Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  A few still say that whether men and women are born to high office and power, or denied it by lowly stations of their birth, some will always hunger for honor and glory and command over others. Skeptics warn that it remains true, even if not obvious during blessed times such as ours, that a new Kali Age awaits us in the endless cycle of rebirth and redeath; that as one OE philosopher predicted over five millennia ago, it is only the dead who have seen the end of war.

  That is very much a minority view today, and not a serious one. Our most informed and advanced thinkers are far more optimistic. Our philosophers and legal scholars are confident that war is a matter that henceforth should only concern historians or anthropologists, those whose odd temperaments and antiquarian tastes focus them on errors and sorrows of our past. The rest of us are free to enjoy sweet fruits of perpetual peace, to live and explore deep caverns of the mind, to study the majesty and wonders of the vast heavens free of fear of ancient anarchy and the mass violence that marked the turning of history’s pages and the end of civilizations. We are changed and matured. We shall not make war again. We have outgrown it. We renounce it.

  Rout

  “We just weren’t ready for this fight,” Jan admits. “Not by a country klic. They put us in the death ground too soon, forced us to fight on their terms on Southland and again at the MDL.”

  It’s two days after the fight in the sweetgrass meadow and Jan is talking in low whispers with Tom Hipper, one of three NCO strays who joined Madjenik after the lost fight at the MDL. They’re huddled inside a two man camo-tent, during a longer than usual rest stop. The corporal wants to know why the KRA has lost the war.

  They both know it has, even if the killing and the dying’s not over with. They’re talking it through, starting before the shattering defeat on “Breakthrough Day,” as they’ve started to call the rout of the main KRA defenses at the MDL. It’s a neutral-sounding term that’s actually soaked in collective bitterness and personal shame and defeat.

  Tom and Jan talk in low whispers, also masked by sound baffles woven into the camo sheets they squat under. They’ve started to buddy-up during rest periods, piecing together what happened. Also, though neither man will admit it, so Jan can avoid facing Zofia for a bit and Tom can get away from the non-stop chatter of “Pie Girl.”

  Madjenik has been under field camo for over three hours, waiting out passing flocks of drones it was damn lucky to identify at a far distance. Well, maybe not so much lucky as good. One of the Southland strays attached to Madjenik, a rustic, simple brown-haired kid who spent a lot of time outdoors, noticed something odd about the flight patterns of the approaching flocks.

  “Ain’t no snow geese fly-yeen dis faw nord dis time of yar, sah,” he first informed Zofia, pointing out a series of V-shaped passive radar signatures on his scout screen, slowly coming at them from the south. She immediately brought him to the head of the column to speak to Jan.

  “Repeat to the captain what you told me about the geese, private.”

  “Yas, ma’am. Well, cp’tin sah, dese ain't no snow geese, is all I ken say. De geese is all s’posed ta go da udder way, go soud by now, cp’tain, whad wid winta comin’ to Nord’land in a couple mons.” He pauses, then adds confidently to both officers. “Dey gotta be drones, sahs.”

  On a distant world, RIK engineers who designed and built the spybots to mimic Genève snow geese got the timing all wrong, putting them on the wrong continent, migrating the wrong way in the wrong season. A typical bureaucratic fuck-up. And a lucky break for Madjenik.

  “So, the enemy’s MI geeks got too clever by half. Well done, kid. Keep your eyes peeled for any other anomalies you see. You just got promoted to lead scout, private.”

  “Yas sah, tank yu, sah, err, I tink.”

  So Madjenik went to ground still 15 klics shy of the eastern edge of Pilsudski Wood, waiting as two more faux flocks passed the wrong way overhead, along with a mountain eagle way too far out from any mountain to be real or alive. Animal ground scouts and midge drones that must be out there are a greater worry. But Madjenik has intermediate-range camo even on the move and Jan deploys laser snipers on its march flanks with orders to take out any rabbit or cat or dog or fox or other small animal they spot on infrared. Midges and other swarming insect drones are short-range spies only, and Madjenik has good jammers to stop them.

