik.”

  “Who?”

  “Howard Conrad, he’s Aristide’s COO, but I think he’s been working for someone else all along. Olarik is some mercenary, calls himself a Colonel, he runs, ran the fighter program.”

  There was a deep fluttering growl from overhead and something big passed over. There were yells and shouts, a couple of shots but whatever it was gone.

  “Shit, that’s the Moonbeam. I thought they’d be looking for me.”

  “Do you have your cell phone?” The marshal asked harshly.

  Cliff shook his head, “Dumped mine, but Wendy and Tilly had theirs, I tried to use them to muddy our trail” He saw their puzzled look, “Look Wendy, my wife, was never hot on the moon colony, when we were told we were evacuating a couple of days ago she decided to run. Didn’t tell me but she got off the plateau with Tilly and to her sister’s house here in town. That’s where I found them. I tried to get out of town but the roads are closed.”

  “Moon colony?” Mike asked faintly.

  “That’s what the Plateau project was all about, about colonizing space, the moon. Aristide’s always had a dream, he believed he had a mission and the Paaly Stack gave him the key. But he never understood others had other plans.”

  Suddenly the sky was blotted out by something huge and the fluttering growl was back, the Sheriff cringed instinctively. Then an immense black something settled down, spanning the road and onto the park, there was a squealing splintering crunch as a massive landing pad crushed a small car parked across the way. Its size and utter silence were shocking, no rocket backwash, no torrent of air, no flashing lights, no eerie glow, nothing. The Sheriff realize it was roughly pyramidal in shape about the same time as he saw the lethal black shape restlessly sweeping an arc, a cannon of some kind about halfway up the side on one corner.

  “Damn, that’s a big cannon...” Martin yelped, there was a crash and a glowing rectangle in the side of the craft and black figures leaping out and down onto the road and sidewalk. A good dozen moving towards Betsy’s with the urgent assurance of trained infantry, weapons at the ready.

  Both the Sheriff and Martin knew all they could do is get people killed and lifted their hands away from their bodies. Martin muttered out of the side of his mouth, “You know as well as I do that someone’s going to do something stupid.”

  As if his words had conjured them up there was a snarl of unmuffled engines and the flash of headlights. Two old pickup trucks roared around a corner down the street, the one in trail looked like it went up on two wheels going around the corner much too fast for its old undercarriage. They both screamed to a halt several hundred feet short of the forbidding black slope of the spacecraft. There was no motion from either one, the Sheriff decided they had to be staring straight down the muzzle of an auto cannon.

  Then there was a yell from the other direction, “Take this you damned Space Invaders!” Followed by a flash and bang, Mike had heard, seen that effect before, his eye tracked the big slow moving RPG round spiraling through the air.

  The infantry returned fire, the Sheriff saw somebody falling near the launch point just as the flying bomb impacted a minivan two cars down from the spacecraft and blew it to scrap.

  “Oh shit.” The Sheriff swore, bracing for more death.

  But he was wrong, the infantry, space marines maybe, except for the four who had turned to engage the idiot with an RPG, kept moving, the big man in the lead, with the black balaclava battle mask all but ignored the Sheriff, Martin and Ted, instead he pointed at Cliff, “Mr. Samson, you are to come with us.” His voice was clipped, probably not American but not really identifiable.

  Someone in the back of one of the old trucks had a bullhorn, “Hey space invader creeps, get the hell out of town before we blow your sorry asses out of existence.” The alcohol slur in the voice explained just about everything. The Sheriff wondered in disgust if his wife would forgive his getting killed outside her restaurant because of a drunken redneck idiot.

  The soldier ignored it, beckoned to Cliff, who looked at the other three, “Please, remember we didn’t intend this, look after my Wendy and Tilly.” Then he went.

  “Hey, you Space Invaders, what the hell do you want?” the drunken voice thundered down the road, its owner not seeing the dozen infantry and the one slender captive move back to the ship. A few seconds later it simply lifted up and away, it was so sudden so silent that it caught the Sheriff, who had been expecting it, by surprise, there were a couple of shots into the sky but the craft was gone.

  The Sheriff let go what he had no control over and ran down the road, he came to a stop beside the sprawled body and empty RPG tube, John John Johnson the trucker he had talked to this morning, stared up at the sky with mute surprise at being dead.

  Martin came to a stop next to Mike and stripped off his jacket to throw over the horror of the smashed in chest and almost unmarked face, “Idiot,” he muttered in harsh benediction.

  The Sheriff sighed, “Yeah, well I know how he felt; he just had a problem controlling his impulses.”

  There was a yell, pointing fingers, screams of fear. Brilliant stars fell out of the sky, one after the other, in what seemed an endless stream. At first his heart stopped, before he realized the missiles were falling away from the town, towards the plateau.