Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  “Report to me in person, Jan.”

  “Yes, general. In person, sir.”

  “No couriers or electronics on this one.”

  “Understood, Lian.”

  “And hurry, Jan. The PM is personally interested.”

  “That won’t affect my report.”

  “I know. So does he. That’s why he approved you.”

  “I’ll be back in three days. Samara, come!”

  Jan and Samara go to MI interrogation rooms, then fly down to the southern vales to speak directly to dozens of eyewitnesses, and not just officers. He talks to kitchen helpers and armtrak drivers, to master sergeants and mortar crews, and to privates in the basic infantry who were in the valleys when it happened. When he reports back to New Beijing in secret after three days, General Sòng wastes no time dictating and sending an urgent, top coded message to Kars.

  “To the PM. Eyes Only. My Dear Georges: It’s true! There was a mutiny in the southern mountains. Elements of RIK 917th Infantry Division killed their CO and officers and rebelled, after continuous, unrelieved combat deployment in the southern black, in the deepest cold, for over two years. Georges, Rikugun is badly squeezed for men! Our response onsite, and I confess, also my own here at HQ, was slow, too slow. The revolt was crushed by a SAC armored column before our own relief column got there. They’ve sent their ferocious Amazons to suppress the last rebels in three neighboring valleys. The women are winning. The mutiny will fail. But the important fact remains: there has been open fighting between SAC commandos and Rikugun regulars, and now also the WCBs. There’s more, so I’m coming to see you at long last, Georges. This has so much potential we must talk face-to-face. And I’m bringing along General Jan Wysocki. You two have much to discuss. It’s long overdue that you meet our famous Ghost. As ever, in loyalty. LS.”

  ***

  After he reports, Jan goes back out with Samara. Zofia stays in the R&R camp. As commander of I Corps, she sometimes stands in for him with the whole of 1st Army. He and Samara visit a POW compound south of New Beijing, to get a close up look at the enemy the Wreckers have been fighting for five years. As a Krevan, his war began almost a full year before the larger war broke out, the one Alliance folk call the Fourth Orion War being fought against the Dual Powers by a union of necessity that the memexes and milnebs call the Free Worlds Alliance.

  He can’t help thinking darker thoughts as he sees the latest Rikugun prisoner arrivals, the last surrenders and survivors from Mountain 375. They’re marching slowly down a surface tarmac road, heading for a coastal prison camp. He thinks that while they’re shopworn and ragged looking, they look beaten but not yet truly defeated. ‘Gods, look at the defiance in those faces! We have a lot more war to wage still. Rikugun is not a broken enemy, not yet. Especially not its women.’

  Of all the prisoners he sees, three will stick in his memory forever. Two are women, captured in mountain fighting where three WCBs moved down from the north county to put iron in the soul of failing alpine troops. One is a petite, young lieutenant who has the look and aspect of a cougar trapped in a steel cage, taut and ready to spring at any tormentor. From the corner of each eye reach three fine filaments, etched with gold inlay. Jan recognizes them as Daegu tribal markings. They spray out like cat’s whiskers, amplifying the angry girl’s cornered cougar impression. ‘With those facial markings, she must be from Gross Imperium.’

  Samara also thinks the gold whiskers confirm the fierce girl’s cat-like looks, though she’s puzzled why this cat is otherwise utterly hairless. She growls a threat, bristling high around her neck and all down her spine, tail erect and limbs tensed, ready to attack. “Easy girl. It’s alright, Samara. They’re our prisoners now.”

  Jan will never forget the vivid blue eyes that flash hate and utter defiance as the small lieutenant catches him watching her. She’s helping along a startlingly beautiful, but dazed and clearly badly wounded colonel. He notes the elevated rank: Rikugun is allowing women to command the WCBs. That’s something MI confirmed to him in private. Again, it suggests a growing shortage of men. ‘Why else would those misogynist bastards change the officer rules in the WCBs?’

