Nova Wars

The morning was crisp and cold, with dew on the grass and the bushes.

Except where they'd been burnt, then the ground was thick, clotting ash that stuck to everything.

The pair were walking down the side road, off to the right side of it, tromping through the ash and the mud. One was a large female Captain of the Means of the Way Dra.Falten military forces with a nametag that read "Strechen", her formally immaculate uniform streaked with mud and dirt and rumpled, even though a sharp eyed observer could still see the starched creases down the front of the legs and on the sleeves.

Walking in front of the female was a much smaller male, 1.25 meters to the females 1.75 meters. The male's uniform was dirty and rumpled under the camoflauge cloaks that were draped over the trooper. His rank of Rifleman Second Class and his tags of "Tawtchee-9912743" were either gone or hidden by straps and/or the cloak.

The male marched in silence, one foot in front of the other, his rifle held loosely in his hands, his head up and looking at his surroundings as he steadily moved down the road. Every ten or fifteen minutes he reached down and pressed the stud on an atmo bottle at his hip.

Strechen knew he'd taken that atmo bottle off of her adjutant when the Lieutenant had been killed in an ambush. Male tanks didn't have the device on them to repressurize the tank from ambient atmosphere, and the one that Tawtchee kept tapping did.

The female moved wearily, limping slightly, her head often down as she panted behind her face mask. She had a cloak across her shoulders but thrown back.

Strechen followed the Rifleman silently for as long as she could but finally couldn't take the silence any more, needing something, anything to take her mind off of how sore her footpads were.

"How long have you been in the Imperial Military Services?" she asked.

"Fourteen years," the male answered.

She waited a few moments for the male to elaborate, most males just rambled on as fast as possible, hoping to give her the right answers before she became angry or lost interest, depending on the circumstances.

"You don't seem to care about treating me as my rank demands," she said.

"Nope."

"After fourteen years it seems as if you would understand and be able to perform basic military courtesy."

"Yup."

"Yet, you do not."

"Nope."

She waited and sighed with frustration as the male hit the stud.

"Ahh, that's the stuff," he said, taking a deep breath.

"Why do you still have atmosphere boost? Mine is at 20% and the auto-reclamation system can't keep up," Strechen said.

"You have yours on constant. I only take a hit when I need one," he said, still tromping forward. "Learned that my first week here."

Strechen reached down and pulled her atmo-tank up. She looked at it and moved the button from dedicated to automatic to manual.

They marched in silence for a while.

Tawtchee suddenly stopped, holding up his hand. He cocked his head, listening closely, then moved over to a flat rock. He got out his sextant and took another reading, looking at the map.

Strechen was still slightly irritated that the smaller male had not given her back her map.

"Take five," Tawtchee said. He began taking off the cloaks, laying them down and quickly rolling them up. He took off the duffle, then the ruck once the duffle straps weren't overlaid on the ruck straps. He started arranging stuff, putting the cloaks in pockets, just leaving one draped over his ruck.

Taking off the boots, Strechen wiggled her toes and sighed.

Tawtchee sat down in front of her and grabbed her foot, pulling her sock off.

Strechen shrieked and yanked her foot back.

"Stop being a boot," Tawtchee snapped, grabbing her foot. He looked at it closely. "Some cracks in your base pad, looks like some bad wear on your middle toe pad," he dug in his bag and pulled out what looked like a roll of tape. He peeled some off and Strechen wondered why it was so thick.

The tape went on her pads, then he checked the other foot, putting three pieces of tape on her toe pads. He also brought out a nail clipper and cut her pinkie claws down.

"There," he said, standing up. "Take care of your feet."

Strechen wanted to snap at him that she knew what she was doing but instead looked around.

They were moving through forest that was bright green even though the trunks were scorched and fire scarred. Bushes were blackened skeletons that had ferns poking up through them. There was a crashed striker buried in the ferns, the fuselage so burnt up that she couldn't tell which side it was from.

"Grenky," Tawtchee suddenly said.

"What?" Strechen was yanked out of her thoughts.

"It's a Grenky aerospace striker. Before they started fielding the ones with the battlescreens, so probably a year back or so. Took a missile, you can tell by the way the fuselage is warped," Tawtchee said.

