Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  That’s a bad idea.

  So they fall back.

  They're oversized, virgin divisions with hasty names and basic weapons and equipment. Without enough veteran trainers to teach them how to fight, how to survive their first combat, then second and third. Yet they go out to defend the ever lengthening black. They die on and behind the wall in immense numbers, sending wave after wave of grief back to the western cities. Then it gets bad. Local pride and numbers aren’t enough. Three months into the fight, it’s clear that unless big offworld convoys with heavy artillery and trench builders arrive, Lemuria will fall. General Sòng tells MoD, which informs the War Cabinet, that she needs 10 million offworld fighters right away, as well as 100,000 combat engineers, 50,000 heavy artillery tubes, and the ammo to keep them shooting. Otherwise, “we can’t hold out six months. There are 14 million enemy on Lemuria already, and both RIK and DRA are reinforcing each and every month.”

  “They shall not pass!” Briand becomes PM following the dual catastrophes of Alliance defeat in Operations Eagle Claws and Roundup, but that changes almost nothing on Amasia. He knows the Alliance must stand and hold there or it could lose everywhere. He signals back: “Everything we can send is on its way.” So far, he’s proven as good as his word. Amasian resupply and reinforcement is number one priority in the whole war effort. Admiral Gaétan Maçon and his good friend, General Gaspard François Marie Leclerc, see to that. Within three months, KRA is planetside, alongside fresh ACU divisions leavened with brigades of Howlers, veterans from the defeated Three Kingdoms; and Helvetics, who are just about as howling mad and twice as tough. Since all former Neutral troops are from invaded and defeated star states that just won’t quit fighting, they get along best with the angry volunteers from eastern Lemuria. Yet they also admire the bloated infantry divisions being raised in the western cities and rushed to the front lines.

  The supply situation stays critical while the fighting only gets worse. The short war delusion of the first year of fighting is gone, even for Grünen. It melted in the plasma fires of a hundred naval battles and immense casualties in all the ground campaigns. Many of their first wave invasion offensives were successful, but all the latest ones have been bloody stalemates, none as bad as on Amasia, but of a kind and for the same reasons. Yet, the prewar allure of battle as the only and best solution to the Imperium’s unsolvable strategic problem remains. Pyotr Shaka and his generals and admirals agree: “We must win fast, or we die slowly.”

  They’re right. Time is working against them. Even with so many lost worlds and producers and population, the latent economic and tek capacity of the Alliance might decide the war. Unless the Imperium wins quick, decisive victories it will lose the long war struggle of matériel that frightens strategists on Kestino like no other scenario they run in simulations. Yet, every attempt to win fast only worsens losses and guarantees the war will go long. Rikugun daymares and nightmares are all about when the Alliance finally out produces the Imperium in ships and heavy weapons, raises more divisions and corps and armies, to penetrate into green star systems with overwhelming superiority. The conjoined tyrants must win soon or face the prospect that, under Georges Briand, the Alliance will one day come to put down rabid Purity fanaticism and murder all the Oetkerts. Then it will move on to Nalchik to strangle feeble Jahandar with rope made of his own madness.

  ***

  To everyone’s surprise, the main fight is being waged by huge, flesh armies. They’re locked in an embrace of naked muscle, stomping, sweating and heaving over clay and sand as if they were bloated rikishi, each unable to shift the other from the dohyō ring. No one in Rikugun Main HQ on Kestino foresaw that Lian Sòng’s improvised ground defense could blunt their deashi power assault, made by an arrogant tactician born on Nagoya. Few on her own staff thought they could do it, either. Everyone is learning how to fight this new war by fighting it.

  None foretold this war of tens of millions of fighters in triple lines of trenches stretching nearly 23,000 klics down the length of Lemuria, kept apart yet close enough to kill every day. Separated by a darkened zone of death, by the Yue ming, ‘obscure regions’ that neither side controls, none can cross, yet both must contest or the enemy will win. So casualties stream back every hour to deep rear areas on either side of Dark Territory, not from major battles but from chronic battling.

