Free Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon by Glynn James, Michael Stephen Fuchs Page A

per second wherever the pilot or gunner looked. This was in addition to the pods of anti-personnel rockets and the laser-guided Hellfire missiles – the shape-charged warheads of which pack a five-million-pound-per-square-inch punch. The aircraft also had an array of day and night cameras providing 127-times magnification, thermal viewing, and all-weather radar.
    Then again, like so many things in the ZA, riding the dragon wasn’t what it used to be. There were no more air-to-ground threats that needed to be scanned for or defended against – never mind enemy aircraft, which were a feature only of wars long past. And because Charlotte wasn’t being shot at, she didn’t have to make attack runs. She could simply pick a spot, hover in place, and unload from there – which, if less thrilling, was a hell of a lot easier and safer. And with that much less to attend to, not to mention a military-wide shortage of pilots, she was doing without a gunner in the front seat these days.
    It was just her, the legions of advancing dead, and her own morbid thoughts.
    And she really was alone here. Right now, on this section of the line, there were no friendlies on the ground – for her to support, to look out for and avoid blowing up, or even just to hear their comforting chatter and matey accents on the radio. She knew the Paras were out there somewhere, fighting hard on both her flanks. But they were too far, her altitude too low, for them to be visible.
    No, this was a pure anti-personnel mission, and she was the only personnel assigned to it. One living woman, and one fire-breathing dragon, against maybe ten thousand dead guys.
    It was this fact of her aloneness, along with the 127x zoom optics, that was unsettling her mind now. She continued to peer through the camera, via the monocular lens in front of her right eye, trying to get a sense of the effect on target of that last rocket volley. The good news was she had basically destroyed, single handedly, the entire front wave of rampaging dead.
    The bad news was that she could already see the next one advancing behind it. Another dark line was coming over the horizon – taking over the damned horizon, actually, making their own mass of rotting bodies into a new and twilit edge of the spinning Earth. England was being overrun in not-so-slow motion, the sceptered isle becoming a floodplain.
    And the other bad news was… Charlotte could see their faces. All of them. With the high-powered optics, nothing was opaque or obscure to her. She could dial up the detail to an arbitrary level. She could see nose pores from a mile out. And, still very much against her will and better judgment, she once again found herself scanning faces, both hopeful and terrified of seeing a hairstyle, the familiar curve of a cheek or jawline, a scarf given and forgotten a hundred Christmases ago.
    Because, for all she knew, her own father could be down there right now. Maybe her mother, too. Or her brother or sister. This wasn’t really her family’s part of the country. But she had lost touch with everyone, after running away and joining the military, the day of her eighteenth birthday. She knew seeing them down there was vanishingly unlikely.
    Then again, vanishing was her family’s specialty.
    Her father had gone for good by the time she was ten, and had not made himself very present before that, disappearing for weeks and months at a time. Her mother had been around – but only physically, retreating into days-long alcoholic hazes, numbing the pain of her past bad choices and dwindling future prospects. Even when she was sober, her coldness and psychological distance made it seem as if her soul had long departed her body. And Charlotte’s brother and sister, both older than she, had taken off as soon as they were old enough to support themselves.
    Everyone had left her, one at a time.
    Until she was finally old enough to leave herself.
    Home had just been a place to escape from – and definitely