by Kali Altsoba
“Mita helvettia! What the hell, we’re all already dead.” Jan says it into the com, grinning at his weary clutch of ungentle, bloody-minded fighters as he does. He may yet understand them. One day. As they already think he does.
“You got that right, sir.” It’s the burly, hairy sergeant crouching beside him. A shock of thick black stubble scrapes against the sides of his visor, almost audibly to Jan. He pulls the scrap of apple peel from his teeth and drops it to the bottom of the ditch. A field mouse darts over his boot, snaps up the thin peel and with a whip of its reedy tail disappears between two tall vanilla grasses. The sergeant grins broadly.
Every man and woman in Jan’s line of sight nods at the affirmation and returns their captain’s mulish grin. They all understand the merciless nature of an enemy who wastes any stragglers or wounded left behind. For on the third day, biting down so hard he tasted wet iron oozing from his bloody lower lip, Jan held still as he watched three young KRA try to surrender. No one in this company will ever try that again. Not ever. No more surrenders. Not to them.
One boy was cut apart by crisscrossing masers swayed back-and-forth by a big, pitiless Grün firing from a hover-gunship turret. Worse than the sight of the bisected boy was listening to crunching bone and terrible screeches as a second armtrak dropped its hover controls to become tracked ground assault armor. Just to crush the two other kids into puddles of pink pulp under its carbyne and ultrasteel treads. darkly staining the rich soil of their native Northland. Everyone in hiding was grateful when the horrid screams abruptly stopped.
Jan learned the next day from a straggler who joined Madjenik that it’s a common Grün practice to grind prisoners down into smeared clods. It wasn’t just the forbidden act of a single tanker, the sick pleasure of a lone driver. Of a sadist in an armtrak saddle, his lust unbridled by war’s opportunity for cruel freedom.
“I was hiding, sir, staying real quiet like. I even had my safety off, ready to blow out my own brains if they came to do it to me, too. That’s when I heard ‘em, sir. A loader taking a break beside his Mammoth.”
“What did you hear?”
“He said he likes to switch over to manual so ‘I can have fun ironing Gelben prisoners.’ Sorry to repeat that sir, but it’s what he said.”
Jan knows that “Yellows” is what RIK mockingly calls its KRA enemies, who wear wheat-colored weaves. Invoking the republic’s agrarian color to imply martial cowardice. “What else did he say? Take a breath, and take your time. I want details.”
“He was a big bear of a man, captain, near as big as the black bears I seen in Toruń Wood before the war. He said the way to do it was to slam one track brake hard while he hit auto-drive on the other side, spinning the whole armtrak right in place, sir. It was real sick, sir, the way he laughed about it after. They all laughed. All of them.”
Another straggler confirmed it. “I heard one talking about ‘grinding,’ too. He said it to the other drivers, with a big belly laugh, captain. He said ‘It’s the best fuck I ever had!’”
“He said that? Exactly that?”
“Yes sir, I know ‘cause some other bâtard yelled out ‘And it’s a lot easier on the goats!’ That’s when they all laughed, sir.”
“I heard it, too. Then they agreed that ‘grinding’ was the thing to do to all prisoners. A couple of the young ones looked as green as their own weaves, but they had to promise to do it.”
A third catch-up said he watched an ugly, squat-nosed gunsō give a similar order. The Grün sergeant was standing beside a sneering taisa, a silent, sinister, coppery colonel wearing steel-gray weaves to match the callow color of his SAC uniform underneath. That afterward the two gray-clad men climbed into a sleek, needle-nosed black command hover, last seen heading back to the coast where RIK and SAC HQs were set up behind the now broken MDL.
“Gray weaves, not green? You’re sure?”
“Yes sir. They were SAC, not RIK. Special Action Commandos. Not regulars.”
Gray, not green. Gray, a cold abnegation of all the rainbow colors of life. A deliberate negation of color to declare absolute power of obliteration. Gray, symbol of moral indifference and pallid death, brought to Genève from Death’s home in the Grün Imperium. Gray, steel weaves worn by SAC officers and kill squads out on their deadly, daily business of murder.
