Breda, European federation, March 2035
Finding Artem Mamoshina was easy. Getting him to sit down for a conversation? Not so much. Fortunately, our schedules aligned—he had a cargo run to Antwerp, and I was heading south to Belgium. We arranged to meet at a quiet stretch of highway near Breda, where I’d interview him in the cramped yet familiar confines of his truck cabin.
“The cold was bad, but at least it kept them still,” he said, lighting a cigarette with the calloused ease of a man accustomed to long nights on the road. “But when spring came, when the snow melted and the ground turned to mud—that’s when we really started to suffer.”
He exhaled, eyes drifting as if seeing something far away.
“The trenches northwest of Kyiv…” He shook his head. “They were never meant to last, you know? Just hasty scars dug into the earth, barely deep enough to keep us safe. At first, we were grateful for the frozen ground—it gave us something solid to crouch against. But then came the thaw. The walls collapsed, the floor turned into sucking, ankle-deep sludge. We were wading through filth, our boots drowning in it. Everything—our rations, our blankets, even our bullets—was soaked through. The mud swallowed it all.”
He tapped his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, watching the embers fall.
"And then, of course, they came. Just before the Chinese, Kazakhs, and Koreans were able to help us, they were a few weeks too late. For those two weeks, we were fighting a losing battle, just trying to hold them back. I remember one afternoon, I fired off 9 LAWS—those single-use rockets. The tripods hated those. The charge inside would slice through them like butter and set off their fuel, making them explode from the inside."
"Did you have to deal with beetles?" I ask.
"Not really," he replies. "The beetles were mostly in Bulgaria. Whatever command structure they had made sure nearly all of them went south. If a beetle was spotted, our jets would zero in on it. You couldn’t risk a 100-ton flamethrower wandering around, especially if it was about to breach our trenches. What I’m saying is, we weren’t dealing with a massive assault of crabs. It felt like we were holding off scattered packs, not the full-blown divisions you’d see in places like Germany or Bulgaria."
He offers me a cigarette which I gladly accept this time. Before saying an insult at a driver for cutting of his truck in a reckless manner.
“We were stretched too thin. We had lost too many men trying to hold Lviv, and at times, it felt like you were the only one left in your trench for hundreds of meters. You’d call out if you spotted a crab that our drones hadn’t picked up, and the others would come running. The sky was never empty—spotting drones, FPVs, mortar-dropping bastards—a constant, buzzing presence overhead. Before you’d instantly duck for cover when you heard them because you didn’t know if they were ours or the russians. Now thank god we know they weren’t meant for us; they saved our asses more than once.
At least we had experience. Fighting the Russians had taught us plenty. Killing those Moskals was target practice. They had wasted a month withdrawing from the Donbas, still paranoid that we might strike the moment they turned their backs to reinforce the north. Even with St. Petersburg on the brink, they stayed huddled in their trenches, unwilling to give up their ground.
I don’t know which whore in Donetsk had their president on a leash, but she must have worked wonders.
The trenches were filthy, damp, and reeking of sweat, blood, and rot. The mud swallowed everything—boots, bodies if you didn’t take them away in time, even your sanity if you let it. If it rained, you’d be wading through knee-deep sludge, freezing your ass off. We slept three at a time, huddled under layers of thick blankets. The only thing we ever took off were our boots. The nights were calm. Those crabs preferred the day. My entire watch would be spent staring at the night sky or, if I had enough battery left, watching them through my scope from my position.
There was an unspoken truce in the dark. They didn’t shoot at us, and we didn’t shoot at them—unless they got too close. When things were quiet, we could go for days without firing a single shot. Sometimes, you’d take a few potshots at a crab that wandered off, looking for a puddle deep enough to sleep in or stripping bark off some dead tree. They walked around like lost kids searching for their toys.
I noticed he had gone quiet, lost in thought. I took a sip from my Coke and asked, “Anything else about them that seemed odd?”
He exhaled through his nose, thinking. Then, finally, he spoke.
“They knew each other.”
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I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean… they were familiar. I remember one time—me and three others just sat in our trenches, watching them through binoculars. There were five of them. One in the middle, the others circling around it. At first, we thought they were setting up for an attack, but then… they started playing some kind of game.”
“A game?”
He nodded. “One after another, they’d take turns stepping forward, tapping the middle crab on the back, then walking back to where they started. The middle crab just stood there, calmly spinning in place. We watched them do this for almost ten minutes. Still don’t know what the hell it was. It was almost…” He hesitated, searching for the right word.
“Innocent.”
I imagined it for a moment—those things, whatever they were, playing in the ruins of a war they had no place in. But that fleeting image of childlike curiosity shattered the moment they attacked again.
Their blasters were worse than anything the Russians ever had. Some of them fired rounds that would explode above the treetops, raining molten metal down on us. We called them ‘moles’—munition tthat burrowed into the dirt before exploding underground. If one of those hit your trench, you had maybe a second before it tore through the earth and ripped you apart with shrapnel.
