by Kali Altsoba
“My sweet mother, Janine Whitmore, used to say very old words in times like these.”
“Shit, kid! Sorry, but there ain’t no such words, ‘cause there never was times like these.”
“Any time a friend or family member dies is times like these.”
“What does that mean?”
“That this terrible place is full of unmourned and dear departed.”
“Yeah? So what can we do about it?”
“We owe them words.”
“Sure, kid. But let me tell ya, no words can ...”
“Quiet,” Jan orders firmly. “Let the boy speak. What did your mother say, son?”
Jarred speaks the ancient verse his mother said over the graves of many a lost friend, and once also over the grave of a lost child. No one interrupts, and not just because Jan said not to.
“Turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day,
things which I have seen I can see no more.
Though nothing can bring back the hour
of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
we will grieve not. Rather find
strength in what remains behind.”
“Nice one, kid,” the skeptical soldier says quietly to Jarred and to him alone.
It’s the last words anyone in Madjenik speaks for the longest time. Except for the captain and lieutenant, but they only talk ‘cause they have to give the company its march orders.
With the praying done, Madjenik hauls north across the cemetery road, moving back among the silent, begrimed trees. Nothing more is said as they leave, trailing not clouds of glory but little puffs of ash that rise behind two shambolic lines of grieving fighters shuffling silently in thick combat boots. It’s two hours into the next march cycle before anyone speaks a word.
Even if the “Path of Death,” the Voie de Mort as Zofia dubs the Old Forest Road, wasn’t exposed to overflights and hunter-probes, not too dangerous to take on the last klics of their trek to Toruń, no one among them could stand to make such a journey. Not emotionally or mentally. They’ve no moral strength to pick a callous path around the dense crowds of corpses still on a gadarene exodus to nowhere, on a thoroughfare of death that stretches hundreds of klics through an ash forest many remember so much more greenly from childhood days. Childhood’s over.
So they quietly redeploy ten klics deeper inside the dead and decimated trees. They trudge though deeper ash than necessary, over burned and fallen branches, past giant smoking stumps, under arching roots as black and bent and mocking as the Gates of Hell in old stories. They trod on, always paralleling but carefully out of sight of the dread road they know is there.
They take turns at walking flank or rear or point. They keep alert watches while their comrades erratically slumber. Try to sleep themselves when ordered. Snatch an hour here or there while lying atop still warm and downy ash, suffering fits and fevers. They eat shrinking rations sparingly, without interest. Sip tepid, gritty water from quarter-full canteens. Stop by a blackened root to pass dark urine whenever needed. Defecate silently at the bases of dead trees.
For eight more nights they make forced marches, stopping every two hours for rest-and-water breaks. More nights of stepping on hidden roots, kicking past sooty clutter on the burned-out forest floor, stumbling through a half-meter of choking ash with every dragging step.
The dawn breaks into nighttime gloom much later this time of year, this far north. It’s two months past a lost harvest interrupted by invasion. The long, cold nights give them several extra hours of dark to trudge in silence. To not be seen. And better, not to see.
It’s not just the Voie de Mort they wish not to see, or the drear ashland of a once beloved old forest now past saving. Soldiers always hate daylight more than concealing dark. With light comes new danger, especially exposure to detection by bird and insect-mounted drones. They haven’t seen any for a while, but two buzz over them as they draw nearer to the Great Berm.
Even with huff-duff blockers and adaptive camo refracting light around their sleeping forms, bending it into an illusion of ashen floor and hiding thermal signatures and the rhythmic movement of their breathing chests, scared sentries say afterward it was a damn close thing and some time before the drones moved on. No one cares to repeat the chance, to tempt tiny metal mistresses of the day to alert monstrous Jabo masters who will call Death down upon their heads.
No one speaks about the hideous spectacle they all know runs alongside their way ahead, a host of ashen ghosts keeping silent company with them along the final klics to Toruń. As night turns into gray and back into night, again and again as they trudge north, Madjenik dreams silent dreams of bloody reprisal for the murders done to kinfolk on the plains and the Old Forest Road.
The next morning, they get their chance.
Berm
The early morning air is cold this far north this time of year, already late into autumn. Gray light falls onto a gray landscape, so that the unaided eye cannot tell ground from sky. Even the dew looks gritty and dull. It’s one of the ugliest mornings anyone has ever seen on Genève.
Jan can’t access the old Surface Position System, the prewar SPS grid, because all KRA and civilian government satellites were knocked out during the first two days of invasion. He must rely on smaller, portable tek. So he studies a dated, static tactical map traced over his HUD.
‘We’re here at last. Two klics east and four south of Toruń Gate. So near, yet so far from home.’
He looks down the short length of a shallow gully where he crouches in a half circle with Zofia and the NCOs. He’s damned and determined not to walk into a trap, let alone run into one. He needs Zofia’s tactical counsel and theirs. He knows she sees the same imaging he does on the officer-only command link. So he asks her directly, looking straight into her startling jade eyes.
“Should we just make a dash for it? Can we hope to get through that way?”
