by Kali Altsoba
“You’ll have to talk to Lee Jin’s people about that.”
“They’ll take this news hard, sir. Some of them may crack.”
“It can’t be helped. Things are collapsing everywhere.”
“Alright sir, understood. Where are you sending us?”
“We need the 7th Assault on Amasia, as fast as possible.”
When the Enthusiastics heard they were being short shifted to Lemuria they said: “Looks like we’re off the 4Rs and onto the 4Fs: fuck you, fuck off, go fuck yourself, and you’re fucked.” Well, they weren’t wrong about that.
At least the 7th goes down to Lemuria with two veteran battalions of “howling mad” Threes attached, on permanent loan from the ATK, the “Armies of the Three Kingdoms.” They can thank General Gaspard Leclerc for that. He personally pled for veteran help from the Three Kingdoms government-in-exile. By the way, no one uses that official name anymore. They call that violated Neutral by its ancient boast name instead, the “Iron Kingdoms.” They call its fighters “Howlers.”
To outsiders, bearded, auburn clad Howlers look out of place beside blue clad troopers. After fighting side-by-side on Oberon, then on the Caliban moons, and now into it on Lemuria, appearances don’t matter a whit among men and women in the ranks. Already, troopers and Division HQ alike boast that the 7th Assault is the first “fully integrated, true Alliance combat division.”
Maybe, but it’s not the only one anymore. Howlers and Helvetics are seeded in over 200 ACU divisions. Their governments chose to fully integrate with ACU rather than reform and refit broken armies with rushed, begged and borrowed equipment. Predictably, Krevans respectfully decline. They fight alongside ACU divisions not inside them. What can I say? It’s a Krevan thing. KRA is ferociously independent. So independent that some wag back at the Hornet’s Nest on Caspia calls Krevans “4Fs” in his memos and dispatches. And nobody really objects. It spread up-and-down the milnebs. In the ranks, other Allied troops start to call them “Fuckers.” It’s meant affectionately, sort of. It’s real hard to be affectionate toward Krevans. They’re all such uncompromising hardasses and, well, fuckers.
With no R&R at all, and pretty much collectively and individually traumatized by serial bloody defeats, the news that Enthusiastics are going to Amasia is grimly received. Tired old hands aren’t recovered and the rookie class has yet to complete hurried training. Doesn’t matter.
“War doesn’t wait ‘till you’re ready,” General Nadine Yupanqui tells her tired fighters in a tough communique they listen to in silence. “So make ready to go back into the war. Colonels, majors: get your brigades and battalions ready and loaded. Argos 7th Assault leaves this moon by shuttle for Lemuria in six hours.”
***
Susannah watched it unfold on the local Argos memex, as well as her direct military neb. As a private, the milneb doesn’t tell her much more than civilian news. Yet everyone still asked her to explain it all, to say how the war still could be won. It might have been her uniform. Or maybe they thought just because she was wounded she knew far more about war than they did.
Well, most of them thought that. Some still talked blithely about victory, using prewar tones of inevitable justice and triumphal Calmari virtue. It made her sick, and angry. She hated just about everything about being back home on Argos, her old room, her old life, her old school friends. Even her sister and parents, who seemed small and indecently pure, too clean of the war. Home was too odd, misshapen. So over for her. Devoid of meaning or pleasure or comfort, with war nowhere and all around. And all that she cares about. If she cares about anything.
What she knows is how little she understands war. Not like when she first shipped out, when she thought she knew everything. Then, she was adrift in the innocence of combat virginity and full of the natural and immortal arrogance of youth. Now, she feels old and full of doubt.
Alone in her room, standing naked from the waist up as she finishes drying her hair, she pauses to cup and lift her left breast to look again at the hair thin scar running white underneath. It’s the only physical leftover from her life threatening wound and life changing trauma on Glarus. ‘I have to know what it all means. I must understand this war and what it did to me. I must understand Death before I meet him again, when I meet him again.’
