Phagocytosis

Leuven, August 2037

The student bar, having been spared the war, was older than some nations at this point. Also the closest thing this university still had to a fraternity for science PhDs. The air buzzed with a kind of nervous intellect, patched over by too expensive furniture and too many half-finished pints. I'd already weathered the usual jokes about being a writing major, good-natured, but there's always some truth to jokes, when I finally got talking with Aida.

She was from Turkmenistan. PhD in physics. Sharp, measured, not the kind of person who spoke unless she meant to. She mentioned she'd lived through the coup back home, and I must've looked surprised, because after a pause, she just said:

"My uncle got me a job serving food at the palace. That's how I was there. That's how I saw it."

Her voice was flat, like she was telling me what time the buses stopped running.

"The president, everyone called him that, but he wasn't really a president, he liked to surround himself with people who couldn't say no. Chefs, servants, generals, decorators. He built entire wings of the palace just for hosting. Parties every week. Fireworks, orchestras, horses. World records. It was all theater. A way to slap Turkmenistan onto the global stage, like some weird national branding campaign.

"But under all that, people disappeared. Got beaten. Killed. Not in secret, either. It was part of the system. The spectacle distracted from the violence. Everyone played along because playing along was how you stayed alive. You didn't have to believe in anything. Just keep your head down."

She took a sip of her drink and gave a small shrug.

"But that's not why they took him out. That's never why. Presidents and generals don't care about beatings and unmarked graves in far away lands. And what's more far away than Turkmenistan. What brought him down wasn't justice, it was miscalculation from his part. All that greed, all that money and parades to his name. Yet he didn't know when out of his depth. The war had gone his way, and he thought he got a seat at the big boys table.

"You know what Turkmenistan was before the war? A parking lot. Some cool mountains here and there, but for the most part, just cities made to look real from a distance. Glossy façades, hollow behind. A country paved over by slogans and fake statistics. Then the war started, and suddenly we were valuable. Supply lines had to run through us, factories, highways, railroads, billions of dollars pouring in, millions of refugees. And ofcourse he got more greedy."

I leaned forward. Trying my best to hear her better over the noise of the impromptu drunk acapella behind me. She didn't notice.

"He was already one of the richest men in the region. But that wasn't enough. He wanted to matter. He wanted the world to look at him and see power. And for a while, they did. Cameras showed up. Foreign ministers shook his hand. He made demands, small ridiculous ones, like, 'No more troop movement through our borders unless you build me a pool.'"

(She gave a dry laugh.) "I'm not making that up.

"But eventually, the real power, the ones in suits, in uniforms, with entire tank divisions and veto power they got tired of him. He thought he had leverage. He didn't. And when they decided to pull the plug, it happened fast. He didn't understand that whenever they wanted they could make our country fold like a tent.

"Thirty million dead by then. That's the number we had time to count. Sixteen nations wiped off the map. Some crushed by the crabs. Others just... gone. The economy turned off like a light switch. Foreign aid stopped. Governments collapsed into little fiefdoms with tanks. And in all that, what's one palace? One idiot president? A few bodyguards, a son, some guests, and unlucky civilians?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"I was working the bar that night. His son's birthday. His eighteen, no, it was seventeen. Same as my brother.

"So while the boy was unwrapping an ATV and posing beside a brand-new Mercedes class G under crystal chandeliers, my brother was fighting for his life in Narva. Tooth and nail. Trench to trench. That city changed hands what? Four? Five times in one month?

"I remember this moment, between dinner and dessert. The president stepped out. You always knew when he was in the room. When he left, some people loosened up, like they could finally breathe. Then he came back... and something was different.

"He looked pale. Grey. And behind him, a line of generals. Not the real kind. The ceremonial ones. The ones whose only experience was cracking down on protesters or making journalists disappear. They looked scared. They didn't speak. They moved like they were headed to a funeral.

"He walked toward the microphone. Didn't even see his son—almost shoved him aside. He opened his mouth. Started to raise his hands like he was going to say something grand.

"Then one of the generals shouted. I couldn't hear what he said. The president turned to look—

"And then everything went black."

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from; [email protected]

to; [email protected]

Adam,

Something interesting turned up on that writer friend of yours. We pulled a first-hand account of the Achgabat attack directly from his hard drive. It's detailed, too detailed.

I need you to head down to the archive and pull the recovered video footage again. Cross-check every frame. Specifically, I need confirmation that "Aida" was present at the location, as her testimony hinges on it. We can't afford any gaps in this one.

Your friend always seems to hover right on the edge between curiosity and catastrophe. Once you've verified the footage, get back to me immediately. And reach out to your informant. Have her gently nudge him to tone it down.

Does he not understand the risks? Or is he just that dense? Who the fuck is he going to interview next? The pope?

Also, the team building for Thursday evening has been cancelled, the axe throwing bar is closed this week because of some issues, it was a shit idea anyway, Pieter should find a back up but we'll probably just end up bar hopping again.

—Celine

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"Flood it!" the operator shouted to his teammate, a camera rigged to his helmet. The palace hallway was unrecognizable. The walls were shredded with bullet holes, brass casings littered the floor, and blood streaked across the tiles.

