7th February 1996 (63:9:28)
— Contact plus 00.05.04:17.30
Beth walked across the scorched earth — slowly and carefully, her footing turned slick and sticky with water and blood soaked into the soil, half-healed burns throbbing and stinging. It seemed quiet and loud all at once, the pounding of countless guns and the roaring of fire gone silent, replaced with the chatter of voices and the rumbling of equipment and crackling of magic...
It was over.
The final battle against the alien landing in Indochina had taken two, maybe three weeks from start to finish. Beth wasn't sure exactly how long it'd been going on, her troop (with their Syrian, Soviet, and Laotian friends) hadn't arrived until well after it'd already started. They'd linked up with a sizeable British force just moved in from the Congo — the fighting more or less done there, they'd been splitting their resources between the other battles still ongoing here, in India, and in the Amazon — the gaps in their troop patched up with people from wherever. They'd been put on the edge of the British division, with a second SCF troop, so the magical translators could better help coordinate between the English-speaking soldiers on one side and the Vietnamese-speaking ones on the other. (Though the other troop's translator was actually a mind mage instead of an omniglot, still worked.) The slick magic radios just starting to come in helped a little, but they didn't have enough for full coverage yet, so having a few translators on the ground in more mixed areas helped keep things from getting too messy.
Like, for example, accidentally hitting each other with friendly fire. That had still happened, as Beth's injuries proved, but they'd tried to keep it to a minimum, at least.
The fighting had been long, and slow, and bloody, and miserable — though Beth had actually missed big parts of it, thanks to getting herself injured, twice, like an idiot. The aliens hadn't been right on the shore, more toward the heart of the delta region, so they'd been able to land people behind them — mages under concealment spells sneaking in over the water, and then marking spots to transport hundreds and hundreds of soldiers and countless tonnes of equipment in by portkey — so they could press in on the aliens from all sides. Or, they'd mostly surrounded the aliens, they couldn't actually cover literally every inch in the circle. The aliens had spread out over a pretty large portion of the wide, flat, muddy, heavily-cultivated delta region, the endless rice paddies converted for their own uses (the local population either killed or captured and brainwashed), they simply didn't have the numbers to constantly watch all of it. There were occasions where small groups of dinos or scab assassins managed to slip through the gaps and try to hit them from behind, turning the battle even more confusingly chaotic.
At least they'd had pretty significant air support this time, thanks to most of the aliens' aircraft already being knocked out and the big spaceships being scared off. Before Beth's troop had even gotten down here, the entire region had already been softened up by a constant rain of missile strikes — Soviet equipment, mostly, but they'd also been hit from the other side by American installations in the Philippines, and a surprise attack from the Korean navy, dropping concealment spells once they were in place just off shore and instantly opening fire. (Which was a neat trick, Beth had heard they'd gotten help from Chinese and Japanese mages to get together the raw power necessary to hold the proper spells to hide them from alien detection for that long.) After that bombardment had gone on for a few days, they'd stopped with the big, long-range missiles and swapped over to bombing runs — every once in a while, Beth would hear a deep, sharp roar of engines coming from one direction, they'd get an order to halt and get into cover (throwing up whatever defensive magics they could manage on short notice), and muggle aircraft of some kind would scream across the sky, and large strips of the land would just light up, blotting out half of the landscape with fire and smoke, the noise incredible, her head rattling and echoing in her chest...
Beth completely missed this as it was happening, but apparently the battle was going badly enough that the aliens up in space had moved their ships in to bombard the airstrips the planes were flying out of. And also targeting the Korean navy, apparently — after unloading long-range missiles from the shore, the ones that would fit had continued picking up the various branches of the river, essentially acting as armoured mobile heavy weapons platforms to back up the infantry on the ground, which was clever. (Beth had never seen one at it, but she'd heard the oversized naval guns pounding away in the distance a few times.) Unfortunately for them, just like the Americans months ago now, the Soviets had been waiting for them to try that: they'd barely even been in position, just started firing lava bombs down at the surface, when a volley of nuclear fucking missiles tore through their formation. One of the smaller ships was completely destroyed — Beth had seen the burning debris streaking across the sky, like a dense little meteor shower — and they'd even managed to clip the big, seashell-shaped one, blowing a decent-sized hole through it, sending it limping away for repairs. From that point through to the end, they had completely uncontested control of the skies over the region — the pilots had to be careful flying too close to the ground, since the aliens still had surface-to-air weapons, but the bombardment could go on more or less uninterrupted as their forces on the ground slowly crawled their way along.
