Alliance: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Look! No, look closer! Do you see it? No? Well, it was there for a moment. I tell you, it was there! A glimmer in the dark as one krasno saves a book from a cooking fire and goes to a moldy corner in a bombed-out and rained-in basement to turn its pages, wondering at the strange old words and pictures of better worlds than hers. And over there! See? I told you! Yes, that odd, filthy-looking couple who just finished fucking on the floor. Now they're staring at the head of a broken statue, wondering who ‘Mozart’ is and why his white-marble hair is so funny and big when everyone they know has shaved heads and lice. OK, so it’s a very, very faint hope. Still...

  Aleksandr won’t make the same mistake at Krakoya II. He’ll pulverize that secondary world before he releases the big, shark-jawed transports to disgorge drop-ships filled with more krasnos and the promise of pain. He snaps off orders to his recombined fleet as it moves toward the drop-zones high above Krakoya II, four days after pounding Krakoya I’s batteries into dust.

  “Re-form the battle line. All capital ships line ahead, straight on from Leonine. Escorts to the flanks and rear of the formation. Ready heavy batteries for stand-off bombardment as the line passes over. Maintain underside battery-fire all around the planet. I’ll give them seconds and thirds if they don’t surrender quick. Fire Control: I want a priority target list on my viewer now!”

  He glances at Royko, supporting his bulk with a hand on a polished brass railing at the opposite end of the Combat Bridge, ‘as if he belongs here by pride or place. That oily, ground crawling slug! That adipose sack of...’

  Aleksandr is distracted by Royko’s ridiculously-oiled hair. He notices clear-color grease spots appear wherever thick, black fronds touch his starch-stiff DRA collar. Out of the high, brown choker struggles a squat pillar of bright red flesh so thick it seems more a continuation of his shoulders than a neck. It looks like a broken construction cone, cut off unceremoniously by a set of jiggling chins, supporting an unnaturally large head always bobbing in self-congratulation.

  Aleksandr approves the priority target list just before the first ship-of-the-line reaches optimum shooting position, stretching out ahead of Leonine. He turns to the senior Fire Control officer, who’ll co-ordinate fire-rate and precise targeting by all ships in the battle line. “Firing from priority list. Enter codes ... commence fire by priority targeting, now. Shoot!”

  As the first underside of kinetic ammo is loosed planetward the Bridge on Leonine rocks slightly, before inertial dampeners compensate for departing ice-mass and energy. In minutes, white and black plumes rise from the surface, far below but clearly visible in the Main Scuttle.

  He looks at Royko a little longer this time. ‘What an immense sow of a man! A bloated drecksau. And the stench!’ He gets satisfaction from the porcine insult. One day he’ll say it to Royko’s face from the point of a maser pistol. Maybe. Aleksandr despises Royko but is relieved to see that Jahandar’s current Chief of the Great General Staff seems nonplused about the losses over Krakoya I, and is pleased with the new bombardment tactics he’s using over Krakoya II.

  Then contempt returns, as it always does whenever he just looks at Royko: ‘The Weeble is always bursting and boasting. He never stops eating and he never shuts up.’

  “Weeble” is what many sneeringly call Royko in private, naming him after a fat, wobbly toy he does indeed resemble hilariously closely. It doesn’t help garner respect that he’s always orange-faced and seems to be bursting from his uniform. Right now he’s also boasting loudly to an aide-de-camp and to everyone in earshot on the Bridge. ‘Bursting and boasting, the Weeble.’

  “The landings on Krakoya I are a complete success, a stunning victory. The occupation is going exceedingly well. Just as I planned in my Grand Design that I presented to Jahandar in his Study in front of the great starmap. Now, its Krakoya II’s turn to feel my lash.”

  What are the extinct lives of nearly 300,000 krasnos against grim Jahandar’s pleasure? Numbers on a ledger of his master’s gratitude over Royko’s conquest of a world filled with more Dead Souls for Soso to bully and batter. How many more krasnos are about to die beneath him?

