Invasion

Chapter Fifteen

The big situation map was updated constantly as elements of the tactical communications network were re-established, but no one was entirely sure just how accurate it was. A big swath of Texas was covered with the red glow of occupied territory, reaching from Houston in the east to San Angelo in the west and northwards as far as Fort Worth, but it couldn’t all be occupied by the aliens. They might control the entire territory in a grip of steel or they might have restricted themselves to the cities, fighting it out to take and hold them against human resistance. Countless military units, trying to make their way out of the trap and back to the human lines, were filtering through the area, while places like Fort Hood continued to resist the aliens. The entire situation was hopelessly confused.

Paul sighed as he checked the latest updates. The chaos in Texas was only the tip of the iceberg. The alien invasion, even if it had landed in Russia or darkest Africa, would have been disruptive enough, simply through the loss of all the satellites. The landings in Texas were starting to push the United States into chaos; sooner or later, they would have to evict the aliens… and even if they succeeded, what then? As long as the aliens controlled space, they could simply pound the planet into submission… and no one even knew why they were doing it. They clearly wanted Earth intact, or else they would have rendered the planet uninhabitable, but why? What did Earth have that was so attractive to them?

But that didn’t matter, not at the moment. The truth was that the United States Army was on the run, caught between the fires of the alien landings and their bombardment from orbit, exposing countless civilians to the wrath of their new masters. The aliens might treat their captives decently, or they might simply slaughter every human that they found; there was no way to know. In time, reports would filter in through the Internet of what was happening in the occupied territory, but the handful of reports they had were contradictory. He suspected that some of them were actually the product of wishful thinking.

He stood up and walked down the corridor towards the Situation Room. The Secret Service guard at the door checked his ID quickly and professionally — ignoring the fact that if the aliens had managed to create human duplicates, the war with probably hopeless anyway — and allowed him to enter the room. There was a new air of despair floating through the air as the cabinet took their places, a new sense that everything might just be hopeless, but Paul ignored it. They had to keep fighting, if only so they could get better terms…

Easy for me to think, he thought, coldly. He was in a bunker, safe and protected by an entire battalion of infantry… although they would be no protection if the aliens realised their location and dropped a KEW on their heads. He was safe… and millions of American citizens were not. The entire planet wasn’t safe. It was easy to talk of resistance, but how many would resist when their lives and families were under threat from the aliens? Human response to enemy occupation was often a random variable; it depended, too much, on how the occupiers acted and why. The French had been happy to remain quiet under the Germans, but the Russians, knowing that they would be thrown into the gas chambers eventually, had had no choice, but to resist. What did the aliens have in mind for humanity?

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

The President looked tired, but there was a new strength in his eyes. The position of war leader wasn’t one that most American Presidents had to hold and few of them had really expected to hold it. There was a vast difference between a minor peacekeeping operation in Africa and the global war on terror, to say nothing of World War Two or an alien invasion. Paul wondered, cynically, if the President was contemplating his chances for re-election… if there would be another election. The aliens might render it all irrelevant.

“Please be seated,” the President said. He took his seat and peered around the table. “What the hell was Brogan thinking?”

There was a long uncomfortable pause. “I believe, from our brief telephone conversation, that he wanted to spare Austin further destruction,” Spencer said, finally. There was an uneasy tone in his voice. He had to know that his own position was exposed and vulnerable. “The aliens would have taken the city anyway, devastating it like Houston in the process, and…”

“And nothing,” the President said. “Why did he order the defenders to surrender? He shouldn’t have even been able to do that!”

“I don’t know, Mr President,” Spencer admitted. “The last report we had was that he’d gone to meet the aliens personally… and then we lost contact. The fighting was dying down anyway when he decided to… spare us further bloodshed.”

General Hastings coughed. “He may have sent several thousand of our people into a POW camp, if the aliens have POW camps,” he said. “I don’t think that all of our people will have accepted the surrender order — some of them actually made their way out of occupied territory to report to us — but enough did that the cities fell. Houston was devastated by heavy fighting; so far, reports indicate that the city was literally torn apart.”

The President ran his hand through his hair. “I know,” he said. Paul realised that he felt the weight of each death personally. “What exactly is going on in the occupied territories?”

“The aliens,” General Hastings said, nodding towards the main display. An image of a black-clad alien appeared in front of them. A moment later, it changed to reveal an eerie purple-red face, marching towards a target on the horizon. “They’re humanoid, which the scientists can’t explain, but they’re clearly alien. They don’t move like us.”

