by Kali Altsoba
“Ain’t gonna be no parade” becomes a catch-all confirmation, used by tens of billions as short-hand to make criticism of Alliance generals, of the government, of the war. The words grip the hour’s doleful, sinking mood. Or part of it.
The other part is hate. Hot, pressurized, pushing upward like magma. Into the place where naïve enthusiasm dies, hate for those who began the war is born. The government worries about doubts among the young, but it likes and encourages their hate. The nebs shift hard away from love of country, away from duty and service, to hated of the enemy.
Hate is hot.
Hate is deep.
Hate is useful.
Hate is good.
The young especially want and need to hate. Volunteers are still showing up at recruiting stations in numbers that surprise and please the authorities. Wanting to fight, or thinking that they do. Not waiting to be called. Wanting to choose, not just be a number.
Older folk gather in pubs and music halls to get drunk every night, to forget worries and the war. No one wants to sing or hear patriotic songs. They sway-dance to ditties about far away loves or weep over old melodies from quieter times. The most popular are Amor, an old ballad revived to slower, even coital rhythms. Angel of Mercy is a mawkish melody about army nurses that would be dismissed along with all other war songs, except it has a hint of dirty. Rose Blessé is a saccharine croon to a wounded lover. Cleaning My Rifle is a wailing lament with a rural, hokey sound, but you make that one dirty, too. Oka is sung in a faux-Krevan accent by a rising Calmari star. It’s second on the charts, though Keep a Cup of Kars Coffee for Me is closing fast.
***
At the front it’s different. Songs out there are about loose girls and looser boys, drinking hard all day and fucking all night. And about homeworlds. Weeping cliché sentimentalism about blue lakes and soaring mountains, or bold prairies and familiar old streets. Anything but the war.
Soldiers look different. They grow more disheveled with each month and fresh defeat. Too many pale blue uniforms are coated in Imperium mud and spattered blood. Too much of childhood is lost to battle trauma. The clean shaves on Mobilization Day are gone. Among men, an unkempt ‘bearded bandit’ look takes over. Uniforms stay dirty, beards and hair uncut and uncombed. The troops act as slovenly as they look. Conversely, every female ties long hair back, if they don’t cut it off altogether and conceal their sex in loose uniforms and gruff talk.
The youngest soldiers are no longer youths. They’ve seen too much death and suffering, too many refugees looking up at them with worse than fear, eyes dull from each casual abuse. In retreat, they live-off plundered food whenever rations run out, sometimes taking it by force from crying civis on their own side. They sleep in rough quarters rousted from frightened families they drive into cold night air. Teens with guns scream and push at slow oldsters many times their age, in ways they never saw in themselves just months ago. War does not make youth more tender.
“You’re too damn slow. Get outa the way, grandpa!” A rough push.
“Why are you acting like the Grünen, son? We’re your own people.”
“Shaddup, you stupid old man.” A harder push, this one to the ground.
“Calm down, private. Back in line. May I help you up, sir?”
A pretty blonde of 18 summers, tight curls smeared with streaks of black grease and dirt to hide her great beauty from friends and foes alike, messages her mother. “We’re all drowning in gloom. We’ve seen what a battle’s really like and know that we’ll see it again. I miss you.”
She’s killed by a Dauran grenade three days later. It’s a slow, painful, bleeding-all-over-herself death. ‘There are few die well who die in a battle,’ her best friend thinks as she shovels a thin layer of dirt over the corpse bag, to keep the rats from tearing it open with yellow teeth after she leaves her friend behind. She thinks its odd how boring lines of ancient wisdom ignored in school stick in the brain anyway, to return unbidden way out here, where and as they’re needed.
Another village, another old man.
A different unit. A different response.
A pause in the brutality. A return to decency.
“Papa, get off that porch and come with us. The enemy’s right behind.”
“Ah son, thankee, but I can’t go with yee.”
“Sir, he’s right. You can’t stay here. We’re pulling out.”
“I lived here all me life, sergeant. I have no place else ta go.”
“The old woman’s dead, sir. You can’t help her. You need to come with us.”
“I can’t leave her, son. She bee my wife for one hund’red seexteen yeer.”
“Alright, let the old man be. Company, move out!”
A 20 year-old wanted to study literature. He messages his father: “Each day brings new misery and despair. Poetry is a dead thing of my past. The only future we youth can see is war.” He’s killed in bits. He loses an eye, loses an arm, then loses his life in a dirty skirmish on a Vilnu moon. There’s a bigger firefight a day later, and the day and week after that. So his fight is forgotten, the fulcrum moment of his life, and it’s not even recorded in the division’s weekly After-Action Report. There’s no time to stop to write down all the dead.
Some rumors are good. “The enemy’s breaking!” or “We get real good food tonight!” Then time passes and Grünen and Daurans don’t break and the food stays putrid or scarce.
All good news inevitably turns into worse experience. Soldiers become cynical about anything on the Alliance milnebs. They trust no one outside their own squad or company.
“Where’s the front?” asks a new soldier joining the ranks.
“To our rear!” is the bitter answer.