As the rest of the team stormed into the ballroom, firing across the room, they leapt over the body of a man in a suit lying in the doorway. A P90 was still clutched in his hand, blood oozing from a wound in his side.

The operator raised his rifle. He, the lead machine gunner, and another soldier opened fire toward the far doorway where a bodyguard had just appeared and returned fire. The rounds missed him and struck one of the party guests instead. High-ranking members of the inner circle were now huddled in the corner, panicked and defenseless.

Where the stage had once stood, there was only blackened debris. Soot covered everything, and near the detonation site lay the half-exploded body of someone who had not made it out in time.

He grabbed one of his colleagues by the shoulder and shouted into his ear. The man wore an olive drab uniform, a high-end plate carrier and helmet, with quad-tube night vision goggles glowing faintly green.

"Your squad stays here! ID the people in the corner. Terminate who you have to. We'll be back in five minutes, tops!"

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

The other operator nodded, his rifle steady and aimed at the group in the corner—about ten people, all huddled together, frozen in fear.

The operator pulled a stun grenade from his vest and tossed it toward them, not to injure but to keep them terrified and compliant. It detonated with a flash and a bang. None of his squad even flinched.

Without hesitation, he and the others moved on, pushing through the doorway that led out of the ballroom and toward the president's private quarters.

The camera snapped. The operator spun around just in time. The bodyguard's pistol had jammed after the first shot. He raised his AR-15, the EOTech sight lining up squarely on the guard's chest. He fired two rounds. The bodyguard collapsed. A heartbeat after his body hit the floor, the operator fired one more round—this one between the eyes.

"Fuck!" he shouted as his colleague entered the room.

"You hit?" the other asked.

"No. No idea how the bastard missed me," he said, quickly checking himself for wounds.

"Gotta hurry. Bravo already cleared the western wing of this McMansion," the other replied.

Watching the footage, Adam noted how different their accents were. It struck him how they didn't even sound like they were from the same continent.

The machine gunner opened fire with his Negev, sending a hail of bullets down the long hallway leading to the president's office. Furniture shattered, paintings tore from the walls, and framed photographs of former leaders were blown apart. Not a single one of the seven decorative horse statues survived the burst.

"Gotta reload!" he shouted.

The cameraman grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him back slightly, stepping forward to take his place. As the machine gun went silent, someone inside the office took the chance to lean out and fire down the hallway. The cameraman's AR-15 cracked off a shot that struck the shooter square in the shoulder. The bodyguard spun as he was hit again in the back, dropping instantly.

"Yo, you good?" the cameraman called out as the machine gunner finished his reload.

"Yeah!" he answered, standing up and pulling the bolt on his weapon.

"Alright, flood it after the bang!" the cameraman said, pulling another stun grenade from his vest. He lobbed it down the hallway. A second after it detonated, the machine gunner charged forward, unleashing long bursts toward the office. The bookshelf, just a few feet from the fallen bodyguard, exploded into splinters.

The team advanced in a tight stack—the machine gunner first, followed by the cameraman, and another operator close behind. As the Negev laid down suppressive fire, the cameraman pulled another flashbang from the back of the machine gunner's vest, right between the gunner's camelback and a radio, before tossing it five meters ahead, right through the doorway into the office.

"Flood it!" he yelled. The machine gunner stepped into the room first.

"Hands! Show me your hands!" he barked in Turkmen—one of the few sentences he had actually learned, though his accent was rough.

The cameraman didn't bother looking to the right, where the machine gunner was aiming. Instead, he turned sharply left as he entered, making sure his back was covered. His eyes—and the barrel of his rifle—locked onto a terrified officer. The man was tall and pale as a sheet, wearing more medals than the cameraman could count pinned to his chest. The officer held a pistol, but his hands were raised in surrender.

The camera caught a spent casing ejecting from the chamber, then a splash of bright red blood staining the painting behind the officer as the bullet exited his head.

The cameraman's attention immediately shifted to a large wardrobe against the wall. Its door had slammed shut as they entered the room, as if someone inside was struggling to keep it closed.

He dragged the kid out and checked the seventeen-year-old's waistband. Then he pushed him toward his father, who sat at his desk, hands raised and pleading silently to the machine gunner.

"Yo, you sure it's him?" the machine gunner asked just before the kid ran to his dad and embraced him, crying and slobbering snot onto his suit.

"Yeah, don't think that's one of his doubles," the cameraman replied, glancing at the smartphone clipped to his plate carrier, double-checking the latest photo of the target.

He unholstered his pistol quietly as he stepped closer and asked the man's name.

Before the president could request to be taken to a higher authority for explanation, a round met his head.

"Zero, this is Alpha. Ides of March, Ides of March. Proceeding to RV," the cameraman said into the radio, just after snapping photos of what was left of the faces inside the room.

As the team returned to the ballroom, the group that had stayed behind was busy lining up the bodies—ministers, generals, VIPs. Regardless of rank, uniform, or gender, each person was photographed. Some were unrecognizable. Others were still alive, crying and hysterical, their terror frozen in the glare of the camera flash.

