Invasion

Chapter Forty-Five

“That’s confirmed,” the dispatcher said. “We have a GO signal.”

Gary leaned back in his chair and started flipping switches. The SSTO, sitting under the camouflage netting, started to warm up. They hadn’t dared test the shuttles before — the aliens would have noticed and known what was coming — and there was a small, but definite chance that something might go wrong, even though the alien definition of ‘idiot-proof’ was much more thorough than the NASA definition. There were thirty shuttles, built according to the alien plans with some improvements, and some of them might not fly.

“Understood,” he said, winking at the co-pilot. Simon Horvat had been a USAF fast-jet pilot who had survived the decimation of the USAF in the first bombardment of Earth and transferred to the SSTO corps, looking for some payback. The vast majority of the pilots hadn’t managed to make the switch — the simulated SSTO craft flew very differently to F-22s and other normal aircraft — but Simon had made it. “We have thirty seconds to lift-off, I repeat, thirty seconds to lift-off.”

The dispatcher managed, somehow, to convey a scowl through her voice. “You have clear skies and good hunting,” she said. By now, the remaining two parasite ships had been hammered into beaten hulks by the ground-based lasers and masers. They wouldn’t have been completely destroyed — the lasers weren’t that powerful — but in the midst of the bombardment, they would have lost most of their systems and were, hopefully, falling down towards the planet. “The President has sent you a personal good luck message.”

“Tell him we’re on our way,” Gary said, and keyed in the final sequence. The SSTO suddenly came alive around them as power thrummed through the ship. It didn’t feel like a space shuttle, or even one of the massive Russian rockets, rather more like a helicopter on the verge of leaping upwards. The craft had been much easier to make than he’d expected; if NASA had pushed it, Earth would have had the craft a long time before the aliens arrived. “This is Armstrong, requesting permission to depart.”

“Permission granted,” the dispatcher said. The drives were now throttling up, producing a heat signature that might be detectable from space. The alien prisoners hadn’t been able to shed light on the exact moment when the shuttle would become detectable, or when it would draw fire; it depended on how the aliens had preset their automated servants. “The covering is being removed… now. The area is clear.”

Gary laughed. “Mission control, launching… now!”

He pushed down on the switch and the rockets fired. Instantly, he felt as if an elephant was sitting on his chest, the pressure growing stronger as the craft started to struggle towards orbit. They were definitely committed now; the simulations had suggested all kinds of things that could go wrong, from improper fuel mixes to stealthy alien Brilliant Pebbles-type systems in orbit, watching for human spacecraft. The console was coming alive as the sensors, suddenly shed of the need to remain hidden, started to come online, sending radar pulses out ahead of them. They were on their way.

“So far, so good,” Simon said, watching the readouts carefully. The pilots were almost passengers in their own craft at the moment, allowing the computers to handle the first part of the flight. They had to reach escape velocity and orbit before the aliens managed to get more of their parasite ships overhead, or their whole adventure would come to a sudden and unpleasant end. “Establishing laser links… now!”

Gary took a breath. The entire fleet, thirty shuttles, should have risen from Earth. If even one of them had failed, their combat capability would be seriously degraded. They couldn’t risk using radios either, not when the aliens would definitely be listening to their words, so they had to use lasers to communicate… and that meant finding the other shuttles. If something went wrong…

“I have laser link with ground stations and twenty-eight of the shuttles,” Simon said, after a moment. “Telemetry reports that Reagan and Lead Pipe were unable to generate thrust and rise from the ground.”

Gary swore. Barely five minutes into the mission and they were already down two shuttles. The pilots would survive, but if they lost the battle, the aliens would smash the shuttles from orbit, whatever was wrong with them. The only good part of the caper was that they’d had their problems on the ground and not at attitude, when they might have cost the lives of the crew.

“Get on to the engineers and see if they can figure out what happened,” he ordered, despite the growing pressure. He didn’t understand how Simon managed to talk so normally. The pressure was worse in a Russian rocket, but at least it was over quickly. “Tell them to inform us if it was a problem that could affect anyone else.”

Simon winced. “Could we do anything about it if it was?”

“Probably not,” Gary admitted. There wasn’t room for proper spacesuits in the shuttles, although they did wear standard NASA-issue protective garments. It brought back a sense of Déjà vu; they’d worn similar outfits when they’d been taken onto the Guiding Star. This time, at least, they were armed and dangerous, unlike the pitiful Discovery. The aliens had simply blown the shuttle out of space and destroyed the remaining two on the ground. “I’d just like to know…”

The pressure eased, slightly, as they punched their way through the upper atmosphere and out into low Earth orbit. Gary examined the live feed from the ground quickly, running through the situation in his head, trying to assess it properly. There was no time, now, for orders from the President or someone else looking over his shoulder. Seventeen parasite ships in orbit and apparently intact, despite the best the ground stations could do; two more apparently disabled and damaged, and an additional three on entry trajectories that didn’t look controlled. All of them out of place for a mass attack, but seven of the seventeen on trajectories that would allow them to intercept the shuttles short of Guiding Star’s battle section, which was ahead of them. The battle section, he’d been told, was almost out of fuel mass, but it didn’t take much imagination to conceive of the aliens refuelling her somehow and guiding her away from the shuttles. They had to reach her before she could escape.

