If Aliens Met Humans by Samuel Masten - HTML preview

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Days turned into a week under the silent watch of the Xylan ships. In the command bunker deep beneath the crippled capital, General Thorne reviewed the military situation with her staff. The assessment was bleak. Humanity’s advanced military was powerless. Their smart missiles couldn’t lock on without satellite guidance, their drone swarms were grounded without a network to command them, and their sophisticated laser defense systems were useless against the Xylans’ energy shields.

The alien ships appeared to be invincible. Analysts poured over every scrap of data they had collected during the "friendship" period. The Xylan vessels were constructed from an unknown alloy that was stronger than anything on Earth. Their shields could repel a direct hit from a tactical nuclear weapon without even flickering. A direct, conventional attack on the fleet would be a suicidal act of futility.

A council of war was held in the bunker’s main briefing room. General Thorne, President Shaan, and Dr. Lena, the leaders of the new government-in-exile, gathered around a holographic map of the occupied planet. Their faces were grim but determined. They had to find a new way to fight. They were searching for any weakness, any small detail they might have overlooked, any crack in the aliens' seemingly perfect armor.

Dr. Lena was the first to offer a glimmer of hope, though it was a strange one. "We cannot hurt their ships," she began, "but the Xylans themselves are still biological. Their minds are their weak point." She explained her theory again. The atmosphere had turned them into aggressive, strategic warriors. They now thought in terms of overwhelming force and technological superiority.

"Their own history is one of peace and harmony," Dr. Lena argued. "This 'warrior' mindset is new to them, a triggered instinct. It’s possible they have no experience with, or even a concept of, true asymmetrical warfare. They expect a formal army to fight them. They may be tactically brilliant, but they may have a blind spot when it comes to a messy, unpredictable, global insurgency."

General Thorne seized on the idea. A conventional war was lost before it could even begin. But a resistance, fought in the shadows of every occupied city by ordinary citizens, was a different story. It was the only path left. But for a resistance to succeed, it needed weapons. Not complex smart weapons, but simple, rugged tools that anyone could be taught to use.

This presented another major problem. Most of the personal firearms of the year 2125 were also "smart" devices. They relied on electronic targeting, biometric locks, and networked ammunition counts. With the networks down and electronics unreliable due to the threat of more EMPs, these advanced rifles were little more than useless plastic and metal bricks. They needed purely mechanical weapons.

It was a young historian on the strategic staff who unknowingly provided the answer. He was asked to brief the General on past insurgencies. He spoke of the great conflicts of the 20th century, describing how resistance movements had fought powerful, technologically advanced armies with simple, reliable, and mass-produced firearms. Weapons that didn't need a battery or a network to function.

A wild, desperate idea began to form in General Thorne's mind. What if the answer to fighting a hyper-advanced enemy from the future was not a more advanced weapon, but a more primitive one? What if the solution wasn't waiting to be invented in a lab, but was already gathering dust somewhere?

The desperate search for a weakness turned into a desperate search through history. General Thorne gave a new order to her intelligence staff. They were to scour every database and archive they could access. They were to look for the locations of old military armories, historical weapon caches, and most importantly, museums. Museums dedicated to the conflicts of the distant past. They were looking for the simple, mechanical tools of a forgotten age of warfare.