"How do you know this? Were you with intelligence?" Strechen asked.

Tawtchee shook his head, getting up and pulling on his ruck, then his duffle. "Picked it up, I guess."

He knocked some dirt and mud off his weapon, turned it on to run a function check, then turned it back off.

"Why do you keep your weapon off? What if you are ambushed?" Strechen asked.

"Keeps drones from finding me. Dommy drones can pick up an active rifle at nearly a kilometer, Grenky drones can catch me at about six hundred meters," the male said, shrugging. "Like you saw, if we get ambushed, I'll be too busy grabbing cover or running for position to shoot back."

"Oh," Strechen went silent.

"Let's go," the male said.

Strechen held back her instincts to snap at the male, to take command and make all the decisions.

Her feet felt better and the right boot wasn't pinching.

The sound of engines grew louder and louder, until suddenly the pair left the overgrown forest.

A large dirt road went from right to left. There were trucks, tanks, armored cars, flatbeds, armored personnel carriers, tanks, even hover-vehicles moving in both directions. The ones heading right were all mostly clean, intact, the trucks full of gear or soldiers.

The ones moving left were dirty, some were damaged, only a few had soldiers and never a full load.

"We can get a ride," Strechen said excitedly, moving forward.

Tawtchee grabbed her by the back of the shirt, stopping her.

"Only if you want a ride to the front," he said. "Follow."

Again, Strechen had to push down the desire to tell him what to do. Instead, she followed him to the edge of the road, where he waited for a gap and darted across so that he was walking with the traffic heading left.

He walked, holding his rifle, a floppy hat on his head, in that steady, ground eating pace that Strechen had learned to hate because she couldn't emulate it.

At one point trucks roared by with dead males in the back. Some looked perfectly fine, others were burnt and blackened, little better than carbonized skeletons. Some trucks had blood running off the bed, thin trickles onto the ground.

"Honored dead," Strechen said.

"Poor dumb bastards," Tawtchee grunted.

"Show respect," Strechen snapped.

Tawtchee stopped, turning to glare at her. "You have pretty big ovaries saying that to me, ma'am," he snarled.

"They are being taken back to return to their families," Strechen said, straightening up. "You would do well to respect their sacrifice."

Tawtchee suddenly laughed, a dark, mocking tone. "That what you really think?"

She nodded. "They are taken to the rear, where their remains are put in coffins to return to their families and buried with honor."

Tawtchee sneered. "They're taken to the rear, a DNA sample is taken, then they throw the bodies in the incinerator."

Strechen blinked.

"Then, once their number and DNA scan is in the system, they throw the sample into the incinerator," he snarled. "They cease to exist," he shook his head. "There are over five thousand males born for each female. We are conceived in a lab, grown in factories, tested in infancy for what we will be best at, educated in creches, work our lives away," he stared up at her. "We have no families. We have no clans. We live six to twenty to an apartment. We will never pair bond. We will never have children. At the end, we are just a number in a database."

"That's..." Strechen started to say.

He started walking away.

"Once they burn the DNA sample, we cease to exist," he paused. "We live, we work, we fight, we die - never more than a number. For the glory of the Empress, the Emperor, and the Empire."

It chose that minute to start raining. Warm, sticky feeling rain that smelled faintly of burnt metal.

"Long live the Empire," the male grunted.

-----

The traffic had gotten heavier. At times cargo-lifters or strikers flew overhead. Strechen was having to hurry to keep up with the shorter male as he passed groups walking the same way they were. The rain had made the dirt turn into heavy sticky red mud that made her feet seemed to weight a ton, made each step an effort.

The males just seemed to trudge along like they weren't walking through mud.

Strechen noticed that most of the males were wounded, some with bloody bandages on their arms or legs or even on their heads.

All of them watched carefully by female officers in tailored and pressed uniforms.

She saw an officer stop Tawtchee, looking him up and down, and hurried up to the male. She was suddenly worried the new officer would interfere with her duty of bringing the smaller male to the starport and making sure he boarded the transport.

"...a disgrace to the Empire," the female officer, a Senior Command Lieutenant, was telling Tawtchee. "Your transponder is off, your uniform is a disgrace, and why do you have an officer's breathing accessory tank?"

