Get a free novella when you subscribe
Menu
A decade after a global virus and the subsequent chaos brought civilization to the brink, Lori Rose joined the military of a nascent matriarchal society to strengthen the rebuilding efforts. But her career stalled because her headstrong personality drew the ire of her superiors. Now, as she contemplates her dwindling options, their enemy launches a sneak attack that kills her command staff and captures hundreds.
But if their enemy wanted a quick victory, they crossed the wrong soldier. With nothing but her wits and a few unlikely allies, Lori hatches a daring rescue attempt against a technologically and numerically superior force.
Can she save her people before her actions plunge them into an unwinnable war?
Forged Wings is a prequel novella that introduces Lt. Lori Rose, before she became the feared General.
by
Chapter 1: What You Think
Lieutenant Lori Rose stepped out of her military tent and zipped her field jacket as she marched toward the dark clouds hanging low over the western horizon. This close to Monterey Bay, the breeze grew teeth the second the sun went down. Moss Landing’s two smokestacks rose to her south. The power plant had been out of service for over a decade, yet the relics still dominated the skyline, demanding attention but delivering nothing.
A silent Steller’s jay accompanied her, hopping from bush to tent to bush along the walkway down the ancient trailer park that hosted their camp. It landed on the western dogwood in her path, its head moving in quick, sharp twitches. The blue of its belly darkened to a deep purple by the time it met the shoulders.
Lori sneezed as the pungent whiff of ozone in the air tickled her nose, startling the jay up two branches. The feathers on its head evoked a Mohawk fade, particularly when it glanced her way. In her early teens, a few of her classmates had attempted hairdos in this style, but unlike this jay, they hadn’t pulled it off.
All her classmates, like all her friends and family, were long gone. Hairdos or intellect or strength or wealth had neither helped nor hurt when the Purge had hit. Lori had been one of the lucky few survivors, assuming being left to fend for herself in the middle of a dying city as a child constituted luck. She’d survived by making her luck and had learned to interpret how the universe treated you with caution; you never got what you deserved or what you wanted.
Your job wasn’t to divine a purpose for why the universe worked the way it did. Your job was to figure out how to make it another day. Everything else was a distraction, and in her world, distracted teenagers hadn’t lived long.
Tonight, she’d been summoned to Major Tearney’s quarters, no doubt for another rebuke. Stretched over a wooden deck, the major’s digs dwarfed the beach bungalows to their west. It was a tent in material only, it’s faded blue-slate canvas towering over the tan tents pitched on either side of the gravel path. The left side hosted the office where the command staff met, while the right side was the major’s private space.
Lori didn’t hate the tent just because of its current occupant. It was a close cousin to the gray canvas monsters that had swallowed her mother one spring morning a decade ago. One moment she’d gone to work on the Pearl Harbor Centennial Commemoration they were assembling on Treasure Island, the next they’d shut down the island. Soon after, Treasure Island had turned into a quarantine zone with the dead piled on refrigerated containers. The follow- ing week, the entire Bay Area had shut down, but the real trouble arrived when the power to those containers went out.
Lori pulled her chin up and relaxed her grinding molars. Two soldiers sat on stools along her path outside their tent. The shorter one, with red, round cheeks spotted Lori first, put her cup on the ground, stood up, and saluted. The other one noticed too late and stood with her steaming cup in hand.
“At ease,” Lori said before the taller soldier spilled her coffee. They remained motionless as Lori passed them. Their body lan- guage projected resignation, which was the reason Lori kept getting in trouble. The warning these somber faces provided had gone unheeded by command staff. The Marin generals and politicians talked a good game, but their messages diverged from the reality the troops experienced daily. So Lori took it upon herself to motivate the troops whenever she spotted defeated eyes.
At the rate the hostilities had escalated, war with Kern was inevitable. If they were going to fight, Lori preferred to fight with soldiers who expected to win. Somehow, Major Tearney believed being prepared meant having your guns cleaned and your tactics dissected. Lori had learned a bitter truth early in life well before joining the military: you only won the battles you believed you could win.
Right now, these soldiers were scared. The three brigades Kern had sent north sat around King City, launching random missiles that, so far, flew over their camp and splashed to sea. The whales in the deep canyons of Monterey Bay probably didn’t appreciate the ruckus, but they were in no position to express their discontent. Lori was and did, which is probably why she was walking into Major Tearney’s office. Again.
