Phagocytosis

Security Demarcation Line Latvia, "Rēzekne Gate" Sector –
Multinational Forces FOB (Forward Operating Base)
March 2038

Although no crabs have been sighted within 20 kilometers of the demarcation line in the past five months, the last beetle, a junior or infant, was culled with the help of a laser guided bomb a year ago. Discipline remains high despite the absence of active threats. Lieutenant Colonel Pham Duc Thien compensates for the quiet by organizing alert drills once or twice a month. All 560 soldiers stationed here, whether Belgian, German, Dutch, Vietnamese or Canadian, must be ready to move at any hour, be it 2 a.m. or 2 p.m. They grab their weapons and equipment and rush to man their posts without delay, man armoured vehicles or ready short range chemical weapon stations.

We watch as a company of German infantry march across the parade square, rehearsing for one of the many parades that waste Casper's time. The shock troops are equipped with helmet-mounted displays, flak protection around the torso and head, and rebreathers that shield them from Crab pheromones in the air and lung-attacking CBRN agents. A few among them, the corporals, medics, and machine gunners, wear last-generation exoskeletons. These suits help them carry extra ammunition, handle heavy weapons, or drag the wounded with less effort.

As a late infantryman rushes to join his platoon, having forgotten his gloves in his room, Colonel Pham grabs him by the shoulder. The German, already behind, just wants to rejoin his unit. His sergeants and officer glance over, wondering how much longer they will be delayed by the colonel.

Colonel Pham begins speaking, calm and steady.

"Those rebreathers we had, the first generation, not like these modern ones. Our helmets looked similar too. They resembled a bell. Sometimes you couldn't get through a doorway without turning sideways, they were so bulky. But they gave great protection against shrapnel. That's why we kept the design. Just made it a bit more modular and better looking."

He grabs the infantryman's leg as if inspecting a horse. The soldier struggles to keep his balance as the colonel taps the shin protector.

"Those, at first, guys wore football pads or MMA shin guards under their uniforms. Be it Viet's like me or Spaniards. Mostly to stop dumb injuries, like slamming your leg into metal edges when climbing in or out of vehicles. Saved me once, climbing through a broken window. Could have torn my leg open. Once the industrial ministers thought it was necessary, they began mass-producing frontal leg armor that looked like this. Supposedly, it was designed to stop shrapnel. If I remember correctly, injuries from HE blasters dropped by twelve percent after that."

Despite being twenty centimetres shorter and seemingly half the German's weight, the colonel spins the soldier around as if he were a doll.

"This chest armor here, it's modular and flexible. Unlike the old steel plates, it moves with you—letting you bend, twist, and stay agile without feeling like a tank. The engineers designed it specifically to protect against HE blasters and flying shrapnel. Layers of advanced materials absorb and disperse the impact, so fewer soldiers end up with broken ribs or worse. There's still ceramic plates front and back of course."

He taps the armor lightly.

"It's not perfect. No armor ever is. But it's saved more lives than you'd think. The flexibility means soldiers can keep fighting longer without getting worn down by heavy gear. And when you're out there, every advantage counts." He says before tapping the shoulder in the back, in a too casual way for a colonel. The shoulder stands at attention before sprinting back to his platoon.

"Guy's nineteen I believe. They all are." He continues, walking away as if expecting me to follow.

"Any kids of your own?" I ask.

He doesn't look at me. Doesn't answer. Instead, his gaze drifts to the corporals in the square, their exoskeleton frames glinting in the pale March light.

"Exoskeletons," he says slowly, as if tasting the word. "People, civilians, folks who were no where near those think they've always been like this, sleek, quiet, worth the weight. They weren't. A decade ago, strapping one on was like climbing inside a steel coffin with a bad attitude. The joints would seize up in the mud, servos would grind until you swore you could feel the teeth stripping under your skin. If you got hit in one, the whole frame might twist and break your leg before the enemy even got a second shot in. The first american and french units who issued them during the war had their men keep them off and keep them in the back of their vehicles." He scratches his chin, ignoring the sound of marching boots in the distance.

