by Kali Altsoba
Fickle and fortunate, yes. But not for everyone. Five men die screaming in a secondary fire, beyond any reach or hope or help. After that Jan breaks Madjenik into ever smaller march groups, fearing to lose the whole company in a single unlucky blaze. The smaller groups can also move more quickly across the forest floor, darting from burn patch to burn patch, reasoning that the Jabos will not burn the same trees twice. Always north-by-northwest, heading to Toruń.
Heat and billowing smoke are welcome in a different way. They conceal Madjenik from thousands of mini-drones curving and flying above the canopy, and confuse thermal drones and e-sniffers mounted on crawling or slithering ground-bots. In all ways, Madjenik is undetectable. Protected by the vast canopy from visual observation, hidden by smoldering fires from infrared, concealed from normal movement and e-surveillance by captured RIK equipment and codes. It was easy for a company tek wizard to reverse pilfered detectors so that they jam all RIK search channels instead of assisting them. But where did Madjenik get RIK huff-duff gear?
***
Zofia took it from a Grün engineering squad her platoon blundered into one klic shy of Pilsudski Wood on the first day, as they reached and probed the forest edge. That was way back when, as she scouted ahead of the main body of the company. The reversed huff-duff had helped keep them hidden and alive ever since. They probably would’ve been found by now without it.
Some thirty-odd RIK Skyforce engineers were taking a break from setting up a tac station for circling Jabos and Raptors, most of which were then still high over the northern plain or shooting civis heading to the forest roads. They stood in a too confident, languid group. Talking, eating, drinking, lounging overlong in the shade of three idling acoustic hovers. Within the hour, Madjenik would use their bot cargo transports to move its wounded and supplies into the forest.
The engineers were eating cold sandwiches with mugs of hot field coffee when Zofia spotted them. She instantly ordered her squad to low crawl into a semi-circle ambush position.
“Kinda odd we’re setting up way out here, along the southern forests. Ain’t no real targets worth bombing that I can tell.”
“That’s OK with me,” says a second engineer. “Just means we’re also too far away from the fighting front to be targets for any KRA fuckers, either.”
“You’re right. So let’s lose these damn useless helmets. It’s way too hot under this too blue sky.” His homeworld’s sky is pink.
Dropped helmets, leaning stub masers, and shiny foil sandwich wrappers carelessly littered the ground around the ATC hovers, glinting in a hot sun like freshwater fish flashing in a shallow stream as they come up for dragonflies dipping too close to the warm water surface.
The engineers were way too confident in themselves and in their detect gear, especially the thermal camo-gel suits they were quite sure must hide them from all Krevan HUDs. It never occurred to them they could be under direct eyes-contact observation. Besides, they were certain there were no KRA left who weren’t dead, captured, or running scared inside the woods.
So it was a short fight, pretty much one-sided as Zofia gave the shoot! order via HUD platoon relay to Madjenik troopers who had silently low-crawled to within 50 meters of the over-bunched targets. Inside 30 seconds of mayhem all 14 engineers lay dead or scorched and dying.
Zofia stood up and advanced alone into the still smoking work site. She spent a minute observing the dead and dying enemy then hand-signaled come to the scout platoon, with a circling left arm raised over her head. The whole platoon was around her in an instant. Half pointed weapons outward in a compact perimeter defense, the rest waited on her fresh orders.
“Burn the ATCs. But only after the rest of Madjenik gets here. Get ‘em ready to burn, with delay-action incendiaries. But hold off firing until we’re all away or you get further orders.”
“Yes sir. Prep for burning but hold for orders.” Six fighters forming First Squad in this compact half-platoon readied the too biggest, most ungainly ATCs for destruction. They were directed by the kind black sergeant who pitied the severed half-boy at the meadow, thinking of his own young son now lost to his knowledge somewhere on occupied Genève.
