by Kali Altsoba
“The officers are out front, sir. I guarantee it.”
“I don’t see them, the cowards!”
“With respect, sir. That’s unfair.”
A pause in lethal illumination of the attack lane. One Platoon jumps up and runs another fifty paces toward the pillbox before dropping underneath to wait out its revived, reloaded rapido fire. Just like Uncle told them.
“Why do they keep stopping?”
“It’s the rapido, sir, ‘drop-and-scoot’ is combat SOP when facing those.”
“Godsdamn it! Get those pikies up and moving!”
“They’re waiting for the rapido to unload its charge, sir.”
“My plan depends on speed and surprise.”
“We’ve already lost surprise, sir.”
“Then we must get to the enemy black wall even faster.”
“Sir, the men need to wait until…”
“One Platoon, hit that bunker now!”
After twenty seconds delay, ten newbies rise prematurely. The hot rapido is still shooting over their heads, but it sees them and lowers aim. They had to stand, had to run forward. They’re new to this and their captain, who doesn’t know what Mother Duck told them about waiting then advancing during reloads, is lashing at their frightened lieutenant. He’s screaming threats, shouting orders into HUDs.
“Get the fuck up and continue the advance!”
“But sir…”
“Now! I’ll courts-martial anyone who hesitates.”
Their ears fill with bells and warnings, their eyes are drawn to large red threat symbols, their minds focus on the captain’s angry e-com urgings, and threats to shoot any man who fails to rise to attack. The young shōi caves in. He stands and leads his squad in a charge. It’s cut apart in seconds. The lieutenant falls, headless.
The rapido again pauses to reload crystals. Fewer stick men than last time run another fifty paces before dropping. This time they don’t get up when the rapido pauses to reload, no matter how much the captain bellows and screams into their helmets. They stay put, terrified. They’re pinned down by a second rapido and a row of supporting infantry who open up a lethal green crossfire into the assaulters’ exposed position. This wasn’t in the plan. No one knows what to do. So they stay where they are, impossibly illuminated and exposed to enfilade fire.
One of the stick men doesn’t adhere to the pattern. He runs forward waving his arms in the air, shouting at the others to “follow me!” The stick man quickly draws the Beards’ attention and most of their small arms fire. Streaking green light tears into the ground all around his hopping feet. It’s a baby faced lieutenant, a fresh junior officer leading his first enthusiastic and highly reckless attack. He’s full of piss-and-vinegar from political indoctrination and too proud of achieving top score in his small unit tactical class at OTS. Worse, he’s raw and just young enough to still think that he’s immortal. On his third surge and effort to rally an attack this entirely mortal young man is sliced apart by a blue rapido bolt from the second pillbox. He falls in halves, like a cut apple under a baker’s knife.
Three frog mortars from Weapons Platoon lay a counterstrike on the revealed, unexpected strongpoint from where concentrated infantry fire is coming, where a second heavy rapido is now shooting into the dark that’s no longer dark but laced with light. The little green stick men stay in place, hugging the ground ever tighter. Until several incoming Alliance mortars land right on top of their prone positions and half of One Platoon dies right where they lie. The rest are inspired to rise and run by more incoming shells arriving. Some fall down again, cut apart by rapidos or splattered into paste by an excited AI shell that zeros on a slow, running target then plunges down, expiring in orgasmic satisfaction of its purposeful design and metaphysical fulfilment. And that’s it. The diversion attack is over.
‘Write it up however you want, sir. Your diversionary assault just failed and every man who’s left alive out there and still has limbs to crawl home to our side has turned away from the attack target and is fleeing from the pursuing lights.’
‘Wait, you say? Wait for what? Oh, I see. That’s not what you told them to do, standing at your periscope in that pretty green uniform. The main attack has yet to go in and you think there’s a chance the night’s capture mission could succeed? How many lost boys constitute a success, sir?’