"And the power packs… ha. You needed two men just to haul enough to last a day. Some units made deals with mechanics just to get better batteries. But it was a miracle if the damn thing didn't fry itself halfway through an op. We never had those. One of the few things I'm glad for."

I wait for him to loop back to my question, but he only gestures at the parade square again.

"These here, they're different. Light enough to run in, smart enough to adjust mid-stride, and if a part fails, you can swap it out in minutes. Took us too long to learn that agility's more important than raw strength. Men died figuring that out. Thanks to advanced battery technology and half the world putting the Congo and other African countries to waste for the lithium mines. "

He still doesn't look at me, and I realize he's finished talking, but not about what I'd asked.

Colonel Pham finally glances my way, as if remembering I exist.

"Come," he says, turning on his heel.

I follow him across the square and into the main building, the hum of the drills fading behind us. His office is small, the air stale with coffee and cigarettes. Low blinds cast narrow stripes of light across a desk scattered with field reports and a half-empty ashtray. A service dress uniform hangs on the door, the ribbon edges curling from age. Between the stacks of papers and a lap^ptop, an odd photograph, three figures in civilian clothes, smiling stiffly on a beach.

The colonel closes the door and, without ceremony, unclips the seals of his mask. It's a modern model, the kind reserved for senior officers, war heroes, or in his case, both. The release hiss is soft, almost human, and he lifts it away.

From a distance, his face beneath could almost pass for whole. The left side, untouched besides a few scars is weathered but otherwise unremarkable. The right, at first glance,seems repaired, rebuilt with the quiet confidence of 2030s medicine. But the longer you look at it, the more it unsettles. The synthetic skin doesn't quite match the living half, the jawline droops imperceptibly lower, and the cheek carries a faint, unnatural tautness. His right eye is an optical implant the price of a mid-range car, yet it offers him barely a fraction of natural sight,ten percent, I once read on a report. The iris contracts a beat too slow, and when it moves, it drags the eyelid with it in a way no living muscle ever would.

Up close, it's not grotesque. It's just uncanny. A face assembled from the best intentions of engineers who had never met him. Despite easing the social discomfort the mask was meant to prevent, I'm not surprised when Pham exhales and seems to drop his guard once it's off.

He breathes out long and slow, as if removing the mask has returned oxygen to him. He sets it carefully on the desk beside the odd family photograph and leans back in his chair.

He pours me a glass of whiskey.
"To the lost," he says, and we touch glasses.

By the time the whiskey's burned its way down my throat, Pham is still working at his own glass. Even with his head tipped all the way back, a thin thread of liquid escapes the corner of his mouth and slides down his chin. He carefully cleans it with a tissue, as if used to it.

The office is dim, the blinds letting in only narrow blades of pale light. Pham sits across from me, the mask,and the mechanical eye fixed to it, resting on the desk between us like a discarded tool. Without it, his face is laid bare. The left side is whole, lined with age but solid, a few shallow scars. The right is something else entirely, skin drawn tight in places and puckered in others, the hollow socket dark where the implant would normally sit, the jaw twisted just enough to pull his mouth into a permanent half-grimace.

The room is quiet enough that I can hear the faint tick of the wall clock, the hum of the building's ventilation. The longer the silence holds, the more aware I am of the mask on the desk and the missing eye staring right at me.

"Kaunas," he says, pointing at that part of his face.

"Victory there nearly cost me an arm and a leg, like the Americans say," he continues.

I can't help but chuckle.

"Sorry," I say.

"Don't worry, it was meant to be funny."

"Outskirts or in the city itself?" I ask.

"Outskirts. I was careless, we were careless, so were our bosses. Everyone wanted it over with. Poland wasn't even fully secured. Resistance still clung to the forests, big cities still turned into free-fire zones at night. We locked them down, left the stragglers for other units, and sat facing the Suwałki Gap.

