The Graycoats

By Ian Murdoch

An aging American officer, a young Russian girl, and a Canadian soldier are fighting a hopeless and losing war against the Uneras, a dogmatic movement that has already subsumed most of the world. When the Uneras' mysterious benefactors make themselves known, these Allies must struggle to survive and win as chaos erupts around them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359583003

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The Graycoats

THE GRAYCOATS

Ian Murdoch

Copyright © 2019 by Ian Murdoch

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2019

ISBN 978-0-359-58300-3

Published by Lulu Press

Available through www.lulu.com

CHAPTER 1

November 2nd, Arrival Year (AY 0)

The important thing to remember, Mr. Chairman, is that it’s very likely our enemies have been right all along.

Alright then. I wasn’t already having a bad enough day.

High-level communiques referencing ‘Saviors’ or ‘Deliverance’ have increased 400% in the last week. Occupied territories have been culled for slaves at a similar rate.

The Uneras are always talking about their Saviors. Go ahead, have a seat I suppose. And aren’t they standing up more units to replace losses after their offensives in Tennessee and Krasnoyarsk Krai?

Mr. Chairman, I don’t think this is run-of-the-mill intelligence we’re seeing. You know how precarious our situation is, even without some unexpected--

I don’t need you to sit here and remind me of something I’ve known for years. All of the old preparations are still in place, just the way you and I laid them out three years ago.

I’m worried they will have been wasted resources if these ‘Saviors’ don’t show themselves soon.

The real question is: will they matter even if they do arrive?

I didn’t expect such pessimism from you, Mr. Chairman. That’s usually my realm of expertise.

I know, I know. I keep a certain face on for the news broadcasts, for the President, even for the other puffed up idiots on the Unified High Command. You, however, never blow smoke up my ass, so I won’t blow any up yours. You’re right, we’re both right. We’re precariously close to being totally fucked.

///

The tin of Copenhagen thumped with a hollow echo against Louis Blake’s numb fingers and the delightfully rare tobacco inside compacted into a hard lump. A handful of high clouds had already caught the rising sun's light and burned fiercely against the burgundy sky. His skin protested the dry and cold air by cracking and itching, but he’d long since buried the sensation under a host of other chronic maladies.

He was a tall and broad man, though spending two of his four decades in the Army had shortened and wizened him a bit. His nose teetered off to the left slightly, broken and flattened by a humvee crash that had sent his face bouncing off the back end of a machine gun. The beginning of a spider-webbing mess of lines and creases sprouted from the corners of his narrow and dark brown eyes and stretched across ashy, sun-beaten skin. A full but trimmed beard covered his lantern jaw and part of a mass of scar tissue that spread across his neck just above his collar. His breath rasped quietly in his throat and misted around his head.

Almost no one else was awake other than the minimal human component of the overnight guard shift. Tiny and disposable ground sensors were scattered over a kilometer away from their patrol base in a rough circle, passively observing the sickly Front Range forest for motion, heat, sound, and electromagnetic transmissions and passing their reports back with low power transmitters. Semi-autonomous claymore mines and machine gun turrets covered every possible path inwards to the base to buy them time in the case of any Uneras stumbling through their sensor perimeter. Small, songbird-sized airborne drones buzzed just above the brown or bare treetops. The few remaining mobile drones they had were scattered underneath the thickest patches of underbrush, ranging from squadrons of Quadcopters, to tracked Sabre gun-bots the size of a mastiff, to trash can-sized coaxial flyers, to the ever off-putting quadrupedal robo-mules.

Blake popped the lid off of the dip tin and reached in to scoop out a disappointingly small pinch. It tasted awful in his lip, but the tiny bump of nicotine still perked him up. Blake sighed happily and looked back up to the brightening sky.

Major faults detected.

Self-Check: Fatal Error

Self-Repair: Fatal Error

Recommend shut-down and immediate maintenance. Y/N?

His aging and initially experimental cortical implant, nestled between the inside of his skull and his brain proper, flashed the warning messages to him via his similarly old corneal implants. He blinked, annoyed, at the ‘N’ to clear the messages and the implant sent whistling and buzzing not-quite-sounds directly to the auditory center of his brain. With a simple thought-phrase, he removed the artificial filters and scrolling line of packaged outputs his implant had laid over his field of vision to go back to taking in a rare, good, morning.

For the last six months or so his unit had spent in the southern stretches of the Rockies the weather had grown ever more severe and unpredictable. Today, though, only a faint breeze rustled the thinning and sickly leaves and needles of the dying trees around him. Isolated and rural areas like this had generally been spared from the worst of the Uneras’ systematic bombardment of herbicides and defoliant chemicals, but their effects had grown truly endemic. They floated on every breeze and seeped into aquifers. He’d picked this nearly idyllic glade to site their patrol base on partially aesthetic grounds. Everyone needed to forget what the war was doing, even if only slightly. Even if just for a moment.

The sun finally breached the sheer spine of rock along the eastern edge of the valley and conferred just enough warmth to stall the numbing and biting cold. Blake coughed wetly, and the coppery tang of blood splashed across his tongue before he clambered to his feet. His joints creaked and popped amidst a quick flurry of pain but his implant -- despite its malfunctions -- managed to block or deaden most of it.

