by Kali Altsoba
No one knows how or why they did it, but all agree that Amasia’s AI nanny bots played Mozart with molecules, painted Renoirs with strands of DNA. Then they shut down and waited under the apple trees they planted for the first colonists to arrive, despoilers of the New Eden they had made. Even more oddly, when we got there they were gone. No one knows where or how or why.
Amasia has it all, every key genetic base, each source of original and exported flora and fauna, all “brought to the stars in DNA jars,” as a familiar Calmari children’s rhyme puts it. There is no comparable biorepository in Orion, not even the origin world. Old Earth was despoiled by genetic experimentation, human overpopulation, and waves of mass extinctions. It never recovered, or not fully. Amasia is more nearly complete even than the despoiled origin planet.
More, it has flocks, herds, swarms of long extinct Old Earth animals, notably cynodonts and brontotheres, which get along fine with elephants and mammoths but have trouble recognizing predators. There are no dinosaurs, however. Despite what small children across all Orion are told and believe, and all seem to really want. No one else wants them, on Lemuria or anywhere else in Orion. The closest the bots came is a few re-engineered Cretaceous plants on jungle moons like Narada high above Amasia, and more elaborately on distant Mezozia.
Today the legacy of billions of years of natural evolution swims and hides and hunts in the vast Okeanos. It migrates in huge herds up-and-down Lemuria, lives in treetops of the boreal forests and in torrid austral swamps. It crawls along the floor of the great deserts and burrows under permafrost and tundra beneath the aurora poles. It climbs the sides of alpine valleys and lives under the mud of the great rivers that divide and irrigate the supercontinent. It flies above...
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Susannah Page was wounded on Glarus, shot in the heart by a sniper bot with a design-is-destiny complex and real pride in its precision and purpose. She almost died, in just her twenty-second year of life and joy. She screamed in agony and terror as a 3.5cm hole was ripped by a blue plasma ball right through her combat armor and high thermal suit, and into her heart.
She was saved by a fast acting squad mate who jabbed her with suspend, and by a medic and Robobear who carried her to a Trauma Pod. While it flew her back to base camp for triage and possible medevac, a particularly fussy and creative REMOTE took care of her while Head of Cybersurgery Lee Jin plunged into her heart to poke and cut and begin repairs. A lot of folks were there for her when it mattered, but she remembers none of that.
It’s not her fault.
It’s the suspensor.
It made her a black hole.
Until she got to the hospital ship Red Rover and they brought her out of it, then put her back under, then brought her back up, then put her back down, like she was a bobbed apple. All part of the psych side of healing, they told her. “It’ll help you accept what happened.” But it didn’t.
With casualties rising all over the eastern systems they needed her med ship bed. She was sent back to Argos on an old crate task listed by MoD as recover wounded, which meant everyone on board was designated active duty, told to get better and get back. Other ships carried no returns. Reefers went home, too. That’s what folks called morgue ships full of bagged bodies and parts.
Another too cute Robobear carried her down the Argos elevator gangway, swaddled like an overlarge baby in white linen. She was littered past a silent, gawping crowd on the platform, then magleved home to worried parents. She was wheeled by her Dad into a perfectly made up, corner room from childhood. Her little sister, Anya, stood in the doorway with an odd look on her face. Of all that, she mostly remembers long talks with her surgeon, Lee Jin. She looks him up in the milneb and medneb databases and is surprised to find he isn’t just the sweet man she now misses talking to. He was the head of the ACU-NCU Cybersurgery Corps when they met, and he just got promoted to Medical Major General and Head of the newly formed and even bigger Alliance Medical Corps.
She has been gone for six months from Argos 7th Assault, also known as the ‘Enthusiastics.’ Like everyone else in the 7th, she hates the nickname. And there’s not a thing she can do about it. Argos is the 7th Assault’s main recruitment base and Argosians love the new wartime moniker. They think it’s tough and patriotic. Susannah hates that civilians try to slip it into conversation with her, as if they support the war harder by saying it, or it gives them a bit of reflected martial glory. Even her Dad does it. It happens whenever she has a chat with an old teacher or a school friend, too. So she stopped talking about the war, then she stopped talking.
Real battle is different from what any soldier imagined before the war, or any civilian back on Argos or anywhere else in the Union even conceives. The fact that not one so called Enthusiastic veteran is actually enthusiastic about the war, or much of anything anymore, doesn’t matter. The nickname sticks to Argos 7th Assault like a bluebottle fly on rotten mockmeat.
The 7th got tagged ‘Enthusiastic’ after an odd display of parade ground ardor just before its first deployment. Before it went into its first ever fight, on Glarus in the Braunwald system. That utter disaster is called Tactical Retreat from Glarus in the official unit logbook. Its vets call it “The Slaughter.” Susannah simply says “that’s the place a sniper bot fucked me up.”
No one knows what really happened that morning. Only that the rankers were giddy as they stepped out on parade review in best blue swanks. Only that they all looked “enthusiastic” on the last day before their first combat deployment. Not one trooper was actually eager to get into battle, as people later said they were. The truth is, the whole division was spiked high on adrenal boost stolen from Base Supply by a drunk medic, who quite expertly, even admirably, infiltrated a high dose of the hyper stimulant into barracks coffee dispensers. The practical jokester was never caught. To this day no one even knows he did it.
