2 years after the Armistice

POV: Sjulzulp, Free Znosian Marines (Rank: Six Whiskers)

The twin moons of Tatolm‑4 hung in the washed‑out afternoon sky. A warm, fetid breeze pushed across the bomb‑gouged prairie; what little remained here was matted with grime and dried Znosian blood.

Six Whiskers Sjulzulp hugged the uneven parapet of the forward trench, every muscle rigid.

The war had lasted long enough for the smell of death to really settle in — and for Sjulzulp to earn a sixth solid line on his insignia. The extra whisker was less a medal of honor or valor than a reminder that he was still here. In such a brutal, grinding war, the easiest path to upward mobility was survival.

Static hissed in his inner‑ear comms; the stench of plasma fire and gunpowder clung to the air like fog. His ears briefly flattened beneath his ceramic composite helmet as a distant plasma cannon discharged somewhere to the north. 155 millimeter, he was pretty sure. Veterans of this war knew the sounds of death from one another. This one was outgoing. Or so he hoped. There was always a chance the enemy lines had rapidly moved in that sector. In that case, they'd all be overrun and dead before they knew it.

Sjulzulp turned back to his technical specialist. "What do you see?"

"All clear. No sign of Loyalist activity on our drones."

"Are you sure?!"

"I think they moved out," the drone operator replied after a few more seconds. "Took their equipment with them too. Here… see for yourself."

Sjulzulp grabbed the datapad and glanced at the remote image. For a brief moment, he wondered if this could be some new electronic warfare trick from the enemy. Perhaps the Loyalists had broken through their latest encryption standards and were using their signals to feed him false intelligence. Technically, that was always possible, but he hadn't heard of anything like that. And if they were going to use their top-secret zero-day exploits, it probably wouldn't be over some bombed out stalemated front like here on the relatively worthless Tatolm-4.

"Where did they run off to?"

The drone operator shrugged. "No idea. Maybe they're out of supplies. We've been shooting down their incoming landers for the last couple of weeks. They've got to run low sometime, right?"

That wasn't a bad guess. But that was all it was, a guess. With some motivated reasoning in there too. The recon in this area had been spotty for a month now. There were a few thousand other important battlefields on this planet, and there were only so many monitoring assets in orbit. Truthfully, Sjulzulp knew the enemy could be anywhere. They could be gathering to attack him right now. Or they could have retreated due to lack of supplies. He wasn't one of the mindless; his brain could come up with a dozen different explanations for this scenario, all equally unlikely and posing more questions than answers.

"Yeah, that's possible," he admitted out loud. "Can you get your drone any closer?"

"No, this is as far as the line goes."

Both sides had developed enough electronic warfare to make the operation of remote control devices difficult. In this part of the front, like most parts of the Znosian worlds at war, both sides blasted enough signals into the air at each other that some of the kits in his unit speculated it was giving them all cancer. Sjulzulp didn't know if there was any truth to that, and he was pretty sure a million things were going to kill him on this battlefield before any cancerous growth could. But he stood far away from the massive transmitter trucks and devices anyway, especially at dusk, when the enemy drones were most active.

In the impermissive operating environment, his unit had gotten a few of those optical-wire guided drones, each trailing a fiber optic cable back to the controller. These were reliably unjammable, as far as he knew, but there was a range limit and there were some tactical disadvantages to giving the enemy a literal line to follow back to your position.

"Pity… I guess— I guess there's only one way to find out, huh?"

The drone operator gulped. "We're— we're going out there?!"

Sjulzulp took a long look at the empty stretch of foul-smelling mud between his line and the enemy's lines. He could wait. He could easily wait. Report it up the chain. Wait for them to synthesize the information, pass it further up the chain. Then, someone is going to make a determination, pass it around. And then they're going to come back and order him out there to see what was going on.

That was how things operated back in Dominion units. And as fast and efficient as they could make it, it lacked the energy — the initiative — that was the reason that the Free Znosian Marines were doing so well in comparison. Sometimes, that initiative led them straight into an ambush. That was bound to happen. But on balance, it was the new way of war they'd adopted, and by the false Prophecy, they were sticking to it.

War sucked, he knew. Everyone was gambling, and everyone lost, some more than others.

But as he stared back at his people who looked up to him to make a decision — their lives fully in his paws and his in theirs — Sjulzulp knew deep down that he wouldn't trade this for anything else in the galaxy.

"Hey, keep your ears up," Sjulzulp said. "If the enemy's falling back here, command will want to know. And if they're preparing for a counter-attack, well, command will want to know too."

"If we're going there to check, I just hope it's the former and not the latter," the operator muttered.

"Maybe we've finally broken them."

"Maybe. And we'll be in Znos this time next year?"

Sjulzulp smiled. "Next year in Znos."

Sjulzulp crouched low as his platoon advanced out of the muddy trench into the open grass. There was a patch of high grass between his line and the enemy's that survived all the artillery shelling, about a kilometer at its widest. It was rigged with a myriad of explosive mines and unexploded ordnance. His platoon walked in a single file, relying on their memory of where they placed their own defenses and hoping they wouldn't step near any of the enemy's.

