The Fallen

[Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.]

The valley wasn't green, but it would have been once. Not now; by now the soldiers had started digging in, and the dull colours of dirt and mud had replaced any hint of green. The landscape was depressing, Mal decided. He may have spent most of his life on a ranch where the dominant colours were those of earth and the overriding impression was of dusty, ochre dirt, but the piece of land here surely deserved to be called depressing.

Maybe, Mal thought, it was because of all the armed men and women flooding the valley, turning it into a hive of activity full of busily toiling limbs. Or because he could already see the shapes of the trenches and the rudimentary shelter they would provide, see where the enemy would most likely attack first, guess where they probably already lurked, waiting, and envision how the ground would look when it was covered in dead bodies. Or because whatever natural beauty the place had ever possessed had vanished beneath the growing defensive structures and preparations for war, and he had no time and no inclination to look for where it might have gone, had it ever been there at all. Or maybe he was just tired.

Mal frowned out across the muddy brown expanse of the valley. Exhaustion sounded like a good excuse for all this introspective reflection. Corporal Alleyn might not entirely believe him, and let him know as much through small but significant movements of her eyebrows and a marginally altered quality to her nominally-respectful "Yes, sir," but the exhaustion bit was true enough. He muttered something safely incomprehensible but expletive-laden under his breath and turned away to issue orders. Although first he would need to locate his squad, and the to-be-expected additions to it, amongst the zigzagging paths that would hopefully soon be trenches.


An explosion that sounded directly overhead sent Mal sprawling into the dirt on pure instinct. A second later, a brief shower of dirt clods rained down on top of him. He stayed motionless, scowling darkly at the ground, before clambering to his feet and brushing off the worst of the dirt.

Yeah. Trenches? Not the best defence from aerial attacks.

Unfortunately, it was all they had now. The shuddery, erratically sparking forcefield generators that Mal had never expected to work at all had finally given out not more than a day ago. And with the generators gone, the rest of their defences were falling as well. They were holding out, hanging on, gripping to the chance of life with their teeth, and their nails, and everything else they had, and perhaps Mal should just abandon that metaphor and get on with his job. Distracting himself with internal ramble would never help.

And the walls of the trenches, that never had quite ended up being completed, not when every day they collapsed a little, even without the persistent tremors of gunfire and artillery, and had to be forever restructured because the sides fell in and had never been all that stable to begin with…but telling himself all the ways in which he might suffocate in piles of dirt if the walls collapsed on him, like had happened to Robson and the others, wasn't going to get Mal anywhere either.

He glared at the nearest wall, leaking small flurries of dust unrepentantly down its sides, and then hunched half over, crouching with his arms over his head, as another explosion sounded. Further away, machine guns chattered. Mal pushed to his feet, and started to run again, awkwardly, along the crooked line of the trench. There was no one in this section, a mistake, because their defence was breaking and really all the Alliance needed to do was wait. And there should be people here, no matter how spread thin they were, but there weren't.

And – and Mal froze, lurching to a standstill as he rounded the latest corner at speed to stumble, spin and almost fall in the effort not to plant a boot in the middle of a mutilated stomach with its guts hanging out, or an arm with no apparent owner. And no one would be walking away from this spot, or moving from it at all except to the industrial-quality incinerators they had been told to use, because graves were too labour-intensive, took too many men away from their duties. And what did that say about the way the war was headed, that even a squad on burial duty was too many men away from the front?

Mal swallowed, and stepped steadily across the stretch of trench that he couldn't look at too carefully until the dismembered limbs were behind him. And then Mal ran until he reached Chidrawi's abandoned squad to round them up and send them back to man the trenches and fill the gap in their front lines.

It was only when he relocated Corporal Alleyn, hunkered down beside her, that he realised someone had finally managed to shoot down that automated drone taking pot-shots from above their heads. And he couldn't help but think, to wish, that maybe this was a turn in the right direction for once. It could only be a small turn, the tiniest shift in the currents of battle that changed their hopes from absolute, certain doom for all of them to a slim chance for something. But Mal planned to make it do something worthwhile for as long as it lasted.

And maybe then, finally, something could come out of all this. Nothing new or beautiful, nothing like peace, could ever come from the unmoving, twisted bodies of young soldiers, or the contorted, terror-ridden expressions of shell-shock. But maybe they could find something to cling to.

And maybe that something could look a little like hope.