RWD: 5.07

5.07

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

—THUFIR HAWAT TO PAUL ATREIDES

The first missile silo opened at 07:43:17 Central Standard Time.

In an abandoned barn thirty miles northwest of Amarillo, Texas, a pair of rusted corrugated steel roofs set in an open gable suddenly slid off the building and fell to the ground following a dull bang. Inside, rails hissed as missile erectors rose into position—angling forty-three degrees plus the correction for latitude, for wind, for the earth’s turning and the target’s drift across it. A choir of safeties unlatched. Arming chains ran. Actuators each screamed once. A line of sootless cylinders stood upright in the straw-dusted dark, steel brushing wood on the way up, the touch leaving a clean arc where age had been.

Guidance noses in the wind.

No human hands were visible. Only old lumber and new machines, field mice vanishing along the baseboards, a bolt-head vibrating on a threshing floor that had held cotton and then nothing, for years. The first motor lit with a white punch and the barn exhaled a square of dust the size of a house. Siding snapped outward from overpressure. A nearby roost fled on a frantic line across the fleeting dawn.

In the same minute, a flatbed idled on a Havana frontage road, two sea cans chained to its deck. Tourists walked past, phones lifted for the old American cars, not for the disguised launch platforms behind them. Container tops gave way like the lids on coffins. The interior did not hold rice or shoes. There were rails again, but cleaner, oiled to a mirror. A Cuban traffic officer turned his head at the wrong second, saw the silos rise and lock, and forgot to blow his whistle.

Chihuahua. A warehouse whose listed cargo was bat guano and palletized salt split a false wall. The platform rolled out into sun, the boom angled from a scissor-bed like a carnival ride being tested after hours. In South Dakota, a camper abandoned in the Black Hills looked empty to a ranger’s passing glance until the roof explosively separated along a seamless seam, panels flipping a few meters into the air before falling off to the side. Pine air took on nitrates. Elk raised their heads. Somewhere, a child asked why fireworks were being lit in the woods.

More sites activated. A derelict factory in New York. A storage facility in Miami. A ranch in Montana whose owner was visiting his daughter in Seattle. Each location chosen for specific criteria: minimal population density, favorable launch trajectories, plausible cover stories that would dissolve under investigation but hold long enough.

The commotion was rather brief in all instances. A bang or whir, then a sudden puff of compressed air followed by a brief, hellish scream as rocket motors ignited. In the wake of this was silence, and in many cases, stunned onlookers unsure what they had just witnesses.

One hundred and seventeen rockets launched within a four-second window. The synchronized ignition lit up military installations across the continent, triggering automated alerts that would reach human operators too late to matter. Most carried conventional explosives—simple, brutal, effective. A few bore disposable satellites. Twenty-three held more exotic payloads, courtesy of Brockton Bay’s most notorious tinker.

Most of the missiles climbed, gaining altitude before leveling off and plunging towards their targets. The arcs leaned toward America’s middle. Kansas, with its white squares of irrigation pivot and its grain elevators tall as parables, would soon learn a new scale of attention. The rest fell across the American southeast in sparse, surgical taps—porches that would rattle, dogs that would wake and bark at lines in the sky that meant nothing to them. 

Amongst the projectiles, a minority did not plan to fall at all. They kissed the high blue and curved shallower, staging off their last weight as they pushed surveillance payloads toward apogee. 

On highways and in parks, on stoops and in parking lots, the public lifted faces and phones. The videos would trend. A clip would freeze on a frame in which a boy in a soccer jersey stood with his mouth open and the glowing line ran up behind him like a wound. Somewhere, a man dropped his coffee and did not notice that it had scalded his hand.

###

Paul followed it all on a hand-sized tablet whose surface read his touch as verdict.

He sat in the driver’s seat of a gray sedan that had never once had its oil changed on time. The upholstery was clean under his fingertips, but the smell told the truth—cheap cloth, and a lingering wintergreen from a peppermint someone had crushed into the carpet months ago. Beside him, Keiko kept both feet tucked under the seat and one elbow braced against the door; her weight shifted in small increments, betraying the tightness she otherwise masked. In the back, Taylor’s presence was a faint motion of fabric and breath until she accepted the tablet he passed her. He knew her eyes would keep flicking toward the side window—not because he could see it, but because he could hear the minute changes in the seat springs and the faint hiss of air when she leaned. He had already mapped what she was looking at: the street’s regular pulse of traffic lights, the thin gull cries where the bay began.

Three civilians in a parked car, two blocks and a turn from the Azn Bad Boys’ current operational nest—brick and shabby, its second-floor balcony holding two chairs that never hosted anyone for long. He had walked the routes in his head, counted the paces, fixed each storm drain’s location in memory. He made Taylor rehearse the street names aloud—partly so she’d remember them, partly so the exchange would pass as casual conversation to anyone watching from outside.

