by Kali Altsoba
The smallest of the five moons, sweltering Narada, is handed over to the DRN after six months, by irritated Kaigun marines. Its garrison was gone when they arrived, but they still took heavy casualties from auto bot defenders. It rankles that DRA takes over at no price. Baffled krasnos shuttle to junglar Narada, then plunge directly into the high north interior of Lemuria, close enough to the black to troika, then hike, the last few hundred klics. The first to arrive under the northern lights were vets of the ‘Battle on the Ice’ at Nunavut. They thought it was going to be as easy a fight as that was, a day of advancing uphill for Jahandar then weeks of eating, drinking, and rutting their fill. They discover they couldn’t be more wrong.
Constant offworld reinforcement is made possible by each side holding bohr zones aligned to Amasia system’s star, Chara II. Alliance navies hold the only inner system LP that any of three navies controls, the L3 on the star’s farside. All other inner zones are so heavily contested that no one tries to jump convoys in. And even the NCU can only use the inner L3 when none of Dual Powers moons, all with interceptor bases, are in the farside phase of their orbits. That means most Amasia Flotilla warships are stationed to hold an outer system, Greek camp L4, parked astride a neptune class, cold gas giant orbiting Chara II at extreme distance.
Kaigun holds the neptunian L2. DRN holds the “Trojan camp” L5, taking over from a Kaigun warfleet that seized it at the start. The transfer was part of a deal that brought millions of krasnos to fight in frigid north Lemuria. No one controls the windward L1, between the blue giant and Chara II. Everyone who jumps in-or-out of that highly contested bohr zone does so at very high risk of interception by seeker mines or lurking phantoms that all three navies hide there.
The gap between opposing fleets is a heavily contested ocean of nothingness, a vacuum no-one’s-land separating the navies. Kaigun daisa always spit on their own Bridge deck right before making the dangerous run down from the outer LPs to the inner moons. Always. That’s why Alliance captains and sailors in the rebuilt system flotilla call the gap “The Juice.” Pretty soon, they're all spitting on NCU and KRN decks, too. Just for luck. It’s a slippery naval war out there.
Both sides frantically resupply and reinforce from outside the system, needing to replace huge wastage in the never ending ground war. Each navy harasses and ambushes heavily defended troop and supply convoys making the dangerous trip down from the LPs to the inner system moons, thence a fast run to the surface of Lemuria. Neither side can stop all the enemy’s convoys getting through. Clotted clouds of broken ship parts, and frozen dead from all sides, clutter The Juice like jelly fish washed into an inner harbor. Yet, it’s not possible to interdict all enemy movement around the cold gas giant, where twelve moonlets moving in complex orbits forbid sure detection. Convoys wend past outer moons and then through a thick mid-system asteroid belt that allows ambush and interception, but also easy concealment and route deception. Then it’s All Ahead Bendix for the inner moons.
Next comes tighter passage through a kind of shield wall of five inner moons orbiting Amasia. The system’s baroque weave of smaller celestial bodies provides cover for hunter and hunted to duck and conceal, dash and hide, and dash and hide again. But also to predator warships that hide, then pounce, as the convoys bring helpless troops and vital supplies to the inner system moons, before heading down to Amasia’s contested surface. A complex weave of five short and medium orbits means that, on three days out of five, one of the two Alliance moons is in such close proximity to an enemy base that arriving convoys must track by mid-course correction to the second moon. It’s a constant dance, and a logistician’s nightmare, to ensure that the right cargo ships arrive at the right destination, that each division lands finally on the west coast of Lemuria with proper arms and equipment, ready to make the fast surface run out to the black walls to engage the enemy.
Yue Lao and Chang'e are the last stops before a frantic, plunging descent by NCU shuttles to Panthalassan landing sites, as far away from RIK skycraft bases as possible. Kaigun marines hold the two medium moons, Hydra and Nix, while the DRN occupies the fifth and smallest inner moon, tropical Narada. From the three Dual Power lunar bases, dropship convoys are constantly landing and rising, heading up-and-down the curving Thalassa coastline. Ground ports and occupied cities bustle with the busy sounds of disembarkment and preparations for inland war. Kendo stick beatings betray forced sex brothels, rape camps, and hard labor details run by SAC or Kempeitai. Farther north, screams of terror rise up at the swish! of an approaching black robed Shishi. Krump’s men are all over the north.
