World War IV: A Broken Union Read Online Free Page A

Governor. Do not spread your mind thin with worries beyond your control.”
    Dean leaned his head into her hand, and Kemena felt the weight of his thoughts. “If I did that, I wouldn’t be much of a governor, would I?” He flashed the smile that had always gotten him into as much trouble as out of it.
    Kemena kissed him then pushed him away with a hard shove that sent him stumbling backward. “You come back in one piece, Governor. You hear me?” Once again her hands fell to her stomach. “For both of us.”
    Dean walked back slowly, placing his hands over hers on the small bump, and the tiny life that grew inside. “This will not break us.”
    When he kissed her, she felt the rush of their life together, all they had done, and all they hoped to do. From her first memories of childhood she knew exactly what she wanted out of life, and she knew the type of people she wanted around her when she did it. The world begged for more than it had received, and they were finally the right people to do something about it. Dean was right. This would not break them.
    “Governor, I—”
    Kemena pulled back from Dean’s lips and saw the red face of Professor Hawthorne fumbling with the books and papers in his arms, stumbling backward. She offered a smile and a light chuckle at the embarrassed historian. “Hello, Professor.”
    “Governor, Doctor, my apologies, I didn’t realize I was intruding on a… moment.” Hawthorne kept hunched over in a half bow with his eyes glued to the floor, almost as if he were afraid to look up.
    Kemena walked over to him and lifted his chin, grabbing a few of the books to lighten his load. “It’s quite all right. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
    “I was hoping to speak with the governor before he left. I saw Sam leave from down the street, and the guards outside said you were here, so I was hoping we could have that word now.”
    Dean was more flustered that the professor had intruded than she was and appeased the old man with a nod and a grumbled yes.
    The professor dumped the remaining books in his arm on the closest table and started scrambling through the pages at a hurried pace. “I apologize for the mess, Doctor Mars; I’ll only be a minute.”
    “It’s fine, Professor.” Kemena sifted through some of the pages of the old history books she remembered reading as a child. The professor had taught her when she was a girl, and she was always amazed at how vivid his retelling of the past was. It was Hawthorne’s lessons that had propelled her to learn about medicine in the first place.
    “Ah, here, this is what I wanted to show you, Governor.” The professor pointed frantically at the page then paired it with a few old sketches. “The message your brother Lance sent about the Chinese and the black-market weapons trading they were doing in Australia had me wondering where on earth they could have gotten those types of guns. While I know we have our own stockpile of the old moderns, to have that many and to sell them would be worth a fortune.”
    “What does this have to do with the symbols?” Dean asked, looking over the sketches.
    “The old Russian countryside was massive, larger than that of all of Asia and the Middle East. And from what I’ve read, the leaders at the time had begun construction of a number of manufacturing facilities, and the western opposition believed that the Russians had more structures than they let on. If that was the case, then it’s possible a few of them weren’t destroyed when the bombs fell.”
    Kemena took one of the sketches from Dean’s hand. The faded drawing was of a weapon, a rifle, but far different than what most of their military used. It was modern, one of the old rifles that required no loading of powder or lead. An efficient killing machine. “You think the Russians have found them?”
    “Between what your brother described about the guns and the alliance of the Chinese and the Russians, I think it’s a strong possibility, yes.”