Invasion

Chapter Nine

Bastards, Joshua Bourjaily thought, as the live feed from the ISS showed the alien starship approaching the station. There’s no one going to profit from this, but NASA.

A moment later, the alien starship opened fire. Joshua came to his feet, shocked out of his complacency and cynicism by the sudden attack, as the alien weapons started to fire… and the live feed from the ISS cut off sharply. He’d seen something like it before, when watching live feeds from combat zones around the world, and that could only mean that the source of the live feed had been destroyed. The camera had been mounted on Discovery, if he recalled correctly, and the unarmed space shuttle would have been a sitting duck to alien weapons.

“They… they opened fire,” the talking head said, sounding shocked. The image switched to the live feed from a commercial satellite orbiting near the ISS. The alien starship was breaking up into an entire armada of smaller ships, spreading out from their mothership to attack the planet below. There was a graceful inevitability about the hazy images coming through the network and then the image vanished as the satellite was destroyed. “We seem to have technical problems…”

“They took out the satellite, you stupid bitch,” Joshua yelled at the screen as it switched back to the talking head. The blonde-haired girl looked stressed out of her mind. “They destroyed the system and you’re calling it technical difficulties…”

The television fuzzed once and failed. A single line of red writing appeared on the display. NO SIGNAL. Joshua stared at it in disbelief; ever since he had been a child, there had been literally hundreds of channels available to the discriminating viewer, more than anyone could have watched in their entire life. The growing presence of satellite television had only added to the constant barrage of news, entertainment and boredom from the media, but now… now it was dying, fast. He cycled the television through a set of channels and watched as, one by one, other stations vanished off the air. The BBC vanished in the middle of a stunned discourse by a professional astronomer on how the aliens couldn’t possibly be hostile; Al Jazeera flickered into nothingness during a live feed from a ground-based observatory.

His telephone rang once. When he picked it up, there was nothing, not even a dial tone. On impulse, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and examined it, unsurprised to discover that there was no longer any link to the satellite. The modern make of cell phones used satellites rather than ground-based stations… and they were all going to be destroyed. High overhead, the aliens were blasting them out of space… and suddenly Joshua’s horizons shrunk to the four walls of his apartment. He checked the radio quickly and discovered that it was still working, barely.

“This is an emergency broadcast,” someone said. Despite the static, it didn’t sound like the President or the Governor. Joshua didn’t recognise the voice at all… and yet, it sounded vaguely familiar. “The aliens have opened fire on orbital targets. Remain in your homes. Do not go onto the streets. Do not place yourself in danger…”

A wash of static echoed through the machine. When it cleared, a different voice could be heard. “We speak now to astronomer David Berkinshaw,” it said. Joshua couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It could have been either. “David, you predicted that the aliens were friendly. How does this tie in with the current state of affairs?”

“They could have been provoked, somehow,” the astronomer said. Joshua smiled briefly as he heard the stunned disbelief in his voice. Few had considered the possibility of the aliens being hostile, as far as the news media was concerned; they had preferred to focus on how the world would change once the aliens arrived and brought the new millennium. “Science-fiction is full of wars starting by accident. I would ask you all to broadcast messages of peace towards the alien craft…”

The ground shook, violently. A thin layer of dust shivered down from the ceiling. “My God, they’re attacking,” Joshua gasped, and dived under the table. A moment later, the building shook again and a flare of light spilled up through the window. He pulled himself up and headed for the door, catching his camera in one hand and his recorder in the other, and ran up the stairs. If Austin was under attack, he was in the perfect position to record the images for future distribution. He passed a handful of his neighbours, all looking as stunned as he was, as he ran upstairs, ignoring their shouts to remain down under cover.

He ran out onto the roof garden and stopped dead. The starry night was ablaze with light. For a moment, he thought he was staring at fireworks, then he realised that there was a battle going on, high above the world. Streaks of light seemed to be flaring through space, rising up to challenge the aliens high above, while the aliens moved in their stately orbits around the planet. He lifted his camera and peered through the zoom function, but he couldn’t see enough to tell who was winning… and then he saw the fires.

The Austin skyline was marred with towering flames. They came from the direction of the airport and he remembered, with a sudden burst of guilt, that he’d reported on the deployment of a Patriot missile battery to the airport. The aliens had hit the civilian airport — they’d hit civilians — and had he somehow encouraged them to target the men deployed to defend the location? Had he betrayed them to the enemy? Cold logic suggested otherwise… and yet, cold logic wasn’t very reassuring, not now. The entire towering furnace had to be the fuel and aircraft going up in flames; what had the aliens done to it to cause such devastation?

