Dawn broke on a cool autumn morning. Warm orange sunlight creeping slowly in through the attic window; fog and condensation making it diffuse into a bright ghostly glow, bathing the entire room with soft tangerine light. Little clouds of dust particles floated lazily in mid air, suspended in the cone of luminescence projecting from the window. Every now and then the odd bird or two would fly by the window casting flitting shadows that whizzed by as fast as they appeared.

Sera lay on the bed, wide awake. She had a lot on her mind, staring blankly at a familiar spot on the ceiling. She had spent many a sleepless night staring at that spot, thinking to herself about things of varying degrees of importance; it was very much a recurring thing for her by now. In any case, she definitely had a lot to think about. Today would be her first day in the resistance corps as finally something other than a trainee — the culmination of six months of grueling hard work; and a daunting prospect, to say the least. She had been enlisted into the aerial defence program,  begrudgingly however, as she'd originally hoped to work with heavy artillery and robotics units. She'd never been much of a flyer really, an average pilot at best, but she definitely knew her way around a weapons array system. She had her dad to thank for that. He was quite the tinkerer, going out scavenging to the great metal graveyard for parts and cogs and bits and ends. Every time he'd gone there, he’d always come back with some busted up old timey guard sentinel or would have an ancient EM wave war drone or other strapped to the back of the truck. He used to say that however horrid the third world war may have had been, at least it'd given us some good free parts.

Sera always had an odd fascination towards machines. She had patched up an old sentry drone back when she was thirteen, with some modern tech and an integrated A.I. chip. Now they have a nice little guard drone to drive off pesky mountain cats. Since then she'd gotten much better at dealing with machines, showing enough prowess to be even called technomancer once or twice in her life. But obviously she was no real technomancer, nor could anyone be for that matter, for those were just old legends and war stories told by old decrepit war survivors going batty with dementia. But in spite of herself, she quite liked the idea of it. Tales of the legendary technomancer started popping up after the end of the third world war, survivors recounting their "encounters" with this person— the one who bends all machines to his will. Wading into battle shrouded in a thick, swirling, smog of nanobots, materializing weapons from the ether and scorching entire battle grounds in a matter of seconds. The kids nowadays can't even begin to fathom  what their latest buzzword means. Not once do they ever feel like glancing at an info-bank before running their mouths like parrots. But then again, she always did have a disproportionate amount of reading material growing up. Her dad's library of historic antiquities was one of the only sources of entertainment she had back then. That and hacking the guard drone's direct control system and going hunting for mountain cats.

A loud beeping sounded suddenly from beside the bed. Her Hollo band had turned on and was flashing the number 0600. Is it morning already, she wondered aloud grabbing the little wrist band off the bedside table and getting out of bed, her frizzled brown hair all tangled about her face. She could see that bright sunlight was practically pouring into the tiny room, making her feel a little stupid for not noticing that it was morning. As she walked over to the closet, she could hear footsteps downstairs as the other cadets all started scrambling out of their night clothes. The rule was, you take too long, you run the drills in your underwear; and in this cold that was a pretty efficient tactic.

As Sera pulled on her uniform and climbed down from her little attic room, she noticed that there was quite a lot of nervous muttering, even more so than usual with new recruits. Everyone looked a bit worried. Before she could ask anyone about this peculiar occurrence however, someone called out.

"Oi Sera! Check the hollo news. It's crazy!"

It was Dan, one of her fellow trainees, or ex-trainees as they were both officially resistance members now, with a more disheveled than usual look about him. She quickly tapped the little screen on the wrist band and the hollow frame popped up. She saw that the Hollo news tab did indeed have new entrees, the top story of which was titled "Massive Unknown Extraterrestrial Object Crash Lands on Earth". Curiosity piqued, she tapped into it and a live broadcast of a newscaster started playing.

"... widespread fear has spread across the globe as reports have come flooding in that an unknown object of immense magnitude has crash landed on earth. The object thought to be extraterrestrial in nature is being speculated to be some sort of spacecraft for extraterrestrial intelligent life. Whether these speculations hold up is yet to be seen however as Earth Land Resistance officers have moved in to quarantine the area. For now, that’s all the information we have, but make sure to stay tuned for updates, live from Hollo World News."

"So what do you think Faraday, think they'll bite?"

