Leipzig, European Federation, February 2035

  "Crabs can't see blue," Felix "Ossi" Jonker tells me as he serves the patron next to me another beer. The businessman, overweight and sweaty, listens to every word with a tense focus, as if he was not dead drunk before he collapses over the bar.

  "Don't know why the Hungarians decided to airdrop us blue berets with the crates of AK 47s and ammunition, but we liked to believe the Crabs didn't see blue and that somehow the Russians had figured that out. Real head cannon if you ask me. Kept us busy when we weren't plotting ambushes or recon missions," he continues as he washes the glasses behind the bar.

  "How did you end up behind enemy lines?" I ask.

  "Operation Graf Salm, yeah, that clusterfuck. Unlike the Australian , Austrian and Italian commies who ended up in Bavaria, my unit was cut off in Passau. My platoon, three Marders, we were trying to break east when we got ambushed by some red Crabs. Out of twenty something men I was the only one left alive. Barely had time to regain my composure. We were sprinting down a forest hill, stumbling and falling, just me and three others. Hit my head pretty hard a few times on the way down. If I hadn’t had my helmet I would still be lying there. At the bottom I smashed it against a rock by the edge of a creek running through that little valley. The water was half frozen and I remember thinking, 'At least it’s cold enough to keep the bleeding down.'"

  He pauses to refill a shot glass with something clear and bitter smelling before sliding it across the bar without looking. He nearly forces it in my hand before hitting his with mine and taking the shot.

  "Accidentally wandered north. Yeah, that's literally just it. I was so dazed, the other guys who had tried to make it down the hill were dead. And I took a gamble. God knows what would have happened if I had followed the creek southeast. Guess the sergeants in basic training weren't lying when they said we should always have a compass at hand. Walked for a day. Battle was still raging, could hear the fighter jets and Banshees roaring overhead."

  "Did you not try to get the attention of them?" I ask.

  "Ha. That's a good one." He turns around as he laughs hysterically, waking the businessman for a second. The man lifts his head, chuckles as if in on the joke, and slumps back down.

  "If I was a colonel, some important journalist maybe, they might have bothered noting where I was spotted. But they weren't risking a multimillion helicopter, its crew and a PARA rescue special forces squad to save the ass of a conscript. Only helicopter who did notice me, still don't know why it was flying so low, a Hungarian H145. Saw the gunner on the side behind a mounted M134. Couldn't see their face because of the helmet's face mask. Pilot circled around. And before I could start thanking God for my luck, I heard a roar coming."

  He stops to take a sip from a chipped coffee mug behind the bar. It smells like instant powder and leftover schnapps.

  "Pilot tried to drop altitude fast, I guess trying to dodge the incoming. Too late. The gunner was already firing. They hadn't even tilted the minigun up properly. I saw the bullets kick up dirt a hundred meters to my left before they arced upwards. The banshee was coming in low. It caught their tail with a clean pass. One hit. Maybe two. Clean slice like a butcher knife. Rotor broke apart in the air. I watched the fuselage spin like a coin flipped by God and slam into the treeline."

  His face shifts slightly, more grim than before.

  "No fireball, but the thing was done for. It landed cockpit-first, and the pilot and copilot were pancaked between the wreckage and the forest floor. I didn’t know a body could be mangled like that. Blood mixed with gasoline and hydraulic fluid. I’ll let you imagine the smell." He pauses, swallowing hard, before continuing. "The gunner in the back wasn’t in the back anymore. She’d been thrown clear before the wreck hit the ground. Found her a good ten meters away from the crash site, just lying there. I tried moving her, thought she was dead. All I wanted was a radio. But then I was met with a curse, and that's when I learned some Hungarian curse words and that an arm doesn't move that way. She shot up, cursing, then switched to English as she took off her helmet. Her breathing was ragged, like it hurt just to inhale. Found out later she had a few broken ribs, but compared to what happened to the rest of the crew, she’d won the lottery. She had blood in her blonde hair but we had no time for a medical checkup. She ignored me and ran toward what was left of the helicopter, cursing as she saw what had happened to the guys up front before reaching behind for a bag. Just a day sack, with two patches—one with "Lena" and another that looked like a unit patch, I suppose. She tossed me another bag, which I later found out was the pilot's emergency kit for situations like this. She cursed again as she realized how hurt she really was. More cursing followed, all in Hungarian, as she looked around for her machine gun but couldn’t find it. My G36C and her pistol would be the only things we had to rely on. Three mags for mine and one for her sidearm. Talk about an uphill battle."