A pair of birds somewhere sang back and forth to one another in the brightening dawn. His boots made almost no sound on the thick mat of brownish gray pine needles and fallen aspen leaves as he walked around the center of the patrol base. Over the whispering rustle of the wind and the avian love song, the only other sounds were the gentle hum of their compact 3D printer and his aging and minimalistic exoskeletal frame. The frame required much less power and maintenance than the newer, more comprehensively armored suits, but the only real benefit it conferred was a modest boost in strength and endurance. Made up of a simple series of carbon fiber and lightweight polymer struts secured to his limbs and torso by straps and powered by a small backpack electric motor, his frame helped him carry the enormous loads required of modern infantrymen without being too intrusive to normal movement. Their trustworthy, always running printer was busy churning out a new batch of passive sensors and repair parts from plastic and scrap metal they’d scavenged from the valley over the last few weeks.

A bulging wall of dark gray cloud loomed over the valley’s west wall, the burgeoning storm piling over and over on itself like a breaking wave. He slung his bullpup battle rifle, a highly altered version of the venerable M16 family rechambered to fire rounds large enough to punch through Uneras body armor, and headed for the 3D printer. He also carried a heavy and reliable revolver for the close-in fight with armored Uneras, though its slow and heavy rounds couldn’t guarantee a kill as well as the rifle. A sharp gust hissed through the dying forest and sent a fresh crop of leaves and needles spinning downwards through the clear air like patchy brown butterflies. He paused next to the flexible and man-portable solar panel arrays set up all around the printer and frowned; they’d need at least another day of good sunlight for him to be comfortable with battery power for their frames and drones. The coming crush of cloud would delay them, and he knew the Uneras were always searching for Strike Teams like Blake’s.

Coffee, sir? His two team sergeants were crouched around a small electric stove near the printer with a pot of boiling liquid. Peter was a tall whip of a man from Texas and had been conscripted around the time the war had taken a turn from bad to worse. After a few years of fighting in a conventional line unit in places like Northern Chile and San Francisco, he’d come to Blake’s Strike Team when the front lines pushed north up from Mexico and through his hometown. Raoul had been orphaned from his native Colombia when the Uneras had very nearly overrun that continent and had fled north with the Allied armies. He was short and broad, and his cropped black hair was streaked liberally with gray.

It was thin and weak, but Blake still accepted the proffered cup with a grunt of approval, No movement last night? Blake said, his voice both guttural and rasping.

Both men shook their heads, Uneras truck convoys have stopped completely in the last week, Peter said.

Maybe they’re shifting all of their focus back east again? Raoul added.

Fewer convoys means fewer things we can steal for my explosives, a young man, a boy really, slouched down beside the three older men. He pushed his shaggy, greasy black hair away from his dark eyes and continued, I’m done putting together all of the IEDs for the next ambush, so we can get going any time now.

Raoul and Peter both glared hard at the boy but said nothing, opting to let Blake handle it. Gallagher was practically a savant at assembling Improvised Explosive Devices from 3D printed components and stolen or scrounged parts, but he was still a teenager. We’ll leave when we’re ready and when we’re certain the Uneras are looking elsewhere, not when you feel like it.

The boy huffed loudly but didn’t respond. Raoul spoke up, Where are we going next, Major?

Blake furrowed his brow and took another sip of coffee despite the lump of dip in his lip. He couldn’t bear to waste either. Back in the spring, the Uneras had pushed north as far as Salida and Canon City before stalling. The Allied 48th Mountain Division had been shattered, its remnants scattered into the dying forests and mountain peaks.

He blinked in momentary confusion. The 48th? Or the 12th?

His battered implant howled at him for a long moment. He clenched his jaw and focused on his thoughts until he forced his mind and the malfunction to clear. It had been the 48th, yes.

Are you alright sir? Peter said.

Fine. Blake spat dark brown tobacco juice into the loam. Just my implant acting up. We’re going to head north, to Salida.

His team sergeants glanced at each other, "There’s a Battalion at least of Auxiliaries

in Salida, and who knows how many slave companies," Raoul said.

There are other ways north, back to Allied lines. We need a refit and replacements. There are smaller passes some of these locals can lead us through, Peter said diplomatically.

Blake scowled and spit again, Salida controls the east-west routes coming from Canon City. When the Allied counterattack comes, they’re going to want detailed intelligence on the town and its garrison. We’re not attacking Salida, just getting close to it before passing on by.

Gallagher scoffed. Blake had entirely forgotten he was there. His implant hadn’t worked right for years, but it was starting to worry him. We just need to get back to putting bombs on roads and stealing everything we can find. Stop with this big Army, big war bullshit.

I don’t remember asking you for a damn thing, much less your opinion, soldier, Blake rasped. Gallagher tried and failed to meet his glare before slinking away, muttering something about the Refugee Cities to the north and how he ‘wasn’t even being paid anyway.’

