Almost. Their base, ahead of him, had been built on the remains of yet another small town. It had been deserted before they arrived, but according to observers, the aliens had flattened all the buildings anyway, paying special attention to the two churches. It seemed to fit their normal pattern; the only religious places they left alone were graveyards, perhaps preferring to leave the dead alone. It was strange thinking of a star-faring race as being scared of ghosts, but maybe that was the answer, although he cautioned himself that just because he wanted to believe it didn’t make it true. The aliens had provoked more attacks on themselves by destroying religious buildings… and, by placing the base so far from major support, they’d handed the resistance a chance at a real success.
Or, perhaps, it was a trap.
The briefing had been clear enough. The aliens had deployed powerful radars around the red zone. Between them, they controlled the skies and blasted anything, aircraft or missile, out of them before they got close enough to do some damage. No aircraft flew on Earth now, apart from the handful of alien helicopters, which at least meant they could fire off anti-aircraft weapons at anything in the sky. The aliens didn’t seem — thank god — to deploy any heavy aircraft, either fighters or bombers, but they didn’t need them. If they were under heavy attack, they called in strikes from orbit… and they’d been doing more of that lately. Something had to be done to throw them back on their heels.
He peered through his night-vision goggles towards the alien base. It was nothing much; a handful of vehicles, carefully organised to protect the vehicle in the centre, the source of all the radar emissions. The techs had gone on and on about multi-phased radar algorithms and bullshit like that, but as far as Pataki was concerned, his only task was to destroy the radar vehicle. No one had told him so, specifically, but he’d picked up enough to guess that his assault wasn’t the only one being mounted. If they could knock down all of the alien radars… but then, they’d still have the ones in space. The very concept astonished him; the aliens could literally sweep the ground with radar emissions from orbit and pick up on any moving vehicle, maybe even a moving person. If it didn’t have the right IFF, it got blasted, automatically.
All right, you bastards, he thought, as he surveyed the remainder of the base. Where are you?
The aliens had billeted their forces in what had probably once been a school. A handful were patrolling around the outskirts of the village, but the remainder were supporting the vehicles, watching for any incoming threat. It all looked surprisingly lax to him — he would have established random patrols of the area, just in case — but maybe the aliens couldn’t afford to expend more people on guarding the radar base. It was even possible that they were running out of soldiers, although that happy thought was probably wishful thinking. They couldn’t rely on the aliens running out of manpower any time soon.
“Sarge,” one of his men whispered. “Look.”
Pataki followed the pointing finger. A group of humans sat there, chained to a truck, a human truck. They didn’t look very pleased to be there, which probably meant that they were slaves, as he had been, rather than collaborators. There were actually quite a few alien collaborators now, although most of them were working for the aliens under duress, their families held hostage for their good behaviour. Pataki was glad, despite himself, that he didn’t have any family in Texas; what would he do if he were told that he had the choice between betraying the resistance, or his family being killed?
“We’ll get them out,” he muttered. “Are the mortar teams ready?”
“Aye, boss,” another man said. He actually had been a government official, too low-level to be important, before the invasion. He’d taken to underground work like a duck took to water. Somehow, he was also one of the best shots in the small company. “They’re ready.”
Pataki smiled, carefully sighted his M16 on one of the alien guards, and pulled the trigger. The alien fell. A moment later, all hell broke loose as the mortars opened fire as one, their shells targeted on the alien radar. Mortars weren’t the most accurate weapon in the world, but they’d had plenty of time to choose their targets and at least one shell landed directly on the alien radar. A chain of explosions tore it apart as the aliens returned fire…
Damn, they’re fast, Pataki thought. His position had barely been missed by a machine gun mounted on one of the IFVs. One of his men took aim with a Javelin and expended it, against orders, on the IFV, blowing it up in a massive fireball. The remaining aliens, forced back into the school, fired down desperately towards the human positions, daring them to attack the school and flush them out of their position. Pataki smiled, nodded to one of the missile teams, and watched as they launched a single missile right through one of the school windows. Judging from the size of the explosion, the aliens had been stockpiling ammunition inside for quite some time; if any of them had survived, it would be God’s own miracle.
“Get the prisoners,” he snapped. The aliens would respond harshly and, despite his belief that they were being attacked all over Texas, he knew that they didn’t dare stick around. “Squad Two; you’re on rearguard. The rest of you, fuck off; we’ll meet you at the rendezvous point, assuming we survive.”
“Yes, sir,” the former government worker said, rapidly packing up his mortar and retreating. Pataki rolled his eyes — he’d told the man never to call him ‘sir’ a dozen times and it still hadn’t taken — and watched grimly as the former prisoners were released and welcomed to the resistance.
“Time to take our leave,” he said, as Squad Two rapidly completed their work. The alien bodies — so far, no one had taken an alien alive, apparently — were being booby-trapped with grenades and a handful of mines. The aliens recovered all of their bodies, apart from the ones that had been spirited away by the resistance, and if they were lucky, they would kill a handful of aliens when they came to retrieve these bodies. The alien vehicles, he suspected, were well beyond repair. “Move out!”
They vanished back out into the silent night… except it wasn’t silent. The still night air could carry sound an amazing distance and he could hear, faintly, the sound of shots and fighting. In the distance, he could see new fires burning… and, when he looked up, he could see twinkling in the night sky. Something was happening up there, he was sure… but what?
The ground-based laser vehicle hadn’t been a great success in trials, Mikkel Ellertson knew, despite the best that the researchers could do. The laser was the most powerful built on Earth, so far, but it couldn’t slice through metal like a knife through butter; that, alas, was still in the realm of science-fiction. It could — and had — be used to trigger off missiles before they could impact on the ground, but it couldn’t be used to destroy alien spacecraft high above. If it could, it would have prevented the aliens from seizing control of Low Earth Orbit and the entire war would have gone very differently.
What it could do was damage sensitive components. Ellertson, a student of high technology since he’d been a little kid watching his father solder together a mass of components to produce something weird and wonderful, was certain that the alien space-based radars were actually quite fragile. If they were deployed in zero-gee, they could have been built without any of the limitations that ground-based systems hard, hardened against any kind of attack. The aliens thought that their radar system was untouchable… and, as far as missiles were concerned, they were right. A missile could destroy the station with ease, assuming that it reached the alien radar, but it would be burned out of space a long time before it reached attack range. The alien lasers could burn through steel, if not immediately.