by Tim Curran
“Seriously though,” said Squid, “someone should tell ‘em you got your call sign for your madras, not for your looks.…”
“Can it, Squid,” Moses barked in their ears, “visual in five.”
Jasi checked her position—perfectly on Moses’ seven. Squid was equally precise; a mirror-image wingman, while their WC formed the tip of the arrow. Behind them, the rest of the squadron formed up, twelve more Typhoons, the spear. Further back was the rest of the coalition; Russian MiGs wingtip to wingtip with French Rafales, German Tornados zipping between lumbering Chinese H-Xs, on loan from the People’s Liberation Army, and the last remaining American F-22s bringing up the rear, laden with fiery death, nothing but bloody vengeance on their agenda. Eighty-six planes in all.
As one, the coalition banked right to approach the city from the North, the setting sun pouring orange through canopies and throwing the cockpits into violet gloom. Static flashes bounced between wisps of cloud and touched down in the green waters of the Mersey Estuary and the very air itself seemed to shimmer, blurring the world outside. Jasi frowned as her HUD winked out, then sputtered back fainter than before, and then the Thrasher phased in, one mighty leg in the churning port, the other in the middle of the ferry terminal which collapsed like a sandcastle. It was directly in front of them and barely had time to raise its flailing arms before the planes were upon it.
Moses’ voice thundered in every earpiece, “Brimstone markers and hail! Right leg!”
Jasi swooped in tight formation with Moses and Squid, and let loose.
“Enemy engaged, sir.”
Group Captain Redcarr nodded at the young officer who had appeared at the open door of his room, and reached for his jacket, “Inform the AC I’m on my way.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the woman, already out of view. A few months ago such informality would have cost her dearly, but that was a different time. He buttoned his jacket and straightened his tie. Redcarr might have let standards slip a little, but Air Commodore Grant would still chew him out if he wasn’t dressed for battle. An hour of sleep had done nothing to alleviate his fatigue and everything served to make his march toward the command center miserable: the bright, overhead light strips, the stench of sweat and coffee and nicotine and the bitter Icelandic air that seemed to penetrate the corridors of the airbase with awful ease.
Keflavik was small, but it would suffice. The air station was once home to the U.S. Air Force, but had been returned to the Icelandic coast guard many years ago. Now it bustled once again with pilots and engineers; rescue helicopters shunted to one side to make way for fighters and bombers that jostled for space on the tiny runways, spilling out onto the surrounding fields. Redcarr knew that their tenancy was to be short-lived; it seemed that no sooner had the coalition taken root than a Thrasher would appear to spoil the party. Humanity was dealing with a ruthlessly intelligent foe.
As with everything on the base, the command center was cramped and filled with frantic personnel. Redcarr squeezed through the bodies hustling around, relaying information and status updates, and returned quickly snapped off salutes as he made his way to a raised dais at the rear of the room. A huge metal desk squatted in the middle of the platform from which the Air Commodore barked orders at an endless stream of subordinates. AC Grant was a big man, half as wide as his desk, and he acknowledged Redcarr’s arrival with a curt nod.
Redcarr saluted, “Air Commodore.”
“Sit down, George,” snapped the AC, dragging a wooden chair to the side of the desk. He angled one of two monitors that were connected to a solid, gun-metal slab of a laptop so that Redcarr could watch the feed: six different views of the battle—live images from cameras mounted beneath a half dozen support planes.
Redcarr sat and craned forward, scanning the six quadrants of the monitor, trying to get his bearings. Each of the feeds was a mess of activity. He might as well have been watching a live feed from the mouth of a hornets’ nest. Six tableaus, grainy and chaotic, taking turns to freeze in an impressionistic splash of pixels. Six images showing the utter one-sidedness of the battle as wave upon wave of fighter planes strafed the monster, whirling around it like a nursery mobile as the Thrasher flailed its colossal arms and swatted them from the sky. Tiny pinpricks of light dotted the creature’s body, evidence that missiles were finding their targets, but still it rampaged, incinerating the docks with its fiery breath, seeding the ground with golden blooms. Even as Redcarr watched, two of the images turned to static in rapid succession.
