34

We’re losing, Eddie thought.

There were so many of them. For every mrill ship they destroyed, two seemed to take its place. Eddie understood how Ben found the battle oddly captivating. Thousands of exotic machines twirled around him, spitting green darts through the darkness of space, while the endless stars shone brighter out here than he had ever seen them on Earth. The sun rose and fell endlessly as the battle migrated around the planet. Eddie’s mind was transfixed every time the spike of white light sliced across the dark surface, even as his transformed body kept fighting.

There was no way humankind could prepare for this kind of war. It was too . . . alien. You just wanted to stare at everything. Forget the frenzied, technicolor battle. Even just seeing the Earth from this vantage point was enough to send your mind reeling. The universe was huge. Everything was huge. There was so much out here. There was a whole new frontier out here to explore.

“And these assholes want to kill us all, just as we get a chance to do some sightseeing,” he said out loud.

“Yeah, these aliens are trash,” Nick agreed. “I bet we’d have even been willing to rent them some space down here while we went exploring. But no, had to make a ruckus.”

A mrill shot nicked the hull of his ship. The vessel shuddered and kept going. But the damage was piling up. The repair systems were chugging along, patching up holes, reconnecting circuits, keeping the weapons firing. The repairs were taking longer with each hit, though, as a handful of the tiny repair droids were lost each time.

Nick and Eddie had noticed the same lack of tactical imagination among the mrill pilots that Ben had seen among their infantry. Without their mental link, each individual mrill soldier or drone fell back on brute-force tactics, massing and charging, falling back and regrouping. Of course, sheer numerical superiority was its own tactical advantage. They just kept coming and coming. Even if each wave was predictable, another and another and another would eventually wear down even the most skilled pilot. The drones were the only thing keeping Nick and Eddie alive. Once they were all gone, the conclusion would be inevitable.

“I don’t suppose anyone else is sending up a few hundred more drones to support the cause?” Nick asked. “No chance that France or, uh, Uruguay has been holding out on us?”

Eddie grunted as he yanked his ship into a sharp turn, fired three times, destroying another mrill drone, and skimmed beneath a cloud of wreckage.

“That’s a negatory, sailor,” Eddie finally replied.

Both men could see that they had 134 Chinese drones left, versus 627 mrill ships. And the mothership still lurked in the background. It hadn’t fired a shot after disgorging its initial fleet.

“You think that thing is spent, or just biding its time?” Nick wondered, directing a squadron of drones to break formation and circle back to obliterate four mrill ships he’d managed to lure away from the main force.

“I think we’re going to have to find out,” Eddie replied. “We’re playing a sucker’s game. We can’t keep up this slap-and-tickle forever. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy.”

The two men instantly shared a battle plan through their mental link, swapping and refining it in moments. Their ships converged, as did one hundred of the remaining drones. The drones formed themselves into a wedge, with Eddie and Nick trailing behind. Before the mrill could regroup, Eddie ordered the formation to speed toward the mrill command ship, firing in all directions, a battering ram of ionized energy.

The first, disorganized line of defenders was pulverized in moments. The mrill simply weren’t expecting a frontal attack. But they reformed quickly. The second line of defense was also defeated, but now the mrill were finally trying a new tactic. Scores of ships swooped around behind the attacking wedge. They had recognized that Eddie and Nick were the literal brains behind Earth defenses. Kill them, and the rest of the fleet would be, if not sitting ducks, then at least unimaginative ducks.

Eddie ordered the remaining Chinese drones that hadn’t formed the tip of the spear to circle around and cover the rear of the formation, essentially forming a protective three-dimensional shell around the two pilots. He then ordered the drones at the rear to turn around and fly backward, their guns facing out to intercept the approaching mrill. The entire formation now resembled a spiny porcupine, quills extended in all directions. It was an ancient maneuver. The Roman army had called it the “Testudo Formation,” when legionaries would march with their shields interlocked on all sides and above to protect against incoming enemy arrows. It looked impressive as hell, but it wasn’t invincible. The formation depended on everyone moving as one. If one spear carrier fell half a step behind, the entire enterprise could collapse in seconds. Still, it felt like their only shot at getting close enough to the alien command ship to stab the fuckers in the heart.

“Charge of the friggin’ Light Brigade,” he muttered. “Let’s get it on.”

Ben stumbled as an explosion hit nearby. A second, closer detonation knocked him over completely. Chunks of the building and street rained down on him as he clambered back to his feet. The reinforced mrill assault was shaking the city like an earthquake. The surviving A-10 jet had tried to circle around for a second attack run, but the mrill had blown it apart before it could fire a single missile. No parachute this time, as the plane spiraled directly into the Washington Monument, slicing it in half.

