by Kali Altsoba
***
Twenty klics back from Tedi’s concealed and Ops Secret location, 15 behind First Trench, Leyla waits outside their hut for her to return. Waits in both fear and hope of the coming Alliance attack that will release her lover back to her, this side of the black. Back to her waiting arms and lips, back into her long days and liquid nights. If the damn squids don’t kill one or both of them first. It’s a good thing that a troop convoy with replacements for Gross Imperium makes planetside three days after Tedi leaves for the FOP at the head of her little observer squad.
That means Leyla fills her days training the new girls. Along with her normal duties of inspecting weapons and equipment, bucking up morale, and resolving large and small disputes that break out between junior officers and NCOs, who in turn break up stupid fights and arguments among bored yet tense WCB fighters. As Major Celik, Leyla writes a dozen AARs per day on small patrols, casualties, and nightly assessment of defense readiness, all sent back to male MI officers at Brigade HQ. Some reports capture her attention more than others, especially those coming from Tedi’s FOP and three others in the deadly space facing the enemy.
She desperately longs to embrace Tedi, legs wrapped tight around each other’s hips, breasts against breasts, caressing naked backs, kissing deeply with tongues and mouths and souls all through the night in the exquisite pleasure of kama. Leyla dreams of intimacy awake and asleep, the way nomad Bedouin who live all their lives in the deepest desert dream all day and every night of hidden aquifers and of cool, open water. She’ll quench her longing in good time, by drinking deeply from Tedi’s cool, clear well. She’ll eat ripe figs plucked from under Tedi’s bright green fronds. Rest in her broad, leafy shade. Splash relief from the desert heat over her sweating face and neck and body from the deep blue pool of Tedi’s waiting oasis.
Leyla hasn’t slept in three days. She taps her right hand nervously on her black, mockleather holster as she peers uselessly into the darkness, seeking Tedi and the future that’s obscured by the Yue ming. As she stands beneath the same dull stars that ceiling her darling Tedi’s distant night, she casually treads upon a black-and-red rove beetle. It made a fatal error of trying to climb over the toe of her combat boot. She flicks her foot and stomps the startled beetle flat as it lands upside down on a slab. Its last sight is a hard metallic sole blotting out the indifferent stars as a boot descends to crush everything it is or was or could ever be. Its wriggling, black legs cut wildly into the air in a frantic, squirting death spasm. Its last thought is of cruel abandonment by the Six Legged Coleopteran God. Then it’s gone, evermore.
Leyla grinds its cracked, oozing carapace into night sand and tuft grass. She wonders if this or any creature so small and easily dispatched senses impending death, as she believes hers is coming soon. Can a rove beetle’s apprehension of mortality match her own? Does it feel corporal sufferance with the same stabbing pangs as she does? Are the far off stars as indifferent to its fate as to hers? Will it miss its scuttling mate and life as Tedi will sob and miss her, when she’s told the news? When expiring from its mortal coil on Amasia, does a scurrying thing so small and common share a sense of fate and lost possibility with giants dying all around it in the Yue ming? What does it share with her, a great and callow, iron souled giant crushing out its life with indifferent weight and power?
She wipes the underside of her boot on a nearby rock and inhales hemp vapor from a thin, black stick. Tedi doesn’t like her drug habit, but it gets her through nights when she must lie lonely and unsleeping while her sweet young lover is on watch. Or like tonight, away from her, out there in deepest Dark Territory. At least she doesn’t take soma as often or, gods forbid, robusto. She inhales again, deeper this time. It’s a new batch of spiced hemp fresh arrived from someplace offworld. It’s very good. Leyla starts to see things in the sky, interwoven colors like silken threads of peacock neck fabric. Each cloud and burst of light entwines so that if she turns her face slightly one way they look to be a blue blur, but turning back changes the silk strands of the heavens green or pink or red or purple. Then she finds the perfect spot. She sees all possible colors, all at once.
