Phagocytosis

Strasbourg, European Federation, July 2037

Françoise Martin agrees to meet with me at the Monument national de la Victoire du Grand Est.

The monument rises from the center of Parc de l'Union, not far from the Rhine, where borders once divided Europe and now only mark its unity. It is a structure of glass, steel, and stone. Deliberately unfinished in appearance. Its central spire, asymmetrical and twisted, represents the chaos of war contorted toward the aspiration for peace. The base is anchored in reclaimed Alsatian sandstone, engraved with the names of the cities that bore the heaviest fighting: Vendenheim, Haguenau, Saverne.

A thin membrane of transparent solar panels clads parts of the façade, shimmering faintly with the changing light. On sunny days, it powers the entire memorial and its subterranean archive.

Sitting on a bench, we look at the soldiers goose stepping during the change of guards. As per protocol, one French, one German, and one soldier of the international coalition who took part in the fighting here. Today its an Uruguayan.

Inside, the core of the monument is a circular chamber known as La Salle des Silences. Visitors walk over warm sand, lit by a soft, artificial dawn that never changes. The walls respond to movement, projecting the silhouettes of those who served, soldiers, medics, engineers, displaced civilians, alongside snippets of their spoken memories, curated from letters, text messages, oral histories, and video fragments. None of the voices are identified. The anonymity is intentional, allowing the dead to speak not as individuals but as echoes of a collective past. Françoise admits never having been in there, the wounds still fresh. She at first thought this memorial would be just like one of many across Europe.

"Let the kids experience it, I've seen my share." She finishes as she takes her first drag from her cigarette.

"We knew it wasn't over. That once we liberated the farms and woods north of Strasbourg that Germany was next. Hell we had crossed into Germany through Belgium, liberated most of the cities on the Rhine. We were left with the pockets coming from the Northern Vosges Nature Park. A national park twice the size of Paris. The whole operation felt more like a performance than a necessity. We knew people back home needed good news. Kicking the crabs out of France once and for all was a way to help them swallow a hard pill. A pill that said: "We've been mauled. But today, we won. And tomorrow, we push into Germany, to liberate it."

It worked well for the folks back home—the ones in the munitions plants, the farms, the newsrooms. They could swallow that pill. But me? I'd lost my fiancée. My brother. A dozen friends. That kind of pill doesn't go down. That kind of wound doesn't heal.

They spared nothing. France's last pre-war units were thrown into the fight, pushing the bastards back across the Rhine. Griffons. Jaguars. Leclerc XLRs. Special forces had slipped in a week earlier, and thanks to the American Air Force, you couldn't get thirty seconds of quiet near the front without hearing Crab Buster bombs or a rolling carpet of explosions somewhere ahead. Fifteen thousand tons of ordnance dropped in just one week.

And then there was Haguenau. Bastards had hit it a few months back when Strasbourg was in dangerr.

Driving past what was left of it looked like rolling next the end of the world. The place had been nuked. Hadn't even waited until our blocking forces had retreated. Building as old as the united states now a twisted plain of ash, rebar, and melted glass. Trees were gone. Roads disintegrated.

The air force and the brass called it a "necessary measure.". I don't care what they say, what they threaten. Heads should have rolled for that alone.

You saw it in the face of people in the tactical assembly area. From the grunts to the two star general walking around with his gear that clearly had no grease nor mud. Everyone wanted to get it over with, alive. To be honest. I had seen that expression before and I saw it again even after the war. That little voice in your head;

"Just one more exam! Just two more days and it's friday! Just two more weeks of work and I can go to Spain and relax in the sun! Just one more pay check and I can afford that apartment! Just one more village to liberate! One more street to clear! One more house!" Didn't see that in Lucas's eyes as he tried to make sense of the rebar a red crab had hit him with in the throat!"

"Grab his machine gun!" the sergeant kept yelling.

You don't stop to help the wounded in the middle of a firefight. Everyone knows that. But it's a hell of a lot harder when the one bleeding out—choking on his own blood, crying through gurgled gasps, is the guy who stood watch with you from 3 to 4 a.m., night after night.

The guy who always gave you his pork ration, even if you didn't trade him your smokes.
The guy who secretly carried some of your gear to ease your load on those brutal marches.
The guy who pulled two bastards off you when they tried something they shouldn't have and beat them to a pulp.

