The First Sip of Vengeance

The sun was a merciless hammer over the wasteland. At Blockhouse #73, it baked the packed earth of the walls until they radiated heat like a kiln and bleached the timber reinforcements to the color of old bone. Inside the small, fortified perimeter, the men of the 2nd Platoon were listless, their sweat-soaked tunics sticking to their skin. The boredom was a physical entity, as oppressive as the heat, broken only by the shimmering mirage on the horizon and the irritating hum of flies.

"Lieutenant," a soldier grumbled, wiping his brow with the back of a grimy hand. He spat onto the dust. "The water tastes foul again today. Like licking an old coin."

Lieutenant Chang, a young officer whose face was already aging with the strain of this command, didn't bother looking up from his patrol roster. "It's the minerals in the ground. I've told you before. Drink it or dehydrate. Those are your orders from on high. Now get back to your post on the parapet. General Yuan's inspectors could arrive at any time, and I will not have my command looking lax because you're complaining about the taste of water."

The soldier grumbled again but obeyed, trudging up the ladder. The well was the heart of their small world. An ugly, stone-lined hole in the ground, it was the only source of fresh water for ten miles in either direction along the railway, a vital lifeline for the blockhouse garrison, the cavalry patrols that passed through, and the steam engines that chugged along the iron tracks.

It was the sentry on the western wall who broke the monotony. "Halt! Figure approaching! West side!"

Lieutenant Chang grabbed his field glasses. A lone figure was shuffling towards them out of the shimmering heat haze. Hunched over, dressed in filthy rags, the person looked like one of the thousands of destitute refugees created by the Clear Zone policy. The figure carried two empty, slapping waterskins. The sentries on the wall raised their rifles, their shouts cracking in the dry air.

"Halt! This is a military zone! Turn back now or we will fire!"

The figure stopped, raising a hand that was frail and bird-like. A cracked, weak voice drifted towards them, carrying just enough Mandarin to be understood. "Water… please… mercy. My grandchildren… sick."

Lieutenant Chang walked to the gate, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. He was wary, but the figure before him seemed to pose less threat than a stray dog. It was an old woman, her face a web of wrinkles and sun-damage, her body stooped with age and exhaustion.

"This is not a charity, grandmother," he said, his voice firm but not entirely unkind. "The decree is absolute. No one is permitted inside the Clear Zone. You know this."

"Just water," she rasped, her breathing shallow. "I go. No trouble." She was seized by a dry, racking cough that shook her entire frame, and she stumbled, catching herself on the gatepost. She looked pitiful, a piece of human driftwood washed up on the shores of the empire.

One of the younger soldiers at the gate, a boy from a village in Hunan, spoke up. "Sir, she's just an old woman. Look at her. What harm can she do? We have more water than we can drink."

Lieutenant Chang hesitated. He was a product of Yuan Shikai's brutal school of thought, but he was not yet a monster. His orders were to eliminate threats, and this woman was clearly not a threat. She was a nuisance, a reminder of the human cost of their grand strategy, but nothing more.

"Fine," he relented with a sigh. "Private Li, fill her skins. Then she leaves. Immediately. Don't let her near the blockhouse itself. Escort her back a hundred paces and make sure she keeps walking."

The young private, relieved, took the old woman's waterskins and headed towards the well in the center of the small courtyard. The woman, Altan in her flawless disguise, watched him go. Her eyes, hidden deep in the shadowy hollows of her face, were not meek or grateful. They were as cold and hard as river stones, calculating and patient.

As the soldier lowered the bucket into the well, Altan was struck by another coughing fit, this one more violent than the last. She staggered away from the gate, stumbling towards a small, neat pile of discarded supply crates as if seeking their support. The movement was a deliberate misdirection. While the lieutenant and the other sentry watched her apparent weakness with a mixture of pity and annoyance, her hand, small and impossibly swift, darted into a hidden pouch at her waist. She retrieved a small, tightly sealed leather bladder, no bigger than her palm.

