Operation Arcana

by John Joseph Adams

  At this point, we have to figure anyone with half a lick of sense knows we’re dragging a shit ton of trouble behind us in the shape of three trolls. Anyone in front of us basically wants to get trampled, if they’re hanging around. Doesn’t stop you from jumping at every flickery shadow, though.

  Plus, we can all sense you’re feeling the sting of letting that wood elf get the jump on you and you’re itching to prove yourself.

  “Jotun,” I mutter to you. Be cool.

  Cool as a frost giant.

  The woods open up in front of you, which we all know is both good and bad; we have better visibility, but then so does anyone looking for us. And whatever advantage we had flitting between the trees where the trolls had to crash through would be lost in the more open ground. But if anything could make up for it, it was the view.

  As you hustle down off the ridgeline, running along just below the crest, the trees thin out and you can see the Medju Gorge, the twisted frontier between the wood elves’ home and the land of the orcs. I’m glancing at the tortured rock formations rising up like blackened souls trying to escape Hell, each larger, more misshapen, and unnatural than the last. The gorge deepens and widens, and the formations grow more massive. Almost anything could be hiding in there, Orley thinks.

  The ridge you’re running along slopes down toward the rim of the gorge, and the plan forms in our minds almost at once. Pros and cons shoot back and forth without the need for pleasantries or protocol as fast as the thoughts form. Within moments we’re moving into position for a hasty ambush.

  You stop and curl back, the rest of first team following you; you have the unenviable job of bait. But you’re going to start in the beaten zone, so we think your run to safety will be short and the trolls will be distracted with other things—like stampeding off a cliff. As the ridge slopes down, the flat ground between it and the edge of the gorge narrows, and you and your team start trotting in small circles in an area where there’s only about fifty meters of flat, sparsely treed ground between the ridge’s steep slope and the gorge.

  You feel them before you hear them, and hear them before you see them. The ground shakes and thuds first, the earth itself reacting to the trolls. Then you hear it—the trees cracking, metal jangling, grunting and snorting of the biggest, dumbest animals on two legs. Trees wave and topple, and then they lumber into view, massive arms and legs swinging through the foliage, then huge bodies tearing through. Your mind has a hard time with it, even through the unreal vision of Night Seeing. Videos from the first Rangers through the breach was one thing—gunsight cameras another—but this almost burns out your brain.

  Good thing we’re here too. Other than coordination, this is the thing Tactician’s Weave is good for. We push you through the initial shock. As one your team raises their weapons and fires. You’re not trying to bring down the trolls—only enrage them, draw them right into the beaten zone.

  It works, of course. They’re big dumb animals. But we all notice just how ineffective your fire is, and the plan starts to make less sense. Still, we’re committed.

  “This is a bad idea,” Lady Wíela hisses just as you and your team start to move, spraying three-round bursts back at the lumbering beasts.

  “Yep, we know,” I say and bring my rifle up. There’s a HEDP—High Explosive, Dual Purpose—grenade in the tube slung under the barrel, and I’m hoping it does the trick.

  “You won’t get me back to your world this way,” Lady Wíela says.

  “We won’t get you anywhere if we don’t try to shake these assholes.”

  They cross the line, and whatever else she might be saying is drowned in a cacophony of fire. Our three automatic weapons open up, concentrating on the closest troll. Actual night-vision goggles help us, but they’re not as good as the spell you’re under. We see greenish lumps, fragments of huge bodies, and the bright, actinic sparks of tracer rounds seeking them out and pinging off their impossibly thick hides.

  One staggers into view and I take the shot, angling up my rifle and popping off the grenade. The rifle butt smacks me in the shoulder, and I admire the shot for a moment—just like they say you shouldn’t—but it’s a perfect arc and nails the troll in its squat neck.

  We all admire it, and then we scatter like camouflage cockroaches when the light turns on.

