“That’s good, sir. We’ve driven them back for now, but I’m down to just the one healthy mentalist for the next week or so. Any chance of another one or two being sent this way?” Silence as he listened to the answer. “Right. And the Kiwis don’t have any?” Silence as he listened. “Well, that can’t be helped. The news about the Indos is good, though, sir.” Another short pause as the person on the other end of the line responded to that comment. “Very good, sir. We’ll try and hold.”

He got off the phone and nodded at Andrew. “You’re my main man until Greaves is out of her hospital bed. Think you can handle it?”

“I have so far, sir. They appear to have many more mentalists than we do, sir, but many of them aren’t that strong, comparatively speaking. At least not the ones I’ve run into.”

“Read your report from training school. You are the strongest of the mentalist trainees in that batch. The others have all been deployed on either the northern front or the northeastern one. This is understandable as they have been sharing one not very strong mentalist between them. The Kiwi convoy is about to leave Wellington, so they should be here in a week or two, although it hasn’t been decided where they’ll unload. Unfortunately, while they have people with the talent, none have had any training, as such talents were frowned upon in Kiwi-land.” He gave his head a little shake. “Much like they were here up until a decade ago.”

He paused for a moment, perhaps reviewing the past, but then he continued. “The good news is the Indos are sending an expeditionary force that will have half a dozen strong mentalists. Although how strong theirs are compared to the Jap ones is anybody’s guess. They might think they’re strong and then find they’re woefully underdone, like our first group.” Then he grinned. “Finally, the tide is turning. Ammunition production is up, and we’re about to introduce the Japs to thirtieth-century warfare with our new drones.”

“Is that what was filling up the helipad area at the hospital?” Andrew asked, forgetting for a moment that he was a private in the office of a Lieutenant Colonel.

“Spotted them, did you? Yes. Both we and the Japs have been using quite a few drones but mostly for surveillance and artillery spotting. All the traditional drone roles. Our strategists have found it interesting that the Japs don’t seem to regard them as weapons in their own right. We haven’t been subject to mass attacks by kamikaze drones so far. There have been some used on apparently choice targets, but generally, they haven’t attacked infrastructure or the population. When you think about it, what with them being Jeps and all, it is kind of odd.” He shook his head in puzzlement.

“Of course, our air defenses are quite good and have had a fair bit of practical experience in recent years, which they discovered very rapidly as we shot down several hundred drones in the first few days. Not that we don’t have the same problems. Their cyborg lasers are more than capable of taking down drones at a low altitude, and the chips in the cyborg’s heads mean they have no trouble competing the angles and how much to lead the target on the fly in the field without the computer set up that we have on our defense systems.”

The next thing he knew, he was being shaken awake by a strange lieutenant. It took him a moment to realize that a superior officer was waking him, but then his mind stepped into gear, and he rolled off the couch, stood up in a somewhat wobbly manner, and managed to salute, after a fashion.

“You’re Harris, right?” The Lieutenant said rather than asking him.

“Sir.”

“Come with me.” The Lieutenant clearly didn’t want to waste any time, but as the officer turned to head out of the room, Andrew queried the immediacy.

“Be all right if I take a leak first, sir. I need to go pretty bad.”

“Oh, right. Of course.”

That task was quickly accomplished, and he followed the Lieutenant out of the building where there was a car waiting. It was clearly a civilian car that had been requisitioned for military use and given a quick dab of olive paint here and there over its black base color. As they came down the stairs, he could see some kind of white design painted on the roof, but because of the low angle, he couldn’t make out what it was. They turned left and drove back up Grant Street until they reached the hospital, where they pulled up at the front entrance, having gone past the helipad that was covered in men doing something. He wasn’t exactly sure what.

He was taken inside the hospital and soon discovered that some of the outer buildings had been taken over for military use. He was shown around the corner to one where he found Captain Greaves reclining in a bed with her right leg all bandaged up. He came into the room to the end of the bed and came to attention.

“How are you, Captain? What happened to your leg?”

“Harris. I hear I have you to thank for the hospital not getting overrun by the Japs yesterday.”

“I wasn’t on my own, Captain.”

The Captain nodded. “No. But without you, we wouldn’t have held once I was injured. You did a damn fine job. The officer in charge of the defense is putting you in for a metal.”

“Um, I don’t feel I am due a medal, sir.”

The Captain nodded. “Those that earn them usually feel that way. Anyway, you’re going to be tasked with the defense of this whole section of the front. At least as far as countering enemy mentalists are concerned. Do you think you can handle it?”

“All I can do is try, sir.”

She smiled from her bed. “Good man.”

“Any idea of when you’ll be getting out, sir?”

“Probably another week yet, maybe longer. The doctors aren’t sure.”

“Well, I hope you get better soon, sir.”

The Captain nodded with a smile. “I will try, I will try. Anyhow you do your best; that’s all anyone can ask.”

“Sir.”

He left the room to find the Lieutenant still waiting for him. They returned to the car and proceeded up Grant Street to the roundabout, where they turned right, took the first right, and then pulled up in front of the RACV center, which had been taken over to be used as the Battalion headquarters. He was taken to an office just inside the front doors, where he sat and waited for nearly an hour before being ushered into the presence of Lieutenant Colonel Grey. The weathered, tough-looking officer was on the phone with someone when he was shown in, and he was waved to sit in the chair at the front of the desk so the battalion commander didn’t have to interrupt his listening to whatever the other person was saying. Whoever was speaking on the other end of the phone finally stopped, and the Lieutenant Colonel spoke for the first time.

