by Kali Altsoba
Jan and Tom remember heavy armor and hovergrenadiers shooting red spandaus and blue masers at anything wearing beige, slicing KRA fighters in half, cutting them down by cooking them inside their own combat suits whether they stood or ran. Sonic and frag grenades, delayed-action mines, all-spectrum guided missiles showered into dugouts on pre-sited trajectories were new terrors in a cacophony of hurtling fear and wounds, piss and panic and fast-moving death.
The last Jan saw or heard of the armtraks was a rising mushroom glow of pulse cannon blasts and a distant, click-clack of heavy pink-crystal guns on the far side of a tree-covered hill, about three klics back of his smashed and abandoned original position and MDL ‘strongpoint.’
Racing ATCs followed the heavy armor, spraying medium pink-crystal maser bolts as they sped through the rigid, cracked-open line, gunners jeering the dead and the dying. Hand-fired masers from hovergrenadiers atop the carriers kept defenders’ heads down. Piercing hot light scorched any flesh it found, erupting limbs into a fine spray of red spittle and bone. The extreme fury of the elite hovergrenadier attack was unbelievable to those it met. Nothing they trained for or dreamed about before the war prepared them for such violent malevolence.
“Bad day, bad day,” Tom says, for both of them.
“Yeah, real bad day,” Jan concurs. ‘The day I ran away. The day I failed Madjenik.’
The second day was nearly as bad as the first. Regular infantry struck at dawn, crushing the last MDL resistance. RIK troopers rushed through more breeches, fanning out behind ragged holes punched through the rear side of the broke-open line. Lean gatling-bots and squat ground-crawlers, crusher-bots and automated spandau platforms supported the fresh leg infantry leaping ahead on power-glide combat boots, jumping five or seven meters with every stride, shooting on the move. They came out of hover Armored Troop Carriers flying alongside the assault wave, gunners laughing and shooting even small animals that dared show a black nose or darting tail.
Stragglers from other broken sectors along the shattered front told Jan later that heavy columns of RIK Mammoths, Elephants, and hovergrenadiers blasted multiple corridors through the two-line frontier defense of pillboxes, firing pits and forward shooting-stations. The second, rear line of the MDL stood for less than a day, barely defended by overwhelmed KRA infantry.
“Yeah,” says Jan, struggling to return from his dark, personal reminiscence. “But the biggest surprise was that once they busted through our perimeter they should have spun all that armored force around to trap us between two grips of a vice. But they didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because they didn’t have to. We weren’t a threat anymore, with so many companies and battalions broken and scattered and ... running. So they kept moving farther inland, leaving units like ours to lesser mop-up troops, like the Double Moons. Seems to me it was always their plan.” He’s right. It was.
“Damn, captain! You mean that we haven’t beaten their best, what with nearly half of the fighters in Madjenik already gone?”
“Sorry, Tom. Their best smashed right through us on the first day, like we weren’t even there. Madjenik took on and took out their scrub second-eleven in the meadow, no more.”
“Godsdamn, I want to meet up with their elite units again in that case. We’ll show them!” Jan lets the foolish boast pass. “Maybe. We never expected to be left behind by the main forces of an invading enemy as the battle swept right over the coast and moved too fast inland.”
That was the core tactic, on Genève and the other four Krevan worlds where invading armies struck without warning and simultaneously. Hit and move, then hit again. Wave after wave, not pausing or slowing attack momentum, never relenting. Keeping defenders stunned and off-balance, until collapse came and everyone in beige weaves reeled back in panicked flight.
Follow-on attacks overwhelmed with more weight of firepower but also bewildering maneuver, hitting the Krevans hard then moving quickly to strike fresh targets ever farther to the rear. Leaving original frontline survivors in smashed formations to be dealt with by a third wave, then a fourth. Cascading attacks left more broken bunkers and dead Krevans behind, and isolated clots of stunned stragglers like Madjenik Company, dodging and running and trying to hide from ‘growlers and grinders’ and conscript leg infantry humping after them in cocky mop-up units.
