A Young Girl's Guerilla War

by RagnartheSemiGreen

Tanya dies in an artillery barrage on the Rhine Front, contrary to both her and Being X's plans. Unwilling to let his chew toy escape so easily, Being X reincarnates Tanya back into Japan... Six years before Britannia conquers Area 11. (First posted on Space Battles)

35. Chapter 34: Elphinstone in Indochina

(Alright, it's been a while. I had a move and a bunch of other stuff, so please excuse the delay. This is a somewhat unconventional chapter, but it describes a pivotal event that happens offscreen from the main action. I hope you enjoy it, since I had a real blast outlining it. A big thank you to Sunny, MetalDragon, Larc, Rakkis157, Rain and Aemon for their editing and beta-reading. Thank you to Koreanwriter for his research and ideas. Thank you to Mazerka for the new TvTropes page.)

Elphinstone in Indochina, A Tragedy in Four Parts SCENE 1: Bite and Hold

NOVEMBER 27, 2015 ATB
VICEREGAL PALACE, SAI GON SETTLEMENT, AREA 10

"To His Grace Field Marshal Joseph Milburn, 6th Duke of Vancouver and by the grace of His Imperial Majesty commander of the 4th Army:

Whereupon it has come to the attention of His Highness Schneizel el Britannia, Second Prince of the Holy Britannian Empire and Chancellor of the same, that progress towards a final victory in Area 10 over the rebellious Numbers and their Chinese backers has been delayed, and whereupon the Districts of Kampuchea and Lao Long remain in a state of rebellion, His Highness has seen it fit to issue a revised order (FO 2015-11-25 #0317) in regards to the Indochina Campaign.

You are ordered to begin construction upon an installation in the Son La Prefecture from whence the forces of His Imperial Majesty may conduct long range anti-insurgent patrols, thereby stabilizing the influence of His Imperial Majesty's government upon the northern prefectures of the District of Annam and curbing the infiltration of rebels from Lao Long. Said installation shall be sufficiently spacious to house and stage a minimum of two brigades, and shall prove a capable mustering ground for an incursion in force into the Lao Long District within a year. Construction shall be completed no later than May the Seventh, 2016 ATB. Schniezel el Britannia commands it to be so.

You are also ordered to begin construction upon a highway connecting the previously mentioned installation in the Son La Prefecture to the Port of Ha Noi, to facilitate the advance, resupply, and reinforcement of His Imperial Majesty's soldiers stationed in the hinterlands and to facilitate anti-rebel actions in the Districts of Annam and Lao Long. Said highway shall be built along the most direct route allowable and have sufficient width that four standard supply trucks may proceed unhindered, two headed westward and two returning east. Construction shall be completed no later than June the Thirtieth, 2016 ATB. Schniezel el Britannia commands it to be so.

In recognition of the imposition these orders imply upon your command, the 4th Army shall be reinforced that it might conduct active patrols in the northern districts of Annam and garrison the new installation therein without weakening our citadels pre-existing in Area 10. The 16th Honorary Legion, late based out of Elizabethtown, Area 5, is due to arrive in Sai Gon no later than February the Twenty-Seventh, 2016 ATB. The 19th Honorary Legion, late based out of Pleasanton, Area 7, is due to arrive in Sai Gon no later than April the Thirteenth, 2016 ATB.

May these reinforcements aid your pursuit of victory against these ungrateful and rebellious Numbers. May Saint George hand you his sword and Saint Charles his rod.

All Hail Britannia!

Kanon Maldini, Earl of New Uxbridge
Private Secretary to His Highness Schniezel el Britannia, Second Prince of the Holy Britannian Empire"

With a sigh of disgust, Joseph Milburn dropped the new orders onto his desk and leaned back, rubbing at his temples. Across the desk, Robert, his aide-de-camp, shifted uneasily from foot to foot, clearly dying to take a look at the new orders himself but not quite willing to breach protocol enough to ask.

"No need to stand on ceremony, man," Joseph growled, waving at the orders. "Read them and weep."

"As you say, Your Grace," the aide responded diffidently, scooping the document, printed on quality paper and dripping with the seals of the Chancellery, the Second Prince, the Earl of New Uxbridge, the Courier Corps, and so forth, up into his hands and eagerly reading.

Joseph watched as a dismay that reflected his own spread over the young captain's face.

"This…" Robert swallowed. "I suppose Sir Harrison finally got his interview with His Highness, then?"

"It certainly seems as much," Joseph grunted sourly. "Don't know anybody else as wedded to the damn-fool fort concept as he is." The field marshal shook his head. "That idiot must think that we're still fighting the Horse Lords, the way he wants to fortify every hill and ridge in the damned Area."

If pressed, Joseph Milburn would admit that Sir Harrison Dunmore, 12th Baron of Morgantown and an old hand in the Ministry of War, was not a complete fool. Indeed, "Mad Horse Harry" occasionally had his moments of brilliance. It was just that those moments were firmly wedded to a personality that stubbornly refused to ever admit to its own fallibility. When challenged, Sir Harrison was fully capable of moving mountains solely to prove that his ideas were correct. Unfortunately, this stubborn refusal to concede extended equally to Sir Harrison's less than brilliant ideas as well.

And it doesn't help that the Dunmores have held title in the Homeland since before it was the Homeland! That carries weight. Coupled with several shrewd matches made with other leading families back before the Emblem of Blood and old Mad Horse has no difficulty finding well-connected friends behind every door at the Ministry. And now the Chancellery as well, it would seem…

"It's a stupid idea," Joseph said, shaking his head as he ground the base of his palm against his aching forehead. He could already feel the resignation washing over him; the prospective "Advanced Fort" plan had clearly progressed from something that could be fought to something that must be endured. "It's a stupid, stupid plan."

"Your Grace?" Robert asked diffidently, more to give him a chance to complain, Joseph knew, rather than out of genuine curiosity. His loyal aide had already heard that particular rant before.

Still, no reason not to take the opportunity.

"A single gigantic fort way out in the boonies is nonsense!" Joseph groaned, feeling the rapidly developing headache spike behind his eye. "What possible use is it, sticking an entire division, plus support elements, out at the end of a nice long road?"

"It would be a serviceable base of operations for the invasion of Lao Long that His Highness appears to be angling for, Your Grace," Robert pointed out, busying himself with copying out the Chancellor's order for dispatch. "Perhaps that's how Sir Harrison sold the concept to His Highness?"

"That's almost certainly the case," Joseph conceded. "That doesn't change the fact that it's still going to be hideously difficult to keep the base supplied, even if we can get the highway built on schedule. For one, if we only have a single viable route to the base, every Ten squatting out in the bush is going to understand exactly where we are vulnerable.

"The whole idea of a single massive base to mount patrols from is ludicrous as well," Joseph continued, aware that he was starting to yell and not caring a whit. "What, do they think that the Tens will be content to just present themselves for slaughter? It's like the idiots learned nothing from the Area 11 Campaign! Mobility won us that war, Robert! By the time the Elevens knew where we were, they were already dead!"

"As you say, Your Grace," his aide consoled. "But perhaps His Highness sees the ongoing menace of the Ten rebels as insignificant compared to the potential gains? I mean," Robert continued, looking up from his copying, "if the Fourth can firm up our grip on northern Annam, you will be ideally placed to apply pressure to Lao Long. If you can apply pressure on Lao Long, then the Chinese will be forced to route supplies and reinforcement destined for Kampuchea and Malaya all the way through Bengal and down through Burma, instead of straight south from Yunnan Province."

"Leading to a glorious toppling of dominoes from here to Sumatra, firming up Britannian control over Area 10 and Area 12 after half a decade of war in a single fell swoop," Joseph sourly concluded. "Yes, I know all about the grand plan the Second Prince has in mind to conclude his Imperial Majesty's adventure in Southeast Asia once and for all. And if it all works, it will be a major feather in His Highness's cap and a boon to the entirety of the Empire."

The unspoken corollary of "but what if it doesn't work?" hung heavily in the air.

"There's just too many ifs for me to feel at all comfortable," Joseph said at last. "If we can site a good location for this base and build it on a timely scale, and if we can build and keep open a highway from it to Ha Noi to keep the base provisioned, and if we can mount sufficient patrols to keep the Tens away from the highway and clear the insurgents out of northern Annam, we might have a good opportunity to invade Lao Long, a district that Chinese regulars have been digging into for the last five years. If we take Lao Long, we might significantly impede Chinese efforts to continue the fight for Area 10, potentially giving Viceregal-Governor McCarthy an entire Area to govern for the first time in his tenure.

"But if we fail to accomplish any of those milestones, somewhere north of a division is going to be stuck out in the ass-end of nowhere, right on the border of China proper, with Chinese forces on three sides, in the middle of a jungle where every tree has a Ten or two hiding behind it."

"But those are His Highness' orders," Robert noted unhappily. "The decision's been made."

And neither of us want the DIS to inquire about our unwillingness to execute our orders, Joseph thought, and nobody would ever mistake Schneizel el Britannia for a particularly forgiving man.

"Summon the corps and divisional commanders," Joseph ordered, bowing to his fate. "Let them know that I'll expect them in two hours. No excuses. Send someone to the Viceroy and let him know he's free to send a representative, if he so chooses." He hesitated, then added, "but first, get me some aspirin for this damned headache!"

SCENE 2: Clipped Wings

JUNE 8, 2016 ATB
FORT AURELIAN, NORTH OF SON LA CITY, SON LA PREFECTURE, AREA 10

Two weeks ago, Warrant Officer Lowrie "Dutch" Kramer had been a proud member of the 13th Support Wing, a storied part of His Imperial Majesty's Army's VTOL forces with a pennant strung with battle honors and dripping with commendations.

More importantly, two weeks ago she had made every flight out to Fort Aurelian or any one of half a dozen lesser but equally embattled outposts studding the mountainous Annam backwater known as Son La confident in the knowledge that a dry bunk and a hot meal were waiting for her back at Air Base Ha Noi.

Then her transport VTOL, never the most agile of birds, had caught a rocket, and Dutch had caught a one-way ticket straight to soggy Hell.

It could have been worse, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time as she scuttled down the duckboard-strewn communications trenches connecting the subterranean headquarters bunker to the outer trenchlines. That rocket could have hit my side of the bird. I made it to the ground in one piece, which is more than Rodney can say.

Warrant Officer Junior Grade Roderick "Rodney" Kapoek had exhibited his characteristic exemplary good sense and died immediately, bailing out on Dutch one last time, just as he had done before so many ill-starred trips out into the "recreational" district just outside the air base. Despite his lackluster skills behind the control yoke of a "Fatty," as the admittedly bulbous PH-173 Transport VTOL was best known, Rodney's overall assessment record was almost as good as Dutch's thanks in large part to all the infractions he had avoided by not being around when the shit hit the fan.

When Dutch had sprinted and splashed her way through the soupy mud of the No Man's Land the valleys surrounding the Hill had become after months of artillery and mortar bombardment, she had left the pulpy thing that had once been Rodney strapped to his chair, the smashed Fatty's final crew.

