The impact threw the sound of a savage destruction many kilometers away. Tufts of smoke splayed conically, magnificent in their colossal bloom and fragile as dewy petals and towering like a macabre aspect over the dawnlit battlefield freshly minted.
A mechanism within the butt of the Schwerer clanked loudly amidst the lazy thrum of its electromagnets. Betelgeuse stumbled and fell, then picked himself up again.
Static in his ears. Everything was vague and jellylike and painted in washed out colors. He held onto the Schwerer's siderail for support and glanced quickly, his vision swimming, at the analog panel, noting that the second of two armature-rounds had been loaded.
Current, check.
Armature-round, check.
He wasn't quite sure why he wanted to fire the thing. It was Subaltern Cacliocos' last instruction, vaguely-heard, but since when had he cared so much about authority? The word of his superiors carried for him less weight than a toddler's petulant importunings. He loathed to follow as he loathed to obey; and yet he followed and obeyed anyway, because rebellion against an absolute system required insidious tactics and a patient heart.
But he could not help the realization which stabbed at his heart, insulting in its simplicity and in its characterization of himself besides.
Somewhere over the course of the battle the why became less important than its how. The enemies of the Democracy, the Chimerae—they deserved to die for the simple fact that they weren't human. Here was an enemy he could hate and kill without repercussion, unlike the puppets of that superstructure he was beholden to.
Globy spots flashed across the periphery of his vision. Were these by-ways into rare intellections merely the action of magnetic fields upon his mind?
The Chimerae had to die and he didn't know why. He might as well have been a creature of pure battle-sense, his will aligned to the will of the Democracy, when he smashed the flensed remnants of that button.
Maybe it's payback. Goddamn cowards don't even have the courtesy to risk their own skin.
Again the Schwerer rang its loud blare, sending a lethal missile ripping through space and distance to blast its destination to smithereens. The air flexed and billowed jaggedly under the influence of strange pressures, and Betelgeuse felt the varied oppressions recede with the depletion of the battery.
Under the strengthening glare of Corydon the drones were retreating across that rustred waste toward the smoking boreholes gouged out of steel, like locusts made mad by harvest-scents. The soot-streaked remnants of the Jegorich First Brigade were rising from their hidden places and rushing forward and sending a hailstorm of rounds after the machines, cutting down a good number and planting the swathe of land with short-lived dandelions bloating and wilting in seconds.
Just as the twang of railgun fire began to die down, a hoarse metallic scream echoed over to Betelgeuse' right, and the telltale trail of a Schwerer Gun's armature-round lanced toward the walls of Liberation's Reach—once, then twice—rifling great partial-circles into that metallic skin and tapering it to pinprick points where the boreholes overlapped.
'So, another one survived,' Betelgeuse thought, his ears ringing.
The static had disappeared and Betelgeuse' comms beeped dully, indicating that a private channel had been established.
The giant had come up to Betelgeuse and proffered a heavy palm spoked with inhumanly thick, tubular fingers, and an accented voice that just might have been his boomed through the helmet and perpetuated Betelgeuse' tinnitus.
"Staff Sergeant Entuban Kanos. You gots bawls."
"I've heard some say," Betelgeuse' replied drily, accepting the handshake. Up close he could see through Entuban's scuffed visor that his face was exceptionally broad, although this was in keeping with the rest of his queerly shaped body. His head was oddly pear-shaped and his cheek muscles were cut with deep striations and shivering with shadows. His flattish nose was entirely too small for his face and as a whole his features looked almost stranded within that wide moat of tanned skin.
"D.B., what it mean?" Entuban pointed at his torso and the callsign stenciled thereon.
"... Don't Blink."
"Ah. Much sorry about your friend," Entuban sighed, trudging deep footprints toward what was left of Caleb and staring mutely at that pulped and smoking thing.
"He was a good soldier," Betelgeuse nodded. But he wasn't my friend.
Thete came picking her way through the smoking metal carcasses littering the charred gravel, her railgun held in her right hand, its muzzle frayed and scorched and raised skyward. The rest of the section—Voke, Douglas and Frederica—came trailing behind with an air of solemnity.
She went to Caleb's body first and lowered her head in silent prayer, then skirted Entuban's girthy form and came before Betelgeuse.
