by Kali Altsoba
“You mean we call up the Fifth Tranche, if a little early?”
“Not just that. We need this year’s Tranche to hold serve, sire. In addition to the Fifth Tranche, we need 100 million more men to replace this year’s losses, if we are to stay on plan. We must prepare for winning offensives in Year Six. We need more than this one Tranche of coming-of-age youths. Many more.”
“What? 100 million more? Double the usual number? Where am I to get so many disposable men, just so my generals can waste them making little bulges?”
“Not only men, sire. We confirm that the success of the WCBs means we can now expand to make all women conscript divisions. If only as garrison backstops, to free more men for fighting units. It’s still better to fight with men, of course.”
“You speak like a general!” Pyotr spits the word.
“Sire?”
“You have no idea of the terrible politics of this thing you say so glibly, to conscript women. Sending women volunteers to war is one thing, conscripting women into combat is another. My people would revolt against you, then against me!”
“Then you must call up a double tranche of male recruits. We can’t wait until next year. We need the Year Six tranche now, sire, on top of Year Five.”
“The sixteen year-olds?”
“Yes sire. Call up both the Fifth and Sixth Year Tranches and we will hold the line across Orion, while training and planning for victory next year. Or conscript women as well as men, establish fresh Female Tranches to match the males. I say, do both. The whole Imperium will support you in this, sire.” The fool general looks confident, even cocky. Takeshi’s upper lip curls into a barely discernible smile. He has a man already in place in this general’s HQ, ready to step into his command shoes. He put him there two years ago, in a more junior position. Gave him orders to watch and wait, knowing that Pyotr’s incompetence would one day bring the chance for a successful purge of the officer corps. He has men in place in every major HQ in Rikugun, watching and waiting for his orders.
Pyotr is no Emperor of Death. Not compared to dread, brutish Jahandar. Still, he’s a swift killer when he loses his patience and temper. As he does now at last, murderously. He orders three of his top generals arrested on the spot, and has them executed within the hour. They’re beaten to death with their own swagger sticks and command batons, then beheaded and spiked. Two civilian advisers he orders killed with the heavy medallions of their offices. The gold and platinum is melted down and poured into their eyes and mouths. He’s more merciful to a failed field marshal who prostrates and begs for his life. “Hang the swaggering incompetent!”
Pyotr kills in a moment, for the moment, sating magisterial pique in a swirl of bitter almond scent and poisoned purpose. Takeshi revels in it. Powerful men are being cleared from his path. Pyotr has done it before, with Takeshi egging him on. Maneuvering him toward murders that serve his secret ends, not Pyotr’s. Yet, these executions are not just murders slaved to a manipulated royal temper. They slyly serve Imperium policy, too. Pyotr knows it’s necessary to lop off some heads to “encourage all the others.” It confirms official displeasure to his people while reminding Rikugun of his lethal authority over them. And he does it in dimming hope that blame for the failure in the war on Amasia will fall with the rolling heads into waiting wicker baskets, and not come to rest on his. Dead men are convenient scapegoats for tyrants, while the scapegoats of tyrants always end up dead.
He doesn’t like that his royal name is directly attached to three failures by his uncle and RIK. He’s no fool, but he did a foolish thing. He should not have given in to vanity and allowed his fool uncle to use and sully his name, before all the Imperium, by titling the Amasian offensives for him. It was an even greater error to claim, as Pyotr did with memex trumpets blaring at the end of Year Three, that he would take personal command of all military operations in the war. He doesn’t remember, but Takeshi egged him into doing that as well. Now his fortunes and the uncertain fortunes of a failing war are conjoined, inseparable in all their vital parts. No political surgery can separate him from a lost war, should he now lose it. He must win, win all or he will lose all. So the heads of generals roll.
