Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  Finally, the Alliance position on Lemuria grew so desperate Lian Sòng called for all possible help, even for the woeful 22nd Marines to ship planetside. “Send me whatever you have, every fighter you have, or we won’t be able to hold.” She held, but it was a close run thing. Casualties on Lemuria meant that every possible unit, no matter how baleful its troops or reputation and how unreliable its officers, was needed along the creaking seawall holding back a surging Rikugun tide. Even sadsack marines could fill in a section of Second or Third Trench, freeing real fighters for important action up at the frontline. So the 22nd left the misfits’ moon, boarded transports and made the frantic drop-under-fire to western Lemuria.

  Now here Joachim Suri is almost a year later, with 22nd Marine assigned for the first time to a quiet but actual frontline section of First Trench. He stands his watch with 2nd Platoon, gazing over hazy flats that stretch beyond the range of a locked-and-loaded, twin rapido built right into the heavy rampart, with firing steps jutting from black wall on either side. It’s a real good, defensive position. It can hold off a shit load of attacking glide troops, if it ever comes to that. But it never has, and he doubts it ever will. He sighs heavily as he gazes into Dark Territory, where first light is spitting into the dark. As usual, nothing is happening out there.

  Civvies never get that. Never get how utterly, stultifyingly, boring war is. That you spend most of it doing absolutely nothing, or else mindless little tasks the Army makes you do for reasons not even it fully understands. They think war is nothing but endless thrills and action, and the kind of danger you go to theme parks to experience. So that when you survive, as of course you will, you get to talk about it excitedly at the end of another shift behind the black. You get to remember it out loud but humbly, as you bond with your “front mates” or “band of brothers” or “comrades of the barracks” (most of whom you can’t stand the sight of every morning). They think it’s about winning a glowing, chest pinned evidence of manhood. Of passing some test in combat that only a civvy could ever see that way; about being “wounded in honorable battle.” Fuck them.

  Joachim is hoping that he’ll see first action soon, and that when he does he’ll take a ‘good wound,’ or a ‘blighty, as most marines and soldiers call it. No place vital, just deep enough and barely serious enough to get sent to the rear for a few days or weeks to recover. Or if you’re real lucky, offworld. Anywhere but in the line. That’s not how Joachim uses the term. He wants a wound that he can display. One to let him tell a corpsmen, “leave the scar.” Scars are so much better than war tattoos. As long as the wound is ever so slight and in a mentionable place. He doesn’t want a difficult, unmentionable wound. Who the fuck wants that?

  Even better, of course, would be some medal for heroism. Joachim can hardly imagine what that might mean for him, and to his coldhearted father. He doesn’t even daydream about it, because he knows it can’t happen to a bumbler, to a failed butterbar in dismal, disreputable 22nd Marine. Still, at night he can’t control his dreams… Then his mind asks him: “Will you find it at last, that elusive Crimson Crest, for a good wound and visible scarring your father says he craves for you, but yearns secretly for himself even more than his son?” The Crimson Crest is the only combat medal most civvies recognize. And the fucking Orion Peace Prize.

  Joachim envies wounded men sent back to Third Trench with smiles on their faces. He thinks they smile like that because they know they met and passed the ultimate test of their manhood. They didn’t run or fail. They stood and fought, and only fell when flesh was too seared or bones too broken to stand any longer. He doesn’t know any better than civvies, because he has never been in combat. It’s not that at all. They smile because they know they’re leaving the danger and horror of First Trench and of the black, maybe even medevacing off Amasia if they look down and see that it’s a real good ‘blighty.’ Quite a few are self-inflicted.

  New anti-trauma prevent pills developed by ACU MI and the Medical Corps suppress fear, but not all of it. That’s deliberate. The armies quickly relearned, on all the flaming worlds, that only soldiers who have fear can overcome it, to exhibit what Joachim calls “true warrior courage.” That makes veterans in other divisions who hear him laugh bitterly. Still, only native instinct and the challenge of fear the body sends the mind allows for other interior qualities and virtues to emerge. A ‘true warrior’ deals with fear, absorbs it, manages it, but never truly defeats it.

