Free So It Begins by Mike McPhail (Ed)

guys’ attention, sure enough. No one’s mind ever wanders when the Colonel speaks in his powerful, Scottish accent, and whenever they run one of his old movies, a handful of guys always hit him up for autographs, ask him how it was shooting the love scenes.
      He only smirks and nods as if he knows.
      It’s a hell of psyche-out.
     
      No bombing for two days.
      Then our orders came through: surface clean-up for most of the men, but not for my platoon. We pulled special duty. We were to rendezvous with a Special Forces unit that had collected what our orders described as a “valuable artifact,” secure it from them, and bring it to Camp Scott, on the double-quick, of course.
      Leaving our rabbit hole, however, was a process.
      First, advance teams surfaced and reported back on up-earth conditions. Then everyone got booster shots against possible contagion from Frek remains, took anti-rad pills, and got equipped with live ammo and full-integrity body armor to replace what we’d damaged in training.
      Centcom had shipped us in and tucked us away only days ahead of the campaign to sterilize the Eastern seaboard. We’d been down-earth for two months, like cicadas waiting to hatch from the ground when the weather turned hot, and we were eager to go. Even the guys who’d been dreading the day they’d see action looked relieved to finally be doing something.
      Colonel Connery made the rounds while we suited up.
      Captain Willis and Captain Smith followed him.
      They helped with our gear. They steadied our nerves and tried to keep us from thinking too much about the blasted wasteland that waited on the surface.
      I snapped the last of my armor in place, checked my ammunition, and waited for my platoon to finish suiting up. I was their sergeant. I tried not to think about what that meant. I’d had weeks to ruminate on it. Now it was time to act.
      Colonel Connery reviewed our orders with me and said he was grateful to have a man like me in his division. I wondered how much of that came from what they’d programmed into his brain on the clone farm, or if he’d thought up any of it on his own. I guess it didn’t matter one way or the other. His pep talk was protocol. When he was done he slapped me on the back, said he’d keep a good cigar waiting for me, and then walked off into the crowd of soldiers.
      By then my platoon had gathered at the elevator.
      The ride to the surface was silent, the journey up-earth long. Anticipation poured off my men in waves. They were good soldiers: Abernathy, Barnes, Champ, Foster, Itgen, Marvin, Morris, Smith, and Testa.
      And me, Colin Rook.
      They were my soldiers; they were Rook’s Raiders.
      I hoped we’d all come back together.
      I knew we wouldn’t.
     
      Riding up-earth, I felt as if we’d always been fighting the Frek, as if the pre-invasion world had only ever existed in movies and dreams, and as if no time before my first day in bootcamp had been real. I couldn’t remember the day I decided to enlist, or even when the Frek invasion had begun.
      Like everyone else, though, I knew their first assault had come without warning.
      We hadn’t even known that the Frek, or any other alien life, existed until they attacked us.
      Even now, no one really understands why they invaded Earth.
      I lean toward the mistake theory: the Frek thought there were no intelligent species here, and by the time they figured out otherwise, it was too late to change course. If all Frek invasions are alike, then they’re pretty much impossible to stop once they’re underway. Frek females give birth to about 500 young at a time. Frek children pop out of the womb in little, curled-up bundles no bigger than soccer balls, but they grow to the size of lambs in about three days, and they’re more vicious than badgers. The first anyone knew we were under attack was when pregnant Frek mothers, already in labor, began dropping from the sky and popping out killing