by Kali Altsoba
Millions of men and women live miserably in bunkers, sheltering from silent snipers, smart shells, streakers, infantry raids and armtrak assaults. Others live in soundless, troglodyte caves. Some in caverns hollowed by combat engineers from foothills or the several ranges of austral mountains that rise to meet a blue-green sky. Or they huddle under huge flat deserts and black earth steppes, rich with smells of dead stalks and live humus and palm walls. Or they hunker under hard tundra. Some dwell klics deep under the northern icecap, only surfacing to fight.
The black walls stretch nearly pole-to-pole, across or under all types of terrain. The high point is the extreme south, straddling alpine peaks and valleys that start where the lower coast touches an ice capped bench of the Okeanos, some 1,400 klics shy of the frozen pole. The hateful gashes scour the leeside of the austral ranges before racing strong foehn winds northward. The surging winds reshape barchan dunes as they head up north, spinning off dry tornadoes that hop and score and scar the land. Clever AI terraformer bots seeded recovered Late Pleistocene megafauna that thrive here now, a parting gift perhaps before they left Orion. There are straight tusked elephants and cave lions and cave bears, heavy bodied antelope not seen in 20,000 years, spotted hyena, and saber toothed big cats from an Ice Age ago and worlds away. Also roaming are dire wolves and giant ground sloths, camelids and steppe mammoth, and even Irish Elk with 2.3 meter antlers.
Next the inverted black cuts into thousands of klics of open pampas, roamed over by hundreds of millions of grazing animals, who don’t understand the interruption but work out new highways to follow the seasonal rains and greening then browning of summer grasses. At last, flattened foehn winds weaken into breezes. Air moistens and grows heavy as it passes over the Ten Thousand Lakes, all jumping with bass and trout, perch and pike and pickerel. Pungent rains drench the central plains, encouraging green and yellow elephant grasses and fresh sets of immense, roaming herds. Elephant and quagga come, and auroch and gnu, and gazelle and wildebeest, wild mustang and zebra. And brontotheres and cynodonts.
On and on the black runs.
Cutting all nature in two.
Filling up with death.
Strangling all life.
Leaving scars of war.
Passing the equator, sinuous lines of tens of thousands of tunnels and dugouts dive below five enormous rivers and many large and small tributaries. One great river flows south, to reach the subarctic sea. The others run north, slowing and widening to fertilize the central plains and slake the thirst of irrigation systems that serve immense vistas of food crops: wheat, barley, corn, sorghum and millet. The sameness of endless, bot harvested crops is broken only by alternating colors chosen by bioengineers for aesthetic reasons. They cleverly follow Newton's famed seven, of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Little did conservative bioengineers know how ironic their choice now becomes, as RIK reinforcements tramping down the colored stalks call out an bitter variation on an ancient schoolchild mnemonic: “Rikugun Of Yore Gave Battle In Vain.”
Halfway north of the equator the trench systems bend sharply, tearing away northeast across dank green-red-yellow-blue primary growth forests of a wood zone 3,800 klics out from New Beijing. They gouge a thousand klics of hard tundra where musk ox and wooly mammoths and woolly rhinos roam, once the trees stop. They cross a snow desert that scatters and reflects brilliant colors of the famed boreal aurora. Then the walls go deep, diving under a blue-white ice pack covering the geographic pole. The last arctic outpost is hated Fort Desolation. Its frozen battlements are under permanent siege by RIK, brought north by ice boat. The horizon up there, where frozen armies fight, is always white-on-white.
Already, the meaning of a hundred thousand AARs, and staff analysis on both sides, is clear: no one can achieve a decisive outcome on Lemuria with existing weapons and roughly balanced numbers, with each side escalating reinforcements to match escalation by the other. Neither side will break or yield, so the stalemate must go on. Only it will do so on an ever bigger and bloodier scale.
The tools needed for victory don’t yet exist.
