Invasion

In her view, the only way to win was to burn the aliens out of Texas before it was too late. The people living there, those who hadn’t fled, might manage to raise an insurgency, but somehow she doubted it would put the aliens off their advance for long. They might simply call in strikes from orbit and crush resistance completely. No, burning Texas was the only option…and yet it was one that the President wouldn’t embrace. Something would have to be done.

Chapter Sixteen

The first hours after an invasion and occupation are always the most dangerous ones.

– Anon

The human city was…strange.

Part of it had been devastated, of course, by the fighting. The defenders shouldn’t have had a hope, but they’d held out long enough to delay the advance and cost the lives of nearly a thousand warriors. The outskirts of their city was in ruins, but they’d held until one of their superiors had given the order to surrender…and even then, not all of them had obeyed. A pile of bodies, sorted out from the remainder of the wreckage, showed just how many humans had fallen in the defence of their city.

WarPriest Allon watched dispassionately as the small convoy advanced further into the human city. It was a strange sight to his eyes. The humans seemed to have been far more profligate with their resources than the Takaina had ever been, or at least had been since the Unification Wars. Every household seemed to have a private motor vehicle of its own, or other signs of great wealth and status, while their buildings were crude and unfinished to the eye. They were proportioned wrong, of course, for Takaina…but even then, they looked weird. They’d built towering skyscrapers in one part of their city and smaller buildings in others, according to a plan that made no sense at all to him. It wasn't a logically laid-out city, nothing like there would be at home, which meant that controlling it wasn’t going to be easy.

The High Priest had given him command of nearly a million warriors, but they weren't all down on the planet yet, coming down as the landed warriors secured control of landing sites for the spaceplanes. They’d deployed a hundred thousand warriors to each of the major human cities, but half of them had to remain alert for attack by the remains of the human forces. They were scattered throughout the occupied zone and, as they encountered warriors, tried to fight their way out rather than surrendering. They were doughty warriors, he admitted without particular concern; they’d certainly hurt the landing force badly, if not badly enough. The ruins of their cities testified to that.

We have to hold here, he reminded himself. The High Priest had made a major gamble by deploying so many warriors to the occupation and conversion duty, but if they were all killed, the Takaina would be weakened badly. The natives would probably resist, regardless of orders, and he had to do whatever it took to keep them down. Once the remainder of their planet had been subjected to Takaina rule, they would all be brought into line.

Ahead of him, human prisoners were marched out of the city, their arms and legs shackled, clinking as they moved. They didn’t look beaten, not to his eyes, and there were a surprising number of different uniforms among them, some recognisable as fighting garments, others strange and seemingly ill-designed for fighting. The Researchers who spoke the human language would interrogate some of them, later, to find out what they knew, but Allon doubted that they would know much. Warriors were never told much by their superiors, just because they might fall into enemy hand and be brutally interrogated. Torture was commonly known among the Takaina, particularly of those who converted and then tried to fight on; he wondered, briefly, if the humans used it as well.

The human civilians seemed to be trying to flee the city en masse. He didn’t blame them for it; most of the fires might have burned out, but the devastation had probably rendered some of them homeless…and they had to know that the war was going to continue. They couldn’t be allowed to leave, not yet; they had to learn to understand the city first. The improbably-named Austin – and what sort of name was that for a city, he wondered – would be the test case for occupying the remainder of the human world. If he succeeded, he had a good chance of becoming High Priest. If he failed, his Clan would disown him and he’d be lucky to be allowed to commit suicide. The rewards and risks of high rank were both vast.