Justice didn't give us any time to rest. Everyone came back from Georgia, Athan and Karu were beat to hell and scheduled for regenerators at once, and I only saw a glimpse of AEGIS, who looked as though she'd had her throat torn out by a feral wolf, scratched metal shining through torn skin. But even as they were putting themselves together, Justice was in action.
I watched the satellite feeds as he made his way in a straight line across the state, further north than any incursion he'd done thus far. And he was completely obvious about his target.
Atlanta, home to half a million people. Capital of Georgia, seat of a lot of American history, from the civil rights movement to their role in sheltering hundreds of thousands during the Sino wars.
Of course, the city itself wasn't in any danger, I heard. XPCA were scurrying to get the usual locations evacuated -- courtrooms, law firms, offices and the like. But as I watched, I had a sinking feeling in my gut that this was going to be different from every other time, worse. He'd never acted like this before; in a variety of ways.
First, he wasn't moving quickly. That much was apparent by the fact we were still tracking him. When he wanted to, boom, way past supersonic, and too small to keep an eye on. But this time, while he was still shooting through the air upwards of three-hundred miles an hour, by his standards, that was a leisurely stroll.
And second -- and most worrying to me -- until now, whenever he'd killed, he'd retreated. He picked a target through some unknowable algorithm, killed them and often everyone in the same room or building until his hands were soaked in fresh blood, and then bolted away just before reinforcements could confront him.
And hey, honestly, before they could get themselves killed.
But this time, he wasn't doing that. He was drifting west towards Atlanta, and nobody knew what it meant. I heard orders flying around everywhere from this being our chance to take him out, to stunted questions about whether this constituted an event.
I didn't know what it was either, but I did know that on some level, this was immensely wrong. My stomach had lodged permanently upside-down, and I sat there, rocking in my chair, wishing someone would do something authoritative.
Of course, it took me a while to realize I might be that someone. Until now, I'd just thought of it as a formality on the edge of the loophole we'd created for ourselves, but technically, I was as much a director of the XPCA as any of the rest of the future committee.
I turned to TARGA, all black and shiny, and lurking in our office I think because this is where AEGIS tended to hang out. She was watching the same feeds I was, probably ten-thousand more of them, and her expression was a somber :/. I cleared my throat experimentally, to no effect.
So I spoke. "TARGA?"
She glanced up at me, the mass of black metal twisting and overlapping in a way which...well, Athan always called it like a cockroach. He wasn't exactly wrong.
"Yes, Lia?" she asked, her voice like a synth of AEGIS'.
"I'm ordering an evacuation of Atlanta," I told her with all the confidence I could muster. "The whole city."
She stared at me for a few long seconds. And then nodded. "Yes, Director. I'll begin routing our efforts at once."
It sorta tickled me how I went from 'Lia' to 'Director' within the span of a single sentence. She might have a huge chip out for Athan, but she was still, if nothing else, absolutely obedient to the rules and order.
Which, come to think of it, was probably why she had such issues with Athan.
Orders were already being relayed and followed on the feeds I was watching. It was like the vids of shaking a supercooled water bottle and watching the freeze propagate. In a growing cascade, the disordered confusion of what was going on, what to do, what actions were worth pursuing or not, they all began to crystalize and orient in line with the orders being given.
And if there were complaints, I didn't see 'em. Everyone knew by now, this was the job. We're the XPCA. Protecting civilians is our number one priority. It didn't matter if we completely expected Justice to turn around and fly away -- there were five-hundred thousand lives down there we would be betting against a flying lunatic.
It was impressive, the efficacy of that one order. Hundreds of trucks and VTOLs were already moving, the XPCA base just west of Atlanta already disgorging nearly all of its available resources, and others nearby spinning up, as more further out began to supplement them in turn.
And within minutes, all of America was engrossed in a huge web of genetic algorithms and osmosis, as TARGA dynamically reallocated forces across the states, surging inwards towards the southeast, but leaving a blanket covering the rest, redistributed and spread thinner, but not too thin.
Even for someone like me who wasn't particularly into this kind of thing, it was pretty nuts to watch. So many of the movements seemed pointless, likely to just make some XPCA dudes shake their heads at their sudden relocation like 'what the hell are the brass up to now?'. But seeing the whole picture, the three-thousand mile view, it was easy to see how even these trivial movements on the other side of the country were calculated moves. Filling in gaps, from filling in gaps, from filling in gaps, from mobilizing forces.
I had to sort of shake my head and marvel. Maybe forty percent of the entire XPCA was affected in some small way by the order I'd given. Hundreds of thousands of men and women, and billions of credits of machine, all shuffling around by the few words I'd uttered. It was insane to think I had that kind of power, that any of us had that kind of power. And it really reminded me of what Athan had said about this being our one and best shot of fixing the XPCA.
