Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  For ‘the boys’ of RIK, as they commonly call themselves in a uniquely all-male and all-youth army, combat thrills and simple propaganda supplies motivation. At least to start the war. The real problems will come later, if it drags on and expands across Orion. If the war’s fortunes shift. If victories don’t come so easily. For now, they accept the morality of doing what officers say is their Pure duty. Including dirty tasks like shooting “bandits” and “saboteurs,” reprisals like burning villages, or herding oldsters into crowded occupation camps that reek of fear and feces.

  They disembarked from drop-ships and landers on Southland then assault-hopped a salt sea to reach the hardened coast of Northland, and were glad. They busted the enemy MDL in a day, glide-marched on combat boots over the broad northern plains with officers barking and bullying from dark green hovers that flew beside or behind the march columns. They loved every minute. Each quick victory and smashing of an opposing KRA position. Loved using their weapons, too.

  They grew more hesitant when “enemy civilians” offered traditional gifts of bread and salt, even after they trampled crops or readied to burn down a cottage or village. Many of ‘the boys’ grabbed the warm bread greedily, without giving pay or thanks. Others were shamed by the familiar homespun gesture and sourdough smell, and slunk away. Guilty and empty-handed.

  Conscripts are growing more disoriented as they advance over the plains, now pushing hard on hordes of refugees who fan out in disturbed pond circles of woe from the first tossed stones of war, spreading tales of shocking destruction and despair that lap across the quiet land.

  Young Grünen are confused by odd reactions of civilians they meet, those who can’t run fast or far enough. Or those too foolish to run, who sit and wait, disregarding or disbelieving the worst tales of rapine told by hurriedly passing columns of fleeing others. Staying in old and well-loved homes, come what may. Until their error blooms into sudden horror and the stench of rot.

  Whole units succumb to sudden fears and shoot up houses and hedgerows, without fire discipline. Officers call this curious behavior “hedgerow psychosis,” and punish it hard. Not to save Krevan civis caught in the wild shooting but to preserve unit discipline and their authority.

  It happens anyway, in village after village. It comes from an obsession with being shot at from behind low hedges or from inside cottages and shops, even though detection gear precludes such simple hiding places as concealed firing points. No one can ever say for sure that he knows anyone who was actually shot this way. Although they all say they know someone who knows someone who surely was shot at.

  “There! Over there! I saw a flash.”

  “It must be a muzzle.”

  “Where?”

  “There, there. Inside that open window.”

  “There’s another, behind that big shrub.”

  “Quick, shoot before they fire first.”

  Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack. Whirr, brzzzt!

  ‘Hedge fright’ means houses in little villages scorch with maser fire, rubble and humble ruins burn twice over. They’re not the ruins of great lost empires. They’re ruins nonetheless.

  Third Squad is finished its penal run and is back in march column, but smoldering angry at being singled out. A family huddles in a basement, another with five kids hides in a root cellar. Then someone walking point thinks they see movement at the cellar door.

  “It’s a sniper!”

  “Lob two frag grenades down there.”

  Boom, boom.

  A skinny lad is sent down to investigate. He staggers out and vomits on the grass. He asks if it’s a crime to kill blindly this way. “It’s simple self-defense,” the NCO assures him, and all the rest. Supply is told to rush more frag grenades to infantry units leading the advance, that they’re running short.

  There are no big cities on Genève except Toruń. So the columns march from hamlet to village to small town, then to hamlet to village to town. Over and over, day after day during the RIK advance. Country folk they meet don’t look like the terrible enemy described by their old high-form teachers or nervous family back home, those hanging on every memex lie and vid.

  There are some who won’t believe that Genèvens are their natural or blood inferiors, no matter what they’re told. No matter how many old men and women they roust and boss about as if herding dairy cattle. The only difference these honest young men can see amidst the mud and fire is that they have masers and Krevan civis do not. That makes them powerless, not inferior.

  “Those two arguing old sods over there sound just like my cracked grandparents,” one lad from far-off Schwyz laughs to a kid recruited from the closer border world of Zug.

  “That ginger kid reminds me of my little brother back home on Glarus,” says another.

  “Hey little girl, where’s your momma? Stop crying, it’ll be OK.”

  “Gods, that one looks exactly like my cousin Klara, from Uri. Same eyes, same hair.”

  Genèvens don’t descend to levels of evil depicted in daily briefings by the politruks, the politico-priests assigned to each division in a dual-command system hated by RIK officers. Most politruks are minor Purity ideologues who give propaganda lessons on ‘biopolitical science’ and other regime dogma. They bore most of the men, but tend well to morale. So they’re tolerated, of some use to officers even if they’re also spies reporting to Pyotr or to the Curia on the loyalty of field commanders. A few over-interpret their authority as superior even to operations staff, but they’re slapped down hard by RIK generals as soon as the shooting starts. Still, no politruk can be dismissed outright, even by a senior general. Not without real good reason and a royal permit.

