by Kali Altsoba
Infantry wearing pale Union-blue, modified by the sheer-white of Nunavut, wait for the krasnos in a thin line bent along an L-shaped, sunken road. They’re entrenched behind the crest of the low ridge up which the Browncoats march, file-upon-file. The waiting infantry are called “Blue Onis” by the oncoming ranks of krasnos, who never saw a blue-clad demon before today.
Calmari have no term like it for the approaching horde. They simply call them “popovs,” as they did in the last war when they fought on the same side against the Grünen, and in the war before that, when Nunavut fought with a Union it had not yet joined against Browncoats on the ice. No one knows what “popov” means, though some say that it’s a common surname across the frontier. It’s a simple, almost meaningless, almost baby-word used outside the Hidden Empire that seems to fit the unknown pathetics marching up an ice-slope for the Tyrant and his generals. Also dropping today from orbit to march and kill and die on four more invaded, and betrayed, ‘Auld Alliance worlds across the borders of the United Planets of Krevo and the Calmar Union.
The ridge where the blue-white infantry stand forms a distinct upper-lip to a high plateau, stretching at a hard right-angle to the heavy masers and plasma guns in the woods. The elevated slope conceals a line of fixed positions, sparing each side line-of-sight shooting for now. Blues are engaged only by long-range arti pounding the ridge with plasma. Each shell erupts into a red or green starburst as it lands. Earlier shelling fell behind the Blue line, taking out a large park of giant‑wheeled tractors and the garrison's housing, then burning up most of the town of Iqaluit.
Soldiers’ families are safe beneath the ice-pack in deep dug-outs, praying for mothers, fathers, husbands and daughters holding along the ridge. As civis scrambled into funk holes, the 10,000 of the garrison and other able-bodied adults donned insulated-armor and headed out into concrete-and-steel slits above silent Iqaluit. Now the town’s a smoldering ruin at the far end of a gentle plateau behind the ridge. Dauran gunners ignore it, to instead march rows of bursts up the reverse slope and wash plasma shells back-and-forth over the trench that runs along the crest to join the bend following the L-shaped road. It’s marked by a sign proclaiming “Wicked Corner.”
Overhead fly ‘Vs’ of JS-2 and JS-4 shturms, liquid-armored streakers slow enough to be flown by human pilots. Strictly non-orbital, they max at Mach 2.5, just within human physical tolerance. Shturms have no defenses against modern ACU Wasps, top robo-fighters with layered-graphene skycraft frames that can pull 30-G turns at Mach 20, dipping in-and-out of low orbit and tearing into upper atmospherics at hypersonic speeds. Even slowed to Mach 12 for low-level intercepts, Wasp interceptors are beyond human capability or endurance. But there are no ACU Wasps on Nunavut today. No fast machines to buzz down from suborbital CAP nests to destroy the swarms of shturms swirling and bombing and diving over the blue-and-white ridge line.
Yet sky defense batteries take a heavy toll, ripping off wings, tearing off shturm armor, ripping into fuselages to kill combat-virgin pilots. Magnetic rail-guns shoot tens of millions of ceramic pellets skyward, shredding any shturm that flies into a streaming funnel. Where the death birds come crashing down tall columns of black, acrid smoke rise over deep snow, like pillars of mineral salts rise from Nunavut’s forests of deep-sea vents. Crash flames warm narrow tunnels of a frigid ocean of arctic air, just as undersea analogues warm blue-ice covered seas.
As on the ground, Dauran sky tactics call for overwhelming enemies with brute numbers and firepower. There are so many shturms hurtling through the brightening orange sky this dawn that some get through a screen wall of rail-gun pellets and ack-ack, to drop 2,000 kilo bombs or lay precise rockets and crystal-microwave blasts onto the thin blue line of Gardes Nunavut on the ridge. Ragged gaps of broken black-ultrasteel and smoking superconcrete appear in the elongated entrenchments, as hot black dirt and warm red blood meld into drifts of whitest snows. Wounded spin in their own red fluids. Whirling like Sufi dervishes. Cut-loose, like odd Jabberwock verses.
