by Kali Altsoba
She found his little shipboard attentions soothing rather than intrusive, sweet more than suggestive. Except for the time they were talking and he said he worried that her mind returned so often and so darkly to thoughts of death. She shook him off with a false but well practiced laugh, and an independent mind-your-own-business toss of her rich brunette hair. She wouldn’t let him or anyone go to that place with her. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The next day she was onboard a medevac bound for home. During her recovery stay on Argos she got a lot more unwanted sympathy, and too tender inquiry into her exposed state of mind and the nakedness of her soul, which she had just discovered and found empty. She couldn’t recover fast enough to get off Argos quickly enough. She wanted back into the war.
Susannah was always a private person. Now she’s different. Now that she’s back with the 7th and one-of-them-again on Amasia, her squad mates know that she often becomes morose and lost in distant thought. At least they know better than to ask what draws her so far away from them, and from everything all around. Many of them are partway there themselves. More will cross over to join her in solitude after tonight’s big raid. They always do, after a fight.
***
Like Susannah, most badly wounded are repaired under suspend solution then awakened too soon, released from care too fast, sent back to combat zones too early. At least Susannah got better and more personal treatment than many. Lee Jin saw to that, taking a special interest in her case. Yet even Susannah was sent back to the front lines too quickly by the powers-that-be on her homeworld of Argos. She was physically healed and smoothed over and salved, they weren’t wrong about that. Mentally, however, she still carries internal shrapnel. It’s hidden by rough and jagged mind scars she doesn’t even know are there. Yet also sorta does, but doesn’t quite understand. She thinks the answer is out in the Yue ming.
It’s the miracle and the curse of suspend solution that does it. Bodies almost torn apart but still alive when reached by a medic or Robobear are frozen on the spot. And not just in muscle, bone and organs but at a molecular and psychological level. Still alive because some fast acting and well intentioned, godsdamn-can’t-mind-his-own-fucking-business medic or mate or Robobear got to a bleeding lump of bone-and-pain-and-memory just in time, and jabbed in a suspensor dose that kept the thing alive. Whether it wanted to live or not.
Conical and hexagonal smart shrapnel are really complicating Lee’s life. They make jagged wounds, huge blooms of trauma that pump blood until the suspend hits. Until a medic calls in a REMOTE, long before a cybersurgeon plugs into a cubicle. Smart shrapnel digs deep, each fragment smart enough to seek the most damaging entry point of least armor and resistance. They carry bits of bone and dirt, cloth and filthy airborne particulates into gaping wounds. Modern medicine ended the scourge of infection and sepsis of uncleansed wounds ages ago. The human genius for war finds ways around that. Flying bits of smart shrapnel are too often coated with slow viruses or fast poisons. Lee hates shrapnel.
He’s not too much fonder of infantry masers. Microwaves heat flesh and bones at differential rates, instantly boiling fat and soft tissue into sputtering hot grease and hissing steam that erupts out of wounded men and women in little organic geysers. It takes only a second or two longer to destroy bone. A tight beam cooks marrow as it heats calcium salts until the periosteum, compact layers, and spongy cancellous explodes, shattering a leg or arm or hip or any one of 206 bones in the human body. Even with all frontline medical factories and hospital ships working flat out, it takes time to grow a DNA matched humerus or fifth rib or pelvic girdle, an even longer time to fit or rebuild shattered sockets, skill to overlay muscle, fat and skin and get the whole just right. So most maser wounded are suspended, then piled into medivac transports and shipped back to military moons or planetside recovery camps for longterm care and psych and physical rehab.
