Tag: solstice war

The Birth of the Solstice War

Welcome to the first “The Solstice War” supplemental post. I’ve been meaning to start doing these for a while now since they’re something I promised on the Patreon. However I couldn’t figure out exactly what to write about. I figure then that it’s best to start from the beginning.

Of course, every story starts with its author in one way or another, so let us start with me.

I have been wanting to write The Solstice War in some form or another for years. My childhood was very difficult in a lot of ways, I lived in a rough area, money was not always on hand, and I had nascent ideas about queerness that I could not admit to for fear of retribution. One shining light in my childhood, oddly enough, was video games and militaria of various sorts. I loved watching documentaries about wars, reading articles about wars; especially World War 2. My favorite games were strategy games: I loved Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and so on. Later I found far more difficult war games about World War 2, such as Panzer General, Operation Europe and Combat Mission. When playing any of these games, I’d often imagine myself as the voiceless commander that is often the player character in them. It made me feel less powerless about things. Later I discovered shooting games where you could be a soldier IN World War 2, like Call of Duty, and that was almost as good as being the commander.

I especially liked when I could play as the Soviets in video games, at first because they were different than the others. Though all the Western media I consumed was quick to vilify communism, I found it fascinating. As I learned more and became an adult and found sources that weren’t fed through a western lens (Marx; Lenin; a wee bit of Mao) it became my political ideology, despite the hatred I knew I would face for it. I figured I was already a queer hispanic person in the US; I was already hated. I might as well be true to myself and be a dirty commie.

Ultimately, of course, I grew up, and I knew that war wasn’t just my fun, it was not simply something I did on the computer to feel like I was strong. In fact, it became disgusting to me that I found it a source of strength. All those chits on the board, back in 1941, were people, and they died, and they did not die simply because I fumbled with the UI or didn’t know the game’s rules properly. So for a while I tried to swear off all that stuff. But I kept getting back in. My life was not getting better and I needed distractions. So I could never quite let go of war entertainment.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was generally more harmful to me to hate myself for liking these games, than it was to attempt to construct some kind of principled abstinence from them. I know intellectually that war is bad. I know intellectually the history of World War 2 from all sides of the conflict (though my particular focus has always been the Soviets). I understand it, I respect it (what deserves respect). I have different ideas about war now, which have come from shedding noxious notions of strength that I held as a put-upon and hurt little boy.

When I’m feeling down though, I’ll still boot up Company of Heroes or Unity of Command.

This became more problematic when it came to my other hobby, and my biggest passion: writing stories. Ever since I was 12 I loved writing stories. I wrote little stories on notebooks and tried to get my friends to read them. When I found out that the internet, and especially forums, fanfiction.net and fictionpress.com would allow me to reach tons of people with my scribblings, I was the most elated kid in Puerto Rico. I wrote a lot of stuff during my childhood and teenage years. My writing matured, but I eventually came to a point where I was very self-conscious of what I was writing, and convinced myself it wasn’t good enough to do it. That lasted about 2 or 3 years in college, as I was finishing my English degree and received a lot of encouragement from my department not to write fiction, and especially not to write the dreaded “genre” fiction.

So instead I tried to write stuff for tabletop RPG games. I regret wasting time on that.

 

In late 2011 I decided to get back in, with stuff like Ladybird that was quirky, and dumb, and that I didn’t have to take seriously. It built up my confidence, but I knew I was avoiding writing dramatic fiction, and I knew that I wanted to write it. (Though I also want to write Ladybird, but I am one person who is occupied enough with a single story as it is!) I rewrote Ladybird a bunch of times, and constantly found myself writing “first chapters” of Ladybird that redefined her origin, because I wasn’t satisfied. Even now I have another origin in mind!

That’s kind of when I realized writing origins was pretty destructive sometimes and it is better to start ahead and assume the origin has happened already. But that is beside the point right now.

For a long time I wanted to write a war story, mostly just to do it. I know a lot of stuff about war and about the time period of World War 2 and I felt like I could write a very interesting story with this knowledge. I didn’t have any particular political aims for the war part of the story: my writing has in general always been fairly political, but not really about war itself. Ladybird is a story that is leery toward capitalism and moneyed democracy, open to queerness and coloredness; that is my writing in general, and that would also be any war story I wrote. Of course, it would also force me to deal with those apprehensions I have toward war as a piece of entertainment. I don’t want to write a story stereotypically “critical” of war because I do not believe the pacifist message helps empower oppressed people such as queer folks and colored folks. But I also did not want to write a celebration of war, because celebrating war attracts the kind of people I am heartily disgusted by, like nationalists and racists of all sorts. Military fandom is highly, rigidly conservative and reactionary. I wanted an ambivalence of war; and a focus instead on the people and the ideologies behind it.

That is when I got the core idea for the Solstice War: a look at a World War 2-styled conflict from the perspective of a communist nation toward which other, capitalist nations are committing violence driven primarily by economy and ideology.

Over time this core would expand in different ways, which I hope to talk about more in the future once I have collected all of my thoughts on the subject. I find writing about writing to be difficult to do objectively or scientifically, because to me a greater part of writing is sort of instinctual. When I was seven years old I taught myself English by watching English television and picking up thesauri and dictionaries. It has always been an obstacle to my thinking of English (and writing) as a specifically contrived practice that constructs objects. In a way, I “just do it.”

So, here’s hoping that subsequent entries in this series grow more coherent and not less.

Stoking Hell’s Fire — Generalplan Suden

This chapter contains scenes of psychological distress.

20th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E, Morning

Adjar Dominance — Bada Aso Region, Foot Of The Kalu

Madiha found herself suspended in a void.

A dim and invisible light source allowed her to tell her own body from the infinite darkness. She sat, alone, in a soundless, mostly sightless place, holding her legs against her chest. An enclosure around her forced her head bowed, her legs squeezed in, and her arms locked tight. Her enclosure seemed to turn around her, and sometimes a corner would scrape her head, or an edge would brush against her legs. She was trapped in an invisible, moving cage. It was only big enough to hold her body, and not even her actual body.

She was a child inside the moving walls.

She was the androgynously-dressed little girl who passed beneath the notice of the guards in the city of Bada Aso to deliver key letters between the ideologues who would eventually overthrow the Empire; the child who would eventually be taken to the capital to see the start of the Revolution. To take part in it. Perhaps even to cause it.

Her heart was gone. In its place there was a candle. Her only light.

She felt it burning in her child-like chest. She was a child of the Revolution.

A child who was exploited; they used you until your flame was dead.

Her body started to grow. And the flame blew out. She was entirely in the dark. She felt her legs growing longer, her arms, her back, stressed against the gyrating walls. She was being crushed. Who exploited her? She didn’t remember anything about a flame, anything about being used. Her memories of the Revolution were vague. She was so young; she didn’t truly understand the death she saw. Skin brushed against the enclosure, pounded against it, stressed, ripped, bled; her body was her adult body, and it compacted.

She felt bone breaking and flesh splitting.

All of that death; she had forgotten it. She forgot that she caused it.

You had a spark of the World Flame. Your spark burnt so powerfully that the shine was seen through your eyes. But Warlord, your eyes don’t shine over the battlefield anymore, not like they used to. They used your spark to start their revolution; they burnt through all of you. That was not the conflict you were born for.

Now you are a shade of your true self. You will lose your destined battle.

Madiha started to choke. She could see a figure outside the box, watching.

There was a figure outlined in the darkness, featureless, sexless; all at once naked and in leopard bands and in in uniform, brandishing a club, a shield and a throwing spear, a rifle. When the all-being spoke it did so in a hundred voices at once.

You would not be the first. Many of us failed. All of us died. History went on.

As Madiha choked to death in her little box, the figure looked at her without pity.

At least, you are remembering a little now. Maybe you will die fighting.

Screaming, she woke, but only halfway.

Everything was rattling and moving and dark.

She was in the half-track, laying in a hammock tied up to the tentpoles holding the roof tarp, but she had no way of knowing this. She was trapped in a terrified haze.

She shouted, and cried, and flailed her arms, trying to pry apart that box which had held her. Memory of the box and the man dissipated, but the physical sensation of her prison seemed fatally real now. Suddenly she felt a multitude of hands reaching out and touching her, holding her, and she heard words, but whatever was being said her ears did not pick up. All sound was drowned out in a sharp whistling, and all sight was a blur.

“Madiha!”

Parinita’s light brown face appeared before her like the moon on a clear night.

Her gentle features and her strawberry-colored hair came into focus, and her voice rose above everything else, annihilating that horrible world from which Madiha had somehow escaped. She was like a spirit in the flesh, glowing in the dark, her innocent face and soft hands seeming to reach into Madiha’s very being.

Whatever rotten thing had latched onto Madiha, those hands had ripped it from her. Her touch registered in Madiha’s senses, and she stopped struggling.

She was not trapped in a box anymore, she was not choking; she was in the radio half-track, driving to Bada Aso for that fateful battle that she had ordered everyone to prepare for. All around her were the impassive faces of KVW rifle troops. Though they wore very deadpan expressions, she could tell they were worried by the intensity with which they stared at her, and the hesitation in their normally decisive and confident movement.

Having served with the KVW for so long, she was used to the way they behaved by now. They were even easier for her to read than Parinita, and “ordinary” people. Parinita’s proximity, the softness of her expression, Madiha found it hard to understand anymore.

“Are you alright now? Were you having a bad dream?”

Though she knew that Parinita meant well, the way that she offered her sympathy rattled Madiha. It made her feel like a child running from nightmares.

An Ayvartan officer, commanding an army group with tens of thousands of soldiers, crying in her sleep, weeping as she woke from a dream. As the content of her dream began to waver and become lost in the fog of her mind, Madiha felt more foolish receiving Parinita’s sympathy than she felt relieved. However she made no show of emotion.

She nodded cryptically and stood from the hammock.

“Did I say anything in my sleep?” She asked, wiping fibers from her uniform.

“You moaned a little at first. I went to sleep;; then I heard you groaning and begging.”

“Begging?”

“It’s what you sounded like to me. Like you were pleading.” Parinita said.

Madiha shook her head. “I see. I apologize for disturbing you.”

“It’s fine.” Parinita said. She smiled. “I will pray for sweeter dreams.”

“I will pray for gods to actually answer.” Madiha replied, grinning a little.

She looked across the blank expressions of the KVW rifle troops around her.

They nodded their heads and sat on their benches again, leaning on their rifles and against the walls, understanding immediately that they were not to relate this event to anyone. Battlegroup Ox was already confused and demoralized enough; if in addition their replacement commander, whom they had been essentially coerced into accepting, was already breaking down in her sleep from shell shock, their fighting spirit would plummet.

For better or worse, Madiha had to present a strong front from now on.

Until the sun came up, Madiha rested in her hammock, but she no longer slept.

She felt a strange burning sensation in the back of her eyes, and though she tried to remember the exact content of her nightmares, it was beyond her grasp.

Knowing nothing was a familiar situation to her; in a way she knew nothing about herself first-hand. There was a stranger living in this flesh, and she did not know whether that was her, or someone else. Yet despite living with this insecurity for so long, it was always newly disturbing to realize the gaps in her existence.

As soon as the dawn came, the half-track slowed to a stop off the side of the road, and one of the KVW soldiers traded places with the sleepy driver. Two other soldiers disembarked with a toolkit, and together they checked the tires and refilled the fuel.

Parinita started making calls on the radio again, and her staff continued the difficult work of imposing order and efficiency on the scurrying elements of Battlegroup Ox, and organizing them to effectively carry out Madiha’s sweeping defensive plans.

Their work for the moment largely went on without the merest hint of oversight from their new commander. Madiha stepped out for a moment, settling down beside a withered old tree by the side of the road and catching a breath of air untainted by exhaust. She felt a tingle across her body, as though still seated against the shaky walls of the half-track.

Though she scratched her skin and scraped against the tree, she could not relax.

It grew into a discomfort in her own flesh that was familiar and disgusting.

She shook a little, feeling overwhelmed by the touch of cloth against her body, feeling trapped and tight. But even if she shook off her clothes it wouldn’t be enough: she couldn’t shake off her entire flesh. Her breathing grew a little labored and she remembered her mantras and her meditation therapy, and distracted herself from the anxiety by taking in the landscape. There was a strange comfort in the vastness and openness around her.

Between Dori Dobo and Bada Aso the terrain was flat and broad, covered in wispy grassland and a few sparsely wooded stretches. Strong winds began to blow from the north, and the skies were cloudy and foreboding. Despite the dismal weather, Madiha was easily captivated by the surroundings. There was a monumental green landscape stretching before her, with the edge of the Kalu Hilltops on the northeast, gently rising, and Bada Aso in the distance to the northwest, a long cluster of buildings rising to block her view of the coast.

She had spent the most significant years of her life in Bada Aso, and she had seen the terrain from so many angles. She had arrived to the city, starting from the rural southwest at Dori Dobo; she had come from inside the city and headed northeast to Solstice, across Tambwe straddling the foreboding mountains, and past the desert; and she had returned to Bada Aso, moving southwest again. She had left it and then returned to it from the Bakor isles. From every compass direction, it seemed, she had seen her city and its surroundings.

Familiarity never bred boredom; Bada Aso seemed new with every visit.

She cast eyes behind herself now, trying to focus on the movement of people.

It was an alien sight sometimes, to see others moving under their own power, existing apart from her. In a way though, this made them their own landscape in Madiha’s mind. She could watch them and keep herself calm. She could track them, the soldiers changing tires, the soldiers hauling fuel, the ones eating rations, the ones cleaning their rifles. Seeing them carry out their business without being under her power was strangely calming.

Soon Madiha’s suffocating anxieties had dissipated completely – for now.

Far as human landscapes were concerned, the one about to arrive at Bada Aso dwarfed anything Madiha had ever witnessed. Behind her was a convoy of thirty vehicles, many of them civilian trucks borrowed from local unions. Several such convoys, each with their own dozens of vehicles, traveled on different roads and paths, evading potential pursuit and aerial reconnaissance, ferrying the tens of thousands of soldiers that they would need.

Those soldiers who had been in a position to do so took the trains in their cities or towns and rushed ahead to Bada Aso and established themselves outside the city.

It was a massive undertaking, and even these measures did not cover all the men and women and their equipment. Many soldiers rode on tanks, bikes or even on horses.

Fuel was plentiful, though it far outstripped the supply of vehicles. Being able to run their fuel supply ragged was the one advantage that Ayvarta definitively had over Nocht, who received most of their fuel from Lubon or the Higwe dominions. Ayvartan trains could run nigh-on endlessly, and the trucks could drink heartily, in a way that their pursuers could not afford. They could run and run; but Madiha only ran as far as Bada Aso.

Her beautiful city; she had finally returned to it.

Sadly it was to witness its destruction.

All of the vehicle crews went through their own paces, and many found a few things to fix. Their stop dragged on a little. As new tires were rolled out, engines oiled, tarps adjusted, Parinita walked out to Madiha, having completed her radio calls.

Since they had met two days ago, Parinita seemed to be tackling everything with a lot more energy than Madiha expected. Her skirt had gotten a little bit dusty in the truck, and she had tied her long, wavy, and increasingly messy hair up into a high, charmingly arched ponytail. In her hands she had a piece of paper, shaking in the wind.

Madiha could see furious scribbling all over it, including the margins.

For a secretary, Parinita took some incredibly untidy notes.

“I’ve got good news, and bad news! But I think the good news outweighs the bad!” Parinita jovially said. She withdrew a pair of glasses, lightly cracked from the battle they survived at the border, and perched them on her little nose.

Madiha sat up from leaning against the tree. “Bad news first.”

“Glass half-empty kind of woman, I see?” She said, cocking a grin.

“That doesn’t even make sense.” Madiha replied. “Tell me the news.”

Parinita waved her hands. “Just trying to be personable! Anyway here goes; the Regional Council at Bada Aso is displeased that the KVW has taken command of Ox, and they would like to have a word about it with you once you get to the city.”

“Ring them up again and tell them I will meet them soon, but I have other plans first.”

“Besides that, I have a lot of good news.” Parinita said. She sat down beside Madiha on the tree, legs up to her chest, and with her head resting on atop of her legs. Looking up at Madiha, she continued.  “Okay! Evacuations are going well in north Adjar. Despite objecting to your command, the Civil Council followed your evacuation orders completely. I wager because Inspector Kimani also called Solstice yesterday and they yelled about it. So the retreat to Bada Aso is going about as well as it can at the moment.”

“I notice you didn’t mention the Center and South.” Madiha said.

Pulling her legs in even closer, Parinata shook from side to side in childish distress. “Hmm. I guess I undersold the bad news. But in a way, this is good news too. Nocht’s forces are advancing slower than expected because they’re moving to capture and consolidate the resources we have been abandoning pell-mell as we retreated. We received messages in secret from the police in Dori Dobo and Hajal that Nocht was moving in slowly. Yesterday they hardly even tried to catch up with us. Instead they went for whatever industry and agriculture didn’t make it out, and they swept around it quickly.”

Madiha sighed. “I thought they would prioritize differently. Since they aren’t chasing us, this means they want to capture the port cities to use as bases for the war effort.”

Parinita nodded. “Yes. Unfortunately, we were unable to destroy or evacuate as much as we wanted to before they grabbed it. Thankfully none of it is fuel production. All of that is farther out, past Solstice and down the Horn of Ayvarta and all of that.”

“Agriculture helps them though. We could’ve stretched their food supply.”

“We did what we could.” Parinita lifted a hand from off her leg and patted Madiha in the shoulder. “It’s a miracle we managed to evacuate anything at all with just a few hours notice. For the circumstances, we’re as well off as we can be. Now we have time to plan.”

“I’ll take your word for it. You’re good with organization, aren’t you?”

“Gowon seemed to think so. As quick as he was to make me the idiot and toss me under the cattle to the Inspector, the old fool never spent a second organizing supply schedules, drafting response plans, or considering emergency policy. That was all the staff, under my direction. Not to brag or anything.” Parinita fidgeted with one of the temples of her reading glasses. “I always worked diligently. Gowon was hardly ever around. He would just tell us to research and write reports and organize fact sheets and maps. We developed the rhetorical and factual backbone of his ideas. I never thought he could be doing anything bad. I never analyzed it. I just wrote reports and edited plans and military papers.”

“It’s not your fault.” Madiha said.

Major Gowon, the previous commander of Battlegroup Ox, had been complicit in a lot of dirty deeds. Parinita’s staff had likely helped him, unknowingly, to realize a lot of projects that would have been unfeasible without the data and planning resources available to a military branch. He was suspected of smuggling arms out, likely for Nocht to study and take apart; of helping to hoard away silver and pushing iron and lead across the border into Cissea through his family’s old mining company, with which he had devious pull.

Now he was dead.

They would never know the true extent of his crimes.

She hoped Parinita would not have to bear the weight of that sin now that Gowon’s head was sprayed across a white wall in an old warehouse on the now occupied border.

Madiha gave her a weary smile. “Parinita, I appreciate your help. I’ll have to rely on you a lot from now. This is my first big command. But hopefully I can give you better direction where it counts. I would like to work closely with a good staff.”

Parinita smiled back. “I’m already feeling more confident, Captain!”

“I’m glad. And I have a curiosity, if you have a moment to spare.”

“Alright.” Parinita said.

She appeared puzzled by the request, but she innocently accepted.

Together they stood off the roots of the decayed tree and walked a few paces around the trunk. Madiha pointed Parinita towards a cluster of trees in the distance, some twenty or thirty meters away, taller and greener than the one nearby.

In other countries, the Aster’s Gloom was the first of the ravages of cold: but in Adjar there were always plants in bloom. Fruit grew prominently from the branches of this little grove, and it was plentiful and large, and its yellow and red gradation of colors helped it to stand out from the green leaves and gray bark of the trees.

Carefully, so as not to cause Parinita any fright, Madiha withdrew her sidearm, a fairly small revolver chambered for the 7.62mm x 38 caliber. Parinita looked even more confused at first, but Madiha just wanted to give her a little demonstration. She gently drew her attention to the grove again and asked her to to cover her ears with her hands.

Holding the weapon with both hands, Madiha aimed and pulled the trigger. Parinita watched the grove in the distance. In an instant, a lone piece of fruit, severed from its branch, fell from one of the trees and into the patchy grass below it.

“Now I want you to try it.”

Madiha took Parinita’s hand and deposited the weapon on her palm.

“Back at the border, you were shooting that BKV rifle; your stance was not very good, but I could see some potential. I’m wondering how accurate you could be in a more relaxed setting. Nobody is going to interfere, so take your time and line up the shot.”

Madiha closed Parinita’s fingers around the weapon.

Parinita began to stutter. “I c-c-certainly can’t land a hit like yours!”

“I never miss what I am aiming; but I’m telling you, I think you can do it.”

There were ulterior motives, but Madiha certainly did feel she would be able to do it.

Standing behind Parinita, Madiha instructed her on a better posture for target shooting.

She patted Parinita’s legs gently, coaxing her legs closer together, and bending her knees just a little; she pulled Parinita’s arms, which she had fully extended with the weapon, to a more relaxed position, so she could retract and extend more easily; and she taught her how to hold the revolver with both of her hands. Three fingers and thumb around the grip, index finger along the frame, and her off-hand over the main hand with the thumbs together on the side of the weapon opposite her shooting finger. Parinita’s hands were a little shaky, and when she fired her first shot, she hit the trunk of the tree.

“Don’t be discouraged.” Madiha said. “Try again.”

Madiha stood close by her and helped Parinita to align the gun’s iron sights and to properly aim at her target. All the while, however, her mind was on other matters entirely. Back at the border, Madiha knew that she had seen through the eyes of a soldier, and that she had subconsciously improved the aim of a gun team firing on the Nochtish assault guns.

This was no dream, she remembered it perfectly.

She had not passed out or had a shell shock episode; odd as it sounded, she knew that she had left her body behind entirely and occupied another mind. Though the sensation was all but gone from her memory, Madiha knew that she could do it again.

She had to coax out this strange ability.

Ever since she was little, Madiha had never missed a shot she took.

That much she remembered.

If somehow, she could make the aim of her own soldiers that good, it would be a coup.

Once again, Parinita aimed and fired.

She hit a branch this time and shook the fruits upon it, but nothing fell. No direct hit on the target. Parinita slumped a little and breathed quickly. “I’m just no good at this. Guns make me a little scared. I had a bad score with weapons in basic training. I’m thankful for the instruction; I just don’t see the point of it. I’ll never be able to hit the fruit like you can.”

“Simply relax and focus.” Madiha said, as gently as she could.

She said this just as much to herself as to Parinita. Dealing with something fully unknown, Madiha turned, begrudgingly, to Dhyana. It was part of the prescription for her anxiety and shell shock. Meditation was the only thing she felt applicable to this situation, and she felt comfortable tapping into it, so she controlled her breathing, relaxed her body as much as she could, and tried to separate her thoughts from her self.

Standing eye to eye with Parinita, her hands loosely holding the woman’s waist and arm, Madiha tried to clear her mind of thought, to try to rip herself from her body again.

Of course, the objective was not the same.

Her meditation focused on overcoming her anxiety and the stress she suffered. She had projected herself outward and tried to find some measure of peace around her to quiet the palpitations of shell shock. Meditation helped her extend her conscience. She felt Parinita’s pulse through their close contact, felt the warmth of the woman’s cheek against her own. She felt the outside. But she could not just waver off into the landscape now, vanishing among the grasses; she needed to slip into another person’s consciousness.

Parinita fired again. Madiha thought she felt as though one shaking flesh with her.

“No good, I missed again.” She said. Her words had grown hazy.

Madiha did not even see what she had hit this time. She closed her eyes.

“Parinita, I know you were a head secretary, but what was your rank before?”

“I was non-comish.” She stammered gently. “Chief Warrant Officer.”

“C.W.O Parinita Maharani; I believe in you. Try it one more time.”

It was the rank. Rank and name; that is how Madiha understood the people around her; that was how she related to them, how her consciousness sought out their own. That was how she entered their minds. It was a hierarchy; that was how she controlled them.

This alien realization, this almost inhuman thought, was what propelled Madiha’s power. She was suddenly out of her own body and staring over Parinita’s shoulder, and she was staring over her own shoulder as well but with ghostly, detached eyes.

Somehow she was inside Parinita and out of her, while also inside and out of herself.

Was this how those false spirits and ancestors and gods were supposed to act and feel?

She viewed the world perfectly as though through any ordinary lens, and she felt as free to move about the landscape as she ever had. But she felt veins, tendrils, appendages of some sort that seemed to connect her to everything around her, so that her touch could reach far beyond her body. Subconsciously those strands of thought with which she touched the world took Parinita’s arms and steadied them, took her eyes and guided them.

Parinita aimed and fired once more with confidence. A second fruit fell from the tree.

Madiha, both Madihas, however many Madiha; all of her distributed consciousness heard the gunshot. She felt a burning pain the back of her eyes and a rushing sensation, as though blood was about to burst through her sockets. Madiha’s projection raised her hand to her eyes, and found them covered in blood, hot blood as though freshly boiled in a kettle, burning her avatar’s hands, gushing through her avatar’s brain, causing an alien agony.

Everything started to spin, and all of the tendrils of thought retracted as though into a ball or a knot. Her extension cut off entirely. Though she once glided over the world like a god in the limited space occupied by Parinita, now she was shocked back to frailty.

No longer could she sustain the ghostly warlord.

A sudden pain forced her into retreat.

Once more, Madiha knew flesh. For a moment she was as dazed as when she woke in the morning, her arms letting go of Parinita, her feet shaking, her body taken from her own control. Beside her Parinita celebrated as though nothing happened.

“Did you see that? Wow! I did hit it!” Parinita said. She turned toward Madiha and threw her arms around the Captain in elation. “Incredible! I feel incredible, Madiha!” She held Madiha’s shoulders at arms length, and staring at her Captain’s confused, numbed, awkwardly expressionless face, she looked suddenly quite conscious of her impropriety.

She lifted her hands from Madiha’s shoulders as though they were poisonous, and stuffed them into her pockets. “I mean, umm, Captain! Thank you for instruction, Captain!” She saluted stiffly and averted her eyes, standing like a comical statue.

Once more, Madiha knew control. As though her spirit had fully filtered back into her, the pain subsided, and the fog clouding her mind was gone. Around her the world stopped spinning. Realizing her situation Madiha mustered a quick smile.

“I told that you could do it.” She said, a little slurred. Her voice recovered slowly.

Parinita held her salute stiffly. “Yes sir; I mean ma’am! Yes Captain ma’am!”

They heard someone approach from the other side of the tree, and turned their heads.

“Major, you mean. She is a Major now.” Inspector Kimani said.

The Inspector hung back from them, leaning against the trunk of the dead tree and lighting a cigarette after addressing them. She had her peaked cap in her hand, and the red and gold jacket of her KVW Officer uniform was half-unbuttoned.

Kimani evoked no exceptional feeling when delivering the news.

She spoke in a serious and factual voice that was hard to ascribe any emotion to. Everything she did seemed purposeful and planned. It was though Kimani moved through history with certainty. Madiha could hardly meet her eyes. She felt quite beneath her.

Kimani seemed comfortable enough leaving the news to hang in the air.

She continued to smoke casually in front of them.

“I was promoted?” Madiha asked, trying to draw further reaction.

“The Warden herself declared it and called me.” Kimani said simply.

“Is it so I can more appropriately replace Gowon?”

“Yes.” Kimani replied. “Among other things. You deserve it. Feel proud.”

Major Madiha Nakar, Commander of Battlegroup Ox.

It was a contested title, at the moment. But something about it still sunk hard into the pit of Madiha’s stomach, causing her to feel heavy and sick when she thought about it too much. And yet she had a plan for it, for Battlegroup Ox, for everybody in it. In the span of a few minutes she had begun to draft it, and over the past day she had fleshed it out.

Now it was official, it was on paper, and her staff knew all about it.

Everyone was preparing for it already.

Bada Aso, the city of her childhood, where she first learned of revolution, where she first found love, where the broken pieces of her heart and mind and soul had been painfully picked from the bloody earth and affixed again: she would turn it into Hell.

Three of them stood there, Inspector Kimani, Chief Warrant Officer Maharani, and Major Nakar, silently exchanging glances, waiting to get back into motion, with the city far away in the background. They would be the architects of this Hell.

Engines growled behind them, and exhausts coughed gray smoke into the air.

“Looks like the convoy’s ready.” Kimani said. “Let us depart then, Major.”

“Right.” Madiha said. “We’re taking a little detour. Have the rest of the convoy stand by outside Bada Aso, but do not enter the city yet. I don’t want any more potential panic or political friction. We’ll be going to the Svechthan barracks, instead.”

Kimani nodded. She took a final drag of her cigarette and then stepped on it.

“Yes ma’am.” She said. She saluted her. Madiha found it a very bittersweet response. She was in power now, and Kimani could no longer protect her, neither from the scrutiny and ire of others, nor from the vacillating images of her forgotten past.

20-AG-30, Noon

Adjar Dominance — Bada Aso Region, Kalu Coastline

Battlegroup Ox, under Lt. Purana’s overview, assembled outside of Bada Aso to gather their forces and await any updates on the political situation.

Madiha had given them instructions to await and support incoming elements, and if worse came to worse and they were not allowed into the city, to establish a preliminary battle line out of it. Meanwhile Madiha, Kimani and Parinita took their own small convoy of half-track trucks farther north, past Bada Aso and further along the coast.

Kimani’s half-track was in the front, leading two other trucks with Parinita’s Battlegroup Command staff. Even as they drove they were assembling information and making necessary contacts on the radio to smooth over Madiha’s grand defensive plans.

Near the front and the tail of the convoy were two smaller trucks, each with a quad-mount 7.62mm machine gun assembled on its bed: these linked machine guns were their only recourse for anti-air defense should the Luftlotte begin raiding the city and countryside. It was a poor defense, but it was all they could muster at the time.

Madiha worried that she had left too much work behind to Lt. Purana’s unproven divisional staff. Mobilizing the troops and handling what was essentially the front line, or as close to one as they had, was a monumental task to give the relatively green troops of Battlegroup Ox. But Madiha had work for her own staff that had to be completed soon.

So they drove, and they drafted, and even Parinita couldn’t take in the countryside passing them by, her face deep in tables of organization, warehouse manifestos, projected industrial output. Madiha had delegated everything as best as she could.

Her own work was for the moment disagreeably political.

She had to round up allies, and she had to coerce skeptics.

However, the drive allowed her to stare out into the open and take in the view.

Built across a gentle rise in the terrain at the foot of the Kalu Hilltops, straddling the coastline and the Umaiha River, Bada Aso was a major port to the Core Ocean, and even as war approached the city there were still fishing ships and merchant vessels visible on the open sea. It was a beautiful city, and Madiha loved every moment she could spend simply staring at it, burning its pristine condition into her mind. A rail hub, a hive of industry, a port, a place of culture, of history, of romance. Bada Aso was so much to her.

Yet along with these fond thoughts was the military mind.

Her plan would destroy the city.

Past the limits of the city the terrain on the Kalu along the coast began to rise a little more sharply, and soon Madiha could look to the distance behind them and see the port extending from out the cover of the northernmost city buildings.

There were several massive ships docked.

Madiha would have to remember to ask Admiral Qote about them. Any kind of firepower available in Bada Aso had to be used for their advantage. For the next few days, she would have to assemble a war machine to defend the city. Her role as both savior and destroyer weighed heavily on her, and even as she stared along the empty green and blue it haunted her. She had always found her emotions difficult. Now they seemed impossible.

“Major! I’m sorry if there was something on your mind, but I need your opinion–”

Thank the spirits for Parinita! She and Madiha quickly went to work together on breaking down Support Battalions in each division and how best to reallocate them for Ox’s needs. It was utter drudgery, and felt relatively pointless. Ox’s organization was a mess: 8 small Regiments per Division with no Brigade structure was unmanageable and impossible. She had to make it work somehow. It made a good tonic for Madiha’s depression.

Several dozen kilometers they drove along a steep cliff on the edge of the continent, until it gradually sloped and descended into the rocky berm of a very long beach. Straddling a few more kilometers of rainforest just off the shoreline, they found a complex of scattered groups of long buildings, arranged four or five a block surrounding a broad square field.

Madiha opened a slit in the Half-Track’s armored bed and spoke with the driver, giving permission to approach the base. A strange flag flew from a raised guard post just outside the entrance arch to the fenced-off camp. It was white and blue and had red rock in the center; nothing like the flag she knew, with its hammer and sickle and black hydra.

At the gate, the half-track was recognized from afar and quickly greeted.

“Dobroe tovarich! May I take a look in the back?” said a guard with a heavy accent.

Parinita snuck a peek through the viewing slit to see the guard, but couldn’t see anyone at all from it. Madiha turned her around to the back of the truck. There a rather small individual had come to inspect them. He waved amicably and made an effort to climb aboard. Parinita looked taken aback. The person inspecting them was a Svechthan.

He was smaller than everyone in the truck, but fairly slender and well proportioned to his size. Parinita looked like she had never seen anything like him in her life. He took a quick head count, exchanged a few pleasantries with Madiha half in his language and half in theirs, and stepped off the truck, clearing them to pass. They drove deeper into the camp, and a few other equally small-seeming men and women waved them toward an unused parking spot near warehousing blocks for the 1st Joint-Training Corps.

“They’re like little dolls!” Parinita said, her hands raised to her cheeks.

“Don’t say that aloud, you fool.” Kimani hissed.

Parinita turned red in the face and made a gesture to cover her mouth. But she still had a mischievous look in her eyes. All around them there were more Svechthans coming and going about their business, and Parinita watched them like it was a show.

Madiha was very well acquainted with them, but to an Ayvartan who was not exposed to them, certainly they seemed a whimsical people, being very soft-featured, and pale like snow, with flowing hair of exotic, icy shades and that matched their white and gray-blue military uniforms. What most people tended to focus on was their height, however. They were proportioned like adults, but rather small ones altogether compared to other folk.

Hailing from the harsh frozen north, where food was scarcer and the sun all but vanished for months at a time, Svechthans had adapted their size. Adult Svechthans topped out at around 155 centimeters for the truly rare tall folk among them, and stopped growing at 145 centimeters on average. Average Ayvartan men and women tended to settle at about 170 to 190 centimeters; Madiha was about 185 centimeters tall, and Kimani 192. At 176 centimeters or so, Parinita was quite taller than all of the Svechthans around them.

It was a very visible and striking difference.

Madiha could see how Parinita might feel as though among fairytale folk. Despite the best efforts of both people to cooperate, and despite the great debts of friendship they owed, they were still somewhat rare sights to one another in their respective lands.

“Don’t stare so intently.” Kimani scolded again. Parinita sighed heavily.

“We’re headed for the main barracks over there. Try not to be rude.” Madiha said.

“I’m not going to be rude!” Parinita said, flustered. “Just little surprised is all!”

Despite its name the 1st Joint-Training Corps was actually a professional and fully-trained Svechthan formation deployed to Ayvarta, composed of a Tyazhelyy (Heavy) Division and a Pekhota (Infantry) Division. There were over 20,000 people in this complex, largely Svechthans, taking part in harsh weather training and other exercises that suited the Ayvartan climate and geography. The Svechthan Union was a very cold and gloomy nation and found the heat and constant sunlight in Ayvarta very unwelcoming.

Since each found the others’ homeland to be difficult terrain, the two countries exchanged units to participate in training for potential operations north or south, and thereby improve their readiness. During their walk to the main barracks offices, Madiha saw the field in the middle of the camp teem with activity.

Tanks fired test shots into armored target walls, men and women ran through obstacle courses in their full gear, and there were even a few games of Gorodki, a sport where a wooden bat was launched at a group of wooden pins. All these activities helped build the soldiers’ warm weather endurance, and strengthened their bodies.

She supposed the Ayvartans in Svechtha performed similar activities.

Madiha and Kimani ducked their heads to pass through the doorway into the main office building just off the edge of the training fields. Though buildings and objects made for Svechthans were not miniature to Ayvartans, and all of the buildings, the chairs and desks, possessed fairly relatable dimensions to them, particularly tall Ayvartans often had to bow their heads and curl up their legs to fit comfortably through doors and in vehicles. Madiha spoke with the desk secretary, and she stood up from her post and bid them to wait, while she walked through the office door at the back of the room. Moments later, she returned, and bid them to enter. Once again they bowed their heads as they passed through.

“Welcome, tovarich, I expected your arrival. Please, have a seat.”

Inside the office they were greeted by an older man, Kapitan Golovkin, judging by the nameplate on his desk. He was well built for his size, and had a rather stately mustache. Madiha thought he looked familial, like a small and pleasant uncle. And certainly he did seem to have been expecting them, having worn his full dress uniform that day, with all of his assorted honors clipped on it, in 35 degree heat. He was smiling and gracious, and offered everyone in the room a cigar. Madiha and Parinita begged pardon and passed.

Kimani on the other hand was quick to accept, and even quicker to taste the smoke.

There was a subtext to this action, beyond being a gracious guest or a lover of tobacco products. Madiha had never seen Kimani smoke in a meeting before. She assumed, then, that this was a gesture meant to push Madiha into the spotlight.

Kimani would be smoking, not speaking.

“Recent events have been unkind to us, haven’t they Mayor,” said the Captain, lighting his cigar and staring up from it at Madiha, “To think that scum of the North would launch an undeclared war upon you. Upon us. It is horrifying to consider.”

Eager to get to the main point, and to cut the chances that she might misspeak or grow nervous in the interim, Madiha quickly replied. “And it is our material reality, Captain. I assume that you know the purpose of my visit, then.”

“You seem sharp, and you get to business quickly,” Golovkin waved his cigar, jabbing sharply toward Madiha and grinning, “We appreciate that in the north.”

He looked directly at her.

“Yes, I know you wish the aid of the 1st Joint-Training Corps in the defense of Bada Aso. I learned of your ascension to battlegroup commander just yesterday, at the same time as I received in full the details of the border battle. So I assumed you would come here.”

“I need all the manpower I can get.” Madiha said. She felt a pang of guilt. Ayvarta seemed a poor host, incapable of protecting her guests. Instead she was asking them to risk their lives to protect her. On some level she felt this was not their fight.

“We cannot refuse.” Golovkin cheerfully explained. “After all, we are subordinated to Ayvarta’s territorial command. So you do not need to ask us for our consent.”

Madiha had rehearsed on the trip and spoke as directly as she could.

“I know that as a formation under my regional command in Ayvarta you would carry out my directives. But I do not merely want you and your forces to follow orders, Captain. I need your support. Battlegroup Ox is disorganized, and I can only stretch our professional forces so far among the vastly greater number of green troops. Your forces are more experienced. I need your cooperation Captain, not simply obedience. I need your forces to help lead my own in addition to fighting alongside them. I need a shared camaraderie.”

Golovkin blew smoke and suddenly devolved into a prolonged coughing fit.

Madiha raised her hand tentatively to help, though in what way she didn’t know, it was all a reflex; equally reflexively Golovkin seemed to wave her hand away, grinning through the violent coughing fit. He looked at her with a glimmer in his eyes, and he began to laugh all the while he coughed, and to smile as he choked on the smoke.

Eventually his voice returned, and he was only smiling and laughing.

“Prekrasniy! Oh that was a wonderful entreaty, tovarich. Major Gowon would have never said something like that. I’ve only known you for a few minutes, but you are already a breath of fresh air. I am pleased to hear this; and do not worry. Any fight for Ayvarta is a fight for Svechtha. Nocht knows very well that it cannot fight in our territory. Our seas are stormy and difficult, and our land is rocky, icy, and inhospitable. They’ve tried to fight us before and it has been catastrophic for them. But they know that they can starve us out.”

Golovkin’s response was quite endearing; Madiha felt instant relief.

“I will do whatever is necessary, tovarich, for your food, and the food of my people.”

Ayvarta and Svechtha were incredibly close partners in the modern day. Where other nations either ignored or preyed upon Svechtha and its small and unique people, Ayvarta had little history with them before the new millennium. Svechtha was the birthplace of Socialism, and it inspired the ideals of the current Ayvartan administration. The Revolution came as a shock to the world, and only the Svechthans welcomed it.

Both nations found themselves in a world where they were each other’s only real lifeline. At first the approach was tentative and contact almost alien. Gradually, as their friendship with the Ayvartans deepened, the two countries exchanged military and resource aid. Ayvartans supplied Svechthans with much of their food, in return for raw materials and an open exchange of ideas and expertise. They met each other’s needs well.

So therefore Golovkin certainly viewed this as his people’s fight as well.

Ayvarta’s fall would create a food crisis in Svechtha. Though they could grow some food, and they certainly did, their existence would become bleak and meager once again. Decades of heavy rationing and food insecurity had ended when those first ships full of grain and dried produce arrived on their shores from Ayvarta.

To return to darker days after experiencing such joy and freedom from want would be a tragedy. Regardless of Madiha’s efforts, their commitment was guaranteed.

There was a thrust of history behind this meeting that neither could escape.

Regardless, for the sake of her own conscience Madiha asked again. She knew that she had secured his help, but in a way, she still felt a little like she was taking advantage of him. She wanted to hear him say it again, to lift the final burden from her.

“So can I count on the strength of your people, Captain? Will you join me?” She asked.

“Major,” Golovkin stretched his small hand over his desk, “Let us not tarry.”

Madiha took his hand into hers, and shook gently.

He laughed heartily and praised her strength.

She was almost forty centimeters taller than he, but they were seeing eye-to-eye over that desk. In an instant, Madiha added two divisions to her effort. It had been an easy conversation between two people who had wanted to trust and cooperate, and perhaps had no other option but to do so. It lifted her morale, and for the first time it made her feel that she had a handle on the situation, that she grasped at the pulse of war with a master’s hand.

However, she had one more crucial meeting to attend, and it was very clear from the smoke ring blowing from her lips that Kimani would not interfere with these affairs.

She had lifted her wings from over Madiha; it was time the chick learned to fly alone.

20-AG-30, Late Afternoon

Adjar Dominance — City of Bada Aso

More of Ox’s troops had arrived outside the city by the time Madiha returned.

They had followed her and Parinita’s instructions marvelously, and the mobilization was efficient. Trucks and tanks were strewn about the open field straddling the edge of the city creating a makeshift encampment that stretched out a few kilometers.

Along the dirt roads connecting to the city minor officers had been posted to direct incoming traffic. Staff had organized arrival, food distribution and medical stations for incoming divisions. Temporary headquarters areas had been established. These were little more than tarps slung over the sides of radio trucks and pinned up with tent poles.

Around each temporary HQ the divisional staff was hard at work organizing the arrival and debriefing of Ox’s ten divisions. To protect them, anti-aircraft artillery guns of 37mm and 85mm calibers had been unhitched from vehicles and set up to watch the skies.

Visually it was all a mess. But it functioned and everyone who came in had directions to follow. Madiha was pleased with the results of her orders. Now she had make good on getting all of these soldiers into the city that they were supposed to defend.

Arriving at the camps, Parinita radioed their presence to Lt. Purana, left in charge of the mobilization temporarily. Kimani’s half-track was marked, and so they escaped the scrutiny of the checkpoints and advanced briskly into the heart of the camp; past parked trucks arrayed like houses on a block; down a long line of Goblin and Orc tanks from the Independent Ox Tank Battalions that accompanied every Rifle Division; turning a corner around a battery of artillery pieces being hastily inspected and cleaned; and past stray gaggles of soldiers cracking open crates and distributing basic kit to platoons.

