Amasia Read online

  Amasia

  Volume V

  The Orion War

  by

  Kali Altsoba

  SECOND EDITION

  ©

  Kali Altsoba

  (2019)

  About the Author

  Kali Altsoba is the pen name used to publish future military fiction by the award winning military historian, Cathal J. Nolan. He is the author of multivolume works of international and military history. He received the top international award for military history in 2018, the Gilder Lehrman Prize, for his acclaimed The Allure of Battle (Oxford UP). His histories have been feature reviewed in academic and military journals, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The National. He has given public lectures in Argentina, Britain, Canada, Israel, and all across the United States. Recent venues include the Chautauqua Institute, National World War II Museum, New York Historical Society, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Kabul, Afghanistan), National Intelligence University, World Affairs Forum, and Center for Military and Diplomatic History. He has interviewed for or appeared on CBS Radio, Fox Radio, Radio Free Europe, Newstalk (Ireland), BBC Mundo, PBS, C-Span, The Dead Prussian, and New Books Network, where he hosts a podcast on military history. He regularly consults on military historical research to the PBS series NOVA. He is featured on camera in the 2018 NOVA documentary on Dunkirk.

  Author’s Note (First Edition)

  Some events in this series derive from real world acts of war, including war crimes and atrocities adapted from After Action reports, combat memoirs and eyewitness accounts. They come from widely varied armies, times and cultures, in dozens of wars across many centuries. The result is often grim and not for the fainthearted, cruel and pitiless, but true to the wide human experience of war waged over time. As dark as the tale becomes, as savage as some characters and combat depictions are, I hope my effort to root this series in a deeply human experience of the high politics of empire and the brutality of war will be rewarding to some readers.

  Author’s Note (Second Edition)

  This book is reorganized, rewritten, and expanded. Seven new chapters are added, along with character and situational development in all other chapters. The story develops earlier themes in the series, adds plot twists and enhanced character arcs that continue in follow on books. Combat depictions may echo real events drawn from veteran experience, but are all reset within a complex weave of character development and future war that is reshaping the history of the Thousand Worlds of Orion yet to come. There are numerous literary references woven into names, plot twists, characters, and dialogue. Some are explicit. Many are left implicit, as a kind of cultural “easter egg” for curious readers to discover and explore.

  Contents

  Walls

  Moons

  Leave

  Return

  Cities

  Black

  Coffee

  Throne

  Rabbit

  Deluge

  Bomb

  Wicked

  Patrol

  Pucker

  Cramp

  Ambush

  Disgrace

  Reed

  Dingo

  Head

  Mind

  Endure

  Sample

  “Big fish eat little fish, until they gorge to death. It’s the way of all fish and of all flesh. Nature is an extremist.”

  Pyotr Shaka Oetkert III

  Walls

  “They shall not pass!” That’s what ACU Major General Lian Sòng promised as Rikugun dropships fell out of a crisp dawn sky up-and-down the east coast of the supercontinent Lemuria on Amasia. Fell through the clouds in building sized landers full of death. “The time to debate is over! The time for action is upon us. War, horrible war, comes to you now! It’s time to fight! Defend your cities and homes! Defend yourselves! To the walls!”

  That was a year ago, back when there weren’t any walls yet. Just primitive fighting pits and disconnected blockhouses she built in the countryside before the war began, knowing that war was coming. Knowing from Core Secret reports she got off-the-record from Defense Minister Georges Briand and the Head of the JSC Admiral Gaétan Maçon, because Lian Sòng was a trusted member of the Network. Knowing that horrid war would soon march across desert and forest and plain and tundra, across the immense land and into the cities of Lemuria. Knowing that fat dropships would disgorge war bots and swarms of ‘locusts’ from pregnant bellies.

  No one wanted a dirty, draining, flesh-and-blood war on the ground. Certainly not Lian Sòng, whose order to build walls and strongpoint defenses saved Lemuria when war came in fact to its fields and cities, but pissed off every soldier handed work tools under her late summer command, in the last summer of peace in Orion. That was back during the Krevan War, when the Calmar Union was still officially neutral. Before the “Big One” started, as Amasians call the Fourth Orion War.