The rookie barely absorbs what that means when his sergeant starts a mocking chant that has the rhythms of the rook’s fresh training, but not the words.
“Who do soldiers serve?
Officers and Death!
What’s our future? Gimme three!
Death! Death! Death!
Hut, two, three, four. No More!”
Krevans have been at war for fifteen months, Calmaris for nine, Helvetics and Threes for seven. Everywhere the Alliance is falling back, losing ships and armies. Losing worlds and hope.
“Isn’t the Calmar Union the most advanced power in Orion? How can we lose to these horrid, unfree Grünen. How can we lose to their ridiculous Purity and to fat stinking Pyotr?”
“Worse, were losing also to the backward Daurans!”
“Impossible!”
“Yes, but it’s true.”
“Why is this fight so hard?”
“Why do we suffer so many defeats? Why?”
“Le diable à quatre.”
“Whaddaya say, Krevan?”
“I said the-devil-times-four.”
“Yeah, you said it boyo! The fucking devil, times four!”
More defeats, more armies cut-off and fighters slaughtered. More despair. Then the Grün counteroffensive slows as the fortune and misfortune of war, the great pendulum of advance and reverse, starts to swing back again. Not back toward victory, but at least farther from defeat as resistance entangles and bleeds the green Cerberus as its three heads snarl and bite into the vitals of the Alliance. Sacrifice slows the stumbling Dauran colossus, too. The iron in the soul of the Alliance is emerging. Now it’s a contest to see who can endure the most suffering. And inflict it.
Everything is changing. Again.
Denial
Two months after invading the Calmar Union, the Dual Powers break over the borders of the Three or ‘Iron’ Kingdoms and invade the Helvetic Association of Free Trading Worlds. Forewarned and thus readier than Krevans for this betrayal, Threes and Helvetics put up stiff resistance while also immediately launching exodus fleets on the Krevan model. They fight hard and well, but there aren’t enough of them to defend dozens of threatened homeworlds.
Although Briand doubts it will make a difference militarily, he advises a counterstrike for politi
cal reasons. “Attack rather than react, prime minister. Don’t repeat the Krevan fiasco. Let’s make a great show of unity, even if it leads to a minor military setback.”
For once, he’s terribly wrong. This will be no minor failure. Alliance troops rush in to help as two more small nations agree to “join an unbreakable front of all the free peoples” of Orion. Politically, it’s a success. Militarily, Operation Eagle Claws does not go well at all.
Alliance forces conduct a protracted defense of Oberon, the Three’s capital and central industrial world. But on the whole, Eagle Claw is too hastily conceived and carried out. MoD still expects to achieve limited success and it might, except that, over objections from the War Hawks and Briand, the Alliance commits to a double-offensive while defending the Neutrals. The two operations, Roundup and Eagle Claws, merge into a singular collapse into disaster.
Briand at least gets what he wants: an ennobled cause and two more former Neutrals who follow the example of furious Krevans, agreeing to fight on from exile. To fight past hope, for hate’s sake. Their governments accept to establish more Allied Base moons, bringing the total to sixteen, eleven new exile worlds plus the five Krevan bases. Altogether, they host several billion “Allied Guests.” The vast majority are young and able to fight. Their old were all left behind. None of that makes up for the cascading disasters tumbling out of the eastern systems.
ACU 7th Assault or 'Enthusiastic’ Division is hurled late into the Eagle Claws campaign, minus Susannah Page. She’s medevacked home to Argos, and misses the entire bloody affair that ultimately loses Oberon to Pyotr. The 7th is badly cut-up in the Iron Kingdoms, for a second time in three months. While Susannah recovers and rehabs, her division suffers a third defeat in a prolonged fight for the ice-moons of Caliban. Other ACU divisions and armies fare just as badly, or worse. They always arrive piecemeal, then are fed too little and too late into ongoing battles. They’re pushed into evermore ill-conceived and desperate counterattacks. They’re badly led by generals not long for their jobs. Cold comfort to all those they get killed with their incompetence.
Krevans fight in Eagle Claws, too, including Jan Wysocki 10th Commando Brigade and the tired ‘Rusty Buckles’ of KRA 1st Division, part of another too little-too late surge to aid the retreating Helvetics and Threes. They fall back in a fighting-defeat and retreat along with the rest of the Alliance. It’s a too familiar and repeating bitter result for the Krevans, defeat and retreat.
“Godsdamn it!” Zofia complains to Jan, in their cabin on Jutlandia on the way back to Orestes Base. “All the bright boys in HQ who do all the forward-ops planning should have called this Tail Feathers instead of Eagle Claws. They had no plan for a possible defeat or retreat, none at all. We had to scramble backward, again! Do our generals know what they’re doing?”
Jan’s never heard her sound this sour, but he has no response beyond a shrug of Genèven resignation. He says nothing a lot these days. They’ve been arguing in hard silences a lot more, too. Everyone is tense. At least their arguments are about the war, not about each other any more.
“That’s charming, dear, but it’s not an answer.” Zofia stomps off to get coffee and ream out some of the new Madjenik recruits. Making the youngsters sweat helps her calm down. Jan thinks she should drink less coffee but he hasn’t yet found the moment to say it. Silence is easier.
