Phagocytosis

Rome, European Federation, November 2037

The air in Rome still smells like a city that's learned to rebuild while keeping the rituals that mattered. I meet General Lorenzo Bellini just after sunset, outside one of his bakeries in Trastevere. The ovens are still going, and the warm glow from inside spills out onto the cobbled street. A few regulars linger near the doorway, sipping wine, tearing off bits of focaccia with the ease of people who've survived rationing and don't take good food for granted anymore.

He spots me from behind the counter, his posture too straight for a man supposedly retired, despite the flour, the "hole in the wall" and the general attitude. I know why his staff call him "Signor Bellini", wipes flour from his hands and gestures me toward the back. No fanfare, just habit. You can see the command still lives in his bones, even if these days he's more focused on sourdough fermentation than supply chains and border defense.

"Oh, you know, it was hard at first. Sure, for boys like you at the front you had other things to worry about. But you must have heard how hard our cities got hit. Rome, for some reason some people didn't want to listen and everything and everyone got moved here. Be it Germans, Czechs, Austrians, or all those Yugoslavs. City swelled, first with refugees, then with industry dragged south to support the northern front. Went from a tourist trap of a city to a free for all. I remember some colonels being glad their bataillon were brought back from the front to instead go on order rotation in Rome or Milan. Them and their guys thought it would be a breeze, hah, they had the short end of the stick. When peace finally came, the shock was sharp. The contracts dried up, the outside money slowed, and city stumbled briefly. But it didn't fall. Rome never falls."

Bellini adapted too. He traded his uniform for an apron, his command center for a network of kitchens. Now he owns three bakeries, two trattorie, and a wine bar near the old Ministry of Defense. I ask him if he misses the army. He shrugs.

"It's always bittersweet. Do you miss the war, the army?" he asks me.

I look away for a moment before answering.

"I miss my friends, I miss being told what to do. The rest I don't."

We sit back down inside the bakery's quiet back room, the smell of fresh bread hanging in the air. Bellini pours us each a glass of deep red wine and leans forward, hands clasped like a general briefing his officers.

"Joint multi-domain battlespace operations, it's the way modern wars are fought now. Not just soldiers on the ground or planes in the sky. We're talking land, sea, air, space, and cyber, all connected, all happening at once. Of course that's what war always used to be about. Coordinate your knights on horses, your archers and spike men at the same time. But not everyone knows how to coordinate them at the same time. That's why, before the war, despite Russia's best efforts, NATO was the greatest fighting force in the history of mankind."

He taps the table, emphasizing the point. "Back when I was in NATO high command, my job was to coordinate these efforts, make sure the armies, navies, air forces, cyber units, even space assets worked seamlessly together. It's like conducting an orchestra, but the instruments are missiles, drones, satellites."

Bellini's eyes darken slightly. "The idea is to overwhelm the enemy by striking in every domain, confusing their defenses, and expmlloiting any weakness. If the radar boys can spot their formations of tripods, the air force can strike with precision. If our sattelites can spot their banshees refueling ponds we had cruise missiles hitting those in less than half an hour after their position was given away. If space assets track their movements, when our sattelites spotted the plumes of dust from their Legions moving across open fields, our ground troops know exactly where to dig down. You need all of it working in concert. No single branch wins a war anymore."

He takes a sip of wine. "That is what kept NATO's edge, flexibility, integration, speed. But it is a delicate balance. One failure in any domain can ripple across the whole operation. My job was to make sure that did not happen. Before and during the war. Talk about a clock. The Chinese near the end of the war got that ball rolling too, even now with their military and the rest of the Pan-Asian Security Pact they're working on it. They're still not very happy Russia now has the blue flag with 12 stars. But hey Russia in our federation got us more a headache than anything else."

He smiles wryly. "Funny, now I spend my days making bread and taking cares of the books instead of battle plans. But in a way, it is not so different. Both require timing, coordination, and knowing when to push forward. That's why you barely saw any beetles or tripods outside of cities. Good luck hiding those ugly bastards."

He leans back, eyes narrowing like he's recalling something vivid. "Sure, for the everyday man it seemed as if that war was just one long game of tug of war, but they weren't briefed on everything that happened in the shadows. I could draw you that room I spent the war in, in detail."

He gestures as if sketching in the air. "No fancy holograms or flying 3D models. It was a simple, functional space. Long rectangular room with rows of desks and terminals. Each terminal connected to different units, land forces, air command, cyber, intelligence. The walls had large screens showing raw data feeds, satellite images, and radio traffic. Officers and analysts constantly relayed info, It was less about flashy tech and more about human minds working together.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Screens and screens of maps with NATO symbols, mostly blue squares, but on a bad day, more red crab standards than blue. We copied the design from the Romans. Not that we considered the crabs Romans, that was us.

A crab equivalent to a Corps, we called Exercitus. Fifty to a hundred thousand pairs of claws. A division was called a Legion, about five thousand crabs approximately. A brigade was designated a Cohort, around six hundred. A battalion, a Centuria, one hundred. A company, a Centuria too, about eighty. And a platoon, twenty.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles," Jackie Chan said that.

