Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  ***

  It’s late in Year Three of the war on Amasia and Tedi Shipcka feels old. She knows all about Dark Territory. At age 20, she’s a rare, original veteran of the WCB, an ‘old hand’ with almost three years active service under the Black Eagle flag. Those three years she spent entirely on Amasia. It’s not the war she wanted or expected when she enlisted, hoping to see her Dad out there. She still doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead, marooned or prisoner of her hated enemies. She’s the last of the true ‘old hands.’ Her and Major Leyla Celik. Last of her Kolno cohort. All the rest are dead or missing or prisoners of war on the other side of the black; or they were sent home with unrecoverable wounds. The newer ‘old hands’ are from cohorts that came into WCB after she did, sometime in Year Two or Three.

  Tedi smells of the black, a little bit of every sector she has served in, that the WCB bled into over three years. She smells of dank water and earthworms, foul bunkers, underground mess halls and barracks, burned moss and summer grasses, smoking woods and overturned clays; of corrupt unburied flesh, scorched metal and glassy sand, maser grease and fungal rot. She hated the desert at first, but now she likes it when the division rotates into The Sandbox. It’s easier to stay clean in the desert. Sometimes, when she’s with Leyla, she cleans up well with real soap and a jug of hot water. Later, she loses the industrial smell, coming to smell like Leyla’s olive sweat instead, with subtle hints of fish oil and recent orgasm. Tedi is a tough and respected fighter, though she’s not much liked. She’s senior gunsō now, her master sergeant’s rank coming with hard combat experience and harder won battle skill. Though it must be said, it’s also because her commander wants to keep her nearby, on the Battalion HQ staff by day and on her back at night.

  Leyla was promoted to major when the Women’s Combat Brigade lost three male officers in the mauling it took in the First Shaka Offensive. She should rank higher than major by now, but she’s stuck in command of One Battalion, blocked from a full colonel’s rank and command of the divisional WCB because Rikugun won’t change the rules for female officers. It still won’t let any women command more than a battalion or rise above the rank of major, fearing that regular Rikugun soldiers will not respect any higher command rank on a woman’s collar. Rikugun Main HQ on Kestino won’t budge on the issue, even though most male officers on Lemuria think the women of the WCBs have earned it. Most, not all.

  Leyla nearly snuffed it that first day, when the WCB lost its combat cherry to a massive and perfectly timed counterattack by the Enthusiastics, the ACU’s 7th Assault Division from Argos. She got left behind by fast retreating hovers. It took her four days to sneak and skulk back to Rikugun First Trench, over a hundred hostile klics to the east. She stripped a dead Blue out of her uniform and hid her giveaway baldness under a battered ACU helmet. Rear area confusion and battle mayhem helped, as heavy fighting continued back and forth over Dark Territory for almost a week. That let her travel on the enemy maglev, hiding in plain sight.

  No way she’d have made it walking.

  Not from far off, Alliance Third Trench.

  Never through Ghoul Snakes City.

  She didn’t have to fake not being able to speak. To hide her Grün accent she lifted her visor whenever challenged by the MPs, showing off a nasty throat wound she took from from a piece of shrapnel. That was why she missed the transport when the recall signal came. She never lifted the HUD so high that the MPs could see giveaway cat’s whisker tribal markings around her eyes. They saw the jagged gash and moved on. She scuttled off the ACU maglev when it got to First Trench, then hid all day on the wrong edge of Dark Territory. She crossed over that night, gave the call sign by hand signal, and climbed up the parapet and wall. A medic fixed her throat wound well enough that it left only an irregular white scar. Soon after, she was promoted to major, to fill the shoes of one of the evaporated male officers.

