by Kali Altsoba
They accept losses to get past.
In half a minute they’re all gone.
Far behind Leyla and out of range.
“Let ‘em go,” she orders, as if her girls have a choice. The main attack is on the way, looking now like a solid wall of red symbology getting larger on her HUD. No target is distinguishable from the next, there are so many.
The moving wall is less than five klics away and driving fast into the east. Red infantry clusters and armtrak icons flash on her viewer as they closer. Her scanner sees spaces where before it painted a solid mass. Twenty seconds more and two WCB Mammoths lined up on either side of her strongpoint gunpit drop invisibility field camo. They engage active huff duff and fire-and-direction finders, then open up with their main guns as well as quadruple side cannons, at pointblank range at five onrushing Buffalos.
Boom! Boom!
Poom, poom, poom, poom.
Poom, poom, poom, poom.
Leyla engages a half dozen infantry hovers, calmly guiding four double spandaus of an eight gun battery firing at her direction from a shielded pit. All eight barrels from her ocht gun, her ‘four double,’ are spitting green energy at the Blue ATCs. Men and women fall out of burning Alliance vehicles, some on fire.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Gross Imperium’s silver knight insignia glows brightly as the two Mammoth turrets shudder with outgoing concussive salvos. They’re doing severe damage to the smaller, surprised Buffalos. A return hit glances off the rightward Mammoth, scoring the famous “For God and Death!” WCB motto that’s acid etched into its plate armor. Leyla barely makes out what’s left behind. “For ... Death!” Then the Mammoth blows apart. “To hell with that! For Tedi and for life!” She bellows it out loud, though no one hears her over the terrific din of battle. They’re dead. So many of her girls are dead, unmoving. Or they’re crawling away from the gunpit, howling unheard with gaping wounds that can never be healed.
The other Mammoth refuses to maneuver as Buffalos and hovers whirl around the flailing strongpoint. It stands stiffly, all camo systems down or knocked out, adding multibarreled weight of fire to the gunpit, which is rapidly weakening as well. Leyla relies on her HUD to say to the gun crew green friendly or red enemy, to say who and where to shoot the overheating barrels that remain intact. More fighters in blue and a few Threes in auburn who leap out of the assault hovers go down in smoking ruin before her. WCB women, too, all around her. The gunpit crew are briefly lost to her sight inside a drifting bluish-white haze that flows over the subrampart. A choking, acrid smoke veil engulfs her as well. It’s coming from burning men and women trapped in one of the assault hovers, and dying armtraks: the second Mammoth is out-of-action, a roaring inferno from which screams rise.
A steel splinter slices into her combat glove, sticking into the back of her hand. She jerks off the torn glove and pulls the jagged metal out, oddly fascinated by how her own blood spurts from the small, jagged wound left behind. She wonders if the shard is poisoned. Shrapnel often is. ‘Not too many sabot rounds use metal anymore, unless you want to bond poison to it.’
The passive AI in her helmet and HUD is way ahead of her brain, and goes active. It’s already telling her combat suit to micro inject antitoxin into her arms and legs. It may be too late, depending on the poison used. Leyla pulls the ripped glove back over her bleeding hand and returns to her hot spandau work. She rams an aerographite charger into the pistol magazine and rapid shoots, without ever aiming at specific targets. Her command link is down, hit by a smaller but slicing bit of shrapnel. She’s using her streaking green pistol blasts to visually direct fire by the four girl spandau crew. That’s all that’s left: four, out of eighteen.
They’re serving the last pair of surviving gun tubes, standing inside a smoking hole that minutes before was an armor protected, eight-gun firing pit. The women can’t hear their major’s shouted orders or receive commands via delinked HUDs, but they see moving Blue targets her pistol lights up, even with near misses. They bring rapid fire and pain and death down upon their enemies.
Leyla runs over to serve as reloader when the crew loses two more girls, one to an infantry maser shot, the other to mortal panic. That nearly forces Leyla to shoot the frightened girl on the spot. She has her pistol out to do it when the scared kid decides not to run after all. She slides down to lie curled in a trembling, crying ball of self pity and catatonic terror, right under the ocht gun loading bay.
