Clear fiber-optic filament strands of Selene draped across the buildings of the city, grown as hair of a recent corpse. The bombed-out remains of buildings stood as trees while the dead bodies of humans crumpled at their rubble roots grew as small shrubs of mottled green and brown. Above the trails of rockets and the occasional swarm of loitering munitions on their journey, drawn by the smell of a supply line distant from the front they overflew. Only on occasion did they fall on a particular sector for reasons mysterious to those within it.
At night the sky flashed with occasional bursts of tracer fire and the streak of rockets loosed in the dance of launchers on either side. Streets remained illuminated by starlight and the heat living soldiers gave off while they rushed on their infiltration missions. Guided by distant programs on planned routes painted as luminous paths in their goggles. Each a probe to establish an outpost in some building and move the fractal line to slice off and encircle another section for a months-long siege.
A runner, deliciously supple thighs moving under thin fabric easily penetrated by bullet or the shrapnel of a fragmentation grenade, carried a heavy load of equipment on her back as she rushed to penetrate enemy defenses. She first caught the eye of one of the intelligence daimons while she went between the cover afforded by skeletons of apartments and unwisely onto a street. Her image filtered up the chain, the patches on her uniform catalogued, her body measured and then assigned for death within ten minutes.
The pilot watched her prey scramble over rubble from solar-powered drones perched on eaves transmitting over the web of fiber-optics and laser waystations. She measured her thighs from this vantage point and imagined herself before them, forcing them open with a knife for some additional penetrative fun. But the pornography of this night would be of a different kind.
Five minutes and her prey would have advanced far enough to make it unclear where the sensors were. She waited, perched on a dozen rooftops and in the basement of a shattered office building, breathing stale air while her thighs pressed together.
The timer finally ended, the fun could begin. A drone deposited by a mothership a week ago spun up and flew from its position, unspooling fiber-optics from its laser transmitter. She weaved past other lines, down the street. Her prey noticed her and broke.
She plenty of energy in her battery and expended it freely in the chase; she was rough, not one for much foreplay after having been made to wait. Her prey threw herself through a door and she was forced to pull up into a slight arc before following her inside.
The pilot could hear her panting over the audio link, the buzz of her rotors blanked out to give her awareness on her hunt. She was crying gently, stationary, hiding within some room. Old blueprints for the layout of the building displayed on her headset. To the right stairs, so her entertainment would be forwards, in the laundry room. A shame she wouldn't get to look at the body afterwards.
She pumped the engines to max and burst through it. To the left there her prey cowered and let out a scream. She reversed her right rotors and flipped 90 degrees, and accelerated at full, her prey's frightened body curled in with an arm to shield her in the corner of that room filled the screen in a single frozen moment.
The pilot brought her fingers down between her thighs and finished to the sight.
The pilot was hollow, empty, a pure void through which war had asserted itself. In her youth she enjoyed footage of victims falling into industrial machinery, unthinking blades rending feeling flesh into dead material. Biomass. The romance between dangling long hair and the spinning lathe drew her in as it did the masses of whirling limbs which soon after flew about the factory floors.
As a child she was a voracious reader. The Odyssey, the Iliad (half skipped over), the books, dozens of myths, Heraclitus. She moved on to artless military thrillers whose soldiers lived as cardboard cutouts. Then, finally, poetry in increasing quantity, and a few choice stories whose beauty made her swoon.
In the mirror she read the lines of fictional soldiers to herself and emulated the faces she imagined they would make. Their voices slowly became hers, their mannerisms her own. The image of a soldier from a thousand wars filtered through a photomask of narratives and formed the lines that would etch themselves onto the surface of her empty shell.
A frozen corpse lay in the center of the street, its head positioned looking towards the sun that sat low in the sky on its winter's course, skin bleached by the light of the dawn that passed for a couple hours down between the buildings it prostrated itself before. About, upon the path to it, lie two soldiers, both from the side of the street, who had decided to join it in its worship of the monolith.
The pilot enjoyed crying at funerals. It was a refreshing sensation to have tears come from her face. To ball up her fists in pseudo-anger at its cause. To break down in the bathroom To hug those who remained, to kiss them and wish them well. To sit before whatever meager food was there and to leave it untouched. To feel hunger bite at her from that.
Her first time she had been stoic, unfeeling as a child. She thought then soldiers were stoic and unfeeling. But, in her reading she came across an understanding of tears, and built herself into a form that could cry. So when she came to her next funeral (a case of a brain tumor that a classmate she barely new had died from) she broke down completely and was thus embraced.