“Too damned close,” growled the Air Commodore, “what are those fools playing at?”
“They are under orders to capture the moment the Thrasher falls, sir,” said Redcarr, fixated on the monitor, “the EAC wants to capitalize on the momentum of London.”
“This is a fucking war, George, not a TV show.”
“Those lines were blurred long ago, sir.”
Another live feed winked out, and suddenly the remaining three showed the same image, albeit from different angles: fifteen fighters in tight formation, streaking towards the monster.
“This is it, sir,” Redcarr said, pushing forward in his seat, his voice rising with excitement, “the Typhoons!”
Grant motioned to a comms officer standing at the base of the dais. The officer looked up, his hand still pressed to the receiver in his ear.
The big man yelled at him over the loud hum of the command center. “Tell them Godspeed. Bring that bastard down!”
The officer nodded and relayed the message into his mic as his superiors settled in to watch the conclusion of the battle.
“Markers away!” Jasi corkscrewed her plane between the whipping tendrils of the Thrasher, keeping her WC in sight through the spirals of black smoke and ash that swirled around the monster’s torso. A bright flash to her left, then a violent shudder through the cockpit as an F-22 spun wildly overhead to crash into monochrome flesh. Moses was already long past the danger zone, his own laser markers firmly embedded in the creature’s thigh, and Squid was hot on his heels.
Jasi’s HUD showed ten of the original formation had survived; Pinball along with both of her wingmen had been vaporized, Sixer had bailed after being clipped by an arm and Mandrake’s seven had been hit by a friendly. Nobody would be blamed for that, such was the confusion in the sky.
Moses’ voice came through clear and calm. “Good signal from homing markers. Hot Stuff, Squid, on me. Mandrake, shepherd Sixer’s support and provide cover. Rollover, take your boys around and flank from the south. Brimstones up!”
By the time the wing commander had finished his orders, the Typhoons were already a third of the way to Manchester. In perfect formation they turned around, three peeling off to the south, the remaining seven forming into a tight wedge as they screamed back toward the enemy. The weapon stations nestled beneath each fighter wing retracted their safety locks and dim lights blinked on the launchers, each one carrying three brimstone missiles. Fire and forget, they were called.
Within seconds the battle was in sight.
The Thrasher had not taken another step. Instead it appeared to have rooted itself, one leg in the water, the other surrounded by rubble and fire. The top of its torso had curved over and the gaping maw was spewing verdant flames in a roaring column that utterly destroyed all it touched. Its limbs were raised, protecting its ‘face’, flailing in all directions and occasionally sending a plane to join the heap of twisted metal and death below. All around this monstrosity flew the remainder of the coalition, half of the original force. Each country was still represented, but only one H-X remained to bomb the creature in swooping runs, flanked by a gaggle of Tornados and Rafales. The American F-22s and F-15s looped around the monster’s head, tearing out globules of flesh with their cannons and the remaining MiGs darted in-between the meaty whips of the Thrasher’s fingers, peppering its trunk with air-to-air Vympel missiles. The distractions appeared to have their desired effect for the Thrasher kept its limbs aloft, exposing its legs, upon which seven
Typhoons now descended.
Jasi stayed tight on her WC’s seven o’clock position. She thumbed up the trigger guard.
Six bursts of yellow from beneath her leader’s wings signaled the attack as his voice boomed loud in her headset.
“Missiles away!”
Jasi fired simultaneously with Squid, and twelve more trails of white smoke joined the six already inbound to the creature’s right leg. Seconds later another eighteen trails appeared in the sky over the sea as Rollover’s group joined the fray.
Again, Moses’ voice thundered in Jasi’s ear, “Impact in seven seconds, get over the water!” She watched him bank hard and ascend, and then he exploded into glittering dust as one of the thick tendrils sliced through his plane.