“Sure as hell worked,” Jan concludes, “as far as I can tell from campaign info we picked up before Main HQ went dark. The signals were pretty chaotic, but always said the same thing. ‘How can they be here already?’ ‘What happened to my reserve?’ ‘Where’s my support?’”
“They must’ve taken out every one of our satellites, including all the deep space stealthy ones, to blind our HQ like that, after just a few days.”
“For sure. So I guess Genève Squadron saw some tough fighting, too.” Jan has several old friends in the local naval squadron, dating to his school days. “We lost to them everywhere.”
“We positioned in a hard crust defense,” Tom concludes, seeing the big picture now for the first time, closely following Jan’s brutally honest teaching. “Once they pushed armor holes into that crust they were unstoppable, eating right through the soft-middle like into an apple pie.”
Jan smiles to think that Tom has summed up the whole campaign in an image he’s been trying to get away from ever since the meadow fight. A hard pie crust with a soft apple interior. Now full to the rim with wriggling green worms. But he says only: “Yeah, you’ve got it.”
“Could we have done it differently, sir? Was there a better way to defend Genève?”
“We would’ve been better off defending ground in-depth, layer after layer receiving the penetration thrusts while shaving off some of their attack momentum, attriting their forces.”
Tom nods, hesitates a moment, then asks. “Do you think that would’ve stopped them?”
Jan says what he really thinks. “No, surely not. We might’ve held out a bit longer, and sure, we would’ve killed a lot more of their men and machines before we broke. That would’ve been something. But no, we never had even a puncher’s chance to win this prize fight.”
“No chance at all, captain?”
“Mita helvettia! We’re two local divisions of the KRA! The whole Krevan Republic is just 24 small worlds. They’re the vast Grün Imperium. They invented war! No, no chance at all.”
Each man falls into silence, almost mournful in its heaviness, sitting under a shroud of military camo. Then their thoughts drift from the big strategic down to the merely personal.
‘Why crush his hopes like that? What the hell do I really know?’ Jan chides himself, as he always and often does. ‘I’m just a washed-out officer who would’ve run from my first fight no matter where it took place.’ Jan Wysocki is the most self-unforgiving man left on Genève.
Tom’s thoughts aren’t so darkly personal. He likes himself far more than Jan does. Still, he goes quiet too, thinking about family and a hometown now deep inside the Occupation Zone.
Both men are also thinking about other things they saw since Breakthrough Day. How too many enemy soldiers laughed as they cut down scared children in beige uniforms with Silver or Gold division shoulder flashes, standing as if at school, without weapons and arms raised in futile submission before they were killed. Lots of civilians met the same grim ethic.
Tom saw up close how ordinary Grünen in uniform enjoyed the violent freedom gifted to them by war. Heard them shout the dread and ancient RIK battle cry “sonnō jōi!” Yell “revere the Emperor, kill the barbarians!” Watched them pump maser heat into upturned, childish faces.
Jan tells Tom he heard others shout “Todt, Todt!” as they dealt out “Death, Death!” in fact to prisoners, to wounded, and to harmless civilians. The week-old memory is as clear in his mind’s eye as Tom’s face is in his real eyes. It shakes him physically, not with fear but with deep rage.
It’s clear now to everyone under the camo that atrocity is to be the Imperium occupation tactic
, even if they don’t know yet that the order comes straight from the Jade Court on Kestino. Jan decides then and there that he’ll pay back this enemy like with like, blood with blood.
Zofia breaks into his coms, startling him back to the present. “The last ‘V’ of bot-geese is passing overhead, honking to each other as if they’re real. Time to get moving again, captain.”
Five minutes later Jan and Tom stand up and gather their camo sheets into their march packs. Tom heads back to his squad and Pie Girl. Jan moves to the head of the reforming, forlorn little column, careful to walk beside his new head scout rather than his second-in-command.
