by Kali Altsoba
Bigger columns of retreating KRA are broken up, smashed and harried by diving Jabos who strafe and bomb everything that moves on the northern plain. Any who survive sky attacks to make the great trek inland from the coast do so because they move alone or in pairs or small groups, or are widely spread out. Concentration at even battalion level brings down mass long-range arti bombardment and skyfall fire from diving Jabos. And real hot, mass ground pursuit.
Only the lucky or the skilled, and not all of them, manage to infiltrate a bushy copse in groups of three or five or ten, hide in muck up to their necks in a thick and sloppy slough before sliding a few more klics north, hiding and slipping away again tomorrow. They’re hunted by tens of thousands of mini-drones carrying full-spectrum detection gear. They lie under superceramic-fiber screens and other adaptive camo, standard-issue gossamer sheets doubling as thermal insulation blankets. It’s just enough to cloak, concealing electromagnetic signatures and body heat and movement from enemy patrols, mini-drones, micro hunters, and the ever-circling Jabos.
Swallows wheel overhead, flying atop the fray and slaughter, singing dirges to the dead below. Thinking themselves more noble and pridefully poetic than these dire ways of men. They fly slow and low over the panic, above all the parched pain of wounded too hurt to walk or crawl and now abandoned by unhurt men too tired to carry their stretchers any farther. The songful swallows avoid long trails of fresh corpses, undeceived of all cares by a maser shot or spandau ball of blue electric fire. They leave the carrion trail for white-tailed eagles who circle in pairs, and murders of black ravens that caw caw with delight at the unexpected harvest of dead flesh.
Carrion-eaters swoop down to tear with beaks and talons at the unbidden larder that all war lays out fresh for such as them. The raven’s portion is neither victory nor defeat. He feasts indifferently and alike on dead meat and offal that spills from open green or wheat wrappings.
***
A tight tattoo rat-at-tat-tats in the distance. Do you hear it? Now a heavier drumbeat of marching columns of RIK battalions, of divisions and corps. Listen! Do you hear their black, tramping boots stomping on the roads in unison? What’s that? Ahh, rough martial songs on the summer wind! March ballads from the last Orion War. Bold songs of old victories and death and glory. Bliss it is in this summer of war to be Grünen and alive. And to be RIK? It’s very heaven!
Underneath the fateful tromping in the distance there again rises that lighter sound, the tinny parade rat-at-tat-tat of a snare drum here, another one beating over there, tapping out time for the green-clad marchers of destiny, of Purity’s sacred army. Luring them deeper into war, as the “drum’s discordant sound” lured so many generations down four score or more of centuries.
Nitōhei Lars Knut recalls an ancient warning dully learned at school but understood fully for the first time only now, as the volunteer RIK private marches over Genève’s scorched fields. He and his friends all had two years training, of course. It was mandatory from age 16. Now they have the chance to use it, to find real meaning and purpose in the great adventure of their lives.
His mind wanders back to when he heard the announcement of his and Pyotr’s war over the homeworld memex, piped into his classroom just a month before his 18th birthday:
“Hear this, all subjects of Pyotr Shaka III. The Imperium’s honor and dignity has being insulted. Our borders have been violated. Foreigners have done murder to our people, on our land. Pyotr knows that you are with him, as he is with you in this dark hour of need. Onward to Victory! Onward to liberate all Lost Children worlds! Long live the Empire and its Emperor!”
Lars and every lad in his age cohort cheered and rushed from school, running all the way to the nearest recruiting station. He got there without even his hat, on the proudest day of his life. He’s had regrets every day since then. He doesn’t know why he’s here. He wishes he wasn’t.
The other boys in pale green marching with him over Northland can hear only the snare drums as they parade to war, and in war. They’re the discordant proud, the many, out on Death’s anointed rounds. They have no regrets. It’s all too exciting. They want to be in no other place.
