Chapter 3: First Response

	It was soon discovered that the aliens were making similar attack runs on the other Continental capitals: Rio De Janiero, Sydney, New Dehli, Alexandria, and Rome. (the latter was, in fact, the overall planetary capital, as well as the European capital.) Iseemed that you could sum up the alien war plan succinctly: “Go for the big targets first.”

	Yet there was a problem. The aliens had gotten the first wave of spacecraft through our atmosphere largely undetected. How did they do this? Commander Holt was loudly and profanely wondering about this, especially considering the voluminous presence of armed defensive platforms in near-Earth orbit. Other military spokesmen also made the point succinctly: it was a sensor override tactic which we were working on a countermeasure for.

	Alexander Holt prepared an address to be delivered to the public via standard news channels; this speech, to be known as the Midday Address, began as such:

	“Citizens of Earth, a few hours ago today we were hit with the beginning of a terribly malicious alien assault. It is said that an army is maintained for a thousand days so that it may fight on one; today is perhaps that day. So far, Terrestrial Republic Defense Forces, 5th Corps, have defeated the initial force striking at Washington, and there have been similar occurrences in other cities, and we shall remain vigilant! The invaders shall be driven back, mark my words! I paraphrase one of my great predecessors when I say this, but ‘we shall fight them at the landing sites, everywhere. We shall never give up, never surrender!’”

	The news networks were carrying footage from a satellite that had observed the maneuver, that of the second force coming in. The Drashnaki troop transports were encased in a ‘shell’ formed by some sort of escort vessels. Furthermore, the cloud ‘put in’ right between the 5th and 6th Orbital Defense Platforms. Thus, it was as far away from either as possible, maximizing the response time required of either platform. 

	Each platform scrambled several Class 1 Starfighter squadrons, which reached the cloud as soon as possible. They immediately began hammering away at the Drashnaki escort vessels with their twin missile launchers, all of them aiming for what appeared to be critical positions on the escort ships: the bridge window and the cluster of engines. Oddly, these ships were not returning fire. Senior Airman Al Voight, one Sixth Platform pilot, commented on both this and the high durability of the vessels: “Ain’t no room for cannons on a solid block of armor…” Several of the different news films decided to quote this. The relevant Platform Commanders launched ‘fresh’ new squadrons as the first wave returned to reload their missile racks. 

	As the second wave of our fighters arrived, some of its missiles went errant and hid the ship’s midsection as opposed to the engine cluster. The ship seemed to falter for a moment; then more-accurate strikes led it to slow down and fall out of position, revealing what it had been guarding: several (relatively) small vessels, each only a few times the size of our Starfighters.

“Commander of S.F. Squadron Epsilon, requesting orders on Bogey Type Bravo.”
“Bogeys are enemy troop transports; fire at will” responded the 6th Platform base.

	It did not take too long to see that order carried out; the troop transports each fell after only a few missile hits. We had cut into about half the cloud before even our most daredevil pilots agreed that the cloud had already reached too low an elevation; those remaining vessels had simply outraced us.

	It was soon reported that there were several other ‘Devil’s Clouds’ (as we began to call them) trying to enter at many other points; Starfighter squadrons were sent after those as well with differing degrees of success. Learning from the initial encounter, a larger first wave of starfighters was sent against each, and the fighters launched missiles at all parts of the escort vessels from bow to stern. Even so, at least part of several clouds still reached their landing sites.

	Those landing sites were very close to major cities, but not in them. (This choice of landing location would avoid the immediate threat from our major cities’ ground-to-air weapons complexes.) Blade Warriors, Mobile Cannons, and other machines which we had not yet had the pleasure of encountering were pouring out of their transports at Washington, San Francisco, and more than a dozen others throughout the planet. Even the half-force that had landed at Washington appeared to be quite formidable. The invasion had truly begun.

	Logically, many people wanted to get the hell out of Washington, my family included. The high-speed train run back to Mackinnaksvile early Saturday afternoon was completely packed. Thankfully, once we got back home, the closest I would come to the battlefront for a while was the constant news reports.

