Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) Read online

  COLUMBUS DAY

  By Craig Alanson

  Text copyright © 2016 Craig Alanson

  All Rights Reserved

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One Columbus Day

  Chapter Two Deployment

  Chapter Three Camp Alpha

  Chapter Four Paradise

  Chapter Five Intel

  Chapter Six Fort Arrow

  Chapter Seven Colonel

  Chapter Eight Planting Potatoes

  Chapter Nine Jail

  Chapter Ten Skippy

  Chapter Eleven Away Boarders

  Chapter Twelve Merry Band of Pirates

  Chapter Thirteen Flying Dutchman

  Chapter Fourteen Space Suits

  Chapter Fifteen Raid

  Chapter Sixteen Home

  Chapter Seventeen Idle Hands

  Chapter Eighteen Ticking Clock

  Chapter Nineteen Outbound

  CHAPTER ONE COLUMBUS DAY

  The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. Every country had a name for the day the Ruhar attacked; the common name that stuck, after a while, was Columbus Day. I guess that makes sense. There we were, innocently drifting along in the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when we humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits.

  When the morning sky twinkled, with what we later learned were Ruhar warships jumping into high orbit, we were curious. When power plants, refineries, factories and other industrial sites around the planet started getting pounded from orbit with hypersonic railgun darts, we were shocked. For me personally, when a Ruhar combat transport dropped out of the sky and skidded across a potato field, outside my tiny hometown in northern Maine, that was when I became Officially Alarmed. It was a Monday morning in early October, the Columbus Day holiday in America, I was home on leave from the Army, visiting my folks. Taking a break after my battalion got rotated home from peacekeeping duty in Nigeria. What a shit job that was, I was happy to be home in the States. My leave was ended by a burning streak across the sky, as the Ruhar transport came directly over my truck, arced over the lake, and crashed in the Olafsen’s potato field, plowing up dirt and potatoes until its nose was half submerged in a pond. It wobbled side to side for a minute, with a screaming sound coming from its engines, then it took off and flew low and unsteadily over the tree line toward the center of town, trailing smoke from its underside.

  Our supposed allies, the Kristang, think that Ruhar assault transport was damaged during the drop from orbit, and fell short of its intended target, since that is the only possible reason the Ruhar would have invaded Thompson Corners, Maine. Hell, I didn’t want to be there anymore, that’s why I joined the Army in the first place. My hometown is nice enough, it’s simply nothing special. There’s potatoes and cattle and sheep and other farming, of course, and some people like my Dad had jobs at the big paper mill down in Milliconack, and you could get by with some lumbering, working as a hunting or fishing guide, a little welding on the side, whatever. Nobody in northern Maine relies on one job. Anyway, Thompson Corners is not the sort of vital strategic target that military planners would think of, when deciding where to drop from orbit a combat transport, with a dozen or so heavily armed troops. The Ruhar troops, cute and furry bewhiskered bastards that they are, no doubt waited until their transport finally skidded to a stop on the front lawn of the elementary school in the middle of town, popped the door open, gazed in awe at the magnificent vista of Thompson Corners, and asked the pilot where the fuck they were. Soldiers are soldiers, whether they have fur, skin or scales. So, logically, the Ruhar lobbed a missile at the most imposing structure in the area, the potato warehouse, and took it out in impressive fashion. I mean, they blew the hell out of it, those soldiers must have had something against potatoes. Next they destroyed the two bridges across the Scanicutt river; the railroad bridge and the old concrete highway bridge that’s been there since it was built by FDR’s Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. We'd had a lot of rain, and the river was running high, so with the bridge out, the only way for me to get into town was to drive all the way to Woodford and cross the river there. Like the old New England joke; you can’t get there from here, right? Nice idea, if the roads hadn’t been clogged with panicked traffic, and a hundred other people didn’t have the same idea I had, at the same time.

