by Kali Altsoba
“This is the place the war started.”
“What? Where?”
“Bad Camberg Defense Outpost.” Yuki says it reverently, almost like it’s the birthplace of a saint. And it’s kinda true: Bad Camberg has become a place of pilgrimage for Purity devotees and the Most Faithful of the Lost Children Society. Yuki’s not a member. That reverent stuff is for civvies, now that there’s a war on.
“What’s that?”
“That is where the filthy Krevans attacked us!”
“Where, down on that big planet?”
“No dummy, on the moonlet!”
“Don’t call me dumb!”
“Sorry. I just thought everybody knew…”
“What moonlet, dummy?”
“Touché, Jack.”
“Well?”
“It’s called Bad Camberg.”
“Why does a moonlet matter?”
“What do you mean? It was attacked!”
“My teacher said ‘moonlet’ is what we call big rocks.”
“I guess that’s true, but this one…”
“Is a big rock, dummy!”
“OK, I already said ‘sorry.’ Jeez!”
“Why do you care about a big rock?”
“It’s where our heroic garrison fought the first battle.”
“Over a big rock? Why?”
“To stop the Krevan invasion.”
“Of a big rock?”
“Well yes, but… can you stop with the ‘big rock’ already?”
“The war started over a little rock?”
“No! Jeepers to Jehoshaphat! It’s a moonlet!”
“It’s a big rock or a little rock. Teacher said.”
“Well sure, but that’s not the … we were attacked!”
“I never really got that. Why did Krevans attack our rock?”
“I don’t know … It doesn’t matter. They did!”
“That one?” Jack Lee points hopefully to a small moon.
“No, that’s a moon. The little … errr, the other one.”
“Where? I don’t see nothing.”
“The one with all the green lights.”
“That? Teacher was right. It’s just a big rock!”
“I want to see! Move over!”
It’s a third kid, pushing from behind. His name is Andreas Krobot. Behind him are Yuki’s other friends, Usman, Tura, and Kurt. They all met in Base Camp.
“Look, you can see Bad Camberg.”
“Where? Is it that moon?”
“No, over there. See the bright green lights?”
“Where? I can’t see any lights.”
“On the big rock.”
“Oh, there. Yeah. Cool. Umm … what are they?”
“That’s the war monument Pyotr built.”
“It’s real pretty. Rikugun green.”
“I saw the vid. There’s a big statue of him there now.”
“I saw it too. He’s standing in the middle of acres of green lights.”
“What a spectacle! How grand! How green!”
“They say the light nets cover half the moonlet.”
“That means half a big rock,” Jack sniffs.
“We’ve been over this already.”
“Why did Pyotr light up a big rock?”
“Jeez Jack,” says Andreas, “because brave men died there, you idiot!”
“Don’t call me an idiot!”
“Not this again…”
“I don’t get it, either,” Usman complains.
“That’s because you’re an idiot,” Jack says before he stomps away in a huff.
Yuki patiently explains, Andreas nods vigorously in support the whole time. “It’s so every soldier and sailor who comes through Koblenz system on the way to battle on the border worlds can see the place the Liberation War started. We’re reminded of sacrifice by the brave defenders. That’s what the green lights mean.”
“Reminded that we fought over a big rock?”
“Cut it out, Kurt. It’s not funny. Show some respect.”
“Yuki’s right,” Andreas jumps in. “Brave men died here.”
“So we could liberate a rock?”
“Not you, too, Tura.”
“But Jack’s right. Just look at it. Bad Camberg is an airless rock,” Kurt insists, no longer joking.
“Why does it matter, this rock you’re so proud of?” Tura asks.
“Are you really dense or trying to be funny?”
“I guess I’m dense. You told us all about it, but I really don’t get it, now that I see it up close. Kurt and Jack are right. It’s just a big rock, only with pretty green lights wrapped all around it.”
“And a giant ultrasteel statue of Pyotr standing in the middle.”
“That means he’s upside down sometimes, ‘cause that rock is tumbling.”
“Stop it! It’s not a rock! It’s where the Liberation War started!”
Andreas leaps in on Yuki’s side. “And we’re winning! Koblenz was a frontier planet. Now it’s the capital of Imperium Province 37. That’s Koblenz, two other frontier systems, all twelve liberated Krevan systems, and three more planets that were stolen from us last time by the Blues. But we got ‘em back in Year Two.”
“Twelve of our Lost Children recovered from Krevo in Year One. Many more from the Blues in Year Two. What glory! What a triumph for Pyotr and our armed forces, Rikugun and Kaigun! Huzzah!”
Yuki is so passionate in his devotion to the war and empire that they decide to stop teasing him. Still, Tura and Kurt really do silently agree more with Jack.
‘It’s just a big rock!’
“Are they all out here, Yuki? All twelve in this sector?”
“Yes! I think we jump across three to get to Amasia.”
They watch him gaze loyally out the scuttle as the old transport joins a troop convoy in high orbit of Koblenz, off Bad Camberg. It’s settled in the lower end of the loopy Lagrange area formed by the moonlet’s oblong orbit. He gets excited and points out more things, explaining to his friends why they’re so important. He’s awed to see so many warships and troopships and auxiliaries in gravity free holding orbits. He sees even more cargo haulers and icers, ammo factories, slave ships, big naval tugs, and several sleekly cannular phantoms. He can’t count all the warships.
