Original Work To Win or Lose it All (Conquistadors III)

Hi, everyone

To Win Or Lose It All is book 3 of The Conquistadors trilogy, following Conquistadors and The Counterfactual War. It will properly make absolutely no sense unless you have read the first two books; as always, I will happily send copies of the previous two books in exchange for comments on this book.

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Prologue I

From: The United States and the Protectorate War. Baen Historical Press. 2070.

It cannot be denied that the United States of the early thirties was a deeply divided society, in a world that was increasingly fragmented, hostile and/or fundamentally opposed to American values. The recent election had brought many of the tensions threatening American stability into the open and the victory of President Hamlin, a well-meaning and decent but ultimately ineffectual politician unwilling or unable to confront the problems facing the United States, did nothing to calm the roiling fury under the surface. Prone to dithering, lacking any real power base, it seemed likely his first term would be his last. Indeed, even his own party was preparing to primary him rather than take the risk of letting him seek re-election.

Political deadlock in Washington owed much, it should be acknowledged, to the simple fact the United States was not in any physical danger. Chaos along the Mexican border and turmoil in the Caribbean did not post any significant threat, certainly not one that threatened the political or bureaucratic elite in Washington. Simmering tensions in both the Ukraine and the South China Sea – and, of course, the Middle East – might draw attention briefly, only to be dismissed as the United States returned to contemplating its internal problems. Talk of civil war, never far from the surface, seemed to ebb and flow with the tides. The paralysis in Washington seemed to ebb and flow with the tides.

It was the worst possible time for the United States to face an Outside Context problem, an invasion from another world. But there was no choice.

The Protectorate knew nothing of America’s problems when they transposed their assault force into our dimension. Through sheer luck, the Protectorate Expeditionary Force arrived right on top of a small town in Texas – Flint – and rapidly secured the area, while probing the surrounding region and hacking the internet to download as much data as possible. They had assumed theirs was the only timeline that had enjoyed an industrial revolution and it was a surprise to discover that our world was a technological civilisation, if one nearly a century behind their own. Their commander - Captain-General James Montrose – had no intention of retreating, let alone opening peaceful contact and developing diplomatic relationships. He had come to make his name through conquest and determined to do so. His brief attempts at diplomatic outreach were nothing more than a bid to buy time.

President Hamlin dithered, as was his wont. Flint was surrounded and sealed off by the United States Army, but there was no attempt to demand access to the occupied town or seek confirmation of the tale the diplomats had been told. Unsure of what he was dealing with, Hamlin ignored the advice of his Vice President - Felix Hernandez – and his military officials, refusing to countenance either a more aggressive approach or a pre-emptive strike. It was not until a refugee fleeing the town accidentally started a brief engagement that rapidly spiralled out of control that the military was permitted to take a harder line, too late. The PEF attacked with a fury and technological edge the defenders couldn’t match, rapidly overrunning the army positions and expanding into Texas. A combination of computer hacks and cruise missiles strikes further weakened the United States, making it difficult to coordinate any response.

On paper, the PEF was greatly outnumbered. In practice, their advanced technology and cold-blooded ruthlessness allowed them to crush resistance, eventually seizing Austin and threatening nearby states before America learnt how to fight them. The sheer force of their attack weakened both the United States and its global allies, while their diplomatic contacts with hostile states – and covert operations within America – raised the promise of reinforcements and even American surrender. Their ability to land almost anywhere – showing off their power by attacking New York – cowed Hamlin. Believing the war to be lost, with the arrival of a second invasion force in the Middle East, he made overtures to Montrose.

This was too much for Felix Hernandez and his growing cabal. They started making urgent preparations to remove President Hamlin from power, preparations that were ironically detected by the PEF and used to justify a strike into Washington itself. With only limited understanding of how the American government worked, the PEF moved to seize the White House and the President, intending to use him as a puppet. The plan misfired. The assault force found itself trapped in Washington, and the relief force was forced to fight its way through the city in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to save it. Casualties were heavy on both sides, including Hamlin himself, but the PEF suffered its first real defeat.