Jan is an educated man. He knows that SAC promotes crackpot theories of “Original Purity” and is pursuing a pseudo-genetic social engineering project to “reclaim the pre-colonial genome.” He knows that its death squads are now roaming free-style over Genève, all across the occupied northern plains. And he knows there’s nothing he or Madjenik can do about any of it. ‘We’ll settle with that SAC colonel and his pet toad some other day. Just not this day. Right now I have to get the company out of this ditch or we’re all going to die. It’s time to attack.’
He jumps onto the company coms. “Engineers, make ready to deploy SRDs.” Zofia sees his plan unfolding on her HUD. She reminds the engineers that there’s no motion detector or AI bot-probe patrolling the camp perimeter, at least not one they’ve detected yet.
“Stay off coms when you break from visual camo in the ditch. Hand signals only. Once you leave sheet-cover your standard dampeners, those digital wonders you all call ‘digies’ that are built right into your combat weaves, will hide you from active search pings for five minutes. No more. That’s all the time you’ve got to deploy the snakes and make them do max damage!”
Jan breaks in. “Less than that. I want all SRDs in release position in three minutes. Go!” Twenty of Madjenik’s surviving combat engineers gather at two crates of sleek, silvery tubes humped from the MDL on a small carrier-bot. Each Smart Roboticized Demolition or SRD or ‘snake’ the crates carry is 10 centimeters in diameter and a half-meter long. “Spread out and deploy down the flanks.” The chief hisses the urgent command to the others, each one grasping a pair of snakes. Orange-capped detonators are dangerously tucked into their webbed tool belts.
Jan sends out more orders: “Sergeants, distribute grenades. Everybody double-up on assault frags. Mortar squads, set up your tubes here and over there.” He points to a flat stretch of ground spread behind him and the gossamer-thin camo tent that’s fast coming down. “Load HE and plasma rounds in pairs, but wait for the snakes to blow first and for my fire command.”
He turns back to the main body of fighters. With his left hand he holds up an aerographite pink-crystal reload pack by his head, standard silent hand signal to load ammo. He order flashes a thought-command across all company HUDs, adding a harsh whisper in all helmet auditories. “Lock-and-load. We’re gonna smoke these bâtards!”
Coiled for combat, ready to sprint into the lead of a charge across the meadow if Jan orders it, Zofia whispers out loud to no one in particular: “Things are about to get sparky!”
***
The engineers are semi-exposed outside the shallow ditch as they shift from under improvised shielding to move down the long flanks. Each pair is guarded by a single sniper with a laser-pulse rifle. The engineers hug the snakes close, the stubby masers of their specialty slung diagonally across chests with safeties still on, their wide belts loaded down with small tools and the detonators. The rest of Madjenik readies for a direct assault.
“No sonics! Frags only. And set all weps to full power. We want quick cookings,” Zofia snaps at a fresh kid who’s trying to hook two sonics to her upper weaves. It’s one of the scared stragglers, the one who saw the bear-man armtrak driver ‘grinding’ prisoners behind the smashed MDL. She fumbles for replacement frags. The kid is trembling, struggling badly to hitch the grenades into weave loops on her chest. She looks even more frightened as Zofia lays the timeline on for the whole company.
“Three minutes for the engineers to do their job, get our show rolling. Then two more for the snakes to reach their set targets. After that even passive motion search by any nearby locust will locate all our friends no longer under the camo-tent. The rest of you watch your HUD cloc
ks but keep fucking still as a dead mouse. Wait for the shoot and move out orders from the captain!”
All eyes are on Jan as he extends his arm in a silent deployment signal. Without looking at Zofia he thought-flashes the same order over all HUDs. “Line abreast. Buddy-buddy pattern.”