"Good job, B.T. Resup truck's ETA fifteen minutes. Once Cacliocos is done with that dressing down Second Battalion-Com's giving him, I'll confer with him on next steps," Thete transmitted.
"So fast?" Douglas whined, his affected drawl less annoying than usual.
"Why's he getting whacked?" Voke inquired, standing by Caleb and staring vacantly at a gash of smog rising into the sky.
"Breaching comms hierarchy. Wasn't supposed to be addressing Brigade or something like that," Thete replied. "You know Cacliocos un-fucked the coordination for that pullback. Made Battalion-Com look incompetent."
"They shouldn't give him authorization if he's not supposed to do it. Like how you couldn't reach Caleb," Frederica remarked glumly. Betegeuse could detect a bitter and hard edge creep into her tone.
Thete ignored her, shutting off her section comms-link and turning to regard Entuban who had dragged up beside them. She saluted crisply.
"No, no salute. I'm no officer," Betelgeuse heard Entuban say. The man had established a private comms channel with Thete and hadn't closed the one with Betelgeuse.
"Ha! Tell that to the Grand Marshal," Thete chuckled, and Betelgeuse wondered if there was some inside joke he was missing. Later, Thete would explain to Betelgeuse over cricket-rations that, traditionally, only personnel commissioned by the Protectorate as officers (the lowest-ranked officer being the rank subaltern) were to be saluted by the lower ranks and/or non-commissioned ranks. This practice had been changed sometime in the previous year when the Grand Marshal in his infinite wisdom had decided that all ranks were to be saluted by the lower ranks regardless of commission, suggesting in a article promulgated by the Ayish-Zhabo that this would "tend to promote the kind of discipline and respect crucial to the functioning of the PDF".
"Too-tchey. I have channel open to Don't Blink over there, yeah?" Entuban pointed to Betelgeuse.
"Who?" Thete turned to Betelgeuse, then raised her eyebrow. "Ah-ha. I see. D.B."
"You sound like Sylvan," Entuban continued, his eyes running over the penal brand upon Thete's forehead.
"I'm from Gehen," Thete returned, nodding.
Entuban then launched into a tirade using a tongue whose words seemed to Betelgeuse to consist wholly in guttural declensions and sibilant elisions, and when Thete replied her language was unsmooth and stuttery and not at all like the punchy, flowing articulations Entuban utilized.
And Betelgeuse listened to them talk for some minutes, wondering why they had kept him looped into a conversation he couldn't begin to follow. Some meters away Voke and Frederica were dragging the lump that had been Caleb, their forms enveloped in gaseous wisps, making with their efforts a trough across the steaming gravel. They set that dismal gargoyle against one of the myriad igneous formations and balanced it as vertically as its lopsidedness could admit, like some grim headstone commemorating the night.
"... carry him no more into vague tomorrows, O Lord, and keep him in Your arms; into the certainty of Paradise will he walk and amongst Thine footprints will he give thanks…"
That unintelligible conversation between Thete and Entuban continued in earnest; underneath that frenetic gibberish was, barely discernible, a low mumble cast in Voke's soft tones, creeping and tentative like the secondary line to some discordant polyphony.
"... and if ever You have found fault in his speaking things he did not understand, of things too wonderful for him to know, and of his thereby obscuring Your counsel without knowledge, we beseech You, O Lord, forgive him and give his spirit a chance to listen, so that like us he may learn to give thanks to the Power and the Glory…"
He focused on it, shutting out the foreign tongue, and could not help but find therein dimly remembered artifacts of a previous life. It was the consignation of a spirit bereft of its moorings in realspace—for where the Incunabulum was no more, the spirit was threatened with inexistence.
"... for his failures are the failures of all Humankind and his arrogance is our arrogance; and if ever we should forget, the day will come that is the Last Day when the pride will be torn from our breast with that same fury that had struck the evils of yore, and churned and cast the greatest men down like mites…"
Betelgeuse turned and ran his eyes over that claustrophobic diorama, and saw that others were doing the same—picking through rubble and wreckage and cobbling together what they could of their friends, if only to have something to mourn the memories that could have been.
"… and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness…"
----------------------------------------
The 'resup truck' resembled a titanic centipede, with thin segmented trains equipped with treaded tires that went up half as tall as the trains themselves.
