Exodus: The Orion War Read online

  Not trying to take cover.

  They’re utterly defiant.

  Terrible and terrifying.

  Proud, filthy, exhausted.

  Wreckers and brave firefighters of Relief One.

  Comrades who raced into hellfire to meet the Wreckers.

  They move together over upturned, smoking soil, brown splashed with red, littered with thousands of whole and partly rendered corpses. Those from older firefights mixing unbiased with new dead torn apart by the mine blast and plasma bombardment. Or from the infantry fight right after.

  “Gods, they slaughtered all our boys.”

  RIK has picked up the last several minutes of Madjenik’s unit coms, broadcast in the clear as it neared Relief One. They know who these fighters are now, where they came from, and that they’re the ones who humiliated an Oetkert cousin and a whole division in the south before coming to Toruń.

  “Look, in the middle of the wedge. Who’s that?”

  “No! By Purity and the Black Faith!”

  “It’s the Ghost! The Ghost of the Wood is here!”

  Begrudgingly, one of the watching battalion officers says: “They’re tough. I have to admit it. I could almost admire these tawny bastards.”

  No one disagrees. For the first time, watching Rikugun who brought fear and calamity to Genève know that they also fear the deadly fighters in dirty tan weaves limping into Toruń.

  Data search: navies.

  Result: deterrence.

  Historia Humana, Volume XX, Part VI (d)

  The energy revolution that underlay the Second Age of Expansion finally arrived with true controllable and miniaturized fusion, the nudging of deuterium and tritium atoms with tiny lasers until they overcame the atomic repulsion barrier and fused inside magnetic containment chambers. Radical miniaturization came next, with the development of compact tori allowing low-field magnetic plasma containment. That had the biggest effect on land and ship weapons during the First, Second, and Third Orion Wars. Since then, still lower-threshold tokamaks permit small ground plasma-cannon mounted on armtraks, while tiny plasma drives diversified missile and warship design so that today’s navies have many varied classes, unlike the older navies that centered on a single battleship or ‘ship-of-the-line’ model, and attendant tactics.

  Some plasma charges can be stored in spherical magno-chambers as small as a walnut. This makes possible ship-to-ship missiles (‘torpedoes’) as well as broadside and chase plasma-cannon of huge destructive power, supplementing older kinetic and laser weapons. It also means smaller ships can carry a very large punch, which encourages experimentation in size, weapons systems, and overall hull design. Finally, it allows navies to design specific ship types to serve specific strategic and tactical roles. All major star states and many smaller ones have built ships deploying the new weapons systems and theory. Fortunately, naval development is still untested and unused in real war, as we remain deep inside the blessed or Shōwa Age.

  There are critics of modern navalism who say its ideas about strategic balance lead instead to needless expansion of all navies, and thus raise costs and tensions in Orion. Some accuse Kars School theorists of providing cover for less than noble interests, justifying and expanding budgets that were cut severely over the first 200 years of the Peace of Orion. They say navalism serves mainly special interests, not the real demands of defense. The most radical say that building powerful battleships and fleets of cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers to guarantee peace only makes war more likely. That putting instruments of war in the hands of policy-makers only tempts them to aggression, since the new navies might be used as easily as a sword than as a shield. They say Orion must disarm, universally or unilaterally, stand down all its armies and navies if we are to continue within the Long Peace.

  Proponents of military preparedness as the preserver of peace reject this claim and idea out of hand, in the name of moral and political realism. They retort that such critics are fatal naïfs who do not understand that we humans shall have war always, even if our current moment in Orion is entirely peaceful. They argue the record of our past to counter those who would disarm today in hope for a better tomorrow. They point especially to the fate of Setubal and Lugo in the Third Orion War as bitter examples of what a lack of military and specifically naval readiness might mean should war return some day to ravage the star states and peoples of Orion. It is an ancient debate, engaging sages of war and peace arguing over millennia. It has been argued up and down the length and across the breadth of the thousand histories of the Thousand Worlds of our great spiral arm civilization.

  Fortunately, the drums of war beat only in that history. The star states of Orion today prepare for war, but only to keep peace through military balance and deterrence. We have achieved a fine balance, order and stability. We guarantee it in the blessed treaty known as the ‘Peace of Orion’ that codified the settlement ending the Third Orion War nearly 300 years ago. That great document set up the safeguards that have kept peace ever since, along with the great and majestic navies that today patrol the star lanes and borders where the major empires meet.

  Technological shifts since the Peace of Orion was agreed mean new weapons became possible, then become facts. Yet the will to use them remains suppressed, as vestigial in our advanced time as an appendix. As extinct as Old Earth dinosaur bones kept in museum cases. We are deep in what many call the new Satya Yuga, the age of truth, virtue and righteousness. Only the second in our long and too often sordid history. Others call this time the Shōwa Age.

  By whatever name, the idea that conflict could lead back to war is only an echo of past hatreds, a relic of our former folly and inertia of culture and imagination. We moderns have demonstrated the wisdom to forgo war. We are beyond war. We have together decided to never again lose in war a future Mozart or a Wang, or some other yet unknown and unrequited youth of eternal talent secretly embedded in the billions whom war would take before their due time, foreshortening their Youthspan and denying their talent to those who stay behind...