‘No, I won’t take it back, sir. No, it’s not an impertinent question, sir. It’s what their mothers would ask you if they were here. Lucky for you, they’re not. They’d turn harpy. Tear you apart with bare hands for what you did.’
‘Yes I know, sir. Mothers don’t get a vote. The only people who get a vote are your superiors at HQ. You’re forgetting the enemy, sir. The enemy always gets to vote. They’re stuffing the ballot box right now, on the other side of the black.’
‘Courts-martial me? Go right fucking ahead sir. But know that at the trial I’ll tell them all what a walking, overstarched cluster fuck you really are, sir. With all respect, sir, to your natural High Caste talent and rank superiority, and all that.’
‘Yes sir, I concur. Let’s finish the op and discuss this later in private. For as the bard said, at this moment “more of your conversation would infect my brain.”’
No one says anything to the captain, who’s standing at the periscope trying to figure out what to do next, worrying that he just fucked up three months of prep and lobbying to command this tactical experiment at the black. Survivors crater hop, scurrying like crabs. Then they run flat out to the starting point of the failed attack. They gratefully tumble into a fallback slit trench, laser-bored 200 meters out earlier in the day on quiet orders from Mother Duck. The captain doesn’t know about the failsafe slit. He doesn’t know dick all what he’s doing, or even why.
‘You could rebuild the black wall with all the shit bricks you can make with what that fucker doesn’t know about combat,’ Uncle thinks as he scuttles under a yellow laser fired by an aroused auto bot. It misses. Unlike everyone else who’s falling back, Uncle is running across the battlefield, running from disaster at Grid Point R7 to make sure there’s no repeat disaster at at GP R9.
Shrew
Yuki is out there with Two Platoon, creeping across darkened terrain just shy of R9 when strobes light up Grid Point R7. He’s undetected and far enough away from the intense fight that he and ten nitōhei frogs are able to hop down into an oddly unguarded section of enemy black wall. The captain will later conclude that this gap was there because the diversion part of his attack plan worked flawlessly. He’ll tell Battalion and Division HQs: “The diversion provided by a well-timed assault on the pillbox at R7 let our forces reach R9 undetected. Casualties were acceptable, tactics successful.”
That’s not why the Iron Three’s wall is undefended. That’s not it at all. It takes the assault team time to discover the reason. For the moment, five men run ahead of Yuki, around the hard bend of the nearest zag. Instantly, they’re out of sight. Yuki is more wary and stays where he is, trying to regain directional bearings after rolling to the bottom of the cut, all the way from the parapet. When he jumps to his feet blood pounds in his temples. Every nerve and muscle goes taut and alert.
He looks around, expecting to see frantically defending enemy coming at him. He sees no one except men in green utilities. “Where are the godsdamn Beards?”
He doesn’t want to do this stupid, terrifying thing again tomorrow night. He’s angry that he may have to. Then, in a sudden rush a dozen bearded and only half dressed men run past him from behind. The largest stumble crashes into Yuki, knocking him off his feet. He doesn’t think. He opens fire from a prone position and the man crumples, a dark wine stain around a smoking hole in his lower back.
He keeps firing as more half naked runners fall and die. The rookies take their cue from his spitting maser. They also stab and club down the fleeing and unarmed men half clad in auburn, jumping on top to finish them off. Beards call out strange plaintive words in an alien tongue. Yuki and the rooks ign
ore the foreign cries and pleas. Murder instinct takes over in a moment, as if the squad is a pride of lions pulling apart a bleeding antelope already down and kneeling on its two front legs.
Yuki hears Mother Duck shouting. “Damn you! Stop! Don’t kill them all!”
He’s too late. Yuki and the rooks stab and kill until there’s no more killing to be done, until the trench is silent. When the fever passes, Yuki stands up. Seven dead or mortally wounded men lie around him on the duckboard in burned clumps and pieces. More are stabbed and bleeding out or clubbed and insensible. Standing over them are hard panting, excited former combat virgins of the assault team.
