by Matt Forbeck
“What’s the next?” Nathan had asked.
“Getting them out of this damned war alive. But that’s your job, not mine.”
“Sergeant?” Parente said to Mitch. “Would you receive grace?”
Even in the middle of war, at the moment before they were most likely to die, the chaplain kept reaching out. Nathan had to respect that even if he knew the man’s efforts were as doomed as those of his platoon.
“You’ll never reach men like Hunter,” Nathan had said to Parente. “He’s too far gone.”
“The Brotherhood is patient. In the long run, faith outlasts all.”
Mitch had heard that and snorted. “In the long run, Padre, we’re all dead.” Then he’d stared out over no-man’s-land. “For us, maybe in the short run too.”
Mitch ignored the priest and lit his cigarette. El Jesus grinned at Parente, pride and pity warring on his face. “Top’s going straight to hell.”
Parente gave a resigned sigh and trod off down the trench to offer solace to whatever other men he might find. El Jesus winked at Nathan, and the captain found it hard not to smile at the man’s infectious mood. Despite having orders to march into the maw of the Cog war machine, the man shone like the blazing sun in Mars’s red sky. Nathan wondered if he’d learned this while living in the Danger Zones of San Dorado or if he’d just been born that way. He wished he could summon a fraction of the man’s heart.
Instead, Nathan pulled another periscope from next to the ladder in front of him and cleaned the lens on this one too. The dead soldier behind him had given up on being able to see out of the thing and had paid for his impatience with his life. Nathan took his time, making sure the optics were clean, then raised the top of the scope over the trench’s lip.
The ATCs were closer now, and the Cogs’ 880 was hammering their lines harder, softening them up. Soon the shells would stop, but only when the ATCs drew close enough to disgorge their lethal cargo: a full squad of Bauhaus soldiers each.
“They’re nearly with us,” he said to his men.
The Capitol guns would kick in soon, Nathan knew. The commander on the hill behind them, on which the nearest gun was mounted, was careful with his ammunition. He had only so many shells and didn’t care to blow them on long-range shots that probably would only shower their already-filthy foes with mud. He liked to wait until each shot would do the most harm.
Nathan hoped he wouldn’t wait too long.
“You know your top kick used to be an officer,” Nathan said to El Jesus. He took one last look through the periscope, then brought it down.
El Jesus raised a large eyebrow at Nathan’s words.
“That’s right. We went through the Academy. Was gonna be one hell of an officer and a fine human being. One morning he woke up with a screaming case of I don’t give a fuck.”
Nathan reached down and pulled on a tarp bundled up over something tucked under his ladder. It gave way, revealing a waterlogged case of whiskey beneath it. The rain had long since soaked away the print on the box, but the contents inside were still safe.
“Give a fuck about what?” said Mitch. “Every yard we take, every Cog we kill, all we do is make some fat fuck’s stock go up two points.”
“Yeah, but it’s all about the money, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
Mitch snorted. “Ends up that way when they give out cash bonuses to officers based on body count.”
Nathan opened the case and pulled out a bottle. He looked down at the label and the Martian brand emblazoned across it, the triple moons riding high above the stylized red planet.
“You know,” Nathan said to Mitch, “sometimes I get the impression you don’t believe in the rightness of our mighty corporation.”
It was a weak joke. Nathan had lost any idealism about his job too. He found it hard to remember what it had been like to feel that way about Capitol. The last time he knew he’d had it had been during his training with Mitch at the Academy.
That had been several worlds ago.
He wondered if the Bauhausers on the other side of the battlefield cared for their corporate masters back on Venus. Or were they like the soldiers dug into the trench with him here, worn souls, tired of war—of life too—but ready to do their job at any cost? But did any of them truly know the price?
Nathan didn’t expect Mitch to reply, but his old friend surprised him.
“They don’t pay me to believe, sir.”
Nathan handed the bottle to Mitch. The rain washed the dust from it as it passed between them.
