Ashes and Dreams

It had been months since the United Earth Government collapsed, its leadership killed, captured, or gone into exile. The nukes had stopped flying long before that. Someone, it seemed, had realized that too many nukes would have completely destroyed the Earth's habitability. Small mercy. That didn't stop the cruise missiles, firebombs, and occasional orbital strike. More than ten billion were believed to have died. Small mercy.

It was cold now, colder than it should have been in the middle of spring. By all records, only the caps of the Rocky Mountains should have had snow. Yet as Daniel Graham drove across the rocky desert, there were long streaks of white where snow had fallen from the night before. White and orange danced across his visor, but he paid it no mind. His attention was on the rising mountain in the distance. He jerked at the wheel slightly as the rugged motorcycle jumped an old drainage ditch and found itself on asphalt. A fallen sign he zoomed past faintly read "Welcome to Colorado Springs"

Daniel paused briefly on the side of the road and took a brief swig from his canteen before looking through his binoculars. This was how he spent his time these days. A good man at heart, he had spent all of his time and energy after the collapse with attempting to unify the broken remnants of the UEG. Not for power or glory, but for survival. He didn't know what life was like on the colonies, but if humanity was going to survive its own hubris, they needed Earth to survive.

The city itself was of little consequence to him. While it had avoided being a target of a nuclear strike, a fate that could not be shared by the likes of Los Angeles and New York City, it had nonetheless been subject to riots and fires. Most of the urban centers were likely burned out husks or utterly stripped of value. There were signs of life in the city, of course, but he had no desire to see how they'd react to an outsiter, and certainly not how they'd react to a UEG officer.

What interested him was the mountain that overlooked the city; Chetenne Mountain. There in its heart, if the radio transmissions were to be believed, the old Cheyenne Mountain Complex was still functioning. And there were people inside of it. While it hadn't been a major military complex during the height of the UEG, there had been efforts underway to modernize the complex and utilize it as a hub for coordinating inbound and outbound interstellar traffic. How far those efforts had gone, if at all, weren't known.

Giving the cycle a shot of fuel, Daniel shot down the old highway towards where the complex was supposed to be. The road was mostly intact, though there was evidence of damage from a lack of maintenance. Mostly likely it was from the colder-than-usual weather. Taking an old loop around the heart of the city, Daniel zigzagged his way though abandoned cars and the occasional collapsed section of building. Occasionally he'd see blurs that could have been confused people, but he didn't stop to look or talk.

The road that was supposed to lead up to the mountain complex was littered with broken cars. It was apparent that at some point there had been a run on the place, whether for safety or revenge he didn't know, and the military had fired back. Not an auspicious start, he admitted to himself, but he had come too far to turn back now. If there wasn't an active military presence in the complex, then he'd get what supplies and ammo he could before starting out again. There had to be some place he could go to to start rebuilding the UEG.