There are times in a man’s life when he
is forced to question the very essence of his existence. In fact, it
may be more accurate to say that there are times in a man’s life
where he is not forced to question the very essence of his existence,
as this is the rarer circumstance in these times. The arrival of the
Thorlinthians on Phoenix Day three years ago shook the world to its
core, but it was the strange reaction the Americans had to the
situation that likely doomed us all.

I am Wilhelm Johannes Baker. My friends
once called me Wil, but those times are long gone now. In these days,
a man like myself has no friends. It’s not that friends would be
unwelcome in a time like this. Friends are just too hard to keep
alive when you’re silently heading the underground resistance against
an enemy that’s everywhere you turn and seems to be able to see into
your very intentions without even waiting for you to speak or even
look upon them.

I used to work for the Secret Service.
No, that’s not entirely accurate. I still work for the Secret
Service. I just happen to be the only one who knows that I’m still
alive and continuing my mission of protecting our sovereign nation. The hardest part wasn’t even faking
my death, to be honest. That part was painfully easy when compared to
trying to evade Thorlinthian raids. I didn’t even mean to do it,
either. I still remember that attack.

I was playing chess with my partner,
Jim. He always loved chess, but he never had any skill for the game.
Every time we played, I beat him without even having to pay
attention. It made for something better to do during down time than
reading the paper, though. Even in the early days, it seemed like the
Thorlinthians had a complete vice grip on the media. I’d never seen
so much good news. It made me a little nauseous to think that not one
of those stories was even fabricated. For once, the media was
focusing on the positive, trying to keep the masses calm, and it was
disorienting to see what happened when every job became volunteer
work.

One of the very first policies put
forth by the so-called Peace committee was to eliminate all currency
trade systems. Not only that, but bartering was outlawed in the same
policy. If you needed food, you went to work. When you got home,
there would be a daily ration for your family outside your house,
delivered by people who’d previously been on welfare. If you got
sick, you reported to the nearest Peacekeeper Station, and they’d
treat you. If for some reason you needed bedrest (which with the
Thorlinthians’ medical technology usually meant you had just been
treated for cancer or something), your daily ration would still be
provided to your home. If anyone capable of working in the family
didn’t go to work, the daily ration would not be supplied, and no one
in the household would eat. It must have been a joke, shoving all
that Commie crap down our throats while pretending to allow us to
govern ourselves.

The worst part of the deal was that
each country’s military was pulled from wherever it had been and
returned home to serve as Peacekeepers. And yet there I was, part of
the puppet government. I was “serving the President” and charged
with protecting him. So I couldn’t handle the papers anymore. I
started concentrating on the easiest chess games of my life as if
they were championship matches. But then…

A siren bellowed out into the empty
air, screaming to be heard. Someone was on the premises that didn’t
belong. Another assassination attempt? If only people realized that
POTUS didn’t actually have any power. Somehow, the American people
continued to convince themselves that these new policies and all this
news of alien invasions was somehow a government conspiracy intent on
deceiving the American people into sitting by and being trampled on.
But that didn’t matter. There was an intrusion on my facility, and
that meant someone was out for blood. Who would it be this time?
Rednecks? Yankees? Mercenaries?

The truth chilled my bones faster than
liquid nitrogen. In the courtyard, two stories beneath me, was a
single man. It’s amazing how long the human brain can refuse to
register crucial information when it’s just the last thing you want
to see. Instead of seeing the bloody pile of bodies, I saw the young
man’s strangely colored natural green hair. Instead of seeing the two
lone blades he held in his hands with which he had just slain so many
of my men, I saw his piercing violet eyes looking directly at my own
blue ones. Instead of seeing the dark red kilt and wool-like cape
over a red plaid shawl, I saw his gentle face, somehow tainted by
something distant and indiscernable. Indeed, when I should have been
noticing that the men below me were dead due to the sudden appearance
of a Dragon Rider, I was only noticing that there was a man standing
in the courtyard, looking at me.

But soon, the world came to crisp
detail once more as Jim screamed, “Get down!” and fired his
pistol down into the courtyard. But it was too late. As soon as the
window had broken, the Dragon Rider had somehow leaped two floors up
to that very same window. Still shaken, I drew my pistol, too late to
stop the strange Thorlinthian blade that had reached into Jim’s heart
but not too late to hit the Dragon Rider square in the chest.
Normally, this would barely faze a Dragon Rider, as they wear
advanced armor beneath their uniform, but this was a .50 AE Desert
Eagle, and it packed a hell of a bigger punch than standard issue M9.
While not being enough to go through the armor and kill the
Thorlinthian, it was enough to knock him back and to his knees for a
moment, though the latter, in hindsight, was likely due to simple
surprise.