Lasers aren’t his biggest problem, if they bore through an eye into a brain, or sneak past armor weaves to core out a vital organ. Then you’re done and Lee never has to worry about fixing you. More often, lasers hit other body parts that Lee does have to deal with. They sever arteries and spinal cords, puncture lungs and bowels and hole bladders, spill dark green gall from spastic livers, rupture spleens and stomachs, bore into kidneys, tear out larynxes or pharynxes, rip off testicles and evaporate ovaries. Otherwise, neat holes made by lasers in the flesh of arms or legs or buttocks or shoulders are medically almost nothing. They’re easily found and stopped up, stanched and repaired with printed muscle and fat, covered with fast skin grafts. They don’t leave much damage or scarring. Actually, searing lasers cauterize and sterilize the little wormhole wounds they make even as they make them. Lee and most of those wounded by lasers can live with such wounds. It’s why every army issues masers: they do a lot more damage.
Plasma burps, ‘dirty shells,’ ‘poison pellets,’ ‘screaming meemies,’ exploding caltrops that tear off both feet, those are something else again. After a big infantry vs. infantry fight with masers, lasers, frags, and ‘four deuce’ mortars and artillery, medics signal back a single word to warn what’s coming to the forward surgeries: DELUGE. It means a waterfall of wounded will wash over the frontline medical system. Wounded come from all over the Allied worlds, too: Aralians, Argosians, Howlers, Helenes, Caspians, Krakoyans and Karsians, to name just a few. Also Genèvens, whenever Wreckers and Rusty Buckles or another newly designated Genèven division goes planetside. They get RIK or DRA prisoners, as well. And sometimes civvies, caught by barrages that fall errantly into the deep hinterlands.
Then there are the millions whose minds the war rapes and rips and ravages. They’re harder to reach or heal, wandering wards lonely as clouds of poison gas. They’re mute or cry uncontrollably, convulse or go catatonic, unblemished or self mutilated, shaking or profoundly still, lost in a fugue state. Or they start-and-duck at each loud noise and think only on their death. Lee cries over those cases.
***
Susannah understands the strategic importance of Amasia, or at least as much of Lee’s explanations of the complexities of grand operations and longterm strategy as she could absorb lying in a hospital bed, or walking slowly down the corridors of Red Rover. She would lean on his mind for nourishment and on his arm for physical support, always a little closer than the last time. Once, she stumbled just a little, not-quite-on-purpose, so that he had to catch her and she pretended he was holding her up. He helped her back to bed with his arm around her waist. She liked that. She liked it very much. She got a fluttery stomach, again.
A few weeks after she got to Amasia her pride finally broke down and she sent a half-joking, half-offputting vidtext addressed to “My favorite surgeon.” Sent it to where Lee Jin was treating wounded or having some important meeting offworld. She didn’t know. She just dropped it into the milneb marked: Chief of AMC. It started out pretty stiffly, with a weak attempt at a joke: “Dear Doctor Jin: There are so many enemy here on Amasia! But don’t worry, I hear Lemuria is big enough. We’ll find room to bury them all!” And similar things. She sent it before having second thoughts, then third thoughts, about the cruel impression it might make. Turned out fine. He was delighted, actually. They have a long range, bantering correspondence. They don’t speak of meeting, though both think about it often.
Susannah doesn’t understand the war. Not yet, anyway. She does understand hate. She feels it burn inside her daily. Many weeks later, finally back-in-the-line after a rear area leave, and champing to hit back at those who hurt her, she shakes off questions about politics and thoughts about a busy cybersurgeon she thinks she’s unlikely to ever see again. Weeks pass of the same dull gray days bookended by splatters of the same fiery, flame soaked nights. Routine converges all her time on the edge of the black into a blurry bore.
Until two hours ago, when the intel was confirmed. Susannah just learned that Gross Imperium moved into the line right across from Argos 7th Assault. It’s why she’s so pissed. She was on guard duty last night, so her sergeant won
’t let her go on the big battalion raid to kick the Todts in the teeth the very first time they head into an unfamiliar section of Dark Territory. Her section. It’s happening now!
General Yupanqui orders a bigger than usual patrol to teach the newly arriving enemy who he’s facing, before she knows exactly who she’s facing. Big mistake, but it’s too late to call the probe off now. The first heavy, double company patrols are already punching with mailed fists into Dark Territory. Susannah doesn’t have to worry about command decisions like that. She’s just excited that a supremely dangerous and hated enemy is back in her personal gunsights, across DT from her and the rest of the Enthusiastics. She thinks it’s time for payback. Hard and fast or bloody and slow. She doesn’t care which.