“Perfectly fucking useless,” Leyla shouts out loud at the brand new girl. “Get the hell out of my way!” She gives the tight ball of fear a hard kick to her ribs. She can’t be heard over the noise of war, but a boot in the ribs speaks loudly in a universal tongue. The girl moves, rolling and crawling, crying and bawling.
Leyla looks down at her numbed hand as she rams a crystal recharger into the spandau’s magazine, more by sight than feel. Her glove is soaked with reddish-brown stain. She realizes with a start of sudden pain that she has just taken another wound in the small of her back. She can’t get at the new hole unless she strips off to find the puncture, and she can’t do that right now. She takes over the targeting panel as the last two girls crumple in pieces beside her. From a gunpit crew of 18, the only ones alive are Leyla and the crying kid, curled in a ball below the firing panel. She shoots the two remaining spandau tubes into scampering Blue troops.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
A third pain strikes her, catching her breath in her throat. This one is hard and brutal. She reaches down low and behind and feels a large piece of jagged shrapnel jutting from just above her hip. It hurts, despite the fast combat meds her utes auto spray inject. Her medic program warns her not to remove the shard, or a great wound will open and she’ll bleed out in under a mike. She leaves it sticking there as she returns to firing the paired guns into enemy infantry scrambling for cover.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Pom, pom, pom, pom.
Leyla knows she’s losing too much blood from too many wounds. She feels hot wetness running down her leg, inside her utes. More is trickling down the small of her back onto the curve of her buttocks. She’s lightheaded. ‘I need help, or I’ll bleed out.’ She calls for a medic, forgetting in growing confusion that the HUD link is cut. That’s when a shock wave from a close in mortar shell hits her so hard in the back it knocks her down. She lies stunned at the bottom of the spandau pit, beside the fetal girl who’s still bawling and useless as a toddler. She finally stops crying for her mother when a hot maser rips off her head. It rolls away at speed, banging into the gunpit rail like a ten pin bowling ball.
Leyla’s ears clang and ring.
Her wounded hand bleeds and throbs.
Her scalp tingles and feels oddly wet.
A strongpoint is broken, an ocht gun silenced.
The small of her back and hip hurt like someone is jamming a red hot poker into her. She’s foggy, confused, unsure what to do. She tries to stand, but can’t feel or move her legs. She no longer hears the spandau barking at the enemy. She can’t remember that the whole WCB crew is dead, including her. Her last thought is: ‘I do hope sweet Tedi lives.’
***
Eight hours later the fast moving attack isn’t so much beaten back by Gross Imperium as recalled by New Beijing. Blues and Beards make an orderly, phased withdrawal, protected by artillery strikes into Rikugun’s deep rear. It was a test run after all, never intended to be decisive. Heavy losses are counted on both sides, but as tactical experiments go, General Lian Sòng and MoD on Caspia are well pleased with this one. The blitzers secured Rikugun First and made it past Second before recall codes were sent. Allied mobile artillery, fast levi-bikers, and most important of all, the main ground assault armtraks and heavy infantry punched a deep hole right through the best division Rikugun has on Lemuria. Next time, Alliance might push an entire corps into a hole that
big. Make more holes just like it all at once and New Beijing could push a whole army through, even an army group. Damnation! It could push its main force troops through the Rikugun side of the black like dough through a pasta machine.
Then there’ll be wide open flanks again!
Flanks mean return to a war of movement!
Flanks mean a return to hope from war!
Grim faced Rikugun scouts are sent to police the battlefield. To locate and aid friendlies and kill enemy severely wounded. To count Gross Imperium’s dead and report “lessons learned” to MI analysis at RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen, who will then assert to RIK Main HQ on Kestino that they came to those conclusions on their own. It’s astonishing what they find, what precision shelling and follow on blitzers and the main attack did to the black walls and men and women standing on top, beneath and behind them.
