"Sound the general alarm!"
He said it with gritted teeth. "Full defensive posture. All personnel to stations."
The klaxons began to wail across the base.
[WARNING!]
[WARNING!!]
[UNKNOWN HIGH-SPEED OBJECT DETECTED.]
[ATTEMPTING TARGET LOCK. FAILED.]
[ATTEMPTING THERMAL LOCK. FAILED.] [ATTEMPTING VISUAL CONFIRMATION. FAILED.]
The klaxons rang through the corridors of the base. Personnel scrambled to defensive positions. Emergency shutters descended over the exterior windows. The auto-turrets on the perimeter walls swiveled to face the direction of the incoming contact.
Inside the operations room, the senior officer stood at the central console.
"What’s its speed." The technician was pale. "We can’t calculate it, sir."
"What do you mean you can’t calculate it."
"The system can’t resolve it. Whatever it is, it’s moving faster than our tracking algorithms can process. We’re getting fragmentary signal, the object crosses our detection cone faster than the sensor’s sampling rate. It’s not that we can’t see it. It’s that we can’t see it clearly enough."
"Put it on the cameras."
The tactical wall display switched to the base’s external surveillance feed. Every camera in the outer perimeter fed into the display simultaneously. Fifty-six panels of external footage, each one showing the endless snowstorm of the Antarctic coast.
Every panel showed the same thing. Snow. Wind. Nothing.
"It’s not there."
"It is, sir."
"Where."
"We don’t know."
The senior officer’s jaw tightened.
Another technician’s voice cut across the room. "Sir. Something just passed through Sector Three."
"What."
BOOM!
The base shook. The communications tower, a hundred and twenty meters tall, three hundred meters from the operations center, was suddenly not there. The wall display’s Sector Three feed showed a slow-motion collapse of the entire structure as it fell in on itself, split into hundreds of clean vertical sections, its steel skeleton reduced to falling debris.
Every soldier in the room went silent.
BOOM!
The radar installation.
Gone...
The radar was, when Camilla was finished, a scattering of steel fragments and severed cable trays. Its antenna dishes had been reduced to what looked like carefully quartered orange slices.
BOOM!
The auto-turret battery on the western perimeter.
Gone.
BOOM!
The base’s central satellite uplink array.
Gone.
[WARNING. RADAR SYSTEM FAILURE]
[WARNING. SATELLITE UPLINK LOST]
[WARNING. EMERGENCY POWER GRID DAMAGED]
[WARNING. WEAPONS SYSTEMS OFFLINE.]
The systems shouted their failures into the ears of soldiers who could do nothing about them.
BOOM!
The auxiliary generators.
BOOM!
The eastern perimeter defenses.
BOOM!
Every piece of surveillance equipment attached to the base’s exterior.
The senior officer stood at the console watching every red icon on his tactical display go dark, one by one, in the specific ordered rhythm of a systematic disarmament being conducted by something that knew exactly where his equipment was and exactly how to destroy it.
He did not shout.
He did not issue further orders.
He simply watched.
At one point, one of the high-speed forensic cameras, a piece of equipment normally used for tactical playback of live-fire exercises, captured something after its footage was slowed down by a factor of several hundred.
The frame appeared on the wall display.
For less than a fraction of a second, it showed a beautiful woman with red hair, suspended mid-motion in the polar air, her hand extended in a small, elegant sweeping gesture.
She was smiling, then she was gone.
The room was silent. The senior officer stared at the frame.
"...Was that a human?"
Nobody answered him. The soldier at the console beside him spoke slowly, without lifting his eyes from his terminal.
"No human can move at those speeds, sir."
The senior officer nodded slowly with a heavy heart. He had no idea what the fuck was going on...
Camilla arrived at the base’s central operations center approximately eight minutes after her first pass through the perimeter.
She had, by that point, systematically destroyed every piece of surveillance, communications, weapons, and detection equipment the base carried. She had also, during her rapid patrol of the coastline, destroyed the equivalent equipment maintained by the informal Strange Families settlement that operated under the base’s semi-official protection, every private drone, every family-owned surveillance suite, every satellite ground station, every high-fidelity recording device that could have captured any part of the Antarctic incident.
She left the buildings themselves intact. She left the personnel alive.
She had promised Stan she would not kill any more humans, and she was, as she had told him in the cave, a being of her word.
She materialized in the operations room in a single silent motion.
The soldiers already inside the room raised their sidearms with the immediate, drilled response of trained personnel confronting an intruder.
Camilla looked around.
Her crimson eyes swept the room.
She took in the array of small handguns pointed at her from various angles. She took in the tactical displays showing the base’s now-completely-degraded defensive capability. She took in the senior officer at the central console, who had not raised his sidearm and was, instead, watching her with the specific quiet composure of a man who had accepted that his weapon would not have mattered.
She smiled.
’So much enticing blood,’ she thought. Her tongue traced along her upper lip once, involuntarily.
A trace of reluctance moved across her expression.
’But I promised.’
Her eyes moved once more across the room. Then she vanished.
The wall displays flickered.
Every diagnostic system in the operations center reported that the base was still standing. Every external sensor confirmed that the woman had, once again, exceeded their detection capacity. Every attempt to track her retreat produced null results. She was simply too fast.
The soldiers slowly lowered their weapons.
The senior officer stood at the central console for a long moment.
Then he closed his eyes. He rubbed his temples with two fingers, feeling a headache rise.
"...I need a full incident report drafted."
The junior officer at the drone console straightened up.
"Sir. Yes, sir."
"Everything. Convoy loss. Drone destruction. Base infrastructure. The visual capture from the forensic system. All of it. Flagged priority one, forwarded up the chain the moment we recover our long-range communications. I want it in the hands of national command within twelve hours."
"Yes, sir."
The junior officer paused.
"Sir. What about the Strange Families? They observed the incident from their own settlement. Their equipment was also destroyed. They’re going to have questions."
The senior officer’s expression tightened.
"Let them ask their questions through official channels. Whatever they know or don’t know, this is a national security matter now. It stops being an informal peninsula arrangement the moment a hostile unknown eliminates a full military detail and disables a sovereign facility. I don’t care what the families claim to know. Their intelligence is going through us from here on."
"Understood, sir."