EAGLEOPOLIS

SUPER EARTH

2185.05.22

"Good morning, Eagleopolis," Adamas said into the command net, watching the tactical feed from the War Room. "I have wonderful news. There is a gun under your city."

"A gun," Alpha repeated, flatly, somewhere on the surface of Super Earth. "Sir. It is six in the morning."

"It is a very large gun, Alpha. An orbital defense cannon, to be precise. Emergency planetary hardware, buried under the Congressional Rapids Family Fun Zone back when someone thought the war was over. Your job is to raise it, aim it, and put a shell through the Overship that has been hovering over the eastern districts for the past fourteen hours."

A short pause on the channel. Then Lunar, with genuine feeling: "I would very much like to shoot an Overship."

"Then we are all motivated," Adamas said. "Briefing continues. The drive you pulled off Widow's Harbor has finally been decrypted. Most of it was fleet movements, which arrived usefully late. But there was one file on unknown enemy units. You remember the blobs of meat?"

"I was literally being chased by them," Lunar said.

"Intel calls them Fleshmobs. They appear to be Illuminate experiments. Attempts to fuse Voteless together into single larger organisms. Slow, heavily massed, and they absorb small-arms fire very well. They were in the test footage. Not the most pleasant to watch over breakfast."

"How do we kill them?" Choko asked.

"Concentrated fire, heavy ordnance, or fire. Ideally all three."

"I would like to be assigned the fire part," Choko said, immediately.

"You always would like to be assigned the fire part."

“That is true.”

"Choko, you have the fire part. Alpha, platform security. Lunar, you are, like last time, on horde clearing duty. You have the cannon controls once the platform surfaces. Get moving."

The Family Fun Zone had been built for a version of Eagleopolis that no longer existed. Its carousel stood melted in the middle of a plaza that had been a queue for roller coasters. Cartoon mascots, painted on walls now pocked with plasma burns, smiled at nothing. The slides had been turned into firing positions by someone before them, which Adamas counted as good news, and the merry-go-round had been turned into a barricade, which he counted as better news.

"Platform located," Alpha reported. "Big hatch, middle of the plaza. Looks like it wants a code."

"It wants a sequence. Sending it now," Adamas said. "The platform takes ninety seconds to rise, and another ninety to bring the cannon to battery. The sequence will also broadcast a rather large amount of electromagnetic noise, so expect company. Ninety seconds is a long time. Keep them off the hatch."

The hatch opened with a hiss and a groan, much like Adamas’s morning routine. Below the plaza, machinery that had slept since the last war began to move, and the ground started to hum.

They came out of the side streets while the platform was still rising.

There was an ancient technique in what is now known as Sector 02 of Super Earth, thousands of years old and long lost to time, where by doing a specific skipping step, one can gain much higher speed than walking, yet spend far less effort than running.

The Voteless that have begun to investigate the commotion used exactly none of it, but nevertheless covered ground fast enough.

Overseers drifted up behind them, staffs glowing. The first wave broke on Choko's fire line, which she had laid across the plaza approaches with the care of an artist composing a still life.

"Contact front!" she called, and the Torcher roared.

The flame caught the wave and rolled it up. The Voteless burned the way everything burns, eventually, and Choko did not make them wait for eventually. She walked her line back and forth behind the fire like a farmer checking a fence.

"Beautiful," she said. "Absolutely beautiful."

"Less admiring," Alpha said, cutting down an Overseer that had drifted past the flank. "More firing."

The platform reached full height, and the cannon came up out of it like a periscope the size of a building, shedding dirt, playground litter, and empty casings.

"Sixty seconds to battery," Adamas said. "You have new contacts. Multiple avenues. And Alpha - you have something big in the northern approach. The footage was right."

It came around the corner of a gift shop with the slow, rolling patience of a landslide. It had been people once. Now it was a mass of them - a knotted, heaving ball of fused limbs and torsos, ten feet tall and wider, dragging itself forward on hands that were no longer attached to anyone in particular. Faces showed on its surface and sank back in. Where small-arms rounds struck it, the flesh simply closed over.

"Okay," Lunar said. "That's the thing."

"That's the thing," Adamas confirmed. "Airburst. Mind your backblast, and mind everyone else. We already have enough chunks of flesh flying around today."

"Friendly fire," Alpha said, "would be very on-brand for this mission."

Lunar was already moving, jogging a wide arc to get the Fleshmob lined up against the empty carousel, the RL-77 coming up on his shoulder. The launcher felt almost toylike for what it was. He settled the reticle above the mass, where the rockets would have room to arm and burst.

