by Kali Altsoba
On Amasia, fighting is heavy and sustained but unsuccessful in defense of cities along the east coast of the supercontinent Lemuria. They fall like bright shining pearls once the string is cut, loosing all shared shape and form so that RIK scoops them up, one-by-one. ACU garrison divisions on Amasia are broken and bleeding and falling back. Then it gets real sparky.
Fuck that! It gets positively electric-storm, in a great swirl of fighting armies smashing into each other in huge lightening-and-thunder battles all down the length of central Lemuria. And that’s pretty fucking far, over 23,000 klics, almost all the way from pole-to-pole. All stops are pulled, all hands to the tiller. Use whatever cliché you want. This is the real war!
General Lian Sòng doesn’t deign to reply to Pyotr’s brash ultimatum. She governs from New Beijing as an old friend and fierce partisan of Minister Georges Briand. He broke all CIS and MoD rules before the war to share with her Core Secret intelligence. She’s part of his inner circle of War Hawk conspirators, along with LeClerc and Maçon. She worried as they did over phantom incursions and the enemy build-up before the war. So she ordered field works built and emergency plans prepared. It cost her with the public, but all is forgiven once the shooting starts.
Lian Sòng smells like the planet she governs. Of sea air and river beds, austral mountain flowers and northern tundra mosses, of rolling grassland and crackling desert heat. She smells like steamy coastal cities where hot-spice foods steam up from huge woks and blue smoke rises over big BBQs. She smells of defiance and determination. RIK faces a hard fight on Amasia.
As soon as the outer system pickets report the arrival of a hostile fleet she sent an urgent signal over the Amasian GovNeb invoking emergency powers well beyond martial law. She put evacuation plans into effect by decree, and ordered them enforced without mercy. They were.
She’s too shrewd, too tactically skilled to try to hold every square klic of a supercontinent or all Lagrange points of a star system only to lose it all by overextended effort. She decided before the war that she’ll defend two of the larger moons, abandoning three others. That she’ll hold the L3 with core naval assets, but not any other bohr-zone. Let her enemy stretch his naval assets holding more than he needs. She needs only one LP for coms and resupply.
Her order to the NCU flotilla lying in multiple ambush positions beyond the five moons was straightforward and stern: “Make ready for battle. Hold them as long as you can, but not however you can. Ignore all warships. Take out the troopships. You won’t stop them all from making planetfall. Instead, fall back after first contact to protect the two largest of our moons. As for Lemuria, we’ll be waiting down here when the surviving troopships arrive. Good hunting.”
She’s forced to abandon garrisons on three smaller moons to combined orbital and ground assaults, but hangs on to the two larger moon bases that are essential if there’s to be any hope of holding Amasia more than a few sad weeks or brutal months.
Similarly on the ground. RIK landings fall on Lemuria’s eastern coast, alongside the Thalassa Sea. She defends the east coast cities, then orders all regulars to fall back to defense-in-depth field works she pre-built down the length of the supercontinent. They’re already filled with raw volunteers from the west coast and central plains, forests and deserts. They can barely hold a maser.
That’s where she stands, dug in and holding what is now “the longest, harshest, bloodiest set of trenches in all the fucking histories of all the fucking wars ever fought in all Orion.” It’s what she cabled to Kars and Caspia. MoD gives her no help in reply. Just one simple order:
‘Hold until relieved.’
Fighting on and around the five moons continues as waves of suffering race over the great grass ocean of the central Lemurian steppe, as huge Rikugun army groups drive westward from coastal bases, inland across the broad face of Lemuria along four deep axes of advance and destruction. The assaults crash into arctic villages under the white nights of the far north; course over vast temperate zone forests where strands of trees collapse like so many toothpicks; sweep across immense steppe lands and over deep southern deserts; smash into alpine snow valleys of the austral mountains. The east is abandoned to a tsunami of death. The center and west hold on.
A third of Lemuria is lost, yet hundreds of millions of Amasian men and women are determined to live, to fight on until Kars and Caspia send help.
‘Hold until relieved.’
Children bone-tagged with DNA-IDs are checked against a central register, then moved out of exposed cities into camps on the broad southwest Lemurian pampas. Most keep company with their grandparents, as parents and older siblings are called up and rushed to arms.
The smallest leave potential bombardment zones clutching favorite dolls or stuffed animals. They say frightened goodbyes to worried parents and siblings wearing light-blue ACU weaves, preparing to move into fighting posts in pre-dug lines and hardened field fortifications.
“Papa don’t go. Papa, stay, stay.”
“Grandpa, tell mama not to leave.”
“Mu qin, why are you leaving? Don’t send me to stay with strangers!”
Variations are heard all across Amasia, in the multiple languages and mixed-up barrio patois of the blended population of Lemuria. Old soldiers donning armor for the first real fight of their lives shrug to hear war is coming at them from the Green Empire. They say what oldsters in the eastern systems all say, whatever the source of their suffering: “We’ll do what we must.”
“Yes, it’s necessary to do what we must.” Aging life partners agree. Or say nothing, simply planting a soft kiss on a familiar cheek. Perhaps for the last time. Then pick up a maser.
Younger fighters are more nervous and many are far too eager for what they think is a coming adventure. Happy in their ignorance and convinced of personal immortality, they assume the common stance of youths before their first war begins. Before combat teaches them how unspecial they are or how fast they’ll run when they learn to love themselves more than false glory or honor.
Most folk just swear at the coming disruption of their lives, hiding deep fear under the bravado of coarse street curses delivered in the diverse languages and dialects of ethnically-mixed Amasia.
“Liu mang” (“bastard!”).
“Poq gai Pyotr” (“Peter should die in the street”).
“Tirarse un polvo” (“throw a powder”) at the invaders.
Most popular of defiant boasts heard in backstreets and in crooked, greasy high-board trenches is the simple but not ineloquent: “All fuckin’ Grünen can kiss my big Amasi arse!”
Amasia’s attitude is captured in a proverb General Lian Sòng adopts as its defiant slogan: waiying, neiruan. “Hard on the outside, soft on the inside.”
What’s left of the system flotilla after the lunar battles defends the last open LP, looking for arriving NCU warship and transports. Ground-based ACU skycraft scramble and ‘archie’ tubes fire over the big cities, desperately fighting off swarm attacks by piloted RIK Jabos and high-altitude AI-Raptors.
Is any relief or reinforcement on the way? Maybe not. The rumint in the trenches is that the Union’s defenses across all the eastern systems are in chaos and collapse.
‘Hold until relieved.’
General Lian Sòng sends a last defiant message to her superiors on Kars and Caspia. She broadcasts it in the clear, without any encryption so that the invaders might hear it too, and fear her: ‘Our center is yielding. Our right wing is falling back. Our left is reeling. Situation excellent. We’re attacking.’
Coming Next:
Volume IV
The Orion War
Alliance
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