Lt. Morales nodded as Lori approached. “The major is with Headquarters. It’ll be a minute.” The jay hovered for another second before flying away, showing no sign of the irritation those around it might feel.
Morales’ cheeks barely moved as she spoke. If Lori had to guess, she’d have said Morales didn’t care for the Major though she was too professional to broadcast that in public. Then again, if discretion had been her goal, Lori had failed miserably, starting with her first day of training when she’d completed the fitness test run in the slowest time ever recorded. But she’d finished, unlike two-thirds of the trainees who’d been collected by Jeep. Lori had refused the pickup, disobeying a direct order on her first day. Not much had gone smoothly since.
Lori nodded to Morales and plopped on the metal folding chair inside the door. In this setting, a few minutes meant anything up to an hour, depending on how pissed the major was. Lori settled in.
At the hour mark, Morales’ tida chimed. She took her fin- ger-sized glass communicator out of her pocket and tapped it before turning to Lori. “She’s ready for you.”
“Major,” Lori said and saluted as she walked in. Major Tearney sat at the head of the folding contraption that passed as a conference table. Lit by the pink reflection from the screen facing her, Tearney’s wide cheeks loomed in a cartoonish display of anger. Despite all her efforts, Lori never managed to like her commanding officer. She’d have settled for respect, but sadly, even that eluded her.
Captain Paik sat to Tearney’s left, two screens lit in front of her. Paik stood a head taller than Lori, her sharp black hair bundled into a loose pony tail. Lori turned to Paik and saluted again. “Captain.”
“Lieutenant,” Tearney said, but did not lift her eyes from her screen or offer Lori a seat. She swiped her screen and flicked, transferring whatever she’d been working on to her tida. She finally lifted her eyes. “I am tired of summoning you here.”
And I’m tired of being summoned.
Lori hadn’t joined the military on a whim. She’d studied Marin and its philosophy, politics, and operations. Chancellor Czernak ran the show, but with a deft touch, her edicts championed by others who took the brunt of the criticism until Czernak became the wise stateswoman who offered the compromise.
Marin’s ideal had lured Lori, but the discipline of the military had reeled her in. The Marin military was an extension of Czer- nak’s will, forged and run by General Prami Dey, who’d been an Air Force lieutenant before the collapse. Projecting strength, the Marin military had a clear mission to protect Marin and contain the influence of Kern’s patriarchy.
A few months in, the veneer had cracked, the reality of political expediency eating away at the ideals. The military’s clarity had held for another few years before compromises had weakened Lori’s belief that they were serving the higher good. Now all that held her here was Kern. Those crazy fucks down south had to be stopped, and the best way to do that was through the might of Marin’s military. That was why officers like Major Tearney confused her, officers who accepted Kern’s open hostility.
“You were to stop sowing doubt about the competence of Marin leadership among the troops,” Tearney said. “Two days ago, you stood here and nodded when I asked you to stop lecturing the troops.”
Lori stood halfway between the tent’s entrance and the table, half in the command center, half out. “With all due respect, Major, that’s not what I’m doing.”
“Oh?”
“I only talk to soldiers who question their place, their mission. I give pep talks, not lectures. My goal is to help this unit be ready when Kern attacks.”
“If, you mean?”
Lori gave a hint of a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And keeping this unit ready is my role.”
“Yes, ma’am.” But you’re not fucking doing it!
“The executive council believes diplomacy will prevail.”
Lori bit her lip, then breathed out, lowering her shoulders. “Of course, Major.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?” When Lori remained silent, Tearney added, “You can speak freely, Lieutenant. It’s not like you’re going to say anything you haven’t said before.”
“No, Major. I don’t believe diplomacy will prevail.”
“Why not?”
“Because Kern moved three heavily armed brigades to our doorstep. There are two reasons to move 10,000 troops into the Uregs.”
Tearney took her chin between her index and thumb. “Please, enlighten me.”
The Unregulated Territories stretched between Marin to the north and Kern to the south, covering hundreds of miles of unclaimed territory from the East Bay to Santa Barbara. Indepen- dent compounds and gangs filled the Uregs, along with fledgling proto-states like New California. But mostly, the Uregs offered a buffer between Kern and Marin. Militarily, it’d be a snap for either to conquer it in a few days. The scattered compounds were armed against gangs and each other not a proper military.
