Opening Voiceover:
I was born in 2029, in a small town on the Big Island of Hawaii. History would later record that year as the one when the last hope of peace between the Oceanic Treaty Organization and the Pan-Asian Alliance finally vanished. My father was one of the OTO's best pilots during the early days of the war that finally erupted six years later, one of those brilliant men who, if they were remembered at all, would only be known as the ones who first taught legends like Suki Singhe, or "Baron" Fokker.
The pretext for the conflict was the contest to control the rich mineral resources of central Africa, but there was no one on either side who believed that it was only that, and so it raged on for nine blood-soaked years, savaging wilderness, farmland, and shattering dozens of major cities.
I had only just reported in for mandatory flight training the week after my fifteenth birthday when the entire daytime sky went solid, brilliant white. For a few hours the two warring sides fell into a confused frenzy, butchering each other as never before, but then an astronomical observatory in Paraguay captured an image of the massive - and unmistakeably artificial - object that had been captured into a parabolic orbit out of the very center of the Flare.
Things moved very quickly after that, with accusations and denials flying fast and heavy between the PAA, the OTO, and the Neutral Nations Group as the alien object moved closer along its inevitable course towards the Earth. When the object began to maneuver under its own power, everything went still, as the people of the world leaned forwards and held their breath, waiting to see what happened.
The first exploratory team to arrive at the site of the alien vessel's planetfall found a massive, obviously warlike ship, several miles long and bristling with weapons. Despite its size and self-evident power, however, it had been damaged, severely, in the not-too-distant past.
As we learned more, several inevitable conclusions were reached - this derelict's enemies might well be our own. We could not afford to be unprepared if they were.
And, most of all, we would have no hope if we were not united.
By the time I was twenty, both the integration of the three major leagues into a true United Nations and the frantic, desperate effort to repair and refit that utterly alien technology into something that Earth could risk relying on for her defense were coming to fruition - helped, in their different ways, by the puzzling discovery that the 'alien' language was nothing more or less than an almost-unaltered version of the ancient language from which the entire Indo-European linguistic group had evolved...
For my part, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had no love for the military, not after the way they had thrown away my father's life and memory, and the popularity of air shows and other spectacles in the suddenly-flush atmosphere of the post-war period meant that, as someone who had been learning to fly almost from birth, I was never short of work.
Then the sky went white again...
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
I was born in 2029, in a small town on the Big Island of Hawaii. History would later record that year as the one when the last hope of peace between the Oceanic Treaty Organization and the Pan-Asian Alliance finally vanished. My father was one of the OTO's best pilots during the early days of the war that finally erupted six years later, one of those brilliant men who, if they were remembered at all, would only be known as the ones who first taught legends like Suki Singhe, or "Baron" Fokker.
The pretext for the conflict was the contest to control the rich mineral resources of central Africa, but there was no one on either side who believed that it was only that, and so it raged on for nine blood-soaked years, savaging wilderness, farmland, and shattering dozens of major cities.
I had only just reported in for mandatory flight training the week after my fifteenth birthday when the entire daytime sky went solid, brilliant white. For a few hours the two warring sides fell into a confused frenzy, butchering each other as never before, but then an astronomical observatory in Paraguay captured an image of the massive - and unmistakeably artificial - object that had been captured into a parabolic orbit out of the very center of the Flare.
Things moved very quickly after that, with accusations and denials flying fast and heavy between the PAA, the OTO, and the Neutral Nations Group as the alien object moved closer along its inevitable course towards the Earth. When the object began to maneuver under its own power, everything went still, as the people of the world leaned forwards and held their breath, waiting to see what happened.
The first exploratory team to arrive at the site of the alien vessel's planetfall found a massive, obviously warlike ship, several miles long and bristling with weapons. Despite its size and self-evident power, however, it had been damaged, severely, in the not-too-distant past.
As we learned more, several inevitable conclusions were reached - this derelict's enemies might well be our own. We could not afford to be unprepared if they were.
And, most of all, we would have no hope if we were not united.
By the time I was twenty, both the integration of the three major leagues into a true United Nations and the frantic, desperate effort to repair and refit that utterly alien technology into something that Earth could risk relying on for her defense were coming to fruition - helped, in their different ways, by the puzzling discovery that the 'alien' language was nothing more or less than an almost-unaltered version of the ancient language from which the entire Indo-European linguistic group had evolved...
For my part, I wanted nothing to do with it. I had no love for the military, not after the way they had thrown away my father's life and memory, and the popularity of air shows and other spectacles in the suddenly-flush atmosphere of the post-war period meant that, as someone who had been learning to fly almost from birth, I was never short of work.
Then the sky went white again...
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."