Mobilization

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  The cursing commodore looked around at his staff officers in disgust, but none responded. As the balloon of their triumph deflated, a thin mist of uneasiness and fatigue hung in the air.

  The Alliance Armed Forces opened their gunports all the same, never slowing their charge, and attacked the third formation. After a brief yet violent battle, they’d literally torn it to shreds. Again, there were cheers—that was, until they sighted the fourth formation.

  II

  It was April 29, and Yang Wen-li’s swift attacks had broken through the empire’s eighth defensive formation. But a ninth had spread before the alliance: tens of thousands of points of light lined up together, ready to attack.

  “Such thickness and depth …”

  Yang was impressed. When the imperial formation had counterattacked, Yang had successfully predicted it would assume a deep defense pattern, but he hadn’t expected it to be so dense. Here was a living example of the saying, “Reality is always greater than imagination.”

  Merkatz crossed his arms.

  “It’s like we’re peeling away the layers of a pastry. One by one, these defense formations keep on coming.”

  “There’s no end to them.”

  Chief of Staff Murai shook his head.

  Rear Admiral Walter von Schönkopf twisted his lips into a cynical curve.

  “It’s too late to stop now. Shall we peel away the ninth layer, or … ?”

  Yang returned his gaze to Merkatz and nodded, having gotten the answer he was looking for. They were past the point of no return. Knowing that the water was getting deeper and the mud thicker, the alliance had no choice but to walk into the center of the lake. Duke Reinhard von Lohengramm was pulling the alliance by an invisible tether, and his manipulation thereof felt magnificently ominous. But how was Duke von Lohengramm observing the progress of this battle, and where was he hiding himself, waiting for his moment to strike?

  “Your Excellency …”

  This reserved voice came from Julian’s mouth.

  “Did you have something to say?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency. I think I know what Duke von Lohengramm means to do.”

  Yang slightly furrowed his brow and looked at the flaxen-haired boy. Yang was harsh with him like this on occasion, if only to avoid the appearance of a ward’s favoritism.

  “He’s good at keeping up appearances. But a light-year separates what Duke von Lohengramm thinks and what he does.”

  “Yes, but in this case, I’d say that distance isn’t even one light-second.”

  The staff officers’ gazes converged on Julian. Yang waited a moment before pressing for an explanation.

  “Duke von Lohengramm’s goal is to exhaust us, both physically and psychologically. This is especially proven by the fact that every time one formation is broken through, another one takes its place.”

  “He’s right, you know,” muttered Merkatz.

  Yang gazed at the boy in silence. Julian was enunciating every word carefully, as if to confirm what he was saying for himself.

  “They’re not coming at us head-on. Our sensors would’ve picked up on that if they were, and Duke von Lohengramm would have a hard time keeping an eye on the battle’s progress. Presumably, there’s nothing at all, and hasn’t been from the start, between our forces and Duke von Lohengramm. Instead, I think the enemy’s forces are positioned on either side of us, like thin cards.” Julian took a breath and stated his conclusion. “In other words, they’re shuffling their deck right front of us. If only we could circumvent this, we might be able to engage Duke von Lohengramm’s main fleet.”

  Julian had expressed himself with incomparable lucidity and accuracy. When the boy finished speaking, Merkatz nodded first.

  “I see. That makes sense. You’ve certainly thought this through.”

  Yang sighed. It was possible for Duke von Lohengramm to have moved all divisions from the sides to the alliance’s fore, all while keeping a direct eye on the state of the war. Even so, thought Frederica Greenhill, she wondered whether Yang’s sigh was directed at Reinhard von Lohengramm or Julian.

  Just then, a report came in from an operator. A group of the empire’s single-seat fighter walküren was fast approaching.

  “Have Poplin’s and Konev’s squadrons engage,” Yang ordered.

  Already thinking of the next short-term tactic, he moved off his desk into the chair and put on his black beret.

  As 160 spartanians and 180 walküren flew past each other at high speeds between the large warships, they transitioned into an all-out dogfight.

