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  If she played her cards right, she thought as she sat down at her console, she might be one of the people to make first contact. She’d always dreamed of meeting aliens; how might Allah’s other children appear to her eyes?

  Jones shut the door behind him; she began to write up the bulletin, thinking of just how much the solar system had changed.

  Alien contact, in her lifetime!

  Chapter Two: The Never-Ending War

  Western Exclusion Zone, Africa

  “Missiles launched,” came over the radio to Captain Christopher Fardell. He nodded to himself as their icons appeared on his helmet display; they’d been launched from a stealth ship off the coast. The General Franks was designed to be hard for space-based radar to locate; the low-tech Wreckers wouldn’t have a clue the ship existed. “Twenty seconds to impact.”

  “Heads up, people,” Fardell said to his platoon. The twenty-one other suited figures made gestures of acknowledgment; after five years of training and endless live operations against Wrecker bases, his troops behaved almost as one. They could see the missile icons as well as he could. “We move as soon as they hit.”

  There was limited intelligence on these particular Wreckers, although the agencies had been poking them with whatever remote sensors they had. Wrecker factions ranged widely – these ones might be radical Islamicists, independence nuts, eco-terrorists or just plain criminals. Not knowing what he was about to face made his job harder; simple fanatics were easy to deal with. It was the ones who thought who could be really dangerous.

  There were no betraying active emissions from this base, but there rarely were; active emissions were as good as phoning American forces to say “Kill us now.” But there might have been passive sensors, and if those existed they’d now be lighting up with warning of the hypersonically incoming missiles. He could almost sense their presence as they screamed through the air. It had taken time and effort to find this particular base, and there was a probably a reason the Pentagon wanted it taken intact instead of simply levelled from orbit.

  If they wanted it intact, they shouldn’t have sent battlesuits, Fardell thought as the first missiles impacted on the base. They were loaded with compressed high explosive; he could feel the ground shake from kilometres away as shockwaves collapsed underground bunkers and fortifications.

  Other missiles blasted in, targeting suspected enemy barracks and supply locations; they took no prisoners. Fardell knew that the spooks weren’t happy at all about that part of the plan, but the General had put his foot down; he wouldn’t risk his men’s lives any more than strictly necessary.

  “Advance,” he said to his platoon.

  Battlesuit regiments had few traditions; they’d been raised in a more practical era. Advancing while shouting battle cries was the mark of fanatics and incompetents. The battlesuits preferred to make their presence known only when their blows landed.

  “Eye-spy, are you tracking us?”

  “On you, sir,” Lieutenant Lance Seeman said.

  The coordinator was the safest man in the platoon, watching the engagement through drones, satellites and suit-sensors from a bunker in Texas. He had detachment, but sometimes the distance that gave him meant he didn’t properly understand the situation on the ground. The Pentagon had had to learn hard lessons about leaving tactical decisions to the man on the ground.

  “Have you now,” Seeman reported. “Feeding you data.”

  Most of the information was useless, but Fardell filtered that out with long-practiced ease. They’d been briefed carefully before the insertion, into a part of the continent that had once been called Nigeria. That had been a hundred and fifty years ago, and the continent was a mess. Fardell’s own ancestors had been slaves imported from here, and every time duty sent him back to the continent he couldn’t help being grateful to the slavers. Africa was that bad.

  The city they were heading into had been known by several names since decolonization and then the collapse, when between disease and warfare most of the continent’s population had been wiped out. Most of the native survivors tended to keep to themselves, but ever since the European-African War and the European occupation of North Africa, Wrecker renegades had used the forbidding, empty continent as a base.

  There were rumours of meaningful civilizations active deeper in inland Africa, but Fardell doubted any of them had much potential. South Africa was advancing north, Europe slowly moving south and the Caliphate growing westwards; it was possible that someday the Wreckers’ poisonous refuge would be drained.

  Until then, he and men like him had the endless task of penetrating the continent, destroying the bases and getting out. It was hard, because the wars had left arms everywhere and made desperate local leaders corrupt, or even more corrupt than they had always been. Few of the legitimate colonies lasted more than ten years. The illegitimate ones would grow to be troublesome, if not dealt with. Since the Los Angeles bioweapon of twenty years ago, the United States government had taken a hard line on them.

  “Captain,” said Seeman, “I have movement coming down the highway toward you.”

  A hundred years ago, the Army would have inserted spotter teams in the area, risking themselves for intelligence. Nowadays Lieutenant Seeman had robotic flies and butterflies at his disposal to collect information without that risk.

  “How many?”

  “At least fifty,” Seeman said. “Older weapons.”

  Legacy weapons, such as the ever-present AK variants, were harmless to the battlesuits; they couldn’t penetrate the suits’ armour. Small explosives and missiles were a threat, but much less of one than modern missile systems and plasma cannons.

  Wreckers were often primitive, but they could be surprising. Some groups only had AK-47s, but others had in the past jerry-rigged plasma weapons and would need to be eradicated by orbital strikes. The first thing every trainee learned was that your battlesuit didn’t make you invincible.

  “Sign of anything dangerous?” Fardell asked.

  There was a long pause while Seeman focused in on the data.

