This War of Mine(s)

August, 475 IC, Odin

Yang's class schedule was packed. This annoyed him, since he had spent the vast majority of his life aboard his father's ship completing study modules at his own pace. For him, that meant that he would put aside one day every month to dedicate to doing nothing but math, speed through the course as quickly as possible, and then not think about it again until his next self-imposed math day. For his other subjects, he puttered along and did well, since they were both easier and more personally enjoyable. This relaxed approach to education left him with plenty of free time to use as he saw fit. That time was over now, though, and he had class every day, six hours a day, without even a break for lunch in the middle. That was a thirty class-hour schedule, not even counting the mandatory physical training on weekends. Was that normal?

He checked on the intranet to see the class lists of each of his courses. As the same student names popped up over and over, he began to realize what was going on. He had signed up to be in the military history department, and so was in all those first year classes, but it appeared that all the top scoring students (the top thirty or so) had been tracked together in the strategic warfare program. Yang was not in the strategic warfare program, but someone had put him in those classes anyway, either by accident or by design. He frowned at the screen, wondering if he should write a letter to the registrar asking to be dropped from the strategic warfare class list. But then he shook his head and closed his computer. Better not to make trouble. They'd figure out he didn't belong in those classes quickly enough when he did badly in them. He'd still do well in his history classes, of course.

If he couldn't ask the registrar, he could at least ask his mentor. This first question would at least serve as a test for if Eisenach was going to be prejudiced against him or not. He tapped out a question.

>hi Eisenach, this is Leigh, your mentee

>I've been given a double course load (all strat classes + all history classes)

>do I have to be worried about the strat classes? Are they difficult?

To Yang's surprise, Eisenach responded almost immediately.

>history is what I want to study

>I see.

>I'm not here to play power games

That had been a more pleasant interaction than Yang had been expecting, though it didn't fill him with confidence. He had to wonder what Eisenach thought they had in common. Maybe he also stood out like a sore thumb— Yang hadn't seen him in person, so he wouldn't be able to tell.

Regardless, Yang also had to get going to class. He stumbled into his first class about fifteen seconds late, having been unable to find the room. Everyone stared at him on his way in, which made him sweat and try to find an unobtrusive seat in the back. The professor ignored him, which at least was a relief.

The day didn't improve from there. All the first day classes passed in a blur, especially the last one, his afternoon class, because he hadn't eaten lunch. At least this first day was more concerned with passing out syllabi and going over course scope than it was about actually delivering information.

When he finally made it to the dining hall to try to get something to eat, he discovered the offerings to be very slim. Two in the afternoon was long past the acceptable lunch hour, so he was alone with just a cup of tea and a cold sandwich. Being alone was perfect, though, especially after feeling the animosity of his classmates during the day. Some of them were not hostile (Reuenthal stared at him a lot, which was somewhat unsettling but not dangerous feeling; Wahlen was nice enough; Bittenfeld acted the way he acted towards absolutely everybody;) but a lot of them very visibly couldn't stand him. Well, that was their problem, Yang supposed.

He did wonder what exactly he had gotten himself into, but when he looked around the empty dining hall, he decided that drinking tea and cracking open his history text to do the first reading were much more pleasant than being trapped in some kind of indentured servitude back on Phezzan. Only time would tell if it would stay that way.

All of Monday and Tuesday went by far too quickly, in a haze of theoretical classes, with Yang keeping entirely to himself. On Wednesday, though, Yang was faced with the class he was least looking forward to: the six hour long strats practical. He had pressed Eisenach for more detail and been told the following information: every student at the academy took a strats practical, but students in military history, administration, and engineering were all supposed to only have three hours a week of the course, not six; the strats practical was the subject that was most highly weighted when calculating rankings; and the class would alternate between pitting students against simulations and against each other.

