Skeleton Wars (9 page)

When the aircraft started descending, seven
of them remained in space and started shooting down the satellites
which they were not ready to use and those they had failed to get
access to. Each of these aircraft also launched a miniaturized
satellite into low earth orbit to boost their communication
systems. Three of these seven satellites were killer satellites
which had been equipped with hot laser emission pumps. The ghosts
hoped to use them to destroy missile war heads from other countries
that would try to help the US.

As the aircraft descended into the US
airspace, darkness appeared throughout the whole country for a
period of three minutes. The darkness was punctuated by strong
lightning which deterred further attempts by the US Air Force to
have more fighters take to the skies to intercept the UFOs. Even
the Patriot Missile and other anti-aircraft systems had been
switched off by the ghosts and hence the US army had no other means
of preventing the aircraft from reaching the ground.

By the time the darkness disappeared, all the
skies had been filled with the triangular aircraft. The UFOs had
managed to occupy strategic positions over all US landmarks. Due to
lack of any means of communicating with Pentagon, pilots of all the
military planes had to follow orders from their airfield
commanders. Military planes from different US Air Force airfields
started rising to the skies to battle with the UFOs. They started
firing countless air-to-air missiles at the triangular aircraft.
Their missiles were however exploding before reaching their targets
after being hit by hot laser beams from the aircraft.

In the first minutes of the aerial combat,
the triangular aircraft concentrated on producing laser beams that
were destroying the air-to-air missiles from manmade fighters. They
waited for the fighters to expend most of their missiles before
they started firing back. Their missiles had higher accuracy rates
of hitting the target because of their advanced homing guidance
systems. They were semi-autonomous in a way that once fired they
would stick at one target and would follow it wherever it went,
whilst taking evasive action against other projectiles and aircraft
that had filled the US airspace.

Many fighters were shot down in a very short
period of time. When the UFOs started firing their missiles, pilots
of the fighters that had exhausted their missiles decided to
abandon them. But still, as they tried to descend by parachutes,
some would be hit by fragments that were coming from the explosion
of their former planes which the missiles would have hit. Other
pilots attempted to ram their planes directly into the UFOs after
running out of missiles to use. But this was rather futile as it
gave the skeleton pilots better chances of shooting the jets down
with greater accuracy before they could reach them. Huge clouds of
smoke and fire had filled many areas in the skies which greatly
reduced visibility to the extent that some fighter planes ended up
colliding with each other.

After crippling the US Air Force, the UFOs
separated into three groups. The first group which was consisting
of highly maneuverable aircraft remained high up in the skies to
continue with the aerial combat with the few US fighters that had
persisted. These aircraft were also supposed to perform a
reconnaissance patrol mission for the underground skeleton
warriors. All the aircraft of the second and third groups descended
to lower altitude to support the infantry skeletons, but they were
assigned different missions.

Those of the second group became long-range
strategic bombers whose mission was destroying the enemy’s
fortifications, artillery and supply lines. They started firing
air-to-surface missiles at strategic targets like factories, US
Army forts and shipyards. This was intended to demoralize US
soldiers and to diminish their ability to wage further war. Bridges
and cloverleaf interchanges of major state highways were completely
destroyed to interdict communication and supply routes to the
frontlines.

The third group consisted of tactical bombers
whose aim was countering enemy activity on the ground and
supporting infantry skeletons in their offensive operations against
human troops. They could at some points do dive bombing to obtain
greater accuracy of the target before hitting it. The aircraft had
been equipped with anti-collision sensors which enabled them to fly
swiftly through urban concentrations with very tall buildings at
very low altitude without colliding with any building. In open
fields, they could operate at very short ranges to shoot directly
at troop concentrations using powerful, accurate and rapid firing
guns that had been mounted on them.

The infantry skeletons were highly boosted by
the aircraft’s ground invasion. They immediately changed their
mission from fighting to confuse to fighting to defeat the US Army.
The skeletons started forming groups that would encircle a platoon
of human soldiers and kill everyone. Then they would confiscate
their weapons and use them to drive other platoons away from major
towns and city centers.

Artillery men started fleeing to the
outskirts of major towns and cities to escape the might of the
skeletons. The soldiers that tried to surrender in advance would
not be spared. The skeletons were shooting them down even when they
dropped their weapons! The clever soldiers decided to put off their
uniforms to disguise as civilians. Some even joined the groups of
refugees that had started streaming from USA to neighboring Mexico
and Canada. But the aircraft would still attack them! They would
drop fragmentation bombs on them which could kill multiples.

The most disastrous weapons that the ghosts
came with were the flying drills which had been designed to cripple
the US Navy. Each of these contraptions consisted of a cylindrical
body with a hemispherical end and a sharp pointed front part. The
front part was a driving attachment which could perform much the
same work as a drill of boring holes through a barrier. Their
bodies had been built from an alloy that was five hundred times
stronger than steel. They could hence pass through the concrete
walls of earthly buildings or titanium hulls of warships without
registering any damage. Inside the cockpit, the pilot of each
flying drill was facing an instrument panel on which various gauges
and dials could indicate the drill’s position, altitude and the
target to hit. The single seat cockpit was covered by a small
polycarbonate canopy which could enable the pilot to see what was
taking place above them.

In true sense, the drills were flying
submarines that had been designed to hunt and sink down warships
including aircraft carriers and submarines. Not less than six of
these would fly above an aircraft carrier and use their rapid
firing guns or their small missile launchers to destroy all the
planes on the ship’s deck and to disperse the crew on board. As the
crew tried to escape from the attacked ship, the drills would soar
high up in the air before returning at a blinding speed to collide
with the ship intentionally. During the collision, they would use
the driving attachment in front of them to bore holes through the
deck of the carrier. At the same time other drills would attack the
ship from below the surface of water to bore holes through its
hull. The carrier would then start sinking after taking in water
through these holes. Before attacking any warship, the ghosts from
the International Space Station would first jam its weapon systems
which made it impossible for the ship to defend itself.

