by Kali Altsoba
Alliance ground forces met unexpectedly hard initial opposition, then thick opposition, then heavy opposition, then massive opposition. Until the twin drives stalled out, spear points snapped, shafts thinned as supply convoys were attacked by swarms of thousands of phantoms.
This is the moment Pyotr awaits. Now come swift counterattacks into the sides of the over-exposed Alliance spears, breaking the shafts and isolating the leaf-blade spear heads. Alliance forces are suddenly cut-off, with lead units as far as 50 bohrs deep in Imperium space.
Kaigun war fleets drive off Alliance ships with massed missiles and broadside guns from the big battleships, always shooting from inside halos of hundreds of screening Zerstörers and a new class of smaller, faster ships NCU ship-counters designate DEs (‘destroyer escorts’). The swarm-and-missile tactics are unexpected, and they work. NCU support fleets pull out one-after-another, fighting desperate holding actions at evac LPs. Even so, whole ACU armies are trapped on suddenly isolated Grün planets and moons. Mass surrenders follow. It’s a total disaster.
Inside three months the Alliance is in wholesale defeat, bordering on rout. It pulls out of the pincers in long fighting-retreats. It’s forced to abandon more worlds to the Daurans, who take advantage and launch dozens of northern invasions. Military chiefs tell the War Cabinet that the Alliance is at real risk of losing the war. Talk about offense ends. Talk about swift victory stops. Its all about preparing for long-term fighting and defense now. It’s about survival, not winning.
With military collapse in the east, refugees surge westward across Orion. Hundreds of millions, a billion, three billion, ten billion, then thirty billion on the move. Fleeing the fighting and invading armies in the greatest forced migration in the history of the Thousand Worlds. They board any craft capable of quantum-jump and flee. Always westward, spreading panic to worlds as yet unreached by the enemy. Morale plummets wherever refugees pause or ask asylum, telling tales of woe and destruction of their homeworlds, of savage Dauran occupation or RIK reprisals.
People call the turnabout “The Great Rout.” There’s disdain for Robert Hoare’s inept leadership, deep anger against everyone in the War Cabinet, including Georges Briand and his faction. Debates in the Lok Sabra devolve into shouting matches, pointed fingers and blame, and at least twice, outright brawls of hundreds of MPs. Defeat looks irretrievable. All contact is lost with dozens of overrun systems, with old friends such as Azteca, Rodinia, and Novaya Bator.
Terrible ground fighting continues on Amasia where, even reinforced, General Lian Sòng is barely holding the long trenches against incessant Rikugun attack. A hundred contested worlds fall into the vortex of war, sucking down as well millions of combat-bots, swarms of skycraft, vast herds of armtraks, and tens of millions of volunteers and conscripts. With no end in sight. Rules are cast overboard, sinking along with mercy. Everyone girds for a long and filthy war.
The twin governments order that local, familiar faces should tell relatives about lost or missing fighters. But there are too many names. Local officials balk, refusing to go door-to-door to give out the bad news, to face the families. Rolls get longer, the demand for information more insistent, until the government has no choice. It broadcasts the endless lists of dead and missing direct to memex screens and on holo scrolls posted outside town halls and police stations. No one can look away or turn them off. It’s a profound shock. There are so very many.
Each name is etched in golden letters in ancient, flowing script. It’s meant to give glory to the dead and comfort to the living. The same with somber bells that toll and lament all day and night, as names scroll down faux parchment lists in town and city squares. Some fool in an MoD tower thought bells would help. It’s appalling. Local police walk up and shoot out the speakers.
“Was it really like this, last time?”
“Did we kill so many of our kids back then, too?”
“Never! It couldn’t be like this!”
“The old vids say that it was.”
“Impossible! Else how could we do this again?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? This is just the beginning.”
