by Kali Altsoba
The forward observer is both intelligent and sensitive. He was a schoolteacher back in civvy life, so far back in time and memory and so many worlds and bohr jumps away that he can barely recall it. He knows the hammering shell fall he helps direct onto the enemy’s black wall jellies organs, shatters coms and hearing, blinds with stellar incandescence, incinerates flesh off bones. He was shelled, too, by far off Alliance guns under some other observer’s professional guidance. Three times he was shelled. The last time, he barely survived. His crew didn’t. Whatever he thinks about the retargeting job he has to do today, he does it well. He doesn’t give a furrow shitter’s last dump what any rookies think of him or the war.
“Battery Todt, Red Leg 18, this is Red Eye 25, calling in Fire Mission.”
“Red Leg 18, accepting call sign. Go ahead Red Eye.”
“Adjust fire for Target Location at Grid 787562, Direction 4800.”
“Rodger, Red Eye 25. Adjusting.”
“Mark Registration Point 1.”
“Marked.”
“From Registration Point 1, Direction 1800, right 600, drop 400.”
“Adjustment inputted to spotter shell in flight, arriving 30 seconds.”
“Target is ACU bunker, estimated capacity is 500 infantry.”
“Spotter impact confirmed. Target marked. Strobing.”
“Some infantry abandoning bunker.”
“Red Leg 18, fire for effect. Maximum spread.”
“Adjusting inputs, double vic smart shells are en route.”
“Confirming: direction 1800, right 600, drop 400.”
Two incoming wedges of ten smart shells each see the strobing remnants of their brother scout shell, and boost into a controlled dive. They engage evasives to steer around sudden upcoming sheets of ceramic anti-artillery pellets, desperate to reach up from the bunker roof and wall and stop the incoming strike in mid-air. Half the dropping shells are shredded by the sheets of pellets, exploding in deeply frustrated white blossom airbursts, rudimentary AIs screaming at their failure to achieve design purpose. The rest slam home into the ACU bunker roof, erupting with explosive satisfaction, expiring with a sense of absolute creative fulfillment.
“Fifty percent white on target. Hold for hit assessment.”
“Red Leg 18, this is Red Eye 25, bunker eliminated.”
“Estimate 80% enemy casualties.”
“Adjust fire for Target Location at Grid 787585, Direction 4825.”
“Target is access trench, in use by stretcher bearers and support infantry.”
“Red Leg 18, accepting soft target.”
“Spotter shell inbound.”
“Divert inflight penetrator shells to alternate target.”
“Red Leg 18, diverting to Registration Point 2.”
“Antipersonnel ordnance only, new target.”
“Red Eye 25, confirming spotter shell on soft target. Fire for effect.”
“Rodger that. This battery will white up position Grid 787585.”
The most concentrated shelling lands on a narrow front that RIK designates the schwerpunkt: point of maximum thrust, attack effort, and enemy vulnerability in the whole offensive. It’s a tight band of black wall eight klics wide, close to the center of the sector held by fighters of Argos 7th Assault, the ‘Enthusiastics’ who have been beaten up several times already, on Glarus and here on Amasia. RIK Main HQ on Kestino and RIK Onworld HQ at Xiamen on the Thalassa coast of Lemuria believe the Enthusiastics are the fulcrum point on which they will break the whole Alliance defense on Amasia. Crack them and win, is the main idea.
Shōshō Johann Oetkert is encouraged that Gross Imperium met the 7th Assault in major battles before today and easily bloodied and defeated it thrice, on Glarus, Oberon and at the Caliban moons. To this point on Lemuria, there has been only battalion level skirmishing between the two divisions. Both outfits know and hate the other and are eager for this new fight, but is either division really ready for it? “This time, we obliterate them totally!” He orders the main weight of his armor and infantry, with support from tactical skycraft, to attack directly into Argos 7th. He’ll bring overwhelming superiority against an enemy known to have quit and run before today. He’ll break their First Trench and drive on to Second and Third. He’ll smash Alliance plans to bog down Rikugun’s war machine in attrition war.
Pyotr and his generals in Main HQ on Kestino know that Rikugun must attack, that they must win on Amasia while they still have material superiority there. That they must strike before even more convoy battles are lost, and maybe even one of the Amasian moons critical to resupply is retaken by White Sails or another raider fleet. Before General Lian Sòng trains more millions of recruits from the western cities, to tip the infantry balance without even having to convoy in replacements. Time is not on Rikugun’s side, on Pyotr’s side. They must win fast or lose it all. If Gross Imperium cracks the so called Enthusiastics across the desert, Rikugun mobile armies and tactical sky forces will be able to envelop a broken enemy, take down whole divisions and armies in great battles of encirclement and annihilation. Cook millions of squids in cauldrons of operational envelopment, destruction and mass death. That’s the RIK plan, the hope and expectation. But then, it always is.
