Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) (2 page)

Excerpts from
First Contact: A Multimedia Archive
:

“This is the President of the United States. We surrender unconditionally. We only request that you extinguish the arson weapons you have deployed against our cities. In the name of decency and compassion, I beseech you to spare the innocent lives of millions of people who never meant you any harm. Whatever our sins may be, we will repent and make amends. We… We beg for your mercy.”

“This is Trish Valenzuela, reporting from the Empire State Building. The entire city and its suburbs are surrounded by a ring of fire. The flames appear to be growing in height and intensity, and rolling steadily inwards, consuming everything in their path. They…”

(She winces at an explosion in the sky)

“That was news chopper, I think. It hit some sort of invisible barrier, near where the fires started. It’s… (
long pause
). “I’m getting reports of at least a dozen major urban centers similarly affected. Thousands are already dead, and if the fires are not contained, millions will follow, including this reporter. May… May God have mercy on our souls. Back to you at the studio, Morty.”

Robert Freemantle
@RobAtHome67

The fires are getting closer. Most of the Valley already engulfed. Smoke is getting bad. I think we’re all goners.
#LABurning

101 replies 83 retweets 3 likes

“Mom, dad… If you’re still in town, get out into the country as soon as you can. If you can. It’s all happening in cities, they’re targeting the cities. I’m… Listen, I love you both very much. I… I have to go now.”

- voice mail from First Contact, courtesy of the Benson family.

“They were able to use their phones until the end. Dad was on a business trip in Chicago. He called us from his hotel, and we talked until his room caught fire. We heard him scream before the line went dead.”

- Testimonial by Theresa Delacourt.

Last upload from YouTube star Gina Pebbles: The video shows the skyline outside her apartment in Atlanta. It is wreathed in flames, reaching hundreds of feet in height. Police sirens can be heard in the distance. “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragon is playing in the background, the music mixing with the sounds of disaster outside. Down below, several figures run from the conflagration; some of them are already on fire.

Gina turns her smartphone camera on herself. She is crying.

“This is it, people. I’m gonna upload this before it’s too late, ‘kay? Love y’all, and if there’s an America after this is over, don’t forget us, ‘kay? Find the fuckers who did this and make them pay.”

Janice Quinn
@hnybny112

PPL R BURNING TO DEATH. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING HELP US

72 replies 329 retweets 0 likes

“This is Johnathan Britten, KDFW, outside Dallas-Fort Worth. The dome around the metropolitan area is completely filled by rising flames; everybody inside must be dead. The last reports we received from the other side of the dome came from a group calling from a bomb shelter, who claimed temperatures were reaching lethal levels before going off the air. I’m told the structure, the energy field apparently, is containing most of the heat inside it, somehow preventing it from spreading beyond its confines, which is the only reason my crew can film it from under a mile away. It’s still very hot in here. One might say hellishly hot.

“The fires are obscuring everything at the moment, but a news chopper captured visuals of the Reunion Tower as it collapsed. The heat inside the domes is intense enough to melt concrete and steel. It’s… Excuse me for a moment.”

(Johnathan moves out of frame; the sound of retching can be heard even through the roar of the flames).

“New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, a dozen other cities, they have all fallen silent. Millions are dead. The rest of the world is, if anything, in worse shape.”
(pause).
“Okay, fuck the teleprompter. We all saw the UFO footage from the ISS. E.T. came back, the motherfucker. He came back and killed everyone. We’re fucked, you hear me? Fucked!”

- Charlotte NBC Anchorman Keith Neelan, moments before his suicide.

“Much is lost, but much remains. We will never forget this day, and we will never surrender to those who seek our destruction. We will rebuild and restore our strength. God Bless America.”

- US President Albert P. Hewer, shortly after being sworn in.

Year Zero AFC (After First Contact)

“Good to see you, Mister President.”

“No rank in the mess, Ty. Sit down.”

Tyson Keller sat on a plush sofa facing the man who until a few days ago had been the country’s Secretary of Defense. More specifically, the about-to-be-fired Secretary of Defense. Albert P. Hewer had left the Army as a one-star general, had been the head of the CIA for six years and then been tapped for Def Sec by an administration trying to deal with the latest cluster-fuck in the Middle East. Hewer had started butting heads with everybody from the get-go, and inside sources in DC claimed he’d soon be announcing his regretful resignation in order to spend time with his family, a funny exit line for a childless widower.

Then the aliens had come.

Tyson looked around the study, in a manor-style house in an undisclosed location. The Secret Service and Marines had come to his house outside Charlotte, which was possibly the largest US city still in one piece, bundled him into a chopper, and flown him here, here being somewhere almost four hours’ flight away. If he had to guess, they were somewhere in Kansas. Wherever it was, it was nowhere near the Beltway. There was no Beltway anymore.

“First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Ty.”

“Thank you.”

When the balloon went up, Tyson had gotten a phone call from his oldest daughter Rebecca, who’d been a junior in Boston College. He’d listened to her as she burned to death.

The grief was there, pressing against his chest, and it almost overwhelmed him when Hewer’s words stirred it up. Almost. He pushed all emotions down somewhere deep, somewhere they would not show until he was alone with Mathilda. There were tears still to be shed for Becca, but not here and now. This was business.

“It’s just you and me,” the President of These Very Fucked Up United States went on. “No recording devices on the premises. You can speak freely, Colonel.”

“I’m just an accountant now, Al. And I was about to quit my day job, after the last book hit it big on the Kindle.” Not anymore, of course. Even if half the reading public in the US hadn’t just gone up in smoke, Tyson figured science fiction was as dead as the dodo, now that real aliens had shown themselves and bombed the world back to the Stone Age.