She had almost joined him in his fate during that desperate run. Bullets had buzzed hornet-like all around her, slashing out of the tattered treeline to the north, on the other side of the man-made mudflat from the rat's nest of trenches and dugouts that were the outermost outpost of Fort Aurelian, dug into the foot of the central Hill itself. Dutch had arrived at those shallow trenches facefirst, throwing herself ass over tits straight into the huddle of muddy, half-drowned infantry oiks cowering in the meager shelter, periodically lifting a wary eye over the soggy parapet to send a few return shots winging towards the hidden enemy.

Another graceful landing, Dutch thought as she left the deeper trenches of the central network and stooped lower, lifting her knees high as the mud sucked at her boots; the embarrassment she had felt at the moment turned into wry amusement with the passage of time. Just another drop into Fort Aurelian.

"Dutchie," a corporal guarding a junction in the trenches by the shattered remains of a prefabricated concrete pillbox said with a nod of recognition, the stylized numerals of the 35th Infantry Division glimmering gold under the spatter of dried orange mud coating his gray fatigues. "Keep your head down. The Chinamen have been noisy today."

"You know it," Dutch promised with a nod. "What's the weather like today, wouldja say?"

"What's it ever like?" the guard laughed, the laugh turning almost immediately into a pained cough. "Sunny as the petals of a smilin' daisy. Best keep your head way down, is what I'd say."

Grimacing, Dutch nodded again and clapped the corporal on his shoulder. "Thanks for the warning. See ya around, Corp."

"Later, Dutchie."

The teeth exposed by the man's grin were stained yellow from the crystalized coffee that came with each packaged meal ration. As water had run short, the soldiers trapped at Fort Aurelian and their support staff had taken to simply pouring the crystals straight into their mouths and crunching them down dry. The effect, surrounded by the corporal's dirty beard, grown out despite regulations since razors had grown more precious than gold, was like a vein of amber sap oozing out from a crack in blackened bark.

In Dutch's considered opinion, Fort Aurelian was cursed. When the 4th Army's engineers had set to work building the ill-starred installation, they must have knocked down some heathen temple or disturbed a whole pile of Ten graves or something. Whatever they had done, it had clearly cursed the whole wretched place.

Not that the curse had to do all the work. The Tens were happy to lend a hand.

From what she'd heard from her fellow internees trapped in the humid open-air prison of Fort Aurelian, the attacks had begun before the engineers had even finished clearing the broad, low hill just outside of the village of Muong Bu that had been chosen as the site of the new fort. Probably by the unhappy former inhabitants of Muong Bu, all of whom had been evicted as the lead elements of the 35th arrived to protect the engineer detachment.

Dutch could understand why someone who had never been to that hill would think that it was an ideal place for a fortification: The creek that wound past the western flank of the installation joined the Da River only a mile to the north, meaning that water would be abundant, and the pre-existing Prefectural Route 110 meant that the planned highway would have its path proverbially pathed before it. The low valleys to the north, west, and south meant that Fort Aurelian's future defenders would have clear fields of fire against any attacking elements.

The fort had been completed in record time. The top of the hill, formerly a tea plantation, had been cleared to make way for an airstrip, and VTOLs lumbering under the weight of prefabricated buildings had come in an endless stream.

Dutch's first trip out to Fort Aurelian had been as a part of that great airborne convoy, her Fatty groaning under the weight of construction supplies and tools. When she'd landed on the graveled airstrip in the middle of a pounding monsoon rain, the landing gear of her VTOL had sunk straight through the thin layer of gravel and into the thick, slurping mud below. The sound of the mud relinquishing her bird's feet had been clearly audible even over the whine of the gyroscopes.

The consequence of this rushed construction had been that every corner conceivable had been cut and that the construction had gone way, way over budget. Worse yet, somehow the genius responsible for planning the fort had only accounted for the fighting strength of the division destined to take the Fort Aurelian slot, and had not accounted for that division's support staff, its storage, its handful of dependents, or the camp followers that always somehow arrived at any installation. The discovery of this oversight had prompted a second rush of construction and, Dutch hoped, several executions.

When construction of Fort Aurelian was finally completed, three extra cantonments had sprouted up to the west, south, and east of the main hill, crammed full of still more prefabricated concrete buildings as well as an abundance of tents and unofficial shanties that popped up on any exposed patch of ground like mushrooms.

The overdrawn budget and the rushed accessory constructions had conspired to slow construction of the all-important highway from Ha Noi to Fort Aurelian. That crucial artery was woefully behind schedule. Last Dutch had heard, only fifty miles of the planned hundred and twenty-seven mile stretch had been completed. That royal deadline had been left dead in the water. The importance of the airstrip had consequently grown ever more prominent as the primary route of supply.

Worst of all, while so much water had fallen on Fort Aurelian back during the monsoon months that Dutch had felt like she was drowning when she'd flown in and out of the airstrip, the garrison was now finding itself high and dry.

It was all, she had learned, a result of the rushed construction and unplanned expansions Fort Aurelian suffered from. The initial plan for the installation had called for a pressurized waterline leading from the creek, which would supply the bulk of the fort's needs for drinking water as well as water for showers, sinks, latrines, and kitchens. Whatever shortfalls occurred would be compensated for by great filtering cisterns that would retain monsoon rains for the dry season.

Most of those cisterns were gone now, battered down and broken open by the hails of shells, the precious few survivors converted into sub-surface retaining chambers fed by ramshackle raincatches. The fancy waterline was likewise gone, first compressed by the unexpected weight of the cantonment walls and then broken completely by the regular shelling that had pulped the outer cantonments.

Making matters worse, the hill and the area surrounding it had been cleared completely for construction and for the killzone, and now everything not covered by intact cement or corrugated metal was mud. Not on the surface, which had been sunbaked to a crisp, but as anyone who lived in the holes studding the slopes of Fort Aurelian could tell you, the mud was still there, waiting just below the surface.

Which all contributed to the current situation. No matter how much water the garrison had schlepped in from the creek to the west or how much rainwater they filtered, potable water was in critically short supply. Even before shit had well and truly hit the fan, the deliveries from the pipe system had proven frighteningly irregular and entirely insufficient, meaning the majority of the fort's water had to be either flown in from Ha Noi or trucked up the narrow, poorly maintained roads connecting the Son La Prefecture to Britannia's northern foothold.

And that was before it all went to shit, Dutch thought, stopping by the timber-clad mouth of a dugout to knead an aching muscle in her back. Before the-

Suddenly, Dutch was in motion, hurling herself bodily into the earthen shelter of the dugout, subconscious reflexes made hypersensitive by the events of the previous week identifying the shriek of incoming artillery before her waking self had even noticed the warning whine. She landed hard on the packed clay floor, knees and palms screaming with immediate pain that the grounded pilot ruthlessly shoved away.

It's close! Too close! Terror clawed at her throat as she desperately tried to pinpoint the exact moment she'd first heard the dreaded whistle, trying to estimate just how long she had until impact.

Even as her thoughts ran in frantic, useless circles, Dutch's hindbrain took ruthless control, determined to survive. Scrambling forwards on bruised knees and elbows, she pushed herself deeper into the dugout until she hit the back wall, where she pressed herself against the join of wall and floor.

As she scrambled, she clapped her filthy hands to her face, thumbs plugging her ears and eyes covered by her remaining fingers. She left her mouth wide open, following the advice imparted to her by a soldier of the 35th shortly after the crash landing that had marooned her at Fort Aurelian.

"When the Daily Ration is served, just 'cause you're underground doesn't mean you're safe," the teenaged private had advised, the boy with his patchy beard now a veteran of months worth of those daily shellings from the guns concealed in the thick foliage of the surrounding hills. "If a shell comes down close enough, the overblast will gitcha just as much as the shrapnel will. If it's too close, well…" he shrugged, almost philosophical. "Then that's just bad luck. But if it doesn't just come down on your head, just the force of it can still fuck your day right up."

Intrigued, Dutch had asked for further details, which had been immediately forthcoming.

"If you're too close to the blast and you don't take precautions, your eyes will burst, your eardrums will pop, and your teeth will shatter like glass," the private had explained. "Seen it myself, y'know. One of the heavy shells came down only ten yards away from one of the dugouts. All the survivors were bleedin' from the ears and the eyes, and the sergeant didn't have any teeth. Must've clenched his jaw when he heard the shell come down."

That image had stuck in Dutch's mind even before she had seen it for herself. Soldiers and trapped civilians alike, staggering up from deceptive subterranean sanctuaries, empty sockets gaping over yawning jaws, mouths full of frothy blood and white shards of shattered teeth, lurched in her dreams and disturbed her sleep, even when the distant krump of nighttime artillery didn't trouble her.

And so, openmouthed and blind, Dutch did her best to push herself into the wall, to do anything she could to get further away from the mouth of the dugout. Distantly, she noted pressure against her legs, and kicked out savagely. It was probably some other soldier, some comrade in arms, but that didn't matter, not when they were trying to force their way into her tiny slice of wall.

Then, the world fell apart at the seams.

It was impossible to describe, to fully capture in words the moment when the shells shook the order and stability of the world to pieces. When up became down, and when the solid ground became liquid from the shock of overlapping explosions and the air became a solid mass of unrelenting noise.

As the shocks rolled over her, each overlapping with its predecessor and fighting against the hungry successors that bit at its tail, Dutch flopped, fishlike, as detonations ripped their way across the moonscape feet above her head. From the dugout's rough ceiling, dirt fell in clods and showers, the ground shuddering with the concussive force of the Daily Ration.

I wonder if the ceiling will give in?

Dutch had seen it before in these hellish weeks, had stood in mute witness as squads had dug into the collapsed walls of trenches and into basements below the ruined foundations of buildings with hands and with shovels in desperate attempts to retrieve comrades buried alive by dugouts turned into tombs.

Sometimes, the rescue attempts were successful, unearthing wildeyed men and women from the clutching clay, their uniforms a ruin of mud and their chests flailing in shocked hyperventilation. More often, the attempts came too late or never had any chance to begin with, all of the buried crushed by the collapsing soil, timber, and concrete or asphyxiated as tiny pockets of trapped air ran out.

God… Your Imperial Majesty, she prayed, pressing her hands down over her eyes and ears with renewed firmness as a particularly close call sent the ground bucking below her, please don't let me die in the dirt! Please! I'm a pilot! I should die in the sky, not buried alive!

She vomited, then, her stomach spasming and forcing its scarce contents out between her parted lips in an acid burp. Dutch hardly noticed the spasm in her gut; all of her muscles were twitching spasmodically, save for her clamping hands. Her legs kicked out again, slamming into whatever or whoever else was sharing her dugout. Only the bitter taste and the syrupy sensation of thick fluid seeping over her lips and chin told her of her lost breakfast.

Dammit… Dutch moaned, absurdly vexed by the comparatively minor inconvenience. That was the last of my chocolate too…

Apparently, the sacrifice of her calories for the day was enough to buy an end to the Daily Ration. Just as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased. The flow of shells, the heavier howitzers interspaced with the lighter mortars, stopped all at once, leaving an almost echoing silence behind.

Slowly, Dutch forced her hands away from her face, blinking the spots away from her eyes as she ran her tongue over her puke-dripping teeth, checking to make sure that they were all still there. When she found that her inventory was complete, and that she could still both hear and see, she spat once, then twice into the dirt inches from her face, trying to rid her mouth of the taste of the vomit.

