By the fifth day, there was no resistance at all.
On the sixth day, life on Planet France returned to a kind of perverse normality.
The invaders insisted that shopkeepers reopen their stores and essential businesses get back to work. The sidewalk caf6s, numerous in every city, were reopened as well. Just about everything looked as it did a week before, except now there were heavily armed space soldiers at every intersection, and the rumors said the entire planet was either being sold into slavery or ground up as food for the brutal, mysterious invaders.
Such talk was running about as thick as the coffee in the city of Le Mans. The invaders didn't like the cuisine, apparently, but business was fine at the sidewalk cafes, busy even, as the newly conquered citizenry met to whisper about what would happen next. In one of these cafe's — the Chez Nous—sat Hawk Hunter. He was drinking a latte.
He'd arrived during the second day of the invasion, at the height of its intensity. The jump over from Planet America had taken almost an hour, and he'd been forced to enter this atmosphere high and slow, just like his reentries on PA. This meant an anxious ten minutes of descent, much of which he spent dodging the rain of BMK invasion craft still descending on the planet. The slow reentry gave him an opportunity to see the destruction the invaders had wrought. Every major city was in flames. Frightened citizens jammed the roadways, trying to flee the nightmare from space. Mass graves…
He'd set down just outside of Le Mans, folded the flying machine into his Twenty 'n Six, and then walked into the city, wearing the clothes of an American farmer as his disguise. The rumpled shirt and frayed pants fit in perfectly with the people numbly walking the streets. Le Mans had been one of the first cities to fall, and by the time Hunter got there, most of the pillage had subsided. He'd found this cafe open for business, had taken a table in the corner, and had not moved for almost twenty-four hours. The waiters paid him little mind; they just kept the lattes coming and accepted his very PA-looking coins as payment. It was the perfect spy post.
Though more than five hundred thousand troops were down on Planet France, everything Hunter needed to know about the invaders he could tell just from watching the four BMK soldiers standing guard at the nearby intersection. They were wearing old Zanker suits, bulky, ribbed, bubble-top garbs first introduced almost a thousand years before. The bubble helmets had been tinted black, as had the rest of the suit, making the BMK soldiers look anonymous and frightening at the same time.
These soldiers did not appear happy. Not that every occupying force was required to maintain cruel smiles all day long, but these guys were miserable. It was soon evident why. In all the time Hunter had watched them, the soldiers had been given no downtime, no meal break. He'd spotted them popping wrist injections occasionally, essentially doping themselves against hunger and fatigue. A telling sign.
Despite stern appearances, the BMK was not an army that adapted well to occupation duties. They were killers and not suited for anything else. What's more, just watching this foursome. Hunter could tell the invading forces were stretched thin. Since all of the major fighting had already ceased, it would have seemed that at least some front-line troops would have been called back to the city for relief, but that was not the case here in Le Mans.
Reports from other major cities were just about the same. Hunter had managed to carry a squad of CIA men in his Twenty 'n Six with him on this journey. They had fanned out across the landmass, infiltrating the major cities and gathering intelligence on the invaders. The picture they drew was the same as what Hunter saw before him. The BMK shock troops had been brutal during the first phase of the invasion, lazy and sullen once the action had died down. Few would actually be involved in the genocide of the population, scheduled to begin soon. That job was given to special units of soldiers whose superiors had attained favor with Xirstix.
For most of these grunts then, the killing spree was over. From here on out, they were just marking time, just doing a job.
Hunter drained the last of his fifteenth latte and ordered one more for the road.
He'd seen all he needed to. It was time to start picking up his CIA colleagues for the trip back to America. A real war was coming. It would not be fought here on Planet France. This place was lost as soon as the Love Rocket reached orbit. But the war would take place somewhere else; that was a foregone conclusion. And Hunter knew who the enemy would be. Four of them were standing no more than one hundred feet away from him, sweating in their ancient Zanker suits, looking tired, bored, and dopey. The problem was, they were ruthless in battle, and there were more than a million of them. Not real good numbers against planets that literally had no armies, no military equipment, no technology of flight. There were only forty thousand cops in all of America. They were the closest thing to an army the planet had. Hunter wondered if the cops had tried to defend the planet the last time the BMK came calling. He wondered how long such a defense lasted.
But even that could not change what was about to come. There was only one thing worse than allowing the BMK to have its way with the Home Planets; that was not challenging them at all. Knowing what he did now about the circumstances that brought the army of thugs down on Planet France, Hunter vowed to fight them to the death, alone, if he had to. That's how strongly he felt about it. But not only would those odds be overwhelming, he would have to fight this impending conflict with clipped wings because of the two-second problem. If just several short bursts of full ultraoverdrive had caused near devastation on America and (as he now knew) around the entire system, how could he possibly operate against the BMK in the stormy days ahead? In some ways, he had the capacity to cause more destruction than they did.
He'd done some calculations. As he wasn't so sure just how fast his machine could go in full ultraoverdrive, he picked a small fraction—.007—and then set his throttle to go no higher than that number. From now on, his only choice was to fly at about.007 full power, hoping that would cause only.007 the disruption.
But traveling at that fraction, while still very quick, would also mean a big change in the rules. He wouldn't be able to fly ahead of himself and become invisible. He wouldn't be able to appear in two places at once. There would be no chance to destroy the entire BMK fleet as he did the death star's space fighters. There would be no twenty-second sorties like the one he'd flown against the enemy troops on Tonk.
No, bumping down to.007 would be like flying with his air brakes on. And it actually went deeper than that. It made him a lot more human in this place. A superhero who wasn't so super anymore. He would have to make up for that somehow. He knew there were worse things than just being human. He would use his human instincts, his brains, his guile, instead of speed. He would have to figure out how best to hit this enemy, how to fool him. Confuse him. Suck him in. That's what this trip to conquered France was all about. He knew the enemy better now.
He knew something else, too.
Whatever was to come, it was going to be very down and dirty.
20
Pater Tomm was waiting for Hunter when he returned to Andrews Field.
These flights in and out of the isolated field were routine now. Lately, his only welcoming committee had been a black tinted van and a tight-lipped CIA driver. But this time, the priest was on hand, along with some CIA medical personnel to check out the infiltration squad that had accompanied Hunter to the conquered French planet.