Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

Him she turns on, spitting: “Qù xià dì yù,” then to be sure he got the point: “Go to hell!” She has been practicing Lemurian lingo for a month. She’s quite pleased with his shocked look.

  A salt breeze dank with dead crabs and beached seaweed brushes her face, wisping her hair as she passes under the Base Arch, beyond the wall that keeps the smells of sea and city out. She walks through a cloud collage of odors wafted on steam rising from big, iron woks, stirred and turned over by locals. They're hustling hot-food-wrapped-in-paper to the long, blue column. Mockfish frying in tempura batter and deep fried mock foul are the strongest smells.

  “Mockfish! Battered mockfish!”

  “We got cod ‘n halibut! We even got kippers!”

  “Get your crisp duck over here!”

  “Fried with orange peel and soy.”

  “Crispy chicken is better! Over here!”

  “Cumshaw,” says a marine to the vendor, confusing gratitude and thanks.

  She picks out single spices inside the smoke cloud as she marches through it: aniseed, peppercorn and prickly ash, cinnamon and ginger, fennel, hot chilies and garlic. Coriander, cumin and turmeric simmer in yellow and green and hot red curries. She breathes in lighter scents of yoghurt, sesame, shallot, bamboo, bean sprout, spinach, and then a strong odor of broken open pumpkins where an angry father is still shouting at a careless helper, his ten-year old son.

  “Niángpào! That’s today’s profit! I can’t trust you to do anything right.” The father says niángpào with a mocking, high pitched intonation of every syllable. It cuts the little boy low, signaling that his father thinks he’s too effeminate.

  “Sorry, Papa. I’m sorry. I tripped.” He did. The cobblestones in the vendor zone are all chipped and broken from iron rimmed wheels on the food pushcarts.

  Mashed tomatoes smell acidic and bitter, all slick underfoot where some other careless kid knocked over a tall basket to spill them across the path of the 7th. The small girl who did it is crying on her mother’s shoulder. Her father is gently patting her head, trying to comfort her.

  A little farther down the road gray smoke whirls around long BBQ racks where vendors hawk mockmeat burgers, and corndogs on sticks, and sticky fried bread dough rolled in sugar. And other thickly doughy and sweet, and way-too-heavy, travel foods from Lemuria’s south. They're doing a brisk trade. Veterans know they’ll not see really good, bad food like this for months to come.

  ‘It’s an odd thing, but people travelled half-way across Orion in colony ships to get to brave new worlds, and in almost every case they picked or made a climate and terrain that looked exactly like their home regions on the origin world. Hot people to hot worlds, cold to cold, farmers inland, city folk all huddled together. It’s true on all the Thousand Worlds. Least ways, all the one’s I’ve been to.’

  Susannah smells onions frying before she sees them, piled in white mounds always browning at the edges, flipped and stirred by a sweating and shirtless cook wearing a long white apron tied with longer strings around his neck. Grease stains ride high and happy over a bulging belly. He belches loudly, and grins broadly as Susannah marches by his flat cooking stand. Boys and girls run the filled orders to any soldiers who buy, but who can’t stop to pay or close the deal. Some ride crazily wobbling bikes with carry baskets full of steam and sizzle.

  “Here kid! That one’s mine. Dai jobi.”

  “No it ain’t! The mock cod-and-chips is mine! You got a burger.”

  “Nǐ yā tǐng de! You sonofabitch! They're mine!”

  “Go ahead, take them you stupid nóng.”

  “Gimme some of those yam chips!”

  “Ugh, too much salt!”

  A little farther down the road Susannah picks up the finer scents of wooden carts filled with cooling summer fruits: yòu zi, pomelo, mangos, melons, coconuts and oranges. Also duller smells of orange pumpkins and summer squashes, big yams and flat mushrooms, wax gourd and lotus root. The last vendors point to reddening apples, pink peaches, and unready green pears.

