by Kali Altsoba
‘But not fucking hard enough.’
Aleksandr is a little stunned by what’s outside the Main Scuttle, but more dizzy and still straining hard against the urgency calling for release from inside his trousers. He doesn’t answer.
“By the Tyrant! If this assault fails, if you lose my drop-ships, you’ll answer for it to me.” That’s not much of a threat. “Then I’ll give you over to Krump and his Shishi.” That is.
Krump looks tonelessly at Aleksandr, with the deferred confidence of a cat looking at a mouse in a cage with the door about half-open. One hand is in his left robe pocket: klack! klack!
Royko has to say it, he has to boast: “Shishi will be a mercy after I’m done with you!”
It’s the usual sort of threat of torment and death that senior Daurans are used to. Because it’s so commonplace, it doesn’t phase Aleksandr at all. He’s concerned at the moment with the rising tokamaks, and with a squirt of thin liquid trying to force its way out his sphincter against his will. First he clenches, then he deals with the unexpected defense below. The landings on the other Twin will have to wait until he’s sure this one is clear and crushed.
Watching the casualty totals rise on scorecard tumblers projected onto the Main Scuttle, he realizes that Royko may need more troops before it ends here. “A moment, general.”
“One, no more.” There’s nothing Royko can do in the situation, but giving orders and making unreasonable demands makes it seem like he’s in control and in charge. He’s neither.
Aleksandr reorganizes the battle fleet for a kinetic bombardment of the green-blue planet turning below him, its dark side under his hulls. “Battleships and heavy cruisers, Assault Group I. Form a single firing line along my flanks. Line abreast of this flagship. Now! Escorts away.”
It takes time for the unready warship crews to complete this basic maneuver, until all the capital ships are in a single firing line. The escorts withdraw into an uncertain cloud, high up and behind the big ships. A frigate and a destroyer collide amidst the jostling, bringing DRN its first casualties of the war: 65 dead, 187 injured and burned. The very first, if you don’t count a flayed captain whose red, frozen corpse is shooting toward a cool dwarf hanging in the near distance. It should fall into the corona after about three weeks en route. No one will see it happen, or care.
The big ship bombardment line takes 30 minutes to form, and it’s ragged. The DRN hasn’t done this sort of thing in a very long while, not beyond simulations and the occasional live practice firing real shells against dead target-moons, far from the empire’s western frontiers.
“Ready all underside bombards.” More time to load-and-lock kinetics. Aleksandr realizes that when this fight is over he’ll need to spend a month drilling all crews in basic operations. Real combat is exposing how unready for war the DRN really is. And here, it’s unopposed.
“Assault Group II, temporary change of orders. Stay on course to the assault zones over Krakoya II but assume stand-off orbits. Your landings are on hold until further orders. Confirm.”
The first wave of drop-ship transports is nearly gone. Only two made it to the ground so far. The second wave is on the way down, and can’t be stopped by Aleksandr. It’s precisely timed to power-fall now, under terms of the ‘Grand Design.’ Not that the precise time matters, it just seems more grand.
Aleksandr changes the timing of the third wave, ordering it held back until he conducts a massive kinetic shelling of the surface. Royko naturally protests this alteration and makes more threats, but on all operational decisions above the surface Aleksandr has absolute authority.
“I appreciate, General Royko, that you incorporated flexibility into your Grand Design. I will now take advantage of your tactical and strategic foresight to adjust the timing of the third drop tranche.” He really thinks: ‘That ought to hold off the vain shit-bag until I get this done.’
When the bombardment line is ready, the first broadside of 2,000 big shells heaves out the battleships and heavy cruisers, cascading down to the surface on accelerating rockets. Many of the heaviest warheads are filled with simple crushed rock and dust culled by convicts in dry munitions factories on Drapchi prison moons or sealed into rocky asteroids, hollowing them out over lifetimes spent inside. Once you go in you never come out. Even the hard Shishi stay years.
