by Kali Altsoba
His useless rage and waste of shturms leaves his main infantry to advance uncovered upslope to the high-ridge crest. He will leave over a quarter-million krasnos utterly exposed to raking and lasing, to masers and plasma cannon fire from all along their right flank. While the main line of the Gardes Nunavut waiting above has yet to open fire.
The old Dauran way-of-war keeps circling back to simple blunt force, to indifference to own casualties, to murderous tactical mulishness. It’s mass-over-masers now, and as awful as the arithmetic will be for krasnos who must pay the price of mindless attack tactics by their generals, that means the Gardes Nunavut is doomed to die. It doesn’t have enough masers pointing down the white slope at the brown mass marching up to breach its thin blue line.
Browncoat columns move uphill with extraordinary discipline. Holo-flag projections flutter among their ranks, including small boys beating-the-march on titanium drums. They're apparitions from an ancient Age, but seem real and alive projected directly-on-retinas via dot-channels in HUDs. Inside every helmet, fifes and oboes and tin-flutes play old tunes, while a baleful chaunteer wails battle songs recalling Old Empire glories and Daura’s martial tradition.
So much ghost imagery flows into eyes and ears and HUDs, to krasnos already hyper-stimulated by implants, and with samogon and combat drug-addled brains, that command and control is effectively lost to the officer class. That’s one reason, besides elite contempt, why DRA tactics are so dense and blunt even in the face of massive losses. Jahandar and his officers don’t trust ordinary folk to fight for them or Daura, except from forced stimuli of fear and pain.
They’re wrong. Something else is at work among the stomping, tawny ranks. Something that’s released this day that will one day turn on the terror drovers in a red rage. For it isn’t just drugs or pain or fear of terrible retribution that moves the great brown blocks up a skidding hill. Close ranks of brave men and women tramp in lock‑step up the snow-clad incline because most believe the great lies told to them all their lives about Daura and Jahandar, and his and therefore their enemies. He’s the only leader they ever knew or loved. They owe the Tyrant everything.
They believe in the ‘Supreme Leader,’ fill with joy of battle for his cause and their own comradeship. Feel a violent lust rise up in their throats. Without any signal or order given, the brown mass shouts almost as one, “Za Jahandar! Za Daura!” and breaks into a collective trot.
It’s a profound moment for all Daura. The wizened Emperor of Fear who sucks on venom in the starmap room he calls ‘My Study’ in Astrana doesn’t know yet, and will never understand, what’s happening. If he did, he’d be terribly frightened by the hour and day that he brings to pass with his bottomless, insecure vanity. From a hollow pride that called him across the old borders.
He’d fear shared feelings swelling uphill in ordinary Daurans that bond them for now to his name and war, but soon more deeply to each other. He’d tremble to see them go to outside worlds, to know that experience will unite them and expose his lifetime of lies and threats and murder. He’s incapable of such vision, of understanding real folks in this flush of commonality. He’s ready to kill millions to ensure that future is never written. No, he’s ready to kill billions.
No alternative future can be written, or Jahandar written out of it, until Daurans traverse together this Vale of Tears called war. They must kill and reave, suffer and die, in multitudes. Maybe then, at last, despite Jahandar and because of him, after a century of Grim Revolution and false prophesy and claimed godhead, change may come to the vast and darkened Dauran realms.
It will start, if it starts, here in the bloody snows of Nunavut. And in the falling skies of Krakoya. And on the lava surface of Minotaur, and under it, with disrespected dead tossed down a waste disposal tube. If it comes, it will begin in wordless ways. Burgled into the brown stars of north and east Orion in swaddlings of limbless men and faceless women, returning unthanked to shuttered lives unchanged by their sacrifice. It will spread in furtive looks of shared suffering, and knowing shared battles and shared crimes. Next in words, in open marveling at how farfolk are so very different and just the same as krasnos. In rising hate for the officer class amidst the long misery of trenches on Amasia. In questions asked about the war and the regime that makes them fight it. Finally, in a savage orgy of frantic mutiny and brutal murders of officers. Until a leader stands before the krasnos, calling them back to Daura to kill all Shishi and The Jahandar.
