Chapter 40 – The Bodies in the Marsh

Mk23 -IRJ Droplet – Class 7 – Carpe Victoria (Wrecked)

Sector - Unknown

Planet - Unknown

30th November 2342 (BSST)

Sitting beside the river that flows through my new camp whilst the rain continues pelting down has been my life for the last few days.

At first, I had thought that the monsoon had started to pass; the howling wind had begun abating and the lashing rain had slowed its whipping vengeance.

As if sensing my thought, the weather had then picked up anew. A full-on storm rolling in. Thunder and lightening roaring at me in the dead of night.

It was two days into this current storm, and the banks of my river were fit to bursting. I sat further up the bank than I had thought I ever might need to, the shelter of the cliff sides and the little nook I had hid myself into a few days ago was only just available to me.

Huddled into the walls, I stared blank faced at the raging waters, torrents of which cascade down from the cliffs and thunder down to the river below. Eddies and whirlpools fill up the river; white horses leap around the surface with free abandon and in those moments of perfect clarity, the world stands still as I observe its rage. I shiver as it screams at me, hiding away inside my suit. Nothing is so humbling as mother nature. Humans may have tried to claim dominion, but mother nature was still in charge at the end of the day, and never more than now.

***

The slack waters that gently flowed by, carried forth the muddied scent of destruction. The storm had passed but a few hours ago, carrying the rain with it.

Now, the sun was peeking out of the cloud-filled skies for the first time in weeks and the shining rays lit up strips on the muddy waters.

The rushing water had stirred up the bottom of the river, shifting the layers of silt and exposing the rotting remnants that had laid on the floor during necrosis, releasing pockets of mephitic gas that rose from the water, filling the air with the heady scents of death.

Soon, the cause of such smells came tumbling down the waterfall. Carcasses and lots of them, fish, mammals, birds and all manner of creatures tumbled over, landing with a wet slap on the water. Often they would break apart on impact and the denser bones might break off and slide down into the oozing mud, to stick forever more.

The broken remnants floated onwards towards the sea and out of sight.

But still they came, the carcasses disturbed by the necrotic gasses and formerly turbulent currents.

I stared at the lazy river of horrors, absorbed in the scenes that passed me by, scrolling off like an old-fashioned film.

But this wasn’t the ending credits, no! It was just the prologue.

Following the animal carcasses down, the wet slap of something larger rang out.

My eyes snapped over to it, leaving the birds behind. Now, rising up from the water like the lady of the lake in the Matter of Britain, the shape rises up, clawed hand emerging first, the water streaming over the rotting flesh.

As the current of the pounding waterfall releases the rest of it, the lady rolls over and the vaguely human shape floats to the surface.

Over the next hour or so, another few bodies turn up, floating along in the water. I stare, emotionless on the surface yet I’m absorbed in my own world, fear roils and boils in the soup of my emotions as my vision begins to flicker.

The river begins to morph into a marshland, the water stained red and the floating grasses squashed down as a boot comes crashing down but inches from my head, kicking up the water into my eyes and drenching me.

I’m back to the river and the tweeting of birds in the early morning.

The marsh. “Get going troops! We push onwards! Nec receptus deditionem iter.” A gruff voice shouted. The motto of the infantry, it meant ‘no retreat, no surrender, march on.’

A foolish sentiment if I ever heard one but that was the way of the infantry. Meant to impress the idiots who found it inspiring and focus those incompetent leaders on acquiring a goal even if there were far better ways of doing it. At least while the morons were busy, the actual generals could do it properly, using them as a distraction at the very least.

My vision faded back to the river and I leant over, absorbed in the past as memories bubbled to the surface, swelling and encompassing me like the very river.

The marsh, once again. It bloomed, and I felt myself fall back in time, gripped once again in that first horrific conflict.

The rubbing whisper of synthetic leather, the squelch and boom of the marching feet sinking into the marsh, the clack, clack of the guns against our packs and the coughing wheeze of the soldiers in the thin air filled our ears as we marched.

The smell of the death took hold and we shivered, anticipation and fear rife within the ranks. We were the fifth wave to take to the swamp. Ten thousand strong, to delay the relief efforts for just a few minutes before the next wave took their turn. Marching over our blistered, bleeding bodies as they sought to delay just a few minutes more.

It was the tenth battle in our ongoing war with the Sectanids and a bloody brutal battle it was. They were vastly inferior in space and air warfare, however they had a technology we had called gravitational needle mines that had forced us to fight them face to face. Boot for boot in the mud on one of the occupied planets.

The planet, R6JPD-Earth-Beta-1, had been a potential site of human expansion on the free frontier and we had staked a claim to it, as it was the closest to our needs.

But before we had got anywhere near colonisation, the Sectanids had seeded the planet, transforming the once solid, bountiful planet into the horrid marsh they loved. It was no longer useable and though we would abandon it shortly, we couldn’t let them have the foothold.

Only a short step from R6 was the Human planet E7. A strategic point, it held the line so to speak for entry to the human arm of the galaxy and closed us off from attack from the free frontier.

