ΔV Pt. 09

But for the tourists that day were able to ignore the seawall as their tour guide handed on the AR glasses. Putting them on, you could see a sea that was considerably lower -- and considerably more populated. But in these glasses, the population was of ships and tanks and men in uniform. Not fish. For Martin Spiegel, an American from Ohio, the glasses were something to put on later. He was too busy looking at the beach where his ancestors had fought, centuries ago to free the world from tyranny. Because he, unlike the rest of the tour group, was not wearing the glasses, he saw the first man to come from the ocean.

At first, Martin thought he was a swimmer. But the man was dressed in clothing that hung in tatters. And he grasped something in his hands -- something metal and rusted, with rotting wood. And then Martin took in the leering skull that was situated on the man's shoulders. He saw the glowing purple eyes, flickering with an inner light. The man -- the monster -- began to trudge forward. Foot by foot, step by step, he walked up and out of the surf, onto the beach. Others were emerging from the ocean. Dozens. Hundreds.

Thousands.

Thousands of skeletal figures, in rotting uniforms, holding rusted weapons, were marching from the surf. Some of them were carrying short carbines. Others were hefting sub-machine guns. More were holding rifles. But as the rest of the tour group began to see the skeletons intruding on their AR illusion -- the simple programs not sure what to do about all the new inputs -- cries of alarms started to come from the others. The cries were drowned out by squealing and grumbling as the first of the hunks of metal began to emerge from the beach.

Martin had for his whole life enjoyed playing World War 2 wargames. Virtual and VR, holographic, classic model and glue figurines, computer games. He loved all of them. But even so, he nearly didn't recognize the first of the snorting vehicles that crawled out on barely intact treads. Metal slapped and dragged, and the vehicles were encrusted with barnacles and hung with seaweed. But more than that, each one had hideous damage marring it. One had a jagged hole blown in the side. One's entire engine compartment was a cratered ruin. One was without a turret -- but...no. It had a turret. A turret sketched in ephemeral purple flames.

"Uh, uh, everyone remain calm!" the tour guide said. "I, uh, this may be a...a..."

A skeletal figure walked up the hill to the group. He had the helmet of an American GI, the rotting skull of a Halloween decoration, and a large, moldy cigar chomped between his teeth. His eyes flickered as he looked over the group. More skeletons were walking forward -- the only sound being the creak of bones and the grumble of ancient tanks.

Martin screamed and fainted.

***

Sergeant Wojewoda sat in the precinct and wished that he was dead. The paperwork of being a cop was never ending -- another reason to hate the Union. At least, if you asked Wojewoda. He was able to blame an extraordinary amount of his life's woes on the Union. The footpaths that wound through downtown Warsaw were down for maintenance? Why, it was because of the Union's stringent bureaucracy and red tape, forcing needless crews of overpaid technicians to go through needless hoops. His favorite streaming site taken down by a copyright complaint? The Union was bending knee to American media cooperatives, rather than sticking up for Europeans, like they should have.

And thus, the paperwork was yet more piles and piles and piles of red tape dumped upon his poor, overworked shoulders by the Union. Did he not have enough trouble, with the towelheads and the fugis raising a ruckus.

"Sarge," one of his beat cops said, walking over. "Central says we're getting weird reports from the panop."

"Do I look like a P-tech?" Wojewoda asked, his frown growing fierce. "I am not. Go bother the Jew."

"He's out," the cop said. He looked faintly anxious -- as he always did when Wojewoda referred to their resident technical specialist. Wojewoda had no idea why. He was a Jew. The only Jew in the entire force. And only in a sly, halfway sort of fashion. Wojewoda -- who didn't trust Jews any more than he trusted Muslims, refugees, immigrants of any kind, or Russians -- didn't trust their technical specialist either, but he'd never been able to get rid of him.

Until now.

"He's out?" Wojewoda asked, his voice gloating.

"Yes, he's out checking the panop," the beat cop said, ruining Wojewoda's hopes of getting a reprimand slapped on his docket.

"Then why are you bothering me?" Wojewoda asked.

"No, I mean, he left before we got the report -- he said that he was going to do some maint and, well, I mean, now we're getting bugs. Like, in the central computer..."

