Who Is The Real Enemy?

The explosion, very near, deafened me, and the violent air compression threw me on the ground. This probably saved my life, because mortal incandescent metal splinters hissed over my head, where a second earlier my erected body had been. Inside of me, I screamed in rage: damned enemies, using such a cruel weapon against unarmed civilians! Which hell had vomited that scum in our galaxy?

I stayed there, lying on the ground, for some moments more, trying to move. Finally I managed to get up and left as quickly as possible on my shaking legs. My breasts hurt because of the brutal impact with the ground, but I forced myself to ignore the pain and went on stumbling: I had to find a shelter, if I stayed there in the middle of the street I would not survive for long.

It had been a sudden attack, by surprise, typical of the enemies' war stile: they were deceitful beings, sly and with no honour, ready for every trick and cowardice just to damage us. Even to attack a pacific hospital planet like mine, which as a medical centre, following all the war conventions, benefited of immunity. We would never ever attack a hospital planet of the enemy! But they had no sense of honour, and civilisation meant to them only technological knowledge. Fortunately they were not better in this field as the Galactic League, to which my world belonged, but a pacific society like ours had many difficulties to manage that war, during which the enemy created constantly new and worse mass destruction weapons. And we were in those conditions for two generations!

A hissing noise, backward high in the sky, made my blood run cold: it was the noise of an enemy space fighter, which I recognized because I heard it far too many times at the frontline, in the time I was on duty in the field as a physician. A fighter ready to drop its bombs on me or, at the very least, to machine-gun me! They really had no consideration of defenceless civilians... I had no way out!

In that very moment, out of the corner of my eye I saw that the door of the building to my right was ajar. With a desperate jerk, I began to run and literally dived through the crack, opening wide the door with my left shoulder and rolling immediately away from the threshold. Barely in time: a double spray of lethal laser-beams drew a black and smoking furrow in the street asphalt, exactly where I was just the second before. I threw all the curses I knew at the enemy pilot, who meanwhile, indifferent to the fear and the anger, mine and of the millions of my fellow citizens, continued his destruction job on streets, buildings and monuments of Zindar, my town.

I looked around where I had ended up: it was the entryway of a block with many apartments. I couldn't see a single living soul and I concluded that the residents had fled somewhere, probably in the basement, like I would have done hadn't I've been so far from home and with my car broken down in the middle of the street.

From the explosions which were fading in the distance, I understood that the attack was moving away from Zindar, and I breathed relieved. Fifteen minutes later they gave the ceased alarm signal, so I dared to venture again in the street.

It wasn't a nice sight.

On the asphalt there were the black traces left by lasers, and glass splinters of windows that had been shattered, here and there pieces of ledges had fallen down cracking the concrete of the pavements. Somewhere near I heard a mournful lament and the cry of a baby: somebody had been killed. Considering that this quarter had been attacked by only a single enemy fighter! I tried to figure out how the centre of the town would be reduced, where the assault had concentrated the most, and I shivered: it had to be a nightmare. I thought relieved that I lived in the outskirts.

Again, I felt a surge of rage: what gave those diabolic beings the right to destroy my town, to kill my people, to devastate my world?! We were not that crooked...!

I was so lucky to find, not far away, an intact automatic taxi that brought me home, and during the way I thought about the origin of that absurd war.