by Kali Altsoba
Tedi sees RIK male engineers blowing apart pyramidal Dragon’s Teeth, made of white ceramic, ultrasteel, and superconcrete. They’re removing all natural and artificial obstacles for big mobile cannon and whole herds of mammut armtraks scheduled to follow the lead assault infantry. This is no mere trench raid, and the Blues now know it. The giveaway is the sheer size of the attack, and the fact that this is the third thrust into Alliance vitals Rikugun tries this week. Somewhere, an unknown someone on the Alliance side punches in a code and a string of big mines goes active all at once, killing troops on both sides as the last Blue infantry along the leading edge of the Yue ming struggle in hand-to-hand fighting with the fierce women in green. Sequential explosions flatten whole sections, killing everything inside the blast zones. To sacrifice its own people like that, Alliance HQ must have decided that Rikugun was breaking through.
Pitiable groaning of wounded enemies doesn’t evoke any mercy in ferocious women as they reach Alliance First Trench. Lust of battle at the sight of exposed squids drives a frenzy of cruel killing and merciless massacre. Tedi feels it, too, especially after seeing another girl that she knows erupt into flame. ‘Fucking tapas round. Filthy squids.’ A tapas is a nasty little incendiary with a penetration head that burns up a human body from the inside out. No one on either side likes them, though everybody uses them. It’s an unwritten law of the black that everyone will use a prisoner’s own tapas on anyone caught carrying the shitty little weapons. It’s a form of rough trench justice that everyone on all sides accepts and practices.
Tedi climbs up the Alliance black wall to kill a gunner startled by a little green ball of daemon fury that leaps at him out of the Yue ming. She shoots him down then seizes his heavy rapido, meaning to turn it and fire down the trench line. It’s built right into the parapet, facing out. She can’t spin it around on its mounting until one of the engineers helpfully blows away a chunk of the impeding rampart. She fires the rapido down 80 meters of a rightward zag. The pulsing blue bolts cut apart two running men. Both are dead before their bodies stop rolling.
She looks for a third target. She aims at a severely wounded boy sitting with his back against a slab of broken, inner wall. He’s crying for his mama, trembling hands holding back extruding guts. His fingers are dark red, clutching greasy, gray sausages. Her blue pulse ends him. His seared halves flop down and twitch briefly, like caught fish stranded and airless on the bottom of a boat. Tedi shouts with satisfaction at the skill of her shot and fires again, uselessly cooking a bit more of the steaming corpse. His name was Dan Tunku, from the 32nd New Meccans. He was a good kid. She’ll never know that. She doesn’t care.
Her second shot startles three cats from a hidden crevice. They’re here to hunt corpse rats, but they stopped when they found food that didn’t run: part of a dead man, jammed in a crack where the cats settled two days ago. Maybe a scout from a night patrol? Some other quickly forgotten man? Or a woman? On whose side? There’s no way to tell. One tabby is cooked alive with a maser before Tedi orders her squad to let the other two trench cats be. It isn’t her mercy that lets the cats leap and tear away, screeching over the ruins. She needs her girls to kill anything human found hiding or bleeding or crying in a crater, not waste time and attention on carrion cats. Fool shooting will also draw Blue fire down on their position.
As suddenly as it started, it’s over. All the shooting and violence and murder stops. An eerie quiet comes over panting, enraged, murderous girls. Their anger ebbs from flame to red embers. But there’s anger still. A cactus wren flies up to bossily tell off all the noisy, reckless humans. Its char, char, char call is raspy and harsh, like an armtrak that just won’t start. It shits on WCB policing the black. With the section of First Trench assigned to the WCB captured and cleared, Captain Leyla Celik calls transports down. Three Company is going on to Second Trench, 125 klics away. This red day is just beginning.
***
“The attack is proceeding to plan,” an aide-de-camp reports eagerly to Johann Oetkert, for once not forced to lie about his general’s success at making war. The smug royal is watching his grand attack progress. He monitors losses of men and machines but is far more interested in “the length and breadth of my advance” as it flows and expands over a holo map, showing as a bright orange line that reaches now to the other side of Dark Territory. His aide reports that casualties are at “acceptable levels,” that lead divisions spent only the lives and machines deemed necessary to breech the enemy’s first lines of black wall. The general has plenty left to attack Second Trench. And he hasn’t yet committed his reserves.
