Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  “Battery Todt requests the honor of opening the barrage, your Highness.” It’s a formality. Of course the senior battery will open the bombardment. Chief gunner of the infamous ‘Death Battery’ has a partially burned off face from the Caliban campaign. Because of redeployments to four more fights that quickly followed, thence to Lemuria, it isn’t fully repaired. Scar tissue forms dune like ridges over half a cheek and an empty eye socket. His holo visage floats before Oetkert inside the division’s Command Center.

  A row of Todt heavy guns waits expectantly over 400 klics away. Behind the tubes of the Death Battery flutter four evenly spaced, Black Eagle holoflags. On each, a great bird of prey rips at a planet clutched in its talons. One is a blue ocean world, another is covered in green forests. The third alternates desert and plains as it rotates. The fourth is Amasia, its supercontinent both shod and capped in ice. In front of the menacing holo birds with ripping beaks, hundreds of gunners wait at sealed breaches of loaded, primed, firing tubes. Alone in the division, they don’t wear the silver knight’s head. Their specialty flash is a Death’s Head, a Totenkopf, a silver skull underlined by crossed black cannons. A red band circles their caps, traditional proclamation of their status as gunners.

  “Granted.” General Oetkert says it while sweeping a long, spidery arm in the enemy’s direction. Over there, across Dark Territory, behind the other black wall on the other side. It’s a calculated, practiced gesture of his royal prerogative and personal assurity, filled with venomous threat and indifferent death. It’s who he is, whether in peace or war, whether in the bedroom or on a battlefield.

  Pom pom pom, pom pom pom.

  Sounds of air compressing at barrel tips breaks the silence as a hundred Todt guns fire at once. Hurtling smart shells whoosh whoosh skyward from frictionless maglev catapults. Racing shells crack! the sound barrier with great boom! booms! as they rise. Engaging steering rockets on the other side of the sound they line up in rows, like flocks of migrating birds. Volley chases volley with bright exhaust points visible across a darkened desert sky. They hold formation until engaging micro thrusters and independent evasive maneuvers at 30 klics up and 100 out.

  Johann Oetkert sits in a podium mounted command chair, gesticulating to his aides. He’s miming which ground and sky units should move hither or yon to places and map coordinates that they’re already slated to go. Tall and lean except for his belly sac, with a bushy head of thick black hair, his waving arms make him look like a baobab, his fleshless stem hung with fruits looming over acacia scrub land. Only Shōshō Oetkert is nothing like a vital “tree of life” in the sahel. Death is all around him, as it surrounds all Oetkerts down all the generations.

  Pom pom pom, pom pom pom.

  He’ll bound next to the Panthalassa coast with his best mobile units, led by Gross Imperium. He intends to crash across Dark Territory and punch through all three enemy lines of black sunken walls in a single, massive thrust. He’ll break the back of the ACU and push it and any Allied divisions and armies from central Lemuria.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh.

  If he can win this massively violent, immensely bloody race to the sea, his armies will split Alliance forces on Lemuria in two. He’ll make defense untenable. He’ll win the great prize of Amasia for his nephew and himself in one, grand campaign.

  Boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

  The main attack will cross the southern desert, led by Gross Imperium. Four less famous divisions are on either side, in flank support, with a ninth in reserve. A ten division attack, five corps massed as a single army All supported at the center by five heavy brigades of special forces in armtraks, and a mass of hover grenadiers, there to add iron to the spearhead. It’s the largest offensive since the failure of the first assault waves during the initial Rikugun invasion of Amasia 15 months ago.

  Johann Oetkert feels his loins coil with ambition and throb with anticipation, begging for release into war. He waves his baobab arms in exaggerated swings as he gives his second order of the day: “All guns, fire!” Back at Battery Todt and all down the line, air compresses with a thousand concussions as big guns of ten of the division’s organic batteries roar white hot with hatred for the enemy. It’s the signal for a full scale barrage to begin. Over 16,200 all-caliber guns of eight more divisions open fire. They’re spread in attack line four-by-four on each flank of Gross Imperium. Only the guns of the mobile special forces brigades hold back.

  Pom pom pom, pom pom pom.

  Their job is to lead the ground assault. To support Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants of the first wave, with elite infantry in hover ATCs as close in armor support. Before the last shell of the softening up bombardment leaves its tube, lead elements of his ground force attack will be halfway to the first black wall, with streaking exhaust lights of shells flying in formation over their heads.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh.

  Shells crack! the desert sky with swift and heated upward passage, sonic boom after boom after boom echoing above the dark horizon on the eastern edge of the black. Exhaust lights arc up to 30,000 meters then plummet back down with rocket assisted acceleration and independent targeting.

  Boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

  The first silver shells are already flying free, rising almost to orbital altitudes then falling down to smack into half buried or hidden targets laced inside haze covered dunes. They’re clobbering several hundred thousand Blues and KRA holding this sector of Alliance First Trench. Behind them, more hundreds of thousands of enemy in New Beijing’s strategic reserve wait and worry, preparing to endure the unendurable.

