Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  Bot gun clusters and the dense minefields persuade enemy armtrak formations where to move in an attack, and where not to. When they work as planned, they channel RIK armtraks into free fire, presited killing zones. At worst, they slow them down until infantry can have a whack with anti armtrak hand weapons that must be fired up close and real intimate. Skycraft can be called in from bases along the western coast, but only to blunt and attrit bigger Rikugun attacks. There aren’t enough Jaguars or AI Wasps for local actions. Infantry must handle those.

  Units hold more or less territory according to dictates of local terrain. Fewer troops are needed in the mountains of the far south because any ground attack will channel through one of the high alpine valleys. That means natural bottlenecks can be blocked by small, concentrated forces and semi automated strongpoints. It’s a lot different in the flat deserts and grasslands and on the northern tundra. There the last line of defense is the seven ARGs, waiting to fill widening breeches with fast mobile infantry and ultrasteel armtrak mounted firepower. Armored divisions and armored infantry are concentrated in the ARGs, behind the central Lemurian plain. From there the powerful mobile divisions are always in striking or counterattack range of the most likely Rikugun breakthrough routes.

  HQ in New Beijing is gambling on holding the toughest and highest terrain with more bot gun clusters and fewer live troops, while counting on concentrated mobile firepower in the backstop ARGs in case of a surprise breakthrough. It deploys three of these concentrations of armtraks and armored infantry, and rare fighting bots, to shore up infantry lines as needed. General Sòng always keeps four of the seven ARGs close to the center, straddling the equator. That’s where she thinks the main RIK attack must one day fall. So does RIK High Command.

  Alliance generals too bloodlessly call their ARGs “plug-and-destroy forces.” Armtrak and ATC drivers and crews that lead the mobile formations instead call themselves “firefighters.” That’s because their job is to put out any breakthrough fires before they merge into a conflagration that consumes other defenses. Behind the ARGs is wide open country, all the way to the Panthalassa coast. Lian Sòng has two million more fighters in semi reserve scattered over these deep rear areas. Few are combat trained. They work “archie,” and other fast anti-skycraft artillery, service Tactical Skyforce wings, and train to replace losses in the ARGs that form the real reserve. The rest serve noncombat but vital roles in repair and tek support units, or guard multi-thousand klic lines of vital communication, reinforcement and resupply. Logistics is now the pith and marrow of the whole war on Lemuria.

  At least Alliance generals have the easier part: just hold on, in a static defense. Rikugun High Command needs to press home attacks if it hopes to eliminate the Amasian burr stuck in the side of Pyotr Shaka III’s royal ambition and vanity. Rikugun is built for only one thing: offense. Even so, its generals are becoming more adept at defensive war out of necessity, even if their ethos and instinct is and always will be to attack, attack, attack. Officers dream of a perfect dagger tactical thrust, or slashing, akin to a dueling blow. But Amasia is not the place for that, for High Caste subtlety and games. The longer they wait the more they risk erosion of troop morale, cohesion and their strategic purpose. Yet the sooner they attack the more casualties they’ll suffer. And the more Pyotr will rage and demand.

  RIK doctrine and psychology can’t deviate from offense. It must assault again and again after every pause. Worse, Pyotr and his generals know that only offense holds any hope of bringing success in this war they’ve started. Win and dominate Orion, lose and suffer downfall of the regime and the whole Imperium. “Victory or annihilation, there can be no third way.” For in his pride, Pyotr Shaka Mobutu Oetkert III has rolled the iron dice of war. It’s a street craps wager, a buffalo bet that’s tumbling still, with the final number rolling to stop at...

  ***

  No one anticipated the massed artillery barrages, rapido and spandau killing fields, too many armtrak breakdowns, so many broken bots that maneuver warfare ended, or the demise of war bot armies too costly to replace. Now everyone rushes to make cheapened flesh available to throw against enemy lines en masse. Boots to cross Dark Territory in place of bots. Flesh to destroy and kill, and be consumed in fire and mud and blustering stupidity. Let the carnage commence.

