Imperial Legions

Trope-a-Day: Fantastic Fighting Styles

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Fantastic Fighting Style: Quite a few.

The common characteristic of almost all of them, it should be noted, given the Imperial sensibilities towards casual violence, is that almost all of them are militantly unsuitable for “social” fighting. There are sparring forms, but still.  These are killing arts, even the ones taught for self-defense, and no-one pretends differently.

Starting with the most common and simply named of them, we begin with Legionary armatura, the official fighting style of the Imperial Legions. As such, of course, it is an aggressive, offense-oriented style focused on efficacious, efficient maiming and killing, designed to be very good at utilizing weaknesses and very ungentlemanly, by which I mean appallingly Combat Pragmatic, moves – the distillation of literally millennia of dirty tricks.

Given the aforementioned Imperial sensibilities towards casual violence, it should also not surprise anyone that it’s the source of the basic forms taught to everyone for self-defense – it being considered that amateurs can’t afford to muck about with the more complex arts the constabulary use for capture and restraint, and should save their damn lives by putting their attacker down now.

It also has some other specialized offshoots, such as Military Zero-G – which is a combination of the armatura with freefighting, a martial art specifically designed for microgravity, and indeed with optimized forms for those clades which find four arms a much better option than having legs under such circumstances – and Piston-Driven Fist Form, which is Legionary armatura revised for use by people wearing a half-ton of powered combat exoskeleton, to name the most notable.

Other well-known arts, apart from freefighting, include the Dance of Fang and Claw (a natural-weapons-focused style for quadrupeds with sharp claws and sharper teeth); Moonlight and Shadows Form (a style emphasizing silence, invisibility, and subtlety, favored by spies and assassins); Elegant Twin-Blade Warrior Style (for duelists, who need to look rather sharper at the kill than Legionary armatura permits); Silken Courtesan Style (the defensive art of the courtier and courtesan, concentrating on grace, improvised weapons, countering assassin techniques, and staying alive while unarmored; see also Waif-Fu); and Synthetic Heroism Methodology (kung-fu specifically optimized for robots).

But even this merely scratches the surface. A culture which believes that even unfortunate necessities must be done well, and with beauty, develops – shall we say – a lot of martial arts…

Trope-a-Day: Waif-Fu

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Waif-Fu: Some of the Empire’s Fantastic Fighting Styles (coming tomorrow) are like this – particularly those like, say, Silken Courtesan Style, which was intended for the courtier or courtesan required to fight when out of armor and with only opportunistic weapons (and which does include over 200 ways to inflict death and maiming through skillful use of a silk or paper fan, so…), but by no means all of them are.

(It is also somewhat subverted inasmuch as while there are a lot of eldrae who, apart from height, look the part, it’s not the quantity of muscle tissue that counts, so much as the quality.  They may be slender, but they are disproportionately strong – and if they happen to be ex-Legion with the various military-basic upgrades, that may be “ties knots in metal bars for practice” strong.)

The Art of War

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“A war either is legitimate and justified by the Contract, by the Charter, by the codes of the sentinel, by the writ of Dúréníän, and under the imperishable eyes of Heaven, or it is not.”

“A legitimate war is one whose goals are in accordance with ethics and the Imperial purpose. Such wars may be fought for the defense of the Empire and its citizen-shareholders, for the defense of the Empire’s protectorates and allies, for the defense of Imperial trade, for the suppression of rebellion or the destruction of other forces inimical to civilization, and for the expansion of the Empire’s benign influence into uncivilized regions.”

“Only the anathematic may be destroyed entirely, root and branch, twig and leaf; for any war save seredhain alone, the Warmain’s aim must be peace, order, and liberty, not destruction. When a war is didactic, or surgical, the destruction of the supplies, soldiers, and fortifications of the enemy is permissible, but every effort should be made instead to seize them and carry them off, and the persons and goods uninvolved in the war must remain inviolate so far as it is possible.”

“When a war is of annexation, battle plans must be laid with the intent to capture one’s objectives and make them one’s own, rather than to destroy them. Cities, once occupied, become one’s own and should be treated as one’s home. People, once conquered, are to be shown the hospitality of one’s own cousins. The soldiers of an enemy deemed worthy of annexation are to be respected as comrades to be.”