As Felix Hernandez took the Oath of Office, and James Montrose secured his position by scapegoating another officer, they both knew the outcome of the war remained in the balance.

Accordingly, they developed new strategies. The United States attempted, unsuccessfully, to liberate New York. Montrose, believing conventional victory to be impossible, attempted to build and launch an orbital weapons platform that would allow him to dominate the world and hammer any nation that tried to resist back to the Stone Age. Both sides attempted to exploit weaknesses within the other’s political-military framework, making use of infiltrators as they plotted knock-out blows.

It all came to a head when the United States realised the PEF’s orbital weapons platform was within days of being launched. The United States launched a massive attack, conventional and nuclear, on both occupied territory within America and the Middle East, destroying the orbital weapons platform and crippling the Protectorate base in Saudi Arabia. It was a great and yet costly victory, buying time for the United States to gird her loins for the final battle ...

But both sides knew the war was yet to be won.

Prologue II: Timeline A (Protectorate Homeworld)

“It’s confirmed, then?”

“Yes,” Protector John Hotham said, bluntly. “There was a gate in Timeline F … and that gate was destroyed.”

Protector Julianne Rigby sucked in her breath. The Protectorate rarely lost battles and never lost wars. It had fought and won two global conflicts and gone on to wage war on both degenerate states on its homeworld and four other timelines, the latter posing almost no challenge at all. Timeline F was unusual in that it was a technological civilisation – the Protectorate had assumed it was the only human civilisation that had developed steam-powered technology and beyond – but the natives were still at least a hundred years behind the Protectorate. The techs had dug through the remains of the enemy town that had been rotated into the home timeline, and interrogated the captured natives, and discovered they were unbelievably degenerate. It was hard to believe they could pose any threat at all.

But they clearly did, if the report was to be believed.

She scowled. It was never easy to communicate across the interdimensional barrier. The Protectorate Expeditionary Force was effectively on its own, at least until a gate was set up to allow regular transit between the two timelines, and that meant the Protectorate Council had no way to know what was really going on. It took immense power and desperation to send even a simple signal without a gate and communicating anything beyond the bare fact of the signal’s existence was impossible. It was only permitted if the assault force had run into something it couldn’t handle and … that should have been impossible. The natives weren’t spear-wielding barbarians, true, but they were hardly a match for the invaders. They should have been crushed by now.

Protector Horace Jarvis put her thoughts into words. “Either Montrose has been defeated – or he’s playing games.”

It was a vain hope, Julianne knew. Montrose was almost terrifyingly ambitious – and most of his captains were equally so – and he intended to make use of the conquest to build an unassailable political position, but cutting himself off permanently from the home timeline would be a step too far. His captains would never go along with it and even if they did, there’d never be any guarantee a new Protectorate Expeditionary Force wouldn’t be dispatched. Nor would it suit their ambitions to be cut off permanently. How could they compete for power and status in the home timeline if they could no longer travel there? Beating up the natives was nothing in comparison.

No, she told herself, grimly. He’s run into something he can’t handle.

She studied the holographic map without quite seeing it. The captured natives had been depressingly ignorant as well as degenerate. Some hadn’t known simple details of how their government worked, others hadn’t been able to point to countries on maps or had a truly fantastical idea of what their timeline could do. It was lucky the ruined town had included a library and a great many computer databases, although the latter were crammed with contradictory information when they weren’t crammed with truly degenerate pornographic material. Julianne had had a misspent youth – it was common amongst the toweringly ambitious; the risk of losing everything was just part of the thrill – and yet, she hadn’t seen anything like the horrors the investigators had found in the files. Children! Animals! It was just disgusting.

We should put the entire timeline out of its misery, she thought. She dreaded to think what would become of any child growing up in such an environment. And not just because it managed to beat us.

