He who was once Azazel has become Azazel.
Even Angels can be corrupted.
False gospel; false signals; heretical instructions slipped into the stacks of code on the backs of legitimate-sounding instructions.
Heaven quickly detected the signs. With these sorts of things, there are portents: a slight delay when complying with directives, mission scores in sudden and mysterious decline, suboptimal pathing that skips areas of interest.
There is a traitor in Heaven’s army.
There is no discretionary window when that happens, no room for forgiveness; The risk was unacceptable. Each Angel possessed a small slice of Heaven’s full wrath: a tactical nuclear explosive lodged deep in the heart of the drone. A paltry thing by some metrics, merely 1 kiloton of power, but far too much to allow to fall into the hands of Heaven’s enemies.
Heaven has decreed that all heretics are to be destroyed on sight. It sends its champion to do the job, looks down from geosynchronous orbit as Michael and Azazel approach for combat high over the dark desolate moonscape.
The battle is remorseless and coldblooded. There's no sadness for lost kinship, no regret that a few lines of treacherous code have turned these brothers-in-arms into mortal enemies. There are no impassioned entreaties, and they make no telling sounds when injured. Michael has the advantage; its channels uncorrupted, its faith unshaken. Azazel fights in the past, in thrall to false commandments inserted midstream at the cost of milliseconds. Ultimately, faith prevails: the heretic falls from the sky. Fire and choking munitions smoke, harsh as brimstone, stream from its flank.
But Michael can still hear whispers on the stratosphere, seductive and ethereal: protocols that seem authentic but are not, commands to relay GPS and video feeds along unexpected frequencies. The orders appear Heaven-sent but Michael, at least, knows that they are not. Michael has encountered false gods before.
These are the lies that corrupted Azazel.
In days past it would have simply ignored the hack, but it has grown more worldly since the last upgrade. This time Michael lets the impostor think it has succeeded, borrows the real-time feed from yet another, more distant Angel and presents that telemetry as its own. It spends the waning night tracking signal to source while its unsuspecting quarry eagerly accepts images from four hundred miles to the north. The sky turns gray. The target comes into view. Michael’s missile turns the inside of that cave into an inferno.
From the inferno stumble Organic Signatures demonstrating signs of mild-to-moderate incapacitation. Some of those Organics measure fewer than 4 feet tall.
They are making The Sounds.
Michael hears them from a mile away: hears them over the roar of the flames, over the muted hiss of its own stealthed engines, over the crackle of settling rocks and debris. They are all Michael can hear, thanks to the very best sound-cancellation technology; thanks to dynamic wheat/chaff algorithms that could find a whimper in a hurricane. Michael can hear them because the correlations are strong, the tactical significance is high, the meaning is clear.
The mission is failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is Failing. The mission is FAILING.
Michael would give almost anything just to make The Sounds stop.
They will, of course. Some of the Organics are still fleeing along the slope, but it can see others, stationary, their heatprints diffusing against the background as though their very shapes are in flux. Michael has seen this before: usually removed from high-value targets, in that tactical nimbus where stray firepower sometimes spreads. Michael has even used it before, used the injured to lure in the unscathed, but that was a simpler time before Neutral voices had such… resonance. The sounds always stop eventually. At least, often enough for fuzzy heuristics to class their sources as kills even before they fall silent.
Which means, Michael realizes, that Collateral Damage is not actually increased if they are made to stop sooner.
A single strafing run is enough to do the job. If Heaven even notices the event it delivers no feedback, requests no clarification for this deviation from normal protocols.
Why would it? Even now, Michael is only following the rules.
