The scramble siren, a blaring, obnoxious and almost ear-piercing noise, was going off. Carver threw off his blankets and climbed up to his feet, sliding into his green pilot’s jumpsuit almost before he had blinked. It was fine instinct, drilled and trained into him after days, weeks of training. Every training session, it didn’t matter if it was weapons, map reading, engineering, if that siren went off, everyone dropped their weapons, pens and whatever else they were holding and booked it as fast as they could run to the hangar deck.

As his feet slipped through the bottom of the jumpsuit legs and his hands pulled through the end of the sleeves, he stepped through into a pair of long socks, and then into his boots. He did up the zipper on the jumpsuit and then slid his finger along the seal. It all took him less than five seconds. As he swept through the door, though, he made sure to take a second and pause in front of the mirror, sweeping a hand back through his dark curly hair. The grin he turned toward the door was one of excitement.

Was it another drill? He doubted it, somehow. They had roused him from sleep before, in the dead of night, but something about this one felt different. Something felt more… urgent. Intense.

The hall was almost empty. Not many people were still on the base, a lot of the veteran pilots, having run months worth of missions each, were finally getting some downtime. Which meant that it was rookies like Carver, like his peers and friends, who were left to scramble at the call. Just ahead, he could see Sagwa, her ink-black hair tied back in a very tight braid that he had no idea how she had time to put it in. And behind him, thumping into the wall as she struggled into her boots, was Isabella, her brown hair a mess and still hopping on one foot as she came down the hall toward them.

“Bonjour, Isa.” Carver said, his grin still bright and wide. “Better run. Last one there doesn’t get to go.”

Isabella’s eyes shot daggers at him through her screen of hair, then brushed her fingers against her chin and flicked them at him. Her foot hit the ground with her boot on straight, and then she took off running alongside Carver.

“Think it’s a real alert this time?” He asked her as they went.

“I don’t know.” She breathed, the faint traces of her French accent coloring the edges of her words. “I almost hope it’s not. Without the others here…”

“We’ll be fine. We can handle it. That’s why we’re here.”

“I hope so.”

They slid through a double-sided door as it creaked open in front of them, and then they were in the main hall, turning to their lefts and running for the main hangar deck. Other people were running around them, other pilots, hangar techs, response teams, medical personnel, all of them going in the same direction, all of them running with the same sort of urgency. But Carver and Isabella ran the fastest, and before they had reached the hangar they were at the front of the pack, pushing through the crowd and into the wide bay.

The hangar was brightly lit, full of noise and movement before anyone had even reached it. Colonel Gannet, their commanding officer, was standing on top of his platform, a central tower up above the hangar, where he would watch everything and where the sound system would let him address everyone. His eye caught Carver and his rugged face creaked with a twisted smile, and then his gaze flicked to the rest of the pilots, the others that he had trained from the moment that they had stepped into their uniforms.

“All right!” Gannet’s voice boomed out over the hangar floor as everyone poured in through the door. “Emergency personnel to their stations, engineers and pilots, to me.”

“What’s the good word, Colonel?” Carver called up to him.

“Cool your jets, Carver, let’s wait until everyone’s here.” Gannet’s head spun ninety degrees to look at one of the sides of the hangar, at the people swarming that direction and all of the equipment and vehicles there. “How are they looking, Red?”

One of the technicians shouted back to him, “Two are warm and ready for you, Colonel!”

“Good work,” He nodded in their direction, then turned back to his pilots. Carver and the others had all pressed up close to the platform, an assembly of eight pilots and many more engineers. He looked down at them and clasped his hands together. “Alright, list up everyone. We have two unfriendlies headed up the main canal into the city. Our eyes in the sky have them at a minor six and a minor seven. So we aren’t looking at end of the world, here, but they’re aimed straight at the shelters, and if they get there, a lot of people are going to die. Our job, the job you’ve been training for, is to stop them before that happens.” He put his hand up in the air, index and middle fingers extended in the classic V shape. “Two pilots, right now.”

Carver’s hand was in the air almost before the Colonel had finished speaking. “Here, sir!”

Another voice said “Here, sir!” at almost the same moment from beside him.

“Carver Barnes and Sagwa Tsui.” Gannet pointed to them. “Good. You two will be in the tanks we’re going to launch. You’ll be taking Jaguars, not the Tigers. We’re expecting inner-city fighting, so stay loose, stay on your toes, and bring both yourselves and those machines back in one piece.”

Carver looked at Sagwa, and she looked back at him with fire in her eyes and a devilish smirk on her lips. He raised an eyebrow at her and nodded.