Others were filled en route to the Twins with harvested cometary-ice, packed into casings by prisoner-slaves on the dark and grim ammo-ships that accompany the fleet. Shishi guards and prison ship managers are already droving the slaves, making replacements as the first shells fall.
Kinetic ice-shells don’t evaporate or break apart during a blue-hot descent through the atmosphere, because each ice-mass is encased in a superceramic sabot that protects the core up to 8,000˚ Celsius. They impact on top of ground-laser and tokamak batteries, a shower of terrible meteorites that throw up ejecta bubbles of melted rock mixed with a finer ash of incinerated plate armor, vaporized gun crews, trees and buildings from the camouflage parks all around the guns.
Some laser batteries survive, stripped of arboreal and building camouflage but active still. They concentrate on first tranche infantry boats slowing to land across three continents spread beneath the battle fleet. Tokamaks explode assault-craft from the third tranche just now entering the upper stratosphere, released by Aleksandr a little prematurely. Intermediate lasers and masers concentrate on what’s left of the second wave that’s much lower down. And nearly all gone now.
They fire until tubes glow hot. Fire even after that, holding nothing back because nothing will survive this bright shining moment of defeat and defiance. Fire hot, until a second flume of plunging ice-shells from the battleships and cruisers silences them forever. Too late for tens of thousands of falling krasnos locked inside disintegrating drop-ships, or tumbling out to die as meteors of flesh, screaming and burning bright in a black sky over an unknown world.
A dozen infantry-carriers flame out from hits by lasers or masers, cleavering off parts of mountainsides as they scream into the waiting ground. Or cratering wide desert playas with pits of smoke and fire, sending up mushroom clouds of impact dust and vaporized Dauran youths. Other troop transports and assault support-craft evaporate in the upper sky, leaving no trace behind except a brief black dot as white plasma puffs envelope them like flies in cotton candy.
What was ancient is new, what was old is young. What amazed a wonder-struck poet two millennia ago amazes worlds he never could have imagined, in a return to once-and-future war.
“There’s war in the skies!
Lo! The black‑winged legions
of tempest arise o'er sharp
splinter'd rocks gleaming below.”
A poet-gunner on the surface has just about the same thought right before he evaporates, as an ice-sabot shell plunges into his battery. A minute ago he had the greatest satisfaction of his young life when he hit the engine of an armtrak-dropper and saw it toss and tumble into ground.
“Ha! Got you! Ta mère! Fuck all your mothers!”
Krevan gunners shout with each hit they make on the falling ships, each black puffery that sends thousands more unknown mothers’ sons into oblivion. Their daughters, too. For this is a Dauran army dropping through their sky, not a misogynist locust swarm from the Imperium.
In war by Daura, in service to Jahandar, any commoner will do to die. Any krasno of any gender or inclination can die gloriously for Jahandar. Or ingloriously as a burning streak of flesh-and bone-that friction consumes in a night-side atmospheric glow before it hits the ground.
Chunks of assault-ship and armtrak and artillery rain to the surface inside ten-times-ten-thousand bright, burning streaks. By the time the last ground cannon shoots its last round, before a third hard drumming of ice-shells from low orbit breaks apart quad-barrels and ends the crews, 273,000 krasnos die as white puffs or burning clumps, or as pulpy splatter smacking into ground.
There’s death in the sky. Falling dead tumbling from assault ships bored
by ground lasers leave rows of tiny craters where they land. Incinerated dead in craft hit by heavy-maser fire leave nought behind, except soft-gray ash that circles and darkens the next day, and the next, before at last falling inside torrential rains stirred by sky-searing, unharnessed elements of the tokamaks.
Not so white dust. That’s all that’s left of high-altitude ships and people, now distant puffs of vapor forming pretty, high-up clouds. They stretch ever thinner as they circle the stratosphere, pushed by a disturbed, oddly uncertain jet stream. Melding smashed molecules of a host of unthanked and unburied sons and daughters, white dust will take months to spread around Krakoya I before it falls, an ungentle rain of remnant farfolk children falling over a fallen world.
