by Kali Altsoba
Parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of the children’s brigades who now wear the venerated golden sheaves in this real and raw new war all wore the same proud symbol in decades past. Though no elder grumbling over onrushing defeat ever went to war themselves.
They never faced an armtrak skimming at terrifying speed over a wavering cornfield, the lost crop ablaze and buffeted by explosions, lights and swirling smokes. They never stood before a plasma-cannon in an onrushing turret blasting holes in dirt, while heavy side-masers sheared a childhood friend in two a meter or so away, spattering her overproud Gold flash with blood and brains. Or bored an instantly-seared and smoking 10cm hole through his torso or head or groin.
Beyond the burning edge of the Grün advance, blue and orange fields of abandoned crops undulate over Northland’s shallow valleys. Farmlands slowly turn into unplanted meadows as the terrain rises to meet far-off mountains, where colder and more fallow valleys are covered solely in delicate purple flowers, in millions of aster alpinus. Slow creeks and rivers border with summer sweetgrass, with still taller elephant grasses and long rows of wild black bulrushes. All resisting death among ugly gouges where some missile or bombardment pattern landed amid gun pits and hasty rally points, murdering the huddled, frightened, defeated youth of sad Genève.
There are no natural defense lines or basins or places. No large lines of hills or ridges or broad rivers cutting through the flat face of Northland. Only far-off Toruń, awaiting its doom. The ‘Golden City of Wood’ is famed even among the roughest marching Grünen for its unique all-wooden architecture, a favorite site of off-world cruises before the war. It’s the only urban prize on Genève, with its huge granaries that supply the farfolk trade and its KRN docks and heavily defended shipyard. Everyone knows that the invasion must climax and end at its berm.
Toruń resides far from the battered coast where RIK landed, 2,000 klics inland and more than 300 deep inside a vast old growth forest covering the high third of the boreal continent. It waits past the winter line where shorter crops and even poor farmers finally quit, surrendering to acidic soils and the cold northern climate and winds. Deep woodlands surround it, rising upward to the north and west to meet then climb a range of high mountains that continue all the way to the pole, before marching down the other side of the world into another hemisphere. There’s no more forest or farmland over the top of the world. Only rocky heads of the tallest peaks wearing ice all up their broad shoulders, with snow-topped peaked hats poking above the permanent cap.
A terrible enemy is heading for the five Old Forest Roads that lead to Toruń. He plans to overleap the city’s great earthen berm to bring fire to its amber streets, crowded with defeated fighters and desperate throngs of refugees. Toruń waits on the coming onslaught. The mountains and ice don’t know or care at all. Whatever happens, they’ll hold steady in long, indifferent rest.
Data search: expansion.
Result: ascent; DNA-arks.
Historia Humana, Volume I, Part II (a)
After tens of thousands of years of wonderment at far-off stars, Humanity finally reached up from Old Earth to grasp them. It girded for space and slowly rose off the planet of its genesis and evolution to settle the home system. Though not as one. Even in this enlightened era, our Shōwa Age, we do not act with unity of effort or purpose. Our ascent to the stars began as our residence in them continues: divided, fragmented, uneven, unwilling to share a common future.
Two ancient motivations finally moved us into space to stay: greed and fear. Greed for new wealth from moon and asteroid mining operations, and fear that planetside geopolitical rivals would acquire first access to these untapped resources and use them in war. Results were more spectacular than hoped, streaming enormous resources into dozens of Luna and Mars settlements. An L1 magnetic shield (artificial dipole) was built to protect Mars from the Solar wind, inside a spreading magnetotail that shielded from radiation and protected the thin natural atmosphere. Rapid warming from the equator outward to both poles regenerated atmosphere from frozen CO2, to reach stabilized air pressure at 50% Old Earth Standard. Water generators added O2 and trace gases until the magnetic shield and greenhouse effect together released vast stores of Martian subsurface water ice, recreating rivers feeding into a 1/7th surface ocean not seen in over three billion years. With a stable, breathable atmosphere, system trade, population growth, and local farming and industry took off. In 2218 (OEY) the first of four Mars colonies finally attained self-sufficiency, though only after seven had failed and were cannibalized. We had done it. We were off the origin world at last, and on the way to empire.