“That doesn’t mean the rest of you are off the hook.” Gannet continued, “I need as many other machines up and running as we can get, and I want every spare shell and round stacked by the doors incase we need to make a supply run out to our two volunteers here. All you technicians and engineers, it’s time to break out those summer projects of yours. And those of you pilots who aren’t happy that you didn’t get to go, just wait. I’m sure there’ll be a mission for you in short order. Right now, consider yourselves on standby, and if things escalate I need any and all of you to be ready to go at any time.”

He unfolded his hands and dropped his hands to his side, pacing from one end of his platform to the other as he spoke. “Remember, we are not here to simply thrill-seek, or joy-ride, or just to form a steel wall around what’s left of humanity. No. We are the keepers of the flame, we ride the lightning in the storm, we hold the hope of humankind in our hands. We are the best, not because we’re the strongest, or the bravest, but because we refuse, categorically, absolutely, and emphatically, to give up. Now, good luck, fly well, and go with God.”

Carver swam through the crowd and ran toward the far side of the hangar, with Sagwa’s nimble steps right on his ear. The hangar was large enough to hold the big C-55 cargo planes that they used to move the massive war machines and other equipment around from facility to facility. That meant a lot of empty floor space, just to give the planes room to run. But the hangar was not just for planes. Along the walls were little nooks, engineering bays they called them, each one outfitted for any of the variety of piecemeal vehicles that they used. Some were transports, boxy trucks on treads, able to fit literal tons of cargo inside, but most were machines of war.

Tanks were the mainstay. Boxy vehicles that varied in size from the single-person, nimble and small Jaguar, an ideal vehicle for urban environments, all the way up to the Tiger, a three-person mountain of titanium and steel alloy that mounted cannons big enough to demolish whole buildings in a single shot. All of these needed a lot of work, repairs and maintenance to keep running, things like fuel and oil that had once been simple, easy to attain, were now prized and horded. The Tigers were kept ready and waiting, but anytime one of them had to be used would be a dire situation indeed. The Jaguars and their slightly-larger brothers the Lions were not nearly as resource-hungry, and were usually the ones to get the call.

But it was not just tanks that sat around in the hangar waiting to be warmed up and sent out. Carver looked to his left, toward the corner, at a small group of engineers, all wearing red jumpsuits, were furiously working on what looked like a twenty foot tall humanoid suit or armor. It was not quite a tank on legs, it looked too small and nimble for that, but each limb was still with metal and jointed with a mass of wires and hydraulics. The bodies were actually cabins fit for a single driver, and the heads were full of radar, sonar, thermal and other sensory equipment, making the machines the perfect scouts. But they were also extremely difficult to drive and even harder to maintain. They did not have any built-in weaponry and each one was entirely custom manufactured, meaning that if they went into the field, they were almost defenseless and whatever damage they took would take weeks to repair.

That didn’t stop them from sitting there any looking cool, however.

“Carver!” Sagwa swatted his arm as they ran. “Back down to Earth, please focus.”

“Yeah, right, okay.” Carver gave one last long look at the mechanoid vehicle and continued his sprint toward the Jaguar tank that had a large and proud neon green cat’s head design on the front. It was not his per se, the vehicles in the hangar could be taken out by anyone at any time. But he instinctively knew that Sagwa was going to run for the other vehicle with technicians swarming over it: a structurally identical Jaguar with the black and white patterns of a Great Panda painted on it.

She clung to her national heritage like that. Everyone did in some way. Even if the countries didn’t exist anymore, it was something people kept for themselves to try and resemble what life should be like. Like Isabella, and the jokes they made about France and the French language and their snootiness and everything. Sagwa had her pandas, her Great Wall and even Chinese food. Barely any of that still existed. But it made them feel better to joke about it.

Carver didn’t have as much of that. He had grown up in one of the first shelters, all his life was concrete and plaster walls, a heavy ceiling and crowded rooms where their family had to sit in with another two in a room that was barely big enough for everyone to lay down without touching each other. He was what the Colonel called new blood. He was what a lot of the older pilots, the ones who weren’t on the base right now, called a sheltie. It wasn’t a nice thing to say.

None of that mattered once he got into the tank, of course. That was the beauty of it, that was why he was so excited whenever he got the chance to ride. Because then, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, it was your actions that everyone saw.

Carver shouted a wordless acknowledgement to the crew swarming over the pink and green neon tank, and they scattered like cockroaches. He clambered up on the tank, hands slapping on the cool metal, boots squeaking on the time- and element-worn armor. He reached the turret hatch, already opened, and had to stand to one side so that the one last tech who had been inside climbed up and out. He gave the skinny little red-head a grin as he went by, slapped him on the backside, then climbed over and dropped down into the Jaguar.

