![]() But here in the desert, watching towering plumes of smoke emerge from impact sites while my quietly idling armored assault group issued a faintly audible complaint over the radio channel, “I can’t take it.” he whispered “it’s too damn hot”. Hadn’t I been here before? Not on the distant planet of Kharak, not among these fictional races and their squabbles, not beside these improbably vast machines of fantastical war. It was the word “coalition”, used so casually to describe the loose alliance of forces that seemed to stick in my head like a grain of shrapnel, an annoying itch. It was the idle dialogue of my forces, all call signs and denotations, which brought to mind the lazy discussions that ran under every leaked video of a drone strike. It was war as I knew it, distant, technological, baked in desert heat, waged on desert sands. It was war as I knew it, distant, technological, baked in desert heat, waged on desert sands Whichever it was, the accumulation of those images pointed to something in particular, an aesthetic I was born into, something unnervingly familiar. Perhaps it was even the talk of prophets and holy wars, the leader mounting a “sermon on the rock” clad in something that seemed to flicker between an industrial gas mask and a jet black veil. And perhaps they are benign, perhaps it was the amber sands that triggered my memory, or the low drone of everyday military radio chatter. Perhaps benign is how the developers at Blackbird Interactive saw these armaments when they added them to the vast aircraft carrier-on-wheels that serves as the player’s base of operations in Deserts of Kharak. The cruise missiles of Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak take flight in much the same way, though from the elevated viewpoint of the game’s camera they seem distinctly more benign. That amber land was Iraq, and these projectiles landed there unseen by the cameras, the audible roar of destruction distant enough to follow a few seconds after the flash of a successful impact. It would have been the 1990s when I first saw a cruise missile launch, the flashcut plume of smoke followed closely by the hammerblow of ignition - the camera whiteout as its automatic exposure struggled to account for the solid-fuel flare that drove the missile until it was a distant glowing speck, arcing over a distant amber land. It was th e name - cruise missiles - that was so distant from science fiction, so connected to a sideshow of images of war. One of a string of upgrades nudged towards me by my commanding officer, charting the slow expansion of my carrier’s already formidable arsenal. ![]() It might have been the cruise missiles that triggered it. ![]()
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