The Uninvited

No, no, no, no....I hve gotten used to 2 chapters everyday....

Have fun at the wedding. thanks for the story

 

Chapter Thirty-Nine<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

According to legend, the USAF flies planes built with alien technology at Groom Lake AFB – otherwise known as Area 51. There is no truth to this rumour, or so the military says.
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Quantico, USA

“You have got to be out of your ****ing mind.”

“David, David, you’ve been reactivated,” Nicolas said. “That’s you have got to be out of your ****ing mind, sir.”

“Then you have got to be out of your mind, sir,” David said, tartly. “This mission is a cluster**** right from the start.”

He scowled down at the operations plan – really just a handful of sentences scrawled on a sheet of paper – and then looked back up at the General. He’d been anticipating joining the force leaving the base and heading south, or perhaps an assignment to the blocking force that was already being assembled to block the path of any enemy force advancing towards the base, not what looked like a suicide mission. And, worse, one that threatened to send him right into the heart of enemy-controlled territory. He would have thought that he knew too much to be risked in such a manner.

“It needs to be done,” Nicolas said. “I would have sent Jon, but he’s busy with the planning for Operation Firefly. And you have a track record for being calm and cool under fire – and picked up three Purple Hearts to prove it. And you won’t be going alone. You’ll be escorted by a group of SEALs and whatever else we can spare by the time you leave.”

David nodded, slowly. The operations plan called for a team to return to Washington, carrying with them a portable monitoring station so the signals and intelligence unit could continue to study alien transmissions, while also attempting to capture whatever device the aliens were using to implant new slaves. Reports from stragglers who had been picked up by the outer patrols had confirmed that the aliens were definitely implanting every police and military officer they encountered, along with thousands of others. It seemed that the aliens were interested in strong men and young women – the later, David guessed, for the breeding program. The rejects – the ones the aliens refused to take – were apparently told to return to their homes and stay there. Their future, in a world controlled by the aliens, looked bleak.

“Fine,” he said, finally. At least it was action. Only a day after he had pulled the President out of Washington as the **** started to hit the fan, they wanted him to go back. If it were up to him, he’d have gone back with the entire 1<SUP>st</SUP> Marine Division and shot up anything that looked even remotely alien. “When do you want me to leave?”

“As soon as possible,” Nicolas said. “That young computer whiz had something she wanted to show us first. It may help you survive if the bastards catch you.”

David nodded as he followed the General into a secured building. The base had the air of barely-controlled chaos that generally followed any order to prepare for deployment, but there was an uneasy haze of fear in the air. The Marines – and FBI personnel, and whatever stragglers with military experience had been brought into the base – knew that they were in grave danger and that the country itself was under attack, and occupation. None of them had signed up seriously expecting to fight a war in their own backyards and David knew that morale was low. The married men worried about their families; the unmarried men worried about their girls, or what would happen if they lost. He saw a line of armed Marines heading towards the gates, carrying antitank weapons under their arms, and realised that they were volunteers for the blocking force.

The General had been very traditional. He’d explained – Marines didn't like ********, as David knew well from his own service – just what was going on and that the base would have to be abandoned. Indeed, he’d admitted that he was surprised the aliens hadn't dropped a rock on their heads already. The majority of the force would be heading south to a classified location, but some of them would have to fight and delay the advancing enemy force when it finally made its appearance. He’d asked for volunteers and most of the Marines – and FBI personnel – had stepped forward. A number had been pulled out, briefed quickly on the situation, and then started to move to the defensive positions.

No one had quite known what to do with Madiha, so she'd been assigned to the intelligence building and given access to military-grade computers and asked to help the electronic intelligence staff work on a counter to alien internet and mind control. David hadn't known that the work had actually had any success – it seemed to him that the aliens wouldn't have wired a backdoor into their computers for a human hacker to find and exploit – but he had learned to trust Madiha’s expertise. And she was easy to look at as well, a fact that explained why Crisco had been spending much of his time with her when there was nothing else to do.

“We’ve been monitoring alien transmissions,” Madiha explained, once the doors had been closed and secured. “They really are incredibly complex, but we’ve been able to isolate the control routines and study them. I wish we’d been able to unlock just how the alien computer language goes together, yet I’m pretty sure that it won’t be long before we solve that too. After all, it can't be that different from ours, not if they’re using our own internet against us.”

She allowed herself a smile and tapped her keyboard. “We have a number of implanted men in the brig,” she said. “You’ll be pleased to know that four of them have what I’m starting to think of as the basic implant – they follow orders, but they act like zombies. My bet is that the aliens are actually remotely controlling millions of humans from their secret lair and that whatever system they have set up to deal with this is overloading. I’d expect them to be using wetware – ah, the human neural tissue – if that were possible.”

Nicolas cleared his throat. “The important details, right?” Madiha asked, with a wink. “Very well; the important detail is that everyone who has a basic implant is constantly handshaking with the controlling computer, wherever it is. They’re sending out a signal into the wireless ether and they’re getting a reply, a steady stream of orders and perhaps some improvements in the software-wetware interface as they go along. Block that signal and they return to normal.”

She hesitated. “We blocked the signal for four victims,” she added, quietly. “Three of them are relatively normal now, although they’re clearly suffering from shock. The fourth is dead.”

David blinked. “Dead? Why?”

“We’re not sure,” one of the ELINT officers admitted. “The doctors believe that he died of massive brain trauma, although quite why...we don’t know. The man’s medical record did include some minor head injuries when he was younger and that may have contributed to his condition.”

“So we can restore our people,” David said. He smiled for the first time since hearing of the suicide mission. “That’s wonderful news.”

“Maybe,” Madiha said. “You see, we can block the signal here, inside an EW-prepped room. We can’t provide a complete block in the open. The moment the implanted people walk out of the room, the bastards will have them again.”

“****,” David said. For a moment, he’d dared to hope that they could free everyone who had been implanted. “Can’t we remove the implant while the signal is blocked?”

“We doubt it,” one of the other men said. David realised that the man, whose outfit screamed civilian, was one of the brain care specialists who had been brought in from the nearest civilian hospital. “The implant isn't just a tiny pill inside the brain. It has extruded filaments that have bonded to every part of the brain – we would kill them while we were extracting the implant.”

“But there is a possibility,” Madiha said. She reached behind the table and picked up something that glittered under the spotlights. “This should provide limited protection.”

David felt his mouth fall open into laughter. “A tinfoil hat! As God is my witness, a tinfoil hat!”

Madiha grinned. “It isn't actually made of tin,” she said, as her dark fingers caressed the material. “This is the latest in signal-blocking technology. Put a cell phone inside this and you’d never get another call in your life.” She winked. “They had the nerve to tell me that I couldn't be told what they used to produce it – and then they were flabbergasted when I recited it right down to the last detail.”

General Nicolas cleared his throat. “Yes, we did receive something of a complaint from the CIA officers here about your hacking activities,” he said, dryly. “I dare say that the President would be quite happy to sign a pardon if they tried to bring you to court.”

“Besides,” David added, “without you we’d never have come as far as we have.”

“Thank you,” Madiha said. She picked up the hat and pulled it down over her head. “The alien signals should be blocked out completely as long as you wear the hat. Up close to the transmitter, however, may be a little different, so be careful if you get implanted. If it fails...”

“We’ll be walking around with mechanical arms and screaming Resistance is Futile,” David said. “I get it.”

“I suggest taking a few with you and keeping them hidden,” Madiha said. “The aliens will know what they’re for even if the civilian population doesn’t know. And take care of yourself. I’ve mourned too many good men in my lifetime.”

David had to smile. “I shall endeavour to return soon,” he said, and looked up at General Nicolas. “Shall we go?”

“Your team is being assembled already,” the General said, confirming David’s belief that the mission had been planned before the team leader had been told that he would be leading the mission. “They’re looking forward to it.”

“Oh, goody,” David said, picking up one of the tinfoil hats and studying it thoughtfully. “I’m glad that someone is looking forward to it. Next stop; zombie town.”

***​

“Mr President?”

David Clark turned over on the cot and struggled to open his eyes. He was tired; after the meeting, General Nicolas had offered him the use of a cot in his office and the President had accepted gratefully. It may not have been Presidential accommodation, but it had sufficed – and allowed him time to brood. The entire country would have seen the broadcasts the aliens had put out, using his face and voice. They’d think he’d gone insane, or power-mad – and later, when they realised the truth, they would think he was a collaborator. At the next election – if there was a next election – his challenger was going to have an easy victory.

Stop that, he thought angrily, trying to concentrate on the here and now. The crisis facing the country was far more important than the next election, or even his own political survival. He knew that he should be thinking about winning the war, about saving the country so that there could be a next election, yet the sheer scale of the crisis was impossible to grasp. He’d grown used to the concept that, when there was a crisis, he would deal with it in the White House, surrounded by his Cabinet and political advisors. Instead, he was lying on a cot on a military base, with his position as President void in all, but name.

The voice came again, a little more urgently. “Mr President?”

Clark pulled himself up into a sitting position. “Yes,” he said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was doing. He doubted that he was fooling anyone, least of all himself. “Come in.”

The door opened, revealing a young Marine with a nervous, ****-eating grin. “Mr President, the General would like to see you in the situation room,” he said. “I’m to escort you there if that is convenient.”

“Yes, thank you,” the President said. Ordinarily, he would have made polite conversation, asking after the Marine’s family and trying to learn what made him tick. It was astonishing just how far a gift for remembering names and faces could take one in politics. Now...they passed the short walk in silence, leaving the President alone with his thoughts. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the hustle and bustle of the base – the endless series of military-type activities that the President had found incomprehensible – seemed to have dimmed. He base was dying slowly from within.

General Nicolas was standing in front of a computer display, showing a view from high overhead. It took the President a moment to realise that he was looking down at Quantico from a satellite or drone launched from the base. The last he’d heard, it had been impossible to deploy any of the advanced technology that had cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars. Clearly, some of the desperate effort to restart the technology had borne fruit.

“Mr President,” General Nicolas said. “I’m afraid that I have bad news.”

The President looked up at the display. It was covered with military symbols, largely incomprehensible to him, but he didn't need a full understanding to realise that red icons on the display meant trouble. In fact – he thought back to some of the lectures on military tactics that he’d heard while preparing for his inauguration – it looked as if the base was slowly being surrounded by enemy forces.

He said as much to Nicolas, who nodded. “They’re actually keeping their distance for the moment, so we do have some time,” the General confirmed. “That said, I rather suspect that they will be moving forward at night, or perhaps early the following morning. It depends how comfortable they feel fighting in the dark.”

The President frowned. “How comfortable are we fighting in the dark?”

“Night-fighting is tricky, Mr President,” Nicolas said. “We have advanced technology – night scopes, for example – to make life easier for our soldiers, but they probably have the same technology – if not something more advanced – to help their slaves. And then we know that the hybrids can see in the dark, just like cats. It doesn't really matter. Once those forces start advancing, this base becomes untenable. We will have to start the evacuation plan.”

“I understand,” the President said. He looked down at the screen, wishing that he could read it with easy familiarity. “How do you intend to proceed?”

Nicolas spoke, using a laser pen to illuminate parts of the display. His voice was as calm and casual as if he were lecturing at West Point or another military academy, rather than describing all-out war across the American countryside. The President envied him his calm. He wanted to start screaming in horror, personally. The entire country was slowly and systematically being taken apart and reshaped in an alien image.

“Well, we started moving men and material to secondary locations just before the **** hit the fan – pardon my French – and we continued that process once we knew that we could hold this base, for the moment,” the General began. “We will continue moving men and equipment out of the base to the south – they don’t have a blocking force in place yet, although it is just a matter of time – and hopefully get most of our people out of the way before they start advancing.”

He tapped blue icons on the display. “We’ve deployed a volunteer force armed with what heavy weapons we can spare to these locations,” he continued. “The enemy force has a heavy armour and transport component, so they will have to use the roads or slow down as they try to travel cross-country. The volunteers will get in, land a few blows, and then get out again before the enemy soldiers recover their balance. Experienced teams can use this tactic time and time again, causing considerable delays.

