Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

Most dangerous are the tan colored snakes that come out only at night to form rolling snake balls, from which issue more little tan snakes four weeks later. They attack anyone who tries to search or move or boobytrap the flesh piles they claim. Locals call these sandal colored vipers “ghouls,” from their habit of nesting only in carrion of dead animals, and now in dead Rikugun and Alliance. Although Tedi doesn’t know it, as she swells with too righteous anger, the same callous scene of disrespected dead repeats between Rikugun First and Second Trenches. Bodies on her side of the Yue ming lie in blackened crumples streaked with hues of fading blue, beige, and tawny utes. They, too, are nested in by thousands of vipers. It’s why this whole section of the black is called by both sides “Ghoul Snakes City.”

  Tedi is suddenly hurled backward inside the cage. Her helmet thuds against a top bar, straps around her shoulders dig into her as the bimotor takes crazy evasive action. She hears its small guns rat-at-tat-at-tat, hears also the whoosh! whoosh! of effulgent flares leaving the undercarriage. She looks out a side scuttle to see a bimotor flying in wedge formation with hers and four more transports. It explodes into a plunging, blazing orange ball. A starstreak missile has ignored all frantic shooting flares, evaded all cones of railgun pellet fire, to strike home in an ecstasy of death. The floundering, mortally wounded bimotor starts to fall out of the sky, engulfed in arson. Smaller balls of wildfire with odd, flailing, black-green stick figure centers fall from the mortally stricken craft. Tedi feels a surge of nausea as she watches the little fireballs smack into the desert floor, and extinguish. Unless Rikugun wins today and recovers all its dead, those girls will become fresh nests for ants and ghoul snakes and the-god’s-know-what foul indignities of Nature.

  Surviving WCB bimotors hold speed as they fly the maelstrom of explosions and roiling air, spewing hundreds of heat and light flares while shooting spreads of defensive ceramic pellets in wild sheets. More missiles whoosh past Tedi’s peripheral vision, seeking to penetrate and bring down more bimotors, or chasing uselessly after thermal flares the transport fleet shoots off in all directions. Until a wave of low flying Raptors and Jabos take out the distant starstreak launchers with long range Mach 30 dumb rockets and smaller, shorter range smart missiles.

  Tedi was right.

  It’s a damn rough ride.

  And here’s the second black wall.

  Leyla Celik leads Three Company from the front this time, leaping ahead from the lander and hard gliding straight toward the enemy’s Second Trench, looming half a klic away. Tedi watches her jump to the ground, landing like a big cat, a puma maybe, or a cheetah. The image makes her misremember an ancient verse from school, blending its lines with cheap boasts she picked up at Kolno Barracks from propaganda broadcasts of the Rikugun milneb. Both times in her short life seem so achingly long ago it doesn’t matter either way, or what’s the source.

  ‘Once more unto the breach, fair friends, once more!

  Close the black wall up with stacks of Calmari dead.

  When the blast of war blows as now, in fairest ears,

  Grün womanhood imitates the action of the tigress!

  Stiffens all her sinews, summons her to hot blood.

  Disguises fairer nature with hard favored rage!’

  Tedi leaps out next, at the head of her squad. Leyla is out of sight, somewhere up ahead. Tedi follows, and reaches the black wall with no pity in her heart. Her head is still full of visions of burning girls falling out of the sky. She’s swollen with righteous rage, filled with fresh hate over lost comrades in the dawn fight, and too long neglected dead in the desert. Men she never knew, but who also wore green utes like hers. Then she’s into a fresh fight, shooting and clubbing Blues defending broken bits of wall. With quick maser shots she cuts down two defenders trying to surrender, stabbing one in the throat to be sure he’s dead. She yells to her squad.

  “No prisoners! I’ll shoot any girl who shows pity! I’ll shoot any girl in this squad who takes prisoners! Kill the squids! Kill them all!”

  War is not making Tedi more tender. Its hardening and crueling souls in all the WCB. Who could have expected this? Is this the nature of war, to defile and pervert our nature? Or does it just reveal our true nature? Men and women alike. Tedi’s hatred grows with each fresh kill she makes, while killing becomes easier when it’s lubricated by hate. It’s happening on the other side, too. Blue women really hate Tedi and all her bitch WCB friends. No prisoners are taken. No quarter is offered by Gross Imperium or accepted by Enthusiastics of Argos 7th Assault. This is mortal combat. War without mercy. A fight to the death. It’s not about lost star systems or pride of empires or peoples anymore, if it ever was. It’s about the hate, raging in the here and now. It’s about killing and dying, here and now.

