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men. The gunfire coming from the direction of the other units had all but ceased, and Brennan didn’t have to be there to know the body count had to be rising steadily. By this point, he didn’t care anymore that it had been his men who had inadvertently started this fight; he wanted the aliens dead before they slaughtered the rest of his people.
    Baker and Boone grabbed the multishot grenade launchers from the back of the vehicle and the squad was about to split up and come to the aid of the other two units when Harris shouted a heads-up. The remains of the Bravo squad were pelting toward them, four men dripping with sweat and blood, a flash of silver right on their heels.
    “Get down!” Brennan roared.
    His scream yielded immediate results. His men dropped on the spot, leaving the pursuing alien an easy target. It saw the missile coming, but wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid a direct hit. This time, Brennan saw it all. The brief stop, the start of a dodge, then a sudden expansion of the armor just before the Spitfire hit its target and enveloped the creature in a fireball. The explosion looked weirdly muted, half-absorbed by whatever material the alien was wrapped up in, but the result was the same: a crispy fried critter surrounded by a ring of blackened earth.
    Two down, one to go. Heartened by their success, Brennan and his men picked up their bloodied comrades and swarmed toward the southern side of the crater, where Charlie squad was scrambling to stay alive. They ran uphill, panting, high on adrenaline, and then there was this sound, a deep, flat whooomph , and the ground shook once, hard.
    Brightness erupted from the crash site, fire and smoke forming a mushroom cloud that eclipsed the sun. It should’ve burned them all, but the edge of the crater shielded them somewhat and the heat wasn’t as extreme as Brennan would’ve expected. He noticed an odd scent in the air, unlike anything he’d ever smelled before, acrid and sweet at the same time, and he thought, way back in the back of his mind, that the aliens must’ve activated some kind of self-destruct mechanism. It was what he would’ve done had he gone down on an alien planet and realized the few of his men who’d survived the crash were losing their battle with hostile native forces and they were all about to become prisoners or worse. There was a moment, brief and almost lost in the roar of the explosion and the stutter-focus of his awareness, when Brennan felt a deep stab of sympathy for the unknown alien commander who’d had to make that call.
    It lasted until he heard one of his men scream and looked up to see the last remaining alien tear into Sergeant Harris and rip him apart with inhuman strength. Illuminated by the falling tower of flame behind them, the creature hacked and sliced through Harris’s flesh like a madman even after he’d stopped shrieking, right until the pointed warhead of a Spitfire missile hit them both and stopped it. And if this detonation looked a bit different than the other two… well, Brennan was too distracted to care right then and so were his men.
     
     
    T HUS ended the first encounter between humans and extraterrestrial life-forms, with twenty-one dead and four injured American soldiers, a total of thirty-nine dead aliens (including six armor hosts and five bone riders), a spaceship blown to smithereens, and a huge hole in the ground. All in all, it could’ve gone better.

FOUR
     
    I N CONTRAST to popular belief, Area 51 was not the place where the US military stowed alien remains and UFO wrecks. That was primarily because there hadn’t been any until the Widowmaker and her crew met their end in the Texas hill country. That didn’t mean the military didn’t have bases equipped to deal with the unexpected. In the wake of the crash and subsequent confrontation, it was quickly decided to transport the alien bodies to the closest of these facilities. This happened to be Camp Jackson, located in the New Mexico