Invasion

Easy for me to think, he thought, coldly. He was in a bunker, safe and protected by an entire battalion of infantry…although they would be no protection if the aliens realised their location and dropped a KEW on their heads. He was safe…and millions of American citizens were not. The entire planet wasn't safe. It was easy to talk of resistance, but how many would resist when their lives and families were under threat from the aliens? Human response to enemy occupation was often a random variable; it depended, too much, on how the occupiers acted and why. The French had been happy to remain quiet under the Germans, but the Russians, knowing that they would be thrown into the gas chambers eventually, had had no choice, but to resist. What did the aliens have in mind for humanity?

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

The President looked tired, but there was a new strength in his eyes. The position of war leader wasn't one that most American Presidents had to hold and few of them had really expected to hold it. There was a vast difference between a minor peacekeeping operation in Africa and the global war on terror, to say nothing of World War Two or an alien invasion. Paul wondered, cynically, if the President was contemplating his chances for re-election…if there would be another election. The aliens might render it all irrelevant.

“Please be seated,” the President said. He took his seat and peered around the table. “What the hell was Brogan thinking?”

There was a long uncomfortable pause. “I believe, from our brief telephone conversation, that he wanted to spare Austin further destruction,” Spencer said, finally. There was an uneasy tone in his voice. He had to know that his own position was exposed and vulnerable. “The aliens would have taken the city anyway, devastating it like Houston in the process, and…”

“And nothing,” the President said. “Why did he order the defenders to surrender? He shouldn’t have even been able to do that!”

“I don’t know, Mr President,” Spencer admitted. “The last report we had was that he’d gone to meet the aliens personally…and then we lost contact. The fighting was dying down anyway when he decided to…spare us further bloodshed.”

General Hastings coughed. “He may have sent several thousand of our people into a POW camp, if the aliens have POW camps,” he said. “I don’t think that all of our people will have accepted the surrender order – some of them actually made their way out of occupied territory to report to us – but enough did that the cities fell. Houston was devastated by heavy fighting; so far, reports indicate that the city was literally torn apart.”

The President ran his hand through his hair. “I know,” he said. Paul realised that he felt the weight of each death personally. “What exactly is going on in the occupied territories?”

“The aliens,” General Hastings said, nodding towards the main display. An image of a black-clad alien appeared in front of them. A moment later, it changed to reveal an eerie purple-red face, marching towards a target on the horizon. “They’re humanoid, which the scientists can’t explain, but they’re clearly alien. They don’t move like us.”

“One theory of alien life is that alien worlds will seek similar answers to similar problems,” Paul injected. “The humanoid form is incredibly versatile, far more versatile than…say, a fish or a horse, and alien intelligent life might have developed along the same lines. No one has actually gotten proof, one way or the other, until now. They may be alien, but they have to have at least an equal grasp of science and technology to us, if not a superior one. They may not be as alien as we imagined.”

“That’s not, of course, a good thing,” General Hastings said. “That means that we’ll want the same worlds and so on.” He paused. “The aliens landed in extremely heavy force – one figure puts their landing force at over five hundred thousand soldiers – and expanded rapidly. NASA says that they might actually be stuck on the planet…”

The President was interested. “Stuck?”

General Hastings nodded at Paul. “The issue with getting anything into orbit is mass, basically,” Paul explained. “To get a shuttle into orbit requires two external boosters and an external tank, all of which are discarded once the shuttle is on its way. To get the Apollo moon missions into space required a massive rocket, which actually discarded several stages as it rose upwards into space. The more mass, including fuel, the more power you need to push it into orbit, which means that the requirements keep going upwards.”