  Male and female fighters of Gross Imperium break through Second Trench, but with far more difficulty than they breeched First. Then it all becomes a slaughter. More casualties are taken and inflicted on both sides. More hate and murder leaks into the Thousand Worlds. More horribly wounded youths cry out in vain, and die for other people’s vanity. More little atrocities are made in red, splattering rage.

  Never recorded.

  Never admitted.

  Never forgiven.

  The next man Tedi kills she does up close and intimate, looking into his face. He blanches, and his eyes roll all the way over as she plunges her leaf shaped blade deep into his gut. Then again, and again. Snick … snick, snick. It makes a slapping, sluicing, wet noise as it slides out the last time and he topples down.

  Tedi laughs as she remounts the waiting troop carrier that meets WCB on the far side of Alliance Second Trench, ready to make the run to Third. She wipes off a dark smear of dead man’s blood from her knife, using her standing cage strap like a razor strop. ‘Once more unto the transports, my squad! Blast out the name of War! Loudly and longingly!’ She knows now why they told her at Kolno that “war is a brain spattering, windpipe slitting art.” They didn’t say that they stole the brutal line from an ancient poet, who meant something quite different by it. She wouldn’t care. She’s among the very best of Pyotr’s chosen cutthroats now.

  ***

  It’s 175 klics to Third Trench. The way looks open to Tedi, but in fact Shōshō Oetkert’s thrust is reaching a trench too far. On the flanks of Gross Imperium he’s faltering as a stiff planned advance meets stiffening resistance. Third Trench is sited beyond counterbattery range or sky cover, beyond even the mobile artillery. In vanity and lust for battle honors, overeager commanders of the heavy armored divisions are outrunning everything, roaring past long range artillery support, the mobile guns, the trailing leg infantry. All are left behind by the racing armtraks.

  ACU Skyforce strains to intervene, held back by Lian Sòng like a leashed lion. As the advance crests toward Third Trench, Oetkert’s brutally patient opponent in New Beijing finally releases flocks of gold winged skycraft, cutting edge of a ferocious counterattack by two of seven reserve ARGs. Her sacrifice of the static units in First Trench and Second Trench that let Oetkert’s lead divisions penetrate this deeply now pays off. Her timing is perfection.

  Jaguars overfly mobile ground units rushing up behind Argos 7th to stiffen its hold on Third Trench, even as Nadine Yupanqui’s horde of Enthusiastics also hurl themselves into a perfectly timed counterattack. Sòng’s golden birds swoop over the smoking battlefield at 500 meters height or less. They strafe and bomb and tear apart Gross Imperium’s lead armtraks, spilling howling hover grenadiers by the thousands onto the late afternoon sand. Black beetles and black widow spiders look anxiously to see if ghouls or saharan ant colonies have spotted the crumpled nests, then quickly burrow into bleeding flesh and under broken bones.

  On one sweep, a triad of cocky Jaguar pilots disdain to use their main weapons. The trio accelerate, dropping supersonic wakes onto an exposed and scattering armored platoon. Triple booms fall upon the desert, rippling sand and tossing nine machines skyward like cows caught in a twister-for-the-ages. Drivers, loader
s and gunners go insensible inside the tumbling tanks. Ground units finish the job after the machines fall back to the desert, dropping gas grenades through holed armor or into gasping air vents partly opened by the impact with Amasia’s mass.

  The screaming sound of diving, strafing Jaguars terrifies the trapped mammut crews, struggling and sweating upside down at the broken controls of overturned Mastodons and Mammoths. There’s no escaping these birds of prey as they hunt the exposed desert floor, like hawks swooping for mice. They’re followed in, low and hard, by waves of strumping and strafing Yellowjackets. The superfast helos attack exposed infantry before it arrives at Third Trench in heavy transports.

