A cloud of dust kicked into the sky by a column of advancing armor…rockets roaring from artillery batteries…the zing of bullets and the dull clap of grenades…these were the sounds of battle; the music that beat time to humanity’s war of survival.
Trevor Stone- Emperor Trevor Stone — could see it all.
In his mind.
With his eyes he saw only push pins and order of battle charts; aerial photography and casualty reports. These were the swords he swung from his seat of power in the second floor office at the lakeside estate in Pennsylvania.
The biggest of the maps on the desktop illustrated the expanse of his Empire. The borders hugged the Mississippi river from the Gulf coast north to Illinois then retreated eastward along the Ohio River to Army Group North's position near Columbus.
New England, several Canadian towns along the northern border, Florida, New York City…all "liberated."
An eclectic combination of monsters and alien armies invaded Earth on a late June day six years and seven months ago. On that day, a mysterious entity dressed as an old man told Trevor that he must survive, fight, and sacrifice to save humanity.
During those early months, each dawn felt like a precious gift because living until sunset of that same day seemed a tall task.
After the Battle of Five Armies-so nicknamed by Dante Jones in reference to a famous battle from Tolkien's The Hobbit — 'survive' changed to 'fight'.
To his surprise, Trevor found a knack for taking the downtrodden refugees of man's collapsed civilization and transforming them into armies of murdering mobs. Yesterday's store clerks and accountants, teachers and lawyers, found new purpose as soldiers crusading against the invaders.
Slowly they expanded outward from Trevor's lakeside estate. First he found individual survivors and some families, then remnants of the U.S. military, and then hidden colonies at campgrounds or in isolated towns and villages.
As he found more and more survivors, his cause grew into a small nation. Many of those survivors came from alien slave camps overrun and liberated, others-like Ashley, the mother of Trevor's son-rescued from globs of green goo into which they had mysteriously disappeared in the early days of Armageddon.
Then came the Hivvans.
The Grand Army of the Hivvan Republic controlled most of the southeastern United States. With air forces, armor support, and intelligence units, these bipedal reptiles possessed the trappings of evolved warfare.
They fought a series of pitched, combined arms battles. Artillery bombardments and dive bombers; infiltration units and armored spearheads; the vocabulary sounded eerily familiar despite an enemy of extraterrestrial origin.
Trevor’s finger stopped on a dot south of Wilmington along the Atlantic coast: New Winnabow, North Carolina.
He closed his eyes and could nearly hear the village elders denying his forces passage despite explaining that failure to let his forces through would derail a critical strategic maneuver.
After exhausting every avenue of negotiation, Trevor sent a swarm of his personal warriors-the K9 Grenadiers-to wipe out New Winnabow.
In the year and four months since that slaughter, humanity made more gains-both in territory and resources-than in the previous four years combined, and the defeated Hivvans deserved the credit.
Instead of outright murdering the human population, these reptilian aliens preferred to capture and enslave. With each victory, Trevor released more captives, growing the free population significantly. The liberation of Columbia, South Carolina emancipated ten thousand people alone. The following year nearly three times that number escaped bondage when the Hivvan capital in Atlanta fell.
Furthermore, the Hivvans turned the large cities under their control into fortresses and cleared the surrounding wilderness of threats. In short, these invaders eliminated scores of dangerous alien monsters, making humanity's job that much easier.
The Hivvans unknowingly helped Trevor's cause in one other way. They brought to Earth powerful equipment that re-arranged the atomic structure of matter. This form of alchemy allowed the aliens-and eventually humanity-to turn useless or abundant materials such as scrap metal, wood, or wastewater into important resources like rubber, iron ore, and petroleum.
As the Hivvans retreated, the agriculture-friendly lands of the south came under human control and the food supply vastly improved, nearly eliminating starvation despite a population that recently broke the one-million mark.
After the fall of Atlanta, his soldiers entered Florida and reached the citadel-like city of Miami where a large population lived besieged by a myriad of monsters. Trevor's Empire chased away those nightmares.
Further north, ferocious block to block fighting cleared New York City of alien pests. While they found almost no human survivors in that concrete jungle, the symbolic capture of such a renowned city boosted morale.
Last summer, "Operation Patriot" sent thousands of Imperial forces into New England. By summer's end the major cities and important junctures in the Yankee states stood free. Furthermore, expeditions across the old Canadian border found thousands of survivors-including Canadian military-living in camps scattered through the wilderness.
Of course, the new civilization occupying the lands that once bore the name 'America' held little resemblance to the United States. No densely populated metropolis' linked by gridlocked roads and high speed trains. Instead, isolated outposts and villages connected by neglected highways where the danger of human bandits and extraterrestrial monsters threatened.
Steam trains operated on the rail lines, armed convoys traveled the roads, and communications relied more on couriers and radios than phone lines and cell towers.
While things progressed well on the battlefield, Trevor faced a monster of a different kind at home; the rebirth of one of the lowest forms of life on Earth: the politician.
New Winnabow's destruction in the jaws of Trevor's K9s sparked a conflagration of protests with Evan Godfrey fanning the flames. The resulting unrest forced Trevor to make political concessions as evidenced by a stack of papers on his desk from the newly elected "Senate."
The very sight of those papers-and what they meant-gave him a headache, thus he welcomed the interruption when a knock came at his door.
"Yes, yes, come in," he called enthusiastically.
Three men walked in to the room, starting with General Jon Brewer, the man who had organized the rescue mission to free Trevor from one of The Order’s torture chambers, outwitted the Roachbots at the Battle of Five Armies, and marched across the ice cap in northern Greenland to retrieve the gateway-controlling runes. At one time his ego stood nearly as tall as his six-foot frame, but a personal failure of courage at the outset of Armageddon clipped his swagger. Now he desired only to serve and had demonstrated the ability to adapt yesterday's tactics and weapons to the reality of a changed world.
