Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  Hairless nudists wait in long submissive rows, smooth and clean looking as freshly washed eggs in a hatchery catchment, brown and white mixed up in long lines heading for the cartons. Gone is the last prideful uniqueness of each recruit. Depilation was phased out in most Rikugun units before the war, but not in Gross Imperium. Anyone who doesn’t make the final cut, who is washed out after Basic at Kolno, will stay hairless. They’ll dwell among the hairy ones that inhabit lesser divisions to which they’ll transfer. It will mark them off as shameful failures.

  Tedi stands rigid, shorn of eyelashes, eyebrows, and the luscious blonde locks her mother brushed long and lovingly every night for 16 years. Until Tedi stopped asking her to do it, and her mother pulled away as well as a seventeenth birthday approached. Standing without a strand left on her head of what was once a nile of flowing blonde hair, hairless as a newborn newt from her pubes to the bottoms of her feet, Tedi is even more determined than ever to make the final cutoff. ‘I’m going to make it. I am! I will be Rikugun. Everyone will see that I am!’

  The recruits are ordered to pick up the string tied, cubist packages they left on the ground during the sterilization and depilation. They open them all at once, and pull out sleek, pale green trainer utes. Tedi’s suit shimmers and moves to touch as it dons her, learning distinct contours of her lithe body as it expands and contracts to snug fit her limbs, lift and cover her pert breasts, surround her taut buttocks. It fits perfectly, almost purring in its functional satisfaction. She pulls on a pair of metaled black boots rolled up in the bottom of the brick. Now standing at attention even without being told, wearing formfitting Rikugun green for the first time, in lieu of the girlish lace and childish baubles her mother liked to dress her in, Tedi tears up. She feels a sudden gush of love of nation. It almost overwhelms her.

  She glances around quickly. The other recruits in this special cohort have the same unit number she does on their training uniforms. Gross Imperium bears a famous name that Tedi is startled to see that she also gets to wear. It’s on a silver armband built into her utes, that fits snugly around her right bicep. As she locks it in place, it turns on for the first time, auto burning and inking a gothic lettered tattoo of the division’s motto into her skin. It’s deep and permanent. She’ll display it with pride, if she doesn’t wash out. If she does, there’ll be an ugly removal scar on her arm instead. She won’t be allowed to leave Kolno still tattooed with that motto. Instead, she’ll wear a scarred mark of failure and shame that she’ll hide to the end of her days. And not just because washout medics will make it especially jagged and ugly.

  “Form up by unit. Do it now!”

  “Form up by unit. Do it now!”

  Tedi swells with emotion as she feels the burning pain truly signal childhood’s end. She’s full of pride for coming this far, all by herself, against what everyone wanted for her. Standing in the smallest cohort of recruits, with Kolno Barracks busy with cohorts of lesser trainees, seeing the famous motto burned on her arm, she mutters sotto voce: “For god and death…” A thought hits, coursing through her body just like the first and most intense organism she ever had. It wobbles her knees. It wobbles her thoughts. It wobbles her soul. ‘I’m nitōhei! I’m Rikugun.’

  Not yet she isn’t. She’s still just a recruit. Not yet a nitōhei, a Rikugun private. But she knows that now she is marked to become Rikugun, and by its top division. For the first time, she surrenders the best part of herself to a higher group, to Gross Imperium and Rikugun. She stops being Tedi Shipcka and welcomes a uniformed identity. She will be a proud fighter in a grand and honored division. One whose motto and trail of glory dates to the Foundation Wars when the House of Oetkert of the Waldstätte joined with the Brethren’s Ordensstaadt to seed war in Orion.

  She’s suddenly, blissfully at one with all the other wannabe nitōhei standing in erect green rows beside her, lost in private thoughts about their shared future. She’s one with her Imperator, Pyotr Shaka, one with the goals and ambition of the Imperium. She thrusts out her chest, lifts up her chin, stamps down hard with her steel shod right boot. She does it again, then again. She finds the rhythm, she’s in unison with the other green clad recruits in her cohort. She cries out the burning motto as a stamping herd thunders the hard, black carbon parade ground.

