by Kali Altsoba
“What does it mean?”
“What about our war against the locusts?”
“Can they be here to remake the ‘Auld Alliance?”
That was when Ones and Twos and all other Krevans wearing tan fought alongside Blue shirts and Brownshirts against the Greens, the locusts, in the Third Orion War. It’s a neat rumor, made up on the spot and utterly and devastatingly false. For now they hear confirmation clarions and see GovNeb warnings flash bright and red and loud. The last hope for peace or rescue is lost.
“It’s war then, and betrayal.”
“Another betrayal.”
“Damn Jahandar! Damn all treacherous Daurans!”
“They stab us in the back while our strong sons and daughters are far away.”
“It will be easier to forgive being killed by our locust enemy than by this old friend.”
“Is there no end to destruction of our Republic, to our suffering?”
“Godsdamn the Tyrant to helvetti for all eternity!”
“Lost, all is lost. Sauve qui peut! Save yourselves!”
No one on either world expected an attack fleet. Not on this quiet system so far removed from where Krevans are already fighting and losing everywhere against Grünen. Not an assault this soon, anyway. And never by the Daurans.
Nothing has been heard from their map-brown stars in so long Krakoyans almost forgot they were still out there, across a long-darkened and untraversed frontier. Everyone thought they had a little more time before an enemy force arrived wearing the hated green of the swarm. Time enough to join the Exodus. No one looking to the night sky expected to see a brown-clad horde arrive from a half-forgotten and nightmare state, tearing down at battle-speed toward their little worlds left hanging by the Krevan War with the Imperium in a wide-open, undefended system.
The last ships at Krakoya II have just time to embark refugees already on the mushroom platforms and get way. The problem is that the near bohr-zones are not prime for a run to any Calmari system: they connect to different adjacent stars than the outer LPs. It means taking a less direct and more insecure route. That’s why most Little Ships were going to leave from behind the gas giant, now barred to them by the descending Dauran fleet. The only way left to reach Calmari space is a multi-bohr route through dangerous places, starting right here. Not all ships will make it, but any willing to try must leave now. Any jump will do, to any bohr-linked star.
On these very last Little Ships tearing away on fusion-drives from the upper tiers of the Krakoya II north elevator, it’s worse than anyone knows. Half the escape routes that frightened captains are hastily charting are already compromised by Dauran or Grünen landings that no one on Krakoya knows are happening simultaneously with this one. Too many of the Little Ships will fly straight into war, thinking they fly away from it. What starts in tragedy doesn’t always end in farce. This war moves only from tragedy to tragedy for Krevans.
Krakoyan youth spent the first month of war mobilizing and training, the next three fighting hard, and losing, on Brno. As they left falling Brno, then evacuated again from Acis, wild rumors circulated that the Twin’s divisions would make a last stand on Aral. Before they got there, Aral fell. The next false hope was that the Calmar Union was at last ready to declare war on the Imperium, that a powerful NCU fleet was coming to the United Planets from Amasia and a second would soon leave Baku. That story died a month ago. All of 900,000 are already gone from the sister worlds from a starting complement of 1.7 million fighters. They were lost in retreats and evacuations, in fighting from lost-world to lost-world. Driven always onward by the locust swarms, until the last companies and battalions were ordered to seek sanctuary in exile.
The lies and rumors were heard back home, too. When they proved false, hundreds of millions resolved to leave on relays of Exodus ships. Too many then delayed departing home, clung to memories too long. They thought war was still far away and that it would stay there for a while longer. Now their mistake is crushingly clear to those trapped planetside on two doomed worlds. Just because they wanted to walk in their homey garden one last time, or sail once more on a quiet countryside lake, or sit in a city park where they planted a hope-tree as children. The last free citizens of the United Planets hear the hard truth in the clarions, realize their dark future in a memex moment.
Say farewell to the Twins. Both garrisons are gone, stripped down to just local police forces. Krakoya has already fallen to Jahandar’s vanity and Pyotr’s cunning. All that’s left to do is the killing and dying, as the only warships in the system, four old frigates and 10 jury-rigged police boats, rise to meet the whole Dauran battle fleet.
