Be Excellent To Each Other

This was written a fair whiles ago shortly after the 2005 movie came out. I haven't really touched it since, maybe I will add to it again sometime. Anyway, it's a fictional history of the invasion. Hope you enjoy it, if you like the sci-fi invadey world of WotW. I haven't written anything remotely similar since, everything subsequent being resolutely non-scifi character pieces with occassional mild urban fantasy. (Aside from the big secret project, natch, that I'm incredibly tardy on writing.)

ANYWAY -

THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT INVASION

A Commissioned UN Study Summarised by

(Nervous Pete!)


INTRODUCTION

Ten years have passed since the great invasion.

What more needs to be said? Only the children of this world know nothing of that horror. It something of which no man, woman or child spends more than an hour without remembering with a shudder – and yet remains something very difficult to talk about. To varying shades of severity, the majority of everybody’s experiences were alike. That fact alone would appear to render such a publication as this pointless and even worse, belittling.

But there remain questions, and the need of a history for posterity. If this work can bring more people to write about their experiences, then maybe we will be better prepared if this cataclysm ever strikes again. Although many believe that if they returned, nothing this time could stop them.

So let us look at the facts objectively, for we owe it to the dead, and to our children to record this despite the pain of reflection. This journal will be publicised in chapters in all the major newspapers, one a day for the same time the alien invasion lasted. The project will eventually be linked with the definitive global documentary film made by Godfrey Reggio, Ang Lee and Peter Weir, due to premiere.

The invasion lasted for seventeen days; this study covers not only the possible method and motive for and of the attack, but the history and progression of the invasion. Added are sample interviews with survivors, to remind us that for all the theorising and dry facts, this history is one of horror and heroism.

CHAPTER ONE

DAY ONE

HOW DID THEY GET HERE?


A year ago Walter Alvarez, son of Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, set up a global scientific committee to answer this very question. The study, entitled the somewhat whimsical ‘E.T Technique’, has already made startling discoveries.

By using GIR (Ground Impulse Radar) the traces of ten sample tripod shafts were located. The information was scanned and vectored using SeiScan Geodata and the results used to locate the source of the tripod. Steerable BORAIS-VNIIBT Turbodrills were then used to dig down to the origin point. The standard depth appeared to be ten thousand six hundred feet, where a largely intact egg shaped cavern was commonly found. Within these caverns additional alien hardware measuring twenty feet across was found, being an enhanced version of the shield technology used by the tripods themselves. This shield, operating on its own power source, kept the tripod cylinders safe from tectonic shift and the pressure of the surrounding rock. The power source was a separate unit, and after the tripod burrowed to the surface, self-destructed.

After extensive study of ground shift patterns and the radioactive half-life of the power source residue, it seems that the tripods were introduced to this earth over six thousand years ago in the form of cylinders that buried into the earth.


The discovery of the wreckage of advanced alien technology orbiting the planet reveals further information about the aliens’ arrival. It is now believed that the cylinders were accelerated to a velocity close to light speed. At the same time, ‘slow-boats’ were launched housing the alien pilots in suspended animation. Six thousand years later, the slow-boats arrived and the aliens awoke, first taking up a geo-synchronous orbit over Eastern Russia. The vessels then launched capsules which were matter compressed to slip through the atomic structure of the rock, riding a volley of charged particle beams into the target tripods. Analysing the results of Cerenkon and Coulomb interactions, we believe that these beams were probably comprised of cold plasma of a hydrogen and helium mixture, operating at an extremely low temperature.

The charging and ‘anchoring’ of the beam’s path took some time to implement – up to two hours before the first particle beam was engaged. The charging over the target area caused curious atmospheric disturbances – the strange vortex and lights in the sky being similar to an aurora borealis, accompanied by swirling clouds formed by rapid temperature drops.

The curiously small size of the capsules caught on video can be explained by the phase transition of this matter compression. The capsule flashed through the target tripod; at once phase shifting the aliens back to our plane and depositing them before continuing its way further underground, where it presumably disintegrated. The oft-reported freezing rock phenomenon was a side-effect of the matter compression beam.

The charged beam had additional properties. Firstly it bore a thin path approximately six inches wide through the earth to the tripod cylinder itself, weakening the rock above the machine and allowing greater ease in its burying. Secondly the beam unleashed, either intentionally or otherwise, an electromagnetic pulse. This pulse affected all electronics attached to a power source. Only electronics that were switched off at the time and were given replacement batteries, or had their existing battery’s poles reversed, were able to function. Hardened military circuits and batteries also proved very resistant, sometimes surviving close misses of several miles. The pulse itself is considered to be a milder version of that unleashed by atomic weaponry. The range of the EMP blast did not stretch for more than forty miles around each beam, and the damage to electronics was consistently weaker than the standard result of an atmospheric nuclear detonation.

It is believed that the awakened tripod then took control of the cylinder, which began to blast a path to the surface using a variation on the matter-compression beam and the disintegrator beam. The cylinder lid, akin to a bore drill with teeth, rotated and dug upwards churning the ground ahead of it. This was responsible for some of the 'ground rotation' above it, where the ground would break apart and move with the 'swirl' of the cylinder. As it dug towards the surface, loose rock and earth filled the shaft in its wake. When it reached the surface a large crater formed as the surface rock and soil slipped into the remaining shaft space, finally sealing it off. This total action accounts for the destructive seismic tremors in the immediate vicinity of the tripod entry point. The cylinder, almost completely obscured by dust and debris, then opened, unleashing the tripod.

