Commander Aleksandr Vascak sat at his small personal desk, wolfing down a bowl of beef stew as quickly as he could. It was, coupled with the lack of sleep marked by his sagging eyes, a habit he was quick to learn at the start of the war with the Allied Nations that stayed with him even with the recent defeat of the traitorous Yuri.
Vascak looked at the small set of clocks in the wall set to various timezones, in his case it was 0700 local hours in Helsinki. The Commander was tasked by the Premier himself with dealing with the local resistance groups occupying parts of the capital and beyond. The resources he had in achieving this end were somewhat paltry, but his casualties were in the hundreds - low by Soviet standards - morale was decent and most fighting was restricted to isolated neighborhoods.
A buzzer whined throughout the halls of the underground bunker outside his room, yellow lights flashing over him and his meal. Vascak left his stew to go cold as he rushed out of his quarters down the cold concrete halls to the main command center.
Passing two reinforced steel doors and the sentries guarding them, Vascak was greeted to a medium sized square shaped room with all four walls dominated by monitors, terminals and staff working them, a single podium stood before a 9x9 slope housing a monitor bearing the old emblem of the Red Army as a screensaver, smaller secondary screens rested at the top corners used for both communications and any other visual needs. The bunker was built in WWII to oversee military operations in Finland, and with few exceptions most of the technology inside the command room was dated as such, but was sufficient in what it was needed to do.
Vascak moved to the podium, which held various buttons and switches and a crude touch screen interface with accompanying stylus. Vascak flipped the power switch to one of the small monitors before him and adjusted the frequency as he did with various dials, his intelligence officer, the modestly attractive Lieutenant Zofia appeared on the black-and-white screen.
“Report, comrade Zofia,” Vascak ordered into a microphone, his eyes sharp as a hawk despite appearing saggy and sleep-deprived.
“Unconfirmed reports of Yuri's forces have been sighted near our main communications hub near Helsinki Zoo,” Zofia replied, “Loss of this outpost would significantly hamper communications for all areas north of Leningrad and security of the region would be at risk.” The normally confident woman had an unusual look of confusion as she spoke, it was being hidden to the best of her ability, but Vascak payed good attention to detail and could still sense it in her body language even through a TV screen. “According to these reports, Yuri's forces consist entirely of cavalry.”
“Define 'cavalry.'”
“His forces are made up of unicorns and large, mutated ponies,” came the deadpan answer from Zofia, even she had a hard time believing what she just said.
A less forgiving Soviet officer would likely think of her assertion as a joke, and seek out punishment for it, but Aleksandr... knew Zofia a bit closer than he likely should and took it at face value. “Set me up with the hub and all forces stationed to it immediately.”
The lieutenant nodded, speedily typing at the keyboard before her. “Establishing battlefield control, standby.”
The slope screen before Vascak displayed a satellite generated image of Helsinki Zoo and everything around it for a two kilometer radius. The communications hub housed most of the forces available in the area, one company's worth of conscript infantry and a small group of four Rhino tanks, with one Tesla Trooper squad and a few additional squads of conscripts being recalled from patrols already engaging. The infantry were represented by small red blips clustered together with a symbol identifying their status - three bullets denoting the conscripts and a lightning bolt the Tesla Troopers for example - and the the tanks were highlighted red.
All in all, Vascak had about a couple hundred men at his disposal. With time of the essence, additional forces were too far away or busy suppressing the partisans elsewhere in the capital. Yuri had demonstrated more than once in the war against the Allies what he could do with metropolitan cities if he can entrench long enough, and if these so called unicorns were not destroyed quickly, Helsinki would be lost and Soviet influence in Finland soon after.
The Commander used his stylus to mark areas on the tops of buildings for spotters to observe from, assigning squads and groups for his various sub-commanders in the room to relay the orders to so he could focus on the bigger picture.
Private Guglielmo Pennacchini ejected his pistol’s empty magazine, and it ammo bounced and jingled against the layer of spent cartridges that littered the crossroad where his fellow soldiers had deployed their machine guns against the equine assaulters, who were now either lying dead or dying and moaning all over the Nussalee.
His platoon, after a rather hasty wake-up call at the wee hours of the morning, had been deployed and ordered to defend Bonn’s University from attacks until further notice. Guglielmo, begin a volunteer pretty much just out of training whose squad had been assigned to guarding duties behind the frontlines up to that point, despite a brief moment of annoyance and confusion due to the early wake-up, had been quite anxious- if not outright excited- by the idea of entering in a real battle for the first time in his career as a soldier.