Zofia is emphatic. “No way, sir. It’s far too risky to break cover now, this close to the berm. We shouldn’t move the company at all before we scout what’s waiting for us up ahead.”
The NCOs agree. Tom Hipper points out a second danger. “Toruń HQ has no idea that we’re out here, sirs, assuming it still exists. Not a damned clue. That could be a real problem.” Their first concern is stumbling into hordes of RIK lodged in perimeter siege trenches, but a second is triggering friendly-fire from the garrison should they just barrel toward the Gate.
“No dash for the Gate, then” Jan tells Zofia and the NCOs. “Not now, not here. Not when we’ve come so far over so many hard days’ nights. Against all odds. Against the Will of God.”
Defying the gods makes Jan sound smart and tough. Only he needs to know that he, too, is weary past endurance and worse, uncertain what to do next. That he needs a helluva lot more tac info and time to think before he decides how to approach the berm around besieged Toruń.
‘And three day’s sleep, and about 5,000 more guys in beige weaves on this side of the godsdamn earthen wall. A couple of heavy bot-guns and Rhinos as back-up wouldn’t hurt, either.’
Jan is not a religious man. He hasn’t visited a Life Temple or Common Faith prayer meet since he was a kid, when his mother made him go. Hasn’t wanted to meet or needed to pray. He says whenever he’s asked that the gods are too fickle, too cruel and capricious to trust or respect. “Just like people, only more so.” He’s said it so often over the past ten years it comes out of his mouth by rote. That’s why even he’s a little surprised that he said the last bit out loud.
‘Why did I invoke a deity I don’t believe in just now? Might be the Old Forest Road ... the old prayers that Madjenik spoke there. Maybe it shook me up worse than I thought, too. OK, time to get over it.’
Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t. Truth is, the charnel smells and horrific images didn’t stagger him as much as that. Not to make him flip over on the religious question. No, there’s something more at work that he doesn’t want to admit to himself, can’t and won’t b
elieve about himself.
It’s that he’s getting real good at this thing called combat command. He instinctively knew that even if he thought no gods had anything to say about Madjenik’s fate a whole helluva lot of his fighters did. He knew they needed to hear it on the eve of combat. So he lied to them.
He’s a good officer now, a leader who knows all his fighters well. Knows that two of the NCOs and many of his very best troopers do believe in a watchful god or gods, even if he does not and never has. Knows that a few words about defying the deity will please rather than offend them, because bone weary troopers about to enter into an impossible fight need their captain to say exactly that. Because even the most religious fighter among them doubts whose side God is really on these days, with Genève on fire and so many innocents dead on the Old Forest Roads.
Shaking off the lapse into memory and self-pity, Jan refocuses. He doesn’t really know how to deploy ‘Wysocki’s Wreckers’ or what tactics to use in the coming fight. So he stalls.
“We halt here for now. Before we move again I need to know how many bâtards are between us and the berm. Lieutenant Jablonski, you’re up. Pick 30 fighters and get ‘em ready.”
“Yes sir.” Zofia says no more, just crisply salutes, palm out in the traditional KRA way. There’s nothing more for her to say to him. Not now. Not yet. Maybe never. Zofia is focused solely on the tough job facing Madjenik, knowing that one or both or all of them is unlikely to survive.
Jan looks over his NCOs, five grimy sergeants and seven tattered corporals. They don’t look like much, but they herded sorry survivors through three forests to reach this gully. ‘One red, one gold, one gray.’ He knows he could never have made it without them. He wants to thank them. To kiss them. Instead, he acts how they need. Supremely confident in command.
“We’re gonna hole up here and rest everyone for two hours, then use what’s left of the night to creep a little closer. After that, we go into the Wrecker’s last fight. Neither your gods nor I promise that we’ll come out the other side OK, but let’s make it our best fight anyway.”
They know that Jan still refuses to call the ersatz unit his Wreckers. They love him all the more for it, and for his brutal honesty about their long odds and odd gods. They listen to his last orders, nod agreement, then move off in stealth to resume their due places in the Wrecker line. It’s not just Jan who’s changed. They’re all far better soldiers than when their first war began.
Jan splits the company into five over-sized platoons of 50 fighters each. He prosaically dubs them in the KRA standard way: A-B-C-D-E, or ‘Able’ through ‘Easy.’ It’s a simple if ancient method, confirmed in utility over eons of now forgotten military history. All that matters to Jan is that it’s quick, it’s easy, and it works. He’ll order four to move in echelon, staggered at 60 meter intervals. The fifth he’ll keep back as a last reserve and to help the walking wounded.
“Pickets, maintain position. Everyone else, rest up!” He knows that he must send Zofia and 30 of his best fighters out as a scout line moving in advance of the main company skirmish line. She’ll be his eyes, with passive HUD scanner on. She’ll be a trip-wire, to warn of looming danger. She’ll be a panic siren in the dark. If needs be, she’ll stand to fight to hold off the enemy while Madjenik runs. She’s the love of his life and he’s going to send her to her death. It’s what he must do. It’s the price of command. No favors. No flowers.