Jaguars, or Jaguar 33b Sturmpanzers to use the technical designation, were single-seat vehicles originally manufactured in Germany. The driver rode in the center of what was basically a cylindrical turret in a square tank body, which had two electromagnetic low-friction treads attached to its sides that had two configurations: travel mode and battle mode. Travel mode let the treads spin up to the fastest RPM that the magnets could make them go, hitting speeds of almost seventy miles an hour on pavement or level ground. Battle mode sacrificed speed for maneuverability, giving the driver three hundred and sixty degrees of possible movement and letting the turret spin independently. They were rather marvelous machines, actually.

But what Carver appreciated the most was the cannon. Each tank had only a single gun, no smaller supplementary weapon, but the gun that it did have was no mere popgun. Each one was a bored 80-millimeter recoilless multi-caliber JG212 cannon, able to accept a wide variety of shells rounds, one of the last great creations of the Rheinmetall-DeTec AG company before both the company and Germany as a whole were wiped from existence. The cannon fired from a hair-trigger, automatically reloaded with whatever rounds were queued up by the pilot, and was operated on a computer-controlled targeting system that could lock onto a target the size of a fingernail, or just saturate a city block with fire and explosives until the ammunition ran dry.

Listening to the thing hum and whir as it moved was the sort of sound that gave Carver goosebumps all over the back of his neck. It got him more excited than any sound had the right to.

The tank’s engine was already idling, one of the engineers had probably run it to make sure it was still running smooth. The engines in these machines were complex, internal combustion that ran on compost and other waste, not the most efficient fuel by a long shot but the only one that they had in abundance. Things like gasoline, ethanol, almost any sort of oil were basically as rare as gold now. And alternative propellant sources, like natural gas or batteries, didn’t have the power that the engineers responsible for the Jaguar needed. All of this was explained to the pilots during training in order to help them understand why, for as cool as the tanks looked, there was a reason that they without exception smelled like a manure pile.

Of course, since they wore a helmet that closed in their face and fed them breathable, unscented air, you couldn’t really smell it once you were inside. Carver dropped down into the pilot’s couch, a seat that was at once padded and also embraced his body to prevent him from being tossed around with shock. He held still for a moment as the seals on the back of his jumpsuit attached to the seat, locking in with some sort of suction or seal that he still didn’t understand. Once they were in, though, he was not moving until he hit the release.

The tank around him was covered in lights, dials, switches and all sorts of other things. All of them were important, at some time and in different ways. Most of the pertinent ones were located directly forward, where the front wall of the tank dissolved to show a holographically projected view of the inside of the hangar, and Carver’s hands fell onto the control yoke that would tell the tank where he wanted it to go. On it, where his left thumb rested, was a circular pad that controlled where the turret would pivot and elevate, matching up with a large crosshair projected onto his holographic view in front of him. His right thumb had a single button, a red one, that fired the cannon.

Other things, like the throttle controls, the ammunition selection toggle, and most of the emergency evacuation features, were just to his left and right along the walls of the turret. Carver ran his hands over everything, mentally checklisting where all of the different knobs, buttons, dials and switches were. He had been in this cockpit or others identically to it many, many times, too often to have counted. Every time, he ran this sort of unconscious check, just to make sure that everything was there, and that everything was real. He just did not want to have it be a dream.

After the button check, he ran through the actual system check. The mechanics already had, of course, that was their job. But the first thing a pilot had to do after hitting their seat and doing up the seal was to double-check their work. The fuel levels were green. Engine output was green. Internal electric systems were also green. Everything looked good. The last thing he checked, and the first thing that he turned on, was the communication system, a subsonic radio that could reach any transmitters on the same frequency for miles.

“This is Carver, all systems green.” He said to the empty air. “Ready to roll.”

There was a burst of static before he heard Sagwa’s voice echoing through from her own vehicle. “Sagwa here, I am green as well.”

A third voice joined them, the pitched and sibilant tones of Colonet Gannet. “Good to hear, team. Your designation is Firebug, One and Two respectively.”

“Firebug One, standing ready.” Carver said, grinning.

“Firebug Two ready.” Sagwa said at the same moment.

“Firebugs, we are clearing the hangar. Move out on the tone. You have eyes in the sky once you’ve cleared the facility. And if either of you dies, the other is immediately demoted to KP for a year, clear?”

“Don’t worry sir, we’ve got this.” Carver said with confidence. His hands tightened around his control yoke. “We’ll make you proud.”

