Invasion

The three of them left, slowly, leaving Joshua alone. His laptop was where he’d left it, but he didn’t dare power it up, not when the light might draw more fire. He crawled over to the candles, mounted on the table, and blew them out, one by one. Darkness fell in the room and, with it, he could see flickering light from outside. Greatly daring, surprising himself by his own courage, he crawled over to the window and peered, carefully, out over the city. Flames and smoke were everywhere and he could hear, in the distance, the sound of shots.

They’re revolting, he thought, with a sudden sense of awe. He wanted to get up and go join them down on the streets, but he didn’t quite dare that much, not when he didn’t know who’d been shooting at them. The streets below were almost empty, but he saw a gang of teenage boys, running towards the fighting and carrying bottles in their hands. He hoped, for their sake, that they were only alcohol, not Molotov Cocktails. The kids wouldn’t last more than a few seconds when the aliens saw them. The anarchy on the streets might be drawing them like a magnet, but they wouldn’t be able to hurt the aliens, now that they were warned…

A burst of fire, fired from somewhere out of his view, came down towards the kids and tore them apart. Joshua watched in horror as an pair of alien vehicles rushed past, one of them firing its heavy gun towards an unidentified target, the sound of the impact and detonation echoing through the air. He saw, briefly, a sniper crawling over a nearby rooftop…and realised that he didn’t dare go onto the roof. Soldiers had mistaken reporters for insurgents before…and the alien rules of engagement, it seemed, were much more liberal than any that American forces had used. He didn’t dare leave, though; he wanted – needed – to know what was going on. Below, the bodies sprawled, abandoned. If they were still alive, they would die there, on the streets.

He saw a beam of light, reaching down from high above like a pointing finger, striking somewhere to the north. The sound of the explosion reached him a second later and he realised he had seen a falling KEW; the aliens, in their anger or desperation, had reached for the heavy firepower. A series of secondary explosions echoed out over the city; he watched, grimly, as a new line of alien vehicles passed, heading northwards as well. The hovercraft drove over the bodies and, when they finished, there was very little left of what had once been human youths.

Bastards, he thought suddenly, as more aliens passed. They were heading towards the Texas State Centre, he realised suddenly, or at least they were heading in the same direction. Some of the great reporting heroes had been on the ground when American or British bases had been attacked by insurgents, surrounded, but never broken, and he wondered if that was what had happened to the aliens. They’d taken over the government buildings in the city and…hell, he’d have bet good money that attacking them would have been one of the population’s fondest dreams. How capable would the aliens be at defending a building they barely knew?

***

It was the arrival of the reinforcements from the camps outside the city, WarPriest Allon knew, that had turned the tide of the battle. The warriors charged with guarding the human buildings had fought well, but the best they could do was hold out against the attackers, knowing that they might run out of ammunition and be hacked down before they could escape. Nine tanks had been deployed to cover the human buildings – and every human they’d found in the area had been taken to the camps, just in case – but four of them were now burning and two more had been disabled. There had been too many warriors in the area to call in a KEW strike; the entire battle had been a close-run thing.

Dawn rose upon a burning and battered city. Hundreds of warriors patrolled the outskirts of the government zone, while thousands more patrolled the city itself, trying to locate the remaining human insurgents. Most of the remaining human population, Allon was relieved to see, was trying to keep itself out of the firing line. It might have helped keep incidental damage down during the fighting, but the odds were that some of them had been blazing away at his people last night, leaving a grand total of five hundred and seven warriors dead or seriously injured. Partnered with the losses all across the occupied zone, nearly a thousand warriors had been killed outright…and he didn’t want to think about how many humans had been killed. Their death toll, he thought, must number in the high thousands, at best.