Next came Omar Nehru, the Imperial Council’s Director of Science and Technology. He oversaw the matter transfiguration equipment, prioritized resources, and adapted alien technology for use by humanity. Omar-a native of India who came to pre-Armageddon America to teach engineering-never failed to have a cigarette dangling from his lips.
Last came Brett Stanton, Director of Industry and Manufacturing. Brett coordinated military production using the raw materials from Omar's matter-makers to manufacture guns, ammunition, spare parts, and even humanized versions of the captured alien 'Eagle' air ships. Brett occupied one of the most important positions in the burgeoning nation, but the stress of his job took a toll made obvious by the rapid thinning of his body and hair. His pot-marked face showed signs of early aging and his brown eyes always appeared exhausted.
The men sat across from Trevor who noticed Omar carried a cardboard tube.
"All three of you, at once? This can't be good news."
"Relax, Trev," Brewer assured. "This is a good meeting."
"Mister Trevor," Omar spoke in the stereotypical accent to match his ethnicity, something he did by design. It grew worse whenever he grew agitated, and disappeared when shocked or scared. He seemed to enjoy playing the part. "We having a proposal you will much like."
Brewer translated, "We have an idea. I think you're going to like it."
Trevor asked, "Is this the Isaac’s Apple project?"
"The idea grew from that, yes," Jon answered as Omar pulled a set of blue prints from the cardboard tube and unfurled them on Trevor's desktop.
"What am I looking at?"
Brewer pitched, "Our forces are stretched thin, even with the two new divisions. There’s just so much territory to cover as we head west."
Stone said, "We always find a way to get by."
"Here’s our new way to get by," Brewer tapped a finger on the blue prints.
Trevor let the lines take shape to his eye. At first, he thought he viewed a large navy ship, maybe a battleship or an aircraft carrier. Yet the hull did not look quite right.
Brewer said, "This is something we were kicking around and realized it might work. Omar drew up the plans and Brett checked with our production capabilities. I spoke with Shep and Stonewall about it last week during our meeting in Chattanooga."
"Fine, great, what is it?"
"Take a good look, Trev, at a Dreadnought."
"A what?"
"Dreadnought. Just a name I thought up but it could be anything; air carrier, air ship…whatever. The point isn’t the name but what it can do for us."
"And what is that?"
"Project power," Brewer told him. "The same way navies used aircraft carriers to project power around the world. Except, in this case, it isn’t limited to oceans but can go anywhere."
"Break it down for me."
Omar pointed to different parts of the blueprint as he spoke. "It utilizes a greatly expanded version of the anti-gravity circuitry that is in the Eagle air ships. Now if you look here, you can see that we've incorporated more reverse-engineered alien technology, particularly-"
Trevor held his hand in a 'stop' sign. "What is this thing? What do you see it doing?"
Brewer said, "An airship nearly five thousand feet long-that’s about four times an aircraft carrier-and twenty-five hundred feet wide. That gives us a huge flight deck, heavy weapons mounts, and major transport capability, all with a crew under three hundred."
Omar added, "We are a mind of such that the anti-gravity technology can be adapted to assist in the landing of the jet planes. Combined with the long deck, this will be making it much easier to recover and launch even at the higher of altitudes."
"Right," Jon agreed. "We also see this thing being armed to the teeth with heavy-duty energy batteries based on Redcoat technology. The thing could pack a wallop, launch planes, and deliver hundreds of troops to the battlefield."
Trevor leaned back in his seat and let the idea of such a craft sink in.
"Think of it," Brewer salivated. "We send Dreadnoughts in advance of our armies. They pulverize enemy positions, land troops, and airlift out survivors. Remember my expedition up north? It would have been easy with one of these. We could have flown to the Arctic Circle in a day or two instead of going by sub and would have had air support, more troops, more supplies."
Trevor turned to Brett Stanton. While Omar dreamed up such things and Brewer could use it on the battlefield, Brett Stanton would ultimately make it a reality.
"Can this be done?"
"Yep. But wait now, it won’t be easy and it won’t be fast. I’m figuring eight months from go to prototype. That’s assuming I have the materials I’ll need."
"You will have all of the materials you will be needing," Omar insisted.
"The technology this is based on, it’s all sound?"
Omar answered, "It is simply expanding on things that are working for us already."
"And our resources are best spent on something like this?"
General Jon Brewer answered, "Trev, I mean wow, our response time will be faster, we’ll be able to explore remote areas easier. Hell, build a bunch of these and send a fleet around the world to hit The Order’s main facilities or gather survivors in Europe. All that will be possible."
Trevor gazed at the blueprint and saw what Omar and Jon envisioned: jets lifting off the deck, alien fortresses pounded by the guns, a thousand soldiers landing behind enemy lines.
"Okay, start work on the prototype. Do it real careful, though."
Instead of the smiles and nods of enthusiasm he expected, Trevor saw the men-one after another-look away from him as if they had something more to say but feared sharing.
"What? What is it?"
"Well," Jon said sheepishly. "Don’t we have to first get funding through the Senate?"
Of course. The recently elected Senate that busied itself debating food inspection regulations and labor laws with no practical application in the reality of the new world.
Trevor’s blood boiled. "Do what I say. If any of those damned politicians say a word, send them to me. The only power the Senate has is what I allow it to have. It's a present I gave to Evan Godfrey and his protestors to get them back to work and away from my front yard."
Jon nodded his head although Trevor saw doubt in his eyes. Nonetheless, his best General told him, "You won’t regret this, this could really change things."
Trevor glanced at the map on his desk.
"Yep. It’ll give me a whole new set of pins to push around."