“Right, move out, Madjenik. Fifteen klics to reach forest cover.” He thinks: ‘Then it’s turn north, and the long trek to Toruń.’
***
Even as Madjenik is breaking camo and making ready to move at last into Pilsudski Wood, follow-on waves of enemy are also moving. RIK 10th Armored has hover scouts out. looking for hidden pockets of KRA in what is now its rear area. They find a burnt field with 300 dead conscripts from Uri, a third with cut throats. But the attack plan can’t be altered, not even to find who committed this atrocity. Scouts will come back later. Oetkert vengeance will be had.
For now, 10th Armored’s infantry must plow the sea in the parting wake of its advancing armtraks, its robo-gatlers and heavy fighting-bots still plentiful in these first days. Such complex prewar machines aren’t yet used up by daily attrition, not yet worn out and proved too expensive to replace in the same numbers with which this little local war in Orion begins. That will change as war cascades up and down the spiral arm, sooner than realized. There are signs of it already.
Tek planners should’ve known better about the combat bots. After all, from the first hour of the war masses of human fighters are engaged. Flesh-and-blood fighter are far more plentiful than smart silicon and steel war bots, a fact that will only grow in importance as the Krevan War broadens and continues. As a planned short war goes long instead, gulping industry and finances, billions of lives and the futures of whole worlds and systems.
Flesh is cheaper, more adaptable and more easily replaced. That rough truth will grow truer as expensive war machines become harder to build or restore, reducing armies to more basic weapons carried by infantry and armored vehicles. With only as many AI fighting-bots rolling off straining assembly lines as sphinctered wartime budgets will permit.
Smug RIK generals and everybody in senior tek and military leadership across all the militaries and governments of Orion will only learn this the hard way. Learn the only way any army ever does. Not by books of old histories and doctrines, but by fighting. As war spreads to more systems the toll in flesh will mount as autonomous fighting machines clash, fail and fall.
All that lies ahead, on other worlds than Genève. For now, heavy armtraks, AI bot-walkers and mobile guns abound on one side, creating an illusion of permanent invincibility. They swell Grün civilians with pride in empire and in the military, as they watch official war vids marching across and trumpeting over the memex. Hardly anyone notices that the Imperium is already suppressing casualty lists, contacting each bereaved family directly with warnings to keep its loss and grief private and contained.
No memorial services are allowed. Only victory celebrations. For not all goes smoothly for the RIK in the opening invasions of Krevo. Errors and indiscipline affect the flow of fights beyond the shattered MDL, grating against the advance, slowing it here, separating it over there. It doesn’t help that orders are ignored by imprudent and insubordinate corps commanders, eager for a too personal glory. Instead of concentrating all armor into spear-tips to plunge deep into Genève’s exposed belly they make an arrogant broad front advance, attacking all points at once.
Sudden flash fights disrupt RIK’s grand marching schemes with little battles Main HQ doesn’t want, as its armies pursue strategic envelopment of the running Krevans. In division and corps-sized assaults made against isolated battalions or just companies of fleeing fighters, senior generals launch old-fashioned attacks taken from faded storybooks or military fables learned in boyhood. Or in some hoary prewar tactical class. It’s their first war, too. After three centuries of peace no one really knows what to do. So attacks made into desperately defended strongpoints bring casualties to alarming levels, even for so indifferent an officer corps as the Imperium’s.
Krevans dig-in behind outdated, loop-holed walls of ultrasteel forts centuries old, where maser troops once stood and held off dead Grün kings and crusaders of the Black Faith. They’re eventually blasted out by heavy weapons, but they serve as breakwaters to the advancing RIK assault waves, letting stragglers move westward. Including the shattered remnants of Madjenik.
It happens on four other Krevan worlds as well, until the brashest generals are removed from command or summarily shot. Their successors don’t make the same mistake. Instead, they make entirely new ones, with hesitation and delays born of new tactical caution. The advances are slowing, letting more KRA units slip away. Others regroup and turn back to fight some more.