Obviously the technology used for this is beyond our current understanding, and represents scientific theory and practice of which we are not even fully aware of yet. The scientific community is pretty much resigned to being unable to fully understand the methods used, the oft quoted late Arthur C Clarke line being, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”


The ships covered the northern hemisphere first - ‘blitzing’ Russia, the Ukraine and Europe on the first day, Northern America and Canada on the second day, and the Pacific and Japan on the third. Another invasion force, six hours behind then swung over the equator and the southern hemisphere, invading Australia, China, India and the Asian territories on the first day, Africa on the second and South America on the third.

The dispersal patterns of the tripods were primarily clustered on the larger continents and islands. Smaller volcanic islands appear to have been avoided. This explains the absence of tripods throughout the invasion on Sicily, Montserrat, Hawaii and Iceland. The number of tripods deployed also dwindles considerably on the equator, which is believed to be due to the red weed suffering under more barren conditions, requiring the presence of much moisture. Some larger islands were also curiously neglected, New Zealand had no tripods and neither did Sri Lanka, Corsica or Cuba. This has led to a cult belief that the countries had been blessed, and also explains why immigration is so high for those countries. Scientists more pragmatically contribute the blessing to recent volcanic activity that formed the islands.


APPROXIMATE TRIPOD DISPERSAL


APPROXIMATE TRIPOD DISPERSAL


Russia – 1300
Ukraine – 600
Eastern Europe – 440
Western Europe – 360
UK – 100
Mediterranean - 250

North America – 1400
Canada – 420
Alaska - 20

Central America – 700

South America – 860

Africa – 90
Middle East - 240

China – 1800
East Asia – 400

India & Pakistan - 900
Australia – 140
Japan - 80

Total: 10,100


It has been theorised that there remain even more tripods buried, either waiting for another slow boat or as ‘back-up copies’ in case of failed underground shielding, or tripods being too far removed from population centres to be effective. What appears to have happened in the alien planning is that they predicted what territories would provide the greatest source of food production and civilization and so sowed the majority of machines thusly. Hence the large numbers in North America, Russia, South America and China and the relatively small numbers in Africa and the Middle East.

CHAPTER TWO

DAY ONE

PLAN OF ATTACK + THE FIRST MOVE

Kiev was the capital of the Ukraine, a bustling city of some three million inhabitants. Located on the banks of the Dnipro River, it was a scenic population centre surrounded by wooded hills. Famed for its arts, Kiev had a world class Opera House and two famed theatres, the popularist Kyiv Young Theatre and the innovative Ivan Franko Theatre.

In the summer of 2004, it enjoyed the highest tourism revenue it had since the Chernobyl disaster, and the world was beginning to forget its association with that particular horror, and of the horrendous artistic and industrial damage it suffered during the Second World War. Kiev had endured hard times, but a cautious optimism flourished.

Bad luck comes in threes. Kiev is now famed for having been the first city invaded by the tripods.

Yuri Chebankov was a postman in the central district of Kiev. At ten am on the third of September he was walking to the Operetta building. Having finished his morning shift, with a two hour break in the day to enjoy, he had decided to visit Linka Cerusa, a young woman who worked in a large bookstore on the corner of the nine story building.

“I had some pastries and I knew it was time for her morning break. I was about to open the door when there was a great flash from behind me. It came from the vicinity of the Central Metro station. Everybody had been talking about the very unusual weather that morning, of the clouds and the lights in the sky, so lightning did not surprise me. But then there were another three bolts in rapid succession, and I said to myself, ‘There is no thunder’, and I became a little scared. I stepped inside and the lights went out. I thought it was a power-cut at first.”

Yuri joined Linka in the staff room on the third floor. They looked out of the window at the street below.

“All the cars had stopped. Every Russian knows that that is what happens when a nuclear device is detonated, and at first we were a little worried that the Chechens had done something. Meanwhile lightning was still hitting the Central Metro Station. There was smoke coming from the roof where the lightning hit. We all knew that lightning doesn’t strike twice, but none of us said it. It was a little too weird to accept. Then to our relief the lightning stopped. We sat and talked by the window for ten minutes, trying to guess at what it could have been. Linka thought it must have been solar flares that had caused it; and I agreed with her, since I was in love.”

At this moment in time, the tripod would have been burying up through the earth at an approximate rate of 3.6 feet a second. Fifteen minutes later it was nearing the surface.

“All of a sudden there was a little tremor, nothing alarming, just something like as if a heavy truck had passed by, only there was nothing moving outside. Still, we did not worry. Then a little kick and another tremor, and then we felt a sustained rumbling underfoot. We could see ripples in the glasses of orange squash before us. Everything was trembling; it was becoming a little violent. Then we heard some crashing outside, and we looked out the window and saw that a portion of the Central Station had collapsed, and the roof was split in two. There was a great deal of dust. There was no doubt in our minds now that it was an earthquake, and we were quite concerned. Linka’s manager was talking about evacuating the building for form’s sake.”

The tripod had emerged within the main foyer of the station, and as it burst through the roof it claimed the first victims of the war, as the eastern portion collapsed crushing dozens of commuters.