Kaliningrad was a crater of radiation. On the Belarusian side, the marshes would poison you if you so much as breathed too deeply. So we waited there, staring out over those Polish fields littered with the wreckage from the first days. Burned-out tanks beside rusting civilian cars. Shattered Tripods. An odd dead beetle lying half-buried in the mud.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

A month sitting there in northern Poland, tight as coiled springs, waiting for the word to hurl ourselves forward. Every day the numbers swelled. Balkans, French, Arabs,nNorth Africans, Iraqis, it didn't matter. They poured in from every direction. By the end it looked like something out of Xerxes' wars, a tide of men and machines massed for a single push. We were sitting in front of the hot gates of Greece. The Spartans? They were preparing too. Their hatcheries ran nonstop, so hard they raised the temperature in that part of Europe by a full degree. They made probing attacks here and there, but they knew better than to test themselves in front of the largest army the world had ever seen.

We played cards, cleaned weapons we'd already cleaned twice, stared at the horizon until our eyes burned. Some drank, some prayed, some wrote letters they'd never send. We all knew what was coming. You could smell it in the air, that metallic taste before big battles.

Every day another convoy would roll in, more tanks, more APCs, more poor bastards from some other corner of the world who thought they'd be the ones to finish it. Nobody wanted to admit it, but the longer we waited, the sharper the edge got. One day you're ready to go, the next you're ready to kill just to break the silence. But the reinforcement's didn't necessarily fill us with confidence. Made us feel as if there would always be someone behind us to pick off where we died."

Officers spoke English, and they had translators too. But for the everyday grunt,some kid from Ho Chi Minh City or Tangier—the only language that mattered was dates.

"10th of November, 10th of November," Pham says, mimicking a bad Asian accent, then shifting to a rough Arab one.

"Officers were gone for too long, endless briefings and maps they kept hidden, practically slept with them in their sleeping bags. The cooks and field kitchens were ordered to finish the stock of fresh food they had. For every tank that arrived, three fuel trucks rolled in behind it. The mess halls went from greasy chaos to bare counters in a day. Soldiers ate faster, chewed slower, because none of us trusted that tomorrow we'd get anything warm at all.

The air smelled of burnt diesel, overcooked stew, and tension. Men joked less, stared at the horizon more, counting the days in their own heads. The dates became a language of their own, a rhythm: 10th November, 11th November, 12th November. Every delivery, every rumble of engines, every ration disappearing from the mess hinted at the storm building just over the next hill.

It was the Arabs who woke me up. Jordanians, I think, an infantry company stationed next to us. Before dawn, I heard their prayer. I made my way out of the tent and saw sixty or so men standing in neat rows in the field. One group faced us, kneeling and bowing with an Imam in front of them, aligned toward Mecca. Another group stood behind, the same number of men in full battle dress, facing the enemy, as Islamic law dictates. Like clock work, when they finished their last rak'ah the first artillery shells started flying over our heads. And it didn't stop.

"The earth trembled, artillery kilometers north, likea constant drumbeat. Smoke climbed in thick columns, if it wasn't shell tearing through the fields it was the endless columns and formation of armoured vehicles. The sky… the sky was streaked orange, fire in the distance, barely any difference between 7am, noon or evening. Just the constant heavy overcast being lit up by an explosion every couple of seconds."

The units that were to attack before us rolled past, crushing mud and garbage under their treads. Mountains of steel. We stood there, helmets tucked under our arms, weapons slung, watching the tide surge forward. And between us… monks. Buddhist monks in saffron robes, incense curling in the wind. One knelt before me, chanting, hands raised. Another sprinkled holy water, circling the officers, blessing us for courage, for survival. Even the mud didn't dare to dirty their robes. They looked so out of place yet they were what we needed the most. All of it while the engines groaned and the distant shells fell."

