Chapter 25
Marek Kowalski was cautiously making his way through the forest, keeping an eye on the exoskeleton to his right. It was piloted by Pedro Anunciada, a new recruit from Portugal, who seemed to have adapted to the armor very well. Behind them, he could hear the thumps made by the feet of the mechanic spider as it crawled along the leaves. It was late April 2043, in the woods around Lesosibirsk, Siberia. The snow was quickly melting away and the forest floor was turning into a soft, immense muddy swamp. The spider, about the size of a large van, stopped and Marek heard the voice of Dimitri, the Russian patrol commander, on the intercom.
“Tovarish, please proceed to secure the body collection area. The sensors do not signal any enemy drone activity, but there are always traps. Copy, tovarish.”
Marek listlessly copied, he did not like his superior and the way he had configured the translation software to keep some Russian Red Army slang. He looked again at Pedro, who suddenly stopped and put the exoskeleton in defensive mode, just before seven flying drones appeared between the trees and aimed their missiles at them.
Activated by Marek’s eye movement and the adrenaline flow data sent by its skin chip, the exoskeleton immediately fired the anti-drone flares a second before the drones had a chance to fire. A series of explosions followed, smoke quickly spread out over the forest floor, and Marek switched the infrared visual system on.
He could see that Pedro was standing up again, and checking the area where the drone wrecks had fallen. On the intercom, the Russian was screaming.
“Are you all right, tovarish? Come in, come in! Is everything ok?”
“It’s all right, Mitja,” Pedro’s voice answered calmly, “it was just a trap, but the new software was good enough to react on time. A few months ago it would have probably costed our lives. We can start the body collection. According to the sensors, we have at least fifty-three corpses to recover.”
Mitja stopped the spider and a team of four soldiers got out, wearing lightly armored biohazard containment suits. They started collecting the bodies and threw them on to the spider container. They mostly belonged to Chinese soldiers.
Marek moved back to his look out position to the left of the spider, as a chilly breeze - a remnant of the winter - swept the smoke away. Pedro had reached his position too, as he felt safe enough, he set the exoskeleton system in auto defense mode and started to chat.
“Pretty good harvest today, Marek. If we have the same density on the rest of the attack fronts, we might get well beyond ten thousand bodies, which, given the average gas plant yield, means….um…more or less thirty megawatts of electric power…which means, we could feed the batteries of sixty exoskeletons for one week.”
“Exactly,” Marek confirmed, “or have enough gas to heat the battalion headquarters for the next winter. Did you use your battle computer to calculate that?”
“No,” Pedro replied, “I did it mentally. I have been using Telomerax for seven years now, and I can see the benefits.”
“I hope we can continue enjoying them if and when we get out of here,” Marek continued. “How many weeks do you have left?”
“Another twenty weeks,” Pedro answered. “I should be leaving before next winter comes. I have been fighting here for seven months. At the beginning I was in the body collection unit like the…”
Suddenly, an explosion came from near the spider. The exoskeletons immediately took defense position, but their sensors could detect no visible threat. Then the voice of Mitja broke into the intercom.
“Marek, Pedro, quick, rainfall, rainfall! Worms, repeat, we got worms!”
The exoskeletons fired a small series of grenades toward the spider, which broke open in midair and released a dense spray all across the area. Marek and Pedro waited a few seconds then approached the transport vehicle.
“Mitja, any casualties?” Marek asked.
Dmitri stood up from the spider pilot seat and circled around the machine. Two body collectors were lying dead on the ground, next to one of the Chinese corpses who had seemingly exploded. Pedro came closer to the body to examine some small metal debris around it.
“Is this the worm case? I have never seen one,” he asked Marek.
“Yes, it is. It looks like a new type, actually,” his comrade answered, “now I will explain… before going into battle, the Chinese sergeants choose some troops to swallow a worm egg, which is just like a small chocolate candy. It activates itself as soon it detects the death of the host body. Once somebody moves the corpse, like a collector patrol, the egg detonates and releases around a cloud of nerve gas, which you have to be quick to neutralize. The first versions were metallic, and we learned to find them by doing the x-ray scan of the bodies beforehand, but this one…” Marek interrupted himself while checking the samples Pedro was holding in his hand, “..this one looks as if it’s coated in some organic material that probably prevented us from detecting it.”
“What do we do now?” Pedro asked, looking at Dimitri. The lieutenant did not say anything and just hinted to the two remaining soldiers to throw also the bodies of their comrades onto the spider.
Around half an hour later, the patrol was walking back into Lesosibirsk.
“You know, Marek, it’s kind of strange,” Pedro said abruptly.
“What?” Marek asked, “The war? Or this battle? I wouldn’t call it strange.”
“No, I mean, the whole situation. A few days ago, before the attack began, I was surfing the web and came across an old movie, about the battle of Troy, released at the beginning of the century. Then I went on reading the original text, just to break the tension before the battle. Greeks and Trojans, do you remember?”
“Kind of, but what’s strange about it?” Marek answered without showing much interest.
“It’s that they fought to bring back into their camps the bodies of the dead, just like we do. A lot of technology has appeared over time, but nothing has radically changed, don’t you think?”
“Well, no. They wanted the bodies for superstitious reasons and loot. We want them because they have a value, an objective value. We turn them into fuel to continue and eventually win this war. Look, we can see the anti-aircraft batteries. We are reaching the gas plant.”
The field gas plant, one of the hundreds scattered around the thousand-mile front, was the nerve center of each sector, the prize for which people fought on both sides. Fueled by the biological collateral of the war, as it was called in official reports, they produced the energy and resources to continue fighting.
The spider stopped next to the area where prisoners of war were unloading the bodies, and throwing what was left of them over the conveyor belt that took the biological mass over to the first processing station, to be eventually turned into gas and electric energy. Beyond combatant bodies, the plant was processing any kind of biological carcass. Marek and Pedro were observing the scene, when the voice of Dimitri resounded over the intercom. “Escort patrol, you can go back to the battalion quarters, mission is accomplished successfully. And be ready for tomorrow inspection.”
Marek and Pedro did not need any reminding. They knew very well that the following day General Irina Kanchelskaya, the South Sector Commander, would be visiting the first line. They had enough time to clean up their exoskeletons and put together the battle recordings, so they put their work down and headed to the bar next to the gas plant for a drink. As they walked down the muddy road, Pedro noticed a Filipino prisoner hurrying over to the belt, with a crown of flowers in his hands. He turned his head, following the rush of the prisoner, and then back to Marek, who smiled and commented.
“That guy was caught prisoner about two years ago, his name is Cosme. He was the only survivor of one of the many Filipino mercenary companies fighting for the Chinese in this area. His unit was annihilated by a thermobaric grenade bombing, I think his brain was permanently injured, as he can no longer speak and keeps doing the same crazy things from when he was at the camp.”
“What crazy
things does he do?” Pedro asked.
“Well, he keeps making bouquets of flowers, to put them on all the childrens’ bodies he happens to find, before they are put on the belt.”
Pedro nodded and asked back. “Alright. But how does he do in winter?”
“He builds a stock during spring and summertime. As he is harmless, the military police allowed him to keep his small obsession. It might help him to overcome the hardship, after all.”
Pedro did not answer, and thought about the months he had ahead of him, then he turned back to Marek.
“Thanks for telling me, mate, I might be kind to him, in case. But now let’s hurry up, I need my vodka.”