94: Chapter 94 Fleet Approaches, Army Mutiny

On the east side of Indian Springs Air Force Base, in the staging area of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Outside the hangar, rows of parked AHH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, originally the main force waiting to execute an aerial assault mission.

At this moment, the pilots were not sitting in the cockpits.

They were all standing outside the hangar, just like the soldiers from the cavalry and ranger regiments, looking up.

Some were still wearing flight helmets, while others had taken them off and placed them silently by the rotor pylons.

A young second lieutenant pilot, still in his reserve period with only a few months left, spoke with cracked lips:

"This doesn't look like they want to exterminate us; they are using that war right now to show off their strength."

"It's not too late for us to surrender now."

"If we wait until they turn that entire flight formation toward us, the word 'negotiation' won't exist anymore."

"There will only be scorched earth left by then."

No one refuted him.

Not because they were afraid of him, but because every squadron commander and co-pilot present was reaching a nearly identical conclusion from the exact same data.

In the face of absolute crushing power, any resistance is futile.

Just like when an avalanche arrives, no one thinks of punching the avalanche; the only thought in everyone's mind is to flee, to flee as far as possible.

...

Colorado, Cheyenne Mountain Underground Monitoring Center.

This monitoring hall of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, embedded within the granite mountain, is the most advanced real-time aerial threat monitoring hub in the Lighthouse Country and even the world.

At this moment, in the monitoring hall, all the giant curved screens were displaying the same image.

Duty operator Katherine Myers stood up from her seat, forgetting to unplug her headset cord, which yanked the headset, causing it to wobble and knock over her coffee cup. Coffee spilled all over the keyboard, but she didn't even look at it.

The sergeant major behind her stared at the thermal imaging sector on the screen, his lips moving several times, only squeezing out a sentence in a whisper:

"My God!"

Everyone in the entire monitoring hall stood up from their seats one after another.

Some dropped the intelligence folders in their hands at their feet, forgetting to pick them up; some repeatedly tapped their controllers, trying to confirm if the current sensors were still within calibration range; others repeatedly shouted into the encrypted communication channels:

"Re-verify the number of unidentified flying objects!!"

"Repeat! Re-verify!!"

"The number is still increasing! They are still appearing!!"

After repeated checks, the aerial target recognition algorithm produced numbers that jumped higher and higher, finally settling on a figure that sent a chill down everyone's spine in the hall, leaving them breathless and silent: 200,000!

When the duty commander, Air Force Major General Terence Brady, rushed into the hall from his office, he was still clutching a teacup, his tie crooked to one side of his shirt collar.

He stood in front of the curved screen, watching the live footage of the southwestern sky interwoven with energy beams and explosion fireballs, standing there for a full five seconds, then took a deep breath, turned around, and said to everyone behind him:

"This is not a drill!"

"Summon everyone at The Pentagon! The Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Homeland Security Committee! Recall everyone!"

"Record all data! Upload all data streams directly to the White House Situation Room! Don't miss a single one!"

His voice didn't tremble. But the hand holding the teacup transmitted that tremor, causing tiny ripples to form on the surface of the water in the cup.

...

Hoover Dam Visitor Center and surrounding viewing areas.

On the viewing platform and parking lot outside the visitor center, no one was looking at the Hoover Dam anymore.

Everyone's eyes were glued to their phones, held up toward the sky, or they were gripping the railings tightly with their bare hands.

Aliens. This word didn't come from a government press conference, nor from any official channel, but from the mouths of every mortal who saw the 200,000-strong fleet crowding the skyline with their own eyes, spreading uncontrollably like ink dropped into a water tank.

To the southwest, the web of light interwoven across the firmament and the silhouettes of ships slowly tumbling and falling were already beyond the scope of explanation.

There was no warning, no announcement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, no traditional emergency broadcast.

But everyone present could not retract the scene they had just witnessed: the moment a giant mothership emerged entirely from a spatial rift, that entire familiar night sky was no longer the celestial body anyone recognized.

Someone collapsed against the edge of the stone railing at the visitor center, burying their face deep in their palms; when they raised their head again, their eyes were red, and they kept muttering, "The world is going to end today, and I've never even left Iowa."

A young woman squatted on the ground, hugging two children to her chest, one on the left and one on the right, praying incessantly in a low voice, her lips pressed against her younger son's dirty ear, vaguely repeating, "God, please take away all our sins."

Meanwhile, on the left side of the observation deck, near the row of souvenir shops by the road,

a thin white old man wearing a faded plaid shirt was waving his arms vigorously at the sky. His old eyes, buried in wrinkles, swelled with an extremely excited light. With a hoarse but exceptionally loud voice, he shouted repeatedly at the fleet formation in the direction of the galaxy:

"Sir! This way! This way! Noble Alien gentlemen, please come this way!"

"I know where those capitalists and billionaires live! I'll lead the way for you!"

"I know their satellite map coordinates, I know their yacht berths, and I know they have hidden 90% of the gold in all of America!"

Behind the railing on the right side of the observation deck, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and arms covered in old-fashioned combat tattoos ripped his T-shirt off, threw it on the ground, and roared at the sky:

"I want to join you! I apply to join the noble Alien army!"

"I have received ground reconnaissance training; I can act as a guide after you land! I know best where the most expensive wealthy districts are on this planet! I just want a beam gun!"

His wife and three children stood behind him. The wife covered her mouth with her hand, dazed, and the children looked at their father, who was waving his fists at the sky, with faces full of confusion and fear, as if looking at a stranger.

In the visitor center parking lot, next to the vending machine near the mountain side, Jack Cooper, the host of the YouTube outdoor adventure channel, was holding his selfie stick as high as possible, with the fill light on his phone case turned to the brightest setting, looking as if he had been injected with adrenaline, excited to the extreme.

He had been live-streaming for less than ten minutes, and the number of people flooding into his live stream had jumped from the usual two or three hundred to 1.5 million. The comment section on the screen was scrolling too fast, so fast that he couldn't even finish reading the comments himself, so he could only pick the most frequently appearing words to respond loudly.

An ID spammed: "Holy shit! Those are UFOs! Real UFOs! Jack, you fraud, you really captured something this time! Don't end the stream!!"