by Kali Altsoba
“What can the Grün Imperium want with Genève? We have nothing they don’t already have. Why are they here?” Everyone asked that when the assault ships fell out of the sky. But none of that matters anymore. Not now, as Jan stares at armed farfolk pulling on green weaves as they break camp, rising and readying to kill again. Bile rises along with hate, burning his throat.
Looking at smug RIK troopers across the meadow he sees a chance that Madjenik hasn’t had since the fighting started. A chance to do more than run and die, day after day after day.
‘Can’t go, can’t stay. Good. OK, then Jan. We’ll fight. Today, maybe it’ll be different. Today, maybe we’ll do the killing. Today, at least we get some payback.’
***
Jan knows from his recon that the enemy he’ll face in the coming firefight in the next few minutes are conscripts from Uri. Knows that their coms and jammers and weps are standard issue for a RIK light infantry unit. He knows this because his periscope tells him, and because he tells himself. As his moda begins to wear off he’s finding he talks to himself much more often, and by name. Which is really kinda odd. He never did it before the war. Not before five days ago.
‘They’ve got nothing special when it comes to weapons. ‘Bout the same as us, though a lot more of it, and they’ve got numbers on us too. The one big thing they have that we don’t is backup. All we have is a chance to surprise them. If we don’t hit them hard and deadly right at the start, they’ll call for armtrak support and call in a skycraft strike. And that will be the end of your brief and inglorious career, Jan Wysocki.’
Uri is a fiefdom world of the Grün Imperium ruling family, passing down from Oetkert to Oetkert over fourteen centuries. It’s an immensely powerful and populous place, teaming with branded dāsa slaves and bonded serfs, all serving the top three classes of Grün citizens. It’s part of the Imperium core, a Waldstätte foundation world. One of the most important in all Orion.
Genève is different. It’s a small, sparsely populated agro-world, unimportant in the great doings of the spiral arm. Full of intense pride, nonetheless. Jan loves its odd little byways and hardy and unpretentious people. Off-world, he was told with urban and sophisticate disdain that he even smells a bit like Genève: a little oaky, with more than a touch of its old growth forests.
When he got back after just a year away, after washing out of KRA Officer Academy on Aral, he fell back into Genève’s comfortable ways. It was easier to return to the boy he once was instead of seeking out the man he failed to become. He would sit for hours, digging with his toes into black leafy humus in a copse of golden trees that waited forever behind his mother’s small farmhouse, filling his senses with their odd yet so familiar shapes and odors. He said he wanted to be forever rooted, just like them. He knew that they, too, tried but failed to reach the stars.
After he was expelled from OTS he learned the officer trade more slowly. He read tactics and history at night, taking his commission the long and local way, and qualifying only to serve with KRA Homeworld defense on Genève. Even then it took him 10 years to make captain. Still, they had no choice but to give him Madjenik Company once he got his bars. Besides, lots of ill-made officers held command. What did that matter in peacetime? Someone had to do the job.
Always his own worst critic, Jan actually read more widely than most fulltime KRA officers, and understood more of what he read. As the crisis built between the Krevan Republic and the Grün Imperium, as war loomed, he knew sooner than most what was coming to Genève.
‘Helvetti! Over the Long Peace the KRA on Genève became a community college, not a fighting force. A holding place for our local youth before they leave military obligation behind to start real lives as civilians. Only failures like me stayed in for 10 years. That’s why we never had a snowball’s chance in a desert in this fight. Madjenik wasn’t ready and it had me as captain.’
That first day, his first ever day of real war, five days back, waves of green clad troops poured into ever widening breaches made by heavy armored divisions and pounding field guns. Jan stood up and shot back, until he smelled panic in the air and realized it was his own. He ran.
They all ran, any who survived in Madjenik. Scrambled madly back from forward funk holes, the company overcome after just two hours of ferocious, lopsided fighting. Jan loped away from fading pleas for help then distant cries for mercy, from wild screams followed by a sudden pop, pop as RIK killed abandoned wounded and prisoners. Only those who ran survived that first day, as many tens of thousands died all around. Yet the logic of running won’t dissolve his guilt.