Only the cruel instruments of endless death.
On that, all the armies and fighters agree.
Coffee
General Lian Sòng looks over strategic level position sheets with her senior officers twice daily: S-1 Personnel, S-2 Intelligence, S-3 Operations, and S-4 Logistics and Supply. Less often, she meets with Allied special forces leaders, as she meets now with Colonel Jan Wysocki. He’s back from an offworld mission with Admiral Magda Aklyan’s White Sails. His troops, the Wreckers and Rusty Buckles, are resting up and refitting in Lian Sòng’s protected coastal 4R retreats.
Her coal black eyes have a hard look, offset by a kindly round face. There’s a black mole on her right cheek the same color as her eyes. The hint of kindness is an oddly attractive blemish in a general with a reputation like hers. Although she never lets her natural gentleness get in the way of tough decisions she must make nearly every day. She knows that it’s her essential toughness, not her gentleness, that ensures she and a hodgepodge of Allied armies are still holding on Lemuria.
She just finished a night council of war in a holomap room in a deep bunker HQ outside New Beijing. Her staff officers are gone. Jan is alone with her as she broods over the holomap that scales in-and-out, detailing the strategic situation along the black. She points to a triple, sabercat scar running the length of Lemuria when it’s viewed at an orbital scale, with a parallel triple, this one a tiger clawing, following as if in a mirror wherever the first cut travels.
“General Sòng, how long before they try to break through again?”
“We bloodied them badly last time. It will take them months to recover.”
“But they will try, won’t they?”
“The enemy’s brief on Lemuria is for open war.”
It’s quiet as a tomb inside the command bunker, yet the still air seems loud with echoes of distant shelling that fall all around two lonely captains of war. Even this far back from First Trench the map room seems to smell of rain and cordite, of burnt bone and broken armor, and slow rotting recruits from the nearby city.
When the initial retreat reached her incomplete prewar positions, Sòng issued her famous “stand and hold where you are” order. It’s celebrated now in Alliance propaganda, but she knows she condemned hundreds of thousands of raw combat virgins to die in place. They were necessary deaths that extended the black farther to the north over here, southward over there. She knows it, but thinks about the lost every day. Even though her order saved many tens of millions more.
“And your purpose, general? Is it not the same?”
“My brief is to fight along this black wall for a hundred summers.”
“It may just take that long,” Jan replies after a quiet moment. “Our enemies are pouring in reinforcements.”
“We’re raising more corps ourselves. We’ve linked all our positions into a set of continuous lines and in-depth defenses, behind the black. And we have many offworld divisions to support our mainline, local recruits.”
“Amasians are fighting hard for their homeworld. Of that I have no doubt, for I’ve seen your troops do it from every dawn through each aurora night since we arrived on Lemuria from our refit at Orestes Base seven months ago. What you’ve done here is truly remarkable. We’re proud to fight alongside you as allies.”
“Well said, ‘Ghost.’ And we are grateful that ‘Wreckers’ and ‘Rusty Buckles’ and all the other colorful KRA cohorts fight with us so bravely and so well.”
Jan ignores the general’s casual use of his folklore nom de guerre. He never chose it. He doesn’t want it. He hates its expectation of heroism and special skill and success. Even though these days he accepts its heavy burden and command obligation. He deflects, as he always does.
“Plenty of Howlers and brave Helvetics fight here, too. Damn good fighters. We’re lucky to have them in the Alliance and here beside us on Lemuria.”
; “Yes. More exiles who, like you Krevans, fought all the way here to suffer and die after their homeworlds were overrun. We share common enemies, but it’s more than that. You are all well proven as our true friends.”
“The difficulty for us exiles is not to die for a friend. It’s to find a friend worth dying for. All former Neutrals know we have a good friend in the Calmar Union. That we are bonded allies, at last.”