“At least this time we bloodied one of Pyotr’s armies,” Jan says later, to buck up Zofia as Wysocki’s Wreckers recover from another lost battle, another ruined world, disembark from yet another cramped and crowded troopship after bohring-out of a system abandoned to the enemy.
He told Wreckers and the Rusty Buckles who fought with them, as they debarked shuttles onto the transports: “Hold your heads up high. We did our part. We hurt the enemy so badly he’ll find his victory here hard to distinguish from our defeat.”
10th Commando Brigade excelled in the fighting for the violated Neutrals, even volunteering to serve as a veteran rearguard to let hordes of scared Oberon conscripts get out first. The unit’s reputation inside KRA is cemented as a truly elite commando. Even outside the KRA, across the wider Alliance, the Brigade’s prowess and reputation for sacrifice is growing.
So, too, is the reputation of its hard-fighting colonel. Again, he’s paraded on GovNebs and milnebs and memexes as the ‘Ghost,’ only now not just of Genève. He’s the “Ghost of the Alliance.” It helps that the War Government pushes the story, as always. And that Briand is not immune. It helps even more that RIK puts a big price on his head and sends assassins to kill the hated Ghost. And that three SAC special forces missions were stymied on Oberon and one more on the Caliban ice-moons, where hard interrogations revealed they had orders to take him out.
Silvery, yapping, nipping and jumping Samara leaps on Jan and Zofia when they get back to base, exhausted and filthy and stinking of war. “At least your husky bitch has finally accepted me as part of your life,” Zofia laughs, tumbling onto the bed to wrestle with Samara, rubbing her belly as she rolls over to permit this rare but welcome intimacy by her great rival for Jan’s love.
Jan doesn’t answer. He’s just won their usual race for the only shower and is enjoying its bracing wetness, thick soap in his tightly-shut eyes and in his hair, white bubbles cascading all down his shoulders and back like foam around boulders in a springtime, mountain stream.
“What the...? Oh! Ohhh ... Zofia slips in behind him and presses her naked breasts hard against his back, her taut pelvis rubbing against his buttocks. She curls her arm around his waist, reaching down to arouse him.
It’s another hour before they let sulking, jealous Samara back on the bed. Zofia has just lost all the trust she gained. ‘Worth it.’ She grins down impishly at still sulking Samara, gives her a gentle push off the bed with her naked toes, then swings her leg over Jan to mount him again.
***
To Prime Minister Robert Hoare’s lasting credit, over the first nine months of the war he throws himself into a hated task with vigor and dedication to shame a far younger man. While his thin body responds heroically to the demands he makes on it, he can’t sustain the moral effort. Nor can he hold together his coalition. A sad, dull despair settles over his last gray days in office.
Hoare isn’t the leader his nation or the Alliance wants or needs. It has been nine months since he was fatally deceived by Pyotr, since his beloved Union was invaded. Five months since he endorsed premature offensives that led to military disaster. Nearly everywhere the enemy is engaged the Alliance is still reeling in retreat, though no longer in rout. At last a no confidence vote is called in the Lok Sabha. Hoare resigns as prime minister before it can pass, as it must.
Georges Briand is acclaimed as his replacement, chosen in a somber session of the War Cabinet. He heads a broad coalition joined by all major parties. No other name is even mooted. Briand is a desperate choice for a more desperate time, in a spiral arm descending into total war.
Even quiet Robert Hoare votes for Briand. A bitter backbencher says off-the-record but lets it go out over the GovNeb: “You can always count on the former prime minister to do the right thing, after he’s tried everything else.” He stays in the War Cabinet as honorific ‘Minister of Roving Portfolio,’ to make a public show of unity and support for Briand. He never speaks.
***
“War isn’t chess, prime minister, where you trade a knight and a rook for a chance to trap the black king in five moves. No one can see that far ahead.” General LeClerc finds himself far more patient with Robert Hoare these days, and freely gives him the respect of his former title.
“War does move faster than politics. I’m dizzy from its speed.” Devoted to peace, the former PM can’t understand why a morally superior position isn’t also physically superior. He’s bewildered that losses are mounting and defeat looms for all that he loves and tried to achieve.
“How do generals do it? How do you master war?”
“We don’t. No one is a master of war. It’s cours
e is too dynamic, too close to chaos. And no one is in control of chaos. Only arrogant fools like Pyotr and Jahandar think that they are.”
“Even you generals don’t control war?”
“We only ride its foam.. We try to steer closer to one bank or the other, but the current is always too strong, too deep, full if unforeseen eddies and rocks, with a treacherous undertow.”
“How then do you plan to achieve victory?”
“Plan? From day-to-day for now, but we are also preparing things to bring the war to the eastern systems, in good time. You and I may still hope that we will win. That’s the other side of chaos: the enemy doesn’t control war’s course any more than we do. He just thinks that he does.”
“I’m glad to hear it, general, that all isn’t lost. You and I have not seen eye-to-eye, but I ask you in all humility to help open mine. For I feel blind today. I can’t see through the deluge to the finer things I once believed were true.” Robert Hoare has reached the lowest point in his life.