Now he just lay there, gasping, blood bubbling in and out of the hole in his throat, mixing with the air he was trying to breathe. His eyes locked on mine. He grabbed my collar, tight at first, then loosen, and let go.

The tinnitus I got from firing his Minimi down that cobblestone street still rings in my ears every damn night. Maybe if I'd worn my ear protection… maybe then I wouldn't have to be reminded of it all the time.

The Crabs sent their best. No beetles, no tripods, just the red elites. And they were more than enough to maul us.

Wissembourg. What a stupid name.

The streets were choked with debris, wreckage from this battle and the ones that came before. It was too close for air support, tight alleys, blind corners. The Crabs knew better than to keep their distance and get picked off from above. Every time they so much as smelled jet fuel, they'd surge toward us, fast and brutal.

The fighting was house to house. Room to room. You'd turn a corner, heart pounding, and there they'd be, waiting for you.

We had four companies attacking from all directions. We were holding the east. The south had been cut down to fifty percent strength. We'd lost contact with the north. Still heard the gunfire, and air assets had eyes on them, but no one was picking up the damn radio. The west wasn't faring any better than us.

I did my best, inching forward one centimeter at a time past the alley corner we were hunkered behind. The street beyond led straight to the town center. As soon as I got eyes on the church, I opened up. Saw one Crab trying to drag his buddies to safety. Two bursts dropped him and put his friend out of his misery.

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The sergeant was yelling something off to my left. I couldn't hear him. Didn't care. Not like whatever he had to say could get us out of that predicament.

It's a miracle I even survived that minute and a half, lying there with just my machine gun barrel, right arm, and part of my head exposed to the bastards down that street. They were throwing everything they had at us. Blasters. High explosive. Rebar darts. And that's not even counting the friendly platoon behind us, further down the street.

The whole platoon was dug in behind some half-assed barricade. God knows who threw it together. Two police cruisers and a construction van, parked sideways. About a dozen guys behind and beside it, all laying down fire. I watched the tracers fly overhead. Thank God the street sloped upward. Might've been the only reason I made it through. There was no such thing as a 45 degree safety arch at that moment.

Just tracers flying above my head, coming my way or going toward whatever unfortunate Crab or cement wall. I tried my best to push my weight onto the weapon and its bipod, but even then, good luck keeping it accurate. I knew something was wrong when I saw the barrel smoldering. Normally, it's normal for the barrel to get so hot you can light a cigarette on it. You're supposed to cool down and change barrels. But good luck getting me to follow procedure at that moment. Hell, it wasn't even my gun. My HK416 was slung on my back—I'd never even qualified to fire a Minimi in the first place.

Still, something was off as I fired burst after burst. Sometimes at a corner or window where some Crab had just peeked out, sometimes right in their center chest just below the throat—where they'd taught us to aim. With my luck and stupidity, after loading another 100-round belt, I pulled the trigger, only for the weapon not to stop firing after I let go. Adrenaline was already high, but imagine firing a machine gun, with an odd 90 or so rounds left, but it refusing to stop.

I held on for dear life with my right hand on the pistol grip while I tried to stop the belt with my left. Time and time again, I failed. At that moment, I figured I just had to ride the lightning and hope the weapon didn't explode in my face. My squad, whoever wasn't firing or holding a sector, realized something was wrong. I heard them yelling my name as if I wasn't already aware I was firing a runaway stallion.

I thanked God when the final round entered the chamber and went downrange. I only had time to drag myself out of the corner with the weapon. Some guy, Richard, took over and fired his HK416 in semi-automatic mode, as if it could even compete with that badly cleaned, overused Minimi that had just nearly killed me.

As I was making sure the weapon was really empty, I heard something just across from the alley we were in—right past the street where countless tracer rounds and blaster shots flew through. There was a wall with nothing behind it. It could have fit a house, but all I saw were trees behind that old brick wall. The trees moved and shook before collapsing. I could only guess what was hidden back there. Had it not been for the free-fire zone the city had become, I would have heard the Leclerc behind it before it drove through that old wall as if it was paper.

