Exodus: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Jan relieves the whole first watch. “I’ll take it from here. Get some rest.” Two minutes later he looks to his left and sees that Zofia has taken up sentry about 50 meters away. She nods to him, then turns her head to scan.

  ‘So, she wasn’t asleep at all. Of course she wasn’t.’

  Fighters curl in fetal balls or stretch lengthwise under full-spectrum light-and-sound camo. Modified RIK huff-duff sensor blockers hum softly, audible at all only because they’re at full power this close to the enemy. The wounded got the last of the water, but here and there a prone fighter sucks at her canteen, hoping for a final dreg. Tomorrow they’ll slake a lifetime’s thirst with deep, cold draughts from the clear reservoirs of Toruń. Or they’ll drink nevermore.

  Jan checks the tiny chronometer in the top left corner of his HUD. Local time shows in green beneath an orange UST clock. Either way, the mine blows at dawn. In all the histories of all the wars alertness flags to a natural low just before first light. Shock and disorienting effects of the mine explosion will be maximized, even though most of the enemy are surely on combat meds to counter stress. If Madjenik is lucky, quite a few will also be dull-witted from too much drink or doing illegal robusto the night before. It’s another good reason to attack at dawn.

  Using an industrial laser hauled from Toruń shipyard, combat engineers bored the mine shaft and chamber two weeks earlier, readying for the big perimeter ground fight General Constance intends to lead herself to distract RIK sky and ground forces from departure of the Exodus ships. Now the mine won’t be used in the last battle outside the berm after all.

  “Instead, we’ll help a lost company break in to the city.”

  She’s speaking to her closest and most reliable aide-de-camp, Lt. Dylan Byers.

  “What do you say to that, lieutenant?”

  “Frankly?” He’s always frank with the general, since she insists on it. “I don’t see it as the wisest use of our last resources. It makes much more sense to stick to the original plan.”

  “You really think so?”

  “No, actually I don’t.”

  “I thought not. I know you Lt. Byers.”

  “It’s just that...”

  “Stop holding back. Speak your mind.”

  “Well sir, I think you’re exactly right. In a fight that’s already lost, this seems the right choice. It’s just the right thing to do.”

  “Agreed, on all scores. Except one. The fight’s neither lost nor over.”

  “It’s not?”

  “We still have the Exodus ships.”

  “Well yes, but only if we can get them off-world. All the captains have to do then is get out of the system with every Kaigun ship available blocking the way or in full chase.”

  “You don’t think they can do it?”

  “I think it will be hardest thing any of us have ever done, sir. Whether we are staying to die like you, speaking frankly, sir. Or leaving on Exodus. Getting past the heavy orbital patrols and then out of the system? I don’t see it. I’m not KRN, sir, but I can’t see how to do it.”

  “Thank you for your candor, lieutenant.”

  “General, sir. I didn’t mean to offend. I didn’t mean …”

  “I gave you permission to speak freely. No offense by me is warranted or taken.”

  “I’m glad of it, sir.”

  “Resume your post.”

  As Madjenik rests, engineers in sound-baffle suits pack the cavity with a plasma bomb. Main guns on the high berm are told to wait three minutes after the detonation before shooting everything they have at point-blank ranges. The delay should catch milling enemy out in the open, inside an “absolute fire zone” 500 meters wide and deep. More guns will saturate an even wider killing field on either side of the crater in a barrage lasting seven minutes, keeping heads down and return fire suppressed. Then the race will start. Madjenik vs. Death, one chasing the other into a killing corridor, a gauntlet of hellfire through which Madjenik must run to live.

  Jan’s orders are to mass at 2:30 UST. Madjenik must then advance in stealth to attack position, just 200 meters from the RIK line directly east of the Berm Gate. It will wait precisely 10 minutes after the mine detonates, timing its mad charge to the end of the saturation barrage. When the guns stop, Jan will release all Madjenik to crash the rear of the enemy’s position.

  ‘It’s the best we can do,’ he concludes after reviewing the general’s plan over and over. ‘And a helluva sight better than any plan I had, which was none.’

  He’s real glad that someone else is making the hard calls. Especially so capable and so senior an officer as General Constance, the highest ranking KRA officer still alive on Genève.

  Still, he decides to add a tactical wrinkle of his own. Madjenik will bull rush the mine gap, but not in a single wedge as the general ordered. It’ll form five platoon wedges moving in echelon, a semi-disconnected larger wedge that he’ll personally lead from the apex.

  ‘What can the general do to me for disobeying her orders? I’ll not likely survive the attack in any case. Very few, if any, of us will.’

  He thinks up the variant while looking up into a streaking sunset, upon hearing familiar honking and watching several hundred wild snow geese passing overhead in five companion ‘Vs’ that form a larger ‘Vic’. They’re leaving for the equator, thence to Southland for the long winter, oblivious to the human ballyhoo below. ‘Or damn annoyed about all the noise.’

  Jan hears a distant dog bark. He’s always liked dogs, but he’s never had one of his own. ‘Must be in the RIK camp. Let’s hope it stays there. There’ll be enough death today without my having to knife an innocent dog that wanders out here and barks out our position.’