  She almost bought it a second time, during a trench raid, but that’s another story. Everyone has two or three of those. Tedi had several close calls, too. Every vet in the WCB has come too close to meeting Ox Head or Horse Face out in the Yue ming. Everyone who has ever gone out into the obscure regions has heard the whispering of vaporous daemons above a crater rim or under an armtrak wreck, felt ice cold breath of one of King Yan’s minions on the back of her neck. No one talks about that, or about a near miss from a sniper round, or the mine they nearly stepped on, or the hot smart shell that came skittering over the black but for some reason known only to its AI chose to take out the two girls in the next slit trench, leaving you in yours, shaking on the stem like an autumn leaf.

  Being the only two surviving vets from Tedi’s original Kolno Barracks cohort, along with staying clear of becoming friends with any of the vulnerable newbies, pushed Tedi and Leyla closer. They both felt it, as old hands died off one by one, or by twos or threes or fives. Then came the worst day for the WCB, a disaster of losing 737 girls in the same attack when a single penetrator missile plunged into the Brigade assembly bunker. It took two weeks for coast slaves to scrape all that mess off the inner walls, to wash the interior out and disinfect, and for the combat engineers to repair the caved in roof. The catastrophe sped everything up for Tedi and Leyla. Soon after, they found they were the only pair left from Kolno.

  They were already drawn to each other, had longed for each other from their first sighting back when Tedi was a frog recruit and Leyla was watching them all train, deciding who among all those combat virgins she should promote to NCO. Training and necessary officer distance and the lack of physical opportunity held them back from acting on their feelings. That all changed when they got to the black, where Tedi lost every virginity she had. They became lovers after one of Tedi’s closest brushes with death, while on patrol. When she got back, lily white with fear, shaking all over, covered in warm blood from a man’s throat she slashed before he could reach out to cut hers, they succumbed to each other. They melded.

  It started in comforting and trauma and ended in caresses, as they collapsed into each other, embracing in fright and relief at Tedi’s return; surrendering to pent up coital tension they both felt from the first time they met. It ended in deep kisses and exploding orgasms in Leyla’s officer quarters. Their affair continued on R&R in rear area barracks, returned to Leyla’s private officer hut, then over the months that followed they wet pretty much everywhere two people can make love. All the time, ever since that first time. They can’t get enough of each other.

  The sex is shockingly, gloriously physical. Unlike anything in young Tedi’s experience. She admits that red facedly to Leyla after a long night of lovemaking. Before the war, she confesses, before she met Leyla, she had experienced only the usual teen fumbling. Embarrassed if exciting experimenting with a clumsy, sticky, premature boy and a few big breasted, big pawed girls. All as innocent and inept and idiotic and unsatisfying and embarrassed as she was. Leyla is different. From the first tendrils of lust that lightly touch Tedi’s face, then slide down to her breasts and lower, flowering into intense caresses, she knows Leyla is the one. She’s far ahead in time and place from Tedi’s limited experience. Yet, the depths of their newfound passion are so great, differences in age and rank and experience melt away like a spring snow resting on warm earth. They become rooted in each other.

  Leyla proves to be exactly the extraordinary lover that Tedi imagined in her night dreams. The first time, her confident hands probed and reshaped the younger woman like soft wax, until Tedi folded arching loins into a wrapping embrace of her stunningly beautiful superior, coming again and again and again. Tedi learned how to please Leyla, too, though it took more time. They seek each other out, then keep to themselves whenever they’re off duty. They’re happy, content in bed and without. They keep the affair secret, of course. Officers and soldiers directly under them aren’t supposed to couple. It gets easier with Leyla as battalion commander. She adds Tedi to her staff and quarters her in the command bunker. Tedi officially occupies the small, orderly’s room o
utside the major’s suite. With all the privacy they want or need, their relationship becomes almost domestic in its familiarity, its ease and routine and daily comforts. The nights stay special, however. Nights are wet and engorged, filled with glorious, exploding bouts of lovemaking.

