The Assault

2. TERMINAL VELOCITY



THE HIGH-ALTITUDE FREE-FALL LANDING PAD—PERSONNEL (HAFLP-P) was developed in secret by the British military in the early 2010s. Designed as a clandestine insertion method, it was regarded as so secret by the British that not even their U.S. allies were privy to the project. Not until the Bzadian War, at least. After that, countries keeping secrets from each other seemed pointless, as human forces allied against the alien intruders.

The HAFLP-P, commonly known as the “half-pipe,” worked off a basic law of physics: terminal velocity. It makes no difference whether a human being jumps from 200 feet or 32,000 feet. After the first few seconds, the human body falls as fast as gravity can make it. So a stuntman falling from a high building and a skydiver falling from an aircraft would hit the ground at approximately the same speed.

A stuntman survives his fall by landing on a huge inflated airbag with large vents. The impact of the body on the bag blasts air out of the vents, and the result is a massive cushion to slow the fall. The half-pipe works exactly the same way. It consists of a landing pad made of an incredibly strong but gossamer-thin fabric and a compressed-air cylinder, plus a smaller emergency cylinder. When it hits the ground, the half-pipe landing pad inflates instantly, like an airbag in a car, expanding to the size of a swimming pool.

The way to survive the fall is to hit the pad dead center, which is a lot harder to do from 32,000 feet than from 200 feet. From 32,000 feet, even a landing pad the size of a football field would appear as a mere pinprick far below.

To ensure the jumper lands on the pad and nowhere else, each half-pipe is keyed electronically to their free-fall flight suit. Small fins and vanes on the suit move, aiming the suit at the center of the landing pad. If everything works correctly, the person will land in the middle of the pad uninjured. If they miss the pad, or something goes wrong with the equipment, it will be a very hard landing.


[2355 hours]

[Central Australia]

“Mayday! Mayday!” Chisnall yelled desperately into his comm. “Half-pipe malfunction!”

He had instinctively flared his limbs again, slowing his descent to buy himself as much time as possible.

“I’m clear. Use mine!” Price sounded scared, but her words were strictly professional. “Activating emergency strobe and reinflating.”

There was a procedure for a half-pipe malfunction, but Chisnall had never heard of anyone using it. At least, not anyone who had survived. There were only seconds left before he was a smear of red on the desert. He twisted around, scanning the ground for the infrared strobe.

There it was!

When Price landed, the air was shunted out of her landing pad, making it useless until it reinflated. The secondary, emergency cylinder could be used to reinflate the pad, but that took time, and time was one thing he didn’t have. Landing on a half-deflated pad was only marginally better than landing on solid ground.

Chisnall had already hit the manual override on his wrist, cutting off the signal from his own half-pipe, which was like the song of a siren, luring him to disaster. He angled his arms and legs, aiming for the rapid flicker of the strobe.

The light of the strobe grew, impossibly fast, as he hurtled toward it. He could even see the landing pad now. It looked flat and empty, although the surface was billowing as the air rushed back into it. He tucked his arms and legs to his sides, rolling over onto his back before flaring out again.

“Come left! Come left!” came Angel Six’s voice in his comm.

He must have drifted right when he rolled. Chisnall adjusted slightly and was just wondering whether he had overcorrected when a giant hand smacked into his back, followed immediately by another, even harder collision. A crunching sound, followed by blackness.


The Bzadians had first come to Earth in the 1940s, not long after the end of the Second World War. They had hung around for most of the 1950s and quietly disappeared in the mid-1960s, having completed their survey of the planet and, apparently, liking what they saw.

Back in those days, stealth technology was unheard of on Earth, and they were able to fly their stealth rotorcraft without fear of being detected by the primitive radar systems that existed at the time. The only real danger of detection came from the occasional farmer or airline pilot who saw one of the rotorcraft and cried UFO, but those people were generally dismissed as being fruit loops.

Then came the year 2014, when the first transporters began to arrive. Not hovering over Earth’s major cities like spaceships out of some sci-fi horror flick, but orbiting once around Earth before beginning a gradual descent through the atmosphere toward the center of Australia.

The transporters had wings like a space shuttle, and like a space shuttle, they were little more than huge gliders, landing on the massive level salt flats of the Australian desert. Each one held nearly 3,000 aliens in stasis tubes, about to be awakened after a fourteen-year journey.

Once down, the transporters were there for good. They had been built in space and launched in space, for a one-way ticket to Earth. They had no propulsion system capable of breaking free of Earth’s gravity. Once they landed, they could never again get off the ground.

