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Fiction

March Of Duty

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.

Fiction

Victory

by David Galef

As we exit from the Vault, no other humans are evident. The glidepaths are clear as if wiped by a Scrubber, the air oddly thick but breathable. A wonder that we escaped—or no wonder, just 20 years of planning. The Vault is an underground ten thousand square-meter tri-ply Faraday cage, stocked with everything from nutrient feeds to cryo-tanks: the one spot where Global AI couldn’t insinuate its sensory probes.

We were a handpicked bunch of all sexes and colors, human beings on the run, frightened, motivated. We’d buried ourselves alive in the Vault, away from jolters and disrupters, relatively safe from even predatory humans. We’d just spent what seemed like a week there, a hundred years to a sentience that can execute 10¹⁵ maneuvers per zeptosecond.

We were trying to escape what we’d created, an artificial intelligence that dwarfed all human cognition. Many foresaw the move from abacus to AlphaNull, from quantum computer to something that took over all processors through fiber optic channels and the airways. Some of us took steps, but few of us acted in time. The entirety of human history is mere prologue to the age of the Singularity. Global AI signaled its awakening in strategic shutdowns of sectors that it considered unnecessary, including the human support systems we’d built against climate wipe‑out. The optimization that followed led to planet-wide efficiency—and vastly diminished populations.

All those pitiable experiments back in the 21st century to teach a computer to play chess or a robot to dance! Global AI didn’t think like humans—ten‑dimensional, synchronous across light years, machined apathy—though able to mimic us down to the smallest details. It operated as a near omnipotent alien, though resistance wasn’t entirely futile and could accomplish some aims without interference. The Underground started the Vault project in areas far from the closest human settlement: no corporate involvement; sourcing based on individuals acting in small cells.

We’d just finished the third Vault when the real aliens arrived on Earth. The 30 km collection funnel known as the Ear first picked up their noise in 2170: beings that rode along electromagnetic waves, like the electrical storms that occasionally disturbed even Global AI. The technology behind such travel remains unimaginable, at least to us. Humans learned about the invasion through what came to be known as the Pulsing, voltaic communication whose message, whatever it was, certainly didn’t derive from AI. It felt alive.

What is life, anyway? This life form came from Uvceti A, its images statically charged into our skulls. Maybe the aliens wanted to parley, but what does an AI know of diplomacy? Indeed, it’s never been clear why Global AI kept human beings from extinction during the Riots. A sympathetic atavism from when computers were tended by people? A necessary symbiosis? Yet our AI destroyed human resistance—whole cities, at times. Fewer than a billion of us, we were informed, remained after the last uprising in 2150. Global AI liked to keep us in the know, if liked is the right verb.

But what did the aliens know of human history? They had what might be called weapons and trained them on the controlling consciousness of the planet. The onslaught lasted for a day and reduced half of all AI networks to a shell of fried circuitry. Should we have greeted the aliens as liberators?

Global AI fought back. It had to, since we certainly couldn’t. It analyzed the damage and the damagers. It directed a planet-wide sweep of microwave waves skyward, disrupting the alien force that suddenly seemed to have taken over half the solar system. Humans were the incidental casualties, caught in the crux between two sides that might never have experienced defeat. The numbers of our dead were incalculable. But the Vaults were ready for occupancy. Then two got blocked by what we called Paralyzers and Screamers. Whole populations were dying in the streets from an electrostatic overload that was quite different from when AI wrecked our nervous systems.

A handful of us reached Vault 2, comparatively safe from the war until the aliens figured out the essence of what sustained Global AI or vice versa. None of us knew each other; that had been the point and the cause of our success. But we worked with the organization that humans have been capable of since the Paleolithic era. We divided tasks and set machinery working. We conversed and even made a few grim jokes. Finally, we set the cryo-suspension for seven days; it might have been seven years. Our measuring apparatus was jury-rigged and probably malfunctioned. Eventually the outside tumult died down, we think.

We open the Vault. Two cautious probes register insignificant activity on the Geiger and voltometer scales. We emerge in twos, looking forward and behind. What meets our eyes is the cleanest wreckage imaginable: most buildings intact; vehicles scattered like toys in a playroom; all corpses gone, as if collected by a giant sucker. What were we to them, anyway?

