The Basement War

(Author Note: Urban warfare in the age of unmanned systems.)

Junior Sergeant Olivi Kavald sat and watched from his fighting hole artillery 500 meters to his right. The heavy self-propelled guns had rolled up an hour before, crews draping the guns with camouflage netting and tree branches as they tucked into the tree line at a children’s park while a dozer bot plowed up a playground to scrape together defensive berms. Kavald could see their fire direction center 300 meters behind the guns, backed into the awning of a car park.

Kavald was a 20-year-old Donovian NCO contract soldier. He was less than two meters tall and had the build of a runner when he joined the army, not the best body type for heavy infantry. But four years of medically supervised steroids, and several outpatient surgeries to implant belly bands similar to an internal weight lifting belt, had improved his mass by 10 kilos and his core strength scores by 30%. The infectious smile and leadership had come naturally.

Kavald watched as SHORAD bots were positioned on the battery’s flanks, and two Gatling-type guns on trailers were parked in front of the battery. Soldiers set up smoke launchers, laser dazzlers, and probable GPS jammers. The NCO grew increasingly concerned, because protecting the guns with a complete anti-PGM battery meant they were important, and therefore a likely American target.

"Sgt Kavald, when we moving out, we don’t want to be anywhere near those fucking guns when they start firing,” yelled one of his fireteam’s privates from another fighting hole. Only 18, the private and his battle buddy comprised half of Kavald’s fire team. Private Vaks was from far Western Donovia and had an accent hard for Kavald to understand. Kavald recognized the private had a point. They had seen how American counter-battery fire had a distressing habit of obliterating everything within a 500-meter radius of a suspected artillery battery – just to be sure.

“Shut up Vaks. You and Mulder watch your sector. Let the lieutenant worry about the guns.” They were dug deep in covered fighting holes in someone’s front yard, while their IFV was concealed in the caved-in living room of the house, netting covering it. Their platoon was spread around the suburban street while battalion recon bots roamed the streets in front of them looking for infiltrators.

"They’re right you know,” muttered private Omar to Kavald. He was in Kavald’s hole and was responsible for the fire team’s LMG. Like Kavald, he was from the city and had a complete secondary education.

“Seriously, shut the fuck up,” Kavald muttered back. He didn’t need “his” kids panicking right now. They were close to making contact with American ground forces and he needed them focused. He suspected the Americans would be nothing like the Otso units they had faced.

#

Sgt Kavald’s battalion tactical group (BTG) of heavy infantry had crossed the Otso border five days before with the 2nd echelon of forces. The first two days had been uneventful except for the lack of sleep. Otso defenders had easily been pushed aside, and all Sgt Kavald and his BTG had seen was the debris of destroyed Otso forces.

Nearly four thousand small but highly lethal autonomous ground combat bots had preceded the Donovian main forces on their lines of advance and ranged up to 20-40 kilometers ahead, swarming and dispersing as needed to attack targets designated by the Front Command, or operating autonomously in hunter-killer packs. They worked in concert with reconnaissance UAVs and loitering PGMs to attack targets directly, or feed information to long range strike systems hundreds of kilometers away in Donovia.

The bots operated in groups of 100-200 in front of main force elements, or were airlifted deep into the interior in groups of 40-60 in dedicated carrier transports. The Donovian’s established multiple FARP RV points to resupply the bots with ammunition and batteries by transport drones behind Otso lines to keep them operational.

RUMINT was the Donovians had inserted dedicated special forces teams and civilian agents tasked with close-access cyber missions before the invasion in addition to the numerous “traditional” special forces’ teams attacking critical assets. These cyber teams allegedly had targeted urban data centers, major fiber backbones, and high priority SCADA networks requiring close access. Whether the RUMINT was true or not, Otso had suffered crippling transportation breakdowns causing traffic and rail gridlock. Out of position and locations fixed by the combat bots and UAVs, front line Otso forces were being decimated by long range fires and suppressed by aggressive EW and cyber-attacks before being destroyed by Donovian armored forces.

On the third day Sgt Kavald’s Infantry BTG(Heavy) had conducted a passage of lines and pivoted northeast, where they were directed to seize a suburb of the Otso capital. There Sgt Kavald and his unit had seen their first ground combat. They dug in after seizing the suburb and held the left flank as armored forces swept around the Otso capital to the north and south.