“We don’t know, however, how the enemy will respond to these tactics,” he added, reluctantly. “They may just press on anyway and that will force us to speed up the evacuation and abandon some of our equipment here. Indeed, once they realise that there is an evacuation underway...”

The President held up a hand. “I trust you to handle the military aspects,” he said. He wouldn’t have known where to begin issuing orders to get the scratch military machine moving. “What happens to the blocking force?”

General Nicolas winced. “Most of them will die, Mr President,” he admitted. “In an ideal world, we’d trade space for time indefinitely. We don’t have that kind of luxury here; we’ve got our backs to the wall. The volunteers will make a final stand here” – he tapped a location on the map – “and hold the enemy for as long as possible. As we have a serious shortage of heavy weapons...”

Clark closed his eyes in pain. Those men – and perhaps a few women – were going to die, just to protect his ass. People had died at the White House to win him time to escape; now, they were going to die so he could escape again. The cold logic – preserving the President, the legal head of both government and state – was nothing compared to the knowledge that men and women were going to die.

“Tell them to escape when they can,” he said, finally. It was the only thing he could say. “I don’t want them to die for nothing.”

“I’ll do what I can,” General Nicolas said. For the moment, they shared a mutual understanding. Neither of them wanted to watch the volunteers die. “There is no other choice, Mr President, As Napoleon said, years ago: ask me for anything, but time.”

 

Chapter Forty-One<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

How quickly could we duplicate alien technology? Again, we don’t know. Mastering it, however, may be the only thing that will save us from an alien takeover.
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Quantico, USA

“Is this even remotely ethical?”

Jon posed the question as he watched, through a set of one-way glass, as a pair of doctors pushed the alien injector gun against the skull of one of the prisoners from the Marine Corps Brig. In the normal run of things, Abdul Al-Hamid would have been transferred to one of the secret prison facilities scattered across the United States, where he would have been interrogated and then quietly sent for trial or eliminated. As a leading financier for Islamic Jihad, his guilt amply proven by both public and secret intelligence, few people had any qualms about throwing him in an unmarked grave. Besides, keeping the fact he’d been captured secret ensured that his successor wouldn't be sure of his own succession, at least for a few weeks.

As it had happened, the terrorist had been in transit when the new crisis had broken over the United States and no one had quite known what to do about him. Several people had suggested shooting him outright and dumping the body in an unmarked grave, but when the alien technology had recovered Howard had had another idea. Using him as a test subject to understand how the alien technology interacted with the human brain was far more useful than simply disposing of him.

“Good question,” Nicolas said. Jon frowned. He barely knew the Commandant of the Marine Corps – unlike David, he’d never met him before being forcibly retired from the service – and wasn't sure how far he could be trusted. At such a ratified level, politics crept into the decision-making process, no matter how the military tried to overcome it. “We weren't going to let him go anyway...and we do need a test subject.”

The terrorist soiled himself as the injector gun was triggered, shooting a stream of alien technology into his skull. The technical geeks had explained that the aliens weren't quite using nanotechnology to implant and control humans, but their technology clearly used it in some form, if only to create the initial string of control implants. The doctors had surrounded the test patient with a whole series of medical devices, recording everything from brainwaves to how blood flowed through his skull. They hoped that they would be able to track the implants as they formed within the man’s brain. Jon felt oddly sick, even though he knew what his fate would be if the terrorists – the forces the man in the chair backed – took over. Homosexuals would be lucky if they were merely shot. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban still ruled, they’d had walls dropped on them.

Jon scowled, turning away. “Does the President know about this?”

“We haven’t kept it from him,” Nicolas said. He shrugged. “I understand your concerns, but we’re short on options. I suppose we could have tried to liberate a monkey from the nearest zoo and implant it...”

“Right,” Jon said, crossly. “I get the picture.”

Most of the base’s personnel had already left the base, slipping out through the tightening blockade and heading down to Nevada. The President and a handful of civilians – including William and Kimberly – had been transferred to a survivalist farm that David had recommended. God alone knew what would happen if the final desperate gamble failed, Jon knew; the President would hardly be in any position to assert federal authority. Perhaps he’d just slip into the shadows and let history pass him by.

Jon himself had been assigned to one of the task forces preparing for the operation in Nevada, but the General had asked him to remain at the base rather than head down to Nevada at once. Jon hoped that the General had a good idea how they could escape the blockade, for it was getting tighter all the time. The scouts had reported that the enemy were moving up tanks and armoured cars, along with several dozen black helicopters. Jon wasn't sure what was keeping them, unless they believed that the base had a far heavier defence force than it actually possessed.

Or perhaps they’re just waiting for us to muster our force, he thought, coldly. Perhaps the aliens believed that they were planning a final desperate defence, rather than slipping away and preparing to fight another day. Or maybe they just didn't care enough to push the issue. If Madiha and the other tech geeks were right, the aliens were having problems controlling so many human beings. Perhaps they intended to consolidate what they’d taken before turning their attention to mopping up the remains of the American military.

“There’s no very definite influence on the subject at the start,” one of the doctors said. Jon didn't know his name and didn't particularly care to. “The implant is definitely spreading through his mind, intersecting itself with his brain cells, but it's not taking control. I think that the implants wouldn't be activated until they pick up signals from outside – and this is a shielded room.”

Nicolas nodded. “Can you deactivate the implant without killing him?”

“Probably not,” the doctor said. “We’d have to find a way to hack into the control software and disable it, something that we cannot do without the command codes. Even if we succeeded, I’d bet good money that the overall system would adapt at once and lock us back out again. We’d have to isolate every implanted slave or knock out the overall system.”

Jon and Nicolas exchanged glances. Only an hour ago, they’d discussed the special weapons that had been recovered from a nearby top-security base that had only been known to a handful of personnel. The aliens had known, however, and they’d been in the process of securing the base and transporting its contents elsewhere when the Marines arrived and opened fire. The hybrids had put up a vicious fight and over twenty-two Marines had died in the battle. Their deaths hadn't been in vain – the team had recovered several special weapons from the deport – but it was an alarming glimpse of the future.

One of the special weapons had been experimental, a weapon that produced a massive EMP capable of blanketing a continent. The odds were that the weapon would never have been deployed back when the world made sense – using it against Iran would have knocked out all the surrounding countries as well – but now, it represented a final fallback position for the human race. The team taking the weapon would hide until they heard from the President – and if they didn't hear from the President, they’d fire the missile up over America, preset to detonate at the right time. The EMP would cripple the aliens; even if it didn't affect alien technology, or the implants they used to maintain their control, the human technology they used would be fried. The remainder of the human race would have a fighting chance.

And as for the other special weapons...

“You’d better go see your hacker friend,” Nicolas said, as the doctors started to probe the helpless terrorist. “We may have to blow this popsicle stand ahead of time.”

Jon nodded and walked out of the room, back down the stairs and out into the open. A cold air blew across the base as he headed towards the intelligence building, which had been taken over by the geeks and their toys. He was still privately amused at how well Madiha had taken to working with the intelligence officers – he’d never thought of her as a military personality – but perhaps it wasn't such a surprise. Spooks were a weird breed anyway and they could all respect her prowess at hacking into enemy computers.

Madiha looked tired, but happy as she bent over a laptop, tapping its keys. Jon cleared his throat and she looked round with a grin, waving him to a seat. The laptop was displaying an incomprehensible display of spinning lights – Jon couldn't understand them at all – but Madiha seemed to understand them perfectly. She tapped the laptop one final time and closed it, picking up a secure bag and slipping the laptop into it.

“I think I’ve learned more about how their system interacts with ours,” she said, as she turned to face him. “Give us a few months and we’ll own their system.”

Jon snorted. “We don’t have a few months,” he said. “Is there no way you can speed it up?”

Madiha grinned. “It turns out that quite a few hackers I know have been hacking their way back into the network,” she said. “Most of them don’t have the faintest idea of what actually happened, but they’ve been sharing notes and information. I’m hoping to coordinate with a few dozen others in cracking the alien computer language and then getting into a position to do some real damage. I think that several others have already started to attack the system. They’ve been suffering from denial of service attacks and robots for the last few hours.”

“Good,” Jon said. “Perhaps it will slow them down a little...”

“It isn't good,” Madiha said, flatly. “I can’t prove it – well, not in layman’s terms – but I think their system is alive on some level. There’s been plenty of talk about a real artificial intelligence within the next few years, using the latest in quantum technology, and the aliens are definitely at least a decade ahead of us in computers. I think their system is adapting to the attacks and adapting itself to deal with them. If we need to distract their system for a few hours...”

“It will grow harder,” Jon concluded. She nodded. “Is there no way you can stop them?”

She shook her head, yawning suddenly. Jon wondered when she’d slept last, or even if she had since the aliens had come out into the open. “There’s never been a hacker authority or commander in chief,” she said. “No one ever commanded a hacker army. I can't stop them, although I think the aliens will, once their control tightens to the point where they can track down individual hackers. The results will not be pleasant for them.”

Madiha frowned. “On the other side, there is another possibility,” she added. “What were you planning to do with the captured alien?”

“I don’t know,” Jon admitted. They’d left the alien in the prison cell for the time being, although he suspected that the General either intended to move the prisoner or put a bullet through the alien’s skull. “What do you have in mind?”

“The alien’s implants allow them to interact with the alien computer network,” Madiha said. “If we were to take the implants, we could use them to...distract the network. You could use them to slip into Area 51 and...”

Jon shook his head. On paper, it sounded brilliant; in the real world, it wouldn't work. “They know he’s been captured,” he said. “We know that they monitor their own ships now. The moment the alien’s implants log into their network, with or without the alien, they will know that something is badly wrong.”

“Oh,” Madiha said. She considered it for a long moment. “But we could hack into the system and prevent it from sounding an alert...”

“While being shot at?” Jon asked. “It won’t work in practice, I’m afraid. The same goes for using Sven to slip through their defences. That trick won’t work twice.”

The thought of the young hybrid made him smile. Sven – and Sharon Mack – had been moved out to another facility, travelling in a sealed van. If they were lucky, the aliens wouldn't have picked up on the transfer, although Sven would have to remain in the van for the remainder of his life. If the aliens won, the moment he exposed himself, they would have him. And then they’d come for Sharon. Jon had seen some of the reports, from David and other recon teams, and compared the names to William’s list of abduction victims. The aliens, no longer needing to hide in the shadows, were picking up the abductees and transporting them elsewhere. There was no way to know where.

He glanced up sharply as the intercom buzzed. “Now hear this,” a voice thundered. “Contingency Plaza Toro is now in effect; I say again, Contingency Plaza Toro is now in effect. All personnel immediately report to their stations for Contingency Plaza Toro.”

Madiha blinked. “Contingency Plaza Toro?”

“Yes, as in the opera,” Jon said. General Nicolas had picked it, suggesting that he was a far more cultured man than the stereotypical jarhead. “In other words, someone is bringing the war to us and it’s time to leave before they get here. Grab your bags and let’s go.”

***​

Gaby nestled in her hiding place and peered through the scope towards Washington. The brief update from the field telephone – a jury-rigged device that had the virtue that the aliens could neither detect it nor jam it – had warned her that the aliens were finally on their way. Gaby had spent time working with Arab militaries – or fighting Arab militaries – and she was used to how they took their own sweet time to get ready for operations. The aliens, on the other hand, had launched their coup with swift brutal precision. The fact they’d waited for so long before moving on the base puzzled her. The enemy had done exactly what the Americans wanted and that felt odd. The aliens hadn't struck her as particularly stupid.

Both David and General Nicolas, for different reasons, had tried to talk her out of joining the blocking force. Gaby, however, had stuck to her guns and reminded them that there were only a handful of snipers at the base – and half of them were FBI snipers, unused to the hunting skills of military snipers – and she couldn't afford to remain on the sidelines when her skills were desperately needed. Besides, she wanted to get stuck into the enemy and if that meant lying in wait for the enemy to arrive...well, it was what she’d trained for and by God she was going to do it.

