This story takes place in the year of 2257. We'll start with the disaster.
In Europe one of the prime sources of dairy food and livestock was Scotland. It was rich with rolling hills and great soil. Most Europeans who were still farmers lived there; of course, the term farmer was applied very loosely.
Mostly it was technology. The farmers sat at the computer control booth and ran the equipment from there. Making it one of the more technologically involved jobs, if anyone can believe that.
So, the British prized this area much, and had limited any building or new developments there. No fuel cars were to drive in the area and pollute it.
Now I'm sure you can understand why they were very mad when this was all destroyed.
The Americans had a new technology, nuclear powered spacecraft. The testing was pretty much complete, they were deemed safe for use.
This technology had been implemented into a satellite. It was orbiting in close-earth at the time. There'd been a small error; one of the valves had been one size too big. It had exploded. Right above Scotland.
They were calling it the worst disaster resulting from humans of all time.
The entire country of Scotland had been rendered barren for over a hundred years. A week after the incident over a million had perished.
Millions more all over the European nations were sick with radiation related diseases, or would be soon enough.
There is no telling how much money was lost because of the incident. Surely it was billions and billions.
It was estimated that twenty years after the explosion an eighth of the world's population would die due to it. That was over a billion people.
Due to the jet stream and other air currents the radiation had been carried east and not west. The United States was one of the very few countries in the world not directly affected.
Just about every country was mad at the United States. We were the ones who were supposed to help other people fix their mistakes, we weren't supposed to make them.
The President apologized numerous times, but the UK, the hardest hit of all, declared war.
So it had started. World War III. It had come as a shock to everyone, after so long without a major war most people never thought it would happen again, and most were unprepared.
Now, everyone used to say that the wars of the future wouldn't be fought with humans but with robots, they were wrong.
This was very similar to previous wars, just new technology.
With that I will now lead you into the story. The first character you'll meet is a 26 year-old West Point graduate who is a fighter pilot in the US Navy.
The fighter was a sleek, black killing machine.
It was a point in the front, getting larger to the back. At the back two wing like things stuck out and curved forwards forming a point about halfway to the front.
On the ends of each of these wings were two energy cannons. These shot out packets, balls of energy tightly packed so you could see it and it didn't disperse.
I fired one at the English ship! It was an older model that shot actual mini-bombs that exploded one impact and looked more like a small version of the antique space shuttle painted dark blue.
My packet hit him right on the weapons platform, totally disabling them.
He did a nosedive and went almost straight down. We were about 20,000 feet up, and he had a lot of space.
He pulled a kind of loop and dove so far he ended up going upside down away from my belly.
I pulled a quick corkscrew and leveled out. He was about 500 feet below me, and 2,000 ahead, almost in firing range.
I was gaining on him, slowly, but surely. But I knew he wasn't going to give up this easily.
I was right, right after that thought ran through my head my ship rocked fast, jerking me hard. I'd been shot by an English fighter, one of the older "SuperSonic 7-A" models, or SS for short. It was just in the corner of my field of vision, a thousand feet up and 1,200 to the right.
It had hit right on the top of the shaft where I was sitting, only about a foot from my head.
If this had been an earlier model fighter, with an actual glass window, I'd have been killed. But this ship didn't have windows; instead, it was a series of cameras that all sent information to a large, curved monitor that might as well have been a window. On the outside of that was 4 inches of an almost indestructible alloy invented especially for government use.
The explosion had delayed me a bit, and I was too far behind to catch up now, so I turned my attention to the SS that had gotten a cheap shot off of me.
Just as I turned my cameras and sensors towards him he fired a mini-bomb. I didn't have time to dodge it! I wasn't gonna survive another hit though, this one was right for my engine area.
Suddenly, the mini-bomb exploded about 20 feet from my ship.
The shockwave shook my fighter a little but not enough to cause a delay.
"Yeah! That was a great shot, if I don't say so myself!" Ty, the other American fighter pilot with me, and my best friend since first grade, shouted in exhilaration.
"GREAT shot Ty! You just saved my life you know, I owe you!"
I was going top speed to the fighter that had fired on me, he was almost in range�
I locked on and fired! The packet, a glowing blue streak, went gracefully as a shooting star through the air and hit the ship square in the engines. The fuel ignited in an instant, and a white-hot explosion burned against the blue sky, and the fire and twisted metal fell to the crops below.
"Nice shot, sleek." Ty complimented me through the radio.
"Thanks Ty, but it takes more than one good shot to win a battle, I just let another ship escape because I wasn't monitoring all the space around me." I told him.
There were only two SS left now, Ty was handling one, and the other was shooting wildly at him.
I dove down fast to about a hundred feet, then went to get beneath the SS shooting Ty from behind.
I got a lock on it, and shot the last of the two disperser missiles I had.
There was almost no way it could miss, it had a targeting system in itself linked to the fighter's computer, never leaving the target it was locked onto when it was launched.
The SS finally saw it coming when it was about halfway to him, giving him about ten seconds to react.
He shot a volley of about ten mini's towards it, one of them hit and exploded, but the disperser managed to stay intact.
It went flying up, straight up, and hit the SS in the belly. The resulting explosion was a brilliant red, but outlined in it I saw a black shape, barely visible in the blinding light.
Ty! I'd forgotten to watch out for him!
"TY!!!" I yelled into the radio, as loud as I could.
The only response was silence, and as I stared at the burning black figure outlined in the brilliant red, a flash of light so bright it blinded me for ten seconds. The burning fire and energy had reached the energy generators in Ty's ship, making a tremendous explosion.
I saw something falling, it was a piece of debris from the ship, and, oh god, falling next to it I saw a hand, a hand covered in dark blood, and then, out of the light I saw something worse, it was his head, his mottled, basrely visible head, falling towards the calm, waving fields below.
Suddenly I felt cold, even though the ship kept the temperature at a constant 68 degrees.
I was shivering and goosebumps were breaking out. My stomach felt twisted, my best friend had just been killed, and it was my fault.
I'd been careless, damned careless! So damn careless it had killed my friend, and companion, who'd saved my life just seconds before I killed him.
My last words had been "I owe you." Ha, I'd paid him back all right, with death. Oh god, death, I'd never see him again, his fiancee�
He was engaged, to his high-school sweetheart. They'd been planning the wedding, and it had been delayed when he'd been called back to service. Now it was off, canceled.
The other ship that Ty had been fighting was fleeing now, almost invisible on the horizon.
I threw up, vomited on the inside of my helmet. It was wet and sticky and gross. I jerked off the helmet, and turned on autopilot to land me.
I felt hyper, and my stomach was twisted, and I was lost and didn't know what to do. I felt helpless, like there was nothing I could do to fulfill my needs, I needed something that I couldn't get, that nothing would give me.
When I landed I went straight back to my dorm. It was only me and Ty called out, the Brits were attacking a nearby city, Virginia Beach, and we'd been called out against the five SS.
I grabbed my HandiBook, a computer like the old Palm-Pilots that you could insert cartridges with books onto to read, and opened up Endless Sky, a book about the War in Oceania a couple centuries back.
While I read I kept thinking, I'm going to win this war, I don't care what I have to do, the Brits caused me to do this, it's still my fault, but I'm going to pay them back, if I do it singlehandedly.