Chapter Text
“FU-!” the corporal screamed, and was blown to smithereens, spreading his insides in a splattered puddle where he had been standing. The battlefield was littered with such puddles, and a new one was created with every flash of light, glimmering in the dark like so many fireflies, winking out lives one by one. An eerie whistling filled the night sky above, silent propulsion systems keeping the guided missiles above in a chaotic, unpredictable orbit that would occasionally break to scatter entrails across the ground. They were designed to be shrapnel grenades, anti-personnel, with just the right payload to break a human’s bones from within. They hadn’t missed yet.
Why am I here, thought the Commander for the fifth time. I should be up with Tactical Command. It’s a waste to send me out here. They’d be throwing away an asset.
He held a rifle in his hand. Gas-propulsion, designed to shoot superheated matter through the air until it dispersed. It was an efficient weapon against people, a modern flamethrower and firehose, but utterly useless at range, and therefore unable to help him or anyone else against the missiles that rained down from above. He might as well have been armed to the teeth with toothpicks.
Another scream, this time from close by. The Commander turned his head and saw the soldier next to him clawing at a bright red hole in his chest with terror in his eyes. Looking down, both men saw a blinking light embedded in the cavity. The Commander stepped back and averted his gaze from the flash, feeling droplets of gore splatter his ankles. That had been close.
Another soldier ran up to him, catching himself as he nearly slipped on the pool of blood from his had-been comrade.
“Commander!” he shouted, a note of terror in his voice. “What do we do?”
The Commander thought for four seconds.
“Form up in packs of sixteen or more,” he said. “These missiles can come from any direction, so make sure that the ones in the center are aiming up. You should be able to stop them once they get into visual range. They are designed to turn and accelerate quickly, but not to do both at once. Either they’re going to bombard you from directly above, or they’ll go down right next to you and turn at a right angle. Either way, there is a narrow window in which they will be easy to predict and shoot. Understood?”
The soldier nodded and dashed off, calling for allies. The Commander didn’t bother joining him. The instructions he had given the man were doomed to fail eventually, but the way in which they failed would be informative.
The Commander watched as a group of soldiers formed, superheated gas burning through the fog of night as they attempted to light up the gloom and see their doom approaching.
Sure enough, the soldier from before began to scream from within a mass of his comrades as a missile embedded itself, not in his torso, but in the ground next to his feet. The resulting shockwave knocked him to the ground, along with the soldiers next to him, and they died in a flash from missiles streaking down to strike in the chaos. It had been the first time a projectile had failed to embed itself in flesh, but it wasn’t a miss. The missiles never missed.
Now the Commander knew why.
He cupped his hands like an old-timey megaphone and shouted to the darkness around him,
“It’s Her!”
The tone of the battle – if it could even be called that, anymore – changed instantly. Soldiers began shouting across the barren plain, carrying his words to the edges of the battlefield, and they began to fire their weapons straight up, illuminating the darkness with fifty-foot pillars of flaming light that widened as they grew further from the barrel, trying to intercept their deaths on the way down. The Commander didn’t bother. He knew that She would not allow anything so meager as guns to stand in Her way.
One by one, the lights winked out, a thousand tiny candles blown out in a dark room. If they had any sense, they would fire at the ground, heating up the short grass and stone until Her infrared sensors couldn’t distinguish between them and the earth. But he couldn’t say that. If he said that, She would undoubtedly hear.
He didn’t say a word. He just aimed his rifle at the ground and fired at maximum intensity, heating up a patch of grass that didn’t even have time to catch fire before it disintegrated into ash, revealing rough, sandy soil underneath. He kept going until the sand was an amorphous, shining sheet of glass, and then until that sheet began to glow red-hot and melt into the surrounding dirt. With that done, he turned a hundred and eighty degrees and began to do the same to another patch of earth some ten feet away.
Soldiers around him saw the light and began to realize what he was doing. Within moments, they too were melting the sand around them, trying to throw off the missiles’ sensors. It was working. For the first time, the Commander saw a missile bury itself in a slab of soft, superheated earth twenty feet away from the nearest soldier, and the man laughed, a high, wild sound of relief that carried across the plain.
