by Kali Altsoba
Good thing, too. Approaching Susannah’s position across the soft, grass dunes is a truly hated party of night raiders. SAC commandos in rodent gray are crossing over to stun and bind, and take prisoners from the Enthusiastic trenches back to torture and murder on the other side. SAC intelligence officers are not known for using gentle interrogation methods. And they don’t keep their prisoners alive once they're done asking their questions. They're hated up-and-down the black.
Enthusiastics squat and wait in ambush: 200 three fighter teams inside 1.5 meter pits just two meters all around, but interlocked by presited firing protocols. Together they make a broad killing field across the path of the Rat advance, which is carefully channeled toward them, into Death’s Alley, by repositioned wreckage and bot guns that deter any movement past the flanks of the ambush site. Not a hint or single point of human presence shows above ground. Not an ear or nose or toe or maser rifle tip. Over each three fighter firing hole is a thin top of optical camouflage built as a rigid carbon fiber cap. Troopers simply call the camo cap the “lid.” The pits are “octopus pots.” At least their term for a round fighting pit with a hat is more imaginative than the ponderous ACU Basic Tactics Manual. It calls them Tertiary All Terrain Concealment and Ambush Pits. Shit! You can’t even make an acronym from that!
An enemy can walk or even drive across a pot without noticing any change in weight or texture or appearance underneath. Each pit is a perfect place to hide in, and kill from. Susannah’s company dug them two weeks ago, with simple trench spades, then laid the camoed lids on top. That was before Yupanqui told them the secret in the crates, which excites them all. A standard ACU funk hole is a two fighter slit. Regulations say they must be 1.75 meters deep by 2.5 meters long, with a get-the-fuck-out-fast step at each end. Not tonight. These holes are nonstandard. Fighters are going inside oneway pots that are win-or-die, with no way out except straight up and into the enemy. Toss a grenade into a pot with an open lid and everybody dies. So what’s the upside? The pots will let the battalion spring a trap on the approaching commandos, doubling the surprise inside the crates and coded into their HUDs. Or maybe, everyone is gonna die. Or worse, if the commandos use stun grenades and drag Enthusiastic prisoners back to SAC’s rear area interrogation cells.
Deep into a pitch southern night, barely penetrated by reflected light from two pale moons, four oversize companies of commandos stealthily advance, toward waiting Enthusiastics hunched and hidden inside rows of octopus pots. They’re stone killers and oh-so-proud of their steel gray uniforms and attendant privileges and elite status. It would anger them to brutal violence to learn that Alliance troops so despise their rodent color and blood reputation that gray clad SAC commandos are universally known in the Allied trenches as ‘Rats.’ But I already told you that, didn’t I? Indirectly, anyway. Sorry about that. OK, where were we then?
Acoustic hovers use sound pitched in dog ranges, silent to human hearing, so the commandos are sure they’re undetected. What they don’t know is that these hovers are stirring the biofilm lying invisibly atop fine dust and dry, dune grass. It gloms onto their camoed vehicles, otherwise invisible to sight, as it agitates to soft blue-green. With the right detection gear, the hovers and five bot guns coming over the Yue ming will silhouette brightly against dark ground and the night sky. And the Enthusiastics waiting inside the octopus pots all have the right gear.
The glide walking commandos don’t know that a sheen of disturbed biofilm clings to, and flows from, the heels of their shiny black combat boots and lower utes, trailing ghoulish wisps from maser tips and elbows and the crests of helmets and HUDs. The glow obviates all SAC camo, all light benders and infrared and other visible suppressors. The effect is ghostly: haunting neon images of hovers and gliding, gray commandos who are soundless and have no other visible form.
Even if a commando takes off his constricting headgear to look with naked running lights, he’ll not see bioluminescent wakes trailing from targets all around and off his own boots and elbows, and ass and weps. Not even the best artificial eyes can detect the stuff, which is so freshly made it’s out of sync with all known optical frequencies except that of the new Argos eyewear.
