Encounter in the Steppe

Bohdan Tytar dismounted his bot-horse and began studying the tracks in the grass. The strap of his respirator had slipped to his ear, and he pulled the mask from his face. “You can take your respirators off too — let’s rest.” Through a light cough from the change in breathing mixture, Bohdan’s voice didn’t sound particularly confident. “Next breathing session in four hours.”

His two comrades also dismounted and coughed the moment they pulled the respirators from their faces. The gas composition on Loca Deserta-17 already measured 72% similarity to the air of Old Earth. So there was no need to wear breathing masks constantly. But if a person breathed this planetary air for more than ten hours straight, the oxygen level in the blood would begin to drop sharply. Within a day or two, a person would first fall into weakness and dizziness, and then into a quiet sleep. Not a fatal one.

“Our people didn’t finish the air work here — another year and it would’ve been like Old Earth.” One of the Cossacks, named Opanas Kelep, cleared his throat and also began studying the tracks on the ground.

“That’s true, maybe someday they’ll finish the air for us too.” Bohdan crouched near the edge of a stream and stared at the tracks again. “But as far as I know, the terraforming stations were smashed during the first raid on the colony. I had acquaintances who worked there — they say orbital bombs flattened all the air-generation tunnels.”

“Damned narrow-eyes — don’t they need oxygen on this colony themselves, if they want to take it?”

“The devil knows — maybe they’ve played with their genetic modifications enough that they can breathe ox farts.” Dmytro Hordynia, their third man, joined the conversation but still hadn’t gotten off his horse, peering out into the steppe.

“Enough chatter. Back to work.” Bohdan Tytar, as the squad leader of the plastun scouts, cut off the conversation that was breaking their concentration.

He walked several meters to the side, following the tracks from a caterpillar tread. Around the impression left in the ground by the heavy machinery they’d been tracking, half a dozen more tracks were visible — most likely from wheels. “Damn, they’ve got a whole crew here. I thought it was just one melt-carrier chugging through the steppe.”

They were clearly left by Empire of the Sun equipment that had passed right through a small stream in the middle of a deep gully.

“The narrow-eyes were here about half an hour ago — the tracks have already been slightly washed by the current. Two more hours till sunset — we’ll attack at dawn.” Bohdan exhaled loudly, stood up, and immediately slipped on a slick stone.

“By the Star Sich, Bohdan — we still need you.” His third comrade, Dmytro Hordynia, also dismounted, but before stepping down, checked the ground first.

“I hate this area. Stony steppe, grass grows in patches somehow. Always damp, and these little pebbles — like mines.” Bohdan rubbed his knee, which had started hurting after five hours of chasing the melt-carrier, and now this cursed stone had to turn up.

The other two haiduks had already climbed off their horses. The pebbles crackled under their heavy iron boots. Each disconnected the wire that linked them to their horse’s control module. On the forehead of each bot-horse was a small bronze trident, and below it — pressed into the metal — the name of the regiment and company: “Spears. Plastun-12.” Not one of the bots even stirred.

Bohdan Tytar was the otaman¹ of a small plastun² scout squad, which had now been two days into a raid behind the lines of the Empire of the Sun³. Its forces had encircled the only hive-city on the colony planet “Loca Deserta-17” in a wide crescent. Their squad had been caught resting when the invasion began, and within three hours of the alarm, the full regiment of “Zbarazh Spears” had mustered.

The attacker had broken through orbital defenses in the first days of the assault, dragging the heavy atmospheric flyer⁴ battles into an air war that had not ceased since. For Tytar and his plastuns, this was already their second raid. When the imperials managed to land their mobile spaceport, the colony surface became a killing ground.

Enormous — simply colossal — ships, three to four hundred meters long, were ferrying troops and equipment from the invasion fleet in orbit down to the surface for the siege of the only hive-city. The Hets⁵ had erected several defensive belts. The most important was a fortified trench line stretching seventy kilometers between two natural obstacles — the ocean on the left and impassable thickets on the right. Fighting raged along the entire length of this line.

The attackers were reinforcing their siege force daily; it had even come to the deployment of heavy titan-tanks on their side. The task of the plastuns — light, mobile infantry — was to restrict the free movement of detachments and saboteurs, and to bleed the enemy’s manpower and materiel base day by day.

It was the trail of one such column that the plastuns had stumbled upon two days ago. It was a convoy transporting melt-charges for tanks and rifles. About a day ago, atmospheric flyers had raided it, destroying half the convoy — but the trucks with enormous barrels of plasma had somehow survived the rocket salvo and cannon fire.

Dozens, even hundreds, of such convoys dragged their cargo daily from the spaceport to the hive’s defense line. The road was long, because the imperials quite reasonably understood that getting closer than five hundred kilometers to the hive meant suicide for their spaceport, which was constantly moving to evade orbital strikes.