  “Wáng bā! What, we’re mudders now?”

  “Sonofabitch is right.”

  “I wanted to dig holes, I coulda stayed on the farm.”

  “I never signed up for this.”

  “It’s too hot!”

  “Let the bots do it.”

  “They’re all bái chī. All they're good for is war. They don’t dig.”

  “And you thought march drills and all that hiking was bad?”

  “We don’t even git paid proper, not for dis shit.”

  “Quiet! If an officer hears you, you’re zhāo biǎn. He’ll kick your ass!”

  Yet when the war came and the big landers fell, when each disgorged a locust swarm, even those rudimentary prewar ditches, gunpits and blockhouses allowed Amasians to hold on. Helped them beat off RIK assaults long enough for fighters to learn how to fight in their first ever combat, for barely uniformed conscripts to rush pell-mell to the front, for enough young men and women to die on both sides that a long defensive line formed up-and-down Lemuria, then stabilized into what everybody now calls “the black.” They fixed the enemy in place, forcing Pyotr to send more war bots and armies in electric storms against men and women standing as circuit breakers to insulate the open cities of the center and west of Lemuria.

  Sòng was too skilled to try to hold everything only to lose all. She put core naval assets into defending two LPs and the two largest of five moons, Yue Lao and Chang'e. Amasia flotilla held the farside L3 and a cold neptunian L4, needed for essential resupply. But she pulled small garrisons off three moons, Hydra, Nix and Narada. Most moved to Yue Lao and Chang'e while she also reinforced a ferocious ground defense against the first wave Rikugun invasion armies. She managed to hold onto two-thirds of Lemuria, but was forced to abandon the Thalassa coast where the huge Kaigun dropships first fell, like premade ghettos from the sky.

  RIK secured the coast and all its cites, then made a spectacularly overconfident assault along four main axes in the north, center, and south of the supercontinent. Four attack axes! The arrogant bastards! One focused thrust through the central plains would have been hard enough, but it just might have made it to the west coast, splitting Lemuria and all its defending armies in half, east to west. Then Rikugun could have turned north or south, rolled up any flank it chose, smashed the last broken armies General Lian Sòng put up, marched into the western cities to dictate terms to New Beijing and secure Amasia for Pyotr and for Purity.

  Instead, it was stopped, with only the east coast and a third of interior Lemuria occupied. Stopped by swirling war bot, armtrak, and mobile infantry battles with hunting packs of Rikugun Jabos and Raptors overhead, dogfighting ACU Jaguars, AI Wasps and Yellowjacket helos. Stopped by sheer blood-and-guts and so many ‘last-stands-to-the-death’ that most never made it into the After Action Reports. By hard fighting, down to knives a
nd fists that the memex couldn’t make up. Until the multi headed hellhound was exhausted, ceased biting, and squatted on Lemuria to lick its bleeding wounds. Hacking into Lemuria on four broad fronts instead of making one narrow thrust, instead of pushing an unstoppable sword straight through Amasia’s vulnerable guts, ensured the war would go on. Why did they do it? Couldn’t they see this would happen?

  It was Pyotr.

  It was his generals.

  It was Grün arrogance.

  It was singing Rikugun march columns.

  They all pushed too far too fast, on too many fronts, because they assumed they were superior in war. Because they were Grünen, who say they invented war. Bad logistics, too. They forgot all about those. They were so sure they would win fast they made no plans to win slow or to supply a long war should their armies bog down. Yes, but surely they changed tactics after that initial failure? Surely they learned to reconcentrate when the four snarling dog heads started to falter?

  No. They tried again, and were blunted again. A dozen times the generals tried to smash through Sòng’s ad hoc defenses, to crush all resistance by her mostly amateur forces. A dozen times she stopped them, though pushed backward a little more each time. Until the RIK banged straight into still disconnected field works she had ordered built prewar. Strongpoints of dug in artillery and rapido gunpits, infantry in shallow trenches, and a lot more blood-and-guts.

