Invasion

Colonel Paul James watched as the President took his chair in the middle of the White House National Command Centre. The decision to have the President in the White House, even though he was actually in the underground command centre, hadn’t been an easy one for the Secret Service to swallow. They’d read countless novels of alien invasion, and seen Independence Day and other big-screen versions of alien invasion, and they feared that Washington would be attacked almost at once. They’d wanted the President in one of the massive command centres, well away from anything that might draw alien fire, but the President had insisted on remaining in the White House. First Contact, he’d said, on national television, would not be made with him cowering in a bunker somewhere.

The Vice President, Theodore Taylor, had been packed off to a command centre, despite his protests. If the aliens attacked Washington, it was likely that he would be President of the United States within the next hour. The NCC was supposed to be proof against a nuclear detonation, built using the most advanced bunker-building techniques known to man, but there was no such thing as absolute security. If the aliens dropped an asteroid on the city, the shockwave alone would probably collapse the bunker completely. Paul watched, dispassionately, as the President glanced around at his fellows, from the operators working at various consoles to the handful of Cabinet members who’d joined him for the alien arrival.

There was one hour to go.

Paul caught the eye of one of the Secret Service men and nodded briefly. The man didn’t respond. He’d seen Secret Service men who fitted the stereotype exactly and men who blended perfectly into the background, but they all had one thing in common; they couldn’t be distracted from their primary task. They would all put themselves between the President and lethal danger, yet they knew that there were limits to their protective abilities, particularly against such a dangerously unknown faction. The aliens might have weapons that were beyond human imagination; Paul was reasonably certain they wouldn’t be flying City Destroyers into the atmosphere and blasting Washington with a death ray, but even the weapons encompassed by their observed technological level were formidable. A single asteroid would completely ruin their day.

His eyes strayed to the big screen, overlooking the room. Normally, it would show the President, at a glance, the precise status of the entire United States military machine. Now, it showed the images from the ISS and the orbiting telescopes, including a pair of highly-classified spy satellites that had been re-tasked from watching for terrorists to studying the alien craft. The larger alien starship, the one that was still a week away, was still almost impossible to resolve, even in the most powerful telescopes, but the smaller one was much easier to comprehend. NASA’s scientists believed that it didn’t have any gravity of its own, which suggested that it was designed for high-speed manoeuvring, rather than a slow and stately entrance into Earth orbit. The ship’s hull, vaguely conical in form, was studded with bumps and blisters, some of which looked like smaller spacecraft, attached to their mothership like giant parasites. The more Paul studied the footage, the more worried he became; if nothing else, the aliens had made a hideously effective show of strength.

The President looked over at him from his chair. “Colonel?”

“Ah, yes, Mr President,” Paul said, ashamed of having been caught unprepared. The sheer size of the alien craft was daunting. He checked his terminal briefly before speaking. “I have the latest reports from the joint defence program.”

The President lifted an eyebrow. “The FAA has grounded, at our request, almost all civilian air traffic,” Paul said. It hadn’t been a hard decision; almost everyone in America, and indeed the rest of the world, had decided to stay at home and watch the alien arrival. The live feed from the ISS was going to have more viewers than anything else in human history; companies, resigned to the inevitable, had decided to give their employees a day off to watch the show. No one seriously believed that anyone who had a choice would come in to work…and, for those whose service was essential, they were still glued to television sets or watching streaming internet broadcasts. “The only aircraft in CONUS, apart from emergency aircraft, are military aircraft maintaining a CAP over our cities and defence bases, and the Boeing 747 aircraft that we adapted to carry laser weapons.”

He paused. “Please, continue,” the President said. “What about our ground forces?”