  With nothing else to do but pace and watch and think, he notices that the air smells of burned metals and yellow clay as well as cold wet ash. Also of burned and rotting animal and human flesh. The burned-meat smell he sets aside by thinking of it as some elk or deer trapped in a sudden gust of forest flames, not a roasted countryman or woman struggling to reach the berm and falling short, to be roasted inside-out by compact microwaves from a heavy spandau.

  Not so easily can he push away from his clogged and protesting nostrils the sweetly-sick odor of weeks-old putrefaction that is all around. Already, hidden bits of corpses that litter the forest floor on the outer margin of a battlefield are shifting from first decomp by aerobic bacteria to all-out rotting by anaerobic species. By the trillions, the creatures are feeding on corpse tissues, fermenting sugars in forgotten livers and kidneys and fouled brains and bowels, releasing gas by-products: ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, methane. The gases bloat corpses until they vent from a nearby orifice. Or inflate inner cavities until bursting out a ruptured abdomen.

  He looks down warily where he’s pacing to see a lump of discolored and indeterminate flesh he only noticed because it brushed his boot with a little clink. He realizes it was once an arm and hand. It’s swollen but small. Perhaps a girl’s or a woman’s? Certainly it’s a refugee’s.

  Dark veins that once carried blood and oxygen down the arm are filled with anaerobic bacteria converting the last hemoglobin into sulfhaemoglobin. The newer molecules in dead and settled blood give shriveling skin a marbled, greenish-black look. On two fingers slippage is so advanced that sheets of skin loosened and fell away, exposing pale thin bones. There are blisters up and down the arm and on the back of what was indeed a young mother’s hand. It’s still wearing a wedding ring that cuts deep into a finger blue and fat with death around the gold.

  ‘When alive, this hand may have held an infant to a suckling breast.’ He looks away, fearing to find what’s left of the child she dropped when the maser took her down. His mind wanders back to childhood lost and he wonders wistfully where his own mother is on this last night of nights, before his last day of days. ‘Are you alive, making garlic soup and folk medicaments on the old farm where I last saw you, before the war? Are you in the world? Anne-Marie Wysocki, are you with me still?’

&n
bsp; Eighty minutes before H-Hour it starts to rain. A real late-autumn soaker. It slimes the ground and everything they carry, running off in little indifferent streams that tunnel into and under the resistant ash. At least the sheeting rain drives the wary dog indoors. It stops barking.

  Jan spends the last full hour of what he knows might be the last night of his existence walking the foreshortened sleeper line, stopping and stooping to talk in whispers with restless and anxious fighters. He never truly realized before this last dawn how very young they are.

  “How are you son? Did you get any sleep?”

  “A little, captain.”

  “And you? Are you ready to visit Arbor City?”

  “Can’t wait, sir. I was born there. My family’s in there.”

  “Well, they’ll be proud and happy to see you. Now rest.”

  They smell wet and musty and bone tired. The powerful black rain, sky water mixed with risen ash, washes the last soot off their drenched weaves. For the first time since these fighters entered the ash zone they look oakish as the first light of day breaks, not deathly gray.

  ‘At least when we fight our last fight, when we die today outside the berm, we’ll do it standing up and looking once again like Krevan soldiers.’

  Then it’s time. He alerts NCOs and gives the order himself over the company’s linked HUDs. “All rise. Ready to move out.” Hundreds of wet fighters stand up in the fading dark.

  Jan and Zofia are so in sync when going into combat that it seems like they’re playing tag-team command, issuing readiness orders one after another.

  “Stow all camo. Just leave it there.”

  “And all non-essential gear. Take only weapons and ammo.”

  “Warm masers. Safeties off. Frags armed and ready.

  “Prepare to advance 200 meters. By platoon, advance!”

  The echeloned platoons move out, five smaller V-wedges forming one larger V-wedge, looking to Jan just like the snow geese, only gliding low and in slow motion across the ground.

  “We’re at 200 meters. All halt!”

  “Crouch position!”

  “No, turn the other way, trooper.”

  “Sir?”

  “Turn your back to the enemy line and barrage.”

  “Shields down! Get your visors dark.”

  “Last check: light filters and flash shields on full power now!”

  “Check.”

  “Right, stay low and still.”

  “Don’t turn around until you get the order.”

  “Wait for the go command.”

  “And everybody, shut your fucking eyes.”

  Jan remembers part of an old prayer, an odd thought for him. It’s the kind of thing learned early in life when parents and teachers pour the hemlock of unqueried faith into too trusting ears and into lasting memories: ‘Worse than all my foes, I find the enemy within.’

  It’s not true. His worst foes are over there, about 200 meters away, waiting to kill him and all his Madjenik charges rather than let him into Toruń. He might get Madjenik through or he might not. Either way, Jan Wysocki intends to slaughter as many of his enemies as he can.

  Crater

  The mine blows exactly on schedule, producing two lethal effects. An intense thermal blast sears metal, rock and flesh while a wave of intense pressure and expanding gases spreads out and upward at supersonic speed.