"Then go and find him, Jozef!" Wojewoda snapped. "Do I have to do-"

Jozef had frozen. His mouth was hanging open in shock and he gaped at the space behind Wojewoda's head. Wojewoda was about to ask him what the hell he was looking at and why he looked like a fish when the cold, hard barrel of a gun pressed to his neck. It was as cold as the grave and slightly rough around the edge. The pressure dug in a bit more and a quiet voice, speaking a very strange, accented kind of Polish murmured: "All right, my good fellow. Hands up."

A figure walked past Wojewoda -- a second figure. They were dark and carried a strange looking weapon. A rifle. A wooden rifle, with only a small tube of metal. Wojewoda wondered if that was how they had gotten past the precinct's security systems, but no. The metal detectors would have sniffed out even metal surrounded by all the wood in the world. The rifle instead just looked old, and the figure paused as they started to frisk Jozef, taking his service weapon and grinning as they held it up.

Wojewoda realized three things.

The figure frisking Jozef was a woman.

She was a Jew.

And she was a ghost.

Wojewoda had seen movies his whole life and he knew what ghosts looked like: Translucent and shimmering, like they were only half here at all. The only thing that the movies had not gotten quite right was that ghosts could seem physical and solid. They could take pistols, then gently push Jozef aside and snap zip ties around his wrist. The voice behind him spoke again: "Hands up, or else you get to join our side." Wojewoda forced his arms up and stood, his jaw tightening. Fingers that felt ice cold and steel hard gripped onto his arm, then swung his arm back behind him. He was cuffed and searched and forced to his knees. More cries of alarm came from the rest of the station -- and then gunshots. Then the alarm. The woman, who was sitting on the desk, glanced up. "Heh." She had a small toothpick tucked into her lips. "Think they'll realize how much of a waste of time that is, Mordechai?"

The other figure stepped around from where he had been standing. He was also a Jew. Wojewoda glared at him, trembling.

"I don't think it'll matter," he said.

The gunfire had stopped. A figure dropped through the ceiling. It was as if they had simply decided to no longer be standing -- and so, the ceiling had become like so much light and nothingness to them. They were another man, this one so hideously burned that Wojewoda couldn't have determined who or what they were. But they spoke in a language that Wojewoda swore was almost German -- but not quite.

Wojewoda hated Germans.

"Is that Yiddish?" Jozef whispered to him.

"How the fuck am I supposed to know?" Wojewoda snapped.

"It is," the man that the woman had called Mordechai said. He turned to face Wojewoda. "And for what little it is worth-" His eyes flicked to Wojewoda's tunic to read his name tag. "Sergeant Wojewoda, I wouldn't be here unless I had no choice."

"Fuck you," Wojewoda snarled.

The man shrugged.

"Mordechai!" A shout came from the front. "The Nazi fucks are calling for reinforcements -- the army depot is giving them trouble."

Mordechai's face twisted. He made a face and then shook his head. "We have no choice," he said, quietly. He turned and walked out through the wall, leaving the two police officers bound and kneeling. The woman spat her toothpick out, then ground it out on the ground as if it was a cigarette. She sneered slightly, then followed after.

"Do you know who that was?" Jozef asked.

"It was some Jew ghost," Wojewoda said. There were some advantages to the simplicity of Wojewoda's viewpoint. He wasted no time in terror. In disbelief. So, the world had ghosts now. He didn't care. What he did care was that two of those ghosts had come into his station and humiliated him. He gritted his teeth and ground them together. "And when I get out of these cuffs, I am going to find out how you kill someone twice."

***

To call the Pentagon a place of pandemonium was a radical understatement. The current chief of the national guard, General Tybor Briggs, was hunched over the situation response table that had been installed, a century before, to manage the various ecological crisis that had nearly ripped the United States apart. The table had been updated, the parts replaced, the programming overhauled. But, in the same way that the ship of Theseus had remained the same ship despite replacing the hull, the sails and the oars...the table had not changed for a century.

At least, that was how Briggs thought of it.

Wargaming programs were being turned on and used to chart the red blotches that were breaking out along the coasts and the center of the United States like a sudden rash of the chicken pox. He heard the voice of the various aids and administration specialists, bringing in reports as fast as they came in. And in the modern world, that was at the speed of light.