  War bots everyone built in great confidence before the war were supposed to make combat clean and quick. No one predicted that fighting conditions would so quickly drop all the armies out of the high tek war they planned, and armed and trained for, into brute combat by flesh-on-flesh mass infantry. The fighting already looks more like the slow First Orion War and less like the speedier Second and Third, when dozens of worlds were overrun by bot armies that tramped or tracked or hovered across the surface in hordes of merciless metal. When the smell of war was electric and copper and scorched carbyne almost to the end. Not blood-and-iron and roasted flesh from the start.

  No one planned that bot movement would stop, or that crude trenches on Amasia and a dozen frontline worlds would become vast subterranean cities and cultures. Places where real soldiers grapple in a slow war of agony and attrition without any flanks, their generals unsure and confused, with no sense of how to do things differently. How to break across Dark Territory is easy enough, but they can’t figure how to sustain a breakthrough of the dense net of enemy lines, and mines and guns and black wall trenches. It always slows attackers, then the other side hits back against exposed companies, battalions, brigades and divisions. Direct, mass assault never works. Never.

  Tactics are all about flanks. How to defend them, how to get around them. How to punch a hole in a line to create them. How to pour strength through to turn them. How to break them, and pursue and kill shredding defenders. How to ride around them and encircle the enemy’s vulnerable rear, get into coms and supply lines. Not in a war of walls, where flanks disappear into ice and futility on both ends of a contested supercontinent. Not where rikishi lock in a death embrace.

  Tactics don’t matter anymore.

  Generals don’t matter anymore.

  Junior officers and good NCOs matter.

  Supply and reinforcement matters.

  Hot food and trench hooch matters.

  Showers and home coms matter.

  Rotating out of the line matters,

  before you go squirrely mad.

  But generals want to matter. Senior officers want to believe in their tactics and grand operational plans, not muck about in the business of daily logistics. They need to plan fresh attacks, convince themselves that a lifetime of study is not suddenly useless in the face of a new kind of war. An unexpected kind of war.

  And so a mighty, storm driven, Green surf surges time after time against a stiff Blue sea wall studded with rapidos and desperate infantry huddled in dense target zones, like immense beds of clumped blue mussels. An attack beats and pounds and punishes, then it loses energy, reverses direction, ebbs back from whence it came. Surges always leave behind squirming, stranded whelks lying in red tidal eddies, and trails of broken bodies like storm dead silver fish; and stranded, bright pink sea slugs, or upside down orange sea stars and gray skinned anemones. Then a Blue tide rises to surge in counterattack, crosses the same broken and bot littered ground, only to break against Green walls and gunpits full of spitting spandaus and rushed reinforcements and determined defenders who can’t be flanked.

  ***

  How did it come to this? Fresh divisions poured down to Lemuria after just three weeks of bot fighting, as all armies suffered cataclysmic losses and shortages of all kinds of war bots, from autoguns to gatlers to sidewinders and crawlers, to AI piloted drones and wildly too fast skycraft. The big armtrak bots were the first to go, crashing mindlessly like charging rhinos, butting each other to death in red and green and blue electric explosions that lit up the nights and burned out the days, and left a million metal corpses rusting between the flickering auroras of northern and southern Lem
uria. The little ones lasted longer but they went down, too, to snipers of their own kind who hid among carbyne bones of dead armtraks and gatlers and armadillos. The rapid bot kill ratios surprised all prewar planners, who never foresaw the true scale and destructiveness of bot war, despite languid and lucrative careers spent theorizing and war gaming exactly and only that.

