'This Jolene Crawford wants you to rendezvous at her location in three days. Instead, we send you in tonight a few miles from the meeting point. You can survey the situation and decide either to leave or make contact. It will be your call.'
'That sounds like the easiest way to go.'
'Captain, since we marched into Ohio, nothing has been easy.'
– 'Hello, Denise? Is that you?'
Nina, in a farmhouse bedroom turned communications center, struggled to hear the voice on the other end of the phone.
Communication across the growing Empire proved spotty at best. In the case of Army Group North, they managed to tap into hard lines connecting with a switchboard outside of Pittsburgh which, in turn, connected to more lines all the way back to Annapolis, an amazing technical feat in the post-Armageddon world.
Nonetheless, Denise sounded as if she spoke through a tin can at the other end of a mile-long string.
'Mom, that you?'
It had taken Nina a long time to accept being called 'mom'. The opposite had been true of Denise. The girl longed to call someone 'mother' after losing her real parents in the fires of the invasion at six years old.
'It’s me, honey, how are you?'
'What?'
'I said, it’s me. Yes, it’s me, mom. How are you?'
'Oh. I’m good.'
'Are you going to school? No skipping, you hear?'
'That was one time, geez. No skipping, I promise. School is actually pretty cool.'
Nina broke the bad news, 'Hey, I’m going on a…well…I’m going on a mission. You know I can't say much, this isn't exactly a secure line.'
Denise groaned, 'So much for our weekend in Pittsburgh, I guess.'
'I'm really sorry. I pulled a lot of strings to try and meet up for your birthday, thirteen is a big one. You're a teenager now. I can't believe it.'
'This sucks. Mom. Things were better last summer. Can't I just live with the groupies?'
The families, loved ones, merchants, and traders who packed their belongings into wagons, horses, and backpacks to follow the troop formations were known as 'groupies.' The teachers among the 'groupies' held classes for kids offering basic ABCs. However, Nina and her commando unit often changed Army Groups at a moment's notice. She wanted something more stable for Denise, even if it meant seeing her less.
Nina told her adopted daughter, 'I’m sorry, honey. I really am. This will be over in a few days I think. We’ll see about next weekend. We were already celebrating a little late, so what's another week, right?'
'Yeah, Mom, whatever.'
The line clicked, a burst of static, and the connection broke.
– The black painted Eagle transport ship cut through the frigid darkness above the Till plains of western Ohio.
Nina Forest did not remember the first time she rode in an Eagle air ship. That memory had been one of a year's worth of memories wiped away by the aliens known as The Order. She also did not remember how to fly an Eagle, a skill Trevor Stone taught her before the stealing of those memories.
She did know, however, that humanity had captured four Eagle air ships from the invading force nicknamed 'The Redcoats' during the battle of Wilkes-Barre six years ago. The ships exemplified humanity adapting extraterrestrial technology for use against the invaders.
Engineers improved upon the alien design and now Eagles rolled off an assembly line at the old Philadelphia shipyards for use as transports, command vehicles, and cargo carriers.
This flying machine amazed Nina because of the lack of aerodynamics. Indeed, the Eagle resembled a flying brick sporting a triangular nose cone with a thin long windshield. Twin engine baffles marked the rear of the rectangular passenger compartment while landing gear sprouted from pods at each corner. Anti-gravity circuits in the undercarriage kept the Eagle aloft and the hydrogen-powered engines-fueled by fresh or desalinated water- pushed the ship along with a ride as smooth as an ice skater gliding across a frozen pond.
Most of the Eagles wore white paint but a few dressed in different colors, such as Nina's black special operations ride that night.
Nina knew how to fly helicopters, even big Blackhawk transports and Apache gun ships, but she had not found the time to take a training course for Eagle flight.
Captain Forest shook those musings from her mind and glanced around the compartment.
A small sealed bulkhead led forward toward the cockpit while another bulkhead led to the aft engine room. Storage compartments lined the walls of the passenger module and two sliding doors would open to the outside at the right time.
She shared the windowless yet brightly lit passenger compartment with the rest of her Dark Wolves team.
Oliver Maddock sat in one of the high-backed bench seats reading an issue of Know Thy Enemy, a magazine devoted to the thousands of different monsters that had come to Earth alongside extraterrestrial armies and overrun humanity nearly seven years ago.
Nina knew that a military expedition had traveled to the Arctic Circle and retrieved a device that shut down the alien gateways. The Empire had uncovered one such dormant gateway just outside of Atlanta; a big green arch serving as the Hivvan springboard in their assault across the American south.
From what she heard, the device recovered from Greenland also made it possible to send captured aliens home, a sort of one-way return trip to their planet of origin. A backlog of Hivvan prisoners waited in cells in Pennsylvania to take that trip. The location of this device, however, remained a closely guarded secret.
Alas, the Earth retained an incomprehensible number of dangerous alien life forms ranging from prey such as herd animals and giant rats to predators like armor-plated Jaw-Wolves and carnivorous Giant Jellyfish. Those animals did not need gateways to increase their number, they merely reproduced.
As for the sentient extraterrestrial races such as the Hivvans, Platypuses and Red Hands, they had descended upon the Earth seemingly to murder or enslave mankind. Often times the invaders fought amongst themselves, but just as often they worked together to attack Earth's indigenous population.
Nina did not understand why Maddock wasted his time reading Know Thy Enemy. Like her, Maddock received the most up-to-date information on the invaders including hard, scientific facts from scientists conducting tests on captured creatures at the underground complex in Red Rock, Pennsylvania.
Carl Bly, meanwhile, studied creatures of another sort as he sat in a corner 'reading' a new issue of Playboy. The headline lured, 'Girls of the 1 ^ st Armored Division!'
Vince Caesar, the fourth member of the Dark Wolves team, busied himself with cleaning his weapon. Caesar, she knew, read every report from Red Rock and would not allow his mind to be distracted by pornography, unless ordered to do so, of course.
Nina pulled a photograph from the pocket of her black BDUs and stared at a picture of the blond girl who called her 'mother' and who had recently turned thirteen.
Mother.
Nina did not know what that had meant in the old days, but she knew what it meant in the post-Armageddon world. It meant making sure Denise went to school. It meant standing in line at the distribution center to get enough food for the week.
It meant telling Denise that, no, she could not build bonfires at Highland Beach with the older boys from school. Nina did not care that Denise could fight with the skill of a second-degree black belt or that she could plug a Gremlin in the forehead at twenty yards with a handgun. The girl would be in bed at a reasonable time and not hanging out with older boys anywhere, let alone the beach at night.
It meant taking Denise to the doctor-where the lines were often times longer than the distribution center lines-for vaccinations and check-ups. It meant scrounging enough of the new 'continental dollars' so Denise could buy a cool skirt for the school dance.
It meant a lot of things that translated into headaches, heartache, shouting matches, spending lots of money, and bouts of self-doubt the likes of which Nina never experienced in all her life.
And it was worth every last second.
