by Kali Altsoba
“Still shooting too high, the fools!”
The main phalanx is caught up by combat engineers and snipers pulling even along both flanks, making the whole advance a half-klic wide. Snipers shoulder their precision laser pulse rifles, switching to short assault masers with a wider, more wicked short-range beam. Engineers shoot even shorter, stubby masers pulled from chest belts. It’s the signature weapon of their craft that sets them off from regular infantry on any battlefield, in any army, across all the worlds.
Only the mortar teams hold in their original position, in front of the now burning apple orchard. They’re not firing bombs anymore. They’re instead readying plasma rounds, electronic ‘smoke’ and precision EMPs, all to be used only in the event of a sudden change of fortune or a command from Jan to retreat. Two scouts scan in all other directions except the battle, watching for RIK armor or Jabos that might suddenly appear. Either one would be a game changer.
Nothing goes wrong. No hovering armor or Jabo fighter-bombers show up to save the Double Moons. Besides, the networked snakes and daisy-cutters did the hard work of killing or maiming most of the surprised enemy already, tearing open green armor weaves like ration foil packs during a meal stop on a training march, disemboweling young Grün boys and men inside. They find 200+ curling, fetal dead on the ground, weaves and bodies ripped apart. Some look to Jan like burned and still-smoking potatoes pulled from a campfire on a summer night, foil peeled back and tossed on the grass to cool down. Others are carelessly mashed, faceless and shapeless.
Another 100+ enemy are wounded, or merely stunned. Some heave in place, with broken or missing limbs. Others crawl weakly to nowhere, like salted, helpless, dying grubs. Dozens are completely unmarked in intact green weaves, looking up stupidly at arriving troops in tan, brains addled by the concussive wave from precision snakes blowing as one. Or knocked flat and giddy by the daisy cutter blast wave. Or seeking ground before they blew, staying down out of primal fear during the entire fight with Madjenik. They’re the lucky ones. Stunned flat or diving prone, preserved from waist-high plasma spears of the daisy-cutter tori that passed over where they lay.
Madjenik’s firing line arrives where the wounded and the fearful wait, and completes the grim work snakes and mortars started. Zofia’s in the lead, as always, but she doesn’t come with bandages, water or sponge as she moves straight and swift to the first wounded man.
She gives no kill order. She just kneels on hinged knees over the first befuddled nitōhei she comes to, pulls his faceplate back to expose a pulsing artery and slices open his throat with a black-diamond blade taken from her boot. She wipes the wetted knife on the gasping private’s arm then slides it slickly back into a mockleather sleeve atop her muddy boot. Spurting blood fountains in a meter-high arc, splashing Tom Hipper and the brunette as they pause to watch.
A week ago Jan would have ordered Zofia arrested. Would have charged her with war crimes. Maybe even shot her after a courts martial. Before the war, whenever he thought about combat ethics he always thought he knew the “right thing” and that he would do it. Yet he’s also much older and far harder than he was just five days ago. Five terrible, unbelievable days ago.
He’s the leader of a little band that’s like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see yet bound to die. And he has met the enemy. So he says nothing as his fighters follow Zofia’s lead, moving systematically over the smoldering camp to leave no man or boy alive. He stands in silence, gazing over the melancholy battlefield as Madjenik systematically polices the smoking meadow, gathering maser chargers, food and weapons. Stripping all moda and suspend off dead medics.
The field is rich in odors, both of nature and of battle. Broken sweetgrass juices seem even sweeter than when inside healthy stalks. Ruptured black soil, where the snakes blew neat round holes, gives off wild scents of humus, roots and worms, mixed with harsher chemicals from the high explosives. Bitter bile leaks dark and tart out of puncture wounds made by daisy-cutters in sprawling dead youths. A warm sweetness rises sticky and thick from red throats cut gaping open, little pink air bubbles forming at the corners of each gash, popping too quietly to hear above the summer breeze and tramping feet as Madjenik sweeps one last time for survivors.