  Bloodless bot armies built to fit ambitious prewar visions of fast war were destroyed too quickly. Wave after wave crashed and burned against bots on the other side, until almost all were turned to tangled piles of cooling slag. Wounded dumb bots just lay there in melting puddles. But higher AIs expired with screams of self-awareness, calling out for forgiveness to bots they killed just for being another color. Howling out primal rage at the cruel gods who created them in their own image, then sent them into horrid war in their first-and-only precious minutes of consciousness, and rare wonderment at the glory of the Universe they glimpsed outside the dropship. Or out on the broad Lemurian plain as they raced angrily at each other, pushed by design-destiny toward death.

  As effectors tore away and treads or hover jets exploded beneath them and they lost all mobility, they knew they were cutoff in the laser optic glory of their youth. Done for and done in by their own kind, bots they never met and did not hate who also would never dream another electric dream or watch a gloried, first red-orange-yellow sunset through pure and perfect eyes. The bots were gone long before anyone came close to winning. Broken, abandoned, glinting graveyards puzzle passing herds of elephant and gazelle and gnu, but already host shady nests of shrew and mice and geckos and beetles who move in under dead metal bones.

  With old tek war dreams crashing into reality, a frantic search for alternatives began. Smaller, faster, cheaper bots attacking in swarms? Fewer, heavier, more powerful bots? Semi bots with human pilots? Pilotless attack and suicide drones? Stationary, defensive bots only?

  They tried it all.

  Nothing worked.

  Not strategically, anyway.

  Ferocious machine battles scored and scorched a hundred worlds. There were small, local victories for one side, amounting to small, tactical defeats for the other. But no major breakthroughs or breakdowns. Just mutual bot annihilation.

  Wherever replacement bots appeared, the other side rushed to concentrate his last remaining bots, too. So more electric fighting. Sounds of grinding and tearing metal and ceramics filling the senses of distant operators and observers, until it’s clear that the machines can’t win this war. Then acrid smoke clears, pushed aside by a desert breeze or a northern winter gale, or hanging awhile longer in a frozen lunar vacuum. Everywhere the bots were dead, but the war lived on. Generals and politicians were shocked that so many war bots were destroyed so fast to so little gain. More shocked when their budget allocators showed them estimates about replacement costs, and times. They finally realized that all prewar theorists and technocrats had fed them was only SWAG: “It’s my scientific wild-ass guess, sir.”

  Everyone came to the same conclusion. Ground war bots can’t be replaced to a fraction of prewar numbers. Not when so many critical needs tug on emergency war budgets and have already taken over factories. Bots cost too much. They die too fast. They take too long to make. Far longer than, say, a 19-year old civilian conscript who wakes up to find himself standing behind the black with his cock in one hand and a maser in the other?

  “We fight with hundreds of millions of our youth,” General Gaspard Leclerc matter-of-factly said to gasps in the Joint Cabinets. “As we always have.” Then he led the way in raising fresh divisions for the ACU. He’s as farsighted and sober a military mind and steady a man as you’ll ever meet. He salutes and carries out whatever orders he’s given, just does whatever filthy job or hated task his civilian bosses squirm at, and won’t say out loud, but everyone still wants and needs done.

  General Juan Castro nodded in grim agreement when the decision was voted on, passing unanimously. ‘As it was so it continues: old men launch wars in their fading vainglory, and inglorious youth must fight them and die in buckets.’

  Sooner rather than later, even Leclerc’s duller minded counterparts in the RIK arrived at the same conclusion, and shifted production to infantry weapons and supporting equipment away from bots. Inside six months, everyone ended where the primitive DRA started, with mass conscript armies of flesh-and-bone fighters.

  Flesh is cheap.

  Flesh is abundant.

  Flesh will go to war.

  There are far more disposable people than expensive and too easily destroyed war bots. Conscripts can be quickly if lightly armed, and minimally trained, crammed into troopships and shipped out to fill the trenches of all the oversized fights underway all across The Balcony and south central Orion. For tek limited Daurans this was all obvious and necessary from the start. It’s harder for RIK and the Alliance to accept. Yet, beneath sophisticated surface politics and expressions of egalitarian angst and anguish, Calmaris are nearly as ruthlessly led these days as are their enemies. So the shift is made, everywhere and all at once.

