I shake my head. “Not yet. But I haven’t tried.”

“The air force tried yesterday. It didn’t go well.”

I frown. “I saw them flying in. I know they didn’t make it.”

“They had some success against the smaller ships, but they didn’t even get close to the Anubis. The air force was considering another strike when the Chinese went all in.”

“What does that mean?”

“A couple hours after the attack on New York, they got trigger-happy. Were probably worried they might be attacked next. They threw everything short of a nuke at the warship over Beijing.”

“And?”

“Casualties in the tens of thousands,” Walker answers. “The warship still in the air. They’re shielded somehow. Chinese scientists say it’s some kind of electromagnetic field. They got tired of crashing jets up against it, so they tried parachuting a small force directly onto the warship. Those guys didn’t survive contact with the field.”

I’m reminded of the force field surrounding the Mogadorian base in West Virginia. The shock I received from touching it was enough to knock me out and make me sick for days.

“I’ve run into their force fields before,” I tell Walker. “Literally.”

“How’d you break them down?”

“Never did.”

Walker gives me a deadpan look. “And here I was getting my hopes up.”

I look back at Walker’s map and shake my head. Every black X looks to me like a fight I don’t know how to win.

“Twenty-five cities under attack. You have any good news, Agent Walker?”

“That’s just it,” she says. “This is the good news.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Some places, like London and Moscow, sent troops out to fight the Mogs. But the response is nothing like here or Beijing. No bombardment, no rampaging monsters. It’s like the Mogs are taking it easy on them. And then there are the places like Paris and Tokyo that didn’t put up any fight at all. Those cities aren’t actually under attack. The warships and scout ships are controlling the airspace, but other than that there aren’t any Mogs on the ground. And then, this morning, that warship flies right over us, like we’re nothing. It’s got some people thinking maybe they don’t want to fight. Maybe it’s all just a big misunderstanding with the aliens, that we shouldn’t have attacked them first.”

“We didn’t,” I snap.

“I know that. But around the world, what they saw—”

“Setrákus Ra is sending a message,” I say. “Even though he’s got the advantage, he doesn’t want a protracted fight. He wants to frighten humanity into submission. He wants us to give in.”

Walker nods and walks over to her laptop. She enters a series of passwords, no easy task considering she’s typing one-handed, before finally pulling up an encrypted video.