Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  After she passes the first cutoff, a military aptitude test taken over the memex, Tedi boasts to all her friends: “You have to be the best to be allowed to try out.” She exercises harder, builds as much muscle on her small frame as she can, ties back her blonde hair and runs for klics and klics each day. She’s determined to make it into one of the WCBs. That’s why her mother cries all the time as Tedi’s seventeenth birthday approaches. The week before, she’s inconsolable and “like totally wrecked,” Tedi scoffs to her friends. Mom knows that her Tedi will make the final cut, then go to war. Tedi always achieves every goal she sets herself.

  Tedi wants to go to war. Or she thinks she does. It’s her turn to serve the Tennō and the Imperium, to play her worthy part in Pyotr’s noble struggle to recover lost worlds, to return the Empire’s “Lost Children” to the heartbroken heimat. That’s about as political as she gets whenever she thinks, with pounding pride, about the swirling, disparate worlds of varying achievement and misery that her people call the Grün Imperium. Orion knows that ancient war state as the Green Empire. Its leaders say that its greatness lies in inventing war, organizing for war, and thriving through war. Well, that’s what’s being tested now in the Fourth Orion War, isn’t it? That’s what war is for and best at: clarifying who’s more powerful, more brutal, and more ruthless than all the other wolf like states we invented and inhabit.

  Tedi can finally join up, starting tomorrow. Tomorrow is her birthday, her day of Military Majority. She will be allowed to enlist in a Women’s Combat Brigade. She is, at long last, impatiently but inevitably, on the cusp of achieving the goal that drives her life and every waking thought, that fills all her night dreams. She’s about to reach the minimal Age of Military Majority. ‘I’m turning seventeen!’

  “Told you I would!” she says the last day before Coming of Age, with a stamp of a petite foot in front of her severely disapproving and upset mother. “We’re a military family! I have to join up! You can’t stop me!” She wants to go Kaigun like her father, Ship’s Engineer Theodore Shipcka. She wants to join Pyotr’s navy, maybe even serve on the same warship as Dad. But she can’t. That stodgy, senior service refuses to allow women to enlist even as auxiliaries. It’s taking losses in the convoy battles, sure. But it’s not yet feeling the same casualty pressures that Rikugun feels. And it’s just more conservative by tradition. So she’s going to do the next best thing: sign up with Rikugun, the Imperial Army. No one can stop her. Not her friends. Not her teachers. Not her woeful mother. She’s a little fireball of furious desire and determination. She doesn’t even try to sleep.

  Tedi is out the door long before midnight turns toward the first dawn of her seventeenth year. She slips away without a word, leaving her mother sobbing and alone. She’s going to volunteer to serve in one of the Women’s Combat Brigades, of course. And not just any WCB. She’s aiming for the best. Why not? She’s from Daegu, homeworld of the top division in the entire Rikugun. Even it’s going to have a WCB attached, part of Gross Imperium, the Greater Empire Division. Even if she’s not chosen by that most elite of all elite units, she’s ready to serve in any Daegu WCB they tested her into. It’s still hours before a bright sun rises into an orange-yellow horizon and she can sign up. Each minute seems an hour unto itself.

  She waits outside the local Recruiting Office in Lentvaris City. She’s head of the line, of course, standing with three other giddy girls. Later, they’re joined by fifteen more girls, rubbing sleep from their eyes and past attachments out of their lives. The first three, the early birds, are just like her: eager and ardent for glory, for what they think will be their life’s adventure, and to serve Pyotr. It’s a joyous tension they share, like they’re waiting at the gate of a concert arena with lights flashing over a multicolored stage, eager to see their favorite memex idol live-in-person from the priciest, first row seats. One of the three actually squeals. As for the rest? A mix of motives: a vague sense of duty; wanting to escape a dull servant life; boredom with civvy doings in Lentvaris when memexes are filled with war stories and everything interesting and exciting always seems to happen offworld; a recent disappointment in a boyfriend or a girlfriend; or long term, in themselves.