	President Johnathan Karrde broadcasted this message from the capital in Rome on Tuesday the 17th: “Due to the current state of crisis, Terrestrial Republic draft procedures for males ages twenty to twenty-five are initiated promptly, with today’s approval of the action by the Planetary Congress.” Sgt. Murphy had explained the procedures to me in detail on my 17th birthday, the gist of that discussion being that 26-29 (Draft Group II) may follow 20-25 (Draft Group I), then my age group, 17-19. So I was “clear” for a little while; some of my friends had called expressing similar sentiments. Quite frankly, I didn’t really see any member of our good ‘ol rogues gallery as soldiers.

	Alexander Holt had used a rather clever tactic to repulse the force striking at Washington – the full details of it were not revealed, but we understood it basically to involve a complex series of baiting and decoy maneuvers. The clouds landing near Rome, London, Alexandria, and Shanghai had been reduced to inaction, or easy defeat, by the success of the Starforce bombardments in reducing the strength of those areas’ Devil Clouds. At the other cities where the enemies had landed, the battle was still in progress. (Among these cities were Paris, Dehli, Tokyo, Sydney and Hong Kong, from the news reports I recall hearing)

	Nearly a full ‘Devil’s Cloud’ force had managed to land at Sydney, so the following should not be a complete surprise, but hope (and denial!) are powerful forces. On August 21st, the news headlines screamed: SYDNEY FALLS. The enemy march through the city occurred at slightly before 4 PM, meaning about 2 AM on the 21st, New York time. Thus, it made the news broadcasts on the morning of the 21st in North America. The iconic news footage of the enemy march through the city was that of a Drashnaki Bombcrawler robot releasing one of its devices at the gleaming-white Sydney Opera House, the building of course crumbling in the explosion.

	My God, no Republic city had fallen to an enemy in 135 years, since a rebel attack towards the end of the Unification Wars (World War IV), in 2191, when the Palmer Raiders had marched through Atlanta, North America. Military Commander John Floyd, of the First Corps in Europe, expressed the problem: that the Drashnakis would head east to Perth, north to Port Darwin, and north across the Pacific islands, starting with Indonesia or the Phillippines.

	Holt’s Midday Address a couple weeks ago had been quite defiant in tone, and his comments on the Sydney news were even more so. The Drashnaki commander was already known to be titled as a ‘Hulaas Prenarka’ (Supreme Admiral), and his response to this message revealed his name to be Alazar Starnrok. ‘Alazar Starnrok.’ The already extensive library of human curses was further improved by these two words.

	Supreme Admiral Starnrok was probably an intelligent life form, and thus he probably realized that the ‘Devil’s Cloud’ tactic couldn’t be carried on forever: it had proven to be hit-or-miss, and certainly every commander recognizes that he does not have an unlimited supply of soldiers and warships. Soon, we figured, he would have to open a large hole in our defensive web by launching a frontal assault on one of the Orbital Defense Platforms. We wondered when it would come, and where.

	Meanwhile, the Devil’s Clouds, and the troops that they did manage to land, remained a problem.

	Admiral Starnrok ended the policy of sending the devil’s clouds with minimal defensive weaponry. Their Scout starfighters, appearently the same design as what I had seen in the initial Washington raid, denied our ‘Class Ones’ the clear missile shots at the large escort vessels that they had previously enjoyed. Furthermore, their presence required our platform commanders to send out more starfighters, not to mention Valkyrie gunboats.

	Unfortunately, our Falcon-class and Star-class battlecruisers did not have the speed to keep up with the devil’s clouds. Their ‘Ravager’ missiles would have come in handy, and they would have cut through the escorts’ heavy armor easily, while their own shielding withstood fighter-weapon punishment. (Aan anonymous Starforce officer had once been quoted, only partially in jest, as saying that the Ravager missile was his “favorite problem-solving technique”.)

