Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  “I want prisoners for interrogation.”

  “Yes sir. The patrol will go out at midnight.”

  “Tell your men to leave all their frags here, lieutenant.”

  The main drawback of sonics is that they don’t send out highly directed noise packets, like sound bullets do. Out here, in Dark Territory, their circle of reliable damage dissipates fast. A sonic’s energy diffraction also makes it an extremely short range weapon. Lob range, no more. Unless fired from a rifle mount, you have to get up close and real personal to bring someone down. That said, they work well indoors, where resonant echoes amplify their effects. So patrols carry them when attacking blockhouses or FOBs that they need to storm, without killing all the FOBBITS inside.

  The corporal’s frag grenade is much more powerful and deadly. It lands square on the overly bunched, crouching and still arguing enemy. It takes out four with ripping jagged metal. Set for maximum blast, Jedidiah’s sonic sends out arpeggio pulses of painful, compressed sound. He can’t tell what it’s doing to the enemy ‘cause he ducked his face into the dirt, arms over his head.

  The pressure detonation from the five megawatt grenade bursts eardrums of every man in the Grün patrol left uninjured by the frag that landed first. It catches them in a spreading sphere of sound, overwhelms their helmet buffers and heads for their brains. The blast causes an instant distraction of intense ear pain, quickly followed by sharp disorientation. Infrasound at this range creates complete inner ear imbalance and a false but terrifying crushing sensation in the chest.

  As electrics race up aural nerves to overstimulate auditory cortexes, weird psychological sensations of sheer awe, primal fear, and psychic dislocation hit. A niagara of chemicals auto releases into addled brains, provoking an overwhelming fight-or-flight response. Then it happens again and again, as the broadcasting sonic “spins out,” screeching infrasound pulses so quickly that the affected must suffer minor but immediate brain damage. The highly satisfying practical result is that within three seconds five Rikugun collapse unconscious, as helpless as blind grubs under turned over sod. But the two grenades wake up other predators in the dark. Bursts of laser fire stab out into Dark Territory, searching for the source.

  One beam sears the ground less than a meter from Jedidiah’s head. Two more fly singing past his ear. It’s coming from the west, from the Allied frontline. So near to dryness and freedom from fear, he’s pulled away from the appealing coast by an undertow of friendly fire he can’t face or resist, ‘sucked back from safety and the shore by the wild tides of war.’ The landscape erupts all around. Jedidiah screams in fear and frustration. “It’s just not fair!” He shouts to the corporal at his elbow. “We took out the enemy patrol and now our own side’s shooting at us!”

  “Disperse, disperse! Go to cover!” It’s the corporal, ignoring a rookie’s moral argument in favor of surviving in real war.

  The second, bigger patrol Jedidiah saw moving away a minute earlier is also caught out by the sudden burst of shooting. He sees ducking and diving figures in reflective blue. ‘Good, they’re on our side.’ Then he realizes ‘there aren’t any sides out here, just targets for the auto bots.’

  Somewhere not too far away, under yet another Blue or Green patrol, someone trips an antipersonnel mine. Poom! A few seconds of screams, then silence. Then the whole area erupts in hundreds of explosions of light and sound, of flying dunes and dirt and severed limbs and terrible screeching. A string of detonations as the minefield blows, backlighting a scrim stage on which shapes dart and disappear like wayang kulit shadow puppets. Flat images of men stand and run, chased by hopping animate mines. Silhouettes of writhing, sidewinding snakes and ambling, then quick charging dillos whip across the scrim screen, all chasing after the running men. They whistle then blow, before returning to shadow. Flashes from wayang mines light up the landscape, but not the night. They dome it instead, with a low level gloom like a heavily overcast day just now threatening to storm. The kind of ill lit day that’s best for funerals.

  All around, Jedidiah sees an eerie land of broken battles, a queer history writ in relief and wreckage of folly and futility over the past two years. Specters of a dozen failed attack plans by sacked or executed generals float in and out of his vision, illuminated by brilliant flashes of mines and streaks of hundreds of green, blue, red and violet lights that lacerate the landscape. He buries his head in his hands and cries out. “Mercy!”