“No, they don’t,” Nathan said. “They pay you to fuck shit up.”
Mitch almost smiled at that. Instead, he took a long pull from the bottle, then handed it back to Nathan.
The captain tipped a bit of the warm whiskey into his mouth. It tasted rotten, but it burned all the way down into his stomach. The warmth spread from there throughout his body, from the top of his head to his toes.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then passed the bottle to El Jesus. He knew the corporal would take a belt and then pass the bottle down the line. It was a ritual, perhaps a hollow one, but one the soldiers would respect. At this point, it was all they had left.
3
Something in the back of Nathan’s head told him that the time for action had come. Perhaps he could unconsciously feel the vibrations in the earth from the treads of the Bauhaus ATCs. Or it might have been a sixth sense he’d formed about such things after having been in countless battles.
Maybe he was just sick of waiting.
“Get up!” He had to bellow to make himself heard over the nearly constant roar from the big guns spitting death over their heads. “On your feet! Get on your feet!”
Mitch and El Jesus stood straight up and began a last-second weapons check. As they did, those nearest them followed suit, and then those nearest them, and on down the line.
The bottle passed faster now. A soldier stood up to receive it, took a swig, then passed it on to the soldier next to him. He then checked his weapons and slapped a fresh, fully loaded clip into his assault rifle.
Nathan watched the procession for a moment, then reached out and nudged the man nearest him, who’d gotten tired of watching and sat down. The captain had just gotten the others to their feet, and he couldn’t have them all following this man’s lead.
“On your feet, ladies!” Nathan hollered. “Show those Cogs your war face!” Word passed on down the line.
El Jesus flashed all his teeth in a boyish grin, then pumped his shotgun.
Holy Cardinal, Nathan thought. He is young. He’s actually enjoying this.
Finally, a soldier took the last pull from the bottle. After nearly gagging on the backwash, he smashed the bottle on the ground and raised his rifle to the ready. That seemed to be a signal to the others that the time to hit it had come.
As a unit, the drab-clothed soldiers hauled themselves up their ladders, pushing the ends of their guns up over the lip of the trench before them. In an instant, the trench bristled with them, sticking up like the quills on a porcupine’s back.
Standing alongside his soldiers, each of them perched on top of a flimsy ladder or another makeshift stool, Nathan stared out into the hellish fields of no-man’s-land. The never-ending rain had made a swamp of the once-green fields. Puddles of water glistened in the sharp glow of tracer bullets, flares, and exploding mortar shells. Some of them joined together into bodies of water large enough to qualify as lakes if they’d been more than a foot deep.
Despite the chaos happening overhead, though, Nathan saw nothing stirring on the ground before him. A part of him, he realized, had wished that the ATCs would be waiting for him and his men when they topped the edge of the trench. To see the enemy would be a welcome change from the usual routine of duck and cover.
The big Capitol gun thundered then, signaling the start of the fight in earnest. Nathan missed the flash, but the crump got his attention. The shell exploded in a violent mess of mud and the bodies of whichever p
oor soldiers had been in its way.
Tracer fire zinged overhead again, closer this time.
“Let’s step to it! Lock and load!” Nathan readied his rifle. Although wet, it was clean and ready, and he knew its cool barrel would soon run hot.
On Nathan’s signal, the men stepped up on the wooden, mud-caked rail running the eastern side of the trench, then slapped their rifles down over it.
They knew not to fire yet, but Nathan feared one of them would lose his nerve and start shooting before he ordered it. “Easy, lads,” he said, trying to soothe their jangling nerves. “Wait for it. Easy.”
Nathan peered through the rain-soaked night again, straining to see the Bauhaus soldiers as a Bauhaus ATC roared up to the thickest part of the snarls of barbed wire to disgorge its cargo. The golden Bauhaus cogs emblazoned on its front and sides glinted in the glare of the overhead flares that had turned this rain-soaked night into a bright, black-mantled day. The massive machine—all flat, armored sides and sharp, angry angles—trained its main machine gun on the trench and laid down a sweeping sheet of covering fire as the main hatch burst open on the side closest to the trench.