  When I saw that assault ship coming in, trailing smoke behind it and headed for the center of Thompson Corners, I was already in my parent’s pickup truck, on my way into town to pick up my sister from her friend’s house. It was ten minutes after the first sites got hit, the radio said the governor had just declared a state of emergency, urged everyone to remain calm, then all communications went out. No radio, no cellphones, no TV, no electricity. I didn’t need to wait for instructions, I was going to pick up my kid sister, get back home, and hunker down with my family until I figured out what the hell was happening. Behind the seat was my father’s bird hunting shotgun, and a box of shells that were good for quail and not much else. Shows how clearly I was thinking that morning. All my Army gear, including my rifle, were back at Fort Drum in New York state. I was, after all, on leave. Coming over the hill, I saw the ruins of the bridges, and nearly crashed into a line of traffic that was trying to get into town like I was. Bill Geary, a volunteer firefighter and a retired captain from the Maine National Guard, was getting people organized, to drive over to Woodford and come into Thompson Corners using the old fire road. I, like a dumbass, shouted that my truck had four wheel drive. Almost everybody in northern Maine has four wheel drive, even if it’s only a beat-up old Subaru. Since I was last in line, I got turned around first, and three guys whose car had gone in a ditch jumped in my truck. We roared off like the cavalry coming to the rescue in a movie.

  By the time we fought through outbound traffic to get across the bridge in Woodford, and bounced along the poorly-maintained fire road halfway toward town, the Ruhar had already secured the center of Thomson Corners, which was empty because no humans had waited for an engraved invitation to get the hell out of there. One sheriff’s deputy panicked, and fired off a couple shots with his 9MM service weapon, until the Ruhar got annoyed and took out the Shell station he was hiding in, with what looked like an antitank rocket.

  I’ve seen Ruhar up close since then, plenty of times. No, they don’t eat humans. And, no, they don’t kill babies. Believe the propaganda if you want, I know what I’ve seen. If that sheriff’s deputy hadn’t opened fire, the Ruhar might not have killed a single person in town. I couldn’t blame the Ruhar; if some idiot was taking potshots at me, I’d light him up with a rocket, too. I know, because I’d done the same thing in Nigeria.

  Anyway, the Forest Service gate across the fire road was locked, we wasted five minutes while a guy three trucks ahead of us tried blasting the lock with a shotgun. Surprise! The Forest Service had anticipated somebody trying that, and that lock wouldn’t’t budge. So, a guy rammed the gate, and busted both the gate and the radiator of his truck, which then need to be pushed off the road before the rest of us could squeeze by and drive through.

  Yeah, yeah, everybody has a story from that day, this is my story, so shut up and listen. One thing I’ve learned is that Ruhar Army grunts are like grunts across the galaxy; they want to get the combat over with and get back to their barracks, or dens, in their case. Did I hate them? Hell yes, bu
t I don’t think they meant to kill people, at least, except as collateral damage. Whatever their objective was on Earth, these troops had missed their landing zone, and were making the best of the situation. Everybody would have been better off if those Ruhar had sat in their busted transport with their thumbs up their asses, called the Ruhar version of AAA, and waited for a tow truck. Combat ops don’t work that way. Something gets fucked up on every mission; you adapt and do the best you can to accomplish your objective. This group of Ruhar decided their objective was to secure Penobscot county, whether that made sense or not. The Kristang tell us the Ruhar’s most likely plan was to destroy our industrial infrastructure, and knock us back into the stone age, so we’d be no threat to them. If that was their original objective, they missed it by a couple hundred miles, when they landed in Thomson Corners. The Kristang were mostly telling the truth about why the Ruhar hit us, although they lied about everything else, which I’ll get to eventually.

  We shouldn’t even be fighting the Ruhar, they aren’t our enemy, our allies are.

  I’d better start at the beginning.

