Arbelos Chapter 1: The Drop
“This story began with a question that nobody wanted to answer. ‘Are we at war in Varall?’ When my old friends in the brass got evasive, I sharpened my inquiries to ‘Who are we fighting?’ and ‘If the Astiagen Coalition isn’t at war, why did the Council approve sending so much advanced military hardware half way around the planet?’
After a month of nosing around and only a string of polite deflections to show for it, I got the sense that if anyone in the Islands did have the answer, they’d been sternly told not to take my calls. So I did what I’d learned driving my trak: I went to where the shroud was thickest, and hoped it would hide me long enough to reach the source. I traded some old favors for a flight into the capital of Varall, Yarselo. From there, I followed the rumors and the flow of Astiagen goods south, to the Icano Peninsula. Even 16 years after the war, a perpetual grey clings to the so-called Icano Disaster Area. The whole area’s a massive crater, full of fog that swallows the stars and gnaws the sun down to the bone. When you’re under that faded sky, it feels like the war never ended. And maybe it didn’t here.
In Barican, I caught a lucky break: one of the Astiagen military advisors had read my memoir, but hadn’t kept up with my latest reporting. Two days later, I was back in a trak, smelling like diesel and shuddering south toward that hungry fog.”
-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula
The husk of a tree clung to the earth with death’s own stubbornness. Its pitted branches shook ever so slightly as the utility trak ground past, breaking the ashy earth beneath nine tires. Riston craned to snap a photo, and then the tree was gone, whisked beyond sight by the momentum of the vehicle.
Despite the trak’s compartment seals reading green, Riston pulled at the buttons of his layered polysynth coat, willing it tighter. His camera felt heavier against his chest with every jarring bump of the road.
The trak was an old-style Astiagen armored trak, repurposed as a hauler with a retrofitted cabin set behind the ball-mounted pilot’s cockpit. The U-Trak still had an arm mounted on its left, though the right side had been stripped of the 20mm guns in favor of a winch and cable. He looked across the aisle to the four Varallen soldiers filling the inward-facing row of seats on the opposite side, then to the Astiagen liaison. Borread sat at his makeshift desk in the back corner of the cabin, papers pinned to the wall. The two seats next to Riston felt especially empty.
“Not far to the drop now, cameraman” came the voice from the driver’s cabin ahead, speaking Riston’s own native tongue of Astiagen. Dry as the silt outside, Riston mused. Then: That wasn’t a bad line. Maybe worth keeping for the final piece. He drew his notebook from his front pocket and fumbled for a pen. The wiry, slump-shouldered driver hadn’t given her name, but it was at least a two-day trip and he’d have time to ask.
“And that’s the front line?” Riston didn’t think he’d get much out of the driver, but he asked anyway.
It was Borread, the liaison, who answered. “That’s right. Shouldn’t be anything interesting to photograph until we get to the Serpent’s Maw.”
Riston looked appraisingly at the fresh-faced liaison, his eyes once again passing over the red coral pin under his unit insignia. That marked his home as the Astiagen island of Sporad. Borread was stocky and solid, a bit shorter than most of the Varallens around him but likely heavier thanks to muscle built by hard training and generous meals. Riston imagined that he’d grown up pulling down sails or rowing the many small straits of the archipelago.
Then Riston looked to the Varallen soldiers across the cab. Their childhoods were harder for him to imagine. Two wore unsealed body armor and carried rifles and full packs, though he was fairly certain from the grease-stains on their uniforms that their main job was field maintenance of the traks. They’d curtly given their names as “Vedos” and “Lodi.” Vedos scowled at nothing in particular, a look Riston recognized from many of his commanding officers years ago. Old shrapnel wounds on his face marked Vedos as a veteran, of which war Riston wasn’t sure. His seniority among the Varallens was clear, though. Lodi sat relaxed, holding a loose screw between calloused fingers. He scratched idly at the seat beneath him, slowly worrying a line in the metal.