The Bzadians said they had come seeking refuge. Their own planet was dying, and they needed just a tiny corner of our world to call their own, to resettle their people. Their own world was a desert planet, and the inaccessible reaches of the Australian deserts suited them perfectly.

Earth governments could hardly refuse. Our first contact with an alien race was an opportunity to demonstrate the goodwill and compassion of the human race. The Australian government, although initially unsure, came under immense pressure from other countries to comply.

In 2015, the aliens lost a transporter when an equipment malfunction caused it to miscalculate its entry and damage its wings. It fell to Earth on the screens of every television channel on Earth. The slow-motion disaster happened over the course of a day, with Bzadians and humans alike helpless to stop it. Three thousand souls extinguished before they even had a chance to wake from stasis. The loss of that craft generated immense public sympathy for the newcomers and helped turn the Australian government’s opinion in their favor.

In any case, what choice did the Australians have? The aliens were already there. More transporters began to arrive. And more. Over 6,000 of the massive spaceships dotted the Australian desert before Earth governments began to sense that something was wrong. These first Bzadians were not mere settlers. They were assembling an army.

Alarmed at what they were seeing on satellite imagery, the Australian government hastily threw up a thin ring of defenses around its major cities. On June 17, 2020, “a day of inconceivable treachery,” the Bzadian Army attacked Australia’s defenses. The Australian Army stood no chance, and within days the cities belonged to the aliens.

The reason for the sudden, shocking attack became clear on July 2 that same year. The skies above Earth turned black as a huge armada approached. Those early transporters were no more than the first drops of a thunderstorm.

Australians were at first allowed, then encouraged, then forced to leave. Their homes and businesses, their schools and shops, were all required for the incoming Bzadian settlers.

Australia became New Bzadia.

Still the other governments of Earth dithered. Appeasement was the policy. Let them have Australia, they said. Nobody wants a war.

And so it was for over three years.

Then came the probing attacks northward to Papua New Guinea, northwest to Indonesia. New Zealand, to the east, was left alone. Too small, too isolated to be bothered with, although Bzadian aircraft made regular sweeps of the country to make sure Earth forces were not using it as a military base.

In Indonesia, one of the first countries to fall, the conquered population began a vicious guerrilla war against their occupiers. The Bzadian response was quick and brutal. The entire population was eliminated. The aliens were unrestrained by any kind of human morals and saw humans as a subspecies. An animal to be tamed and put to work, or put down if it turned on its master and no longer served a purpose.

The “cleansing” of Indonesia crossed all human boundaries: racial, religious, age, and gender. The alien invaders systematically cleared the country of humans as humans might rid a house of cockroaches. Some managed to escape; those who couldn’t, died.

Finally, the world responded. A line was drawn in the sand.

Battle commenced.

Southeast Asia fell quickly, with heavy casualties on the human side, and the invaders headed north. Even the combined weight of the great Asian armies could not hold the alien invaders. The huge landmasses of Asia were lost, along with their vast mineral resources.

Europe was next. The Russian scorched-earth policy slowed them but could not hold them back. The Bzadians had learned from human history and attacked Russia in the summer, the spinning hulls of their huge battle tanks decimating the massed armor of the Russian Army.

They spread west and east, conquering and subduing country after country. The Bzadians were confident that Earth’s primitive armies would be no match for their high-tech weapons.

And to some extent they were right. But what they hadn’t counted on was the incredible pace of human technological progress. They arrived expecting to fight weapons and machines they had seen in the 1960s. What they came up against were Earth’s armies of a new millennium. Stealth fighters, predator drones, and cruise missiles.

Humans had another advantage also. Satellite surveillance. The aliens had not been able to ship to Earth the rockets, nor the tons of rocket fuel required to break a payload free of Earth’s atmosphere. Launch facilities in Asia and Europe had been destroyed before they could fall into Bzadian hands. Humans knew what the Bzadians were doing. The Bzadians, for the most part, were blind.

Still, the outcomes of the land battles were never really in doubt. City by city, country by country, Earth fell to the Bzadians.

Finally, the aliens turned their attention to the Americas, the last outpost of humanity.

This presented a whole new problem for them. Geography. The Bzadians were not used to Earth’s vast reaches of water. Their own oceans were mainly subterranean, and their knowledge of boatbuilding was confined to rivercraft. They had no knowledge of submarines. A species that had evolved on a planet with little surface water found itself in a war on a planet where two-thirds of the surface was water.