More of his soldiers were rousing now, prepping little meals in the crisp morning air. Only about half wore uniforms and Frames and were nominally members of the Allied military. The rest wore a smattering of hunter's garb and older body armor and were armed with an eclectic mix of battle rifles, hunting rifles, and even shotguns. Uneras offensives had created nearly as many insurgents as Refugees.

He craned his neck and stared back up at the massive storm, trying to capture a few more minutes of the serene glade. Something flickered against the shrinking stretch of blue sky for a second. The faint and slightly wavering Augmented Reality display built in tandem by his cortical and corneal implants sprang unbidden into his view. Something or someone nearby was sending microburst traffic on Ultra High Frequency bands, and the remote sensors were feeding the reports to his implants through the radio built into his frame. The traffic was encrypted and too short to triangulate, but it was there. That distant prick in the sky was almost certainly an Uneras drone.

Everyone up! He barked into the cold air. His implant crackled non-sounds, and his AR flickered in response to the sudden surge in brain activity. Raoul and Peter took off into the woods to rouse their sections.

The distant drone flared briefly and a missile lanced down into the wooded slope.

Instead of ripping him and his men apart, it streaked into the flank of a hill three kilometers away and outside of their perimeter. They’d cobbled together a group of poorly shielded heat sources and automated radio transmitters to throw off any pursuers, and it’d done its job and bought them time. He knew Uneras ground troops would be sweeping the valley, searching for his team. And the drone would only keep loitering overhead.

Get this goddamn array packed up time now! Peter shouted. Frame-wearing troopers rolled up solar panels and hastily packed components of the printer. Raoul’s men and women, mostly irregulars, activated most of the remaining drones to protect the human soldiers and carry away parts of the camp. Gallagher was there too, hanging bulging sacks of explosives on the twitching mule bots. His rebellious sneer had evaporated, replaced by barely concealed panic.

Another missile hissed downwards from the drone into the same hilltop, Do we pack up the perimeter or do we leave it, sir? Peter said, nervously eyeing the plume of dust and smoke growing out from the burning hill.

Blake glanced at his AR overlays, checking on the flood of reports hitting his implants. The Virtual Assistant program loaded onto his cortical implant was doing its best but still falling short. Cross-hatched red markers appeared both in his view and on an overhead map created by his implant, denoting possible ground units on approach. Based on the still-increasing volume of bursting radio traffic, nearly a Battalion of Uneras was combing the valley for his team. They were moving far faster than he had prepared for.

Leave it in place, Blake said with a grimace. The automated defenses were invaluable and only replaceable if and when they exfiltrated north for a refit. But they couldn’t reuse them if they were all dead.

Two more drones, sweeping in from the east, Raoul stated calmly over their low power local radio link. Mid-altitude, same as the first one. My frame thinks it sees coaxials coming up from the south, too, but I can’t make them out.

Once upon a time, all they would have needed to do to get the drones off their backs was hit them with a focused beam of high powered radio waves. That would’ve broken the link to whoever was controlling them and either sent them crashing down or buzzing back to their launch points. Now, the semi-autonomous protocols the Uneras programmed into them were more than good enough to keep them on station and even cycle through different frequency bands to reestablish their link. If they had better equipment, trained specialists, they could try and hack them remotely, but they didn’t have those things. They’d have to try and knock them down the old-fashioned way.

Alpha section, ready to move, Peter said.

Bravo section, ready, Raoul echoed.

It’d taken them hours to encamp, to set up all of their myriad sensors and security measures, and set Gallagher and the printer to fabricating what they needed. Three and a half minutes had passed since the drone had first launched. The storm was bulging over top of them, threatening rain at any moment that would turn the poisoned ground into a quagmire but also ground the Uneras drones stalking them.

His orders to move out were on his lips the moment that the horizon to the south rumbled ominously. Artillery, lots of it. Whoever the Uneras commander was, they knew the air cover was about to be knocked out and needed another way to slow down the Allied force. Masks on! Gas incoming! there was no way to tell exactly what those cannons were firing at them, but he’d fought the Uneras long enough to know all of their standard procedures. A mix of high explosive set to burst at treetop level and on the ground, interspersed with a generous amount of nerve gas shells. They’d all been inoculated with bioscavenging enzymes the year before, but their efficacy faded over time, and they couldn’t be cavalier about exposure. The masks would stay on. And slow them down even more.

The world shattered as he was proven right. He slammed himself into the loamy ground. High explosives ripped into trees and tore ragged craters in the dust in a wildly scattered pattern. After the first blast, all he could hear was ringing and the dull crumps of more rounds reverberating through his aching body. Some of them felt different, hollower, and he knew those were the gas rounds spilling their lethal cargo through the forest.

A cold, calm fury washed over him like a fall into a frozen lake. He tensed angrily, teeth grinding, hands squeezing his rifle until they hurt. Somewhere, Uneras were rushing through the forest to kill his men and women. Somewhere, a commander was smirking, pleased with himself at catching one of the immensely aggravating Strike Teams and bringing the war towards its seemingly inevitable conclusion.

A hot ember of hatred flared in his gut, and his implant popped and hissed approvingly. He’d fought his way out of worse. The barrage tapered off after only a few minutes, and he scrambled to his feet, All sections, move out to Rally Point One. Peter, shoot those fucking drones down. Here we go.