She braced her rifle – her trusty M40A5 – and smiled to herself. In Afghanistan – a country she had grown to hate rapidly and thoroughly – there had been no end of ROE to follow, including some that meant the snipers had to let the enemy have the first shot before firing back. It struck her as a direct contradiction of what the snipers were trained to do; besides, she had little regard for political generals, of all ranks and services. Gaby was no feminist Nazi, yet she had been profoundly shocked by how women were treated in Afghanistan. Killing all the Taliban – or, even better, castrating them and leaving them to bleed out on Afghanistan’s plains – would have improved the world no end. Now, she had unlimited ROE – and the people she was shooting at were her fellow Americans, enslaved to an alien agenda. The irony wasn’t lost on her. The only reason she’d gotten involved with the Clan in the first place was because she feared that the United States was falling victim to an alien agenda.

The first enemy troops came into view and she felt her lips curve up into a cold smile. The hybrids weren't wearing American uniforms; they were wearing black jumpsuits that seemed to suggest a more sinister origin. She swept her scope over them, looking for something that would suggest rank, but saw nothing. Salutes in the field were forbidden – it might tell an enemy sniper that there was a person worth shooting in front of him – and it seemed that the aliens had swept away all formality. Or perhaps not. The hybrids advanced with deadly purpose, holding their weapons at the ready. Behind them, a line of armoured vehicles followed them, weapons spinning endlessly in search of targets. They had no idea what they were about to hit.

Quantico wasn't normally known for being used as a base for armoured units, but the General had been able to bring up a Marine tank platoon before the **** had hit the fan, supposedly for training purposes. Gaby heard the noise as the first Abrams tank opened fire, launching a shell directly into an enemy armoured vehicle. It blew up with a thunderous roar as the tank shifted aim, trying to take out a second vehicle before the enemy returned fire. Gaby studied the hybrids for a long moment, noted how they moved, and then calmly squeezed the trigger. It was hardly her first kill – she’d lost that particular virginity in Iraq – but as the hybrid’s head blew off, she allowed herself a smile. At least she wasn't shooting genuine American servicemen.

The enemy collected themselves and started to fire back. Gaby cursed and slipped backwards as shots – far too accurate for her taste – started to crack through the air towards her. The bastards had to have a sniper-tracking radar set nearby, a trick the US had used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had a rough bead on her position. She would be dead if they hadn't been concentrating on the tanks and trying to kill them before they could reposition themselves and return fire.

Grinning to herself, she reached her secondary position and took up a firing pose. The enemy didn't know it, but a group of SF personnel had carefully prepared the area they were about to enter. It was lined with IEDs and other unpleasant surprises, just waiting for an imprudent hybrid. Gaby had no illusions about the eventual outcome – the aliens controlled everything and could just keep throwing enslaved Americans at the defences until they broke – but they’d know that they’d been hurt.

As the tanks opened fire for a second time, she picked her next set of targets and started to pull the trigger. They wouldn't get her, she resolved, without paying a high price.

 

Chapter Forty-Two<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

And yet, we could learn so much from the aliens. Quite apart from technology, what could an alien race teach us about arts, or history, or even galactic geography? Why do they have to remain covert? What are they trying to hide?
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Virginia-Nevada, USA

The flash lit up the night sky.

Jon braced himself for the shockwave, but the pilot of the tiny aircraft knew what he was doing. The Marine Corps had designed the aircraft for stealthy observation, not speed or power, yet a skilled pilot could turn on a dime. It had been an experiment in cheap and plentiful CAS support in an age of insurgent warfare – rather than multi-billion dollar hanger queens – and would, in a sensible world, have given the Marine Corps all kinds of new capabilities. As it happened, only a handful of Raven aircraft had been produced when the **** hit the fan, but one of them had been based at Quantico for flight tests.

He looked over at Madiha and gave her his best reassuring smile. The special weapon wasn't not, officially, a nuke. The briefing papers he'd read quickly had been quick to point out that it wasn't officially a nuke because, reading between the lines, most people subscribed to a taboo about using or even thinking about nuclear weapons. If the politicians had heard the word nuke, they would probably have cancelled the entire program, rather than producing a handful of devices. The voters had never been consulted, not without reason. It was alarmingly easy to whip up anti-nuke campaign these days.

Back in 2001, the United States had nearly trapped Osama Bin Laden and the inner core of his organisation in a mountain fortress called Tora Bora. The fortress had been surrounded by local Afghani warlords, while USAF aircraft had orbited overhead, ready to bomb hell out of the terrorists. And yet the terrorists had escaped. The fortress had simply been too large to bomb effectively, while the warlords – whose power depended on their private armies – had been unwilling to shoulder the burden of digging the terrorists out, not when it would cost them most of their influence. The United States had responded to the crisis by developing – after a secret research program – a fusion device designed to literally melt its way through rock and destroy even the most formidable bunker system.

It had never been tested, or even deployed against terrorists or an enemy state. Instead, a handful had been stored until they’d been recovered – and one of them had been used to destroy Quantico. The blast wouldn't be as powerful as a proper nuclear bomb, but the base would have been destroyed and the victorious enemy forces would have been caught in the blast. All evidence they could use to track the human resistance down had been destroyed.

He looked down at his hands, unwilling to reveal his concern to Madiha. They knew the aliens possessed a number of spacecraft and it was quite possible that the aliens would track the aircraft as it fled the base. Intercepting and shooting it down wouldn't prove a problem – the alien weapons moved faster than any warning could reach the pilot - and Jon knew that there was no way to hide. They would have to hope that the stealth coating held up long enough for them to reach Nevada and join up with the remainder of the force.

“I'm picking up nothing on the passive,” the pilot called back. Jon smiled in relief. They didn't dare use active radar – that would have drawn the aliens to them like moths to a flame – but the passive sensors should at least tell them if there were any other radars in the area. “I think we’ve lost them.”

“I hope so,” Jon said, glumly. For all they knew, the aliens had something that made the most advanced radar systems the United States had developed look primitive by comparison. They might be able to track a stealth aircraft from right around the world, or peering down from orbit. The resistance was risking everything on a single throw of the dice. “Let me know at once if that changes.”

Jon had fought insurgents while in Afghanistan and had a healthy respect for their skills – and the damage they could wreak on an occupying force – but he knew that very few insurgents had ever defeated an occupying army. Even the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, hailed by the jihadists as a great victory for the Islamic faith, had only taken place because of trouble at home and a flood of weapons from the free world. And the Russians had never been able to mass-convert Afghanis to communism, the religion of the left. The aliens, on the other hand, could convert humans simply by implanting them and turning them into spies to be sent home, perhaps unaware of what had been done to them. Some of David’s more extreme members of the Clan had talked about fighting a war against the Federal Government, but Jon had had no illusions. Victory would not have been cheap, even against the feds alone, while the aliens had other advantages. And if they failed, the last organised human military force would be destroyed.

He closed his eyes and tried to get some sleep. Long ago, he’d picked up the knack for sleeping whenever he could, but now sleep didn't come easy. Shaking his head, he peered out of the porthole towards the ground, taking in the depressing sight below. Once, David had shown him a satellite picture of the night time United States, with the east and west coasts illuminated by light. Now, almost all of the lights were out and the darkness was broken by only the occasional flashes of light where people had generators or batteries. Jon would have thought that knocking down most of America's power grid was impossible – there were plenty of redundancies built into the system – and yet the aliens had effectively succeeded. At first, outside the cities, local communities would band together and try to survive, helping those who needed help. Later, if the power never came back on, who knew what would happen? They would be in uncharted territory.

Silently, he cursed the aliens under his breath. He had to hand it to them. They'd knocked out everything that could be used to organise resistance, from radios to the internet. If General Nicolas hadn't started work on contingency plans before the **** hit the fan, it would have been completely hopeless. The aliens would have secured the country and taken over the rest of the world at leisure. Even though their plans had been blown early, they had still effectively won. If the resistance failed, the entire world was doomed.

He’d heard General Nicolas and the President discussing extreme solutions to the problem. The United States might be lost, but what about the rest of the world? Perhaps, if the Russians were largely untouched, they could organise a nuclear strike against the aliens; if not the Russians, what about the Chinese or the Europeans? Even if the aliens had left them alone, though, and concentrated on America, they would be fools to have ignored their nuclear missiles. The chances were good that the Russian or Chinese missiles would be intercepted by alien lasers or American-designed missiles. It said something about just how desperate the situation was that the President was seriously considering urging the Russians to launch a nuclear strike against the American mainland.

“I have something,” the pilot said suddenly. “It’s a radio transmission.”

Jon checked his watch as he stumbled to his feet. Somewhere along the line, he’d drifted off to sleep, allowing the plane to fly further from the base. The dawn was coming up in the distance and he allowed himself a small smile. At least the sun was coming up. He wouldn't have been entirely surprised if the aliens had managed to turn off the sun.

The transmission was constantly interrupted by bursts of static, but he could make out the words. “...I ask you, what has happened in Washington? Why is the power still off? Why are stormtroopers breaking down doors and abducting harmless people? Why has the government banned guns? I tell you, there can only be one answer. The damned socialists in Washington have finally decided to come into the open and enslave Americans to their damnable New World Order...”

There was another burst of static, blocking out the next few words. “And I say to you, we will not surrender. We will fight to prevent the black-shirted stormtroopers from taking our rights! We will not surrender to the dumb-o-crats in Washington! We will not surrender to the so-called United Nations and the your-a-peons in Paris! We will defend our rights to the last!”

Jon had to smile. “Ten gets you twenty he runs away when the shooting starts,” he said. In his experience, the people who shouted the loudest for violence were the ones who had never seen it. “Who the hell is he?”

“I don't know,” the pilot admitted. “The bastards haven't been that successful at suppressing talk radio, so my guess is that it’s one of the local hosts.”

“And there are those who say we can trust Washington to do what’s best,” the talk show host thundered. “There are those who have faith that the federal government can save the world. Answer me this, then; why did they take Elizabeth Macpherson? Why did they take her? She was a bleeding heart liberal, she wanted to take away guns from innocent civilians, she believed in Washington and Karl Marx with all her heart. She even marched in support of the terrorists before we went into Iraq! Why was she taken? Take heed; no one is safe!”

Jon and the pilot exchanged a long look. “She must have been one of the abductees,” Jon hazarded, finally. The aliens had definitely been using their forces to round up the abductees, although no one knew why. “They didn't take her because of her politics; they took her because of her genes.”

He shook his head and walked back to the cabin. Madiha was sitting there, looking up at him. “It’s the end of the world, isn't it?” She said. “The end of the world as we know it?”

“And I don’t feel fine,” Jon said, dryly. He took the seat next to her. “What’s on your mind?”

Madiha shook her head. “I was just thinking...I don’t want to die a virgin.”

Jon blinked at her, and then burst out laughing. “I think you’ll have to wait until we land to get that handled,” he said. He wondered about offering to fly the plane for a few hours, allowing the pilot a chance to get into her panties, and then decided not to cause trouble. “I play for the other team, you know.”

He winked. “And besides, we’ll both die virgins.” Madiha looked at him, her dark eyes irritated and amused at the same time. “I’ve never ****ed a girl, you know. I haven’t even kissed one!”

***​

The advance parties had set up a small command centre near Crystal Springs, Nevada. The ghost town was located at the junction of SR 318 and SR 375, which, Howard had pointed out, was also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. Nevada State Route 375 allowed visitors to travel near Area 51 – although outside the security perimeter – and reach the small town of Rachel, located near the centre of the highway. Rachel catered to tourists and UFO seekers with alien-themed businesses, exploiting both the notoriety of Area 51 and the rumours of UFO sightings in the surrounding area. Howard had explained, not without a sneer, that Majestic had organised an entire industry of hustlers and cranks to divert attention from the more exotic aircraft and projects underway at Area 51, although the whole project had come alarmingly close to unravelling when Snowbird – an experimental aircraft built with alien technology – had crashed far too close to the town.