  She reaches the platform where the 7th Assault will transfer to a maglev for the outbound leg. She feels salt sweat trickle over the down of her upper lip. The air tastes wet and fetid with sea rot. ‘It will dry out as we move inland.’ She spits out a piece of bitter peel from a hand sized mango, slices and slips a warm wedge of the sticky fruit into her mouth. It flavors her lips and tongue bright orange. She feels instantly sick and a little disgusted. It’s overripe and too thickly sweet. Its escaping juices run stickily over her knife and hand, staining the stiff cuff of her swanks, a too new, parade ground uniform that makes her look like a newbie among all the scuffed and scruffy veterans of a barely rested division returning to combat. They're all wearing combat field weaves called utilities, or just ‘utes.’ She forces back a bile and vomit taste in her throat as she throws the torn and spoiled fruit away. She cleans the bright orange juice off her knife, wiping it on a patch a little higher up from the cuff of her ruined sleeve. Then she ignores and forgets about the stain as she steps into a humming maglev car. As soon as she gets to barracks she’ll strip off these useless swanks and pull on paler blue combat utes. The dress blues she’ll toss into a disposal unit, or maybe tear up into gun rags that’ll be useful for cleaning her maser.

  She sees an endless landscape pass by in a blur of color, the flatness of the northern plain thickly sown with red, blue, orange, yellow and green fields of grain. Still short, not ready for harvest. So she knows she’s at least a thousand klics farther south when she sees combine harvester bots whir through fields of much taller, fully ripe crops. Silver bladed grain wheels mow through high stalks, shooting columns of seeds into grain tanks while spreading straw beneath the bots in long, golden rows. Towns are fewer, too many gutted by fire and abandoned. Nearby fields are pocked and cratered and fallow, also abandoned. She’s thousands of klics south from where she started in New Beijing’s protected docks two hours ago. The last thin trees disappear as the broad savanna turns to central sahel, and dry sahel threatens to become true desert with every klic she leaves behind.

  The last thing she sees before her maglev dives below ground is a thick flock of barrage balloons. They seem oddly graceful in their obesity, floating like languorous manatees grazing in some brackish estuary. Each one drags a thick cable with horizontal spurs sticking into air at odd angles and altitudes, like a stegosaur’s tail. These last few hundred are a leftover from General Sòng’s earliest defenses, when tens of thousands deployed to deter RIK skycraft from making rear area strafing runs. They were a total failure. Their pilots never dragged lethal cables into the path of a single enemy skycraft, as they were supposed to do in the mind of some Hornet’s Nest weapons designer, long before the war. Most fell down in fire and futility when the attacks came, bursting into flame, with dead men tumbling out of ripped open bubble baskets. The abandoned survivors are all ground anchored now, protecting nothing but wasteland passing by her window.

  Suddenly the sky goes dark with soil and rock. As outside light disappears, from old civilian habit she reaches over to switch on a porthole viewscreen. It’s disconnected and blank. She knows she’s moving under black wall trenches when the train slows, switches lines, turns to backtrack, then turns again. Her jagged journey continues for two more hours, diverting along two dozen switchbacks and side routes that mangle her sense of distance and direction. As they’re intended to mangle the perception and reports of RIK mini spies, dots and eavesdroppers.

  At last the train stops, and she debarks deep underground. They don’t tell grunts like her exactly where they are, but she thinks from the bone dry desert air when she gets topside that the 7th is somewhere in south Lemuria. She doesn’t care. She’s back in the war and eager for it. She can’t wait to strip off her stained blue swanks. They make her feel almost like she’s a civilian. Half-an-hour after finding her assigned bunk in a dugout 50 meters below First Trench she’s changed out of her bright blues into pale blue utes. She’s eager to start. Eager for the fight.<
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  “Sergeant, I want first shift on company rampart duty. Just tell me where.”