The order for the second raid Bohdan Tytar received personally from the commander of the “Zbarazh Spears.” The first raid had been catastrophic: their unit had been spotted by the imperials’ atmospheric reconnaissance, and within just three hours, two ballistic missiles had fallen on the haiduk camp. Half of the twenty-man unit had died on the spot, and the rest had barely managed to slip away from pursuit and cross back inside the defense line.

This time their unit numbered only three. Bohdan Tytar — otaman; Dmytro Hordynia — operator of the heavy flamethrower “Hornet,” which hung on the right side of his bot-horse; and Opanas Kelep — rifleman and communications officer. The objectives were no longer as sweeping as before.

The mission of the patrol was to locate and destroy just one transport vehicle and, if possible, inflict enemy casualties. The melt-carrier⁶ was an excellent target for their Hornet-42 flamethrower. “We’ll camp here for the night. Near the stream you can hear machinery moving clearly, and our biologists say this water’s drinkable.” Bohdan Tytar turned to his men and began pulling things from the saddlebags on his bot-horse.

Hordynia and Kelep also began rummaging through their bags, looking for ration packs and sleeping rolls. Then all three lowered their horses to the ground: the bots folded their mechanical iron legs and lay down on their bellies, like camels.

Bohdan pulled out a sealed food pack and settled onto his sleeping mat. “At 04:00 we move out. I think within an hour we’ll catch up to the melt-carrier, attack, and break contact. Let’s eat now and sleep a couple of hours. What did you get in your ration pack?”

“I got a mix of crap, poured in crap.” Dmytro replied gloomily.

“And I got fried boar ears, cured fillet, KozakBread pastries, and a Prague cake.” Opanas replied with a completely straight face.

“Oh, if only… if only.” Bohdan’s mouth watered just at the names.

“It is what it is. Good thing there’s anything at all.”

“Dmytro, you should’ve been a poet, not a plastun.” Bohdan reached into the pack, pulled out a spoon, and began eating something resembling buckwheat porridge.

All three silently choked down their food. It was actually nutritious and didn’t irritate the stomach, but when you’ve been eating the same thing dry for two weeks straight, even cake becomes revolting.

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Tytar rinsed his mouth from his flask after the porridge and continued. “Opanas, you’ll prepare the Hornet in advance so we can ride up, aim, sting, and run. If there’s a big detonation — we’ll decide on liquidating the personnel based on the situation. We fall back toward the wall immediately. In case of wounds or losing a horse, we assess on the spot. No spare horses — we’ll try two on one… we’ll manage somehow. We don’t think about capture, but war is war…”

“If my wound is serious, leave me — I’ll handle it myself. Better someone gets out of here.” Dmytro stared at the ground, then twitched and stuffed the emptied pack into his kit.

“None of that.” Bohdan cut him off. “Did you forget the punishment for abandoning your own?”

“Yes, I know. It’s a shame — in that squad of ten that left two plastuns behind, two of my friends were among them. Both were executed in front of my eyes when they came back.” Dmytro opened his pack and shoved the empty flask inside. “And if the colonel issues them an infamy⁷ as well, I don’t know how their parents will survive it.”

“So — so that our own parents don’t think about that — no one gets left behind. We came together, we leave together.” Bohdan finished his mixture, licked the spoon clean, and stowed the trash in his pack. “And another thing: keep your footprint on the surface minimal. Their scouts don’t waste time — we hunt them, they hunt us.”

“Agreed. We act by the situation.” Bohdan spread his sleeping mat next to his horse. “Hordynia — you take first watch. Then Kelep. I’ll take the dead-hour shift. Stand down until 03:00.”

Bohdan lay down on the mat and fell instantly asleep from exhaustion. Hordynia removed his rifle from the saddle, clipped two batteries to his chest armor plates, and moved behind a large stone, concealing himself there.

The planet “Loca Deserta-17” had been habitable for about seven years. They’d even started growing their own food here, though not enough to cover all needs. The nature resembled the homeland steppe — with stone ridges, very ancient mountains scattered here and there, and an enormous ocean that covered almost the entire surface of the planet. A single continent bore the hive-city on its shore; in the north, tall mountains rose, covered with moss and various ferns. From the mountains stretched a plateau, where all of the Hetmanate Federation’s mining operations were concentrated.

The farther south one went, the better the land became. And around the hive, grain fields stretched to the horizon. Now, after the attack, the beautiful yellow fields were slashed with haiduk tracks; here and there, preparations for abandoning the first defense line and withdrawing to the colony were underway.

The damned Sunflowers had set their spaceport five hundred kilometers from the hive. The Hets couldn’t hit it with rocket weaponry — the narrow-eyes defended the spaceport well, and it kept changing location. In general, a mobile spaceport, when you control the skies, gives attackers an enormous advantage. It can only be struck with heavy rockets, but for that you need to know the precise location. And to know it, you need orbital satellites or reconnaissance rockets… which get shot down by atmospheric and space aircraft a hundred kilometers before they could reach the possible target area.

And the Hets’ military engineers were no slouches either. They devised a clever plan: they launched reconnaissance rockets and drones into different parts of the continent and watched where they were being shot down. This allowed a “dead zone” of seventy-five kilometers in diameter to appear on the map — where no drone had managed to fly through. Most likely, that’s where the walking spaceport was roaming.