Dauran special forces wear tan uniforms with thick black belts to honor Jahandar’s gang days on Sachi. They ride atop armtraks securing the left flank, or weave among mobile assault-guns advancing at the same plodding pace as the slew-footed infantry. The infamous DRA ‘Tan-Blacks’ are genetically altered in breed jars to enhance endurance and conscience-free fighting. It’s an older and far more reliable modification than Grün ethics-suppression implants, but so terrible in its effects that all civilized societies banned the awful practice after the last war, in a codicil to the great Peace of Orion. Jahandar observes no law or limits. Tans have no fear or pity and take no prisoners. Except a few unfortunates to torture later for information, or just for fun.
Short-range arti is towed upslope by heavy snow-tractors steered by Inuit men caught off-base with frightened families, forced to guide their enemies up the ridge to kill old friends. For inside each commandeered snow-tractor rides a hardened Shishi ready to chop the local driver to pieces with a humming blue sachi, should he deviate from the straight path up the icy ridge. Also promising to do far worse to his wife and children should he stop or even falter.
Defending Blues hold fire. They wait on plasma cannon raking the right flank, let them finish their raw, red work. Officers in all-white with blue-trim look downslope through tall periscopes at approaching tractors and heavy columns of enemy. Fighters in blue-and-white stand stoically still or shuffle nervously or crouch under black carbyne trench-shields. Hundreds die wherever the shield walls breach. The rest all stand firm, holding the thin blue line.
Krasnos, too, are frightened and confused. Not one chose this strange fight over a snow-covered hillock on a world outside their ken before today. Or any fight in this terrible new war. Or ever made any major decision about their own forlorn and forfeit lives. They don’t know the meaning of the snowy loam they must cross, or why strange stars rise in a night-side gloom.
Who are these krasnos who hail from hidden worlds of the Hermit Empire? They're serfs or slaves, born into labor bondage. They all live unfree, though few know or understand this fact.
They’re slave soldiers of a vast enslaved empire, where no one is called slave and every man and woman is told instead that they live as equals under the just egalitarianism of the Grim Revolution. It’s a grasping, perverse polity, ruled as an absolute autocracy for many centuries before the rise of its current and most darkly twisted overlord. Krasnos live not much better than Drapchi-moon slaves, but they’re told they do, and most believe it. They’re less than pawns of a hermit chess master, who’s hidden from them and Orion no longer. Jahandar the Dread, and with him all of perverse Daura, is pouring over the ancient frontiers of a millennia of eremite history.
Most are conscripts from agro-worlds that prevail among Dauran planets. Folk of simple humor and taste and plain living before the state and DRA took them, who don’t comprehend why they must march uphill in brutal cold to kill people they can’t see and don’t know or hate.
Most krasnos, which is what ‘popovs’ call themselves, are ethnic Dauran. Minorities hail from a hundred ethnicities spread over dozens of once free worlds the old emperors conquered and annexed. So advancing Browncoats on Nunavut this glacial morning include raw conscripts taken from Achinsk, Britomarti, Kureiki, Kurgan, Ingush, Sachi, Tampere, Tocharian and Uralic.
A few from persecuted ethnicities volunteered, hoping for a chance to please almighty Jahandar, the Sachi thug who passed himself off as Dauran and now parades as a god. “Through blood sacrifice,” they said to their families, “we’ll earn a way back to acceptance for our worlds and beaten-down peoples.” Their suffering and loss will prove in vain. Loyalty in the slave Dauran Commons flows unnaturally and in one direction only, always upward to Jahandar.
Even among the desperate volunteers there are no Darkhans, Rigans or Zunghars. Those suppressed peoples are collectively suspect, not trusted to bear arms lest they renew rebellions against Jahandar’s terror and oppression. Millions o
f ‘suspect minorities’ were rounded up by Shishi decades ago, deported to off-the-chart prison moons. Whole peoples uprooted at the whim and suspicion of the great Tyrant of Astrana, long before twisted klack! klack! Krump was born. Transported to spartan moons to slave for the profit of SHISH leaders and the Dauran terror elite.
