Tales from Kalgachia - 24
Like anyone else instructed in the Kalgachi way of war, Captain Vyrus Peckerup of the KDF understood the imperative of not telegraphing one's punch - but nonetheless he felt mildly hurt at being kept in ignorance by his own command for so long. After all he was, in his own modest estimation, as dependable a young son of the mountains as any with whom he served. He had never missed a Byeday at Church, he had borne the trials of his Urchagin with a stoically dry humour and his mongrel bloodline was the stuff of propagandistic dreams - he could trace descent from all of Kalgachia's main ethnicities and state with confidence that the genetic essence of the entire country was united in him. Not that he was given to such boasts - in an act of calculated modesty he had applied to the enlisted ranks of the KDF, only to be reassigned as an officer cadet halfway through basic training once his good breeding and initiative had been recognised by his instructors.
But still, in the face of all this, the order to mobilise the infantry company Peckerup now commanded had come like bolt of lightning from a blue sky. His superiors at battalion, in jarringly apologetic tones, had stated that they had little more notice of the impending action than Peckerup did. Part of him wondered whether or not to believe them - the Lywallers among them were especially duplicitous bastards who were ever prepared to sacrifice honesty for politeness. In Peckerup's opinion, such a tenor inevitably lent itself to the kind of degenerative careerism which had infested the armies of the exiled Froyalanish King Noah and had no place in a professional force like the KDF. There was a place for grace and deference, as Peckerup well knew, but it was better to practice it in passive and unspoken forms rather than insult the intelligence of one's superiors with torrents of glib platitude. He liked to think that his commanders appreciated the subtlety of his art, but this latest surprise had led him to wonder if the better part of it was wasted on them.
As it was, he had little time to reflect on such matters as he began to fire off hurried instructions to his lieutenants, grizzlers and sergeants to rouse the men in their deep underground barracks and get on the telephone to recall those troops on leave. Then there was the bickering over the issuance of adequate kit with the garrison quartermaster - a sadistically stingy character and probable spiv of the kind which seemed to afflict armies the world over. For once, Peckerup refused to accept his assurances that any missing kit would be 'issued in theatre' and ultimately threatened the man with a court martial if the company left garrison with so much as a mess tin missing. The QM would have his revenge for Peckerup's outburst - the wily blanket-stacking bastards always did - but that could be dealt with later.
Time and again, the question came at Peckerup from various subordinates as they scuttled past him: "Is this a crash-out, sir?" To which the answer was always the same: "If this were a crash-out, soldier, the alarm would be sounding. All the telephone lines would be dead, the vents would stop blowing and half the lighting would shut off while the backup generators fire up. So this quite obviously isn't a crash-out." Peckerup was tempted to clarify that it was in fact a 'clusterfuck', but slandering the command chain to the enlisted ranks was as much a faux-pas here as in any other army - that kind of talk was reserved for the officers' mess.
For all their tendency to cluck and strut like hens in a coop, however, battalion command had pulled a few strings and managed to procure some motor transport in the form of flatbed trucks and horse boxes with wood-gas engines, which looked as if they had been hauled out of a potato field mere minutes previously. As fate would have it, the sky was a cloudless blue which meant the trucks had assembled themselves a half-hour's march from the garrison's surface entrance to confuse spy satellites. Having assembled his own field attire complete with conspicious Bocskai cap - to help enemy snipers identify officers, the old joke went - Peckerup led his company in open order up the gravel road toward the pick-up point, occasionally falling back to converse with his lieutenants who agreed that they were lucky in not having to cover the entire distance to wherever they were going on foot; the KDF's standard 'invasion rules' stated that roads were to be avoided like the plague unless being sown with mines or ambushed, but this appeared to be a rather different operation. All Peckerup knew about it was a few snatched words from his battalion commander about an operation 'in the southwest', on which the company would be briefed when they reached the Kalgachi frontier. As it was, however, the truck which Peckerup boarded had a crude radio set which he began to fiddle with from the passenger seat in search of a clue, as the sergeant beside him settled into the driver's seat for several hours wrestling a steering wheel through Kalgachia's patchy roads.