The first time she was injured during the battle, she learned that Sirius was actually with the British forces who'd been moved here — she'd had no idea until he'd turned up while she was in hospital. (Apparently, Sirius and also Hedwig were on her file as her only living family, to be contacted in an emergency.) The aliens were being pretty liberal with the use of their bug grenades, they'd rigged up devices that would fly over and then burst, flinging out dozens of them in all directions. Beth had seen one coming, and managed to tag it with Sunflame, but that'd only killed most of the bugs — one of the survivors had imbedded itself in her side before she could react. One of the slicing bugs, cutting deep into her before getting caught on a bone somewhere, and it'd still been alive squirming around insider her, which was extremely fucking uncomfortable fuck fuck fuck. (Just remembering it still made her nauseous.) Bill had had to pull some reckless battlefield surgery shite to dig the fucker out, which Beth didn't really remember very well, to be honest, the whole thing just a smear of noise and pain and the squirming and blood — she'd either passed out or been stunned pretty quickly, waking up in hospital in Biên Hòa.
She'd spent a single afternoon with Sirius while she was recovering — the first time they'd seen each other in like half a year. Sirius looked surprisingly good, actually. His messy mane of hair had been chopped short — which he'd sarcastically whined about, but it was just too bloody hot here — months of tropical sun having chased away the unhealthy pallor he'd still had from Azkaban. And he'd seemed fitter, not so terribly thin anymore, a bit more energy in his smirk than usual. Tired and strained from the fighting, yes, but paradoxically in better shape than he'd been before the invasion started.
As indescribably awful as the war was, as many people would die before this was over, that Sirius seemed to be doing better was one good thing Beth could take out of it, she guessed. Though, honestly, not being able to just laze around the house drinking probably had a lot to do with it...
Beth had been sent back out to her troop as soon as she'd been well enough to fight again. Closing in on the centre of the alien settlement, so dense it was practically a small city, they'd only been a few days away from the end of the battle before Beth had gotten injured the second time — and this one was, again, kind of her fault. They'd been picking through a bombed-out alien village, little more than scorched shell and bone and mounds of mangled charred flesh (the familiar burned bacon smell of dead alien tech heavy on the air), corpses both human and alien strewn about, too badly torn apart and blackened to be quite recogniseable, their species only determinable by the different blood colours. Apparently some aliens had been hiding out in the rubble for people to come by, leaped out at the back of the Vietnamese team just to their left. Beth had apparated over behind them, came out cursing...and then suddenly she was on fire.
She wasn't sure what happened, exactly. It was possible she'd been caught up in a curse or some kind of incendiary explosive from their side, or it could have been one of those spear-fire-grenade things the aliens had going off, or some of their bugs for that matter. She had been shot, though, at least five times — that definitely hadn't been the aliens. In retrospect, apparating opposite the aliens from their people had been a fucking stupid idea, since any bullets that missed them would continue right on and hit her, but she hadn't been thinking at the time, heard the noise and saw what was happening, saw Quyên go down in a spray of blood, and she'd jumped without thinking.
She was told that the distraction had been helpful, giving their people a few seconds to react, but mostly she just remembered how much being on fire fucking hurt. She didn't even remember getting shot at all — her memory faded out pretty quickly after the burning alive started, which was probably for the best, honestly.
Beth had still been in hospital, unconscious — kept in a coma as her skin was grown back, which was a thing magical healing could do — when the battle ended. She heard about it well after the fact, when half of her troop came to visit her — still a bit delirious, silly from pain meds. By the time she was let out, the clean-up operations had mostly finished. They suspected there were probably still aliens in the region somewhere, they had teams scouring the whole peninsula looking for any signs of them, but the battle proper was certainly over.
The delta was wide and flat, stitched through with countless river channels and artificial canals, the ground under their feet gradually built up over millennia by silt carried in from upriver. Before, practically the whole delta region, with the exception of a few towns dotted here and there, was all farmland — rice, mostly, but some other crops mixed in to give the area a bit of texture, broken up with strands of palm and coconut and cashew and various fruit trees. (A lot of the food they grew here was actually new to her, especially the fruit, apparently they only grew in the tropics and didn't transport well.) By the time the war came here, some of the local plants were still there, but much of the farmland had been stripped, replaced with unfamiliar alien plantlife. They had these funny stalks grown in paddies a lot like rice, with these fruits on the end that glowed in the night, weirdly pretty...