The sheer scale of dying makes even Death seem different. The Lok Sabha is stunned when the prime minister announces in closed session that military losses in the first four months may exceed 40 million, mostly ACU. He’s asked but can’t give an accurate account of Calmari civilian dead. “Whole worlds are unaccounted for,” he tells a silent Great Parliament.
CIS and SGR secretly estimate the civilian death count at: “Greater than 1,800 million, but it may be substantially higher. Surface bombardments are obscuring an accurate count.” On a hundred worlds marauding armies are still on the move. And on half of those, the Shishi rule.
Everything is changing.
***
Twice twenty million military mothers weep and grieve. A hundred million more don’t know whether to mourn or cleave to a last hope that a beloved daughter might yet recover from wounds or a lost son live on somehow, “out there.” One father meekly asks about a son reported missing weeks ago and thought likely to be dead: “Do I speak of him in the present or the past?”
It isn’t just a question of tense. It’s a matter of hope over despair, of agreeing to death over life, of accepting realism and sober despondency about forever lost children or clinging to an awful tug of hopeless longing. Then comes announcement of a whole new official category beyond Missing Civilians (MC) and the familiar acronyms KIA and MIA scrolling down holos and vidscrolls. It speaks to the kind of defeat that’s coming: PDE (Presumed Dead or Enslaved).
Two more months of protracted fighting and fleets of hospital ships and converted liners arrive even at far western systems, the last not already clogged and clotted with dying. The med ships are stuffed to overheads on every deck with suspends and severely wounded, too numerous to be handled by prewar military facilities. Too many for roving hospital ships or isolated moons to handle or conceal. Too many to keep hiding, as so many were first hidden on off-limit moons and inside converted asteroid mines. Far too many wounded and suspends to pretend any longer.
All civilian medicine is conscripted. All pharmacies and drug factories, all bioprinters and med labs, all limb and organ growth farms are taken over by MoD. More synthetic-blood and suspensor factories are under mad construction, corners cut everywhere in the rush to meet volume demand. All hospitals are militarized, doctors and nurses and orderlies ordered into uniforms and issued ranks. Top surgeons are told by soldiers half their age: “Shut the fuck up, doctor. There’s a war on. Prima donnas like you will do what you’re fucking told, go where you’re told, eat and shit only when and where you’re told. You got that, sir?”
Everything is changing.
There are just too many dead. Unmoving, hushed-up wrongs carried back to homeworlds, wreathed in white, bagged or boxed with stupid flowers on top. Too many youths wounded in unmentionable places, carried back along with the dead on bohred-out old cargo ships drafted into NCU service. Human wrecks move as bound white-packets onto orbital platforms, thence down-and-out the elevator’s base on endlessly moving maglevs. Passing by prosperous florists.
Families are roped off in long rectangles, nearest the wide gangplanks. Behind them crowds gather alongside the quays, at first. They come to see the descending cabs carry home noble warriors, eager to cheer air-cushioned medivacs carting out the shattered flotsam of other people’s lives. They say they come to pay respect to patriotism and sacrifice. Most really come for curiosity’s sake, honest or morbid. They come to see a spectacle, so that later they can say to a neighbor or a friend: “It was terrible, I can tell you! You do know I was there?”
They push forward, cheering, clapping, straining to see. Then those in front do see and the edging crowd halts as folk turn silent, then look away. Severely wounded are carried down the gangways by Robobears, behind flowered and crated dead. Woeful assemblages wrapped in fresh linen pass by in rows, like a bakery conveyor belt of bread pans of white, uncooke
d dough.
A glimpse of a broken body or half-missing face peering from behind a bandage streaked with yellow pus shocks strangers silent, except for children and other moral virgins still too far back to see. They clamor and push for a better place. “Get going! Move, old man! Let me see!”
The white mounds and white-wrapped youths pass the silenced crowds to meet sobbing parents and siblings, muffled in grief. Or there’s no one there to meet them, as they’re carried to hyperloop cars leading to a thousand cities on hundreds of shocked worlds. They’re heading to long-term care hospitals or to mental asylums or worst of all, back to their old rooms at home.