#

It had been later on day three when the Americans intervened. With little warning, the front turned into a hellscape of exploding vehicles and broken men. Weapons struck out of the blue, sometimes destroying single vehicles, sometimes wiping out hundreds of meters of roadway at a time. Despite all the prewar warnings of American capabilities, the first blows were a major shock after the ease with which the Donovian’s had rolled up the Otso forces.

The leading armored sweeps turned into acres of burning vehicles destroyed from the air, from arsenal ships in a distant sea, and from precision missile fire over 500 kilometers away. Sgt Kavald and his men spread out, dug in, and turned off every emitter they had. Orders were to ride out the initial strikes. The Americans had impressive capabilities, but intelligence claimed their weapon inventory was limited, and they were having trouble getting ground troops into theatre over such long distances and in the face of very aggressive Donovian interdiction efforts.

American drones started appearing, sometimes singularly, sometimes in swarms of small, high speed kamikaze PGMs which were deployed like submunitions from long-range rockets. Sgt Kavald had seen a swarm run down the staff of a field kitchen which had set up in the open, targeting men individually until everyone was dead.

Then there were the “brilliant” AI-enabled missile salvos Kavald had watched operate as cooperative entities, one swarm trying to break through an opposing swarm to get to their target. Deadlier still were what the battalion intelligence officer identified as unmanned fighter aircraft. They looked like miniature hot-rod sized stealth fighters. Kavald and his men quickly learned to recognize the different types – the ground attack fighters appeared in groups of four, and counter-air fighters in flights of three, usually a manned fighter with two unmanned wingmen. The supersonic aircraft often flew at extremely low altitude which scared the hell out of Kavald’s men when a flight rocketed by without warning at treetop level, breaking every nearby window.

Sgt Kavald’s unit witnessed a massive air battle stretching across the horizon on day four. It had included aircraft, drones, missile swarms, SAMs, lasers, and God knew what else. Private Vaks swore he had seen laser beams from space. Under an umbrella of SAM systems and laser batteries, the American aerospace forces were somewhat checked by day five, but losses were still bad, especially at night when the Americans seemed to have an advantage. Half of first company had been caught moving into new positions the night before. Kavald had watched giant explosions rip up the earth and tear vehicles part. Two entire platoons had been wiped out in seconds. They never saw what had targeted them. Kavald wondered how long his luck would hold.

#

“All units! Fall back on vehicles and prepare to move out,” Sgt Kavald heard over his tactical net. Despite constant jamming from both sides, their mesh networks were resilient enough at the tactical level they could still communicate. There were no lights as the electricity was out, but the noise was constant from dozens of running engines and men on the move. Fires kept things light enough they didn’t need their NVGs. Except for the bots, Kavald imagined this was just what an army looked like on the move 50-100 years ago.

What Kavald was not prepared for was the smell. It was a putrid mix of burning structures, vehicles, fuel, and men. Bodies littered the subdivision they were dug into, already starting to bloat in the summer heat, and they attracted clouds of flies. Empty ration packs littered the area, uneaten food spoiling. And the stench of hundreds of soldiers relieving themselves wherever they could made the stench worse than any training exercise he had ever experienced.

“Move out everyone. Let’s go, off your asses! Rally on the track. Move!” He crawled out the front of his fighting hole, pulling his gear out after him. “You heard me Vaks, you got your wish. Now move it!” He hefted his rifle in one hand and his pack in the other and jogged over to the track, which was turning over. The vehicle commander yelled at him from a hatch.

“Sergeant! Roll up the netting, hurry, we need to be ready to move.” Kavald and two soldiers grabbed the netting and carried it to the track, throwing it up on the deck. Crew members scrambled to secure it. The soldiers threw their packs up and the crew secured them as well.

Sgt Kavald decided to keep watch at the front wall of the house until it was time to depart. High above him he could see hundreds of shooting stars ever second streaking into the atmosphere like a continuous firework show. It was beautiful and was caused by millions of tiny pieces of destroyed satellites Donovia and the American’s were both shooting down in low earth orbit entering the atmosphere. The proliferation of micro-satellite swarms had made LEO a giant shooting gallery and they were being destroyed in bulk.