“We heard this almighty noise, like a foghorn crossed with a tuba. I don’t need to tell you what that was! It sent shivers down our spines. We turned to look and there was this black shape looming over the station. It rose higher and higher, and we saw that it looked like a metal boiler on stilts, with a great glowing eye and swaying tentacles. We froze for a moment, and then I realized that… well, something like that clearly cannot be good and that we should hide immediately. I ran to the cupboards and filled my post bag full of biscuits, grabbed some meat and cheese from the fridge, some bottle water. Linka wanted to stay and watch but I twisted her arm and dragged her down the stairs and out onto the street. There were people running everywhere. Then I heard this noise… the tripod was three hundred yards distant but I could hear it very easily, it sounded like an arc amp being switched on and off. I heard things smashing and all this screaming. Now I knew of this workman’s tent covering a manhole, it had been there for days. Fortunately Linka had become too stunned to make any protest as I dragged her to it. To get under ground, that was my idea. I pulled her into the manhole with me. Fortunately it was dry down there; it was a long cable and pipe line, not a sewer. I lay down on top of her as dust fell about our ears, and the screams grew louder overhead. Soon we smelt smoke, but we were wise not to emerge. The tripod had been burning the street.”

The tripods actions were indicative of their behaviour upon emerging. After running through a short status check, the machine would power up its weapons before testing them out fully on anything within sight. This process could go on for up to a dozen minutes before the tripod finally moved onto a planned objective. It seemed to be testing the available power, stamina, range and effectiveness of its weapons. It fired at individual moving targets to test its accuracy and reactions, and then at larger ones to test power and range. There were ten tripods that emerged within Kiev. Within twenty minutes, they had killed one sixth of its population.

Yuri stayed underground for the next two weeks, only emerging to hunt for food and water, always keeping an eye out. He set up a system of mirrors so that he could see around street corners, and make sure nothing could sneak up on him.

“I was lucky and I had a head on my shoulders. My grandfather had survived the gulags, my father Stalingrad… we were born lucky, we Chebankovs. The tripods seemed to do most of their hunting in the suburbs and country. I don’t think they reckoned on anyone surviving in the city centre. The only problem was the stench of the dead, they were everywhere… and the human dust… the human dust covered everything. We only drank bottled water and wore damp towels around our faces. The rats seemed as scared as we did, and we didn’t really see many around! Occasionally we heard the tripods and firing, but we didn’t leave the city until three weeks later, when some survivors came along and told us that the tripods had died. It may sound irresponsible to say that Linka and I made a baby that second week… but we were getting quite scared and alone, and we became involved.”

Yuri was the first one to keep his wits about him and was one of the luckiest of the survivors. He is now a deputy mayor of Kiev, helping to oversee reconstruction and is married with one boy. Kiev was lucky in one way: it never had the black smoke deployed against it. If it had, then the dead could have numbered three million, instead of the two and a half million disintegrated, vaporised, crushed and burned in the city.

It is time to speak of the tripods themselves. They came in various sizes, no two exactly the same. Scientists studied the dead machines and concluded that they were a mixture of organics and metals, and that the aliens had found a way to ‘grow’ metal, flesh, muscle, veins and wires to fit a frame, much like coral. It is this unique building process that meant that no tripod was exactly the same in design or height. Some carried all the weapons, some only one type. All were at least one hundred feet tall however, and a few reached as high as three hundred and forty. The weapons were as followed:

Narrow Disintegrators: These were anti-personal weapons designed to destroy organic matter selectively. They were commonly mounted on two tentacles on the left and right of the hood.

Wide Disintegrators: These were the same weapons, but set to a wider beam, sometimes disintegrating a path sixty feet wide. Not all tripods used them, suggesting that some lacked the power requirements due to favouring different weapons or devices.

Newton Cannon: So named because it seems to work on the same principle as Newton’s physics. The Newton cannon creates a wave-charge manifested in pale green light that violently pushes objects, at its most effective creating thousands of pounds of pressure to the square inch. It was mainly used against road links, bridges, rail, shipping and buildings. Sometimes it was employed against aircraft. It was mounted in the centre of the hood, seen as the large glowing circle of light or ‘the eye of the Cyclops’ as it was nicknamed by many. Also known as ‘block-busters’ for their widespread levelling of city blocks.

Plasma cannons: These were mounted on two swivel guns just under the hood. They were mainly used to take out armoured targets and were capable of a rapid rate of fire.

The destruction of Kiev went largely unnoticed by the rest of the world for the first two hours simply because barely anybody lived long enough to deliver a coherent message. Even the rest of the Ukraine was unaware, although within half an hour more machines would spring up over the country, killing many more.

It would be another two hours before the first military units began to respond. It would be another four before foreign governments became aware that something was happening in the Ukraine. As for the public throughout the world, the great majority were unaware until the attack began, due to the failure of communications, or silence on the authorities part.

This policy of silence was to ensure that the vital transport routes remained relatively unblocked by stalled cars or traffic jams, allowing emergency services and military units to respond to the attack. It is doubtful that any warning would have been effective. There was no way of knowing where the tripods would emerge; it was an even chance whether it would be in the country or in the city, as the distribution was locally quite random. And if you didn’t run and hide at the first site of the tripod, then you were a very rare sort of person.

Two hours after the attack on the Ukraine, cities and towns in Western Russia, the Baltic States and the Easternmost European countries suddenly fell silent.

The invasion had begun.

