Chapter 2: Mr. Steele Goes To Washington

	Well, I was going to Washington on August 13th, and for free to boot, transportation included. The train tickets were dated 8/13/26, and timestamped for the 11 AM run.

	I had found ways to occupy my summer, instead of mere thumb-twiddling, and soon enough, it was August 13th. The trip was for myself *and a few others*, along when my parents, sister, and girlfriend. We all showed up at the train station, with nobody having a huge amount packed – this was indeed intended as a short weekend trip. In fact, I was bringing the suitcase that was still packed from a trip to my grandmother's house last weekend. (Yeah, she’s old. But still nice. And refusing to go makes you seem like an asshat, I thought to myself.)
	
	As Mackinnaksville was only a few hundred kilometers north of Washington, the trip took only a couple hours, considering that these trains go at approximately 400 kilometers per hour. At the station in Washington, there was an official-looking person waiting for us. Someone came over to talk to me, and another person came over to talk to my parents. My contact’s name was Johnathan Bowers, and he went over some simple rules of procedure for the trip.

	"Yeah," I acknowledged.

	He then began to walk over to a vehicle that was obviously the transport in question. That took us from the train station to a fairly open area of the city. I saw a road leading up to platform in question.

	"Okay, here we are," said the ship pilot. I heard the whoosh of pressure doors unlocking and opening as the ship set down. I recognized this street as the Triumphal Road, less than a block from a ceremonial platform. We began our walk up towards the platform. It turns out that a ceremony was actually going on; some bigwig must have been winning something; because I recognized Continental Governor Melissa Bryant.
	
	She was about to give someone a medal when she was interrupted by the shout of a platform mechanic saying "You ain't from around here, are you?" Unfortunately, the mechanic's comment was not in reference to me, or any of the other civilians walking near the platform. It was in reference to twelve things currently hovering overhead. They looked like small airplanes, yet were distinctly alien in form, with teal markings. He was right, they most definitely “weren’t from around here.” Whatever the hell they were, they were hostile. White-light laser blasts promptly emitted from one of them killed the security guard on the farthest edge of the platform. Later, I would learn that his name was Cpl. Sameer Jahlrani, the first casualty of this invasion.

	Charles Bronson, a Marshal, and the commander of the President's Guard, was near a platform exit ramp barking orders. 

"Boys, hold 'em off while Bryant gets to the bunker." 
"Melissa! To the bunker! Now! All of you ceremony people, go to the air-raid shelter below the platform!”

	I saw my parents and sister also making a break for the said shelter. I wasted no time in joining them. You see, I really did not feel like being laser-blasted today.

	The air-raid shelter was hooked up with communications systems and cameras, and by those, I saw the concrete-and-durasteel bunker that Bronson was pointing at. Governor Bryant practically slid into the wall of communications equipment as she went to dash off the distress call.
	Alexander Holt, probably on the receiving end of that call, was one of the planet's top Military Commanders (Commander for the 5th Corps, tasked with defending the Washington area), and from what we all had heard, he belonged in the job. The guy had been a Starforce Admiral before Governor Bryant elevated him to the current post, and it was understood that he was one heck of a tactical genius. What a macabre situation in which to observe the pleasure of a master at work. We heard the following radio communication, evidently broadcasted in order to reassure the public that the authorities were trying to be on top of the situation.

	“This is ‘Agent M1’. The shit hit the fan during that damn Central Platform ceremony. Have twelve identical hostiles, this looks like a Code 18-A. I repeat, we have a Code 18-A. Get some Starforce guys on this now.”

	“A 'Code 18-A'??? An alien invasion??? Unfortunately, I know you don’t kid around with me. I’ll get a few squadrons on this.”

Through transparent portions of the shelter’s roof, I saw those squadrons ride in. Clearly a unique group; the markings were definitely unlike the normal Starforce sets which I read about. I surmised that I was now viewing the Kazansky Wing. Colonel Thomas Kazansky was another one of this planet's military legends. However, he seemed more suited to the battlefield than the command center, and as such, his reputation went before him as the Fifth Fleet's top fighter pilot. His 23 wingmen weren't slouches either. These guys should take care of the twelve alien vessels, no problem.

	I could see most of what was happening, again, through the shelter’s communication system, which had access to ordinary news feeds, ordinary of course being a relative term at the moment. I saw the white lasers finish off the last of the platform’s Riflemen, as our fighters were maneuvering into position, angling into two twelve-man flanks. The Terrestrial Republic Class I Starfighter has twin air-to-air missile launchers, and as such, I saw the fighters release in unison a hail of forty-eight missiles. The two lead enemy fighters went down. By the time all twelve had been destroyed, I saw that only three of ours had gone down.

	Then the alien leader broadcast a message, one that temporarily overwhelemed our frequencies. This had evidently been sent brute-force, as it seemed to be overpowering most of the spectrum. It was an incredibly haughty message. The alien looked pretty humanoid, slightly over average human height, and I could see mottled gray skin where ceremonial robes were not covering it. Later, he would be identified as the Drasnaki Hulaas Prenarka (Supreme Admiral) of the Ver-arka Theknar Slessan (Fourth Imperial Fleet). He said "Well, I suppose you will provide an interesting challenge for us before we destroy you."

	“Trash-talking: a universal instinct,” I muttered.