	On August 22nd, the Drashnakis met First Corps ground forces in a climatic high-stakes battle in the open field, a type of warfare that had been surprisingly rare on Earth since the World Wars. One surviving First Corps soldier released his journal entries relating to the battle, which had spread virally in their digital form.
	
“Journal of Terrestrial Republic Army First Corps Corporal Raul Fincanteri”

17th August 2326.

	What was reported by the watchers in Perugia, about a hundred kilometers north of here, has shattered whatever sanity we had remaining after last Friday. A Drashnaki war-cloud landed to the near south of their city. Considering what I’ve heard about their previous attacks, rampaging through the countryside is not their prerogative. They are coming for Rome, the City itself.

19th August 2326.

	Our commanders have passed along the word that First Corps men from Florence are coming in from the “rear” (the north), to encircle our enemies, to drive them into a trap at Rome, that trap to manned by yours truly and associates… Several of my fellow soldiers have half-jokingly wondered why we couldn’t drive the enemies north into a trap at Florence.

20th August 2326.

	The news of Sydney’s fall came to us at seven hundred hours Rome time, which was midafternoon in Sydney. As such, I was in the enlisted men’s mess for breakfast at the time. News of this level was about the only thing that would actually bring any of the officers in here, and indeed, one of them came in gasping for breath waving a report. One of the men near the door was able to make it out, and shouted a simple, short phrase: “Sydney down. A moment of silence for our fallen Sixth Corps brothers.” Almost in unison, everyone in the hall stood up and clasped their hands in front of them.

	Other than that, we didn’t dwell too much on the news (although the breakfast hall was much more silent than usual); we were preoccupied with not allowing Rome to be next.

	Bunkers and other temporary fortifications were to be laid out, tanks to be directed into advantageous hill positions, et cetera. I was working on the former, and in all likelihood, I would be occupying one of those bunkers during the battle to come. Even for someone with a few years’ worth of experience with the Terrestrial Republic military, I was awed at the collection of military machinery in the area. Reinforcements were arriving around the clock from southern Italy, it seemed.

	The enemies still haven’t made their move yet, and from what we had known this morning, they should have been surrounded within days. The last sighting had reported them as still being 40 kilometers from Rome, but on the march. I was part of the last watch that day, and at 23 hundred hours, my macrobinoculars picked up the flashes of their landing craft. (which were off in the distance, to be sure.) I passed on my sighting to the watch commander ASAP. Damn, the last thing we had needed was for them to get reinforcements.

22nd August. 2326. “Prima Battaglia di Roma” 
[This title is old Italian for ‘First Battle of Rome’.]

	I’m fairly lucky to still be here today. Me and my Army comrades had to take care of a toxic slime problem today…but wait, would referring to the Drashnaki armies as toxic slime be offensive to actual toxic slime? I jest, but perhaps humor is the only way to avoid insanity as I overlook the rubble and scarred landscape.

	I can imagine the utter joy the Drashnakis felt as they looked up at a cliff bristling with gun barrels…gun barrels that started emitting plasma shells around high noon. Their ranged troops, the Mobile Cannons, started firing up at the tank emplacements on the cliffs. With deadly accuracy, our boys were more than happy to return fire. We had the advantage of height, an ancient prescription of warfare.

	Meanwhile, a cloud of Blade Warriors had been storming up a hill at our infantry, a group that was important, especially considering that said group included me. I was in a bunker towards the back of our line, slightly to the right of its center. I looked through one of the bunker’s blast windows, slid my Lasertec Mk V into the gunport, and clipped in a full battery pack. I simply began squeezing the trigger. A perverse advantage of facing large enemy infantry formations is that delicate aim is not necessary…

	We had Flamethrowers laying in wait for any that did reach our line, themselves a few rows back. The Blade Warriors had begun to breach the outer fortifications. We continued to simply lay down laser fire at them for a short time, perhaps ten minutes or so. Then part of the cloud seemed to have taken orders to shift to, what was from our perspective, the right. From the opening on the left, there started to come a series of tracked, segmented robots-of-war. The Bombcrawlers. Much of their infantry turned with its back towards these machines, as if guarding them.

