6th Week 3rd Night
It was the third night of the sixth week. The city’s defensive cannon was, at this point, more of a hum of continuous fire than a collection of individual shots. The stream overhead had become a fixture by that point, an endless blue streak that swung this way and that across the sky, only terminating in the hulls of something. Darkness was frequently banished by the constant detonation of explosives high above the city, to the point where the streets were more often bathed in artificial light than not. The defensive drones churned out by automated factories on the city outskirts flitted about with accelerations no living being could survive, spewing hateful fire at the city’s assailants. All this had, by now, become normal. Even as the intensity of the fighting above steadily increased, even as hits to the city’s shield became more common, even as it dropped once again and the high-rise district was drained of power to supercharge the cannon, life went on.
They didn’t live in the high-rise district, though they were lucky enough to reside deep into the city where the residual plasma from shield impacts wouldn’t disintegrate them when it dropped. They were eating dinner, a family of three – a mother, a father, and a small child of 8, the Davis family – when the city finally succumbed to that endless assault. None of them were prepared, though the parents knew it was to come eventually. The shield had dropped not long before, and until now this usually happened only once a night. The lights of their home were joined by those of the skyscrapers in the distance as power was dumped into the coil gun at the city’s heart, the whine of fire growing in pitch and volume as the assailants above were shredded. The family sat frozen until the shimmer high above restored itself and they went back to eating.
Then it dropped again. And the lights stayed on.
The color drained from the parents’ face as the child looked on, confused as to why the sky had become clear for the second time in a night. It wasn’t supposed to do that, they thought, this was strange, they thought. It wasn’t long until a stray round or bomb or missile from above made contact with the outskirts of the city. The bright light did little to alarm them, but the angles of the shadows outside did. There wasn’t much time to respond before the walls came blasting in, but both parents made to reach for their child, to get one last touch. They never made it.
Through some divine intervention, or luck, or fate, or whatever miraculous force, the child survived. Most bones broken, one eye sliced across in a vertical scar that would remain with them for life, more blood outside of their body than anyone would like to describe, they lay in the rubble, first unconscious for some hours, then crying for more. It was the crying that saved them, in the end. Some bleeding hearts had been inbound since bluespace transmissions from Utopia had become more erratic and censored. They arrived shortly after the assailants had left, seemingly satisfied with what they had wrought. Not a city was left standing on the whole of the planet, and the atmosphere would not remain breathable for long. Neither would the radiation levels remain survivable, nor the stability of the ground remain resolute, nor the temperature remain livable. Had they been asleep at the time those outsiders came, had they not been wailing for a family or community now buried in the rubble, Max Davis would not have lived.
