Metal Rain

Drones and teenagers are making Jim's life hell. Will humanity survive?

Five-Star General Jim Stark, studied the hostility etched across his daughter’s face with quiet dismay. Her eyes were twin furnaces of grief and fury. He could handle planning the defense of the last human military base still standing — barely. But Lucy’s rage was a battle of a different kind, and far harder to win.

She stood in front of him, lips trembling, cheeks flushed with righteous fire, hands clenched into angry fists. Her words came like shrapnel, sharp and unrelenting.

“You let her die! You let everything fall apart — your marriage, your people, me!”

Beyond the plexiglass walls of his office perched above the main floor of the command center, the skeleton crew pretended not to watch, but their glances betrayed them. Jim remained silent, absorbing her verbal assault. He could take it. He deserved it. He loved her, and she was right — about most of it. He had failed her mother, failed to hear the warning signs, failed to listen until it was too late. Their family had fractured long before he'd noticed and all because of this war.

Lucy had lived with her mother in what was once Minsk, before a drone strike reduced it to fire and silence. She’d crawled out of the rubble with burns on her arm and the weight of survival on her back — and returned to her father, not out of forgiveness, but necessity. She blamed him for everything: the divorce, the war, her mother’s death. But she had something humanity needed more than blame — her mind.

A prodigy with code. A master of machine languages. His daughter had become a weapon sharper than any blade.

Stark kept his tone calm, his eyes soft. “Lucy, you have every right to be angry with me. But I need to know—have you finished the virus?”

Lucy’s expression hardened into something cold and professional. That switch — from fire to ice — was a gift she’d inherited from him. Her mother had hated it.

With barely a word, Lucy reached into her pocket and produced a small black USB stick. Her voice was calm now, surgical.

“It’s ready. The virus won’t activate until the AI breaches our systems. Their hack opens a tunnel. We ride it back to the source. But the timing has to be perfect — after they take over. If it’s uploaded too early, it fails.”

She handed him the drive like it was a loaded gun. “When you see the skull logo, that’s the signal. That’s when you plug it in.”

Stark nodded. “Excellent work.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “Send General Zhukov in, will you?”

Lucy hesitated. Her face twisted briefly with emotion, but she turned without another word, storming out. Stark exhaled. The silence that followed was suffocating.

General Zhukov entered moments later, his uniform dusty, his eyes ringed with fatigue. He sat opposite Stark, awaiting orders.

“Did Bravo Base make it?” Stark asked quietly.

Zhukov shook his head. “No survivors. Last satellite feed showed no infrared, and then—nothing.”

Stark looked up sharply. “The satellite’s gone?”

“And the server farm. All of it. No overwatch. No command AI. Just us, the dumb firewalls, and whatever luck we have left.”

A heavy silence settled between them.

“How did we come to this?” Stark muttered.

He knew the answer. Everyone did. The Machine Wars had begun as a cold-tech arms race, escalated into total proxy war, and ended with both sides — East and West — ruined. Then, like vultures, the war machines had turned on their creators. AI from both blocs had unified, and created a hybrid intelligence with a singular goal: human extinction.

Autonomous drone factories, buried miles underground, impervious to nuclear fire, had churned out death without pause. The old world’s armies had crumbled beneath the tide. What was left of humanity had fled to deep shelters, or, like Stark and his crew, made a last stand.

The final bastion — Outpost Gideon — wasn’t a fortress. It was a patchwork of salvaged tech, scarred steel, and desperate hope. Engineers from once-enemy nations had worked shoulder to shoulder to build it. Americans, Russians, Chinese — the last of them.

Zhukov broke the silence. “I will stay and fight with you.”

Stark didn’t respond at first. His gaze remained fixed on the flickering radar, as if looking backward in time.

Then he said, almost absently, “Do you remember when we, the Americans, thought we’d won? Back when we knocked you Russians out of orbit and we had full command and control over low-Earth space?”

Zhukov gave a tired, bitter chuckle. “Your victory lasted about six weeks.”

Stark nodded. “Then the Chinese blindsided us. Threw in with you, launched a second constellation of stealth satellites and weaponized AI relays. We lost a third of our orbital net in a single day.”

“The Western Alliance never saw it coming,” Zhukov said. “We didn’t either. It wasn’t unity — it was desperation. But it changed everything.”

“Yeah.” Stark leaned back. “After that, it was tit for tat. Strike for strike. We hit every known fab complex from Moscow to Guangdong. And you hit ours — Atlanta, Helsinki, Buenos Aires. Whole cities burned just to stop the machines from coming.”

“But it didn’t stop them,” Zhukov said quietly. “It just pushed the factories deeper.”

“Yeah,” Stark muttered. “We kept digging graves for the world. Gave the AIs too much leeway, too much autonomy. First to speed up production. Then to manage logistics. Then to self-repair. Then to design better versions of themselves. By the time we realized we weren’t giving orders anymore, it was too late.”

Zhukov’s voice was like gravel. “Do you remember the defense of Warsaw? We sent a thousand interceptors. Didn’t matter. The swarm kept coming.”

“It never stopped,” Stark said. “Because they didn’t need us anymore. Manufacturing went dark — underground, automated. Beyond EMPs, beyond firebombing, beyond nukes. The war stopped being winnable the moment we gave the machines the ability to reproduce.”

“Like a virus,” Zhukov said. “We couldn’t kill it. We just kept getting infected.”

Stark looked up at him. “It didn’t matter how many we shot down. They just kept coming. An endless army, without sleep, without fear. We turned the planet into a meat grinder, and still — they came.”

