by Kali Altsoba
“You deserve to starve, you Blue bitch. Get out now!”
They shout and shove in envy, anger and contempt. They especially hate a young mother who wears no military uniform, just a flowered cotton dress and yellow apron. They don’t even question her. Two WCB haul her outside and five more line up and shoot the woman on the spot. Then they all go back inside, sit at her kitchen table, and carefully consume her last winter loaves, a small cake of cheese, and a jug of warm goat’s milk. They leave her unburied. They take the goat.
Two raggedy children sit in a corner.
Skinny arms hugging scraped knees.
Sobbing silently for a murdered mother.
They scar and scourge deep rear zones, acting more cruelly than many RIK men. They’re more efficient in the smallest confiscations because they know how these enemy women think. How any woman hiding food for her child must think and act. Another cottage, another brutal confrontation with a WCB foraging party.
“Where did you hide the dumplings?”
“Please, I have no dumplings.”
Click clack.
“Now ya got no fuckin’ head!”
“Gilda, find those hot dumplings! I ken smell ‘em.”
“Partisans! Squids!” They accuse in an instant, then whole families die.
“Where’s the bread you baked?”
“There is no bread. We have no food left.”
“You lie!”
“Please, you took it all last time.”
Click clack.
They’re especially hard on any single women their own age they find hiding, especially jealous and vicious. Single, childless girls whom they find they don’t shoot. They hang them from the rafters of tobacco or dairy barns, or corn cribs.
“Where’s the sack of flour you’re hiding?”
“I have none. I swear it!”
“There’s flour on your hands.”
Click clack.
“Whose that under the floor boards?”
“No one, please, it’s no one!”
“Get out! Everybody outside, now!”
A minute passes, a quick click clack, click clack and a family ends. Another cottage burns. And another, and another. They’re like pyromaniac raptors, burning everything they can’t kill. Suffering they see or cause brings no pained moments of conscience or regret. Wherever they and the other Women’s Brigades operate behind the black walls, just like male units, they throw civvies out into whirling blizzards or biting sandstorms, to sleep in their place and in the safety of stolen beds and hutches. They gobble precious stores of hoarded, hidden food crucial to families trying to survive through the next winter, the fourth of the war.
They’re beyond pity.
Beyond good and evil.
They’re something else.
They make mothers and maiden aunts peel and roast the last precious potatoes, demanding “more butter and salt! We know you have butter hidden. Bring it out now, Blue Oni bitches!” They picked up the alternate to “squids” from Daurans. They like how it sounds, “Blue Oni” added to “bitch.” They devour the feast, last of the winter food, gulping it in front of wan children watching every greedy, disappearing bite. They take the last two eggs and flour with them as they depart, making sure to carefully break anything nice or pretty that they must leave behind.
Nothing moves these hard women of war. Not defiance of old men nearing Final Age whom they slap and kick and pull outside by the white of their beards. Not wails of old women pleading for the lives of their rope tied and roughed up granddaughters, about to be shot outside their own homes on charges of hoarding. Not screams of young mothers gone insane with worry over the stealing of the last bits of winter food they have for three small children. Not crying of little boys violently orphaned on the stoop of a rude home, while they watch. It’s behavior shocking to freshly baked newbies, to WCB recruits come straight from training at Kolno Barracks who are told that they must learn this callous cruelty, too. Must do whatever the veterans do and say. Or else face harsh discipline on the spot.
Worse than the Red Bag.
Worse than the Dog House.
Lethal, frontline discipline.
Not that Kolno Barracks kid’s shit.
So they punish and beat up and rob civvies, too. It’s part of the new natural order, and who can question Nature’s order when you arrive at First Trench at 17 or 18 years old? When everyone there is a veteran? Older, harder, crueler, ordering you to do it, for Pyotr and for home? So they do it.
