The blurred topography beneath winks at me. Guns. They’re almost pretty. Rail slugs whip past at speeds too fast to see. They must slash furrows through ranks of men behind me, to my right, to my left. I can’t tell. I can’t care. I can’t look back. All I can do is go down, down fast as I can to where death waits with its mouth open and its teeth gnashing the men ahead.
My brain is recovering from the sensorial overload of drop shock.
I register landmarks. The city to my left. Bastion One north. The crater south.
I’m on target. I’m not lost. I still don’t have a name. I’m an insect in the path of speeding machines and munitions that won’t even notice my death because they’re not aiming at me. I’m too small.
The assault is too big to grasp much less evoke an emotional reaction. I feel nothing. Not even fear. Just shock and awe and insignificance. I witness the assault in staggered, isolated frames.
Gun batteries belch fire and die by fire.
A whole block of cityscape disappears under the wreckage of a pinwheeling destroyer.
A squadron of bombers slips under flak. I think they’re ours.
A hundred Praetorians vanish in a flash of light.
A clawDrill’s arrest program fails and it disintegrates against a starscraper.
A giant ice monument to Ragnar Volarus melts as a particle beam blazes through its torso.
Three ripWings with Lune crescents on their wings rocket past to shoot down a lone enemy fighter. The crescent seems like the mark of some insane king. Not me. Someone else. Some authority who has strategy, reasons, a plan.
I have no plan. Survive the passage. That’s my only job.Dive. Make landfall. Find my drill. Then the rest. I’m locked onto my drill’s beacon. So are Ajax and Rhone. They materialize out of the chaos onto my flanks. Cityscape veined with colorful advertisements swells ahead. Rapidly, the buildings and battlements grow taller, grander even as the scenes of battle shrink.
A ripWing crashes into a soft-drink advertisement, beheading the smiling vixen.
Armored men dive onto gun batteries and lay charges.
A Praetorian lands too fast behind his clawDrill and is sucked into its business end.
Missiles slither from civilian starscrapers.
Bodies fly like confetti from a bisected transport.
My theater shrinks and becomes more comprehensible the closer I draw to our drill. It has landed on a metal and duroglass mesa about half a click shy of our designated landfall. Fuck it. Its Helldiver has already started to dig. I don’t blame him. The dull gray surface rushes up to greet me. Am I dead? Am I Hades staring at a necropolis where humans are fused in the landscape itself? The mesa has faces in it.Faces.Hundreds of terrified faces.
No. It’s an apartment complex. Those are windows. Tenants.
I invert, land, and become a man again. I am alive. I almost roar.
My heart hammers in my chest. Under my boots a Green woman holding a glass of whiskey stares at me through the cracked duroglass of her living room window. The plants in her apartment start to shake, but not from me. Her eyes meet the dark glass eyeholes of my helmet. In the reflection of the glass between us I see my second wave descending behind me.
I feel powerful. She is insignificant. I am too hateful from the drop and the death I saw to care if my thoughts might be wicked. The Green flashes me the crux and tilts back her whiskey.
It’s already boiling. She screams. Her plants behind her wither. Her hair singes. Moisture abandons her body and her flesh catches fire as the heat generated by our clawDrill rages through her apartment. Frozen by the whiplash from insect to human again, I watch the woman with detached remove, thinking:Who’s the bug now?
The spell is broken when Ajax barks my name.
My Praetorians have secured our landfall. Dogfights swirl overhead. Rhone stomps up to me with bad news.
“They prioritized the clawDrills. Took out half of them. The rest have landed and have penetration.”Only half. Gods, their ripWings are good. I hop onto a coms antenna protruding from the surface of the apartment complex. I have a few seconds to see the landfalls from a clear vantage. Even then, it’s impossible to tell if my plan is doomed.
The light of war stutters across the landscape. It stirs a memory, summoning an apocalyptic image I saw in an old paper book when I was young and making my way through the Palatine stacks—a lithograph depicting the war of god’s angels after paradise was lost. The clawDrills tower on the grim hellscape like the pagan obelisks to which the angels flocked.
It is hell—terrible and awesome and silent beneath the heavens. I can appreciate its strange beauty now that I am human again. Maybe that is the problem. Maybe that is why we wage war, because bugs don’t and angels do.
I shiver and so do the drills as they disappear into the moon. Geysers erupt after them. Level by level the moon depressurizes and spills its guts out. They were things once, the guts. Metal bulkheads, glass windows, plastics, insulation, and bodies, all now churned into fractal spew. Then identifiable debris comes as pressure shoves anything untethered on the compromised levels toward the holes ripped in their world. Toward these debris geysers rush my Praetorians.