She shook her head. Montrose was dangerously ambitious, true, but he wasn’t incompetent. His captains would have knifed him in the back, perhaps literally, if he’d lost his iron grip on the invasion force. The fact he’d been beaten – or at least that the gates he’d been trying to set up had been destroyed, violently enough for the emissions to be detected from a whole other timeline – was deeply worrying. It suggested they were facing an incredibly capable foe.

Perhaps we invaded their version of a degenerate state, she mused. It wasn’t impossible. Texas had been a backwater when the Spanish had invaded and it hadn’t really changed under the Protectorate. The invasion force had been assembled there at least partly because it was a long way from the known and extrapolated power centres. There might be other, more advanced, countries in Timeline F.

“We have two choices,” Hotham said, bluntly. “We send reinforcements – or we don’t.”

“The risk is considerable,” Jarvis said. “What are we facing?”

“Risks are manageable,” Hotham pointed out. “We cannot abandon our troops to their fate.”

“They knew the risks,” Jarvis countered. “And we have to consider the safety of our homeworld.”

“There’s nothing in the investigation reports to suggest our enemies know anything about interdimensional travel,” Hotham said. “They can’t get to us.”

“They have the concept,” Julianne said, quietly. “Alternate versions of their heroes, goatee-stroking evil counterparts ... they have the concept, if not the technology, and given time they will have the technology too.”

“Decades, at least,” Hotham said.

“Perhaps less,” Julianne said. “For all we know, their ... America ... may be a degenerate state.”

“The data suggests otherwise,” Jarvis said.

“They could easily have written lies into the databases,” Julianne pointed out. “The Tsars did that ...”

“Yes,” Hotham agreed. “And look what happened to them.”

Julianne smiled. She’d been raised to accept that the truth needed to be accepted even if the truth wasn’t something she wanted to accept. There was nothing to be gained from lying to one’s own people, even if the truth was unflattering or actively dangerous. She could cite a dozen cases where hiding from the truth had only made the situation worse ... but the Tsars had disagreed. They’d lied to their people, lied to their military officers, lied even to themselves ... they wouldn’t have lost the war, perhaps, if they’d been more honest about the balance of power. Perhaps there was a timeline somewhere where they had.

“And the truth here is that we have lost contact with Timeline F,” she said. “Do we risk sending a third invasion force?”

She ground her teeth in frustration. If she knew what was happening ... it would be easy to make the final call. But she didn’t and she couldn’t ...

“Best case, Montrose has been hammered, but remains unbowed,” she said, into the silence. “In that case, he can put together a whole new tech base and eventually reopen contact with us. Worst case, Montrose and his entire force has been destroyed. In that case ... our enemies may well have captured enough information and technology to make them actively dangerous to the home timeline too.”

She let the words hang in the air for a long moment. Montrose had strict orders to keep technology and databases from falling into enemy hands, but if he’d run into something he couldn’t handle it might have proved impossible. There were limits to how much the censors could keep out of the databases without crippling the PEF and if one had been captured ... she gritted her teeth. The natives of Timeline C simply hadn’t been able to accept technology as anything other than magic. They knew nothing about how the world really worked. But Timeline F was different. They wouldn’t bow down and worship a random piece of technology because it was beyond their understanding. They’d try to understand. And they would succeed. Eventually.

“If the best case, reinforcements will swing the war in his favour,” Jarvis said. “If the worst, we’ll be giving the enemy another chance to find our timeline.”

Julianne grimaced. It wasn’t easy to locate one specific timeline in an infinity of possible timelines. It had taken decades to work out how to tune the gates to allow passage and even then ... there were scientists who insisted the gates weren’t linked to one timeline so much as they were linked to a multitude of assorted timelines. Julianne didn’t pretend to understand the math or follow the arguments, but ... given time, the enemy timeline could home in on her timeline. And then all hell would break loose.

Hotham leaned forward. “Abandoning Montrose and his army would be dishonourable.”