  Aristotle understood that about courage, about why it’s the first, the cardinal virtue. Joachim doesn’t understand it. Neither does the DRA. Daurans suppress fear of their enemy with wild implant devices and biological crimes, but they raise it higher about their own officers and leaders with incessant HUD coms and pain stimuli implants tied to officer triggers. They go to fantastic extremes. “All you have to fear krasno, is your own fear,” is the advice given by DRA medics as they pass out placebo trauma pills. Then they chuckle to each other as some shitbag adds: “Along with dread Jahandar and a Black Robe standing behind you.”

  Only bots lack fear, and robusto users. And neither can decide this war. If they could, war bots would be out there again in swarms and all the armies and the star nations that produce and stand behind them would be force feeding robusto to all their coerced and conscripted youth. Count on it. The pols only say they are making war to secure a future of peace and prosperity for the next generation. They can’t think that far ahead. Pols are self-selected tacticians. Not one is a true strategic thinker. Doesn’t pay to be. Not even for Pyotr and Jahandar. They know better than anyone that while you’re sitting there having all those great strategic wet dreams and insights, some other pol is sneaking up behind to cut your throat.

  Joachim isn’t at all sure what courage, if any, is inside him. After months in the frontline he knows that you can always pretend it is, but that’s not the inner knowledge or outward ‘blighty’ or Crimson Crest that he longs for. He knows that how you behave in combat defines you forever, in the judging eyes of all others and in your own. That’s why he wants a “good wound” to show off back home, and to gaze on and draw meaning from in the flat, empty mirror of his life. He’s not too scared to fight. The opposite is true. He’s too much looking forward to the next raid, the next attack. Which would be his first. He’s also full of self-doubt about how he’ll do when it comes. ‘What if I don’t stand? What if I fail, again?’

  He picks carelessly at a clump of black soil jutting from a seam in a sheet of carbyne shielding that sustains the wall and earthen parapet two feet away. He peers into the eyepiece of his periscope rifle. Nothing moves across his scope or shows in his HUD or the rapido sights. He idly traces a finger along the fine ridge of fiber optic com links prebuilt into fitted sections of the black. They connect to Divisional and Corps HQ, far behind First Trench. ‘I can’t fail, I just can’t. Father will be so disappointed.’

  He lives in a constant mood of nervy anticipation. He was told more than once by sympathetic old hands that when it comes to combat, waiting is more frightful than the act. But he isn’t sure he believes them. He thinks they were just trying to calm him, to placebo him. One veteran corporal was more practical. He told Joachim: “Just stick close and do what I do. You’ll be fine, son.” He felt closer to the older veteran than he ever felt to his father, although he never admits that, not even in the wee, dark hours alone with his perpetual self-doubt.

  The corporal was transferred to another Marine division a month ago, scooped out as too veteran and too good a small unit leader to languish in 22nd Marine. Not that it matters. He can’t follow the NCO’s advice. He’s an officer, even if no one thinks he’s a good one. It’s his job to lead. He’s supposed to stay lucid in the midst of frenzied combat chaos. He just doesn’t think he can or will.

  The clock ticks over. His shift is up.

  A one-pip leads Third Platoon into the zag.

  It’s the same handoff they do every night.

  “Suri, you and Second Platoon are reli
eved.”

  “Relief accepted. Retiring to the bunker.”

  Another dull day is in the bag. He slogs down the ramp to the underground battalion mess. He’s a platoon leader in a frontline unit, but it’s only the 22nd Marine, parked on the left edge of ‘The Veranda’ that protrudes quietly into the grass ocean, a curved joint where Dark Territory curls in a verdant arc over the northern flats. Nothing important ever happens here.

