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“I don’t know where most of them are, sir, but somebody will,” the lieutenant answered. “They were used in the old days, like the nineteenth century, to move supplies up from the river. They’re not very well-known, even to locals, but I’m sure that someone in EMS or city engineering will know where they are. They’d practically have to.”

“All right, we’ll get past that,” said the colonel. “The Posleen will still sniff them out.”

“Yes, sir, so we have to make the Posleen think there is nothing left to find in Fredericksburg.”

“And we do that…” asked the colonel, quizzically.

“By setting off a real mother of an explosion,” said the junior officer excitedly. “If I had a nuke it would be perfect.”

“But we don’t have one.”

“Quarles Gas is right outside of town, sir,” the lieutenant pointed out. “Fill up a couple of the buildings with natural gas and set them off. Can you say, ‘F-A-E’?”

The colonel opened his mouth to rebuke the idea then pulled out his pipe and began tamping it in thought.

A fuel-air explosive, FAE, was the next best thing to a nuclear weapon.

During Desert Storm the United States Air Force dropped pamphlets — helpfully translated into Arabic — on the Iraqi lines explaining that at 10 a.m. on a certain date they would drop a fuel-air bomb on an area which was held by a brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The pamphlets went on to explain that the weapon would have the effect of destroying all the life in a two-square-kilometer area and be severely damaging out to three square kilometers. All personnel in the affected area were urged to evacuate before they dropped the FAE, to reduce needless loss of life.

Naturally, Saddam Hussein — that polite and abstemious gentleman — derided the idea that such a weapon existed. So at 10 a.m., a battalion and a half of soldiers, over eight hundred human beings, were wiped from the face of the earth in a pair of milliseconds. The Air Force spokesperson promptly held a press conference to defuse Saddam’s natural reaction that America had initiated first use of weapons of mass destruction.

The next day the United States Air Force dropped pamphlets — helpfully translated into Arabic — on the Iraqi lines explaining that at 10 a.m. on a certain date they would drop a fuel-air bomb on an area which was held by a brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The next FAE took no lives, but did leave a three-mile-wide stretch of the lines open to advances. At least three Iraqi officers, however, are known to have lost their lives trying to stop the mutinying troops from retreating out of the area of effect.

“That’s ‘Can you say FAE, sir,’ ” the colonel corrected, distractedly.

“Right, sir.”

“Yes, I can. So we hide as many women and children in these tunnels as we can, then we set off an FAE.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the excited lieutenant.

“Then what?”

“Then it kills a lot of Posleen, they think everything is destroyed and go away in frustration.”

“And the women and children dig themselves out of a series of collapsed tunnels? Into a possibly hostile environment? Do you happen to know how they are constructed?”

“No, sir,” answered the lieutenant. It was a good question. If the tunnels were not structurally sound, the overpressure from the shock wave would collapse them on the very people they were trying to save.

“What the structural integrity and overburden are?”

“No, sir,” said the crestfallen civil engineer.

“Well, neither do I,” mused the commander. “Obviously we don’t have all the answers. You know, I think that our alien friends have never read Sun Tzu.”

The young ADE nodded his head. “ ‘Cast them into positions from which there is nowhere to go and they will die without retreating.’ ”

“ ‘On dangerous ground one must devise stratagems, but on deadly ground do battle,’ ” concluded the battalion commander.

The sergeant major stuck his head in the conference room as the colonel nodded his head in turn. “Sir, it’s the fire chief, she’s here with a group of cops and firefighters to see what they can do.”

“Get them to the operations officer…”

“Sergeant Major, Colonel,” shouted the colonel’s driver, running past the sergeant major in the corridor. “You need to come outside and see this.” The officers and NCOs, perforce, followed.

* * *

Shari finally made it out of Target, after what seemed like hours and she only had half the things she felt like she needed. For once the problem was not money. By prior plan on the part of the Target corporation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the store offered everything for free. One person had quipped that that really meant the world was coming to an end. The problem was reaching the merchandise.

Everyone in Fredericksburg seemed to have come to Central Square at once and there were fights breaking out everywhere. Twice she was sure she had lost Billy in the crowds and even as she fought through the crowds she had things snatched from her basket.

Finally she decided that whatever she had was going to have to do. All of her acquisitions were in four shopping bags, three that she carried along with the baby and one that Billy lugged. Two boxes of cereal bars, diapers, wipes, some bottled water and juice, a few batteries. It was not much to make a run for it.

She heard them saying that the Posleen were coming to Fredericksburg but wrapped in her own straitened world she had not assimilated it. As she fought through the crowds towards her distant car, the movement and noise around her dropped off, the crowd in front of her stopped. She was forced to stop as well and looked up with everyone else in the parking lot.

* * *

In the east, the sky was on fire. A new sun made up of hundreds of glowing red landing craft tight-packed into a giant disk was an eye of Baal descending upon the Virginia tidewater. The sight was unreal in the dusky afternoon sunshine, a blazing circlet of death picked out among the fleecy clouds and the darkening cerulean blue sky.

Every human in view of the spectacle stood transfixed as the circle grew and grew, swelling from a moon-sized ring to a horizon-spanning wall in moments. In the time it took to scream, the circle went from a speck to a ring to a blazing wall of fire and then snuffed out as the landing craft slowed below orbital velocities. As the meteoric reentry slowed, the individual ships could be picked out, the twelve-sided polygons of the command craft surrounded by their rings of protective landers. Moments later the sonic boom hit.

The sound was too large to be real, an aural Krakatoa beyond the ability for human hearing to accept. Most in the parking lot were driven to their knees and many lost their hearing permanently. None were spared.

* * *

Shari screamed with everyone else, her hands flying to her ears, for once matronly protectiveness being driven out by self-preservation. Billy and the other children were writhing on the ground in agony when the crowd began to surge. She snatched her children up, overcoming her own pain, dropped her hard-won possessions and stumbled into the lee of a truck that, for the moment, was stationary.

The crowd around her broke into riot as everyone individually did whatever they thought was the best for themselves. Some tried to get back into the stores, some ran for their cars, some, like Shari, huddled in the shelter of unmoving vehicles and some began firing randomly into the air. She held her babies as the world around her went mad and they screamed in pain and fear, from the riot as much as the sonic boom. Her ears ringing madly, she cradled her children in the space afforded by the shadow of the truck and waited for the panic to subside. Instead it increased, the crowd surging first one way and then the other as more shots rang out. She steeled herself to look, needing to know the cause of the newest panic and was nearly panicked herself as the shadow of an interstellar craft swept across the parking lot.