Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  “No need to dig it deeper, son.”

  “Sergeant?”

  “He won’t be in it very long.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Graves Registration will bag him later. If not, more shells are coming over in an hour or two, or for sure tomorrow. Ours or theirs, doesn’t matter. They’ll churn or toss him. So go easy on the spade work.”

  If the shells don’t add him to the red stew that feeds the daemons of the Yue ming, Graves Registration will rebury him someplace else. Hopefully a quiet spot not on the firing grid as a numbered Point. Then another unit will dig him up and move him, usually a bit closer to the rear. He might hop six or seven times, until the last unit gets him to a big military incinerator or just doesn’t care and leaves him be. That kinda thing is routine. It keeps the meat jalopies running.

  Black

  General Sòng has a groaning civilian burden on top of her military logistics problem, for the western cities are swollen with 337 million refugees from abandoned cities of the occupied east. She struggles to manage food and medical crises from convoy to convoy. She rations what little food and housing there is in taut and frightened, walled cities. She orders land confiscated or forced into hydroponics, adding huge irrigated military farms in the arid southwest.

  There are crowded children’s camps in deep rear areas which she ordered built prewar, where she made conscripted parents send their children even before the fighting started. Most families have since reunited, defying her orders with her silent blessing. But hundreds of thousands of orphans are in the camps still, with both parents dead in the first wave battles. They're called “Lian’s children.”

  On the other side of the lines, 242.5 million civilians never got away. Never tried to flee west as refugees, or were captured after they started out, harried then trapped by RIK. Since then, the eastern cities have been emptied into immense internment and labor camps, converted to urban barracks. Dispossessed cram into white hut camps that are more pestilential and miserable with each day, clustering and clumping like exposed, untidy barnacles washed by lapping waves of war.

  Dauran generals do the same up north, though the DRA’s tundra sector of the line is in a region sparsely populated even in peacetime, and thus mostly empty of civilians when krasnos arrive late to the fight. It’s even emptier of life these days. All life, human and animal. “The godsdamn Daurans are killing everyone and everything that moves up there!”

  Military archipelagos appear astride both coasts: hastily erected shuttle ports, supply and rear area bases, training sites for raw recruits built on opposite edges of the immense and sprawling landmass of Lemuria. One chain of coastal bases serves as termini of Alliance convoy routes, the other waits on descending Dual Power shuttles. Each side settles in and settles down for what everyone concedes is going to be a long, bloody slog on Amasia.

  ***

  Hasty RIK generals in a heavily fortified HQ at Xiamen on the southeast Thalassa coast still want a breakthrough now! Their fighters know better. They understand it’ll be a long fight, not ended quickly or won easily. Recruits are less eager than the first wave, less keen for battle than “the boys” who overran Krevo and other central Orion neutrals and dozens of Union worlds. They know there’s a lot less “marching forward into glory” and lots more ugly dying on Lemuria.

  It got so bad just over five months back that Pyotr swallowed his contempt and fathomless pride and agreed with his worried generals to ask for Jahandar’s aid. The wizened Tyrant delighted in Pyotr’s show of weakness, and embraced a chance to gain a toehold on a major Calmari world that was not part of their prewar secret agreement on a final division of spoils in Orion. He ordered Krump and Royko to take 35 oversized divisions to Amasia, starting with the six that had brief winter fighting experience on conquered Nunavut.

  Jahandar is eager for Amasia for himself. He has heard about Purity’s interest in the ur genome, but he doesn’t care. He covets only power over more lives and worlds, and a chance to humble his ally Pyotr. His generals lust more for wealth, so they’re frustrated that they take over a barren 2,200 klic section of tundra front high on north Lemuria. Inland from the frozen coast, there are no great cities that far north. Just scattered service towns and yurt camps. The terrain up there is not so much flat and snow topped as it is rucked into a rolling series of low rises and troughs, filled with ice lakes and deep permafrost drifts. From low orbit it looks like a carelessly kicked up rug on moving day.