All frontline KRA units crumbled in a day, Madjenik survivors tangling and co-mingling with remnant elements of three other fleeing companies. By nightfall the stragglers were badly mixed together, all that remained of 3rd Battalion of Genève’s 1st or Gold Division. The youth of Northland was humiliated and broken and on the run, fleeing in disorder from an ancient and hated enemy come again in his pride to kill and burn and plunder harmless Genève.
‘He was everywhere. On fast hovers and biker scouts. Hordes of heavy armtraks. Main force infantry combat gliding in waves. Mobile assault guns. Swarms of hover troops in ATCs.’ Jan knows the enemy was too many to do more than run and hide, to try to live another hour or day. But he can’t and won’t forgive himself. ‘You’ll never get that day back. Never.’
The RIK had total drone and skycraft dominance above, and still does. Jan and Madjenik were chased through burning fields and hamlets over days and nights that followed. Sometimes the RIK got there first, blocking the way. Farm dogs barked at the intruders all day and all night long, until maser shots rang out and the dogs went silent, too. Joining their murdered masters. So it went, for five terrible days and four awful nights after the breakthrough. Jan didn’t lead the company in a KRA approved “advance to the rear,” laid out in the Aral Academy tactics manual. Madjenik just moved wherever extreme violence pushed it and he accepted it must go.
***
A passive HUD scan confirms the periscope. ‘OK, they’re the 172nd from Uri. Not a main or elite RIK unit like we fought at the MDL that first day, or the other locusts that chased us on Z+2, plus 3, or plus 4. These guys are brand new, looking like they’ve never been in a real fight before. They’re acting like it, too, standing around in the open. Well, they’ll pay for that.’
Jan watches his careless enemy milling across the sweetgrass. Looks past the stupid boy pissing casually on his homeworld’s violated soil, unaware that he’s marked for certain death inside a pencil periscope and command HUD. Jan’s counting, locating strongpoint positions and weaker attack points. Plotting to slaughter hundreds of men and boys he doesn’t know and will never meet, except here in a sweet odor meadow he’ll scour black with fire and hate and death.
‘We have to keep moving to have any chance to reach Toruń.’ That’s where KRA Main HQ is, the fortified and heavily defended forest capital of Genève. It’s the only large city. The only place to reach for, even if he knows there’s almost no chance of getting there. Not against the long odds war has stacked against him and Madjenik.
‘There’s no place else to go. Not on all Genève. But that oversize company of locust bâtards is in the way, over there across the sweetgrass meadow.’ Main HQ is gone for all he knows, or at least it went dark on the military neb since Z+2. There’s nothing on the emergency backup civilian memex either. Jan is deaf, blind and dumb to the enemy. He can’t report in and he can’t get intel or new orders. He’s cut off and all alone. He suspects that most other KRA units are just as badly off, or worse. He’s not wrong about that.
‘At least Madjenik recovered from first combat shock from five days ago. We’re actually becoming something of a real fighting unit now. Why not? Those bâtards taught us to fight by fighting, to survive by stealthy movement, to kill them, too. Silently and without remorse.’
No one is more surprised at this turn by a band of defeated and raggedy amateurs than Madjenik’s own worried and wound
ed captain. ‘But it probably won’t matter in the end.’ Jan also knows that whatever happens in the next hour Madjenik will almost surely die before the day is done. There are just too many other “locust” units out there, waiting to circle back to the sounds of combat, to swarm and descend to consume all that lives and moves.
“If ever there was a hopeless cause, it’s ours. Well, at least we can kill a hunter’s chance of enemy before we die, if we can take them by surprise.”
He doesn’t realize that he muttered the dismal thought out loud. It’s overheard by a huge, dark-haired sergeant who never leaves his side or takes his gaze off the company commander. The big man doesn’t move as Jan’s dark words reach him. He just continues to guard his captain.