  The trolls wig out, big time. The one I hit, he finally breaks and does a runner right toward the gorge. The other two start flailing around, maddened, completely lost. While that’s great for us trying to boogie out, it’s shit for us trying to do so in one piece. Tree limbs and rocks and clods of dirt the size of your chest start flying through the air. Marcel gets hit by a shattered tree trunk and goes down, run through with a couple of big shards of bole wood.

  You grab him by the drag strap on the back of his vest and start to move through the woods. You might have been one of the biggest Tolkien nerds in your boot-camp platoon, but you were also one of the strongest.

  We like you like that.

  “Leave him,” Wíela hisses as we try to regroup. She’s stayed by my side through the ambush. “He will only slow us down, and the trolls’ madness will pass. They will hunt us again.”

  “We do not leave a Marine behind!”

  “You jeopardize this mission!” she cries. “And the whole war besides! Your people have stopped the invasion into your world, but you are barely keeping your enemies from staying on this side. I am the key to the alliance your forces need.”

  There is no denying that we’ve been stuck in a morass ever since pushing through to the other side, and you know it as well as any of us. You watched it on TV, on the Internet, through shaky YouTube videos and live Tweets. When the rifts opened, we didn’t even know it was happening. At first, it was just tiny pockets where two worlds touched. But they grew wider, reaching beyond the woods and back alleys and caves where they first appeared. And just as we started to investigate, they poured out.

  You wouldn’t think—no one thought—that a bunch of creatures out of the storybooks could stand up for long against cops, much less the Army or Marines, but they made a fight out of it the world will never forget. Or maybe the world will, given enough time. Maybe it will fade to legends and fairytales and great big hairy operas by the descendants of the Germans.

  One thing’s for sure: everyone started looking at those old stories differently when orcs started beheading joggers in Central Park and trolls destroyed the Empire State Building.

  When we stopped the invasion and pushed through the fissures, we allied quickly with beings like the wood elves and humans like Lady Wíela, who were our allies and friends in the old stories.

  Which is why we were on the edge of the wood elves’ territory, running from trolls.

  “We know what’s at stake,” I tell her. “We know you have information the brass is hot and heavy for.” She seems to be some sort of royalty on this side of the rift, and we’re the anonymous security team delivering her to the safe location. We know our role.

  We don’t stop moving, trying to form back up as we leave the thrashing noise of the trolls behind us. We take advantage of the bond that Tactician’s Weave brings us and keep moving generally toward the objective.

  “You don’t know what’s really at stake,” she says, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “You haven’t the first idea.”

  “You could just tell us,” Orley says, interrupting.

  “I can only speak to your leaders. And if you knew why, you would know we have no time to drag around the dying.”

  It’s clear she’s not going to tell us peons anything. “He’s not dying; he’ll be fine if we get him to a surgeon soon.” We figure she has no idea that people could actually recover from wounds like that, much less survive them, without some intense magic. But still, the charitable understanding is hard to come by.

  “We will all die if we do not get to safety and soon.”

  I smile as you come across a deep draw cutting across our path that drains down into the ra
vine. “We’ll get there,” I say.

  You pick your way down the near slope of the gully, checking left and right like a good newbie should. You’re rattled from that first encounter with the trolls, but you’re also taking pride in having survived it, and having had the presence of mind all on your own to grab Marcel and drag him out of the killzone. Heath and Lomicka are carrying him now, groaning on one of our collapsible litters. They’ll have a tough time getting down and back up the other side, but they can see your steps, your route, and pick their own way down from what they’ve seen through your eyes.

  The sounds of the trolls still behind us somewhere spooks you, and you nearly squeeze off a round in panic. But we steady you again, remind you we want the trolls to follow us, and you press on. You pick your way across the gully floor slowly, eyeing the sharp rise on the far side. Lady Wíela has graciously informed us of a dry streambed that rises more gradually out the other side, and you pick up her landmarks and start moving toward them. The direction takes you down and west, closer toward that nightmare rift, where the draw empties out. Some of us think we can hear shrieks . . . or maybe it’s just the wind whistling over those rock formations.