RIK ground vehicles course down cobble streets in empty towns littered with unburied corpses from the last bombing run by Jabos or swarming drones, leading charnel columns over hundreds of klics of burned-out farms, destroyed hamlets and butchered villages. Thousands of black smokers rise behind the corps, far back over a golden horizon. Wispy black monuments to all the shattered lives, homey dreams destroyed forever. Families scattered and broken and lost.
One RIK officer later recalls rolling the northern plain to reach the forest zone. “It was gruesome; we had to force our halftracks and armtraks through endless rows of corpses. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of skulls cracking beneath our wheels and the dull thump of arms and legs caught in our treads as we rolled. All cohesion in our column was lost as some drivers frantically shied like frightened horses, trying to find some other way around unmoving dead.”
“What did you do?” His debriefer asks him not from horror but only in mild and polite disinterest. He has lots of other after-action reports to fill out and this emotional rubbish just gets in the way. Yet the slow-talking man is a shōsa, a promotable major gaining his combat badge with a quick tour in the Rikugun. So the debriefer has to listen for a minute or so, at least.
“I ordered everyone to get off manual drive and back on auto. That way we rolled steady and true right through the burning towns. The crunching of skulls accompanied us everywhere. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound. I sometimes think I can hear it in the falling rain.”
“That so? Interesting. I’ve made a note. See? Right here. Look ... umm, well, thank you shōsa. I think I have everything I need from you for now. Sonnō jōi! And good hunting!”
Hardly a barn or crop or shed stands after the Rikugun passes. Where once spring horses nickered in neat enclosures, red mounds and lumps of exploded hair and horseflesh now lie inert, mare and foal together. Whole fields of unharvested, sun-ripened corn burn like paper maché as rows of dry stalks heavy with ripe bursting yellow ears flare up or burn low. Abandoned fields untouched by the RIK are fired anyway, by stray sparks from passing nailed boots or radiant heat from burning crops and buildings one field over, or two or three. Until all the spreading plain is dead and gray and smells of scorched crops and splayed corpses. Of burned and primal carbon.
The land layers over with ash fall that looks like dirty snow, covering fields and villages and ruined towns with warm gray blankets. Once sweet country air fills with blown cinders and the smells of burning vegetation and roasting flesh. Flames crackle and snap hotter and higher wherever melting fat of footloose herds feeds the fires, as deranged gates swing woefully open from madly bent fences. Human corpses mingle with dead pigs, goats, and silent herds of cattle.
As Madjenik treks across the great eastward bulge of Pilsudski Wood its fighters don’t know that wide rivers of refugees are flowing toward Toruń. The sight is pitiful even amidst all the suffering on Genève and four other burning Krevan worlds. Civilian innocence of combat is what makes it far worse somehow, matching befuddlement to anger and fearful uncertainty. The refugees move singly or in small family groups, until caught by stronger currents that carry them to places they don’t know because they can’t resist. Can’t reach a safe or sheltered shore against so powerful a force of nature as war, whose mighty undertow pulls them from their old lives and carries them out to sea. To drown or not. They know not where or why or when or how they go.
Forty klics beyond the old woman’s cottage, now burning on the horizon, an incoherent and floundering cacophony of refugees is trying to squeeze into a gap between towering trees at the start of one of the five Old Forest Roads that cut through Toruń Wood to the Arbor City.
Modified for size, color, growth rate and longevity, the great trees of the famed golden woods of Genève command full luxury prices. Wood carvings by Tor
uń’s skilled craftsmen are specially valued off-world for soft, subtle hues of exposed grains, each artifact injected with an embedded nanoflake ID to guarantee authenticity. Export to closed Dauran worlds was stopped decades ago, after the “Grim Revolution” closed off that largest of Orion polities. But fine flutes and violas and other wood instruments, and aromatic frankincense and delicate carvings, are all in demand by the wealthy of the Calmar Union and across the cloistered elites of the Imperium.
