A dull thump ran through the SSTO and gravity caught up with them permanently. It felt, suddenly, as if he were carrying a crushing weight, one he hadn’t even been aware of while in orbit. It was all he could do to raise his head, cursing himself for not asking for an exercise machine or something while on the alien ship; they had to have known about the problem. Two weeks — it felt like much longer — in zero-gravity… and it felt as if all of his muscles had atrophied to fat and bone.
“The feeling will pass,” Gary assured him, as the aliens opened the hatch. Air, warm dry Earth air, wafted in. Despite an unpleasant smell tickling his nostrils, he had never tasted anything so good. “It takes longer than two weeks for real problems to kick in, although we should all rest before we actually go anywhere.”
The aliens seemed to understand. Surprisingly gently, they helped the humans out of the ship and down to the tarmac. Francis looked around, suspecting that they were somewhere in the south by the air, but he didn’t recognise the small airfield at all. A handful of other SSTO craft dotted the field, patrolled by heavily-armed aliens; there were no sign of any other humans at all.
Philippe looked up at him from where he was trying to stand on wobbly legs. “Do you know where we are?”
Francis laughed. “I suppose you know everywhere in France, right?” He asked. “You Europeans; your countries are so small. It can take days to get across America!”
“No,” Philippe said, reasonably, “but the aliens wouldn’t have dumped us somewhere we couldn’t get out of, would they?”
They looked towards one of the aliens. “Where are we?” Francis asked, wondering if the guard spoke English. “Where do we have to go?”
The guard said nothing, but pointed with one long hand towards a small group of aliens, waiting for them at the edge of the field. Francis placed his trust in his legs and started to walk towards them, feeling his legs grow stronger as his body got used, again, to the Earth’s gravity field. The aliens waited patiently for the humans and their guards; he suspected, watching the way their faces twitched, that they were finding their progress funny. The aliens should have been used to bodies that had been in space too long, but instead… they were laughing! He was sure of it.
“Welcome to Earth,” the lead alien said, with hopefully unintentional irony. “You will take that vehicle there and head to your people’s lines, outside our area of control.”
Francis followed the alien’s gaze and saw a large SUV, carrying a white flag on the hood, fluttering in the wind. It would be very visible from space, he realised; the aliens were taking no chances on a friendly fire incident from either side. It would be fairly easy to drive once he got his strength back — and Gary or Katy would be able to drive it as well — and it should have enough fuel to get to friendly lines, wherever they were. Gary went over to check the vehicle out as Francis continued to speak to the aliens.
“Thank you,” he said, dryly. The aliens probably wouldn’t recognise sarcasm. “Where are the friendly lines?”
The aliens produced a map. It was a fairly basic roadmap of Texas, one that might be used by any driver planning a road trip, and someone had written on it in green ink. If the map was accurate, the aliens controlled the state as far north as Waco, although the area that represented Fort Hood couldn’t be that firmly under their control. He would have bet good money that Fort Hood was currently the site of a nasty little war. He might never have been in the services, but he was confident that Third Corps could hand out one hell of a beating to the aliens if they were confronted on their own ground.
“Your military has formed a base here, outside of Dallas,” the alien informed him. Francis felt his blood temperature start to plummet again. If the aliens knew that the base was there, how long would it be before they decided to hammer it from orbit? He had to get there first to warn them before they got hit. “We advise you to drive there. Our forces will not interfere with you provided that you do not attempt to enter the cities. Once you have reached your people, convey our messages to your leaders.”
“Of course,” Francis said. He was starting to get sick of being given alien orders. “It shall be done, superior sir.”
The joke was lost on the alien, but Gary cracked a smile. “Come on, sir,” he said. “We’d better get moving if we want to get there before dark.”
Looking at the map, Francis doubted that they would get there before it got dark, but he held his peace. They had a long way to go before any of them would feel safe. The columns of smoke, rising up all around them into the clear blue sky, would see to that. He hoped, desperately, that they meant that the fighting was still going on.
Philippe took the backseat and watched as the two American men took turns to drive through what had once been a prosperous American state. He had never been to Texas before, but somehow he suspected that it hadn’t always looked like this, not even when a hurricane had blown through it. The Americans said little as they drove on and even the others kept their thoughts to themselves; none of them had been prepared, really, for the reality of alien invasion. Texas had been wrecked overnight.
The Interstate highways had been torn apart. Hundreds of cars, vans, and even trucks had been abandoned, or had been shot up in the fighting by one side or another. Near civilisation, there were mercifully few bodies, but further away from the towns and cities they were everywhere, mostly just civilians who had been caught up in the fighting and had been mown down by one side or the other. They passed through the remains of a town that looked as if a bomb had hit it, the handful of survivors watching them bleakly as they passed. Philippe had thought himself a hardened man — he’d seen more of the misery that humans could inflict on one another than most — but there was something truly soul-crushing about seeing an entire country laid so low. The aliens seemed to have occupied the land, but outside the cities, they saw little of them. They just didn’t care.
They passed, as quickly as they could, groups of refugees, trudging along to the north. They saw no other moving vehicles on the roads, although there were plenty of abandoned or burned-out vehicles. It wouldn’t have taken long for the aliens to have… convinced the civilians that vehicles should be abandoned; the odds were that they had decided that cars might be used as weapons, or worse. Katy and Sophia wanted to pick up a handful of refugees, but Philippe and Stanislav disagreed with them and Gary and Francis agreed; they couldn’t take the risk. A lot of refugees had to be completely desperate and willing to steal a vehicle… or at least to rob them of everything they had.
An hour after they started out, they came across the first sign that there had been a battle. A collection of destroyed or burned-out military vehicles littered the interstate, facing a handful of oddly-shaped piles of wreckage, surrounded by hundreds of bodies. It took Francis a moment to identify the bodies as National Guard… and Gary a few moments longer to realise that the oddly-shaped wreckage was in fact the remains of alien vehicles. The National Guard had made a stand and hurt the aliens… and had then been brushed aside from orbit. Gary insisted on picking up a handful of dog tags, if only to identify some of the dead, and collecting some of their weapons, just in case. They might be attacked along the way.
The signs of devastation grew less as they headed north, the sky becoming overcast as darkness started to fall, but they stayed away from the cities. They could have headed up to Dallas or Fort Worth, but the Americans wanted to head directly to the military base. They were still arguing about the decision when a shot rang out and several soldiers appeared from nowhere, pointing their weapons at the SUV. Gary braked to a halt and grinned as the soldiers surrounded them.