  It’s a typical Rikugun set up. Most male officers also keep “front wives” like Tedi in orderly’s quarters, or stashed somewhere behind Third Trench or back in a stolen villa on the Thalassa coast, if they’re more senior and can get back there often enough. Some are tender with very young front wives, though not as tender as Leyla is with Tedi. Others are not. It doesn’t matter: they take young women into their beds at the black, but they all think of other, more distant women waiting faithfully on a far off homeworld as their real wives. The ones who will give them first sons to inherit their High Caste estates. Most front wives are seconded from the old Women’s Auxiliaries, but at least a dozen in Gross Imperium are women fighters who choose to shift permanently to HQs from the WCB. They spot some senior male officer while on R&R and latch onto him like a lamprey on a shark.

  Tedi despises women who give up a place in the WCB to service a man, or to save themselves from combat. She’s blithely unaware of the irony of her own kept position. She says it indignantly, looking up at Leyla from a warm bath: “Those huora would rather fight the war flat on their backs or on their knees for some male officer than standing on a firing step to fight alongside their WCB sisters!”

  Leyla says nothing as she softly brushes away bright beads of cold water glinting like diamonds on Tedi’s pert breasts, nipples erect from water just a little too chill, and from Leyla’s soft strokings. She reaches the sponge between Tedi’s legs to wash and caress her lover with skilled, teasing strokes. Until Tedi pulls Leyla’s face down to kiss her mouth, flushed and ready for another long night of languid sex. Leyla lifts her out and carries her naked to the bed.

  ***

  Tedi’s on duty in The Sandbox deep rear today, without Leyla. Thousands of klics behind Third Trench. She’s in Xiamen actually, to collect 1,285 whiskered recruits who shuttled down to the Thalassa coast from offworld. Frosch girls from Daegu. That’s Ordensstaadt dialect and Rikugun slang. It means “frog.” Maybe it’s because their utes are still so very shiny and, well, so very green? She’s here to escort them to the black wall section held by Gross Imperium WCB.

  ‘They’re all too damn young. Just kids.’ She worries about their youth, the lack of training of these replacements. Their silver knight shoulder flashes are still bright and burnished, with animate, roving red eyes that scan and scout for targets. Building scanners into the flash is new. It enhances HUD peripheral vision.

  ‘How can we win with kids?’ Something else about them bothers her more, but she can’t figure out what it is. Something surface and obvious, but she keeps missing it. It’s as irritating a puzzle in her mind as a pebble in her boot. She’s still trying to identify the mental itch, only half listening to the brigade link as her colonel greets the rookies with his usual rhetoric about “blood revenge on Pyotr’s enemies.” He’s impeccably uniformed in crisp lettuce green, tall and aristocratic in his bearing and speech patterns and demeanor. Second Caste, maybe. Tedi has heard it all before, many times. She believes most of it, though not as fervently as when she first volunteered to fight in Pyotr’s war and shipped out to the black on Amasia. That war is raging across half Orion, following the great naval lines of communication. But she has been here the whole time.

  Believing in Pyotr and the greatness of the Imperium is one thing. Believing in final victory, believing in the generals and in Rikugun and in the wider war, well that’s quite another entirely. Tedi no longer believes any of that shit. Like most veteran NCOs in most armies in most wars, she tunes out official talk as her colonel drones to the new girls about honor and glory and winning the final fight, and the reputation of the WCB. She’s done this before, too many times. Stood at attention for a brassy oration in front of rookies who don’t know a zig from a zag or a swatch of ass wipe from their helmet liners. Knowing she’ll have to take them into the black soon and watch some of them die. Some will buy it fast and stupid, others slow and obscene. Or she won’t see a thing. She’ll look and they’ll be gone.

  So she does what she usually does when “bored out of her gourd” on official duty. She lets her mind wander to Leyla’s voluptuous body, with which she last coupled wetly a few hours ago. It was a long and languid, and hotly naked and passionate goodbye. Remembering, she feels wet and flush all over again. She always does when she daydreams or night dreams of Leyla. She comes back for a moment. The colonel’s now talking vaguely about a coming offensive that Gross Imperium will lead across the black “very soon.” About how they’ll retake lost trenches and overrun the enemy’s lines as well, this time for once and all. It seems like more of the usual crap, so she lets herself drift back to Leyla. Tumbling into her warmth, folding into deep caresses and under her loving tongue.

