Julius Paine watched as Lauria’s shuttle lifted off the roof, pushed by light beaming from the roof of the building on which he still stood. He let himself feel relief. She was safe. Although she is going to be mad as hell when she finds out I’m not there.

Grimacing as another shot of pain lanced into the back of his skull, Jules tried to blink it away. He didn’t think anything was broken, but that didn’t change the waves of pain radiating into the back of his head or the deep ache from his forehead. The dull pressure of the gun pressed into his back increased, as did the grip squeezing his shoulder.

“Let’s move.” His captor said. Together they shuffled back up the stairs.

The shock of full daylight pierced him so deeply that he felt his bile rise and his vision swim. Fuck maybe something is broken. By the time the disorientation faded, he was stationary in front of a man whom he didn’t recognise and a woman he certainly did.

Agent Converez was like a woman torn. On the one hand, her face was relaxed. On the other, her eyes were bloodshot and darting between Jules and the man in front of whom he was standing. Her position a half-step behind him told Jules that this was the man who was in charge. With that understanding in place, Jules let his focus center on the same man.

He was obviously delighted; it practically radiated off his person. He was obviously rich. Everything about his person screamed exorbitant wealth. His skin was flawless, his face well-shaven, his hair neatly coiffed. Jules wasn’t a great judge of clothes, but the suit he was wearing was beautiful. Everything about the man was beautiful.

When Jules’ attention snapped up to his face and saw the man’s smile, his stomach dropped. It was the smile of a man who had caught someone in the act of stealing his car and was going to enjoy the beat-down that he felt entitled to give.

This is not good.

When Castelain spoke, the delight seeped into every syllable. “There is something that I need you to do. Once you do this thing, you are going to join me on my helicopter and we are going to take a trip.”

Castelain nodded to the man holding the gun, and Jules was practically lifted off of his feet as the gun dug painfully into his spine. “Do you understand the consequences of disobeying me?” He asked Jules.

“I suppose you will hurt me more?” Jules gasped.

He nodded jovially. “Yes, but too much. You are quite valuable to me, alive and intact.” He pointed at Lauria’s ship, retreating towards the heavens. “I will shoot down that ship and the one it’s joining.” He pointed at the building below his feet. “I will shoot down this building.” He pointed to the city. “I will rain death on that city, and then on your commune in Montana.”

He slapped Jules across the face, gripping his chin and holding it so the two were making eye contact. Through the ringing in his ears and another wave of nausea “If you want to prevent those things from happening, here is all you have to do.” Castelain pulled out his phone and held it in front of him. “Say: I, Julius Paine, am responsible for these attacks.” He nodded cheerfully. “That’s it.”

OH GODS this is not good.

He lifted one hand off the phone and pointed at the ship. He shaped his fingers into a kid’s pistol, index finger extended and thumb jutting upwards. He locked Julius Paine in his gaze and flexed his thumb in the universal symbol for cocking the gun. His uncanny smile never wavered.

“It is time to choose, Mr. Paine.”

In the end, what passed through Julius Paine’s mind in the moment he was allowed to consider had no impact on history. He tried to think of a way out. He told himself the consequences couldn’t outweigh the costs, though in his heart he suspected that for a lie. He tried to make a rational choice, but in the end he found himself acting without having made much of a decision at all.

Julius Paine obeyed. “I, Julius Paine, am responsible for these attacks.”

As soon as he spoke, the man grinned, slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Thank you. Honestly, thank you. You have made the world a better place today.”

They rushed down the stairs and into the landing strip embedded below the two penthouses. How the hell did they land a helicopter on this berth!? Jules was lifted up into the chopper before. His head was feeling worse. The chopper inched its way into a sickening drop before balancing itself and flying away from the city. The ocean stretched in every direction he could see.

The noise was overwhelming and he wasn’t offered a headset.

Jules could see Converez shouting and gesticulating but he couldn’t make anything out over the pain in his head and the noise and the roaring of the flight. Soon she stopped at a sharp gesture from the suit, gripping the sides of her seat in obvious distress. The roar of the chopper overloading his senses, Jules felt his eyes drifting shut. He knew he shouldn’t sleep, but...

When he opened his eyes, the noise of the chopper had ceased. Looking out the window, Jules saw that they had landed on an obscenely large yacht. A dozen armed men ringed the landing pad. Part of him accepted that he was well and truly fucked.