They’re going to sing about this for centuries. They’ll call the ballad, “Death Ride of the Bantams.” They’ll sing as well, though mournfully, of white tokamaks that tear apart the sky.
***
“Achilles glared at him and answered: Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out ... There can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, ‘till one or other shall fall.”
Hector must duel with Ajax. Greeks must burn their dead. Agamemnon and Ulysses must be felled or wounded. The great unmarked hero Achilles must be humbled. He will feel first mortal pain then mortal fear, then mortal death. The old leaders must die and give way to new. Only after the old order crashes onto rocks can a Council of War and Alliance be made, and the wise meet to plot a way to topple mighty Troy, and Persia too. All before Ulysses can go home.
Hope is dead in the United Planets. Hope only lives in exile. It’s shacked-up out there, with Hate. It’s camped in an exile’s tent outside the walls of Troy, where Ulysses wanders in despair and disguise. He waits for arrogant Greeks to be humbled by the gods of war. Brought low with fire on the ice.
The gods do not disappoint.
Nunavut
Wintry Nunavut lies inside the far edge of the habitable zone of a very ordinary star that the local Inuit called Popayá. Its modest orange mass resides two-thirds up the Orion spur, at the hinge of the Dead Zone where no life of any kind exists or ever has, as far as our probes can tell. Nunavut is the sole habitable planet, and just barely that, in a remarkably unremarkable system.
It’s also the first way-station abutting the long Dauran-Calmari frontier, right before all those Dauran brown stars turn Calmari blue, where The Balcony juts into the Hermit Empire. That makes the little ice-ball strategic. Despite impoverishment and underpopulation and lack of any resources, despite barely surviving its founding decades and still lacking an elevator or a naval squadron, its location makes Nunavut key to General Mikva Royko’s ‘Grand Design.’ So he orders the ice-world hit on the first day of the war, while he does the same to the Krakoyas.
Inuit pioneers arriving at Nunavut in the GDM-ship Baffin adopted a frigid snowball long unwanted by others. Dissidents from modernity, they followed a few AI nanny-bots sent ahead to ready a narrow equatorial band of the ice-planet, so that they might rebuild an ancient lifestyle and recapture self-reliant values too long lost by their people. After centuries of AI effort and even harder Inuit struggle against unforgiven errors, enough fish and fauna were seeded in the equatorial band of lakes and conifer forests that hunger never came again to the Ice People of Nunavut. As it did to the first generations, and had to ancient ancestors on faraway Arctic shores.
Immense herds of caribou now roam the snow pack and millions of fresh-water seals huddle on thick ice-sheets covering a hundred lakes and inland seas, watching for Great White Bears who stalk their breathing holes. Also for silent Inuit shooters who walk in imitation of the white bears, one paw softly padding in the same place as its brother. In the brief summers, tough tundra mosses and muskegs spring back up under the passing weight of Inuit, bears and caribou.
Hunters creep close to kill nervous seals with laser harpoons, to keep numbers in check and store meat for the lon
g midnight months. For most peoples of Orion lab-grown mockmeat satisfies both protein needs and moral qualms. Yet Inuit still eat real animal flesh, and trap and skin and wear against the savage cold white-bear fur and arctic fox and white-wolf pelts. As did their ancestors before the Second Age. A few non-Inuit also make hunter-huts of hard snow, kill and eat game meat, wear white fur, and track across ice-sheets on sinew-and-birch snowshoes.
A few off-worlders even join in the traditional game of ice-hockey, where teams of ten on large sheets of ice-covered snow swat and clobber and miss and guide, but rarely score with a hollowed-out, liquid-mercury puck. Its agitated antics and the stumbling player falls, far more than the skaters’ skills, bring fur-clad crowds stamping and laughing to their mukluk feet. Otherwise, the quiet life of Iqaluit, Arviat, Kugluktuk, Sedna and scattered settlements over an isolated ice-world is as normal as anywhere in the Calmar Union. Until today’s dawn.
