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  9.

  Fayetteville

  Alante Brockner

  There was something huge on the horizon, and it wasn’t the city, nor was it the blocky prefabs or high towers of 23rd Century post-peace America or similar that were dotted all over the Wide Earth. It was rounded, a beetle-shell of some light material with hues like oil on water where evening-dim sun hit the thing. Maybe as big as half the city. Hard to tell, because the ship sat on the city so everything was mashed up. Bear Battalion were coming in over fields of rubble that had been suburb and highway. Rail tracks that had looked like springs, or the gentler snaking curves of interstate rails, were snapped, warped, shattered so they looked instead like Fayetteville’s severed arteries. Smoke billowed beneath growing cloud, fires bright and harsh in Alante’s visor. Enhanced as her suit was, she knew there were blooming radiation signatures up ahead that would kill a civilian. Suited, the 245th could take it, no problem. The civilians? If they weren’t already dead, the clock was ticking down for any survivors anyway. It wasn’t a rescue. It was war.

  We’re actually at war. Humans. At war.

  The thought was insane. There was peace, or close enough for Army paperwork for sure.

  She’d drunk in bars in Fayetteville, got laid there, knocked teeth out in the City’s sun-sheltered streets. Those bars she knew almost definitely weren’t there anymore. She didn’t have to be closer to figure that out. The aliens’ ship had landed smack in the middle of the city. It was the size of an orbital platform, or a carrier - sea or space.

  No...bigger?

  She just couldn’t get her head around it.

  A single structure, even a meg-carrier on the ocean...no single structure could be so huge and not just fall apart.

  What is that? Three miles? Five miles in length?

  It was insane for her to guess, and so far beyond anything she considered sense her mind just quit trying. Her suit could only estimate because she couldn’t get a full scan with her suit’s capabilities without circling it and any data from the drones in the sky wasn’t patched through to her. From her angle it seemed to be shaped like a football – the American kind – that they’d played with a hundred years ago when a failing United States had tried out the Restoration before the Wide Earth took. An American football, but one someone had sat on. If it had been taller, they’d have seen it long before, maybe even from Bragg.

  Intel probably knew how big it was. What it was. She didn’t imagine they’d be forthcoming with essential information like what they were facing, or armaments, or threat assessments.

  Mostly, huge things look small when they’re far away, but she had the ruin of Fayetteville right there for scale, didn’t she?

  What was the population of Fayetteville yesterday? She flicked her eyes, running through screens to voice comms and asked. Population fluid, as of yesterday 469,500 to closest available estimate.

  Is anything left? Anyone?

  ‘Move it on!’ she heard. Master Sergeant Jakes, yelling.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d slowed, seeing the finished town and the ship for the first time up close. They’d seen the netcasts, heard the words, but seeing a thing at a distance was different to seeing for real. And smelling. Even through environmental filters there was a sense of filth from fires, and the haze more deceptive than typical in the North Carolinian sun. Alante shivered with a tingle on her skin, like something awful still lingered in the air.

  She moved on, they all did. She wasn’t smiling now.

  The D-Guard didn’t struggle or whine about stepping over the shifting ruins leading to the city – and the shell on top of it – ahead.

  For the first time she began to understand why she was here. Why she was career. Why she’d joined the Army. Why she’d thought she might fight.

  Because I am a fighter. Always was.

  She’d been a scrapper growing up. Still was, even though she’d worked out for herself it was better to get paid, fed, have a roof to sleep under than fighting for a place in the low-street gangs.

  Fighting for her brothers and sisters now, but also...

  Going to war for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. Those people crushed and dead beneath the monstrosity mounting their city.