“Fu—” was the last sound Squid made as the limb continued its sweep, pulverizing his cockpit and sending his Typhoon to the shattered dock below. Jasi fought the steering column as she twisted her plane away from the tendril and barely had time to seek an exit before the brimstones hit. The Thrasher’s upper leg erupted in a colossal ball of bright flame, and charred meat blossomed like a grisly firework. Instantly, the main torso of the creature began to shimmer and fade as the severed leg folded in on itself, tumbling into the water in a cloud of smoke, silica, and gore. The force was overwhelming and Jasi could feel her face burning through her visor as the momentum of her turn propelled her into the dematerializing torso. Her plane seemed to dissolve around her, and then she felt nothing.
AC Grant pushed back from the desk and stood, rolling his shoulders in an exaggerated display.
“George, I want an operational report in one hour.” He stepped down from the stage and grabbed a mug of coffee from an adjacent table on his way out of the command center.
“Yes, sir.”
Redcarr watched Grant leave and then turned to the comms officer. “Bring the reports to me here, I’m staying to re-watch the feeds.” He typed in a handful of commands and loosened his tie. “And tell the interpreters in the basement to come up here. I want to speak to them.”
The officer barked into his headset as Redcarr began to watch the recordings, rewinding and re-watching that one particular moment when a crashing Eurofighter Typhoon appeared to phase out alongside the fallen Thrasher.
The light hurt her eyes, but there was no sun in the sky. She felt the wind on her face, freezing, shredding. The sand beneath her feet shifted and rippled; the dunes, colored green and brown and blue, rose no higher than her ankles. Jasi brought her hands to her face but could feel nothing save a dull pressure that soon dissipated in the relentless chill. Squinting, she peered around, looking for a semblance of normality, but received no reward, just an endless vista of undulating sands beneath sepia clouds that chased and clashed overhead. She dimly recalled a life. She saw faces, tasted food and lovers on her tongue, heard whispers—a name that might have been hers. Jasi raised her right hand and gazed at it, surprised that she could not focus on her caramel skin despite every grain of sand stuck to her fingers being crystal sharp in clarity. She considered an emotional response—fear? Sadness? Neither seemed appropriate. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light she opened them further, and then she could see structures on the horizon: towering black spires that thrust into the clouds. One of the spires moved.
I will go there. The words percolated inside her until she began to walk.
The two people standing before Redcarr had already surprised him by not being freakishly dressed weirdos. They further surprised him with their findings.
“As far as we can ascertain,” began Madeline King, the lead researcher on the alternative linguistics team, “the halos, as they have been dubbed, are an amalgamation of known symbols and mathematical patterns.…”
“But so intricately entwined that they cannot easily be identified without being broken down into their purest forms,” interrupted her partner, Phillipe Montenegro, unaware of her admonishing glance.
“Indeed,” King continued, “we have identified cipher runes dating back over a thousand years.”
“Elder Futhark,” added Montenegro.
“Yes, Futhark derives from Old Norse, but these have been married to unverified sigils from The Book of Azathoth.”
“The book of what?” Redcar sighed, rubbing his face.
“Azathoth,” repeated Montenegro, “and these, in turn, have been broken into simpler forms using hyperbolic tessellation fractals and then rendered…”
Redcarr cut him off with a hand in the air. “Simplify. Give me something I can tell the AC without him shooting me.”
King placed a manila folder on the raised desk. “The contents of this won’t be much use to you then, Group Captain. Just tell Grant that by working backwards, we think we can decipher a basic meaning to the symbols.”
“Don’t let me stop you, then,” said Redcarr, picking up the folder. “Get back to it.”
As the two interpreters left the room, they parted to allow a red-faced young man who was barreling toward the dais, a scrap of paper in his hand.
“Group Captain Redcarr!”
Redcarr jumped down from the stage and snatched the paper, scanning it quickly before yelling at the comms officer. “Get AC Grant back in here! We have a new phase-sign on the edge of London!”