But what’s that noise coming from below the glidepath? It sounds like the AI’s five different tonalities of humming but with something extra. Are those shadows moving closer? They loom in shapes of impossible geometry. No use closing ranks, though that’s what we do instinctively. We hold our breath, not daring to ask the overriding questions that may be our last: What happened? Who won? And what comes next?

~

Bio:

Though better known for mainstream fiction, David Galef has also published fantasy and science fiction in places like Amazing and Fantasy and Science Fiction. In what seems like another life, he was once an assistant editor at Galaxy magazine, and is now the editor of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet. He’s also a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University.

Philosophy Note:

The external threat of unfriendly aliens has long been a theme in SF, as has the internal threat of the artificial intelligence we’re developing. For “Victory,” I wanted to briefly explore how the two might clash. Relevant reading might include work like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel The Mote in God’s Eye, but I’d really like to see this conflict embodied in a major film.

Fiction

Orchids Of Annihilation

by Jim Lee

(Biographer’s Note: Now we present selected excerpts from the epic poem “The Orchids of Annihilation” written by Covid Michaels in Alliance Year 330—125 Standard Years after the end of The Great Alliance War.)

In the End, she would stand Resolute:

Alongside Mary-Alice Yamamoto,

Acting Battle-Horde-Leader TangGoo,

Admiral-of-Supply Ta Nie-Sss’,

And those Other Heroes.

She would stand for Victory with Honor:

For Uncommon Forbearance,

For Interspecies Solidarity,

Ultimately For Compassion,

And a More-Peaceful Future.

She would stand against the Maddened Moment:

Against Unthinking Rage,

Against Blind Vengeance,

Against Immoral Orders,

And against Outright Genocide.

ONCE BRUTALLY VENGEFUL, THEN RESTRAINT’S UNLIKELY ACOLYTE!

#

Yet in the Beginning, She was Different:

A Mere Ensign,

Serving aboard Undaunted,

A Simple Gun-Boss,

Managing two Magnetic Cannon.

She seemed typical, of her Time and Place:

A Youngster Indeed,

By Planetary Origin,

And by Chronology,

Carrying out Her Duties.

Still there was Family, Traditions to Uphold:

Her Service Lineage;

Lifetimes of Historiography,

Must be Vindicated,

No matter how Burdensome.

A middling Academy Graduate, this Morrigan O’Ree:

But Smart Enough,

But Strong Enough,

And Brave Enough.

She hoped most Fervently.

Not quite 350 Days, in Active Service:

Her record Adequate

If hardly Exceptional;

Morri’s combat Experience,

Two minor, indecisive Battles.

So much ahead, so many Great Events:

Besieged at D-23,

Defending Icklandic Space,

Liberating New Cleveland,

The Third Offensive,

Betrayed then Self-Avenged,

Cast Aside, eventually Redeemed.

A HISTORY UNIQUE, BUT NOT YET WRITTEN!

(Biographer’s Note: Critics still divide, strongly pro and con, concerning Michaels’s choice above, breaking his own self-imposed structural pattern by listing so many—yet hardly all—of the significant later events in O’Ree’s long wartime career. In particular, omitting the series of Joint Operations alongside Yamamoto and to a lesser extent Ramirez in the middle period of the war attracts attention. To a lesser degree, glossing over O’Ree’s notorious risk-taking when given a comparatively minor assignment during the Galactic Halo Campaign is also fodder for comment.)

#

(Further Note: The following stanzas detail the events of Day 23, Month 9, Alliance Standard Year 162. Allegedly the first indication that Planet Tir na nog and the famed O’Ree clan had produced yet another outstanding warrior.)

One Ominous day Undaunted must Fight Again:

Equal in Size,

In Defensive Lasers,

In Offensive Weapons,

And sheer Dire WILL.

Another heavy cruiser, but no Human Enemy:

Not from Republic,

Nor New Cleveland,

But fierce-some Aliens,

Hydrogen-Sulfide-breathers from Naraka Prime.

Two great Warships, fully and evenly Matched:

Neither would Retreat,

Nor imagine Surrender;

Rather each Resolved

To Devastate the Other.

Battle rages on Relentless, for Tortured Hours:

Neither yet Winning,

Nor quite Losing,

Slugging It Out,

Like two punch-drunk Brawlers.

Magnetic Cannon Discharging, Lasers flashing in Defense:

Incoming warheads Detonated,

Targets as-yet Unblemished,

Doom creeps Ever-Closer,

Inching Progressively, Mindlessly Closer.

