The Great war - Part 7
#7 of The Great War
Yays! Now it's time for part 7! It starts getting a little religious here, people. I don't aim to bash anyone of any faith, or of no faith, in my stories. If you're under 18, gone, now, nuff said.
Part 7 - Reinforcements
Gone. They were all gone. Saphyra looks around her home castle, the entire thing having been moved to Earth as planned after the humans were wiped out. But...it didn't feel like she thought it would. None of the dragons looked particularly happy. The once beautiful blue jewel was blue from a distance, but the green fields were all scared with craters and blackened by the war, and they all felt...lonely. Lonely? They had the elves! They had come to Earth in small droves, and the rest would be here soon!
Saphyra looks around, taking to the air. The one she was supposed to be joined to was here, yes, and they were joined. She could feel him in the back of her head, the direction to him and the distance. He was just over the horizon, the elf helping to rebuild certain parts of the Earth. She flies far from the castle to find a cliff nearby. Britain had been chosen for the castle because the island had just enough space for the castle city and the castle itself. She flies over, watching all the elves and raptors interacting, but she still felt...alone. It was as if part of her heart were gone, and she wasn't the only one. The other dragons seemed down, their spirits sagging some, even those with draconic mates. Both dragons flew slower, almost losing altitude between wingbeats.
Saphyra looks up as she flies. The stars are bright in the daytime sky. Wait...that can't be right. Stars only shine at night on Earth. As she watches, the stars seem to get brighter, then fall from the sky, one hitting in the direction of her bond mate, the feeling abruptly leaving her as the horizon turns orange. But she doesn't feel sad. All the sadness she could have for loss of bonds was gone because they were gone. But who? The humans, their enemy? A star falls and she sees it go past her, the letters USA large on the side, with their flag. The human's last strike, denying their foe her victory. The missile drops straight at the castle, even as the entire horizon goes orange.
A bright flash that dazzles her comes up as the warhead goes off, it would have blinded her if not for her second eyelids, and she watches as the explosion shatters the home she grew up in, spreading thru the town on a massive shockwave, thousands vaporized instantly, tens of thousands, anyone who was outside and not a dragon. Then the blast hits and she shrieks in pain as the heat from the nuclear explosion racks her body.
She could imagine no worse way to end, her family gone, her friends gone, her home obliterated. But worse than the explosion that has taken life and friends and the home that she had, worse than the fact that a race as proud as the dragons were shakled to the elves, was the fact that even with their entire race bound to the elves, they were still alone. She looks down in amazement, the heat of the nuclear blast is driving her up, higher and higher. Before she goes too high, she quickly looks to where the castle was, to where her mother was vaporized, and sees a gigantic mushroom cloud rising into the sky, the city that was around it completely gone out to almost the horizon, all the rest of Britain and the island burning.
Saphyra keeps going up, her body defying gravity as she races skywards, heading into the thin upper atmosphere. Britain was burning, mushroom clouds coming up from it. As she goes higher, she can see more explosions, the entire world laid open to her eyes, and every continent, where ever dragons were, where ever they put a city, or collected themselves, there was an explosion. She roars out, knowing her race is dead, the pain of being alone clear in her voice! The atmosphere seems to darken around her as she looks down, and form into a face. A human face. It takes her a moment to realize it is him! And her heart leaps! "Come back!" She yells out to the face in the clouds, but it desolves away, leaving her to fall back to the ground, faster and faster, Saphyra not caring anymore, rocketing down face first, flame coming from her body from the speed of her fall. And just as she's about to hit...
Saphyra snaps awake in her room and bolts upright in her sleeping cot, her face streaked with tears, panting heavily, her shoulders heaving for breath. She looks around, not knowing what to expect, but the window outside shows the dull brown of Europa rather than the green of Earth, or the black of the ground in her dreams. She examines her mind, and only finds the thin pull showing her which direction that human she is so after is, the pull making her look up in the direction of the small blueish star that is Earth. She shakes her head and gets up. Flying will help her, so she walks to the balcony and shifts into her natural form, spreads her wings, and takes flight.