Yet he can change nothing strategic with a guillotine blade. His armies can’t sustain their current levels of loss. Not without straining recruitment and training systems on all Imperium homeworlds. Not with smaller but deadly serious fights underway across 14 other contested systems. Then there’s the enormous burden of the convoys, and another that comes with garrisoning and holding nearly 200 captured but hostile Krevan, Three, Union, and Helvetic worlds with not enough rear zone troops. Occupation is harder than conquest. ‘Must I conscript women?’
Protracted stalemate and strategic overcommitment compels Pyotr and Main HQ in Novaya Uda to rethink their strategy. Rikugun HQ at Xiamen on Lemuria rethinks operations as well, but only because Pyotr is so displeased with his uncle, a general and prince of the blood whose great victories are indistinguishable from grave defeats. Also, the executions got the attention of the officer corps. Yet, no one questions the mechanized mysticism of imperial ideology. No one challenges core goals and all the bad ideas that sustain fighting on Amasia and the wider war. And so, the terrible, hard fighting will go on and on. Because powerful men deem that it must go on, without ever asking “why?” Everything must go on as before.
No setback can be admitted.
No war aim can be changed.
No new defeat is acceptable.
Yet stalemate cannot be endured.
Attrition cannot be sustained.
Instead, memexes on the homeworlds hail a great victory on Amasia, planned and commanded in person by Tennō Pyotr himself. “The Third Shaka Offensive was a greater victory than the First or Second. Inspired by our Tennō’s unmatched military genius, Rikugun made three brilliantly coordinated attacks wherein our glorious troops inflicted 45.7 million casualties on the enemy Alliance. Hail Pyotr and bold Rikugun! The glorious Black Eagle will soon fly over all Amasia!”
Families of serving soldiers and sailors believe it, though sons and daughters on the ground on Lemuria or the moons above it do not. They hope the good news means the war will be won and over soon. Others have more doubt than a year or two or three ago, doubts about the war and whether any news is true at all. At least the enemy casualty figure is only a small lie. Exaggerated, but not totally off-the-mark. Left unreported is that Rikugun suffered half again as many dead, wounded and missing. Offense is harder than defense. Rising up to fight in the open costlier than hunkering behind the black walls. Crossing the black in assault waves always harder than shooting back from behind strong ramparts, into the Yue ming. The dilemma for Rikugun comes down to this: attack and lose men and machines in unsustainable numbers, sit still and lose the war to the Alliance buildup over time.
The generals and admirals disagree more often and more loudly these days, as they quarrel and compete over resources and the best recruits. Kaigun is not told the true extent of Rikugun’s material and manpower losses. Nor does Rikugun know when it frames its big Amasian lie, that several months back Kaigun stopped giving Main HQ accurate stats on its convoy losses. They’re almost as appalling as what’s going on between the black walls down on Lemuria.
***
For a year after General Johann Oetkert and Rikugun fail to break through in Third Shaka, the ground war slows to a brutal crawl. Each side is exhausted. Each must rebuild and reinforce. They still fight, but cautiously. Slow grinding replaces faster battles. Hosts of men and women disappear into the Yue ming all the same.
Fighters die.
The armies live on.
The war continues.
Soldiers die in a meaningless light shelling that takes place every day up-and-down the black, as the artillery says ‘good morning’ and ‘good night,’ or just ‘good riddance’ and ‘fuck you too.’
They kill each other in platoon level skirmishes when patrols stumble into each other out in the Yue ming,
or when suddenly exposed by a parachute flare and massacred by crashing mortars. Or they don’t come back from probes-in-strength sent to scout out enemy defenses. Otherwise, patrols and probes seldom go out at more than company level. There are no brigade scale battles for seven months. All division, corps, and army attacks are on hold by silent HQ agreement. Troops hunker, rebuild, reinforce, wait for the climactic battle that everyone knows is still ahead. The last battle. The one to decide the fate of Amasia and perhaps of Orion.