As the truck bounced into motion and took its place in the regimental convoy, Peckerup tuned the radio in to Summit 1, the Kalgachi national news station. After patiently waiting for the woman on air to finish warbling on about developments in the Lithead basket-weaving scene, the top of the hour came and Peckerup was rewarded with a news bulletin which finally revealed the nature of his operation - The Council of Perfecti, said the announcer in a tone of suitable gravity, had determined that the Nezeni population of ungoverned Lepidopterum required the protection of the Kalgachi state and that the Kasterburger Republic, lying an equal distance beyond, was resolved to establish a common frontier with Kalgachia through its own territorial expansion. The mutual extension of both countries' territory had been agreed between the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes and the Kasterburg Magistracy in a matter of hours, the report stated, before quoting a triumphal statement by the Lord Lieutenant of Lithead to the effect that the odious cause of Shirerithian hegemony would been set back for a generation and the strangulation of Kalgachia woud no longer be possible without first subjugating the Kasterburgish state. At a stroke, the Lord Lieutenant said, Kalgachia had assured the salvation of their Nezeni brethren in Lepidopterum yet also made common and amicable cause with their bigoted detractors in Kasterburg who, through new and productive contacts with the civilised Nezeni, would surely abandon the prejudices poured into their heads by the rabid ideologues of Shirekeep.
"Lepidopterum, then..." muttered Peckerup. "Ever been there, sergeant?"
"Can't say I have, sir," said the driver. "There'll be plenty of Tee-als down that way, though. Dreadnettles, shrapnel lilies, all kinds of nasties..."
"How good are you at identifying those plants? The vegetation's thicker in the low country... they won't stand out as much."
"Did a course on it last year, sir. In Tealsburrow. They give you an eye for all the microhabitats, so you know when to look out for them and when you can concentrate on other stuff."
"Perhaps you can enlighten me with your knowledge, when you get a moment."
The driver said nothing to this, but filled the awkward silence by turning up the volume on the radio which had just broken into an old Minarborian march. On the open back of the truck, the soldiers caught the tune drifting out of the open cab window and began to sing along in tuneless mirth:
"What comes to he who dares salt the soil of our pretty little Garden?
Rendered to compost thanks to the toil of our pretty little Garden!
Sound the call and you will see! Hordes of charging cavalry!
Swift skyward rockets flying free!
From the blood of the foe, red roses will grow in our our pretty little Garden...!"
"Alright, Gopniks, listen up!"
The thick Bergburg accent on the Major giving the briefing identified him as an officer from the KDF's intelligence headquarters in that same city. In front of his map easel, Peckerup's battalion was stood at ease in formation. They peered over each others' shoulders to get a good look at the map, which detailed the ungoverned area beyond their present location at Kalgachia's southwest corner. Stylised cartoon Tee-als with menacing frowns were stuck on the map to indicate the creatures' concentration and movements. Also marked were suspected burrow sites, known settlements of humans and a colour-coded patchwork of their zones of influence and political alignment.
The Major twirled his map pointer like a marching baton and paced about as he spoke. "Now you're probably mighty fecked off at being dragged off leave, out of your beds and whatnot, for this little surprise. If you are, it means me and the boys are doing our jobs properly so don't come crawling to us for sympathy! If I had my way I'd keep you gossip geese in the dark until your first firefight but I don't, so you won't be. And if I can't keep you virginal grunts in blissful ignorance, I guess I oughtta spill the full tin of beans..."
He nodded at the map. "This here is your operational area. The name of the operation is Broodmother. The name of the formation you're part of is Task Group Celestine. All following so far?"
He shook his head at the feeble murmurs of acknowledgement which fluttered around the clearing. "I said are we all following so far!?"
"Yes sir!!" came the troops' more prepared response.
"Schlub almighty..." muttered the Major. "Alright. The objective of Operation Broodmother is the capture of all territory within this frontier line..." he followed the darkened line on the map with his pointer, "...which will be incorporated into the Garden of Kalgachia by all manner of bureaucrats and Church do-gooders in the years ahead. But for them to do their work, you must first do yours. Some of you may already have served in the area, or in other parts of old Whisperwood. If you have, be sure to teach your comrades what you've learned, because it ain't no joke out there..."
Peckerup's driver glanced awkwardly at him from the ranks, diverting his gaze just in time to avoid Peckerup's glance back.
"Your main enemy," continued the Major, "will be the Tee-al. Obviously. Most of you have already been deployed to fight these things or at least trained for it, so I won't bother you with the details. Known concentrations of Tee-als are marked on the map here, but just because a place isn't marked doesn't mean there won't be Tee-als there. The furry mamzers can get a shuffle on if they pick up a spicy whiff of pheromone, so expect them everywhere. We've also had reports of cerahippos and other engineered fauna, mostly concentrated around the ruins of Lepidopterum here. We don't know if the locals have herded them into a biomic minefield or if they just gravitated there for easy pickings, but as a general rule you should expect the concentration of troublesome species to increase the further southwest you go. On the plant front, those of you who have served in Lithead will remember the deadly triad - Dreadnettle, Shrapnel Lily, Sharpshooter Primrose. Any one of them can decimate an unwary unit and give your medics a headache. Your operational area will have them in greater concentration than in Lithead... they like the lowland climate better. Aside from these three plants, there are hundreds of others which can give you a rash so nasty it'll make you wish you were dead. They're all in the booklets you've been issued, so I suggest you spend tonight reading through them instead of jerking off. And now we turn to the locals..."