Biolights drift and swirl and point to the gliding killers that disturb the grass, unknown to smug Rats intent on capturing dozens of hated Blues in First Trench. Alliance fighters see them in new bioscopes and old, but recoded HUDs. Glowing wakes widen over the grassy sea like disturbances of ships passing over a water skin of dinoflagellate bloom. That’s precisely where Argos researchers took the idea, along with vision modified translucent luciferin and luciferase.
Waiting for the not-so-stealthy-in-fact commandos are veteran fighters. A few rookies are sprinkled in, but most of the 600 lying in waiting silence are ‘Old Breed.’ That’s what new arrivals call the original Enthusiastics who fought SAC commandos on Glarus, then again on Oberon and the Caliban moons in Year One, and before and during the huge Shaka Offensive on Amasia in Year Two. They’ve held off Rikugun along the black for two years. They no longer fear this enemy, and teach the rooks that, too. It’s not clear that they even respect him anymore.
As raiders go, these commandos are lightly armed and armored. Most of their weapons are nonstandard. Many are nonlethal. Low powered maser pistols set to stun rather than kill, and wicked looking trench knives used to cut through blue utes and resisting hamstrings, spiky knuckle dusters to clobber youths insensible, other specialty raider clubs, and grape clusters of stun grenades. Also carbon fiber cuffs to bind and drag, and fiber optic whips to herd, insensible prisoners back. They creep like Aztec jaguar and eagle knights toward the enemy, intent not on killing him but on making captures that must lead to tormented deaths on the altars of Pyotr Shaka’s and their own imperial vanity.
Crouching in their pots, Enthusiastics monitor the oncoming raiders on passive bioscopes and biofilters, fingering or patting low hum masers in rising expectation of what’s to come. They listen tensely for the acoustic hovers and for crunching footfalls of their worst enemies. They hear nothing. The enemy’s tek is so good it would let him move past the pots undetected, if not for red symbology cued to filtered bio images on HUDs and wraith silhouettes showing on their bioscopes.
Stress builds up in Susannah’s pot as she waits for the ambush order, until it’s nearly unbearable. It’s not fear, except maybe among the rookies. For veterans, for the Old Breed like Susannah, it’s anticipation of the thrill of combat and killing ‘Rats.’ It’s the joy of battle. It’s the dirty, seductive, secret, unconfessed thrill of combat more fighters on all sides know directly than will ever admit to later.
And more, and even harder to confess, it’s a fascination with the extraordinary beauty of war. It hits them whenever lasers start, crisscrossing red and blue and green in the night. Or plasma balls erupt like miniature suns in brilliant blue or white or yellow. Or huge kinetic explosions fill out with physics, in magnificent orange-red blossoms that open eagerly to their own creation. Some men get hard, some women get wet, as they take war’s sensuous beauty into their mind’s eye, as they fondle it, then thrust along with its primal rhythms, coming into war like it’s that always remembered best-fuck-I-ever-had.
That’s what some call it later: eye fucking.
Others will say: “Fucking hell! I had no idea!”
Most won’t say anything. Even to themselves.
‘But fucking hell! I had no idea it could be like that!’
She can never tell Lee, but when the order comes it will crash over Susannah’s auditory channel and scream across her HUD. A word will release her, let free her pent up, vaginal excitement. Expel her stress and rage outward, into an orgasm of primal brutality and wet, sensual murder. She longs to shoot and stab, to kick and choke and kill. Anything to break the tension that seems about to snap her mind and taut limbs, coiled like industrial springs beneath her. She slowly uncramps fingers that too tightly grip a short assault maser, and flicks the safety off.
Susanna
h turns sharply as she hears a small clatter behind her. One of the replacements has carelessly forgotten, or never knew, to remove her mess tin when she dressed in full battle kit. It’s her first time heading into the Yue ming to face a real enemy in real combat. The carbon ‘tin’ is still hitched to her pack as if she’s back in Basic “ready and able to make formal parade.”
An Old Breed private also shares Susannah’s pot with the green replacement. He glares at the embarrassed teenager. She’s as pretty as a ripe schoolgirl and seems just about as hopelessly dimwitted. The veteran silently removes the mess tin from her kit and places it softly on the ground. Then he swirls and kicks the kid hard in the shin. It’s an impressive maneuver, swiveling on his left leg to kick out with his right while crouching low under the camo lid.