“A mass that expands without adding to itself becomes brittle, and is easily shattered and swept aside. So also an Empire that expands by destruction, leaving ruin in its wake. Only by preservation and incorporation, in adding the wisdom and strength of one’s enemies to one’s own, can an Empire grow and remain strong. The Warmain who wins a thousand battles and leaves none alive betrays the Empire and weakens his legions. The Warmain whose enemies surrender before a battle is fought is worthy of the highest praise.”

“The legionary excellence cannot conduct a war that is not legitimate, whether as Warmain or as Legionary, in the battle or in the train, at vanguard or in the rear, and retain his excellence. Let the legions commanded to engage in such wars refuse their service to the Warmain who demands it. Let the legionaries ordered into such battles overthrow their commanders and bring them to judgment. Let all legionaries excellence remember that the first duty is to the Empire, and not to the war.”

– The Imperishable Axioms of the Legionary Excellence

Out-of-Sequence Trope-a-Day: Space Marine

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(Reason for out-of-sequencing: to express, in the light of this story, the sentiment that GW can kiss my authorial ass, too.  Along with everyone else who has ever used the term, whose earliest usage that I am aware of dates to the 1920s.  Come sue me, melonfarmers.)

Space Marine: Yep.  Except, as we said back in [will in the future say in] Space is an Ocean, they’re just regular legionaries who happen to be assigned to ships, habs, drifts, etc. in space, so in practice, the entire ground-based military of the Empire are Space Marines, or at least one assignment order away from it.  (When so much of your territory is, well, space, why would you even bother training troops that can’t operate in it?)

And, yes, they all wear some kind of Powered Armor, but the heavy legionaries play this to the max with their walking-tank-style combat exoskeletons.

The Sound Of Your Doom

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There have been many battle-cries and war chants throughout history.  Every legion has its own, indeed often several for different occasions, as do the House guards, most mercenary companies, and other military organizations great and small.  Of all these, the most infamous are the Final Words of the destroyed Ninth Imperial Legion, the Hounds of Makrast:

Dármódan xalakhassár hál!

The words themselves are simple enough, from the clipped military dialect of Eldraeic: “Slavers, die!” would be a good colloquial translation.

The meaning of the phrase, however, is rather more.  In honor of the destruction of the Ninth, it is reserved for use during seredhain, the blood war, the war of extermination of anathema; its meaning, then, is that everyone dies today – either the enemy will be annihilated, or the Legion destroyed, attempting it.  Neither quarter nor mercy shall be given, no lives shall be spared, no prisoners taken, no surrenders accepted.

It is the Legions’ boast that none who have heard it in anger have lived long enough to report the experience.

Trope-a-Day: Drinking on Duty

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Drinking On Duty: Averted inasmuch as neither the Imperial Navy nor the Imperial Legions, nor indeed any other part of the Imperial Military Service is dry, even on duty.  Drinking enough to render yourself unfit for duty, on the other hand, and the punishment for same, is played very straight indeed.

On the third hand, between the biotech upgrades you start out with and the ones which you acquire mid-way through boot camp for your shiny new military-basic body, you would have to drink truly heroic quantities of booze – enough that you’re unlikely to be able to have it with you on post, unless your duty station is engineering and you’re slurping the reactor coolant directly – in order to render yourself unfit anyway.  (This does mean that you can’t drink to forget the horrors of war, but since you can visit a memory redactor for that, it’s probably not so bad a trade-off.)

Trope-a-Day: Church Militant

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Church Militant: The eikones revered by the Church of the Flame include two war gods, arguably so described: Dúréníän, eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy and tactics, and patron of the sentinels; and Kalasané, eikone of battle, courage, valor, victory through strength, and personal combat.  Their combined religious order, logically enough, is made up entirely of heavily armed and appropriately deadly templars – and when I say appropriately deadly, I do mean that in the modern age, they’re stomping around in much the same power armor as the actual Imperial Military Service uses.  (No bludgeoning weapons here out of a “commitment to peace”; they are very clear about Coming In War, and Gods Being On The Side Of The Big Weapons.  Also, not terribly keen on converting by the sword – they’re religiously militant, not militantly religious, if you see what I mean.)