He won’t tell anyone.
He can’t tell anyone.
He’s buried on Oberon.
***
The bot hit Susannah right in the heart with blue plasma. Even as the Trauma Pod whisked her away, back in the clearing her platoon, then her company, got cut up in a sustained firefight. The sniper bot that started the argument by hitting her square in the chest next killed a nice lad with a perfect decapitation shot, then went off its game a touch and only burn wounded two more. Ten minutes later, as her company kept advancing, the bot’s ‘friends’ joined in. Human fighters, too.
Inside an hour, the nasty scouting action Susannah’s company’s rookie CO stumbled her squad into got much bigger. By day’s end, with one company pinned down, General Nadine Yupanqui rushed in reinforcements to match the rapid escalation her Rikugun counterpart was making. The fight got bigger by the hour during the night, drawing in even larger units from both sides until half the 7th was engaged in ferocious combat that continued over the next two days and nights. Then it went eerily quiet. Not even the dead whispered.
But two weeks later things got real sparky for the Enthusiastics. That’s when they learned they were up against a top RIK division, but only after it had landed covertly behind the 7th Assault’s heavily dug in MDL. Came down a day before the first clash, in the same area where Susannah was almost killed by a perimeter sniper bot that’s now a slag puddle.
Gross Imperium is based at Kolno Barracks, the elite training site in the whole RIK, near Pusan on Daegu, in Carmé system. Its all-body shaved fighters, make that its totally depilated fighters, wear a silver knight’s head shoulder flash, famous across the entire Imperium and now also infamous among Enthusiastics. Susannah did some research while on leave. She fixates on Gross Imperium as she monitors the 7th’s rising MIA and KIA lists scrolling on sobered Argos.
She tells a school friend visiting for the day, who really wants to talk about boys: “You want to talk about boys? I’ll tell you about ‘the boys.’ Yeah, that’s what they call themselves in RIK.”
Her girl doesn’t want to talk about them. She wants her friend back. Alw
ays laughing, sometimes funny Susannah. Not this dour revenant. She doesn’t like angry Susannah. The one who can’t come home from Glarus or stop talking about Gross Imperium. Though her mind does wander to thoughts of hairless, young male bodies when Susannah tells her about depilation. But Susannah won’t stop there or leave it alone. She refuses to have fun with the ridiculous thought.
“Wanna know what’s real weird? They have ‘For God and Death’ tattoos imprinted exactly under the same motto that’s on their outer sleeves. Who does that? 50,000 hairless guys all with the same death cult tattoo? Fucking fanatics.”
“Awks! You’re like soooo angry, Suze.”
“Still wanna talk about boys?”
“Don’t be such a creeper!’
Anyway, Gross Imperium air dropped right in front of 7th Assault, setting an ambush that caught everyone in ACU command on and above Glarus off-guard and wrong footed. It just about overwhelmed the 7th in a heavyweight slugging match that went the full 15 rounds. It left both prize fighters wobbly and bloody by the end, but the 7th nearly knocked out.
Susannah’s battalion lost 14 officers KIA and 234 rankers. Thousands more Blues were killed outright, across the division, with lots more thousands severely wounded. Nearly 2,000 Enthusiastics are listed as missing-in-action, left behind when the 7th bugged out on emergency shuttles as the invasion of Glarus and the rest of ill conceived Operation Roundup collapsed into retreat, then into rout.
“You try being ‘enthusiastic’ after that,” Susannah says, glaring at her airhead friend, having trouble remembering why they were ever friends to begin with.
Her friend is thinking the same thing. She says she has to go see her “GF Squad” and needs to “skurt.”
“GF Squad? Your girlfriends? You have no idea what a squad is!’
“OMG Suze, you’re really going emo today! Why you gotta be so thirsty?” Later, her former friend tells all her other former friends: “She’s such a wankster! Forget her! Let’s go check out the boys at the downtown Recruiting Station. There’s always boys there!”
Susannah is pretty hard on people. She says it out loud to her parents’ and their friends during her ‘Time to Go Back to the War’ party. That’s the one her folks throw when she’s medically cleared to return to active duty. OK, they didn’t call it that, she did. They thought of it as ‘We’ll Miss You, Susannah.’
“You haven’t earned it. Not one of you, sitting back here in the same comfort and safety as before the war! What do you know about combat ‘enthusiasm,’ or even about patriotism?”
“Susannah, please…”
“Oh, stuff it! What do any of you know about war? That taxes are going up? That the Mercury Ball League shortened this year’s schedule because 14 occupied worlds can’t send a team?”
“Well dear, we know that…”
“You don’t know anything!”
“Susannah…”
“I got shot in the heart!”
“Susan…”
“Not you, me!”
“But you’re better now.”
“Yes dear, the doctors said…”
“In the heart!”