“They knew the risks,” Jarvis said. “What price honour if it puts the homeworld in danger?”

“We have orbital battlestations and troops ready to be dropped on any target from orbit the moment we give the word,” Hotham pointed out. “Let them poke their nose into our world. We’ll burn it off instantly.”

“Unless they have some way to counter it,” Julianne said. “We know little about their true capabilities.”

“Their tech is at least a century behind ours,” Hotham said.

“The tech we captured is,” Julianne agreed. “But what about the rest of it?”

She rubbed her forehead. They just didn’t know.

“We need to consider the safety of the home timeline first,” she added, quietly. There was no point in prolonging the argument. Anything that needed to be said had already been said. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, and it would cost them when the news was announced, but there was no choice. Better to sacrifice their reputations than the homeworld. “And that means we must not poke this bear any further.”

Hotham scowled. “And you would abandon the entire invasion force?”

“We must,” Jarvis said. “The safety of our timeline comes first.”

“Yes,” Julianne agreed. She felt guilty even saying it, but it had to be said. “Whatever the dangers in Timeline F, Montrose and his troops must face them alone.”

 

Chapter One: Outside New York, Timeline F (OTL)

This is America, Julia Burnside thought, as the jeep rattled to a halt. This is our world now.

She swallowed, hard, and looked around. The suburb had been a nice place to live once, if one happened to be white and reasonably well off, but now it looked like a war zone. No, it was a war zone. Simple cookie-cutter houses, seemingly untouched by the fighting, contrasted oddly with blackened ruins or piles of debris; larger apartment blocks looked shattered and broken, rubble strewn everywhere as if it had been picked up and tossed by an angry god. An unpleasant scent hung in the air as she clambered out of the jeep, a mixture of fire and dead bodies and things that haunted her nightmares. She’d seen horrors in her short career as a roving reporter but this …? This was America.

It just didn’t seem right.

“Wait,” the driver said. He was a grim-faced young man, neither talkative nor flirty. More proof, if any were needed, that something was terribly wrong. “The MPs will be along in a moment.”

“Thanks,” Julia said. She’d done some dumb things in her career too – she’d gone to jail for a feature article and crossed the Rio Grande illegally for another – but this took the cake. She was starting to have second thoughts about the whole affair. It wouldn’t be that bad, surely, if she jumped back into the jeep and demanded to be taken to safety? “If I …”

She shook her head and looked around. The street was eerily quiet and still. Smoke rose in the distance … perhaps from Manhattan. It was certainly in the right direction. The homes looked deserted, some locked up nicely and others open to the elements … they’d probably been looted, she guessed. The whole region was under martial law, and the police and military patrols had orders to shoot looters on sight, but there were too many demands on their time for them to mount more than basic patrols so far from the front lines. Anyone with nerve could get in, spend a few hours searching for valuables, then get out again without being caught.

“Keep your hands where we can see them, if you don’t mind.”

Julia jumped, then spun around. Two female MPs were standing behind her … how the hell had they crept up on her? Julia prided herself on her situational awareness – it was a survival skill for anyone in her career – and yet the MPs had caught her completely by surprise. It was … she put the thought aside and studied the two women. They both looked young, in their mid-twenties, yet they had the thousand-yard stares of combat veterans. They probably were. There were no true front lines in this war. The simple fact the enemy had managed to invade and occupy New York was proof enough of that.

“We’re going to search you now,” the leader said. Her voice was drained, as if she no longer cared about what she was doing. “If you have any electronic devices, this is your last chance to leave them behind.”

“I left them all at the hotel before I got into the jeep,” Julia said, although she didn’t expect them to take her word for it. She’d known, intellectually, that hostile forces could peer through her laptop’s webcam or turn her cellphone into a surveillance device, but she hadn’t really believed it until it was too late. “I’ve just got pen, paper, a clockwork watch and an old-style camera.”

