Note: This part was a bit rushed and might be revised later.
22 May 1916
Left Bank of the Putylivka River, Russian Empire
Vladimir sighed, collapsing onto the dirt ramparts of the artillery dugout. It was a warm spring day with a nice breeze, but it felt blisteringly hot in his woolen uniform and he’d been on his feet since late the night before.
“Pyotr?” he called, voice hoarse and dry.
His friend sat a few paces away in a similar position. He gave Vladimir a bleary look. “Yeah?”
“Do you remember when I said that camp was boring?”
They chuckled. Vladimir glanced at the pile of shells that lay on the cart, still to be unloaded, and groaned. They’d been woken at dawn a few days before and crammed into an over-crowded train, then rushed to the front for what felt like an eternity. He’d thought for sure that he’d finally be able to actually fire one of the big guns they hauled, only to be pointed to a boxcar full of six-inch shells and told to start transferring them to the carts. He’d finally gotten to a firing position, only to have to unload the same damn shells he’d loaded before.
“Get back to work you useless bastards!” PoruchikChekhov shouted, stomping towards them. “Do you think the wagons can wait for you to take a goddamn nap? On your feet!”
He felt like hell, but didn’t argue, shambling towards the closest cart. Chekhov was a short, heavyset man who acted like a noble despite being the son of a printer. As Vladimir and Pyotr heaved shells off the wagon bed he chewed them out, a frequent enough occurrence that he was able to tune it out. The damn things were heavy, and each movement made his arms scream with pain. What else was new? His arms hurt, his feet hurt, his head hurt, and Christ almighty did his back hurt.
The cleared cart turned and went back up the road, and another came to take its place. He limped the few hundred paces to the next gun and got to work there. The rest of the unit was scattered up and down the road in similar groupings, working at unloading shells, loading and positioning guns. They’d shown up that morning to find the guns already present but not set up, and he had no idea why they were like that nor did he really care. He’d given up on ever understanding anything high command decided after they’d fled all the way from the Carpathians to the Pripyat Marshes in two months, and just wished they’d give him a rifle.
About an hour later, one of the gun teams decided to start dry-firing their howitzer and Chekhov raced off to scream at them. Vladimir sat down on one of the carts, trying to relieve his screaming feet, and Pyotr followed.
“I hate that bastard.” Pyotr muttered, glaring at the poruchik’s distant form. “If he wants to act so much like an aristocrat then I’ll hang him like one.”
Vladimir frowned. He despised Chekhov as well, but it wouldn’t do Pyotr any good to openly threaten an officer. “You shouldn’t say such things.”
Pyotr snorted. “What, you think the Okhrana has spies in a goddamn artillery battalion? I’ll say it again, if Chekhov wants to act like a blue-blood I’m going to get an up-close and personal look at said blood.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Vladimir tried to rub his aching feet through the soles of his boots to no avail. His throat was quite dry.
Pyotr spoke first. “I don’t suppose you like the nobles, do you?”
Vladimir shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do about it one way or the other.”
“But you can! You’ve seen how incompetent they are, if common people like us banded together, there’s no way they could stop us.”
“Maybe. But I’d just like to get on with my life. God decides what happens to me, my job is to get along as well as I can with what He decides.”
“That….that’s fair.” Pyotr said in a tone that suggested he didn’t agree. “But you’re sure?”
Vladimir nodded. “Mhm. He decides whether or not I catch a bullet, or even if some rock falls out of the sky and whacks me over the head like it did in Siberia. He’s seen me through this far, I’m not going to start questioning Him now.”
Pyotr started to say something, then cut himself off. “Shit, here comes Chekhov.”
They got back to work unloading shells. After two hours without relief Vladimir’s feet felt like they were on fire, and a furtive glance revealed that even the poruchik was shifting his weight uncomfortably. Good, he hoped that they felt like the Devil himself was nailing his boots to his feet. He was tempted to say something to that effect, then realized no-one had asked for water all day. He did so, and after a brief conversation with a runner Chekhov had pointed him and a few others towards a nearby river. After briefly getting lost he found the river, which was really a glorified stream, and filled his canteen, parasites be damned. In the quiet of the wilds, he could hear a faint buzzing sound, almost like there was a bunch of angry bees about. He looked around, saw nothing, and shrugged.
He’d just gotten back to the battery when someone at the other end started to shout, incoherent at such distance. This was followed by several more men, and within a minute it seemed as if half the unit was yelling. Several of the horses were also acting nervous, eyes and ears flicking about as they shifted in their braces. Chekhov leapt off a near-empty cart with a start.
“Now what?” he growled, storming towards the source of the commotion.
Vladimir and Pyotr exchanged slightly confused looks, then followed. He handed Pyotr his canteen, and the man took several large gulps.
“What is it?” he gasped as he finished.
Vladimir shrugged. “Hell if I know. Maybe the Austrians are up to something, or maybe the Fritzes put up an airship.”
“God, I hope it’s not an airship. My cousin was at Tannenberg and fought the zeppelins there. I hope I never have to see one.”
Vladimir’s response died in his throat. Before them, Chekhov stood staring at the sky, bug-eyed, with dozens of other men in similar positions or muttering words of confusion or disbelief. Coming out from behind a stand of trees, he looked upwards as well, and stopped in his tracks.
An object was hovering in the sky a mile or so away, transfixed several hundred feet above the treetops. The first thing that struck him was its color. It was bright white, like a whitewashed egg, the sort of white that’s painful to look at, but had smaller black channels running across its surface. As his eyes adjusted, he realized how large it truly was. If he had to guess, he would put it at about the size of a wheat field, shaped like a rounded piece of honeycomb. In the center of it was a bright blue disk, several shades lighter than the sky around it.