"Here," a piping voice said, and a canteen appeared under her nose.

Rising up onto her knees, Dutch gratefully took the canteen, swigging from the stale, metallic water within after she scrubbed the vomit from her face with her shirtsleeve. Taking a second drink, she regretfully passed the canteen back to its owner, a scrawny infantryman with an already purpling cheek.

"Ah, sorry about that," Dutch muttered, suddenly feeling guilty about her panicked kicking. "Thanks for the water."

"'Snot a problem," the reedy-voiced soldier replied, wiping the rim of his canteen and taking a careful sip. "It happens. Not the first time, hopefully not the last."

Because caring about a bruise means that I'm still alive, went unspoken.

"What," Dutch asked, forcing a smile as she stabbed for comic relief. "Like getting stepped on by girls or something? Wouldn't have jumped into this hole if I knew it was filled with pervs."

"Hey," a second, deeper voice objected. "Don't lump us in with him! This is a good clean dugout. Family friendly, if you count spiders as kin!"

Turning, Dutch realized that she had, in fact, shared the sanctuary of the dugout with three other people, two in the same army gray that she wore and one, the other woman present, an apparent civilian.

"I'll… Take your word for it," Dutch replied, staggering to her feet as a ridiculous feeling of being an intruder washed over her. "Thanks for sharing your dugout. It's…" she looked around, taking in the filthy bedding the woman was sitting on, the bucket in one corner that had survived the bombardment without overturning thanks to the rocks wedged below it, and the shreds of ration packing scattered liberally around the hole. "...Homey," she finished lamely. "Would love to stick around, but…"

"Places to go, things to see," the soldier with the canteen nodded. "Plenty to see at scenic Fort Aurelian. Remember us when you plan your next vacation! Now, if you'll excuse me…"

Walking on rubbery legs, Dutch quickly exited the dugout and returned to the communications trench, ducking her head back down just in case.

At least they were friendly, she mused as she resumed her trip out to the West Cantonment. Could've stumbled into another impromptu heroin den… or an active murder… or the suicide bunker… Jumping into a threesome's nothing at all, compared to that.

Swallowing her still-acrid saliva, Dutch pressed on. She had a job to do.

When she had first found herself without a Fatty to fly or supply runs to make, Dutch had been at loose ends. Lost in the sea of the fifteen thousand surviving Britannians trapped in Fort Aurelian, Dutch had drifted through the tiny, bizarre world of an isolated, overcrowded base entering its fifth week under siege. Eventually, she had found herself attached to the divisional staff as a runner, carrying orders from the headquarters bunker out to the peripheral command posts and back.

Runners like herself had become a necessity as the generators burned through the stockpile of Sakuradite and the supply of batteries fell perilously low. Out of necessity, use of any powered device, radios included, had to be rationed. Every day a wire would be run up a temporary antenna to broadcast a report back to Ha Noi, but aside from that necessity the use of radio communication was held back for the frequent attempts by the surrounding enemy to overrun the outer lines of the fort.

Today, Dutch had drawn the boobie prize in her task to collect a mid-morning report from the command post halfway up the hillside from the ruined West Cantonment.

The west of the fort was the side closest to the creek, Fort Aurelian's nominal water supply. Dutch suspected that the "nominal" part of that designation was doing a bunch of the heavy lifting, considering that the creek lay almost half a mile from the foot of the fort's central hill with a major artery of local traffic running between the fort and its water. When the necessity for new additions to house the overflow from the hilltop barracks had prompted the construction of the three cantonments, the West Cantonment had been the first to complete construction and had stretched all the way the base of the hill to Prefectural Route 106's roadbed, on the creek's shore.

Now, the flat expanse between the creek and the hill was muddy ruin, the Cantonment's broken walls and crumbling prefabs jutting up irregularly from the flat swampy stew.

A few of those holes weren't there yesterday, Dutch noted as she cautiously followed the switchbacking communication trench over the crest of the hilltop. That's probably all the report I need… I could probably just turn back here and now and report back in… But it's not like I've got much on the schedule for the rest of the day…

With a suppressed sigh, Dutch ducked back behind the meager parapet topping the trench once more, returning to the clasping clay.

At least the command post is only halfway down… Not like I have to go all the way down to the waterboys…

The thought of setting foot down in the swampy, flooded trenches at the foot of the hill, full of knee-deep stagnant water and the parts and pieces of the unburied dead, sent a shudder through the pilot turned messenger.

While death came easily in all manner of forms across Fort Aurelian, nowhere outside of the medical tents was the misery so condensed then among the outermost ring of defenseworks at the hill's foot. By day, snipers hiding in the dense jungle across the creek or in the hills were a constant menace, as were the Daily Rations and the similarly hidden machine-gunners. This was true all across Fort Aurelian, as were the malarial fevers, the septic wounds, and the parching, unrelenting thirst. By night, however, a special horror would descend on the waterboys in the outer rings as Ten insurgents creeped across the sodden moonscape to slip into trenches and foxholes, slitting the throats of unwary sentries and sleeping soldiers taken in their dugout barracks.

Dutch hated going down to the Outer Ring and thanked her lucky stars and her warrant officer's tabs that she had lucked into a position at Divisional Headquarters instead of filling some dead sergeant's boots down in the swamp.

Not that there aren't even worse options than that…

The West Hill Post was just as Dutch remembered it from her previous trips to the sector: Centered around what had been intended as a checkpoint between the West Cantonment and the core of Fort Aurelian and better known as "Water Street" – as it was on the way to the swampy hell of the outer ring, better known as the "Bog" – the succession of staff officers from the various regiments and battalions of the 35th had excavated something like a sunken pit in the hillside, the hillward wall of which hosted a trio of entrances into a network of tunnels dug out from the red clay of the hill. The tunnels terminated in a room carved from the rocky bones of the hill and reinforced with rebar scavenged from the Cantonment's ruin. A single dingy bulb connected to a noisily chugging generator in another room lit a table matted with scribbled reports and stained maps.

Inside that room, Dutch found the usual knot of junior officers, most of whom were sitting around the edges of the wall without even finding a useless task to busy themselves with. She couldn't blame them for taking advantage of their ranks to elbow their way into the command room itself, rather than trying to find a place to squat in the less finished dugouts with the rank and file. Not only was the command room far drier than the crusty mud outside, the rocky ceiling and twenty feet of dirt atop it offered superb protection from any stray mortar shells the Tens or the Chinese might be inclined to send their way.

Standing out amidst the knot of useless lumps were two men, only one of whom she recognized. As both wore captain's ranks, Dutch turned to the devil she knew first.

"Captain Parker," she said, offering the customary battlefield greeting of a firm nod in place of the rear echelon salute. "How are things looking today in these parts?"

"As expected, Dutchie," came Silus Parker's tense reply. "Had a brisk night last night. Two platoons, plus the mules. Poor bastards."

The "Water Street" command post, as the only open area in the sector with anything approaching security, was the jump-off point for the nightly "water runs" conducted by particularly unlucky units. It was a horribly dangerous task, but deeply necessary; Fort Aurelian, for all the rain that had fallen upon the hill during construction and later in air-dropped steel jugs, was a profoundly thirsty place, now that it was cut away from its main water supply.

Two solutions to the problem had presented themselves. The best solution, more airdrops, had been thwarted by the concentrated anti-air capacity of the besieging enemies, the same capacity that had brought Dutch low. The "water runs" had thus become the default solution to the endless thirst upon the hill. When night fell, the remaining heavy machine guns and mortars mounted on the hillcrest would lay suppressing fire down into the jungle while the chosen platoons and their unlucky civilian "mules" would run out across the ruins of the West Cantonment down to the stream, where they would fill heavy jugs with muddy streamwater before running back to the Britannian lines for more jugs.

The Chinese and Tens would, of course, do everything they could to prevent these runs from succeeding. Which was why the West was so particularly pockmarked with artillery craters and strewn with minced corpses.

In fact, according to the scuttlebutt Dutch had heard, the shelling of that particularly half-mile square area of the old Cantonment had been so thorough that the ground itself had broken. While footing was tricky but still generally solid below the first few inches of mud to the north, east, and south of Fort Aurelian, between the old Route 106 roadbed and the defensive lines the mud was deep and soupy.

"'Slike oatmeal," a private had said, all but wailing his disgust. "You put your foot in ten paces past the parapet and you sink balls-deep in the muck!"

Trying to cross that slick, sucking, deep mud with heavy panniers, heavy when empty and heavier with sloshing water, was a practical death sentence.

But without water, we all die.

"Brisk night," Dutch agreed, her eyes lingering on the fresh coat of mud drying on the captain's trousers, a new layer atop the dried layers of previous forays down past Water Street. "So, uh… Did they manage to get us a drink, at least?"

"About fifty gallons," Parker replied, his face grim. As well he should be; with the daily ration of a pint of water per soldier and half that for civilians, that accounted for the intake of only two companies or so, three at tops.

Enough water for four hundred men, in a fort with around twelve thousand survivors…

The second, unnamed captain winced slightly at the number, but to Dutch's eagle eye it looked a bit too theatrical. A reaction that had been feigned to meet expectations, not one springing from sincerity.

And now that I look closer, Dutch thought, peering at the other officer, he's hardly got any mud at all on him. Damn near could be up in Headquarters, the way he looks. And… Wait a second, he's not wearing the 35th's patch…

"Hey Parks," she said, turning back to Captain Parker, a man she had grown passing familiar with during her month of messenger duties, "who's this guy? Where the hell did he pop up from?"

"Not popped up," the other man said, in an accent that practically screamed Area 4 to Dutch's West Coast ears, "but dropped down." He smiled, pleased with his own joke. "James Yates, Captain James Yates, of the Lucky 13th Division, at your service. I parachuted in last night."

"Sir," Dutch replied woodenly, wondering what kind of an idiot would voluntarily jump out of a perfectly good VTOL – like her Fatty – when it wasn't actively on fire. Especially when the destination for that jump was Fort Aurelian. "Isn't the 13th holding Sai Gon for us all? What're you doing up here in the north?"

"Word's gotten out that you could use a hand or two up here," Captain Yates smoothly replied, a grin bubbling up to his lips. "I figured Fort Aurelian would be a good place for a man of my skills, so I volunteered to lend my help."

Bewildered, Dutch glanced to Parks, looking for an explanation. The veteran's face was resolutely stony, any opinion he might own up to concealed behind the grim facade. Disappointed, she looked back to the still smiling Captain Yates.

Maybe I misheard.

"You… volunteered?" Her question was careful, probing. "Because of your… skills? Sir," she added, a tad belatedly.

"Oh yes, quite," Captain Yates replied agreeably. "Been a soldier all my live-long life, just like my father was and his father before him. To tell you the truth, when I first heard His Highness's orders about the new 'northern fort' bit, I was really hoping it would be the Lucky 13th tapped to fill the slot!" He chuckled for a reason beyond Dutch's tired comprehension. "Of course, Iron Pants Wyman was having none of that, so you 35thers managed to snag our spot instead!"

Iron Pants Wyman… Dutch blinked; she doubted she'd ever have the bravery to refer to Lieutenant General Joyce Denton Wyman, Countess of Hartford and the commander of 9th Corps as well as the second in command of the 4th Army as Iron Pants.