  Anti-skycraft defense opens up, filling the lower half of the sky with streaking short range missiles and rising cones of shredder. Clouds of pellets reach for the Jaguars and Yellowjackets. Black puffs appear wherever a missile or spreading disk hits home and brings down a golden hawk. But only the smaller, mobile units are in range, and there aren’t enough of them to cover all armor and infantry and win the vicious fight for air space above the battle. There never are anymore, not on offense anyway. Not when Rikugun is on this side of Dark Territory. RIK has lost its initial advantage of strategic surprise, now it’s losing the struggle of war material. A deadly stalemate continues that neither side knows how to overcome.

  General Oetkert orders thirty squadrons of Raptors into the fight against the ‘Goldies.’ They tear down from high holding patterns to intercept the low flying, committed Jaguars. As manned fighters draw even with hammering gold skycraft they’re pounced by hypersonic robo fighters, a swarm of angry AI Wasps buzzing from suborbital CAP nests high above the walled cities of the west coast. A swirl of mangy curs quickly mars the day sky in snarling dogfights, loosing sky-to-sky missiles, sending shattered frames flying apart. Until all the Raptors turn and flee.

  Suddenly exposed ground crews leap out and down from armtraks and mobile gun platforms as gold hued skycraft curve and claw and bite armor with seekers, strafing madly running infantry with heavy underside rockets and rapidos. They leave behind upended, burning, smoking ruins of Oetkert martial vanity. All the war games played out so very differently on the pre-assault simulators inside Main HQ on Kestino, again on sophisticated strategy holos in Onworld HQ in Xiamen. They always left out the human element in control on the other side of the black. Badly underestimated Generals Lian Sòng and Nadine Yupanqui, in part because they’re women. How can a mere woman best an Oetkert or defeat Rikugun?

  They ignored a clever and highly adaptable opponent in Lian Sòng. Neglected tough Nadine Yupanqui and her hardened Enthusiastics, who are no longer the frightened and defeated division that fled from Gross Imperium on Glarus, and was beaten and butchered twice more on Oberon and the Caliban moons. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Any enemy, let alone one as prepared and determined as this one. Oetkert’s plan was always too tight assed and narrow margined. And so his master breakthrough fails. Defense-in-layered-depth is too strong to overcome by blunt assault. Not with exposed armtraks broken by armor killing Yellowjackets and waves of diving, strafing ‘Goldies.’ Not when a sudden counterbarrage of concealed artillery wipes out entire regiments of first rate RIK leg infantry, exposed in open desert in front of Third Trench. Not when Alliance shells fall out of the afternoon sky with exquisite accuracy. Not when the massed armored divisions and heavy infantry of two full Blue ARGs counterattack into the tattered front edge of Oetkert’s faltering, overextended assault waves.

  Yupanqui’s counterattack is perfectly timed to halt enemy momentum. Only as Gross Imperium stalls does she release the Enthusiastics from strict defense to attack their old foe from Glarus and Caliban’s moons. They yell their hate as they chase demoralized, familiar enemies back to Alliance Second then through First, then all the way back across Dark Territory to breach RIK First. Susannah Page is right there, combat gliding with the wildest fighters, howling inchoate sounds, shooting and killing without mercy in an orgy of personal red revenge. A cherub faced, schoolgirl type is right beside her, kabar already in her hand and red wet. A few klics away, Ava Mack rises yelling from a forward jump off slit to join the counterattack, her stutter disappearing in an adrenal rush. Jedidiah Haig stumbles after her, his mousey brown eyes full of fear, his HUD not coded properly and not receiving FFI threat warnings. He shoots wildly, and nearly hits Ava in the back. Lee Jin is in the next system, down the Giraffe’s Neck bohr road, waiting with a fleet of hospital ships for a heavy escort screen to move to The Goddess or The Old Man in intersecting orbit above Amasia. Second Lieutenant Joachim Suri and the sadsack 22nd Marine are en route from the “Moon of Misfit Marines.” They miss this fight, but their time will come when that fool Oetkert tries the exact thing all over again, in the more massive Second Shaka Offensive of Year Three.

