Novgorod, European Federation, January 2035

Yuri Aslanov and I sit on a bench in front of his apartment block. His attention is split between a cigarette and his phone resting on his knee, showing a live feed of his newborn son sleeping upstairs. My focus drifts to a gang of cats harassing a delivery robot nearby.

"Took those little devils half a year to get used to my prosthetic leg." he says, exhaling smoke.

"Did you lose it in Estonia?" I ask.

"No, months after," he replies.

"I take it you were glad not to be part of the push into Estonia?" I ask.

"You guessed right. Bastards thought half a dozen inflatable bridges would get a brigade into Narva. That Estonian city on the river, right at the border."

"No, my platoon got orders to split off from the main push and head south, just a few kilometers from the staging area. Bog and forest as far as you could see, the size of Estonia itself. Didn't even have a name, just one big green spot on the map. Same week, the Scandinavians in northern Denmark and a huge Hungarian detachment in southern Germany lost thousands of men after getting flanked by Crabs coming out of green zones like that. So I suppose high command wanted to at least pretend to recon the area before sending in thousands north of it."

He pauses to flick ash from his cigarette.

"So three of our BMP-2s took a left while the rest kept driving down the highway, which was littered with burned-out cars, tanks, and what was left of Beetles. Even the occasional Cat 2 Tripod that had crashed and burned in the middle of the road. Took three tanks just to drag one of those bastards out of the way."

"Just one long drive. Bit chilly on top of that BMP. It was late September. We all knew what was coming, and everyone wanted northern Estonia liberated before the ground turned to mud. The generals, the politicians, the journalists—everyone wanted it done. Even us, sitting up on top of those thin cans," he says, flicking his cigarette butt toward a nearby trash can.

"I've been meaning to ask—why did you guys always ride on top of it?" I say.

"You weren't getting out of that thing in time if we got ambushed," he replies. "Easier to have everyone jump off at once than hope we could squeeze through those thin doors with all our gear."

"The lieutenant had everyone from his company commander to Division staff yelling at him over the radio to reach our position in time. Twenty thousand men—mostly us—but about a thousand Finns and Chinese too. But the bulk of it were boys from Moscow, Voronezh, and Grozny. And all of them were waiting on our little platoon to link up with the Finnish recons on the edge of that forest. They hadn't seen any Crabs, but something out there had spooked them bad enough to call us in."

"Which made us wonder why they needed us, of all people. Those guys were ghosts. You should've seen our faces when we reached the crossroads where we were supposed to link up with them. We sat there for a minute, trying to figure out where they were. The lieutenant was sweating bullets, thinking maybe he'd misread the map and just cost a whole brigade an hour of daylight."

"Then they sat up. Literally. Half a dozen of them just stood up from the bushes—boonie hats with camouflage netting, ghillie suits draped over their chests and shoulders—and suddenly there were twenty of them in the crossroads, covering every angle like they'd been there the whole time."

He shakes his head and lets out a short laugh.

"I was real glad we'd been called up to fight aliens and not Finns."

"One of their sergeants, could just make out some blonde hair beneath her camo, stepped onto the track and came up to our lieutenant. They'd found the entrance to a cave and needed our 30mm cannons, just in case. She climbed on top of the BMP along with a few of the others. One quick map-reading crash course for our lieutenant later, and I was helping some Finnish guy up while the rest led the way on their quad bikes. The guy sitting next to me pulled out a flask. To this day, I still don't know what was in it. He caught the look on my face and handed it over, made me try it. Laughed when he saw my reaction as I coughed and thanked him anyway. Twenty minutes later we got in position. From what the recons had seen, the entrance wasn't natural. Just something digged in an unnatural way. Didn't understand English enough to get it, and our Lieutenant translation device didn't work. BMP's stayed far away because the last thing we needed was the noise of the engine giving away our position. I managed to keep up with the Finns. Somehow, they held their dispersion and formation even while moving through the shittiest terrain you can imagine, either huge swaths of thorny bushes that ripped through your gear or ankle-deep mud that tried to swallow you whole."