  It was brutal. It came down to masers and frag grenades, fists and teeth, but it flattened the advances. It stopped the two middle thrusts cold, and pushed the two flanking attacks north and south instead of west, as Rikugun tried to get around Lian Sòng’s hard edges. Again, and again, and again, they tried. Until the flanks were gone. Until black boots chipped arctic ice in the north and stubbed against the stiff southern mountains. Until both armies stretched from boreal and austral extremes and collapsed where they were, snarling futile rage at each other.

  Finally, exhausted, flailing enemies paused to rest and reinforce: ACU corps and divisions were on the very lip of defeat, but Rikugun was too spent to push home to victory. Without orders, incapable of moving any more, each side dug deeper, armored harder, hunkered down. Did anything to get below the incoming shells. And dug, and dug, and armored and plated over top, and dug some more. Now they’re thinly stretched over spider threads of interlocking trenches, between which lies a desiccated, destroyed, no-go zone of poisonous air, fast death and slow decay, of active search mines and lurking sniper bots, and silent suiciders that kill anything that moves.

  Anything that moves.

  Wearing any color, blue or green.

  Everyone calls it Dark Territory.

  Except some of the locals, especially from the western cities. They call it the Yue ming, the “obscure regions.” It’s not quite the same as the Hell of the Old Believers, or the Ten Courts of Hell and the realm of the dead that ancient Chinese called Diyu. It’s more of a vaporous, nether region. A place like ancient Greeks called Hades, before hellfire was added. Or maybe a place of suspended karma, of shivering, cavernous underground layers Buddhists still call Naraka.

  Call it whatever you want.

  Curse it however you like.

  Cross over it in pride,

  then come running back.

  It’s no one’s to control.

  Not you, not them. Dark Territory, the Yue ming, belongs to neither the living nor the dead. The living who try to stay there always end up dead, while the dead who cannot leave are never allowed to rest. They’re prodded and probed by bots and scavengers, set atop boobytraps, nested in by desert spiders and vipers, tossed and churned into bone chips and jelly by the next barrage or the one after that.

  There are lots of walls now. Thousands upon thousands of klics around the western and central cities, covered in ack ack, railguns, anti-skycraft missile silos. Defended by scared local militia who hastened to learn the most basic military skills before the war bots and locust swarms arrived. Like how to hold and fire a maser or load a ‘four deuce’ 4.2 mortar, or drop a frag into an open armtrak hatch or toss it down a Rikugun fighting hole. They’re still holding the walls, pocked and pitted now from spent spandau fire and Jabo plasma strafings that sometimes missed, but far more often hit their mark and left raw holes and red limbs scattered all around smoking craters. Many died in defense, but the enemy did not pass.

  More walls, of a sort, form a rigid, armored spine all down Lemuria: black carbyne, sinuous, triple lines border all Dark Territory. Call them trenches if you must, this complex of defense-in-depth and supporting defensive works that run pole to pole for nearly 23,000 klics. They're really upside down, parallel walls. They’re built underground to a bedrock depth of 75-100 meters, to stop tunneling mole bots with mines clinging to their backs. They top out at 3-4 meters above ground level, rising up to support firing steps on long ledges where companies and battalions stand to repel enemy glide infantry and war bot assaults. The long walls and Yue ming lying between can be seen from orbit, looking like a jagged scar was clawed across the face of Lemuria by an angry beast. They serve the same purpose as the higher walls that surround the cities: “They shall not pass!”

  Amasians rose to her exhortation. They armed and went out to wrestle with Rikugun. They bled and died as the enemy pushed like a furious rikishi in a frontal deashi style, sumō attack of constant forward movement. It began as soon as an arrogant Nagoyan general waved his war flag, a gunbai proudly in his family for 22 centuries. His tactic of wave assaults that just didn’t stop worked, until they were stopped. Now he, too, is stuck in an unexpected hikiwake, a positional draw between fleshy, exhausted, death grappling armies on Lemuria.