  Tedi bursts through the door when they finally open it. Ten minutes later, she walks outside and stares down at the wondrous RIK contract in her hand, with her own signature on it in filigreed silver letters. It says she’s to report for training to Kolno Barracks, a huge boot camp that trains up several Daegu infantry divisions, Gross Imperium, and now also the new WCBs. She looks up to a streaking sky to see the last stars, just before a new day obliterates them. Then she runs all the way home to tell her mother. She’s soooo excited! Behind her, dawn shatters the night.

  After Tedi gets back from the Recruiting Station with a bound contract in her hand, at the most somber Coming of Age Breakfast, like ever, she’s subjected to her mother’s sobs and Lizzy’s shrill name calling and too bitter accusations. So Tedi locks herself in her room all day and daydreams about coming heroism in combat, as a proud Grün woman allowed to fight for Pyotr and the Empire. She’ll be glad when the day comes around for her to leave her mother and sister behind. She imagines that, instead of shouting at her and crying, they’ll hug her and wish her well as she steps off a platform in bone dry Lentvaris, and heads by maglev a continent away and more, to breathe the dank tropical air of Kolno Barracks. At last, she falls asleep. She dreams about her Dad, and how he must be soooo proud.

  ***

  Two weeks later and she’s part of a wave of Rikugun recruits leaving for basic training, for boot camp at Kolno Barracks. Once again, she’s first in line, thrilling to alternatives and exciting dangers and opportunities her future and the war now offer. She’s on the edge of the only true multiverse there is: myriad consequences bubbling inside this universe that flow from her free will. Not an ancient fantasy about infinite bubbles of boiling spacetime, but a real interchange of all possible paths her choices might lead to: love or hate, heroism or failure, or life or death.

  Lead to watching a weaker girl sobbing silently in a filthy and far off dugout behind the black on Amasia, before she puts a frag down her utes and ends herself. To her knifing five men in hand-to-hand fights, or getting knifed herself. To going lost in The Sandbox desert, where cold corpses will rise to fight her and smirking snipers lie waiting to kill her, unless she ends them first. She’s leaving the ecstasy of her youth and mental and physical vitality, going off to face horrible wounding or permanent crippling or far more permanent death. Yet, all those undiscovered countries are acutely exciting to her, too. As they always are to immortal young.

  Exhilaration grips Tedi as her maglev pulls away from the black platform at Lentvaris Station. She waves back toward it, fast receding in her vision outside a porthole style window. She waves only once. Then she turns away from a crying mother and a confused and angry little sister, to face her future. Already, they’re turning into tiny gray shapes, soon-to-be-forgotten grains of a granular past. The accelerating maglev rides on cushioned air inside the hyperloop, pulling her away from what she thinks is the desert of a merely personal childhood toward a verdant future of adult choices in a Thousand Worlds at war. Whooshing her toward vistas of glorious imagining and purpose, in service to a higher cause than herself; a life devoted to Rikugun and Empire and Pyotr Shaka III. The sleek, silver rod swoops past mountains of the northern continent before tunneling under an ocean, thence overtop a continental plateau to reach Kolno Station. It’s the final destination for anyone and everyone like Tedi, for naïve youths eager to reach for fame in war.

  Tedi’s mother and little sister stand in silence for long minutes after her sleek maglev pulls her away from them, far from their lives. They remember the other times they’ve done this, each time Tedi’s father pulled out to return to active duty. And the last time he left, a short hop to the God’s Lift, then up to reach his ship parked in low orbit. Not knowing it would whisk him away to war but never bring him back. Tedi’s
mother and sister also recall the times the boys left them standing there, also on their way to war. But Tedi? ‘They’re taking our Tedi from us, too?’

  Theodore Shipcka is still far away. A career navy man with Kaigun, a grease-and-no-nonsense engineer, he’s serving on a phantom somewhere out there in the war that’s raging up-and-down the badland borders where the blue map stars abut green ones. All they know officially is that he’s in some far off ‘system unknown.’ “How brilliant is that?” Tedi always demanded of them, and of her school friends whenever their talk turned to comparing dads. She’s soooo, like, proud of him!

