by Chris James
The click-clack of the Battlefield Support Laser stopped as the NATO missiles ducked and dived to follow the evasive manoeuvres of the Blackswans. The missiles found targets and distant pops and bursts of black smoke hung in the sky. Raptis watched keenly, but the Spiders appeared to have been reduced to wreckage, spiralling down to the streets below. He did the maths: two hundred and fifty-six Blackswans carried twelve thousand, eight hundred Spiders. When fitted with the air-to-air model of the RIM 214 smart missile, each PeaceMaker carried thirty-six missiles, which an even fight when the surface batteries of RIM 214s were considered.
Further waves of missiles arrived in the battle space as more wings of Blackswans descended in sweeping geometrical patterns that fascinated Raptis. Amid the explosions and the shrieking noise from chunks of metal falling to earth, the cirrocumulus high above the battle moved off and the day came on, the sky bright and blue and fresh. The puffs of smoke from the first engagements began to soften and merge. Raptis looked at the debris created by the explosions and followed some pieces down into the city, wondering how much damage they were doing.
After two minutes of ferocious combat, the battle appeared to be winding down. He didn’t believe this first attack could be all they would send. In any event, the PeaceMakers which had provided the missiles to defeat the enemy force were now obliged to retire to bases further north to re-arm. This would take at least thirty minutes. Raptis recalled the briefing they’d had on the naval engagement the previous Tuesday and how the defences had been swamped, and he questioned how much more awaited Athens.
As if in answer, Corporal Drakos in the mobile command centre reported: “SkyWatchers detecting one thousand and sixty-four new hostile contacts approaching, ETA two minutes. We have ten squadrons of armed PeaceMakers in theatre, now locking on.”
Raptis shook his head in resignation. The next part of the engagement would see eight thousand, six hundred and forty NATO missiles take on fifty-three thousand, two hundred Spiders. He twitched his eye to open comms to his troops hidden in defensive dugouts further down the hill, feeling the responsibility of his rank. “All teams standby. Things may start to get busier soon. Make sure your Stilettos and Pickups are ready to go; we might not get much time to use them.”
He heard his Commanding Officer’s voice in his ear: “Sector three, report.”
“Sector three, standing by,” Raptis answered. It occurred to Raptis that an invasion force might not choose to begin with Athens, and could prefer to get a foothold where the defensive line was weaker, which, despite full mobilisation, included many places around Greece’s rugged coastal areas. In his ear, the other sectors reported their readiness.
He withdrew closer to the mobile command centre just as the first wings of the next wave of Blackswans spun down out of the bright blue sky. The Battlefield Support Laser began its click-clack and Raptis imagined the heat of the pulses as they hit the shielding around the Blackswans. A moment later, the laser stopped and numerous streaks of white raced in from further inland. Pops and blotches of black cloud began to fill the battle space above the city. He stared in fascination as the confrontation played out above him. After a moment, the white streaks thinned out.
Raptis saw Blackswans approaching the ground unobstructed. A wave of around ten descended in a curved line towards the Acropolis, and Raptis caught his breath when he realised that the Parthenon and other ancient buildings must be their target. He twitched his eye so that his Squitch zoomed in on the area. The first two Caliphate ACAs disintegrated in fiery explosions; the next two received a cloud of Stiletto missiles and blew up. But despite two missile hits, the next Blackswan deployed its Spiders, which left the body of the ACA in a cone formation, spinning to the ground. Raptis swore aloud when he saw for himself how quickly these monstrous mobile bombs moved after they hit the ground. Their appendages snapped open and twenty or more of them swarmed over the Battlefield Support Laser and detonated in unison. The shock of the explosion made Raptis take an involuntary step backwards, even though he was over three kilometres away.
He deactivated the zoom and stared aghast at the scene. Dozens more Blackswans swooped down to disgorge hundreds of Spiders. In the heat-haze they appeared to move almost in slow motion, disappearing among the columns of Greece’s most well-known landmark. A second later, silent clouds of yellow and grey dust billowed up. The columns of the Parthenon buckled and toppled over into the dust.
