…we need more troops…
…they’re everywhere…
…pull back now pull back…
…saigon is out. bangkok, manila…
…chicago oh shit…
…what the hell is that…
…the sunlight…
…new york has fallen…
…pentagon satcom dead…
…wind river…
…regroup don’t let it…
…voices get the fucking VOICES out of my…
…nuke it nuke it nuke it—
…
silence fell, as did mankind.
the Stream.
a blackness moved, converged, lashed out.
the warriors of the Judas fled before it.
the black would harvest once more.
another When had fallen.
It knew only pain.
There had been a different place once, but the memory was but a haze lurking in what had been its mind. The line between reality and fantasy became a gray area into which it retreated.
There was no sensation of up or down in this black hell. It thought that time still existed, but it was not sure. It could see nothing, hear nothing.
Floating, floating in an ocean of rhythmic pulses.
It remembered the terrible loss of humanity, the invasive metal tendrils, the feel of flesh becoming silver decay, the incomprehensible mind that became its own. The incomprehensible Pattern.
It floated in the black and wept tears of damnation into the void. It sensed that it was not alone.
Indeed, it sensed that it was one among an infinity.
“Geiger’s off the scale!” shouted the man in black and gray over the howling winds and the staccato voice of the radioactivity meter. Another shockwave passed over them, and the men braced themselves against the hot blast of air. The world was dust and choking and burning breaths.
“Where’s ground zero?”
“Probably Chicago. That fleet of Spears…Well, they must have dropped everything they had on it.”
“How long do we have?”
“We can’t take this level of rads for much longer. Here.” The medic held out a hypodermic spray and reached out to administer the radiation treatment. He shook his head, motioned for the medic to tend to the other troops first. “We’re almost out of antirad. After that…” The medic shook his head.
Another man approached, looking apologetic. “Bates is fading.”
“Let’s go.”
The two soldiers dressed in urban warfare camouflage slipped through the shadows of the blasted-out building to the makeshift triage where the wounded lay dying and the dead were piled. Flashes of white illuminated the horizon as they walked, forearms held over their eyes to protect their vision from the atomic war being waged to the west.
“General, how are you doing, sir?”
“I’ve…I’ve been better, West.” His chest heaved, and a line of dark fluid trickled leisurely from the general’s mouth and nose. He gasped, body wracked in pain.
West tried to overlook the wound, but his eyes were led back again and again by some grisly fascination. He shuddered.
The general had been cut apart, cleanly sliced by a beam of light in a diagonal path that cut off his left arm and leg and the lower half of the right leg. Neatly cauterized intestines spilled from the gaping hole in his body. More disturbing than any of the exposed tissue was what was consuming it, a spidery, tendril-like silver substance that was replacing the flesh that it touched with a metallic copy. Bates was being turned into a silver husk. It was incredible that he was still alive.
“Well, it looks like you’ll be in charge soon.”
“Nonsense, General. We’ll get you patched up—”
“Cut the bullshit. Let me die in dignity.”
“Sir, I—”
“Hear me out.” Bates coughed. More blood.
“Yes, sir.”
“West, I want…I want you to take the men…”
Lots of blood.
“Sir?”
“Take the men and run. Get as far from these…things as you can…Live to fight another day…”
“But General, Wind River’s gone, Satcom’s gone. We have to make a stand, just like when we took Montreal. Remember that? Eighth Assault won the war because we wouldn’t give up. We have to fight—”
“No…” Bates had a body-wracking coughing fit. “You stand and fight, and you’ll die…West, live to fight another day…These things aren’t human…”
“Of course not, General. Now try to rest.”
Blood flowed from Bates’ eyes.
“…run and live…”
“General, try to rest.”
Bates’ hand grasped up and secured a weak handful of West’s fatigue sleeve. He pulled West close, whispered into his ear. “I know what you are, West. I know you can destroy them.”
West blinked and frowned. General Bates released his already faint grasp on West’s sleeve.
His body slumped. West closed his eyes.
“Rest in peace, General Bates. Bag him.”
On the horizon behind them, the night sky was torn open by the flash of a large atomic. Lasers flickered the sky like so many fireworks. The drone of gunfire began again, and more warplanes flew overhead.
“Doc, how are the rest of the wounded?”
“All seventeen critical. Not a chance. Those weapons—”
“Kill them. Put them out of their misery so we can move out. Understood?”
Hesitation. “Yes, sir.” West turned back to the horizon. Sunlight was waking in the east. Faint sunlight. “What the hell will today bring?” he asked to no one. He faced the scene of destruction stretched before him. The earth shuddered as the fleet of warplanes fell from the sky, enveloped in a web of silver, erupting their payload uselessly on the ruins of suburbs: playgrounds and tract housing and drive-in movie theatres where children had laughed and families had dreamed and teenagers had been teenagers in the back seats of their father’s cars.
It was the dawn of a new day.
Weeping.