***
Arrival of the Dauran attack fleet coincides with the Wolf Moon, as Inuit call the lunar month before the Snow Moon that sees the heaviest fall during long, dim winters. Some call it “Hunger Moon,” from folk memory of harder times in the first century of settlement when packs of white wolves howled over the tundra and moose and elk were yet scarce in the crackling, ice-covered new taiga. Today a far more ravenous Wolf is come to Nunavut to claim his gory rights.
Dauran infantry in thin, dreary brown coats move up a snow-covered hillside in broad ranks. Six full divisions of krasnos, 300,000 strong, stamp the frozen ground in unison. They debarked from assault-craft, immediately assembling into ranks and files in the chill dark. They came down in huge drop-ships with 20,000 troops in each, or double the number of the whole Gardes Nunavut in each of 15 new-style landers. ‘We don’t have a snowball’s chance in…’
Already many krasnos have frostbite on torn and bleeding fingers that clutch too-frigid masers or metal clips on ceramic HUDs. They’re dressed for summer war, not for fighting in mid-winter, not for a fight in the infamous cold of Nunavut, of all places in Orion. Not for the coming ‘Battle on the Ice,’ as history will record the sordid thing that happens here today.
As the cool, Class-K Popayá sun dimly breaks the bleak horizon, the vast brown throng advances westward into an orange dawn. Combat files thump the ground in unison, 300,000 boots stamping each footfall as one, making the loudest artificial sound ever heard on Nunavut. Rank upon rank advance. They undulate over the foamy white of a snow-sea like taupe sargasso, waves of fighters slipping and falling over graded crinkles and pits in the wintered hillside slope.
Or perhaps like a bumper herd of caribou, cajoled and jostled across tundra by barking, snapping NCOs and over 2,000 junior officers. The NCOs walk beside the files like husky dogs Inuit use to drive the herds in summertime, to lower pastures. Captains and majors and a few brown colonels follow, but only one general. A tall, handsome black man in a shimmering uniform. He has odd, black-on-black and utterly unreadable eyes.
The sole natural cover is a morning mist forming hoarfrost on the branches of runty arctic trees. It mixes with thick clouds of chemical ‘smoke’ from primitive fog-mortars lobbing yellow bomb bursts overhead, to obscure and occlude line-of-sight aiming by the defenders’ lasers. It’s another outdated weapon and tactic, but all that the backward Daurans have with them this day.
Except for tan-clad officers who wear modern ceramic weaves, krasnos wear only light liquid-armor three centuries out-of-date. It can’t stop modern weapons. As if in compensation, inside their passive-only HUDs, commandments exhort a steady advance with stock slogans and shouted praise of the “military genius of Jahandar,” and of his elder son, their field commandant on this day of days. General Kurshid Ramos watches calmly from a thousand-klics safe distance.
There’s no tactical subtlety here, no effort at clever maneuver. Not even basic, sensible seeking of cover except for the obscuring chemical fog. No effort made to evade a violent squall of plasma shells arcing into the sky above the tawny mass before plunging back to ground with the searing heat of a thousand miniature suns, to evaporate and roast alive screaming men and howling women. Browncoats are not trained in tactical evasion. Only to advance straight, or die.
Browncoat infantry is supported by long-range artillery and 400 tractored armtraks. The whole mass advances against defenders who had just hours to prepare, after sensors warned that a strange battle fleet had arrived at Popayá’s outermost bohr-zone. Everyone was stunned to see battleship hulls decorated with the almost-forgotten emblem of the Dauran Revolutionary Navy, a mailed fist gripping a flaming-missile inside a swirl of stars. That emblem hasn’t been seen in 300 years, not since the ‘Auld Alliance beat back the Grün Imperium in the Third Orion War.
Ice-clad and sparsely populated, Nunavut has just 130 million Inuit, and guests. No NCU fleet defends the little ice-world founded by settlers from one of the original GDM colony ships, the Baffin. For a dozen centuries Inuit were proudly independent and profoundly isolated, until the Second Orion War showed that security lies in numbers. Seven hundred years ago Nunavut federated with tolerant Calmaris, who exempted certain of their local traditions from legal bans.