Miles away, hidden in a rocky outcrop, Dmitri watched the entire scene through his powerful German field glasses, his knuckles white where he gripped the instrument. He had argued passionately against this plan. It was too risky, too subtle. He had advocated for a classic ambush, a night raid to kill the sentries and set fire to the blockhouse. Altan had been immovable. "A wolf attacks the throat," she had told him, her voice devoid of emotion. "It is a glorious, bloody spectacle. A scorpion stings the heel. The victim barely feels it, until the poison reaches his heart."

Back at the blockhouse, Private Li returned with the full, sloshing waterskins. Altan straightened up, her coughing fit miraculously subsiding. She took the skins from him, her head bobbing in a pantomime of gratitude. "Thank you… thank you…"

As she turned to leave, her feet seemed to catch on an uneven piece of ground near the well's edge. She "stumbled" again, her frail body lurching towards the stone lip of the well. In that split second of motion, her hand, now clutching the small bladder, dipped below the rim. With a practiced squeeze perfected over weeks of rehearsal, she emptied its contents—a concentrated, slow-acting poison derived from toxic local lichens, a nomadic secret refined by Dmitri's chemical knowledge—directly into the garrison's water supply. It was colorless, odorless, and its agonizing effects would not manifest for hours. She righted herself, gave another grateful nod to the soldiers, and began shuffling back into the desolate wasteland from which she came.

"A waste of time," Lieutenant Chang muttered, turning away. "Everyone, back to your duties! Look sharp!"

The narrative shifted forward twelve hours. A suffocating darkness had fallen over the steppe, the only light coming from the cold, distant stars and the single lamp burning on the blockhouse roof. The first scream tore through the night's silence, high-pitched and animalistic. It was followed by another, then another.

Lieutenant Chang, his own gut twisting in a knot of agonizing cramps, stumbled out of his small quarters. The scene in the courtyard was a vision from hell. Half his platoon were writhing on the ground, their bodies convulsing in violent spasms, their mouths spewing bloody vomit. The water, their lifeline, had been the source of their doom. Raw panic erupted. The men who were still healthy stared at their canteens with abject horror, realizing they were holding their own death sentences. They were thirty miles from the nearest support base, with no way to call for help except by a signal lamp they were now too sick to operate, and no way of knowing if the next blockhouse was also afflicted. The silence of the vast, empty land pressed in on them, no longer a comfort but a terrifying, suffocating blanket.

A few miles away, Altan sat calmly by a small, nearly smokeless fire of dried dung. Dmitri found her there, dismounting from his horse with trembling legs. "God in Heaven… it worked," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "I heard the screaming on the wind."

Altan did not look at him. She stared into the flickering flames, her face illuminated, the wrinkles of her disguise wiped away to reveal the smooth, implacable mask of her vengeance. The young woman was gone, replaced by an avenging angel of the steppe.

"They are dead," she stated, her voice flat. "Or they will be soon. But they died of thirst while surrounded by water. They died of fear, in the dark, betrayed by the one thing they thought was safe. General Yuan has built a wall of forts to keep us out. But his wall has to drink."

"Toghrul would have killed them with rifles," Dmitri said, the comparison automatic.

"And lost ten of his own men in the assault," Altan countered without emotion. "My way, I have lost none. And I have done more than kill a single platoon. I have turned every well, every stream, every oasis in this land into a source of terror for them. From now on, every time a Qing soldier raises a cup to his lips, he will hesitate. He will see the face of a harmless old woman and wonder if she has been there. I have not merely attacked one blockhouse. I have attacked the morale of their entire army. This is how you kill an empire. Not by breaking its bones, but by poisoning its blood."

Dmitri looked at her, at the cold fire burning in her eyes, and a chill ran down his spine that had nothing to in with the night air. The Russian Empire had sent him here to arm a rebellion, to create a festering sore on China's border. He realized with a sickening lurch that he had armed something far more intelligent, and infinitely more dangerous. He had armed a mind that understood the true and terrible nature of asymmetric warfare.