  "Did she survive her injuries? Hard to believe she walked away from this?" I say.

  He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he lifts his hand and points to the wedding ring around his finger.

  “Not like we were going to dig trenches and wait for them to come to us like I had done for months on end before that. We took off east, this time thanks to her we did go in the right direction."

  He lets the moment settle, the dull hum of the bar filling the silence between us. The drunken businessman nearby snores into his arm, completely unaware of the history unfolding beside him.

  “She knew her way around the woods better than I did. Even banged up like she was, she moved with purpose. I could barely keep up, and I was the one with two working lungs. That first night we found a hunting shack. Empty, but dry. She passed out the second we locked the door behind us. Emergency radio in the packs didn't work. Or no one was bothering to answer. But there was nothing.

  While she slept, could'nt risk making a fire in the old stone hearth and I looked around the shack with my Petzl. There was a cabinet full of rusted tools, a bed where she was laying on, and a moldy mattress rolled up in the corner, and, to my surprise, an old 1960s radio sitting beneath a pile of hunting magazines. Big thing. Olive green, with cracked knobs and a metal handle. Looked like the kind your granddad would use during the Cold War.

  I spent the next hour with a screwdriver and some blind hope, going over every wire and coil inside. Pulled a mouse nest out of the back. Cleaned the contacts with some vodka from Lena’s day sack. She had stuffed it in next to a map and some painkillers. Not military issue, just a flask she must’ve carried for bad days. The dial was stiff. Speaker blown. But it was a radio. I was met with a dull German voice after I managed to connect the radio power source to some batteries, I could make out the swiss accent.

  "We're still waiting to hear what happened to the units that moved to Munich. The Ministry of Defence refuses to disclose details on ongoing military operations, but from the reports we're receiving from the front, it is not looking good."

  "What is he saying?" Lena asked, her voice still hoarse.

  I translated the broadcast quietly as she sat up, wincing with every movement.

  The voice on the radio crackled on.

  “We have confirmed reports that our troops who advanced toward Passau have either been encircled or wiped out. There are also unverified sightings of new Crabs and renewed tripod activity near Linz. It’s beginning to look like everything we reclaimed last week is about to be lost again.”

  Lena unfolded the map and spread it out across the table. With a marker, she traced the positions mentioned on the radio, then marked our own. The picture it painted was grim. We were far off—days away from Vienna even in good weather, assuming we were healthy, well-equipped hikers. But we weren’t.

  One look at each other told us everything. No one was coming. No one even knew we were out here. We were cut off.

  She sat down heavily on the bed, shoulders slumped, eyes blank. I joined her. We stared at the cracked ceiling in silence until sleep took us. Across the continent, thousands were dying every day. What were two more?

  I slept too well. Too deeply. Something about it felt wrong—my uniform still damp, the mattress reeking of mold and old sweat, Lena groaning softly in her sleep from the pain. And yet, when I woke, it wasn’t the discomfort that stirred me. It was the light streaming in through the gaps in the wooden shutters. Birds chirping outside. And a strange, low sound crackling from the emergency radio.

  Not static.

  Something else.

  Barely had time to tell the panicked guy on the other end to calm down and to look for landmarks. He reacted as if Christ was on the other end of his radio. Understood that there were four of them, and like me their units had been destroyed trying to retreat. Lena was up, went to her map and tried to find out where those guys were. About an hour walk thankfully, it was the only reason we had catched their transmission.

  "Who were they?" I ask.

  He ran a hand through his hair, still rough from sleep, and gave a small shake of his head.

  "German regulars. Infantry. From a unit out of Regensburg before the war, I think. They were supposed to fall back and regroup near Landshut, but something hit their convoy. Crabs, Tripods. Lost 200 men. By the time they scrambled out of the wreckage and got their bearings, they were already behind enemy lines and the war had moved km's more to the south."

  He leaned back against the wall.

  "They were kids, mostly. Maybe one NCO with real experience. The guy I talked to on the radio, Jonas, was barely twenty. Sounded like he was holding it together with spit and tape. Lucky we picked them up at all. If we had moved fifty meters further into the woods, we would have missed the signal completely."

  When we finally reached their position, Jonas embraced both me and Lena, as if we were their saviors. When he saw her flight suit, he lit up, thinking that because she had something to do with the air force, she was his ticket back home. It was a tough conversation when we had to break the news to him that she was just a mechanic, stuck inside a helicopter and behind a minigun. High command wouldn’t waste resources on trying to save us. Instead, we shifted focus to survival: stitching up Lena and Marcus, another guy from the marauder group we found, getting food, collecting water from the creeks, and avoiding Crabs.