"He's with me, Lieutenant," Captain Strechen said.

"And you are?" the Lieutenant asked.

Strechen suddenly remembered that the male had used her transponder as bait for the rogue automaton the night before.

Strechen dug out her ID, holding it out.

"Field Captain Strechen, Means of the Way Intelligence Direct Action Services," she said, drawing herself up and looking down at the Lieutenant. She pointed at Tawtchee, who was already managing to move slowly into the steady stream of troopers heading west. "I'm taking him to the starport on direct IDAS orders."

The other female nodded jerkily. "Apologies, Captain."

"Carry on, Lieutenant," Strechen said. She spotted Tawtchee, who had somehow managed to get nearly twenty paces away. He was accepting a smoke from another enlistedman, laughing like he belonged with them.

She caught up, grabbing him and pulling him out of the small group of males, all of whom flinched from her.

"It's five more miles to the Massive Active Operations Base," Tawtchee said. He blew smoke and looked off to the west. "Then you can do whatever and we can go our separate ways."

They walked for a short time before she asked a question that had been burning in her mind since the night before.

"What makes you so special?" she asked.

"Huh?" Tawtchee looked up from the holocube he'd been tossed by another trooper.

"What makes you so special they'd pull me off assignment, give me an assistant, then have me go to an active war zone to get you?" she asked.

Tawtchee just shrugged. "My boundless charm, extraordinary good looks, and impressively sized penis?" He sneezed. He looked at the cube, nodded at a passing trooper, and tossed the holocube to him in an odd behind the back motion.

The other trooper caught it behind his back, but when he brought his hands around to the front they were empty.

Strechen pulled her attention away from how easily the holocube had been passed on and hidden, looking at Tawtchee. "Be serious. Do you have some esoteric schooling? Some unique experience?" she asked. "Are you somehow politically connected?"

Tawtchee snorted and combed his whiskers. "Not hardly. My creche was five thousand strong. My birth factory put out a thousand of us a week. I was one of thousands chosen that year for the Imperial military just my fetal factory alone. The closest I've been to the Emperor was swearing my oath in front of his hologram and it was pretty blurry. It could have been you in his clothes for all I could tell."

He started walking again. "I have no idea why they would send you to pick me up."

Strechen frowned, catching up. "You must have some idea. You're the only one on this planet I was assigned with picking up and we have a fast transport waiting at the starport just for the two of us."

Again, Tawtchee just shrugged. "No clue. They don't tell people like me anything beyond 'go here' and 'do that' and 'kill that bastard for his country' and 'try not to die', Captain."

"Maybe something from your earlier career?" she asked.

He sighed. "You're not going to let this go."

"No."

"Fine. First assignment was Lawp'Vrakak. At least, that's why the Empire called it. It had a different name, as we found out," he pulled the roll of smokesticks out of his pocket and lit one.

"Spare?" a male walking a little faster asked. "Lost mine when the FOB got overrun."

"Keep 'em," Tawtchee said, tossing the small roll to the other male.

"Thanks, brother," the other male said. Strechen noticed that he immediately handed out all but two to the other males around him. One produced a lighter and passed it around.

Another group caught up to Strechen and Tawtchee, surrounding them, and she lost sight of the other group.

"I was one of about twenty-five thousand troops assigned to guard two million colonists and administrators for a new colony," Tawtchee said when Strechen ran a bit to catch back up to him. "There was about two thousand scientists too. We landed in a good spot, set up the beacons for the colonists, and the transports landed. We had most of the prefabs done in under two weeks. The scientists started checking out old ruins after about a year and I was assigned to guard some from any wildlife."

How did he move so fast when his legs were noticeable shorter than hers?

"Someone screwed up and we found out that someone else used to live there," he said.

They were silent for a while as the rain got heavier. She saw most of the males weren't even bothering with their cloaks, just letting their uniforms and gear get wet as they marched. She saw Tawtchee tap a guy in front of him.

"Where's your socks, brother?" Tawtchee asked.

"Left lower pocket," the other male said.

She watched as Tawtchee pulled two rolls of socks out and hung them from the other male's rucksack frame. Then the other male repeated it for Tawtchee. A quick glance around showed her that a lot of males were doing that, some even hanging underclothes or pants from their rucksack frames.

