by Tom Kratman
“Merde,” Arcand said aloud, setting aside his field glasses for a moment.
The tall French officer stood in a chest-deep fighting position just below the crest on the forward slope of a small ridge. Two green eyes peered out from underneath his helmet on either side of a prominent Gallic nose, under which he kept a well-trimmed mustache. Next to him crouched his radioman, a long-service Foreign Legionnaire named Ngo. Originally from America rather than Vietnam on Old Earth, Ngo was a passable Vietnamese speaker due to his grandfather’s efforts. On Arcand’s other side stood his chief of staff, a short, stocky dark-haired German colonel named Karl-Heinz Schwartzengrosse who had also brought his radioman.
“Our guns can’t reduce the bunkers.” Arcand said.
“I should think not, Herr General,” Schwartzengrosse said, sniffing at Arcand’s frustration. “My pioneers built those bunkers, I would have them flogged if they collapsed under light guns.”
“That’s so helpful now that they’re in enemy hands, Herr Oberst,” Arcand said, tone dripping with acid.
“You cannot blame us for that, sir,” Schwartzengrosse said with mock-wounded dignity. “It’s pearls-before-swine to entrust good German fortifications to Italians. We’ve known that since 1943.”
Arcand snorted, suppressing a smile.
Another volley of artillery fire punctuated their conversation. As soon as the smoke subsided, the insurgents continued to fire unabated upon the besieging Zulus.
“Merde,” Arcand said, again. “All right, have the artillery lay in the smoke screen, have all mortars put HE on those bunkers. It will do even less than the artillery, but it should at least fuck with their aim. Tell the artillery to have their firing solution for Hill 392 prepared, as soon as Colonel nDlamini initiates his assault on Hill 371, start shelling Hill 392. That will suppress them while the Zulus are exposed on the other hillside.”
Schwartzengrosse nodded, and took the hand microphone from his radioman. He began issuing orders over the artillery radio net. Arcand, in turn, turned Ngo’s radio to his command frequency and raised the Zulu’s company commander.
“Assegai, this is Scipio, prepare to advance.”
One of the tallest and most heavily muscled Zulus led the rest into the attack. Four days of beard covered Alexander nDlamini’s angular jaw and his large brown eyes were wide with adrenaline. The epaulettes of his green and black fatigues bore five brown stripes indicating his rank as a colonel.
Alexander sprinted up the side of the hill, more than a hundred of his men arrayed behind him and to either side. He made it about ten meters up before ten riflemen overtook him on their way up the slope, a massive man with a gray beard shouting at them the whole way.
“Move, you bastards,” Adjutant-Chef Mjanwe screamed. “Will you let your prince do all your fighting for you?!”
Alexander smiled, a momentary flash of brilliant white against coal black skin. The hill was long and steep, with mud layered several inches thick. With each step the mud sucked at his boots. Rising with the clinging mud, the smell of rotting vegetation and death filled his nostrils. As the company plunged into the massive smoke cloud provided by the artillery, forms became indistinct while diffuse light lent everything on the hillside a surreal, nightmarish quality.
Alexander could barely see the men to his left and right, their dark green-gray-black uniforms blending them perfectly into the mist and mud. For several moments, all Alexander could hear was the squelch of his boots in the mud and his own ragged breathing as they trudged up the hill. Then the air was filled with the crack-thweet of bullets flying past them.
The shots were raggedly aimed, but they were close enough to cause Alexander’s stomach to feel like it was simultaneously crawling to his shoes and leaping out of his throat.
“Stay on line!” he shouted. “Marching fire!”
Matching deed to word, Alexander raised his rifle to his hip and fired off a round every time his left foot hit the ground. Muzzle flashes burst through the fog on a long line to his left and right. The uneven but persistent cacophony of return-fire drove the enemies’ heads down, even in their bunkers.
The angular outlines of the hillside bunkers loomed up out of the fog like massive headstones. Alexander looked around to see his subordinate officers and NCOs running about, positioning machine gun teams with oblique angles into the bunkers’ firing slits and urging riflemen forward on their bellies, hopefully beneath the fire of both friend and foe.
