Čovjek Snuje, Bog Određuje

[Mouxordia]

Man Proposes, but God Disposes​

CHAPTER 1: The Lead-in

All was eerily quiet aboard the ship. Not even the distant hum of machinery was felt through Andrej’s boots, and it was quite unsettling; the breathing of the ship, her bloodflow and signs of life were essentially quieted. Purposefully smothered by her crew in order to avoid detection.

And Andrej hated it.

The man wanted nothing more than to pull into Cerštuva with his guns trained on any available enemy encampment and let loose, so filled with rage was he.

But that wasn’t ‘the plan.’

So his ship was chosen to be stuffed to the brim with soldiers, and tasked with sailing under no power to be as silent as possible in order to successfully deliver said soldiers. For what reason, Andrej didn’t know, nor did he care. All he knew was that his ship and his crew was being put in a very tough spot. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it, it was that sailing under no power and allowing the ship to drift in with the tide was an extremely dangerous tactic. The Htjeti would be unable to maneuver and unable to turn her screws to move or counterattack should they be discovered. Or worse. They could hit a mine. In which case they would all be hosed.

And so Andrej had been unable to sleep, and now sat in his captain’s chair grinding his teeth and darting his bloodshot eyes all over the horizon. Twilight already made the man uneasy. Being unmaneuverable and immobile at the beck and call of the tide heightened that sensation nearly a hundred fold.

“Captain,” a voice whispered in the darkened bridge.

Andrej nearly jumped out of his seat. The fact that he’d been sitting frozen in the same position for hours on end was his only saving grace. “Yes?” he croaked, his voice crackly and raspy. A sudden feeling of thirst overcame him as he sat up and back in his chair and cleared his throat.

“I’ve brought you some midrats, sir,” the voice continued.

Reluctantly, Andrej tore his gaze away from the horizon. His eyes strained against the long shadows and darkness inside the bridge. But his brain had caught up with him and his stomach grumbled and his memory recognized the voice all at once. “Thank you, Oli,” he said, his voice still seemingly insanely loud to his own ears.

“No problem, Skipper,” Oli said, and Andrej could hear as the man leaned against an old powered-down console.

“Where do our charts put us?” Andrej asked as he stuffed some of the best-tasting bread he’d ever had in his life into his mouth.

“About 20 nautical miles out,” Oli said lowly, “We should be able to see the lights of Cerštuva soon.”

“Thank the stars,” he muttered under his breath. The journey through Hell was almost halfway over, and Andrej couldn’t wait for it to be done. "Notify me when we've reached our first waypoint. I'll be here." Oli moved for the door before hesitating for a brief moment, stopping on its threshold. Pausing in his chewing of stale bread, he turned his head a fraction toward the opening. "What is it, old friend?"

"Captain... Andrej... you should lay below and catch some rest. At least for a little while," Oli spoke, a tone of concern tinging his words.

Andrej took a moment to swallow his bread, then turned his head back toward the blood-red horizon. "No, Navigator," he spoke, a considerable amount of confidence in his voice despite the clear signs of fatigue, "My place is here. Lay below and keep an eye on our charts."

"Aye aye, Captain," Oli professionally replied. The two of them were friends, but something like that couldn't get in the way of their hierarchy.

Andrej leaned back in his chair, listening to the door being dogged shut, his eyes on the rapidly-darkening horizon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Captain,” the hoarse voice of Andrej’s friend and ship’s Navigator Oli sounded throughout the creaking bridge.

“Navigator?” Andrej sarcastically replied, his fatigue and 37 hours without sleep starting to catch up to him.

Oli continued on to deliver his report, unphased by Andrej’s tone, “We passed waypoint one approximately one minute ago. Cerštuva’s skyline should be visible.”

“Indeed it is,” Andrej remarked, his gaze never once straying from the blood-red horizon, where one could now see the buildings in shadow, backlit by the setting sun, “Come and take a look.”

Oli stepped fully onto the bridge and looked out to the same horizon that had been gradually revealing the great port city of Cerštuva to him. Even at this distance, Andrej could see the crumbling structures reaching up toward the sky like broken and tortured hands. It was probably because the man was intimately familiar with the city and, although it had been three years since he’d been back to it, he was still able to vividly remember every block of his hometown. He could see both versions of the city superimposed upon one another; where the effects of war could clearly be seen by missing buildings, misshapen facades, and the twisted barrels of long-abandoned anti-aircraft weaponry.

