by Kali Altsoba
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
Joachim hardly notices all the armor pushing directly past his position, leaving him standing like a boulder in the midst of a sudden mountain flood. He just keeps shooting at the oncoming green infantry, still advancing into his rapido fire. The armtraks ignore him, a solitary rapido firing from a broken position in a shattered section of the enemy’s black. They have emphatic orders not to stop for anything, to maintain momentum, to bypass any strongpoint and leave it to mop up infantry.
The two big fougasse laid right against the black wall did a real number. RIK combat engineers are constantly blowing the holes wider, laying in more precise and targeted charges. Already, there’s a gap that stretches three quarters of a klic north from where Joachim stands on a 50 square meter dais, shooting into the Yue ming. A second, raggedly undefended bit of broken wall reaches a quarter klic to the south. Over half his battalion is dead or hors de combat on either side of him. The rest of the brigade is dissolving, its HQ overrun. In fact, the whole of sadsack 22nd Marine is reeling backward, getting ready to break and run. The armtraks seem to sense it, to know it like a lion knows the wildebeest it’s choking is losing its battle for life. They keep going, keep biting the jugular with clamped iron jaws.
Rows of armtraks drive pell-mell past him, looking for soft, rear area targets beyond the now jagged black. Heading for Second Trench, hoping to get through so fast they make it to Third. Nor does Joachim see ferociously violent hand-to-hand fighting within the zigs and zags, where the last fighters of his own platoon hold out around his island gunpit. He just keeps firing his carbyne shielded barrels at anything that moves into vision in front of him, sway spraying red pulses over a field of dead and dying men. He’s more deadly than them all.
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
He doesn’t know it, but help will soon be on the way. Three minutes after the huge fougasse go off and the Mammoths and Mastodons break through the jagged gaps either side of his gunpit, an ACU armored counterattack starts forward from Alliance Second Trench, 102 klics due west of his position. General Lian Sòng is answering Prince Oetkert’s challenge. Is she also swallowing his poisoned bait?
ACU Buffalos and ATCs fly at breakneck speeds 25 meters above the green prairie. They leave long, acoustic suppression trails in the grass below that look like ruts from the thousands of simple, migrant wagons the first Amasian farmer-settlers in the region used. Back when they were racing against each other to find and stake claims in a brave, new AI terraformed world. That was long before a thriving colony ever gathered to agree on where or whether to build wheelie roads and maglevs that would least despoil the splendor of the grass the AIs made.
Blue armor slams hard to the ground, ducking below volley flights of streaking anti-armtrak missiles fired by the forward hover infantry protecting Mammoths, Mastodons, and Elephants. Not all the Buffalos and ATCs make it down or deploy tracks in time. Behind the lead wave, black mushrooms rise where fusion engine containments crack and fail, and big machines crash and roll, then blow apart into white plasma blossoms. But the survivors make the switch, charging along the ground with lower profiles, closing yawning breeches in the linear infantry defense.
Opposing armored fleets slam into each other in strange, violent mating rituals of head butting collisions and mounting tangles of clashing tonnage. Masers and lasers are the tusks and horns of the bellowing, enraged and murderous herds of mammuts and bovids. Buffalos ram or mount larger Mastodons, in forced pairings destined for stillbirth and sterility. Dozens of Elephants are driven backward into open topped coms and supply trenches, carbyne cover shields broken and blown off, lying scattered under or atop wounded and dying infantry. Yet the surprised mammuts give back as good as they take from the angry, charging bovids.
Everyone fights in sure knowledge that only one herd can survive this moment and hour. Push on to Second Trench and Third and win, fail and you die. Push the enemy’s leading armor and heavy infantry back out the breaches he made in the black wall and seal them, or lose it all. He’ll pour millions through, like rushing water past a broken dam. Infantry also joins the desperate fight. Alliance assault hovers arriving from Second Trench right behind the Buffalos peel off to engage Rikugun advance infantry flooding through the breeched perimeter. Both leave the herds of armtraks to fight unaided, except for dedicated RIK hover grenadiers and ACU armored infantry that clash with each other and assault the metal beasts.
