by Kali Altsoba
She listened intently after that as he showed her weaving star holos held in the palm of one hand as he gestured and waived the other one to make some point, usually about “the damn fools in MoD who sent us too far too soon.” In their time together, he explained advanced military and strategic concepts with the same gentle ease that he explained her wound, her operation, and ongoing recovery. She thought he had the sweetest, gentlest eyes.
She stands alone, looking out over the Yue ming night after arid desert night, hot day into endless scorching days, and she finds herself thinking about her short time with Lee. She craves his gentle presence and profound insights about the war, so many of which proved balefully true. ‘Maybe he can help me understand?’
She has been changed by a brutal wounding, changed also by her long recovery. Changed forever by the war. She must know what it’s all really about. Then she can talk to Death when she meets him again. For she’s already met him once. She woke up after three days under full suspensor, with no time passed in her frozen mind since a soundless medic jabbed her back on Glarus. No memory of the Robobear or Trauma Pod or liftoff to orbit, or shuttling to the quiet LP where the hospital ships waited. She thought she still was on Glarus, blue fireballs popping right at her, a hammer crashing into her chest.
She screamed. “I’m hit, I’m hit! I’m hurt real bad!” She was utterly bewildered why they held her down, strapped her in, told her that she was on a hospital ship called Red Rover and already halfway to getting better. ‘Getting better from what? What the hell happened?’ Then she saw the raw wounds bleeding all around her missing breast and exposed heart. She fainted. Then she changed. She never used to ask questions, no more than the next kid, anyway. Now she must know why things happen as they do. What it all means. If it means anything.
‘Why am I told to do the strange, once forbidden things the Army now orders me to do? Things my family says they approve, and all the folks back home ask of me and tens of millions more youths. They cheer us off to war, then go back to lives of songless and quiet desecration.’
She’s determined to understand everything about war, if it takes her forever. To figure out the early war cheering, wartime pain, gloom about defeat, suspended hope, new fatalism. To understand her extraordinary anger that starts fresh each morning and rises all day, to crescendo when she’s cold and alone at night. It’s so intense it cuts her off from the foreign country of her past, where she did things so differently. It conceals all tomorrows in robes of rage. Is hate her only future?
Her quest must wait. A chance for revenge just appeared. Yesterday, she heard real solid “coastal gossip” that Gross Imperium made planetside, though no one knows or can say where, and none of her officers will even talk to her about it.
“Sir, can you tell me? Are the Todts really here?” That’s the ACU nickname for Gross Imperium. It comes from their sick motto: Für Gott und Todt! Basically, it means Death.
“That’s classified.”
“Ah come on, sarg…”
“Shit, private, you ask a lot of questions!”
It’s strong scuttlebutt. It says that a reliable agent identified a For God and Death! tattoo on an RIK drunk who got too wild in a Thalassa cathouse, drawing attention of a CIS informer among the whores. If it’s true, it means the best division in RIK came down on the last shuttles to land 12,000 klics away, somewhere on the occupied and now heavily fortified east coast.
“You know I have to ask, sarg.”
“Yeah, sure. Now fuck off!”
Susannah was on sentry duty when she heard the rumor. Now it’s almost time to be relieved. She’s eager, for once, to leave her sniper scope position. She needs to confirm it. To find out if the rumint is true, and where on Lemuria the most elite division in all Rikugun is going to deploy. She hopes it’s in the Enthusiastics’ sector. She wants payback for the chunk of flesh and hope a sniper bot cut out of her with a 3.5cm plasma round, and for all the lost mates she’ll never see again. She’s not the only one who wants a piece of that particular enemy. Every veteran in the 7th remembers “The Slaughter” of the division on Glarus.
***
“How did we get to this point, fighting from underground and behind stupid walls?” Susannah asks the question over and over during her first months back with Argos 7th. Her mates are grown sick of hearing her ask it.
“Dunno.”
“Don’t care.”
“What the fuck does it matter now?”
Those are the usual answers she gets from soldiers in her company, who want her to shut up so they can sleep or eat. Or just want her to shut up about the war.
“What happened to all our bots?” she persists. “Why are there so few holding the line with us? I don’t think I’ve seen more than ten for the whole battalion. Why is it mostly just us?”
Susannah has a special interest in war bots, snipers above all other types. She hates bots, but wouldn’t mind seeing a few more auto fighters shooting in the other direction from her side of Dark Territory. She hates locusts more than bots.
“You shaddup, private,” a roughhewn, Argos country sergeant yells when she asks. “Ain’t yore bis’ee’ness. You clean yore kit and keep qui’yet. Yore distur’ban duh young’uns wid all yore ques’tyuns. You and duh resta this company’s just gotta git from t’day ta t’morraw.”
So she figures it all out on her own, studying whatever’s available, picking up on officer doubts by eavesdropping on their chatter when they fail to notice she’s listening. That’s how she learns the first battles saw hideously expensive prewar bot fighters mostly wipe each other out in colossal mechanized combat. How bots broke down so fast in numbers and effectiveness when facing other bots, the first fights were over in days instead of lasting weeks or months. How both sides were forced to rush in huge armies of human fighters like her, because flesh is cheaper and more readily available than expensive, autonomous war machines.