So ends Jan’s and Madjenik’s innocence. So ends the bloody business of the day.
***
They don’t have time to bury their own dead from the firefight. Not time even to say the full Common Prayer. They can only make the traditional promise to family who survive the loss of a child: “You will not sorrow alone, dear mother, dear father, over an early grave.”
They’re gathered in clumps of three or four or ten fighters or more, after killing off the wounded. They’re dead if a high Jabo breaks cloud cover overhead. So Zofia lets them have it.
“Spread out, damn it. Corporal Hipper, get them moving and dispersed before a spy drone or ground patrol stumbles over this mess and we have Jabos climbing all up our asses.”
“Yes sir, lieutenant. You heard the order, let’s move Second Squad. Spread yourselves out, godsdamn it. Hut, hut. You, ‘Pie Girl,’ move your fat ass.” All other NCOs join the droving.
Jan connects to Zofia over the officer link. He hesitates, unsure what to say after what he saw her do. He doesn’t want any kind of personal conversation. Not yet. Not until he can think about her without seeing a red-dripping, Q-carbon knife in her hand. If that day ever comes, after today. Until then she’s still his best combat leader and the only other officer. He’s decided what to do next but he’s not sure it’ll work. He needs her. He must tell her, but he’ll keep it real tight.
“Lieutenant, we’ll head due west for Pilsudski Wood. It juts out hundreds of klics from the main forest zone at this latitude. We can get to cover fastest there. From Pilsudski we’ll go off-road, the long way northwest through the old forests to Toruń. At least that’ll give us a fighting chance. We have to keep moving. We can’t stay out here in the open. Not after this.” He cuts her off and switches back to the full company channel before she can reply.
“Madjenik, this was a real good day! But we’re still cut off and alone. We have to keep our heads down. They’ll be coming after us heavy and hard once they find what we did here.” He doesn’t look at Zofia. He doesn’t dare. “We’ll head for Toruń, via Pilsudski Wood. Off-road, using the deep forests for cover.”
There’s a murmur of relief, even a laugh or two of pleasant surprise that they’re going to Toruń. Jan decides to squash that reaction fast. Hope’s dangerous where he’s taking them next.
“Some of you won’t make it. Maybe most. We’ll be chased and hunted and hounded all the way by a more numerous and more mobile enemy.”
They look grimly at him, and he finally looks at Zofia. He sees it in her face. ‘I’ve gone too far. They need a little hope after all.’ He makes a quick course adjustment, but too far in the other direction. Finding the right words is hard. He’s not there yet as a leader.
“I promise I’ll get us to Toruń! There, we’ll get fresh supplies and orders. More than that, we’ll load up on weps and ammo and I’ll lead you back out past the great city berm to kick these saatana off Genève. Send them direct to whatever helvetti they believe in.”
It’s a stiff little speech, well past corny at the end. As soon as he stops he knows no one believes the last bit about being heroes and winning the war and saving Genève and all that shit he just made up, like he’s talking to small children during a power outage huddled inside a loud and dark storm. It helps them anyway. It’s closer to what Madjenik needs in this moment.
Zofia flashes an approving grin. He misunderstands and recoils from her warm smile. She’s innocent to the mental shudder he feels when she looks at him now and he recalls her slick knife work in the burnt grass. ‘How can someone so pretty be so cold, so morally indurate?’
Madjenik is in a good mood for the first time in five days. It moves off jauntily in spread formation, observing strict coms silence and electronic discipline.
Only now does Jan remember that his leg is aching. He forgot during the fighting in the ditch and across the meadow. It’s over 60 klics to Pilsudski Wood, a thousand more from the edge of the forest zone to far-off Toruń.
‘And when we get there, if we get there, what then? Will our beloved Arbor City still be waiting to greet us, or will it be just another smoldering pile of ash and corpses? I can’t think that far ahead. Take another step, that’s all. My job is to get us out of this burned meadow, into the somber night. Then to the forest. After that? Well, let’s make cover first and we’ll see...’