  Inadequate enemy logistics helped Amasians hold on until offworld help arrived, as RIK armtraks outran glide infantry and the infantry outran supply, until the whole Rikugun halted and spread north to south in front of Lian Sòng’s partly prepared defenses. Now, just over a year after the first assaults, black walls are continuous and offworld reinforcement and local recruitment are both underway. And so the brutal, daily fighting must go on forever and ever, without end. Amen.

  Many volunteer to fight. The most angry come from the occupied east. They clamor to enlist. Some just to get out of sprawling refugee camps, others who want red vengeance, payback for being frightened for their lives and forced to run. They long for a chance to kill ‘locusts,’ a terrible green abstraction they’ve learned to hate. “War, war!” is the rally cry of these bitter easterners. It’s heard in training camps and in their hasty barracks and across the black. “War to the knuckle and the knife!” Others volunteer from the large western cities. They hope to avoid the same fate as in the east, to drive looming barbarians from their gates. Their hate burns slower but as surely, its fire lighted by the death of a friend, or a brother, or a great grandparent who will never go to a Life Temple to receive death as a gift.

  More are conscripts. Willing to serve, but not eager, waiting their turn to be called. Everyone rages at the late arriving Daurans, now in the north country, a spartan land of almost permanent ice. Amasian hatred for DRA ‘popovs’ is even greater than for the RIK, as the antelope hates the jackal more than she fears the lion. Few prisoners are ever taken in the north, by either side.

  Amasia was not part of the prewar arms trade. It has no armaments factories or special skill or capacity to make weapons. General Sòng is determined to change that, but for now offworld supplies of everything are critical. Pink crystal magazines, armtraks, bot guns and artillery tubes, even quality cloth armor ‘utilities.’ That means readiness of the huge volunteer and conscript divisions depends on the luck and skill of the convoys weaving in from the inner L3 or outer L4, and not enough supply is getting through. Yet war won’t wait.

  After another barely held off offensive, Sòng has no choice but to deploy her unready, oversized Amasian divisions. They stomp off to war, the “iron hooves” who come from all over Lemuria. It’s a local term for unblooded soldiers. No one knows why, but everyon
e uses it. They go into combat short of everything. Cannon fodder, without heavies in support except for a few armtraks. In some Amasian divisions a majority don’t have basic field equipment. Just a set of plain blue utes, a helmet and HUD, a maser, combat knife, and grape bunch of frag grenades. Whenever they get into real bad trouble, Lian Sòng calls in her Armored Response Groups. Seven big unit ARGs are held back as an emergency reserve.

  Amasian divisions take the field under hasty local names: Azteca, Bolivar, Fei Tsue (“Emerald”), Huan (“Badger”), Jing (“Whale”), Ju (“Bamboo”), Manitoba, Ohio, Shan dian (“Lightning”), Siang (“Elephant”), Shi (“Lion”), Sioux, Texas, Twu Ying (“Eagle”), Wu (“Daring”), and Zhu (“Pig”). Wu’s flash is a cannon in silhouette, which is kinda odd since it’s just an oversized infantry division with no organic artillery. Sioux’s flash is a feathered headdress. Zhu’s shoulder patch is an angry black boar, bright red ring in an iron black snout. ‘Pig’ is a rare but proud, all rural unit.

  They’re a human breakwater holding back a surging tide. Sòng stacks them in the trenches like sandbags, or maybe big boulders in a delta levy straining against flood waters. At 200,000 fighters each, a ridiculous and ungainly number, Amasian divisions count on sheer infantry quantity to make up for poor training and woeful fire support. So they stand tall and fire masers at the green glide troops that come at them in waves. They take massive casualties from their first day of contact, but they hold the enemy at bay. They even move into Dark Territory in acts of desperate pushback that count on surprise over skill.