CHAPTER THREE

DAY ONE

THE INVASION OF EUROPE AND RUSSIA & THE DAWNING REALISATION

Kiev was the first central target in a battlefield that stretched from Bucharest to Moscow. Two hours later the lightning would strike and the machines would arise in Kaluga, Volgograd, Moscow and St. Petersburg - Odessa, Minsk and Warsaw.

At this point something strange happens. After having engaged with weaponry for five minutes the tripods suddenly stopped moving and firing and stood still for a period of thirty minutes. Then they continued their assault. It is still unknown as to why this happened, but it afforded a few opportunities for intrepid reporters and cameramen to take a look at what was going on. None of the material managed to be broadcast at the time, but after the war several tapes were discovered. The most famous shows the ‘dusting’ of a crowd of refugees fleeing over the Kremlin bridges. It remains an example of the precise and clinical horror of the alien attack.

The half an hour grace allowed for one concrete result: the clarification for world governments that an alien invasion was taking place in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Ukraine.



Gerhard Schroeder, one of the few surviving pre-war leaders speaks of the dawning realisation.

“I was in a café in Bonn when my mobile phone went off. I received a certain code that meant that I had to take shelter immediately, in the nearest safe-house if possible. I remember putting a large note on the café table, and the smile of the waitress as she saw the denomination. The car was idling outside, I got in and it sped me to just outside the city, to a converted underwater reservoir. Back then, in happier times, those types of bunkers were quite rare and I am thankful for its proximity. After my arrival it would have only been another two hour before the lightning started and the cars went dead.”

The bunker was one held over from the days of the cold war, kept in working order in case a terrorist organisation employed a nuclear device, or one of Germany’s reactors went critical. It was heavily shielded and well concealed. On the ordnance survey maps, it still read as a reservoir.

“I talked some more over the phone. The call was from our foreign embassy in Moscow. Somehow they had gotten the old EMP hardened hotline working and were frantically giving us what they knew. I couldn’t believe it. My people thought they were drunk at first. Then they thought that they had witnessed a horrific terrorist attack and were somehow confused in their reports – shocked and delirious. But the persistency of the calls, and a matching report from Warsaw, persuaded them to give me a call. They were reliable people. We’re not known as jokers, as you know. The reports spoke of great metal machines that had come out of the ground and were killing everyone. They spoke of the Kremlin being razed. I sat down and couldn’t stop grinning. A nervous reaction, it was all so strange. It was fortunate I had good staff in there. They brought me some good whiskey. I picked up the phone…”

Schroeder phoned the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry. He ordered satellite information to be sent to his bunker, and for the armed forces to stand on alert. A certain secret plan was put into action, called Operation Security Blanket. This was to impose a complete takeover of media services and the alerting of all emergency services to be prepared for any type of attack. Fighter jets were scrambled and leave was cancelled.

“It may seem hard to believe that such an action was ordered on such scant evidence, but I had long had a nightmare for the past few years that something terrible might happen and that our nation had to be prepared. I faced the possibility that I might have to look an utter fool and risk political ruin to prepare our populace for any sudden threat. The reports from Moscow and Warsaw, from reliable people, and the sketchy reports of great clouds of smoke from the cities from certain radio stations, persuaded me. Had Putin and the other leaders been able to send a warning in time, more lives might have been saved. The aliens seemed to pinpoint and destroy our command and control centres with terrible accuracy in the first hour…”

Most of all, Schroeder attributes his daring response to the odd feeling he had in the preceding months. “Premonition, I’m surprised that more people didn’t have it. I knew something was coming. Now I read of people both high and low having had the same feelings. Most dismissed them. I hear that Jose Zapatero had the same premonitions, most specific ones that saved his life.”

Despite Schroeder’s uneasy anticipation, the vast majority of the global population suspected nothing and were taken completely unawares by the invasion. Still, it is interesting to note that across the world, certain drawings were made of the tripods by children in the months leading up to the invasion. The machines certainly bear an eerie resemblance to John Christopher’s famous 1970’s work, ‘The Tripod Trilogy’, right down to the tentacles.

Schroeder made calls to his fellow governments, attempting to co-ordinate affairs. He was horrified to find that none of them had taken any action beyond moving their threat indicators up a notch, and sending in reconnaissance flights. As a report came in of German Air Traffic Control suddenly losing contact with twelve German flights over Polish airspace, and the further urgent broadcast reporting dozens of other radar signatures fading from the screens, Schroeder ordered his military on full alert and sent an urgent bulletin begging all foreign governments to do the same.

Twelve minutes later, the lights flickered and died in the bunker and the ventilation fans ceased whirring. A frantic ten minutes of engaging back up systems and the electronics were back on line, but no contact could be made with the outside world.

The blitz over Germany had begun.

Two hours earlier Russia had succeeded in engaging its first armoured units against the tripods. Two divisions of T72 tanks supported by BTR80's moved up against tripods outside St Petersburg, twelve miles south. They were at two thirds strength, the replaced solenoids having decayed in storage for a sizable quantity, or the installations having been fumbled. Two dozen Hind attack helicopters supported the attack with rocket pods and wire guided missiles. Three squadrons of SU-27 Flankers went in at low altitude, and one squadron of 'Badger' Bombers commenced carpet bombing.

The attacks destroyed an entire suburb of one of Petersburg's satellite naval town of Kronstadt on the Neva River, but failed to penetrate any of the tripods shields. Hundreds of lives were lost on the ground from the conventional weaponry of the Russian forces, and the estimated loss to the attacking divisions was 88% men and 94% equipment. Similar scenes were repeated shortly after in other locations around Russia and her neighbouring countries.

