U.N.E.

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

Angela sighed and pushed back into the unforgiving pilot seat of the X-04 Rogue. A small bead of sweat rolled down her chin and dripped off the tip, landing on her neck just above the line of her flight suit. The last couple of days had been hard and seemed to fly by so quickly that Angela could hardly believe they were sitting on the edge of some Japanese coast waiting for the UNE Hive to arrive. Everything had happened so quickly that she was still trying to piece everything together, and without much luck. It was almost like nothing felt real.

After meeting with Alex for a private briefing, Angela and her friends had been taken to a large Russian hangar where they had found their Rogues waiting for them. They spent three hours working on them and making sure every single part of it was in working order and tuned just they way they wanted them; but sadly their long day didn't end there. They then piloted their Rogues from Moscow all the way to Japan, where they met up with the Japanese, Russian, and Chinese defence forces.

The flight over had been long, but once more Angela and the others found themselves unable to find a minute to rest and catch their breath. However, what happened over the course of the next two days had been even more exhausting, and just remembering it made Angela feel tired. While the Russians and Chinese prepared their own defensive lines, it was up to the X-04 Squadron, using the call sign Lightning, to help the Japanese forces prepare their own lines. That had been more trouble than it was worth and it was amazing that they had even gotten it done.

It was bad enough trying to show a group of inexperienced soldiers and pilots where they needed to be and what they needed to watch out for, but it was an entirely different beast when there was a language barrier. Even Michelle, who was their communications expert and knew a couple of different languages was having trouble explaining it all to them. If it hadn't had been for Alex, who somehow managed to speak some Japanese, Angela feared that they would still be out there trying to explain everything through mime gestures.

By the time they finally got everything settled and everyone was in their designated area's, the pilots barely had eight hours in which to sleep, eat, get further briefings, get their own machines checked out once more, and clean up. Most of that was done at the same time, like Angela eating a quick and hot meal as she was being briefed by Alexander and checking out her computer systems to make sure no bugs occurred during battle. In fact most of them had slept in their cockpits even though rooms had been made available to them in the small Japanese town they were defending. It wasn't the best sleep Angela had ever gotten, but it was sleep and that was all that mattered.

After waking up and getting one more meal before there was no more time left, Angela now sat in the cockpit of her Rogue and waited for the sky to literally fall on top of them. The radio was quiet and there was no video up link active at the moment, so Angela simply sat there in silence as a hundred different lights flashed in front of and beside her. Being cooped up inside the cockpit was like being locked away from the real world, and Angela couldn't help but feel a little isolated. Which was weird considering her computer gave her up to the second information on what was going on not only in her little part of the world, but elsewhere as well. Still, she felt a little lonely.

She felt a long way from home now more than she ever had in her life, and it wasn't just the distance. Sure, she was technically half the world away from her small and sleepy little town, but this hadn't been the first time she had been so far away. No. She felt so far away because she had come a long way to get to this point in her life. All that training, all those hours spent learning how to pilot the Rogue, all those late nights trying to understand how each system worked had led her up to this moment. A moment where the fate of the world might just rest on the actions she made today. She could feel that pressure weighing down on her and she shuddered. Would she be able to do what was required of her, or would she fail and watch as the world burned around her?