Invasion

target, the sound of the impact and detonation echoing through the air. He saw, briefly, a sniper crawling over a nearby rooftop…and realised that he didn’t dare go onto the roof. Soldiers had mistaken reporters for insurgents before…and the alien rules of engagement, it seemed, were much more liberal than any that American forces had used. He didn’t dare leave, though; he wanted – needed – to know what was going on. Below, the bodies sprawled, abandoned. If they were still alive, they would die there, on the streets.

He saw a beam of light, reaching down from high above like a pointing finger, striking somewhere to the north. The sound of the explosion reached him a second later and he realised he had seen a falling KEW; the aliens, in their anger or desperation, had reached for the heavy firepower. A series of secondary explosions echoed out over the city; he watched, grimly, as a new line of alien vehicles passed, heading northwards as well. The hovercraft drove over the bodies and, when they finished, there was very little left of what had once been human youths.

Bastards, he thought suddenly, as more aliens passed. They were heading towards the Texas State Centre, he realised suddenly, or at least they were heading in the same direction. Some of the great reporting heroes had been on the ground when American or British bases had been attacked by insurgents, surrounded, but never broken, and he wondered if that was what had happened to the aliens. They’d taken over the government buildings in the city and…hell, he’d have bet good money that attacking them would have been one of the population’s fondest dreams. How capable would the aliens be at defending a building they barely knew?

***

It was the arrival of the reinforcements from the camps outside the city, WarPriest Allon knew, that had turned the tide of the battle. The warriors charged with guarding the human buildings had fought well, but the best they could do was hold out against the attackers, knowing that they might run out of ammunition and be hacked down before they could escape. Nine tanks had been deployed to cover the human buildings – and every human they’d found in the area had been taken to the camps, just in case – but four of them were now burning and two more had been disabled. There had been too many warriors in the area to call in a KEW strike; the entire battle had been a close-run thing.

Dawn rose upon a burning and battered city. Hundreds of warriors patrolled the outskirts of the government zone, while thousands more patrolled the city itself, trying to locate the remaining human insurgents. Most of the remaining human population, Allon was relieved to see, was trying to keep itself out of the firing line. It might have helped keep incidental damage down during the fighting, but the odds were that some of them had been blazing away at his people last night, leaving a grand total of five hundred and seven warriors dead or seriously injured. Partnered with the losses all across the occupied zone, nearly a thousand warriors had been killed outright…and he didn’t want to think about how many humans had been killed. Their death toll, he thought, must number in the high thousands, at best.

And then there were the booby traps. The humans had proved themselves fiendishly cunning; there had been incidents where warriors, not recognising what was harmless and what wasn't, had strayed into a killing ground and had been slaughtered. Cars had been rigged to explode, mines had been hidden in inventive locations…the chaos went on and on. It would take cycles upon cycles to restore the morale of his warriors; a day ago, they had felt themselves in charge of the city and of the humans. They had been confident of ultimate victory. Now…

Now, they felt as if they’d lost the war.

We’re not used to resistance on this scale, WarPriest Allon thought, coldly. They still held the advantage, but it didn’t feel like it. We never expected anything like it. There was nothing like this, not even during the worst of the Unification Wars. What sort of world have we found? What will we need to do to win?

Chapter Nineteen

A Diplomat; a person who gives up all the spoils of victory for an uncertain peace.

– Anon

“Welcome back to Washington,” the President said, as the handful of surviving Ambassadors were ushered into the small meeting room. The Secret Service had wanted them to come to the President’s bunker, but Paul had advised strongly against it, warning that the aliens might have left a surveillance device on their captives, or tampered with their minds in some way. That had started a new round of official paranoia, including the thought that all the Ambassadors might have been killed and replaced by look-alike aliens, but Paul had pointed out that that was probably a step too far. The aliens hadn’t shown anything like that kind of capability. “I’m sorry about the accommodation, but…”

“That’s all right, Mr President,” Ambassador Francis Prachthauser assured him. The Ambassador had been so relieved to be back on Earth, Paul had been told, that he’d ordered a huge meal for himself and his fellow travellers before he'd been allowed to see the President. That had provided a chance for them all to go through a medical and security check, but nothing suspicious had been found. The aliens, it seemed, had played it straight with them. “We have something of a long story for you.”

He started outlining everything that had happened since the ISS had been attacked. Paul listened carefully, occasionally injecting a question or a request for clarification, while part of his mind considered everything that had happened and how it related to what was happening down on Earth. The alien communications devices hadn’t gone anywhere near the President; they were being storied in a secure compound on the other side of Washington, being examined carefully by scientists. They seemed to be fairly standard radios, if tuned and locked to a particular frequency, but the scientists hadn’t been able to swear that they didn’t have other functions. They couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the President or an important military base, just in case; two of them would be leaving the country soon, anyway.

“And so they left us to make our own way out of the occupied zone,” Francis concluded. His tale had included a long section on the alien territories and they would have to revisit that, pulling out everything he’d observed to add to their growing stockpile of knowledge, before the foreign ambassadors could be allowed to leave the country. “They knew where the base near Dallas was.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” General Hastings said, with a moment of grim amusement. “That’s a dummy base, meant to be noticed by the aliens and keep their eyes off the real base. Doubtless they will bomb it soon, with dummy bombs.”

The President smiled. “You’ve had a hell of a time,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Are you convinced that the aliens want us to surrender to them?”

“They gave us, in effect, a demand for unconditional surrender,” Francis admitted. “They indicated that there might be some room for negotiations at the edges, at the fringes of their plan, but I think they intend to force us all to surrender and convert to their religion.”

“That’s going to really please the Bible Belt,” the President said, shaking his head. “I wonder why they think it’s going to be that easy.”

Paul shared his thought. Religion might be a collective delusion – and he had never been convinced that there was a god or gods out there – but it was deeply held, for all of that. There would be outrage across the world at the suggestion that they should abandon human religions and convert to an alien religion; there’d be resistance almost everywhere. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the aliens landed in the Holy Land…

Something clicked in his head. The bloggers in the occupied territory, even though they saw only a tiny percentage of the occupation, had all been in agreement on one detail; the aliens had been smashing places of worship. They’d smashed, without the slightest show of regret, any religion building they’d found, from Churches to Mosques, while carting off all the priests they’d found to an uncertain fate. It had ensured that the resistance was simmering away, but it also suggested something about how the aliens treated other religions; they sought to destroy them completely.

“They’re going to go for the Holy Land,” he said, suddenly. “That’s going to be the scene of the next landing!”