FSE

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hat night was a clear night. A cloudless night. A sleepless night. That night was a long night.

He walked up and down for several hours, running over the last few months of his life in his head. He had been loving, caring.. He had had emotion at some far removed point. He had held his nephew, barely a year old, in his arms and wanted to cry. He had fought inner daemons about love and life and decided to talk to his parents again after four long years of self-imposed exile from his home country.

But so much had changed.

He had been considering the army for several months as the hordes of the Dragons had pushed through into another country, and tales of burning cities and murdered children swept across the Fur's billions-thick population. Before the fresh wave of conscription bills came descending upon his town and taking its young, Ace, or Rolis as he was back then, had put his name on that fateful line.

But so much, so much had changed.

He paced faster now. Running over the months building up to this stalemate. He had been tested, pushed... He had been driven harder than he thought he could run. He had held his best friend as he lay, bleeding onto a foreign street for a distant country and his blood had boiled in rage. He had wrestled the life from traitor-furs and blown out reptilian guts and wiped their cold-blooded innards from his knife. He had written all this to his sisters, to his brother, to his mother, his father, uncles aunts old friends, anyone who would listen to his bloodied story and his death ridden name, anyone who could see the machine he had been trained to be.

So far all he had found was two. Lill, the only other Black Fox he had trained with, whom he had met in basic training, and met once again when Captain Ellie, who was the second person who would listen, had inducted him into her personal command after he had been hailed as the best sharpshooter in the 117th mechanized.

Ace shuddered. The biting cold of the wind gnawed at him as it hissed and howled through the weaving trenches, rippling his thick, black fur and caressing him with its icy touch. He clutched the strap of his rifle as it clattered against his thick Kevlar armor. The conscripted furs about him were silent. Some of them were writing, some of them reading. Some watched woefully at the stars, others into no-furs-land. Some silently weeping. One was even rocking gently from side to side with a distant look in his eyes.

The sudden and distant 'Thud-Boomf!' of batteries opening up thundered, rolling, echo-filled and distant across the barren stretch of land. Yellow-white tails of glowing rounds raced across the sky, spat out by foot-wide tubular mouths that licked the black sky with tongues of fire. Ace glanced at the mesmerizing, almost fearfully beautiful scene as the shells waded through the bitter, cloudless night sky before the skunk-fox suddenly broke out of the hypnosis, sprinting, leaping into a fox-hole nearby.

Two more blurs of furred conscripts rushed in behind Ace as he watched the sky fill with the glowing white-hot rounds seeing the full scale bombardment.

"They know.." He whispered to himself. "Gods damn them all! They know!".

Watching the untrained conscripts outside mesmerized as the shells seemed to run off into outer-space Ace waited. Waiting for the last moment to come. It did. With a thick THUD he felt a tracer round impact somewhere to the right of the hole, seeing its glowing marker and smelling the putrid smoke it released carried along the wind. A marker for the incoming bombardment.

With a thick slam the door swung shut as Ace bolted it down. Three inches of plate-steel plugged the two-foot wide hole in the seven-inch thick concrete walls of the bunker.

Five furs beside himself were in the hole. Two sat, both squirrel volunteers - the odd shaking of the bombardment as shells struck nearby interrupted their card game. The walls juttered and tins of rations fell from small shelves above the beds in the back and along one side of the hole as the bulb shook on its wire jittering on and off, chasing shadows almost randomly across the room.

Two more had followed Ace in here. Both conscripted skunks, looking just-of-serving-age. Both looking unwelcomed by the war. Both looking dispirited by the bombardment.

Both looked lost.

The last fur in the hole, bringing the total up to six including Ace - two furs more than bunks - was a female collie. She had been sat in the far corner of the hole since Ace had bolted in here, he assumed, and her face was matted with dried tears. She sat shivering from cold terror, her ears slack and her fur dulled. She didn't have a weapon.

The two skunks looked at Ace, who looked back, after checking his equipment. He realized he was the highest ranking soldier here. Still a private, but a First-Class Distinct Veteran Volunteer private. The squirrels were Private Volunteers, the skunks and the terrified collie-girl were Conscripts.