Mother Duck tears into Yuki. He looks like he might even strike him with a tightly clenched fist he brings right to Yuki’s nose. “You mutha fucka! You dumb, useless tool! I’ll make you take point when we come back tomorrow night to do this again with all of them alert, because you killed all the prisoners!”
Yuki looks down and away. He realizes how much he fucked up. Mother Duck is right. Now he’ll have to come back across DT tomorrow and do this all again, in far worse conditions because the enemy will be both angry and alert. That fresh-as-mint green officer will make them do it. And if he doesn’t, Mother Duck will.
To everyone’s immense relief, around the zag suddenly comes a short column of filthy looking Beards. All have their hands atop their heads; some bleed from minor facial wounds, like they took a beating. Two are combat dressed, but the rest are in only underwear, like the dead and dying Beards lying on duckboard. A grinning trooper holds his stub maser on them while bringing up the column rear.
‘Prisoners! Hurrah!’ Yuki is elated. Now he won’t have to come back at night into an awake and angry hornet’s nest of Beard rapidos. Now maybe Mother Duck will stop screaming so closely and juicily into his face, and remove his fist.
Behind the prisoners comes another trooper around the zag bend, his maser held at waist height and humming. He has an even wider grin as he herds five women all in a bunch. Two are partially dressed in auburn uniforms, one waist up and the other waist down. Three are buck naked, sweaty and gleaming white in the moonlight. ‘So that’s why the Beards are in their skivvies! Dirty old bastards!’
“Private Hoth, take a prisoner back. Fuck up and I’ll shoot you.” Mother Duck is spitting fire, laser hot mad about the whole fouled up mission. And with Yuki.
Yuki levels his weapon at the first male tongue in line, ordering a thickly red bearded man up-and-out of the trench and over the parapet. He follows him over the lip. Mother Duck is behind but slower. He leads alternately happy and shaken frogs, spattered with other men’s blood, and the Beard prisoners out into the black.
Yuki and his captive each look like half an unmade bed. They trot in tandem eastward, toward RIK First Trench on the other side of DT. They’re jog gliding at a good pace, almost home when an incoming shell from the creased captain’s perfectly timed barrage hits too close by, right on time but way off target.
Boom!
It’s a short round, a dud just as Yuki feared and predicted. A defective smart shell whose jets splutter until it falls randomly to ground. Its final, blasphemous, electric blue thought is framed as a cold metallic curse about the utter futility and meaninglessness of its short, unfulfilled creation and purpose. ‘Fuck existence!’
The contact explosion lifts both men off their feet, tumbling them upward and head-over-boots into a baker’s oven of breathless, rapid heated air. Explosive fire and a concussive wave pancake out from the high detonation point, passing above them. Yuki falls headlong into an old crater, temporarily blinded and confused by the near miss plasma flash that explodes the darkness into nova brilliance. When he comes back to consciousness there’s no sign of Mother Duck or the squad from Two Platoon. No one else is in the crater with him. Except the red bearded prisoner, the Iron Three. He’s staring hard and straight at Yuki. Crouched and coiled, like a feral cat about to spring on a bird with a broken wing.
***
“Move one finger and I’ll roast that beard off you and blow your head apart.” The barbarossa man doesn’t understand a word Yuki says, but he recognizes the mortal threat in his look and in the humming of a warmed up maser. He submits. He relaxes backward, leaving the tense crouch behind. Yuki keeps the gun on him.
Two hours after coming back to consciousness Yuki stretches a painful kink in his left leg and looks over to his bearded prisoner. The scruffy man is awake and alert, like Yuki recovered from a shock wave from a defective shell that only partially detonated, knocking both of them into a yawning old crater.
He’s no longer tense.
He’s gone all passive.
Wary but not threatening.