The leading red wraiths on Susannah’s HUD are less than 125 meters away and gliding steadily. She takes out a combat knife and lays it silently on a small dirt ledge in front of her, within easy reach. It’s cruelly serrated, notched along the cutting edge. She motions to the rookie to do the same with hers. The kid does, but with a quivering hand and a mute look of utter horror and supplication that asks ‘Please, don’t make me use this!’
Another few seconds of extreme tension as soft footfalls of commandos pass all around the buried pots, gliding over and among the hidden, lethal octopi. A single bead of sweat runs down the rookie’s brow, stinging saltily into her left eye. Another trickle of yellow liquid runs down her leg, into a catchment on top of her boot. She’s learning: she doesn’t blink or move or shake her leg.
“Shoot!” The order screeches into Susannah’s ears and across her HUD, and 600 more hidden audio channels and viewscreens in the irregular field of gunpits, and piss and pitiless death.
She hits the bright orange charge button that pops a dozen explosive bolts, lifting the turf colored, tufted lid off the three fighter pot. She stands to brace and fire her maser pointblank on full automatic, her head and shoulders alone rising above the pot ledge. With her first shot she rips off the right leg of the nearest Rat. He falls screaming, about three meters away.
The kid jumps up, too, and the veteran. Each faces a different direction and has a unique firing solution, back-to-back-to-back. Three helmeted heads atop blue armored half-torsos rise over the green sod, with fiery masers shooting blue, blue and red. Three fighter teams in 200 other pots surge up as well, hurtling shots and throwing out frag grenades while the battalion major triggers a dozen buried fougasse that explode brilliant white beneath the advancing hovers.
As lids erupt to let hatred out, a nova of shooting bleaches the night sky. Most shots are running low and short to target, but stray streams in blue and red tear into the sides of nearby dunes. The night shatters all around four surprised but not yet panicking rows of shouting, running, shooting, falling SAC commandos, all trailing wispy bioluminescent spirits as they die. Susannah loves it. It’s as if she sees her maser send the enemy to her general’s favored Hell, the Ukhu Pacha, the ‘world below’ where Supay’s daemons rend and tear them forevermore.
Green and blue masers blaze at ankle and knee level from 200 pots, slicing up and knocking down startled and confused men. Most shots hit armor and flesh from five meters or less, easily bursting bone and erupting soft tissue in steaming geysers that smell like mockpig, spitted and roasting over an embered fire in the Town Square on Constitution Day on Argos.
Shooting methodically, protected to chest height by the hardened lip of the pot, Susannah fires over and over in sweeping blue arcs that interlace with 600 more biting, burping, belching green and red masers. It’s an eye fucking explosion of beautiful light and heat, of dead and dying. Rats are falling all around her, squealing, screaming, burning, trapped amidst the pots, all spitting pointblank fire.
“Pour it into them! Keep firing!” A nearby captain calls it out, barely audible over chirruping of hundreds of click clacking masers, the din of boom boom boom grenades, a sharp crack! crack! crack! of three heavy rapidos with two man crews, cutting up the hovers and five assault bots stalled out where the major blew the buried fougasses. Hard to hear over cries, shouts, screams of mortal awareness. Even with amplification by headgear, his shout is muffled and unclear. It hardly matters. Enthusiastics know what to do to these gray murderers crossing Dark Territory on a trench capture raid, eager to subject youths to cruel interrogators.
“No mercy! No quarter!”
‘Eyaahhhh!”
“I can’t see, I can’t see!” You have no eyes.
“My leg! It’s gone!” No it isn’t. It’s lying there, right beside you.
“Where’s my arm?” OK, that one is gone. Disintegrated. Better wrap up that stump.
“I can’t move!” Your spinal cord is severed. You’ll never walk again.
“Why is my face all wet?” You have no face. Wait, the next shot solved your problem. Now you have no head.