First Brigade's support personnel had set up a long canvas tentage beside the open hull of one of the truck's sections, handing out fresh batteries and full magazines of armature-rounds to the milling soldiers. Betelgeuse grabbed what he needed, then went down the train, past the interminable slant of cars beset by grasping soldiers, past segments designated Polyaria First to Ninth, past Saltilla, until he came up to Jegorich First and then entered the dimly vibrating segment and dug through the crate labeled with his full unit designation.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He rifled hurriedly through the paraphernalia. Just when he felt his coagulated wound start to tear he found his groundsheet and the two chocolate bars he had secreted away within, and he retrieved one and stuffed it into his magazine pouch and folded the groundsheet carefully over the other before setting it back into the crate.
When he exited the confines of the segment he saw a group of sauntering Jegorich soldiers making in his direction, and observed behind them faces he thought he wouldn't see for some time yet. The pale-skinned and sharp-nosed Michael Thane, flanked by Aminata Waggon and Zachariah Greenberg, their exosuits blacked by grimy streaks.
They halted their step on seeing him, and Michael, brow furrowed, hair bunched and tangled in the confines of his helmet, stared at him silently. Not that they would have been able to communicate, none of them having the authorization to establish a private comms channel.
After a moment Betelgeuse set off again, passing by the Jegorichians and his fellow PLPs and hugging the train of interconnected segments round several rock formations and then debouching to the space with the canvas tentage, now burbling with activity. A legion of troops were engaged in emptying the front segments of the resup truck, stacking crates upon crates of munitions and other peripherals under the cover of the natural rock formations to the far side, and then covering them with mud-colored tarpaulins.
Further ahead Betelgeuse saw Thete and the others gathered by the mouth of an incline which looked like it exited to a still wider space. They were sitting by the slope's talus and reclining against the slanted surface, the arms of their suits floppy and unsolid.
Frederica was the first to notice Betelgeuse, and she pantomimed a wave with the open palm of her bare hand spread over the inside of her visor. As he got closer Betelgeuse realized they were eating within their exosuits and had unsheathed their arms from their sleeves to indulge in a rather cramped repast.
"B.T., I got your crickets," Frederica transmitted, filling her right sleeve with her arm and lobbing a cuboid object at him. He caught the thing deftly and glanced at the crinkling wrapper, then made his way over.
Cricket-rations. I've heard so much about you, sir, and now we finally we meet.
"How d'you get the thing inside?" Betelgeuse asked, turning the wrapper over and finding it barren of clues.
"It's that thing by your oblique. Thete says it's supposed to be for 'ventilation'," Voke mentioned between his crunching mouthfuls.
"It's called the Ventilation Aperture man, what else is it supposed to be?" Thete exasperated, munching on her own insectoid bar.
"You gotta unclasp it first. There's a hole," Frederica explained, patting the space beside her with her sleeved arm whilst holding her block of cricket-rations up to her mouth within her suit. He sat beside her and she took his wrist and placed it on her knee and poked at his wrist-transceiver, navigating to the settings menu and pointing out the relevant button.
"Remember to seal it quick or you're gonna feel faint when the C-O hits," Thete raised, leaning forward to glance at Betelgeuse.
He did so and unsheathed his arm from his sleeve and raised the brown packaging up to his naked eye and unwrapped it and saw that it was nothing more than a nondescript gray block that didn't look very much like crickets and didn't smell like anything at all, and then he bit into it and found the ration bar crunchy and awfully salty.
Betelgeuse, sensing that Frederica was still observing him, shifted slightly to return the stare. Her close-cropped hair had grown longer and hung slightly tangled over her brand and the skin about her delicate nose had an oily shimmer and her sad brown pupils contained more things than he was familiar with. When their eyes met she suddenly looked away, as if afraid that by some unknown means her secrets might be leaked.
Retrieving his chocolate bar, he nudged Frederica with his elbow. She turned again, and before she could react he secreted the chocolate bar into her magazine pouch.
"Thanks for foaming me up," he said, masticating with his molars. "For the second time."
"... No need," she mumbled, as Corydon's rays shone redly upon her cheeks. "You saved me once too."