Attrition in ships and sailors along the complex convoy routes is constant and extreme. More fights break out in high and low orbit, yet a shuttle run under the cover of streaker missiles and skycraft is the quickest and least dangerous leg of the whole system supplying Amasia. Except for Daurans. With only outdated and outclassed shturms to protect their falling infantry, they lose low orbit boats to archie or streaker missiles or ACU Wasps nearly every time. In each run of 20 dropships, at least one building sized clunker spins out of control and then out of the sky, spilling 20,000 astonished, screaming popovs out of broken lock doors or gaping holes or a cracked in-half hull. They fall in their brown unis, landing on snowy tundra and pack ice, embedding in the white like raisins in bread dough.
General Mikva Royko callously, but accurately and fairly typically for a DRA general, said to Admiral Fedor Aleksandr when he lost a quarter million dead in the first hour over Krakoya I: “There are millions more krasnos where these dead came from. Billions more, should I need them. Should Jahandar order it.” Nothing is different in the skies above Amasia. There, too, the DRA makes war the way Jahandar governs all Daura, with indifference to suffering or loss of Dead Souls.
All the while, cluttered and contested lunar orbits fill with broken warships and human wreckage from all the navies. So much flotsam is up there that, looking up during a crisp night from Lemuria below, troops of all the armies see a sky sparkling with tens of thousands of added stars: reflected lights from broken bits of hull, shattered scuttles, frozen corpses in glinting vacuum suits, fragments of exploded missiles, and bright hexadiamond shielding. It’s as pretty as pearls.
***
For Alliance convoys, Amasia lies at the end of a long supply line that looks on a starchart like a demented giraffe, perhaps AI bot adapted to a substandard gravity world. Its overlarge head gobbles huge amounts of supply at the end of a ridiculously long, insupportably skinny neck. At first, a thin string of undefended bases is held by ragged NCU flotillas fighting desperately to hang on against the first invasion wave, then fighting to hold the line through the disaster of the Great Rout that sees so many Alliance fleets and armies overrun or falling back, leaving Amasia alone at the terminus of a bohr string thirteen jumps too long.
After desperate fleet-to-fleet fighting led by White Sails for the Alliance, the Amasia ‘bohr road’ was finally secured with a chain of improvised moon bases in uninhabited systems linking to Sòng’s holdout L3 and L4. Bohr road bases are now fortified and defended by the NCU and marines, and the requisite LPs cleared of phantom, destroyer and cruiser incursions. A hardened, but uncomfortably thin, ‘Giraffe’s Neck’ supply line forms a strand of linked Lagrange points leading back to core supply and reinforcement bases deep inside Calmar Union home territory.
Amasia is vital to the outcome of the wider war, seen as critical by strategists on Kars and Kestino alike. An exceptional fight is underway to control its surface, its moons and Lagrange points. Everyone recognizes its pivotal strategic location, so Amasia gets first call on vital war supplies. Each side commits more than it can spare from a dozen all out surface fights elsewhere in The Balcony. If Lemuria’s ground defenses are overcome, a system-by-system invasion tide will resume its westward flow, an unstoppable tsunami overcoming brief inconvenience of a high sea wall erected on Amasia. But if Lemuria holds, the Imperium must be denied the swift victory it wants and needs, and Purity f
anatics will insist that Pyotr pour ever more resources into the fight, thereby reinforcing failure.
Holding on will give the Alliance the precious time required to recover from near fatal blows landed in the first, lightning campaigns. And worse defeats in the catastrophe of the Great Rout, when a premature Alliance counteroffensive called Roundup backed into a well intended but terrible failure to aid invaded Neutrals in Eagle Claws. Both operations collapsed into retreat, then rout, then ruin. With home systems overrun, hundreds of millions of forlorn but heavily armed refugees from the Three or “Iron” Kingdoms, and Helvetics from the Association, managed sustained fighting retreats to Calmari sanctuaries to join Krevans already well into forced exile. Not nothing, but another desperate Alliance claim to have salvaged a moral victory from outright military defeat. Anything the pols can use to justify the lost fleets and armies misspent in the missteps of Roundup and Eagle Claws.