To his right there was a triple blast on an air horn, then the big guns started firing. Each gun was firing nine 152mm rounds a minute, fed by attached ammunition carriers. The flashes and noise were a physical force on Kavald’s chest, despite the ear protection he wore as part of his combat suit protection system. The fire mission went on for several minutes with varying levels of intensity, and then stopped. Kavald saw crews preparing to depart with notable haste. Kavald’s sense of unease grew watching them.

Suddenly the SHORAD bots started firing missile salvos. The missiles shot up, and then all tipped over in one direction, racing off low on the horizon to the east. The smoke devices detonated, launching cannisters of smoke which near instantly covered the entire battery in a multi-spectral cloud of obscurant. Kavald involuntarily ducked behind the wall but kept watching. He saw multiple flashes in the sky as missiles intercepted incoming targets. The Gatling guns and laser dazzlers started firing, slender fingers of tracers reaching out of the smoke cloud around bursts of light. The guns pivoted on their treads and sprinted away in clouds of diesel exhaust and rooster tails of dirt.

Ten of the twelve guns and their ammo carriers made it out of the kill zone, saved by the anti-PGM battery. The other two, slow to pull out, were engulfed in explosions, followed by secondary explosions as their ammunition stores blew up. Kavald saw a turret lazily fly through the air out of the smoke.

#

Ten minutes later they were on the move. Sgt Kavald watched the chat window in his eye piece and saw the orders from battalion.

“What’s the word Sergeant? Where we headed?” asked his fire team members. Only non-coms and officers had the chat windows in their visors.

“Looks like we’re headed into the capital. Our battalion has been ordered to seize the city and hold it from any American counterattack.”

Sgt Kavald relayed to his team what little he pushed when he got it, otherwise they bounced along inside the IFV for over two hours. Periodically the 30mm gun fired, or there was a WHOOSH of an ATGM launched from the blister cannister on top of the IFV. The driver and crew commander yelled at each other through the throat mics, ignoring their passengers as they entered increasingly dense urban terrain in column, IFVs, tanks, and bots spread out in a long line through captured parts of the city. The noise of combat got noticeably closer.

“WHAM!”

“WHAM!”

Two shocks on the right side reverberated through the IFV as the active protective system fired twice in quick succession. Before anyone could react, the IFV violently rocked up onto its left track, throwing everyone together in a heap, before crashing back to the ground. Screams permeated the troop compartment, but they seemed muffled to Kavald, whose ears were ringing from what was a third, more massive explosion, as the IFV’s reactive armor deflected the third Otso RPG. White gas filled the air as the fire suppression system kicked in, followed immediately by the venting process to clear the air.

The IFV lurched to the right and slammed into something solid as the fire team were disentangling themselves. The ramp dropped and Sgt Kavald could see the vehicle commander yelling at him. He wanted them out! Kavald took a gasp of air and started grabbing men by their harnesses, shoving them to the hatch while screaming. Their training kicked in and they instinctively grabbed their ballistic shields on the way out. He literally kicked Vaks out with his boot and stumbled after him down the ramp, slamming his hand on the deployment button on his way, activating his fire team’s companion bots.

He stepped off the ramp and into hell. The IFV’s 30mm was hammering away at a target down the street, taking the corner of a building apart to dig out a hidden threat. Heavy brass rained from the IFV, bouncing off the wall and onto Kavald, showering him in hot metal. Kavald was against the wall of a multistory building. Rubble was everywhere. Explosions rocked the street, which were filled with abandoned and smashed cars, many with bodies in them. He could see men running, some taking hits and falling. Tracers whipped by in both directions, ripping through cars. Disoriented, he looked and saw Vaks running through a hole into a building. Kavald raced behind him and dove through the wall into somebody’s corner office.

Behind him, down the center ramp, rolled two flatbed logistic bots. The first carried their heavy armor and exoskeletons, the second a replenishment load of ammo and batteries. From the side of the IFV, eight half-meter sized spider bots deployed from their cannisters, just as the IFV popped smoke, blanketing the street as the fire team took cover. The spider bots moved on eight articulated legs which could drive spiked hooks into concrete walls and climb vertically or along ceilings. Reading the emissions from the fire team’s mesh networks, their AI deployed them in a semi-circle in front of the IFV to improve the fire-team’s situational awareness, several of them climbing on tops of cars or trucks for better visibility. The log bots rolled into the building behind Kavald.