"Yeah Dyke, must well not have saved the guy," Douglas chortled through the comms. He was sitting at the far side from Betelgeuse, after Frederica, Voke and Thete.
"Now that we're all here," Thete stood, taking the ground before them and wolfing down the last of her ration, "I've received some unfortunate news. The Chimerae didn't take the bait and command line says they're wheeling toward the left pincer and hitting them with the drones. Command line wants First Brigade to penetrate into the Target."
"That answers the question of who's unlucky enough to get the infamous Charlie Mike first try," Douglas grumbled.
"Look Doug you gotta stop complaining so much. I think that's what's giving us bad luck," Voke offered sarcastically.
"Hey Coke, ain't no one wanting yer commentary," Douglas shot back, making sure to emphasize his use of Voke's callsign if only just to make their avoidance more salient.
"Okay, shut it," Thete interjected, filling her sleeves with her arms and affecting a power pose Betelgeuse found unnecessary in the circumstances. "The truck will taxi us closer. Note also that the enemy has comms-jammers set up around the Target perimeter, so we're going to be light on coordination once we go in. Finish up your food quickly and we can go help the rest unload; once the stores are out of the front segments Cacliocos says we gotta load up immediately."
"That thing will take us over the plain? We'll be out in the open," pointed out Betelgeuse.
Thete deflated noticeably. "I guess it was our job in the first place, to draw the Chimerae's attention. The forward transport will skirt the edge of the rock forest, so we'll have some minimum cover."
"The plating is barely five centimeters thick," Betelgeuse added, eyeing the humming chassis from the front to where it wound out of sight amongst sandstone protrusions. A look that might be described as incredulous flashed across his face, and he remained evidently unconvinced that military nomenclature had any magical power to transform a 'resup truck' into a 'forward transport'. "I don't think it could last two shots from our ZWENs."
"You know maybe this isn't such a good idea after all," Douglas squinted. Beads of sweat started to form on his forehead.
"Look, it's only a few kilometers to Target and anyway we don't have a choice," Thete gritted her teeth. The confidence her stance formerly exuded had along the way disintegrated into something more akin to a tantrum and her arms were held straight and flared to both sides.
"Wow, another piece of unfortunate news," Voke sighed, and Frederica nodded silently to herself, staring vacantly at a patch of ground and brooding about things faraway and uncertain.
----------------------------------------
Suffice to say the journey taxed to the fullest the capacity of their rumps to withstand blunt trauma.
Section Five was settled in the train-segment second from the front. They shared that cramped space with the remnants of Cacliocos' platoon numbering about eleven soldiers including Cacliocos himself, as well as most of the rest of their company. All in all there were fifty able-bodied men and women hailing from Second Battalion, Third Company crammed standing into a place barely twice as large as the APC's troop compartment, and Betelgeuse, squeezed between Frederica and Voke and hemmed in to his front by four gray-streaked backsides, wondered about the situation obtaining in Entuban's segment. 'It must be a nightmare,' Betelgeuse thought, considering that man's legendary girth.
The car moved slowly, canting this way and that as the forward-transport trekked treacherous inclines and steep undulations. At one point the car had tipped so far to the side that Third Company Commander Major Storr transmitted company-wide the instruction to "crouch starboard". Section Five was, incidentally, located against the car's right wall and therefore bore the brunt of that meaty crush.
"Everything goes back to the elevator," Douglas breathed, and Betelgeuse couldn't find it in himself to disagree.
As they rode the morning got brighter and warmer and the heat increased so precipitously as to become nearly unbearable. Then Thete reminded Section Five to ensure their exosuit conditioners were toggled to cooling and Betelgeuse sighed at his own absent-mindedness.
Thin strips of plastic near the roof of the car served as windows through which bright shafts of light intruded, and by this time they outlined a resplendent patch of crimson which swung with a definite amplitude about the middle of the space. By coincidence Cacliocos had been caught in that patch and Betelgeuse, facing him two rows over, could not help but observe in that man's listless expression something sullen and disturbed. The slight twitch of that scarred upper-lip told a story of the man that Betelgeuse could never write, but which he understood by way of an inexplicable psychic consonance.