Hordynia, after returning from the first sortie, had managed to witness the launch of massive two-hundred-meter rockets that had fired from the tunnels north of the hive-city. Even from that distance — some thirty to forty kilometers — everyone could hear the building roar of the boost engines. Four rockets had been launched in a single salvo.

At that moment Dmytro had been seized by the hope that the rockets would reach their target and at least partially relieve the pressure on the first defense line, and the haiduks might somehow push the enemy back from their only city… But later that evening, a rumor had rippled through the townspeople and haiduks that only two of the rockets had managed to reach the target area… where the target no longer was.

That night, the enemy had hit the mountain ridge with orbital strikes, where the launch tunnels were located. A few bombs were also dropped on the city itself, but the anti-orbital defenses managed to intercept them before they reached the altitude of atmospheric aviation.

As though someone had heard Dmytro’s thoughts — on the black-blue sky, he noticed three stars moving with extraordinary speed across the dark dome of space in a single direction.

“Either ours. Or not ours.” Hordynia muttered quietly to himself, shifting position to ease the numbness in his right leg. His rifle slipped accidentally from his knees and drove its barrel into the grass and soil.

He slowly raised the weapon and began picking out the dirt that had gotten into the barrel with his finger. Hordynia himself came from a plastun line of haiduks. From the ancient days of the Hetmanate’s expansion of power on Old Earth, all the ancient Terek Cossacks had joined the ranks of the Great Hetman Vyhovskyi, receiving privileges and a seat on the Kish Council in return. Since then, every man in his family had served in the plastun scout forces, with the exception of only a few great-grandfathers who, for whatever reason, had not done so.

Hordynia jerked sharply when he saw a flash of light on the horizon, and a few seconds later the sound of an explosion reached him.

“What’s this now…” the haiduk continued muttering to himself and rose, leaning on the boulder.

He raised the rifle to his shoulder, pressed his eye to the scope, trying to make out what was happening on the steppe horizon. Unfortunately, the thermal sight only reached a kilometer, and the ordinary optical lenses in such darkness gave no better result than his own eyes.

A few more explosions lit up the sky from below, and the distant crackle of gunfire reached his ears with a delay of a good ten seconds.

Dmytro got up and walked over to the sleeping Bohdan Tytar. He shook him lightly by the shoulder, and Bohdan snapped his eyes open, staring at Hordynia.

“Damn it all — can’t a man sleep. What time is it?” “Half past eleven.” “Show me where the explosions are coming from.”

Tytar rose, pulled a sizeable pair of binoculars from his personal bag, and pressed them to his eyes, peering toward the horizon Dmytro was pointing at.

After a minute of watching, the sky lit up again with flashes, and the distant rumble of explosions rolled to the ears of both haiduks.

“I can see ours. Either they’ve hit some armor, or the armor is chasing them across the steppe.” The binoculars’ tenfold digital zoom allowed him to make out only large objects at that distance. “Either way, we need to reinforce them and link up. We prepare for battle — and they’re heading our way.”

Bohdan lowered the binoculars, climbed down from the boulder he’d been standing on at full height, and looked at Hordynia.

“Wake Kelep. His Hornet is going to come in handy. With that firefight going, our target has most likely already woken up too — so we won’t catch anyone by surprise.”

Kelep woke the same way as Bohdan: snapping open completely unsleepy eyes, with no sharp movements, sighs, or gasps. Years of training, practically from childhood, had given the plastuns complete control over the body in extreme moments — like “a big mustachioed uncle with a topknot and a rifle shaking you by the shoulder in the middle of the night in the steppe, deep behind enemy lines.”

“Kelep — up. Another plastun squad is in a firefight. We need to reinforce them. Ready the Hornet for combat immediately. Enemy armor is involved.”

Kelep, silently, as if receiving such an order in the middle of the night were perfectly normal, rose, rolled up his sleeping bag with the mat, and stuffed it behind the horse’s saddle. Then he walked around to the right side and opened the sizeable case containing the Hornet launch unit.

It was a meter-long tube. Along the middle of the tube were several buttons and a usage manual — so simple that even a rookie djura still concussed from his first skirmish, who just yesterday was twisting horses’ tails, could handle it. On the open lid, nestled in soft-plastic grooves, lay three rounds for the Hornet. Externally they looked like ordinary iron slugs. Which, essentially, they were.

None of the optical targeting systems found in the “Bumblebees” used by space haiduks were present here. Just a body, inside — seven kilograms of explosive. And another kilogram of plasma dust, which would incinerate everything in the explosion’s epicenter.

“Should I prep it for combat right now? Or will I have time on approach?” Kelep, leaning across the horse, asked Tytar, who was already pulling on his helmet and the respirator with its proper breathing mixture.

