03: Old Friends
Sushi
#fuckcancer
03: Old Friends
For a place known as the "blue country," Gallia was so very green. A single blue truck rattled down the road, passing pasture after green pasture, and forest thick enough to blot out the sun above. The precious shade washed over the two passengers in the bed of the truck, who were crammed in tight with boxes of ammunition and medicine, piled high. One was a young Gallian wearing a dusty brown jacket, still wrapped up in white bandages from a recent hospital stay.
"What the hell happened to you?"
It took a moment for her to register that she was being spoken to, and another for her to turn groggily around. "Huh?"
A woman smirked at her over a crate of ammo. She had a boot kicked up lazily on the cargo, but her gaze was razor sharp. "Don't tell me you're all drugged up from the hospital. They give you the good stuff?"
"Oh," the Gallian said with a slight smile. "No, I was just distracted. Writing a letter, you know. Having a hard time with it..." She turned her gaze more fully to the stranger. The smell of foreign cigarettes and gunpowder was pervasive on her, and her uniform was dotted with foreign rank and insignia.
"What's so hard about writin' a letter?"
"Well... it's for my parents. I don't know a good way to break the news," the Gallian said. "I mean, I just got hospitalized. I don't have any clue how I did, either, and well..." she looked off to the side at the rolling hills. "... I'm getting transferred to the militia, too. It just seems like too much bad news to put into one letter."
"That's not so hard." The foreigner flicked the lid of a cigarette lighter with their thumb. "Shit, you're alive, mama and papa are gonna be over the moon. Who gives a rat's ass what unit you're going to?"
"That's... a positive way of looking at it, I suppose."
The foreigner shook her head. "Nah. I'm saying it how it is. You're alive, and you're safe. Anything else is secondary." She leaned closer to the Gallian with a grin. "By the way. Got a question for you. Where you steal that jacket from?"
The Gallian responded with a slow blink. "What? This jacket's mine. I didn't steal it from anyone."
"Bullshit. That's some Vinland heritage you're wearing, soldier. What the hell's a Gallian doing wearing all those patches?"
It made her take pause. The way this Vinlander kept smiling as she jabbed at her. It was some kind of game, to get a rise out of her. The Gallian folded up the letter in her hands and tucked it away in a pocket. "It was issued to me, at the Tank Destroyer School in the states. The 601? That's my unit. Don't know why you're being a jerk about it."
The Vinlander laughed at that. Her eyes glimmered over a lit cigarette. "A jerk? Kid, if someone isn't giving you a hard time in the army, it means they don't like you. I'm just happy to see another familiar uniform." She exhaled a long stream of smoke and looked over the front of the truck. "What's your name, corporal?"
"Kris Massis. Nice to meet you, uh..." Her eyes dipped down to the stripes on the Vinlander's sleeve. "Staff sergeant."
"Pleasure, Kris. Just call me Winter." Kris followed the woman's gaze, and saw that Fort Amatriain had finally emerged as a distant shape among all the patchwork farmland.
"Can I ask a question, too?"
"Shoot."
Kris kicked her boot against one of the many crates in the bed. "My unit... A Company, 601 TD. Have you heard anything about them?" It was a question that put a pit in her stomach. Kris wasn't sure she even wanted the answer, but... it was her unit, and she owed it to them to find out. "The officers at the hospital. They wouldn't say anything, not even if they've heard a rumor. I half think they're doing it on purpose."
Winter's smile wavered. "Yeah. That's tough, Kris. If I were you, I'd be dying to know. But I stepped off a Federation ship yesterday. I can ask around for you, of course, but you should hope we don't run into each other too much."
"Uh, why?"
She flicked her cigarette out of the truck. "It's an embarrassing story, tell you some other time."
30 km from Randgriz
A tepid cup of coffee sat in front of her, sloshing with each bump in the road. Her pen scratched insistently at the paper. There were several crumpled-up letters piled up at her feet. Half-written ones. She had the first part down, just telling her mom about where she had been these past few days, that everything had been okay after leaving the hospital. Breaking the news about the transfer had been something Kris had dreaded, but compared to being given command of an entire tank crew, that seemed so small and unimportant now.
