Chapter 1
The New Earth Coalition
January 17, 2339
Settlement 0012
It was a sunny day in January, and I was at school. The air was brisk and frigid, but the school was warm and unaffected, which was a rare blessing. Not many people nowadays could afford heating. I was just beginning to fall asleep when my teacher, Mr. Browndon, caught my eyelids drooping.
“Mr. Turner, perhaps there’s something more worthy of your time than history?” he asked, slapping his pointer stick against the concrete outer wall.
Pure fear revived me, and I threw me head back so hard I nearly got whiplash.
“No, uh, sir. Sorry. I was paying attention, I swear.”
He sneered, gesturing to the holoscreen behind him.
“Then perhaps you’d like to elaborate on the Great Catastrophe?”
At least it was something I knew about. In fact, there wasn’t a single person I knew that wasn’t familiar with it. I sighed and proceeded to recite the stories.
“The Great Catastrophe was a massive nuclear war that erupted on Earth somewhere around one hundred and twenty years ago. It wiped out much of Earth’s natural wildlife, and whatever survived began to mutate over succeeding generations,” I snickered a bit , “Clearly, we survived.”
“And how did we discover our new home?”
I’d apparently missed that part. As he glared at me through his small bifocals, I raised an absent hand in defeat.
“I don’t know.”
“Luckily for humanity, a physicist by the name of Kurtis Bontrager survived. He and a few other survivors from the scientific community banded together to unite our scattered people. Eventually, he scavenged blueprints from a long-dead military experiment known as Project Whiplash. It was supposed to be able to allow humanity to travel through time, so to speak. We were able to discover New Earth after the machine was built, and immediately began to colonize it. Sixty years later, here we are.” He returned to his desk quietly.
It was a simple story, a fact that had always bugged me. I hadn’t been alive in 2277, over sixty years ago, but it was odd to me that such a terrible catastrophe had, in the long run, basically been solved by packing up and moving. Sure, it was across planes of reality, but still. Shouldn’t there have been more?
However, I wouldn’t be getting my answer from the simple-minded Browndon. I knew that because he was the kind of teacher that taught straight from the book; always had been. I figured he didn’t actually know anything he was supposed to be teaching. It wasn’t his fault, though. There were no colleges established, no actual places of higher learning to attend. The history book itself barely had enough to fill its measly two hundred pages. It was vague and generalized, which was annoying.
I slumped back into my seat and sank a few inches, yawned once, and then closed my holodesk’s screen and prepared to take a nap.
Just as my eyes began to droop, a shout from the hall woke me up. Then another one. Browndon stood up, setting down his holotab, and walked to the door. He was looking through the window when it opened, slamming into his face. The door opened, and in the doorway, in full dark blue Coalition attire, was a man. He was tall, built like a brick, and had the face of someone who’d seen more interesting things than the inside of a low-class school building like mine. Behind the man was my red-faced principal, Mr. Parson.
“Mr. Gra-,” started Parson.
“You’d be smart to keep your mouth shut, Parson. You know as well as I do that the Coalition wouldn’t take too kindly to anyone denying them their soldiers,” said the man, holding up a hand to silence him. His mouth stretched into a fine line.
The entire room, as well as Parson, immediately became silent. Even Browndon, who now stood nursing his nose, was quiet. The man looked around the room quietly, nodded, and then took out a holopad and peered at it.
“Turner, Matthew,” he said, his voice gravely and rough. My entire class turned to stare at me, but I sat still as a stone and said absolutely nothing. Surely there was some mistake – The Coalition couldn’t be asking for me, could they?
His lips turned down into a frown, and he stared at me from across the room.
“Speak when addressed, son. I ain’t got all day.”
“Sir, there must be some kind of mistake. Check your pad, I just turned sixteen last week – The draft surely isn’t that desperate?”
“That’s the concern of the Coalition, not you. You’re being called upon to protect your people, and you don’t really have a say.”
Quiet chatter broke out amongst my classmates, but all I could do was sit there, paralyzed. Parson gave me a look of pity, then quietly approached my desk.
“Matt, there’s nothing either of us can do. You’re going to have to go with Colonel Grant. You know the rules,” he said quietly, placing a hand on my shoulder in what I could only presume to be a comforting manner. I peered over Parson’s shoulder at the Colonel, who stood in the doorway, holopad clutched in both hands. He stood straight up, to the point I probably could’ve run a knife down his back and not cut a thing. It was almost disturbing how conditioned he looked.
“Fine. Let me get my stuff.”
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