  The graying vet looks at her a little sideways, but he agrees. “Half-a-klic left, Grid 783, second tier shooting step. Four UST on guard post lookout, then you’ll be relieved. Got it? Alright solider, move out.” She double times it to get to her post early. Then she gazes at last, and for the first time, into the black. It reaches all the way to the far horizon, and beyond. She raises her sniper’s long gun to a waiting niche in the upper parapet and rests it there impatiently, warm and humming and lethally expectant.

  All she hears is a desert night owl.

  All she sees is stars and glinting flotsam.

  All she smells is juice from a broken cactus.

  She watches an orange dawn break into streaks of yellow over the enemy’s trenches in the silent east. There’s no joy for her in this return of jaundiced light. She sees it creep and reach out to part the veil of night, to peer more closely into secret curves and morning lusts of dark trenches slowing waking to the new day.

  It’s the stillness that interest her more. A vengeful bearing in the quiet that hides danger and a chance to creep ever closer. To watch her, concealed from her scope. To sneak, to crawl, to wait and hide, then pounce and kill with teeth and talons and steel claws, or focused radiant light. There’s no peace in the stillness hanging over the Yue ming as the heavy curtain of night lifts to reveal a sparse stage with no players on it yet, but holding promise of a great drama to come. The stillness looks back at her with inscrutable brooding. She senses an evil intention.

  ‘I’m waiting for you, Susannah.’

  ‘When are you coming to meet me?’

  ‘Soon. I will meet you very soon.’

  She tries to imagine all the shuttles and sidewinding maglevs and troop and supply carriers moving above and below ground, feeding into the desert sector. Then she tries to picture all the hidden movement along the whole lightless zone, the darkened lane of territory up-and-down the dragon spine of Lemuria. She can’t manage it. It’s too vast. Too humbling. She muses on old wisdom that seems new.

  ‘Mortal lives of replacements are like generations of leaves. Autumn winds scatter old leaves across the worlds. Living wood erupts with new buds in spring. So too with fighters. The winds of war blow away one generation before another bursts into green life. The old dries out and fades away, and it is raked into dead piles. The new thinks it is the first ever to bud, and that it is forever.’

  There are plenty of dead leaves, but not so many green boughs on Lemuria to bud enough local, replacement fighters in the numbers needed. Not enough to permanently tip the balance of forces that keeps trench systems where they are, shifting a few klics east or west in a local sector where an attack or a counterattack gains minor ground. But overall and always, they become deeper, wider, denser and more lethal. Harder to overcome with each brute day and renewed assault.

  ‘Leaves on the wind. Leaves unto leaves.’ Convoys sail down The Gap on both sides, bringing youth from half Orion down to the inner moons, then on to die on Lemuria. So the attrition of young bodies and breaking of young minds and spirits goes on, without reaching a decision. Maybe without purpose. And on, and on.

  And yet, she wants to be no other place.

  Feels at home like this in no other place.

  Can learn what she craves in no other place.

  ‘What is this strange thing called Death that nearly took me away? Is he to be feared or welcomed? I will ask him face-to-face when we meet again, out there in the Yue ming. I must go out to meet him again. I must know who and what he is.’

  She declines her first relief. She stands a double nightshift glaring into Dark Territory with two fingers aligned with her maser trigger guard, ready to light up and burn out any sudden sound or movement. She hears only scurrying geckos.

  ‘I’m waiting, Susannah.’

  ‘I’m waiting for you to visit.’

  ‘Soon, we’ll meet again very soon.’

  Cities

  It’s awful, fighting along and under the black walls. Yet for all the misery and muck and death of trench life, the underground fighting systems save more lives than they take. They serve both sides well. They let the Alliance stand its ground, holding defeat at bay. They let the Imperium keep its initial gains with minimal reinforcement, while the greater part of Rikugun fights on other contested worlds. For there are many battlefields on fire across east and central Orion. Only Georges Briand and a few close confidants can see a path to distant victory, and his vision of coming war is horrific, filled with the crime that encompasses all other crimes.

  Terrible.

  Dreadful.

  Unthinkable.

  Inevitable.