This is a defense-in-depth. Great depth. Oetkert will lay down a larger ante to cross the more heavily defended Second Trench, and pay a far higher price in lost men and machines to take Third. He should be deeply worried that any surviving breakthrough troops will face powerful Alliance armored and mobile reserves waiting to counterattack from the deep strategic rear. But he isn’t. For the moment, his rolling armtraks and hard running infantry are free of the damned mines that nearly stopped them as they moved over DT. Most enemy guns that survived his initial bombardment are tied down in ongoing counterbattery exchanges with his deep stationary batteries, far to the rear of Rikugun Third. Meanwhile, his biggest mobile guns, rolling heavies and mediums, are shifting forward to engage the next level of ACU defenses. Over the edge of doom.
‘Even the new Women’s Brigade is keeping pace with my attack schedule.’ The progress by the women pleases him, because it doesn’t delay him. Otherwise, he doesn’t care. Now is the moment to show his mettle. He’ll cross all Gross Imperium over the open space that leis between Alliance First and Second Trenches, before the enemy’s artillery retargets. Before brilliant plasma balls fall once again, scorching and glassing the desolate wasteland men have made of this once vibrant desert. Before white fire and death falls onto his advance to churn and chop his best divisions into charred vestiges of a fighting force. He’s confident as he releases hosts of assault hover carriers to pick up advance infantry and carry it forward. He’s always confident.
An orange line starts to move.
Ghouls
Tedi looks up to see short haul transport hovers charging down, coming in low and fast to collect the women of WCB. They emerge as shadows out of an orange-red, streaky light that’s breaking the sky behind her. It’s a natural dawn in the east, not false illumination of the west by the artificial suns hurled by Rikugun cannon across Dark Territory, thence down onto the enemy lines. The streaks reach with long grasping fingers into blackness, a new day’s ghastly, incandescent monster clawing at then climbing the broken wall of night. Tedi looks away, afraid to see a horrible visage peer into the Yue ming, where such terrible things are happening.
She has made her very first kill, led her first assault, won her first personal and company victories. She’s not a combat virgin anymore. None of the women of the WCB are. They’re all killers now. Rigid bodies lie everywhere as Tedi ushers her squad toward the descending acoustic hovers. Most dead are fresh, red and wet from this morning’s attack. Some are cold and gray, lingering from older fights. Forgotten corpses from an old raid maybe? They lie stiff beside wrecked weapons and broken machines. Time means nothing to any of them now. Dead is dead..
A staggering Mastodon, hit earlier by a shoulder rocket, explodes as it strikes a camouflaged ‘floating’ mine attached to the top of one of the Dragon’s Teeth, and made to look almost like a dental crown. It’s crew called the dead Mastodon ‘Besotten Jenny’ because it broke down all the time, like a girl back home the lead gunner remembered who cried every day for no reason at all. Her real name was Paolina Della Bordella, but that was such a mouthful all the girls in her high school called her “Jenny.” A second armtrak they call ‘Blue Buster.’ But it never makes it across Dark Territory. This tank squad isn’t very good at naming its machines.
Or protecting them. Besotten Jenny comes apart like a collapsing trailer in a tornado. As it rolls to a final stop, it sheds sheets of armor
and softly plops three burned and mangled crew below and behind it, like big mammut turds. Severed bot guns sputter electric blue sparks, their slaved AIs asking plaintively for orders as they fail and fall. Secondary and tertiary explosions cascade from the wreckage. Then everything goes to hell. One fusion drive containment collapses and a white plasma shell blows at the same time. Double detonations take out a nearby ATC and white the twenty grenadiers it carries. Two of Tedi’s girls fly up, spinning like unwanted and thrown away dolls. Body parts rain down around Tedi’s squad with thuds! and thumps! Three girls heave and wretch as they watch Jenny explode.
