Free How I Conquered Your Planet by John Swartzwelder Page B

we
expected, we finally managed to get our troops onto the ground for the land
battle. After all, you can’t surrender to a flying saucer. You have to
surrender to the space monster that slithers out of it.
    I put down my saucer a few miles outside of Central City. We
slithered out and immediately ran into some teenagers who were necking in a
convertible. The girls were horrified by our appearance and screamed so much we
had to drag them into our saucer to get them to shut-up.
    My men liked the way they could make teenage Earth girls
scream.
    “ Let’s make more girls scream,” said one of them.
    “ Aye aye, Private,” said another.
    “ Belay that order,” I said sternly. “We’ve got work to do.”
    We formed into columns and struck out for the city. We met
little resistance at first; a few small Earth scouting parties, a suspicious
farmer who we finally managed to kill, and a few more teenage girls. So before
long we could claim a string of unimportant, but important, victories.
    The main reason for these victories was my battle strategy, or
lack of same, which I’ve already described to you (The Burly Maneuver). I kept
my men going straight for our objective, ignoring the roads and bridges,
climbing trees we easily could have walked around, and so on. This is
unorthodox, because it is a bad idea, and it confuses the enemy, who were
expecting to be fighting something that made sense. Think again, Earthman.
    Since the Earthmen knew they were fighting aliens from another
planet, they tried various experimental methods to defeat us. They tried
different sound frequencies on me but none of them worked. I like sound
frequencies. Nonetheless, I discouraged that sort of thing as much as I could.
You never know - the next crackpot idea might work. “Form a protective cordon
around me men,” I told my boys. “We can’t afford to lose me. I’m getting paid
the most.”
    As we got closer to the city, we ran up against fewer
suspicious farmers and more trained troops. During these battles I kept
coughing on the enemy by mistake as I was fighting with them. That Martian Flu
just wouldn’t go away.
    “ Sorry,” I said as I coughed repeatedly in an attacker’s face.
“Sorry. Sorry.”
    “ Cough the other way when you’re fighting can’t you?”
    “ I’ll try.”
    But in the heat of the battle, I often forgot to cough the
other way.
    The more I fought and coughed, the more the enemy troops
started to cough.
    The battles had all gone our way at first, but in the long run
being unorthodox is no match for knowing what you’re doing, so soon my various
battle groups began losing. The enemy would hide behind a tree, for example,
then wait for my men to start climbing it. Then they would set fire to that
tree.
    My subordinates were afraid to tell me when things started to
go wrong. They started bringing in overly optimistic battle reports.
    “ How’d that battle go, Lieutenant?”
    “ Great!”
    “ Is there something wrong with your leg?”
    “ No, it’s great.”
    “ Because it looks like it’s bleeding.”
    “… it’s great.”
    Well, warfare shouldn’t be all work. It’s bad for morale. Since
we were winning so handily, according to the glowing reports I had been
getting, I decided to show my men I was a regular guy just like them, not the
battle hardened thinking machine I appeared to be.
    “ Since everything’s going so great, Lieutenant, order the men to
put down all their weapons in a big pile and have a party.”
    “ Uh…” He hesitated.
    I became impatient. “Now, Lieutenant.”
    “ Yes sir.”
    Before the party could really get going, while the first record
was still playing in fact, we were attacked again. This time in force. We
quickly found ourselves pinned down and being fired upon from all sides.
    I began firing off commands: “Third Battle Group – stop
dancing!... Burly’s Rangers – turn off that music!... All units – find your
weapons!”
    My men began sorting through the