61

Dominique Wiewall

July 15, 2045. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

When President Wood announced that the covert operation to take out the defenders’ center of gravity at Easter Island had failed, the room went silent.

Dominique hadn’t realized just how much hope she’d staked on a few dozen elite Alliance forces. She wondered what went wrong, how they’d been discovered before making it into the underground complex to detonate the nuclear device.

That was to be their game changer: take out the defenders’ high command, throw them off balance. It had been a brilliant and psychologically fascinating move on the defenders’ part, to take Easter Island, reinforce it, and make it their center of gravity.

Dominique rubbed her eyes, which were burning from lack of sleep. The war just went on and on; there was never an opportune time to sleep, and hadn’t been for the past five months. Mostly, Dominique slept in her chair in the war room.

“We have to find a way to get populations in occupied territories to rise up,” Peter Smythe said. He punched his palm. Smythe had been a baseball star, once upon a time. Despite that, he wasn’t an arrogant dickhead. Dominique appreciated that. “That’s the defenders’ weakness: The forces they leave behind to hold captured territory are wafer-thin. If they had to keep backtracking to put down insurrections, we could wear them down.”

Trying not to show the exasperation she felt, Dominique went to the back for more coffee. They’d been broadcasting pleas for resistance to the captured populations almost from the start, but the defenders were ruthlessly effective at making gruesome examples of anyone caught listening to those pleas, let alone plotting resistance.

With the coffee warming her hand through the Styrofoam cup, Dominique studied the big map at the front of the room. The defenders were positioning themselves to storm their facility, as well as Alliance headquarters in Baghdad. Those were their two primary targets. So far, Alliance forces were repelling the defenders in both locations, but the defenders were choking off supply routes, and once those were under defender control … well, you can’t fight without food and fuel.

“How are you holding up?” It was her Secret Service guardian angel, Forrest.

“Tired. Depressed.” She looked up at him. “They’re my children. At the end of the day the defenders are my children, and they’ve done unspeakable things. You know?”

Forrest put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch felt good, nourishing. “I don’t think you can think about it like that. The mistake was provoking them, not making them.”

Dominique nodded, wiped a tear from the end of her nose.

“I think we’re all well past our breaking point. Hang on. We’ll get through this.”

“Somehow,” Dominique whispered.

“Somehow.”