The Assault Read online

  The battle above their heads was intensifying. The type ones, the enemy craft, were faster and more agile than even the best human aircraft, and Angel Chariot had no way to evade them.

  But hiding in the sky was a surprise for the Pukes.

  “Multiple signals!” Inzusu screamed. A swarm of dots had suddenly appeared on his screen. He stabbed at the comms button. “Multiple signals, right behind you. Immediate evasive maneuvers!”

  The pilots of the interceptors reacted immediately, breaking formation and streaking into different parts of the sky.

  “Where in Azoh’s name did they come from?” Czali asked behind him, an accusatory tone in her voice.

  “Out of nowhere.”

  “They’re not aircraft; they’re missiles, hunter-seekers,” Czali said, examining the screen.

  “Hunter-seekers? The scumbugz don’t have hunter-seekers!”

  “They do now. Must have got hold of one of ours and reverse-engineered it.”

  “Azoh!” Inzusu hit the comms button again. “Get out of there, now! Multiple hunter-seeker missiles right behind you. Repeat, multiple hunter-seekers right on your tails.”

  Already, the tiny hunter-seekers were accelerating to attack speed and targeting the closest interceptor. He could imagine the shock on the pilots’ faces as they suddenly realized the danger behind them and broke off the attack on the scumbugz to fight for their own lives. Their planes had sophisticated antimissile systems, but the enemy missiles were hunting in packs.

  Czali swore as two of the red dots blinked, then disappeared from the screen.

  Two more flashes lit the sky above Chisnall, fading into the distance as he fell.

  “Heaven, this is Angel Chariot. I have two confirmed hunter-seeker kills. How copy?”

  “Clear copy, Angel Chariot. Confirming two kills, over.” The pilot continued dispassionately. “I have three-way missile lock. I am breaking low and left, heading for home.” Then his voice changed. “Missile launch! Missile launch! I have multiple inbound missiles. Confirming zero six missiles, over.”

  Chisnall’s heart sank. The remaining enemy craft had closed within range. There were six air-to-air missiles swarming toward Angel Chariot.

  The second wave of hunter-seekers hit their targets with three explosions and three blasts of light. That was the last of them, but it was too late.

  The voice of the pilot was back in his ear in quick, unemotional sentences. “Countermeasures deployed. Missiles are closing. Going for the moon, over.”

  The pilot had tipped his jet back and was now rocketing skyward, vertically, like a rocket lifting off, hoping to leave the missiles below him. But it was not going to work. It was never going to work.

  “Missiles still closing. Missiles—”

  There was another boom.

  Chisnall cursed under his breath.

  Angel Chariot was now fragments of metal and exploding fuel tanks, a fiery meteor falling back to Earth. But it had played its part. It had given the enemy radar something to focus on, a distraction, as the six angels fell toward the desert floor below.

  There was silence as the last of the red dots blinked and faded from the screen. Inzusu gritted his teeth. They were not just dots. They were comrades. Bzadians. Killed by the scumbugz that infested this planet.

  “We need to wipe this planet clean,” he said.

  “Disinfect it,” Czali agreed grimly.

  Inzusu turned his attention back to the ghostly echoes fading in and out on his radar screen. Still no sign of parachutes. The echoes were falling like stones. Just to be sure, he kept watching until the faint signals crashed to the sand of the New Bzadian desert.

  Chisnall continued flaring his arms and legs. Already the others would be accelerating down away from him. It was standard operating procedure to stagger the landings, for safety reasons. He would be the last of his team to land so if things went wrong, he would have a few more seconds to figure out what to do, although in reality that probably just meant a few seconds longer to live.

  He checked his timing, tucked his arms and legs into his body, and felt the acceleration as he dropped faster and faster. Already he was falling as fast as a human being could fall: terminal velocity.

  “Angel Six down, all Oscar Kilo.” Price—the first to land—sounded winded, but that was normal for this type of jump.

