💾 Archived View for germination.systems › ~vidak › old-blog › 2009-12-19-five-oh.gemini captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:45:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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generator: pandoc
title: '2009-12-19-five-oh'
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
It rained hard against Bertrina Humphries' office
window, and as the wind blew waves of belting streams against its panes,
she looked up and swore she saw Harkoff's bloody face behind the glass.\
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Her mind wandered, the face smiled.\
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[{.aligncenter
.size-full .wp-image-689 width="170"
height="106"}](http://theamazingfruitsalad.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/app-6_pysops.jpg)\
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I met up with some of my comrades sometime after the war. We all served
in the same battalion. There were 666 of us in the 6th battalion, and
none of us died. Our Lieutenant Colonel was insane, he had an obsession
with tapping on window-panes, whenever he saw them he tapped at them
furiously. After we took shelling from the enemy, or after large
assaults, he would disappear into the wilderness for several days. After
the first year of the war, we dissolved the companies within the
battalion and floated around in a big group. Right from the beginning of
the war, we were told to march dead south, following the river and then
the beaches of the Great Lake, to find some enemy secrets. We never
found anything. We followed the water until we left our country, and
began to pass mines and churches and castles and poor people wearing
overalls.\
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Every now and then we encountered massive wheeled iron beasts that
spewed shells and black clouds into the sky, but whenever things got
tough another battalion from our brigade would appear and the beast
would roll on by.\
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We met priests who flicked strange water at us that caused us to
experience great indigestion and sleepless nights. When we reached the
south sea we turned back and marched home. When we got home two years
later, fighting intermittently along the way, we found Nela razed to the
ground.\
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We decided to partly march through the desert, and we saw mounds of
charred Jousen corpses outside every commune, and women with children
born from rape.\
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We saw four of the enormous iron beasts destroyed in a line as we
entered Nela.\
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I went to war and I saw nothing. I didn't meet anyone and I probably
didn't kill anyone. I heard our Lieutenant Colonel went back to the
south some time ago and married a woman there.