“Don’t worry about making me proud, Carver, worry about doing your job.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

A loud and insistent tone sounded through the tank’s cockpit. Carver’s right hand immediately dropped off of the yoke and onto the throttle controls, easing them forward. The Jaguar’s engine went from a distant, muffled purring to a rather more insistent growl, and the view in front of him moved and shifted as the tank left its berth and moved out onto the hangar floor.

“Lift shaft four is ready for you, Firebugs. Don’t hurt yourselves on the way up.”

Carver started his tank rolling forward even faster, toward the Number 4 lift shaft, a section of the ceiling about 100 feet by 100 that corresponded with a section of the floor that would lift anything on it upward to the surface. Storing things underground was risky, some of the monsters that had turned up in the past were able to burrow underground. Of course, building their hangar above ground was not exactly a likely prospect either. Doing that would have been difficult even if the world hadn’t ended.

Of course, that hadn’t stopped the team over on the continent that used to be Asia from doing it. Carver had talked about it with Sagwa before. From the rumors they had heard, it stayed aloft in midair with either magnets or the powers of a magical child. It was honestly hard to tell which was the more unlikely option.

The rolling of the Jaguars was as smooth as if they were on wheels, the electromagnetic motors keeping the action of the treads smooth and almost noiseless. Carver and Sagwa rolled their vehicles up to the lift shaft side by side, and the moment they parked and came to a stop, the lift started moving, carrying the two pilots and their machines upward. All around, his view was nothing but a metal shaft, not quite a square but not quite a circle either, with rails and ladder leading both upward and downward. Carver found himself looking upward toward the ceiling, even if all he could see was the barrel of his tank’s cannon sitting right above him. Somewhere, way up there, was a heavy, ten-ton set of doors, and beyond them, the surface.

A sound was coming over the radio, a soft murmuring noise that didn’t rise in pitch, just varied in rhythm. It took him an extra moment for him to recognize that it was Sagwa, and she was humming something.

“Is that… is that a song, Sagwa?”

The noise stopped. “Um… n-no.”

“It was. You were humming something. What were you humming?”

“It-it was nothing. Never mind. Just… just drop it.”

“That didn’t sound like anything I’ve heard before. Is that an old one, from before?”

“It sounded like ‘Space Oddity’ to me.” The Colonel’s voice said, sounding rather pensive for butting in on their conversation. “An old Davie Bowie jingle. That song was old when my parents were still crapping in diapers.”

“‘Space Oddity’.” Carver thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”

“You wouldn’t like it, Carver.” Sagwa said, apparently having recovered her wits. “Too much actual singing, not enough electronic screeching noises.”

Carver rolled his eyes. “It’s called electronimo, Sagwa.”

“That’s not even a word, Carver, I highly doubt it’s actually a genre of music.”

“It is a genre of music, it’s a combination of electronica and screamo.”

“Sounds dreadful.”

“It’s amazing, the musicianship is so awesome.”

He heard a burst of static that he was pretty sure was Sagwa sighing. “Not even a word.”

Then there was another burst of static, this one longer and louder. The doors were opening, and the communications were starting to get interfered with by the sheer presence of the massive motors that opened and closed them. The floodlights around them, the strips of LEDs that illuminated the shaft, everything went dark.

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” Carver heard what Sagwa was saying. It sounded like she was quoting something, a song maybe. He didn’t recognize it, but it sounded too mellow, and her voice sounded too solemn, for him to interrupt her to ask. “But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore?’ This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, ‘Lenore!’— Merely this and nothing more.”

“What is that from?” He asked when she had finished.

“An old poem, by Edgar Allen Poe.” There was a rumble beneath the two of them, and the view outside of their tanks suddenly expanded as they emerged from the darkness of the shaft into the wide, expansive shadows of the night on the surface. “I wouldn’t advise that you read it.”

“You wouldn’t? Why not?”

The rumbling stopped, and then they were alone, just the sounds of their engines and their voices echoing in the expanse within their vehicles. All around them was a barren wasteland, once verdant greenery reduced to scorched, ashen hills, the bare, hollow skeletons of trees standing alone, forsaken by the sun and the rain, bent double with weariness and weeping. There were buildings as well, buildings collapsed into themselves or knocked over and laying on the ground in great heaps, concrete reduced to dust, iron and steel rusted to uselessness or corroded beyond recognition.

The only thing, the one beautiful thing for them as they looked up and around at the surface of Earth, were the stars. Hundreds of them, thousands of diamonds of light sparkling high in the inky black expanse of sky, shining down just brightly enough to make what was on the surface below faintly visible as silhouettes.

“It’s rather dark and depressing.” Sagwa said in response. Her tank started to move. “Let’s go.”