Any response over the net was lost amongst the hammering drumbeat of his heart in his ears and his ragged breaths behind the polymer faceplate of his mask. Three missiles hissed upwards from small and shoulder carried launchers. Another three went up a second later to ensure the job would be done. The distant blips of the orbiting drones wheeled to avoid the missiles that sought them out on twisting tentacles of white smoke. Flares dazzled in wide fans, futilely, and the dangerous but ultimately replaceable drones burst apart.

Blake raced between the sickly trees, scrabbling on loose rock and sun-bleached wood. He gravitated towards Peter’s section and the train of drones, the soldiers’ assigned as their controllers trying to split their attention between their footing and the tablet computer terminals guiding their artificial charges. Their eyes were wild and bright, lips curled back in nervous snarls. Gallagher glanced at him warily, still hovering near his precious explosives.

Another peal of thunder rumbled from the south and was answered by the crash of lightning from the storm surging down over them. Fat and frigid rain drops sheeted down over his team, and a well-aimed salvo of Uneras rounds smashed into the patch of ground they’d just vacated. Shrapnel hissed through the cold rain and sliced through wood, but no one was hit, not yet. Uneras radar had easily been able to pinpoint their launch site.

A wave of new data flashed across his AR, but Raoul spoke into the net before he could read it, Movement on the south, east, and west of our former perimeter Major. His transmission was punctuated by a sharp flurry of detonations as some of their claymores went off. Automated machine guns chattered in precisely calculated bursts at whatever was chasing them.

How’d they surrounded him so quickly? Frustration bubbled like black bile in his gut, and his brain echoed with his implants’ wailing synesthesia. Slavish, paranoid preparation was good for something.

The rain was so heavy he could barely see a hundred meters in any direction. Downslope to the south, the storm flickered faintly, wisps that marked where Uneras or their drones were dying to breach a perimeter that no longer mattered. Even with their overhead drones gone, the Uneras would realize that fact soon enough. On they fled, north up the valley and up the slope of its eastern side. Rally Point One was a warren of boulders and fallen dead trees near the sheer rock wall of the valley that would hopefully hide them long enough to completely evade the Uneras.

If they made it that far: a dozen more claymores went up in a wide arc behind them. His implant did its best to build a picture of the fight from a bird's eye view, but it was barely more than blips of data. The way those contacts moved, the reckless speed with which they tore through the perimeter. He could guess easily enough. The Uneras had a slave battalion chasing them down.

He saw his men slipping and tripping in the mud and broken wood. They weren’t going to make it, Everyone halt! Form up, sections on line facing south! Frames in the center, drones and militia on the flanks! Blake turned to Gallagher and pointed upslope to the boulder field, Get your ass up that hill and plant the biggest fucking IED array you can think of. I want anyone chasing us in there to get a face full of pain. The boy nodded and took off at a panicked run with the robot mule tailing him like a disturbingly attached puppy.

Everywhere his soldiers scrabbled into makeshift fighting positions, piling rocks and logs or digging out shallow pits from the mud. Tracked Saber gun-bots scanned sectors assigned by their controllers, and Frame-wearing troopers emplaced heavy machine guns. The rain pounded down ever harder and little rivulets of black water braided their way down the poisoned slope.

Contact, troops, twelve o’clock, two hundred meters! someone shouted into the net before firing a long burst into the rain. His AR picked them out -- at least two hundred of them -- scrabbling, rabid, up the slope towards them. Battle rifles barked. Belt fed machine guns stitched out streaks of tracer rounds. Gun-bots stabilized themselves in the muck and fired disturbingly accurate bursts into the Uneras mob. Enemy gun-bots trundled behind and amongst the Uneras, firing inaccurate bursts of fire up at Blake’s troops as they slipped in the muck.

They were insane, implacable, hopped up on an addictive cocktail of methamphetamines, cocaine, and psychotic hallucinogens to keep them unhinged, violent, and above all controlled via their crippling addiction. ‘Recruited’ from conquered populations, the Uneras’ slaves were motivated by terror and addiction and -- depressingly -- equipped as well or even better than his militia. Between their dulled nerves and composite body armor, the slaves were terrifyingly hard to kill. They bayed and howled for blood, knowing their captors would reward the survivors of a successful battalion with ever higher doses of their drugs.

A bullet whickered past his head and Blake shoved himself further down into the muck. He picked out one of the frontrunners of the suicidal attack, wild black mane of hair flowing out from underneath its helmet and rebreather, and squeezed his battle rifle’s trigger. The first round flattened against the ceramic plate in the slave’s vest, and it stumbled slightly from the force. The second and third smashed through its rebreather, sending shattered glass and spattered skull in every direction.

The slaves were well equipped for a close-in fight, though, and submachine guns and pistols chattered up at them and grenades sailed through the rain-choked air towards the Allied line. Shockwaves of sound rippled visibly through the rain. Automated messages flashed across his AR. Two of his soldiers were down, killed instantly. Now a third. He tried to pick out another target in the chaos, ears ringing from the continuous detonations and the harsh cracks of gunfire. Blake’s skull already felt like it was coming apart.