  The skies were quiet, clear of jet and choppers. Distant drones spotted the air above the alien ship but this was ground action all the way. The KES units were ahead, the Dogs behind. Autonomous weapons systems were rolling from giant transport platforms near a hundred yards long. Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV’s, like a tank, maybe, but with a compliment of eight to ten specialists tucked away in the bowels) were spreading in a wide approach line both on the northern and western boundaries of the city. The vehicles were the ubiquitous green of army units. KES and the dogs were gun-metal grey with insignia of rank, battalion, division, company, and a soldier’s name. Command centre trucks, mobile platforms manned and unmanned, nine heavy artillery rigs which were the beautiful and barbaric ‘Cattle’ – Composite Armour Tactical Light Offensive Battle Unit. Those were equipped with 105mm gun, with a fat muzzle brake at the end of the barrel so the thing didn’t look like any kind of cow, but more like a tortoise sticking out its head – if the tortoise had rabies, maybe, and roller blades, and a huge cannon instead of a head.

  The Big Bear himself, Major General Dwayne Washington, thundered to the head of the line of D-Guards. They were the best of 245th Armoured. They knew it.

  We’re the heavies. We’re the longbow in the Hundred Year war, punching through plate armour. We’re the mustard gas in the trenches of the Somme. We’re the jet fighters of human war.

  She believed they were the best, but looking at the squat ship crushing a city she didn’t feel like the sharp edge of military technology at all.

  She couldn’t quite decide, either, if the Major General’s presence on their advancing line was a spectacularly bad gesture, or a brilliant one; to stand with his forces, to show them what command should look like. Better, she was sure, to not be like those Intel cowards in their shielded command centres miles or more out from the line. She leaned toward the Old Man’s presence being a bad idea, though. She didn’t know for sure, but any enemy who let you roll right up to their doorstep without even bothering to twitch back the curtain should have worried them all.

  She didn’t like it.

  ‘On me,’ said the Big Bear. ‘Let’s take the dog for a walk, shall we?’

  He stomped on ahead in his D-Guard, his regalia bright across his shoulders and on his helm. Something flew out from the ship.

  Fuck, she thought. Forward or back...

  She was built to move forward. It was in her genes.

  The missile, a bright yellow trail like a firework’s tail, streamed from the ship and she charged.

  The crater and the mess of the Big Bear where the missile hit was seconds in the making, two hundred yards or so to her right. The grand Old Man was strewn and mixed up with the remains of at least a platoon of Dogs and KES Units.

  Turned out a bad idea, Old Man, she thought. Let Good Lord Death sort ‘em out.

  Her thoughts were fast, manic. She was suddenly almost giddy with fear, excitement and confusion. She charged through smoke and blood and steel, out the other side, to find the KES units charging beside her, Dogs on her heel, and their own heavy artillery racing ahead to smash into the giant ship and tear holes.

  Whether the enemy ship had shielding, or defences, or not, the missiles from Bragg’s various platforms and heavy units hit the dark and pearly rainbow-tinted carapace of the alien ship and their munitions proved more effective than she could have hoped.

  Plutonium-tipped shells, heavy calibre fire, large bore flat rounds. The ship didn’t seem armoured. Everything they threw at it tore right through.

  Which begged the question, if the ships were so easy to destroy, why had the Earth been smacked down so hard?

  That thought flitted through too quick for Alante to grasp. Ahead, all around, small things the size of c
ats, just as nimble, but hopping sidelong, broke from the dry dirt and latched onto KES units streaming ahead of her toward the ship. The KES were unable at that point to slow without the dampeners and shocks from an impact to slow them, so they charged on and keep right on going even when those things hanging onto them exploded.

  Those scuttling bombs would later become known as crab-mines.

  The first time they encountered the Cephal’s staple outermost defence none were prepared. The crab-mines tore the forward units to shreds. In moments, they’d lost most of the KES units, their Major General, and the majority of forward command.

  The ship clearly didn’t matter to the aliens...and suddenly, it didn’t matter to Alante either.

  That’s why they smacked us down, thought Alante while her units roared and panicked all around like they were civilians rather than 245th Armoured’s finest.

  There was no leadership from the shielded commanders way back, and those in the field with her were too damn slow to respond.

  They don’t care about the ships. The ships are disposable. Like blimps. Nothing to the aliens at all. They’re just troop carriers.