There was a sniff to Andrej’s left, and Oli rubbed at his nose before moving toward the bridge’s door once again, his face a stone facade. “We’ll reach the second waypoint in 50 minutes, Andrej,” he said, pausing a moment as he stepped through the portal, “I’ll let you know as we get close.”

Andrej’s gaze ripped away from the battered skyline to see his friend go, his footsteps disappearing down the passageway. With a surge of newfound energy and anxiety, the man turned his gaze almost fearfully back out through the viewport.

There were some sympathizers that were supposed to meet and help them moor, delivering much-needed relief in the form of fresh manpower and rations, but Cerštuva sat as the last stronghold of the monarchies, still maintaining a stranglehold on both the houses of Mošo and Ordja through their respective slimy, filth-ridden fingers. Just the thought brought Andrej’s blood pressure up. Moreso than it already was. For decades, civil strife had wrought the country asunder until, finally, the royal house fractured into factions and the country descended into complete and total anarchy. Eventually, those many factions melded into just two de facto city-states-slash-regions: Mošo and Ordja; until a third faction rose about five years ago from the ashes of their continuous destruction. A rebellion. A single force united against both institutions. The people.

And for the past five years, the rebels have been wreaking havoc across both kingdoms, slowly driving the royalist forces back. But they had made a wrong assumption about their thoughtless oppressors: relying and hinging on their hatred for one another and assuming they would continue to fight one another as they also fought the rebellion. Everyone had assumed that Cerštuva would become their tomb, and that the royalists on both sides would be the ones to dig it for themselves.

They were wrong.

And so for the past two years they’ve struggled and bled and died block by fucking block, tearing the city to bits in the process. But tonight, though, would be the final push they needed to finally shed the shackles that sought to dominate and enslave them all.

At least, that’s what Andrej had hoped. The problem was that there were no more fickle people to turn from the royalists’ side. Those that continued to fight did so with an unerring and quite frankly frighteningly ravenous turpitude and steadfastness that Andrej couldn’t help but objectively admire. But the man had done and continued to do his part.

With a subconscious and almost nervous hand, he reached forward to a small storage bin set into the very old and degraded console in front of him. Twisting the latch and swinging the small door down, he looked down at an old OP-12 Glasnik seated in a weathered leather holster. Grasping the pistol in his hand, he drew it from the holster. With a huff, he reholstered the weary weapon and slung the leather contraption around his shoulder so that the holster fit comfortably under the crook of his armpit. Andrej was confident that he wouldn’t need it, but…

Just in case.

 

[Mouxordia]

CHAPTER 2: In Where Shit Hits the Fan

Andrej didn’t like how dark and quiet the pier was. He couldn’t see anything beyond the small fires that burned various piles of trash.

“I don’t like this,” Oli commented, his tone fairly wary as he stood on the bridge and looked out at the pier with binoculars.

“Nor do I,” Andrej confirmed.

The bridge had a gaggle of people on it now, attempting to coordinate the very difficult task of mooring a ship with no pierside help, with all eyes warily eyeing the eerily quiet and empty pier. Not even the sounds of gunfire could be heard in the distance, as Andrej last remembered from his time in the city.

What used to be a bustling industrial area with factories and shipping depots now sat long-abandoned. What once held goods for both import and export now held decaying corpses, ransacked boxes, and burnt-out trucks. Shadows dancing against blown-in walls played tricks with their minds, and the occasional crumbling brick lending a certain credence that there indeed was something out there.

A sudden shout pulled Andrej from his Captain’s Chair and onto the bridge wing, nearly tripping out of the watertight door. What had happened? Were they under attack? Apparently, no. A quick view to the forecastle showed a sailor with his hands in the air in triumph. He had snared the bollard on the pier, essentially tying the ship to the pier, and had let out a shout of success. What would have normally garnered praise from his shipmates this time earned him ire and a flurry of hands reaching up to pull him back down below the edge of the gunwale. Andrej’s temper quickly rose. He wanted to shout down to the sailor and berate him, but doing so would have further compromised their already potentially-blown silent incursion. No one dared to make any further noise, all waiting with bated breath as if their silence would somehow nullify and compensate for the noise their shipmate had made.

A single crack of a bullet and the subsequent ricochet off the superstructure to Andrej’s left would be the answer to the question in all of their minds. The sailors on the forecastle scrambled to find cover as Andrej himself dove back into the relative safety of the bridge, shouting order to his bridge watch.