Before the war even rough, raw lumber of the lowest grades was avidly sought, gifting premium credits to cutters and exporters. Genèvens managed the tree crop wisely, fast-growing export trees in tall rows a thousand klics long on sparsely populated and rural Southland, while keeping pristine the old growth forests of Northland. All wholly free from all timber gatherers and poachers, guarded by watchers and wardens and local pride. The old gold-and-silver forests around Toruń were preserved for guided tourists and the pleasure of Genèvens. The spectacular southern woods were kept untouched, even unvisited, valued solely for their wondrousness.
Until General Brusilov ordered half the southern forests burned to nubs, setting fire to a thousand years of old growth and leaf and windfall. Now, along five narrow, serene roads built for off-world tourists to travel through parts of the northern preserves that fan away on all sides from Toruń, huge crowds of terrified refugees are surging. They’re all trying to get off the open plains where Jabos swoop and hordes of RIK in black boots tramp ever closer. They’re trying to reach the wood edge and thence move under forest cover to Toruń, 300 klics to the northwest.
Dogs jump and bark and nip at ankles and hanging finger tips, harrying anyone who dares to touch their hard-pressed masters. Larger breeds run away, or turn about in foolish tight and barking circles, keeping people wary and at bay. Cats are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they’re in the trees hunting chipmunks and unsuspecting tom-tits? Being cats, they have their own agenda.
The worst jam starts two score klics from the old woman’s burning cottage, where a mob is heaving and shoving into the arched entrance of one of five Old Forest Roads. Yet the column barely moves. Curses, exhortations and hard pressing come from the rear and sides of the fleshy funnel, as those still exposed and frantic push pitilessly on the backs of seemingly more stupid fortunates moving too slowly just ahead, with an advancing Grün column now so close behind.
A red-faced man curses: “Damn all locusts! I don’t deserve this misfortune befalling me and my family. Why is my life taking this hard turn?” Perhaps it’s his fate? There is a war on.
“Get out of my way!” Thump! Slap, slap. A fat woman hits an oldster and two children she accuses of blocking her way. The oldster looks startled and confused. The kids start to cry.
“Don’t you be hittin’ people, you fat cow!” She takes several blows to the back of her head from the children’s separated and terrified mother. “Here’s another for you!” Smack.
A red-headed child and a small woman faint inside the close and sweaty crush but are jostled forward regardless, heads bobbing insensibly as their limp bodies are held upright and in place by the hermetic indifference of the billowing crowd of desperate refugees. No one even notices as they float along like leaves or wood chips in a narrow, languid Great Plains stream.
The tailback becomes less dense and agitated just inside the forest, where the funnel-shaped outer snarl forms a cannula slow-flowing between massive arboreal pillars. No human will or pushing or hard cursing or prayer can ever hope to budge the great trees. They stretch in two endless, even columns. A living Parthenon. But are there ever gods alive among the ruins?
Flowing like treacle onto a darkly shaded road are ‘townees’ in pastel-colored shirts and light summer frocks, and farm families in rougher working clothes, many wearing dirty old hats. Weary teachers herd clutches of small children still wearing school uniforms and chittering like sparrows, or crying for their mamas. Heavily pregnant young mothers are being pulled or pushed in simple carts by older women, or by widow grandfathers. Their parents are in the KRA. Gray and withered oldsters well past 120 years shuffle along, aided by middle-aged offspring in their spry eighties or nineties. More dogs walk beside the compact family groups, tails between legs.
One banker is thinking about large ledgers filled with now worthless credits: ‘Is this the accounting of my life? All my diligence only to end up here, stuck on the road with this rabble?’
A factory worker thinks only about his missing daughter, fighting somewhere with Gold Division farther south. As far as he knows: ‘Oh my sweet Sophia, to see you one last time. To touch your dear face, so like your mother’s. Only once more, is all I ask of this failing world.’
A worried woman of fading beauty but deep character asks: “Has anyone seen my gray mother? She’s old and not fully with us anymore. We were going to take her to the Life Temple next month. Have you seen her? Her name is Golda. Ma mere, ma mere?”
Many on the Old Forest Roads are frightened youths, male and female. Still too young to enlist or fight in the KRA, they’re old enough to know they might yet be raped by advancing RIK marauders. Or executed as accused tirailleurs by roving SAC or Purity death squads.