  “Where the RIK always thought in terms of aggressive war and built oversize weps systems to that end,” Jan explains to Tom, “the prewar KRA thought only about defense and protection. The difference in style and plans is showing up now. We’re pretty good at hiding.”

  “Yeah, but it showed in a different way on Southland and again on Breakthrough Day, back at the Northland MDL.” Tom sounds bitter.

  “True. When their fleets arrived we weren’t ready for how good and powerful they were, how well-planned and truly massive their assaults would be, how closely integrated from orbit to our upper skies down to the surface. No more than our politicians were ready for the speed and brutality of Pyotr’s lightning diplomatic offensive and the ferocity of his propaganda.”

  “That Bad Camberg lie that started the war raced up and down Orion while the truth was still clambering out the airlock and gasping for breath,” Tom glumly states.

  He remembers how the government on Aral was still readying a formal repudiation of the shocking charge coming from the Jade Court on Kestino, that KRA commandos raided a minor Grün moonlet without provocation. That’s when, without warning, huge Grün invasion fleets arrived at four border systems and a fifth attacked the asteroid belts and ice-moons of Aral itself.

  “You’re right. Here on Genève, probably everywhere, the KRA was still mobilizing. We were training hasty recruits in makeshift bases when the Kaigun fleets arrived in system.”

  Once the Grün ships blew past Genève Squadron their well-protected flotilla of high-orbit troop transports couldn’t be touched by ground defensive batteries, all sited to protect the capital of Toruń on Northland. There were none to stop a landing on rural Southland. So that’s where the invaders came down, scudding onto the only other significant landmass on Genève beside a few scattered islands. KRA ground guns were hit by precision fire from destroyers making such low orbit attacks that two skimmed hard and hot against the upper atmosphere and spun out.

  “Our ground positions were wiped out by hyper-velocity unpiloted gliders or just by dumb ‘gougers’ dropped from untouchable battleships and cruisers. And we had no navy left.”

  The gougers came down white-hot and unstoppable at Mach 30 or more, plunging into hidden or buried targets like a vast shower of untracked meteors. Thousands of gougers left long, precise lines of smoldering craters where defense batteries and barracks and whole towns stood. Smokes rose tens of klics high over waffled Southland.

  “Once our ground batteries stopped firing back, Silver Division never stood a chance.” It’s Jan, thinking out loud to Tom.

  Southland’s towns and defenses were reduced to ruins and hot fresh craters. Then RIK ground assault waves rode to the surface of a long peaceful world, disgorging from immense armtrak-carriers and squat infantry boats that looked like bakery boxes. The ground fight that followed was a constant emergency for the overwhelmed KRA with action exploding from one point to another. Dumb kinetics, whizz-bangs, smart self-guiding shells, and clever mini-plasma ‘streakers’ to pummel bunkers, coms lines, and supply and support bases. It stunned defenders of an overmatched and unready force holding a simple land covered in tree farms and ranches, and lacking any major city. Those not killed by gougers or shells faced a massive infantry assault.

  “Neither of us was there, thank the gods.”

  “Yeah, it must’ve been awful. They had no chance.”

  “Over quick, at least.”

  KRA armor was a small undergunned type dubbed ‘Rhino’ in mockery of its almost comical, stubby main gun. Back when there was time for jokes, countryfolk said that a Rhino “looks like a Toruń bachelor, poorly equipped bu
t always ready for his wedding night.” The generals rushed them forward pell-mell, trying to patch gaping holes. They were no match for the enemy’s heavy armtraks. There were only a few hundred Rhinos on all Genève in any case.

  The few Rhinos available on Southland rushed forward just three hours into the fighting, trying and failing to close yawning gaps in broken perimeters and shifting defense lines. They were smashed apart by precision drops from Raptors overhead, or swooping Jabo streakers that almost never missed the rumbling, stubby little tanks. Silver Division infantry was pushed aside by waves of armtraks and hovergrenadiers in acoustic-levitation ATCs, rushing into rear areas like an elemental torrent through a broken dam. Leg infantry followed, leaping on glider boots.

