Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  ‘How eager our boys are to see action!’

  ‘The enemy should beware the 400th ID!’

  ‘I can’t wait until we get to the black!’

  Instead, they spend a week in a sprawling coastal camp where their greatest enemy is a dark swarm of ambassadors from a host of billions of bluebottle corpse flies, swollen with gluttony on the unburied dead of Lemuria. Then the 400th whistles thousands of klics in a sealed maglev to reach the edge of the central plain. All prewar routes are known to the Alliance and bombed out long ago. So they travel along one of the new, deep lines that crisscross securely beneath the hinter zone, silvery filaments in a giant but demented and buried spider’s web.

  The maglev was dug by the Badgers of Ash Division, then built up by Rikugun engineers over three years of hard work and harder war. All lines are at least 100 meters underground, some much more than that. All are heavily camouflaged and protected against Alliance skycraft by a thick rear area CAP of Rikugun fighters; and camoed, ground based missile and ack ack defenses. There are thousands of irregular yet connected spurs beneath eastern Lemuria. So many that Yuki’s cab, shooting through the maglev like a canister in some ancient pneumatic tube mail system, makes dozens of changes of direction to throw off detection, missiles and interceptors. He’s bewildered and staggered by how much land there is under his boots and over his head. He approaches the station master at one of the last stops, awed at how far he has traveled both north and south in an immense land, yet for so little apparent progress westward. That’s where he wants to go, out to the black.

  “Why are there so many spurs? And why did we take them all?”

  “Ha! That’s funny, kid. Trust me, you didn’t. Not even one percent.”

  Yuki can hardly believe Lemuria is this big. He doesn’t believe it. He persists. “Why do we move north-south as well as west? Why can’t we head straight to the front? We’re deep underground. Why so many changing tracks and directions?”

  “We move you around like that so that each troop cab takes an unpredictable, uniquely serpentine route to confuse enemy ‘Goldies,’ their fighter-bombers.”

  “But we’re underground.”

  “They have deep penetrator missiles, kid. So do we, by the bye, on our Jabos. Get predictable out here and you get dead. That’s the rule. So we jumble you up.”

  “OK, but why is my company detached? Where’s the rest of the 400th ID?”

  “Your division is broken up and moving in 20 discrete cabs. It will come back together, but only at the final destination.”

  “When will that be? We’re not even at our own Third Trench yet.”

  “Can’t confirm that, kid. Security protocols.”

  “I understand,” Yuki says. His eyes reveal that he doesn’t.

  “Listen kid, the way we move you replacements no single enemy attack, not bombing or sabotage, can shut down our system or stop the troop and supply trains reaching the rear edge of the black. It’s all about interception probabilities.”

  “OK, that makes some sense.”

  “Anything else, kid?” The station master is bored, so he indulges curiosity.

  “You said I traveled only one percent of the system. How is that possible?”

  “You’re on Lemuria, kid. Everything is built and done on a scale like nowhere else in the Thousand Worlds. Take this tube web, for example. It’s as big as I say, an enormous triumph of Rikugun engineering and logistical genius. No one else but we could have built it, or built is so fast and well and deep as we did.”

  Yuki thinks so, too. He beams proudfully back at the pudgy station manager, then salutes him. He’s proud to wear the same uniform as a man like this, so loyal and dedicated to doing his job well in service of the war effort. Even if he never gets to serve in combat at the black where Yuki longs to go, to find his destiny.

  In fact, the station master is a bragging, rear area shit who old hands instantly know never pops out of the observation bubble on his precious maglev anywhere near the black. Still, he wasn’t lying about the immensity of the logistics system Rikugun has built on Lemuria. Its maglevs aren’t just equal to the old hyperloop destroyed by the war bots in the first weeks of fighting, they’re a masterpiece of transportation on a scale of effort only the genius and urgency of war can muster. A moral and cultural accomplishment impossible to conceive or build in peace. The only thing that the boastful station manager neglects to tell Yuki is that the enemy built a mirror image maglev system on the other side of the black.