Despite all the invaders’ victories, the oceans still belonged to the humans and were guarded by the strength of the combined human navies. The Bzadians’ heavy transport aircraft were only good for short distances, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans became a moat, defending Fortress America from attack.

Still the Bzadians tried. In 2026, they launched a massive invasion fleet and set course for American shores. A cloud of aircraft buzzed overhead, a protective screen designed to keep the human navies at bay.

It almost worked. The human navies retreated, under attack from a thousand stinging hornets. The invasion fleet surged forward, confident of victory, right into the trap that Earth forces had laid for them. Waiting silently beneath a thermocline, the submarines of forty nations were massed. Operating in concert, they allowed the alien fleet to enter a kill zone before simultaneously unleashing a storm of deadly torpedoes.

It was the first and last time the Bzadians tried a waterborne invasion.

But they did not give up. They attacked overland, crossing the frozen Bering Strait and driving into Alaska in the great Ice War of 2028. It was an ambitious and daring gamble, but the Bzadians were again beaten back as the U.S. forces used the ice itself as one of their most potent weapons. As the summer came and the frozen sea melted, the aliens withdrew, licked their wounds, and consolidated their gains.

The nations that made up North and South America, now collectively known as the Free Territories, watched and waited, preparing for the attacks they knew would come.

And every day the alien transporters kept arriving. The story about their planet dying was true. The part about needing just a small corner of Earth was not. They wanted it all.


Blackness became a murky world of luminous shapes, fading in and out of Chisnall’s vision like vague banks of cloud. He watched, fascinated by the changing shades and rippling patterns, as yet unconcerned by a total feeling of numbness. He felt no fear, no desperation. What would be, would be, and he could do nothing but watch.

The shapes were calling for him now, making terrible primal sounds. And they knew his name.

“Chiiiznaaal!”

“Ryyyaaan!”

One of them moved in for the kill, a dim oval sharpening into eyes, a nose, and fangs that flashed toward his neck.

Except it wasn’t aiming for his neck.

The lips sealed on his in a warm, salty kiss that was damp and tasted slightly of peppermint. A flood of hot, moist air flooded his chest. The pressure was too much. He couldn’t breathe. Then the lips were gone and the pressure released and the air fled from his lungs.

Again the lips closed on his own, but this time when the pressure released, he found the muscles that controlled his tongue and used them.

“What are you doing?” he asked, realizing that at best it was a blurry mumble. “I’m not dead!”

At that moment, pain hit him everywhere, all at once, a cacophony of agony.

Then the oval shape was back, not covering his face this time but next to it. Soft hands had found their way around his neck and were pulling him—no, just holding him, which sent the pain to a whole new level. But he said nothing and just felt the curves of the body cradling his. The face pulled away and he saw it was Sergeant Brogan, Holly Brogan.

“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” she asked.

He hated the way Brogan said that. “Leff-tenant.” There were no f’s in lieutenant. Why couldn’t Australians speak proper English?

“What’s your status, Lieutenant?”

He tested his arms, then his legs. They all seemed to work. That meant his back was okay as well. He reached up to his head, and his helmet came away in pieces in his hands. It had done exactly what it was supposed to do. It had absorbed the shock, destroying itself in the process but saving his life.

His back was on fire, as were his legs. In fact, his whole body felt like he had just gone twelve rounds in the ring against Easton Bunker, the battalion boxing champion, and he knew he’d be black and blue the next day. But nothing felt broken. The combat body armor he was wearing beneath his flight suit probably had something to do with that.

“What’s your status, Lieutenant?” Brogan repeated.

“Oscar Kilo,” Chisnall said weakly. “Oscar Kilo.”

He was lying on the floor of the desert. More accurately, he was lying in the floor of the desert. Embedded in it. The first impact he had felt had been the surface of the landing pad. The second had been when he made a small crater in the sand of the desert. As much as the partially inflated half-pipe, it had been the soft sand of Australia herself that had saved him.

The other members of the team were also there, gathered over him.

“Cheese and rice, LT,” Monster said. “You one lucky son of a bitch.”

“They don’t call him Lieutenant Lucky for nothing,” Hunter said.

He felt a gentle hand on his forehead. Brogan was leaning over him again, her eyes close to his, looking at his pupils for signs of concussion. Her hands felt their way around his head, pressing gently on his skull. He felt her breath on his cheek. “Are you injured, Leff-tenant?” Brogan asked. She was unclipping his body armor, her fingers probing his arms, his legs.

He said nothing and just let her do her work, feeling the pressure, the pain, as her fingertips explored the damaged areas of his body.