“Prep it all right now. The firefight is moving straight toward us — we’ll hit from horseback.” Tytar pulled the respirator down to his beard, revealing his thick fair mustache so Kelep could hear him better. “We switch the vox to ten meters. No unnecessary radio silence breaks. According to intel from radio reconnaissance, the narrow-eyes have learned to track even such weak local voxes through their recon drones.”

“Understood.” Kelep and Hordynia answered simultaneously.

The gunfire was getting ever closer. The sky no longer lit up as much from explosions, but the plastuns clearly distinguished the fire from haiduk laser rifles and an enemy rapid-firer — most likely the Sunflowers’.

In just four minutes after the first flashes, all three were ready for battle and mounted. Kelep, as the designated Hornet gunner, loaded it with one round and raised the launch tube to his right shoulder. He gripped it firmly by the handle that protruded from below. The shell itself stuck out in front of the tube and glinted faintly under the stars of the “Loca Deserta-17” colony. The launcher was recoilless. Kelep was preparing to fire straight from a gallop. Hordynia, as the second crew member, checked once more the box containing three additional charges for the Hornet, then flicked the safety off his laser rifle, which he always kept in hand.

“They’re even closer to us now. The Sunflowers have run into another one of our patrols and are driving them across the steppe. Our people are still holding. Here’s the plan: we fly straight at them, but come in from the left flank. I can see two mechanized infantry vehicles — one of them is a tarantula. The other — unclear, but wheeled. Kelep — first target is the tarantula⁸. It can change direction at any moment and is very maneuverable. Then you hit the other vehicle, whatever it is. A few dozen meters out, I’ll try to reach ours on the vox so we don’t shoot each other. Let’s go! For the Stars and the Sich!”

“For the Stars and the Sich!”

All three bot-horses gathered speed and raced toward the glow that was growing larger by the moment. The delay between the flashes and the explosions shrank with each dull strike of their bot-horses’ metal hooves.

The final minutes before contact stretched slowly. Approaching the firefight, the plastuns could already make out half a dozen riders performing the finest feats of trick riding, dodging the salvos of melt-fire, laser bolts, and grenades that the narrow-eyes were pouring on them from their fighting machines.

On the tarantula, hanging half out of hatches, sat three Sunflowers firing at the Hets. Several spotlights on each vehicle tried to catch the silhouettes of horses in the night steppe. The imperials weren’t going for the kill. They were herding, keeping their distance, again and again cutting down those who slowed.

The plastuns returned fire as best they could, but couldn’t inflict significant damage or penetrate the armored machines. When a laser or plasma shot from a rifle struck near the silhouette sticking out of a vehicle hatch, it would duck down for a few seconds, then reappear. The silhouette would vanish for a few seconds, then pop back up in the hatch.

“Plastun-12 — coming to assist. Pull the vehicles left of yourselves. We’ll strike.”

Bohdan Tytar opened to a longer vox broadcast, trying to reach the plastuns. One of them had just been cut in half by a melt-machinegun burst, horse and all. The impact with the ground sent the dead man’s helmet flying, revealing a long gray oseledets.

“GOING LEFT!” — a breathless, unfamiliar voice that broke into a shout answered briefly over the vox.

The surviving plastuns began shifting to the side, drawing the imperial vehicles with them and exposing them to a flanking strike from the Hornet.

“Kelep — at your discretion. You go first, we’re second. Work through all three charges. While they haven’t spotted us, the first strike will be a surprise.”

Opanas Kelep, steering the horse with his left hand and legs, was circling ever deeper under the right side of the tarantula, which had not yet noticed the new threat. The Sunflowers sticking out of the hatches were happily firing at the plastuns and calling out to each other about something. The roar of the mechanical legs of the spider-tarantula was so loud that the approach of the three horses went entirely unheard. About a hundred meters from the enemy’s machinery, Kelep turned his horse ninety degrees and drove it straight at the target with all his strength. Riding at a gallop with a flamethrower was hard — his legs cramped from the strain, but he had to compensate for the swaying and bouncing of the horse at full speed. Opanas released the reins he’d been holding in his left hand, shifted it to the forward grip of the flamethrower, and pressed his eye to the large collimating sight.

Breath in. Breath in. Breath out. Breath out. Breath in. Slowing his breathing ever more under the meditative training chant of “Prih-Skok”⁹, he finally minimized the swaying of the sight and the tremor in his hands and legs. He gently pressed the trigger — and the rocket, carrying plasma dust and explosive, left the tube with a painful, sharp whistle and flew straight into the mounting mechanism of the tarantula’s front leg.

The machine’s standard defense systems tried to intercept it: steel balls fired from side ports in the armor and exploded a few meters from the hull, trying to destroy the dangerous projectile with a cloud of fragments. All in vain.

From the detonation of the melt-substance, the front leg of the spider was melted and nearly torn away, and the machine — given its enormous mass and momentum — pitched its hull straight into the ground. The impact sent two Sunflowers flying from the hatches, and they soared a dozen meters before slamming into the earth. The third narrow-eye was unable to get out of the hull — instead, the impact snapped his spine. His body lay on the armor in an unnatural position, bent at ninety degrees. From the shattered visor of his helmet, a stream of narrow-eyed blood immediately began seeping.