  It’s a “quiet sector.” At least, it has been ever since the opening battles of the war set the boundary of the Yue ming that separates the exhausted armies. No trouble beyond local probes and routine patrolling is expected by New Beijing. Of course, MI has been wrong before. Like when it tried to predict where the First Shaka Offensive would land its blow. That was costly.

  ***

  Listen! Something’s happening over there, across Dark Territory. There’s movement and noise, energy and bustle in the night. More than usual, disturbing all passive sensors. FOBs come alert to little sounds and lights escaping camo, furtive movement and rustling in the dark. Patrols in blue and green utes sidewind throughout the Yue ming, stumble and expire together in vicious hand-to-hand firefights that always end in calling down plunging, acid mortars from both sides.

  What is it? What is that awful sound?

  What is that rising, humming bustle?

  What’s waking? What’s coming over?

  What sly, wicked thing this way comes?

  What’s making that unholy, godless racket?

  Is it the grass screaming under armtrak treads? Is it the sky ripping as missiles and shells tear its fabric apart? Is it just the dawn raping the night, again? “From camp to camp through the foul womb of night the hum of either army stilly sounds.”

  It’s the armies!

  They're waking at last.

  But something much more.

  Bigger than anybody’s army.

  Much worse, more terrible.

  Rikugun moves out and so, too, does ACU. Moves and hustles, sends out more pickets and patrols, rouses regiments of fighters from predawn lethargy, herds them into dugouts and firing pits to stand watch along the inverted black that cuts Lemuria in two, standing between the sides and defeat. High reconnaissance assets try to penetrate gloom and camo fields on the distant, eastern shore of Dark Territory. Too late. A big bombardment starts. A bright, shining, artificial dawn erupts all along the edge of the dead zone lying betwixt the restless armies as their hibernation ends. Battle is returning to central Amasia. Full scale and all out.

  The days are longer and warmer now, waking the Great Beast of War to rise from his slow winter slumber, urging him to feed. To stretch forth tentacle, beak and talon, to tear into the underground for nourishment. Squid like, he squirts over the land to sweep into his grinding maw any crab people he finds scuttling in the open. Bird like, he swipes and rips them apart as they run, with his saber talons. Bear like, he lifts up decapitated hills to look for naked human grubs wriggling beneath. Cat like, he toys with and teases his squirming food, snatching life away only after many torments. Wolf like, he snarls and snaps in jealous rage, stalks and culls the weak. But he also kills the strong from two frightened, stampeding human herds left naked to the ravenous spring by their winter hate. Everywhere he passes he shits broken things and leaves chewed up corpses and spat out bones.

  He rips apart dunes with mines, digs up rich black soils with missiles, knocks down forests with sheeting artillery, gouges deep holes with mortar claws. As a bear he shakes and overturns trenches and bunkers to feed his gory spring hunger with morsels of terrified men and women huddling and screaming inside. As a squid, he reaches down with long tentacles and poison hooks to feed, and leaves a thousand sucker marks in every broken field of mud and waste he crosses over. As a wolf, he makes deep prints everywhere his claws gain purchase as he lopes after wildly running, terrified fighters. He is howling nature and utterly unnatural.

  New caves are carved in the dry chalk. Hollow depressions are gouged from bedrock sandstone. Smoking, bleeding wounds are everywhere in the torn black earth. Giant divots mark the tundra and permafrost. War scoops out the Lemurian plain, glasses deserts with plasma heat, burns forests. He tramples villages and towns and every living thing within them. He blackens Amasia’s blue skies with smokes from fresh pyres of burning machines and ambition, on which he roasts human and animal flesh. He sends green flame missiles high, with wispy, white vapor trails to tear long scars across the face of the cerulean ceiling of the world.

  His Roar is Awe Full. At night the Great Beast peers with fierce red eyes into the black of space, searching for high orbital patrols and troop convoys. When he sees one he licks it out of the sky, spearing it with a snaking, three pronged tongue of bright plasma fire. Tens of thousands of men and women, and wasted machines, tumble from high above, falling into the enormous cavern of War’s gaping, saber toothed maw, his open Moloch Mouth. They are ground into nothing by his black diamond teeth mounted in crimson, ultrasteel jaws. Fattened, full of death, still War hungers. His appetite grows with every fresh kill and each new eating. He’s standing now, roaring his insatiable hunger.