  “Angel Five down. Oscar Kilo, Oscar Kilo.” Wilton was also down and okay.

  Chisnall’s eyes were glued to his HMDS, waiting for the signal from his own half-pipe. There it was: a yellow light and a pip, pip alert in his ear. His half-pipe was due to impact in three, two, one … The pip-ing stopped. There was a moment’s silence, followed by a screech inside his helmet and a red flashing light.

  The half-pipe had failed to deploy.

  He punched at the manual override. Another screech, and the red light was still blasting at him. His landing gear had failed.

  Those panicky hands were back around his heart and nothing was going to persuade them to loosen their grip. Lieutenant Ryan Chisnall of the Allied Combined Operations Group, Reconnaissance Battalion, was now falling toward the barren Australian desert at terminal velocity.

  Very terminal.

  2. TERMINAL VELOCITY

  THE HIGH-ALTITUDE FREE-FALL LANDING PAD—PERSONNEL (HAFLP-P) was developed in secret by the British military in the early 2010s. Designed as a clandestine insertion method, it was regarded as so secret by the British that not even their U.S. allies were privy to the project. Not until the Bzadian War, at least. After that, countries keeping secrets from each other seemed pointless, as human forces allied against the alien intruders.

  The HAFLP-P, commonly known as the “half-pipe,” worked off a basic law of physics: terminal velocity. It makes no difference whether a human being jumps from 200 feet or 32,000 feet. After the first few seconds, the human body falls as fast as gravity can make it. So a stuntman falling from a high building and a skydiver falling from an aircraft would hit the ground at approximately the same speed.

  A stuntman survives his fall by landing on a huge inflated airbag with large vents. The impact of the body on the bag blasts air out of the vents, and the result is a massive cushion to slow the fall. The half-pipe works exactly the same way. It consists of a landing pad made of an incredibly strong but gossamer-thin fabric and a compressed-air cylinder, plus a smaller emergency cylinder. When it hits the ground, the half-pipe landing pad inflates instantly, like an airbag in a car, expanding to the size of a swimming pool.

  The way to survive the fall is to hit the pad dead center, which is a lot harder to do from 32,000 feet than from 200 feet. From 32,000 feet, even a landing pad the size of a football field would appear as a mere pinprick far below.

  To ensure the jumper lands on the pad and nowhere else, each half-pipe is keyed electronically to their free-fall flight suit. Small fins and vanes on the suit move, aiming the suit at the center of the landing pad. If everything works correctly, the person will land in the middle of the pad uninjured. If they miss the pad, or something goes wrong with the equipment, it will be a very hard landing.

  [2355 hours]

  [Central Australia]

  “Mayday! Mayday!” Chisnall yelled desperately into his comm. “Half-pipe malfunction!”

  He had instinctively flared his limbs again, slowing his descent to buy himself as much time as possible.

  “I’m clear. Use mine!” Price sounded scared, but her words were strictly professional. “Activating emergency strobe and reinflating.”

  There was a procedure for a half-pipe malfunction, but Chisnall had never heard of anyone using it. At least, not anyone who had survived. There were only seconds left before he was a smear of red on the desert. He twisted around, scanning the ground for the infrared strobe.

  There it was!

  When Price landed, the air was shunted out of her landing pad, making it useless until it reinflated. The secondary, emergency cylinder could be used to reinflate the pad, bu
t that took time, and time was one thing he didn’t have. Landing on a half-deflated pad was only marginally better than landing on solid ground.

  Chisnall had already hit the manual override on his wrist, cutting off the signal from his own half-pipe, which was like the song of a siren, luring him to disaster. He angled his arms and legs, aiming for the rapid flicker of the strobe.

  The light of the strobe grew, impossibly fast, as he hurtled toward it. He could even see the landing pad now. It looked flat and empty, although the surface was billowing as the air rushed back into it. He tucked his arms and legs to his sides, rolling over onto his back before flaring out again.