Pham's gaze dropped. "It felt strange… surreal. The chants, the incense… at odds with the chaos, but somehow it held. I kept my eyes forward, tried to look unreadable, but maybe they saw… maybe they knew I felt it. I just shot my men a look, making sure they were truly present, not distracted by the chaos a few meters away. They had to stay on edge, always in the game. But in that moment, I wanted them to think of themselves, their lives, their gods, their ancestors, a brief moment of quiet in the storm before we were thrown back into it."

The monks finished their prayers in the field, their chants low and steady, the incense smoke as noticable as the stank of diesel engines from the tanks that rolled past. Not a flicker of fear crossed their faces. Even as the distant horizon was lit up by strings of nuclear detonations blooming like terrible flowers in a line, hundreds of kilometers away, yet the monks moved as if it were a normal morning. The rhythm of their ceremony never faltered.

"You watch fire that can wipe a city from the map, and you learn quickly who's afraid to die and who isn't.Riga, an odd 250 km had to be cleared. No crabs, no debris, no hatcheries that could slow them down. Americans, Scandinavians, Canadians, Brazilians, everyone with ships, they had to land south of it without delay. Every building, every street, gone. We didn't do it for glory. We did it so the amphibious assault could succeed, and that was all that mattered."

Climbed onto our BMP-1s as the first trucks carrying the wounded rumbled back from the front. One big German truck, a makeshift cross nailed to the hood, carried only the dead and dying in the back. The dead had perished during the drive; they wouldn't have been picked up otherwise.

Closer and closer, the artillery grew louder. Tank cannons boomed in the distance, machine-gun volleys staccato against the wind, and every flash on the horizon hinted at destruction we couldn't yet reach. The earth itself seemed to tremble beneath us, the trees swaying as if the forests.

Made our way through the fields our side had captured that morning, the fields north of us were no longer fields. Trees had been shredded into jagged stumps, their bark scorched black, the roots heaved up as if the earth itself hadvomited them. Craters pocked the plains, some wide enough to swallow a small house, others shallow and slick with mud and blood. The rivers, didn't know what was water and what was sediment, oil, or blood. Just that orange reflective oil spill like texture that reflected the explosions in the sky. Even looking at your boots wasn't peace full anymore.

We threw ourselves at them, all of us dismounting, my men steadying their nerves while I guided them, our BMP-1s positioned neatly between us as we marched headlong into the village the commander expected us to capture. We rolled and stepped over bodies, human and crab alike, pushing forward without pause. Our machine guns and BMP cannons tore at the village while the crabs returned sporadic fire with their high-explosive blasters.

One shot landed too close. I hit the ground and sprang back up as fast as I could. Warm blood ran down my face, and I glanced at the soldier next to me.

"Am I okay?" I asked.

"Just a scratch," he said. Nothing worth slowing an advance over.

I was lucky. Three men down the line, one of ours was blown clean in two. No fancy body armor to catch the shrapnel or deflect the blast. Three farms, three brick houses, probably built the year my parents were born. Yet we lost half the platoon before we even got to the fences. It wasn't a surprise. You push men into a meat grinder long enough, you stop counting how many come out the other side. You just keep walking. Just expect you'll have someone to help you write the letters to the parents once everything is done for. No change in orders of course, just ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK.

To my right was a BMP-1, my staff sergeant inside, screaming into the radio so loud I could hear him over the gunfire and the roar of the engine. Then one deafening bang. The impact rattled my skull, left me dazed for a heartbeat, vision swimming. I only caught what happened thanks to my left eye—the one that had been spared. Whatever hit it from the right punched straight through. Like something out of a cartoon, the BMP rolled on, everyone inside dead or dying. I saw the smoke from the entry point, and the hole where it overpenetrated just a few meters behind. The vehicle was cooked, drifting forward at a skew, the driver likely dead, tracks grinding through the mud as if nothing had happened.

I collapsed a few meters ahead, not fully grasping what had just happened. The sight of their commander going down must have rattled my men. Some panicked, one, just one, dropped his rifle and bolted back the way we'd come. Most only fought harder, slamming their rifles into full auto as they charged the barn where the fire was coming from. Only one man came to help me. I shoved him away, telling him to get back in the fight.