  Sauropods and Buffalos, the biggest Alliance armtraks that there are, encircle floundering, confused Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants. Taut, tense fighters from Argos bay for ‘Todt’ blood as they crew the cabs and mounted guns. Both sides will call this armored fight to the death the Battle of the Giants. No quarter is asked or offered, so that the slaughter of men inside machines is immense. In minutes a metal boned graveyard starts to take shape. Not designed but chaotic, irregular, smoking piles of metal, ceramics and circuitry burning orange-yellow atop sand wherever one of the great beast dies. Also dying by bushels are Allied armored infantry and RIK hover grenadiers. Only a few unconscious wounded are taken prisoner. Hauled roughly to the rear, they’re more roughly handled in ACU interrogation rooms at a top secret base New Beijing MI runs just outside the city.

  Tedi falls back with stunned survivors of first combat by the brand new WCB, bloodless maidens of battle no more. So does the rest of shaken Gross Imperium, its regular all-male brigades running fast right beside the women. Rapido tracers show Tedi the way as night begins its descent over the western edge of the black. She ducks and covers and runs with her squad. She loses three more girls to tapas rounds in a helter-skelter flight and fighting. She helps a wounded male into the nearest transport hover, readying to flee over the anonymous desert to the safety of RIK First Trench. Tapas rounds skip and tattoo the ground all around, sending little fireballs up to head height. Tedi hates tapas.

  As she steps inside the hover she hears a deep rumble of an exploding, expiring Mastodon somewhere close. It’s rammed by a Buffalo, then clambered over by a whole platoon of Blue infantry who pour maser fire and liquid flames into every metallic orifice of the impaled beast, dropping in chemical poisons to make sure. Next she hears a low thrum, thrum as the hover’s acoustic drive kicks in and it strains to lift off inside a halo of hard blowing sand. She thinks she hears a fading, female scream. Somewhere out there. “Has anyone seen Captain Celik?” she asks urgently? No one has, not since the Jaguars came to strafe and bomb. Not since Leyla gave Three Company the retreat order, before she disappeared from view inside a swirl of smoke and fire that came in low from a filthy Yellowjacket helo.

  Jaguars snarl and claw at Jabos overhead as AI Wasps make protective circles over 300,000 swarming, counterattacking, vengeful Blues. Armtraks and glide troops from two local Amasian divisions, Jing (“Whale”) and Ju (“Bamboo”), make mass murder among Rikugun infantry from the flank divisions falling back on either side of Gross Imperium. Regular RIK divisions don’t have as much air transport as the privileged Todts, and lose most of what they have to Alliance sky defenses and skycraft. They’re easy marks even for undertrained Amasian infantry spraying rapidos and masers into Rikugun infantry showing its back as it turns to retreat, then run. ACU armtraks don’t slow or stop to “grind” their enemy like Rikugun tanks did. They charge right over them, crushing and mashing screaming men and women under their churning treads.

  A dry wind shifts and sands of war move with it. Raging fighters in blue pursue through the night, retaking every centimeter of desert lost by day to Oetkert’s long planned offensive. Then they make a mistake, crossing
the Yue ming themselves in hot pursuit of fleeing enemy. Yupanqui’s counterattack falters as it comes into range of Oetkert’s heavy artillery and nears his forward arti and skycraft bases. A prince of the blood royale is being humiliated. He won’t stand for it. He orders a barrage into Dark Territory by every gun he has. Now it’s the turn of Enthusiastics to scatter for cover as hot plasma falls all around, fired so recklessly that plenty of Rikugun fighters die as well. Fighting washes back and forth over the two First Trenches and inside hotly contested Dark Territory for two days. Then everyone retreats to their original lines. All the generals are frustrated. Ordinary fighters on both sides know better what’s coming next. Weeks and months of patrolling and more bloody attrition, while everyone refits in preparation for the next big battle.

  Red faced, scraggle bearded, wine eyed King Yan sits out there in the middle of Dark Territory, judging the dead that Ox Head and Horse Face and daemons of the Yue ming bring him each hour, piling wounded souls around his knobbled feet. After he judges and condemns them all to dwell in Diyu, he sends them away in shuffling gray lines, tied with unbreakable hemp rope. The dead souls who cannot walk are piled on barges pushed with barbed poles from the banks, down the dark Ice River that flows up-and-down between the auroras, far below Dark Territory. It’s the great, hidden Kokytos. “Where does it lead?” the righteous dead ask. “Are you taking us to the end of all suffering in the Celestial City?” Ox Head and Horse Face and the daemons laugh. Only they know that Kokytos leads from the worldly City of Destruction down to the City of the Damned beneath it. And much worse.