  He observes out loud, just to Samara, to whom he talks all the time when he’s away from Zofia, which is often these days: “Old hip wound, judging by the way she limps. New shoulder wound. Still bleeding. Looks badly concussed, as well. An astonishing beauty, even so.” He looks down. “Best not say that to Zofia.”

  Samara isn’t paying attention to Jan’s musings. She’s wondering why all the women shuffling past are so oddly hairless, yet whiskered. They remind her of those really weird, naked cats she saw on a space station White Sails fleet took her to. One of them looked real smug, and had a navy medal pinned to its silver collar. Jan told her it was a citation for “Gallant Ratting.” She chased the creepy cat down the station corridor anyway. She doesn’t like these hairless women any better. She lies down to stare at them, alert with ears pointedly erect, furred head on thickly furred, silver white paws. She growls throatily at the oddball shufflers.

  The smaller woman blazes furious defiance as she assesses Jan’s rank and full, dress uniform. Maybe it’s because he’s Krevan. Or maybe because he’s wearing a truly ridiculous, gold braided bicorn hat atop his dress oak general’s weaves. He has no choice. KRA makes him wear it whenever he’s on duty but not in combat mode. It’s one reason he prefers to be offworld, with White Sails. So he can toss the stupid hat in a box, so that Zofia stops mocking him. She does it even though, as a general now herself, she also has to wear a stupid hat onshore. More likely, the younger woman’s feral alertness is because he’s keenly observing her friend.

  Tedi fiercely holds Jan’s gaze as the marching column carries her and Leyla past where he stands, judging everything. Jan watches the taller, wounded woman drop slowly to the ground, fainting from blood loss. As she kneels, the cougar also drops to her knees to help her back up. She’s roughly pushed aside and onto her back by an angry guard. Tedi physically resists being parted from Leyla. Three more guards move in. Samara sits up to watch, growling low threats. At whom?

  “Get off! Leave her alone!”

  The guards have the spitting cougar on the ground, beating her. The kid fights like a hellcat. It takes all four guards to subdue her. Even then she kicks back and gouges and scratches them. They start to beat her harder, with MP batons. Then a Blue guard captain sees the oakish general, in a really fucking stupid hat, watching everything. Not knowing what Jan might be thinking, he intervenes to stop the beating before the general does. The kid’s pinned, but still kicking at the guards.

  “Let her go, boys.” The four guards look like they’d rather bash in her skull. He turns to Tedi. “OK lieutenant, you can help bring your colonel to the hospital.”

  Tedi runs back to Leyla, puts one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees, picks up the larger woman and carries her back into the march column. She refuses to put her down again, despite the size difference. Rikugun trainers taught her how to carry heavy, wounded men back at Kolno Barracks, under threat of the red bag. Leyla is light compared to them. Jan watches the pair move away, eddying inside a molasses slow river of prisoners moving downstream to a camp on the coast of the Panthalassa Sea. He doesn’t know what their special bond is, but as a man and as a soldier, he knows they surely have one. A powerful one.

  They remind him of Zofia. He leans down and scratches Samara behind her left ear. She lies down, less agitated now that the scuffle is over and the hairless women have moved on. Next to pass by is a short column of raggedy, frostbitten survivors of RIK 917th ID, the last of the original mutineers. They were found after two weeks, hiding from SAC retribution inside a mountain cave. Jan heard that all they had to eat was bat meat. They look emaciated, and haunted. One man is babbling loudly to himself. The rest are mute. They look scared of everything.

  Unlike the women or brutal SAC troops who fought to the end, these men look totally demoralized and defeated. ‘
Was it us who did it, or the stupidity of their commanders leaving them in the frontline so long? Was it Alliance blood and guts or bad Rikugun logistics, worse officers, and lack of good food?’

  He knows this Rikugun division was down in the extreme south for two and a half years. It really shows. They’re sallow and thin, yellowish in color, haunted from lack of warmth, food or hope. They’re quite simply the most beaten men he has ever seen. At least, outside pathetic Daurans in the far north. ‘Hmmm, that’s both ends of the black here on Lemuria. Could there be tactical advantage there?’