“Spare the hover bikes. We can use those. Get those three cargo bots humming,” Zofia ordered. “Load all huff-duff onto one, ammo and food and potable water on another. Move them into the forest now.” Another short squad of fighters hurried to reload the squat cargo carts.
“Sergeant, take the hover bikes and two cargo bots with you and scout three klics over the edge of the woods, then set up tonight’s camp site and send back a guide to this rally-point.” It’s the burly, apple-eating sergeant she spoke to this time. The shorter, black sergeant and all First Squad were still busy stripping weps off the ATCs and readying the hulks for burning.
“On it. Second Squad: you’re now the lead scout. Get on those bikes and loaded cargo bots and be ready to move out with me in five minutes!
Zofia again: “Corporal, empty that third bot, yeah, the flat one. Shift anything useful to the other two, then send this one back the way we came to Captain Wysocki with the main body. He’ll know to use it to carry the most badly wounded. Keep your men here. The bot can go on its own. Just reset its orders. I’ll HUD flash the captain that it’s on the way.”
“What about the bodies, lieutenant?”
“Stuff ‘em into their own ATCs and half-tracks and let ‘em burn, too.” Troopers started carrying corpses to the waiting cremation pyres. But not all of them. One engineer Zofia found dead but still sitting up with a partly-eaten sandwich in his mouth. Because the top of his head went missing all in a moment, there was no way for the bit of brain left in the half-bowl of his skull to tell his mouth to chew or his legs to run. She ordered him left exactly as he died. Except that, just for fun, she returned a fallen cup of coffee to his curled dead hand, hooking the cup handle over his extended thumb. Then she tapped a message into the vidscroll she found in his pocket, before returning it there. It said: “Service courtesy of Madjenik Company, KRA.”
The rest of Madjenik moved through the scene 15 minutes later, grateful wounded packed in gauzy rows atop the flatbed bot, riding for the first time since the sweetgrass meadow fight. More critical equipment was collected and humped under nearby trees, then deep into the woods.
***
The skirmish with the engineers took place four days after the sweetgrass ambush of the “Double Moons.” That’s what Madjenik vets call the dead conscripts from Uri with twin moon flashes, the ones they assaulted from out of a wet orchard ditch with suicide snakes, short masers and forward mortars. Madjenik means it more cruelly, knowing that it left 100+ boys in a gore-soaked meadow grinning not just out of dead mouths but also from smiling crescent throats.
Brusilov continues to send heavy patrols in all directions, not knowing how few of his combat leaders ever dare to cross the forest’s edge anymore. Senior officers probe just a few klics, ordering wildly noisy searches meant to warn off bandits who might be hiding nearby. Then they file false after-action reports. Better a lie to HQ than lose one’s brigade to the Ghost.
Finally, an exasperated Lt. Colonel who’s certain Madjenik is long gone claims in his field report. “Today’s patrol killed bushels of bandits. No additional resistance is possible or expected. Mopping up operations commencing. No prisoners anticipated. None will be taken.”
The taishō still doesn’t believe it. Brusilov wants hard proof of his victory. So the clever colonel recycles refrigerated RIK officer corpses, dressing them in bloody KRA weaves to fool the suspicious general. He thaws them out and sets them up in forest ambush poses, before flying him in to view the faked and staged carnage. The colonel wasn’t at Bad Camberg and doesn’t know he just squared the circle of deception with the use of KRA uniforms on dead RIK men. If Pyotr ever hears he did it, the man will roast, revive, and roast again in the dungeons of Kestino.
Instead, General Nikita Brusilov Shaka Oetkert is satisfied at last. He declares victory in
a personal message of self-congratulation and tactical boasting that’s hand-delivered to HQ, with a copy sent directly to his cousin Pyotr. A third copy is broadcast copiously over the memex. The last Jabos are released to resume their northern missions, firing the roads leading to Toruń.
