Little Green Men—Attack! by Robin Wayne Bailey

Author:Robin Wayne Bailey
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781476782133
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2017-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

A great library, the battlefield! Stalwart librarians, our bravest soldiers! My friends, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about . . . Bookworms from Outer Space? —RWB

by Allen M. Steele

Eighteen hours after an alien spacecraft landed in Copley Square, the Boyleston Street entrance of the Boston Public Library opened and two people stepped out.

This occurred a little before six a.m. The first light of a mid-September day was just breaking on the city, the sun still hidden behind the downtown skyscrapers. The two individuals who unexpectedly emerged from the supposedly evacuated library slowly walked down the concrete steps into the glare of floodlights set up across the deserted avenue. A young man and woman, both of whom appeared to be typical Bostonians in their mid-twenties, stopped when they spotted the dozens of U.S. Army Rangers, Massachusetts National Guard soldiers, and SWAT team members huddled behind sandbags and sawhorses, with just as many rifles, pistols, and riot guns pointed their way.

“Oh, hell,” the young man said.

“Please don’t shoot,” the woman called out, raising her hands to her shoulders. “We’re just librarians.” She was older and a little more composed than her colleague, but it was obvious from the way her legs trembled beneath her knee-length skirt that she was just as nervous as he.

A moment passed, and then two SWAT cops came out from behind the cordon. They waited until the couple reached the edge of the sidewalk, and then trotted across Boyleston, grasped the two librarians by the arms and hustled them across the street.

By then, the TV news crews who’d staked out the scene had been alerted to the breaking development, and reporters and cameramen ignored the barricades and began hurrying in from the press staging area several blocks away. They were too far from the library to get there in time to see anything, but they didn’t come away empty-handed. Although the news media had been expressly forbidden to use drones, the CNN crew decided that it was worth the wrath of the police to get live footage. Before their drone was shot down by a sharpshooter positioned on the roof of a nearby condo, its camera caught a few seconds of the pair being surrounded by soldiers and cops and hurried down the street to the Lenox Hotel, where a forward command post had been set up.

All this occurred in less than five minutes. In that time, no one paid any attention to the spacecraft standing in Copley Square across Dartmouth from the library. About ninety feet long, it resembled a pumpkin seed made of broken mirrors, its myriad pieces fit together in complex patterns that reflected everything surrounding the craft. The ship didn’t have any obvious means of propulsion save for the ring at its aft end that glowed and hummed as the vessel made its descent. Although the spacecraft was poised on the four slender legs that telescoped down from its underside shortly after it landed, the ramp that was lowered from beneath the tapered bow had not yet reappeared to let the aliens who’d emerged go back aboard.

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