Family flees a mercenary army trying to enslave them. Brother and sister get unnaturally close for warmth, and other reasons.
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Ostnordia at War
Chapter 3 – Winter Warfare and a Wife
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My name is Otto Hayar. Our whole family worked for the same company. I did odd jobs like sweeping, trash cleanup, and unloading delivery trucks; up until I was 18 and allowed to do the dangerous and better-paying logging work. My older sister Anika answered the telephone and helped with paperwork in the company office, and her twin brother Lars was a mechanic. Father led the logging team I joined recently.
A lot of what my team did was heavy work that required strong muscles and powerful machines. To those unfamiliar with the process, it looks simple. Cut a tree down, remove the branches, then drag it to where it can be loaded on a truck. Now imagine doing it in deep snow, a kilometer from the closest road, next to a cliff, and occasionally with near-zero visibility. Just avoiding injury or death can be challenging some days.
I was a beginner and did the running around for Father and the rest of our team. I brought tools, fuel, and lunch to the more experienced men. I did most of the simple but unpleasant tasks, like clearing snow and ice off the vehicles and sharpening the saw chains.
There were only elementary and middle schools in our area. We would have needed to go 150 kilometers each way if we wanted to attend high school, which wasn’t worth it. In the remote towns in the North, if you could read and do basic math you usually got by fine.
At home we alternated between speaking Swedish, English, and Russian, in addition to our native tongue, Ostnordic. We hadn’t gone to high school but were far from stupid.
She had passed away nine Winters ago, but thanks to Great-grandmother my family was more capable than most. She had been a medic and saved many soldiers who fought against the Russians early in the Second World War. She told us a lot of stories about the old days. Her favorite was a small group of men hiding on the side of a mountain as they saw a Russian column approach. Our soldiers only had rifles and three shells left for their light field gun. Just the six of them gave 300 Russians a terrible time; even with their machine guns, truckloads of supplies, and four tanks.
They waited until all the vehicles were in a valley between two tall mountains. They aimed carefully and fired their cannon at the engine of the tank in the lead. The flaming behemoth completely blocked the road.
Our men ducked into a depression in the ground. The Russians stopped and fired thousands of shots, in every direction. When the Russians finished shooting and tried to find a way to move the wrecked tank, our men dragged their cannon through the woods and shot out a track on the tank at the back of the line. All thirty Russian vehicles were trapped, and the closest town was over twenty kilometers away. The Russians wasted thousands more bullets, while our six hid in a ditch.
They waited in the woods until the Soviets made camp. The Russians set up tents, posted guards, and looked ready to hold out against anything that might come their way. They even had heavy mortars and a pair of anti-aircraft guns. They relaxed and their cook made supper.
Our sergeant decided that instead of knocking out another tank, they would use their last precious cannon shell in a better way. They aimed and waited for the perfect moment.
When dinner was ready, the Russian cook had the soldiers line up. The first bowl was being filled as our cannon fired. Dozens were splattered with hot stew, as the huge soup kettle exploded.
They had a cold, hungry, and sleepless night. Before our men skied out of the area, they sniped at the Russians until the sun started coming up, firing a single shot every minute or two to keep the enemy from getting any sleep.
The Russians lost the burned-out tank and at least sixty men, for the price of abandoning a field gun that was out of ammunition anyway. I didn’t envy the ones who had to fix a broken tank track on a 30 below day, while our snipers might have been watching them. Great-grandmother’s sister married the sergeant later. That story always made me smile, no matter how bad my day was.
I knew that eventually we lost. It was still very inspiring that with only 30,000 soldiers and fifty armored vehicles, we held out against their thousand tanks and half a million men for a year. Their brilliant strategy that finally defeated us? They sent another half million soldiers. Very, very Russian. Simple, wasteful, and crude; but it worked.
Compared to most other nations the Russians can fight in Winter, but Ostnordians are born for it. If it were water instead of Winter, they were bears who could swim, but we were the sharks.
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The recent war had been going on two weeks before we heard the Corporates were near our province. My family did the best we could to prepare. My Father Aatz and his co-workers used their saws and heavy equipment to destroy bridges and railroad tracks, in addition to blocking roads with large trees or rockslides. My siblings and I planned many ambush positions and escape routes, and got our supplies ready.
Father was on his Logmeister, a tracked vehicle with claw and chainsaw arms on the front of it, cutting an ancient fir. We watched the huge tree fall across the road near our cabin as the first of the Corporate Army Inc. tanks came around the bend. Father tried driving the ponderously slow machine the few hundred meters home and the tank fired. The Logmeister disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame.
