Turquoise Skies Over a Burning Megacity

The following is a serialized publishing for Detroit: Megacity

2047 - Corporate Consolidation District A7

Yarnik wakes up after a meager two hours of sleep. His roommate, Davend, can be heard downstairs, chattering on the holoscreen as usual, but much earlier than expected. He says:

"Waking up to hear that Zenith bombed Acropolis today was not something I expected to hear"

Acropolis is one of the resistance-aligned free city-states. There had been many rumors and talks about an imminent strike. Yarnik knew people working with enforcers, this hadn’t been much of a surprise at all. After coding all night, he was unusually awake. He had to go to work that morning at one of the executive facilities on the upper stratum of district 7A. Davend continued talking uninterrupted, anger about the war, criticism of the board and comments from Zenith’s president, and typical complaints. Yarnik quickly got dressed and ran to his personal MetroLift and stirred up the turbines. Flying through early traffic at dawn, the empty corridors were a breeze. The temperature was just above freezing, and the ice had all long melted from radiant warmth of the urban ecosystem. His breakfast was delivered to him via courier, steamed vegetables with fried eggs and tofu.

He snapped out of his energized daze as his thigh began to burn. He quickly flicked off a piece of steaming tofu, remarking to himself at how effective the biomylar bags were at retaining heat. He consumed his meal and squeezed the bag and fork into a ball and tossed it into the bin.

The sky was turquoise; he was grateful to be able to see it this morning. The cranes on the horizon had not yet finished the next layer of skyline, a few more years perhaps and the sky would shrink, like so many other blocks he had grown up around. Algofeeds showed Zenith Hypersonic Wings flying low, between large vertical farms and past the camera man. Yarnik hadn’t typically seen craft going this fast before, but the maneuver was fairly standard. A loose formation of sleek wings. The next videos showed large black plumes of smoke rising from the free city of Arcopolis. Another showed a Zenith launch facility on fire and being evacuated. Yarnik stared emptily, supposing a quick counterattack by the resistance’s frontline, known as the Warband, wasn’t much of a surprise either.

For a moment be thought about his quiet day, and how intense this same morning must be for the other people closer to the fighting, and he wondered if an attack would occur in his area. He pondered if an EMP might go off. He dismissed it. He knows corporate response to such an attack would be swift and brutal. He doubts the resistance would attack district 7A, as it was very much removed and distant from the ongoing war.

2047, Outer Industrial Sector - Scavenger Corridor C19

Kera wakes to the sound of metal ticking as it cools. That’s how she knows the night shift generators finally shut down. No alert. No light cue. Just the soft contraction of steel somewhere above her head, like the city yawning. She had slept sitting upright against a pallet of stripped conduit, wrapped in a thermal tarp that smelled faintly of mold and rust. Her left boot was still on. The right one she’d used as a pillow, laces knotted so the rats wouldn’t drag it off again.

The holoband on her wrist vibrated once, a passive feed ping, not a message. She flicked it on with a thumb.

ZENITH CONFIRMS STRIKE ON RESISTANCE-ALIGNED FREE CITY ACROPOLIS.

No audio. She didn’t want it.

The band overlaid a shaky clip across her vision: hypersonic wings slipping between vertical farms, the camera struggling to track them before the feed cut to smoke. Black columns punching upward through layered habitation blocks.

Someone nearby swore.

Kera shifted, joints popping, and pulled herself to her feet. The corridor was already awake now, a dozen figures emerging from behind tarps, crates, collapsed service panels. Nobody looked surprised. A few looked tired in a way that went past exhaustion.

Acropolis had been loud on the barter nets the last few weeks. Too loud. That always meant something was about to get smashed.

She stepped around a puddle of coolant runoff and crossed to the charge station bolted into the wall. The indicator light was green, fully charged. She unplugged her plasma cutter, clipped it to her belt, and checked her scrapper backpack. Wire spools. Scrap ceramic. Medkit. Three sealed ration bricks. One drone battery she’d been saving for a good trade

Her stomach tightened, not hunger, not yet. Calculation.

Bombings meant two things out here. First, supply routes would lock down. Second, corporate patrols would surge, sweeping outer sectors for anyone they could tag as sympathetic, opportunistic, or expendable. Scavengers usually qualified as all three

Someone was talking behind her, low and fast.

“—they say the Warband hit a Zenith pad an hour later."

Kera didn’t turn. Retaliations weren’t news. They were weather

She climbed the access ladder to the upper strut and cracked the hatch just enough to look out. Dawn light bled in, filtered through stacked transit rails and suspended walkways. The sky was visible here, but barely. A thin, pale strip between structures. She watched a pair of enforcement drones slide past overhead, black against turquoise, moving fast.

She closed the hatch.

If Acropolis was burning, salvage prices would spike. Everyone would be desperate soon; corporate logistics disrupted, resistance cut off, civilians displaced. That meant more broken infrastructure. More abandoned nodes. More risk.

It also meant more bodies.

Kera tightened the straps on her pack and started toward the southern tunnel. She’d planned to strip a derelict pump station today. That would have to wait.

As she walked, the holoband updated again: another clip, this one closer. Flames climbing the side of a residential arcology. Someone screaming before the feed cut out.

Somewhere far above her, executives would be eating warm food, watching the same footage. Somewhere else, people were running through clouds of debris. Kera kept moving. She glanced once more at the narrow strip of sky before entering the underground.

2047, Lower Reclamation Basin - Grease Core

Jacke was a prince of the Grease Trolls, which meant blood, soot, and obligation long before it meant command.

