The Yeomen of England (Posleen in England)

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Marching to the Guns

Command Post

Liverpool, United Kingdom

1^stst April 2007
General Amherst was almost relived when the Posleen finally started moving, heading west towards Liverpool. The aliens had spent a couple of days sweeping up and down their occupied territories, clearly hunting down the remaining humans and adding them to the cooking pot. He didn’t know if the Posleen cooked their food, but there was no hope of a War of the Worlds scenario; the Posleen were immune to all terrestrial bugs²⁰.
He shook his head. There were so many questions about the Posleen; ones that he suspected would never be answered. They could – and did – eat humans; humans couldn’t eat them. They seemed to be immune to all human war gases; they didn’t use gas themselves, unless you counted the gas that had been released in Manchester when the sewage had begun to burn. Their technology was so much better than anything comparable to humanity’s; they didn’t make anything like as much use of it as humans would have – as Fleet was planning to use when they retook the high orbitals.
If they retake the high orbitals, Amherst thought, and felt a flicker of nervousness deep within his belly. He knew just how lucky he’d been to have escaped the fall of Manchester, and now he was in another trap; a city that only had boats to carry its people away from the rattrap. He scowled; nearly every major merchant ship – those that some God King hadn’t killed from orbit for no reason that a human could understand – had been drafted into the shipping. The logistics were appalling; it was worse than Dunkirk.
He smiled suddenly. Some of the people who’d made Dunkirk work had been rejuvenated and placed in command. They would do it, even if no one else would or could. Move thousands of people from the shore to the large boats; twenty minutes per trip. Move said large boat to Ireland. Move said empty large boat back again…
He stared at the map and shuddered. The distance between Liverpool and Manchester was roughly fifty kilometres, but the Posleen could cover that in an hour – if they were not stopped. The first line of defences were strung out along the A570, using the motorway as a common line of defence. The second line was along the M57, which was right at the edge of Liverpool itself.
He who would be strong everywhere is strong nowhere, he reminded himself. Unfortunately, there was little choice; they needed as much coastline as they could, and they had built powerful defences and – now that there were no longer any refugees coming from Manchester – powerful minefields. He shuddered; human troops would mutiny if ordered to clear a minefield with their bodies – the Posleen just went right ahead and did it.
Corporal Loomis coughed. “Sir, the Posleen are moving towards the first line of defence,” she said. “Do you have any particular orders?”
Amherst shook his head. “No, Stacy,” he said. He watched as the sensors updated the path of the Posleen, wishing that he had a few Himmit aliens under his command. The Himmit could sneak around like nobody’s business. “Notice how they’re developing their attack?”
Corporal Loomis looked up at the display. The Posleen were spreading out across a wide front, heading towards Liverpool, but pausing to overrun small villages and towns, and of course the handful of farms in the region. The Posleen would reach between Wigan to Warrington, both towns having been evacuated before the Posleen came for them.
“Bolton may have to be abandoned,” she said. Amherst nodded; Bolton had been serving as a refugee centre, but the new defence lines were further north. The Posleen would take a massive bite out of Greater Manchester, perhaps as far as Blackburn, before they were stopped. The SAS, which had people on the ground in the Peak District National Park, were reporting that the Posleen were probing towards Sheffield.
“Anything else?” He asked. Corporal Loomis had many important asserts, but she wasn’t a strategic thinker. “I was thinking about their movements.”
“They’re advancing on a broad front at walking pace, pretty much,” she said. She paused. “What the hell do they think they’re doing?”
Amherst frowned. “Scavenging for food was my first thought,” he said. “It’s possible, I suppose, that we got enough civilians out to make them hungry.” He scowled. It was too good to be true, or at least believed. He scowled down at the Galactic plot; one thing, at least, the Posleen landers couldn’t hide when they were moving.
“No,” he said. It was a single word and it froze the entire conversation. “They don’t want any of us to escape, not this time.” He scowled. “The Americans and our own survivors from Diess did warn us; the Posleen learn from experience.”
His hand traced arrows on the map. “They’re going to slam into the defences, battering them at every point along the line, and then they’re going to punch their way in.” He would have cursed, if he’d had the energy. “We have most of the people out of Southport, don’t we?”
Corporal Loomis nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said. “There’s just a couple of thousand left.”
“Order all of the ships heading here to get to Southport – no, pass it on to the guy handling the logistics,” Amherst ordered. “Southport is indefensible. The Posleen will be there in an hour or two at their pace, and I want the place empty before then.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Loomis said. She tapped orders into her PDA. “Orders sent.”
“Good,” Amherst said, thinking furiously. An idea had occurred to him. “Order the second defence line forward to reinforce the first.”
Corporal Loomis blinked at him. “Sir?”
“See to it,” Amherst ordered. “We have to hold the Posleen as far back from the city as we can. Pull in all the civilians to the docks, empty the suburbs, and then move the Marines to the edge of the city as well. It’s time to start moving faster.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Loomis said, having the sense not to argue further. “Anything else?”
Amherst glanced up at the map. “Surge the last aircraft from John Lennon and divert the others. The Posleen are too close for them to be allowed to continue flying.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Loomis said. “I’ll see to it at once.”
***

The Challenger-III had been beaten and battered by the Posleen, first in the advance and then in the retreat, but it had remained intact, more or less. Some quick work had repaired the damage and improved the armour, although the design teams had noted that it would be a while before the new Challenger-IV tanks – with stronger armour – arrived.

Given a completely free choice, Captain Bertha Demimonde would have preferred to be spending the day in bed with a hot young man, such as her driver. Of course, the British Army would have been very unhappy about such a relationship – and there was no proof that Corporal Joe Buckley would be even remotely interested in her. There were other men, of course, and Demimonde had an…interesting social life near the base, but instead she was stuck defending Liverpool.
She glared across the land towards the defence line. The Challenger-III wasn’t hidden; one thing they knew about the Posleen was that they had near perfect line-of-sight shooting. The SAS had lost several hundred snipers when firing at God Kings, just because of all of the Posleen opening fire on their position. She wasn’t certain how she thought about that; the minuscule protection of a dug-in tank, versus the ability to move rapidly.
Ahead of them, the infantry were dug in, preparing to stop or blunt a storm of Posleen. The alarms had been blaring for the past ten minutes and she was getting sick of the racket – she knew that the Posleen were coming. Lieutenant Tamara Shull, her gunner and sensor tech, had been reporting their anti-gravity emissions for the past fifteen minutes, the signs of an entire swarm of Posleen landers coming their way.
Behind them, the dug-in artillery began to fire, hurling thousands of shells towards the Posleen. Demimonde cursed suddenly; the hail of shellfire might start triggering the mines before the Posleen themselves started to run over them and detonate them. The Posleen were so unconcerned about their own fate that they would probably trigger the mines themselves, utterly unconcerned about the deaths – the unnecessary deaths.