Jan stirs slightly on the dirt lip of the ditch, waiting and watching as the periscope tallies and marks the enemy a final time. His wound throbs a little more than before. He shifts his leg ever so slightly. It doesn’t help. It only wakes his memory. Back to first combat. To the day he failed as an officer and as a man. To the black day he failed Madjenik and fled from his duty.
***
Jan ran hard for his life that first morning, back turned full and flat to a pursuing enemy. Until he felt a spear of white-hot metal tear into his weaves and pierce his lower calf. The impact knocked him over even before he felt any pain, taking his wounded leg out from beneath where his brain thought it should be, as if his knee was hit with an industrial hammer. As he registered the blow and began to tumble he felt more astonished than hurt. ‘No, no! I can’t end like this!’
A sear of pain traveling both ways inside his calf made him cry out. He dropped his main weapon. Crumpled, grabbing uselessly for the wound, glimpsing pursuers closing to finish him as he turtled to the ground. Hot shrapnel from enemy frag grenades just like the piece that felled him tore and screeched past his head, sending his HUD wild with red threat warnings.
Poumm, keraaack! Pulse rounds slammed into hot dirt beside his left shoulder where he landed, spraying him with stinging grains as he clenched his teeth in suppressed pain.
Click-clack, click-clack. He heard the distinctive charge-and-shoot sound of nearby RIK masers, then a sudden whirr zsuiii-slitt! of two incoming rounds riving grass and dirt beside his head. He tasted a clod of clay that flew into his mouth mixed with sweat of his face, a clot made of black Genèven soil from whence he came and where he must return one day. Dust unto dust.
Maser bolts from enemy rifles sliced down stalks of near ripe golden barley around him. He lay half-revealed by burning stalks, under gray-black smoke. He reached his hand out toward his dropped rifle, desperate to shoot back at his tormentors just one last time before he died.
He was still stretching out his arm when five troopers dropped in a semi-circle defensive perimeter around him and returned rapid fire. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, over and over sounded the telltale double signature of their pink-crystal masers, charging and discharging again and again. These were friendly sounds. Close and clear and loud. Scorching air with microwaves.
Rough commands shouted in a high-pitched female voice told him who his rescuer was: Lieutenant Zofia Jablonski. The 22-year old redhead was fighting and leading like he could not, with authority beyond her years laced through all her actions and bearing, stiffening the will of the squad of men she led. She had real tactical command presence and she knew it. It was her squad that came back for him, that cut apart a whole charging and overconfident enemy platoon bent on his murder, that lay down counter fire of high-kinetic rounds, throwing and lobbing rifle grenades and hurling pulse-rifle maser fire.
‘That was an eternity ago. Five days!’ He sees it all again right before him. Then he’s suddenly back on the ditch lip at the edge of the apple orchard. He can’t shake this odd sense of leaping in-and-out-of-time. ‘It must be a side-effect of the moda. Well, maybe and maybe not.’
Jan doesn’t know this about himself, but over the fearsome days and nights after his and Madjenik’s ugly baptism by fire he started to put aside shame. Most hours of the day anyway. Doesn’t get that he’s growing into a real combat leader. He has no choice. He’s the senior officer left alive. One of only two officers, in fact. Hundreds of scared young faces look up at him daily with mortal pleading in their eyes, enemies at their heels. So he stopped running from the job.
Turns out, he’s pretty good at it. Yes, he lost more fighters to ruthless pursuers during pell-mell running battles to escape the MDL kill-zone. Still more in desperate rearguard fire-fights where he ordered some men to stay behind to fight to the death to save all the rest. Yes, even counting the stragglers that signed on, Madjenik is down to 185 fighters from its prewar complement of 300. And it’s still barely 220 klics from the MDL, where it first started running.