“Thenjiwe,” Alexander shouted, pulling his young radio operator down into a crater in the hill next to one of the machine gun teams. The boy, just turned seventeen, regarded him with wide eyes. With two metallic clacks, Alexander ejected his spent magazine and reloaded a fresh one as he spoke. “I won’t need the radio for a minute, stay here with the machine guns.”
Without waiting for a reply, Alexander joined the advancing riflemen, cradling his rifle across his arms so it stayed up and out of the mud even as the clinging, sticky terrain coated his uniform and invaded every crevice of his body. Enemy and friendly fire cracked and buzzed back and forth over his head.
Not ten meters to his left, a musket ball tore into a soldier’s shoulder with a sucking, cracking sound, nearly ripping the man’s arm off. The ruined limb hung by strips of skin and a shredded lattice work of ligament and bone that hardly resembled a shoulder socket. He began to scream, a terrible too-shrill sound. One of his fellows rolled laterally and began to work on him, Alexander could make out an injector in the man’s hand and the wounded man’s screams mercifully subsided after a thump-hiss sent an ampule of morphine coursing into his system.
Alexander rolled back over bumping against another soldier, a thin, younger man—
“Damn you, Thenjiwe,” Alexander said. “I said I didn’t need you!”
“Begging your pardon, iNkosi,” the young man said, using the isiZulu address for a lord with a toothy grin despite the deluge of fire and carnage around them. “You said you didn’t need the radio so I left it with one of the machine gun teams.”
“This is insubord—” a pair of near misses buzzed over them like angry hornets. “Eish! Damn you, little Cousin, let’s go.”
An arrow thunked into the mud where Alexander’s right foot had been just a moment earlier. They were now receiving volleys of arrows, modern small arms and black powder musketry all at once. At this range arrows and crossbow bolts could be just as dangerous as bullets. Perhaps more so, given that the insurgents probably dipped the arrowheads in shit and UN medical care, miraculous as it was, was still hours away from the front line.
The assault element reached a line of sandbags no more than five meters away from the bunkers. Alexander rolled onto his back, let his rifle lie across his chest, and retrieved a grenade from a pouch on his load-bearing vest.
“GRENADES!” He shouted.
Alexander pulled the pin on his grenade, let the metallic lever, colloquially known as the “spoon,” fly and counted to two as slowly as his racing heart would let him.
“Three,” he continued, as he propped up on an elbow but still low to the ground to avoid masking his own machine gunners’ fire, and chucked the grenade into the nearest bunker. The trajectory was more like a baseball pitch than a classic lob, but it worked. He was close enough that he actually heard the grenade clang against the back wall of the bunker then clunk to its floor.
Pressing himself flat to the ground face down, he grabbed Thenjiwe to make sure the boy was prone too. The concussion of the blast washed over him and he felt debris clatter none-too-gently against the top of his helmet. His grenade’s detonation was replicated in the hill’s other two bunkers. The machine gunners ceased firing over their comrade’s heads, knowing what was coming next.
Springing to his feet, Alexander sprinted toward the bunker, screaming one word, the same centuries-old battle cry that had shaken rival Nguni tribes, the Voortrekkers, the redcoats and communists alike; now revived on a new planet.
“NGADLA!”
The cry rose over the din of battle, echoed in dozens of throats as the Zulu charged the bunkers.
“NGADLA! NGADLA!”
Alexander, Thenjiwe close on his heels, sprinted around the side of the nearest bunker, and through its rear entrance. Only one man was still standing in the bunker. He was tall for a Cochin, and all Alexander could make out about him otherwise was that he was covered in blood and dirt, somehow still standing despite the grenade detonation. The insurgent stopped fumbling with a crossbow as Alexander burst through the back door. Dropping the weapon, the man pulled out a grenade, identical to the one Alexander had thrown seconds earlier.
The bloodied insurgent managed to get the pin out, but as his left hand came away from the metal sphere Alexander rammed his bayonet between the man’s second and third ribs with all the force in his body. The insurgent’s breath left him in a rasp and his bones cracked with his impact against the bunker wall, then Alexander twisted the rifle, changing his bayonet’s orientation from perpendicular to parallel with his enemy’s rib cage. Planting his foot on the man’s thigh, he pulled the bayonet out with a cracking and squelching sound and a gush of blood and viscera.