Two-by-two, still crouching, little sub-units take up position, spreading out a quarter klic from Jan and Zofia at the center. Farther down the flanks snipers drop into open spaces between each engineer pair, pre-sighting scopes on carelessly exposed boys and men wearing pale green weaves. Making them sure targets to be kissed by the guns. Morning haze is clearing quickly under a risen sun. A rich smell of black soil, damp worms and rotting apples and leaves fills the air on radiant heat. It competes for attention with the odor of sweetgrass.
Mortar teams site two medium tubes 20 meters apart, right behind where Jan crouches, looking intensely across the golden meadow for any signs that Madjenik’s movement is detected. Three-man mortar crews check passive target displays then lock-in their weps, ready to drop high-compression HE rounds co-loaded with small plasma rounds smack onto the crowded encampment. They’ll start with the crowded red canteen as the primary target, then work the shelling outward and all around until they meet a second wave of desolation moving inward from the perimeter of blown snakes. Done right, the snakes and little mortar barrage should sandwich and shatter a good part of the sleepy infantry company gathering over breakfast from just over 100 to about 300 meters away, with a great clot of men still hovering around the field canteen.
All remaining shooters take up kneeling or standing fire-positions on Jan’s short flanks, forming a bloc of concentrated infantry firepower facing unsuspecting and unready enemies, still casually breakfasting or lolling slowly awake across the fragrant field. Unaware that they’re about to die in fire and light, far from their homeworld. For reasons they’ve hardly considered.
“If we time this right they’ll never hear it coming.” Jan whispers it to Zofia, even as he hand signals hurry up! to the engineers with his left fist, pumping up-and-down repeatedly.
“Then time it right, sir.” Her reply is borderline insubordinate, but she’s right to say it. She moves 20 meters to his left, to command the other half of the central firing position.
Jan waits impatiently for the farthest engineers to hand-sign readiness. A minute later the most distant waves in a ‘two’ signal. All are in position, ready to release the snakes. It’s going to be close. They’ve got less than two minutes before they’re sure to be detected by active gear.
This spread-out and close to the scan exposure window, Jan avoids even a silent HUD order via his command relay. He fears to lose his only true advantage: total surprise in a sudden, overwhelming firestorm. Instead he makes a crisp slashing motion with his right arm across his chest, a signal seen on battlefields for thousands of years. Receiving the make ready order, the shooting line rises, resting maser rifles on small tripods on the ditch edge, shoulder-sighting and steadying aim at the nearest unwary Grün picket or exposed officer.
Crouching engineers release latches on the front of silver launch tubes resting over the lip of the ditch, poking partway into the tall sweetgrass. Clamps snick! open all at once. Something thin and lissome squirts from each tube. Twenty snakes are loose and slithering off to hunt prey.
The SRDs scan for environmental colors before flashing a mottled yellow-and-brown adaptive light camouflage, then slithering away, undulating over ochre dirt under the tall grass. Micron-sized phononic crystals spinning underneath baffle all sound. In a moment, 20 sidling forms wriggle stealthily toward individualized target coordinates. They move with swift, lethal intent, excited to be free and active and purposive after a dark and tubed and crimped existence.
More mottled movement. It’s a follow-on wave of 20 SRDs auto-spread to optimal kill pattern to maximize blast effect and anti-personnel shrapnel from compact explosive charges. No e-search picks up the 40 sleek, shielded metallic maneuvers. Gentle rustles under softly waving sweetgrass hardly hint to the pickets at an animate presence, so the unmindful guards from Uri miss the swift passings. Thirty seconds more and the smart-munitions arrive at deadly maximum detonation insertion points all around the camp, deep inside the Double Moons’ perimeter.
They blow all at once. A swirling, tumultuous mess as excited as a living, giant breeding ball of real snakes, only exploding in a death-mating that is both fulfillment and extinction in a single moment of exquisite, orgasmic evaporation. It’s a neat trick of all military AI. It finds its greatest fulfillment, a kind of machine happiness, in its own planned and purposeful destruction.
Jan bellows and flashes all at once: “Mortars, lay it on them now! Infantry, open fire! Single company volley, shoot! Again, shoot! Again!”