Raptis gasped, unable to comprehend the scale of the disaster. Many more Spiders fell into the vast cloud of dust which now hung where the Parthenon had been. The sounds of the explosions came to his ears, and these jarred him back to his professional presence and responsibilities. A new-found hatred for these machines and those who’d sent them ignited inside him.
A voice spoke urgently in his ear: “Captain? Captain Raptis? We’ve got hundreds of incoming. Super AI is telling us we’ll be overwhelmed in less than thirty seconds.”
Raptis put a finger to his ear and yelled: “Get out! Arm yourselves and evacuate the command post.” He began to withdraw from the mobile command centre, moving down the hill to join his troops. He became aware of the crowded sky above him. Now that the Blackswans had achieved air superiority, they cruised to specific positions before releasing their cargoes. Raptis saw the Battlefield Support Laser next to the command centre suffer the same fate as the one which had been defending the Acropolis: its weapons burned through and destroyed the first pair of Blackswans, but soon it was overwhelmed. Rapis had to leap and run to avoid the debris of a falling Blackswan. When he looked back, the earth shook under the impact of ten or more Spiders detonating on and around the Battlefield Support Laser and command centre, far more than was required.
Raptis watched as thousands of Spiders fell like a deadly black rain over the whole city. Blooms of smoke followed bright orange flashes in numerous locations on the patchwork quilt of buildings below him. In some areas, larger conflagrations grew. He twitched his eye and shouted: “Hill thirty-five, calling for reinforcements. Command centre and BSL destroyed, many casualties, over.”
He waited for a response but when none came, he switched channels and heard a cacophony of similar distress calls, demands for reinforcements, and pleas for medical support. Other units in the city were being similarly decimated, and he decided he had to do something. With a bitterness and anger he’d never believed he would feel, he looked out over his city as thousands of Spiders rained down on it, bringing unimaginable destruction and death.
He opened a comms channel to his units on the hillside. “Okay, troops. Command and the BSL are knocked out. All companies report in.”
“Kilo three-two. Holding position. Almost out of ammo.”
“Lima four-three. Leopards knocked out. We’re withdrawing with wounded. If anyone knows where we can get some GenoFluid packs, we’d be delighted to get our hands on them.”
Then the voice of Corporal Metaxas spoke in his ear: “Mike five-four here, Sir. Our Leopards are holding out. We’re in a good defensive overhang. A Spider needs five shots all-in to defeat its shielding. The best we’ve worked out is three shots from the Leopard and then a couple of Stilettos. After that, a few shots from a Pickup will take it out.”
Raptis waited for his other companies to report in, but he heard no more and had to assume they were unable to respond. He realised that if he still had the mobile command centre, he’d have access to their life signs and would know their condition. But now he felt the imperative to move off the hill. The battle had become a rout. He looked out over the city and his heart broke: palls of dirty black smoke hung over vast areas, and he saw tongues of orange flame flash within them. Blackswans cruised down, released their cargo of Spiders, and departed the battle space. The Spiders decided autonomously how they could cause the maximum damage, disruption and death, and proceeded to the most effective location for detonation.
Surveying the appalling damage being inflicted on his country’s capital city, Raptis asked himself
what defence there could be against it. He recalled again the image of the young Turkish woman and her son being enveloped by the Spider in Istanbul, and questioned how long he and his men had before the battle space became so swamped with Spiders that they would be able, here also in Athens, to target actual individuals for such brutal eradication.
“Okay all troops, fall back. Let’s get down to where we might defend a hospital. Set your Squitches to follow me.”