Not like there aren't probably a few DIS or MI types hidden in the ranks… I'm beginning to understand why he volunteered.

"I see…" she said, stalling for time. "So… Why are you… Here?" Her wave took in both the specific command post and, more broadly, all of Fort Aurelian. "You volunteered?"

"Oh, quite!" The chuckle came again. Dutch was rapidly finding it quite irritating. It was just so satisfied. "Not much glory in garrison duty, you know, and majorities don't just earn themselves. A spot of action here in the balmy Son La seemed like just the ticket to get my Crown and Cross!"

The crown and cross being a major's rank tab… Right.

"Actually," Yates squinted at her collar and frowned at what he saw. "You aren't a 35ther either, are you… Ah, Dutchie, was it?" He blinked. "Is that your… given name?"

"Chief Warrant Officer Two Lowrie Kramer, late of the 13th Support Wing," she replied, a bit testily. "No sir, Dutchie isn't my given name. Most people call me Dutch, on account of the last name."

"Ah, so you're a 13-er too, eh?" Yates' grin widened by a tooth, clearly pleased with himself. "After a fashion, I suppose. A thirteen on the wing!"

"She's a 35ther," Captain Parker, Parks, broke in, his voice tired. "She's also here to take a report, isn't she?"

"Yes," Dutch agreed, seizing the offered out with both hands. "I need to run the numbers back up to Divisional toot sweet. What were you saying just now, Parks?"

"But she's not one of yours though," Captain Yates objected, clearly not finished with the conversation nor willing to let a point rest. "What, did you parachute in too, Chief? Or do you prefer Dutch? Dutchie?"

"She's a 35ther," Parker growled, rounding back on Yates, "on account of her havin' been on this fucking stupid excuse of a fort for weeks, after she spent months flying in the food and ammo."

"I got shot down," Dutch said, taking a step between the two captains. "Sorry, Captain, can't say I was brave enough to volunteer to be here like you. I'm just unlucky, that's all. Captain Parker," she continued, turning back to the man with the 35th Division's patch, "the numbers?"

"Two platoons and ten civvies came on through last night," Parks ground out, glaring at Yates, "and twenty three passed back through, most of them injured."

"Ah." This time, Dutch did wince. Those were bad numbers. At forty soldiers to a platoon, less than a quarter of those who had ventured over the parapet last night had returned. "A bad night, eh?"

"Starshell," Parker agreed with a nod. "Lit the whole place up. They must've hauled a machine gun right to the treeline."

"Ah." There wasn't really much else to say to that.

"Sort of a net win though, isn't it?" Both Parker and Dutch turned to stare at Yates, who rolled a shoulder in a half-shrugging motion. "They brought back enough water for ten platoons, all told. With the losses, especially the civilian losses scratched…"

"More water for us," Parker finished, nodding with unwilling agreement.

"Still not enough," Dutch muttered unhappily. "The water runs… They just aren't working out."

"Men are cheaper than VTOLs," Yates pointed out, "though I'm sure you don't need me to tell you as much, eh, Dutchie?"

"Dutch will work," she replied curtly. "Thank you for your report, Captain Parker. I will pass it on to the duty officer immediately. Captain Yates."

Turning on her heel, she strode out of the rude bunker at the heart of Water Street and back out into the muck of the trench network.

Which, for all the mud and the shit and the blood, not to mention the tiny bits of the unlucky recipients of the Daily Ration everywhere, has the advantage of lacking Captain Yates completely.

Back at Divisional Headquarters, safely below the hilltop in one of the few purpose-built bunkers available at Fort Aurelian, the mood was little better. Despite being hundreds of yards away from the Water Street command post and further yet from the suffering soldiers trapped in the muddy hell of the West Cantonment and the outer ring defenses, the eyes were all the same. Exhausted, thirsty, and desperate for any good news, the major who took Dutch's report visibly sagged in his chair at the report that only fifty gallons had made the trip from the creek to the fort the previous night.

"Fifty gallons, Emperor preserve us…" The duty officer took his glasses off and rubbed at his bleary red eyes. "That's nothing, next to nothing…"

"Yessir," Dutch acknowledged. "Captain Parker noted the use of a starshell by enemy forces once the water party was out beyond our defensive lines. He also indicated that they had placed a machine-gun at the treeline. They knew where we were going."

"Of course they knew where we were going," the major snapped. "We go to the same damned creek every bloody night!"

"Yessir," Dutch agreed. "Perhaps we should stop?"

"...Perhaps we should." The major sagged deeper into his chair. "But then what, Warrant Officer? Every pint we can't pull out of the creek comes from our stockpiled rainwater or the reserve from the last airdrop. You more than anybody short of Baron Traub should know just how deep those reserves are, and how few drops have been successful of late…"

Before Dutch could find an answer to that comment, the door to the duty room burst open.

"Message from the Radio Room, sir," the corporal who ran into the room announced, brandishing a scrap of paper torn from a notebook. "The daily from Ha Noi just came in! Reinforcements are coming!"

"Reinforcements?" Dutch breathed, turning to stare at the soldier. "They're coming to relieve Fort Aurelian?"

"Just so!" came the enthusiastic reply. "The Knightmare Corps landed in Ha Noi, a whole brigade of them! They'll be linking up with the 23rd and the 3rd Honorary, then they're all marching up-country to crack the damned Chinamen wide open around us!"

The 23rd Infantry Division and the 3rd Honorary Legion… Dutch's mind reeled at this sudden turn of events. The 23rd was the 35th's sister division, the other half of the 17th Corps, while the 3rd Honorary Legion was one of the oldest Honorary units and one of the few considered on par with true Britannian units. It was also a division-sized unit in its own right. Plus a full brigade of Knightmares, that's at least thirty-five thousand men and three hundred Knightmares, rolling to our rescue.

That's one hell of a relief force!

"Well then," the major remarked caustically, cramming his glasses back onto his face, "in that case, they'd better be bringing their own damned water, because the 35th certainly isn't going to share!"

The deflating comment, perhaps made by the duty officer to prevent his own long-numbed hopes from rising anew, passed far below Dutch's feet. All of a sudden, though she was still in the bunker room, still entombed in the open-air graveyard that was Fort Aurelian, the grounded VTOL pilot's head was in the clouds.

Back where she belonged.

She knew it was foolish, especially at this first news of a relief that might not arrive for days or even weeks, but Dutch couldn't help herself.

After so long spent in the stinking, sodden horror of Fort Aurelian, after sprinting away from her burning Fatty and away from the charred thing that had been her sensible, trusty copilot…

After days of cowering under the pounding Chinese artillery and thirsty nights spent sucking on stones in a vain attempt to soothe a thirst so dire that it kept her awake…

After watching men and women die gutshot, shrapnel-ridden, malarial, and suicidal, watching doughty soldiers scream and gibber under the incessent shelling and watching cheeks hollow and eyes sink after foodless days…

For a moment, Lowrie Kramer allowed herself to believe that, one blessed day, her clipped wings would spread once more and would carry her up, up into the clouds, and she would leave the jungle mud of Fort Aurelian far below her and far, far away.

SCENE 3: Futility

AUGUST 10, 2016 ATB

A PASS IN THE TA XUA MOUNTAINS NEAR NGHIA LO, FORTY MILES EAST OF FORT AURELIAN, YEN BAI PREFECTURE, AREA 10

Six weeks hence, a great and terrible beast had ventured forth from its lair in Ha Noi; a great tentacle in Britannian gray and navy had reached out across floodplains and mountains, rice paddies and the endless jungle. Now brought to bear and bleeding from a thousand cuts, the monster was too worn down and exhausted now to even roar defiance.

The initial leg had been all triumph, a near parade up the unfinished Imperial Highway 27, the landspinners and boots of His Grace the Duke of New Lancaster Sir Stewart Cavendish's mighty Relief Column marching with regimental precision along the broad elevated spans of the great road. Unstained by mud, the beast had sauntered forth arrogantly, confident in the awe its purple might would inspire in the Numbers who bore witness to its majesty.

Said Euan Cameron, a private of the 23rd: "It was incredible. I had never seen anything like it before, not back in the Heartland and certainly not in the two years I had spent humping my way through rice fields north of Da Nang. 'At long last,' I remember thinking, 'we're finally getting tough on the Chinamen bastards.'"

Private Cameron's impression was common to almost all who witnessed that triumphant exit. This was, after all, a Britannian field army in all but name. An entire corps-worth of soldiers marched, two divisions of infantry supported by engineers and doctors, mechanics and drivers, cooks and intelligencers and technicians and generals. A fully mechanized force, the 23rd Infantry Division advanced in an endless procession of lightly armored personnel carriers, while the 3rd Honorary Legion followed in their wake, making do with the same model of truck their fully Britannian comrades used to haul supplies for transport.

Behind the main body of mechanized infantry, still more trucks followed, heaped with provisions and ammunition and all the other necessities for a Britannian Army in the field. Towed artillery jolted behind some trucks, and field kitchen trucks rattled and banged. Almost endless fuel trucks, loaded with diesel for the trucks and carefully padded Sakuradite fuel cells for the more exotic machines, swelled the train still further. In sheer quantity, the supply train made up the body of the great monstrous column, with each division's support elements outnumbering the combined transport vehicles of both.

The great and ponderous supply train was further reinforced by the support elements attached to the most distinctive unit in the column, the spearhead that the lieutenant general commanding the army was depending upon to force a path through the forces encircling the invested Fort Aurelian.

Said unit was found, for the first leg of the journey at least, at the very head of the column. In rank upon neatly dressed rank, as if rolling down Saint Darwin Street for His Imperial Majesty's birthday celebration, the three hundred Sutherlands of the 7th Armored Brigade had led the way out of the Ha Noi Settlement to the enthusiastic cheers of thousands of Britannian settlers and Honorary Britannians.

When it left Ha Noi, New Lancaster's Relief Column had been the single largest concentration of Britannian forces seen in Area 10 since the initial conquest just over seven years ago. The idea that a force of conscripted Chinese and ragged Tens could stand against such a magnificent relief, even a force that Military Intelligence estimated at almost twice the size of the Relief Column itself, had been ludicrous.

The idea had remained ludicrous for the first fifty miles of the planned one hundred and twenty seven mile track to Fort Aurelian.

Then, with startling abruptness, the finished stretch of Highway 27 terminated, and with the end of the elevated highway came the high water mark for the Relief Column.

Immediately, the hithertofore silky smooth logistics devolved into a hopeless traffic jam stretching back almost all the way to the gates of Ha Noi itself. Highway 27 had been an impressive four lanes wide, freshly paved, and elevated over all the pesky mud and vegetation. Some had quietly criticized the use of the traditional pillared skyway structure as opposed to a cheaper highway built on a roadbed atop a graded mount of fill, citing that a less sweeping structure could have been finished with greater speed and lower cost, but such dissent was kept quiet for the road contractors were close friends of Area 10's Viceregal-Governor.

In stark contrast to Highway 27, the unimproved expanse of Prefectural Route 32, the best road past the end of the Imperial Highway, consisted of a mere two lanes of irregularly paved track whose muddy shoulders narrowed perilously when passing by rivers, through mountain passes, and in the stretches between the tiny hamlets full of warily watching Tens.