#

Kavald got the team organized.

“Get your armor on and spread out along this wall,” he ordered as he grabbed his add-on ballistic armor from the log bot. All four men grabbed their heavy-duty combat chest plates, and integrated ceramic armor they slipped into leg, pelvic, and arm pockets. They mounted their fully charged lightweight exoskeletons, on which their gear went. If needed they could hook their SWAT-styled ballistic shields on one forearm, and the exoskeleton helped hold it in place.

Sgt Kavald was in one of the Donovian’s premier heavy infantry battalions. Modern ballistic armor had made the concept of “heavy” infantry viable again for the first time since the First World War. Too heavy to wear their armor all the time, heavy infantry carried their extra armor and exoskeletons with them until needed, then suited up just before entering battle.

Fully enclosed heavy armor suits for the infantryman wasn’t the only thing which made them “heavy” infantry. Their IFV was designed for urban combat, with the armor protection of a 6th generation MBT, a 30mm gun which could elevate at extreme angles to reach upper floors, and a blister pack of ATGMs and thermobaric rockets. The space inside the IFV held a single fire team along with their log bots, and the eight spider bots on the outside.

The battalion was organized very different from the general purpose Donovian mechanized infantry. Everything was in sets of four. Fire teams were made of four men, not three, with four fire teams per platoon. Weapon loadouts were bigger, with each fire team having a machine gun, automatic grenade launcher, or RPG team. Four squads made a platoon, and four platoons a company. The battalion sported four infantry companies, an up gunned combat bot platoon with large caliber recoilless rifles for direct fire support in urban areas, a heavy weapons platoon with flamethrowers and thermobaric weapons, an armored 120mm mortar platoon, a recon drone and scout/sniper platoon, an engineering platoon, and an attached tank company.

#

A voice screamed in Kavald’s ear.

“Sgt Kavald! This is Lt. Thomas! Third platoon is spread out along the street to your front up to the crossroads! You are our anchor on the right!”

“Copy that LT! What are my orders?”

“Prepare to attack. Looks like the Americans were able to airlift some limited airborne infantry into the capital. Our job is to remove them. The cross street is our platoon boundary. I’m in the building to your left.” Little red dots and overlaid boundary lines appeared on the force tracker as the LT sketched a virtual map.

“Yes sir. I’ll get the team situated. Do we have any support?”

 “Call for local fires on channel three. The Major is deciding who gets first use of the 120mm mortars. We’re getting the recoilless rifle platoon, a flamethrower team and two tanks. If we create a significant penetration, they’ll send the request up for Division or Corps artillery assets. Forth battalion is right behind us to exploit.” There was an explosion and static on the feed. After a pause the LT came back on the air.

“That was close. Close on the enemy and destroy them before they can dig in!”

Kavald’s team blasted holes in the front wall with mini sticky satchels to clear a field of fire, and after pushing aside a number of modular desks, chairs, and a printing station, set the LMG as a base of fire. They ignored several terrified civilians in business clothes escaping along a corridor to the back of the building.

Kavald deployed the spider bots across the street, roving through the traffic jam and rubble to fix the American forces. Opposing skirmish lines of Donovian and Otso/American bots engaged in an automated skirmish of autonomous recon, attack, and defend missions against each other, attempting to obtain the vital situational awareness on the enemy.

Despite the intense fire outside, Kavald saw civilians racing in all directions in and out of buildings and around abandoned and crashed cars. It was clear the Donovian’s had arrived faster than expected – the city was still fully occupied. The streets were clogged with massive traffic jams of abandoned vehicles, often loaded down with luggage. Many of the cars were shredded and burning. Civilian dead lay everywhere, and Kavald saw more killed in the intense cross fire every few minutes as they sought to escape. There was nothing much Kavald could do about it.

The LTs voice was heard inside every helmet.

“Heavy Infantry – FORWARD!”

 Intense automatic weapon and tank fire exploded from Donovian lines, streaking across the street and smashing into the buildings on the other side, engulfing the opposite store fronts in intense covering fire.