Hidden Drapchi prisons absorbed hundreds of millions more ‘ethnic rebels’ just before the war, adding to four billion already there. The secret moons will swell with more arrivals soon. For the terrible Shishi moving alongside Royko’s hordes into soon-to-be-annexed systems have orders to “screen and deport all conquered populations.” Including 130,000,000 Inuit who have tried to live in peace with each other and their neighbors since settling a forlorn ice-world.
Today’s fight will make the krasnos much harder, inuring them to suffering they witness and cause. Already they know the foreignness of new comrades and places that’s common to all war. The familiar strangeness of military life is exaggerated by their gross ignorance and narrow life experience. Three-quarters come from villages or command farms, the rest from grim factory towns and grimy slums in a thousand ugly, teeming cities. More than most youths caught up in the burgeoning Fourth Orion War, or in any war, they don’t yet know what they don’t yet know.
Few traveled out of their local districts before conscription. Fewer still went off-world, and none at all ever left their home system. Daurans are almost a pre-interstellar people, kept for centuries in deep isolation by distrustful leaders. Long before these children were born, off-world travel was decreed treason by Jahandar, punishable by execution in town square and on the JarNeb, by a ‘sachi-death chop’ by some Shishi judge and sadist. That central edict against movement stagnates all trade and the economy, but ensures loyalty of a sort.
Just in case it doesn’t, propaganda plays in their HUDs. For Jahandar doesn’t trust a moment’s silence that might allow a doubt or free thought. So he fills each minute with praise of himself. Dauran youths are rounded up like milk cows, forced into brown coats and shipped off-world on crude transports with little military training beyond how to march in lines. They’re handed short masers, pointed toward Jahandar’s enemies and told to advance or die.
Lies in their ears and pistols in their backs replace the natural loyalties of comradery and combat. Anything natural that bonds human beings to each other is treasonous and unnatural to solitary, corroded, Soso-Jahandar. Individuals are here, but they fight and die as a herd. Jahandar will have it no other way. His is the only personality permitted in all of vast Daura. He intends that for all the Thousand Worlds.
To their foes, popovs are faceless automatons who obey without question their hardest generals and distant, twisted leader. A brown horde marching in herded files toward the abattoir, straight into guns held by bewildered and much more frightened enemy, inhuman in indifference to wounds and death. Why do they do it? Just because Jahandar orders it? Is it simply from fear?
No, more than that. For many krasnos will die today with his gruesome name willingly whistled with their final breath. Astonishing those who kill them, dying youths will cry out not for parents or comfort or home but for their dread, cruel, aloof pharaoh.
“Za Jahandar!”
Belief in lies told or sung in praise of Jahandar and against all his enemies is a mark of how deep his terror system and control reaches into minds and lives. A sign of how needful of leadership Daurans feel as they go to war for the first time in centuries. A need for guidance in strange lands so deep that drugged, witless youths slogging toward the Blue Oni line and their own savagely violent deaths by fire-on-ice joyously and spontaneously shout the Tyrant’s name, as plasma shells burst inside their files to sear off heads and limbs and close foreshortened lives.
“Za Jahandar!”
Others hold secret views, unhappy with abject want in their rude villages and their lowly personal positions. The smartest hide these forbidden thoughts, put on a brown uniform when ordered and wear a peaked DRA cap with a bright comet streaking across the face of a stylized sun. They hate army life. Yet they, too, march up a bleak snow hill yelling.
“For Jahandar!”
Even reluctants must scream out his battle yell. Any hesitation brings intense pain stimuli though HUDs, thence via dot-implants in their retinas to agitate and sear the pain centers of their brains. Always, behind the pain the brutal Shishi watch and wait, hoping to use blue-laser sachis to slaughter pens full of mooing, frightened cattle marked and prepped for slaughter. Shishi have no higher purpose than this, not even service to Jahandar. Their sadism is self-fulfilling.
Krasnos will kill here today. Whenever and whomever officers or NCOs order. Yet, they’re not evil. Or no more or less than their enemies. Just like the blue-clad youths waiting atop the snow ridge, they too love life, laugh, sing and cry, get drunk and make stupid fumbling love. The difference is young krasnos are unfree, raised to obedience in terror of the most savage Shishi punishments imaginable, of themselves and of their families. So they’ll do exactly what they’re told and die in bushels in the tumbling snow on an algid Nunavut morning.