***
When shooting stops, over 700,000 krasnos are still alive to land unopposed, They stream out of drop-ships that fall onto every land mass. Inside gray armtraks and brown ATCs, on gyro bikes and in assault hovers or just on combat glide-boots, they swiftly overrun and brutally cut down remnants of the garrison holding out in three old military bases. The cities are all open.
For tens of thousands of tan-and-black clad DRA Special Forces, rage is further stoked by genetic selection and isolated breeding. It’s a form of combat manipulation that’s been illegal across Orion since the last war. Only the DRA still does it. The other Powers stopped because they found it ineffective, not because they objected on moral grounds. In war, the law is silent on most days. These mad berserkers rival the Shishi in sheer cruelty.
Ordinary krasnos are urged to combat frenzy by more common means: ethics-suppression neural implants and behavior-mod drugs that make them obedient and ferocious. These, too, tend to sap initiative. But unlike in free armies or even the RIK, that’s the way Dauran generals prefer their dogsbodies. That’s also why HUDs swell with exhortations and soft, subliminal urgings, and play old battle music keyed to sound-trigger ‘on’ coding in empathy-suppression implants.
An emotionally-dulled but mentally-aroused mass of brown-clad troops pours across the countryside, then crashes into the undefended cities. Once the barbarians are inside the gates they smash, loot, burn, rape and slaughter without pity or pause or purpose. Some topple statues and torch galleries, theaters, schools and public buildings. Others shoot civis who run, or just anyone who stands abjectly with arms raised and is not Dauran. It’ll be days before prisoners are taken, the last civis hauled out of deep underground shelters where they hide during the bombardment.
One column of backwoods ignoramuses, never before off their rudimentary homeworld, and never even near a major city let alone set loose inside one, tromps through a game reserve outside the capital. They’ve never seen or heard of such a thing, keeping animals to look at and not to eat. Not even in folk stories about the way the strange Blue Onis live. They gawp at the oddly un-shy animals, especially long-necked, spotty ungulates who seem not to recognize any danger from a gun until one comes crashing down and the rest lope away. They run in such an oddly panicked way the krasnos fall down laughing. Except two who are already carving steaks.
Until they’re astonished to be attacked by an immense pride of over 70 huge, Asian lions panicked by the bombardment and fearful of a noisy column of doofus krasnos tramping through the reserve. The intruders are much too close to a circle of new-born cubs, here where no one comes except wardens and veterinarians the lion mothers know and trust. Four krasnos go down screaming, long white teeth sunk into a neck or back with heavy, tawny beasts on top strangling the last breath of men. The rest run in terror back through the yawning park gate they blew apart on the way in, they way they blow up everything. They leave it swinging and bent, groaning on broken stone pillars as they flee into the countryside to warn disbelieving fellow krasnos about giant cats from a grandmother’s nightmare that are gnawing on four of their childhood friends.
That night forty lionesses and fifteen solitary males enter the nearby suburbs, to hunt. Then come five supercrocs, waddling slowly like ambulatory luggage. Three packs of jackals, four troops of excited baboons, and one of hundreds of chimps, bark and chatter as they skirt around the painfully slow crocs. Thousands of gazelle and giraffe and other ungulates stay in the reserve, happy to see all big predators leave. Along with noisy, irritating baboons and chimps.
The lions take seven more krasnos down before a full battalion is sent to hunt down and and kill all the roaring, panthera with a newly acquired taste for human flesh. Afterward, they make pretty good steaks, roasted over improvised spits on marble floors or in big pits dug out of manicured gardens and lawns. The supercrocs are a lot harder to kill. They lie unmoving in utter darkness in low and hidden places, to catch and gobble six more krasnos along with three local, wandering children whose parents are dead from the bombardment. It takes a second battalion four days to hunt them down. They make even better steaks than the older, stringy lionesses.
With all the non-human predators gone, the most dangerous animals are free to do as they please. They roam the cities unmolested by law or conscience. Most get drunk on samogon for days, killing and raping random victims. Then they sleep it off, get up and drink and rape and kill some more. There’s not the slightest effort made by officers to stop or control them. Officers are all in the best mansions, fucking local girls or boys who came to them for help or food. This is Jahandar’s army. This is the future for all of northern and central Orion if the Dual Powers win.