They also supply all the military chaplains, which in the Imperial Legions is not a noncombatant position.  If anything, it’s a more combatant position than “legionary”… if one considers enthusiasm anything to go by.

Trope-a-Day: Powered Armor

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Powered Armor: In multiple kinds.  Regular legionary armor (also used by the Watch Constabulary, and indeed similar suits without the militarization are used in the civilian construction and other hazardous-environment industries) provides only moderate power-assist, but does come with kinetic barriers, self-contained environmental support/NNBC protection, medical and tactical computer support, and limited vector-control flight ability.  (Although those limited assists do still let you wuxia it up with the best of them… only with overpowered guns.)

The full combat exoskeleton of a heavy legionary is a walking tank with interchangeable heavy weapon packs that turns it Up To Eleven, letting its wearer punch out small buildings, throw respectably-sized vehicles, dance a merry jig amid venting fusion plasma, and toss around nuclear grenades at close range.  (And yes, they have civilian versions, too.  They’re used for things like cleaning up melted-down reactor cores from the inside, while they’re still hot.)

Both of them include substantial mesh-networked combat drone control capability.

Well, Sometimes It’s Also A Metaphor

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When you become a sniper, they cut out your hearts.

This is not a metaphor.  It’s a difficult series of surgical operations, considering all the things they did to your skin and bone and sinew when you passed the Anvil to prevent the enemy from getting near either of them, but difficult or not, replacing them with constant-pressure cyberpumps is necessary to get an LS-series vocspec.

To hit something at ten-thousand yards, you can’t afford any tremble in your hands.  The photonic nerves everyone uses these days are a good start.  The breather hemocules and milspec glands we gave you at the end of basic take care of fatigue-based muscle tremors.

But if you really want to compete in this game, you can’t have a pulse.

Anvils Should Be Warm (2/2)

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The recruits shivered in the cold wind and ankle-deep slush, a ragged sextet of double lines stretching across the Agoge landing field, gazing around them in puzzlement at the empty, frozen wastes stretching to the moon’s horizon in every direction in the dim and ruddy light of distant Arvael and the stormy face of Bastion overhead.

The crack of an activated address system drew their attention, as one, to a single legionary standing by the gate.

”Good day, recruits. I am Marshal mor-Issek Kalvanek, commandant of this facility. Welcome to Agoge, our little training moon.”

”I do not, however, welcome you to the Imperial Legions. Yes, you have been accepted as recruits to the Legions. I’m sure you have all bragged to your friends and families about your new status. That stops now. Disabuse yourself of any such notions that you might have. Legionary is a title that comes at a steep price.”

”Those legionaries in front of you are the Sergeant-Instructors in charge of each section. Their job is to smelt, refine and hammer you, our civilian raw material, into something worthy of the Legions. This training will not be easy. It will, indeed, be the most strenuous period of your lives, however long they extend, and however many wars we send you to. It was designed that way.”

”Those of you who survive to the halfway point of the training you are about to enter into will have earned the right to call yourselves legionary-apprentices. I use the term ’survive’ advisedly; while it is rare for any recruit to graduate without having died at least once, over half of you will wash out or walk out – and I remind you, you are free to leave at any time – before that point is reached. Until then, consider the term ’legionary’ a forbidden word.”

”I have seen some of you looking around you at the landscape. Fort Petrae is 64 miles from here. Before you graduate, you will be required to circumnavigate this moon under full combat conditions to return here, but for today, a nice easy run to your quarters. I will be running with you, and as would be my custom had it ever happened, anyone who beats my time to the Fort will receive a three-day pass for their first weekend off duty.”

”Sergeant-Instructors, take charge of your sections. Begin the Anvil!”

Anvils Should Be Warm (1/2)

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Welcome to Palaxias System, home port for the Capital Fleet and the Home Fleet, and indeed for the Imperial Navy in general.