All that was gone, of course — the delta was a wasteland now. The ground under Beth's feet black and green and red from ash and blood, the sun dim from acrid smoke, so much of the plantlife burned away that you could clearly see how wide and flat the terrain was here, stretching on and on, a mangled ruin of an alien building or some muggle equipment scattered about, stitched with canals (both man- and alien-made) or just countless puddles formed in craters from explosions, the filthy water gleaming dull in the murk...
Beth would say it looked like hell on earth, but she was pretty sure hell wasn't supposed to be this damp.
There were people around, construction and digging equipment — portkeyed in, roads didn't reach here and the ground was too muddy for them to move easily — working out the remains of the alien structures, clearing out canals and reforming the irrigation and dikes and shite for new rice paddies as quickly as possible, mages inching through behind the muggles to filter contaminates out of the soil with some complicated transfiguration spells. An enormous proportion of Indochina's (and a good chunk of the world's) rice had been grown here, and famine was looming on the horizon. They'd lost the vast majority of the crop that had already been here at the time of the landing, they wanted to get a new one down as soon as possible. As thorough as the destruction had been, that was going to be difficult — not just rebuilding everything that was lost, but there was stuff to do with companion plants and helpful insects and shite, Beth didn't know. She'd heard gossip that it could easily be a decade or more before their output here was back to normal. Shorter than that with the help of magic, thankfully, but, just losing the rice from the delta was going to be significant blow to the world food supply, just by itself.
Honestly, Beth was considering asking to stay in Vietnam, to help with getting food production back up and running. There was still fighting going on in India and the Amazon, but with how bad the food situation was going to start getting soon, she suspected this was actually where she'd be able to do the most good. Someone would have to teach her the spells, sure, but she would learn them quickly — she was a cheating omniglot, after all — and she was a pretty powerful mage, so, once she had them down she could probably blow through shite pretty quick. Not to mention, they knew there were still survivors stalking about, they could use a few wands watching their backs...
As much of a fucking mess as this place was, it was honestly hard to imagine they'd get it back together in time to make any difference at all, at least not any time soon. Magic could pull off some crazy shite, true, but, fuck, it was going to get bad...
"There you are!" That was Sirius's voice, she glanced that way — toward a patch of boards they'd put down for flat ground, at the centre a pavilion shading a table strewn with maps and notes and shite — to see him picking across the muddy ground, cursing through his teeth as one boot splashed into a puddle. He still looked somewhat off to Beth, without the curly mane of hair around his shoulders, his skin with some actual colour to it, but Beth guessed she looked rather different now too, so. He had his uniform trousers on, but he hadn't bothered with the jacket, just wearing a pale off-white vest, streaked with ash and speckled with sweat — it was bloody hot and humid out here, so. "I've been trying to find you, your boys didn't know where you'd gone." Her troop, he meant, he liked to call them that for some reason. "What are you doing all the way the fuck out here, anyway?"
Beth shrugged — she didn't really know how to answer that question. She'd just wanted to get out of the camp, didn't know why she'd come here in particular... "How'd you find me?"
"Blood tracking."
She rolled her eyes, her cheeks puffing out in a sigh. Sirius might be one of the good guys, but he had grown up in the House of Black, he'd learned all kinds of weird esoteric magics. Including blood magic you could use to easily direct yourself to close relatives — proper tracking spells normally needed something that belonged to the target (like a hair or something), using blood magic was cheating. It wasn't even the first time he'd done it with her, apparently that was how he'd found her in Little Whinging that summer too. "Of course. Fucking purebloods..."
"If there's one thing we're good at." Beth was pretty sure that was supposed to be an incest joke. He came up next to her, turning to follow her line of sight — not that she was really looking at any particular thing. Just, fuck, this place was a mess, that was all... "So, what's up? You okay?"
She shrugged, the motion tugging at her still-tender skin, sweeping over her in funny little prickles. "Dunno. Just thought I'd take a walk."
Sirius gave her a single raised eyebrow. "Here?"
She didn't really have an answer for that, so she just shrugged again.
"No seriously, kid, how are you doing?"
"I'm fine, Sirius, I just..." She glanced over the devastated landscape, mud and ash, swallowing down...something. "I don't know. It's been a long few months, that's all."
