Colonel Alberto Felici had been on duty when the telephone call had come through from Britain. A British observatory had tracked an alien craft as it lowered itself down towards the planet, coming in on what was suspected to be an attack run, even though the aliens normally launched their weapons from standard orbits. There was certainly something odd about it… and, with the aliens invading the Middle East, everyone was nervously awaiting the next step in the alien plan. He studied the computer screen, which showed the alien craft as it entered their view, and frowned. It almost looked as if the craft was going to pass directly over Rome…
“I have a track,” Julia announced, from her console. Programming the computers to work with the telescope data had been easy… once they’d realised that astronomers had been doing it for years. “The UFO is definitely going to pass over Rome, almost exactly over our position.”
“How lucky for us,” Felici muttered. The alien trajectory was taking it over France, but at the speed it was moving, it would be bare minutes before it crossed over Italy. He longed for some kind of weapon, something that could be used to shoot back at them, but the aliens could just pick off whatever part of Italy they wanted. The Italian Air Force had been literally shot out of the sky and several army bases had been destroyed from orbit. He wasn’t even sure why… unless the aliens hoped that there would be an uprising and the Italian state would be destroyed. “Keep an eye on it and pass it on to the next observatories in line.”
He ran his hand through his hair. Italy had been badly hit by the aliens and he was worried about his family. He got to watch the aliens as they carried out the invasion, but he was unable to intervene… and, as far as he knew, no one else could either. The aliens had been attacked in orbit during the first encounter, but since then they’d kept space to themselves and prevented the human race from striking back at them. The Prime Minister might keep up the encouraging tone in his webcasts, but Felici and his fellow officers knew the truth; Europe was naked and defenceless under alien fire. Once the aliens had finished attacking the Middle East, and completed the destruction of America, it would probably be their turn next… and all they could do was wait to be hit.
“Sir,” Julia snapped, her voice suddenly rising with alarm. “The alien launched something towards us!”
Felici whirled towards her console. She was right; the alien spacecraft, now firing it’s boosters to reach a higher orbit, had left something behind. The telescope was powerful, but all they could tell was that it didn’t appear to be a KEW. The KEWs they’d seen while Italy had been attacked had been smaller, somehow, and faster. This… object was just falling down slowly towards Italy.
His blood ran cold, suddenly. “Get me a trajectory on it,” he said, knowing that it was already too late. The Americans had said that the aliens were religious invaders… and Rome was the home of the Vatican, the largest religious centre in the world. Felici, himself a devout Catholic, had wondered what the aliens would do when they reached Rome, but now he had the suspicion that he knew. The alien weapon was still falling…
“Sound the alert,” he ordered. It was already too late. “Everyone get down…”
The windows went white as the bomb detonated.
High over Rome, precisely targeted on the Vatican, the nuclear bomb detonated. For an instant, too quickly for human minds to follow, the bomb was still there… and then it exploded, sending a massive blast of flame over the city. Seconds later, the shockwave followed, blasting Rome and smashing buildings, merely human in the face of the raging power of nuclear fission. The people caught under the blast were vaporised, utterly, while those further away, but unlucky enough to be looking at the blast, were blinded. The secondary effects of the blast, the shockwave and the firestorm, tore through the city, disrupting or destroying the city’s emergency response teams. Armed police and soldiers had been patrolling Rome, as in many other European cities, and the blast hit them, killing and maiming thousands. The EMP pulse knocked out or disrupted every piece of electronic equipment within range, apart from shielded devices, and further disrupted recovery efforts. No city in Europe had been hit like that, not since the Second World War, and Italy was ill-prepared for the crisis… but really, who could have prepared? The disaster was so large as to be unimaginable.
A quarter of Rome’s population had fled the city well beforehand, going to live in the country or with friends and family in other parts of Europe. Half of those that remained were killed outright, or died within the first hour of the blast… and they were the lucky ones. For the remaining citizens of Rome, the nightmare had only just begun…
And, of the Vatican and its centuries of history, almost nothing was left.
The High Priest watched dispassionately as the fireball billowed out over the City of Rome. The shielded satellites that were constantly observing the planet below the Guiding Star had tracked the weapon from the moment it was launched to the moment of detonation, whereupon they’d started to monitor the devastation. The humans below had been slaughtered in the blast — and the High Priest mourned their deaths — but the centre of their religion had been destroyed. Few would go now to the City of Rome, few would even consider rebuilding it, not when it could be knocked down again in a heartbeat. Some of the Inquisitors had even called for a second strike, mounted as soon as the humans started recovery efforts, but the High Priest had rejected that as meaningless barbarism. It wasn’t as if the humans below could hurt them in orbit. If they had had such weapons, they would have deployed them against the bombing ship.
He turned his attention to the near-orbit display. The Inquisitors, as untouched as ever by the magnitude of what they’d done, were coming in to dock with the Guiding Star, probably not even expecting praise for their actions. They’d killed, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of humans… and they didn’t even care. There was a reason why even the High Priest disliked the Inquisitors; if he showed any weakness, or lack of resolve and ability, they would turn on him. They were… not popular.
But they were necessary. The Guiding Star was a closed environment. When the starship had been launched, it had been outfitted with all the supplies it needed… and could carry. It could not afford dissent or even major changes in society, not when they operated with so few supplies, whatever the reason. The population of the ship, all one billion of them, had exactly what they needed, no more, no less. The massive farms on the habitation module produced enough food for the people, but barely… and as for having luxuries, forget it. The High Priest had few perks that came with the robe, and many problems. He had thought, back when he’d been an under-priest, that the High Priest had had everything, but he knew now that that wasn’t true. He might have had extra servings of some foods, and the occasional sip of forbidden water, but that was about it, even for his rank. They couldn’t afford a major social upheaval that would come, inevitably, from so many perks for the high-ranking priests.
And yet… the humans had so much. They had barely developed a space program — and smashing what they’d had in space had been easy, far easier than he’d allowed himself to anticipate — but their civilians had so much. They all seemed to have their own means of transport, their own computers, their own links to the human computer network that was proving so hard to shut down… they had so much, and his people had so little. The Takaina had access to the endless wealth of space; they could have provided their people with such a lifestyle, but that would have meant that they couldn’t launch further colony ships out towards the stars. He knew, even if the Inquisitors didn’t, that there were warriors down on Earth wondering why the humans had so much, and they so little. Looting and pillaging were forbidden, on pain of a sudden and horrible death, but there were dozens of reports of just that. Envy was a powerful motivator… and, now that there was an uneasy peace in Texas, the warriors had time to think.