Astrographically, Palaxias is not a significant system; its sun, Arvael – named after Eliéra’s largest raptor – is a minor red dwarf star, its sole asset is its proximity to both the Empire’s throneworld and the seat of the Conclave, but this has been enough to raise it to galactic prominence, or at least notoriety among those who have no business there, and so are not permitted within the system.

Its six gas-giant planets are given over entirely to the business of the Empire’s fleet.  Local patrols and the system’s extensive grid of defense platforms are controlled from the moons of the outermost gas giant, Fortress.  The fleet is built, for the most part, in the shipyards and forges of Armory and its moons, and semi-autonomous swarm squadrons breed in the depths of its well.  Endless skydiver flights skim the atmosphere of Bunker for deuterium, helium-3, and metastable metallic hydrogen, and orbiting cryocels the size of moonlets stockpile antimatter shipped up from downwell or in from Esílmur.  And thousands upon thousands of pods, packages, containers, warehouses, and powered-down vessels of the Reserve surround the logistics base at Depot with a set of metallic rings.

(Officially, of course, nothing at all happens around epistellar Battlefield with its perpetual storms, sun-stoked, huge and fierce even by gas giant standards.)

But the heart of the system is its second world, Bastion, a bloated giant that had just missed fusion ignition, or rather its four moons.  Palaxias itself – Prime Base – a rocky moon hollowed out into the endless docks, autofacs, offices, barracks, laboratories, and other necessities of hosting the two largest IN fleets.  The nameless tiny moon-turned-habitat, bristling with communications arrays, which housed Core Command, seat of the Admiralty.  Frozen, ammoniac Quarters, offering places to take short leaves and quarters for families and contractors, a tiny domed outpost of civilian civility in an otherwise militarized system.

And Agoge, the fourth moon, whose close-in orbit to Bastion warmed it barely enough to allow open water and breathable air; a garden world but certainly not a garden spot.  Agoge was not a primarily Naval world.  Agoge was Legion territory…

Trope-a-Day: Badass Army

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Badass Army: The Imperial Legions try very hard to play this one straight when they have to.  Because of the low-growth, low-manpower demographics of a long-lived species, they generally prefer to eschew most army-type fights in favor of the Sneaky Bastard special-ops method of warfare, or better yet, the the-leaders-of-our-enemies-all-dropped-dead-in-totally-unrelated-accidents-that-cannot-be-connected-to-us-three-years-before-the-war-would-have-happened method of not-warfare.  But sometimes you have to have a real war anyway…

…which is where they figure they need to make the most of the limited number of sophont resources available, by virtue of equipping them all with genetic and cybernetic enhancements (see: Super Soldier), training them rigorously in their own version of The Spartan Way, including in the incredible coordination and discipline that comes from fighting as a conflux (temporary group-mind), and then equipping them lavishly, which means power armor even for regular infantry and combat exoskeletons amounting to walking tanks for the heavy kind, a plethora of Mecha Mooks and Attack Drones attached to each individual soldier, and liberal use of heavy weapons up to and including nuclear/antimatter hand grenades.

After all, when you don’t have numbers, you might as well plow that budget into extended training and capital equipment, right?  The Legions themselves may be small in number, but they work hard to make facing them like facing an army made up entirely of elite troops, with a weight of metal on the field a couple of dozen times higher than should be reasonable for that number of people.

Trope-a-Day: Warrior Poet

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Warrior Poet: Where, in the Imperial opinion, Cultured Warrior and The Spartan Way meet; or the intended product of the latter.  What a sentinel is supposed to be; not merely someone who can fight, but someone who understands the philosophy of fighting, and the art of fighting, and the principles by and for which one should fight.  (And would understand perfectly where the Vikings and the Irish and the “pen and sword in accord” samurai were coming from.)

And the ability to quip, or better yet toss off a perfectly formed chelír, mid-battle certainly also doesn’t hurt.

Trope-a-Day: The Spartan Way

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The Spartan Way: Except for the lack of Drill Sergeant Nasty (which see), the Imperial Legions really do train like this – for the principal reason that, well, they are heavily dependent, given the Empire’s population demographics, on quality over quantity, so they want the most absurdly close to impossible quality that they can possibly achieve.

