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13:47 Sunday 9 July 2090
The Illuminati and the ONP had never experienced anything like it. They were accustomed to frequent attacks from One Life, to sabotage and incursions, but they had never faced anything like this before. All out assaults on installations were taking place all over the globe. Normally attacks caused damage and casualties but the arrival of reinforcements kept damage to the Organisation to a minimum. The attacks were almost symbolic in nature, designed to remind the Illuminati that One Life was still around and that they shouldn’t become complacent. It had always been like this.
But this was different. Every single installation that the Illuminati operated, every research establishment, every military base, every administration office came under simultaneous attack. This was a highly coordinated operation designed to cause rapid and maximum damage, with no opportunity to muster reinforcements. If the local ONP administrative offices at Jackson in California was attacked, it could normally expect support and assistance from the neighbouring Illuminati garrisons at Stockton, Modesto, and maybe from Sacramento. If the Illuminati central headquarters in Johannesburg came under fire, it could normally rely upon forces from Roodepoort, Sandston, and Germiston to help out. An assault on Copenhagen in Denmark would normally result in reinforcements being dispatched immediately from neighbouring Malmo in Sweden. But this time those neighbouring forces were themselves struggling under One Life attack; they were in no position to give assistance to anybody else. Communications zapped between bases, installations, and offices begging for reinforcements only to be told that the resources that they were requesting were also under attack.
Garcia had spent years surreptitiously planning this campaign. He had grandiose dreams of being the saviour of mankind, of rescuing humanity from Recarn rule. The subtle manipulation that he had applied to Douglas over the previous twelve months had borne fruit. The eldest of four children, he had seen his father killed by an ONP assassin for daring to oppose the ONP mayor in local elections. His father, Enrico, had started gaining popularity with the electorate, so it was decided to eliminate the threat. Garcia had vowed to destroy the Illuminati and all it stood for; to him, such a vow, even from an eight year old, was never to be forgotten.
At his campaign headquarters on Douglas’s secluded island, invisible to the prying eyes of the outside world, he scanned the bank of oversized monitors, each showing several assaults as they happened in real-time. He was a happy man; there was no way even the Illuminati with its vast resources could recover from such an enormous and coordinated onslaught. Garcia beckoned his trusted second-in-command to join him.
“Stage one is going to plan. Look at the screens, Alexander, look at the screens. Isn’t that a wonderful sight to behold? This is even better than we could have hoped for. The Illuminati is crumbling, running around like headless chickens.”
Indeed they were. Electromagnetic pulses had disabled the automatic defences of installations, leaving the defensive forces with no option but to break cover and face the attacking armies with considerably less effective weaponry. Garcia had increased production of disruptor grenades and had authorised their indiscriminate use. The resulting carnage that resulted from the grenades was stomach-churning. An off-shoot from failed matter transportation experiments, they had been designed primarily as a means to breech structural defences. They had never been intended as an anti-personnel weapon, but Garcia didn’t worry about such things. The only good Recarn was a dead Recarn, and he wasn’t concerned in the manner that they should die. The areas around the battlegrounds were strewn with limbs and body parts, where parts of Defenders’ bodies had fallen outside of kill-zones. Their deaths had actually been swift, painless, and instantaneous, but the bloody remains that littered the sites suggested otherwise. It was difficult to see limbs and heads, scythed from their bodies, without imagining that pain and suffering had been visited upon their owners.
Garcia was far too exuberant in his appreciation of what he saw unfolding before him. His satisfaction at a well-planned operation being executed with more ease that he could have anticipated could be understood, but he could scarcely contain himself. If he could have patted himself on the back, he would have done.
“Alexander, this is going excellently. I couldn’t have hoped for more. We start Phase Two as soon as Phase One is complete. There’s no point in hanging around. No point at all.”