The rain quickly soaked into them, dripping reddish mud from them.

"Who used to live there?" Strechen asked after Tawtchee moved off to the side and lit a smoke as they walked.

"Terrors. Or, rather, Terrans," he said. "Some idiot triggered a defense system and forty-eight hours later the troopers that didn't manage to get off planet were dead," he said. He gave a barking laugh. "The colonists, of course, were being guarded by Terran robots and the pointy eared Terrans everyone calls elves. Guess the colonists were their colonists now."

He shrugged. "I was lucky, I got Senior Experimenter Hrekkel onto one of the last transports," he gave a bitter laugh. "If that scientist hadn't dragged me aboard after that robot broke my back, I'd be just another forgotten number."

Strechen nodded. "Then what?"

"Bhrestikin-4. Dommy troops were making landfall. We were coming in on dropships when the Grenky jumped in system. Turned into a complete fuck fuck circus," he shrugged. "We managed to take the planet for the low low price of seventeen million of us and nearly a thousand officers."

A thousand officers is a horrific toll, even if we did take the planet, she thought, then almost stopped. Really? Am I so quick to dismiss the numbers of dead males? Millions. All dead.

She heard Tawtchee's voice in her head. They dump the sample into the incinerator and we cease to exist.

The male was still talking. "After that, Charmeka-3. What a shit show. Dommy troops pushed Grenky and then us off the planet. They just wanted it more. They threw fifty million into the grinder, the Grenky threw sixteen, we threw thirty. Of course, might have been the Dommy started to prioritize killing officers that last two years."

He looked at her. "Average life expectancy for an officer anywhere near the front lines was seventeen minutes. On-planet was sixteen days."

That made her blink in shock and nervously try to brush her whiskers despite her mask being in the way. She thumbed the stud and took two deep breaths.

"Then here," he shrugged. "So, no. There's nothing special about me, Captain," he tugged his round brimmed soft hat down slightly, lowered his nose, and kept walking. "No special schooling, no special experience beyond getting my back broken by a pissed off robot, no political connections, no neat little quirk of my DNA that makes it so the Empire can only survive if I do some stupid shit while an officer stands there looking impressed."

Thunder rumbled in the clouds as more trucks passed.

"There must be something," Strechen said.

"Whoever sent you to get me? They wasted your time," Tawtchee said, shaking his head.

They kept trudging through the rain and the mud. Every time a vehicle passed, Strechen got her legs splashed with mud.

Truck after truck passed with dead Dra.Falten male troopers on them, piled high, blood running off the tailgate and into the mud of the road, where it mixed with the rain and then was splashed on the troops walking next to the road.

After nearly two more hours they passed by the gate guards, moving through the snakelike "S-Gate" and into the Massive Active Operations Base.

Strechen asked an MP and got directions to the starport.

Part of her wanted to stop somewhere and put on a clean uniform, but the way Tawtchee kept blending in with the groups of males worried her that she'd turn around and he'd vanish. She didn't want to take six hours looking for him just to find him in the bar across the street from wherever she went to freshen up.

The airfield slash starport was at the far side of the MAOB, uneven tarmac over dirt. Small starships, aerospace fighters, dropships, even strikers were all being moved around, some pushed by large groups of straining males or being pulled by groups of males using tow cables.

She marched straight up to the dropship that had brought her to the surface, pulling out her orders and showing them to the Way of the Means guard at the base of the gangplank.

It only took about ten minutes for the dropship to take off.

With some envious disgust, Strechen noticed that Tawtchee was asleep before the dropship even lifted off. He slept until the dropship landed inside the transport's bay and Strechen got up and kicked his foot.

"Let's go, Rifleman," she said.

Tawtchee just shrugged, getting up and following her.

The first thing she did was drop him off at the room he'd be using for the duration.

"I'll be back in an hour," she looked him up and down. "Use the auto-laundry on your uniform," she sniffed. "Make that two hours. Take a shower."

Tawtchee just nodded.

There has to be something he's not telling me, she thought as she headed to tell the Senior Field Operations Colonel that her mission had been a success.

Well, if you discounted the now headless Lieutenant.