by Kali Altsoba
As well as conscripts, the huge mine kills elite infantry that RIK shōshō placed right in front of the Berm Gate. Some of their best units, and among the most loyal. In all, some 1,238 volunteers from Schwyz, another of the core Waldstätte forest worlds. They die not inside the crater but just outside it, still in the blast zone where the concussive wave spread out. They’re mushed or buried in heavy ejecta or killed by flying rocks or shards of jagged armor or other, stranger things. Shrapnel of all sorts, warm and animate as well as cold and sterile and dead.
Seven young Schwyzers are crushed by a large oak that topples into their blown-open trench, squashing them to pulp and jelly that smells vile as cancer vomit. One nitōhei is struck dead by a parabolic pelvis falling back to ground. Another boy of just 17 summers is impaled by a meter-long splinter that flies out of the crater lip at waist level, like a javelin shot in error from a targeting machine that flies across a running track to take down the leader of the relay team. For so he was before RIK recruiters came, beating snare drums up and down his school.
An older gunsō is decapitated by a shoulder blade spinning away from an exploding volunteer at high rotation speed. The impact is so violent it throws his own severed head into the chest of a gentle man from Yokohama visiting a new-made friend among the Schwyzers.
The heavy blow from the tumbling head shatters nine of Kenji Hamaguchi’s ribs and drives them hard inward to puncture both lungs, leaving him to gasp a last minute in terrible mortal torture on the ground. He dies clutching ochre mud of a world not his own, surrendering everything he was, he is, or ever will be in a fight not of his ken or making, in which he never learned to hate. It will be another month before his recently pregnant wife hears the news of his death on Genève, and miscarries their first child in a paroxysm of grief and bloody fluids.
A fat black fly sitting on a splintered willow trunk watches Kenji Hamaguchi die, and a dozen more around him. She sees tumbling bits of bone that scud! and skip! like pond stones thrown by naughty boys to crack open lake-ice on a winter day. She’s more interested in men on fire, running wild in terror, falling and rising only to fall and stay, where she and hers might find them later and feed. She smells blood and bile and freshly ripped flesh and grows excited. She hears thudding! body parts landing and thinks not of what they once were or might have been but only of her own kind, and of how rare is such good fortune falling to her from the sky.
Truth be told, it’s not as rare as she believes. For she is herself carrion spawn now in the hundred thousandth, millionth generation since a careful laying of eggs by an ancestor in a dead Frenchman’s eye at Verdun, in a forgotten war on a far-off world. She rubs front legs together overtop her buffalo hump and bulging fractal eyes, and smells for blood and meat. She bit two men for breakfast and so feels no need to feed. But she mated recently and is engorged with ripe, heavy eggs. So she wings over to a disemboweled boy and plants a wobbly sack inside his warm, spilled guts. The Lord of Flies is not so cruel or fickle as she thinks. War is good to flies.
Farther out a medic comes upon four youths from Cretan, a minor Grün world. They’re all ripped raw and open by dirty plasma spears that tore off their body armor and inner thermal protectors to reach down and score them to the bone. Two scream in agony even after fast jabs of his strongest painkiller and his last but insufficient loads of weak suspensor. Beholding them with pity, an old soldier asks if there’s any means of saving the lads. All out of suspend to stop their gaping wounds and pain until more help comes, the medic answers: “No.” At once, the graying NCO approaches the boys with a short ceramic blade and cuts their throats gently.
And on and on. Fate piling 1,170 more dead on her butcher’s table, joining 1,402 in the crater and 1,238 of Pyotr’s sons dead at its smoking rim. Later, poets on both sides think they give the moment meaning by sitting beside ruby fires composing verses full of the glorious pity of war. Grün songs will mourn and moan, forgetting who started the war. Krevan verse will boast and brag, promising to end all Grünen just like ‘the boys’ who died at Toruń’s crater.
