Rikugun
Page 6
Tedi starts to fear sleep shift more than any daily training task. When she takes off her helmet and climbs into her cocoon under the perpetual twilight gloom of The Doughnut, her mind finds a way to strange paths. It travels down suppressed and ugly fantasies that aren’t at all like her daydreams, to images of wounds she might receive or ugly deaths she might make. She knows it’s totally irrational to keep her helmet on, trying to keep dark visions away. She does it anyway. Only after she crawls inside her cocoon does she take it off and curl fetally, trying to sleep but not to dream. Once, she tries sleeping with her helmet still strapped on, HUD down, hoping to stop her nightmares. All it does is give her a crimped neck in the morning. After that, she leaves her helmet at the end of her bunk with the rest of her kit, and struggles with the dreams and her insomnia as best she can.
One night she tries a sedative the Infirmary gives her. It makes her groggy the next morning, which leads to one of her worst “punishment bag” incidents. So she decides to put up with the frightening thoughts bursting into her head every night. Ugly thoughts that never leave her anymore, but which she manages to push down deep into the back of her skull most of the time. The really odd thing is that during the days, the thoughts and fears never even occur to her. She doesn’t know it, but half the recruits cocooned all around her bunk in the twilight are going through the same day-night struggle, trying to fend off a growing fear of wounds and war that creeps into dreams, tossing in their sleep, yet dealing with it almost without thinking during long, hard training days. The only thing that’s really different is that Tedi is the only one to try wearing her helmet to block out the nightmares.
Week Ten arrives at last. Tedi is promoted to gochō, to corporal, even as fierce instructors toss every last practice enemy at the women one more time. Tedi likes it, feeling sure of her skills, eager for real combat. Captain Celik nods her approval as Tedi leads her squad on another successful obstacle sniper run. Tedi personally takes out two instructors with sonics, before they ambush her people. She tweaks her HUD to read low power maser signatures and lobs in sound grenades before the snipers set and shoot. One of them is the chief sniping instructor. He stretches out temporarily frozen tendons and fingers in his trigger hand, unable to use his rifle to shoot Tedi in the back as she leads her squad running out the other end of the course. He curses to himself as she escapes. ‘That’s fucking twice!’
When training ends after just 10 weeks, it seems more like 50. Just like Tedi, many of the graduating nitōhei think they’re eager and ready for war. They’re not. But there’s no more time for training. They’re needed in the real fight right away.
It’s time to go to war.
Childhood’s over.
It’s time to kill for real.
Newly commissioned nitōhei and other ranks in Tedi Shipcka’s cohort move in four tight blocks of 500 new Rikugun, two all female and two all male, to stand at attention at the feet of the giant holo of Pyotr Shaka III that straddles Main Gate of Kolno Barracks. The holo wears RIK formal greens. Its jaw is oddly square and juts almost straight out. On the royal head is a black fez with a wide green band. A silver tassel hangs off the left side. The giant face looks down sternly at its new soldiers, as the great head turns slowly from side-to-side. Pyotr’s hands are stuck ostentatiously on his giant hips, legs spread wide as if mounted on a stallion that isn’t there. The swagger pose is meant to show his vitality, virility and manliness. To most admirers, it does. To Tedi, to more observant, it makes him bowlegged. She loves the real Imperator, but she laughs inwardly at holo Pyotr. His looping arms look too much like teapot handles, turning the whole meant-to-be-imposing giant into her mother’s favorite flowered china. She giggles. She’s just seventeen.
Tedi recovers in time to put her serious face back on and join other graduates worshiping at the feet of this godlike image of the Imperator. They’re formed into parade units, to swear their final blood oath to “serve the Imperator and Imperium until victory or death.” They shout the oath in thunderous unison, fifes playing badly and flags fluttering too heavily in the dank tropical air. Bored NCOs watch the third ‘out parade’ of the day. Then a tattooed pageant of proud nitōhei marches past the hollow emperor-teapot. As each file in Gross Imperium passes in review, heads snap around to face the looming hologram and give salute to their honorary commandant. The chant starts: “For God and Death! For God and Death!”