Both sides conceal and conserve skycraft and the heavy artillery. RIK generals fret that inaction undermines morale and reduces seishin or “fighting spirit.” On the other side, planners in the War Cabinet on Kars and at MoD on Caspia, and generals in New Beijing, are grateful for the long respite. Everyone is urging key industries on distant homeworlds to kick up war production, waiting for the tools of greater death and destruction to arrive on Lemuria. Smarter officers turn away from tactics to the less glamourous but more essential task of logistics. Rikugun generals less so, of course. They still lust for battle laurels, dream wet dreams of decisive breakthroughs and pursuit to the coast, of wining all with a genius blow.
Offworld, both sides focus on attacking the enemy’s critical outer bohr zones, and defending their own. Fast convoys dash down inner systems even as stealth raiders try to cut jugular lines of resupply. Almost every night, someone’s burning landing craft and bodies of thousands of young soldiers tumble through the aurora above Amasia, to crash burn on the ice or splash down and sink into the Okeanos. Navies are expanding across Orion: fighting to protect or interdict sinuous routes that lace back to production planets in the deep, strategic rear of vast star empires. Convoys of cargo haulers and troopships move to embattled worlds from far off recruitment basins in the far eastern systems of the Imperium and far west systems of the Calmar Union, escorted by hundreds of old warships and swarms of newer, faster escorts. The war for the LPs and the bohr roads they make is expanding.
Fleets leapfrog from bohr to bohr along protected routes, scooting past hidden phantoms and wide fields of seeker mines. Then they make dangerous last jumps into violently partitioned and contested systems, plowing at mere sublight speeds down to some rocky moon above a wartorn planet, harried and hounded. On the way, the convoys are hit by in-system AI interceptors and missile boats. They face swarms of interceptors that hide among asteroid belts or in an oort cloud, base off smaller moons or launch from LP orbital platforms, or rise from fortified moonlets or fly off ice carriers. All out naval war is underway, going full throttle even as fighting subsides for a time on the surface of Amasia, in the calm before the final storm. White Sails is out there, in the thick of it: Admiral Magda Aklyan and now Captain Émile Fontaine, Jan and Zofia, Tom Hipper and ‘Pie Girl,’ and all the other ‘Wreckers’ and ‘Rusty Buckles’ from KRA, joined now by the Dismals of ACU 22nd Marine and cocky Rosenkavaliers, with fresh roses pinned on at all times.
Civilian naïfs on both sides expect scientists to come up with some decisive, tiebreaking wonder weapon to win and end the war. They don’t. Or at least, not yet. Everyone at last understands the warning that Major General Gaspard Leclerc gave the Alliance War Cabinet four years ago, when the fight was getting started. “This business could go on for a very long time,” he said. Most folk, from the most powerful to the simple and ordinary, didn’t believe him back then. Everyone believes him now, with hundreds of millions of troops locked in combat across half Orion, sitting in dank gunpits or behind black walls on burning worlds.
Forced labor in new military factories comes to hundreds of worlds. Alliance homeworlds, too, where PM Briand breaks all the old rules when he orders slaving of RIK and DRA prisoners. Slave labor is legal in the Imperium and universal in Daura, so it comes naturally to governors on occupied worlds. Evermore ferocious propaganda raises hated for the enemy to fusion core white. Governments order all ablebodied into military mining or aggie production or weapons factories or transport and medical services. The sphere of private lives and choice shrinks until all that’s left is a choice of how you’ll suffer. Not even when or where to die.
Some of the smartest people on all sides join expanding internal security and secret police forces that monitor public morale and report and repress dissent. Yes, the Calmar Union does it, too. It’s done to keep the flow of young flesh into armies and navies going, and armies and navies ready and constantly fighting. Imperium police are rougher than before, the traditional Kempeitai and Takeshi Watanabe’s new “Specials” adopting swifter and crueler punishment of all dissent. Everyone has to watch what they say these days, not just what they do. Speech is criminal now. Daurans accomplish the same ends more simply, with abject terror. But then, that’s what the Hermit Empire has always done to its own people.
This is mortal combat.
