Response to The Writing Reader Prompt #1778 – Siege

In April I responded to Prompt #1694 – Ghetto Uprising on Writing Reader. This post is a narrative outline of how the story that contains that piece will begin.

Daily prompts and the responses to those prompts are located at http://www.thewritingreader.com/blog/

Prompt #1778 – Siege

This is the visual that accompanied the prompt at Writing Reader.

The celebration was over.

The explorers arrived in an armada of spacecraft. No one doubted when they claimed a neighboring solar system as their home. They were greeted at first with cautious optimism for good reason. Their ships were sleek and fast. The technology they shared was decades, perhaps centuries ahead of anything on the home planet.

Delf had never been a major player in interplanetary commerce. Nations with access to materials and fuel sources needed to build, send, and maintain interplanetary craft did so. But the commitment to such expeditions was limited to those with known monetary benefit. As a result, no spacecraft produced on the planet were cargo-carries. They had neither weapons nor defenses. The lack interest in space travel as anything more than a novelty would come back to bite the native population.

The fact that there were a lot of explorers was easy to overlook. Only a few naysayers pointed out the number of aliens. Also noted by the vocal minority was the fact that all the aliens wore uniforms. The refusal to allow native Delfites to board any of their ships except those that landed on the surface completed the trilogy of concerns.

The vast majority of Delfites ignored the naysayers’ warnings. Nations who’d long ago ceased looking for common ground with one another embraced the aliens call for a unified planetary government. The aliens offered their assistance in establishing a central government and its ancillary agencies. Only two of the smallest sovereign states balked at the offer. Both changed their stance when the announcement that access to alien high-level technology would be limited to those included in the planet-wide governmental structure was made.

Within two years of the landing of the first alien ship, all Delf was aligned with the alien agenda. It was now three years beyond that date, and the situation was far less desirable. What had been touted as the introduction of a wonderful new era had been exposed as the start of a planet-wide takeover by the alien species.

The aliens once seen as allies had shown themselves to be invaders. Platoons of soldiers used plasma and ion cannons to destroy energy-conversion and manufacturing facilities. With the ability of the native population to produce only rudimentary fuel and weapons all that remained, the aliens withdrew. A fleet of military ships and its associated troops were left behind to see ensure no change to the status quo.

It became clear that the aliens intended to use Delft as nothing more than a source of raw materials forced labor. In response, the Delfites launched several offensives. Those were quashed with casualty counts lopsided in the aliens’ favor. It was clear that they had neither the firepower nor the manpower to trade blows with what was obviously the heavyweight in the match.

Realizing they could never win a traditional war, Delft leaders switched to guerilla tactics. Guerilla strikes were more successful than the frontal attacks. In reality, though, they were nothing more disconcerting to the aliens than mosquito bites are to humans.

When it became clear that the aliens intended to use Delf as nothing more than a source of raw materials forced labor, the Delfites launched several offensives. Those were quashed with casualty counts lopsided in the aliens’ favor. Realizing that they had neither the firepower nor the manpower to trade blows with what was obviously the heavyweight in the match, Delf leaders switched to guerilla tactics. While those proved to be more successful than the frontal attacks, they were nothing more than the equivalent of mosquito bites to the aliens.

However, mosquitos can become more bother than the host organism is willing to tolerate. Thus it was with the aliens. Armed patrols roamed the countryside. Cities were searched with ruthless efficiency. The surviving Delfites fled to the smaller cities in the hills and mountains and dug in.

The siege was now in its tenth month. Reconnaissance forays by the natives reported increased activity in and around the metallic ore mines. Some took the alien interest in resource gathering to be a sign of waning interest in the fighting. Others, led by the remnants of the vocal minority, insisted that resource gathering was the first step in the production of military hardware. Only time would tell which faction read the signs accurately.

And time was a commodity that the Delfites were running short of.