When the smoke cleared and we could see again, the machine was flaming rubble and he had vanished. The tank tried driving over the meter-thick tree trunk but got stuck. The two other tanks and several vehicles full of soldiers stopped behind it.
Anika screamed as she took her rifle off the cabin wall and tried to run out to fight them, but Lars and I knew better. We grabbed her arms and dragged her away from the front door. There was no way a hunting rifle would hurt a tank, and a hundred or more versus three was unlikely to end well for us.
We grabbed the things we had prepared and ran out the back door. We threw on our packs, slung our rifles, and skied away as fast as we could. We made it half a kilometer before they got to the cabin and started shooting in our direction.
They were bad shots, firing at least fifty times before Lars yelled. I stopped to look and saw he had been hit in the left arm. I turned back to help but he yelled, “GO! Keep going!” I was emotionally torn and paused to decide. Lars was hit again, this time in the back. I heard a terrible gurgling noise as he coughed out a lot of blood, then fell over into the deep snow.
Anika led me away. We skied across a frozen river, knowing all but the lightest vehicles wouldn’t be able to follow. Even men on foot might break the ice. I’d love to see one of their tanks try to drive through bone-chilling water ten meters deep! We went another eight or nine kilometers, mostly downhill. We crossed the river again, then switched from skis to snowshoes and climbed uphill. After several more kilometers, we reached a small clearing deep in the woods.
As the sun started to go down we dug a snow cave, like Great-grandmother had taught father, and he had taught us when we were small children. We had a meal of crackers, sausage, and dried fruit. The temperature was -25c outside, but in our cave it was only slightly below freezing. To natives of Northern Ostnordia, that’s almost comfortable.
As usual, we spread out a plastic tarp on the snowy bottom of the cave, then a thin foam pad, our other tarp, then our second bedroll atop it. It was vital to reduce the amount of heat lost to the ground. The final layer below us would be a wool blanket. We had another wool blanket and a sheet of thin plastic we would cover ourselves with, to keep any drips from melting snow off. That was enough to keep us warm, if we wore our parkas and other clothes while we slept.
In the morning Anika still agreed, we were going to make the Corporates pay for what they did. They took half our family away, and we wanted revenge. She said we needed help and more information about what they were doing. We’d ski to the Soviet border and ask the Russians to help us. With their renewed dedication to socialism, we were sure they would at least give us jobs and a place to live while we prepared to fight back.
We had a few handfuls of trail mix for breakfast, then headed out. The closest Russian town was 200km from home, which would take us five or six good days of skiing. We had food for eight days and I wasn’t worried about the weather. The more snow fell or blew around, the easier it would be for us to hide.
Last January my older brother Lars and I had gotten lost and spent a week in the wild. Hunting and fishing were unreliable during Winter, and we went hungry a few days. It wasn’t fun but easily survivable, since we knew what we were doing. The truly bad part was Father scolding us about getting lost when we finally made it back.
On our second day Anika and I made good time, until the snowfall increased greatly. We could barely see our feet, much less the terrain ahead. We realized we might fall off a cliff or run into trees and get hurt if we kept going.
We built another snow cave, significantly larger than the previous one, since we had plenty of time before dark. The snow stopped as night fell, and the wind got much stronger. By the time we got ready for bed, the temperature had dropped to fifty below.
Even in the cave it was around minus ten, and slowly getting colder. We needed to leave a large enough air hole open to the outside, so we didn’t suffocate, but that let in a lot of the cold.
Anika told me, “You know the best way to stay warm at night. We’ll do it to survive.”
As I joined her in undressing, I said, “Right.” We laid on our sides in just our underwear, with our coats and other clothing piled on top of us, with me spooned behind her.
When we got too cold, she would masturbate as I humped her butt through my shorts. We needed to be careful not to climax or sweat much. Any liquid on our bodies would cool us even more. It was awkward doing that with my sister, but it had been even worse when my brother and I had needed to. Each time we woke up too cold, we repeated our abortive self-arousal sessions, every hour or so.
The heavy snowfall returned in the morning, but it warmed up a little. Since we couldn’t ski with near-zero visibility, we snowshoed several kilometers then spent half the day ice fishing. We weren’t travelling very fast, but we’d get there if we kept making progress. We built a wall of snow around a small area to block the wind and made a campfire. We shared some dried berries she found and a small fish I had caught for lunch. Anika caught a bigger one later, which we had for supper and breakfast the next morning.
