Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Four klics inside and four surviving bikers whir into a natural clearing, then whirl to stop at a preset shooting line, no longer rabbits but now acting the cornered worm who turns at last to face its tormentor. It’s Jan’s preset, narrow-V kill zone, over 200 guns waiting down each long side in a tangle of high roots and low branches, silent under field camo and heavy oak canopy.

  “Shoot!”

  They fire as one, slicing down the scouts in a quick and efficient slaughter. Surrenders are offered by fallen and wounded men with frantic waves and shouted pleas. None are accepted. It’s over in just a few minutes, leaving the clearing smelling of smoking wood, bike oil and bile, of scored metal, burned-out hovers and scorched hubris.

  A wounded scout is hauled over to Jan. He’s a big man with a mashed-in shoulder and panic in his artificially-colored purple eyes. He pleads for his life all the way over, imploring the grim KRA fighters prodding and dragging him across the clearing. He keeps offering to trade secret info on the Bad Camberg special op, a false flag attack on a Grün moonlet that Pyotr used as an excuse to start the war. His premise for invading the blameless United Planets of Krevo.

  The scout looks up dumbly at Jan, repeating: “I was there! I was there!” He smells of old barroom piss and new forest-and-fear shit weighing heavily inside his weaves. Two surviving ‘rabbits’ force him to his feet. “Please, please. I’ll tell you all the details of what we did there!”

  He begs again, then offers the Judas-kiss to his only friend in the hover scout unit, even in the whole RIK. “That boy over there, the one screaming by that huge tree, he was the one who made the broadcast. He was the one, not me. I was only...”

  Jan interrupts, to coldly refuse the trade. “We all know what happened at Bad Camberg moonlet. Your filthy trick fooled no Krevans. But it’s good to know we have as our guest one of Pyotr’s murderers who started this fucking war. Welcome to Genève.”

  He reaches out and slits the big man’s throat ear-to-ear, with a single broad stroke of his black diamond knife. A young, thoughtful fighter holds the startled man’s head up by a fistful of his shockingly thick black hair as his knees slowly buckle and he slides down. She does it so he won’t spurt jugular blood onto Jan’s already filthy wheat-colored weaves. The dark ejaculate spurting to the forest floor smells heavily of iron and thick proteins, of lipids and severed lymph.

  Jan looks to see who’s holding up the half-severed head. It’s the small straggler girl who reported the ‘grinding’ of KRA prisoners by Grün armtraks, the rookie soldier who fumbled with her sonics at the meadow before correctly mounting frags. She’s got a hard fistful of black hair, tilting the man’s neck back to widen the gash and speed release. She waits until the body stops spurting and jerking, then lets go. It collapses into a dark, spreading pool of escaping fluids.

  Tramp! tramp! tramp!

  Advance scouts from a colony of tree-ants has already found the sticky treasure. Soon a long supply column will stream down a broad trunk to collect and gather it to the nest, guided in by chemical messaging. Soon, Madjenik’s finest mini-drone sensors will pick up their grating formation moving down the hard bark to reach the forest floor.

  Tramp! tramp! tramp!

  A miniature army is following a blood trail to the gore and spoils of war. To gather up a winter’s feast into heavy mandibles. To collect manna from heaven, if you’re an ant.

  Jan nods acknowledgment of the straggler youth’s kind act, then orders: “Leave them to the forest. Bury their hovers in the deep hollows, under a century of windfall. Cover the bodies with their own camo sheets, but strip off their fucking weaves! Leave flesh hidden but exposed for Genève tree rats to gnaw. Let their dead converse bone-to-bone and feed our forest saplings.”

  So they toss the black-haired man with a newly sliced throat awkwardly down beside a naked, once-handsome kid whose face is half sheared-off. He was seared by a maser right at the outset of the fight in the clearing. The boy flopped and howled in terrible agony all through the quick forest battle. Before he died, his screams made him sound more like an animal than a man.