None of those marching out to fight the Supreme Leader’s war know that Pyotr has never been to Kolno or visited a battlefield, or conquered world after it was ripped from the enemy. None of them know that he’s no longer the slim, warrior figure that looms overhead. That he is grown lazy, oily and fat. Tedi passes under what, even while wearing her best serious look, she can’t help thinking must be “Pyotr’s Spout.” She lets go a loud giggle. It doesn’t matter. She’s leaving Kolno and Daegu. She’s leaving behind her home, her homeworld, her childhood. She’s in Rikugun now, body and mind and soul. She keeps time with the beating drums and joyously belts out RIK marching songs, in an off key voice.
The cohort surges under the arch of Main Gate, stamping in unison in black combat boots. It flows as one down a straight road to Pusan Elevator, visible above the dark jungle canopy as it reaches toward the first stars of arriving night. Clad all in green and marching crisply, now in separate division units, the cohort looks nothing like the raggedy crowd of rainbow civvies who stumbled in just ten weeks ago. These are soldiers of Rikugun and the Imperium. They’ll board maglev cabs and rise to meet waiting Kaigun troopships, set to join a convoy bound for Amasia. That’s where the male battalions of Gross Imperium and the other divisions already serve along the black, waiting for WCBs to join them. They need replacements. A silver knight assault at brigade level only yesterday lost over 1,000 men.
The cohort passes out of hearing of Gate Tower guards. ‘Unto the wars, with fifes and flags in mottoed pageantry ... Far footfalls died away till none were left.’
A silence descends.
It doesn’t last long.
Hear the huff puff youth?
A column is coming up the road from Kolno Station, caterpillaring over the last gentle rise. Youths with odd civilian hair stumble, panting and footsore as they run in ill suited shoes with cut heels and ankles. They’re eager to finish their first forced march. Their hair is unkempt and windblown, and matted with sweat and orange-red laterite. Their hands clutch string bound, cloth packages that are all the same. Their feet are spotted with blood and blisters. The band at Main Gate strikes up an ill timed, poorly performed tune as the raggedy files of recruits tramp through. Tin eared as ever, it bellows out brassy marches that are hardly heard and not heeded as youths ardent for war pass with wide eyes under stern, Teapot Pyotr.
Barrage
Women’s Auxiliary Service units from before the war began are all converting to Women’s Combat Brigades, while fresh WCBs are forming from scratch. Yet, RIK Main HQ isn’t even thinking about full gender integration. Can’t conceive of it. Not even when backward, reactionary Daurans field a gender neutral army up at the Dauran Gate on Amasia. Not when all Alliance armies waiting to receive the first attack by the WCBs are fully gender integrated, and have been for over a millennium, dating to the First, Second, and Third Orion Wars. Moral corruption by direct mixing of the genders won’t be allowed in Rikugun. Not ever!
Or at least not yet. Misogyny of the Broderbund runs too deeply in Imperial culture and in social mores. Too many centuries passed under the Old Order, with Brethren at the center of power, standing with a degen assassin’s blade behind the Jade Throne. From there, they spread hatred of free women, free labor, and free thinking. The times are changing, and fast. Imperium military needs are too great. Rikugun will experiment with WCBs. Yet, old thinking can’t change overnight, not even under the immense pressures of wartime. Not when the whole economy of the Ordensstaat and genetic tradition of the Brethren themselves trace to slave-clone mothers. The first generation of imprisoned ute
ri was transported in stealth lockers on the colony ship Deus Ex Machina, along with frozen zygotes. It was an atrocity. It violated all Old Earth colonization and terraforming laws when the GDM ship broke past the oort cloud, then turned, disguising its final destination. They brought to the stars in the hold of their ship all the old scourges: enslavement of labor, enslavement of women, and bondage of the mind. Then they made war.
Brethren were finally pushed out of power at the Jade Court in the Red Purge, carried out by the Dowager Empress Mary Oetkert. Pyotr’s mother relented in the mass killing only when the High Council of the Broderbund agreed to reduction of the Hashâshīn central fortress, Rudkhan Castle in the high Alborz Mountains on Terra Deus. The legacy of the Sword Brothers remains the filthy reality at the heart of the Grün Empire. The ruling elite as a whole is infected, heir to a twisted, misogynist theology inherited from 1,500 years of Broderbund rule and pernicious doctrines of the Black Faith, elevated to the state religion by the Jade Eye himself, Karl Ferdinand Oetkert I, founder of the Green Empire. Behind a veneer of elite civilization, behind the courtly façade of the Jade Throne, High Castes rape and keep lower caste women in slavery, while castrating their sons to make male field slaves and workers of a vast dāsa underclass. Castration makes men docile, while women are kept uneducated, bonded for sex and used to make more male slaves.