	The Bombcrawlers were relatively close to the left-side cliff, leaving the tanks unable to fire down from the cliff on them. They began to release a fusillade of small white spheres. These spheres made a most deafening, blinding, deadly explosion once they had rocketed up the hill and hit our lines.

	Sgt. Lucastri had promptly requested air support, like many of his similar-rank counterparts doubtlessly had. Starforce was busy trying to intercept more Devil’s Clouds, and besides, much of its strength was based up on the orbital platforms (which obviously needed to stay in place) , so we wondered what Starforce would be able to send, even in a critical situation such as this. Our small arms, including Flamethrowers adjusted to damage electronic circuitry, could barely seem to touch the crawlers. Granted, we could damage individual machines fairly well, but there seemed to be too many of them, compared to amount of infantry we had lined up

	Barely thirty minutes later, it seemed, the crawlers were more than halfway up the hill. The Blade Warriors had managed to breach the other half of our bottom-of-the-hill line by sheer force of numbers. Sandbags and barbed wire had seemed to pose little challenge to them, and we only had so many reinforced bunkers. This was the first time I really thought ‘Are we screwed?’ Especially if the Bombcrawlers could break through, turn towards the cliffs, and shut down our heavy artillery.

	Then: A shadow. The weather today had been as clear as pure water, so the shadow had nothing to do with a cloud shifting position and heading in front of the sun. The object was more than a hundred meters long, maybe even twice that, painted in the Republic combination of brown, blue, green and white. A Falcon-class cruiser. Starforce Headquarters was not kidding around.

	This must have been one of the new Falcon MkII’s- which had, among other things, a small carrier bay added. I could recognize the silhouettes of two more of them. Smaller craft disgorged by the carriers immediately headed in formation over the bombcrawlers. Small packages were dropped on them. Small explosive packages. 

	The captain of the lead Falcon II broadcasted a message over multifrequency radio. ‘Say hello to my little friends.’ The Mobile Cannons, one of the few Drashnaki weapons types present capable of surface-to-air fire, immediately had to take pressure off of our tanks to counter the new aerial threats. (It appeared that the new Falcons were quickly warming up their air-to-ground batteries, and the previous Falcon arrivals were already using them on ground troops, which couldn’t individually withstand aerial capital-ship bombardment very well.)

	Even as several of their number faltered and stopped due to explosion damage, the Bombcrawlers mindlessly soldiered on. They were robots, after all. Yet, our aerial bombers, delivered via the Falcons, were simply too small in number to completely eliminate the Bombcrawlers; their sudden arrival had been as much of a morale-booster aerial show than a serious move. I could recognize the gut-wrenching sight of our last row of bunkers in that section disintegrating. The Bombcrawlers immediately turned to march on our tank cluster; the tanks’ ponderous siege cannons slowly rotated, most of them too late. Was this the end?

	Indeed maybe so. The Blade Warriors were now within I-can-see-detail eyeshot of my position. They seemed even more ferocious and deadly up close. Their namesake blades, although they did not make whole sheets of the stuff yield, could still slice through durasteel-plated bunkers with only a few swings, leaving ragged cuts. What in hell were those things made of?

	As if the following moment had been triggered by some sort of deity, twelve small black darts started screaming through the air. Their forward-mounted guns started rattling at the crawlers. Yep. A Valkyrie gunboat squadron. The ships screeched to a halt and abruptly about-faced, turning its rear-mounted missile launchers down at them. That volley was the straw that broke the bombcrawlers’ back.

	Meanwhile, I could see the Blade Warriors get nearly on top of my bunker.
‘Retract your guns and evacuate,’ ordered Sgt. Lucastri. As this design of bunker had doors on all four sides, it was easy to exit the bunker in the opposite direction and engage in a backwards advance.