Over 2,000 wounded men stagger away from the smoldering hole, coming up from a nearby trench or gun pit, trailing wisps of pale blue gas and clouds of steaming vapor that smells exactly like cedar and hot rocks in a sauna. They’re blind from incandescent plasma, scalded by instantly boiled ground water, seared by hot surface gases. They fall over sudden rubble, trip in hotly sucking mud. Cry out for aid. Ask comfort. To find a friend. Men dig frantically to free comrades still half buried or struggle more weakly to pull themselves from a collapsed bunker or caved-in hole.
More wounded lie where they fall, bleeding out. Or stand up holding a broken or badly gashed arm, whimpering and asking “what happened?” Or sit with hands over stone deaf, yet oddly-ringing ears. Or look around stupidly, head exposed with helmet held ever so carefully in their lap like a hive for missing bees, smiling mutely at everyone who passes. Morally naked and physically nude. All are present at the “Battle of The Crater,” as this little skirmish in an immense and expanding war will be called by those who were there. And more who weren’t.
Far out from the crater rim more conscripts from Unterwalden and five volunteers from Schwyz walk aimlessly with blank and distant stares, outwardly unhurt but knocked insensible by the concussive wave from the plasma mine. They know not where they are or their names, nor unit nor cause or what to do next to save their lives. They wander, unarmed and unhinged. Helpless and vulnerable, pissing hot yellow down their legs like lost toddlers with no mothers.
One youth a half klic away from the rim sits stunned, knocked down by the blast wave but otherwise uninjured. His back is supported by a shattered tree stump. In his lap, resting exactly how they landed, are the unblemished and naked buttocks of a dead man that flew out with the other debris. The boy looks down at the pale curving flesh, deeply puzzled. He asks out loud in shocked bewilderment, of no one in particular: “My god! Am I hurt that bad?”
Two of his friends collapse, laughing so hard they can’t get up or breathe. They roll about the ground sucking for air, useless with mirth, helpless to themselves or their bewildered comrade, who also starts to laugh. All are oblivious to their doom, lurking in unfired mortar tubes and KRA heavy weapons counting down three minutes to the “Shoot!” signal, waiting to fire into a jagged, cratered, shattered chunk of what was the RIK siege line at the Toruń berm. More boys in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing in the wrong moment.
Friends come up from underground to help. Strangers too. They hook an arm, grasp a waist, firm wobbly legs, carry the lame and guide the witless. They come to coax confused or bleeding comrades back to shelter, into a nearby bunker or shallow trench, anywhere a fellow human sufferer might be safe in the dead and scalded no-man’s-land in front of the hated berm.
That’s when Toruń garrison starts its saturation bombardment. All those inside the kill zone, 2,000 insensibles and wounded and another 473 uninjured men who rose out of safety to help them find aid or cover, all are caught out in an intense shelling and instantly charred. Or worse, writhe in agony on the slower path to death, burned and sliced, conducted to oblivion by intense lasers, heavy masers, and white plasma mortars that drop in shells like meteor showers.
The barrage is so radiant it takes 20 seconds for heavily protected visors of Madjenik’s forewarned fighters to adjust, and they’re 600 meters from the central kill zone and under stiff orders to cover and look away. Anyone not behind an anti-flash combat screen never sees life through natural eyes again.
Seven minutes of bombardment is a very long time. Especially when the weapons used are multicolored heavy lasers and big pink-crystal guns, ball lighting, fusion cannon and kinetic explosive rounds. For Madjenik, waiting to make the mad dash into the still smoking crater, the shelling seems to go on forever. It lasts an infinity and again for anyone lying directly under it.
Worst is the unendurable incandescence from large plasma shells arcing out of big
Type-3 cannon or fired from short-range steam catapults or just lobbed by kinetic mortars. As magnetic chamber containments unlock inside the parabolic warheads, balls of super-ionized plasma explode outward with the shocking brilliance of miniature suns, only forming suddenly just a few dozen or a few hundred meters away.