The tablet pulsed a new frame of information, buzzing the update in an inaudible code he felt through his fingertips. In his mind’s eye—the structured lattice of Mentat abstraction—it became a map in ash-white and arterial red: boxes scattered across the continent where his missiles would fall. Most in Kansas, not cities but margins—culverts, farmhouses, grain silos by churches. The rest sparse in the southeast, a sprinkle like salt. Yesterday’s work, today’s conclusion. The Fallen were not a single house. They were rot carried in trucks and sermons and family dinners. Target the places where the rot ate deepest.

“Uplinks are clean?” he asked, holding down the speak icon. His own voice sounded like a line cut across water. Sliding. No wake.

“Copy copy,” Lisa replied over the call. “Telemetry is good.”

He didn’t turn. “Hibana?”

Keiko’s voice came quiet and slightly far-off. “Stop bothering me. Haven’t found him yet.”

Paul nodded without comment. He lifted his thumb and let it settle on the screen again. The attack package nested under his finger was a light bundle of malware and viruses. His target? The three letter agencies that sought to make an habit of obstructing him; PRT, FBI, NSA, the likes. He did not need to blind them forever. He needed them to argue with their own tools long enough for him to walk past. 

He touched the command.

Elsewhere—machines logged onto machines. Secure communications began cycling through encryption keys at random intervals. Emergency response systems for this part of the city began routing all calls to a single overwhelmed desk in Anchorage. Cameras buffered and then rebuffered the same ten seconds of curb because the storage servers were convinced it was still last Thursday. A call from an office upstairs to an office downstairs rang the same desk. A man trying to pull a satellite line for a tasking found that all of his satellites were already tasked to watch a field outside Salina where no one had ever needed to look at anything. Surveillance algorithms started flagging every email containing the word "the" as potential terrorist communications. He felt the resistance—the little reaches of system integrity—take purchase, and then slip. Temporary. Enough.

A chime from Lisa: “Drones are up,” she said. The operators three then fifteen miles away would be sitting in a motel room, thumbs on FPV sticks, goggles washed in live feed: alleys, rooflines, a glance of a face and then down into the rectangles of courtyards where plants died and laundry never dried. “Two fixed-wings, three FPV quads. I’ll have a window into the lobby in two.”

Paul marked the time internally. “Taylor.”

The girl exhaled once, long, as if she were diving. Paul did not need to see to know what would happen next.

Two blocks away, an ice-cream truck had been parked since before dawn, white and chipped and clean enough, a cheery banner along its flank. From the half-opened front seat, a swarm would emerge, pouring out onto the street. Then the cloud would thicken. Africanized bees massed the color of dirt and amber. Gallinipper mosquitoes with bodies like knotted wire. Hornets that had been eating sugar-water and protein paste all night carrying passengers—bullet ants riding like careful thieves, clamped to transport. They would blot out the road, an unnnerving, buzzing cloud of impending chitin, stingers and gnashing mandibles. Paul listened and flet for updates from the surveillance assets as the swarm flowed like smoke across the streets. He got confirmation of his expectations immediately; Civilians running, screaming. Cars swerving. Someone fired a gun at the cloud of insects, achieving nothing but even more panic.

In moments, the mass of insects would cross the distance and hit the warehouse like a wave against breakwater, flowing through windows, under doors, through ventilation systems. Mosquitoes, hornets and ants leading the assault, descending on and disabling the grunts. 

The bees, however, possessed a singular target. Laden with paper wads soaked in a distilled concentrate of Newter’s hallucinogenic fluids—a purchase from Faultline’s Crew weeks ago—they’d searched for and located Lung. Paul quickly got confirmation of that as well; the cape, barely in the initial stages of his transformation—given the timbre of the bellows Paul heard through the screen—roared as the bees swarmed him. They wouldn’t sting. That wasn’t the instruction Paul had given their master. Instead, they forced their payloads into Lung’s orifices; his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Within seconds, the cape’s roars began to falter.

“His down,” Taylor announced, a hint of relief in her voice. 

Paul tilted his head toward Keiko. 

“I found him,” the tinker announced. Her new power—a second trigger’s gift—let her sense explosives within a five-block radius. Oni Lee, the ABB’s teleporter, was a walking arsenal of grenades. Paul had counted on the favourable power interaction. Keiko went silent for a moment, distracted possibly by the task of parsing the sensory data. A moment later, a distant explosion rocked the street, followed quickly by another. 

“Hibana?” Paul probed.

“I think I got him,” the tinker replied. “Not sure. Can’t sense him anymore.”

“Kill confirmed,” interjected before Paul could request a confirmation. “Oni Lee’s down. Feed’s live if you want it.”

“No need,” Paul said dismissing the offer. He keyed his mic again. “Genesis, you’re clear to retrieve the package.”

Their part of the operation completed, Paul turned the key and eased the sedan into the stream of vehicles fleeing the violence. Police sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer. The federal response would come soon—hobbled but not helpless. They'd have contingencies for their systems failing, backup communications, hardened protocols. 

But by then, they'd be gone. Ghosts in a city full of them.