Something else moves leaden legs up the blood-soaked slope on Nunavut, more powerful than fear or drugs or HUD exhortations. No terror pestering of frightened conscript children, no brutal mistreatment of non-ethnic Daurans, no pain stimuli relayed through HUDs by sadistic NCOs and officers, no terror troops ready to cut them down from behind, nothing will matter so much as the other things all krasnos will share as the Orion War spreads and lengthens.
Such as wrapping sore and swollen feet in portyanki, a kind of swaddling sock. Sleeping in dank uniforms on frozen ground when training or on the move. Eating coarse, black bread and thick cabbage-soup every day. Sometimes, with the bread-and-soup ration they get buckwheat or real-beef jerky or a bit of dried sturgeon. Always, the meal is washed down with steaming tea from company tea buckets and ever-present samovars. While krasnos eat, the best voices sing old folk songs or stand to recite beloved, simple verses. And nothing so unites soldiers as that. It’s not the heat of combat that does it. It’s the warmth of a shared fire, a shared tent, shared coitus. And hard drink and laughter and crying on a familiar shoulder. It’s their poverty and suffering, it’s life and fate, that binds krasnos to each other in ways so profound the appalling Jahandar regime can’t understand it at all. Yet it knows. Soso knows this from his gang days, and fears it.
So he should. Though not today. Not for a thousand days or more of war to come. Yet one future day, Jahandar should quake with fear at what he unleashes into Daura and Orion on frozen Nunavut this day. He has sent krasnos outside the zone of brown stars. They’ll be changed utterly by this, and forever. On the day they realize that about themselves, they’ll come for him.
Bantams
The KRN has just four older-model frigates and ten small attack boats at Krakoya. At the start of the war the frigates were judged outmoded, too decrepit even by KRN standards to make-bohr to Brno or Acis, too weak to fight the Kaigun with any hope to survive. So they were left behind at the Twins when the troopships left, told to stay and protect the LPs as best they could.
The attack boats aren’t bohr-capable or even custom-built military. They’ve no quantum-drive and just old-style, liquid-armor over single hulls. They’re converted police cutters, hastily armed with a single forward-shooting laser when war broke out. Just old dogcatchers, built to chase coy smugglers who hid in the prewar system’s thick cabotage trade. Smugglers with fast little ships their captains brought out of hiding when the new orders from Aral arrived, and used to ferry Exodus fighters and civilian refugees to distant sanctuary. Krakoyans like smugglers.
Before the war most Krakoyans held far more jaundiced views about their police. They liked cheap goods and supported smugglers in a centuries-old contest in the outer system and gas giant moons. They viewed the second-oldest profession as a noble calling with a storied history of resistance to taxation and defense of natural economic freedoms. Far more in kee
ping with the independent spirit of most ordinary folk than a thin beige line of police cutters flashing red-laser strobes as they vainly chased speedier smuggler ships. That opinion is about to change, forever.
As the Dauran war fleet appears on police and frigate vid screens the tiny joint flotilla is holding in high orbit at the L1 of Krakoya I. It just finished escorting a large convoy of empty Little Ships from the outer bohr-zone to collect more Exodus passengers. It was waiting for the civis to embark 200,000 refugees when Admiral Aleksandr hove into the system with his fleet.
Now all the little warships are heading to the outer system at flank speed. The flotilla is rising to intercept the entire Dauran fleet while half-empty civilian ships race for Krakoya II and its still open bohr-zones, to bail out the system back door with any refugees already waiting in orbiting, non-bohr capable shuttles or on the upper elevator stations. Anyone still on the ground or only halfway up the elevator cables when the last Little Ships get there will be left behind.
“No waiting. No tears. Leave now!”
It’s instantly clear to all onboard the tiny KRN flotilla that any attempt to defend against the approaching massive battle fleet is utterly hopeless. Even were half the prewar KRN here, it might not suffice to stop this immense and powerful fleet. Yet, there’s no hesitation by captains or crews. Horns and visuals call out on every bantam ship. “All hands to battle stations!”
