Soaring, I breach the clouds and find myself faced with the armada of flying warships, each the size of a small island. The engagement is as fierce as predicted by command, filling my ear with static-laden information about the oncoming hordes of light aircraft pouring from the aerial dreadnoughts. White trails of missiles and bright flashes of tracer fire divide the blue sky as my SpecOps sky-mech faces down impossible numbers.
The battle is going well until the Consortium releases its most dreaded servant; DRAKEN, an A.I. driven sky-mech based on the stolen design for my own machine of war. The ensuing duel is brief and lop-sided. DRAKEN’s inhuman reactions best my feeble biological brain in a blazing moment of sorry hubris and I am cast from the sky in a bright ball of fire and molten titanium.
Impossibly, I survive the wheeling crash into the anticipant earth. When I emerge, bloodied and staggering, it is into a jungle choked with moisture and insects. With the distant battle unfolding above, I take shelter inside an abandoned Consortium bunker. The mold has infected every crack of the concrete and large chunks of wall and ceiling have fallen in, allowing nature to complete its stranglehold on the forgotten architecture.
I am ready to rest and tend to my wounds, when I realise I am not alone. The creatures, poor, mutated approximations of humans, jump me at once, four to one. Armed only with a service pistol and my damaged body, I am just able to fend off the creatures, whose randomly spliced genes have resulted in a deep frailness in their ailing bodies. After, covered in infected bites and scratches, and surrounded by four corpses, I await death.
Instead, I get a squad of Consortium grunts. They surround the old bunker, weapons drawn. I emerge, learning on an empty doorframe for support. One amongst their number, the closest, steps forward to take me into their custody. He looks apologetic this one, perhaps he knows my fate better than I do. Before much can be said, the squad and the jungle fall silent. Something slowly pounds the earth, growing in resonance. Footsteps.
The Tyrannosaur bursts through the underbrush and roars, leaving my ears ringing. The Consortium grunts raise their weapons, then drop them and flee. The man who has my arm pulls me along and we begin to run with them. But the Tyrannosaur is faster.
One grunt explodes in a red mist of gore as the beast clamps down its massive jaws around his midsection. Another is crushed underfoot as a man might step on a butterfly.
We sprint blindly into the sweltering ferns, charging into the unknowable labyrinth of the jungle, the Consortium grunt running ahead of me. Screams and roars fill the air around us but all I can see is the blurred rush of greenery and the occasional flash of strangled sunlight.
Both he and I fall into the cave as it appears before us. I stumble to get to my feet just as I feel a rush of hot air billow past me and a crack like an articulated vice being snapped shut. I turn to see the Tyrannosaur with its head jammed as far as it will go into the cave entrance, straining to go further. Blind fury in its eyes, each gnash of its massive jaws sending a deafening snap echoing down the gullet of the cave. It’s skin is unnatural; cords of solid, grey muscle overlapped in a strange weave. I scramble further into the darkness of the cave, following the Consortium grunt and leaving the Tyrannosaur to its impotent rage.
The grunt introduces himself as Hernandez as we make our way through the dark, tight tangle of the cave system.
‘Why didn’t your squad shoot the thing?’ I say, as we pick our way over a subterranean stream.
‘Didn’t you see its skin?’ he says. ‘It’s mutated. Become bullet-proof. Rapid evolution, thanks to all the chemicals dumped during the war. It’s been changing the land, all the plants and animals. Haven’t you seen it yourself, you know, on your side?’
‘I’ve spent all my time in the sky,’ I say, wishing now that I hadn’t.
Hernandez has a hunch that this cave system will lead us to a Consortium Forward Operating Base and after a few hours of trekking and scrambling through the dark, he’s proven right.
The mountain air lands freezing on my face as we emerge out of the shadow of the cave into the white expanse of a vast range of titanic rock. In the sky above, the battle still rages. Black puffs of flack crackle between the rapid trajectories of light aircraft and the laborious yaw of the colossal airships.
The Consortium mountain base is a row of hangars opposite a central building with hundreds of tents pitched around it in orderly rows. A high, chain link fence runs the circumference of the base, holding back a tide of dark figures who are gradually making their way up the slope of the mountain.
‘Who are they?’ I ask.
‘Refugees,’ says Hernandez. ‘They’re running from the battle, they must think the base is safe.’
We pick our way across the high snow drifts until we reach the edge of the fence, where the refugees gather, fingers curled over the links and pleas thrown into the base to meet with the expressionless masks of the Consortium soldiers.
Hernandez uses his uniform to push through the crowd and I follow in his wake. He manages to catch the attention of a nearby guard, who he begins to talk with. The guard looks past Hernandez’ shoulder at me, his reaction guarded by his mask. But before any decision can be made about my immediate future, the future intervenes. An almighty boom rocks the mountainside and causes everyone to turn around and look towards the peak of the mountain.
The sun is blocked from our vision as a smoking Consortium airship slowly but inevitably plummets towards the spiked zenith of the mountain. The collision produces another ear-shattering explosion, the shockwaves blasting the very clouds apart, as the mountaintop is split under the bulk of the falling ship. Then the snow begins to bowl down the slope towards the base.
Panic ensues, and the weight of a thousand refugees all moving in unison collapses the fence in moments. In the mad scramble, I catch sight of Hernandez and follow him into a nearby hangar. A Consortium soldier closes the massive hangar door, as the last few people push their way inside and a lot more are left outside.
Then comes the howling rush of a mountain’s worth of snow collapsing around the hangar and as it covers the high windows, we are plunged into darkness.
Paddy Dobson
6th January 2021