"Fort Obama in Florida reports that a detatchment of Confederate cavalry road in through the wall-"

"M88s are on the road towards Arlington-"

"-say again, they're using bows?"

"-no effect?"

"We're dispatching troops as fast as-"

"Overrun -- mark that down!"

A chime came on Brigg's collar. He frowned and tapped it on. The familiar sound of the President's firm baritone came into his ear. "Briggs, talk to me. The Secret Service say that we can't land Air Force One -- something about terrorists capturing the White House?"

"Mr. President," Briggs said. "We're under attack by..." He paused. "I have no good goddamn idea, sir. Half the Joint Chiefs have already been captured. We have skeletal Native Americans on the phone, holding three quarters of my command staff hostage -- and Jeb Stuart just..." He tapped a few buttons on the situation response table. "Just stole a platoon of M88 Typhoon tanks and is driving them up the road to Atlanta."

"I've been reading reports from the Enterprise," the President said. It was the fact that he still sounded calm and collected, like he not only knew what was going on, but how to deal with it, that made Briggs regret voting against him in the last election. "They say that the other world has paranatural powers that include something like this. Have we gotten any word from the Enterprise?"

"Not a thing, sir," Briggs said, frowning as he swept his gaze through his reports. "It doesn't help that Admiral Chowdrey is missing and half our spaceports are being held by..." He paused. "By an army of ghost black people. The officers on the scene, the first responders, think that they're slaves."

The pause that followed was pregnant.

"Begin securing lines," the President said. "And get me Captain D-"

The line went dead. The table went dead. And distantly, Briggs could hear the sound of machine guns -- mixed with the sound of hollering and yelps and yips that Briggs had heard before: It was the sound of a particularly obnoxious biker gang. But these biker gang sounded like they were armed with modern assault rifles -- and from the rapid way the gunfire got closer, they were being driven by a hard driving son of a bitch. A few soldiers in hastily donned field kit over their dress uniforms. One of them was reloading his rifle. "Sir!" the other said, her voice tight. "They're blowing through every defense we got. They have tanks, sir. Fucking tanks."

Briggs nodded. "All right, people, we're leaving."

A roar shook the building. The whole room rattled.

"Now!" Briggs shouted, louder. The men and women around him proved they were, at the very least, professional. They grabbed the supplies they could, triggered the emergency sweeps on the harddrives, and then started after him. Gunshots echoed through the corridors and screams came with them. But Briggs strode forward confidently -- even if terror crawled in his gut, a terror that he hadn't felt since the bad days in South America. But that had been in jungle and heat and far from the air conditioned comfort of the Pentagon.

They emerged into one of the large open areas that the Pentagon had to connect different sections. The rooms had been turned into complete pandemonium. Three dead soldiers were sprawled on the ground, and bullet holes scored the walls. But striding through the room, casual as if they were immortal, were three skeletal figures in ratty, tattered uniforms -- uniforms that Briggs didn't quite recognize. He had seen the stereotype of the Blue and the Gray, but...in truth, the Confederate and the Union army had not been uniform. These men could have been from either side.

The fact that the skeleton that saw him pointed and hollered, "Look at this here uppity nigger!" actually did far less to indicate which side they were on. Briggs had no illusions about the racial sensitivity of the Union. But he did tighten his jaw.

The two soldiers in their hastily donned flack jackets snapped their rifles up. The skeleton was holding a modern looking assault rifle -- one of the civilian models. The skeleton, despite a lack of lips, still managed to smirk. "You think that's gonna do a damn thing to me, damnyankee?" he asked, finally confirming his side -- his voice full of sneering condescension.

The woman flicked a switch with her thumb. The underslung grenade launcher chuffed and the skeletons burst into flames as the grenade slammed home. Shrapnel whined through the air and smoke roiled and Briggs bellowed over the ringing in his ears: "Lets go! Now! Now!"

The skeletons were so many chips of bone -- but the explosion drew shouts and hollering.

Briggs set his head down.

It was going to be a long day.

