by Kali Altsoba
More shots hit the mark ... an ankle is scored by a full-power maser and a foot slices off ... over there, a knee shatters, sinew and bone expelled in an explosion of flesh cooked-from-the-inside-out by intense microwaves ... a scream of surprise and sudden pain ... another ... and another ... and another ... A lone, athletic, half-dressed boy runs out of the smoke toward the ditch, then stops. Bewildered. Uncertain. Afraid. Like a deer chased by a moving forest fire.
“There’s one, on the left. Shoot him! He dropped his weapon! Quick, cut him down before he finds it!” It’s the stubbly sergeant giving the order.
An electric pulse flashes out and hits the mark, taking off a hand ... click-clack, click-clack, pssst! pssst! ... two quick maser bolts fly over smoking grass ... goring a thigh where a raw hole’s erupting ... something red spurting out ... click-clack, click-clack ... hmmmm, pssst! pssst! ... gut shot now ... the runner drops ... He’ll never leap a college hurdle race again ... he’ll not make love, greet an orange dawn, kiss his mother’s downy cheek as he leaves for school.
“Ta mère!” One shooter who got him shouts it out, then again in longhand. “Nique ta mère! Fuck your mother!” It’s almost as if he knows. He keeps on yelling and shooting, cursing all Grünen to hell. And their whore mothers. And their mothers’ whore mothers.
“He’s done! Next! Keep firing.” Zofia gives the new target order. “What’s that moving on the right?” someone calls out from 10 meters to her left, along the ditch firing line.
Fifteen stick figures in green ... more red triangles on HUDs, inside the smoke roll ... so many! ... an arm separates, falls from its shoulder, drops onto hard-packed sod with a thud ... now a head explodes ... a lost body crumples straight down like a marionette with its strings suddenly cut ... A few return shots, at last! ... then a lot more, zinging by ... That one was close!
“We’re in a fight now, boys and girls!” It’s the master sergeant, face of black stubble and with dull murder in his all-black eyes, like a shark’s stare. Merciless. Amoral. Fatal. Behind him a Madjenik sniper tumbles hard out of a tree and splays dead in the ditch, like a broken toy.
“Incoming!” A thin youth in the firing line clutches at a dark wine stain spreading across his chest over beige weaves. His ‘limbs fall slack with chill,’ his arms release his maser, and with a resentful moan his life and spirit slips onto shady ground thence off his mortal coil.
Kinetic rounds join the fray ... whistling, whistling ... smack, smack, thuuudd, craaaaaak! ... A tree splinters behind the mortar crews ... apples falling all around ... the master-sergeant picks one up, raises his visor and jams the broken fruit into his mouth, not biting down ... not yet ... holds it clamped between clenched jaws, visor up like a tired welder ... shooting his maser.
“They’re firing high!” Corporal Tom Hipper shouts, breaking sound discipline like all the rest of the bellowing, howling, terrified men and women in Madjenik’s short firing line, and the others, shouting and dying across the grass. His plain brown eyes are wide with joy in life and battle, with combat’s rushing excitement. Shouting anything and everything gives voice to a rush of adrenalin and combat thrill as he never felt before. He’s flush with sex and death, so that his groin swells and throbs. It’s no more than a natural physical effect of fast rising blood pressure, of pumping blood and adrenalin pushed out by his brain and body in response to mortal danger. So natural and so sudden Tom is utterly unaware that he has the hardest erection of his life.
Everyone is shouting now. No one listens. No one sees. Senses fill with the sounds and fury of battle and pounding hearts and a red rage throbbing in veins behind eyes, hammering like a beaten drum in either ear. It’s the smells they remember most clearly later: urine and wet clay, crushed sweetgrass, mashed apples, the windborne scent of a late summer mockmeat barbeque.
