by Kali Altsoba
The rivers of woe flow toward Toruń as if they were glaciers, hardly moving to naked vision. All five Old Forest Roads are clogged tight with human detritus, like pent-up jökulhlaup pushing under an ice dam or melting glacier. Nowhere is the slow river of flowing flesh able to breach the blocking canyons of groaning trees that tower on both sides of each road, all along the way. No one can force a path through to the last defended site and garrison on Genève, the last sliding chance to maybe board a transport and flee a devastated and soon-to-be conquered world.
Wanderers are made mad and wild by suffering. After the new bombing starts, only the healthy young and unusually lucky will somehow trickle through or squeeze out the top of each frozen column, gaining room to lope to Toruń’s berm. The rest move like a hard glacier or not at all, jamming together in rising despair at a pace so slow it might make a Galapagos tortoise rage.
At first the bombers track unshielded lines of bodies with infrared scans that peer through a naturally buttressed canopy reaching out and interwoven from either side. Like the roof of a medieval cathedral, the highest boughs cover and shade the tightly crammed crowds standing or kneeling to pray far below. The green rooves frame canalized tangles of stopped vehicles and forlorn pedestrians that surge with panic after hearing sounds overhead. Bombs begin to fall and strafing starts by screeching Raptors. In minutes the canopy, thinnest right over the Old Forest Roads, is ablaze. Along with the bombs, burning timbers fall onto screaming refugees beneath.
Wave after wave of skim bombers swoop down low over the five living logjams. Soldiers mixed-up among civilian refugees shoot hand masers and a few small pulse cannon skyward, in hopeless protest against the enemy’s total dominance of the sky. Anyone on the ground close to the tree line dives toward the great roots and trunks, seeking any sort of cover. Those too closely jammed together to move at all, trapped by the multitude of flesh, fill up the middle of the road. All they can do is embrace for final comfort or in prayer. Or despair, and scream and die in fire.
Out on the plains RIK ground forces advance ever closer, snare drums beating all around as the great marching columns draw toward the forest edge and redeploy from column into line, in long semi-circles around the mouths of the five Old Forest Roads. The sight of so many guns pushes panic in waves before the redeploying troops. Crowds stampede, trampling hundreds to death without gaining any distance on the men in green. Always, more people block the way.
There’s no escape from singing marchers or snapping snare drums or wide firing lines, front row prone, second row kneeling, third row standing. More divisions arrive in the rear and down the flanks, ordered to stand with arms shouldered to witness the greatness of the Imperium.
“Battalion, ready masers.”
A dull humm rises as weapons come off safety and tiny lasers warm the pink crystals. The terror peaks. Women in the back files of the crowd scream and cover their children’s eyes. Men plead for their lives. Children clutch at a praying parent’s leg and look up, bewildered.
“Battalion, present arms.”
The order is repeated all down the lines, until ten thousand maser barrels present toward the heaving crowds at five blocked forest entrances.
“Fire by volley! Front rank, fire! Second rank, fire! Third rank, fire. Again. First rank, fire!” It continues until the pink crystals burn out, after 20 shots.
The panic of the crowds surpasses anything anyone has ever seen on Genève. Men and women push like penned cattle in the jammed chutes of some Dauran slaughterhouse, bellowing fear in voices unrecognizable even to themselves. Others rush like bullied bison heading over a bluff into a Sioux blood kettle waiting below. Those few who try to turn, wanting to stand and die with dignity while facing their murderers, are not permitted any grace. They’re pulled away by the madding crowd or down by a death grip of a stranger tearing at their clothes or faces.
One old man does manage to stand alone and unafraid, wearing a neat suit and tie while surrounded by a mound of dead, and heaving wounded waiting for follow-on troops to deliver their kill shots. The battalion colonel walks over, pulls out his pistol, places it square against the old man’s white head and pulls the trigger. He falls, lying still across the body of his dead wife.