Brogan was the perfect soldier: highly trained and cold as ice. But inside her somewhere he knew there was a pretty normal sixteen-year-old girl. Someone with feelings. Some of them for him.

Chisnall shook his head and sat upright, ignoring the shriek of protest from his back. He rolled to one side and stood up on limbs that did not want to hold him. Brogan lent him an arm for support while he steadied himself.

He looked around. It was not as dark in the desert as he expected. Even without his night-vision gear, he could see the shape of mountains to the northeast. The desert floor itself seemed almost luminescent.

A whole night’s tabbing lay ahead of them. That was not going to be fun or easy with the state of his back and legs. But nobody had ever said this mission was going to be easy.


Each of them recovered their own gear, hauling in the fabric of the half-pipes in huge armfuls. Chisnall’s was still in one piece, although the casing had split open on contact with the desert, spilling the contents all around. The fabric of his landing pad was a large, tightly packed wad. While the others were busy with their gear, he levered open the control hatch with his utility knife, using his flashlight to peer inside.

The trigger in the unit’s nose cone should have fired a small explosive to blow the end off the main air cylinder and inflate the pad. The trigger mechanism, although mangled by the crash, looked functional. It was a very simple switch; there was not much that could go wrong with it.

The miniature motherboard was in pieces and there was little point in even looking at that. But if the motherboard was faulty, the system would not have shown as ready. He traced the wires along to the detonator. They looked fine. He slit open the left wire with his knife, exposing the metal core. Nothing wrong there. He slit open the right cable and gritted his teeth slightly.

There it was. Impossible to spot by visual inspection. The metal core of the wire had been removed and replaced with a narrow filament of fuse wire. It would conduct electricity and pass all the circuit tests, but as soon as a high voltage was applied to set off the detonator, it would melt, breaking the circuit. A gap in the wire testified that that was exactly what had happened.

Somebody wanted him dead.


A FACC-E (free-fall air-cushioned container—equipment) had dropped with them. They spread out to search for its signal with their locator packs, with Hunter and Price staying put to dig a big pit in the sand.

“Got it, LT.” Monster’s normally huge, booming voice was unusually quiet on the comm, reminding Chisnall that they were deep behind enemy lines.

Monster and Wilton brought it in, and they all retrieved the gear they would need for the mission. Night-vision goggles. Bzadian helmets and weapons. Backpacks full of supplies. Everything that had been too dangerous or too heavy to carry with them on the half-pipe drop.

Into the pit went all the half-pipes and cylinders, along with their flight suits and helmets. Brogan tossed in a thermite grenade on a ten-minute timer, and they hurried to fill the pit in, completely burying the gear before they heard the sizzle and felt the heat of the explosion through the sand.

Chisnall slid on his NV goggles and looked around at his team. They stood in a circle, fully kitted up, fully armed.

“God, you’re ugly,” he said.

Each member of the team had had bone extensions added to their skulls to give their heads the elongated “corn kernel” shape of the aliens. Their skin had been discolored with chemicals that would take years to fade, giving them the mottled green and yellow skin of the alien invaders.

The alien combat helmets they wore were slightly elongated, with a metal rim forming a visor at the front. They also came lower over the ears than most human styles of helmets. The body armor was black and ridged in odd places. Markings on their armor identified them as members of the Bzadian 35th Scout Battalion. Satellite surveillance gave them a good picture of which Bzadian unit was where, and the 35th Scouts had been transferred to Uluru from Perth just the day before.

“Yeah, and you look like something I once left on the sick bay floor at school,” Price said, sticking out her forked tongue at him. They had all had the operation, splitting the ends of their tongues in two, like a snake’s. Physically at least, they were alien soldiers—“Pukes.” So named because their skin looked like the contents of a vomit bag.

“We going kill scumbugz, yezzz,” Wilton said in a thick Bzadian accent, effortlessly imitating the strange, buzzing speech of the aliens. “Going kill lotz scumbugz. This our planet now.”

Chisnall smiled briefly and pulled a GPS mapping tablet out of his top utility pocket, wincing as the muscles in his back and arm objected to the movement. A flashing orange light indicated their position, and a steady green light showed the location of their target.

“We made good distance,” he said. “GPS shows us less than two hundred klicks from our target.”

“Dude, that is, like, forever,” Wilton muttered.

“Yeah, and if we’d bailed when you first started whining, it would have been four hundred klicks,” Brogan said.

Chisnall nodded. Every extra second on the aircraft was almost a kilometer closer to the target.