The casualty and even the dropout rate is refreshingly low these days (due to modern techniques of assessing psychological breaking points and that modern noetic technology lets you resurrect the dead – but still, if you die more than twice, or twice on the same test, you fail.  Although you do get to live again, just not to continue the training program beyond that point; the Legions also need auxiliaries), and also due to the mental, genetic and nanotech upgrading that comes as part of the package (see: Super Soldier), but it’s still really, really harsh.

And would, yes, violate most of the Laws and Customs of War were you to do it to the enemy.

And, yes, that same modern noetic technology does let you conduct occasional live-fire exercises and do ANBC training with real radiation, nanoburn, and nerve gas.  (Although due to the expense of replacing bodies and equipment, Valhalla-style live-fire exercises are reserved for virtuality training.)

But then, if after the training the actual war feels like a picnic in the woods, then it’s pretty much done its job right, right?

Also, importantly, contrast Cultured Warrior, since the Empire doesn’t want to Sacrifice Basic Skill For Awesome Training – on the modern battlefield, the inflexible die fast – nor do they want the people responsible for protecting society to end up with the distorted perspective that comes from a life of fighting and only fighting.

Trope-a-Day: Cultured Warrior

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Cultured Warrior: A very important aspect of training and institutional culture, not just for the Imperial Military Service, but for the entire sentinel darëssef, which includes the police, emergency services, paramedics, etc.  The argument runs, essentially, that it has dangerous and unpleasant side effects to have people running around trained to fight who know nothing else but fighting, be it fighting wars, fighting crime, fighting disease, or fighting entropy, and are thus disconnected from the finer things in life and the gentler, civilized virtues.

Thus, in addition to everything else, sentinel training (including even the seriously harsh kind used by the Imperial Legions) works hard to cultivate a taste for high culture and an appreciation for the finer things in life as a contrast to and counterpart for the gritty side of life.  In action, the institutions of the darëssef, from the IMS, the ISS, the Watch Constabulary, etc., on down have traditions to encourage this, including specific cultural leave in which their membership is encouraged to immerse themselves in this side of life on the institutional dime, in the interest of keeping them collectively healthy, functional, and complete.

Even many mercenary outfits do this, on the grounds that a sane mercenary is a more profitable mercenary.

Trope-a-Day: Super Soldier

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Super Soldier: Most successful galactic militaries and mercenary organizations tend to have a favorite package of military-specialized genetic enhancements, nanoviruses, and implants; these days, receiving at least the “military-basic” upgrade package (a whole shopping list of enhancements on top of the already impressive alpha baseline, for the Empire’s version) – usually sometime around the midpoint of basic training, once they’re reasonably sure you’re not going to snap on them and quit – is more or less necessary to compete on the battlefield, especially as regular not-in-the-combat-exoskeletons infantry.  (Although, commonly enough, those troops have their own upgrade requirements.)

Trope-a-Day: Awesome Personnel Carrier

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Awesome Personnel Carrier: The V40 Ralihú – as used by the Exploratory Service and the Imperial Legions – with its full-environment sealing (operate on any planet, including underliquid; also, climate control), all-directions sphere-drive, vector-control facility for better ground-holding and brief off-ground hops, plus ability to drop from orbit and hover for recovery, kinetic barriers, solid armor, excellent suspension, and modular enhancement system including a full squad carrier, medical facilities and moderately heavy weapons for IFV use… probably qualifies.

Trope-a-Day: Combat Pragmatist

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Combat Pragmatist: Despite their reputation for honor, the eldrae in general and the Imperial Legions in particular are very much the combat pragmatists.  (An immortal life, after all, is a very precious thing, both individually and demographically.)  So while they would much prefer to resolve conflicts through other means, including delightfully fair and stylized “game war”, if it actually comes down to it – well, let’s just say that no-one ever told them that war ought to be sporting, and that idea would be good for a laugh at the Admiralty any day of the week.

