Battle for Earth

  Battle for Earth

  Bob Blink

  Chapter 1

  Earth had lost! Hell, it hadn’t even been in the war. No one even realized there was going to be a confrontation until the day before it started. Within a week, it was over. Earth had nothing left to fight with, although the resistance it had put up even from the first day had been pitiful. The battle had been so one sided it was laughable, or would have been if it hadn’t been so tragic. Mankind’s first encounter with another species, and within short order our world was wiped out. At least our ownership of it had been. Some of us survived, although for how long was very uncertain.

  The aliens, no one knew even now what they called themselves, had appeared out of nowhere. No lazy, easily tracked approach orbits coming into the solar system marked their arrival. Even if we had been looking, their ships were true stealth vehicles. Radar and visible light were totally absorbed, providing no signature to be detected. Not that anyone was watching. The first indication that there was trouble was the near simultaneous loss of every orbital satellite. It didn’t matter what the function of the orbiting hardware might be, or whether it was government or commercial, nor what kind of orbit it occupied. All were simply destroyed, as was the international space station with all seven on-board astronauts. That threw communications and monitoring into disarray even before the destruction began.

  For part of the first day the news channels did their best to provide coverage of what was taking place around the world. Mark didn’t know what backup systems they had for routing the television signals, but he’d spent part of that first morning watching the video showing the systematic destruction of every major city around the world. He didn’t know what kind of weapon the aliens were using, but it wasn’t nuclear. There were none of the familiar mushroom clouds with their radioactive fallout. Earth’s attackers were smarter than that. They wanted the planet to be useful when they were finished. The bright green beams that originated from the huge alien ships were precise, and cut through the cities as if they were made of straw. The cities burned, the stone and steel structures melted, and the people underneath the beams were simply consumed.

  The military had tried to respond, but found that their most capable systems were far too primitive to have any effect on the massive ships. Missiles failed to track, and even when they somehow managed to run true, they exploded harmlessly against a defensive field that simply absorbed the blasts with no noticeable damage to the target. In desperation, Earth’s defenders turned to their own nuclear devices, launching the deadly weapons toward the unknown invaders. The blasts were bright and spectacular, and did no more damage than the more conventional weapons. Almost immediately the aliens took to destroying any weapon that was launched well before it could reach a target and detonate. Even if we were willing to contaminate the planet, they weren’t.

  The attackers had also responded by renewed focus on the military bases around the world. It was as if they’d wanted to be attacked in order to reveal the defensive positions that needed to be purged. All military bases were the subject of fierce attacks. Every plane, in the air or spotted on the ground, was eliminated. Within a day, the skies of the entire world were owned by the invaders. Similarly, every ship, and every vehicle that might have a military function, was wiped from existence. Even the supposedly invisible submarines deep in the oceans had apparently been located and targeted.

  Any source of electromagnetic emissions was immediately taken out. The military lost most means of communicating. They found themselves restricted to the limited capability provided by fiber-optic cable and aging copper lines, not that any directives passed across these restricted means of communicating had any real chance of success. Within a day, even these lines of communication had been compromised, the attackers having somehow tapped into both the commercial Internet and its military counterpart. The aliens also appeared to understand human languages, and were amazingly adept at cracking the best of codes.

  As part of the attack on microwave communications, all commercial broadcasting had been taken down in the first hours of the attacks. Those individuals like Mark, who had been watching the destruction from their homes, found themselves cut off from any further news of what was happening. Mark had seen enough to know that the attacks were universal, and that the entire world was crumbling around them. A graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley, he’d correctly assumed that the entire Bay area was likely to be a major target, and had thrown a few things in his Hummer and gone in search of Sharon, his girlfriend. They’d headed north, hoping to be able to get out of the area before the attacks he anticipated began to materialize. They hadn’t gotten nearly as far as he’d hoped.

  Over the next few days, awareness of events became a much narrower perspective, focused only on one’s immediate surroundings. Neither Mark, nor any of those around him, had any understanding of how the world might be faring more than a hundred miles away. There was no news, and essentially no travelers from other areas. Survival was a local concern, and while everyone wondered if the government was still holding out somewhere, no one really believed that to be the case. The only vehicles spotted in the air were the alien craft. There was no longer any ground fighting, at least in this area. The invaders were clearly in total control.

  Fortunately, the aliens ceased their attempts to search out and kill the remaining humans. It was as if having knocked the population down to a small fraction of what it had been, and totally destroyed any meaningful resistance, the aliens were content to allow the survivors to get along as best they could. At least they left the bewildered humans alone so long as they didn’t become a nuisance or interfere with them in any way. Most of the time, anyway. Mark had seen an alien ship indiscriminately fire on a small group of survivors walking across the flatlands. Those attacked hadn’t been armed, and had simply been seeking someplace to find shelter. He assumed the aliens had blasted them as the equivalent of a prank as they’d flown over. Target practice perhaps. Whatever the reason, what he had observed made him especially cautious about being spotted in the open.

