The First Protectors: A Novel

by Godinez Victor

  He thought for a moment.

  “But they must not have many of these men. Otherwise, we would see more of them on the ground in Washington. They’re fighting an effective tactical retreat, but they are losing many lives. Americans are always eager to send technology to do a soldier’s job when possible. If they’re sending the soldiers instead, then the technology must be spread very thin.”

  Rodchenko nodded.

  “Very soon, I would expect these aliens to concentrate all their fire on these upgraded men. They’re the only real threat, no?”

  “And if they’re defeated, the Americans will have no choice but to turn their nuclear weapons on their own cities. Although perhaps the aliens will have countermeasures for that, as well,” Leonov replied.

  Rodchenko, uncertainty etched on his face, leaned forward so only Leonov could hear him.

  “Yuri, are we fighting the wrong enemy? We can still take Moscow and overthrow the bureaucrats, but we cannot stand against that,” he said, gesturing at the TV. “Maybe we should form an alliance with the United States?”

  Leonov stared at the screen for a long moment.

  “No, Vanya, I think we stick to our plan. You’re right. I don’t think we can defeat this force. But maybe the Americans can. We let them exhaust themselves against this foe, and we step into the vacuum. Russia still needs saving. We must be on our way soon.”

  “And if the aliens win?” Rodchenko asked.

  The light from the fierce battle on the TV flickered across Leonov’s face, leaving reflections of orange flame in his eyes.

  “Then, Vanya, we die for the Motherland.”

  Ben couldn’t believe how close the news reporters were getting to the battle. He tried to protect them as well as he could, but the mrill separated their forces every time he did, sending the larger detachment on to attack the cannon near the White House, which Ben had to pursue. The hapless reporters were soon destroyed. Ben got on his own secure line to Rickert and yelled at him to keep the media back.

  “We’re trying,” Rickert said. “Things are falling apart. There’s major panic all through the New York, Boston, DC region, and we’ve had to deploy National Guard, Army, Marines, everything, just to prevent 30 million people from stampeding in every goddamn direction.”

  “And the reason they’re panicking is because these TV news idiots are covering everything we’re doing,” Ben said. “Of course they’re panicking! I’m sure it looks like a fiasco on TV. You’ve got to cut that shit off.”

  “Even if I could, it wouldn’t matter,” Rickert said. “The news crews are just a tiny part of it. You’ve got maybe a thousand people with cellphone cameras broadcasting all over the internet—at least the parts of it that are still working. There are even a couple guys flying personal drones, the two-hundred-, three-hundred-dollar jobs out over the battlefield, live streaming from their onboard cameras. Or they were, anyway. Apparently they got taken out in the bombing run by the B-2s.”

  “Those guys make it back to base safely?”

  “Yeah, most of them. Looks like the mrill managed to shoot one down. We’re not sure if the crew was able to eject. I’m like that damn Dutch kid trying to plug a million leaks with his fingers and toes.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. What’s your status?”

  Ben fired three shots from his rifle, toggled over to a timed explosive round that he launched into the side of a building near a mrill squad, and sprinted down the street, hurtling over wreckage and sliding to a stop beneath the jagged roots of an overturned tree. Hot shards of shrapnel embedded in the tree, surrounding cars, and concrete smoked and smoldered.

  “We’re holding a quarter mile from the White House, and I think I can stop them here.”

  The timed explosive round detonated. The force of the blast shoved one of the concealed mrill out into the street, and Ben blew it apart with two quick shots. It fired wildly into the air as it tumbled to the ground. The mrill didn’t seem interested in even rudimentary battlefield tactics. They didn’t bother to establish overwatch or sniper teams to protect their main force. No advance scouts. They just massed and charged, like some seventeenth-century European army blundering across an open field. All that’s missing are the drums and fifes. Not that it mattered against most of the defenders. The military forces simply couldn’t touch their technology. Ben, on the other hand, was dancing around them like a wasp around a bear. It had obviously been a long time since the mrill had faced anything like an equal foe. Even the brin had been overmatched.

