Amidst the thud and crash of the howitzers Mrs. Figgy set up a blackboard and lectured him on how to deploy aiming stakes, train the guns, use the written values in the range tables, and all the rest of the necessary technical expertise. The howitzers of this make-believe army were decades more advanced than that of the Fleet, replying on long range plunging fire instead of direct fire.
Rene watched the gun crews at work for a while to learn the rhythm of things before joining in as an ammo bearer, bringing up the shells stacked on tarpaulins at the ammo dump in the rear. Soon Mrs. Figgy had him promoted him to gunner, and by the time the first Amit attack was beaten back Rene was chief of section and directing fire missions with seamless efficiency.
During lulls in the fighting he sat on empty ammo crates and smoked ‘fags’ with the lads. Fags were chopped and dried leaves rolled up in paper that one lit on the end with a match, producing choking vapours that you then inhaled for the dubious benefit of coughing up your lungs. But it was relaxing somehow, and once he got started Rene found he could not stop. Besides, smoking made for good conversation.
“So do the Amits ever stop coming?” he asked, “Or does this illusion go on indefinitely?”
“Things can’t go on like this,” Tommy spoke confidently, “Not after the frogs whipped the huns at Verdun. This whole affair will be over by Christmas, mark my words.”
“Not this shite again. Besides, you’ve got it backwards,” another said. With the exception of Mrs. Figgy, apparently everyone had that same first name, “Between Churchill’s blundering at the Dardanelles and that slaughterhouse they call Somme, I shouldn’t wonder if the Kaiser heaves us back over the channel in time for plum pudding.”
“The Boches will be back,” said a third Tommy, a fag quivering on the corner of his trembling lips, “They always come back. Over and over and over again.”
Their rations came wrapped in tin boxes that opened with a tiny key that rolled up the lid. Lunch was tinned meat, watery rum and biscuits, but after hours of hard labour Rene had never known such earthly bliss. As they ate Rene learned that the tommies fought for an entity known as the BEF, a civilization many decades more advanced in terms of technology. Rene knew they were historical and not fictional because of the many unmistakeable similarities between the BEF and the Fleet, from the way they spoke to the strict class divisions between officers and enlisted men—Mrs. Figgy for instance never once interacted with the tommies other than to scream orders at them.
Nobody seemed to know what the cause of the war was, only that the press back home had started calling it the Great War, though Rene struggled to see what was so great about it.
One of the tommies sang a sad, whimsical song:
“We’re here because,
We’re here because,
We’re here because we’re here.
We’re here because,
We’re here because,
We’re here because we’re here.”
Rene felt a lump in his throat as a bout of homesickness came over him. Mrs. Figgy saw him wiping his eyes and said:
“They are only an illusion, Rene. An amalgamation of historical video games, heightened by real combat footage against cosmophages.”
“I know,” Rene cleared his throat, “The Amits in here run funny, move too much like human beings do.”
“And why do you think that is?” Mrs. Figgy
Like all proper soldiers they gossiped, trading rumours of terrifying new innovations made by the ‘boches’ (their word for Amits). They spoke of bouncing land mines that leapt up in the air and detonated at chest height, cutting down whole swathes of men, of bombs that released a creeping green mist that could clear out whole trench systems if the wind blew just right.
All of this sounded very far-fetched to Rene. Amits never made anything more complicated than rudimentary tools. Though he had heard of how, during the years-long battle of Assail, some warrior broods had developed harder exoskeletons resistant to bayonets, he ascribed this change more to some freak act of nature than to any intelligence on their part.
He remembered the acid sculptures and star charts he’d discovered back in Mound Euler and began to think twice. If the Amits were smart enough to make art and mythologize, then who knew what they were truly capable of?
Then the second wave of attacks hit their lines, and Rene learned it firsthand.
“Fire mission!” Mrs. Figgy screamed, “Battery adjust, right 5. Shell Mk. 1, Charge 3, fuze delay. Battery one round, quadrant 313. FIRE!”
Rene and the tommies tossed their fags aside and went to work. Usually the attacks ceased after a few salvos of shells, stopped dead by the rifles in the trenches ahead. But the quadrants kept creeping closer and closer, until at last the enemy came within sight.
The tips of their spiked, visored helmets were the first things to hove into view as they crested the ridge, rank upon rank of Amits clad in segmented steel armour marching in perfect lockstep, claws grasping arquebuses and halberds. The sight was intimidating, but Rene was an artilleryman now, and had learned that there was only one solution to all his problems.