  The inexperience of KRA generals and Silver Division, the locally-raised and nearly exclusively infantry defense force on Southland, was revealed in desperate flank battles. In just hours, all the ill-used Rhinos were blackened hulks, burning amidst many tens of thousands of dead youths and long columns of stunned and surrendered infantry. All over Genève a shorter form of the Common Prayer for Death Youth was hastily said: “You will not sorrow alone.”

  The fight for the southern continent was waged and lost in a day. Silver Division was surrounded and sundered, or dead or missing or captured. Only 50,000 KRA got out, fleeing across the intercontinental gap in speed boat shuttles pursued by taloned sky fighters swooping down to strafe anything moving on the water. In desperation, Main HQ at Toruń on Northland sent every cruise and ballistic missile it had over the gap to hit the RIK before it dug in. Every missile and attack drone hurled southward, wasting reserve strike power. The limited prewar supply of missiles and pilotless drones also ran out after barely 200 minutes of heavy launches. No one prewar conceived that an air battle could consume skycraft supplies at such rates, but it did. Everyone has a lot to learn about how this new war in Orion will be fought, it has been so long since the last one.

  “Then came the awful retaliation,” Jan says to Tom. ‘Death bird’ missiles skimmed and dodged sketchy ground fire to obliterate targets in deep rear areas across more broken positions, reaching far across Northland.

  “That’s when my unit first came under fire, while marching to the MDL. You too?”

  “Yeah,” Jan confirms. “First time was on the road. Madjenik was lucky, though. Most of the smart shells and missiles just flew over our heads, carrying that destruction farther inland.”

  On just the third day RIK set up its Main HQ and assault base on Southland. It was protected from orbit by heavy warships out of reach by Toruń City’s ground batteries, parked unimpeded in geostationary supply and reinforcement circuits behind the arc of the planetary horizon. The ground build-up continued until the RIK generals were ready to jump an assault sub-atmospheric over the sea gap, to force a fresh lodgment on the larger and more important continent. That’s where the bulk of Krevan troops were waiting, in a shore Main Defense Line.

  There was a pause in fighting as RIK readied to cross a flat ocean, on most days calm and vivid blue under sunlight reflecting as bright as glare from a polished mirror. It was enough time to give Gold Division HQ in Toruń the illusion that it was prepared for the coming assault on the coast of Northland. Yet foreknowledge hardly counted when the attack came.

  A second landing jumped directly continent-to-continent, with additional orbital drops and fire support on either flank of the landing zone. It gave RIK generals a toehold on the eastern lip of Northland. The larger, more temperate, more heavily populated of Genève’s continents was still nearly as agrarian as its austral counterpart. Its rolling terrain hosted neat fruit and grain farms, sprinkled with ten thousand villages, a few bigger towns, and a single forest city in Toruń.

  Thirteen RIK divisions disembarked. Four were armored, each centered on a 1,000 burley Mammoths and huge mobile artillery tubes. Four were mechanized infantry, supported by herds of armtrak Elephants and ATC hover troops. The rest were regular leg infantry or barely-trained conscripts. Mop-up grunts and cannon fodder, but RIK tactical sky force was almost unimpeded. KRA Main HQ was still moving ground forces to the coast when the RIK lodgment was secured, wide enough to allow a second build-up prior to the big breach assaults made against the MDL.

  “Our generals made another mistake,” Jan advises Tom. “They pushed our reserves into a hasty new defense line they drew 200 klics inland, digging in to wait under the hard pounding by more enemy missiles and gougers. We should’ve counterattacked them at the coast instead.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, I do. Better to disrupt their plans. Instead we let them come at us like a storm of steel, a fury that rolled over all our defenders along the sea rim. Our MDL was way too brittle.”

  “I remember. We’d just pulled into our so-called strongpoint and dug in when they hit us, harder than I ever imagined possible. We broke in just two hours.”