Impossible.
Unbearable.
Unsurvivable.
About 10% of arriving KRA plasma shells are ‘dirty plasma’ that disk out to spear men across a wide killing field that stretches all around the crater. A gritty mix in smaller crystalline plasma rounds gets them dubbed ‘dirty’ by any receiving party, though both sides use them so routinely that they’re called ‘dusty’ or ‘grain plasma’ by opposing artillery. Not ‘dirty’ shells.
They’re superheated ionized gas rounds just like any regular plasma shell, only with nanometer or micrometer-sized particles suspended in the medium. When hot plasma bursts from a demagnetized casing that’s pre-set for altitude or depth release, dusty particles fly out in an expanding ball of tiny acetylene spears that cut right through all ceramic or liquid armor and pierce hotly into flesh, moving on through any bone the grains hit, then clear out the other side.
Searing, acetylene death is no different than death by regular plasma balls emerging from containment shells. Yet everyone believes it is. Fighters on both sides hate ‘dirty shells’ and vow to kill and mutilate any captured mortar or gun crew they suspect of firing them, even though grain plasma is perfectly legal and used by all artillery in every army in Orion.
It’s one of those shared irrationalities of war. Dead is dead and plasma balls or spears burn just as quick and hot and deep, with the same awful pain and fear coming to the brain along the way. Yet every army will exact revenge on the enemy’s gunners when a battery is overrun and found to have dirty plasma among its munitions. It’s an acceptable atrocity.
Maybe what every infantry that murders captured dirty gunners really hates is the long-distance comfort and anonymity with which the big guns kill? Even their own. Killing gunners up close and intimately is payback for all that abstract death. They feel the same about pilots.
Seven minutes of flashing, searing heat and incandescent brilliance without natural peer on any rocky planet’s surface since Orion formed. Seven minutes when the last white-hot shells merely burn atop bouncing rubble made by the first wave down, and the second, and the third.
Seven minutes.
Seven hundred seconds.
How does one count to eternity?
The barrage stops. For those left with eyes to see the sudden still and dark is almost as startling as the plasma fall. They stagger, stumble and fall in their blindness. They circle and scream in horror and terror in their madness. They stay mute and unmoving in their emptiness.
Then two hard wedges of wheat-clad fighters charge from either side, intent on making sheer bloody murder of any survivors in their way.
***
Relief One is 1,000 strong. It combat glides hard eastward out of the Berm Gate just as 300 howling, hurtling Wreckers crash into the exposed back of the shattered RIK position, a onetime trench line that’s now a smoldering and indefensible ruin. The wedges drive toward each other, and right through 1,442 stunned RIK still alive but disoriented and disorganized around the crater, last intact survivors of 8,355 in the initial blast and bombardment zones.
Achieving total surprise, gliding in 10-meter bounds on powered combat boots, Jan’s five-part wedge rushes right over men turned witless by the last 10 minutes of their lives. The mine blast and shattering follow-up bombardment leaves Grünen even in the outer kill zone exposed and traumatized, huddling in some broken gun pit or shell hole, clutching knees and rocking like abandoned toddlers, warm piss running freely down into yellow-green puddles.
Youths and much older men curl fetally, crying out for their mothers. A quick click-clack, click-clack of masers, a poom, poom, poom of frag grenades as fire teams from Charlie at the center of the Wrecker triangle run past. All the momma-crying and fetal rocking stops.
Jan leads a blitz assault on two pillboxes now facing the wrong way, twisted around by the explosion of the mine and seared black by uplifting plasma. He tosses a sonic stun grenade into an open firing slit. He’s all out of frags. A muffled cry escapes. He shoots. Silence.
He slows his glide just enough to point out the other bunker and order two fire teams from Dog platoon “to pump fire inside that funk hole! Smoke ‘em out. Kill ‘em all!” He shows them where to drop in the incendiaries, making a square window signal with his left hand.