  "Was that hard?" I ask.

  "I was out for a few days after that," he replies. "Lena didn’t trust those guys enough to stay alone with them in a small cabin, so we went out together. We were sitting by a creek, trying to catch fish like cavemen with makeshift spears when we heard it, trees cracking and the unmistakable sound of an engine that wasn’t human. Lena, being an air force brat, didn’t catch on right away, but I knew exactly what it was. I'd been on the receiving end of a tripod attack before. Realized it was heading straight for us. I shoved both of us into the freezing water before she even had time to react."

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  He serves himself another coffee, as if trying to avoid getting too drunk before heading home.

  "It wasn't a second too late," he continues. "I saw the fish panic for a moment, then suddenly, a massive leg crashed into the water about ten meters away, right above us. A Category 1 tripod, maybe fifty meters tall. Under the shallow water, I could make out its massive form, searching for us, like it knew we were there."

  "It stood there for what felt like an eternity," he continues, his voice lowering as he recalls the memory. "Its long, spindly legs making ripples in the water as it searched. The sound of the engines, the whirring of its joints—it all felt so close, so impossibly close. I could barely breathe. Lena was shaking beside me, trying not to make a sound, and I was praying that we wouldn’t be spotted. But that thing... it was relentless. It had no reason to care, no mercy."

  He takes another sip of coffee, his gaze distant.

  "We stayed still, absolutely still, submerged in that freezing creek, holding our breath. The cold was creeping into my bones, but I was more afraid of making a sound, of drawing its attention. The water barely covered us, but I hoped it would be enough to hide us from its sensors. Every second felt like an eternity. My lungs were burning, but I didn’t dare to exhale, not even a whisper. Lena was the same, eyes wide with fear, her mouth pressed shut, holding her breath as if the slightest sound would give us away. The seconds stretched on, and I could feel the cold settling deeper into my body, but we stayed silent, motionless.

  "That thing... it was so close. Its legs crashing through the water, sending ripples toward us. I couldn’t even look at it; I just kept my eyes trained on the water, hoping the murk would hide us, praying it wouldn’t find us. And then, after what felt like an eternity, it stepped away, its huge form moving back into the trees. We didn’t move a muscle until we heard its footsteps retreating into the woods."

  He exhales deeply, shaking his head as if still trying to shake off the fear of that moment.

  "We finally broke the surface, gasping for air. The second we did, the cold air hit us like a punch, but we didn’t speak for a while. Not a word. We were both too shaken, too aware of how close we had come to being spotted. Lena... she didn’t say anything for a long time. She just stared at me, wide-eyed, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened."

  Didn't stop running till we hit the cabin. Both from the fear of the 20 or so tripods that were going the opposite way, moving south east towards the front line, but also from the cold. We knew the moment we'd stop that we'd start freezing again. Felt like we did a marathon as I shoved the door of the cabin open.

  Marcus sat on the table with that dumb look he always had on his face.

  "Hey I managed to radio the brass but they told us to just walk south!" He said, ignoring the fact we were soaked and freezing. Just grabbed the radio from his hand and did a radiocheck as Lena looked over the map and drawing a line indicating the direction those tripods were going too.

  I took the radio from Marcus, my fingers numb but steady as I tuned into the frequency. The static on the other end made my jaw tighten, but I didn’t hesitate. I was done asking for help or favors.

  “This is Private Jonker,” I said, keeping my voice flat. “We’ve got updated intel on enemy movement. Tripods, about 20 of them, moving south-east towards the front line.”

  The operator on the other end sounded skeptical, like he hadn’t even bothered to listen to our last requests. “Jonker, this is High Command. We’ve already dealt with your evac request' You have to walk south. We’re not sending a rescue team—”

  I cut him off, annoyed. “I’m not asking for an evac. I’m telling you there’s an entire squadron of tripods heading south-east. Twenty of them, at least. Category 1 and a few 2's. They're not moving like a patrol. They're gearing up to hit who ever is left in Linz. You need to pass this along to the brass before they get blindsided and get more men killed."

  There was a brief silence on the other end, and then I could hear the operator’s tone shift. Gone was the casual dismissal, replaced by a sharp focus.

  “Wait... you said 20?” he asked, now sounding serious.

  I just described what we saw, the direction they were moving, and the speed they had. Category 1 tripods could easily move below the tree line. The only reason we saw them was during our run to the cabin. After that, we were redirected to more operators on other frequencies, as if it was some game of broken telephone. That’s how our group of marauders started. We were stuck between Passau and Linz, right on what we called the "Vienna Express." Most of the crabs and their machines moved through that corridor to hit Vienna, and monitoring the road toward it was a golden opportunity for High Command.