  “Fuckin’ eerie,” Ysbarra mutters. She spits at the ground and hefts her SAW, taking comfort in the cold metal of the light machine gun in her hands.

  This could, really, be anywhere on Earth. Back home. Back in the world. The same sorts of weeds and scrub poke up through the same sorts of rocks. The air, we all think, smells a little sweeter in the forest we just came from, and a little fouler up ahead where we don’t want to go.

  So as long as there aren’t any invisible caves, or crystal staircases, or anything else weird, we should be good to go for the next attempt at an ambush. It’s not that we want to stop and fight the trolls, it’s that we don’t have much choice. From here it’s a straight shot back to our bivouac, and little else but open ground between us and the relative safety of the Forward Operating Base. Either the trolls run us down in the open ground, or we drag them all the way back to the FOB with us and hope the Marines there are up to the task.

  It’s a bullshit buffet, and we’ve got to pick something to eat.

  “Wish we had a couple Gamgees with us,” I mutter.

  “What?” Lady Wíela asks.

  “SAMs,” I explain, realizing she isn’t following. “Surface to Air Missiles.”

  But she’s no less mystified.

  “Think they’d stop a troll?” you ask.

  I shrug. “Couldn’t hurt . . .”

  We follow you down, keeping up our dispersion, all of us trying to ignore the thudding in the distance. The trolls have gotten their shit together and could well be on our trail again. The sound of them certainly isn’t growing any fainter.

  The good Lady is chirping at my shoulder about moving faster, but she answers the questions I put to her, however reluctantly. She sees the wisdom in our plan, however far short of ideal it may be, but she is not happy about it, and her nervousness grows with the sound of the trolls.

  You set up in overwatch once you reach a shallow enough part of the streambed, scrambling up the side and back toward the steep edge of the gully. You perch on top just as the litter bearers make it down the far slope with Marcel between them. Sighting through the scope on your rifle, the landscape is laid out, the trees thinning to nothing on the opposite side, and treetops swaying as the trolls plod through.

  We start setting up while we watch through your eyes, measuring distance and time and need. It’s easier this time, picking out their flailing limbs and misshapen bodies, the thinning of the forest giving you more space to see. Still, the fully glimpsed form of them is just as terrifying as the half-glimpsed pieces.

  “Damn,” you mutter.

  They are almost as broad as they are tall, but not fat as such—just thick. Squat necks with lumpy heads atop them, huge swaying arms that brush the ground as they lope along. Their hands are barely hands at all, almost just clubs on the ends of their arms. But it’s not like they need much more than that.

  You can only see two, which gives you hope that one of them did, indeed, panic himself right off a cliff. We’re preparing for three anyway, not that it makes much difference: more than one stretches our resources to the breaking point. We have six kilos of C4, two collapsible anti-tank rockets, a dozen or so grenades, and a dwindling supply of regular ol’ bullets. We arrange things as best we can, and once again dangle some bait for them.

  This time, Lady Wíela herself volunteers. I tell her no, but she is insistent. We’d hate to do all this just to lose her, but she won’t be put off. “You have the weapons,” she points out. “If any of you steps away from your post, you reduce our fighting power. I’m your best option.”

  She’s right. And if the trolls don’t bite, we’re fucked either way. We’ve been calling for backup—air support, or advice from up the food chain. But there’s static in the air. Errant spells. Energy from the rift. Who knows? We seem to be on our own.

  So we set up and there is no mistaking it now; the ground is shaking, the trees are swaying and there is no chance that it’s a column of tanks rolling through to pick us up—they’re still having problems stockpiling enough diesel on this side of the rifts to make it work.

  We hustle to improvise some claymores and set up Brust and Antoine on the opposite side of the dry streambed from you with their anti-tank rockets.

  Lady Wíela paces through a small section of cleared ground in the middle of the gully. You keep looking from her to the treeline and back again, feeling personally responsible for her safety even though we’ve taken that on as a squad. You still haven’t worked out that team-mind thing, but we know you will; we all had to work at it at one point or another.