The slope was too steep and slick, and their fire was too heavy and accurate; the rabid slave attack was faltering and breaking up. Broken bodies were sliding and tumbling back through the muck, the few survivors just firing wildly amongst the trees as drones and Raoul’s Frame-stabilized infantry scythed them down one by one. Drones sparked and shattered underneath long bursts of fire and fell silent. Cease fire, prep to bound to the Rally Point.

Fatal errors rampant.

Shut down strongly recommended.

Catastrophic loss of data possible.

Recommend shut down and immediate maintenance. Y/N?

His implant screamed and warbled at him. Daggers of misfiring nerves seared at the back of his eyes before spreading through the rest of his body in a single heartbeat. He shook his head feebly and tried to force his head into the frigid muck as if it would numb pain that didn’t really exist.

The edges of his vision flared red and his implant jolted his sympathetic nervous system. Blake was up in a crouch with rifle firing before he even understood what the implant was reacting to. His breath hitched, and the natural pathways of his fight or flight response took over tenfold.

Guardsmen. While the supremely expendable slaves fixed them in the center, the Frame-equipped Guardsmen had enveloped them. Their frames were thicker and bulkier and fully enclosed the true believers within a shell of ceramics and aramid fibers. His wild burst still managed to punch through the first Guardsman’s breastplate.

It kept coming, the medium machine gun cradled in its arms swinging towards the mud-spattered American despite its grievous wound. They fired together, and Blake’s rifle clicked empty after two more shots tore through armor and flesh alike. Rounds hissed and cracked around him, burrowing into the mud and sun-bleached trees, but all of them just missed him. The mortally wounded zealot kept stumbling towards him and Blake fumbled for his revolver. He slapped the Uneras’ machine gun aside with his forearm and jammed the fat barrel of his sidearm against its throat. The sound that rattled out of the Uneras’ shredded throat perfectly echoed his implant.

His frame whirred loudly, lending its strength to his arm, and he shoved the bulky corpse into the mud, You let them sneak up on you Lou, Blake muttered to himself. Two more Guardsmen emerged from the dark woods on their flank with more tracked bots in tow. Contact, Guardsmen, 8 o’clock, 50 meters! He shouted over the net and slammed another magazine into his rifle. Their bots were the first to respond, swiveling to drill accurate bursts at the new threats, but it wasn’t fast enough. The Guardsmen raked the line with heavy machine guns and grenade launchers, sending men tumbling into the mud and smashing drones. Ricocheting bullet fragments and splinters of shattered wood pinged off of his body armor as more and more foes burst into view on both ends of their line.

Peter and Raoul peeled off squads and fireteams from their sections to check the envelopment with cool professionalism even as fire scythed soldiers down all around them. Blake shot an Uneras drone to pieces with a long burst and forced a Guardsmen to take cover behind a fallen log. The man beside him primed a grenade and lobbed it perfectly into the Uneras’ hiding place; it disappeared in a puff of steaming mud and shrapnel. A moment later, his soldier’s chest was torn apart by a heavy machine gun.

Blake knelt beside him and their frames exchanged a burst of information. Flat-lined. Good toss, kid, Blake quickly assessed his AR overlays. They were going to keep adding pressure to the flanks and probably the front in a rotation to keep his forces scattered and confused until they were all dead. Unless they fought their way loose now. He rasped into the net, Knock this wave back and bound towards the rally point by section. Peter and his militia and drones moved first, heading a few dozen meters up the slope -- under fire the whole way -- until they dug in once more to cover Raoul and Blake’s measured retreat.

Another wave of the Guardsmen in bulky Frames and leading drones screamed out of the storm, then another, but his sections managed to keep their movement going again and again. One of the zealots shrugged off a seemingly impossible amount of shotgun slugs and obsolete rounds from Peter’s section before finally going down. But only after killing four men at point blank range. Another roared with insane laughter over the lashing rain as it ripped the machine gun from one of their Saber drones and turned it on the retreating Allies.

His foe was smart. Smart enough to find where they were. Smart enough to surround them, fix them in place, try their damnedest to destroy them. The boulder field loomed out of the rain ahead of them, and some of his men were already dug in up there, pouring fire down on the Uneras trying desperately to close the trap. Gallagher leaned down with an outstretched hand and pulled Blake up, both men panting and drenched. I didn’t see any damn bombs out there, Blake said.

That’s the point.

Well then. Ready? Blake asked, trying to catch his breath.

Ready, the boy said with a grin.

Blake huddled behind the rain-slick stone and peered around it. Another slave unit had made its way up the slope after them, and Guardsmen and drones were sending long bursts of fire at any of his men that were even slightly exposed. Very smart. His men had only managed to make it this far because the rain had kept any more of the Uneras’ ubiquitous drones from swooping down on them.

Hit it.