Yang snuck into the room right before class started and found a seat that he calculated would put him the perfect distance from every other student, while not looking like he was intentionally avoiding anyone. The lecture hall was rather large, but the number of students who came in was only about thirty. The professor, a grey-haired man named Staden, stood at the front of the room, consulting a pocket watch for the optimal moment to begin class. Considering that there was a clock right on the wall to the left of the chalkboard, Yang thought the pocket watch was a little much.

Staden cleared his throat. "Welcome to your first class of the Strategic Warfare Practicum. I'm Captain Staden, your instructor for this course. We'll all be seeing quite a lot of each other, unless you drop rank severely. I run the top-level practicum for all four years of the SW cohort, as well as two sections for the engineering cohort.”

Staden went on, explaining more about how the class would work, and Yang paid attention, taking notes. They would have theory for the first hour, then play some kind of war game for the rest of class, with a break for lunch in the middle. For homework, there was theory reading and an analysis postmortem of how their war game went. Staden was apparently a bit of a luddite, preferring not to use computer grading and simulations for most of their battles, instead assigning members of the class to moderate the war game. Nobody playing the game or moderating would be aware of who they were interacting with.

He was happy to learn that there would be upperclassmen watching the game moderators, to make sure that all orders were interpreted fairly and in a way that made sense. It seemed like this would be an interesting challenge, at the very least. Yang hoped that he would be selected to be in the game moderator group, because it seemed like the most interesting, though that would also mean that he would have to work with a partner.

Staden described the scenario. It was apparently based on a real place, an incredibly snowy planet just on the other side of the Iserlohn corridor on which the "rebel fleet" had been gunning it out with the imperial forces for years. The planet was completely inhospitable, but full of natural resources. The simulation would be of a land battle, which interested Yang as well. There was something very pure about space battles. There was little in the way of landscape to them, so much less of the battle depended on the universe itself, merely the people in it and the decisions they made. Perhaps the subtle complications of land battles were better suited to human evaluation than computer-automated scoring.

Staden finished his lecture, and then each student was given a folded piece of paper that specified their role. Yang frowned when he realized he was going to actually be playing out the battle, and not being a moderator. He walked out of the lecture hall and took his assigned seat at one of the player stations, a little cubicle with a computer. He would type out his commands and receive information on the geography, troop movements, and reconnaissance through the computer-- it was easier that way than having couriers run messages back and forth to the GMs and other players in other rooms.

Yang was playing the attacking side, simulating the FPA. He tucked all his personal thoughts to the back of his mind and looked at the map. His base was on the far side of a mountain range, and his objective was to capture the rare metal mines on the other side of the range, protected by an imperial base. Ideally, he would want the mining equipment to be unharmed. At his disposal, he had a group of armored vehicles, a squadron of troops (with limited on-foot mobility, considering the blizzard climate), a limited amount of mobile artillery, and the stationary defenses of his base. There was no air support because the space above the planet was hotly contested and planes couldn't fly in the terrible weather.

Yang leaned back in his chair and waited for the game to start, thinking over the situation. It seemed to him to be a stupid thing to fight over. Though the mine was useful, it definitely wasn't worth the lives of the soldiers on both sides who were fighting to the death over it. If he had been in command of the whole operation, he would have simply destroyed the mine, or indeed the whole barren planet, rather than having the other side endlessly want to contest it. Of course, that was outside the scope of this simulation.

A bell rang and the game began.

He typed a note to the GMs. "Where is the food supply coming from? Both sides."

A note came back from the GM quickly. "Your food supply is two months of dry rations stored underneath your base. You do not have intelligence on how the enemy or mine town is supplied."

Hm. So starving them out probably wouldn't be an option, if they were as prepared as he was.

He consulted the map. His base was about five hundred kilometers distant from the other one, which would mean a difficult and plainly visible approach, if he were to just send out his armored vehicles.

He typed a note to the GM, "Do I have cold weather birds for messages?" Radio was a problematic thing, easily intercepted or blocked by the enemy.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Functionally unlimited."

Excellent. He could at least send out one way communications and get some reconnaissance going.