Most krasnos don’t get to eat lion or croc steaks, or live in stolen mansions like officers. They squat in more modest, broken houses, tearing up manses of a size and kind they’ve never seen on the JarNeb, yet are only modest homes here on the Twins. They urinate and defecate on marble floors and imported south Orion rugs. They smash exquisite Toruń wood furnishings to make kindling, roasting mockmeat slabs they find in cold cellars or, if they’re lucky, cooking baboon and chimp. All the briefly-safe giraffe and gazelle are hunted down inside the reserve and torn apart by masers. Then the krasnos wreck and destroy anything and everything they can’t use or just don’t understand, which is everything: furniture and crockery, works of art, ancient printed books, mirrors and vidscreens, surgical instruments and incubators in gutted hospitals.
Admiral Aleksandr smirks and shrugs when he hears of the despoliation going on below. ‘That’s fat Royko’s problem.’
Royko belches. He says of excesses of murder and wanton destruction: “I don’t wage war on an allowance.”
Civilization halts on the Twins. It’s the new time. The time of the barbarians. The Peace of Orion and in Orion is over, while the Terror of Jahandar is just beginning.
All the while, a medley of gentle melodies by the most famous of Second Era composers plays in continuous lamentation over the Krakoya memex. Until the last server is located and the broadcast crew gutted on Royko’s angry order. Scorched earth, scorched cities, scorched worlds. It’s the Dauran way of war. It is coming out of hibernation to roar and rampage over Orion.
***
Admiral Aleksandr is embarrassed. He curses all intelligence officers for failing to locate the big tokamak batteries in advance of his attack. He might ask himself, how could the Shërbimi Informativ Ushtarak, or SHIU, military counterpart to the strictly political SHISH, have done it?
For decades its agents were kept cloistered in Dauran space, not allowed to compile reports on ‘foreign shit’ worlds. Even during the last two years of serious preparation for war, only a handful of SHIU or SHISH agents were allowed to operate over the frontiers from a few dozen archaic phantoms. They didn’t understand improved camouflage or most of the new tek they saw, that was a century or more in advance of anything Daurans had. They couldn’t have detected the hidden tokamak batteries even if they’d passed directly above them in a phantom! Which, in fact, one of them actually did a month ago. He won’t survive another week after this.
Daurans are stumbling into war. Succumbing like Jahandar to the allure of battle. Doing so deliberately blinded by a regime afraid to all
ow them any real knowledge of farfolk ways or power, yet needing them to know. It may prove a fatal combination before Jahandar’s war ends
Aleksandr is forced to admit that he also made mistakes. He should have struck first and much harder, bombarding half the surface before landing. Should have done it Jahandar’s way, the Dauran way. Should have started with exaggerated terror and reckless slaughter to compel the Twin’s abject submission. To make them understand that resistance is fatal, that not even their desperation tokamaks can save their people or cities or ways of life. That all Daura is come in fire and fury to take their lives and worlds away from them. That the Hermit Empire is back.
He doesn’t get it. None of the Dauran leaders watching Krakoya I burn, get it. Not at all. They don’t understand why Krakoyans did it, knowing what the Hermit fleet over their heads must do to their ‘foreign shit’ world in response. What he and Royko and Krump will now do.
Willing slaves of the greatest killer and slave-master in a thousand histories, they cannot understand why a free people chooses to rip apart its own skies over accepting to surrender. Why the Ones and Twos and all Krevans choose defiance over despair, prefer death and destruction to slavery and submission. The dull-witted, half-drugged krasnos eating monkeys and shitting lions onto priceless rugs, making cooking fires with millennia-old books and desks, don’t get it either. But at least there’s dim hope for them. They’re so utterly ignorant of everything important in this war that’s sweeping them away from their homeworlds to here, that a faint hope lies with them.