  “So did we.”

  “You did, sir? Hard to believe.”

  “True all the same. We were just one of hundreds of companies in place or still en route when they hit us. HQ was still moving to the second line, trying to defend-in-depth but getting to it too late. That left us all spread out, not strong enough to hold either line or to counterattack.” It’s a pretty accurate operational conclusion, based on only minimal tactical information. Jan has a real good military mind, though you could never convince him that was true.

  RIK controlled the skies that day, unchallenged since it first met outclassed fighters of Genève Sky Defense on Southland, burning skycraft on the ground or shooting them out of the summer air with superior human and AI pilots flying in greater numbers inside better machines. Next came flocks of ultrafast, unpiloted tactical suicide drones, wave after wave plunging down.

  “We had nothing to shoot down the drones,” Tom laments, remembering directing his platoon in ineffective ground fire turned skyward, that hit maybe one in 50 incoming drones.

  V-wings of human-piloted Raptors and Jabos swirled high overhead, picking off short-distance targets or suddenly diving to pound explosive smart ordnance low-and-tight atop an unlucky or de-camouflaged unit. Jabo dive bombers strafed wildly, uncaring of civilian losses, shooting pulse maser cannons into buildings before pulling up and away in screaming climbs, safer even than the drones from interception by feeble ground fire that rose almost lazily behind them, passing kinetic ordinance harmlessly through widening vapor trails and wake turbulence.

  “Then their heavy armor came at us in ‘V’ wedges. Couldn’t do anything to stop it either, not with the light weapons we had. It was too big, too fast, too powerful. Rhinos failed, too.”

  Mass shock came in a series of hard punches by RIK Mammoths and Elephants, multi-turreted hover and ground gunships forming the armored fist of the assault. Three Mammoths came straight for Madjenik, rapid-firing two plasma-cannon and four spandaus each, AI targeting bots slaved to the guns spit red light and fire in gatling-cycles from M-8cm and M-10cm masers. They ripped kinetic and energy rounds into strongpoints and flew right past Jan’s troopers.

  Underpowered, under gunned and under armored, Rhinos had no chance against armtraks built for mass assault. A few took out an enemy vehicle by ramming, but most were blasted apart in just minutes. Any left were destroyed by the Rikugun’s planetside sky force. The deadly Jabos raced in at Mach-plus speeds from bases a continent away, strafing and bombing anything that moved. Wrecking exposed infantry trying to muck to the front to help. Or running the other way.

  “Why does RIK call their big armor Mammoths?” Tom asks. “They don’t look like that at all. They looked to me more like a passing maglev train, long and straight, fast and lethal.”

  “Dunno. We call our armtraks Rhinos, even though they fight more like warthogs. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. A lot of good fighters died horribly inside our lost Rhinos.”

  The big enemy armtraks had magnetic-rail kinetics down their long sides, used mainly to batter buildings and smoke out infantry
. They shifted from hover to tracks when they neared Krevan infantry or strongpoints, taking on a shockingly low profile to avoid local surface-to-surface missiles. Madjenik scored only glancing hits as the heavy armor roared through its position and past, racing into the interior.

  Then came 12 smaller Elephants and elite RIK assault infantry. “They were worse than the heavy Mammoths, those Elephants. They were so damn fast.”

  Elite hovergrenadiers supported the leviathans, remoras cleaning off any KRA attackers. The crack assault troops rode in armored hovers and smaller, darting ATCs. They shot up soft targets the rule-governed bot-guns left alone as non-priority threats: crawling or sitting wounded; men lying gashed-open with pink lungs heaving like bellows; women running in mortal fear; teens dropping weps to stand with hands raised high, crying while vainly trying to surrender.

  RIK generals never paused. Not even to finish bleeding, broken and smashed units scattering and running from all the breakthrough points. The RIK did supreme damage at lightening speed then raced its armor and assault guns through each shattered Krevan position, speeding past or right over stunned defenders to bring death ever deeper into the panicking rear.