"Eight tanks, four soldiers each, dispatch for reconnaissance only. Circle enemy base/mine to see what defenses are in rear. Bird communication only. Timestamp immediately."

"Acknowledged. En route."

He closed his eyes and thought for a minute. A frontal assault on the base would be ridiculous; there would be no way that he could win, unless the enemy had way fewer armored vehicles than he did for some reason.

A bell chimed, informing him that he had a message. "Your base security spotted two enemy vehicles at this position." A marker lit up on the map.

Yang tapped his chin with his pen, then typed back. "Do not engage, but one tank follow at distance for observation. Send bird message back if enemy encampment encountered." Just in case, he wanted to make sure that the enemy wasn't camped out near him. For all he knew, the enemy could be intending to attack his base. It would not be unreasonable to expect that his opponent had been given a different objective than to simply defend his base, after all.

It would be advantageous for him if the enemy did try to attack him at his base, actually. That way, he could wipe out a section of their forces and head off himself while their base was weakly defended. But he doubted his opponent would be so stupid. What he needed to do was find a way to draw the enemy out of their base, winnow down their numbers without losing any of his tanks, then charge in.

That was tricky. The only thing that he could imagine would tempt the enemy to leave their base would be the sight of his own tanks on the horizon, but that would mean putting his own people in danger.

They weren't real, Yang reminded himself.

"Weather forecast for the next week?" Yang asked the GMs.

He received the information that a heavy blizzard would be descending on the area three days from now, but only the usual light snow before and after. Okay, maybe that was something that he could work with. Limited visibility could be useful to an attacker.

"Do I have landmines available?" Yang asked.

"Yes."

"Do they have to be deployed by hand? Or can they be aerially dropped?" A plan was forming in his mind, though he didn't like it. If the soldiers involved in it were real, and not just numbers sliding around a computer screen, he never would have seriously considered it, but they were just numbers, so he was free to be as creative as he could.

This answer took a longer than usual time to come back. The GMs were perhaps consulting one of the upperclassmen. "They must be deployed by hand."

Yang sighed, pulling his legs up to his chest and pressing them against the edge of the desk. He tapped out his next message. "Any news from my scouts?" It was a silly question to ask, considering that the timer had not yet advanced enough for the scouts to have seen anything and sent back a message. They wouldn't waste their limited birds on just reporting their position, unless there was something to actually say.

"Impatience is a sin, Hank von Leigh," Yang muttered to himself.

The fact that the timer was advancing relatively slowly made Yang worry that his opponent, whoever his opponent was, was doing something complicated that was absorbing the GMs' attention. Or maybe time just always advanced slowly early in these simulations as everyone set up their starting positions.

“Does the mine connect to the enemy base in any way? Specifically underground?” Yang asked.

“You do not have that information.”

Hm. Interesting. He would assume it was a yes, though. If he were the enemy commander, he would want a way to quickly enter the mine, should it be invaded. And if he were a civilian mine worker, he would want an ability to take refuge in the base, in that same situation.

“Do I have the ability to map underground passages if I can approach close enough?”

“No.”

The GM sent another message. “Your scout following the enemy’s scout has reported back that the enemy vehicles are proceeding directly to the enemy base.”

He had a thought. “Are messages being sent to me encrypted?”

“Yes.”

He let a little more time pass, hoping to hear back from the very first scouts he had sent out, the ones who were scoping out the enemy base. The report came back and looked pretty much as Yang had expected. There was a description of patrolling tanks, estimated troop strength, base defenses, et cetera. He was concerned most with the heavy artillery that was mounted on the base; his armored vehicles would be no match for it, if they came too close. Again, he wanted this to be a tank battle, but as little of one as possible.

