Cally O’Neal looked at the pack and shook her head; she wanted to load for bear but there was just too much to carry.

She had spent half the night curled up in a ball, alternately sleeping fitfully and waking up to cry. She wasn’t very good at crying — it really ticked her off when she did — but she had a lot to cry about.

When the word of the Posleen invasion had come, both of her parents were recalled to duty. Because her mother was considered “off-planet,” Cally’s older sister, Michelle, had been moved to safety on a distant Indowy world. Cally had been left behind in the care of her grandfather on the family farm in Rabun County in north Georgia. The farm just happened to be about five miles on the good side of the Eastern U.S. line of defense.

The Posleen had hit the Wall at Rabun Gap several times over the last few years, but this was the first time they had ever succeeded in breaching it. Now they were all over the place and she was alone in a friggin’ cave, behind the lines and without the comfort and advice, not to mention combat support, of Papa O’Neal.

It was not the Posleen who had killed Papa, though, or at least not directly. Something had hit one of the landers when it was passing over their valley and the antimatter containment system had failed. The explosion, equivalent to a one-hundred-kiloton nuke, had come as she was moving back to the deeper shelters. But Papa O’Neal had still been in the outer bunker.

She had found him later, or at least an arm, which was as far down as she could dig, but it was still and cold. She had covered it back up and headed to Cache Four where she had spent the night.