Jan doesn’t think twice about ordering her to lead the scout line. ‘She’d volunteer anyway, if I didn’t give her the order. No stopping her on this mission. Besides, she’s the best I’ve got.’
Armed only with stub-masers, frag grenades, and black-diamond combat knives, Zofia’s “Forlorn Hope” moves out two hours later, followed at 200 meters by the five big platoons.
Left behind by Madjenik are the carrier-bots and non-lethal gear. There’ll be no need of it tomorrow. Coated in clinging ash, the Forlorn Hope disappears from Jan’s and Madjenik’s naked sight in less than a minute. Lost amidst the gray ruin of dead trees and burned-off undergrowth coated in a sickeningly familiar blanket of white-gray. All wearing the same dull coating as Madjenik.
Zofia takes center point. She looks like a young lioness prowling at the head of her pride, aware that far more numerous packs of hyenas are lurking all around, occupying the only water hole. Denying it to her thirsty young. She will not have it. She’ll find a way through, somehow.
If Zofia finds the foe the Forlorn Hope will halt, cull tactical intel and await orders. If the enemy makes first contact and a firefight breaks out, her orders are to drop and hold in place “for three standard minutes.” Time enough for Madjenik to move in to help. Or to pull out and run.
Jan never says the last bit. They don’t talk about it. No need. Each is familiar with the other’s tactical mind, confident as lovers who know each curve and contour of the other’s body. They both know that his decision to fight or run will rest on just how big a sleeping RIK bear she rouses and if Jan thinks he can get the rest of the company past its slashing claws and teeth.
Thirty men and women willing to give their lives to save something much bigger than themselves. Honor? Duty? Madjenik? There’ll be three minutes for each one to decide. Just 300 standard seconds of fire, of sound and fury, until Zofia releases any survivors with an ancient cry of honor’s duty done: “Sauve qui peut! Save yourselves, whoever can!” Only that last order from her can set them free. If any still live after three minutes. That’s why it’s called a Forlorn Hope.
Jan gives the Advance! order, flashing a command onto all HUDs. Madjenik is an all-veteran unit now. And old hands always scatter into a wide dispersal pattern and move out with extreme caution in the suspected presence of hostiles. So Madjenik deploys neatly and without delay or question in four big platoons in echelon across a half-klic frontage, with a fifth in center reserve ready to surge into any gap. Zofia is out front, probing gingerly for the hidden enemy.
The fighters are grateful for the first time that dry ash as thick as pillows lies underfoot, muffling every footfall. A good thing, too, since at two klics out a hundred red threat warnings of huge enemy numbers and heavy weps position triangles suddenly pop up on Zofia’s HUD. The info is instantly relayed to Jan and all NCOs via Madjenik’s shared tac-display channel.
Zofia gives the command, arm reached back with open palm: Stop! Then a raised and tightly clenched fist: Freeze! Her tac relay is unclear to Jan but the sheer volume of red threat symbology suddenly flashing bright across all HUDs prompts her to hiss: “Halt all movement!”
She systematically scans the multitude of threats. Her HUD can’t identify every one or pin exact locations, but the scan IDs elements of two full RIK infantry battalions, at least. The center of the enemy’s trench line is barely 400 meters in front of her. She’s almost in his camp!
‘Merde! That’s over 4,000 men! And they’ve got five heavy assault guns and four big armtraks parked nearby.’ Zofia knows Jan sees and thinks pretty much the same thing she does.
She hears him exclaim “Jumalauta!” under his breath, another invocation of divine help. Is a deity tuned in to the company HUD command-link? He says it with sacrilegious profanity, in a way he hasn’t spoken the word in 20 years. Maybe he is more religious than he realizes?
No, he’s just appalled and uncertain and scared nearly witless. That’s why he defaults to local religious curses learned in childhood, ear-cuffed by his mother whenever he used them. His doubt is curling back on him, like a dying old man will revert in the end to a child’s first fables.
He recovers quickly and sends an urgent flash: Immediate halt! All units! It screeches into every HUD in Madjenik, in both visual and auditory. It freezes all five platoons in place.
“Looks real bad,” Zofia agrees, whispering along the officer-only channel, for his ears alone, excluding even NCOs. ‘Don’t want to spread panic. Time and enemy enough for that!’
Jan think-switches to show contacts then filters the order wi
th threats only. His HUD instantly presents two full battalions of red infantry ranging out 700-900 meters from the berm, betwixt his present position and the heavily defended Gate. Also sitting between Madjenik and Toruń are five RIK plasma-cannon pillboxes and a heavy crystal-maser battery. It’s impassible.
“Voi paska!” Jan curses again. It’s picked up by the open link to Zofia.
“Yeah, I know,” she whispers back.
Their shared HUD link is almost desperately counting and marking in differently-shaped red symbols the incredible density of thousands of enemy troops, hundreds of guns, and dozens more waiting armtraks spreading all the way down the berm on both flanks of the locked Gate.
“There are no gods!” Jan curses. “And if there are, then godsdamn them all! How in unholy hell are we supposed to get through that?”