  Now the officer class turns to the hated politruks for a different kind of service. They’re ordered to spread malicious rumors in the ranks about atrocities committed by lying and cunning civis. Old women are accused of handing out envenomed fruit, young women of seducing Grün boys then slicing off their testicles as they sleep. Rumors fly among units, swift lies on wings.

  “Crushed glass is baked into the bread they offer us!”

  “Don’t eat anything those filthy bitches give you!”

  “And stay out of the root cellars!”

  “I heard that, too! They’re all mined with nail bombs.”

  “It’s the old women who stay behind who do it.”

  “They coat the nails in rat poison, too!”

  “And they put potassium cyanide in salt shakers left in their abandoned cottages.”

  “No, that can’t be right. I had some today, on my mockmeat ration.”

  “It’s true, I tell ya. My friend said he smelled bitter almond in one shaker!”

  “Gods! I think I’m gonna throw up!”

  “Filthy, cunning teufel.”

  “Murderers! Old whores! Schlampes!”

  Confusion and embarrassment shifts into fear, then to hatred, as rumors spread that civilians in the next village, or the one after that, are spies. Or worse, that they hide guerrilla fighters in every copse or barn, lurking around every bend, hiding behind each hedgerow. Or even that children are spotting for KRA snipers concealed under flooring or inside a woodpile.

  It doesn’t matter that few tirailleurs or snipers in trees shoot at them. The accused village is punished anyway, with indiscriminate harshness. With passing days and more sacked villages on their resumes ‘the boys’ grow ever more used to hard practices and collective punishments, until they come to see such easy brutality as normal and all kindly things as odd and foolhardy.

  Other rumors arise naturally as heavily armed youths bully the weak, the unarmed, the fragile old. It’s always thus in war, that nether realm where power comes to youths allowed to drink too soon and deeply of dark pleasures of bossing and breaking the frail and frightened.

  On five invaded worlds war dissolves what once held youth in moral check.. War drips onto them like fluorosulphuric acid onto glass. They’re decentered from any law, isolated from parents and socially enforced mo
rality, led into brutality by officers, goaded to act cruelly by politruks and each other. The terrible corrosive of combat dissolves softer bindings of restraint holding back the natural barbarism of the young. They become lords of flies and death.

  Every rumored atrocity becomes real and reciprocal. Whether stories of poisoning and castration are true or not, RIK drag Krevan girls and mothers into a field or barn to rape and murder. In a thousand villages, high-pitched cries and screams are followed by fatal silences. Parents are shot in front of their children and worse, children are shot in front of parents. Or all are shot and the corpses burned together in pyres made of household furnishings and bedding.

  “You can’t run a godsdamn war like it’s a charity,” a snarling 2nd Division major general snaps when asked about his rough tactics by a concerned journo. She’s eager to report home on the liberation of one of the ‘Lost Children’ worlds, but shaken and shocked by what she sees out there. “Hawks eat doves,” the shōshō declares matter-of-factly. It’s a sentiment that not just Takeshi Watanabe would approve. It’s the ethos of the RIK. “Now get the fuck out of my HQ.”

  Censors cut out his remarks and block the story on the Imperium’s nebs and memexes. The journo is arrested and sent home on the next shuttle carrying back wounded, to be met at the space dock by agents of the Kempeitai. She’s declared damnatio memoriae and never seen again. Never to be spoken of or remembered aloud, not even by family. Mourning her is a punishable offense. Then the declaration sentence is itself erased and she disappears into a memory void.

  Taishō Nikita Brusilov orders RIK 10th Armored to shoot all Krevan males it finds. Long before reaching Pilsudski Wood its hover-scout van kills hundreds of men and boys, and some women and girls, piling corpses inside their homes to burn. When darkness falls the division’s line of march is marked back to its day departure points by pyres of burning farms and villages.

  One 20-year old private, called “Jacko” by his friends, objects when lads he trained with, fights with, eats alongside, all from his own Fahnlein or ‘small flag’ tactical group, gang-rape and then crucify a 40-year old woman on the door of her own barn, leaving her to hang and die. ‘Are these really my squad mates? ‘The boys’ can’t be this cruel, not to this poor woman. They can’t do this! They mustn’t do this!’

  He blurts out a heartfelt protest. “What are you doing? We’re here to defend against Krevan sabotage and aggression, to liberate our Lost Children worlds. These little people did nothing to hurt you or the Imperium! That woman did nothing to deserve this. Stop! Stop it!”

  He’s arrested, drumhead courts-martialed for “incitement to mutiny,” and sentenced to summary execution. All on the authority of a SAC lieutenant about his own age, a young tough so enraged at Jacko’s “sympathy for the enemy” he has to be restrained from shooting the naïf with his pocket maser. The lieutenant angrily jams the pistol back into a low-slung hip holster, reluctantly convinced to let an execution party from Jacko’s own Fahnlein shoot him instead.