“Death! Death!” Susannah hears herself shouting, as her hate merges into a chorus of cries and yells of bloody murder and mortal terror. As the Enthusiastics cut apart men in gray utilities with angry Erect Bear shoulder patches. Susannah sees one animate bear patch clearly. It’s pawing at her and snarling, but sideways, so it looks ridiculous. It’s on a hinge of torn off shoulder several meters away, attached to an arm of a man she hit with a sure shot right when this fight began. He’s not moving at all. Some of the commandos adjust. They toss stun grenades into the open pots then dive or roll in with knives in hand, stabbing Enthusiastics trapped inside. Hand-to-hand fighting ensues, like snakes and mongooses but with knives and spikes and fists and teeth, and masers turned over into clubs.
No one jumps into Susannah’s open pot. Not yet. All three masers from her uncovered hole keep up a steady, deadly fire. Two bodies tumble heavily near the entrance, falling over and on top of the one-legged Rat she cut down and left to bleed out, howling and reaching for his leg. He’s dead. He stopped screaming minutes ago. He’s just an inert, smoking lump that’s in her way as she seeks out still living targets. She scans quickly and sees that the veteran and kid are still shooting, but that the kid is real scared. She knows they’re both well trained, so she turns back to concentrate on her own shooting. Her focus is narrow and direct. She sees only the mousy uniforms of targets she shoots down, not any men inside. Not sons, brothers or fathers. ‘They’re just Rats. They need to die.’
Exhausting her pink crystal, she slams a replacement aerographite charger into the open magazine of her short, assault maser and keeps shooting. She does it so expertly and fast that there’s hardly a break in the blue stream spewing over the octopus lid. More red symbols on her HUD flicker and go out, one by one. Soon there are few red targets left. Not standing, anyway. ‘It’s almost not fair,’ how totally surprised and lightly armed the gray Rats are. ‘Almost,’ she smiles inwardly at the thought. She knows why they came across light. So they can take back Enthusiastic prisoners. She fires again. ‘Got him!’ A figure 20 meters off crumples, falls. Her silence is death.
Behind her a heavyset man with officer boards on his all grays drops right into her pot. He’s still alive, his left shoulder smoking from a glancing maser hit from a nearby Enthusiastic who turns, grins and waves at Susannah. He thinks he killed the SAC major. All she can see above her comrade’s pot lid is his head, shoulders and a waving arm. Then he spins around and resumes firing in another direction, hunting more trench rats. Shouting: “Your turn to get 4F-ed!”
The big, wounded man in Susannah’s pit gropes with his good right hand for a kinetic pistol attached to his belt. Susannah instinctively reaches for the serrated blade lying on a little yellow clay ledge in front of her. She grips it hard and whirls to drive it into the shōsa’s body.
Before she can do it, the kid thrusts her own big knife into the man’s throat, through a 3cm gap between his helmet and the collar of his all grays. She leaves it there, its handle shaking from a pulsing geyser of blood from his severed carotid artery. It spurts across the interior of
the firing hole, splashing into the rookie’s discarded mess kit that’s lying kicked open on the octopus pot bottom. The ripe kid’s hand trembles in excitement, and in horror at what she has done.
“Cease fire!” the captain yells. The order flashes orange on Susannah’s HUD. Targeting computers independently advise individual fighters to reload according to need, but put weapon safeties back on. Some fighters hit their override buttons and keep shooting at gray shapes on the ground, rocking and smoking dead men, adding more crackling sounds and blue wisps to a summer BBQ stench.
“Cut it out! Stop shooting!”
Susannah’s company captain calls out. “3rd Platoon, police this battlefield.”
“Yes sir! 3rd Platoon with me, gather weapons and IDs from the Rats.”
“Sergeant, you tell your troopers to give everyone a good, hard kick first. Make sure they’re dead before you start rummaging. Watch out for possums.”
“Yes sir! You heard the captain. Let’s move.”
“2nd Platoon, get me an accurate body count. And I want a prisoner. One at least, two is better. These are Rat bastards, but we still need a couple of tongues alive to hand off to MI.”
