Destruction

“What the hell was that?”

Masada had just disappeared in a blinding flash. In an instant, every one of the twenty-eight thousand transponder signals in the city went dead as the terror of nuclear fallout slowly consumed the city.

“Oh my God, no!”

The image would be forever burned into Captain Mitchell Riker’s head. A chill ran the length of his two-meter frame and his stomach heaved. As he collapsed into the command chair, the bridge of the megacarrier Leviathan (CVM-2) dissolved into chaos.

“This can’t be happening. . .”

Something like this had never happened before.  The war on Canaan had been long and hard, but weapons of this magnitude had never been used, at least not on the ground. But here they were, watching in terror as an entire city was completely destroyed, taking an entire legion of troops with it.

“Third Army Command,  this is Leviathan. Do you read me?”

He thought briefly of Field Marshal Melissa Hutchison, the first female five-star general in the Marine Corps. She had tirelessly led the Third Army from one side of Canaan to the other, accomplishing things that no other general had before. He met her once, during their deployment to the planet. She was young for a general – just fifty-six – and reminded him a lot of his mother, cunning and fearless. And now she was dead.

“We’re not picking up anything. No IFF transponders. No dropship beacons. All the coms are dead.”

His communications officers were working themselves into a frenzy trying to reach somebody, anybody in the city. But all that came through the bridge speakers was static. It bored into Captain Riker’s ears like a drill, forcing him to believe the wretched reality that every single one of the twenty-eight thousand Marines, Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen in that city was now dead, reduced to static.

“Third Army Command, this is Leviathan. Somebody.  .  .anybody,  please respond.”

Beneath the hail of nuclear winter that veiled the city, a dropship crashed. Its wings and control surfaces had been burned off in the heat blast and it went down hard, breaking into two pieces.  The scene was completely silent except for unitelligible chatter buried in the incessant static. In the twisted wreckage of the front half, the silver bars of a Marine Captain twinkled in the light of the inferno. The man’s face behind the shattered translucent visor was streaked with blood and sweat.

“. . .viathan. What is your situation?”

With the message barely breaking through the static, the man’s eyelids twitch, and snap open. Captain Brian Engelhardt isn’t dead yet.