Invasion

A roar of thunder passed high overhead. He cringed, remembering, deep inside, the silent skies after 9/11. There hadn’t been any aircraft in the skies since the aliens had arrived – the internet claimed that they were all blasted out of the sky by the aliens from orbit – and the sudden change shocked him. A series of thunderclaps followed, the entire building shaking with their impact, and he felt himself stagger. He heard the sound of smashing china below him, back in the kitchen, but ignored it. He had to get to the roof! The elevator had been marked as untrustworthy since long before the invasion, but he could still take the stairs. He ran up them, passing others coming out of their apartments, half of them holding guns as if they believed the aliens were coming down right on their heads…and burst onto the roof.

“My God,” he breathed, as the sight struck his eyes. Austin seemed to have been hit several times by the alien weapons – kinetic energy weapons, according to the internet; they didn’t need nukes when they could destroy anything from orbit – but it wasn't that that caught his attention. “They’re landing!”

A massive set of contrails was burning across the sky. The sight was eerie, almost impossible to grasp, a set of…rockets moving through the air. He scrabbled for the binoculars someone had left on the roof and pulled them to his eyes, wincing as the brightness of the rockets almost blinded him. He’d seen, a long time ago, a movie about the first astronauts returning to Earth, their space capsule overheating as it came down in the atmosphere and what he was seeing now was almost exactly the same. It would be nice to believe that the alien craft had somehow been destroyed and were burning up in the atmosphere, but he couldn’t cling to the delusion. The aliens were landing…somewhere in the direction of San Angelo.

They’re insane, he thought, his ears echoing with the sound of their passage. They might be hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, but he could still hear them…and the thunderclaps of their KEWs impacting around the city. The Patriot missile batteries that had survived the first exchange of fire wouldn’t survive this one; as he watched, a flare of white light flashed up in the city, followed by a thunderous explosion. Windows were shattering all over the city. He didn’t want to think about the number of people who had been hurt in the invasion.

“We’ll eat them alive,” the gun nut said, with heavy satisfaction. He was toting a long rifle-like weapon that somehow managed to look completely terrifying. Joshua wouldn’t have bet against it being an illegal military-grade sniper rifle. “If they’re on the ground, they can be killed, right?”

Joshua shrugged. The closest he’d been to Iraq had been Florida, but he’d read enough about the insurgency against American forces to know that fighting the aliens was going to be bloody, very bloody. The aliens might have their own way of fighting insurgencies…or maybe they would force the Texans to turn Austin into a post-modern version of Stalingrad.

He smiled suddenly. If nothing else, he was going to get one hell of a story.

***

The enemy attempts to engage the landing craft hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful. A handful of the smaller, expendable craft had been hit with ABM warheads and destroyed, the stresses of their sudden course change tearing them apart. Two of the larger landing craft had rocked as warheads detonated under their heat shields, but the shields were strong enough to absorb the blow without significant damage. Retro-rockets fired madly to slow the descent, trying to ensure that the craft landed without emulating a KEW and causing massive damage – while incidentally keeping the crew and warriors alive.

An alien town seemed to spin up at them and they came down, hard. Shockwaves ran through the entire fleet of landing craft, but the warriors had braced themselves for the impact and were unhurt. Rapidly, knowing that they might be coming under fire at any moment, they ran for their escape hatches and vehicles, spilling out onto the new world they had come to conquer. One way or the other, there was no way back to the Guiding Star, not unless they secured a safe landing site for the spaceplanes. The landing craft could never return to space.

***

“Dear holy shit.”

Sergeant Oliver Pataki stared in disbelief as the small unit made its way towards the alien landing site. They’d been on a patrol of the area, just to check up on the thousands of refugees who’d fled the city and to locate possible deployment areas for Third Corps when the aliens had started to land. They’d had to seek shelter as the aliens had landed, the noise of their landing had been deafening, even at their distance, but now they were heading towards the alien positions. The higher-ups back at Fort Hood would need intelligence just to decide on a response.