He looked up, checking for Loyalist drones with his helmet optics.

None so far.

It was quiet.

Almost… too quiet.

His gut screamed danger at him, and Sjulzulp wished it were as easy as that. The battlefield of the Great Schism was not for those who followed their guts, because those who did would have hopped away and hid under a thick blanket many years ago.

Ahead of the column, there was a rustle in the grass. Sjulzulp almost hopped out of his fur.

Caw-caw. Caw-caw.

A pair of winged scavengers took off and circled overhead. Most of those species had been once thought extinct under the careful management of the Dominion's exterminationist wildlife policies, but life found a way and war brought them back.

His platoon relaxed. One of his Marines pointed his rifle up, miming as if he was aiming at them. A couple of his comrades patted him on the shoulder and jeered. All in good fun.

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

"Shhh!" Sjulzulp shushed them. They were still quite far from the enemy lines, barely out of their own first-line defenses, but caution kept troops alive, and Sjulzulp intended to keep them alive. As many of them as possible anyway.

A few minutes of marching in relative silence later, they stopped for a short water break.

"Something doesn't feel right," Sjulzulp muttered to himself as he drank from his canteen. Not too loudly as to affect morale. He felt his lieutenant Five Whiskers Khvisk shifted uncomfortably next to him. She'd heard him. But she had the sense not to inquire further.

Sjulzulp kept his eye towards the direction of the enemy lines as they slowly progressed through the field. As they pushed past another dense brush into a clearing, he noticed a small patch of discolored vegetation to his front, no more than fifty meters ahead of him.

He halted his platoon with a paw gesture and brought up his rangefinder.

It was nothing. Just an oddly colored patch of tall grass.

As he prepared to give the order for his platoon to move on, there was a glint to his right. In the corner of his eye. He turned to see what was making—

And there they were. It took him a second for his brain to register what his eyes were seeing.

Loyalist Marines, their armors gleaming with the red and white insignias of the Dominion, creeping through the tall grass, just like he was.

Back! Back!

Sjulzulp urgently gave his platoon a paw signal to back into the dense brush they'd just come from.

Caw-caw. Caw-caw.

The winged scavengers overhead gave them away, but nobody ever accused them of being a disinterested party. As they made their noises, one of the Loyalist squad leaders looked up, as if in annoyance at the creatures. Then, as the enemy squad leader levelled their gaze, it fell upon the exact brush that Sjulzulp was backing into. For a moment, their eyes locked.

Sjulzulp could see the enemy frown and slowly point an outstretched claw at his exact position.

"Back! Back!" he roared. "Back to defensive positions, now!"

Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

A shrill whistle pierced the air. And the Tatolm-4 afternoon erupted with the thunderous bark of machine gun fire.

Rat-at-at-at-at-

"Back! Back to the trenches!" Sjulzulp bellowed as his platoon retreated for the safety of trench cover, his own weapon spitting death back at the encroaching enemy. They hopped with wild abandon. By some miracle, nobody stepped on one of the defensive mines they'd left as they sprinted for their own line.

Rat-at-at-at-at.

"Ahhhhhh!" One of his two whiskers, Mnazilsto, screamed as a tracer seared through his leg, falling to the ground. "I'm hit."

Sjulzulp turned back. "Get Mnazilsto back up!" he pointed at the wounded trooper as his rifle continued to bark out covering fire towards the tall grass, enemies unseen.

"Leave me!" the injured two whiskers yelled from the ground. "Go! Go! My life was forfeited—"

"Shut the fuck up! Get him up!" Sjulzulp yelled, his voice somehow carrying through the din of battle on the radio.

"Yes, Six Whiskers!" two of his scouts responded simultaneously as they turned to the fallen Mnazilsto. As they hurriedly picked Mnazilsto up by his limbs, another burst of enemy gunfire pierced the grass and found one of the scouts, cutting her down where she stood.

Exactly the reason that Dominion Marine doctrine prohibited assistance to the wounded under fire without achieving local fire superiority. But doctrine doesn't sing songs around the campfire; doctrine doesn't cover your back, and doctrine doesn't bleed out in your arms. And this wasn't the Dominion Marines. Not as of two years ago.

Sjulzulp swore again, slinging his rifle onto his back as he hopped back to the trio. "You got the whiner?" he asked as he grabbed the fallen scout by the armpits, dragging her limp body backwards through the heavy mud.

"I've got the two whiskers!" the other scout yelled as she dragged Mnazilsto through the mud by his two long ears. That, too, was not exactly regulation, but it did the trick.

Seeing the display, the rest of the platoon turned back, their rifles providing a steady stream of suppressive fire. They didn't see the enemy they were shooting at; they were a few ten thousand years too late for that kind of war. But Sjulzulp could swear it was having an effect on their accuracy.

Rat-at-at-at-at.

The volume, however, was indisputably undiminished. The incoming fire was still heavy as the summer Tatolm rain.

There's no way. We're not going to make it.