  Parade

  Survivors of ‘The Battle of the Crater’ who stagger through the Berm Gate are in pretty rough shape. Rougher even than tens of thousands of rejected refugees camped and penned just inside the berm wall, still denied access to the city proper on General Constance’s firm order.

  As Tom Hipper stumbles past the hopeless huddle he’s appalled. Some look to be as filthy and bad off, or worse, than Easy platoon. And his troops spent months trekking here.

  “Who are they?”

  “They got no ID, corporal. Least ways, not a valid one.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “General says, ‘don’t let ‘em in,’ so I don’t let ‘em in.”

  “But they’re our people!”

  “Orders. You know.”

  “Orders can change...”

  “Look son, don’t worry about it. Trust the general.”

  Tom can’t linger to find out more or to protest. He must see to Easy’s wounded, some of whom are dying. Of course they’re given suspend by medics attached to Relief One right on the battlefield, but at least three won’t make it if they’re ever unfrozen.

  “Reanimate them and they’ll die in minutes,” says the KRA surgeon who looks them over in a quick triage just inside the Berm Gate. “We can fix a good deal, but not everything.”

  Tom is at his wits end what to do, and is glad when the worst of the wounded are taken away from him by the surgeon and carried off to somewhere inside the city. Only then does he think once more about the pathetic souls still outside the inner perimeter.

  When RIK besiegers arrived outside the berm General Constance rescinded one tenet of her earlier martial law decree, her decision to bar possible fifth columnists from entry. Moved by mercy, she let all civis through the Gate to at least huddle inside the berm. She gives them rations and water but that’s it. She still denies them entry into the city proper. They stay in berm camps or restrictive pens, all under armed
guard just inside the interior of the berm wall.

  When Madjenik arrives there’s an effective second city of sooty tents, huts and pens, packed against the inner firewall, atop the flat firebreak that runs all around Toruń’s perimeter between a squat earthen inner wall and the superconcrete covered and reinforced outer berm. It’s a grimy reminder that some Krevans collaborated with the invaders before the war. Like the faceless boy Zofia shot, and Jan ordered left hidden to rot and serve as food for tree ants.

  These ‘second city’ refugees are almost all natives of Genève, yet are rejected by Toruń City Police and Spaceport Security. Even their biometric scans are suspect. And how do you prove personal loyalty when forests that stood unharmed and protected for over a thousand years are burning all around, while across Krevo worlds are falling to brutes and brutality?

  ‘At least they’re still alive and safe inside the berm, and as well fed as anyone else. I suppose we have to do it. Just seems such a shame, to do it to our own. Fuck, I hate this war.’

  There’s no need to vet Madjenik. Gate guards know, or think they do, all about the forest fights and long trek by “Wysocki’s Wreckers.” Madjenik’s exploits have been the talk of all Toruń for months, its real deeds but even more those wholly imagined in tall tales that grow longer with each retelling. The city’s interest in Madjenik goes as far back as when the ‘Lost Company’ fought off and then obliterated pursuing hover scouts way back in Pilsudski Wood.

  “That Ghost is running rings around the enemy!”

  “They’ll never catch him or the Lost Company. Hurray!”

  “He gave them scouts what for, that’s certain true.”

  “He’s gone quiet now. You just wait. He’ll be back.”

  Since all Genèven broadcasting went down and military coms went out within a day of the breakthrough and flight from the MDL, the only source of information on Madjenik has been RIK milneb chatter intercepted by the KRA in Toruń. Desperate hope did the rest.

  The stories kept Toruńite spirits up for a while, until General Brusilov went live with a proclamation of total victory in the south and boasted of his “extermination of all the forest bandits.” No one believed the fat windbag, until RSU staff showed off piles of fake corpses in wheat-tan weaves in a propaganda vid broadcast night and day directly into Toruń. Hope and morale plunged after that. Behind even Brusilov’s lies must be the truth of Madjenik’s death.

  Madjenik trekked silently north, all the while given up for real ghosts or worse by despairing Toruńites who no longer expected to hear good news from anywhere outside the berm. What did stories to thrill children matter anyway, as their city girded for its final battle?

  Then came an astonishing contact. Months ago, Constance ordered TCC to routinely sweep all KRA com-link channels. No one was more surprised when the beam picked up Jan’s command-link, rediscovering lost Madjenik and connecting it to the Toruń garrison and HQ.

  It wasn’t until just two hours ago that ordinary fighters and civilian Toruńites learned that Madjenik is still alive, and unbelievably, is heading over the bridge toward the Berm Gate. The first, rather loud hint only came when the mine went off and an intense barrage began just outside the berm. Most folks thought it was the beginning of the end, the start of the final RIK assault and last battle. Thought that RIK and SAC troops would be in the streets in just hours or days, breaking into the golden city of burnished wood streets and polished towers. It makes the news of Madjenik’s arrival seem even more miraculous. Millions rush to see for themselves.