The other two wore driver’s fatigues of heavy cotton. Both were young. Barely more than kids, one part of Riston thought. Maybe older than I was on Draft Day, mused another. One held herself taught, focused fully on a sheet of paper in front of her. Her fierce, amber eyes dashed over the details of something in scrawled Varallen. A letter? Riston couldn’t tell. The other, a young man with straight brown hair, looked over at Riston. Interest briefly crossed his face before his gaze wandered off to the dead landscape outside. Neither had volunteered their name.
I must look antiquated to them, he thought, still wearing layered polysynth even though the standard issue is fiber now. Self-consciously, Riston ran a hand through the wiry coils of his hair, hoping there wasn’t as much grey as there had been last time he’d checked.
And then behind the cab itself, Riston cast his gaze on a battered hitch that held fast the trailer. A fourteen-meter steel box full of military secrets that people had definitely killed to protect. Finding out what was in there was part of the real story he was chasing. The dangerous story, not the cooked-up Service Monthly press piece that had apparently looked legitimate back in Barican.
“Is it common to go out to the front for training exercises? These wastes seem as good as anywhere for live fire drills. Nobody’s going to complain about noise.” He pointed his question to Borread.
“Well, the drills are only half the point. We’re also scouting.” For what, Borread didn’t elaborate.
“Shouldn’t we be worried about artillery? Air spotters? Booby traps?”
The driver barked a laugh like brakes tilling sand. “Not that kind of front.”
Borread spoke up again. “There might be some rebels out in the wastes, but they tend not to stay out in the open long. They’re no real threat to us, though. They might be able to bust up one of the Regime’s patrols, but we’re equipped too heavily for them to bother us.” A moment passed, then Borread asked “You served, right?”
“Yeah, at the Dominance border. From ’23 to…“
The cab jarred against something in the road, and cold memory ran down Riston’s spine.
---
Sixteen Years Ago
Indistinct words and a radio crackle knocked Riston back to wakefulness, sharply yanking the gauze of nightmare from his mind. He looked at the monitor, and outside, the Herunock Dominance city of Novish was far worse. Cold buildings, pristine except for the fine, white calcium residue. The only part of the body that the airborne biophagic agents couldn’t fully break down.
The breath caught in his lungs, and instinctively, Riston’s eyes flicked down to the oxygen gauge. It still held three hours of operation time. His eyes shot left. The hatch seals were still yellow-green. He forced a gasp in and out and tried not to imagine what it was like to decompose before dying.
“You’re drifting five degrees, Lieutenant.” Limmi’s hail hit Riston like a second bucket of cold water.
Riston depressed the call button on his handgrip. “I’m fine.”
“Dreaming about something nice, LT?” Edu needled over the radio.
Riston tried to crack a smile, but found himself too tired. “Just getting back to base after this haul to eat slop, chase gremmans out of the engine, sleep on a hard bunk, then wake up to do it all over again tomorrow. You know, the little luxuries that keep me going.”
Edu laughed.
Riston scanned the horizon through the monitor, focusing on the thick, blue smudge. They were almost in visual range of their target. “Okay, chatter off. We have no reason to believe the stack here is guarded given the state of the Herunock, but better – “
A burst of force shook Riston’s trak, and flaming debris scattered across his view from the left. Throwing a handcrank, he skidded his vehicle into the shadow of a towering edifice. He spun the head-mounted camera to scan for the source of the explosion. A twisted hulk burned where Edu’s trak had been a moment before. Had he bailed out? This deep in the shroud, his lightweight polysynth suit seals would be lucky to last a minute even if he hadn’t been hit. Blue smoke and white ash seethed from the smashed frame, quickly dispersing whatever might remain of Edu. Hopefully he’d died in the explosion.
Silently telling grief to wait its turn, Riston swept the horizon again. Artillery? Mines? There weren’t supposed to be any hostile aircraft left.