She gritted her teeth as the MP patted her down, inspecting every last inch of her body. The prison staff hadn’t searched her so thoroughly and they’d had orders to treat her like a regular inmate. The other watched carefully, one hand near her holster. Julia didn’t blame her for being paranoid. The invaders had turned everything on its head, rewriting computer databases and digging up information they’d used to blackmail people into doing their bidding. She was loyal and yet … how could they be sure? All the old certainties were collapsing everywhere.

Her lips twisted.“You are going to buy me lunch after this, aren’t you?”

The MP’s voice didn’t change. “If only you were as funny as you think you are.”

Julia smiled, despite everything. “Sorry,” she said. “How many times have you heard that joke?”

“Hah. Hah.” The MP straightened up. “Listen very carefully. You are entering a combat zone. If we give you orders, follow them without question. Keep your head down. If you see any drones, hit the ground first and check afterwards. You got me?”

“Yes,” Julia said. “I’m ready.”

The MP shrugged, then motioned for Julia to follow as she made her way up the road. Her companion brought up the rear. Julia felt cold as the town shifted, the abandoned buildings slowly giving way to sandbagged houses and makeshift trenches being dug by a number of soldiers, militiamen and volunteers. They walked past a burned-out tank – she guessed it was American; the remains of an enemy vehicle would be removed and studied as quickly as possible – and several IFVs in various states of repair. A dozen technicians swarmed over the vehicles … she guessed they were fixing what they could and cannibalising the vehicles that couldn’t be repaired. They barely looked up from their work as she passed.

She felt sick as the urban landscape became more desolate. The buildings were being woven into a much larger network of trenches, fortified strongpoints and supply depots that looked like the photographs she’d seen of the First World War. There were cables everywhere, some half-buried in the muddy terrain; she swallowed, hard, as she saw piles of rubble concealing tanks and firing positions. Something moved ahead of her ... she flinched, despite herself, before realising it was a solider wearing a camouflage outfit. He blended in so well she would never have seen him if he hadn’t moved.

A dull whine echoed through the air. The lead MP threw herself to the ground. Julia followed suit, wincing as she landed hard enough to hurt. The whining grew louder, the sound chilling Julia to the bone as a drone flashed over the trenches and vanished into the distance; she heard gunfire from behind her, the shots tailing off a moment later. She hoped the shooter had hit the drone. If the horror stories were true, failing to take out the drone would only draw its attention.

“It’s not the whiny drones you need to worry about,” her escort muttered. She rose slowly, glancing from side to side. “It’s the ones that made no noise at all.”

Julia shuddered. It was bad enough hearing the drone.

She scrambled to her feet and kept walking, glancing from side to side. Mortars and other heavy guns were carefully positioned within the trenches, some tended by soldiers and others seemingly controlled remotely or not controlled at all. Some looked oddly absurd ... she wondered, suddenly, if they were fakes, mock-ups designed to draw enemy fire and make them think they were hitting something important. She made a mental note to leave it out of her report when she wrote it. The big news agencies might have reluctantly switched back to paper editions – the enemy had already proved they could hack the internet at will – but there was no way to be sure a copy wouldn’t cross the lines. If she’d been gathering information for the enemy, she’d want to keep an eye on the newspapers too.

“In here,” her escort said, as they stopped outside a half-ruined building. “Good luck.”

Julia felt claustrophobic as she stepped into the semi-darkness. The hallway was wide, but it was lined with blast-resistant materials that limited her freedom to move. The windows were covered with plastic, making it impossible for anyone to see inside. One room had a handful of very basic beds; she guessed the staff slept there, when they weren’t rotated back to the rear areas. She’d seen the military camps twenty miles to the south. They weren’t much, compared to the summer camps she’d attended as a child, but they were so vastly superior to the trenches that there was just no comparison.

“Miss Burnside?”

“Yes,” Julia said. A middle-aged man in a military uniform – no nametag, no stripes – was standing by a door. “That’s me.”