The two Sunflowers who’d been luckier only had their luck hold for a few seconds. Two bursts from laser rifles — from Tytar and Hordynia — ended their attempts to rise.

“Kelep, you’re a master! Load another one before they recover!” Tytar began laying down covering fire on the tarantula, whose pilot was trying to right the machine and bring it up on its remaining five legs.

The Hets had encountered such zoo-machines for the first time on “Loca Deserta-17.” Until then, rumors had circulated that the Empire of the Sun was developing strange machines resembling animals and spiders, but to actually knock one out… The tarantula was extraordinarily maneuverable and had immense off-road capability. Even losing two — or even three — limbs, if not all on the same side, didn’t turn it into scrap. Tytar had personally seen one of the narrow-eyes’ tarantulas continue fighting and moving across the field with one leg on the left and two on the right.

“Plastuns — spread right and left, we need to fix the other vehicle!” Tytar, seeing the chaos in the ranks of the squad that the imperials had been chasing, took command of the battle over the vox.

“Executing! But don’t finish off the tarantula — our squad leader’s in there!”

“What? He’s captured?” Tytar replied in surprise over the vox.

“Yes! We’ll sort it out later!”

“I heard everything — I’ll work on the tarantula’s legs!” Opanas Kelep, sheltering behind a large boulder — the steppe was littered with them — was waiting for Hordynia to load him another grenade. Doing it alone without dismounting was nearly impossible. And there was no time for that.

Dmytro rode over at once, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and bent toward the box on his horse’s side.

“Loading a charge!”

“Go — the tarantula’s almost back on its feet!” Kelep laid the flamethrower tube on his right shoulder and turned slightly toward Hordynia so he’d have an easier angle to insert the new charge.

Dmytro unclipped two latches on the right case of his bot-horse, pulled out the first round, removed the plastic safety cap from the signal connector, and inserted the melt-grenade into the launch tube.

“Ready! I’ll draw their fire — you follow me!” Dmytro Hordynia pulled the laser rifle from his shoulder and opened fire the moment he sprang out from behind the stones.

The response was swift: one of the guns on the tarantula began firing back, but due to the severe pitch of the hull, the gunner couldn’t quite crank the sight around, and all the shots landed ten meters from the plastuns.

The second rocket from the Hornet struck the spider’s rear leg, cleanly tearing it from the hull. The detached chunk of metal from the leg drove straight into the central, last manipulator of the machine, putting it out of action too.

“Watch out — now that’s shooting!” Tytar shouted happily over the vox. “Plastuns — how are you holding up?”

Through the darkness, the smoke from the explosions, and the boulders piled everywhere, Tytar had lost track of the second vehicle. It had vanished from sight the moment the tarantula went down.

“Two of us left! Another was cut down by their armor’s machinegun!”

“Can you see the vehicle? Fire upward — where are you?” Tytar wanted to switch Kelep to a new target as quickly as possible.

“Damn — they’ve unloaded infantry from the armor! I can see a whole squad!”

Tytar spotted the tracers from a laser rifle slicing through the absolute darkness that had descended on the colony. In response, the heavy plasma machinegun spoke with a wolf’s snarl.

“Plastun — we’re coming to you!”

The two comrades came to Tytar. They had just finished off the tarantula’s drivers who’d been trying to abandon the machine. One of them had managed to run a few meters from the burning vehicle before going down from a single shot to the back of the head — Hordynia had neatly put half a gram of plasma through him at full gallop from horseback. The other was finished right in the hatch.

Hordynia dismounted and, under cover from Kelep, checked the passenger compartment of the burning machine. The moment he cracked open the hatch, the body of the squad leader fell heavily out.

The entire head and face had been shredded by tiny fragments of shattered armor. No bullet wounds. No burns. Only sharp metal driven into the flesh with such force as if it had been hurled from the inside.

Kelep lowered his plasma rifle, squeezed his bot-horse firmly with his knees, and felt something cold seize in his chest. He couldn’t tear his gaze from what had happened.

Hordynia’s hand paused on the hatch for a moment, then slowly released it.

“Dead…” he said briefly, not activating the vox.

Tytar glanced at the tarantula’s hull. The hole from the second Hornet shot was still smoking, the edges of the armor bent outward.

“Damn it all…”

The heavy roar of a plasma cannon jerked him sharply back into the fight.

“There are still two of ours. We need to extract them. The light support vehicle’s left. It only has a plasma cannon.” Tytar spoke coldly to the plastuns, not taking his eyes from the body that had fallen from the hatch. “The fight goes on. PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER AND KEEP WORKING.”

Kelep felt his stomach clench. He had fired the shot, and the consequences were plain. Even knowing it had been necessary, the weight of responsibility landed heavier than any gallop across the steppe.

Meanwhile, the volume of fire from the fighting vehicle of the narrow-eyed scum was building. From two of its sides, two smaller plasma cannons had joined the chorus.