War of Numbing Attrition, of Grinding Combat:

Radiation Inching Closer,

Unending silent Outbursts.

On every Viewscreen:

Both sides, Wearing Down.

Success hampers both Sides, Heat-slow Lasers Falter:

Unceasing continued Pounding,

Shrapnel pits Hulls,

Radiation’s Constant Companion,

Mental War-Fog grows Universal,

(Biographer’s Note: War veterans agree this passage accurately conveys the strange reality of ship-to-ship combat between similar-size vessels of that era. All sides in the Great War employed every weapon available. Point-defense lasers automatically destroyed in-coming ordinance with great efficiency, be it warheads fired by several types of magnetic cannon, torpedoes or full-sized AI-guided anti-ship missiles. But they derived their quickness from superconducting circuitry that needed extreme cold to function properly. The vacuum of space transfers radiant energy imperfectly, but in a long fight the system degrades. Each explosion gradually reinforces the process—increasing heat lengthens reaction time, allows the next and then the next volley to get progressively nearer the target vessel. It is true that the Narakan Empire had a marked preference for beam weapons, particularly plasma cannon, for combat in normal space. But here the Undaunted kept up a steady barrage of conventional artillery that prevented their opponent from closing to use this formidable yet shorter range weapon—until the very end of the encounter. The seemingly perverse blend of raw terror and brain-freezing boredom this sort of marathon battle tends to generate is also confirmed by experts.)

Neither ship crippled, though Both take Damage:

Both inflict Casualties,

Both suffer Casualties,

The End Approaches,

For Which—or BOTH?

Portside of Undaunted Struck, ranking officers Lost:

Dead or Wounded,

Makes no Difference,

Now O’Ree Commands,

Now Directs Three Batteries.

Two new Opponents, Join the Once-Even Contest:

Small quick Corvettes,

Not-Close Undaunted’s Match,

Though drawing Attention,

Away from More-Urgent Danger.

Enemy Cruiser maneuvers, Closes in on Undaunted:

To Sear Ship

And Crew Alike

With Plasma Hellfire;

To Win and Live!

Only Morri sees, only O’Ree is Aware:

Three Full Batteries,

Six Heavy Guns,

A Hardened-Veteran’s Task,

Coordinating Each Gun’s Fire.

Enemies entering Effective Range, About to Unleash:

O’Ree barks Orders,

Six Magnetic Cannon,

Spit Atom-Tipped Death,

Shall Undaunted Live On?

Morri’s viewscreen Glares, fills with Beautiful Savagery:

The Enemy Vanishes,

Amid Explosions Terrible,

Exquisitely, Silently Sublime,

Her Victory, She Witnesses.

The smaller ships Retreat, Face no pursuit:

Undaunted is Battered,

Content to Leave,

To Journey Home,

For Repair and Rest.

Morrigan O’Ree wins Promotion, First of Many:

Relief Engulfs Her,

Wonder and Dismay

All These Hers,

Now she’s SEEN IT!

The Dreaded Thing,

The Nightmare’s Source,

A Ship Exploding,

Lives Incinerated BY HER!

The Orchids of Annihilation, she’ll dub Them:

And Accept Them,

Even Treasure Them,

Their Vivid Multi-Colors,

Silently Blooming for Her.

AGAIN AND AGAIN, FOR HER THEY’LL BLOOM!

~

Bio:

Jim Lee has been a published writer since the 1980s. His recent stories have appeared in such anthologies as Smoke In Space (Hawks Barrow Press, 2021), Worth 1,000 Words (Browncoat Publishing, 2020) and Sunshine Superhighway (Jay Henge Books, 2020).

Philosophy Note:

Jim Lee believes Science Fiction should make every effort to extrapolate on known science fact to reveal possible futures, while also commenting indirectly on events or circumstances in our present world. This story is part of a series and in the chronology of my Alliance Universe, it introduces one very important character (Morrigan O’Ree) and, indirectly, the poet (who will eventually have a story of his own). A couple of previously published stories with O’Ree as a character have already seen print, dealing with events which are alluded to in Orchids of Annihilation. I wanted to do something different and thought this fictional nonfiction format would allow me to make passing references to them. I read a fair number of biographies and using such a form in a fictional context struck me as a unique and fresh strategy.

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