Doug: The Architect

The ashes fell like snow.

Daniel stood on the edge of the crater where the heart of the city had once stood. Shattered shells of buildings teetered on the edge of the crater, ready to fall a thousand feet to the bottom. Every few seconds a piece of debris would fall, twirling crazily, catching the last few rays of the failing light as it arced into the eternity below.

It was not cold, yet a shiver ran down his spine. He had wrought this, his order had launched the weapon, and the weight of responsibility sat squarely on his shoulder.

Never before had he seen destruction on such a scale. Here, up close to the blast site, all the biological had been utterly obliterated, so he was spared the sight of the waves of bodies that could be found further out, but the gaping hole in the city and earth seemed to be an almost worse wound.

His head turned slightly at the scrabbling sound of one of his junior lieutenants approaching.

“General Mattis sends his regards sir, and requests you take a look at these reports.” The Lieutenant looked young, but after three days of clean up evaluation his eyes were timeless orbs.

Daniel took the papers and glanced over them. “They’re surrendering.” He glanced over at the crater. “Took them long enough.”

“I guess the Kaigani have difficulty accepting the concept of peace through superior firepower, sir.”

“I guess they do. You know, the eggheads told me there was a one in five chance that this particular device might set the atmosphere on fire.”

The Lieutenant showed little emotion at this, the possibility that Daniels order would have killed him and everyone else on the planet.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

“Sir, If I may speak candidly?” What Daniel had taken for nonemotion was really time to consider a response.

“By all means.”

“I work in operations planning. I saw the numbers. We would have lost more than 4 million men taking this city alone. I’m not talking countries or provinces, I’m talking cities. The Kaigani lost eight million here, and another six at Golan. I don’t know how many we’d have lost taking the entire nation. I know for a fact that using conventional tactics we would have had to kill every single Kaigani. Our best estimates put that at well over 50 million. Sir, we’d have still been fighting for another seven years. We have been fighting for ten. I grew up in this war. And sir, I’m so damn tired of fighting it.”

His eyes shone with the tears of a man freed from a great burden.

“Whatever history calls you for this, I know that to me, to my wife, to my children, to my mother and father, you will always be a hero for ending this. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t humane or even honorable, but it was the knockout punch. My father once told me, ‘It’s not the guy who fights fair that survives; it’s the guy who wins.’ We won sir, and it’s not like we had any other option.”

Daniel was silent for a long time, staring into the crater that was the end of this chapter of humanity. Finally, he spoke. “Thank you, son. Give General Mattis my regards; I’m going to be here a little while. Tell him to accept their surrender, and to prepare a more formal ceremony. I think their capital building should suit the bill nicely.”

“Yes sir.” The Lieutenant was all business now; he clambered away through the surrounding debris.

The flecks of ash were beginning to cover up the damage, soften the sharp edges, blur the harsh lines of destruction.

“I do believe we’ll have to put a new city here.” Daniel murmured. “Fill in this crater. Make it a lake. Put a shrine in the middle… After the hurt comes the healing.”

He knelt down, and the destroyer of the city, who was an architect by schooling, used a piece of concrete slab and a burned chunk of wood to sketch the first outlines of Irenasgrad.

Peace city.

"Peace can mean the sight of children at play in a park. Or it can mean the absolute, perfect silence that follows a gunshot."
-Doug