Madjenik puts any pursuit far behind after it fords a shallow, meandering river marking the border between Pilsudski Wood and the Gold Oak Forest, a second vastness of untouched ancient woodland. Three weeks after the ambush of the scouts the company is 700 klics away, moving stealthily through roadless oak woods, creeping across the grain of old growth laid out centuries before by AI-nanobot bioengineers. Far from the fuming, fumbling General Brusilov.
As fighters brush past ancient trees they invariably shake huge wheels of delicate silver threads, giant webs sparkling with tiny droplets of morning dew that tremble with their softest footfalls. Tom Hipper thinks they look like range-finders made by the giant, lurking spiders. Jan thinks of them instead as targets, knowing that he’s pulling the image out of some forgotten and ancient verse. The swift passing of Madjenik sends the sullen spider architects fleeing, then back to work reinventing fresh web wheels to replace a life’s work carelessly destroyed by war’s mere passing. Ants and flies and midges are more happy to see the thumping human columns pass.
Wreckers see fewer drones and micro hunters, hear fewer circling skycraft as they move. Once, a whole week passes quietly after reconfigured detectors pick up the last faint signals from RIK air-bots, and none whatever from ground-probes. It’s late-summer and stately snow geese honk as they migrate high overhead. These ones are going south, in less uniform ‘Vs’ than the faux geese that went north. Early whooping cranes with never-ending voices are also heading south, indifferent to or at least uninvolved in the war below. Jan listens to a feathered ‘vic’ pass honking and hooting onward, envying white geese and cranes their freedom and power of flight.
‘I wonder if they know something I don’t? A thousand klics still to Toruń. I promised to get Madjenik there, and I will. After that, we shall see...’ His mind wanders back to a red dress.
Madjenik has shaken all pursuit but it’s completely out of touch, cut off from any coms with military or civilian government higher-ups. If any are out there still. All satellites are down and old frequencies carry only dead static. Jan and Zofia and Madjenik don’t know if they’re the last free Krevans on Genève; whether Toruń holds out or is a smoldering ruin under the Jabos’ reign of fire; what became of the rest of Silver and Gold Divisions; if their families are alive or gone forever. They don’t even know whether the damn war is lost and over or just beginning.
“We’ll keep moving northwest, to Toruń,” Jan tells them again. “We’ll find out what’s happening across our homeworld when we get to Arbor City. One day at a time ‘till then.”
‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ And they’re utterly sick of them. Verdant dark, thick moisture, strange animal and bird calls, a heavy smell of old vegetative rot beneath their feet and in the stagnant, unmoving air. They hate every leaf and root and sagging golden bough.
They’ll regret feeling this. They’ll want to return to these mighty golden oaks carpeted in a millennia of musty windfall, hear again the woodcock’s call and the finches, smell living wood and leaves and old roots and fresh droppings of kite hawks, tree squirrels, bear and elk. They’ll long to walk silent and sad in the leafy, feather-pillowed, protected womb of the southern woods. Once they learn what awaits them on the pitiless path ahead.
Roads
The same day Madjenik attacks the ‘Double Moons’ in the sweetgrass meadow, 600 klics to the north and 200 farther west a short column of badly shaken and even worse beaten KRA soldiers retreat ahead of the relentless RIK advance. As they draw alongside a simple cottage standing just off the roadway they’re met by an old woman in a blue checkered headscarf.
“Locusts are back the other way!” she accuses. “Where are you going? Running, are you? And you wear the golden sheaves? Shame! Shame on you! If I was still in Gold you’d not see me running away! What cowards you all are!” They know it’s her fear that hurls hurtful words at them, her mortal fright over sheer helplessness and their abandoning her to the oncoming locusts. They resent her anyway.
“Say it to all my dead friends, mother!” It’s a stocky private, shouting as he suddenly breaks ranks and turns back toward the old woman. He steps menacingly at her, with red-faced threat. Until his weary corporal orders him back into line. Unable to take her with them, the battered remnants of 2nd Battalion, KRA Gold Division, tread silently past her tidy little cottage. Not the first, but now the last retreating troops to do so. Their shoulders droop, their faces are dour with foreknowledge that Grünen following close behind will surely burn the little cottage down. The old woman knows it, too.