  “Nothing detected.”

  That wasn’t grounds for Fardell to relax. Plasma weapons could be tracked with ease once they’d been activated, but HVMs and mines could be much harder to identify until it was too late.

  “Looks like we’ve been rumbled,” Lieutenant Browning muttered. “Must have spotters of their own out here.”

  The suits spread further apart as they reached the ancient highway, which despite its condition showed signs of recent use – wreckage had been cleared out of the way and some attempt had been made to fill the worst potholes. He brought up an overview of the developing situation; supporting elements were already beginning to move toward blocking all possible routes out of the ruined city. It was on Twenty-Second Platoon to go in. Well spread out and pausing when they could behind the wrecked vehicles along its side, his people advanced up what had been the highway.

  “Lance, send the warning.”

  A remote drone, old enough to be classed as expendable, had been flying stealthed over the city. Now a voice thundered from it:

  “This is the United States Army, operating under the Wrecker Protocols.”

  Fardell could hear it even through his suit from miles away; the Wreckers in the city immediately below its blasting speakers had to be feeling the voice through their very bones.

  “You are surrounded and trapped!” the deafeningvoice went on. “Surrender now and you will be treated fairly! Resist, and the Protocols’ enforcement provisions will apply. You have five minutes to decide.”

  Fardell brought up the orbital view, which was limited; the long-ruined city had tens of thousands of places the wreckers could hide. The Wrecker Protocols authorized any country to engage Wreckers to do as they saw fit to them; international law didn’t require Wreckers to be given a chance to surrender, or to be treated well if they did.

  If they did surrender they’d be resettled – to nice penal camps in Antarctica. That mig
ht have been why not many of them did. Fardell would personally have rather had more flexible rules of engagement so more would, but since the nuking of Madrid and the bio-attack on LA… two attacks in one year by groups based out of Africa had given the West a harder line on them. Mercy hadn’t been an option politically in two decades; it was ‘soft on terror’. In about four and a half minutes, Fardell’s platoon would go in and shoot anyone they saw. Only rarely would they accept surrenders…

  “Four minutes,” Seeman muttered. “There’s no sign of any concentrated movement, but one of the spotters heard shots…”

  “Deserters being taken care of,” Fardell guessed. It wasn’t unknown for some Wreckers to realize their mistake when faced with real force. Their attempts to surrender could be… taken badly… by their more fanatical group-members.

  A red alarm flashed across Fardell’s visor; incoming mortar fire. He mouthed a curse as the shells popped up from launchers nearby, rushing into the air to come down amongst the suited platoon. Analytical software was already running; direct hits from these shells would be nasty but near-misses were likely to be survivable, unless these Wreckers had more tricks.

  Explosions blasted up among his troops as they spread out, their sensors already probing for the enemy spotters…

  “Got them,” Seeman reported. Coordinates appeared in Fardell’s visor; a skyscraper that had somehow largely survived decades of neglect and heavy fighting. “Engage and destroy…”

  Fardell raised his right arm. Instead of a human-like hand, the suit’s right fist was the mouth of a heavy plasma cannon. A stream of blinding white light blasted out from it at the skyscraper, which exploded as the energy impact vaporized parts of it. Streams of explosions detonated amidst the ten-story building as it crumbled; absently, Fardell realized the Wreckers must have had other explosives in there.

  His people knew what to do. They advanced at a fast run, faster than an un-suited sprinter could have gone, directly toward the line of major buildings up the road. They’d started to glitter with weapons fire. There were other defences along the way; some of Fardell’s soldiers swept their plasma cannon along the ground, leaving scorched trails in the knee-high shrubs and vegetation around here but also detonating nearly a dozen mines.

  “Launching HVM strike now,” Seeman said. Icons indicating High-Velocity Missile launches lit up in Fardell’s visor as a drone fired. By now the US Army had plenty of experience taking down buildings; every one that the first fire had come from exploded under the impact of a missile.

  The suited platoon ran forwards at the speed of galloping horses as the Wreckers launched their own counterbattery fire, desperately hacking at the battlesuits and what drones they could detect with mortars and twentieth-century machine guns.

  Ground-based lasers on the shoulders of some of the platoon activated, turned and flashed as they detonated the incoming shells. Small-caliber bullets started to patter off Fardell’s suit with all the impact, to him through the armour, of small hailstones. Wreckers with automatic rifles, mostly young men and many with the glazed eyes and jerky movements that implied battle drugs, ran forwards from what was left of their positions. They sprayed bullets, mostly from the hip, and were cut down by the suited troops.

  Fardell grimaced, although this was his job. These ones had had no chance, as the commander who’d sent them would have known. Battle drugs did wonders for your aggression, bravery and pain tolerance, but at the cost of your judgment. These ones’ tactics had been obsolete since the First World War, but they’d been too impaired to have a clue.

  Small explosions blossomed among the platoon as someone further away with an autocannon opened up. As he got the range on the fast-advancing platoon, some of the indicators for Fardell’s people began to show minor damage…

  “Alert!” Seeman snapped as a new icon appeared on the display.