He grabs another cigarette, lights it

"We got to the cave's mouth, wide, low opening carved out of clay and it looked like it'd give way if you stepped wrong. Slick and sticky ground, the kind of mud that just sticks to your boots no matter how hard you try to shake it off. Inside, dark as hell. Couldn't see past the first few steps. Just about two hundred meters away, partly hidden behind some trees, the road leading to the cave had been crushed as if someone had flattened all the trees and bushes along the way. It was big, so big that we figured it might be from our friends from another planet. When we realized it was large enough for a Beetle to walk out of, our anti-tank team dropped their bags and quickly deployed their RPG-28s just in case. BMP 2 received the order to be ready to push through all the needles and get to our position on a moment's notice.

I almost stepped right on one of the Finnish recon guys who had stayed behind, crouched so still and quiet he might as well have been part of the dirt. Our lieutenant, who was anything but calm despite trying to act otherwise, was talking to the Finnish lieutenant who had stayed with him. He looked around like he was trying to catch someone staring. I knew I should have looked away, but hell, he pointed at me and told me to come over.

Five minutes later, I was asking that same Finn for another swig of that liquor of his. I sneaked three gulps while the lieutenant checked if the radio on my back was working. Turns out the only reason it was just me, him, two more guys from our platoon, Timur and Adrian, and three Finns was that the Finns and Chinese had refused to push their men forward until that cave was cleared and accounted for. Twenty thousand men waiting on me to swallow up some courage and enter that mouth of darkness.

"Only silver lining that day was that I'd been issued those Greek night vision goggles. Me and my lieutenant had ours, the Finns had their own, not some UN handout like us. Not like we could use them properly anyway."

"Why's that?" I ask, shooing two cats away.

"They crave attention, don't do that," he says.

"NVGs either work by picking up ambient light and amplifying it or by using an IR light to illuminate what's in front of you. The latter the Crabs could spot. The other, there just wasn't any light around in that cave to boost," he continues.

So there I was, couldn't see a damn thing. Even the last bit of light from outside was long gone. I just grabbed onto the Finn in front of me, and someone behind me must have done the same. No whispers, no chatter, just the sound of our footsteps squelching against that clay-like mud.

Then the Finns stopped. I could feel the shift, like a silent signal rippling down the line. Someone up ahead started rustling through their pockets, searching for something. I heard the soft crackle of a wrapper and the snap of something breaking. A moment later, the cave lit up, just faintly. One of those little chemlights. Barely visible without goggles, but enough to paint the tunnel in a sickly glow.

That's when I saw it. A kind of veil stretched across the tunnel in front of us. Almost the full width, maybe twenty meters wide, and just as tall. And then it hit me. We were walking downhill the whole time. Subtle, barely noticeable. We'd been at it for five minutes, so God knows how deep we were by then.

One of the Finns turned around as he pulled out his knife. Tall guy, moved like a ghost. Didn't make a sound when he walked, and not a sound when he pierced that white veil. It looked like a giant spider web, but when I touched it, it felt like silk.

We made our way through the slit and our NVGs lit up. We weren't out of the tunnel yet, but something far ahead was casting just enough light to bring the goggles to life. As I stepped through, one of the Finns stood off to the side with a spray bottle of some kind. Pure saline water. He sprayed each of us in silence as we passed.

I'd smelled it on them earlier. Faint, clean, like sea air. I guess they didn't want to waste it on us until they were sure we were about to encounter them.

"Why did you go further in?" I ask, eyeing one of the cats watching me from a nearby bush like it was on sentry duty.

"We didn't. The Finns signaled for us to stay put and stay quiet. My colleagues were happy to oblige. Not me though. I couldn't just sit on my ass while those three Finns crept further into the tunnel toward the lighted section.

When they were halfway to the larger opening, I dropped my pack and did my best to follow without making a sound. My eyes were trying to adjust to the light ahead when I realized I could actually see well enough without the goggles. I flipped them up and kept moving.

When I got to what I can only call the exit, everything opened up. The tunnel widened into a massive chamber. It was half clay, half rock. The path stayed wide, but the ceiling kept rising until it felt like a cathedral carved into the earth. I saw it slope down steeply ahead, but I never made it that far. The Finns grabbed me and pulled me down to my knees beside them at the edge.

Right next to us was a sharp drop. Later I'd get a better look and realize it was around sixty meters deep. But that wasn't what had my attention.