Madiha’s own convoy had grown as well.

Two more small trucks trailing her carried some of Golovkin’s seasoned Corps staff into the camp, as well as a 76mm gun towed behind each. Svechthans went nowhere without their precious artillery, Golovkin had explained. They loved artillery.

The Half-Tracks drove past the 6th Ox Rifle Division area, where Lt. Purana was established, and looked for a good spot to park out of everyone’s way.

While they established themselves, Madiha looked out the back of the half-track and saw the Lieutenant working outside of a nearby radio half-track, going over documents and maps and listening in on various calls. He looked quite busy: several people seemed to be vying for his attention, while he himself was moving between various radio stations and makeshift war room tables. It was a very hectic time. Nocht was on their heels, and they had to manage the evacuation, reconnaissance efforts made against the Nochtish advance, the mobilization of their own troops from all corners of the dominance, as well as keeping Solstice appraised of the unfolding events. Lt. Purana had been temporarily left with it all.

He looked as effective as he could be given the circumstances.

“Inspector, we’re going to meet with the Lieutenant. I want you to help him.”

“Aye aye, Major.” She said simply. She lay against the wall of the half-track with her arms crossed, meeting Madiha’s eyes effortlessly. That confidence of hers, that bluntness, it came so easily. Madiha resented it a little, now that it was deployed on her.

Once all of their trucks were well situated within the encampment, Parinita and Madiha disembarked, the former trotting behind the latter with a thick folder in her arms.

They approached Purana and waited for him to finish with one of the radio operators. Once his attention was drawn he made his way past the staff and saluted the two of them.

“Glad to see you return Commander!” He said.

“Glad to have returned.” Madiha said. “I’ve secured the cooperation of the Svechthan troops, Lieutenant. That’s 15,000 soldiers and around a thousand additional medical, communications and logistics and planning staff. Show them camaraderie.”

“Yes ma’am!” Lt. Purana said. “I assume I needn’t worry about sorting them out?”

“My staff and the Svechthan’s will take care of things from here.” Parinita said.

“Ah, that’s good.” Lt. Purana breathed deeply. “I read books and received all kinds of training; but that never makes it easier actually coordinating forty people on signals and logistics and intelligence who all need me to look over their work.”

Parinita laughed. “Well, your staff is just as anxious and new at it as you. Don’t worry; my Battlegroup Command staff will take everyone under their wing and show them the way. We’ve done things like this in the past. I’m sorry we had to dump it all on you.”

She looked quite chipper being in a position of seniority for once. Madiha found herself fond of her expression and energy. She was a lot more reliable than Madiha had initially thought, and both in the sense of her professional skill, and her willpower.

“I understand.” Lt. Purana said. “You had work to do, and you deferred the rest to us. That’s how the army works. Frankly, while we’re a bit ragged, I think everyone’s pleased to have a chance to do something serious and important in these dire times.”

“I’ll make you put that training to use.” Madiha said. “Soon you might make Captain.”

Lt. Purana rubbed the back of his neck anxiously. “I’m happy with Lieutenant, ma’am.”

“Indeed.” Madiha put on an amicable face.

Lt. Purana, however, turned a grave expression. “Back to business then.”

“Did something happen?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m afraid the situation with the city took a bad turn.”

Madiha raised an eyebrow. “How bad?”

“The Civil Council in the city is holding a meeting, and have denounced us.”

“I can’t believe they would play politics at a time like this. What have they done?”

“From what I’ve been given to understand they’re not only preventing us from entering the city, they are preparing to move military stockpiles and surplus food, fuel and materials out of the city against your evacuation orders.” Lt. Purana said.

“They can’t do that.” Madiha said. It took all her strength not to tremble. She was wholly unprepared for such a thing. “We need those stockpiles to hold the city. That’s the food and ammunition that Ox is depending on. Without it we can’t do anything.”

“I tried telling them that. Even I could see what a nonsensical situation this was; but they weren’t keen on listening to me. This happened maybe thirty minutes ago, so I think we have plenty of time still. But they really want you in a room with them.”

Madiha gritted her teeth.

It was all Council bickering, and though she had foreseen it, she had no foresee the extent to which it would hinder her efforts. Even if they did not intend to go through with this – and Madiha could not know for sure – politically the Civil Council of Adjar had to look like they were retaining their authority in the face of the KVW’s overreach.

Kimani had executed Gowon, which had been the start of a figurative coup.

The Regional Battlegroup was not supposed to be administered by the Military Council. The KVW controlled the Navy and their ten divisions. No more than that.

Demilitarization had stripped the Military Council of the power to control the state army, and had made that a civil power. Technically the KVW had certain rights such as inspecting and vetting state commanders, giving them some de jure influence over the state army as a whole. However, appointing a KVW officer, even a Civil Liaison like Madiha, was a bold step into the territory beyond the Military Council’s legal borders.

Madiha was not KVW anymore as of a few days ago, technically speaking, but for all anyone knew, Kimani was pulling the strings. And behind Kimani was Warden Kansal and Admiral Qote and the Military Council, marginalized and weakened but still very active.

After the inspections, it could definitely be seen as the beginning of a military coup.

“This is a constitutional minefield. I expected them to object.” Madiha said. “But I didn’t expect them to take such drastic action. I thought they would bicker in a room for a few hours then agree we had to defend the city. Not put all the ammo on a train.”

“Yes, this is more than an objection, ma’am. They’ve taken off their gloves and slapped us.” Lt. Purana replied. “The Civil Council never stepped over Gowon’s toes in this way, even if they did boss him around sometimes. You should go talk some sense into them, Major. While the troops around here are rattled, they all know that it was your decisions that saved us at the border. And every division that arrives here, I’ll them the same thing. We’re all behind you, Major. We want to stop running and protect our comrades.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Madiha said. “It means a lot to me. Disseminate orders to all arriving divisions to keep their guns hitched and their trucks loaded. I want six divisions ready to relocate into the city with all their materiel by tonight. Come what may.”

“Yes ma’am.” Lt. Purana said. He saluted, and reached out his hand and shook Madiha’s, before turning around and heading back up into his radio half-track, and gathering the attention of the divisional staff there to appraise them of the situation.

He looked so much more confident than before. Back at the border, Lt. Purana had gathered up his barracks and gone out to fight Nocht in a near total absence of leadership.

When Madiha arrived to take command he was a little rattled, but the bravery it took to walk out and fight without orders sustained him through the battle.

Clearly his comrades believed in him, and so Madiha had promoted him to lead the remnants of the 6th Ox Rifles Division that survived the border battle.

Seeing him around the staff gave her hope; perhaps she was a better judge of character than she thought. And perhaps Ox was not as hopelessly scattered as she had hastily thought. Given some time to think, they were settling into their roles well.

Now the only one who needed to fully accept their role in this conflict was herself.

Kimani and Parinita’s staff members arrived, carrying their equipment and documents.

“Remember our contingency. Defending this city is paramount.” Kimani said.

She put her hand on Madiha’s shoulder, and just as quickly seemed to brush past her.

The Battlegroup Command staff led by Parinita walked among Lt. Purana’s staff, rechecking information and becoming appraised of the situation. They were a team of 25 people, small but with a variety of professional backgrounds. Signals specialists, engineers, mathematicians, technical writers, logistics personnel, and more.

Their counterparts in Lt. Purana’s divisional staff made space for them, and looked relieved to have more support. Parinita herself would not be joining them for long; Madiha quickly pulled her away from the work at the camp, and together they departed the field of military vehicles and headed toward the Council at the heights of the city.

They took a small and fast scout car, half the size of the half-tracked trucks, and Madiha drove them up the gentle slope that separated the dirt and grass from the paved edge of the city. She pored over her options on the drive there, while taking in the sights.

Around its southern and eastern borders Bada Aso was a collection of humble old buildings; the skyline rose with the hill upon which the city had been built, and receded again on the western and north-northern edges, downhill and straddling the coast.

It was a fairly tight city despite its wide roads, with few parks and truly open stretches of land. Alleyways and thoroughfares, blocks of buildings, dominated the space. It was a large city as well, of many square kilometers, occupied by hundreds of thousands of people. Though it was no Solstice it was a major city, and its layout and architecture commanded respect. This was not currently evident in the streets, but the city teemed with life.

A dozen divisions could potentially brawl inside of it.

“Do you have copies of the plans we worked out yesterday?” Madiha asked.

Parinita nodded her head. “Rough copies, but y’know, it’s been a rough time!”

Madiha smiled. “As long as they can hold them in their hands and read them, it’s fine.”

They drove over the Umaiha River and past the richly developed center of the city, and north, uphill, to the Council Building, an old capitalist palace that dominated the city skyline with its domed tower and dominated the hilltop with its broad, columned facade.

Madiha parked the scout car at the foot of the building staircase, helped Parinita off the car by her hand, and the two of them ventured inside, past swaying flags and a hectic mob of personnel and citizens taking care of last-minute affairs of the city’s evacuation.

From a world of light they seemed to transition to a stage of shadow.

Stiff police guards led them through the building to a broad office that faced away from the sun, cast into a gloom by the early evening sun. Six people turned their heads to the door from a square table in the middle of the room.

Electric torches on the wall, their bulbs and handles mimicking real torches, cast a dim light that seemed only to accentuate the shadow. Police guards took their places along the shuttered windows at the back of the room, and along the door. They had the emotionless demeanor of KVW, and saluted the Major when she entered the room.

Parinita hugged her documents close to her chest.

No one offered them a seat.

“The Council acknowledges Captain Madiha Nakar.” said an older man.

“Correction, I’m now a Major.” Madiha said.

No one at the table seemed content with the information.

Madiha looked across their faces. At first she glossed them over and found nobody familiar. She was not looking for anyone familiar after all.

From the first pace she took through the door she was aware that there would have been a new Council since she was last living in the city some four years ago. And with all the recent developments she had not had the time to study up on them: that had been delegated to the KVW office staff. But it slowly dawned upon her, working through a sudden and fierce denial, that there was one person in the room she did recognize.

A young woman, her hair styled into luxurious curled ringlets, her green eyes narrowed. She sat in a corner, as though shying away from notice, with her arms crossed and her gaze averted from where Madiha stood. She tapped her feet in frustration.

Since when had Chakrani Walters been given a seat on the Council?

Heart pounding, chasing her own breath, Madiha could only suppose that she had been appointed Vox Populi, the extra seat that was rotated between prominent citizens who had made great contributions to the city. Everyone else in the room was a career bureaucrat that had been voted into political office on two-year terms as Regional Representatives.

“I must raise one objection,” said one of the younger men, “Representative Walters had connections to the Major in the past. The Council should rightly scrutinize whether it would be a conflict of interest for her to rule on this issue right now.”

Chakrani spoke up quickly and bluntly. “I’ve no depth of feeling left for the Major.”

“There are records of cohabitation and even preliminary paperwork for a marriage–”

“That is all in the past.” Chakrani interrupted. “We have been separated for years.”

In an instant it seemed the matter was dropped.

Of course, nobody in the Council seemed to care that Chakrani likely harbored ill will toward Madiha; so long as she did not love her, everything in the meeting room was fine. Parinita squirmed a little behind her documents, and Madiha strained to control her own breathing, still her thrashing heart and present a stony expression before the Council.

“Then let us deliberate,” said an older councilor, “Major, we the Council hold that your ascendance to Battlegroup Commander of Ox was an illicit move that oversteps the boundaries of the Military Council’s power, and interacts antagonistically with the Civil.”

Madiha wished she knew anyone’s names there. They would not introduce themselves.

They just wanted this meeting out of their way. She could tell that they were not about to listen to her. However she had to make her case and pray they listened.

“The Military Council has the power to replace officers of the state army.”

“Yes, but to replace them with KVW agents is a decision clearly driven by agenda. There were likely suitable and qualified candidates in the regional military pool that could have taken proper command. Why did Inspector Kimani appoint one of her own?”

“We were being fired upon by the enemy. We had no room to deliberate.”

Another councilor spoke up.

“Then after your escape, the decision should have been reopened.”

“I am not a KVW agent, by the way. I was found incompatible with the training scheme. I am a planner and a civil liaison. I do not have an agenda here but to stop Nocht.”

Now it was Chakrani’s turn to speak, and she found quite cutting words with which to rebut Madiha’s statements. “But you’ve worked alongside Kimani for your entire tenure and have not participated in any reconciliation activities with the Civil Council, therefore your impartiality is obviously suspect.” Her tone was indifferent. Madiha would have preferred outright hatred and anger. Something about the way she was addressed and spoken to seemed to paste over that anything had existed between them.

At least the anger would have acknowledged and condemned Madiha’s sin.

“Have you any reply to that, Major?” Chakrani pressed on.

“No, I do not. That is factual. Having said that, I believe interrogating my loyalty is a waste of precious time. Nocht is advancing on the city with military force, and without its defense they will walk right into Tambwe and from there set foot on Solstice’s sand.”

The only older woman out of the six councilors in the room took this opportunity to interject, speaking in a gentle, motherly tone of voice. “We understand this point of view. However, there are diplomatic and military concerns to consider first.”

Madiha blinked. “Diplomatic?”

“That aspect is not your particular arena.” Chakrani said, her voice dripping with self-righteous sarcasm. “But yes, we’re considering diplomatic channels.”

Madiha struggled to hide her outrage. “I have a proposal for the defense of the city.”

“Your actions have rendered a defense of the Dominance impossible by our accounts.” Replied the older woman councilor. She sneered at Madiha and Parinita.

“Excuse me? What would you have done? What are you implying?” Madiha said.

“She means we’re retreating.” Chakrani said. “We have already begun plans to move materiel out of the city and into Tambwe. You elected not to fight Nocht at all, and fled from the border; so now we have no recourse left but to flee as well. We are not staying. We will relocate to Tambwe and attempt to get world leaders together in discourse; or failing that we will mount a defense from a position of greater readiness–”

“Councilor, you, perhaps, are not staying. You, perhaps, wish to beg the imperialists for mercy. Battlegroup Ox is standing here and fighting until the Imperialist’s blood and gore decorates our streets.” Madiha shouted. She began to talk over the Councilors as they tried to respond. “I retreated because the terrain between Dori Dobo and Bada Aso was indefensible. Mobile units would have trounced us in such featureless open terrain and encircled any fortified settlement. However the conditions around Bada Aso give us a unique opportunity to score a blow against Nocht. To encircle the city they must advance over the rough and defensible terrain of the Kalu. We have a port through which we are linked to the outside world in case of a siege; and the city itself will disadvantage Nocht’s mechanized and armored forces. We can fight them here and we can win!”

“Order!” Chakrani shouted. “Major do not disrespect the Council again!”

Madiha laughed bitterly. “Of course. I shall watch my tongue in the face of this.”

“Walters, do calm down,” said the older woman councilor.

Chakrani was turning red in the face.

With an opportunity to speak again, Madiha continued.

“We can’t just keep running now. Nocht’s forces, fully organized along Tambwe’s border, will outnumber even two intact Regional Battlegroups. Right now we have a shot at drawing in their forces into terrain where we have advantage. I ran because it was necessary to fight another day; but if we don’t fight now, we will give them free reign to recreate the border situation again, where their entire force will be fully ready to attack us at will with their supply lines established and all of their formations in supporting distances. They will crush us on open terrain again. I ran so I could pick my fight, and consolidate all of the strength I could get. I did not run just to get a head start on more running.”

“The Council understands your fervor to fight, Major,” the younger man councilor said, “But a more level-headed decision has been taken. Your proposal is too little too late. The Civil Council in Solstice is in agreement with the Civil Council here in Bada Aso.”

There was no other choice.

Madiha had a plan; Madiha had to construct the Hell which would consume Nocht. Something inside her burnt, and she felt the injury as though her flesh was really ablaze. She felt that other mind pushing her to make a difficult decision, a monstrous decision.

In a second all of her hesitation was obliterated, burning up over the all-consuming pain in her mind. From there it was as simple as snapping her fingers, a voiceless command, pointing the guards toward the table. Within an instant of seeing the gesture and hearing the cracking noise, the Regional Police drew their rifles and surrounded the table.

Those guards standing outside the door did nothing to stop anything. Councilors raised their hands in stunned defense; Chakrani screamed and covered her head. Madiha ordered the police to stand around and kettle the councilors at the table with their guns.

“Ayvartan Republican Guards Police, the kind that guard VIPs such as you, receive a form of the conditioning given to KVW agents. They are actually loyal to me above you.”

“What is the meaning of this, Major?” Shouted the old woman councilor.

Madiha’s expression was as void as those of the police. Parinita looked from side to side, scanning over the faces to see if any of them might betray a hint of emotion. She was not let in on the plan; nobody was except the KVW High Command, Kimani and Madiha.

It was their desperate last resort.

“You will act to temporarily dissolve Council, on account of a successful censure motion that will happen right now. All ordinances drafted within the past five days will be annulled and reversed. Social functions will continue to act as normal for citizens who don’t evacuate. In 15 days we will hold a special election with the Unions which you are welcome to attend, though if we’re still fighting, I’ll have it pushed back another fifteen days.”

“I can’t believe you! You disgusting thug! You’re staging a coup!” Chakrani shouted, weeping. “You destroy everything you touch! Can you perform nothing but violence?”

It took all her strength not to weep alongside Chakrani. With every word she said she wanted to break down. “A rather humble coup, I suppose. You will be all ferried out to Solstice by train directly after your vote. You can complain all you want there.”

Blue-uniformed Police stood silent with their rifles partially raised. For the next fifteen minutes Madiha and Parinita quietly oversaw the dissolution of the Council.

Executive authority was temporarily granted to Madiha, and her first act if possible would be to find a Union representative to whom she could shunt that authority toward.

Without the evacuating public finding out most of the details, the Council was escorted by the Police and fast-tracked through the lines of evacuees as a special exemption. Madiha had hardly left the Council building by the time the train had ferried all of her enemies safely out of her grasp. Flanked by the KVW-aligned police, she sat on the steps in front of the scout car, and for a moment she went wholly numb over what she had done.

In her mind she reminded herself of the mantras her therapist had told her: she was a good socialist, an honored soldier, a valuable person; she had worth, she could be happy.

Along the way everything broke down from repetition.

The mantras warped in her mind.

She was a petty dictator of a city soon to be ruins; she was a murderer and a liar; she never even got to look at Chakrani in the eyes again before the police led her out and onto a train, helplessly away from the city that she loved and the old lover she hated.

Parinita sat beside her, quiet, still a little stunned.

The Battle of Bada Aso had ingloriously begun.

21st of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E, Midnight

Adjar Dominance — City of Bada Aso

Battlegroup Ox was finally moving into the city.

Once again the streets were alive at night.

Trains kept running as people fled, but many decided to stay behind for their own reasons. Come daylight, Madiha would have to find them useful work.

While the staff was setting up according to the plans, the Major simply walked alone.

Madiha did not smoke and she never drank to get drunk. Given a brief respite from her responsibilities by the fall of night, she nearly always chose to walk as a distraction, alone, over any other potential diversion. She would stare at the landscape, and try for a brief moment to internalize the life that she saw in it, and to feel as though a part of it.

Often she committed herself to fanciful thoughts of swelling streams, eternal fields of tall, uniformly green grass, vast cities of red clay and brick and blue cobblestone, sharp and vibrant in her fantasies; and always she would try to imagine her form enmeshed within the grand tapestry. Lost in the colors, she thought she could feel closer to something genuine and alive. She would recite her mantras and try to feel good about herself, to combat that anxiety and doubt and even a surreptitious ideation of suicide.

These daydreams hardly ever lasted long. There was always something off about the landscape in reality that all too easily distinguished it from her fantasy.

And furthermore she felt too apart from the creation of some loving force. Whoever was responsible for those fields and streams and monuments, they would not want her around them. She was an alien existence, alone and apart from creation.

Even in the depths of her own mind she was not safe.

Thoughts smoldered, burning her brain.

In those moments alone, it seemed like all the worries she kept suppressed would come rushing back. Every moment of tranquility forced her to confront all of the wounds that she worked to bury under titles like Major and Battlegroup Commander.

She walked along the Umaiha river, like she used to do with a certain someone who was forever gone. It brought along painful recollections. All of her few memories seemed to hurt now. For a long time Madiha barely had reliable memories of anything.

As a teenager she felt like she was an empty goblet, and she tried to fill it, but always with the fear that there were droplets of poison leftover from another drink. People told her about events she had participated in. She was the youngest person ever to receive the commendation Hero of the Socialist Dominances and a few others.

She never wore the medals.

They meant nothing to her. All she wondered about was the identity of that person that had done those things and whether she would ever return. Certainly she was more authentic and desirable than the person standing there along the river.

For a time, living in this city, her beautiful and vibrant city, Madiha had filled the goblet. She had seen studied in a school with people she once considered friends; she had seen films and went swimming and learned to drive a car; she had taken a clerical position and worked peacefully; she had lived with someone whom she thought she loved, and consummated the relationship. She thought that she could construct a love and friendship and community so powerful it would drown out the rifles and fires going off in her head.

Little by little everything fell apart– no, not by itself, she destroyed it all, she thought.

Now the entire goblet was poison. All of her stable memories just brought her pain.

That little candle inside her was still burning, and it hurt.

It always hurt, just more or less.

“Major! Wait a moment, I’ve almost caught up!”

She heard Parinita’s voice long before she saw her, along with the cracking and grinding of a pair of treads. She turned her head to see a little over her shoulder, and found her riding desant on the back of a Goblin tank that was headed for the regional depots.

The Goblin switched its lights on and off in order to offer its own greeting to the Major.

Parinita hopped off the machine with a big grin on her face and a lot of dust and even a few bugs on her uniform. Brushing herself off, she insinuated herself into Madiha’s little walk. Somehow Madiha found it even easier to drown in her own melancholy even with the oblivious cheer of a recovered Parinita at her side, humming and strutting along.

“If it means anything to you, I think that could have all gone much worse.” She said.

“I see. So you think it was that terrible?”

“Well, by any honest metric it was. Not exactly democratic. But it was bloodless.”

“Thanks for the kind words.” Madiha ambivalently replied.

“I support you nonetheless.” Parinita said. She clapped her hands together and her tone of voice grew quite perturbed. “Anyway. Anyway! Anyway: that lady used to be your lover then? Was all that true? I was very shocked by her attitude. She was so nasty to you.”

Her gossipy chirping was a little more amusing than Madiha wanted to admit.

“It was true. I’m homosexual; we were going to marry.”

“I see.” Parinita smiled. “I can relate a bit; I’m more the type that goes both ways.”

Madiha laughed. For a moment she had thought she might experience prejudice; it was extant, still, but it was very rare. One could mostly tell who still held fondness for the last days of the Ayvartan Empire by their resistance to varying sexuality or gender.

In the distance they heard the whistling of a train leaving Bada Aso.

Between them there was nothing but silence. Much of the city had evacuated.

Those that remained had better things to do now with their time than walk outside and air their footsteps and breathing to fill in the void. Soldiers were gathering in places other than the edge of the Umaiha right now, and the occasional passing tank and half-track had a destination in mind and no time for two women walking side by side along the river.

Water, the occasional insect flying by her ear, breathing, and the small idle noises of two people with nothing to do. It was easy to cast all of this as a pure, content-less silence, because it was all devoid of human words and filled only by simple sounds.

Human words were supposed to force meanings from the brain.

Though Madiha questioned whether her own speech had any such powers.

Soon Parinita broke their silence. She stopped walking, and reached out to the Major, waving her over to the guard-rails directly overlooking the river. Standing over the water, she drew Madiha’s attention with those gentle amber eyes.

“Major, may I speak freely to you? I have a concern.”

“You weren’t until now? Then, you may, if you wish.” Madiha said.

“I am concerned about your health. Your eyes hide a deep sorrow.”

Parinita had seen her tossing and begging in her sleep, trapped in nightmares that she had only a vague imagining of. So, Madiha expected her to be curious at some point, to approach her and ask her in how many pieces she was broken, and whether she could hold.

It was not so much the content of her words that surprised Madiha, but the delivery.

Parinita met her, bluntly, with a presence that she had never mustered in any other context. She was cutting through the fog that kept them professionally distant. And yet her expression was delicate, as though she wanted to understand pain equal to Madiha’s.

Her entreaty lacked the scrutiny and flagellation Madiha felt she deserved.

All Madiha could rally in reply to those alien words was, “My eyes?”

“Window to the soul and all.” Parinita said. She crossed her arms and averted her gaze, perhaps with embarrassment. Her behavior was uncharacteristically forward and determined. As Madiha’s secretary, in a traditional setting it would be improper for her to pry. Her work was simply to prepare informational products for the Major’s benefit.

However, Madiha thought she sensed a kindness in Parinita that was too deep for the secretary to suppress. Soon their eyes met again and Parinita continued.

“Your eyes really struck me when I first saw you.” She said. “You looked so hurt. But during the battle at the border, you looked more at ease with yourself. In a fight, you feel at home; I can tell. I want to help you feel at ease – around the staff, too.”

She delivered the last part with a building embarrassment, her voice trembling before the white lie. That was obviously an excuse to hide away her true intentions.

Where did the staff fit into anything?

They had been quite absent at the beginning of the conversation. Clearly Parinita was worried about her, and she was worried about the extent of her worry and whether it was right and proper. Madiha felt touched by it all. Even her fumbling to cover herself up was very endearing in its own way. Parinita was a far kinder person than she had known.

Touching as it was, the facts were fundamentally unaltered.

Madiha was at a loss for what to say.

“I find it difficult to speak plainly about it.” She said. “Anything I say would be incomplete, Parinita. My self, my life, is very complicated and strange.”

“Then speak to me how you would usually speak. I just want to listen.” Parinita said.

At the edge of the river a silence fell between the two women for a moment. The Umaiha rushed beneath them, both physically and beneath their notice. This was the spot indeed; Madiha remembered. She had come here with Chakrani so many years ago.

Here she had lied in a caring voice, trying desperately to salvage some depth of feeling between them. Back then they had drowned out the noise of the river in their own silence, the same way that they suddenly did now. In the days after that meeting, when Chakrani’s father was condemned to execution, both of them tried to continue, they tried desperately to pick themselves up, but their relationship was too tainted at that point.

Chakrani’s hatred built every time they saw one another.

Back then, her voice, however much she spoke, could not overcome the silence.

“I can’t speak easily or plainly about this.” Madiha said. “This is the voice that I’m cursed with. I sometimes wish I could speak with a voice more genuine and full of emotion. But I’ve never been able to do that. I feel like I speak and think in the way a telegraph does. A series of clicks on a board. I’m like a machine. Keys strike in my mind and words escape, and none of it feels warm or alive. I say things but they do not come out of me.”

“That’s a very dehumanizing way to think about yourself.” Parinita said.

“Everything about me has been very dehumanizing.” Madiha said.

Her face was reflected in the water. Just like that time.

And although it attested to the fact of her existence at the moment, to the configuration of her flesh in a face that had more than once been regarded as living and well and even beautiful, all of it felt false, muddled. It felt like a plastic skin that hid some ungodly horror, a real Madiha that reflected the condition of her mind. Everything about her felt wavering and false, and she feared what might have been more genuine about her and less constructed in a bid to live. It was not just her speech, though that was an obvious part of it.

Madiha had always felt as though her very humanity seeped through her fingers.

She was helpless to keep it in her own grasp.

“My entire life has occurred outside the scope of anything which I could consider human, Parinita.” Madiha said. “I have not lived a human life. Just today I coerced my way into control of a city. At the tips of my fingers is a war machine that could ravage this entire dominance. As a child I participated in a revolution. I might have killed people as a child. I definitely did as an adult. And yet, much of it is hard to remember.”

“Well, you’re in the army, Madiha. That’s a business that needs to get done, at the moment.” Parinita replied, nervous but visibly empathizing. She put a gentle hand on Madiha’s shoulder, and they both looked down at the water again.

“I spent my childhood in an orphanage, and my recorded age was seven years old at the time of the Revolution. But how can I know that this was the truth? Years of my life have gone from my recollection: what was my origin, what happened during the Revolution and after? It’s all faded from my head. I lost years and years. I feel that I have flitted in and out of my own existence. It’s disgusting. I feel downright monstrous, Parinita.”

“Madiha, everyone struggles with memories. It’s as human as it gets.”

She remembered the dreams. People don’t have these dreams, do they? People, ordinary people, they do not get tortured to death in their own dreams. They do not wake feeling a flame burning their brains to ooze. Madiha felt a shiver, a horrifying disgust and fury at her entire existence. Was her mind so thoroughly in pieces?

Had it always been this way, or were there some happy figments in her life?

Perhaps her time with Chakrani. But she had destroyed all of that as well.

“Not in the way I do. You don’t understand how alone I am in this.” Madiha said.

She was pleading now, she even had her hands out, as though she expected to be given something that could calm her. Madiha stared, for once appearing as broken as she felt. Parinita averted her eyes and looked out to the water again. Both of them grew silent for what seemed like the hundredth time. Starting and stopping, running into walls, unable to communicate. That was Madiha’s experience with humanity.

But Parinita cut through the silence.

“Do you like films, Madiha? I love them, you know.”

Did she like films? It felt like a complete non-sequitur. Who was she talking to?

“What is this about now?” Madiha said.

“C’mon, just answer me simply, okay? Do you like films? Moving pictures?”

“I’ve enjoyed a fair amount of films.” Madiha replied with marked confusion.

Parinita beamed at her, clapping her hands together with joy.

“Good! We have that in common. I think everybody likes films. They’re very novel.”

“I suppose so?” Madiha could not help but voice it in the tone of a question.

“Would you like to get together every once in a while to talk about films? It would give us both a break from the war; and I feel it beats drinking away our sorrows like my recruiter used to suggest I do back during officer candidate school.”

Parinita patted her jovially in the back and shoulder, her body language cheerfully insisting upon an answer. Her energy and directness was refreshing to Madiha, and it imparted on her a surprising sense of relief. Just from talking to her in this way she felt a burden lift. All those psychic fires burning away Madiha’s soul began to recede.

That fury and disgust with herself, that storm that pulled her from her flesh and cast her away into the void was passing away, for the moment. Her own skin felt familiar again. She felt less wretched and more alive within herself. There was a soul in her bosom, and while it could burn and hurt and alienate her, she was rediscovering comfort, fondness.

Someone just wanted to talk to her about films. It was dumb, in a way; in a good way.

Soon the pain would return. But for the moment she felt a little restored.

Her head had been pulled out from the smoke and she could breathe without coughing.

Though her lungs may still be blackened, she had earned a respite somehow.

“I probably don’t know as much as you do. But I would be happy to.” She replied.

“Great! Have you ever seen Life Blossoms On the 17th Terminal?” Parinita said.

“Well, no, not really. I know it’s popular. I’m not fond of love stories.” Madiha said.

“But it’s so much more than a love story! It has so many charming subplots!”

Faces reflected on the river below, for over an hour that night they ceased to be Major and Chief Warrant Officer and were simply two people talking about the behavior of an eccentric train guard and the stowaways he encountered day by day.

For once Madiha felt that if she slept tonight, she would not wake haunted.

NEXT CHAPTER in Generalplan Suden — The Gates of Hell

The Councils Divided – Generalplan Suden

42nd of the Postill’s Dew, 2024 D.C.E

Adjar Dominance – City of Bada Aso

6 Years Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Lieutenant Madiha Nakar, recently promoted from KVW Sergeant-Major, looked over the lower waterway of Bada Aso. Under the evening’s falling sun the scene was replete with imperfections. Nothing but an ugly concrete cage several meters too long, built to trap the Umaiha River running through Bada Aso, and bridged by a pragmatic, artless structure fit for motor cars and horses, but not lovers walking hand in hand.

At night though, it took on an interesting character as Madiha waited, looking down from the concrete rails at the edge of the river. A full moon rippled in the water. The warm illumination of the streetlights, and a touch of the night’s pervading gloom, gave the place a more romantic character. In the dark, she could see herself holding someone close to her, exchanging a secretive kiss, and whispering warm nothings over the water.

She had realized none of that yet.

Madiha saw only herself, a lone shade reflected in the water, her features obliterated by the strength of a gentle breeze upon the river’s surface. For several minutes she waited. Soon another twisting facsimile of a person appeared, wrapping its arms around her from behind. She felt a kiss on her cheek and the warmth of someone’s breast against her back.

“Hujambo, Madiha!”

“Hujambo, Chakrani.”

Her companion turned her around and looked at her with exaggerated and friendly awe, running her hands over Madiha’s chest and hips, feeling the texture of her uniform and marveling at the few medals upon it; running her fingers over the contours of the empty pouches on her belt. She examined her thoroughly, licking her lips with satisfaction.

Chakrani was Madiha’s age, still a girl in her mid-20s, with a bright smile upon her light brown face, piercing green eyes and long, dark, gently curling hair styled into fashionable ringlets. She had on a long, modest dress with a shawl over it, as Bada Aso got a little cold in the dark during the sixty days of the Postill’s Dew.

If there was one person whose touch Madiha was pleased to feel, it was Chakrani’s.

“You look so gallant in uniform! And you let your hair grow out. It’s so feminine! Very pretty.” She took Madiha’s long, slightly messy ponytail by the tips. “I must say though, I thought you looked handsome with the bob cut, when it was cut to the shoulder.”

“It was not so much that I let it grow out, but that I didn’t have much time to reign it in.” Madiha replied, laughing a little at all the attention Chakrani gave her.

She raised her hand and slid fingers under a few of Chakrani’s ringlets.

Chakrani raised her own hand to meet Madiha’s gentle touch.

“I’ll take your word for it. You were tight-lipped in your letters.” Chakrani said.

“I was sworn to secrecy on certain things.” Madiha replied, smiling nervously.

Chakrani played a little with the tie on Madiha’s dress uniform.

“If I’m also being honest about things other than your hair, I wept when I heard you’d returned here. I spent the whole morning crying. I was so worried when you left. I truly didn’t want you to be part of the KVW. Having you there at my side all these years, after all the turmoil; I never thought you would choose to join the military. I wish you hadn’t.”

“I was already part of them before.” Madiha said.

“As a kid! You were an orphan and they gave you a place. You had no choice. This is different. I’ve seen you shaking and crying in bed. Madiha, war has really hurt you a lot, you know? And it breaks my heart that you’re going back now to be hurt again.”

“I am fine.” Madiha said, raising her hands a little in defense.

“You say so. But I think you’d be happier in a union with a self-managed job.”

“I’m not good for much of anything outside military planning.” Madiha said dully. In her mind she had imagined a thorough, impassioned rebuttal, something which captured some depth of her true feelings. None of that managed to reach her tongue in time.

“You don’t even need to work then.” Chakrani told her, in the tone of a scolding. “You live in the Socialist Dominances of Solstice, Madiha, you can stay home with me; we can live easily on the subsidy and my father’s land grant from the government. You do this because you want to. And I don’t want to chain you down, but you must understand how much it hurts me that you will constantly elect to expose yourself to harm.”

Chakrani rested her head on Madiha’s chest.

Madiha flinched at the mention of her father.

“I understand.” Madiha said simply. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to ruin our night.”

Chakrani sighed.

“It’s fine then. I’m sorry too. But let’s promise to talk about it later, alright?”

Madiha felt a surge across her spine, but the only intimate contact that she could think to initiate was to hold hands with Chakrani. She sealed their little covenant with this gesture, knowing in her heart that it was disingenuous of her to accept those terms from Chakrani.

They were merely delaying the night’s cruelties.

While it lasted, however, Madiha wanted to enjoy a little revelry.

Hand in hand the two of them wandered across Bada Aso’s streets along the lower waterway, where the terrain lay flatter. Bada Aso was an old city, fairly low-lying and spread out, with wide cobblestone roads flanked by rows of two-story buildings with fairly broad alleys between them. Houses and venues of red and brown brick, built in the Imperial age, composed most of the architecture. Initially Bada Aso had been built along the waterway, so where Chakrani and Madiha walked, they saw Imperial-age buildings sharing the streets with a few old but beautiful structures still standing from Ayvarta’s antiquity.

Most of them were repurposed now into museums and cultural centers.

These older structures were largely composed of alternating layers of stone and wood that made the buildings appear like rocky cabins, with a heavily textured exterior and protruding wooden beams. Alongside them stood the anthropomorphic facades of old Imperial buildings, with their archway doors and arching high windows. Bada Aso seemed like a quaint, organic city here. Newer, concrete and rebar buildings were more common along the relatively new main street, and in the upper waterway, north uphill.

Silent, save for a few smiles and laughs and shared, enamored looks, the two journeyed along the old city. For most of the way their only witness was the moon overhead. On the streets themselves there was not much activity, with only a few people and no motor cars travelling down any given street alongside or opposite the happy couple.

Every few blocks, they passed a cooperative restaurant or club, and saw people outside, listening to the music through the walls and trying to make their way in. They knew well that there was a vibrant nightlife in old Bada Aso, even if the buildings did not rise so tall over them as in Solstice or in the photos of foreign cities. Ayvarta was a different place, fundamentally different, but still held many things in common.

A conspiratorial look slowly appeared on Chakrani’s face, as she cast eyes along the connecting roads and ushered Madiha along by the arm, skipping merrily.

Straddling the waterway and out in the main street there were several places that hosted nightly events with food and music, with dancers and poetry, and sometimes with other attractions; but were often short on seating. They were a first come and first serve affair.

Demand for these venues outstripped supply.

But connections could open up seats nonetheless.

Ever since they set off, Chakrani had been chirping here and there about a special place that she wanted to show Madiha. She had cheerfully led Madiha down several blocks, almost to the edge of the old city where the Umaiha bent away from into the wilds.

She soon found one of her favorite places, Goloka. 

Outside it was nothing so special, it looked like most of the Imperial age buildings in Bada Aso. However, appearances were very deceiving in the old city.

Even just standing outside, Madiha felt the beat of furious drums rumbling her heart.

There was a small, very well-dressed party outside trying desperately to gain entry.

Surely this was not simply a sleepy little bar.

Smiling, with a little mischief seemingly in the making, Chakrani urged Madiha to watch her as she gained them entry. Casually, she walked past the party at the front and waved over the sliding glass window on the closed door. Someone inside seemed to recognize the gesture, because the door opened, and the couple was suddenly let in.

The Goloka was an upscale drinking and dining club, a place of gaudy color provided by special light bulbs, and a sumptuous atmosphere with music and professional dancers. In the middle of the building was a small stage flanked on all sides by tables for the guests, and there was a small bar and a kitchen ready to serve light meals and drinks.

The place was misty with the sweet-smelling smoke of incense.

On the stage, near-naked men and women danced arm in arm and face to face to the sound of drums and string instrument. Hips shook, hair swung; there was as much flesh as music on display. It was sensuous and wild, and the ardor of it swept up the couple as they entered. Chakrani clapped; Madiha, pulled her own collar, feeling flushed.

“Chakrani, you’re lucky I was working today. We’re packed.”

Chakrani smiled at the young, well-dressed clerk who had opened the door for them.

“You’re always packed! Any way I can repay you, Jabo?” She said.

“Buy something and don’t stay around for too long.” Jabo quickly replied. “City Council is thinking of drafting up an ordinance to limit the time people can loiter in co-ops to improve access. They don’t like seeing people out the doors in lines.”

“Oh, don’t worry, this is just my first stop tonight.” Chakrani said, waving him away.

Jabo shook his head a little, and amicably departed to meet with the club Host, an older man who managed it. Clubs and taverns such as these could be owned by people, as co-ops. Ayvarta’s government largely had better things to do than run clubs and bars.

While the beauty and exotic quality of places like Goloka seemed a little out of hand to someone as humble as Madiha at first, there was still equity and camaraderie to it.

You just had to arrive early enough for a table.

Or, like Chakrani, you had to cultivate a sociable persona, and make friends.

They waited at the door for a few moments for Jabo to return. He found them a table after another couple had departed the venue. Chakrani and Madiha were then happily seated in this vacant table, near the stage, where they watched the dancing.

Over Madiha’s objections Chakrani ordered them two tall glasses of Phena: coconut liquor common in Ayvarta, and often cut through with a bit of fruit juice. Soon the server arrived with colorful glasses and Chakrani handed him a few bills.

These sorts of transactions were still very common in the socialist Ayvarta, where everyone still earned wages. If one wanted food prepared by private cooks, or alcohol served in taverns, or things like non-government newspapers and books, and clothing other than the essentials rationed within state shops, one paid in Shells, the Ayvartan currency.

For those items which were scarcer or in higher demand, one needed Honors, a gold wage card handed on special occasions or to workers who truly exceeded expectations.

Seeing a chance to make a bigger impression, Madiha objected once more.

“I can cover the cost, Chakrani. You should not have to pay for us.”

She reached into her uniform for a wallet.

Her guaranteed wage was a little higher than normal, being in the army’s special branch, the KVW. It was a hold-over of the country’s revolutionary fervor. Military personnel received slightly better benefits, rations and wages thanks to this emphasis.

Chakrani did not work, so she had only her state stipend to spend, and Madiha thought it would be the “gentlemanly” thing to do for her to pay for the spoils of the evening. It amounted to twenty shells a drink: expensive, when it came to down to counting the milliliters of fluid, but nothing that either of them couldn’t handle with their money.

“My, my, it’s not just your uniform that is gallant now,” Chakrani smiled, teasing Madiha with a finger on her chest, “Footing the bill? You’re serious about me, aren’t you?”

She laughed a little, and Madiha joined her, wondering when she had ever become un-serious about them, or given that impression. She had always been serious. Chakrani was just teasing and flirting, but Madiha felt a little trepidation about it.

Especially considering what would soon transpire.

After a moment the server took Madiha’s bills instead of Chakrani’s and went on his way, tallying everything in a little notebook for the cooperative as a whole. Profits garnered from these exchanges by the cooperative were divided among the cooperative workers, including the Host or Hostess who managed the cooperative venue, in a way that they would determine among themselves democratically; or failing that, an equal split.

However, a certain percentage of profits had to be “invested” – put back into the venue, into new shows, put into the food distribution (to help bolster local unionized agriculture), into bonuses for workers, paid to the government and so on.

Madiha learned many of these things just growing up.

Socialism had always interested her. And though Ayvarta now did not look exactly like the books said it would or should, Madiha could see the progress being made.

Even in little things like going out with a friend she saw the machinery of politics and people running as it did nowhere else in the world. In her eyes everything around her worked, more or less; it took care of people. People would always complain a bit about the shortages of elvish wine or some other thing from a past life; but they had homes and food.

Of course, in the end, it was all over-analysis of a nice night out with a lady friend whom she fancied. Madiha was prone to indulging in political thought, especially as of late.

However, what mattered was the invisibility of this machinery. All of it happened as it would anywhere in the world, and the night progressed as it would for any couple. They watched the show; they held hands; they tasted each other’s drinks. It was a traditional story played out on the stage, even if the actors told it through dance, and danced it while dressed in diaphanous, tight clothing that brought a fierce blush to Madiha’s face at times.

They were telling a mythical story about the creation of the world.

Madiha could tell from the movement, from the costumes; though there were no lyrics to the music, and no voice to the acting, she could tell what has happening very easily.