  “For God and Death!”

  “For God and Death!”

  “For God and Death!”

  Kolno

  Tedi is ecstatic, but can hardly comprehend it. She signed up to the Women’s Combat Brigade hoping for this, but she didn’t know that she was prechosen to Gross Imperium until the contour seeking uniform pulled itself on, then branded her arm. ‘Like, everyone says that joining an elite division makes you elite, too. Am I really elite? Gosh!’ Instant respect! She feels it, wearing a black and silver knight’s head patch for the first time. Honor and history are burned onto her flesh.

  ‘It’s not like being boot to a regular division. They wear only numbers and task flashes, not the silver knight!’ She means blocks of recruits she sees through humid haze, running, marching, shooting, dodging fire, engaging holo enemies. They’re from a hundred other cohorts brought to Kolno Barracks to train for the 2nd Engineer or 21st Infantry or the 5th Armored. She’s not even thinking about other infantry divisions or truly pathetic 32nd Supply. At least the 2nd Engineers, 21st Infantry, and 5th Armored are also elite combat divisions whose cohorts will one day fight alongside Gross Imperium. Lesser infantry, and the 32nd Supply, are so woeful they train at camps outside Rudimina, over a thousand klics away.

  ‘A relegation league if there ever was one!’ Tedi gloats. Five minutes into her military career and she’s haughtily disdaining anyone not wearing her most elite of Rikugun flashes. Ironic, since Daegu’s mercury ball team was relegated from the Orion Cup Premier League for 170 years. Hardly matters anymore, since the war put an end to mercury ball across the old borders. So it’s All Imperium League for Daegu and other Grün worlds from now on. Aral was the last Premier League champion. Now, Aral and other Lost Children from what used to be Krevo have teams in the All Imperium. They’re just not very good. Most of their players are dead, or in exile with KRA and KRN. No one goes to the games on Aral anymore.

  Tedi knows that her father and brothers would be sooo proud to see her in this splendid uniform, to see her wearing the renowned armband motto and flash. The silver knight’s head in her shoulder flash is already tracking and turning with her movements, its rot eyes scanning for possible enemy or traitors. She can’t wait to send her dad and brothers a vid of herself wearing crisp greens, though she doesn’t give a second thought to what her mother and sister will think. ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Today is everything she dreamed of when she volunteered. ‘No, it’s better!’

  Tedi’s reverie is interrupted by more barked orders from red faced clones, as the wooden soldier NCOs start to drill the now green clad recruits. She still thinks it’s all grand fun after four hours of parading, marching in squares, and other drill. She’s learning to be part of something bigger, to move more crisply, to turn, halt, restart, turn back, march some more, then make her first countermarch. She does it all happily, under a baking sun and with barking, wood toy drill instructors. At last, yapping NCOs release a tired, excited, hairless mob to race for the Doughnut. The thundering herd in hard, black boots runs all out. 4,000 steel shod soles throw off spark showers as they klack! klack! on the blacktop, making frantic fireflies that die quickly in the graying dusk. The most athletic and eager runners clatter, klack! ahead of all the rest, running all out even after a day of hard marching.

  Tedi is one of the first to arrive. She grabs a plain, flat mess tray. The cooks slop up her tray with rice, reddish mockmeat, and bits of dried prunes. The mix is truly awful, but somehow it tastes good that first day. Everything about her first meal and first day in Rikugun is good. Later, she gathers with other youths from her home city of Lentvaris, all from the same barracks quadrant inside Central Dormitory. They crowd around a handsome
singer in a back corner of a green bordered hall, deep inside the great warren. First they sing popular memex songs about heroes of the Liberation War. Then she learns her first RIK marching tune.

  “Over here, over there,

  RIK march everywhere!

  See our divisions rolling along!

  In and out, hear them shout

  ‘Forward march, don’t turn about!’

  Rikugun is rolling along.”

  She likes the next one more, especially the long held “righ” note in O-ri-on. She yells it off key, as the truly terrible singer that she is. No one cares, and she does it with wildly joyful enthusiasm. So do the other kids. She’s part of this now!