  Most of the old hands of the WCB and Gross Imperium are confident that their defensive position will hold, that the war on Lemuria will go on. That they must and will play a loyal part in it, dying a little more to each other daily. But they no longer believe in victory on Amasia, or in the wider war. They no longer thrill to the shrill trumpet’s call, their ‘souls in arms and eager for the fray.’ Like Tedi, they do their duty bravely and well, but no more. There are no heroes among the old hands of the WCB, not in that reckless greenhorn sense anyway. That kind of early ‘hero’ is gone. They don’t race in an attack the same reckless way. They slip behind cover, dart from wreck to wreck, fearful of mines and rapidos. They’ve learned when to duck-and-cover, when to go outside or hunker under shellfire.

  Any hero who didn’t learn that is dead. It’s only the new girls who look as eager as Tedi did once, back when her shiny bald head still felt odd to her touch. Unlike now, when she can’t even remember her mother brushing her long blonde hair before she left home forever. They all look like they still believe. Like they really are “Pioneers for a New Age of Purity,” like she thought she was three years ago, when she volunteered before first light on the morning of her 17th birthday. That girl died piece-by-piece and is buried somewhere in the black with all those dead heroes Rikugun still parades before fresh recruits and on the civvy memexes. She died along with the rest of her dead cohort. Before she first lay under Leyla.

  Tedi senses that disaster lies ahead, looming over WCB, over her and Leyla. A gloom is descending over the whole of the black and Rikugun. It broods like Pyotr’s hologram loomed over Kolno Barracks. That place of myth and hope she loved as she loved imaginary Pyotr, with a virgin’s adoration. That place where her emperor and Rikugun instructors raped her innocence at the start of what she now blasphemously calls in private, to Leyla alone, “Pyotr’s Teapot War.”

  “The foul womb of night” has birthed a bastard spawn who wears his afterbirth still. He slithers from base camp to rear trench to frontlines, across Dark Territory to the enemy’s black wall, thence to far off enemy camps and to distant coastal ports bustling with killing cargos destined for the front. Far beyond Amasia, too. On a dozen burning worlds where fighting is underway and in a hundred systems where navies dart in to contest vital lanes and raid moons and LPs. The hum of fleets and armies sounds stilly in her ears. A dull, monotonous roar, a churning and clanking engine with no driver or direction.

  Some call it Duty.

  Some call it Glory.

  Some call it Honor.

  Its true name is Vanity.

  Tedi and the replacements reach First Trench after a day’s travel by maglev and truck, and then on foot. Education in reality starts right away, as Tedi leads twenty new girls into DT. A hundred other sergeants take out the rest. Tedi’s group gets back alright, but two girls in another patrol startle and run and are decapitated by a bot gun before their sergeant can burn it out. The other newbies all go out again the next night and the next, losing three more whiskered girls to creeping
mines.

  Down in the underground WCB barracks during their fourth night along the black, the most forward of the new girls walks right up to a kneeling veteran who’s mumbling loudly in a corner of the brigade assembly bunker. It hosts up to four companies at a time, but there are rarely so many girls allowed in any more. In fact, it’s locked during bombardments to prevent crowding, a lesson learned the hard way when WCB lost 737 girls to a single, deep penetrator in Year Two.

  “What the hell are you doing?” The kneeling woman doesn’t answer. She has jet black skin, made shiny in the windowless light by the total depilation standard for both genders in Gross Imperium. She drew the rookie’s attention by looking wildly around, throwing her arms skyward as she mutters, waving her hands in an urgent come hither motion. As if she expects someone important to arrive at any moment. The forward girl asks her again, more insistently. “Who are you looking for?” Still no answer, just more arm waving and gestures.