How long had she been walking for? Minutes? Days? The spires on the horizon had not grown at all; many of them had uprooted and disappeared over the distant curvature of the desert. The sand continued to shift beneath her feet and the air had grown no less frigid. Jasi thought she had been deafened by the constant rush of wind past her ears—surely that rushing noise was her own blood in her veins—but then a new sound came, so high and intrusive it stopped her in her tracks. It was a whining, buzzing sound, mercilessly aggravating, growing louder. Jasi turned slowly, scrutinizing the air for the source of the irritation, and then she spasmed as tiny pinpricks of pain riddled her body. She spun wildly and then she saw them. A cloud of tiny insects, swarming around her chest and waist, biting, stabbing with their stingers. Jasi tried to run, but the sand offered no purchase and so she stood and swatted at her antagonists with flattened palms, hoping to knock them to the ground. As the insects attacked her she was able to squash them against herself, feeling nothing as she slapped them against her numb skin. Despite the bug numbers dwindling, the buzzing grew louder, to the point where she could no longer function rationally. She flailed wildly, all thoughts of reaching the spires receding as she fought against the biting flies and their constant, awful drone. She stumbled forward, brushing insects from her eyes, and then she saw new shapes in the sand: tiny towers of dirt and glass dust arranged in clusters between the shallow dunes. Their nests. Even as she watched yet more insects poured from these structures, and Jasi lumbered forward, determined to stamp their homes into the dust.
Air Commodore Grant blustered into central command, purple and steaming. “Bring me up to speed!” he roared, stumbling to his seat behind the desk, reeking of Scotch.
Premature celebration, thought Redcarr as he shared the monitor images with his superior. “Second Thrasher attack, sir. It materialized south of the Thames about ten seconds ago. Hardly any phase warning.”
“Damn.” Grant pawed at a stack of notes next to the laptop, “Where are we?”
Redcarr checked the screen. “The London defense is already engaged, sir. Mostly all gone. I have what’s left of the EAC refueling in route to the location. ETA four minutes.”
“Armaments?”
“Looking rough, sir. I’ve made Rollover—Sgt. Wallis—the acting WC. According to his reports they’ve next to nothing left in the pipes save cannon rounds and a handful of air-to-airs.”
“God help them,” said the AC. “Bring me those fucking freaks in the basement. I want to know why this thing has attacked so soon.”
“Yes, sir.” Redcarr passed on the order and returned his attention to the monitor, grimacing.
You have done well. The thought welled up from deep within and caressed
her warmly, antiseptic words that made the stinging fade away. Jasi knew the commendation had come from the horizon, and she looked up from the crushed mounds at her feet to see the spires moving toward her. So vast were they, so massive their strides, that they were upon her in moments, resplendent in their liquid-pitch carapaces, their sinewy, hinged claws sinking into the desert sending silica waves spouting skyward. Jointed, cylindrical appendages sprouted from slits in the central spires, and Jasi caught the shimmer of lustrous black hair within: a writhing veil over multitudes of milky orbs. The closest forelimb reached out for her, and Jasi smiled as the point of one bristly pincer pushed onto, and then through her, drawing her out of the cold wind and into the warm dusk of a late summer. Mission accomplished.
King and Montenegro stood before Grant’s desk, the looks on their faces indicative of the roasting he was giving them. When he had finally spluttered his last and wandered off claiming to need another drink, the pair turned to Redcarr.
“Apologies,” said Redcarr, motioning for them to join him on the stage, “he’s under a lot of stress.”
“Aren’t we all?” said King, gathering back her folder from Redcarr’s pile.
Montenegro stabbed at the screen, “Is this live?”
“Yes,” said Redcarr. “We can’t fathom why London is getting hit again.”
“Strategy,” replied King. “The Thrashers are cutting off supply ports, communications, and all potential threats before the final invasion.”
“Much the same as we would,” added Montenegro. The young man suddenly snapped his head forward and peered at the screen. “Group Captain, can you rewind that?”
“Of course.” Redcarr tapped the keypad until Montenegro waved his hand.
“There! Freeze it there!”
