Leanna O’Regan stared defiantly into the eyes of General Thompson, standing over her. She broke her gaze for a moment to look over his shoulder, out the windows of the battleship bridge and across the ocean waves to he horizon. All she could see was water gleaming in the mid-day sun, beyond the hulking, dark grey hull of the massive battleship. Leanna locked her eyes again onto the balding, grey-haired man wearing a black uniform that barely concealed his protruding belly. 

“You wouldn’t dare attack Ojai! The people of that town have nothing to do with the California Independence Movement! They are a peaceful people-” Leanna protested loudly, almost desperately.

General Thompson stepped forward, his face inches from Leanna’s. Leanna grimaced under his breath, and stepped back only to back into the looming black figure of Dante Valderez, who was standing behind her. The loose bun of braided hair she had hurriedly tucked together fell apart against Dante’s chest, letting her long black hair unravel and spill down the sides of her face. Her eyes went wide, as she stood trapped between the General and Dante. She looked out the bridge’s windows again, her mouth slightly open as she breathed through it and her fists clenched at her side. 

Dante breathed loudly through his respirator, rasping at her, “Perhaps you can think of another target, Rosa?”

Leanna flinched at the harshness in Dante’s voice, and relaxed her hands, bringing them up to her chest and resting them over her heart. She looked down in defeat.

General Thompson stepped aside, revealing a green monitor showing the southern California coast with a set of crosshairs blinking over an area north of Los Angeles. “Look here, Ms. Jardine! We have targeted your hometown with a new kind of missile that is capable of precision strikes. No longer do we need to use weapons like cannons and ballistic missiles that are little more than medieval catapults! We can target individual buildings from hundreds of miles away with self-guiding missiles.” He removed a pen-like device connected to a cable from a holder in the panel next to the monitor, and offered it to Leanna. “Ms. Jardine… I grow tired of asking you this. If you can select another target – a CIM base – you can spare Ojai and go free.”

Leanna’s lip trembled, and tears started to form in the corners of her eyes. She took the stylus from General Thompson and stepped away from Dante towards the green monitor. She looked over the electronic map and tapped the screen with the point of the pen to a point near the blinking cross-hairs. The cross-hairs moved to line up where she tapped the screen, and Leanna looked up at the featureless horizon with tears rolling down her cheeks. “There’s a ranch outside of Ojai called ‘Paraiso en la Tierra’. That is a primary CIM base of operations,” Leanna mumbled dejectedly.

General Thompson removed the pen from her hand and looked at the green screen and the location of the blinking crosshairs. “Commence countdown!” he shouted, tapping the screen with the pen again, and moving the cross-hairs back to their original position. He flipped open a red plastic cover on the panel, revealing a push button.

“What? You said you would spare the town!” Leanna cried out. She raised her hands to strike at the General, but Dante reached over in one swift move and grabbed both her arms by the wrist, pulling them down behind her back. Leanna’s hair was now flying across her face, as she struggled in Dante’s grasp.

A voice somewhere on the bridge was counting down from 10, and all the activity in the room became focussed on the impending launch. The disembodied voice called out “0… Launch!” and General Thompson pressed the revealed button on the panel without hesitation. Below the bridge deck, white clouds of smoke billowed out, and a grey pointed, winged rocket shot up into the blue sky above them. It arced gracefully away from the battleship, leaving a trail behind it that displayed its purposeful path. It adjusted its trajectory periodically, flying low and straight above the rolling ocean, as if it were a manned fighter jet on a mission.

The smirking fat man turned to Dante and barked at him, “Send out a PAB broadcast in the area to find the ‘Paraiso en la Tierra’ ranch and to apprehend anyone there for questioning. Remove this CIM traitor from the bridge and return her to the holding cell.” Dante shoved the stunned young woman around and pushed her towards the stairs, still holding her arms behind her back, followed by the two guards in light grey armor. “Maybe now she will be more helpful in also explaining where she was bringing the suitcases of gold and so reveal other CIM gold reserves,” General Thompson snarled at Leanna, his eyes still following the rapidly disappearing rocket. 

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***