“NGADLA!” Alexander screamed, but then the grenade rolled out of the eviscerated insurgent’s hand.
Five, a detached piece of Alexander’s mind registered the standard fuse time for a frag grenade. He could try to climb back out of the bunker, or dive for it.
Four, Alexander dove, hitting the ground with jarring force, his fingers brushed the grenade, but it rolled out of his grasp further into the bunker.
Three, snaking along the floor, Alexander reached again and managed to get a firm grip on the baseball sized metal sphere, batting it into a pit in the center of the bunker made for just such an occasion.
Two, Alexander grabbed the eviscerated insurgent, who’d lost enough blood that he offered no resistance. Alexander man-handled the dying man to the ground, right on top of the pit, curled himself into a ball atop his enemy, shut his eyes tight and held his hands over his ears.
One—THOOM!
The blast turned his victim into a vaguely cohesive pile of meat and sent Alexander flying several feet into the air and over onto his back. Alexander hit the concrete floor with a huff of air. For several seconds he lay still, allowing the buzzing in his ears to subside and his vision to clear.
When he could see again, he saw that Thenjiwe was sprawled on his back, covered in blood and guts, clearly dazed but breathing normally. After a few seconds, Alexander heard voices speaking isiZulu. They sounded as if they were speaking from the other end of a long metal funnel, but one addressed him directly and Alexander realized they were just outside.
“Colonel nDlamini, are you in there?”
“Yes, we’re in here, this bunker is clear,” Alexander shouted to the door, his own voice sounding muffled and distorted in his ears. He climbed painfully to his feet, wiping entrails away from his eyes. He offered his free hand to Thenjiwe.
“Ngiybonga, sir,” Thenjiwe said, as he accepted Alexander’s hand.
“Wamukelekile, imbongolo engenayo,” Alexander said. You’re welcome, insubordinate ass.
Alexander’s adjutant-chef, Nkosiphindule Mjanwe, walked through the bunker door. The gnarled older warrior examined the carnage inside the bunker with aplomb. Seeing his commander coated in gore didn’t seem to faze him.
“Sir, this hilltop is taken,” he said, his voice matter of fact.
“Excellent, Adjutant-Chef,” Alexander said, as he finished pulling his radioman to his feet. “Engage Hill 392 and tell the machine gun teams to hurry.”
Mjanwe acknowledged the order with a crisp, “Yes, iNkosi,” then strode off rapidly to carry out his orders.
Turning back to the firing slit, Alexander pulled a gray cylindrical grenade with green tape on it from a pouch on his chest. Pulling the pin, he tossed it just outside the bunker. A cloud of green smoke billowed out of the small canister; the predesignated visual signal for having taken a mission objective. That done, he turned to his young cousin.
“Are you all right, Thenjiwe?” He asked, looking into the boy’s eyes, checking for signs of concussion.
“I’m fine, sir,” Thenjiwe protested, drawing away. “I feel fine.”
Alexander nodded.
“Good, because my radio is a hundred meters down the hill.” Alexander waved out the bunker’s firing slit. “And guess who’s running down there to bring it to me?”
“But, Cousin,” Thenjiwe said, looking balefully at Alexander. “Can’t the gunners bring it up with them?”
“This is a, ‘sir,’ conversation, Corporal,” Alexander said, eyes flashing with a good simulation of genuine anger. He jabbed a finger into the boy’s chest. “Next time I tell you to stay put, you stay put. What would your mother say to me if you were killed to no good end?”
“As long as all my wounds were in my front, you know as well as I do that your aunt would say, ‘well done.’”
Alexander patted his young cousin’s shoulder and smiled at him.
“Well spoken,” he said. “But you’re still going to go get my radio.”
Headquarters, UN Forces-Cochina
Khoi Dau Moi, Capital
Cochina Colony, Terra Nova
Since she was not attending mass, Mai didn’t bother with a more formal gown, or any of the western cut garb she wore while serving General Arcand. Her loose blue tunic and gray canvas pants marked her as any random peasant girl running errands, and though eschewing make-up couldn’t make her plain, it did make her look less, “westernized.”