She awoke to the sound of sobbing that drifted to her from the stifling black.
Pain wracked her body and she adjusted the bandage that encompassed the left side of her face. She gently traced the gouged path of flesh that someone had stitched back together as she had been passed out. A thin line of fire was imprinted from just above her left eyebrow to her cheekbone. What had once been her left eye was now a throbbing ball of agony. She vaguely remembered a nearby explosion and shrapnel filling the sky and falling to the asphalt that smelled of poison and blood, her face greeting the ground with a brutal slap.
Why am I still here? How am I still alive?
She surveyed her shelter with her good eye.
She was beneath Seattle, in a decrepit sewer tunnel left over from the era before the New America program. The tunnel stretched away in both directions, the ceiling thirty feet above her. The dank smell of old sewage had permeated this sanctuary, but it was better than the caustic chemical atmosphere on the surface.
“How’s your eye?” A voice, gentle, quiet, masculine. The man facing her was dressed in a military-issue medical uniform. A pale green glow emerged from the chemlite he carried. Similar glows could be seen throughout the stretch of tunnel visible to her. She shrugged, touched her throat, grimacing.
“Throat’s still bothering you? I’ll bring you something for it.” He gently began to remove the bandage from her face. “Let’s take a look at that eye.” She grew uneasy.
The medic removed the steripad from the left side of her face. It was a deep flesh wound. Thankfully there had been no nerve damage, but she would never regain sight in her left eye without a transplant, and there probably would be a terrible scar, especially with the current state of medicine being practiced. It was wartime, after all. Unfortunate, the medic thought. She really was an attractive woman. Very intriguing…He hated to see her face contorted in pain.
“Try
to open your eye.”
She hesitated…
“Go ahead. I won’t bite.” He grinned.
Slowly, tentatively, she opened the eye. She could see only black with the left eye, but with her right she searched the medic’s face for his unspoken opinion.
He tried to conceal his shock at what he saw in her eyes. The right one was a lucid emerald green. A man could become lost in that gaze, he thought.
The left eye was what had surprised him. The iris was a cold, impossibly gray orb. The wound snaked through the iris in a leisurely path of scarlet.
Impossible, the medic thought. She’s a Styx.
She noticed a hint of distress in his eyes…
He knows. She contained her panic. He knows.
He simply misted the wound with an antisept spray and gathered up his things in the ghostly green light.
“I’ll bring a biotic for your throat. As for your eye…” He looked through his kit, took out a small round container. “Let’s see if this will help it heal.” He withdrew a round green disk from the container. He opened the lids of her left eye and covered the wound with the medlens.
She blinked and looked at him in silence. Aside from the red vertical line bisecting her left eye, she was the picture of beauty.
With two green eyes.
“I’ll be back later.” He reached out and patted her bruised hands gently. “Try to get some sleep, okay?”
She smiled at him. He blushed as he walked away.
He knows.
“Our father, who art in Heaven…”
The faithful, in their terror, turned to prayer. Words of hope, learned by rote in the sunlight of forgotten youths, floated up from the assembled mass.
“Hallowed be Thy name…”
Sounds of humanity: coughing, groaning, weeping.
The church had become a refuge for the prey.
“…the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory…”
The building shook with the force of a nearby explosion. A candelabra tipped over at the entrance.
“…forever and ever. Amen.”
The doors blew open.
“Hold your positions! No retreat, no surrender! We aren’t going down without a fight they’ll remember!”
His supply of bad war movie cliches exhausted, West readied himself for the attack. What were these creatures?
A dull ache was starting to form at the back of West’s head. He checked his weapon and was disturbed to see that his eyes would not focus properly.
He blinked and shook his head. It was as if some terribly powerful force was trying to pry its way into his mind…Tangible, maddening.
West and the other soldiers crouched behind a crumbled wall. They came from many different backgrounds: career military, civilian militia, and other men and women who just owned a gun and wanted to live. One thing united them: they all had the look of a trapped animal.
He could hear, feel the approach of the Enemy forces.
They would draw the line here.
With eyes that blazed cold gray light, he jumped over the wall, his automatic rifle blazing armor-piercing rounds into the Enemy midst.
It began.
Soldiers poured into the church.
“Everyone get down! They’re coming! Get down!!”
The soldiers took up defensive positions and trained their weapons on the entrance. The faithful prayed; the fearful wept. The soldiers waited.
The light outside the door dimmed.
The preacher continued with the sermon, shouting to make his voice heard over the roar of nothingness from without.
“I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…”
The building shook.
“…the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth…”
Wails of grief.
“And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondsman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”
The Enemy swept into the church.
The old gods did nothing to protect their flock.
The faithful were judged.
Nightmares.
She was trapped in their power. Her dreams always haunted her, bringing up memories of a past she still struggled to forget.
But she was a Styx.