Letting the Sectanids have this would be disastrous, hence the battle of attrition on R6 that we were currently engaged in. Already forty-thousand had marched to their death across the swamps and marshes of R6 and many more were to come.

The treeline faded back, and the fifth wave and I began the run to the first and only trench. A wall of bodies throwing themselves forward, absorbing the counter fire as we pressed onwards. Men and women collapsed around me, horrific wounds scarring them for life – if they survived.

I pressed my face into the back of the man in front of me, the first three lines had been cut down already and the fourth was up.

I stepped over someone, careful to avoid them, though I felt a jolt, I looked down. I hadn’t stood on him.

It confused me.

Like a tree falling, the man in front of me started to fall, poleaxed.

I grasped at his hand trying to steady him, but it just twisted him around as he dragged me to the floor.

I ended up straddling him, staring eye to eye with the first corpse of my life. The first one so close. The bombing of my childhood had seen me grasp death hand in hand, but this, this was something else.

He had been struck by a PNL beam. Pulse narrowing lasers were terrible, terrible weapons, but only now had I grasped just how terrible they were.

The laser had struck him on the face plate, melting through it in seconds and spraying him with the molten sharps of plastic composite that they were made of.

The remaining laser pulse had begun to sear his face bubbling the skin like a marshmallow in a fire, the plastic fragments welding to his skin. I thought he looked like a human smore. His eye had popped, and the socket was leaking some form of fluid that tracked down his face, making him cry.

I threw up right there, before being squashed down by the boots of the men behind, thinking I was dead already.

I scrambled to my feet and retook my place in line as we rushed to the trench. Laser fire and projectiles screamed overhead lighting up the skies like a stage show, only this time it wasn’t for show.

We made it, from the ten-thousand that had started, I thought perhaps just over two had made it.

The trench was an important position as it kept us engaging the Sectanids. If we let off for but a few moments, they would be able to get reinforcements. The needle mine field had stopped air support and to get the relief craft in they would have to deactivate a section of the field. To do that they had to drive us back to prevent an artillery strike, so this trench was the all-important position. If they could control it, the battle was over and R6 was theirs.

All along the wall, soldiers poked their heads up and fired back, the Sectanids had, however, released a smoke screen through which they fired at us. We were firing blind and broken but we wouldn’t give up, no matter how many of us fell.

Life in the trench was short and hard, the three days that I spent fighting had scarred me for life, by body and by soul. I saw things that shook me to the core, things I hadn’t seen before. I could have walked away, should have even. But I knew, this was who I was now. Soldier, nothing more, nothing less.

Three days into the fight and the Sectanids had grown desperate. Despite killing thousands of us, they were losing, with no reinforcements coming in this stalemate, they were slowly dwindling members and the even match wouldn’t last much longer.

As the sun set on the day and night took hold they gave us a last-ditch push. Running over the marshes with unnatural ease. We slaughtered them with our guns, but the looping strides of these vermillion crested bugs ate up the ground in quick order. As our tired eyes struggled to keep track of them they made it to the trench and slid in.

Chaos!

That’s what it was.

Men hit men, Sectanid against Sectanid and the pile of death grew ever higher in the meantime.

It was last ditch efforts for us all, we couldn’t give up the trench and they couldn’t let us have it either.

Bullets flew, grenades, boomed and the whistling scream of the projectiles cheered us on.

Click.

Shit.

Grenade, grenade! I thought, scrambling for one.

Pull the pin!

Boom!

Darkness.

I cried out, gasping as I came back to myself. The memories had come back with a vengeance. The bodies in the river had been eerily similar and the memories, once buried, had come rushing back in, gripping my heart with cold dead fingers. Like a twisting knife in the gut I felt the acidic burn in my throat and the blurry vision encroach signalling the vomit inducing clenching as I shook.

The days in the trench had quenched me in the reality of battle. The training had forged me, but the battle had made me. I’d been sharpened to the knife I was today – respected and revered in black ops - by the commando training that the commanders had offered.

Having dragged me out of the trenches with but a dozen others they thought I had something special, to survive that hell, I had had to, they reasoned. I’d been awarded a medal and sent off for training.

I had never told anyone that the only reason that a naïve infantry girl had survived was that she had knocked herself out with a concussion grenade and survived only by chance.

Never would it be revealed.

The battle on R6JPD-Earth-Beta-1 had been the first major conflict between the Sectanids and us. I was twenty-two at the time and so new the paint was barely dry, but after it, no-one had ever looked down upon me. The trench win had been the end of the conflict but the whole battle had been just as bloody. A hell of which only a few thousand survived, only a dozen or so from the trenches.

Of the three-hundred-thousand humanity had sent, only six-thousand-four-hundred-and-twelve survived, many of whom retired or died shortly after.

But it was worth it, the Sectanids had lost their foothold on our arm and they had moved on after a few space battles without needle mines.

Fourteen years later, and I was here, beside a river. Once again watching the bodies of people whose hell I could understand yet whose name I didn’t know. Reliving the memories I had worked so hard to put away, and feeling the pain all over again.

I sighed, at least the sun had come out to play.