Nowadays, not much happened on Wall Street. The windows of the New York Stock Exchange were barred and covered with tarps, and its venerable walls bore scorch marks and cracks from clubs and even the occasional bullet hole. A fair few of the titanic office buildings had their doors chained closed, with angry red biohazard symbols spray-painted onto adjacent walls. White outlines were scrawled into the asphalt, slowly fading to a dull gray. A week ago, when the unrest plaguing America was finally starting to give way to the growing fear of Waffen’s bioweapons, a citizen protection league detachment had made its way down the famous street and was fired upon by a group of anonymous assailants. Whether they were Waffen, human purist, or one of a hundred other insane ideologies duking it out in the city at the time was a question for the FBI; what mattered was that those in the street were slaughtered to a man.
The CDC was setting up triages in hospital parking lots. The mayors of six different major cities across the country had all resigned in the last day; one of them walked into office the morning after the resignation of his predecessor, and had walked right back out by lunch. The stock market, which had just barely begun to recover from its precipitous fall at the start of the war, had gone into freefall once more. And yet, in certain areas of the Coalition, things were actually worse. Namely, the President was keen, whenever it was convenient, to remind the Russian tinpot Kuznetsov that the only reason the US wasn’t in full opposition to his coup was because they had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
To say that the war with the Poslushi had done a number on the homefront was an understatement for the ages.
However, the American malaise was not unopposed, and there was still one tower in the centerpiece of the nation’s finances whose doors were open. Sure, it was surrounded by sandbags, Jersey barriers, and hired guns, and the limousines that dropped off men and women in smart business suits came with armored escorts, but they were there all the same. Plastic tables were laid out in the conference hall to accommodate the influx of people, greatly contrasting with the thousand-dollar bottles of champagne poured for those sitting at them. At one table, the chairman of Northrop-Boeing discussed the battle over Arkhangelsk with a smug, look on his face that said that yes, indeed, it was his company’s missiles that were fired from the USS Montana, and no, their ninety-five percent kill rate wasn’t exaggerated at all. At another, the CEOs of Alpha Software Inc. and Texas Instruments were in an intense negotiation with their Planetary Technologies counterpart about securing the necessary materials for their battle computers from Planetech’s asteroids.
“Ahem,” Warren Harrington coughed into his microphone, instantly turning the attention of most of the room to the podium at its front. In one hand, the wizened old man held the mic, and in the other was a brimming glass of sparkling wine. He had an air of unquestionable authority about him, but those who recognized him saw a few new wrinkles around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and his coy smile no longer held that signature pride. However, as with any salesman worth their salt, he kept on trucking.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual Symposium of the War-Effort Economic Partners, or SWEEP for short. As you all surely know, the combined militaries of our various nations have struck a crushing blow to the imperialist forces of the Poslush Combine in orbit of Novoarkhangelsk two days ago, and we’ve yet to see signs of their return. For now, it’s apparent that we have them on the back foot, and offensives of our own, far more decisive than that middling campaign on Omen, will be coming posthaste.”
“However, what will CAST do once the silos are empty and the nukes have run dry? At the moment, we’re going through munitions like we still have China at our beck and call, and sooner or later, the Coalition must face a choice; we will either adapt to our needs, or run out and starve despite our advantages. Surely, the Coalition knows this, and will come to our doorsteps with contracts aplenty in due time, but what if they underestimate their own needs? Surely we, as providers of their weapons, know precisely how much goes into a war, and we must not wait until we are called upon to volunteer our services, for king, country, check, and all that.”
A dry laugh went through the room at the jab. Harrington allowed it to die down, then continued. “Some would say that it’s enough that we do this once, but what about next time? What happens when they run out of munitions again? No, we cannot, in the interests of our nation and our investors, allow the governments of Earth to continue depleting their stockpiles without us to replenish them at every turn. With our economic might combined, we can win this war in the name of liberty and free trade, in this land and far beyond.”
A curtain slowly descended from a slot in the ceiling behind Harrington, hanging loosely in the background. “In order to better facilitate and coordinate our efforts, I hereby propose the formation of a consultant agency and trust between our respective corporations, allowing us to ensure our place in a new pan-galactic order.
“Now, who better to style ourselves after than the man, the myth, the legend, Henry Ford himself? As he reinvented the industrial landscape, let us reinvent ourselves, becoming greater than what we are, spreading free commerce around the galaxy until our logos can be found from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Let us recreate the majesty of the British East India Company, of US Steel, of Standard Oil, and bring money to the masses!”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Harrington thrust his glass into the air. At the same time, an insignia was projected onto the curtain, consisting of two hands clasping one another over a heavy steel door, the kind used to seal off bank vaults. Then, he loudly proclaimed, “To the Ford Initiative!”
A hundred hands came up in response. “To the Ford Initiative!”
