by Kali Altsoba
Carved into wall niches, or as freestanding sculptures made out of solid lava-columns, are hundreds of local gods and goddesses from across the Union worlds. The scientists and families of Ellora came from many religious traditions over the centuries, as well as from none at all. In the first big cavern, Tlaltechutli the Mesoamerican goddess of life was made by Azteca engineers who started the statuary tradition. There is Shiva the Destroyer and Transformer, slaying a fire demon. And here, sitting in meditation with a serpent around his neck, adorned with a crescent moon, his hair a holy river with red banks made of ancient lines of lava. Vishnu the Protector sits in blue, six-limbed glory. There are dozens of fat Buddhas and one or two crosses. Inevitably, a dozen melting Gaias grace the tubes. Most spectacularly, molten Tonatiuh, Sun God of Narym, flows half-a-klic from a vaulted cave ceiling to just above its floor. Metzli, moon goddess of Minotaur, looks disapproving of all the others. Here, too, is King Mino’s man-bull.
Cut by more secular worshipers are stylized, sculpted atoms and double helixes and chiseled swirl galaxies of such delicate artistry that gas bubbles left behind in ancient lava become miniature nebulae and star factories. All this art and faith and science inside great tubes and high-vaulted pool chambers where lava stopped flowing a billion years ago or more. Until we came and made the silent, hollow red-and-black cathedrals. Places where men and women worship whatever moves them to awe or piety at the immense age and indifference of Creation.
Hundreds of Minotaur’s biggest tuff-tubes have open mouths a half-klic wide or more that belch onto the lunar surface. The largest subsurface tubes with surface feeds were modified as deep-access ports for research ships, interconnected by free tunnels several klics below. Now they’re used by the NCU as secure hangers to conceal 400 attack-boats, five frigates and eight destroyers that pop out of launch bays to harass passing convoys heading for Portus Cale.
During the opening fight for the planet, small warships swarmed out of black and gaping cave mouths to make lightning attacks against slower, poorly-handled Dauran troop and supply ships. The attack-boats took heavy losses from the DRN escorts. Yet even now, with larger ships committed to Minotaur, they strike hard and often against enemy warships circling in unceasing patrols ever since Portus Cale itself succumbed. The destroyers hold back, staying in the caves as a last line of defense. The frigates engaged but were soon lost. That left the attack-boats to dart in-and-out of wide cave mouths, never using the same one twice. They shot torpedoes that easily penetrated DRN liquid-armor with plasma that gouged ultrasteel-hulls a century out-of-date, ripping into superstructures of the biggest but still inadequately-protected enemy warships.
Wildfire arrives while the fight for Portus Cale is still underway. Its ships brake hard in tight formation, dashing straight from the nearest LP down into the mouth of the largest cave in ACU hands. They corner at reckless speed into connecting tunnels as plasma and ice-sabot come pounding down in pursuit, weapons too dumb to turn corners in chase of Wildfire. The shells and ice-sabots crash into the cave floor while Aklyan is already speeding down a secondary tube.
On Jutlandia and Warsaw, KRA strain in stirruped, padded wooden bunks that somehow still smack-your-butt-real-hard. They hang on to the rails but not the contents of their stomachs during the plunging descent and multiple hard-turnings. Vomit and cursing is everywhere after the extreme maneuvering Captain Aklyan puts them through. ‘Fucking again!’ is the common thought among all those who rode with her on Alpha, rising off Genève and down The Gauntlet.
‘Gods, how I hate the fucking navy!’ It’s a common, silent curse in the tied-down bunks. Many thank all the gods they see when the troopships finally stop and they stagger out, even the really odd ones they don’t recognize. Most thank the ships’ crews later. Much later, after they get their stomachs and ground-legs back and can keep down a ration-pack meal.
For now, they’re out of the ships and straight into the fight. They take over tunnel defense and surface hard-points from exhausted Blues, lay down low-gravity ambushes and collapse hollowed-out lava caves filled with great clots of advancing Browncoats. Alongside Wreckers and the Rusty Buckles are two divisions in blue of the Army of the Calmar Union, fighting from the start. Too many also wear bright-red badges of courage-under-fire. Soon, so will many of the arriving fighters in beige, for bitter fighting will continue for many weeks after Portus Cale falls.
