Work-in-progress -- "Dialectic" (Patreon)

I'm digging into revising this new novel and decided it'd be fun to share a chapter with y'all. This is from early in the book and flashes back to before the timeframe of the novel. The basic pitch for this part of the book is "Independence Day meets Captain Marvel". The novel  is generally more polics-and-sociology-inclined, but this will give you a dose of action and a peek at the main characters. The novel's code-name is "Dialectic" and there's a 95% chance that title will change. I have a working title in mind (Between Two Wars) but I'm not totally sold on it.

Note: is a very early draft, so there may be some typos and the whole thing might not make the final version.

--

Jenn hovered in place a few hundred feet off the ground to get her bearings. The coastline stretched out before her, the setting sun to her left shifting the sky orange to red to purple. Purple skies had been a rare thing before, but this unforgettable shade hadn’t let up since the day the invaders came and started mucking up the earth’s atmosphere.

She’d first heard it called Xenoscaping at a briefing weeks before, by Dr. Phoenix, a scientist with a high ponytail, a razor-sharp jawline, and tortoiseshell glasses.

Off the coast, hovering just above the waterline, was a circular command ship a mile across. It bristled with lasers and missiles and could probably see her, too. But those weapons were designed for enemy ships, not for living weapons smaller than womprats.

When the aliens captured Jenn and who knows how many others around the world, they’d probably expected to make a version of the winged shock troops. The aliens’ forces looked like a menagerie mish-mash, they couldn’t all be from one species, probably assimilating victims from each planet into their fleet Space Rome-style but with more brainwashing and genetic engineering and whatever the gem-crystal-machine-things were. Jenn held up one hand, the light playing across the gem, catching circuit-veins and reminding her just how much she didn’t know about what they’d done to her. There were a thousand theories about why the aliens were here, from the “Hannibal of the Stars” theory to “They’re God’s wrath” to “They’re just assholes”.

A barrage of anti-aircraft fire brought her back to the moment. She zipped out of the way, flak exploding behind her. 

Jenn tapped the button on her shoulder radio and said, “I’ve got the flak cannon’s attention.”

Major Burrell’s voice came back, crisp and confident. “Roger that, Ruby-1. Closing on your position. Look out for Raptors.”

Right on-cue, a squadron of the alien’s intercept ships roared into view. They looked like a flying K, a forward wedge with side wings to hold extra weaponry.

“Raptors at oh-nine-hundred. Engaging.”

She shot forward, taking aim with her right fist to open fire as the squad dispersed to try to surround her. She punched straight through one ship as she lit another up with lances of red-gold energy.

The aliens hadn’t just made her into a weapon, they’d made her The Weapon. 

Jenn tore through a squadron of fighters that could out-fly and out-shoot any human fighter jet in seconds. She’d done it before and she’d probably do it again. The aliens kept coming, and she kept tearing them apart.

Thing was, even with Kelly and the other Enhanced, the aliens had them on numbers over and over. They’d torched three command ships in the last month, but each time they were replaced within days.

With humanity’s satellites destroyed in the first wave of attacks, they had no early warning system. Communication lines were in tatters, international coordination nearly impossible. 

Kill the ships, clean up the occupying forces, rescue civilians. 

Then more ships came, with more Harvesters, more Reapers, more ground forces that looked like something out of a video game.

The war was barely three months old and it had already felt like a lifetime.

Which is why this mission wasn’t about destroying the command ship. This time, they were going to steal it.

On the ground, Maj. Burrell’s forces moved down the highway toward the anti-aircraft emplacement. They couldn’t move the tanks through the rough terrain without giving away their position, so the Major just drove them down the highway like a boss, letting the aliens come to them.

Jenn fired on the anti-aircraft battery to get their attention again, flying figure eights and half-Eimmelmans and whatever else she could think of as she rained alien blaster death down on the invaders.

Every attempt at diplomacy had failed before it started. There’d been no real chance to try to learn one another’s language, no interactions that didn’t start with blaster fire and end with Harvester claws.

They didn’t understand much about the aliens’ ideology, culture, or much else. Just how they fought and what it took to kill them. Maybe the aliens didn’t see this as conquest and enslavement. Maybe they just didn’t care.

Another squadron of Raptors screamed into earshot, accompanied by a Manta, one of the larger alien cruisers with air-to-surface weaponry and powerful anti-air lasers. Those things actually hurt. Charlie from Virginia was still in a hospital after trying to take on two Mantas at once.

“Engaging the Manta” she said on comms, climbing higher to prepare a diving pass. The Raptors followed, harassing her like mosquitos. She swatted them away, aiming for the manta’s “tail” aka the fully-articulated anti-air laser. The Manta got off two shots on the way. She dodged the first and deflected the second with a two-handed energy blast of her own. She punch-rammed through the base of the tail, tucking and flipping in the air to charge up and under the ship’s belly. She held out a ruby-wreathed hand and tore the ship’s belly open from stern to stem.

A chain of explosions sent the ship wobbling and crashing to the ground. The Raptors continued to hammer at her with pinprick cannons while she pushed the Manta into the ocean rather than crashing onto the highway.

She tried to not think about all of wreckage from human and alien ships that she’d seen go down into the Chesapeake, but those were problems for the future. Climate change and the long-term effects of xenoforming, the refugee crisis, and more wouldn’t go away when the aliens did. But humanity couldn’t deal with them if every person was in an alien work camp or a Harvester cage.

The Raptors broke off and made their way to the command ship. She clipped one with a long-range blast, but let the others go. 

It wasn’t hard to find Maj. Burrell and his forces, she just made sure to radio as she approached so they didn’t see her sillhoetted and assume she was one of the hawk-thing shock troops and try to shoot her out of the air.

