He lifted his weapon, too late, as he saw a pair of humans running towards him. The weapons in their hands flashed fire… and he felt a brief moment of pain, before he fell down into darkness.
Chris saw antitank rockets smash into the guardpost, destroying the firing position before the aliens could bring their machine guns to bear on either side of the fence. The assault force outside had already taken out the other posts, allowing them to get close and start taking down the fence and push the blast walls aside. It would have been simpler to knock down the fence in a dozen places, but combat reports from America suggested that the aliens scattered mines between the two fences and they didn’t have time to clear a path. Besides, it might be easier to get people out over the road.
“Get the prisoners moving,” he bellowed. Sergeant Haywood heard him and started pushing the prisoners towards the gates. A second team headed towards the cages holding the remainder of the prisoners. Some of them prisoners looked as if they’d been beaten half to death, but they were all moving, if poorly. He’d have to assign people to help them get out of the base if they ran out of other options. “Get a team over and concentrated on the alien barracks!”
The aliens seemed to have had a number of troopers hiding in a large building that had clearly been designed to serve as a fortress. Chris watched as they fired from portholes, forcing his men to stay back. Whoever had designed the building knew what he was doing, he admitted to himself; the aliens could cover all of the possible angles of approach, except directly above their building. He detailed two platoons of Royal Marines to keep the aliens pinned down, while rounding up a platoon to follow him towards the human-designed buildings. If their intelligence was correct, the humans the aliens had been using as interrogators would be based there.
A small group of aliens had gone to ground behind a blast wall and were firing down towards the detention camp. Chris nodded to two of his men, who threw grenades over the blast wall and ducked for cover. Two shattering explosions tore through the aliens, sending bloody chunks of flesh flying everywhere. The alien body armour was good, he noted, with a flicker of envy. Several of the alien bodies were intact, even though they’d been stunned or killed by the grenades. They put a bullet in each of the alien heads, just to be sure, as they reached the hanger. Inside, there was a small alien helicopter and a pair of aliens who had to be techs. They reached for weapons hanging by their sides, only to be shot down before they could draw them and open fire. Chris watched them fall and then glanced at the alien helicopter, wondering if they could fly it out of the base. A quick check revealed that it had been designed for beings with very different proportions than humans and it would be very difficult for a human to fly. Maybe two humans, with proper training… he pushed the thought aside as they ran towards the stairs. There was an entire underground complex underneath the hanger, one built back when the base had been preparing for war against the Russians. The aliens would probably have found it uncomfortable claustrophobic…
“Incoming,” one of the sergeants yelled. Chris glanced up to see an alien helicopter swooping over the base, firing down towards the humans on the ground. A Stinger leapt up and slammed right into the alien craft, sending it heeling out of the sky and down to the ground, where it exploded in a massive fireball. “Sir…”
Chris unhooked a grenade from his belt and motioned for the soldiers to get ready. A second later, he hurled it down the stairs, where it exploded. He followed it down, weapon ready to deal with anyone lying in ambush, only to see nothing more than scorched walls, illuminated by flickering light bulbs. They moved down and started to check each of the small rooms one by one. Most were empty, but a couple held wounded prisoners and one held a man who’d somehow managed to bite though his own wrists and commit suicide. Judging from the condition of his body, he’d been tortured so badly that he’d thought that he was on the verge of breaking and decided to silence himself permanently. Chris would have liked to take his body out of the alien base and bury it somewhere properly, but there wasn’t time. The aliens would be responding, even now, to the attack on their territory. How long would it take them to get reinforcements to be base, or decide to cut their losses and drop KEWs on their heads? The only thing keeping them from doing that was the aliens holding their building on the surface.
The final set of doors were locked, but Chris slapped an explosive pack against the doors and jumped back, allowing the explosive pack to blow the door off its hinges. Inside, there were five men, cowering under the table. Chris recognised two of them as people the aliens had recruited to serve as interrogators, which probably meant that they were all interrogators. He nodded to his men, who seized the interrogators, searched them roughly, and then bundled them back towards the stairwell. They’d be taken back to the resistance base, interrogated themselves, and then executed. After seeing what they’d done to the prisoners, he had no room left in him for mercy.
A shuffling sound further down the corridor caught his attention and he unhooked his torch from his belt, pointing the beam of light into the darkness. Dark eyes stared back at him and he almost fired reflexively, before realising that the alien was unarmed. How could it even be in the underground complex? Chris wasn’t claustrophobic, but he’d had to crawl through all kinds of tunnels at Catterick and the alien had to find the human tunnels proportionally worse than he’d found the drains he’d had to explore. It struck him a moment later that the alien had to be one of their intelligence officers. Who else would want to be so close to the interrogation rooms?
He pointed his gun at the alien’s head and glared at him. “Can you understand me?”
The alien seemed to quiver, and then nodded. “You’re coming with us,” Chris said. “We won’t hurt you as long as you behave yourself, understand?”
There was a pause, and then the alien nodded again. A student of humanity, perhaps? Human body language had to be alien to the Leathernecks, just as their own body language was almost unreadable to humanity. He looked at the alien’s clawed hands and winced, inwardly. The last thing he wanted was the alien behind him with those natural weapons. He’d heard stories that suggested that the alien claws could cut through flesh and bone.
He jerked the gun upwards and the aliens shuffled to his feet. Chris stepped to one side and motioned for her to move towards the stairs and he obeyed, slowly. He couldn’t tell if the alien was moving slowly because he was claustrophobic or because he was hoping that its fellows would come to the rescue. Chris poked the alien impatiently in the rear end and the alien jerked, before moving a little faster. His massive bulk blocked half the corridor.
“Get him to the surface and out of the base,” Chris ordered, before peering through the remaining tunnels. The lighting was failing, suggesting that the base’s emergency generator had been damaged in the fighting. Or maybe it was just designed to add to the effect. “We’ll finish searching down here and then get up to join you.”
The remaining rooms were empty, apart from one which had a pair of laptops and several large hard drives piled on one table. They were definitely human manufacture, which seemed rather odd — even though the aliens had been noted as having an interest in human computers and rounding up human experts they could put to work somewhere outside Britain. He picked them up anyway, remembering their intelligence sweeps through Taliban hideouts back before the invasion, where they’d found all kinds of interesting information — and porn — on their software. The intelligence staff would study the laptops and determine if the interrogators had stored anything useful on their systems. Who knew? There might be videos of their interrogation sessions that could be played at their trial.