  The wasteland the shells overfly on the way to their design-destiny ending is called by locals bahr bilā mā, “sea without water.” The barrage hails down upon distant targets, shaking megabarchan dunes, blistering Alliance walls and trenches in a suddenly brilliant and artificial dawn. Sand turns to molten glass, people and animals outside turn to puffs of white ash that’s instantly blown away. Tens of thousands of shells fly over Dark Territory each minute, long range guns firing up to 10 times each per minute. Now, more than 3,200 medium range and short range cannon join the pummeling, whiting the Alliance black wall and hinter areas with midday luminance. Carpets of novae made of heat and light and ill intention are lain over the sand, scorching and uprooting farside desert. At journey’s end, each plunging ball of light bursts wherever a smart shell chooses to die, on top of a best selected target or under desert floor, looking there for hiding Blues. Hits blossom into blinding plasma spheres of white or blue or red-orange death.

  A pitch, moonless sky fills with flash lightning brighter than any light source in the natural history of Amasia. Brighter than any light since the time of swirling primordial violence as the planet suffered eons of bombardment by falling rocks, since the slag and molten flow epoch when continental fragments finally collided to frame a slow cooling supercontinent. Plasma escapes containment chambers to displace great gulps of dirt and air. It tears apart exposed Buffalo armtraks and rips armor plating off hapless black walls. It turns men and women into gray puffs of instant cinder, then blows them into dust with artificial, howling wind.

  It’s radiant!

  It’s beautiful!

  It’s full of colors!

  It’s eye fucking glorious!

  Violence as verse, not prose!

  Plasma as poetry, in pitiless war!

  The poetry of war isn’t in the pity.

  The poetry of war is in all the hate.

  Thunder peels out of cracks torn in the night sky itself by searing plasma. It roils over a strobe illuminated landscape, louder than the volcanos halfway across the Okeanos. Louder than any sound heard by any living creature since AI nanny bots descended with roaring rocket brakes, demigods come from parsecs away to seed a world in their makers’ image. Or was it their own? Is this what they wanted?

  Barroom, barroom, barroom!

  It’s not just the sights, all the colors and bright light.
The genius and brilliance of it all, of the artillery and rockets and falling plasma. There’s music in the sound of war, too. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? Murder is played in the dark on a thin fife or snare drum, but death and destruction on this scale turns night to day and murder into a major symphony! Listen! Another volley! And another!

  Pom pom pom, pom pom pom.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh.

  Boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

  Towering sahel baobabs go up in flame. Boiling saps screech like screaming medieval crones clad in blackened bark, burned alive at woody stakes of their own form and essence. The immense trees hiss and groan, beseeching god or the devil for mercy but hearing no reply except the shells. Powdery fruits come plunging down, burning velvety gourds that cascade to the desert floor. They thud onto the glassy sand like catapult tar balls landing in an ancient siege, exploding in showers of big black seeds and steaming ejaculations of tart cream and pulp.

  Up from the brobdingnagian din, in all directions fly terrified, screeching carrion collectors and screaming birds of prey: gold eagles, lappet faced vultures, whole flocks of panicked cactus wrens. They all disappear into gray puff shadows as the heat and concussive waves arrive. Not one feather falls back. Every living creature runs for cover that’s being stripped away, or digs frantically into the sides of megabarchan dunes, seeking entry into ancient sand inside rock layer crevasses. They tear off claws and break teeth and talon in their frenzies. Anything to escape the exploding mini suns. Caracals snarl and hunch in fear, or run the wadis wailing in terror but not escape. Vipers and sidewinders, blacktailed jackrabbits, fennec foxes, meerkats, kangaroo rats, millions of rodents, hordes of sonoran toads, all mobile life in the target zone tries to burrow into its eolian deposits. Most are too large or too slow. They leave only shadows in sand turned to glass. In a century or two, if peace returns to Orion, jewelers will cut and sell “Amasian death glass.” They won’t be able to command a high price, however. There’s so much of it.

  Sixty klics out a pack of coywolves howl and lope, running in demented circles as night changes into sudden, unexpected and brilliant day along the western borderland of dunes and wadis and walls. They’re out of range of the heat, but the light and sound drive some mad. They turn on the others inside the insanity of a world inside out, biting and yapping and howling. Out to 100 klics away from the thudding shells, loose sand bounces and cascades into each crevice and bunker it finds, seeking rest like disturbed water seeks its level. Small pebbles jar free to skitter across obsidian bottoms of old craters. On the other side of the Yue ming, along the Rikugun black wall, there is no artificial shell dawn. This red morning, men watch artificial suns rise in the west before the Amasian sun rises in the east behind them. But look east, and you will see a sky streaking with 100,000 lights.