This was a fairly common story.

Chakrani and Madiha had arrived a bit late for this particular set, but they managed to see most of it. At the beginning of time there was a paradise in the center of the world where nobody was ever left wanting. Everyone ate their fill and was sheltered from weather, and everyone was a single community, undivided by taboos. Their unity and carefree nature was expressed in the sexually-charged dance on the stage.

Men and women danced, face to face, flesh to flesh, glistening with sweat; and men traded places to dance with men, and women with women, and they shared with their new partners all of the same eroticism that they had shown the opposite sex.

Men and women traded items of dress, slipping into new masks, new facets of gender and sex, to show that in the past they had all been truly free, unknowing of the kind of constraints that now seemed to face mortals in the world.

It was the sort of show that would be scandalous in Nocht or Lubon.

However, the story would turn soon dark.

An evil force led the peoples astray, and lured them to the corners of the world, and away from their paradise, from their warming fires. Naively each of the peoples followed. In their new lands, for the first time they felt need and want, and their natures grew meaner.

They were no longer carefree and united; women dancers broke away from other women and shied from their touch, and men from men, and eventually, even men and women could not touch anymore. All of them grew covetous, longing again for paradise, and they thieved from one another: on stage the dancers seemed to struggle with one another, taking their masks only to throw them away once they acquired them.

Beneath the larger masks, they had smaller face masks that revealed more of their individual features. Now their emotion was laid barer for the audience to see.

They had become imperfect beings, too easily read and defined, their sins too obvious.

Such was the fate now of people in the material age.

“I love this atmosphere.” Chakrani said. She repeated the sentiment about everything in Goloka, from the dancers to the drinks to the architecture and interior decorating. Everything about the place enamored her. Her exuberance rubbed off on Madiha. She had felt guilty, leaving Chakrani behind a year ago to join the KVW’s operation in Cissea. But Chakrani had grown a lot since then. She had left her own comfortable surroundings and expanded her horizons without anyone’s help. Madiha felt elated to see her like this.

“It certainly lifts the spirits.” Madiha replied. Again she had wanted to say something just a little longer, just a little more inspired. But words seemed to escape her grasp around Chakrani, and she said something pedestrian again despite all of her thinking.

“I wish I could run a place like this. Wouldn’t it be great?” Chakrani said.

“Put in a request to the Commissariat of Developments.” Madiha said.

“I should.” Chakrani said. “Though, it’s a little intimidating to think about.”

Madiha reassured her. “Bada Aso could definitely use more places like this.”

Chakrani curled one of her ringlets around her finger, face flushed.

“Do you think I would make a good hostess?” She asked.

“You would be the best.” Madiha emphatically replied. Finally she seemed to find the enthusiasm to speak to Chakrani in the way that she deserved. She was radiant, joyous, an angel; and Madiha wanted so badly for her to be happy. She had a longing that hurt.

On stage the drums grew fierce again, and the couple turned to witness the final scene.

This was a story with no happy ending; all of the peoples of the world in their different corners, met again in what they thought was paradise, but warred with one another. The close dance that was once seen as pleasure, now meant war and strife. Madiha was astonished and enraptured by the skill and beauty of the dancers.

She felt Chakrani’s hands on her cheek.

Before she could think to meet her lover’s eyes and inquire, Chakrani had already turned her around, and pulled her forcefully in over the little table.

Their lips met and joined, locking together with ardor and desire.

Madiha felt Chakrani’s tongue slip into her mouth.

Closing in, they shared a kiss as intense as the dance behind them and lasting until the drums fell silent. Around them the audience clapped and cheered for the entertainment, but Madiha scarcely heard them over the taste of coconut from Chakrani’s mouth.

Chakrani let go of Madiha’s tie, by which she had been holding her neck, and their lips slowly separated. For a moment they remained close enough to taste each other’s breaths in the air, as though they would be drawn in to kiss again, but they exchanged grinning looks, and sat back on their chairs instead, contented with the moment.

“You really have not changed since you left.” Chakrani said. “I’m so glad.”

Madiha smiled warmly at her, wanting to believe this was true, but she knew otherwise.

On the stage the dancers started a new set, while Chakrani and Madiha emptied their glasses. They left a tip for the dancers and vacated the table with a friendly farewell to Jabo. Outside, the party that had been waiting all this time finally got enough tables freed up to seat all of their members, and walked past Madiha and Chakrani on their way out.

They waved and wished them a good night.

Perhaps the peoples of the world were not yet so mean and covetous after all.

But what they were, still, was tied down with conflicts and duties.

Standing again by the waterway the two of them peered down into the water.

They were both quiet, and Madiha’s hands had begun shaking. She was anxious. Chakrani stood by her side, warming her up, sometimes resting her head on Madiha’s shoulder. Both were fresh off the spiritual high they had achieved in the club, gently joining flesh within the uproar of the drums. Perhaps any other night it would have led to more.

Madiha wondered what her lover was too shy to ask of her now.

In a way she knew. But she would have to interrupt such fond thoughts.

After a few minutes of silently counting the ripples she saw on the river’s surface, Madiha finally reached into her back pocket and withdrew a series of photographs.

She got Chakrani’s attention and showed her the pictures.

Each image was incredibly crisp.

Her father and a few other men seated at a bar; drinks ordered; drinks passing between them. Bags traded; documents spread open. At first, Chakrani did not understand at all. She seemed to think it was a prank, but her face turned pale, and her her eyes drew wider open as Madiha showed her more pictures. She grit her teeth and grew frustrated.

Finally, she took Madiha’s hands. Her eyes were starting to tear up.

“What is it? What is the point of this, Madiha?” She shouted.

“This is evidence, Chakrani.” Madiha finally said. She had wanted to say it in a way that captured some kind of empathy, but her voice came out incredibly cold. Madiha silently cursed herself. What was she doing? She felt like a stranger to herself, like she had no control over what she did or felt. She withdrew the photographs.

“Your father has been arrested by the KVW, Chakrani.”

“Spirits defend.” Chakrani covered her mouth as though to hold back from vomiting.

She took a few steps back from Madiha, staring at her with fear.

All that love and fondness between was instantly annihilated in the span of a few minutes. Madiha had not done the capture herself. She was just here to try to gather more information. That was the sad fact of their date. Now she did not know whether it would have been crueler to cancel the date entirely and tell her about her father immediately, or to have gone along with it, and tried to have fun and exchange a kiss, and maybe even share a bed, before confessing the awful news and finally slashing apart their bonds.

“Listen, he is only in custody right now. The KVW is investigating his case.”

“And by ‘the KVW’ you mean we, right? You mean yourself, you’re part of it!”

She was shouting. Madiha raised her hands, afraid that she would be struck.

“I asked to be part of it; I’m trying to do anything I can to help him. He has been charged with something terrible; and there is a wealth of evidence against him. But I’m going to do everything I can for him, I promise you that, Chakrani.”

Her eyebrow twitched as she spoke. This was a blatant lie.

There was likely no helping him. And Madiha had no intention to help him, and no desire. She hated him. Any good socialist would hate him. He had taken several vacations to the neutral Bakor archipelago lying partway between Nocht and Ayvarta. There he had given away valuable information to Nocht. The State had trusted him; trusted him too much.

The Anka fighter plane, the Goblin tank, the composition of the state forces, defensive plans drawn up in case of border of conflicts, Ayvarta’s dealings with Svechtha: all had been made an open book to Nocht. Chakrani Walters’ father, Georg Walters, a Nochtish man himself and a former capitalist who had sworn to surrender their privileges and industry to the revolutionary government; this was the man who had conspired with Nocht.

The KVW had made a perilous covenant with him and his ilk, a gambit to end the bloodshed, and though the war had ended, and socialism had been born and grown from it, now they found their faith in the reformed bourgeoise had been repaid in this way.

But Chakrani couldn’t hate him. Madiha knew she couldn’t hate him.

She was his beloved daughter. Her father was a Nochtish man, but she was a Zungu, racially divided but fully born into Ayvarta. She was not bourgeois and she was not Nochtish. To her there was no concept that this man could be different than her.

It was impossible to her that he could betray his people.

She did not know that perhaps, she, and Madiha, and everyone else around him, were not his people at all. She saw no divide; but he had come from a different world.

Madiha felt all the colder, all the more heartless.

But she knew she was right.

Chakrani was speechless. Her legs shook, and her knees looked about to buckle. She approached Madiha, and collapsed into her arms, weeping profusely into her chest.

She begged her to save her father. She begged her to remember all those days that she was their honored guest, how they had spent so much time together in their teens, how their love had blossomed. Madiha continued to lie, to tell her it was ok.

As time went on she had completely forgotten the actual content of the begging, and the content of her own lies. She only knew that Georg Walters was destined for a firing squad, and that Ayvarta was destined for an internal clash.

Every night since, Madiha was haunted by the diabolical contrast between that wonderful kiss, and that treacherous exchange of deceptions by the waterway.

She felt the chill of her own words in her mouth every morning.

But the execution of Walters had been the right to do. She never wavered on that.

9th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

Adjar Dominance – Bada Aso Region

9 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

They kept chickens and a rooster in the tenement’s backyard, and everyone could count on the latter to bring in the day without fail. Ajith woke before the dawn with the crying bird, and he walked out of his apartment with the first rays of the sun.

He dressed in a pair of overalls and a dress shirt, but over it he wore a traditional robe red and orange like blood reflecting the sun, with tassels hanging from the cut.

In order to work safely Ajith would have to remove the robe, but he was sure that today was the start of his turn as overseer, so he might get to keep it after all.

From the tenement he followed the street up to a corner where a green truck with a long, flat bed was parked, and he climbed onto the bed of the truck and sat there.

A thin trail of smoke rose to the sky from the front of the truck. It curled around the side of the truck, emanating from the end of a cigarette. Ajith’s driver Chanta was an older woman, tall, thin, with black skin and a lot of frizzy hair under a green cap with the crow logo, symbolizing the regional worker’s council.

They exchanged enthusiastic but largely silent greetings.

Both of them were tired.

Thankfully weekend was coming, and they got 3 good days off this one. It alternated between weeks. Sometimes it was two days. Ajith could take any time off if he wanted, he had worker’s protections, everyone had; but everyone knew that if they just disappeared, work wouldn’t get done. If he didn’t go mine, rocks wouldn’t come out; workers would get less raw materials, he supposed. Everyone worked for the sake of everyone.

Even the driver did too. She could take off; but there’d be one less driver. And it wasn’t exactly a skill that was prolific in Ayvarta, where most people didn’t have a car. Everyone worked to keep everyone else working and fed. Everyone understood how the chain worked, and they tried to show up for their job every day. Tired maybe, but ready to go.

Ajith sure was.

So it was best for everyone that Ajith only took it easy on the designated weekends.

From the adjacent tenements and even from adjacent boroughs a slow trickle of other men and women approached the truck over the next fifteen minutes. Once the truck was fully loaded, the driver took her place, and they backed up off the street.

Driving west, they stopped first at a civil canteen, where a girl waited with a stack of prepared lunch boxes. She handed them one by one, and people closer to the edge of the bed passed them around to those farther back, until everyone had a box.

Canteen girl waved them goodbye and wished them a good day, and the truck was again on its way to its destination, a quarry far away on the eastern edge of the Kalu hilltops, about two hour’s drive from the city. A dirt road would take them there.

Almost everyone used the time to sleep more, except Ajith.

He watched the world roll by; the hilly terrain rising, flattening, falling; the green grass and white dirt across the landscape, colored like the cream of kale served at the civil canteen; gazelle flocking to watering holes in the morning while lions slept.

He even saw a tusker off the distance when the truck rose further uphill.

It was a bumpy ride, and too cold when it began, and too hot as it ended! Nevertheless he enjoyed these moments of peace, watching such a lush world unfold around him through the wooden frame of the truck bed. He took a mental note of everything he saw.

It would definitely inspire a few drawings when he got back home in the evening.

Soon the truck veered off along a broad, dusty, featureless stretch of pale rock.

Ajith and his comrades worked at a limestone quarry. Stretching out kilometer in front of them the terrain descended before a stark, man-made escarpment, as though a knife had come down from the sky and shaved away a chunk of the hillsides, carving a flat, rocky space. Their handiwork transformed the landscape here. With explosives, they blasted all the useless topsoil and got right to the limestone. Then they blasted the good rock out, and worked the pieces for shipping to various industries that made them into goods.

Everyone got off the truck, and got out to work.

For the driver, she would be switching vehicles, until it was time to pick the workers up again. And as Ajith expected, when he got out to the line of tents straddling the “safe zone” outside the reach of flying debris, there was Shasra, one of the previous overseers, a sprightly woman ten years his junior, to hand him the whistle and the clipboard.

In turn, she took the hard hat that was left for him in the basket labeled “Ajith” that was just outside the equipment tent, pulled out for the first shift workers.

They would be trading duties today.

In their country the workers all had their turn managing, cutting, blasting, driving (if they knew how, or wanted to learn), taking inventory, and so on; in this way they self-managed everything. They even took turns sitting at the desks of the union council.

“You’re on Overseer duty, Ajji, from today until 34th of the Gloom.” She cheerfully told him, adjusting the hard hat. “So I’ll be out there blasting rocks for you. You better make sure everyone’s working right! I don’t want to get buried just yet.”

“Ancestors defend, don’t tell me that on my first day.” Ajith said, rolling his eyes.

“It’s just a joke! Don’t enjoy a little dark humor? See, it works on two levels–”

He laughed and waved his hand as though fanning away her words, and walked past her into the equipment tent. He had a checklist of things to do, helpfully written in a curly, childish-looking script by Shasra. Managing wasn’t as hard as he thought.

First he had to check equipment: he peeked over the crates of stick-bombs to insure that they had not gotten wet, and looked for the general presence of rust on the picks and the rock saws. Once he was sure all the tools were fine, he would sign off on it to the other workers, and they would come in and pick their things. Everyone patted him on the shoulder on the way in and on the way out. It was sort of a joke to them.

Every Overseer stood like a statue near the tents while equipment was distributed.

After everyone had bombs or a pick or a saw or a shovel, Ajith checked the water trucks. There were two, similar to the transport truck, but with large containers to which hoses were attached. They needed to be filled to a certain level in order to last the day.

Water was essential for the cutting of stone, and of course to keep everyone alive in the heat. Ajith checked and signed off on that as well, and Chanta took a water truck and drove out to the escarpment, the chiseled face cut against the hills. Ajith hitched a ride.

For the rest of the day, he would be working there: taking measurements, checking the rocks, making sure they filled their quotas with the right size rocks that their contracts stipulated, and so on. Barely cerebral work. It would go by quite easily, he thought.

Or at least, that was the plan; until the KVW half-track drove in.

Unlike their old truck, this was a big powerful vehicle, meant for battle, with its face and the sides of its bed armored against light firearms. Windshield and both windows had received some kind of tint to block one’s sight of the driver and passenger.

A tarp had been rolled across the top of the bed, so the occupants could not be seen anywhere from the outside, save for the dispassionate, black and red uniformed woman crewing the open-air machine gun mounted atop the vehicle’s pintle mount.

Every head in the quarry turned over shoulder to watch the vehicle drive in, and kept their eyes on it as a pair of passengers walked out to the escarpment from the back.

“I think they’ll be wanting to talk to you, boss,” Shasra said mischievously.

Everyone else took this visit as an entertaining novelty, but Ajith felt a little nervous about it. The KVW always claimed to be there for the workers, but he felt a great unease at any armed presence. Whether wielded by folks on your side or against your side, guns were guns. Ajith had been in the state army, for a few years at least, long before it was split up like the Councils. After that he was in the reserve. He knew what guns did.

As such he was always nervous around guns.

Two women left the vehicle and approached him.

Ahead was a taller, older woman, of obvious Umma ethnicity like Ajith himself: she had skin so that dark it gleamed with sweat in the sun, a convex nose, broad lips, and a lot of dark curly hair under her peaked cap. Her uniform was the red and gold of an honored KVW officer, and displayed a few ribbons proudly; it contrasted with the black with red trim uniform of the woman on the gun mount, who was an average KVW riflewoman.

Clearly this was the boss of the two: she had a calm and serious expression, and she moved with confidence. She stood her full height, taller than anyone around.

Behind her trotted the other woman, a little shorter but still fairly tall, dressed in the green uniform of the state army and the rare few uninitiated KVW forces. She was an Arjun, the most numerous of the ethnicities in Ayvarta as a whole, but not as much in the Kalu Hilltops and Bada Aso region. Her skin was brown, rather than black, and her nose and lips were smaller and thinner, and her shoulder-length hair was straighter.

Judging by the honors on her uniform she was a Captain, while the other woman was probably a Colonel or higher. These were experienced, veteran officers.

Ajith drew their attention, waving his hands and ambling forward to meet them.

“I’m Ajith Diaye. It’s my turn at Overseer here in the quarry. How can I help you?”

“Inspector Chinedu Kimani,” the older woman introduced herself, extending her hand to Ajith, and taking it with a strong grip, “and this is Captain Madiha Nakar of the 3rd KVW Motor Rifles Division. We would like to discuss a few things in private.”

A shudder traveled down his spine, but Ajith kept his composure.

He led the two women back to the tents, one of which had a desk, a few filing cabinets, and an old radio unit that hardly anyone used. It was the size of a clothes chest, and Captain Nakar sat on top of it, while Inspector Kimani took one of the chairs. Ajith, behind the desk, felt no more authoritative or prepared, only ridiculous, and quite anxious.

Inspector Kimani looked at the discarded things atop the desk, a dusty rag, a wooden clock, and crumpled up papers. Ajith swept them off and sat down.

“So, let us discuss. What brings the KVW to a limestone quarry?”

“It’s not necessarily the quarry.” Kimani said. “We need to consult a local miner.”

“I’ll try my best to represent my fellow workers, but know that I’m only one person.”

“I understand.” Kimani reached into her jacket and withdrew a few photos. She put them on the desk for Ajith. They were aerial photos of a military convoy carrying people and equipment up mountainous terrain. Ajith recognized it immediately.

It was a cave system in the northeast called the Shetani Kinywa, demon’s mouth.

It was a source of iron, but it was dangerous. There were already open pit sites in Adjar and the unions in Bada Aso had refused to work the Kinywa for years.

In the photos he saw trucks and workers there, all clad in military uniform.

“Battlegroup Ox is mining the Kinywa? I don’t understand the point of that.”

Inspector Kimani nodded, and took the back the photos, stashing them inside her jacket once again. “It’s a very rich site, or so I’m told. During the Imperial days they completed excavation and had access to significant ore bodies, with an even greater quantity projected to be deeper underground. After the fall of the Empire the Kinywa went untouched. There had been many deaths there, and even rumors of evil spirits and such things – self-managed workers had rights now and they opted to leave it alone. Nobody could force them to work the site any longer, and so it was left to fester. The Demon’s Mouth, they called it.”

“Even if it was safer to do, it’s not worth it. I remember that the unions around here have told the Regional Council in Bada Aso as much. We’re working open pit sites right now that are yielding more than enough of all kinds of ore to ignore the Kinywa.”

“Yes, and getting to the Kinywa and back is difficult enough without hauling ore.” Inspector Kimani said. “However, that has not persuaded the Council or Ox’s Army-level command. They’ve gone over your heads and are working the mine alone.”

Ajith blinked at the way she phrased it.

He had never quite thought of it that way.

For himself and the other workers, and probably for the union, it was not seen as a competition with anyone. They were guaranteed work, after all, and wages; they had both right now. However, hearing the Inspector saying it that way, it did feel as though a trust between the Council and the Union had been violated by the mining of the Kinywa.

After all, things tended to be done by agreement between Councils and Workers.

The Council had ignored them, gone behind their backs, and recruited an entirely different, ill fitting corps of laborers to do the work they had rejected.

It felt very wrong indeed the more he thought about it.

“We were heading to the mine to talk with the soldiers and commanders there,” said the Captain, Nakar, from the back of the room, “We would be going there this weekend, and wondered whether a representative of the miners here could accompany us, and help us judge the conditions at the Kinywa site. The KVW believes this project is a flagrant abuse of power: soldiers are not miners, and it should have been implicit that only miners should do contract mining work. So we find this project highly suspicious.”

“I don’t really think it could be anything too sinister.” Ajith said. He felt nervous again about this situation. This was some kind of friction between the KVW and the Regional Council and its military, Battlegroup Ox. He was in the center now. And yet, he felt a duty to his fellow miners. “I had plans for the weekend, but I guess I can go.”

“We will compensate you.” Inspector Kimani said.

Ajith accepted. They shook hands, discussed a pickup, and the women went on their way. Their Half-Track disappeared behind up the ramp out of the quarry site and behind the hills. Ajith resumed work, telling everyone that it was all fine.

On the 11th of the Aster’s Gloom, instead of waking with the sun, Ajith slept in a little, ignoring the rooster’s cries. He left the tenement around nine o’ clock.

A KVW Half-Track was waiting outside the tenement to the bewilderment of everyone around. This time the gun was crewed by a young, tan-skinned man but he had the same blank expression as the woman before, making them almost eerily interchangeable.

Ajith climbed into the back, where a squadron of twelve riflemen and women sat along with Captain Nakar and Inspector Kimani. All of the riflemen and women looked like they were daydreaming, with eyes partly closed, and lips offering no indication of contentedness or dissatisfaction. Kimani looked about the same, but when Ajith examined her more closely he found her eyes much more intense, and her posture stronger.

Nakar on the other hand looked simply depressed and exhausted.

Soon the Half-Track was off, out of the city, past the Kalu hill-tops, joined by a Goblin tank along the way, for who knows what purpose. The little convoy drove far north at top speed for several hours, almost half the day, out to the edge of the Kucha mountains. They drove up a steep, rocky road far up into the belly of the mountain, and found themselves before a massive jagged opening, surrounded by sharp stone teeth on all sides.

The Half-Track parked, the rifle troops disembarked, and they marched carefully toward tents set up at the edge of the cave. Inside the jaws of the cave the floor slanted down for several meters like a natural ramp onto an adjoining tunnel.

One slip of the foot and the hapless worker would slide down to the bottom and break several bones. Ropes and wooden supports had been bolted down onto the rock to help navigate the ramp and reach the tunnels down to the mining area.

While Captain Nakar and Inspector Kimani bickered in a tent with a Lieutenant from Battlegroup Ox, assigned to oversee the military labor in this site, Ajith and and half of the rifle squadron examined the cave itself. Ajith was not an expert on underground mining, but he could easily see the deterioration all around him. If Ox was planning to renovate the place, they had not even begun. Lighting was dim, and the elevators were old.

Cranks and other mechanisms were rusted and creaked loudly under everyday abuse. The elevator off the main tunnel led down two tiers. While tight, the first one was manageable enough, with almost proper lighting, provided a large diesel generator that had probably been disassembled and then pieced back together in the spot.

On the bottom tier they found the true horror.

From the elevator platform, a short tunnel led to a stark void, into which miners dropped down with sturdy hopes to survey the walls of what seemed like a literal bottomless pit. It was like opening a gate to hell. Staring into that lightless pit, Ajith could tell why the place was called Shetani Kinywa. The air was thin, and he smelled something foul. Every sound echoed seemingly infinitely.

Soon he found it hard to tell his surroundings.

He felt sick, and he begged the rifles to take him back up.

Ajith was so dazed and suddenly ill that he almost had to be pulled physically back to the top by the soldiers escorting him, a task which they took to without even a twitch of the brows, their expressions as stony as the walls.

Above ground, Kimani and Nakar had taken their bickering with the lieutenant out of the tents and into the cave. Soldiers stood in the periphery, watching with unease, while their commanding officer irascibly confronted the two KVW women.

He was shouting, and gesticulating wildly with his hands at the sharp stalactites around the maw. Kimani was shaking her head and gritting her teeth; Nakar still looked simply exhausted and depressed, with her head down and her clipboard against her chest, sighing frequently and averting her eyes. Out of the crushing tightness and darkness of the tunnels, Ajith felt like he could breathe and move again. His senses slowly returned.

Inspector Kimani and the Ox Lieutenant both turned their heads from their argument to silently greet the new party coming out of the elevator. Ajith stood under his own power, still a little shaken. Captain Nakar sat back, and started taking notes.

“Thank you for your time. What is your assessment of the site?” Kimani said.

Ajith caught his breath first, but he hardly needed to think much before speaking.

“This place is very dangerous. I’m surprised nobody has been killed yet. All the shafts need to be maintained or replaced, and the supports are old and need to be reinforced. Those elevators haven’t been touched in decades. Lighting is weak and dim, all of the torches need to be replaced; no matter how new your generator is those lights won’t give you any more glow. On the lowest tier there are people doing vertical mining almost entirely in the dark, save for battery torches. Whatever amount of iron is here, it’s not worth digging out. It’s endangering these people, who have no mining expertise and nobody to train them. If I’m being called on to make a suggestion from the Union, it’s to stop this now.”

“Sounds like a very convincing case to me. However, Lt. Hako,” Kimani turned to face the mortified Lieutenant once again, “it’s in someone else’s best interest to keep it running, isn’t it? This isn’t about production or quotas or surpluses: it’s about the mining here going directly into someone’s pocket. That seems like the only reason I could see to be so adamant about digging here. With a mine this inaccessible, ignored, rejected by the unions, and far away from the eyes of Solstice, you can do whatever you want with the ore as long as you have complicit cronies overseeing every step of the way, and a connected fellow at the top to push the product to someone who wants it. Maybe Cissea; maybe Nocht?”

“How dare you!” Lt. Hako shouted. “Are you accusing me of treason, Inspector? Is that the KVW’s task now, to seek after paranoid delusions? It is impossible that any of us could have had dealings with the enemy, and you know this perfectly well!”

Perhaps she did. Ajith thought it sounded ridiculous himself.

Perhaps it was just agitation?

But the accusations did not shake Kimani at all. Undaunted by the lieutenant’s growing wrath, she crossed her arms and gave him a cutting look before speaking again.

“Answer me this then,” She began, “did this quarry not once belong to one of the old bourgeoise who switched loyalties during the Revolution? Was it not part of Gowon’s portfolio? Is it not then being reclaimed for him? Or am I mistaken about this theory?”

Quickly the lieutenant snapped back. “You are mistaken, his family mines are in Dori Dobo! They supply his steel mills! If you want to inspect his mines, go there and leave the Kucha alone, it is entirely unrelated, he has nothing do with things here!”

“I guess we’ll be paying a visit to the border then, to inspect these quarries.” Captain Nakar said. She looked up from the ground finally, displaying some curiosity for the world around her. She grinned wickedly. “So many things owned by a Major in the army.”

Suddenly the lieutenant went pale.

He had, in his anger, given something away. His body shook.

Kimani grinned. “Yes. Major Gowon will be hearing from us personally about this.”

Nobody knew how complicit Lt. Hako was, personally, in any of these misdeeds. However, everyone could tell from his appearance and the shaking tone of his words that he was guilty. “Comrades, I did not mean it in that way at all. Of course, the Major gave up his claims years–”

Kimani stopped grinning, and snapped her fingers.

Captain Nakar drew her revolver on the lieutenant, aiming at him from where she was seated, on a rock a few meters away from Kimani and him.

There was a collective gasp among the soldiers, but none of them intervened, not with the KVW rifle squadron in the room. As one, the KVW rifles raised their weapons and stood in phalanx, facing different directions in the room. Stray soldiers and military laborers held up their hands and made obvious their surrender.

Those with weapons discarded them immediately.

Ajith was in the middle of all this, stunned to silence. Inspector Kimani, satisfied with how things proceeded, stepped aside and gestured for the Lieutenant in charge to surrender himself as well. “Lt. Hako, you’re under arrest for complicity in the misappropriation of funds, aiding and abetting the exploitation of workers, and misuse of military materiel. I would not resist if I were you. Madiha never misses a shot if she has time enough to aim.”

“Perhaps you could testify about all these things Gowon’s family has.” Nakar added.

Lt. Hako extended his arms. Kimani handcuffed him, and the situation was thankfully diffused without bloodshed. Ajith sighed and felt faint with anxiety.

Immediately, orders were given to gather up everybody and begin dismantling the operation. All of the soldiers looked scared and ashamed of what was happening.

Ajith wondered if on some level they knew that they were used for somebody’s benefit, and that taking part in the military, they simply went along with it and followed orders. Or if perhaps all of them were benefiting directly, with hidden perks for those who took special part in these projects. He wondered what compelled these people to try to do this.

There was a lot Ajith didn’t know, and he didn’t really desire to think about it. His experience was with mines. He waited outside the cave until Kimani bid farewell to him, and ordered the Half-Track be used to drive him back to Bada Aso. This would be the last he personally saw of Captain Nakar and Inspector Kimani, but not the last he would hear of the friction and conspiracy between the Councils. Soon, it would be public knowledge.

14th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

Solstice Dominance – Solstice City Center

4 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Admiral Kremina Qote discreetly extricated herself from the arms of Warden Daksha Kansal, leaving her lady love sleeping soundly in the bed of their two-story house.

For many years they had covertly turned this building into their nest, though it was registered only for Daksha and the two of them barely lived in it: they mostly lived out of offices. In Admiral Qote’s own situation, she lived mostly off various fleet ships.

Theirs was a humble house, in a small suburb just off the heart of the Ayvartan political organism in Solstice Central. From the side of the bed, Kremina could look out the window and see the People’s Peak, the tallest building in Ayvarta, an office building where large meetings were held. That was Daksha’s real home as Warden of the KVW.

They had agreed to be careful and discrete about their love life.

Still, whenever an important meeting in the city pulled the Admiral away from her fleets in the major ports of Bada Aso, Guta, Chayat or Tamul, she could easily take time to be with her lover. Their love was older than the Socialist Dominances of Solstice that they had started to build 20 years in the past. It could survive a bit of distance.

Before the sun rose, Kremina left Daksha a little note, with sultry little things about the sex they’d enjoyed the previous night. She donned her uniform, adjusted her tie, and tied her long, half white and half black hair into a functional ponytail.

Watching her lover sleep, it was difficult to believe she was the leader of a revolution, the leader of a military force, the rock around which an entire people had risen up. She had on such a peaceful face when dreaming. Kremina could have looked at her all morning. But she threw on her jacket, blew her a kiss, and left the room and the house.

She had an important task. Outside, a KVW car was parked along the street.

A young man in a black uniform with red trim waited outside the car.

“Good morning, Admiral. Where shall we go today?” He said. His voice was near toneless as he opened the door for her and stepped aside to usher her in.

“Revolution Square.” Kremina replied.

He nodded, and circled around the car back to the driver’s seat.

Kremina almost felt a compulsion to tell the young man that he saw nothing; that he would say nothing; that nothing of this would be shared, that the privacy of her dealings with the Warden was paramount. She did not need to. He knew. Her driver was a KVW agent. He was expressionless, professional, a symbol of propriety and collectedness.

In the rear-view mirror, she briefly met his gaze, and saw the almost imperceptible red rings around the iris of his eyes. One could only see them if one was looking intently. In that empty-seeming stare, was the mark of his loyalty. His training had been long and intense, but in every way it had bettered him. He knew no doubt, no fear, no imprecision, and no disloyalty. It was what he wanted; and what he received.

For him, it was impossible to betray Kremina or Daksha. It had been guaranteed.

“Would you like to listen to the radio, Admiral?” He asked.

“Put on something traditional.”

The Agent turned the knobs on a large box installed on the front panel of the car. From a large speaker on the front of the box came the sounds of drums and communal chanting, backup instruments. Kremina sat back in the cushioned seats, closing her eyes and letting the music take. When a song she recognized came on she would sing with it. Foreigners liked to reduce the sound of Ayvartan music to the smashing of drums: but from the radio a complex sound came, with wind and xylophone instruments, and even string melody.

Most Ayvartan traditional music was played by many people, who both sang and played at once, producing a choral effect. It was the music of a community.

“Mark my words, someday all cars will have a radio.” Kremina said.

“If you say so; it was an expensive addition to the car.” The Agent replied.

Kremina smiled. “But don’t you love it? Having music for a long drive?”

“It did help with the waiting, once I had read all of my newspaper.” He replied.

“Ah, I apologize. I was inconsiderate to you in my rush to meet the Warden.”

“It is fine. Had I undergone another mission I would still have had to wait in front of someone’s house or in front of some other facility. It’s in the fine print for my work – ‘as a KVW driver, you will wait outside many exotic places with your car’.”

Kremina burst out laughing. KVW Agents could surprise her, despite everything.

While the music played the car left the suburb and turned a corner onto one of the streets around the City Center, leading out of the borough. Aside from a few public trolleys and private cars, the vehicle roads were uncrowded and easy to navigate.

Leisurely the driver took them around the Center, and a few blocks up to the next borough, closer to Revolution Square. Despite its importance and significance, this Park was not built in the Center along with the rest of the apparatus of government, but rather in the place where the first battles of the Revolution had been waged.

Solstice was known as the First Great City; but it had actually been built during the Ayvartan Empire. Underground, much of it was that old still. During the Empire a water system had been built to draw from sources to the north and east of the city that still worked quite well. All it had required was a change to modern kinds of pipes.

Above the surface Solstice was undoubtedly one of the most modern cities in the People’s State. Heavily rebuilt since the revolution, it was dominated by concrete buildings with clean faces and tiled, vaulted roofs. Smooth new concrete streets and asphalt roads linked the blocks and boroughs and districts of the city. Trees had been planted in recesses set into the rounded street corners. Parks and theaters and large, communal eateries and marketplaces had been raised where once stood the palaces of the aristocracy.

Much of the capitalist excess had been destroyed, though some of those buildings remained, re-purposed as museums, containing artifacts of the revolution and aristocracy; or as hostels, if they had enough rooms. Solstice was transformed according to science.

Some remnants of an even older past remained as well. As they drove into Gita, the borough adjacent to the Center on the north, they passed by the Our Lord of Mercy Messianic Church, a monolithic building, retained for its historical significance.

All of the intricate carving in the exterior, and the design of the interior, everything had been carved out of one stone. It was a piece of grey, looming history that was left untouched even as Messianic worship declined across the Socialist Dominances.

From the church the car moved onto a connecting road flanked by trees and green pitch from another nearby park that added color and recreational space to the city.

Without the obstruction of buildings Kremina easily saw the massive walls that surrounded the city, almost fifty meters tall, providing a ring of defense that had never been penetrated from without: during the Revolution the KVW took it from within.

Brutally so.

Seeing the walls always briefly brought to mind the planning that she taken part in, so many years ago, when the Revolution began to grow like wildfire across a few days.

Solstice had been the goal of the revolution and the first place to fall.

Then came the deadly task of holding on to it and expanding.

There were several assets that came into play then. Of course, the walls; but also the wide Qural River that hugged that flowed from the north, curled around the east of the city, straddling the walls, and slashed farther east and south into the depths of the desert.

Due to the river, Solstice was an oasis in the middle of the Red Desert, and supported by the farming villages in the fertile north that supplied it with the food it required, the city stood as a fortress against the loyalist southern Dominances that resisted socialism.

It had been bloody and horrible fighting across several years since those deadly first days in Solstice. She had been largely removed from its most abominable battles.

After Solstice was taken, Admiral Qote never again had to fight a battle herself.

Kremina felt a bit of guilt about it still, a twenty-year old guilt.

She had planned many operations that annihilated her own people. Logistics was her strong suit. She had hardly picked up a gun to fight with her comrades.

Sometimes she wondered if there was really a point to what she did, if she served a useful purpose. What did a planner bring to the Revolution? What did a middle aged woman who was good with numbers and organization offer to the people’s struggle now? On what authority could she possibly organize other people to kill each other; what made her more qualified than they, to organize themselves? To decide to kill others?

She shook her head, shaking away those thoughts.

Everyone had doubts, nowadays.

It felt like a difficult wind had been ceaselessly blowing their way, and she did not know anymore whether she had secured a victory all those years ago, whether she had gotten what she wanted, what the people wanted. She was 50 years old. Back then she had not thought that she would live to see her work cracking before her.

Now she had lived enough to see political friction in Ayvarta, and she was driving to see if after nearly two years she could potentially settle some of it. The Revolution had ended in the death of the Empire, but also in a compromise between its remnants and the people who had fought them. While the bloodshed ended, and socialism was ultimately established, it insured that factionalism from within could in the future resume.

She was becoming increasingly aware that she lived in that future now.

Her driver caught her attention, taking her from her reverie.

“We’re here ma’am.” He said.

They drove up a street adjacent to Revolution Square, and the Agent parked the car astride a bench. He waited there, picking up a new state newspaper from a nearby box.

Kremina dismounted and ambled across the green grass in the largely immaculate park, toward a monument in its center. It was a massive statue of a Hydra, the symbol of the revolution. This multi-headed snake represented the operation that turned Revolution into Civil War: across all of Ayvarta, rebel cells ambushed and killed several high-ranking Imperial officers, decapitating the army. It had required supernatural coordination.

Today, the Hydra bit off no heads; rather it loomed over a lanky man with very black skin and cropped hair, and a flat, broad nose, dressed in a blue suit with a red tie.

He waited for her with a folder full of documents under his arm.

When he spotted her, he left behind the shadow of the Hydra and they began to walk around the park. There was little to see: the park was a memorial, a square of trimmed grass surrounding the Hydra statue and its plaque, and it had very few places to sit or rest.

So Kremina and the Councilman, Yuba, simply walked around the periphery. Yuba offered her a cigarette, and she declined. He put it away. They procrastinated for a moment.

Kremina had wanted him to open up.

He had called her, so she had wanted to see his initiative. But he was timid. All of them were, ever since the Special Order had gone a few weeks ago.

Nobody had expected the KVW to take such an action.

It was one of the few actions they could take, anymore.

Now they were all afraid. It reminded her again of the revolution, where whispers of a coming death had made the once boastful and proud aristocrats of the Empire quiet and reserved, and kept them trapped in their homes for fear of retribution. The KVW had no such thing in mind for the Councilman, but he and his ilk seemed to have jumped to the same conclusion. They were always ready to see conspiracy around them.

Ever since the real conspiracy of a few years back, they saw it everywhere.

“Is there anything specific you wanted to discuss, Councilman? I’m a busy woman.”

Yuba pulled his cigarette out again. This time, he lit the stick, and took a drag.

“I was hoping we might be able to begin to reconcile some of our recent differences.” He said. Yuba spoke as though he was reading a note to her. He delivered his lines without pause, but they had no conviction behind them. “Your Warden’s Special Order has the regional councils in the Southern Dominances worried. They tell me they had been trying to complete several important projects; now they are afraid to move forward. They don’t know what your aim is, and I have heard you have already dispensed justice on your own.”

“That we have. And I disagree with the importance of those projects, and the methods by which they were carried out.” She said, speaking back to him in that same dispassionate voice which he used on her. “We have ample evidence of corruption among the southern councils and military commands. Oversight is sorely lacking in the former rebel territories and the self-managed unions will suffer in the long term if these ‘projects’ run unchecked.”

Yuba replied quickly, as though he had studied her reply before she even said it.

“Admiral, our enforcement authority is stretched, especially in the outer Dominances. Adjar is a long way away. We are beginning to move over uncertain territory and we are up against the limits of our authority on certain matters. We didn’t want to infringe upon regional councils that know their territory best. We assumed good faith.”

“That’s understandable.” Kremina said, though with an obvious hint of frustration creeping in. “You fear becoming a tyrant, but now you are just too soft. Your civil governors and your military commanders are bypassing the unions and taking resources for themselves, and making development decisions that are outside their scope. This is deeply troubling to me and to the KVW, as stewards and guarantors of the people’s will.”

Kremina was selling it light.

She went so far as to believe that they were traitors, outright.

She suspected that they were selling materials in some kind of black market.

How far up it went, she did not know; but she knew the governors and military commanders at least in the Adjar Dominance were making some kind of personal profit at the expense of the people, and misusing military personnel to do it. While characters like Gowon shuffled soldiers between odd jobs they had no right to do, their borders were undermanned, and readiness was criminally low. Something was not right here.

But saying all of this would have simply upset the Councilman.

He would have called her a radical and an extremist and started shutting down. So she undersold it. Unlike her lover, the Warden, Kremina knew when not to be too blunt.

Yuba, however, seemed ready to be defensive regardless of what was said.

“These are serious concerns, Kremina that we simply were not prepared for–”

Kremina shook her head at him in disgust and interrupted him as gently as she could.

“You were more than prepared. When we sat down and made concessions, when we traded back and forth between the powers of the state, the powers of regions, the powers of the people, when we stitched together what became Ayvarta; I told you that the faction of Collaborators had to be watched, and had to be understood to be a dangerous element.”

You was a strangely broad term between them. Much of Ayvarta’s policy happened in the legislative chamber, the Civil Council, which then reached agreements with the regional councils of its Dominances, and with the Unions of the working people.

There were essentially three factions in the Ayvartan state government.

After the Demilitarization acts and the split of the Council into two Chambers, the Military and Civil Councils, the Liberals or “in-betweeners” and the Collaborators held the most power in the Civil Council. Because the Military Council couldn’t enact Civil Policy (and lately was blocked even from Military Policy) it was down to the Liberals and Collaborators. There were smaller factions, remnants of the “Zaidi” faction who were labeled “militarists” and shunted to their own place, but they hardly mattered.

Kremina meant specifically the Liberals: more numerous than Collaborator-aligned bureaucrats and lawmakers in the legislative chamber, and they could be swayed to many positions. But it was increasingly difficult. The KVW and their few council allies were called the Hardliners by their peers, especially after Demilitarization was enacted.

This situation arose over twenty years ago.

While it was quickly clear that the Empire was defeated in the first year of the Revolution, war between its old Dominances continued for a year more: 2009 to 2010 saw some of the bloodiest fighting. Low level insurgencies stretched from 2010 to 2015 as the budding government asserted power. Only the defection of the Collaborators and their incorporation into the Civil War ended the war totally and definitively.

And yet, Kremina always got a bad taste in her mouth when she thought of the concessions they made to them. They accepted socialism in the streets in order to save their lives. Food for the people, housing for the people, all good; so long as, behind closed doors, there was a legislative process that could potentially be manipulated, and a bureaucratic apparatus they could jerk around, and the notion of possible “reforms.”

Yuba, who came out of that process, saw things very differently, of course.

“As far as the Councilfolk from Shaila and Adjar have told me, their Unions were overstretched; not everyone wants to work, and especially not everyone wants to work in dangerous jobs like mining and chemical labor. The Councils acted on their initiative.”

“I disagree fundamentally that a lack of workers exists or is an acceptable excuse, and that the use of military labor in their place is any kind of acceptable work-around; and furthermore, that’s not the only problem here with regards to the use of military personnel.”

Yuba nodded. “So you’re also here to protest demilitarization as well.”

Kremina shouted. “Of course! I can understand that you do not want the military creating civil policy. I empathize with you, having been a girl under the Empire. But taking away our ability to influence military spending and military policy is ridiculous!”

“We have not done that! As you’ve shown with your Special Order, you can still—“

Kremina interrupted him. “That’s not enough. We are the Military Council! The People’s Army during the revolution was the KVW. Yet now the Military council seems to have almost no bearing on the military! We control only fragments of it!”

“You control what you wanted to control!”

