The fighting had been hard, and Edgar had been worried his men weren’t up for it at first. Many of them were new to this frightening situation, whereas Edgar had been here most of his life in one war or another. A mere foot soldier when the alliances had been forged, he was now Field Commander of twelve different brigades of brave men and women, the spearhead of the front line in this war.
Soon, after the initial shock had worn off and the realization came that they weren’t going to use one of their horrifying H.Y. bombs (for reasons Edgar neither knew nor cared about; much like Merrik Caspar many miles north, Edgar Taft knew that knowing these things wasn’t his place in the world), the victories began to pile up. The army was mighty in number and abilities but fragile in the correct circumstances. Those circumstances currently were the proper and well-timed use of the weapons Edgar Taft now commanded. Once the heavily armed tanks and low-flying tactical strikers had arrived two weeks back, the tide shifted overnight. After weeks of being herded back up the massive shores of the Vein on both sides, suddenly they were holding their ground. Soon, they were pushing back. In the last week, they had regained sizable tracks of land back from the enemy. They were merely a shadow of the terrifying enemy they’d been not long before.
Couple this with the report that their central command had been destroyed in the great ocean, a rumor supported by the lack of new robotic troops to arrive as of late, and you had yourself one extremely pleased Field Commander Edgar Taft of the United Peoples Military, the amalgamation of the armies of the Westlanders, Inja at least four ally nations to the north, who had been providing the technical might that had helped them get this far.
Sadly, the smile was short lived. No sooner was he about to give the order to give those heartless bastards another good push when new orders were brought to him via coded transmission.
*ATTN: F.C. EDGAR TAFT,*
*YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED TO CEASE ALL FURTHER AGGRESSIVE MILITARY ACTION AGAINST THE SOUTHERN INSURGENTS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.*
*AT NO POINT ARE YOU TO PROGRESS FARTHER SOUTH. YOU ARE STRICTLY TO DEFEND, AND DEFEND ONLY.*
*YOURS IN TRUST,*
*A. BREE.*
“God damn it!” Taft screamed.
His good friend, second in command Shan Dio, a representative from a far north race who’d served with Edgar for four years in one way or another, looked up from his desk, glasses askew as he reviewed both digital and paper aerial maps of the area with marked locations of friends and foe.
“Not good news I assume?” he asked, thin face smirking at his own obviousness. Edgar never returned the look. He just stood in their shared military trailer/bunkhouse staring at the orders on the screen in front of him. Shan got up and joined him, adjusting his glasses as he moved his terribly thin frame over to his friend. Once he was done reading it for himself (a taboo, as it should have been for Edgar’s eyes only, but such standard decorum was no longer practiced between these two) he flopped down in a chair next to Edgar and let out a large sigh. He had been just as eager to drive these devils away as his friend and was in the throes of planning how to hit them the hardest when Edgar got the news.
“What on earth does the W.G.C. have up its sleeve that it wants us to stop here, in the middle of winning this war?” he asked, accent thick with rolling ‘R’s like those of his people. It had long since stopped sounding strange to Edgar.
“I have no idea. Why sit on the sidelines for so long only to get involved now? Why not just let us do as we have been? It’s a system that’s seemed to work so far.”
“You don’t think there’s more to it than what we see, do you?”
“Oh I give you a great big good god damn guarantee that it does, Shan, but I haven’t got a fuckin’ clue what it could be. Pass the order along to the troops, I guess. Don’t hide the fact that we’re not big fans of it though. I want them each to know exactly where this is coming from.”
“Can we do that, sir?” ‘Sir’ didn’t come out of Shan’s mouth often. It meant he wasn’t positive whatever Edgar had asked of him was the right course of action.
“We can and we will, Shan. Nothing says we need to run and hide every time the damned W.G.C. gets involved. These are men and women of action. It’d make me sick to my stomach if I heard this order from a commanding officer without good reason. I’d think he wasn’t happy with what we were doin’.
“No, no we tell them straight out that this is bureaucratic interference. They’ve earned that much truth by this point, I’d say.”
“Agreed. Just making sure.” With that, Shan went back to his post and sent word to the standing forces in the front lines, the message heavy with disgust.
“Why, Shan? What are they thinking?”
Shan had no time to answer. A hurried knock on the door interrupted them as a cadet burst in, face red and out of breath. Edgar was about to admonish the young man but was interrupted. “Sir!” he spit out in a ragged breath. “Sorry to interrupt sir, but you need to come here at once. There’s something you need to see!”
Before he had a chance to answer, the cadet was gone again out the door and lost to the masses by the