  Olivier Poplin had been called many reprehensible things, but a coward wasn’t one of them. He sallied forward, ensuring that those who trembled at his approach would be the first to go down.

  “Whisky, Rum, Vodka, Applejack, all units are go. Don’t get swallowed up by the enemy. You swallow them.”

  Poplin had, appropriately enough, named his squadrons after types of alcohol. Following his customary signal call, he gave them the green light to branch into eight directions.

  Although Poplin’s squadron was known for its three-as-one formations, the fleet captain was having too much fun taking out enemy craft solo. He appeared reckless, when in fact he penetrated the multitudes of enemy targets with such speed and vigor that with every beam he fired he reduced one or two ships to a flower of light. His enemies were taken aback by his peerless skill, but two of the walküren, their pilots spurred on by courage and ambition, ferociously taunted their large prey with arrows of fire and snapped at his heels.

  “You think you can provoke me? You’re half a century early for that,” Poplin laughed derisively.

  As his pursuers corkscrewed behind him, he dashed through space toward an enemy warship. Ignoring the photon-bomb tracers dangerously caressing his craft, he shot up suddenly just before impact. He climbed to the top of the ship, just centimeters away from the body, and performed a roll.

  The two walküren in pursuit were no match for his skills. One of the pilots crashed into the hull of the ship, scattering in an orange ball of light. The other attempted to replicate Poplin’s steep climb but got too close to the ship’s hull and was sucked out through a hole torn in his craft after churning up too many sparks of friction.

  “Guess I can’t count those two among the ones I’ve shot down. Konev is totally going to outdo me this time.”

  Poplin didn’t have much time to boast, as his subordinates were embroiled in a fight the likes of which they’d never encountered. The imperial walküren, under Commander Horst Schüler, with eighty kills to his name, was employing his own three-as-one strategy against the alliance, capturing and destroying spartanians in tandem with tightly knit fire. As the spartanians were drawn within their firing range, they evaporated, one by one.

  Poplin rallied his pilots, amazed at how sharply their numbers had dropped. The status report from Lieutenant Moranville was filled with bitterness.

  “Team Applejack is down to two. Everyone else was killed in action … everyone else …”

  Suddenly his voice grew weak and drove an ominous wedge into Poplin’s chest.

  “What’s going on? Do you copy?”

  The voice that came back wasn’t Moranville’s. The only common feature they shared was a feeling of overwhelming exhaustion.

  “This is Warrant Officer Zamchevsky. I’m all that’s left of team Applejack.”

  Poplin audibly sucked in his breath and let it out, smashing his piloting console with his right fist.

  That the renowned Poplin fleet had lost almost half of its ranks made the alliance shudder, but an even stronger impact was waiting in the wings. Upon returning, Poplin was downing a whisky in the officers’ mess, still in his pilot’s uniform, when Konev’s vice commanding officer, Lieutenant Caldwell, came walking in with a weary-looking pair.

  “Hey, what happened to your b
oss? I want to see his face looking more depressed than me.”

  Lieutenant Caldwell stopped in his tracks, his face a study in bewilderment and hesitation, and answered in a heavy voice.

  “As of now, I’m acting commander of the Konev squadron, Commander Poplin.”

  With a face that was a poster of displeasure, painted and framed, the ace pilot tossed back another glass.

  “I’m in no mood for roundabout explanations. What’s happened to your commander?”

  The lieutenant resigned himself and gave an unambiguous answer.

  “Killed in action, sir.”

  Poplin glared at the lieutenant with a light in his eyes that resembled an urge to kill. The dissonance of innumerable conflicting emotions was the only thing that kept an angry bellow from roaring out of his chest.

  “How many did it take to bring him down?”

  “Sir?”

  “I asked you how many it took to bring him down. Ivan Konev would never have gone out from a single shot. How many imperial ships did they need to take him out?”

  The lieutenant looked at the floor like someone accused of wrongdoing.