"The Highway was a huge disappointment," Colonel Javier Gutierrez, commander of the 3rd Honorary Legion's 2nd Regiment and ranking prisoner taken during the campaign, complained after his eventual escape from Chinese custody. "Not the finished road itself, but that less than half of the planned length of Highway 27 was completed by the time we left Ha Noi. Whoever thought that diverting funding and manpower towards completing Fort Aurelian before work finished on the supply route necessary to keep that damned base functional deserves to be wheeled."

It had taken a full week for the Relief Column to begin moving up the strictured route, a week of reorganization and slimming. The Honorary Legion was obligated to reduce its truckload, forcing the infantry to walk from here-on out. They would soon be joined by increasing numbers of their Britannian colleagues in the summer humidity of Indochina as the armored personnel carriers and fighting vehicles began to break down, as did the first of the supply trucks.

In the midst of the snarl, the behemoth sustained its first few superficial injuries.

A lone Honorary sentry was found with his throat slit by a comrade sent to relieve him; a handful of unlucky Tens were unceremoniously put up against the nearest wall and shot.

Unknown saboteurs snuck into the still column in the middle of the night and set three of the 23rd's supply trucks on fire; six families of Tens were nailed up in their houses, which were set unceremoniously alight.

A Britannian sergeant kicked a paint can out of the road while leading a clearing detail up the shoulder of the Prefectural Route, and lost the leg to a crude black-powder charge concealed within the can; another thirty Tens paid for that insult to His Imperial Majesty's forces with their lives.

"That's how it went," Private Cameron later confirmed. "The Tens knew the rules just as well as we did. We'd been fighting the bastards for years, so we both knew how it went. It was almost an understanding, you know? They'd knife one of ours, so we'd machine-gun ten of theirs. Didn't matter if the paddy-squatters in question were responsible or not. If they hadn't come to us to point out the Viet Trung sympathizers in their village, then they were complicit. Hell," Cameron recalled, smiling with amazed respect, "if we didn't make them complicit in the Trung's lot, the Trung would do it for us! They'd kill one of ours, then tell the villagers that they could join them or wait for Britannian bullets!

"Point is, we both understood one another, us and the Trung and the damned Chinamen."

And on it went. Swatting away annoyances, the beast dragged its way along the poor roads of interior Area 10, heaving its way through Phu Tho Prefecture and through Yen Bai, coming at last to the border of Son La Prefecture, wherein stood Fort Aurelian, weathering now its third month of siege. By the time the Relief Column reached the shore of the Da River, three full weeks had passed since the triumphal exit from Ha Noi.

It was there, as the Column began to cross the shaky, overtaxed Ta Khoa Bridge, that Duke New Lancaster's forces first encountered Chinese resistance.

As would be the routine for the ensuing week, there were no Chinese to be seen, nor hardly any Tens. A sentry might see a flicker of a face through the brush, or perhaps a particularly aggressive patrol might be able to chase down and subdue a living captive for interrogation, but by and large the only Tens the Column encountered in Son La Prefecture were either already dead or soon to be.

After the first woman carrying the swaddled form of what an unwary patrol mistook for a baby detonated in a suicidal blast that took three Honorary legionaries with her, any Ten approaching the Column was shot on sight.

Those Tens the Britannians did see were unimportant compared to the observers they missed, lying prone in the mud and elephant grass and reporting the Column's position back to the Chinese regulars up in the hills or deeper in Son La.

From those hills and hidden bases came the lash of artillery fire. Mortars smuggled close to the Column by grimly determined Ten partisans dropped from above with shrill whistles while Chinese howitzers sent 105 and 120 millimeter shells screaming down upon the long, vulnerable stretch of the Column.

The field artillery attached to the Relief Column of course attempted counter-battery fire, but without observers or really any way of knowing where the unseen tormentors were, the attempted suppression was ineffectual at best. Worst, the need to disconnect the artillery pieces from their towing vehicles and the fury of the Britannian reply to the Chinese fire did nothing but slow the Column still further and provide the hidden observers with the exact locations of Britannian artillery, which they dutifully fed back to the waiting Chinese artillery officers.

Britannian artillery rapidly became an endangered species in Son La Prefecture, as did the attack VTOLs that had buzzed overhead for the first leg of the Relief Column's journey. Tasked with suppressing the harassing artillery, VTOL after VTOL fell prey to waiting anti-air assets squatting in the jungle around artillery emplacements, waiting for just such Britannian impetuousness.

By the start of the fourth week on the march, progress had ground to an effective halt for Sir Stewart's forces. The sound of explosions great and small was an almost constant harrange as Chinese artillery sent irregular and variable bursts of hate slashing down from above, while roadside mines and grenades hurled from the undergrowth by insurgent Tens erupted from the sides. Infantry patrols sent into the bush to clear insurgent fire teams and observers away from the Column vanished into the green maw, while squads of Sutherlands found themselves almost immediately sunk down in the soft red mud, the Tens retreating away and leaving the bogged Knightmares with nothing to do but squelch ignominiously back to the wallowing Column.

That was when supplies began to truly run low.

The Relief was supposed to arrive at Fort Aurelian within two weeks, three at the outside, and the siege was meant to be lifted almost immediately. Duke New Lancaster had sent word back to Ha Noi and ordered the dispatch of further supply, as well as vehicles to convey the wounded back to the Settlement, but the previously tranquil roads of Area 10 now bristled with explosives both improvised and manufactured, while the jungles crawled with snipers and ambushing parties of Tens, armed to the teeth and disinclined to show anything approaching mercy. Ambulance loads of Britannian casualties were hacked to death and left nailed to the trestles of the Imperial Highway. Burnt out trucks and wrecked VTOLs blazed an iron road from Ha Noi to Son La.

Rationing became necessary, not only of fuel but also of spare parts, medical supplies, food, and, increasingly, water.

With the Britannian counter-battery capability degraded, Chinese artillery began to target any concentration of supply vehicles, almost dismissively ignoring the armored personnel carriers and Knightmares in favor of the soft-skinned trucks and support vehicles.

"It got to the point where our captain warned us not to go out alone, or with men from other units," recalled Lieutenant Eddie Bower. "It was too risky, too likely to leave you with a knife in your back and your rations shared out among the bastards who put it there. Our battalion held together, as did most of the 23rd, but in some of the support units and especially among the Honoraries, discipline was all but gone by the end of July."

Morale began to break down.

Officers at all levels of command, from lieutenants commanding platoons all the way up to the lieutenant general commanding the entire Column, the Duke of New Lancaster himself, grew increasingly dubious of the chances of relieving Fort Aurelian. In quiet conferences between trusted brother officers, more and more voices began venturing their thoughts about turning back to Ha Noi "to regroup and replenish."

One particularly daring lieutenant colonel of the 23rd made bold to say that the entire Relief had already failed and they might as well head back to Ha Noi before someone else had to come out to relieve them as well.

For his cowardice, that particular disgrace was quickly shot by the Military Police. His words, the thoughts of many in both the ranks and the officers' mess, were less easily dispatched.

A handful of Honoraries tried to desert. After a night riven by the sound of screaming, an extra-strength patrol sent to bring the deserters back to face military justice found their work already accomplished by the hands of the vengeful Tens.

Unable to flee and unable to handle what was rapidly becoming a siege situation, no matter that the Column was still technically mobile, the suicides began. Singly or in pairs, soldiers found an escape from the roadbound hell.

Discipline began to collapse, prompting officers and Military Policemen to lash out at insubordinate soldiers with mounting brutality.

"Before Indochina, I had ordered a total of three floggings during the entirety of my career with the 3rd Honorary," Colonel Gutierrez admitted. "The entire legion, barring the greenest recruits, were career men, and all were acutely aware of the general regard the 3rd enjoyed as a Honorary unit with a service history more distinguished then most Britannian divisions. In Son La, though… three floggings was a good day, almost outstanding." He chuckled wryly. "We damn near ran out of rope, we were hanging so many barracks-room lawyers and compromisos! We left an orchard in our wake…"

At last, by the end of the fifth week, not even the Duke of New Lancaster could find the optimism necessary to continue the plodding, painful advance. Still ten miles out from Fort Aurelian, the besieged base's hilltop redoubt tantalizingly visible to the advance scouts from their ridgetop positions, the great beast, now wounded, turned back.

It was not permitted to retreat in peace.

Flush with supplies, the unseen Chinese artillerists continued their explosive deluge, endlessly flaying the rearguard with shrapnel and high explosive. Every other tree and shrub seemed to have a Ten lurking behind it, who leaned out of cover only to make a handful of hurried potshots at the Relief Column's flanks before diving back into the jungle under a fusillade of return fire. And always the mines, always the booby-traps, always the tripwires and the buried fuses.

It came as a surprise to the surviving engineers of the Column that the bridge over the Da was intact when Duke New Lancaster's command retraced their footsteps back across its span, and the comparatively intact state of Prefectural Route 37 was also a surprise. By contrast, the network of tiny unpaved roads had been deliberately undermined by the Tens to render them impassible to vehicles, leaving only a single viable route forwards. Attempting to turn and make a stand was not an option; Every village and town between Chieng Sinh and Bac Yen was burnt, the water fouled, the fields left barren of even the green rice.

The already gloomy resignation bit harder as the Relief Column trudged on down a single unbroken line of intact roads towards Ha Noi. Harried on three sides, with every alternative route destroyed and trapped in a land that may as well be a desert for all the food or clean water it offered, it was clear to all in New Lancaster's Column that they were being herded forwards. Even the strength to choose their course had been sapped away, worn by shell, by mine, by endless ambush and constant hunger and thirst.

The Column trudged on, leaving broken down vehicles and dead men in its wake, fleeing an enemy they had yet to see over the course of the short, brutal campaign.

Nobody even pretended to care about Fort Aurelian any longer.

"Fort Aurelian?" Private Cameron chuckled, shaking his head. "Who gave a shit about them? Who could be arsed to give a shit about the men in the next regiment, or even the next battalion?" He leaned forward in his seat, eyes intent. "I'll tell you who gave a shit about the men in the next regiment: The idiots too stupid to survive the retreat from Son La. Want to know who survived? The bastards. The ones who stole rations, who bribed and bullied extra food and ammunition out of the quartermasters, the ones who didn't share their last heels and scraps, that's who survived. On Sir Cavendish's Wild Ride, if you gave a shit about anybody else, you died. They're probably still moldering in that Goddamned jungle, the bleeding hearts are."

Finally, strung out in a pass in the Ta Xua Mountains, just at the border of the damned Son La Prefecture and the cursed Yen Bai Prefecture, the enemy at last showed their face, offering battle only now that the Britannians were almost entirely dismounted, save for the 7th Armored Brigade and their few straggling support vehicles.

"You really can't begin to understand how we felt at that moment, if you weren't there," said Lieutenant Bowers, closing his eyes at the memory. "Six weeks of hell, where the majority of the fighting was in the ranks, between the men, and then… Cresting over that ridge, halfway through the pass, and then… Chinamen. Chinamen on every ridge, on every mountain."