“We received word from the recon elements we sent to Las Vegas and the other population centres,” General Nicolas was saying, as David entered the command truck. It was alarmingly bare compared to the command centres the Marines had used in the recent past – few computers, no videophones – but there was something about it that appeals to him. “The city is in flames and the aliens are blocking all escapes. The outer settlements know that something is wrong, but they don’t know what. There’s a lot of chatter about resistance to tyranny and Washington, yet there’s nothing else, apart from fear. People are scared.”

David nodded. “And Nellis?”

General Nicolas nodded towards the map someone had taped to the side of the vehicle. “In lockdown,” he said. “The aliens probably have control. The base is so close to Area 51 that they would have targeted it for special attention. The recon units think that the aliens have been flying people in and out of the base all day, but we don’t know why. The same goes for the other military bases in the area, including Fallon. Bastards.”

“Yeah,” David agreed. NAS Fallon had been one of the bases Nicolas had attempted to secure prior to Operation Clean Sweep. The aliens had to have been in control even before Clean Sweep had begun, for they’d made reassuring noises while preparing their masterstroke. The entire base had to be regarded as enemy territory. “And the rest of the force?”

If there was something to be grateful for, it was that Quantico had hosted a complete list of active and retired servicemen in America, including thousands living in Nevada. The advance teams had made contact with as many as possible, using tinfoil hats to check for alien mind control before explaining what was going on and asking for help. A National Guard armoury had been opened and used to arm the volunteers, who ranged from retired Marines to several men who had fought in Vietnam and even Korea. Oddly, the list had included a number of Russian military personnel who had defected to the United States before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They’d never expected to fight to defend their adopted homeland, but most of them had volunteered to join the resistance when they’d been briefed.

Furthermore, the aliens hadn't managed to get their hooks into all of the Nevada National Guard. They’d tried, but there had been enough confusion and doubt to make it tricky for them, not when there were so many strange – and arguably unconstitutional – orders coming from Washington. Once the retired soldiers had been briefed, many of them had insisted on making contact with friends or relatives in the Guard and explaining what was going on. A handful of implanted officers had been quietly secured, but the remainder had largely rallied around the resistance. It gave General Nicolas some extra firepower, although it risked losing the advantage of surprise. The aliens might well have noticed losing control of the Guard.

“We’re as ready as we will ever be,” General Nicolas said. His hand traced the lines he’d drawn on the map. “You do realise that this is a classic disaster waiting to happen?”

David nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Howard had filled them in on what he knew about Area 51’s defences and they were formidable. Majestic had expected the aliens to descend on the base and open fire – if they felt they were ready to move against humanity openly – and so they’d created a fortress. And after Howard had left and the aliens had moved in, the chances were good that they’d improved the defences and backed them up with their own technology. The force General Nicolas had assembled might not be able to punch through and break into Groom Lake, the core of Area 51.

And then there were the hundreds of unanswered questions about the base itself. No one had been surprised to discover that there was no data on Area 51 stored in any of the computers at Quantico, which meant that the assault force would be going in blind. Howard had told them about a few secret access points they might be able to use, yet no one knew how current his knowledge actually was. The aliens could have sealed all of the chinks in the defences once they’d taken Majestic.

“So we’re going to attack directly from here,” the General continued. “We’ll try to slip in close without being detected, but the terrain isn't suited to stealthy operations. I’m pretty sure that they will see us coming. In fact, I am damn certain they will see us coming.”

His eyes locked in on David’s like laser scopes. “Which is why we’re going to be the diversion,” he said, firmly. “While we draw their attention to face us – and use all of the hacking tricks the hackers have developed to make them think the attack is much heavier than it really is – you and your team are going to go in the back door. Get into the base and do whatever it takes to stop them. If worst comes to worst, use the special weapon and take out the entire base.”

David nodded, but the General hadn't finished. “I have never sent good men into a position where I expected them to die,” Nicolas said. “I have never casually expended my men as if they were nothing to me, but that is exactly what I am going to do now. I am going to buy you as much time as possible to get inside and take out the base. Whatever you do, do not fail. The entire world depends upon your success. Failure is not an option.”

From anyone else, it would have been melodrama. From the General, it was simply a statement of fact.

“I understand, sir,” David said. He snapped a precise salute. “I won’t let you down.”

 

Hi Chris,
I really enjoy reading all your fiction but am I wrong or did this story jump from chapter 39 to 41.

 

DOH!

Chapter Forty

Given the capabilities the aliens have shown for controlling human minds, we can expect them to use them if they ever took over openly. Our minds might be enslaved overnight
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Near Washington DC, USA

“I don’t think I want whatever those guys are smoking,” Petty Officer Second Class Joe Buckley muttered. “It’s clearly ruined their brains.”

David nodded, sourly. After a drive up from Quantico, they’d abandoned their vehicle in a garage they’d broken into – the owner and his family had fled somewhere where they believed they would find shelter – and headed onwards towards Washington on foot. It hadn’t been an easy journey. The police were out in force, manning checkpoints and roadblocks, checking identification on everyone who tried to pass. It was clear that military and police personnel were being isolated from the common herd, while everyone else was being ordered to turn back. The new law was enforced with live ammunition; beyond the police checkpoint, towards Washington, David could see the remains of several burnt-out cars, shot up by the armoured police vehicle behind the checkpoint. It reminded him of scenes from Baghdad just after American forces had entered the city. The city’s drivers, heedless of American fears, had driven towards checkpoints at high speeds. Far too many of them had been shot and killed by nervous American soldiers.

Near the checkpoint, sitting by the side of the road, were a line of prisoners, their hands cuffed behind their backs. David couldn't tell what criteria the alien-controlled humans had followed to single them out from the crowds of refugees, unless the aliens merely wanted some humans at random for their experiments. Or perhaps they were military personnel who had been implanted and the aliens were waiting for the implant to bed down before activating it. There was no way to know, so he made a mental note that the alien prisoners might turn out to be hostile. He hadn’t had to do anything of the sort since a mission to Somalia that had, officially, never taken place.

“Yeah,” he muttered, as he swung his visor around to study the policemen. “They’ve clearly been smoking something, all right.”

On the surface, the police checkpoint looked normal, apart from the burned-out cars. The policemen were wearing their uniforms and reassuring smiles. Their walk, however, was slightly jerky, as if their puppet masters hadn't quite figured out the strings. And when one of the policemen turned, as if he was looking directly towards where the team was hiding, there was something damned and suffering in their eyes.

David had no idea why the implanted policemen couldn’t pass for normal, unless the aliens – as the intelligence team had suggested – were having problems controlling so many humans at once. It actually suggested a way to beat them; give them too many problems and their control system would fall apart, unable to respond to so many problems at once. The real problem would be coordinating so many strikes at once. Without communications, they were back to the days of carrier pigeons and bicycle messengers. The aliens would have a decisive advantage in being able to react to any trouble.

Buckley caught his hand. “Stay back,” he said, sharply. Another car was coming into view. Thankfully, most of the civilian population seemed to have decided to heed the instruction to leave cars off the road to allow military transports to pass unmolested. “There’s company coming...”

David nodded and refocused the visor. The car didn't look official – although that proved nothing – and yet the driver was clearly a military man. So were the four younger men in the car, two of them wearing uniforms that marked them out as army soldiers. David frowned as he swept the visor over their faces, focusing in on their eyes. They were clearly nervous and worried, despite the weapons they carried with them. It seemed clear that they hadn't been implanted.

“Watch,” he hissed, wishing that they were in a good position for lip-reading. It was hard to make out what was going on, but the driver was waving a military ID under the policeman’s noise and arguing with him. David could almost guess what they were saying. The young soldiers wanted to get back to their unit and weren't going to stop for anything, not even a dumbass cop carrying out orders from Washington. “I think...”

The policemen had waved the soldiers out of the car and then produced weapons. The machine gun on the armoured vehicle swung up to cover the unsuspecting soldiers, who had been taken completely by surprise. The police barked an order for them to drop their weapons and raise their hands. A moment later, all five of them were cuffed and kneeling on the ground. David wondered, for a horrifying moment, if he was about to witness an execution, before one of the policemen produced something from a sealed case. He focused in on it and saw a device that reminded him of a power drill. It was clearly alien technology.

Or at least something derived from alien technology, he reminded himself. The intelligence team – with Howard’s help – had been trying to put together a picture of how Majestic had infiltrated the military-industrial complex, an infiltration that had allowed the aliens to gain access to the Stunk Works, Phantom Works and secret research and development laboratories across the country. They’d concluded that Majestic was an inch thick and a mile wide; Majestic possessed no factories of its own, but the various production companies had genuinely believed that they were handling government contracts. Majestic, in the early days, had used it and the technological bleed-through to boost the overall technological level of humanity. Later, the aliens had used it to build their invasion force. It was probably the first time in human history, David had concluded, that an invaded nation had literally given its invaders everything they needed to invade successfully.

The policemen pushed the drill-like device to the soldier’s head and pulled the trigger. There was a moment of pain, and then the soldier stumbled and would have fallen if one of the policemen hadn't caught him. The others followed moments later; once they were all injected, the policemen pushed them towards the edge of the road and forced them to sit down. They didn't keep a close eye on their prisoners, but perhaps they didn't have to worry. Even if the soldiers escaped, they would be enslaved once the implants had finished deploying inside their heads and connected into their brains.

David glanced down at the terminal on his belt and scowled. Ever since they had started to approach Washington, they’d detected heavier and heavier levels of alien wireless transmissions, an invisible blanket falling down over the entire country. The intelligence team had talked about the aliens using the American – and probably the European and Russian – satellite networks to spread their transmissions far and wide. David had a sudden horrified realisation of just what the world would look like under the aliens. It would be nothing more than a giant ant colony, with everyone – human, hybrid and alien – programmed to know their place from birth till death. He remembered what the alien had told the President and shivered. The aliens didn't want glory, or conquest, or even to spread the word of God. They wanted nothing more than bare survival in a universe that was cold and uncaring about rights. David wondered, as he returned his gaze to the policemen, if the aliens understood the universe better than humanity. Nothing, not even the Bill of Rights, guaranteed rights. The human race had no right to survive.

Tom Monacan, one of the other SEALs, looked over at him. “You want to take them now?”

David scowled. On the walk towards Washington, they’d seen many horrific sights, sights he would have believed were un-American. The irony wasn't lost on him. He’d built a survivalist retreat and created the Clan because he had believed society was going to head into a nose-dive, yet when the crunch came he’d found himself as shocked as anyone else by what had happened. The aliens hadn't just invaded his country; they’d raped his country. Even if the aliens dropped dead, even if the government resumed control without any further problems, the country would never be the same. A certain innocence had been lost forever.

“Get into position,” he ordered, shortly. “Remember; that device must be taken intact. Don’t handle it with your bare hands or it might bite you.”

The SEALs nodded in understanding. Alien technology might have some unpleasant surprises built into it, like an isomorphic sensor that would realise that it wasn't being handled by authorised personnel and a self-destruct for when it fell into alien hands. Given what William had said about how careful the aliens were with their technology, it was actually quite likely that they’d use some of their technology to safeguard the rest.

David watched as the SEALs slipped away, studying the police checkpoint to be sure that there were only a handful of policemen – and the armoured car. Looking at it, like an obscene joke from a Third World shithole, made him grind his teeth in anger. The aliens might be out of reach, at least for the moment, but he was going to wreak that car if it was the last thing he did. He checked his weapons quickly, hoping that the SEALs lived up to their reputation. He hadn't had time to check their files before leaving the base. Putting the thought aside, he put the RPG launcher together with practiced ease. It would be ready when the SEALs were in position.