  “Come left! Come left!” came Angel Six’s voice in his comm.

  He must have drifted right when he rolled. Chisnall adjusted slightly and was just wondering whether he had overcorrected when a giant hand smacked into his back, followed immediately by another, even harder collision. A crunching sound, followed by blackness.

  The Bzadians had first come to Earth in the 1940s, not long after the end of the Second World War. They had hung around for most of the 1950s and quietly disappeared in the mid-1960s, having completed their survey of the planet and, apparently, liking what they saw.

  Back in those days, stealth technology was unheard of on Earth, and they were able to fly their stealth rotorcraft without fear of being detected by the primitive radar systems that existed at the time. The only real danger of detection came from the occasional farmer or airline pilot who saw one of the rotorcraft and cried UFO, but those people were generally dismissed as being fruit loops.

  Then came the year 2014, when the first transporters began to arrive. Not hovering over Earth’s major cities like spaceships out of some sci-fi horror flick, but orbiting once around Earth before beginning a gradual descent through the atmosphere toward the center of Australia.

  The transporters had wings like a space shuttle, and like a space shuttle, they were little more than huge gliders, landing on the massive level salt flats of the Australian desert. Each one held nearly 3,000 aliens in stasis tubes, about to be awakened after a fourteen-year journey.

  Once down, the transporters were there for good. They had been built in space and launched in space, for a one-way ticket to Earth. They had no propulsion system capable of breaking free of Earth’s gravity. Once they landed, they could never again get off the ground.

  The Bzadians said they had come seeking refuge. Their own planet was dying, and they needed just a tiny corner of our world to call their own, to resettle their people. Their own world was a desert planet, and the inaccessible reaches of the Australian deserts suited them perfectly.

  Earth governments could hardly refuse. Our first contact with an alien race was an opportunity to demonstrate the goodwill and compassion of the human race. The Australian government, although initially unsure, came under immense pressure from other countries to comply.

  In 2015, the aliens lost a transporter when an equipment malfunction caused it to miscalculate its entry and damage its wings. It fell to Earth on the screens of every television channel on Earth. The slow-motion disaster happened over the course of a day, with Bzadians and humans alike helpless to stop it. Three thousand souls extinguished before they even had a chance to wake from stasis. The loss of that craft generated immense public sympathy for the newcomers and helped turn the Australian government’s opinion in their favor.

  In any case, what choice did the Australians have? The aliens were already there. More transporters began to arrive. And more. Over 6,000 of the massive spaceships dotted the Australian desert before Earth governments began to sense that something was wrong. These first Bzadians were not mere settlers. They were assembling an army.

  Alarmed at what they were seeing on satellite imagery, the Australian government hastily threw up a thin ring of defenses around its major cities. On June 17, 2020, “a day of inconceivable treachery,” the Bzadian Army attacked Australia’s defenses. The Australian Army stood no chance, and within days the cities belonged to the aliens.

  The reason for the sudden, shocking attack became clear on July 2 that same year. The skies above Earth turned black as a huge armada approached. Those early transporters were no more than the first drops of a thunderstorm.

  Australians were at first allowed, then encouraged, then forced to leave. Their homes and businesses, their schools and shops, were all required for the incoming Bzadian settlers.

  Australia became New Bzadia.

  Still the other governments of Earth dithered. Appeasement was the policy. Let them have Australia, they said. Nobody wants a war.

  And so it was for over three years.

  Then came the probing attacks northward to Papua New Guinea, northwest to Indonesia. New Zealand, to the east, was left alone. Too small, too isolated to be bothered with, although Bzadian aircraft made regular sweeps of the country to make sure Earth forces were not using it as a military base.

  In Indonesia, one of the first countries to fall, the conquered population began a vicious guerrilla war against their occupiers. The Bzadian response was quick and brutal. The entire population was eliminated. The aliens were unrestrained by any kind of human morals and saw humans as a subspecies. An animal to be tamed and put to work, or put down if it turned on its master and no longer served a purpose.