  My name is Joe Bishop, I was twenty years old on the day the Ruhar attacked Earth, a Specialist in the US Army. Before the Army cut it, I had slightly longer than medium length hair, an indeterminate blonde-brown color, which I got from my mother. She called the color ‘mouse fur brown’ and had dyed her own hair a golden blonde as long as I could remember. Blue eyes I got from both my parents, and my height at six feet three inches definitely came from my father’s side, my mom barely stands five-four in her stocking feet. In high school I played third base on the baseball team, wide receiver on the football team, and was a backup shooting guard on the basketball team, although I didn’t play basketball my senior year. Truth is, I wasn’t a star athlete at baseball or football either. I worked hard, put the team first, and we won our share of games. When it came time to send out applications to colleges, I didn’t know where I wanted to go to school, or what I wanted to be when I grew up. Other than knowing that, I didn’t want to sit behind a desk all day. And I wanted to get out of Thomson Corners. My father had been in the Air Force for a couple years, then he went into the reserves, as a mechanic. Same type of job he did at the paper mill. He liked working with his hands, fixing stuff, and I kind of did too. Money was tight, and I didn't want to bury my self in debt with student loans, so the military sounded good to me.

  When I’d signed up for the Army, I did it because I wanted to serve my country, and because the Army would pay for college. The life also appealed to me, I loved the outdoors; camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, canoeing. The training was tough, sure, nothing that I didn’t expect, and I was proud to get through basic, and be assigned where I wanted: the 10th ‘Mountain’ Infantry Division, in Fort Drum, New York. Peacekeeping duty in Nigeria wasn’t what I would have wished for, but we got orders, and I went. I was surprised that peacekeeping involved killing so many people, but it is what it is.

  So, now you know why I was laying under a bush atop a small ridge that overlooked the center of my hometown, staring at that busted Ruhar transport ship, and trying to figure what, if anything, we should do.

  “That is one big damned hamster, Bish, you ain’t lying.” Tom Paulson said as he handed the binoculars back to me. “What’re we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know yet. Let me think.” There were plenty of military veterans around my hometown, I had one of them with me, but Tom had been a Navy supply clerk twenty years ago, and I was Army infantry with recent combat experience, and on active duty. I guess it made sense the others were looking at me for ideas. They knew I’d been in combat in Nigeria, but fighting disorganized home-grown militia fanatics in the bush was totally different from tangling with giant space hamsters in my hometown in northern Maine.

  “Goddamn, where are all the gun nuts when you actually need them? Is this all we got?” I looked in dismay at the collection of hunting rifles, shotguns and the odd 9MM handgun. Everybody in Thomson Corners had a gun, because everybody hunted, or at least needed to keep bears away from their backyard bird feeders. “Come on, nobody has an old M-60 in the attic? Maybe an AK?”

  “Hell, Bish, I want to kill a moose so I can eat it, not vaporize the damned thing." Tom said. "Hunting licenses ain’t cheap.”

  “All right, all right, me too.” I looked through the binos again, at the hamsters patrolling the streets of my hometown. At the dark smoke coming from the potato warehouse, across town by the railroad tracks, which was still burning. At the hamster’s shuttle, or landing craft, or infantry assault ship, or whatever they called it; squat and ugly and powerful looking, with a banged-up nose and a bent wing, and a thin stream of white smoke coming from the belly, as it sat on the front lawn of the elementary school.

  Hamsters. We have other names for them; rats, weasels, rodents, but with their fine, golden fur, round faces and whiskers, what they most look like are hamsters. Except hamsters aren't six feet tall, wearing body armor, helmets and goggles, carrying evil looking rifles, and coming down from orbit in an assault ship. That I know of, I mean, I never owned a hamster, so what do I know? We didn't know they were hamsters, until one of them in the doorway of their ship, maybe the pilot because he didn't have a rifle, took his helmet off, got something from his pocket, and started eating it. He got yelled at, and put his helmet back on, but not before we saw his furry head and hamster ears. They weren't exactly hamsters, but close enough.

  Susie Tobin lifted her eye from the scope of her .30-06 hunting rifle. “What about the quarry? They have dynamite, right?” Susie was about five feet nothing, her day job was a teacher at the regional middle school, and looking at her, you wouldn't think she could even lift her old Army surplus rifle. But I'd seen the racks of deer antlers, tacked up on the south side of her barn, so she sure knew how to use it.

  “What’re we doing with dynamite?" Diego scoffed. "Run up to that ship of theirs, and throw it through the door? You wouldn’t get within a hundred yards, before they cut you down.”

