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I was getting ready to go off to work one day a week or two ago, drinking coffee after breakfast, idly flipping through a music magazine. The radio was on in the background. It was mostly filtering in one ear and out the other, but something in the broadcast caught my attention. I rewound what I'd heard and listened in.

"...have discovered that the 'Flying Dutchman' airship, featured in many aviation myths, is more than a myth. A commando team from the Royal Navy were able to board the mysterious aircraft as it appeared over the North Sea, though its engines were still running, and a brief investigation showed it to be not merely an airship, but a gun carrier bearing live weapons. Further investigation will have to wait, as the military team was forced to parachute to safety when the aircraft began to ascend into the upper atmosphere, despite the apparent lack of crew, flight controls or navigation gear. It has since disappeared from Continental radar screens, and interceptor sweeps have not been able to spot it. I'm Natasha Dunrek, for WNTC..."

I just shrugged, at the time. I decided I would read more about it later.

It was today, as I padded out to retrieve the newspaper, that things started to get weird.

I should point out that I live near a military installation, so it is not uncommon for me to see fast attack craft or the occasional airborne troopship buzz overhead. But today, there were many of them. I couldn't tell where they were, mind you; I live in a city full of hills, and the horizon is roughly two blocks away. I could only say they were somewhat to the north, somewhat to the west. And as I retrieved the paper and unfolded it, three more aircraft - two attack craft and a troop carrier - roared overhead, toward wherever it was that they were gathering.

I shrugged as I scanned the headlines without really paying attention. It was probably some exercise, such as is conducted every few years; the government is convinced that we are under threat of massive attacks here at home by extremist devotees of the warrior cult. Not that it hasn't happened before, but... ah, don't get me off track into politics, eh? Suffice it to say, as this city's shore district contains one of the largest refineries for thousands of miles around, a lot of exercises are conducted here.

There was a small article a couple of pages into the paper. A man dressed in low-key, hard-wearing clothes had crashed through a skylight in a downtown financial firm's offices. He was quite, quite dead at the time, had been for a few hours, apparently - whatever had killed him left a large scorch mark on the roof and burned a three-inch-wide hole in his chest. The fellow had no IDs or anything on him that anyone could identify, nobody knew who he was. And as he fell, he apparently dropped a briefcase-sized computer, built into an actual briefcase. Turns out it's some sort of map on disk, blah blah blah, had a telescope or something that plugged into the side so you could sit in any one place, look at any other place around you through the telescope, and the computer would tell you precisely what spot you were looking at. Lovely. Strange man with a strange GPS computer shows up dead from a strange wound. What does it mean? Who the hell knows?

It was an hour and a half later, as I was parking my bicycle at work, that things, having been weird, got even more so. Now, I work at a bookstore; we serve the people politely referred to as "unlikely engineers", the guys whose idea of a good day is to figure out how to give something three extra legs and then blow it up. The texts you want to use to make these projects successful are, to say the least, a bit esoteric, and to be a successful salesman and dealer, I have to know what's in them, as do my colleagues here. We're all rather strange people.

But we don't all have a grain of common sense (myself included), any more than our customers. Which is why, when I heard thumping and thunder in the distance, and looked out the window to see sparkles and flashes in the sky, I said, "Why is someone putting on the fireworks in the middle of the morning?" It was a full second before we realized what was happening.

From our high vantage point, we watched the chaos unfold. The Army was under attack. Their fighters were zipping way overhead while the heavier attack craft were circling at a lower altitude, as though they were looking for something to strike at. I saw the air behind one shimmer and unfold to reveal a sleek and angular craft, which blasted the slow-moving attack fighter in front of it with gunfire and then disappeared again, as the attack fighter broke up in flames. Next down were two troop carriers, the same way, and I whispered a prayer as I saw soldiers, infantrymen, tumble hundreds of feet from the shattered wrecks to the ground.

There was a series of thumping impacts around the city. Objects were falling, landing with sprays of debris. One of them plummeted past our window and struck a glancing hit off our building before burying itself in the street pavement outside. The crash knocked everyone off their feet for a moment, and when we got back up and looked around, the situation was worse.

It looked like truck trailers had been dropped from the sky - and maybe they had. The one in the street outside was the size of a double-wide trailer. As I watched, its walls split open as though burst from inside, and as it collapsed, a vehicle rumbled out of it. It was a tank. It sped down the street to a major intersection, weaving through the rapidly building traffic jam faster than anything that big had a right to maneuver, made a hard left turn, and disappeared around the corner.

We in the store stopped watching at this point. It was time to pack up our stuff and leave - and so we did. It took us under five minutes to have all our computers shut down, all our telephones pocketed, jackets on, ready to go. And so, we left, shoving two recalcitrant customers out the door.

I was a little dazed, now, finding myself standing on the pavement outside the store. Should I go home? In theory I would be safer there, but the occasional flying truck trailer was still dropping out of the sky. For all I knew, one would land on my little house. Should I go to the area of the action and see what was going on? (Of course not, I answered myself.) Instead, I decided, I would go down to the nearby coffee and sandwich shop. I would be able to fortify myself with a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, plenty of interesting people also ate there, and it was in a deep part of the building - an old fallout shelter, I think.

Now, I have a friend who works for the local paper. He's a photographer. And he's really dedicated. So when he rushed into the shop and ordered a bunch of coffee and sandwiches for the news crew in the van outside, I wasn't surprised to hear him say he was heading down to the port, where things were blowing up. (They still were; the faraway burp of tank guns and the rattle of small arms fire were audible, and occasionally the ground trembled.) Here, too, the shop's employees were preparing to close up shop, but they served him first.

It was then that I asked if I could hitch a ride in to see the action. Although he doubted the wisdom of that, he agreed, and so it was that I got to see first-hand what war-cultists on the rampage are like.