  Percussion waves from the mines ricochet among the ruins, drumming on the outside of the wrecked Mastodon where he lies with arms crossed over his helmet. Under him is an intact plate window. Its vision slit protectoscope looks up at him querically, reading his ACU unit patches, yelling silently to an all-dead crew and disconnected AI that an enemy is outside banging to get in. For the past six months it has been dutifully reporting geckos and scurrying beetles, and one snake that crossed over its visor face. It thinks it’s surrounded by armies of tiny enemies. Now here’s a real one at last, and he’s just lying there, frozen in place.

  Jedidiah only looks up to the strobing light because his corporal is tugging at his shoulder, then kicking him, shouting things at him that he can’t make out over the resonating din of the mines. He taps the side of his headgear, helpfully. ‘HUD and coms both out!’ It’s times like these he wishes that he also carried a micro GPS build into his belt, or as it’s called by HQ when issued to new officers to backup their basic unit coms and HUDs, a “lost lieutenant finder.”

  The ground around him shakes, the air contracts and splits. It’s hard to breathe as overpressure waves from the mines slam into his chest. A klic away, a pair of Rikugun spandaus bark into the rising din on his left. Their red beams cut into a soupy, dirty yellow morning fog, turning into sickly pink spears of light that stab indiscriminately. Jedidiah thinks the fog and lights look like bloody piss collected in a medic’s jar at base camp, when the Army was looking for STDs. To his right, a third spandau and dozens of infantry weapons open up, firing at things he can’t see or, like the spandaus on his left, just taking a morning piss into a yellow gloom.

  Grains of gritty irritation get into his headgear and ears. More sifts down inside his rigid collar as he hugs the thin, sandy soil. Most of the fire is coming from his own First Trench. Two rapidos and about 200 infantry masers, at least. A weaker return fire shoots across DT from Grün FOPs and FOBs and small bot gun nests. It’s just the start. The corporal kicks him again. Jedidiah at last gets up.

  The whole godsdamn front seems to open up as every gun and hand maser starts shooting wildly into the dark from both sides, blindly searching for anything still moving. Everyone in the Lost Patrol forgets four dead and five unconscious Rikugun lying insensible nearby, with bleeding ears and noses. The closest is just meters from Jedidiah’s abandoned hiding place under the carbyne and steel bones of an extinct Mastodon. The protectoscope reports to nobody that he’s gone.

  ‘Confirm please. Over?’

  The corporal leads them in a desperate crawl toward First Trench, intent only on finding fast refuge from raging, lethal lights and shaking ground. Then two are killed and the rest realize they’re truly trapped. Shooters from their own side are more likely to target and to kill them than wilder and lesser spandau and maser fire coming from behind.

  “All stop! Hold position here. All spectrum camo!”

  It won’t matter if anyone sees them or not. The danger is random fire into their exposed position, not aimed shots. Yet there’s nothing for it but to stop and hold where they are. There’s no place to crawl to that’s any better than this one. So they stop moving, get small, and die one after the other.

  After he stops crawling and splays flat for what seems an hour, Jedidiah hears a voice coming from the Blue trench, now just 75 meters in front of him. The voice is not coming in over his broken HUD but traveling on real air.

  “Keep firing! Kill all the Jarad!”

  ‘What did he say? Locusts?’

  “Wipe them out, the wald il klaab!
”

  Jedidiah is stunned. ‘Sons of dogs?’

  “You bunch of kis ikhtak!”

  ‘OK, I know who these idiots are!’ He recognizes the dialect and the curses, especially that one about a bad sister, from a year as an exchange student on New Mecca before he was called up to the war and into 7th Assault. ‘Another desert world specially chosen by god for his people.’ He recalls the local chauvinism with real bitterness he never felt before. ‘What is it with god and fucking sand?’ He yells toward the Blue trench in crude New Arabic he strains hard to remember. “Meccans: I not Jarad, I not locust! Stop shooting! Stop!” Two other voices take up the plea, in Union Basic. “We’re on your side! Stop shooting!”