Today she was at a funeral. Some man, his name she did not know or care to remember, had died. She remembered his face, frustrating in life, the range of that feeling in death he brought about was excellent. While death was common the funeral was an event infrequent enough to break the monotony away from the front. She longed for one on occasion during those endless days waiting to be dispatched.
A soldier rushed through a street under synthetic nanoparticle fog, labored breaths through a sweat filled respirator. A drone popped from the window and, in an instant, detonated too far to be instantly lethal but too close to permit survival.
The pilot switched to her spotter and perched on a nearby tree to wait and watch the scene unfold. She grinned in pleasure, maybe this victim would take hours to expire. The coward screamed and begged, of course. He could not accept its death had come at that moment and sought to bring others with it. A gift, in a sense, to compensate for dying so poorly.
The relationship with the pilot's last girlfriend had started with her usual emptiness. She went up to a girl and followed the usual lover's tale. She stuttered with nervousness asking her out after they had grown to know each other. They ate, touched, kissed. She blushed at being held, moaned at the slightest touch as she had seen one should, and soon lay together.
But what could she be in the bedroom? No answers had come to her from her stories. They always cut away from the scene before it happened. Sex was perfunctory to her, a mechanistic transition between diagrams of a fading anatomical textbook.
She knew of rape. That was a thing soldiers could do, and so she could do that. She desired it feverishly, and some nights spent them weighing the consequences that would arise if she had followed through. She dreamed of the terror on her face, her girlfriend would be so easy, and the obliteration of her own life so total. What love was there would surely wilt, and so her hand was stayed.
But their love was pure, besides this defect. They danced, they sung, they cuddled under the stars that burnt above and her girlfriend read her poetry that she wrote. Poetry, naturally, on war, whose warmth and beauty was never apparent to her girlfriend.
One night, after a number of months in their relationship, she was utterly drunk with her girlfriend who was likewise. They kissed as lovers, her girlfriend brushed her back which caused her to shiver as was proper. Her girlfriend groped her, and things descended as she discovered another route she could travel down.
The sensation was overwhelming. She knew of violation, and so she played the role. She resisted, meekly (for she was drunk). She asked her lover to stop several times in a soft voice. Fingers pumped in and out of her, she squirmed and moaned involuntarily while tears made tracks down her face as she silently cried.
The next morning her girlfriend looked at her in horror, she assumed, for her girlfriend had not decided to play this character. The rapist indeed was not her girlfriend, and yet her girlfriend was now was one. She comforted her lover- or tried as best she could, in her usual borrowed voices. It was essential for their love that it happen again. And yet it was impossible, for her girlfriend was not to be a rapist, and thus fled the evidence of her action.
The pilot was a doll. Limbs crafted through aeons by her goddess, singular above her. Eyes to see prey. Hands as input devices. A brain to lead a target. She had won every battle thus far, though those limbs and mind were brought to bring about her successor, who in weakened form she controlled. She hoped to be killed while she remained in the favor of the goddess. To be killed, certainly would be better than to die sick, old, or to run like some pathetic animal. To die at her height, an arc cut in half so it would stand without a fall. To have a meaning, a closing chosen by her creator, war. To die beautifully while still beautiful...
The pilot was nothing but feeling moving in arcs through static images in eternal time. Desire pulled her through the air, ears listening on every frequency for the slightest sound. She felt air rush through her dozen blades, rotors twitching and adjusting individually to steady her flight.
A flutter of movement in her omnidirectional vision drew her down. The movement twitched across the landscape below, it accelerated from bush to bush. She came down for the kill, swooping on a course that they would intersect shortly. It threw itself into a muddy ditch, causing her to lose sight briefly as she flew past and accelerated on a new course towards it.
The soldier screamed as she pulled her body closer in violative intent. It had tried to cover itself with mud. To duck beneath the surface of the small pond. But there was no matter. Inwards she came and so the screen ended. Somewhere in a rack collected telemetry was graded and, with success a reward was given. Her wife smiled at her favorite daughter-bride, born into perfect beauty.
Shortly after she awoke with tears for she still had a body and self-reflective consciousness to pollute her service.
The mosquito buzz crept closer and closer. She sat still on the floor while looking out from her view on 3rd and 29th. No movement happened before her out there, not a sound she could hear from the listeners above the infernal buzzing. The noise changed as the drone entered the room she was in. She could feel the prop wash as war's dress moving against her skin. The kiss of her lover waited behind her head, against her neck almost-