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~ "That's just one of those stories from your papers.", decried Colonel James Malloy.

~ "Nah, it's true! My cousin just over at Janus Hub didn't come back from her tour there; where else could she be?", came back the friendly voice over the low priority comms.

~ "Nothing that much of an adventure, at least. The war's practically over, if not technically. Last I knew, we'd pushed `em back to their home world, and were in the process of reverse-terraforming it.", replied the golden retriever in between bites of his sandwich from the seat of his anti-aircraft tower looming protectively above the city below. "And anyway, you're changing the subject again. How'd the date with that pug go?"

~ The reply was a belt of hearty laughter that only a lion could muster. "Well, I didn't exactly uncurl her tail, if you catch my drift!"

~ The shared laughter was interrupted with the unscheduled arrival of a dozen warships several thousand feet above the tops of the city, bristling with flame and lightening as the entangled universe about the ships settled back into place from the abrupt exit from faster than light travel and into atmosphere. Muttering a prayer for whatever crew must have been aboard, the retriever tossed aside his sandwich and fell into the instincts worn deep with training.

~ James Malloy recited quietly to himself, "Station Five-Alpha, Ready.", while shunting the telemetry data of twenty-some odd objects over to traffic control for sorting out. The glowering hulks resisted inventory simple by way of the chunks of armor they shed and subsystems wrenching their ways loose of tangle and superstructure with the sudden manifestation of gravity. Toggling in an over-ride to let the primary radio control channel take over in case any orders arrived, he started to sweep channels with the secondary radio to try and get a notion for where these things were going to crash while his mind raced to recall and construct the daily lives and patterns of those he knew and loved and now worried for.

~ Emergency services were a cluster of rapidly paced and rigidly sequenced requests and acknowledgements for personel here, equipment there, and the occasional declaration of warning to evacuate particular blocks and buildings as the latest data and path calculations came down. None of this chatter was particularly insightful as Col. Malloy kept to his instincts, tracking the objects that were now somewhat lingering in the airspace of the city, still ablaze in every place a ship could be on fire. His visor display kept each of the ships, and the occasional chunk falling planetside, ringed in an annotated indicator. Each of them persistently identified as "Transponder Error".

~ It was as he pieced together that his friends' niece went to one of the schools being evacuated that all but one memory fell silent at the arrival of a sound the Colonel had hoped forgoteen. The slow churn, ascending in magnitude like an angry snake coiled at right angles and transposed into sound. Nothing else made that noise, and for the half second it rose the Colonel hear and saw nothing but. Some ship's main battery of bismuth cannons were being fired in atmosphere. James Malloy's right hand was already on its way to disable the safeties as his left hand began to call up and target the nearest three ships.

~ Grab. Pull. Twist. The third closest ship was a piece of falling armor, cancel targetting. Shove down until you feel the glass break. Targeting fifth closest ship, the fourth was a piece of something kicked into the air. The safety rod breaks, targeting goes live. James' body acknowledged the lurch of the shockwave from the strike of the bismuth cannon with the city's fusion plant replaced with an inelegant combination of crater and metal spray. Col. Malloy heard nothing but the sickening smell of burnt feathers and fur from when the war was still fought planetside years before his muzzle had gone gray. The tower seamlessly toggled to battery as the city grid went dark.

~ All tubes hot, and Colonel Malloy unleashed the full measure of the tower's Tooth Fairy missiles. The golden retriever consumed the four seconds of opening volley to reassert new targets for the secondary guns. For the next several minutes, it would be observed that the sky above and city below had each concluded that the constitution of the other would be improved with the addition of Hell.