“Ok, ok, we got you,” the soldier said. “Come on; we don’t have all day.”
Fort Hood’s interior felt… freer to Brent. It was certainly a far cry from Austin, where the insurgency had fought the aliens. Here, there were defensive positions everywhere, with tunnels and fallback positions carefully woven into the terrain, backed up by artillery and even a handful of tanks. The men — and a handful of women — looked as if they would never pass another inspection, but they were united by their determination to hold out indefinitely. They were proud of what they’d done, he saw, and he couldn’t blame them. The best the insurgency had done was bleed the aliens badly.
His guide told him some of the stories as they reached a hidden door, leading down to a bunker complex. Fort Hood had been on alert since the aliens had separated their ship and most of the buildings had been abandoned… and the aliens had barely dented their capabilities, even if — his guide assured him — there had been a lot of very convincing weeping and gnashing of teeth on open channels. They’d come in expecting an easy occupation, ambushed and chased back out again, after which the fighting had settled down to the occasional savage confrontation between the two sides and plenty of insurgency. The bunker system, something that wasn’t discussed publicly, had kept Fort Hood alive… and kicking.
“So that’s what they’re doing,” Colonel Osborn said, when Brent had finally finished his story. He’d regained a little of his own pride when he’d realised that the soldiers were in awe of his own accomplishments, even though neither side had really harmed the aliens enough to make them give up and withdraw. “They’re settling here.”
He scowled. Brent had been a little surprised to discover that a mere colonel was commanding the defence, but it had turned out that the original commanding officer had been killed by the aliens, although so far it seemed that they didn’t know that.
“We’ll forward this off to Washington,” he added. “You might have to go with it later. Until then, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.
“It’s confirmed, then?”
Paul nodded. The sight of the massive engineering bay, covered with engineers moving, welding and slowly building the spacecraft, awed him. He’d been a frustrated spaceman long before he’d passed his tenth birthday, learning far too quickly that very few people flew the fantastic space shuttles… and that they never went anywhere, and part of him envied Gary Jordan, now a General, beyond words.
“Yes,” he said, grimly. “They’re landing in Australia.”
Gary nodded slowly. “And it’s still going to be a week before we’re completely ready to move,” he said. “At least that should keep them busy somewhere on the other side of the world.”
Paul scowled. The aliens had fallen on Australia one morning and, according to the handful of reports, were securing their landing zones now in the centre of the country. The Australian Army had put up a fight, but the aliens had stamped on them from orbit with the same power they’d brought to bear on America and the Middle East, forcing the remainder of the army to go underground and carry on an insurgency. Australia was hardly as disarmed as Europe, but with far fewer people and far fewer sources of supplies, he didn’t know how long an insurgency could last. They would have made the same kind of preparations as other armies had been making, even since the lessons from Texas had started to sink in, but would they be effective? No one knew for sure.
He cast his gaze around the dissembled spacecraft. “A week?” He asked. It seemed implausible somehow. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes,” Gary said. “Really, the guy who invented these things was a genius who didn’t have to work for a bunch of idiots who knew nothing about risk and cared only for pork barrel funding. A few hundred parts, each one easy to make with the right equipment… and all we have to do is put them together like a jigsaw to build a flying spacecraft. It’s far more impressive than I can say; if part of one spacecraft went down, we could cannibalise parts from another to keep it flying, without much in the way of compatibility issues.”
He led the way over to a set of strange-looking modules. “The shuttle that crashed in our territory was a cargo and passenger ship,” he explained. “They were actually capable of carrying quite a bit of cargo and we’ve replaced all of that with weapons. It’s going to make landing a bit more dangerous than it would be for them, but with the parachutes in the nosecone, we should be able to get back down safely. Of course, if we don’t actually win, our chances of survival will be about the same as a meat-eater at the annual tofu-munch convention, but…”
Paul grinned. “How many volunteers did you have?”
“Thousands,” Gary said. “Pretty much every surviving USAF pilot wanted in, along with the remaining astronauts, navy and Marine flyers. We put them all through the training period — it’s lucky we have your lady friend; simulating flight was actually quite difficult without her help — and put the best ones to work, simulating attack vectors. So much needs to be done carefully — we can’t really plan this too much — but if luck is with us, we should be able to hurt them.”
Paul nodded. “And the remainder of the gear?”
“I’ll show you,” Gary said, leading him out of the underground hanger and into another large room. A pile of newly recovered alien equipment lay on the table, being sorted out by a group of young engineers, while a second table had several alien suits lying on them. Gary nodded towards the pile of equipment. “Looks crude, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Paul said. “Why…?”
“You’ve never been in combat, have you?” Gary asked. Paul said nothing. It was shameful, at least to him, to admit it, but he’d spent his whole life in the military and had never been shot at or fired a bullet in anger. “Trust me; the Pentagon buys a lot of crap that promises the heavens and the earths, but is hell on the battlefield users. The guys in procurement tell the designers to fuck off and they bitch loudly to their congressman, who takes a large bribe and orders the army or the fighter jocks or whoever to accept it. Oh, they’re not always that bad, but… most of them tend to have flaws that need to be edited out, somehow.”
His eyes lit up with the glow of enthusiasm. “Now, take the AK-47, preferred weapon of rag-headed punks from one end of the world to the other,” he continued. “It’s simple, easy to learn and can take one hell of a lot of mistreatment by illiterate ditch-diggers before it craps out. This technology, Colonel, is an alien version of the AK-47; they could build handheld lasers and other really nifty shit, but would it be usable on the battlefield? This stuff may be crude, but it works.”
“But it can be countered, right?” Paul asked. “We can get around their tech.”
“Oh, of course,” Gary said. “Some of their weapons are actually inferior to ours; the handful of their sniper rifles are far inferior to ours, but don’t let that fool you. In the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, a blunderbuss is a lethal weapon. Their night-vision gear is also inferior, but we’ve actually had reports that they’ve been improving theirs or deploying newer stuff… and they have the distant advantages of not needing to worry about how much damage they do to their surroundings. Who cares? It’s all going to be knocked down, right?”
“So it seems,” Paul said, tightly. The images from Texas were far from reassuring. “If they keep expanding at their current rate, they’ll be knocking down Austin before too long.”