The Twenty-Sixth
The Ossel road, seven kilometers east of Kessa junction — Day Twenty-Six
Private Aurelio Doss had joined the Kelsford Dominion’s northern conscript brigade nine months ago because a recruiting officer had come to his valley with a photograph of a bridge that needed building and a promise that the fighting was somewhere else, and he had believed both halves of it for almost as long as it took the truck to cross the border.
Tonight he rode in the third vehicle of a convoy of eighty, on a bench seat worn smooth by better men than him, with a rifle across his knees and seven magazines in his vest and a coffee thermos that Corporal Yelena Marchetti had filled that morning and had already, twice, threatened to take back if he didn’t stop complaining about it.
The convoy had left Dunmarrow’s freight yard at five that morning, twenty-one hours behind the schedule that had once, weeks ago, promised a night movement under cover of darkness on a road the intelligence summaries called quiet.
It had not left quiet, and the road had not stayed dark, and by the time the lead vehicles reached the Ossel crossing the light was going the flat grey of late afternoon, which was, Doss thought without knowing why the thought had come to him, the worst possible light there was: too bright to hide in, too dim to see far by.
“You’re doing that thing with your foot,” said Marchetti.
“What thing.”
“The tapping thing. It’s driving me insane.”
“Sorry.”
She didn’t say it was fine.
She didn’t say anything for a while, and then she said, not looking at him, “Twenty-six days since I’ve been shot at. I was starting to enjoy myself.”
He laughed, because it seemed like the thing to do, and the tracer fire came before the sound of it.
The tracers came first.
Green light threading the tree line to the north, and Doss’s knees dropped a half-second before the crack-crack-crack arrived — flat, wrong, three slaps against his eardrums that didn’t match the picture in front of him.
The lead truck’s windshield spiderwebbed white.
The driver’s head snapped sideways, no hinge in it, and something in Doss’s own neck ached in sympathy.
The truck kept rolling — twenty tons of ammunition crates drifting toward the ditch on dead momentum, the second truck already jackknifing behind it, its cargo of field rations spilling across the road in a slow avalanche of cardboard and dust.
Doss’s hands had the rifle up before he decided anything.
Cold metal against his cheek.
A taste in his mouth — copper, the inside of his cheek bitten through — and his ears gone strange, muffled and enormous, gunfire arriving through cotton while his own pulse hammered louder than any of it.
Forty meters left, Marchetti was down over a replacement — three days in-country, boots still shined — both his hands pressed to a hole below his collarbone that didn’t look like it should still be letting air through.
It was.
Blood came up between his fingers in a patient rhythm, unhurried, and Doss’s chest tightened watching it, forgot to breathe, had to remember how.
Marchetti made the call the way people make it in the field — no music behind it, just because the next five seconds required one — got her arms under his shoulders and started dragging, his heels carving two lines through the gravel.
A round passed close enough to Doss’s ear that he felt it, a hot flat slap of displaced air, and he flinched sideways, caught himself, kept firing into shapes he couldn’t separate from the dark.
It was not Krayzek’s Vanguard, though the escort would spend the rest of the night believing it was.
It was a Concord reconnaissance-in-force, two platoons and a section of anti-tank teams, positioned three days earlier on intelligence that had described, with real precision, a heavier and better-escorted column departing on the twenty-first — a column that, on the schedule as it actually existed, had never left the yard at all, because its shells had gone to a summit’s working group and its rail slots had gone to Ardenne. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
The force that had waited three days in the tree line for that column found instead, on the twenty-sixth, a lighter one, arriving six hours later than even its own revised timetable, with more fuel aboard than shells, and considerably less escort than the intelligence had promised.
They attacked it anyway.
A gap of five days and a change of manifest had not reached them; wars are not updated as fast as they are fought.
Up the column the fifty cal woke on the lead truck’s ring mount, and its voice went through Doss’s ribs like something physical — not accurate yet, but loud enough to argue back.
The tree line answered with more of itself.
More green thread.
More muzzle flashes stitching the air.
And Doss understood, in the part of his brain that did math without consulting him, that this hadn’t been a probing shot.
This was the ambush, all of it, arriving at once.
Four kilometers back along the embankment, Sergeant Emeric Voss heard the fifty cal’s report come over the company net a full ninety seconds before the words did, a background hiss of gunfire under a voice too calm to be calm.
“Contact, …”
“Contact, contact, convoy under fire, grid four-one-one, request immediate armor support, I say again, request—”
Captain Bruun’s voice cut across it, flat, already moving.
“Widow elements, mount and move. Three-Fourteen, you’re closest. Go.”
Voss was already down the hatch.
“Driver, start her. Gunner, load sabot, then HE. Loader, hold nothing back — if we fire it tonight, it’s spent tonight.”
“Understood, Sergeant.” Lucan Castagnac’s voice came up from the gunner’s seat steady and thin, the voice of a boy who had learned, eleven days ago, to sound like a man.