The drills had also been equipped with
high-end torpedo computer targeting systems which they could use to
shoot down the submarines from beneath the water surface. With
their advanced stealth systems, they would remain concealed in the
depths of water for a long time before attacking the submarines by
surprise. Below the water surface, they could travel at speeds of
over 90 knots, twice faster than any man made sub! But even when
moving at such a speed, the skeleton pilot could still properly
calculate their position, orientation and velocity without external
reference, using the advanced inertial guidance systems that had
been mounted on board.

US submarines could not clearly identify
their locations nor get directions to follow because the ghosts had
switched off the Global Positioning System. They instead had to
resurface from below the water body in order to use their
periscopes to view what was ahead of them. This was multi
disadvantageous to the submarines because apart from the periscopes
having poor and short visibility ranges, it made easy for the
drills that were flying above the water body to spot them. The
drills also had sonar detection systems that could enable them to
detect the submarines that tried to use sonar telephony to
communicate with each other.

Many submarines decided to maintain radio
silence and remained submerged in one position in order to avoid
detection. In others, the crew decided to abandon them by means of
their Escape Immersion Equipment whenever they suspected an
approaching drill. When those escape systems failed or when they
failed to use them early enough, they got no chance to survive
after the collision between the attacking drills and the subs.

Right from the start of the attack, the fight
on the ground had been greatest in Arlington County, in the US
state of Virginia. There had been a stronger whirlwind at the start
than anywhere else. The wind had blown off many gravestones from
almost all the graves in Arlington Cemetery, just near the
Pentagon. Skeletons of the dead arose from the graves, many of
which were probably former US Servicemen. They were joined by
skeletons from other cemeteries to wage an attack on the Pentagon,
the US Army headquarters. Over four hundred of these human
skeletons quickly occupied all the highways leading to Pentagon on
the complex Pentagon Road Network.

Initially the Pentagon Force Protection
Agency, together with the US army had tried to repel them backwards
by shooting heavily at them. However, the arrival of the ghosts’
air force and the switching off of the Pentagon’s Computer and
Communication Systems plus its electrical power supply had helped
reinvigorate the skeletons on the ground. The fighter UFOs had also
weakened them further by dropping bombs on all interchanges that
link different highways on the Pentagon Road Network, limiting
further access to the Army Headquarters by the US soldiers from
other areas who would have wanted to help their colleagues.

Also the fragmentation grenades that were
dropped on the soldiers and on their artillery greatly demoralized
them. Many decided to retreat in order to save their lives. Despite
the effort the PFP agents had put in to defend the building, the
skeletons proved to be militarily superior and were able to conquer
it. The skeletons killed everyone at the headquarters and even
moved to the bunkers and butchered all the VIPs that had taken
refuge there.

As soon as the infantry skeletons finished
taking over the Pentagon, the third division of the skeleton
warriors arrived. They came in very large aircraft which were
actually flying airships. With 20 decks, a height of 75 meters and
a width of 320 meters, the largest of all was arguably larger than
Oasis of the seas, the largest manmade cruise liner at the moment.
It arrived last and was accorded the greatest hospitality by the
fighter UFOs because it was the one carrying Lord Ghost. As it
descended to the ground, twenty fighter aircraft kept on flying
closer to it in formation. They escorted it until when it landed in
the central courtyard of Pentagon.

Many of the other airships landed in the
highways that lead to Pentagon. The skeleton warrior helped the
engineers to offload the equipment which these airships had carried
from Ghostia. Using the trucks the skeletons had confiscated from
humans, they transported the cargo load to Pentagon. These
different sets of equipment were used by the ghosts to assemble
different structures at Pentagon and in other parts of the country.
Many missile launch centers were set up in the Pentagon’s central
courtyard. The ghosts expected to use them to launch
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles against any foreign country
that would try to rise against them. Many of the ICBMs were armed
with multiple warheads that would carry mixtures of deadly
chemicals and pathological spores which could kill thousands of
humans in a short time. These missiles were however to be used as a
last resort because their air force was strong enough to counter
any foreign attack.

Pentagon’s last basement level, Level B was
turned into a science laboratory for their clandestine
experimentations. Lord Ghost sent a special group of skeleton
warriors to the streets to carry out raids in all man’s hideouts.
They kidnapped all the babies below the age of three that they
would come across. Using the trucks they had looted from the
streets, they drove all the children to Pentagon and handed them to
a team of the skeleton scientists. The children were taken to the
laboratories in which they were forcefully laid on operation tables
in supine positions.

Every child was injected with sedative drugs
that made them motionless. The children were then undressed
immediately and the skeleton scientists started dissecting them.
Their internal organs were disemboweled and their skins were
removed to obtain their skeletons. The bare skeletons would then be
dropped in very large centrifuges. The centrifuges had inbuilt
grinding tools that would crash the bones of the babies’ skeletons
to extract out their bone marrow. The bone marrow would then be
collected and put in very large glass test tubes.

The ghosts had come with a team of
cytologists who had devised methods of stimulating the pluripotent
stem cells in the bone marrow to reverse them back to totipotent
stem cells which they would then use to develop all body organs and
tissues. Their aim was to use these cloned tissues and organs to
dress up their bare skeletons! All along, this had been the main
reason as to why Lord Ghost had decided to attack mankind! He hoped
to obtain another arm and new flesh which could transform him into
a half-immortal-half-mortal being which was to rule both the earth
and Ghostia.