Gallagher punched a few commands into his tablet. Nothing happened. Blake was ready to choke the life out of the boy himself when Gallagher grabbed a simple backup manual detonator and slammed down all of the switches. The entire slope below them erupted in a rippling wave of blasts that made the Uneras artillery strike seem tame. Fire licked over dead trees and slave soldiers alike, and superheated mud splashed high into the air in terrific geysers. A second group of IEDs went off just below the boulder field and sent smoldering rock and logs tumbling down the slope and crashing into the panicked Uneras. Smoke and steam billowed angrily in defiance of the stinging rain. Wood and bodies burned freely, and the entire hillside was left a cratered moonscape.

Ready to move sir? Raoul asked him quietly over the net.

All of their defenses and almost all of their drones were gone. There was no other option now than to escape north to refit. The final count flashed across his AR as they scrambled through the warren of boulders and trees: he’d woken up with eighty-nine soldiers and militia. Forty of them had been blown apart where they fell by Gallagher’s IEDs. At least that meant that the Uneras couldn’t brutalize the noble dead. Blake just scowled behind his rebreather and forced the black bile in his ruined throat deep back down inside him.

November 2nd, AY 0

Colonel Kapadia checked the seals on his Frame’s built-in respirator one more time before hobbling down the ramp of his Klallam 8x8 Armored Personnel Carrier. His command squad of veteran Guardsmen looked on as the venerable colonel staggered onto the broken and mud-spattered roadway. Kapadia didn’t quite limp, but his gait was permanently bowed and lilting after the six months he’d spent with American interrogators. Before the rise of the Prophet and the Uneras. They’d dislocated both of his shoulder and hips, broken and reset most of the bones in his limbs, and beaten him badly and repeatedly enough to leave him with brain damage. He smiled at the thought; only the Messiah himself had seen worth in the broken man after the Americans were done with him. Kapadia’s faith and skill had allowed him to eventually rise to the command of the Rundas Brigade, the most loyal and zealous of all the Messiah’s Guardsmen.

They’d spent nearly a month hunting down scattered remnants of one of the Allied divisions amongst Colorado’s beautifully poisoned mountain valleys. That was what the Rundas excelled at. It was what Kapadia excelled at, amongst many other things. A few hundred holdouts had been killed so far, and one of them had been granted the opportunity to convert after revealing the presence of one of the non-believers’ Strike Teams in the same area. He’d refused, and been pitched off a cliff, but the intelligence was accurate. Two of his battalions had already converged on the interlopers despite the frigid rain coming down through the patchy canopy of bony tree-limbs.

His black eyes studied the sodden forest and convoy of Klallams and ramshackle civilian trucks. He twisted his body -- hunchbacked despite the best efforts of his advanced external Frame -- back and forth, How are the slave batt-batt-battalions doing, captain? He said in the Uneras pidgin of Bengali, Farsi, and Swahili.

Some of the platoons are already at reduced strength due to the failure of chemical protective equipment on the way into the combat zone, sir, his aide said, a hulking man in his own bulky and enclosed Frame.

That was to be excoriated -- expected. Kapadia gave a dismissive, thin-lipped smile. Well, get them into the woodline or start shooting them. He’d rather be further up the valley hunting the Strike Team, but the same prisoner had revealed the location of the last few hundred holdouts. Perhaps with this area cleared, he thought, the Rundas would be assigned to Oregon, Arkansas, or maybe Greece or Kazakhstan.

Kapadia tried to form another sentence, another order for his men, but it stuck on his lips. His Flexible Brain-Computer Interface -- a mesh of electrodes implanted directly onto the surface of his cortex -- sensed the difficulty and applied a gentle shock to the areas of his brain the Americans had damaged during his captivity. The western powers had pioneered cortical implants years before, but the wisdom and revelations the Saviors had granted the Uneras had shown them how to craft far more wondrous and terrific devices.

They weren’t expecting us. Send the slaves right in, we will support as needed. The slave overseers’ herded their chattel off of the trucks and handed out a final dose of Shisheh, the street name of the drug cocktail that kept the slaves controlled and their violence focused on those that rightfully deserved it. He smiled again, watching the overseers laying into the slaves with fists and swagger sticks, moving them into the thin forest and up a nearby hill. It is a beautiful thing, isn’t it Captain?

Colonel? his aide said, confused. He wasn’t one for a vivid imagination. A loyal, vicious and blunt instrument. The Uneras needed them too.

Look at it all, Captain. Once, this place was surely lush and greed -- green. Because of us and our dedication to the Saviors, it is now poisoned and barren. These slaves once went about their lives, impure and ignorant. Now they serve our great purpose and will be cleansed through pain and fire.

Deliverance through Purity. Purity through Desolation, his aide said, ever the sycophant.

Indeed. We await deliverance. As we wait, we destroy this world to make it pure.

A geyser of mud and rubble tore through the advancing slaves and a thunderclap of sound washed over them. Slaves screamed in confused rage at the Allied IED but charged up the slope all the same. One or two turned the wrong way, blinded and bleeding or just too addled with Shisheh to think. The overseers cut them down with pistols and submachine guns, bellowing motivation and orders all the while.

