Invasion

Under War Priest Aflaha was in a furious mood. “Get the additional forces brought up and break into that damned city of heretics,” he thundered at his subordinates. He’d been running the battle directly from his command vehicle, very aware of his responsibilities…and he felt as if he were losing. The War Priest had commanded that the city – the humans called it Athens – be taken, but somehow it was stalling his most powerful thrusts. “I want it taken before dark!”

The humans had barely showed themselves, but they were delaying his advance, step by step. Rockets had been fired from cover, nasty bouncing mines had revealed themselves and damaged and destroyed tanks, insurgents had mounted sneak assaults on his supply units…it was turning into a nightmare. Some of the smaller human habitations had been rigged to be lethal traps; he’d come to the point where he was ordering them all levelled, just to prevent more of his warriors from being lost. He wasn't losing, but the High Priest was not going to be happy…

“Push on,” he snapped, to a question. Taking the city was the only way he would redeem himself. “Take that city!”

***

General Ridgley carefully opened the small box, mounted on the single console, and pulled the key from around his neck. It looked so…small, barely more than the key to a teenage girl’s diary, but it commanded unimaginable destructive power. He tried to analyse his own feelings as he placed the key within the device and turned it, but it was impossible. A dull inhuman calm had come over him. The key opened a second section within the device, this one demanding a fingerprint scan, and he placed his thump to the scanner. A moment later, a single click revealed that the device was now functioning.

“Sound the warning,” he ordered, checking his watch. The soldiers on the line, if line it could be called, would have what warning he could give them. “Five minutes, mark.”

All around the area, they would be abandoning the fight and diving for cover. The aliens might wonder why, or perhaps they wouldn’t notice, but it no longer mattered. He inserted the second command, watching as the timer ran down…

And seven nuclear bombs, the first nuclear weapons detonated in anger on American soil, exploded as one.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

– J. Robert Oppenheimer, from the Bhagavad Gita

The High Priest watched with a kind of numb horror as the nuclear warheads detonated. The American use of the warheads had not been anticipated, not in such surroundings. The analysis of the human mindset had suggested that they were terrified of their own weapons, to the point where only two had ever been deployed on their homeworld, until now. The researchers had interviewed countless humans and most of them had regarded nukes as an unbeatable horror, a crutch for the entire human race. They had believed that they would never be used.

In hindsight, the trap was easy to see. The humans probably had nukes buried all around the occupied zone. They’d lured the warriors into a trap and detonated the nukes, catching thousands of his people in the blasts. Some would have been on the fringes of the explosion and survived, but most of the force, almost ten thousand warriors and their vehicles and equipment, would have been killed. It was the most serious loss that they’d suffered since making landfall on Earth.

He had feared – and taken precautions against – nuclear weapons being deployed against either of the footholds. The Americans, in particular, had plenty of nuclear weapons, although interrogation and intelligence work hadn’t revealed many precise details, and seemed to dislike the inhabitants of the Middle East. The High Priest had expected to see the Americans firing missiles into the Middle East, and had deployed his forces and parasite ships to counter such a move, but instead…instead, they had used nukes on their own soil, the one thing most of the prisoners had believed that they would never do.

But, he thought, they probably had the entire area evacuated.

He’d followed the battle carefully and noted that the warriors hadn’t encountered any human civilians. They’d been ambushed and delayed by humans sniping from cover, or booby-traps that had taken out a few vehicles or warriors, but they hadn’t encountered any civilians. It wasn’t easy, to be fair, to tell the difference between human civilians and human warriors – the Americans and Middle Eastern humans seemed to have a fetish for weapons, something that was alien to non-warriors- but as a general rule, anyone shooting at the warriors was a soldier. There had been thousands of them, delaying the advance…and baiting the trap. There was a first-class mind over there, the High Priest decided; a first-class mind with a willingness to use his own people to bait a trap.

The War Leader waited for the High Priest to finish his meditations. If Guiding Star itself had come under attack, he would have reacted at once, but at the moment, there was little need for hasty action. If the humans had taken out the parasite ships floating high overhead, they could have used the chaos caused by their nukes to really hurt the foothold, but they’d left them alone. It still struck the High Priest as funny that a race with so many advancements and other surprises had done so little with space, but it was clearly a sign of divine favour, a blessing that would allow them to bring Earth under their control and lead their race to newer heights. There were researchers, even now, working on captured human technology, some of which promised uses even beyond what the humans had imagined. As a race, they were even more imaginative than the Takaina; he’d been astonished to discover, from one of the researchers, that some humans had even plotted out the course of the war a long time before they’d even known that they weren't alone in the universe. And yet…what had they done to prepare for it?

The High Priest turned to face his subordinate. “How many of our people were killed?”

“Preliminary data suggested seven thousand warriors have been killed or seriously injured,” the War Leader said. He sounded nervous and well he might; it wasn't unknown for unsuccessful commanders to be burnt at the stake by the Inquisitors, as failure in battle was often taken as a sign of sin. The commander on the ground was probably considering honourable suicide right now, assuming that he hadn’t been caught up in the blasts and killed. “The line is being re-established and our forces are being pulled back to regroup.”

“And effectively abandoning the advance,” the High Priest said. He kept his own voice under careful control. The last thing he needed, now, was to hear what they thought he wanted to hear. He had to heat honest advice… just for a moment, he wished that the War Leader was a sterile female, as blasphemous as the thought was. It might have been easier to get advice then. “How should we react to the human action?”

“They have killed enough of us to force us to redeploy,” the War Leader said. The High Priest nodded impatiently. It was true that seven thousand was considerably less than a billion, but as part of the force deployed to hold the American occupied zone, it was a serious loss. If the humans had had the capability to mount a counterattack, it might have proven decisive. “They cannot destroy the foothold, but we can no longer advance, at least without redeploying additional vehicles and warriors to the area.”

And those we deploy there from orbit we cannot recover quickly, the High Priest thought. Getting them down was easy. Getting them back up was much harder. The logistics alone argued against further deployment, but with the preparations for settlement, they had to strengthen their position. The human insurgency had swelled up again and additional soldiers were needed. Moving one unit of warriors from an occupied and – supposedly – pacified area meant that it very rapidly turned out not to be pacified after all. Some genius of an Inquisitor had decided to take all the children from a small town to be brought up in a religious training centre…and the entire town had risen in rebellion. They had all had to be slaughtered.

The situation was even worse in the Middle East. The natives there were even more bent on protecting their