A muffled roar arrives from where 40 snakes willingly died as one ... A thinning blast wave reaches Madjenik, standing up in a shooting line but still inside the ditch, pumping low shots across the singeing sweetgrass ... The shock wave is dissolute and harmless, rocking the shooters gently for a moment before it passes whispering into the apple trees above and behind.
“Lieutenant, commence volley fire by squad.”
Zofia takes over. “First Squad fire! Second Squad fire! Third Squad fire! Fourth Squad fire! Repeat rotation. First Squad fire! Watch the heat on your crystals! Second Squad fire!”
A dozen different screams arrive from all around the perimeter and deep inside the camp, reaching above the whisper of deadly snakes to lament so many snuffed-out youth ... Across the meadow, a roiling bank of acrid black-and-gray smoke ... Snipers aside and away from the main firing line are shooting between paired sets of engineers along either flank ... two climb into tall apple trees for better line-of-sight ... Masers volley in squad relays overtop the ditch ... aiming for lower backs, snipping spines, incapacitating legs ... far worse than kill shots.
“Six pickets down!” a spotter calls to Jan. “And two officers!”
Those are head shots ... cocky, lazy RIK captains and majors aren’t wearing helmets inside their camp perimeter ... stupid, bloody, brain-spattering deaths ... Another four pickets down ... falling, tumbling ... bored through chest or gut ... others spinning, thrashing ... legs not working anymore ... they need more than one shot to die.
“Shoot ‘em again! Make it count!” More screams race back across the meadow. Primal. Hair-raising. Coming from a different part of the brain than language, yet speaking to everyone who hears all the same. Like flopping fish in a boat hit in the head with a stiff club, the pickets stop moving. The camp disappears into a giant smoke roll rising above where the snakes just committed suicide. But there’s much more fire and smoke and secondary explosions than there should be from the snakes alone.
“SRDs hit an ammo dump, sir!” The spotter states the obvious. Jan ignores her.
“Individual firing. Fire at will! Pour it into them! Use your HUDs. Pick out your targets. Keep shooting!” Jan’s blood is up, his temples pounding.
Zofia’s shouting something else. To him? To the handful of fighters crouching in the ditch still, instead of standing? He can’t make her out at all. Her urgency alone breaks through.
“Use the damn command-link!” he yells, also hand signaling almost wildly to her. Zofia sees him mouth the words, taps her helmet to show it’s his com-link that’s off. He engages it with a thought. Hears her clear, bell-like laughter bouncing inside his helmet as she tears off another clip of maser fire across the meadow. Others fire all around and beside him.
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack ... like a swarm of demented crickets ... blue-electric maser bolts pumping ... burning ... smoking ... coring tunnels through columns of vanilla grass and the exposed torsos of young men ... scorching the dreams of vain distant fathers ... isolated lasers churr like partridges, spitting red and green lights from the wide flanks ... Two real birds flush from the tall grass, making startling runs of flapping wings and screeching ... they end in small explosions of muscle,
feathers and brains as fighters hot in blood shoot at all movement.
“The grass is on fire!” someone yells, pointlessly. The morning’s wet sweetgrass smell is gone. All is acrid, tart, burnt, bitter ash in the nose and eyes. Waves of shocking sudden heat roll over Madjenik’s firing line as gusts of hot air push across the tall, burning grass, shortening it to black stubs. Then all the sweetgrass is burnt off and sight lines into the RIK camp are wide open.
Hit by three lasers while rolling on the ground, one body in the burning meadow directly across from Jan erupts like a bladder with the piss let out multiple puncture holes at once, little red jets squirting upward after death with the last contained pressure in a dead man’s arteries.
“Change out your chargers. Redouble firing! Shoot, godsdamn it!” Zofia’s voice is clear and ringing in Jan’s helmet now. “Second Squad, movement on your left. Volley point 270˚ on my mark, mark! Again, mark! Got them! Recommence fire-at-will.” Madjenik is still standing in the ditch. But they see more Grünen now, with the tall grass burned off. Running. Officerless. Men and boys in a mad panic, reacting to first combat without any order or sane direction.