A mob of Bauhaus troops stormed down the ramp made from the ATC’s open hatch. In the absolute madness of the moment, it struck Nathan how much they looked like his own soldiers. Maybe the months stuck here on this horrible ball of mud had worn off all the bits that made them different.
In the end, they were all soldiers sent off to fight a war for people who’d never held a gun in their lives. They had more in common with one another than they did with their superiors. At the moment, though, none of that mattered more to Nathan and his soldiers than killing these bastards before they killed them instead.
The Cogs came fast and low, charging straight for them. For a moment, they didn’t seem human, but that had to have been a trick of the light. Or maybe it was Nathan’s training as a soldier kicking in, dehumanizing his foes so they’d be easier to kill.
He decided it was time to give in to that training.
“Let ’em have it, lads!” he shouted.
The Capitol line erupted in a fusillade, and the Bauhaus troops responded in kind. This was war, all right, the keen moment of battle they’d dreaded for so long. Nathan couldn’t help feeling relieved that it was finally here.
Men fell on both sides of the line, most without a word. Those who weren’t killed instantly by the bullets that struck them were often knocked out or went into shock. A few, though, maintained consciousness and bellowed in horror and pain.
Those were the worst. The dead Nathan could ignore. The dying distracted everyone around them, and in the middle of a battle he couldn’t afford any distractions. That sort of thing would just end up with more of his men killed.
Nathan blocked out the screams as best he could and kept firing, firing, firing, letting the bullets blast out of his gun as fast as they would go.
Then El Jesus spotted something.
“Incoming!” the big corporal yelled.
Nathan peered into the darkness in front of them to see if he could pick out what had alarmed El Jesus so much. He couldn’t make out a damn thing but bullets, mud, and blood.
Then he noticed that the mist toward the horizon had turned thick and yellow and was billowing their way.
“Gas!” Nathan yelled. “Get your masks on!”
Nathan dropped to the ground and struggled with his mask for a moment before pulling it into place. This was the sort of thing he’d been trained for back in boot camp so many years ago, but this was no drill. If he failed to get the mask on in time—or put it on incorrectly—he would be dead. He had no room for error.
Satisfied that his mask was snug and functional, Nathan glanced about to see most of his soldiers managing to get their gear on as well. One man farther down the line still lagged behind the others, though. He’d just gotten his mask out of his bag when the yellow smoke washed up to the edge of the trench and then spilled into it, filling it in an instant.
The soldier, a man named Bisley, took in a lungful of the pale yellow stuff and dropped to the mucky excuse for ground. He began to cough in short, violent hacks. A moment later he vomited, then fell over on his back, blood frothing from his mouth in dark pink bubbles.
The soldiers who had managed to get their masks on in time looked to Nathan for guidance. His voice useless under his mask, he signaled for them to stay put. Even with the enemy this close, their best defense was the mud in which they’d dug their trench. If they could leave as little of themselves exposed to the impending assault as possible, they might survive long enough to take out the attackers as they closed.
Nathan’s troops vaulted themselves back up their ladders and leveled their rifles over the field of battle like the combat-tested veterans they were. And then everything broke down.
Unable to communicate with his soldiers by voice or by hand signals, Nathan lost all control over them. They had to rely on their training or instinct, or both. In some cases, it seemed they fell back on neither.
One soldier began firing blind into the thinning mist, shooting at the invisible Bauhausers who had to be out there somewhere. Most of the others, hoping their compatriot had seen something, joined in, chattering away at the smoke in short bursts from their assault rifles.
Whether the Capitol soldiers hit anything, Nathan couldn’t tell. He held his gun still but ready, conserving his ammunition and waiting for a target to present itself. He saw Mitch doing the same, slapping the soldiers nearest to him to their senses. El Jesus kept near his sergeant, his shotgun still silent, although the end of it jerked back and forth at every sound.
