During the salvage operation, some people inevitably pocketed supplies on the side—but order held, and no serious incidents broke out. The police officers and government officials aboard worked through the existing chain of command, distributing food and water tier by tier down the line.
"Mr. Swan is really something. Maintaining order in conditions like these—that's no small feat!"
Sam Wilson had nothing but praise for Charlie's management abilities. He certainly wouldn't have bet on himself keeping order at all. Once order collapsed, there was no telling how many survivors would make it out alive.
"Hey, ladies and gentlemen—we caught one." While they were still discussing the enemy situation, Bella dragged an unconscious alien onto the deck.
With the help of supply drops from multiple airlifts, communications across the fleet had been restored. Word of the alien invasion had spread widely, and once the survivors learned that enemy activity had been reported elsewhere while their own stretch of water remained clear, the panic dissipated. Nobody was talking about going home anymore.
You could survive out here on the water. Go back, and you'd just be walking into your own funeral.
Hauling the alien onto deck also served a purpose beyond intelligence—it was a morale boost.
Sam had seen how capable Bella was during the archaeological expedition. She had excellent marksmanship, outstanding endurance, hand-to-hand skills on par with special forces. Her capturing an alien solo didn't surprise him in the least.
They tied the alien up and then brought it around, ready to question it. The language barrier was total—except for Bella, who had quietly cast a Comprehend Languages spell on herself. To everyone else, the alien was just spitting green fluid and making incomprehensible sounds.
"What's it saying?" Natasha knew enough about Bella's spells to know something was going on, and she leaned in to ask quietly.
The truth was that Bella was only catching fragments—the magic couldn't parse everything. She pieced together what she could: "A lot of the words even the spell can't decode... but the gist is clear enough. These things really did come to Earth for water. They call themselves the Xerun—or something that sounds like that. He doesn't even know exactly why they came to Earth. From what I can tell, they're more like... raiders. The most broke, low-rent bandits you've ever seen."
The intelligence haul was thin. Bella kept the Xerun business strictly between herself and Natasha—she couldn't explain how she understood the alien's language, so there was no point broadcasting it. She did, however, participate in the subsequent autopsy.
The Xerun were neither impressively advanced nor comfortingly primitive. Once you stripped away the metal armor, the bodies underneath were frail to the point of absurdity—bone density less than a tenth of a human's.
As Bella read it, this was a species that had evolved wrong. Or maybe just badly. They could only function because of the external metal armor grafted directly onto their bodies—flesh and metal fused together at the biological level. Their skulls were a case study in hydrocephalus; pull off that cooking-pot helmet and a small puddle of grey-brown gel oozed out. These things had nothing but fluid sloshing around upstairs.
The Xerun's chest cavity featured a double diaphragm—another meat-and-metal hybrid. Heather cut through it with her electric saw, and everyone leaned in for a look. The heart inside resembled a lump of dense, gelatinous jelly. Sam Wilson pulled on a glove and reached in, rooting around for a solid minute. He came up with nothing.
"What the hell is this thing!" He yanked off the glove and tossed it aside. You didn't need advanced biology to read the verdict—strip away the tech and the weapons, and these aliens could be summed up in a single word: weak.
"Where'd you find this one?" he asked Bella.
"It climbed up from the underside of the hull. Left foot was badly injured—probably took a hit in the nearby fighting, then drifted over with the current. And I'd wager these things aren't strong swimmers."
Sam opened his mouth, then closed it again. Bella saved him the trouble: "Go ahead and file the report. It's firsthand field data. Should be worth a promotion, right?"
"Well, I..." Sam looked uncomfortable. The last time he'd ridden Bella's coattails, he'd jumped two grades. Was he seriously doing it again?
"We don't have much use for commendations. File it. If the military knows this thing's weaknesses, fewer soldiers die." Bella's expression was earnest.
"Alright." Sam nodded without hesitation.
He passed the alien's information up to the command center. Command took it seriously and dispatched a helicopter specifically to retrieve the body.
For all their flaws, the Xerun were combat-experienced. Since making planetfall, they'd operated exclusively in squads—not a single straggler the whole time. This corpse was the first one human forces had managed to get their hands on since the invasion began, and it was genuinely valuable for the researchers in the rear.
The morale boost from the alien corpse was limited. Material shortages remained the survivors' most pressing problem.
No evacuation plan was anywhere close to materializing. Enemy forces blocked the west; an active warzone boxed them in from the east. They were adrift with nowhere to go.
The rescue plan was a ghost—but the supply drops kept coming. The rear command center was doing what it could, and significant quantities of food, water, medicine, weapons, and ammunition had been airdropped to the fleet.
But all that aerial traffic eventually caught someone's attention. The alien invaders turned their gaze toward the waters off San Francisco.
Whoosh. A high-velocity laser beam punched through a transport helicopter.
The instrument panel and the pilot were punctured simultaneously. The pilot died on the spot. The helicopter lurched like a drunk, spiraling down toward the ocean surface.
"Move! Everybody get below decks—now! Go!" The supply drops over the past few days had added more than twenty soldiers to Sam's force, bringing him to thirty-six troops total—with which he was now attempting to protect sixty thousand civilians.
He worked to drive the people on deck below. Civilians moved with agonizing slowness. Far above, a disc-shaped aircraft materialized against the sky, buzzing with a sound like a swarm of bees. The enemy didn't rush in—they just hung there, a massive, unblinking psychological weight pressing down on the survivors. Panic spread rapidly through the survivors.
"First squad—to Ship Three! I need you to form a defensive line between Ships Five and Nine!"
"Second squad, on me—we're heading to Ship Seven! That's where the most survivors are. We hold that line!"
"Chief Swan! I need you to round up your people and help me with the civilian evacuation!"
Sam Wilson was mid-deployment. With sixty thousand civilians to protect and however many aliens in that disc, you'd think sheer numbers would favor them—one kick each and done. It never worked that way in practice. Order mattered more than anything else. If your own side didn't panic, that was victory.