Not even banishment of the Broderbund back to their pilgrim worlds, and the triumph of the SAC High Curia after the Red Purge, fundamentally changed that powerful history of exploitation. Women play a hugely constricted role in the war economy, little role at all in the bureaucracy, and none in planetary administration. Their moral energy, their intellectual and physical talent is left untapped by an aggressive, militarist regime that oversees a desperate and declining empire. One so bloody minded about its Black Faith heritage and misogynist principles it is trying to conquer Orion with one mailed fist, instead of two. That’s why women are not fully integrated into Rikugun or Kaigun combat units. They’re confined to the old Auxiliaries that serve male fighters in every way imaginable, and now the experimental, gender segregated Women’s Combat Brigades. And even that small crack only because Rikugun is stalled, bogged down on Amasia and other worlds.
***
Tedi’s cohort boards a spartan cab to ride the military elevator up to a low orbit platform, where it transfers to a waiting Kaigun troopship that will carry to war replacement cohorts from five Daegu divisions, including 32nd Supply. She looks on those boys with disdain, as she locks in to an interior row seat and readies to burn away from Daegu to the L3 on the Carmé star farside. The ship will jump unescorted from there, to link with a gathering, heavily protected troop and supply convoy five jumps out, closer to danger as it nears the frontier and Occupied Zone. Seven more jumps in convoy mode, then they’ll make a hair raising run down to Nix, Rikugun’s inner moonbase circling wartorn Amasia. Some of the new nitōhei are terrified as they feel thrusters engage that will carry them to the bohr jump and eventually to combat. But most think that Rikugun and Kolno Barracks has made them ready for it, because that’s what they were told as they left the base.
Tedi and her cohort are tougher, stronger, harder physically and mentally than ten weeks ago, when they were civvies. But they’re still seventeen or nineteen and not any wiser. And they’ve never faced an enemy. Being young, all think they’re special. Hundreds of millions more youth just like them, on both sides and from all over the Orion spur, already wear uniforms: green, blue, brown, oak, and more. None are special. Hundreds of millions more are gone before them, disappeared into a rainbow of death. Others were removed from the iron chessboard of war by wounds or broken psyches. So many are gone from so many homeworlds that the numbers of dead, wounded, and mentally crippled no longer seem tragic. Death is become a statistic. And what room for tragedy is there inside a statistic?
***
A week later, Tedi is clutching to handholds onboard a smaller shuttle, burning up from the airless moon Nix, whipping silently around Amasia as it has for six billion years. Her non-bohr shuttle is rocking hard with evasive maneuvers, her convoy under fire from the moment it rises off the moon’s surface, jumped by Alliance raiders that MI identifies as elements of White Sails. It’s a much feared raider fleet. Unpredictable, well-led by Admiral Magda Aklyan, full of malice and marines. Tedi’s shuttle is forced to hit the Amasian upper atmosphere hard, duck in at an acute angle then dive into a red nosed, white knuckled fall to the Thalassa coast. Outside the side scuttles during the descent, sudden white plasma blossoms made by the enemy’s missiles compete for attention with harmless natural clouds.
Tedi doesn’t see any of that. All the way down her eyes stay fixed on the olive skinned vision that is Leyla Celik, directly across from her in a reverse direction seat. Leyla is intently watching Tedi, too. Their eyes meet and lock. Leyla’s lips part slightly, her legs spread imperceptibly to anyone but Tedi, who feels flushed, warm and wet. It’s a very odd way to enter your first war, hot and wet for your captain instead of thinking about the fact that someone out there in the vacuum is trying to fill it up with you. ‘I can’t help it. Gods! Look at her!’ Outside the main scuttle, a night of contested space streaks with the light of an Amasian day rushing up to meet the dropships. A brilliant dawn fills with astonishing illuminations made by the heat and passion of combat, by the perverse genius of war.