The confrontation, later called the Nghia Lo Massacre despite the battle taking place some distance from the town in question, was the fulfillment of a strategy devised by General Nguyen Minh Hue, leader of the Viet Trung's Northern Department, and Field Marshal Qin Zheyuan of the Southern Command of the Indochina Army, of the Federation of China. Called "tuna hunting" in reference to the traditional practice of funneling schools of tuna into smaller and smaller netted corrals, the Duke of New Lancaster's Relief Column had similarly been guided into an increasingly untenable strategic position during its time in the Son La Prefecture.

Now, its momentum bled away and its supplies stretched to the breaking point, Sir Stewart and his staff were left with a force still thirty-thousand strong yet possessing an almost negligible capacity for combat. The pilots of the 7th Armored Brigade remained eager for their Sutherlands to fulfill their long-anticipated role as a vanguard charging into enemy forces, but were alone in keenness. The formerly mechanized infantry divisions were exhausted, dispirited, under provisioned, dismounted, and stretched out over almost four miles of jungle road all but completely lacking in effective cover.

By contrast, the Chinese forces waiting for them on the slopes and ridges of the Ta Xua range were well rested, well positioned, and in extremely high spirits. They were also running a supremely high risk as they were also on the brink of overextension, though this was unknown to the Britannians.

As the bulk of available Britannian forces in northern Area 10 had bogged down south of Son La City, Field Marshall Qin had sent the majority of his forces marching north and east through northern Yen Bai Prefecture. Though the defenders of Fort Aurelian didn't know it, the force besieging them had been reduced to a bare skeleton of its former strength. Similarly, the units harassing the retreating Relief Column were predominantly Viet Trung, with a double-handful of Chinese artillery units chivvying the retreating Britannians forwards.

It was a spectacular gamble, and one that paid off spectacularly as the Britannian "tuna" swam at last into the narrowest of the nets at the pass near Nghia Lo.

When the leading elements of the 23rd Division and the 7th Armored Brigade crested the pass and looked down into the high mountain valley and the village of Ban Cong, they found the road forwards had been rendered completely impassable. A trench fully sixty feet wide and twenty feet deep had been scoured and blasted across the roadbed, while every ridge, hill, and slight elevation bristled with anti-tank gun emplacements behind earthen fortifications.

Field Marshal Qin's pioneers had been extremely busy.

The situation on the mountain ridges converging on the pass looked no better. Further light artillery had been hauled by gangs of Chinese and Ten soldiers, and now those guns looked down on the head of the column.

The remainder of the Relief Column, stretched out over four miles of unpaved switchbacks, was in an equally dire situation. Driven forwards by harassing machine-gun fire, the infantry and support units were disinclined to retreat back down the slopes towards the dense jungle and its menacing insurgents. Further machine-gun emplacements on the foothills of the Ta Xua mountains, well-guarded against any attempted Britannian VTOL sorties by numerous anti-air units, further discouraged any attempt to balk at the path up into the mountain pass.

Had the infantry pushed back against their Ten pursuers, the encirclement could well have been broken. Due to the requirements of the trap within the mountain valley ahead and the need for manpower to fortify the ridges and peaks of the Ta Xua Range, only a few thousand Viet Trung light infantry, backed by a battalion of Chinese artillery and a few crewed weapons were available to drive the Relief Column forwards.

It is a mark of how far Britannian morale ebbed that breaking out back towards Son La seemingly never entered the minds of the soldiers of the Relief Column, nor their leaders.

Caught between the tightening jaws of a vice and with only a hard, bloody road leading back into the hostile wilderness at their backs, the 7th Armored Brigade, under their Brigadier Sir Aibert Penwright, requested permission from Duke New Lancaster to make an assault upon the enemy's blocking emplacements. Such an assault would necessitate crossing the ditch dug across the roadway, as their Knightmares' landspinners would be ineffective on the mud of the paddies and the thick undergrowth of the Indochinese jungle, but Sir Albert asserted that the Sutherland model's Slash Harkon, significantly upgraded in range and strength from the version fielded by the previous generation Glasgow, would permit a crossing with sufficient speed that the 7th Armored stood a good chance in dislodging the enemy force from the hills within the valley and above the village of Ban Cong.

Lost for ideas, Lieutenant General Sir Stewart granted permission to Sir Albert to make the attempt.

At roughly the same time, Major General Sir Henry Hyde, commander of the 23rd Division, requested permission from Sir Stewart to advance his division forwards, away from both the punishing hail of artillery falling on the trailing end of the Relief Column from the persistent Chinese still attached to the pursuing Viet Trung forces, and from the handful of machine gun emplacements established by the Chinese at the summit of the nearby ridge, whose commanding field of fire allowed the gunners to shoot almost straight down into the cowering infantry trapped out on the muddy, near coverless track up the slope of the pass.

Optimistic regarding the outcome of Sir Albert's Knightmare advance, the Duke of New Lancaster granted permission for Sir Henry to advance as well, with duplicate orders passed on to Major General Alfredo Espinoza, commander of the 3rd Honorary Legion.

As is almost always the case for battles involving field elements of the post-Emblem of Blood Britannian Army, the battle hinged on the moment the Knightmares made their charge. Two hundred and thirty seven Sutherlands, the still-functioning core of an entire armored brigade, who no matter how badly attrited, were still piloting the latest generation mass-production model of Knightmare Frame, plunged down from the lip of the pass, landspinners churning the already degraded unpaved Prefectural Route 112 into slurry.

By all accounts, it was not a textbook perfect charge; the geography conspired against Sir Albert in that regard. The pass was simply too narrow, the ground too variable, to commit to the precisely augmented sweep of regimented formations called for by Knightmare Corps doctrine. Instead, the 7th descended in a near manic avalanche of killing power, blazing suppressive fire at the waiting anti-tank cannon strewn across the folds and hills of the valley floor.

In this moment of chivalry misplaced from the battlefields of the Hundred Years' War, the Knightmares truly lived up to their name. Much like their spiritual predecessors at Crecy and Agincourt, the pilots drove their mounts hard into the oncoming fire, certain that once they pushed out of the geographic obstacle and over the broad trench dug across the road, they would slaughter the puny crews manning the decidedly unchivalrous 100 millimeter towed anti-tank guns.

Perhaps two thirds of the Frames in the initial charge made it across the trench. Sir Albert's estimation of the capacity of the Sutherland's Slash Harkons proved well-founded, although the brigadier did not live to see himself vindicated. Caught by a well-placed shell during the initial rush down from the pass, Sir Albert was killed before his force managed to close with the enemy, leaving Colonel Valentina Smythe in command.

While the 7th made its charge, the 23rd and 3rd Honorary were rapidly advancing up the mountain road towards the pass itself, whose angle they hoped would protect them from the lashes of the heavy machine guns mounted on the slope above, as well as from the artillery, whom they hoped would be forced to reposition in order to shell their new position. In fact, to say that the two divisions "rapidly advanced" to their new position would be quite kind to the units in question, both of whom had admittedly sustained significant losses by this point in the campaign. By Chinese and Ten accounts, some elements broke and fled for the safety of the pass, although others successfully maintained the leapfrogging advance as planned by Major Generals Sir Henry and Espinoza.

"The fucking Honoraries broke," snarled Private Cameron, still clearly angered by the memories of that day. "There we were, walking backwards up that damned hill, giving back to the Tens just as good as they gave to us, when the fucking Honoraries ran for their miserable hides!"

"The Britannians fled," claimed Colonel Gutierrez, flatly denying that soldiers from his legion had routed in the face of the enemy. "They couldn't handle it any longer. They all but pushed us into the hands of the insurgents as they fled, so eager were they to save their hides."

By the time the 7th Armored had forded the trench, leading elements of the 23rd and 3rd Honorary had already begun to bunch up at the mouth of the pass, effectively blocking the Knightmares' sole egress, should retreat prove necessary. As more units straggled up to the mouth and saw the concentration of dug-in Chinese units ahead, the congestion in the pass grew increasingly problematic for both transportation and for cover, as the increasingly packed infantry proved an irresistible target for the southernmost light artillery elements.

Back in the valley, the bulk of the surviving 7th had crossed the trench, but had found themselves minus their original commander. While Colonel Smythe managed to rapidly take control, the momentary pause in the advance disrupted the initial momentum and allowed the anti-tank guns positioned around the rim of the valley to reorient to target the bulk of the Knightmares anew. This proved little consolation for the closest Chinese positions, which were rapidly overrun by individual squads of Knightmares acting at their commanders' own recognisance.

As Colonel Smythe re-established command, she directed the Brigade to advance down the secondary road heading east, towards the Hoa Ban Hostelry located halfway up the valley slope. This position would allow her brigade to gain sufficient elevation to rake the anti-tank positions on the low hills within the valley with their Knightmares' assault rifles and Slash Harkons while both outflanking those same positions and reducing the effective field of fire of the bulk of the cannon mounted on the valley's upper slopes.

The downside of this strategy was that it placed the Knightmares well out of range of any possible support from the infantry units congregating in the pass and left the 7th surrounded on three sides by hostile units.

In this case, however, speed proved sufficient armor for the massed Sutherlands. The outflanking maneuver met with initial success, reducing the volume of incoming fire while providing a range of targets for the Knightmare Frames. Capitalizing on this momentary success, Colonel Smythe ordered independent operation by platoon, increasing the flexibility and dispersion of the 7th as well as chaos on the battlefield while reducing the concentration of her forces. From here on-out, the 7th Armored Brigade began to operate as roughly fifteen units of six to ten Sutherlands apiece.

Back up at the increasingly crowded mouth of the pass, the last straggling units of the 3rd arrived, ceding the road back to Son La entirely to the mostly-illusory pursuers. To the great dismay of the bedraggled, shell-shocked infantry, the lash of Chinese shells followed them right to the lip of the pass, ruthlessly punishing the outermost layers of predominantly Honorary infantrymen. At the same time, as the 7th plunged deeper into the valley, emplacements bypassed by the armored unit's rush turned their focus on the leading elements of the infantry carefully stepping out of the northern side of the pass, forcing their withdrawal back to the dubious shelter of the pass itself.

As the fragments of the 7th began to range out across the valley floor, speeding across the valley and strafing Chinese positions, the final "paddle" of Field Marshal Qin's plan arrived in the form of several wings of attack VTOLs, launched an hour earlier from airfields at Muang Mai, in Lao Long. The arrival of Chinese ground-attack assets came as an immense surprise to all elements of Duke New Lancaster's command, as no such air units had heretofore been deployed by the Chinese during this campaign.

"We should have seen it coming," admitted Lieutenant Bower. "After all, it's not like the Chinamen didn't understand what air power could accomplish – Hell, they had enough anti-air on hand for the entire trip to Son La to shoot down any Fatties trying to resupply us, not to mention our own attack VTOLs. But, well…" He shrugged, clearly embarrassed. "They hadn't thrown a single VTOL against us for so long that we just figured they didn't have them. Stupid, really."

Justifiably wary of the highly capable Sutherlands and perhaps leery of the potential for friendly fire, the VTOLs opted to target the highly concentrated, immobilized infantry instead. There was almost no cover, nor were there any viable escape routes. The slopes were rocky, steep, and bare, the road back down to Son La entirely exposed to artillery and sniper fire, and the road into the valley led down into an increasingly dangerous warzone of dueling Knightmares and light artillery.