"Have you considered practicing your aim instead of writing fucking letters?"
Kris closed her eyes and tried her best to let the initial wave of irritation pass on by. She held her breath for a moment longer before letting it out. "I know you're not serious when we have a whole eleven shells. But if you think you can outrun the coax... we can do some target practice."
Dai snorted. "Itching to get a darcsen kill, dickhead?"
The burning in her cheeks shut up Kris right away. She had resigned herself to an embarrassed silence when sergeant Grenier finally thought it was time to step in. "You misunderstand, Dai, corporal Massis here isn't out to shoot all the darcsen tankers, just the annoying shithead ones. Like you."
"... fuckin' traitor is what you are, Grenier."
"Perk of rank, Dai." The sergeant said his retort with a characteristic flatness that made it seem like this wasn't thef first, or second time they had had this exact conversation before. "Just you see. When you pass the promotion board for sergeant, you'll be just the same as me." He waited a beat before reaching up and pushing the top hatch open. "Anyway, you lovebirds get your shit together. We have another mission to do."
"Fuck you."
"Roger, sarge." Kris let out a sigh in relief. Somehow fighting the Imperials felt preferable to endlessly butting heads with Dai. The young private had a way of turning every single word into a source of confrontation, and even listening to Dai and Grenier bicker had become fatiguing. How did Brenner deal with it? The man had been silent in the driver's hole for the entire march. "What are we doing? Did the LT say anything?"
"Bull, we're third in the column. Put us right behind Chariot." Grenier took a sip of his coffee as Imp Cleaner rocked on her heels and started to lumber down the road. "The LT needs us to back up a militia tank squad. Enemy lancer squad. We gotta kill them all," the sergeant said with his usual mirth. "You feel good about that, Kris?"
Kris grit her teeth. It took a moment to relax her jaw, a soft exhalation of breath following before she answered. "Do I have a choice?"
"No, not really." Grenier's chuckle was dry and toneless. "But that wasn't what I was asking."
Kris lied. "I don't feel anything about it." Kris didn't sound convinced, and she knew it. Grenier had to be able to feel how hard her heart was slamming in her chest. So why did he ask? It was more testing, Kris thought. "I've shot an antitank lance before, in TD school. It's no big deal." She thought about the fantastic flash of light and the way the armor panels dented inward. The warheads struck with brilliant showers of hundreds of pinpricks of light. Their instructor had reminded them that each and every point of light was a supersonic piece of metal.
The thought made her gut work into tight little knots. A part of her found some irritation in it; the way the sergeant was prodding those insecurities. She spoke again, more softly now, but more firmly. "An anti-tank ambush happens in an instant. If they... were still alive to ask for help on the wireless, I think they must be pretty tough. So I guess I feel that."
It was quiet for a moment, save for another sip from the sergeant. "Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it. Keep your eyes peeled. First round's HE."
Kris peered through the sights, and saw the other two tanks in the platoon rolling ahead of them. The first had its gun pointed over to the left, the second to the right. She gripped the traverse handle and spun the cannon over to the left, leaving her with little but the leaves in the trees in her sight as they clattered along. She was alone to her thoughts when Grenier gave her a sharp tap on the shoulder.
"Gunner, turn to your one o'clock. Can you identify that vehicle?"
"Let me take a look." Kris leaned into the sights, and saw Chariot turn sharply off the road, plowing into grass that went almost up to its turret. Imp Cleaner slid off the road and slewed right, putting since distance between the other tanks in the platoon. When the shaking in her sights settled, Kris turned the handle and swung over toward the far end of the clearing. There was a slight rise in the land, where the grass gave way to ruddy dirt, and a farmer's plot charred black by shell-blasts. There were craters big enough to swallow a tank whole, and militia in light blue uniforms crawled through them like so many ants. "I see our troops. Around a dozen of them."
A giant militiaman with scars on his face stood up from the scant cover and aimed his lance at the trees beyond. There was a flash, and what sounded like a dull pop to Kris as the warhead launched, before the thunderclap of impact a few moments later as a tree was blown to splinters. He immediately dropped back down as more rifle shots echoed out, invisible except for the puffs of dirt all around the lancer. He scrambled for better cover, and the other militia stood to fire back with rifles, then the rattle of machine guns filled the air.