 The LMG opened up on the building across the street. Omar fired a disposable thermobaric weapon through an opposing window. There was a flash and the building wall bulged out into the street. All four men charged forward, ballistic shields in front of them, private Vaks hoisting the LMG out of the window and following slightly behind the rest.

Like heavy infantry of old, the men were encouraged to paint their shields, and bold martial designs decorated 1.5-meter-high ceramic shields shielded dozens of fully enclosed infantry in heavy armored suits, their exoskeletons propelling them along with 50 kilo weapon loadouts on their frames.

Kavald looked to his left and saw dozens of human forms and bots charging through the clouds of smoke across the street, the men and machines synced in coordinated fire and movement as they raced forward.

Just like in training, they breached the building, spider bots sprinting in front of them down corridors. The first building was empty. They got to the far wall and breached it with a sticky charge. Again, Vaks set the LMG in a window and raked the building across the street.

Now they started taking fire. Several bullets hit Kavald’s shield, and one pinged off his shoulder armor, knocking him back. They took a moment to catch their breath – the armor and gear weighed over 70 kilos and even with the help of the exoskeleton, it was a lot of weight. Kavald nodded,

“GO! GO! GO!”

The team charged across the street. Vaks took a sustained burst of rifle fire on his shield painted with Viking axes, and his upper armor plate, knocking him down but not injuring him. Kavald blasted the window the fire came from with a 40mm grenade. He and Omar stacked on either side of a shop door. Kavald put a sticky charge on it and blew it.

Kavald braced his shield at an angle to the door. Private Omar dialed the safe arming range for the portable automatic grenade launcher to three meters for arming the smart grenade and then raked the interior with a string of explosions. Then they charged in behind the detonations, sweeping the room with rifle fire.

 Three dead Otso soldiers lay on the floor of what was a shattered women’s clothing boutique, and two more dead in American uniforms were by the back-stockroom door. Fire came from the stockroom behind the dead Americans. Two team members advanced behind their shields, launching grenades as they went, with the other two behind following. They breached doors as needed with explosives and grenades as they penetrated deeper into the building. Finally, the American’s broke and ran. Nothing the American light infantry had seemed to be able to stop the Donovian’s in their heavy armor.

#

After several days of constant attacks with pushed the defenders to the edge of the city, Otso and American resistance stiffened to the point they refused to budge any further. American airpower and PGM strikes created a curtain of fire the Donovians could not penetrate even in their armored suits. While the larger war raged around the capital, a stalemate settled in within the city as the Donovian infantry deployed a screen of combat and dug in to hold the capital.

As the lines stabilized, both sides began to burrow into the rubble. Trenches were cut by hand or by bot through buildings and streets. “Instant concrete” composites were brought forward in portable tanks and spayed by the engineers to fortify positions. Mines blanketed the roads and alleys, while coils of razor wire and concrete barriers blocked open spaces intermixed with destroyed vehicles, and foam sealant charges were dropped down manholes to seal up sewer tunnels.

Kavald and his fire team of Vaks, Mulder, and Omar occupied a strongpoint two blocks back from the MLR, rotating with another fire team on 24-hour shifts, their spider bots acting as roaming picket forces. By now the entire team suffered from an accumulation of minor injuries, but the armor had saved them multiple times from death or major injury.

“Anybody got some hot sauce?” Asked Omar. They were eating in the basement of a building, their sleeping bags laid out along the walls, with a ballistic blanket hanging over the door of the room they occupied. A covered bucket sat in the corner as a toilet.

“Nope, used the rest of it yesterday,” replied Mulder. He passed the blunt he was smoking to Vaks to let him take a hit. They could take off their exoskeletons and their armor while in the basement. Down here they were protected from the worst of the shelling and could almost relax. Their exoskeletons were connected to power converters attached to a stack of hydrogen batteries scavenged from electric cars to recharge.

Next to the batteries sat open crates of ammunition and rations. Two lightweight cargo rickshaws were next to the crates. The rickshaws could attach to a soldier’s webbing, allowing a soldier to pull hundreds of pounds of cargo behind him. They were adopted commercial designs for long distance hikers. Every few days one of them had to hike back to the supply point and drag supplies back through the trenches. The rubble filled terrain and constant traversing of holes in walls which characterized the rat lines had made bot resupply too difficult. It had fallen back to the old methods for supply – heavy packs on loaded backs.