  Where the DRA combat zone touches Dark Territory it hinges like a great gate in RIK’s upper fence, which straddles it on either side. The image is so obvious the sector is called the Dauran Gate by everyone. It’s just about the most miserable place on Lemuria. Even krasnos who fought on greasy ice on Nunavut come to the far north ill equipped for long winters behind the frigid, endless black. They spend most time scavenging fuel and food, just trying to survive.

  “Worse,” says the top RIK officer forced to work liaison to the DRA: “they’re swinepriest Daurans! What use are they in combat? Phaah!”

  RIK needs its DRA ally yet won’t give a half thought to its food and matériel problems, which under Jahandar’s inept war leadership are worse than its own. RIK is stretched thinly up-and-down Lemuria and inland to one-third its width, even while fighting other wars on a dozen Alliance worlds. Kestino doesn’t have the numerical superiority it needs to win outright. That’s why despised Daurans were invited in, asked to join the fight on Lemuria under the pretense that “Dual Powers” is a cooperative alliance. It’s not. It’s a violent marriage formed from shared lust for spoils of aggressive war. A violent divorce awaits only a first stumble or serious quarrel.

  In appearance and habits, officers and troops on all sides of the Yue ming are fraying. They’re even starting to look like each other, regardless of differently colored combat utes. They're settling into a quagmire of muck and murder none can escape. A war of countless small unit actions and rare big battles. Of constant night raids and patrols across Dark Territory that lead to sudden hand-to-hand fighting under illuminating strobe flares and terrible searchlights. It means heavy artillery bombardments from 500 klics away, and missiles plunging down from 5,000 klics distance. It means short periods of intense, terrifying madness that punctuate long stretches of the most suffocating boredom they’ve ever known. Anyone with imagination feels trapped between trauma and ennui.

  Lemuria is a soldier’s byword for suffering. For eating meals amidst human and animal body parts chopped over and over by incessant shelling, mincing meat and bone into a lumpy red stew inside a million craters. For how bottoms of craters ooze blood when squeezed under footfall. For lying in sodden and filthy utes, cowering from auto snipers disguised as bot wrecks. For picking at body lice and fungal rot all night. For quarters shared with a billion black flies and a hundred million corpse fattened rats. For long range harassing fire that lasts for days, stops to wait for men to come up from deep bunkers to suck down fresh air, then thunders down again, catching them out with its bluntness. For crouching under big barrages that sound like the worst howling banshee wails of scared childhood. For choking terror, while waiting underground for the endless shelling to stop. For panic as a dugout caves in and bunkers pancake. For short nights full of foul dreams following long days of dull terror.

  Conditions in the long, horrid black of Lemuria are so appalling that old diseases are renamed as if they’re new afflictions unique to a special stalemate: Lemuria fever, Lemuria foot, Lemuria mouth, and Lemuria burn. The latter’s more than ironic. It means the putrid blackening of flesh and other horrors experienced at the northern and southern ice zone extremes, where so many are disabled and die from poisonous frost gangrene. A burning pain comes with thawing. The worst is Lemuria rot, a fatal mental disintegration and decay of morale ending in suicide.

  After the war of movement stops, after a year of fighting from static trenches, everyone agrees that it’s going to be a long, hard brawl on Lemuria. Well, not the
generals. They’re still trying to win with fast tactics. Soldiers just want to survive another day or week. So they all dig deeper every day, or dig out when caved in. They’re starting to think this will be an endless war. Maybe they actually do know better than the generals and pols after all?

  On both sides of the frontlines soldiers see the black as a choice. One path leads to a terrible recycling of dead souls, a burning wheel of rebirth and redeath that they want to get off. The other road ends in utter oblivion and welcome nothingness. That’s the path of renunciation of desire. But it’s the far harder path to reach and trod. For most, the black remains a forever cycle of suffering.