As he despaired, dragging his wounded trooper, they hopped past another thick bush, and he could see the defensive trenches in front of him. The sprinting platoon heavy gunners who'd been covering their rear had reached it first. They set up their newly certified heavy weapons on the trench parapet at the defensive line, and without needing orders or shouting a warning, they gave the gesture indicating they were going to open fire.

I hope that thing works.

Ka-chunk. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

They held down the trigger, and dozens of 40mm high-explosive dual-purpose grenades whistled just past his ear, exploding the world behind him and his retreating platoon in a horizontal line, splattering mud and broken grass in every direction. The distraction — well, either that, or its thirty meter lethality radius — silenced some of the incoming fire, and with it, they managed to all clamber back into the trench.

But their troubles were not over.

As Sjulzulp hurriedly applied his tourniquet to his several wounded troopers, Khvisk shouted, pointing a claw out into the no-man's-land behind him. "Six Whiskers, it's a whole damn Loyalist den! They're coming out of the grass! Right flank! All guns to the right!"

Sheeeeeeeeww. Fwoooomp.

The distinctive sound of incoming mortar fire ended not in an earth-shaking explosion. Instead, a cloud of thick white smoke ballooned out of the impact site, concealing the area they'd just vacated.

"Gas! Gas! Gas!"

The platoon hurriedly unpacked their rubber protective suits even as the incoming weapon fire continued unslacked.

"It's not— They're smoking their advance!" someone shouted to his left.

Sure enough, as Sjulzulp peeked over the trench parapet, hundreds of Dominion Marines in the distance charged towards them under the cover of the smoke barrage. Now, it was certainly possible that the enemy commander did drop some nasty chemicals on their own troops, but he surmised it was probably just white phosphorous. If he was wrong, well, he wasn't going to live very long anyway.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

Rat-at-at-at-at.

As more snarling Loyalists rushed through the dense smoke, Sjulzulp stopped counting. There was no point.

"Curse the False Prophecy! The whole party's here!" he shouted. "Khvisk, radio!"

She tossed him the long-range secured radio, which he snatched out of the air.

"Division artillery, this is Six Whiskers Sjulzulp with the forward recon platoon. I need immediate fire support! Do you read?"

Rat-at-at-at-at.

There was a moment he thought that the message wouldn't be able to cut through the jamming, but perhaps with how hard his claw was jabbed on the talk button, the radio sensed his urgency and it got through. The response came back almost immediately.

The creature on the other end was calm. Almost infuriatingly so. "We read you, forward defense element. You're in luck, Six Whiskers Sjulzulp. For some reason, the mindless assholes have let off on their assault over here. We have two batteries idle for tasking—"

"We've got a flooded cave! Flooded cave! Coordinates two-one-zero, one-zero-eight," he read off as his new orbital positioning unit converted his location to local grid coordinates. "I need every round you have on us right now! Flooded cave!"

"Isn't that… your platoon's current position, Six Whiskers?"

"Yes! They're right on top of us! We won't hold another ten minutes!"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "No can do, Six Whiskers. We aren't going to just level your position—"

"What?! I need a high-explosive barrage on my coordinates right now!"

Rat-at-at-at-at.

"We aren't firing on friendlies—"

"That's an order!"

"Sorry, Six Whiskers, but you don't command my artillery. Besides, I outrank you by a whisker," the creature on the other end of the radio actually had the guts to reply calmly.

"What the fuck— there's like a thousand of them right here, Seven Whiskers! We're getting overrun! Better us than the entire line! Our lives were forfeited so our hatchlings can be free!"

"Yeah, yeah, calm your ears. I've got the Alien Legion on the line. You say you can hold another ten minutes, right?"

"I said we won't hold another—"

"Their combat QRF will be there in five. Just keep your ears down and read me the coordinates. The enemy's coordinates this time, please. We've got a few of the precision munitions we can spare."

Sjulzulp tossed the radio to Khvisk and resumed command of the hasty line defense, directing fire to the waves of incoming Loyalist Marines. As the fire thickened, one of his heavy gunners staggered and fell from a burst of machine-gun fire from far away. Without needing orders, her assistant signaled for the medic and got onto the weapon herself, its outgoing fire not slackening for a millisecond. He knew she was not trained or bred for it, but the weapon wasn't very difficult to use in the first place.

After all, it — like many of its alien origin — had been designed to be used in conflicts where warlords were more ubiquitous than college diplomas.

Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.

"Hold the line! Enemies on the left!" he shouted into his radio to his Marines on the left flank. "We've got reinforcements in five!"

They might not have heard him, but he swore that the gunfire there intensified. He peeked over the trench top to see where the surging enemies were concentrated on—

Thud.

Sjulzulp fell to the ground, seeing stars. He coughed out in pain as he tasted the smell of blood in his helmet. Laying face up in the Tatolm dirt, he saw a blur of shapes in its hazy brown sky. Out of the corner of his dimming vision, Khvisk ran toward his downed position, shouting something inaudible.

As he blacked out, the only thing Sjulzulp heard was the distinctive, terrifying thrum of the Coyote-150 drone swarm as the flying explosives dove into the fight.

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