Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  A short curve of apple-red hair is visible under the dirt-smeared rim of her dull, beige helmet, pushing a red curl, a little intriguing bit of womanly color, out into the crisp and tart morning air. Her muddy faceplate is pulled half-way back. It perches on a small but not quite delicate, and in fact decidedly imperfect nose. Her lips are full, and slightly parted. Zofia is also exhausted by five days of killing and running, of leading and hiding and too little sleep. She’s trained and marked for combat and mucked over with filth. Yet she takes his every breath away.

  She stirs slightly, spilling a second crimson curl from beneath a beige helmet rim. She doesn’t wake. It was a hard day’s night before the current three-hour rest period, with images of pursuing enemy threats showing red on every company HUD. As they had all the past five days.

  Even now a faint matrix reflects onto her clear white face. It flickers soft blue symbology for friendlies gathered in the ditch, but dozens more red threat markers tag nearby enemy, just rising and starting to stir to the day. The milling locusts across the sweetgrass meadow are way too cocky, or dumb. They’re carelessly exposing their whole position to passive e-surveillance. Their moving presence dances eerie and electric on her HUD and hence atop her closed eyelids.

  As Jan watches her fitful sleep he remembers more from when he was hit while running away. How she held cover fire while two strong men ran to yank him up by the underarms where he lay wounded and waiting to die. He felt a tsunami of searing pain, an eternity of waiting for a kill shot in the head or back. Fear of the wolf of war pursuing the ungainly five-legged creature the three men made as they hell-bent stumble-ran, while Zofia kneeled to give nipping cover fire.

  Lurching past burning barley his good leg churned, hardly touching ground past gushing, flashing amber stalks. Confused, temples pounding, jolts of intense pain traveling up his hurt leg, calf torn open and smoking where the white-hot fragment was still searing deeper into his flesh.

  A third man scooped up his maser, shoved it into his hands as they reached low cover of a natural drain at the edge of the barley field. Said matter-of-factly, without judgment, “I think you might need this, sir,” before whirling down into a classic prone shooting position to crack off plasma rounds at enemies suddenly hesitating, then howling from burning wounds of their own. ‘That’s when I saw her, alone and exposed. Outside cover.’

  Only then did Zofia race after them across the field. Zigging then zagging. Kinetic rounds and erratic maser pulses snapping never-to-be-harvested barley around her. She dive-rolled to a stop beside Jan. Checked him over for hidden wounds. Saying nothing to him. Just doing her job. A consummate military professional. Smelling of confidence and competence and lethal surety. ‘She was born to command. Not like me at all.’

  Jan reluctantly pulls his gaze away from the young lieutenant’s curling, lithe and almost feline form. His eyes are blue and brilliant now, shining hot with hate, startling the big sergeant by reminding him of an unstable star he saw once up close, hovering on the cusp of going nova. The glare of Jan’s hate warms the big sergeant with confidence. If his enemies could see Jan’s face in this clear moment, look into those hard blue nova eyes, they would surely be very afraid.

  ‘I vow that I’ll not fail these fighters again! Or Zofia.’ Jan means it. He’s determined to save Madjenik, to live up to what Zofia sees in him and demands of him. Determined at least to lead the company out of this ditch and across that fucking sweetgrass meadow. To do that, here and now. Yet he just can’t help the flush of self-doubt that follows instantly. ‘But what if I do fail? What if I make a mistake that gets more fighters killed? Gods, what if I get her killed?’

  Doubt and self-loathing returns before he can push it back under cover. Then somehow he manages to wrestle it down, reaffirming inner control, suppressing his paralysis of mind and confidence. It’s a fight he has every day, even every hour, ever since his failure at the MDL. He thinks it’s the fading moda. It isn’t. It’s a struggle to admit his better self. A struggle that’s going to make him a very good officer. If only he lives through the coming fight in the sweetgrass.

