Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  All around him, drooping mortar bursts land death and more terrible wounds atop onrushing infantry. In just minutes, hundreds of bodies in dull green combat utes fill in old furrows. Most are bent awkwardly and lie still. Others move slowly. Men in brutal agony pulling themselves along the ground to no place, other than away from the spot where they met an AI hunting shell that did them in. They have no legs or a broken spine or a wide open, soggy belly. ‘They look like snails, leaving greasy trails of black dirt and gray offal behind.’

  His vision shifts. Dying snails become wounded slugs, writhing under rending claws of giant creatures moving beneath the surface, heaving soil around and over the crawling ruins of men. One suffering slug man is pulled and torn, torments made on his slimed and broken body before he’s ripped in half. Joachim wants to look away. It’s just too terrible to see or say. He must look.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  His twin rapido spews agony into the enemy, sending men tumbling to ground without heads or with half limbs or great, raw chest holes. His mind slips. He sees the brown holed field before him not as filled with charging, yelling, cursing men coming to kill him with hot masers and knives but as a churned vista of demented, barking dingoes with bloodshot eyes. They lope toward him, panting and yapping, urged on by terrible giants with arms of light. He kills them as they bound over open mouths of jackrabbit burrows from which all the dead rabbits have fled.

  It’s stress hallucination.

  His weird visions shift, until the dead and dying turn into torn earthworms left in careless halves, wriggling in vain efforts to escape a Gahanna of suffering. Just trying to live another second or minute or an hour, as worms and slugs and men in death agony all seek to do. So much pain and miserable wounding, all this slow, motherless and motherfucking death under a summer dawn rising at its own pace, with orange streaky indifference to the singular fates and failures of men below.

  ‘Gods, this is my first combat!’

  Well, what’s it taste like, son?

  ‘Dunno … kinda salty?’

  Shit, that’s just weird!

  ‘Did you see the dingoes?’

  What dingoes? I see Rikugun.

  ‘The bastards are brave, I’ll give them that.’ He bites his lower lip. Almost giggling, he watches drone mechs move outside the flank range of his overheating rapido. They fascinate him. He steals glances at the oncoming machines over the side rampart of the frantic gunpit, as he fires his twin weapon at still approaching enemy infantry. The green mass comes on straight at his ramparted trench wall at full highland tilt. He keeps on killing and maiming, sweeping twin barrels from side-to-side in lateral arcs. He sees each hit or miss more clearly at this intimate range, every ploughing set of parallel furrows he makes in dirt or through utes and human flesh. Sees each shattered and exploding bit of bone and soul, as sons fall.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  The bot mechs aren’t like the prewar combat bots that consumed each other in the first electric battles. These are just big mobile gun platforms, much cheaper to build and more expendable than the complex machines with which all sides began the war, and nearly lost it. Some are remote controlled by operators in FOPs or in stealth Jabos overhead, but most fight independently of human control, with only a basic AI engine and preprogrammed attack coding. The nearest platform bot has seen the damage he’s doing to the green infantry and starts blasting right at him, its ten barrel gatling laser seeking and scouring his position. Streaks of red and green fire lace toward him faster and more accurately than a human gunner could hope to achieve, but mostly glance off the reflective rampart. He fires back.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Maser-beats-laser nearly every time. He quickly and easily severs its forward guide legs, collapsing it headlong into a waiting crater. It falls with great green eyes in a triangular head, like a maimed mantis clipped by an angry bird or a night hunting bat, swooping down to pluck it from its roost spot. It sputters in battle lust and frustration, shooting wildly but hitting only air. ‘Stupid, useless bot.’

  One fast moving mech crushes stumbling, wounded soldiers who get in the way of their own side’s monomaniacal machines. Horribly screaming men are pulled under ultrasteel tracks as tons of only semi intelligent firepower roll over them, intent on fulfilling mission codes. The dull witted mechs don’t notice anything past a momentary inconvenience, a tilt to one side as bones and bellies squash under heavy tracks, upsetting their gyros and aim for a few seconds.

  One poor fellow senses the drone closing behind him and turns to wave it off. Maybe it sees him, maybe not. Probably it does, but it doesn’t care and never swerves. Instead, it rears up like a wild stallion who spots a coyote behind a sage brush, then drops right back down on top of the man. Unheeding, it churns his pulpy flesh into the black soil as it moves ahead. It takes only seconds for the mechanized monster to level out, to resume shooting at Joachim’s fellow Blues.

  ‘Holy shit! Fuck me!’

  ‘Don’t care if he’s Grünen.’

  ‘That’s just fucking wrong!’