Then gunfire blasted back at the troops from the thickest parts of the mist. Capitol troops dropped into the mud, parts of them blown off by bullets. Some screamed for a few moments before death took them. Others fell into horrible moans that seemed they might never end.
The remaining Capitol troops returned fire at their unseen assailants. Bullets spattered Nathan with mud as he blasted away into the retreating swirls of smoke. Somewhere in the middle of it all, he heard the deep growl of a massive engine amid the staccato crack-crack-cracks of rifles and chain guns.
The piss-yellow smoke fading now—the Bauhaus troops wore no protection against it—Nathan ripped off his gas mask. The damned masks got in the way more than they helped when it came to fighting like this. The poison burned his eyes and nostrils and tickled the bottom of his lungs, but he could see clearly again, unhampered by the mask’s narrowed vision.
The ATC’s machine gun fell silent as its troops closed on the trench, the gunner unwilling to cut down his own troops to get at the ones hunkered down in the mud.
4
The Bauhaus troops came at the trench hard and fast. As much as Nathan hated the Cogs, he had to admire their training. They didn’t flinch in the face of the Capitol defensive fire, never turning back for even an instant if a fellow next to them dropped to the ground, dead before his face hit the mud. A moment later, they were at the lip of the trench and then were leaping in.
Nathan took down two of the Cogs before they reached him, but another came racing in right behind his fallen friends. Nathan jumped back into the trench and waited for the Bauhauser to reach the muddy lip before dropping him with a shot to the chest.
On either side, Bauhaus troops descended into the trench to do battle with the Capitol soldiers. There were just too many of them coming in too fast to stop them all. Gunfire burst out all around the captain now, and he hugged the trench’s muddy wall to avoid the worst of it.
To the south end of the trench, a Bauhauser tore apart a Capitol private with a knife. Behind him, another Capitol soldier stabbed him in the back with a trenching tool. Blood erupted from the Bauhauser’s mouth, and the soldier who’d killed him thrust up the small shovel in triumph. A moment later, a burst from an assault rifle brought him down too.
Nathan glanced behind him and saw that the way was clear. He opted to do the only respons
ible thing when faced with such odds.
“Fall back right!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Fall back right!”
Facing out into no-man’s-land, right would be to the north along the trench, away from the bulk of the Bauhaus invaders. If he could get his soldiers together and find better ground on which to make a stand, they might have a chance to survive the day. Otherwise, with the visibility as poor as it was, the Cogs would pick them apart.
As he broke north, calling out the new orders, Nathan ran into a private named Robertson. He slapped the man on the shoulder and pointed for him to move, but the soldier refused to move his weapon from where he had it trained back down the trench.
Nathan slapped the man again.
“I’m not retreating!”
Nathan recognized the defiance in the soldier’s eyes. He’d spent most of the last few years of his life trying to beat it out of his men, although he knew he’d never succeed. The ideals of freedom were too deeply ingrained in the minds of Capitol’s citizens for even its best soldiers to ever surrender them.
Many times, Nathan had realized that this dedication to freedom set Capitol apart from Bauhaus, Mishima, and Imperial. The other megacorporations—even the Brotherhood—treasured obedience and the hierarchy of their societies. Not so with Capitol. It was their worst weakness and their greatest strength.
“Retreat, hell!” Nathan said to the man. “We’re advancing in the opposite direction!”
The other soldier smiled at that and lowered his weapon. As he did, a barrage of bullets tore into him and drove him to the ground.
One of the shots ricocheted off Nathan’s helmet, knocking it away into the mud and sending him sprawling along the trench.
Stunned, Nathan reached up to wipe the water and muck from his face. His hands came away covered in his own blood, the red liquid blending with the black dirt. His ears rang so loudly that he wondered if the bullet had turned his helmet into a bell, with his skull as the clapper stuck inside.