	Colonel Kazansky's squadron veered off to head in the same direction form whence it came; I assumed that they were quickly retreating to a nearby hangar. A message had recently come back over the bunker's videophone stating that three massive Battlecruisers had come down from Earth orbit after taking heavy damage from an electrical source. The message said that the damage logically had to do with our new alien friends.

After Colonel Kazansky's squadron got patched up, they headed west of the platform, the direction that the alien fighters had come from. They noticed a large cloud of the aliens' ground units and began to open fire with their air-to-surface lasers. However, there was one class of enemy unit that looked like a four-legged robot, that carried a cannon at the junction between its four legs. Those things could evidently fire into the air. Kazansky retreated, and decided to wait until more battlecruisers showed up.

	Then the enemy ground-unit cloud headed eastwards, to a section of Washington where a lot of our military hardware was stored. I suppose that, from the aliens’ viewpoint, it was indeed a good target. Holt immediately ordered the tanks at the Military Factory Center to reinforce Bunker Cluster A, Bunker Cluster A being located on the road that the Drashnakis were currently heading down. I noticed that these tanks looked very much like Sgt. Murphy's tank. A few Field Medics and two more squads of Riflemen also moved into place.

	"Enemy sighted, opening fire." This came from one of the tank commanders, as he caught sight of one of the enemy's smaller foot soldiers. As their weaponry consisted of some sort of blade attached to either arm, we called those Blade Warriors. That one fell, aided by shots from some of the other tanks. As the Blade Warriors hit the row of bunkers, bursts of flame began to shoot out of the bunkers. "Ah, so we have some Flamethrower infantry in there…Niice," I said. The tanks aided in hammering away at the Blade Warriors, while the Rifleman squads, as well as the Riflemen in the first line of bunkers, fired at the Mobile Cannons (as we had begun to call the four-legged robots). One went down, and I could immediately see it ooze blue hydraulic fluid.

	We all heard a clicking sound as one of the Bunkers depressurized.
	"Jesus! What are those blades made of? They can tear through Bunkers…Well, at least those Riflemen are still…."
	(pause)
	"….alive."

	The destroyed bunker was located at the left of the front row, and a handful of the Blade Warriors began to hit the lefthand bunker in the back row. A squad of newly arriving Riflemen killed the last of them. Now free of the Blade Warrior responsibility, those Blade Warriors having been a more immediate threat to the bunker clusters, the tanks turned their turrets on the Mobile Cannons.

	I noticed one of the Mobile Cannons straggling away from the battle scene.
	"Yeah, that's right. Get the hell outta here," was the taunt that immediately came to mind.
	"Hey, where'd Marshal Bronson go?" I asked.

	"Need any assistance?" This comment did not come from me, however. It came from the man in the front of a Armored Hoverbike formation. This must have been where Bronson went – off to get one of his toys. A toy which he was currently launching grenades out the side of. 

	A new crowd of Blade Warriors still maintained the advantage of being fast on their feet, but as the old saying goes, “almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

	Bronson decided to immediately send troops up the road the Drashnakis had recently come down. He was ‘going in’ himself, but showing some self-preservation by doing so from the back of the formation. A dozen more tanks rolled in, as well as more riflemen. These all began to march up that road.

	Alexander Holt, befitting his earlier military pedigree as a Terrestrial Starforce admiral, was in charge of the air operation. He had six Fifth Fleet battlecruisers moving in, with none other than Kazansky’s fighters pulling the escort duty.

	Evidently, most of the Drashnaki ground forces in the area had already been defeated at the bunker cluster, but their outpost still posed a formidable challenge: a huge wall of some sort of fixed cannon emplacements. The six battlecruisers had enough firepower and enough armor to simply start blasting away at the cannon emplacements from range. I saw the now-familiar markings of laser bursts sputtering out as they hit a dispersal shield. Also, any physical bullets seemed to simply dissolve, until the shield system was run out of energy. (The high-powered lasers from the battlecruisers caused the latter to happen rather quickly...)

	The groups of tanks possessed some firepower themselves, as well. With Riflemen laying down cover fire, the tanks concentrated their fire at one enemy emplacement at a time. As they were lining up their turrets to take a shot at the third one, however, the squadron's commander slightly miscalculated the trajectory, and the plasma shells slammed full-force into the metal-and-crystal tower behind that cannon. The crystal shattered, and bits of the metal dropped to the ground. Then something odd happened.

	The fourth cannon in line, which had been firing at the Riflemen, simply petered out. Nothing had hit it, no lasers or bullets. That tower was probably housing the power crystals that the cannons ran off of.

	There were similar metal/crystal structures in the area of the cannon emplacements. Anybody could figure out what to do next, probably even a complete moron, let alone a skilled military officer. 

	"Okay gents, take out the crystal towers." This order came form Marshal Bronson himself. The tanks purposefully demolished each tower as quickly as they had accidentally demolished the first one.

	Not surprisingly, the cannons then stopped firing. Our tanks proceeded to roll past the now-dead cannons. There indeed weren’t that many soldiers left in the area, but the isolated soldiers that remained refused to surrender, inflicting sporadic damage on the tank squadrons. 

	Soon, this minor outpost lied entirely in ruins. But the question remained: what else did these malicious intruders have in mind for us, and when would it end? Unfortunately, we feared that Corporal Jahlrani would become the first of many – too many.