Sergei Ivanov, who was defence minister at the time, remembers it thus:

"We kept wiring back to the Kremlin for orders, then Murmansk, then various C&C centres... but nothing came through. I had been attending a special conference in a business holiday retreat outside St Petersburg. My pager went and gave me the alert. I was flown over to the big military base at Kronstadt and there told to get to the deepest bunker, fast. We had a special hardened channel to several mobile command units, and we used this to keep tabs on the battle. We followed standard practice on deployment, though our units were heavily depleted by the EMP. The messages flooded through... rockets... no effect... UDR... no effect... sabot... no effect... and so on and so on and so on. I was safe in my bunker and my men were being erased from existence. For a while I thought of ending it all, but the desire for vengeance was stronger, and kept me alive."

From his first alert to the opening shots of the battle, two hours had passed for Sergei Ivanov. It is a testament to the preparedness of even the fading glory of the Russian army that they managed to field that many units at such a short notice. Whatever their skill, force of arms and bravery, the result was scarcely different to that of the poorer Baltic states that would suffer the same onslaught in the coming hours.

Before the day was over, the Russian Federation had lost sixty percent of her military capabilities. The nuclear silos were blasted from underneath by what the scientists have dubbed as 'energy mines', while the jets were knocked out of the sky by Newton rays that ranged to a hundred miles and more. Like many countries, only the navy escaped severe damage, and only because the tripods seemed unconcerned with naval technology.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAY ONE

EASTERN EUROPE & MILITARY SURVIVORS


The divisions sent in against the tripods on the first day did so with very little intelligence. Almost without exception they were hastily scrambled and sent into the general vicinity of tripod activity, with next to no real knowledge as to the capabilities of the invading force. Pins were stuck in maps and divisions were sent to vague, shaded expanses on maps, ordered to ‘engage all hostiles’. In the history of the human race, no contingency plan has ever existed to meet an entirely unknown threat of terrifying power, one that without warning emerges in the heart of one’s country. The survivors were the units with the worst intelligence and the greatest luck – sent to remote locations already vacated by the tripods that were merely passing through. Many of them had the fortune to see a distant action, or hear the chilling words ‘no effect’ crackling over their radios before the static. In this way many abandoned their vehicles and put their survival training to good use, hiding from the marauding tripods.

Curiously the aliens seemed careless about abandoned military vehicles. Even ones brazenly left in the open on roadsides, were passed over as the tripods focused on more active targets. Half of the meagre ten to twenty percent of the surviving material at the end of the war came not from hardened and camouflaged shelters, but from ditched and neglected vehicles. Their more fortunate crews would return later, when the first symptoms of the ‘divine sickness’ overtook the aliens.

Edmund Kosel was a captain in the third mechanized division, commanding a Patria AMV at the lake of Jezioro Slepe in Western Poland. Part of an amphibious training unit, he received orders to head south west in the direction of the small town of Legbad to engage a ‘hostile alien force of unknown composition’. As the column of ten armoured transports and five battle tanks rolled along the narrow forest roads, Kosel’s engine began to malfunction. Three miles from Legbad his AMV failed twenty yards within the tree line. Requesting instruction the commander of the force ordered Kosel to keep his AMV under cover, to fix the engine and then employ it as a reserve unit should the need arise.

“I had three crew and ten soldiers under my command, a full complement. I sent two of my crew outside to work on the engine, and set my men up as a tight perimeter. Well, in theory anyway, the tight perimeter gradually shifted into a line of men laying flat on their stomachs, gazing out towards Legbad. We saw our comrades moving up the road and then spreading out into a strung out line across the fields surrounding the Legbad suburbs. Then we saw the enemy appear over the distant western forest, two machines striding towards the town.”

It becomes impossible to accurately state the origin and movements of these tripods; probably they arose in the annihilated Bytow and were headed towards Tuchola. The precise movements of the invaders becomes academic, with just under five hundred tripods in Eastern Europe their criss-crossing paths show like the tracks of six mile wide tornados in the satellite photos. Such conjecture was far from the mind of Kosel and his men as they saw the tripods loom over Legbad.

“My driver said to me, “they must have a firing solution by now,” and for some reason I thought he was talking about the tripods. I’d forgotten entirely about our comrades. I could only stare at these giant insect like machines striding over the trees towards us. Then a ragged roar sounded from the unit ahead of us as the five tanks opened up, aided by heavy machine gun fire from the armoured cars. I heard the bolt notch back on our light 33mm cannon but I grabbed the gunner’s arm before he opened fire. I knew the moment I saw them that our fire would be useless…”

For one in every three hundred and twenty seconds a tripod’s shield snaps off. At that moment the tripod is vulnerable, but it requires a shell already on the way to take advantage of such a snapshot of vulnerability. The average engagement time of a division lasts no more than between three and eight minutes. The chance of a successful hit is almost zero.

The fire of Kosel’s comrades was wasted.