Everywhere along the black wall on the east side of Dark Territory sweating, sticky Rikugun infantry crowd in narrow jump off trenches, jostling in overheated frustration. Weapons all face frontward, but packs and sensors and other awkward gear tangle and snag in small, irritating ways. Black sheets of carbon fiber parapet overhead trap still air, making it oppressive and hard to breathe. A dehydrated rookie faints and falls against his mates. He’s roughly brought around.
Waiting fighters are spared the glare of a rising desert sun by the predawn hour and by facing westward. They see all the streaking lights sailing overhead in great parabolic arcs. They sense death in the expectant plasma heading at the enemy, even if they don’t actually feel any heat. They’ll feel hot soon enough, when hard rays of a noontime desert sun beat down on exposed backs and parch their mouths with radiating fear, while stirring fierce dust devils to chase them across the stark and sandy plain. They’ll feel pain and burns far more if they lose. For now, waiting to move out into the streaky darkness, they feel only excitement and expectation.
Then they hear it. Monsters approaching in the dark, clanging and breaking everything, wherever they move. Louder, closer, huge black shapes loom above them and then on either side, terrifying dark forms silhouette against a pitch night. Some rookies scream in fear. NCOs beat the screamers with clenched fists, before angry officers can do worse, reaching out with kinetic pistols to shoot them dead on the spot. The rookies stop screaming, look out into the black, become soldiers again, weapons warm and ready. For these are friendly armtraks, moving east to west. Not enemy Buffalos or Bisons, but herds of Mammoths and Mastodons and Elephants moving through and past the waiting assault infantry into lead position.
The day and hour are both carefully chosen to match the one time in each three month period that all five Amasian moons are set, or face darkly to Lemuria. Yes, absence of moonlight won’t interfere with enemy motion or heat scanners, but the basic biochronometry of humans is another matter altogether. Despite training and combat stimulants used by all the armies, a dawn attack is still most likely to catch defenders with psych guards down. Dawn is the time of lowest energy, alertness or mental quickness. Evolution conspires with biology to make it so, leaving us with circadian rhythms that are lowest just before the period of arboreal night rest ends. Drugs help, but night still triumphs. It’s a small thing, but Main HQ and even General Oetkert wants every possible advantage for this important attack.
It also matters, more than Darwin’s Ghost, that this particular crack of dawn follows an Alliance holiday. That makes it the hour and day when many enemy fighters are still drunk or stoned, hungover from a wilding the night before. Many who see the beginning of this day through a blur will not live to see its end. Their light will set
in violent red hues, hours before their intended or foretold eclipse.
“Ready my advance.”
“All units are in position, Highness.”
Shōshō Oetkert waves a spidery arm at a strategic map holo hanging in the air in front of him. He gives the order with a lustful sense of the moment, then sits back to watch the spectacle unfold. Like a poison recluse spider, he watches unwary prey skittering on hot sand. He feels pulsing in his venom sack. At last, he bites.
“Start the attack!”
Flotsam
Three weeks ago, fast military shuttles carried Gross Imperium WCB on a hard run planetside, from Nix down to the Thalassa coast. Also in the big convoy were three regular infantry divisions redeploying to Amasia, from yet another Alliance world that fell to the Imperium in The Balcony, where the fight is going badly for the enemy. The whole convoy came under hounding and harrying attack from AI Wasps, launched from an ice carrier under command of Admiral Magda Aklyan in White Sails. It lost one big troopship with over 40,000 men onboard, and two smaller cargo ships. One was fully loaded with variously colored protein powders, intended for RIK kitchens. The other had shells meant for what will be called the First Shaka Offensive, because Johann Oetkert is going to fail badly the first time he tries to break through to reach the Panthalassa coast, and then try it all again.
A cloud of multicolored food powders, broken bits of the three shattered ships, and tens of thousands of dead men is falling elegantly toward the system star. It won’t arrive at the corona for three years. Before it does, three times it will make pretty, cometary-meteor shows as Amasia passes through a spreading debris ‘tail.’ The powders will glow red and green and yellow in the Lemurian night sky. Over ten million inert plasma shells will streak incandescent across the horizon, before burning out. Tens of thousands of frozen dead men will slow thaw, then char black as they fall through air. They’ll give off no bothersome smell in the vacuum float or later, as they incinerate while plunging through an ever thickening atmosphere. Only their ash and larger bits of debris ---some broken bulkheads, torn pieces of hull, coolant piping and engines--- will make it down to settle or crater or splash; all unmarked save by a passing pod of blue whales, far out over the vast Okeanos.
Kaigun officers on the escort ships are badly shaken by the attack and loss of a large troopship. Later, drinking hard liquor in a lakeshore cathouse hotel on Hydra, a group of six Zerstörer captains are even more upset to learn that it was a Krevan, and a woman no less, who pounced the convoy and bested them over Nix.