***
Waiting to receive the stamping horde of advancing Browncoats are 120 pink-crystal rapidos strung out along the ridge, charged and humming with expectant death. Another 10,000 stub-masers and laser-rifles prime and hum, ready to fire, all aimed downslope at the upcoming horde by a compact line of first-rate Inuit fighters. All are clad in ice-blue armor of the Gardes Nunavut. All stand ready to fight their virgin battle. The first by the Army of the Calmar Union.
On each Gardes shoulder is a deep-blue triangle, a flash wherein a standing white bear grips a red salmon in its jaws. Above the parapets, a hundred flags fly. On each another white bear gulps down a squirming, flapping salmon that cannot get away. Then the holo bears stand up as one and slash-and-flash black claws and roar defiance. At the Nunavut ice. At life and fate.
Gardes officers wear all-white armor with thin blue rank-bands encircling snow helmets. They shut off tall periscopes rising over carbon-fiber and ultraconcrete walls, to stare downslope at arriving enemy whose individual faces are becoming distinguishable with unaided vision. The soon-to-be-famous ‘Ten Thousand’ are riveted, stoic and silent. A few hastily-armed townsfolk are there, too, with unpainted breastplates and awkward helmets. They’re all scared and flighty.
Not the wordless, unmoving Gardes. Not the Ten Thousand. They look with contempt down to the rhythmic approach of shouting, stamping, murderous Browncoats marching now for vengeance for 50,000 comrades left behind on the hillside, victims of the cannon in the woods.
Gardes say nothing as the heaving, unstoppable mass bleeds along its flank where sturdy and unrelenting redoubt guns still tear it up. Watch in silence as red and green plasma balls land among the admirable files, ripping chunks from the infantry horde which doesn’t slow or halt.
Browncoats are now four-fifths up the white hill, trotting faster and as one. More blue plasma rises on the right as forest batteries fire yet again, and again, sending whistling, scalding, expanding puffs of death to tear great holes in krasno ranks and files. Grain plasma eager to burst from electro-magnetic sabot bores through the brown, before casings release and brilliant flowers of light erupt into expanding balls of tiny spears that acetylene right through men and women.
The dirty shells kill 60 or 100 even 500 at once. Yet on and on the brown lemmings come. Kinetics bore into them, too. Half-kilo ice-balls shoot from 140 catapult tubes burrowed into the protective hillside, right under the lip of the high ridge where the Ten Thousand stand and wait with warmed masers they have yet to fire. Super-hardened ice, not even in sabot, shoots downslope to smash hips and ribs, to impale ranks of krasnos with flying, jagged bones from a shattered friend who an hour ago lived and laughed and got drunk around a shared samogon jar,
Sergeants yell, ranks fill, files close and keep coming. Delayed sounds of the arcing ice-and-fire barrage reach farther down the hill, newly slick with more than snow and ice-melt. With red grease underfoot. And still they come, rank after rank. It’s madness. It’s Daura going to war.
Another blue-white puffery as cascades of brilliant electric balls spark in terrible parabola out of the little flank copse that Kurshid failed to take with suicide troops, then all his shturms. Rock-ice balls whistle downslope, thud along the hillside, scud through bodies, clip off feet and arms and torsos. The body parts in turn go bounding through the packed mass of Browncoats.
Thousands of mothers’ dreams and hopes are gone in a moment, burned open or seared shut by plasma fire, ripped apart by tearing fragments of metal and rock, speared by slivers of j
agged ice tearing through poorly-armored flesh. Rear ranks step over mangled comrades keeping tight order as the lines are raked again and again. No one bends to help the wounded. No one breaks ranks. Not one Browncoat runs. Nor any officer, brown arms outstretched and pointing the way up. Ghost drums beat. Hundreds of thousands of real boots pound-out-time in unison.
Not one of the brown-clad troops has shot a weapon yet. Brigade after brigade, division upon division, the whole mass moves uphill at a measured pace. Masers presented in front ranks, resting on shoulders or cradled like infants by thousands filing in behind. The advancing infantry suffers more murderous volleys, endures more death and raw casualties without shooting back.