Two fleets of monstrous invention and centuries of desperate ill will collide at intimate ranges. Two hateful herds, each confounded by murder and mayhem and attacking infantry all around. The little stick people in blue or green climb atop to shoot into exposed driver cabs, or lie down to stick magnetic mines on vulnerable undersides and less armored asses. They flame inside the panicking machines with fire packs. It’s hard enough driving and shooting inside a tangled armored battle, but the infantry that scurry among the stamping, pawing hooves make it so much worse. Stop to clean them off with stubby masers or pencil flamethrowers built into the hull, and your world gets rocked by a direct hit from a pointblank enemy armtrak that you should have hit first. Don’t clean the infantry off, wait until you take that clear shot at a Buffalo or Mastodon passing across your main gun sight, and the next instant you’re all on fire and your crew can’t hear you ‘cause it’s bailing out, leaving you behind. They’re scrambling to drop straight out the floor hatch before fusion containment cracks from secondary explosions. ‘Bye captain.’
A stricken Elephant falls and rolls in seeming agony, rammed again and again by a most determined Buffalo, until its underbelly is torn open and trembles with extruded control wires and gushing internal fire. Soon, most of the Elephants are dead, gored by larger and more deadly Buffalos. But the Buffalos suffer the same fate facing larger, heavier mammuts. They’re butted and pushed, shoved hundreds of meters backward by Mammoths or Mastodons. Brakes squall, tracks grind and dig for reverse purchase without finding any in soft, yielding dirt of The Veranda.
Two enemy beasts are locked together in a death embrace on top of crushed, collapsing black ramparts. Neither can use its main gun, so the crews have come out and are fighting with fists and knives and kinetic pistols. Mated pairs of brutes explode together in pagan funeral pyres of red-orange flame cremations. Wildly scrambling crews run from the smoking machines before they blow apart, away from plowing scenes of primal rage. Away from the mad, murderous menagerie.
A ragged line of Buffalos stops cold, ready to fire their big frontal cannons at pointblank ranges, volley style. Before their too clever commander can order the shot, eight of fifteen bovid armtraks are no more than smoking ruins, caught by a fast dropping line of strafing Jabos. Incoming rockets toss the tanks into air and in all directions, knocking them around and out like a setting of fifteen-pin bowls. Bot gunners along the sides of surviving vehicles rake howling hover grenadiers riding the sides of Mammoths and Mastodons. Rikugun gunners repay the unkind act, mowing down hundreds of Blue armored infantry. Hard to pick a winner. That would be like asking a wild storm which is winning, the rain or the wind?
A whole lot of 22nd Marine panics as the bunkers and zig-zags behind First Trench collapse from satchel charges dropped straight down ventilation shafts or rolled crookedly onto ramps, carelessly left in place when the clarions sounded. They run until zig meets zag, where yet more enemy wait to kill them. The joints usher terrified men and women into cooked death by maser volley, or cold death on a jagged combat knife. Some die tangled and frantic on jutting wire and broken rampart spars, that hold them in place for their approaching killer. For others it’s hot death as liquid flame gushes over them, lighting them up like Roman candles; slick greasy death with a sawtooth snicked into a gut; gurgling death, throat ripped out or jaw torn away by a flying bit of shrapnel, left unable even to cry out for aid.
Lonely death comes to some in the midst of thousands, lying mortally broken at the bottom of a fresh crater that quickly fills with ye
llow ground water and a final piss. Instant death greets boys who turn to a mush of pink pulp and red mist when a high explosive kinetic lands a meter away, one drop in a steel rain falling out of a maliciously clear and beautiful sky. Fumbling, choking death meets crews trapped inside ultrasteel coffins, as gas grenades are dropped inside. Infantry die under crushing weight of metal rearing and grinding, wherever a Mammoth driver chooses to run over and squash them slowly rather than shoot them down fast with spandaus; or bore through them with focused light from one of his six hull lasers.
