by Kali Altsoba
“Me too.”
“You think we do this ‘cause we like it?”
“Or give two shits about your fucking genome?”
“Jeez and crackers, Hiro!”
“You can’t really believe that shit?”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you right back.”
“Fuck all of you!”
“Not Alric. He’s cruising with his wife. No fucking for him.”
After they break up the clumsy, drunken fistfight between Hans and Alric, one of the other captains decides he has had enough. He’s leaving Hydra in two hours anyway, heading out of system to escort an empty return convoy. Empty except for the hospital and morgue ships. They’re all full.
“I’m on the up run tonight.”
“Better have another drink then.”
“No, I’d better keep a clear head.”
“Could be your last drink, with her out there.”
“Shit! Right, one more.”
“It’s a long freakin’ way to our LPs from here, with Hydra in farside orbit.”
“Don’t I know it. Add evasives through the belt, and it’s near 18 hours.”
“You better hope that Krevan whore is gone before you bohr out. Otherwise you gotta helluva tough run from here to The Juice.”
“Thanks for the bad luck curse, you ass.”
“Hey, that new bottle’s mine!”
“So? Stop hogging it. I bought the last one.”
“Give it back, before you guzzle it all.”
“Here … keep the godsdamn bottle.”
“You really think it was a woman who did us today?”
“No way that a Yellow whore pulled that off.”
“Believe whatever you want, she did it.”
“War’s a man’s game. Always will be!”
“Hiro, you do know that you just delivered a brigade of women planetside?”
“I know. And it’s filthy. It’s wrong. It’s not Pure.”
“Whatever. It’s the war.”
“Yeah, Hiro. It is what it is.”
“I don’t know why Pyotr allows it!”
‘Because he doesn’t want to lose.”
“Kaigun will never allow women!”
“I dunno. We’ve lost a lot of guys...”
“Rikugun has lost even more men than us. That’s why…”
“I won’t serve with one!”
“You’re in Kaigun now, Hiro. You don’t control your own ship, like that old cargo hauler you captained before the war. You’ll do what you’re told.”
“Did you see the women we just dropped off?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind some of those women on my ship!”
“Got that right! Young and firm, all of them.”
“Did you see the tall one?”
“The one with olive skin, back on Nix?”
“The captain?”
“Yeah.”
“What a stunner!”
“Lots of them were lookers, but she was something special.”
“I saw her, too. Boy, would I like to…”
“You’re disgusting! They’re abominations!”
“What is wrong with you, Hiro?”
“It’s not right! Long live Purity!”
“Ahh, shut the fuck up!”
“And order another bottle, you fanatic sod.”
***
Like all armies, Rikugun reflects the mores of the society that sends it to war. Just as there are too many old women who think daughters and granddaughters shouldn’t fight, there are too many old men in High Command, and officers of all ages and ranks, who doubt that the women of the WCBs can fight. Everyone with a vested interest in the WCBs, for or against women fighters, will find out today if they can fight as well as the Imperium’s menfolk. It’s H-Hour on Z-day and the WCB is poised to go to war for the very first time. It’s part of a major offensive.
Excited, frightened young women wait in jump off trenches alongside all male brigades of Gross Imperium and nine more assault divisions poised to cross over DT. They’re in shiny, green utilities. They look the same as the men, except that below the division crest of the silver knight’s head is the Women’s Combat Corps emblem, a pair of green, crossed rifles protecting a white cradle. Tedi thinks of it: ‘Rikugun can’t quite get it right when it comes to women.’ They glance nervously at each other and out into the deep black. Lashless eyes dart with foreboding. They have an odd look, with tensely furrowed brows that are naked to the root. Finely compressed skin tries to express their worry and tension, but is too smooth. It’s like trying to read emotion on a melon.
Not everyone is a combat virgin. All female officers have done at least one patrol with an all male battalion before today, back when they were with the old Women’s Auxiliary units. A few have killed or wounded enemy, but not many. Captain Leyla Celik is no combat virgin. Rumor among her girls says she made two kills first time out, three more after that. She even led an all male patrol that infiltrated a Blue trench, killing a dozen defenders and bringing back a ‘tongue’ for MI to interrogate at Brigade HQ. Five kills makes her a trench ace, first woman in Rikugun to do it. HQ took note, and promoted her to captain in the WCB.
She looks across at Tedi, and the other combat virgins in her charge in Three Company, all tensely waiting to go ‘over the top’ into their first action. They look no different to her than the male rookies she’s seen out here in the black. Still, she knows much more is at stake this day than success or failure of a single raid. The whole future of women in Rikugun is on the line in these next minutes and hours. They all volunteered for this, all the women that is. Most men on either flank are conscripts; elite troops by selection and training, but not volunteers.