  The mrill’s arrogance was the most effective tool in Ben’s arsenal. Even with their signal jammed, they still assumed their numbers and better guns would overwhelm the defenders. He thought about how the US had stomped into Iraq and Afghanistan. Night vision and motion detectors and body armor and drones and satellite surveillance against malnourished mountain men wrapped in raggedy gowns and clutching AK-47s older than some of the soldiers they were trying to shoot. Turkey shoot. Cakewalk. Some fifteen years later, and the US had staggered out in some kind of bloody-nosed, ill-defined draw. You didn’t need technological parity to defeat your enemy. Sometimes, close enough was close enough.

  A pair of A-10 “Warthog” jets rumbled in low over the horizon for an attack run. Ben found their radio link through the tangle of wireless communication threads nearly choking the sky overhead. He sliced through the relatively primitive encryption around their signal. There was no time for pleasantries.

  “US ground force to approaching A-10s, this is Lieutenant Ben Shepherd. I’m on the ground engaging the enemy. You’re also patched in to US Army General Tom Rickert. I need you to listen very closely and quickly. You’re about twelve seconds out from the enemy position. I’ll mark target with smoke. If you waste time with questions, you’ll probably be shot down. Out.”

  He didn’t wait for a response, ordering the marines who’d gathered near him to pop smoke grenades on the mrill position while he provided cover fire. Everyone moved without question. They were too tired to do anything but obey at this point. As the smoke grenades arced through the air and Ben fired and ran, he noted briefly that this smelled unlike any battle he’d ever been a part of.

  The flames and smoke were familiar, though other elements were radically different. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the background, the result of the conventional weapons fired by the military units; the old black brew of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate that had been the hallmark of every battlefield Ben had ever known. But his own weapon and those of the mrill forces produced an odor, or really a lack of odor, that Ben could only think of as alien. Even though he knew the basics of the hydrogen ionization process that formed the heart of his rifle, the total lack of noticeable smell was still jarring. Goldberg, the excitable engineer, had explained that hydrogen was odorless, and his weapon would not produce any kind of trackable smell when fired. That chubby savant had assured him that was a good thing, as it was one fewer way for mrill sensors to detect Ben’s movements. It was also more proof how much everything had changed.

  Ben noted almost subconsciously that the humans were winning, at least down here. There were three mrill fighters and one robot left. They were still doing heavy damage to everything around them, but their pace had slowed. Ben could hear the regular pulse of the cannon behind him, now no more than a thousand yards or so, and a blanket of red light fell over everything each time it fired. These bastards are going to die within sight of their objective, Ben thought with savage satisfaction.

  And then the A-10s arrived.

  Each opened their massive, nose-mounted 30 mm “Avenger” Gatling guns. The cannons burped and delivered a mix of armor-piercing and incendiary rounds, aluminum slugs wrapped around a depleted uranium core. The supersonic shells landed before the sound even reached the ground, screaming through the yellow smoke.

  The banana-sized bullets ripped through the mrill position, obliterating the robot and one of the mrill troops.

  The A-
10s peeled off. One of the remaining mrill troops fired at the receding aircraft, catching the tail of one of them. The aircraft broke apart and spiraled into the ground, but not before the pilot ejected. A ragged cheer went up from the US ground forces closing in on the mrill position. Two Abrams tanks clattered into view from an adjacent street, firing as they came, while Ben directed two of the Chinese drones that had just shot down a pair of mrill drones to circle back and engage as well. This would be over in moments. And the sun was rising, Ben noticed. We’re winning, he thought.

  Ben felt Nick opening his internal communication link.

  “Shit, watch out below, boss. Major incoming. And we’ve got our hands full up here.”

  Ben looked up just in time to see forty mrill drones escorting three mrill drop ships punch through the orange-tinged clouds. The drones rained green fire in every direction, emerald beams sending up yellow and orange fireballs—all of it reflecting off the low-slung clouds. Even as he was mentally rallying the Chinese drones and readying his own rifle, Ben thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  34

  We’re losing, Eddie thought.