Humanity reached next for the large moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Specialized colonies were set up on Callisto (2273) and Ganymede (2295), supported by water and volatiles surface mining. Ice-mining of the Jovian moons was supplemented by subsurface mining of the largest Greek and Trojan objects (2315). Cheap outer system water supplied rising demand from dry Martian cities, ultimately allowing hydroforming of two freshwater seas. Several older, domed Luna cities also expanded significantly at that time. Thus began the doldrums of the first Satya Yuga, a Winning Age of widespread contentment that greatly slowed tek and cultural advances. Historians say that, in addition, the ‘suspensor revolution’ in private life that greatly expanded average lifespans and Youthspans caused Humanity to once again postpone reaching for extra-Sol habitable worlds. Our purpose stalled as the First Age of Exploration and Expansion ended.
The key change leading to interstellar settlement was realization that the future lay in our DNA, not atomics or metamaterials. It thus came not from a new tek revolution but from a cultural shift, building on incremental but unrelated tek shifts. The change led to abandonment of large ship and fast drive ambitions in favor of lightsail nanocraft and DNA arks. The first ships were AIs-only, nanobot explorers with small mass and thus achievable energy-velocity thresholds. Their job was to map targeted planets and ready optimum landing and cultivation sites for the second type, the DNA-arks that followed only decades or centuries later.
Some 120,000 nanocraft launched, powered by lightsails that dwarfed AI packages riding the Solar wind with gossamer sheets many square-klics wide. The lightsails were assembled by ‘spiders’ printing fabric from 10,000 spinnerets, assembly line fashion. The little ships passed beyond the heliopause in both directions down the plane of Orion, riding pulse ‘assists’ from solar-power generators parked in L1 gravity-free orbits. Thus boosted, the first nanoships reached 15% lightspeed. The stars drew ever closer, some actually coming within Humanity’s reach. But it all still took too long, so that most of us lost patience yet again. Most nanoships were abandoned, assists turned off to save costs or lost in jealous system wars or to indifference.
When interest in the explorers was renewed most of the nanoships were tied to civic or scientific interests in exo-science research programs, leading to a renaissance in exploration and to great advances in bioeconomics and exoengineering, in terraforming, holistic eco-system and climate management, and other developing exo-sciences. Al last, the DNA-arks went out, host ships for genetic molecules programmed to interact directly with organic material, one of the boon ideas of the new exoengineering industries. The pods seeded alien soils with cradle-DNA that began to self-assemble bacteria and simple plants, and lower-form animals, guided by the great AI-bots that we all still honor and admire today. This pod-infusion terraforming method eliminated life-support and other gigantism issues in older colony ship design.
DNA-arks also served as coded databases of all human knowledge. DNA turned out to be the ultimate compact storage medium for any forms of information, not just building diagrams of trillions of exported life forms. A single gram of DNA dedicated to information storage held almost 500 billion gigabytes of data, capable of access by the AI-bots and all future colonists.
As the first colonies were mapped then bio-seeded by teams of AI-bots in dozens of distant star systems Humanity shared a rare moment of unity, peaceful
conviction, and near-universal public support of planetary exploration. It is widely agreed by Orion historians that this was the single greatest achievement of the Heroic Age, an unfolding era of peaceful interstellar expansion.
Not all new sponsors were properly screened. Some were fronts for ethnic or religious isolationists, ranging from harmless Inuit who settled unwanted and icy Nunavut to intolerant sects of ascetic renunciants and fanatics such as the Broderbund. That opened the door to grave error leading to greater sorrows, to deep historical regrets and to the reinvention of war...