The Major flipped the map over the top of the easel to reveal a series of monochrome photographs, taken at telephoto distance, of humanoids more oddly formed than the average Nezeni and covered in crude tattoos and piercings, milling around burrow entrances and carrying an assortment of mismatched firearms. A murmur of surprise came from the assembled troops, mostly the Nezeni ones.
"As you can see," said the Major, "the modified genes come through a little stronger in these parts. We've made intermittent contact with these... people... and their response to us has been mixed. They're broadly aware of Kalgachia's existence. Some elements are supportive, some are ambivalent, some are cautious to the point of paranoia... but many of their elders hate the miscegenated Nezeni as much as the Nationalist-Humanists do. They consider the interbreeding of different modified iterations, and with the unmodified, to be vandalism against the perfectly-engineered genome left by their Deep Singer ancestors. We're not entirely sure that there aren't actual Deep Singers remaining over there... you might even run into the Broodmother herself. Be ready for anything. Chaplains! Are the company chaplains here...?"
A few robed hands were raised from the ranks.
"Alright," said the Major. "You guys will need to play a strong hearts-and-minds game out there. Keep your schtick clean and to the point. If you get talking to the locals, emphasise how enlightened our beliefs are, not how wrong theirs might be. Give the elders some space. Target the young ones, bring them up to date on post-Shrub theology. They've been in the dark for a couple of generations now. Encourage them to ask questions. If you find an encampment or burrow that runs its own affairs efficiently, don't go messing around with their methods. Any promising leaders you find, let the Prefects know. Bring. Them. On. Side..." the Major stabbed these words into the air with his pointer. "Let them know what the Nationalist-Humanists and the Kasterburgers think of them. Get it into their heads that Kalgachia is their only hope. If all else fails, play the Karymov gambit and bribe the shit out of them. The Prefects will be on hand to cough up the necessary cash and trinkets. Now, onto the role of your particular regiment..."
He flipped the map back over and laid the tip of the pointer on the western edge of the operational area, just north of Lepidopterum. "Your regiment, the Third Infantry, has been chosen to secure the Kasterburg contact line northwest of Lepidopterum. You have been chosen because you're from Oktavyan, mostly Urchagintsy, and present a politically reliable face to our Kasterburgish neighbours. More importantly, most of you are not Nezeni. Those of you who are, keep a low profile if you meet the Kasterburgers. Their heads are full of Shirerithian propaganda and they don't like your kind. It's sad but it's true."
"Boo-hoo," came a rasping Nezeni voice from the ranks, provoking a flutter of nervous laughter.
"Now about your insertion," said the Major. "Your pathfinder teams and equine elements will proceed on land while everyone else is heli-lifted ahead to reconnoitre and establish a firebase... or a series of dispersed fire rhizomes as the situation demands. Company commanders will be provided with aerial photos to discuss suitable insertion points with their Whirdlebirb pilots beforehand. Is everything understood?"
"Yes sir," came the collective reply.
"Mm?" The Major cocked his ear at the troops.
"Yes sir!!!"
"And one final thing," said the Major. "Our cossack brothers are going to be in on this and they'll be ranging throughout the operational area. An area which the Perfecti have already designated part of our Kalgachi homeland. So if those Schlepogora magpies pay you a visit, politely remind them to keep their hands in their pockets."
More, slightly less nervous laughter filtered around the clearing before the troops were dismissed to their bivouacs.
Viewed from the glazed nose of a Whirdlebirb helicopter, the territory approaching Lepidopterum was a more impressive sight than Captain Peckerup expected - what it lacked in topography, it regained in the sheer verdant brilliance of its forest canopy which extended all the way to the horizon and might have been considered a jungle, were its great green sea of foliage not moderated by clusters of coniferous trees and occasional gaps of scrub and heathland. Here in all its raw splendour was the untamed Benacian interior, for generations the fever dream of humble pioneers and ambitious generals alike. The grave of hubris and the brave man's reward. As he looked down on the endless branches and tussocks whizzing beneath the helicopter's nose, Peckerup's romantic euphoria gave way to the more technical question of just how much oxygen was being pumped out of all those trees. He never had heard of a Nezeni with a lung complaint, and it was no wonder. The Deep Singers had sown this land well.