Kris followed the stream of tracers to a turret, and the shape of a tank half-buried in the mud. "I see it... oh, that's a big fucking tank." It looked twice as wide as a light tank, and entirely different in shape. Where the Gallian tanks hulls that narrowed to a neck-like roof, the body of this tank was low and rectangular, the front dominated by a thick, single piece of armor raked backward. From the welds, the armor looked three or four times as thick as a light tank, and turret on top was wide, low, arrow-shaped, mounting what looked like an oversized field gun. The white-painted gun mount reminded Kris of a rhinoceros horn. It was sunk all the way down to the tracks in the mud, but the turret spun and spat long streams of automatic fire. "I- think it's one of ours, but I've never seen a tank like that in my life."
Grenier sat up in his seat and peered through a pair of binoculars. He beat a fist against the tank roof. "Yeah, son of a bitch, I see it. Why don't we get a closer look?" Imp Cleaner lunged forward through the glass, dirt torn up by spinning tracks. "Kris, put some fucking HE in those trees. 12 o'clock, 300 meters. Follow those tracers."
"A-alright!" She was already spinning the wheels to put the cannon on target. Blue Gallian tracers sailed lazily through the air, disappearing amongst the trees at the end of the clearing. Kris tried to imagine where they were landing and pulled the aiming mark just beyond the tracers. "On the way!"
The white-hot tracer seemed to linger in the air on the way over, traveling in an arc over the heads of the militia, descending just out of sight before fiery blue swallowed up the woods, and a tree fell sideways in a rain of splinters and dust. Grenier didn't send the next shell home in the breech. It was an odd sort of quiet following the deafening crash of ragnite shells, and Kris could hear the blood rushing through her ears as the other tanks in the platoon fired all at once.
75mm cannons firing sounded like fists beating against the hull. The shells impacted in a line a hundred meters wide. Four tongues of blue flame collapsed an entire section of the trees, and for a few moments, the forest had fallen entirely silent. Not the platoon of tanks, however. Grenier slapped Kris on the shoulder. "Did I tell you to stop, gunner? Rake those fucking trees with the coax."
"R-right. On the way." Kris exhaled and spun the traverse handle as she pressed down on the coax pedal. Blue tracers ripped through the air and vanished into the air between gnarled, burnt tree trunks. Dai scampered out of the way as fistfuls of scalding hot brass casings ejected onto the floor. Small puffs of smoke appeared in the trees, and it took Kris a moment to see the flash of rocket exhaust.
It happened too fast to think about it. As soon as Kris realized enemy lances had been shot at them, the warheads had already struck the ground just in front of Imp Cleaner and exploded. An ice cold feeling spread from her stomach to her hands, and her feet, clinging in a greasy layer of anxious feeling. Shrapnel rained against their tank, sounding like a handful of pebbles hitting a tin roof. It was so different from being behind a lance, firing them at a target. You could see the hot flash of exhaust from the lance warhead all the way to the target.
Being on the receiving end was nothing but a bang and a flash. It was terrifying.
Another tap on the shoulder brought her out of it. "Longer bursts, Kris," said the sergeant. "Don't be shy." Imp Cleaner lurched as the cabin started to fill with the stinging fumes. Kris blinked stinging sweat out of her eyes and watched the shape of the Gallian tank loom larger and larger, until they came to a stop just behind and to the side of it. When the other tank fired, Kris felt Imp Cleaner rock from side to side from the muzzle blast.
"Oh, shit," Kris muttered, releasing the coax pedal every few seconds to let the machine get some relief, sheets of stream rising off the barrel and blocking her sight. The lancer that had fired earlier jogged over to their tank and thumped the butt of his lance against the side. He was covered in a thin layer of dirt from the exploding shell-bursts.
"Hey, you in the tank!" His voice was gruff. He didn't seem particularly bothered by the bullets snapping over his head. "Shift your fire to the right, twenty degrees." Kris spun the turret over, her eyes glued to the sight. No matter how she squinted and moved around for a better view, the trees were all that she could see from inside the tank, the enemy hiding somewhere below her sight. "Right there!"