Gunfire chattered from within the bony thicket, and his aide reflexively moved to shield him. He could see shapes flitting along the slopes, blurred by the rain but lit by firefly muzzle flashes. They were so misguided, these non-believers, and wasting their lives so futilely against the glorious future the Saviors promised. They had enlightened the Prophet with their message and their boundless knowledge, uplifting all true Uneras to reshape the world in their image. The slaves that flushed their armies and toiled in their factories and mines were tools to be used until they were spent and cast aside. Those that paid lip-service to their message of Deliverance only to save themselves would be consumed as well and purged when Deliverance was at hand. Their world, which had spawned the impure race of man; it too would be used up, but not cast aside. It would be given to the Saviors to be purified and remade, just as Kapadia and the other True Believers would be remade.

Kapadia sighed happily, his heart filled with religious ecstasy at the thought of their Arrival. The heavy machine guns on the Klallams roared all around him and Guardsmen streamed into the edges of the forest to envelop the doomed Allies revealed by his slaves. Grenades thumped in the frigid mud. The already dying wood was torn apart further, piece by smoldering piece. Men and women screamed in insane, drug-fueled rage or pained terror, or both, as bullets and shrapnel and burning splinters of wood filled the air as readily as fat raindrops. Frame-wearing supermen thundered amongst the trees, ripping the life from Allied guerilla and panicked slave alike.

What a mighty symphony of desolation. Of Purity. All for their Saviors. He did not need to conduct this work of art himself, he had trained these men to perfection.

His reverie collapsed and the warmth of belief slipped ever so slightly from his face, Heavy resistance from Strike Team! One of his commanders shouted over their shared Battle Command net, The drone and slave attack has faltered. Moving in with Guardsmen reserves.

Kapadia frowned. This man would need chastisement. Push the asphalt -- assault. They must not be allowed to escape, he said calmly.

The ground shook and a distant string of fireballs flared bright enough to silhouette the trees and vehicles around him. Panicked voices filled his ears, but he didn’t bother to try and sort them out, Captain, tell me what just happened.

Yes, Colonel. His aide sorted through dozens of reports on a hardened tablet computer and through the voice nets. The clearest and most accurate messages he forwarded to the computer on Kapadia’s Frame, forming the grim and frustrating picture for the colonel. The Strike Team had been bloodied but escaped after wiping out an entire battalion each of slaves and Guardsmen.

The Virtual Assistant on his Frame quickly collated the data with the much more powerful VA in the mainframe on the Klallam and built an updated map for his tablet. Automatically generated recommendations scrolled across the screen, but all of them were unlikely to result in the Strike Team’s destruction, Cancel pursuit. Consolidate and refit until the weather c-c-c-clears, the rain was starting to seep through the gaps and joints in his Frame, but he was too excited by what was coming next to be chilled. Captain, let’s go take a look at what we’ve caught.

They slopped their way up the hill, past smoldering craters and steaming bodies. Guardsmen loomed amongst the trees and saluted him as he passed with clenched fists against breastplates. The haggard remnant of the slave detachment panted and shivered under the gaze of their masters and their wild eyes fixated on the humpbacked colonel.

A fine haul, sir. Broken bodies caught the freezing rain where they fell. Their inferior Frames and armor had failed them this day, but their morally bankrupt beliefs had doomed them long before. This was inevitable, as all Uneras victories were. Kapadia reached out and dug his twisted finger into a bullet scar in one of the long-dead trees.

So beautiful, he muttered. His heart jumped with every new sign of destruction his eyes picked out from the gloom.

Sir? his aide asked, obtuse as always.

String them up. Fetch the Assault Platoon.

Guardsmen gleefully hauled the non-believer bodies out of the mud and hung them on the surrounding trees by their Frames or torn scraps of clothing. The slaves whooped and cackled, still riding the Shisheh’s highs. Their overseers -- wisely -- were already disarming them and herding them into shivering groups. Chanted Uneras platitudes, muffled by armor and rebreathers, filled the erstwhile battlefield.

One of the dangling bodies stirred and the stunned non-believer groaned in pain. The chants grew louder and faster, his assembled Guardsmen aroused by a live witness to their ritual. Heavy bootsteps squelched in the mud and the assault platoon lumbered into view. The pilot lights on their flamethrowers flickered hungrily despite the rain, and their Frames were even bulkier and more protected than the others. Groans became panicked screams, and the assembled Uneras backed away into the sodden gloom.

Kapadia nodded slightly at the sergeant leading the team and the woman dipped her fire-blackened helmet deeply in response.

Jellied petroleum splashed across the grisly monument they’d created, roaring and hissing as it devoured wood and flesh and vaporized rivulets of black water. The other members of her team added burning fuel to the blaze, and the darkness of the storm was utterly boiled away by purifying light. Frames warped and bent. Flesh cracked and blackened. Deadwood groaned and popped. And the screaming grew in a furious crescendo until it abruptly stopped.

It was likely no one would ever find what he’d created. That didn’t matter. The non-believers were desecrated in death. The flames would spread as far as they could, further ruining the valley. Oily smoke was already choking the air around them, and the aerosolized chemicals lacing the soil and forest would further poison their impure world. That was all that mattered.

Maybe, just maybe, the Saviors would see his latest monument to their glory and commandments. Then, he would be Delivered.

