by Kali Altsoba
“Are you saying we just keep feeding millions of children into the Moloch of the trenches on Amasia, and into more trench systems on a dozen other contested worlds? And into the convoy attrition battles of the navies?” Puff puff.
“Yes, prime minister. It’s either that or lose. And we mustn’t lose.”
“What a terrible thing! I see why you chose not to inscribe it, to put your name to such infamy for all of future history to read! I am glad that Robert Hoare is not alive to hear you say it. It repulses me!”
“So it should.”
“It would have broken Robert’s gentle heart if he heard you say this, for you are near to breaking mine.” Puff puff.
“You and I never fully agreed about your predecessor, prime minister. I found him more wanting, before the war. Because of the war.”
“You lack the empathy of sitting in his place, as I do.” Puff puff.
“That is likely it. But know prime minister, it is not my intention to wound you. Not you, Georges. But you must hear these hard truths. You must listen.”
“In your terrible judgment, Gaspard, how many more youths must we send to die in this war? How many more must we ask to kill in our unholy names?”
“Hundreds of millions. Billions. If we do not fight well, tens of billions.”
For the first time in a half century Georges Briand is speechless. He doesn’t even draw his pipe, which sits in his hand slow smoldering and utterly forgotten. It slowly goes out on its own, like last night’s forgotten campfire abandoned by careless teenagers. Thin wisps of pine and agarwood fill the air with a gentle smell of a winter morning in a unwalked forest, that he now knows he will never walk.
Leclerc lets the shock settle, does not interrupt the brooding silence. Knows he cannot lift the burden of All the Ages he just draped over Georges Briand’s shoulders. He knows that he has come back to Kars with nothing to offer the prime minister except a shroud of sorrows. And an expectation of years or decades of more blood, more suffering, more torments and tears, more terrible decisions and mass killing.
Except for a small idea he got talking to a simple gunner he met way up north, across from the Dauran Gate. The tale the soldier told confirmed what Lian Sòng said in New Beijing. “Georges, there’s one more thing you should know...”
The Story Continues in
Rikugun
Volume VI
The Orion War
Sample
Leyla glances for a last time at Tedi. Any second now the Women’s Combat Brigade goes over the top of the parapet, into Dark Territory for the first time. That’s the place Alliance troops call the Yue ming, the obscure regions where you can’t see the next second of your own life with certainty. Where so many simply disappear. Every girl is tensing. They all smell of new uniforms and fresh greased weapons, of piss and fear and panting combat virginity. Cat’s whisker eye marks line up along the sights of stubby masers as they check weapons. Others just stare down at the bottom of the jump off trench, hard gripping a frag thrower. In one corner a bald, former redhead with freckled skin heaves up.
Tedi crouches expectantly at the head of her squad, trying hard not to look at Leyla. The fine curves of her lithe limbs are outlined by a skintight combat suit. Her small breasts strain against the light green ceramic fiber with every taut breath she takes. Leyla feels her own stirring lust for this pretty young thing in her care and command. She wants to imagine Tedi naked, pliant to a probing touch. All that will have to wait. Right now it matters far more that Tedi is a highly capable corporal, a gochō of Rikugun about to go into first combat, as is the whole WCB.
Every crouching girl who’s ready to spring into Dark Territory believes that she’s a singular creature and marvel of creation, destined by the gods and by her own virtues to survive this fight. The same thing is true of all male battle virgins in Gross Imperium, and everywhere down the line. Not one of them thinks they have just minutes to live before a sniper nails them. No one thinks this is the last time she’ll run on legs about to be blown off at the knees by a hidden Alliance snake. Not one can imagine the true agony of being cooked inside-out by a slow maser, or bored through by a hot blue rapido plasma ball. They think all that must happen to someone else. ‘Maybe her beside me, or her over there. Or her…’
At some level of awareness, they all know that someone among them will lose a limb or part of a foot or her face, or everything she might become over the rest of her violently aborted life. ‘Not to me, that won’t happen to me.’ Some envision the others as dead in some awful, contorted pose. Not one sees themselves like that, a broken oozing thing that the rest of the WCB has to step over and around. Or screaming in agony. Not as one of those, a left behind, an unsavable without any arms, begging Captain Leyla Celik for a fast and clean pity shot to the head.
War is enthralling and even delightful for a few minutes more to these virgins who have no experience of it, yet have thought of little else for months or even years. They're fearful in a distant, abstract way. They think they're ready, because they know they're not anything like the pathetic Kolno washouts who were hustled off base or shot after four stays in the Dog House during Basic. They're survivors. They're the first WCB, attached to the most famed and fearless of RIK divisions, Gross Imperium. Each girl feels that she is untouchable by death. She’s excited and ready for anything battle might present her. She’s special, beloved, immortal.
‘That’s who I am.’
‘I’m elite. And successful.’
‘I proved it at Kolno Barracks.’
They’re 17 or 18 or 20 years old. They're all young, healthy, confident. Some are pretty, while some are plain. Not one has a fucking clue what’s coming.
‘My uniqueness won’t end.’
‘Mom says I’m too precious to die.’