Not all the bodies Tedi sees lying on the ground are unmoving. She’s startled to see two ‘dead’ Blues suddenly jump up and sprint toward a shallow hole thirty paces off, running wildly from more approaching armtraks. They were inside an abandoned ACU Observation Post that wasn’t properly checked by a careless 4th Squad leader. The corporal who failed to police her area will pay for the mistake later, in a Brigade punishment box that makes the Dog House look humane.
Mammoths with silver whisker markings and spandaus bristling from all sides move past the ruined Mastodon. One monster curls sharply around the rough edge of a crater to reach the small dugout where the two 7th Assault Division men have run to hide. It’s the last pitiful refuge of two conscript boys from Argos. They were playing dead while WCB passed over their OP in wrath, but panicked when they heard the armtraks. They leaped and ran, guaranteeing that now they’ll die.
A Mammoth brakes right on top of the shallow dugout-hideout, which used to be the backend of a now open, revealed and crumbling OP. It spins thrice in place on one track, the other unmoving. Out of the ground come horrible screams. Then they suddenly stop. Tankers call it “grinding.” They like to do it, to crush enemy infantry like this. Gives male drivers a hard on. The women of WCB? There’s not a single shred of compassion or pity inside the driver’s cab. At least she’s fast and effective, cruelly satisfied to bring rough justice with steel treads for girls these two killed by calling mortars into the advance. Outside, she hears women cheer.
All Tedi can think about at the moment is a fabled giant from a child’s tale her mother used to read to her when she was a little girl, with long blond pigtails, back on Daegu. The old quatrain comes to her unbidden, but in her mother’s faux frightening bedtime voice. It’s twisted into more immediate meaning by hidden daemons of the Yue ming, who are already licking at the red paste.
“Fa fe fi fo fum!
I smell blood of an Argos man.
Be he alive or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
She laughs out loud.
She’s turning hard.
She’s turning cruel.
Leyla throws Tedi a quick, hard look from behind. This is not what she wants for Tedi. Then she remembers that she gave the order: “You kill ‘em all.” Now Tedi’s squad, the whole of Three Company, is cheering the grinding by a cat’s whiskered armtrak. It happened in an hour. War doesn’t make men tender. Or women either.
It’s exactly what most of the Yue ming daemons want. Ox Head brays. Horse Face whinnies. King Yan scowls over his long beard, bulging eyes glare in a wine dark face. Then he starts to judge the incoming dead from the new attack, one-by-one he condemns them all. He doesn’t care if they come to him in Blue or Green, only that they’re all bathed in wet crimson. The gray, sunken dome of Youdu the Dark Capital lies beneath the black walled Yue ming. It’s bathed in outer darkness, but a small flicker of torchlight can be seen when the slate colored Gates open to receive new populations of dead heading inside, weaving through the last vestiges and whispers of the Region of Darkness, of Diyu, realm of the Yellow Springs. The light seeks to escape as each soul passes in, and is marked for eternal bondage. Might a few hope to return to the worlds of suffering one day, reincarnated from the south direction by Yamarāja, the first mortal to die? He has not escaped yet, but he plots against King Yan, aspiring to rule the departed in his stead, to be the Lord of Pitrs above ground as well as below. War is come to all Orion. Even the daemons and rival lords of the underground plot to wage it against each other.
Mammoths and Elephants race through the bloody paste, foul remnant of two youths churned by merciless metal tracks. The armtraks are the leading wedge of huge armored formations now pouring through ten holes knocked in Alliance First Trench, over 142 klics of frontage of the nine division Shaka Offensive. Oetkert’s plan is on time, on target, and on the way to breaching Alliance Second Trench. Files of armored beasts head for gaps in the line of broken Dragon’s Teeth, combat engineers clearing traps and obstacles, armor rolling past sneaky animate mines that nest in silent fields until rolled over. A path cut by Battery Todt’s shelling is widened with kinetic explosives by on-the-spot engineers. Once through the gaps the armtraks leave infantry behind, rising on acoustic levitation to race to Second, then Third Trench. It’s about speed now. HQs can see that in their holomaps. Who will get into position first, Oetkert’s heavy armor or Sòng’s mobile support?