Scouts
The massive teaks, maples and oaks of Pilsudski Wood remain gold-leaved, for it’s just past midsummer. AI-bot bioengineered for Genève’s lower than standard gravity, the smallest of the wondrous trees stretch up over 125 meters. The greatest grow tens of meters higher. Wide root spreads, huge base girth, and vast canopies spread out to match these great trunk heights.
Inside the ocean of gold deciduous trees are pointy islands of silver firs, rising to top out at 60 meters. They’re protected from root and canopy competition by acidic needles shorn onto and hence changing the soil far below. They, too, were bioengineered by nanobots before any settlers arrived, only in brilliant silver pine rather than deciduous gold. No one knows why the AI-bots did it, since they weren’t programmed for bio-aesthetics like this. All agree the result is spectacular. The Old Forests of Genève are famed not just within Krevo but across all Orion.
On the forest floor puddles of shining needle-rain merge into shimmering silver lakes, bordered by golden shores of undisturbed windfall. The leafy bedding is plush and comfortable, home to many species of fauna from tiny shrews to rabbit and raccoon, deer, elk, moose, quick red fox, black bear and solitary gray timber wolves. The animals of Genève were also made by AI-nanobot terraformers that carefully tended spore, seed and fauna gene banks carried on ark-ships from Old Earth. The AI-bots reworked alien soil and air for two full centuries before the first quantum-drive colonists arrived to found Toruń. The bots are all gone now. No one knows how or where, only that they’re revered on Genève as makers and shepherds of the great forests.
***
“You were right, captain.” Tom Hipper remarks on their next march break. “The pursuit is ferocious and unrelenting. But I’m still not sorry for what we did in the meadow.”
Madjenik has reached the forest edge, many klics from the burned sweetgrass left behind, roughly carpeted with spent crystals and scorch marks and enemy dead. With boys blasted open by the satisfied snakes, scythed in half by the big daisy-cutters, bored through an eye or chest by a sniper’s laser, cooked inside-out and burst into messy red clumps by close assault masers fired at intimate ranges. Madjenik left no wounded behind, no witnesses to its tactics or spies to its direction. Only dead men in green gaping skyward with throats cut ear-to-ear by carbyne blades.
Just 107 survivors make it to Pilsudski Wood. Sixty were lost by threes or fives, or twos or tens, along the way. Some fell from a careless camo accident that exposed scouts to a sudden, strafing Jabo. A few more to unseen hunter-killer mini-drones or undetected mines left by other retreating KRA More in sharp firefights as suicide rearguards Jan formed at the start of each day, staying 3 klics back to ward off pursuit as long as their lives and ammo lasted. Sixty dead out of 167 who survived the tart ambush at the apple orchard and across a burned meadow.
Madjenik swells past its original size once it gets inside the forest, joined by nearly 300 stragglers from other broken units. Without officers, they fled individually or in small groups under the golden canopy, to stumble into or be drawn to Jan and Madjenik beneath the boughs.
One older fighter pleads: “Please sir! We gots no place ta go and no one ta follow. Just gives us some ammo and water. Just gives us a chance ta fight back.”
A young woman, badly cut on the hand, says: “I never even fired my maser yet, captain.”
A rare Silver Division veteran demands: “Ya’ gotta let me join Gold, sir, an’ fight back.”
Jan is the senior officer and Madjenik by far the strongest single unit among the forlorn inside Pilsudski Wood, so he assumes command. Zofia is the only other officer and remains his second. Among the strays there are good NCOs he assigns to leaderless squads. For three days everyone hides among the trees, recovering strength for the arduous trek to Toruń to come.
Then it gets sparky again.
***
Madjenik is having a shit load of trouble with an aggressive unit of RIK 10th Armored hover scouts, probing in repeatedly from along the forest edge. The scouts are so cocksure they make no effort to hide their presence or movements or intentions. The arrogant asses even sing smutty Grün songs at the tops of their voices as they come into the woods, like they’re drunk or on leave and heading to a cathouse instead of toward mortal combat.
