by Joshua James
What really bothered Engano, above all else, was the fact that this was never supposed to happen. The UEF and AIC were at war, sure, but neither dared attack the other’s capital planet. Mutually assured destruction was the best of deterrents.
The UEF was constantly developing planet-destroying weapons. Chief among them was the unnamed secret project on Earth’s moon. All reports that AIC spies brought back said it was a massive stationary rail cannon capable of hitting a target hundreds of trillions of light years away, propelled by gravity itself.
Naturally, the AIC had to create a counter-weapon. Only a select few, including the soldiers manning their planet-killing weapon, knew where it was. Everyone stationed there was specifically chosen because they had no family and few friends. They were loners who’d have no reason to ever tell or even communicate with any outside parties. Mutually assured destruction kept either side from using their mega-weapons, and also kept them from taking the fight to each other’s homes.
The feeling that Engano had failed the citizens of Vassar-1 would creep up later, she knew: when she was alone, trying and failing to bury her past with the help of booze, men, or both. Probably both. Definitely both.
But right that moment, alone in her thoughts in the back of the transport, she allowed her fury and rage to come to the forefront. She wanted someone to pay. She wanted blood, a pound of flesh.
“Take me to the Bowery,” she ordered the pilot through her HUD.
“The slums, ma’am? Are you sure?”
“That’s what I said. Let’s hit these assholes where it hurts, in their home. Radio base, have them send some backup. We’re raiding their damn temple.” Engano wasn’t thinking straight, but she didn’t have any other plan.
“Ma’am, respectfully, we need to get you—”
“Do it,” she snapped. “If someone was going to blast me out of the sky, it would have happened by now. And the best way to make sure you bastards actually move is to put myself in harm’s way first.”
The city sentinels and the high militias were hard at work, killing or capturing any terrorists across the city. There was no time for organized raids on knowns cells, but there was no need for it, either. The bastards were brazenly making themselves known now.
Things seemed as if they were coming under control, but Engano saw that as a bad sign. So instead of joining the efforts to finish off or corral the last of the cultists, she wanted to hit them where she knew it would hurt. She was counting on a certain element of surprise. The cultists were acting like magicians trying to draw attention away from their trick, whatever it was, but Engano wasn’t interested in allowing herself and her forces to be led around by sleight of hand. She’d take the offensive.
Only a couple of minutes from the Bowery, Engano readied herself. She demanded a rifle from one of her escorts and prepared to set boots down herself. If she was going to order this, she would damn well take part.
The escorts glanced at each other. The one closest to her said, “Ma’am, I can’t let you—”
“Not only are you going to let me, you’re going to volunteer to give me your flak jacket and helmet along with your rifle. You wouldn’t allow me to land in such a hot zone without protection.”
The men again exchanged glances.
“Or would you prefer I was unarmed and ill-protected?”
The one closest to her warily complied.
“One minute until touch down, ma’am,” said the pilot through Engano’s HUD.
Her hands started to sweat. It’d been awhile since she’d been in the field, both as an agent and as a soldier. But she assured herself it was like riding a bike. It’d all come back as soon as she hopped back on.
As the transport lowered, Engano saw more and more of the streets, and it was much more horrific than looking on from up high. There were bodies everywhere. The denizens of the areas around the Bowery hadn’t been spared by their cultist neighbors.
Dozens of dead littered the square that the AIC military wanted to set down on. So instead of actually landing, they had to hover a couple of feet above the cobblestone-covered ground. Engano was one of the first to jump out, narrowly missing a deceased woman face-down in her own blood. The six soldiers in the transport with her followed.
Just as Engano’s transport set off, another landed. It was some of the backup she’d ordered. Six more soldiers joined the pre-raid group. Another half a dozen should’ve been on their way, but Engano didn’t want to wait.
Engano knew that speed would be key. If any of the Oblivion leadership or members were still at their temple in the Bowery, they wouldn’t stick around for long. So she gave the order.
“We’re heading in, straight on. Your group, go around to the west entrance. The temple’s in the middle, we’ll meet you there. Eliminate any cultists you come across, regardless if they’re armed or not. There’ll be no prisoners until we reach the objective. Understood?”
“Ma’am, what if we—”
“No prisoners.”
Engano looked across the square at the second group of soldiers, who stared back, waiting for an acknowledgment of her order.
“Understood,” came the answer in her HUD at last.
“All right, let’s go,” Engano said.
But the words were barely out of her mouth when several of the supposedly dead civilians in the square outside sprang up off the cobblestone and started firing at them.
Two
Two in Engano’s group went down, each catching a bullet to the back of their head and back respectively. One from the other group was also killed instantly.
Engano turned and knelt down in one fluid motion. “Behind us!” she screamed, completely unnecessarily, as everyone had figured that out by now.
She took down one of the cultists, an old man in ragged clothing holding an ancient slug gun, with a pair of shots to his chest. The rifle felt strange at her shoulder, and she allowed the kick to push her third shot high, but the damage was done. The man crumpled and fell.
