The Women

"Lt. Malker, you've got E squad; you'll cover the 17th Avenue approach. Hold that line. Lt. Kerybowicz..."

Lt. Sarah Malker stopped paying attention. She was on 17th, with Sanber to the west and Woo to the east; she didn't need to hear the rest of the assignments. Field discipline was relatively lax at this posting, and she was expected to move out once she had her orders, not hang around until someone dismissed her. She winced. It wasn't so much an attitude of serious dedication to the war effort that promoted the laxness, but rather the rapidity with which members of this command had been promoted; the command team in this ironically named whistle-stop town had been decimated recently and the new staff of what had once been known as Central City, Nebraska, was too untrained to reflexively keep their unit leaders from wandering off. She also wondered what exactly "whistle-stop" meant; she'd only heard it from another trooper who claimed to have read it in a book as describing a small, useless town. Looking around at the litter-strewn plaza that served as the parade ground, she had to agree that if anything was a whistle stop town, this was.

Despite that, another major push was coming, they knew; multiple captured scouts from the men told them that the bastards were gearing up for another push. This time, they apparently were going to arrive in and in the center of the town, though how they expected to do that Sarah didn't know. They'd have to fight their way in from the northeastern side to get to the 17th approach, and yet the scouts they'd caught indicated that it would be one of the first avenues of attack. If they were right, though, the men would be unloading into a trap, and the beleaguered Central City command would turn this front around with a decisive victory.

Two hours later, Sarah was set up with her squad, nine other tough young women armed with steel and wood. They hadn't been lucky enough to find the houses in this area with firearms and ammunition, so they were armed with carving knives, hammers, clubs, and one curiously archaic sword pulled from a room that had looked like it belonged to a teenage male. The faded posters of scarcely clad women on the walls and the piles of dirt and mold that had formerly been clothes certainly implied it. They were hunkered down behind the ruins of an old white wall and a couple of overturned automobiles. Suddenly a hissing screech tore through the air and a deep mechanical chugging began to fill their ears. The terrible screech came again and an enormous metal object, like a great moving metal wall, came charging slowly and inexorably along the two metal rails that lay in the ground. Some man had animated this enormous metal demon and tamed it, for Sarah saw that a large number of men stood in its belly and rode hanging on to its armor. There were, however, far more of her own soldiers ready to receive them.

Even before the monstrous thing had slowed to a stop, the men were leaping off of it and spreading out to defend their very obvious place of entry. Sarah smiled and waited for the attack signal. Had the been spread along the eastern border as usual, they would have been hurrying to return to the middle of town, costing them valuable time and stringing them out piecemeal. Instead, as she heard the cry and rose to charge in a massive ring with the rest of her comrades, they were centered around the invaders and would soon have them at their mercy... in every sense.

The fight was like a 200 lb second grader: short and heavy. Within ten minutes the men had been killed or subdued; Sarah herself had taken down two particularly impressive specimens. Both were of average height (Sarah was slightly shorter than average, and had trouble braining large opponents), but well-built and broad of shoulder. Her squad had faired better than others; one woman was dead from a polearm, but two were merely concussed and would recover, and the rest were just bruised and scraped. As they tended their wounded and trussed up their captures, they stayed away from the engine when possible; it still clicked and steamed, but made no move. Sarah called over a strapping young woman with no captures to help her lug her two back to the command post to be registered, marked, and locked up.

Every command post had an enormous and solid stockade; it was a necessity of a war fought when the spoils were quite literally the other side. Having taken two, and with one already owned by her, Sarah eyed them both as they began to stir groggily, then casually ordered them both stripped down. They were both fine specimens, but one was impressively endowed; larger even than her current thrall. She very happily signed the other over to the handlers to be taken off the front to a work/breeding post, back on the other side of the Rockies, and eagerly eyed her newest prize. She thought she would enjoy him a great deal this evening...