“Lieutenant, 45 degrees. Anti-trak gun. Emplaced.” Bless Limmi’s good eyes. The corporal’s engine shrieked as she deftly maneuvered her vehicle behind a nearby building. A scant breath later, a shower of light ripped away the pavement beneath her retreating shadow. Riston eased his own trak deeper into cover for good measure, then hammered the long-range radio.
“Command, this is 2nd Squadron. Engaged by Herunock about 3 miles east of Novish. One trak destroyed. Requesting aerial bombardment to clear a path to the stack.”
Silence, then a crackle. “Negative. All flights are currently engaged. Reports indicate that resistance should be light. Push through.”
Riston didn’t think of himself as insubordinate. Well, not usually. But he was tired and Edu was dead. He hammered the radio again: “We’re pinned down by an entrenched gun, enemy composition unknown. They seem somewhat resistant. How are we supposed to dig ourselves out of this? Can’t you at least spare some artillery?”
More silence, then another crackle. “Enemy forces are depleted in this sector. Recommend direct engagement to break through. Timely pacification of Novish is crucial to operational-”
Riston cut the radio and ground his teeth. “Did you catch that, Limmi?”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant.”
“I guess I’ll draw their fire, then. You approach from the…”
“Protocol is to preserve the soldier with the greatest technical experience.” In a curt way, she was polite to defer to protocol. To the idea that he was better trained to dispose of the biophagic reactor. But they both knew what she meant: ‘You’ll definitely die if you try to be a hero, but I only might die.”
Riston inhaled, then forced his breath out. “You’re right. Wait ten seconds, then…”
---
“You were there in ‘26? During Operation Curtaincall?” The young officer’s interest was obviously piqued.
“Yeah, but at the time, everyone called it Operation Shitshow. Sounds pretty immature now, I guess, but the name stuck. I drove an old A-Trak with the Iron-Beaks. We zapped a couple of Herunock killstacks near Novish during Curtaincall. Then when things cooled down a bit, I went Journo Corps. Not for the pay or fine amenities, of course.”
Borread chuckled, and Riston swallowed the bitterness of lying to a fellow soldier once again. Riston didn’t mention his tempestuous departure from the Astiagen Journalism Corps, or that the assignment papers he’d shown Borread’s CO were hastily forged. The truth will out eventually, Riston assured himself, but not while it can still get me shot in the middle of the Varallen wasteland.
“But speaking of operations,” Riston asked, changing the subject, “how would you describe your role as military advisor to the Varallen Irregulars? Obviously, I read the brief, but I want to hear it from your side.”
Borread thought for a moment, and Riston could almost hear him rummaging through his mental cabinet for the canned answer. “We’re here purely as advisors to support the lawfully elected government of Varall. Varall got it bad in the war, and it’s our responsibility to make sure they can clean up the mess without the Oberect League forcing them to join. Command says they’ve been backing insurgents to destabilize the government. And, of course, this provides us a great chance to field test the new hardware: the modal traks. Today’s excursion will be reconnaissance in the Icano crater. But we all call it The Serpent’s Teeth.” He gestured out the window, to the rolling fog that swallowed the horizon, pierced by distant spires of stone.
“And what do we expect to find there? The dossier on The Serpent’s Teeth was pretty thin.” So thin that it didn’t exist, Riston thought to himself.
Borread shrugged. “Who knows? That’s what’s exciting about the place. But as long as we get field data on the M-Traks and check the field markers, I’ll be happy.”
As the two Astiagens spoke in their native tongue, the younger Varallen soldiers shifted uncomfortably. The young soldier had his gaze fixed out the window again. The other’s gaze seemed to bore straight through her paper and into the empty seat to Riston. Riston turned to her.
“How long have you been at this?” Riston’s Varallen wasn’t great, but he suspected that wasn’t why she didn’t respond. She wasn’t quite ignoring him, though. She looked at him, Riston thought, the way he used to look at a beetle in his soup in the mess. An unwanted complication, but you picked it out and kept eating because they weren’t going to give you another bowl. Did she understand Astiagen? Riston wanted to ask her about the workings of the Varallen Irregulars program, but he’d have to wait until the liaison was out of earshot.