Lian shoots him a look, to assess if he’s jibing her for the fact Calmaris took too long to join Krevans in this war, or if he’s playing her. He’s not doing either. Jan is, however, getting much better at necessary diplomacy. He bows low. Not cynically but with genuine respect, given earnestly to this small but tough and special ACU general. She keenly reminds him of Amiya Constance of Genève.
The respect is mutual. Jan proved adept and resourceful when he was under her direct command, when Wysocki’s Wreckers and the Rusty Buckles reported to her HQ outside new Beijing, volunteering to help shore up Amasia’s defenses. Volunteering even after terrible defeats and losses suffered in fights at Minotaur and Oberon, and on the Caliban moons. They joined one of her ARGs and held off a near breakthrough in North Central Lemuria, in the area above The Sandbox that’s now called The Veranda, because it juts into the Rikugun side of the black.
Jan is so highly thought of he’s now a member of her War Council even though his Wreckers come and go too often for her taste. He and his outfit have an earned reputation for getting tough jobs done right. It has grown so high that Alliance MI and Special Ops HQ all the way back on Kars and Caspia call the Wreckers away to undertake regular offworld missions. They serve with White Sails as marines, as special dropship assault forces on Magda Aklyan’s butcher-and-bolt raids, and sometimes in ship-to-ship boarding actions. Or just as backup on some secret, long range excursion made to enemy stars. Yet always, the Wreckers return to Amasia.
Jan doesn’t know it, but his political sun is ascendant far beyond a deserved reputation as the Ghost commander who frightened Rikugun generals and troops on Genève, and yet more on a half-a-dozen truly brutal butcher-and-bolt missions. He’s long been considered a command star by the War Government on Harsa, but it’s more than that. Admiral Magda Aklyan asks for his Wreckers every time she goes out on another deep space mission. Although she doesn’t always get them, her rising reputation, and her respect for him, rubs off on his own.
Seven months ago, Lian Sòng filed several stern but admiring AARs pointing out Jan’s astute and instinctive abilities as a field commander in the big fight in Central Lemuria. And more, on his easy rapport with Alliance troops well beyond those wearing Krevan beige; with Blues and Howlers and Helvetics and the rest. Her recommendations swelled his already glowing reputation, working through the military bureaucracy but also winding up the unofficial Network, bypassing normal chains of command to reach her old and dear friend, PM Georges Briand.
Briand forewarned Sòng of the coming war. That’s why she built prewar field works that proved the key to holding Lemuria along a line of entrenchments that now frame a continental ridgeback spine. He has relocated since then from the Office of the Minister of Defense atop the Hornet’s Nest in Lowestoft-on-Stamos on Caspia, to the Prime Minister’s Office and residence in Barda on Kars. From inside the PMO, his eye remains on Amasia as the critical system in the war.
“It’ll come down to resupply even more than fighting or reinforcement,” Song continues, almost to herself. “We can raise enough fighters here on Amasia, but can our navies keep open the short shuttle routes to our two open LPs, to supply and support us from the two moons we hold, Yue Lao and Chang’e?”
“The routes will stay open, general. The shuttles will come. I know, as I just arrived on one with the Wreckers and Buckles.”
“I agree, but lunar dashes from The Goddess or The Old Man are the short end of the supply chain, no more. What about the Giraffe’s Neck convoy routes?”
“I’ve been with our combined navies a lot over this past year. I’ve seen White Sails fight a half-dozen times. There’s no better fleet in any navy in Orion.”
“Agreed. Bravery and devotion is not confined to our land forces. But do you think we have enough troopships, transports and escorts, to keep the route open?”
“There’s more to war than numbers, general. There’s heart and fighting spirit. We in the Alliance have both in abundance.”
“No doubt, but that’s not what I asked, colonel.”
“Our foes see the red breath of our warships and die in space in silence. The Juice will stay open, sir. Admiral Aklyan guarantees it. As for our enemies down here, clinging to the stolen soil of Lemuria, they hear the terrible thunder from our cannon, our mortars and our masers. Let them fear to raise their heads above their parapets except to wail defeat into the air that we shall scorch above them.”