The wall gave way as it smashed through at full speed. The turret spun around and took the front over. Brave bastards—I don't even know how they managed to navigate those narrow streets to begin with. The barrel looked straight at me. It spun back as if to double-check I was from Earth. It must have been just two or three seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

I noticed the tube on the side of the barrel. My face and everyone else's in my squad must have gone pale as we realized that flamethrower, jerry-rigged onto the tank, could have turned all of us in that cursed alley into roast beef. The Leclerc hull spun around, knocking down walls of nearby houses as it crushed bollards with ease. The turret rotated and locked into place, even as the hull shifted to face the center of town. Blaster rounds scraped against its paint but did little damage.

Once I realized what was happening, I turned around and covered my ears just as the Leclerc fired a shell at whatever unlucky crustacean or 10th-century church it had in its sights.

That shut everyone up. No more shouting and screaming from my squad mates, no more blind firing from humans and crabs alike. Just the noise you get when your hearing is truly done for, and a wall of dust covering everything. Didn't even see the Leclerc anymore, just the rough shape of it. Only thing I saw clearly was the napalm coming out of that tube just spraying the poor bastards in the center of town. Saw it, then I felt it.

It let go of its napalm tank for ten seconds before stopping and driving forward, crushing bollards, locked bicycles, and cars as if they were cardboard boxes. Infantry followed right behind—the same guys I told you about down the street who were shooting over my head.

Half an hour later, the last one of them was taken care of. They put up a good fight to the end. But just like us in the beginning of the war, they couldn't handle the onslaught of bodies and lead we threw at them.

I was in an old café, helping take care of the wounded. Lucas was dead, but we had dragged him in anyway. Like the first aid man who had a week of tactical casualty care instead of just one day like us could fix a ruptured windpipe and artery.

I wasn't there at the beginning, but I heard the first machine gunner who made it into that cursed basement had killed five or so of them before retreating back. One by one, they walked out of that basement staircase, our guys shooting them down one after another before we realized this might just be it—the first account of Crabs surrendering in the entire war. They kept them down there for half an hour. Our battalion commander, along with a few embedded journalists, had to see it. I heard from Gauthier that they shoved those engineers back inside with a kick every time they tried to get out of that door.

The ones from the engineer caste—with more "handy" hands, bigger eyes, smaller size, no snout, and who always seemed to carry their "kids" on their backs. The bastards even came out with their hands in the air. Had they pretended not to understand anything we tried to tell them for the entire war?

Everyone was dumbfounded. I was right there, helping to herd those Crabs in front of a wall. Kicking them back to the wall if they got too close. Just a small neighborhood park near the center of town—the church wall, some grass, a dead tree, and a few benches. The wall stretched about a hundred meters or so. And there they were, all cowering on their knees in front of it.

We couldn't believe it. Couldn't make sense of it either. What was wrong with them? Sure, these were engineers—probably here to maintain one of the countless tripods we'd destroyed on our way in or to help build some hatcheries. Still, surrender wasn't in their playbook.

The footage didn't do it justice. Safety was well off, along with everyone else, all eyes fixed on them, waiting for a reason to react. And they gave us one. One of them stepped too close, maybe clutching something, maybe not. But that was the cue we needed.

Our colonel stood nearby, the press ready to capture every moment. Then the first shot rang out. Followed by a second, and then the rest of us joined in—a relentless storm of rounds into their bodies. Their screams were lost in the roar of gunfire.

My HK416 ran dry, and without missing a beat, I switched to my pistol. I kept firing into anything lying in the grass that set my nerves on edge. A body could take a bullet, twitch, and my pistol sights would be on it as I thought it was asking for more.

I've been asked a few times what I would have done differently. What I would change. Would I have given peace a chance?

I've thought about that a lot. I still do. The nights I wake from nightmares, reaching out in bed only to find the other side empty. Every time I walk down the street, I see someone's back and think it's Karim, Louise, Étienne, or Lucas. Then I realize they've been gone for a long time and the person ahead is just a stranger like so many others. Every family reunion feels hollow, as if my brother and uncle left a gaping hole at the dinner table, a black hole in the room. Every moment of happiness with family and friends gets swallowed by the simple fact that they aren't here.

I catch myself laughing or smiling and then look over expecting my brother to make that weird noise he always did when he laughed. The cause was just. The fight had a purpose. But all the victories mean nothing compared to that black hole that has swallowed damn near every one of us. No parade or monument will ever fill the hole left behind, no matter whose hand I hold as I walk the streets in summer.

The only thing I'd change is this: instead of using my rifle, I would have used Lucas's machine gun in front of that church wall.