***
Lee Jin missed his little free time visits to Susannah in Recovery, after she was shipped home on a fast transport to Argos, with thousands of Argosian wounded. He had to make make room for thousands more arriving white bundles, swaddled in suspended astonishment. Then it got worse. Two weeks after she medevacked away from Glarus, real heavy fighting got underway beneath Lee Jin’s feet on the planet below. Heavy ground action sent him scrambling into his surgery long before a short squadron of Zerstörers attacked the NCU escort screen protecting Red Rover and his other fully loaded hospital ships, Mercy, Relief, and Esperanza del Mar. A bohr call for help went out fast. It arrived barely in time.
Before the Zerstörers reached his hapless medical ships, NCU jumped in three heavy cruisers and five destroyers parked in an adjacent system at the other end of the bohr telegraph. They got to the orbital fight faster than any in-system relief could, by bohring instantly to the LP where Lee’s medical flotilla was gravity free floating with an insufficient escort. It was a high risk tactic, covering two systems with the same ships, depending on instant bohr coms for a fast link and jump. It was just enough relief, just in time. NCU got Lee’s precious ships the hell-out-of-there, though it lost a cruiser in the effort because its still vaporing captain and crew took a short range torp straight in the gut, before they knew what was happening. That’s the downside of jumping right into the middle of a fight: the other guy is alert and shooting while for the first minute or more, you’re trying to figure out if your navel is really an event horizon, or maybe a sinkhole. The cruiser broke in two. Slow crashed into Glarus. No survivors. Lee watched her go down.
No one could save the situation on the ground. Enthusiastics had to be pulled offworld on evac shuttles that rendezvoused with what became an escape convoy, peeling away from Glarus under heavy fire right after the departed hospital ships. Lee hardly left his cybersurgery during the rout and run. He just kept working, unfreezing one wounded trooper after another and repairing whatever he could. He missed his little free time visits to Susannah in Recovery, after she was shipped ahead on a fast transport to Argos along with thousands of Argosian wounded. To make room for thousands more arriving white bundles, swaddled in suspended astonishment.
Glarus wasn’t the only bad defeat. Not by a long parsec. Things went sour and south just about everywhere. The brilliant counterstrike at Glarus was merely one blow in a massive Grün counterpunch into premature Alliance thrusts, made too deeply and rashly into the core strength of the central stars of the Imperium. Inside three months the Alliance was reeling backward, its fleets and armies ordered out. They didn’t just pull back, they ran from two score worlds, pursuit following hard on their exhaust plumes in every case. At least the short war illusion was shattered among leaders of the Calmar Union. All premature plans for a new offense were discarded in the face of shocking defeat. After defeat, after defeat, after defeat.
It was different on high tek hospital ships across Cybersurgery Corps. It was worse. Too many red-and-white, unmoving bundles arrived on medevac shuttles. They weren’t enough beds or surgical cubicles. Not enough morgue ships, even double stacked. Way too few reefers. The ACU-NCU medical service thought it was prepared for war, but it wasn’t. Lee Jin was immediately promoted to Major General to give him a seat on the Alliance General Staff, and named to head up a unified Alliance Medical Corps that was fully independent of all other military authority. The pols back on Kars and Caspia insisted on that, when they saw the impact of wounded returns on support for the war. Lee answers only to the PM.
It all happened right in the middle of a major cluster fuck. He had to figure out the politics fast, so that he could concentrate on learning anew and teaching his new AMC all the forgotten ways of combat medicine that hadn’t been practiced in 300 years. Like how to treat major trauma when there are hundreds of cases in an hour and thousands in a day. Ah hell, make that tens of thousands in an hour during the panic and fallback, hundreds of thousands on his first day on the job, and over three million by the end of his first week. That’s how bad it got during the scoot-and-run, during the Great Rout. And no medical system can handle that.
What he learned, what all his orderlies and nurses and cybersurgeons learned, was that there aren’t any new or better ways to do it. Not really. So Lee and his doctors did, and do, what they knew and what they know. Only faster than before. They have no choice. The butcher’s bill from all the worlds where intense fighting is underway is counting not in tens or hundreds of thousands, but in red millions. And there’s no end in sight. If anything, it will get far worse at full mobilization.
This is all only just beginning.
This isn’t some border dust up.
This is the fucking Fourth Orion War.
***
Enthusiastics were torn up a second time while Susannah was awa
y, when they rushed into Three Kingdom space to fight for Oberon, then to help Helvetics defend their Caliban moons. That was during Operation Eagle Claws. After that fiasco, after yet another fighting retreat and defeat-and-scoot scramble off another fallen world, 7th Assault was withdrawn from combat to give its shaken survivors some long overdue 4Rs. That’s what they called the order to “rest and relax, refit and rearm.” The relax command led to a lot of bitter, black humor in the ranks. Nor could officers relax as they were ordered, not with 15,000 raw replacements needing rushed combat training. Everyone knew that meant a minimum of three months, even under ideal peacetime conditions. Yupanqui was given less than half that. Then, before leaving for base camp, she was called in to Corps HQ.
“Nadine, we have to cancel your division’s leave.”
“Sir, you know that I have 15,000 green replacements with no training?”
“You’ll just have to finish that on the fly.”
“On the fly?”
“In the field.”
“I see. But sir, I also have a lot of serious trauma cases.”