Nonetheless, I managed to bring myself
to a more upright position and move to the door. Then, everything
went wrong. As I called out into the hallway for assistance, I
realized my mistake. I had just turned my back to a live Dragon
Rider. My body soon felt the brunt of that error as the
Thorlinthian’s blade ran its way up my spine. Instantly, I fell to
the ground in agonizing pain but managed not to scream. Somehow, I
was alive, and I planned on keeping it that way.

I don’t know how long I lay there,
praying to God that the enemy wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t dead and
that I wouldn’t bleed to death, but eventually the Dragon Rider must
have left. It felt like an eternity, but somehow I still wasn’t dead
when a small group of men came through, looking quietly for
survivors. As one of the men approached me, he stepped right over me,
not even bothering to check for a pulse, which gave me a pretty good
idea how bad I looked. I tried to speak or even groan, but I couldn’t
produce a single sound. Then another man approached me, and I started
to think that I may actually be dead, simply observing the world near
my place of death.

At the very moment I was certain this
man, too, would simply step over me, he crouched down and checked my
temple for a pulse. Later on, after learning just how near death I
was at that moment, I’m not sure how he felt my pulse at all, but he
did. “This one’s alive. Don’t worry, sir, we’ll get you to help!”
It was at that time that I realized the people searching for
survivors were not men. They were children. I had just been saved by
a boy who hadn’t even started middle school.

The boys placed me carefully on a
makeshift stretcher and piled some pillows on me and covered it all
with a cloth as a disguise to get away from the scene. Before
leaving, however, the children took an iron from one of the rooms and
burned away my fingertips. They then took me to the Peacekeeper
Station, where they told an incredible story about an uncle who had
saved their lives from a pedophile with a sword and whose hands had
been burned on the stovetop as he held his arms over them in
protection. In panic, of course, the pedophile had left, and the boys
had brought me here, bringing that painfully obvious lie to a close.

What happened next baffled me
ceaselessly for the next year: The Thorlinthian healer believed their
story, as the Peacekeepers had just brought in a suspected pedophile
who had been carrying none other than a sword. In the most ridiculous
stroke of luck, my life was saved. Actually, as I discovered a year
later, the Peacekeeper who had brought in the pedophile had told his
son about it only minutes before the boys had gone in to look for
survivors. Still, it had been impressive.

I was treated, and my spine was
repaired for the most part. I would never again be able to move my
right pinky, but that was hardly a price to pay, in my opinion. As I
was being discharged from the station, the Peacekeeper Captain came
into my room and asked for privacy. There, he told me about the
resistance and how to find a man named Larry Denton, who was leading
the organization at the time. I asked if there had been any survivors
from the assault. He informed me that only hours ago, the last of the
three thousand men and women who had worked and lived at that
facility, including the President, who’d been hiding there, had been
declared dead. This included me, which meant I was a dead man on
record.

I spent the next two years working my
way to the top of the resistance, building our ranks the entire time
while watching my world fall apart. When Larry Denton disappeared on
the second anniversary of Phoenix Day, I was placed in charge of the
resistance, and I’ve been moving from town to town ever since,
staying as close to the enemy as possible to avoid being noticed.
Recently, we’d heard word of a research vessel called the Leviathan.
It’s purpose is to attempt to duplicate Thorlinthian weapons
technologies without being noticed. It’s to be launched tomorrow, and
I’m placing some of my most trusted men on its crew as guards and
scientists.

Unfortunately, we aren’t the only ones
to be supplying crew members. Most of the guards are heartless
mercenaries out of work. The Leviathan’s front cover is that it’s a
cargo vessel which will be lost at sea in a few months. We’re putting
a lot of hope into it, and we’re looking forward to some results.
Clayton’s going to be sending me all results as soon as they’re
finalized, just in case they’re discovered, but we’re putting all our
prayers into the hope that what we get back from the Leviathan will
be enough to make a difference in our little war.

That ship is our best hope of actually
pushing away the Thorlinthians. We can’t afford to lose it.