51

Oliver Bowen

June 9, 2045. Sydney, Australia.

There were no human-sized seats in the aircraft, so Oliver stood clutching the pant leg of a fire suit hanging from a hook above him, trying to stay on his feet as the Harrier weaved and dove and banked. He watched what was left of Sydney through the bottom of a window. Human soldiers ran from the cover of one bombed-out building to another. A platoon of defenders vaulted over rubble, looking eager to kill.

“Where are our heavy weapons?” Oliver heard Erik shout into his comm.

“Most have been redeployed,” a gravelly-voiced defender replied.

“Redeployed to where?”

“Moscow, Mumbai, Washington, Shanghai…”

Oliver had a moment of thinking he must be dreaming this. Surely this wasn’t happening. Kai was in Washington.

“What about Sydney?” Erik asked. “What about me?”

“If the Alliance doesn’t turn its force to engage us in their cities, you’re going to die.”

Erik turned toward Oliver, shock and fear evident on his face. It was reassuring to see Erik was afraid to die. “I need Lila. We have to find her.”

“I agree.” His mind was racing. Besides being major population centers, there was something about the cities the defender on the comm had mentioned that struck a chord.

Then it came to him: They were all cities that held mothballed defender production facilities. They were going right after those facilities. Surely the Alliance had thought to destroy those facilities before they launched the invasion. Surely.

Below, blackened rubble and fires were replaced by the green calm of grass and trees. Belmore Park. Since Lila hadn’t returned to the hotel after the funeral, and she clearly hadn’t gone somewhere with Erik, Oliver’s best guess was the park. She spent a lot of her free time there; the normal-sized trees and plants made her feel less like a child, she’d said.

The Harrier dropped close to the ground, its enormous rotors causing the trees to bend and sway like reeds as leaves were torn from branches and blew in all directions.

They cruised along the main walkway, everyone aboard seeking some sign of Lila. Now that they were here, Oliver realized how futile this was. If she’d been here when the bombs began to fall, she would have sought shelter. Not in buildings adjacent to the park, though; she was too smart for that. She would have sought low, protected ground, or better yet, climbed down into a sewer.

“Watch for open sewer holes, or other places she might have taken cover.” Of course, all of this assumed Lila had been in the park when the invasion hit.