Piles of busted spider bots, mini drones and other small tech sat outside in the hallway in mangled heaps. A forward deployed materials maintenance team had also set up in the basement, spread out among three other rooms to provide front line repair to bots and the various electronic, computer, and mechanical equipment for the troops. One room handled 3D printing of parts for any piece of equipment needed, including metal and composites. One room handled electrical repairs. And a third room handled computer repairs. The computer room was draped with plastic tarps on the walls and had a double curtain of plastic on their door in an attempt of keeping a “clean” room free of dust while they worked on sensitive circuit boards.

Out on the cratered back-loading dock of the building there were various containers of fluids and lubricants needed for bot maintenance, along with ammo for the bots and several recharging stations. The maintenance team had been accompanied by the BTG’s logistics element which had turned the back of their building into a bot forward arming and refueling point. Giant fuel bladders had been placed in a basement dining hall across the street, with pumps running hoses to street level. A flexible pipeline cluster ran along the bottom of a trench and through buildings from rear services to supply the bladders. The entire loading-dock area was draped in dust colored urban camouflage and IR-masking netting. Guards over watched the parking lot with anti-drone rifles.

“When are we coming off the line for good?” Bitched Vaks. He was the one who seemed to handle the stress the worse. Kavald had been watching him closely for days. Vaks hands twitched, and his eyes hinted at stim overdose syndrome. Nobody had shaved for days and everyone had sore throats. “We’ve been in this shit for weeks. Everything tastes like dust.” He took long pull on the blunt. “Even the weed tastes wrong.”

“That’s because it’s the government issued crap. If you want the good stuff, I friended the corporal running the computer repair team. He claims he’s getting his stuff from a guy in second platoon who is getting it from some kid running contraband across the front line.” Omar smiled. “It’ll knock you on your ass for hours, but it’ll cost you. His source can only send small amounts tucked into bots coming over for repair.” Vaks looked disgusted.

“I don’t know when we’re getting pulled back. The replacement LT doesn’t share much.” Kavald looked at each of his men, who all looked exhausted and lethargic like him. “If the shit hits the fan, don’t wait on his orders, just follow my lead. And if you haven’t noticed, not a lot is getting through in the way of supplies. I don’t think things are going to well outside the city so we need to stay sharp. Maybe stick to the government weed.”

“Why do you say that? What did you hear?” Everybody leaned forward and started talking at once, talking over each other and arguing. Kavald held up a hand for silence and considered his response, the marijuana smoke which hung in the room making him put in extra effort to focus.

“Nothing specific, just that supply lines are under severe attack.” He nodded to the hallway where the maintenance team was located. “They are having a really hard time keeping things running at this point with what’s making it up to the line.” He considered his next words carefully. “And scuttlebutt from the company XO is troops outside the city are being issued radiation monitoring patches and iodine pills. There is talk of using tactical nukes to blunt the American counterattacks and regain the offensive.”

“Fuck,” Omar said despondently for all of them.

They finished their blunt in depressed silence.

#

Bots and snipers had become a constant menace making life above ground miserable for everyone. Everyone stayed below ground as much as possible and the men had started calling it the basement war. The upper floors were left to drones, fire support officers, and snipers.

The combat bots were bad enough, but the American mini flying drones zipping through buildings at 80kph were unnerving harbingers of death. They roamed through building interiors at high speed and if they found a target, the American’s dropped a guided rocket on the building from 600 kilometers away. The insect drones were also bad as they were hard to spot among the flies and tucked into corners to maintain surveillance. Kavald and his team had learned to string wire or netting across openings to stop the racing-style drones and had to do a complete sweep every day for the micro insect drones.

Conditions had gotten worse for everyone in the city. The constant shelling had turned the city into a wrecked moonscape of craters, twisted hulks of cars, and gutted buildings. Fires burned constantly. Men only moved through enclosed or shielded trenches from location to location or risked death a dozen ways. Tens of thousands of rats had overrun the city, along with feral dogs and cats. The fly swarms were worse than ever, and they all suffered from body lice and pink eye.