Reasserting her grip and leaning harder into the next shots, she expertly placed two rounds in the face of the young terrorist next to him. She tried not to think about the fact that she’d actually been aiming for his chest. She watched the boy collapse, and he was a boy. But he’d been holding a gun and pointing it at her.
Something rumbled in the pit of Engano’s stomach. The sharpshooter in her wasn’t exactly coming back just like riding a bike, and the cold-blooded killer was even more difficult to coax out of retirement. Even so, with the help of her small team of officers, the ambushing cultists were all dead in less than a minute.
But they were just the initial contact in what was looking like a well-thought-out trap to greet any unwanted visitors. Shots broke out from inside the Bowery itself, preventing Engano’s now smaller, pinned-down group from entering. The other group, however, must have evaded the notice of the shooters inside. Within a few minutes, they managed to work their way around the far side and hit the group from behind.
In the crossfire, Engano quickly led her team on an assault of the front gate. As the fire diminished, a tall sergeant kicked open the slum gate. Engano followed him in and surveyed the dozens of dead in the square.
Super-heated high velocity bullets screamed past overhead.
She lifted up one of the corpses—taking care that this one was actually dead and not another shooter playing possum—and took cover behind it. Another AIC soldier was lost in the secondary ambush. She was down to three.
Up the hill from their position, and holding the higher ground, were dozens more positions firing down on them. What few officers remaining from the group that had initially come from behind the first group were now hopelessly pinned down, themselves hiding from gunfire coming from further behind them.
“HUD, call AIC Base 24,” ordered Engano.
“This is B24. What can I do for you, Madam Director?” answered a young soldier on the other end of the HUD.
“I need an immediate d
rone airstrike,” she said calmly. “I’m painting the target now. Need this one in a hurry, terrorists have us pinned down.”
“Say again, ma’am,” the solider replied. “It sounded like you said—"
“Do it fast!” she barked.
To his credit, the young man caught on fast. “Understood,” he snapped. “We’ll have inbound eyes on your position in forty seconds.”
“Make it thirty,” she said. “HUD, end call.”
Engano used a laser on her rifle to mark the side of a burnt-out temple that seemed to have gunfire coming from every window. It was also the kind of place where innocents might be hiding, but if that was the case, then the terrorists were using them as human shields. She didn’t see anything to suggest that was the case, but she didn’t see anything to dissuade her of what she expected the terrorists to try, either.
In her experience, collateral damage was a part of fighting extremists and terrorists. It often created more enemies, but it was the ones right in front of her that she had to worry about. ‘To make omelets, you have to break some eggs.’ That was something her mother used to say. She probably hadn’t meant for her only daughter to use it to rationalize killing non-combatants, but Engano had to justify this somehow. You’re a sick bitch, she told herself.
“Incoming strike, take cover!” Engano yelled out to her three remaining AIC support. She hid behind her human meat cover, keeping her target painted, and waited for the incoming missiles.
The whole outer border of the Bowery that linked to the temple on both sides disappeared, along with the temple itself, in a series of loud explosions. Even behind her human shield, Engano could feel the intense heat after the drone-launched missiles hit their mark. The ground shook under her. It shook so violently, in fact, that some of the cobblestones became dislodged. And in the immediate wake, the gunshots ended.
“Everyone okay? Sound off!” Engano stood up and immediately checked on the three soldiers still with her.
“I’m good!”
“Safe and sound, ma’am.”
“Ready to roll.”
“Okay.” Engano looked at the damage from the drone strike. The ramshackle homes of the Bowery, just inside the wall, had stood no chance against the missiles, and the resulting damage was proof of that fact.
Engano led the way in. She stepped carefully through the wreckage of the drone-struck homes. At one point she felt something squishy under the thin corrugated metal wall she stepped over. She tried to ignore it, and the implication that it was organic remains.
Through the smoke and fire, Engano emerged into the labyrinthine alleyways of the Bowery. She followed the holographically-projected directions in her HUD to the temple in the slum’s center.
Curious and frightened residents stuck their heads out their doors and windows to see what the hell was going on. “Go back in your homes! Now!” ordered Engano. The soldiers that followed her did the same.
More terrorist gunfire opened up from a stack of hand-built homes. That brought Engano and her group’s progress to a screeching halt. Before going any further, they needed to deal with the threat.
Engano nodded to one of her men and he shoulder-charged a nearby door, knocking it off its shoddily-made hinges. Engano rushed in behind him and scared the family that lived there half to death. They huddled under a table in the kitchen—which clearly functioned as the living room and bedroom as well.
There was no time to reassure them. Engano peeked around the corner of the entrance to the home and almost took a shot to the face. She leaned back as plaster was blown from the wall, and then returned fire, with little aim around the corner. But that allowed one of the soldiers with her to slide in low and, using her covering fire, he quickly dispatched the shooters.