Krevan veterans of the fighting at Toruń berm also fight on Minotaur. They say it’s just as hard, or maybe even harder, fighting popov conscripts inside pitch-black lunar caves as was the attrition battle against better-armed and more professional RIK. After the first month the new enemies are learning important things about each other. Daurans know that the Alliance is vastly better armed and armored at every level, bringing huge fire-superiority to every battle. The Allies know that Daurans are the most courageous and relentless fighters they’ve ever met in combat.
The little DRA machines are the worst. Not sophisticated, they’re Dauran after all, but quite effective. Animate mines DRN fly-bys drop down the tubes lie dormant for hours or even days, intelligently and malignantly waiting for an approaching Alliance victim. Sneakier little suicide-bots crawl into small tuff-caves and carved-out shrines and alcoves, or wherever they detect body-heat or the slightest movement. Then they self-detonate. The two ACU divisions and 1st KRA Division lose lots of good men and women to mines and bots. Human suiciders, too, who spelunk and pothole-down angular tubes or just para-drop down vertical ones, then run flat out into a barracks room or eating hall and blow the guts out of the whole cave. You can feel the vibrating booms! in the lava up to two big caves over. More, if there’s a deep connecting tube.
Heavy kinetic bombardment by DRN battleships and cruisers overhead fails to break the natural caves or artificial connectors, or flush out Alliance ground forces. Defenders shoot short-range missiles and small tokamaks from inside protected caverns, badly hurting a battleship and completely wrecking three DRN heavy cruisers passing over the mouths of immense lava tubes. The losses force an angry Dauran admiral to pull all his big ships back. Too late. He’s executed later that day on Jahandar’s coded order, relayed by Krump to three Black Robes on the flagship.
Hundreds of transports fly into the hollowed moon, fleeing Portus Cale with survivors of the ground fighting there. They don’t come as reinforcements. They’re in transit to the nearby LP that’s contested by Aleksandr’s battleship fleet against remnants of the original Portus Cale NCU squadron that was here when the Daurans arrived. Wildfire’s arrival evens the odds.
No set-piece naval battle is fought, but a hundred smaller actions are as warships escort the troop transports to the escape LP in twos or threes each time. Both sides run out of missiles real fast. Wildfire’s light cruisers Reckless, Renown, Revenge, Retribution, and Redoubtable do yeoman’s work with large-caliber plasma cannon supporting quicker, darting fire from the destroyers. Refurbished Resolve and Resolute take several lasing hits, but are too quick for the Dauran ice-sabot. Aklyan’s three heavy cruisers from Lwów, Bao Ninh, Phuong, and Viêt, fly in a pyramid around the troopships and punish any DRN ship that gets too close.
A second wave of DRA is lifted from Portus Cale to finish a dirty job of clearing troglodyte defenders from the deepest, darkest, oldest tubes. Before they can make a descending assault from the surface into the tunnels, the krasnos are surprised by acutely well-prepared ambushes on the surface. Allied troops shock them by coming up into the light to fight, to take the assault right to the assaulters. Alliance commanders are much too confident that DRN ships overhead won’t shoot while their own army is engaged so closely on the moon’s surface. They have a lot to learn about how to fight Daurans, and how Daurans fight.
“Cling to their combat belts,” Jan orders his Wreckers. “Get in so close their navy can’t bombard us for fear of hitting their own people.”
It’s a tactic he learned fighting RIK 10th Armored in Pilsudski Wood. Facing vastly superior groun
d forces and heavy arti while Jabos and Raptors circled tirelessly overhead, he ordered Madjenik’s fighters to close to intimate contact with their enemy’s ground forces.
He’d be right on Minotaur, too, if the Wreckers and their allies were facing Grünen. But this is a Dauran enemy they fight. Jan and other Alliance commanders on Minotaur and other fronts across northeastern Orion will be shocked by Dauran admirals and generals, by their blunt force tactics and disdainful views about taking own casualties. About how they’ll sacrifice whole divisions if they think it’s what Jahandar wants or it will save their own lives. You can’t fight normally against that. You have to adapt, or they’ll win. Sometimes, they’ll win anyway.