He checked the time again, and then gave his orders. A lot of his plan relied on his opponent being somewhat stupid, or at least thinking that Yang was being stupid. He had to make sure that this was not a habit that he should get into, especially if he won, potentially underestimating the enemy. But if this was a real fight, well, Yang would not have wanted to be fighting it. He wouldn’t have kept a useless base on this planet. He wouldn’t try to seize the enemy’s well defended base. But a simulation was a simulation, so he had to act within the narrow lane that was being carved out for him.

A bell sounded and his computer screen went dark. All around him, his fellow students were stretching and standing.

“How’s it going?” a blonde haired guy asked the person next to him. Yang thought his name might be Kristoff von Stockhausen or something like that. He was going to have to do a better job of keeping everybody straight.

“Don’t talk about it,” came the sharp voice of one of the upperclassmen at the front of the room, who had been silently proctoring. “You have forty five minutes for lunch. Get back on time, or the simulation will restart without you, and you’ll end up losing.”

Yang trooped outside, grateful for the break. He pulled a sandwich from his bag, one that he had got from the cafeteria before the start of class, and sat down on the green lawn to eat. The sun was high and hot overhead, a sharp contrast to the harsh winter he had spent the morning imagining. His classmates milled around or left to get lunch in the cafeteria, all ignoring him, though not without first looking directly at him.

When he finished his sandwich, he lay back on the grass, arms underneath his head, and shut his eyes. There was a state right on the edge of falling asleep where he did his best thinking, he believed.

His peace didn’t last for too long, though, because as his classmates began to return from lunch, someone walked up to where Yang was laying, casting a shade over his face. Yang resisted the urge to open his eyes and see who it was. If he pretended to be asleep, maybe they would go away.

“Hey, von Leigh, what role are you playing?” It was the voice of von Deitch, who was number five, if Yang recalled correctly.

“It would be breaking the rules of the game for me to talk about it,” Yang said without opening his eyes. “I’d prefer not to develop a reputation as a cheater on my very first day.”

Deitch snorted. “But not the second?”

“Not then, either, but it’s the first day I’m worrying about right this moment.”

“You don’t win battles by not thinking about the long game.” That wasn’t Deitch’s voice, it was Gautier’s, the person directly behind Yang in the rankings. He didn’t like this.

“Luckily, this is school and not an actual war,” Yang said. “I can afford to take things one day at a time.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” Gautier said. “All the easier for me to take your spot.”

Yang still wasn’t opening his eyes. “You can have it. I’m not attached to the number.”

“Is there something you are attached to?” Deitch asked.

“Why in the world would I tell you that?” Yang asked.

“What kind of accent do you have?” Deitch pressed. “You don’t come from Odin.”

“I’m from Phezzan.”

“A Phezzani with no ambition to be at the top,” Gautier said. “That seems like a wrong combination if I’ve ever heard one.”

“It’s the truth.”

“It should make beating you easier,” Gautier said. “But it hardly feels like a fair contest.”

“It’s fair, as long as you don’t go talking about the game over lunch break,” Yang said with a smile. He could practically feel the glare that he imagined was on Gautier’s face.

“We’ll see who’s on top at the end of the day.”

"Sure. Good luck," Yang said. He kept his voice mild, but that didn't stop either Gautier or Deitch from giving his bag a sharp kick, sending its open contents spilling out. Yang tried not to flinch and was just glad that the kick had been at the bag rather than at him. He didn't open his eyes until they were gone; he waited for the sound of Gautier and Deitch's footsteps to fade before he sat up and collected his things.

When he did look around finally, he saw that the whole situation had been observed. That man Reuenthal was watching him again, leaning against the building, arms folded loosely across his chest. Yang met his stare, that time, and Reuenthal didn't back down, just put that weird half smile on his face. It was impossible to interpret. Yang stood, nodded at him, then picked up his bag and went back inside to take his place at his computer terminal.

Compared to interactions with his classmates, the simulation felt clear and easy to understand. Enough time had passed in game that the blizzard was going to descend on the area the next day, so Yang's plan went into action.