"...Yeah." A solemn quiet coming over him, Sirius glared out into the distance for a silent moment. Beth was aware he still wasn't happy about her fighting — right up until the aliens attacked, he'd been hoping he'd be able to keep her out of the war with the Death Eaters, that his generation could clean it up before she was old enough. Of course, that probably wouldn't have worked very well — Beth was hardly any more likely to just sit back and do nothing about the Death Eaters as she was the aliens — but Sirius could be stubborn like that sometimes. He'd argued about her joining the SCF, really hadn't wanted her to go, but he also hadn't tried to stop her when she got stubborn about it. She couldn't guess what exactly was going on in his head, but it seemed likely he was beating himself up in there about not stopping her from getting herself involved in this shite.
So, when he shuffled closer, she let him wrap an arm around her, turned to lean her head against his shoulder — despite the unpleasant tingling from her still-sensitive skin, and how bloody hot and humid it was here.
After a moment standing there in silence, Beth groped for his hand, gave it a quick squeeze. "We are winning, you know."
"I know." A little bit of the stiffness leaked out of him, and she could hear the smirk on his face as he said, "Bet those bastards are fucking regretting ever showing their ugly faces here."
Beth was pretty sure they were, yes. She didn't exactly have much of a bird's eye view just cursing the alien right in front of her, but according to Hermione the smart people were certain the aliens had expected their planet to be a much softer target than it'd ended up being. At this point, pretty much the only thing they had to worry about was reinforcements coming in — which was possible, they were certain there were more of these bastards out there somewhere...
They were going to win — not just here in Vietnam, but everywhere. A lot of people had already died, and a lot more were going to as the worst of the famine finally hit. It was already starting to get bad, Hermione said, but they hadn't seen anything yet. Things were still going to suck for a while, but they were going to make it, in the end.
(And that was worth it, no matter what happened to Beth. Sirius understood that — he hadn't stopped her for a reason.)
"Come on, kid," Sirius sighed, giving her shoulder a final squeeze before letting go. "Some friends and I were going in to the city for the evening. You look like you could use a good night out."
Biên Hòa, he meant. The Vietnamese (with some foreign help) had managed to hold most of Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh throughout the entirety of the war, despite having a landing so close by. The city centre had been hit pretty badly in the initial bombing, and intermittently afterward, the vast majority of the civilian population evacuated northeast across the rivers, the metropolis descending into a massive urban battlefield. Naturally, the Vietnamese had posted soldiers and equipment all over the place, converting the city into one big death trap — the fighting had been pretty much constant, the damage to the city's infrastructure crippling, but it'd never technically been lost, and they'd even managed to save most of the residents.
The fighting was almost entirely kept west of the River Sài Gòn, the strip of land between the Sài Gòn and Đồng Nai heavily fortified and built up with local residents and military people moving in from elsewhere in Vietnam and a litany of allied countries. The towns of that strip — Thủ Đức, Dĩ An, Thuận An — were very professional-like, an oversized army camp, set up all practical and ready to jump at an incoming attack on the city proper across the Sài Gòn at any moment. The more civilian environment was just on the other side of the Đồng Nai, in the city of Biên Hòa — that was also where they'd put stuff like the hospitals, further behind their lines where they'd have time to catch infiltrators. (They'd quickly learned that the aliens liked to do their suicide sneak-attacks on healing centres, if they could find them.) Beth had heard there were, like, restaurants and pubs and dance clubs and the like that were still operational there...when they could find the supplies, and power for sound systems, apparently there was a lot of negotiation going on behind the scenes the people running the places were doing to keep everything up.
They did get plenty of help doing that, of course, for morale reasons, but sometimes the leadership had to pick and choose priorities. Shortages of various supplies were starting to become a serious problem — fuel in particular, they were rationing electricity pretty strictly these days...
Not that Beth really felt like partying that much — she was still recovering from being set on fire and shot five times, she felt all slow and tired...
"...Yeah," she agreed, letting out a sigh. "Yeah, why not? Not sure I'll be great company, I'm a bit, you know."
Sirius nodded. "Healing comas can do that to you. The best thing you can do to get through it is try to do things, to get your body and mind going again. Going for a walk isn't a bad idea — even if you could have picked somewhere with a better view." After looking over their bleak surroundings with a grimace, he turned a smirk back on her. "Come on, Beth, we won! That calls for celebration! And hey, if you get lucky, you might get lucky again."