“What the hell is that?” he asked aloud. Pyotr said something similar, and the men looked at each other with complete bewilderment. Vladimir scanned the crowd, spotting Ivan Ivanovich, who had once been a teacher’s assistant.
“Hey, Ivan!” he shouted, jogging towards him. “What is that?”
Ivan shrugged. “I don’t have a clue.”
The strange object began to twist, almost like a top spinning in place. Maybe it was trying to find its course? He didn’t know, he wasn’t a pilot.
At long last, Chekhov broke from his trance. “What-- that-- Mother of God!” He stammered for a minute, choking on every syllable, before he finally spoke clearly. “It has to be the Fritzes or the Bozgors, what with their zeppelins. Shit, they’re probably calling in our position to the artillery right now.”
The officer jumped up on the nearest cart, pointing to men seemingly at random. “You, all of you, start loading. You, find that damn thing’s mark and set as many guns for it as you can, and the rest of you get to your guns. You, run up to the nearest command tent and tell them everything. Move!”
Men began to swarm around them, running this way and that like a nest of disturbed ants. Their gun having been lost in transit, Vladimir and Pyotr scrambled to the nearest cannon and started manhandling shells. His arms felt as if he hadn’t done anything in a day, the shock and adrenaline from facing this new weapon wiping out their exhaustion. He’d seen similar guns in action before, and as he glanced at the strange airship drifting towards them he almost felt sorry for the Fritzes aboard. Almost.
“FIRE!”
He slammed his hands over his ears as soon as he heard, barely blocking out the eardrum-rupturing roar of six inch field guns firing en masse. Instinctively, he turned and watched the shells fly, dimly aware of everyone else around him doing the same. Most of them flew wide or low, courtesy of faulty sights or bad crew, eliciting groans from the artillerymen and shouts from Chekhov. Two, however, went straight for the airship, hurtling towards it with the finality of a speed train. He squinted, anticipating a gas explosion.
Instead, bolts of bright-blue fire--no, not fire, burning light--shot out of the object’s center, hitting the shells dead-on a few dozen feet out. With faint popping sounds they exploded, falling to the ground as clouds of dust.
The battery lay in stunned silence for a long minute. Pyotr was the first to speak. “What?”
At once, they exploded into shouts and yells, men frantically gesturing between the object, the guns, occasionally one another or at Chekhov, who was trying to regain control of the cacophonous mess. Vladimir, however, stood transfixed. The humming sound from earlier was back, louder than ever, and as it grew in intensity the object approached. Their shells hadn’t hurt the airship, or whatever the hell it was, they had just pissed it off. Parts of the craft began to break off, and he realized that the black marks were seams, like some sort of bizarre child’s toy. The smaller parts spun briefly, then righted themselves and bore towards them at a much faster speed. This was bad. Really, really bad. The pit in his stomach was slowly sinking into an abyss.
Not for the first time in his life, Vladimir turned and ran, pushing aside the jumble of men who surrounded him. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw others doing the same, and Chekhov roared something and fired his revolver into the air to no avail. The humming sound was everywhere now, and he could barely hear the shouts and cries of the men around him. He bolted past a man and into a gap in the crowd, arms pumping like cylinders as he got into the open for the first time. He needed to get out of here, now, before the airship landed or came back around for another pass.
An explosion erupted behind him, and he glanced behind him to see the smaller airships hovering above the grass a few hundred meters away, clouds of murky gas spilling out from their sides as a gun rapidly turned into a smouldering heap. He looked forward and nearly slammed into a tree, dodging out of the way and resuming his full-tilt sprint. A few paces later, a chorus of screams and shouts erupted, and Chekhov and whichever men had rifles began to fire. He looked over his shoulder again to see twisted purple forms charging across the plain towards the crowd of fleeing men. He prayed, shouting out barely-remembered hymns as he poured all of his energy into running. Bolts of light, like the ones that had destroyed the shells shot over his head and he dropped into a crouching sprint, he was sure now that if he stopped he was dead or worse but his legs were beginning to tire as strain from the day began to show.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a cart, its wheel shattered in a pothole, and he spun about at once. Snatching up a nearby shovel he leapt onto its flat back, focusing on the braying donkey that was thrashing against its restraints. As another bolt shot overhead he jumped onto its back, grabbing its mane with one hand and slamming the shovel blade into the ties with the other. It gave way and the other snapped and the donkey shot out of the bars, nearly throwing him off as it raced down the road at full gallop. He was a good rider and managed to lock his legs against its side, clinging to its mane and bridle as it hurtled away….
He turned and saw a scene from hell. The smouldering remnants of the guns lay in an arc around their former liner, some having been tossed out of place as if by giants. The unit had been turned into a seething mass of men and bodies as they struggled to escape the--God, what were those? He couldn’t see well, but strange, purple beasts rampaged among them with crackling blue light and the occasional explosion. Men were frantically manning one of the farther guns and trying to point it at the demons, but they were too close and about to be overrun. Stomach roiling, he looked away.
He was gaining distance now, but he still needed to get away. He kicked the donkey, turning it slightly to the left and plunging into the brush. God willing he knew where he was going. A few minutes later he emerged into the river valley, galloping across the sluggish current and onto the other side. He rode for three more hours, kicking the donkey into an outright charge before he felt safe enough to stop.
What the hell had happened?