  ***

  Digging and growing the black walls on the Alliance side of Dark Territory was simultaneous, with arborescent palm stems shipped in from Argos Weapons Labs six months before the war seeding growing farms along the western coast. High speed biodiggers wound into the soil of central Lemuria, making living walls 100,000 times stronger than marble. Self-sustaining and self-repairing walls and bunkers use photovoltaics for main power. Larger stems are programed to tunnel deep, like the roots Chan Wèi spliced them from in her Argos Lab. Smaller roots carve out secondary tunnels, making coms and supply rooms safe underground from surface bombardment. They keep the deeper trenches dry, too, as tangled, long root systems pull groundwater into interlocked and living defenses that are smooth as ultrasteel on the inside but hairy with root thirst on their outer skin.

  It’s not so elaborate on the other side. RIK generals are only half committed to fixed works because they still hope that their next offensive, or maybe the one after that, will move the terrible Alliance black wall a thousand klics west. Or even win the fight outright, in a brilliant, swooping drive all the way to the coast. So again and again, RIK attacks come across the gaping no-go territory, the terrible Yue ming that separates the paralleling black wall trenches. A desolate band of hollow sound where no army holds sway save Death’s ever swelling, spectral legions.

  It’s rumored that there are ancient war ruins somewhere on the supercontinent. At night, soldiers tell tall tales of fortified polygons from the First Orion War and broad fields of rusting war bot carcasses left over from the Second. Although no one can say where they are, there’s supposed to be all kinds of treasure buried in the ruins. And even better, hideouts filled with deserters from both sides, who got away and live off supplies scattered over the tundra by each DRN dropship crash; or maybe left over from a 200 or 300 klic retreat by somebody, earlier in the war.

  A thousand years later, more mole men are digging pits all down the center of Lemuria, to hide from hate. The balance of firepower-over-flesh and cannon-over-will favors defense. Deep defense, the kind that goes down as well as back from First Trench to meet Second Trench and then Third Trench, and in a few highly contested sectors, even a Fourth and Fifth line of defense-in-depth. So every fresh assault leads to more bloody losses adding to the butcher’s bill from opening flank battles that cost Rikugun over a million dead in the first week alone. And about half again as many suffered by the reeling and then still retreating ACU.

  Rikugun has lost all momentum. It now abuts ferociously against Lian Sòng’s expanded and deepening, yet static lines. The black cuts deep and wide for 22,840 klics, north to south down the entire length of Lemuria. With the flanks sunk in ice on either end of the front, the only way ahead is to hammer at General Sòng’s hardened, sinuous defenses. It’s a recipe for attrition. Maybe even one for defeat. And yet, insistent demands for a final breakthrough coming from the powers that rule in Kestino ensure that the fighting here must go on and on, and on.

  The next offensive will be stopped before it begins, by a “Pyotr’s Birthday” bombardment. It will be especially heavy because Alliance MI will learn that Rikugun intends troops to celebrate the day in the field. The barrage will catch whole corps in the open, outside their walls and bunkers, singing and drinking to the coming victory. It will topple dead youths into hot craters, dirty plasma spears slitting them open to spill undigested birthday breakfasts from gashed bellies. It will slaughter a quarter million before the rest scamper back under rampart cover.

  Each Rikugun attack falters as it meets deeply layered Alliance trenches and “Triple A” (air-artillery-armored) fire support, backed by ARGs that race to plug any developing hole that threatens to permit a breakthrough. ACU commanders are unable to summon enough sheer force to push the invaders offworld. Grün and Dauran generals can’t win a decisive outcome, either. Every grunt instinctively knows this, and digs ever deeper into Lemuria’s surface. They burrow down as deep as muscle and digger roots or bots can go, until they hit bedrock. They dig no matter the color of their utes. They dig and dig, and still they must cower from lethal probing by smart artillery and AI bombers dropping penetrator bombs.

  All that means trenches, trenches, and more trenches. Black walls, more walls, and still more walls, in lines that now trace the face of Lemuria from pole-to-pole. First, Second, and Third lines of trenches serve strategies of extended defense-in-depth, on either side of the middling territory that stays dark to anyone’s control. Jump off or attack trenches backstop this Dark Territory, the obscure region called the Yue ming. They fan out from each First Trench, further connected by parallels and covered over coms lines where courier bots run messages back-and-forth whenever the enemy jams electronics.