  Men and boys are animals, and scream like it when half their face is carved to fall like this most fetching boy’s did into astonished hands that trembled as he tried to stick it back onto an exposed white cheekbone.

  Or when they know they’ve been stuck vitally in the gut in hand-to-hand combat and the ripping blade’s about to sneak in again, snick! snick! to spill their bile and blood onto the forest floor, where ants await the sweet red rain.

  Or neat laser holes appear in their weaves and the red spurts out, even though they feel no pain. Not yet, though it’s coming, like a freight train loaded with fire on hot tracks running into their mind and soul, already up-to-speed and unstoppable.

  Or an arm or calf or thigh erupts from the inside-out as a maser cooks marrow inside thick bones to then explode the limb like a July firecracker stuffed in a holiday hotdog by a naughty child, who after carelessly tosses the damaged and unwanted mockmeat onto the fire.

  The dead boy slumped against the tree screamed about his missing face and far more primally, until the fight was over and Zofia finished him with a quick head shot. But only after the black-haired man flung his weapon down and his arms into the air, and cried and pled for his own life while offering to betray his dying and only friend.

  Like all the other dead scouts, the faceless kid’s shoulder flash says: RIK 10th Armored, then right below: 1st Scout Company. That’s not what pisses off everyone in Madjenik. It’s an ID holo they find tucked deep inside his inner vest pocket, a party card that boasts: Minoru Honda, Brno Purity Volunteers. Brno is a Krevan border world, but with a large Grün ethnic minority.

  “The kid’s a godsdamn native-born Krevan!” The grinder girl shouts it as she finds the tag. Corporal Tom Hipper gives the body a full, hard kick. His own dark mane of hair tosses from the heavy blow. “Fucking traitor! Rot in helvetti, you son of saatana! You whoreson!”

  One officer they leave fully dressed, but booby-trapped with poison gas injected up his anus into a dead man’s stomach. Then they shove a fleshy butt-plug deep inside him. They lift his corpse 400 meters from the clearing and battle site but don’t camo it. They want him found.

  He’ll be taken to a field morgue where a Rikugun mortician will surely puncture the anal plug and stomach lining with a long trocar. When he does, the erupting dead man will surrender his lethal toxins and kill anyone within 5-10 meters. If the clever little trick works, a small cloud of deadly gas might kill three or five or ten more Grünen.

  Medical workers, probably. It’s better if it’s their field medics. Or maybe they’ll freeze-dry the corpse temporarily and ship him home to be embalmed, prepped and set up for a grand ceremonial disposal, as all dead RIK officers are. He’s the perfect carrier of the poison. A sharp trocar will surely find and release it, either here in a Genève camp or on his Grün homeworld.

  There’s no point fixing up enlisted dead the same way. RIK burns all non-officer corpses, usually right on site. So Madjenik strips and camos those, leaves them to army ants and rats and tree snakes. Besides, a poison “booty-trap” is a one-time only trick.

  A ripple of coarse laughter moves down the ranks as Madjenik marches deeper into Pilsudski Wood. “Hey Corporal Hipper! Hey Tom, that’s some killer fart we left behind!”

  “You would know, sergeant. You’ve let loose some of your own.”

  “Got that right. Best way to get a camo tent all to myself!”

  They’re happy to have killed so many hated scouts, sad to have lost six good men among the ‘rabbits’ when they did it, but mostly mad as unholy hell about the dead Brno kid.

  One more thing. After the ambush and slaughter of the scouts no more distinctions are accepted between Madjenik “originals” and an engorgement of straggler “newbies.” Everyone’s in the same shit and thus the same outfit now, which they start calling “Wysocki’s Wreckers.”

  The name sticks hard, no matte
r how vehemently or often the captain objects when he overhears them use it. Not least because, behind his back and sporting a big grin as she does it, fiery-haired Lieutenant Zofia Jablonski endorses and encourages the fierce new combat moniker.