“Read a couple of your novels while I waited for you,” Hewer said. “Not too bad. Not my cup of tea; I’m into historical fiction, when I read fiction at all. But not too bad.”

“Don’t forget to leave a review at Amazon. Wish more people did.”

“Heh.”

Hewer grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant grin, or a pleasant face for that matter. Albert would have never gotten elected to any major office. Not photogenic enough. His face could best be described as ‘Nixonian,’ the kind of mug cartoonists and comedians would have a field day with. He was President only because everyone else above him had gone up in smoke, along with untold numbers of Americans. Including one of Tyson’s children.

“So what do you need, Al? Want me to reenlist?”

“No. I’ve got plenty of trigger-pullers. I need someone willing to do what needs to be done.”

“Which is?”

“We’ve got to rebuild this nation, Colonel. This is the biggest disaster in the history of this country, of this planet. We lost, by the latest estimate, a hundred and sixty million people in CONUS alone. We’re probably going to lose another million or two, maybe a lot more, by the time the winter’s over. We have no economy. We’ve got plenty of food, but we may not have the fuel to move it where it’s needed. The aliens hit the twenty largest population centers in the country. Charlotte’s metropolitan area is number twenty-one, by the way.”

Tyson held up his thumb and forefinger, about half an inch apart. “Missed me by this much.”

“Lucky you. Lucky us.”

“What do you plan to do about this, Al?”
What the hell
can
you do?
He kept that last question to himself.

“There were two bunches of aliens up there, Ty. One of them took out the ones that blasted us. If they hadn’t, we would have been obliterated. We got hit by the first of what would have been successive bomb waves. As it is, we got off lightly, here in the US. The initial spread happened over Asia; we got the tail end. China and India have effectively ceased to exist. Ditto Japan, Australia, Indonesia, both Koreas. Billions are dead. Europe’s got a few cities left, but their power grid’s collapsed; a lot of the survivors won’t make it to next year. The second wave would have finished off what’s left. The friendly aliens saved our bacon.”

“And what happens now? Do they figure we owe them? Or that they own us now?”

“Not exactly. They feel a measure of obligation towards us. Their ship has left, but a few technical advisors and their equipment stayed behind. Their technology is just this side of magic, and they’re sharing it with us. With the US.”

“Not with the whole world?”

“No. For whatever reasons, they like us the best from all the countries that survived. The Russians are still around – some Russians; a lot of their military facilities didn’t get hit, and their rocket forces are relatively intact. But the good ETs don’t care for the Ivans. One of the first things we got from the Puppies was an anti-ballistic missile system that makes the Russians about as dangerous as a kid with a peashooter.”

“The Puppies?”

“Wait till you meet one. Kinda look like a cross between a raccoon and a light-skinned Dachshund. Cute as hell.”

“Mammals?” Tyson had always figured aliens would be absolutely different, not humans in funny costumes like in the TV shows he loathed.

“Pretty much. They are a DNA- and carbon-based life form, according to my Science Advisor, who happens to be another sci-fi writer on the side. Apparently it turns out some theory about the origins of life was right: ‘antiperspirant’ or something like that.”

“Panspermia, is that what you mean? Life originated somewhere else and came to Earth via comets and meteors?”

“Bingo. That’s one of the reasons I need you, Tyson. You’ve thought about this kind of shit already. That puts you miles ahead of your average government pinhead.”

Tyson’s head was spinning from the things he’d just learned. The hopeless malaise that had infected him ever since Becca had died began to give way, replaced by something else, something several Jihadists had become acquainted with shortly before their demise.

“I never cared for alien stories,” he said. “Figured if they showed up they’d be so far ahead of us we’d end up like the Aztecs and Incas at best, or like ants under a boot at worst. Guess I was only half right.”

“Now you don’t have to guess, and you’re mentally prepared for this stuff, more than most people. The other reason I want you, of course, is that you’re a hard case, an utterly cold-blooded son of a bitch. I need the Hun.”

“I never cared for that handle. Huns were undisciplined barbarians.”

Al had given Tyson that nickname, back when they’d gone through OCS together, a long time ago.

“You weren’t afraid of getting your hands dirty, Ty. Or bloody. That’s Hunnish enough.”

Tyson shook his head. “Al, you really don’t want me in a position of power. The country’s suffered enough already.”

“If we’re going to come out of this alive, we need to become something else altogether. We need to clean house and prepare, or we aren’t going to survive. The Puppies will help us, but sooner or later we’re going to have to stand on our own two feet. Sooner rather than later. We need to become a new Sparta.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“By any means necessary. Look, we lost a hundred and sixty million Americans, and ninety-nine percent were innocents who didn’t deserve what happened to them…”

“More like ninety-five percent. At least eight million of them needed killing. In my humble opinion.”

“Maybe. But the point is, most of the people who would be against the changes I’m going to institute are gone. We’re going to have to rearm, implement the new technologies we just got, and gird our ever-loving loins for war. One of the first things I’m doing is reinstituting the draft. Universal and mandatory. Everyone serves. Everyone spends a couple years in uniform, getting the stupid knocked out of them. Men and women. Ladies got the vote, so they get to put on combat boots and march while some drill instructor yells at them.”

“Good luck getting that passed.”

“There is no Congress. There is no Supreme Court. The only effective source of law and order in the country is the military, plus a handful of state governments. And yeah, that means getting around the Posse Comitatus, but my new Attorney General’s on the job. You might know him; he did some sci-fi writing himself. Luis Corazao.”