  It’s not at all unusual. The Purity Revolution executed millions of Grünen before this day, and that was before imposition of full martial law and military discipline in the field army. A year ago, Pyotr justified all prewar killings in a secret speech made to top Imperium officials.

  “We execute many people without knowing if they’re fully guilty. My regime and the Purity Revolution can’t stop to conduct investigations. We have the obligation to triumph.” He knows it’s always been the Oetkert way. All Grünen know it, too. It’s a threat as well as a fact.

  The “Jacko affair” causes a brief stir in 10th Division. A young private, a Grün ethnic from Brno who speaks real good Krevan, gets up early to walk over from the nearby hover-scouts unit. He takes along a large black-haired friend who doesn’t say much but is always stupidly grinning, Since the whole division has been ordered to watch the execution, they want to get the very best places. They would make the trip to watch regardless, orders or no orders.

  It’s over fast, but not ‘till after the division eats a full and good breakfast of hardtack fried in mockpork grease. Jacko waits bound tight and alone, under double guard, watching from his death perch. He’s fed nothing and given no water. The Imperium doesn’t waste supplies on any “useless mouths” like him. ‘The boys’ eat quickly, unconsciously eager to see how Jacko will die. The firing squad sits off to one side to eat and wait, unspeaking and unspoken to by the rest.

  The execution is carried out without ceremony. Jacko is made to kneel before the trunk of a wide oak tree, mouth gagged and head bowed low so that his killers don’t have to hear his last words or look into his eyes as they cook him with maser rifles from just five meters away. Two wiser, or just more experienced, men in the execution squad plug up their noses with grass so that they won’t have to remember their mate Jacko in every other burnt-roast smell. The squad’s gunsō starts the order sequence.

  “Ready!”

  Jacko trembles, a mortal shudder he can’t help. ‘What’s happening to me? To all of us? How did it come to this?’

  “Present!”

  He lifts his head as high as can against the restraints to plead with eyes alone, unable to spit his gag. Two friends squinting down tubes of stubby masers hesitate, but only for a moment.

  “Fire!”

  A smoking, headless, useless corpse falls forward in front of the oak, then lies still. The great tree rustles briefly in the strange silence that follows, broken only by the sounds of masers checked and shouldered, and by small crackles of melting fat rising from the smoldering body.

  Low branches heavy with summer green are hardly bothered by a merciful breeze that flutters to lift the stench of roasting flesh, hair and offal. The gust betrays the closest onlookers by curling back around, carrying a small cloud of blue-black and foul-smelling smoke over the firing squad, thence to choke front ranks of suddenly frightened boys and men standing stiffly in green combat weaves. They’re kept there for a full five minutes before a dispersal order is given.

  Minoru Honda of the 10th Armored hover scouts walks straight from his prime position to Jacko’s lifeless, headless body, his black-haired friend trotting alongside like a loyal hound. He unseals his combat suit, pulls out his penis and pisses all over the corpse. His dopey friend is content to spit, grinning all the while.

  Honda looks at Jacko’s distraught friends in the firing line, his fat penis still in his hand, dripping dark yellow on the body. He laughs. “Someone’s got to put out the fire you started!”

  Later that day 10th Division packs up and moves out, heading at last into the great forest with orders to reach and invest Toruń. But first its pale battalions are marched past the gagged head and dead man slumped before the oak tree. They tramp by in silence and crisp parade-ground formation, barked at and pummeled by sergeants if anyone tries to look away.

  “Eyes right, trooper! You will look at the traitor.”

  “Long live Pyotr! Long live Purity!”

  The point is made by the officer corps. There’ll be no dissent in this unit. Not without consequences. Holo-vids of Jacko’s execution are dispatched to all other squads and companies and divisions, marked Mandatory Viewing. It’s not the last such vid the men will see on Genève.

  No comet streaks across the sky after the shooters from Jacko’s squad put away masers. The heavens don’t blaze forth in protest at their friend’s passing life or death. His mates aren’t struck dumb by his murder, not beyond an hour in any case. They accept the sentence, hard as it is, guilty as they are for provoking it and carrying it out. Jacko’s fate angers them nonetheless.

  Not against the callow SAC chūi who ordered the execution, then made certain Jacko’s best mates formed the firing party. They’re allowed no anger in that direction, toward the thug lieutenant in perfectly creased, suffocating slate-gray weaves. As gray as dead Jacko’s skin. No, their rage is directed out, toward all Krevans. Especially the woman they raped and crucified. Their rage moves them from guilt t
o vengeance, the only mood allowed to them by the RIK.

  “Damned Krevans!”

  “Jacko would still be alive if not for them, right?”

  “Too right!”

  “They’re why we’re fighting on this shithole planet.”

  “They started this fuckin’ war!”

  “That’s why Jacko’s dead.”

  “You’re right! They attacked our base at Bad Camberg.”

  “We’d still be at home if they hadn’t.”

  “Jacko would still be alive!”

  “Before that, in the last war, they stole our lost worlds.”

  “Took all our Lost Children.”

  “That’s why we had to come here, to take them back.”