  Instinct took over Fardell’s body as he threw himself out of the way before he’d consciously recognized the icon. A plasma blast, a ball of white-green sun-stuff contained by magnetic forces, shot past him, close enough to have burned an un-suited human.

  Instead it struck Corporal Chester, slightly behind Fardell and to his left. The captain watched in horror as the suit went pale white and then imploded, burned out by the plasma. Chester hadn’t even known what had hit him.

  “HVM strike on the plasma gun,” Fardell snapped. “Right the hell now!”

  The target had been designated the moment the first emissions had been detected; the drones circling above had already prepared a missile. On Fardell’s command, Seeman sent the missile streaking own into the position the shot had come from, sending it up in a blazing white gout of uncontained plasma fuel. The superhot wave ignited neighbouring buildings; Fardell paused as audio-filtering software indicated screams in a large one that might have once been a warehouse. The screams didn’t sound drugged.

  “Gunnard,” he said, “check it out.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Gunnard Frederickson acknowledged, gesturing for his squad to change direction slightly.

  Fardell took a moment to scan the overall situation. The Wreckers were collapsing; they’d never stood a chance to begin with, but they’d fought as though they hadn’t cared. Seven Americans, including three of his people, had been killed by their desperate swipes. A handful ran toward the badlands away from the advancing suit platoon, but they weren’t Fardell’s problem. They’d run into the support formations, regular troops positioned to deal with fleeing Wreckers.

  “Sir, I think you should see this,” said Frederickson. There was a grim note in his voice that worried Fardell – those fires were starting to get out of control. “It’s… not good.”

  “On my way,” Fardell said. He headed toward the warehouse as support troops in armoured cars and armoured personnel carriers began to show up. Their task was to secure the city, taking whatever intelligence and prisoners for interrogation that they could. The way those fires were spreading, Fardell didn’t give the support elements much time for that job.

  The warehouse the screams had come from was nothing special, but the dozens of Wrecker corpses around it now suggested it had had some importance. The Wreckers had tried to hold an impossible-to-defend building… why?

  Fardell stepped through a hole blasted in the wall and muttered a soft curse. The warehouse was filled with female bodies, some still alive. They were handcuffed naked to railings running through the building. Nausea filled Fardell and a reflexive part of him activated a chemical implant before it became overwhelming. He’d heard that the slave trade had resumed in parts of Africa. He’d never before come face to face with evidence.

  “Support units up here now!” he snapped.

  Frederickson’s squad had already started breaking apart the railings the women were chained to. It was God’s own mercy that the wreckers hadn’t secured them by their feet as well – getting them out ahead of the fires was going to be hard enough as it was.

  “Have them all out of here and get them some medical attention before it’s too late!”

  Fardell stepped back outside as the first heavy lifters arrived, powerful VTOL engines thundering as the heavy craft landed. Guarded by unsuited support troops, medics spread out to the area; a gesturing officer directed more people inside to help the still-chained women.

  One by one they were escorted into the waiting lifters for transport back to a Forward Operating Base. There they would be interrogated and tested carefully, because the Wreckers might have tried to slip some of their senior people out amongst the slaves – but Fardell doubted as that. If the battle had gone just a little differently, or these growing fires spread a fraction more quickly, these women would have died.

  The fires were spreading anyway, starting to give the unarmoured soldiers real problems. They were beginning to pull back; it didn’t surprise when Seaman’s voice came telling the suited platoon to withdraw. Fardell rapidly gave orders, directing the eighteen surviving troops to filter south out of
the city.

  “Understood,” he said to Seeman. “We’ll make our way back to FOB Helena.”

  “No,” said Seeman, “not Helena. Transport is coming to pick you up at this location.” A map-point lit up, far enough from the burning city that the approaching transports – whose markers Fardell could also see on the map – could safely land. “You’ve got redeployment orders, sir – you’ll never believe what’s happened!”

  Fardell blinked. The platoon had only been out here eight months this time; they were being moved back from Africa before the year was up? They’d had two weeks’ leave only a couple of months ago… He knew it was more than impossible, but he had to ask: “One of the big Wrecker factions has surrendered?”

  “No, sir.” Seeman’s voice hardened a little. Some things, of course, you couldn’t discuss over potentially insecure radio networks. “Await pickup at the location as designated. You’ll be filled in on the way.”

  Christopher Fardell shrugged and headed for the evac point.

  Chapter Three: The Rulers of the World

  United Nations Building, Geneva

  “Mr. President,” came through President James Cardona’s earpiece from his chief of staff. “Task Force Douglas reports mission success, Wrecker base cleared. Forces returning to base now.”

  Cardona gave a curt nod. Until a few days ago, an operation like that would have been major business, requiring direct Cabinet-level input for its planning and legalities. There were thorny legal problems of operating within the African exclusion zone, and political ones with the use of strategic assets like orbital bombardment and battlesuit systems. Now, it seemed mundane next to the confirmed discovery of alien life.

  The original United Nations had died almost seventy-five years ago in the terrorist attack that had levelled Manhattan; the rebuilding program had purposely left its building out. The expanding Great Powers were no longer interested in coddling smaller ones; America hadn’t been the only major nation to find the UN increasingly irrelevant in a world of Wreckers running rampant.