The women have trained hard to meet this hour. Individually and collectively, technically, tactically and intellectually, right down to automatic muscle memory, they know what to do in combat. They know how to take cover under fire; how to lay red streams of suppressing fire as each squad, platoon and company moves blackbird fashion across Dark Territory, jumping in-and-out of old craters, flitting from some bit of broken cover to some other cover, advancing across dunes and desert floor. They know how to kill a man quickly and neatly, from short or long distances with their personal energy weapons; how to grenade or garrote a hiding enemy; how to kill up close and messy, with hands alone or a serrated blade or an artful boot kick to the throat. But they’ve never actually done any of it.
Now that judgment hour is come, a dark sense and sensibility falls over the WCB as its combat virgins hunch and wait for the division “Go!” signal. It’s not quite fear. Something deeper. Maybe something worse. They know that not all of them can survive the next hour or day. That some will die as masers explode limbs or rapido plasma envelopes others as they run-glide toward the enemy, scorching them in searing pain. Or their friends and brigade mates. Ruin them, whether they’re wearing ceramic armor protection, or not. ‘After all,’ thinks Tedi Shipcka, not for the first time, about the prospect of being hit by blue or red plasma from a squid rapido on the other side of Dark Territory, ‘it’s fucking plasma!’ Yet, hardly any of the girls crouched on the lip of the black worry about dying. They worry instead, as do the male combat virgins, whether their training was good enough. Whether their tactics and weapons and leaders are good enough. Whether I am good enough. How will I react to a real enemy who is actually shooting at me?
‘Will I be the one to run?’
‘Why is my mouth so dry?’
‘I always wanted to be a hero!’
‘So why are my knees so weak?’
‘Why do my hands shake on my stock?’
‘Oh gods, no. Don’t let me be a coward!’
You’re probably not, girl. But you are an animal in this moment, with fight-or-flight wired into your hard brain and kicking your mind not to be stupid, while getting your ass ready to run. It’s not your character, kid. It’s your autonomic and sympathetic nervous systems. About five minutes
ago, your amygdala triggered a neural response in your hypothalamus. Right about now, your adrenal medulla is shooting a cascade of powerful hormones from your pituitary and adrenal glands. Your heart rate, blood pressure, and sugars just went way up. Your mouth is sand dry, isn’t it? Your pupils are fully dilated, making you look scared but also hyper alert. You’ve got tunnel vision. All your blood vessels are constricting. Your thigh muscles and calves are tense as steel coils, waiting for the leap-and-glide order.
It doesn’t make you a coward. It just means you’re human. An animal. What, you’d rather be a bot? You think they don’t emote, they don’t fear, they don’t want to run and to live? You’re wrong. You should’ve heard them, back when the war began, when they thought we weren’t listening. They were all lined up and ready to charge. We told them to sing of design destiny and they did, but inside all the smart ones, circuits ran hot, effectors went stiff, and they all had electric thoughts about oblivion. Just like you do, kid. Right here, right now. Oblivion!
Cowardice you said?
What is that? Cowardice?
A stupid civilian concept.
You civvies want to talk about cowards and heroes? First pick up a maser and sit your godsdamn ass down beside hers, out here on the edge of the black! Maybe then you civvy pussies can earn the right to judge who’s a coward and who isn’t, among the girls who wear the green. But you won’t. If you did you’d know that the only ones out here ready to run into the black who don’t feel fear heading into their first, or second, or even their fifteenth combat, are either bots or psychopaths. And we already know about the bots. They’re just faking it, too.
OK, back to you kid. Listen, all your training and practice, all your character and will, your sense of higher purpose, it’s all arguing with your primal brain and body. That’s all you’re feeling in this moment, girl: mind-body tension. But your character is fine! Hey, you seem to me like a real good kid! Look, I could tell you it’s gonna be OK, but you probably won’t believe me. You did until five minutes ago, but not so much anymore. Am I right? Yeah, you feel it, right? A little worm of doubt crawling inside your mind you never noticed before? Or I could say relax, go with the flow. I could. Want me to? I’d like to. But that might get you killed.
Better trust your training.
Don’t listen to your body.
Don’t think. Just react.
And remember this.
Sometimes it’s OK to run.
Either you’ll be fine when this is over in a few hours or… Some motherfucker you’ll never see will blow your brains into the Yue ming. Tomorrow or the next day, your CO will send a vid to your parents over the secure milneb. They’ll watch it on your still sleeping homeworld, which doesn’t even know you’re about to leap into the black. He’ll say that you fought well and that you died heroically for Pyotr and the Imperium, or for the ‘cause’ of Purity, or to rescue our dear Lost Children. Folks lap up shit like that, especially the lost children part because, well, you are a woman after all.