KRA snipers and skirmishers and half-battalions take cover in extended ditches fanning away from the old forts, in low trenches and along any high ground. Too many eager volunteers wearing pale green weaves, and far more green-clad conscript lads not so keen for battle, are killed or grievously wounded by defensive fire that rakes their upright ranks as they’re recklessly sent forward across pre-sighted killing zones around the old forts.
Tens of thousands are laid prone by crescendos of maser fire and the rapid “crack-crack-crack-crack” of wall-mounted or hidden KRA rapidos. Tumbling blue pulses come out faster and at greater range than the green-clad infantry can match, struggling uphill with outclassed and out-ranged stubby masers. For RIK planners put so many resources into AI-bot and armored forces over the past 50 years they didn’t upgrade infantry weapons. The price of neglect is paid in hosts of lost fathers and sons.
KRA rapidos make gaping red holes in the staggering bodies of men and burning armtrak hulks. Grünen are already calling this weapon “Hell machine,” for the ripping lethal impact its heavy-caliber pulses punch through flesh and armor. What saves the day for the generals is a standing practice in the RIK of concentrating directly off the march, as soon as contact is made with any enemy. Each time a firefight breaks out more divisions and corps hasten to the sound of distant masers, and screams and explosions as the terrible fury of battle grows nearer and louder.
Massive RIK numbers win these small encounter battles each and every time on Genève, but at rising cost in lost lives and wounded, and in confidence of the troops. Grünen know now that they face defenders who will fight hard and well and to the death for every inch of their violated and cherished soil. It makes volunteers and raw conscripts alike hesitate, then halt. RIK generals are going to have to do something to clean up the rear areas after all. Toruń must wait.
KRA officers are also new to this game called combat. So they leave their infantry over-bunched, to take terrible punishment from RIK assault artillery that’s always vigorously pushed forward, across rivers and canals and burning fields on low-flying hover rafts. Krevans are thus outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the end of each day’s fighting. Their generals also fail to reinforce initial strong positions at the forts, or to counter-maneuver around the attackers while they retain some advantage of firepower over numbers. Content to rely on the stationary rapidos as their ancestors did in the last war, they fail to spread support infantry to maximize the defense.
Some isolated KRA units show foolhardy courage in doomed last stands that repeat a hundred times or more across five invaded worlds. In one bloody field on Brno a ‘Forlorn Hope’ of ragged fighters charges massed ultrasteel guns and infantry ten times their number, attaining in red defeat only piles of mangled youth. And brain-and-blood splattered memories of useless slaughter smeared over medics’ long white aprons. Not one reaches the enemy line, or lives.
Outnumbered or outflanked by each d
ay’s end, despite fighting hard and well, the KRA on Genève is forced to withdraw from its pummeled forts and retreat along the north plains roads leading to the forest zone. Forced out into the open, it pays a heavy price as RIK skycraft swoop and strafe and bomb the ragged and retreating columns, shorn of long-since destroyed sky cover.
This is what defeat looks like. Raggedy and rough-hewn, pouring over the land as chaotic as a torrent from a broken dam in a wild hurricane. It smells like burning flesh and acid-melt. It tastes like iron in the mouth and of dark and bitter bile. It sounds like primal howls and mortal screams and the harsh laughter of conquerors. It leaves corpses as detritus in its wash and wake.
Before the war, Gold Division was standard bearer of a proudly independent agroplanet. Its ‘sheaves of wheat’ cap flash gained all wearers instant respect. And free rounds of beer or shots of corn liquor or rye whiskey. And back-patting and tales of their own youth spun by fat, middle-aged men. It was almost worth the three years compulsory service every Genèven youth undertook, all that free drinking and food in any of tens of thousands of simple village pubs. Or lying naked in a reserved military hotel room while on extended leave in sweet-smelling Toruń.