Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) by Lee Guo

safe because they were already camouflaged. Or at least he hoped. He would fire them at the alien landers when they came. Only then would he reveal their positions.
    Why didn’t he have more marines? Because high command had never planned against a conventional ground army invading Meerlat, since its colonization fifty years ago. The only contingency was a simple pirate raid, and forty thousand marines was more than enough to take care of that. The Orion border wasn’t anywhere near Meerlat, so an Orion invasion of Meerlat was next to impossible. Besides, during the Orion War, the Orions didn’t have any use for civilians. They simply ignored them or bombarded them when they felt the civilians got in the way.
    These aliens were different. They had use for them.
    Streit wracked his brain trying to think of past situations but came up empty.
    All he knew was that he had to protect the civilians with any means necessary. He was well aware that if the aliens had no problems destroying thousands of people up there , they would have no problems killing people down here .
    “Alien troop transports are ejecting landing vessels,” the tactical officer announced.
    He gazed at the hologram of the planet. He could see the smaller landing pods separating from the larger hyperspace capable troop ships. No doubt, the aliens had the same type of technology and tactics when it came to sending troops down to the ground. At least in this respect, he felt relieved. Technically, large kilometer long ships could descend down to a planet’s surface, but they would be exposed to anti-air fire. If the large ship went down, everything within it would be annihilated. It was much better to separate the cargo into smaller ships. Besides, there was the issue of logistics. It was much easier to deploy stuff onto the ground from hundreds of smaller transports once they reached the soil than it was to deploy everything from one big ship.
    Streit stood aghast at the figures. The seven big troop transports were a dozen kilometers wide. But the thousands of smaller landing pods were only a hundred meters wide. If alien technology was anything like human technology, each of these smaller ships could contain up to thousands of ground soldiers. He was facing an invasion force of a million enemy ground troops. There was no way he could fight off this many even if the enemy had infantry technology—which they certainly did not. But perhaps he could prevent some of these ground troops from landing.
    As the minutes passed, he watched intently as these landing pods descended through the planet’s uppermost exosphere by the thousands. 3275, to be correct. Their descent was slow, by human standards. They looked like gigantic roaches, with hundreds of small black feet scattered all across the bottoms of their hulls. Before long, he knew it was time.
    “Open up the anti-air turrets, now,” Streit ordered. “Remove the camouflage.”
    “Yes, sir,” the weapons officer replied.
    “Set the targeting systems on each gun to fire at the nearest target. Missile targeting should be spread throughout their landing force, but still target those closest to them.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Let’s see how their atmospheric shields hold up. “Fire!” Streit didn’t know what to expect, but he was glad of one thing. Because they had split up their ground troops into thousands of smaller landing vessels instead of one gigantic troop ship, it at least gave a glimmer of hope that they feared that human anti-air technology could destroy or incapacitate a massive troop ship. If that was possible, then it was just as possible that his anti-air fire could destroy their landing pods.
    ...Or perhaps that’s the way they always did things. For instance, against races with equivalent technology as their own, they were forced into deploying landing pods to minimize casualties against those races.
    Either way, he was about to find out.
     
    First Escarot Tranport Sheras-Cree, in orbit