***
Major General Johann Oetkert is a recluse spider of a man. All long, thin legs and arms with a hanging belly sac full of acid poisons. A thousand facets glint in his cold, arachnid eyes. They’re deep jade, the marker of all true Oetkerts. And so he is, a prince of the blood royale, direct descendant of the Jade Eye himself, Karl Ferdinand Oetkert, founder of the dynasty, of the Waldstätte, and of the Imperium. As first uncle to Pyotr Shaka III, Johann Oetkert was made a general by birthright. Like all high born holding high rank to start the war, he thinks he got there on his merit. He thinks he’s commander of Gross Imperium because he’s exceptionally skilled, a true master of tactics, perhaps with a genius for war. He doesn’t know he’s just a lucky sperm. His vanity of position is as dreary as his vanity of power.
Already on Amasia for four months, he’s sick of raids into the black that go nowhere, and long range shell duels sailing back-and-forth over Dark Territory. Tired of what he considers little fights that only wear down his famed and lethal division, attrit its capability without bringing glory and honor to its name and his. He thirsts for fresh movement out of the trenches, for more spectacular advances like those he and Gross Imperium made when they chased the Alliance from Glarus and Caliban. During its first week on Amasia, too, Gross Imperium smashed strong elements of Argos 7th Assault, hitting it again and again after that, until it was so battered the 7th was forced out of combat and offworld, to rest on the Alliance moon Chang’e, The Goddess. General Oetkert wants to do that again.
He hates that his elite division is deployed in the southern Lemurian desert, in The Sandbox. Hates that it has been left idling or patrolling shifting barchan dunes, lost amidst thousands of slower domes of sand. He wants another rolling victory for his vaunted armor and mobile infantry, cities for hover grenadiers to sack and occupy, planetary conquest illumination ribbons to hang on his already glowing breast. He pleads for approval over the heads of Rikugun Main HQ on Kestino, directly to his nephew. At last, Johann Oetkert gets authority for a nine division attack. He calls it the Shaka Offensive, to curry royal favor. He’s in way over his head, but he’s in command. It’s the Imperium way. He expects nothing less than the command, to be at the center of war and empire. The only surprise is that Rikugun Main HQ resisted him as long as it did. After all, he’s an Oetkert of the innermost circle, brother to the dead Dowager, senior uncle to Tennō Pyotr Shaka.
Shōshō Oetkert intends to drive his army straight 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 ne
eds a breakthrough badly, since both diversion attacks on the flanks have failed. That prior blunting means that even if Gross Imperium smashes through Alliance first and second lines of black wall defense, too many reinforcements are waiting behind Third Trench.
It’s going to be a close run thing, but the odds are bad. Heavies are scheduled to move forward, driving Rikugun fire support ahead of multiple penetrations by assault infantry and herds of mammuts. Nine assault wedges, just like the one the WCB will be part of, will hit ACU First Trench at the same time, across 30 klics of front. Probing for weakness, looking for a breakthrough access point, WCB will be part of just one of those saber thrusts. And there are eight other divisions attacking in a hundred more wedges on either side of Gross Imperium.
It’s the biggest attack by Rikugun since it stalled out in Year One. Since the black walls first snaked up and down Lemuria, stretching pole to pole as the Diyu daemons of the Yue ming laid down the borders of their obscure lands. Since Gozu and Mezu, since Ox Head and Horse Face, made lists of dead souls and times of passing. Since they built Youdu the Dark Capital there and invited Death and King Yan to dwell with them in the middle of the black. And call the dead to join them.
Staff officers work out all the operational and tactical attack plans, prodded to seek extreme goals by his angry impatience. What does it matter that their general is too easily blown about by gusts of vanity that cling like bits of lint to a second rate mind? What does it matter that everything he proposes for the new offensive failed in the last one? What does it matter that he overrides the smallest objections they make, trying to save Rikugun lives and give the attack some hope of success? Being an Oetkert trumps all of that. Being an Oetkert is all. And today is Z-Day. The moment of attack is nigh, set for just before the natural dawn. Johann Oetkert is about to order the opening bombardment of the first Rikugun offensive of Year Two of the Fourth Orion War on Amasia. Wolves howl across the black. Panting geckos bob up-and-down, anxious to see history made. Or is it flies they watch?