In one pillbox, all that’s left of a smashed spandau nest, tally men find a lolling head of a 21-year old Daegu girl in a corner, but not the petite body it belonged to. Two other girls are bodily intact, if you ignore that their faces and skin are all missing. They were hugging each other in mortal fear when a plasma ball howled and seared into their dugout. It killed them instantly, leaving them clasped in each other’s arms. “Crisped to charcoal blisters in a child’s comfort position.” That’s how the official report writes it up, with unusual frankness for a routine AAR.
Another battle assessment team finds a mound of dead atop a small hill, inside an unburned yet oddly naked birch grove. The last summer winds rustle thin birch branches that were bioengineered centuries ago to make broad red foliage. Tens of thousands of flat, serrated edge, triangular birch leaves are prematurely down, gentling and covering the dead. They were rustled early from the stem by animal madness and mayhem acted out below, by mad minutes of murder. Barren trees that shed them stand a keening watch on the hill, crooked as widowed crones. The dead are covered in the handsome, early leaf fall brought down by their mortal struggles. It’s what the tally men find underneath the green foliage that impresses them with its sheer, unbridled violence. To judge by death positions and wounds, a terrible fight took place hand-to-hand. Deeply personal, to the death.
Tally men sort through jumble, pull bodies apart to do the count, discover that everyone in both platoons is still there. Two platoons met beneath the birch trees and wiped each other out, but only after both sides exhausted crystal chargers and all powered weapons. Every single man in each platoon is dead. But how? Pairs of corpses embrace, locked in brutal, shared last moments. One man with a caved in skull clutches an axe he used to smash in another man’s head, before someone else hit him with a heavy spade from behind. Stiff fingers of one dead man gouge out the eyes of a second corpse, through his cheeks. A third man chopped off the gouger’s arms, leaving them hanging out an impaled face. Other hands on other paired dead are tight with rigor, clutching black carbon handles of jagged knives, slick blades lost in dark ruby patches. Knives jut from torn utes of dead men, and three women. Others lie prone, pale and pig stuck. Only the uniforms are different.
Two hundred meters farther on the tally men come across an intact, interrupted breakfast, abandoned in a moment by the Rikugun platoon that expired in the shady birch grove that’s now naked before Autumn thinks to arrive. The counters sit down and gobble all the unclaimed food, while a stomach sick lieutenant files an AAR with Division HQ. He carefully composes and provides all the details of the investigation of the hilltop grove, and signs off. MI at Xiamen enters his AAR in the summary report to General Oetkert and to Main HQ in Kestino in just ten words: “Grid point 7365. Rear area skirmish: 100% casualties. Enemy repulsed.”
Rows of immodest and unswadled dead are laid out on the ground behind First Trench. They’re left uncovered by any shroud over brutally violated bodies. Some dead lie among the wounded, starting out alive an hour ago but now needing to be moved to a different, untended row. Living wounded writhe like naked worms, exposed in warm sod violently overturned by giant moles. The main attack came right through the sector of black held by the Women’s Combat Brigade, so nearly all wounded and dead fighters collected at the point position are women. They’re missing heads, arms and legs, have one breast or none, are spilling gray from open stomachs, howl silently without lower jaws or out of partial faces. Some survivors clasp hands to gaping wounds in their thighs or hold down wine red dressings atop gashed open bellies, filled by triage medics with fast expanding wound foam.
More are total suspends, immune to conscious hope or fear. Triage medics run up-and-down the line as more and more wounded are carried to its ends, injecting hardening, sterilizing foam into any open wounds, jabbing with fast suspensor any with major trauma or massive blood loss. Silent women stand around, too shocked and shaken to speak or cry. Many are lightly wounded themselves, but must wait for treatment. Several stare down at Major Celik’s unmoving body, not knowing what to do. They were told not to touch her or try to pull out the jagged shard that still impales her hip. No one except the medics moves at all until a stocky, butch captain normally with Two Battalion assumes command of Leyla’s leaderless One Battalion. She divides stunned women survivors into stretcher and burial teams. She orders all the rest to begin local clean up, or back onto perimeter protection.