She’d only made that mistake once before learning to always call in her approach.

Maj. Burrell’s force was made up of three tanks, two humvees with machine gun turrets, and a few dozen infantry. They looked about as ragtag as Jenn felt, mixed units with people and materiel from the National Guard and the Army.

She saluted as she levitated down to the street beside Maj. Burrell, who rode shotgun in one of the humvees.

Major Burrell was somewhere between thirty and fifty, fit and lean with a tight fade, faint laugh lines, and dark brown skin. He moved with a crisp efficiency she’d come to associate with military folks on-duty, though he made it look deliberate and human rather than robotic the way she’d imagine if she tried.

“Ms. Strait, good to see you.” Only a handful of the Enhanced had been active or retired military. So most of them didn’t technically have rank. Officially they were “Civilian Liasons”, but in practice most people treated them like non-commissioned officers from another branch of the armed services. Some had even taken to calling them the Xeno Force. Still better than Space Force.

“Major. Thanks for the backup. It’s a lot easier to rip those Mantas apart when they’ve got more targets to shoot at.”

“And it’s easier to be a distraction and fire support than take those on directly. Anything else we need to know?”

“Saucer’s still there, the other Raptors made their way back home when I took out the Manta. So they definitely know we’re coming.”

Major Burrell frowned, looking to the coastline. “I was hoping to cover a bit more ground before they got wind. I’ll let the other units know. Ms. Yamagata and the 37th are coming in from the north, they ran into a trio of Bulldogs with Abominations in tow, they’ll be a few minutes.”

Jenn perked up. Any chance to fight alongside Kelly was a good one. “Are they still in it? I could go help them clean up.”

“Command says we’ve got incoming on our position. We need to make the coast before they cut us off from the 57th. The USS Chesapeake will provide backup if we can rendezvous in time.”

Jenn started hovering. “Then lead the way. I’ll be your eyes.”

Maj. Burrell gave the command to roll out as Jenn gained altitude with a slow spin to take in the three-sixty view. She spotted the Navy ship to the south, making its way along the coastline. The command ship would spot it before too long, hitting home how delicate the timing was. The aliens could call in forces from another area fast but not instantly. To assault this command ship, they were pulling units from across the state and some from Pennsylvania while other forces tried to keep the DC saucer and its forces from sending reinforcements.

“Nothing big,” Jenn mused to herself. “Just a complicated, ambitious mission relying on difficult timing, coordination of hundreds of people from different services plus a pair of civilians with half-understood alien superpowers to capture a ship that no human to their knowledge had ever been inside and survived to tell the tale.”

But that was the mission. And Jenn wasn’t going to stand by and let other people fight when she had the power to help. Even if she barely understood what the aliens had done to her or why. Even if she’d spent over a decade of her life protesting the USA’s excessive militarism, over-inflated budget, and valorization of warfare. She wanted to save lives and it was a lot easier to do with the army calling her a friend than calling her a rogue weapon.

“The Chesapeake is coming around a bend in the coastline. Maybe four clicks from the saucer. But that’s just eyeballing. No sign of the 37th or the Harvesters to the North. Path between you and the coastline looks clear.”

A change in the light caught Jenn’s eye. She turned to see the top of the saucer iris open to reveal an entire fleet of Manta ships, headed their way.

“We’ve got incoming!”

***

Kelly ripped a Raptor in two and hurled the pieces like javelins through the face/helm of a Manta. The tail spat death, and she zipped from side to side, the blasts following her just a split-second too slow. She clotheslined the tail, shearing it off and sending it spiraling. Jenn had mentioned that the tails kept firing when they were cut off, so she grabbed the tail and turned it on the body of the Manta to spit death once, twice, three more times before going dark.

She’d grown up the granddaughter of veterans, with uncles that had served in Vietnam and older cousins that had fought in Afganistan. One was probably still there. That part of the family lived in Chicago and they hadn’t heard from them since the first days of the invasion. Most of her relatives that had served kept their experiences of war to themselves. But none of them had to fight a war like this, nor did they win whatever cosmic lottery that meant that she, Jenn, and a handful of others had come away from the aliens’ laboratories with the power to shred an alien warship apart like a pile of junk mail.

But she wasn’t fighting for the kicks. That was a side-benefit. The sooner this was done, the sooner people would be safe and restore balance to their lives.

“On your six, coming in hot.” came a familiar voice on the radio.

Kelly turned and saw Jenn’s red hair and ruby gem aura darting across the sky, headed her way. With three Manta ships in pursuit.

“You brought company,” Kelly said, climbing toward a low set of clouds.

“I thought about prosecco, but I didn’t have one of those travel sleeves. You want the two on the left?”

“We’ll get wine after. I’ll peel them off and give you their back.”

The two of them flew circles around the alien ships, dashing in and out of firing range as they wore down the armor between shots on the flexible tails. With three of them all in range at once, charging the tails the way she had with the solo ship wasn’t viable.

This type of fighting both was and wasn’t as much fun. The clenching grip of danger mellowed out her combat high. She concentrated as she pushed herself to climb faster, pulling several Gs that would have knocked the air out of her lungs before the alien enhancements.

Something clipped her and the world spun. She picked out Jenn’s red-on-red and regained her bearings. Down was there, up was here, and the Manta was coming right for her. But its tail was providing fire support for the others as they tried to surround Jenn.

“Bad move,” she said, and charged straight through the Manta’s bridge, wreathed in azure flame.

Once clean-up was done, they had time for at most thirty seconds of hovering-and-kissing before they had to report in. Kelly intended to make every second count.