“The vehicle is about two hundred meters out. Kelep — can you hit it from that distance?” Tytar was working out the plan to kill the second armor.

“If we come in a little from the side, the vehicle’s profile will be bigger. Then I can hit it. Head-on, I can’t burn through that armor.”

“Then we go down into the gully. Along it we’ll come out on the flank and strike. Hordynia — load up.”

Plastuns never needed an order repeated twice. With movements honed over hundreds of drills, Hordynia opened the case with the melt-grenades on Kelep’s horse, pulled out a charge, and slid it into the tube. A small red light near the collimator glowed faintly, signaling that the shell had been accepted and was ready to fire.

The battle with the remnants of the other plastun element had gone static and was no longer shifting. None of them were coming over the vox anymore, but the characteristic green-tinted color of the plastuns’ laser shots still bathed the steppe in its glow. In response, the plasma cannon from the roof of the armored rapid-firer put out three times as many shots, simply incinerating stones and boulders, burning holes through them. When plasma contacted cold stone, it burned through it and ruptured it, scattering dozens of fragments in every direction, which could easily kill a person without body armor.

Tytar tried several more times to reach the plastuns on the vox, but in response the ether only crackled with static. They moved on their bot-horses several hundred meters, getting as close to the combat vehicle’s flank as possible. The vehicle itself had stopped and was laying suppressive fire, while a squad of light imperial infantry was advancing toward the improvised shelter of the nearly wiped-out unknown plastuns.

“We’re… done. I’m the last one.” — suddenly a signal broke through the vox. — “We’re about to cook that vehicle. Hold on!” — “I’ll take them with me. The plasma burned my legs, I can’t feel them… where are they. The rapid-firer burned our horses too. Yokhym is dead.” — the voice, with the strain of agony, was sliding almost into a howl. “They’re already here!”

A few seconds later, at the spot among the boulders where the plastuns had held out, two grenade explosions rang out, briefly lighting up the battlefield. Six dark figures that had been crouching in for the flanking approach to the shelter flared in the light and went dark. Tytar barely caught the sight of one of them, at the last moment of the flash, jerking unnaturally and folding sideways — like a blade of grass being cut by a stick across a meadow.

“No-o-o! Give us a minute!” Tytar, unwilling to believe what had happened, wheeled sharply toward Kelep. “Opanas — silence that rapid-firer!”

Kelep had to dismount: the gully’s exit was too steep for the horse, and it might lose footing with the loaded Hornet. Together with Hordynia, the two of them climbed the slope, with Dmytro pushing from behind, not letting him fall back. The extra fourteen kilograms of the loaded Hornet were making themselves felt. Hordynia himself held one more additional round in his hands.

The rapid-firer continued vomiting plasma into the stone before it. Even at a distance of nearly two hundred meters, this wheeled vehicle was a clean target. Its large dimensions — five by twelve meters — allowed it to carry a squad of light infantry plus several small rapid-firers on the sides.

Hordynia barely peeked over the top of the gully, pressed his eye to the Hornet’s sight, and within a second fired. The grenade needed less than two breaths to reach its target. The combat vehicle was not stuffed with electronics for intercepting mines or rocket grenades — it was more like an armored truck. So without any obstacles, all seven kilograms of the Hornet’s charge entered directly under the base of the rapid-firer’s turret.

An enormous sheaf of sparks and sizzling molten metal — sputtering like fat in a frying pan — scattered dozens of meters in every direction, illuminating the imperial infantrymen who were just finishing their sweep of the plastun’s shelter. Taken by surprise, they crouched, some beginning to fire chaotically in every direction. From the upper hatches came two imperials: one missing an arm, with a dark, still-living patch of plasma on his back, burning him alive. Twitching for a few seconds right on the armor, his figure went rigid, as if fused with the metal.

All this chaos was amplified by a second grenade from the Hornet, which Kelep expertly drove straight above the rear wheel where the engine was. The shower of burned metal and plasma chunks was not as spectacular as the first, but from the backside of the vehicle poured thick black smoke, and within seconds the machine blazed like a box of matches.

“They still don’t know where we are.” Tytar watched through the scope as the narrow-eyes took up positions around the vehicle, some helping their equally narrow-eyed comrades climb out. “Let’s hold off on the rifles for now — can you get another grenade in there?”

“Of course!” Hordynia was already without orders descending to his horse for the third charge.

“I count five more imperials still moving.” The blaze from the burning combat vehicle was lighting everything up well around it. “Kelep — fragmentation strike.”

“Understood.” Opanas took the Hornet tube in hand and pressed “FRAG” on the round’s programmer. Now the grenade, upon exiting the tube, would automatically switch to proximity detonation two to four meters from the target. Hordynia scrambled back up the steep incline with two charges under his arms, slipping once and nearly going down flat on his back.

“Don’t go blowing us up with that melt-crap.” Kelep was a bit nervous watching Hordynia’s struggles on the rocky slope. Though he knew the grenades didn’t detonate on their own without the programmer.