She decides that she’ll not struggle against Death, like the broken beetle who lies still in sticky sand and crushed grass. She regrets killing it, just a little. Then dreamily returns to kaleidoscope introspection. ‘I shall hug the coming dark like a new bride, enter into death like sweet Tedi yielding under my caresses.’ Stupidly happy, she goes inside her battalion hut to sprawl naked on a major’s cot, to sleep a multicolored sleep. Across the Yue ming, Alliance artillery is rolling forward.
It’s shifting into barrage position.
It will open fire in two hours.
It will preempt the dawn.
It’s targeting Tedi’s FOP.
Nest
As always, the attack begins with an intense barrage. The pounding falls first and lightest just behind Tedi’s hidden FOP. A raw mix of blistering plasma and screaming high explosives arc down in falling curves, seemingly in search of her personally but really landing a half klic away. After one minute the shelling lifts and rolls on. It stops a quarter klic farther on to pummel new grid coordinates for precisely 100 seconds, then lifts to advance again. Then again and again, walking destruction slowly and methodically toward RIK First Trench in one minute increments. So far, Tedi has nothing special to report.
This looks like a classic, standard barrage. It’s walking over the intervening black like that mostly to be methodical in its destruction, though also to terrorize any Rikugun FOBBITS before it murders Rikugun regulars huddled underground, cowering from mini novas and small, kinetic earthquakes that fall out of the sky. She doesn’t yet see that this time, the barrage is clearing a channel through Dark Territory, washing over FOPs like Tedi’s, erupting hiding bot guns, smashing past skirmish lines and sunken pillboxes in front of the First black wall. Anything that might slow Blue infantry assaulters who will flow through the cut channel red hot, racing like so much splash and tubular lava tumbling down a volcanic mountain valley, overwhelming anything and everything in its red path.
Tedi sees that the barrage is, as always, a niagara curtain of cascading, sheeting destruction and death. It’s also different, for this is the first ever nettoyage barrage. Instead of pounding thinly along the outer perimeter of Gross Imperium’s whole sector, it’s concentrated in a narrow strip two klics long and less than a half klic deep, but super intense within that zone. The falling curtain is thick and incredibly powerful, cutting through everything in its chosen channel, clearing and paving a lava-and-glass highway for the assault infantry and armor following close behind.
This is new.
This is impressive.
This is terrifying.
Tedi’s HUD visor auto adjusts to eclipse to try to save her natural eyes. Through a heavy filter she watches the stately recession of falling shells move on as the rolling barrage lifts its parabolas to reach ever more distant coordinates. It’s like watching a rainbow recede, where it touches down. She vids a report to Mr. Jowls at Brigade MI, warning of what’s coming east, clinically describing the deliberate pace and progress and purpose of the shell curtain. ‘Maybe my warning will let a few more fighters get deeper underground, and live.’
Maybe.
Possibly.
Probably not.
Her voice is calm but her mind races to find Leyla, wondering if she’s safe, then returning to her reporting duties. Her eyes dart to camoed slit windows that circle the FOP, drawn to movement flashing by outside. Right behind the arcing curtains of falling sheet plasma come the first blitz assault infantry riding acoustic levi bikes. They zip among old and newer craters and up-and-over broken bits of war machines, darting low and sideways among ruined bot guns and in wide paths around gutted pillboxes. Never pausing. Always moving ahead with speed and lethal purpose. The Alliance has learned a thing or two from Rikugun’s failures.
A first wave of Allied crack assault troops passes over an
d around Tedi’s FOP without notice or incident. She moves to an observation slit, from where she can see individual features and faces inside the darkened HUDs of Blues and Threes flying past. One man has a unique scar that runs from the top of his left ear to his chin. It’s especially unusual given the capabilities of reconstructive medicine. A woman like none she knows in the WCB glides past next, thick curls escaping from under an ill fitting blue helmet, clearly borrowed in haste from a unit pal or maybe a dead soldier. Tedi sees her curls loosen and cascade over her eyes into her mouth, before the helmet air compressor blows them back and around. For a moment, she’s once again a little girl back home on Lentvaris, her mother lovingly brushing the lush blonde hair she no longer has. For a moment, she hesitates.