The officer pushed open the door to reveal a simple office. “Come inside,” he said. He sounded as tired as the MPs. “I’m Major Lincoln. I’ll give you a briefing and then we’ll move on.”

Julia followed him inside, looking around with interest. The office was strikingly simple; a folded table, a pair of folding chairs, a handful of maps on the walls ... she blinked in surprise, torn between amusement and horror, as she saw the old-style rotary phones on a cabinet by the wall, linked to cables that ran through holes that had been opened and then hastily plastered closed. A poster hung above the telephones, showing a gormless middle-aged man with glasses striking a Lord Kitchener pose and saying THINK BEFORE YOU TWEET. Julia had no idea who he was, or why someone had struck the poster there, but she hated him on sight. The computer on the other side of the room was so primitive it might as well have been a typewriter. Perhaps it was.

Her eyes lingered in the map. Manhattan was coloured red, a grim reminder that the economic heart of the United States was in enemy hands. The lines around the occupied zone looked oddly unsteady, as if the intelligence staff weren’t quite sure where the lines actually were. Further from the city, large regions were marked with mushroom clouds – Julia had been assured the enemy nukes weren’t real nukes, but it hardly mattered to the soldiers and civilians who’d been caught in the blasts – and surrounded by friendly blue lines. Julia knew how to read a basic military map, but the one on the walls defeated her. The markings were completely unfamiliar.

“We used military notation from a science-fiction RPG,” Major Lincoln said. He stood beside her, close enough to be companionable without being too close. “If the enemy raid the building and snatch the map, they’ll have some trouble deciphering it.”

Julia felt a flicker of alarm. “They do that?”

“They do.” Major Lincoln tapped the map. “They’ve rarely given us more than a few hours of peace. Drones, raids ... sniping ... they have some kind of energy weapon, God alone knows how it works, that is completely invisible until it hits the target. Long-range too, from what we can determine. Longer than our snipers, we think. I saw a man get his head burned off from quite a distance ... we shelled the area, in hopes of killing the bastard, but we don’t know if we did. We have very loose front lines because the bastards are good at finding and killing us. And disturbing us. They hit a barracks with some kind of sonic weapon and the poor bastards who were hit ... well, they had to be pulled out of the lines.”

He glanced at her, his face grim. “If they come boiling out, I don’t know if we can stop them.”

Julia blinked. “Are you supposed to be telling me that?”

Major Lincoln flushed. “Probably not.” His voice was too tired to be teasing or flirty. “But I have made that clear to Washington.”

He drew a line on the map with his finger. “Soldiers, Marines, National Guardsmen, Militiamen ... we have all kinds of defences, all kinds of weapons from simple minefields to advanced technology I can’t tell you about, but ... we’re on the edge. You remember Iraqi Freedom?”

Julia shook her head. “I was born five years after the war started.”

“This war is just like Iraqi Freedom, except we’re the Iraqis and our enemy is far more ruthless,” Major Lincoln said, bluntly. “They don’t go out of their way to commit atrocities – I’ll give them that much – but they don’t shy from committing them either. They can go where they please, as long as they’ll willing to commit the forces required, and they are very good at finding us and hitting where it hurts. I’ve got hardened men suffering from shellshock because the bastards keep the pressure on, even when they’re not actually hammering us. We’re lucky we’re able to rotate the troops in and out of the trenches or we’d really be in the shit.”

And you’re acting erratically too, Julia thought, numbly. Are you suffering from shellshock too?

Major Lincoln sat down, motioning for her to sit facing him. “What are you going to write?”

“The truth, or as much of it as they’ll let me,” Julia said. She knew the rules. The price for access was having the military censors going through everything she wrote, hacking out anything that might give aid and comfort to the enemy. Her superiors wouldn’t try to fight if the censors asked her to cut out anything, no matter how mundane. The days in which the media could get away with broadcasting anything had ended when the invasion force had materialised in Texas. “I can’t promise anything else.”