  There were so many of them. For every mrill ship they destroyed, two seemed to take its place. Eddie understood how Ben found the battle oddly captivating. Thousands of exotic machines twirled around him, spitting green darts through the darkness of space, while the endless stars shone brighter out here than he had ever seen them on Earth. The sun rose and fell endlessly as the battle migrated around the planet. Eddie’s mind was transfixed every time the spike of white light sliced across the dark surface, even as his transformed body kept fighting.

  There was no way humankind could prepare for this kind of war. It was too . . . alien. You just wanted to stare at everything. Forget the frenzied, technicolor battle. Even just seeing the Earth from this vantage point was enough to send your mind reeling. The universe was huge. Everything was huge. There was so much out here. There was a whole new frontier out here to explore.

  “And these assholes want to kill us all, just as we get a chance to do some sightseeing,” he said out loud.

  “Yeah, these aliens are trash,” Nick agreed. “I bet we’d have even been willing to rent them some space down here while we went exploring. But no, had to make a ruckus.”

  A mrill shot nicked the hull of his ship. The vessel shuddered and kept going. But the damage was piling up. The repair systems were chugging along, patching up holes, reconnecting circuits, keeping the weapons firing. The repairs were taking longer with each hit, though, as a handful of the tiny repair droids were lost each time.

  Nick and Eddie had noticed the same lack of tactical imagination among the mrill pilots that Ben had seen among their infantry. Without their mental link, each individual mrill soldier or drone fell back on brute-force tactics, massing and charging, falling back and regrouping. Of course, sheer numerical superiority was its own tactical advantage. They just kept coming and coming. Even if each wave was predictable, another and another and another would eventually wear down even the most skilled pilot. The drones were the only thing keeping Nick and Eddie alive. Once they were all gone, the conclusion would be inevitable.

  “I don’t suppose anyone else is sending up a few hundred more drones to support the cause?” Nick asked. “No chance that France or, uh, Uruguay has been holding out on us?”

  Eddie grunted as he yanked his ship into a sharp turn, fired three times, destroying another mrill drone, and skimmed beneath a cloud of wreckage.

  “That’s a negatory, sailor,” Eddie finally replied.

  Both men could see that they had 134 Chinese drones left, versus 627 mrill ships. And the mothership still lurked in the background. It hadn’t fired a shot after disgorging its initial fleet.

  “You think that thing is spent, or just biding its time?” Nick wondered, directing a squadron of drones to break formation and circle back to obliterate four mrill ships he’d managed to lure away from the main force.

  “I think we’re going to have to find out,” Eddie replied. “We’re playing a sucker’s game. We can’t keep up this slap-and-tickle forever. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy.”

  The two men instantly shared a battle plan through their mental link, swapping and refining it in moments. Their ships converged, as did one hundred of the remaining drones. The drones formed themselves into a wedge, with Eddie and Nick trailing behind. Before the mrill could regroup, Eddie ordered the formation to speed toward the mrill command ship, firing in all directions, a battering ram of ionized energy.

  The first, disorganized line of defenders was pulverized in moments. The mrill simply weren’t expecting a frontal attack. But they reformed quickly. The second line of defense was also defeated, but now the mrill were finally trying a new tactic. Scores of ships swooped around behind the attacking wedge. They had recognized that Eddie and Nick were the literal brains behind Earth defenses. Kill them, and the rest of the fleet would be, if not sitting ducks, then at least unimaginative ducks.

  Eddie ordered the remaining Chinese drones that hadn’t formed the tip of the spear to circle around and cover the rear of the formation, essentially forming a protective three-dimensional shell around the two pilots. He then ordered the drones at the rear to turn around and fly backward, their guns facing out to intercept the approaching mrill. The entire formation now resembled a spiny porcupine, quills extended in all directions. It was an ancient maneuver. The Roman army had called it the “Testudo Formation,” when legionaries would march with their shields interlocked on all sides and above to protect against incoming enemy arrows. It looked impressive as hell, but it wasn’t invincible. The formation depended on everyone moving as one. If one spear carrier fell half a step behind, the entire enterprise could collapse in seconds. Still, it felt like their only shot at getting close enough to the alien command ship to stab the fuckers in the heart.