Though it’s fondly regarded within the Calmar Union, Nunavut has no real importance. Without significant exports, it has no space elevator, no orbital or Lagrange point factories, and no outer system mines. Nor does it want any. The Gardes Nunavut is correspondingly tiny, at just 10,000 local fighters in a single, grossly undersized division. At barely 1/5th standard size, the proud fighters of Nunavut wear simple white-and-blue. The colors of home and the Union.
Only Popayá’s locale, where the Dead Zone tricorners with Calmari and Dauran borders, where its LPs connect to a dozen more important systems, makes Nunavut worth defending at all. That’s why no vaunted Kars School strategist or naval analyst in their high Hornet’s Nest MoD tower in Lowestoft saw a fight coming over isolated Nunavut. And never with the Daurans.
Above the droved Browncoat infantry stamping up the slope fly commotions of shturms, outdated ground-attack, piloted skycraft. Arrayed in ‘V’ formations, they look to Inuit far below like migrating snow geese. Only these are lethal birds. They arrive from rough-hewn, overnight bases carved into a thick ocean ice-sheet 1,200 klics away.
That’s beyond the reach of the Iqaluit garrison guns. And they’re the biggest battery in the largest settlement in a narrowly terraformed corridor of barely tolerable climate, hugging the cold Nunavut equator. A steady ack-ack-ack of anti-skycraft fire soars over the MDL above the mass of Browncoats, hurtling packets of proximity-fused shells skyward. They burst in soft black puffs of active-seeking, screeching hexagonal shrapnel.
The battle on the ice will be won or lost this day not by plasma cannon or low, swooping shturms but by ordinary men and women wearing plain brown coats over old liquid-steel armor. Simple folk who comprise the expendable bulk of the DRA. They march where they’re told by officers in light, brown weaves. They kill who and when they’re ordered. They live or die at the whim of cruel and uncaring overseers, at the behest and in indifference from far-off Jahandar.
A terrible truth only Royko knows is that for each Inuit soldier killed today ten krasnos will die, and many more will suffer grievous wounds. The kill-ratio might fall in later battles, if Dauran officers can learn to better spend the splendid human capital of vast conscript armies. For now, with Royko floating high over Krakoya I and General Kurshid far-off on a shturm base on an ice-sheet a half-klic thick, on this first day the krasno death-toll causes no concern or delay.
On the ice-ledge before Iqaluit on a frigid dawn, with temperature straining toward -35˚ Celsius, massed Browncoats move across the open mouths of crystal-maser cannon dug into a stringy copse along the far-right flank. Heavy pulses are already taking a red toll of crisped and crumpled krasnos. They protect a second battery of garrison plasma-mortars 600 meters aft, from where a cascade of arcing shots rises over the hillside and down onto the tramping infantry.
> A huge snowy owl twists its magnificent head, screeching angry protest at the unnatural commotion, at being disturbed in her morning hunt for pika, marmot or snow hare. Disdainfully, she pulls up and away on wide beating wings, disappearing into a total white-out horizon where ground snow-dust blends seamlessly into a crisp-white sky, creased with orange along one edge.
Browncoats plunge over packed snow on the order of vile, 24-year old General Kurshid, eldest son of Jahandar the Dread. Kurshid has basic Nalchik Military Academy training, though before today he never led even a platoon into a real battle. He boasts a hard reputation inside the regime and DRA. So hard, that when those who know the truth are certain they’re alone and no Shishi spy will hear their whispered fears and hatred, they call Kurshid “the Butcher of Riga.”
Repressing hunger riots there before the war, he denied aid to civilians wounded by his troops, letting them die in slow agony. But not until his regiments rounded-up and murdered ten thousand family members in front of the dying rebels. He aspires to, and mimics, the brutality of his aloof father, thinking that’s the path to Jahandar’s withheld grace and favor. Kurshid’s not so intelligent or careful or ruthless, or alone, as Jahandar. The ghastly Tyrant shows no interest in his eldest son and has nothing but contempt for his small acts of calculated and cruel depravity.