Morale plummets as damaged children return swaddled in crimson, as suspends inside critical-care Pods that carry double or triple-amputees, or charred and hidden from any view. They come home as once-pretty girls now missing jaws or hips. As slim boys with no faces or torn stomachs or a ripped-open thigh held shut by shiny staples and skin grafts. And those are mostly-recoverable cases. They take the very worst out a different way, unseen and unseeable.
Fathers puff portentously on clay or wood pipes. They don’t know what to do. No more than they did that day their child arrived, swaddled in blood and birth wax and fresh white linen. Mothers only think they can help. They wait patiently with fresh sheets and folded piles of clean bandages and a long-forgotten toy or favorite stuffed-animal, and other hopelessly useless things.
A woman near Final Age sobs into cupped, liver-stained hands looking on what shot-and-shell did to a great-great-great grandson with indifferent violence. “You’re home now, sweetie.”
An old man weeps onto the crimson half-breast of a mummy-like, white-wrapped great-granddaughter. She’s also missing an arm and both legs. It’ll be six months before they can grow new ones to replace them. “There’s a backlog, but you’re on the list. I checked yesterday.”
Next come the wounded in mind or spirit. Silent, startled, vacant souls walking behind locked Pods and stretchers of more visibly-damaged comrades. There’s less sympathy for these types of returnees, at least at first. Civilians are still learning what war is, and does to the mind.
Ignorant judgment flows over returnees like ice-water over stones in a high mountain brook, chilling and cracking anew the shuffling columns of the mentally lamed and maimed.
“Doctors can do wonders these days, can’t they?” is one snide remark, deliberately loud enough to be heard by a wincing, involuntarily twitching boy walking stooped but unaided.
“It’s not like she lost both legs,” snarks another. He’s draft-exempt because he happens to work in an industry declared key to the war. He’s making more than he ever thought possible.
“Looks to be moving just fine to me,” someone agrees. “Where ya hurt, honey?” It’s not meant to be sincere. The question is meant to hurt.
The mute girl doesn’t look up. She hasn’t spoken a word to anyone in four months.
A third is honestly ignorant, pointing to a young man who’s ambling along, seemingly just fine, except for that look in his eyes. “What’s the matter with him? He’s not wounded!”
A fourth is faux-reassuring, mostly to himself. “Sure, a bit of rest and you’ll be fine. We’ve got good doctors here on Alcmaeon, the best in the Union.”
The creek of curiosity about wounded soon runs dry. As more ships arrive, more cabs descend the elevators, more maglev trains gape open to take onboard more wounded and carry them away to distant cities and shores. Crowds thin until only a few strangers press forward with notified families to reach a passing stretcher. Not to offer sympathy or aid or even flowers. Only eager to hear unfiltered news direct from someone so recently “at the front,” they ask a question.
An anxious mother to an amputee. “Have you seen my Jacqueline? She’s from Belleville, too, just like you.” A swaddled head-shake answers ‘no.’
A too forward child. “My dad’s with your regiment. I know ‘cause you got the same nova patch he’s got on his cap. Why are you here when he’s still away at war? Where’s my dad?”
A young wife. “My Absalom, my love. Did you see him? Is he alive? Say that he is.” She’s exempt from military service for one year because her belly’s too heavy, weighed down with months of swollen memory of a long missing sweetheart rent from her in mid-love, half a year into their marriage. The scenes repeat on a hundred worlds. The woe is unique to each.
Dazed and drugged youths look up blankly from underneath pink-stained dressings. They give no answer. They don’t know why they’re resented when just months ago they were fêted, prideful in their physical health and uniqueness and completeness as they strode up these same quays, seen-off to war by happy, cheering and confident crowds. Back then some lads wanted a light war-wound, in just the right place, to make them more handsome. So that women would move nearer to touch their bravery. Now they’re unwanted. Not here. Not like this. War is the hard teaching ground where narcissist youth learn that no one is special.