  “Charge of the friggin’ Light Brigade,” he muttered. “Let’s get it on.”

  Ben stumbled as an explosion hit nearby. A second, closer detonation knocked him over completely. Chunks of the building and street rained down on him as he clambered back to his feet. The reinforced mrill assault was shaking the city like an earthquake. The surviving A-10 jet had tried to circle around for a second attack run, but the mrill had blown it apart before it could fire a single missile. No parachute this time, as the plane spiraled directly into the Washington Monument, slicing it in half.

  The remaining drones were having slightly better luck, the handful that remained. Ben struggled to maintain his communication link with them, but the mrill seemed to have finally brought some of their own jamming tech to bear. Ben’s internal computers were trying to route around it while keeping his own jamming signal active. Keeping track of everything happening in the sky overhead while also leading the leathernecks and soldiers on the ground was straining even his superhuman senses.

  More than a hundred mrill troops were now advancing through the streets. A company of fourteen M1A3 Abrams tanks was converging on McPherson Square, just a block from the White House. The heavy armor rolled into the grassy opening and the mrill shots destroyed them like a finger through aluminum foil. Infantry died even quicker. Wide energy beams swept out from the mrill rifles and cut down dozens of men at a time. Ben fought with everything he had.

  The mrill were moving faster now, their objective in sight. The cannon had taken out more than half of this assault group before it had reached the ground. Once the cannon was gone, the mrill would be able to land with impunity and that would be that. Maybe Ben could take out this bunch before they reached the cannon. Maybe.

  The feeble morning sun was momentarily obscured by a plume of ash and dust as another building collapsed. Everything seemed to be on fire. A restaurant on the northeast corner of the square burst outward in a ball of flame as glass shards covered the entire area.

  Ben’s small squad of marines had pulled back, on his orders. The ones who were st
ill alive were almost out of ammo and nearly drunk with exhaustion, staggering, and swaying on their feet. But if Ben had given the order, they would have charged immediately. The stew of adrenaline and fatigue had nearly turned them into robots themselves. Ben had seen it before, had felt it before. At some point, your brain slipped into neutral while your body kept going, not even realizing how clumsy it had become. Maybe the brin had just figured out a way to weaponize that feeling. Turn a person into a fearless, tireless weapon and set him loose. Whatever the brin had done, though, they hadn’t figured out how to erase guilt. Sending these shambling men back into the fight would have been a death sentence, and Ben already carried too many of those with him. He’d ordered them back to the command center on the White House lawn.

  Not that they were much safer there. The mrill were still advancing, and drones continue to drop in from the outer atmosphere, strafing the city as long as they could. The defensive cannon and the Chinese drones had picked them all off so far, like fleas on a dog. But more were undoubtedly coming. For whatever reason, the mrill had chosen this as their landing spot; the point on the anvil where the hammer would fall. Ben doubted the mrill had any interest in taking prisoners or keeping slaves. Mankind was of no use to them. They simply wanted a ready-made planet on which to settle. Even if their combat tactics were almost insultingly rudimentary, they’d know, as they’d learned from the brin, that you couldn’t leave a single native behind to get up to mischief. They’d scrape the planet clean of people, flatten the cities, and then start over so that no sign would remain that mankind had ever built a civilization on this planet or even walked its surface.

  Ben realized with a jolt that if the mrill won, the only proof of man’s existence might be the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now cruising out of the solar system. The primitive machines carried gold plates embedded with basic data about the human race. Should, by an astronomically tiny chance, another alien civilization ten thousand years from now scoop up the spindly probes, they’d discover the brief history of an extinct species etched on these tombstones sent hurtling through the dark.