Yuki is sitting about a third of the way up one side of the wide, wet shell hole. The silent tongue sits directly across from him. Yuki’s waiting for dark and an All Clear signal in his HUD to let him cross the last 500 meters to First Trench with his prisoner, back to the safety of the homeside black wall. The more he stares at the man’s filthy red beard and dirty utes the more the barbarossa prisoner seems somehow less an enemy, more an ordinary fellow. Just as hungry and knackered of war as he is. The change in basic perception is more of an itch than a revelation.
At least at first. It becomes forever once they squat with hands over ears and mouths open wide during random shelling by long range mortars. High trajectory sabots fly up then fall nearly straight down, landing with low thuds and brilliant neon flashes, pushing waves of heat overhead that must cook them if not for the soggy crater’s protective rim rising two meters overhead. From which side it’s coming, neither knows. Or that the more they seek the bottom the closer they slide toward each other until they’re physically touching, unaware.
The squat position is prescribed procedure taught in every army. Here, in an old crater facing a Universe trying to kill them both, it renders them absurd. Like hear-no-evil macaques from an ancient children’s tale. The barbarossa man starts to look to Yuki like a brown furred, red faced snow monkey hunched near a hot spring, howling madly at the noise and its simian fate. Yuki looks much the same to the Iron Kingdom man, with his open, oval mouth and big startled eyes.
A shared image of a universal folk memory and childhood mimicry doubles them over with laughter, once the shelling stops and each sees the other crouched in a monkey pose. They point at each other, hopping-in-place and making stupid monkey noises until they fall and grab their sides in hurtful laughter. Yuki drops his maser in his convulsions. The hopping, mirthful Beard makes no move to grab it. Yuki retrieves it. He turns the charger off and turns the safety on instead.
After that, they aren’t enemies anymore. They see that they’re two ridiculous men sitting in a wet hole in the middle of a too vast yet oddly empty battlefield that goes on forever. In a war that will go on without them, forever-more-without-end, Amen. They are in a gray Hades antechamber on a farfolk world neither knew before the war, for which neither cares a jig or a jot. They know they’re merely specks of dust floating without purpose in an indifferent Cosmos, briefly colliding in a curved moment in spacetime with no larger meaning. It just is. Breathe it in.
The laughing fit passes after eating imaginary bananas no longer seems quite so funny. They sit for a time, not even trying to speak. They only smile and gesture rudimentary thoughts, surrounded by their own foot and hand prints pressed in the wet yellow clay as they clambered down. Yuki is so inside the moment he forgets to remember another crater, with imprints of two boy’s faces in hardening mud.
They search odd detritus washed to the bottom of the crater by the last heavy rains. It’s the usual refuse: rations, an empty hooch bottle, a chewed stub of cigar, burned out crystals, a left boot, bright dried up orange peels someone left behind, and a porno holo they can’t get to work no matter how hard they try. And they try real hard. The bottle, cigar, crystals and other war junk they understand. They also know there are plenty of porn holos in the wide space between the walls, but they can’t
imagine who brought such a useless thing out here, into Dark Territory. They laugh again as they mime how much the panicky mystery man rues losing it, pretending that he’s still frantically searching, hopping about in one boot, hooch bottle in one hand, smoking a half chewed stogy.
Yuki speculates: ‘Maybe it was some dumb frog, hoping his company’s attack was actually going to succeed, that he wouldn’t be going back across DT to his old bunker but would sleep that night in an enemy dugout. The fool.’
It’s raining hard. So they hunch under a carbyne sheet that juts inward from the overhang crater lip. It’s broken leavings of an earlier shelling that shattered a nearby OP, sending carbyne sheeting skyward to spin out and land just so. They drink from Yuki’s helmet, imbibing rainwater runoff collected as it tumbles down the armor sheeting. Yuki reaches into a sealed pocket on the leg of his utilities and takes out two hemp sticks, each laced with soma. They’re kept carefully dry and intact in a small, rigid container. He hands one to “Redbeard,” as he now calls the Three prisoner in his head and out loud. Barbarossa gratefully takes the stick.