  At last, he comes back to the apple orchard to stay, realizing that he was drifting off and cursing himself again for weakness. This time, he pushes it down and deep. ‘Damn! I need more moda. And real soon. We all do, if we’re going to make it. Well, there’s sure to be a good supply of it on those boys in green weaves across the meadow. We’ll just have to take it from them.’

  Jan looks one last time at the unaware men and boys in pale green, rising to meet their last dawn and hour. Feeling their last pleasure, before their last pain. ‘An ancient poet said that each of us bears his own Hell within. Maybe, but it’s my turn now to play at damnation. I shall make a new and hotter fire to scorch this swarm of locust!’ This is his other self. The ruthless and efficient combat leader struggling to emerge, to take charge of him and of Madjenik’s future.

  He knows that in the next few minutes he’ll cover the vanilla grass with screams and blood, and spill the offal of sons of a far-off world. He’ll advance Death’s pale flags to plant his poles in unsuspecting and undeserving youths far from home. How can he do this thing? Even to these careless ‘locust’ boys swarming across a meadow that’s not their own?

  ‘Am I better than those terrible, distant persons who did this to us, to me, these past five days? Disrupting my life and ripping my world apart forever, as I’ll now destroy the lives of young strangers? As I forever eclipse the love of their woeful mothers with Death’s dark disk?’

  These aren’t royal Oetkerts, the ruling dynasty who started the war. They’re not from the upper three castes of the Imperium, who gain from it the most. They’re not even regular RIK troops, the green legions who bear its brunt and its casualties. They’re certainly not an elite unit of Shaka Pyotr’s political army, the Special Action Commando or SAC. Those gray-clad killers are hated as much or more insider the Grün Imperium as outside it. Although their reputation for cruelty and capricious murder is growing all across Orion, apace with fresh reports of the vicious role they’re playing in the Krevan War.

  These boys are conscripts from Uri. Rear area scrubs filling out behind the main assault by Rikugun regular divisions. They’re tasked with lesser duties, with follow-on and mopping-up shattered units like Madjenik. He doesn’t know any of them, these farfolk dressed in pale green weaves. Can he kill them just for being here? Just for pissing on his native sweetgrass? Can he give the order to end them forever, as night’s darkness crumbles into this new day on Genève?

  ‘Yes, godsdamn it! Because it’s different! Genève is my home. Our land, our world. Not theirs. They came to reave our worlds. They started it! Now they must pay! Now they must die!’

  They didn’t start it, really. Not these men and boys anyway. But a child’s morality is all that’s left Jan as he hugs an ochre ditch lip and contemplates pure bloody murder. Men have had this same argument with themselves ever since creeping out onto the Serengeti plain after they invented war among the trees, and wanted more. It’s what war reduces moral reasoning to once we’re really in it. We’re like troops of monkeys throwing nuts at each other from separate trees. Then rocks. Then clubbing and biting each other to death in a collective frenzy. Then setting fire to the whole forest rather than let the other troop have any of it. “Well, you know,” we always say after it’s over, “they started it.”

  What matters far more is that Jan’s blood is up and hot, and that blood wants blood. He wants vengeance for his world and his lost fighters, but also for his shame and lost self. Maybe after that he can get Madjenik’s last survivors out of this soggy, filthy ditch. Away from the little orchard just opening to the rising dawn warming his back and exposing his hidden position.

  ‘To go where?’ To Toruń in the far north woods, the last possible refuge left to any KRA or civilian running from the Rikugun horde that’s advancing across all Genève. If Toruń is even there anymore. If the wondrous Arbor City of the locals
’ deepest pride is not a blackened ruin.

  ‘How? I don’t know how.’ He only knows that Madjenik can’t stay here. Not for one hour more. The camo won’t hold and there’s more movement already in the enemy camp. More sound, too. Beyond the usual clanky matins and dull breakfasting, his HUD is picking up weapons and huff-duff warming up. And even his unaided ears hear a sergeant’s barked orders rousing the last and laziest sleepers.

  ‘Now! We must strike now.’ He retracts the periscope, folding it in on itself with a series of soft clicks. Across an open field is a careless enemy, his double-moon flashes glinting in the sharp early morning sunlight. ‘A whole company milling in the open. I’ve got them, the fools!’