Two green-and-black camo clad legionnaire nodded politely as she stepped out into the fog and humidity of the Cochinese morning, familiar with her routine. No guards followed her as she left the compound. If she tried to escape her father would die and her neighbors back in Thang Pho Xahn would suffer terrible retribution as well. Such restraints had proven more effective than sentinels or chains.
Mai monitored her gait, ensuring her stride was neither too bold nor too meek so as to draw the eye of bipedal predators. Mai loved her people, but she was under no illusion that the Cochinese were all good men. Despite the presence of sabretooth cats, cave bears and sundry other terrible carnivores on Terra Nova, Man had thus far proven himself the deadliest animal on two worlds.
The morning heat was already oppressive, rapidly coating Mai in sweat and soaking the armpits of her tunic and the crotch of her pants. The moist discomfort annoyed Mai, not for its own sake, but because it was a tactile reminder of how living in a climate-controlled cage had changed her.
With the general away on an operation, Mai had little to do at the compound. Not that her duties were all that onerous when he was present. She was a student of all things French and teacher of all things Cochinese, serving girl and social secretary, but only to Arcand himself and, unlike his predecessor, Arcand didn’t expect sexual favors of her. Since the old Frenchman didn’t have a boy to satiate his lust, either, Mai was unsure why she remained unmolested. Surely the UN had some miracle cure for impotence.
If he expected her loyalty in exchange for his unwillingness to rape her, he would be sadly disappointed. She’d willingly suffer a thousand more such indignities to rid her home of the godless Earthpigs.
Still, Arcand had been meticulously correct in his conduct toward her. He had even quelled misconduct from his subordinates towards her peers amongst the other captives. It was admirable enough that she was willing to pray that he died quickly when they finally drove the godless UN from Cochina. She believed such magnanimity to be her duty as a Christian.
The brackish smell of the river was heavily seasoned with the ammonia stench of dead fish as Mai approached Khoi Dau Moi’s economic heart. Men and women of all ages, dressed much as she was, moved from bamboo stand to stand, trading hauls of fish for pottery or bushels of rice for a cut of gamey water-buffalo meat and perhaps a few grams of opium or black powder under the table.
Thus the
haggling of the market went on, even under the pall of the occupation. The UN demand for opium hampered production of many other necessary agricultural goods, but it hadn’t, quite, destroyed their barter economy.
Mai kept the crosses atop St. Christopher’s Church in front of her. Five years ago, St. Christopher’s had been the largest structure in Cochina, bigger than any governor’s mansion, bigger even than the Buddhist shrine at Thành Phố Dồi Den. Now the ugly, synthetic monstrosities of the UN headquarters buildings all dwarfed it and everything else the Cochinese could construct with their own means.
The intended message of superiority, and permanence, was clear. But as Mai approached the stone façade of her church, she noted that it still stood despite the shadow of the UN’s tyranny.
A light shines in the darkness, she silently recited John’s gospel. And the darkness has not overcome it.
She pushed the doors of the church open with a creak. There was no mass on Wednesday morning, so she found the pews empty. Fortunately, Father Duc was fiddling with something upon the altar. She was glad she’d caught him. When he wasn’t actively engaged at his church, Duc spent his time out amongst his flock providing counseling, or simply lending a hand with this chore or that, despite his advanced years.
Since Duc considered every Cochinese he could reach on foot or cart part of his flock, he was popular with Buddhists as well as Christians, and even had the grudging respect of the communists in Khoi Dau Moi.
“Mai,” Duc said, smiling. “What brings you to Church on a Wednesday morning? You can’t have amassed so many sins in three days as to need confession again.”
Mai bowed her head respectfully, but then put her hand out to shake his, a slightly more masculine gesture than was customary for a girl her age greeting a patriarchal figure. Duc showed no surprise at her extended hand, or at the thick slip of folded paper she passed when he grasped it.
“I was hoping I could join you on your rounds, today,” she said. “I have no pressing duties at headquarters.”