Defiance Station

Content warning: this was written 24 hours before the drone attacks in Ukraine.

Tomb-like darkness embraced the city streets. Flashes of outgoing anti-missile fire illuminated the broken skyline. The car raced, dodging the many craters and molten debris.

"God, please, just get us there safely!" Daniel Devaile held his wife Maria's head in his lap; hunched over her, he peered over the edge of the window, his finger exploring a bullet hole in the door. 

"American? Don't worry; this is my twelfth trip tonight, and nobody has died yet." The driver slowed and pressed his face against the glass, looking up. "Just a drone. I think it's ours. Besides, my friend, if you die, I die with you. Slava Ukraini! If we go, we go out together, and we spit on the devil for taking us out of the fight." Glancing back at the drone, he moved the pistol from the seat to his lap, accelerating.

Bricks rained down on the hood and shattered the bullet-riddled windshield. "Jesus, man, that was close! Get us the hell out of here! No, we are Canadian. We are just hobbyists here with our club on vacation." Daniel's chest heaved as every muscle tightened, wrapping his body around Maria's head like soft squishy armor. 

Maria trembled and murmured. "Shit, man, she's praying! She has never prayed before. Are we going to die?" The engine's roar and high-caliber bullets tearing through the rear fender was his answer.

"Everyone out! Out now! The tire's gone, and I think I'm hit and bleeding out. Go to the corner, down the stairs, and stay underground." The wound was horrendous, but he would survive if he stayed out of sight till help arrived. Help was everywhere—the traumatized scrambled out of hiding to help the trauma victims.

Daniel helped the driver to a doorway and asked, "Wait here. You will be okay. Thank you, thank you. My friend, you saved our lives. How can we repay you? I don't even know your name."

The driver pulled Daniel in, nose to nose. He could smell his breath and his blood. "My name doesn't matter. I am just one of many. You remember I am Ukraini. I am this battered land."

The entranceway to the subway was just a block ahead. Daniel and Maria hustled from doorway to doorway, trying to stay out of sight. Daniel stopped and knelt in a pile of concrete rubble. "I don't like it; those are bodies, at least six, I see. It looks like a kill zone or a trap."

Maria kept lunging towards the safety of the shelter, but her husband held her back, waiting. After several minutes two older women rushed out of the shadows and checked each body for signs of life—none exploded. They took a moment to close the eyes of several of the bodies and one they spat on, the one charred by a Molotov.

"Okay, let's go!" Daniel dragged Maria towards the subway till she bolted right past him. She ducked down underground, only her eyes visible above the top step watching Daniel's approaching feet step over a lifeless child's body. She had vaulted every obstacle so quickly it hadn't dawned on her she jumped the child without looking down.

Dual streams of unleashed tears flowed toward the pools of blood. The blood flowed towards the tears. "Shit! They are fresh! Run, dammit, run!" 

Maria burst out of safety, racing to her husband's aid. Now she dragged him into the underground and the unknown.

Hundreds gathered in the cold darkness, furniture set ablaze kept children warm in deeper. The faint flicker made the shock on every face appear ghostly. Maria hugged Daniel's arm and whispered. "Hunny, I can't imagine how many here will die after we escape."

Three explosions nearby shook loose chunks of concrete that fell amongst the crowd though they barely reacted. A young girl nimbly spun around a piece that tumbled to Daniel's foot. She held out a thread bear doll missing an eye. "Pryvit, ledi."

"What a cute doll, but I don't speak Ukrainian." Maria touched the young girl's dirty face.

Twisting her foot into the ground, she thrust the doll forward again. "Excuse me, woman person. Are you," she made walking motions with her fingers, "to the train house building? Take my little toy friend to safe place, please. Take freedom, please. Don't let bad man hurt." She struggled to find the right words, but the meaning was clear. Her younger brother crouched nearby, holding an imaginary gun, ready to face his fears—steel tanks.

"My god, Daniel, that girl must be around seven. She doesn't think she will make it." Maria held the doll staring into its single cold black eye. "I can't deal with this. It's all too much. We need to get to the train. I'm not sure we will make it either."

"Five more blocks, give or take. We will be safe underground. The last few blocks will be above ground, through checkpoints. We will be safe there." Concrete dust shaken loose got in Daniel's eyes and throat. Coughing, he added, "at least from bullets."

Unable to speak their language, all they could do was shuffle past them, awash in an air of mixed hopeful misery. There were moans, and there was laughter and punctuating it all, boisterous and angry shouts, "Slava Ukraini!" 

Maria clung to the sad little cyclops rag doll, "I wish I could have taught her one word: defiance." Daniel wrapped his arm around her when she raised the doll in her fist and bellowed, "Defiance!" It echoed through the subway, repeated by all who knew the meaning. 