  “Bring the silver trumpet out,

  we’ll sing a marching song.

  Our enemies will run and shout

  to see our Green, united throng.

  We are the scourge of O-RIGH-on!

  Bang the snare drum, bang it out,

  we’ll sing a triumph song.

  Our enemies all run and shout

  to see us, fifty million strong.

  We are the scourge of O-RIGH-on!”

  When the curfew gong sounds, Tedi heads contentedly to her designated B Shift bunk. It’s a spartan carbon plank covered by a single blanket sack that Rikugun calls a “cocoon.” She climbs into one in the third deck of a stacked tier of 10 cots, connected by a single ladder at one end. She’ll share the cot and cocoon with two other trainees she’ll likely never meet, recruits from A and C Shifts.

  Tedi is in a cavernous chamber along with 1,200 other sleepers, in one cot out of decades of row bunks that extend away from her in all directions. There are 40 more barracks quadrants exactly like it around the Doughnut hole, sleeping 48,000 recruits per shift, three shifts per day or night. Sleeping halls remain in perpetual twilight, so that external time will soon lose any meaning for the recruits. Daegu’s diurnal rotation doesn’t sync with UST in any case. Over the ten week course each shift will get roughly the same day-night training without breaking the rotation. Recruits must get used to working to UST from now on, not watching local sky and stars for signs of light and dark and time. Where they’re going, everything is timed in UST, starting from Kolno Barracks to troopships that will carry them to war on whatever strange world they’ll be told to invade, occupy, or defend.

  Most newbies pass out right away. Many over partied with friends the night before leaving home forever. Ohers are exhausted from the march from Kolno Station to Kolno Barracks, followed by a half day of drill under the hot Carmé sun. In minutes, the cohort quad is hush with the sounds of sleep. Tedi can’t even close her eyes from excitement, despite her physical fatigue. She’s not alone. Here and there, the most intelligent recruits toss and fret and twitch most of the night, brains working to figure out why their bodies are being tormented to the edge of endurance. Recruits from rich families have artificial eyes that they dim in hard sunlight glare or turn off completely at night, plunging them into total blackness for sleep. Others must watch flecks of dust and light and electrical impulses flit across inner eyelids in a hyperdance of electric and optic overstimulation. This will be the last night for weeks that Tedi has a problem sleeping. For the next ten weeks her cohort will stagger from one exhausting mental and physical activity to the next, on to another harder one, and another, until they come to see the time share cots as a glorious refuge from brutal workouts and wooden toy NCOs. Until graduation approaches and they start to fear war more than Kolno Barracks.

  Tedi Shipcka is happier than she’s ever been. Why not? She’s young, healthy, feels more alive than yesterday or any day in her seventeen years. She’s overjoyed to be Rikugun. ‘They’ll teach me everything I need to know. Then I’m really going to war! Praise Pyotr!’ From old habit, she reaches up to tie back her shoulder length, blonde hair for the night. Her hand passes instead over a smooth, bald pate she doesn’t recognize as her own. Her fingers linger awhile, mapping unfamiliar features to tactile memory. Her last thought before she finally falls asleep is of her mother, brushing back her flowing curls while humming a soft lullaby.

  ***

  Tedi makes it through the first two weeks of intense physical exertion still in a state of near constant exhilaration. Young and fit, she nevertheless is exhausted like never before. Down into her bones. Every single night. She’s not alone. Even the best of trainee nitōhei are having trouble. There’s no break from the physical training and no rest ahead. And they’ve only finished the first, most basic course. Now it gets hard. “Endurance, exhaustion, execution!” It’s what the always angry gochōs shout. Recruits must finish mental tasks after 30 klic runs, or wall scaling for hours in the heat. Tasks like sorting munitions by caliber, disassembling and reassembling a stub maser, making flash vid IDs of enemy skycraft or unit patches and call signs. Any mistake brings punishment. Tedi makes one, and has to run a lap around the Doughnut. Then she makes another. “Two laps, recruit! Now!”