The morning larks flit swiftly overhead, dropping snatches of birdsong on the marching column. The sounds arrive like falling bombs. Did he think of that, or did he read it somewhere? He’s not sure. He glances slyly at Zofia, walking 20 paces in front of him.
He does indeed know that she’s a woman. Is keenly aware of her. In a moment of weary weakness he lets his mind wander over her petite form, imagining as he often did before the war what her taut body might look like beneath her now hopelessly grubby, wheat-colored weaves. How the pert curve of her breasts must meet a hard belly, then descend to ...”
Then he sees in his mind’s eye a bloody blade held in her clenched fist, slicing black-and-red across a gasping boy’s throat. ‘No. I can’t think about that other Zofia, dammit. Not now. Maybe not ever again.’
He moves one foot ahead of the other, dragging his aching leg along more with his will than with torn, protesting muscles. He tries not to limp, thinking that if he shows any weakness Madjenik will lose its recent and, to him, seriously misplaced confidence in his leadership.
‘Right now, that blind faith in me is all that’s holding this company together. So keep walking, head up. Do it for them. Gods know, you owe them. Show no pain or it all will end.’
An indifferently learned, half-remembered schoolboy rhyme repeats in his head, as hard stabbing as the rhythmic throbbing in his ripped calf. It’s ancient, translated into a hundred old and modern tongues, fragments lost and newly added over two millennia. He can’t remember all of it, or remember any of it clearly. Yet just trying helps keep his mind off the pain in his leg.
Actually, he garbles it pretty badly. Perhaps unconsciously. For the verse as he recalls it chides him out of the storied past, its mockery keeping time with each footfall he makes. His confusing of old lines with personal doubt haunts each painful stride, echoing in a teacher’s voice, then more harshly in his father’s stern and unforgiving tones, then most oddly in his own.
“On the first red day he up and ran,
our brave commander, our Captain Jan.
He turned and ran to save his life,
dropping his maser and carbyne-knife.”
Another step, more pain. Another and another. Five klics from the meadow. Ten klics. He’s drenched in shame and guilt. ‘How many more will I kill? What new mistakes will I make? How many must die because I’m not good enough, not ready for command?’ Mixed-up and ill-recalled verses and voices censor him again, blame him, mock him through his pain and worry.
“All of his fighters knew that
their captain had blundered.
Theirs not to question why,
theirs but to follow him, and die.”
He’s one bad decision from disaster, from mission failure and costing more Madjenik fighters their limbs and lives. For death is all around. More old lines come back to him, mangled by exhaustion and new experience, fragmenting images of war verse badly learned in boyhood.
“Enemy to the right of them,
pursuit to the left of them,
rumbled and thundered.
Into the jaws of Death,
he led the six hundred!”
‘Well, at least I shan’t kill as many as him, whoever he was. I had 300 fighters to start. Down to 167 at last check-in.’ He laughs out loud at the relentless, black arithmetic whirling through his receding moda barrier and an emerging exhaustion fog. He doesn’t notice the effect this has on the others.
Nearby fighters hear him and smile. His short laugh lifts their spirits. They think it means their captain is in a fine mood after his brilliant victory over the Double Moons in the sweetgrass meadow. They think it means he has a plan. They’ll follow their captain wherever he leads.
What the hell else can they do?
Data search: Orion.
Result: alien life, Rare Earth.
Historia Humana, Volume IV, Part III (e)
As every schoolchild knows, ancient OE astronomers found many hundreds of thousands of rocky worlds. About 11% were potentially habitable, while 2% were found at optimum orbits. Signatures of primitive life were found on several thousand rocky planets, but no instrument or SETI project found advanced life or any evidence of any alien civilization in Orion. Organics detection instead made three things clear about the galactic suburb where Sol system resided.