The remaining drones were having slightly better luck, the handful that remained. Ben struggled to maintain his communication link with them, but the mrill seemed to have finally brought some of their own jamming tech to bear. Ben’s internal computers were trying to route around it while keeping his own jamming signal active. Keeping track of everything happening in the sky overhead while also leading the leathernecks and soldiers on the ground was straining even his superhuman senses.

More than a hundred mrill troops were now advancing through the streets. A company of fourteen M1A3 Abrams tanks was converging on McPherson Square, just a block from the White House. The heavy armor rolled into the grassy opening and the mrill shots destroyed them like a finger through aluminum foil. Infantry died even quicker. Wide energy beams swept out from the mrill rifles and cut down dozens of men at a time. Ben fought with everything he had.

The mrill were moving faster now, their objective in sight. The cannon had taken out more than half of this assault group before it had reached the ground. Once the cannon was gone, the mrill would be able to land with impunity and that would be that. Maybe Ben could take out this bunch before they reached the cannon. Maybe.

The feeble morning sun was momentarily obscured by a plume of ash and dust as another building collapsed. Everything seemed to be on fire. A restaurant on the northeast corner of the square burst outward in a ball of flame as glass shards covered the entire area.

Ben’s small squad of marines had pulled back, on his orders. The ones who were still alive were almost out of ammo and nearly drunk with exhaustion, staggering, and swaying on their feet. But if Ben had given the order, they would have charged immediately. The stew of adrenaline and fatigue had nearly turned them into robots themselves. Ben had seen it before, had felt it before. At some point, your brain slipped into neutral while your body kept going, not even realizing how clumsy it had become. Maybe the brin had just figured out a way to weaponize that feeling. Turn a person into a fearless, tireless weapon and set him loose. Whatever the brin had done, though, they hadn’t figured out how to erase guilt. Sending these shambling men back into the fight would have been a death sentence, and Ben already carried too many of those with him. He’d ordered them back to the command center on the White House lawn.

Not that they were much safer there. The mrill were still advancing, and drones continue to drop in from the outer atmosphere, strafing the city as long as they could. The defensive cannon and the Chinese drones had picked them all off so far, like fleas on a dog. But more were undoubtedly coming. For whatever reason, the mrill had chosen this as their landing spot; the point on the anvil where the hammer would fall. Ben doubted the mrill had any interest in taking prisoners or keeping slaves. Mankind was of no use to them. They simply wanted a ready-made planet on which to settle. Even if their combat tactics were almost insultingly rudimentary, they’d know, as they’d learned from the brin, that you couldn’t leave a single native behind to get up to mischief. They’d scrape the planet clean of people, flatten the cities, and then start over so that no sign would remain that mankind had ever built a civilization on this planet or even walked its surface.

Ben realized with a jolt that if the mrill won, the only proof of man’s existence might be the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now cruising out of the solar system. The primitive machines carried gold plates embedded with basic data about the human race. Should, by an astronomically tiny chance, another alien civilization ten thousand years from now scoop up the spindly probes, they’d discover the brief history of an extinct species etched on these tombstones sent hurtling through the dark.

The Abrams tanks were firing wildly as they entered the square, desperate to at least do some damage before getting destroyed. The 120 mm cannons and .50 caliber machine guns roared and barked as the tanks bounced into the square, careening over sidewalks and cars, most of the shots going wild. The weapons tore into storefronts, trees, park benches, and the still-smoldering hulks of the cars and trucks the mrill had destroyed during their advance. Everything seemed to be exploding at once, and Ben used the chaos as cover for his own, more effective attack. The mrill were concentrating their fire on the tanks, which exploded like sealed food cans shoved into camp fires. Ben saw the mrill aiming at one of the tanks trying to circle around the burning, popping wreckage of another Abrams. Before they could fire, Ben snapped off a volley of shots, killing two of the mrill and sending the third tumbling backward. The tank roared into a clearing in the square, lowered its turret to aim at the cluster of mrill, and fired one shot before it was torn apart by another squad of troops . . . but it was a magnificent shot.

The General Dynamics M1028 round was more like a massive shotgun shell than a traditional tank round, packed with tiny tungsten balls to shred infantry or punch holes into concrete or cinderblock walls. The 1,098 hardened spheres, each 9.5 millimeters across, screamed out of the barrel at more than 1,400 meters per second.

Even the mrill didn’t move that fast.