She sobs and tosses small stones after the passing troops, the loose ends of her checkered headscarf flapping in a sudden gust of wind, the slack of her ancient breasts sagging as her shift opens when she stoops to grope for more stones. They ignore her, too proud and too ashamed to object to this last small indignity, awkwardly shifting their heavy gear and shuffling onward. A few pebbles clatter harmlessly on the cobbled lane behind them. Then the last soldiers are gone.
***
Groups of discombobulated fighters from Gold retreat across the plains, avoiding roads wherever possible, speeding along them whenever they can. Everywhere along the byways there are burning hulks of abandoned military hovers and acoustic ATCs that prove too vulnerable to use as transports, with RIK tactical sky force flying over from bases on the austral continent.
“Some traitor must have given our camo-codes to RIK, or they couldn’t have picked us off like that, so easily.” It’s the voiced thought of a bitterly angry Special Branch officer, limping along a back road a day after his intelligence unit was shattered by a diving Jabo.
“Not traitors, not in the KRA. It was the politicians. They did nothing to prepare for this.” It’s the sole survivor of a whole company smashed at the MDL.
“How could anyone prepare us to face the mighty Grün Imperium?” It’s an older veteran. “How do you prepare for this? How could we ever hope to defend Genève from them?”
“That’s defeatist talk!” It’s a very young soldier, screaming red-faced at all the others. “I’ll report you when we get to Toruń!” No one pays the beardless lad any mind.
Others are too stunned to have opinions. They have only stories. Of fleeing villages and being strafed on country roads. Of dead friends or family, ruined lives and hearths and homes.
“They came from the air. They flew, we ran. They bombed, we died.” He says it in a whisper, head bent low, this rare survivor of Silver Division who made it all the way over the water from Southland. Only to be bombed again, beaten again, and have to run all over again.
A young woman says out loud, but mostly to herself: “The awful smell ... burning hovers, roasting flesh. Everywhere the sweet, sickly smell of day-old death.” She has a vacant look in her eyes. So do many in the forlorn crowds that file ever westward, away from the guns behind.
A few stragglers get away on rugged carbon fiber motorbikes, the untippable military type with multiple gyros that stay upright at high speeds going around hard corners. Or bouncing off-road over rough fields. Or down a mid-channel of a gravely creek. Or along the sloppy banks of a cold and fast river. Or tearing and zagging like wounded rabbits through Pilsudski Wood.
Some units formed temporary defense rings after the breakthroughs of the first week of fighting on Northland, setting up weak pockets of resistance to hold up RIK ground attacks for awhile, here and there. They fight to the last. Men and women. Empty all their crystal chargers fighting around the old ultrasteel forts of the last Orion War. Are overrun at last and shot down where they stand, unarmed with empty masers. Or stand tall against a stone wall to be executed.
“Long live Krevo!”
“Vive la Genève!”
“Firing squad, in volley … fire!”
Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack.
Sizzle. Slump. Silence.
The rest move haltingly, like the unkempt survivors of 2nd Battalion passing the old woman’s doomed cottage. Jerkily heading northwest toward hoped-for shelter inside the great forests that rise to meet the high mountains. Pushed by enormous violence hither and yon more at the whim of local RIK commanders than with purpose by their own officers, many of whom are dead or missing in action in any case. A handful of refugees move southeast, looking to hole up in brackish marshes and swamps of the Toruń River delta. Delaying the inevitable, at best.
North or south, it doesn’t really matter. All wheat weaves want to live another hour or to fight another day. But no one thinks on victory. They know the KRA is a beaten army, pursued by hard youths in pale green for whom the war is still fun. Who fire merry masers to burn down farms and cut down farmers’ sons. Kill their daughters, too, as if shooting water guns in a child’s backyard or in a town fair game. Then they scythe the fruity tops off orchards with hot spandaus.