“I should go down to the bank and take out the rest of my savings,” a voice said. Joshua turned suddenly to see Mr Adair from the flat below his. He was watching the conflict in space through a telescope and wincing as more bursts of light sparkled out high above. “They have to give me my money, right?”

“Right,” Joshua agreed, thoughtfully. He might have joined the father of two girls, both of whom were entering their teens and knew it, but it wasn’t as if he had much in the way of money. He’d kept most of what he earned safe in his apartment, where the IRS and other busybodies couldn’t find it. There wasn’t enough to make it worth taking special precautions. “I think you’d better get moving fast…”

Another burst of light, high above, illustrated his point. A moment later, a streak of light appeared from space, racing down towards the planet, striking… somewhere kilometres to the west. He wondered, suddenly, if that was where Fort Hood was located; there was a flash of light in the distance, followed suddenly by a long rumble of thunder. More flashes in the distance caught his eye and he found himself wondering, suddenly, what was under attack. Had the aliens gone after everywhere? Was Austin the last city left on Earth?

It was silly, he knew, but in the air of unreality surrounding the entire war, it was easy to believe that they were alone in the world.

“Yeah,” Mr Adair said. “Do you want to come with me?”

“No, thank you,” Joshua said. Banding together, along with the others in the apartment, probably wasn’t a bad idea; one of the permanent inhabitants had even started a neighbourhood watch and encouraged the other residents to stock up on guns, just in case. At the moment, Joshua wondered if he’d been precognitive, or just paranoid. The media had been full of stories about collapsing gun control programs everywhere as the reality of alien contact sank in. “I’ll stay and watch…”

An hour passed slowly. Shelia, one of the other residents, appeared with a flask of hot soup, which she distributed around to the residents. Joshua hadn’t realised that they’d been joined by five others, including two children, but he was grateful for the soup and for the quiet buzz from the radio one of the others had brought. It was a more powerful model than his own, but despite constant channel sweeps, they heard very little. The static — or, he suspected, the jamming — seemed to be everywhere.

It cleared, suddenly. “All designated emergency personnel are to report for duty at once,” it said. Again, the voice was almost impossible to recognise under the static, but it sounded like the FEMA manager he’d interviewed once in the wake of a building collapse in the city. “All FEMA volunteers are to report to their local emergency centres; all others are advised to stay inside and off the streets…”

There was another burst of static. High overhead, he heard the sound of an aircraft, racing towards… what? A wink of light flared up and a streak of flame fell towards the ground, coming down somewhere to the east. This time, the explosion was smaller and he found himself praying that the pilot had managed to eject before the sudden destruction of his aircraft. He hadn’t been a big fan of the military, but watching the death of the aircraft reminded him that they risked their lives so that people like him didn’t have to risk theirs. The pilot, male or female, had deserved better than to die like that…

“They’ve bombed San Diego,” the radio squawked suddenly. “The death toll is in the millions… the entire harbour has been destroyed!” The voice changed suddenly. “We have an unconfirmed report of an aircraft carrier ablaze and sinking off the Atlantic coast.” It changed again, again and again, each message vague, unconfirmed, and panicky. “The President is dead! My God; they bombed Washington!”

Joshua gasped and heard the others gasp as well. It had been fashionable to bitch about Washington, to complain about the IRS auditing good Americans, about the FBI wasting time playing politics when they should be protecting American citizens, about fat cats outsourcing businesses to places that didn’t have labour laws, or starting wars in far-off countries for their oil… but… but it was Washington! He hoped — he prayed — that it was a lie, or even a mistake; he didn’t want to face the possibility that it might be real. No one did.

Shelia came over to him and sat beside him. “If the President is dead, then who takes over?”

Joshua shuddered. “That would be the Vice President, in theory,” he said. He didn’t think much of the Vice President and knew that others shared that opinion; he’d only been given the role, or so they believed, because he had no embarrassing skeletons in his cupboard. “With all the disruption of communications… God alone knows who’s in charge these days…”

Another piece of flaming wreckage fell towards Earth. He remembered, with a sudden flash of dark humour, the end of Independence Day. The destruction of the alien mothership had produced the same effect, even though the mothership should have sent enough wreckage crashing down onto the planet to make it completely uninhabitable. More and more streaks of fire were burning up in the atmosphere; he found himself praying that they included alien wreckage, spacecraft destroyed from the ground, or even by the secret orbital defence systems that rumour said had existed for years. A brief flare of yellow-white light, like a bad version of a science-fiction laser, flared for a moment in the darkness, and then faded out. Whatever was happening up there was coming to a close.

“Damn it, they should be telling us what’s going on,” someone said, in the darkness. “We’re taxpayers, right? We have the right to know what’s happening!”

