I love writing science fiction. I discovered it when I was a sixth grader, fell in love with it in seventh grade and have been reading and writing it for the past forty-five years. I love working with young adult; their viewpoints, opinions and language keep me from growing old. Working in a high school keeps me sort of up-to-date with what’s going on in their world. I’ve combined two of the things I love into one story…
What if two vast, alien cultures needed Earth to raise their young – gravity, atmosphere, raw materials are all correct? ON EARTH, they two cultures agreed to be civil and keep their war far away. Then what if something happened and their cold war escalated into a shooting war. And what if, as the war grew, young love grew in its shadow – how would the war affect love? More importantly, how might LOVE affect WAR?
When me and Kashayla kissed for the first time, there was fireworks.
That’s cause it was the same night that The War To End All Wars broke out between the alien Kiiote and the even more alien Yown’Hoo.
Kashayla pulled away first, her eyes open. Nothing kills the mood than the girl staring into your eyes from four centimeters away. She said, “Nobody said nothing on the net about a firefight.”
“You don’t read the right netnews,” I said. She was sort of irritating that way. She saw the world in only ten sources she checked every fifteen minutes. But what can you find out about the real world from only ten points of view? I kept twenty-nine active links, so I said, “LunarEye saw all kinds of ship movement. Started yesterday.”
Kashayla pushed away from me and dropped with a thump on the park bench. We were in Spoony Park, not far from DownTown Minneapolis. The City had turned the lights out for the night, so we had a clear view of the eastern sky. Since the Yown’Hoo shot down the last of the Aerospace Force jets and gravity-fighters, the sky’s belonged to them and the Kiiote. They don’t care if we fly little prop planes. Just big ones or fast ones.
Or ones with thermonuclear warheads. Even I thought that was a stupid thing to try. The Old US Government thought they could sneak a couple of the missiles up to a couple thousand feet inside passenger jets, then launch ‘em at the Kiiote orbital dens and the Yown’Hoo plateships.
Stupid adults. I knew she was gonna be all sulky now cause I was being snarky, so I said, “Hey, you know what I meant!” I slid closer to her, but she moved away. I knew better than to try anything more. We’d been friends since we were born, raised in the same Takes-a-village, on the same block. We even shared the same online query marker guru. Mom still called them ‘teachers’, but Ms. Dahlstrom doesn’t teach much. She just sets out our goals and lets us do the learning.
“What did you mean?” Kashayla asked.
“I mean,” I stopped. More than likely we were heading for our old argument. We’d been having it since we were ten so I was pretty sure we weren’t going to resolve the issue right here. On the night the Alien Cold War all of a sudden became a Hot War. I said, “One thing we can agree on?”
Overhead, there was a flash of light. Fortunately it looked like it was still in space. She looked at me and said, “What’s that?”
I lifted my chin to the fading sparkles of the exploded alien starship and said, “I’m scared. How about you?”
We locked gazes, then she sighed and slid closer to me. Another, smaller explosion in space flashed just above what was left of the Cappella Building. The top of it had been melted by the Kiiote when they found a terrorist cell sniping at their surveillance satellites with a ‘stolen’ Yown’Hoo gravity lance. Leaning her head on my shoulder, she said, “And here I thought we had all the time in the world.”