  It hardly occurs to Royko to count his dead, and never to consider Krevan lives lost four days ago and now, far down on the surface under fire and ice, beneath his flabby feet. Besides, Royko boasts some more, this time voicing the view of the whole leadership elite of Jahandar’s empire: “There are millions more krasnos where these dead came from. Billions more, should I need them. Should Jahandar order it. Am I right, Admiral Feodor Aleksandr? Billions more?”

  “Yes, general. Should Jahandar order it. Proper and wise of you to note that.” Royko is despicable, but for the moment he has the Tyrant’s ear. Best to flatter and fawn. For the moment.

  Even so, Aleksandr makes silent notation of Royko’s dangerous slip in usurping the glory that should adhere to the Tyrant in Astrana alone. That’s not something Jahandar allows. It might prove useful one day, to Aleksandr. It might help him bring Royko to Röhm Krump’s choppers.

  ‘Perhaps sooner than the fat fool imagines.’ For Aleksandr knows what Royko doesn’t, but should suspect: ‘Everything on the Combat Bridge is recorded.’

  “Quite right, admiral,” Royko chuckles. “As Jahandar orders and I command.” He knows more battles are coming, more invasions are underway as ordered by Jahandar and prepared in his own Grand Design. He chortles a second time, then turns to a young aide-de-camp standing stiffly nearby, waiting to receive any order the great general issues and scurry to carry it out.

  “Bring me the report on General Kurshid’s landings on shitty Nunavut in the Popayá system. Hurry! I have more worlds to win for myself and Jahandar!”

  Gardes

  A dull, gray mass of 40,000 Drapchi prisoners shambles ahead of the main Browncoat infantry climbing a snow-slippery hillside in front of smoldering Iqaluit. The gray-clad men and women are shuffling, cowering, convict wretches marching in shtrafbats. In death battalions.

  They're punishment groups, with no military training of any kind, not even how to march in ranks. They move all in one direction, but as irregularly as a herd of frightened caribou, with ragged edges where stragglers are bullied and fall to packs of barking, murderous wolves. They wear plain gray cloth and all-round, numbered prisoner caps. Not brown coats. Not peaked caps with the DRA comet blazed in front. They’re not worthy to wear even those wretched uniforms.

  They have no armor and no insulation whatever against bone-cracking cold. Several have succumbed to it already. They lie in still lumps behind the heaving mass. All thin and gray and crumpled. In an incredible, almost blinding pure-whiteness that’s spoiled only by dark ruby pools where a follow-on officer just fired kinetics into their brains. These are the shtrafniki, the true Dead Souls of Jahandar’s most lost and hidden worlds. Long damned and doomed to die.

  Just one-in-five carries a weapon. It doesn’t matter. They were brought here to die, not to fight. Jahandar ordered Röhm Krump to clear his prison moons to make room for a harvest of farfolk captives his generals promise they’ll quickly reap. Also to punish and execute the Dead Souls. To force “traitor-convicts to pay for their crimes against me. I am merciful. They can die in battle.” If one can say ‘battle’ for what the gray and shambolic shtrafbats are about to endure.

  Shtrafniki will take the heaviest casualties, beyond even those multiples of death suffered by the mass of krasnos infantry. Officers know that any hesitation, let alone retreat, by the gray-clad shufflers will be deemed a criminal lapse of their leadership, worthy of a swift Shishi death. They won’t hesitate to kill, to save themselves. These are convict scum they drove. Not people.

  “Shoot all panic-mongers and cowards,” Royko ordered his sub-commanders before five armies were sent to foreign shit stars to implement his Grand Design, including General Kurshid who would lead the krasno landings on Nunavut. “Put them all on the death ground. Make them choose life or death, choose Jahandar and me or suffer instant destruction. There is no middle.�
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  Tall, unnaturally lean Röhm Krump klack! klack! stood beside the weeble general when the order went out, viciously grinning and nodding assent to silent men in Shishi cowls and capes who went along with all five invasion fleets. Lacquered blue eyeballs in his robe pocket collided between his constantly touching fingers. klack! klack! He grew excited massaging the murdered eyeballs the way other men do when fondling a woman’s breasts klack klack!

  A sub-cluster of 10,000 shtrafniki branches right, toward a flank-battery firing from the scraggly woods down onto Browncoats moving toward the Blues waiting on the high ridge-line. The remaining 30,000 continue up the main slope, 200 paces in front of the main, brown herd.

  Bellowing sergeants hound the gray ones with stub-masers humming, screaming about more instant executions to add to the still corpses already dotting the hillside behind. Officers notch-up pain impulse transmitters on control wristbands, sending wireless sadism to neural implants in 10,000 scrunching brains. NCOs yell in coarse, basic Dauran “ni sha’ga nuzad!”

  Not. One. Step. Back.

  The battlefield turns hot and sparky all at once, from behind. An officer shoots a thin lad who strays a touch right, only for a moment. He raises his kinetic pistol and shout-repeats the fatal command: “Ni sha’ga nuzad! Not one step backward, you fucking coward!”

  Pooom! Another officer shoots a 20-year old girl who falters. Why does she stumble? Because three years of prison hunger and hard labor, and the last nine days of her life before this morning waiting in pitch-dark in a shtrafniki shuttle, buckle her hinged-knees for just a moment.

  It’s unforgiven. As she struggles in an orange dawn to climb up sharply-sloped ground through thick, encrusted snow, she hears a kinetic double-cocking right behind her head. She doesn’t turn. She doesn’t bow. She doesn’t plead. She just stumbles, and ends.

  A single stumble is enough for any Dead Soul to expire in an instant. Did the boy stray rightward from the line on purpose? Is the girl’s stumble really a tragedy? There’s also escape in a quick battle-death. Maybe she meant to bend down, into the mercy of suddenly ruddy snow?

  Can’t ask her now.

  The unthanked task of 10,000 shtrafniki is a suicide surge. Assuming any survive long enough to reach the edge of the fire-spitting woods on the Browncoat right flank. These cowed, crouching relics of long-forgotten mothers and decades of dumb labors lost are crossing an inert, contact-mine field laid by the Blues in front of their woody redoubt. That’s the second point of the shtrafniki advance: to clear the anti-personnel mines and poppers with their feet and bodies.

  Shtrafbat duty is a death sentence, no more or less. So a quarter-division is sacrificed to clear mines by an indifferent General Kurshid who, somewhere in the dungeon he calls a mind, hopes his callow cruelty will impress his father in Astrana. He spends forfeit shtrafniki lives on Nunavut with moral and tactical abandon. On the other hand, all DRA generals do the same.

  Moving over the frigid battlefield, shtrafniki will suffer ten times the casualties of even badly-led Browncoats already dying in droves, under heavy pounding from plasma guns firing brilliant blue-green lobs up from the copse redoubt. Already, thousands of unmourned krasnos lie in clumps of crimson carnage, splayed upon a streaked and erupted skin of dirty snow.

  Worse than brutal treatment from NCOs and officers on the way to the copse will be torment and butchery of any survivors by far-harder men waiting for the fight to end. Pitiless killers in long, collarless robes, chest flashes showing off a rabid lion-and-dog’s-head and golden broom. It’s the awful, terrible, terrifying Shisa, the lion-dog symbol of the Dauran terror police.

  Hover-borne Shishi sadists, whom Jahandar calls “my harrowing hounds and drivers,” are on Nunavut and four other farfolk worlds already, on this first morning of the Fourth Orion War. Yes, the conflict everyone knew as the Krevan War is over, its last fights on the Twins and the other eastern systems are blending into a bigger fight among all the Powers, that everyone knows from the first hour is the successor to the Third Orion War. It can have no other name.

  As the doomed convicts move into the minefield, once-and-future jailors and tormentors are waiting to receive and execute any survivors. It’s die now or die later for all shtrafniki, and many think dying in battle is better than returning to the file of silent Shishi standing in black-robed rows beyond the range of Iqaluit’s garrison guns, right behind Kurshid’s personal guard. Close enough to watch the arrogant general, too, now double-breakfasting in obese indifference.

  Dead Souls meet the mines and begin to die, right on schedule. Watchers with the Blue battery on the flank wait until all the walking-dead are deep inside the minefield, then trigger hundreds of palm-sized surface poppers and larger, buried fougasse. The charges rip limbs off bodies and gut shtrafniki like sturgeon, piling dead and dying in disordered heaps and clumps.

  Then the Blues blow powerful PMN-100s and 120s, teller mines and claymores. Each new round tears apart more files and shattered ranks, hurling whole bodies and large-and-small parts 10 or 30 meters high. It rains red shtrafniki, turning the snow-covered hillside bright pink.

  The morning sky opens to a sudden gale of blowing snow, utterly indifferent to suffering of so many men and women inside the storm. Huge flakes larger than a human hand swirl like falling maple leaves in stunning blue-white crystal beauty. It’s the famous ‘big snow’ of Nunavut that Calmari children dream about during milder winter festivals on a hundred different worlds. The immense snowflakes flutter onto wounded, to cover clumps of piled corpses in white leaves.

  An arctic wind blows in fresh sheets of them, thickening the air over a slowing, thinning shtrafniki advance. The big snow also hides a line of infantry in blue-and-white, crouching in a shallow trench in front of the cannons. The battery guard opens fire at close-range. A sudden burst of red and green lasers issuing from the woods makes a carnival show of dancing, lethal light. Each lovely shot is held-in-place for five seconds by the shooters, following standard laser-targeting training. It’s so the intense beams have time to bore through enemy body-armor.

  Only these Dead Souls don’t wear armor, not even badly outdated liquid-armor worn by Browncoats. Tight beams slice shtrafniki faces off, open unarmored chests, halt the front ranks of terrified and confused convicts. Held for so long against mere flesh-and-bone, powerful light bores through a second rank, then a third, slowly losing lethality until the fourth man or women back is only badly burned but not killed outright. Thousands stumble and fall. Any who turn to run, as instinct and their natural brains tell their bodies they must, die instantly from behind as panicking officers fire hand-masers and kinetic pistols into the shambolic ranks of all who flee.

  The murders are too late. A red-brown path splays over the mines, narrowing as it covers hard snow with odd lumps and splotches of howling wounded and silent dead. The funnel path where the last shtrafniki meets the last mine ends a tapered alleyway of dead, reaching almost to the cannons but stopping shy of the firing-line in the small woods. The blood trail is a klic long.

  Dying, limbless, hopeless shtrafniki drive no further. All their drovers go down as well, all the hard sergeants and merciless officers die amidst dead and dying shtrafniki, bored through their armor by Blue shooters who turn weapons on anyone standing once all shtrafniki sprawl on the snow. The last of the pitiless ones turn to run, and are turned into puffs of vapor-steam rising in red mists where electric-blue plasma balls from a heavy rapido catch them in the back.

  “Shtrafniki dog-eaters failed, my general. The attack on the flank is stopped.”

  “What? Impossible! Send more shturms to pound the flank! Burn out that shitty little forest and the fucking Blue guns! Finish off all dog-eaters. Kill every Oni in the woods.”

  “As you order, my general.” His staff officer thinks: ‘Can you think that real war is so easy? That you make it eating a second breakfast in your chair? Do you see what happens to our troops when you send them straight toward the enemy. Why are you
in command here? Why?’

  Kurshid’s strafing shturms murder the last gray-clad wounded who lie bleeding among the mines, then mow down hundreds of Blue flank-guards with showers of lethal splinters from big fragmentation bombs. High tree-bursts cover new dead and wounded with wood chips that smell of pine-sap and green, fresh-cut firewood. It’s an oddly pleasant, winter-morning smell.

  Smoking ruins of the burning copse defile the clean snow with soot, running downslope in black meltwater rivulets under the flaming pine trees. Yet the pulse cannon in the redoubt are intact. Untouched by the human wave that wastes 10,000 lives. Not shifted by explosive charges from shturms that strip the little forest bare, but fail to break strong carbyne-turrets or shields.

  “Again, again! Bomb them again! What’s wrong with you? Destroy those guns!”

  Kurshid roars and stamps his feet in rage and sends the skycraft in again, until nearly all his shturms are gone. They have to fly too low-and-slow to hit the copse, and can’t escape smart hexagon-cluster sky shells that soar up to meet them, break apart and independently pursue.