He sent out about half of his total tanks (he wanted to leave his own base defended) and all of his mobile artillery, positioning them just out of observational range of the enemy base. He also made the decision to move his command post with the tanks, which cut down significantly on the amount of information he was receiving (none from the base), but allowed him to change his plan on the fly, rather than hoping that his orders would be executed and succeed. By time they arrived in their positions near the enemy base, the blizzard was in full force. He then ordered them to creep forward in the low visibility conditions, and had soldiers lay land mines in strategic positions around all the entrances and fields around the base and mine. Not too close to the entrances— he didn't want to give the game up immediately— but close enough that he might be able to take out a good number of the enemy vehicles without firing a shot.

He hoped that the blizzard snow would cover up all evidence of the mines and would stop his soldiers from being seen. None of them reported back that they had been attacked (though several suffered frostbite and two went missing), so Yang was hopeful that they had not been seen. Before the blizzard ended, he pulled his tanks back out of the enemy's detection range. It was a hasty maneuver, but he hoped that it would work.

Then he further split his force, deciding that a quarter were going to go far out of their way and approach the mine from the opposite direction, hopefully after Yang had already taken out as much of the base defenses as he could with the force he retained. He didn't like splitting his forces, but he thought that a secondary prong of attack coming later might at least fluster the enemy commander. If flustering was all he could get, he would take it.

As the blizzard began to clear, being replaced with the usual windy snowfall of the planet, Yang began to charge his tanks in, aiming directly for the main entrance of the enemy base, ordering them to halt if they came close enough to set up their mobile artillery and begin shelling the base. He wished he had a cup of tea. Waiting for the GM to report the enemy's actions to him was making him twitchy. Yang closed his eyes, and only opened them when he heard the message chime.

"You are taking artillery fire from the enemy's base defenses. Current losses are—"

"Set up mobile artillery, target base defenses, have main body of tanks move back out of range of enemy guns." He needed to draw the enemy tanks out of their hole, which would only happen if they felt they were about to be overrun, which would only happen if he was able to take out enough of the base's artillery to approach safely. His mobile units were probably less powerful and fewer in number than the base's stationary defenses, but if he could take out enough of them... He drummed his fingers on the table. Next Wednesday, he would bring himself a thermos of tea, he decided. That would make this more pleasant. The TA could yell at him for liquids in the computer lab, but he wouldn't care.

"Enemy artillery operation has been reduced by 60%. You have three mobile artillery units remaining."

Well. Enough was enough. Yang ordered his tanks back in, charging in a wide half encircling formation around the main entrance of the enemy base. It would still take them a while to arrive, but he hoped that—

"Enemy tanks are emerging from base. Observed at these positions." The map view changed, showing dots for the observed tanks, as well as his own positions. Yes. Now, just a little further...

The enemy tanks entered the minefield. He ordered his tanks to open fire and his artillery to switch to shelling the approaching vehicles. If he could disguise any damage to enemy tanks as coming from projectiles rather than mines, even if just for a minute, that would allow even more tanks to muddle their way into his minefield, where they would ether be forced to retreat exactly along the path they had come out in, remain stationary targets, or charge forward and risk disaster.

Two things became clear immediately: it was the GMs, acting out the role as soldiers, who were not accurately simulating the battlefield situation; and the enemy commander knew exactly how to reorganize himself. Both of these things were bad for Yang. If the GMs weren't taking into account the battlefield confusion that Yang had hoped to create with his mines, and were instead allowing the enemy commander to reorganize immediately, his plan was less useful than he had hoped. And, if the enemy commander knew what he was doing, that also meant that Yang was not likely to win this engagement.

He had had a little bit of an advantage: the opening that his landmines created did give him some time to fire upon the enemy as they rearranged their battle lines and were forced to fire at the ground in front of them to clear a safe path towards Yang's tanks. But then the whole force of the base was coming out towards Yang, and it turned into a brutal struggle.