That's when I heard it,a low buzz overhead. A jet, I couldn't tell whose. It passed over us fast, leaving behind a scatter of canisters that tumbled down toward the farm.

They burst in midair with a muffled pop, scattering a shimmering mist that hung for only a heartbeat before it ignited. The blast was not the sharp crack of high explosives—it was a rolling, hungry roar that sucked the air from your lungs. The barn vanished in a sphere of fire and pressure, its walls peeled outward like paper, roof curling into the sky. The shockwave slammed into us, carrying the stink of scorched soil, vaporized fuel, and whatever had been inside. When it cleared, there was no barn, no shooters, no shrimps, just a patch of earth still burning, flames licking at blackened beams and the twisted silhouettes of what had been crabs just a few seconds earlier.

It all went quiet, too quiet. Maybe it was the shock, but I found myself clawing at what was left of my right eye, scraping at it like I was trying to wipe mud away, as if that was the reason I couldn't see. One look at Nguyen's face should have told me no amount of wiping would bring my vision back.

Ngo, the next one in the chain of command came sprinting at me. Like I had done before, he grabbed my radio, my magazines. He grabbed a hold of my chin, blood pouring on his gloves. Just stared me dead in the eye. A small smile, as if he was about to say everything would be alright, yet didn't dare to. Held my chin as I held his arm for what felt like an eternity. Only when I tried to smile did I realize something was off with my chin.

"Drag him, everyone else forward!" Ngo barked. The tone wasn't cruel. Just necessary. We had minutes before the crabs counterattacked. Minutes before this ground was soaked in more blood. In places like that, the living and the dead just traded places until one side ran out of replacements.

It was his turn now to make sure the crossroad where that damned farm stood was secured, that the boys would have a wall to shelter behind when the next volley of crabs came down on us. I was just another body on the ground, something people tripped over. My back was against a wall, slumped forward so no shard of meat or bone from what was left of my face would slide into my windpipe.

The machine gunner to my right kept silent, though my ears rang from his endless bursts. I didn't need to lift my head over the wall to know the crabs were closing in. At long range you fire in twos or threes; across the field, maybe five or eight. He was hosing out fifteen, twenty rounds at a time, swinging his weapon left to right like he was trying to hold back the tide. Men dashed past carrying belts of ammunition, grenades, anything they could grab.

My back stayed to that chaos. I wasn't thinking of home, not of my three daughters or my wife. I was just waiting for the blanket to roll over me, for all of this to finally be over. Instead, I saw the sun rise from the south.

Rows upon rows came at last, the way I imagine armies must have looked at Waterloo. Armored vehicles shoulder to shoulder, infantry flowing between them in loose ranks, rifles barking over our heads at the crabs beyond. The ground trembled under their advance, each step and each track link grinding forward as if nothing on earth could stop them.

That was enough to settle the machine gunner. He eased down beside me, took a knee, and began feeding a new belt into his weapon with the calm of a man who'd just remembered the rest of the world was still fighting.

I didn't black out from the blood, not at first. My senses were screaming, but I was still there, still aware, still trying to think. It wasn't until they had to make the cut in my neck, push that tube down into my windpipe, open a new path for air when my own couldn't do it anymore, that my body finally let go. Just for a few seconds, but long enough to feel like falling into a void. When I came back, I could breathe again, and that's when I realized how close I'd been to never waking up."

Got a medal for all of that. They pinned it on me in an empty IKEA outside Suwałki, same place they stacked a thousand other broken men. I've still got mine somewhere. It's worth about as much as the men who died earning it, nothing. The real price came later: my girls screaming when they saw me in the bathroom without bandages, and a wife who never again felt at ease touching my face. But hey, we took the farm, took Lithuania until we realized we didn't need it anymore. Couldn't even be bothered to clean up the last crabs living like cave men in the woods anymore, just put a fence around them and forget about it.