“How many do we have left?”
Voss did not need to check the notebook.
He had known the number since morning; he carried it now the way he carried the names.
“Nineteen,” he said.
“Make them count.”
The Iron Widow came off the embankment at a speed no manual recommended, throwing up a rooster-tail of frozen mud, and turned onto the Ossel road with its cage rattling and its engine screaming, four kilometers from a fight it might reach in time and might not, carrying every round of ammunition its crew had left in the world.
The second truck’s cargo hit the road and something in Doss’s gut flinched at the sound before his mind caught up — that wasn’t right, that wasn’t gunfire, that was cardboard and dust and six pallets of rations dying a stupid, unmilitary death — and a round passed close enough to his ear that he felt it, actually felt it, a hot flat slap of displaced air that made him flinch sideways into Marchetti’s shoulder, and for a half second the two of them were just two bodies colliding in the dark, breath and sweat and the smell of each other’s fear, before the war pulled them back apart.
“Tree line, forty degrees, they’ve got a tube up—”
There was nothing in the column that could answer it.
The two Hound IFVs assigned as armored escort had been the first vehicles hit, both burning already, their crews either out and firing from the ditch or not out at all.
Doss watched, because there was nothing else to do, as a shape crouched at the tree line and a launcher came up onto a shoulder, and understood with total, useless clarity that he was about to watch a truck die, and then, a half-second later, understood that the truck in the launcher’s sights was the one Marchetti had just dragged the wounded boy behind.
The round came in with a shriek and missed high, and punched into the embankment beyond, and the flash of it threw every shadow on the road out long and wrong, and in that light Doss saw, for the first time, three armored shapes coming up the road from the west at a speed that had no business on that surface, cages rattling, exhaust roaring, running lights dark.
Voss brought the Widow onto the flank of the ambush with the fifty cal already answering the tree line and the gunner’s sight already tracking.
He did not slow to assess.
Fourteen years of tank commanding had taught him that the assessment and the shot happened in the same half-second or they did not happen usefully at all.
“Launcher position, tree line, forty degrees left. Sabot’s already up—”
“HE would do it better, Sergeant, the launcher’s dug in, I don’t have a clean—”
“Your call. Fire what you trust.”
A beat.
Then: “On.”
The Widow fired.
The high-explosive round went into the tree line in a flat orange bloom that threw broken branches thirty meters into the air and turned the launcher position and the men around it into something the war would record only as a grid reference and a number.
Beside the tank, the coaxial gun raked the ditch where muzzle flashes still showed, and Doss, forty meters away, saw the tree line’s fire stutter and thin, saw two more shapes break from it running, saw one of them go down and not get up, and did not, in the moment, feel anything about any of it beyond a raw, gulping relief that the launcher was gone and the truck behind Marchetti was still a truck.
It took eleven minutes, start to finish, though nobody who lived through it could have told you that afterward with any confidence; time in it had stopped behaving like time.
When the tree line finally went quiet — not silent, but quiet, the ragged, spent quiet of a fight that has used up whatever had been driving it — the road held four burning vehicles, one dead driver still slumped at his wheel, six wounded being carried or dragged toward the ditch’s meager cover, and the replacement boy under Marchetti’s hands, alive, barely, his blood slowing now under the field dressing she’d finally gotten pressed against the wound.
The ration pallets kept burning where a tracer had found the cardboard, small and absurd light against the dark, throwing everyone’s shadow long and wrong across the road.
Voss opened the hatch and stood half out of the turret in air that smelled of diesel and cordite and burnt cardboard, and looked down the length of the shattered convoy, and did the only arithmetic that mattered to him now.
“Loader. Count.”
Kallin’s voice came up, flat with exhaustion.
“Four rounds fired, Sergeant. Fifteen remaining.”
Fifteen.
Out of a war the general staff had believed, in the spring, would be over by winter, out of a column that had left with eleven days of shells instead of twenty-three because a minister needed his ally’s president to have a headline, out of a schedule that had slipped six hours further still because a bridge no map remembered had dropped into a river, the Iron Widow had fifteen rounds of main-gun ammunition left to fight the rest of whatever this war intended to become.
In the gunner’s seat below him, Lucan Castagnac sat with both hands still on the controls and his face the color of the smoke outside, and Voss reached down without being asked and put a hand once, briefly, on the boy’s shoulder, the way he had after the drones, and felt the same fine tremor running through it, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing left to say that the number in the notebook hadn’t already said better.
Down on the road, in the small orange light of six burning ration pallets, Aurelio Doss sat with his back against a wheel that was still warm from the fire beside it, and watched Yelena Marchetti hold a stranger’s hand and tell him, in a voice gone perfectly calm, that he was going to be fine, that the truck was going to be fine, that everything, somehow, from here, was going to be fine, and neither of them believed a word of it, and both of them kept saying it anyway, because it was the only ammunition either of them had left.