She understands blood revenge. She craves it, as do many others. That’s why, after the first anniversary of the war has come and gone, Alliance artillery takes special pleasure in extra heavy shelling of RIK First Trench on Pyotr’s birthday, a rare systems wide Imperium holiday. Susannah sneaks onto a rampart wearing a bombardment light-and-blast shield, so she can watch all the pretty little suns falling and dancing and killing her enemy far across the Yue ming.
It works, too. Long range ACU cannon start out by seeming to fire the usual “Good Morning!” barrage, as they do every day before dawn, all down the line. The usual smatter of massive shells and rockets fly 300-500 klics in parabolic arcs before screeching, weaving and steering smartly down onto the enemy’s bunkers and forward camps and depots, methodically marching up-and-over First Trench.
Susannah listens to a dull, distant growl of exploding dirt and carbyne sheets, watches colored smokes that mean liquid metals and liquefied flesh is rising high. The guns wash back-and-forth over the enemy’s positions, in-and-out and over the edge of the Yue ming and frontline queue of RIK lives and black walls, adding shallows and contours to a moonscape terrain that cuts into the face of Lemuria. All but a few dimwitted or just unlucky Rikugun knew in advance that this diurnal barrage was coming, and so they’re safely underground when it begins. After one-quarter Universal Standard Hour, the long range Alliance batteries stop. Rikugun MI and Main HQ on Kestino, and RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen, are all wrong.
Lots of youths pay the price. A host of ACU midrange and close range guns were secretly advanced to forward positions a week before the Tennō’s birthday. Artillery spotters wait for the mass of green infantry to come out from protective cover, to wander up from the underground into a sudden and welcome quiet. To mingle, to celebrate living another hour and surviving another godsdamn barrage. To start this special day with extra food and drink magleved in from the coast and best enjoyed under an open sky. RIK Onworld HQ approved it, told them they’ll be OK after the “Good Morning” shelling stops.
Nearly three million mostly drunk, mostly dumb, all of them blinking, happy RIK oblige patient Alliance spotters. They come out of the bunkers and funk holes into the smoky silence, gathering inside presited targeting grids. Susannah grows excited. She watches intently, waits and hopes for death with a surge of gut drunk happiness. She wills thunder and fire to fall from the sky upon her enemies. Or is it a gnawing hollowness she feels? A moral emptiness and nothingness?
‘It doesn’t matter!’
‘Fire, godsdamn it!’
‘You should fire now!’
In the northern sectors they mostly stay put, misled by Alliance MI that a big attack is coming up there to spoil the day; that the north is where the Alliance will make the spoiling effort, in the same old way: by combat gliding infantry across DT to assault the black walls on the other side. Falsely assured, other RIK gather outside their bunkers and out in the open, hundreds of meters behind the parapets. They gather from the desert central region to the deep and snowy south, clustering unwary, passing around canteens and tin cups filled with raw trench hooch or the cheap gin Rikugun provides. They start to sing required praise hymns to the great Tennō Pyotr Shaka III, but quickly shift to bawdier songs about loose women, better things to drink or eat, and better times back on distant homeworlds.
That’s when General Lian Sòng’s hidden batteries reveal their presence along 11,000 klics of the black, from the central desert down to the austral mountains. They catch stunned, terrified, exposed youth by surprise and kill 250,000 at least, and wound twice as many more. Men run helter-skelter from brilliant shell falls, staggering, stumbling, screaming out death cries no one hears over a cacophony of exploding light and searing fire, and primal energy and hate. Or they evaporate in silence, turning to vapor inside expanding plasma balls, leaving no memory or physical trace behind. Not even a fine mist on glassy sand or melting snows. Life is torn from the living, atoms are torn from atoms, dust falls back onto dust.
