Invasion

Francis felt his gaze straying to the display. “Perhaps they have something we haven’t even imagined,” he said. He’d read all the speculations, but now, watching the alien craft approaching in silent majesty, they were somehow inadequate. The aliens seemed to move so effortlessly in space…and still they were silent. “Or maybe…”

An alarm sounded. “Radar sweep,” Damiani snapped. His face was very pale in the room. “They just swept space with a high-powered radar!”

Sophia flinched. “Did they detect us?”

“They detected everything on this hemisphere,” Damiani said. It had been a stupid question, born of fear and tension, but he allowed it to pass. The aliens would have located the ISS with a simple telescope sweep. “They’ll have picked up everything that wasn't behind the planet…”

A second warning tone sounded. Francis saw Gary’s eyes swinging towards the radar display…and saw the icon of the alien starship slowly beginning to break up. For a crazy moment, he thought that the aliens were committing suicide, that they’d spent all of the effort to get to Earth only to die, but then he realised that the aliens were launching smaller craft. Lots of smaller craft…

Damiani’s eyes went very wide. “Incoming,” he shouted suddenly. There was no hiding the raw fear in his tone. “Incoming…”

And the hammer of God struck the space station!

Chapter Six

Is an alien attack possible? Of course it is. Statistically speaking, almost anything is possible. There is a better question to ask, which is ‘what is the probability of an alien attack?’

– Travis S. Taylor

Captain Markus Kane watched with increasing disbelief as the alien ships opened fire. He’d watched, enviously, as the alien starship launched its parasite vessels – hell, he wished he had one of them; each of the smaller ships was still larger than the shuttle – but then awe had turned to horror as the alien ships launched a single missile at the ISS. The station, almost defenceless, was hit and started to come apart in chilling slow motion, tumbling though space.

“My God,” Sonja breathed. She sounded stunned and Kane didn’t – couldn’t – blame her. The aliens had opened fire. Without any communications, without any provocation…they’d simply opened fire. They hadn’t even transmitted a surrender demand! The ISS was doomed – that was inevitable – and it was only a matter of time before the aliens turned their attention to Discovery. The shuttle had been flying a few dozen kilometres away from the space station, watching and recording everything that happened…and the aliens had to know where it was. Escape was probably impossible. “Sir…”

“Focus,” Kane snapped harshly, as he brought up the weapons console. The shuttle had never been intended as any kind of warship and it had been a new addition, but they might manage to take a bite out of the aliens before they were blown away. The alien ships were spreading out, taking out satellites with some kind of rail gun-like weapon…and he knew that Earth was rapidly being knocked out of space. The aliens would take and hold LEO…and further resistance would become almost impossible. “Concentrate on your duties!”

The shuttle orientated towards the lead alien ship, now boosting towards them with effortless ease, not even making any attempt to hide from the shuttle’s sensors. It was a gesture of contempt for the human race, Kane was sure, and one he intended to ensure cost them. The alien ship was the size of a small wet-navy destroyer, larger than anything humanity had launched into space, and yet…it wasn't doing anything impossible. It was bound by the same laws of physics as Kane and his own ship.

“Weapons online,” Sonja said. Her voice had steadied as she pulled herself together. Like him, she had probably accepted that they were both dead; it was only a matter of time. “I have a track on the incoming ship…”

“Fire,” Kane ordered. The shuttle jerked once as two missiles were launched from the open cargo bay. They didn’t have nuclear warheads, an oversight he cursed silently under his breath, but if they hit the alien craft, they would do some damage. The aliens probably couldn’t evade them at such distances, either; unlimited by concerns for human pilots, the missiles were travelling much faster than any manned ship already. “Bring up the second pod and…”

The first missile exploded, a good five kilometres from the alien ship. Kane spared the telemetry a glance and realised that the aliens had somehow shot the missile down with a point defence system, probably a laser. The second missile followed moments later, while the big alien craft orientated itself on the shuttle. Alarms started to ring in the shuttle as the forward heat shield, designed to shield the crew from the fury of returning to Earth, started to melt under the alien bombardment. The alarms grew shriller as the lasers swept across the protective covers over the cockpit windows; Kane saw red light starting to burn through as the shuttle started to spin helplessly in space.

He looked across at Sonja. “I'm sorry,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand. “I wish that…”

The alien lasers punched through the hull. A moment later, the wave of heat reached the remaining fuel in the shuttle’s tank and Discovery, one of three remaining space shuttles, exploded in a ball of fire. The alien craft moved slowly through the wreckage, paying a moment of respect to the crew, and then returned to its attack profile. The remaining satellites had to be wiped out of space.

***

The entire space station was shaking madly. Francis heard the sound of tearing metal as the station spun through space, the noise somehow overcoming the noise of the alarms blaring out as the space station was torn apart. The status display on the wall was showing hundreds of red icons, almost obscuring the image of the space station itself, before it blinked out of existence, revealing that the power was failing. He caught on, desperately, to the side of his chair, just as he heard the dread noise of an air leak. The habitation module had been breached.

This can’t be happening, he thought, dazed. The sudden rush of air towards the breach was pulling at him. He saw one of the space station’s crewmembers flying towards the breach and then out into space, pulled helplessly along by the rush of air…and then he saw one of the ambassadors following him. It looked like Bai Li, to him; the Chinese ambassador was merely the second victim of the aliens. This can’t be happening…

A hand caught on to his arm and he turned, automatically, to see Gary waving a mask at him. Gratefully, he took it; he hadn’t even realised that the air was racing out of the compartment, leaving him with nothing to breath. He saw Sophia, one of her hands turning black and blue in the fading light, take a second mask and breathing desperately through it; he couldn’t see the Russian or the Frenchman at all. He concluded, as the seeping cold started to filter into his system, that they were both dead. The air was starting to slow now, leaving them completely dependent on the masks and their links to the emergency air storage units; he said a silent prayer of thanks for the NASA genius who had designed the protective outfits.

We should have been in spacesuits, he thought. It was becoming harder and harder to think; his head was pounding away like mad. An hour ago, they’d been so hopeful about the meeting…and now the aliens had simply opened fire. It was crazy; had they really come hundreds of light years just to start a fight? He didn’t have any illusions as to how long he would survive the coming few hours; as long as they were using the masks, they couldn’t reach the escape pod…assuming that it was still intact. Even if they did reach it, the aliens might target it on the way down, which would mean certain death. If Discovery was still in orbit, the crew might manage to pick up the survivors, but somehow he doubted that the aliens would give them that chance. He’d read a thousand different versions of the alien invasion story in the fortnight since he’d known he was going to meet the aliens…and all of them warned that the aliens would seek to control space. Given how weak Earth’s defences actually were…

The cold was growing colder, somehow. The station was still spinning, providing the semblance of gravity, but he could see the hull buckling under the pressure. A moment later, a new rent appeared in the side of the module, tearing open and revealing the spinning starfield outside. For a moment, he saw Earth, growing larger in the