  In combat, “only seconds” means survival or destruction. The mech collapses into a heap of sputtering lasers, then blows apart as defending Blue infantry take advantage of its tilt over the crushed man, shooting into its exposed underside. Other mechs go down as they, too, stumble on newly broken ground or addle on a slippery body underneath their whirring tracks. There are far fewer drones and gun platform mechs than just minutes ago. ‘They're not a lot more than maser magnets.’ It’s why prewar bot gun stockpiles were so quickly exhausted on all sides, and simpler mechs are hoarded for largescale fights like this one, not thrown away in trench raids. No matter how the designers adjust, platforms powerful enough to make a difference are also too large not to get blown apart pretty damn fast. Even basic infantry weapons are sometimes good enough to bring too costly, too tall, overexposed machines down. Joachim takes out two more himself.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Some green infantry are hesitating to assault the black wall. Men leap sideways to evade a flailing bot gun or a looming ground obstacle, then decide concealment is the better part of valor. Others leap too high, adrenal excitement forgetting to adjust down glide boots to make shorter hops in a close-in assault. They’re all quickly killed by green or red hand masers lacing over the steady ramparts as they descend toward them in exposed, predictable ballistic arcs. ‘It’s like popping bubbles.’ Some stop run gliding to avoid falling headlong into a crater or sliding off a slag heap of melted war machines from some Year One or Year Two big raid or battle. Others stop, then try to edge around one of a thousand lethal caltrops and snakes strewn and slithering in front of the ACU trench in a concealed, second AI minefield. The animate mines blow apart some attackers while channeling the rest into Joachim’s rapido optimum kill zone.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Indecision in combat is nearly always fatal. Rikugun are cut down where they stand or crouch, in a single, lethal second of confusion over their next step from life into fate. Over their last step, ever. A few dozen huddle together in mortal fright astride isolated, cracked Dragon’s Teeth, ten more beside a piece of dead Mammoth left over from a many months ago fight. ‘Horribly stuffed with epithets of war.’ The ancient phrase floats into Joachim’s head as he sprays red into huddled green, ripping the nest apart and sending shock waves into Orion to make dozens of mothers weep. Marine snipers pick off the other ten, one by one. Methodically. Dispassionately. Ruthlessly. You’d never know they’re rookies.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Most charging infantry don’t pause. Each green rank washes like a frothing storm wave over innermost Marine OPs and gunpits, sweeping past those feeble human breakwaters. All go silent in the wake of green waves and wavelets. Any marines caught by the attack in F
OBs and FOPs beyond First Trench are just shit-out-of-luck. This cresting attack flood stops for nothing, is blocked by nothing, pities and spares no one in its way. No one pities the tide. The tide pities no one.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Joachim grows terribly excited by what he’s doing, and sickened. He feels the twin barreled rapido jumping on its hard tripod, shaking and shuddering in his hands as he fires into the rising rollers coming straight at him at such close ranges he can’t miss. He watches in horrific fascination as rounds he fires strike home into flesh, shredding limbs and organs in splattering explosions of human bits and forever ended young hopes and lifetime dreams. He thrills to it, throws up, wipes a chunk of vomit off his lips onto the back of his hand, and keeps on shooting.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  A sphere of thunder overwhelms his senses, penetrating the sound baffles and mufflers of his headgear and HUD. It’s the din of battle. He thought he knew what to expect from OTS. To overwhelm trainees, drill instructors piped a roaring cacophony into HUDs and over the training grounds. It rattled him, helping him fail the course. This is totally different. Nothing in his life’s experience comes close to the sound of fury of a field of battle where the game of war is played.

  Rolling thunder forms from screeching explosions of fougasse mines under groaning mechs; thousands of detonating grenades as the infantry clashes hand-to-hand; hurtling, howling rockets as mobile and short range guns engage on both sides; and roaring engines of hundreds of oncoming as well as fast reversing and sideways scrambling armtraks and ATCs. Sonic booms drop from tracer missiles and Mach plus skycraft, swarming and diving and dying overhead.

  Above all Joachim is stunned by an overwhelming, nonstop roar of small arms fire pouring over and back at the black wall. Billowing, swarming, tangling clouds of click clacks, click clacks merge into a rising hurricane of chittering, chirruping, chattering, clattering. A million waxing shots and echoes meld until they sound for all the Thousand Worlds like a vast swarm of mad grasshoppers descending in hungry rage to devour wasted crops. Colliding and clashing in their hasty greed. Crashing and falling, wings flailing uselessly, jumper legs broken, antennae gone.

  He feels more than hears a second roar he can’t initially identify. It stuns him to finally tumble what it is: a rising, clamor of a hundred thousand human voices. Wild, primal yelling as panicked men and women lock together in hate and mortal combat. Primitive animal screams of fear, pain and finality. Terrified and terrible curses of rage, hate and violent murder. Solitary cries of individuals dying can’t be made out inside the undulating, onrushing tsunami of crackbrained bedlam and mass murder. He thinks the whole world but him is gone mad. He realizes with a sudden shock that one of the howling, wolfish, primal, pitiless voices is his own.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Slow spirals of curling smoke roll over the battlefield as the armtraks advance, explode on hidden mines or clinging mobile seekers, or are struck by shells that arrive like fallen suns. A rumble from distant Alliance guns joins the din, signaling that ‘Long Tom’ plasma shells are rocketing in from far off Union batteries, 500-700 klics away. Divisional and corps artillery is trying to split the attacking armor from its infantry. He no longer hears the roar of the oncoming tsunami. He’s right inside it now, under it. His ears full of it, his nose full of it, his mouth full of it.