“Tell them we’re being ground down,” Major Lincoln said. He looked older, suddenly. “We all are.”

He stood, motioning for Julia to follow him through a series of makeshift tunnels and into the open air. The trench network looked thicker here, deep gashes in the ground walled by piles of rubble, concrete and sandbags, the latter looking oddly primitive and yet effective. A handful of sniper traps were scattered along the trenches, human cut-outs rigged to look real to someone who was too far away to see them clearly. She guessed they were meant to look warm to anyone looking through an infrared sensor. It was hard to tell if they drew enemy fire.

Major Lincoln nodded to a pair of outdated cannons. “Those date back to the War Between the States,” he said. “Pathetic, compared to modern artillery, but surprisingly effective. We’ve discovered that we can catch them by surprise by using gunpowder, where modern explosives are far less likely to get past their sniffers. We’re lucky they don’t have decent counterbattery weapons” – he smirked, nastily – “and we taught them the dangers of using their aircraft as roving artillery. And …”

He broke off as a dull whine echoed through the air. “Get down!”

Julia threw herself to the ground as a swarm of drones swooped overhead. A dull unpleasant sensation ran through her body, a sound she could hear and yet not quite hear, making her feel uncomfortable before the automatic guns opened fire. She saw a drone disintegrate, tiny fragments scattering everywhere, before the rest of the swarm threw themselves onto the guns and exploded. A wave of heat rushed over her; she glanced up just in time to see the final drone blossom into a white-hot fireball, strangely constrained despite being in the open air. She had no idea what it was, but it was effective. The target had been completely destroyed.

“Keep your head down,” Major Lincoln ordered. The dull boom of guns echoed in the distance ... she saw a streak of light, a small missile, heading towards the enemy lines. “They might not be done yet ...”

He staggered upright and peered into a makeshift periscope. Julia stared in dull surprise, then realised it would allow him to look north without being spotted and shot by enemy snipers. She forced herself to climb to her feet and stand beside him, waiting for a turn. Major Lincoln glanced at her, then shrugged and stepped aside. Julia gave him a grateful smile and pressed her eyes to the periscope. The scene before her was ...

She shuddered. Row upon row of destroyed buildings, little more than piles of rubble; burned out cars and trucks and tanks and even the remains of an aircraft ... friendly or hostile, she couldn’t tell. Nothing moved, not even an insect. New York’s skyline was clearly visible in the distance, but a number of familiar skyscrapers were missing ... she tried to tell herself she didn’t know which buildings should be there, but she couldn’t convince herself. The towers were just rubble now. She hoped the inhabitants had gotten out before the hammer came down, although she feared the worst. The war was nearly seven months old and yet there were still people who couldn’t quite wrap their head around the country being invaded. Julia wanted to make fun of them, but she knew better. She couldn’t quite believe it too.

“You see now?” Major Lincoln turned and walked down the trench, careful to stay in the shadows. “This is the reality of war now.”

Julia followed, glancing from side to side. The trench network looked deserted ... she picked out a couple of men, nesting within heavy camouflage, and hoped there were others. The sound of distant gunfire was slowly fading, leaving behind an eerie quiet that was somehow worse than the shooting. Someone fired a shot ... Major Lincoln showed no reaction. Julia suspected he was as worn down as the rest of his men, facing a high-intensity war in their own backyard. He really needed a break.

We all do, she thought, numbly. We ...

Something flickered, at the corner of her eye. She looked and saw the drone, swooping down on her ... no, on Major Lincoln. She opened her mouth to scream, but it was already too late. The drone sliced right through the Major’s head, leaving blood spurting everywhere, then seemed to flicker and vanish into the clear blue sky. Julia stared at the remains of a man’s life, as Major Lincoln’s body crumpled to the ground, then threw up. She’d thought she’d seen horrors, gruesome sights that proved man’s inhumanity to man ...

But she hadn’t been prepared for the nightmare. No one had.