It was the room.

There were more tunnels like the one we had just come through, on the far side, with steep stairs cut into the rock leading down to the center. The whole place must have been the size of a football stadium. And what lit it—and heated it—were Beetles. I don't know if they were alive or dead. The Crabs had fitted some kind of tap or valve into some of them, channeling hot magma from inside their bodies into narrow, purpose-built streams that ran like veins across the chamber floor.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

They sat around those streams. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. Some resting. Some sleeping. A few working on weapons. Others tending to the Beetles in their pens. A few were even playing that spinning game of theirs, if you can believe it.

And somehow, they hadn't seen us yet. The Finns were trying to stay cool, but I could see it—cracks starting to show. They looked at each other like they were trying to figure out what the hell to do next. We were still in the dark, high above the Crabs. Safe, for the moment.

I guess they made a decision, and it nearly got us all killed.

One of them pulled out his phone. He was going to photograph it and get out. Sleek, new iPhone. 4k camera. Two months' salary. But those new phones, they come with face ID. Uses an IR light to scan your face and unlock without a password. Quiet, invisible to the eye.

Not to them.

We saw a few of their snouts turn in our direction as he started snapping pictures.

Then the first rebar bolts hit the opening.

We barely made it back from the edge. They were smart enough not to use high-explosive blasters—probably didn't want to bring the ceiling down—but those rebar bolts were no joke. The four of us nearly got pinned to the rock behind us by twenty or so chunks of scrap flying at god knows what speed. If we'd stayed a second longer, the last guy would've caught one in the chest. And I don't like our odds if we had to drag someone bleeding out up a slope like that.

We started lobbing grenades. Not directly at them, but around the corners, down the crevasse, onto the steep stone stairs that led up toward our position. You're never really ready for the sound of explosions, especially not underground. Down there, it didn't echo so much as hammer into you, deep and close, like your own bones were rattling. The Finns didn't hesitate. I don't think they cared if the ceiling came down, as long as it took the Crabs with it.

Didn't need to tell the rest of my platoon what was happening. They were already halfway through the veil by the time we came running. I just threw myself through the slit, hit the dirt, and turned around, laying down in the opening after the last Finn jumped out behind me.

"Good man!" he shouted. Same guy who'd handed me the liquor earlier.

I just stayed there, flat on the ground, my barrel through the slit, breathing hard, ears still ringing. The others were already sprinting back the way we'd come. I was still lying there, trying to decide if I should run at ten seconds or fifteen.

Then the first Crab came up over the steep path where we'd been spotted. That made the decision for me.

I let him come a little closer. Four more were behind him. Then I made Vanya—my AK-12—sing.

"Vanya?"

"Vanya, first girl me and her had, you know what I'm refering to, now stop interrupting".

They were just as disoriented by it as I was by the gunfire. Difference was, they were taking rounds to the chest and snout while trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Half a magazine in, maybe ten Crabs down, and they started firing back. I couldn't tell where from. The muzzle flash and their own dead kept me hidden.

"Go!" I heard the Finn yell. The same one from before. His voice was close, and then I heard the chatter of his PKM. Hadn't even noticed him posted up behind me, maybe fifty meters off to my left.

The noise was unreal. Rounds tearing through the air, cracking just ten meters to my right. Rebar bolts slamming into the stone. My breath felt louder than the gunfire, like my body was trying to escape through my lungs.

I ran. Passed him. Kept going for maybe twenty meters. Then I spun around, made sure I knew exactly where he was before I started firing again. He caught on. Got up with that PKM like it weighed nothing. I had no idea what I was even aiming at—just laying fire into the veil. It was still standing, barely. Enough to blur the figures on the other side. But the bullet holes and rebar tears were punching through fast.

The smell of gunpowder hit hard, sharp and metallic. My ears were ringing bad. Still hear that ring sometimes. He was sprinting toward me now, close but not too close. Trusted me enough to cover him. I was more surprised by that trust than anything else.

"GO!" I heard him scream again right as my gun stopped firing, I dropped the empty magazine, not bothering to pick it up as it missed my magazine dump pouch while I loaded another mag.

