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It was Captain Mercutio Rizzo's unfortunate lot in life to assess the Eldian recruits trained at Fort Helios and suggest them for assignment to battalions in the first or second wave. The weak, criminal and mentally unfit went to the first wave. Those with the potential for social rehabilitation were assigned to the second.
He was now faced with an unusual predicament in the form of Private Matthias Kruger. Everybody agreed there was something wrong with Matthias Kruger. He went through life with a sort of predatory intensity that made people instantly wary. Rumour had it, he’d volunteered for service. Private Ognen Hatch had been on the same transport train from Liberio and he claimed to have seen Kruger walk into the recruitment office. Warrant Officer Sinan Bakal was sure he’d seen him laughing in a disturbingly unhinged manner over nothing while he was on lavatory cleaning duty. Captain Rizzo had observed him nearly kill two significantly larger opponents during the hand-to-hand combat portion of basic training.
The injuries sustained by Privates Gross and Weiss at the hands of Private Kruger were not Captain Rizzo’s concern. Some attrition was expected during training. The two men had reportedly raped another conscript, although no official complaint had been filed. Hazing was common and gave the Eldians something to look forward to during their brief training. It was good for them to assert dominance over each other.
Gross and Weiss were treated, and Weiss returned to the barracks, while Gross was deemed unfit for duty and shipped out immediately as part of a first wave assault on a mining town on the border with the Northeastern Province. Gross was undoubtedly the luckier of the two. Rizzo often mused that death was a kindness for the accursed Eldians.
So, it was not the injuries inflicted that concerned Rizzo; rather, it was Kruger’s absolute lack of remorse or fear following the incident. Rizzo recognised a sociopath when he saw one.
Kruger had the animalistic power of the top dog. Rizzo knew men sent to him from the internment zones were little better than animals; they mistook aggression for charisma. The devilish brutes were drawn to Kruger's show of strength.
Despite his unsettling flat affect, Kruger had acquired a coterie. Fellow conscripts admired his quickness to settle disputes with violence and his stamina and skill in simulated combat. He was constantly surrounded by people who were not quite friends but, more accurately, hangers-on.
It was a grim duty to turn the undesirable and inferior into tools for the empire. Kruger should have been an easy assignment; volatile and unpredictable, with an innate taste for violence, he was the ideal candidate for the first wave. Men like Kruger had the potential to excel on the battlefield but were unfit for civilian life. However, he demonstrated intelligence and leadership abilities desirable in the second wave. In the end, it was his aptitude scores that swayed Rizzo. Kruger would best serve with his mind intact. So, it was that Captain Rizzo assigned Kruger to the 124th Eldian Rifle Battalion.
The soldiers of Squad Six from the 124th Eldian Rifle Battalion were dying in the arid trenches outside the settlement of Dunha. Dunha was a mid-sized desert town centred around an oasis; it had been a stopping point for merchants on the trek from the Vata mountains to the port city of Alm-on-the-Sea for thousands of years. Modernisation had replaced trade caravans with steam engines, and the town lay at the intersection of the four main rail lines serving the Federated States of the Mid-East Alliance. The town was held by what had initially appeared to be an irregular unit.
The 124th had been sent to assist in the final push to take Dunha and cripple the Mid-East Alliance’s logistics capabilities. Once Marley held the transport terminal, it would be a simple matter of attrition taking care of the forces holed up in Fort Slava.
The trenches formed a narrow, winding warren along the southern edge of the town. Packed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow space, the men of the 124th died standing. The periodic exchanges of fire had gone on for ten days without advancing the front line. The defenders of Dunha lobbed grenades and artillery fire, raining death on the Marleyan forces.
The 124th exchanged fire across the narrow strip of no-man's-land, occasionally felling the defenders of Dunha as they perched on rooftops and picked off the neverending stream of Eldian conscripts who filled the trenches.
Air support was called in to break the siege. The biplanes drifted dreamily in the blue sky, disgorging their cargo. The buzz of the biplanes and the crack of the anti-aircraft guns merged in deafening cacophony. Two planes went down, the wreckage smouldering in the no-man's-land outside the town. Creeping shapes emerged from one broken aircraft and scattered in all directions.