“Fire mission!” Rene ordered, “Target, that column of infantry. Fire at will!”
And they did. But instead of tearing huge gaps into their ranks, only those within a small lethal radius were struck dead, the rest shrugging off the shrapnel and ploughing on.
The unseen riflemen in the trenches ahead laid on a shower of lead, firing so fast that it sounded like rotary guns going off. Scores of Amits sprawled onto the ground, but the rest ploughed on and briefly disappeared behind the masking hill.
Within minutes the rifles fell silent. The tommies at the howitzers gave each other grim looks and said:
“Bring up the devil’s paint brushes.”
The crews abandoned their position and came back pushing three squat, monstrous guns on wheelbarrow mounts, each fed by a cloth belt holding thousands of brass cartridges. The tommies muscled the ‘paint brushes’ into positions on the flanks for enfilade firing and sighted them along the aiming stakes.
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“Ever used a paint brush before?” Mrs. Figgy asked him, pushing the cloth belt tongue into the feed and racking back the charging handle.
“Can’t say I have,” Rene said as he took hold of the spade grips.
“Well then, today you’re Pablo Picasso. This is a Vickers gun. It’s a .50 calibre, water-cooled, 1,300 rounds per minute beast. Use short 10-round bursts for accuracy. But when they get close enough to see their faces, hold that trigger pad down till kingdom come. The barrel will heat up something fierce, but don’t worry about it melting—it’s water-cooled.”
Mrs. Figgy brought up the blackboard and sketched a diagram of the Vickers’ internal mechanisms, so simple yet so robust. When he understood its workings, Rene got behind the thick bullet shield and trained his sights on the reverse slope. A knot of black-clad Amits came stamping down the scarp, mandibles and halberds daubed with blood. Without thinking he pressed his thumbs together and was surprised by the chattering roar that issued from the muzzle of the gun. Streams of smoking cartridges rolled out of the ejector, bright yellow vitae spraying out of the Amits where the bullets chewed them up. Rene began to see how the Vickers had earned its nickname; all it took was one quick pass through the ranks of the enemy to paint the ground with their blood.
He kept up a hellacious rate of fire, sawing back and forth with frequent bursts. When the smoke cleared (and the Vickers made surprisingly little of it compared to the firearms of the Fleet) all the Amits lay in dark clumps on the ground. Rene started to breathe a sigh of relief, but stopped when the clumps stirred, the rearmost Amits dusting themselves off and getting slowly back to their feet.
He now realized why the riflemen in the trenches had been overwhelmed; the armour of each beast was especially thick around the vital cortexes and nerve cluster, making them resistant to the usual kill-shots.
Some were split right open from stem to stern but kept shambling forward anyway, ignoring their gaping flesh wounds or half-severed limbs in their eagerness to come to grips with their prey. The gunners let them have it a second time and quite literally chopped them into pieces with the machineguns, then shot at the pieces till they stopped twitching.
“Ruddy good work, lad,” Tommy cheered and slapped him on the shoulder, “We showed those Boches, didn’t we?”
The ground began to shudder and quake, and the smile faded from Tommy’s face.
“What’s that? Heavy mortars?” Rene asked. He looked about and saw that Mrs. Figgy had vanished.
“Worse. Back on the howitzers, all of you!” Tommy shouted, “They’ve brought tanks!”
Tanks? Rene thought, confused. What was so alarming about a bit of compressed air in a canister?
Then name did little justice to the monstrosities that now came at them like grubbing beetles, vast slabs of sheet metal nosing forward on angled tracks, cannons swivelling from sponsons on their sides. Cowering behind it were Amit infantry, sheltering in its rear from the machineguns that now started up again in earnest, the bullets sparking off the hull like so many firecrackers.
Caught switching between weapon systems, the Tommy gun crews only managed to let off a single sporadic barrage before the enemy was upon them, firing back on their positions with ugly black powder swivel guns that did little damage but still managed to suppress the artillery.
Rene knew the battle was lost when the tank came within fifteen meters of the gun emplacement and disgorged a complement of stormtroopers, their breastplates festooned with bandoliers of knobby sticks. Using the tank for cover they advanced to near point-blank range and began tossing bundles of sticks into the sandbagged positions.
“Mashers!” someone screamed right before the little bundles started going off in a cloud of shrapnel.
One of the mashers landed at Rene’s feet. He stared at it stupidly until Tommy shoved him aside, seizing the stick and curling up into a ball on the ground with the grenade tucked underneath him. Rene clamped his hands over his ears as the muffled detonation filled his world with clods of dirt and pieces of unspeakable carnage. Pain stabbed into his shins where the shrapnel shredded his pants, knocking him to the ground while the Amits leapt into the trenches to continue their butchery, seizing tommies and wrenching their heads off with a bite of their mandibles or skewering them on the ends of their halberds.
