X-COM: UFO Defense

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It was dark that night in the streets of Ravenna. Even in the first years of the twenty-first century, the streets didn’t have much more light than they had when the place was still the second city of the dying Roman Empire. Too many city councils fond of kickbacks had siphoned off funds from “unnecessary” public lighting budgets again and again, and the crooked contractors had done the rest of the job, leaving the city’s narrow streets drowned in a near-premedieval gloom. There were exceptions to the rule, of course—such as tonight, when the place was better lit than usual, not by moonlight, but by muzzle flashes.

The horizontal lightning of energy weapons stitched the dark air, leaving everything stinking of ozone, and all the air so ionized that your hair stood up in it like a cat’s fur stroked in dry weather. Sparks jumped from everything that wasn’t already singed or on fire, which at the moment wasn’t much. The alien craft had landed at one end of the Piazza dei San Vitale, starting what Ari could only assume was intended as a terror mission. They started it very well, by the simple expedient of either frying or crushing to death the several hundred people in the open air there. They had been sitting drinking espresso corto or vino rosso in the close, airless stillness of an unusually warm autumn night, eating pastas and honey pastries, talking and laughing the night away. Then the night had come down on them in a blaze of thrusters and a crushing weight, and now not much was left of them but their screams, by now mostly faded to sporadic faint moans and weeping. Around the piazza, everything was dark now, all the lights out in the apartments—the silence indicative of human beings praying that the things out there would somehow, by some miracle, pass them by.

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