  With HUDs out across the Lost Patrol there’s no way to signal the correct IFF code to the New Meccans holding this chunk of line. Instead, they open a steady stream of lethal intent right at the Lost Patrol’s huddled position, revealed by all the shouting and shimmering under Allah’s blessed dawn, recreation of the first day. Every member of the Lost Patrol is hit. Some die right away, others bleed out in slow agony. Jedidiah survives unscathed. He has no idea why or how.

  ‘How did I end up here, in front of the New Meccan sector?’ Maybe it’s his faulty HUD? ‘That’s four klics south from where we started! Where are my own people, the Enthusiastics?’ Before he can figure it out a howling explosion sucks the air from his lungs and sends him tumbling, in a zephyr of sand and grains of molten and flying glass. He rolls to a startled stop, then slips as he tries to rise into a crawling crouch. Another explosion forces him down. This time he stays down, lying on his flattened belly like they taught him in base camp two months ago, on the Panthalassa coast. When he first came to Amasia and nervously sniffed its alien air, and all the odd odors of New Beijing and Lemuria.

  He’s sweating and paralytic with terror, lying in a shallow shell crater under a broken parapet. Mortaring and laser tracer fire continue all day. Brilliant flashes in every primary color, and some strange mixes and hues he never saw before. The sound is overwhelming. Without his HUD auditory protectors, the intensity and volume of the guns might drive him ripping, howling mad. In midafternoon he pisses his combat suit. He craps it badly before dusk. He doesn’t notice or care.

  He hears geckos scampering unseen, sees five dune beetles and two little snakes go about their business, indifferent to him and the war. He dreams of the green forests of his homeworld. As night comes around again he takes his chance and crawls toward the Meccans. Like a snail.

  No one shoots this time. All the excitement of the night before is passed. It’s just another dull, day’s end at the front, another jaundiced sunset leading into another diamond studded night sky filled with reflective orbital debris. He reaches the lip of First Trench where a short section of parapet is broken off, rolls over and slides three meters to the hard bottom with a loud plop!

  “Asalam allahkum!” Jedidiah blurts out the traditional New Meccan greeting before a startled guard challenges him with a pointed maser, puzzled more than worried by his accent and grubby blues. The guard has a green bandana with white lettering, the Takbīr, wrapped around his ACU helmet. Other guards wearing the same green bandanas come running to check Jedidiah’s ID and ACU and Argos 7th Assault patches. Then it’s over.

  “Halal, halal. Permitted!” They say it smiling, pointing him to a path leading from the zig to a smaller zag, then to the immediate rear via a runner’s communication trench. “Imshi. You move, yes? You sadiki, friend.”

  He stops shaking an hour after they give him strong, sweetened black coffee in a tiny white cup, with a drop of opium in it to calm his nerves. They drape a mock camelhair blanket around him, too. They pat him kindly and feed him. Then they back away and leave him alone. He’s grateful to the Meccan one-pip who comes to take charge of the found man, but puzzled why the officer insists that he shower at Second Trench before he reports back to the 7th.

  “Clean yourself up soldier, before you head back to your unit. It’s for the best. Take a hot shower at Second Trench. That’s an order, by the way.”

  Pucker

  Jedidiah travels back to Second Trench via a miniature, underground maglev ammo and troop shuttle. It’s part of a vast feeder system connecting the frontline to Panthalassan coastal ports and depots and cities. It’s a sign of how much things have improved for the Alliance on Lemuria. Rikugun has a parallel system, but it’s not’s quite so fine. DRA must truck and walk across the tundra and high arctic, exposed to Alliance skycraft and harassing missiles all the way.

