Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  “Do you smell them, all the daisies?”

  “Actually, they’re african moons.” It’s Jarred Whitmore, interjecting as he rarely does into conversation by others. He knows all these flowers types well, from gardening with his mother before the war.

  “Really? OK kid, you would know, I suppose.” Jarred falls silent, embarrassed to have seemed a know-it-all in front of his mates, but more lost in a rush of homey memories of Mother and her wonderfully varied flower garden. He stands there with the rest of his platoon, joined now by all Madjenik. Gawping at the open space.

  The youngest natural-eyes in the company, and several artificial sets soft-clicking and whirring, narrow to make out a dark tree line to the north, on the far side of the botanical break where the wide meadow worked as a natural fire stop preventing southward spread of the terrible blaze that reduced Toruń Wood. It saved the Gold Oak Forest that Madjenik is leaving behind.

  “The Great Fire.” That’s what immense blazes along five Old Forest Roads spoking away from besieged Toruń are already being called, though Madjenik doesn’t know that yet or even that any fire broke out up north. They know only that blotches of Pilsudski geysered pillars of flame and smoke around them when an angry RIK taishō looked for “the filthy bandits” who kept embarrassing him, and so hurled Zeus’s electric bolts randomly into the deep woods below.

  “A’right,” barks an anxious NCO, jumping to disperse the company before Zofia jumps down his throat for letting them stand in the open. “Enough ah yur fuckin’ gawkin’. Let’s move.” They step guiltily through a host of golden bell-flowers. “Narcissus pseudonarcissus,” Jarred says softly but out loud, thinking he says it only to himself. They hear him and laugh.

  “Jarred Whitmore, you have so much wool in your head it’s a wonder you aren’t taken away and sheared for being a sheep!”

  The spread of daffodils ‘stretches in never-ending line along the margin of their day. Ten thousand they see at a glance, tossing golden heads in sprightly dance.’ Jarred hears the familiar verses sonorous in his mother’s voice, almost as if she’s walking beside him in the open way between two great forests planted over a thousand years ago, managed by wise and wondrous AI who worked so patiently and wisely to raise new life under a skyfall full of stars.

  ‘They flash upon my inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude, and then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.’ He does the little hop-step that his mother always gives when she sees the daffodils in a neighbor’s meadow close to home, the place she taught him that and many another ancient verse. Battle hardened fighters on either side of the line of march look quizzically at him and then each other, but say nothing. They know he’s a bit of an odd duck, but also that he’s an OK kid.

  It’s not just Jarred the flowers surprise with joy. Madjenik breathes in sweet scents of the white-with-black-center african moons and flocks upon flocks of purple-disk morning glories, and is revived. Some stoop down to scoop up a blossom or two, better to smell the sweet aroma by pressing soft petals right to their noses. Several women tuck flowers into weave pockets, and one also into the brow of her helmet with her faceplate raised. Some things never change.

  Yet they also hasten across the firebreak, glancing upward frequently. For after weeks of easy arboreal cover they feel naked under the open sky and scudding wisps of nighttime clouds. In their urgency they make good time, moving eight klics north straight across the flowers. As they draw closer to the far shore of the wide meadow and see the dark tree line loom they grow giddy and gay again, like small children let out unexpectedly from school on a bright spring day.

  Then everything changes. Dancing white, red, yellow and purple blooms and sprightly green grasses turn to uniform gray as they reach the edge of the ash zone. A lonely, timid coyote bays in the distant desolation, answered at greater distance by a coywolf. A moral chill descends.

  The northern side of the meadow smells of old campfires after a heavy rain sluices down, full of damp rot and frigid mornings, dashed hopes and new hatreds. The great trees begin again, but they’re not living towers of gold oak or silvery pine spires. Underfoot is no deep, musty leaf fall to carpet arboreal cathedrals like Pilsudski Wood or the Gold Oak. The way ahead reeks of ash and death, of malice and murder. It reminds Jan of another hot landscape, one a dead poet saw in front of the adamantine and iron-clad Temple of Mars, its red dome glowing with war:

  “A cake of scurf lies baking on the ground,

  and prickly stubs instead of trees are found.