“Because we had no other choice! You voted to have us divided this way; and the state army upon whom you lavish millions more shells worth of funding hasn’t progressed in quality or readiness in five years; and the KVW can’t even inspect the materiel it misuses or outright loses from warehouses without scandal.”

“The only reason there is scandal is that your inspections completely ambushed us! Kremina, there is a process, and there would be no scandal if you followed process!”

Yuba looked weary. He certainly hated this argument. He saw himself as a friend to the Military Council, and to Kremina and Daksha. However, he always felt like he had to argue in favor of written policy all of the time, and he took it upon himself to defend the law as gospel. Kremina did not hate Yuba, but she found him horribly frustrating.

She sighed deeply and rubbed a hand over her own face. “So you’re telling me that your Councils can collude with the Regional Military to create a ghost workforce whenever they want? And unless we tell them ahead of time, so that they can pack up all their operations and pretend to be innocent, the KVW cannot intercede in these affairs.”

“That is unfair, Kremina. You’re taking a fatalistic view of it.”

“And you’re taking too permissive a view! This is another way the Councils have privilege over the people’s unions and workers. I’m stepping forward to end that privilege.”

“I have seen how you’ve stepped forward, and I cannot agree with it.”

Kremina closed her fist in subtle anger. Of course, that’s what he would balk at.

The Councilman raised his hand a little to interrupt her speaking.

“You agreed with us that after the Akjer incident that corruption in the government and military was present and that it had to be investigated, rooted out and prevented in the future. We didn’t want another Georg Walters who could pretend to be one of us and walk out of our council meetings and right into Nochtish association. So we made proposals.”

“You made proposals, and you forced them on us!” Kremina shouted.

Yuba continued talking over her. “We acted democratically. We carried out plans. You were there! I want to know if you are willing to make that commitment again. We can do right by the people and create order, rather than instill chaos. Do you agree?”

Kremina scoffed. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Perhaps this was all well and good in Solstice and in the north and east, the Dominances like Chunar which had supported the Revolution from the get-go.

But it was different in the Southern Dominances like Adjar and Shaila.

Those governments had initially supported the Empire.

Without the defection of the collaborators they would likely still do so.

Perhaps in their own way they still did even after all of that.

Five years ago, Kremina would have trusted the council. Now? Never again.

“You and the Council went wild and used the fight against corruption to push all manner of atrocious reforms on us. We only agreed because we were outvoted. We had lost the reins of power the moment we cooperated with you in good faith. So you ask, am I willing to undergo that process again? No. I’m not willing to be fooled again.”

Councilman Yuba looked shaken again by her words.

“We did things democratically–” He began to whimper.

“Yes, yes, you outvoted us in the vote to strip our voting power. Very democratic. I’m sure it is no coincidence that the larger, more populous Southern Dominances and their Collaborators got proportional representation weeks before the fateful vote.”

“What’s done is done and sarcasm seems hardly helpful here.” Yuba evaded her eyes.

Kremina scoffed. She pointed forcefully at him, returning to the previous matter.

“You must at least agree to investigate the claims we are making!” She shouted.

“We are! We are investigating. We are investigating in the way that is legal to do.”

She knew exactly when an impasse had been reached, and there was nothing she could do now but to push at him. Kremina had very limited power. The KVW no longer had the ability to draft or even to vote on laws, and their suggestions had been falling on deaf ears or been actively undermined for years now. She only had one resource here.

The Special Order had deployed the KVW’s armed divisions across Solstice to inspect the work of the relatively new State Army and its constituent Battlegroups: with this action, she hoped the Civil Council, the far stronger half of the bicameral structure to which Yuba belonged, would take notice and feel pressured to reopen the issue on Demilitarization.

She saw the pressure building, but legislation had yet to come.

However, she had no powers right now other than to frighten the Councilor, so she stayed the course. She could play with his fear and the fear of the Southern regions.

“I would have loved for the Warden to not have to spy on your councilors and military commanders to sort out corruption and treason,” She said, grinning a little, picturing her own face contorted like that of a venomous snake tasting the air, “but I’m afraid that is not our current material reality. Five years ago we dealt with a rash of degenerates who sold our country and people out to Nocht. Substantively, those traitors and the people with authority in this country slowly cease to seem like separate entities.”

Yuba pulled on his tie a little, like Kremina’s words had started to choke him. “I agreed five years ago. I agreed with you during Akjer; and I have tried my hardest to bridge the wishes of your people with our own. I thought we agreed back then and right now.”

“I’m afraid we don’t. You think that by actively uncovering corruption, the same way we did five years ago, that we are the aggressors now. I don’t know what to think about how your perceptions have changed. While you stand there berating me, our enemies have begun making demands of us, threatening us; I thought we had a common foe here.”

Councilman Yuba readjusted his tie once again, and shook his head in frustration.

She would have loved to know what was happening in his head right then: why the things that made so much sense to her were like air, passing through his ears, around his brain and back out the other end. Perhaps the Liberals were no longer any different from the Collaborators. Perhaps they never were any different. Kremina sighed.

“Then it appears it is intractable.” He said. “I hope we can speak again soon.

Kremina smiled at him, and shook his hand as they readied to part ways.

“I understand. May the ancestors guide you to the correct path, Councilman.”

Kremina watched him disappear into his own private car, and felt like shooting him.

She wished back then, when the Council had proposed reforms, she had acted more strongly. After all, the KVW had killed all the traitors. What more reform could there be?

Trying to minimize bloodshed had hurt them back then; perhaps even further back.

Perhaps the Revolution should have gone on longer and been more brutal.

Even if the killing had dragged on for two years more, perhaps they should have kept fighting until all the opposition was buried underground. Perhaps there was simply no reforming them. Perhaps she had been naive. She had helped end the bloodshed by believing that the people fighting her could be agreed with, could be settled into a fair system for all. Though her people now had homes, and they ate every day, and they lived freely, slowly and surely she thought she could see their life endangered, from within and from without. She wondered if two more years of revolution, and a few million more of the right kinds of corpses, would have made Ayvarta a more united and secure place today.

She wondered if she should have died in the fight, rather than the negotiating table.

25th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

Solstice Dominance – Solstice City Center

7 Days Since Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Everyone was still reeling. On the 18th of the Aster’s Gloom, the world had changed.

There were people among the KVW who foresaw an invasion, but it was an abstraction to them. It was a subtext in the behaviors of their national neighbors that was not ever thought to mean “within days, there will be foreign troops on your soil.”

Now Admiral Kremina Qote was dealing with the immediate aftermath of a foreign invasion. Their borders had been shattered. In Adjar all military forces had fully retreated, opting to preserve their strength for a final apocalyptic duel in their one modern stronghold, the city of Bada Aso; and in Shaila, Battlegroup Lion fought every engagement they could, and ground to dust. Tukino was a foregone conclusion, and Knyskna would be next to fall.

The Nocht Federation, the seed of capitalism, had finally made good on the veiled threats, the saber-rattling it had begun before the ashes even settled on the Revolution.

A bright spot had gone mostly unnoticed at first: Madiha Nakar still held Bada Aso.

Kremina had been surprised to hear the name again. She felt a complex series of emotions toward Captain Nakar: shame, guilt, relief, hope. Nakar had a complicated past with them, moreso than she knew. When she heard of Kimani’s decision to hand Battlegroup Ox to her in the wake of Gowon’s execution she understood it perfectly.

Kremina and Daksha had immediately ordered Nakar be promoted to KVW Major in order to properly command Battlegroup Ox in Gowon’s place.

While the Council had been shocked by the appropriation of their forces by the KVW, they did not make it an issue with the Warden or the Admiral. Had they done bickered openly in a time of crisis it would have been farcical and draining on morale.

There were still whispers of discontent, but they were just that.

Now everyone was faced with the chaotic reality.

The Civil Council debated their strategies, including potential diplomacy with the hated enemy; Battlegroup Ox and Lion were largely left to conduct the war as their independent commands saw fit; the KVW quickly took stock of their options, of their future and role in this conflict, and their independent divisions joined in the fight where they could.

Meanwhile Solstice was in the midst of a great confusion, as the relationships between its frayed governments hadn’t the time to heal before the fighting began.

Everywhere the air carried a crippling doubt.

Would the Councils divided fall to Nocht?

In the morning of the 25th Admiral Qote woke uneasily with her face over a stack of folders atop her desk in the Commissariat of Naval Affairs in the People’s Peak.

Despite being Admiral of the Navy, as a member of the KVW and Military Council a lot of political information ran through her office in general, so she was working several jobs in it. She was not sharing a bed with Daksha through this crisis, although she desperately wanted to. She wanted those strong arms around her, wanted, selfishly, a night spent in desperate pleasure rather than hours of fitful sleep over a desk.

From the moment she woke she was on the phone.

She remembered that an evacuation report was due, and she rang up Transportation.

At the other end of the line, the man at the transportation department hurried to give her numbers. She was cautiously optimistic. In Shaila 60% of the population had been evacuated; in Adjar, 40%, but it was to be expected since Nakar never fought delaying actions in Adjar before Bada Aso. So far so good; it wasn’t a total disaster.

Broken down, the numbers were a little more hopeful. 70% of heavy industry, including 90% of military-related industry, in Shaila had been evacuated thanks to the delaying actions of Battlegroup Lion. With Ox in full flight, only 50% of industry escaped in Adjar, but that which could not be taken had been successfully destroyed.

In the end 80% of industry, one way or another, had avoided falling into Nocht’s hands. 70% of agricultural product had been withdrawn from Shaila, and 50% in Adjar. The Adjar numbers were a little deceptive, however, because Madiha Nakar had ordered that food in the Bada Aso region be stockpiled to support the fighting, and that amount was not “lost” yet. Civilian numbers, however, were less rosy. Focus had fallen on crucial resources, and only 40% of ordinary civilians in general had escaped the fighting in time.

Kremina pressed the tips of her fingers against her face, rubbing her.

She was pale, pale even for her, sickly. Her head was pounding. From her desk she withdrew a pill bottle, and swallowed dry a small white stimulant drug.

She waited until its effects kicked in.

Phones rang nonstop across the building and the chattering over them was like a song dedicated to their dire situation. People ran through the halls, there were never not lines of bodies moving across her door, and the stomping of their feet was ceaseless.

Never since the elections five years ago had Kremina witnessed so much activity in the building. Even the initiated KVW agents, constituting the overwhelming majority of her staff, acted with a frenetic, anxious pace that betrayed a hint of fear, one that would have never shown on their impassive faces. From the orderlies to the officers everyone worked in a mute panic, as though by their effort they could sway the battles being waged.

Over the next few minutes Kremina’s head cleared, and she felt more alert.

A doctor assigned her the prescription days ago when she broke down from shock.

Across the room she heard a tapping sound and raised her eyes from the desk.

At the door was an older woman, smiling gently at Kremina.

Long-haired and dark-skinned, tall and broad-shouldered, slight hints of crow’s feet and those amber eyes that seemed to glow with life. A radiant character, a goddess; this was the Daksha Kansal that Kremina knew. She closed the door to the office behind her, and leaned over the desk, brushing her lips on Kremina’s own, holding her chin, caressing her neck as they kissed. It was too brief, the sensation gone too soon.

“How are you? You haven’t had any more shocks have you?”

Daksha was worried for her. They held hands over the desk, fond of each other’s touch.

“No, I am fine. Thank you. How are things on your end?” Kremina said.

“Coffee is the only thing flowing through my veins at this point.”

They locked eyes, knowing that they each shared the same confused mix of emotions: joy and passion, trepidation and despair, anger and helplessness, all mixed into one.

The chaos that had stricken their land seemed only to amplify the longing they had to be together and open. When Solstice was attacked; if Solstice was attacked, could they die together, holding hands? Or far apart, never knowing what became of the other?

These personal worries joined the professional and patriotic crisis burdening their minds, and to silently hold hands and quietly empathize was all they could do to endure.

Kremina and Daksha were the two highest-ranking, most powerful people in the armed forces, the Warden of the KVW and the Admiral of the Navy, connected enough to speak for the other organizationally. Terribly in love; but with an equally terrible fear of making that as public as their titles. Could they make their union known in these conditions?

Daksha was the first to let go; she was always the more focused, blunt one of the two.

“I’ve called for a meeting with the Council.” She said. “I’m going to confront them.”

“I see.” Kremina said. “I figured you would do so eventually.”

“I need you to be there with me. Someone has to be there to look sane.”

Kremina grinned a little. “Of course.”

“Glad to have you with me.” Daksha said, caressing Kremina’s cheek.

Several hours later, much of the Council was arranged in a meeting room on the third floor of the People’s Peak, a circular room with a sunburst painted on the roof. It was thought to keep people focused, but that was a bit of theoretical psychology Kremina did not trust. She had seen more than her fair share of dozing in this room. It was a fateful place for all of them. Five years ago, she had failed miserably to stop part of the sequence of events that led to their situation. As she stood in this room, surrounded by these people, with Yuba at their head, it felt too much like the unforeseen Demilitarization vote that Kremina had lost. She carried that guilt with her whenever she stepped inside.

And yet, Daksha still relied on her. They stood proudly, side by side under the doorway.

“The Council is honored to host the Warden of the KVW and Admiral of the Navy.”

A gavel sounded, stricken against the table by the Republican Guard, special police that were assigned to protect Council meetings and other political events.

Odd as it seemed, the calling was procedure, even if Daksha had instigated the meeting. Whenever it met, it was the Council that called to order and called for guests to appear before it, and never acknowledged to be the other way around. Kremina pulled a chair away from the table and sat, while Daksha remained standing nearby.

She never wanted to sit with the Council, and they played along.

“The Council acknowledges Daksha Kansal. Please make your statements.”

“Enough with the formalities.” Daksha said brusquely. “Are you really planning to open diplomacy with Nocht? After they invaded us in an undeclared conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives, and climbing by the moment?”

The Council was silent. Its members seemed to struggle to offer a reply.

“All options are open to us to end the bloodshed.” Yuba bravely said.

“The KVW categorically refuses diplomacy with Nocht! I will talk with Nocht once I have ground their bodies to powder and summoned their wailing spirits, and I will ask them if they have gone to Hell, for surely it is where they belong! That is my conviction!”

As one the Council members shook their heads and grasped their faces.

“If this is going to be the tone of this meeting we will have to adjourn.”

Just off Yuba’s side at the head of the table was a man much older than anyone around, ten years even Kremina’s senior. Arthur Mansa, a native Ayvartan and a speaker for the Collaborator faction, a big, thick, powerful-looking man with a heavily weathered face, a thick gray beard and a last ring of frizzy hair around his otherwise bald head.

He had lived to serve the Empire, to serve capitalist industry, and finally, to extend his life, he had even committed to serve socialism. Yet he had never been at gunpoint. His faction in Adjar had been one of the few militarily successful parts of the anti-communist opposition. Yet, they were the first to come willingly, to lay down arms.

After the flames of war turned to smoke, he was one of the men at the negotiating table with the least demands on the communists. Always the most pragmatic, the most reasonable. He conceded much and requested little or nothing in return. He was an old patriarch, somehow still alive in a new society. Kremina was wary of him.

“You can run away all you like, that won’t help the situation.” Daksha replied to him.

“I have never run away. I have always acted under the law of the land.” Mansa calmly replied. “I have always respected the rulers of the land. That is the utmost bravery. You have been carrying out extrajudicial justice, killing those inconvenient to you, so that you do not have to face the criticism of your peers. I will repeat for our comrades: she has sanctioned extrajudicial killing in our land. She performs this barbarity without fear.”

Warden Kansal was visibly irate, pushing her fist against her chest and screaming. “Extrajudicial? What is extrajudicial is your tolerance of cronyism and exploitation! You who allow your councils to go above the labor unions, using our soldiers to appropriate material and extract wealth in secret! These people went above my command and slashed training times, cut resources, illegally transported viable weaponry to be “serviced” Gods know where, disappeared materiel, likely to be sold in Mamlakha or Cissea or Bakor or the Higwe; they have betrayed our fighting men and women! Death is the most merciful punishment they could have gotten! They should have faced a freezing Svechthan gulag!”

She swiped her arm in front of her and pointed her finger across the table.

“And you, you come here in this time of war, to defend them? To defend Nocht?”

“I’m not defending Nocht. You’re losing control again Warden.” Mansa replied. “Be reasonable to us. You have demonized us from the first, but we have gone to great lengths to try to reconcile. These old feuds have no bearing on our current problems.”

Daksha gritted her teeth as though she were biting Mansa’s flesh between them.

“This all happened under your pathetic watch! Isn’t it convenient – the ‘Civil’ council controlled by collaborators who supposedly renounced capitalism and made a show of their conversion to socialism to survive the revolution, and here you are twenty years later. What do I find you ignoring? What do I find, growing like mold under the edifice this revolution built for the people? And I’m the radical, the criminal? I’m the one shunted to a seemingly powerless ‘Military Council’ whose actions are deemed extremist? To hell with all of you!”

Admiral Qote crossed one arm over her breast and raised a hand over her face, unable to keep her eyes on the scene. Several council members seemed to turn to her to control the Warden, but she had completely abdicated the discussion.

“I have always known your true character! But it has never been more open than now.”

Mansa sighed. “Is ad hominem what you convened us for, Warden? This is childish.”

Daksha laughed, an angry, bitter, hateful laugh.

“I’m through with all of you. Summon me again when you are ready to fight Nocht.”

In the next instant Warden Kansal snapped her fingers in the air.

It was a much louder sound than it should have been, as though echoing across the city.

At once, the Republican Guards police saluted her, and left their position behind the head of the table. They walked around the edges of the room and departed, their expressionless faces betraying no hint of emotion, no hesitation.

Council members stood up, as though expecting an attack, but they noticed that in the adjacent halls, the police and guards were all leaving the building, making no threatening move. Confusion reigned over the meeting for several minutes.

Warden Kansal and Admiral Qote said nothing.

Eyes darted between the two women and the halls as the trickle of police and guards seemed to leave the premises entirely, headed spirits know where, all marching in step. Out the window, councilmen and women could see police and guards leaving all of the nearby buildings in the City Center, joining an eerie parade in the middle of the street.

“What have you done, Warden? Is this a coup?” Yuba cried.

Kansal laughed and clapped her hands. “Is that what you fear so much, Councilman? Is that why you turn your backs on our people, and give up to Nocht? No, you pathetic coward. I am recalling all of the KVW. No longer will I defend you or be complicit in your actions. This includes Police, Republican Guard, the Revolutionary Guards, the Navy, and 10 divisions of independent KVW troops. We will fight Nocht as much as we can without you. I will not seek to overthrow you. We have agreements and laws – a couple regrettable ones, to be sure, but I will not violate them. Our people need stability. They need to know that the structures that have cared for them all these years remain intact. I will uphold that.”

She turned around and walked out of the door.

But before leaving, she looked back into the room at the stunned council.

“Like I said, when you want to fight Nocht, you know where I am,” she said and then she joined the great march of the KVW agents, as they took to the streets, having been given an inviolable command to vacate their positions and return to where their loyalty truly lay. The Council stood in silence, watching from the windows as the parade vacated the City Center. Kremina pushed up her glasses and stayed in her seat.

This had come as a shock to her as well.

She had not foreseen that Daksha would use the contingency.

It was no wonder that she had aggressively lobbied for the conditioning of the Police and the Republican Guard five years ago. It not only protected the state from traitors: it gave her a prop for this sort of theatrics. Few people knew, but the KVW agents’ training instilled loyalty to the KVW first and foremost; and not just to the state.

On that table, however, there was one man who had gone unmoved. Mansa.

He was still staring at where Daksha stood, and where Kremina sat.

“Admiral, you know your last hope is Bada Aso, correct? That is why you sent her.” He said. “She is the last hope of legitimacy that you possess. We are all watching her. And we do not intend to let you use her again as you have before. I intend to speak with her when she returns, if she returns. You will have her by your side no longer.”

Kremina did not reply. She grinned lightly, adjusted her glasses, and acted cryptic. When the meeting was adjourned, she stood up from her chair and left, wondering what made Mansa so sure that Madiha Nakar would side with him.

Perhaps it was his old stubborn foolishness.

Or perhaps it was his true colors.

NEXT CHAPTER in Generalplan Suden — Stoking Hell’s Fire

The World Ablaze – Generalplan Suden

 

This chapter contains some strong language and mildly disturbing religious imagery.

 

8th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Nocht Federation Republic of Tauta – Thurin City

10 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

It had been the same window, for months now. But across the glass Bercik saw an entirely different world. Geography, climate, nothing had changed but that the mindset in which it existed, the permanence that buttressed it, was fading.

The Aster’s Gloom swept across Nocht with cold, heavy rain in the south and storms of ice in the north. For all of its sixty days the inhabitants could expect harsh weather and overflowing drainage. Thurin, located on the lower coast, received a terrifying downpour to mark the passing of the seasons. Under relentless wind and rain people crowded the street still, a rainbow of umbrellas and capes, headed to collect wages and keep the machinery of urban life moving. Around the edges of their streets the ditches filled into miniature rivers. Awnings drained a steady trickle over the walking commuters. Those few private cars that cruised the streets did so with their hoods up over the passengers, blowing little clouds of smoke that dispersed quickly with the force of the rain. Everyone had their heads down and they walked briskly and in step, undaunted by the storm.

For those inside a building, it seemed a daunting world beyond the glass.

Thurin was a large but flat city, thick with people but bereft of monuments. It was low lying, unremarkable to the untrained eye, lacking the glass facades and the distinctive architecture that made Citadel Nocht the jewel of the Northern world. Thurin had power in Tauta, but it was far from a work of art, with its buildings and streets composed of muted gray concrete, its architecture boxy, perfunctory, artificial. Overhead the sky was dark with a mix of storm clouds and smog, which would linger like a fog whenever the factories overworked.

Bercik found himself deeply unsettled as he peered out over his city. Before crossing the threshold into adulthood he thought his city was vibrant and alive. Gradually those warm feelings left him. He did not know what to think now.

From the window on his apartment he had a view of a street, filled with people, their heads down, soaking wet. What did they think of the city? What did they know? Where did they intend to be at the end of the Gloom? For Bercik, he thought he had his life figured out, but then the Dahlia’s Fall gave way. Sixty days ago he had a future and now he envisioned something very different, something macabre. All of those people, could they see as he did? They were not equipped to do so. And as he watched them, he felt all the more desperate.

“Scheldt! Scheldt! Wake up!”

Accompanying the soft, high voice was a rhythmic thumping on the side wall.

“It’s fine Kirsten! I’m awake.” Bercik replied.

“Oh! That’s great. Have a wonderful day! Take care!”

Bercik chuckled. He had asked Kirsten to be his alarm clock, in case he wasn’t up. That boy was always awake. He delivered newspapers, so he was up at ungodly hours, and didn’t seem to ever sleep, playing his violin and singing all the time.

Bercik left the side of his window, and crawled along his bed. He sat on the edge of it, and stretched his legs. Bercik could almost touch the walls with the tips of his feet. It made him think that he was renting a cage, a spot in a pet shop alongside excitable little dogs like Kirsten. Barely enough room for his legs, intermittent electricity, and a bed that clung from the side of the wall with chains. Amenities included only a sink with running water, a mirror, a window, a light bulb, and a chest for his few earthly possessions. He was already wearing his one good suit. It had a more legitimate claim to being his skin now than the pinkish-pearl sheet over his flesh. Despite covering a dozen stories a month, he could still only swing 50 copper marks for a box that was scarcely three meters around him. Such a condition could only continue, in the state he was in.

But he had a meeting to attend. Money could wait. He worked toward something greater now. Bercik stood in front of his mirror. He adjusted his tie, patted down the wrinkles on his suit as best as he could. Then he squatted down to the floor. Carefully he crawled under his sink and pulled a loose board off the wall, and from a hollow space behind the pipe he gently extracted a large folded envelope, thick with documents. He quickly hid the envelope in his satchel, along with several papers held together by a gray paper clip in a corner.

His heart pounded relentlessly as he donned a black hat and walked out the door with the satchel prominently in his arms. Though he expected it to be snatched from him, nobody showed interest. Nobody knew its value, or his own.

Most people kept out of Bercik Scheldt’s way these days. Nobody hailed him on the halls, or chatted with him down the stairs anymore. Front desk barely looked at him. He was like a ghost walking. People who used to find him cheerful and boyishly handsome no longer did under an unkempt beard, a thick head of hair and bloodshot eyes. They did not leave him alone because he looked tough — he had never looked tough. They left him alone now because they thought he was diseased, and perhaps in a way he was. He snuck his satchel into his coat to offer it better protection from the rain, and crossed the threshold out into the world. Walking under the rain with his head down and his hat soaking up the water, without even an umbrella to his name, Bercik felt that he couldn’t even see people’s faces anymore when he looked at them.

It was like living in another world, like he was still seeing them through a glass.

He walked under the rain, across the corner from the tenement, dripping and cold, and then he slipped into a phone booth. Water pooled under his feet as he slipped a few copper mark coins into the machine and rotated the dial.

Bercik waited only for the phone to ring a few times, and then killed the call.

He let the handset hang by its cord for a while, and then he picked it up by the neck.

A new call, to a new number, all part of the secret procedure he had been told.

This time, someone picked up, clearly effecting a low, raspy voice as they spoke.

“You already got all I’m going to give you, my friend.”

“I know. But listen.” Bercik replied. He lowered his voice and bent closer to the phone, trying to insure nobody around could read his lips, or something similar. “I don’t think The National is gonna swing any more stories. I’m going to try; I want to try to get them to pick one. It’ll be drastic. We can’t do this little dripping and pouring shit anymore. We gotta come out.”

The voice replied, quickly and harshly. “I’m not coming out anywhere.”

“No, not you, I mean me. I’m gonna write about everything.”

“Everything? It’s too much for one story. I’m telling you, people will believe a drip feed of facts that can broil in their heads for a week. All at once without all the facts bare beforehand, it will sound like a conspiracy, my friend.”

“I’ve gotta take that chance. My editor, I think he’s gonna give up on us.”

“On you, you mean. I wouldn’t want to have to do anything drastic to protect myself.”

“You wont,” Bercik said desperately, “You won’t. You know what I meant.”

“I do; and yet, the phrasing is dangerous. You are becoming a little too close, my friend. This will be our final call. Like I said, I’ve given you everything I could have possibly given. If The National can’t stop the war, then it’s war.”

The Voice at the other end hung up. Bercik looked at the phone helplessly.

He had poured all of his life into a series of shocking headlines that had The National paper in the spotlight. When he was not out in places he shouldn’t be at, talking to people who didn’t exist after the fact, he was in his cramped bedroom, writing his stories squatted on the floor with the paper laid on the flat lid of his clothes chest. He was on the pay phone around the corner, dropping coins into machines to reach people who were torn between their opportunism and the call to stop a catastrophe. Out of his own money he had paid for a flight to reach a meeting where he paid more to crooked suits for government papers. Without wings he would not have made it in the time-frame they set up.

The Voice sure had given him a raw fuckin’ deal, he thought grimly.

Bercik kept walking, under the rain, further uptown. Overhead he saw clotheslines, emptied out when the rain started. There were hundreds of them between the buildings on either side of the street. Each of those clotheslines was a family of people, people who did not know. People with children, for crying out loud. Bercik moved faster, trying to outrun his mind. Out the tunnel of clotheslines he crossed a plaza. Statues of Nocht ideologues watched sternly over him, their plaques embossed with their names in small print, and their contributions to the world in large gold letters. The founding man, General Gunther Von Nocht, his plaque read “LIBERTY.” Anselm Schmidt, father of capitalism, his plaque read only “INDUSTRY.” There was a statue of the Messiah, white as chalk, bald — and suddenly, Bercik noticed, the statue was also bleeding from places unmentionable. And his plaque stood out the most as well. Situated at the center of the plaza, the statue stood like an opponent looking down on one’s path, flanked by a great, powerful and unharmed founding man in every compass direction. Yet, his plaque read, “SACRIFICE.”

He had never taken much notice of the wounds on the Messiah’s statue. The statue was all white, so the ruptures and the caked blood, all as white as his skin and face, it all just seemed part of the attire. Now that he looked at it again, as though for the first time, Bercik couldn’t help but think that it was pleading him, and not for veneration. Under the rain, it seemed in tears, begging him.

Bercik ran past and put the plaza behind him as quickly as he could.

The world stormed unabated over him as he crossed the streets and made his way far uptown, almost an hour’s worth of walking under the pitiless rain. Where a crowd formed, he would find some respite as people lifted their umbrellas over him to grant a momentary succor, but soon his suffering would begin anew. When he reached the diner, Bercik was so soaked that the waitress held him up at the door and patted him down all over with a towel. She admonished him, shouting about pneumonia. A pool of water formed on the rug in front of the door. He thanked the young lady and apologized for the inconvenience. It was a small diner, with a line of tables across the length of the front windows. There were polka-dot cloths and red leather seats on thick wooden frames. Had he not been sopping wet Bercik would’ve called it cozy.

Also, had his editor not sat, staring daggers at him, at the back of the place.

That hampered the atmosphere quite a bit as well.

He joined his boss, Hans, at his table, laying his satchel down beside him. Bercik affected a tough confidence, the kind that man’s men sort of editors appreciated from the robust writers of their time. He made his face stony, his movements rigid, like a predator readying to spring. Across from each other, they stared intensely as though they would fistfight at the earliest convenience. It was infuriating, like a game played by two little boys pretending to be adults. Except Hans was not a little boy; at fifty-four he was over twice Bercik’s age. His wrinkled face contorted into a grin around a thick cigar, glowing red at the end of his lips. He reached out and pulled Bercik’s hand over the table, shaking it roughly like he wanted to rip the arm out. He patted him on the shoulder, laughed heartily and raised a glass full of some indistinct liquor and drank.

“I got this for both of us. You can’t just sit here without anything.”

After downing his glass, Hans poured a tall drink for Bercik.

“How’s my favorite thug eh? Ready yet to go back to covering boxing?”

Hans raised his fists, smiling, and threw a few phantom punches.

Bercik wanted to sigh. This attitude, this feigned ignorance, was pathetic.

“I’ve got a tougher man to put down.” Bercik replied. It was good language for working with Hans. A tough-guy posture, where everything was a fight, where everything drew blood. “I’ve gotta give the man in Nocht Citadel a black eye.”

Hans grew silent for a moment. He grew serious. “Yes, that’s certainly been happening. That man’s let you punch his face a few times now, and it seems they’ve recently figured out The National was punching. And that it hurt.”

“Something happen?” Bercik asked.

“You haven’t been around the office lately, but others have.” Hans said.

“Something happen?” Bercik asked again, nearly growling.

“We told them to fuck off.” Hans said. He took a long draw of his cigar.

“Good. That’s my man, Iron-Jaw Hans.”

Hans looked out the window. “I’ve begun to notice, Scheldt; when you throw a punch at something, I’m the one who sits and gets hit back. You should drop around the office sometime and take a few of those yourself, chum.”

Bercik shrugged. “I’ve been working Hans, you know I’ve been working.”

“Ok.” Hans said tersely. He put his cigar and continued. “On what now? Find out that President Lehner has been fucking Queen Vittoria or something? That would be a fresh turn from some of this other shit you’ve been digging up.”

Tiring of the bullshit, Bercik cracked open his satchel and pushed the envelope inside across to Hans. His tough-guy editor was less than enthused to receive another mysterious-looking pack bursting with stamped government documents. This time it was a variety of shipping and storage papers, tracing the life of a series of M4 Sentinel tanks, top of the line, along with Heinrich no. 27 Archer monoplanes, from their inception in arms factories in Tauta and Oster, and their journey to Mamlakha and Cissea, Nocht’s relatively new client states. Each document covered 20 or 30 tanks and planes, but the orders piled up. Over a thousand vehicles had been delivered to each country in the past five months.

“This just isn’t compelling to me, Bercik. Explain your angle here. We’re giving our new allies the hardware they need to defend themselves. Seems altruistic to me. I don’t know what to tell you, other than I wish this was a sex story.”

“Do you think Cissea can afford this Hans? Look at that. A hundred tanks a week for the past two months? They could buy fifty tanks from us right now, tops. Not five hundred of the god damn things! And the planes, good lord, almost four hundred planes down to Cissea, and all of them top of the line? You don’t even see these in air shows, this stuff’s brand new. Doesn’t this look fishy?

“What do people care if we’re giving Cissea planes now? Come on, ah.” Hans laughed and waved his hands as though trying to swipe the words out of the air. He acted with a self-effacing cheer, as though his charm and wit alone could get Bercik to shut up and swing the day around for him. He knew better than that, Bercik knew that he did, but they had to go through the routine.

“You know what this looks to me and to my sources? Military mobilization.”

Hans raised his hands defensively. “You’re reaching now.”

Bercik pulled open his satchel and dropped stapled set of papers onto the table.

It was a draft.

“I’m not reaching, I’m writing.” Bercik started to talk fast. His heart was pounding. He set his shoulders, tried to look determined and to talk with conviction. He had to get this. “I’m writing about how the Libertaires promised us no more wars, and now all the technocrats and whiz kids are gleefully about to plunge the world into hell. It’s all goin’ to fucking Ayvarta, Hans. Why the hell else would Cissea, and Mamlakha for fuck’s sakes, why would we send them tanks and planes, to MAMLAKHA, why would we send a ‘peace force’ of over 300,000 men? It’s war, these guys are setting up for war, and the people deserve to know it right now. We can put a stop to this, they ran on peace–”

“Peace force? You know why the peace force is going, you covered it! They’re going to stop the terrorists in Mamlakha. Everyone knows this now Bercik you can’t just change the facts. This is getting crazy now, too crazy for you.”

“Is it crazy? What do we care about Mamlakhan terrorists? Ayvarta’s across those borders, and we care about that. Deploying this ‘peace force’ after sending Mamlakha a thousand vehicles? After all the speeches of the menace of communism in Cissea? This is not about Mamlakha or Cissea. All along those have just been stepping stones, Hans. Our government is after Ayvarta, and it’ll be–”

“Stop, Bercik,” Hans interrupted him suddenly, raising his voice. But he then paused, and he let out air for a moment, a long exasperated and anxious sigh while he pulled he ran his hands over his head, and sat far back in his seat as though he thought he might get socked from across the table. He was reaching for words that might sound like a reasonable excuse. Bercik had seen that face far too many times now. He had seen it in tabloid pieces about celebrity affairs and he had seen it in tough pieces about mayoral scandals and mob violence. It was hard to believe he was seeing it again, and in a story of this magnitude. “These guys are heavyweights Scheldt, you have to understand this. And they’re getting real tired of your shit. Citadel Nocht is set to bury us, they’ll make sure we can’t cover a fuckin’ baseball game ever again, ok? And they’re being gracious right now. They’re willing to drop everything, give us access to some primary, reliable source documents, and stop badgering us for your mystery benefactors: if we’ll give them a place to air their side of the story, and drop the subject. I’m willing to take this and you should be too.”

“God damn it Hans. The past few stories we did don’t even climb a meter up the iceberg. You know this is bullshit, you know the only thing we’ll get is a whole lot of papers filled with black bars. I’ve got real stories from real mouths and real eyes who’ve seen the real shit here. Real shit. You’ve got constitutional rights for fuck’s sakes, you need to stand up for yourself!”

“I know it is bullshit Bercik, but we have no choice.” Hans said. He was almost to the point of shouting. Bercik could not believe this. Here was Iron-Jaw Hans, who got deep in the shit with the police in the labor riots twenty years ago, ready to lie down for the boys in blue? What world had Bercik Scheldt been transported to? Hans sighed and kept talking. “If we keep going against these guys we’ll be run out of town. Those last stories you did about all the corporations and the cronyism and the oil shit in Mamlakha, that’s got them really pissed right now. Everything they would do to us is legal. We can’t force them to let us operate in peace, they make the laws here. For the love of the Messiah they could even say we’re commies and send the boys in blue to give us a good beating every Sixthday just to check if we’re not sending communiques down to the Commissars in Svechtha or something. You need to look at it from my perspective ok? I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids to think of here.”

Bercik rolled his eyes and put his fist on the table. He was still playing the tough guy, and he couldn’t believe his ears, he couldn’t believe that Hans was not playing the tough guy anymore alongside him. “Fuck you and your family.”

“Don’t do this to me now, ok?” Hans said. For once he sounded pleading. “Right now, I’m the only person in this damn city looking out for you. In twenty years when you retire with kids and a wife and a house, you’ll thank me.”

“Eat shit.” Bercik shouted. He lowered his voice and leaned forward with a dangerous look in his eye. “I don’t need fucking kids. I need you to publish this story ASAP or the world’s going to hell, Hans. The two biggest military forces in the world will be going at it soon. Millions of people will die. Not just their people, our people. There’ll be conscription, rationing. You lived through the unification war you stupid piece of shit, I didn’t, and yet here I am, being the only one in the room that fucking remembers. We can stop that. We have to.”

Hans stared right into Bercik eyes. He had a haunted look of his own.

“Yeah, I lived through it, ok. It’s not like that can happen again.”

Bercik grunted with exhaustion. “It is happening! And it will be worse this time. We’ve got bomber planes now, we’ve got tanks, we’ve got bombs that weigh 400 kilograms, and they’ve got all that too. There’ll be air raids, there’ll be firebombs sweeping the fields. Kids as young as seventeen can sign up right now to go to that. How can you sit back and not do anything, when you can stop this?”

“It’s just a story, Bercik. It wouldn’t have done anything but screw us over.”

Bercik was quick to answer, and sharp, as though it was a personal insult to him.

“No, you’re wrong. The people have a right to know. They can demand this stop.”

“We can’t stop this.” Hans said. He smiled a little, and looked down at the table. “I’ve got a living to protect here. If I survived the unification war as a kid, then my kids will survive it too. But I can’t survive having enemies in Citadel Nocht.”

Bercik couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It just did not register to him that someone would hear what he said, and then would elect to sit back and do nothing about it. He thought that he had tried his best, in his mind he kept replaying the words, and to him, they perfectly depicted the death and the madness he saw on the horizon. In his mind he had painted at this table a picture fully realizing the flames, the smell of rot, the thick gunpowder-choked air. It was in his draft. But Hans pushed the draft back across the table. This act seemed somehow definitive, a confirmation that Bercik’s words hadn’t reached anyone, that maybe he hadn’t even said anything that he needed to. He had fucked up; Bercik felt a pit form in his stomach, and a sudden wave of nausea. His legs shook under the table and his hands above.

“I’ll take it to another paper. One that’ll take the risk.” Bercik threatened.

“You know there isn’t any. None of them want this responsibility.” Hans said.

There was silence between them for a moment before Hans simply stood up from the table and left the diner entirely. Bercik remained, sitting in his chair, shaking and staring at the empty seat, wondering if it was all some awful dream. Would he awaken tomorrow and repeat this day and do it right? In his mind he had not yet crossed that one-way door between a world in which he saw a future that was possible, a future where life and color returned to his picture of his life past the month; and one in which the chaos of war was inevitable, where monochrome became red with blood and fire, all far beyond any of his means to stop. Trapped in his own consciousness, Bercik sat for close to an hour alone in that diner, still wondering what he could say, what he could write, that would get this story on the front of The National and save Nocht.

11th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Kingdom of Lubon, Territory of Pallas — Royal Airstrip

7 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Flight would never take off in a big way, or so people had once said. No average person could even conceive of a reason to venture from their country and cross the seas. To visit a neighboring region a train was more cost-effective; for most people even leaving their village was a waste of time. At best, people conceived of airplanes as military and diplomatic tools.

However, the Queen had always been enamored with technology, and thus she did not heed these detractors. During the twenty years ago she had laid down Lubon’s first airstrip, within sight of the Royal Villa at Pallas. Over time the importance of the Royal Airstrip, as well as its size and its contingent of planes, had increased. It was now fully stocked with all manner of aircraft: there were small biplanes, short monoplanes with twin engines and room for a few, and a couple of large passenger craft.

As usual the royal delegation would be flown to the territory of Nocht across the North Sea by the official Pellicano royal plane that was festooned with Queen Vittoria’s sigils and the oak tree flag of the Kingdom. This was a very large craft considering the few people that were to board it. It had 4 propeller engines, and a 3o meter span, and it derived its namesake from its broad nose.

Princess Salvatrice felt small next to the mammoth craft. She had never flown before.

She did not board with her mother the Queen: she had not, in fact, even arrived at the airstrip with her mother. She had been hastily taken from her studies at the messianic academy and taken via private car to the airstrip, unceremoniously and without any of her possessions, and no guarantee that any of her servants would make it onto the plane. Now she approached the craft and boarded from a hatch opposite that which her mother would be using. She could see her mother’s car parked on the other side of the strip.

She wondered dimly if Clarissa would be joining them on the plane as well.

Two black-clad men led her up the ramp and into the aircraft. They were gentle and deferring, but the princess could not help but feel that she was being forced, pressured, driven to move against her will. Those men were not insuring her safety, but her compliance. Inside the aircraft she met face to face with her mother for the first time in what seemed like years.

Tall and majestic, the Queen approached from the other end of the plane like an opponent, with a gliding stride, guarded by two blue-clad, rifle-armed cavaliere, Lubon’s revered Knights. Salva bowed her head to her mother, whose appearance seemed to shift the gravity in the room. She had a powerful and beautiful countenance, framed with bountiful and perfectly straight golden hair, accented by intense green eyes and the long, sharp ears characteristic of pureblooded Lubonin. Every second string of fabric in her ornate dress seemed woven out of silver, and she glittered from the curve of her shoulders to the hem of her dragging skirt.

“Raise your head, Salvatrice.” The Queen gently commanded.

Her voice sent a shill down the princess’ spine. She curtsied, and stood as tall as she could.

“Reverita Madre. Dio vi benedica.” She said, a trembling in her voice.

“Dio vi benedica, figlia.” Queen Vittoria replied.

The Queen raised her hand and the guards and knights made toward the front of the plane.

They were greeted by servants, none of which were Savaltrice’s, and some of the air crew. Side by side the royals walked down the aisle, along the plush seats in the interior of the plane, to a table laid down for special guests, bolted to the floor near the very back of the craft. There were two chairs for them, held down with adjustable clamps that allowed the air crew to unfasten them, move the seats to new positions and then clamp them again to insure they would not move in flight.

Princess Salvatrice sat, across from her mother. She felt the backrest of the chair forcing her spine straight, it was so rigid, hard and tall. More servants appeared from another room with tea and pastries. Princess Salvatrice did not fancy eating. She had been made to change into a dress before travelling out. It was a functional and form fitting gown compared to her mother’s, with tight sleeves and a high neck and a restrained sort of skirt, like the bulb of a tulip. But it was still mostly white, and could so easily stain.

“It is an honor to be with you this day, mother.” Salva said.

“Merely an honor?” Queen Vittoria replied, grinning a bit.

Salva stared down at the cups, feeling her attempt to be filial had been wholly misguided. She remained silent, stewing in a brief shame, until she saw her mother’s hand glide closer to her face, and those long, elegant, bejeweled fingers gently lifted her chin, as easily as raising a feather from the ground. Her mother’s stark green eyes narrowed as they took stock of Salva’s condition.

“My poor child. Doctors said exercise and sun and southern air would improve your constitution. But oh, my dear, all it has seemed to do is darken your complexion. You will need to build strength: haste and travel are in your future.”