Once the sun went down, it was pitch black in the cave. We only had two candles and didn’t want to waste our precious flashlight batteries. We repeated our earlier activities to keep warm through the night. I was a little surprised when Anika let me reach around her, to help her masturbate.
I’d never seen or felt a female’s private parts before and got very aroused. I lost control of myself and climaxed, squirting semen into my underwear. A lot seeped through, and my sister got wet too.
I sheepishly told her, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to!”
“Darn it, Otto! Take your underwear off and wipe us dry. Quick!”
She took her wet panties off too.
I apologized some more, and she said, “If you can’t control yourself and need to finish, put it in my mouth. We won’t get wet that way.”
“But … but you’re my sister!”
“Your nearly frozen sister! We do what we need to, to stay warm and alive.”
“I guess. Okay.”
She asked, “Who do you think about while we warm up?”
To hide my shame I lied, “Hildi Olsen”. She was a girl I used to sit next to in school.
“I used to think about Hans Afrit, until he got married. But now … it doesn’t matter. Good night.”
Since she didn’t object and we were doing it to survive, I was more than happy to jerk off and cum in her mouth twice during the night. The second time she said, “Help me stay dry too.” She pushed my face between her legs and I licked up her juice. The next morning, we made love. I thought Anika would resist, but she seemed even happier than I was. As I was getting breakfast together she looked at her watch and said, “It’s the morning of December 25th. Merry Christmas!” I smiled remembering the joy her sexual gifts had brought me, but knew we were still in a life-or-death situation.
The blizzard continued and we slowed to practically a crawl for six more days. We would go to bed when the sun went down, keep each other warm and happy all night, then kiss and make love again when we woke. We realized we loved each other in a physical way, as well as the usual family way. As soon as the sun rose, we would check the snare traps we set each evening. They rewarded us with five rabbits over the course of our two-week trip. We caught another small fish through the river ice and supplemented that with several handfuls of dried berries we found sticking out of the snow. We had four days’ worth of food left, but if we hadn’t trapped or fished, we would have been down to almost nothing.
The storm finally let up as we got to the edge of a large grove of trees. We saw a helicopter land on the far side of a valley from us. A dozen soldiers got out and we quietly laughed at them. They were wearing white parkas, but JUNGLE camouflage pants and BLACK caps! They had snowshoes, but they were factory-made aluminum ones, which sent off gleaming reflections of the sun. They wouldn’t even do for hunting, since the shine would alert any animals nearby. Well-armed soldiers would be dangerous, but these obviously knew almost nothing about winter in the subarctic.
They split into two groups of six, one heading away from us and the other in our direction. Their awkward gait and slow pace made it clear none of them had snowshoed more than a kilometer or two before. Anika and I quickly agreed on a plan. We left most of our things in the snow cave with a small campfire burning outside. She climbed the steep hill nearby and I skied 200 meters away and found a good spot behind some boulders.
When the enemy got to our camp and started looking around, I heard Anika’s bird call, indicating she would take her first shot in five seconds. I aimed at the one who appeared to be in charge and counted down. A split-second before I fired, I heard a BANG from her rifle. As my own went off, I saw an explosion of blood from one of the men. She had hit him in the neck! I got enough of a glimpse to tell my shot was on target, hitting the leader in the chest as the recoil thrust my shoulder back.
I rapidly cycled the bolt and aimed for another shot. I fired and heard one scream as my bullet pierced his belly, quickly followed by a small explosion and more screams. I reloaded again and started searching for another target. I saw three bodies on the ground and THREE MEN ON FIRE! One shot himself in the mouth to escape the torment of the burning white phosphorus all over him. The other two frantically struggled to get the intensely burning fragments off their faces and clothing. To spare them from additional fiery agony, we finished them off with headshots.
When the last of them stopped moving, we returned to our camp. I knew what my sister liked, so I handed her one of the enemy’s fully automatic carbines. She bashfully admitted, “I was aiming and started to sneeze. Shooting the phosphorus grenade by accident was a miracle.”
I happily declared, “If any more miracles happen, I’ll take ‘em!”
She agreed, “Good. Here’s a real sniper rifle, with a 16-power scope on it.” I’d been wanting one for years, but for hunting instead of fighting. It would be a huge improvement. My old rifle worked but was made during World War 2. I should be able to hit targets close to two kilometers away now, instead of ‘only’ five or six hundred meters.
