“Are you sure it was Agni?” asked Major Fraser.

“Positive. My powers made the identification.”

Fraser nodded in acknowledgement. “You need to be extremely careful, then.”

“How dangerous is Agni?”

“She’s classified as a global terrorist. On the do-not-hire list for the Stratospheric Guard.”

“She’s never fought the aliens, though?”

“She has.” Fraser pulled up a file on his tablet. “You want the five-minute brief?”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Agni. Originally from Mumbai, India. Started out in early 2069, known for less than a year before the alien attack on New Delhi. She took part in that.” Fraser showed me his screen. “This is what she looked like.”

The image showed a young girl with black hair, in a bright blue and red costume with flames painted on the sides. Her face was obscured by an orange-red mask, and on her head rested a golden tiara - which appeared to be on fire. A blue-and-red cape fluttered behind her.

“Agni’s headgear was inspired by the crowns worn by the Hindu gods,” explained Fraser. “This is a picture of her a couple of days before the Battle of Delhi.”

“Did she fight well?”

“Served as a frontliner. Hit the aliens hard - really hard. She has perfect control of flame, and was able to surround a number of aliens with vortexes of fire. Seven kills, thirty-one assists.”

“Assists?”

“During the battle she was put in a frontline strike group including nine other ultrahumans. Her strike group was decimated by the aliens - only she survived. Mid-battle, she ran across another strike group which she joined.” Fraser pulled up another image. “King Shah and Waqtwazir, two ultras from Pakistan.”

“She met them there?”

“Right in the middle of the battlefield. Acting together, they cut a swathe through the enemy formation. Between the group she was earlier part of - which got ten aliens - and this one, she was involved in killing thirty-eight aliens.”

“That’s a pretty decent number.”

“Split amongst thirteen ultras, of whom only three survived. Not a great exchange rate.” Fraser shrugged. “The Stratospheric Guard assessed her as a frontliner and King Shah as one of the anchors for the battle - which caused no shortage of heartburn, let me tell you.”

“Why would it cause heartburn?”

“A lot of Indians were upset that a Pakistani ultra had been named as the anchor. It’s political. Anyway, it was expected that she would be part of future SURGE responses, after that kind of a debut.”

“What happened?”

“To understand that, you have to understand Pakistan in the 2060s. General Ismail Duraid had overthrown the civil government in 2066 - quite ruthlessly, I must add - and declared military rule for the seventh time in Pakistan’s history.”

“That seems a lot of coups.”

“It was their curse as a country. Anyway, the Pakistani ultras - such as they were in 2066 - had stayed out of it. King Shah became active in 2067, Waqtwazir a year after, and they both made statements supporting the regime.

“In early 2070, there were protests in Karachi against General Duraid’s regime. The army was deployed and fired on protestors in large numbers. Waqtwazir was from Karachi, and - according to the official news sources - went rogue. He attacked the troops sent to maintain order and killed a number of them.

“General Duraid called King Shah to Islamabad and demanded that he track down and kill Waqtwazir. King Shah refused.”

“I can understand why.”

“So can I, and it was really stupid of Duraid - but what followed was even more foolish. King Shah was from Lahore, and the Pakistani military didn’t know his exact identity - but they knew, roughly, which part of the city he was from. So they carried out a massive pre-dawn raid and arrested thousands of civilians from that locality.

“The civilians were transported by truck to a massive detention camp near Rawalpindi. Duraid again called up King Shah and told him that he had track down and arrest Waqtwazir, or the civilians would pay the price. We’re fairly certain that one of the families there was King Shah’s actual family, though nobody knows who it was.”

“That’s… terrible.” I paused. “But - that’s also stupid. You don’t threaten a Herculean by targeting his family.”

“Extremely stupid idea, yes. Duraid is the proof of that. Shah’s response was…. Well, he called Agni and another ultra, Hifara, to help him fight back.

“The next day, all three of them hit Rawalpindi. Hifara created a network of tunnels under the city, and under the camp. The tunnels under the camp were meant to provide an escape network for the prisoners, while those in Rawalpindi were traps for the soldiers. Then King Shah hit their hard equipment - the tanks, the anti-aircraft batteries, the jets - and Agni struck at the barracks and armories where the infantry slept.

“They started their attack at two in the morning. By four a.m., half the city was on fire and thousands of soldiers were dead. The Pakistani army called in troops in division strength to fight back. It didn’t make a difference. By the end of the day, five divisions of Pakistani Army troops were dead.”

“I heard that a hundred thousand died.”

“The estimates for casualties from the Battle of Rawalpindi were ninety thousand dead amongst the Pakistani troops, and close to forty thousand dead civilians. Agni also hit the homes of the families and dependents of the troops.”

I sat back, shocked.

One hundred and thirty thousand dead? In a single day?

An atom bomb might have killed less.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“They got the prisoners out,” said Fraser, “and then King Shah escorted them south, towards Karachi. One of the leading politicians in Karachi - Altaf Peerzada - offered them asylum and called for independence from the control of the north. The sentiment was echoed pretty fast.

“General Duraid didn’t like that, so the Pakistani Air Force was ordered to bomb the civilians fleeing to Karachi.”

“And?”

“And in the firefight that followed, the PAF lost close to forty jets, and Waqtwazir was killed.”

“It didn’t end there, did it?”