She’s about to get her chance. Her redeployment orders are lying atop the dresser beside her freestanding, full length mirror. The war is settling into a drawn out “attritional phase,” as civilian and even some MoD strategists and talking heads on distant Kars and Caspia say nightly on the Argos memex. They say it so easily and blandly, like they know. They don’t know shit.
Susannah lobbied hard to return early to active duty. So she’s shipping out to Amasia in an hour, heading off to rejoin the Argos 7th Assault Division. Once she dries her hair and puts on a new uniform she’s going to Argos City maglev station. She’s going back to the war, where she belongs. She’ll maglev for an hour, then leave her bewildered mother and worried father and indifferent little sister at the Austral Elevator ramp. Mom and Dad will put on brave faces, of course, and wave to a daughter they no longer understand but still love deeply. Anya will wave, too, and pretend to cry. She’ll do it from behind a wry smile that comes from thinking about moving into Susannah’s vacated room. Anya has coveted it for years.
Return
Specialist Susannah Page makes a pearl string of bohr jumps on a troopship packed to the lowest deck hold with other oddballs and returnees. Mostly, they’re combat virgin replacements being hurried to the frontlines on one contested world or another. But more than before, there are also patched and recovering Argosian wounded like her. All are leaving Argos behind, again. Heading back into the war on far off worlds they never knew before their lives tripped over Pyotr’s vanity.
She catches up with her old outfit on the second moon of Amasia, Chang’e. She arrives at Houyi Starport, The Archer’s Base, just two days before the 7th is scheduled to board a ‘decade’ squadron of fast shuttles, fly past Yue Lao, The Old Man, and descend at speed to western Lemuria. Enthusiastics have already been in ground fighting down there. After another three months of bloody battles, they were finally sent up to The Goddess for a stretch of R&R. Lian Sòng agreed with Nadine Yupanqui that they had to get the 7th offworld, or it might crack up.
As desperate as the fight is on the critical world spinning below, the 7th was fought out. It had to replace losses and it had to rest its exhausted veterans. So after months of fighting and seven major battles over three long campaigns, all of them losing efforts that ended in retreat or outright humiliation, the Enthusiastics were finally granted leave away from the front lines. It came far too late for some. The rest settled in for three weeks along a freshwater, terraformed lakeshore on Chang’e, where they could lie on white sand beaches and watch other units come and go by fast shuttle from The Archer’s Base. General Lian Sòng made it happen by putting the division on garrison duty, shipping the original garrison planetside to replace the 7th in its forward trenches in The Sandbox. That’s the big desert just south of the equator, where grasslands and huge migrating wild herds thin, then stop. It works. Nadine Yupanqui tells Lian Sòng that her Enthusiastics are ready to go back into the fight. Sòng will soon order a rotation system for all fighting divisions: every three months they’ll get three weeks shore leave. But along the Panthalassan coast. It’s too risky shuttling up to the moons as well as down.
Susannah wanders the beach alone, thinking solitary thoughts as she smells fresh water on the chill Chang’e air. She walks alone because she hardly knows anyone anymore. At least half her old platoon is dead or recovering from wounds, or reported missing-in-action. Those left in her company who still recognize her merely nod tensely and move off. They have thoughts of their own to deal with, and she seems only a vaguely familiar stranger to them. One or two say a quick and quiet word before their last day of low gravity ‘liberty’ is over. Then everyone returns to barracks to refocus on where they’re goin
g next. And what they must do to survive there. Now the sounds of arriving and departing shuttles seem more ominous. To everyone except Susannah. She can’t wait to get back to the war.
She vids a message to her family back on Argos, about how fine she’s doing, and how “I’m sooo glad glad to be back with the 7th. Now I get to see all my old friends,” she lies. It’s pretty minimal stuff. She feels no more attachments there, back on Argos. Not to her old school friends. Not to the distant cousins she hardly remembered who came to her farewell party. Not to her sister or parents. They're all past tense, a smudge in the back of her mind and memory. That has been true ever since she met a prideful sniper bot on Glarus, where she died.
