Invasion

out several times over, so I don’t know how reliable they are, but it all hangs together internally.”

“You mean they could be lying,” the President said. “They could be trying to convince us to surrender based on a bluff.”

“I don’t think that it’s a bluff,” Paul admitted. “Oh, based on what we’ve seen so far, I have to agree that if we can destroy their mothership, we’ve won, at least for a few centuries. Plenty of time to build up our own defences and get a massive force into space ourselves. The problem is that destroying the mothership is not going to be easy.”

“Of course it is,” Deborah said, in a rare moment of humour. “Just take the alien spacecraft at Area 51, fly it up to the mothership, plant a bomb and blow it to hell, then fly back in time for tea. Simple.”

General Hastings scowled at her. “There has never been an alien spacecraft at Area 51,” he said, irritated. The internet had been filled with speculation that there had been sixty years worth of warning of the invasion, during which nothing had been done to prepare for their coming. “Groom Lake was also hit, badly, from orbit and was seriously damaged. Recovery efforts are underway, but it is unlikely that anything there will be able to help us, apart from the lasers.”

The President leaned forward. “Lasers?”

“They’re a key part of Operation Lone Star,” Paul injected. It was something he hadn’t wanted to discuss. “If we can use them as a surprise, the aliens may find that countering our attack becomes much harder.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. They were faced with the task of ordering an attack that might fail…and, in doing so, leave large parts of the country exposed to alien attack. Thousands of American soldiers might die, for nothing. None of them were used to making such decisions and the prospect hypnotised them. Deborah, finally, broke the silence.

“If we lose,” she asked, “what happens to us?”

Paul shivered. “According to the documents, civilians will be brought into the faith, military soldiers will be offered a chance to fight for them, religious leaders will be, at best, jailed and leaders will be killed,” he explained. “They don’t intend to build a new and prosperous state, not like we did when we went into Iraq, but to crush us and completely re-work our society into their image. If they win, existence as we know it is over. At best, we will be their slaves for the rest of time, unless our descendents can organise a revolt. At worst…”

“At worst, they drop an asteroid or fry the planet and kill us all,” General Hastings growled. The frustration in his voice was easy to hear. “It kind of makes you wonder why they haven’t simply threatened us with complete devastation if we don’t surrender.”

“It could be a religious thing,” Paul said, softly. He hated to admit ignorance, but there was no choice, not when the fate of the entire planet was involved. “There is still so little that we understand about their society.”

“Is there a bio-threat?” Deborah asked suddenly. “Might they catch something nasty off us and drop dead?”

“I don’t think so,” Paul said, after a moment. “They took enough samples from the captured ambassadors to check that they could live here safely. I don’t think that the common cold will be wiping them out anytime soon.”

“We live in hope,” the President said. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked them firmly in the eye, suddenly galvanised into action. “General?”

“Yes, Mr President?”

“I am hereby ordering you to start making preparations to launch Operation Lone Star within a week,” the President said. His voice, at least, was firm; Paul noted Deborah’s surprise and wondered why she was so interested. “Keep it non-nuclear if possible…”

“We need to use some EMP,” Paul said, quickly. It wasn’t a part of the plan that could be removed fairly quickly without impinging on everything else. “We need some of the nukes, Mr President. They won’t be used on the ground.”

“Make it so,” the President said. “General, the country is counting on this. Make it happen…and may God help us all.”

Chapter Twenty

Where the laws of war have worked to migrate the horror and protect innocent life they have… done so when the combatants shared the same values and had what we might like to think of a basic decency.

– Tom Kratman

The alien holding pen was massive. Ringed by barbed wire and guarded by a handful of alien tanks, it held upwards of four thousand American prisoners, spread out over a set of smaller holding pens. The soldiers and other men and women captured during the invasion occupied one large section of the camp; civilians captured in the act of resistance occupied a second one. There had been no attempt to segregate the sexes, or even to ensure that the prisoners behaved themselves; if there hadn’t been an ingrained habit of discipline and a common enemy, the prisoners would have probably started to kill each other after the first day, or fallen into rule by strength.

Sergeant Oliver Pataki, senior prisoner by virtue of being one of the first humans to be captured, stared out over the camp and winced. It wasn't the best POW camp he'd ever seen, that was for sure; the aliens seemed almost indifferent to their comfort. They didn’t bother to provide more than basic foodstuffs and a constant stream of running water; the medical tent, where the injured had been placed in hopes that the medical staff could help them to recover, was the only covered place in the entire camp. The prisoners made their beds on the hard ground and planned, grimly, for an escape. Pataki hadn’t wanted to end up serving as the commander of the camp – in effect, the chief collaborator – but there had been no choice. The aliens had certainly never given him a choice, or even someone senior to take the burden away.

The thought nagged at his mind; where were the senior officers? The highest-ranking person in the camp was a Master Sergeant, but he was sure that all of the Captains or Colonels wouldn’t have been killed in the fighting, or maybe even a General or two. The aliens had definitely figured out human ranks and, once they’d captured a few hundred prisoners, had started to weed them out; senior officers, it seemed, went elsewhere, while the junior prisoners got dumped in the work camps and put to work.

I’m sure there’s a treaty against that, he thought, with a certain burst of amusement. It was illegal, under the Geneva Conventions, to put prisoners of war to work – or, if there was no choice, they had to be compensated for their work – but the aliens had never signed the treaty. They’d organised groups of men, each one chained up and shackled together, and marched them out of the camp and put them to work. In the week or two since the aliens had landed, Pataki and the remainder of the prisoners had dug graves, helped clear roads and airfields and countless other tasks that required manpower and little thinking. A handful of soldiers had tried to escape, only to be gunned down by the aliens, who had then left their bodies outside the camp as a warning. The warning hadn’t passed unheeded; Pataki had learned that if they escaped, they had to make certain of it…or they would die.

He’d started the Escape Committee the day after being captured, and had ensured that everyone who entered the camp was thoroughly debriefed by his people, but none of the news was good. The aliens had simply rounded up everyone with a weapon and thrown them into the camps. If they’d arrested most of Texas, he’d thought at the time, they'd have to almost wrap the entire state in barbed wire, but if they were merely keeping guns off the streets…they’d put a crimp in any resistance right there. The civilians who’d been added to the camps had told them about the destroyed churches and the ongoing fighting, but it seemed that Texas wouldn’t be liberating itself anytime soon. The aliens could move forces from place to place far faster than the insurgents could react…and, if they were pushed out of a given area, they would simply call in a strike from orbit and pulverise the resistance fighters. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the aliens would, eventually, secure an uneasy peace.

Bastards, he thought, as he started to pace the camp. He’d started to organise games and exercises to keep everyone as healthy as possible, but the longer they stayed in the camp, the weaker