  Each side’s Second Trench is 85 to 150 klics back of First. It’s also lined with troops and depots, bristles with strongpoints and supporting big guns. It, too, can absorb a penetrating attack, then support a big counterattack. Third Trenches are farther removed, at 500-700 klics from First, framing the black as a combat zone that’s 1,000 to 1,400 klics wide, depending on terrain features. Deep rear areas support secondary and tertiary field works with endless spiders’ weaves of tens of thousands of narrow communications and broad supply runs that hang from the fighting fronts. Thence the great webs cling to opposite shores of a single sea.

  On each side of 22,840 klics of this sinuous and lethal Dark Territory, bunkers smell of trench stew and boiling gauze wherever ‘platoon pots’ of hot food and boiling bandages simmer all day in back corners. The land is dalmatianed by fuel depots and ammo dumps, by field kitchens and field hospitals, by R&R huts, holding zones for replacements, prisoner pens and forced labor camps. There are camouflaged reserve infantry bases and skycraft bunkers, thousands of brothels, endless rows of ugly red or black brick trainee barracks, and long columns of open eyed rookies getting off convoy shuttles, looking as nervous as choir boys out on their first holosex venture. On the Thalassa coast there are ugly fungal growths of slave labor camps furiously producing ground transports with local adaptations. Millions of captive Amasian civilians enter the camps to work. None ever depart.

  Soldiers see only panoramic snapshots, ground level images of a klic or two of muddy prairie, arctic snow or mountain rock or sand or grass battlefield before them, within a limited range of aided or unaided vision. The views are all the same except for the color of the backdrop terrain. They're scorched, corpse cluttered, wrecked by shells and burned ground, broken forts and expired machines. Limited imagination blocks vision past the nearest parapet, shuts out the immensity of a scarred landscape running from one end of Lemuria to the other. The infantry sees no more than what’s right in front of it. The rest is all abstract images on intel screens that officers hoard and sometimes only pretend to understand.

  Only MI and sky pilots see the immense battlefield below with a bird’s eye vision of the suffering of the countryside. Deep hinterlands are marked off by fixed big gun positions, heavy bunkers, and endless rows of brick barracks hastily made from the land itself. You have to be high to see the networks of fortified canals, covered over to hide barges loaded with carbyne ammo crates going one way and recovered bodies thrown into empty crates coming back. High altitude fliers map the maglevs, skycraft fields, supply roads, depots, hospitals, big armor parks, seaport facilities, bases for subsea attack b
oats, long range scout launchers, and bigger missile silos. Only skycraft pilots looking down or HQ staff officers looking over stealth sat data sheets see just how truly massive an endeavor the war is become, how thick it spreads with effort, material and humanity.

  To sailors contending in warships for the space above Amasia and around its five moons, interlocked webs of fighting walls and supply trenches appear as a giant wound clawed by some great beast across the face of Lemuria. The parallel scars formed by the black are wide and complex, reaching far out as well as down each sinuous side of the Yue ming. Intricate, silvery filigree cuts are visible to unaided vision from 200,000 klics offworld. Surgically reconstructed eyes see the black at twice as far. Cybernetic implants see it at thrice that distance or more. Up close the black is hideous, whether your eyes are natural, lab grown, or cyborg.

  More aggressive officers probe and poke the enemy line with angry artillery and the lives of their troops. Each side makes small day-and-night patrols. Bigger raids in company or battalion size go out somewhere down the line at all times. Each side is ordered by its HQ to launch local assaults, make more patrols, take prisoners, nibble on the Yue ming. So troops rise from bunkers and dugouts, slit holes and hardened gunpits, to race on combat glide boots across Dark Territory, dodging active mines and snipers, both bot and human. Always, fewer make the return trip to their own lines than started out.