Just 60 days have passed since the Bad Camberg incident. Only 42 since the Kaigun broke into Genève space, on the dark day a vanguard of Zerstörers flashed in from the outer system bohr-zone to cut the “God’s Lift” cable and drop Genève’s elevator onto the northern forest. More enemy ships jumped into the L1 on the windward side of Genève system’s largest planet, an orange-blue gas giant. Kaigun capital warships bashed through the local flotilla to reach Genève’s moons, with more Zerstörers swooping in to detonate 50 EMPs in close orbit, knocking out the civilian memex and nearly all military coms. All that a full week before the first planetside landing was made on Southland and the KRA started its cascading ground collapse.
Zerstörers severed the Toruń space elevator cable 900 klics above its landing dock. The highest quays and platforms tossed away from the planet, outward from a spinning world to which they were no longer tethered, beyond hope of rescue or recovery by a smoke-obscured and war-pummeled world and people. Lower cabs full of lumber, grain or people fell back from tens of klics high, crashing into the quiet forest west of Toruń as cab ascents aborted, setting patchy fires. A thousand klics of nanocarbon ribbon snaked gracefully to ground over several weeks.
All local hovers and skycraft, military and civilian, are demolished or abandoned. Shot down or forced to ground by thousands of RIK falcons that hunted the sky clean of native birds. They caught outdated KRA fighters parked in long files on the first day, killing most still in their nests before they could rise to challenge for supremacy of the sky, now a domain of fear. Raptor fighters and Jabos, sleek skim-and-dive bombers, are free to hunt and strafe all ground targets.
Millions of civilians are fleeing the war as best they can in private vehicles of all types. Running from the pursuit, from the barking guns, away from a strangely orange-glowing horizon that holds its flickering color even at mid-day. In the first days the Jabos were preoccupied with attacking military traffic as priority targets and let the civis run, or only indifferently strafed their raggedy columns. But now all KRA targets are dealt with and Jabos are looking for easy prey.
Hodge-podge traffic collides and chokes into five Old Forest Roads, impassible tailbacks the like of which Genève never saw before in its 1,000-year history. After reaching the forest the refugees abandon all useless ground transport, leaving tens of thousands of vehicles impossibly tangled at five tunneled entrances to the woods. The crowded parking lots invite attack. Already, the burning of dispossessed vehicles by the Jabos has begun, raising tower clouds of acrid black.
“Don’t bunch up!” someone cries. There’s no authority in the words or in the woods, so the warning goes unheard and unheeded. The danger’s real enough, however. It makes no sense to bunch. People do it anyway, instinctively huddling together against the breaking storm of w
ar.
Raptors see the jams and skim down to just above the treetops, making long strafing runs parallel to the five narrow roads that cut through the immense northern forests. Pilots hungry for targets since denuding the great plains turn toward the packed forest roads, through woods less sacred and thus more traveled than Pilsudski or the Gold Oak Forest, yet nearly as thick and tall.
Panicked refugees block each others’ way, like a stumbling jam of logs from high up a mountain stream feeding into the broad Toruń River. They push as if they, too, were cut in high crest-line woods and cast direct into rushing white waters to make their jumbled way down the jagged mountainsides, jostling pell-mell to sawmills and great booms and docks below. There to tumble and turn, be claimed and pulled out, reshaped as artisanal treasures or disposed as waste if too damaged by rushing down the mountain. Only the jams of refugees are trying to go the wrong way, up to the boreal mountains at whose feet gentle Toruń rests. The last safe harbor.
Long, stretched crowds pressing through the narrowly pillared roads are calmer than the broad and rowdy mobs frantically pushing into the funnels where Toruń Wood meets the plain, where marching and singing RIK ground forces are finally heaving into view. They trudge along tall, shaded defiles through immense dark forests that fan out for hundreds of klics from the hub of Toruń, vital heart of all Genève. Five arboreal canyons spoking away from a frosty northern city to reach warm plains and rich farms of lower Northland. Beautiful and calm. In peacetime.