Invasion

of them were actually the product of wishful thinking.

He stood up and walked down the corridor towards the Situation Room. The Secret Service guard at the door checked his ID quickly and professionally – ignoring the fact that if the aliens had managed to create human duplicates, the war with probably hopeless anyway – and allowed him to enter the room. There was a new air of despair floating through the air as the cabinet took their places, a new sense that everything might just be hopeless, but Paul ignored it. They had to keep fighting, if only so they could get better terms…

Easy for me to think, he thought, coldly. He was in a bunker, safe and protected by an entire battalion of infantry…although they would be no protection if the aliens realised their location and dropped a KEW on their heads. He was safe…and millions of American citizens were not. The entire planet wasn't safe. It was easy to talk of resistance, but how many would resist when their lives and families were under threat from the aliens? Human response to enemy occupation was often a random variable; it depended, too much, on how the occupiers acted and why. The French had been happy to remain quiet under the Germans, but the Russians, knowing that they would be thrown into the gas chambers eventually, had had no choice, but to resist. What did the aliens have in mind for humanity?

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

The President looked tired, but there was a new strength in his eyes. The position of war leader wasn't one that most American Presidents had to hold and few of them had really expected to hold it. There was a vast difference between a minor peacekeeping operation in Africa and the global war on terror, to say nothing of World War Two or an alien invasion. Paul wondered, cynically, if the President was contemplating his chances for re- election…if there would be another election. The aliens might render it all irrelevant.

“Please be seated,” the President said. He took his seat and peered around the table. “What the hell was Brogan thinking?”

There was a long uncomfortable pause. “I believe, from our brief telephone conversation, that he wanted to spare Austin further destruction,” Spencer said, finally. There was an uneasy tone in his voice. He had to know that his own position was exposed and vulnerable. “The aliens would have taken the city anyway, devastating it like Houston in the process, and…”

“And nothing,” the President said. “Why did he order the defenders to surrender? He shouldn’t have even been able to do that!”

“I don’t know, Mr President,” Spencer admitted. “The last report we had was that he’d gone to meet the aliens personally…and then we lost contact. The fighting was dying down anyway when he decided to…spare us further bloodshed.”

General Hastings coughed. “He may have sent several thousand of our people into a POW camp, if the aliens have POW camps,” he said. “I don’t think that all of our people will have accepted the surrender order – some of them actually made their way out of occupied territory to report to us – but enough did that the cities fell. Houston was devastated by heavy fighting; so far, reports indicate that the city was literally torn apart.”

The President ran his hand through his hair. “I know,” he said. Paul realised that he felt the weight of each death personally. “What exactly is going on in the occupied territories?”

“The aliens,” General Hastings said, nodding towards the main display. An image of a black-clad alien appeared in front of them. A moment later, it changed to reveal an eerie purple-red face, marching towards a target on the horizon. “They’re humanoid, which the scientists can’t explain, but they’re clearly alien. They don’t move like us.”

“One theory of alien life is that alien worlds will seek similar answers to similar problems,” Paul injected. “The humanoid form is incredibly versatile, far more versatile than…say, a fish or a horse, and alien intelligent life might have developed along the same lines. No one has actually gotten proof, one way or the other, until now. They may be alien, but they have to have at least an equal grasp of science and technology to us, if not a superior one. They may not be as alien as we imagined.”

“That’s not, of course, a good thing,” General Hastings said. “That means that we’ll want the same worlds and so on.” He paused. “The aliens landed in extremely heavy force – one figure puts their landing force at over five hundred thousand soldiers – and expanded rapidly. NASA says that they might actually be stuck on the planet…”

The President was interested. “Stuck?”

General Hastings nodded at Paul. “The issue with getting anything into orbit is mass, basically,” Paul explained. “To get a shuttle into orbit requires two external boosters and an external tank, all of which are discarded once the shuttle is on its way. To get the Apollo moon missions into space required a massive rocket, which actually discarded several stages as it rose upwards into space. The more mass, including fuel, the more power you need to push it into orbit, which means that the requirements keep going upwards.”

He realised that the President was starting to look a little confused and swiftly came to the point. “The aliens haven’t shown anything that is completely beyond our understanding yet,” he continued. “A fusion rocket – if that is what they have – is beyond our current accomplishments, but we can understand it. They are definitely bound by the same laws of physics as we are. Their massive landing craft can get down, all right, but they can’t reach orbit again. They’re stuck on the surface of Earth.”

The President laughed suddenly. “Are you sure of that?”

“It’s impossible to be certain, and a lot depends on the assumptions fed into the computers, but unless they have some means of reducing mass or even full-blown antigravity, they’re stuck. They have to win or they can’t get back into orbit.”

“In other words,” General Hastings said shortly, “we can kill them all.” He looked over at the map. “At the latest reports, all of the cities and towns within the occupied areas had been occupied by the aliens. Resistance was light in some places and extremely heavy in others. There are literally millions of refugees roaming the countryside and many of them are trying to get out of the alien-controlled territory. Our remaining units within the red zone have been forced back to their feet and are either trying to make it out or prepare an insurgency.”

The President frowned. “I was under the impression that an insurgency was doomed unless it had outside support,” he said. “General, we need to liberate that area as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Mr President,” General Hastings said. “The problem is that it might not be possible to liberate them at once.”

He looked back at the map. “The aliens have deployed ground-based antiaircraft systems that are capable of blasting anything we have out of the sky, so far,” he said. “They have deployed a mixture of ground-based and space-based radar arrays that allow them to literally track everything moving on the ground. Tanks, armoured vehicles and other targets, such as trains, have been blasted from orbit. I doubt that we have a single tank remaining intact within the red zone. Their laser weapons are capable of burning missiles and artillery out of the air…and, of course, anywhere that opens fire is targeted at once from orbit. In short, Mr President, their position is impregnable for the moment.”

Paul spoke before the President could say a word. “But that still leaves us with the insurgency option,” he added. “We can certainly supply insurgents and send Special Forces over into the red zone…”

“The Army has to liberate the area,” the President said. “Can’t you launch a major attack?”

General Hastings hesitated. “It will take at least a week to sort out everyone who escaped from the red zone and get them into new units,” he said, grimly. “We have major forces massing outside the red zone, but at the moment, they are totally vulnerable to KEW strikes from orbit. If we launch a major armoured thrust, we will have the shit blown out of us and merely add a few thousand more dead to the lists. Given three weeks, we could mass over seven hundred thousand men and a thousand vehicles…but that might be exactly what they want us to do.”

“All the money we spent on the Army and it cannot defend us?” The President asked. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“The Army was not built up to fight in these conditions,” General Hastings said, tartly. Paul heard the underlying anger in his voice and shivered. “We were used to fighting as part of an armoured force with air cover, or as a counter-insurgency force, but not as an insurgency force in our own right. We lost control of space, Mr President, and as long as they can look down on us from their lofty perch, we’re going to lose.”

Paul spoke quickly. “We may be able to negate some of their advantages,” he suggested. “We’re building up new missiles and ground-based lasers as quickly as we can. If we use our remaining missiles, we could force the ships orbiting high overhead to concentrate on defending themselves, rather than attacking the planet.”