by Kali Altsoba
In late winter of Year Four of the Orion War, something remarkable happens. It starts in the austral mountains on Lemuria, a forgotten, tertiary front in a war gone long and stale but more bloody and brutal every year. It happens in a useless, rock-and-snow sector of the black walls that snake together like hateful, angry lovers all down the supercontinent, unable to complete each other, unable to let go. It happens in the high southern region that will never decide the outcome of the fighting, yet is vital to it because it denies the generals and armies any flanks.
It starts three mountains over from where Yuki Hoth lies forgotten in a shallow grave on the shady eastern side of Mount Sheol, awaiting removal and cremation when spring returns to the vales. A brigade of RIK 917th ID is so hungry and cold and despondent, and so pissed off with too aggressive officers, it finally breaks.
The men refuse an attack order.
They down the tools of war.
They mutiny. They say “No!”
They shoot their CO and hang his headquarters staff, taking more time to kill with special cruelty three unctuous politruks. The fools die praising Pyotr and Purity, as they eat microwaves with broken teeth from muzzles shoved bloodily into their mouths, while their executioners angrily shout: “Shut the fuck up!”
The mutineers tie up junior officers who refuse to go along, shoving the bound Pyotr men into the icy basement of one of the old chalets. They stop firing on Blue patrols, sent out to discover what the commotion is across the valley. They stand up in the clear, and wave them off instead. Blues wave back, cautiously at first, until it’s certain no one will shoot in either direction. Soon, junior officers meet in the middle, standing in deep snow on the valley floor to discuss ceasefire terms.
The truce creeps up a high pass overlooking a crossroads where two valleys meet. It spills out of the first into the second, as pickets eagerly exchange news. Soon a profound excitement, a thrill of freedom to disobey, infects unit after unit of cold, hungry, southernmost Rikugun. Infects six divisions that feel abandoned by their commander, General Johann Oetkert, and RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen.
After a day spent gorging on last supplies and voting on every possible issue, great and small, the original mutineers of 917th ID go far beyond a combat strike. They agree to surrender to the Blues across the valley. Rikugun have surrendered before, but as individuals or in small groups. Outside of being overrun and cutoff by the flow of battle, this will be the first capitulation of a whole unit anywhere on Lemuria. Hell, first big surrender by RIK in the whole stinking Orion War.
It’s a threat to Pyotr and the Imperium beyond rising desertion or self inflicted wounds, and it’s spreading fast. Spies in the ranks report to Divisional HQs that open talk of mutiny is moving into adjacent units. Rage grows alongside panic at RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen. There are spies there, too. Before local generals can suppress the news, word races back to SAC and to RIK Main HQ on Kestino.
The mistake the mutineers make is to go over the heads of local officers and appeal to the general on the far side of the valley. They jigger a transmitter and announce on an ACU frequency that they’ll give up weapons and position if the Blue general will grant them safe conduct across the valley floor, over the white that now covers the black, and accept their surrender. They want to be taken to a west coast prison camp. The signal carries farther than they think.
Worse, Alliance generals and units in the south are second tier, just like their abandoned opponents on the Rikugun side. There’s no urgency or initiative over there. So the general says the mutineers must wait where they are, while he checks with superiors in New Beijing. “I need to follow proper protocol. We have to do this right.” They wait for two full days.
It’s rumored that a senior officer is on the way from New Beijing. The wildest rumors say that General Lian Sòng herself is coming, bringing hot food and safe conduct passes for them all! Pickets watch for an ACU convoy coming to collect the 917th ID and take them to warm prisons along the far west coast. They cheer lustily when lookouts see a straight line column of armtraks and tracked infantry carriers approaching, without camouflage and decked in glowing ACU insignia. The convoy has all its lights on and is broadcasting old but valid enemy IFFs. It’s moving on an ice road that cuts a narrow channel through the deep snow on the valley floor, between walls of snow ice three meters high on either side. Over 200 happy, unarmed men run and tumble downslope to greet their captor-liberators.