The pellets, moving at roughly four times the speed of sound, mulched a small plot of trees in the square and then plowed through a cluster of mrill troops, turning them to mulch as well. Two mrill soldiers simply ceased to exist in any visible form. Their rifles exploded, sending wild bolts of electricity arcing in every direction.

The air now stank of electricity and explosives. The mounting human losses were staggering. There were at least 60,000 dead, both military and civilian. It was hard for any mind, even Ben’s augmented brain, to grasp that number. The piles of shattered hardware were also overwhelming. He’d never seen so much military equipment destroyed in such a short time. Tanks, planes, helicopters, ships, trucks. Crushed and stomped by the thousands. The nation’s capital was on fire. What wasn’t on fire had simply been turned to dust, for miles in every direction. Even if the mrill disappeared right now, this would go down as one of the costliest wars in history.

A jagged landscape of ruined, blackened tanks now blocked the streets heading out of McPherson Square, so the mrill started bombarding the wreckage, carving a canyon through the ruins. A few wounded soldiers were killed in this secondary assault, and Ben felt his hatred threaten to overwhelm him again. It was all he could do not to charge head-on at the mrill force. The writhing, impotent rage had no outlet, and he felt it would consume him; that he would die of bitter guilt before the mrill could kill him.

A dozen artillery shells, arcing in from the southwest, slammed into the mrill position without warning. A handful burst in midair, while the rest slammed into the ground. The staccato explosions reverberated through the battered square, gouging the concrete, puncturing the few remaining windows, and excavating craters in the ground. Several of the mrill were knocked to the ground, and Ben fired and fired and fired.

An Air Force AC-130J “Ghostrider” gunship was also coming on station. The massive airplane, bristling with a 30 mm cannon, bombs, and missiles, was built to slowly circle ground targets and grind them into powder. It was a devastating and demoralizing weapon—at least against human enemies. Ben had worked with them multiple times in his previous life. The gunships were tasked to Special Operations Command, and often served as angels on the shoulders of SEALs, Rangers, and other SpecOps boots on the ground. The ships were outfitted with a mix of weapons, and these new Ghostrider units were outfitted with the most sophisticated sensors and tracking technology known to man. Ben knew that the sixty or so mrill cutting a swath through downtown DC possessed technology about which man knew almost nothing, and they would destroy the lumbering aircraft as easily as they had the massive Abrams tanks.

“Ghostrider, acknowledge, this is US Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Shepherd. Acknowledge immediately. Yes, I can hack into your secure connection. You probably have about five seconds to acknowledge my communication and break off before the enemy zeroes you in.”

To his credit, the pilot barely hesitated before responding.

“Copy that. Breaking off and awaiting instruction. Damn glad you’re still with us, sir. Let us know what you need.”

“Sit tight, pilot. I’m gonna conference you in with the artillery units positioned half a klick south of here. You’re going to need the distraction, but it’s gotta be timed perfectly. You’ll probably get half a full pass before you’ll need to withdraw and maybe we can get a second shot. No hero bullshit. There will be Klondike bars in hell before the mrill drop their guard for more than a couple seconds.”

“Roger that,” the pilot said and chuckled. “I never liked Klondike bars, anyway.”

Ben scanned through the thicket of radio transmissions pouring in and out of the defensive emplacements near the White House. It was a tangled mess back there, and the snippets of conversation he intercepted contained an undercurrent of panic beneath the river of military jargon. He found the command frequency and dialed in.

“All US military forces stationed at the White House, this is Lieutenant Ben Shepherd, United States Navy. I am engaged with the enemy at the southwest corner of McPherson Square. I need an artillery barrage in the northeast corner of the square in sixty seconds to provide a diversion for an inbound Air Force AC-130 gunship. Strike coordinates are 38 degrees, 54 minutes, 8.5 seconds north, 77 degrees, 2 minutes, 1.8 seconds west. We’ve got sixty-some tangoes advancing on the White House, and this is our shot to clear their ranks a bit before its close quarters combat on the White House lawn. Acknowledge.”

There was a moment’s silence, then garbled conversation as multiple voices tried to jump in to respond. A deep southern accent cut through the jumble.

“Goddammit, radio discipline. This is Colonel Hank White, 1st Battalion, 201st Field Artillery. I’ve still got thirty-five M109A6 Paladin artillery units functional. I’m tasking them all to your strike coordinates. Mark sixty seconds . . . now. Good luck, son.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Ben said. “AC-130 captain, do you copy that?”

“This is Captain Tim Hackwell, and I damn well copy. Inbound in fifty-six seconds.”