Tipping her head back, Beth let out a groan. "Bill tell you about that, did he?"
"Sam, actually." Of course, the nosey bastard. "Seemed to think I should know for adult, making sure the kid you're responsible for is okay reasons, but honestly I'm impressed, Beth. I didn't start successfully seducing older women until after I'd gotten my NEWTs — my teenage self would be very jealous."
"Oh shut up," she said, rolling her eyes, "I've heard the stories of what you were like as a teenager, I know you think you're funny but I— Hold up a sec." While rolling her eyes she'd caught an odd hint of movement, gave it up a double-take. There was something... "I want to check something quick, and then we can go."
A short walk away, one of the teams was working at something, she couldn't tell exactly. They had one of those big damn digging machine things with them — Beth didn't know what they were called — and while turning up a heap of dirt she'd caught a glimpse of something odd. She walked closer, Sirius patiently trailing along behind her, stepping carefully to not slip in the mud, circling around the occasional puddle. The engine of the big bloody thing was loud, a deep hard thrumming making her teeth vibrate in her skull, the hydraulics hissing and puffing...
There! There it was again! She was closer now, she could see it better: when the scoop of the digger disturbed the earth, it shook loose a bunch of these tiny little reddish-brownish bugs, enough of them moving around that the surface seemed to undulate a little before they settled again. As she watched, there were a couple other bugs, larger, some a brighter red and others a pale sky blue, but they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the tiny little reddish-brown ones. What the hell were those?
"Hey, um..." Beth glanced around, spotted a middle-aged local man nearby, had a vague air of being in charge about him. Trotting closer, waving a hand over her head, she called, "Hey, boss! What are those bugs?"
The man gave her a bemused sort of look, eyes glancing down over her uniform quick. "Dunno. Never seen them before, turned 'em up when we started digging. Every time we see a new one we catch it and send it off to the scientists."
"...I see." Beth had thought it was possible that they were a local thing she'd just never come across before — but the man confirming they were new to him too had unpleasant prickles running down her spine, like eyes on her back, a cold stone dropping through her stomach. "They must have been left behind by the scabs."
"Must have."
"Any idea what they're doing?"
The man gave a noncommittal tilt of his head. "Nope, I'll leave figuring that out to the lab types. Stink something awful, though."
"...Right. Thanks." Beth retreated from the team of workers, occasionally glancing back at the digger. A bunch of bugs were turned up by the next scoop too, dozens and dozens of the little things crawling all over...
"What is it?" Sirius asked.
"I don't know." Once they were well out of the way, Beth crouched down. Drawing her wand with a flick of her wrist, she turned up a chunk of dirt — unsurprisingly, a bunch of the little reddish-brownish beetles scurried around, scrambling to burrow back below the surface, Beth snatched one up before it could. The bug was flat and round, the shell almost a disc — sort of reminding her of the aliens' bug grenades, but much smaller in size, easily pinched between the pads of her finger and thumb — with...six tiny little skeletal legs, and two more at the front formed into bulkier grasping arms, like a miniature scorpion. Again, a lot like their bug grenades, except this one didn't seem to have wings at all. It was a tiny little thing, maybe half an inch wide...and there was a funny smell to it, a faint whiff of rotten eggs...
Beth cast a slicing charm off at an angle, skimming over the surface, cutting a long, shallow channel. Bugs came swarming up all along the length, some here and there had even been sliced apart by the curse, scrambling around for a few seconds before they disappeared, burrowing underground again.
"I don't know, but I don't like it. I've got a really bad feeling about these things, Sirius."
"...Yeah. Yeah, me too, kid." His hand coming down softly on her shoulder, he let out a thin sigh. "There's nothing we can do about that, though. Let the brains of the operation figure that shite out — that's their job. Our job is to blow up shite, if we can help with this they'll tell us."
Yeah, he was probably right about that. Beth didn't like just waiting, though, this was going to bother her now...
"Come on, kid, let's go get pissed. Drinks are on Michael, he owes me twelve for saving his stupid arse too many damn times."
"...Fine." Beth tossed the bug away, obliterated it with a piercing curse before it could slip away into hiding. She stood up, held out a hand to Sirius. He took it, and a blink later they were apparating away, leaving the delta behind.
Physically, at least — the whole night, Beth couldn't get the blackened, ruined landscape out of her mind, countless alien bugs churning unseen just under her feet.