‘Spirit of Shekhina, please watch over me.’
It’s the last, purely civilian belief they retain. In the next few minutes they’ll shed it, too. Military psychologists and trainers call it the ‘Last Illusion.’ Training can’t penetrate it. Only combat can do that. It’s the combat virgin’s cherry and they're all about to give it up to Pyotr, who doesn’t give a shit about them.
A sense of invulnerability is dangerous to these girls as individuals, but useful to the team effort they’re about to undertake. It encourages them to take more risk than anyone experienced in combat will ever try, dare things more veteran and more wary troops will flat out refuse. They're more aggressive than the old hands, still aiming to please their officers, impress their squad mates, display courage to all. Or so they think. They’re actually most eager to prove something to themselves about themselves. In their first attack they’ll be ferocious because, unlike more weary and more wary veterans, they don’t yet understand that anyone can die and that if you’re in combat often enough or long enough, in the end everybody does.
Suddenly, everything changes. Every girl breathes out as she hears it, a far off and unexpected, unnatural silence. It stills the WCB. Squads, platoons, companies and battalions, crouching behind the black parapet, with armor sheeting above, tense like they're about to climax. Instantly and acutely taut and alert, each girl has the same thought at the same moment. ‘The barrage is over. It’s time!’
They startle as one when a sharp burst of firing erupts nearby, building into a whirlsome gale of colored beams of energetic light and death washing overhead. It’s friendly gatling bots suppressing enemy who might be hiding along the line of Gross Imperium’s advance. Next come brilliant illuminations by a thousand incandescent flares above, each one turning a fearful piece of night into a slice of terrible day. Each flying light shoots straight ahead, farther than the last one. They make long, dropping lines like airborne headlights lighting up the ground as slow, civvy skycraft come in to land. Only a thousand skycraft are flying overhead into Dark Territory at the same time, along a thousand runways reaching into the black.
Whistles blow.
HUDs light up.
T
he attack is starting!
It’s the foul blast of war!
“At last! We go to do battle!” A thin voice shouts into black air streaking with white lights. “Huzzah! Huzzah!” The battle cry rings out in distinct female tones, moving up-and-down the jump off trench, rippling over the women’s heads like a fast running mountain brook over small, cold stones. Two all male brigades move out on the WCB left flank. Two more on the right flank.
“Attack! Attack!”
Disguising fairer nature also from themselves, ferocious women of the WCB eagerly shout “Huzzah! Huzzah!” as they jump up and leap over the parapet, into war. Willingly, wantonly, wholly of their own free choice, they charge into the obscure regions. Fast and lethal, they pounce over the black into Dark Territory. They land on the other side like alert house cats, rise and race ahead like aroused panthers. They’re firing masers straight-in-front in the RIK fashion, screaming in shrill, harpy voices. In a few strides they hit max glide on black acoustic boots.
“For God and Death!”
“Huzzah! Huzzah!”
“For God and Death!”
Tedi and her squad bound like madwomen across the sand flats. Alliance First Trench is three klics ahead. Acoustic boosts in their combat boots propel them forward in ten meter bounds. “Too fast! Dial it back corporal!” Tedi adjusts the squad’s bound rate via her HUD link, slowing everyone to six meter leaps, adding an irregular bound pattern every sixth step to throw off snipers and mortars.
A few more glide-strides and the squad hits a good rhythm, leaping around and over smaller craters and dross piles, past broken war machines left behind in a dozen failed attacks in the first year of the war. Tedi eye checks left and right, then again on her HUD. She’s glad to see other squads keeping exact pace on her flanks. Captain Celik is at the rear, shouting and urging Three Company ahead. In her clinging combat gear she looks to Tedi like a mother raptor herding her lethal chicks toward a braying herd of trapped, Triassic herbivores.
Only there are no flat molar herbivores out here.
Only meat tearing carnivores with sharp canines.
The only animals that inhabit the black are killers.
Ill formed slag from a shelling a hundred days ago is topped by a thin sheet of gooey, amorphous glass still cooling from the predawn bombardment. It sags beneath Tedi’s boots, sucking at them with lingering, golden heat and adhesive intention. “Keep moving! If you stop, you’ll burn!” In places the newer shelling missed, her heels crunch and break through brittle, older sheets of surface glass, laid out in orange and blue and red and violet splashes a half acre wide or more.
‘Medium range mortars did this. The big ones glass it up a meter deep.’ She shouts: “Watch how you step! This shit can cut you in half if you tumble!” The glistening plain mirrors strobe and luminous flares exploding over her head, some coming from beyond the enemy’s black wall, more arcing up and over Tedi from behind. It looks for a moment like open clam shells made of light hold each naked Aphrodite charging into this strangely luminous world, then the illusion is gone. It shatters as real enemy shells fall, and real friends start to die all around her.
Half a klic on the WCB runs into a sniper bot. Three women go down in ripped pain and gashed open limbs before concentrated maser beams eliminate the nest. Two fall screaming, clutching smoking legs. One girl is gut shot. She crumples in on herself like a deflated soufflé. They anticipate bot nests better after that, but lose two more fighters to static shooters. It’s another klic before Three Company begins picking up heavy defensive fire. Human this time. They’re near the wall.