The young man answered in Varallen without looking, still counting sand dunes as if to affect disinterest. “This is her third excursion. My second. She’ll be on point, and I’ll be on fire support. I rode with her last time.”
The trak driver in the cockpit spat loudly and answered in Varallen. “Find us a route without so much mud this time, Hazha. I only just got the inside of this heap clean from the muck you two tracked in.”
The soldier stayed silently focused on her letter. Her counterpart kept counting dunes.
Riston pushed up to the barrier to the cockpit to look at her. The driver’s hair was flecked with grey where it poked out of her layered polysynth gear. She kept her equipment polished with vesseed oil, an old trick to keep the material supple. He’d used the oil on his own gear during the war. Any oil technically degraded the protective quality of the polysynth itself over time, but that was better than letting a crack form. Cracks could lead to tears in the thin sheets of metal foiling embedded in layers within. And tears in the foil were what got you killed in the Shroud.
“So, how’d you end up on this operation?” Riston asked in Varallen.
The driver’s gaze flicked to the liaison, then back to Riston. She answered in Varallen.
“I know the terrain. Our mutual friend back there hires me and a few others to drive the U-Traks out for these… “ She said something Riston didn’t understand, but presumed to be euphemistic. He scribbled down the phonetics and hoped someone could translate it properly for him later.
“You’ve been driving traks a long time then? How old are you?”
“Stopped counting. Old enough to remember the sky. Young enough not to miss it much.”
Riston guessed she’d been a teenager when the Icano Disaster cast a permanent pall over the south of Varall. Even two decades after the Liberation, the sky was bleak and ashy here, and it only got worse the further you travelled toward the mysterious region called The Serpent’s Maw. The old war won’t give up hold here.
“So, you cleared the big killstacks?” Her sandy voice rasped ever-so-slightly more than usual. Tension? Anger? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but the inquisitive urge led him on.
“That’s right. We handled the cores. Disarming and disposal by rupture, whenever the Herunocks would stop shooting at us for a minute. Second most toxic materials I ever had to handle, after latrine duty in basic.” He hoped for a chuckle, but silence filled the cab. The axles creaked on sand.
Borread spoke up. “What’re you two chattering on about?” The driver’s eyes flicked back at him, but the liaison didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh, just talking about this old U-Trak,” Riston lied. He wasn’t sure why he did it this time. It seemed safer, somehow. “This looks like an old A-series that got refitted for industrial use, right? Lost the ‘A’ when they took off the armor, picked up the ‘U’ with the ‘utility’ winch. Not too different from the one I used to drive.”
The liaison nodded. “When we decommissioned these, a lot of them went to local governments to help with reconstruction. This heap was probably used in the Liberation here, then given to the Varallen government. Eventually, a lot of them ended up in civilian use. Our local contractors have tons of old Astiagen gear.”
Riston looked around the faded interior of the cabin. Scuffed metal, paint fading. Some caked grey-blue smudges that might be the mud the driver had been complaining about. Equipped with a passenger compartment, a loader arm, and a large winch instead of weapons of war. But still sturdy. He felt the engine’s familiar thrum. Then, a shudder ran through the frame. The sudden jolt, the cramped confines, and the lingering smell of the driver’s vesseed oil once again jarred him back to Novish.
---
Sixteen Years Ago
Streamers of blue smoke coiled around Riston’s trak as it burst from the Shroud where it hung thickest, behind the mortar team. The steel resisted the biophagic agents, but even a small crack could prove lethal. The treads shrieked where they bounced over broken concrete to crash through the side of the damaged building. The Herunock soldiers crewing the mortar were caught flat-footed.
Riston squeezed the triggers and a fusillade roared from his machine’s head and sponson-mounted guns. Bullets ricocheted off the soldiers’ bulbous, armored suits. One of them was swept away by the torrent of fire. As he died, he flailed like a drowning diver in an antique submersible suit.