  Yet still a Hell whose reach exceeds his grasp. First, Alliance navies will have to fight and win along the convoy routes while its armies hold Amasia. Then they must plow the stars, taking back a hundred lost worlds with a hundred counter invasions. Only then can the Alliance bring the war home to Daura and Imperium worlds. Only then may he contemplate all the terrible, dreadful, unthinkable, and absolutely necessary things that he knows he must do.

  For everyone else, here and now on Lemuria, as on smoking and submissive Acis, glowing Portus Cale, on crushed Aral and sullen Oberon, on wrecked and smoldering Genève, on all the occupied worlds and many more that must become battlefields before this war is over, only one thing matters any more: survival.

  Get yourself from today to tomorrow.

  The day after is just too far ahead to see.

  And even if it comes, you might not be here.

  More likely, kid, is that you’re already dead.

  ***

  The first primitive trench lines were spontaneous. No one ordered trenches. They grew from raw fear driving soldiers to dig like maniacal moles. They came from a primal search for cover from howling shells, to escape plunging fire and a roasted death. Under incoming shells, men and women burrowed down without being told, out of animal terror and animal instinct. Even if all that meant was burying one’s face in dirt or scratching madly at rock hard scrabble soil with torn and bleeding fingernails, or a kit spoon. To get down the first meter, they used bare hands, knives, broken helmets, detached HUD visors, butts of stub masers. Next, cavities of shell casings welded to a rod. Now they use entrenching spades and big digger bots and biotunnelers.

  Under a killing artillery rain that never stopped, rival armies went to ground. Scratchy trenches deepened and hardened with each new day into permanent field works. Like two giant snakes, they shed skin as it grew too small, slithered farther north, then south. Grew fatter with each division they consumed, to become the longest and widest trenches in the long histories of war. Once combat engineers arrived, they tunneled underground. Wearing blue or brown or oak or green, they pushed at rocks and pulled roots with heavy robo diggers they call “Earthworms.” They mounted gun turrets above and inside the carbyne black walls, and ramparts along their slimed sides. In front, the infantry set e-wire and motion detectors and autoguns. Then they stood behind to wait for the other mole army to come across.

  Deeper down, Allied engineers set loose hyper stimulated palm roots to tunnel sideways at madcap speeds and almost unpredictable directions, then bored them out and shot the pulp topside. They dried out and heavily reinforced the organic bunkers wherever the biodiggers hinged or halted. Some officers wanted the mad palm roots to tunnel under Dark Territory, maybe even all the way over the black, so they could walk a battalion or brigade under the Yue ming and launch a surprise attack to kill the enemy behind his own black wall. HQ stopped that idea cold.

  “We’ll leap from the ground like Jason’s sprouting dragon’s teeth! We’ll…”

  “Listen son, a tunnel heading out is a tunnel leading in. The answer is no.”

  “But sir, we could catch the enemy unready and rush…”

  “Dismissed!”

  Alliance armies have 11.8 million frontline troops spread over 2
40 divisions on Lemuria, holding 22,840 klics of black. Average paper strength is around 50,000 fighters, except for the quadruple sized Amasian divisions. That makes average length of extended fieldworks held by any one regular division about 80 klics. That’s way too much. It leaves a helluva lot of open space that invites attack. Trench masters rely on fixed bot guns, rapido batteries, strongpoints, motion and sound detectors, and wide animate minefields, all linked to the clotted infantry.

  If RIK breaks through in the center of the long black it might collapse the whole front. Fast armor and mobile infantry could fan out from penetration points to roll up erupted flanks of badly exposed positions. So big NCU convoys snake planetside with flesh reinforcements and heavy artillery, racing to stuff cannon more than bodies in the line gaps. It’s left to General Sòng to raise poorly armed and trained, but oversized, divisions of local infantry. Each one is almost the size of a normal corps, but lacks combat power. So they’re backstopped by offworld guns and backboned by offworld infantry and armor. Anything to hold the line.