November 2nd, AY 0

Natalya started awake just before the Uneras guard kicked her in the stomach. Everyone up! He shouted in the Uneras pidgin. She gasped and wheezed, sucking in lungfuls of frigid air. The guard moved on, and Natalya scrambled to pull on her ragged parka and fold the scratchy blanket. The guard, an Auxiliary from somewhere in North Africa, screamed and raged at the next girl huddled on the floor and kicked her over and over. When the blanket slipped from her head, her vacant eyes stared past Natalya and out into the snowy dawn. He shrugged and moved on.

The guards herded them all out of the fire-gutted apartment building and into the sharp morning air. Ice hung in the air and caught the rising sun here and there and Natalya tried to focus on it to avoid the sight around her. The remnants of the city of Krasnoyarsk loomed in every direction, pitted and scorched by the last Uneras offensive that had seized the city in south-central Russia. Vistas like this were the only ones that she could remember.

An emaciated slave woman ladled thin broth into cups for them, and they drank it down as fast as they could while shuffling down a rubble-strewn street. Hers was cold and near frozen before she was able to choke down the last of it. One of the other girls was crying softly to herself, not even trying to hide it from their guards.

Quiet, they’ll hear you, she hissed at the other girl in Russian. She’d been captured somewhere else though, maybe Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, and she didn’t understand Natalya’s plaintive words. The lead guard heard anyways and backhanded both of them viciously. Her cheek actually felt warm for a few minutes before the numbing cold returned.

They trooped down into a tunnel cut into the massive piles of rubble that comprised most of Krasnoyarsk, passing other work gangs of shivering slaves and a handful of construction drones. Out here the Uneras worked the adult Russians they’d captured when the city fell around the clock. Most of them had already frozen or starved to death. Bodies burned every day and the stink of burnt meat never left the air, no matter how strong the wind blew.

Inside! Get inside dammit! The lead guard bawled at them, and the Uneras kicked and slapped Natalya and the other children to force them into a series of tiny and cramped passageways. These tunnels were the only reason that they were still alive. Whoever brings back the most gets a double ration!

The tunnels cut through a collapsed drone factory the Russians had operated right up until the city’s fall. Natalya and the others spent their lives in the darkness finding scrap metal or computer parts for their masters to repurpose. The darkness enveloped her almost instantly and her claustrophobic breaths bounced off of the poorly shored-up walls. They wordlessly split into groups of two or three, fumbling in the inky blackness and coughing and hacking in the stale air. Natalya fumbled along the walls, feeling for anything useful. Someone was sobbing openly in another tunnel, and the sound seemed to echo from every direction.

The tunnels shook and dust pattered down on Natalya’s head. One of the girls shrieked, and another impact knocked a few pieces of rubble loose from the nearby wall. Her blood pounded in her ears, and she couldn’t stop herself from hyperventilating. Another girl bumped into her and knocked her back, hot and rotten breath washing over Natalya’s face, We have to get out of here!

Natalya kicked the other girl back and managed to turn around in the narrow tunnel. A broken cinder block slipped from above and smashed into the small of her back, but she just kept wriggling forward. She could hear more explosions reverberating down through the crushing tons of rubble. The Uneras were winning this war, she thought. What could be happening up there? Was it an accident?

She saw a faint aura of light and rushed towards it. Others bumped into her. Someone tripped and fell and she stepped on their chest but kept running. They burst out into the main tunnel, but the guards were gone. Momentum and fear carried them further up the shaft, towards the surface. Slave bodies wallowed in tacky pools of dark blood. The drones, though, kept moving and stacking rubble as usual.

The air screamed and an artillery round smashed into the mouth of the tunnel. A wave of air pressure smashed into them and bowled the children over, and wet chunks of someone splattered against the tunnel walls. Hot blood leaked from Natalya’s nose and ears but she forced herself back up to her feet and stumbled towards the light. Uneras scrambled back and forth through the smoke at the mouth of the tunnel, shouting to each other frantically.

The others hesitated, panicking and backing towards the darkness. Natalya never remembered an attack as sudden or brazen as this against the Uneras masters. This was the only chance she’d ever have to escape. Ignoring their cries of alarm and fear, Natalya rushed the rest of the way up the tunnel and out into the smoke-filled but free air.

Fires burned in every direction, and dying slaves and Uneras guards screamed into the chaos. Dozens of drones tried to continue their pre-programmed tasks despite the carnage. Another group of artillery rounds screamed down nearby and knocked an already gutted apartment building down in a cloud of billowing smoke and dust.

She picked a direction and sprinted as fast as her malnourished legs could carry her. Aerial drones circled above like opportunistic vultures and missiles hissed into other sections of the burning city. Smoldering rubble blocked the road ahead but she just kept running, scrambling over it and ignoring the heat searing her hands and face.

Wait! Wait for us! She heard a shrill cry; the other children had followed her. A ragged line of them stretched across the burning vista.

Come on! She screamed back, but a shell shrieked into the center of the square and half of them disappeared with a flash and the crack of thunder. Three other teenage girls stumbled to Natalya’s side, whitewashed with pale concrete dust. Nothing else moved in the boiling black smoke.

They ran and ran and ran, fueled by adrenaline and desperation. Uneras guns and