Oddly better at fighting, too. Even the bot lobby that’s always hanging around and pestering folks in the Ministry of War Production is forced to admit it, after the first four or five drinks loosen up their most calculated lies. Captains of the AI and war bot industries tell the lobbyists to shift argument and tactics, to instead emphasize stripped down fighting bots with lower level programming and basic AI, to serve as force multipliers in mobile assault operations. It works. There’s no more talk of winning the war with high end AI bots alone, but production of the simpler types rises. The same thing is happening on the Rikugun side of the black, only over there it’s Pyotr’s royal cousins and the leading High Caste families who cash in. Daura? Don’t even ask! They get a few bots on loan from Rikugun, but mostly they still just send over krasnos in immense human wave attacks.
A deep vein of tactical info comes to Susannah in the underground battalion mess, where one of ten dispensers at the coffee station is right next to an Officer’s Only table. She wonders how long she can linger at the 500 gallon tank pretending that it’s rebrewing. She’s supposed to fill a pair of five gallon jerry cans with breakfast coffee and hump them back up to her company’s billets.
“Bots were always a luxury,” she hears a thoughtful, handsome captain from Supply say to his companions. He has a high shock of blond hair and matching eyebrows over a long angular nose. His mouth is tense, but finely drawn.
“They were prewar theory. An intellectual indulgence by all the planners, no more. War bots can’t be supplied in sufficient numbers now. We’re making far more unarmed transporter bots. Mechanized muscle is being transferred into logistics, away from the frontlines. You saw it when you all landed. Remember the bumblebees and oranges? Medical Corps, too. Lots more Pods.”
“What do you mean sufficient?” It’s a very young 1st lieutenant asking, from another company much farther down the line. Not Susannah’s, but still one of the Enthusiastics. He’s canteen hopping. “To win this war, don’t we need to replace all those bots we lost in the first campaigns?”
“We can’t
make them in enough numbers to replace so many losses, let alone to win the war for us. It’ll be years before we see war bots in large numbers again, if ever. It’s down to flesh and bone now.” Susannah is impressed by the captain’s candor. Others are puzzled.
“Aren’t fighting bots superior by a factor of many multiples to even the best human fighters we’ve got?” It’s another one-pip, just back from his third patrol in the Yue ming. He can’t get to sleep. Not just because he’s chugging coffees. His patrol came under heavy spandau fire on the return leg. It’s the first combat action where he lost troopers under his command. His left hand is still trembling badly. Susannah thinks he might start crying any moment. She’s seen his look before, on lots of faces of fighters coming off a first patrol or a hard night of DT sentry duty.
“Sure they are,” says the battalion major, joining the little group’s steadying of a shaken new officer. She's older by several years, with fine lines of command worry starting to crease her brow and the corners of her mouth. They make her look more serious and wise than she really is.
“Human hands and eyes firing standard masers, even with computer assisted stabilizers and aimers in our HUDs, are far less accurate or deadly than a bot gunner aiming and spraying the same energy weapon at an onrushing enemy.”
“So shouldn’t the Army be hurrying more bots out here to help us?”
The handsome captain from Supply interjects, saying far more than he should, ignoring a red poster gummed to the inside of the mess hall: “Beware! Barracks and Bunkers Have Ears!” Two grim MI men put it up a week ago. Another one, this one in blue, says: “Hush! The Enemy is Listening!”
“They’ll send what they can, but we don’t have many left and there are lots of fights underway in central Orion.” The captain really should shut up, but he doesn’t.
“How do you know?”
“I’m in Supply. There’s just a trickle arriving planetside these days from old prewar warehouses. Few are coming off the production lines, I tell you. Our factories are converting to worker bots and defensive weapons systems. Especially artillery.” He ducks under a severe look from the major. “That’s the scuttlebutt, anyway. Ummm, that’s why I’ve volunteered for front duty. This is my last day in Supply.” Finally, he shuts up.
The fresh lieutenant is confused. “What about the enemy? Has he got bots?”
“Not so many,” the major reassures him. “About the same as us, but different types. His are far more mobile and offensive. The captain’s right: ours are built these days to sit in place and hammer away at enemy attacks.” She looks at him less severely, knowing that he volunteered to move from Supply to combat.
“Also,” a more experienced one-pip offers, “we’ve learned how to take their bots out, better than at the start of the war.”
Another infantry captain and a 2nd lieutenant join the table, in time to hear the major’s last point and the one-pip’s boast. Hot coffee burns Susannah’s hand as she fumbles to still look busy, forgetting for a second that she’s filling a jerry can.
The newly arrived butterbar, who’s not shy, says: “Our fighters wait low-and-level, then hit ‘em in the flanks or backsides as they move past fixed positions out in Dark Territory. The armor’s always thinnest in the ass. MI told us that, and for once they were right. I mean … err, a great bit of info, major … err, sir.”