The general view of said Admiralty is that in a real war, if you’re not cheating, you’re fixin’ to lose.  Special operations (including assassination) are pretty much the best ways to make war, with sneakiness, ambush, infiltration, deceptiveness, preemption – and only a complete idiot or a lunatic would announce to the enemy that they’re about to attack them in advance – and avoiding a fair fight at all costs making up most of the rest of the doctrine.  While in regular warfare, they take pains to preserve civilian lives and local property values, that’s because it’s also moderately stupid to destroy the asset value of whatever you’re fighting over – if you care to keep military assets around your civilians, provoke them to a no-rules war, or engage in asymmetric warfare, you can find out for yourself that this is not an absolute rule, it’s merely a moral preference – and in the latter case learn that Disproportionate Retribution is also the order of the day (on the grounds that the ideal response is one which precludes any possible necessity of its repetition).

Much the same principles apply to individual-level combat; most of the Empire’s prized schools of armed and unarmed martial arts explicitly include a wide number of moves which humans would call, ah, “ungentlemanly”, including the virtues of the Groin Attack, shooting people in the back, and other extracts from their millennia-long collection of dirty tricks.  Of course, what they’ll tell you is that if a gentleman is required to fight, he’s fighting for something, and that that something is not going to be served by voluntarily conceding the advantage.  He is, therefore, obliged to use all the means he has available to win it.

(That the contrast between their general “honorable” behavior and combat pragmatism causes cognitive dissonance in a remarkably large number of species and cultures is, incidentally, something else that they shamelessly use to their advantage.)

Is There In Death No Beauty?

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High in the mountains of Cimoníë lies the black-spired citadel of the Aellakhassren, the Order of Beautiful Death, the finest students of ktenology the Empire has to offer.  Not death-worshippers, they would have us be clear; their order takes Ithával and Kalasané as exemplars, save those few who, by profession, look to Pétamárdis or Gaëlenén, or Olísmé the Consoler, and there are but few devotees of Entélith among them.  Rather, the Aellakhassren are dedicated to the principle that even the darkest practices, if they must be done, should be done well, and with their proper excellence.

In the voluminous Outer Court the warrior-poets of the third degree abide, along with the many who seek to learn from them.  The cadre of the Legions study elegance, ease, and beauty in pistol, carbine, and grenade as their forefathers learned it in sword and clockbow, and how to enter battle with song and quip ready to the lips.  Assassins study the artistic use of knife, drug, and thought-virus.  Bodyguard-courtesans learn the subtle arts of killing with the edge of a silken fan, or death concealed in the seasoning of a drink.  And in the Pavilion of Unfalling Shadows, the euthanatrists learn the art of easing the dying out of life with gentleness, dignity, and grace.

The Inner Court is the preserve of the masters of these arts, the warrior-poets of the second degree, who have learned to turn their beauty and elegance themselves into weapons; who can paralyze an opponent with a meaning-laden gesture, or with an artistically composed chelír ease the passing of the dying or cast an enemy into doubt and self-defeat.

The Onyx Spire is the dwelling of the few warrior-poets of the first degree, who are reputed to have refined their order’s arts until they are able to kill with an idea, a choice of dress, a single question.  Few enter there but the masters of the second degree.

None return.

Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

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Just throwing in, now it’s not on my nonexistent regular blog, a plug for the blog Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor, of which I approve thoroughly in the interest of not making my suspension of disbelief hurt any more than it does already when reading Generic Fantasy or other genres that really ought to know better.

(Speaking for my own universe, there are more than enough layers, in between the fabric jacket, the tech compartments, the cerametal-composite armor-plating, the superconductor meshes, and the ablative layer sprayed over the top of all of that, to make telling the gender of anyone wearing the entire-body-enclosing standard-legionary-issue N45 Garrex field combat armor or its cousins damn near impossible unless they’ve got their equally-all-enclosing helmet off, which is never done under combat conditions. But then, that’s a design feature – you’re not supposed to see a person, you’re supposed to see one mean bastard of a legionary who may just be about to ruin your whole day. The key words here are studied memetic overkill.

As for its big brother, the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton – well, considering that piece of armor is a couple of tons of personal mini-tank that lets you punch out buildings and survive getting in a nuclear-bazooka fight at implausibly close ranges, frankly, you’re lucky to be able to tell what species the wearer is. At least without the sort of prolonged study no-one’s ever been inclined to do when there’s an occupied M70 wandering around the vicinity.)