His half encirclement would be easily broken through, splitting his forces, so Yang had to waste time reorganizing into a tighter formation. Then it was the haze of battlefield confusion, and Yang did his best to get in between the enemy tanks and their base, in order to cut them off from retreating. While he succeeded at that, his numbers (small to begin with) were being whittled away. Since he had wormed his way right up to the base entrance, he had some soldiers exit their tanks and enter the enemy base. He lost contact with them after that, but he hoped the GMs would give them at least a fighting chance at taking the control room and maybe capturing the enemy commander.

It was a vicious fight, and it lasted a long time. Glancing at the real clock on the wall, Yang could see that they were coming right up on the end of class time, and most of his classmates had left already, having finished their battles one way or another. But Yang was deep into this fantasy battle, knuckles white as he tapped out commands to his imaginary troops. He was losing, he could tell just by the bare numbers, but he wasn't going to give up.

A message came from the GM. "Your detached force has breached the mine's defenses."

Yang let out a little laugh. So they hadn't been wiped out. That was a pleasant surprise.

But then a second note from the GM. "Base defenses are firing on the mine."

Ah, well, there went Yang's chance of actual victory. If the mine was ruined, he had failed. He should have taken out all of the base artillery, and maybe taken into account that there had to be some kind of self-destruct function underneath the mine, simply to stop him from getting control of it. In order to actually win, he would have had to force the enemy commander to surrender, which was not going to happen. His opponent was smart, from the way he moved his tanks, and proud, from the way he'd rather force a draw than give up. Would that translate to the actual battlefield, he wondered, when real people's lives were on the line, and not just numbers on paper?

Yang let out a little half laugh. If there was no win condition anymore, he might as well save as much of his forces as he could. Waste not, want not. He ordered his forces to withdraw, breaking through the encirclement and rejoining up away from the enemy base.

"@GMs. I'm retreating— there's no more win condition for me since the mine was destroyed. You can end the game now."

He got up from his chair with a yawn and a stretch. The proctoring TA gave him a flat and annoyed look. "I was hoping to get out of here early," he said.

"Sorry," Yang said with an apologetic smile. He was the last student in the room.

"Yeah, don't drag things out for so long next week. Try to win or lose quickly, okay?"

"I will do my best."

Outside the room, Yang stood alone in the hallway for a moment, leaning his head back against the stone wall and taking a few deep breaths. His heart was beating unexpectedly fast, and he felt as though he had been running all day. The sudden removal of tension was like ice water pouring through his arms and legs, waking him up and exhausting him all at once.

A door creaked open down the hall, and Reuenthal stepped out. He seemed relaxed, with that odd, tight smile on his face and his hands held behind his back. So, he had been playing against the number one.

"Hey, Reuenthal," Yang said, keeping his tone light. "Good game." He wanted to strike the delicate balance between Reuenthal not thinking that he was mocking him, and Reuenthal knowing that Yang wasn't angry at having lost.

Reuenthal paused, then turned and came towards Yang, who stiffened unintentionally. Reuenthal stuck out his hand. "Good game," he said.

They shook hands. Reuenthal had long, slender fingers, and his hands were cold as ice. Yang felt soft and sweaty in comparison. The intense and prolonged eye contact made Yang uncomfortable, but he wasn't going to back down here.

"I look forward to our rematch," Reuenthal said finally, then dropped his hand.

Yang rubbed the back of his head. "We'll have to play other people before we match each other again. And by then I'm sure I will have lost my number two spot."

"Oh?"

"I'm not that invested."

"Is that why you retreated right as the GM was telling me the doors to my command center were being fired on?"

Yang shrugged. "I had already lost at that point. You could have wiped out my tanks if I'd stayed much longer, and then everyone left would have been stranded, and..." He shook his head. "It was a pointless battle anyway. The planet isn't worth the effort."

"In a sense." Reuenthal was contemplative.

"What do you mean?"

"You should decide what level you're playing the game on, von Leigh." And then Reuenthal was off, headed down the hallway, leaving Yang feeling much more confused than he had been when he started.