The mood in the trenches became uneasy as the explosive percussion of twenty simultaneous titanisations echoed across the battlefield. The sky took on an ominous yellow hue as the sulfuric steam engulfed no-man's-land. Only a few of the titans wandered into the trenches, their attention caught by the frenzy of men and equipment on the move within the town.
Shouts could be heard inside the high walls surrounding Dunha. Within the quarter hour, three rotary cannons appeared in the bleak strip of land outside the town gates, mowing down the advancing titans. Despite the allied soldiers’ efforts, the walls were breached within the hour, and soon their screams were replaced by an eerie silence.
Of the eight men in Squad Six, Private Reginald Pflanz was the first to die, struck by a bullet as he peered through the periscope. They left him in the trench, his lower jaw hanging and his teeth lost in the dirt.
Lance Corporal Novak and the six remaining Privates traversed the short distance between the trenches and the town gates, providing cover for Squad Two.
The second wave of Eldian troops scrambled out of the trenches, pouring into the town. Within Dunha, the survivors of the titan wave gathered their remaining firepower in a last effort to repel the Marleyan advance. The tak-tak-tak of machine gun fire burst from the roofs, decimating the advancing line. They fell in piles, the rear ever advancing as their bodies joined those of their comrades, hot blood absorbed into the arid ground.
The blocking detachment held the line, ready to shoot the panicked and cowardly. The imperial war machine did not tolerate a single step back.
Private Kruger observed the deaths of his comrades with detachment. He considered the bodies of Martin and Baris splayed on the burning desert sand. Martin’s head was a ruin of gore; what was left of him was already a swarming mass of flies. Baris had died slowly, suffocating on his blood, his guts spilling out like sausage casings. Beside him lay little Paisan. The boy had a shocked look on his face. Novak, Stein and Hoti had entered the town. They were currently busy dying in a titan’s jaws or at the end of a bayonet. Kruger had been shot in the neck and thigh. He lay under the blaring sun, watching the steam rise from his wounds. Above him circled great birds with fleshy pink heads.
Before him was the town of Dunha, its high brick walls and towers resembled a honeycomb. The sounds of small arms and artillery fire continued into the evening. Kruger lay amongst the bodies of the dead, watching the sky darken into dusk. The desert sunset was an alien red and yellow, the sun sinking slowly behind the sandy scrub and the spires of rock that rose from the barren land like towers.
The stars came out, twinkling merrily in the vast blackness of the night sky. Kruger traced the familiar lines of the constellations, finding the plough and the titan’s toe. His neck was healed, but his leg pulsed and steamed where the bullet remained lodged in the femur. He rolled onto his stomach and crawled to the trench, slithering over corpses.
He leaned against the cool embankment in the darkness of the abandoned trench. The bodies of Pflanz and another soldier lay on the ground. The second man had died from artillery fire, and his shredded guts were bloating. The stench of blood and shit filled the narrow space. Kruger took his trench knife from its sheath and bit into a strip torn from the hem of his shirt. He began to saw into his leg just above the knee.
Blood welled up as he hacked, separating the knee from the femur and cutting through the thigh into the femoral bone. At first, a hiss of titan steam puffed out of the wound, but he gritted his teeth and fought his body until the steam stopped and blood flowed, thick and dark. He scrambled on the ground, where he found the long metal cylinder of a spent casing and pushed it into his eye until a thick liquid ran down his cheek.
Breathing in the putrid air of the trench, he fought to stay conscious. The ground suddenly shook with the explosion of a mortar round, and he flung his detached leg out of the trench, where it caught in the concertina wire. It was surprisingly heavy, and it left his hands tacky with blood. There was a burst of machine gun fire from Dunha and then the sporadic sound of small arms. White pinpricks clouded his vision, and nausea roiled in his stomach. He bent over and retched, expelling a few stringy strands of mucus and bile. He lay down, panting.
He was roused a few hours later by a team of stretcher-bearers. They loaded him up and deposited him in the medical tent behind the front line. He drowsed on the narrow camp bed.
In the morning, they loaded him onto a train to Fort Slava. The fortification had been taken three days into the siege of Dunha. Peace accords were already being signed, the Federated States of the Mid-East Alliance dismembered, and new borders drawn up.