“I don’t believe what this country has turned into,” Len growled as the pickup ground and shuddered to gain speed. “Roadblocks; people being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night. Things never used to be that way. Yet the media talk about it as if it’s normal. People forget. It’s alien ways. They’re turning us into a colony in our own country.”
“That’s what we’re fighting,” Marie reminded him unnecessarily. The hills back from the highway looked green and peaceful. Water behind the trees reflected patches of sky. Marie felt weary of it all: combat training and sabotage; constantly having to be ready to move; always being haunted by the specter of capture, interrogation, and everything that went with it. Why couldn’t she just live a safe and familiar day-to-day life somewhere, enjoying little things like friends stopping by to visit, or being alone with her thoughts on a hill after a walk up through a forest?
All that the people needed to take their country back was solidarity and awareness. Even with all their technology and alien backing, the powers that were robbing them of their livelihoods and turning them into property like some modern version of a feudal order could never prevail against a determined majority. But the majority were uninformed and unorganized. What did it take to wake them up to what was going on? Why did Marie care? She could go back to China, find a niche there, and probably never have to worry about being directly affected to any serious degree again. So why had she come back?
For the same reason she had left the comforts and security of her former life in California, she supposed. The restlessness that compelled her to contribute even a token to putting something right with the world. How anyone could remain complacent when there was so much going wrong with it, she was unable to comprehend. How could she once have dreamed of making a life with Roland? Because he was Roland. She still thought of him, even though all that had been a different universe, a million years ago. That was the stupid thing.
“Do you know there was a time when you could drive from anyplace to anyplace anytime you felt like it?” Len said. “Didn’t have sensors under the road reading who was leaving the state. Didn’t need no ID with a tax compliance sticker to get gas.”
“Anywhere? Like New York to California?”
“Yep, if the fancy took you. Just get up and go.”
“It sounds unreal.” Marie was distant, still partly lost in her own musings.
“People don’t remember,” Len said again. “Everything’s rules and restrictions. We’re being turned into an alien military base, that’s what it is.”
Marie used to wonder why, if their world was so disciplined and orderly, governed under a single ruling system, the Hyadeans possessed a military establishment at all. Their answer was that they needed to protect themselves against a rival power known as the Querl, who inhabited a group of worlds loosely strung across the same star systems. The Querl were of the same race as the Hyadeans, having split off as a rebellious faction and left to found a culture based on their own political and economic principles. According to the Chryseans—which was the correct name for the Hyadeans of the home planet and its subject worlds—these principles were unsound and illogical, resulting in chaotic rule by ill-defined authorities, with consequent depletion and degradation of the Querl planets. The Chryseans would educate Earth and provide guidance to prevent similar things from happening here. And the institutions that were ultimately in control of things—in the West, anyway—were lending themselves readily to bringing their own houses into line. A compliant media establishment spread the word and the imagery, and for years the people, by and large, had been buying the line and not seeing the regimentation, exploitation, and the slow erosion of what had once been their rights. But now they were feeling the effects, and that was changing. Recruitment for Sovereignty was on the increase, and support was quietly spreading across a wide but largely invisible infrastructure of American life that didn’t have access to the interplanetary financial markets and saw little prospect of benefiting significantly from the proceeds. As resistance grew, the classical escalating pattern would develop of what one side saw as protest and suppression being viewed by the powers in control as provocation and response. The times would get ugly before they could improve. CounterAction was preparing.