STORY / 13

LOW ALTITUDE

INTENSITYHIGHVIOLENCEDEATHSTRONG LANGUAGE

TEXT

“LOW ALTITUDE”

Romincka Forest, near Gołdap, border with the Kaliningrad Oblast, Poland. EU territory.

2027

The tension between the Western bloc and Russia had been building for months, until it crossed a threshold beyond which diplomacy could no longer keep pace with events on the ground. Along NATO’s entire eastern flank, border skirmishes had become increasingly frequent—provocations, exchanges of fire, infiltration attempts. Every night, Russian special forces teams tried to cross the border, testing the response, searching for gaps, probing sectors where the defensive system had not yet had time to mature.

That night, cold, persistent rain fell from a low sky. The wind tore through the spruce canopy hard enough to drown out the forest’s ordinary sounds—ideal conditions for a team intent on passing undetected. The temperature hovered only a few degrees above freezing: low enough to dull the senses, high enough to turn mud and melting snow into a quagmire. The team leader had chosen the night deliberately. Weather reports intercepted from open sources had indicated poor thermal visibility and winds capable of masking movement.

No one had anticipated that the same conditions which impaired human senses would mean nothing to a machine that relied on none of them.

Under the Tarcza Wschód programme, the Polish Armed Forces had deployed twelve heavy Skorpion-2 combat drones along the length of the eastern border. Each had an operational radius of one hundred kilometres and patrolled at altitudes between fifty and two hundred metres, where ground-based radar lost contact and deploying fighter aircraft to chase a shadow through the forest would have been prohibitively expensive. The machines were powered by combat-grade edge AI, resilient to satellite-communications jamming. Visual navigation did not need GPS to distinguish forest from border.

In the Gołdap-East sector, drone SK-014 stood watch. It was solely responsible for a stretch of frontier that would have taken a foot patrol forty minutes to reach.

Four men moved in single file through the spruce undergrowth: Sergeant Klimenko at the front, followed by Voronin, then Bykov, with Corporal Sidorov bringing up the rear. They had crossed the border seventy minutes earlier, a hundred metres from an old hunting stone erected in the time of Emperor Wilhelm. Their orders were simple: reach the relay station near Dubeninki, plant the charge, and get back before dawn.

They moved confidently and quietly, and they had reason to be confident. The same jamming equipment had taken two Polish reconnaissance drones out of the equation during their previous crossing near Żytkiejmy. Small machines, helpless without GPS, they had obediently turned back towards base or hung motionless in the air.

Klimenko, a veteran with twenty years of service behind him, had repeated the lesson during the briefing like a mantra: no drone could fly without communications, and without drones, the enemy had no eyes in the sky.

No one corrected him. No one in his intelligence service yet knew that a rule which had held true a month earlier no longer applied to this stretch of the border.

Klimenko was leading the way when he ceased to exist.

He heard no whistle. Saw no flash. One moment he was walking; the next, he lay in the moss, his body not yet aware that it should stop moving. A loitering munition descended straight from above, as silent as snow, and took him before his brain could register that anything had happened at all.

Voronin saw only the end of it: a burst of spruce needles, a body collapsing without a cry, and the silence that followed—deeper than before, as if the forest had held its breath along with him.

“Klimenko?” he whispered, dropping to one knee beside the motionless shape. “Klimenko, what the hell—”

There was no wound he could make out in the darkness. No enemy he could point his rifle at. Only a low, muffled rumble somewhere above the treetops, a sound he could not associate with any machine he knew, and a growing, icy certainty that something was watching him from above at that very second.

Something that had already made its decision.

“Scatter!” he shouted, because it was the only response from any training he could remember that seemed remotely applicable. “Блядь, врассыпную, съебались отсюда!”

Fuck! Split up! Get the hell out of here!

Bykov bolted towards Bludzia. Sidorov ran in the opposite direction, towards the Rominta, stumbling over roots, his own breath, his own fear. Voronin never made it anywhere.

Sidorov heard it behind him: a short, broken scream, cut off halfway through, as though someone had clapped a hand over the man’s mouth.

Except it had not been a hand.

He did not look back. He ran through the rain, driven into his face by gusts of wind, until he reached water that rose to his waist, icy despite the air temperature being above freezing. It drove the breath from his lungs faster than fear could. He sank until the water reached his chin, leaving only his eyes and the crown of his head above the surface.

Then he stopped. That was what he had been taught to do. The Rominta would suppress his thermal signature, fool the infrared camera.

For a moment, he thought it had worked.

The shadow that swept high above the river channel turned away and disappeared in the direction of Bludzia.

He remained there so long that he lost all sense of time. It might have been a minute; it might have been ten. His teeth chattered so violently that he feared they would betray him, not the heat of his body. The fingers clenched around a root jutting from the bank had long since stopped feeling anything.

Somewhere in the depths of his mind, in the small space where fear still left room for thought, he understood that if he stayed in the water another five minutes, hypothermia would finish what the machine had not.

He did not know that the Skorpion’s navigation system had never relied on thermal imaging alone. The GPS jammer they had brought as insurance was useless. The machine needed no satellite to know where the forest was, where the river ran, or where the river lacked a shadow that should have been there.

None of the four men knew that two kilometres to the west, concealed between glacial moraines and camouflaged with spruce-branch nets, stood a battery of Krab self-propelled howitzers. It was part of the fire-support network covering the entire border sector, ready to open fire within minutes if any patrol reported contact with a force larger than a single sabotage team.

That night, there was no need.

The Skorpion had handled the intrusion on its own. The battery remained silent, its systems subdued, unaware that it had been a target at all.

Because it had not been there by accident.

The four-man team’s mission was never limited to the relay station. That was merely the first waypoint on a reconnaissance route. The coordinates of every artillery position they encountered were to be stored on the same encrypted memory card Sidorov carried: intelligence for a future missile strike intended to take out Polish fire support before the main offensive began.

The battery near Dubeninki was one of several targets assigned that night, spread across different sectors of the border.

Two minutes later, Sidorov heard Bykov scream from the direction of Bludzia.

Brief. Then silence.

The same silence that had already taken two of them.

He was alone now. He knew it with the absolute certainty that only the total silence of a forest could provide. No birds. No rustling. Nothing but his own heartbeat, hammering in his ears far louder than it should have.

He kept his head just above the water, watching the shadow circle high over the trees, vanish behind the canopy, then return. Slowly. Methodically. Without haste, as if time meant nothing to it.

As if something above him were running the count again, checking a second time, then a third, making sure the figures added up before allowing itself to leave.

That absence of haste frightened him more than anything else.

A human being would tire. Eventually, a human would give up, decide the task was complete, and return to warmth.

This thing had nowhere to return to.

It had only time. As much time as it needed. And a night that never ended.

His numb legs began to fail him in the freezing current. He crawled out onto the bank because he had no choice—because the water was already killing him, only more slowly than whatever waited in the air.

It was the last decision he would make consciously.

OPERATIONAL LOG — GOŁDAP-EAST PATROL SECTOR

UNIT: SKORPION-2
SERIAL NUMBER: SK-014