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One afternoon I saw a large bull moose close enough for a good shot. I slowly took aim as it approached, happily knowing it would provide at least 200 kilos of meat! I was about to squeeze the trigger when Anika whispered, “No! Don’t waste it.” I realized she was right. I sighed and lowered my new sniper rifle. We didn’t pray or belong to any church but understood that taking the life of a large animal for only a few meals would be a sin against nature. It would be different if we had a whole village to feed but we could survive without it. We allowed the magnificent beast to wander away.
I thought it might be a reward for our self-restraint, when Anika caught a very large fish the next day. It was nearly as big as my leg! We cut it into kilo-sized pieces and cooked and ate our fill. We let the remainder freeze and saved it for later. After another three days, we saw a sign warning the Soviet border was ten km ahead. There had been a few cross-border skirmishes in the past. They were officially neutral but strongly disliked the Corporates, so we hoped they might help us.
We knew we were almost to the border when we saw the edge of the forest and a wide field of snow as the sun was beginning to set. Our countries had cleared a kilometer of forest on both sides of the dividing line, and bulldozed it flat as a tabletop. It would make any incursions obvious and force any invaders to be terribly vulnerable as they crossed the featureless plain.
We were happy to be so near our goal, but Anika and I knew we needed to cross into Soviet territory intelligently. If we skied or walked across at night, our body heat would make us stand out like beacons for anybody or anything with night vision or IR cameras. Counter to common sense, we would be much harder to spot in the middle of the day, crossing the snow field in our all-white clothing. The glare of the sun reflecting off snow and ice would likely blind most cameras.
As Anika started digging another snow cave, I prepared supper. I saw a sparkle in the sky and discovered there was a drone flying south to north over the border line. We ate some crackers with fish and vegetable soup. We decided to start across the border a little before noon. Skiing would be faster, but rapid movement would make it easier to detect us. We’d cross on snowshoes but be ready to change to skis quickly if we were noticed.
We snowshoed slowly, taking nearly an hour to reach the middle of the two-kilometer plain. I spotted a drone, but as it approached I saw it was Russian. We walked a little farther and heard engines in the distance. We looked around and saw eight soldiers on snow machines far behind us. We abandoned our snowshoes and skied for our lives. I was surprised they didn’t shoot, until I remembered their main goal was capturing Ostnordians to sell as slaves.
They were only a hundred meters behind when we reached a small village. We skied behind a barn and saw an old woman getting firewood from a pile. She heard the engines and waved us in her direction. We followed as she led us around a house and into the middle of the village. The Corp soldiers drove around the corner. They hopped off their snow machines, pointed their guns at us, and yelled for us to surrender. The old woman picked up a large metal funnel, holding it to her mouth like a megaphone. She shouted, “RODINA UUURRRAAAH!” – ‘For Mother Russia!’
Suddenly gun barrels protruded from every door and half the windows! There must have been a hundred! A few even had RPG rocket launchers! The Corp soldiers dropped their guns and held their hands up. Instead of capturing us, they became prisoners of the Soviets. Later I heard they were ‘reeducated to be good socialists’ by working in a mine for five years.
An elderly couple kindly invited us into their home. They gave Anika and I tea and food and were excited to have visitors. They called a government office and said an agent would come talk to us the next day. They were very kind, and the lady reminded me a bit of Great-grandmother. We were happy to sleep on their living room floor, indoors for the first time in two weeks. We wore only our underwear and a single blanket, but felt a little too warm.
Surprisingly, the Soviet government was efficient. The immigration agent arrived with a pair of soldiers before lunch. She was a tall, thin, angry-looking lady. Anika spoke to her, since she was older and understood Russian better. In the back of the agent’s car, she explained, “In the Russian immigration system, young men and women live in different buildings. I told her our last names are the same because we’re married. That’s the only way we can stay together. She got you a job loading trucks, and I’ll be a cook. We’ll have a small apartment in Volkhov. Once we’ve been here two years, we can join the Soviet Army.”
I objected, “That’s almost forever!”
She shrugged. “I know, but it’s the only way.” She cheered me up with, “We’ll have a week off work, since this is our honeymoon. Imagine warming each other up in a real bed, or maybe even a hot bath!”
I switched to Russian and said, “I love you, wife!” I kissed her. The next day we heard the government of Ostnordia had fallen. Our nation was no more. We consoled each other with cheesy potatoes, caviar on toast, vodka, and lots of sex.
A week later we were overjoyed when Father knocked on our door. It was great to see him again, but we had some extremely difficult explaining to do.