  Three hundred years of peace did it, dulled minds to the true nature of war. Real war, not pretend fights as in children’s games and General Staff exercises of searing speed and bloodless glory. Peace only made generals think that some little police action they had carried out prewar was real war, not an easy suppression of a barely armed rural rebellion on a backwater world. “The fault, dear generals, is not in the stars but in yourselves.”

  That’s not the kind of war they’re fighting now on Amasia, or anywhere else in Orion. Prewar combat knowledge is from a misremembered as well as forgotten age, lifted from vids and files and the old histories. No one had any before the war started. Some only thought they did, coming from a smallish thing like riot control or a backworld rebellion, polished up in the Officer’s Clubs to swell quiet time egos and make small men draped in braid think they actually earned the right to wear it. It’s not like that anymore. It’s not like that at all. Every general and every army, every still-wet-behind-the-ears young officer right out of OTS, and every plain soldier must learn how to fight for the very first time. And all over again.

  “And far too often, just as you figure that shit out you get killed!”

  “Really sergeant?”

  “Too right, son, so keep your head below the parapet. I won’t tell you again. I won’t have to.”

  “Thanks sarg.”

  “And keep your godsdamn helmet on at all times here in First Trench. You’re not a hundred klics behind the lines anymore!”

  They must learn about small unit tactics and untested infantry weapons, and how to move from hole-to-hole in Dark Territory. Learn how to time a grenade throw, and that a frag is a lot different than a sonic. Learn how to shit where they are, if they’re on guard duty. Learn how to crouch real low while on lookout or in a funk hole or FOP, if sound and motion detectors pick up that a sniper is nearby.

  “What’s going on here, sergeant?”

  “Err, nothing captain. I was just telling the lads to keep a keen eye out for the enemy, especially snipers sir.”

  “Here? We’re in our own bunkers, sergeant. The enemy cannot possibly have snipers this close to our side of the black.”

  “Begging your pardon, captain, but I’ve seen…”

  Kee-rack! Sizzle szlit.

  “Stretcher! Stretcher! Quick boys, the captain’s down!”

  They must learn about tourniquets and wounds and slow death vs. fast, and how to pick up a best pal with an entrenching tool to load him into an empty food sack. Because you still need to use the dugout where he has just been smeared all over the walls and carbyne flooring by an enemy mortar or your own short round. They learn to know the sound of falling mortar shells, and when to duck; and that you never hear the long range artillery barrages until the hills and ground and sky fill with miniature suns of light and heat and instant, incinerating oblivion.

  “Yeah, so don’t worry about the big arti boys. Nuthin’ you can do ‘bout it.”

  “Really, sarg? You never hear it coming?”

  “Yeah kid. One of the big ones gets you, and you’re just gone.”

  “You won’t feel a thing,” adds his corporal. “It’s the rest of us that’ll have to clean what little is left of you off the parapet. Most likely, with a sponge.”

  “Attention! Officer in the bunker!”

  “At ease, sergeant. Just walking the line, seeing to morale. So, tell me, how is everyone doing tonight? Hot food arrive? Everything quiet?”

  “We got the food, sir. Thank you. And yes sir, it’s been real quiet for…”

  “Incoming!”

  Ka-boom! Ka-boom!

  “Specialist! Bring that flour bag over here right away. And bring y
our digger and funk hole buddy. We need to bag up the major and the company captain.”

  “He’s the fifth CO we’re lost in the last three months…”

  Every army must rediscover the special virtues of the people that produces it and sends it off to do that people’s violent, dirty will.

  Learn their vices, too.

  Every army must rediscover the special virtues of the people that produces it and sends it off to do that people’s violent, dirty will. Learn their vices, too. Every soldier in every company and brigade, each division and army, must pay Caesar’s high asking price. They must learn how to fight and win, or how to fight just to live to fight again tomorrow. Learn to fight the only way possible. The only way armies ever did, ever do, or ever will. They must learn to fight by fighting.