“I want our plant started now!” He shouted, withdrawing his sidearm from its leather holster as the tell-tale plinks and pings of ricocheting bullets hit the structure of his ship.

“Sir, the plant is cold, it’ll take at least twenty minutes to start her!” an officer yelled from his cover position.

“I want the cold-start procedures initiated, immediately! And get these fucking jarheads off of my ship!” He racked the slide on his Glasnik, old and worn and almost certainly twice as old as he, and chambered a round. A brief listen told him that the gunfire was off-ship and the plinks and ricochets told him they were the only targets. A brief flash of anger coursed within him, and he jumped up to grab the handset for the shipwide announcement system. He leapt outside onto the bridgewing again, paying no mind to the incoming fire, and shouted through the system to the troops hunkered down on the weatherdeck below him, “For fuck’s sake, take some of the bastards down with you! If you don’t start returning fire, I’ll kick your ass into the harbor myself!” He looked down at his pistol and shoved the thing back into its holster, instead reaching down and yanking an old rifle from the hands of a man looking up at him with eyes the size of dinner plates, “Give me that, if you’re not going to use it!” He shouldered the wooden butt stock into the pad of his shoulder and fired a burst of bullets at their assailants. Andrej wasn’t confident he’d actually hit anyone at this range, but it was enough to send some of the Royalists scattering like the bugs they were. Momentarily satisfied, he shoved the rifle back down into the hands of the man crouching next to him and strode back through the watertight door into the bridge.

Andrej’s brazen act had proved enough to stir the courage within the men on the deck to action, and they began to fire back. Some fired in a suppressive fashion, while some stabilized themselves on the gunwales and lifeline stanchions to get better shots. “OOD, sound General Quarters,” he ordered as he took his seat in his captain’s chair and gripped the handset once again, waiting for the gongs of the General Alarm to finish, “All hands not currently engaged in line handlers, man your battle stations. Fore and aft mounts train on the royalist forces on the pier, and provide covering fire for disembarking troops.”

There were a limited amount of rounds for their hundred millimeter cannons, but Andrej would be sure that they’d make damn good use of it all. Sailors on the deck below him had managed to loop a handful of additional lines to the bollards on the pier and were hastily using human muscle to pull the ship close against the bumpers. The lines were tied off in a hasty fashion, and just in time as the gunnery crews got to their stations and began to turn the cannons toward the pier. A security squad rushed onto the bridgewing with their own machine gun mount, quickly fastening it to its place on the mount and letting off bursts toward the amassing Royalist forces now taking cover behind the rubble and debris of the once-bustling port area.

“Captain! Mounts 1-1 and 1-2 are ready to fire!” the Gunnery Officer reported over the din of gunfire and ricochets.

“For God’s sake, release all batteries! Don’t stop firing!” Andrej shouted back, a bit exasperated that they were asking for his permission to fire when it was clearly not needed.

The crack-boom of the guns firing shook the bridge, as well as the resulting explosion of the Royalist positions. The guns alternated firing, able to fire a round a second between the two of them. The hundred-millimeter rounds weren’t as devastatingly powerful as Andrej had hoped, though. And the gunnery crews weren’t used to firing in such a situation at such close ranges. There wasn’t any training or equipment to account for firing down and at the ground, essentially. A sudden bright flickering emanated from the sky - an illumination round, slowly drifting to the ground on a parachute, and turning the early twilight hours into bright daylight, at least for a little while. Andrej swore, running out onto the bridgewing to shout down at the officers of the troops still climbing down over the sides of the Htjeti on cargo netting.

“Hurry the fuck up! We’re sitting ducks here, and we’ll all be dead if you can’t hurry your asses up!” he yelled to be heard over the chaos.

One of the officers responded with his arms raised in an exasperated manner, as if to say that they were moving as fast as they could. The man promptly received a round square to his chest for his efforts in over-exposing himself.

“Fuck,” Andrej swore under his breath as he himself ducked instinctively to the sound and pressure of a bullet whizzing by his own head. A large whoomf and sudden exploding of the bridge windows drew his attention back to the bridge interior, where a couple of sailors lay dead or unconscious and his Gunnery Officer lay scratching at his face and screaming in pain at having been showered and blinded by reinforced glass shrapnel embedding itself into his face. “What the fuck was that?!” he shouted as he crouched his way back into the bridge and pulled the screaming officer to the back where it was relatively safer.