  Still, they couldn't get us out, nor did they want to. But within just a few days, we were getting airdrops at night, long-range radios, weapons, equipment, and those AKs I mentioned earlier. They sent us two M60 machine guns, along with a few LAW anti-tank weapons, just in case we had to deal with tripods.

  That didn’t mean life was easy, though. There were six of us in that cabin before we had to move. I had a bad case of bronchitis that seemed to drag on forever, and Lena was dealing with chronic pain from her broken ribs and the pneumonia that came with shallow breathing. We couldn’t sleep—it was so cold that winter. Even with the two of us sharing a blanket, it was unbearable. And we couldn’t risk making a fire because of the heat signature; we were high up, on a hill overlooking a valley where half of the crabs were moving southeast. If any of those tripods looked in our direction at night, they’d see the cabin glowing like a beacon, thanks to their sensors. It was a constant game of cat and mouse.

  Even with dug-in observation posts and Viet Cong-style tunnels we dug on the side of the mountain, they spotted us from time to time. Lena often managed to get me and her on the same shift, and I remember one time, when we were about 200 meters from a national road, running parallel to the highway. From the cabin, we had eyes on that road, but with no eyes on the road itself, we decided to set up an observation post there. All was quiet until she shook me. She had seen something on the hill parallel of ours. About a few kilometres away, but she had a keen eye. She had seen that cursed tripod looking in our direction. Smallish, between trees. Just one eye looking at us. By the time we decided to leave our hole through the secondary exit all hell broke loose. Tree above us exploded. Wasn't an accident, the crabs trying to attack us wanted us to keep our head down so they could over run our position. Gave them none of it. I opened up on the bushes some fifty meters in front of us, the one the blaster shot had came from with my M60. Didn't care I didn't have my ear protection as I just destroyed that part of the forest. Lena struggled out of the hole and sprinted ten or twenty meters back and I heard her AK bullets crack in the air. Turned around, confirmed where she was and where she was shooting at and I threw my M60 out of the hole before lifting myself out. Ran towards her, hit her shoulder with my hand as I passed her, signalling to her to give me five or so seconds to take position behind her so that I could take over and cover her retreat.

  When It was my turn I gave it to them. Despite the crabs seemingly blind firing in our directions, us getting peppered from wood and dirt debris from explosive blaster shells hitting the forest around us I just span around and opened up as she made her way back sprinting. Just fired left to right and right to left. Long bursts. By the time I finally had seen that pink, greyish carapace peaking over a bush near where our observation hole was I gave it to him. Just sprayed on the bush, saw the snow that hadn't melted yet, the branches and the crabs carapace flying in the air. Could barely make out its scream as I gave him a torrent of 7.62 bullets.

  The whole idea behind our defense was to hit with as much shock and violence as possible, jyst stun the hell out of them right from the start. Make it seem like we were way stronger than we actually were. Then, while they’re still trying to figure out what the hell just happened, we’d already be gone slipping back into the hills or the forest before they could react. On and on again we kept firing and moving. If I wasn't firing burst after burst I was sprinting, a few reloading as I was doing that. Broken ribs, bronchitis, hunger and thirst it didn't matter. Had to push our mind over all of that as much as we pushed our bodies to the edge of what we deemed possible. In those critical moment we had to overcome conditions and misery we could never had imagined.

  Léna has a girlish voice even for her age. But she could scream like a sailor when she yelled at me to drop down or that she'd be shooting now. Didn't matter if we comrade in arms, friends, family or lovers. At moments like that you just scream at each other over the noise of gunfire and explosions.

  Higher and higher up the hill we ran up. Move and shoot shit. We were limited by the amount of ammunition we carried but soon enough there were no more blaster rounds coming our way. In my opinion, big reason we won the war was the sheer rate of fire our weapons were capable of. Crabs could fire a blast round every five seconds or so. While my M60 was going at 650 rounds a minute.

  "Where were you going?" I ask.

  "Couldn’t risk heading back to the cabin for obvious reasons. We had a rally point higher up the hill, a few kilometers from the cabin—steep and rough terrain, but thickly covered by the tree canopy. That was our only option. We stopped rotating runs and just moved fast, pushing ourselves uphill as quickly as we could. No need to radio the guys back at the cabin; I’m sure they’d heard our little symphony echoing for kilometers."