After a year of losing at war, half-a-hundred Calmari worlds are occupied by either Rikugun or the DRA, and that number again from three overrun Neutrals. Alliance forces are no longer reeling, but they're badly weakened and incapable of a major offensive. Their diverse peoples are also stiffening to a protracted fight, starting to think about how one day they will bring this terrible, long war to their enemies’ homeworlds, too. Starting to think about a day of retribution.
Misplaced hope in quick victory hit hard as Calmaris first learned of immense, unexpected losses. It was one thing to watch Krevan worlds overrun and ravaged, but to see it spread to their own worlds was a terrible because unexpected blow. Yet, anger was gained. Hatred was gained. Resolve was gained, deepening with each scrolling name of a dead or missing youth never to be seen or heard again.
“How can this be?”
“How can this stand?”
“This will not stand!”
Such a raw moment will find the leaders it needs to fight a different kind of war. Many in the Alliance think they have found theirs in Georges Briand. Others still have doubts. Even if he is the leader to fit the hour, has the hour of resistance already passed? Is even Ulysses lost at sea? If Amasia holds, the war will go long. That’s the only way the Alliance can win. Ah hell, it’s going long either way!
That’s why Pyotr also commits everything he can spare to the fighting there. He fears that Amasia is perfectly located to serve as a jump off ledge for counterinvasion of his systems. Its bohr road already juts like a serrated kabar into the swollen belly of his gains. Amasia is an open wound, bleeding Alliance youth and resources but stabbing into Pyotr’s security and ambitions as well. All eyes are on Lemuria. This could be where the war is decided, if it doesn’t just go on forever. Amasia will be vital should the Alliance recover and move instead to offense. Should the Allies have enough hard will to spend lives and treasure and effort to recover over 100 systems lost to brutal occupations. Should they next reach out to ruin the enemy’s worlds as well. Should their diverse peoples have hate enough left, after all that, to wage a war of retribution into the brown and green map stars far beyond the blue star borders of the Calmar Union. Should they have enough bile and bitterness in them to finish a total war to undergird a more lasting peace.
Already, everyone knows this will be a grinding contest of factory vs. factory, machine vs. machine, ship vs. ship, soldier vs. soldier. A fight of gross weight of carbyne plate shields and hulls, as well as exploded war bots and flesh-and-blood that will howl a tale across Orion. It will be all out war at the lethal intersection of industry, ideology, imperial politics, and hatred of whole peoples. An unholy war proclaimed by all who fight as waged to holy ends, a war of grinding metal and matériel. It will be a long fight that may yet come down to teeth and nails and flailing madly to commit murder in the dark.
Strategists agree that the second phase of the war hinges on one thing. Can the severely damaged Alliance hang on long enough? Can its forces hold until latent industrial and economic strength is transformed into military power to match the growing fighting resolve of Calmaris and their minor allies, now mostly fighting from scrub moons in distant exile from their homeworlds? Can the Alliance hold on and hold together long enough to convert stocks of raw material into useful war matériel, turn ordinary citizens into ruthless soldiers, convert potential into actual production of warships, transports, missiles and mines, armored vehicles, bunker plate armor, and huge plasma cannon to incinerate all their enemies?
Or will the fully mobilized Dual Powers follow up initial victories with more decisive blows? Can they hammer the teetering Alliance into submission, take so many more Calmari worlds that a great people gives up hope of recovery and looks only to end its suffering? Will the last Neutrals in the Open and Globular Clusters enter the fight, or cower in distant fear? In this terrible game of empires the fight for Amasia is key. A lynchpin of strategy, hope and dread. If it falls too soon the Dual Powers will inexorably advance, and Alliance survival will dim to the cold future of a brown dwarf star. Ordinary, plain speaking Calmari may then lose the will and stomach to fight, toss Briand and his War Hawks aside, and cut a separate deal that cuts loose all their little partners of the moment.