	Then, I came face-to-face with another Blade. He swung his righthand weapon at me, and I swerved out of the way, and as the weapon grazed me, I felt a terrible searing pain on an arm. Whatever the hell else was going on, these blades worked by being obscenely hot….My swerve had overcompensated, and I began to stumble, and open myself up for another strike. Then I heard one of the Drashnakis bellowing ‘Krallanakh! Krallanakh!’. The soldier striking at me seemed rather surprised at this, but he began to back off, and noticed the rest of them doing the same. It must have been a retreat order…”
	
	“It would have made for a decent story, if it wasn’t so real,” I thought as I turned off my computer.

	As I was reading this, on August 25th, I got a notice from the Auriak Shipworks plant about seventy kilometers west of here. My application had been taken. I had long since noticed that my Build-Your-Own-Spaceship blueprint, which I knew extremely well, was basically a military Class II Starfighter chassis. My blueprint simply asked for downgrade engines, and while the weapon ports were included, the BYOS print had made no mention of filling them. This Auriok Shipworks plant built the real thing. I would be doing basically what I’d done out in my parts garage, but on a larger scale. Quite frankly, even with the current crisis, “Mama would rather have her ‘little boy’ building them than flying them,” as she put it.

	I started on the 27th.  From talking to other people at the Mackinnaksville station that morning, I could tell that many of them were also headed to that plant. Most of the others were also just starting; as a new emergency wartime addon to the factory had just been completed. A few of them were relatively young teenagers, like myself. A few were old ladies. (The thought of one Mrs. Alva Dean holding a welding tank brought laughter; in reality, they’d probably be doing some sort of paperwork.) Construction robots could do much of the fabrication, but they still neither could nor should be doing all of it.

	We were pulling nine-hour shifts, from 9:30 to 18:30, with a 45-minute lunch break, which were taken in the plant’s cavernous news-receiving room / break room. Hong Kong had joined Sydney; Tokyo nearly so. Dehli and Paris were still indeterminate. The bare victory in Tokyo, and the resounding one in Rome, had, it seemed, incredibly lightened a dark hour.

	It was 13:00, shortly after the start of the lunch break. As usual, television monitors were turned to WBUF news. “We have received another transmission from the mothership of Admiral Starnrok…” (Boos at the name of the hated enemy- I swear, the broadcasters purposely scheduled time for these jeers...) 

	I had, at the start of this whole affair, wondered why we were not hearing the Drashnaki language, but rather English, albeit stilted English. I remembered this basic wording from a week-old news report on a previous Drashnaki message: it turns out that “Many of your decades ago, a small number of Imperial Scouts, had to concentrate their social and cultural observations, including observations on your speech-patterns, at the population-centers of Manchester, and Saint Peter’s Burg [sic]. The speech-pattern from the first location appears to closest to your current language.

	Perhaps that message was part of their overall strategy somehow- their broadcasts contained massive condescension- the idea that there had been unnoticed alien scouts running around certainly reinforced that concept. But these messages were still allowed to be broadcasted by our officials, perhaps so Admiral Holt and others could swing with equally caustic, morale-boosting replies.
	
	 “The euphoria you gain from the victory at your capital, Rome you call it, shall be wiped out before long. Even a planet as militarily focused as yours can not withstand the assault of an Imperial Fleet. We represent an empire of several such planets. Must I repeat this to you, once again, as if you were my insolent children?,” Starnrok intoned.

	“Also, what we have identified as the Eighth Division of the First Corps is fighting surprisingly well for Frenchmen…Yes, we have observed even that stereotype of yours.”

	The analysis from one of our officials went like this: “It appears our enemy is planning an even more major move. Military Command intelligence analysts propose several possibilities, and we will prepare for them all.”

	Those of us in the news-receiving room started to play the role of those analysts, positing various ideas. This was a macabre game, but the current landscape of course lent itself to that. The ones with some mind towards military strategy generally suspected they would want to increase their efforts in southern Asia, where they had already established a beachhead, so to speak. With a wry dose of black humor, some guessed that they would want to film take 2 of “World Capital Assault.”

	“Surely a planetary invasion would be well-planned and well supplied. Though I’m certainly not eager to see it, where the hell is their Starforce?” I essentially closed the discussion, as this comment of mine came right before the end-of-lunch bell.