“One theory of alien life is that alien worlds will seek similar answers to similar problems,” Paul injected. “The humanoid form is incredibly versatile, far more versatile than… say, a fish or a horse, and alien intelligent life might have developed along the same lines. No one has actually gotten proof, one way or the other, until now. They may be alien, but they have to have at least an equal grasp of science and technology to us, if not a superior one. They may not be as alien as we imagined.”

“That’s not, of course, a good thing,” General Hastings said. “That means that we’ll want the same worlds and so on.” He paused. “The aliens landed in extremely heavy force — one figure puts their landing force at over five hundred thousand soldiers — and expanded rapidly. NASA says that they might actually be stuck on the planet…”

The President was interested. “Stuck?”

General Hastings nodded at Paul. “The issue with getting anything into orbit is mass, basically,” Paul explained. “To get a shuttle into orbit requires two external boosters and an external tank, all of which are discarded once the shuttle is on its way. To get the Apollo moon missions into space required a massive rocket, which actually discarded several stages as it rose upwards into space. The more mass, including fuel, the more power you need to push it into orbit, which means that the requirements keep going upwards.”

He realised that the President was starting to look a little confused and swiftly came to the point. “The aliens haven’t shown anything that is completely beyond our understanding yet,” he continued. “A fusion rocket — if that is what they have — is beyond our current accomplishments, but we can understand it. They are definitely bound by the same laws of physics as we are. Their massive landing craft can get down, all right, but they can’t reach orbit again. They’re stuck on the surface of Earth.”

The President laughed suddenly. “Are you sure of that?”

“It’s impossible to be certain, and a lot depends on the assumptions fed into the computers, but unless they have some means of reducing mass or even full-blown antigravity, they’re stuck. They have to win or they can’t get back into orbit.”

“In other words,” General Hastings said shortly, “we can kill them all.” He looked over at the map. “At the latest reports, all of the cities and towns within the occupied areas had been occupied by the aliens. Resistance was light in some places and extremely heavy in others. There are literally millions of refugees roaming the countryside and many of them are trying to get out of the alien-controlled territory. Our remaining units within the red zone have been forced back to their feet and are either trying to make it out or prepare an insurgency.”

The President frowned. “I was under the impression that an insurgency was doomed unless it had outside support,” he said. “General, we need to liberate that area as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Mr President,” General Hastings said. “The problem is that it might not be possible to liberate them at once.”

He looked back at the map. “The aliens have deployed ground-based antiaircraft systems that are capable of blasting anything we have out of the sky, so far,” he said. “They have deployed a mixture of ground-based and space-based radar arrays that allow them to literally track everything moving on the ground. Tanks, armoured vehicles and other targets, such as trains, have been blasted from orbit. I doubt that we have a single tank remaining intact within the red zone. Their laser weapons are capable of burning missiles and artillery out of the air… and, of course, anywhere that opens fire is targeted at once from orbit. In short, Mr President, their position is impregnable for the moment.”

Paul spoke before the President could say a word. “But that still leaves us with the insurgency option,” he added. “We can certainly supply insurgents and send Special Forces over into the red zone…”

“The Army has to liberate the area,” the President said. “Can’t you launch a major attack?”

General Hastings hesitated. “It will take at least a week to sort out everyone who escaped from the red zone and get them into new units,” he said, grimly. “We have major forces massing outside the red zone, but at the moment, they are totally vulnerable to KEW strikes from orbit. If we launch a major armoured thrust, we will have the shit blown out of us and merely add a few thousand more dead to the lists. Given three weeks, we could mass over seven hundred thousand men and a thousand vehicles… but that might be exactly what they want us to do.”

“All the money we spent on the Army and it cannot defend us?” The President asked. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“The Army was not built up to fight in these conditions,” General Hastings said, tartly. Paul heard the underlying anger in his voice and shivered. “We were used to fighting as part of an armoured force with air cover, or as a counter-insurgency force, but not as an insurgency force in our own right. We lost control of space, Mr President, and as long as they can look down on us from their lofty perch, we’re going to lose.”

Paul spoke quickly. “We may be able to negate some of their advantages,” he suggested. “We’re building up new missiles and ground-based lasers as quickly as we can. If we use our remaining missiles, we could force the ships orbiting high overhead to concentrate on defending themselves, rather than attacking the planet.”

“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 would hit back, even if the target in question was innocent. He could understand the alien position all right. They would have to strike back.

“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.