At first, stealthy redeployment from underground caves to fighting positions on the surface catches the new krasno assault wave by complete surprise. Advancing as always in solid blocks of infantry, without excess maneuvering or seeking cover, they’re mown down in tens of thousands by multi-barreled rapidos and long lines of hand-fired infantry masers. All laser shots make scatterless-and-soundless beams that shine brilliantly above the airless surface, silently piercing krasno heads or torsos, sending corpses into gentle low-gravity arcs that drop back into open-mouth tube holes and are never seen again. A ballet of death performed in total silence.
Inside krasno HUDs is another matter. There’s lots of sound and fury during combat inside their sealed helmets, piped in by the regime. And lots of vacuum-screaming and dying on a billion year-old lunar surface, in an internal cacophony of shouts and flashing beams and yelled orders and battle cries and whimpering. It spills out of insecure Dauran helmets into Wrecker and Rusty Buckle and Blue com systems. Alliance troops are shocked and even humbled by the roars of pain and rage and crying-death they hear, and know they’re inflicting on fellow human beings.
“Who said this freaking moon was silent?” Zofia calls out almost playfully to Jan in mid-battle, over the officer-only com-link.
“It wasn’t me,” he pleads, then yells more orders to Wysocki’s Wreckers to fall back and displace to new firing positions. Then the fight gets so intense not even Zofia makes more jokes.
Hundreds of robo-masers pop up in compact, rounded pill boxes less than a meter high. They shoot in short bursts, drop and displace along frictionless metallic-hydrogen tracks, snaking inside low trenches cut years ago into the regolith. Havoc is unpredictable. Robo-guns inside the little gray domes pop up again 150 or 500 displaced-meters away and to the right, then back over to the near left, then the rear center, then forward to the right, to the center, back to the right rear. They shoot short and deadly bursts of light and death into a mass of confused Browncoats before displacing yet again along shallow, well-concealed monorails. Reload and repeat. Utter carnage.
General Mikva Royko is greatly displeased. Hell, he’s enraged and spitting krasnos. He and Fedor Aleksandr were ordered to Minotaur after the slow failure, and slower executions, of the original commanders of the Portus Cale invasion. He shouts to everyone on the Combat Bridge of Leonine. “More delay! Worse than fucking cave tactics! Foreign shit criminal acts!”
This is not part of his Grand Design. This is ad hoc battle, evolving as it’s fought, shifting with the intelligence of the enemy, hard counterpunches thrown at him for every blow he lands.
‘What will the Vozhd think? His plan, my plan, is already weeks behind schedule, while bald Pyotr’s armies advance into his designated target systems. I have taken the Krakoyas and Nunavut from the Krevan shits and now Portus Cale from the Blue Onis, but we fall behind the attack timetable here at Minotaur. And enemy resistance is thickening all across The Balcony.’
Worse, what might Jahandar do to Royko if the conquest of this worthless moon is again delayed? Krump’s Black Robes are always lurking, always watching. Already they’ve chopped ships’ captains and first officers and the ground commander, and the fleet admiral who breeched this system. So Royko orders Admiral Aleksandr to recommence heavy naval bombardment, to pay no regard to casualties among his own DRA caused by capital ship “necessary fire.”
Aleksandr makes no protest. He understands who he serves, at Minotaur and in Astrana. He sends ice-shells and other kinetics by the thousands plunging from battleships and heavy cruisers to crash onto a pocked lunar surface, killing exposed Dauran attackers and Alliance defenders alike. Ice-rounds ricochet around gaping tunnel mouths leading into the labyrinth. Smaller tube mouths collapse under the hard pounding, but Alliance fighters mostly make it down the same secret tube mouths they came up, unmolested by bewildered, moaning, writhing krasnos still being slaughtered in thousands by their own navy and the last maglev bot-guns.
It’s too much for the defenders, such death worship and command heedlessness about one’s own casualties. It ends the valiant surface stand, decides the outcome of the ‘Siege of the Labyrinth,’ as the nebs all call the two-month fight on and under Minotaur’s red-black surface.
