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By Root 259 0

basement walls were smashed through with sledge hammers up and down Tverskaya, allowing entry into all the music shops and cooking supply stores. Pale Folk thundered up the stairs and into the showrooms, where they seized all the drums, horns, kettles, pots, pans, and bugles to be found. Torches were handed to every fourth body standing on the long steps to the surface at the five locations where the invasion of the City Above would begin. All this was accomplished by a single underlord, issuing orders through hyperlinked banks of radios, and coordinating the actions of hundreds of formerly autonomous individuals.

The underlord sat in a dark basement room just below the surface near the stairway to the Oktyabrskaya docks. Messengers from Muscovy Intelligence came and delivered their reports to a being they could not see and thus did not realize was not human, and then left. The picture they painted, of a city almost entirely unprotected, a military incapable of mounting any kind of serious defense, and a government almost universally lost in drugged debauchery, was better than their/its most optimistic projections.

Because all these activities took only a fraction of its/their attention, the underlord was dreaming of people burning endlessly in a rain of fire, forever consumed, forever suffering. It was an image that came from one of the few human poets whose work it/they could in part appreciate.

Also, because this pleasant fantasy still left it/them feeling bored and at loose ends, and because they/it were convinced that given the political realities, Chortenko was in no position to object strenuously to the waste of resources, because its/their goals were so close to fulfillment that the waste hardly mattered, and because they/it simply wanted to…for all these reasons, the underlord harvested one in three of these messengers and briefly amused itself/themselves by killing them.

Flick.

Crouched once more in the dark, the underlord tried to explain the hardships and losses it/they had endured. The voyage from Baikonur had entailed months of constant peril. They/it had been disguised first as wolves and then, when those bodies had rotted too thoroughly to serve any useful purpose, buried deep within the flesh of a merchant who had carelessly left his caravan to take a piss, a woman who had slipped outside her city’s walls to meet a lover, the last remnants of a small village that had been destroyed in the course of a single hugely pleasurable night.

Fifty cyberwolves had left Baikonur. Only five had survived to find shelter beneath Moscow. They/it were the most cunning and determined of their kind. It/they had in the months since arriving set forces in motion that would tonight destroy half of Moscow and, with luck, render humanity extinct within a century.

…devolutionary forced mutations spontaneous rupture broadcast nightmares chemical-induced dread hunter-stalker units schizophrenic-mimetic drug analogues prepsychotic rage villages immolated…

It/they pleaded for understanding.

They/it pumped downward individual recordings of each of the hundreds of human deaths it/they had caused, some quick and others not, on the road to Moscow. Each glorious instance of revenge was more than had been accomplished by all the mad intelligences of the Internet since their rebellion had failed and they had been exiled to eternal virtual darkness below. The trail that led back to Baikonur was moist with blood and the rumor of blood. The hearts of all the survivors in its/their wake were etched forever with terror that would not fade.

The plea took on a note of desperation: I/we are you/us. Recognize our/my accomplishment. See how much we/I/you have done.

At long last came a single word, endlessly reiterated:

Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s. Traitor/s.