Vittoria’s fingers brushed aside the long locks of reddish-blonde hair covering the sides of Salva’s head, cut close to the shoulder. She pulled her daughter’s hair back enough to see her ears, shorter and blunter than those of pure Lubonin like the Queen and the Knights. Her hands then traveled down Salvatrice’s narrow shoulders, across her skinny arms. Salvatrice’s had the terrible feeling that those piercing green eyes, the only thing in common between them, were harshly judging her. She felt like flinching away from her mother and waited for the sting of some cruel word or another, but instead, the Queen’s expression was unnaturally tender and her words were uncharacteristically gentle.

“You remind me of your father. Take that as a compliment. He was a beautiful man.”

The Queen’s fingers retreated from her daughter’s flesh. Salva nodded her head.

“Nocht is an exciting country.” Vittoria said. “I’m sure it will lend you energy.”

Salvatrice finally touched her tea and even bit into a scone, anything to excuse herself from speaking. Her mother also began to eat, until the plane was made fully ready. Then they sat next to each on other on one of the benches, a fancier piece of furniture even than the lounge seating at the academy. Servants appeared to fasten Salvatrice and Vittoria’s seat belts as the propellers turned and the plane charged down the runway. They had scarcely managed to seat themselves by the time the plane took off, and a few almost fell. Salvatrice gasped, watching them. Vittoria paid them no heed, as though they had ceased existing the moment their hands stopped performing a service for her.

She had envisioned flight as a romantic sensation, the air rushing past her, feet dangling, wings beating, a sense of freedom, swimming in mid-air; the plane satisfied none of those feelings. High in the sky, she felt heavier and more tied to the ground than she ever had. The vibrations of the metal craft seemed to travel across her legs and cause her to perpetually shake. She did not know how her mother seemed to keep steady in the midst of it. Looking out the window made her feel sick.

Beneath them the green landscape and then blue sea became a disorienting blur. And there was no escaping the fact that she was essentially chained down next to her mother. She prodded Salvatrice about her studies, about her health. She asked her questions, as though to quiz her, but she never corrected her or revealed the current score.

It was maddening, and the silence between each fragmented episode made it only more so.

Several hours later, there was once again land beneath the plane. Snow-covered, mountainous terrain quickly gave way to pale tundra. The Pellicano had taken them from the center of Lubon to the northern edge of Nocht. They would be in Citadel Nocht in another hour or two at this rate, which was absolutely astounding to Salvatrice. While she looked out the window and marveled openly, the servants very carefully brought them goblets of wine and laid down an antipasti plate for each of the women. The antipasto consisted of neatly arranged cheeses, cured meats, artichoke hearts, tomatoes and mushrooms. The wrapped silverware was truly made out of silver.

“Did you eat well at the Academy, my dear?” Vittoria asked.

“I ate better than my classmates.” Salvatrice said.

“Good. You should. I made sure of it. I realize, dear daughter, that I could not be there for you personally throughout your studies. But I hope you realize in turn that I personally arranged for your life to be one of comfort and good health.”

“I know, honored mother. Thank you.” Salvatrice replied. It felt like talking to a stranger in a stranger’s voice. None of this was natural. All of the formality and care between them made it seem like a puppeteer’s play of a mother and a daughter.

Vittoria smiled. “I hope that my love and my care shone through to you in the resources that you enjoyed. As my daughter, a light upon Lubon, you deserve the best our Kingdom can offer. Food and clothing, an education, the best doctors in the world laboring to improve you; in all these, I hope that through the years you have seen my warm hand at work, though you could not feel it in flesh.”

Salvatrice nodded meekly. All those were things she could not have honestly said she had felt. In reality her mother was so distant that she needed a special voice to speak to her and could not use her own. This was at best an alien idea of love.

“I say this because I hope soon to overwhelm you with the love that I had previously not been able to give. I feel regret that I did not sooner take you from the countryside and into my bosom.” Vittoria said. “I want you close, henceforth.”

Salvatrice’s lips contorted into a false smile. To all eyes, it seemed sincere.

“I am overjoyed to receive your attentions, dear mother. I have longed for this day.”

She knew better than to ask what had happened to her older sister, Clarissa.

All of their conversation, bereft of this fact, denying this context, was nothing but a torrent of pretty lies. From the instant she boarded the plane she had known something was amiss. Clarissa had not been there beside the Queen, in her rightful place. But Salvatrice knew not to bring it up. This act of evasion was not something she had learned previously, not a technique of the court. This was her common sense, the barest fact of the existence. Always she had been painfully aware that she was a discarded second.

Clarissa had direct access to the Queen throughout her life, direct access to matters of state, a private tutelage in Pallas and not in a Messianic academy miles and miles away from the nerve-center of power. Salvatrice acted as though the stars had realigned and transported her to a new world where a new set of facts and rules applied, but she still saw the remnants of the old, she carried them like a scar. Her sister had been revered, and she had been abased, as much as a princess could be.

And yet, Clarissa was not on this plane giving contrived graces to her mother.

Salvatrice was; and so she smiled, and she played along in this strange new world.

Knowing all throughout, that she, the second daughter, should not be here.

She, the scandalous offspring of a foreign man, should have remained hidden away.

12th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Nocht Federation Republic of Rhinea – Citadel Nocht

6 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

A dull ache settled across Princess Salvatrice’s cheeks. To smile as she did, to wear that falsity on her face for so long, took effort. It was titanic, and it hurt more than all the horse riding, swimming, and mile running that she had ever done.

Since landing in Citadel Nocht’s National Airport on the 6th, the Queen and Princess had been honored guests of the Libertaires, the party currently in control of the presidency and bicameral legislature of the Nocht Federation. They were met by a jovial diplomat at the airport, and he ferried them through the gentle snowfall via a sleek private car, driving deep into the city, where the buildings rose like otherworldly spires, black skyward features of glass and metal with an imposing, polished, faceless appearance.

Led into the maw of one such monument, they escaped the gray and white world outside and into a vibrant, golden, palatial suite, where they dined under a chandelier. Six courses were served, with colorful vegetables, succulent meat, silky and flavorful soup, and festive, decorated desserts. It was a feast almost more for the eyes than the mouth. Salva felt like she was defacing art when she tasted a cut of meat, peeled a slice of oily beet from a salad plate, or forked a piece of chocolate cake.

“Unfortunately, Herr Präsident will be unable to join us tonight,” said the diplomat, an Herr Svend, seated at the opposite end of the table from the Queen and off to one side of the Princess. He was a lanky man with slick black hair and blunt facial features, older than Salvatrice by at least a decade, yet someone who could still be called young. “He looks forward to your meeting tomorrow.”

They were all speaking Nochtish now, a rough and aggressive-sounding language that the Princess could only speak in short sentences. She had tried to offer thanks to the driver of their car, a duty beneath her mother, but she had tied her tongue in a knot trying. Lubon was a flowing, elegant tongue, a language of romance and poetry, of lyrical beauty — or so she had been taught.

To her ear, Nochtish was like the wailing of a beast. She had been actively afraid of those voices as a child, and as an adult she admitted to a little apprehension still. She could not tell anger from joy in the Nochtish tongue.

Her mother had an almost divine gift with it, of course, and she spoke perfectly.

“How unfortunate. I would have wanted Salvatrice to meet him in a more relaxing setting than a military policy discussion. He and his wife are lovely people.” Queen Vittoria said. She even smiled at Svend, who nodded graciously back. In this kind of setting, the Queen was at her most relaxed. Salva noticed her own princessly manner in her mother, delicately cheerful and youthful. Here it was alright for her to relax the Queenly mask and at least appear to enjoy herself. Whether she truly was enjoying herself, Salva could not know.

“Yes, it is a dire circumstance indeed that has kept him away, milady.” Svend said. He acted at all times with a calm and inviting demeanor of his own, a gentleman who had to present his country as softly and warmly as possible. “He would not pass up any opportunity to dine with such lovely guests as yourselves, but these were truly inescapable matters involving his personal cabinet.”

“His loss has become your fortune.” Princess Salvatrice said. She smiled, partly at her athletic pronunciation.

The Queen allowed herself a tiny chuckle behind a delicately raised hand.

“Oh indeed! Indeed!” Svend laughed, and raised his wine glass to honor Salvatrice.

“Indeed. Though, I am concerned for Herr Präsident. I became appraised of the leaks concerning the Generalplan and was told there would be nothing to worry about.” Queen Vittoria said. “Should I be cautious of these developments?”

“Oh no, not at all.” Svend quickly said. “We found the source of the leaks and are taking measures to insure that the public consumes this information in a proper context. Only one newspaper took an antagonistic role, and they’ve changed their minds since those stories; after we gave them access to new information they broadened their views. You will find that the media is very reasonable.”

“I am glad to hear it.” Queen Vittoria raised her own glass. “To the free press!”

“We could not live without it!” Svend laughed heartily, raising his own glass.

Princess Salvatrice smiled meekly and said nothing. Though both Svend and the Queen discussed these events like they were tearoom gossip, chuckling and smiling like old friends, Salva could not help but think that there was a sinister undertone to everything they said, to the way they treated the controversy like the first words words out of an infant child. In Lubon’s papers and radio programs very little of it was discussed: the distance was too great. But as a student at a prestigious university, Salva had access to papers like The National and The Federal Review to keep abreast of Nochtish news. She had read about the fallout of the past few weeks. It was not such a laughing matter.

Salva would’ve spoken, but Princess Salvatrice could not.

After dinner Svend offered them gifts of soft mink coats and hats, winter-wear greatly in vogue with the high-class ladies around Rhinea. Princess Salvatrice found ocassion to wear her coat immediately: the party was headed out of the warm suite for a tour of Citadel Nocht, the nerve-center of high class culture and of the Federation’s government and politics. From the windows of their car and through the gentle drift of snow Salva saw the broad roads, teeming with motor cars and trolleys, that constituted the bloodstream of the City of Steel.

“Take us to the park, I want Salvatrice to see it.” Queen Vittoria said.

“Gladly, milady. We still have plenty of time.” Svend replied. He signaled the driver.

Minutes later they arrived at the Industrial Park, a vast indoor plaza like a glass cube in the middle of the city, where the machinery of capitalism was almost worshiped. The Princess saw numerous exhibitions of engines and cars and planes on public display, severed in half so that one could see the inner workings in the metal flesh.

She strode through mock-ups of factories, bronze autamata representing the workers that churned out the machines in conveyor belts and across shipyards and automobile factories, in joyous cooperation with the capitalists and industrialists who secured them the materials to do their work and awarded them fair wages driven by the market.

Pretty women in fitting costumes, such as airline crew and worker’s overalls, led children and families on tours of the facility, explaining to them the History of Industry.

They walked across the plaza in a little guarded entourage. Two Knights that had accompanied them on the plane had left their own car and walked alongside the Princess and Queen. They did not carry long arms, but they had pistols under their gold-trimmed blue coats. Their ears were very sharp, like her mothers’, and it made Salva a little anxious about comparisons. She was the only Lubonin in the entire plaza without long ears.

And people were looking: with Svend and a tour woman at the head of their procession, and two Nochtish guards at the back, the Queen and the Princess and their entourage stood out to all the visitors, and heads turned whenever they joined an existing tour group at an exhibition. It soon felt to Salva that she and her mother were becoming as much a part of the exhibitions that day as the machines.

She felt the stares.

“Don’t shy away.” Queen Vittoria told her daughter. “Bask in their awe. You deserve it.”

Salva wondered bitterly what had happened overnight that led her to deserve awe.

In earnest the tour continued, with Svend growing more energetic as they went, clearly invested in the attractions. He seemed more genuine than anyone else in the party. And indeed he felt more genuine than many of the exhibitions.

Salvatrice was a little perturbed by the surroundings.

All of the trees inside the plaza were false, for example. They were machines with a textured exterior and plastic leaves. From afar they fit the bill, but after passing by enough of them Salva could see the welded seams where the machine’s plates had come together under the bark texture. “In the future, we can have air purifiers masquerade as trees,” explained a tour guide, “these machines are display models, and have a limited range, but they are able to take in the air near them and clean it. In the future, one tree will remove smog from a whole city block.”

“Real trees grow poorly in Citadel Nocht, I’m afraid.” Svend commented.

Queen Vittoria laughed delicately. Princess Salvatrice smiled.

She smiled mostly to cover up how disturbing it all felt. Falseness within falseness, lies after lies.

When they had thoroughly exhausted the exhibitions in the History of Industry, Svend’s face grew rosy and he led them to his favorite area of the plaza. They passed through an archway into another half of the glass cube, and this one proudly displayed  The New Age of Warfare.  Clockwork automaton soldiers in gray uniforms, wearing the tall Stalhhelm of the Nochtish armed forces, strode in pre-determined paths across the exhibition, saluting, running with their rifles, taking aim at the walls and ceiling as though in real combat.

Here the exhibitions were a little more guarded. None of the vehicles had visible cross-sections as in the History of Industry exhibition. There was an enormous Fatherland tank, the first tank Nocht ever developed and a copy of the Lubonin Remus, hardly more than a set of massive tracks with machine guns on sponson mounts. This led to the first turreted tank, the M1 Warrior, essentially a smaller metal box on tracks with a cubical turret atop housing two machine guns.

“We have an M3 and M4 now, but the exhibition for the public ends with the M2.” Svend explained, gesturing toward the M2 Ranger. Larger than the Warrior, and with a more complex rounded turret housing a real cannon (albeit a small, 37mm gun), the M2 looked a lot more like the tanks Salvatrice had seen in pictures and newspapers and in the military parades at home. Below the M2’s pedestal, a golden plaque read, THIS MACHINE GUARDS YOUR FREEDOM. Salva thought that was a little ironic, considering the tank was obsolete.

“So this is your favorite spot, Svend?” Salvatrice asked, pronouncing the words slowly.

“Quite! I helped oversee the construction of this exhibition. I financed some of the pieces.”

Svend looked fondly upon the Fatherland tank. “But it is incomplete!”

“Incomplete?” Salva asked. She thought she mistook the word for another.

“I have tried to convince your mother to send us a Remus for the exhibitions here, but ah, it is a difficult thing to arrange.” He said. Queen Vittoria laughed. “Perhaps when you are Queen, my dear, you’ll allow us to enshrine one here?”

Princess Salvatrice did not know how to respond other than to close her eyes and affect a slightly wider smile, as though she were so amused at the thought of being Queen. In reality, it was such a scary thing to consider it shocked her near senseless, and all of her Nochtish seemed suddenly to escape her. She merely smiled and hoped that she would be written off as an airhead and left alone.

“The Remus is Lubonin history.” Queen Vittoria interjected. “And we don’t have very many left.”

“For a military boy like me, it just feels incomplete not having a Remus here.” Svend lamented.

Salva kept quiet the rest of the trip, as they looked at some aircraft bombs, inert of course, and then visited an industrial-looking cafeteria and gift shop on the way out. The Queen showed a little more of that youthful idiosyncrasy she allowed private company to enjoy by buying a sandwich from the cafeteria, where the staff became clearly awestruck and could hardly work.

She did not end up eating the sandwich: the action, the show, was simply the Queen of a foreign country dropping in on cafeteria workers and receiving their compliments and adulation. Nobody seemed to offer the same to the Princess, except vaguely, in association, the same way they treated Svend. How could they? Until a few days ago she had been a phantom to the politics of her own country.

How could anyone in Nocht be supposed to know her and treat her like a Queen?

After the plaza, they drove north of the city, to the harbor. All of the water was frozen over, and only icebreakers could plow through to the piers. In the distance, a tall statue stood just a few miles off the harbor, in its own little island. This was the Mother of Industry, a symbol for Nocht. It had been commissioned and built by a rich man to represent Nocht’s values, or so Salva had read. For the Nochtish people, anything was possible with hard work. Industry, then, was the key that united and liberated them all, and they were thankful for it.

Salvatrice wondered what people from different countries would think seeing that statue. It was snowy out, and hard to make out the shape in the distance. All Salva knew, in her first time seeing The Mother of Industry, was what significance other people gave it in the books she read. They were soon off again in the car, the snow picking up, and Salva never got to see the actual shape of the statue.

Winds picked up, and the snowfall thickened. A blizzard cut their happy afternoon short, and they returned to the suite. Salvatrice had her own guest bedroom, itself the size of a small apartment. It had a washroom with a bath and a shower, and its own couch and coffee-table seating area. Her bed was large enough to fit three of her, and a plate of snacks and a wine bottle rested bedside.

Servants from the hotel were ready to take care of her the instant she arrived, pulling off her coat and working on the dress cords behind her back. She nearly yelled, but retained her composure and simply waved them all away: it was so distasteful to her that it was the express purpose of these total strangers to await her and disrobe her. She missed her own personal attendant deeply. Once alone in her room, she undressed herself and stood in the shower, under warm water for several minutes, until a cloud of white steam filled the enclosure.

She donned a complimentary robe and fell asleep in it, dead tired. Her back hurt, as did her feet from wearing raised slippers: but what hurt most was her face, her cheeks, the area around her eye sockets. They had made the greatest effort that day.

13th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Nocht Federation Republic of Rhinea – Citadel Nocht

5 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

After a lavish breakfast, Salvatrice found herself in a private car once again.

Along with the Queen, she was driven past the spires of the inner city, and up a tall hill to a large, black, dome-shaped building, honeycomb-like etchings glowing gold across its surface. She was given no warnings, no impression of what her role would be; her mother trusted that she simply knew by instinct not to embarrass her.

All Salvatrice knew was that they were headed to the Citadel itself, in order to participate in a military policy meeting. At the top of the hill the car drove behind the dome-shaped structure, and the guards led them from a private parking space hidden behind the dome into an elevator, and up to the highest level of the building. They stepped out onto a lobby, and from there walked to the meeting room, where a round table held a map of the world.

Lights played tricks in this room: illumination was widely dispersed, and all of it was coming from low along the walls and from the map on the table, so that a gloom seemed to settle over people’s faces. They were like the ghosts children pretended to be, flashing lights under their chins to appear frightening to others in the dark. It was an eerie place in which to set a meeting.

Queen Vittoria and Princess Salvatrice took their places around the table, joining the delegation already there.

Across from them, Nocht’s President, Achim Lehner, welcomed the royals. He was a handsomer and younger-seeming man than Salvatrice had expected. He had a high nose bridge and low cheekbones, smooth blonde hair short on the sides but gelled back over the top, and deep set blue eyes. He had a confident and complex look. Salvatrice was wary of him already.

“Vittoria! I am so happy to see you.” President Lehner said. “And your daughter is lovely, I am glad she is here. I had thought I would be meeting Clarissa again today, but I am pleasantly surprised. You should let Salvatrice out more often!”

The Queen’s smile visibly dropped, but she gave no reply. Salvatrice lowered her head.

“You must be pleased to finally meet more royal blood in the flesh, hmm?”

President Lehner addressed a young woman who stood next to him.

She was not his wife, an actress and model who Salva had seen in the papers several times. No, this was a different lady. She had a dark brown complexion, a small, flat nose and black hair that was collected into twin braids across the sides of her head, connecting into an ornate bun at the back of her head. Her eyes were a sharp green, like Salvatrice’s own, and she was as lavishly dressed as anyone in the room with a long and well-fitted glittering black dress.

Salvatrice recognized her: she was Sarahastra, Empress-In-Exile of Ayvarta.

Salva corrected her train of thought quickly: the woman had changed her name, to “Mary Trueday,” taking a Messianic-sounding name. She wanted to be respectful of this change, of course, and hoped she would not get the name wrong. But it was hard not to think of her as Sarahastra. Her presence in Nocht had always been well publicized, and she had become something of an iconic victim of Ayvarta’s Communist regime over the years. Salvatrice had not seen very many Ayvartans in her lifetime, and found herself a bit captivated by Empress Trueday. She had a lovely and unique appearance in Salva’s eyes. But her expression was dour and reserved.

“I am pleased to make the acquaintance of the revered Queen Vittoria and her daughter.” Mary Trueday said, bowing her head lightly. “It is my hope this day that we will successfully embark to liberate my country from a brutal tyranny.”

“Oh, my dear, not business, not quite yet. We’ve guests still to arrive.” Lehner said.

Mary Trueday responded with a deferring nod of the head to the President.

Hanwa’s own delegation, the final piece of the puzzle, arrived soon after. An older man, bronze-skinned and with an angular look to his eyes, a foreigner among foreigners, entered the room. He was Salvatrice’s height, shorter than Lehner, but certainly better built, muscular and broad shouldered. He was dressed in a beige and red uniform. A symbol of a white sun over a red field prominently covered his shoulder-guards, and he wore a long sword with a gently curved blade in its sheathe.

Salvatrice thought he could not be a civil leader, that he must have been a general. But he was quickly introduced by President Lehner as the Shogun of Hanwa, its de-facto leader. While Hanwa had a royal line, much the same as Lubon, the Emperor of Hanwa was a figurehead, unlike Queen Vittoria, who had an active hand in all the policy of her land.

“Ohayou-gozaimasu, Kagutsuchi-sama.” President Lehner said, bowing stiffly.

Shogun Kagu, as he was known among his people for short, looked amused.

“It seems we are all here. Let us skip the pleasantries. We are here to plan a war.” He replied.

“Oh, it’s already planned, mostly.” President Lehner said. “I had my boys take a crack at it. Past few months we’ve been running the numbers, building up, wondering among ourselves, ‘hey, can we do this?’ And we found that: yeah, we can.”

He clapped his hands and the table upturned, its face spinning like a reversible tile. What appeared in place of the world map when the device had settled again was a specific map of Ayvarta, its surface marred with lines and arrows and numbers.

There were dates, routes of advance, strategically important holdings, resource-rich areas. In the center of Ayvarta, across its great Red Desert, was Solstice, the capital, and the place where all the lines, all the arrows, and the final dates all intersected.

Across the top and bottom of the map were the words Generalplan Suden. Nocht forces deployed out of Cissea and Mamlakha, and moved quickly up the continent. According to the dates Salvatrice was reading, they planned to take Solstice by the end of the Postill’s Dew: in just eight months. Lubon forces would drop from the Northwest and Hanwan attacks from the sea would target the Northeast and Far East corners of the great southern continent. They would surround the communists completely, from all sides.

“Nice strategic table, isn’t it?” Lehner said in a joking tone to his guests. “I’m glad I didn’t invite the Svechthans here. It would have been awkward if the table had ended up being taller than them.” He chuckled and grinned. Salvatrice covered her mouth a little in shock. She was a comparatively sheltered girl, she knew, but it was a bit shocking to hear such an insensitive joke in this setting.

“I hope, Mr. President, that you have a real plan somewhere not on this table.” Shogun Kagu said.

“‘Course I do! You’ll get copies. I’ve got plenty. But the map says a lot, doesn’t it?”

“About your ego, perhaps. But I will not stake my armies on your mathematicians. My country is already fighting a war to subdue the savages in Yu-Kitan and claim the land that is Hanwa’s birthright. I expect you to support that as well.”

“Oh I do, believe me.” President Lehner said, smiling. “Yu-Kitan is another playground for the commies. You can bet you’ll have help from our Panzers down there as soon as we can muster it, Kagu-sama. Can’t have them running the Jade Land.”

“Is Svechtha on the agenda as well then?” Queen Vittoria asked. “They are communists.”

“‘Fraid not, milady.” President Lehner said. He seemed to be in his element around this crowd, talking fast, gesturing as though he was staging a play. He had been an actor once. “Svechtha will collapse when Ayvarta stops sending the pipsqueaks food, so don’t worry about them. A direct assault on them is just too costly and the rock they live on is just too worthless. But trust me: you’ll get ’em.”

Queen Vittoria seemed greatly dissatisfied by this answer. But she did not press it.

“The Svechthans are a pitiful, weak people.” Kagu-sama interjected, closing his fist as though to symbolize crushing the Svechthans as a whole in his palm. “They can hardly squeeze a grain of wheat from that dead land they inhabit, and they are built like children. Aid me in Yu-Kitan, Faery Queen, and I promise you upon my honor that Hanwa will deliver to you that icy rock next.”

“I will hold you to that.” Queen Vittoria said, unflinching toward the outdated title.

Salvatrice found it odd, seeing her mother in this setting. She had thought her mother invincible, a goddess on Aer. Everything should have been mutable in her grasp. And yet, here she stood with other people of equivalent power. She accepted their terms and did not set her own. Salvatrice was seeing the fallibility of her living parent for the first time. In a way, it emboldened her personally: but she also knew that if she ever took this office, she too may find herself a weak link within a pack of wolves if that was indeed what was happening in this room. Nobody’s thoughts here were open or obvious to her. She could only infer. But she had a sense Lubon was the weakest party here.

“Ok, that was weird, anyway,” President Lehner chuckled, “Anyway, eyes on me please. I’m going to run you through exactly how we’ll end the threat of Communism once and for all, and return my dear friend Lady Trueday to her rightful place in Ayvarta. I’ll also explain our casus belli: that one is simple. Communism is an ideology of chaos and destruction and must be eliminated.”

Mary Trueday nodded her head and smiled a little.

President Lehner clapped his hands and the map turned anew.

“You know how I do that? I have people under the reversible table changing the maps. A magician is not supposed to explain his trick, but I can’t help it. It’s such a neat trick. Anyway, feast your eyes on all those beautiful divisions.”

Across the bottom of this new map, 20 military divisions in Cissea and 30 military divisions in Mamlakha, a total of over half a million fighting men, were positioned along the border, and arrows indicated their initial movements. Salva was not a military mind, but it seemed like a massive amount of soldiers to her. Their guard for the trip consisted of maybe 10 Knights at best. However, she noticed that the Ayvartan opposition had no divisions listed anywhere. She chose not to inquire about this.

President Lehner went on to list the Nochtish strengths: 1200 aircraft, nearly 2000 tanks, 550,000 men, countless heavy weapons, 4000 artillery guns divided into howitzers and anti-air, and a  reserve of Mamlakhan troops, as well as a small reserve formation of expatriate Ayvartan volunteers, referred to as the “Kaiserin Trueday” Panzergrenadier Korps.

“That’s what I’m bringing to the table, ladies and gentlemen. Intelligence informed me that the commies disbanded countless formations, so the ‘Ten Million Men’ of the old Empire are no more. Their army is around 1.5 million, at best, and they are scattered around the ten dominances of the Solstice Dominion in groups of 100,000. These troops are poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly motivated. No match for our Landsers. My plan is to roll over them as fast as possible with smaller, faster, elite formations, with the best training and equipment that the civilized, free world has to offer. We will destroy half their standing army in a little over three weeks. Anyone have questions?”

Shogun Kagu and Queen Vittoria held their breath for a moment.

“I must first know the status of the coastal supergun in Chayat.” Shogun Kagu said. “In order for the Imperial Navy to succeed in an invasion of Ayvarta by sea, Chayat must be immediately taken. The supergun would give us great pause, however.”

“Our intelligence suggests it was never completed. Y’know, weak commie industry. However, in the event that it was active you could easily outrange it with your naval aviation. Work with me here, Shogun, I am counting on the greatest navy in the world for this plan.” President Lehner said, spreading his arms and laughing a little nervously. “Your honorable seamen must choke off Ayvarta in the east.”

“All of our naval aviation is committed to the fighting in Yu-Kitan,” the Shogun explained, taking an aggravated tone suddenly, “I will need 30 days to redeploy them, and I will not risk the fleet and launch an attack, until they are ready.”

President Lehner grinned nervously. “Chief, you’re kinda breaking my balls here.”

“In order for the necessary build-up to be completed, I too must abstain from the initial attacks.” Queen Vittoria said, speaking over both of the men. “Our forces had been pared down from conflict levels and must be hastily reassembled.”

“So,” President Lehner flapped his coat a little, “So, both of you, 30 days?”

“I do not know about the Faery Queen, but it will be 30 days for me.” Shogun Kagu said.

“Closer to 25 in my case, but might as well make it 30.” Queen Vittoria replied.

“That was not the plan, people.” President Lehner said. “We kinda had a plan going.”

“Due to your secrecy, I have not yet seen this plan except for vague suppositions.” Queen Vittoria snapped back. “And it has proven pointless! Your intentions were leaked to the public. You should have brought us into the planning long ago.”

Throughout the debate, Mary Trueday said nothing. Salvatrice could not even read the expression on her face. She just looked blank, like a doll standing beside the President. Even as he moved or shouted emphatically, she stayed still.

“I suppressed all the leaks. There’s no problem there. Only problem here? You two!”

President Lehner pointed a finger at the Shogun and the Queen.

Shogun Kagu grinned and laughed. “Thirty days, President, or you get nothing at all.”

“Thirty days or you go it alone.” Queen Vittoria added.

“Alright. Ok. You can delay your parts for thirty days. But I can’t delay my part.”

“That is your choice.” Queen Vittoria said.

Princess Salvatrice felt like hiding the table. The leaders were suddenly tense and aggravated. They looked at each other with hateful eyes.

But soon she was relieved, when the meeting was called, and aides delivered to everyone the (now mostly obsolete) Generalplan Suden, 2/3 of which would have to be delayed for thirty days. President Lehner and Mary Trueday stayed in the meeting room and watched everyone leave. Shogun Kagu stomped his way out the door. There were no jovial goodbyes: just a tenuous promise between these great powers, bound only by the thought of favors and spoils. Salvatrice did not even know what her own country got out of it, other than remaining Nocht’s ally.

Queen Vittoria pored over the documents in the private car on the way back to the airport. Salvatrice had never thought of her mother as a military mind, but she seemed to understand everything in the plan far better than Salvatrice ever could. Reading her own copy of the plans, Salvatrice could hardly understand the Nochtish military jargon scrawled across blurry photos and old maps and intelligence communiques. Glossing over most of it, she put it down and sat with her head bowed and her hands across her lap. She and her mother had not spoken for hours. All Salvatrice understood was that soon, it seemed the whole world would be at war. Nothing seemed to contradict this basic fact.

She felt the stress of it weigh on her shoulders. Trapped inside the car, trapped inside this world, trapped beside her mother, and likely, trapped by a new title and by the grave responsibility that awaited a future leader of Lubon, a country at war.

“Mother, what happened to Clarissa? Why isn’t she with you here, instead of me?”

She had to know whether she was Princess or First Princess. She had to know if the fallout of this conflict may affect her as a future queen, or if it would treat her as an unrelated royal, hidden away for all her life.

Queen Vittoria closed the Generalplan Suden documents. She did not smile this time as she looked over her daughter with that powerful countenance and those awe-inspiring green eyes. That motherly mask was replaced by a look of indifference, a blank callous stare of a sort that Vittoria might reserve for a servant or even a pack animal. Those eyes had never looked at Salva in that way.

“I have confined Clarissa to the Convent of Saint Anastasia. She was indiscreet and allowed a man to take advantage of her. To preserve her chastity and reputation, she will serve as a sister there. You are forbidden to see her.”

Her words were like a blow to Salva’s stomach.

She had seen little of Clarissa in her life. She did not even have a desire to see her, prior to hearing this. But now she wanted more than anything to rip her from wherever she was locked. It was stunning to think that a mother could speak so coldly of her child and the abuse she was committing against her.

And in a deep, dark place in Salva’s heart and mind she considered that such a fate could just as easily befall her now. With Clarissa gone, she was indeed the First Princess, the Heiress to the throne. Whichever way this ‘Solstice War’ went she would have to be deeply embedded in it. All of the suffering of Lubon would become her own, inextricable.

“Mother–”

“Not one more word about it.” Queen Vittoria said, sharply and dangerously. “Clarissa admitted her mistake and acceded gracefully to this demand. She will repay her sins. In her place, you must be the light of Lubon. I understand that you may not be ready for this, but I promise you, I will make you ready. I will make you stronger and more powerful even than your sister. I will not commit the same mistakes. You will expand Lubon, its glory, its prestige, its history. I know that you have the potential. And I know you will accept the responsibility.”

Salvatrice was nearly in tears, but she fought them, harder than she had ever fought anything. This was the greatest of all the falsities she would ever have to commit, to keep this contrived strength, to hold shut the hole dug into her heart.

There was only one thing she could say, right now.

“Yes, mother. I am overjoyed to be chosen to succeed you. Viva Lubon.”

15th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Nocht Federation Republic of Tauta – Thurin City

3 Days Before Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Bercik had gone out to eat, and when he returned to the tenement it was already dark. Dim, intermittent light from terribly old bulbs scarcely lit the hallways. After reaching his floor, he found the door to his room just slightly ajar.

He felt a chill over his body.

Rather than go into his room, Bercik walked a few paces to the next door and knocked on it. He heard some off-key singing and a few strings of violin play, and knocked louder. Then he heard the door chain clinking, and Kirsten opened up for him, positively beaming when he saw who it was. Kirsten was a young guy, barely twenty, with a soft face and with blonde hair long and a little curly, wrapped up with a piece of old tablecloth into a messy ponytail; Bercik called him “kid” in his head, but he wasn’t that much older that such a thing was warranted. Kirsten seemed quite stricken with him that night, staring at his face. He fidgeted a little with the straps of his overalls and whistled while staring.

“Mr. Scheldt, wow! It’s pretty amazing what a little grooming can do.” He said.

Puzzled, Bercik reached up to his face and stroked his chin with one hand. He had shaved his beard off, but he didn’t think it made that much of a difference. “Just call me Bercik. Kirsten, did anyone come into my room?”

Kirsten looked over Bercik’s shoulder in confusion. “I’m not sure Mr. Bercik–”

“Just Bercik, please.”

“I was practicing my violin so I didn’t hear anything.” Kirsten replied.

“I see. Could I borrow that loose pipe from your sink?”

Kirsten nodded his head, and pulled the pipe loose from below his sink himself. It was as long as a baseball bat when out, and once you knocked it loose from the sink you could pull it right from the floor and have yourself a nice beatstick.

He handed the object nonchalantly to Bercik with a big beaming look on his face.

Apparently discerning what Bercik planned to do, he asked, “Do you need backup?”

Bercik raised an eyebrow and looked Kirsten over. He didn’t look like much of a fighter.

“You can go running for help if anything happens.” He said.

Kirsten crossed his arms and looked satisfied with this arrangement.

A few paces over, they stacked up in front of Bercik’s door. Bercik held up the pipe, and Kirsten pushed open the door with a delicate tip. Since he was already badly in debt, Bercik never left his lights on, so with only the dim hallway lights filtering into the room, and their bodies mostly in the way, they could see nothing inside. It was almost pitch black. Kirsten peered in around Bercik’s side as he walked into the room, ready to swing at anybody. A few steps in, they turned on the light bulb, and found nobody inside. Everything looked exactly as it had been left. But Bercik would not allow himself relief yet. He handed the pipe to Kirsten and pulled out his locked chest. He opened it, and found his few clothes folded inside, as well as his typewriter and paper. Nothing had been touched there. He lifted his mattress from the bed-frame. Nothing.

“Perhaps you just let the door a little open. Common mistakes with these old doors.”

“Nah.” Bercik said. “I don’t, not anymore. I got too much to lose from that.”

They looked over the room for a few minutes but found no signs of tampering.

“Wait.”

Bercik felt compelled to look at his secret hiding place under his sink. He pulled back the boards.

There was something wedged in there. And he was sure he’d gotten rid of all his documents.

He pulled out an envelope, a fairly fresh one, thick with documents, just like the ones he used to hide there. This one, was stamped with a date, 18th AG-30, three days in the future. Bercik closed the door, lacking the presence of mind at the moment to cast Kirsten out of the room first, he ripped open the enveloped and pulled loose the documents. Across the front of a cardboard folder, the words Generalplan Suden had been written hastily in a pen. All of the pages Bercik thumbed through were reproductions. They were photostats of all the documents.

This was big stuff; Bercik felt his stomach turn as he saw the details of troop formations, the dispositions of all the countries involved, the weaponry that would be used. They had a timetable, Messiah’s sake! Eight months, starting in three days.

A war to ‘end the threat of communism,’ between all of the world’s major powers.

“This is worse than I imagined.” Bercik whispered to himself. Kirsten grew alert.

Along with the folder, Bercik found a crisp, folded letter. From inside the letter, once unfolded, slid over a couple of 1000 Mark bills, spilling onto the floor. Kirsten stifled a gasp, physically covering his mouth when he saw the money. It was several times their rent. He picked them up and looked at them with disbelief, while Bercik tried to read the letter, but found himself foiled by the handwriting.

“I can barely make this out.” Bercik said.

Kirsten’s hand shot up into the air like he was in a classroom. “I could try.”

Worth a shot; Bercik handed over the letter. Kirsten unfolded it again and looked it over. Bercik took the money from his hands and began counting it. Though this was a simple task, he was so dumbstruck by the amount that he counted and recounted the few bills, unable to comprehend the vast amount that they added up to. He held them up to the light bulb, and they looked real enough.

“My dear friend,” Kirsten began, “It appears that I was right, and we were too close. We have no choice now but to complete our work, you and I. My labors now are complete: you now truly have all the information I can get. I will pay dearly for my role in this, but I do so with the conscience that history will absolve me, and that you will a champion of history, when you help end this war.”

Kirsten gulped loudly, and continued. “You should prepare to leave immediately.”

“I guess that is why I needed 5000 marks.” Bercik bitterly said.

“So you’re not with the mob? I thought you were a gangster, not whatever this is.”

Bercik burst out laughing suddenly. Kirsten’s face turned red and he crossed his arms.

“Of course I’m not with the mob. Don’t you read the newspaper?”

“I don’t read them! I deliver them! I would be fired if I cracked open the bundles.”

“Messiah’s sake.” Bercik shook his head. It was so absurd!

Sitting in his room like this, Bercik felt strangely amused. After Hans had rejected his story he had felt the wind knocked from his guts. For months he had given every part of himself to cover this story, and in an instant he had nothing anymore. His world had collapsed and he walked in a void. But then he had decided to turn it around. He shaved his beard, he changed out of his suit, and he got a good night’s sleep. He had almost been ready to give everything up and get a factory job or go back to covering scandals in the cabaret world or something; but now he held in his hands the whole truth again. Was this fate inescapable? How could he fulfill the wishes of his mystery benefactor? The Voice was right, of course. If he released this Generalplan Suden to the public all at once then its meaning would simply be distorted, or its context embellished. It could be false: after all it was just a folder of hasty photostats. Bercik himself would surely go to jail, or worse. He could not stop the war in Nocht.

In Nocht; but perhaps there was a place where this information could be used.

Bercik stared at the marks in his hand and got a very crazy idea percolating in his head.

“Kirsten, do you want to go travelling?” He asked suddenly. “I’ll pay for us both.”

Kirsten’s eyes wandered and he rubbed his arm. “I’m not sure the company would take well to it.”

“Leave them a note saying you’ve eloped or something. They’ll understand.”

“Well, alright then. Truth be told, I had wanted to ask you if I could join the mob too.”

“Be serious here already Kirsten; I’m not with the mob!”

“Well, I know now! But I didn’t before. I just wanted to do something snazzy.”

“Here’s your consolation prize.” Bercik grabbed him by the shoulders. “We’re taking the shady barges down to Ayvarta. We’re showing them these papers. Along the way I will buy you a didgeridoo or something. How’s that sound?”

“Better than delivering newspapers.” Kirsten replied, gently pulling Bercik’s hands off him.

In that bizarre instant, their covenant was sealed. At all costs, they had to make it south.

? ? ? — ??? ??? ???

Woodland separated Mamlakha and Ayvarta, and nobody believed that a large force could push through that rough terrain. Nocht, however, was already at the edge of the wood, waiting for a critical message. Leading the expedition was the 8th Panzer Division under Brigadier-General Dreschner. He had accomplished the task of penetrating the Janna woods by employing light tanks, assault guns and half-tracks exclusively, and leaving behind the heaviest of his Panzers and much of his artillery, save for a selection of mountain guns that could be disassembled and ferried in his supply trucks. Well after the attack by the light forces was underway, his heavy guns and medium tanks would join to deliver the decisive blow. However, he expected that with the element of surprise, the initial attack would be enough to scatter the communist border defense.

Even his own Befehlspanzer was left behind. Instead, a radio truck was assigned to him. A new driver and radio operator awaited him there, and they would be joining him for the rest of the conflict, all eight scheduled months of it. Dreschner rode a scout car through the wood to meet with his own forces at the front before the critical hour, and to take his place in the radio truck. He dismounted the light car, under the cover of thick trees and uneven terrain. He found his half-tracked truck on a wooded hill overlooking a three-meter drop down onto the next tank in line. Dotted with hills and thick with trees; but his forces had crossed it all. Even now he was making history with his 8th PzD.

He walked jovially along the edge of his truck, and came around the back to find a woman sitting on the bed with her feet dangling from it. She was a skinny and messy-haired girl with a small, sleek pair of glasses, dressed in the gray Landser uniform. She was issued no weapons. Instead, she held in her hands a strange cheaply-printed book, which she nearly had her nose into. Dreschner stood across from her, wondering when she would deign to notice him. He cleared his throat, and eventually put his hand on the book and pulled it down.

“Good morning. Signals officer Schicksal, I presume?” He asked sternly.

Karla Schicksal blinked, and then nearly jumped. “Yes sir! Sorry sir!”

She saluted him, her hand shaking.

Dreschner raised his hand over his hooked nose in consternation.

“What is that? What were you reading?” He asked.

“It is a pulp book, sir! It is The Terror of the Saucer Men, sir!” Schicksal replied.

“The Terror of the Saucer Men?”

“It is science fiction sir. First published in 2028 in Baffling Stories magazine–”

“Just, tell me what it is about. Why are you so interested in it?”

“Yes sir! It is a fictional story about a species of evil green men from the bowels of Space, who fly in metal saucers, and who have come to terrorize and colonize Nocht, sir! They are all linked by a powerful hive conscious, and work in terrifying cohesion, sir. Their orthodoxy and single-mindedness helps them to conquer the fragmented races of Aer, sir. It is very horrifying to consider!”

Dreschner looked at her critically, and she shrank away a little, putting on a nervous face.

“You can read your funny books during your breaks.” He said. “Put it away now.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

Schicksal gently folded the book closed and slipped it into her coat.

Dreschner climbed into the back of the truck, and Schicksal stood up from the edge and followed him deferringly about as he inspected it. There was a very large radio unit, the size of an ice box, under a table installed on one side of the bed. Armored walls protected the equipment, and a tarp overhead kept out the elements. They had a Norgler machine gun in case of emergency, and a bench along the wall opposite the machine gun gave them a place to sit, and, god forbid, sleep in. Dreschner was not well acquainted with the radio equipment.

“What model is this, and do you think you can operate it well?”

“It’s a Funk Frei-Angebot 30!” Schicksal exclaimed suddenly, as though she had been ready to answer the question since Dreschner first laid eyes on the machine. “These were put into frontline service just this year. They are state of the art radios, we could talk to people across Mamlakha with these! Well, perhaps not that far, but close, in good conditions. I can certainly make use of it.”

“Well, I’m glad someone understands these.” Dreschner said with a grin.