Catching sight of one of the prisoners, he was suddenly reminded of an elderly Korean-American woman the team had encountered while walking in towards Washington. She ran a small eatery and had reminded him of Mariko, reminded him enough that he’d taken the risk of making conversation for a few moments. She’d been nervous, something he suspected applied to all the civilian population. Their lives had changed abruptly overnight – and they didn't have the slightest idea of what was really going on. Perhaps the aliens would discover that controlling humans permanently was impossible, or perhaps...

David wasn't a science geek, but he’d spent time listening to the science geeks, particularly the science geeks who had been, four days ago, part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit. Before they’d heard about the aliens, they’d been responsible for predicting how new technology could help terrorists – and some of their ideas had been downright frightening. And then they’d started learning what the aliens could do and their ideas had grown far more horrifying. The aliens, they claimed, could create a swarm of nanomachines that would drift across the countryside and implant everyone, enslaving the entire human race overnight. David sincerely hoped that the geeks were already well away from the base. Howard had sworn that the aliens weren't particularly imaginative, but they clearly had no qualms about borrowing useful ideas from humanity.

One of the SEALs lifted his hand and waved. David picked up the RPG and pointed it right at the armoured car. In Iraq and Afghanistan, even poorly-made RPGs had been a major threat. The United States had taken the original idea and improved on it considerably. The armoured car might have been able to stand up to a terrorist RPG, but not to a RPG produced in an American armoury. The projectile struck the armoured car amidships and blew right through the armour. The entire vehicle exploded with a thunderous fireball.

The policemen turned, just in time to see the SEALs as they opened fire. They didn't stand a chance as the SEALs rapidly and brutally picked them up. David felt sick as the last one fell to the ground, dead; they hadn't volunteered to be implanted and enslaved by the aliens. Saddam’s Republican Guard had volunteered to fight and David had killed them without qualms, but this was the first time he’d killed Americans. And they hadn't even been trying to kill him!

He jumped up as the last of the policemen died and ran down towards the SEALs. Joe Buckley had already found the injector device and picked it up with a gloved hand, transferring it to a sealed box. It was lined with the same material that had been used in the tinfoil hats, so it should block any distress signal. David took the box and walked over to the soldiers, who looked up at him in disbelief. Their eyes, at least, were normal, but David knew that they couldn't risk removing their cuffs. Who knew when the implants might kick in?

“I need answers, now,” he said. “Who are you and what happened when you were captured?”

He listened to the story as he picked up their ID cards and skimmed through them. The soldiers had been either active-duty personnel or army reserve and having realised that the country was under attack, had decided to report in rather than follow orders and stay in their homes. David winced inwardly as one of them confessed to having voices in his head, although he seemed to believe that it was the result of concussion rather than something more sinister. David didn't have the heart to tell them the truth, which raised an interesting question; should he take them back to the base for the researchers to study, or leave them to be converted into slaves. The third possibility – shooting them now to save their souls – was unthinkable.

The sound of helicopter blades cutting through the sky made up his mind. “You can come with us if you follow orders to the letter,” he said, looking up in search of the helicopters. He was sure that the black helicopters, the ones he had seen back at the farm, were on their way. “If you disobey orders, you will be shot without further ado. Do you understand?”

They nodded, in unison. “You’ll have to stay cuffed,” David added, as he helped them to their feet. He reached for the tinfoil hats and pushed them onto their heads. “And if you start trying to get rid of the hats, we will shoot you at once. Don’t forget that.”

Cursing himself under his breath, he motioned for the SEALs to start leading them back towards their vehicle. It would be easy to find another vehicle and hotwire the engine. And perhaps, if they got the prisoners back to the base in time, something could be done for them. And who knew, maybe pigs could fly.

“I think we have trouble,” Buckley said. The noise of helicopters was growing louder. David looked up and swore. A flight of helicopters was coming in from the direction of Edwards AFB, where the President would normally board Air Force One. “I can hear cars as well, sir.”

David considered rapidly. The team wore the latest cooling uniforms, which meant that IR sensors would have some problems tracking them, but the prisoners were only wearing their uniforms. And besides, the suits weren't perfect. The helicopters might be able to track them anyway. And that meant that they were probably doomed.

Buckley seemed to agree. “Sir, you and Rocky can get them back to the car,” he said. “Tom and I will hold the line here.”

“No,” David said, flatly. “You’re not going to throw yourselves away.”

“There’s no choice,” Buckley said. “Now, go!”

David took one last look at the SEAL and nodded, slowly. “Good luck,” he said, unwillingly. “Try and get out if you can.”

***
Joe Buckley braced himself as the first of the black helicopters roared overhead. He had taken off part of his uniform and exposed his bare chest, knowing that it would allow the helicopters to sense him properly. If they were lucky, the helicopter pilots would assume that their quarry had gone to ground in hopes of avoiding being seen from the air, unaware that the helicopters were tracking them high above. Joe had done duty in Afghanistan and knew just how stunning some of the latest technology for tracking people was – and just what it could do. The Taliban had never known what had hit them.

He looked over at Tom as the lead helicopter floated back towards them, keeping them in view. Tom winked and picked up the Stinger launcher. Joe had argued that there was no point in carrying it all the way, but David – jarhead though he might be – had insisted that if the aliens came into play themselves, the Stinger might save their lives. Joe had some problems believing in the aliens – he hadn't seen any sign of little Grey aliens – but it hardly mattered. All that mattered was saving the country.

Tom lifted the Stinger to his shoulder in one smooth motion and fired it towards the helicopter. The black helicopter attempted to break away, but the Stinger followed it, slamming right into its hull and punching through to the interior of the craft. It vanished in a colossal fireball, pieces of debris crashing down to the ground. The other helicopters pulled back, clearly monitoring the situation, but unwilling to risk another missile being launched at them. It suggested, to Joe, that the helicopters didn't carry Hellfire missiles or something comparable – or perhaps the aliens simply wanted prisoners.

He smiled as he heard the sounds of engines growing closer. Civilians would have been astonished to discover how much military equipment SEALs could carry into battle and the aliens were about to get a very unpleasant surprise. By the time they were overrun, or killed, the rest of the team should be home free. Quickly, he checked the grenade he'd separated from the rest on his belt and wired with a dead man's hand. If the aliens caught him, he’d privately resolved, he’d blow himself to bits before he allowed himself to be assimilated into the hive mind.

“On my command,” he muttered to Tom. “Fire!”
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Chapter Forty-Three<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

And yet, very little is actually known about Area 51. All we really have are rumours.
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Groom Lake AFB (Area 51), Nevada, USA

The Greys did not possess emotion, at least not as humanity understood the term. Once, they had been a race remarkably similar to the humans they exploited to create their hybrids, but all that had been pushed aside in the desperate search for something – anything – that would allow them to survive. Unlike many – indeed, most – humans, the Greys could never take refuge in the belief that they had a right to survive; the universe was neither caring nor sadistic. The Grey race – what they had called themselves, once, was long since forgotten – would survive or perish by its own efforts.

Few humans could comprehend the tangle of biological and mechanical technology that made up the Grey society. There was no longer any such thing as an individual Grey in individual bodies. Instead, they communed together in a hive mind, sharing thoughts and feelings until they could act as one. Their minds roamed out, from the handful of remaining spacecraft to the hybrids and implanted humans under their control. The Plan was working as predicted, they assured themselves. Having to launch the open takeover ahead of schedule was...annoying, but it had worked. They’d long since cored out the human government and military structures and the fragmented opposition would never be able to pull itself together into a dangerous force. Indeed – and it amused them, insofar as they could still feel amusement – humans were merrily slaughtering each other, rather than unite against the common foe. They’d taken steps to ensure that hatreds – religious and racial, both hatreds that made little sense to the Greys – exploded into the open, distracting what remained of the independent human militaries, yet it was still...gratifying to see their schemes bear fruit. Unlike humans, the Greys were patient – they’d spent nearly eighty years preparing their invasion of Earth – and immortal. Assuming, of course, that they managed to overcome the degeneration of their physical forms. The damage inflicted on their genome – the Greys had forgotten who they were fighting, or why – was destroying them. If they failed to create the hybrids and download their mentalities into their waiting mind, the Grey race was doomed.

A new awareness flared through the network, alerting them to a new danger. A human military force was advancing towards the core of their power. Long ago, they had based themselves well away from humanity’s populated zones, but when they’d taken over Majestic, they’d taken over Majestic’s bases as well. The United States remained the greatest danger to the invasion and subverting it – and controlling it – had to be supervised personally. The awareness was followed by a second; the remaining Americans knew, beyond all doubt, that their enemies were located at the heart of Area 51. Why else would they have risked everything to advance on the base?

The Greys would have smiled, if their mouths allowed them to smile. They had known that discovery was a possibility for a long time, long before a rogue human had filmed one of the abduction ships in operation. They had contingency plans to defend the base that had assumed they would be holding off a sizeable force, instead of the ragtag army advancing on the base. Indeed, the humans didn't know it, but some of their equipment was reporting back to its alien masters. The Greys could not have avoided detecting the army.

New orders flared through the command network, ordering the defenders to respond to the new threat. Human-built automated units would lead the way, followed by the first of the warriors and implanted human slaves. The army might kill some, or many, hybrid warriors, but it would never get near the vital areas. It’s destruction was an absolute certainty...

Wait! What was that?

***​

Madiha looked down at her keyboard, chewing a long strand of hair as she considered the commands she’d just laid into the machine. Few knew it, but one of the main communications network hubs was in Nevada, along with buried links that ensured that the internet would survive even a nuclear attack. Madiha had used her computer to hack into the network, ignoring the challenge of overcoming the alien overrides and concentrating, instead, on preparing her offensive. If she succeeded, she would strike a blow for freedom and the country that had given her a new chance at life. If she failed...if she succeeded or failed, she would probably never know about it.

She tapped the key when the timer ran down to zero. Instantly, the program she’d created began propagating itself into the internet. It wouldn't attempt to break the alien overrides by brute force; instead, it would attempt to locate every computer still hooked into the internet and install itself on it. Madiha had no idea how quickly the alien computers would respond to what she’d done, but unless the aliens were more advanced than she thought they’d never be able to wipe out all of her little programs in time. She’d even wrote in a self-modifying program to ensure that a blanket killer program couldn't exterminate them all. The aliens might be able to counter it, yet it would take them time. Time they didn't have.

The trick was as old as the internet. Each of her programs, once installed on the host machine, would take it over and start firing out new copies from the new computer. The secondary targets would keep passing on copies to the third set of targets, and then the fourth, until every vulnerable machine within range was infected. Madiha had no idea how far it would spread, not with the internet in such a disabled state. It was quite possible that every computer in the country would wind up with a copy of her program. She mentally counted down the seconds as her programs spread out of control. The aliens didn't seem to be responding at all. That made a certain kind of sense. They didn't seem to notice how the hackers were subverting parts of the internet for their own use. What countermeasures they took seemed almost accidental, as if they were dealing with the problem without understanding the root cause.

She smiled as time ran out. All over the internet, every subverted computer went to attack mode, a brute-force hacking attack against the alien network. It was quite possible, Madiha believed, that one of the attacks would actually unlock the computer network and cause some real damage, but it wouldn’t matter. All that mattered was that the aliens would be distracted, maybe just enough to give Jon and his friends a fighting chance. She hit a key, dumping the computer’s memory and ran for the door. Twenty seconds after she escaped the command truck, a IED blew it into a fireball. Whatever else happened, the aliens would never be able to use the computers she’d set up against humanity.

Madiha turned and looked towards the mountains, illuminated by the setting sun – and, beyond them, Area 51. She’d done everything she could. The rest was up to Jon and his team – and God.

***​

Jon had kept in shape, ever since leaving the army, but the walk towards the rear of Area 51 – crossing the Nevada Test Site – was pushing him to the limit. The suits they wore made the trip harder than it would have been otherwise, as had the frequent stops to hide from possible detection. They’d seen no humans, or even Greys, on the trip, but they had seen drones and automated vehicles on patrol. The whole scene was eerie and Jon found himself hoping that they wouldn't see anything until they reached the base itself.