  The “cleansing” of Indonesia crossed all human boundaries: racial, religious, age, and gender. The alien invaders systematically cleared the country of humans as humans might rid a house of cockroaches. Some managed to escape; those who couldn’t, died.

  Finally, the world responded. A line was drawn in the sand.

  Battle commenced.

  Southeast Asia fell quickly, with heavy casualties on the human side, and the invaders headed north. Even the combined weight of the great Asian armies could not hold the alien invaders. The huge landmasses of Asia were lost, along with their vast mineral resources.

  Europe was next. The Russian scorched-earth policy slowed them but could not hold them back. The Bzadians had learned from human history and attacked Russia in the summer, the spinning hulls of their huge battle tanks decimating the massed armor of the Russian Army.

  They spread west and east, conquering and subduing country after country. The Bzadians were confident that Earth’s primitive armies would be no match for their high-tech weapons.

  And to some extent they were right. But what they hadn’t counted on was the incredible pace of human technological progress. They arrived expecting to fight weapons and machines they had seen in the 1960s. What they came up against were Earth’s armies of a new millennium. Stealth fighters, predator drones, and cruise missiles.

  Humans had another advantage also. Satellite surveillance. The aliens had not been able to ship to Earth the rockets, nor the tons of rocket fuel required to break a payload free of Earth’s atmosphere. Launch facilities in Asia and Europe had been destroyed before they could fall into Bzadian hands. Humans knew what the Bzadians were doing. The Bzadians, for the most part, were blind.

  Still, the outcomes of the land battles were never really in doubt. City by city, country by country, Earth fell to the Bzadians.

  Finally, the aliens turned their attention to the Americas, the last outpost of humanity.

  This presented a whole new problem for them. Geography. The Bzadians were not used to Earth’s vast reaches of water. Their own oceans were mainly subterranean, and their knowledge of boatbuilding was confined to rivercraft. They had no knowledge of submarines. A species that had evolved on a planet with little surface water found itself in a war on a planet where two-thirds of the surface was water.

  Despite all the invaders’ victories, the oceans still belonged to the humans and were guarded by the strength of the combined human navies. The Bzadians’ heavy transport aircraft were only good for short distances, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans became a moat, defending Fortress America from attack.

  Still the Bzadians tried. In 2026, they launched a massi
ve invasion fleet and set course for American shores. A cloud of aircraft buzzed overhead, a protective screen designed to keep the human navies at bay.

  It almost worked. The human navies retreated, under attack from a thousand stinging hornets. The invasion fleet surged forward, confident of victory, right into the trap that Earth forces had laid for them. Waiting silently beneath a thermocline, the submarines of forty nations were massed. Operating in concert, they allowed the alien fleet to enter a kill zone before simultaneously unleashing a storm of deadly torpedoes.

  It was the first and last time the Bzadians tried a waterborne invasion.

  But they did not give up. They attacked overland, crossing the frozen Bering Strait and driving into Alaska in the great Ice War of 2028. It was an ambitious and daring gamble, but the Bzadians were again beaten back as the U.S. forces used the ice itself as one of their most potent weapons. As the summer came and the frozen sea melted, the aliens withdrew, licked their wounds, and consolidated their gains.

  The nations that made up North and South America, now collectively known as the Free Territories, watched and waited, preparing for the attacks they knew would come.

  And every day the alien transporters kept arriving. The story about their planet dying was true. The part about needing just a small corner of Earth was not. They wanted it all.

  Blackness became a murky world of luminous shapes, fading in and out of Chisnall’s vision like vague banks of cloud. He watched, fascinated by the changing shades and rippling patterns, as yet unconcerned by a total feeling of numbness. He felt no fear, no desperation. What would be, would be, and he could do nothing but watch.

  The shapes were calling for him now, making terrible primal sounds. And they knew his name.