Then Admiral Aleksandr uses nukes. The first makes a brilliant flash that’s here then gone, leaving no mushroom cloud rising below his battle fleet. Only rock-melt and ash fighters. The detonation cracks open lava walls that haven’t felt this much heat since molten Minotaur cooled to slag. Red rivers return to Minotaur as melted surface rock flows briefly in ancient channels then quickly cools again, now encasing lumpy, unnatural sculptures that look exactly like DRA heterodiamond-artillery tubes, and armtraks and ATCs with krasnos trapped inside.
Alliance commanders don’t need to be told to get the last fighters back inside deep lava tubes once the first nuke goes off. A few immobile maser-bots still shoot from a twisted and churned-over maglev-rail system, cutting down stunned krasnos before a second nuke goes off and a third, and the surface is entirely sterilized of any bot or living beige or brown or blue.
Royko is well pleased. He signals to Jahandar that victory is at hand, in a few hours or days at most. Then he orders a single, mass assault to overwhelm the wormy-apple, foreign shit moon that once again, but only briefly, has red rock-melt flowing on its surface.
***
A senior commanders’ conference in a compact subterranean cave decides that Minotaur must be abandoned. Or rather accepts the obvious and inevitable. Major-General Philippe Proust, in command of all Alliance forces still in the Portus Cale system, gives the order personally.
Jan salutes Proust and heads back to let battalion majors and his fighters know the end time is here. His time and command presence on Minotaur, his hit-and-run tactics in its caves and tubes, and the initial success of his ‘cartridge belt tactics’ on the surface, have cemented his reputation as the Ghost. And that of his Wreckers’ for toughness, guile and courage.
Yet, he and they are defeated. Minotaur is lost, and the Wreckers, and Buckles and Blues, are pulling out in haste and still under attack. “We’re always losing. Defeat, retreat, regroup. It’s getting boring,” Jan signals to Zofia over the officer-to-officer direct link, her-ears-only.
“This is not a defeat,” he announces immediately to all Brigade officers and commandos, speaking through a wide-open, All-Way link that includes any Blue troops in range. He does it standing on top of a stack of carbon-fiber equipment crates, left behind by the prewar researchers who high-tailed it out of system with their families when the Dauran fleet and drop-ships arrived.
Wreckers are gathered in a medium-sized cave at the far end of what was once bustling Lava Center and the abutting cave city of Ellora. The research center is wrecked. Test equipment and supply crates lie helter-skelter everywhere, along with several broken, crab-like shells of DRA animate-mines and expended suicide-bots. Also three dead Daurans, suiciders who got in pretty deep but were shot down by alert guards before they exploded poisoned vests laden with tiny metal darts. Whatever is left of any value in Ellora is being systematically primed for quick burial under lava rubble. The work is being done by distressed ACU engineers, some of whom weep to think of what they’re doing to love’s labors of generations of engineers before them.
/> Jan’s optimism is met by murmurs of polite disbelief and one open disagreement. “Sure feels like we just got our arses kicked bad, up topside, sir. You saying’ we didn’t, colonel?”
Such informality in addressing a superior and commanding officer shocked the tough ACU liaison when he first encountered it, when he was first assigned to the Wreckers. Colonel Sergei Kornilov of ACU Military Intelligence thinks differently now. He appreciates the special bond Jan has with his all-volunteer, special forces commandos. And with attached Calmari units.
“You hold on sergeant, and I’ll explain it real slow.”
Some laughter in the ranks. Even squat Kornilov smiles out his square face, over a salt-and-cayenne pepper, reddish beard. He has a semi-flattened nose, as if he fell on it and is still waiting for it to pop back into its proper place and shape. On most days his narrow eyes look cynically at the worlds. Not today. Something about Jan Wysocki moves him in ways he thought he was dead to years ago. Since long before the war. ‘There’s something about this man, what?’
“No, this is not a defeat. It’s a major defensive victory.”
“A fucking what?”
“Defense also wins wars, sergeant. In fact, every war we Krevans ever won we won on defense. We’ve never gone out looking for worlds to conquer. Do that, and you better have a real big, and real good, fucking army. And you all know, Krevans only count for one of those.”
