Vilcabamba

Winning wasn’t in the cards. The President knew as much. Fifty years of bitter experience had taught him as much--him and the rest of the handful of surviving independent human leaders. Living, and living free, to fight another day was as much as he could hope for.

He got reports that Krolpish forces were advancing on both the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. That didn’t sound good. Neither did the fact that one of those reports cut off all at once, as if the human sending it got interrupted. Fatally interrupted? Moffatt didn’t know. It gave him one extra thing to worry about, as if he needed any more.

And Grelch disappeared. Even Craig, Colorado, didn’t feel safe enough to suit the renegade. He had no confidence that the free USA could hold the line against his own people.

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Krolp always underestimate us. We never would have been able to hang on this long if they didn’t.”

“I know,” Moffatt said, wishing the Cabinet official hadn’t tacked on that last sentence. In the hierarchy of wishes, though, that was only a sprat. As always, the big fish was wishing the Krolp had never found Earth. Yes, and wish for the moon while you’re at it, the President thought. Had they found anything on it they wanted, the Krolp would have strip-mined the moon, too.

Two days later, the centauroids started hitting back. That was the day after the assassination attempt against Governor Vrank failed. It took out several of his guards and quite a few merely human minions, but Vrank survived. And he was not happy, any more than a cat the mice had tried to bell.

Perhaps because the Governor of North America wasn’t happy, his soldiers slammed headlong into the free USA’s defenses. The Krolp killed far more humans than they lost themselves. They always did. But they didn’t get very far, not with that first thrust. If humans spent enough blood and laid enough traps beforehand, they could slow down the alien invaders.

They could. For a while. The idea was to make the mining scheme unprofitable for the Krolp. That was the human idea, anyhow. But the Krolp had ideas of their own. One of those ideas was not to let the backward natives get uppity and start thinking they could push their betters around.

Quite suddenly, Grand Junction ceased to exist. That wasn’t an H-bomb, though it might as well have been. But Harris Moffatt III hadn’t just slipped away from Grand Junction by himself. He’d feared the Krolp would strike his capital. People started slipping out as soon as he told Prilk he would fight. Most of them were safe. So were most of the data stored in Grand Junction, and even some of the factories that had been there.

Craig was unlikely to last long, either. Moffatt and his advisers moved farther north still, up into an even smaller town. As long as you had radio, where you were didn’t matter too much.

That all made good military sense. So did stopping the enemy when he came at you. Surprising the Krolp once hadn’t been too hard. Neither had disrupting them behind their lines. But disrupting them wasn’t the same as killing them all, and killing them all was what the free USA really needed. The centauroids shook off the disruption. They weren’t so easily surprised the second time they attacked.

And the American defenses crumbled. Human-made arms never did much against the Krolp. Captured, stolen, or bought alien hand weapons performed like--well, like hand weapons against the full weight of Krolpish military might. As well turn a .357 magnum on a tank. You could, sure, but how much good would it do you?

“We need to be able to make those gadgets for ourselves!” Harris Moffatt III raged, as his father and grandfather had before him.

“Yes, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said. No doubt his predecessors had told the two previous Presidents the same thing. Perhaps unlike his predecessors, he added, “The Incas needed to be able to make muskets and swords and armor to fight the Spaniards, too. The only trouble was, they couldn’t. They didn’t know how.”

The President knew only too well that humans couldn’t make Krolpish weapons. The principles were beyond them. Even if the principles hadn’t been, the manufacturing techniques were.

By the third day of the second attack, it wasn’t much of a war anymore. It was a rout. American troops in the mountains surrendered as fast as they could--when the Krolp let them. The centauroids made examples of some of the troops. That wasn’t pretty, either. They were as far ahead of mankind in torture technology as they were in everything else.

To add insult to injury, they started smashing northeastern Utah to smithereens as soon as they got there. They might have been saying that human resistance wasn’t even worth noticing. As a matter of fact, that was just what they were saying, both to themselves and to what was left of mankind.

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