  Another 200 meters and a horde of bellowing attackers will breach the outer parapet. Then it’ll be hand-to-hand, to the knuckle and the knife. Waiting marines reach for grenades, sharpened spades, wicked knives and poisoned spikes. It’s not even about training any more. This is far more primal. Ground churns and shakes around Joachim as heavy armtraks move over AI minefields without hesitation or loss of speed, crushing the last rattlers before they can commit suicide, squashing copperheads and black mambas, making screaming meemies scream.

  Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom. Poom poom.

  Mammoths weave among hulking corpses of men and machines, the foolhardy and the unlucky who went first into the smoking, animate minefields. Bodies are carelessly tossed 15 or 20 meters high by new mines set off along the rampart wall by ACU engineers, desperately trying to stop the armored breakthrough. Partially immobilized drone mechs and now also armtraks fight from awkward, stationary or crawling positions until a second or third volley of rapido red shuts them down.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  Rikugun combat engineers blow huge fougasse against the base of the black wall 50 meters on either side of Joachim’s desperate gunpit, leaving him an island in a churning sea of green. Except no man can be an island in war, “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Joachim becomes a promontory. All that he does connects to the battle as it moves beside and behind him.

  Opposing infantries engage hand-to-hand inside the trench. Cavities fill with stacked bodies of dead and dying, intermixed in RIK green and ACU blue, all bleeding buckets of red. Stunned, unconscious Rikugun lie atop wounded or dead Alliance marines. Shot or scalded, hacked or holed, disemboweled or grenaded, knifed or beheaded or garroted. Onrushing mechs and armtraks roll over human mound bridges that now span gaps in the broken ramparts and black wall of First Trench. Hardened treads churn up a sickening pink paste of wet dirt and flesh. Cries of horror go up from both sides, calling out to the heedless armtrak drivers.

  “Stop, just stop!”

  “For pity’s sake!”

  “For the love of the gods!”

  “By all that’s holy and unholy in Orion!”

  The machines roll uncaring onward, sparing neither friend nor foe under tracks intended for precisely this pitiless, crushing, unstopping movement. Spitting blue and red from spandaus mounted on multi tons of hate both designed and driven to crush hope and the limbs of men. To advance Pyotr’s vain, petty, imperial purposes beyond restraints of mercy or any decency. That just leaves the jaws of the Dragon Line as a breakwater. If that doesn’t stop them, they’ll break right through.

  Mammuts are approaching jagged Dragon’s Teeth that run north-to-south as far as can be seen, starting a half klic behind the black wall. The backstop line is supposed to slow any armtrak breakthrough down, hold the big machines in place for huge Long Toms to hail down destruction, or elite infantry to emerge and kill at short range. It doesn’t work. The long range gun crews are afraid to fire-to-grid with so many Blue troops mixed among enemy armtraks, while backstop infantry is already running. It’s what Alliance generals feared. It’s tank fright. It’s panic.

  Onrushing metal beasts are protected by anti-mine frequencies broadcast by engineers riding in the lead RIK Mammoths and Mastodons. They set off most of the hidden explosives lurking atop white ceramic Dragon’s Teeth, well before the monsters arrive to be snagged and gutted from below. Small clouds of white dust rise as each tooth is extracted by a precisely targeted, coded beam. Then the first monster pokes its metal snout through the gap, accelerating at the lead of a long, triple column. To its right and left, more wide paths are opening through the long rows of white pyramids, as if a Red Sea is parting on the order of the God of War.

  The codes were betrayed to interrogators by torn and bloodied captives who talked, then died, deep underground in RIK MI’s dank cells. Little white pyramids thus explode prematurely, letting a horde of charging metal beasts pass though the Dragon Line, running right over and past panicking, fleeing, dying Blue infantry.

  Combat is artistry of destruction.

  There’s a great battle to be fought.

  This was all just prelude.

  Head

  RIK armtrak drivers are under strict orders to smash through First Trench then fan out on the other side, rip into short flanks at the gaps, then race into the rear area behind First Trench but still many klics in front of Second. They’re supposed to keep going and breach that defense line next. To keep moving, regardless of losses in supporting infantry or their own long columns. The goal is Third T
rench.

  General Oetkert screamed right into the face of the commander of heavy armor before the battle began: “No stopping! You get through those Dragon’s Teeth with the codes my MI supplied, then you keep moving! If you stop, I’ll send your head to my cousin Pyotr in a glass box, with an apple in your mouth!” Well, no one ever accused him of subtlety of speech or command inspiration. Like all the royal family, like the whole Rikugun and even the whole Imperium, in the end all he thinks will move men of lesser status to action is fear and threats.

  Oetkerts have been underestimating the ordinary citizens of their empire for centuries. But for the moment, the general thinks his screaming worked. More and more armtraks and heavy drone mechs are breaking through the broken black wall and the Dragon’s Teeth, racing into 300 meter breeches that are already widening on either side of Joachim’s gunpit. He congratulates himself, chuff with success. Swelling with the irrepressible, unearned confidence of the blood royale.