  With disappearing tails, a million shrews and tan mice vanish below ground. Slithering vipers, from red to sickly pale to black, flicker and wind and are gone. Men and women run behind, panic racing to the deepest bunkers and subterranean caverns, trying to get below any layered rock when they realize they can’t reach prepared positions saved for them by thick ceramic shielding. Those caught too far out duck behind any rocky or armored niche; or drop into any hole or trench they can reach, curling instinctively and dying there in fetal position. Some slide to the bottom of the nearest crater and ball up, whimpering like a toddler. Others howl and run in circles like the mad coywolves, until a plasma blossom finds them too, and converts whatever they were or ever will be to blowing ash in a sudden, desert whirlwind. Behind the broken black walls and long, exposed wadis, no man or woman or bird or rat survives, nor lowly worm calling out to a Lumbricus God.

  A thick layer of surface sand ripples into moving sheets of gooey, golden glass that flow stickily down flattened dunes, pooling into molten lakes at the bottoms of large craters and lethal puddles in smaller ones. Rolling sheets of fast moving glass engulf ruins, encasing scalded bones of dead armtraks and wrecked trench works. Liquid glass captures screaming fighters inside hardening silicate globes, a man’s or woman’s last moment of life and pain and final scream trapped in clear, golden sarcophagi. They’ll cool and harden later, lying atop the desert like huge, ancient insects locked in Triassic amber, or quickly buried under the surface by the next round of incoming shells and missiles. They’ll be the most prized of all Amasian death glass, illegal but kept anyway in secret private collections.

  Fighters trapped outside the killing zone, but close enough for fear, fall to their knees or bellies, hands held uselessly over helmets in an instinctive effort to block the appalling noise and mute their fear. No one hears them, no one aids them, as they scream into coms systems totally overwhelmed by light and heat and sound.

  “Ayeeeee!”

  “Gods preserve us!”

  “Mama! Mama!”

  Eeeyoh, eeyoh, eeyoh.

  Blasts are ricocheting and moving, seemingly getting closer. Now they’re behind the nearest line of dunes, that offer no protection at all. They are getting closer. Someone is marching the barrage this way! Right over our position!

  “The guns are retargeting!”

  “Get inside! Quickly! Run!”

  Boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

  Too late. It’s too late for that. White puffs of ash shatter with concussive waves of shells plunging themselves with happy AI fulfilment into the next target, and the next, and the next. Brilliant flashes become showering plasma that screams to all below that they’re about to die inside a mini sun. Strikes range from 500 meter airbursts to zero altitude groundbursts that throw up black mushrooms of sand and broken wall. Sky blossoms burst white or red or green over the heads of huddling infantry. Whole companies are caught out and killed in the open, out making quiet morning ablutions or breakfasting or languidly pissing yellow over the parapet.

  Pom pom pom, pom pom pom.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh, whoosh whoosh whoosh.

  Boom boom boom, boom boom boom.

  Ground level blasts sear blockhouses and melt shut the tops of trenches. Penetrator missiles, called ‘collapsers,’ wait to explode until they burrow below 50 or 100 meters into chalk bedrock. They make deep cavities, collapsing all above, burying bunkhouses and pipes, mangling machines and men who were sitting on shitters that are now inside falling caves of rock and groundwater steam. Follow on shells tunnel like mad moles, branching out from the first penetrator holes and pits made by the first happy suiciders, looking for more buried barracks and supply depots, or exploding as they fall into hidden armories, surgeries and bedrock kitchens.

  On both sides of the black, men and women not under the shell fall shudder in relief that the terrible bombardment isn’t pounding them. Most are blank to far off suffering, living out the fact that human empathy has a range of about half a klic. Some are not so indifferent. A few even fill with pity for helpless fellow sufferers, regardless of what color utes they’re wearing or which side of Dark Territory they defend. But not many, because most of that type doesn’t last very long out here in the black. They change fast, harden toward an enemy’s death or die themselves, even faster. Only a few move in a different direction, from the usual rookie faux hardness to a true veteran understanding of the universality of suffering.

  “Gods help anyone who’s lying under that.” He’s veteran Rikugun, a forward artillery observer who’s watching General Oetkert’s softening up bombardment through a trench periscope. It has heavy luminescence filters. His job is to report back precise hits and call in adjusted fire-to-grid patterns as more shells fall.

  “What the fuck do you mean?” a frosh fighter asks indignantly.

  “He means it could be us tomorrow,” adds a third man, trying to fend off a fight.

  “Not if we kill them all first,” shouts a fourth man, also new to the black.

  “They’re squids! They should all burn and die!” proclaims a fifth. He just got here from Kolno Barracks. This is the first bombardment he�
��s ever seen. He has a hard on, watching the enemy’s side of the black turn brilliant white.

  “We’ve all got blood on our hands,” a friend of the first man quietly observes.

  The frosh whirls on the doubters. “Watch your mouths. I can report you two!”

  “Shut up, kid. Just do your own job. Keep that godsdamn radio open or you’ll be on report. I mean it. Watch, listen, learn. And shut the fuck up!”