Haline

Prologue

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23 YEARS BEFORE HALINE

        “We estimate about four dozen of them, sir!” Major Trey Benlin had to yell for his voice to be heard above the thumping rain. The smatter of gunfire up the ridge didn’t help, nor did the thunder that rolled every five minutes. The storm was furious about something.

        “Okay, Jemmer! Your team is to take out the militia. Don’t pursue. Just get as many as you can, then have your drone squad push the rest past the perimeter-defense line and let our team out there do the rest. Split into two groups, one on the—”

        Lightning flashed and Colonel Rylan Hawk paused for the expected rumble , his gray and black and wet beard glistening in the dim light. He continued loudly: “— on the rim of the dam, the other up this path here.”

        With his index finger, Rylan followed an incline on the holographic terrain map. Even under the tent nothing was dry, and the map phased and distorted as sideways-moving droplets from outside blew in. He looked up at Major Gaven Jemmer, who stood suited in standard-issue military rain gear, hood pushed back, water running from his drenched hair down his wet face. “Understood?”

        “Yes, sir!” Gaven nodded sharply.

        “Benlin, even without these bastards trying to blow the dam, we have orders to reinforce the thing. There’s an engineering team waiting at the bottom of the hill, here.” He pointed again to the map. “We also have to make sure the desalination and decontamination equipment hasn’t been sabotaged at the off chance their true objective was reservoir poisoning. Your team is to escort the engineers and do whatever it is they need you to do.”

        “Yes, sir. Understood.” A streak of dripping mud ran along the left side of Trey’s face. He didn’t seem to notice.

        Rylan took his fist off the table where he had been leaning over the map and stood up straight to face his top two Majors. He’d hand-selected them from dozens for the assignment knowing he could count on them, unlike the many others who were either too preoccupied with suffering borne by families back home, or worse— potentially traitorous.

        “Gentlemen, these marauders think that with a few charges and some luck they can flood Center City and then come down and take what they want. Well, we’re not going to let that happen.”

        He cracked the hint of a smile. “All right. Go get ’em!”

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       “Soel,” Alyel whispered. In the background she heard the evening report broadcasting in the living room as the door to their apartment slid shut behind her. Leaning back, she closed her eyes, relaxed her shoulders, and indulged in a deep inhale.

        It was not the long days of treating poisonous spider bites, acute malaria, advanced typhoid, sun burns, or frail bodies of the famished that she found most stressful.

        “Violence that nature inflicts upon us after a millennium of us inflicting violence upon nature,” she had once said to a nurse as she surveyed an overflowing waiting room filled with heavy faces at Central Hospital.

        Rather, her stress was rooted in the twelve-minute walk between the emergency room at Central and the apartment she shared with her husband , Soel, four blocks away. Though the streets were regularly patrolled by city police, sometimes they themselves were the danger. Other times, especially as fall turned into winter, it seemed every alley she passed sheltered the hopeless and desperate— and hungry. If you were lucky they just wanted your keycard. Slightly less lucky, they would slit your wrists looking for hidden cardsafes. But in the cold, hunger trumped all other desires. If you were not lucky, your body was what they wanted.