  The Alliance has engineers, too.

  It also rediscovered a mad genius for war.

  In fact, its maglev system is even better than this.

  Yuki can feel the effort his Imperium has made here, in each whip and turn of his rocking cab as the maglev tube strains to deliver him and the 400th ID over silent, frictionless rails. It fills him with pride to be part of so very great a thing, when he’s so very small a person. He has felt this every day since he joined Rikugun, since he “put on the green” and headed off to Basic to learn how to become a man.

  It’s an ancient trick of all armies, to tap into the fathomless need of youth to belong to and serve some higher moral calling, some greater purpose that gives their lives the gloried meaning they search for. It’s one of the great perversions of every war, this seduction of the young to ends of wastage and murder in the name of higher and eternal things. It works perfectly on Yuki. He is innocent, willing, wanting, and seduced. Though not all the way. He has a secret motive of his own.

  Yuki’s train makes 20 more sudden stops as it passes under the monotonous, central Lemurian landscape. He longs to see what’s outside but he’s forced to look instead across the cab at the same boyish faces he has known since boot camp. He doesn’t mind. These are his “comrades of the barracks.” He knows every one of their names, Usman and Tura, Jack Lee and Kurt, and Andreas Krobot. He knows all their stories. He has made secret notes about them all, his newfound family of brothers-in-arms with whom he’s going into battle, and into history and literature. He’ll write their history and through them the history of this new Orion War in a literary masterpiece of his own sweet genius.

  It’s why he volunteered. If he’s honest, he’ll admit it. He didn’t volunteer for Purity or to serve Pyotr, or to recover Lost Children, or for the glory of the Grün Imperium. He did it for his art. The war is consuming every moment in Orion and he needs to be in it, to see it, to feel it. He needs to fuck the war. He thinks it’s the only way to make art for his generation. He knows that for the next half century at least, no one will care about anything else. No other literature will matter. Only the experience of this immense war. He can’t be a great artist and not know war.

  “Everybody, out!”

  “End of the line.”

  “Take your gear.”

  “Form up by company.”

  Yuki and his “bonded brothers” stand up, pick up gear, and march out of the silent, stationary cab onto an underground platform. That’s how he thinks of his new friends, as the “bonded brothers” of his deepest moral imagination and artistic aspiration. But reality keeps intruding into his art. Instead of tending to uniqueness Rikugun keeps reducing Yuki to a cog. Like now. Twenty cabs line up against the gray sides of the platform. It’s broad enough for a whole division to form up.

  “Move it!”

  “Get the fuck out, now!”

  “Double time, march!”

  The whole 400th ID is switching to ground transport at a terminus still 800+ klics east of Third Trench. Yuki wonders again at the vastness of Amasia. ‘How can it be? How does all this land stay afloat? The Okeanos I understand, but how can the land be so large? How is Lemuria this big?’

  The tunnel leading to the surface seems to him like the inside of a giant worm that bored a passage from the coast, to emerge here out of Lemuria’s black soil. First chance he gets, he breathes that unsuccessful simile into the secret recorder he keeps hidden in his sleeve. Nine out of ten of these litt
le, artsy notes he makes don’t work out, miss the point in whole or part. Like this awful one about a worm. Yet, every so often he hits the mark. He lives and breathes for the one in ten.

  A broken and abandoned town nestles at the mouth of the station, last stop at the foot of rolling, low hills that finally reach the edge of an immense savanna. The gunsō at Koblenz was right. The scale and vastness of the Lemurian landmass takes Yuki’s breath away as he steps under a clear and open sky. It’s oppressive, a forever blue above an endless flatness. He’s shocked at his own reaction, at how provincial he discovers he is. For he longs for night to hide the Amasian sky. He would rather look up into the familiar distance of the cosmos than see land that is so immense it goes forever into the distance before him. Then he sees her.