A second soldier tottered toward Riston’s track, grenade in hand. In the slow instant, Riston looked at the domed, eyeless visage. Was the face below etched with desperation? With fear? With fervor? He’d never know. Riston jerked the controls and down came the great crane arm, crushing the soldier before he could deliver the charge. Blood splattered out of the smashed suit and rapidly turned to smoke as the ravenous biophagic agents lurking in the air descended upon it. The stick grenade rolled free, detonating harmlessly a few meters away.
The third soldier wheeled desperately, trying to aim the anti-armor emplacement point-blank at the oncoming trak. The armored figure struggled absurdly as he tried to rotate the cart-mounted weapon alone. But hesitate, and the absurd can kill you.
The trooper was just a step away, separated from Riston by a couple of meters and two shells of metal. But even if he’d known the right radio codes, even if he could speak their language, Riston didn’t know what he’d say to the person in front of him.
He pressed down the trigger, the guns roared to life once again.
---
The liaison broke Riston from his reverie. “Well, it’s not as if these old models can stand up to the new M-Traks anyway. So there’s no harm in giving them out to the Varallens. They need our help to hold off Oberect expansion. But enough about the antiques. It’s the fancy new hardware you’re here to shoot, right?”
Riston blinked away the pressure in his temples, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m excited to see my taxes at work. When they told me these cost ten million each…” He whistled appreciatively. Of course, he had no idea what had cost so much money. But the Council budget for military spending was open record. Production information from a Seltra Heavy Industries executive had been a bit harder to get, but had only cost him a few rounds of drinks, in the end. And long division was free, or at least paid for already by someone else.
“Let me tell you, you will not be disappointed in your purchase. They won’t let me drive one out here – something about foreign entanglements and the sanctity of our role as ‘non-combatant advisors’ – but these are some beautiful killing machines. I’d love to let you try one out, but you’ll have to settle for taking your shots from the ground.”
As they spoke, the U-Trak had crawled up the lip of a vast sinkhole in the sands. Sands that were once buildings and farms and people. And there it was, a vast crater swathed in mist. Spires of stone jutted from the swirling fog.
---
The descender rails were a permanent fixture of the crater’s edge, but the motorized lift was on the back of the U-Trak, and took several hours to assemble. Riston had watched the Varallen Irregulars toil at setup as Borread furtively consulted a series of paper charts of the crater. The two pilots weren’t exempt from work, but Riston sought them out as they rested in their cotton fatigues dusty with the acidic soil. The one the driver had called “Hazha” was shredding the paper she’d been staring at so intently earlier, and letting the scraps flutter over the edge. Her dark hair was pulled back tight now, her lanes of vision cleared.
“So, what’s it like down there, Hazha?”
“Hazhlet. ‘Hazha’ is a nickname Auglez uses because they’ve known each other a long time.” The other corrected. “And I’m Tahl.”
Riston made a mental note of what must be the sour driver’s name. Auglez.
“I haven’t known her that long,” Hazhlet cut in. “She’s just overly familiar.”
“Ah. Apologies.” Riston waited for a moment, staring out over the edge. Clouds of mist twisted around the stone spires. The teeth, I guess, Riston thought. With his foot, Riston pushed a clod of parched dirt into the abyss, and it clacked on the side before vanishing.
“It’s surprisingly cold down there,” Hazhlet offered. “Even inside the Modal Trak, there’s a chill that clings to your bones.”
“And there are monsters,” Tahl offered.
Hazhlet shot him a look, and Riston raised an eyebrow. “Can I quote you on that?”
Hazhlet spoke next. “No, you cannot quote him on that. Go ask your liaison if you want to know more about what’s down there. Or wait and see for yourself in a few hours. You don’t need to hear it from us.”