They think their war is over. But cheering by thousands watching from high above abruptly stops when the armored column suddenly breaks through the snow walls, shifts offroad into an attack spread formation, and accelerates. Active SAC insignia and IFFs turn full on. Acoustic jets blast blackened snow and ice beneath elevating armtraks. Elephants shed their faux Buffalo shells and turn red spitting spandaus on startled, unarmed men in the lower valley. Men running away from the sudden onslaught look as awkward as slow motion penguins waddling away from native hunters on Nunavut, chasing them down on hovering snowmobiles to slaughter them with laser harpoons on red stained ice.
Mutineers higher up turn fearful and wrathful in a moment, as their brothers struggle in a mad panic to climb the mountainside. They watch as raisin men run uphill as fast as wobbly legs and deep snow drifts allow, while they shoot at the armtraks with stationary spandaus. Elephants open return fire at short range with side mounted spandaus, while SAC commandos fire hand masers from ATCs. The slaughter is immense, as it proceeds without pause or mercy down the valley floor, then turns up to overcome the spandau positions set in a rocky ridgeline. None of the 200 men who ran downslope in fool’s joy escape the spitting guns. Scattered, dead mutineers look like tumbled raisons tossed carelessly onto a sheet of dough.
ATC hovers with the Erect Bear of the Special Action Commando snarling on their armor plating scour black furrows as they rip up the valley side, cutting down running men. They climb above the stone chalets to reach and burn out the pine hut soldier villages, overflying low stone walls of abandoned farms with all side spandaus blazing. They drop down to tracked mode and run over men, turning the snow red below churning, spinning treads. Mutineers grab masers and grenades and man the heavy spandaus, but neither side has used much armor up here and they lack heavy weapons. One side of the vale erupts into bloody civil war as men in blue on the other side stand and watch. The slaughter goes on for two hours.
Real ACU watch it all happen from recce drones and eagle nest OPs, but the second rate Blue general has no orders for this scenario so he does nothing to help. He’s waiting for a big column from New Beijing. It’s three hours late. The ass could turn the course of the Orion War if he acted, but instead he lives down to his low ability and sits the whole thing out. He’s waiting for General Lian Sòng to make any decision that must be made. Yet he isn’t keeping her informed. He really is a fool. She’s distracted in any case by a major attack by Rikugun in The Veranda, planned long before another fool, General Johann Oetkert, had even an inkling that his troops in the south would mutiny.
What? You think it can’t happen? You think fools don’t get to be generals? What planet do you live on? How many fools around you are in high positions of real authority? How many times a day do you wonder how they ever got there, and know that the answer is connections mommy used or an overrated school they went to and barely passed, or they were born with a silver foot in their mouths? It’s worse in the Imperium. It is the Imperium, where royal cousins and uncles hold high commands across Rikugun and Kaigun and at the Jade Court.
When the shooting stops, 3,500 mutineers are dead and 7,500+ are in chains. They’re herded like dāsa slaves on Fates, taken down the mountain to the splotchy valley floor to be transferred into sealed cargo trucks that will haul them to SAC prisons and before Kempeitai firing squads. Five armtraks and seven ATCs lie smoking and in ruins, but only 117 dead SAC commandos and special police are carried down the mountain, with another 150 walking wounded. The dead will be celebrated as heroes of the Sakura-kai and Jade Court for crushing
this secret little revolt, this shitty treason that no one else in the Imperium will ever hear about. Their masters are celebrating already, reacting to bohr relay news of the victory. Power on Kestino shifts perceptibly away from compromised Rikugun, accused of being unable to control its men, to the SAC High Curia, which clearly does.
As the column of chained and confined prisoners starts to leave the valley, the Blue general finally gives the order. Artillery and infantry both open fire. They’ve had two hours to site their weapons and are more than eager to take out gray clad “Rats” they just watched shoot wounded prisoners begging on the snow, and chain other men like Dauran cattle headed to the slaughterhouse. It’s the first time some of the free men and women in blue utes realize what’s at stake in the Fourth Orion War. The barrage wipes out the SAC column, along with nearly 65% of chained mutineers. Then ACU infantry pours down its side of the secured valley, to finish off wounded Rats, take prisoner any living Rikugun, and give aid to the wounded.