  She’s winsome and strange. A mournful girl in a dirty yellow dress standing at one end of the station. She watches mutely as his eager battalion tramps down the platform to waiting acoustic hovers. The lads wolf whistle and shout vulgar things at her. She makes no reply, gesture or sound. Yuki doesn’t whistle or shout. He smiles and waves stupidly and awkwardly, an innocent and happy boy waving to a pretty, if unkempt and vacant girl about his age or maybe a little younger.

  This is Yuki’s greatness. He sees what others don’t. This girl wearing a filthy yellow dress once had poetry in her dull, gray eyes. He knows it, despite the vacant and uncaring look she now has, that neither receives nor returns his own. A look of indifference to her life and fate, and to his. He wonders what can have happened to reave away her verse. The girl disappears too fast from his strained view as he trundles away, though not from his notes or memory. Later, he’ll understand.

  The 400th ID hover hops in four angular 150 klic legs, to confuse spies and dive bombers who might break its camo. It’s escorted by a reinforced company of strangely nervous gunners riding Ceramic Shredder Platforms. CSPs are mobile batteries, the main active sky defense when moving on the surface. Three times the huge tubes send funnels high at long range, searching with spews of pellets for high flying Goldies or Wasps that might dive and strafe the long, camouflaged column of 400th ID trucks. The pellets hurtle skyward, great gaggles of shredder that form mock insect patterns. It’s what gives them the moniker “swarms.”

  Yuki never hears a single enemy skycraft or sees a vapor trail or other give away, but the loud shooting by the swarms thrills him and all the other lads. His company cheers the brave gunners and chats excitedly all three times they fire. He wonders for a moment what must happen to all the pellets when they fall back to ground. He sets the stray thought aside. ‘Good thing Lemuria is so big!’ True, it is. Even so, sometimes the plunging pellets do find unintended targets, wiping out whole villages with hard falling rain, shredding herds of bellowing buffalo or bewildered gazelle. Or just leveling crop fields with ten million micro hits and craters, cutting through small birds and even insects on-the-wing as they plunge to ground, catching out careless hares and silent fox and stalking coyotes. Even worms and beetles might take cover from their lethal, indifferent falling.

  Still hundreds of klics behind Third Trench, Yuki sees two boys playing on a barge anchored on a riverbank. Nearby archie tubes spit fire from a battery that’s invisible under adaptive water camouflage, while the guns reposition at random to confuse overflying spies. The two boys are oblivious to the sounds of the guns. They’re trying to catch flashing trout in the stream, with their bare hands. The odd shimmering and occasional emergence of a tube end from cover as it fires into the sky is part of the natural landscape to them. As much as the gold river or the silver trout, or pools of sparkling quartz on the bottom of the languid waterway. From a thick wood he passes next, Yuki hears a scratchy call of a screech owl about its own business. Also indifferent to the war, it’s looking for careless blue frogs hip-hopping along the riverbank. He can hear the frogs bellow and blow, as if taunting the owl. He doesn’t see them. But another little note about blue frogs and trout and owls and fisher boys finds its way into his sleeve recorder.

  The hover column drops the 400th ID at a forward assembly area. From there, it’s ground trucks most of the rest of the way along a once fine, prewar tarmac that’s now cratered and under repair from end to end. The road goes straight as an arrow into the Lemurian distance. This land is as vast as Yuki’s love of life and all his new experience. It rolls on and on forever, endless as the prairie sky above.

  ‘This is an immense country.’

  ‘Bigger even than an ocean.

  ‘My gods, it could swallow us all!’

  Ruins and piles of rubble, truck and armtrak wrecks, broken bridges, rusting constructors, vast bot graveyards astride the venerable road, mark the route taken by Yuki and the 400th ID. For it’s the same road taken by the main RIK advance at the start of the war three years ago. The same road that ACU reeled backward along for thousands of klics, on the lip of catastrophic defeat.