  She knows he was in the first naval battles brought on by what the Imperium memexes call the Krevan Outrage, which she thinks was an unprovoked series of attacks on Grün culture and minorities, then a cross border raid and murders. She doesn’t know that was all a pack of lies, a set of trumped up border provocations; assassinations of local governors by Pyotr’s own hit men; and religious riots paid for and organized by Takeshi Watanabe’s gang of thugs, and his police informers and double agents. That’s what led to the Bad Camberg incident, a false flag, black op designed to stir the same reaction among billions of outraged Grünen that Tedi felt, sitting down to the last supper she shared with Dad before he left for the war.

  She knows he fought at Lwów then at Aral, missing her 16th birthday. He got shore leave after Aral finally fell, to a ground assault led by Field Marshal Fidan Onur himself, Chief of the Great General Staff! The ‘Little General’ many people call him, because of his small stature: he’s shorter even than Pyotr by a full head, at least. But there was nothing little about his command skill and planning. That’s when it looked like the war was over, already won. But then Dad missed her whole 16th year, because Pyotr declared a far bigger “Lost Children” crusade against the last Neutrals of Central Orion and attacked the Calmar Union. Dad’s out there, somewhere inside the great band of blue stars that fills out the western half of the Orion spur on every holomap of the Thousand Worlds. Or maybe he’s dead?

  She wants to tell him that she’ll join him very soon. She hasn’t seen him in 20 months, not since before the Liberation War began. That’s the last time he was home for a quick shore leave, before he shipped back out on his new type stealth to join in the liberation of the first Lost Children worlds from Calmaris. Hundreds of new phantoms like his ship secretly deployed across the frontiers in advance of Pyotr’s attack order. It has been all out naval war along the major bohr lanes since then. No shore leave, except maybe at an active moon. She doesn’t know, because all coms with the forward fleets are strictly censored and Dad hasn’t sent a vid.

  The Shipckas have heard nothing in all that time. Not a word or vid since the big war started, no hint of if, or when, Theodore is coming home to them. Not a word to Tedi, his favorite and namesake, or to her little sister Lizzy or her Mom. The milneb is off limits, so all military families have access to is a lesser servneb. No matter. In Tedi’s house they believe everything reported on the servneb, and even vaguer propaganda that spills out of the civvy memex. Sure, Tedi worried. But she was also happy, thrilled that Rikugun and Kaigun “move from victory to victory across the spiral arm.” She is soooo proud that Dad’s a career engineer on a sleek, evasive phantom, a new type so secret he couldn’t even tell her about it. All she knew when he left was that he was headed to an interdiction boat. All she knows even now, 20 months later, is that servneb propaganda says his boat type was so superior it cut apart Alliance shipping across a hundred star systems in the first big fights of the Throwback. That was a brutal series of ground and space battles, all won by the Imperium. Even the Alliance calls it the Great Rout.

  Tedi knows that much, but not that Engineer Shipcka’s boat was AH 137. No one in her house knows that it went missing after sending out a distress signal. Or that Alliance countermeasures raised AH class phantom losses to unsustainable levels a month after that, so that the whole interdiction boat class was pulled back for refitting and reassessment. They have no idea that AH 137 is still missing, or that when a rescue flotilla of five Köln class frigates got to its distress signal origin site there was nothing there. No debris field, no floating frozen corpses or baffles or bulkheads, and no spinning beacon signal box. Not an atom of evidence.

  No one in Kaigun Main HQ on Kestino, let alone on Daegu, knows where AH 137 is. It’s gone missing, simply presumed lost along with Engineer Shipcka and 130 fine crew. It’s hard for Kaigun to admit losses, including to family. But the news is coming soon to the Shipcka home. Tedi’s mother will get the official death notice three days from now. Except it won’t really be a death notice. It’s almost worse: an “Engineer Shipcka is missing in action” note. Lizzy will cry all night.

  It’s not just her Dad. None of the men in Tedi’s family have called home since they left in the very first mobilization wave, then the second. There was no word about either of her older brothers, Tony and Tommy, for months. They deployed in the Krevan War, then nine months later to help liberate eastern systems of the teetering Calmar Union. Tedi is closest to Tony, who followed their Dad into the Kaigun and is also serving loyally, “somewhere out there with the fleet.” But she’s proudest of her eldest brother, Tommy, because he’s dead. He was cut in half by a maser during a Rikugun’s assault on the Helvetic capital world of Caliban. Mom got the official notice two months ago. That’s when she cried all night.

