[Witches' Horses] Sibir
Title: little help, sir?
'Verse/characters: Sibir; Sergeievich, others
Prompt: 84A "courage"
Word Count: 337
Notes: This dramatically predates anything else in the Sibir sequence. Prompted by a poll response and some chanting from billradish.
Vocabulary: 'singer' - audio connection. 'zastava' - mobile staging ground for horses carrying men to board something or calvary. 'skiff' - lifeboat.
The singer chirped, well into the day cycle after the last battle.
The man on duty blinked at it several times before he leaned over, irised the display. "Please state your name and rank."
"Ruslan Sergeievich, and I don't really have a rank, sir," said a very young man's voice, crackled with static and interference.
How in God's name did-- " . . . How did you get this frequency, soldier?"
"First principles and heavy gloves, sir." There was a brief pause. "The highest ranking man alive out here is a sergeant, sir, and he took a pretty bad knock to the head. We patched together two of the less-damaged [radios] to call for a pickup, sir."
God the Father, he thought, It's like the ghosts of the dead are calling home. "Stay on the line, soldier, I need to go up the chain."
"Sir."
It took three minutes to find a captain, four to convince the captain that he really needed to take the call, at least to the stage of dismissing it as an ugly hoax, another two to manage to patch the signals together.
"How many of you are out there, son?" the captain asked, his tone neutral.
"Twenty three, sir," the kid replied. "We've got the worst-injured in a skiff from the zastava that went down out here, but the horses are pretty banged up and we lost all the riders. Sorry sir."
"Don't apologise for needing help, son. We figured everyone out there was already dead. How do we find you?"
"Um . ." There was a brief pause. "I c--we can probably patch the skiff's image-code to a couple of the horses for power. The zastava was the Carpenter's Axe."
"I'll tell the riders, Lievetenant," the captain intoned. "They'll be there by tomorrow."
There was an extended pause on the other end, then the kid said "Thank you, sir?"
The captain chuckled. "God grant you fortune."
"I think He did already, sir. I had to borrow a second set of gloves to get this thing working."
'Verse/characters: Sibir; Sergeievich, others
Prompt: 84A "courage"
Word Count: 337
Notes: This dramatically predates anything else in the Sibir sequence. Prompted by a poll response and some chanting from billradish.
Vocabulary: 'singer' - audio connection. 'zastava' - mobile staging ground for horses carrying men to board something or calvary. 'skiff' - lifeboat.
The singer chirped, well into the day cycle after the last battle.
The man on duty blinked at it several times before he leaned over, irised the display. "Please state your name and rank."
"Ruslan Sergeievich, and I don't really have a rank, sir," said a very young man's voice, crackled with static and interference.
How in God's name did-- " . . . How did you get this frequency, soldier?"
"First principles and heavy gloves, sir." There was a brief pause. "The highest ranking man alive out here is a sergeant, sir, and he took a pretty bad knock to the head. We patched together two of the less-damaged [radios] to call for a pickup, sir."
God the Father, he thought, It's like the ghosts of the dead are calling home. "Stay on the line, soldier, I need to go up the chain."
"Sir."
It took three minutes to find a captain, four to convince the captain that he really needed to take the call, at least to the stage of dismissing it as an ugly hoax, another two to manage to patch the signals together.
"How many of you are out there, son?" the captain asked, his tone neutral.
"Twenty three, sir," the kid replied. "We've got the worst-injured in a skiff from the zastava that went down out here, but the horses are pretty banged up and we lost all the riders. Sorry sir."
"Don't apologise for needing help, son. We figured everyone out there was already dead. How do we find you?"
"Um . ." There was a brief pause. "I c--we can probably patch the skiff's image-code to a couple of the horses for power. The zastava was the Carpenter's Axe."
"I'll tell the riders, Lievetenant," the captain intoned. "They'll be there by tomorrow."
There was an extended pause on the other end, then the kid said "Thank you, sir?"
The captain chuckled. "God grant you fortune."
"I think He did already, sir. I had to borrow a second set of gloves to get this thing working."