Flying armored machines skim 8-10 meters above the desert floor, avoiding low dunes and larger bits of old war wreckage. But not flying so high as to invite missile strikes from hidden rocket batteries or mortar outposts. Hover grenadiers scoot alongside in tight flocks of sleek ATCs. Leg infantry can’t keep pace. They must wait for slower assault hovers, screeching into hard landings to collect them. Tedi leads survivors of her squad onto one of the bulky troops transports. As her girls run past the crushed OP most don’t dare to look into the bloody pit, its sides coated in white fat and red grease. The few who do lose their breakfast over the dugout lip. Or more stupidly, into their closed helmets.
Bimotors and other close assault vehicles are flying the gap between First and Second Trench, carrying breakthrough WCB and other infantry to the other side of the breached, first black wall. Tedi counts her squad: there are two dead and two wounded girls; one badly, the other one still walking, ready and game to fight. Most of Three Company and the rest of WCB’s infantry are already flying toward the second squid line. Well before they get there, they’ll go to ground, returning to glide mode to make the final approach. They’ll leap across low sand on acoustic boots, not fly in fat target ships straight into a much better defended Second line.
“Buckle up, girls. This is sure to get real bumpy.” Tedi’s less excitable now than in those first minutes, so long ago, when she crouched under the rampart not knowing how she would fare in first combat, how her girls or the WCB would do. She’s calmer, crueler, more grim. She watches her girls strap into a standing cage, one of eight down each side of the fat interior of the hover. It fills quickly with more laggard girls. All look tougher than before. All are calmer, crueler, grimmer. The troopship itself is lightly armored, built for speed in support of leading armor and hover grenadiers. It’s not an attack craft. It has only minimal defensive guns. Captain Leyla Celik jumps into the last cage space, right beside the pilot’s closed cab. But she doesn’t strap herself in. She just hangs there from the overhead strap, one long athletic leg dangling out an open door. Tedi thinks that, in contrast to the fat hover, she looks magnificently sleek, fast and lethal. Like a velociraptor.
The bimotors skim low over a slightly lesser waste than the heavily churned klics of Dark Territory between the two First Trenches. Here, behind the Alliance line, the desert has taken a lesser pounding and there’s much more of it. Yet this flat expanse, too, is cluttered and polluted with bent and broken artifice amidst its naturally clean dunes and shallow, sandy vales. Tedi sees scorched and half buried armtraks. Also many crashed ATCs with markings from both sides. A vast detritus of hate is abandoned to ghoul snakes, beetles and geckos. OPs hit in the opening bombardment a few hours ago are all gaped open, exposed. Some smoking black or gray in slower burns, others still engulfed in crackling, purple-orange chemical flames. Brackish smokes rise high overhead blasted blockhouses and once buried bunkers. Fires and multicolored smokes are everyw
here, shifting the color of the lower sky from a brightening azure dawn to hazy yellow mixed with dirty gray.
‘What are those?’ On the desert floor she sees thousands of black-green dots she can’t identify. They’re scattered randomly amidst shiny dunes and flat vales and whole fields of windswept ripples in the sand. Finally, one whizzes by directly below her bimotor’s transparent armor floor. With a gasp, Tedi realizes the dots are patches where corpses wearing green utilities were left to rot, dry and shrivel. Left unburied by a callous, barbarous enemy. Left for the desert’s carrion eaters.
‘It’s foul! We would never do that!’ Thousands of Rikugun bodies in old, green utes lie desiccated, baked to black by weeks or months of sun radiating above the bahr bilā mā, the “sea without water.” They’ve been picked at by ravens, coyotes, vultures, gold eagles, and other heat tolerant dune scavengers. Tedi would be more upset if she could see them up close. They’re slithered into and nested, penetrated in unmentionable places by deadly red-white-black coral snakes and yellow-black kingsnakes. Ignored by hopping jackrabbits and shaggy crested roadrunners, they are pecked at and picked over by redeyed blackrails and warblers, quick little birds that dart in to find grubs and fat white maggots. Rikugun flesh is turned into moist nesting material for black scorpions and black widow spiders and blister beetles, and colonies of angry and aggressive saharan ants that drive away all other nesters.