It was for this moment, more than any other part of the battle, that the name "Nghia Lo Massacre" was earned. An estimated twenty-seven thousand soldiers, trapped in a space roughly a quarter-mile wide by a half-mile long, were bombarded from east, west, north, south and from straight down all at once.

Machine-guns, mounted on the slopes to either side of the pass, exhausted their entire stock of ammunition, forcing crews to resort to small arms to drive escaping soldiers back down onto the killing floor.

Artillery, zeroed in with precision to the areas directly fore and aft the pass, fell in a constant sleet, pulping soldiers maddened or desperate enough to flee north or south.

From above came machine-gun fire in killing hail, supplemented occasionally by air-to-ground unguided missiles. VTOLs launched from Lao Long left, ammunition racks emptied completely, and returned restocked to pour more hate down upon the cowering wretches still crawling maggot-like in the sea of the dead.

"What could we have done?" asked Private Cameron, raising his hands in supplication. It is unclear if this is a rhetorical question or a prayer. "What did I do? I told you, sentimentality was a killer. Is a killer. I found a rock, crawled underneath it, and shot anybody who tried to squeeze me out and themselves within. I was safe and cozy down there, all fourteen hours I spent, till some damn paddy-squatter reached in and pulled me out."

In the valley too, events had begun to turn from bad to worse for the remaining Britannian forces. While the initial wave of Knightmares operating in small units disrupted the Chinese plan to simply deluge the 7th in a sea of artillery, the commanders of the valley-top batteries soon adapted the plan to fit the changing tactical situation. Particular armor squads or platoons venturing into open areas of the valley or within the overlapping ranges of multiple batteries would be pinned in place by coordinated battery fire, with a secondary or tertiary battery firing the kill-shots on the pinned unit.

This approach took time, of course, and a great deal of ammunition, but Field Marshal Qin's plan had originally called for "drowning the Britannian Knightmares in a bottomless well of shells," and so stockpiles more than sufficient were available for the batteries on hand. It was a near-run thing, though: Per witness accounts, "in one day, six month's worth of carefully transported and stored shells were expended, all within the scope of a single valley not more than a hundred kilometers square."

By the second hour of the battle, less than a third of the initial strength of the 7th remained active.

By the eighth hour, as night fell on August 10th, the last surviving Sutherlands powered down, their fuel cells expiring at last. While a handful of the 7th's pilots would be taken alive, mostly those who had been knocked unconscious in the disabled wreckage of their Knightmares, none of the pilots who had danced and dodged until their Knightmares had shut down around them surrendered. Knowing full well the usual fate of pilots who fell into the hands of the Empire's enemies, all including Colonel Smythe opted for suicide via their sidearms to captivity.

By the time the clock ticked over into August 11th, the only living Britannians within the valley and pass of the Ta Xua Range were prisoners. While a few lucky survivors had fled out down the southern slope, willing to take their chances in Son La, few of those survived the solo trek south and east through the Indochinese jungle back to the Britannian holdings along the Annam Coast.

For the first time since the Invasion of Great Britain and the Humiliation at Edinburgh, a Britannian field army had not only been defeated, but had been utterly destroyed. It was a Britannian Cannae, with Lieutenant General Sir Stewart Cavendish, Duke of New Lancaster, a new Lucius Paullus.

And for Japanese and Filipinos, Vietnamese and Malayans, Papuans and Javanese and a dozen other nations who had in living memory been free from the Britannian yoke, Nghia Lo proved both an opportunity and an inspiration. Not only had the single most significant field force in the Pacific Areas had been crushed practically to the last man, but that force had included a full brigade's worth of Knightmares, conclusively defeated in a field engagement.

The Holy Britannian Empire was not unbeatable, and so it was not invincible. Victory might only be a distant possibility, but for the first time since the effortless Conquest of Area 11, hope flared in the hearts of millions of Numbers.

And if freedom was out of reach, vengeance would be a fine consolation.

SCENE 4: Weep for Aurelian

AUGUST 15, 2016 ATB
FORT AURELIAN, NORTH OF SON LA CITY, SON LA PREFECTURE, AREA 10

After so long spent ducking behind parapets and hiding in bunkers, standing out on the pock-marked expanse of Fort Aurelian's battered airfield felt intensely alien to Lowrie "Dutch" Kramer, late of the 13th Support Wing and now of Fort Aurelian.

It was strange, she reflected, for a pilot to become an agoraphobe, but sometime over the months spent dropping to her belly at the crack of an unseen rifle and scurrying for cover at the warning cry of a mortar, Dutch had grown to fear the open air. The sky, once her workplace and personal refuge, had become abominable.

No guns anymore now, no incoming shells… Cracked lips ached as Dutch forced a smile, trying to find a sense of long-awaited relief amid the numb foreboding. That's all over now… It's all over.

Before and behind her, to her left and to her right, the surviving garrison of Fort Aurelian stood in ranks below the open sky. Overgrown hair and lengthy beards hung lank and brittle from withered faces grown pale with hunger. Filthy uniforms, threadbare after months of wear, looked oversized on the soldiers of the 35th, while swollen legs made the worn, holed boots all but impossible to remove.

Bleary-eyed confusion was written large across every face as soldiers and the scant handful of civilian dependents who had survived the siege blinked in the harsh light of a summer's morning. It was the dehydration, Dutch knew, that mostly accounted for those stupified looks, but only mostly. Everybody, herself included, was asking themselves the same question.

"How could it come to this?"

Months of siege, of deprivation, of a heroic struggle against thirst, against malaria, against the damned Tens waiting in the jungles outside of the fort, all for this conclusion. Two months of expectations, so fervently raised when word of the column sent to relieve these loyal sons and daughters of Britannia, all dashed but four nights ago, when word of that column's fate had come through, first from a Ten messenger under a flag of truce and then confirmed by Sai Gon.

How could it come to this?

It didn't matter, Dutch supposed. Somehow, all of the blood and the tears, the courage and desperation, none of it mattered.

They had lost. The siege was being lifted at long last, but only because Major General Sir John Traub, Baron of Rigby and commander of the 35th Division, had sent word to the Tens the day before last that he wanted to discuss terms of surrender.

Bullet in the head if we're lucky, she thought. Beats dying of thirst, I guess. Or fire.

From her place in the ranks, Dutch watched as the small knot of officers, the divisional staff, saluted the flag one last time. At some signal, the Flag of the Holy Cross began its descent down the battered old radio antennae used as a flagpole, one of a long succession of impromptu flagpoles that had borne the Colors of Britannia high over the hill, that had marked Fort Aurelian as a tiny patch of Britannia lost in the verdant, heathen sea of Indochina.

Facing the line of staff officers was another line, a line of cowards, of sneaks, of knives flashing in the dark and bullets whizzing out from the shadows under trees. The Viet Trung had, at last, set their filthy feet upon Fort Aurelian.

It was difficult for Dutch to believe that these were the unseen tormentors, who had kept His Imperial Majesty's forces pinned up here in their private hell for an entire summer. Round-shouldered and stooped, the skinny men and women who ringed the twelve-thousand strong square of surviving Britannian soldiers looked far from intimidating. Nearly as gaunt as the Britannian survivors themselves and dressed in clothing nearly as ragged as their uniforms, only the rifles cradled in their arms looked remotely dangerous.

But then again, I suppose that's really the only thing that matters.

At the head of the formation, someone was talking, though Dutch couldn't make out the words in the flat, still air. Not as her head spun with the familiar dizziness born of months-long chronic dehydration. It took all her focus to keep herself drawn up straight, thumbs in line with where she thought her trouser's seam should be.

There were, she realized, actually two voices coming from the front. The first was garbled nonsense, though she'd heard enough of the Tens' barbaric language to recognize the sound. The second, almost as nonsensical, was an interpreter.

"-will march out a half-mile to the edge of the old road," the interpreter was saying, "where you will divide into companies for processing. All weapons and ammunition are to be surrendered, including side-arms and knives. All food and water are to be surrendered. All valuables are to be surrendered. Any attempt at resistance or concealment will be dealt with stringently."

So that was it, then.

Closing her eyes, Dutch tilted her face up, savoring the sensation of the sun against her skin as she let the meaningless babble of the translator wash over her. None of it mattered. All that mattered was that she was finally, at long last, leaving Fort Aurelian. Not as a heroic defender, greeting the cavalry with a quip and a handshake. Not as a pilot, taking wing once again to leave the earth and all its troubles behind her.

But also not in a body-bag, her more pragmatic side pointed out. It could be worse.

When Dutch had sprinted from her burning VTOL, over fifteen thousand soldiers had manned the defenses of Fort Aurelian. Now, barely twelve thousand stood by to enter captivity. A full fifth of the garrison had died during the last two months, few of them falling to snipers or shellfire. Hunger, thirst, disease, and despair had been the real killers stalking the trenches and bunkers of Fort Aurelian.

And now, I'm leaving it all behind.

Suddenly, the soldier standing in front of her began to move, and Dutch realized that it was her file's time to join the desultory procession off the hill. Half-staggering, she lurched into motion, barely holding herself upright as the world swung around her again. Looking down, she focused on putting one foot in front of the other, step after step, feeling as if she were sleepwalking her way down the hill's gentle slope.

When the bedraggled column snaked its way past Water Street, the old command center dug out halfway up the western slope, Dutch looked up in time to get her first up close view of a Viet Trung. He was young, perhaps fourteen or fifteen at most, but he carried his rifle with an air of long familiarity.

Give him twenty more pounds and put him in Army gray and he'd look just like some of the enlisted did back when I arrived.

Appearing to notice her eyes upon him, the young soldier spat at Dutch's feet and jerked his rifle down the hill, yelling something in the Tens' language. Dimly, the former pilot realized she'd stopped to gawk and, shaking herself, rejoined the stream of humanity flowing downhill, out of Fort Aurelian.

That stream continued to flow past the network of timber-lined communication trenches and over the boards laid over the top of the outer ring defenses as an impromptu bridge, past the half-flooded foxholes and through the ruined swamp of the West Cantonment, all the way to the slight rise that marked the former course of Prefectural Route 106.

Further humiliation awaited the defeated Britannians at the roadbed. Overseen by two hundred or so rifle-toting Tens and who knew how many of their friends lurking under the jungle's cover, twelve thousand sons and daughters of Britannia threw down their rifles and pistols, dropping the coilguns into waiting tarps as an apparent Ten officer tallied the number of each. Grenades were collected with greater care by a trio of insurgents carrying egg cartons. Finally, the survivors of Fort Aurelian were even forced to discard their utility knives and eating utensils, dropping them into another waiting tarp at the shouted direction of an officer bellowing in broken Britannian.

Then, the bastards forced the parched and starving survivors to surrender any food or water they might have.

The circulating boxes came back predictably all but empty, to nobody's great surprise. The fighting spirit of the 35th Division had been eroded by months of sleepless nights and hungry days, but the urge to save a last heel of bread or a carefully husbanded canteen had only been reinforced by long suffering.