“I now have direct links to Europe and the other stations,” Simon said. The shuttles were falling into orbit now, heading outwards on an intercept course. Could Guiding Star escape? The habitation section, remaining in L4, was out of reach, for the moment, but if they could take out the battle section, they would have won. “They’re confirming our orbital tracks. Five of the alien craft are definitely moving to intercept us.”

“Understood,” Simon said. He keyed in a command sequence and smiled. It was the sort of moment that should have a soundtrack, one composed by a patriotic composer, perhaps who’d taken a mind-blowing cocktail of drugs. He was almost disappointed that there was no music playing. “I am deploying weapons… now!”

A series of dull thumps echoed through the hull as the hatches opened and the weapon systems deployed out from the cargo hold. The aliens had used their holds to store cargo, but the human designers, pressed to invent as many weapons as possible, had loaded them with racks for weapons. Each of the shuttles had a slightly different weapons load, a trick intended to confuse the aliens, although none of them carried as many missiles as Gary would have liked. The shuttles simply weren’t very large, as far as carrying heavy missiles was concerned, and most of their offensive punch was contained in the lasers and rail guns. The alien parasite ships would have much more capable weapons.

“I have radar sweeps,” Simon said, as warning tones sounded. The display lit up with red waves of light as the parasite ships swept space for targets. The aliens knew that they were there, now, although they could hardly have missed them. He’d planned the engagement, insofar as he’d planned it at all, on the assumption that the aliens would have seen them from the beginning. “They know we’re here.”

Gary nodded. The aliens had swept orbit carefully in their first week at Earth, knocking down or recovering every piece of space junk Earth had launched, which included pieces from the satellites they’d destroyed. The shuttles were flying into clear space, apart from the alien craft, and that would ensure that they wouldn’t be decoyed. The aliens would not be able to trick them into wasting their missiles.

“Good,” he said, accessing the laser link to the other shuttles. “All units, prepare to engage.”

The High Priest stared as the new icons appeared on his display. They looked so much like Takaina shuttles — almost completely identical, at first glance — that he had wondered if they’d all been launched from the Texas Foothold, before the tactical staff realised that most of them had risen from other parts of North America. The humans had built their own spacecraft, he saw now, and had managed to coordinate their actions beautifully. The parasite ships should have been able to knock them all down before they even reached orbit, but they’d been diverted to handle the missiles and their warheads… and had been caught out of position.

It was going to be a close-run thing, he saw, as soon as he realised what must have happened. The humans would have armed those ships to the teeth and, sending them out on such a course, intended to destroy Guiding Star. The realisation wasn’t as shocking as it might have been — the High Priest had known for a long time that that was the only way the humans could actually win — but he’d thought that he’d placed his people beyond all possibility of actual defeat. The attack formation developing in front of him proved that he’d been wrong… and that the time needed to correct matters was much shorter than he had imagined.

His mind traced the orbits of the parasite ships. Half of the force was either damaged or out of position, while the remainder were not armed to the teeth. The designers hadn’t really anticipated the need for real space warships, even through the Takaina could have built them, because of the divine blessing that had ensured they only encountered races that were behind them, technologically. In hindsight, it was a costly blunder and one the High Priest vowed to fix, assuming that he had the time. Guiding Star was bringing up the drive now, preparing to simply outrun the human craft, but warming it up would take time, time they wouldn’t have.

“Order the parasite ships that can engage to get into position and engage,” the High Priest said. The humans couldn’t have stuffed much in the way of weapons into those hulls, no matter how advanced their technology. It was possible that the two sides might be more evenly matched than he had supposed. “Prepare to move us from orbit as soon as the shuttles are onboard and the drive is ready. Do not wait for orders, just ignite the drive and move.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

The High Priest turned back to the display. Now that he had issued his orders, and further orders would only confuse the issue still further, something was alarmingly clear. The human shuttles weren’t just similar to the Takaina shuttles, but practically identical. The conclusion wasn’t very pleasant, but the Takaina had seen it before, back during the Unification Wars. There was a reason why females were generally kept away from the danger of being taken prisoner; their tendency to fall into the mindset of the enemy side was well known. It was a survival trait, and not something that the Truth blamed them for — in contrast to some of the more perverted human religions, which blamed women for things they couldn’t remotely help — but something that had had to be taken into account. Someone, down there, had gotten their hands on a Takaina female and brought her into the human race.