  Jan swivels his head, looking down to his own ragged company. He’s more determined than ever before in his life, about anything. He knows that the same mood fills the ditch behind and all around him. These men and women have faced death, too. Many times over the past five days. They know now that there are much worse things. That makes Madjenik very dangerous.

  Jan rubs his left thumb against the handle of a Q-carbon knife firmly sheathed against his boot. He’s certain what he must do next. All hesitation and doubt is gone. Doubt is the enemy of command, of a controlled rage he needs to lead this fight. Gruff resolve alone shows through his HUD as he pulls it over his face, sending command data streaming through a short-range tactical net, enemy symbology sent to glow eerily red on morning displays across all Madjenik visors.

  “Let’s put some hurt on these mulkku!” he snarls, sliding to the bottom of the slick-sided ditch in an ochre ooze. His troopers are instantly argus-eyed. All suddenly look hard and grim, slamming aerographite chargers into open magazines of maser assault rifles. Unclipping knives.

  Meadow

  The familiar soft click-and-purr of the charged-and-ready crystal masers brings Zofia to full alert. She sniffs cautiously, breathing in apple and sweetgrass. She checks the command-link for fresh data. In seconds she assesses the position and situation. She stays prone, but ready.

  Only then does she steal a sly glance at Jan. He looks stern and intense but handsome as ever, at least to her. Even more attractive for his fierce resolution and killer look in this moment of decision. It all flashes through his tinted visor. She indulges thoughts of more than looming combat, for just a moment. It could be one of her last.

  ‘I told him that I went back for him because he’s my captain, our leader. But why can’t he see that I also went back because it was him? Does he even know that I’m a woman? He used to, before the war. But he never shows it anymore. Not since this all started. Not since the MDL.’

  She’s had this thought before, usually while waking up like this and not fully in control. She always pushes it down and clamps it closed, the same way he fights off and imprisons self-doubt. She’s a professional, a top graduate of the Aral Academy. So she knows how to shake off all personal thoughts in a combat zone. She does it now, consciously focusing for a firefight that humming masers tell her is coming real soon. Fully alert, she shifts from prone to a tense crouch at the edge of the ditch. It makes her look like a young panther readying to spring upon its prey.

  The big unshaven sergeant watches Jan intently, slowly biting into a fallen apple, deep red and half-rotten, runny with fermented juice. He chews methodically, looking at first glance like a sleepy koala. His hard and alert eyes belie his slovenly appearance. ‘They’re narrow and vaguely fish-like,’ Jan thinks. ‘No, more shark-like. Yes, that’s it! He has a natural killer’s eyes. But something else, too. What?’

  The ‘Double Moons’ are real sloppy soldiers. Their pickets are inattentive, like the one who shouldered his maser to take a piss while Jan watched. As if he was pissing in training camp back on Uri, returned from a night on the town and full of sated lust and cheap ale. Too many of the rest are closely bunched around a field canteen at the center of the camp, showing as a dense smear of entangled red light on Jan’s HUD. No properly trained or experienced infantry would act like this in a combat zone, certainly not first echelon RIK. Not any truly professional troops.

  ‘Yet we did it, too, and paid a heavy price for it on the first day.’ Jan wonders why, then answers himself. ‘No one in Orion has been to war in a long time. Nearly 300 years. Maybe we overestimate these Grünen? They’re just as inexperienced at war as us. And this batch are fresh conscripts, not a SAC or Purity death squad or even RIK regulars. Still, they shouldn’t be here. It’s war now, here on Genève. They all made their choice. We’re all making final choices now.’

  Jan knows that even these carefree, rookie enemies shouldn’t be underestimated. Even conscripts are a heavily-armed threat the like of which hasn’t been seen in the Krevan systems for nearly three centuries. With a silent thought he outlines the crowded canteen with a throbbing red rectangle in his HUD, marking it as a top priority on all linked Madjenik target screens. That includes stragglers and strays, who Zofia tapped in to the system as each arrived and was vetted.