"Oblige the man," Grenier said. "Give them another HE." The weight of a shell rocked the gun up and down as the breech clanged shut. At this distance, she barely had to lift the center of the reticle for the round to be dead-on to her point of aim.
"HE, on the way." Kris saw the militia lancer cover his hands with his ears and pressed the red switch for the gun. The gun slammed back from the recoil, and the tracer careened through the center of the scope, exploding almost at the same time as the shell case slammed into the turret wall and dropped down. The other streams of tracers from the platoon's tanks swung over, and more HE shells landed right on top of the position.
"Good hit, good hit gunner. Don't let them rest, get them with the coax."
"Alright..." Kris pressed the coax pedal with her boot, and the machine gun chattered, joining into the lethal rain descending on their target. As she fired, the machine gun started to shoot faster, and faster, until the bolt slammed forward on an empty chamber. It was deafening quiet, save for the sizzle of the barrel. "I'm out, I gotta reload." She flipped open the top cover of the Erma and wiped empty cases aside with her gloved fingertips. Dai lifted a full can of ammunition from the hull and passed it up to her.
By then, the militia had started to emerge from shell-craters and move forward, their bodies hunched low. They moved fast, and they wore little aside from their uniforms and a few pouches full of ammunition. Most didn't even wear helmets or armor. The militia darted from cover to cover as Kris slotted the fresh box into place, and draped the belt of 7.92mm rounds into the feed tray. She heard dull thuds in the distance she recognized as grenade blasts, and closed the feed tray cover with a tap of her fist. By then the tanks had stopped firing, the militia having vanished into the trees and brush. "Thanks for the ammo," Kris said.
Dai didn't bother to respond.
When the militia returned, they had Imperial soldiers in battered metal armor marching in front of their bayonets. They were streaked with blood that seeped from beneath tightly wrapped bandages. As sergeants blew whistles and the troops shouted an all-clear, the medics moved up with their heavy cases of ragnaid, checking on their own first, then the Imperials. A tendril of cigarette smoke filtered up from below as Dai stared out of an open hatch. A layer of empty casings from the machine gun covered the floor beneath the turret. The cases jingled as Grenier grabbed his weapon and climbed out of the turret. He looked like he were just going on a leisurely hike, instead of stepping into a recently-shelled warzone.
Kris took a peek below the turret ring. They had nine shells left. Four black-nosed armor-piercing shells, five yellow-nosed high explosive shells. There were piles of unopened 7.92 ammunition cans for the machine gun piled all around the hull.
Dai didn't look at her as Kris climbed up, out of the turret. The shock of breathing air not tainted with gun-smoke was enough to make Kris double over, gripping her knees as she heaved. The next breath of air tasted like charcoal and the acrid, stinging smell that a high-explosive shell left after detonation. Kris ran her hand over the bare metal where the shell had struck the day before. It was smooth as glass and cold to the touch now.
When Kris brought her eyes back up to the scene of the fight, she saw all the militia emerging from their hiding spots. They were an odd assortment, old and young. She saw a clean-headed man in a headband who looked far too old to be lugging around a MAGs and a dozen magazines like he was. It struck her in an odd way, like she had seen her grandfather take up a sub-machine gun to fight in the war. There was another shocktrooper, pretty and silver-haired, who fussed over some powder and eye shadow, even as her uniform was caked with mud. The tall lancer with the scar on his nose looked like he had worn gold fringing on his uniform shoulders, which made him one of their sergeants. As Kris jumped down from the tank, the big lancer offered a curt nod.
It felt like by now, her heart had finally stopped racing, and the fresh air didn't make her light-headed any more.
After a battle, this was usually the time when a squad's officer would be checking up on their enlisted, but Kris didn't see any officers walking around. She turned her attention to the odd tank they had been sitting by, and the militia standing by it. There was a corporal in a traditional Darcsen shawl talking to what looked like the squad's officer, along with another sergeant with a red scarf on her head. They had been working away at the tank with a pair of shovels, but it wasn't enough to expose a single road wheel yet. Kris turned to Imp Cleaner and grasped a heavy, braided cable sitting on the hull, hefting the weight over her shoulder as she returned to the militia squad.
