“Have you seen one up close, sir?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No prisoners yet. They have potent hand weapons and they’re not averse to using them. They’ve repulsed every man who tried to parley with them. I saw two from across the street out front,” he added. “Sneaky-looking fellows; strange hunched-forward way of walking. And one was on all fours for a moment, I’m almost sure.”
“He was,” I confirmed. “Those things aren’t human, Manfred.” I handed him the disruptor.
“This is what they’re doing their shooting with. No, the other way. Careful! It can blow the side out of the building. Better get Sjoman in here. Lars can explain the thing to him.”
Richtofen handled the weapon with respect and pushed a button on his desk that brought the tech chief in at a run. Richtofen handed over the disruptor and Lars went over to him and said, “Fortunately, sir, it’s a type of weapon that will be easy to negate. It projects a field of energy, and with a slight adjustment, it can be made to project an out-of-phase field that cancels the basic field when it impinges on it. We need to run off a batch of them as soon as possible.”
Sjoman was nodding as if that meant something.
“How much territory have they secured, General?” I wanted to know.
“You’re very formal tonight, Brion,” Richtofen replied in mild rebuke. “Here in Stockholm, they’ve taken over the Old Town for some reason, and Sodra, and are rapidly clearing the center of the city. They’ve set up a field HQ on Kungsgatan near Stureplan. We’ve killed a few hundred of them. They seem heedless of our gunfire―walk right into it.”
An aide rushed in just then with a report that confirmed the aliens were swarming in every city and town so far contacted, as well as in Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and every other capital on the continent. London reported fighting in the streets. No word yet from North America. No contact with Japan.
“Communications have virtually collapsed,” Richtofen told us. “These fellows know just what to go after. Bridges and airfields sealed off, transmitter towers down, highways blocked. What news we’ve had has come by sea. It’s as if they were unaware of travel by sea. Our ships come and go freely. They seem to be limiting their attention pretty much to the urban areas, but they’re in the small towns, too. Very few have been seen in rural areas, except in scattered groups. They’re apparently more interested in driving the people out of towns than in killing them; casualties have occurred mostly when people get in their way. Those who flee are allowed to go, then rounded up and detained.”
“That makes it a little difficult,” I commented. “We can’t use heavy weapons on them without destroying our own cities.”
“Precisely,” Richtofen agreed. “I assume that’s the basis for their strategy.”
“How many of them would you say we’re dealing with?” I asked.
“My best guess is about four hundred thousand, at this point,” Richtofen said grimly. “And more arriving every hour.”
“Make that three hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-eight,” Lars contributed.
“It appears,” Manfred said seriously, “that our best strategy is to resort to guerrilla warfare. I’ve already taken steps to establish a field HQ near Uppsala. You and Barbro had better get up there right away. I’m counting on you to take command.”
I said, “Yessir,” but with a sinking feeling.
Chapter 1
During the course of the next twenty-four hours, we got a few Imperial Army units mobilized, equipped with hastily run off wide-field anti-disruptor beams. We made up a six-truck convoy, and forced our way through some flimsy Ylokk barricades to the open countryside with no casualties―on our side. By “we,” I mean Barbro, Luc, our loyal houseman, a dozen or so senior officers of the Army and the NS service, their families, various doctors, mechanics, cooks, a pick-up squad of men on leave, and anybody else who wanted to evacuate, most of them carrying along a few unleave-behindables.
At the edge of the city we commandeered six buses and an Army half-track, and after repulsing repeated feeble attacks, soon gathered in enough men to fill our transport.
“These ‘Lock’ aren’t what you’d call crack troops,” a young lieutenant named Helm commented. He’d served in the peace-keeping force in the Middle East, and he’d seen determined attacks. These fellows seemed tired, half-hearted by comparison. That was OK with me. But they were persistent, and didn’t seem to mind casualties, though they always dragged their dead and wounded away when they fell back, and always they managed to snag a few prisoners.
Once we were clear of the city’s outskirts, the aliens stopped harassing us. Our new gadgets had worked fine, and since the enemy seemed to have specialized in the one, seemingly irresistible weapon, they soon learned to run when we appeared. It was a stand-off: they got the cities; we could have the country. It was peaceful there, but somehow it didn’t look the same. We saw a few evidences of war.
Chapter 2
We were directed to Field HQ in a clearing in a beech forest near a small town. On the way, we encountered a roadblock adorned with three wrecked trucks, and a 75mm Bofors. The gun crews were ready to blow our lead bus off the road until I and a couple of other plainly human fellows jumped down and convinced the troops we were the good guys. They sounded glad to see us after they got over their disappointment at not getting to use their field-gun on the buses, but they kept staring down the road the way we’d come. They told us about a shortcut to Headquarters. We found it: a six-man tent and a half-track with a few Army men standing around.
I took over from an exhausted brigadier who was almost out on his feet, but was doing his best to monitor the action around and in the city, and to keep the few local levies he’d managed to get together in position to block any further advance into the area.
An anxious-looking major came in from the woods and asked me, “Where’s the main body, sir?” He didn’t quite break into tears when I said, “We’re it.”
“We’ve turned back one small convoy so far,” he told me. “They drove right into our gun muzzle. Didn’t seem to realize what it was. They’ve got some heavy stuff of their own, but very short-range.” He pointed out a couple of smashed tree-stumps a hundred feet from the tent. “They blew them up, but didn’t come any farther, after we blew two lorry-loads off the road.” He patted the flank of the half-track with its Bofors .80.
“They’re used to short-range energy weapons,” I explained to him. “That gives us a sort of advantage, if we can entice them out of town. Carry on, major; I’ll be back.”
The major nodded, and said, “Ja visst! We can’t use our gun in the city; we’d destroy it!”
I told him to keep up the good work, and I took some men and went out to reconnoiter, cautiously. I didn’t think the Ylokk would be taking their rebuff at the roadblock lightly. We could see their patrols, single scouts and details of up to ten men―oops!―things, clustered around every outbuilding and thicket. We moved on, three of our vehicles limping badly, and soon came in sight of the little town called Sigtuna. It looked peaceful as Swedish towns always look on a spring morning. There was a burnt-out half-track in the ditch half a mile from the first building, a dun-colored restaurant with red geraniums in window boxes. I checked inside: nobody alive there. A hundred yards farther on, we found a man in Swedish Army gray-green, lying in the middle of the road. He stirred as my lead truck came up and stopped beside him. He had a terrible wound in the leg. I got down and went to him in time to hear him say: