Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  “Maybe granny fucked a pikey, before she pushed your dad out.”

  “That’s a lie! Granddad was Second Caste! He has a certificate!”

  “He’d better have, or that fine estate Rikugun gave you on liberated Caliban…”

  “What about it?”

  “It’ll be forfeit to the Purity boys.”

  “He’s right, I heard they’ve been accumulating estates they confiscate as soon as they decertify High Caste families as not truly Pure.”

  “Shit! They can do that to us?”

  “You’ll lose your commission, too, shōsa. So you’d best hope your old granny never fooled around with the help.”

  ***

  Leyla decides it’s time for blunt advice. She wants all her girls to hear it, but focuses on one above all. “Gochō Shipcka,” she calls loud enough that all Three Company hears her, letting her invocation travel also over the company link.

  “Yes captain?”

  “You tell your squad to shoot anything inside DT or on their black wall that moves a finger. Don’t hesitate to kill every squid you see, or you’re dead.”

  “Understood captain.”

  “You kill ‘em all, you hear me? No prisoners.”

  “Yes sir!” Female officers are so new in the military that no allowance is made to employ a non-male pronoun when speaking to a woman who’s superior in rank. Probably never will be, either. This is Rikugun after all. Not the ACU or KRA.

  “You remember: everyone over there is the worst drecksau there ever was.”

  “Yes sir! They’re all drecksau sir.” Tedi never heard that farmer’s curse before signing up with Rikugun. She sure hears it a lot now. She has been called “shit pig” quite a few times herself. Yet so common a vulgarity strikes her as odd coming from her most uncommon and admired captain. It looks and sounds ugly on her perfect lips.

  “You and your girls kill ‘em all and you will come out of this fine, with your squad alive and intact. You hear that Three Company? Kill ‘em all. Long live the Women’s Combat Brigade!”

  Leyla glances for a last time at Tedi. Any second now the Women’s Combat Brigade is going 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 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 flying fuck 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, aiming to please their officers, impress their squad mates, display courage to all. Or so they think. They’re actually eager to prove something to themselves about themselves. In their first attack they’ll be ferocious because, unlike more weary and wary veterans, they don’t yet understand that anyone can die and that if you’re in combat often 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 alert, each girl has the same thought at the same moment. ‘The barrage is over. It’s time!’

  They startle as one, as 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.

  The 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 WC
B left flank. Two more on the right flank. ‘Here comes the order!’

  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 bound rate via her HUD link, slowing everyone to four meter leaps, adding an irregular glide 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 Year One of the war. Tedi eye checks left and right, then again on her HUD. She’s glad to see other squads are 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 heavy predawn bombardment. It sags beneath Tedi’s boots, sucking at her 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 girls start to die all around her.

  Spotted over the surface sand are exquisitely beautiful blossoms of olive green moldavite, looking like stony coral or lost anemones abandoned on a sand brown beach. Formed as splatters of ejecta melt by the impacts of plasma shells in some earlier bombardment, cooling while airborne, they fell back to lie still, a few hard spines poking upward while others prick and bleed the desert’s face. Thousands of hard glass anemones jut up from the low tide seabed of the crater field, spread by receding artillery. ‘Ours or theirs? Who knows? Who cares?’ They’re violent afterbirth from battles past, long forgotten fights for this same stretch of endless, useless, waterless beach. They’re brilliant green and translucent in reflected light from arcing flares. But bejeweled death waits in their lethal spikes, ready to sting and poison or cut apart anyone who dares cross over their mates and bedding field.

  ‘How beautiful! How perfectly green! It’s an omen!’ Maybe, Tedi. Yeah sure, if that’s what you want them to be. Or maybe they’re more like caltrops strewn over some ancient battlefield to hobble hooves and feet of a charge of heavy horse and armored footmen? They lie just like a child’s jumping jacks, always landing with one iron spike pointing up, no matter how carelessly they’re tossed or strewn. But you might be right. Maybe they’re a glorious, green omen of Pyotr’s victory?

  A scream tears the night air, to Tedi’s left. A girl is down, glass caltrop jutting out the top of her boot, which is pierced clean through. Or maybe she was stung by an ancient sea anemone? It doesn’t really matter anymore, not to her or Tedi. She falls badly, awkwardly and unevenly. As she lands, another moldavite shard cuts her throat halfway through to her spine. That’s all Tedi sees before her next glide carries her forward, away from the red greased, green jewels.

  Half a klic on, 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 deflating 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 out releases 20 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 lethal but not confident, 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 my 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, most dangerous moment of her life? What’s wrong with her? She’s only seventeen! With a brain so young and empty, why can’t she remember everything? Yeah, I know. ‘Cause the mind is just quirky like that. It can’t recall details afterward, especially of adrenal soaked experience. Can’t remember leaping over sticky, cooling glass with a WCB girl right behind who’s sliced down at the legs, blown apart by a rapido blue plasma ball. That one was meant for you, Tedi. But it missed you, by about 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 wearing 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, then falls straight down, faceless. Tedi doesn’t wait to see the body land. She’s suddenly in too much danger herself. A scared squid stands up and shoots right at her from pointblank range, but misses. Tedi t
akes 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 collapses to the sand, 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 apart, turning into a sudden rainbow of multicolored plasma as its miniature reactor, no bigger than a walnut, cracks open its thin nitrobon and ceramic shields and loses 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.