Free Conquest ~ Indian Hill 3 ~ A Michael Talbot Adventure by Mark Tufo Page B

some ratty- as s discovery ship but for a full- blown Battle Cruiser . H e nearly growled in anticipation, but while he was still under the thumb of that incompetent fool , he would do his best to make sure that his head stayed rested firmly on his neck.
    The alien fighters and heavy bombers launched within minutes of the order. They had already been on a high alert status. Even with the unaided eye , people knew trouble was coming, like a giant meteor shower the ships lit up the night sky. Those who could , sought shelter under ground. Some took up refuge in school buildings and town halls — the more prudent or at least more realistic took up sanctuary at their local churches. The attack was furious, swift, global and devastating. What little infrastructure had remained from the previous attack was now completely obliterated. The alien bombers were completely foreign to anything the E arth had been exposed to previously . T hey didn’t so much as drop bombs as they let go of an energy ball roughly fifteen feet in diameter from the under belly of the vessel about five hundred feet from the ground . I t stop ped and explode d , the effect was not unlike that of a giant soap bubble on the ground . W hen it burst roughly twenty seconds after forming, everything from skyscrapers to blades of grass were sucked up into the vortex caused by the collapsing bubble, a mile across by almost half that length high of material was crushed into matter no bigger than a London double decker bus. What mathematicians that were still alive tried every calculation they could to figure out how it was even possible . B ubble bombs were dropped on every major metropolitan area on the planet. The effects were devastating and instantaneous. Hundreds of millions died in what the aliens called a war, whereas humanity saw it as wholesale slaughter. The few thousand jets that were able to be mustered and flown did some damage but not enough to stop the carnage. Two days after the bombings ceased, the ground troops began to land . R ight as people thought the worst was over, as the old adage goes, they hadn’t seen anything yet. Devastator troops didn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians or domestic animals for that matter. They shot at everything that moved.
    Indian Hill suffered no damage in those first few days of the occupation. But Boston twelve miles northe ast was for the most part a memory now. Th at was something even die hard Yankees fans would not have ever wished. All communications had ceased from the once major metropolitan area because there was no one or nothing to deliver a message. The aliens set up one of their major headquarters a little south of Boston in Dedham . R esistance was brief and for the most part futile. People did harbor some hope when they realized their weapons could inflict damage but that was briefly lived when the return fire started . Scouting reports and shortwave communications made the reality even more disconcerting than what many had only imagined as being the worst case scenario. The only major city left standing on the eastern seaboard of the United States was Washington DC and that more as a political maneuver than an oversight. The aliens , it seemed , wanted the carnage to stop almost as much as humanity did, but for far more sinister reas ons, at the rate people were dy ing it would become increasingly difficult to be able to harvest them as a valuable resource. The President acquiesced, there was no choice, he either surrendered or watched what little was left of his country crumble, there would be no third term fo r him even if it was allowable under the current Constitution . The aliens mustered their biggest forces in what was once the hub of the free world, every American monument was torn down. Every flag replaced and every remaining person was interred in make - shift holding areas. Many died in the first few days of captivity , most because of shock and hopelessness Many more would