Three blocks remained, time was running short, ahead evacuees gathered. Screams stopped them dead in their tracks. A woman was dragging herself down the stairs from the streets above, missing both legs below the knees. She was screaming and frantically grabbing the railing, pulling herself with blood squirting behind her. She was still urgently fleeing her attacker. The screams were terror, not agony.

Two men and a grandmother rushed up the stairs toward the danger. Only one grabbed a Molotov from the foot of the stairs. She let loose her fiery present. Outside, men screamed in agony. One shot pierced her skull, and the heroic elder tumbled down the stairs. She came to rest against the woman's severed limbs, whose final screams faded to gasps of horror throughout the masses huddled in the darkness.

Maria snapped. "We got to go! We got to go now!" She was running through the crowd blindly. She didn't look back to see if her husband had followed.

The crowd ahead thickened, thousands pressed together near the stairs to the station. They pushed through the crowd though several tried to stop them. A man wearing body armor crudely thrown together out of a car door stepped in front of Daniel and put a hand on Daniel's shoulder. "You don't want to go out there now. The station, they targeted it. There are bodies everywhere. Worse, much worse, there are body parts everywhere. It's just..." the big burly man broke down in tears, "human soup; ankle deep." He fell to his knees with a heavy clang of steel on concrete.

Maria held the doll transfixed, rocking back and forth. She kept repeating, "this isn't right, this isn't right." 

Daniel slumped down, sitting on the stairs. "We aren't leaving now, are we?"

Maria stood tall. "I supported your little hobby, even though it was expensive, because I knew it made you happy. Hell, I thought it was fun too. What if we could help these people?"

Daniel took her hand and kissed it. "Maria, come on, you know me. What were my first thoughts when I saw the drone?" 

Maria helped him to his feet. "Danny, my man, my love. I could only think, run home, run. But I know you. Every time you see a butterfly or birds fly by, you dream of new ways to fly your toys." Now that they stood eye to eye, she added, "they never were just toys to you, were they?"

Daniel didn't answer her, not directly. He was lifting the soldier with the car door shield to his feet. "Sir, I need a laptop and every 3d printer you can scavenge. I need the entire stock of every hobby shop. I need cameras, small and lightweight, and explosives bring me things that go boom."

Six hours after the bombardment ended and darkness settled in, Daniel had six laptops, fourteen 3d printers, ten intelligent men and women, and one translator. More importantly, he had one thumb drive he wore around his neck. 

They gathered around small camping lights on folding tables. Daniel took off the thumb drive and plugged it into a laptop. "Ladies and gentlemen, and of course, my darling wife, Maria Devaile. When a drone flies over, what makes you look up like our driver did?" 

Maria knew the answer. "He heard it. I heard it too."

Daniel switched on the screen. "Motors, even the quietest electric, rely on noisily spinning blades. In World War Two, the tides of many battles turned by silent infiltration behind enemy lines. My wife and I have been experimenting with remote control sailplanes. The World War Two gliders all grown up, then shrunk down. Silence, stealth, and performance stretched to every limit."

He swiped the touch screen, displaying 3d designs along with performance details. "Okay, this one, print them smaller and cheaply, but very stiff. It is so maneuverable it can dance and spin around the incoming fire. It has a matrix-like evasion possibility in the right hands. Fifteen G force positive and negative. I took the design of the Swift S1 that was used in every world championship and combined it with features planned in Duckhawk 004. The Perlan 2 space glider's designer solved the speed barrier. You will never get to do dynamic soaring in battle, but I had that baby reach near transonic. If we build them no bigger than a hawk, they will be impossible to shoot down. These would be perfect anti-drone fighters. Actually, it wouldn’t need any guns, just wire filaments towed behind. Foul the drone’s props by looping and spinning around it, then bring it down.”

Daniel swiped to the next screen, and the short, stiff, straight wings were replaced with long, gracefully swooping ones, arching upwards." You want to build this one much larger, eight to twelve meters. Get it high, keep it at altitude, the perfect overwatch of long distances." He clicked the mouse button, and animation began. "It already has a self-launching motor that folds away into the fuselage. The blades fold when the motor's off. Do you think you can rig a gun mount and make it an aerial sniper? If we launch them high, they have a range of hundreds of kilometers, with the right optics, that's visual range too."

The next screen showed a colorfully painted plane with up-swung wings, although much shorter. The logos clearly showed it was built for competition. "Now, this one, you will want to build many, out of lightweight materials, like Styrofoam. Thirty-five-mile range at high speeds, using no lift. Hundreds of miles if you use atmospheric energy. Hell, make them entirely out of explosive plastics. But if we do that, we aren't doing that down here where people can be hurt. If we don't build them out of explosives, we fill them to maximum weight. These kamikaze bombers are silent and don't appear on the radar."

Daniel went over each model and the strengths of each one. Eight were selected—three for being highly specialized, five for range, speed, or versatility. 

We still heard the boom boom booming from distant bombings and the buzz buzz buzzing of drones, both outgoing and incoming, all day and night.

What they never heard was our silent incoming act of defiance.