  Woods with knots and knares deformed and old;

  headless the host, and hideous to behold.”

  They move into the desolation, disconsolate with ugly, gouged, mutilated stumps and runty pillars. Walk past verdant lives burned in agony to half their former height or less. Charred sentinels stand mute with outstretched and naked limbs, blackened against a crisply starry night. Raped of rustling leaves and all bird song, abandoned even by insects and homeless rodents, left only with raw pain and open wounds leaking sap. And solitary hostility to all living things that pass below.

  “There’s no eye cover here” Zofia notes, ever practical about optical surveillance.

  “Right,” Jan agrees. “We’ll have to hole up by day, move fast at night. But first we need to move Madjenik quickly out of this field, get under whatever canopy is left in Toruń Wood.”

  “Yes sir. Also, from the look of that burned-out tree line, food and water are going to be problems again. And real soon.”

  “Right again, lieutenant.” It’s been a long time since he’s called her Zofia. “Conserve water. Half the ration, starting now. Same with the food. Make it happen, Jablonski.”

  “Yes sir, captain.” There’s a hurt bite to her use of his rank that even Jan can’t miss.

  “Move out, people! Let’s go! Move your asses! That includes you, Whitmore!” The boy looks up guiltily at Zofia with pale blue eyes, still lost in thoughts of his old home and Mother.

  ***

  Later that night, well into the ash zone, Jan looks over longingly at Zofia. She’s panther-like in the dark, crouched on guard duty and in active command as he takes his turn at rest. ‘Not so long ago I couldn’t imagine how such a beautiful creature might engorge with cruelty and blood lust. Until I saw what she did to boys lying insensate in the burnt sweetgrass.’

  Now he no longer shudders when he remembers her quick knife work on Z+5. He’s done too many similar things himself, and he knows it well. He almost forgets that he ever thought he was different from her, better than her, more moral. ‘I’ve ordered too many hard beatings of prisoners since then, to get the intel I needed to keep us alive. I’ve cut too many throats, to show others how and that it must be done. I’ve overseen too many executions of pleading, crying youths to feel moral distance from Zofia. From anyone in this filthy, fucking war.’

  He was right that worse lay ahead after leaving the meadow, but wrong about why and where the enemy spearheads would push out across Northland. ‘I wasn’t so clever after all. I never dodged and ducked brilliantly around the whole RIK main force to reach Pilsudski Wood, as my troopers think I did.’ RIK left him and Madjenik behind, uninterested in so small a prize.

  ‘Any KRA straggler bits and pieces like us that got through the drift net into the woods only did so because so few RIK commanders paid us any attention. The interrogations told me that. We were minnows wriggling out between net wires that held a whole school of larger KRA dolphins and tuna well enough.’ All bloody and panicking as Grünen speared and shot and killed them inside the trap, while all around frenzied sharks bit and thrashed in a froth of blood frenzy.

  Minnow or not, Jan saw too many of his fighters die no matter what he did. No matter how clever his tactics of hit-and-hide. Until he finally learned how to fight by fighting, inside Pilsudski Wood. So when he looks over at Lieutenant Jablonski now, red curls whispering softly to him in an ash wind as she crouches alert to danger, he sees not a stone killer wi
th no mercy or qualms but a highly competent officer. His essential “Number 2” on the trek to Toruń.

  Sometimes, and this night is one of those times, he stops being her commanding officer and reverts to seeing her as any man must. Recognizes a vixenish young woman called Zofia for whom he has longed since before the war started. Since he first saw her stamp across his parade ground in a taut KRA uniform that hardly hid her figure. Since the red dress evening he fell into her eyes and personality. Now he sees under the dirt and blood a trim, athletic, compact beauty who sometimes also shoots him quick looks on the march that he doesn’t understand, yet craves.