Inquired a deep gruff voice, it was Samson, their ward captain.

"I don't know cap, but if they do, at least we'll get to have some fun." Sera replied with a smirk.

Samson's office was a cramped little thing. They had called her there to brief her about her station and the unit she'd be joining, though she found it strange that she was not being briefed at the auditorium along with the rest of the new cadets. She looked around for something to do other than just stand around, but came up fruitless. The room itself consisted of only two items: a display desk and a printed polymer chair. Even the walls were pure white, making it feel like a sensory deprivation chamber. She had to admit though, if nothing else, Samson was a very efficient captain; the state of his office alone proved that — nothing but the essentials, not even a family picture on imprint. In all her time, Sera had never seen someone with a blank desktop on standby, everyone had some sort of picture or quote or hand scribbled reminder on imprint display; it's not like it drained power or anything. Even his files were so neatly organized that you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for the Global Open Library index. It was just unnatural to see a person's files that precisely categorized and structured, especially considering the fact that he has to keep track of over 200 cadet files. Many even nursed suspicions that Samson was secretly an android in hiding, but even androids were programmed with a sense of humor to avert suspicions of their artificiality. Although, most of the cadets did agree that Samson had a secret stash of hardcore, kinky, hollo porn hidden away in some deep, dark, corner of his data banks. However, no one had ever mustered up the courage to go check. 

It was at this point that the doors to Samson's office suddenly swung open. Samson had always made his distaste for automated doors quite apparent, said they made him feel unsettled. In fact, he had a general distaste for a  great many instances of modern technology that he liked to call "over complex hyper-modernist tech", some of which included Hollo bands, automated doors, digital writing pads (he had his own stash of antique paper pads), cleaning bots, and a whole host of other things that made life so much easier for normal people. 

In walked Samson with his stiff stocky shoulders and his spine as straight as an arrow, quietly mumbling something under his breath. He was followed by a stranger Sera had never met before. It was a woman, in black flight gear, with the ELAR logo on it. She had thick, wavy, platinum blonde hair cascading in large swells down the sides of her face; though a large proportion of it was haphazardly restrained by a single black hair band; as if the thing couldn't handle all of the hair and she'd resorted to just holding back as much as she could. Her eyes, though; her eyes were a soft shade of pale grey, like new fallen snow on a winter evening. They were a bit mesmerizing to look at, really — cool and calm, like the pure essence of winter. 

"Private Faraday, are you with us?" said Samson suddenly, his deep voice amplified in the confines of the small office, making Sera jump a little. 

"Y-yes, captain." Sera replied, a little embarrassed. 

"You might be wondering why you were told to come to my office to be briefed instead of the auditorium. Well, it's because you were personally requested by her." said Samson, nodding his head towards the strange woman. "This is —"

"Steele", cut in the bright haired woman. "Air Marshall Steele," she finished, with a smile, extending a polite hand. 

Instinctively, Sera bolted upright, her spine audibly popping under the sheer force of the sudden movement as her right hand shot up in salute. Sera had put herself through rigorous training while she was still a trainee cadet, consulting the hand manual as much as she could, and part of that had been to recognize and react to higher ranking officers appropriately. Especially officers of such high ranking. Of what she could remember, Air Marshal was the third highest rank there was in the ELAR. 

"Oh loosen up kid, don't get a stiffy on my part," she said with a light chuckle. "Ranks in the resistance don't mean as much as you'd think these days. It's basically an empty courtesy at this point." 

Sera let her arm drop, relieved as to not have offended an Air Marshal. "But I read in the manual—" 

"The manual?" She actually laughed this time. "They still give out those old, useless things to cadets? I'm amazed." 

"Eh-em!", The captain cleared his throat,"Air Marshal Steele here personally asked for you to be stationed as her co pilot."  

Sera stared at the captain. She was confused now, and rightly so, for she wasn't exactly an award winning pilot - she barely got by; she was actually the worst in her cadet unit at flying the standard issue S-48 Mach-2 ion propulsion jet. Her simulation scores were so bad that they wouldn't even let her fly an actual jet by herself. Her only saving grace was the fact that she passed her weapons training with flying colors. Which begs the question, why would such a high ranking officer be personally asking for her. She felt like this was all a particularly mean spirited practical joke. But she couldn't just ask, what if the pale eyed woman really was an Air Marshal? Her need to know ballooned inside her so much that, before she could stop herself, Sera blurted out, "Why?"  

