48
Lake of the Woods, Canada
May 30th 2033 – Memorial Day
Seven Months after the UP Battle
Larry Redhawk leaned forward from his passenger seat in the Chariot, trying to spot any landmark that would tell him where he was. The experimental cloaked aircraft moved through a bank of dense clouds as silent as a specter. After cruising over Lake Superior and the Canadian Boundary Waters, he assumed they were in Canada, but that was just a guess.
Twenty minutes later the cloud cover disappeared and he looked down upon a landscape he didn’t recognize. A vast lake spread out below with a long archipelago stretching to the west. Dark green forests covered the land and the water sparkled the bright blue of newly thawed ice.
The autonomous aircraft’s autopilot was as quiet as the ship itself and