"Men, I've got good news! And I know you need it, bless ya." Jack Wallace says. Ever since the defeat at London, and the hasty evacuation, the Colonel only just barely being scooped up in a blackhawk before the dragons started to burn the city, the man had been sad, which was an amazing thing to see on a Scottsman. Davis looks up at him, as does McLintock, all of them sitting in the base lounge at Holloman AFB. "We finished construction on the Freedom, our first combat spaceship. They're calling it a destroyer. We might be able to interdict anything coming our way." He sits down, sighing. "If we can stop them getting reinforced, we can finish them off before we have too few people."
That sounded like good news to Davis. Finish off the war before too many people were lost, then he could sit back and relax on the two week vacation they give you after a major deployment. He could imagine it now. Beer, a trip to Hooters every day, clubs and women. Oh that would be the life. "They're upgrading our fighters again." Crusher says, plopping down on the chair nearby. "Fusion cells, they say. We don't need to use gas anymore."
That catches everyone's attention."You mean we can do regular military operations now?" Wedge asks, getting a nod from Crusher.
"From what I've heard, they've got the technology made and distributed everywhere. The tanks will have it, all our cars will have it, the power plants will have very large versions of it." He says. "It's this big." He holds up his thumb and index finger about an inch apart.
"So small?" Skywalker pitches in, looking over from his drink of orange soda.
Davis nods. "Makes sense." He says. "Fusion power is supposed to give double the yield of nuclear power. They'd also make it that small so that if we go down it wouldn't go up like a nuke." He says, looking at Crusher. The boy usually digs into this stuff.
"Yeah." He says. "It's contained by a large EM field." He says. "When we start to go down, it automaticly ejects the pilot. When the pilot leaves, the chair opens the circuit to the magnets, stopping the field, and the fusion reaction just stops." Suddenly everyone was in a good mood. If they could move, if the entire Army could move without restrained by fuel, as this now sounds like it's the case, they could win. They could launch offensive operations, and engage the enemy away from places like cities or bases, where all the fuel was before.
Wallace leans back in his chair, puffing on a cigarette a bit. "Well now, if that doesn't twitch yer beard nothin' will." he says. "This is great news. I'll go tell all those Englishmen in the tank batallion ye pulled out of London, so I will." With that, he's up and gone, leaving Skywalker grinning idioticly at the accent.
Saphyra sits on top of a cliff of solid crystal, maticulously shaped by the raptor to reflect light and produce a rainbow in the sky, and looks up at what the dragons call the Eye of God, the storm that Jupiter is known for, an entirely unique occurance in the entire galaxy, and one fo the reasons the dragons settled on Europa. Her dream comes to her thoughts once more but she pushes it away. Humans did not have such weapons. She obviously had spent too much time fighting. She snorts at her own foolishness. If they had them, they would have used them in their Europe when they were being overrun and slaughtered. She stays there for a few minutes before flying back home. The rest of the draconic army was going to Earth, and she was going to fly them back there herself, along with her father and mother, who wanted to move the castle to Earth now, rather than later.
Over the next week, things went from bad to worse. Three days after Davis learned about the ship in orbit, word came that it was destroyed, the dragon's having sent reinforcements, the ship tried to intercept only to find out our space missiles don't manuever well enough to hit dragons, and left the ship and it's fighters with only their railguns, and at a huge number disadvantage. They put up a big fight, but were completely annihilated, the ship detonating it's core at the last few minutes of the battle, the crew trying to do what they could to protect the Earth, to give their fellows on the planet a chance. After that, their offensive fell flat against the face of the enemy forces. They were forced to pull back, consolidate, and rapidly upgrade their forces and their weapons, while the dragons burned their way thru South America and the rest of Asia, China falling in a week's time, Japan in a day. Fortunately the dragons didn't split their forces over the entire continent. The next few months saw the South Americans begging for help from the United States, a country they once despised as much as the Europeans despised the old Soviet Union, but their pleas were unanswered. The US Navy was no longer a factor, and they wanted to keep up the ruze that they were depending upon oil still, which there was an ample supply of in South America. The fires in Venezuela made such dense clouds of smoke that they were visible from space. And all that time, the US wouldn't help militarily, tho now they did not turn away refugees. It was during this lul in US activities that Shale made an ambitious plan: To launch a raid into Washington DC, and cut out the US once and for all.