Now, after the battle, he was looking over the landscape left by the partially literal firefight- as the unicorns had thrown fireballs in his and his squadmates’ direction- from the vantaged position of the small elevated marble colonnade serving as entrance to the University. From here, he was seeing mostly burning bushes, scorched houses, a snow-like cover of spent casings, dead equines littering the streets, and the rest of his squad either staring silently at the carnage or disassembling their weapons and undoing their emplacements.
“Uh-hu. I didn’t expect this to be over so quickly.” Guglielmo commented, feeling almost confused by the quickness of the fight he just had fought, and by his foes’ bizarre appearance, one that resembled pastel-coloured horses with horns and eyes as big as faceplates; instead of the robe-clad bald men and women that many of squadmates said to Yuri’s standard unit.
Corporal Filippo Damiani sighed, as he slowly unhooked the ammo belt and disassembled his machine gun.
“Be glad it was quick and that no-one in the squad has been toasted by any of those things,” The corporal said “I still remember when that Yuri guy used to employ only conspiracy theorists, sociopaths and other assorted nutjobs as soldiers, and when they actually shown to have been trained.”
“Could they shoot fire from their foreheads?” Guglielmo asked, as he kept looking around him.
“More like their hands, but the effect, and I think the way to did that, was pretty much the same.” Filippo let out a sigh, as he strapped the heavy gun on his back. “Only, they had actually managed to torch soldiers and, sometimes, overheat vehicles.”
Guglielmo cringed somewhat, but then regained his composure, feeling he needed to not show outwardly what was going on in his head.
“Poor bastards.” He simply said and Filippo nodded in response.
After what felt like an eternity, the sergeant, a slim and short man with little more than a few tufts of regrown hair peeking out from under his helmet, his name Daniele Broccu, came close with his left hand gripping on the pistol and pointing towards his left, from where they had come from in the first place.
“Let’s get moving, the Commander has ordered us to join the Armoured Division currently in the Stadtgarten close to the river.” He said, with his usual gruff voice followed by a boar-like squeal, one that offset his otherwise laughter-worthy hair.
Filippo immediately got up and silently followed the sergeant, soon followed by a good chunk of the squad. Guglielmo, after a timid nod, holstered his pistol and followed his squadmates in line, basically begin the last of them before the ones tasked with the unfortunate duty of carrying most of the sandbags.
Cservenka's squad advanced up to the side entrance of the zoo, the sound of muffled gunshots and primal roars in their ears and smoke billowing over the walls. With the entrance too narrow for the Tesla Troopers to enter in formation, the two outermost Troopers moved behind the inner two and covered the rear. Now forming a thin M-shape, the squad approached the ticket stand their weapons ready to turn it into ash at the first sign of hostile movement.
“Kerensky, search that stand,” Cservenka ordered, the Trooper complied as ordered and swiftly but cautiously walked up to the stand, kicked the door open and peered inside.
“It is clear comrade-Sergeant,” Kerensky said.
“Affirmative, return to formation.”
“Movement on right!” one of the other Trooper's shouted, aiming his Tesla coil at a cage designated for the some exotic bird judging by the picture.
Cservenka did not turn fully to see what Kerensky and the other Trooper discharged their weapons at, but when he did he saw a torrent of flame shoot towards them and what was throwing it.
Yuri's forces were already highly unconventional and even more unethical, his main infantry unit essentially used a flamethrower - a weapon once used liberally by the Soviets in WWII but since banned under the rules of war - created with their minds for example. But what was even more unconventional about the so-called “Initiates” was that the Initiate throwing fire at them wasn't a man, but a pony, no, a unicorn!
Except, this unicorn only vaguely resembled a horse. It had the same oversized eyes as the Brute before, but in contrast its head seemed too big for its body to be able to balance. Its legs did not have hooves so much as furry stumps at the ends and its coat and mane colors were a vivid red and yellow but still bore Yuri's mark on the flanks.
‘What on earth did he do to these animals?’ Cservenka thought. Following a similar course of action to the pony-Brute moments before, Cservenka aimed and struck the unicorn dead. The flames ceased with their source neutralized and their target visibly and thoroughly cooked to the center.
Valerian Jung sipped his coffee slowly, as he kept his gaze fixed on the light blue counters representing his units, as they advanced forward into Bonn’s northern suburbs. Much to his bemusement and gladness, Yuri’s assailants hadn’t been particularly fierce or tactically savvy.
“Either they were a suicide squad composed by botched animal mutations,” Valerian muttered with a small smirk. “Or Yuri has a major head cold and refuses to calm down. Send initiates one by-one in a narrow street is…”
Valerian Jung shook his head.
