When the Devil Dances

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you’ve never been in one,” Mosovich said. “There are multiple elevators for each shaft, so that incoming refugees could be shuttled down really fast. There’s an ‘up’ shaft and a ‘down’ shaft and they slide between the two.” He nodded as the structure shuddered and began to rise. “I’ve been on one that got stuck; wasn’t pleasant. Anyway, where were we?”

“Reduced death rate,” Shari said.

“Not reduced overall, mind you,” Mueller said. “Combat casualty rates have made up for it.”

“How many?” Elgars asked. “I mean, combat casualties?”

“Sixty-two million,” Mosovich said. “In the U.S. and of American military forces. And that’s just the military losses. Pales compared to China and India, mind you, but still pretty bad.”

“Six…” Shari gasped. “Could you say that again?”

“Sixty-two million,” Mueller said quietly. “At the height of the war there were nearly that many under arms in the Contiguous U.S., what they call CONUS, and in the Expeditionary Forces. But in the last five years, most combat units, most infantry battalions, have had three casualties for every position in them. That is, they have had three hundred percent casualties. At its height, the American portion of the EFs had nearly forty million personnel. But the total casualties have topped that and the AEF is below twelve million, and only half of that is actual ‘shooting at the Posleen’ fighters.”

“And there’s a steady attrition in the interior,” Mosovich added. “There’s still landings from time to time; there was a globe that made it down, mostly intact, near Salt Lake just last year.”

“We heard about that,” Wendy said. “But… nothing like those casualty figures.”

“They’re not very open with them,” Mosovich agreed. “Add in the forty million or so civilian casualties and the fact that we’re fighting this war in the middle of a ‘drop’ in males of prime military age and we’re… well, we’re getting bled white. Even with rejuving older guys, taking a person that has never held a weapon in their hands and teaching when they are eighteen is one thing, doing it when they’re fifty is… different. They, generally, aren’t stupid enough to be good soldiers. Not cannon fodder soldiers. Young guys want to be heroes so the women will love them and have their babies. Old guys just want to live to see the next sunrise.”

“Which just makes keeping women out of combat units stupid,” Wendy said, shaking her head at the condition of her rifle. “This is…” She shook her head again. “I know that I can depend on you big strong men to protect me. But I don’t want to have to!”

“Don’t sweat it,” Mosovich said with a chuckle. “We’ll find you a weapon. And women generally aren’t stupid enough either; they can have babies any time they want. That being said; I don’t agree with the policy either, but nobody can seem to get it changed.”

He stepped through the door into a concrete room. It was about fifty meters wide and a hundred deep with black lines painted on the floor. The walls were covered in condensation and a steady breeze blew out of the elevator towards the glass doors at the end. Halfway down the room there was a series of small bunkers. As they approached them it was clear that most of them were half filled with dirt and garbage, some of it blown in, but much of it dropped into them by passersby. Many of the lines on the floor had peeled up and there was trash all over the room, although clearly little of it was new.

“I think I know the real reason that it’s nearly impossible for females to get in Ground Force these days,” Mosovich noted. “But it’s a nasty reason and you won’t like it.”

“I’ve dealt with a lot of stuff I don’t like,” Wendy said. “My life seems to consist of dealing with stuff I don’t like.”

“In that case I think the casualties are the answer, two answers really,” Mosovich said.

“The first reason is that we’re being bled white. We’ve lost about eighty percent of our productive-age male population. But even with combat casualties, we’ve only lost about thirty of our productive-age females…”

“We’re breeders,” Wendy said.

“Yep,” Mosovich agreed. “The powers that be are obviously thinking that when the Posleen are kicked off planet, it won’t do much good to have nobody left but a bunch of old women and a few children to ‘carry on.’ So they’re conserving the breeding population.”

“It takes two to tango,” Shari pointed out, adjusting Shakeela’s coat. The bunker was quite cool compared to the underground city they had left and it was clear that the fall had settled in up here. “Where are the ‘breeders’ going to find…”

“Guys?” Mueller asked. “It’s not a nice answer, but it doesn’t take many guys to make lots of babies, but it’s a one for one ratio with women.”

“He’s right,” Mosovich said. “It’s not nice, but it is true. That’s only half the story, though.