Susannah cheers, along with nearby trench guards also wearing smoky visors to watch Dark Territory light up. Inside the bunkers, millions of Alliance fighters shout and stamp approval as their enemy’s line disappears under a boiling roll of acrid smoke, illuminated from inside by brilliant flashes of high explosive rounds, incandescent ball lightning, and white plasma from stubby shells lobbed by fusion cannon in parabolic arcs at extremely short ranges of just 10-20 klics. Some much closer, as ACU rolls its shortest mortars right over the edge of the Yue ming. Black smoke rolls are penetrated by piercingly brilliant red, blue, and green lasers from heavy cannon and pink crystal guns shooting into the death clouds.
Blunt thunderclaps report back to Susannah from the roiling storm of steel and light and heat, confirming “death and ruination is delivered.” The deep base of so many guns firing merges into a continuous roar, uplifted on a rush of superheated air. She thinks it sounds like gods’ voices must sound, if there be any. “To whom can you compare Me? Or declare Me similar? To whom can you like Me, so that we seem comparable?” It looks to her like a line squall has descended to churn the desert as far as she can see. Only there are three million men inside the rolling plasma and flashing sheet lighting and black gales full of the Voices of God. She knows that, as she looks out across the boiling Yue ming and laughs.
“Now the void was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the worlds. And the gods of the artillery said, ‘Let there be light!’ And lo, there was light inside the darkness. The gods saw that the light was good and that they had made the guns in their own image. They said to their creatures, ‘Be vengeful and decrease in number thy enemies; pound all the earths and subdue them. Kill the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and every living creature that moves on the ground. And the Throne of War appeared, surrounded by twenty-four thrones on which sat the rulers of the empires of men. The kings reached out and together broke the Fourth Seal and lo, there leaped a pale horse, and War mounted it, holding a fiery balance in his iron hand. And all the kingdoms and all the empires prostrated before War, praised him on high, and said: ‘Thy will be done.’”
The Imperator Bombardment, “Pyotr’s Birthday Barrage” as it’s called in the Alliance lines, kills so many Rikugun infantry and so demoralizes all the rest that a planned offensive in the south is going to be put off for three months. Rikugun artillery will reciprocate with predictable, extra heavy bombardments on Calmari ‘Constitution Day’ and on ‘Alliance Day,’ a brand new holiday marking the occasion of formation of the Grand Alliance. Because these retaliations are so easy to see coming, damage and losses will be kept to a minimum.
Susannah will regret her own lack of direct action in the months to come, but she’ll approve of this way of celebrating the other side’s holidays, with fire and malice. She’ll think it perfectly fits the tens of millions gathered to commit murder on Lemuria, where everyone knows that they cohabit in the greatest abattoir in all the centuries, in all histories of all the wars.
“Yes sir, I do approve of the slaughter we’re doing here on Amasia.”
“Interesting that you say it. I do as well, private. In fact, it’s the only way to win the war. What do you say to that?”
“In that case, sir, it’s bes
t if we just get on with the killing.”
It’s what Susannah will tell General Gaspard François Marie Leclerc when he stops for less than an hour in Argos 7th Assault sector, during his first inspection tour of the fighting and supply situation on Amasia. He’s going to ask to speak to individual troopers directly. Susannah is going to be ninth in line, ordered to meet the general by her company CO. She’ll be mildly curious to meet “one the biggest assholes in charge of this half-assed war,” as her CO puts it. Odd that she doesn’t think of Lee Jin that way. He’s a bigshot general, too.
Leclerc will think the pretty young private makes a very good point, not least because he came to the same conclusion a long time ago, as far back as Year One. Maybe even before this all got started, when he was visiting Argos Weapons Labs. He’ll reiterate it in his Ultrasecret report to Prime Minister Georges Briand.
Rabbit
“Rabbits at 6:00 o’clock! Break! Break!” The schwarm leader shouts orders to three more RIK skycraft flying with him in a fluid four formation, breaking sound camo as he uses open air coms to line up the attack dive.