Clipping sounds of a small engine became audible behind them. This puzzled the Brigadier-General, since he was not expecting anyone else to arrive via private car, especially not into this wood. Dreschner and Schicksal both turned around and saw the new car arrive, and a young woman dismount and approach. Dark-haired, with rich brown skin and green eyes, and wearing a dress. It was Kaiserin Mary Trueday of Ayvarta. Dreschner was taken aback by her arrival. He did not quite know what to make of, or how to treat, a royal lady without country. Ostensibly she had a lot to gain from their operations, but it was never instilled in him that she required the deference he reserved for Nocht’s leaders.

“Greetings,” Dreschner said, taking no particular tone. “What can I do for you?”

Schicksal was useless in this. She froze stiff and stood awkwardly behind Dreschner.

“I simply wished to offer you a benediction, as you liberate my land,” the Empress replied.

“I am here because Nocht’s soldiers need expert direction in the coming days.” Dreschner said. “I am here to make history, and earn us glory and respect. Forgive me, milady, but I am not particularly invested in liberating anything or anyone.”

Mary Trueday smiled. It was a puzzling smile. Dreschner felt like he could not tell what the expression truly meant, like there was a subtext both making itself known but also unreadable. There was something about Trueday that was off.

“Even so, your actions will do me an invaluable service. I will finally take my rightful place again. You needn’t believe. I will be eternally grateful once I have returned to my throne, and taken my place among my people again.” She said.

“Indeed.” Dreschner replied. He was tiring of her. “So, what is your benediction?”

“I pray to the Messiah to grant you foresight.” Trueday said. “It is the greatest gift a commander could have. And also to warn you, that among the Ayvartans, there will always be at least one commander with a preternatural gift for–”

Another new noise interrupted them. Schicksal hurried to her seat, and donned a headset.

“Orders from Oberkommando. It is Zero Hour. We have been activated for attack.” She said.

Dreschner nodded. He had scarcely paid any attention to Trueday and her words were annihilated from his mind now. Finally the time for action had come. He was becoming restless. “Well, Empress, I thank you for your visit. We must make haste.”

Mary Trueday smiled that eerie smile again, with that doll-like face and those eyes.

She stood and watched, as across the forest the engines of various war machines rumbled to a start, and readied themselves to charge into the land that she had been ejected from as a child, and upon which she gazed dispassionately now as an adult.

18th of the Aster’s Gloom — Generalplan Suden Zero Hour

Beginning of the Solstice War.

* * *

NEXT CHAPTER in Generalplan Suden — The Councils Divided

The Battle of Knyskna II – Generalplan Suden

This chapter contains scenes of violence and death.

28th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

Shaila Dominance – Djose Wood, 8th PzD Headquarters Area

A gruesome ambush unfolded in Knyskna; it was all the more chaotic when witnessed only through the radio. Communication was so incoherent that Dreschner periodically ordered the lines to be cut for a moment so they could take a breather from the noise.

With the fighting dying down Karla Schicksal diligently wrote down the details – it would be up to her to pass on the losses to Oberkommando in a preliminary report via radio. Kampfgruppe K lost an entire platoon of assault guns in Knyskna, and several tanks suffered damage from a ceaseless barrage of heavy mortars that would be difficult to repair. However they managed to destroy key enemy positions in the process, and killed many of the entrenched communists, forcing the ambushers to flee from the site.

Kampfgruppe R was a disaster, having lost a platoon of assault guns, an M4, and suffered damage similar to Kampfgruppe K, broken periscopes and blasted guns that would require them to pull back to the headquarters. They suffered these loses without taking any of the enemy in turn to show for it. In addition Kampfgruppe R‘s main route of advance had been destroyed and they would be slow and vulnerable if they stuck to the plan.

Piling atop these troubles, both Kampfgruppen had seen a total and devastating loss of foot soldiers. Each would have to bury its compliment of Baumgartner’s men.

There was a bright spot.

Kampfgruppe L had also been ambushed, and lost most of its platoon of assault guns to the attack, but it had retreated diligently and inflicted terrible damage to a platoon of communist light tanks, and its compliment of recon troops survived the onslaught.

This was the extent of the good news.

They could not rely on L for their main penetration: the Western thoroughfare, through which L advanced, wound more and took longer to navigate than the south or south-east.

Despite the setbacks, she realized every Kampfgruppe had achieved its (uncontested) initial objectives, therefore the operation was still on schedule.

Could additional movement be possible in these circumstances? Clearly their final objectives would be heavily contested, and the terrain favored the enemy. Driving through the main thoroughfare would leave them open to more ambushes, and there was still the question of breaking through the rubble in a timely fashion. With their depleted manpower, the 8th Panzer Division’s kampfgruppen in Knyskna might not be able to make it.

Obvious as it seemed with the benefit of hindsight, nobody in the 8th PzD had foreseen the vicious ambushes and the prodigal coordination that had made them possible.

All of the Kampfgruppen had been allowed to advance uncontested toward the ambush points, and had all been struck at almost the same time. Anti-tank rifles at relatively close range had taken tracks and engines. Anti-tank grenades at such ranges scored deadly hits that crippled the vehicles. Their men, inside and out of vehicles, became sitting ducks.

Schicksal sighed audibly. For the most part she felt quite removed from the fighting, as though not really a part of this invading army. But in these moments she felt a sickening sort of solidarity with the poor fools who had been burnt and blasted dead.

She also felt a disgusting complicity. She facilitated their march toward death. She had been a primary medium for many deadly words: “advance!” and “attack!” and so on. While Dreschner gave the orders, so many men heard them through her voice.

Many perhaps found it soothing to do so.

That was probably a key part of her job. Schicksal had a good voice. Did these men feel more inclined to charge into ambush having heard a siren lure them to this course?

Schicksal sighed; she wondered how people reacted to her reports. Would seasoned warriors think about this situation and its participants differently? Was there a different brain in a General or Field Marshal’s skull than the one she had been born with?

She pulled down her glasses and rubbed her temples. She stared long and hard at her radio, her vision blurring in and out of focus and a tight pain flaring across her head as she pressed with her fingers. Her mind was running away with her. She reined it in.

She was just a signals girl, she had no power and no debt of blood to anyone.

Many of these men probably did not even consider her a soldier.

From overhead, Dreschner tapped her on the shoulder with his foot.

“Shicksal!” He called out authoritatively.

“Yes sir!” She replied.

“I order you to eat!” He unexpectedly replied.

Schicksal pulled down her headset and looked over her shoulder.

“Say again sir?”

“You have not eaten a thing in seven hours now. Break open your Keinne and eat.”

“Yes sir.” She said. In the back of her mind she felt he was being quite patronizing. She thought she was just fine. He hadn’t eaten either. But he must have seen her rubbing her head and sighing and staring at her radio with frustration. Obediently Schicksal pulled open a gray pouch on the floor of the tank, along the wall with her radio equipment.

Inside was a can of Fleisch, and bundles of bread and cheese wrapped in wax paper. She spread the creamy, pungent meat paste atop the dark, hard bread and ate, gnawing on the cheese between bites. Beside the bread, meat and cheese they had a large can of mixed vegetables preserved in stock, and sugar candy in the form of little amber rocks.

There was nothing to drink but water.

Schicksal was quick to finish her meal. It fell into her stomach like a stone, and it was all rather bland. Perhaps a bit of oil or mustard would have helped the taste.

She found the repetition of chewing and tasting eerily calming regardless.

While she ate, Brigadier-General Dreschner had thoroughly looked over the same photos for the fifth time, and nodded his head to them. They were all taken days ago and were in Schicksal’s mind mostly useless as a source of information on the current enemy position, but Dreschner was incredibly interested in them. From time to time Dreschner would write something with an ink pen on one of the photos and mutter to himself.

He had invested much into this plan, having received permission to push ahead on his own from the Oberkommando Suden. The High Command wanted movement at any cost, and they were willing to believe that movement could be gained with Dreschner’s limited resources. Dreschner was all too eager to believe he could take Knyskna.

It was an ambitious drive, and though they had planned for a few snags, they had not planned on the level of resistance and ingenuity they were met with. Schicksal always snatched glances of the General as he worked, wondering dimly what went through the mind of a tactician, how he saw the unfolding battle. Did he think anything like she did?

She wondered how he saw the communists too; what he failed to see; what he saw now that could correct his earlier mistakes. It seemed alien to contemplate; and ultimately there was not much of a show for her in watching the man tap and fidget and grit his teeth.

Schicksal made to put her headset back over her hair and turned her back again, but she paused when she heard the General grunt in her direction and felt him tap her on the shoulder again. Graciously, but with an inner sigh, she met his eyes anew.

“Would you like some bread as well sir?” She replied with false cheer.

“No, not that. I’ve got a new route for Kunze and Reiniger to follow.”

Karla feigned interest. “Changing the plan, sir?”

“Our enemy is different than we expected.” Dreschner said.

“Do you think we can still take the rail station before night sir?” She asked.

“Yes.” Dreschner said tersely. Karla wondered whether this was all his pride talking.

But she was just the signals girl.

She listened, and with her soothing voice, she relayed the orders.

“In addition,” Dreschner said, rubbing his chin and smiling with a sudden satisfaction, “Contact Baumgartner and ask if among his men there are any Gebirgsabteilungen soldiers. I want those men in the southeast and the west, advancing into the city, alone. I want them to climb, and I want them to put those hookshots and rifles of theirs to good use.”

Karla nodded.

Dreschner was definitely wrapping his head around the situation now.

She saw it in his eyes.

28-AG-30: Knyskna, Southeast Inner Boroughs FOB

A dismal compliment of soldiers returned to the FOB.

It was late afternoon and the sun had already begun its trek down from the sky.

Soldiers trickled up from the southeast, climbing wearily over the rock, squeezing through rubble, and ambling across the open streets, making their way into the building.

Sgt. Bahir’s headquarters staff greeted the arrivals and furnished them with some food and drink in paper cups, soupy lentils and milk flavored with fruits, a minor pick-me-up.

Staff members took quick reports from surviving officers, gathered inventory and distributed supplies, and found everyone places to sit and rest. There was a somber and eerie mood around them. Nobody wanted to admit it, but they all felt quite defeated.

Squadron III arrived with the others. Though the ambush was far behind them, in Leander’s mind, and likely the minds of his comrades, he still heard the blasts and saw his allies die fighting, and it felt stunning and bizarre to him, like he had watched it in a film.

Sergeant Bahir entered the lobby where all the soldiers were gathered, and he appeared to look over everyone at once from his position by the door of his office.

He had a semblance of a smile and a fiery gaze.

“Good work everyone.” He said. The instant he started to speak all the whispers in the room quieted. Despite only being a Sergeant, Bahir was older than everyone else in the room and more experienced. He commanded the respect of a general within this FOB, and everyone was eager for his message. It would end up being brief.

“Nocht will have to work harder to penetrate through to this FOB. All of our defensive sectors across Knyskna are holding so far. I received word from the railyard that we have only a few more trainloads before our armored train can take us all from here. Avenge your fallen comrades by living to fight another day. Victory is close, comrades!”

He raised his fist into the air, and everyone followed. This was all the speech that he would give. It was not the right time now for long speeches. He acknowledged them and praised their efforts and that was all he could do in the face of what had transpired.

Once Sergeant Bahir and his staff retreated back into their makeshift office, and everyone in the room began to idle once more, Leander felt Elena’s hand settle on his back.

He looked over his shoulder, and she tapped him in the cheek to make him look away, positioning herself behind him and sliding her hands into his jacket solemnly.

Bonde joined her, and from the glances Leander got of his face he appeared concerned.

Though Elena was as ginger to him as she could be, his wounds still stung awfully whenever she touched them. She inspected him, and shook her head several times while doing so and made disapproving sounds. She was exasperated by his condition and he did feel like a bit of a fool for his recklessness back in the thoroughfare.

“Leander, you need to go find a medic and get yourself patched up.” Elena said.

“I’m fine.” Leander replied. He wanted to stand guard. An attack would be coming. It hurt, but he could deal with the pain. He hoped during battle it would fade into the background completely. It was only a dull, persistent ache at the moment.

“Your back is a mess of bloody cuts. You could get an infection. Go.” Elena insisted.

Sharna recused herself from the discussion, but Bonde was watching them intently.

“Go to the medic, Leander.” Bonde said suddenly. It sounded like an order.

Leander complied.

He dropped his BKV and ammunition into a crate, and asked a nearby soldier where to go. With her directions he made his way to the back of the building, arriving at a rectangular sky-blue room once used as a washing and laundry space. Soldiers had pushed the cylindrical washing machines out into the alleyway behind the room’s back door, and the space was now occupied by a few tables and curtains. It was a lonesome place.

There were no wounded men or women to accompany Leander.

Anyone who might have qualified from the forward platoons had been wounded to death. Nobody had even had time to collect their bodies due to the situation.

Leander purged his mind of such morbid ideas, drank his milk and tipped the gooey lentils into his mouth. He could not even focus on the taste. Seated on the edge of a wheeled bed he waited for a medic to come tend to him. There were no medical orderlies on hand this time. Manpower of that nature was scarce; the few medics probably had other duties.

He figured that someone would be sent to him soon enough, after they completed some other chore around the FOB, and so he waited patiently for what seemed like a half hour for attention. He wondered idly what kind of doctor had stayed behind with them.

Whenever he stopped moving or fighting, he always seemed drawn to take greater notice of his condition, and all the little discomforts that were piling up. On the battlefield it was easy for him to forget the slight chafing of his breasts against the brace, the aching of the bruises across his chest and belly and shoulder whenever he bent or moved his arms.

He smelled like gunpowder and smoke, and there was a hollow ringing in his ears from the absence of explosions and screaming and gunfire. He guessed he was a soldier now, more than before. A week ago he had no training and a rifle he could barely work.

Now he had all kinds of scars, and an eerily building knowledge of battle.

Leander sighed a little. But this was the man he had chosen to be.

A man who could protect his people and his dreams in absence of any greater technical skill or ambition. Was that an ideal soldier? He didn’t know. It was just who he was.

He was starting to regret having time alone to think.

When finally he heard steps along the adjoining hall, he raised his head. So far he had given no consideration to seeing another doctor and explaining his unique status to them: but he figured it would not be a problem. Then, through the empty doorway into the room appeared a familiar face. It was Dr. Agrawal in her white coat and long skirt, her hair tied up into a bun and her face looking less rough than the day before. She was on her own and smiled when she came into the room. Leander’s own face brightened at the sight.

“Ah, Leander Gaurige! I did not expect you to be here.” She said, loudly and cheerfully. Leander flushed a little bit. “Don’t be surprised, you are still quite fresh on my mind. I thought by now you would be safe on your way to Solstice. I must admit it is bittersweet to see you again. I love familiar patients, but people only come to me with misfortune.”

“Sorry.” Leander said. “I had to stay. It’s the kind of man I am, you could say.”

“I suppose you could be a much worse kind of man than this!” Dr. Agrawal said, patting him on the shoulder. Leander cringed a little bit, and she removed her hand. “Oh, sorry, sorry. I’m such a friendly oaf sometimes. I need to regain my professional spirit.”

“It is fine. I can feel myself healing already in your care.” Leander said.

Dr. Agrawal laughed. “I’m not that good I’m afraid. Are you surprised to see me?”

Surprised was a large understatement. Leander was quite visibly exuberant.

It was almost like meeting a great friend again after a long time, even though he had only met the doctor for the first time very recently. She had been very kind to him, and as his first real doctor, outside of quacks and spirit healers, she left an impression on him.

“I never asked what you were doing, but I assumed you would leave.” Leander said.

“No, I was never planning to go. I came out of a fairly early retirement in order to do necessary medical work in this time of crisis. A doctor should follow the blood draining from the people. So I decided to rejoin the army, albeit a bit begrudgingly. After all, I’m used to the environment. I learned medicine while in the army. It has been a quite a long time since I was last active military, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Well, I for one am glad you are here, doctor. Makes me feel safe.”

She nodded. “Working with wounded soldiers these past few days was what rekindled my commitment. And I must admit you were on my mind since we last met. Let us not leave your back running red for any longer, Private Leander Gaurige.”

Leander cooperated easily and removed his shirt and loosened brace to free his breasts. He was happy for the doctor’s company in this situation. It was a real relief to see her again.

Dr. Agrawal cut the bloody bandages from his back, and stared with consternation at the red, pitted expanse across his spine, covered in shards of metal and long cuts.

He saw everything in a mirror established across the room.

It was worse than it looked when he had his clothes on.

However it was not crippling. Just a honeycomb of bright red flesh wounds.

The Doctor nodded to herself after examining him, and stepped beside the bed. From a nearby crate she gathered clean towels, tweezers, a roll of bandages and a bottle of clear liquor. She put all the things atop a little trolley and kicked it over to the bed.

Leander was puzzled by the final item and picked up the bottle.

“This is eighty-percent alcohol!” Leander said with child-like wonder.

Dr. Agrawal took the bottle from his hands, and tapped him on the head with the cap. “It would certainly make your throat feel a bit raw if you drank it. But it’s not going in there right now. Liquor has other important uses in a time of crisis you see.”

She popped the top of the bottle, shook it to give him a warning, and then poured a steady stream over Leander’s shoulder. He cringed and clung to the side of the bed with his hands, his wounds flaring up with stinging pain the instant the liquid dripped over them. He felt heat seeping through the cuts and into his flesh, and felt the sharpness of the fragments anew as the liquor flowed past them and over the gashes on the surface.

“We ran out of medical alcohol, but hard liquor is decent.” Dr. Agrawal said.

Leander grit his teeth and tried to smile a little through it, saying nothing.

Dr. Agrawal picked up her tweezers, and the towels and bandages, and she set to work, taking the tiny bits of steel and pulling them gently out of Leander’s body, setting them aside, then cleaning the wound again with another sharp drizzle of liquor. Dabbing from the towels irritated his flesh, but Leander tried to be strong and stony faced.

Between cleaning and pulling, Dr. Agrawal paused and looked up at the mirror, feigning like she was examining him with more interest.

After a few times, she finally came out and said what she was thinking.

“Bullets to the chest and explosions behind your back. I see you’re becoming a regular soldier, my boy!” She pulled another fragment as she spoke. Her ward could not help but burst out laughing through the hot discomfort of the liquor seeping into his wounds and the awkward touch of her tools across his back pulling out pieces of steel.

It was strange but wonderful to him how he could laugh in the middle of these events, in a medic’s quarters having fragments pulled from him and blood cleaned off his back.

Once all the pieces had been pulled from him, Dr. Agrawal dressed the wounds.

“Thanks.” Leander said softly. Both for the treatment and the good laugh.

“I try.” Dr. Agrawal replied. “A good attitude helps everyone. Myself included.”

“Is that how you handle being in the military?” Leander asked.

“All of the labor involved in that is invisible. It happens in the brain. What aspect of the military do you wish to harden yourself against? Fear? Loss? Grief? Everyone thinks about each of them differently.” Dr. Agrawal said. She closed her eyes and smiled contemplatively. “I used to feel a mute pain and pity for everyone around me. Gradually the group of people I mourned for grew smaller, not always by death, but simply by necessity. You’ll start with a big heart in war, but you’ll find that it will shrink.”

“I see. Being honest, I sort of want to weep for all the comrades who lost their lives.” Leander said. He smiled a little. He felt the tears in his eyes but he did not weep. He felt oddly calm. “I do not, though. Perhaps my heart is already hard.”

“It is not. If it were, you would not admit it to yourself so readily.”

“Is it alright to be calm in the middle of this? I’m sitting here awaiting an attack.”

“War is an alien thing, especially in these times. We all process it differently.”

“I suppose that’s just another part of myself I have to figure out.” Leander said.

Dr. Agrawal finished wrapping his bandages and helped him to affix his chest brace anew. She patted him gently on the shoulder with the tips of her fingers, careful to be friendly with her touch but not actually excite his wounds in any way.

“You would be a novel man indeed if you can completely decipher such a thing.”

Leander stood from the bed. He extended his hand toward the doctor and she shook it.

“It is no problem at all comrade.” She said. “This is my reason to live.”

“Will you be staying? With our company, I mean. Or our division? I don’t know.”

Dr. Agrawal chuckled. “I would usually be considered a regimental asset, but perhaps I can convince HQ about the dire need for increased medical care at all levels. But yes, unless misfortune befalls me, I intend to follow your general grouping of men and women as far as we go. I will try to be available specifically to you if that is possible.”

She withdrew a card from her pocket, with her name on it, and handed it to Leander.

“Just show anyone that card if you need care and I will see to it to personally.”

Leander beamed. “Thank you! I would feel much more comfortable that way.”

“I’m glad you appreciate the arrangement.” Dr. Agrawal beamed back. “Until we get to Solstice, I’d like to do what I can to help you. You’re a special patient. I really want you to meet Dr. Kappel. I think it will do you so much good to meet with her.”

“I will definitely make it to Solstice and meet her.” Leander said. Though a part of him wondered why she was so happy to help him, he suppressed this cynicism rapidly and easily. “And maybe you can meet Dr. Kappel yourself as well!”

“Ah, no; I have different people I must meet first if Solstice is ever on my horizon.”

She looked a touch melancholy for a moment, the light wrinkling around her mouth and eyes becoming a bit more pronounced, and a flash of an old pain in her eyes.

Their conversation was cut short before Leander could venture to ask what was wrong and who she might meet instead of her colleague. A uniformed man tapped his fist on the door frame several times and leaned through. He was a little shaken up.

“All HQ staff must prepare for evac, ma’am, and the Private should go out front.”

Dr. Agrawal nodded. “Go on, Leander. And take care.”

Leander followed the beleaguered soldier out to the lobby, where everyone crowded around Sgt. Bahir and a few of his direct subordinates at the door to the FOB.

He sought out Squadron III and easily found Sharna standing about a head taller than anyone else, drumming her fingers along the body of her BKV anti-tank rifle.

Leander regrouped with his comrades and asked them to catch him up on what was happening. He saw people everywhere, and standing at the doorway, Sgt. Bahir spoke determinedly into a radio, but Leander could not hear what he was saying or listening to.

“Supposedly a runner’s coming with information.” Elena said. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine.” Leander sighed. “I was fine before, actually, but I am even better now.”

Elena frowned at him. “You were only a fine way from an infection.”

Shots rang suddenly out across the ruins.

Through the gaps in the bodies around him Leander saw a pair of people running at them from the distance, rifle bullets striking the earth around their feet with sharp cracks.

People started to disperse and he could see better what was going on outside.

It was the forward observers running toward them and under attack, desperately climbing over rubble, squeezing between broken buildings and running across stretches of wide-open street to try to make it to safety. Someone out there was gunning for them.

Men and women from the FOB suddenly leaped over the open window frames and through the door of the lobby and onto the street, their own rifles in hand, and opened fire at the buildings overlooking the thoroughfare to try to cover for the runners.

Leander, stunned, did not join the charge. As he watched things unfold, he felt almost bitterly that he should go fight, but he and his squad stayed behind instead. He felt more than a little foolish huddling in cover with Elena and Sharna and Bonde.

Outside, the situation was confused. Fire fell intermittently, deflecting off rubble or striking the ground near boots and crouched legs. Nobody could find the snipers anywhere at first, until suddenly a bullet carved a bloody hole through the neck of one of the runners, and it seemed that all at once half the company was locked to the same building a block away and firing relentlessly. A body fell from a high window and people ran out to collect it as well as the injured runner, who choked in the street, grasping the wound.

Despite this, bullets continued to fall from nearby rooftops and the battle continued both for the people outside and for the people in the FOB, as the snipers began to put their rounds through the windows and the door with increasing frequency and accuracy.

A burst of chopping gunfire that could have only come from a Norgler fell near the rifle troops outside. The HQ staff began to wave people to cover and distributed guns. Leander picked up a BKV again and aimed out the window, but couldn’t see a thing to shoot. Sharna and Elena filled the air with lead in his stead, and Bonde picked up a scope and scanned the area, but it all seemed hopeless for them from where Leander sat.

A dozen meters away the runners and the soldiers from the FOB linked up, and took cover from the snipers and from the hidden machine gun together. Sgt. Bahir watched them. Unfazed, barely hiding against the building’s door frame, he cast a smoldering look at a cluster of nearby structures. He turned a dial on his radio and called their artillery.

“Company calling for a 120mm barrage on the Dunbe apartment block, hit the rooftops. Three tubes, 15 rounds total across three buildings. Coordinates to follow–”

Minutes later the sound of machine guns and rifles coming from the rooftop was shouted down by the blasting of mortar shells, crashing down in as much of a rolling barrage as three tubes could muster across the rooftops of three adjacent buildings.

Rooftops collapsed under the heavy mortar shells, and smoke and flames belched from the upper floor apartment windows. As the shells fell and the smoke blew Sgt. Bahir waved for the people outside the FOB to run back inside, escorting the live observer and carrying the injured observer and the body of the dead Nocht soldier into safety. Inside they settled the injured observer down on a table, but it was too late. A medic pulled down her eyelids and arranged her hands over her chest. Feeling that the presence of death would upset everyone, a few soldiers were tasked with taking the body out back to be bagged up.

Meanwhile Sgt. Bahir examined the badge on the Nocht soldier.

He picked it up and raised it to his eyes, and everyone around the room could see it.

It was a flower that Leander had never seen before. It was easy to tell that this sniper was a different kind of soldier than the men they had slaughtered around the tanks. He had on a more rugged-looking uniform with a cape and hood and thicker pants, all gray with a strange pattern over them, and his rifle mounted a scope atop.

Clipped to his belt was a folding grappling hook. He was a climber.

“Gebirgsjager.” Sgt. Bahir said. “The edelweiss badge leaves no doubt.”

“Mountaineer troops?” A member of Bahir’s staff asked.

“Yes. Trained for mobility in rough terrain. Such as the ruins all around us.”

“Sergeant!”

Behind them, the remaining observer caught his breath and saluted clumsily.

He was not dressed in a military uniform, but in a vest and shirt and trousers, like a civilian, but with an orange scarf around his neck. Leander wondered if he was a civilian, or just dressed like one. Their observers were dispersed all over the city, watching Nocht’s movements and reporting via radio. What kind of circumstances would force them to run back? From the look of it all, it appeared to Leander that this Gebirgsjager soldier had been hunting the observers. He gulped at the thought of it. Such a feat in such a short span of time certainly made the mountain men of Nocht a lot more frightening an enemy.

The Observer stuttered as he spoke. He looked quite shaken up.

“Sir, the imperialist forces have left the thoroughfare here in the Southeast. They didn’t even move the wrecks from the ambush spot. They’re pushing through the buildings and alleys and taking a circumspect route toward us. I lost track of them sir, I’m sorry. I was attacked and lost my radio in a panic. She and I, we were attacked by them.”

“It’s alright.” Sgt. Bahir put his hands on his shoulder. “You did well. Take a horse from out back and evacuate. Carry her body to her family as well if you can. We thank you both for your service. This should not have been your fight, comrade.”

“Thank you sir.” Still shaking, the Observer was helped out back by staff.

Sgt. Bahir turned around to face all the soldiers on guard around the windows and the doorway, rifles out and looking over the windows and rooftops nearby for more of these Gebirgsjager men. He called them all to attention and pointed them outside. “Everyone gather your equipment. I want as many BKVs in hands as we can spare. We’re abandoning the FOB. Run to the alleys, take the horses and ride to the last line.”

Around him, there was a nodding of heads and the evacuation commenced in a hurry. Squadron III formed up quickly, took their things in shoulder slings and packs, and hurried outside with the rest. Leander suddenly looked forward to meeting a horse.

28-AG-30: 8th Panzerdivisione Southeast Advance

The M4 Sentinel medium tank carefully pushed its way into the building through a broken wall, budging cement blocks and rubble. While the structure shook, it did not collapse. Easily, the tank slid itself through a back door and into a little plaza between the buildings, a recreation area where the apartment’s inhabitants could get fresh air and sit.

Treading over a bench and past a wooden fence, the tank found itself squeezing into an alleyway between two buildings that had been reduced to gray and brown mounds. In the alley, the tank commander called his subordinates over the radio, and then one other M4 and a single M3 easily followed his trackmarks through the building and into the alley.

Together they advanced through the depths of Knyskna’s ruins, knowing that any major building collapse would force them to abandon their tanks. They advanced in small groups to avoid choking the tight paths and to coordinate easier. It was nerve-wracking movement, stopping and starting and stopping again, careful not to disturb the area.

As they wandered through broken buildings and squeezed into alleys and trod over hills of rubble, through their periscopes they saw tiny groups of Gebirgsjager men in their cloaks climbing the sides of tall, sturdy buildings to establish positions and flush out scouts.

In pairs and even sometimes on their own, these hunters protected the tanks from any more communist ambushes. Already they had flushed out a few communist scouts.

These were not the only men in the ruins.

Ahead of them, a man in motorcycle approached and waved for them to advance. He led them into open spaces between ruined blocks and standing structures. Every so often the motor soldier would pause beside the lead tank, climb it, pop the hatch and address the commander. He shared what he had learned about the area, and where next they could squeeze the tank platoon into and advance unopposed. They would call it in, await confirmation from a beautiful voice. Then they would be off again.

Brigadier-General Dreschner had ordered them to make their advance directly through the ruins and up north. And so they moved through the rubble, and they called Dreschner’s little siren to keep the General appraised of their progress through the maze.

“This is Signals Officer Schicksal in contact.” She said. “Report confirmed. Continue the advance as ordered. Watch the high ground for enemy activity.”

So they moved through the ruins, high explosive loaded into their cannons and ready to shoot in case of an ambush. They knew the communists had few tanks of their own, and those that did exist could be destroyed even without penetrating rounds.

These tankers had not personally seen the ambushes. They had been briefed, and they understood there was danger. But they were relatively fresh off the staging areas and no harm had come to them as they moved, so they were just as confident as the men in the morning, advancing through a land devoid of the enemy. They had heard of the embarrassing defeat of the communists at Tukino and Dori Dobo and in the borders.

They hailed from Nocht, the capital of capitalism – they would win.

For many of them, they had to win. For their country, yes; but also for their futures. For their careers. Names and histories were being made in this ancient land, and you either flew or you fell. Nocht’s technocrats demanded perfection. Nocht was a land of opportunity, but only the very best, the hardest working, the most skilled, would earn the true riches to be reaped. It was a competition; even as they advanced together every man knew that he had to take the glory for himself first, in order to earn himself a big seat like Dreschner’s.

United without, divided within, and with gold in their eyes, the tanks advanced.

Coordinating this effort in southeast Knyskna was Lt. Kunze. Unlike the Brigadier-General’s Befehlspanzer, Kunte’s M4 Sentinel had the standard radio equipment and a real gun. He could communicate with the FOB in Djose, but the farther he got, the worse he would sound to them. He could definitely not contact any forces farther than that, but he did not need to. Speaking to Dreschner (Schicksal, for the most part) was enough.

His tank was pitted and burnt and the left track was worse for wear – a 120mm mortar had nearly struck him, and he had endured several BKV attacks when he attempted to pursue the communists and avenge the loss of his assault gun platoon.

That had been more than enough combat for Lt. Kunze. He was anxious enough without suffering the persistent sweat and shaking of being in a fight. He hung back now, following a ways behind the advancing troops, always removed from them around a corner or hidden in an alleyway, observing and coordinating well away from the front.

From below him a boy barely out of his teens turned to face him. He was the radio operator of his tank crew, which included a gunner and loader in front of him, and a driver below as well. In a soft voice the boy said, “Schicksal is calling, sir.”

“Is this something you can’t handle? Turning a knob?” Kunze said contemptuously.

“She wants to speak with you personally.” the boy continued, his voice shaking.

“Fine, fine.”

Kunze pulled his headphones from around his neck and up to his ears.

“Lt. Kunze reporting.”

“Status report,” Schicksal asked, “Brigadier-General wishes to know your progress.”

“According to the Jagers, we’re only a few blocks away now. But we have to penetrate the thoroughfare from multiple alleys, or else we will have all the tanks bunched in one place and suffer the same problems.” Kunze replied.

“Correct. Therefore, you should make greater haste.” Schicksal said.

“We are advancing on schedule!” Kunze said, raising his voice suddenly.

Schicksal did not rise to the provocation.

Her own voice was smooth and clear, her lines delivered with precision and skillful timing. “Our schedule is being rewritten. Sunlight is precious right now. Brigadier-General Dreschner expresses his desire for you to personally direct the assault on the communist defenses along the southeast thoroughfare. It is, presently, the shortest and most direct route from which to attack the communist base, given the problems Reiniger is facing.”

She paused. Preempting a response, she spoke again.

“Of course, if you do not feel up to the task–”

Obviously, there was no choice. Clearing his throat and controlling his tone of voice again, Kunze replied much more affirmatively. “I am honored that the Brigadier-General chose me for this mission and I shall conduct it to the best of my ability.”

“Wonderful. Then, do make haste. All tracks are to stop at nightfall.”

Kunze grit his teeth a little reflexively. He hated it when the radio girl tried to tell him how to conduct himself. He hated it even more when she seemed like the one giving him orders, when she spoke with a voice like she had deigned to command him. What would she know about anything? How dare she talk so authoritatively to him as though she had a role of any importance in this battle? What goddamn nerve.

Of course, he knew intellectually that Schicksal was just passing along whatever it was Dreschner mumbled to himself in his radio tank as he waited for them to do the work.

But it still felt condescending and humiliating when it was she who delivered the lines and not the CO. It reminded him of the attitude she pulled in the Djose, talking when she wasn’t supposed to, sitting by Dreschner all the time like she was something special.

He envisioned Schicksal having just as much of a stick up her ass as Dreschner, all the while sitting comfortably behind the lines, and it vexed him.

He almost went as far as to say he hated Schicksal and her ilk.

But Kunze was at heart a fearful and stealthy creature.

He said nothing untoward. Schicksal had nothing to aspire to, and therefore she had nothing to be careful about, but he did, and he had to.

“Acknowledged.” He said. “We will speed up and breach soon.”

“Good. Report just before launching your attack. Schicksal out.”

Silence on the radio. Lt. Kunze and his tanks were now the premier force in Knyskna.

Kunze ripped his headphones from his head and in a sudden fit, threw them and the little box they were attached to at the radio boy, striking him behind the head with the object. Not a peep came out of the boy, and faced with Kunze’s sudden fury he just hunched closer to the small radio unit affixed to the side of the tank.

Irate, incoherent thoughts filled the Lieutenant’s head. He bit his nails. He sweated like a pig. It was all up to him now, suddenly. That snake Schicksal, he thought irascibly, her tone revealed nothing, she did not betray any of the impact of the situation in her voice, but he knew, he knew. This was his chance to either fly or fail. Dreschner was testing him.

He knew. His heart pounded.

“Vorwärts!” Kunze shouted, his voice reverberating inside the tank.

His gunner and loader steadied themselves on their makeshift seats, and his driver sped them all out of an alleyway, cutting in front of a platoon of tanks in order to advance toward the creeping front line. He would be getting even closer now to the communists than he had ever been before. In his mind Kunze still heard the shots and the blasts and felt his tank shaking. His whole body trembled with the thought and his stomach roiled, but there was no other way. Regrettably he would have to direct the advance with greater fervor.

Otherwise, he risked a higher rank on Dreschner’s shit-list, along with Reiniger.

So many of their elite 8th PzD had failed already.

Kunze couldn’t afford to fail with them. This was for Nocht, for country, for people, for freedom, for capitalism, for glory, for himself. It was better to die than to fail this.

“Listen up, and broadcast this to the crews when I’m done.” Kunze shouted, his voice strained over the noise of the tank. “Kampfgruppe K has been given the honor of taking the communist’s base of operations in Knyskna. We will be the first into the oven and the last out, as it should be. We are the real men in this fight! Our country depends on us; depends on you. I’m expecting a swift and thorough victory! Allow none of the communist scum to escape your grasp. You have the better weapons, the better training, and the spirit of progress and ingenuity!  I want to hear no excuses and see no failures. There will be rewards, great rewards, to those who distinguish themselves! Vorwärts!”

Everyone in the tank cowered; the message soon shook other hearts in Kpfg. K. as well.

28-AG-30: Southeast Inner Boroughs West Bend

Abandoning the FOB the Ayvartan troops ran toward the far side of the thoroughfare and vanished into its alleyways and intersections. Groups of horses had been tied down around the thoroughfare in case emergency transportation was needed.

Headquarters’ own horses were located just behind the FOB, and they were already riding up the thoroughfare: everyone else dispersed hastily off the path.

Leander’s squad ran two blocks up from the FOB and took a corner into a tight alleyway that opened up into a small sitting plaza between two big buildings, within which a single big tree had been planted. Several horses had been left tied to this tree, with one soldier left behind to care for them. He waved to make himself known when he saw Leander’s squadron approaching, and began to untie the horses for them.

Smiling, Leander approached one of the bigger horses in the pack, its hide a uniform brown and its mane long and dark. All of the horses were Ayvartan breeds, middleweight, meant more for riding than for heavy pulling, and they were quite beautiful to behold.

Though he might have been a stranger to war and an untrained warrior, Leander knew horses. A caravan was nothing without them, after all! He made cooing noises and stroked the horse’s muzzle as he stood near it. He laughed contentedly as he petted the animal.

Obediently, the horse made no move away from him, and seemed for the most part ambivalent to his presence. Fair enough! They didn’t know each other yet. He felt oddly excited about the horse, even in the middle of this situation. They could be attacked at any moment! But a horse was such a natural and beautiful and comforting sight.

Behind him, Elena laughed and patted him cheerfully in the back.

“You two are hitting it off, I see! What do you think of it?”

“This is a good horse.” He replied. “It has a great build. Does the army have cavalry?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.” Bonde said, grinning at Leander. “We have cavalry units that ride horses to battle, dismount and then fight on foot. I’m afraid you won’t be leading any saber charges in this era. Not with machine guns around.”

“Around the caravan I always heard war stories but they were mostly about swordsmen and cavalry charges and things like that. I guess those stories just don’t work anymore.”

Bonde shook his head with a big smile on his face. Elena chuckled again.

“I don’t want my own horse.” Sharna said suddenly.

Everyone stared at her again as though she were going mad in front of them.

“Why not?” Elena asked. “You don’t know how to ride one?”

“I know; but someone needs to be on guard with a good weapon.” Sharna replied.

“We can use our pistols from horseback can’t we?” Elena added.

“I said a good weapon.” Sharna replied, hefting up her BKV.

“You can shoot a BKV from horse-back?” Bonde said with surprise.

“I can shoot a BKV from any position.” Sharna said proudly, sticking out her chest.

Bonde looked puzzled, but he did not argue any further. He waved for Sharna to climb on Leander’s horse. Everyone seemed to correctly assume that Leander was probably the best rider, and the implication pleased him greatly. Finally, something he could do well! Leander climbed on first and took the reins, recalling when his mother had taught him how a proper woman should ride. It was all he knew growing up, so he would have do it.

Sharna sat behind him, her BKV set against her shoulder and her legs tight around the sides of the horse. She raised the barrel over Leander’s shoulder and kept her eyes locked to the sights, swaying from side to side as the horse began to move.

After receiving a good scolding from everyone, she hooked herself up to Leander with a rope, in case the recoil and tenuous position threatened to knock her off. Elena and Bonde both took their own horses, and withdrew their pistols as they rode.

Together, Squadron III trotted out of the alleyway and back onto the thoroughfare, gathering around in the middle of the road to make sure everyone was handling their horses well and fully appraised of the situation.

Behind them followed the horse handler, unarmed, riding his own horse while guiding the spare horses up as well. Soon as they were out on the street they saw a trickle of other riders leaving the alleys as well. Many rode clumsily up, and a few were trotting for lack of experience with galloping. Leander thought it was quite a shame to see.

“Everyone knows where we’re going right?” Bonde said to the huddle.

“Up the thoroughfare to the last defensive line.” Elena replied.

“Good. Everyone got that? Remember to watch your sides and watch the buildings, our enemy is apparently stealthier than we imagined.” Bonde said. “If your horse is sniped at, try to get away from it and not fall with it or it could crush you.”

“Easier said than done.” Leander said sadly. “But if someone gets hurt I will try to swing around and help you. I used to ride horses with my brothers, racing through the wood. This thoroughfare is cake compared to riding the Kasht!”

“Riding the what?” Sharna said.

No one heard her; her lips moved but her voice was lost under the booming of a gun.

Flying in from out of sight, a shell cut across the road and blasted the street.

A high explosive charge blasted the handler and the spare horses to oblivion. Responding to the blast the squadron’s horses trembled and grew anxious, they neighed and took several steps away from the source of the heat without command; that they did not jump and panic from such a close blast attested to their thorough training. A few meters closer and the shell fragments might have given the horses cause to panic and topple.

Over his shoulder Leander spotted an M4 Sentinel charging out of a building facade through a shower of concrete debris, with a second tank creeping along not far behind. Both of them turned their cruel turrets from the ruined remains of the handler and the spare horses and the street beneath them, seeking after prey.

The promised attack had come!

“Go!” Bonde cried out, and Leander stirred his horse to move.

While the tanks extricated themselves from the rubble and swung their faces to meet the riders, the squadron made haste, galloping away from the site.

From the fronts of the tanks, old Nochtish quengler .30 caliber machine guns fired away at the runners, spraying hot lead across the street and up the road.

Squadron III’s riders ducked and hugged closer to their horses to present less a target.

“Keep it steady, I can take out the gun!” Sharna shouted.

She sat up and tried to shift around on her seat to fire on the tanks behind them. However she struggled to do so while keeping steady on the horse, and made herself a target while she fumbled with her gun.

“Are you insane?”

Leander reached back and pulled Sharna down against the horse, as bursts of machine gun fire flew over head and around their horses.

Streaks of gunfire kicked up dust around them. Leander cued his horse gradually to the left and right to evade the shots, and the group followed him, trading positions, leaping over objects that might block shots. They moved fast, and thankfully the horses were well trained. Leander did not have to cue for it to go over the uneven terrain, to climb the jagged earth around shell craters, or leap over large rocks.

They kept ahead of the bullets, but this only pushed their assailants to their more natural weaponry. There was soon a thunderous noise across the thoroughfare. Two shells flew simultaneously from the barrels of their stationary pursuers; the first overflew them and several meters ahead, kicking up smoke and dust and concrete fragments, but they rode through without harm. A second shell fell painfully short of their galloping steeds and merely blew heat at their backs as they rode away.

Unfortunately the tanks reloaded quickly.

Leander felt the heat of another explosion just at his heels and saw a fourth and even a fifth shell crashing on the street sides and blasting a new hole far ahead of him.

His horse took the leap over the fresh, hot shell crater naturally.

Sharna grabbed hold of him with one hand once the horse took to the air, and shot dirty looks behind herself – she had been trying to retaliate, but could not turn around and fire the BKV comfortably at an enemy directly behind her while riding the horse.

A series of rhythmic booming noises issued from the guns as the tanks continued to shoot and the shells crashed around the road and streets, throwing hot smoke and splintered earth into the air, but none of it put a stop to the riders of Squad III. Growing increasingly behind in their pursuit, the tanks were pushed to greater action. Over the clattering of their horses’ shoes Leander heard engines roar and machines trundle forward.

While a significant gap had developed while the M4s were stationary, charging at full speed the tanks made rapid gains on the horses. Machine gun fire raked the debris and air around the riders once again creeping closer and threatening to clip them before they could escape. Leander tried to speed his horse up, but he thought he could feel the effort the animal was putting in just to gallop at the current speed – it was not a machine, and it could not sprint for much longer. He looked over his shoulder at the tanks closing in.