  And if they were full of troops...just how many were there? And where?

  10.

  General Screw-up

  Kiyoko Jones

  Lieutenant General Stavius Mulne of the Americas Unity Marine Corps, General of the Airforce Sam Farel, General J. John Haugan of the A.U. Army, and Rear Admiral Kiyoko Jones were the highest ranking A.U. officers remaining after the initial attack.

  Rear Admiral Jones was British, and Lt. General Mulne a non-border citizen, but everyone had something invested in the outcome of their private meeting. Heavy matters, yes, but not strictly the business of states, nor nations, any longer. Their deliberations were far weightier than niceties observed after long-standing treaties, or handshakes and flute glasses and slick smiles while a forces’ band played tunes they hated.

  The acting heads of the various branches of the Wide Earth Armies, under the general remit of the Americas’ Unity forces, were about to authorise the first nuclear strikes on Earth soil since the Wide Earth Accords.

  ‘I’m all for doing it,’ said Mulne, boorish, face perhaps handsome once but now sallow, nearly grey, from long meetings and far too many drinks from those fine-stemmed party glasses. ‘I don’t even have the words for what our world is now, apart from ‘defeated’. We’re being beaten down so hard I have no objections to bringing nuclear solutions into play. Do you?’

  None disagreed. Jones thought it was an accurate assessment, no matter her feelings about their discussion on authorising a step from which they would likely not come back from.

  ‘What is the possible fallout of taking out the enemy’s troop ships compared to the current devastation?’ asked General J. John Haugan. His dark face wrinkled in distaste which Kiyoko Jones understood very well. ‘What are we looking at here?’

  They sat at a long table, Gen. Farel beside Mulne, and opposite them Rear Admiral Jones and the army’s very own General Haugan.

  ‘Please,’ said a man out of place among the military leaders, but nonetheless in a position at the head of the table. He held a single-use handset which was voice and touch activated, PL-linked to a wider secure predictive computer system ring fenced from the 3rd Generation Global Net. 3rd Generation, and an artificial intellect greater than a hundred thousand of the smartest human minds. It hadn’t predicted a massive alien assault would bring the Earth to its knees in just over a day. A mighty artificial mind, certainly...but one upon which humanity placed far too much faith.

  The man holding the disposable handset wore civilian attire but he wasn’t a civilian, nor military. He was StratInt – Strategic Intelligence, supposedly in the service of Intel and Command. Jones saw StratInt as something akin to the bastard sons and daughters of shaded organisations long gone. Successors to the N.S.A., the C.I.A., F.S.B., Mossad, MI5 – as powerful, now, as the sum of all those various intelligence organisations which had come before. Did StratInt, and by association Intel and Command, serve humanity at this point, or the Global Net? Were they accountable to anyone? Did the man in the suit himself know whom he worked for...or against?

  Kiyoko Jones worried about this very much. She worried more, her heart pounding, when the nameless man turned toward the large white-screen before the joint security chiefs and brought up a display with a global 3-D representation of enemy presence around the world.

  She forgot her disquiet concerning the man from Intel and Command before them, and focused of steadying her heart rate.

  ‘Sirs, ma’am,’ said the man in the suit, perfectly comfortable to be the only one non-military present at the meeting with the ranking chiefs of the armed forces, speaking for the entire world right along with them. ‘If you’ll take a look.’

  The man paused, listening to the net speak through a wire-zip at his temple. The bag looked like a stoma one might have after stomach surgery, but this allowed information in, rather than digestive waste out. When the meeting was done, the wire-zip would be removed, burned – the only external point of weakness to the secure system. ‘Predictions are based on...’ began the man, but he didn’t finish that sentence. As far as Kiyoko Jones was concerned, he didn’t need to. The screen she was seeing was awash with bloody red of a failing world.

  ‘Don’t care about the predictions, sunshine,’ said Farel. ‘Spit it out and move it on. We’re creamed here.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the man, smiling thinly, and brought up a different graphic representation with predictions from the most powerful intellect. It was a mess.