At long last, the beatings Dutch had been expecting began. The Tens prowled up and down the lines of captives, yanking anybody they thought might be concealing food out of line. The offender had a chance to turn their pockets out voluntarily. After that…

Feeling numb, Dutch stared blankly ahead as a man wearing sergeant's stripes folded, breath driven from his lungs by a riflebutt's stroke. Another Ten, perhaps the battlebuddy of the woman with the rifle, grabbed the collar of the sergeant's uniform, and then laughed as the rotted cloth tore easily away, taking the back of the threadbare uniform shirt away with it.

The riflebutt came down again, this time on the unfortunate sergeant's neck, and the second Ten joined in, kicking the man to the ground and joining in the beating. Growing bored after a minute, the Tens cut the pockets of the unconscious soldier's uniform open and, finding nothing, waved two more prisoners over to haul the non-com back into line. They did so, carrying the limp man between them, naked to the waist and bleeding from his open mouth.

From somewhere behind Dutch and to her left came a shout, then a gunshot, then laughter.

Maybe someone tried to run. Doesn't sound like it worked.

The heat was relentless; the Tens were moreso.

After an interminable half-hour spent carefully not reacting to the random beatings and occasional gunfire, a great shuffling movement rippled through the assembled Britannians. Slowly, under the incoherent barks of the guards, the increasingly disorganized mob, now bereft of weapons and even the most meager of provisions, were turned back around to face Fort Aurelian.

Looking at it from the outside, it's amazing that anybody would want to fight over it, Dutch reflected.

It was a horrid place, all red mud and bare concrete without a shred of the greenery that grew so thickly over all of the other hills, nature reclaiming the tea plantations abandoned by farmers escaping the crossfire. Surrounded by a wide scar of denuded land, a thin hard-baked crust with sticky mud waiting below like the world's worst shepherd's pie, the central hill of the fort reminded Dutch of nothing less than a vast ingrown hair in the surface of the world, swollen and infected and utterly at odds with the surrounding Indochinese landscape.

In that way, I guess it truly is a little piece of Britannia abroad. If for no other reason then so many Britannians died for it. The thought stirred a tiny shred of defiance in her heart. Yes, she reflected, glaring at the Ten guards from the corner of her eye, enjoy your victory, you damned rebels, but you will never truly take that hill back. It's still Britannian, it will be Britannian again, and it will always be Britannian. We might never see it, but the Holy Empire will triumph! God is with us!

Another barked order, another far away interpreter translating the call and… the great captive force began to stagger back across the Cantonment, back to Fort Aurelian?

Dutch blinked, looking from side to side at her similarly confused comrades, recognizing a dawning horror on their faces that she felt in her heart as she stumbled unwillingly forwards, back towards that little piece of Britannia, that open-air prison.

Why are we going back? Are they making us go back? What's going on?

Up ahead, she saw a handful of Tens filter out, lugging boxes and crates with them. It was only as she passed the party going the opposite way that she recognized those crates as similar to the ones she had once off-loaded from her VTOL in a life that felt like it had belonged to someone else.

The ration stores, Dutch realized, her traitor feet dragging her forwards. They took the last of the stockpiled rations out… They made a point of taking all of our personal rations away…

She glanced around again, finally seeing her captors, as if for the first time. There were so few of them, perhaps only a regiment's worth of the short little pajama-clad bastards. Just enough to keep watch over prisoners stunned by their own surrender and shocked to be outside their ringing fortifications for the first time in months, but nowhere near enough to actually guard a massive column of captives outnumbering them eight to one.

These are Tens, not Chinese regulars! They're jungle fighters, insurgents! They don't have a camp to put us in! But… But they do have the fort…

A fort that had just been stripped of even its paltry stock of food. Drowning in her horror, Dutch was absolutely certain that when someone went to check the water tank that held the rainwater, or the big steel jugs carried in by VTOL, that they would all be holed and empty, the precious drinking water spilled away into the endless mud.

Not enough Tens to march a column of prisoners to some prison compound somewhere, she thought, but definitely enough to shoot anybody who tries to leave the prison we built for ourselves.

When Dutch set foot back on that little patch of Britannia, lost in the green Indochinese sea, it was with the bleak certainty that neither she nor any of the 35th would ever leave Fort Aurelian again.

They had surrendered, and the Chinese and their Ten auxiliaries had acted in a manner directly after her own emperor's heart.

Woe to the vanquished.

Coda: An Early Herald

AUGUST 10, 2016 ATB
LATE EVENING
SHINJUKU GHETTO, TOKYO SETTLEMENT, AREA 11

"I understand," I replied, speaking into the phone's cheap microphone. "Thank you for the warning. Your services are most appreciated, Mister Reid. I wish you a profitable news cycle."

Closing the phone on the turncoat Britannian's no-doubt snarky retort, I allowed the apartment's silence to return as I stared at the abandoned cot that had once been Naoto's.

Diethard had proven his worth yet again tonight, delivering word of the devastating defeat of the Britannian field army in Area 10 at the hands of the Chinese as well as the main gist of the official story due to be aired first thing tomorrow morning. While I had little doubt that Kaguya and the rest of the Kyoto leadership would receive similar reports of the calamity from their own agents, the rest of Japan would remain ignorant of the details of the Britannian reverse. Indeed, I was certain that all but a handful of Britannians in Area 11 would remain similarly ignorant.

That mattered little, from where I was sitting. No matter how the Britannians tried to spin the defeat – Diethard said that the current story would claim that the Britannians had halted their march in order to provide humanitarian aid to local Ten civilians in the wake of wide-spread flooding and had been cruelly attacked by Chinese and Ten collaborators while spread out and unprepared – the two infantry divisions and armored brigade would be no less incapable of reinforcing Britannian garrisons across the East Asian and Pacific spheres.

That should be cause for celebration, I thought glumly, resisting the urge to juice my enhancement suite as my mood plummeted. No, the defeat itself certainly is cause for celebration; the issue is the anticipation that now is the moment to strike, before the Britannians can repair their temporary handicap. And even that isn't necessarily the issue, so much as the fact that we are still so, so far away from true readiness… and that the slaughter in Yokohama has thoroughly discredited any appeal to patience in advance.

Damn you, Chihiro.

Here in this worn-out studio, my home for lack of any other location I could rest my head with any sense of security, I felt trapped. It felt so obvious to me, how things would proceed from this point.

According to Kaguya's excited chatter, Munakata and his conservative faction among Kyoto House had fallen from grace in the wake of Yokohama, and their loss had been to the gain of the nationalist faction headed by Kaguya and her mentor, Lord Taizo. For all of her clear acumen, my impression of Kaguya was that she positively burned with desire to free her country. Asking her to turn back from this opportunity would be all but impossible.

Even if I declined to honor our deal, I doubted she would lack for swords. From all that Major Onoda had told me about his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kusakabe, I could envision no scenario where the commander of the JLF's 3rd Division declined an attempt to bring about the Day of Liberation he had dreamed of for so long. Based on the colonel's previous acts of gekokujo, General Katase would be at the very least wary of issuing any orders countermanding his powerful subordinate's decision. Indeed, since I had handed Kusakabe an opportunity to take full credit for the only successful operation of scale conducted by the JLF in years, I imagined any such order Katase was nevertheless inclined to give would soon be followed by a changing of the guard in the JLF's leadership.

And to cap it all off, I even gave him a consignment of Knightmare parts, tools, and energy filters. Just what Kusakabe would need to guarantee a successful lightning assault.

And if I decided not to go along with this madness… Perhaps the JLF wouldn't be the only organization to sustain a sudden change in leadership.

That might be simple paranoia or catastrophizing brought on by fatigue, but I couldn't fully discount the possibility. The reluctance to take orders from a hafu had subsided of late, but a sufficiently unpopular order, especially one to hold back from attacking the Britannians in their weakness, could breathe new life into the old resentments. Nishizumi was a snake, of course, but he at least had a certain cynicism that passed for reasonability. What worried me more was the potential for some fresh Chihiro to step out from the crowd some day and fire a bullet straight into my back.

But we simply aren't ready. Am I the only one who sees as much?

With a chill, I realized I might very well be the only person in possession of the facts who had sufficient knowledge of full-scale war to indeed see as much.

The last war the Japanese had fought had been a one-sided slaughter, but for all of its devastation, it had been remarkably quick. Japan had been taken by surprise and its leader had brought the war to a screeching halt with a shocking surrender. Both factors made it easy for angry Japanese to discount the humiliation as the result of perfidy. Not a fair fight, as if such a thing mattered.

The war before that was effectively out of living memory. I doubted many veterans of the First Pacific War had survived the hard years since the Conquest, not as food became scarce and casual cruelty common.

But I stood watch on the Rhine. I captured Orse Fjord. I witnessed the death of Arene, a death delivered by merciless artillery and an encircling military that the partisans and their Francois mage allies could not overcome.

More than any other living Japanese, I know what will happen if Kusakabe gets his way.

In my mind's eye, I saw Shinjuku, that twelve and a half square kilometer prison encircled by walls, home to just over two hundred thousand people, despite the ongoing evacuation up the ratlines. I envisioned howitzers, towed guns lined up wheel to wheel in great lines, barrels heaving and buckling as the caissons jumped and rolled with the recoil. I saw the rotten skyscrapers of dead Tokyo buckling, old steel screaming as the concrete dust rose in plumes from shattered tenements.

The guns… The guns… I shivered at the thought, clenching my upper arms. Somehow, the self-embrace did nothing to push the cold away.

I had seen death in many forms, but few were quite as terrible as death by artillery. The way it pulverized the body, obliterating anything familiar or recognizable… The way it left its victims smashed into the mud, spread out for meters all around… The way men unharmed by the explosion itself were injured by the bone shards, the helmets and bent rifles, the jewelry and shovels and sometimes just by the dismembered limbs all sent flying… Nothing about it smacked of the human.

It was a mechanical death, death by shelling, the final result of a dehumanizing system that stripped the individual first of their rights, then of their autonomy, before finally ripping away any hope for a future and eventually their existence. There was no way to buy one's way free of the thresher, nor any opportunity to reason or plead with some tormentor. It was a faceless enemy, remorseless and deadly. It took everything from you, most especially your dignity, all without giving the poor soldier writhing in the churned mud anything human to rage against. When the iron rain fell, there were no depths of desperation to which a soldier would not sink…

Please, please, please! Help me! Did you want prayer? That's what you wanted, right?! I'll pray to you! I'll use the Type 95! Just please! Help me! Not like this! I don't want to die like this!

Yes, I knew all about artillery.

But how could I convince my people of the folly? How could I tell the girl upon whose largesse my starving people depended that she had to push back against the hotheads who told her that she could finally be free under her own name?

How could I tell any child whose father or mother had died at Britannian hands to keep their calm and play the long game?

…No matter what else, the news will come out soon. Best, I decided, that Shinjuku hear it from me.

There would be celebrations, I knew. People would embrace and laugh with joy. I would laugh and smile with them tonight, for to do anything else would spook them and steal this precious moment of hope away. I had a duty as a leader, and part of that duty was to make the daily horror of our situation into something palatable, and so I could do no less than encourage my people to celebrate and to remember that all empires died some day.

After the celebration, I could continue to find an escape out of this trap I had placed myself within. And if no such escape was possible… I would just have to figure out how to triumph despite myself.