She snaps back to reality as a pair of Threes on a hover bike fly past, within centimeters of the FOP outer shell. She realizes that this is the real danger, not that defenders will be overcome in shelters by the shelling. If the women of WCB stay underground, the high speed of this assault following so closely behind the shells will overrun the black wall. The only hope is to brave out the bombardment near the surface, huddled under thick carbyne plates and heat resistant parapets, ready at the spandaus and on the long firing steps, holding until the barrage passes overhead and behind. It’s the only way to stop hurrying infantry that will hit the black wall like lightning emerging from fog. She must tell HQ, must reach Mr. Jowls on a dedicated milneb channel. She must countermand her first warning.
There are so many buzzing cyclists on solo, bi-bikes and tri-bikes blurring past that the vid counter on the FOP periscope can hardly keep up a running tally. In an excited but firm whisper Tedi calls it in to Mr. Jowls. “Alert! Leading edge of attack heading your way. ETA to First, two minutes, maximum estimate. Alert! This is not a drill. Enemy assaulters are highly mobile and moving very fast.”
In addition to bike mounted skirmishers, Alliance generals are experimenting with a hybrid bombardment to accompany the blitz riders. As the curtain wall of explosions rolls over Gross Imperium’s first line of defense, another burrowing barrage is already landing at maximum ranges in RIK deep rear areas. The double hits confuse and discombobulate reinforcements gathered for the usual, inevitable counterattack. While short range Alliance arti pounds the Yue ming then RIK First Trench, maximum range distance guns “wash” plasma shells back-and-forth over Second and Third Trenches, 250 and 750 klics beyond the edge of Dark Territory.
It’s devastating, this way of shooting all at once at both ends of the division’s defense-in-depth. It catches unwary RIK gunners by surprise and out in the open, wreaking havoc with counterbattery fire. Battery Todt is hit especially hard. Half its crews are milling in the open when the “Incoming!” warning arrives, followed thirty seconds later by the first rocketing down, AI evasive, self-targeting shells. The barrage rolls on and over Rikugun territory, imprinting the landscape with ten thousand smoking black disks per minute. Sheer, glass circles form under sky bursts that burn off all the tuft grass and fuse sand beneath. Shallow glass craters left behind in neat rows look like a giant’s table setting of saucers, laid out horizon to horizon at a wedding banquet for huge guests who will never arrive.
Each warhead seeks its own preset subsurface target, or it homes on heat or movement on the surface. Battery Todt loses 30 long range tubes inside a minute, and takes heavy casualties among exposed crews. Broken gun tubes and shattered crew lie all about its arti squares and gun parks, just behind Third Trench. Worse, its weakened return and counterbattery fire leaves unchallenged the narrow lane that’s cut through First Trench minefields and bunkers by short range howitzers and heavy mortars. Down that unopposed highway Tedi sees three thousand swift, blue and auburn clad levi-bike blitzers flow, first wave of an incoming tide.
Early warnings arriving from Tedi and two other FOPs don’t help, so fast is the first wave of mobile assaulters. The narrow front, curtain barrage, and 3,500 blitzing bikers rolls right over the first layer of defense into the immediate rear of WCB First Trench. Already the front edge of bike blitzers is past First, racing for Second, before most women get to the surface from deep barrage bunkers. When they come up they’re attacked by a second biker wave. Tedi reports that even the second wave bikers are only skirmishers. They’re light infantry at best. They can reach Second but can’t hold the position against counterattack. They’re too few, too lightly armed, and they lack armor support. Still, they can do a whole helluva lot of damage to key infrastructure back there, between the walls. And they can harass and mess up the normal counterattack.