“It’s a long way to Kestino, to the best whores I know,
right behind the Palace, where slave girls love to blow.
When I’ve fucked all Genève’s women, it’ll be time to go,
way back to my homeworld, to the Purest girl I know!”
One young scout shouts as he mounts up: “I shall redden my sword in bandit blood!” He turns red-faced himself as his squad mates collapse in laughter at such mock-medieval posing. Then they remount and scoot over the forest edge on compact hovers, boasting: “We’re going to kill the bandits! We’re going to kill Gelben!”
***
“Alright, I’ve had enough of these bâtards.” After the fourth scout raid Jan organizes an ambush of the whole brigade patrol group of 80 hover scouts. He briefs Madjenik overnight.
“We’ll lure these careless, overeager mulkku deep inside the trees. I need ten volunteers for a special mission. A one-time unit.” A hundred hands snap up.
“Right, thank you all. Lieutenant Jablonski will make the selection.” That’s quickly done, in an HUD flash. Jan continues: “You’ll use our last hover bikes and feign like you’re in trouble, to pull the scouts into the woods after you. Let’s call the unit the ‘limping squad.’ You will … ”
Zofia interjects: “Seriously, sir?”
“Well, what would you call it?”
“How about ‘wounded rabbits’?”
“OK, now you’re serious? How is that an upgrade?”
“Let the volunteers decide.”
“Wounded rabbits! Wounded rabbits!”
Seven men and three women shout it over and over, until Jan hushes them. They stand grinning back insolently at him while stealing looks over at Zofia, who grins back at them from behind Jan’s back. An hour later the plan is set and the order is given.
“Mount up, rabbits!” They clamber onto five untippable carbon-fiber, two-fighter speed bikes, the last transport left to Madjenik besides a few small cargo carrier-bots loaded down with ammo, food and water. And with wounded.
Zofia winks at the rabbits, then says whorishly: “Flash your tits and some cottony tail at the arrogant enemy! Bring him to us with his cocks all hard. We’ll show him a real good time.”
Jan doesn’t know how to rejoin to that, so he wisely says nothing. ‘What a thing to say to men going into battle! She’s always a surprise.’
The hover scouts are breaking camp outside the tree line, a thin morning mist hanging low over the first spreading light of a new day, when five hover bikes break cover and enter an unguarded perimeter. The bikes scud to a stop and quickly reverse, riders feigning panic and surprise. Shouts of “Bandits! bandits!” and “After them!” rise down a half-klic of forest edge, and several carelessly snapped-off pistol shots ring out. Making certain they’re followed, the “wounded rabbits” swerve back under cover of the thick forest, seemingly bounding away without leadership or purposeful direction. Fleeing wildly, as frightened rabbits should.
Excited shouts ring across the scout camp, not an alarm so much as a call to an easy kill and quick murder of what is assumed is a bandit scavenger party out looking for food. A short company from 10th
Armored takes Jan’s baited hook, swiftly mounting 20 four-man, soft-skin hovers. They zip and yell and shoot wildly as they pull in behind the darting, hip-hoppity bikers.
Trying not to pull too far in front of the pursuit, a brace of “wounded rabbits” is hit right away, scored in the back by hover-mounted masers. Four men fall fatally hard off their bikes, crashing and tumbling into huge tree roots and heavy undergrowth, broken and burning bikes setting small fires left behind that the damp morning forest easily contains and soon snuffs outs.
Success urges imprudence on the 10th Armored scouts, hot on a blood trail. Whooping and shooting wildly, they weave their slower, heavier four-man hovers over huge root loops or under thick down-hanging vines and low branches. In just minutes they leave all artillery support and the rest of their company, and any possible reinforcement, back outside the dim woods that close around. Two more rabbits tumble. They want the rest, forgetting the warren must be near.