"Gen'elmen, it's one point five kilometers to Target," Major Storr transmitted, his voice a robotic monotone. "We'll exit the rock forest in less than thirty seconds and the starboard hull will open. Intelligence reports them Chimes have lookouts. Give'em hell boys."
'I guess the ladies don't gotta care then,' Betelgeuse thought glibly, turning to face the steel siding and readying himself to unsling his railgun.
"Remember," Thete transmitted, "Chimerae small-arms plasma armaments have a maximum range of one kilometer. We should have five hundred-odd meters on them with our ZWENs. Comms-jammer should kick in around eight hundred meters, so we'll only have very-short-range communication from that point."
At that moment Betelgeuse felt unseen hands jostle him roughly. The ground shuddered with the shuffling mass of humanity and all around he could dimly intuit the intrusion of vague and anxious susurrations.
"Sergeant Jutson," Cacliocos transmitted, his voice crackling with static, "let Sergeant Anlas and PFC Shekar to the front. They're Third Company's best sharpshooters."
"Roger that, sir," Thete returned quickly. "Let's move over, Section Five."
Before Betelgeuse had a chance to move, a hand grabbed onto his shoulder and shoved him sideways into Frederica who was herself battling the turmoil of bodies. He turned and saw arched and bushy eyebrows and bloodshot eyes that barely looked his way, and wondered which was Sergeant Anlas and which was PFC Shekar.
There was a great clangor and the steel siding juddered open upward to reveal, at first, the studded ground, and then thick protrusions close enough to touch; and then the train-segment burst out into the open and Betelgeuse saw a ferric landscape brush past and faraway megaliths tower heaven-piercing over a vast and blasted wasteland shimmering in the heat.
He turned, glancing at the perforated char surrounding Liberation's Reach, and before he could register that the nocturnal flames had burnt out, a cacophony was raised and a multitude of armature-rounds was sent like trailing micro-comets from the snaking segments of their forward-transport.
Inhuman figures dark and backlit against the firmament were scurrying across the top of the wall and between the makeshift crenelations fashioned of chrome-gray metal. The vast majority of the First Brigade's armature-rounds either collided harmlessly against the low-carbon-steel battlements or flew wide; but several found their mark and the distant shrouds shivered then fell away from their line of sight as if they were wraiths banished from realspace.
Betelgeuse struggled to aim whilst fighting for balance aboard the lurching vessel. He continued firing notwithstanding that most of his shots strayed wildly off-target, jamming his trigger until his magazine was empty. It appeared that Frederica to his right was having much the same results.
As he fished into his pouches for a fresh magazine, he sensed a calm and steady beat emanating to his left, like some kind of percussive bassline supporting that whole dissonant confusion. It was the Third Company's sharpshooters, firing to a bizarrely uniform rhythm.
Every one of those shots was taken with measured precision, each sequence of sighting, aiming, and firing neither rushed nor delayed. The duo's armature-rounds traced their blonde arcs through the air and inevitably found their marks, as creature after shadowed creature shuddered and fell away to an uncertain demise.
Two magazines left. Betelgeuse wondered if he should be conserving his ammo, and decided to space his shots out more. Unlike the sharpshooters, he found it nigh impossible to shoot aboard that unstable platform. No more than one of his shots, perhaps, found its target.
The forward-transport veered suddenly and he sensed Frederica's center of gravity shift. Without thinking, his right hand shot out from his railgun's grip and grabbed onto her vest, just barely arresting her fall. Their transport was accelerating now, and the jagged earth flashed by in a blur below her visor.
He let his railgun fall as he leaned forward and grabbed under her armpit with his left hand, and his weapon sling caught on his shoulder, sending the muzzle swinging like a pendulum. Betelgeuse pulled with both hands, straining against Frederica's mass; another hand shot out from the side to grasp Frederica's thigh, and Betelgeuse saw that it was Douglas, struggling with him.
She was upright now and had turned toward him to grasp his arm tightly. She looked at him and he returned her gaze and found in those pupils a vulnerability which clashed with her broad shoulders and tall stature.
It was the last thing he remembered before the world fragmented with savage energy. There was a bone-rattling jolt and so much sound it was quiet and then a vortex-rush of air—somewhere beyond the periphery of his vision a kaleidoscope of colors hot and cold revolved with terrible speed and then all was momentarily suspended in time.