One World

Part 2

They barely escaped.

Gabriel Cassel discarded his weapons and sank to the dusty floor of their underground lair, silently counting the losses.

Two of his men were dead, one wounded. The rest managed to escape.

"Fucking bastards," Garret, the oldest of the rebels, swore as he tried to clean a nasty-looking wound on his forearm.

Garret was a former mercenary, a tough and determined man who would stop at nothing. One of Cassel's top soldiers.

Above their heads stretched the remains of a ruined city, relentlessly searched by an army of aliens hot on their trail. Fortunately, this cramped and filthy hideaway, which had originally served as one of the underground railroad's engineering rooms, was buried deep enough to evade enemy sensors.

Ardanian technology was far more advanced than the humans'. The aliens had already disabled all satellites and transmitters before the first attack. What they didn't destroy from orbit was finished off by a powerful electromagnetic wave that followed, rendering all terrestrial communication useless.

Anything more complex than a toaster stopped working in an instant; cell phones, computers, watches, all digital devices.

With no computers, no navigation, no radar, the Ardanians' sleek fighters and aircrafts simply finished them off.

Gabriel Cassel was one of the pilots. He served in the Air Force early in the war before being shot down.

After weeks of fierce fighting and bloody casualties, it was clear that the human forces didn't stand a chance against the aliens.

Resisting was futile.

What followed was a total blackout, complete chaos, and in a few months, the end.

And capitulation.

Only islands of unorganized resistance remained, the last of those who refused to surrender and submit to the new world order.

Groups of renegades now gathered under the leadership of Gabriel Cassel.

The rebel leader glanced at his companion, who was bandaging his wound with the skill of one who had done this sort of thing many times before.

Garret was by far the oldest and most experienced of their men, his graying hair and deep wrinkles betraying his advanced age. Most of the others were much younger. Some were still children. Determined, brave, ready to give their lives. Still children. Children who had lost everything.

The youngest, Mark, was thirteen, a skinny boy with tremendous determination and courage. The boy's parents were killed in the first wave of attacks. Fortunately, he and his brother escaped the same fate. And now they were out for revenge.

Gabriel had no idea what had happened to his own family. If his parents and younger sisters had managed to evacuate, or if their bodies were buried somewhere under the rubble. He couldn't find any news of them, but he kept hoping.

But whether they were alive or not, for their sake he went on. For them, for freedom, and to show the foreign conquerors that the humans would not give up easily.

He pulled out one of today's most valuable trophies. An Ardanian communication device. A wristwatch-like object with a transparent display resembling fragile glass. But only in appearance, the material was actually unbreakable.

The alien technology, unlike the humans' was fully functional on the planet.

It had taken the rebels many days to crack the encryption, but with the help of Eric, a former programmer and occasional hacker, they had done so and were now able to use the Ardanian devices and their weapons. If they managed to acquire them.