Divided (#1 Divided Destiny) by Taitrina Falcon Read Free Book Online Page A

area.
    Within a minute, they were all onboard the chopper and it was rocketing back into the sky, banking hard and heading towards Jersey with all the speed it could muster. Leo tensed, waiting for the blast that would take them out of the sky, that would send them spiraling to their deaths on the unforgiving ground below. He was certain that they would not be so lucky as to all survive a second helicopter crash.
    The seconds ticked by, the chopper gained more distance and the sounds of battle faded. They had made it. Leo let out a sigh of relief. They had gotten lucky, very lucky, and this could hardly be called a victory. Not yet. The eight of them had escaped with their lives by abandoning the fight. Leo knew they needed to resupply, and the scientists needed this alien and its suit, but that didn’t make running away any easier to live with.
    Both the pilot and the copilot who had saved their lives earlier had been left behind. Leo had lost track of them once the fighting had started. He hoped they managed to find cover and made it out okay. People were dying back there, innocent civilians, while they were whisked away back to the military base and relative safety.
    If the scientists could reverse engineer the suit’s energy weapon, that would give them a better chance, but there were still so many. It would really take something special to drive the entire alien fleet away from Earth. For the moment, at least until more troops could be shipped in, they were outnumbered as well as outgunned.
    It was no comfort to know he had been right with his initial thought the day before. They really were in for the fight of their lives. This was only the first battle of what would probably be a very short war.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Five
    With the discovery that the aliens attacking them were in fact Roswell Greys of conspiracy legend, Area 51 resembled a kicked-over anthill once more. The prevailing theory around base was that if Roswell Greys were real, then anything could be real. When Julian had first heard one of his colleagues state that, he hadn’t been able to hold back his snort. They had just been invaded by aliens; what difference did it make that they were Roswell Greys? Either the invasion itself made fringe science theories more likely, or nothing would. The revelation that the invaders were Roswell Greys changed nothing on that score.
    From the moment the booming voice had demanded their surrender, Julian’s quick mind had been ticking over the problem. Analyzing the data results from attacks on the energy shield was practical, but he was no fool. Even if they could bring one of the ships down, he was sure that the aliens would just recalibrate their shields. If they wanted to bring all the ships down, it would have to be a simultaneous attack, and that would only deal with the ships that were currently attacking Earth—if they were lucky.
    Julian knew with certainty that the aliens wouldn’t have committed their entire fleet to this. They would have had to be fools, or desperate, and their actions so far appeared calculated and planned. They appeared to be quite the formidable enemy. No, they needed something bigger than their conventional weapons. They needed an edge, and right now they had nothing.
    He had heard that one of the special forces units had recovered one of the alien ground troops. The body and the suit were being shipped out from McGuire. A few of his colleagues were practically salivating over it, but Julian was pretty sure the answer didn’t lie there. Given time—and it would likely take years—they might be able to reverse engineer the energy weapon and produce versions of their own. However, that was time the aliens would likely not give them.
    If the aliens were smart, and Julian believed they were, then they would start hitting the world’s infrastructure. They would attack transports; they would bring down the power grid. If the military couldn’t move people and resources