“Work out a plan,” the President ordered. “Find us a way to hurt them.”
“Nukes,” Deborah said suddenly. “Can’t we get a nuke in there and use it against one of their ships?”
“You can’t be serious,” Spencer burst out. “You’re talking about nuking American soil!”
“At the moment,” Deborah snapped, “it is not American soil.”
“And so you’re going to destroy it in order to save it?” Spencer snapped back. “I don’t think that the people will thank us for scorching their cities with nuclear fire.”
“Have you been listening?” Deborah asked, icily. “We are not in a position where we can just wash our hands of the entire affair. We cannot decide that the going is too tough and so we’d better get going, not here. This isn’t Iraq, or Somalia, or somewhere where the cowards in government can decide to back away, having made the entire situation a great deal worse, and leave the locals to death, enslavement or worse. This is American soil!”
“It won’t be American soil if we leave it a radioactive mess…”
“Enough,” the President said, sharply. “Colonel James, what do you think of the proposal to deploy nukes against the enemy?”
Paul flinched, suddenly very aware of his junior status. Special Advisor to the President or no, the President could quite easily blame him for anything that was politically…uncomfortable. As an American, he disliked the thought of using nukes on any American soil, particularly a number of cities…all of which had thousands of Americans serving as human shields.
He said as much. “Any deployment of nukes will have to be done carefully to avoid major civilian casualties,” he said. “The second problem is that deploying the nukes isn’t going to be easy.”
The President blinked. “Was all the money we spent on missiles wasted as well?”
“No, Mr President,” Paul said. “We developed a limited ABM capability and, we know, so did the Russians and Chinese, but we never developed the kind of working screen that the aliens have deployed. Nukes are normally deployed via aircraft, missiles or shells…and the aliens have a working screen against all three. We could bombard them repeatedly in the hopes of getting a warhead through their defences, but we would rapidly run out of warheads. The stockpiles were, I’m afraid to admit, badly run down in the years since the cold war ended.”
He leaned forward. “The only way we could get a nuke through would be to smuggle one into the red zone,” he added. “There are Special Forces personnel who are trained for such missions; we could deploy some of them, pick a target, and nuke it.”
Spencer scowled. “And what will they do to us?”
General Hastings coughed. “What can they do that’s worse than what they have already done?”
Spencer glared at him. “When Saddam threatened to use chemical weapons during the Gulf War, we quietly warned him that we would go nuclear in response,” he said. “When there was a danger from missing Russian nukes, we made it a policy that if the Russian nukes were used against us, we would retaliate against Russia, if only to provide a great deal of incentive to cooperate. We have long had a policy that one nuclear strike must be repaid with another, if only to keep the deterrence factor in play. We have even considered striking Iran first to prevent them from using their nukes!”
The President winced. No President since Roosevelt and Truman had been in a position where they had seriously had to consider the use of nuclear weapons, except Kennedy. The Cuban Missile Crisis hadn’t exploded into war, thankfully, and with the end of the cold war, the nuclear nightmare had faded slightly. Terrorists with nukes were an ever-present threat, but actually producing or obtaining a nuke was much harder than the media made it seem. Sure, the Russians could still devastate America, but they’d be devastated in turn…
But they’d all had to wrestle with the possibility of a terrorist nuke. If terrorists had nuked Washington, who could the US retaliate against? Russia, if the nuke came from there? Mecca, if Islamic terrorists? Retaliation wouldn’t actually achieve much beyond adding a few million extra dead to the death toll. It would have been pointless spite…and the President who didn’t hit back would be impeached and replaced by someone else who
“This is war,” General Hastings said. “I take no pleasure in the thought of a nuke being used, but I don’t think we have a choice. Once the aliens get organised, they’re going to start pushing outwards, clearing the way as they move. If that happens…”
He didn’t have to spell out the consequences. “Colonel James, I want you and your staff to draw up a plan for evicting the aliens as soon as possible,” the President ordered. “Once you have an operating plan, inform me at once. We need to move fast.”
Paul said nothing. Maybe it could be done; maybe the aliens could be removed…or maybe it was merely the beginning of the end for humanity.
Deborah Ivey had more practice than most in keeping her face under control. Her career in a man’s world – despite an ever-increasing number of women entering politics – had taught her to keep her innermost thoughts to herself…and what she was thinking was far from complimentary. The President was losing it. He’d been shown, twice, that conventional war wouldn’t work against the aliens, but he was still keen for such a war to be launched. It would be nothing, but an unmigrated disaster.
In her view, the only way to win was to burn the aliens out of Texas before it was too late. The people living there, those who hadn’t fled, might manage to raise an insurgency, but somehow she doubted it would put the aliens off their advance for long. They might simply call in strikes from orbit and crush resistance completely. No, burning Texas was the only option…and yet it was one that the President wouldn’t embrace. Something would have to be done.
Chapter Sixteen
– Anon
The human city was…strange.
Part of it had been devastated, of course, by the fighting. The defenders shouldn’t have had a hope, but they’d held out long enough to delay the advance and cost the lives of nearly a thousand warriors. The outskirts of their city was in ruins, but they’d held until one of their superiors had given the order to surrender…and even then, not all of them had obeyed. A pile of bodies, sorted out from the remainder of the wreckage, showed just how many humans had fallen in the defence of their city.
WarPriest Allon watched dispassionately as the small convoy advanced further into the human city. It was a strange sight to his eyes. The humans seemed to have been far more profligate with their resources than the Takaina had ever been, or at least had been since the Unification Wars. Every household seemed to have a private motor vehicle of its own, or other signs of great wealth and status, while their buildings were crude and unfinished to the eye. They were proportioned wrong, of course, for Takaina…but even then, they looked weird. They’d built towering skyscrapers in one part of their city and smaller buildings in others, according to a plan that made no sense at all to him. It wasn't a logically laid-out city, nothing like there would be at home, which meant that controlling it wasn’t going to be easy.
The High Priest had given him command of nearly a million warriors, but they weren't all down on the planet yet, coming down as the landed warriors secured control of landing sites for the spaceplanes. They’d deployed a hundred thousand warriors to each of the major human cities, but half of them had to remain alert for attack by the remains of the human forces. They were scattered throughout the occupied zone and, as they encountered warriors, tried to fight their way out rather than surrendering. They were doughty warriors, he admitted without particular concern; they’d certainly hurt the landing force badly, if not badly enough. The ruins of their cities testified to that.