 Civilians hid during the fighting and came out to scavenge for supplies during lulls. Some begged troops for food and women desperately offered themselves in exchange for supplies. A few had even set up brothels a couple blocks behind the front lines on both sides. A thriving black market had sprung up. Gangs were escorting people out of the city for $5,000 a person. Otso special forces also roamed the ruins in civilian clothes, men and women planting IEDs and conducting close access recon missions. They were summarily killed whenever found.

#

Despite the herculean efforts of Kavald’s battalion and its three sister BTGs to secure the city, by the fourth week in the city, the men could tell the tide had clearly turned against them. The Americans slowly isolated the defenders inside the city, creating a shrinking pocket.

Kavald’s team prepared for yet another assault on their position.

“Everyone double-up on ammo and batteries. Know your route to the next position. When they come, they’re going to come hard.” Kavald’s throat was dry and painful from breathing constant dust-filled air. He limped from several minor wounds and injuries. Kavald and Mulder manned a heavy machine gun covering a plaza. His replacements were both raw recruits. Vaks had died the week before from a mortar barrage; Omar from an American sniper using a steerable bullet when Omar thought he was in a safe place to take a shit.

 The shelling picked up noticeably and they all curled up at the bottom of their improvised bunker, covering themselves with ballistic blankets. All they had were encrypted voice comms. Days before they all had to pull their computer circuits from their suits and smash them after it was confirmed the American’s had successfully hacked the data network, probably via access from a dead soldier’s suit. Once the compromise was revealed the American’s had started sending pictures of bombed out Donovian cities until the chips were ordered smashed. Command said the images were fakes. Nobody knew for sure.

Kavald watched their front from under the blanket with the wireless cameras he had placed in the firing port, linking them with a local-only mesh network on a handheld viewer. Movement flickered on his tiny screen.

“Up! Up! Here they come,” he croaked in a whisper and all four men painfully scrambled to their positions, throwing off the blankets. None of them had shields anymore, they had all eventually failed from dozens of hits from high powered rounds. One of the replacements immediately flopped backwards, a bullet through the cracked facemask of his ballistic helmet. The other three started firing into prearranged locations as smoke filled the plaza.

“What the ever-loving fuck are those?” screamed Mulder. Dozens of cannisters arched through the air into the square, spewing something.

“Fuel air explosives?” Kavald guessed, starting to panic. But thankfully the anticipated explosion never came

Before they could react further, an American bot with a 20mm cannon raced into the square and targeted their bunker with suppressive fire. Mulder was killed by a 20mm shell which skipped through the firing port, knocking Kavald and the remaining replacement to the ground as Mulder exploded in front of them. More 20mm HE rounds hit the back wall through the firing port and it was only their armor which once again saved them from the fragments.

Kavald could see American infantry bounding forward through the dust, with an actual tank in support, additional tiny bots scurrying in front of them. In a daze, he briefly admired their tactical proficiency as they sprinted through the kill zone with well-disciplined fire and movement.

More cannisters were launched towards the bunker. One bounced through the firing port and started filling the bunker with gas. He was briefly thankful it wasn’t a fuel air explosive. The feeling lasted only until he took his next breath.

Then Kavald and the remaining replacement started retching. Both their ballistic masks were cracked and riot gas seeped in. His eyes were on fire and his lungs felt ready to explode from the pepper spray. Blindly he ripped off his helmet in a desperate need to breath and blindly crawled through the escape hole.

There, eyes swollen mostly shut, and continuously retching, he felt his way to the next room. The air was better there, but he didn’t stop, other than to splash some water on his face to try and flush his eyes. Explosions from satchel charges destroyed the bunker behind them. Weaponless, he and the replacement fled along their rat line to escape, ditching their heavy armor plating as they went so they could move faster.

#

After several hours of combat which ebbed and flowed from block to block, Sgt Kavald and his replacement private eventually reached the new Donovian front line. He was tagged to be evacuated out of the city to a field hospital near the Donovian border with a variety of ailments, including a probable TBI, torn knee ligaments, and chemical pneumonia from riot gas and weeks of inhaling particulate matter.

It was in the field hospital he heard the Otso capital had fallen after the pocket had closed around the remaining Donovian infantry. A week later he was evacuated back to a regional civilian hospital in Donovia, which is where he was when the ceasefire went into effect, in a ward full of recently called up reservists suffering from acute radiation sickness.