“And that’s a fraction of Imperator Pyotr’s mighty fleet. Of our fleet!” Yuki shouts in wild excitement. Then he leads the other frosch boys in three cheers for the Tennō, before Yuki closes the ceremonies with Imperium Over All.
“Brothers come, stand together!
Defend us from Kestino to Koblenz!
From Nagoya, Schwyz and Terra Deus,
we march in united ranks and files!
Imperium, Imperium above all others!
Over all in the Thousand Worlds!”
The night view of Koblenz now hanging overhead excites him as much as the fleet. He marvels to see tens of thousands of klics of thick, bioluminescent growth clinging to the warmth of maglev webs connecting dozens of cities. The smallest that he sees is much larger than the biggest city on land starved Oceanus. Larger even than built out islands that Yuki thought were true engineering marvels, until today. Until he sees the glory of Imperium for what it truly is. In all magnificence.
Born on a world of endless water with just a few sparse archipelagoes, Yuki is overawed by Koblenz’s daytime continents hanging in the sky above the fleet and moonlet. He never saw a world with so much land, except on the memex. It’s even more impressive seen from orbit over Bad Camberg where his troopship KG Seven Seas and the rest of the convoy dock to wait for seven more escorts to arrive. They’ll need the extra frigates to dare a run through hostile space to the Amasian outer system, thence down to one of two inner moons held by the Imperium.
As he looks out and up to see mighty Koblenz and its cobweb cities, now in the nightshade time of the planet’s rotation, he can’t believe what an old gunsō in Two Company told him earlier that day.
“Can you believe
there’s so much land up there? Look, sergeant! It looks like nearly half of Koblenz is land mass! So much land! So many of our people and cities working to win the war! What a mighty empire we are!”
“Yah, maybe kid, maybe. Bud led me tell yah, Koblenz is nudding. Yoh wait ‘till yoh git to see Lem-uwya whiles yoh is dwopping onta Am-ass-ia. Now dat’s whad yoh call land!”
Yuki can’t wait to see it. To walk on fabled Lemuria. Until then he doesn’t mind the wait in orbit high above holy Bad Camberg. Because whenever he looks down in devout awe he sees an illuminated, 500 meter Pyotr reaching up to him with upstretched arms, beseeching all youth in Rikugun and Kaigun to stay loyal to Purity and the Empire. He makes a silent, boyish vow to do precisely that.
***
A week after the frigates arrive and Yuki’s convoy leaves Koblenz system, a KRN phantom class stealth jumps into the far end of the oblong Lagrange area at Bad Camberg. Its missile fire control and navigation systems are preprogramed, so that it can jump in and jump back out before the crew has even recovered from bohr effect. And hopefully, before Kaigun auto defenses take the boat out. In the two seconds the phantom is inside the Lagrange area its Weapons AI drops, rather than fires, four special kaitens in the shooting lane leading to Bad Camberg. Then it’s gone, its crew double vapored but the ship unnoticed, dormant bombs heading for a smugly lighted outpost inside what is no longer an Imperium border system.
The four suicide birds drift in stealth mode, e-camo wraparounds set to deflect active pinging. Standard light camo does the rest, imparting a bent light whiteness to the outer skin of the suiciders. To system defenders and observers, they appear to be clumps of cometary dust known to pummel the moonlet biannually. Almost imperceptibly, the kaitens slide silently down the long gravity oblong, all power off except for a tiny current shimmering through each of the four e-camo sheets. Each small spark of energy is barely enough to warm an arctic mole’s burrow.
Four days later, certain that they’re in range and that no inner system defense guns can react to their incandescent exhaust in time to stop them, targeting AIs in the suiciders engage fusion cores. The discarded cometary tail becomes brilliant, lighted from inside even as ancient dust and ice is incinerated by the plumes. AIs drive their kaitens in four looping suicide runs to reach the moonlet from distinct angles. The penetrators burrow nearly three klics beneath the surface, big asteroid busting nukes snug and secure inside four ultrasteel hardened missile cones. They blow Bad Camberg apart. Its fairy regolith and neon green lights, and all its billion year old rocks and dust, are sprayed across the system. Brilliant burning streaks and softer sheets of light are visible even across the daytime sky on Koblenz. The larger bits of the moonlet, including several chunks of shattered, ultrasteel Pyotr, are caught by the gravity well and slam into the surface a few hours later.
Killed instantly on Bad Camberg are its entire garrison of 200 Kaigun marines and a 104 man gun battery crew. Also gone are 24 monument maintenance staff, and 1,465 Purity pilgrims newly arrived from Manmō. There are more casualties on Koblenz when a big and burning chunk of Bad Camberg plummets to ground, taking out a length of bio illuminated maglev just as a night train enters the tube. The only other casualties are 273 civilians from a High Caste school outing, killed by a plunging fragment halfway around the planet from the burning maglev. They were enjoying a holiday picnic to celebrate Pyotr’s birthday. A home vid captures the moment of surprise as High Caste mothers and fathers look up to see Pyotr’s giant, molten head tumbling right at them. It takes out the whole camper park.