The things must not have been armed with machine guns, or at least if they were, they weren’t firing at him, but one of them had a mentalist on board because the next thing he knew, a fireball slammed into his shields. He did the arcing fireball trick to the right-hand machine, and it went up spectacularly, the explosion damaging the vehicle next door, which twisted sideways and then ran diagonally into the next house along the street from its position. A figure jumped down from began advancing up the road towards him, and a series of fireballs came glancing towards Andrew from the Japanese mentalist. They weren’t overly strong fireballs, as far as Andrew could tell, and then he prepared his own response with fireball, slice, sleep, and stun. He followed the stun with another fireball and slice combination.

Whatever he did, the mentalist was suddenly in several bloody pieces as the slice spell got through. He looked to the south but couldn’t see any more the gun carriages he knew with there, so he ran back across the main road to the service station as he was fairly certain they wouldn’t target that as all scuttlebut said that the Japs were short of fuel. He spotted one of the machines sticking its front around the football club building, but from where he was, he couldn’t lob a fireball into the top compartment. Then he saw a second one moving around the other corner of the football club and heading across the football ground. Sacrilege! He thought to himself as the tracked vehicle dug up the hallowed turf.

He raced back across the road to the cricket club practice wickets, where he could clamber up the wire fence and balance on one of the horizontal cross pieces while eyeballing the gun carriage. From his precarious perch, he could see enough of the open top lob a fireball into the opening, which turned it into a giant fireworks display. There must’ve been troops somewhere nearby because lasers suddenly flashed out in his direction, and more solid rounds bounced off the wire netting around him. He dropped back down and scooted away, angling back towards the main road to see if you get a bead on the remaining gun carriage he could hear moving. Looking down the main road, he couldn’t see anything, but he could hear it moving, and then he saw it to the left of the sport football club building retreating down the road taking the troops with it.

With the Japs apparently retreating, a couple of hundred Ostrayan troops poured across the bridge and began deploying on Andrew’s side of the river, leapfrogging down Grant Street. Other squads advanced down peel men’s Lane and Taverner Street as the Japs began a general withdrawal from the area. By this stage, Andrew was exhausted and found his way back to the pub on the corner on this side of the bridge. The place was closed, but he banged on the door loudly until finally, a portly gentleman opened the door, and he explained that he had been fighting the Japs all day and he needed a drink and somewhere to sleep. The portly gentleman looked past him and saw no one else trying to get in, so he beckoned Andrew into the building and shut the door behind him. Five minutes later, he was stretched out on a comfy lounge in the man’s office with a beer half-drunk beside him, and he decided he’d just close his eyes for a minute.

“Shit!” Andrew said in surprise.

A couple of soldiers bailed out of the building next door and raced across the road to the restaurant there, although they didn’t go inside. Instead, they went around the back to put the building between them and the enemy. Andrew couldn’t see anything from where he was, so he diagonally ran across the road to join them. Leaning out looking down ground Street he could see one of the gun carriages just turn at the roundabout where Station in Griffith met. That lined itself up on the college building to the right of where Andrew wasn’t fired, the explosion knocking down a fair chunk of one of the buildings.

Andrew still couldn’t see enough and decided he needed to get higher. He could try and get upstairs in the building he was hiding behind, but then, if the building became a target, that wouldn’t be such a good idea. He spotted the big tree in the verge area between the car park on the main road. He made a snap decision, kicked in the rear door, and started through the restaurant. Then he spotted a fridge with drinks in the main dining area and grabbed a cola. The sugary drink was just what he needed! Then he saw some sports drinks in the last section and grabbed two of them. One he chugged even as he moved to the front of the restaurant while he shoved the other into his backpack for later.

He spotted the tree just out front and then had trouble opening the front door before nearly ripping it off its hinges. He raced out to the tree, trying to keep low, and took up a position behind the trunk while he studied the trunk. There were a couple of convenient branches that allowed him to haul himself a fair way up, and then the was a junction area where several branches spread out that he managed to climb up to and where it was possible to stand.

From here, he could just make out the closest of the silvery, reflective gun carriages much more clearly, and he could also see that it was apparently open-topped. How convenient! He smiled as a thought occurred to him. He prepared a strong fireball as he could manage and then looped the spell into the open top of the gun carriage. A flash of flame shot up from inside the vehicle, and then it exploded as the ammunition cooked off. He could see a second vehicle still driving up Station Street, but it was just too far away for him to reach with a fireball.

The house on the corner that had blown up was now just a smoldering ruin, so he hopped out of his tree and raced over the main road, where he took up a position behind a tree with a lot of branches. He was able to work his way up into it to some extent, although not as far as he had on the previous tree. Because the house had been largely demolished, he could see down Taverner Street, where two of the gun carriages were moving forward in tandem. The tree had too many branches for him to throw the spell properly, so he hopped down and ran across the road to an electrical box or something. The gun carriages must’ve seen him as one of them fired in his direction. He heard the shell whistle past his head before it smashed into the house behind him, where it exploded, wrecking the house pretty much totally.

800 years ago, a large science vessel accidentally created a wormhole into a different universe. The survivors traveled to the Earth in this strange universe and discovered it was still hot, humid, and ruled by dinosaurs, as the asteroid that impacted their universe had apparently missed in this one. Unable to find any way home, they developed a planet in the system they had arrived in, where they built a new civilization derived from their old one and called it the New Federation. Over the centuries, they had caught intimations of other civilizations but chose to keep hiding until they were strong enough to stand alone. And then the Troodons came…. and the Troodons weren’t friendly.

Follow the New Federation as they struggle to survive in a galaxy full of aggressive aliens.