Aside from Peckerup and his principal lieutenant who were wedged in the space behind the pilots' seats, the other six men of his company command section were enduring a less comfortable ride on the exterior seating either side of the helicopter, their helmeted heads lowered against the combination of headwind and rotor blast. On account of its passenger load the helicopter's weapon hardpoints were empty escept for a pair of half-filled 20mm gun pods on the outboard rails. Overhead, other Whirdlebirbs with no passengers and full armament were keeping sharp vigil, the spherical sensor domes above their coaxial rotors spinning and dipping to survey land and air alike. This great formation of transports and escorts resembled nothing so much as a swarm of seethingly determined bees, tearing through the sky with a deafeningly resonant buzz.
The previous evening, in a derelict sheep shed which had been requisitioned as the regimental officers' quarters for the night, Peckerup had discussed the implications of Operation Broodmother with his fellow company commanders. The tense pre-operational mood had lightened after their regimental colonel had come around and handed out Bedricson & Hege cigars from a golden case, and the shed was soon thick with rich milky smoke and talk of what might come. It was observed that the KDF had never before attempted to field a division-strength expeditionary force in territory without actively sympathetic locals. There were no partisan supply caches from which to top up, but neither were Peckerup and his comrades authorised to plunder the locals. The old Minarborian road network was mostly crumbled away and the Whirdlebirb helicopter squadrons would be run ragged in their combined role of transport, supply and close combat support. It was standard for every KDF unit to get savage banter from every other, but even in jest nobody ever dared speak ill of the 'Birbs' - in the war to contain the Tee-al, they were the most effective element but suffered some of the highest losses. Their fire support had saved countless ground units from mauling and lifted out countless soldiers who had known the caress of the Tee-al's claw, whether rigged for medical evacuation or not. Their crews could be indentified at formal functions purely by the amount of combat decorations on their mess dress.
At the other end of the spectrum, Peckerup and his fellow officers had wondered aloud: which idiot had decided to integrate Prefects and cossacks into the same operational command structure? Guesses were made and none confirmed, but it had been agreed that said idiot would be nowhere to be found when the call for mass burial parties went around. The infantry would step in to clear up the mess, as they always did. From the regimental colonel himself came a reminder that it was the eternal fate of the infantry solider to give the most and get the least, regardless of flag, but that this predicament placed them adjacent to the Garden's divine benefactors. Some in the colonel's presence would never return home after this business, he had noted as he took the final puffs of his cigar stub, but in the Great Garden Beyond they would be welcomed foremost among the departed faithful, enveloped forever in murmurs of righteous rustling and winds of transcendent song.
"Bullshit," the regimental chaplain had said from the feeding trough in which he lay half-asleep, and after an explosion of laughter the officers had retired to face the coming dawn.
"Visual on LZ," crackled the pilot's voice through Peckerup's headset, jolting him from his reverie. "Confirm insertion proceeding, sir?"
Peckerup leaned foward between the pilots, his eyes flicking between the approaching patch of open scrub outside and the tube monitor which gave a feed from the helicopter's sensor dome as it scanned the surrounding ground. "Confirmed, skipper," he said, slapping the pilot's shoulder. "Let's do it." He turned and nodded to his principal lieutenant who hauled the starboard door aside, preparing a hand flare as the helicopter lurched low over the landing zone. As it passed overhead the flare was activated and hurled to the ground, a bright pinprick of vivid green light which trailed a thread of white smoke as it bounced. Peckerup's helicopter then lurched upwards and circled in a holding pattern as the other helicopters drifted in to deposit handfuls of soldiers, each hovering low enough for them to hop to the ground and scuttle out to form a defensive perimeter while their transport hurriedly peeled away to patrol the ground further out. From further above, the escort helicopters swooped down and buzzed around the surrounding tree cover. Peckerup and his section were eventually dropped onto the ground themselves, racing out of the raging rotor blast to direct the fire platoons into more defensible positions and assemble a recce party. The transport Whirdlebirbs zipped away but some of the escorts hung around in the distance, little more than faint specks as they flew slow, twisting patrol patterns. Besides their quietly buzzing presence, all Peckerup could hear was birdsong from the nearby trees and a mild, almost warm breeze which was laden with humidity. After taking a deep breath and daring himself to believe that this alien land could be called Kalgachia, he remembered he came here for a reason.