***

Dalethraxius and Annie stood in the center of the ritual and Annie tried to not feel sick. Her guts were roiling and bubbling and her skin writhed with goosebumps. She put her hands on her thighs and bent forward and closed her eyes. It had been a very long day. The ritual, Dale had explained to her, was all about channeling and focusing power. Drawing it forth and building it up. Like creating an aquifer. If one tried to concentrate that much magic into ones own physical body, it would get burned out and exhausted, and turned eventually into a pile of ash.

And so, the two of them had created a space where they could pour out the magic into the landscape. Dale had been crafting the foci for it since he had gotten his job as a blacksmith: The small objects had been circled around a single tree in the overgrown ruin of the suburbs that Annie's enclave sat in. The tree, Dale said, was the symbolic representation of every forest in California. That forest had drank up power over the course of the long, grinding ritual. Her throat ached and her lips felt chapped -- but she hadn't been able to stop speaking, even if she had wanted too.

The magic had built inside of her as she chanted, adding its own energy, its own life to the driving working.

Dale and her, walking around a tree, their hands making the complex movements that she had been practicing for weeks. Her lips forming the words. The magic flowing through her, into the tree. Growing. Like a cancer. And then...

The release.

Describing the release would take Annie years and a thesaurus. She had felt her entire body quiver, every muscle tightening and then trembling. Her bones had ached and she had seen colors that were on no spectrum that the human eye was made to see. She had felt the magic as it threaded through her and left her panting and gasping. Dale had been just as badly struck, his face caught in an expression that could have been pained or orgasmic. And when the ritual had finished, the tree had browned and died. She felt the deaths of the other trees, echoing through her.

They'll be brought back, she thought, woozily. We can do it.

The sun was edging down to the horizon and evening was falling. A night that felt darker and deeper and colder than any that Annie had seen for a long time. She swore she could hear distant screams and shouts already. She looked up at Dale...

And saw that he was holding up a small lock of hair. Her hair. His brow was focused. His lips pursed.

"What are you doing?" Annie croaked. Her voice was raspy and raw, like it had been sandpapered. Which made sense, considering how long she had been talking. Dale looked at her. His eyes were furtive and guilty. He gulped, then touched his own lips. A tiny glow of magic flowed down his throat -- and as he spoke, he touched her lips and she felt the tightness and rawness of her throat fading and smoothing away.

"I..." Dale paused. "I took advantage of you, Annie. A fortunate coincidence." He sighed. "The widoer of your father's sister is the captain of the Enterprise. The ship the Americans sent to my world, to Arcadia."

Annie bobbed her head.

Then it sparked in her head.

"Sympathy," she whispered. "Like with the tree-"

"Like with the trees," Dale said as the stars glowed above him. "Like with the hundred million furious souls we've raised. We called up every dead slave, every slain soldier, every massacred civilian, every diseased indigenous person. They're taking all the places of power: Political, industrial, military. We have troops in every power station, police department, army depot, and government building -- and soon, they'll be reporting in." He lifted his chin, his eyes glowing -- and Annie felt the ping. It was a strange, clicking language that translated in her mind, unfurling into words and knowledge.

Aboriginal ghosts had just taken the Sydney arcology's power plant.

Dale smiled, wryly. Then, quietly, he continued. "But that won't matter if Arcadia can join into the fight. Your space forces can't engage us without using nuclear weapons and kinetic impactors that will cause more damage than ground fighting -- but Arcadia has magic. They have the same magics that defeated me last time. They have their twisting fate." He scowled, looking at the lock of hair. "...and your Enterprise has fifty ten megaton nuclear warheads."

Annie's blood went cold.

"No," she whispered.

"The population of Arcadia is, maybe, a hundred million. There are billions of people on Stark," Dale said. "I'm saving those lives by just knocking the Arcadians back to the stone age. They can recover."

Annie stood. Her knees ached and her body trembled with exhaustion. She took his hands, squeezing her fingers around his hand, closing his fingers around the lock of her hair. Annie leaned her head forward, her voice husky. "Dale. It's not enough to just be right. You also have to be good." She lifted her eyes. "This war -- we're limiting it as much as we can. But hitting Arcadia with nuclear weapons? No. No. That's not like you."

Dale's lips pursed. "The t'row may disagree with you."

Annie felt the coldness in her deepen and spread. For a moment, she wondered...