Lian Sòng gives him a quick, odd look. More often these days, Jan says this kind of over-the-top, old sea dog kind of thing out loud. He’s becoming quietly famous for it in top Alliance leadership circles. He doesn’t say it pretentiously or meaning to be poetical or dramatic, since no one outside the Harsa government-in-exile even knows about his Ulysses mission. Not even Zofia. He does it almost unconsciously, because he’s slipping deeper into the leading role of Ulysses, just as shrewd and farsighted Amiya Constance knew he would and told him he would.
***
Susannah has been back from medical leave for four months, mixing but not melding with mates old and new in Second Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Assault Division, the benighted ‘Enthusiastics.’ She helped defend against two RIK trench raids in the 7th’s relatively quiet sector of First Trench in arid, southern Lemuria. Neither was bigger than a company level probe, scouting missions more than raids. Certainly not all out attacks. Those were made in other sectors.
Argos 7th Assault has been on leave twice since the war began, finishing its first liberty just as Susannah got back and the second one last week, after pulling a three month duty stint at the black. It’s General Lian Sòng’s new policy, and it’s working. The 7th is refitted, revived, and reinforced. Susannah’s sergeant said of it: “Addition by subtraction. Looks like 3Rs are better than 4Rs.”
In fact, the division is almost looking for a fight. Susannah certainly is. She’s frustrated with standing daily duty or sitting in a so called FOP barely 500 meters out, that’s not really ‘forward’ and shows her nothing to observe. Except ghoul snakes hunting nervous mice, and an occasional desert eagle circling and diving down to talon a ghoul snake too cocky in his success as a hunter. Only going out on night patrols interests her, because they take her into the Yue ming and so much closer to the enemy. Closer to meeting Him again. She is settled into uneasiness.
She’s another cog in a long war of unmoving black walls and low level, daily attrition. She stands to her duty, but quietly laments that she must guard a frontier that borders a barbarous land. She looks out over barchan dunes where bones of friend and foe lie unburied. She sees desolate fields, whitened by a thousand desert frosts. She stands where an achingly dry wind blows over her, out of the eternally lonely desert. She looks up to see only sorrows fall, instead of rain, and towerless lines that border a poisoned realm where no one lives and she covets only death.
For Susannah the war is an otherworldly place without real feeling. Even without real people. She seeks no companionship. She keeps to herself as much as she can, communicating only about guard duty and shift changes and where to eat and shit. She longs to renew her fight with Death, to seek him out and confront him, ask who he is and how. Others let their minds wander offworld back to lost friends and family, or apprehended youth. When her mind departs Amasia it only goes to look in one place, back to the innocence of self she left behind on Glarus.
‘So many lost, just to spend a month in Braunwald system six bohrs over the Grün-Union frontier. A leap of faith that we ACU failed to make or keep. Then catastrophic losses of fleets and armies in the Great Rout. All leading to this. En
dless war in an endless land under divided skies and moons, tethered to the thinnest of space supply lanes. Death, are you coming to visit us today? We rise, we fall. They rise, they fall. Is war just about which of us will fall down last?’
She knows that a simple private isn’t supposed to know or worry about such things, so far above her pay grade, but she isn’t stupid. And she gained a taste for grand strategy talking to Lee Jin in the Recovery Room before she was transferred to an Argos bound medevac ship, before Lee and his four fully loaded hospital ships emergency bohred away from Glarus. She’s thought about it ever since.
He’d sit by her bed with a thumb projector making holo starcharts dance in the blanket folds covering where she provocatively spread her legs. Just to tease him, saying: “Here, doctor. I’ll make a flat space for your maps.” She started it as a private joke, but then things changed. At first she thought he didn’t even notice. But then she saw that her playful immodesty embarrassed him, so she stopped.