	Now back to my fusion-welder ‘cannon’. For an amateur shipbuilder, as I was, this seemed like very nice equipment. The equipment consisted of a fuel tank and a narrow tubing line, I suppose. A white-hot blast shot out of the nozzle and hit the two pieces of ship-grade durasteel (steel being somewhat of a misnomer; I believe this stuff was an alloy of aluminum and titanium), melting them together. The stuff had an extremely high melting point, so melting it for the weld required some sort of insane heat blast. Welding was an old concept, I know. (I remember my Metalworking teacher discussing 1900s welders) But here, it was done 2300s style. 

	My particular job at this point was to affix the metal framework in which the ID-7 engines were inserted.  (The numbing repetitive aspect of assembly-line work had long been noted, and at least in this plant, this problem was well-addressed. Each worker’s assignments were rotated, at least through a short list of options.) 

	On the morning of the 29th, I was pushing a cart of parts to the Cockpit Finishing section - I recognized them as various types of control knobs. At this time, an alert bell started ringing. I knew it wasn’t the lunch-break bell; it was, unfortunately, too early for that. It wasn’t the alarm tone for a plant emergency that necessitated us to evacuate. It was an urgent summons to the news room.

	There was obviously had some important news to pass along, and was rather anxious and nervous about it. Yes, old Herman Chalmers, The Boss, did not look normal right now. 
	
	“Grave news, ladies and gentlemen,” he said simply. “What we have seen in the past few weeks was evidently only an advance force…” Silence. He then clicked on the largest news monitor in the room.

	Our mouths were agape, as we noticed the pictures on the screen. Pictures that explained where “their Starforce” was. Four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, at least it was at the time of this footage. Where the Moon was located.

	Mr. Chalmers then ‘handed off’ the descriptive responsibilities to the news-net station announcer. 

	“Along with military sentry systems, a camera belonging to one of our affiliates, L-ARM, caught footage of a major Drashnaki warfleet approaching Luna’s northern hemisphere…”

	A veritable cloud of buzzards was in the footage behind him. Sentient, hostile buzzards. By far the most numerous shiptype was about a hundred meters in length, and looked like a barbell with flat square weights, one ‘weight’ presumably being the ship’s bridge, with the other end being the engine section. Some other ships looked much like these in shape, but were twice as large. A very small few were of similar shape, but towered over their counterparts. Looking at the size of those few true Goliaths of their operation was a foreboding sign of what this Drashnaki Fleet could bring to bear. 

	There were also some other two-hundred-meter ships that were shaped like darts. I did not see any of the Scout starfighters or ‘Skirmisher’ gunboats, or even those troop transports, the three Drashnaki designs I recognized from previous reports. To call them designs is not entirely appropriate – they were sharp and angular, with black, brown and blue paint, and they were sometimes left in metallic gray. Completely utilarian.

	I had logically assumed that Scouts and Skirmisher small craft were in some of the larger things, those being carriers; I was correct. A few began to disgorge their fighters, which swept down towards the Moon’s surface. Some carriers peeled off from the formation, presumably to head to the ‘The Wall’ colony on the moon’s far side.

	The news announcer continued. “This is not a flyby on a vector that happened to be close to the Moon. This is a grab for undefended population. As any puncture in the Colony Domes would be fatal, a puncture that can be easily created by Drashnaki lasers or missiles, not even a makeshift defense could be raised. The only gesture they allowed was that our Colonial officials were allowed to take down the Republic, and the old American flag banners, with some sense of propriety. This notion was soon shattered…”

	“Nareen Krallanakh landing sequence completed.” This was an alien transmission, picked up and translated for the benefit of all the news-net’s viewers. Two Drashnakis stepped out of the said vessel in royal-blue space suits, and planted some sort of flag. A blue-colored bird-like creature, on a imperial seal with a white background, the seal being on a black background. The close-range video feed was then cut off.

	It seemed that they left residual garrison forces at each of our moon colonies, the rest of that fleet proceeding to head straight towards Earth.