Survivors among the prisoners are left in chains as they’re shipped off to an ACU prison camp on the Panthalassan west coast. Blue scouts find tied up officers shivering and half dead in the stoney basement of an empty chalet. Alliance MI scours captured Rikugun gunpits and abandoned camps. They’re most impressed by how little food there is on the other side of the liberated valley. Local MI men, all lower rank, file reports saying just that. Mostly, they’re ignored by distracted Main HQ in New Beijing. This is not the key fighting front. An immense battle is raging up north, from The Sandbox to beyond the central plain, to heavy fighting on the tundra and around The Icebox. News from the south will have to wait.
Finally, the Blue general orders his troops to move out of the secured vale and scout for tactical possibilities in the next one over. By waiting for orders, he has already squandered any last chance to break open the mountain front and restore a flank and war of movement and decision in the south. It’s three more days after that before he allows large scale war parties to leave the top of the high passes and descend into five adjacent alpine valleys. Three days that allow Rikugun to regain control of its infected units. The incursions are repelled with heavy casualties. It seems that Rikugun has brought south several its most reliable units, the Women’s Combat Brigades attached to divisions fighting in the central and northern fronts. There’s no morale problem among Rikugun women. More than most men, they seem to still believe they have something to prove by fighting Pyotr Shaka’s war.
Turns out, WCBs are among the most reliable and highest morale units that Rikugun has left. Most are conscripts these days, but the WCBs still get more than their share of outright volunteers. Some are fanatic fighters. Combat is ferocious as the angry women arrive and make whatever point they’re trying to make, with fire and pitiless discipline and merciless resolve. The rebellion is contained to five mountain valleys, then systematically and brutally repressed. It doesn’t spread up north, following strong foehn winds and the line of parallel black walls. Not even news of the mutiny gets that far. Yet, it’s clear that things are changing on Amasia.
Oddly, in MI’s summary judgment there was no mutiny, just a great confusion leading to a RIK friendly fire incident in one of the high valleys. The incompetent Blue general is playing cover your ass by denying anything other than his victory over the SAC column. Yet one ACU major won’t back down: he swears that he took a surrender offer from 10,000 mutineers. And the rumint just won’t stop. It renews with each deserter who walks over Dark Territory to end up in MI’s secret interrogation camp outside New Beijing. None of the deserters interrogated was in the “strike valley,” but they swear that a full infantry division, and elements of two more, mutinied in the mountains. Beaten and questioned for days, they won’t abandon the mutiny story or admit that they’re spies. After, they’re fed with black bread and fish and shipped off to a coastal POW camp, with grins on their faces.
SAC men take especially hard beatings in the MI interrogation rooms, yet New Beijing still refuses to believe mutiny reports. MI knows its audience, so it reports: “Unsubstantiated. Veracity of RIK prisoner testimony remains questionable.” It’s just too hard to believe that the war could end like this. Lian Sòng’s intelligence liaison, General Sergei Kornilov, tells her that he can’t be sure, but he thinks what happened was that a SAC commando raid disguised as an Alliance column went up the wrong side of the valley and got caught in a friendly fire incident instead.
“They were camoed as Buffalos, flying under a false flag and using our IFFs. We think they meant to attack our side of the valley, but turned the wrong way. That’s what the division commander is saying. Worst mistake we’ve seen, but not unprecedented. Then our guys took advantage of the enemy’s confusion to wipe out the column of Rats, as they tried to back out of the vale.”
“Maybe,” Lian concedes.
“You have doubt?”
“How do you explain chaining up their own men?”
“I can’t explain it. It makes no sense.”