"We won't send out the recce yet," he said to one of his lieutenants. "We're the first company to arrive in this sector. We'll get eyes on the new frontier line... It's only about two clicks west according to my map here... and when we see the next wave dropping the company north of us, we'll send a party to them."
"Shall I set up an OP for the guys contacting us from the south, sir?" said the lieutenant. "I'd like to see them coming. If they spring on us from the treeline, the boys might get spooked and..."
Peckerup nodded. "Make it happen. Hopefully the folks to the north of us have the sense to do the same th-"
"Contact!!" yelled one of the soldiers observing the treeline. Peckerup turned to see a solitary figure emerging from a thicket, apparently oblivious to the dangers of the flora within. It was a male Nezeni, well-built but clothed in tatters, who advanced slowly in full sight of the soldiers.
"Sir!?" yelled the young man who had seen him, his voice betraying panic.
"Calm it, boy!" said his sergeant before Peckerup could reply. "And lower your weapon, for fuck's sake!" Despite this, the sergeant also looked at Peckerup for an answer.
Peckerup in turn looked around him. "Chap?" he said. "Where are you?"
The company chaplain emerged from behind a bush, sliding off his fatigues and letting the hem of the silken robe underneath spill out onto the ground. "I see we've made a new friend, sir," he said as he stepped foward.
"So we have," said Peckerup. "Go and give him some chat, will you? We'll keep you covered in case he tries any-"
"Welcome to the jungle, Captain!" the jolly greeting of the approaching Nezeni took both men by surprise. Peckerup was struck momentarily speechless, wondering how his field-dulled rank insignia had been spotted and correctly identified at such distance, allowing the visitor to address him again:
"It's a long time since I've seen the Birbs come in mob-handed like that. It's enough to make one nostalgic..." He nodded at the carbine Peckerup was cradling in one hand. "...And do me a favour and put your safety on. The range instructors at Katarsis must be getting slack, letting an officer pick up dirty habits like that."
"Hrm, my bad," said Peckerup, clicking on his safety catch. "Anything else you want to pick me up on while you're here?"
"You need to spread your men out," said the Nezeni. "We get a few disreputable types around here with rocket-propelled grenades. They probably saw your grand entrance so they might come for a sniff around in the next few hours. And unless you want a bullet between the eyes, ditch the officer's cap and grab a helmet. Hoodlums know to target officers too, you know... they might even try to grab you alive for ransom."
"So," said Peckerup. "You're either a deserter or a mercenary... not that it's my business in either case, but what was your old unit?"
The Nezeni cackled. "Old unit? I'm still in, Captain. Although I admit I've gone a little native this past year or so. Sergeant Jethess, Special Purpose Regiment..." He extended his hand. "...Airborne Company. They told me you'd be coming."
"I might have known," muttered Peckerup, shaking Jethess' hand and looking him up and down. "They didn't tell me you'd be here, sergeant."
"Well they don't know where I am most of the time," said Jethess. "I toddle off to a designated rendezvous once a month for orders but the rest of the time I wander as I please, ingratiate myself with the locals, take names, kick butts, that kind of thing. Even got me a wife a few months back. About five clicks East of here there's a cosy little burrow system. Under thick tree cover, nothing giving off IR or EM sigs, totally hidden. I only stumbled on the place by pure chance. Nice folks there, I'll introduce you to them."
Peckerup exchanged glances of disbelief with his lieutenant and chaplain. "Do they know about Operation Broodmother? Do they welcome it?"
"Well there's been a few debates but in all honesty I don't think they care. They're worried about Tee-als, bandits, Shirerithians and Kasterburgers in that order. I don't think your chaplain here and his heresies against the Old Garden figure much in their thinking. I mean shit, if we can save them from Tee-als, bandits, Shirerithians and Kasterburgers... they'd fight each other for the front pews at Ketherist chapels."
"Do they know who you work for?"
"Yep. It nearly cost me though... one of their young punks got in with some itinerant Laqis and spilled the beans. They came to grab me for ransom but little punk boy had a fit of remorse and warned me. I had to break radio silence and call in a Whirdlebirb strike on the chancing bastards. But things have been pretty good since then."
Peckerup took off his cap, smoothed his hair back and turned to his subordinates. "Lieutenant, have the men spread out," he said. "Assemble me a recce section from guys with experience in Lithead. I'll take them along with the sergeant here and he can introduce me to his local friends. In the meantime, the company's yours. Understood?"
The lieutenant's eyes briefly widened at the unexpected reponsibility but he swallowed his nerves. "Sir," he said, and strode off to carry out his orders.
"So, sergeant..." said Peckerup to Jethess. "Do you think I could get me a wife here too...?"