“Advance 100 paces and reload. You, boy. Step over that woman. She’s dead. Keep pace with your company. Don’t hold up the firing line. Move it!” Nitōhei Lars Knut has no idea what’s going on. Only that he never signed up for this. He vomits all over the last man he killed, then wipes the bile off his mouth. His training is all he has to fall back on. So he puts one shaky foot ahead of the other. He keeps in line. He follows orders.
“All halt. Reform firing ranks. Front rank, fire! Second rank, fire! Third rank, fire.” It’s just like they all practiced in basic training, right out of the RIK infantry tactics manual. It’s so close to basic weapons and march practice that many men don’t realize right away that they’re scorching flesh when they fire their masers. Not until they have to step over the smoking dead.
Nitōhei Lars Knut knows. He cries wet tears with every shot he fires. But he still shoots when told to, reloads when ordered, advances and does it all over again. He’s lost count of how many lives he’s taken in the last 15 minutes. He can’t afford to know. It could drive him mad.
“Advance 100 paces. Reform ranks. Commence fire at will. All ranks, fire at will!” Now the click-clack, click-clack sound truly does resemble a host of crickets. Or maybe a swarm of locusts, moving methodically across a field. Consuming everything before advancing.
So old-fashioned is the firing drill that if there was a real army on the other side a helluva lot of RIK would die, too. Main HQ back on Kestino knows this to be true. It’s scrambling hard to change the basic infantry manual, which dates back 300 years to the last Orion War.
Why change? Because on Lwów another rigid prewar general tried the same godsdamn parade ground tactic, but not against unarmed civilians. He went in against determined KRA and got an entire Rikugun division shredded. Over 50,000 dead. A one-off? No. It also happened on one of the ice-moons of Aral, where 350,000 RIK are already gone in a fight just getting started. Says one cynical but honest staff officer, just before they arrest him for it: “That’s a lot of grief and hidden family losses to censor on the homeworlds.”
Back on Genève, there’s no running from the firing lines. No running either from heavy masers shooting blue bolts down into the forest from Jabos and Raptors swirling above. Or from rippling plasma that cuts into the roads to rip apart huge trees at will, tattooing with incinerating heat anything and anyone below the swooping skycraft.
Whirr, keraaack! Lasers slice the canopy, dropping multi-ton flaming branches onto cowering families, crushing them and cremating the corpses. Jabos and Raptors whirl and spin overhead however they choose, their crews doing needless acrobatics to impress watching peers.
Poumm, zzssuiii! Pulse packets slam into dirt along the roadsides, kicking soil and bitter roots over abandoned wounded, tossing more women and children and vehicles high in the air. The enemy skycraft circle high above picking the fattest, slowest targets. They line up like taxis, waiting for a turn to swoop and strafe, to dive-bomb the crawling, bleeding columns far below.
The big warbirds are as unchallenged as hunting eagles selecting which flashing fish to snatch from a run of salmon packing the tumbling streams below. Crying, screaming, burning, dying civilians back up over hundreds of klics of blazing forest, along each of the five Old Forest Roads. The roof above them is gone or hangs in smoky patches, the roads are holed and wrecked. Everywhere lie burned transports, overturned carts, abandoned wounded and dying.
Those who can’t move die where they stand, too old or too little or too young to shift. Many who are still virile and fast also die, pinned in place by the crush of the panicking crowd. Ditches and roadbeds fill with burning bodies, the dead and still dying. Nor is there cover inside the forest edge, away from the center of the fire roads. Not when slabs of living
lumber cut from the canopy by Raptor masers tumble down. Multi-tons of flaming green wood, hissing sap and gases and colored smokes and fire, falling and rolling, setting alight the base and roots of the great trees until pillars of fire rise into the sky. Like some great pagan spectacle recalling Hades.