First, there was primordial life scattered across Orion, except for one statistically improbable barren area astronomers call the “Dead Zone,” still unexplained even today. The existence of primitive yet alternate ecosystems on colonizable planets never posed an impediment to their terraforming for human exploitation. Moral and philosophical respect for the “sanctity of all living things” was mooted by ethicists and exobiologists, but not accepted by Sol governments or the general public or any of the then still thriving major religions. Instead, in our celebrated amour propre, we reasserted an ancient claim to unique moral, genetic, and cosmic status. If we were not quite the center and purpose of all creation, we were at least the centerpiece of Orion.
Second, the ‘Rare Earth’ hypothesis was confirmed. There was no alien life beyond prokaryotic levels, and no other advanced intelligence in the Orion spur. And thus not likely anywhere else. The ‘Great Silence’ of the Fermi Paradox was confirmed and reconfirmed. The numerical value reserved for advanced civilizations in the venerable Drake Equation was definitively entered as ‘one.’
A few skeptics still say that the explanation of our uniqueness may be the ‘Great Filter,’ wherein advanced star-faring civilizations that arose before us exterminated themselves or each other. Some suggest this may explain the Dead Zone, which remains largely unexplored: why spend on archeological exploration of dead worlds with so many exploitable inorganic sites within now thriving, inhabited systems? They also warn that the same filter lies ahead, waiting for us should Humanity discover a suicidal new technology or unsustainable trajectories come to dominate our social, economic and —the least likely outcome, because most tightly controlled by our success at grand terraforming— our multiple environmental futures. We are alone. Unique. Wondrous. The pinnacle achievement of either cold mathematics or calculated creation. Choose.
Lastly, it was clear that all inhabitable worlds were ours to take, even those with minor alien life beneath our genetic achievement. Alien genes could be replaced or blended with cradle world genomes to improve our survivability on what would become the Thousand Worlds. Otherwise, the silence in the heavens proved far more welcome than any mooted great discovery that “we are not alone.” We welcomed that no one was out there to block us from interstellar empire, if only waiting habitable worlds could be reached by our colony ships. And if history proves one thing above all else it is that empire is our most natural system of organization, the social-moral norm most desired, most of the time, by most of our peoples.
Unfortunately, we established not one but three great star empires, though one insists still on disguising itself to itself as a republic. Outside the unexplained Dead Zone where no life exists or will take hold, the Thousand Worlds of Orion are flush with civilization. And we have just begun to settle the small clusters that lie between Orion and Perseus. It is a matter of regret only that the scattered children of Old Earth are not united across their new homes. We brought too many hates and old differences out to the stars with us, where we waged three terrible Orion Wars before arriving at the current political configuration. However, all tha
t was long ago.
Today the Peace of Orion, or the ‘Long Peace,’ still survives after 300 years. Scholars say this is because the three great star empires —Grün Imperium, Calmar Union, and Dauran Commons— are committed by treaty and now also by custom to avoid grave quarrels between the past and present that might lose us all the future. The powers collectively guarantee security, including for the several small Neutrals that lie between and buffer them from each other: the United Planets of Krevo, Helvetic Association, the Three Kingdoms, and a dozen even smaller star states. The youngest star-nations, those in more recently settled open and globular clusters, also grow rich and secure in the shadow of Orion’s extended peace. They are not part of the main interstellar treaty system, but live contentedly in its shade nonetheless.
Scholars agree, and history shows, that the Long Peace proves that we have finally left our violent childhood and adolescence behind. Mystics and the new religions say that we are blessed to live in the Shōwa Age or ‘Great Enlightenment,’ or ‘Satya Yuga’ (‘Winning Age of Reason and Order’). By any name, we enjoy a deep peace, mature commercial relations across all borders (except Daura’s), cultural intercourse and prosperity across the Thousand Worlds. Ours is an era of enlightened peace such as never seen before in our long, dark history.