  “Commander Konev wasn’t killed in a dogfight. He was fired upon by a cruiser.”

  “I see.”

  Poplin stood up from the table. Lieutenant Caldwell reflexively took half a step back.

  “The imperial forces needed a cruiser to put away Konev, did they? Then they’ll need at least half a dozen battleships for me.”

  Poplin laughed, but his laughter put the lieutenant in mind of a heat thunderstorm. Poplin threw something, which Caldwell caught. The lieutenant watched the ace pilot, who betrayed nothing of his drunkenness, leave the officers’ mess before looking at his own hand. There, clutched in its grip, was an empty bottle of corn whisky.

  After successfully breaking through the imperial forces’ ninth layer, Yang Wen-li announced a change of strategy. For once, he was truly drained by this ongoing succession of battles.

  “Duke von Lohengramm’s tactic is to chip away at our forces by a most extreme form of deep defense. It’s just as Sublieutenant Mintz has said. Going on any longer like this would be foolish, but stopping would buy them time, and so either way we play into his hands. Our only chance at victory is to demolish the enemy’s multilayered formation.”

  After such a stale introduction, Yang presented the fruits of his mental labors to his staff officers and instructed them on his new strategy.

  Thus, on April 30, the war underwent its second dramatic change.

  III

  At this stage, Reinhard, in an apparent state of lethargy, was devoting himself to sustaining Yang’s attacks as a means of whittling away at his penetrative power. Facing Yang head-on was just one part of his strategy to capture the whole of FPA territory. When his generals fell back from the sectors to which they’d been dispatched and flooded the Vermillion Stellar Region, the first battle welcomed its magnificent climax. The preparations for said climax were relatively simple.

  To sustain Yang’s assault, Reinhard had prepared upward of twenty-four defensive formations. In the same way that he’d symbolically poured wine over a stack of paper for his generals’ edification, he planned on depleting Yang’s military power one layer at a time. Reinhard had put everything into this strategy, which filled Yang with insuppressible admiration. The military forces of a temporarily breached defensive formation dispersed to either side and took a roundabout path back to their allies in the rear, where they formed a new defensive barrier. Thus, Yang was faced with the prospect of a never-ending battle, winning over and over against a limitless defense.

  Reinhard’s strategy was a well-oiled machine. Not only did it stop Yang in his tracks, it inspired Yang to retreat some eight hundred thousand kilometers away, where he concealed his fleet behind a small group of planets that would be difficult to probe. Before long, a report confirmed that a sizable fleet had fallen back and was moving to the alliance’s starboard side, or the imperial forces’ port.

  A gloom passed over Reinhard’s ice-blue eyes. It was unthinkable that Yang Wen-li would disperse his forces without good reason. His purpose in doing so was undoubtedly to spread out Reinhard’s forces in kind, but the problem was whether Yang had dispatched his main force to begin with. The artificial-eyed chief of staff, Paul von Oberstein, interrupted his master’s train of thought.

  “Considering how openly they did it, we can assume it’s a decoy, but it might not be. Either way, it’d be foolish to spread ourselves too thin.”

  Reinhard nodded, but that gesture took on hues that were more of deferment than approval. He didn’t have the greatest of expectations for von Oberstein as a tactician. The artificial-eyed chief of staff might have been an excellent strategist and politician, but when it came to genuine combat, he couldn’t hold a candle to Reinhard’s refined genius.

  Reinhard noticed he’d been fiddling with the pendant on his chest. If the redhead whose likeness slumbered inside that pendant were still alive, he surely would’ve had some good advice for Reinhard. Since losing him, Reinhard had carried out all battle plans himself, from page to stage, as it were. The enormity of what was lost to him was as deep as the foolishness of having lost something he shouldn’t have lost in the first place.

  “What say you, Your Excellency?” urged von Oberstein.

  At this, Reinhard dragged his heart back to the ground floor of reality. It still took him a few moments to give his order.