Krasnos are not the most skilled or best armed or armored infantry on the field this day. They’re deadly and courageous and fantastic and laudable nonetheless. They march ever upward, persevering until officers release them to shoot. Holding return fire until, as an ancient warrior-king told his similarly ferocious troops in millennia past: “You see the white of the enemy's eye.”
Stepping on silent dead and over moaning wounded, they keep coming. Mad, relentless, terrifying. Through rolling barrels of anti-laser mortar fog, swallowing their dry fear, ignoring a sudden soft splattering of a camp pal’s blood upon white snow. Shoulder-by-shoulder, masers up at last, glinting in a cold Popayán sunrise, moving inexorably across what an hour before was but a peaceful hillside meadow where as children they might have laughed skidding on toboggans.
Even the Gardes think it’s magnificent, this moving block of Browncoats taking murderous fire and not stopping. Advancing into Death and Glory. If the ancient bard could see this sight on a frozen Nunavut hillside he might yet again exclaim: ‘What a piece of work is Man! How noble and infinite in reason and faculties!’ And in making war, how like a god.
For this is war as Jahandar the Divine conceives it. Blunt and brutal, overwhelming in mass and force. War also as written out on rigid staff officers’ maps as formal regularities, as neat collages of squares and advancing lines, of centers doing this on command and the flanks doing something else. War as the unstoppable advance of Jahandar’s triumphant, divine will.
Not the baleful scenes playing out in fact on Nunavut and the other invaded worlds. Not real men and women taking real lives, dying real deaths. No, this is war as elites who never fight and as all small boys everywhere want and wish war to be. War full of vigor and excitement, and flags and drums and thrills and courage. War unto Death and into Glory. ‘Gods, I do love it so!’
This is war as backwater, tabletop strategists and all gamers think it should be: rational, orderly, symmetrical, and precise. “Move this block here, that one over there. I win!” It’s war as artists celebrate it in swirling vidscrolls, and as whorish troubadours sing of it. War both brutal and beautiful. War supple, sensuous and arousing. War flowing with color, movement, ambition, genius, spectacle. Engorged with sex and death. War as a star nation’s essential virtue and honor, its nova birth and its finest hour. War as a test of youth’s courage, immortal. Or so civilians say.
This is war ancient and modern all at once. As both Roman and Dauran waged it, though millennia apart. It’s combat as courage in an eternal contest of spirit vs. quailing flesh and blood. It’s thrilling, enthralling, exciting, and appalling. It’s war as high art, acting out a formalist fetish perfected by the highest and finest thinkers over three centuries of the ‘Long Peace,’ well before the Tyrant seized power or ever thought to impose his will outside the Hermit realm.
Except that war is not part of the natural order for those dying on the snow before Iqaluit. God or the gods may or may not be dead in the Universe, but on this red day the gods are surly and degenerate, for god‑like states and Tyrants now rule in the place of gods. Besides, war needs no gods. War is not the creature of the gods. It’s Humanity’s enfant terrible, inspired by science. Mortal combat is with laser, maser, and plasma. With advanced physics servicing very old hates.
At last the Gardes open fire with hand-held lasers and masers, and fast-shooting rapidos. Maglev rail guns below the ridge shoot kinetic canister at 500 meters, shredding the oncoming front ranks with widening sprays of half‑ounce ice-and-ceramic balls, travelling at great speed.
Raw holes appear where a maser reduces someone’s sweetheart to a pulpy, smoky mess of bones and gore. Over there an ice-ball tears out a living boy’s extruded guts, tangling them in tromping feet of the files behind. Nearby, a horribly-burned girl writhes in agony. A third boy clutches a stump of arm, crying “mama, mama.” All die alone. Unheard. Unaided. Uncomforted.
Still not wavering or faltering or shooting back, the long columns of Browncoats march into mortal death and immortality. If that’s what a few JarNeb vids and broadcasts later mean. Both sides will remember this battle, one as a glorifying victory, the other as a noble defeat.