This is the Fourth Orion War.
No more fooling around. No limits.
Fight with no-holds-barred, or perish.
***
Ground supply of the armies demands more acoustic levitation hovers hurry off production lines. But there are never enough. So maglev cargo trains, tracked ground huggers, troikas and other very old fashioned vehicles are also used. Even ancient wheelies, running camoed on hardened surface roads. They’re cheap, fast to build and repair. The armies will use anything to keep the vital flow of matériel moving inland from ships unloading at coastal ports, thence thousands of klics to the all-consuming black; out to fighting zones where, along with hungry troops, wait the always feasting, always famished, daemons of the Yue ming.
In the heady days of Rikugun advances across Lemuria in the first summer of war, rough cut roads supported fast fleets of armtraks and heavy, tracked ATCs filled with enthusiastic grenadiers and assault troops. The roads were laid out by cocky combat engineers, before Lian Sòng’s defenders stopped running and held fast in place, then counterattacked and killed a lot of exposed RIK infantry and too many support engineers. Those surprising rebuffs led Pyotr to issue his first, infamous Halt Order. “Not one of my soldiers shall take a single step backward.”
It was Imperial Order No.1 and it caused millions of Rikugun to dig deep into the crust of Lemuria. They cut into hot southern deserts and the black soil pampas, skirting over herbs and heather to reach the ice hard polar regions. From then until now, four weary years later, each side fought standing still. Straddling trenches to wrestle its enemy like tottering sumo on wobbly legs, each too weak to win but refusing to yield or move or go down or leave the sandy circle of war. The temporary roads soon became vital to supply of hundreds of divisions that occupy the long black. Inadequate in the hard desert and worse in tropical zones, they’re barely roads at all in the frigid tundra north and deepest south. Yet arctic sky transport is strictly limited: costs in skycraft lost to archie is prohibitive, and low priority sectors like the far north and south give way to more intensive zones.
Logistics are the sinews of war. No grand battle plan ordered by Main HQ on Kestino or Onworld HQ at Xiamen, no long term defense or short term campaign can succeed without Supply Services paving the way for combat units, there-and-back again. Without supply, Rikugun’s muscles will wither, vital organs will fail to function, and it will die an emaciated death. It’s also true across the black. Hell, logistics is the God of War, displacing hoary Battle from a stalemated, hollowed out throne. The war on Amasia has become a contest of little men doing the littlest things. It’s a war of engines and spades now, of soup and heaters and troikas.
Rollbahn
“Attention nitōhei!” The fat taii’s demand order rings out over a frosted forest, across a major supply depot where 40,000 sledges and snow trucks are in various stages of coming-and-going. Twenty young privates just nine days planetside snap to attention. An older, smirking, unnaturally pale white veteran and a short, black gunsō from Kestino stand off to one side. They straighten more slowly. Just before the rough tongued captain barks “Attention privates!” the clustered boys were excitedly boasting a
bout a raider attack on their troopship convoy on the way down to Amasia from the outer system L2. They were also talking, more idly and slyly, about girls. But mostly they were milling about with little to do, more bored than they ever thought it possible to be in a war zone.
It’s their first war.
They had no idea how boring war is.
Mindlessly, stupefyingly, stultifyingly boring.
Except for the convoy attack they talk about all the time. Not one has ever been shot at on the ground. Or even heard shots. They’re combat cherries, every one. Never been close to First Trench. But that’s all going to change. They’re about to get orders to head to the Yue ming.
‘The boys’ is how male soldiers in gender segregated Rikugun units refer to each other. These boys have used the phrase since their shuttle landed hard and fast on the Thalassa coast. That’s 8,000 klics from the big inland depot where they stand rigid in front of a fat, self-important, career RIK captain. They’re the kind of recruit that Rikugun veterans call frosch, all are ‘frogs’ aged 17 to 18. Recent arrivals from Rudimina Training Base on Daegu, they’re barely trained.