***
Lieutenant Steve Smith stood in the open top of his National Guard Humvee, searching the nearby foothills through binoculars and trying to shake the terrified feeling in his guts. His little detail force of one Humvee and one Bradley armored troop carrier had pulled up on a low ridge in the foothills west of the town of Absarokee, Montana. They were lying low under cover of a grove of paper birch trees, as ordered, waiting through the afternoon while the pale quarter moon and the enemy in space passed overhead.
Functional military equipment was as sparse in Montana as anywhere, so the two operational vehicles in the National Guard Armory at Helena hadn’t gone unnoticed by the brass down at NORAD. General Davis had sent an order stating that he needed reconnaissance in the Absarokee area. He wanted visual information on the number and nature of the enemy near Sandstone Mountain. Early that morning Smith and his Guardsmen had hauled out of Helena to drive 150 miles to their present location. They were to wait for cover of darkness and moonset before proceeding closer to the target area up near the Beartooths.
Although they weren’t authorized to move or to transmit anything until then, nothing stopped Smith from keeping his eyes open. He squinted hard across the grasslands at one of the mountains a couple of miles away. There was an odd line of dust rising along a logging road that twisted down its side.
“Hey, Mike,” he said to his driver, “have a look at this.”
Corporal Mike Talbot stood up beside him and focused his own binoculars where Smith indicated.
“Oh, man,” Talbot said after a moment. “We found them all right—or I guess they found us.”
Smith watched through his field glasses for another minute as three metallic forms moved swiftly down the road, stirring up dust as they went. At the bottom of the slope, they turned to move squarely in his direction. A qualm ran through the pit of his gut. This is it, he thought. There’s going to be a fight whether we’re ready or not. He turned to look into the scared face of his driver. “Get on the horn, Mike, and tell Helena we have three unidentified machines coming down out of the mountains.”
“You sure you want me to break radio silence?”
“Do it,” he ordered. “It might be now or never.”
He looked through his binocs again at the onrushing machines. They had already covered a quarter of the distance to him in the time it took to order the radio call.
Talbot flipped the power switch on and raised his handset to his mouth.
“Helena Command Post, this is Red Dog 5, we have sighted an enemy patrol, do you read?”
Smith’s eyes were riveted on the advancing machines: strange, two-legged running contraptions, about tank-sized, moving toward him over the uneven prairie at incredible speed. He turned to look up at the nearby armored personnel carrier. Its commander had stuck his helmeted head out of the top hatch.
“Deploy your troops, sergeant,” Smith shouted. “Prepare to repel an assault.”
The sergeant’s jaw dropped. “Right here?”
“They’re coming at us too fast.” Smith pointed at the trio of mechanical nightmares, now scarcely three quarters of a mile away. “I don’t think we can outrun those things. Get your men moving. This is as good a defensive position as we’re gonna get.”
The sergeant barked orders down into the interior of his vehicle and a moment later a half-dozen soldiers clambered from the back hatch and spread out among the nearby rocks and trees. Directed by the sergeant from his position atop the Bradley, they began setting up a field mortar and two heavy machine guns. Meanwhile Talbot continued to squawk position information into his handset. Smith cut him off.
“Enough of that, Mike. We’ve got big trouble coming fast. Get a video feed going. Our mission was to get a visual on these things and we’re gonna get the job done. Get your camera rolling and keep transmitting, no matter what.”
“Yes, sir!” Talbot quickly fastened a video camera to the gun-mount on the Humvee’s roof. Smith no longer needed binoculars to watch the invaders. They had already closed to within a half-mile and were coming across the grasslands at a good seventy miles an hour.
“Video’s running,” said Talbot as Smith took another look at the strange machines. On either side of their metallic silver bodies were arms bristling with instruments and weapons.
“Coming too fast,” he moaned. He turned to look up at the Bradley. A second man had joined the sergeant and together they were loading a canister of bullets onto its heavy machine gun.
“They’re already in range,” Smith called to them. “Open fire!”