“No. That was how the Pakistani Civil War of 2070 started. The next day, King Shah led a counterstrike - this time against Islamabad, the capital of undivided Pakistan.” Fraser flicked to another image, this time of a city in flames. “Agni and Hifara were with him. Hifara triggered tunnel collapses across the city, breaking the roads in a thousand places and trapping people within. Then Agni set the city on fire. King Shah hit the Presidential Palace, and personally killed Duraid and more than a dozen of his top advisors and aides. Nearly a hundred thousand people died that day.”

“And Agni killed most of them.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t come up in your research,” said Fraser. “The numbers - and the full extent of the havoc - are mainly available because of the CIA’s work in the region. Even today, the governments of North and South Pakistan don’t agree on the actual casualty figures - in any of these incidents. But yes, the battles of Rawalpindi and Islamabad are what led to the breakup of Pakistan.”

“What happened to King Shah, Hifara and Agni afterwards?”

“King Shah and Hifara served as defenders for South Pakistan for many years,” explained Fraser. “The South Pakistan government demanded sovereign immunity for their actions, the North Pakistan government considers them terrorists and traitors. The U.N. essentially decided to stay neutral in the conflict.”

“Why didn’t the UN intervene?”

“Until the battle of Rawalpindi, it looked like a purely internal Pakistani matter, and Duraid had stated that everything was under control. In fact, he’d made a big deal of the fact that the ‘true’ heroes of Pakistan would arrest the ‘traitor’ Waqtwazir.”

“So it wasn’t just that King Shah had refused him - it was the fact that he did so after Duraid made a statement publicly.”

“Likely, but we can’t know what was going through Duraid’s mind at the time. Blindsinger could have been written off as an isolated incident of a single ultra gone rogue. The Rawalpindi incident, however, changed the way militaries across the world saw ultrahumans.” Fraser sighed. “And Agni was at the heart of it. King Shah died fighting an alien attack in Tokyo, Hifara is in semi-retirement….”

“Why didn’t the South Pakistan government give Agni sovereign immunity?”

“Because she isn’t Pakistani, she’s Indian. The Indian government was accused of having sponsored the civil war by sending her, at one point - they responded, within hours, by declaring her expelled from the country. When North Pakistan moved to have her designated a global terrorist, they didn’t intervene.” Fraser shrugged. “After that, Agni became a merc-for-hire carrying out high-risk missions for various private agencies and a few less scrupulous governments.”

“Has the US government ever hired her?”

“No. We checked with Homeland Security on this one - she’s never been a U.S. government asset. So if she’s in the continental U.S., someone private hired her - and you’re her target.”

Fraser folded his arms. “I don’t know if we can openly support you in fighting her, Belessar.”

“You don’t want to give her a reason to come after the U.S. military.”

“Sorry. I wish I could say otherwise, but the truth is, Agni is called the Armykiller. From what we know, she hates the military - any military - with a passion. And she has the abilities to actually act on that hate.”

“I understand.” I shrugged. “I don’t expect soldiers to make a difference to an ultrahuman battle, anyway.”

“We can offer you, though, details on her powers and abilities. Everything that’s been observed about her. And intelligence information.”

“That would help. What kind of intel?”

“The police have access to the city’s entire network of surveillance cameras. We can tip them off, let them know that there’s an international terrorist ultra on the loose - and via DURABLE, we can get that information to you.”

“The surveillance data?”

“Not the raw data, of course, but we have analysts who could help locate her. We can - discreetly - pass on probable sightings.”

“That would make a huge difference.”

“I’ll set it up. Meanwhile - her powers. As best as we can tell, she has near-perfect control over flames. She can ignite fires at will - of any size and scale - and control their flow.”

“She had almost covered the street in flames during our skirmish.”

“That’s a common trick she uses. Survivors of Islamabad reported entire streets on fire, seemingly in seconds and out of nowhere.”

“What’s the fuel?”

“Anything that can burn. Wood, plants, food, plastic, the fuel in cars - if it’s flammable, she can make it burn. She’s not been known to set metals on fire, but virtually anything combustible works. And most houses have curtains, sofas … clothing.”

“She can set it all on fire?”

“That’s how she triggered the flames in Rawalpindi. Soldiers would wake up with their uniforms burning.”

I winced. Nanofibre weave was, essentially, carbon - and theoretically flammable. If the description of her powers was accurate, she could set it ablaze with a thought.

“Is there any limit to her powers?” I asked. “Like, a maximum ignition temperature for anything she can burn?”

“Evidence suggest that she can’t trigger flames in something that needs more than 300 degrees Celsius to start to burn, but that’s sketchy. Also, she can teleport through flames.”

“She can teleport?”

“She’s been seen to jump into a burning flame and emerge at another point, from a completely different flame.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“Superpowers often are. Nevertheless, this is also confirmed - by multiple eyewitness accounts. It’s how she evaded capture in Rawalpindi - several times, the troops thought they had her cornered in a building, but she’d just jump into a flame and appear half a kilometre away.”

“Is that the limit of her range?”

“Nobody knows. It could be transcontinental for all we know. She’s never been observed to take a flight, or a train - although she could simply be doing so in her civilian identity.”

“Which we have no idea of?”

“Absolutely none. She’s known to be an eloquent speaker, fluent in English and Hindi, and quite persuasive and charming - but that was twelve years ago. After the Pakistani civil war, she’s never given an interview or made a public statement.”

“How old is she?”

“Our best guess is thirty-four, maybe thirty-five. We suspect she was just out of college at the Battle of New Delhi in ‘69. Again, not confirmed.”

“Got it. Best way to fight her?”

Fraser smiled bitterly. “Don’t.”