“I doubt,” someone else said, “that the government knows what’s happening right now. What are they supposed to tell us?”

The first man had no answer. “We now have confirmed alien attacks on almost every military and civilian airport within the United States,” the radio said, suddenly. “Alien weapons have struck them from orbit and the death toll is…”

The voice broke off, again. Joshua listened to the next two reports — and a bout of terrible elevator music — without fully hearing them. High overhead, the fighting seemed to have stopped, but the man with the telescope was reporting that there were still spacecraft moving high overhead. It was tempting to believe that NASA had launched the shuttles and somehow driven the aliens arrive from Earth, but Joshua had listened to enough NASA-bashing over the past three weeks to doubt that the NASA bureaucracy could organise a whorehouse, let alone a coordinated counterattack against alien spacecraft. The situation called for Will Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a patriotic scriptwriter. All three were rather lacking.

“This is Governor Brogan,” a new voice said. Joshua recognised the man at once. The Republican Governor of Texas might not have been one of his favourite people, but just then he’d have welcomed George Bush, father or son. “The aliens have attacked the planet Earth…”

“Yeah, tell us something we don’t know,” someone jeered, in the semi-darkness. Dawn was coming, slowly. “You useless…”

Someone shushed him as the Governor continued. “I have no communication with the Federal Government,” Governor Brogan continued, “so I am declaring a state of emergency on my own authority.” His voice was growing stronger as he continued to speak. “The aliens have hit at least a hundred targets within Texas and, reports suggest, hundreds more within the Continental United States. I ask all civilians to remain calm and remain in your homes. Rioting and looting will be dealt with severely and perpetrators will be arrested and tried under martial law.”

A voice echoed out in the darkness. “Is that legal?”

“I don’t know,” Joshua answered. It didn’t sound legal, but he’d had enough experience to know that ‘legal’ was often just a matter of interpretation. The Governor probably couldn’t get away with ordering looters gunned down in the streets, but the police, National Guard and State Defence Force would have very liberal rules of engagement. “At the moment, he could probably get away with anything…”

“There is no cause for alarm,” the Governor said. There were some laughs from the small group. “So far, we have received no confirmed reports of any cities destroyed, including Washington. I was able to speak, briefly, to a member of my family in Washington and confirm that the city remains intact, although several nearby military facilities have been bombed from orbit. There is no reason to believe that the aliens intend to start bombing cities. Normal services and facilities will resume as soon as possible; the power outrages will be brought to an end as quickly as we can. Please remain calm and remain in your homes.”

“There’s someone who isn’t listening,” someone said, nodding towards the outskirts of the city. A massive line of cars, vans and trucks was heading away from the city, heading outwards to an uncertain destination. Some of them would have friends in the countryside, others probably intended to camp out somewhere… and still others would have nowhere to go. “I wonder what the Governor will do about them.”

The radio was silent. Now that it had been brought to his attention, Joshua could hear the sounds of a riot coming from the inner city… and a handful of shots, fired by police or gangsters. It sounded like war had broken out on the streets; a line of police vans drove past the apartment, heading towards the riot. The noise of smashing glass and screams rose up from the distance. He looked over for Mr Adair, hoping to convince him to remain at the apartment and not go to the bank, but he couldn’t see him. His daughters, Sally and Jane, were sitting on one of the chairs, staring up at the sky… but there was no sign of their father. He could only hope that the two girls wouldn’t be orphans by the end of the coming day.

Joshua stood up, nodded to the handful of others who had remained on the roof, and walked slowly back down to his flat. The door had been left ajar when he had left and it a matter of moments to put the kettle on for a cup of coffee. He’d expected the power to fail completely, but instead there was enough for boiling water; he made himself a cup and sat down in front of the television. Unsurprisingly, it was still useless; he flicked through channel after channel, only to be confronted by static or warning messages. The satellite network was completely gone. Televisions still used ground-based systems as well, but those seemed to be gone as well, either through alien action or the system hadn’t adapted to the disaster very well.

On impulse, he checked his laptop. He’d connected it to the internet through a landline, so it should still work. His normal connection service was down, but he linked into a secondary network and was relieved to discover that part of the internet still functioned. It wasn’t what it had been a day ago — the internet seemed to be missing hundreds, probably thousands, of web pages — but he was at least able to log on. No one seemed to know anything; the more reputable forums merely confirmed what Governor Brogan had said, while the less reputable ones were full of horror stories, including the destruction of Austin. Seeing Joshua was still alive, he paused long enough to debunk that rumour, and then started to write up his own notes. It was possible, barely, that someone out there would be interested.

It all seemed so petty now.