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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron Sky" data-source="post: 5864233" data-attributes="member: 60965">Fall, Per Varios Casus<img src="http://cyberpunk.asia/gallery/Chrike_-_End_of_Days.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Bose leaned back in the soft white leather recliner and sipped at his mi tai at the top of his New York penthouse, watching as a hundred-foot tall war machine casually walked through the side of a sky scraper a few blocks down, sending debris crashing into the charred streets and adding swirling concrete dust to the smoke of the burning city.A Navy VTOL fast-roped a squad of Marines on the top of another building nearby then was cut in half by what looked like a flying buzz-saw the size of a bus.Seekers flew from the troops on the rooftop in response, blasting the buzz saw apart and sending its remains crashing into another building where it exploded into a massive fireball.Bose pointed to a section of the black-clouded sky and his smart windows, recognizing the gesture, magnified the area, revealing a pair of F-29 Sparhawks in a desperate dogfight with a TITAN aircraft. His muse overlaid everything that was known about it from humanity's scattered, fallacy-and-terror-laden reports on such craft on the windows around it.It was called a Ghul by the Arabic Union pilots that first encountered it, named after a shapeshifting, corpse-eating monster from Arabic mythology. It could turn completely invisible to the naked eye and was invisible to radar and most other imaging or location-tracking technologies, it could morph into different shapes literally on the fly depending on what aeronautic stunts it needed to pull, and could supposedly accelerate from a hover to Mach4 in five seconds.Four Raytheon AT-140 AMRAAM Air-to-Air missiles detached from the F-29s and streaked towards the Ghul at Mach5. It responded instantly, five engines igniting with a deep red-orange burn like blazing portals to hell. Its skin rippled and streamlined as it arced up steeply, its exhaust tracing the graph of an exponential function - like humanity's death-toll - into the wicked lightning of the highly-charged post-nuclear shroud, pulling g-forces that would have instantly killed any human pilot.The F-29s slowed slightly and dropped away from the clouds, no doubt due to the tendency for TITAN nanoswarms to drift through them and reach down tendrils like the limbs of some Cthulhuan Old Ones at anything that passed underneath, pulling apart and consuming whatever they touched.There was a ripple of distortion as the Ghul plummeted straight out of the sky at Mach15, its now-bullet-shaped body glowing like a meteor as it cut fifty yards in front of one of the F-29s, the intense shockwave and turbulence of its passing tearing the F-29 apart instantly.Its wingman had only a moment to mourn as the four AMRAAMs  plummeted from the scudding clouds in a beautiful-yet-terrible spiral and all impacted with the Sparhawk simultaneously.Bose had watched the East Coast Mass Interception with everyone else - the largest and last real air battle in human history - and seen the TITANs spontaneously jamming, misdirecting, and or hijacking American and EU missiles and aircraft with casual and terrifying ease. Apparently the new AntiTitan-140s weren't doing as well as the Air Force had hoped. As the world had hoped - what was left of it anyway.Bose sighed as well. He'd helped write the missiles' on-board anti-intrusion software in World Com's desperate LastSource project to bring the best hackers, crackers, and other code-junkies together to come up with weapons to save humanity from the TITANs.Fail.It was about that time that a "Slave Galley" drifted in front of his penthouse window, the strange heat-glow of the TITAN's unknown anti-grav technology making the strange black markings on its yellow-green hull ripple and distort in strange ways that gave him an instant headache.His smart windows overlaid AR representations of the IR lasers that shone from microscopic apertures in the Galley's side and traced his body in an obscene, invisible caress.He finished off his mi tai, savoring its bite.Ten jagged spherical machines shattered his windows, the pungent smell of the world burning assaulting him as gale-force high-altitude winds screamed into the penthouse. A Headhunter drifted in behind them - its ripping blade spinning up as four gripping arms remolded themselves exactly to the circumference of Bose's head.He stood and looked around his apartment one more time, lingering for a moment on his proudly-displayed twenty-years of hard-earned technical certifications, the cracked clamshell he'd carried for luck as a kid, the half-eaten can of beans that would be his last meal, the empty bottle of potassium iodide pills on the counter, the spinning holograms of his wife, their two cats, nieces and nephews lost when they nuked DC, his dad who had vanished into the Rockies six months ago with a hunting rifle, a shotgun, and a backpack full of survival gear when they'd announced that London had just disappeared.The barrel of his .357 was cold against the back of his neck.The spheroids darted towards him - he'd seen them at work before, like self-contained anti-human wrecking balls that bludgeoned people into skeleton-splintered wreckage so they could only lay quivering in pain and terror as the Headhunters came for them.As he pulled the trigger, he hoped he'd get a direct hit on his cortical stack so the TITANs wouldn't rip his consciousness free and drag it off into some unknown digital nightmare realm.He heard the hammer click in concert with the crack of his bones as the spheroids hit him in ten places at once with sledgehammer force...</blockquote>

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