By the end of Day Zero (24 hours after the aliens had landed) the good news was: we had picked where they would land correctly. Mexico City, Tokyo and New York City were veritable ghost towns compared to what they had been when the aliens departed from Mercury. But there were still people in all three, and those who stayed were now suffering mightily, or already dead.
The other good news was the Lightning Domes proved surprisingly easy to penetrate: you just needed a Faraday Cage -- a covering of some conductive substance. The catch was: it had to be nice and conductive or it heated up rapidly and the covering cooked you, and it had to be tight-fitting, the dome would generate electricity if it had much more than an inch of free space. You would get badly shocked driving your car through the dome, but if you wore an aluminum fire protection suit while you drove your car through, you would get only a mild shock. Over the next week we got a lot of people out by transforming them into tinfoil mummies and driving them out in cars and busses.
The bad news was: the ozone was killing people and rotting infrastructure. Ozone is O3, and it's quite reactive compared with normal Oxygen (O2). It's poisonous, if you breathe too much, your lungs get irritated and you die of chemical pneumonia. ALIEN GAS ATTACK! Screamed the media when the ozone was discovered.
It was deadly to people, and it's deadly to infrastructure. The Lightning Domes were shedding ugly brown clouds of ozone vapor. The brown vapors were heavier than air, so they spread across streets and buildings, and sank into sewers and basements. (The good news about Ozone is, it doesn't stay harmful for long. Any that doesn't find something to attack will break down into regular oxygen again in less than an hour.)
Ozone acts like super bleach. The vapors gave oxygen to anything that will take it: plant fibers such as clothing, paper and wood; animal flesh from the dying rats, insects, pets and people; plastics of all kinds including paint; exposed iron and aluminum... anything and everything. Many of the effects are unpredictable, but a few are easy to predict, and deadly. Where electrical insulation rotted, there would first be shorts and then fires, and the ozone would make the fires even more intense.
So the first response we made was to shut down power to the city centers. This worked. We had drilled this, and only one or two emergency generators kicked in that weren't supposed to, and those were shut down within minutes. Within minutes of the domes appearing, the city centers were dark, except for the eerie glow of the Lightning Domes themselves.
Even as the centers went dark, military ground forces were moving. This time cooler heads were in charge. The ground forces first probed for weakness rather than launching massive strikes. It took them only a few hours to discover how to penetrate the domes, and spread the word to my people. Once some rudimentary communications were established through the dome walls, the military started looking for the aliens themselves while my people started looking for those who needed evacuation.
A lot of good men lost their lives in both searches. They hunted, and they were hunted. We all had a pretty good idea where the alien ships were: at the center of the domes. But it proved darn hard to confirm that. First, the aliens were fast. From the reports I was getting, it was like we were Wiley Coyotes chasing down Roadrunners. Second, they seem to be able to see around corners. Those few times the military could get a bunch of men in the same place as an alien and "surprise" it with overwhelming force, it acted as if it saw the attack coming, and scooted off. Or worse, killed a few soldiers, and then scooted off.
Once in a while, though, a sniper would surprise one, and get a long shot off. These snipers also got us the first pictures of what we were dealing with. The aliens, or at least their spacesuits, looked like dog-size spiders -- compact bodies with legs sprouting out. One of the snipers may have knocked off a leg.
It didn't happen often as anyone wanted. First off, the aliens didn't show up above ground that much -- they seemed to like skittering around through halls, subways and sewers.
Second, their weaponry was impressive! Speed and seeing around corners were only the first things we noticed. They also seemed to kill every man-jack that was headed for the center of the dome, but we couldn't figure out how. These guys were good; these guys were careful; but now all were dead! Determining what caused "silent death" became a priority two item, right behind locating the alien ship and figuring out how to drive the aliens off.
For the first couple weeks the aliens seem to be searching for something. They seem to be down in the sewers a lot, and they would do things like take subways and sewer lines far outside the shield area, although still in the metro area. They don't do much with parks, rivers and open land. That may be because we do nail their spidery little asses when they wander in the open. We have discovered that guns and artillery can hurt the little buggers when they stand still long enough for us to draw a bead on them. But they spend most of their time indoors, and then they are really hard to spot.
There has been some call for nuking the city center, but Nostromo has held off. So far, the nuke would do more damage than the aliens have... although the constant ozone bath is running the property damage tally into the hundreds of billions. And, we still haven't positively identified the location of the alien ships.
<<<<*>>>>
The month has been a tense version of cat-and-mouse. The ground forces haven't stopped the aliens from moving about, but they have inflicted serious damage on a couple. The aliens have been completely successful at keeping their ships out of sight. We suspect they have moved them several times within the Lightning Dome, but we don't know for sure. Now the Belter Fleet is coming into orbit around the Moon. A lot of people have been saying this will make a difference.