At last, wide front ranks of the Browncoat mass reach the ridge-top, and meet the Ten Thousand of the Gardes standing behind and under fortified entrenchments. The thin defense of Blues is already firing all-out, standing up inside the sunken road along an L‑shaped line.
The closest Blues are 50 paces away, no longer standing stoically but yelling frantically, shooting into the brown mass at point-blank range with encased rapidos spitting violet and green, a wobbling line of hand lasers firing red and more stub masers burning blue. They cut and burn, wound and kill many thousands of lead shtrafniki, then shred front ranks of Browncoats behind.
“There are just too many!”
“Gods, there’s more behind them.”
“They’re not stopping!”
“They’re climbing over their own dead and wounded!”
“Eeeeeyaaaahhh!! It’s madness! What beasts!”
“Shoot, shoot!”
Dead and dying shtrafniki and Browncoats lie in an oozing carpet in front of the ridge. Yet the living still outnumber Blue defenders more than 20:1. At last, massed infantry wearing brown helmets emblazoned with a white comet-and-star halts and raises weapons to return fire.
Short masers aim at the shouting Blues, yet still they wait tensely for a barked order to cross their HUDs. Finally it comes, releasing them like a pent-up orgasm at the enemy. For the first time, Browncoats answer the cascades of death suffered all the way up the slope, sending massive volley-after-volley into suddenly stunned and shaken Gardes. Unit-by-unit fire increases the terrible shock as whistling green maser rounds arrive en masse. Again and again and again.
A hundred thousand green balls tear into blue-and-white armor and Gardes flesh. At 50 meters a short maser nearly always hits its target, no matter how untrained the shooter. Even glancing lases send Gardes coms wild with cries, and HUDs screaming with confusion and too many crossover threat-warnings from sudden and impossible heat of concentrated microwaves.
Gardes return fire, volley-for-volley, each side hammering without faltering, killing and wounding and dying, reloading and doing it again and again. Heavy trench mortars towed uphill by hijacked snow-tractors join the dinning barrage, dropping red plasma into broken carbyne-covers over the now ragged Blue trenches. The thin blue line is badly torn. It holds, but wavers.
Dauran casualties lie awkwardly, torn brown uniforms oozing pools of dull red onto the white hillside. A murmur of moaning slowly rolls downhill. Yet the Browncoats keep up their intense return fire, suffering more grievous losses but always filling in the firing-line. There are so many still coming forward their rate-of-fire doesn’t diminish. Rear ranks advance to take the places of many tens of thousands of freshly dead and dying along an always-shredding front.
There are no reinforcements to fill gaping holes appearing on the other side. Gardes fall dead or drop with wounds. Some keep firing from one knee or lying prone behind those already dead. Every minute this keeps up many thousands of Browncoats die, but so do many hundreds of Gardes Nunavut. And there were only 10,000 of them to start. In a brutal and elemental way, maybe Kurshid does know what he’s doing? Probably not.
Good thing another general is here.
The order that wins the day comes from General Chima Azikiwe, leading a surge of troops cramming onto, then over the ridge crest. On his command, the flanks of the Browncoat mass stop shooting, charging instead into Blue entrenchments then sweeping down the plateau behind, encircling the Blue center. Fighting is vicious and hand-to-hand, with fists, rifle butts, grenades, knives, and sharp rocks loosened by plasma blasts and bombs. Tans on the left flank rip into the staggering Gardes line, capturing and turning defenders’ own rapidos against them.
“The line’s broken. Fall back!”
“Retreat, retreat! Rally at the second line!”
“Suave qui peut!”
Gardes retreat by hundreds, trying to re-form at a second line of field works at the other end of the plateau. As they pull out they hear terrible screams of wounded finished-off by Tans coming in behind. Still more Tans pour along the fast-folding flanks. Gardes Nunavut is down to half-strength or less, pressed by a final rush of overwhelming force majeure: 200,000 roaring krasnos who break all order and rank discipline, out for vengeance for what happened to 100,000 comrades on the other side of the ridge line. Not one Gardes makes it to the second trench.