Typical of Oblivion cultists, the attackers were poorly trained, if trained at all. They could barely hit something standing a few feet ahead of them, let alone a moving intelligent target that could fight back. But two of them at the very top of a set of stairs were entrenched behind enough cover that they were almost impossible to take out. That’s when Engano got an idea.
“Stay here, keep them occupied!” she ordered. Then she ran back out of the ramshackle house and looked for one of the myriad ladders leaning against the wall. The houses were built on top of each other here, and it was customary for every roof to simply be another floor for the next level of illegal construction. She found one and made her way up to the first roof level of the slum.
When she did, she had to pause a second to catch her breath and survey the area. She saw where she needed to go to flank the terrorists from above, but there was no good way to get there.
As quickly as she could, Engano made her way across the rooftops. She made it about forty feet before she heard a loud siren.
It was the last sound she’d ever thought she would ever hear. That siren meant that the planetary defenses were breached.
Engano looked up. She saw the ever-present glowing blue of the planetary shields dissolving. It was an alarming sight, but nowhere near as alarming as what came next.
She watched as forty or fifty AIC fighter ships flew upwards into the sky to meet whatever enemy was coming. They weren’t enough. That became quite apparent when three UEF dreadnoughts became visible in the skies above Vassar-1.
“You have to be kidding me,” she said aloud. Were the Oblivion cultists working with the UEF? Could even they sink so low?
Engano’s first instinct was to get on her HUD and try to figure out what the hell was going on. But as soon as the AIC fighters sent to engage the invaders started falling out of the sky as deadly fireballs, her HUD didn’t work. Nothing electronic worked, not even the targeting display on her rifle.
She looked back up, trying to work out what she could do to help at this point, when the make and model of the lead dreadnought became clear.
And it wasn’t just a dreadnought. It was a super dreadnought. The only one in existence.
Except the two just behind it looked the same.
She gasped.
It was the Atlas. They all were. But that was impossible.
Engano watched on helplessly as hundreds of UEF fighters began to pour out of all three super dreadnoughts.
And then the enormous forward cannons on the lead Atlas began to fire.
Three
Engano felt her shoulders slump. The terrorist attacks were bad, but the city could recover from them. But the sheer power of the dreadnought cannons ensured death and devastation on a whole different scale.
For the first time since she was a child, she felt tears on her cheeks. They were tears of helplessness, standing on the rooftops of the Bowery Slums and watching the energy beams stream down into the heart of Vassar-1.
A UEF fighter sped towards Bowery, nimbly avoiding Vassar-1’s anti-air cannons. The fighter made its way through the fireworks in the sky, and looked like it was heading straight for Engano herself.
At first, Engano thought it was all in her head. There was no way a single UEF fighter would come after just her. But when it started firing at her, rounds easily punching through the roof of the improvised structure on which she stood, she revised her opinion. Maybe it was dumb luck or maybe it was purposeful, but it didn’t matter. It was firing on her.
The only thing that saved her was the fact that the construction was so poorly done that the roof collapsed immediately under the barrage of fire, and she fell through moments before the deadly string of slugs could reach her.
Engano hit the ground hard. Pieces of roof fell on top of her. It took her a few moments to regain her bearings. When she did, what she saw was gruesome.
When Engano looked down, the floor beneath her was covered with blood. She looked for the source. It didn’t take long before she saw the arm of a dead AIC soldier, then the leg of another. There were five soldiers here, or at least portions of them. She only knew the number because she knew how big the squad had been. This was the team that had gone into the Bowery from th
e west. Something or someone had practically ripped them to shreds.
Beyond the walls, thanks to the open roof, she could hear clearly what was happening in the slums beyond. She could still hear gunfire. The staccato sound of AIC weapons was clear.
But then, suddenly, it all stopped. The gunshots were replaced with screams.
Engano picked up one of the dead soldier’s guns lying on the ground near her and ran to the front of the house. She peered out, but saw no activity.
I’ll be damned if all was for nothing.
She ran through the streets, hugging the sides of the homes and staying low. After she reached the temple and killed whoever was there, she told herself, she’d turn her attention to the UEF invaders.
All Engano could hear was the sound of her own heart pounding and her own heavy breathing as she searched the alleyways of the Bowery. But the streets made little sense to her. She couldn’t find her way without her HUD to help her out.
Part of her admired her enemies for their strategy. First they sprang a coordinated attack by the cultists; then they took out the city’s HUDs, leaving them even more vulnerable to the UEF invasion force. Truly it was brilliant, if only that was the plan, but part of her knew it wasn’t. Part of her was well aware of the truth, even if she didn’t want to think about it right now. This wasn’t a UEF military invasion, whatever it looked like. This was an alien invasion.
Finally, after what felt like hours, Engano found herself staring at the opening to the Oblivion’s temple. Dead cultists littered the entrance.
Like her own soldiers, the cultists, too, were dismembered. Blood and guts were splashed across the surrounding walls and streets like some macabre art installation. She felt the bile rise up in her throat, and fought it down.