The Inquisitors are going to be furious, the High Priest thought. It didn’t take much imagination to know which female had been captured. The reports that the shuttle had crashed and had been destroyed during the battles on Earth had obviously been inaccurate. The humans, so much more practiced at deception than the Takaina, had taken the crew alive… and one of the foremost engineers from the Guiding Star. The recriminations would be dreadful; the Inquisitors would claim that it was his fault, for protecting her from the fate reserved for all whose sterility marked them as sinners.

He watched, grimly, as the parasite ships began to engage. One way or the other, it would be over soon.

“All right, here they come,” Gary said. In theory, they could have engaged the parasite ships as soon as they reached orbit, but their lasers didn’t have the power required to do real damage at such range. The aliens clearly agreed; they might have been pushing their ships around the planet, but they hadn’t opened fire. “Mark your men… and fire!”

The shuttle’s lights dimmed as power was rerouted to the lasers. The parasite ships, targeted, returned fire at the same instant, their lasers burning against the heat shielding and armour the engineers had built into the hull. Gary had seen the specs on the armour — it was designed to provide considerable protection against laser fire — but no one had really tested it in space. A dull series of clunks announced the launch of four missiles from the lower hold, their drives already boosting them ahead of the Armstrong towards the alien craft. The parasite ships would have to switch their lasers to serve in a point defence role, buying time for the human ships to engage them.

“This is Homer,” a voice said. The pilots had been allowed to name their own ships, but after several scatological names had been added to the rosters, and several other names that no one had dared to write down, that particular permission had been withdrawn. “We’re burning up; they’re breaking through…”

Communications vanished in a hail of static. “The Homer has been destroyed,” Simon reported, grimly. The lasers would have burned through the armour, flashed through the cockpit and ignited whatever fuel remained in the shuttle. The parasite ships were learning and concentrating their fire on the human ships. Two more vanished within seconds as the missiles lanced closer. “One direct hit; one parasite ship destroyed.”

Gary bit down a curse. The missiles would guarantee the destruction of the parasite ships — if they were allowed to hit them. The aliens now had every reason to burn the missiles out of space before they reached their targets… and the missiles were easy to hit. They weren’t armoured like the shuttles.

“Deploy the rail guns,” he ordered. He’d hoped to hold it in reserve for the Guiding Star, but there was no longer any choice. The lasers just weren’t inflicting enough damage on the alien ships. Their armour was just too strong. Craft designed to skim to the very limits of Earth’s atmosphere wouldn’t be too troubled by their lasers. They just didn’t have the power. “Prepare to engage.”

“Rail guns deployed and locked on target,” Simon said. Three more shuttles vanished in bursts of fire, the wreckage falling down towards the planet below, while one of the parasite ships started to leak air. Somehow, Gary doubted that that would really put the aliens off the attack. They were fighting to protect themselves as well as suppress the human race. “We’re ready to fire.”

“Fire,” Gary ordered.

The rail guns fired pellets at incredibly high velocities. At such speeds, even marshmallows would be dangerous, but the slugs were depleted uranium. The downside was that they were difficult to aim and the alien point defence could still engage them, although they would have to vaporise them completely to be sure of their safety. The shuttles fired several bursts each, while the aliens started to fire their own missiles, their targeting getting more accurate as the two sides closed…

“Got you,” Gary burst out, as one of the parasite ships disintegrated. The pellets had struck the ship so hard that their mass vaporised and converted to energy. The aliens, suddenly very aware of the threat, burned five more shuttles out of space, but one by one, the remaining parasite ships were picked off. They didn’t stand a chance now that they were in range. “What’s our ammunition status?”

“We burned off seventy percent of our total rail gun rounds,” Simon said. Gary cursed under his breath. He’d expected expenditure, but not that much. No simulation had truly grasped how hard the rail guns were to aim. The remaining parasite ships might have been caught out of position, but they were moving now to intercept… and, ahead of them…

He could see the Guiding Star. The alien battle section hadn’t been moving, but now, judging by the emissions, it was on the verge of bringing up its main drive and trying to escape. They couldn’t allow that to happen; the aliens would simply find a piece of space junk and push it down towards Earth. If they aimed properly, they wouldn’t even kill many of their own people, although they’d have to be carefully. He allowed himself to consider the prospect of an alien own goal by dropping an asteroid in the Indian Ocean, before checking his console one final time.

“Take us in,” he ordered, running through it again in his head. The aliens could bring up their drive now and still cheat the human race out of victory, but they would never forget this day. “Bring the remaining weapons online and prepare to fire.”