  "We couldn’t let the Crabs follow us back, so we had a contingency for situations like this. If one of our teams got compromised, they’d head straight to the rally point, lay low for two days, and wait for the all-clear. That little cave carved into the mountain’s side was ideal. Dry, hidden, and stocked—we’d left supplies there: a spare radio, some food, blankets. We also knew no one would come looking until the two days had passed."

  "So after a while, once the adrenaline wore off, me and Léna... well, we replaced it with another kind of adrenaline, if you catch my drift."

  He laughs as he finishes.

  "Weeks turned into months. We sharpened everything—our fighting, how we lived off the land, even the technical stuff like calling in airstrikes. Believe it or not, me and Léna still hold the record for most ordnance called in by a recon unit. They were gonna give us some fancy award a few years after the war, but we overslept and missed the damn ceremony."

  He reaches up and takes a framed photo from above the bar, handing it to me.

  In the picture, Felix stands in a patched-up Gorka suit over German Flecktarn pants, a buff covering the lower half of his face and a blue beret perched on his head. He’s holding an M60 machine gun, the stock slung over his shoulder, his other hand gripping the barrel like it weighed nothing. Next to him is Léna, dressed in the same makeshift uniform, an AK slung tight against her chest. Off to the side stands a man who looks like he stepped out of a different world—decked out in high-end Crye combat gear, an Ops-Core helmet with quad nods on his head, posture casual but alert. You could tell right away he wasn’t one of them.

  "Those guys were Italian LRRP’s. Real ghosts. They’d hike hundreds of kilometers just to hit Crab hatcheries, deep behind enemy lines. Hard men. We had them over for two nights—during which they mostly just ate our food and slept like bears, took a look at our injuries aswell. Not a word, not a complaint. They needed the rest. You could tell just by looking at them—those guys had walked straight into hell, fought through it, and made it back.

  We were more focused on what we called the "Hosts." It’s an old word—medieval stuff—used to describe massive marching armies. Seemed fitting.

  Out east, recon teams had an easier time tracking them. The sheer number of Crabs kicking up the dirt created dust storms big enough to see from miles away. But in Bavaria? No such luck. The terrain didn’t give you that kind of warning. So we had to adapt. We upgraded our observation posts, carved deeper into the hillside, camouflaged better, watched harder. Not that it took a genius to spot a Host—tens of thousands of Crabs, beetles, and a few tripods moving like a tide.

  We started building entire charts and overlay maps just to keep up—timelines, projected paths, kill zones. When to call in what, and where. If we were lucky, we got a B-52 or some other heavy bomber in the night. Rest of the time it was the fast movers—A-10s, Tornadoes, SU-25s—loaded with cluster munitions. One run could kill thousands. And we were the ones calling it in.

  Felix takes a moment, staring into the glass in his hand before continuing.

  "I remember one night clearer than most. Cold as hell especially for early spring, and quiet, too quiet. You knew if the birds weren't singing that there was trouble. As if even the forest held its breath. We’d been watching the valley for hours from an OP dug into the hillside, just above the tree line. Crabs had been pouring through for most of the evening, and we knew it was building to something big. You could hear them. Not like a normal army. It’s a scratching, grinding kind of sound. A living machine."

  He leans back slightly, the hum of the bar filling in the silence for a second.

  "We had the coordinates, the grid was locked. You don’t call in a B-52 strike without being damn sure, because when it hits, there’s no redo. If that thing was ofcourse and hit the hill side I wouldn't be here. So I got on the long-range radio, passed it to the FAC frequency. Code phrases, confirmation, timing. And then they gave us the word. ten minutes out. That’s when it starts to feel real."

  He lights a cigarette, the flame flickering just under his eyes.

  "By the time we heard it, it was already overhead. Couldn’t see it, night sky, no lights, but you could feel it. A low rumble, like a storm rolling over the mountain. Then the bombs started falling. Not one or two. Dozens. Hundreds. A whole goddamn load of them."

  He taps ash into the tray.

  "Each one landed like the fist of God. The whole valley lit up in waves, like the earth was being peeled back. No precision, no targets. Just death in bulk. And the sound, impossible to explain unless you've been there. It’s not just loud, it’s inside you. The ground shook so hard I thought the OP would collapse on us."

  He looks up, distant for a second.

  "We watched as that entire Host vanished in smoke and fire. What was thousands of Crabs turned into ash and twisted limbs in less than a minute. Nothing moved down there after. Not for hours."

  He pauses, then says quietly, “It was beautiful, in a terrible kind of way.”

  The drunken man sits up, looks at a bottle across from him behind the bar and proclaims

  "My son was in the air force! A mechanic!"