Never! How can you think or say such a thing? The good and great people of the Calmar Union will never betray the little peoples of the onetime Neutrals, whom they have received with open arms, then gave to them arms and sanctuary! And now they fight and die alongside them in Orion! Can you ask more? Could anyone ask more? Calmaris are fighting and dying for Krevo after all, and for the Iron Kingdoms and Helvetics and all the small peoples of the Orion spur.
Is that really what you think? Don’t you know? They did it once before, at the end of the Third Orion War. They sold out other small, Neutral star states with which they were allied in a long war against the Imperium. The people’s stand-ins inside the War Cabinet and the Lok Sabra on Kars cut a secret deal with the old Dauran emperor on Nalchik, to betray all their mutual allies in southeastern Orion. The “Lost Neutrals,” other small star states called them after that. For they remembered and taught the tale as often and surely as Calmaris learned to forget.
You never heard of them, right? Well, that’s because they're no longer on any of the maps, certainly not any you were shown in school. They called their betrayal the “Golden Peace of Orion” and then lied about it to their children for 300 years. When the Royal Ambassador of the Three Kingdoms asked the Dauran Emperor why he allowed the southern Neutrals to expire, after fighting for years at their side and as their allies, the august monarch replied in a voice of imperial disdain: “Just because we’re allies, doesn’t mean I care.”
Threes and Helvetics and Krevans know this. So they send their children to help defend Lemuria. Not because they trust in Briand or the Calmar Union. They do it because they must, no more or less. A rump Calmar Union could survive a major defeat, their little states surely will not. So they agree to defend Amasia, fighting alongside hardpressed Blues, even knowing what their father’s grandfathers did. Knowing that even if they stand defiant, hope for victory overall and for their independent survival remains as thin and pale as curds-in-whey.
Alliance forces make gains almost nowhere, but they aren’t losing as badly or as often. The Allies need the war to become a question of time and endurance, of iron will and industry. They need a protracted competition of material strength and psychological toughness.
They can’t win fast and brilliantly.
Roundup and Eagle Claws proved that.
They need to win slow and ugly, by attrition.
They need to make this Fourth Orion War exactly the kind of war that Kestino strategists fear. A long war of mutual grinding, of trading bot for bot and body for body. The place to start is Amasia. Already, it’s more than a breakwater. It’s a microcosm of the wider war. Can the Dual Powers find a way to pass through or over the black wall to cross the Yue ming, or is awful attrition coming to all?
***
It was Purity that changed the prewar calculus. For there’s a
nother reason to fight all out for Amasia besides location and a test of will and endurance. A core, secret reason known only to leaders of the Purity Movement and to Pyotr, and to Calmari intelligence and top politicians. Amasia is coveted by fanatic biopolitical ideologues. They think it holds the ur-text of the Orion genome, not just of Humanity but of all ‘pure’ Old Earth life forms. Purity Movement ‘scientists’ say control of Lemuria is the key to all future directed evolution. To be directed by them, according to dictates of their biopolitical quackery and cracked theology.
Five years before Pyotr started the Krevan War, a top drawer Purity delegation visited from Pusan University on Daegu. That’s where the whole benighted idea and movement began, in the godsdamn faculty lounge of all places. Over coffee and cannolis! If historians actually knew their stuff, they'd be amazed at all the very little places where really big things start. But instead, they're always looking under mountains or inside supernovae. The damn fools! They don’t recognize causation even when it’s sitting in the lounge chair right next to them!
“Control the ur-book of genes and you’ll control the future of Orion, majesty.” They crowed and preached it to him, when he went in secret to meet them in SAC HQ. It was also the day Pyotr met, and was instantly impressed by, a young SAC officer, Major Takeshi Watanabe. He was there as Pusan’s brightest student (true), an up-and-coming SAC officer (also true), and one of the Purity Movement’s most devoted acolytes (faking it, but very well).
