Angela was happy.
Oh, she'd had a large breakfast, but that wasn't the primary reason she was grinning to herself this morning.
No, she was happy because it was a beautiful day. She was strolling through the city park, enjoying the brisk feeling of early autumn.
She'd been in cryo until about thirty years ago, when she'd been awakened to discover that the political situation of Refuge had changed since she'd entered cryosleep.
What had been a single, unified colony had now split into multiple factions. The government of New Montreal had received disturbing reports that the other governments were building nuclear weapons.
So they had awakened her, as a trump card up their sleeve.
For who would want to piss off a Bolo commander?
Fortunately, war had not come to pass. The peace had endured, although recently tensions had begun to stir once more.
Personally, she thought that the war-mongers were stupid. The planet still had plenty of uncolonized territory, so why fight over what already had been?
As she ran her fingers through her short, curly black hair, Angela, who back on old Earth would've been called an African-American, wondered why the Concordiat's planners appeared to have missed the possibility of colonial fragmentation back when they were putting together the expedition.
Then again, they were just one last-ditch colonizing effort among many, as the Concordiat attempted to ensure humanity's survival.
Had the war between the Concordiat and the Melconian Empire finally guttered out? When she had been sent on this expedition, the Concordiat had been annihilating two Melconian worlds for every one of humanity's worlds that burned. But the Melconian Empire, from what they knew, had been twice as large as the Concordiat.
Was the war over? Did the Concordiat even exist now? Were any Melconians still alive? Was Earth now nothing more than a radioactive wasteland?
She did not know. No one on this planet knew.
All told, however, she believed that it would be incredibly stupid if what was possibly the last world of humanity destroyed itself in a civil war.
Angela sighed and sat down on a park bench. She internally winced as she felt her bones protest.
Humanity tended to live longer now than, say, back in the early twenty-first century, but old age, though delayed, still came to pass.
Discounting her time in cryosleep, she had been alive for ninety-three years. She still went for her runs every afternoon, and she still went to the local gym weekly. But she was slower than she once was, her reflexes not as fast, her muscles possessing less strength and endurance then they had at her physical prime.
She looked about, and sighed as she savored the peaceful scenery in the park.
And at that precise moment, hell broke loose.
"Citizens of New Montreal, Nuclear warheads incoming. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill."
Angela leapt to her feet. Even as part of her mind was paralyzed with shock, she pushed through it, her mind flashing over what she needed to do.
Protocol said not to enter if anyone was watching, but judging by the panicked mob of people in the park, no one was going to care. She dashed towards a large boulder, seemingly just one of many that were scattered around the park.
She slapped her palm onto the hidden scanner. As she waited for a fraction of a second, it analyzed her hand, even as hidden cameras and sensors determined that she was who she appeared to be.
The ground beneath her feet parted, and she plummeted down the access tube.
The hidden base was currently buzzing with activity. Readouts showed missile paths, both friendly and hostile. New Montreal's Hellbore turret was under attack, and the anti-air and anti-space turrets around it were blazing, as huge waves of missiles roared in.
But even as New Montreal's own missile launches spewed rapidly, missiles were heading for the city itself as well, and there wasn't a prayer of nailing them all.
Angela strode to the base's commander, a man of Chinese ancestery named Wang Tsu.
They looked at each other, knowing that they only had one chance left.
"Permission to awaken Thunder, sir?"
"Permission granted. May God help us all."
As Angela's fingers reached to key in the command sequence, a nuclear deep-penetrator missile slipped through the anti-missile defenses. It bored hundreds of meters underground and exploded.
There were no survivors.