  “Turn all divisions portside. The enemy is using this as a decoy to move its main forces. We block their way and hit them where it hurts.”

  For once, Reinhard lacked total confidence. The thought of whether he should modify his first attack method was patrolling his brain. If Siegfried Kircheis had been by his side and proposed such a thing, he would’ve followed it without question. His inborn ambition, however, was a necessary reaction against the passive measures he’d taken thus far. He was also tempted by the prospect of taking down Yang Wen-li without leaning on the military forces of his admirals. He believed that he’d read deeply enough into Yang’s tactics. He’d have to hand over the reins eventually, even if only for one battle. Still unable to control the chaos in his heart, Reinhard turned to a positive plan.

  Save for the small number of fleets under Reinhard’s direct control at headquarters, the imperial forces reorganized their battle formations, advancing quickly on the enemy by detouring portside. Turning from total defense to offense put the young admirals in high spirits.

  But when the imperial forces had the enemy within firing range, they were astonished, for what they thought was the alliance’s main force was a group of two thousand decoys pulling meteorites to trick the radar into thinking they were more numerous. While this decoy fleet was luring the empire’s main forces, the alliance’s own jumped out from their hiding spot in the small planetary cluster and went fiercely after Reinhard’s headquarters.

  The alliance forces charged with all their might. If they missed this chance, then defeat was inevitable. Dusty Attenborough and the rest shouted at their subordinates while stamping their feet on the floor, piercing the empty, defenseless space like an arrow.

  By the time the imperial forces noticed what was happening, the alliance had already crossed behind them and was closing in on Reinhard’s headquarters. The speed of their charge impressed even the Gale Wolf, Wolfgang Mittermeier.

  Thurneisen, Brauhitsch, Aldringen, Carnap, and Grünemann tried their best to turn back but were showered by fire from the decoy fleet, sustaining significant damage. Not that they cared much about that, for even as they were being hit from behind by the decoy fleet, the imperial forces were attacked by rows of alliance ships from the fore.

  If this was successful, the imperial forces were sure to be hit by an acute flank attack. Yang Wen-li’s forces were at their exquisite best. Although the imperial vanguard groups fi
red beams and missiles at random, when they inflicted damage on the alliance’s starboard side, the alliance broke formation and surged to port, making it seem as if their center would break. Convinced of this, Thurneisen and Brauhitsch raged to recover from the humiliation of being attacked by the decoy, and charged in tandem.

  Change was quick. Just as they were convinced they’d successfully broken them, the imperial admirals were dumbfounded to learn that they were under siege by the alliance. The bend in the alliance formation was in fact the hollow of a deformed concavity that the alliance had formed in response to the imperial offensive. If the imperial forces confronted them head-on now, they’d be stuck in the middle of the formation. The imperial forces were unlikely to make that foolish mistake. The optical illusion that convinced them they were attacking the enemy’s side had groomed them to be tactical victims of Yang Wen-li’s supernatural abilities.

  Gunfire from the decoy fleet blocking off the rear also intensified, and the alliance attacked from all sides.

  Innumerable striations skewered the imperial fleet, and knives of light minced its warships. Surrounded and immobilized, the imperial forces rolled down a steep slope into death and destruction amid dazzling explosions of light.

  “Aldringen’s fleet is being decimated.”

  This report, filled with danger and fear, was met with a deep ocean of silence by the flagship Brünhild. More bad news poured in.

  “Brauhitsch’s fleet is dissolving its battlefront.”

  The operator giving these reports fought for control over his voice. Reinhard had known all along that the ongoing destruction wouldn’t be restricted to the fleets or battlefronts but would also include the legendary invincibility and glory of his authority.

  “I’ve been cheated,” Reinhard mused to himself.

  A shadow of self-deprecation ran down his pale, beautiful face. If the encirclement was perfectly successful, his defeat was likely, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to crush Yang Wen-li before that happened. With nothing more than an imperfect encirclement and an awkward dispersal of forces, he and his men had become sitting ducks.