“We can’t keep running them like this, they’ll tire out!” Leander shouted.

“Ahead, we can lose them there!” Elena shouted.

She pointed out a large building up ahead that had toppled over onto the road: a broken doorway and window holes faced them, and they could see right through it, so there must have been similar exits on the other side. It covered most of the road and the tanks could not fit through any of the openings: they would have to stop and go around it, or they would have to punch through the facade. Shells overflew them and struck ahead, ever closer. There was no time for a debate or an alternate route. Bonde raised his hand and waved everyone toward that building, and they pushed their horses to one last sprint.

The riders aligned themselves with the orifices, and at full speed their horses leaped skillfully through the ruined doorways and over the holes of the shattered windows.

They touched down on the overturned walls and without stopping ran through the ruined interior and leaped over a broken and upturned staircase to emerge outside.

Behind them the tanks stopped dead in their tracks.

As they galloped away they heard cannon fire behind the ruin.

Squadron III maintained speed for a few blocks, until they realized the pursuit had ended. They regrouped and slowed to a trot. Leander put his head to the neck of his horse and rubbed its head. He could feel its belabored breathing and quickened pulse.

“Is everyone all right?” Bonde asked. “Anyone hurt?”

“I’m alive, somehow.” Elena said. “And very thankful for a rural upbringing.”

“I’m alright.” Sharna said. “Not a bullet or fragment grazed me.”

“I’m fine. Not sure our horses have another panic run like that in them.” Leander said.

There was another blast, but this one was not from behind them.

They looked forward across the blasted landscape of the thoroughfare, and saw glass and concrete flying, smoke blowing and licks of flame coming from buildings.

“I don’t think our pursuers were alone.” Elena said in a choked voice.

All across the thoroughfare concrete doorways and window-frames burst open onto the street and concrete alley walls blew suddenly apart. Across a half dozen blocks on the leftmost side of the thoroughfare Nochtish tanks began to extricate themselves from the ruins in groups of two and three, revealing their own ambush.

From several alleyways the whining quengler guns opened fire on the runners ahead of Leander’s squad and killed many and their horses; and once they rolled out onto stable ground their cannons blasted the road at deadly ranges, tossing horses into the air and vaporizing men and women where they rode.

In moments it seemed like half their force had been wiped out.

One squadron in sight panicked and made the grave mistake of trying to run into an alley: from the perspective of the tanks, coming from one side of the street and facing the other, all this did was give them a target practice. Guns emptied mercilessly on them, and Leander thought he had never seen so much smoke and fire.

The alleyways would not save them in this battle.

“We can’t stop now! Run past them!” Bonde shouted to his squad.

Squadron III raced forward again across the ruined terrain, their horses working themselves raw once more. Leander felt terribly for the animals but they could not afford to canter in such a situation. All of the thoroughfare seemed still ahead of them.

Terrain was their last concern; before long an M4 had thrust out of a building and down a set of steps onto the street, making to block their way and establish a killzone. It threw itself forward and then began to reverse its direction to face them with its quengler. They were closing in quickly but its machine gun would tear them to shreds at this range.

Sharna was smiling, though from what nobody knew.

Leander glanced at her with a mix of awe and horror as she sat up on the horse and raised her BKV, the barrel extended right over his head. He ducked even closer to the horse so he wouldn’t feel the gas blown out of the muzzle brake. Seemingly without careful aim she opened fire on the tank, her finger rapping the trigger and her shoulder and arms absorbing the shock as the stock pumped back into her like a piston.

A barrage of 14.5mm rounds crashed into the tank ahead of them in a tight grouping. Sharna emptied the entire clip on the M4’s face, and her shots mangled the little bulb on the tank’s hull where its quengler machine gun was mounted. Unable to fire its machine gun and too close to use its cannon the M4 was silent as Leander’s squadron ran past it.

“Sharna get down, you’re going to be killed!” Elena shouted, but Sharna was not listening. Held up on the horse only by her legs and the rope she had tied to Leander, she loaded in a new clip, worked the bolt and aimed ahead again.

Leander resisted the temptation to stare: he had to keep his eyes ahead!

They raced forward through relatively open terrain – a terrible disadvantage in this situation, since their horses could clear obstacles but tanks couldn’t.

In this open stretch they were sitting ducks.

A group of tanks facing the other street swung their turrets, but thankfully not their whole bodies, around to meet the incoming riders. And those were not the only guns closing on them. Behind them the tank with the damaged machine gun turned its turret and readied to fire. Leander and his comrades were trapped in a crossfire of three tank guns.

“What do we do?” Elena shouted. Time was running short to make a decision.

“They could hit each other if they miss, they won’t shoot! Keep going!” Sharna said.

None of the M4s seemed to hear this argument, as their turrets locked on to fire.

“Scatter! Scatter!” Leander desperately shouted. “Get out of their way!”

All three guns opened fire with their first shells.

Elena and Bonde rushed suddenly rightwards, and Leander leftwards to evade. He felt a shell just fly past him, like a fist thrown by a god, rushing by his side with such force that he thought it would split him apart without contact. From behind them another shell thrust between their horses, delivered by the tank with the broken machine gun.

Flying past each other the shells struck armor.

In front of Squadron III a large hole appeared in the turret of one of the tanks, and fire erupted from its hatches as the explosives went off. Karma caught up to the assailant instantly, as the shell that had missed Leander struck the exposed back of this traitorously reckless tank and cooked the engine, setting off a vibrant explosion that covered the way behind Squadron III in smoke. The third shell overflew them and vanished into the smoke.

Again the squadron overran an assailant; but this one was well equipped.

Turning callously from the wrecks of its companions, the surviving M4 swung hastily around to chase them and claim the kills it had fought so recklessly for.

Faced with this threat Sharna suddenly shifted her weight: she turned completely around on the horse, and Leander thought all the Arjun’s spirits must have been with her, because she somehow did not fall. She leaned her back hard on Leander’s own and opened fire. He felt all the force of her shots transferring through her body and down his spine, and grabbed tighter on to his horse from the sheer discomfort.

It was like someone kicking down on his spine each time she fired, but it was effective.

The M4’s machine gun barely fired a burst before Sharna silenced it completely. Her fire did not abate. Sharna went through her clip, reloaded with haste and was firing again much faster than Leander thought possible. Her shooting was much louder too – and suddenly the tank exploded behind them, and even Sharna let out a surprised gasp.

“I did it! I did it! I destroyed a tank from the front with a BKV!” Sharna celebrated.

“It wasn’t you!” Elena shouted. “It was the 85mm! Look!”

Ahead of them the end of the thoroughfare was finally in sight, blocked by three tiered lines of low sandbag walls that provided cover for dismounted troops, and guarded by the thick square figures of the two Orc medium tanks. Atop a gentle incline well behind the last of the sandbag walls covering the approach, a single 85mm anti-aircraft gun had been depressed as low as it could go to enable it to attack the enemy tanks directly.

It had smashed through the glacis plate and killed the tank behind Squadron III instantly, and now the gun crew reoriented it.

However, despite being closer than ever, the way to the line was still barred.

Before Squadron III could even think to rush their way to safety, a group of three tanks extricated themselves from the left-hand street. They pulverized their way past a wall in one of the alleys and made for the defensive line at all speed, opening up with their machine guns and cannons against the sandbag walls.

Those few who had made it to the defensive line rallied and prepared to fight.

In retaliation the large Orc tanks advanced out into the road and opened fire, but their low velocity 45mm explosive shells hardly seemed to matter to the incoming M4s. The Nochtish tanks were pushing aggressively, and switching their positions constantly as they advanced in an attempt to avoid the 85mm gun.

Squadron III stopped in their tracks and regrouped.

“We haven’t lost anyone, have we?” Bonde asked. “Except Sharna’s pride?”

Sharna grumbled a little while reloading her BKV again.

“Sorry.” Bonde said. “Maybe I should refrain from jokes.”

“Why are they so zealous all of a sudden?” Elena said, crossing her arms and sighing. “Why would they take those shots if they knew there was a chance they could kill their own comrades. Are our lives worth so much to take?”

“Inexperience, desperation, overconfindence?” Bonde said. “Who knows?”

“I don’t see how four people on horses could make them desperate.” Elena said.

“Oh, I’ll give them something to be desperate about alright.” Sharna said.

Everyone grinned and sighed a little in equal measure at her vehemence.

“We need to link up with the defenders.” Bonde said. “That’ll take some doing.”

A pitched battle grew between the Nochtish tanks and the defenders on the line, cutting off Squad III’s access. They could not even run past the tanks again now even if they wanted to. It was a firestorm of machine guns and cannon fire from both sides: heavy shells from the 85mm crashing around the mobile Nochtish tanks, and the Orcs’ front armor withstanding several punishing enemy blasts and returning fire with their own guns, and small arms fire filling the gap between the forces without pause.

Should they overrun the tanks, Leander was certain they would die in the ensuing enfilade fire before reaching friendly lines. He sighed heavily, exasperated, his heart pounding non-stop. Now that he had time to think about things, all the terrible condition of his body, the wear, the stress, seemed to catch up to him all at once.

“What do we do now?” He groaned. “We definitely can’t go back.”

Bonde stared at the crossfire, crossing his arms and drumming his fingers along his sleeve. Several more shells were exchanged, and a chunk of the sandbag wall went up into the air and threw a pair of riflemen several meters back.

As medical staff rushed forward to take them, Bonde was deep in thought.

He muttered something to himself, and Leander saw a gleam in his eyes.

“At the FOB, did you two replenish your AT grenades?” Bonde asked.

“I did.” Sharna said, casually lifting up a grenade for him to see.

Leander checked his pouch and produced an AT stick grenade as well.

“Alright. Leander, leave your horse and climb on Elena’s.” Bonde instructed a puzzled Leander, pointing him to Elena’s horse. “I’ll take the reins on your horse. Sharna, give me your grenade; Leander, give Elena your grenade.”

“What’s this about?” Elena asked. “What’s your plan?”

There was a sudden explosion ahead of them.

A fourth tank blasted its way out of a building closer to the defensive line’s first sandbag wall. It was immediately met by the 85mm gun. One shell was all it took, blasting through the turret and disabling the newly risen invader.

But the three other tanks took the initiative and pushed to the defensive line, and were dangerously close to the defenders. One of the Orcs attempted a brave pushback, charging forward and firing its gun, but its front armor finally had enough.

An M4’s shell punched through the glacis plate and a second shell smashed through the turret, and it would move no more, the Ayvartans inside likely cooked by the blasts.

Leander found it hard to peel away from the sight.

Soon they’d have no defensive line to run to!

The remaining Orc scrambled back behind the sandbag walls.

Thin streaks of hot gas emanated from the 85mm as its crew reoriented the gun, loaded a new shell, and fired, striking the earth in front of the line of M4s and momentarily giving them pause. Its barrel was starting to wear out from all the shooting.

Bonde waved his hands together, capturing everyone’s attention again.

“We need to hurry here, and I’ve got a plan, yes. Everyone will have to get this precise, but it’s our only option at this point. We can take two of the horses and rush behind two of the tanks: Leander and Sharna will fire their BKVs into the exposed rear of each tank, and then Elena and I will throw the grenades over the engine compartment.” Bonde said. “That should be enough trauma to disable the tanks or at least distract the crews and give us time to run past and link up with the remains of the Company. Do you think so, Sharna?”

Sharna seemed still half-stuck to watching the assault on the line.

“Sharna?” Bonde asked.

The anti-tank riflewoman blinked and shook her head clear.

“Yes, the backs of the tanks have the thinnest armor. It should work.” She said.

Bonde smiled. “I trust your judgment on tanks. Does everyone else?”

Leander and Elena nodded their heads.

“You should trust it!” Sharna smiled and stuck out her chest.

“Then let us switch horses. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Leander and Bonde dismounted, leaving Bonde’s horse to follow however it could.

Leander found the result of the switch strangely, darkly humorous in a way: he sat behind Elena with his BKV over her shoulder, a facsimile of a tank. He was the turret, the horse was the hull. Bonde and Sharna had a similar relationship, albeit Sharna made for a more menacing turret given her skill. With one hand on the reins and another on the grenade, Elena and Bonde started their horses moving, first at a trot and then working up to a canter. Leander’s gun rocked from side to side with the moving horse, he could keep it steady only with great difficulty. Sharna seemed to hold hers perfectly straight.

Elena spurred her horse apart from Bonde’s, and they charged the tanks. One M3 assault gun on the periphery had no machine gun to harass them with. Two M4s, side by side, would be the targets. Leander struggled with all of his might to keep his BKV lined up with the back of the tank. Sharna opened fire first; Leander pressed the trigger in response and felt the stock bash into him, but he pushed forward into the shots, keeping himself upright and on the horse while firing. Sharna put a hole into the back of the engine compartment. Leander’s grouping was scattered but had served its purpose, weakening the armor. Neither tank took notice of them, with the defensive line in their sights.

Elena and Bonde stopped their horses within throwing range and cast their grenades.

Bonde’s grenade was right on target, exploding right into the hole that Sharna had carved for it. The engine went up in flames and the tank almost jumped from the violence.

Elena threw too hard and the grenade struck over the engine compartment, rendering Leander’s effort moot, but the blast was enough to light a fire over the engine.

Both targets halted their fire and their hatches went up, confused crew peering out momentarily, their periscopes thwarted. One tank began to back up in panic.

Squadron III quickly took the opening: Bonde and Elena cued their horses with the reins and sprinted past the damaged tanks as fast as they could.

The horses moved easily around the retreating machines.

They avoided incoming fire from their own troops, but thankfully the friendly fire was not automatic, and the troops quickly stopped shooting past them.

They closed their eyes; Sharna prayed to her Spirits.

Bonde’s plan proved good enough. In moments they cleared the first sandbag wall and ran past the 85mm gun and into the edge of the plaza, where several surviving horses had been hidden around the corner from the fighting. Everyone dismounted, cleared the sweat and the dust from their faces, and caught their breaths. Leander almost threw his arms around Bonde, such joy and relief surging through him.

“I could kiss that shiny head of yours!” Leander said cheerfully.

“Wait until we’re on the train.” Bonde replied nervously.

Behind them the crossfire at the defensive line had died out. They rounded the corner again and peered out carefully, but the tanks they had damaged had fully retreated into nearby alleyways, and the M3 assault gun had itself vanished.

Leander saw someone waving at them from the 85mm mount, and alerted everyone.

They ran down to the gun, past the mortars, two of which were completely decrewed; and one of which had been blasted to pieces by a shell. Sergeant Bahir was waiting for them, and he extended his hand to each of them, congratulating them on making it back. Leander counted perhaps seventeen other people at the line in various places.

“Your fighting spirit has not gone unnoticed, comrades. Squadron III has had the ancestors with them this day.” Sergeant Bahir said. “However, we are not yet out of the fire. We have to defend here. All of our fighting groups on the west and south thoroughfares are also at their final lines. We expect one more major push from Nocht before our train arrives. You have faced so much combat today, but this will be typical of the war if we must win. So I dare ask: will you fight with me on more time, comrades?”

“Of course we shall.” Bonde replied. Leander and Sharna nodded.

“Excellent! You do the Motherland proud. If I am ever in a position to do so, I will reward you for your efforts today, Squadron III. Now I must ask instead: do any of you have experience with the 120mm mortar?” Sgt. Bahir gestured behind himself, where one mortar was shot to pieces and the other two had been completely de-crewed, their occupants in a field hospital one way or another now. “My secretary and I can sight the pieces, but we need loaders. Unfortunately our crews suffered casualties.”

Elena fidgeted a little, but spoke up. “I can probably do that much.”

“Likewise.” Bonde said. “However, these two are anti-tank gunners.”

Bonde put his hands on Sharna and Leander’s shoulders. Leander looked at him critically for a moment, but then realized it was intended as a gesture of faith.

He also realized he knew not even the littlest thing about a mortar, other than it caused an explosion after some unimaginable process. Sharna, meanwhile, seemed very flattered, and crossed her arms with a cool grin on her face and posing confidently.

Sergeant Bahir nodded. “I noticed! We will need their strength on the line itself.”

Soon the sun fell in earnest, and the thoroughfare was cast into an eerie half shadow.

Streaks of orange light played across the road, while the streets were cast in a gloom. Without wind the smoke from the battle was slow to disperse. Leander could see dead horses from where he set up. There were around eleven soldiers on the line itself, counting himself and Sharna. Three others, part of Bahir’s HQ staff, crewed the 85mm gun, while Sgt. Bahir, his secretary, Elena, and Bonde, crewed the 120mm mortars behind the line. Leander guessed the remaining Orc had about three or four crew. So there were less than twenty-five people remaining to hold this line. Nobody had bothered to pick out the corpses from the destroyed Orc still burning away slowly in front of the defensive line.

Their souls now rested with the Spirits, or the Ancestors, or other forms of Gods; their bodies weren’t so important.

Sharna and he took cover behind the front line of sandbags. Standing, they reached only to the waist. Lying against them with their BKVs set up on bipod mounts, they were almost entirely hidden. Beside the footsteps of soldiers pacing and tapping anxiously, and the metal creaking of the Orc’s turret or the 85mm gun’s mount, the thoroughfare was quiet. Stretching far off in front of them it was a landscape of gently rolling smoke clouds, the smooth road pitted with shell holes and covered in dust and chunks and metal hulks.

This last stretch of the thoroughfare had once been open enough to have given them good sight lines, but with the broken tank hulls, the smoke, and collateral damage, visibility had been reduced. Everything reeked of hell, burning oil and gunpowder and smoke, concrete dust in the air. Leander’s eyes teared up from sitting near the front where it all still lingered. His body ached, and he felt like he had been pulled to his limit in a dozen directions by careless hands, his muscles loose and throbbing.

“How long do you think it will take for the train to get here?” Leander asked.

“No idea.” Sharna said. She was far more focused on the road than he.

Having properly sighted the mortars and left behind his secretary in case they had to be adjusted further, Sergeant Bahir rejoined the forces at the front of the defensive line.

From his belt he pulled a pair of binoculars and peered out into the thoroughfare for a moment. He put them down, and kneeled next to Leander and Sharna behind the sandbags.

“Comrades!” He shouted. “We are on the cusp of victory. One final time the enemy will strike us. He will come at us with everything he has. But we must hold this line. Hold this line for your comrades, for your motherland!”

Engines groaned to life in the alleyways.

Smoke canisters flew from the enemy’s positions to cover the road. A white cloud expanded across the thoroughfare and provided the enemy with cover.

Leander could hear the tracks, crunching debris as they went, and he saw distorted phantoms making vague movements out of the rubble and onto the road.

Enemy tanks advanced again from the alleyways, stacking up around the road and turning their strong faces to meet their guns and rifles. Sgt. Bahir raised his fist and the 85mm held its fire. They had limited shells, and within the smoke there was no guarantee of a successful hit. They would need the gun: it was their main defense.

Shells hurtled out of the cloud, crashing into the dead skeletons of lost tanks, falling at the edge of the sandbag wall, crashing over the line. The barrage crept closer and closer.

The defenders ducked their heads and held their positions, the shells now exploding between and around them. When a shell hit a column of fire and smoke rose for a second in its wake, covering a few meters around it. But the area set ablaze by a 50mm shell was limited, and they were spread out enough to survive the sporadic shots.

Only a direct hit from a shell would kill them, but the heat and the smoke and the flying chunks of cement were upsetting and gave the defenders pause.

Leander felt his feet shaking, as though his body was telling him to run. He swallowed hard and set his eyes down the sights of his gun. This was the kind of man he was. 

Figures grew solid in the smoke as the tanks drew closer. Between the blasts Leander thought he heard concerted footsteps as the enemy’s men joined their attacking tanks. Gebirgsjager had probably combed the FOB, and now advanced with the tanks.

Sgt. Bahir raised his fist and then spread his fingers, opening his hand.

At once the Ayvartan line roared to life, with yells of “oorah!” as they opened fire.

DNV machine guns and BKVs and Bundu rifles; anything anyone had on hand they used to trade shots with the enemy. Muzzles flashed all across the defensive line.

Nocht advanced in an arrowhead formation of eight tanks around what Leander assumed was the CO’s tank, as it was clearly damaged from a previous battle and was not firing. Far behind them he could see reserve tanks hiding in the smoke.

Many of the tanks were unbuttoned, their commanders directing volleys of machine gun fire from the coaxial and frontal machine guns on every tank. Hundreds of machine gun bullets struck the sandbags and flew over the defensive line.

Several M4s unloaded their cannons as they moved, and many dozen men moved in tandem with the tanks, stopping and crouching to take aim and fire with their rifles.

Ayvartan machine guns swept across the formation, forcing the riflemen to use their tanks for cover and preventing them from threatening the shooters on the line. Sharna blasted the bulging frontal machine guns and the small holes housing turret coaxial guns, sharply reducing the volume of incoming fire. Leander aimed and waited.

“Vorwärts!” screamed the Nocht CO from the center of the formation.

“Hold the line!” Sgt. Bahir shouted. “Comrades, stand your ground!”

The 85mm gun creaked and whistled as the crew moved it, aiming for the lead tanks.

One heavy round went into the breech, and soared across the thoroughfare, smashing easily through the frontal armor of the spearhead M4 and destroying it. Like a phalanx, the tanks compensated for its loss, the back tanks moving around it and a new leader taking its place. The crew worked hard to reload the gun, but it was clear that they were long past the peak of their endurance, and the gun’s barrel was glowing red hot and smoking.

They loaded a new round and then waited, while cannonfire fell around them, creeping ever closer to taking the gun and its crew out. The Orc tank trundled forward to bar the way while the 85mm loaded. Its commander unbuttoned to keep track of the crew, to know when to move away. Acting as a shield was all the Orc could do.

Nocht’s CO screamed again, “Vorwärts!”

Sgt. Bahir replied, “Hold the line! For socialism, comrades!”

In an instant, the center tank fired its first shot of the battle, as directed by the Nocht CO. A 50mm high-explosive shell crashed directly into the sandbag wall and exploded, taking out a large chunk of the bags and tossing back two of the soldiers.

Stunned, the soldiers limped away to the second sandbag line.

All at once, the other Nochtish tanks started landing their own hits on the first sandbag wall, and the Ayvartans ran as fast as they could and jumped behind the second. This gave them only ten more meters on the quickly advancing enemy. Time was running short.

“VORWÄRTS!” the scream echoed across the thoroughfare.

Loud thunk noises issued from behind the Ayvartan line as Bonde and Elena dropped mortar rounds into the 120mm tubes and sent them flying high into the air to fall over the Nocht line. Finally Elena got to see their effects on the enemy’s tanks. Mortar rounds crashed around the advancing tanks, smearing riflemen across the road, pounding on the armor of the tanks. They were not designed to penetrate armor, but they left noticeable damage across the turrets and faces of the tanks, and each pounding shook up the crew and slowed the formation, buying just a few more precious seconds with every hit.

Facing deadly bombardment, several enemy tank commanders retreated back into their tanks, many closing their hatches just as a stray mortar round crashed atop their tanks. One good shot smashed the side of a tank and split its track in half. Hastily the formation compensated for its loss. They closed within less than 200 meters, practically face to face with the Ayvartans. Leander established himself behind the wall and aimed.

“Stand your ground for your very lives, comrades!” Sgt. Bahir shouted.

Despite the violence all around them, that center tank had never buttoned.

For a moment Leander had a clear look at the Nocht CO, a large man with a grim face, like a beast through the smoke. In the distance he appeared like a grinning, chalk-white monster, reveling as his forces devoured the terrain. He was like some kind of demon.

Leander set his sights a little above the man’s head and without thinking, pulled the trigger once, twice, thrice. He felt the punch of the gun recoiling in his hands, but he was trapped in time suddenly. He saw the rounds strike, wiping features from the man’s face.

His nose was a blur, his eyes disappeared, his mouth was sealed in red.

His face vanished, as though Leander had wiped the paint from a portrait of the man. He slumped forward, smearing blood on the pintle of the Norgler gun atop his tank, and then sliding through the hatch. There would be no more of that alien tongue screaming over the fighting. Suddenly Nocht’s formation slowed, and the cannon fire halted.

Their commander was dead. Leander had killed him.

“Sharna, I think I hit someone!” Leander said, tapping his comrade on the shoulder, his mouth running before words could fully settle in his brain. Sharna looked up from her own sights in confusion at the slowing, quiet tanks.

“I think you did as well.” Sharna said in a distant, incredulous voice.

They then felt a rumbling across the ground that quieted them as much as Nocht. Sharna looked over her shoulder, and Leander followed; he saw a trail of smoke above the plaza and heard the loud whistling of a massive train.

“Stand your ground, comrades! Our ride is here! We have survived the day!”

Sgt. Bahir stood up from the ground, and raised his fist into the air suddenly.

Before them, the Nocht formation erupted into flames as a massive shell struck the two lead tanks with such force that it ripped their turrets from the hulls and scattered them in pieces. Men were sent crashing across the rocks, and those on the periphery caught fire on their cloaks and jackets as burning shrapnel flew every which way.

Nocht’s advance halted immediately, and several tanks reversed as fast as they could, bumping into each other in disarray and panic as the artillery fell on them.

As one the defenders watched in awe as a second heavy shell fell and in a massive explosion tore apart three tanks covering the flank, leaving behind hulls that looked as though crushed under the feet of a giant, and covered in thick, black, choking smoke.

“That’s a ‘Vajra’ gun!” Sharna said in awe. “203mm. Spirits defend.”

Leander peeled his eyes away from the chaos and saw Sgt. Bahir’s secretary using Elena’s backpack radio. They were likely directing the fire on the thoroughfare from the train’s gun. He could hardly believe such destruction was possible.

Nocht was completely scattered.

One final shell and Leander could not even see the enemy anymore through the smoke and fire. They had been erased from existence. What Leander did to one man’s face just happened across a whole mess of tanks and men. He felt the rumbling of the shell falls across his chest, and heard the blast booming inside his head.

In his eyes the fire was trapped. He was purely in awe.

“Retreat to the train yard, comrades!” Sgt. Bahir shouted. “We must depart!”

Stumbling over sandbags and their own rifles the dazed and astonished trickle of soldiers, maybe eight or nine survivors at most, made their way back to the railroad. Some rode their horses, but many were so confused they were simply leading them along. Leander was one of them, blinking and hardly able to think. His own power seemed so shallow and small compared to such a thing! As he neared the rail yard he saw that massive gun, mounted on its own car in the armored train, firing incessantly to cover them.

A crew of twelve swung the piece around and focused fire on the central thoroughfare this time, now that the southeast was clear of the enemy. Men and women rushed into the infantry cars, and the surviving Orc tank took a concrete ramp onto the platform, and then climbed a special loading ramp onto its own metal container. Several goblin tanks from the Western thoroughfare, all remaining horses and a few trucks carrying surviving artillery pieces and crates of munitions were quickly loaded onto the train.

“Leander,”

He felt Bonde’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake again. He was at the platform. He had been walking all this time, but he was so out of it he did not notice. As he came to this realization an orderly took the horse from him and led it away.

“Get on the train. We’re going now. We lived through it!” Bonde said.

“Oh, right.”

“Come on, Elena and Sharna are already inside.”

Leander shook his head to clear it. “Oh, I said I would kiss your head.”

“I would rather you didn’t.” Bonde said, raising his hands nervously.

They climbed aboard an empty train car and sat in a corner next to Sharna and Elena. Several more soldiers arrived soon from the other thoroughfares and packed in. It was only an infantry car because it had slits out from which they should shoot. In reality it was a very bare car with nowhere to really sit but the floor. Elena unfurled her bedroll against the corner so the squadron could have something soft to rest their backs. Leander breathed heavily, and wiped the sweat from his face. He had survived. He had lived through it.

“Good work taking out the commander.” Sharna said, throwing an arm around Leander’s shoulder and pulling him close to herself, grinning all the while. “I saw it, right here! This boy, he blasted Nocht’s lieutenant right off his commander’s seat.”

Elena and Bonde blinked, and then cheered and patted Leander in praise.

Everyone else in the car, the eight or nine survivors of 824 Lion Company, clapped their hands and added their own compliments. It was a bright spot to them all in the confusion and for a moment they all reveled in it, and Leander thought they might throw him around the cart in celebration. He smiled a little, but had a hard time cheering.

“I did not do much! He was going to die anyway.” Leander protested.

“That doesn’t diminish what you did! That was a real hard shot you must have taken, Leander! Without any training!” Bonde said.

“I would rather shoot a tank next time.” Leander replied, laughing a little.

The train whistled again several times. Smoke started to rise overhead. They felt the car shake a little, and move. It was time to go: they had everyone and everything that could be taken from Knyskna. Slowly their train pushed forward, took a curve around the rail station and then hurtled its way out of the city again at quickly building speeds.

They were on their way to Dbagbo now, the territory adjacent Shaila.

They were safe. They had survived the Battle of Knyskna.

Leander sat back against the corner, staring at the BKV rifle laid beside him.

This was the man he had chosen to be. Or at least, that was what he thought.

He did not think he fully understood what that entailed yet.

28-AG-30: Djose Wood, 8th PzD Headquarters

Karla Schicksal pulled her headphones from over her ears and laid them gently on the makeshift table in front of her. She turned the knob on the radio, shutting it off entirely.

Overhead, Dreschner stared grimly at his own shoes, his hat pulled over his face.

In the gloomy interior of the Befehlspanzer, under the full Ayvartan moon, they were the victors, the takers of the spoils, the marchers triumphant. Knyskna was their dominion now. They had won, by the measure that Nocht used to gauge victory.

Oberkommando had its movement.

Now they just waited to know the price. Schicksal knew.

“Casualties are in.” She said, trying to render it in as neutral a voice as possible.

“Kunze is dead, isn’t he?” Dreschner said.

“Yes.” Schicksal replied. “Lentz and Reiniger managed to retreat in time to avoid the heavy howitzer barrage on the thoroughfares. By all accounts, Kunze and his men were completely lost to it. They were hit first on the arrival of the train.”

“Yes. They were the hardest running, the first ones into the maelstrom.”

Dreschner raised his hands to his face, rubbing his forehead.

“I was not altogether fond of Kunze. He was a wretch, but he had a knack for this line of work. Then I spurred him to die. I personally gambled with his life.”

Schicksal sighed. “We underestimated the enemy.”

Dreschner raised his head, and he stared at her suddenly as though surprised.

She felt a shock across her chest, as though his glance had stabbed her in the sternum and knocked her back. Her mind raced with reprimands to herself; she should’ve kept quiet, she should have stopped speaking out of turn a long time ago. And yet his eyes were not cold. He had a soft expression, like a parent looking fondly on a child.

He leaned back on his seat, with his hands over his knees, and gave a melancholy glance at all the maps, the photos, pinned around his space, the relics of this battle.

“We didn’t, Mäuschen. I underestimated them. And from me and my orders, it passed down to you, to Kunze, to all of them. I didn’t see that my hubris would become the hubris of the 8th Panzer Division. I didn’t see that my hubris, my pride, would kill us.”

Gently he pulled the photos and the maps down, and he crumpled them up and threw them out of the hatch. He sighed and drummed his fingers on the metal.

They were both quiet then, quiet almost through the rest of the night. Schicksal wondered if perhaps, it was not the hubris of all of Nocht that was becoming their hubris, appropriated by Dreschner, by the Lieutenants, all the way down to the troops.

Had it passed down to her too?

30th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E.

“Radio’s fixed! We reestablished contact.”

The Major looked over her shoulder from her desk, peeling herself away from the heavily marked maps and photographs strewn across it. She looked across the room, where the Secretary stood in the doorway, her hand on her heart and a little smile on her face. The Major nodded her head and the Secretary approached and sat across her.

“So, what is the news then?”

Her Secretary smiled wanly at her.

“Knyskna fell to the enemy, but they dealt a terrible blow to Nocht. Warden Kansal thinks she might be able to do something about the Council’s poor decision-making so far. Both their eyes are turning to Dbagbo now as the next major battlefield. Nocht has not yet moved toward it, but it’s only a matter of time until they do. The Warden also commends us on our brave efforts here, and asks that we hold on a little longer.”

“So; that’s useless.” The Major replied.

“It’s politics, you know. Let us hope it’s right politics, soon.” The Secretary smiled sadly and put her hand atop the Major’s, squeezing it in a gesture of solidarity.

Both of them cast their eyes together outside their window, across the ruins, where artillery shells fell unabated, and tanks rolled across the streets of the city. The sky was choked with smoke from fires and blasts, and hundreds, thousands, of soldiers fought across the blocks they could see from their position. The Major took in this sight, in part with melancholy, anger, regret, and in part with renewed determination.

Major Madiha Nakar, current head of Battlegroup of Ox as well the 3rd KVW Motor Rifles Division and the 5th KVW Mechanized Division, felt the tell-tale pain in her eyes, the eerie sense that blood was rushing to them and out of them, as she put her mind to work on a solution to the deadlock she and her forces had found themselves.

She had a battle to fight, and time was growing short. Nocht was closing in.

“So, what does this mean for us then? Knyskna?” Parinita asked.

“It means we’ll have to speed things up here.” Madiha said.

She looked out to a makeshift calendar on the wall, and swiped a little line across it with a pen. Hastily drawn up and written by Parinita, this record of their days was a grid of checkboxes to mark down.

At the top it read:

Adjar Dominance – Ox FOB “Madiha’s House”

[9th] Day of the Battle of Bada Aso.

NEXT CHAPTER in Generalplan Suden — The World Ablaze

The Battle of Knyskna I – Generalplan Suden

This chapter contains scenes of violence and death.

28th of the Aster’s Gloom, 2030 D.C.E

Shaila Dominance – South Knyskna, Outer Boroughs

Atop the M3 Hunter a squat, round protrusion easily mistaken for a headlight turned a glass eye on its surroundings. With the periscope the tank commander retained a broad field of vision obstructed only by the form of the tank around them – its height, its broadness, and any open hatches, against which a clever enemy could hide.

There was no such enemy in sight. Around Knyskna the fields were empty. Pillboxes had been abandoned. Trenches had long since been blasted out of existence. Scars cut into the ground by the artillery remained untouched. Kampfgruppe R was eerily alone, save for the smattering of their own recon men, armed escorts in half-track motorcycles.

Ayvartan cities did not have outer walls, at least insofar as the Heer or Army had seen. Ayvarta never went through a period of castling all of its major villages, like the Nochtish had in their antiquity. Ayvartan history had not been as openly barbarous.

Solstice was the one exception they knew, and its walls were prodigious.

But unlike Solstice, Knyskna rose starkly from the surrounding countryside. One step transitioned dirt to paved road, and open field to the first boroughs. There was no barrier. Knyskna was open for the taking. The panzers restarted their engines and advanced.

The M3s trundled forward from the field into the city over the sparse rubble that remained after the aerial bombardment, and past the ghostly defenses on the outskirts. A platoon of assault guns, five machines in all; they advanced in two columns of two tanks with a lead tank following in their wake. They were the first platoon of the southern salient to bite into the city. A platoon of M4s followed a thousand meters behind.

M3 Hunters were slow machines, and better armored, so they set the marching order.

Each platoon was accompanied by five half-tracked motorcycles each carrying three men, one a driver. South Knyskna had the broadest roads, supporting four wide lanes of traffic climbing almost imperceptibly uphill, and the men and tanks fit with room to spare.

Old buildings flanked the invaders on either side, most built of wafer-like brick but many of thick, hardy modern cement. While some had been bombed out and even smashed nearly flat, several blocks stood tall despite the bombing. The tight blocks were broken occasionally by tighter connecting roads and streets between buildings. Their smashed windows and doors were like black eyes, looming over the grenadiers and tankers.

Only heat and distance rendered the city’s heart hazy – the tanks would have otherwise had an unbroken sight-line across the main thoroughfare and right into the Communist base.

Engines burned and treads turned tirelessly. They advanced several careful kilometers into the city, kilometers that they had been warned would be hard-fought for.

The M3s and their motor escorts stopped almost halfway to the city center, and the M4s, having lagged to over a kilometer behind the advance also cut their engines. The platoons had achieved their afternoon objectives in record time, and there was a mood of jubilation among them. Atop the motorcycles the recon men cracked open their ration tins, and in the tanks men inadvisably lit cigarettes for one another and laughed.

The commies had given up!

The tank Sergeant of the assault gun platoon cracked a broad grin as he picked up his transmitter and radioed Lt. Reiniger, in charge of Kampfgruppe R. He gloated about the unfettered advance of his platoon, and about the craven cowardice of his foes.

“Well, shit. Keep advancing. Advance until you take the city or confront an enemy.”

Lt. Reiniger cut radio contact abruptly. His tank platoons sighed among themselves, having dreamt of a good smoke break in the ruins. They stowed their tins, stomped out their smoke-sticks, and took uncomfortable swigs of tepid beer to try to still their nerves. Once everyone was ready they started their engines and trundled forward anew.

Soon they spied the city center, almost clear through the light haze and distortions of the hot Ayvartan sun. It was still kilometers away but through the periscopes it seemed almost adjacent to them, at the end of the long, open southern thoroughfare.

Direct-fire range was 2000 meters, with a good sight-line.

They saw smoke rising in the distance – it was a train leaving the city.

“Shift gears and charge into gun range!” Radioed the tank sergeant to the platoon. “We’ve only a few kilometers to go! We will not let the enemy escape from here!”

Engines grunted under increased strain and treads turned ever faster as the tanks sped toward their optimal range. Periscopes raised, gunners already sighting, the M3s hurled themselves toward the enemy across the unbroken cement tiles of the Ayvartan roads.

The formation tightened and the half-tracked motorcycles sped ahead of the tanks, the men riding them raising their rifles to the second stories to watch for AT snipers.

Behind them the M4s hurried to cut their own distance to the vanguard.

As they moved the outer boroughs transitioned quickly to the inner city. Buildings gradually rose and broadened, taking on new faces – theaters and drug stores and goods shops and other necessities and pleasures proferred under the hydra-headed banner of the government, took the place of the old brick houses and lodges of the outer boroughs.

Around them the main road narrowed slightly but grew two pedestrian streets giving ample room to move. Sewer grates and manhole covers appeared across the slightly bulging stone tiles of the main road, under which the stone arches of the old sewer network easily supported the weight of the charging tanks.

Periscopes tightened their field of view and focused on the base ahead, zooming in across the thoroughfare. Nothing was coming their way.

Nothing impeded their advance.

Attached motorcycle troops kept their eyes peeled while traveling across the few broad intersections and past the alleys, but as a whole the buildings were more tightly packed and it seemed that opportunities for ambush had grown scarcer the further in they traveled.

“Do not slow! We can overtake them! Faster, drive right into the guts of the city!”

Heeding the tank sergeant all of the men pushed their vehicles to top gear.

Dozens of meters ahead of the tanks the two leading motorcycles buckled suddenly, tipping forward and back on a series of hereto unseen broken tiles.

They were given no chance to stabilize.

A blast from underneath consumed both the vehicles, tossing the front wheels and chains of track across the streets and scattering pieces of once whole men even farther.

Remaining motorcycles cut their engines in horror and skidded hard onto the adjacent streets, avoiding the craters beyond which more mines surely lay.

Vanguard tanks braked suddenly, stalling the advancing column amid the carnage.

Hatches went up, and the assault gun commanders peered out into the smoke and debris ahead of them with their own eyes, incredulous. They turned to the recon men left alive, shocked dumb on the streets, and shouted their commands over the sudden silence.

“Don’t just sit there, pull out a bangalore and clear the mines!”

Assault guns faced forward, guarding against targets along the road. M4 Sentinel tanks started to catch up to the vanguard and raised their barrels to cover the higher stories and the roofs. Several surviving recon soldiers linked up with the new arrivals guarding the M4s and together they began to assemble their bangalores, long tube charges that could potentially detonate the hidden minefield ahead in its entirety once installed.

Regardless of setbacks there were ten tanks and twenty men in the column, and despite the minefield, and the flesh of six soldiers splashed across the street, morale was still high. There were no side streets near them, and they had a clear view of the Communist base.

There was no enemy presence to meet them, only desperate defenses.

Soldiers laid the long bangalores down across the minefield and detonated the charges. In an instant fifteen meters length of the road ahead of them went up in feeble flames and smoke. The recon infantry carefully inspected ahead of where their bangalores had blown and found little to arouse suspicion. They waved their hands, and the engines all growled to life again. It was time to clear the final leg of their charge and engage the enemy base.

Hatches went down, cannons faced forward and treads methodically turned.

A periscope among the vanguard caught a glimpse of shock on a recon soldier’s face.

“Contact!” shouted the man, and he turned his rifle on an adjacent building.

His lips mouthed the beginnings of a new word but never spoke it.

His fellows turned but their rifles never found targets.

Not a second passed since the shout that the fizz of a charge, unheard beneath the engines, sparked a series of explosive bundles installed beneath the column.

Violent explosions ripped through the surface.

Underground, the archways toppled; the road collapsed into the sewer.

Through the smoke and fire the recon men and their motorcycles were consumed by the yawning earth, buried helplessly in the rock or blasted apart.

Vanguard tanks unlucky enough to have parked directly over an archway burst into flames, their turrets launching from their hulls from the force of the charges and flung against adjacent buildings like toys. Men trapped inside were butchered by spraying metal as their hatches blew in, their ammo cooked, and screws and instruments turned to shrapnel.

Slow M3 assault guns had no time and no possible reaction to the chaos unfolding, and when the ground beneath them ceased to be they crashed harshly atop heaps of rubble, falling over ten meters below. Treads and road wheels smashed apart and engine compartments burst open from the violence. Crews were battered dead or unconscious.

A pit thirty meters long and ten meters wide was all that remained after the carnage.

One M4 Sentinel found itself half without earth to stand on and before it could move far enough it tipped forward, falling gun-first into the pit – the remainder of its platoon were rewarded for their sluggish advance with their lives, but only for the moment.

Before the smoke could clear, anti-tank rifle shots plinked off the turret and glacis plates of the remaining tanks, alerting them to the presence of an engaging enemy. From four surrounding rooftops appeared small squadrons armed with BKV 14.5mm anti-tank rifles, shooting at the surviving tanks.

The doors to a theater up the street burst open and a crew pushed out a 45mm anti-tank gun, firing a shot over the pit that crashed into the mantlet armor of an M4 and left a sizable dent. Through their periscopes the shell-shocked tank crews watched Ayvartan men and women run out of buildings and huddle in the cover of a street corner a block ahead, with Rasha submachine guns and DNV light machine guns ready to fire on the glass of their ports and hatches. There were suddenly dozens of the enemy upon the Nocht tankers.

Overwhelmed by the events the tank crews shut themselves in their vehicles, closing every hatch, and did not hesitate to back up the street as fast as their treads could reverse.

Gunners loaded High-Explosive into the 50mm High-Velocity guns on the M4s and took running shots over the pit, smashing unoccupied sections of the street, taking out chunks of the theater facade but not the AT gun in front of it, and blasting windows and the corners of building roofs. There was little avail from their inaccurate moving fire.

Compared to the stronger 75mm guns on the lost M3s the M4’s explosive round had a limited area and a weaker punch on the surrounding buildings.