“A green-grey flash and two tanks and a building were thrown up into the air and wrenched apart. Then we saw the beams of light lancing out from the sides of the tripods, flipping over their vehicles and disintegrating those who had dismounted to fight on foot. The tripods then fired a shot into the distant sky, razed a few houses for no apparent reason and rolled off a mile west of us. I don’t know if they’d spotted us and decided we weren’t worth bothering with or not. In our Patria we had a week’s ration of food. We abandoned the vehicle and went back into the forest, found a cabin on a wooded hill and invited ourselves in. They weren’t happy to see us, but we had guns and so we stayed. They didn’t believe us until another tripod passed a mile distant the following day, ignoring us again but visible from the kitchen window.”

Kosel and his thirteen men survived the war. No charges were ever pressed on the matter of desertion in any country, excepting regarding the actions taking place during the ‘divine sickness’, during ‘the cleansing’.

Armed resistance in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine lasted until nightfall, and the midnight glow from the burning cities was enough to read by across the land. At the same time as Kosel’s unit were receiving their orders, a special emergency session at the NATO headquarters in Geneva was convened. An hour later Eastern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Balkans, Finland and Sweden were attacked. The invasion was already underway in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Western Kazakhstan and the neighbouring countries. Further East in Pakistan, India and Siberia the situation was still at peace, though their hearts of power were beating faster at the first messages and reports coming through.

Six hours later those countries, along with Africa, Asia and Australia, would be witnessing the birth of such waking nightmares. The invasion was spreading…


That afternoon Warsaw, Krakow and Katowice were razed with the loss of four million lives. Black smoke was employed, deployed by canisters fired from tubes wielded by the tentacles of the tripods. These canisters broke upon impact, releasing vast quantities of a poisonous black vapour. These clouds of black smoke rolled through the streets, choking those who had taken refuge in basements and subways. Great pillars of this poisonous vapour mingled with the columns of smoke – visible for miles, and blotted the landscape in the few high resolution orbital photographs available, passed with mounting hysteria between powerless, shaking hands in the governments of the developed world.

Lucjan Rymut was one of only one forty thousand survivors in the city of Krakow – out of a population of one and half million.

“I never even saw a tripod when they attacked. I was working on my designs at a small advertising agency, in a three story building on a hillside overlooking a valley suburb of Krakow. I saw an inky black cloud pushing through the mouth of the valley. It moved a little faster than a human could run, and though I could see distant figures sprint clear… sometimes for a hundred yards or so, it would catch them and they’d disappear in the smoke. I wondered if I was high up enough, being near the top of the hillside slope. The cloud sped down the streets below me and clawed up the side of the valley. I heard screams outside and ran to find the loft. There was a strange quality of light, sort of a soft twilight. I pulled down the ladder to the loft, grabbed some food and drink from the fridge and ran up inside. An office temp called Dotora followed me up – I’m ashamed to say I’d forgotten about her, though she worked in the room adjacent. We hid there three days. When the tripods came they fired a steam jet onto the smoke, which smote at the windows and cracked them. We were careful to make no noise and hid between two banks of filing cabinets. This way we survived. When we went downstairs to get more water and food the following day, we saw everything had been covered in a fine black dust, and there were bodies everywhere. We took what we needed and went back to the loft. I don’t think there were any other survivors in that entire street.”

The tripods had little interest in preserving cities, instead preferring to force humanity into the exposed countryside, and to farm the fertile strips along the rivers for their thirsty red weed. Either they employed their ‘conventional’ weaponry in the towns, or in the cities they used their smoke. The odd village, town and even small city they passed over in the first days, probably saving them as convenient ‘breadbaskets’. It was a darkly similar tale up and down Eastern Europe, but as the leaders and men of power in the more affluent Western nations, in Japan and the rising power of China looked at their reports... few of them could quite bring themselves to believe that the impossible nightmare could visit them.

It was so much like a science fiction film to them, and those who would survive, they could do little more than watch.

CHAPTER FIVE

DAY ONE

THE SLOW AWAKENING - NATO IN BRUSSELLS


NATO Headquarters in Brussels was home to twenty six member states, from the super power of the United States to the European Union and satellite nations. In the years preceding 2004 NATO had awarded membership to several Eastern European countries, previously of the very alliance NATO sought to counterbalance; The Warsaw Pact. After the 9/11 attacks NATO even began to consider expanding to include the Ukraine and Russia, among other states, to counter the threat of asymmetric terrorism. The Brussels Headquarters were home to envoys and experts from seeking to gain a window on the alliance, and possibly to open a road to membership. It was a hub of activity encompassing minds well versed in military lore and diplomacy.

As the cloud of destruction formed over Eastern Europe, radio messages and video footage began to filter through to the HQ. They were sketchy and incomplete, but terrifying all the same. Two hours after Kiev - and four hours into the invasion - Russia alerted the NATO HQ, the US Strategic Command at Cheyenne Mountain and the three main UN Headquarters at Lisbon, Geneva and New York that a full scale invasion of the Russian homeland was underway, and a warning for all nations to prepare against a threat it was unable to define or adequately explain. An unusually candid communication from Sergei Ivanov contained the seemingly incredible passage,

(Sic) “… major invasion of alien war machines of unknown magnitude. All major cities thought under attack. Attack preceded by seismic activity, freak lightning storms and limited EMP. Effectiveness of conventional weaponry poor and military capability downgrading rapidly. All higher chain of command unreachable, presumed dead. Reserve right to use nuclear option, though unsure of number of operation silos – we advise immediate DEFCON TWO and equivalent…”


Lieutenant General Thomas L. Baptiste was the man holding the communiqué thirty minutes after delivery. At first he considered the possibility of a hoax by an unusually intent hacker. Security authorisations were checked that refuted this. Then calls were put through to various high command centres in Russia, but none responded.