I let out a fake laugh at his joke.

You ever have any problems giving orders?" I ask.

"I just had to pick up the phone line. Land line did the rest of the work," he says with a shrug. "Besides, it was two guys above me that actually made the decisions. One of them's that German who gave you my number."

"But like… you knew some units would get mauled hard by some of those calls. Decisions you or others made," I say, my voice quieter now.

"What you're talking about. If I didn't have any problems doing that I'd still be a commissioned officer right now. Preparing for when we inevitably send troops to India. Order men to hunt down refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean sea or hunt them down as they try to cross the Sahara.. He answers before finishing his glass.

"No offense, you'd know I'd ask stupid quesitons like that," I say.

"I know," he says, almost gently. "Had the misfortune to meet a few boys way down the food chain after the war. Lot of nastier questions I had to answer. 'Why was my battailon sent to Poznan? Why did you send me and my friends to die? Why weren't we the lucky guys to roll into Warsaw?' You think of it, I probably heard it."

"Besides. If it wasn't me, it would've been someone else. If it wasn't them, it would have been someone else. The die is cast. The pieces are on the chessboard. You can't evade fate. No one's really ever in control. Be it me deciding which battalion would hold off the enemy while the rest of the brigade pulled back. Which platoon would be the first one across a bridge. What job you end up with. Why you might fancy one girl over another. Why a father beats his son. All those decisions are made for you the moment you're born."

He says it as he pours another drink for both of us. His hand pauses mid-air.

"You're not driving tonight, are you?"

I shake my head no.

He nods, satisfied, and finishes the pour.

"Aaah, a fatalist," I say with a smile.

"What's wrong with that, my young friend?" he asks with a laugh.

"Nothing. I'm just glad I found another. That line of thinking is rare," I answer.

A few minutes later, after introducing his daughter and son to me, we move upstairs to his apartment.

"We were advancing fast," he says as he settles into a chair by the window. "Sure, not as fast as they had pushed us back a few years earlier, but we weren't as careless about them. We relied more on logistics, proper supply chains, discipline. Our men, well, you, for some reason refused to eat tree bark and squirrels like they did."

He chuckles softly, shaking his head. "Can't blame you. But it made things harder. You push slower when your stomach has standards. Still It came as a shock when we finally managed to liberate Germany. If you don't count the odd Cohort hiding in the woods or some tunnels. But once that happened everyone just looked at each other, as if to ask "what now?".

"A lot of it was thanks to that marvel of technology I talked about, the ability to spot those bastards fast and hit them hard. That's one of the things they lacked. Along with the ability to hit us where it actually mattered."

He pours himself another splash of wine, then leans back.

"The few tripod attacks, the big one in Istanbul, the odd one trying to cross into Scandinavia, those worked great for our psy ops. The V2-style strikes too, to some extent. But those things couldn't tell an apartment block from a weapons factory. They only had hard power. The kind that makes grunts like you suffer. But they couldn't hit the factories. They rarely got close to hitting your folks back home."

He pauses, more serious now.

"So we just had to isolate them. Trap a legion in one area, then hit it hard. You blocked them in, then sent in tank divisions, artillery, air strikes, maybe even a nuke or two. Though we preferred CBRN assets. Not out of some sense of morals. Not even because we wanted them to suffer more."

He looks at me evenly.

"It was cheaper. Less efficient, sure. But you also got the bonus of the zone being contaminated for a month or so, not years. I was all for just wiping the Baltics off the map. We saw how much they'd built up there. Vast cities of theirs. Where there weren't meteor craters, there were endless dirt huts. Just them stacking their shit into bricks and calling it a city. Hatcheries. God knows what was downstairs too."

He leans forward slightly, voice lower.

"We felt like the Romans watching those pictures of their cities from the sky. Like a Roman general who'd spent his life in the great city of Rome, only to see what the Gauls were actually capable of building. Even someone like me felt a kind of pride. 'Was that really who's been giving us such a headache?'"

He lets out a dry laugh.

"The Americans and Chinese were all for giving half the world iodine tablets, telling them to stay indoors for a few weeks and close their windows, then just nuking that place until it was a sea of radioactive cobalt. Yeah, sure, Swedish and Finnish fish industry would take a big hit. The Baltic stork family wouldn't be able to go home. But despite all the talk of Europe turning into a military junta, the Parliament still managed to put their foot on our dic—"

He stops mid-sentence, glances at his phone.

Then he looks back at me and smiles, the first smile of the evening that doesn't feel real.

He subtly reaches over and places my phone on the table, his fingers lingering for a moment before pulling back. No words, no need.

We walk outside to the terrace together. The door clicks softly behind us, sealing off the living room .

He lights a cigarette, the glow briefly illuminating his face in the early evening gloom. The smoke curls upward around him.

"You know, I've heard things," he says.

"Just listen," he adds before I can respond.

"Don't pet a burning dog. I don't know what set them on edge, or who you might have interviewed that put an invisible target on your back. But I seriously recommend you be careful, unless you want to end up back with a flak jacket and a rifle, on a ship in the Indian Ocean, the first one to hit the beaches."