The din is vast and nearly unbearable for any man or woman in the open holes where armtraks clash and crash. They duck heads between legs and try to cover ears with knees and arms, like small children cowering in a thunderstorm. From instinct, hands grope uselessly over exteriors of helmets whose sound baffles are overloaded with screaming, tearing, metallic electric noise. A deafening decibel level spikes with each new explosion that sends sheets of flame and parapet plate, and reeve bots and bodies and pieces of armtrak, hurtling into air.
Suddenly, the whole armored battle shifts. Rikugun mammuts gain the upper hand and slam what’s left of the counterattacking wave of Buffalos back. They don’t wait to finish off the last bovids. They leave them to the hover grenadiers, who have also brushed aside the Blue armored infantry. They race down parallels, passing along supply trenches linking networked bunkers at the black to supply depots far to the rear. They roar on spinning, grinding ultrasteel tracks, not yet ready to fly above ground, where infantry with shoulder launched mini streakers can too easily take them out. They fire all forward weapons as they rush parallels, sending a red wall of energy ahead to clear nasty infantry ambushers away.
They’re out the other end! No more walls!
They’ve done it, reached open country!
They’re free of black wall, in the clear!
They’ve won through! Hurry! Charge!
Mammoths form a phalanx and charge, like a row of prize destriers bearing up oafish men encased all-in-iron, pounding with couched lances of green and red lethal light. A second line of Mastodons is right behind. A third, more mixed force behind them. It’s a Second Agincourt, only on mounted metal beasts with lances of luminous rage. Can dismounted English knights and hardpressed men-at-arms and archers stand against so great an onrushing armored force? “Where are my longbowmen, Westmoreland? Tell them to deliver an arrow storm! Where are my loyal retainers? Gloucester and Essex, have you deserted Harry the King?”
Just as suddenly, dozens of mammuts dip front cannons down, looking more like a stampede of wildebeest stumbling into hidden pits that trap them. For that’s exactly what they are: tiger pits, or in this case, concealed mammut traps. Klics long, they’re hidden but spread across the path where any armored breakthrough must emerge, before where it can leave tracks to resume hover flight. It’s part of the defense-in-depth that has been built up over two years that makes penetrating the black wall systems of Lemuria almost impossibly hard. And terribly bloody.
Gap infantry is under orders not to move to First Trench, even if it’s breached. But now they’re released from harness and go into action. They pounce on clumsy beasts floundering in the traps, jumping on top, swinging down the back and sides. At no more than arm’s length, they blind drivers with acid bombs smashed onto transparent armor viewports. They shoot acetylene fire into breathing holes, with compact flamethrowers designed precisely to fit known design flaws in Rikugun armor. The fire packs are no bigger than a brick, worn on the hip. Special forces in bright silver hazmat suits with black hoses start to pump in aerosol poisons. Blue infantry finally clears away from the tiger pits, but only to let engineers activate EM satchels embedded at the bottoms. Leaping mines jump up and attach with magnetics and glues to lightly armored mammut underbellies, blowing each machine’s guts upward into its cab and turret. Acrid, bitter black smokes curl out of the long tiger pits, where burning men and metal beasts have gone to die.
Joachim doesn’t see any of that. Just bursts of soil and water, and blood and bone and carbyne parapet plate that flashes up-and-away with fresh RIK strikes against his armored gunpit. All around him floats into semi-consciousness, like scenes in a sea kaleidoscope that flitted across his mind’s eye while he was on his last prewar holiday. But other visions of horror that he sees before him he never thought possible, because he’s their spitting, fighting, shooting, bloody cause. He knows it, too. Somewhere in the deep vaults of a mind retreating from the horror.
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
He sees men in green utes look at themselves with utter surprise as his slashing, twin rapido stream tears off a chunk of their body or splits open a gut, spilling everything onto their boots.
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
He hears a marine in his own platoon scream in mortal terror as her maser misses a dodging, charging commando. He watches her murder with a half meter serrated knife when the “Rat” leaps on top of her, holds her down with one arm across her chest while he saws off her head.
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
He sees the same man die just a few seconds later, killed by the murdered girl’s terrified pal. She clobbers the gray commando senseless with a short entrenching spade, before decapitating him with its razor sharpened edge.