From childhood he was taught the Way of the Beast, the sacred path within Grease Troll hierarchy. He learned to fight not in arenas, but in scrap heaps where footing shifted and blades caught on rebar. He learned how to claim territory measured not in borders, but in pipelines, burn pits, and salvage lanes. He memorized the chants passed down through written manuscript and oral rite, praises to the Ancient Ones whose names were spoken only when engines screamed and fires burned hot enough to bend steel.

He feasted on grease. He forged his armor himself; layered steel plates cut from wrecked transport hulls, sealed with resin and soot, stitched together with copper wire and bone. Each piece bore the marks of ownership and survival.

When word reached the scrap basin that Acropolis had been struck, Jacke did not fully understand what Zenith Corporation was. Only that it was distant. Vast and untouchable.

He had always despised the Free Cities.

Their height. Their cleanliness. Their sky-facing gardens and sealed corridors. The way they lived as if the world had not already burned. He wondered how they believed themselves better than him. How were they better than the kingdoms that survived in the refuse of the old world?

Jacke drank deeply from his cup of hot grease stew, the liquid thick and metallic, careful not to spill any.

He remembered King Sabu’s chant:

"We will destroy them."

The chant still echoed in his ears as hundreds of Grease Troll warriors danced and howled around a flaming effigy built from corporate signage and stripped drone wings. Sparks rose into the smog like dying stars. King Sabu stood above them on a scaffold of welded beams, battle axe raised high, his silhouette framed by fire and smoke as he roared into the night.

Jacke had believed every word

Earlier, a scavenger woman passing through the basin had said salvage prices would spike if the rumors were true. If the Free Cities burned, the scrap kingdoms would feast. Broken infrastructure always trickled value downward. Now the rumors were real. For a moment, Jacke wondered, perhaps foolishly, if Zenith had done this to make life better in the scrap heap. If the destruction above would finally mean abundance below. His friends laughed when he said it. They clapped him on the shoulder, grease-stained hands leaving dark prints on his armor. They told him how stupid it was to think a corporate superpower even knew their kingdom existed, let alone cared. Jacke laughed with them. As the effigy collapsed inward and the fire flared brighter, he stared into the flames and wondered which parts of the city would fall next, and whether the beasts he was taught to worship truly listened from beneath the metal and ash.

2047, Zephyrion Enclave, Technologist Institute. Subterranean Complex 70.

Virtu worked until dawn. Six monitors washed the chamber in cold light, their glow reflecting off steel walls and fiber conduits embedded like veins beneath the surface. As the sun rose somewhere far above the enclave, Virtu finally leaned back from the terminal. What he’d completed tonight was trivial in isolation; another incremental refinement, but it sat atop months of accumulated research now folded into his latest automation framework. He had been building it for over a year, stitching together disparate tech stacks with help from other technologists across the Institute, particularly those embedded in the economics and computation divisions. The platform had recently earned quiet recognition when it flagged an impending commodities collapse hours before the public models reacted. The finance group had moved fast; timing the market with something close to insider precision. It wasn’t luck. Better datasets, deeper insights, better predictions.

Feedback loops that behaved less like static code and more like emergent recursive learning. C-Doc returned from his graveyard shift at the public medbay while Virtu was still reviewing logs. The sound of boots and recycled air marked his arrival before Virtu saw him. C-Doc dropped into his bunk as the daylight filtered weakly through the reinforced curtains stretched over the skylight. A moment later, Virtu’s terminal pinged. An image. A hypersonic launch platform; sleek, angular, unmistakably cutting-edge. Corporate hardware not meant for civilian eyes, leaked raw and unfiltered. Virtu studied it without surprise. It was impressive, sure, but mostly it confirmed what the models had already suggested. The finance team had been tracking the hypersonics program for years now.

Budget anomalies, materials flows, orbital logistics. Seeing it in the field only validated assumptions already priced into their forecasts. Virtu’s intel feeds had lit up hours earlier with reports of the strike on Acropolis. Again, not unexpected. Gamblers had been placing odds on escalation all week. Virtu wasn’t a gambler. Still, the writing had been there; Zenith strike groups quietly forward deployed into contested zones, nudged just close enough to bring the Free Cities within range. The night before, C-Doc had sent an urgent message urging him to overweight their defense index. Virtu, convinced, obliged. Escalation was imminent. Attached were screenshots from a corporate leak; someone deployed on what was supposed to be a nine-month occupation campaign centered on Acropolis. If that intel was real, this wasn’t a single strike. It was the opening move. Virtu’s thoughts fractured as a new message cut through the stream.

C-Doc:

"It’s going down. acropolis high council presumed dead."

Virtu felt his eyes sink into their sockets. He thought of the satellite image he’d reviewed earlier that morning... a rooftop split by a crater, ash drifting across intact structural framing. The building had held, mostly. External integrity meant nothing. Internal damage was unknowable. His cortisol spiked. Old training surfaced uninvited, memories of geospatial analysis, blast radii, casualty probabilities. He imagined the smell. The charred dead. He dismissed the certainty flooding the feeds. Claims traveled faster than confirmation. Strikes missed. Maybe intel was mistaken. Maybe the council had survived. He closed the image. Suppressed the thread. There was nothing to gain by lingering. Virtu returned to his work area and resumed routine maintenance across the complex.

Diagnostics. Network integrity checks. Quiet work. Necessary work. Aboveground, cities burned. Belowground, the systems had to keep running. Just as Virtu began to think about taking a break for lunch, another ping from C-Doc. This time, secure comms channels showing live video feed, a single large stratospheric missile flying majestically above the contested zones of Detroit, pluming a wide thin cloud of exhaust.

This was war. Acropolis, presumably, had launched a counter strike against Zenith. Target unknown. It had been a couple months since a spectacle on this scale; large ballistic ordinance, but who knew what would happen next? Virtu began to wonder how close this was going to get. He felt secure in the underground structure, but the logistical situation above ground would be rough.