To the north, something lit up the darkening sky. Groom Lake AFB – Area 51’s official title – was glowing with light. Jon found himself wondering if that meant that the aliens were getting ready to launch the next stage of their operation, or if they were merely gearing up to hammer General Nicolas and his small army flat. The thought brought on a new urgency – despite the suits – and he pushed himself forward, silently praying that Howard had been right and the aliens had neglected to secure the air vents. If he was wrong...if he was wrong, the plan called for getting as close as possible to the centre of the base and detonating the nuke. And if that happened, none of them would make it out alive.

Crisco touched his arm and pointed. Something was falling out of the darkening sky, heading right towards Area 51. It was an ominous black triangle, as big as a heavy cruiser, silently mocking him as it floated through the air. The aliens weren't even trying to hide now. They knew that they had won. Jon thought of the Stinger missiles three of the team carried and smiled. If the General failed to break into the base, they would have a chance at bringing down the alien craft themselves. He looked towards the glowing lights of the base again, and then nodded at his team. It was time to press on. Who knew how long the aliens would be distracted by the advancing army. Jon was surprised that they’d gotten as far as they had without being challenged.

He heard the sound of gunfire and explosions in the distance as they walked towards the location Howard had pinpointed. At first, there was nothing to see apart from a massive rock, but when he looked closely, it was clear that the rock had been deliberately placed there by someone intent on concealing something. Up close, the rock was huge, easily the size of a small house. Jon examined it carefully, trying to remember what Howard had told him, and then found the small dent that told him where to look. The cover came off easily, revealing a hidden control panel, one that looked as if it had come from the 1980s, back when computer technology was very new.

“We knew that we might have to abandon the base in a hurry,” Howard had said, back when he’d been debriefing the old man. “The tunnel is designed to allow people to escape from the outer edge of the base quickly, without regard for security. Be careful once you’re inside. They may not know about the air vents or the secret passages – we kept them off the map -but they will have security sensors throughout the complex.”

Jon held his breath as he keyed in the code. Howard had sworn blind that it was a separate system and that most of Majestic hadn't even known that it was there, but the aliens might well have discovered it and blocked it years ago. There was a long pause, pregnant with danger and possibility, and then the front part of the rock started to lower itself into the ground, revealing a tunnel leading down into the earth. It was large enough to allow him to drive a small truck down into the base, which might have been the point. Area 51 was far larger underground than it was above the surface. The people within the base would need food and drink.

“Come on,” he hissed. There were no lights within the tunnel, which worried him. The aliens could see in the dark, as could their hybrids, but even with night vision goggles the team was more limited. “David, you and your section bring up the rear.”

The darkness seemed to swallow them up as they walked down the sloping tunnel. After the main door had closed behind them, a thin strip of lighting lit up, blinking frantically as if it was on the verge of burning out. Jon had to wonder just how old the system was, or if the aliens had ever considered replacing it. There was something odd in the air, an acidic stink that took him back to his years on active duty. A gust of dry air struck his face and he tensed. It felt as if someone had opened a door ahead of them, letting in air – and perhaps a security team. If they were caught in the tunnel, they were finished.

He lifted his rifle as the tunnel levelled out and revealed a massive underground vehicle bay. The vehicles in the bay were all old, dating back to the seventies, as if they had been placed within the bay and then forgotten. He looked around carefully as the team spread out, expecting to be greeted by a hail of fire, but there was no one in the area. The only sound was something tapping against metal. There was no way of knowing just what was causing the sound.

David lifted one finger and pointed to a set of heavy doors at the other side of the hanger. Jon nodded. The doors were secure, even against a nuclear blast; Howard had warned them that Majestic might have needed an emergency hiding place, or an escape route, but they weren't going to risk just anyone getting into the base. And the interior of the doors would be part of the modern security system. Even if they managed to break through the airlocks, they’d set off every alarm in the complex.

Another gust of dry air struck his face as he approached the air vent, positioned three meters above the floor. The security team hadn't worried too much about it and it was easy to see why. Nothing, not even a monkey, could have climbed up to the air vent...and then it was secured, quite heavily. Or at least that would have been true back when the base was redesigned for Majestic’s purposes. Now, he pulled on the set of climbing gloves and started to scramble up the wall. A modern military base had special treatment to make such a trick impossible, but Area 51 had never been altered since the Greys had taken over. He reached the grating and started to undo it. It fell down with a terrifying crash and barely missed Crisco’s head.

“Nice one, boss,” Crisco said, as he picked up the grating. “You think they won’t have heard that?”

David shrugged. Crisco was right. The Greys might well have heard the crash, which meant they had to hurry. He pulled himself into the air vent and started to shimmy through the cold passageway, into the heart of Area 51. Howard had told him that the outer system wasn't connected to the inner system – a precaution intended to prevent the spread of alien bugs – but it should allow them through the security checkpoints. And if they were wrong, they would have no choice, apart from fighting. Or detonating the nuke and hoping for the best.

He reached another grating and peered out through it, trying to make out what he was seeing. Below him, hundreds of men in black suits – no, not men; hybrids – were marching across the floor, as if someone was producing them in a cloning vat. They looked almost identical, with handsome features and long blonde hair, reminding him of what William had said about some of the early reports of contact with aliens. The reports had claimed that the aliens were almost Aryan, as if Hitler’s dream race had come to Earth. Jon shook his head at Crisco, who had followed him into the tube, and moved along to the next grating. This one opened up into an empty room. Jon carefully opened it, poked his head through to check that it was empty, then jumped down, weapon in hand. No one came to challenge him, but as he listened, he was sure he heard a kind of whimpering in the distance. The sound tore at his heart. It was the sound of a woman in pain.

Crisco’s face was hard with anger when he dropped down to meet Jon. Jon used hand-signals to tell the remainder of the team to remain in the small room, while David, Crisco and Jon investigated. The sound led them through a pair of corridors and into what looked like a hospital ward, or perhaps a butcher’s shop. There were no beds. Instead, there were coffin-like cabinets, each one holding a human woman. Jon’s eyes went wide. The women were naked, with tubes leading down to touch their mouths and between their legs; they seemed to be sleeping. The whimpering grew louder and Jon walked around the corner, holding his gun at the ready. He froze as soon as he saw what awaited him.

Four tiny grey aliens were pushing and prodding a number of human women towards open caskets. The women were naked, shuffling robotically towards their resting places, apparently unable to run or turn on their captor. One of the grey aliens turned to face Jon and its soulless eyes swept over him before it carried on, taking one of the women by the wrist and pushing her towards a cabinet. The drone had ignored him. It might not even know that he was there.

Jon lifted his weapon in one smooth motion and fired a single shot into the drone’s head. The grey alien’s oversized head exploded, showering green brain matter over the room, but Jon didn't hesitate. The other grey aliens had frozen, shocked at the sudden death of their comrade, and Jon picked them off before they could recover. Crisco came around the corner and stopped dead, horrified. For all of his womanising ways, Crisco genuinely cared about women and seeing so many trapped in a nightmare horrified him. He was far more caring than Jon himself.

“We have to get them out of here,” Crisco snapped. Jon stared at him. The women had collapsed as soon as the first shot had been fired, like puppets whose strings had been cut. The chances were good that they'd been implanted, which meant that when the master aliens started focusing their attention on the humans, they'd be able to take control of the prisoners and use them against their liberators. “Jon...”

“I know, damn it,” Jon said. “I know...”

David let out a shout and ran towards a set of cabinets that had been placed to one corner. Jon followed his moving figure and swore under his breath. There was no mistaking the girls in the cabinet. Mary, Karen...and Mariko. The mission to Area 51 had just become a rescue mission.

And the Greys knew that they were there.

 

Chapter Forty-Four<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

If the aliens use human women for breeding purposes, will they ever start taking women permanently, as permanent surrogate wombs?
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Groom Lake AFB (Area 51), Nevada, USA

The alert flared through the Grey network and the semi-hive mind recoiled in what a human would have unhesitatingly called shock. There could not be humans inside the base. There was no way the humans could have gotten inside the base. And yet, four drones had been destroyed. Their loss was immaterial compared to the fact that humans had penetrated the base. The entire operation was on the verge of total collapse.

A human might have been paralysed by shock. The Greys, effectively emotionless, didn't hesitate. Warriors were recalled from the battle front and sent to deal with the intruders.

***​

“Mariko...”

David barely heard Jon, or Crisco, trying to speak to him. All that mattered was the seal cabinet holding his lover. Mariko was lying there, as naked as the day she was born, trapped within the alien machinery. David’s fingers skittered over the cabinet, trying to find a way to release the lid and free her from her imprisonment. Nothing seemed to work. He kicked and banged it in frustration, yet it remained strong.

“Help me, damn it,” he snarled. His fingers stroked the edge of the cabinet. There would be a seam somewhere and he could get a knife – or a tool – into it and pull it open. “Help me!”

Jon didn't answer. David sensed, rather than heard, something new enter the room and turned, to see a taller gray alien confronting the humans. It was staring down the barrels of two guns, yet its immobile face seemed unmoved. Its skin looked older than the alien Jon had captured – it felt like years ago – just before the **** had really hit the fan. David found himself wondering if the alien truly was older, or dying. Up close, its skin was mottled and it smelled, faintly, of decay. One of its arms was clearly artificial.

“You,” David snarled. “What is she doing here?”

The Grey cocked its oversized head, as if it was having difficulty comprehending David’s words – or the emotions behind them. David wondered, absently, if the Greys really didn't understand; it was clear, looking at them, that they hadn't hesitated to experiment on themselves as well as their human victims. Perhaps a race without emotions had no concept of love, or honour, or loyalty. Logic alone was fundamentally flawed.

“Why?” He demanded, pushing his rifle barrel into the Grey’s face. “What have you done to her?”

She will bear the children of the future, the Grey sent. It’s telepathic voice seemed to ooze through David’s head. There was no emotion, apart from a sense of cold dispassion, almost a disconnection from the world. It stuck David, suddenly, that the Greys simply didn't care. They weren’t motivated by hatred, or religion; there was no emotion behind their actions.

“She won't bear any children, but mine,” David said, angrily. The Grey didn't flinch from his rage. “What are you doing to her?”

Her DNA is incompatible with the hybrid genome, the Grey informed him. There was a hint of dispassionate regret in the mental tone. We are altering her DNA to allow her to bear hybrid children. Her fertility cycle will be extended to the point where she will spend most of her life bearing hybrid children.

David stared at the alien, fighting back the urge to bury his fist in the oversized head. “And what will you do to her then?”

She will be terminated, the alien sent. There was no hint of regret, just a cold unfeeling devotion to efficiency. She will no longer be of use to us.

“Don’t,” Jon said, as David lifted his rifle and took aim right at the Grey’s head. “We need answers and...”

“Why do you think this bastard is being so talkative?” David demanded. “He’s stalling!”

He poked the Grey with his rifle. “Get her out of there!”

That is not possible, the Grey said, coldly. She has already been adjusted, as have the others in this compartment. Her life serves only one purpose. The propagation of our race and the demands of survival. Everything she is has been removed in order to prepare her for her new function...

David lunged forward, driving by a hot flash of rage. Memories rose up in front of his mind’s eye; Mariko as he’d first seen her, years ago; the first time they’d made love; the first argument they’d had; the shooting match she’d won almost effortlessly; the time they’d ****ed outside, under the stars, and talked about the future...and all of that was gone. Even if he pulled her out of the alien machine, there would be nothing left of her, but a breeding machine. The aliens had programmed her to suit their purposes...when the red haze faded from his mind, he discovered that he had crushed the Grey’s head in his fists.

“I hope that made you feel better,” Jon said, tartly. His face was pale. The next set of cabinets contained Mary, Karan and a set of young girls. They too would be nothing more than breeding machines. “I think we'd better be moving, now!”