As she got closer, she saw the turret was marked "07" on its side. She stopped a few steps away from a young man with messy brown hair who looked like the officer. Kris clicked her heels together at attention, at least as best she could with a heavy cable over her shoulder, and raised her hand to her brow in salute. "Good morning, sir! Corporal Kris Massis, C Company, 1st Militia Tank Battalion." After a moment, she added, "I thought you might need a tow."
"Wow, really?" The officer lit up at the greeting, looking a lot more chipper than Kris would have expected from someone who had just been in a firefight. He almost sounded juvenile, compared to other officers Kris had met. "That sounds great, thank you."
"Yeah. It's no problem, uh, sir..." Kris hoped her reaction to the young officer's demeanor wasn't obvious. She held her salute as the officer remained at ease, his eyes turned to the sight of the burning trees.
Kris turned her eyes briefly to him, and he looked back at her. She saw a moment of gears grinding in the man's head before his eyes widened in realization. The officer finally jumped to attention and returned her salute. After a moment, he let his hand drop, and Kris was able to relax and support the weight of the heavy cable. "I'm Welkin Gunther, and this is my sister, Isara. Nice to meet you, Kris." He gestured to the young girl in the scarf, who nodded gratefully to Kris.
"Gunther? Like, the war hero Gunther?" Kris sputtered.
Welkin smiled, then exchanged a look with the girl he had introduced as his sister. "Dad didn't like being called a war hero. He thought it was too stuffy. But I know a lot of people looked up to him." He spoke in a warm way, far removed from the mud and blood surrounding them.
"You could definitely say that... Everyone studied General Gunther in tank school. You could say your father helped all of us survive." Saying the words helped Kris feel a little better about the situation. About the odds they were facing.
"Really? Wow, I've never thought of it that way." Welkin looked lost in his thoughts for a few moments. "I almost wish he talked more about the war. I didn't feel very up to the task when they wanted me to lead a militia squad."
"You could have done a lot worse for being caught in an ambush, sir." Kris looked to the tank, and the small smears of bare metal where antitank lances had skipped along the armor. "Those lances - they bounced right off your tank."
"Yeah, no kidding." Welkin exhaled sharply at the sighed. He looked to the girl in the shawl. "Are you alright, Is? Edelweiss took a few hits, I was worried about you."
Isara's cheeks flushed as she shook her head with a little smile. "I'm alright, Welks. I'm sorry for getting us stuck." The two of them seemed close, although Kris was having a hard time seeing the family resemblance.
"Hey, no use blaming yourself now. Everyone gets stuck. It's a rite of passage for us tankers, you know?" Kris knelt down by the radiator at the back of the tank. She had stories like any other tanker, of being stuck in the mud, usually on a rainy day. Sometimes it was a freak accident, other times, she'd had her own hand in causing the mishap. Kris didn't like talking about those stories.
"...thank you, Kris."
The tow eyelets were at the bottom of the hull on most tanks, which meant they were under several feet of mud for Edelweiss. Kris grabbed a shovel that had been jammed into the mud and started to pick away at the thick layer caked onto the hull. She heard footsteps beside her, and Welkin started on the other side. They dug up the mud for a while like this. It was a kind of miserable that made Kris think back to training. The instructors seemed to always pick days for field exercises where the rain poured and the dirt had become a muddy soup. They said the worst conditions made the best training. It seemed like miserable bullshit at the time, but now that they had seen combat, being in training again seemed like a better alternative.
"Alright, got it hooked up." Kris gave the cable a tug to ensure it was on tight, and walked the other end back to Imp Cleaner. Brenner had already moved the tank closer to make it easier to hook up. Kris knocked against the hatch, and he obliged by tilting open the viewport.
"Corporal Massis." Brenner tipped up his goggles. It was probably the first time she had gotten a good look at him. He had the kind of square jaw that she associated with someone who worked in a steel mill, messy brown hair and sharp, blue eyes. His shoulders nearly touched the edges of the hatch, and his legs barely fit with the seat cranked all the way back. "Just making friends?"
"Yeah, you could say that. Could you raise the platoon on the wireless?" Kris pointed to the bulk of Edelweiss sunk deep into the mud. "That thing's probably two, three times as heavy as our tanks. I think we'll need at least two tanks to pull it out."