But neither Kern nor Marin would allow the other do so. That the area was mostly empty didn’t change anything; whoever con- trolled it dominated the state on a map and in the minds of the populace. So the Uregs existed in perpetual limbo, a demilitarized zone that put the brakes on anyone’s grandiose conquest plans.
That was why ignoring a Kern intrusion into the Uregs was folly. No matter the intent, this move constituted a fundamental shift in relations and led to only one outcome.
“They might be testing our resolve. If so, they’ll push and push until we respond, which means at some point we’ll have to engage. Or they might have decided to claim the Uregs and double Kern’s footprint, bringing their northern border up to San Jose. Our units stand in their way, so they’ll push us aside and keep going. Either way, we will be fighting and soon.”
“And you don’t think anyone on the executive council or any of our generals has thought of that?”
Lori remained silent.
“What do you think you see that I or my superior officers do not?”
“With all due respect, it doesn’t matter what I see. It only mat- ters what Kern sees.”
“What do you think they see?”
“If I were Kern, I’d question Marin’s resolve. And if I doubted that resolve, I’d instigate a battle somewhere important but not vital to Marin’s existence,” Lori said.
“You believe this stretch is important to Marin?”
Lori shrugged. “If they’d pull this stunt closer to San Rafael, we’d fight them. But here? We’d only engage if we believed we’re their equal in strength. So every time we back off, every time we avoid confrontation, we show them that we don’t believe we are.”
Tearney clapped twice. “Straight out of Pop Psychology 101. You’re too young to know better, but that’s the kind of talk that burned the world. Fighting and posturing. If we’d collaborated and rebuilt after the Purge killed billions, we could have saved civili- zation. You were what ten, twelve when it hit? You don’t have any idea how comfortable we were. How simple it was to satisfy your needs: stores full of any food you might dream of, entertainment at your fingertips.”
“It all went up like this.” She snapped her fingers. “Sure, the Purge killed so many that our infrastructure neared collapse. But it’s the aftermath that sealed our fate. Our so-called leaders saw weakness in their opponents.” She waved her arms, “This is the result. We went back a century in the blink of an eye. We lost more in the Four-Day War than in the previous four years of the Purge. The only reason Marin exists today is because Chancellor Czernak saw a better way, a way based on science and civility.”
“And a strong military.”
“What?”
“With all due respect, civility cannot keep Marin alive.”
Tearney shook her head in disgust. “We need to be strong to deter the aggressor. But we don’t need to pick fights. Only a bully punches down.”
Lori gave one stiff nod.
“So do us all a favor, and stop acting like you’re a gift to the Marin military.”
“I don’t presume that, ma’am. But we face an opponent that forgot our strength.” She also feared that Marin had forgotten its own strength, but she kept that to herself.
“So you think you’re smarter than every other officer in Marin.” Lori forced her voice even. “I have no way to assess that, Major.” Tearney turned to Paik. “Add insolence to the charges.” “Charges?”
“I’m tired of dealing with your bullshit. I’ve charged you with insubordination and fomenting dissent. Plus insolence, now. You’re headed back to Marin tomorrow morning. I don’t much care what they do with you there, but our mission is delicate enough without having you second guess my decisions.”
“Our mission?”
Tearney rolled her eyes. “What? You thought we were here to run and shoot?” She nodded to Paik.
“This is the third Kern excursion into the Uregs in the last year,” Paik said. “Each had a different mix of armored carriers and assault transports. We’re gathering intelligence on troop movement and brigade speed based on their size and composition. We’re not here to defend the Uregs.”
Lori stared to her feet.
“We’re preparing for the day we need to actually fight them for something that matters,” Tearney said. “Anything to add?”
Lori shook her head because expressing her thoughts meant new additions to the charges. Tearney and the executive council and generals didn’t realize the day they’d pushed to a far future was here. Kern had tested them, and they’d failed. She saw no path out of their current predicament that didn’t end with an all-out war with Kern. She hoped she was wrong, but no matter what Tearney said, and no matter what she believed about the past, hope was not a strategy.
“You are confined to quarters. You will leave for Marin at first light. For the rest of today, you are not to speak to the troops or anyone in your platoon. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tearney waved a hand. “Dismissed.”