***​

Jon controlled his anger as they headed down the corridor that should – according to Howard – lead them to the centre of the base. Crisco had raised the issue of what to do with the unfrozen girls, but a simple check had revealed that their minds had been completely shattered. Jon had tested it by grabbing one of their breasts and groping it roughly, only to realise that the girl had shown no reaction at all. Her mind had been destroyed by the aliens...

He looked over at David as the Marine moved ahead of him, swallowing his fear and concern. David’s face was frozen, his hands still stained from when he had killed the Grey. Jon didn't blame him for that – he couldn't blame him at all – and yet, there was something about David’s face that worried him. The older man was prepared to die, just as long as he took the Greys down with him.

The remainder of the team fanned out behind them as they finally reached the control centre – or where the control centre should have been. The interior, as Howard had described it, had been torn out and replaced by a weird device that had to be alien technology. It seemed to be composed of nothing more than silver wiring, yet merely looking at it made Jon’s head hurt. Eerie lights seemed to flicker around it, drawing his attention towards the figures placed against the machine, two floors below. Nine Greys stood there, wearing helmets that seemed to link directly into the machine. Their lidless eyes were peering at nothing. They were surrounded by dozens of small drones, tending to their every need. There was no doubt in his mind that he was looking at the heart of the Greys...

Jon ducked as a flicker of light flashed over his head. A new group of Greys had appeared and were advancing with terrifying speed. Crisco pulled his belt of grenades out and started to throw them towards the Greys, but the alien warriors seemed to avoid the grenades with ease. The explosions shook the room, yet the machine – protected by a force field – was unharmed. Jon wondered, even as he sniped at two of the Greys, why they didn't use the same technology to protect their ships, but there was no time to solve the mystery. The entire team was in danger of being pinned down.

“Fall back to the breeding room,” Jon snapped, hoping that David or another hothead wouldn't argue. No one did. Fighting in the control room would have ensured their speedy elimination. A warrior Grey jumped right up in front of him and Jon shot it through the head, sending it tumbling back towards the alien force field. It crashed right into the field and a blaze of energy destroyed it. Its comrades continued to advance, if more carefully. They knew that time was on their side. “Hurry!”

It was clear that parts of Howard’s knowledge had been outdated. That suggested that the Greys might already be outflanking them, sending warriors back through corridors and passages that the team didn't know about to take them in the rear. Jon half-expected to run into an advancing Grey force as they fell back, but nothing materialised. Instead, the Grey warriors kept chasing them, firing bursts of flickering light whenever they had a clear shot. Whatever weapon they were using, it was lethal. A single burst killed a SEAL who had seen action in Afghanistan, even though he’d only been shot in the arm. Jon had no idea what it was.

The breeding room allowed them a chance to barricade the door and catch their breath. Jon had no doubt that the aliens would start breaking down the door, but if the altered women were of any use to them, they would hesitate to use extreme force and risk harming them. Jon, less concerned about Mariko than David, had realised something that had apparently slipped past his friend. The aliens were altering humans because they were desperate – and unsure if their plan had succeeded. Sven’s existence seemed to suggest that they had succeeded, except Sven had helped one of their victims to escape. Perhaps they would consider him a failure. Who knew what the Greys were thinking?

***​

The combined minds would have felt relieved, if they had the capability to feel relieved. The humans could have damaged part of the collective mind, although they’d only broken into a subset of the hive rather than the overall controlling mentality. Still, the Greys told themselves, distributing the remainder of their network over the world was possible now, rendering them safe from disruption. Once the advanced technologically capable nations had been taken, the remainder could be ignored until more breeding matter was required.

They focused their attention on the humans within the breeding chambers. The humans, with their knack for being difficult, had picked one of the few chambers within the complex that wasn't expendable. On the other hand, the air could be pumped out, or replaced with poison gas...or the drones could eventually break down the doors and the warriors could take out the humans. There was nothing they could do in there, even if they killed all the altered women, to harm the overall base. Once the cyber attack was defeated – the immense capabilities of the hive mind were already systematically eliminating the attacking computers – the main attack could be beaten off...and then the plan could resume its steady course towards victory, and survival. Survival was all.

***​

“I'm staying here,” David said, removing his backpack. “Once I get this set up, you open the doors and put the missile through it. That should distract them long enough for you to run.”

Jon stared at him. “I won't let you...”

“Don’t be an ass,” David said, coldly. “You knew that we'd have to set the bomb and if the bastards were close enough, detonate it before we could escape. Get the rest of the explosive into the other backpacks, then get ready to use it. I’ll hide here with my hand on the trigger.”

“No,” Jon said. “I won’t leave you here.”

“This isn’t a bloody movie and Rambo isn't going to burst in here and save our butts from certain death,” David snapped. “I’m staying here with her and the nuke. If the last thing I can do for her is save her from slavery, then that is what I will do – understand? Your brother and niece need you!”

Jon nodded, slowly. He could see Mary in her cabinet, surrounded by alien technology keeping her alive and in stasis until they were ready to use her. The Grey David had killed had been telling the truth. They couldn't save any of them, not the woman who’d married his brother, not their child, not the ones he didn’t know. The aliens had taken a cross-section of humans from all over the world – Hispanic, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, African – for their experiments and breeding program. Many of them would have relatives who would never know what had happened to them.

And if the nuke went off so close to the alien command and control centre, humanity might have a fighting chance.

“All right,” he said, dully. He signalled to the remainder of the team to start packing their explosive into one of the backpacks. “I’ll miss you.”

“You can have the farm,” David said. “It’s not as if any of my relatives would want it.”

They shared a long glance, and then went to work.

***​

The warriors waited patiently as the drones started to work on the doors. Patience came easily to them; programmed as they were with humanity’s long history of military development, they knew that it wouldn’t be long before they were unleashed on their enemies. Unlike the drones, the warriors had self-awareness, even though they existed as a localised hive mind rather than individual entities.

A new anticipation ran through them as the door started to hiss open. They’d run through all the possibilities in their shared communion and concluded that the humans might make a desperate last stand, as other human warriors had done when they'd realised that there was no way to escape. They prepared themselves, supercharging the hybrid nervous systems their masters had engineered into their bodies, just as they picked up the first flare of heat. Even they couldn’t react fast enough to get out of the path as a Stinger missile slammed into their position. The explosion sent some of them spinning backwards, disrupting the hive mind. The remainder swiftly re-established it and moved in for the kill. The door was open and...

The humans threw a backpack out of the door. The warriors recoiled automatically as their sniffers – the sensors built into their bodies – picked up the telltale scent of explosive. It was far too late. The resulting explosion blew most of the warriors to atoms and threw the remainder right down the corridor. By the time they picked themselves up, the humans were already escaping.

***​

Jon’s ears were still ringing as they fled down the corridor towards the airlocks. There was no point in secrecy now and besides, trying to hide in the air vents would only give the aliens an easy set of targets. God alone knew how long the warriors would take to recover from that blast – it had wreaked huge damage on the corridor and set off a number of fires – but the aliens would probably have reinforcements already on the way.

Crisco started to work on the airlocks, pushing them open. Jon looked up at the remainder of his team – three men, out of the twenty who had walked to Area 51 – and then nodded. They ran through the airlocks and up the tunnel towards the surface. Behind them, the airlock doors slid closed.

***​

David snuggled deeper into the alien machinery, careful to keep his eye on the door. The explosion had come far too close to dislodging his hand from the nuke, which would have triggered it instantly. The aliens would have to destroy the nuke to stop it from exploding, which he hoped would be difficult. He looked over towards Mariko’s body – her mind, he’d finally accepted, was long gone – and then into one of the smaller compartments. It was filled with honeycombs, glowing with eerie yellow light...and in each of those honeycombs floated a baby. David recoiled, feeling bile welling up in his mouth. The babies were inhuman, with oversized heads and unblinking eyes. The revulsion was instinctive. The babies were far from human.

An ant colony, he thought, as he heard the sound of someone entering the breeding room. The sound of the footsteps suggested that the newcomer wasn't human. That’s what they have in mind for us. They have an ant colony and we’re just going to become new ants.

He couldn't imagine such a mindset, but he could see where it would lead. The aliens would just keep implanting humans with controlling implants until the entire race was implanted and under their control. Humans would be helpless slaves, if any humans survived at all; their roles in the ant colony determined long before they grew to maturity. Whatever role the hybrids played – if they would blend both races or end up as hosts for the master Greys – wouldn't matter. The human race was doomed if the Greys won.

The skittering sound came closer and he looked up. A Grey warrior looked back at him, implants clicking and whirring as it prepared to kill him or take him for implanting. The alien didn't move quickly. It knew that its prey had nowhere to run. David smiled at it, took one last look at Mariko, and took his hand off the nuke.

“Semper Fi,” he whispered.

The world went white.

***​

The shockwave sent Jon and the rest of the team stumbling to their knees. The ground was shaking, as if an earthquake was tearing it apart. He rolled over, knowing what had happened, and looked towards Area 51. A massive fireball was rising up above the base, overshadowing the night and casting an eerie glare over the scene. The shockwave hit a moment later, a thunderous roar that seemed never-ending...just for a moment, he caught sight of the black triangle, picked up by the blast and sent spinning through the air. The alien craft impacted into the ground and exploded into a fireball. Jon hoped – prayed – that there were no survivors.

He pulled the terminal from his belt and stared down at it. On their way in, they’d monitored alien signals. Now, those signals were gone. Perhaps the aliens had back-up systems, perhaps the aliens had a base out in space and beyond human reach, but they’d lost control over the implanted slaves, at least for the moment. And in that time, who knew what the human race could do.

Jon picked himself up, nodded to the rest of the team, and started to walk.

Behind them, Area 51 burned.

 

Chapter Forty-Five<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

And if the aliens ever do come into the open, what sort of world will they create?
-William Sonnenleiter, Accounts of Abduction, 2015

Washington DC, USA

“And there has been no change in the prisoner?”

“No, Mr President,” General Nicolas said. “He collapsed when Area 51 was destroyed and has never recovered.”

The President nodded slowly. Two weeks had passed since the destruction of Area 51, when the country had woken up to discover that it had been under enemy occupation and started to rebuild. The implanted slaves had wreaked huge damage in the time before they were hunted down and destroyed, those that had survived the shock of losing their masters. Some had returned to normal and found it hard to believe what they’d done while under alien control; others had just collapsed into comas and never recovered. The higher levels of power had effectively been depopulated. The Greys hadn't reached the President or the Vice President, but five State Governors had been under their control, as had a vast number of military personnel. It would be a long time before the public trusted Washington again.

He shook his head. The devastation was beyond belief and it would take years to recover, let alone start building a defence against any other Greys that might be lurking out in space, waiting for a call that would never come. In the US, some of the hybrids had surrendered and others had set out on suicide missions, attempting to cripple the US in the last few moments before they were trapped and killed. And the warriors had simply gone mad. The level of destruction they’d wreaked in their final moments was horrific. The United States hadn't suffered so badly since the Civil War.

It wasn't much better in the rest of the world. Europe, Russia and China had been targeted for direct conquest, which had at least limited the Greys; the remainder of the world had been hammered, just to spread chaos everywhere. The oil wells in the Middle East had been destroyed, while implanted personnel had launched armies on invasions and missiles against all targets. India and Pakistani missiles had been launched at least other – fired by implanted personnel – and the entire region had collapsed into chaos. The President had even heard rumours that biological weapons had been released in the Middle East, although there was no direct confirmation. The global telecommunications network – to say nothing of the American intelligence services – was a fragment of its formal self. It would be a long time before the United States could return to its position of global domination.

The President had insisted, once it became clear that the Grey network had collapsed after Area 51 had been destroyed, on returning to Washington as soon as possible. The White House had been badly damaged by the fighting, and repair crews were still working in the building, but he felt it sent the right message to the nation. The country had been hurt badly, and the sheer scale of the devastation was terrifying, yet they would rebuild. The federal networks might have been destroyed, but local state networks were already being rebuilt. The country would survive.

