104. Get Me Air Force Command

Get Me Air Force Command

For a while, the entire room was silent, save for the hum of computer fans and the almost inaudible buzz of countless electronic devices.

Dozens of screens displayed all kinds of information: casualty lists, abnormal weather across five cities, emergency evacuations of several towns, desperate rescue operations in the storm.

Inside this hastily assembled and badly overburdened command center, everyone ignored all of it.

Their attention was fixed on one of the larger displays, which was relaying footage from a high-altitude reconnaissance drone.

The image showed an area of total devastation: countless fires, smoking craters, heaps of rubble, and cracks in the earth clear enough to be seen from nearly twenty kilometers up. Almost no one cared.

The swarming masses that looked like countless ants crawling over the ground were actually man-sized monsters—or worse. No one paid those much attention either.

Over the past few days, everyone had seen such things too many times to count.

What held the full attention of every person in the room was the humanoid figure near the top of the screen. In an image covering four hundred square kilometers, it occupied a considerable portion of the frame.

The mountain-sized figure was crowned in actinic glare, lightning flickering across its horns and badly distorting the image. Its head had just been swallowed by a burst of fire and dust.

Yet despite the poor image quality, everyone from the lowest analyst to the most senior general present held their breath.

They watched the colossal humanoid stagger, lean dangerously forward, and then crash to the ground with enough force for the earth itself to visibly tremble and deform.

“My God,” someone whispered. In the silence, the words sounded shockingly loud. “They really did it. They really killed that monster.”

The mounting tension finally broke.

The room erupted into victorious cheers, curses, questions, and comments, voices tangled with every kind of emotion as silent fear gave way to loud relief.

“Quiet!” an older voice rang out with authority, cutting through the chaos by sheer weight of rank and experience.

These were soldiers. They were used to obeying commands like that, so even under this level of pressure, and even after one catastrophic loss after another, they restored a measure of order within seconds.

“Their weapon is still firing,” the general pointed out.

Sure enough, thin, dazzling beams kept cutting across the image, shooting from the city’s ruins toward the fallen giant.

The beams continued to carve into the giant’s head, each shot blasting away tons of flesh.

“Damn it!”

That exclamation drew every eye in the room. A junior analyst was scrutinizing the drone feed through more than a dozen filters, trying to extract every possible scrap of data.

“Uh…”

The pressure of being stared down by dozens of superior officers, combined with the tension of the current situation, made the man freeze at his own slip of the tongue.

“What is it? Take your time,” the older general asked patiently, his calm tone once again easing the strain in the room.

“Sir! Despite the damage to the back of the target’s skull—its equivalent of the occipital bone appears to have been shattered—thermal imaging, seismic readings, and ground-penetrating radar all indicate that the target still has a heartbeat, sir!”

The analyst pointed to several filtered images. A few officers showed interest, though not comprehension.

“The target does not bleed the way we do, so death by blood loss is unlikely. It is also still showing involuntary reactions to energy-weapon fire. In addition, the wound is shrinking.”

Everyone understood that last point.

Another round of curses rippled through the room.

They had already seen how some monsters could recover from truly horrific wounds. Why would the enemy’s superweapon not have the same ability?

It had nearly every ability those weaker enemies had displayed, plus several they lacked, apparently for the sole purpose of ruining everyone’s life.

“How long?” the general asked.

“Sir?”

“How long until that monster recovers?” he explained to the analyst.

“We saw the energy weapon harm it and slow it, but not truly stop it. They saw the same thing, which is why they used that missile—a missile that will make our lives much more interesting over the next few days.”

The general could already foresee what a missile capable of striking any point on Earth without warning in eighty seconds would do to international relations.

Thank God untangling that mess was mostly the politicians’ job.

“I… I’m not sure, sir,” the analyst said after a moment of hesitation.

Other analysts were already studying the data and patterns he had pointed out, drawing their own conclusions.

Despite the massive amount of intelligence collected over the past week, they still knew almost nothing about the enemy’s biology—assuming this had anything to do with biology at all, a conclusion many scientists and analysts still strongly objected to.

“The wound is healing at a steady rate, but… we have nothing to compare it to. No baseline. It could take half an hour. It could take only a few minutes.”

“I see.”

The general stared at the screen for several seconds, then made his decision.

“Get me a secure line to Air Force Command,” he ordered one of the communications officers, while sorting through every piece of data the analysts could provide.

“We need to hit them again while we still can.”

Because when an enemy bastard falls down, you do not wait for him to stand back up.

You shoot him in the back.

The pain of falling from the sky is nothing compared to the pain of surviving the impact.

I could not remember who said that, but they were absolutely right.

Although I was immune to the impact itself, that did nothing to protect me from indirect hazards, so I personally experienced a severe case of redout.

For anyone who is not a pilot, and does not treat memorizing trivia as a hobby, redout is what happens when rapid deceleration causes blood to pool in the brain.

The result is, as you might guess, red-tinted vision, nausea, violent vomiting, severe migraine, and occasionally unconsciousness.

Fun!

Under other circumstances, my superhuman recovery and control over force would have protected me from those effects, so the symptoms caught me completely off guard.

Then again, under other circumstances, I had never gone from several kilometers per second to zero in a few milliseconds, briefly enduring more than a hundred and eighty thousand g.