Sole survivor in Baptiste’s department, Switchboard operator Abele Russo recalls, “That was when we all began sweating. For none of them to respond was unheard of, especially considering that we had different systems against software and hardware failure. Baptiste ordered reports from all the eyes and ears on Russia and for us to try every diplomatic and official avenue - from fire stations to police departments and traffic – anybody with a phone basically. We got a few calls through, but the ones that we did manage to contact didn’t have any tripod activity in their area, had no idea anything was even amiss. It was a farce.”

What precisely he ordered and when is unknown, as he left the office for his own private room, but it is widely held that via a special channel commanding urgent attention Baptiste ordered an emergency recall of all NATO personnel and for all nations to elevate to the newly acquired NATO standard of DEFCON THREE thirty minutes into the communication attempts.


Baptiste then acquired access to the various radar and satellite displays regarding Russia and the Ukraine. These showed large fires and smoke clouds in Russian and the Ukraine over major cities. Data was gleaned for five minutes before this link broke down, due to enemy activity. It is thought that the aliens viewed the machines with curiosity, before deciding upon expending the effort to further hamstring humanity. Following the loss of this link, Baptiste raised the alarm to DEFCON TWO. At this point he also began a joint phone conference with the US defence secretary and the Chinese, Japanese and Indian equivalents. It must be stressed at this point that the scale of the threat was still greatly underestimated, though not an insignificant number of officials had a ‘sixth sense’ of the enormity of the situation. The most famous example remains Gerhard Schroeder, who minutes later, was on his way to his bunker. Soon he would be exhorting via phone link for NATO to move quickly, and already scrambling his own units.


Excepting Germany, across the rest of Europe defence officers and government officials began to scramble to action in a confused and contradictory manner. The biggest scale NATO rehearsals usually revolved around the notion of a limited terrorist nuclear strike, or a nuclear meltdown, that could affect multiple countries quickly with large casualties. The notion of hostile Russian activity was considered, perhaps by Chechen terrorists somehow acquiring the ability to launch a small strike from within Russia at NATO hoping to provoke a response, or the ‘Dr Strangelove’ dilemma. This option had never been rehearsed due to concern at the diplomatic implications. Even worse, NATO hadn’t seriously considered any major military threat that wouldn’t involve a period of build up. They can hardly be blamed, for no one sane would have seriously considered the possibility of an alien invasion.

And so NATO ponderously awakened itself and with mounting alarm and disbelief, looked to the east. No specific action was taken within the first hours, until Germany began to come under the first stages of attack, due to no one being able to judge the exact threat or response. It did not help matters that the communiqué from Ivanov was the last message received from him, all communications with his bunker having been lost along with the satellite coverage of Russia and the Ukraine forty minutes after his broadcast.

The first true spur to international action would come with the transmissions of the tripod ‘pathfinders’, preparing to race through Europe on what seemed to be a headlong first hand intelligence gathering spree unheard of in the history of warfare.

CHAPTER SIX

DAY ONE

A VISION OF THINGS TO COME - PATHFINDER TRIPOD ALERTS NATO


The first broadcast footage of the invasion originated in West Germany via satellite link up via Eutelsat. This link was bounced to London for a total of nine minutes before all commercial and public communication channels were lost in Europe. The footage was aired as breaking news via the BBC and ITV’s stations. Sky News and CNN had no access to the feed at this point, and were not able to acquire the source before the entire network went down over Europe.

The same storms and lightning that knocked out electrical systems on the ground blazed with even greater intensity into space. It has been theorised by some that the storm was primarily to knock out satellite coverage and so rob the military of a luxury it had been afforded for the past forty years – though many scientists still hold that it was a mere by-product of the particle beam. Certainly combined with the disruption to solenoids and electronic circuitry, it does seem rather convenient in the hamstringing of humanity’s capacity for self-defence. Whatever the reason, an increasing numbers of satellites were blanking over Europe – NATO were to find that they only had the stored images of Russia as late as thirty minutes into the invasion

Over Russia and Eastern Europe the ‘alien clouds’ had pulsed their charges into the sky with devastating effect, knocking out most of the satellite network and with it any means of passing confirmatory footage of the attack onto other nations. Germany straddled two invasion fronts, and so the East was attacked an hour before the West, and in that hour before the storms pulsed over the burrowing cylinders, individual tripod ‘pathfinders’ raced towards the West – presumably in an attempt to gather information to triangulate further ‘openings’.

One such spearhead surged towards Frankfurt, consisting of a single tripod headed straight towards Rhein-Main US Air Base six miles from Frankfurt. The tripod arrived on the outskirts of Frankfurt around twenty minutes after NATO had been scrambled to Defcon Two. In its approach it brushed a suburb of Frankfurt and seemed to engage in a weapons check. At the same time BBC and German Satellite News via ASTRA 3 SAT were conducting a joint news report on the job implications of the US shutting down its Rhein-Main air force base. Seven minutes were captured and broadcast live before all the European broadcasting stations were nullified by what remains an unspecified device…

Camera shot from Harman-Becker office rooftop in Fechenheim, Frankfurt:

Roger Harrabin BBC correspondent framed against long shot of Mulheim:

“… Which could lead to as many twelve hundred redundancies here in Frankfurt alone, now if we take… sorry Michael, was that wrong?”