  Jan doesn’t know or believe that he’s a natural tactician and leader. If he did, he would understand Zofia’s approving nod at his targeting choice. Officer training bored him as a young candidate, then shamed him when he failed out of the KRA Academy on Aral. Memory of that lost opportunity kicks at him with life-and-death meaning and purpose now. He gives himself no credit for the past five days. Wounded and hurting, he has led a shattered company farther through enemy-infested territory than anyone had a right to expect, dodging vastly superior forces. No small feat. Even he might be impressed, if he only knew the truly high odds against it.

  Nor does he know that already Madjenik’s survivors and even the misfit strays will follow him through fire or high water if he asks. Follow him to the stars, if they ever get off burning Genève. Doesn’t know that’s why the big sergeant is always close and hard staring.

  Jan isn’t thinking about that yet. He’s too busy with a HUD tally of blue friendlies and much larger numbers of red threats. He opens a direct-to-company-relay, while speaking softly out loud for the benefit of those crouching nearby. “Alert! Madjenik attacks in five minutes. Repeat, five minutes. ‘Snakes’ go in first, then we make a straight-up firing line. Get ready.”

  Everyone snaps to, focusing on their HUD squad and platoon or specialty orders while screening out every ambient sight or sound. The bearded sergeant stops munching. He’s down to the core anyway. A chunk of red peel hangs still from a corner of his half-open mouth, lodged between two dirty and oddly uneven teeth. He stiffens, gaping at his captain like a love-sick girl. His big hands raise up and firmly hold a now low-humming maser. It’s warm and ready.

  “Time to show these mulkku how we Krevans fight,” Jan again uses a crude anatomical profanity. He says it without really thinking. Even though he never said it out loud before today.

  It actually fits, since all RIK troops are males. Krevans learned that fact to their great surprise the first time they met this enemy in combat. All boys and men. No women fighters. It’s not like that in their own little army, or in any other military in Orion. Women wear the uniform alongside men without anyone giving it a second thought. It’s been that way for a millennium, everywhere but in the Grün Imperium with its deep legacy of Broderbund misogyny and slavery.

  “We’re going to hit ‘em fast, hard and upright. Don’t stop shooting ‘till I tell you.” The small firefight for an empty field Jan’s about to start won’t decide the fate of this or any Krevan world. It won’t win the war, or much delay losing it. Yet he knows that Madjenik will fight when he gives the order, will kill madly with every weapon it has, in gouts of gore. Die if necessary, on his order. As it most likely will be for most of them before all this losing ends.

  Why? The larger outcome is already decided. Sparsely populated Southland continent was overwhelmed by the first invasion wave. There’s nothing anyone can do to save or win the “Battle for Northland” either, if that’s even what people will later call it. That chance is paved over by t
he brutal realities of clear RIK superiority at all levels of military capability, and by the Rikugun’s newfound combined arms tactics and efficiency that surprised and stunned the KRA. Paved over as well by over 420,000 KRA lives surrendered on Genève alone, and two million more civilian dead. A normal year of Death’s reaping and Genèvens saying farewell in the Life Temples to those whose Youthspan has waned and failed. Now that many in five days of war.

  How many more dead will there be to wail over before this ends? How many more terribly wounded in body, mind or soul? How many tens or hundreds of millions? Jan has no idea. He only knows that Madjenik won’t fight from a false hope of somehow claiming victory out of this calamity. Not beyond maybe reclaiming this one summer meadow for Genève for an hour or two, before abandoning it again. It won’t fight for any lost hope.

  But it will fight. To stay alive for another hour or a day, maybe another week. It will fight to defy the enemy’s every straining effort to kill it. It will fight until it can fight no more, forever. It will fight for hate’s sake. Maybe it can hurt its enemy, too, if only a little. Hit back while it can, before the company dies. For everyone knows that Madjenik is done for. That it shouldn’t have survived this long. It’s all anyone in Madjenik has left. It’s everything. Hate is everything.