Glancing up from the white deck of the yacht, he saw a vivid sunset. He looked more carefully and his stomach dropped. Smoke rose four distinct columns to merge into a beautiful and disastrous melange of smoke, cloud, and death.

****

Most of the world learned about the Attacks from their screens. They saw the carefully crafted message that Castelain wanted them to see. It began with the aftermath in New York.

They saw the flames and rubble of the United Nations Complex in New York. Then they saw the flames and rubble of the Federal Reserve Building. Then they saw the port fall into the sea. Commentators used every superlative they had in their arsenals. Soon many stations reported they had discovered footage of the attacks themselves.

Quickly millions of screens displayed still images of two glowing spherical shapes in the sky. With no apparent means of lift, the spheres seemed to hover silently in the sky. The images shifted to show the spheres over New York landmarks. Then they were releasing what were obviously bombs: menacing, glowing purple bombs that looked nothing like the bombs that experts would recognize.

Soon the still images were replaced by video of the bombs’ effects.

Those effects made it obvious they were bombs. Death. Catastrophe. Fire.

It was then that Castelain spread Julius Paine’s confession. He hadn’t altered it in any way. The New York skyline was intact in the background of the confession.

That didn’t change the rabid response from a thousand political commentators: screaming for his head, confusion and conjecture about his motives. From taking out “the competition” (some never quite defined set of entities), to vengeance for his obviously doomed campaign, to pure and simple madness, the broadcasters accepted the truth of his words.

A few protested the accuracy of the video, noting his haggard appearance and what could have been swelling on his forehead. They could offer little more than halting protests that it just wasn’t like him. Their opponents screamed that no else had the capacity to make those weapons and offered no evidence to support the claim.

This went on for a little less than an hour.

Then scenes from London renewed the shared trauma billions were now experiencing. The two spheres dropped more glowing bombs. The Parliament Building fell into the Thames. Buckingham Palace burned. Britain had obviously received some warning because the world watched fighter planes fail to land a single shot on the glowing spheres which were now darting around the skies accelerating in any direction without seeming regard for lift or drag.

Satellite images projected around the world tracked the ships as they crossed the English Channel.

When they reached Paris they were met in the sky with anti-aircraft missiles, and a sky filled with planes armed to the teeth. After leaving scars of destruction through that city (caused nearly as much by crashing conventional aircraft as by the newtech bombs themselves) and carefully targeted government buildings, one of the spheres was obviously dimmer. The French military reported several impacts from their conventional weaponry.

Planes that didn’t attack were left unmolested, so the world was able to watch in high definition horror as two zipped away from the city.

They arrived together over Berlin a few hours later. The dimmer ship dropped two bombs and then slammed into the German Parliament with a blast bigger than any that had come before.

The final ship pushed up into space rather than continuing the relatively flat flight that it had managed so far. As conventional aircraft failed to track it. Commentators scrambled to reach out to their friends who worked at NASA, the ESA and every space agency they could think of. Soon a few stations were showing dotted lines tracking the vessel’s rapid acceleration and predicting its arrival … somewhere.

It seemed to be making a line across Russia. A single glowing bomb descended like a hammer and obliterated the Kremlin. Where the remaining ship itself would stop was the guess of a thousand so-called experts. Some correctly guessed the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party. No one predicted that the ship wouldn’t decelerate. The explosion that ensued was as much from the kinetic impact of the vessel as any ordinance it was carrying.

Moving at what space experts on a hundred broadcasts predicted was anywhere between a thousand and (one unfortunate fool’s guess of) a million miles per hour, the remaining sphere flashed through the night sky of struck the Zhongnanhai. The strength of the shockwave radiating outwards annihilated the Forbidden City and was detected by siesomographs as far away as Tokyo.

Eyewitnesses in Beijing suburbs said it was like a meteor struck. Night turned to day and the sky was replaced by a mushroom cloud that would interrupt air travel across East Asia for a week. Fires around the blast site would take twice as long to contain.

The world went quiet as broadcasters bleakly discussed the population of the city. Broadcasts continued long into the night. By the end, there were a thousand questions but one asked more than any other.

Where was Julius Paine?

Ironically enough, Jules himself would have loved to know the answer to that question.