  After them come survivors from Yuki’s division, the RIK 400th ID. It was the last division to rebel and the last to surrender to the Amazons sent down from the north to crush the mutiny. It held the women off, but was overrun by the big ACU push into the three rebel mountain valleys. A few men actually joined the ACU in continuing to shoot at the hated women of the WCB, until Blues pointed masers and rapidos at them and ordered them to drop all weapons in the snow. They have a lot of walking wounded. Other men are carried in reeve sleeves or on stretchers.

  “We think this might interest you, sir.”

  “What’s this?” Jan asks an ACU sergeant who holds out an odd, small device.

  “We found it on a wounded master sergeant.”

  “What unit? Who is he?”

  “RIK 400th ID. Dunno who he is, sir. Just some wounded NCO. But he’s a tough sonofabitch … errr, sorry sir. He won’t give us his name. All we know is that those kids over there call him ‘Uncle.’ Odd sir, but one of the vets called him ‘Mother Duck.’ Dunno what it means, sir.”

  Jan raises a querical eyebrow.

  “It’s all we got, sir.”

  “What about his service record and ID dot? They must tell you something.”

  “He cut his chip imbed out of his forearm long before we took him prisoner. Stomped on it, probably. That’s why he’s all cut up and bandaged on the arm, in addition to his wounds. They do that to themselves sometimes, these Green fools.”

  “It seems that they are sincere.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “It’s nothing sergeant.”

  “Right sir. But like I said, we got this device from him. You can have it, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “Some kinda old fashioned vid and sound recorder. Not one of ours, but it’s not coded. We asked MI about it. They transferred all data to a vidscreen stick for you. MI listened already. They said there’s nothing they can use. Just some poems and other odd shit. So I dunno why…” He trails off.

  “Why what sergeant?”

  “Why we had to prise this from the sergeant’s cold, clenched hands. He had already wrecked his ID. I mean, what was the point? It really means something to him, sir. But how come, if our MI says it’s just trench gibberish?”

  “Alright, if MI says I can have it, I’ll take the scroll. That recorder, too.”

  “Want me to send him down for special interrogation? He’ll talk, sir.”

  “He might not be able to. He looks like he’s dying.”

  “Oh, he’ll live. We fixed him up with a dose of suspend. He needed it bad, too. They got none left. Did you know that sir?”

  “I did. Down here in the south, anyway. It looks like Rikugun is husbanding all its resources for the major fighting sectors in central and northern Lemuria.”

  “We got shortages down here on our side, too. But not so bad as that, sir.”

  “General Sòng is producing suspend and other med supplies locally now. And we have to thank General Lee Jin in Alliance Medical Corps, as well.”

  “The local factories are real busy, that’s for sure, sir. All the ports, too. I seen them humming with ships and maglev freight cars on my last leave.”

  “Our navies are doing a better job than Kaigun or DRN getting through the blockades, at the outer and inner Amasian moons. The tide of war in the sea of stars is turning, filling out our billowing canvas.” Jan can’t seem to help himself anymore. He slips often into Ulysses mode these days, as Zofia mockingly calls it ever since he told her what General Amiya Constance asked him to do. That was five years ago now, back before Toruń fell and the Exodus ships fled Genève.

  “I hear you had something to do with that, sir. Been out with White Sails, yes?”

  “I can’t confirm or deny that, sergeant. Anyway, if you’re right, it’s Admiral Aklyan you’re talking about. She’s in charge of White Sails, not me.”

  “But sir, everyone talks about you and the Wreckers down here. Folks call you the Gho…”

  “Thank you sergeant. That will be all.”

  Jan flips through the recorder menu at random, as more columns of prisoners shuffle past. The only ones not moving with the stream are a wounded man on a litter, a dozen young soldiers gathered around him. The guards are urging them on, but they won’t leave him. Four of them pick up the litter. The rest follow.