“Holy Sich, damn it all.” Tytar swore to himself. Then continued aloud:

“Kelep — fire on the black stone where no grass grows around it. Three Sunflowers are lying there, shooting at something. If you aim at the vehicle’s hull, the grenade will go off over them. How many more are in there — only the devil knows.” For some reason, Tytar was starting to be troubled by the thought of why the infantrymen weren’t retreating from their clearly disabled vehicle. Even though the fire blazing behind them was lighting everything up for dozens of meters around.

Without any command, another melt-grenade flew from the Hornet. At that same moment, Tytar’s wisdom tooth began to ache sharply, reminding him of the first battle in which the plastun forces had set foot on the surface. Then, they’d all caught it from drones that had swooped unexpectedly on their patrol as it was finishing off one of the fuel columns for the titan-tanks.

The tooth let up a little, along with what he saw through the scope: the detonation of seven kilograms of explosive with melt-dust directly above three infantrymen hiding behind a stone and periodically firing into the darkness. One arm — holding the Empire’s slender, elegant laser gun — flew from behind the stone, spinning on its axis, shot upward, and struck the stone. Through the scope Tytar could see the muscles on the severed arm contracting, then releasing the laser gun. A fraction of a second later, two more shredded bodies flew up from behind the stone, the melt passing through them as though through a lace curtain on his grandmother’s veranda.

“Bull’s-e…” Tytar couldn’t finish — a sharp pain clenched his teeth, even his eardrums buzzed from some sound inside the helmet.

Hordynia and Kelep spat simultaneously. Kelep’s teeth had always been sensitive to vibrations and…

“THIS IS ULTRASOUND. WE’RE DONE. WE RUN!” Tytar bolted, jumping a meter at a time, flying toward his horse. “IT’S DRONE SCANNING. FULL THROTTLE.”

After those words, Kelep and Hordynia instantly understood what was happening. They dropped the loaded Hornet and rolled the same way down the slope toward their horses.

Imperial drones were sweeping the surface with ultrasound. In sensitive personnel, the impulse caused toothache. Tytar’s wisdom tooth started sharply aching again — as if someone were prying at it from the inside with an iron nail.

The scanning drone itself flew at an altitude of several hundred meters, methodically striking downward with ultrasound, trying to find its quarry. Their last encounter with such a device had ended in the decimation of a plastun squad. First the drone had fired several rounds at them, and then a ballistic missile strike had followed within a few dozen minutes.

The imperials hadn’t moved away from the vehicle. They held their positions as if expecting something from above. Ultrasound didn’t distinguish friend from foe — so anything not immediately beside the burning infantry vehicle was being destroyed from the sky.

The trio of plastuns had only a few minutes left before the drone would pinpoint their position and strike.

“We mount the bots and fall back!” Tytar was already on his horse, and on the move managed to connect the cord-jack to his wrist for firmer bot control.

“Maybe we freeze? If we don’t move, the scanner won’t notice us. We’ll just be stones on the ground.” Hordynia couldn’t get the bot-horse control cord into the jack, then spat and got on without it.

“Damn… The drone scanned us three times. The first pulse was weak — that was exactly when we fired the Hornet. So we lit up like a straw bull from the fairy tale. The next scans came with greater amplitude — it got our exact position. And now it’s just saturating with waves. My teeth are going to start bleeding soon.”

And indeed — every few seconds Tytar felt as if someone were prying at his wisdom teeth, and a metallic taste appeared in his mouth.

“So what’s the plan? Which way do we withdraw?” Kelep was last to mount: he had gone back for the Hornet tube he’d dropped in the panic.

“We go west, about ten kilometers. Our horses are faster than that drone. There’s a grove there — we go to ground under the trees. Remember when we spent the night there two nights ago, near the river? That’s where we race.”

Tytar kicked his legs, directing the horse along the gully. Behind his back, the sky was already beginning to gray with the approach of a new day.

“Oh — almost forgot. We put on the anti-radar cloaks — so we glow less in infrared. Who knows what else that drone can scan with.”

The trio of horses burst out of the gully and shot off across the green steppe. Here and there, stones jutted up from the ground, and between them the plastuns picked their path. Their greenish-brown cloaks billowed above the horses, partly masking the silhouettes of the iron beasts and riders from eyes above.

The impulses from the ultrasonic scanner were weak at first, but every few hundred meters they grew stronger. The drone was clearly hunting them, trying to fulfill its mission — drop a few bombs on the haiduks’ heads. In the final kilometer, Tytar was constantly spitting saliva from his mouth — the pain from the waves the drone was sending had become continuous.

“Listen, Tytar — I just remembered.” Kelep activated the vox to speak with the squad leader at full speed. “A friend of mine from the mechanics gave me two decoys. They’re small boxes, of a strange metallic shape — they reflect ultrasound very well. According to him, they imitate the size of a person on the scanner. Should we try? My teeth are taking hits too — the drone is closing. Another half hour of pursuit and we’re done.”

“Oh, I heard about those boxes.” Tytar squeezed the horse with his legs. “We stop. Set up the decoy.”