  He dwells long and longingly on her curved and feline form. He can’t smell her musk anymore, the promise of sex she always gave off before the war. Here, in seared and dead and desecrated woods, she smells like everyone else: of ash and death and dwindling hope, of gray mud, red murder and mad bloody mayhem. Yet, he knows that he desires her more every day. At night he throbs with longing as he dreams of her in red of a different sort, wearing a low-cut and slit-thigh dress she swirled in to tease him once. Way back when, before time. Before the war.

  Today he caught a quick look from her flashing green eyes during the night march. He lies fitful over the rest period, until at last he surrenders to it, allowing himself to imagine Zofia naked and lying with him. Imagine her beside him, then under him in a sweetgrass meadow on a hot, high summer’s day. Just like the time he lay with that lithe brunette three summers back.

  Now, of all places, in the ash zone, he dreams of Zofia in a miasma of foggy fantasy sex. Not as she is here in a dead forest, taking turns at watch, ready to kill a man in an instant with a hot maser pistol or slick black-diamond knife. Not as she is at rest, curled and covered in muck.

  Zofia glances quickly over and notes a rare wry smile curling Jan’s lips as he lies still, eyes closed and seemingly asleep. ‘Men!’ is all she says to herself, knowing full well what he’s thinking and dreaming about. She knows because she dreams of it often, too.

  ***

  “We’re getting closer to Toruń, captain,” Zofia cautions him five days later.

  “Yes, I know.” The closer Jan gets to the end, the gloomier he becomes.

  “We should expect intensified surveillance. Even if they’re not looking for us, they might see us anyway.”

  “Better slow and safe than dead. We’ve come so very far.”

  “Right, captain. So whenever we move we jam, with everything we’ve still got?”

  “Make it so.” Zofia hates these dark, taciturn moods.

  Madjenik is OK on thermals because all around barren, branchless trunks are slow-burning and the ground is seared several meters deep, heat traveling along immense, still smoldering roots deep below. Infrared can’t pick out their bodies in all that heat. Motion is another matter.

  So Madjenik uses its captured ELMs, which RIK and RSU drones don’t detect. If they did, a swarm of Jabos would be overhead already. Best to assume that the enemy is looking for Madjenik, not that it’s written off as dead and burned in a reckless Oetkert’s southern fires. Not that the arrogant generals in RIK Main HQ on the coast of Northland assume that everything in the ash zone is dead, and have stopped looking there. Good thing, too, ‘cause RIK is looking.

  They’re exposed by day to visual spotting by mini-drone remotes, disguised as insects or small birds. Multi-scanner, multi-capability mini-drones stay up almost forever, as do the micro hunters. Superlight aerographite chargers are repowered by overflying a mobile laser operated by ground handlers, or flying into a power beam sent down from picket ships and coms satellites in geostationary orbit, unmolested by a defeated KRN flotilla long since chased out of the system.

  Madjenik moves only at night, fighters sleeping as well as they can during shortening, cooling days. They lie under a paling, autumnal sun and blackened trees, covered with dual-purpose camo-and-thermal blankets layered with photonic metamaterials at the nano-scale. KRA field blankets keep most warmth in and prying sensors out. They’re safe, but fitful and morose.

  Especially Jan.

  After eight nights of forced marches through desiccated woods every man and woman curses the land and dead trees. They’re all tired, thirsty, filthy and complaining constantly. Each fighter humps their personal weps plus a load of extra gear. And their share of captured weapons and RIK equipment, divided proportionate to body weight: tents and blankets coated in acoustic muffling, light-bending metamaterials, anti-sound projectors, critical canteens of water last filled at a quick stream inside the Gold Oak, days before they reached the ash zone of Toruń Wood.

  They’re crossing a sahara of ash, hot barchan dunes of shifting gray dust. Dry ash blows into artificial or modified eyes and gets into hair down to the scalp. It worries into skin creases on faces and hands, gets inside weaves to burn crotches raw. Slips down boots and inside socks to irritate precious spaces between clammy toes that whinge to sore and swollen feet with every leaden step. Water is strictly rationed, and only for drinking. They can’t replenish from creeks that no longer flow in this dead land of dry-baked beds and dams of burned branches, of ash-clogged streams and dead oases with the gray look and grainy texture of fresh-mixed cement.