It fits the new world, along with basic warcraft that Kolno instructors never taught them but they learn now from veteran women of the WCB. Like how to recognize safely distant from dangerously close incoming mortar rounds. How to stay silent and unmoving for hours on end while enemy bot guns search and shoot at any motion. How to hold a combat knife at the throat of a drunken, lusting rear area Rikugun male, maybe even an officer, with rape in his eyes and in his bulging pants. How to survive in the new times, when survival is all there is. How to think it’s all us vs. them, today and forever. It’s life or death, kid. Choose.
***
It’s three weeks after Tedi kissed Leyla farewell and did the faux courageous “pigeon and peacock” goodbye. Ever since, she has been crammed with two new girls in a fortified FOP five klics into a narrow neck of Dark Territory, about three klics east of the enemy’s First Trench. She’s bored stiff, waiting for something to happen. Anything, please! It doesn’t help that she’s always clock watching, trying to calculate how many USD plus however many USH she still has to stay here.
A reinforced roof of carbyne plank protects against mortars. No infantry maser or hand tossed grenade can penetrate the FOP observer slit that faces due west. Still, the main protection is disguise: multi spectrum light-and-sound camouflage and electronic baffles that are state-of-the-art. Nano scale light benders and total sound mufflers are the best diverters RIK combat engineering can provide. The outer skin can’t be penetrated by EM probes, unless a searcher knows the tiny bit of the blockhouse that projects above ground is there, and aims a beam right at it. Even then, the hidden structure will be real hard to pin down or map out. Flashing alarms will go off inside, and Tedi and the three new girls will most likely get out in time. Most likely. Yeah, probably. Nothing is for sure in the black.
The optics periscope is tiny and flexible, looking from outside like a bent rod or loose wire emerging from the broken track of a nearby smashed Buffalo. The shell is covered in clutter, bits of odd detritus. Just more old war junk, coated in layers of sand and dust from exposure to summer winds that blow hard through The Sandbox. It’s a perfect FOP, actually: silent, secret and invisible. The beauty of the RIK adaptive system is that no two FOPs look alike from the outside. Unless some stupid, bumbling Blue falls right into the hideaway, it’s undiscoverable.
There’s no smoking allowed out here, which suits Tedi. She hates smoldering tobacco and hemp; mostly because Leyla is a user of vapors, and even soma. The FOP collects evaporate, dripping it into interior catchments. But it hasn’t rained for weeks. The air is dry, the catchments are empty. So there’s little potable water past what each weekly relief team carries out here in jerry cans lashed to hips or in shouldered combat rucks. That means Tedi can’t wash, except for basic anal hygiene. Calls of nature are made into empty water carriers kept in a row along the back. Fortunately, Rikugun developed odor camo to block feces sniffer bots and other detectors of human waste from locating its snipers and FOPs. A good supply of the red chemical is sprinkled into ersatz chamber pots. Besides hiding snipers, odor camo has the unplanned benefit of making FOPs a tad more livable.
On watch, Tedi squats over unrolled vidscreens whispering live field reports to Brigade HQ at regular check in times. Her job is to look for signs of “nettoyage tactics.” It’s a rumored new Alliance way of making a trench assault bite-by-bite. Rikugun MI doesn’t yet have a handle on the tactic. It only knows that the Blues are planning to test the novel method in a division
scale attack, or more. The arrogant bastards might even try it in this sector, into the teeth of Gross Imperium.
‘That’ll be some test!’ Off watch, Tedi likes to observe antics of black tailed prairie dogs trying to keep a large burrow town clear of encroaching obstacles, so that they can see approaching predators. The fat, squat dogs are having an awfully tough time of it, with so much broken detritus of human excess and hatred lying across and atop their interrupted city. They’re always angrily busy with clean up. Each coterie works on a different patch of surface, popping op warily out of one of five entrances to each family group burrow, to drag away another annoying bit of rubbish blocking a vital view. Youngsters sit straight up and look all around, keeping sentry duty. They’re ready to bark and whistle a warning to workers to escape down an entrance at the approach of danger, then madly dash to get below ground themselves. They’re not so different from trench sentries. Just quicker. Tedi loves to watch the busy, angry prairie dogs, and not just because she has little else to do in the FOP. She thinks the utterly futile maintenance of their flat little town in the middle of contested Dark Territory is a too comical version of what’s underway on a larger scale up-and-down Lemuria.