  ***

  After the great tumult of the first battles, fighting in Lemuria’s trenches settles into an ugly but predictable pattern. A pulsing thrust and counter thrust, offensive and counteroffensive, armies rising and falling and grinding into each other as if in rhythmic, exhausting, primitive sex. Penetrating, then pulling back with each arriving supply and reinforcement convoy that snakes through the lethal but also porous, mutual naval blockades circling above Amasia. Then plunging into a sweaty, thrusting, filthy and vile rhythm of death and destruction all over again.

  The two sides each poorly spend momentary advantage of numbers as convoys disgorge scared and jostling human cattle into respective military pens. Alliance generals throw weak counterattacks against the RIK’s lines, wasting precious troops and supplies as soon as they arrive. Every time a wave of dropship landers or bigger shuttle fleet arrives at bases on the Thalassa coast, filled with green clad divisions, briefly stronger RIK generals inevitably press for elusive breakthrough attacks. They’re always trying to reestablish lost offensive momentum.

  “Counterattack!” is the order Alliance generals always give. “Breakthrough!” is the sole goal their RIK counterparts seek, pushed by strategists from Kars and Kestino. Everyone else fears clambering out of minimal safety of a First Trench to go ‘over-the-top’ into Dark Territory, the place from which, each time, fewer wasting Allied and wasted Grün or Dauran troops return.

  A month after Susannah rejoins her old division, Rikugun holds a little over a third of Lemuria, a wide eastern zone mostly seized in the first confident weeks of the invasion. It gained several million square klics by grinding assaults after that, before Lian Sòng’s lines formed and firmed.

  All of Pyotr’s mirror image generals are committed to offense. They tell RIK HQ on Kestino that black walls and expanding support nets on their side of Dark Territory are a stopgap on the road to offensive victory. They tell their troops not to get too comfortable, that they’ll be attacking again real soon. Yet the lines look harder and more permanent with each passing month, and ever more the same.

  ***

  On both sides, troops who built out the first trenches gave names to roughly defined sectors, leaving welded signposts as they rotated out. Most replacements accept the signage, even when it claims sites for long departed units: Black Watch Alley, Borderers’ Barricade, Goldies Rule, Kestino Korners. Then mapmakers use the names, giving them arbitrary borders on their sheets and in grid systems. As if they’re real townships on some backwater world, governed by pretentious and puffed up little mayors and self-important town councils.

  It’s an odd thing, but for men and women who occupy them the named places give an illusion of comfort of hometowns on far off worlds. A semblance of self-government even takes shape, as soldiers councils try to organize the local black markets to hold down prices and punish scams. By the end of the first year the black is so nearly permanent that soldiers start to arrange subterranean concerts, lobby for cleaned up brothels, open little private shops, and set up bunker ‘restaurants’ and ‘night clubs’ in the service gaps between main lines of walls and trenches on either side.

  It’s an ominous sign that much bigger sections of line and connected support nets are named by troops living in-and-under them, and by the sheetmakers. Dozens of big sectors are tagged by Alliance troops with names like Ice Town, The Flats, Chessboard, Big Oval, Three Rivers, Swamp City, and Waffle Iron. Bigger townships mean the war is settling into a dull yet deadly routine. In the evolving forever war on Lemuria, a pas de deux of early open movement has become a marathon danse macabre, with functional ”trench cities” emerging on both sides.

  Crater City dates to one of the first bombardments, before crater fields became so common everywhere that naming a sector after them won’t help you find the place. Ration Town and Hungerville are in the mountainous south, where already in the first winter RIK raids are made to capture food as much as to kill the enemy. Honeycomb and Warren are in the deep and driest desert, where ACU palm root tunnelers went mad looking for subterranean water and decided to go wherever they wanted, not where the combat bioengineers said. Worked out well, actually. Random tunnels make defense easier and attack plans much more difficult.