After showing a censored version of the home vid, played to funereal music, Koblenz memex indignantly states that: “The terrorists who planned this outrage deliberately picked an important Imperial holiday in order to target and murder High Caste families.” It’s partly true. The day was chosen for its symbolic value, though no one foresaw that civilian families would die when four delighted AI suicide bombs fulfilled their design destiny in an explosive, existential orgasm.
No one in the Calmar Union governments on Kars or Caspia knew about the detonation mission to blow up a big rock, err, an airless, strategically unimportant moonlet. The authorities would not have approved. Bad Camberg is so far behind the frontlines of serious fighting in Orion, and so insignificant in military terms, it’s not listed on any Alliance target list. Not even the lowest of them, the “least priority, but target-of-opportunity” list compiled after all other lists were checked, double-checked, and approved at the level of the War Cabinet. SGS on Kars and CIS on Caspia both missed obvious clues about what was coming. Like when the Krevan ambassador inquired discretely on a visit to MoD a month earlier why it was that Bad Camberg did not make any target list. He was told by a curt NCU admiral, who couldn’t believe that he had to explain: “It’s just a fucking rock!”
Not to Krevans. For them, Bad Camberg was the symbol of brutal invasion, defeat and occupation of all their homeworlds. Symbol of Imperium war lies, and Pyotr’s treachery and Rikugun mass murder. Especially with a 500 meter Pyotr straddling its surface, Imperium green lighting under his feet arrayed to boast in the manner of a flowered triumph carpet laid before the great conqueror Jade Eye himself. The joint cabinets and all that intel and military might on Kars and Caspia had nothing whatever to do with it. The operation was all Harsa, all Krevan. Kept a close secret inside KRN, which alone took the risk, conceived and executed the mission. Harsa didn’t even tell its top people in White Sails what it was planning.
Celebration on the five Allied Bases, the former sanctuary moons now directly controlled by the Krevan government-in-exile, goes on for three days and nights. It rocks every Krevan ghetto, full of exiles, on a hundred more Alliance worlds. Last time Krevans were this happy, Aral mercury ballers just won the All Orion Cup Final. The winning goalie went KRN after the war began. As it happens, he was a missile tuber on the phantom that put the nukes up Pyotr’s royal arse. Well, his statue’s ass. When he hears the news, four days after emerging from the worst case of double vapors he ever goes through, he says a prayer of thanks to his gods for seeing the kaitens through the mission. Prayer works for him. He’s convinced that the gods are on the side of Krevans in this war, just as they were on the side of his All Orion Champion mercury ball team, the Aral Golden Knights.
***
Fifteen more jumps over six days, and Yuki’s convoy reaches the neptunian L2 in Amasia’s outer system. There’s no trouble as it pulls in to gravity free rest. But there were a couple of exciting false alarms clanging through KG Seven Seas a couple of times along the route. The first rang out when someone on third watch reported a NCU phantom coming out of stealth mode at a bohr zone off Berne. That’s a small Imperium agro world not known for anything much, before the war made it part of the vital supply run to Amasia system. The second time was a repeat of the first incident, only on first watch. Yuki found the clanging clarions and chance of battle exciting. He was disappointed when there was no shooting.
Yuki and the convoy ‘see action’ at last while making the deep run in-system from the LP, down to the Rikugun inner moon Nix. There’s a helluva lot more shooting during the last leg and urgent run planetside from Nix. The escorts are jumped by an enemy flotilla that gets into the convoy lane, taking out two midsize troopships right behind Yuki’s transport: the Zug and Glarus. Three KRN frigates dash in and loose missiles that come at the convoy as if from nowhere, exploding the troopships in silent, white plasma blossoms that leave only expanding clouds of boys, baffles and spirketting. Half the escorts chase after the frigates, the other half chase distractor ghosts and decoys that suddenly appear all around. Strapped into a cramped lazaret during evasive maneuvers even in the last minutes of drop to the surface, Yuki is unable to look out a scuttle. He’s deeply disappointed that he never gets to see the famous supercontinent that’s racing up to meet him.
The ambush costs 165,000 infantry and 300+ crew. Yuki knows that the small worlds for which the troopships are named, Zug and Glar
us, were lost in early war defeats but soon retaken by the Imperium when it smashed the Allied Eagle Claws counteroffensive. He knows that like his own wet homeworld, both planets are underpopulated compared to most of the Thousand Worlds. ‘How they will feel the loss of so many brave sons!’ Just nineteen years-old and full of the moment, he makes a fool’s promise, right out of a book he read once. The kind he’d like to write some day, full of vim and heroes and moral poses. ‘We shall avenge them!’
Yuki’s a little scared at last, glad to make planetfall after a thrilling combat landing on the southeast shore of Lemuria. Every lad onboard cheers and shouts all the plunging, scorching way down. Then they cast aside bucklers, leaping and bounding down touchdown assault ramps, as if expecting to find and defeat an enemy waiting right outside. Yuki swells with pride to see them.