  She’s happy to move on to basic combat skills. Twice each day, her cohort takes weapons from long racks in one of the armories, then double times five klics out from The Doughnut to live fire ranges set up past the edge of the black tarmac. Tedi stands or kneels or lies down in hot dirt, practicing maser and laser shooting before and after Carmé rises and sets. She likes night firing sessions best, because the ranges are lighted by thousands of red, blue and green beams slicing apart the dark. Other B-Shift cohorts are out there as well, staggered over different weeks of the course, showing more or less skill with weapons as a result. Ten thousand shoot low power masers over and over, aiming at distant targets laid out between the evenly spaced guard towers. Then they take turns throwing puff frag and sonic grenades at animate, laser-and-holo projections of enemy troops and bots. Other days, they stay close to The Doughnut, assembled on shimmering tarmac and told to attack each other with hard rubber knives, fists and feet, and slamming bodies.

  Week Four brings practice assaults on simulated black wall. That’s when Tedi makes another mistake. This one she pays for with a low power spandau blast in the chest that takes her off her feet and slams her down hard, onto her back. She gets chewed out by the gochō who shot her as she tries to stagger back up, into an assault pose. Her legs go all wobbly as she readies to charge the enemy’s position again. Before she can regain her senses a stun grenade lays her out, this time flat on her face. She looks up to see the grinning gochō leering down at her. She thinks he must be targeting her especially, every day. But he isn’t. He’s just a real mean son-of-a-bitch. She gets up, steadies herself, and runs the rest of the assault course.

  She learns how to defend herself with a kabar or just a sharpened entrenchment tool, practicing beheading enemy holo fighters with the spade. She grapples with sudden attacks by ghostly silhouettes, nasty holo enemy that climb out of spectral ATCs to attack her squad inside mock First Trench and blacked out dugouts. Holo soldiers have electric weapons that sting real hard and can stun you senseless. You have to take them seriously. Then recruits go against each other in mock assaults and defense. Then on long patrols through ghostly, ever changing Dark Territory. Tedi is sleeping really well now, despite all the bruises and aches and soreness.

  Week Five arrives and Tedi is shoulder firing actual smart rockets at charging mock ups of ‘squid’ armtraks, blowing two of them apart with excited satisfaction. She learns to program rapid fire auto bot guns and how to strip down, rebuild, and slave spandau M-5 and M-10 heavy armtrak masers. She’s told that RIK spandaus are greatly feared and admired by all of Pyotr’s enemies. True or not, their barking sound turns familiar, bulks up confidence in every nitōhei. Tedi likes spandaus.

  Gross Imperium is a pampered, elite unit with the Imperator Pyotr himself as its honorary commandant. The rest of Rikugun calls it “Pyotr’s Pet,” but they envy its skill, the quality of its handpicked recruits, and its heavy weapons complement. It’s notionally a light infantry division, but has an oversized armtrak complement like no other in Rikugun.
It’s nearly as heavily outfitted with armtraks as a regular armored division. It has its own artillery, of course, fixed and mobile. And a heavy brigade of acoustic ATCs. It has a double complement of ground hugger infantry transports, from halftracks to ammo and cargo carriers and AI hauler trucks. It has 1,000 two-man and three-man armored hoverbikes, like the ones the NCOs rode from Kolno Station. They’re for fast scouting and pursuit. It’s not “light infantry” at all. Yet Gross Imperium can move faster than any division in Rikugun.

  While Tedi’s cohort is only part of a single Women’s Combat Brigade attached to that much bigger division, it trains to scale. Tedi and the other recruits assigned to the division imitate large scale maneuvers and capabilities, down to an all out assault on a heavily defended ACU holo position. It’s the biggest simulated fight of basic training so far, and Tedi does well. She veers off her original attack glide when she sees a friendly Mammoth take a hit from a squid gun and spin out. She clambers onboard, resets all the slaved AI bot guns to make sweeping cover fire, then hops back into the fight. Feeling chuffed and full of herself, the next day she gets ambushed barely one third of the way across fake DT. She’s knocked down by a stun maser wielded by an electric blue holo marine, hiding in a boulder field.