“Today’s fighting might be over. But there’ll be more fighting tomorrow. So move your very fat or very pretty asses, ladies.”
‘Move where? Where do I go after this?’
“Get the fuck away from here.”
‘Yes fine, I’ll move away. But where do I go?’
“What about the major?”
“Silence! Back to the black wall. On the double!”
One of the stretcher teams the new One Battalion commander directs to where Major Leyla Celik lies, unmoving. They pick up her body and head toward the rear, where evac transports for both dead and wounded are parked in long rows, like abandoned school buses in summertime. Each transport can carry 200 bodies.
***
Tedi watches Alliance assaulters fall back in good order, noting the count on a vid linked to low power signals from her well disguised periscope. Tedi is out of com link with Brigade MI. She can’t raise Mr. Jowls on any frequency. She doesn’t know that the enemy’s fighters weren’t repulsed. They’re pulling back on orders. But she’s not stupid. There’s a reason she’s the Forward Observer. ‘They don’t look at all defeated or broken. Were they beaten off, or are they withdrawing freely, having proved some kind of tactical point?’ She sees that the Blues and their Beard allies from the Iron Kingdoms have the bearing of a defiant army.
Much like the one she met the first time she went into combat, hip-hopping over the black, eager and proud to test her training and skills, to test herself. But the First Shaka Offensive only advanced into disaster. For that was the day vain General Oetkert sent Gross Imperium and its experimental WCB to attack a black wall too far, trying to reach the Panthalassa coast in one violent stab. The day Tedi made her first kill then several more, and saw the first WCB girls from her cohort die. The day she was nearly killed by a swooping, strafing Yellowjacket, escaping by skidding down a glassed slope into an old crater. The day she stood up again, knew that she could do this, and charged the enemy yelling “Huzzah!”
That same day, ACU Goldies and AI Wasps led a powerful counterattack, tossing Gross Imperium armtraks aside like leaves in air. That day she led survivors of her squad in a pell-mell retreat to Rikugun First Trench, pursued by howling enemies and hurtling missiles that chased, and nearly caught, their lunky transport. That day, a whole brigade of girls and women lost their combat virginity, changing the Imperium by bleeding for it the same as men. That day, Tedi raged over dried out, unburied dead from a dozen old battles and fresh dead from her first. That day, she almost lost Leyla, before she even had her. Before she knew what loss was. Strutting peacock generals and arrogant staff officers were cocksure, before that day, that no squids could slow down the finest fighting division in Rikugun, in
all Pyotr Shaka III’s grand armies. Let alone stop it cold and hard and make it run-to-cover. On that crimson day, Tedi and Gross Imperium first tasted the bitter cud of defeat. Tedi never forgets that day. It was the day her childhood ended.
This is a new day, and she has a job to do. She reports on the retreating enemy over a high secure com line, then readies to pull her team out of the FOP. Mission accomplished. She’ll lead the girls back to brigade bunkers after the last enemy asset passes. It has been a long three weeks. She’s looking forward to a hot bath, then soaking in Leyla’s arms. Kissing her full, red lips for hours. Longing and laughing with her over a languid, star strewn desert night. Tedi motions her girls to move toward the rear bolt hole, to make ready to leave as soon as the light fails and the returning Blues all pass by. They start to come her way.
She raises her hand in the universal “Stop!” signal, halting them as a wayward Buffalo rumbles nearby. The badly damaged armtrak is moving slowly, right over the FOP. It’s almost past, treads grinding on the roof but not detecting open space underneath, so good is the Rikugun design. Then it explodes on a contact mine. Its armored exterior is coated in antimagnetic and infrared and electronic blocking paints, but sophisticated defenses don’t protect against a basic physical contact trigger that detonates a cone shaped charge. The mine tears off its underarmor and blows out its electronic underguts. ‘Damn! I should’ve disarmed it.’ Tedi berates herself. ‘It’s my fault. I’m in charge.’ It’s too late for blame. Deserved or not.