Because hell, here we were, with this kind of power at our fingertips. It seemed insane that there was anything we couldn't do.
A tally informed me that within fifteen minutes, the metropolitan Atlanta was already twenty percent evacuated. Sort of an astonishing pace, and while I'd thought that figure might slow down as the initial wave of rescue operations faded off, I really shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the rate was actually going up. Because, while yeah, there was a limit to how quickly XPCA could get into the city and civilians could get out, I was beginning to see that it was a physical limitation, not one of personnel and materiel.
They were just diving in and scooping people out constantly, bringing them to a relay point closer to the edge of the city, where again they'd be taken further. But the cool part was, as people were brought out of the densely-packed city center, the amount of space the forces had to work with increased exponentially. So while it was difficult work extracting them from downtown, there were a ton more roads to work with once they hit the suburbs. And TARGA, of course, seemed to have every single road in use, often creating beautiful convoys running down parallel streets, like a wall of refugees, with critical arteries of empty vehicles going back in for more.
I was beginning to think we were in the clear, the way she was handling it. Micromanaging ten-thousand or more vehicles at once...forget the paperwork we no longer had to do, for the first time, I really understood what AEGIS had been designed for, and how the XPCA...how anything, really, could benefit from her undivided focus. And TARGA was just that and more; a more powerful computing body, more intense focus, less inhibited with things like personal desires or autonomy.
It was crazy -- impossible -- think that all that wasn't enough. The scope, the scale, the efficiency, the top-down view of seeing it all unfold. She was a maestro, conducting the world's most complete symphony.
And he was the phantom. When he hit the city, the birds-eye view I had instantly exploded into disarray. Comms chatter lit up across all channels. But most horrifying of all was the live feed, the satellites' view, the traffic cams...the mounted cams of the exosuits on the ground.
I saw him float in, blackened arms outstretched and low, like a priest blessing his flock. Drifting, slower than before, at a walking pace almost.
And I also saw the exact extent of his power's range. His telekinesis, at least. Because in a sphere around him, maybe a hundred feet across, things just...annihilated.
The ground under him scraped away, digging a wide trench in the road, abandoned cars just disappearing into debris, pipes fracturing and water and sewage alike erupting into the air behind him. Buildings which stood too tall, too close, were sheared off. Perfectly spherical cuts torn out of them, like swiss cheese, exposing the rooms within, a bizarre voyeuristic destruction.
There were bullets, too. Missiles. Lasers and more, the XPCA and police and military in his path were unloading into him everything they had. But it seemed like the physical attacks were just dissipating into the vacuum sphere around him, and everything else was being deflected within it somehow.
As for where all the stuff he was destroying went? That became obvious with those poor people shooting at him. The clouds of...microscopic nothingness that he'd reduced the chunks of the city into...without even a gesture or glance, he shot it at them at what must have been a thousand miles an hour or more. One second, they were standing there, half in cover, black exosuit glinting in the sun, firearms barking.
And the next, just...blasted. The entire front-half of them gone, like they'd been eroded by a hundred years of lashing winds. A hollow, dusty shell in an instant, and the ground and walls around them, pocked with almost invisible holes, only discernible by the fact there were millions of them, and their freakishly geometric distribution.
The overall effect was just freaky. Surreal, impossible feeling. He drifted forward like it was nothing, took shots like it was nothing, killed anyone and anything in his path like it was nothing. His face showed no emotion, his hands never twitched or flinched...he was impartial, impassive, inscrutable. Eerily calm, in the face of the dozens he was killing, the millions in damages he was inflicting. In his deeds, he promised inescapable, inexorable death.
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It was...in a way...entrancing. Hypnotic, even. From up here, I mean. The feeds from the ground were just horrible, brutal, and short-lived. But seeing it from this distance, it was...it was almost...like…
It was like, the equal and opposite of what I'd just witnessed with TARGA, I realized. I had the same exact awe of watching something so much bigger than me unfold. A minute ago, I'd have told you that nothing in the world could have stopped TARGA, the way she was moving and utilizing every single person on the continent it felt like.
But now those efforts seemed pitiful and ineffective. The carefully-arranged circles of blue dots on the map had been laid to waste, and more and more of them had been overwritten with flashing red X's in his path. He was the unstoppable inevitability here, not her. Compared to him, she was just a toddler pushing around trucks.
I held my breath as he reached the absolute center of downtown, the path behind him a broken scar. One skyscraper looked more than halfway-disintegrated, balancing precariously on its exposed frame. In the gap, I could see people still moving within, like the swarming of ants from this distance, blind panic at their nest being kicked open. I glanced at the estimates, and with some quick math, found that sixty-five percent of people were still un-evaced.
Justice stopped, and for the first time, looked around. I switched through several feeds until I came upon a good angle, from a recon team down the street from him, getting a good high-def view of his face and body as he hung in the air.