  Over three million line the Grand Boulevard leading from the Gate to the inner city, to Governance Square and Old Towne Hall. They’re all there to see the Ghost and Lost Company. Even if the forest stories are only half-true, or less, everyone waiting knows what just took place outside the city’s walls. They’re there to cheer the first good news in months, a rare story of life triumphing over death and Krevans over Grünen. To celebrate the safe arrival of a gritty cohort everyone except its unprepossessing captain is calling “Wysocki’s Wreckers.”

  Madjenik’s too humble leader doesn’t know it yet, but his name along with tall tales of his exploits in the forests and at ‘The Crater’ is spreading far beyond even Genève, to wherever holdout Krevans cling to a thread of hope or hate. Wherever there’s still resistance.

  How could he know that General Constance gave orders months back to make sure that Jan’s story, the tale of the Ghost of the Woods, was spread across Krevo and out into all Orion? He doesn’t know that she signed a report just minutes ago that’s on the way to Aral, saying the Battle of the Crater plan was his, not hers. Constance is playing a very long game, indeed. Jan isn’t even aware that he’s on the board, let alone the key piece in her grand strategic design,

  A clean, young lieutenant offers a crisp salute and salutations. “Welcome captain. It’s a real honor to have an officer and hero like you here in Toruń.”

  “I don’t know about that. I do know I wouldn’t be here without my NCOs, and without Relief One coming out to lead us in. But thank you, lieutenant. We’re all very glad to be here.”

  ‘He’s just as described: modest to a fault, at least on the outside. I wonder how deep that trait really runs? Is my general right about this man? Is he the future of our resistance?’

  Jan is debriefed in a guardhouse in the dark middle of the tunnel by Lieutenant Dylan Byers, the neatly dressed and highly professional officer from Constance’s command staff.

  “HQ already has your combat logs, uploaded from your HUD. Your formal after-action and mission reports can wait for a day or two, after you rest up and settle in.”

  “Appreciate that. I’ll need some time to set up and settle Madjenik in the city.”

  “Let me help you with that, captain. It would be my privilege.” He turns to a nearby NCO. “Corporal, see to the captain’s equipment and to other personal needs.”

  “I’d rather he took care of my fighters first, lieutenant.”

  “Of course. Corporal, bring me a list of all possible quarters for, let’s call it just under 300 fighters. Then see to the captain himself.”

  He turns back to Jan. “Alright?”

  “Thank you, lieutenant.”

  “No need to thank me, sir. But I have to tell you, food and water closets and the like are not a problem, but it won’t be easy finding you all bunks. We’re pretty much overfull already.”

  “I shouldn’t think Madjenik will be in them very long. Looks like there are a lot more visitors outside who won’t want to share when they get here.”

  ‘He’s bitterly realistic and darkly humored, just as MI reported. How interesting.’

  “I’ll rejoin you as soon as I can, captain.”

  “We’re done already?”

  “I must speak to your NCOs now.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Yes, do that.”

  “But I look forward to your field reports, when you’re ready.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you right now?”

  “If I could just have some of that coffee while I wait? It’s been months...”

  “Corporal!”

  Oddly, Dylan Byers takes a lot longer talking with Zofia and the NCOs than with Jan, whom he passes down the line. Jan notices and notes the fact, but doesn’t dwell on it. He meant what he said about seeing to the needs of Madjenik first. After he finishes the java, of course.

  ‘Gods, it’s like drinking liquid silk. How can anything be this good?’ He finishes a third mug as he moves to the far end of the tunnel where he waits for Madjenik to be debriefed.

  Jan doesn’t like the almost worshipful looks he gets from faces in the crowd peering into the tunnel end, where he stands with his back against the cold, damp wall waiting for Zofia and Madjenik to finish talking to Byers and catch him up. Then he decides he’s too tired to care who or why anyone is staring at him or what all the odd looks and whispering is really about.

  ‘It’s just all the mud and blood I forgot is all o
ver my weaves. I also forgot about my three-month old beard. I wonder what I look like? Good thing there’s no mirrors in this tunnel. Probably like I need a handout and a hand up. Surely not like a proper officer, not like that young lieutenant. You could serve cold desert to a virgin off his polished brass buttons.”

  He’s glad it’s all over, his heavy burden of command. Feels it nearing the end as he watches his veterans shuffle up with stiff gaits, each man or woman still throwing exhausted shoulders back as they pass by to receive his salute, which he gives in honor of their sacrifice.

  He’s a little proud that he got them to Toruń, but certain that the general will relieve him immediately, once she reads his after-action reports. Certain because he’ll write them in such a way that she’ll have no choice but to give the company to some more deserving officer.

  He thinks they must all be relieved to be out from under his command, that more senior or at least better officers will soon be back in charge of Madjenik. Glad that he won’t be able to fail them again, like he did at the MDL. Glad there’s no more chance that he’ll get them killed by making some huge error, or leave them behind as he runs from battle and his responsibility.