  Enemy areas are also given names by Alliance troops sitting across from them, either in vulgar mockery or else to remember some odd event. Pyotr’s Pecker is only to be expected, and shaped as it suggests. It’s a short, stubby sector, hemmed in by two narrow rivers. Scrotum is only slightly more imaginative. It’s where a division of SAC commandos was stationed. Get it? They're no longer on Amasia. “Yeah, but the name just sorta hangs there,” a wide grinning sheetmaker said to a humorless superior at HQ, who didn’t even blink as he approved the map name.

  There’s Assholeville and Buttsburg, of course, which are lame, middle school or maybe frat boy handles tagging RIK sectors as they’re seen from across Dark Territory. They're side-by-side on the central plains, barely north of the equator. Or as the troops facing them like to say, “cheek-to-cheek.” Nastier is Whore City, at the lower end of The Sandbox. That’s where Blues first encountered the brand new RIK Women’s Combat Brigades. They arrived in select divisions at the tail end of the first year of fighting, astonishing with their sheer ferocity. Everyone on Lemuria was shocked. Especially ‘the boys’ in RIK. Lots of misogynist bastards haven’t gotten over the idea of women by their side defending the black, instead of on their backs behind the lines.

  Headless Officer is straight across from a short sector before you get to New Beijing, with Burning Man and Vanity’s Grave next up the line. Whiskey Corners, Sour Mash, and Samogonville are in the far north, where everyone thinks and talks all the time about keeping warm, including faux warm with lots of hard, illicit booze in the severe cold. Especially in the Dauran sector, where samogon stills might just outnumber mortar stands on the DRA side. Hell, that has to be true, since in every single unit somebody turns a stand into a still. As long as the commander and his politruk each get their 10% share of the drippings, no one reports it.

  Maybe because the temperate zone is where the hardest fights took place to start the war, it has the gentlest, homiest black city names today. There’s a longing for normality and domesticity in calling such hideous places Green Acres, Shantytown, Moleville, Buena Vista, and Prairie Dog. They seem quiet harmless on the maps. They're not. You don’t have to travel far to reach more honest Gastown, Vulture, Thousand Cuts, and Sand Viper. In desert sectors, wet irony takes over the nomenclature game: RIK has Hopstown, Beertown and Bitter, right across from ACU Ale Alley and Watertown. They only sound better to arrivals coming from either coast than Sniperville and Ghoul Snakes, which are rather less welcoming. After a day, there’s no relief in a kindlier name.

  Even without the generals pushing offensives, fighting never stops along the dragon’s spine of the Yue ming. It centers on FOPs and FOBs loved by aggressive junior officers but hated by all troopers on both sides who have to occupy them. Except maybe a few like Susannah and the most aggressive lone wolf snipers, who want to be where the enemy is. For everyone else, 2.5 meters of shallow slit is not enough to hide a fighting pair as they squat 200 or 500 meters in front of First T
rench, hunkering in a numbered ‘fighting post’ or FOP where they know they’ll likely die.

  You’re not in Vulture anymore, kid. You’re sitting atop a numbered point on some sheetmaker’s target map, 10 X 10 meters on the enemy’s targeting grid. And a hostile FOP dispatcher is sending action your way. Wait for it. It’ll be along any minute. It might be a sniper buried a meter underground, peering through an inverted periscope rifle with strict orders to “let nothing cross from Point 229 to Point 230. Over.” And that just happens to be where you’re walking.

  Or a four deuce mortar strike laid in with a boom! smack on Point 62, where a dumb furrow shitter is frantically pulling up his pants having just exposed his whole squad’s forward position. They’re out of their funk holes now, running hard. Too late.

  Boom! Boom!

  Or a spotter will yell out “lay it down on Point 1007! We’re being overrun!” Called in, four deuce mortar rounds make a helluva racket and a real good point. Even when they fall short and take out the one-pip who called them down on the wrong number, right on top of his platoon. Afterward, the slit trenches and mole holes and foxholes and funk holes all have to be cleaned out, scraped clear of a burned and exploded comrade’s flesh. Maybe’s it’s better to fill them in, push sand or sod back over your dead buddy, make the hole he’s in his ersatz grave?