So it went for another hour. Some of the missiles still found their mark, and hundreds of soldiers met their fiery ends, but many did not. A lesser man would have ascribed it to a miracle.
After that hour, when the first rays of light were beginning to creep over the horizon, fire erupted in the sky. The Commander heard the soldiers’ cheers of relief and exultation as the missiles began to fall, inert, to the ground.
Hovering above them, resplendent with the dawn, was a figure clad in black and blue, long golden hair flowing out from behind her in the wind. Jagged streaks of blinding white light lanced from her fingertips, and missiles fell. She seemed like a goddess in the sky, the eye of a storm of flashing lightning. A thunderclap sounded particularly close to the Commander, and he smelled ozone.
Within minutes, the last of the missiles had fallen. The woman descended slowly to earth, touching lightly on the ground before striding over to the Commander – fluidly, gracefully, as if gliding an inch above the surface of the world.
Shock had come.
“Soldier,” she said brusquely, “what’s the situation? Was that it?”
“It appears so,” the Commander replied.
“Hold on a sec. Commander? Is that you?”
The Commander took off his helmet, eyes adjusting to the lack of night vision.
“Yes.”
“Why the hell are you down here? Shouldn’t you be with-”
“TacCom? Yes, I should, but this is where I’ve been sent. I don’t agree with it, but orders are orders.”
Shock snorted. “Bloody suits. They couldn’t lead an op if they had a million years to plan it. As evidenced by-” she gestured around “-all of this. Mind explaining what happened here?”
“Legion,” the Commander said simply. “She was here. Hades wasn’t. We got bogged down on an open battlefield – which, I would remind you, is a suicidal place to fight Hades – and She picked us off one by one.”
Shock looked around in confusion. “Wait, they had you going after Hades? In a rural setting? Why? They operate in cities, everyone knows that. Urban warfare, and all that. Closed spaces.”
The Commander thought for three and a half seconds.
“Intel was good,” he said. “Clearly not good enough. Hades does have a marked advantage in places where they can take advantage of area effects, but you’re right. Had I been in charge of this operation, I would have called it off. I wasn’t.”
“Had you been in charge of this op,” Shock replied, “you would have sent capes, not glorified mooks. You do realize that this-” she gestured to his rifle “-wouldn’t have done anything against Phlegethon or Cocytus, right? And sending human waves after people aligned with Acheron is worse than a death sentence. What the hell was TacCom thinking?”
She was getting angry, the Commander knew, in that peculiar way that intelligent people did, where she listed everything she felt strongly about in an attempt to justify her emotion. The Commander didn’t see much point in that. If she wanted to be angry, there was no need to rationalize or be circumspect. Anger was simple, blunt. Straightforward. The Commander could almost approve of it, if not for the way it clouded people’s judgement.
“I don’t pretend to know what my superiors think,” he said. “I can only say that I would have done things differently, but that could be due to the benefit of hindsight.”
Shock snorted. “Oh, I know. You must be pissed at them, screwing up this badly. How you of all people manage incompetence, I will never understand.”
“I allow for it,” the Commander said. “Human error must always be factored in.”
“And did your factoring account for error on this scale?”
“My power is not without its limits. You know that. Had I insight into the objectives of my superiors in Tactical Command, I would have known to account for the possibility of catastrophe.”
“So how did you know it was Legion, and not a set of CPUs?”
“Reaction times. I set up a group of soldiers and told them to assume a formation intended to intercept and deter the missiles. The resulting change in tactics was swift, brutal, and admirably efficient – all of Legion’s hallmarks.”
Shock shook her head in exasperation. “Fucking Thinkers. You people are psychotic, you know that?”
“I wouldn’t consider myself to be a representative sample of all combat Thinkers,” the Commander said. “And psychosis is a blanket term encompassing a wide variety of-”
“Whatever. You know what I meant. Choppers’ll be here any minute. Anyone here need medical attention?”
“Not likely,” the Commander said. “Legion is, as I said, remarkably efficient. The missiles either hit or were diverted. There were no nonlethal injuries.”
Shock shuddered. “Fucking Artificers, too.”
“I would caution you against using Legion as a representative sample of all Artificers, as well. One or two of them are perfectly decent people.”
She blinked in surprise. “Was that a joke? From you?”
“Apparently so.”