Fiercely the Communists returned every shot however they could, punching holes into the periscopes and headlights of the tanks, opening fire on the viewing ports and hatches to keep them pinned, and throwing shell after 45mm shell against the strong glacis plates of the M4s. Though they did not penetrate, each blast against the glacis that did not rebound entirely left dents and stressed the welding and rocked the tank, startling the crew; and though BKVs and DNVs could not penetrate the medium armor, they kept the tank blind.

Mere minutes trapped inside the rocking steel hulls and the crews had already become disoriented and lost, unable to count on anything but the gunnery port to track the enemy.

In a desperate measure the top hatches on several of the tanks opened once more, and commanders and radio personnel with submachine guns exposed themselves and returned fire. Shells and bullets ricocheting all around them on the tank’s armor, these impromptu gunners sprayed bullets haplessly on the rooftops and streets, hoping to suppress the enemy.

Communist troops saw bullets come flying their way. They huddled behind the edges of their roofs and the thick metal shields of their 45mm guns to avoid the automatic fire.

For a moment the inferno sputtered and gave the tanks their chance to pull away from the ambush. Frantically the surviving tank commanders of the four remaining M4s dove into their tanks and radioed Lt. Reiniger and General Dreschner, screaming that a trap had decimated the Kampfgruppe and that ground would have to be ceded to survive.

28-AG-30: Knyskna, Southeast Inner Boroughs FOB

Knyskna’s southeastern thoroughfare began out in the Djose, along a dirt road that passed through and connected the wood and the field into the city proper. Along the edge of the city the dirt road transitioned to a paved thoroughfare, and sparse blocks of buildings spread many meters apart and flanked the road. Despite this it remained tighter than the main southern road or the western road, and grew more so the deeper it extended.

Unlike both of those roads, Southeast Knyskna curved sharply in two places. First it bent starkly northwest out of the outer boroughs and into the inner city portion of the thoroughfare, and then it cut even more sharply westward to connect to the city center.

It had been a place full of homes and canteens, markets hosting the villagers that had come from out of the Djose, and artisans of similar origin. Compared to the grandiose main thoroughfare with its theaters and drug stores and its big names written in lights, the southeast was comfortable and homey and had played host to many little peoples.

One could have called it a historic place.

Yet many days ago the Luftlotte’s attack hit this little-known place hardest. Bombers avoided the heavy air defenses south of the city by looping around the Djose and closing in from the east, and the little-known markets, canteens and homes, and the little-known villagers that lived and worked there, were caught in the blaze.

Explosives disgorged brick and wood and cement in mounds over the road, and toppled whole structures over the thoroughfare. People ran screaming as the air raid sirens blared and the world collapsed around them. There was little difference now between the thoroughfare and the alleyways and streets branching from them – all of the outer borough and most of the inner borough had become a maze choked at every turn with rubble.

Tanks and motorcycle troops would find it hard to operate in the choked southeastern boroughs, at least until they made it to the cleaner westward bend into the city center.

So the plan was contingent on keeping them in the rubble as long as possible.

Forward observers had already spotted the tanks moving into the city.

Knyskna’s 824th Lion Company, under Sergeant Bahir in the absence of their deceased Lieutenant, counted on the inhospitable terrain as their chief advantage.

Facades that had been blown open by bombs revealed ruined interiors to the wandering troops. Standing doorways opened toward choked stairways and largely collapsed stories, the remaining high ground accessible by climbing the mounds of rubble in the rooms.

Many buildings that from the outside still seemed to stand were occupied only by their collapsed upper floors, each story piled directly atop the ground floor. These were useless to the Company. Most buildings sadly were: they had largely become indistinct hills of piled rock, and a few had been blasted to the point that they were nothing but stark, chalky foundation lines. The material that once stood over these lines now littered the roads, in many cases blocking off those pathways. In places it was as though whole buildings had been plucked from the earth and casually thrown over alleys and across the main street.

Forward elements of 824th Company assembled deep the inner city portion of the southeast thoroughfare. The buildings there were just right for a temporary base.

Eight-Two-Four had established a Forward Operating Base in a large building just off the corner from where the thoroughfare bent westward. Most of the rooftop and third floor had collapsed, but two other floors had their walls and facade mostly intact.

There were many good and sturdy window frames to shoot out of, big rooms to hold meetings and store supplies, and many of the neighboring buildings shared a similar condition. Therefore it was an accessible, defensible position that was not immediately discernible to the enemy. Advancing forces would only see a ruin before it was too late.

Inside, a 45mm anti-tank gun laid in ambush, pointed south off the bend and ready to hit any tanks trying to make the turn unawares – hopefully in the flanks. In a pinch, it could also be elevated to fire over the rubble as long as a radio observer could sight for it.

It was poor artillery, but it was the only field gun they had at the FOB.

A gaggle of troops waited for orders. The FOB temporarily housed the defenders, their weapons and ammunition and their one good long-range radio receiver. The defenders consisted of two platoons forward, forty-eight soldiers in total. Their remaining platoon was three kilometers away preparing another defensive line, with their two Orc tanks in position and their three functioning 120mm Mortars ready to support the forward elements.

Stationed at the rear, an anti-aircraft gun of 85mm caliber was depressed as low as it could go to use as a last-resort direct fire gun for the very last line of the defense.

All the combat platoons were incomplete. Nobody had what was written on paper.

Soldiers were needed to help Bahir as a headquarters troop. In addition several soldiers huddled in alleyways along the thoroughfare, given the crucial task of caring for the horses that would quickly transport survivors between the defensive lines if a retreat was ever necessary. Trucks and tanks would have just slowed them down if used in this role.

Ambush platoons prepared for battle. They knew all too well now that their position bore the crucial task of delaying the enemy as much as possible. From crates laid down atop the uneven, rock-strewn floors of the FOB, the forward troops picked up new weapons.

Men and women lined up, trading their Rasha submachine guns and Bundu bolt-action rifles for heavier weapons: DNV-28 Light Machine Guns, long automatic rifles that loaded from ninety-round pans set across the top of the weapon; and the pipe-like BKV Anti-Tank rifles, large and somewhat unwieldy. Everyone had pouches of grenades, and even a few explosive mines. A few persons, dispersed among the squads, received backpack radios.

Leander was one of the men lining up for a new weapon. In the distance, he heard the explosions, and saw clouds of cement dust and shell smoke mingling over the far end of the outer borough. Nocht tanks were blasting their way in. A quartermaster gave him a BKV and a side-arm, a small semi-automatic pistol that fit his delicate hands well. He did not have a proper holster for a side-arm, however. He stowed it in an empty pouch.

He grouped up with his squadron in one of the rooms on the ground floor, a nursery that was empty save for a strangely macabre series of baby cribs untouched by the violence. He was quite happy that Bonde and Elena remained with him. They had both been given DNV LMGs, and both of them seemed daunted by the chances their weapons stood against a Panzerdivision. Elena also carried the additional burden of a backpack radio, while Bonde once again bore a signal flare gun, with the same purpose as before.

“Looks like we’ll be depending on Leander to help us with the tanks.” Bonde said.

Leander gulped. “I’m not sure why they decided I’d be suited for this.”

“I’m positive they just handed these out randomly.” Elena said.

“Got any advice?” Leander asked his comrades, sounding helpless.

“I learned a little bit from basic training. Aim for flat surfaces in the back of the tank, the tops of the turrets, or at the wheels between the treads. Those spots tend to be vulnerable to BKVs. Don’t shoot at the front armor – it is too thick for that gun.” Bonde said.

“Yes, that. What he said to do.” Elena shrugged. Leander smiled at her.

“Hujambo!”

Reflexively, the squad replied to the traditional greeting with Hujambo! of their own. A young Arjun woman walked through the open doorway, a BKV rifle slung over her shoulder, and stood before them. She bowed a little. She had a vibrant face, with a lovely smile and a richly brown complexion and long, silky black hair down to the waist. Her build was somewhat round and plump for her size, which was actually rather tall.

Leander thought she had probably been a civilian like him.

“I’m Private Sharna Mahajan.” She said, still smiling at them all. “I was told this is where Squad Three was meeting. I’ve been assigned here as an Anti-Tank riflewoman!”

Elena and Bonde stared at her, but Leander did not find her enthusiasm strange at all. Her cheer felt contagious, and soon Leander was replying back in a gregarious tone of voice as well. “Yes, you’ve got the right place comrade! We are happy to join hands in the struggle! Did you get your rifle out of a crate purely at random as well?”

“Oh no comrade, this is my rifle. I completed my training a few years ago and took a leave until things took a turn recently. My platoon was mostly lost in the Djose assault, so I was reassigned. You will be pleased to know I am a dedicated AT riflewoman.”

Leander clapped his hands. Elena and Bonde’s jaws hung, looking stunned.

Aside from Sergeant Bahir, Private Mahajan was then perhaps the first real, fully trained soldier either of them had personally met. They quickly moved ahead of Leander and shook Sharna’s hand, and she smiled and laughed and shook hands very graciously.

Leander thought nothing of it and joined the hand shaking, until Sharna’s hands were thoroughly shaken.

“Ahh, so welcoming!” She giggled. “You all are nothing like my old squadron from the 8243rd. So stodgy. May their spirits rest in peace!” She clasped her hand together as though in prayer and quickly muttered an Arjun chant under her breath, without turning her face away from her squad mates or breaking eye contact at all. It was strange for Leander, who knew very little about Arjun traditions. They were the majority of the Ayvartan population, but Leander had never had much cause to interact deeply with them.

“We are quite glad to serve with you.” Elena said

“Might I ask who our squad leader is?” Sharna said.

Elena pointed at Bonde. “That would be this guy. Private First-Class Bonde Okiro.”

“I received the promotion this morning.” Bonde said. “It is not important.”

Sharna saluted him. “I’ll follow all orders to the best of my abilities. I can hit a field mouse from 500 meters away, and I have already destroyed a vehicle in this war!”

Leander whistled, standing in awe of the woman. “Was it a tank?” He asked.

“It was a motorcycle! My BKV shot took the front wheel off!” She declared proudly.

There was a bit of silence for a moment as Sharna puffed herself up with victory.

“Well, that is better than what any of us have personally done.” Elena said soberly.

“Does the armored car count? I feel like I did a lot to it.” Leander said.

Nobody responded.

They heard a whistle from outside the room and gathered by the door to the hostel with a variety of people from the other squadrons. Atop a small, ruined indoor fountain, Sergeant Bahir stood over the platoons. He lifted his fist into the air, extending his arm completely.

A few people in the room joined him, Bonde one of them.

The fist was a revolutionary gesture that arose within the groups that became the KVW and overthrow the Empire; but its use declined except with the more fervent communists.

Sgt. Bahir held the fist for a full minute, his head bowed.

“It is sad to me how this gesture has been made to disappear.” He said.

Everyone in the crowd stood at attention. They stood to take in their orders, to hear the plan – but Leander knew they also, more than that, wanted to hear that they stood a chance. So far the war was something none of them could have seen coming, and every battle had ended in defeat and retreat. Leander had heard the others talk of officers killed in bombings, of tanks lost by the hundreds in the Tukino pocket. He himself was motivated enough – he wanted to see Solstice. But as a whole the troops needed reassuring.

Sgt. Bahir gestured out past a blasted window frame, to the rubble-choked thoroughfare, a maze of ghostly bombed-out buildings flanking mounds of debris and overturned structures blocking the road. “The same bombing that claimed this hostel, claimed many of our comrades. It claimed the Lieutenants who trained us and many of the people who support and supply us. It claimed much of our strength. But today, it will also claim one final victim – the enemy’s hope of thoroughly destroying us!”

Leander looked across the room. Almost everyone in attendance was fairly young. Most were older than he – Leander was barely a few months past 18 – but not older than the Sergeant. He looked to be pushing forty. The Lieutenants had all been older, or so he had heard. The Territorial army saw little conflict in many years, and its ranks remained static as its staff grew old. In one fell swoop they had been lost – and so a group of Sergeants commanded Companies in the chaos. To Leander though, Bahir was like an old General from the stories of cavalry and swordsmen that got told around the caravan. He was tall and sleek and gallant like a Lendian knight. His real rank didn’t matter to Leander.

“We are not individuals.” Sgt. Bahir continued. “Our enemies believe our camaraderie and empathy are our weakness. But an Ayvartan never fights alone. We are units! We are a community, we are a combat force, we are platoons and squads; we are comrades. And even when individuals are lost, a community survives. Our objective here is to survive and nothing more. Several trains are scheduled to come and to go throughout the day, ferrying our comrades and whatever valuable materiel remains in the city out to the Dbagbo dominance. Many of these people have not fired a shot, but they have contributed to the conditions necessary for us to fight. Our objective is to buy time for these beloved comrades: for our guardians, for our loved ones, for our friends, for people we don’t know, and even for people we might hate, to escape the enemy and continue the struggle.”

Everyone watched, some looking exhausted, others rapt, but all respectful.

“You will group up into 10 assigned squadrons. Most of you have radios. You will ambush and harass the enemy along with your comrades. We have indirect fire support from three 120mm mortars as well as the 45mm gun here in the FOB. Observers have already spotted tanks moving in – and you have already heard them moving in yourselves. I will not lie, we are not adequately equipped to destroy a Nocht Panzerdivisione. But we can and must slow them down. In coordination via radio, we will resist the advance of the imperialists. We will disperse into the rock, but we will not huddle like they intend us to. We will strike them from every direction. We will fight bitterly. But we will not die.”

Sgt. Bahir turned to face the city center with a flourish.

He raised his voice even more.

“Nobody here will become a martyr! We will survive. In the evening, an armored train will come to cover our escape and ferry us to safety. Keep this hope in mind, and fight to see it. Aim for their tracks, aim for their hatches, aim for exposed men. If you must, retreat to a defensible position. And if they take the FOB we will retreat to the second thoroughfare bend, where we have Orc tanks and a heavy 85mm gun waiting. And if they force us back then we will fight for every piece of track in that rail-yard. We will use every available tool to disrupt and maim the invaders! If they want this rubble, they will bleed for it!”

Sgt. Bahir raised his fist again. Leander raised his own fist almost without thinking – and so did every single other person in the lobby. This was perhaps the speech they needed.

The Sergeant got off from the fountain and the crowd parted as he joined his impromptu staff in his command room. Small hand-drawn maps of the thoroughfare were handed out to each squadron, marking the large clusters of rubble throughout the roads, as well as the positions of escape horses in alleyways. Relative positions for each squadron were listed on the map: Leander’s Squad III would be in the thick of it.

Leander joined Elena and Bonde and newcomer Sharna in front of the FOB and they set off, marching toward the ambush point. They walked across low-lying rubble and over a few eerie stretches of clean road. Far ahead they spotted a thick tangle of debris from a toppled building blocked their view of the road. A window frame along the side of the mass survived the collapse and seemed like the entrance to a labyrinth. It looked ominous.

Soon they reached this obstacle and stood before it in mute awe.

“Well then. I guess it’s time to dig and climb.” Elena said exasperatedly.

“I’m ready when you are, sir!” Sharna said, smiling and saluting Bonde.

“Please don’t call me sir,” Bonde said gently.

“I’m also ready to go, sir!” Leander saluted, miming Sharna.

Bonde shook his head at them. Elena laughed a little. Together they navigated through the rubble. Leander felt an inkling of trepidation, a shaking at the tips of his fingers and feet as he felt the heavy AT rifle at his back, and the shifting rubble below and around him, and heard the explosions far out into the thoroughfare, but he kept himself focused and tried to grin and bear it all. The type of man Leander wanted to be was strong and reliable and committed, and to that kind of man, this trek was no dire ordeal. He had to be brave.

Beyond this rubble, beyond those tanks, he knew Solstice awaited him.

28-AG-30: Djose Wood, 8th PzD Headquarters Area

Karla Schicksal maintained radio communication with the different Kampfgruppe, tracking their progress and reporting to Dreschner, seated above her in the Befehlspanzer with his headphones off, tapping his fingers on the iron walls of the tank.

Kampfgruppe K under the command of Lt. Kunze was advancing sluggishly toward its first objectives in the southeast; Kampfgruppe L under Lt. Lenz made decent progress in the West despite tight roads and rubble; Kampfgruppe R under Lt. Reiniger, tasked with the important main thoroughfare in the South, was not cooperating with her.

Schicksal contacted Reiniger various times, and very few times did he reply.

She did not at all intend to cover for him, but she gave him some slack, knowing him a capable enough officer and a willful sort. Reporting to Dreschner, she told him that everything was going to plan and that no engagements were reported. He was satisfied enough with this. “Tell them to give a detailed report at the first objective areas.”

“Yes sir.” She replied. This type of instruction appealed to her. Dreschner being hands-off in these situations was for the best. It meant she had to make no judgment calls.

She sent the message to each crew in turn. Though the Befehlspanzer’s radio could collect multiple frequencies worth of incoming audio in one feed that she and Dreschner could hear, it could only transmit to specific Kampfgruppe channels at a time.

Dreschner hardly ever listened in – it distracted him.

After sending her instructions and receiving replies, she would notify him of what was said instead. Late morning and early noon passed slowly this way, hearing routine reports. She liked the voices of the men (and the very few women) on the radio – the dedicated signals officers were soft spoken and had clear, interesting voices, unlike the fighting crew.

By noon the first objectives should have been seized, and enemy contact long ago reported. Kunze reported his objective and held for instructions; Lentz did the same; both reported no enemy contact. Reiniger reported nothing. Schicksal gave him the benefit of the doubt at first, but then Kunze and Lentz reported advances towards their second objectives, and Reiniger still did not call. He was far past due for a reprimand now.

Schicksal could no longer ignore Reiniger’s foolishness.

She put down her headset and turned on her seat to face General Dreschner, who noticed immediately. “Something wrong?” He asked, still drumming his fingers on the steel.

“Lt. Reiniger’s reports have been sporadic and vague, and for the past hour or so he has not reported anything at all. What’s more worrying sir, is that none of the Kampfgruppe have reported enemy contacts at all throughout the operation. Something is not right.”

“Of course, it had to be Reiniger,” Dreschner grit his teeth. “That insubordinate clod. Had he any less skill or any less trust from his men I would sack him.”

“What should I do, sir?”

“Contact the fool and put him through to me. Accept no excuses.”

Schicksal nodded and put her headset back on and indicated for Dreschner to do the same. She turned back to her radio set, turned the dial to the correct frequency, and picked up her transmitter. Flipping a switch, she spoke calmly into her transmitter.

“8th PzD HQ to Lt. Reiniger, report your progress and disposition, this is 8th PzD–”

“Progress and disposition is everything’s fucked, lady!” Lt. Reiniger shouted.

Schicksal cringed from the sudden, sharp cracking of his voice over the radio.

She heard gunfire around him and the sharp retort of his tank’s cannon firing. Despite the ambient noise it was the voices that disturbed her the most. She had never heard Reiniger sound so anxious and so loud. Dreschner was by that point listening in with his own headset. His face was contorting with anger and confusion. He tapped his headset.

“I’m here as well you thug, do not shout into the radio!” Dreschner said.

Reiniger paused at the Brigadier-Generals’ voice. They heard nothing but his breathing for an awkward moment. “Well, shit sir. I thought I could fix it myself but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to report, we have just gone and lost some tanks to the commies.”

“Explain you miserable idiot! Why have you not been reporting your advance?”

“Sir,” Reiniger began, which for him, was rare and dire a thing to say indeed, “Kampfgruppe R captured its objectives early and met no resistance. I ordered them to advance until they made contact with an enemy, and I was so focused on command–”

“You clown! Of course they were trying to lead you into an ambush!”

“I’m going to need a losses report for the Logistics crew,” Schicksal meekly interjected.

Dreschner waited with clenched teeth and fists for Reiniger to deliver the report.

“Six tanks knocked out.” Reiniger said, his voice growing more guttural and restrained, as though he felt the General’s hands choking him. “All escorts and their motorcycles too.”

“How the hell did this happen?” Dreschner shouted suddenly.

Reiniger devolved into a pronounced stutter. “They blew up the floor right from under ’em. We didn’t know there was a sewer or bombs there sir! All the assault guns collapsed or blew up, and an M4 fell in from not retreating fast enough. All the men had been clearing a minefield when the charges went off, so it took them all too. Remaining M4s are retreating back to the first objectives. But sir, I believe we’ve got a bigger problem.”

Schicksal’s head hurt, Dreschner and Reiniger’s shouting bouncing around inside her skull. Dreschner was shaking from head to toe in anger, and he spoke as though to an archenemy rather than a subordinate. “You are dangerously close to the edge Lieutenant! I should like to know what you have to report, with your record this blackened!”

There was audible gulping on the other end. “We’ve been trying to fight back with just the M4’s but their High Explosive is garbage. I’ve got reports that even the fucked-up–”

“Mind your filthy tongue when you talk to me you pig!” Dreschner shouted. Schicksal nearly cried out in pain, her hands going up to her earpieces and almost ripping them from her head. She had barely restrained herself from doing so in Dreschner’s presence.

“The M4’s guns can’t even break the ruined buildings the communists are hiding in, sir.” Reiniger said, clearly putting in the effort to affect a dialect more in kind with Dreschner and Schicksal’s speech. “Sir, we need more 75mm assault guns out here and fast if we want to break the main thoroughfares. That 50mm won’t cut it, sir, it’s too limited!”

“Your head is too limited.” Dreschner said, in a low and bitter voice that was far more comforting for Schicksal than the screaming. “You know we don’t have equal amounts of M3s and M4s. Your men will hold their position until the next wave of your Company reaches them, and those will be the last assault guns you will receive, Reiniger.”

Dreschner swiped his hand across his own neck, and Schicksal turned the dial, cutting Reiniger off. Immediately the Brigadier-General turned around and tore some photos that had been taped up from the wall of the tank. He pored over them, flipping between them rapidly, looking over the South roads as photographed days and days ago.

“Knyskna’s main thoroughfare is wide enough for a larger formation than the five-tank advances we were using.” He said, aloud but to himself, Schicksal knew. His mind was racing through possible options. “Six tanks, two rows of three, both M4 and M3.”

He looked up from the photos, and then back down, but at Schicksal instead of his own hands. “Send word to Kunze and Lentz to watch for ambush and avoid overextension. They will expand cautiously past the first objective, with an eye toward the roofs–”

Schicksal turned the dial mindlessly to execute the order, but the radio rewarded her efforts with a blast of static and noise that pummeled her senses.

She winced and stifled a cry, almost in tears now from the unprecedented abuse her ears had received in such a short span, but ever the professional she grit her teeth and got to work, adjusting the sound as best as she could with the radio’s controls. Within moments the mess of noise and static became the frantic voices of Kunze and his tank commanders and the ambient chaos around them, together flooding through the airwaves.

“They’re under attack sir!’ She said. “Kampfgruppe K was ambushed in the southeast!”

28-AG-30: Knyskna, Southeast Thoroughfare

Leander felt his heart beating hard in his chest.

He kept himself pressed against a corner of the room, his rifle in a stiff grip in his hands. As the tanks thundered closer the vibrations along the cement walls transferred to his body and sunk deep into his gut. He tried to be strong, and he endured the situation as much as he could, but the noise and smell and the shaking was turning his stomach.

Sharna lay against the wall on the opposite side of a blasted-out window frame from him. Their dilapidated hideout overlooked the road and made a prime sniping spot – Sharna herself picked it out. She raised her finger to her mouth to signal quiet, and shifted her eyes toward the window. Leander stood carefully beside the frame and peered out.

A column of five assault guns, turretless tanks, advanced in a tight formation, two wide, two deep with a fifth vehicle trailing behind. Leander had committed to memory pictures of the tanks they would be facing, and knew these to be M3 Hunters.

With their guns mounted on the right side of the tank, they would have to turn dramatically to attack Leander’s position, which menaced them from their left. Their awkward design, lack of a machine gun and their engine power meant, according to the notes he had read, that they would be quite vulnerable during such a maneuver.

He took heart in this weakness and hoped he could exploit it.

But the tanks were not completely alone.

Among the armored column traveled over fifteen men, three in a motorcycle, but most on foot – the motorcycle had to start and stop and struggle through the debris beneath and around the column. They were not outfitted for house to house fighting. They had no automatic weapons, only long bolt-action rifles like the ones Leander saw them use when fighting in the woods, and they seemed to struggle with the terrain as they moved.

In addition to the men Leander still heard noises in the distance of tanks blasting at debris, so he knew that the vanguard of the enemy probably counted on reinforcements. Their ambush had to be sprung soon before the rest of the enemy’s tanks caught up to the vulnerable M3s. Every additional tank cratered their chances of success.

Everyone waited for the signal to attack. Below them the Nochtish men kept their eyes to the road and advanced clumsily. Whenever they looked overhead they focused on roofs and balconies and cast only brief glances. They did not know that the buildings ahead and around them were taken up by men and women ready to die fighting them.

When Sgt. Agewa or Sgt. Ibori launched their attacks, it was likely that knowledge of this would be disseminated quickly across Nocht’s forces. They would become far more aware of their surroundings. It was critical to launch their ambushes as soon as possible and with some level of coordination. This was the importance of their radios.

Leander looked behind himself, across the ruined room, where a depression in the floor led to a fairly intact staircase. Elena and Bonde crouched there, waiting to ambush any troops that rushed into the building – and also listening to the backpack radio. When it was time to attack, Elena would let them know with a thumbs up from the staircase.

Leander lifted his rifle for no specific purpose. He could not yet fire, but with every movement he felt more used to its weight, better able to heft it and aim down the sights and quickly take a shot. It was not so different from a Bundu, it was only heavier.

He moved it, and pulled bolt to check the chamber, and felt that these small things could be preparation enough. It helped keep him focused through the rumbling.

“Shoot at the tanks ahead of the column. That will slow them all down.” Sharna said softly, fidgeting absentmindedly with the length of her rifle. “Try to hit the flat, depressed bed right behind the cannon housing. It is the thinnest armor, and right over the engine.”

“Alright,” Leander mouthed, nodding his head to acknowledge her.

They heard a light tapping on the floor behind them, and looked back to see Elena’s hand, raised in a thumbs-up. The time had come for the ambush.

Sharna and Leander stood fully erect against opposite sides of the window frame, their rifles in hand. In this position they were still concealed from the enemy, but could easily fire and take cover before the infantry could get them. They were ready to fight.

Nocht’s tank column was now a short ways past their building, but still well within the BKV rifle’s optimal anti-armor range of 100 to 300 meters. Leander’s five-round internal magazine was already loaded, and he only needed to shoot – the BKV was semi-automatic, a real marvel of a weapon. Leander hardly knew the advantages of this trait.

Sharna took a deep, audible breath, braced her rifle against her shoulder, raised the barrel out the hole in the window frame and took aim while standing on her feet.

In an instant she opened fire, a loud echoing boom issuing from the gun as its 14.5 mm projectile screamed out, the stock pounding against Sharna’s shoulder but hardly rocking her expert stance. She stabilized within seconds and fired again.

Leander stifled a surprised gasp at her and hastily joined the attack, aiming poorly and letting loose a hasty shot – the round ripped from the barrel with a noise like thunder, and the stock pounded his shoulder and nearly pushed him a step back. It was certain to bruise.

The projectile struck the lower left side of an M3 and did seemingly nothing to the track. In a panic the enemy footsoldiers raised their guns and opened on the window.

Leander returned immediately to cover.

From three buildings across the street came similar volleys of sustained anti-tank fire.

Sharna ignored the enemy’s rounds pounding uselessly against the concrete wall around her. She leaned out and fired twice more at Leander’s previous target in quick succession, punching two visible holes into the bed behind the cannon housing.

Her target stalled, black wisps fuming from inside the engine compartment.

Under accurate fire from a building directly overlooking it, four smoking holes quickly appeared on the bed of another leading M3, causing it to stall near its companions.

Nochtish men huddled behind rocks and near stalled tanks, shouting Hinterhalt! as the battle was joined in earnest. With their way blocked by their immobilized lead tanks the remaining three M3s in the back started the laborious process of turning, slowly shifting their glacis plates so that their guns could face toward the buildings and open fire.

“Tracks now, try to aim for the tracks!” Sharna shouted, pausing to work her bolt and load a new clip. “Aim for the farthest tank from you to get a straighter shot at it!”

Leander shifted a step out of cover, swinging the barrel of his gun out of the window and taking aim across the street from his building, where an M3 committed to a ninety degree turn to fire on them. He took aim at the tracks and fired.

His first shot struck the hull plate over the tracks. Enemy fire forced him back to cover.

Because the gun was so large he was unused to thinking of it as semi-automatic – it felt like it should naturally be bolt-action like the Bundu and so he did not rap the trigger or fire successively before going into cover at the sight of retaliatory gunfire.

He had the shoot-and-hide muscle movements from the Bundu too close in mind.

Breathing deep, he stepped out of cover to shoot, this time aiming a touch lower.

Sharna joined him, her rifle now reloaded; Leander’s shot punched through one of the road wheels, blowing it out, and Sharna took out two in quick succession. Under this violence the track split completely, stalling the tank mid-turn and helpless to respond to the ambush. From the opposite side of the street, anti-tank grenades flew toward the immobilized tanks, setting ablaze their stalled engines and smashing holes in their cannons.

Anti-tank fire fell relentlessly upon the hatches and sides of the stalled tanks. Under this onslaught three tanks were rendered useless and their hatches flew open, the crew running out to the street with pistols out and screaming audible nonsense into hand radios.

Stray rifle rounds struck the window frame, kicking up tiny wisps of plaster and cement dust. Sharna and Leander hid again. Nocht’s men were rallying in ever more vigorous support of their tanks, the shock of the ambush fading from them. They aimed for the windows with greater fervor, and though sporadic their fire endangered the snipers.

But the AT rifles were not alone: peeking over the window again with great care Leander saw automatic fire pouring out of the lower floors of the buildings, bouncing off tanks and cutting across the positions of Nocht’s riflemen. Caught in the crossfire several Noctish men fell instantly to the automatic bursts, riddled with bullets in the middle of the road. Several men rushed desperately onto the remains of the streets and charged into the buildings with their pistols out – more easily manageable in close quarters than their rifles.

From behind him, Leander heard the belabored thumping of the DNV light machine guns as Bonde and Elena fought back against the incoming home invaders.

Hidden along the staircase, they could fire on anyone trying to pass the building’s open doorway, as well deliver suppressing fire over the thoroughfare. Their raid on the Djose must have taken its toll on Nocht’s forces, because no grenades or other explosives were flung toward the buildings to dislodge the defenders – the sounds of battle grew decidedly one-sided as the cries and guns of Nochtish men were silenced. DNVs beat like drums from the lower floors. Joined by the booming of intermittent BKV fire this cacophony overwhelmed the mechanical chugging and snapping of Nocht’s weapons.

Leander pulled the bolt on his rifle and loaded a new clip – the bundles were large and difficult to manage, especially while standing with his back awkwardly to a wall.

“You need to shoot more before hiding, Leander,” Sharna said. She was already through two clips, loading her third; Leander was just now reloading for the first time.

Nodding, Leander maneuvered his rifle out of the window to fire once more.

Two remaining tanks had managed to complete their turns and now faced the row of buildings across the street from his position. Leander’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the guns climbing. There were more of their comrades on that side of the street, and their fire had drawn the most attention. He spotted several snipers on the targeted windows, desperately firing into the glacis and gun mantlet of the M3 to no avail.

Alone, their weapons could not stop what was coming.

“Spirits defend,” Sharna gasped, “We have to help them Leander!”

From her pouch, Sharna sought out an anti-tank stick grenade, and found a single, solitary example among a few useless fragmentation grenades. While she prepared to throw it, and at a loss for how else to help, Leander fired three shots into the engine bed of the tank closest to him in quick succession, the BKV stock pounding into his shoulder.

He struck the bed several times at a good angle, smashing through to the engine housing but with seemingly no immediate effect. Sharna took the opportunity to throw her primed grenade at the tank below, aiming to exploit the damage Leander had caused to the engine housing. Those 700 grams of explosive encased in the grenade detonated on contact and blew open a great hole into the weakened engine hatch. Flames burst up from the exposed engine compartment and spread dangerously across the back of the tank.

It was not enough – the vehicle clung on to life. Even as the fire spread they saw the assault gun adjust its cruel aim. Assuredly in its death throes, the gun still readied to fire. There was now no way for Leander and Sharna to stop what was coming.

The M3 Hunter had raised its 75mm cannon as high as the short-barreled gun would elevate. With a dying roar it launched a high-explosive shell through the window across the street, past several snipers still firing in a panic. It detonated behind them.

Leander felt the explosion like a shockwave sinking through his flesh.

Fire and smoke expanded from the windows and doors, casting out burning, dying bodies onto the street. The roof burst from the inside out and showered the thoroughfare in cement chunks, and the upper floor collapsed entirely, burning and burying the machine gunners guarding the doorways. Five meters away the fifth M3, almost entirely unharmed in the chaos, opened fire on a building further down the street, its cannon smashing open the facade and ejecting snipers from the second floor with a crash of thunder. The snipers landed unceremoniously on the streets, instantly dead from their expulsion.

Moments later the vehicle below them had become an inferno.

Leander and Sharna’s previous target had had enough, and the fires finally spread to the ammo racks. From the inside out the great, murderous assault gun burst into pieces with an explosion that forced Leander and Sharna instantly to cover despite their shock.

Whether it had roasted its crew inside it they did not know, but finally the M3 Hunter lay ripped apart along the road. In the span of a few minutes three other assault guns, numerous men, but most importantly, many of their comrades, lay dead with it.

One assault gun remained, and it was unsatisfied with the bloodshed. It once again began to turn, this time casting its murderous cannon directly at Leander’s position.

Bonde ran up to the second floor, loading a new pan magazine atop his empty DNV as he went, and with Elena trailing close behind him and standing guard by the steps. They too had sought cover from the explosion happening almost right in front of them. “We’re abandoning the building. Gather your things quickly. We’ve got time before it shoots.”

Leander and Sharna peeled themselves away from the window, and nodded in silent shock. Leander still felt as though the blast were rolling over him.

Together the crew gathered pouches of ammunition and grenades, clipping them to their belts as they rushed down the steps, Elena and Bonde leading with their machine guns. They each fired a burst out into the streets at any men who might have been cowering somewhere, injured but alive. Seeking new cover the group ran out of the ruin and put their backs to one of the smoking husks, stepping over the dead and the unconscious dying.

Behind them they heard the tank moving and cracking of its gun as it elevated. The squadron crouched near the debris and the hull of a broken M3 and they covered their heads. A 75mm high explosive shell flew into the window that had once been their sniping position and blasted the inside of the building. Chunks of hot concrete and smoke poured out over the street. They heard the tank’s tracks laboring to move once again.

“Does anyone have an AT grenade we can throw at it?” Elena asked.

“Only frags left in my pouch.” Sharna replied, and looked to her fellow anti-tank specialist. Leander silently raised his hand from his grenade pouch, holding a Faru-Kombora 28 or FKB-28 stick grenade, the communist’s AT grenade model.

It was their only one left.

“Do you think you can get close and hit the back?” Bonde said solemnly.

Leander gulped, the fire and smoke and the dead still flashing in his mind.

It was time to be brave.

He set his shoulders and forced his shaking voice.

“I can do it. I just need some covering fire or a distraction.” He said.

Elena looked grimly at him, hands gripping her machine gun as if to say it was useless.

“I think I can keep it busy.” Sharna said. “I can break its periscope and try to put something in the barrel and hatches. I can be very annoying! There are small targets all over the face of that tank I can hit, even if I can’t destroy it by doing so.”

“I guess that will have to do.” Elena said. She patted Leander on the back.

“Run out first, Sharna. Use the debris. Find a good spot.” Bonde said.

With the sling around her shoulder, Sharna confidently rested her BKV against her hip. She held the weapon with one hand on the carrying handle affixed to the barrel, and the other on the trigger guard. Leander nodded to her in the direction he intended to run out from – Sharna nodded back and took position away from it, bracing herself.

She left cover as close to the opposite side of the street as she could, running out into the open and briefly staring down the tank. From the hip she fired her BKV twice at its face – the heavy rounds blasted open the periscope and sank into the front of the leftmost track and took chunks from the treads wrapped around it. A strained noise issued from them as the track began to churn and the tank moved forward. Sharna rushed away from it and took cover behind a collapsed portion of the roof recently shattered by the M3.

Leander marveled for a moment at Sharna’s grace with the BKV – she could carry it and heave it much more competently than he could, and shoot it much more accurately. Perhaps it was her size relative to him, but more likely it was her experience.

“You’re up Leander,” Bonde said. “May the ancestors be with you!”

“Don’t do anything foolish. Throw and hide!” Elena added.

Taking a deep breath, Leander plunged out of cover in the opposite direction from Sharna, scrambling over the fallen men. While in cover he had hardly noticed them, but in motion they all seemed to reappear, staring at him from the earth, bleeding from dozens of wounds across their gray uniforms and unable to even raise their pistols to stop him.

He thought he heard the moaning of their souls in the process of leaving behind their ruined bodies as he ran around the husks they once defended.

Almost on reflexes alone he weaved between the wrecks of the other tanks, using them to conceal himself as he ran closer to the remaining enemy vehicle.

More BKV shots rang out from Sharna’s position and from far up the street, where the last remaining BKV team still lay in hiding and now found occasion again to provide their support. All the shots bounced harmlessly off the tank, but Leander heard the target’s tracks stop and the sound of its gun clanking and groaning as it adjusted elevation.

They had drawn its attention away. Now, however, it threatened his comrades as it had done before, and any one shot would be too much for them. It had to be stopped.

Keeping himself on its left to avoid the gun, Leander ran out into the open, just a few meters from the monster. He threw his anti-tank grenade overhead as best as he could.

Having no immediate and good cover, he hit the dirt and crawled near low-lying rubble.

He closed his eyes and heard the grenade explode atop the vehicle and felt a wave of heat washing suddenly over him. Only a moment later he heard tracks again, and his heart sank. Did he not manage to stop it? He stood and got a grip on his BKV, intending to shoot it anywhere he could in a desperate bid to stop the thing once and for all–

Bonde and Elena opened up on the tank with their machine guns from up the street, despite having no hope of penetrating the thing. Leander realized that it was not moving forward, but retreating carefully down the street, its damaged track rattling as it moved.

Smoke blew from atop the machine, and a hunk of shattered metal flapped against its side. He had blown open the top hatch! Its interiors were now vulnerable.

Leander was breathing again suddenly, ragged, his eyes drawn open, his mind racing to process the opportunity. As his allies’ DNV machine gun fire crashed uselessly against the face of the retreating tank, Leander reached into his pockets and drew his bundle of frag grenades. Purging his mind of dissenting thoughts Leander charged headlong again toward the vehicle, closing physically as fast as he could with the giant machine.

He instantly heard an incoherent screaming from behind him. All machine guns stopped firing lest they kill him as they had done the men lying around him.

He could hear in his head Elena’s voice distinctly asking if he had lost his mind; but he knew he had to move then, as he had in the forest. With a damaged track the vehicle’s movements had been reduced to a careful creep to avoid splitting its treads completely.

Leander ran with all his might and caught up.

He ran alongside the machine, pulling the pins on several grenades and then tossing the entire pouch through the smoking hatch. He heard the deadly metallic ringing of the grenades bouncing down off the commander’s seat and around the interior.

Still running he turned immediately and hurtled away from it as fast as he could, making for any kind of cover from what was about to transpire. He was still running when the blasts began, making his way across the street. It was an instantaneous chaos behind him. Fragments, heat and smoke blew first from the hatch, and then the ammunition stored inside the machine felt its share of the violence as the remaining grenades exploded.

From the inside-out the tank burst open as its stored shells detonated.

Hunks of steel blew from the vehicle’s punctured sides and roof, and when the engine blew the tank almost leaped. Leander heard the pieces flying off the battered machine, whizzing across the air with deadly new life, its rivets, hatches, glass, everything was now ammo. Hundreds of tiny fragments and projectiles blew over him like a cloud, stinging his back and scraping his sides, falling like metallic ashes from a mechanical volcano.

As he set foot on the adjacent street Leander threw himself with all his strength into an open doorway as the larger pieces of burning steel came crashing down around the street, sure to kill whoever they fell upon. He made it to the safety of a building’s interior.

Rolling on the ground in pain; flailing his arms as though trying to beat insects or snakes off his body; blowing out labored breaths as though they could cool the burning metal pinpricks across his back. In this brief, annihilating moment of agony Leander had hardly any time to process that he had almost single-handedly destroyed a tank.

Outside, the street was covered in smoke and fire and metal that any advancing force would have to clear. The ambush had made its indelible mark on the fighting.

No one could be under any illusions, however, that they had stopped Nocht.

As he thrashed over a mound of pulverized concrete and tried to batter down the hot pain across his back, Leander became acutely aware of new sources of noise.

Fresh explosions thundered in the distant parts of the thoroughfare, and Leander, dazed by adrenaline and still in pain, thought it had to be the ammunition in the tank still going off. However, the retorts from cannons soon became unmistakable.

Shots began to fall closer to the ambush sector.

Within minutes he saw the first shell making landfall directly outside his building, and he felt the rumbling of the blast drive right through him like an invisible knife.

Leander forced himself to his feet, grit his teeth against the pain and climbed out of a side window and into a nearby alley. He saw Sharna running up the street and he joined her without looking back, hugging the buildings as he went for what minimal concealment the awnings and collapsed facades might give him from the tanks. Bonde and Elena were not far behind, and vacated their position as Leander and Sharna ran past.

Soon every survivor from the forward platoons was running pell-mell across the ruins.

“How many are coming up?” Leander shouted over the throng.

“It’s a fresh platoon, probably five more tanks. We’ve lost more than half the forces we had here. We can’t stand and fight any longer.” Bonde replied. He seemed stricken suddenly with a thought. “I think it’s about time we called in a favor.”

He paused for a moment, and then he withdrew his flare gun.

Sharna and Elena almost skidded to a stop ahead of them, looking back to see what was keeping their comrades. Bonde raised the gun overhead on a shaking hand.

“Can those three mortars we have left even damage a tank?” Elena asked.

“If they’re 120mm then they might be able to.” Sharna said.

Leander looked back on the street as well in time to see Bonde shoot.

Briefly he saw the M4s charging in the distance, until Bonde launched the flare over the road in as far and high an arc as he could. Before the first shells were even loaded from across the thoroughfare the team began to run again, joining anew the remainder of their company’s forces also fleeing from the sector. Soon the shells began to fall around the advancing M4’s, kicking up dust, rattling the hulls and putting strain on the tracks.

The M4s fired on the retreating forces with their 50mm cannons, but once the platoons dispersed into the ruins they became impossible to directly hit with cannons. Even so, Elena would not yet get her clear answer as to whether the mortars could damage the tanks.

Nobody was looking back into the midst of the shells and the enemy cannon fire.

Under the cover of the mortars and across the rubble-strewn road, the company left behind that bloody, ruined block of houses and the road between them, dotted with bodies and the wrecks of tanks shredded by BKVs and grenades. Their next position was the FOB.

In all, the fighting around that lost block, that had claimed so many lives and tanks, had lasted only minutes, and much of the Nochtish force remained intact.

NEXT CHAPTER in Generalplan Suden — The Battle of Knyskna, Part 2