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sceeve invasion had killed ninety-eight percent of humanity. Coalbridge was part of the two percent remnant that had, by luck or chance, somehow survived. He was his family’s last representative among the living.
    Coalbridge had celebrated Christmas alone by cooking himself a complete holiday dinner.
    Ah, hell, thought Coalbridge, it’s the holidays for one more day. Why not get into the spirit? He found himself liking the weirdly vibrant car tops. Dallas was still alive. Okay, Paw Paw: like you did Praha, I’ll call her she . She was alive. And fighting her way out of sickness and despair. People lived here. This broken, blasted ruin of a metropolis was the home to two million souls, three million if you counted nearby Fort Worth. It was the most populous city on planet Earth.
    Coalbridge turned a corner.
    And there they are, he thought. Some of them, at least.
    Peepsies.
    As he’d seen on the news feed that morning, the antiwar protesters, the Peepsies, were out in force today. Even with reports of fresh drop-rod attacks on Sydney and Nairobi, the organizers had evidently decided the protest must go on. They probably didn’t believe the news anyway.
    He’d been warned to start early for his meeting downtown but hadn’t expected this: the entire Capitol complex was cordoned off by a line of beaten-up school buses stretching from Field to Elm to St. Paul to Commerce, squaring off at Field once more. Paper scraps were plastered on the buses—Coalbridge couldn’t make out what they were and assumed they might be slogans or announcements. They flapped in the breeze.
    Around the buses milled hundreds of Peepsies: students in the new retraining programs out on winter break, the professionally disgruntled, paid “volunteers” working for various antiwar NGO interests, and the hard-core contingent of the permanently deranged and hopelessly bereaved.
    The Capitol complex was surrounded.
    One hundred eighty million human beings left on the planet—barely enough to keep civilization from collapsing around itself, maybe not enough—an imminent attack by a rapacious enemy on its way, and this was how these people chose to spend their time? It was strange to think that they were some of the people he’d spent the last twelve years defending with his life. Yet . . .  
    He couldn’t hate them. He could only feel pity for the Peepsies.
    All of these people had lost most or all of their friends and family. Earth’s population hadn’t merely been devastated; it had been treated to an extinction event.
    Asia had been the first target. The sceeve were after resources and technology. At least, that was the theory. Their choice of what to take and what they left behind was often bizarre. Entire mountains of limestone taken. The contents of a gypsum mine sucked out. As far as technology went, they sought out the most pedestrian means of production—the factories of China, those of the Asian Tigers. After pacification, their “harvesters” would arrive and begin gleaning the landscape, disassembling manufacturing plants, carting them off to space.
    There was no attempt to “collect” any human, scientist, innovator, or entrepreneur. The sceeve did not seem to care about the human brain trust, the universities and corporate campuses, the industrial-park concrete boxes and basement labs, where the ideas came from. These they merely destroyed. They seemed to regard ideas as some sort of epiphenomena, a by-product of technology instead of its generator. Every continental coast was devastated, but the tech that was “sceeved” was always a fabrication plant, a car lot, a copper pit. And retail stores. Every Best Buy store up and down both coasts was dismantled and taken away, every Home Depot, Duggers Lifescience, every Amazon and Walmart warehouse looted. Humans themselves were inconveniences—but not too lowly to destroy at every opportunity. In the end, only the United States managed to put up effective resistance. Earth’s