Good luck running in a straight line—while reloading, wearing night vision goggles lit only by muzzle flashes. I slipped, got up, kept running, slipped again, then fired blindly down the tunnel. Over and over. On and on. Until we finally saw the light at the end of it.

Still don't know how that crazy bastard didn't break a sweat charging up that godforsaken tunnel with a PKM. He made it out before I did. When I finally stopped being blinded by the sunlight, I was staring down the barrels of at least three dozen rifles—and two freshly arrived BMP-2s. I got my bearings, turned, and sprinted straight back into the woods.

There must've been thirty meters between us and the tunnel entrance. Three whole platoons—two Russian, one Finnish—waiting like wolves for the cattle to come stumbling out.

They were ready. Machine guns set, bipods locked down, spare belts within arm's reach. Our anti-tank teams were itching for a reason—just waiting for the crabs to give them an excuse to turn that tunnel into a tomb. The Finns brought one M32 grenade launcher—some oversized chunk of plastic with six rotating drums. A damn crowd-pleaser.

The pressure was unbearable. You could feel it in your gums, like your skull was being squeezed from the inside. No one spoke. No orders. Just breath, heartbeat, and the low mechanical whine of the BMPs adjusting position every few minutes, like metal beasts settling into the dirt. The waiting was worse than the running. Worse than the firefight. It was a held breath across dozens of chests, each one afraid to exhale first.

Every noise echoed like it was two feet away. A boot scrape. A cough. Something metallic dragged or dropped. But nothing emerged. Not yet.

Sweat pooled in the crooks of elbows and behind knees, soaking through fabric. Ants crawled freely up pant legs and into shirts, and no one dared twitch. Every finger hovered near a trigger, every eye unblinking. Time slowed to a syrup crawl. It felt like the sun had stalled just above the treetops, baking down on our necks in silent judgment.

Then nothing.

An hour and a half later, I was sitting cross-legged behind the line, helmet off, watching a tiny green bush next to me like it held the secrets of the universe. It had little white flowers on it—five-petaled, thin and twitching in the wind. I was counting them. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

Next to me, Kovacs—the machine gunner—was reclined against his rucksack, face streaked with dried sweat and powder residue. He was laughing to himself and snorting a thick line of crab powder off the metal receiver of his own field mess tin.

The call went out, and the pictures we sent were enough to rattle High Command. Serious enough to halt the entire offensive. They paused everything. Started redirecting recons toward our sector. Reserves began encircling the forest and I was hoping we'd make it out of it before they'd grind the forests into dust.

Our lieutenant looked like someone had just handed him a second life. His hands had stopped shaking for the first time in days. You could almost see the gears in his head turning, calculating how this moment, this lucky brush with death, might look on a report. Might keep him from being retired into some cushy desk job where he'd be tasked with keeping tabs on a barracks office desks or something with polished boots and zero relevance.

But I didn't care. I just wanted them to get on with it—the crabs, command, the sky itself. The waiting was peeling the skin off my nerves.

Kovacs was now dead set on being bait. "Just stand up, take a slow walk toward the tunnel. Like I'm lost, yeah? Let 'em think I'm alone."

"No, Kovacs," I said. "You're not walking into that mouth. Not high. Not now. Sit the fuck down."

He grinned through yellow teeth, one eye twitching. Crab powder hit him harder than it did the others. Made his thoughts move sideways.

We were still waiting on recon teams to pinpoint the secondary tunnel mouths. Word was we had drones and jets overhead, eyes in the sky, but even those couldn't find the other entrances.

After finally talking Kovacs down—he eventually agreed that being turned into crab mulch wasn't the hero's exit he wanted—I ended up leaning against a tree, listening to that Finnish sergeant talk. Aino, if I recall correctly. She spoke with a kind of effortless calm, the kind that comes from someone who'd had time in their life to think about things that didn't involve digging trenches or cleaning weapons. Said she studied art history in Copenhagen before the war. Baroque sculpture. Danish light. That sort of thing.

I didn't say much in return. Just nodded. The closest I ever got to Copenhagen was hauling pallets in a logistics yard outside Hamburg, years before the first bombs fell. I didn't tell her that. What was the point? We both wore the same dust and carried rifles now, but back then, diffrrent worlds. Different lives. Hers filled with museums and thesis papers, mine with double shifts and eating luke warm sandwiches behind a chemical toilet.