  He makes the 135 klic trip west to Second Trench, then north 8 klics, then 141 back east to reach the curving bend in the line where the 7th is flanked and hinged by the New Meccans. Looping is faster than just walking north, and it avoids a hundred or more ID and security checks that would slow him for days or maybe get him accused of being AWOL or arrested for desertion.

  He travels alone and in silence, in a rail car of empty ammo and carbon fiber food crates that will keep on moving when he’s gone, far past Third Trench to return to coastal depots to be refilled. Other cars are crammed with wounded and troops heading back for leave. He could sit with them, but he instinctively chooses a cargo car and solitude. He passes some real and many more decoy bunkers and the peaked, deflective armor rooves of reserve and rest barracks. He sees lots of real archie tubes, but also Quaker Guns made from pipeline sections or just big logs coated in tar, He passes quiet sector FOBs tied to Second Trench, and long columns of marching, fresh faced Blue replacements that all look like kids.

  The opium drop and sugared coffee helps, but he’s still pretty shaky and out of it. It’s not until he strips off the lower half of his utes to shower that he notices the smell. He’s grateful no one said anything, not even the lieutenant who ordered him here rather than sending him straight back to the Enthusiastics under escort, via a parallel or coms trench. The kind New Meccans fed and comforted him, then let him clean off his humiliation before facing his mates.

  He thinks he’s the only hard luck guy who ever shit his utes. He’s not. It’s so common there’s a term for it. Soldiers call it the “pucker factor” and rate their own and other people’s combat courage on a ‘pucker scale’ of one-to-ten. As in, “Joe’s pucker is a seven! Did you see him stand at the rapido pit when they came over last night?” Sometimes they say, “Jeez, I’m a real pucker-fucker,” meaning they screwed up. But they never say it about someone with bad bowels.

  Jedidiah doesn’t know that the Meccans’ kind silence comes in part from knowing the same thing happened to many of them, their first time under fire. Or maybe the second or fifth. It’s every time for some. He’s so out of the loop in his own company he doesn’t know that many Enthusiastics do it, too. He thinks a warning he heard from one Old Breed drill instructor in base camp was intended only for him, because he’s such a shitty soldier and obvious coward.

  “Fear loosens the bowels, boyo. Sooner or later you’re gonna shit yourself out there. All ya ken do about it is pucker up. Keep a tight asshole and ya’ll do fine.”

  ***

  The next day Jedidiah will head back to a forward slit trench in his own sector. He’s suffering a loss of faith, rather than confirmation, after his “baptism by fire” on patrol. After his first time in combat, getting shot at for real. He gets through reveille OK, and weapons cleaning and check, then a cold breakfast. But his hands won’t stop shaking and his knees and legs wobble as he walks. Every loud or sudden noise is a terror to him, and dawn is migrainous over the horizon. It feels like someone is hammering a nail into his forehead.

  His lieutenant and a visiting Amasian officer, Major Zhang Xianzhong from Xian Division, discuss his case. The lieutenant wants to send him to the deep rear for three days R&R and a psych eval. And probably longer, for trauma treatment. The visiting major says without any hesitation: “Request denied. Haig’s only been in the line for two weeks. He only did one patrol.”

  The lieutenant bites his tongue. He doesn’t sa
y: ‘You haven’t done even that much, you pompous prick.’ What he does say is: “For some men, that’s all it takes. It’s not about character. It’s about the way the brain works with trauma, sir. It’s just different for some than for others.”

  “Nonsense! The man is a coward.”

  “He’s not a coward, sir. He’s ill. We’ve had a lot of experience with this type of thing. Enthusiastics have been in this war, in First Trench, from the beginning.”

  It’s a direct, barely veiled shot at the major, who only served in Xian Division, assigned so far to the strategic reserve. With things gone quiet, it was held out of the line for six months, to train up to regular standards. General Lian Sòng wants her raw Amasians brought up to par with all other ACU units, but she’s holding them out until the big push comes. Many frontline troopers in other divisions resent it. Because it has never been deployed to the frontline, Xian is known sneeringly to active duty troops as the “Terracotta Division.”