Tedi sees the main attack rise out of shallow jump off bunkers and temporary assault trenches. A full corps or more, advancing past her FOP all at once. Two big columns of heavily armed and armored infantry each follow a discrete, thinned out curtain wall of plasma that burrows and burns in front of their attacks. It keeps well to the rear of racing bikers who are already far beyond frontline defenses. “Alert! Double fire walls!” Tedi calls in. “Second barrage on the way to...”
She’s cutoff by bellowing shells falling around and on top of her FOP. They’re part of the secondary curtain fall, draping over her coordinates without knowing she’s there. Though it sure seems like someone is directly targeting her, trying to dig her out, to toss her up in the air and kill her. Tedi falls to the floor with both hands over her uncovered head as a one minute long pounding fury begins. She rolls against something soft that’s moving along the sidewall. It’s the youngest girl in the FOP, a pretty innocent with wide, brown eyes and perfect skin. She’s curled in mortal fear on the floor, against the wall. Four meters away, Tedi sees the other girls of her four fighter team cower in a tiny forward spotter room. They should be safe in there. Safer than Tedi and the brown eyed ball of curled fear.
“There are few die well who die in a battle,” an ancient poet wrote. He knew war well and true. But not this time. This time, he’s wrong. For now WCB women meet the easiest deaths the brigade will suffer in today’s fighting, as Tedi’s second warning arrives too late to help women rising out of First Trench. It fails to stop them from racing into the open, coming out of barrage bunkers into fighting slits, straining to reach assigned gunpits and firing steps. They think the shelling’s over, that the main force of enemy infantry must arrive next and soon. Instead, hundreds of WCB women and girls emerge just in time to meet a second sheeting of incendiary flash from an expertly timed barrage. The solar plasma fall is merciful in the speed of death it delivers, leaving shadow imprints of incinerated lives scored on black, carbyne parapets and walls and floors. Black on black, at the edge of the black.
Behind the second sheet barrage, main formations of ACU and Three infantry come at the now undefended wall standing up. Tedi crawls to the FOP periscope to watch long rows of Blues and Threes combat hopping past, and bot guns and brand new looking, shiny black armtraks. More bot guns and Buffalos and Bisons than she ever saw before. She’s terrified by the sheer mass and power of the attack. ‘Where did they get all these machines? We don’t have near so many. We haven’t seen anything this big in three years. What’s happening? Could we really lose?’
On either side of the breach, opposing spandaus and rapidos strike up an eager argument. They chatter and bicker back-and-forth over First black walls on either side of the Yue ming. They go at it like old, spiteful neighbors arguing forever and again over the true lay of the property line. Heavy, fixed position guns open next. Pillboxes and dug in bots are close enough in this section for neighboring heavy masers to yell at one another directly, to bellow and threaten and hurl things back-and-forth, knowing that no police will ever come to break them up.
Tedi looks longingly at the spandau trigger and targeting panel that juts back into the FOP, knowing that a black snout pokes flush against the exterior of the firing slit. She could cut down hundreds of passing enemy. At least until huff duff, high frequency direction finders triangulated and fixed her position and a targeted steel and plasma storm obliterated the FOP an
d her, and her terrified novice girls. But she has orders to sit tight, not to open fire for any reason. With a silent, hand signal “No!” she grabs and holds back the scared brown eyed girl creeping toward the shooting screen. They’ll live or die by concealment alone.
***
Over twenty klics back, behind First Trench, Leyla Celik stands atop a moss covered parapet that protects an eight-barrel, spandau gunpit. She’s calmly potting individual Blue bikers with her maser pistol. WCB fighters all around her punch raw holes in an attacking swirl of acoustic bikers, who gamely ignore the women’s well aimed fire, concentrating on speeding up their hover bikes and rushing by. They have orders to bypass strongpoints like this, to race ever deeper into Rikugun rear areas, there to sow confusion and make whatever mayhem they can before the heavy assault infantry and armor catch them up. If they catch up.