Blood-Dimmed Tide

My boots crunch over glass as I climb the slippery hill of rubble to see the inevitable. Twisted fragments of steel burnt blue are the only things not covered in morning dew.

The city stretches below, oddly peaceful. Graceful towers on narrow buttresses of spun carbon rise from green smears of parks which also serve as farmland; crystal petals on their sides turning even now to blindly seek the first rays of light as the sun, painfully bright, rises high enough to begin warming the valley. Disturbed by the movement, flocks of birds which roost at night in their shelter take flight and wheel across the sky in patterns that seem to have some meaning, that seem to reflect the calm of the city. Were it not for the drifting smoke, the random fragments of concrete scattered like ticker-tape, the routed columns of infantry hazily visible against the raw, umber soil of the far side of the valley, one might almost believe it. This is the calm that comes when hope is gone: a fuck-it-all kind of a calm.

In my ear, muttered instructions and coded bursts of near-noise on data bands signal the victors; a final warning, far too late for action. Out of the rising sun, a squadron of H-52's streaks noiselessly overhead, like wrathful metal gods. Long enough later that one wonders if they were merely phantoms, the shattering thunder of their passage rolls through, a seismic event that is felt in the diaphragm. It is a precursor, the merest harbinger, of the noise that follows.

In front of me, the Phan river is as broad and slow as the once-mighty Mississippi. At the head of the valley, where the Phan is a mere trickle of snowmelt dancing from the cliffs, it begins. At first it is a mere shimmer at the back of the eye, like the glint of sunlight on distant glass. It comes on, sweeps through the valley; a series of explosions that grow like fastmotion film of fields of sunflowers the size of skyscrapers, and after the initial impacts concentric rings of fire like waves in a pond kicked up by a handful of pebbles. The city moves with it; the ground beneath buckles and actually flows as the tiny bomblets, each no larger than an apple, detonate at heights ranging from one to five meters, each precisely calculating from moment to moment the position of each neighbor until the penultimate instant.. A secondary wave of explosions follows as collapsing buildings, their roofs littered with tiny metal stragglers, lose enough height to trigger the detonations. Some may linger for months, until vagaries of weather and erosion bring them low enough to trigger their checked wrath.

The noise is not merely indescribable, but on some level incapable of even being fully experienced. After the first shock of it hits my lungs, in registers too low to really be called sound, the blast follows, and were my eardrums unprotected in it they would be driven inward to the point of bursting. After that, quickly, the pressure drops and it turns cold as air begins to rush down from the mountains. I shiver even as the flames (not even consuming the city, yet, but still expanding outward from their centers fed only by all the martial knowledge of six million years of primate evolution) spiral upward not in the classic mushroom shape, but in vast red-orange tornados of conflagration.

It is like gazing into Hell.

I watch as a complex amphitheater tumbles upward like a deck of cards. Entire streets whirl upward like ribbons caught in a playful breeze, flashed so hot that the asphalt stretches like taffy. I can't see the birds anymore.

I watch as the roof of a building on the edge of town, outside of the devastation, folds back and flights of armored transports begin to rise from it, eerily reminiscent of the birds so lately incinerated. The pile of rubble I am standing on shifts as the massive foreleg of a Washington Mark VI slams into it, and I skip sideways over sliding debris. Craning my neck painfully upward, I watch it settle into position, its arms spreading akimbo in a lazy grappler's position. I should be deaf, but I can hear the clack clack clack of the starter engines as the twin twenty-foot miniguns begin to turn. The noise quickly becomes a high-pitched screech on the edge of hearing as the barrels whirl into near invisibility, nothing more than seeming translucent cylinders of ethereal substance.

And then the firing begins; a ceaseless ripping burr of sound that seems oddly disconnected from the man-sized muzzle flash that strobes afterimages across the retina. In the distance, now almost too far away for the naked eye to see, the armored carriers become ungainly steel doilies dropping from the sky. Each was packed with the young and infirm, unable to escape the city on foot; now they are nothing more than a fine mist and moistened bone dust,.drifting pinkly downward. Spent shells, each slightly radioactive (from the depleted uranium slugs now travelling toward the hapless noncombatants at just under the speed of sound) and each roughly the size of a fire extinguisher, rain down toward me. And my phone rings.

"Stop."

Noise ceases. The shells hang glinting brassily in the sky, the conflagration stops its helldance across the cityscape below. Smoke hangs in the air, like ghosts of memory.

I lift it to my ear, "Yeah."

His voice is thick and sickly, the voice of a man who hasn't talked for the past week. "You nearly here?"

"Yeah, I'm on my way." I waved one finger in a stylized rectangle, followed with a reverse of the same motion. Two six-foot screens sprang to life in the air. In one, a bumper level view from a speeding car, a digital readout top left reads 108. In the other, a scrolling map with a blinking dot in its center. I do the math. "About half an hour."

"Well, see -" his voice gurgled moistly, and I heard him hawk and spit.. "See if you can't speed it up a little. We may have a problem."

"All right."

I tucked my phone back onto my belt, and couldn't help but look at the blank steel round of the pilot's cabin on the Washington. Sitting in there, hair just regrowing, reddened skin still itching around the surgical plastic of a new neural interface on the back of his skull, the pilot sat in a biofeedback chamber, linked to his machine, unable to smell the smoke and flame and even his own unwashed stink. I knew his name, because it had been mine twenty years ago. I turned and looked further down the line of engagement, and following a second string of projectiles to its source, I could just make out behind its frozen muzzle flare the bulk of another Wash Six, in which sat the man with whom I had just spoken. Out in the valley, oozing rivers of glass are frozen in the act of dropping into the Phan, kicking up motionless clouds of superheated steam.

Motionless, yes. Sometimes it feels as though we are always here.
I turned toward the screen which showed the speeding roadway, gave a practiced mental tic, and became the car.

On the plus side of fifty miles away, buried in automated cropland like a stingray in the ocean floor with only a slender whip antenna protruding, Thull was worried; or at least as close to worried as it was possible for him to be with his modified glandular systems. The radio traffic had gotten sporadic, and passenger flights had been diverted. One superigible had been sent on a flight path that would add six hours to its journey rather than heading directly overhead.

It could have been anything, but it smelled wrong. Ancient, atavistic reactions, which in him had been honed to a sort of sixth sense, prickled the nape of his neck, gave an uncomfortable crawling to the spot between his shoulder blades. He felt these even with his sensorium crowded with the images and tactile feedback of his lifter; the interface had been customized to allow the true sensorium to intrude.

He stretched his neck, felt the stretch and pop of cervical vertebrae. Nothing to do but wait. Yet one fist clenched and unclenched with the sound of leather being twisted.

Hurry the fuck up, Gaunt, he thought. I want off this stinking rock.