  ***

  The ambush of the hover scouts severely embarrasses General Nikita Brusilov, Rikugun taishō and senior officer in charge of 10th Armored Division. He’s yet another royal “blooder,” a distant cousin to Pyotr Shaka III in the Oetkert dynasty. He has the signature jade eyes that all Oetkerts have, while his dark skin shades closest to the maternal or Shaka side of the family.

  Across his fat right cheek is a careful “dueling scar” he claims dates to a test of honor during his High Akademy days on Kestino. It’s almost a requirement of his rank in RIK, to wear a white dueling scar. In fact, he had it surgically added while getting repairs to a vicious gouge in his cheek made by steel fingernails of a Kestino whore he was roughing up more than usual. A week later the girl was “disappeared” off-world, a nameless throwaway from the capital’s slums. It’s what Oetkerts do. Just because they can. Because no one dares say “no” to the blood royale.

  Brusilov is politically connected and very much a political general. He’s unnoticed on the military nebs and not consulted by Main HQ, but he’s prominent in civilian memex propaganda. He makes his own vids, boasting about the progress and mightiness of 10th Division and his own brilliance. The volume of his boasts is rising with realization that he’s stuck fighting ‘bandits’ on a backworld, on dull and rustic Genève. He knows the really big battles are underway on Brno, Lwów, and the ice-moons at Aral. Still, he’s an Oetkert. He can always command attention.

  His enemies know it, too. So news about his lost scouts is leaked to the civy memex. It’s embarrassing, to him and the Oetkert clan. Embarrassing to Pyotr Shaka. That’s why Brusilov is raging mad to “bring unholy hell down on all stinking, fucking Gelben. On all the rat bastards skulking as filthy bandits” inside the woodland sanctuary. That’s why he rashly sends in three battalions with simple orders to “clear the yellow fuckers out! Use any means, but do it today!”

  Brusilov’s arrogant ineptitude flows downhill, through his staff into poor field training and ill-preparedness of the whole division. 10th Armored is better at killing and raping civis in open villages, better at flaming temples than fighting armed KRA. That’s why Jan and Zofia catch the taishō and his ops staff in a clumsy and hasty penetration, made without adequate intel or proper arti support or the critical sky cover 10th Division enjoyed on the rolling Northland plain. Instead of moving inside the woods in basic echelon, Brusilov sends his battalions in one after the other. So Jan and Zofia and the Wreckers isolate, fix and beat them, one after the other.

  “Who told them we were coming? There are traitors on my staff! Find them!” Five staff officers are arrested and shot before the week is out, pour encourages les autres.

  They join 1,500+ dead of 10th Armored from a series of intense forest battles fought over three days and nights. Jan’s ‘Wreckers’ suffer 100+ casualties, more than 25% of all Madjenik fighters inside Pilsudski Wood. But in exchange, they slice up two RIK battalions. A third waits its turn to file into the woods on the general’s orders, but its officers see the carnage of the first two that unfolds on its farscopes. They retreat the whole battalion well outside the forest edge.

  Madjenik doesn’t pursue, but its aroused fighters kill any wounded or stragglers left behind by the two withdrawn battalions. The close hunting lasts nearly fifty hours. Jan and Zofia are methodical, the determined fighters of Madjenik are ruthless. No one found alive is left alive.

  Not even the dead are safe. The corpse of one man who managed to kill two Madjenik fighters before a third masered him in the back is skinned. Then his slippery human hide, an underside of yellow-white fat brilliant in the sun, is nailed to a the trunk of a huge sycamore, the last great tree where the forest edge ends. It terrifies the rest of 10th Armored. It’s done without Jan’s or Zofia’s knowledge, but most of Madjenik knows and approves.

  Stymied by the dense forest and Jan’s hit-and-run maneuvers, Taishō Brusilov readies to go in again, and again. What does he care for the lives under his command? Each time, he does it in more-or-less the same brutally stupid way. Each time, his ill-led men are met by Wysocki’s Wreckers in more-or-less the same fashion. Casualties mount. 10th Armored’s will starts to wilt.

