The stars over Detroit were gone.
Smoke rolled from the riverfront like thunderclouds trapped on earth, glowing orange from the forges beneath.
Factory sirens howled through the night, and every few blocks, the blue flash of a military truck signaled another seizure, another plant, another company, another piece of America claimed in the name of unity.
Captain James Mallory stood at the gates of the Ford River Rouge complex as the soldiers fanned out before dawn.
His uniform still smelled of ash from New York. The bayonets gleamed wet under the floodlights.
The crowd outside the fences wasn't protesting, no one dared anymore. They just watched.
Workers in soot-streaked overalls, wives clutching ration books, children who'd grown up believing that the only war that could ever be fought was far away across the Atlantic.
Incapable of threatening them.
Now the war had come home in olive drab and steel helmets.