There’s no escape into the woods from the road. Not when great roots smash up into exploding pulp, showering splinters from echo blasts, rip apart with flash-lightening rounds, up-end heavy vehicles to scorch and flay alive anyone inside with balls and bolts of blue electric fire. Not when “The Great Fire,” as this soon will be called, races deep into the trees and burns out a half million square klics of forest. No one makes it off the roads into the woods and lives.
Agni the Fire Goddess is come down from the sky to burn the forests short and gray, uncaring of the innocent animals scurrying and scrambling inside: mice and voles, wrens and tree bats, ancient hives of wasps, small green snakes and fleet deer, and stumbling people fleeing in all directions but always forced back into fire. ‘Creatures by the thousands scream in terror and are scorched. Everywhere writhing on the ground with burning wings, eyes and paws.’
Once the huge fires turn outward and move away from the roads choosing or bombing individual targets inside the blazing forest becomes pointless. Everyone trapped on the roads is already dead or marked for death by fire. Besides, ambient heat columns and rising billows of smoke from the terrible conflagrations play havoc with skycraft thermal targeting and optics.
So pilots peel away, heading back to base to rest and rearm for the coming big assault on the heavily defended shipyard at Toruń. They really want to raze the ‘Golden City of Wood’ of which these backwoods Genèvens are much too proud. They’ve known only easy victory so far. Only a few RIK pilots know that attacking well-shielded Toruń will be tougher than burning out undefended columns of fleeing civis. Only a few as yet know that war is harder than murder.
The ancient forests are ablaze down all five long and winding roads leading from Toruń to the great north plain. They look that first night like orange-red rivers of lava, and are in fact smoldering ribbons of terror and torment. Five phoenix serpents consuming everything: teak and redwood, sycamore and maple, vehicles and people, all creatures great and small.
Hundreds of lesser fires leap newborn from great infernos that suck in air and fuel and spit up flames that rise and race along the canopy, then down groaning trunks to start a whole new fire, until it seems that half of Northland is ablaze.
The woods are ashen, dark and deep. When the last fires flicker out a week later, when it’s finally over inside roasted Toruń Wood, 2.7 million Genèvens remain unmoving along five charred roads. Ash falls for days, fills in clouded-over eyes of the dead, covers charcoal remains in a humbug shroud of soft white-gray. No one is left to pray or to mourn. No one is coming with water or aid. Toruń itself at last is under siege. The only ones still alive amidst the cooling ashes are the dazed, the dumb, and the dumbfounded. Even mad Agni is flown away to set fresh fires.
The Wolf is prowling on Genève, his pack running wild and loose in Orion. Hear his mad howling? Now he’s in the woods, stalking more red game. Now he’s at the gate pawing to get in.
Data search: lifespan.
Result: suspensor.
Historia Humana, Volume X, Part V(a)
Epigenetic intervention incrementally extended life expectancy as degenerative diseases were eliminated at DNA source. But the critical jump came from adaptation of military thought-command tek: the quantum dot. Medics adapted a photosensitive silicon flake implant used to link to HUDs to treat brain injuries, migrating from radical combat trauma to relief of ordinary epilepsy and other brain disorders in civilian populations. A dot’s enormous databank infuses new information directly into affected and targeted brain tissue, bypassing damaged sites, correcting synaptic misfires and reordering biologic communication failures. Dots eliminated dementia and nearly all brain diseases related to aging. making a long stride toward extending what medical professionals still call “negligible senescence.” It sum, quantum dot tek led to a revolution in quality of extended life, an indefinite prolongation of a healthy mind past what our ancestors ever hoped. This period of protracted vigor is popularly known as “Youthspan,” a multi-decades extension of the period of life that is most alert, active, and desirable.