Argos is no longer home.
Home for her is the war.
Tomorrow, she’s going home.
***
The ride down to the west coast of Lemuria is uneventful, except that her ears hurt from bad pressure. She’s on the one leaky ship out of ten shuttles that shoot up like arrows loosed from taut, assist pads at Houyi Starport, launched direct-to-orbit from the “Archer’s Bow” on The Goddess. The shuttles pick up fast escorts that intercept their rise just as they emerge from atmosphere, then they whisk past Yue Lao, The Old Man, going All Ahead Bendix. The fast little convoy avoids entanglement with short range interceptors flying off Hydra. It’s currently the closest enemy moon to Chang’e, but the frigate and destroyer escort is tight and deters attack. MI reports that lately, the Kaigun flight master has been thinking better about this kind of engagement.
That might be because he got his people into a losing fight a week ago with shock elements of White Sails, when 100 AI Wasps surprise deployed from a small ice carrier. That’s a new warship type, carved from and built over captured cometary ice and just introduced to select Alliance fleets. There’s no issue with interceptors from Nix. They're still engaged with Wasps and frigates from White Sails, which stayed to protect a convoy racing down from the neptunian L4. The DRN base on Narada is on the other side of Amasia at this phase of its 15-day orbit, which is why the troop convoy avoided the much closer, Amasian or inner L3. DRN interceptors are substandard, in any case. Not much of a threat.
Once her boots hit ground Susannah will deploy with 7th Assault directly into First Trench. She’ll rail out within an hour of screeching down to a fast landing on the Panthalassan coast. The 7th Assault is just one of 100+ offworld divisions supporting millions of Amasian volunteers and conscripts, survivors of first wave battles. Oversize local divisions are still lumbering and clumsy, but that matters a lot less when standing in a trench than in a moving fight. And no one is moving on Lemuria. Besides, they're far more skilled than when they first formed a year ago, when they were no more than civvies fumbling with frags and masers. They ought to be. They learned to fight the hard way, by fighting.
The first thing to hit Susannah as she walks down the gangway of her lander, onto a huge base somewhere just outside New Beijing, is a cacophony of sounds. Loudest is a metallic clank, clank, crunch! of stationary loaders pulling the 7th Assault’s heavy equipment out of cargo shuttle bay doors onto ultrasteel platforms which creak and even oddly whinny a little under the weight. Black-with-yellow-warning-stripe mechs that look like big bumblebees pick up industrial loads with wide effectors, then stomp! stomp! down the ramp. Smaller, bright orange loaders whrrrr past her with graphite ammo crates held firmly in stubby, extended clamp arms. Dozens of compact Robobears are moving the other way, carrying white-and-red bundles of suspended agony, and anger and angst. The platform is as busy as a rush hour maglev station. Only it’s a thousand times more dangerous. One wide eyed young trooper is crushed by a bumblebee mech when he strays into its lane while backing up, trying to avoid one of the fast mobile oranges. In all the busy noise, he doesn’t hear a sudden screeching siren behind him.
“Medic! Medic! Over here, quickly!”
Susannah wants to stop and watch. It’s the first death she’s seen since she left the Recovery Room on NCU Red Rover. But the press of the marchers behind her is too much. A deep current carries her downstream, too swiftly past the dead boy to see what she wants to see. All around her is the tramp, tramp of combat boots and hundreds of excited young voices raised in joyful reunions, friend to friend. Tenor and even higher pitched greetings are punctured by loud shouts of angry officers barking orders in a dozen local and offworld accents. Even some of the Enthusiastics have picked up Amasian lingo. Not much. Just slang and curses.
“Hey, Mackie, you gǒuzǎizi. Is that you?”
“Akhmed? What are you doing here?”
“Just got back from a hospital ship.”
“I thought you New Meccans shipped out from the coast?”
“We did. But I got stuck on The Goddess for a week!”
“How the holy hell did you swing that?”
“I just kept missing the shuttle. Dunno how.”
