“Who the hell are you?” The Captain commanding them asked. Even in twilight, he looked half-beaten, at least to Philippe’s eyes. The aliens had driven the United States out of one of their most prosperous states. Under other circumstances, he would have laughed at how the mighty had fallen, but if America could fall, what hope did France have of victory? “The Redskins don’t let anyone have vehicles.”
“Redskins?” Gary asked, puzzled. The Captain briefly explained that that was the alien nickname. “Ah, I see…”
“I am Ambassador Prachthauser, Special Representative of the President,” Francis explained, shortly. They didn’t have the time for pleasantries. “Believe it or not, we’ve just come down from orbit and we have to get transport to Washington at once. The President will be anxious to see us.”
“We don’t have constant communications with Washington these days,” the Captain said, “but I’ll see what I can do. You’ll have to be debriefed, of course…”
Philippe shrugged. He could live with that.
Chapter Eighteen
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Night was falling as Captain Brent Roeder led seven men out of their apartment and up through the silent streets. Austin had once been a well-lit city, but now hardly any of the street lamps were working, nor were there flickering lights from behind any windows. The city felt like a ghost town, one occupied by an army of monsters, and the people were trying to keep out of sight. Brent partly wanted them to come out and fight beside him, but the rest of him was glad that they were out of the way. The fighting was about to get messy.
They ghosted through the streets, sticking to smaller roads and back alleys, trying to remain away from the alien patrols. The aliens hadn’t announced an official curfew, something that had surprised him, but they would probably take an interest in anyone on the streets after dark. It was what he’d do in their position and, given the amount of weapons and explosives they were carrying, would mark them out at once as soldiers. The aliens didn’t seem to shoot armed civilians on sight, as they would have been legally permitted to do under human laws, but they did take them away and, so far, no one had seen any of them again. They might have gone into the work gangs who were clearing the streets, or they might have been taken out of the city, shot and dumped in a mass grave. The internet had been full of speculation, but no one actually knew much for sure. The only piece of encouraging news was that the aliens were having a hard time controlling the chunk of Texas they’d occupied.
Time to make it a bit harder, he thought, as they reached the gas station. The aliens had destroyed every official religious building in the city and, in doing so, had created a few million more enemies. If they applied that standard on a wider scale… it didn’t bode well for human religious cities. He suspected that the aliens hadn’t realised just how many human sects didn’t want or need religious buildings — Baptists didn’t need a meeting house — or, for that matter, how many religious books were in private hands. He couldn’t even begin to guess at how many bibles existed in Texas alone, let alone the other religious texts. Their response was likely to be brutal and unpleasant. The only reason he could think of for destroying religious buildings was that they wanted to replace them with their own… and that wouldn’t sit well with humanity.
He scouted out the gas station yesterday and was relieved to discover that it hadn’t been looted. It had been operated by a Pakistani family who’d later tried to flee the city, abandoning their home and livelihood. They’d also left a gas tanker that had been used to make deliveries. The aliens still prevented humans from using any kind of motor vehicle, sometimes shooting up a few cars to make the point, and so it had been abandoned, along with its cargo. It wasn’t completely full, unfortunately, but there was enough to make one hell of a bang. He made a series of hand signals to his men, ordering them to take up their positions, and then slipped into the driver’s seat. It was a matter of moments to hotwire the tanker and move it forward so that it was closer to the road. He left his little surprise in the vehicle and slipped out again, back into the darkness.
The aliens, it seemed, patrolled on a regular basis. They had ten minutes until the next patrol would hover down the road. Two of his men quickly pushed a car into the middle of the street, blocking it, even as the others scattered a handful of other surprises around the area. As soon as they were finished, they drew back and waited for the aliens to arrive. If they’d changed their schedule…
Brent smiled as he heard the hum of the alien vehicles. He’d been nervous that they’d send a tank along, but instead they’d merely been using their armoured fighting vehicles. There was something about their design that suggested that they were used to fighting insurgencies, but he guessed they’d learnt out of a book, rather than real experience. No sane and experienced soldier would have driven up to a blockade without checking the area first.
Got you, you bastards, he thought. From his vantage point, he could see the alien hatches opening and a platoon of alien soldiers emerging, wearing their dark masks. That was more worrying than he liked to admit — no one knew what kind of night-vision gear the aliens had — but they were committed now. Four of the aliens headed towards the blocking car, the others fanned out towards the gas station… and the waiting ambush. There wasn’t any time, any longer, to wait for more aliens to emerge. He pushed down on the small detonator and all hell broke loose. The gas tanker exploded and a sheet of fire cascaded down onto the alien vehicles.
“Move,” he snapped, and ran for his life. The aliens smashed every radio transmitter, without fail, and they might try to target him from orbit. It seemed insane to waste a projectile on a single man, but everything since the war had begun had been insane. Shots started to ring out as his three snipers started to pour fire onto the remaining aliens and their burning vehicles; he heard their ammunition start to cook off in the midst of the fire, creating a new hazard for anyone nearby. Trapped, the handful of surviving aliens had no choice, but to hunker down and hope that they could hold out until help arrived. Ironically, Brent wanted them to survive, now; they represented a lure to the remainder of the aliens. Without them, it was possible that the aliens would just write them off and not bother to send help.
“They’re coming,” Fahy shouted, his voice almost drowned out by the roar of the fires and the shooting. “I see two heavy tanks and three smaller vehicles.”
Brent grinned. The aliens were about to make a bad situation worse, much worse. High overhead, he heard the noise of a helicopter, one that he’d never heard before. It had to be an alien craft and so he nodded to one of his men, who brought up a Stinger and prepared to target the alien aircraft. Brent was already moving towards the second ambush site when the Stinger was launched, blasting up towards the unsuspecting alien craft, which was hit and fell burning out of the sky. There was no sign that the crew had escaped.
The lead alien tank went over the mine and detonated it. Brent had worried that the hovercraft wouldn’t trigger the mine, but it did, sending a burst of flame up towards the soft underbelly of the alien vehicle. It was armoured enough to allow the crew to survive, but it fell to the ground and skidded to a halt, out of the action for the moment. The other alien craft opened fire with their machine gun-like weapons, but they weren’t shooting at any of his men, as far as he could tell. Buttoned up in their vehicles, the aliens were just attempting to force them to keep their heads down, trying to prevent the humans from using antitank missiles or suchlike on them. If Brent had had some of those missiles with him, he might have tried to use them.