Memories.
falling. falling. endless. darkness. a child. blood. mercy. merciless. a flickering of images. an orb of stars. flashes of light. bodies. massacre. judgment. a shift. terror.
loss of humanity.
the light oh god the light. heaven and hell and the stillness between.
a weapon: slaughterer of innocents—
She snapped upright from where she had been sleeping and stifled the urge to scream. Her breath came hard, fast; she was bathed in sweat.
Vertigo. Where am I?
Then she heard the weeping and the moaning of the wounded. A child cried out for his mother, began to sob. Other voices joined it in abject despair. She saw the dim glow of the chemlites.
She was still in the tunnel.
Someone was there.
She sensed someone staring at her from the darkness. She tried to speak, but her voice was still a harsh whisper. There had been chemical warfare on the surface.
She found her flashlight and turned it on to see who was watching her. Time was distorted in the tunnel, but she sensed that it was nighttime on the surface. Most of the refugees in the tunnel slept.
The medic sat watching her from the shadows.
“I’m sorry…Did I wake you?”
She shook her head, looked at him questioningly.
“Good. I brought a biotic for your throat.”
He came closer and sat down next to her against the wall. Someone screamed; whether in sleep or in the waking state she could not tell.
“Open up.” She obeyed, and he activated the biotic field, sweeping the back of her throat. She gasped as the human-engineered biological organisms attacked the infection.
“Don’t fight it. It’ll burn for a while, but you’ll be better in a few minutes.”
She smiled and looked down at his name tag. Hayes.
He noticed her gaze. “Simon Hayes. Chief Medical Officer of the Fourteenth Assault. Born and raised in Harkness, Michigan.”
Her eyes widened. He smiled, looked sadly down the length of the tunnel.
“Yes. That Harkness, Michigan. The one that went ‘boom.’”
She placed her hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s see if the biotics have done their job yet. Try to say something, but don’t force it. Start out by telling me your name.”
“Flynn…”
“Good start. What Flynn, if I may be so bold?”
“Ember Magdalene Flynn.” Her throat was on fire, but even in its strangely cracked timbre, her brogue shined through enough to make Hayes smile with surprise.
“And where are you from, Ms. Flynn? Brooklyn?”
She laughed, for the first time in… in a long time. A very long time.
“My friends call me Maggie. I come from New Belfast.”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell.” His smile was the brightest thing she could see in the expanse of the tunnel. He was of course being sarcastic. “What brings you to Seattle, Ms. Flynn? The lovely scenery, the accommodations, the shopping and sightseeing? Are you into grunge, Cobain, coffeehouses, drummers and guitarists with scruffy goatees? That sort of thing?”
She tapped the Milicom identification burn on her forearm. “I heard there was a little fight going on, and I figured I could help out.”
&nbs
p; “Ah, beloved Milicom Systems International. You were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, Ms. Flynn. You would have been safer back at home, probably.”
“I haven’t been home in twelve years. With the troubles in Quebec and all… I joined up to fight in that war; I’ve been stationed in the ASA ever since the annexation. I guess this is my home now, so I’m fighting again to save it.”
Hayes uttered a pained laugh. “Not much worth saving anymore. America the beautiful. Loyalty, freedom, individuality. Greed, corruption, an insatiable desire to achieve globalized manifest destiny. All the things our fathers died for in War Three. You are one of a dying breed, Ms. Flynn.” His smile reassured her that he was being sarcastic, but she could tell that he was being genuine.
“Has there been any word from above?”
Hayes looked down and studied the chemlite; the gentle smile disappeared from his face. “The messages stopped coming through yesterday. No one else has come from above. At last word, all of Europe was gone.” She flinched when he said this, but he continued. “In the end, even Indochine was begging for our help, but it appears we have problems of our own.” He indicated the tunnel they were presently inhabiting and the sleeping refugees. “America the beautiful indeed.”
“What are they?”
Hayes looked up to the ceiling of the tunnel. An occasional explosion would send grit and dust falling leisurely to the tunnel floor in this windless expanse. Sometimes there was the sound of what appeared to be a lightning strike on the surface. Hayes shook his head and looked back down. “I don’t know what they are. I can’t know what they are. I don’t want to think of them.”
“I was just—”
“You were a member of the forces that took Montreal, weren’t you? The Eighth Assault? Don’t worry, I have nothing against the Styx.” His abrupt change of subject startled Flynn. His eyes revealed a calm that she dearly wished that she could possess.
She looked down at the floor. “Yes. I was in Montreal.”
He pulled his shirtsleeve up to reveal a neatly branded “XIV” on his left bicep. “I was in Fourteenth Assault. I believe we took the names after you guys kicked the asses. So it was true. Milicom was behind it all… How the hell did you get to Seattle?…You weren’t exiled to that island, were you? The rumors were true.”
“I was never on Santa Fosca. They hid some of us, sprinkling us around the Allied States. As a hidden line of defense.”
Enemy tst-1 Page 7