The gunner looked up as if taken by surprise, then quickly locked down the ammo canister, sighted the gun and opened up. The brrrattt of the machine gun filled the air with a thunderous noise, followed a second later by the heavy bang of the hand-mortar as the team on the ground launched its first round. The two machine gun nests joined in with a chorus of staccato fire.
General Davis and several other officers gathered around a desktop computer screen in NORAD’s command center.
“This feed is from the Helena National Guard group,” Major Lewis explained. “Lieutenant Smith’s detail, a few miles northeast of the Beartooth landing site.”
“Looks like they’re in big trouble,” said Davis.
On the screen was a shaky video image of three alien machines approaching at a full run across a sagebrush-studded grassland. A mortar round exploded near one machine and all three slowed their pace, forming a widely-spaced skirmish line. The sounds of the Guardsmen’s barrage of machinegun fire and mortar rounds filled the computer’s speakers with scratchy surging noise.
The fighting machines raised their right arms as they advanced through the sagebrush, aiming at the Guardsmen. Narrow straight bolts of blue light leaped from the instrument-studded ends of the arms with alarming effect. A birch tree splintered and caught fire within view of the camera.
“What the—?” Davis gasped at the intensity of the light-rays. “What kind of weapon are they firing?”
A beam from the leftmost machine slashed across the field of view and set off a violent detonation on the right. The camera heeled over at a crazy angle. Lieutenant Smith called frantically through the roar of explosions and small arms fire, “The Bradley has been hit!”
The camera veered crazily as its operator picked it off its mount and swung it around to show the Bradley enveloped in fire with a dark mushrooming billow of smoke rising above it. A man staggered out of the rear hatch with his clothes in flames.
Davis grimaced. A chorus of exclamations came from the growing group of staff crowding around the video monitor. Then another explosion rocked the camera view and it swung back toward the advancing machines. On its way, it swept across Lieutenant Smith’s desperate face. He shouted, “We’re being overrun! They came at us too fast.”
The screen filled for a moment with an image of one of the machines clanking forward on its robotic legs, its light-cannon blasting to the left and right. Then the machine aimed directly at the camera. The screen went to snow and the speakers filled with static.
“Damn!” Davis pounded a fist on the desk top. “That’s unbelievable. What kind of attack vehicle was that anyway?”
The others stood or sat silently, struck dumb by what they had just witnessed.
“And what kind of weapon were they using?” Davis fumed. “Another kind of death ray? How do we fight that? What are we supposed to do against that kind of thing?”
“Sir,” a junior officer seated at a nearby computer console interrupted, clutching a headset to one ear. “I’ve got a report of another enemy attack, this one in Billings. Seven machines. They’ve already overrun the town. No defense force available. Moving northeast to southwest.”
“Billings?” Lewis remarked. “That’s on a path from the landings at Fork Peck Reservoir to Sandstone Mountain. Sounds like they’re trying to link forces.”
“Sounds like they already have,” Davis muttered. “This enemy moves like a Blitzk
rieg. How can we contain an advance this fast?”
An aide came into the room and handed Lewis a computer printout. She glanced at it quickly and passed it to Davis.
“Sorry, Matt. More bad news, this time from Louisiana. A massed invasion moving up from the coast.”
Davis sat down in a swivel chair in front of the video console and murmured, “We’re getting bad news faster than we can listen to it.” He took the printout from her and read it like it was a death notice. “Additional spaceships splashing down on Gulf of Mexico. Amphibious landings unopposed. Fifty-plus fighting machines debarked. Moving inland to the north.”
He scowled. “Have we got any military assets in the area?”
“Nothing organized,” Lewis replied. “Fort Polk’s equipment has been pretty thoroughly neutralized. There’s nothing intact down that way except some squad cars from the local sheriff’s department. That’s how we’re getting our information, from the county police vehicle radios. But as far as a military force, nothing.”
“Unopposed,” Davis muttered. “Northbound from the Gulf of Mexico. They’ll keep going until they link up with the force in Montana.”
Lewis nodded somberly. “Sounds like that’s their plan, Matt.”