"Because you're cute." Answered Air Marshal Steele nonchalantly.

Sera was a bit taken aback by this. What kind of answer was that?

"That was a joke by the way," added the platinum haired Air Marshal, "I saw your training tapes. It's amazing how someone could be so bad at flying a mach-2 jet and yet be so impeccably good with it's weapon systems. You have some talent there kid; and at this point, I need some extra talent on my side." 

Her cheeks were starting to really warm up now, slowly adopting a progressively deepening reddish hue, but still Sera couldn't find any words to add to this conversation.

"Weren't you the one who got on that experimental B-15 high density plasma turret prototype, somehow figured out how to operate it in about five minutes and blew up the entire outcrop of abandoned buildings on the far side of the airfields?" Inquired the pale eyed woman.

Oh yeah, Sera remembered, it had been a long time ago near the beginning of her cadet training. One evening, after their lecture on target locking, she and a few friends had snuck out to the restricted hangars on the other side of the airfields on a dare. Upon arriving, much to her amazement, she saw this beautifully engineered assault turret just sitting there inside the hangar. She also noticed a good number of engineers scattered about the hangar floor, sound asleep and most likely too exhausted to care if she were to take a little look at the beastly machine. It looked like someone had mounted a metal swivel chair onto a HpD printed polymer turret frame. Connected to the swivel chair was what looked to be the widest barreled cannon she had ever seen on an assault turret. The whole front half, including the seat, was suspended over what looked like a magnetic swivel joint. She could actually see the thing floating about five centimeters above the smooth hemispherical socket. She figured it must weigh a ton if it was being held up by a magnetic joint, that or it runs really really hot. As she mounted the seat however, she realized that a control board hadn't been fitted yet, but something like that never stopped her in the past, why would she start then. So she routed out the lead wires to the initial drive relay, and ran a current through it. Immediately the pipes around the main turrets had started to form condensed frost on the surface, alluding to her theory that it runs super hot, which meant it probably was a plasma cannon. So after that she proceeded to turn on and integrate all the components with each other, one by one — the plasma arc generator, the stage-one fine mesh electromagnetic coil and the noble gas injection system. Finally, after all that, she held in her hands the leads for the secondary, high voltage, electromagnetic coil which would fire that beast. All this time, her fellow cadets just stared with awe at her sheer ingenuity, not speaking a word. All she had to do was aim it now; but as she tried turning the turret, she realized that it was extremely finicky due to the almost non existent friction between the two interlocking parts of the magnetic swivel joints, and would swerve off to one side every time she tried to adjust the barrel. Usually this sort of thing was left to highly precisioned micro actuators that carefully aligned the turrets with unimaginable accuracy, but extremely horrible odds had never stopped her in the past, so she spent the next minute or so carefully adjusting the resistors for the rotation circuits, finally managing to get a decent lineup with some abandoned building on the other end of the air strip. It was the moment of truth; one final lead spark, and she'd fire a deadly plasma blast at some unassuming housing over merry yonder way. She held her breath, 3..2..1.. And suddenly night became day for a moment as what appeared to be a small star exploded out of the mouth of the barrel, whizzing across the country side, landing with a monstrous explosion into the side of the hills behind her target, completely obliterating a huge chunk of the ground. If she recalled correctly, she even got into a huge amount of trouble because of it, but barely dodged being discharged as the entire engineering department had vouched for her; for she'd accomplished in five minutes what they were struggling with for five weeks. 

Remembering that last bit, Sera immediately started apologizing, "I'm sorry I did that please, I was just curious, they were teaching us about targeting with turrets at our training back then so I thought I'd test it out a bit. I really am sorry, I, I—"

"Shh," said the platinum haired Marshal, pressing her index finger onto Sera's lips, silencing her frantic apologies. "You have a real talent kid," she said softly, leaning in close, "and I mean to put it to good use. You saw the news yesterday didn't you? An alien spacecraft crash landing on earth, fancy that. The higher ups are already going bat shit crazy, making contingency plans left and right in the event that these things are hostile. Me? I don't give a fuck what the higher ups want with me, I make my own rules, and my own contingency plans. I feel a storm a brewing on the horizon, and it's gonna be a bad one, so right now you're my insurance; meaning, I'm relying on you to help me win this war if it does indeed come. Got that?"