  All of this had been months ago. Mark and Sharon had been forced to make a great circle when they had discovered the Carquinez Straits bridge had been destroyed as part of the attack on the Vallejo entrance to the Grizzly and Suisun Bays. They had driven back and found the Richmond Bridge still intact, and had crossed over to the land north of San Francisco. From there they had circled around coming out well north of Vallejo. As they attempted to make their way back to Highway 80 near Fairfield, they started to encounter a flood of people fleeing the city. The Air Force Base had been there, and as a result the area had been subjected to intense attacks. Mark tried to consider an alternate route as he drove.

  “Lake Berryessa,” Sharon had exclaimed. “This road will take us there. It’ll be off the main route, so it’s probably safer than the freeway.”

  Mark tried to picture a map in his head and decided Sharon was right. They’d be able to loop around and come back out onto the freeway somewhere near Vacaville. That had been when they had picked up one of the last of the radio broadcasts that informed them Sacramento had been attacked, and no one should attempt to pass through the area.

  “Where now?” Sharon asked.

  “The lake,” Mark said after a moment of thought. “We need a place to settle in until everything calms down a bit. It’s early in the year, so many of the homes around the lake will be deserted. We can find somewhere there to hide out.”

  “You mean break into someone’s house?” Sharon asked.

  “I doubt if most of the owners will be making their way back there again,” Mark said bluntly.

  They’d found refuge in the hills around the lake, a couple of dozen miles east
of the small town of Winters. Over a period of several weeks they had joined with others, and now their group had stabilized at nearly fifty individuals. None were eager to see the group grow any larger. Too many in one place might draw attention. As it was, they worked at keeping their location secret, and had only limited contact with other people they encountered when out foraging. Mostly they visited the small towns in the area, but more than once they had made the longer drive all the way to Vacaville. Parts of the city had been struck, although substantial portions remained more or less intact. At least two-thirds of the population had fled to parts unknown.

  For a long time, they’d seen little of the aliens, and some had wondered if they were leaving Earth, their intention being simply to eliminate the humans on the planet. The alien ships no longer filled the skies daily, and sometimes a ship wasn’t spotted for as much as a week. That had been the situation for several months, which had allowed an uneasy routine to settle in. They were no longer hunted, at least for the moment, but no one had any idea what kind of future they might have. More than once Mark had wanted to go exploring, but Sharon had been reluctant to leave the security they had found. They couldn’t be certain what they would find, and already dangerous gangs of displaced individuals had been spotted. Traveling, they’d be exposed and potentially at the mercy of such groups.

  More recently, there were rumors the invaders would sometimes gather up large numbers of humans and take them aboard one of their ships. Mark had never seen this, and couldn’t imagine a reason for it. For all he knew the stories were simply rumors that had spread out of fear of what might be next for those who’d managed to survive this far. True or not, there was nothing that could be done about it. Mankind had lost, and in Mark’s mind, the future of his species was dim. Whatever the aliens wanted to do with them, they would be able to do unchallenged. Earth, and everything on it, had a new master. At their most capable, the human race hadn’t brought down a single alien ship. At least he’d not heard of such an instance, and in the few hours before communications had been lost, everything he’d heard suggested our most powerful weapons had been wholly inadequate.

  Then, starting a couple of weeks ago, the invaders had moved onto a new stage of their occupation. They had started building. A few miles to the west, not too far north of Vacaville, a large facility was being constructed. It was the first sign that the aliens were intent on making a permanent home of the Earth. At least in this area. It was possible that major construction was already well underway in other areas.

  Mark knew it was stupid, but he had to get some idea what they were up to. He’d argued with Sharon about it, but after several days of monitoring the activity from a distant hillside, he’d decided it should be safe enough. While a number of the bear-like aliens were present during the daylight hours, at night they left in their small ships, leaving the area deserted except for a handful of their damn Bots. The Bots could be a problem, but if this facility were an indication that the invaders were planning on moving into the area, it would be good to know more about their plans now. Mark and the small group would want to prepare and move away before the facility was finished. He could see nothing good of trying to hide this close to a major alien installation.

  He was going in alone. While he’d played down the danger to the others, he realized the alien’s technology was so far superior, they could have any number of monitoring devices in place that he’d be totally oblivious to. Actually, no one had been willing to go along with him, and most had openly criticized his plan.

  “Damn it, Mark!” Lou shouted. “This is just plain stupid!”

  Lou was the unofficial leader of their small group. Sixty-seven years old and a former policeman, he’d been one of the first of those at the lake. He had a summer place there which he’d bought after retiring. When things started looking grim, he’d packed up his wife and headed to his cabin.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Mark said. “Simply give up and try and keep running? Maybe we can learn something that the government might be able to use against them.”

  “There is no government,” Lou spat back. “You know that as well as the rest of us. From now on we’re on our own. We have to wait and see what these aliens are going to do.”

