“I saw them,” he said. They’d taken up as good a defensive position as possible, but he was certain that the aliens wouldn’t allow them to escape, not when they could surround the hill and intercept any attempt at fight. That left fighting or surrendering and he didn’t want to surrender, not when the aliens might have killed them all on sight. “Take aim…”
He levelled his M16 at an alien head, hidden behind a black helm, and his trigger finger tightened on the trigger. “Fire,” he snapped. Four shots rang out as one; four aliens tumbled to the ground. Their heads seemed to explode as the bullets passed through them, a sight that caused him to blink with disbelief; outside the movies, it wasn’t that easy to literally shatter a person’s skull with a bullet. “Hit them again…”
An answering burst of fire flashed back at them. The sounds of the alien weapons were definitely different, but they seemed to work on similar principles; Pataki pulled a grenade off his belt, unhooked it and tossed it down towards the aliens. The explosion seemed to shake the ground; in its wake, he heard inhuman sounds of pain. They sounded like a trio of sea lions, or seals, howling their pain and outrage… and then an enemy grenade came over into their position. Pataki threw himself away from the weapon, watching in horror as one of his men tried to cover it with his body and was blown to bits when the grenade exploded. A second grenade, much closer, stunned him long enough for the aliens to break into their position; dazed, he realised in a moment of clarity that he’d lost his weapon. They peered down at him, their faces hidden behind their dark masks, and then pulled him to his feet. His body ached dreadfully, but they didn’t seem to notice, or care.
A buzz from one of the alien suits caught his attention. “You are our prisoner,” it said. “Do not attempt to resist.”
The aliens searched him quickly, and then marched him off towards their prison camp. He watched, helplessly, as thousands more aliens spilled out of their ships and headed towards the human cities, burning in the distance. One way or the other, he was out of the fight.
He could only hope that the rest of Third Corps was having better luck.
Chapter Fourteen
The men and women of the Texas National Guard hadn’t seriously expected to have to fight an alien invasion. The 36th Infantry Division — also known as the Fighting 36th — had been deployed to strategic locations, but there had been an air of unreality about the entire proceedings. The aliens wouldn’t be landing at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, would they?
Captain Tom Wallis peered through the tank’s optical sensors and bite down a curse. They’d been wrong about the aliens being friendly and he and his tank were right in their path, along with the remains of what should have been a heavy BCT, attached to their unit at short notice. The idea had probably looked good to some staff weenie back in the Pentagon, but it had been pure hell for the tankers, many of whom had died when the aliens opened fire with KEW weapons on anything they saw from orbit. Several dozen Abrams and Bradley vehicles had met certain death when the aliens saw them, although they had sometimes ignored other vehicles on their own. They couldn’t have an unlimited supply of projectiles, after all, and expanding them all on individual tanks wouldn’t be cost-effective.
Or at least he hoped so. He’d managed to get the four tanks remaining in the platoon into the large warehouses by the side of the interstate. The latest reports, garbled over the radio — and rapidly silenced — or through the telephone lines and often out of date, had warned that the aliens had broken onto the interstate and started to advance down towards Austin. They were apparently blowing hell out of the civilian vehicles along the way and meeting some resistance from gun-owners in their path. Wallis doubted that the civilians would be able to do more than irritate the aliens, not unless they had some antitank missiles hidden in their cars, but they might slow the aliens down long enough for the National Guard to get organised. They might not be able to defeat the aliens in the field, but a fight in Austin would chew the aliens to bits, as long as they had enough time to prepare.
He scowled down at his watch as he peered into the distance, noting the rising columns of smoke and flashes of light, all coming closer. He’d been a tanker in Iraq and he recalled how Saddam had made the Iraqis switch their defences to the north, apparently under the delusion that the Coalition was about to make a new thrust out of Turkey. It had revealed the position of far too many Iraqi soldiers, who had paid for their leadership’s mistakes with their lives… and it was exactly what the aliens had done to America. Significant amounts of firepower, enough to stall or even defeat the aliens, was wandering around, trying to get back in touch with headquarters, or even other units. Between the jamming, the smashing of any radio transmitter and the complete control of the air, the aliens held all the cards. They were probably anticipating an easy mopping up operation.
Not fucking likely, he thought, as he stared into the distance. Four Abrams mounted a significant amount of firepower in their own right and there was an entire company of infantry, many of whom lived in Austin, providing support. The aliens would probably react at once when they opened fire, but even so, he expected that they would get at least three shots off before the aliens could hit them, assuming they stayed where they were. That would be suicide… and so he intended to move as soon as they opened fire. The only problem was that they hadn’t had time to exercise properly…
A green flare flashed up in the distance. He tensed, even as he muttered a quick command to the runner, sitting by the tank. The spotter had been ordered to fire the flare once the aliens came into view and then make himself scarce, hopefully finding a way out of the occupied zone and back to a military unit. Fort Hood was large enough to be extremely difficult to cleanse of human life… or, with a little luck, he might even make it to Louisiana or Oklahoma, if he didn’t find any other military units in Texas. Wallis prayed under his breath as the first of the alien tanks came in to view, heading right towards their position.
It was the first time he’d seen an alien vehicle and he drank the sight in greedily, hunting for weaknesses. The alien tank looked crude, but tough, tough enough, perhaps, to take a high explosive round and survive. That wasn’t too surprising — the Abrams tanks were capable of taking one hell of a beating and remaining functional — but he’d loaded his guns with armour-piercing rounds. They were supposed to be capable of destroying any tank on Earth; they’d even been field-tested on other Abrams and other tanks. No one knew what they would do to the alien tanks; one of the other spotters was tasked with nothing more than watching the entire engagement from a safe distance — if there was such a thing — and reporting back to brigade HQ.
It’s hovering, he thought, with a flicker of envy. They’d been talking about hovering tanks for years, but as he knew, they remained firmly in science-fiction, rather than real life. It certainly didn’t leave the same trail of wreckage that a normal tank would leave behind on the interstate and it simply hovered over smaller obstacles. It was lucky that most of the civilians had simply abandoned their vehicles and fled; he didn’t want to see a massacre, not when he had to prepare as best as he could for the ambush.