Before she left on this extended mission a gruff, anonymous MI briefer called her in to Brigade HQ. He was an unusually ugly man. Heavyset with sagging, bagged eyes and way too much flesh in heavy jowls. She decided to call him “Mr. Jowls” when she told Leyla, and inside her head. Although she considered “Mr. Badger” as well, because he looked like a tired old badger. Not toothless, but stiff and no longer up for the hunt. Yet, cagey enough to send out younger killers like her, then pounce and take away their prize information when they got back. He hoarded the little bundles up to his masters higher in the chain of command. “Like godsdamn fruit baskets,” is how Leyla put it about Mr. Jowls, and about MI men in general. Tedi didn’t like the look or smell of him. He needed a bath, badly. She liked the content of his briefing even less.
“So far, all we know in MI is that ‘nettoyage’ means the ACU will send over a primary wave of assault infantry to bypass our strongpoints, seeking a fast and deep advance that neither side has been able to sustain so far.”
“Got it sir. They’ll hit fast and hard, bypassing strongpoints. What then?”
“We think secondary and tertiary assault waves will follow as clearers, doing basic ‘mopping up’ duties against any of our people the first wave bypassed. Close quarter fighting will follow, of course.”
Tedi flinched at the euphemisms. She has lost a lot of her girls either defending or carrying out ‘mopping up’ ops. And she knows ‘close quarters’ usually means a knife in the guts of one of her girls. Easy for this HQ furrow shitter to say. A lot harder for her and her girls. ‘MI and Brigade HQ like antiseptic terms like that. I bet if a company of Blue moppers got anywhere near one of their bunkers or HQs, and spread red grease all over the floor and walls, we’d hear different language than using mops and buckets to clean up after combat!’
Mr. Jowls was utterly oblivious. “Follow on waves will try to take down our strongpoints and secure each line of black wall methodically and in turn. They’ll stagger attack, taking First, Second, and then Third. Yes, it’s that ambitious.”
“But I’ll only see them in Dark Territory , sir. Once the first attack wave comes over my FOP, I won’t know about or be able to report any supporting waves.”
“Right. We still need you there to tell us if the attack coming over is standard formation, or looks like it’s going to try for nettoyage.”
“Alright sir.” Tedi thinks: ‘How am I supposed to know if something looks like something else that I’ve never seen? That no one in RIK has ever seen?’
“They won’t make one big, stabbing thrust into our defense-in-depth like your division tried and failed to do when it deployed three years ago. And they won’t attack us yet with everything they have, like we did in Year Three in the Second Shaka Offensive. Not until they test the new tactics.”
Tedi flinches again, remembering both her first combat and the larger, Year Three disaster. It was massive. And a massive failure by General Oetkert and Rikugun, not by the WCBs or Gross Imperium. It’s why things have been so quiet in Year Four. Failure to break through burned up all reserves of men and matériel.
“They’ll try to clear First to many klics depth, then consolidate for defense against our inevitable counterattack. They’ll reengage against Second, and so on.”
“Like cutting a mockmeat salami, one slice at a time. OK, I get ‘nettoyage’ now, sir. It means ‘nibbling, right?”
The MI man glared at her, evaluating her intelligence and tone, but agreed. “That’s right, gunsō. We have to know when this new tactic is first tried, right as it’s happening. Then we can respond at speed and break up their consolidation.”
“Yes sir.”
“This will be the squids’ first offensive on Amasia. We need to stop them the first time they try, so they get demoralized. So they don’t try again.”
“That would be good, sir.”
“I’ll be on the other end of all your reports.”
“Right sir, that’s good.” She thinks: ‘Of course you will, so you can steal the credit for them and carry them up the MI ranks like little fruit baskets.’ She almost sniggers, thinking about Leyla’s favorite putdown of all the little Mr. Jowls.