Captain Raptis didn’t wait for any acknowledgements but proceeded into the relatively dense forest on the hillside, where he hoped he and his troops could reach the city and provide some aid. The one fact that staggered him, which made him despair for the future, was the observation that in each moment of this bright Saturday morning, hundreds if not thousands of Athenians were being killed, and he expected to join them shortly. But their enemy, NATO’s enemy, didn’t have to put a single flesh-and-blood warrior into the battle. While the Greeks in Athens burned and died with troops of the Hellenic Army, the Third Caliph merely expended material. NATO lost valuable, competent soldiers while in return the Caliphate lost easily replaceable chunks of metal. As Raptis led his troops off hill thirty-five to try to save even a handful of civilian lives, he wondered what on earth could save Europe from this pestilence.
Chapter 34
08.03 Saturday 11 February 2062
ON THE OPPOSITE side of Athens, Turkish engineering student Berat Kartal stared in shock as the Parthenon dissolved in clouds of yellow and grey dust. Like all the other refugees from Turkey, he’d had no reliable news since the Caliphate invaded his country the previous Monday. When the ferry on which he’d escaped from the port city of Izmir docked at Athens, the authorities had made only rudimentary identification checks, despite the risk of Caliphate sympathisers slipping in among the thousands of people genuinely fleeing for their lives.
He’d immediately sought out an expatriate Turkish business, a restaurant close to the port, and at first refused to believe the news about Israel and the Third Caliph’s announcement that the whole of Europe was to be either assimilated or annihilated. The restaurant owner, a large, well-fed man who looked to be around Berat’s father’s age, had offered Berat more help in addition to the Lahmacun and side order of Kuru Fasulye which had restored Berat so much.
Berat knew that a fellow Turk would never expect anything in return for the help, but he wished he could offer something. However, as before, the young engineering student reacted to the owner’s hospitality with an inexplicable urge to move on. The guilt he felt at accepting the food without giving anything in return, even though it was not expected, shrivelled next to his fear of the forthcoming storm. He thanked the restaurant owner for his charity, wished him luck, and left.
He spent the night in a school that had been converted into a refugee centre. He slept fitfully after recording the day’s events in his paper journal. A few of the other refugees tried to engage him in conversation, and he remained polite but short with them. In the morning, he filled his water bottles and resolved to escape Athens as soon as possible.
Now, he stood in a nondescript backstreet, having surmised early on in the attack that key transport infrastructure could be the primary target for the Caliphate’s ACAs, after the military defenders had been dealt with. With no enthusiasm, he congratulated himself on his foresight: he could have easily been caught up in this battle. What Berat had not expected was that the Caliphate’s machines would target Greece’s most significant historical monuments for destruction.
Giving a final glance at the pall of smoke and dust which had begun to sink down the rocky outcrop on which the Parthenon and other ancient buildings of the Acropolis were built, Berat hurried on, heading away from the city centre. The sense of impending destruction made him quicken his step as he hastened along streets lined with shops and businesses whose frontages consisted of sun-bleached concrete blocks, bare windows, and chipped and fading signs. Others jogged with him, trying to find a way to escape the violence. From the occasional window or doorway, people would put their heads out and bark questions in Greek, which Berat didn’t understand. At one junction lay the burning wreck of one of the Caliphate’s machines which had smashed into a workshop of some kind.
At every break in the buildings, he looked to his right to see the smoke and dust spread down from where the Parthenon used to be. As he ran, he noticed the number of black dots in the sky increase. He stopped, chest heaving, at a residential junction from which he saw a large portion of Athens. Caliphate ACAs filled the sky. The engineer in Berat admired their geometrical flight patterns.
On the ground, however, all was chaos: fires raged; sirens wailed distantly; and deep, booming explosions seemed to echo off the sky itself. As he gulped in lungfuls of warm morning air, he could taste the smoke and explosives and burnt plastic. To his left, he watched a wave of smaller machines disgorged from a larger one swoop down and crash into a major elevated road junction. Berat stared, fascinated, as they appeared to grow two groups of four legs and crawl swiftly away. They dispersed and he realised what the movements meant just as twenty or more puffs of smoke blew out from the most vulnerable points on the structure. At once, the entire junction collapsed.