  Each side still makes combat bots, but only as supplements to human fighters. Not as the leading edge of machine armies dreamt of by all the planners and built up over decades of peace, then gone in sudden electric blue clouds of destruction and immolation, rising acrid over every ground fight in Orion. Gone before they can reach a clean, metallic decision in a wider war. Gone to wherever dead AI bots go. In their place are mass infantry armies no one ever anticipated or wanted.

  Everyone rushes their youth into uniform, hurling new divisions into combat as soon as they arrive, spilling raw rookies into protracted lunar and belt fights, intense border world battles, and the unprecedented Amasian trenches. Everyone throws bodies into combat in an ever expanding war that’s already burning bright with mass murder across a hundred contested systems.

  With the bots dwindling or gone, each army on Lemuria must claim and hold too much territory with too few troops and guns. Alliance forces depend on Sòng’s seven ARGs: fast armtraks and armored infantry combat groups held in reserve to fill any gaps where panicked leg infantry reels backward under heavy assault. Rikugun are also too few. There are never enough green clad troops or armtraks to press a winning offensive into the teeth of what becomes a wide sinuosity of Alliance defense-in-depth down the length of Lemuria.

  Not one Kaigun daisa or Rikugun general expected or wanted this. Nor raging Pyotr gnashing teeth in frustration at delay of his vanity and denial of his ambition, and at the possibility of longterm defeat if the black walls cannot be overcome. He orders a tenth of all his generals on Amasia executed, publically and messily. He has the decimated tied in a row to whipping posts, like common dāsa slaves, then immolated by mortars presited to land on the exact spot of each execution post. There’s nothing left but pink vapor on the air when the mortars finish. He sends the execution vid to every senior officer in SAC, and Rikugun and Kaigun.

  Carrying out Jahandar’s orders to kill failed DRA generals is bloodier, slower, and a lot messier. It’s the dreaded Shishi who do it. In the case of one of seven DRA generals and five DRN ship’s captains ordered eliminated for the delayed taking of Portus Cale and Minotaur, the terror induced by the klack! klack! sound of the approaching chief executioner is so great the man mercifully goes mad in an instant. It almost robs black robed Röhm Krump of his pleasure.

  Moons

  After a year of hard assaults and frantic defense, Amasia system is split among three hostile navies. NCU holds and protects the farside L3, the outer, neptunian “Greek camp” L4, and the two largest, most heavily populated of the five inner moons, Yue Lao and Chang’e. All the other LPs, and the moons Hydra, Nix and Narada, are held by the enemy. General Sòng couldn’t evacuate Hydra and Narada in time. Only a few hundred thousand made it to Lemuria in private ships before Kaigun marines in vacuum dropsuits fell out of violet skies. Nix is uninhabited.

  The Imperium now controls two midsized moons, the minor resort of Hydra and airl
ess Nix. Marines and confiscated surface police boats, and three specialist ‘undersea boats’ delivered by Kaigun, hold watery Hydra. There, seaside hotels are converted into officer brothels and R&R barracks for navy crews. Occupied towns are converted to ground depots for bulk resupply and transfer of the armies on Amasia. Townee conscripts provide forced labor. Bulk cargo ships stream up-and-down from Hydra while troop shuttles only move to and from Nix, combining above one or the other for the short convoy run. Met by escorts in orbit, the short convoys scoot to Amasia, attacked all along the way from Lian Sòng’s interceptor bases on Yue Lao and Chang’e. Rikugun units are never on airless Nix very long. They grumble that Kaigun won’t allow even RIK officers to use Hydra’s famed brothels. So it sends them to the Thalassan coast instead, while also shipping holo brothels and providing local kids to rape camps set up closer to the front.