  A lot of fantasy nerds got it in their heads that they were the next Aragorn—the movie Aragorn, no less—hacking their way through legions of orcs with a big fucking sword and a bad shave. Lotta assholes got killed that way, in and out of uniform. You’re not one of those assholes. You’re a solid part of the team. You’ve been through the training, paid some dues. Now it’s time to see how it really gets done on the ground.

  So you don’t let yourself linger on the Lady, however good she looks in that gown-and-cloak number. No Cate Blanchett, but still easy on the eyes. Besides, when your brain wanders like that you can feel Ysbarra’s annoyance at the off-mission male-gaze focus like a swift ruler crack to the knuckles. Save that shit for your bunk.

  And when the trolls break through, you’re all business. You estimate the ranges and we read them right off the top of your consciousness. Too close. Far too close.

  “Lady Wíela!” you shout, and the Lady looks at your pointed hand. They’re at the crest, near where we came down, towering above.

  She screams, getting their attention, and starts to run.

  We make a decision and Brust pulls the trigger. An unguided rocket lances out in a tight spiral. It blossoms orange just under the armpit of one of the trolls, causing it to bellow in rage.

  “He ain’t too fucking happy about that,” I say.

  From what Brust can see, we’re thinking we seem to have finally injured one of them—slightly.

  “Nah,” you report. “I think we just really, really pissed it off.”

  It bellows again, and an answering roar comes from down toward the ravine.

  Fuck, I think, spreading alarm out through everyone.

  We scope the end of the gully and see the big dark shape of the third troll lumbering up the gully toward us. It must have gone down into the ravine but continued to follow us and climbed up to try to flank. We would not have given them that much credit for coordination, and maybe it was just a happy accident (for them). “Who cares if it’s an accident,” Antoine hisses. “We are supremely fucked.”

  And the Lady is close to being trapped. “Reel her up,” I order. We’re not going to lose her.

  You grab the 550-pound test-cord loop from your gear and fling it over the edge
of the gully after tying off one end to your vest. If she can get to that, she can climb up, maybe, and you’re torn between firing at the trolls to drive them off and trying to make like a bump in the grass, hoping they get more excited about Brust and his spent rocket launcher.

  We solve it for you when Antoine fires on the other troll, hoping to draw them away. But no matter what we do, we’ve got more trolls than we can deal with and a lot of open ground behind us.

  Antoine’s distraction works, though that means all three trolls are now keying on Brust and Antoine. They are theoretically out of reach on the lip of the gully, but suddenly the walls don’t look so high.

  And then the radio crackles. Fuzzy and fractured, but recognizable.

  “Longshanks, Longshanks, this is Windlord, we are one mike out from your beacon, what’s your sitch?”

  We somehow refrain from cheering.

  “Windlord, this is Longshanks actual,” I shout into the radio handset. “Three brutes, danger close, bring the thunder!”

  “Thunder, aye. Hold on to your butts, Longshanks. Windlord out.”

  You look up and to the west, and you can see them, a flight of four sparks in the distance, but closing, growing quickly. You scramble to the lip of the gully and shout down at the Lady. She hurries toward you, broken from her fear, and starts scrambling toward the dangling cord. She finds it and loops it under her arms, tying it off in front of her. Then she starts to climb, and you take up the slack, taking weight off of her.

  “What is it?” she shouts, seeing that I’m looking over my shoulder into the air. “A dragon?”

  “Even better,” I shout down at her. “Warthogs!”

  She frowns—not sure how a pig might be able to save our bacon right now—as the Warthogs arrive.

  They’re ugly and beautiful-almost-ancient jets made for a different war. Their huge rotary cannons, mounted under the cockpit, were designed to plow 30mm depleted-uranium rounds into Soviet tanks and armored vehicles in support of ground troops like us. The planes themselves are actually armored, and as they dive on the gully you can see the cluster bombs and anti-armor rockets slung under the wings.