Berat’s mouth hung open as he scanned the rest of the city, and he reeled at the brilliance of the tactic. He’d heard of the fate that Israel had met when it tried to neutralise the Caliphate with a massive, pre-emptive nuclear strike. In comparison, this was a stroke of genius: rather than huge bombs that flattened everything and expelled lethal radioactivity for the winds to blow everywhere, here he witnessed an overwhelming piecemeal operation, with thousands of highly mobile and autonomous bombs which each knew the very best place to detonate to maximise death and destruction.
Berat retreated towards the relative anonymity of the backstreets as his mind pointed out a new and more worrying conclusion. When the key targets had been blown up, the remaining autonomous bombs would then turn their attention the less important targets. And so on. He turned into a back street of low-rise residential villas, some well-kept, others dilapidated, and jogged on as his conclusion refined itself further: the sky over Athens must have contained thousands of these flying bombs, and he didn’t think for a moment that when all the soldiers and NATO armaments had been destroyed, and then all the key infrastructure on which the city depended had gone, the machines left over would simply fly off. There could be enough to begin targeting individual residences, or even individual people.
Panic gripped Berat and he started to run along the anonymous, deserted street. His imagination placed one of these flying death machines right behind him, watching him, following him, amused at his pathetic attempt to escape with his life.
He reached the end of the street, arriving at another non-descript junction of low-rise buildings with empty plots here and there that were covered in low, dry scrub. He spun around checking the sky. Distant black shapes zoomed across the bright blue morning. Sounds of thumps came to his ears which had to be explosions. Suddenly he heard a shriek: a black dot travelling very quickly disappeared behind a residential property back along the street which Berat had just run down. The windows blew out and the flat roof seemed to jump in the air, before it collapsed into the house. The boom of the explosion ended with the tinkle of shattered glass. Berat thought he heard screaming.
“Hsst! Hey, you!”
Berat looked to his left to see a figure poking out from under a half-open overhead garage door. The garage was part of the nearest house and a short driveway from the road went down to it at an angle of forty-five degrees.
The young man made an urgent wave with his hand, urging Berat to join him in safety. Berat took a hesitant step towards him but then stopped. The man’s face had bad symmetry and abruptly, inexplicably, Berat sensed danger. His breath regained, he turned and ran, deciding to go left.
Above him, black dots zipped and raced around the fringes of his vision. One grew larger as it sped almost overhead. Berat f
ought his panic and struggled to think rationally regarding how the super AI guiding these flying bombs would choose their targets now that probably little of anything important remained to be destroyed in the city. The thought entered his head that the Caliphate’s super AI might have hacked data records and, after the minute or so it would need to process the information, it now knew every resident of Athens and everything about them. Thus, it could target those individuals whom it identified as being most likely to resist assimilation.
As his chest began hurting again, he saw on his right an old building. He ran to it, its shabby appearance encouraging the belief in Berat that it would be uninhabited. Another explosion shook the ground under his feet, and he swore in frustration as, when he reached the building, the old wooden door refused to open. In frustration he took a step back and kicked at the rusted handle. It fell off and landed in the sand. The door swung back and Berat entered to see shrouds which could only be covering antique vehicles.
In relief, Berat realised that the shed hadn’t been visited in some time. There was a workbench along one wall, so he pulled a dirty dust sheet off one of the cars and crumpled it up. He kicked away some plastic bottles of engine oil and old tyres, crawled under the work bench, and crouched down, using the dust sheet as a cushion and a blanket. The motes went in his mouth and tasted of rusted, corroded metal; they went into his nose and smelled of the decay that nothing other than time can inflict on man and his lofty ambitions.
Tears welled in the corners of Berat’s eyes. At some deep level in his soul, he could feel the thousands of Athenian lives being brutally snuffed out this morning. His thoughts returned to his beloved Turkey and his family and friends there. He thought of all the ancient, historical places in his own country and how the Caliphate must also have destroyed those. He hoped the people he cared for the most had found some way to survive, but suspected they may not have. He recalled the jokes and smiles of his father and uncles and knew they would never submit to a false version of their faith, to a foul corruption of what Allah and Islam really represented.