His captain grins. “There’s something real satisfying about putting a rocket up the ass of a gatling bot. I gotta say, though, I really hated the old ground crawlers and squat crushers.”
“Me too!” boasts the eager lieutenant. “But we’ve shown we can handle them, too, and the big bot gun walkers. Even the small stealthy ones clang-and-bang too much when they move. Who would’ve thought we’d be better at stealth hunting than the enemy’s jaegers and dillos?”
‘They’re not all mobile hunters,” Susannah thinks. ‘They don’t all move. Silent ones wait inside a duck blind while you move into range, then they fuck you up.’ She almost says it out loud, but holds her tongue about what she knows too well. It’s time to fill the other jerry can. She switches over, trying to look bored.
The major ignores the butterbar. She cold comforts the silver bar lieutenant, concluding he needs bucking up after his first patrol death. His coffee is down to a half cup. He starts to rise to get a refill, sees Susannah standing in front of the officer dispenser rack and sits back down.
“You’re a combat leader. You’ll get used to fighting in the new-old way, with living soldiers instead of dead machines.” It’s a bad effort. She knows it, and tries to correct. “Anyway, you don’t have a choice, son.” Awful, really. It’s a wonder she made major. She’s about as inspiring as cold pack food at dawn.
“Quantity of fire has a quality all its own.” The logistics captain pipes in that canned wisdom, regaining confidence, looking to recover for the clumsy major.
“What do you mean?” The jittery one-pip is looking even more jittery. He probably shouldn’t finish that fourth cup-‘o-joe. Too late, he swigs the last dreg.
“What he means,” the major takes control back, “is that we’re raising millions of troops here on Lemuria and shipping more in. So just forget about the bots.” She has seen a lot more fighting than the captain, who’s intelligent and informed but a combat virgin. Her words are supposed to carry more weight, but she’s not good with them. She digs deeper and finds her voice at last. “No matter how imprecise in marksmanship your rookies are as they come to you fresh from the Panthalassa coast, they will do the job of holding the black.”
“How can they, if they’re so very green?”
“They have no choice. We have no choice. We have to stop the enemy with or without decisive help from any bots. Make sure your fighters know that. Most bots arriving these days are coming to help them hump supplies, not fight.”
“I will. But can the fresh recruits really do it? Stop an attack, I mean.”
“Yes. Even hasty conscripts can lay down an effective spread-of-fire. Just look at the record of the Amasian divisions last year. Undergunned and hardly trained. Yet their poorly aimed fire flew out in such volume, from so many concentrated masers, it was effective.”
“I suppose I can see how that could work.”
“It did work! And it will again.”
“Yeah, OK sir. I guess so. But still…”
“Your main job is keep up discipline and training every day, raising skill and accuracy. But in a fight, see to your fire-on-command. Even shaky combat virgins can stop an attack. Especially as the locusts don’t have war bots any more. Or at least, not so many as before.”
Susannah finishes filling the second jerry can and drops both onto a small hoverglide. It’s one of the new unarmed transporter or ‘hump bots’ that are built dumb but strong. She heads for a set of steep, rock stairs leading to the trenches high above. The last thing she hears is the major shutting down the conversation.
“Enough talk. Lieutenant, get some sleep. You go back out on patrol tonight.”
“Yes sir. Thank you sir. Thank all of you, sirs. I feel better, I think.”
***
Up-and-down the black, 25 million tissue and bone fighters huddle in bunkers or under roofed craters, carted by truck or maglev or hoofing it to fill Lemuria’s trenches. They freeze or bake, shiver or sweat buckets, according to which season and latitude their section of frontline resides in. Only in the temperate zone do they feel fine. Well, not fine. No one actually feels fine. They’re just a tad less miserable than all the rest standing post.
Millions more are en route to join the fight, here and on a half dozen other key worlds. Hundreds of millions more are starting basic training across the Thousand Worlds. Even the last, disbelieving holdout Neutrals in as yet untouched western and Open Cluster systems are arming for bedlam. Orion is filling with madmen bearing arms. There’ll be killing enough for all before this ends.
Throne
Susannah has just come off sentry duty on the near edge
of the Yue ming. She spent a long night of tense watching and intense boredom in a narrow slit. That’s why she’s late getting to the soup line, and not assigned to the “push” or “party” that’s about to start overhead. Underground, she can barely hear a muffled thump! thump! thump! of guns hundreds of klics away. Can’t see streaking, shrieking shells fly in parabolic promises overhead. Later, she’ll go topside to wait for the trench raiders to come back and listen to the pitter patter of far off infantry masers and the poom poom poom of rapidos heaving plasma deep into Dark Territory.
“Hurry up! Get your soup,” barks an irritable cook with a walleyed stare and two day’s black stubble. He hurls the order at Susannah and five other troopers the moment they enter his suffocatingly hot, claustrophobic, stinking, officially demarcated Division Mess Tent #3. The red faced cook stands to one side of the big, filthy tureen from which a skinny helper slops gray and evil looking soup into each ACU standard mess bowl. Twenty kitchen hands are already clearing away big piles of dirty mess kits from a just finished, all raiders meal rush.