‘Shit, least of all me.’
Another month and no more strangers come to the piers. Only relatives gather to meet the Med Shuttles, forewarned of wounded arriving like unremitting surf, washing cargoes of bobbing human jetsam onto shore. Trailing red tubes of synthetic-blood transfusion, wounded are loaded into shuttered hyperloop cars that whoosh silently away in a spreading wheel of misery. Spokes form at Mach 5 speed, hermetically sealed in vacuum tubes that pass over callous landscapes or under indifferent seas and idle, sleeping mountain ranges. The trains deposit the fractured ones in a thousand cities, a hundred thousand towns, a million forlorn villages. Then go back for more.
It’s not gaping physical wounds or the ‘five klic stares’ that cold-shocks sensibilities and thins the crowds of gawping strangers. Everyone knows that most physical damage these youths have will be repaired, that any half-decent hospital can custom grow strong replacement bones of crystalline-graphene rods and nano-ceramics, will graft bioprinted muscle to a naked femur and fresh skin to exposed white cheekbones where a Grün or Dauran maser sheered-off the original.
It’s not that at all. It’s the sheer number of wounded that stuns. Everyone expected some lost and wounded as the Calmar Union marched to victory in a just war it didn’t start. Not this tidal flood. This shipwrecked fleet of broken youth. This hard pilgrim’s progress into Tartarus. Whispering confusion spreads in back corners of pubs, in quiet homes, in shops of small towns.
“There are so many!”
“Five more trains today.”
“My neighbor got two ‘packages’ yesterday, poor dear. Both her boys come back on the same train. One needs new eyes and t’other one? Well, he’s done gone a little funny, ya know?”
“How bad is it out there, really?”
“This can’t go on much longer.”
Oh yes, it can. And it will.
Parents blanch at limping or wheeled horrors on the piers or arriving in a village square by medivac from a hyperloop station. Children dream-up worse horrors yet-to-happen to a much missed father. There are too many blessé, too many wounded or blank, staring youth sitting all day at old cafés without speaking. Worms of public doubt about the war burrow ever deeper.
Far too long are scrolling lists of ACU and NCU names who “Died for the Nation.” And somber music all the time. On the Krevan moons it’s much the same, row-after-endless-row, each KRA or KRN name preceded by the same phrase: “Morts pour la Patrie.”
The public mood worsens when a poignant live interview makes it past MoD censors, to ripple along a Military News Alert that trips a taut nerve in every province. A recent mother in her early twenties and in the ACU answers conventionally at first, flashing a smile through fresh graft-scars from under a bandaged, missing eye. “They’re still growing it,” she says cheerfully.
A new, combat medallion lies beside her on a gray military-pillow, gentle illumination advertising her bravery. She inspires with joyous, gay talk of “ma own wee one,” glancing over at a small crib. She says how good
it is to be home “to see my little ‘sis again, an’ ma parents.”
Pressed to tell how it was she won the medal, she speaks more somberly about a friend lost in combat three months ago. Then she looks up with her one good eye and says, sotto voce, “Ya know, this ain’t gonna to be no parade. Not lak we all thought it wus.”
It’s a simple truth. simply stated. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
A frantic off-camera gesture from a portly, military education officer conducting the live interview helps her close with a prepared bravado note. It clangs wholly false with the audience as the wounded young mother sits up straight and says: “But we shuh gonna’ win it! Yes, sah!”
As the camera cuts away to focus on what the director hopes are proudly smiling parents, it catches instead their sick-gray worry. A jarring patriotic anthem pipes into the soundtrack. The scared director is trying to cover his career-ending error of “letting this damn thing go out live!
The interview is never rebroadcast. It’s scrubbed from the memexes and milnebs, tracked into private consoles and erased by censors working into the next week. Too late.
