Chapter 1
One month earlier…
High over the Mojave Desert, a fighter jet sliced through the air leaving two trails of white vapor in its wake.
Its pilot was a young woman named Aria Thomas-Jones, a slim figure strapped securely into the cockpit of the powerful bird.
She had taken off from Edwards air force base almost seven hours ago on a solo patrol around the aberration that had forever changed the course of human history.
California blue sky gave way to a dark swirling mass that spread across miles of once pristine sky.
It was centered above a building erected in the middle of nowhere, a scientific military installation now entirely abandoned.
There were still tracks on the desert floor marking where people had fled, their tires digging in here and there.
One or two vehicles were abandoned, broken down from the storm that had been raging for several weeks.
To Aria, it looked like what a tornado might look like if you extracted its soul.
Green and gray and full of perpetual rain that burned everything beneath it.
This was the fruit of a scientific advance gone awry.
Humanity had been predicting disaster at the hands of advancement from the moment steam engines managed to transport a person faster than a horse could ride.
It had been a long time coming, but finally those people had been proven correct in the most terrifying way possible.
The sky had fallen, and it had brought with it a hell so real that churches across the world were packed to the brim day and night.
The storm had not brought demons, however, and it was not a storm. It was, simply put, a hole.
“And they thought the hole in the ozone layer was bad,” Aria muttered to herself as she steered her plane in a patrol around the very outer perimeter of the thing.
There were eyes on the anomaly at every hour of the day and night.
It was all the military could do to monitor the situation as it developed—the ‘situation’ being a chasm in the very fabric of reality through which creatures that could only be described as dragons were being birthed into the world.
They came angry, and they came destructive, wreaking havoc on everything in their path.
It was fortunate that many had evacuated when the experimental fusion plant that had created this monstrosity first showed signs of malfunctioning.
Previous disasters had given people a healthy respect for energy gone awry and the panicked evacuation had no doubt saved many lives.
So far casualties were relatively few and mostly secondary to the damage caused by the dragons, rather than the dragons themselves, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t increase in time, and it didn’t make the dragons any less dangerous.
Aria adjusted her heading slightly, taking her off the patrol trajectory and toward the portal proper.
High winds buffeted her plane, sending it through a torrent of turbulence.
At first it had been stomach churning, but she was starting to get used to it now, fighting the elements that were so disrupted and twisted near the center of the thing.
She wasn’t supposed to get this close, but curiosity always drew her past the official perimeter.
Ordinarily that would have gotten her ass kicked, but in the middle of a battle unlike anyone had imagined possible, there wasn’t time to kick her ass.
She saw the flash of a dark wing in the clouds, the rise of the curved line of some unnatural body giving her a reaction much like a swimmer seeing a fin slicing though water.
Here be dragons. Hundreds of them. The sound of the Earth’s atmosphere raging at the wound dealt to its very core served to block out their roars and the sound of her engine as she rocketed through the billowing clouds.
It was dangerous to be this close. She was relying on the cloud itself to keep her obscured from the monsters roiling in it.
If they were to catch sight of her and pursue her, her craft would do nothing to protect her.
What drew her on in spite of the danger, what had called her from the beginning was the calm she knew must be at the center of the chaos—the point at which two worlds met.
Some said that if you flew right to the eye of the aperture, you could see the other realm and even pass through it.
Aria wanted that so badly she could almost taste it. She rode the highs and the lows, her stomach rising and falling, clinging to consciousness as she pulled high gravitational forces in the quest for the very center of the portal through which Earth had been invaded.
“Trouble! Return to base!”
Her radio crackled to life.
Aria swore as her plane began giving her orders in her commander’s voice. “You are beyond the perimeter. Return to base immediately!”
He sounded pissed. Even so, Aria thought about disobeying the order.
The turbulence was enough to make her sick, or would have been if she’d had anything in her stomach, but she was on the cusp of seeing something very few people would ever see.
A single pilot had flown through the portal.
He had not returned. Nobody knew what had befallen him on the other side, but Aria wanted to find out.
She was getting closer to the core of the thing and the dark pea soup cloud was beginning to clear.
The shadow of a creature many times more powerful than herself cast over her cockpit as one of the dragons passed above her head.
It took several seconds to clear her cockpit, reminding her just how much she was up against.
“This is insane,” she muttered to herself, peeling off to drop back and below the cloud.
She reset her heading to the base, feeling a tinge of regret and a little bit of self-recrimination at her cowardice.
She’d sneaked into the cloud many times before, but she never seemed to get the courage to go to the very center of it.
The fear always became too great before she could push her plane past that final barrier.
In some respects, what she saw once she was outside the dragon-infested cloud was worse than the shadowy creatures inside it.
For miles around, the land bore the marks of their invasion.
Vehicles were broken down along the roads, tires melted into the road from the breath of dragons.
Small towns were razed entirely, foundations and basements all that remained of the simple little settlements.
There were great tracts of scorch marks where nothing had ever been, but the dragons had decided to unleash their fire there anyway, leaving nothing standing.
And then there were the forests, which had also caught fire in places and were burning out of control.
Emergency services were hard pressed to get enough fire retardant in the air, and though the air force was focused on that too, it was an additional danger nobody needed to be dealing with.
From the air, Aria could see plumes of smoke extending up and down the coast.
Fortunately for her, the base itself was defended heavily by anti-aircraft armaments that were as effective against dragons as they were against planes.
But the world could not be covered in heavy artillery and there was so much of it left completely unprotected.
Much of California was already lost, but the battle continued nonetheless.
Armaments and planes from all over the continent were being sacrificed at the dragon front, holding back the invasion to a certain extent.
Aria set herself into a holding pattern above the base and radioed down.
“This is Trouble, requesting permission to land.”
Aria’s radio crackled with the controller’s response.
“You’re clear for landing, Trouble. Bring her down.”
Less than a minute later, the Tornado jet came screaming down onto the runway, thrust reversers screeching with the effort it took to stop her from jetting off the end and into the side of one of the hangars.
Aria flew an older plane, but her Tornado was doing hard duty and holding up her end along with the newer, shinier models the top guns flew.
There weren’t many of those planes left.
The dragons were incredibly efficient at taking down aircraft when they wanted to.
Aria was still in one piece only because she had never had a direct confrontation with them.
Her encounters in the portal cloud were never aggressive because the cloud prevented her from getting a lock on any dragon in it, and possibly because it shielded her from their aggression in the same way.
The base was a ghost town compared to what it had been before the war.
Attrition rates were so high that most fighters were now stationed a whole lot further to the east. Truth be told, California had all but been written off by command.
Aria and a few other stoic souls had remained to hold the front, a front that was already lost.
It was a relief to pull the oxygen straps from her face and open the cockpit—at least until she caught the scent of smoke that permeated the air almost constantly now.
It was hot inside her flight suit, and she was slicked with sweat, exhausted from an eight-hour solo run over California.
It had been such a depressing, angering experience, seeing the cities smoldering at the edges like overbaked potato chips, the countryside crisscrossed with those dark flaming tracts of land.
She pulled her helmet from her head and swore, “Fuck.”
“That rough, huh?” Her commanding officer met her on the tarmac. Chief Master Sergeant Rory Wetherstone. Silver-haired and wearing the marks of his service on his face, the only guy who’d been willing to have her in his unit, and the closest thing Aria had left to a father figure.
“If this is my debriefing,” she said, wiping her face on the sleeve of her uniform. “Then I can officially report: Fuck. That.”