tell how much of the eerie silence was due to the shock of the impact as opposed to their collective hearing impairment, but Brennan didn’t spot a single animal anywhere, not even from the corner of his eye. The bulk of what had once been a rounded hill covered in brush and summer-yellowed grass must’ve been pounded flat, driven into the ground and compressed into geologists’ delight, but more than enough material was still there, shoved aside by the blast wave. The men were forced to abandon their vehicles and continue on foot once they reached those wrinkled ridges of the crater, the four-wheel drive no match for the mess of rocks and overturned earth before them. They fanned out in three squads to cover a bigger area and Brennan led his unit straight up the slope and to the rim, the stones still warm under their feet.

They crawled the last few feet on their bellies, careful not to present a target when peeking over the edge. Brennan felt his stomach cramp a little with anticipation. He’d never done anything quite like this. Checking out crash sites wasn’t included in his usual duties, and this wasn’t a textbook situation by any means. It made him tense with nerves and an adrenaline-fueled sense of excitement. He was intensely curious about what they were going to find down there. A shuttle? A drone? Some sort of new stealth plane?

Turned out it was something completely different, in every sense of the word. Apparently, aliens did, indeed, have big, creepy eyes, and were on the smallish side.

They compensated with big guns.

Brennan stared, paralyzed, as his brain tried to work through a number of realizations such as, no, those weren’t people down there even though they looked humanoid, and yes, he was sober and awake, and damn, if the ufologists got so much as a whiff of this, they would cream their geeky pants. He counted eight aliens huddled next to the… God help him, that really was a spaceship. They looked tiny next to the immense metal structure, their skin milky white, their knees bent the wrong way, like a dog’s hind legs. They were dressed in something that reminded Brennan a bit of black battle dress uniforms. Looked like only four of them had made it out of the crash virtually unscathed; three were down on the ground, one writhing in pain, one holding on to an improvised tourniquet that kept it from bleeding out through the stump of its leg, one looking dead from the

distance. The alien providing first aid didn’t look too hot, either. No telling if there were more of them still trapped or dead inside the wreck, which looked pretty mangled. It was a fairly big ship, though; seemed likely there’d be additional crew somewhere.