America’s space forces became as mixed as our ground forces during The War. We reactivated ships from boneyards, upgraded militia ships, and even scavenged the collected remains of old battles. We refabricated anything that ran on gravtech, and upgraded many older designs to use it. The result was very interesting to historians. Modern armored wedge gravtech designs fought next to old cylindrical rocket ships that had used rotation to generate gravity before their upgrades. One of my many operations involved an old Republic-class light carrier. She still had her rotating gravdeck, though the crew locked it in position. Modern gravplating made it unnecessary. What I loved about that ship was that everybody underestimated her because they “knew” what her class was capable of. She proved many people wrong.
Yosemite changed everything for me. The Shang killed my family and I wanted revenge. It was a pretty dark time in my life. That’s why I volunteered to fight. And that is why I chose the job I did. I knew that every pilot got a cybernetic partner. I knew from experience how fast they thought. I knew they would be deadly in a fight. So I went hunting a cybernetic partner. Someone who would help me kill them all. My story would have been the pretty typical revenge story if I’d gotten what I was looking for. But Betty was something else entirely. It’s amazing how much the people you spend time with can change your life.
The gangs of downtown Indianapolis broke and ran in the final episode of Twilight’s fourth season. And then the entire crew made a hard right turn to charge the convention center. AI avatars jumped through broken windows, armored vehicles smashed through concrete walls, and Twilight began her final assault on the true reason she had come to Indy. Hackers dove through the computer systems and locked them down to prevent erasure. The terrorists swept the wide-open corridors where gamers once walked in costumes with tripod-mounted miniguns. Rockets screamed through the gigantic halls. Explosions rocked the convention center and AIs and vehicles alike fell to the terrorist counterattack. But the AIs feared death less than even the terrorists, and they advanced without remorse. It was a sight that would chill America.
The ground forces that fought the Chinese in the Hyades Cluster were an odd lot. We used a mix of new construction and refabricated designs found in reserves or museums to put as many wheels, tracks, or wings into action along the widest front ever fought by anyone born on Earth. On world you could see ancient Abrams main battle tanks taking targeting information from a fresh Pershing scout tank. On another world a squadron of Lightning II fighters nearly as old earned honors for bringing down a major Chinese supply convoy and accelerating the fall of an entire star system. We used anything we could find and run through the fabricators. It made for an eclectic mix of designs fielded during The War.
I suppose it was my first experience inside a cybernetic computer that made me distrust them. It was a school trip and everybody in class got to do a full dive into the computer system. Most of the kids were just amazed and loved it. And the idea that what seemed like hours inside the computer became seconds on the outside made them giggle. It made me realize that we were well and truly outclassed. That they could kill us before we even realized they had decided to do it. I was real glad that I lived in a part of the country where cybers didn’t spend a lot of time. It allowed me to grow up not thinking about them a whole lot.
Forge of War on Amazon
Angel Flight on Amazon
Angel Strike on Amazon
Angel War on Amazon
Wolfenheim Rising on Amazon
Wolfenheim Emergent on Amazon