At midnight, dawn broke over the coast. Sudden brightness flooded the ocean and sky. A hemisphere of flame towered over the beach. The low, dark clouds were stained crimson, and then shredded. A column of dust and fire and steam erupted upwards, huge and billowing. As it rose through the clouds it expanded, cooled, coiled back on itself. It loomed above him, seeming to fill the whole horizon. Lightning danced about it. Now there came a deep rumbling that he felt through his legs and chest. The wind shrieked around him and he felt its heat through the suit. The sky was a hundred shades of red and gold and bronze. The high winds caught the cloud and began to sweep away tendrils of dust. Still the column rose, the ocean turning to vapour, the sand baking to glass. Further away, there was another flash, and a third, and a fourth. The whole coast had turned to fire now. The jungles burned. Slowly, the clouds smeared together, merging into a writhing ceiling. The wind cooled and died. The sky darkened with smoke.
Jean had watched impassively. Now he turned and climbed the steps into the dropship. He moved slowly, as if resigned to defeat. In another field he watched a tactical model constructed with data from sensor platforms dropped near the targets, drones at the blast sites or flying high above, and recon sats in low orbit. He studied the damage assessments produced the combat expert systems.
"Alexei, it looks like we got all the primary targets. You may begin the secondary bombardment."
Then he focused on the last footage from one of the hunter-killers. The colony had been vaporised. Between the fireball and the drone observer a handful of machines huddled in a stand of trees that were burning like torches. Their carapaces were dark silhouettes against the inferno. The shockwave raced towards them leaving only devastation in its wake. As it passed it tore the trees apart and the drones tumbled before its force. Their ceramometallic armour cracked and then shattered. The final few frames were a storm of burning mechanical wreckage, broken and fragmented images and then blackness. He played the sequence again and again until he saw nothing but meaningless flickering. Finally, he shut down the whole field, slumped into a seat and closed his eyes. He still saw flames.
© 2002-3 Richard Baker