Sera nodded tentatively.

"Good girl." Said the woman who was apparently Sera's new pilot.

As Air Marshal Steele left the room, so did Sera; trailing wordlessly behind her, unsure as to what exactly she was supposed to do now. 

"Your name was Private Faraday something, right?" Asked the Air Marshal, without looking back.

"It's Sera," she replied unthinkingly.

Air Marshal Steele stopped and looked back at her for a moment. Sera just realized what she had done — she had suggested to an Air Marshal to address her by her first name. Blood rushed back to Sera's face again. Again Sera tried to apologize; but before she could say anything, a smirked played across the Marshal's pale lips as she said, "Alright Sera, I'm Jennifer; you can call me Jenny if you want. Cause, I guess, if you're going to be my co pilot, you should at least know my first name." And then she walked off along the hall, turning the corner and moving out of sight. 

Military quarters did not usually feature attics to live in, but this one did. That's because the entirety of the resistance compound was repurposed from an old abandoned town near the airfields. All the ramshackle houses there had been reconstructed with state of the art, hyper-dense polymer reinforcements and aeropolymer walls and floor panels; but here and there old remnants of the place's history as a pre-war town still remained, one of them being Sera's attic and its wooden floor boards.

Nowadays, no one really used wood anymore for building purposes. Her dad once told her that after the third World War ended, there was this huge push towards healing the environment from the devastation man had wreaked upon it; luckily, by that time, people had invented various synthetic alternatives to natural materials like wood. So the United Earth government had declared that wood could no longer be commercially sold or harvested in bulk, and that trees would now become a globally protected resource. Since then, most building materials were made of a range of bio-polymers. And as they were biodegradable — once treated with some special activator catalysts, they were easily disposable without screwing up the environment; but even so, individuals would still cut down trees to sell to nostalgia peddlers who made novelty wooden items to sell to reminiscing old people at flea markets.

It was dark outside Sera's attic window now. She lay in her bed, wide awake. She was beginning to feel like this was becoming a usual thing for her. She had a lot going through her head; thoughts whizzing around frantically, like they were caught in some raging tempest, all inklings of sleep being violently blown away. That morning had been quite a rollercoaster for her — to be stationed as some high ranking big wig's co-pilot right off the bat like that; it was a scary thought, one that kept gnawing at the back of her head throughout the entire day. Not only that, but she'd been acting very strange too. What was up with her, why was she acting so flustered and awkward when she met that Air Marshal? She never got tripped up like that before. It was a bizarre feeling, like she was lost or something. In that moment, she felt vulnerable somehow; but the question was why? Was it because that woman was an Air Marshal? Was she simply feeling over cautious about not disrespecting her? No, it couldn't be that. Sera was always keen on respecting authority but she was never afraid of it. Even on the very first day of her training Sera got into a heated argument with Ward Captain Samson about the fact that the automated screening had confiscated some of her tools that she'd brought along with her; they were custom specialist tools that she'd made herself. She'd shouted down Samson, walked out of the office and went back to retrieve her precious contraband; all the while being fully aware that Samson could court martial her and throw her in military prison for disobeying direct orders from a higher ranking officer, but she had full confidence that she'd made a compelling enough argument and that Samson would see reason. It was a risk she was willing to take, for, if nothing else, Sera was a person who, under no circumstance, would take other people's shit; she was too hard headed for her own good. And yet, there she was, fidgeting like a highschool girl in the principal's office. why did that woman make her so nervous? It really was baffling to her.

Troubling thoughts aside, Sera realized she had to get some modicum of sleep at least. Lately, her sleepless nights had been really sapping at her performance at the drills. So, recognizing she'd built up a lot of pent up stress, Sera padded her canoe for a good ten minutes, releasing all that bottled up tension. It felt so good — like a rubber band snapping; like a gradually steepening slope and then just free-fall, all those negative thoughts just giving away to pure bliss. Sera was peacefully snoring away within the next five minutes, bed sheets in absolute disarray.

                                                                                                       ********

The morning found Sera crumpled up in a heap on her standard issue bio polymer bed. Amongst the twists and tangles of the horrendously abused bed sheets, only a clump of frizzy brown hair could be seen; entirely obscuring her face. All was quiet in the pure early morning light. The only sounds to be heard were that of the peaceful breathing of the fresh new resistance member.  All was calm, all was right, and then the alarm went off.