Still as a dead cat, about 50 meters ahead and to Zofia’s left is the erect body of a large black-skinned Grün fighter. He’s clearly an officer from the elite citizen class of the Waldstätte core world of Uri. He’s quite dead, but impaled on a triangular shard of carbyne sent hurtling by the explosion of the snakes. Gravity is conspiring with material strength of the carbyne splinter to keep him upright, like a propped-open cellar door. Every so often some Madjenik shooter forgets the dead man is dead and lops off another piece. Cut red meat lies all around his feet.
“I smell cooked apples.” A small brunette says it, behind where Tom Hipper is standing. The thought’s a stray. The sticky smell coming out of the burning orchard reminds her of the fresh pies she baked with her mother, then set on a big wood table to cool. She takes aim at a running Grünen, arms waving wildly in the air over his head, trying to surrender. She shoots him down. He crumples. ‘Maybe not like mother’s kitchen after all.’
Across the meadow boiling smoke roils sideways and out from where the canteen and half the enemy stood barely a half minute before. It’s racing toward Madjenik like a line squall pulling angrily over a desert horizon. It’s five meters high, and rising. It loosens bowels, a little.
“Heavy mortars, now!” Jan orders.
A mortar shell shoots nearly straight up from the center of the Krevan line, then another. KRUMP, KRUMP ... a heavy, dull sound from behind the firing line.
Tom Hipper waits. And waits. Nothing happens. “Why nothing?” He worries out loud, firing his maser randomly and at the level into the darkening storm roll, though which not even his HUD can make out specific targets. Just moving red blurs against a white-gay background.
The dust squall reaches the ditch, choking shooters and reducing rates of fire and any accuracy. Five seconds pass, then in the distance ... KER-thud! KER-thud! The heavy sounds repeat as the mortar crews behind Jan find the range and open a little barrage.
“They’re landing! I knew it! Ha ha!” Tom swells with the joy of battle, with murder and his own vitality throbbing in his veins and in his groin. That’s when he finally notices. “I can’t believe it! I have a godsdamn erection!”
The small brunette hears and grins up at him.
“Die, you bâtard.” He feels ashamed of the shouted thought as soon as he releases it. The feeling of guilt calms him even as it passes quickly, along with his entirely useless erection.
Orange flames, cries of pain ... wounded and dying men and boys lying inside the dirt-smoke roll ... Still the shooters fire and cut down more figures in green, not looking across the meadow but firing into the cloud at dozens of little marked red threats moving on their HUDs.
Jan has no time for shame. This fight’s not over. Too many red threats are still firing back, forming a makeshift and moving shooting line. He has to finish this before they call in reinforcements. He whirls to yell the next command directly to the mortar crews. “Daisy cutters! Both tubes, right now!”
KER-POOM, whoooosh ... KER-POOM, whoooosh ... Two pencil shots arcing dark against the sky ...Tom sees them open, flatten into thick disks, self-stabilizing nozzles spurting.
“Smell the apples? Like my mother’s pies. So good.”
Tom looks blankly at the wide-eyed brunette crouched beside him, smiling stupidly up, looking away to fire her maser at ankle-height across the meadow before smiling at him again. The only thing he smells is burning wood behind and cooking flesh in front, a scorched meat and cloth odor drifting into the ditch with a hot wind whirling in from the scorched, smoking field.
“Mother and I used to bake pies together. Do you like apple pie?”
Tom’s glad he can’t smell the damned apples. He thinks that if he smells sweetness here instead of a vile, burnt and repulsive stench filling his nostrils that killing might become a habit he likes. He worries about the earlier tightness in his groin, fears he already likes it far too much.
Daisy cutters arcing up still, up and up, whirling then turning down ... down is good.
“Beautiful, look at ‘em spin!”
“My crystal’s burned out!”
Slam another into the magazine ... the maser hums and blink
s ready ... click-clack, click-clack, shooting again ... plasma rifles add to the dawn chorus, like no morning birdsong heard in these fields before ... burp, burp, burp ... chirp, chirp ... caw, caw ... bruurp, bruurp, bruurp.
Three green figures topple over at once, hit by a squad volley fired from the center block of Madjenik’s line. Zofia’s over there, directing two squads still using volley fire.