He allowed a quiet sigh before a several second pause.

"Incindary" He said aloud, to anyone who would listen. To his surprise, it was everyone. Even the collie.

"What?" Asked the collie. He didn't reply.

"Incindary what?" She asked again, with the sound of desperate fear shaking her voice.

"The bombardment. Its an incidary bombardment. They're burning us out" He replied.

He could tell from the deep crackling of an inferno and the smell of burning napalm outside. He had only smelt it once before - and it wasn't a smell he recognized or that gave it away at first.

It was the smell of burning meat that did that.

"What? How do you know that?" Asked one of the squirrels.

"That smell. That deep fried, almost enticing yet somehow revolting smell coming through the vents carried by the heat.." He said.

"What about it? Isn't that just high explosive?"

"Its burning soldiers" He replied, still looking towards the door.

The room fell expectantly silent. After a few more minutes of the distant thuds of impact getting closer Ace heard movement from behind him. The collie-girl had jumped up into a bed, covering her face trying to hide her nose from the smell. Ace was just breathing through his mouth. One of the skunks was suddenly sick, followed by the nearer squirrel.

They had held on longer than Ace had his first time.

"What do we do now?" Asked the collie through the covers from the bunk. "Is it safe here?"

"No" Replied Ace with his usual lack of emotion.

"Then what? If we leave we die!" She exclaimed.

Ace said nothing. The air in the enclosed fox-hole was slowly climbing, getting hotter and hotter and Ace felt the pressing need to remove his wrist plates, his helmet and eventually his Kevlar chest-plates. He revealed the well-toned exterior of his body, muscles thick with strength and his fur interrupted and criss-crossed with scars from knife fighting and close-combat from a dozen past battles and ten-fold other skirmishes were along his front. Two small ones, parallel, scraped along the right side of his chest, another down his left shoulder and a another, almost two feet long was slashed down the left side of his toned stomach.

He glanced at the other furs, seeing the skunks following in his example, and the collie staring at the various furs, all trained and toned soldiers. Accept the miserable conscripts still depressing in the corner.

He wondered over to the collie first. She seemed more responsive. She wore tattered and dirtied armor, her insignia confused and scarred, and Ace was doubtful she knew where she should be right now. He sat down at her feet, crossing his legs at the end of the bunk as she sat up, still covering her muzzle, and most of her face with the covers.

"Whats your name?" Asked Ace, trying to get some friendliness into his voice. She hesitated.

"I'm Alaska" She replied. An odd name, thought Ace. It had some connotations with the Humans, but Ace didn't know why.

"I'm Ace" He said. "Honoured Veteran, so I'm the ranking soldier here. But lets not keep it that way, hmm?" He said to her, but loud so that every other fur present could hear.

"How do we do that?" Asked the collie hesitantly. Ace pondered for a few moments.

"Well napalm bombardments generally happen in short concentrated bursts" He said. Still lost in thought. "So, when the impact detonations leave our area, we wait" He added.

"For what?" Asked one of the squirrels.

"Napalm doesn't burn very long. Its superheated jelly. It melts crap. The phosphorus burns, its creating this burning heat, so we wait for it to go out. There should be some fire retardants around here, we find those. After the strike moves up the line its generally 40 minutes until the napalm stops burning and the phosphorus dies out. Then all we do is avoid standing in napalm and we don't have to worry about our paw pads melting to our boots, and we don't touch the walls, and we all go back to our designated HQ or re-assembly areas and await further orders. Clear?" He said, as commanding as possible. The two conscripted skunks looked unconvinced - they obviously believed the stories of the all-consuming napalm spawned fire.

Ace hadn't been entirely truthful when he said they could smell burning soldiers. That had been the kinder version.

Through the door he heard them screaming. He had kept them away from it all. Over the explosions, and through the smell of burning he heard them, he smelt them but by the gods he was thankful he hadn't seen them melting - the flesh rendered from their frames by boiling hot, still-flaming napalm, and others engulfed in all consuming fireballs born of phosphorus rounds.

"So thats all we do? Sit here and hope we don't suffocate in this heat?" Asked one of the skunks.

Ace never replied.

He only prayed.