  "She's right," I said, thinking of the hell that IEDs caused us in Nigeria. They were a problem on the roads, but especially dangerous when we were patrolling a village, where sightlines were limited and there were plenty of places to conceal a bomb. Patrolling, like the hamsters were doing right now. Pairs of hamsters were checking out buildings in the center of town, which, considering it's Thomsons Corners, wasn't much. You may think that, being the Columbus Day holiday, there would have been lots of tourists in town when the Ruhar dropped in for a visit. If you think that, you've never had the good fortune of visiting my home town. Columbus Day is a big leaf-peeping holiday in New England, a weekend when city folk from down south drive out to the country, to see the colorful foliage on the trees, stay in quaint little inns and bed and breakfast places, and take lots of pictures. We do get tourists in our part of the Great North Woods, but not for leaf-peeping. By Columbus Day, a lot of the trees around here have already dropped their leaves, and our part of Maine is pretty flat anyway, plus the pine trees don't turn color. People come here for canoeing, fishing, hunting and snowmobiling. There isn't a whole lot of that going on the first part of October, so the town was pretty empty when the Ruhar crash-landed, the day being a school holiday and all. Damn good thing, too, I couldn't imagine what would have happened if the elementary school had been full when the Ruhar took control of the town. I didn't have to imagine that scenario, since I'd already seen that in the movie Red Dawn. The good one made way back when Reagan was in office, not the crappy one they made later.

  Anyway, I had an idea. "Susie, your father works at the quarry, right? You and Tom get us dynamite, detonators, wires, whatever we need to blow something up remotely." I had no idea how to do that, having never even seen a stick of dynamite. "Diego, stay here and watch the hamsters, see where they patrol, especially how often they go by the old town hall." Which was now home to the town's only diner, and an insurance agency. "Stan, Deb, see if you can find a truck or van down t
here that we can get started, big enough to fit a couple people in the back, something covered, not an open truck bed. Keep to this side of town, you don't want to cross Route 11, or the hamsters will see you. If you find something, drive it over to Red Brook road and leave it there. We'll meet back here."

  "Ok, Bish." Tom nodded. "What're we going to do?"

  I took one more look at the Ruhar, noting the disposition of their troops without even thinking about it, seeing where they were patrolling through the town, and where they had defensive positions around their ship. "We’re going to the dentist."

  "You have got to be kidding me." I blurted out.

  "Bish," Stan said defensively, "this is the best we could find. It's either this, or an old Dodge Neon."

  "Most people got in their cars and left in a hurry, it looks like, there aren't a lot of cars left on this side of the river." Debbie added.

  "Yeah, but-"

  Tom shook his head. "There is no fucking way we can drive this. We're fighting an alien invasion. We can not drive this, this, thing."

  I had to agree. Except for one thing, it was a perfect truck. They'd found a delivery van, like a FedEx truck, it was in pretty good mechanical condition; the tires weren't bald, there was some rusted-out spots around the wheel wells but nothing serious, it had big back doors so several people could get in or out fast, and they reported that it ran and shifted well, with no squeaky belts or squealing brakes. They'd found it behind the Davis Brothers garage, where it must have been getting the interior rebuilt, because the inside was stripped other than the driver seat. It was a good truck, except for that one thing.

  Barney.

  Barney, the big purple cartoon dinosaur with the perpetual stupid grin. Barney, and Smurfs, Mickey Mouse, unicorns, and a lot of other fictional characters were painted on the truck. Whoever decided which characters to paint on the truck had made interesting choices, like, why was Iron Man waving to the Smurfs? And, was that Darth Vader down near the right front fender, or had someone started painting black primer to cover up a rust spot, and decided to get creative? Most of the characters were poorly painted, it took me a minute to realize that what I thought was a sitting Buddha, was supposed to be Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Buddha? It was an ice cream truck, in case you hadn't guessed yet. A ridiculous ice cream truck, that I was fairly certain didn't have permission to use any of the trademarked characters painted on the side. Also, instead of the familiar 'Mister Softee' logo, this one had a poorly stenciled 'Super Softie' logo. How could ice cream be super soft? Was it melted?