  Well, it’s one of hundreds of roads where that happened. One of many that saw death, defeat, and endless defiance. The “smooth period” the milneb still calls it, a time of unstoppable Rikugun offensives and collapsing ACU resistance when huge fleets of warships collided overhead in the night sky and armies first clashed on Amasia and on dozens of other invaded worlds. For the Calmar Union, not yet bound to the smaller Neutrals of Orion in a new formed Alliance, it was a time of humiliation, of catastrophic defeat and collapsing defenses and morale. A time of moral and military despair. A time of surprise and treachery, of arrogance and too much error. The time the war was nearly lost to Pyotr and the Imperium. Nearly.

  Then the Alliance took shape as Pyotr’s enemies stopped retreating. The fleets fought back against a fresh invasion wave with suicidal heroics, even ramming Kaigun warships when necessary. That happened at Minotaur and Portus Cale, and five other fleet-on-fleet engagements. The armies stopped fleeing, too, and everybody on both sides everywhere dug in deep for the long war to come. Amasia was the key. Rikugun stopped moving here first, of all the worlds it stripped and gang raped, it was stopped here first. After that, everyone fought in place. Daura, too. Those bastards bogged down even faster than the Imperium, except where they landed on stripped and undefended worlds, like the Krakoya twins.

  Yuki learns from a CSP loader, during a rest stop, that bomb cratering by the Alliance and repairs along the road by Rikugun have been underway ever since, as eternal and constant as washing and receding of lunar triple tides on Oceanus. He learns that this is just one of hundreds of main surface roads. Maybe thousands. That’s when he has the thought that the landscape of Lemuria could swallow him and the 400th ID whole. Yuki’s not wrong. Amasia could swallow him. It could swallow the 400th ID. It might yet swallow the pride of Rikugun and of Pyotr and maybe the whole Imperium. Swallow it, then vomit up defeat.

  He still doesn’t understand how big Lemuria really is. Doesn’t get that he’s not even a third of the way across it. That the Via Dolorosa he’s on is one of many thousands of supply roads fanning out to the coast on either side of Dark Territory. All in constant repair, all bringing forward replacements and moving supplies, all shipping fresh lambs like him and his Alliance counterparts to the terrible abattoir of the war. Thousands of tarmac roads, more underground maglev lines, air supply and now even draught animal convoys and infantry that must walk forever. All of it heading to one place, to nearly 23,000 klics of buried walls that hide and protect vast subterranean cities filled with hostile fighting men and women and war bots.

  The black. Dark Territory. The Yue ming. All soldier shorthand for opposing systems of triple and quadruple defense lines up to 1,400 klics wide, stretching for 22,840 jagged klics down the scarred and battle pocked face of Lemuria. A vast killing zone, all of it. A slaughterhouse to consume the youth and treasure of a hundred worlds. A charnel house and ossuary for all the Thousand Worlds of Orion. A crematorium and mass grave, all-in-one, full of howling sounds of a war that no one controls or really understands anymore. Supported by billions on both sides, who s
end away their children to die while they go to work to produce shells, regular plasma or gas filled, to kill each other’s husbands and daughters and sons.

  ‘How did all this start?’

  Over a fucking rock, Yuki.

  ‘How will it all end?’

  With all of us throwing rocks.

  Boots

  Yuki sees only a few cowed civvies in the countryside. No boys or men of military age. Hardly any males at all. Old men and women mostly, and mothers with very young girls. The girls aren’t vacant eyed yet, like the station girl in the dirty yellow dress. But they won’t make eye contact with him, and he sees that they run from oncoming 400th ID trucks, to hide behind their vacant mothers. The vastness of the land oppresses him more deeply when he sees this fear of him in their eyes, of everyone in green. This land is nearly empty of civilians and civility.

  Then he sees an astonishingly beautiful woman, standing astride the road. Mature, tall, erect, unbeaten and unbowed. Strands of long, magnificently red hair escape from underneath a blue headscarf. Crimson curls frame her perfect face as she tosses her head back, cascading contempt at the passing trucks. A warm breeze whips her light cotton print dress all around and against her supple body, fluttering with arousing revelations. She’s stately and confident, flush with buxom health and hatred like he never saw before. An intelligent looking but painfully pale child stands beside the vision, holding a small yellow toy in one hand.