I didn't know what he was looking for, but whatever it was, it seemed enough to give him pause. After maybe a minute, maybe he gave up, or maybe that was all he wanted. Because he began to speak.
His voice, magnified somehow in the air, echoed off buildings and sent tremors through the earth. Even here, watching it from a feed, the very sound sent chills up my spine and made my skin crawl. His black eyes writhed with unnatural focus as he seemed to stare right at me through the camera.
"I am Justice," he said, as though a formal introduction by now. "And I will break this world. It is fragile and unjust, and what comes next will be pure."
The silence following his speech was deafening. It felt like all I could hear was the ringing of his words in my head, all else had stopped entirely. And glancing down at the feeds, all else had. Everyone, literally everyone in the area had stopped everything they were doing at the command in his voice. It was insane. It was enough to get a frustrated grunt out of TARGA across the room from me, as her finger-drones flew around and her face crossed into a display of outraged shock.
Justice crossed his blood-blackened arms with a motion that seemed to completely alter his poise. He was no shepherd offering prayer anymore, now he was resolute, walled-off. If his actions before had been indomitable, now too was his very being.
"This is my decree, and it is final. You now face Justice."
And with those words, the city around him began a terrible transformation.
The ground shifted underneath nearby buildings, sending them listing at gut-wrenching angles. The silence broke with the breaking of the earth, and the screams of the people being toppled. The military who began to open fire were suddenly stilled, as though wrapped in a golden, shining, immutable blanket, existing outside of time.
A pair of VTOLS streaking away, probably packed with civilians suddenly lurched, caught in a web of invisible threads which sheared through the metal wings. The turbofans exploded off of them like shurikens fired into the heavens, and spitting smoke, they tumbled and crashed into the glass and concrete walls of yet another building.
Fire poured from the ground under him, as though he were a volcano, and it spread more rapidly than I thought possible, the whole city a hellscape in too little time. The roar of the flames was audible even from this distant feed, as were the now-constant screams of panic of those still caught, the poor bastards beginning to realize their evacuation wouldn't come in time, that this was it for them -- the fire or the quake, or some other horrible death.
One of the buildings Justice had been lifting cracked, snapping halfway up like pictures of the Titanic of old. It felt like slow-motion, as thousands of tons of glass, concrete, office equipment, and people came crumbling out, falling to the street to be consumed by the seething grey cloud of dust, glowing from the fires below like some gateway to hell.
It was just the first to fall. The others he'd been toppling weren't far behind. And when they were done, he moved, almost disappearing for an instant as he repositioned to a new cross-street, with new buildings within his reach, with more fires to set and more XPCA to entomb. A new perfectly-circular hole traced his path, like a bullet wound through the city.
Next to me, TARGA was a blur of motion, and I got the impression if she were more human, she'd be sweating and swearing profusely, though all I could read on her now was the tension across her body and her face >Sad [https://www.royalroadcdn.com/public/smilies/sad.png] as she revised a million orders, doing her all to compensate for the sudden shift.
When, abruptly, she paused and looked up at me.
"Director," she barked, her voice taut and tense. "Permission to deploy Skyweb requested."
I looked down at the holo, watching another block of the city vaporize around him. Before the death toll, there was still most of the city's population down there. Skyweb was precise, but it was also indiscriminate. We'd be cleaving through skyscrapers just as much as he was if we opened fire now.
But what other option was there? This was the Exhuman event we'd always been afraid of, this was the situation for which Skyweb was kept in service, this was why the XPCA had the overkill options like fortress armors. Because some Exhumans were just too much for shadow ops and strike teams.
But still. There were tens of thousands still alive down there. I didn't want to be the one to decide to kill them.
But there was nobody else. I was the only one here with TARGA. The others were in recovery like Athan and Karu, or still in transition, or worse, en-route to Atlanta, like Cosette, Tem, and Moon might be.
I was the one here in the Raven's Nest, I was the one with the feeds in front of me. I was the one to call the shots.
"What's the probability that it does any good?" I asked her. As she paused to calculate I waved my hands. "In generalities."
Her voice was controlled, but I could hear the stress of wasted seconds as she answered. "We know of no natural resistance Justice possesses against beam-class weapons. A decisive hit may end the conflict. Our greatest issue has always been a matter of targeting something so mobile. But given his current stationary behavior--"
"We might actually nail him."
She nodded.
"How long until satellites are in position to fire?" I asked.
"I have brought them to bear as soon as the evacuation order was given and the threat level established. It will be approximately forty seconds before they are able to fire."
I glanced down at the screen again. Another building was beginning to capsize. I clenched my jaw, wondering how many survivors there were from that sort of thing, and how many of them would die to Skyweb's violet death.