The loud obnoxious beeping cut through the morning serenity like a plasma knife through synthetic butter, throwing the world into chaos. The demented fanfare heralding the end of the beautiful slumber that Sera'd worked so hard to achieve. The hollo frame shoved the number 0600 into her face like some sort of deeply offensive banner, like an arrest warrant for the rest of the day to take her away. The horrid sound was like a buzz saw to her brain. It was agonizing — vulgar.

Sera crawled out from under her disheveled mound of sheets, on to the floor hands first. It took her a good minute or so before she could get her bearings and stand up. Shaking her head a little to clear the cobwebs, she tapped the holloband off, silencing it instantly; the holographic display retreating into the little window. The room became oddly silent all of a sudden. It had been a long time since Sera had be awakened from actual sleep by the alarm. She'd always made a habit of either staying up all night or just waking up before the damn thing got a chance to assault her ears. Today she'd failed to do either, so she had to go through that harrowing experience. She'd thought about turning the alarm off indefinitely though, but that was easier said than done. She'd tried everything; opening it up, sticking an automatic tapping machine onto it or even outright destroying the thing. But opening it purged the semi-solid circuitry into goo, the fingerprint responsive only screen meant that the the tapping machine was useless, and destroying it meant that they'd just give her another one. Why an alarm clock needed so much security was beyond her, but if she ever found the son of a bitch who came up with the bright idea, she'd definitely have a stern talk with them about it with her fist lodged firmly in their mouth.

Morning rage aside, Sera still had to get ready for her first day on the job. Stifling a yawn, she slipped on her new uniform. It was different from her old cadet armor, in that it wasn't just a piece of cloth, it was bona fide combat gear. Whereas her cadet gear was a dirty grey color, this suit was light greyish with bright white stripes of interlocking hexagonal plates going down each of her limbs and meeting up at the torso. The material also felt much sturdier and robust, yet it was amazingly flexible as well. It even had a dermal display screen on the left sleeve to possibly monitor vitals and such; she figured it’d link up with her holloband. As she put it on though, it felt a little odd and misfitting, but that  was quickly fixed as the smart fabric adjusted itself to accommodate for her body structure. She could see herself in the dresser mirror as the fabric stretched and contorted to perfectly hug her figure. Sera felt a little weird wearing the skin tight suit; even though the uniform itself did not feel tight at all, it looked as if someone had painted the suit onto her naked body. Though she might not exactly have had been the bustiest of women, it was still making her uncomfortable. "How is thing going to protect me from anything?" Sera asked exasperatedly of the empty room. No answer came, as she stood there frowning in front of the mirror. Sera doubted it would even protect her from perverts trying to grope her. Although, she had faith in her fists to do that bit for her.

Speaking of protection, however, wasn't this thing supposed to have built in body armor? Sera had read about the new 3.0 issue ELR combat body suits in last week's issue of Hollo Weekly. She'd read that it used Mycropoly's new titanium poly alloy nano weave, giving it complete resistance against stabbing or physical penetration; on top of the previous versions' 2000 Cº heat resistive capabilities. But what really intrigued her the most was that this would be the first commercially mass produced battle suit to implement the new Isolated Impact Shell Armor technology. Sera had been hearing about IISA armoring ever since they’d started research on it a few years ago. A rumor here, a snippet there, but never enough to actually get a comprehensive idea of how it’d work. But now finally she had it, and on her body no less. She was undoubtedly  excited to test it out. They say Mycroply actually busted out out their top secret Tungsten Titanium Polyalloy for the impact shell, something the press had been dogging them about for ages.

Wasting no further time, Sera balled up her fist and socked herself right in the stomach! Only to reel it back with a groan as her fist collided with what felt like a brick wall. Knuckles pulsating with pain and wide-eyed with astonishment, Sera looked down to see a bright white band of hexagonal plates going around her entire midriff. They looked like the same hexagonal plates the stripes on the suit were made of, but they were as hard as diamonds. Sera could feel a smile creeping up her face, she was practically giddy with excitement. It was everything she had hoped it would be, and more. Rubbing the sting off her knuckles, Sera kicked open the hatch on the floor, as she made her way down to the fields for morning drills.