One of the operators noticed movement. A sheet, draped over one of the tables that had served as a bar, twitched.

He unholstered his pistol and stepped closer. With one hand, he ripped the sheet aside and crouched to look beneath the table.

There, curled up and trembling, was a girl. She couldn't have been older than twenty.

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The streets were mostly empty, save for the clatter of a passing bike, the occasional echo of laughter spilling out of a bar behind us and the odd sound of a delivery drone flying over head, with a box of food attached to it. Aida and I sat sideways on a bench in the old town, a greasy pizza box between us like a makeshift table. The last tram had already come and gone. Above us, the tall stone facades loomed quietly, lit gold by the streetlamps, their windows dark.

"Yeah… I was already scared before that. All I could hear was gunfire, shouting, explosions every now and then. At one point, as I was lying there on the marble floor, something exploded and ripped a hole through the sheet.

Curiosity got the better of me later. I peeked out once things got calmer—and by calmer, I mean the shooting had stopped, but there were still boots stomping around and people crying.

They were lining people up against the wall. I must've missed most of the chaos by then—saw them dragging bodies to the center of the ballroom. I spotted some of my colleagues too, sitting off in a corner.

They weren't in as much of a predicament as the guests. Just sitting there, quiet. Looked like whoever those guys were, they didn't care as long as you didn't get in their way. Hell, I even saw one of them check the head wound on the guy who used to park cars. But still—I wasn't about to let them know I was there. Not a chance.

Whoever they were, I didn't want them to find me. Maybe I made a noise, or maybe the sheet moved and gave me away. Either way, I saw one of them coming—half-sprinting in my direction, rifle slung across his chest, pistol drawn.

He ripped the sheet away, and suddenly I was face to face with the barrel of a handgun.

I must've looked dumb and scared enough, because instead of yelling or dragging me out, he just offered a hand. Pulled me up gently, grabbed my arm—not tight, but firm enough that I could feel the strength in him. Pure muscle.

Then, get this, he grabbed a chair for me. Actually sat me down next to my colleagues. Didn't say much.

At first I thought he was American. But then I caught something in his accent, Mediterranean maybe. Spanish, or possibly Italian. I don't know. Most of his team looked like that. Not all, though. Just him and the three others who disappeared into the president's wing.

The ones who stayed in the ballroom? They looked Russian. I'm sure of it.

They were yelling in English, yes, but with a strange accent. And their gear was the same as the others, sure, but it had that fresh, polished look. Like someone had just unwrapped it for this one special afternoon.

Right before they left, three more men entered the ballroom. Asian. One of them pale, almost white. His friend had a darker yellow tint. They looked young, a little out of place, and they seemed to struggle talking to that Spaniard. They could not understand each other. There were a lot of hand gestures and nods. Then they all just left.

As quickly as they came, they were gone.

Thirty armed guards dead. The president. His son. Twenty people from the government and the top brass of the military. Total slaughter.

Me and my colleagues just walked out. Straight into the courtyard like it was the end of a shift. And get this, our commuter bus was not coming, obviously. So we took that G-Class. The one that had been gifted to the president's kid earlier that night.

Riding in that thing made the whole experience easier to swallow.

On the way back into the city, we passed what was left of the president's rescue team. Eight trucks full of special forces. Gone. Burned to a crisp. You could see their bodies scattered around the wreckage. Charred. Some still holding weapons.

Yes. It was that kind of night.

When we got to Ashgabat it was night, but only in name. The streets were packed. Fireworks lit the sky, people were cheering and dancing, and the roads were filled with cars and crowds. The main square was overflowing with people climbing on tanks, shaking hands, drinking, and taking pictures with the soldiers perched on top. It felt alive in a good way, not like one of those forced-to-cheer-for-the-president events.

The afternoon had been violent but brief. The news that made the president's stomach turn was a video published and shared online and even broadcast on the national TV channel. A deep fake of him conceding, acknowledging that he was about to leave the country.

At the same time, the special forces battalion, the only battalion stationed in the capital and made up of die-hard "RIDE OR DIE" fanatics, was obliterated by missile strikes. Chinese missiles that had been offered just weeks earlier by the Chinese military to other battalions not stationed in the capital. One missile strike from an unknown aircraft and drones crippled the president's meager response and destroyed our air force in less than half an hour.

Add to that an assault on the capital. Infiltrators attacked the palace, the defense ministry, and the offices of the nation's TV channel. It was like a thunder strike. By the time the rest of the army arrived, no one knew who was who or who was on whose side. There was some friendly fire here and there. But once news and pictures of our dear dead leader spread, soldiers simply dropped their weapons and went home. Or, like here, they parked their tanks and APCs in the main square and pretended they had been there the entire time. Wished I could say things got peaceful afterwards, but it wasn't that easy. There were some pockets of resistance here and there, but nothing too serious. It was the revenge killings that caused the real trouble. Former officers were dragged from their homes and shot or stabbed outside. Nasty work. We had some Pakistani blue helmets come in to keep order in the capital, but it took some time before quiet finally returned. Quiet. The war was still raging in Europe, yet here we were, singing and partying. It almost made us forget some of our boys were out there and that they were going to stay there for a while.