A historic connection of military research to human longevity is usually noted as ironic, but is easily explained. As much as any military wants efficient means to inflict wounds or death on enemies, it wants to save the limbs and lives of its own personnel more. The first step toward “immortality” was this mix of motives and a fortuitous discovery during an OE conflict called the Great War, as an early bio-arms race led to poison gases that forced research into antidotes. One poison was a weak, weaponized derivative of hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a foul-smelling but naturally occurring gas found in sulfur pools, decomposition by anaerobic digestion, human and animal emissions and sewage. Researchers concentrating H2S to inflict mass death by aerosol and shell delivery instead noticed that in low doses it had the exact opposite effect, producing reversible metabolic hibernation in lab animals. Low concentrations of H2S, about 50 parts per million in normal room air, increased nematode and mice life spans up to eight times normal.
It was realized that there was more than superstition in a history of pre-scientific humans seeking natural H2S as a cure-all in sulfur springs and similarly “healthful waters.” There was empirical experience and medical wisdom in worldwide hot spring rites, for hydrogen-sulfide indeed regulates rates at which a human body consumes oxygen. That discovery led to a long search for a H2S catholicon to slow or even suspend metabolism. A refined, artificial compound was finally made with enzymes from decapod crustaceans, long-lived species of remarkably slow senescence. Another key ingredient was artificial resveratrol, found in natural form in red wine.
At sufficient levels the new synthetic H2S-decapod-resveratrol compound, known simply now as “suspensor” or just “suspend,” lowers oxygen burn rate until a heart stops beating, cells cease to die, DNA stops synthesizing, and all bio movement ceases. All without causing cell or brain death. Suspensor places living creatures into an effective state of what was long thought merely fictional and impossible, what was once called “suspended animation.” The final key was an established and very simple med technology: hydrogel nanobots. These permitted delivery of suspend solution nearly simultaneously at the micron level, to every cell in an entire body (hence making possible GDM sleeper ships), or to a targeted and damaged body part, say of a soldier wounded in battle. “Freeze and bag ‘em’ was a military medic’s watchword. Repair came later.
Other research advanced basic bioprinting, copying genes from stem cells to make printouts of living tissue on demand: skin, muscle, marrow, even whole joints, bones and organs (except the brain). Bioprinting became cheap, effective, and universally available to the civilian population. Together with suspensor, bioprinting extended life spans even of the very poorest citizens until they approached those of the socially privileged. That’s when all the trouble started...
Takeshi
Takeshi Watanabe is at the center of this war. The hidden hand of the Imperator, Grün Tennō Pyotr Shaka III. He’s the spider standing on intersecting webs of schemes, plots and lies. He’s also in his natural political element, where his unique talents and fortune and powers must swell. He’s Hector’s warning embodied, revealed even to himself for what he truly is. There’s no chance to win him over to pity’s side. He has iron in his breast and bloody murder on his hands.
Only at this moment he’s not exactly at the center of events, or even near to where he really wants to be. He’s far from the Tennō’s court and his hard won place in the inner circle, inside all other inner circles as one of ‘The Admitted.’ No, he’s stuck in backwater Northland on Genève, doing low-level work on a minor agrarian world already largely overrun by the RIK.
‘Why did Pyotr s
end me to this shithole?’ He holds a middling rank in SAC, yet he has met with the Tennō many times. Both men have been moving toward this moment of war and toward each other for many years. They are near-perfect conspirators. They are also a pair of wary scorpions ready to strike should the other man make the slightest tactical misstep. Or inadvertently reveal his true long-range intentions.
He looks over a smoldering village, out from under the peak of a silver-gray forage cap. Its rim is circled by a green puggaree signifying an active combat command. His jet-black eyes are unblinking, unnaturally steady, with a flicker of red flecks in intensely contracted pupils.
‘Not for the field experience, as he said. Why then?’ A snug, steel-colored uniform clings to the tight contours of his hard and trim physique. A black-gloved hand grips an argentine swagger stick, thick at the top. It’s the same baton of high office carried by all senior commanders. He taps it methodically against his athletic thigh.
‘Pyotr sent me here because he thinks I need a little humbling before we continue with our plans, to remind me who is the Tennō and who his at-will servant. No matter that we both know that I am the greater mind and have by far the superior native talent.’