“Well then, you don’t have the answer. I need more information about this, Sergei. It could be more important than we think, even if it’s confined to the most isolated mountain valleys in the deepest south.”
“Yes sir. I’ll order more interrogations. We’ll get the information we need out of the bastards. We kept a few SAC men alive. It’s time for them to really talk.”
“Report directly to me when they do. Nothing in writing, of course. But push them hard, Sergei. You know what I mean. I have an odd feeling about this one.”
MI might believe the mutiny story if it was about DRA on the icy other-end-of-the-world. Instead, they overestimate Rikugun morale and fighting strength. It’s understandable. The bastards haven’t shown any weakness in four years of fighting on Amasia. The news for the Alliance has been so bad for so long when it comes to war with Rikugun that it’s almost impossible to believe things could be turning the other way. Not yet. The enemy is too strong, and fighting too hard.
Even so, every day more enemy surrender, and not just as individual deserters. Squads, platoons, whole companies are running across the black in the deep south or throwing down their masers and raising their arms when a position is overrun. Yuki’s company surrenders on Mount Sheol a month after he falls into red snow. Something crucially important is going on down there. Despite preoccupation with the deeper, angrier war in the key central fighting zones on Lemuria, General Sòng orders MI to reopen the investigation. She’s spurred to it by an important message from Kars, marked Your Eyes Only. It comes over a Core Secret channel, straight to her personal quarters, bypassing even her most trusted staff at Main HQ and all her ADCs. Only her best spies in the Network and one man on Kars has access to that link and her personal code. It’s from her old friend, PM Georges Briand.
“My Dear Lian: You must look into this mutiny report more urgently. I need confirmation. We all need confirmation. I don’t care what your people have to do to get it. We need to know if this really happened in the south. And why and how, and whether it fits a pattern in the north, around the Dauran Gate, that our friend Gaspard convinced me is key to this war. I’m sending him to brief you. If this report of even a local mutiny is true, we have real hope for the first time in over four years of war. It’s not the beginning of the end, Lian, but it may just be the end of the beginning. GB.”
The message dissipates as the wipe code she enters cleans every trace from the system of the digitized, hand written note. She redoubles the investigation. The commanding general from the southernmost district is recalled to New Beijing to talk to Sòng and Kornilov in person. He confirms the POW reports, adding details about his own errors and summarizing recent fighting in nearby valleys, between the old Rikugun divisions that wintered there for two years and the WCBs. Lian Sòng fires him on the spot for lying to MI and to her, and for gross incompetence.
***
“General Kornilov, I need to be certain before I report to the PM on this.”
“This doe
s not serve my interests to say, General Sòng, but for the sake of the war I must tell you that for that kind of report you need to go to outside sources.”
“Outside what?”
“Outside my department, outside Military Intelligence. Outside the usual and therefore closeminded and too conservative channels.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“You need an honest man to bring back an honest report, someone who will look on the facts with unbiased eyes. Someone not in the direct chain of command who will be tempted to tell you only what you want to hear.”
“So, no one locked into my own thinking here at Main HQ?
“Right.”
“You have someone in mind?”
“You know who, general.”
“Is he back on Amasia?”
“Yes. White Sails is in orbit, and the Wreckers are in the R&R camps.”
“Bring him to see me, ASAP.”
General Jan Wysocki commands “The Wreckers,” expanded from a combat brigade to a full KRA division. The division is back on Amasia, in a coastal R&R base behind a Krevan held sector of black wall. White Sails is parked high above, denying DRN and Kaigun convoys access while giving its own crews and marines planetside leave. Also back is the rest of Alliance I Corps: KRA ‘Rusty Buckles.’ Completing Jan’s command of Alliance 1st Army are two ACU divisions of II Corps: the “Dismals” of 22nd Marine and rakishly proud Rosenkavaliers. They’ve been offworld on a major butcher-and-bolt raid. At this scale, two corps or army size, upscale raids are more like practice invasions. Alliance chiefs are seriously thinking about shifting to strategic offense. White Sails is the leading the way.