Rene groped his way through the blood-soaked mud and found the dying Tommy holding in his own intestines with his fingers.
“I-I’m sorry,” he told Tommy, “I’m sorry.”
“…don’t be,” the man replied with a shaky laugh, “For me this dream has no end. You will go, but I will remain. And I’ll be back and again, and again, and again...”
Rene grasped his slick hand and held it tight, feeling a deep throb of sympathy that transcended time, space and reality itself, an eternal sorrowing comradery that humanity had carried with it to the very furthest reaches of space.
The light fled from Tommy’s eyes and Rene found himself alone. All the same he kept clutching Tommy’s hand till it went limp, only then looking up to see the Amits moving from one gun emplacement to the other, systematically killing everything they found with stick grenades. Rene went flat and wriggled underneath the dead Tommy, muttering apologies as he hid underneath his ruined corpse. The Amits ran clawed hands over the howitzers and spat acid all over the Vickers guns in a clear act of hatred, melting down the dead crew along with their pieces. Then they reached into the hissing mess and began to eat.
For an illusion everything here possessed a shocking realism, from the way Tommy’s corpse sagged stiffly against him to the wet gristly sounds of the Amits feeding. Idly he began to wonder how exactly this engram file had been created, and whose memories had gone into this illusion of blood and pain. The smell of voided bowels and raw meat hit his nostrils and he gagged. Rene tried to swallow the reflex but was unable to stop a small burp from escaping his lips.
The Amits froze in place, pieces of flesh halfway to their mouths. Cursing his moment of weakness, Rene curled up and held his breath as a second Amit came searching for the source of the noise. For the second time that day Tommy shielded him with body and saved his life. The Amit lost interest and went back to the feeding frenzy. Knowing his luck couldn’t last forever, Rene laid Tommy aside respectfully, then crept back up to their smoking Vickers, feet treading on eggshells.
Noting the slurping noises from the knot of Amits to his right, he formulated a harebrained plan. But the machinegun could only turn 180 degrees on its swivel, which meant that he couldn’t bring it to bear on them. But perhaps that was a problem that pure brute strength could solve—the Vickers looked about as heavy as a shoulder cannon from back home, hefty but not immovable.
He’d have to act fast. Rene seized the spade grips with one hand and closed his fingers of the other around the water-cooled barrel.
Rene sniffed the air: something was cooking. He looked down and saw his hand fused to the barrel of the Vickers, his skin puckering up and sloughing off in clumps as it seared his flesh.
A howl tore its way out of his throat as he let go of the Vickers. Amits sprang out of the dugouts and came for him. Rene fell onto his arse while clutching at his burnt hand, kicked the Vickers’ mount with both feet so that it spun on its back leg. It toppled over sideways and fell against the sandbags like a drunk man leaning on a wall.
“Good enough,” Rene hissed as he seized it with his good hand and let it rip, blasting the Amits out of the neighbouring emplacement, hosing down the trench till nothing was left standing. He gloated as the survivors cowered out of sight:
“Hah! Gotcha, ya gormless cunts!”
Rene heard the rattling growl of the tank’s engine starting up again, cannons turning on their sponsons. Rather than being frightened, he felt a burgeoning rage in his stomach, fuelled by the maddening pain in his hand and memory of Tommy’s slack, lifeless face.
He was already dead. Now that he had accepted that fact, he could act without fear. He ran up out of the position, sprinting towards the tank armed to attack it with nothing but his bare hands, screaming like some demented thing.
Another stick grenade flew up and over the trench walls at him, but this time he was ready for it, plucking it out of the air and shoving it down the barrel of one of the tank’s sponson guns.
He was rewarded a moment later when the cannon fired and the barrel came apart like a banana peel, bathing him in a wash of flame and twisted steel.
#
Rene came awake with scream. The learning module’s lid was already open. Snatching the neural couplings from his face, he flopped out of the pod like a beached whale, gasping for air.
“It’s alright, it’s alright. None of it’s real, Rene. Nothing that matters, anyway.”
The Commodore gently picked him up off the floor with his cold metal appendages and held him curled up like a child.
“I…I…” Rene began.
“Yes?”
“I think I just killed a tank.”
“Well, it’s a start,” was all the Commodore said, though Rene thought he heard a note of pride in his voice.