by Barry Charman
They drop at first light, descending from orbit like arrowheads released after some awful tension has snapped. Orders are yelled and landing ramps dropped. He is moving by instinct. There is the pounding of heavy armoured feet. There is no time for anything but obedience. He gets his bearings. Notices that their grass is also green, their sky, though different, is also blue. Then he powers up his wargun and begins. Around him the other dropships land. The roaring weapons obliterate everything. Through his helmet all sound is reduced to a manageable hum. His squad fans out. It all happens wordlessly. Their task is not complicated. They are the spearhead. A decimation crew. Omegacore.
#
The people are faceless. His helmet filters their expressions out. It removes any emotions. Any fear. They are just moving shapes. A fragmented blur of unknown intent. It is wasteful to consider the enemy alive. They are an obstacle. He cuts down a small group and steps over the bodies. Their faces, when he looks down, are pixellated. Their screams, which they surely must have released, were filtered into something resembling birdsong. He stares at the bodies until the pixels burn into his eyes. But he cannot see what he cannot see.
#
By evening he is marching through a reduced, charred land, lazer-cutters are screaming ahead of him, disintegrating men by the dozen. He couldn’t hear cries. Or pleas. Five rotations ago they were fighting on one of their distant moons, now they are already on their homeworld. The push has progressed with a horrible grace. The war has consumed armies, and now it comes to cities. It is all so quick. So quick.
#
Sometimes there is a lull and he looks up at the stars. Beyond is the death grid. Sapphires spill against soft ink. Jade laser-sweeps hunt for satellites and bring them down. They fall like stardust against a scorched skyline. He cannot stop a sigh of delight. Sometimes there is beauty.
#
Orders pulse through the static in his helmet. There is no pause. No hold. He marches through cities that are lifeless. Through houses that are only walls. The doom tanks have passed ahead. Oblivion core droids have visited. A smoking nest rests in a burning tree. The animals have fled. He is grateful.
#
Stopping for a moment, he sips on the cool water that recycles through his war helm. It has a comforting familiarity. He is in a calm coccon scything through this wretched world. He listens, but there is nothing to hear. He cuts the static, but there is nothing outside of it left. He allows for a moment where he murmurs a prayer to both the living and the dead. For the endurance of something that cannot be killed. For something of meaning to linger. For there to be something left. A tree still has five leaves, waving like fingers. He waves back.
#
He hears combat chatter through his suit and understands the war is entering the next phase. The orbiting battalion begins environmental erasure. The conditions of victory have changed. Only waste world status will now satisfy. Decay is stirred into the seeds of everything that has been sown. Culture-wipe phases follow. History turns into parchment and burns. Truth is scorched into a silhouette on a wall. They launch a peace choir to pummel a death dirge into the malingerers. A hymn of death and victory.
#
When it is quiet, he pauses to look around. To see. Here is a courtyard. A public square, perhaps? There is a raised dais in the centre, and bullet-pocked steps that surround it. Here is a place where people lived. Their absence is strangely present. Here they danced. Here they met. Parted. Rejoiced. Sung. Embraced. Mourned. It is rich with sorrow and joy. Here was a land of promise and plenty. He sits on a rock that was once a rose, now fused into a lump of dull glass, and in his armour he weeps. No one is watching and no one cares. So he weeps.
#
Absolute victory is absolute. This is carved into both sides.
#
The objective has shifted to victory level 5. Seasons will be lacerated. Evisceration psalms are to be hummed at all times. Mountain killers have been dropped from orbit. De-pollination chemists have begun crucifictions. Skinned trees are being ceremoniously gathered for a hopefire. The youths from the damnation order are sent to locate small villages, or isolated outposts. They go house to house. A knock here. A shot there. Scalpel guns hiss through the night. Little whispers of parting.
#
His company marches through a cemetery, churning up the dead and filling in the gaps. He mutes himself, and apologises. He sings an old lullaby. He writes a new one. Tries to. He does not know how to create. This is something he only registers now, it angers him. Can you make anger? He wants to stop. To think. He wants to attempt to untangle many things. But the march is pushing on. There is no time to pause. No need.
#
He stops in a labyrinth of rubble. This was once a municipal district, he thinks. A seat of power. They must have had schools. Hospitals. Museums. They must have had a great many things before the fleet eclipsed the sky. Nearby there is a headless statue. A figure holding a glittering golden orb. A tapestry flutters past him, carried by an unnatural breeze. The colours are rich and vivid. He glimpses a golden creature upon it. Like a dragon, but with wide and knowing eyes. Its gaze is languid, yet penetrating. A god? A children’s fable? An amusing beast? There is now no one to tell him. The enemy is the enemy. This he recites when other things are too loud. But this has no clear meaning. How long has it been without clear meaning? When this thought is also too loud, he recites again.
#
A maelstrom has been summoned in the eastmost sea. A vortex that will not be powered down. The pull of catastrophe will be immense. It will be left like this. Drones will record the spectacle. Spools of triumph for the homeworld to adore. The grandeur of devastation: a safe and distant spectacle. Victory is a silent enemy. A dissenting voice diminished, cast unto the void.
#
The recall order is given. Cartographer’s Lament descends from orbit and the company marches towards the beacon. How long have they been here? He wonders if it matters. The assault has been planet-wide. He has seen little of the full war, but has heard fragments through the broadcast that’s been sending updates to all of the troops. The crescendo of screams is just as awful as the silence that follows.
He waits with his company for the dropship to land. Once collected, they will go home. He looks around, at a plateau that was once a forest. He tries to find something that they have left behind. But they will crack the sky from orbit with a resolution wave. Absolute victory is absolute. His boot leaves a square print in the dirt. He imagines walking on one of their beaches. Feeling sand between his toes. He imagines that everything he has ever had or known, could also have been found here. It would have been different, but it would also have been the same. He grips his wargun tight. The land shakes as the dropship descends. They all march onboard. Two by two. Neat and orderly. Quiet and calm. There will be a celebration later. They would rejoice. The enemy is the enemy. Even when they could no longer fight back. When all they were fighting for were scraps. When they were no longer fighting, but were running from you in naked terror, and the only thing you could hit were their backs. The enemy was never anything less than the enemy.
#
There is no window from which to watch the receding world. In the debrief they called it Vector 5-17. But that is not a name. That is not what they called it, down there. What was it to them? There is no sound that reaches him of the great rending that he knows is taking place below. The ship jostles him almost soothingly. Strapped in, he is reminded of being an infant. Helpless, and yet never afraid. He closes his eyes. There is a green that still exists. There is a blue sky that waits. The ecstasy and the horror of this, makes the quiet that he fears he will be left with, almost impossible to imagine. So he tries not to think, but he knows that truly it is all he can do.
~
Bio:
Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, sites and anthologies, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. “Doom Warnings,” his self-published collection of strange and speculative short stories is available in paperback on Amazon and as a PDF at: blurb.co.uk/b/12079076
Philosophy Note:
This is a story about a war without philosophy, without meaning or intent. It is a study of the absurdity of the evolution of war, and its destructive capability, to the point where even the people fighting have no understanding of its cause.