“Fucking raiders! Two hits on my aft section.”
“I heard they flew from a joint fleet of NCU and KRN.”
“White Sails.”
“What?”
“They call themselves the White Sails.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I haven’t a clue in all the worlds.”
“I heard they had a godsdamn KRN admiral in command.”
“Yeah, me too. That’s what Kaigun MI is saying, but only off-the-record.”
“Led by a ‘Yellow’ bastard, a filthy Gelben.”
“In that case, Yellow Sails is more like it.”
“I thought we were done with the Yellows!”
“Those bastards never quit!”
“Don’t they know they’ve lost the war?”
“The minnow war, maybe. The war with Krevo. But sharks are fighting now, in the Liberation War. Lots of sharks, churning the waters everywhere.”
“That’s what we call it. You know what the Alliance and all the Neutrals call it? The Fourth Orion War.”
“Some don’t even call it that. They call it the Barbarian War. Know what that makes us? How can they call it that, call us that?”
“Who gives a shit about what anybody calls it? All I know is that every time we go out there we find that this is a much bigger fight than we thought, when we invaded Krevo two years ago. Where is the Alliance getting all its warships?”
“It’s a lot worse than you think. That White Sails admiral who ripped up the convoy? Not just a Krevan: she’s a damned woman!”
“NCU lets a Krevan cunt command their fleet?”
“Joint fleet. KRN is out there, too.”
“Impossible! No way a woman knows naval tactics like that.”
“A double back into the umbra at Nix? That was good, I havta say it.”
“Sure, but a woman?”
“It’s true.”
All six captains look at each other in silence, for a long minute. They pretty much have the same thought and the same sinking feeling at the same time. ‘If the story gets out that we got bested by a woman rising off Nix, it’s going to be hard to live down the shame of it with other Kaigun officers.’
“I heard she’s from Genève.”
“That shithole world? We smoked its flotilla?”
“Yeah, in the ‘Obliteration.’ I was there, you know.”
“Me too. It was sweet. They ran like the yellow bastards they are.”
“But then they jumped our Kölns around the inner moons.”
“It was her. She was just a destroyer captain back then.”
“We’re all destroyer captains.”
“Yeah, and we just got beaten by a jumped up Genèven bitch.”
“Gods! I feel a little sick.”
“Fucking tree huggers.”
“I was there once. Before the war.”
“What the hell did you go there for?
“A cruise, on the old liner Meiji.”
“Sex cruise?”
“No, with my wife.”
“Ha!”
“Gods, what a bore that must’ve been!”
“Visiting Genève, or being stuck on a cruise liner with Alric’s wife?”
“Fuck you, Hans.”
“More than she fucked you, Alric. I’ll bet a month’s pay on that!”
“It’s much worse there now.”
“How could it possibly be worse?”
“I was there two months ago, escorting a cargo run into Genève system.”
“What could be worse than a civilian cruise?”
“A civilian cruise with Alric’s wife.”
“That’s two. You only get one more, Hans.”
“It’s a scorched ball of dead trees now.”
“And internment camps. Lots of those.”
“They all are, all the conquered worlds.”
“You mean the Liberated Worlds, our recovered Lost Children.”
“Whatever, Hiro.”
“Yeah, we sure liberated the hell outa them!”
“Then we locked up all the Lost Children!”
“That’s so Pyotr doesn’t lose them again. Ha!”
“Think you’re real funny, Hans? You’re not, asshole.”
“Fuck you too, Alric.”
“You should both have more respect for the Imperator.”
“Again, whatever you say, Hiro. All hail Pyotr. What the fuck? Why not?”
“Genève doesn’t have an elevator anymore.”
“One of ours did it, yeah? Zerstörer, I’ll bet.”
“You have to go down in shuttles, like here.”
“You went down in a shuttle?”
“Unlike Alric’s wife.”
“It has been a long, hard day Hans. Or I’d belt you.”
“Long and hard just ain’t your style, then?”
“Puerile, Hans. What a wit! I thought you could do better than that.”
“There’s huge ash piles and a wide burn zone all around Toruń.”
“Rikugun cut holes in the berm. Most of the northern forest is gone, too.”
“Serves the Yellow bastards right.”
“You never saw the old growth forests, or you wouldn’t say...”
“Fuck them! Long live Purity!”
“Yeah, sure. Long live whatever, Hiro. Jeez!”
“You don’t believe in Purity?”
“Biggest con job since the Trojan Horse.”
<
br /> “What did you say? How dare…”
“OK, knock it off boys.”
“I’ll drink to Purity, Hiro. But only if you buy.”
“How can you say it? Purity is why we fight!”
“Not me. I got drafted, out of the Merchant Marine.”