  That’s what that is, and all it is, thought Jones. That’s the end of the world we’re looking at.

  Projections of limited strikes, each option flashing, images showing spread, fallout, repercussions. Figures dropped down below each scenario, droll and bland numbers. Only afterthoughts, those numbers; in billions. The kind of numbers a person couldn’t contemplate anyway. What did those numbers matter to the Global Net?

  She imagined the Global Net, secure, independently powered, served by AI constructs without human fetters to concern itself over. Would it care if aliens, not humanity, spread across the planet? She thought it might not care at all. It was a conglomeration of tech underground, in satellites and orbital platforms.

  And it hadn’t foreseen this destruction? None of the GDR - Global Defense Ring - facilities out there in orbit had fired on these blimps, these interstellar troop ships?

  Not one? No warning? Nothing? Why?

  She shook her head as though to clear a cobweb and tried to focus on the facts and not her supposition.

  Near enough two billion were gone already in cities both ancient and new. Coastal settlements were silent. Oceanic cities on the surface of the seas and ones submerged had been destroyed so utterly by the alien invaders who landed in the seas or on land seemingly without pause that they were nothing but flotsam.

  Vast regions were untouched, but satellite data, while near eagle-eyed when it came to A.U. and Wide Earth territories took longer to come into focus when it came to non-border states; old enemies held at bay by the Wide Earth were reluctant, even when facing the end of the world itself, to provide reliable data.

  The areas which were least affected were also the least populated. The aliens had made landfall so close to inhabited areas to make most nuclear options not only ineffective in the grand scheme of the sudden war, but abhorrent.

  We’d kill more of us than of them.

  Of this, Kiyoko Jones was in no doubt.

  It was a horrific vision, and a disgusting choice, before her. She watched with tension from her shoulders to her jaw making her head ache as the man in the civilian attire controlled the displayed data like a dance, so that options and predictions scrolled, flashed, flipped, disappeared.

  Not a dance, she thought. More like a vaudeville show of death. One performer after another with bad jokes and inappropriate dancing girls with clumsy feet.
/>   ‘What about non-nuclear options?’ asked Farel.

  The man nodded, and in seconds changed the reams of data to show them Global Net’s calculations on other variants.

  High yield, low intensity, kinetic missiles. High and low atmospheric missile attacks. Ground-based autonomous weapons platforms from varied ranges. Mechanised assault scenarios on ground. Air strikes. Massive ordinance air blasts, plasma cloud or fragmentation missiles from submarines. Radiation fog. Gas and viral options. Electromagnetic options. Lists of available results on strategies tried across the globe from all available nations and collated. Attacks and defences which had proven effective, some which had proven utterly disastrous. So far, their options were clearly limited.

  ‘This is pretty depressing,’ said Jones. As for her, she’d had nothing but reports of horrors from the Navy. They were losing even more heavily at sea than on land.

  ‘The only advantage we seem to have is in the air. Their forces so far all seem land-based.’

  She’d seen everything Earth could throw at this new, unknown quantity, and still, no matter the play humanity might make the outcome was the same; Earth was wrecked.

  Even with our air superiority...at some point planes, drones, choppers...they have to land.

  ‘And if we take no such...drastic action?’ asked Rear Admiral Jones, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Ma’am?’ said the suited-man linked to the computers hidden deep beneath miles of rock, across hundreds of miles of Old-American farmlands, Russian tundra, African deserts.

  Jones raised an eyebrow, questioning. ‘Wasn’t I clear? What if we were to take no such action? We stand down the nuclear solution. Go old school. Army, navy, air force. Blood and guts. What about that? You’re the talking head for Global Net, right?’

  The man nodded.

  She looked at the other chiefs. ‘We’re relying on Global Net right now? Why didn’t GDR fire, men? Why no warning? We didn’t know about the first drop ship until satellite collisions? It’s ridiculous. Global Net didn’t just fall asleep, surely? Did it?’