"Clear my front!" he shouted, mostly to Choko.

"It's cleared!"

He squeezed. The RL-77 coughed politely and shot out a rocket in a graceful gliding arc. It reached just under the many limbs the Fleshmob was lumbering on, at least two of which seem to be legs. Then it split.

The airbursts bloomed one after the other, quick as claps of thunder. The blast of an airburst rocket does not cone forward like a shaped charge. It simply happens, in every direction at once, a sphere of pressure and fragments that treats everything inside it as equally guilty. The Fleshmob came apart in layers. The first burst took the mass of it and lifted the whole thing half a meter off the ground. The second burst shredded what was left of the torso region into a fine blue mist. Bursts three through twelve made sure that the mass of what’s left was very evenly distributed across the ground.

When the smoke cleared, there was a shallow crater where the thing had been, and the carousel was somewhat shorter than before.

"Target destroyed," Lunar said.

"The carousel is also destroyed," Alpha said.

"The carousel was already dead. I've avenged it."

"Forty seconds to battery," Adamas said, because the War Room had decided that comedy, like all good things, must be scheduled. "Second wave incoming. This one is larger."

The next ninety seconds were the kind that get left out of official reports. The Voteless came in a flood this time, three avenues at once, and behind them, two Harvesters stepped over the barricades like men stepping over garden fences. Choko burned the left avenue until her Torcher ran dry, swapped canisters like a bartender making a cocktail, and burned it some more. Alpha fought the right avenue with saber and plasma accelerator in a way that would have made a eighteenth-century dueler immensely proud. Lunar put his last airburst volley into a Harvester's shield and then, swearing creatively, finished its leg joint with the launcher's stock, which was not what the launcher's stock was for, and which worked anyway.

"Cannon at battery," Adamas said. "Target locked. The Overship is directly above the eastern skyline, altitude two thousand. You have one shot before its escort finds your position. Fire when ready."

Alpha climbed the platform, blood-slicked to the elbow, and put his hand on the firing plate, because someone had to, and it might as well have been him.

The cannon fired.

The sound arrived late, a single enormous crack that rolled through every district at once. High above the skyline, the shell crossed two thousand meters in less than a heartbeat and punched through the Overship's dome at its thinnest point, clean in and out the other side. For a moment, nothing happened. Then every purple and blue light on the vessel flickered at once. The great tentacles went rigid, then curled slowly inward, like fingers closing around nothing. A sound came down from the ship - not an alarm, something lower, felt more than heard, the whole hull vibrating like a struck glass. Light poured out of the hole in the dome, wrong-colored, too bright. The Overship listed, slowly at first and then all at once, and fell out of the sky trailing ribbons of glowing blue fluid. It struck the outer districts beyond the city line with a shockwave that flattened windows across half of Eagleopolis, and the fires it made were visible from every rooftop in the city.

On the plaza, three Helldivers stood very still, covered in dirt, grime, ash and what can only be described as protein, and looked up at the empty patch of sky where the thing had been.

"Direct hit," Adamas said, from very far away, and even through the comm the War Room could hear someone cheering.

"Extraction is inbound," Lia's voice cut in. "Pelican, four minutes. Do not linger. The Overship had called a gigantic amount of warp ships to avenge it before it died, and they are very angry."

They did not linger. They fought their way to the extraction point two blocks east in a running battle that felt almost cheerful. Lunar was telling everyone within radio range that he had personally killed an Overship with his bare hands, and the RL-77 had been the bare hands.

The Pelican came in low and hard, ramp down, and they piled aboard with grins so broad you could almost see them through their helmets. Choko was already planning which buildings around the plaza could have been burned if there had been time. Alpha was cleaning his saber with something that had once been a mascot costume.

The Pelican banked and climbed, rising over the rooftops, and the pilot's voice came over the internal speakers. It was quiet.

"Before we get clear," the pilot said. "You should look down."

They looked down.

Eagleopolis spread out beneath them from horizon to horizon, and from up here you could see all of it at once. Fires raged from district to district, connecting into one burning sea with streets for rivers. Columns of smoke stood over the skyline like pillars holding up a low black sky. Skyscrapers lie either fallen in ruins, or retain only their tattered concrete skeletons. The defense lines they had fought on were thin threads of light in all that dark, and as they watched, one of the threads went out. Far to the east, where the Overship had fallen, three more hung in the sky, unmoving, waiting.

Nobody on the Pelican said anything.

They had raised a gun and killed a ship. Somewhere down there, the math had not changed.

The city is falling.