Tom’s maser overheats from too enthusiastic firing. As it slowly cools, he feels his loins throbbing once again with impatient lust for yet more blood vengeance. ‘Oh gods no, not again!’
“What happened to the daisy-cutters?”
“Wait for it!”
The big bombs are opening as they descend, spinning into tori, flattening inside the roiling smoke, ground sensors marking distance to detonation ... then, anticlimax ... a soft ‘pop, pop’ barely heard above the roar of battle ... then an odd silence.
Unexpected, like a child’s firecrackers. Like damp squibs.
Tom’s coitus is interrupted.
“What the hell was that?”
“Jump charges! They’ve shed their jackets.”
The falling of the spreading disks is stopped by proximity explosions ... then the main charges blow ... BOOM! BOOOM! ... a spreading torus of molten metal and plasma spears spews out a meter above each ground zero ... 30 meters outward, then 50, 100 ... perfect kill height ... slicing into hard armor and through soft groins and bellies.
Double-concussive waves rock Madjenik shooters where they stand, even this far across the meadow. Tom Hipper can’t imagine what they must be doing to the Double Moons. Yet he knows, at some level of his brain. Knows that ripping death and terrible torment is what they’re doing to living flesh, for he’s right in the middle of it and a cause of it. Wanting more of it.
Wounds are all waist-high ... suckling, slurping hits as energy meets flesh and bone ... hips and buttocks flying ... there goes a detached penis ... bowels and bellies split open ... feces and breakfasts spill out ... and guts, lots of gray and greasy sausages strung out on the ground.
“Stop! Get back inside!”
One boy is frantically stumbling and tripping over his own guts, pushing back at them, unbelieving that they’re falling out of him. Out of him! It’s not working … slippery ... fainting. He falls to his knees, fumbling with fists full of red-gray guts. “Mutter, help me, Mutter.”
Ten meters away half a jaw spins off a too-tall man as he crouches, but not low enough, only lowering his face into the spreading daisy disk. The jaw skims off like a summer frisbee tossed to an old school pal at the beach. Fifty meters more and a severed torso lands atop its own legs, mockingly crooked like a bent and broken acrobat, a contortionist trying to shock children at a town fair. Stunned, wounded, insensible, dying youths everywhere.
Later, all RIK memexes will speak in somber tones about “the sacrifice of our honored dead” and of parents “serving up the red sweet wine of their sons to the nation.” About when “our children gave us rarer gifts than gold or mir,” and how “honor of the Imperium is returned, like a new-born emperor.” The maudlin lies only fool historians and all governments write, and only the safest, most distant civilians approve and quote with knowing nods of blithe ignorance.
They’ll draft ballads and play slow dirges, too. Make solemn speeches and etch letters in cold brass plaques on park benches for mournful mothers to sit and softly stroke, mumbling the embossed name of a never-seen-again child who died in a way she cannot and dare not imagine. It is the pity of war that for those not touched by it war abhors pity. It is the nature of war and the nature of most of us to lack imaginative empathy beyond about 500 meters. Maybe less.
“Death! Amiable, lovely death!” A tall trooper, no more than a boy himself, cries out as he cuts down a running youth in green, exploding his shoulder with a short-range maser blast.
“What are you, a fucking poet? Shut up and keep firing!” Zofia struggles to contain their lust and rage, to focus it on controlled tactical killing, to make them fight as a unit not seekers of revenge. She’s shouting in their ears and HUDs, stamping and threatening to do indecent things to their hind parts with her hot maser if they decrease rate of fire or show the least hint of mercy.
“What’s that? Is someone crying?”
“Poor bâtards.”
“Ahh, fuck them!”
“Shut up and maintain fire! That’s a fucking order!”
Even after clinical death brains keep working for awhile, trying to rescue an impossible situation. A final electrical surge courses through nociceptors, frantic neurons signaling mortal hurt to fearful and addled brains, falling like cracked and discarded watermelons into the long meadow grasses. Leaving a real mess on the ground. Mercifully, consciousness is gone by then. Other deaths take much longer, so terrible and long the mind has time to watch the body die.