Dog’s three-man team goes to work, until the terrible screeching ends and a coarse smell of roasting flesh leaks out to join the barbeque odors hanging all around the crater. Dog hurries past to catch up with its captain, who’s 200 meters ahead firing at the gun port of a half-unburied, prefab officer’s barracks from which two hand masers are aimlessly firing back.
“Seal ‘em in! Keep moving,” Jan yells to Dog as Easy rushes up and past on the far-right flank.
‘Good. They’re executing platoon hop-frogging exactly right. We’ll be over the other crater lip soon. Then we’ll meet Relief One.’
Jan hears an explosion behind him as an engineer’s demolition satchel goes off and a wobbly, precarious barracks collapses inward. At least two Rikugun platoons are buried alive inside. Along with four officers using a back room as a private brothel. So, three Genèven women, too.
Easy’s fire-teams are held up 100 meters to his right, at an undamaged bunker. On the other flank, on the far left of the Wrecker wedge, Baker and Able move fast. Zofia’s over there.
“Keep shooting! Keep moving!”
“There! Over there! Behind that broken boulder.”
“I see him. Shoot!”
“You got him!”
“Stay with me, there’s more on the left.”
“Baker, all squads veer left.”
“First Squad, clean out that half bunker.”
“Grenades! Use grenades!’
Poom, poom, poom.
“Baker! Your drifting too far left. Link back to Able’s right.”
“Third squad, make the link.”
“That means you, trooper.”
Zofia comes up fast on another half-broken dugout. She stops to pour a pocket pack of incendiary jelly down a broken ramp door then fires a maser bolt into the rabbit hole, instantly exploding and igniting the orange liquid. Also setting on fire the tops of one of her boots and the bottoms of her combat weaves. She shakes her right leg vigorously, but the flame is sticky.
Two howling torches run up the ramp, stumble and crawl around her feet, incapable of doing more for all the agony they’re in. Yet still unready or just unable to die. They remind her of roasting marshmallows black on a stick, when she was a little girl camping in Toruń Wood.
She moves back a meter to get a better shot, and dispatches both men with her pistol. For mercy’s sake or just to be tidy? Only she knows. Inside the blackened bunker four more men coated in orange jelly splatter are screaming and burning bright. There’s no one to finish them off. Zofia’s already combat-gliding to the next fixed target, which she marks with a maser round for the platoon following close behind, firing also at a running man while she moves.
She doesn’t need Baker so she waives it on with her hand over her head in a cover this area signal, pointing to a hidden gun pit 50 meters ahead and to the right. Baker reaches the big camouflaged pit in just five gliding leaps. A dozen fighters clamber on top while the rest of the platoon takes position all around, firing into every shrapnel hole and small crack they find.
The pit is full of frightened men and boys, a hundred at least. Half are without full combat suits or any weapon, jolted awake and unready by the mine. The blast caught them completely by surprise, then the bright bombardment befuddled and terrified them even more. They can’t believe that raging, mad and murderous Krevans are now running overtop and all around their hiding place and pouring live fire into
their huddling ranks. There’s no way out. Their enemy is at both ends of the pit, double-enfilading the position. It’s about to get worse.
Zofia gestures with her left hand, as if grabbing and pulling at her lower face. Baker understands: gas. Half keep shooting but a dozen men take out special grenades and drop them into the pit. The poison gas is so lethal Baker doesn’t need to wait to be sure. And Zofia is on them already, threatening them with unnatural acts beyond the skill of a contortionist if they don’t keep up.
“Move, move. Get back to glide speed.”
“You heard the lieutenant, back on your boots!”
“Able, you’re the far left flank of the main wedge. You’ll always be open on your own left. Double squads there. Sergeant, keep your right flank in sight and in contact with Baker.”
“You got it”
“Third Squad. No gaps on the right!”
“Close with Baker’s left.”
“I’m shifting right, sergeant.”