“Ha! What a load of gǒu pì. You old desert fox!”
“I gotta tell ya, the girls on Chang’e…”
“Bì zuǐ! Shut up! Get back in line! Quick, get behind me.”
“You, soldier. Yeah, you with the ‘crescent moon’ cap flash. You’re from 32nd New Mecca. What kind of sorry eyed trooper are you? What the hell are you doing mixed up with Argos 7th Assault? Get over here, on-the-double!”
“Reporting for duty, sir.”
“The 32nd has been deployed to The Sandbox for a week!”
“I was on med leave, sir. Got stuck on Chang’e, somehow.”
“Master Sergeant, put this man on report. Then get his malingering ass south.”
“But sir…”
“Shut the fuck up! Try this trick again soldier, and you won’t need to wait for the locusts to kill you. We’ll shoot you for desertion.” The Military Police master looks like he means it, but as the New Meccan is led away he winks at Susannah.
Slung masers knock into canteens of other marchers, inducing curses and recriminations. Susannah hears her own over starched uniform shish as leggings brush. At each knee bend, her hard creases crack. Engines in squat haulers cough, rumble, rumble in anticipation of loading. Smooth ceramic doors snick unlocked, then creak and scooch along warm metal rails. The trucks are for a division that’s unloading right behind, not the 7th. Enthusiastics are going to the black by train.
Reckless herring gulls keow! keow! as they navigate among the herd of boots, scavenging for dropped or tossed away shipboard rations. Just overhead more gulls circle, bombing shit on new arrivals, crying ha-ha-ha-ha at what they did. Two virile males huoh-huoh-huoh and fly hard at each other in a private dispute over a mate or territory. Or just with a lust for life on the wing. Skycraft wedges roar and fade unseeable far above her vision, on high alert CAP over New Beijing and the shuttle wharves where landers come and go, day or night. They’re out of sight, yet drop long curtains of noise behind that waffle down to arrive like sheet rain on the marching troops below. Warm, friendly rain, for these are AI Wasps.
Whooshing! missiles take off somewhere south, arcing up from stained black launchers. They're on the way to pound a hidden RIK blockhouse or maybe a lost company trapped by daylight in Dark Territory, pinned by a bevy of sniper bots or positioned and marked to die by a silent Forward Observation Post. Or they’ll plunge down far beyond, to flatten ramparts and buckle bunkers in the enemy’s First Trench or plough deep furrows in rear support areas, tearing up his kitchens and ammo dumps and armtrak parks whose camo slipped for one, lethal moment. In her ear’s imagination Susannah thinks she hears distant reports of the big guns, the rhythmic thump! thump! thumping! of shells. But it can’t be real. She’s too far away. Still, the maybe sound makes her feel warm and happy, to think that under the constant, muffled thumping Rikugun are flailing and crying and dying.
Rough smells assault Susannah next, as she strides away from the edge of the ramp. Heavy oils and black machine grease, lighter bronze lubricants poured or spilled in haste a thousand times during the last year of desperate wharf w
ork, soaking and staining the sunbaked concourse she marches over. Her nostrils tart with summer black tar that sticks a little to the bottoms of her boots. It’s the smell of logistics and hard physical work; of male sweat and machine tools and armies.
A stained, filthy dockworker on oil clean up leers as she passes. “Watch your step, honey trooper. Those pretty new blues you’re wearing are way too nice to get all blacked up. Unless maybe you want me to grease you all over? Come on over here, blue buns. I’ll oil you up good.” She ignores him as he keeps leering and grinning. He makes no effort to hide that he’s measuring her tits in his mind, before swiveling his head to watch her ass walk away.
He’s just a dumb civvy.
He doesn’t matter a jot.
He’s not going where she’s going.
Tits and ass don’t matter out there.
Then a fellow soldier picks up on the crudity and leer, and the fact that she’s wearing tight fitting swanks, not combat utes. He wolf whistles at her, then says loudly: “What a yāojing!”