  The shock wave causes devastating injuries to internal organs while the fast expanding gases lift a mass of soil and rock and men in an swelling half-orb of sudden heat and death.

  At ground zero, right above the insertion chamber excavated by the engineers, ultrasteel and superconcrete RIK pillboxes simply disappear. Big gun tubes and entire crews convert instantly into hot odorless gases, adding to the rising bubble. Or reduce to small lumps of singed metal or cooked bone smoking at the apex of a lifting ball of expanding water and soil.

  Heavy maser batteries and fusion-cannon boxes lift 300 meters into the air, riding atop the upward burping bubble. It’s made of brown and ochre clay chunks, rich black top soil, mud and rocks and water, shattered vehicles, and flailing bodies and parts of dead and dying men.

  Four intact heterodiamond gun tubes, too hard to crack apart, tumble slowly upward, gracefully arcing above the cresting explosion of dirt and blood and wood that flashes with plasma lightning from within, like a great black thunderstorm seen at 10,000 meters altitude.

  The tubes are from the 3rd Imperial Artillery, an elite unit from Manmō. So are bits of two dozen erupted gunners. Two crystal-cannon batteries from 33rd Artillery, a regular outfit also from Manmō, rise as a mutilated and mangled muddle of smashed and torn and jagged bits of men and machines, hurtled high up inside the spreading ball of hot debris.

  Four heavy Mammoths parked behind the maser battery come apart at every laser-welded seam as they rise. Three sleeping crews die instantly, killed in a nanosecond because they chose to lie down for a brief rest in a convenient nearby dry trench that no longer exists.

  Inside the fourth armtrak are two military workers busy with minor repairs when the mine goes off. At first they’re protected by a thick shroud of carbyne-armor, riding the huge ejecta bubble high up. Then they spill out, bodily intact, wide awake, and utterly astonished that gravity has so little hold on them or the hugely bulky Mammoth rising right alongside.

  Seconds of rapid expansion that take forever, and then the hubble-bubble slows. It thins and breaks its overstretched skin at the epicenter, and everything it carried up starts to fall: gun tubes, rocks, armor plate, concretized gun anchors, chunks of field, bodies, cracked helmets, heavy masers, three shattered Mammoths and one still intact armtrak. Along with two astonished mechanics from the forest world of Unterwalden in the Waldstätte, core of the Imperium. No one hears them scream over the roar of air and flying clay and groundwater still rushing outward in all directions below them. Mortality arrives in the looming form of gravity, reclaiming them as Genève’s entire and fatal inertial mass smacks each falling man hard right in the face.

  Exactly 1,402 RIK are inside the blast zone when the plasma mine goes off. Some, like the armtrak and arti crews, come from the traditional military world of Manmō. Most others are young conscripts. Two full companies of infantry are from Lucerne, a quiet Grün agro-world very much like Genève. They’re just 10 days into their first combat tour. None live.

  Most of the Lucerne boys die fast, mercifully unaware of their last moments, still asleep as bones are crushed and internal organs instantly pulped by the expansive pressure wave of the blast. A few are not so lucky but still die fairly fast. Painlessly compared to what’s coming to others from different units unfortunately posted just outside the certain kill zone of the crater.

  The descending ruin overhead is full of body parts, remnants of boys and men hailing onto the now smoking and gassy ground. Night sentries about to go off duty and early-rising cooks preparing the first meal hundreds of meters from the crater edge vomit in moral horror as strings of warm extruded gut drape slickly over a neck or arm. Or snag like mockmeat sausages on jutting branches of already scorched and now shattered trees with no bark or leaves at all. Even the trees looked tormented, with gaping white wounds of torn and pulpy vegetable flesh.

  No mother will recognize or embrace the awful things hanging from trees and rocks, or raw and bleeding and unmoving on ruptured ground, oozing blood and water and green bitter-smelling bile. Larger lumps and clumps land with sick, soft thuds! Torsos, legs, severed feet, loosed heads with boy’s faces still frozen in an instant of uncomprehending horror and shock.

  ‘No, not ME, this can’t be happening to ME!’

  ‘Why am I flying?’

  ‘Where are my legs?’

  ‘This isn’t real! I’m young. I’m loved. I want to live!’

  ‘Why ME? It’s not fair, it’s not FAIR!’

  No, it’s not.

  You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, drew the wrong number in war’s never-ending lottery, its ra
ndom draw of life and fate. Now you’re dead, son. Next!

  A thousand meters from the forming crater rim survivors are coated a minute later by a falling, sticky red-black mist, then drenched in rolling sheets made of falling dirt, blood and groundwater. The mix smells of natural plant oils, mangled tree roots and erupted men.

  Exploded rocks and artificial wreckage fall to ground all around, spreading into and around a deep and smoking crater blown 100 meters down at zero point and 850 jagged and wide. Its roofless walls form an earthen coliseum of destruction and despair, of murder and madness. It’s spectacle and sacrifice as blood-sport theater. Primal, exciting, cruel and absurd.