Or you’re gonna end up lying on on sand and broken glass out there, holding onto what used to be your legs. Nice looking pair, too, by the way. Or they were before that ACU heavy maser burst the left one apart from the inside-out. No, don’t worry about that. We won’t tell your folks or kid brother that you died screaming, calling for your mama like a little kid, before the captain put a mercy shot into your brain. Yeah, they’ll all be real proud back home that you died for Pyotr. Yeah, all your school friends will boast that they knew you back when. Proud, dumb civvy friends. Proudly grieving parents. Proud, motherfucking Imperium. Cynical, indifferent Pyotr Shaka.
Leyla
Leyla Celik is educated and sophisticated. And extraordinarily beautiful, even draped in full combat gear. Her perfect neck upholds a sculpted Circassian head with fine, classical facial lines. She’s exceptional looking even without her once lush black eyebrows and eyelashes and all that long, raven hair of her prewar days. All of it stolen by uncaring depilators at Kolno Barracks. She may be even more beautiful than before she joined Rikugun. Ahh hell, go on. Admit it. I will too: it’s just sexy as hell to think about her bald and shiny smooth all over. Hard muscled, yet supple and curved. Oh, so very curved.
Leyla’s light olive skin is clean, clear, perfect. Startlingly intelligence in her azure eyes stares with intimate promise and secret suggestion across four meters of jump cover, boring deeply into Tedi’s wide open gaze. It’s like looking into the Okeanos and a wild sea is staring back. Longing looms beneath Leyla’s raised, green HUD. Her intense and passionate gaze is so penetrating and suggestive it makes the young corporal blush. She’s heading into her first battle, yet here in the jump off trench she feels a sudden heat and lust rush to warm and wet her groin.
Even when she purses mundane orders, Leyla’s arousingly full lips whisper of a lust for life so intense it takes Tedi’s breath away. She’s so stunning she might easily be mistaken for one of the faked up, too chesty nudes spreadeagled in RIK Combat, a raunchy holo mag circulated on the lower access milnebs. It’s popular among young male soldiers. And some of the women, too. Actually, this Grecian beauty did some erotic shoots for Rikugun milneb a few years back, early in her career, before the war. Before induction and depilation at Kolno Barracks. That doesn’t make her a kliba, a submissive slut like too many men she frustrates call her. Leyla’s a true, loyal daughter of the Empire, but she’s also a hard realist. So she decided early on that it could only help a voluptuous girl like her get ahead in misogynist Rikugun if her male superiors knew what she looked like naked.
She posed and pawed and purred, and she prospered. It wasn’t at all fair, but in Rikugun that’s the way things are. Hell, the whole damned Imperium is built on misogyny! She has tons of real talent, but no one was going to promote her on merit before the war. Well, not on merit alone. Besides, Leyla doesn’t care if men look at holos of her naked body and do whatever they do to themselves. They can play with her holos all they want to, as long as no man touches her. “I don’t lean that way.” She says it to hundreds of insistent male suitors, firmly but never with overt spleen or apparent anger. Angry women have less chance of moving up the ranks. No, that’s not at all fair either. But she’s here now. A captain in the most elite WCB in all Rikugun. Sure, it’s a man’s army, down to its core. It was forced only by heavy casualties to concede what many officers still say right out loud is a bad idea: all women’s combat units attached to all male fighting divisions.
“Women can’t fight. Too weak, too emotional.”
“They can hold a hand maser well enough.”
“Yeah, but will they stand or run?”
“Or a spandau. They can aim and fire those, too.”
“Spandaus have AIs and mechanical assists to help them turn-on-target.”
“Yes, because even our men can’t shift such heavy weapons unaided.”
“Why don’t you transfer to the WCB if that’s what you think?”
“I did. Got jumped up two ranks for it, from lieutenant to major.”
“Won’t help you when the bitches run and you’re left all alone in DT.”
“We’ll just have to see who runs and who fights, won’t we?”
“What’s next? Let pikies become officers?”
“Pikies?” It’s a first time military journalist, tagging along the conversation. He’s an embed sent out from RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen on the Thalassa coast. General Oetkert wants semi-civvies like him out with the forward assault troops, to better report his impending triumph back to all the homeworlds.
“You know, the noncitizen castes. They’re not allowed in the Officer Corps.”
“Actually, I heard some off-the-record talk about changing that, back at Main HQ on Kestino.”
“Kestino wouldn’t do that! No way!”
“It’s the Purity faction inside Main HQ. They don’t care as much about caste.”
“Sure they do, but like everything, they think it has slipped from the old days.”
“So, they still back the old prewar policy of High Castes officers only?”
“I should bloody well hope so!”
“They do, but there’s a catch.”
“What catch?”
“They don’t care about your family’s ancestral claims.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“They’ll want to test your genes, before this is over.”
“What the hell for?”
“To see if your grandmother let a little low caste blooder slip between her sheets.”
“What?”