  Brusilov is not a doubter. Not a learner. Too arrogant. Too royal. Too much like his more famous and powerful cousin Pyotr, the Grün Tennō who rules a vast but brittle empire from far-off Kestino. Too much the Oetkert. Too much a prewar general. Too much a fool playing at war.

  Over a large meal of mocksteak and freshly dug potatoes, wood-roasted in gee while brushed with cut parsley and dusted with coriander, he pushes aside all tactical objections from his most competent officers.

  One still offers last-minute words of caution: “Sir, I fear we may be heading into a trap.” The man is no fool. He’s careful to use the plural.

  “What kind of trap?”

  “This bandit captain is a special kind of leader, sir.”

  “So am I, shōsa. So am I.” He pushes another glazed potato into his full mouth.

  “Indeed you are, sir. I only mean, umm, that he’s done it to us twice already, thrice if you count the scouts we lost.”

  “Done what?”

  “He’s lured our men into the woods, cut off our march columns as they strung out in the density of the forest, then beat each battalion column separately and in detail.”

  “They were led by bad officers.” Brusilov takes another bite of mocksteak, hot juices leaking over his teeth and onto his double chin. He dabs at the dribble with a lace napkin.

  “No, sir. That’s not so. They were well-led, but met a superior foe deep in the woods.”

  “Superior? How dare you! Must I do everything myself?”

  The officer hesitates, then he says what Rikugun Security Unit, the division’s intel staff or RSU, concluded but has so far feared to tell the Division’s taishō: “Local kids are saying that he’s using a child’s game to trick us, my general.”

  “What are you talking about? A child’s game?”

  “Yes, taishō. They call it ‘Box the Fox.’”

  “Box the what?”

  “Fox. It’s a common child’s game of distraction and maneuver.”

  “I am no mere fox! I am a wolf of war!”

  “You are indeed, sir.” The officer judiciously lies. “Yet it seems this bandit leader has a rare and natural gift for tactics almost as great as yours. He’s lifted his ambush method not from the KRA manual but from a kid’s game that he and the other bandits all played before the war.”

  Its an ancient game on Genève, where some children distract local farmers while others steal apples or pears right from under their noses. Most farmers don’t really mind them doing it, having done it themselves when young. Some even play along. The more foolish get red-faced mad and chase after the nearest taunting kids, returning to find even more apples are missing.

  “You are children yourselves, to believe this tale. Or are you traitors?” The bold officer knows he’s gone too far. His life is at stake in these next minutes. This is a prince and taishō with his commission to High Command of the Division from the Jade Court. He backs down.

  “One thing, sir.” It’s the division RSU officer finally, with the latest intel. “A captured bandit told us, after experiencing one of our more persuasive methods, sir, so we know it’s true, that more stragglers are joining the bandit group as it moves about the woods. The bandit leader, the so-called ‘Ghost,’ again has over 400 fighters. He’s thus recovered all his recent losses.”

  “I have 40,000 men. And apparently, a covey of scared and incompetent staff officers! I can believe this of them, sniveling third casters, all of them. But you’re a second caster and an RSU man. You’re supposed to have iron in your soul. I see only rust.”

  Another
major finally dares to offer an opinion, his first, perfectly timed and calculated to go directly against the advice of his fellow staff officers: “We should go in as you say, sir, but with massive firepower and overwhelming strength. The whole division all at once!”

  A third finds rare courage in a quick negative inspiration, and says: “Or maybe not at all. Just let then starve in there. They pose no threat to our operations or supply lines.” The calculator is upset at being so easily and quickly preempted in his shōshō’s attention by the opportunist.

  “What?! You fear this ‘Ghost of the Wood?’ Yes, I heard that my men call him that. Are you such cowards, to fear this criminal in the trees, a bandit who fights without honor or rules?”

  “Sir, I must protest! We are not cowards! We only say...”

  “Do as you’re ordered! Send my columns in again! I will hang this ‘Ghost’ and all his men, or I’ll hang all of you!” He pushes away his unfinished meal and stabs his clear-diamond royal dirk into the wood table, where it quivers with lethal threat.