‘Head for a head,’ is the only thing that enters Joachim’s febrile mind. He’s still shooting methodically into a blood sodden corpse field in front of the rampart, sweeping twin beams of red plasma onto and around anything that even thinks of moving. He doesn’t stop, as the rapido auto loads fresh crystals for him. He hears the click! whirr! rack! of the loader somewhere in the far back of his mind, then pulls the twin triggers, over and over.
He’s vital and lethal.
He’s death on two legs.
Calm and all alone.
He really is all alone.
He just doesn’t know it.
Astonished men in pale green run from him in all directions, scattering like a heavy curtain of rainwater that beads and splashes on some hard, impermeable surface. A few dodge his fire, but most sprawl out with burning holes he makes in their gut or back; or loll insensibly with gray, opened heads. Then he sees and hears no more. Just red symbology on his HUD and an endless heavy poom poom, poom poom, poom poom of his rapido as he cuts them all down.
His heart races.
His nostrils flare out.
He hears blood in his arteries.
His gray flecked eyes widen into orbs.
It’s as if he’s the wounded deer surrounded by taiga wolves. Not the Wolf of War incarnate, as he is in this incarnadine moment. No matter how wide his eyes, he sees nothing with clarity. His head empties of content. His limbs seem not his own, except for the coital feel of the twin guns controlled by his caressing hands. Surrounded by a cacophony of madness, he hears cries of a thousand different madmen as if through a veil of water, a plunging niagara of sounds of murder. He tastes iron in his mouth. He rides the rising and falling rhythm of each exploding round, thrusting death at his enemies. The twin rapido becomes in him a pulsing orgasm that never quite completes. The movement of the turret becomes all.
He’s utterly relaxed. Totally calm at last, for the first time in years. Wholly content inside his private apocalypse. He’s more like a plant than an animal or a man. He’s nurtured by the soil of battle. He stands rooted against gusting winds. He’s fixed-in-place by tendrils of duty that keep him standing behind spitting twin rapido barrels. He fires the shuddering tubes again and again and again. Until they seize and dual triggers lock. He looks down at the silent gun, deeply confused.
‘Why have you stopped?’
‘I’m not finished here.’
‘I need to shoot more.’
‘Shit, it’s the loader.’
A platoon of gray clad commandos rises, yells and rushes at him. They have murder in red-and-raging eyes and serrated combat knives in their hands. It won’t take them half-a-m
ike to reach a ripped hole in the lower rampart. Then they’ll charge the platform and saw off his head, like he saw their sergeant do to one of his marines before her best pal ended him with a clubbing and razored spade. Only now does Joachim notice that someone has picked up the severed Rat’s head and spiked it on a jagged sliver of broken carbyne, in full view of all the Rats below.
A rough looking marine he doesn’t know, newly assigned to the 22nd a week ago, rushes to unjam the rapido. He has no helmet on. He lost it somewhere in the pounding surf of battle. His blond hair is cropped short, densely thick down the centerline, hairbrushed upwards in the warrior style of the Haudenosaunee, one of Amasia’s still traditionalist forest peoples. The cropped man reaches out, ejects the spent crystals and slams two heavy aerographite chargers into the magazines. He rips out both seared and cracking barrels, replacing them with cool, new tubes. He’s not a member of today’s gun crew, so he’s not wearing a gunner’s thermal gloves. Joachim took his pair from the blonde with fish eyes, and far paler skin than she had before the dawn. When mohawk man turns and gives thumbs up to Joachim, both thumb and hand smoke with burns from the hot tubes.
Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.
Joachim doesn’t even nod acknowledgment of the reload. He starts to fire the double barreled gun again, shredding the exposed SAC platoon before it reaches the rampart base. He feels time slow and almost stop. He sees each round hit flesh precisely where he guides it to go with an infallible aim at this short range. The carnage he inflicts is endless, until all that’s left on the smoking battlefield that spreads around him in a half-moon of death and dismemberment is the sound of cheering. It’s what’s left of the 22nd Marine in his sector. They’re standing with masers held above their heads, cheering him. Others are standing over dying Rats, making sure they die.