“Just idiotic. The brutes were lucky that they weren’t spotted before they managed to attack and crash one of those IFV in a wall, otherwise this, perhaps, would’ve been one my most successful operations in my entire career.”
His self-complacent boast was interrupted by a bleep coming off from the monitor. Almost losing the grip on his cup of coffee, Commander Valerian looked carefully on the screen. He- after putting his cup down- grabbed the radio transmitter and set the speaker close to his mouth.
“Gamma-6, why did you stop? I gave order to reach the Nordfriedhof!”
“Sir, we’ve just destroyed an hovercraft and…” The Major said on the radio.
“What does this had to do with you stopping?” Commander Valerian asked with a groan. “And why would be there an hovercraft hundreds of kilometers from the sea?”
“Sorry sir, but we’ve noticed that all of the surviving hostiles were retreating towards that vehicle and that they were entering inside. We assumed that they were getting evacuated, so we tried to shoot them, butut…”
“But?” Valerian asked, squinting his eyes somewhat in anticipation.
“The hovercraft’s wreckage seems to be completely empty. There are no traces of anyone ever entering in here, not even charred remains.” The Major said. “I, and my subordinates, were thinking whether leave it alone or salvage for study.”
Valerian Jung sighed, massaging his forehead.
“With the enemy still out?”
“Actually, sir, as I have said, we do not detect any kind of hostile activity. They’ve pretty much vanished.”
Vascak surveyed the battlefield as the spotters reached their positions and relayed what they saw. Several dozen hostile targets, all infantry, appeared on the map scattered about the zoo's premises, either engaging his forces or just trying to create as much havoc as possible. Yet, there was no obvious explanation for how they could have gotten there.
'Even if he doesn't destroy the hub, he makes us look weak in the eyes of the public and rally support for the partisans. Either way he makes my life more difficult no matter how strong or swift the response is. Clever,' Vascak thought, 'But if he was going to perform terror mission, why would he strike when the zoo is closed instead of a time there would be civilians in it?' That part didn't make sense to the Commander at first, Yuri had no qualms about bringing civilians into his fights or using them for slave labor, but assumed he, or what few of his followers pulling the strings in his wake were trying an unconventional recruitment campaign.
In any case, Vascak was having none of it.
The Rhino tanks at his disposal would need to go around two corners to meet a driveway into the zoo, the conscripts following suite behind. Preferring a more immediate entrance, he drew a line for the tanks to form up with and marked four spots on the wall in front of them to destroy. The muzzles of the tanks spewed flame as large holes in the wall opened up a split-second later. Knowing that the Brutes could smash up his precious few tanks if allowed to get too close, he split the company of conscripts into four platoons and ordered each of them to go through a different hole and clear the immediate area of hostiles while the tanks followed afterward. Once the area was secure, three of the platoons would search inside the buildings and clear them out while the last guarded the tanks.
On the other end of the zoo, the Tesla Troopers were engaging the forces of Yuri around them, and quickly concluded the firefight with only part of the outer rubber layers of one of their suits melted and minor burns. Good, he didn't like to have valuable units go to waste.
As the next few minutes went by, Vascak came to the conclusion that the battle went into the Soviets favor as soon as the tanks entered. Yuri's forces failed to act in a cohesive manner and it was just a matter of the Commander's troops cutting them down one by one. The Brutes were somewhat difficult nuts to crack, a bullet from a PPS-41 standard issued to every conscript in the Red Army could down the unicorn Initiates just as easily as their human counterparts, but it was more akin a bugbite for the hypertrophic horses. Of course, anyone could die from bugbites in great enough quality, in such case roughly a couple hundred.
Vascak switched back on the communications channel to Zofia and spoke into the microphone. “Comrade Zofia, what have we found, if anything inside?”
“According to one of the squads, an archlike structure has been found inside the horse stables for the petting zoo - how ironic. An image will be sent to you now.”
The small monitor on the right showed a picture of the stable interior. True enough a silver arch speckled with odd patterns and markings dominated the wall.
Zofia continued, “We currently do not know how this arch appeared, but we predict it is some kind of portal Yuri's forces used to enter the zoo. At this time we do not know where it leads, and it appears to have suffered sabotage to prevent us from finding out. Meanwhile, salvage operations are underway and the bodies of these animals will be taken for research, we have even managed to take a few alive. I shall keep you posted as new events unfold, Commander. Zofia out.” She made a wink as she severed the connection.
The intelligence officer made sure to return Vascak's control over the front to the citywide level. It seemed while the partisans did not try anything bold while Vascak was focused on dealing with Yuri, word was no doubt already spreading of the attack and he knew he was in for another late-night keeping order.