“And you don’t need the trouble that telling me could get you in?” Riston asked. Hazhlet brushed past him, Tahl in tow. The boy shot him an apologetic smile as they passed. Riston shrugged. It looked about a mile down before the mists obscured the drop fully. He wondered if his clod had hit the bottom yet.
---
An hour later, Riston stood atop the assembled lifter, staring into the Serpent’s Maw. The lifter consisted of two metal layers, each a massive plate secured to the rails along the crater wall with massive steel clamps. Wire spools hooked into the hauler’s engine, allowing it to raise and lower the platform, and its claw arm held it securely to the plates. Save the two pilots and Auglez in her hauler, the rest of the mission crew stood with Riston around the platform: Borread, plus Vedos the sergeant and Lodi the primary technician. A light crew for a mission like this, Riston thought. Not a lot of room for mechanical failures or casualties. But fewer people to keep quiet.
A U-Trak hauler sat on the first layer. On the second layer, the M-Traks had been covered with fishnet camouflage, garnished with strips of dusty white cloth. It didn’t fully cover the seven-meter high traks, but only their treads stuck out. Those treads were oddly shaped, though—two long rows on each side of the body, sticking out in front of a sloping cockpit. And before the camouflage had gone on, Riston thought he’d caught sight of an articulated head. He’d asked Borread why they only bothered with anti-air camouflage for the M-Traks and not the hauler. After getting an earful about how Oberect League spyplanes wouldn’t be looking for glamor shots of outdated old haulers any more than he was, Riston had decided to drop the subject.
The lifter rumbled to life with a start, and the drop began.
“Get a shot of the squad up here as we break through the mist line. That’ll be good for the Monthly, right?” Borread seemed to have decided in the last hour that, now that a journalist was attached to his expedition, his role included Director of Propaganda. Of course, since correcting him would involve admitting his actual reasons for being here, Riston had opted to play along.
“Should we get the drivers in the shot?” Riston asked.
“Probably for the best if we don’t,” Borread said. “I don’t know how folks back home would take it if they saw our newest M-Traks were being used by Varallen pilots. Especially ones so young. Might not send the right message.”
Riston would have loved to have ask what exactly this “right message” was, but there’d be a time and a place for that question. For now, he nodded and took the pictures. The lift passed through the mist barrier and descended further, grinding along the rock wall. Just as Hazhlet had said, he felt a rising chill, and he rubbed his arms for warmth, letting the camera swing around his neck. He studied the rock wall, its surface scoured disturbingly smooth. It had to be the detonation of a rupture weapon, like the ones he’d used to zap the ‘stacks during the war. Every time he’d set one off, he’d seen the purple flash, felt the loud whoomp, and the biophagic reactor had been obliterated. Contaminated soil had vanished in a clean-cut bowl shape around the detonation site. Even the particles already in the air were thinned out. But whatever had fired here had gone off on a whole other scale.
Suddenly, a light flashed, and the platform rattled. Riston was thrown from his feet onto the hard metal, the pain of a hard landing and the roar of an explosion catching up him a moment later. A second impact rocked the platform, then a third, and he heard a scream. Something filled the air around the platform, and he instinctively reached for the ventilator around his neck. When he found the camera there instead, the cold certainty of death held him for a moment. He smelled burning tar and coughed, but his flesh didn’t peel away before his eyes. The explosion had been a conventional weapon. Probably a rocket or propelled explosive.
Riston expelled another lungful of the acrid air and struggled to rise to a crouch. The platform rocked slightly from the impact, but the attack was over. Riston peeked over the top of the nearby crates, but saw no sign of attackers. Vedos was cradling Lodi, who bled from a cut on his leg. Borread had tucked in with the pair behind the edge of the hauler’s armored tread. He was shouting, but Rison couldn’t make out the words.
A terrible sound cut through the ringing in Riston’s ears. The rails above gave a dying shriek, and Riston looked up to see them twisting, deformed by the explosions.The platform teetered uncertainly. Then the crater’s misty mouth lurched upward to swallow the world.