Voice of Michael Hamm, cameraman: “Sorry, Roger. We’ve just seen something behind you, looks like an explosion, could you step to one… thanks. Yeah, there’s smoke.”

Roger: “That’s a lot of smoke. Do you think a plane’s gone down?”

Voice of Hans Schuster, sound engineer: “I didn’t see a plane… I am seeing green flashes though, could be a transistor station exploding or something.”

Roger: “Keep rolling, Michael, maybe we… there’s another explosion. That was a big one, a very big one. Christ, all right that’s, Christ – that’s the size of a big bomb, that one. (Into ear-piece) Sandra, put this through to Hue Edwards would you? Roll this in while we move to get a better angle…”

BBC studio: (This is the where the British public had their first view of what was to come)

Hue Edwards: “We were to bring you a story from Frankfurt on those redundancies mentioned earlier but we’re going there now, as we have some breaking news… what seem like a series of explosions. You’ve just seen the footage, now we’re going live through to Roger Harrabin. Roger… can you hear me?”

Roger: “I can Hue… what we’re seeing here is a… well, do you have picture?”

Hue: “We have picture Roger, though it’s hard to tell… clearly something terrible has happened, an oil refinery or something…”

Roger: “This isn’t normal, Hue. I saw the fireworks factory explosion in Enschede in Holland and a few oil fires and this is like neither. In the past four minutes we’ve seen twenty explosions, each lit by strange green flashes. Some of these explosions have been huge, enough to level a council estate and… there’s another one.”

Hue: “That’s incredible, Roger. I can hear them as well.”

Roger: “Yeah, there’s about two minutes’ delay before they reach us. Wait, I can see something moving on the horizon… what is that?”

Michael: “No, that’s not real. That’s… wrong…”

Roger: “Something moving, a great black machine, taller than a church – moving fast, about diagonal to me, three miles away. It’s… Christ, Hue… it’s not human.”

Hue: “Roger, talk to me. What is that there?”

Roger: “It’s alien Hue. I’m not kidding you, that can’t be real. It’s stopped a moment and… oh no, oh no oh no oh no…”

Hue: “Roger?”

Roger: “What we’re seeing here is the… explosion after explosion – ripping through an entire suburb of… machine that’s killing and destroying and… Hue, we’re getting out of here. That thing’s going to level the city or something… we need to get underground because…”

Hans: “He’s right, let’s get out of here.”

Hue: “Is he coming towards you, Roger? No, I can… damn you Hans… I mean Michael, keep the camera on the…”

Roger: “He’s not coming this way, he’s moving away a little… but we’re out of here. You can hear a lot of screaming, that’s from the street below, there are people are running in all directions. I can smell the first of the smoke, I can feel the concussions. I’m getting down to the basement of this place… I’m going to have to leave you Hue. Tell ‘em we love ‘em. Disconnecting link…”

Hue: “I have no idea what was happening there, but the pictures speak for themselves. An alien machine, in Germany, attacking Frankfurt – this is… this is weird. Charlie, I’m leaving my desk, I need to excuse myself for a minute… cut over to Hannah and I’ll…”

(All transmissions ceased at this point)

Britain was the only nation that had any significant proportion of the population forewarned, though it made absolutely no difference in the casualties sustained. In the few minutes the broadcast aired, the tripod destroyed an entire suburb consisting of some twenty thousand people, primarily using ‘block buster’ Newton gravity beams.

Six miles distant in Rhein-Main, American commanders saw a glimpse of the tripod’s power and managed to put through a hasty message to NATO and Cheyenne Mountain confirming in part the rumours that were now racing across the official channels of the NATO countries. Earth was at war with an alien force, and now the Western powers would begin to deploy their own forces against it.

(Next chapter: Hysteria in the UK)

fuck. I'll have to have a proper go at this tomorrow. Wow.

Or when things are calm enough for me...

that was great, very much like World War Z. I can't wait for the rest.

Nicely written indeed, sir. The only thing that stuck out me as being a bit "wrong" was how Kiev was lucky to only have 2.5 million killed instead of 3 million. A saving of 500,000 doesn't really seem all that lucky when you're talking about those sorts of numbers - but maybe it's just me.

15% or so is quite a bit off the price of a car, say.

Yeah, but it's people dying. Living people becoming not living. It almost sounded like "2.5 million? Pah, that's nothing! It could have been 3 million!" when 2.5 million lives is still a death toll that the vast majority of humans would not be able to comprehend.

It's all just numbers though, isn't it. And anyway, when you get into those sort of numbers you're grateful for any reduction at all, I'd have thought.

Also- good work nervouspete!

Good point. Mm. Be aware I was writing this as a 'writers block' declogger when my proper stuff was stalling. Also, the final death toll is around four billion so the matter of factness about death is there for a reason. But on rereading it today (I've only read this twice since I first wrote it ages ago) I saw lots of little punctuation mistakes and some very odd lines. I wish I'd taken out some of the narrator's opinions/comments and kept it drier.

I remember now how much research I ended up doing on NATO command structure, the unit composition of armies, local geographic knowledge and wikipedia science stuff. Ack. That's why I made a halt on it at the time, that and it wasn't getting that much feedback on the WotW forum. TCH.

Thanks for the criticism though, keep it coming! you try writing you fat fuck fucking dare criticise me mutter mutter etc