Invasion

Joshua gasped and heard the others gasp as well. It had been fashionable to bitch about Washington, to complain about the IRS auditing good Americans, about the FBI wasting time playing politics when they should be protecting American citizens, about fat cats outsourcing businesses to places that didn’t have labour laws, or starting wars in far-off countries for their oil…but…but it was Washington! He hoped – he prayed – that it was a lie, or even a mistake; he didn’t want to face the possibility that it might be real. No one did.

Shelia came over to him and sat beside him. “If the President is dead, then who takes over?”

Joshua shuddered. “That would be the Vice President, in theory,” he said. He didn’t think much of the Vice President and knew that others shared that opinion; he’d only been given the role, or so they believed, because he had no embarrassing skeletons in his cupboard. “With all the disruption of communications…God alone knows who’s in charge these days…”

Another piece of flaming wreckage fell towards Earth. He remembered, with a sudden flash of dark humour, the end of Independence Day. The destruction of the alien mothership had produced the same effect, even though the mothership should have sent enough wreckage crashing down onto the planet to make it completely uninhabitable. More and more streaks of fire were burning up in the atmosphere; he found himself praying that they included alien wreckage, spacecraft destroyed from the ground, or even by the secret orbital defence systems that rumour said had existed for years. A brief flare of yellow-white light, like a bad version of a science-fiction laser, flared for a moment in the darkness, and then faded out. Whatever was happening up there was coming to a close.

“Damn it, they should be telling us what’s going on,” someone said, in the darkness. “We’re taxpayers, right? We have the right to know what’s happening!”

“I doubt,” someone else said, “that the government knows what’s happening right now. What are they supposed to tell us?”

The first man had no answer. “We now have confirmed alien attacks on almost every military and civilian airport within the United States,” the radio said, suddenly. “Alien weapons have struck them from orbit and the death toll is…”

The voice broke off, again. Joshua listened to the next two reports – and a bout of terrible elevator music – without fully hearing them. High overhead, the fighting seemed to have stopped, but the man with the telescope was reporting that there were still spacecraft moving high overhead. It was tempting to believe that NASA had launched the shuttles and somehow driven the aliens arrive from Earth, but Joshua had listened to enough NASA-bashing over the past three weeks to doubt that the NASA bureaucracy could organise a whorehouse, let alone a coordinated counterattack against alien spacecraft. The situation called for Will Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a patriotic scriptwriter. All three were rather lacking.

“This is Governor Brogan,” a new voice said. Joshua recognised the man at once. The Republican Governor of Texas might not have been one of his favourite people, but just then he’d have welcomed George Bush, father or son. “The aliens have attacked the planet Earth…”

“Yeah, tell us something we don’t know,” someone jeered, in the semi-darkness. Dawn was coming, slowly. “You useless…”

Someone shushed him as the Governor continued. “I have no communication with the Federal Government,” Governor Brogan continued, “so I am declaring a state of emergency on my own authority.” His voice was growing stronger as he continued to speak. “The aliens have hit at least a hundred targets within Texas and, reports suggest, hundreds more within the Continental United States. I ask all civilians to remain calm and remain in your homes. Rioting and looting will be dealt with severely and perpetrators will be arrested and tried under martial law.”

A voice echoed out in the darkness. “Is that legal?”

“I don’t know,” Joshua answered. It didn’t sound legal, but he’d had enough experience to know that ‘legal’ was often just a matter of interpretation. The Governor probably couldn’t get away with ordering looters gunned down in the streets, but the police, National Guard and State Defence Force would have very liberal rules of engagement. “At the moment, he could probably get away with anything…”