“Fire at will!” Tedi’s shout releases twenty green and blue maser beams to lash toward suddenly revealed guard posts. She shoots at every quick squid target that pops red on her HUD. She’s confident and lethal, running, gliding, shooting with precision and skill. ‘This is nothing like the sniper run at Kolno. This is hard.’ She doesn’t feel cocky anymore. Not like the last time she ran the tactical obstacle course and made the only perfect score. That was the third time she angered and embarrassed a cruel instructor shooting with a sniper mazer way above regulation power. He missed her twice as she dodged and ducked. He cursed her back and wanted her dead. He took it out on the next cohort instead. He killed one of them.
Later, she’ll have difficulty recalling details of this mad run into first combat. “I ran, sir. I glided and bounced the squad as best I could,” she’ll report. “That’s all I remember. Damn it, sir, but DT never seemed to end! And we lost so many girls getting across, sir. I never thought we’d lose so very many. And the best.”
Trouble remembering the most exciting, dangerous moment of her life, and she’s only seventeen? Yeah, ‘cause the mind is quirky like that. It can’t recall details afterward, especially of adrenal soaked combat experience. Especially about leaping over sticky, cooling glass sand with another WCB girl right behind who’s sliced down at the legs, blown half apart by a rapido blue plasma ball. That one was meant for you, Tedi. But it missed you, by a half second of power glide.
Tedi will recall later that she was forced to dive into a hard glass crater while an ACU Yellowjacket roared down overhead. How it swung in low, strafing the WCB with multibarreled masers. How it spit out hot and effulgent flares while it escaped back across the desert to the safety of the deepest Blue hinter zone, way beyond the enemy’s Third Trench. How it left five girls lying on faces or backs, and two more slow sliding down a gold jewel rim into a pit full of shattered glass.
She’ll remember because it’s the first time Tedi gets scared, but more because she’ll rise up and start leading and glide assaulting again. She’ll be proud of that later, of pushing her squad as it darted past its own dead, rushed through the ruins, the front edge of a charging company of wild women who followed in staggered echelon. She’ll remember other things she’ll wish that she didn’t. Because as she runs into and across DT for the first time she’ll see scenes all around of heroism and horror flashing by. Some she retains on purpose, others she’ll try to blot out.
That all lies ahead. Right now, just behind her, two girls she knows leap to the edge of a small crater and shoot down three boys in blue utes, all pleading with hands raised high. One girl laughs loudly as she does it. Then a plasma ball spins her around like a child’s top, let go too soon. Half her bald head is gone in a red splattering moment. She spins twice more before falling straight down, faceless.
Tedi doesn’t wait to see the body fall. She’s suddenly in too much danger herself. A scared squid stands up and shoots right at her from pointblank range, but misses. Tedi takes her down with a quick and accurate blast that lops off her right shoulder and arm, leaving the Blue woman with an astonished expression of frozen horror and disbelief still in place as she falls, dying fast but hard.
On Tedi’s right a bot gun walker keeps steady pace with her squad’s advance. It has silver cat’s whisker markings to show it’s WCB. It spits gatling tubes of red lasers at a rate no human can hope to match, basic suppressing fire to let not-quite-so-virgin anymore, virgin infantry race through crowded and cluttered pockets of scared defenders fighting out of shallow funk holes.
Another walker blows up, a sudden rainbow of colored plasma as its miniature reactor, no bigger than a walnut, cracks open nitrobon and ceramic shields, losing fusion containment. The explosion kills two more girls from Three Company, two from Four Company, and a courageous squid Tedi can’t help admire as she sees him reach up and jam a satchel charge into the walker’s unprotected underside as it passes over his deep fighting pit. A blue electric blast leaves a compact, smoking hole where the bot and a brave man coexisted for a moment. Now both are gone.
Tedi sees RIK engineers blowing apart pyramidal Dragon’s Teeth, made of white ceramic, ultrasteel, and superconcrete. They're removing all natural and artificial obstacles for the mobile cannon and whole herds of mammut armtraks scheduled to follow the assault infantry. This is no mere trench raid, and by now the Blues know it. The givea
way is the sheer size of the attack.
Shōshō Johann Oetkert intends to drive all the way to the far shore of Lemuria. To achieve decisive breakthrough, he needs the biggest mobile guns to blast open highway routes through the thickest Alliance defenses. He needs a breakthrough badly, since both his diversion attacks have failed. The one in the north, at the hinge of The Veranda, ran into an armored counterattack by herds of Buffalos and mobile infantry. The one to the south,, at Tornado Ally, was held by damned Argos 7th Assault, the ‘Enthusiastics,’ holding the other side of the black. Heavies are scheduled to move forward soon, driving fire support ahead of multiple expected penetrations by the assault infantry and armtraks. Nine assault wedges, just like the one Tedi is part of, are hitting the enemy’s First Trench at once, across 30 klics of attacking front. Probing for weakness, looking for a breakthrough access point. WCB is part of just one of those. And there are other divisions attacking in a hundred more wedges on either side of Gross Imperium.