  Actually he realized what Lou was saying was wise, but he felt the need to do something. The months of simply hiding out made him feel that there was no future. He desperately wanted to believe there might be some small hope for all of them, but he was starting to doubt it. This frustration had all been building inside him, but the loss of Sharon earlier in the month when a lucky shot by a gang they’d encountered had struck her in the head had brought all his suppressed anger forward.

  “Okay. Maybe a resistance movement. If not now, then sometime later. Eventually we have to get organized and try and make a comeback. Anything I might learn could make a difference.”

  “What kind of resistance do you think might be formed?” Lou asked sarcastically. “If the combined forces of all the nations on the planet were no more than a handful of bothersome flies to these aliens, what will a few hundred half starved refugees be able to come up with? We have to hope whatever they want is temporary, and sooner or later they will move on.”

  “Not a good idea, man,” Tom had injected in the exchange between Lou and himself, agreeing with the ex-cop as he gave Mark a sharp glance.

  The sentiment among the group had been unanimous. Even Ramji, an Electrical Engineering professor from his old university, had tried to talk him out of going, his always calm and reasonable voice pointing out the great risk for minimum gain.

  “You cannot know what kind of alarms they might have in place,” he warned. “They are so much more advanced than we. They will almost certainly be aware of your presence, and they will be upon you with their ships almost instantly. There will be nowhere to run, and you have seen how much concern they have for meddlesome humans.”

  So in the end he had gone by himself, even knowing the risks and how ill advised it was. He was aware the others were right, but something was pushing him. They were all probably doomed anyway. He didn’t agree with Lou’s assessment that the aliens coming here was a temporary thing. More importantly, he had decided sitting and hiding until they came for him was not enough for him. Not after Sharon was killed. What had all the months of hiding done for her?

  Now he was committed, having crossed the open ground between the trees and the new construction, and made his way onto the edge of the massive structure the aliens were erecting. He hoped that the Bots were all the aliens had felt necessary for security at this point in the project. So little was in place this early so there wasn’t yet anything that really required protection. That wouldn’t be true much longer. He patted the holster on his hip. He had a short barreled Colt .357 magnum in a belt holster, just in case. He knew that a weapon was an added risk. Word had spread that the aliens immediately executed any human caught with a weapon. No exceptions. Somehow he expected that would be the case for anyone caught inside their new construction site, so he felt he had little to lose. Anyway, given the risks, not just from the aliens but some of the feral humans on the loose these days, he wasn’t about to risk being without it.

  He slipped quietly past the supplies of building materials, using the preformed walls that were going up to hide him from the security Bots that moved almost silently around the facility. Resting his hand on one of the walls, he could tell it wasn’t concrete, although in the daylight it had looked somewhat like it from a distance. This material was smoother, and felt more metallic, although he couldn’t have said why that sensation came to mind. Whereas a structure this large made of the more familiar concrete would have had seams and joints, somehow this felt like a single integrated structure. Mark suspected it would be surprisingly difficult to make a penetration in the material.

  Mark dropped and ducked as he sensed the silent approach of one of the damned surveillance Bots. Another few seconds and he would have been caught. The r
obots moved on a cluster of four large balls that allowed them to move effortlessly in any direction. As smooth as the floor of this construction site was, they were extremely quiet as they made their rounds. They could also levitate. Apparently these weren’t inclined to do so, but Mark had seen more than one take after a human in the past months.

  Equipped with the energy weapon that the invaders favored, they were deadly when provoked. The weapon wasn’t a laser, although Mark subconsciously thought of it that way. It was far more powerful than any laser he’d seen before, and could fire in single pulses, or a near continuous beam. There hadn’t been enough opportunity to observe and determine how long the Bots could maintain the firing rate, but whatever power source the aliens used clearly had a long operational time between recharge or replacement.

  Holding his breath and hoping the damned robot didn’t have a means to detect his body heat or hear his breathing, Mark waited to see what would happen. Hopefully the strange material in the walls would hide any telltale signatures the robot was programmed to search for. Silently he pulled the revolver, but he wasn’t certain of what use that would be. He wasn’t at all proficient with the weapon. It had been something he’d purchased on a whim a couple of years earlier because it was so beautiful. He’d only taken it out once before. Hopefully if he needed it the range would be short. He didn’t know a weak spot in the Bots, and he’d seen them shot at by others in the past months and knew they had a certain degree of armor protection. Mark waited as the Bot scanned an area to the left of where he hid. He remained absolutely motionless as the Bot completed its pass, and prayed the Bot was just following a preprogrammed path and hadn’t been alerted by something he’d done.

  Finally the Bot moved onward, its programming satisfied by whatever had brought it to this location. Mark watched it move out of sight. Before he could reconsider and decide this was foolishness, he slipped the revolver back into the holster and slid out of his hiding place and regained his feet. Moving quickly parallel to the path he’d been following before he’d sensed the Bot, he moved toward the opening in the wall that would take him into the central area of the construction site.