Brenner looked from Kris to Edelweiss itself. "More like three tanks. We'll give it a try."
Sergeant Grenier joined them shortly after they hooked up the cables, and eventually Imp Cleaner was connected to Edelweiss, with Chariot sitting directly behind them, connected with another pair of cables. Kris walked the tank back until the cables went taut, then she gestured for the others to take several steps away. "Don't be near these things if they happen to snap," she said. Turning back to the motley arrangement, she flashed a thumbs-up to Welkin, who was back in the turret of the massive tank.
"Alright, try it again, Is." The tank shuddered, a sound emanating from within it that sounded like the spinning of a gigantic cutting tool. Little of the characteristic exhaust shot out from Edelweiss, just a steady, low hum that got louder and louder as the radiator sizzled and popped, ragnite blue light emanating from it as the tank came fully to life.
Kris started to raise her hands, and Imp Cleaner rolled back, engine rumbling as it build up revs. Then Chariot started to pull in turn, the two light tanks pulling their cables taut, spraying up dirt as they pulled heavily on the buried tank. Edelweiss screamed, white exhaust pouring from the mud as the tracks spun furiously, rocking the tank from side to side. It looked like the huge tank was simply tearing up the mud, digging itself a deeper grave despite the efforts of the others to pull it free. That was when Brenner let up on the throttle, as Imp Cleaner bit into increasingly muddy ground, tracks vanishing behind a curtain of dirt.
Kris massaged her temples. "Crap."
"If nothing broke, don't worry about it." Sergeant Grenier stepped up beside her, watching the trio of tanks sink into the mud. "The LT called HQ for a recovery vehicle thirty minutes ago."
"Oh... that helps." It was embarrassing to go to so much effort when there had been a better solution all along. Kris tried to remind herself there were more important things to worry about. The small details of the recovery wouldn't affect how tomorrow would go, after all.
Kris was sitting on the tank roof, her boots kicked over the side. Brenner had finally taken a moment to climb out of the tank and stretch. Dai had struck up conversation with Isara, and Grenier had gone over to the lieutenant's tank for another leadership meeting.
The clatter of tracks on the main road made their heads turn, long before the tanks themselves pulled into view. The choppy sound of their engines was unfamiliar to most of them, but Kris found it oddly familiar. The moment of trepidation finally passed when the first green tank rounded the corner, its frontal armor emblazoned with the white wheel of the Atlantic Federation. They were a familiar sight from her days training in Vinland. Brenner must have seen the way her posture relaxed at the sight, as he asked, "You recognize them tanks?"
"Yeah. They're from Vinland. Mk. 4 tanks, also called the 'minute.'" The first rolled on by, with a tall, teardrop-shaped cast body, a squat turret sitting atop with a medium-caliber cannon. The second and third passed them by, and finally one with a large crane built into its hull instead of a turret and cannon. Parts were festooned all along the sides, spare tracks, wheels, and pins. The group of Federal tanks came to a stop just down the road from them, the hatches falling open as the commanders peered around them with binoculars.
"Hey, where you steal that jacket from, corporal?"
Kris turned her head in a shock, and saw a blond staff sergeant smirking down at her from the roof of the recovery tank. "This jacket was issued to me, staff sergeant..." She smiled, then. "It's nice to see a familiar face."
Winter jumped down with a blocky sub-machine gun slung over one shoulder, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she eyeballed the tanks. "Same to you, kiddo. That's some big fucking tank you all got stuck."
"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Why don't they issue us anything that nice?" Kris looked to Edelweiss, and saw Welkin's face light up at the sight of them.
Winter nudged Kris with an elbow. "So, how's it being in the militia? As awful and shitty as you were saying it was gonna be?"
She thought about it for a moment, but shook her head. "No, honestly. Everyone's been working hard, fighting their butts off. And mostly nice, nicer than I would have expected. I think... everyone in the regular army is so cynical, but the militia seems more optimistic, if that makes sense.
"Uhuh... sounds like you're doing fine." The Vinlander was staring at her. Sizing her up for something. "Listen, I've got something important to talk to you about. About your unit."