"Divided We Fall" Author Unknown V Annual 1986 (World International Publishing Ltd.)

The Visitors bring a new, destructive weapon into the hills outside Los Angeles.

Story Summary

Donovan and Kyle head to the hills outside of town to meet with Las Vegas resistance members to deliver them some needed weapons. As they wait at the rendezvous point, a large Visitor convoy passes by on the road near their hiding place. Shortly after, a force field envelops the top of the nearby hill. Then the small resistance airplane from Vegas shows up, but smacks into the invisible field and the plane is destroyed.

The two men head dejectedly back to the temporary resistance base nearby. There they find that gung-ho American Joe Day is fighting with a new Russian recruit named Ivan about the ideological differences between their two countries. They break up the fight and then Julie arrives, bringing some new information suggesting that the hilltop must be the sight of Diana's new weapon capable of flattening everything in a 50-mile radius. They decide to take it out and the next morning Donovan, Kyle, Joe, and Ivan head back to the area.

They find that the Visitors have set up in an abandoned mine. They use a Blowpipe missile launcher to attack the installation. While Kyle, Joe, and Ivan rappel down into a nearby mineshaft in an attempt to proceed underground beyond the force field, Donovan steals a skyfighter parked there and is able to follow another skyfighter through an opening it creates in the force field. Then he blasts the weapon into bits.

Donovan picks up the others and they head back to base. The men joke in comradeship all the way home.

THE END

Didja Know?

This story appeared in the British V Annual 1986, a book of short stories, articles and games all about V, geared towards kids. The stories use a fair amount of British terms and military jargon, despite taking place in the U.S.

Didja Notice? 

Page 43 describes the airplane from the Las Vegas resistance as a Beagle Pup. This is a British 2-seat prop plane developed in 1967. Less than 200 of the model were ever produced, so the resistance had a bit of a collector's item until it smacked into the Visitor force field.

Page 43 tells us that Donovan and Kyle have returned to the temporary resistance base in a gutted movie theater. We never saw such a base in the course of the TV series. The location is not given here, so perhaps this is a base in an outlying area from L.A.

Resistance member Joe Day is reluctant to allow the Russian, Ivan, to join the group and the two exchange gibes about red communism and capitalist imperialism. The story was written and takes place in the mid-1980s during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

On page 44, Julie refers to the Scorcher, the gargantuan weapon brought into Earth orbit by the Visitors in "Dreadnought" in which Robert Maxwell sacrificed his life piloting the captured mothership into a collision course with the weapon to destroy it before it could unleash its power against the planet. Only thing is, it was never referred to as the Scorcher in the episode; it was called the particle beam triax. Since this book was published in Britain, might the name of the weapon in the episode have been changed for the British broadcast for some reason?

"What'chu talkin' 'bout, Willie?" On page 44, Willie is referred to as Willis. Just a typo, but I thought it was funny.

Also on page 44, Ivan and Joe encounter a milk snake in the mountains, which resembles the poisonous coral snake. This is a real species of king snake found throughout the continental U.S.

Joe and Ivan make use of a Blowpipe missile system. This was a real world, portable missile-to-air launcher similar to a bazooka. The Blowpipe system was used by the British military from 1975-1985.

Page 47 describes Joe as abseiling down a rope into a mine shaft. Abseiling is a British term which means the same as rappelling in American English.

Page 47 reveals that the Visitors have a code they can punch into a computer to open a hole in the mountaintop force field to allow their shuttles to pass through. This is very similar to the workings of the force field used in the TV episode "The Dissident".