That gap doesn't go away just because someone hands you a rifle. I couldn't bear to hear her talk anymore. Copenhagen, Helsinki, St Petersburg. Same story everywhere. She had more in common with the rich fucks from St Petersburg than with some warehouse or retirement home employee from Helsinki. And I had more in common with them than with some art student or mergers and aquisitions expert from St Petersburg or Moscow.

An F18 flying overhead saved me from the conversation. I pretended to focus back on our job, lay down behind my rifle, put my helmet back on, and wondered whether or not to snort the crab powder I'd been saving.

"Why an F18?" I asked.

"Modified Finnish aircraft," someone said. "Something in its nose draws a 3D model of the terrain. Doesn't even care if there's trees. The Americans came up with it to find tunnels in Afghanistan."

It flew overhead, low and slow, while we all got our game faces on.

I turned up the volume on that big, heavy radio I'd been carrying all day. I don't know why, but I knew that jet was a bad omen. Couldn't describe it yet. Just had to be sure.

Battalion staff said something about being ready to pull their troops out of the area within half an hour.

Then Air Force Command came in. They'd successfully identified five tunnel mounds, said the area looked hollow—whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Advised a ZEUS strike.

"Did you know what that meant by then?" I asked. One of the cats got up on the bench and started nudging Yuri for pets.

"We knew about the railguns the UN dumped all that money into. Knew the ones in Greece and Norway were operational, said to have fended off some second landings. It always sounded like propaganda, but stories about those strikes wiping out a meteor fleet twice the size of what landed years ago... that helped people sleep. Gave them something solid to believe in.

But no. We had no idea they could target Earth. That part was strictly on a needs-to-know basis—and turns out, we really needed to know."

Everything went very fast after that. We got the order to stand up, get in our vehicles, and fuck off. We had twenty minutes to make a trip that had taken us over thirty on the way in. The machine was moving now, and the cogs were spinning too fast for us to keep track.

The Finns were first, tearing through the trees on their ATVs. We stayed behind a little longer, then climbed onto the tops of our BMP2s and rolled out. No one wanted to ride inside. Part habit. Had I known I would have sat my ass inside and put all the pressure I could have mustered on my ears.

As we pulled out of the forest, the sky suddenly exploded with a blinding flash so fierce it seared into the backs of our eyes. Some of the guys on top of the BMP2s screamed as the light left them momentarily blinded, faces twisting in shock and pain.

Then the ground shook violently. The blast hit with a force that threw the BMP2s off the narrow dirt rode. The vehicles lurched sideways, wheels skidding over roots and rocks. I was riding on top when the shockwave slammed into us, and I flew off like a rag doll, crashing hard into the trees and the cold, unforgiving erth. Around me, the other men were thrown the same way, bodies twisting through the air before hitting the ground with sickening thuds.

The railgun round had slammed straight through the earth I think, penetrating deep beneath the earth before detonating with unimaginable fury. The blast annihilated everything around it, trees were shredded into splinters, If I hadn't fell in a crevace I would have been stabbed a thousand times by splinters like some of my colleagues. The ground cracked open, and rocks exploded like shrapnel in all directions.

The air filled with dust. The forest was ripped apart in a brutal instant, just turned into a wasteland of smoke, fire, and ruin. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by groans and curses as the stunned men tried to gather themselves. I couldn't hear those. I couldn't hear anything. Only a few month's later when they operated me and gave me my hearing back thanks to some Japanese neuralink.

First one to see the full power of the railgun strike, they hadn't even bothered testing those before that. Some devastation that could erase entire battalions and bury them alive beneath tons of shattered earth.

And we were still alive.

You know, when people talk about the world peace we supposedly have right now, I just laugh. Sure, some parts of the world are still free fire zones controlled by militias and extremists, but no nation wants war anymore not because they are peaceful but because of trauma and the sheer lack of manpower. I laugh. We have weapons now that can wipe out an entire neighborhood with a single volley. Those towering railguns may be under UN command but it is no coincidence that the first, second and third priorities for special forces today are to be ready to insert and capture them at a moment's notice.

"It's a good thing they are aimed at the sky."

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