“Okay, we’re Oscar Mike in five. We’ll head east until we strike the riverbed,” he said. “We’ll follow that north, past Mount Morris. Cross the highway and tab overland past Benda Hill up to Uluru. We should do it in four days, if you ladies don’t want to stop for a manicure and a back massage.”

“Hear that, Wilton?” Price asked. “No more manicures for you.”

“Are we there yet?” Hunter grinned.

“You do that all the way, Hunter, and I’m going to hand you over to the Pukes myself,” Brogan said.

“Daddy, Mummy’s picking on me,” Hunter said.

Chisnall ignored him. “Price, did your scope survive the drop okay?”

“Fully functional,” Price said.

The scope was a handheld radar system carried by Bzadian soldiers. Theirs had come from a POW.

“Okay, don’t take your eyes off it,” Chisnall said. “First sign of enemy mobiles, ground or air, and we hit the deck. Cover yourself with your camo sheet and do not move. Is that clear?”

“Not even to scratch arse?” Monster asked.

“They won’t see you under your camo, and their thermals won’t pick you up either. But they will pick up movement. Once you’re down, you don’t move a muscle, even if a dingo starts chewing on your leg.”

“Rules of engagement, skipper?” Brogan asked.

Chisnall looked at her. “We’re in enemy territory,” he said. “There are no friendlies here. We might encounter alien civilians; we might encounter children. If it has a gun, then you are cleared to engage. But remember: as far as anyone knows, we are Bzadian soldiers. We don’t want to fire unless fired upon.”

He tucked away the tablet and stood up, looking around again at the vast nothingness of the Australian desert.

“Okay, weapons check,” he said. “Hunter, check the laser comms unit too. We’re in trouble if that didn’t survive the drop.”

They couldn’t afford to use radio to communicate with base. The chances of the Bzadians picking up the transmissions were just too great. The laser comms unit fired a precise burst of laser energy at an exact spot in the sky, where a geo-stationary satellite was ready to receive it. It was completely undetectable unless you happened to be in the path of the beam, and since it transmitted for microseconds at a time, that was highly unlikely.

Chisnall checked his own weapons, starting with his coil-gun, a stubby-looking Bzadian rifle that used magnetic fields rather than explosive propellant to fire projectiles. Underneath was a stubby grenade launcher that held two grenades. The rifle clipped onto a spring-loaded bracket across his back. He hit the release button on his right shoulder and the weapon instantly swung up over his shoulder and into his waiting hands. He moved the gun back over his shoulder, ignoring the protests from his back, and felt the automatic holster grab it from him. His sidearm was a needle-gun. It fired long, narrow needles that had incredible range and accuracy.

The others all indicated their weapons were okay.

“Diagnostics on the laser comms all read positive,” Hunter said. “We’re good to go.”

“Good,” Chisnall said. “Send the first signal now: ‘All down safely, proceeding to the first waypoint.’ ”

“All down safely, proceeding to the first waypoint.” Hunter confirmed the message before keying it in. He unfolded tripodlike legs from the unit and found a relatively flat place to put it. When he activated it, the laser swiveled, automatically orienting itself to a signal from the satellite. There was a brief flash from the top of the unit.

“Message sent and confirmed received,” Hunter said. He packed away the comms unit into his backpack.

“Okay, we’re Oscar Mike. Tactical column. Hunter, you’re on point,” Chisnall said. “Everybody, focus on your sectors. Price’s scope won’t necessarily pick up foot mobiles. Use your NV and watch for any sign of movement.”

Hunter set a brisk pace. Chisnall followed at the rear of the team, struggling on leaden legs. Six Pukes tabbing through the middle of the desert. That was what they looked like. Whether it would be enough to fool any spotters that happened to see them, he wasn’t sure.

He didn’t dwell on it. There were other things on his mind.

Someone wanted him dead.

He had spent an hour in Angel Chariot’s bomb bay before the mission, personally checking all the half-pipes, including the wires. They had all been fine. After that, the plane had been under heavy guard. Chisnall had been told to expect trouble on this mission. It wasn’t specified, but it was clear that no one was to be trusted. No one.

But the traitor had made their way into a top-secret, heavily guarded hangar, levered open the control unit, replaced the wire, and closed the unit, right under the noses of the guards. It would have taken a ghost to do that.

The sheer audacity of it was unbelievable.

Only six people apart from him had access to that hangar. One of them, the pilot of Angel Chariot, had died over the Australian desert.

The other five were all here with him.