To my amazement... it does!! As the first five Belter ships arrive, the aliens buzz off! Whoops, it doesn't take long to determine they are headed for the Moon, and the Belter ships! Hmm... sadly, this won't take long.
I urge my people to explore the area inside the domes quickly! We have to find out all we can about the aliens quickly. To make my point, I head in to New York City dome, myself.
It takes me about three hours to get in the dome. The alien fleet is halfway to the Moon by then. The dome is gone, as I get to where it was, I get briefed by my people who were on site when the aliens lifted off.
James tells me, "We have located an alien landing point positively, probably the first. As we suspected, the shield generator was located under the Empire State Building. The ship, however, was under the Chrysler Building."
"They appreciate Art Deco, I guess."
That, or just being someplace different. What would you like to see?"
"Take me to the landing sight. Searches are still going on, right?"
"Per your orders, every man and woman on the team is in the dome area now."
"Excellent! My hunch is we have eighteen hours: six for the aliens to get to the moon, six for them to kick Belter butt; six for them to come back and continue where they left off. We want to find out as much about what they did while they were here as we can."
We head to the Chrysler Building. It takes, maybe, ten minutes. Manhattan is a ghost town, but it's eerier than just that. I've seen Manhattan at dawn on a Sunday, and it looks like a ghost town then. But other things were wrong. For one, there were no loose papers flapping down the street in the breeze, for another, the asphalt was covered with a thick white dust.
"What is that dust?" I ask James.
"Asphalt. The ozone has disintegrated all the organics in the top layer. It's like it was burned to the point even carbon is gone. You're looking at the inorganic ash left behind."
As I looked around I saw more and more signs of ozone destruction. Windows were rocking in their settings because the rubber seals holding them were gone. Cars were rusting hulks without tires or interiors.
"How safe are the buildings?"
"It varies. A lot of wood structures have collapsed already. The concrete ones seem to be holding up the best."
I shake my head. "The property loss... and the months or years to recover."
"Congratulate yourself, boss. There's been no major fire... We're here."
We head down. The deeper we go, the milder the ozone damage -- the ozone was getting all used up before it got this deep. At the heart of the Chrysler building, at the bottom, we find a "nest". By Earth standards it looked like a small place. They had hollowed out a place that looked three big rooms square.
As the reports came in, it was clear they'd been doing a lot of digging. Lots of places, but not very deep. No one could figure out what they where looking for.
As I scanned through the reports we were getting, I had an idea. I made a blanket broadcast, "All right people. The last time they were here, we had a hard time getting to them. If they come back, I want that to be a lot easier. While we've got the ground, if you haven't got something else to be doing, be looking for new ways into these hives."
It was a pretty good idea in it's own right, but it turned out to be brilliant. It was searching for a new way in that found us "the wasp", and that turned out to be the key to Invisible Death. The wasp was an insect-size drone that was heavily ECM'd and packed a single shot, but that shot was enough to consistently drop a single armored man. The one we found was "dead" -- inactive -- lying in an obscure corridor in the Chrysler Building. It took another two weeks to realize what we had found, but when we did, we finally knew what we were up against when facing Invisible Death, and our forays into alien territory became a lot safer. That meant we could cause them more grief.
This also strengthened the foundation for authorizing nukes. We now had a lot more material about aliens that we could analyze, and these let us set better parameters about when nukes should be authorized.
This is when we first saw the scalpings, too. There were human bodies all over the place, that was no surprise. What was a little surprising was the lack of smell coming from the bodies. They were decomposed, but they didn't smell much. It was the ozone. But the ozone couldn't explain why the bodies had their hair cut off. Christ! It was like we were in America in the 1700's after an Indian raid!
"This needs some more research." I said grimly.
"Should we be moving these out?" James asked me.
"We should, but we won't... Don't start moving bodies until we're sure the aliens aren't coming back. We need to find out everything we can, first. We should know their intentions in..." I looked at my watch, "Six hours. Take out a couple bodies for autopsy. But leave the rest for when we have more time."
It was a hard call, and I didn't like making it. If the aliens didn't come back, the media would be all over me for insensitivity. But once we started on those bodies, we'd be at it for days, and right now we badly needed more information to fight off these monsters.
Sadly, I was right. The aliens trashed the Belter ships in an engagement that lasted less than an hour. They dallied another three shooting up those installations on the Moon that dared join in the fight. Then they disappeared.
"They are headed back!" I said when I heard that, "Get the observer posts set up, and everyone out in four hours!"