  Jan is lost in the scroll for some time. Suddenly he looks up, trying to locate the man who would not give up these odd bits and verses but cut his ID from his own arm. He winces as he listens to a reedy voice from inside the recorder recite a line of verse: “I fought hard and died well, at Ulysses’ Troy camp...”

  He hears General Amiya Constance’s voice on the wind, the sound of gulls in the sky behind her. She says it to him all over again: “We are a small and defeated people, yet we are not dissuaded. We shall fight on. Wandering the starry seas, yet knowing that we shall have vengeance, red and gory, just like Ulysses. You will be our Ulysses, a stoic hero for our people to follow to the stars.” Since then, as Ulysses he camped and fought, and saw good people die, on too many worlds.

  He turns to a Blue guard standing nearby, maser slung over his shoulder on a mockleather strap. “Private, where’s the one they call Mother Duck?”

  “On the stretcher, sir. No, not the one on the ground over there. He’s dying. The other one, way up ahead. Yeah, that one. The litter with the four kids carrying it and ten more following. Ha! OK I get it! Yes, the stretcher with all those little lost ducklings following right behind their mother duck.”

  Blue guards are hard pushing the prisoners to keep them moving. They’re shuffling, delaying every footfall, trying to stay in sight of their ‘Uncle,’ of the wounded old man on the litter.

  “Guards! Stop that! Leave those children be.”

  Jan may not be ACU but he’s an Alliance general, and a famous one to boot. The guards back away from the bearers and milling kids. The four bearers lay the stretcher down as Jan approaches. They’re wary, but curious. He has a funny hat.

  He strides over to the swaddled old man lying on the ground on a carbon fiber board, a dozen young Rikugun standing in weaponless guard, looking worried at the approach of an enemy general in crisp oak and gold uniform and bicorn hat. The rest of the tattered green column keeps flowing past this lonely sandbar of restful mercy where a dozen dazed kids eddy, watching General Jan Wysocki and their ‘Uncle.’ It will erode and disappear soon enough, and they, too, will wash downstream along with the other flotsam of Rikugun, into a drear prison camp.

  Jan removes his hat as he crouches down. He sees through bloody bandages that Mother Duck can’t be more than 25 or 26, though he looks like Methuselah. He gently unrolls the scroll to show the wounded man an image. He nods. Jan plays something back from the original, disk shaped recorder in his hand. It has a dark, ruby stain on the backside.

  Jan leans in, talks quietly into an unbandaged ear, turns his head to one side to listen to a whispered response. He speaks again. He listens some more. After five minutes of quiet talk, Jan stands up and motions to the guards that the litter and ducklings should resume the slow journey to the coast.

  As the stretcher comes up to waist height on firmly held poles, the pile of bandages lying on it pulls itself painfully to a full sitting position, steadies itself on its left arm, and shakily salutes the enemy general with its right. Astonishing all, Jan salutes him back. Then each man reaches out a hand an
d shakes in the old, civilian way that no one on Amasia has seen or done in years. And most watching hardly remember from their old, prewar lives.

  Bitch

  “Tell me again, Gaspard. Tell me what I need to know that might save our children from the consuming fires of this awful war. Some of them at least.”

  Georges Briand and his friend and confidant General Gaspard François Marie Leclerc are sitting in thick mockleather chairs in the prime minister’s Toruń wood office in Barda on Kars. It’s the most secure, famous, and utterly arrogant room in Orion. Right up there in its own way with The Study in Jahandar’s Caesarium Selo, and Pyotr’s ridiculously green Jade Throne Room. OK, it might not be that bad, but it’s pretty arrogant, especially for an elected leader of what pretends to be the defender of civilization but is also a hidden empire. It’s shaped as linked double ovals, the classic symbol of infinity that suggests universal claims and the denied ambition of an empire that is disguised as a republic, pretending to be free.