"Do it," I said. And again, she nodded. At once, new displays popped up for me, showing satellite telemetry, orbital shadows, and elliptical alignment. Power levels of the Skyweb systems were charging to firing thresholds, and I watched as security threshold after security threshold were met and disarmed, the whole system going live.
I held my breath for most of the entire forty seconds. Bars appeared and filled and disappeared, streams of calculations flashed past, and again, that feeling of unstoppable analytical precision immersed me as system after system was brought online and to bear in mere moments.
It was crazy how many ways one could measure out that stretch of time. How many buildings toppled, how many people died, how many new fissures opened in the ground or fires skittered atop it. How many times my heart pounded in my ears, or I glanced up at TARGA to see her locked in intense focus. How many progress bars would flash on my holo, how many simulation data would fly past, how many estimates of casualties and collateral, minimized and maximized values calculated in moments.
And then, the feed shook as the sky tore open. An impossibly-thin violet rectangle like a beam from Heaven began the volley, screaming as the air itself burned at its touch.
And then another. And another. More and more, from every angle, all converging at or around one point, one Exhuman.
The first blow sheared a building in half, and kicked up such a cloud of debris that I couldn't see anymore. Other feeds from higher up showed just how much laser death was being poured into the city, but whether it did anything, I had no idea.
But TARGA's reaction gave me some indication. For the first time, she swore under her breath, and I stared at my screen looking for any hint which would give me understanding.
The lasers had begun to move, and with it, I assumed, so had Justice. Frantically tearing down city blocks, the beams cleaved through the city, decapitating structures to the same ends Justice had wrought, only in clean, sterile lines, instead of his chaotic atrophy.
It continued for what must have been most of a minute, more and more of the city reduced to dust as I watched the available system power in Skyweb dip lower and lower as it pounded the earth. Before it was fully depleted though, TARGA slammed her fists on the table, almost perfectly in time with a thousand alerts flaring across my screen.
"No!" she screeched. "That's impossible!"
"What?" I asked, my hands flying across the holo to move windows, looking for any clue what had just happened.
I found my answer with a feed of the scene. A different recon unit it looked like, positioned higher up, maybe on a rooftop above the now-omnipresent cloud of dust. The city was in shambles, wreckage everywhere where there had once been a gleaming urbia. The broken spires looming out of the ember-glowing dust were like shipwrecks in the fog, and I could discern easily those which had been split by his crude methods and our precision destruction.
And there he was. Not untouched, but floating above it all, putting himself back together by the looks of it, his torso, one of his legs, and both of his arms floating around him in a disassembled mass of disturbing cubes of meat. I watched with fascinated horror as they oriented in the air, and one-by-one, reassembled back into their appropriate places in him, as though he were nothing more than a puzzle to be put back together.
"Why aren't we shooting! He's holding still, shoot him!" I shouted.
TARGA snapped at me with a broken growl. She pounded the table again, wordlessly, and my holo filled with the same feed, rewinding to a moment prior.
I saw him then, rising out of the dust, his body bloody and broken, basically just pieces of meat held together with bone. He was a head atop a bloody mass, with one leg trailing behind, and violet death was swarming through the air all around him.
But with a primal scream that echoed in my head, and a twitching, flinching gesture that might have been some kind of throwing motion, a backward avalanche erupted around him. A storm of rock and fire boiled from under the blistering fog and shot into the air, accelerating into nothing but grey streaks as he fired them into the sky.
Into space, I realized. Into the satellites. Into Skyweb itself.
"No," I found the word slipping past my lips as I fell into my chair. "No. That's not possible. He can't punch out a satellite. That's not possible!"
TARGA pounded the table again and slumped into a chair of her own, her reverse-legs folding up under her bizarrely. "Apparently it is. And he did. Fucking fuck."
I could only stare at the feed as he reassembled himself back to pristine condition, hands as coated in blood as ever, newly-reformed body untouched by the grey dust which even now, swirled and boiled beneath him. He seemed to take a minute to drink in the absolute destruction, the screams and choked cries of those below, the complete absence of any building over two stories, and the fires which coursed across the ground.
He seemed to smile. Which was more unnerving than any antipathy. And then, as though caught by a wind, he began to move. Drifting at the same casual pace, slower than a VTOL, he began to move west.
TARGA cradled her head in her hands as projections flared up at once on my holo. It only took an instant for his flightpath to be charted, and there, only a hundred-fifty miles away or so, another major city directly in his path. Birmingham, Alabama, and another quarter-million people who would never be evacuated in time.
"This is it, isn't it?" I whispered, as though afraid to give my thoughts too much. "He's going to do it. Fly city-to-city and do exactly what he said."
"What," TARGA snipped, "destroy everything?"
I shook my head. "No. Break us. Destroy the whole fragile world."
She stared at me for long moments with an intensity I didn't know was possible. But even as she did, evacuation plans and new skyweb orbits were flying across my screen as she did everything she could to protect the second city.