When Eiji was sent back out, a new commander, it wasn’t to Hansilla or Ajanum or any of the other Middle Front battlefields on which he had served all the previous years of his combat duty. He was sent deep south, the ultramarine waters of Panthalassa pulsing in and out of view from the windows of the military train. He was sent into the wet, rotting heat of Membei, a city in the province of Onjikuo.
Onjikuo was nothing like Hansilla or Ajanum; the unbelievable, sweltering humidity was only where the difference began. The more remote regions, the southern borderlands, could in places hardly be called civilized at all. Street violence among civilians was commonplace, from religious warfare among the indigenous sects to duels over matters of honor and mortal family feuds among the descendants of some of the earliest Meihonese colonists, frozen in the mentality of a bygone era. On top of this were power wars among would-be criminal syndicates who had flocked from all over the Empire (and even from neighboring Kolsivite territories) to traffic in all kinds of graft, attracted by the general lawlessness of the region.
Membei could easily be called the wildest of the major cities in the province, and in this festering dungheap chaos had given way to popular unrest and finally, thanks to clandestine agitation by Kolsivite agents, full-scale nationalist revolt. Unit Mirai’s maiden operation was the crushing of this rebellion. The order was for the quick and merciless extermination of the revolt’s central leadership, including the capture or assassination of no small number of identified Kolsivite spies.
It was a mission well beneath of the office of the newly-christened top tier of the Expeditionary Forces. No one pretended otherwise. It was work for the Imperial Guard. A rear unit, if Reizei at all. But Eiji, Yuuhei, and their troops saw it for what it was. A show of force in the region for the benefit of the colonized masses, and for the Kolsivite hordes just over the border. It was also an extension of training, a team-building exercise for the new unit. Graduation.
Not a soul from brass to boot believed that the overkill of obliterating a civilian uprising with the unrestrained force of the military’s top assault unit would really solve the problems in this region. High Command had legions of guildsmen waiting to flood the city, bureaucrats standing by to establish a firm and final governance over it as soon as the blood was washed from the streets.
The first sign of the rebellion’s ineptitude and the sure overkill of sending Mirai as a response was the train. Despite having successfully driven the Meihonese occupational government out of the city, having killed several officials in the process, the rebels had not bothered to seize control of the rail station. Or they hadn’t known how to operate its controls. Their military train carrying Unit Mirai rolled unhindered into the heart of the city. For Yuuhei this brought a sense of confidence and ease; for Eiji, something close to guilt.
They unloaded rapidly. Eiji assigned seven soldiers to stay behind and guard the rail station; another military train was due to arrive soon after, carrying their heavy assault equipment for general deployment to the Southern Front. The rest of the troop, numbering around sixty, moved on the old offices of the Meihonese occupational government.
A block and a half down the street, the first shots were fired. Five gunmen with bolt-action rifles at least two decades old took several haphazard shots in the general direction of the Reizei from windows and doorways. The troop returned fire in unison, the salvos from their automatic rifles finding targets as easily as if they had been fired from point-blank. The Onji gunmen collapsed with faces and windpipes imploded, skin and bone tattered like wet paper targets, more holes than surface to punch them through.
On every corner they encountered another small pocket of resistance, to the extent that it could be called resistance at all. Each time, Mirai butchered the rebel defenders, pouring Onji blood into the street liberally.
The Reizei shed not a drop of their own. The rebels were not trained soldiers. A number of them took to reloading their guns completely in the open, forgetting in their panic even the basic necessity of taking cover in a gunfight. When they were shot down, it was oftener than not by several soldiers shooting in unison like a firing squad, skulls bursting like so much cabbage. Some of these slain were boys no older than thirteen, in clothing that was already bullet-perforated when they put it on. Barefoot.
At the government building, resistance intensified. The rebels had boarded up all the windows on the ground level and some on the second floor. Large rice sacks filled with sand or garbage or rocks, whatever was at hand, were stacked as makeshift barricades in the parking lot and courtyard, behind which the Onji militia crouched, firing upon Mirai’s advance. The Reizei baited them, settling safely behind cover while the rebels depleted their ammunition. Their textbook predictability was gut-clenching. In the space of these few unchallenged moments while the rebels were reloading their weapons, half the Mirai soldiers stepped into the open to rain grenades upon their positions. The rest dumped bullets head-on into the barricades and the boarded windows, which now put to the test seemed mere visual obstructions for all they did to slow or stop the lead. The clusters of grenades came down like a meteor shower, like a fireworks display gone wrong, finding their intended kill zones with such accuracy that blood mist and bone gristle and small strips of ripped flesh still drizzled down in the breeze even an hour later in that smoky air like so much confetti after a festival.