  They all smell of ash and liquid feces, for they all have the “ash zone runs.” There’s too much ash in their drinking water, in their food and in their bowels. It weakens and slows them.

  It’s worse when rain gutters down. The gritty, slimy water they capture in canteens and helmets doesn’t really compensate after the first quenching for what it does to the ashen ground. For rain turns deep ash to thick sludge that sucks at their combat boots and morale like no mud they ever met or saw, slowing and exhausting them and weighing down all the things they carry.

  ***

  Then they reach the southernmost Old Forest Road and all griping stops. The carnage is immense, awesome and all around. Thousands of vehicles line up like stranded ghosts outside a cemetery gate. Large commercial types and small private transports, abandoned military hovers, export timber haulers, civilian troikas with skis retracted, even primitive wooden wagons and a few children’s toy carts. All tangled and stopped in a colossal traffic snarl of fire and death.

  Most are reduced to charred frames, evenly spaced along the road, dutifully stopped from colliding by careful auto-drivers before all controls were incinerated. Passengers still sit stiffly in buses and cars, as if at attention. Bodies are no more than porous ash. Touch one and it collapses like a child’s castle of dried sand, losing frail shape and any meaning, sifting down into a rough black-and-gray cone. Caught by the next stiff breeze, what was once a kind father or mother or beloved child or wise old grandparent erodes to a dusky stream that glitters damp nostrils of the living, the stunned troopers of Madjenik. Until gritty mucus runs black over their caked lips.

  Faces are gone. Etched memories of special worries or the odd joys and humor of one unique life after another, after another, after another. All melted to manikin smoothness. Visages look out from dark hollows where parents’ missing eyes searched the last terrible moments of their lives, to gaze helplessly on the final terror of their burning children before also dying.

  Like hikers overtaken by superheated gas and rock of a pyroclastic flow cascading down one of the volcanoes that surround Kestino, whole families are holding hands, huddling for last comfort in odd merry-go-round sculptures of love and soot. Nearby, the ash shade of a loyal dog.

  Over there lies an inchoate lump of ash once a small child. Here a mother stretches out to save the infant, never to reach him. Many more are shadows painted by ferocious heat upon the ground, shades of life and death brushed onto burnt soil. Soulless, sexless, featureless evermore.

  It seems forever that Jan lets Madjenik gather and stand and stare, all agape and silent. He’s shaken, too. This is a hundred times, ten thousand times the death and destruction anyone has seen or wrought ‘till now. They can do nothing for so many. Not even bury them. For they mustn’
t tarry. There’s no cover over the canyon-like road. The canopy is burned away, leaving only cold, callous and indifferent stars in a cloudless and careless sky. Topless, roofless, burned trees still stand in long rows down each roadside, like the useless pillars of ancient Roman ruins.

  Yet, against tactical rules and wisdom, for Humanity’s sake and their own, Jan doesn’t object as shaken men and women of Madjenik gather in a circle right out in the open to say a quiet prayer for the departed. Or spit a silent curse against the God of War, as is the favor and belief of many fighters who have no time for the Common Faith or who lost it in first combat.

  Jan fills with silent rage. He has no voice for this. Instead an ancient accusation flies into his mind from a lifetime ago, from his forgotten student days, a verse out of time adapted to the precious moment: ‘Go! Tell Pyotr, you who pass us by, that here, obedient to his will we lie.’

  Out loud he speaks only the ancient, polite Krevan promise to parents and grandparents left behind by youths who die too young: “You will not sorrow alone over an early grave.”

  The standard Common Prayer the religious among the fighters say, all bunched up on the road, gives no one comfort. It invokes no sense of divine mercy as they stand in the midst of a crematoria of ash families and isolated, lonely dead. Small consolation comes only from a most unlikely source, from words quietly spoken by, of all people, woolly-headed Jarred Whitmore.