Free Burnout (The Invasion Chronicles Book 1) by Alex Barnett

realization sank in that they wouldn’t, that either the world was dealing with something on a completely different scale from any human understanding of life…
    Or the world was facing a fully automated fleet. 
    The Invasion raged for almost a year, claiming casualties in every nation on Earth…but eventually the tide had turned.  New alliances formed during the war were put to the test, governments and nations that had stayed out of the conflict—or even fought on the wrong side of it—reached out, wishing to join forces in the face of complete extinction.  The tide had turned.  Victories became more decisive; the skies were slowly reclaimed.  A month before Lydia’s great-grandmother gave birth to Grandpa in a military hospital down in Florida, the last invading ships were finally brought down. 
    And the whole world changed forever. 
    The Invasion fleet had been huge, big enough for multiple ships over every continent in the world, and that wasn’t even counting the smaller attack vessels.  The amount of wreckage had been enormous.  Most of it had been cleared away in the first decade after victory was declared, nation after nation snatching up as much of it as they could to study the technology.  The leaps made in science and engineering in the years following Invasion had been incredible, unprecedented in human history.  
    Almost overnight, great leaps were made in transport, in energy, in communications, in military infrastructure and weapons, in architecture.  Post-Invasion tech seeped into every aspect of life.  Even fields that hadn’t been jumpstarted by the study of Invasion technology had benefitted.  There were whole academic circles devoted to theories of what medicine, psychology, art, and history might have been like had humanity not advanced so quickly in other areas, freeing up time and funding to pursue those fields.  There was no one on Earth who had not had their lives irrevocably altered by Invasion. 
    Then there were the “leftovers.”
    Even decades of scavenging tech from the Invasion fleet hadn’t been able to clean up all of it.  At least a few times a year, something broke on the news about some new Invasion-era relic being discovered.  People all over the world stumbled upon remnants of the fleet that washed up on beaches, or turned them up in fields during planting season or construction.  When Lydia was seven, one of her classmates brought a defunct onboard computer from a real Invasion fighter vessel—apparently something his dog had dug up in their back yard. 
    Most often, the leftovers were harmless.  Half-destroyed and missing parts, with power sources that had died years ago.  Some…were not.  It didn’t happen often, but occasionally someone found a relic that was still active.  Weapons, ballistics, explosives.  A fully-functional attack drone discovered by a Filipino fishing crew nearly touched off an international incident when no less than five nations tried to claim it for salvage.  Such finds were rare, though, and had been for many years. 
    Until the Burnouts appeared, that is.  No one doubted the Burnouts were the result of an Invasion relic.  That question was settled.  Unfortunately, that was the only question that had been settled before the Burnouts basically collapsed society in every nation on Earth.  No one knew what kind of weapon or artifact had been activated—if it was a weapon, or the Burnouts were just some side effect of a previously unknown aspect of Invasion technology.  No one had been able to figure out where the first Burnouts had come from, nor how they spread so quickly.
    Grandpa had tried to hide it from them, but Lydia and Ava knew there was more than one military institution operating under the theory that this was some final stage of the Invasion that had somehow been prevented all those decades ago.  Or that the Burnouts signaled the return of whatever alien race had sent the first ships…that the Invaders had