  Tommy’s place in the infantry will be taken by a dutiful third brother, John. He’s named for his maternal grandfather and is barely a year older than Tedi. He finished basic training already. He’s awaiting active deployment to a combat zone. Tedi’s not wrong: hers is a military family. It’s why her mother wants her to stay home. It’s why she regrets her marriage. It was always hard when Theodore was away, but that was peacetime and life went on as before. War is so very different.

  No one wants daughters to go to the war, to fight alongside their sons. But few will say it out loud, worried that neighborhood snoopers are listening or their own children will inform on them to the secret police, to the Kempeitai. The undertow of harsh coercion and a rising tide of war overcomes reluctance and submerges opposition. Women are an untapped recruitment pool, more keen these days than men to make their point through service, prove their value and earn new freedoms. The choice is clear. Women will be allowed to train, then leave for combat fronts.

  The maglev is right on time, taking less than 90 minutes to travel 11,343 klics. Tedi thinks it takes “like forever.” Finally, impatiently, she steps smartly from the cool, pressurized train onto a hardened, baking hot and black carbon platform, out into the claustrophobic heat of Daegu’s equatorial region. ‘I’m here!’ she exults, panting and catching her breath with excitement and from the too sudden change in air quality. ‘Two whole weeks already since I signed up, but I’m finally here!’

  Here is Basic Training. Here is Rikugun ‘boot camp’ at Kolno Barracks. Or at least, the last stop before she’s barked at and herded like Dauran cattle the rest of the way to Kolno Barracks. To get there, the recruits will have to hoof it, in intense heat and thick humidity. It’s less than two hours since Tedi said goodbye to her mother and kid sister, leaving them on a platform in Lentvaris beside thousands of others, families of recruits pretty much just like her. Male and female together. Except she thinks no one is just like her. She’s about to find out how common she really is. In just another few hours there’ll be nothing civvy about Tedi anymore.

  Recruit

  Kolno Station is sun soaked, drenchingly humid, and crowded with excited greenhorns struggling with the last weight of civilian baggage. They drag useless totes from home, full of precious things that will mean nothing by tomorrow. Odd things like clothes, pocket games, holos and hats. Starting with their hats, they’ll be ordered to throw everything onto a big pile below the Kolno Station platform. They’ll have to shed even odder values soon. Old moralities and childish dreams must be left behind, as they discard everything they knew and valued
as civilians.

  The majority of 2,000 recruits shuffling beside Tedi in elongated lines down the carbon ramp are conscripted males. They’re wary about what’s expected, with darting and suspicious eyes that nevertheless check out the young women beside them. Others are just-turned-majority girls like her, female volunteers eager to serve in RIK. Some are frightened, but more are excited at the idea of military training and going to war. Not one has the slightest idea what that will be like.

  The military hyperloop station that serves Kolno Barracks, and no place else, is sited 25 klics outside Pusan. That stuffy university town, dull and dowdy capital of Planet Daegu in the Carmé system, is strictly quarantined from any contact with recruits or off duty personnel from the base. Officially, anyway. This is wartime, and with the military exalted above all, lots of rules are broken. Enlisted can’t get off base or arrange transport into Pusan. They’re stuck in barracks. But there are no rules for a young man in a slate gray uniform. SAC officers do whatever they like, whenever they like, to whomever they want. And no one dares complain.

  Clots of older men wearing camp guard green, idle young men in SAC gray, both are common visitors to the city’s unwashed streets, grubby neon cathouses, strange backstreet bazaars. Older guards and officers stick to the bars and to street whores, but small gangs of swaggering SAC men tour the seediest neighborhoods looking for ‘quickening’ drug, a form of weak robusto. It won’t raise you up for weeks at a time, or make you a white-on-white eyed freak, like the real thing. It’s too weak to sustain a high for more than a few hours, but that’s plenty when you’re already high on yourself for being so fit, young, and a Special Action Commando on the prowl for sex. It will keep you ‘quick’ as you look for even faster women. Or something random to break camp boredom, like a local kid to beat up. They leave barrio kids lying face down in gutters. It’s a primitive blood sport the crass, gray elitists sneeringly call “peasant under glass” or “student knockout.”