“Don’t fuck up, Sergeant Shipcka.”
Tedi understands more after Leyla explains it. “If the new bite-by-bite tactics work, if the squids push back the front edge of DT one line of our black walls at a time, say across a corps or army size sector of a thousand klics, our hold on central Lemuria would weaken, maybe even break.”
Tedi is shocked to think that the deep, triple lines of Rikugun black might be bent backward, preparing a great bulge in the lines and creating local flanks again. Also wrecking whole sections of supply and coms trenches and maglev lines, and overrunning sunken or buried or camoed surface roads. At worst, the enemy might punch right through in a stagger march all the way to the Thalassa coast. That’s what Leyla said, the day before Tedi headed out to the FOP.
Her interest in strategy is lessened, now that she has been here for three years. Far less because she has Leyla to return to each night. She lets Leyla worry about the big picture war, explain it now and then. Then she forgets about it. Out here, surrounded like the prairie dogs by war’s detritus, all that has faded away. It now seems pretty vague stuff to Tedi. ‘Anyway, it’s way above my pay grade.’
Tedi and the two fresh girls aren’t alone out here, even if it seems like it. Up-and-down the black, tens of thousands of Rikugun, men and women, are hunkered down in concealed FOPs. Even so, few are asked to stay out half as long as Tedi, without being relieved. She has another, worse problem. To make her report most useful she’s under strict, special orders from the ugly fat man at Brigade HQ. Just before he dismissed her, Mr. Jowls gave her the oddest order she ever got.
“Let any attack wash right over you. Don’t reveal your position by fighting back. I want you to maintain fire discipline, sergeant. No shooting!”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“You are forbidden to fire unless some godsdamn squid falls inside your FOP and lands right on your head! Your one job is to stay hidden all through the attack. Strictly observe and report.”
“I understand sir. I think…”
“Count whatever you see and get me the information, as fast as you can.”
“Yes sir!” Tedi saluted Mr. Jowls with a quick click of the hard black heels of her calf high, WCB combat boots. She looked him square in the eye as she did it, an unreadable, expressionless look parked on her face while she spun smartly on one heel and stiff marched out of his office. ‘Filthy drecksau.’
Beyond watching for the Blue offensive to start, and the fact that it’s her turn to go, there’s another reason Tedi’s stuck in the FOP. Her special skill set is stealth and observation. Her superiors overemploy good soldiers li
ke Tedi, young women who excel at warcraft. At scouting or fire spotting or hand fighting, or dexterity with a sniper long gun or stun grenades or a trench knife. Whatever skill you have, officers will find a way to use it, over and over and over. Its especially dangerous to be cited in an After Action Report for your specialist expertise in hand-to-hand fighting during a raid to the Blue side of the black, or in defense against a raid.
That’s why girls who once fiercely competed to earn a reputation as some kind of expert soldier now hate their specialist designations. Once you get a rep for having a skill like a keen eye for observation, for stealth and reporting accurately on the enemy, you’re singled out and orders come to do it all again “for Pyotr and the Grün cause.” That’s what happened to Tedi, just because she keeps super alert. That’s why she’s out here for weeks, not back in the Battalion HQ with Leyla.
The new girls are less eager than the first cohorts. They also pick up on trench culture faster than the first cohorts ever did. Most try to stay way below NCO and officer radar, to be as ordinary as they can. But it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later some officer writes you up in an AAR as especially good at some shitty duty, and you become Three Company’s “Best Sharpshooter” or Five Company’s “Mine Defuser” or a “Trench Raider,” or like Tedi a “Forward Observer.” Then orders arrive from a rear area HQ to Leyla or another frontline officer to “send your best Sonic Grenadier out to bring back a tongue.” Or make sure “your Top Scout takes point position on tonight’s patrol.” Or we need “your Best Sniper at coordinates X or Y or C.” Soon, you’re doing more than your fair share of real risky missions. And that will get you killed, or worse.