Eiji split his force again, this time into three; one to storm the building and two to circle it from either side and cut off the retreat of any of their primary targets. He himself headed the infiltration team, while Yuuhei went at the fore of one of the flanks.
At the rear parking lot of the building, Yuuhei’s team came upon three parked, idling auto-carriages and a single large auto-wagon, all of Kolsivite civilian make. He gestured with his fingers. They shot the drivers dead through their windshields and moved in to surround. They held their triggers back, pouring bullets into the windows such that even the briefcases stored under the seats were later found shot through.
Just then the intended evacuees for whom this transport had been waiting began to emerge from service exits on the back of the building. The sound of the doors creaking open caught Yuuhei’s attention just in time, but even before he could raise his gun or call an order, the evacuees were shot down in the doorways, spraying blood back onto those filing out behind them. The other flanking team had arrived and was firing into the doors at around knee level, the better to leave any high value targets identifiable while alive.
Yuuhei led a charge on the nearest doorway and drew his sword, hacking the head, one arm and its shoulder off of the first man he reached and splitting the next very nearly in two at the waist. Inside was a network of narrow concrete corridors, and no less than nine men were crowded into where his line of sight could reach. He let his assault rifle hang from its shoulder strap and drew his submachine-pistol, firing freely into that crowd of bodies. When the clip was expended, he lay into them with his sword, cutting the already-wounded apart one-by-one with steady, exacting strokes.
“We got two of the Kolsivites here,” called a voice from the other doorway.
Yuuhei emerged, his ornate armor and uniform wet with blood, to find the other team dragging two blonde-haired and blue-eyed men across the pavement by their collars. One of these men had been shot through both shins – one boot flopped loosely as it was drug, still attached to his leg but twisting limply as if it contained not a foot but seawater and flotsam. The other boot terminated just above the ankle in a bloom of shredded leather like flower petals, the tip of chalk-white longbone sticking from the meat within like the obscene reproductive organ of some jungle flower. He was breathing a labored but steady rhythm, his brow knit and teeth bared in a mask of agony, but his eyes were vacant in that telltale look of shock, like the most essential part of him was already dead.
The other man was moaning some primeval incantation to his god in the old Kolsivite tongue, gasping at intervals, shot as he was around a dozen times through the pelvis and thighs, his pants all carmine and syrupy wet. Their rough faces glistened with beads of sweat.
“Sir, positive ID on two of the targets,” came the report, as the soldiers waited expectantly for Yuuhei’s command to return them to the train station. Yuuhei nodded, and replaced the clip on his submachine-pistol, turned the gun in his hands to inspect the muzzle and frame. He shot both Kolsivite men through the throats.
“Get their photos,” he said, “and let’s move out.”
They went inside, backtracking along the path of the evacuees until they came to a large, high-ceilinged chamber with toppled furniture, cushions and desks and desk drawers scattered all over the floor. The still-warm, leaking, occasionally twitching bodies of Onji rebels and Kolsivite agents lying among the clutter. Eiji and the infiltration team were in the chamber, crowded around a large table near the center of the room.
Yuuhei gave Eiji a summary of the events outside. Evacuees killed to the last without a single prisoner taken. Eiji was silent at this, but he didn’t scrutinize Yuuhei’s face for long.
“There is a map of the city here,” he said, indicating the large printed cloth draped like finery over the table, with painted wooden blocks lying in clusters at points, “and they seem to have been planning their movements on it. In addition to here and the governor’s palace, it looks like they put together a stronghold in one other place,” he waved his finger in the direction of one of the piles of blocks, “in the northeast of the city. No telling what the building is, though. It’s outside the industrial and government zones.”
“I’ll go look into it,” Yuuhei said. Remembering the troops around them, he added, “sir.”
