Stranger Times

The Old Lie (Smackdown Entry 2)

Calinda despised that photo.

War propaganda, the service insisted on calling it. Something to put the boys in the recruitment line. Or the girls. Glorifying violence by glamouring it up with thigh-high stockings and knee-high leather boots was surprisingly good at getting women to enlist.

But Calinda remembered the street that photo was staged in. She remembered the explosion that turned a building into a tidal-wave of shrapnel. The photographer had nearly fainted when he discovered he caught the picture just before she noticed a city block being blown to pieces.

The photo was taken in Stalingrad, during the last battle of Earth's unification, nearly ten years ago.

It felt like another century. A century where they were alone in the universe.

"Where the frack did you find that?" Calinda asked Corporal Hanz Getchüllf, pointing at the photo of her standing on a tank.

"The LT dug it up from an old supply box. Thought it was time to remind the troops why we call you the Slaughterhouse Bunny," Hanz explained, his hands open and held out in front of him.

"No one gives a shit while we're inside these," Calinda insisted, as she swung the bottom of fist and rapped it against the chest-plate of her Rüstung Mark IX battle suit. "I've earned my place."

"We earn names in the Sturmtruppen. Having you own call-sign is a mark of honour," Hanz said. Calinda couldn't miss the bitter note in his voice.

Hanz hadn't earned a call-sign yet. On the radio, he was still Sturm 4-71.

Calinda didn't bother to offer Hanz any sympathy, instead stepping over to her suit and booting-up its systems.

She stepped inside as it initialized, and it's interface systems took her sight, and threw it through the on-board cameras.

It took her a moment for her head to adapt to eyes that could see in infrared and ultraviolet, that could dump a thousand times more information into her brain. Everything was richer, more vivid, and more beautiful when she wore the Mark IX.

"Sergeant Calinda Draugun, online." She said aloud, an action her suit automatically translated into a broadcast message to the platoon.

"Acknowledged," the reply appeared as blue text at the periphery of her vision. The text came with the ID tag Abyss, the callsign of her lieutenant, and the only other person in the Ninth Sturmtruppen Company to have earned a name.

"Time to drop, ten minutes. For the Fatherland," Abyss sent.

"For the Fatherland," she replied without thinking, sending the old reply out.

She took a deep breath and flexed the suit's fingers, forcing her senses to acclimate to being jacked into the machine's computer network. Her eyes were now glass irises, her skin was a nanotube composite, her heartbeat the timing clock at the heart of the onboard computer.

She might have earned the callsign 'Bunny' from that photo, but her current face, polished and coated to reflect most radio frequencies, was how she earned the other half of her legend.

Slaughterhouse.

Idly, she switched the feeds on Mark IX's display to show her the view from the ship's cameras.

She saw dozens of ships like hers, small transport vessels, gathered in a nearby group. Large capital ships dotted the peripheries. All of them were illuminated in the warm, yellow glow of the nearby star.

As she watched, one of the transport ships erupted into tiny star, followed by a staccato of brief but nebulous flames as a ship was ripped into pieces.