Such a spectacle in the meadow has a whole squad of Madjenik fighters in its gory grip, and won’t let go. They stand mute without firing, ignoring Zofia’s loud orders, watching the last minute of agony of a blond nitōhei, a young RIK private sliced in half who they can just make out through the clearing grass smoke. His torso has landed upright, severed evenly at the waist. His legs are someplace else. He’s looking all around for them. He tries to call out to them but can’t. His mind knows he’s cleaved. His mouth opens only to release a terrible silent scream.
“He’s just a kid.” One of Madjenik’s less hard sergeants says what most in the paused squad are thinking. A short black man from Southland, he’s trying to dip into his diminished store of pity to larder out a useless morsel to a dying farfolk boy. “At least he’s not screaming. Not anymore. Oh good, he’s gone.”
“Ah, fuck him, too.”
It’s a young private standing alongside the sergeant. He’s younger than the dead Grün boy. A callow youth at war. Is he just acting tougher than he feels? Only he knows for sure.
“Shut the fuck up! Resume firing!”
The lad is puzzled to hear that coming from his rough lieutenant. He flushes and concentrates on firing. She moves to the next shooter in the line, directing her to the next target across the meadow.
Surprise is complete, destruction of the camp absolute once the daisy cutters detonate. Resistance melts like a waxen figurine set atop a heated stove. Sporadic shots fly a meter or more over upright defenders inside the ditch, harmlessly cutting apart ripe apples, dropping warm juice and a gentle leafy shower onto the orchard floor. Across the meadow all is death.
Zofia’s barrel tip is glowing orange-hot from too-rapid firing. She has to pause shooting to swap it out. She takes the moment to assess the enemy. “These are not frontline fighters.” She relays her professional contempt over the officer-only com link, for Jan’s ears alone. “They shoot like they’re still on a training range, back on some heavy-gravity planet.”
“Yeah,” Jan answers. “I know. They’re from Uri.”
Genève is a small Class-A planet with 20% lower gravity than Uri. The raw conscripts shooting from across the meadow should reset kinetic weapons to fire lower velocity rounds, and adjust all aim points to account for gravity difference from their heavier-gravity training world. They should know that even a maser will feel lighter and subtly encourage them to shoot higher here than back on Uri. They should be adjusting all aiming down to fit Genève, but they aren’t.
“Bad officers,” Zofia succinctly concludes. “Even their laser rounds are pumping high.”
“Yeah, they’re rookies,” Jan agrees. “Not at all like us, huh?”
It doesn’t surprise him now that he thinks of himself and Zofia and all Madjenik as tested veterans, after just five days in combat. He doesn’t have time to analyze that sudden shift in his perception. He’s too excited by a tactical insight he has about the poor Grün shooting. He looks hard over at Zofia and knows that she understands him. In combat they already communicate like familiar lovers. Wordlessly, with strokes, gestures and eyes alone.
Before
he finishes the order she’s up and out of the ditch, standing in the open in the burned sweetgrass, taking lead position. “Everyone out of the ditch! Re-form the firing line! Advance! Shoot straight ahead, firing off the march!”
Jan simultaneously sends the order-thought to every HUD, using his command and dot-channel implant. He also yells it out loud, knowing from hard experience gained over the past five days not to rely on HUD battle-tek alone. Also just because yelling out orders or shouting to release one’s fear or stress in combat is a very human thing to do. The field is filling with shouts.
Madjenik’s fighters scramble up and over the ditch, standing erect for a moment on its lip at the edge of the smoldering meadow. They advance at arms-length apart, in a close-order line, shooting maser bolts into dark folds of soil and smoke still churning on the far side of the field. Changing out blackened maser chargers as they move, ejecting burned crystals, slapping in new ones. Return fire from the other side sails overhead, just as Jan and Zofia expected.