“I had to drag a guy a full kilometer back to the ambulance,” he muttered. “His trench got hit by one of those. Three guys lost their legs. When I got back, the rats were already eating what was left.”
We fell into silence.
Half an hour later, we pulled up to a roadside fast food joint for dinner.
As I unwrapped my burger, I asked, **“When did you
Half an hour later we stopped at a road side fast food for dinner.
I took a sip of my Coke, the cold fizz stinging the back of my throat. “When did you know reinforcements had finally arrived?”
He didn’t hesitate. “When we had so much close air support, we didn’t know what to do with it.” He leaned back in his seat, a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. “We had so many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean jets overhead, we’d call in an airstrike if a bush moved too much.”
I let out a short laugh, but he wasn’t exactly joking.
“We went from begging for drone strikes to watching entire forests get flattened because someone thought they saw movement. The sky was never empty.” He shook his head. “One time, we spotted a handful of crabs trying to dig in near a ruined barn. Someone got on the radio and called it in. Less than fives minutes later, the Chinese flew above us and the entire damn field was on fire.”
It was a challenge—having some Ukrainian grunt call in an airstrike and expecting a Korean or Japanese pilot to drop it exactly where it was needed. That kind of coordination took time. At first, they held back the “tourists” for a few days, trying to iron out communications. While the UN was too busy finding a way to talk to the crabs, they should’ve been figuring out how to give every army on Earth the same damn maps and call-for-fire manuals.
They only brought in the tourists when a line was about to break.
That’s how I ended up there. Me and my squad, down to the wire.
I must be cursed, because somehow, the crabs always zeroed in on whatever square kilometer I was in. That entire afternoon, they were dead set on wiping us out. I went through 900 rounds on my Minimi—belt after belt, and none of it was suppression. I fired at everything I saw, and there was always something to see.
When we were down to our last belts and last magazines, we told command to fuck off. If we ran out of ammo, we weren’t dying in that trench. We were pulling out.
I had 150 rounds left when I heard it.
A sharp, metallic whistle cut through the air, then a blur of metal darting past just meters above my head. A second later, the shockwave hit. My ears were protected, but I still felt the crack of air in my chest. The shell landed 300 meters away, right in a dead tripod who whoever fired that shell mistook for alive.
I spun around, searching for where it came from. Then I saw it—a tank, rolling in from the road about two hundred meters away.
I couldn’t tell what model at first, just saw its hull bouncing over potholes, but the turret stayed locked on me. I knew that gunner had my face dead center in his sights.
I ducked. Dashed for the Ukrainian flag a few meters away, ripped it from the dirt, and swung it high above my head. Please, God, let them know I’m human.
The tank didn’t fire.
Then two more appeared, flanking it left and right as they rolled toward us. I turned back to the field, my heart hammering, praying that the guys inside those tanks recognized I was Homo sapien, despite how fucking wrecked I must’ve looked.
Another shell came in, even closer this time. Boom. It hit a position where crabs had been firing their blasters at us for half an hour. I flinched. When I turned back, the tanks had lined up along our trench line. The lead tank—just twenty meters away now—had a man pop the hatch. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and scanning the front with binoculars.
That’s when I finally saw the markings. A ZTZ-99A. Chinese. A beauty. It had a red star with some Mandarin characters painted beneath it.
For a second, I just stared. It felt like seeing my mother rise from the dead.
The tank commander finally noticed me gawking and barked something in broken English. Took me a second to register, but I got the meaning: “Eyes forward.”
Not even twenty minutes later, APCs rumbled in, dropping off Kazakh infantry. They took over the trench. We were relieved.
The next few hours were a blur. The Kazakhs took over our trench while the Chinese occupied the other platoon's position. As we handed things over, we walked them through everything we’d learned—the suspected ponds where the Crabs liked to rest, the direction of their last attack, and the exact times when the rats became a real problem at night and all the other fine print.
We broke down the Crabs' combat patterns and passed along our callouts for fire support. They listened, but their expressions said it all—they couldn’t believe how we’d managed to survive here.
Two weeks later, when we returned to relieve them, everything had changed. The trenches were deeper, the shelters sturdier. They had rebuilt the entire setup from the ground up.
We were exhausted, running on fumes, and there was no time to rest when we had dug the trenches. We had dug in, bracing for the next wave, but also ready for the order to counterattack the Crabs and take back western Ukraine. The Kazakhs and Chinese didn’t care—not in a cruel way, but in the way only soldiers far from home could. For them, this was just another posting, a warzone thousands of kilometres away. Their job was simple: hold the line for as long as they could.
For us, it was different. It felt like history repeating itself. Back during the war with the Russians, they could afford to be comfortable. They were the occupiers. We were the ones who had to fight tooth and nail for every inch of our land.
And now, here we were again. Different enemy, same war. We weren’t just holding a line. We were fighting for something real—because if we lost, there would be nothing left to fight for.
That’s where the real tension was between everyone. It wasn’t about the calibre of ammunition, train rail widths, types of fuel or all of that. Sure it was important. But be it Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria or Germany there were the people fighting for their home turf and the others were here to keep them at bay.