But Jan is leading the company now, really leading. And every fighter who keeps pace refuses to quit, won’t lie down or sit to wait to be captured, hoping only not to be killed. There’s more. Everyone still alive, still in the fight and who won’t surrender, has lost his or her combat virginity. They’re harder, better, more skilled than before. They’re becoming combat veterans.
‘How’s that possible? We’ve only been out here and at war for five days.’ Yet, it’s true. Every fighter in the company is a grim and skilled veteran now. Five days in intense combat like they’ve seen is enough for the change to take hold. Hard-learned lessons show in their faces and the way they move and conceal, even if each silent nighttime roll-call records fewer names in the company ledger.
The change is most marked in Jan. Each day, enormous pressures of command squeeze more raw tannins and pomace out of him, leaving behind a maturing wine of determination and command and will to lead and survive. Zofia sees it darkening and aging in him, and approves.
***
‘What brought us to this place and moment? How did it come to this, to two groups of frightened strangers facing death and each other across the sweetgrass? Who did this to us?’ He knows that cold decisions by distant powers led him and Madjenik to this hollow, to the edge of extinction in a shallow ditch alongside a small apple orchard. Men and women, good and bad, swept into ferocious murder and mayhem. Fed into the gory maw of war. By whom? Why?
‘By farfolk whose causes we don’t know. By malice beyond our ken. By oldsters who send the young to die because their own life’s embers burn dimly, yet they want to play at bellows for another hour. They started this godsdamn war that ripped apart our lives, broke our homes and families, wreaked our worlds. I want them all here, right now, to see what I’m about to do. Any bâtard who starts a war should have to look into the glazed eyes of soldiers dying in his name.’
He fights down his rage against the high and mighty councils, against the ‘Very Great Personages’ of vast interstellar empires and star system confederations that dwarf the little and traditionally neutral worlds of the United Planets of Krevo. Those who chose to invade modest and unassuming places, unable or unsatisfied with instead raising up the greatness of their own.
‘Pahhh! figuring out how all this war got started is way above my pay grade. It doesn’t matter anyway. Not anymore. Not now, when it’s already here and all around, and rolling on over the far horizon. All that matters is what I do in the next few minutes to get us out of this ditch. Then what Madjenik does over the next hours while they chase us. Then the hours after that. And any moments of light and life left to us on this grim day.’
He looks back at Madjenik’s restless fighters. They’re all trailing pike, exhausted beyond exhaustion, sustained against bone weariness and Nature only by the forced alertness of five-day old moda doses. Those who can are lightly sleeping. More crouch or sit in awkward poses under the ersatz camo tent. Others kneel, eyes across the meadow, taking their turn at perimeter guard. ‘If some of us are still alive at nightfall, well paska! We’ll displace and move, and move again. I’ll only worry tomorrow about what to do tomorrow. That decision is still a century away.’
His moda is receding
faster now. His exhaustion is returning. He’s jerked alert again by his stabbing leg pain. With the fresh pain comes a flash of thought, hard and overwhelming. ‘I could’ve died. I should’ve died.’ He’s right. By all odds he should be dead. Part of him wishes that he was, because then he wouldn’t recall recent memories that he can’t repress. Shameful and intense, they return despite his effort to focus on the enemy in the sweetgrass.
‘Why did she come back for me? Why did her men obey her? What did I do to deserve such loyalty? Nothing. I did nothing! Worse, I ran. They should’ve left me to die.’
A coward remembers and boasts of his one brave act all his life. A brave man like Jan Wysocki hardly knows that he’s brave because it comes to him as in a second nature. Yet he can never forget the one time he wasn’t, the one time courage failed him. So that he failed others.
His backward gaze lingers on Zofia Jablonski. Her clear green eyes are lightly closed, gauntleted hands resting ready on a maser as she dozes, head sinking and jerking as she drifts asleep then starts awake. Even asleep, she’s always more than half-alert. Like a wary she-wolf sensing approaching danger. ‘She’s the real leader of this company.’