  ***

  An hour after Joachim leaves the battalion mess everything in his life changes. Blaring clarions sound out warnings of an imminent Rikugun attack. Thirteen months after shuttling down to Lemuria to stand watch along the dull rim of The Veranda with his woeful unit, wailing sirens tell Joachim that his great time of testing may be here. Is this it, the moment he has dreamed of and feared all his life?

  ‘Will I run or will I stand?’

  ‘Is this when I find out who I really am?’

  ‘Is this the hour of my redemption or death?’

  Hell son, why can’t it be both, or neither?

  Joachim listens intently to the shells fall. At first it feels like just another daily harassment pounding from medium range batteries. He can’t make out any big, long distance guns yet. ‘Those are being held back for the main offensive. That won’t be here, or 22nd Marine wouldn’t be here. This is the usual ‘Good Morning’ shelling. Are the clarions wrong?’ His naïve faith in New Beijing’s deployment foresight for the Dismal Division is touching, and could prove fatal. He should be hauling his ass topside right about now. This is no drill.

  ‘What’s an attack really like?’

  ‘How would I act in real combat?’

  ‘Am I a brave man or a coward?’

  ‘Will I turn and run? Will I?’

  He knows from old hands that it’s unpredictable what any man will do in first combat, when he suffers his “conversion-by-fire” and “loses his combat cherry.” It comes down to being shot at by people who really are trying to kill you, then finding out what your queasy guts and happy feet and adrenal befuddled brain tell you about the kind of man you really are. Tell you forever. Maybe it shouldn’t be forever. Maybe a single moment or a minute or an hour out of an entire life should not define all the rest. But for most men, it does. Less true for women. Maybe.

  Red magneto vidphones clang loudly throughout the underground company bunker where too many 22nd Marine officers are still lollygagging. Only now do they leap to the coms stations. It’s Division HQ calling in, flashing red urgent.

  This is no drill! No kidding? There’s only a steel storm of artillery falling all along this sector, and three more just north of here. Not only is this no drill, it’s the key puncture point in Oetkert’s plan, in the first of two huge diversions.

  “Everybody outside now! Attack commencing. Take firing positions. Wu Sangui out.” Well, he’s done for the day! He takes something out of a floor safe under his desk in Division HQ and puts it carefully in his mouth. He swallows it. His body goes limp. His eyes blaze white-on-white. He’ll be out of the office for awhile. Call back later buddy, willya?

  HQ’s call-to-arms comes two minutes after the first shells reach and probe the outer trench covers overhead, fingering for any tiny crevice to rip apart. They’re trying to get inside, to
reach the juicy grubs huddled there, to tear them out with searing fire and poison shrapnel claws.

  It’s not another “Hello!” barrage.

  Not just daybreak, harassing fire.

  It’s the real thing, at long last!

  Everyone was waiting for the ‘Big Attack,’

  and here it comes! Right fucking now!

  Joachim’s superiors at Battalion HQ never told him to be ready for an attack. ‘No officer above the company commander ever tells me anything.’ Or speaks to him much at all. And he never finds the courage to start up a real conversation with any superior. Not since his personal disaster in failing out of Officer Training School the first time he took the OTS standard course.

  Why all the doubts that delay everyone’s response in the 22nd to the clanging bells? Because MI has cried “Wolf of War!” way too many times in this very sector before today. There were four false clarions in the past month. “What the hell, again?!” MI never puts it all together, doesn’t get that Rikugun is adapting from its earlier, blunt force ops to more subtle tactics, lulling targeted sectors into a false calm and unpreparedness with a series of largescale probes up-and-down the line for over a month. So that when the real thing comes across today, it seems like another false attack. Rikugun is psych prepping the enemy. Pretty clever.