All three slowed their horses and jumped off on the move. Kelep pulled two gadgets the size of a fist from the pack on his horse’s left side. Their faces were indented inward and had several ridges that converged concentrically toward the center of the figure. Whether the thing worked — no one yet knew.

They also decided to build a small fighting position from the surrounding stones, placing the two decoys inside. For added realism, they sacrificed the Hornet tube, laying it on top of the shelter. From a great height, it might look like someone was lying there with a weapon, sheltered behind a parapet. At least that’s what the three plastuns thought.

“Now we ride stirrup to stirrup. And like that, touching one another, we ride on.”

Tytar and the other two mounted their bot-horses again.

“I think the scanner can still see us anyway.” He spat a large mouthful of saliva down. “If those boxes work, the drone will see that two of us stayed behind and one went on. What’s better to hit — one haiduk or two? I think two. The narrow-eyed filth operator sitting somewhere at the controls reading the scan results thinks the same. If we ride tightly together, on the scanner we’ll appear as one haiduk. That’ll give us time to pull back while they bomb the decoy.”

“Tytar, you’re a real strategist. My own idea was to just lie down on the ground and stay still. Maybe it would’ve worked.” Hordynia cheerfully voiced his idea, which was absolutely wrong. If the drone had already found you within three or four hundred meters, playing dead or pretending to be a stone was entirely pointless.

At the highest speed three riders could manage without breaking formation, they moved on westward. The sun behind them had already risen and lit up the pale little clouds gathering on the horizon. “If rain comes too — pure luxury. Flyers and drones don’t like rain,” Tytar thought to himself.

Ten minutes later, the hits against their teeth had considerably weakened. And soon they fell silent entirely.

“Alright — full DJAGA-DJAGA now. The scanner’s fallen behind.” Tytar struck with his right heel against the small sensor on the bot-horse, and it immediately gave full throttle. That is — a gallop. That is — thirty-five kilowatts.

As if confirming his words, the echo of two explosions rolled to them from behind.

“That would’ve been us. The boxes work. I love our electronics guys!” Kelep turned back, trying to make out the drone or some other nastiness in the sky. “Look, there’s smoke pouring up there!”

“That’s the smoke grenade I threw in too. So that after the explosion, we’d muddy the air a bit and force the drone to circle longer, checking the result of the strike.” Hordynia was clearly proud that his own trick had worked too.

“Well boys — you can’t go wrong with you lot. We fly to the extraction point, we’ll be there by noon. Main thing — no contact with narrow-eyes!”

“For the Sich and the Meadow!”

The gallop gradually eased into a steady, economical pace. The horses breathed hard, but without faltering — the automation itself was reducing the load, preserving the drives. Behind them remained smoke, fire, and death; ahead — the endless steppe, waking with the sun.

The first rays slid across the waves of grass, and it seemed as if the earth remembered nothing. Not the explosions, not the plasma, not the screams. Only the wind and the steady rustle beneath the bot-horses’ hooves.

No one spoke. After a battle, words always feel superfluous. The ears still rang, the teeth ached with the dull echo of ultrasound, and fragments of bodies and armor flashed before the eyes again and again. Each rode in their own silence, carrying what cannot be dropped even at full gallop.

Tytar looked back one last time. On the horizon there was nothing left to see — no smoke, no flashes. Only the steppe and the pale sky. Out there remained those who hadn’t been taken away in time. Out there remained the battle.

“If we live — we’ll remember.” he said quietly, more to himself than the others, and guided his horse slightly to the right, where the grass grew taller.

The three riders slowly dissolved among the waves of green, growing smaller and smaller, until they merged with the steppe entirely.

---

Footnotes

1. Otaman — a Cossack military commander, equivalent to a squad or unit leader. ↩

2. Plastuns — elite Cossack light infantry scouts, known for stealth, endurance, and reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines. The tradition traces to the Zaporozhian Host on Old Earth. ↩

3. Empire of the Sun — one of the three great star empires, the primary antagonist in this story. Colloquially called “Sunflowers” by the Hets, its soldiers are referred to by the derogatory term “narrow-eyes.” ↩

4. Atmospheric flyers — combat aircraft designed for operations within a planet’s atmosphere, as opposed to space-based vessels. ↩

5. Hets — informal slang for the Hetmanate Federation and its soldiers. ↩

6. Melt-carrier — a transport vehicle carrying melt-plasma charges, used as fuel and ammunition for melt-based weapons and tanks. ↩

7. Infamy (infamiya) — a formal declaration of dishonor, stripping a Cossack of rank, privileges, and family standing. Considered among the worst punishments in Hetmanate military law. ↩

8. Tarantula — a spider-like multi-legged combat walker used by the Empire of the Sun. Highly maneuverable, it can continue operating even after losing several limbs. ↩

9. “Prih-Skok” (Jump-Hop) — a meditative training chant used by plastuns to achieve breath control and steady aim under stress, developed over generations of Cossack military tradition. ↩