“Captain!” the security team on the bridge team shouted and pointed toward the pier, “Tanks!”

“Fuck!” he let out as another tank round ripped apart the overhead of the bridge, showering the bridge crew with sparks and metal. Thankfully, oddly enough, the bridge wasn’t armored, so the armor-piercing rounds the tanks were probably firing were simply ripping through the bridge instead of embedding or slowing down enough to cause even deadlier damage. Andrej scrambled to pick up the gunnery handset, but managed to shout through the comms device to the guns below him on the forecastle. “This is the Captain! Target those tanks! GUNNO is down, each mount pick targets of opportunity! Whatever you do, keep firing!” he threw the phone back down and crawled back out onto the bridge wing just as the ship shook and he looked back to find black exhaust erupting from their stacks. The Engineer had gotten the power plant started!

He gripped the railing and shouted back down at the officers of the disembarking troops. His words weren’t heard, though, as the whistle of a descending artillery shell drowned everything out and the forecastle exploded in a ball of flame and destruction. The force of the blast threw Andrej over the side of the railing where he flailed for a moment before falling the 10 meters to the deck below him. He half-landed on the poor officers he had been trying to talk to, the wind knocked out of him and several groans sounding from the gaggle of limbs.

“Ah… fuckin’ Hell…” one of the officers groaned out as several troops tried to get them untangled, “You alright Captain?”

“Somehow… I think so,” Andrej replied back, wincing in pain and gasping for breath, “Is… everyone almost off?”

“Yeah, just about,” another officer replied.

“Good,” Andrej coughed as he stood with his hands on his knees as the ship pitched forward, “I’m making the call. Abandon ship.”

He stumbled over to the superstructure of the aft stack and pulled open one of the watertight doors in its side to open up the storage locker. He pulled the handset off the wall and turned the knob on the device to the correct channel to address the whole crew.

“Attention all hands: this is your Captain speaking -- cough -- an artillery shell has completely destroyed the forecastle and I suspect the entirety of the bow. We are still tied to the pier. It pains me to say goodbye to the Htjeti this way, but we must abandon ship. It has given me great pleasure to be your captain, but though this old girl is leaving us, our fight is not yet done. I repeat: abandon ship. And godspeed to our shipmates no longer with us.”

Another lurch forward as most likely another compartment filled with water and the previous officer ran to the opening as Andrej dropped the handset and hacked up what felt like a lung. “Captain, we have to leave!” the younger man said urgently.

“Right,” Andrej nodded, stumbling after the man as the ship lurched forward and pitched even more. The both of them hastily made it to the cargo netting which had allowed hundreds of men to disembark onto the pier, where many of his sailors were following his orders to abandon ship. He helped a handful of them over the side and onto the netting before being urged and eventually pushed down it himself.

When his feet finally touched the pocked concrete of the pier, he took a moment to look around almost in disbelief. The line of fire they had established was a long line of piles of debris and burnt-out trucks and vehicles only 20 meters in front of them. He couldn’t see the tanks or hear the tanks anymore. Perhaps his gunners had managed to take it out before the artillery atomized them. He didn’t know. He turned around to watch the Htjeti settle half-sunk into the mud of the harbor, continuing to list to starboard. It was almost painful to watch what was essentially a part of him so… destroyed. He helped the last of his sailors climb down from the netting before being joined by the officer from earlier - a Second Lieutenant by the looks of his rank markings.

“Captain Gogovic,” he said as the two of them exchanged a handshake, “What’re your orders?”

“What?” he questioned, turning to look at the various junior officers that had gathered around him, their faces grim as the din of battle still sounded around them.

“You’re the highest ranking officer, sir,” he said slowly, as if it was obvious, “What… are your orders?”

Andrej took a moment to take in the faces of the men around him, already harrowed and worn despite them just making landfall. Their plans had already been shot to all Hell. He wasn’t sure if there was anything left to salvage about them. He had no idea where the friendly forces who were supposed to meet them here were and, to top it off, they had already met such stiff resistance from a sector that was supposed to be under their control.

One of the soldiers broke into his thoughts by handing him a rifle, which he instinctively threw the sling across his back and chambered a round. “The plan,” he said, looking out at the hill in the distance and the old castle that sat atop it, “is the same as I suspect it’s always been, gentlemen: take Saint Josep’s Hill and obliterate the last stronghold of royalist forces in Cerštuva."

"Let’s get to it.”