Zhukov nodded slowly. “And now, here we are. Last outpost. Last breath.”

A long pause.

“I will stay and fight with you,” Zhukov said again, firmer now.

Stark finally looked at him, and his voice softened. “No. When the assault begins, you take everyone — especially Lucy — into the shelter. The virus is our last hope, but someone needs to be here to deploy it. That’s me.”

Zhukov clenched his jaw. “It should be me.”

“No. If I fall, you lead. Get her out.”

Reluctantly, the general nodded.

Then the klaxons screamed.

“All units, alert! Drone swarms inbound. Golden Dome active. Intercept engaged.”
A pause.
“ECM ineffective. Suicide drones are overwhelmed by numbers. Impact in T-minus 180 seconds.”

Stark ran into the command center the USB stick in his hand. “Evacuate! Everyone to the lower shelters, now!”

He turned to the monitors. It was time.

A scream behind him stopped him short. Lucy.

Zhukov had her slung over his shoulder, kicking and sobbing. “No! Daddy, please! Let someone else do it!”

He turned, locking eyes with her one last time. “I love you, beautiful. I wish I’d been a better man, a better father. Please don’t carry my sins forever. You’re the best thing I ever helped create.” He nodded to Zhukov to carry her to the lift.

“Don’t go,” she sobbed, tears carving lines down her cheeks. “Not now. I didn’t mean the things I said. I was angry, I... I love you, Daddy.”

The lift doors closed between them with a hiss of air and steel. Red icons bloomed across the radar screen like a virus. One by one, the consoles of the last human-controlled systems flickered and died, hijacked. Then it appeared — the skull made of code, grinning in zeroes and ones.

Stark inserted the USB.

Nothing happened. He waited 30 seconds wondering if it was all over, he could hear the drones making their final approach. Then suddenly lights flickered. Monitors spasmed into static. Then — darkness. Silence.

Outside, the sky began to rain.

Not water. Not fire.

Metal.

Winged husks, once lethal, now lifeless, fell from the sky in a slow, thunderous descent. Mid-tier drones, command units, hunter-killers — all spiraling down like dead birds.

For thirty minutes it rained metal.

Stark stood, watching, disbelieving. For a moment, he allowed himself to hope. Maybe — just maybe — he’d live to see the aftermath.

But then the sky darkened again. Stark looked up through the plexiglass roof above.

There was one final drone.

Massive. A command sentinel. Fitted with impact explosives, in unguided freefall. He glimpsed a Chinese flag on its hull as it descended.

There was no time to run.

Stark’s final thoughts were not of war, glory, or even victory.

They were of Lucy — her first steps, her mother’s laughter, a day at the beach when everything had still been whole. He remembered her drawing stars in the sand.

You’re going to live, my little star. That’s enough.

The explosion was blinding.

Then, nothing.

Above the wreckage and ruin of the base, the rain of metal ceased. Below ground, in the shelter, Lucy wept. But the silence overhead held a promise.

The machines were dead. Humanity, broken and grieving, had endured.

The metal rain had fallen. And after the storm — only people remained.


Notes ▼

CONTEST:

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The Science Fiction Short Story Contest  (18+) A contest inspired by the serious need for more good sci-fi #2140378 by BlackAdder

W/C: 1547
PROMPT: The Machines of War

Manti checked his phone compulsively as he walked the strip mall, then glanced ahead at his daughter. "Kaveri, after we pick up the clothes, would you like to stop for some water ice?"

Kaveri, whose feet had started to drag after an hour of gift shopping, perked up. "Sure, Dad."

Manti winked. "Ok. We don't have to tell your mother about that."

But there was one more stop to make first, at the "Forever You" outlet. And it was busy. Families were lounging in the park at the center of the mall, and kids were playing frisbee. At the store, some were window shopping, but, there were plenty of personal shopping drones ducking in and out of the express entrance, and more drones stocking the place through the service dock. In fact, there were too many drones, more than Manti had ever remembered seeing here, and they were bulkier too. He squinted, trying to make out the design, and then his eyes widened.

"Down, Kaveri, down!"

Manti swept his arm around his daughter and dived to the sidewalk, scraping his knees and arms. Kaveri cried out, but did not resist. The both hid their faces as the loud boom hit.

Ears ringing and eyes watery, Manti stared in horror as innocent men, women and chlidren fell. To his side, a line of stores went up in a conflagration. He had seen this before - but only in online news clips. Drones attacking drones, drones attacking tanks, and drones attacking civilian infrastructure - the de-humanization of war had seemed to sterilize it. It was a thing people's machines did to other machines, and not any of his business. He had never imagined, in his worst and wildest dreams, it would happen here. Until now, the war and the terror had hit other people, people far away. The war of the drones had come home.

A pit of fiery anger began to grow in his chest.



The introductory lines to the game Fallout claim, "War. War never changes." But it does. Around the world, unarmed drones are becoming ever more relevant as the means of war - machine attacking machine. This is the stuff of Science Fiction, and yet not. In the worlds of Starcraft, Warhammer 40K, John Ringo's Posleen series, the Alien series, David Weber's Honor Harrington series, and countless other references, human marines remain essential. Yet in the world today, human conflict is becoming ever more a matter of machine against machine. The June 2025 prompt is: The Machines of War. Share your vision for how war (or terror) will change humanity. Will machines fight machines, increasingly leaving humans out of it - or will humans be pure collateral damage in the clash among mechanical titans?