It would be too late for too many people. Some areas had collapsed completely into anarchy when the aliens had withdrawn police forces from the area, resulting in massive riots and chaos. Dozens of areas had effectively seceded from the central authority, claiming that Washington had brought the disaster on the United States, or fearing that Washington was still controlled by the Greys. It would be a long time before things ever returned to normal. The Greys had wanted to ensure that local authority was badly weakened and they’d succeeded. The President silently cursed them under his breath.

No one had seen a live Grey – or a Grey craft – since Area 51 had been destroyed, but no one had ever been sure just how many Greys there actually were. Majestic had speculated that the Greys had never possessed a mothership – if only because the Grey tactics suggested that open invasion and colonisation wasn't an option – and it seemed to be confirmed by their absence. The teams probing through the remains of Area 51 – the nuke had ripped the base apart – had confirmed the presence of alien materials and ruined technology. But then, it would be a long time before the world stopped jumping whenever someone saw a light in the sky. Every UFO report had to be taken seriously these days. The Greys might have had a craft that survived and had hidden somewhere on Earth. Given time, they might rebuild their networks and try again.

General Nicolas cleared his throat, breaking into the President’s musings. “And there is still the issue of the hybrids,” he reminded him. “What do we do with them?”

The President sighed. The surrendered hybrids had been taken into military custody, if only to prevent them from being lynched by angry mobs. They represented another major headache for the world; a group of – arguably – humans with genetic superiority and experience in using alien technology. The President wasn't blind to the opportunities the hybrids represented, but at the same time – could they be trusted? The Greys had intended to transfer their mentalities into hybrid bodies. What was to stop any surviving Greys doing so and then using the hybrids to wreak havoc?

“I think we’d better keep them in the camps for now,” he said, finally. Given time, perhaps they could find a solution that didn’t involve exterminating or segregating them all. If the hybrids were allowed to breed with the mainstream human population, their children would be hybrids. “Once everything is settled...”

He shook his head. It would never be settled.

“The memorial service is at 1500,” General Nicolas reminded him. “You have to read the world a speech.”

The President snorted, wondering why he’d ever felt uncomfortable about the Marine – who was, effectively, the only remaining member of the Joint Chiefs. “I didn't know you were my secretary now,” he said, dryly. “When did you get promoted?”

He shook his head at the General’s expression. Too many had died, including thousands whose names the President would never know. The infantry captain who’d ordered his men to fire on civilians and been shot down by one of his own men; the men who’d died when they tried to take Area 51; the astronauts on the International Space Station...and far too many others. They could never honour all who deserved to be remembered by their country, or the world. And no one had ever found a trace of David Crawford’s body. The man who had saved the entire world would be buried in an empty coffin.

The President sighed. There was too much work to be done.

***​

Jon looked down at his uniform and frowned inwardly. The President had insisted on commissioning him as a Colonel and giving him a command, one charged with hunting down the remainder of the implanted slaves and hybrids. There hadn't been many objections, even though it would never have occurred without the war. There were just too many spaces in the higher ranks that needed filled. Too many officers had been implanted, or killed outright. It didn't fill Jon with confidence, even though it was a heady change from being on the run.

He looked over at his brother and niece and shivered. Kimberly didn't quite blame her father for getting her mother and sister killed, but William was doing a good job of beating up on himself anyway. Jon had quietly told him what he’d seen back in Area 51 and then watched his brother break down into tears and shouts of rage. He wouldn't have been too surprised if William threw a fist at him, perhaps blaming Jon for the death of his wife. How could anyone have predicted what had happened?

Years ago, William had concluded his first book by remarking that he hoped that he was wrong. To him, the alien abduction puzzle had started as an intellectual challenge, rather than a cause for serious concern. He’d changed his opinion quickly, yet...somehow, he hadn't really taken it seriously until Jon had recorded a video of the aliens in action. William had suffered from other mainline researchers mocking his theories and research, but he’d been proven right – at the cost of his wife and daughter. Jon worried about his brother, in his own way; William no longer wanted to live. And who could blame him? Jon hadn't thought highly of Mary, but William had loved her. And his obsession had taken her and raped her mind, converting her into a breeding animal. Her death had probably come as a relief.

He looked over as the first lines started to file into the memorial room. He caught sight of Howard – head bowed, a grim expression on his face – and understood. Howard blamed himself too for everything that had happened, even though it hadn't been his fault. Jon wondered what he would have done differently, in Howard’s shoes, and then shook his head. Hindsight was always so much clearer than foresight.

The President entered the room and silence fell. Jon stood to attention with the remainder of the audience, all that was left of the great and good of Washington. The Greys had implanted or killed many politicians, creating a whole new crisis of confidence in the country. David, Jon decided, would have been darkly amused. There would no longer be any muttering about gun control when it was clear that the aliens had manipulated the laws for their own purposes. The people weren't even waiting for the government to repeal the laws. By now, the states that had the strictest gun control laws had been flooded with – technically – illegal weapons.

He smiled as he caught sight of Crisco and Madiha, followed by Anderson and Gaby. Crisco and Madiha had started their relationship the day after Area 51 had been destroyed and, by the looks of it, their relationship was progressing well. Who knew – perhaps Crisco had finally found true love. Jon felt his smile widen as he contemplated the world. Life went on, even in a world that had been devastated by the Greys. Life went on.

His pager buzzed, flashing up an urgent message. He guessed, correctly, that it was bad news.

***​

Sharon Mack watched from her own position as the President started to talk. As far as she knew, she was one of only a handful of abductees to survive the occupation. The Greys had rounded them up and shipped them to a number of bases, where they’d started breeding hybrids in earnest. Sharon had seen the remains of a smaller base, discovered when the military started examining all of Majestic’s former facilities, and had been sick. After that, she’d resolved to dedicate herself to working with the surviving hybrids. Some of them, she was convinced, were probably her children.

Even so, she welcomed the break from Sven. It was clear, to her at least, that the relationship was going nowhere. She’d been pushed into his arms by the aliens, and then she’d kept sleeping with him to dull the pain in her heart and keep him cooperative for the military. No one had asked her to put out for her country; she’d just done it, knowing that she could fall no further.

She looked down at the President and fought to hold down the tidal wave of resentment that threatened to overwhelm her. The government and military hadn't taken it seriously when alien abductions had been reported, had they? The abductees had been mocked and accused of making everything up, while the Greys – slowly and surely – had drawn their plans against the entire human race. If someone had taken it seriously, years ago, would the world have been devastated by the aliens? If someone had listened...

Sharon shook her head. It hardly mattered now. **** happened, as her mother had been fond of saying, and when it happened there was no point in claiming that it was actually chocolate ice cream. They had to deal with the world as it was, not as they would like it to be...

***​

“It's confirmed, then?”

“Yes, Mr President,” Jon said. The emergency meeting had been organised just after the memorial service. “I’m afraid it very definitely is bad news.”

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project had been subverted by Majestic right after its inception in 1961. Majestic, which had known that aliens were already at Earth, had wanted to make sure that SET didn't pick up anything that might have revealed the Grey presence in near-Earth space. Howard had commented sardonically that they needn’t have worried. SETI’s pollyannaish view of alien life and the limits on their technology had ensured that they never detected the Greys, or started to ask inconvenient questions. Indeed, Majestic had been able to use SETI to spread a great deal of disinformation.

When the aliens had subverted Majestic, however, they’d subverted SETI as well. They’d given SETI a large grant – officially from a consortium of business interests – and assisted SETI’s permanent staff in constructing a new Very Large Array. The government-controlled VLA hadn’t been successful in contacting alien life – the Greys had picked up the message, but hadn't chosen to respond – and it had been hoped that an independent VLA would be more successful. Unfortunately for SETI – as later investigations revealed – the VLA staff had all been implanted by the aliens, as part of a fallback plan.

“The VLA has its own independent computer systems and generators,” Jon said. It had been sheer luck that they’d stumbled across it in time to round up the implanted victims, although they had been implanted too long for the tinfoil hats to do any good. “They didn't have any difficulty in taking control and sending a message, bare hours after Area 51 was destroyed.”

SETI had had endless difficulties in deciding what message to send to the stars. The Greys, by contrast, had known exactly what to send – and where to send it. The message, intercepted by the remains of the human satellite network, was still indecipherable, but Jon had little difficulty in imagining what they’d sent. A full account of what had happened on Earth, up to and including the destruction of the hive mind the Greys had been forming when they’d been destroyed, and a warning. The only question was simple; who was listening?

“We know that the Greys are dying; their race is literally decaying away from within,” Anderson said. He’d been promoted to Presidential Scientific Advisor, largely on the grounds that no one else in Washington knew more about alien technology. “Maybe there’s no one there to hear the signal.”

“Maybe,” Jon agreed, slowly. “Or maybe they’re reporting that they came close to success and another invasion force would have better luck...”

He stared out of the windows, over Washington. The odds said, at least according to William, that a race close enough to humanity to allow the hybrids to be created was extremely unlikely. The Greys had to know that too. Perhaps they’d found a hundred other races they could use to create their hybrids, but the odds were vastly against it. If they were desperate to survive, they'd be coming to Earth. They wouldn't have any other choice.

And there was no way of knowing how long it would be before the hammer fell. The Greys didn’t seem to have any form of FTL travel, but the invasion force might be already on its way, or entering the solar system, or...maybe it didn't exist. Maybe the Greys were all gone and the comatose Grey in a military prison was the last of its kind.

He shook his head. They couldn't count on it.

“They’re going to be coming here,” he said, feeling dawning horror. The next invasion force of Greys would be stronger and more powerful. They wouldn't need the implanted slaves; they’d have an invasion force of their own and command of space. And Earth’s defences were in shambles after the first infiltration. “It’s not over. They could be here tomorrow...”

The End​

 

Thanks i enjoyed the read.... whats next on the list?

 

Probably a far-future SF story. Not sure yet.

Chris

 

Thank you for all the stories taht you have given. Please keep writing.

 

Thanks i enjoyed the read.... whats next on the list?

 

Love the stories!

 

Chris,

I'm not done reading yet but I have to say, from the bottom of my tiny little heart: THANK YOU! Superb story...truly superb.

In all honesty, this is 95% ready for a Kindle debut. I'm pretty sure you'll sweep the charts if you do it right.

Wonderful stuff....thank you again.

BTW...long time lurker, member since last year...but this made me make my very first post!

 

Thanks guys - more will be coming soon.

Chris

 

Just got done and WOW is all I can say.

You really are not very far from Kindle release ready. Get us all on here to edit to find the few mis-spellings and what not and go make your mark!

Oh...and give us another story, please.

 

Thank you. Any suggestions on editing would be helpful.

Chris

 

Chris,

I found a couple of words throughout that were mispellings that wouldn't be caught on a spell checker because they are also real worlds. (Gotta hate it when that happens!) Also a couple of repeating phrases that could be mixed up a bit so they have impact and aren't noticeable as repeating.

Otherwise, I have to say yours is just one good afternoon away from being release ready on Kindle.

Hopefully someone else will pipe up here, but I can relay a friend's experience with that. Kindle strategy is something of an art nowadays, but if you want to get the "numbers" that eventually lead to a pro looking or wide spread interest, then you might consider the "low to high" strategy.

Low to High just means releasing it on kindle for FREE at first with a note to everyone you know (and on boards) to go write a review for it and download it. Others will pick up on it fast and you'll get the scifi groups relatively quickly because of the dirth of long and new work that is free.

After you get top status, then charge .99 for it for a while and track your numbers. Then, only after you have a first spot in the rankings, ask for a reasonable amount.

It's pretty simple and you probably already knew all this. A good crisp professional edit for spacing, spelling and syntax (SSS) will go a long way to ensuring you have good reviews based on content rather than a bunch of wanking over minor spelling issues.

You've got a real winner there. Have you thought about approaching Baen on this one? They have a webscription and policy of 1 freebie per author but it will vastly increase your readership if you tie a kindle release to it.