—
The Leopard’s engine let loose an electric purr as it exited the enormous transport craft and took its place in a growing column of tanks making its way down Bundesautobahn 2057. Up ahead, the planetary capital of Kormoran, a tiny town by the name of Spitzerstadt, sat in darkness. Johann could see through the cameras that a few of the buildings had collapsed, and their wreckage was too orderly to have been created in combat. Then it occurred to him; the Poslushi were midway through rebuilding the city in their own image when they had to leave. It was their second step after indoctrination in the process of erasing the cultures of those they conquered.
With a grunt, Johann stood up in his chair and popped open his tank’s hatch, looking around the tank. Where the flickering, feeble light of the streetlamps didn’t touch, the land around the road extended out into seemingly-infinite stretches of grassland, the vegetation just tall enough that someone or something could hide within them. The sight of German shuttles shining underbelly-mounted spotlights into the area around the column did little to put him at ease.
As they got within a thousand feet or so of the town, an oily, smoky smell was noted by everyone. Normally, this would’ve been normal; tanks weren’t exactly clean machines. However, this had an odd undertone to it, a bitter carbon scent, like something that had been left in a fire for far too long, and it put Johann on edge.
Finally, they reached the town, and it didn’t look any better up close. Not a window was untouched in the whole town, and ajar doors creaked ominously in the wind, their locks busted out. Personal possessions had been strewn about on the sidewalks, spilling out into the street; the crunch as the Leopard’s treads ran over a heretofore unseen photo album would be in Johann’s memory for a long while. The lights were all out, and the dark of the night made it seem like every doorway was a yawning maw into a pitch-dark abyss. All the while, the terrible stink grew ever stronger.
Abruptly, the tank came to a stop. “Hey, what gives?” Johann said, looking down.
“We’re getting something on the infrared, ten o’clock!” Hiedrich shouted.
“Human-shaped?” Johann replied.
“Looks like it!”
Nodding, Johann dipped back into the turret, turning the dial on his radio transmitter to LOUDSPEAKER and grabbing the microphone. “This is the 467th Panzer Company of the German Army. We come bearing aid and supplies; please approach slowly and with hands exposed.” he said, his voice blaring across the dead landscape. A few seconds later, a trio of disheveled-looking people emerged from an office building on an intersection, their clothes soiled and ripped in places. One of them had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and Johann could just barely see the glint of a handgun in the waistband of another.
“Put your hands in the air. We’ll have you in for processing shortly.” Johann commanded. Hesitantly, the three obeyed, and the man with the rifle even took the courtesy of shrugging off his weapon and letting it clatter to the ground beside him. Satisfied, Johann turned back out of the hatch, looking at the trio. Upon closer inspection, he realized that one of them had her arm in a makeshift splint, and the rifleman’s forehead was wrapped in bandages. They really had been through hell in the last day or so; Johann wasn’t sure if he wanted to see the worst among them.
“Do you need help?” Johann called.
“We need any shovels you have!” the rifleman yelled back. His face was a bit pale, and when the wind changed direction, Johann realized why. The smell was almost overpowering now, and interlacing with the oil and ash was a putrescence that made him want to vomit.
“Any what?”
“Any shovels; to bury the bodies!”
The smell made a lot more sense now. “Where?” Johann said, a creeping nausea rising within him.
“Just around the corner; you won’t miss it.” the rifleman shook his head, pointing to his left.
“Sir?” Hersch coughed, obviously trying to cover up his own sickness.
“Pull her forward.” Johann ordered, and the tank began to inch forth, Johann seeing a little further around the corner, a little further…
Johann had, over the course of this war, taken down Poslushi quadrupeds, run down their infantrymen, and left a trail of mayhem behind himself, but not much could’ve prepared him for what he saw. Careless of the putrid air, he took in a ragged gasp.
Dozens, if not hundreds of human corpses were piled up into a mound some three meters tall, their bodies twisted and contorted, still frozen in their final moments of agony. The outer bodies were charred and fused together beyond recognition, forming a carbonized shell around the gore, and where that shell cracked, yet more bodies spilled out, their flesh torn open and left to rot by scavengers. Hovering over the scene was an immense cloud of flies so thick as to make seeing it difficult, and Johann could just barely make out a scorched outline where the accelerants had probably spilled out from the pile.
“They didn’t have enough space on their ships; they couldn’t take us with them.” the rifleman choked out, one hand covering his nose.
“Hersch, gas masks, now.” Johann said, snapping his fingers to emphasize his point. Hersch didn’t hesitate in the slightest, and soon, Johann was busy securing the respirator and goggles over his face. It had terrible circulation, obviously, and it was hot and humid as the Amazon after just a few seconds, but anything was better than the stink.
Hersch eased the Leopard into a parking lot and turned the engine off, locking the vehicle as the crew all clambered out. His face grim under the mask, Johann grabbed a shovel from the engineer’s kit on the side of the tank and approached the horror, grabbing the bloated hand of a relatively-unscathed man and trying to pull him off. There was a sickening squelch and Johann fell back, the man’s arm coming with him. Johann just barely had the time to throw the arm away and pull his gas mask off before promptly losing his lunch. When he had finally recuperated, he gestured for his two men to come help him, as yet more tank crews descended on the site, bearing their own equipment.
It was going to be a long, long night.