by Kali Altsoba
Some of the departed left half-eaten soup, shards of edible bowl, and broken bread on the gray tables. They don’t yet know that this was their last supper. In an hour, they’ll head into Dark Territory on a preemptive raid that’s not going to go well at all. At least not for some of them.
A reliable source told MI in New Beijing that the infantry division the 7th fought over the past two weeks, and cutup pretty badly, is to be replaced. As soon as General Yupanqui heard the report this morning she turned to her veteran 3rd and 4th Battalion commanders and said: “Go out there and greet the new enemy. They're sure to send out big patrols on their first night in a new sector, at least three or four companies thick. We know the Yue ming in this area better. So go out in battalion plus strength and let them know who they're facing down here.”
It’s what generals do. It’s not an especially bad call or bad order. It’s certainly not a callous one. It’s just going to get a helluva lot of people killed, that’s all. It’s what happens in war. Though if she’d just waited another two hours for MI to confirm who was coming into the line on the other side, she wouldn’t be sending out heavy, battalion size probes. She’d hunker in.
The field kitchen and attached mess serve 2,800 fighters from two battalions of Argos 7th Assault who live in trenches and dugouts overhead. It smells like it, too. It’s airless and traps every unsavory odor produced by stressed out men and women too tired or pissed off or careless to wash up before they come down to eat frontline slop three times daily, day after day. Hot, cold and indifferent food served to hot, cold and indifferent fighters. Take today’s soup, for example. No, really. I mean it. Please take it away! It’s casually and carelessly made from a hundredweight of smashed potatoes and assorted local vegetables, mostly turnips and parsnips and other hard roots. Add 50 kilos of rice, then dump in 20 kilos of nondescript, basic mockmeat, maybe even a little gray around the edges. Then ladle out a shitload of oversalted disappointment.
Susannah’s inner ears hurt. Her eustachian tubes feel blocked. It’s even more than that, like something’s trying to burst out of her head, stopping only to pound a military tattoo on her inner ear drums. It happened once before, when she first landed on Amasia in an ineptly pressurized shuttle. The hastily adapted cargo hold of the orbit runner she crammed into wasn’t properly vac sealed, so it leaked air into the buffer space between the inner hull and the outer hull. Some of the others debarked with bleeding ears and went right to the medics.
It’s excess pressure in here, instead. “Can’t someone adjust the air pressure?” The grimy cook ignores her as he wipes shiny lines of sweat from his heavily creased brow, using a filthy rag. He tucks the streaked towel back inside a dark blue ACU belt worn incongruously outside his long apron. “Next!”
That’s all the cook says, looking importantly and imperiously down at a small, meek man in front of Susannah. The little man never imagined himself going to war, ever. Not even as a boy. For that matter, no one in MoD imagined it, either.
He’s an orderly from HQ.
He’s been here two days.
He used to be a supply clerk.
There’s a war on, you know.
So he’ll just have to do.
***
The battalion mess would seem odd to any civilian. Just as it does to every fresh faced conscript not yet accustomed to the bullheaded way the ACU does everything it undertakes. And not just because an ACU kitchen and mess under the Lemurian desert is officially called a “tent.” It says so in the regs, and on all the sheets.
Shit, wait! It really is a tent!
Built into bedrock 500 meters deep.
Down under the southern desert.
It’s properly pitched and supported. Its hard ceramic walls and roof snugly fit inside an achingly dry, cool chalk cavern. It’s precisely cut to regulation. Anyone inside is safe from the dull pom, pom, pom pounding of enemy shellfire overhead.
It’s just real hard to hear. Or breathe. What with all the clanging and banging and shouted conversations, and overheavy pressure. Not to mention four huge, industrial bread ovens gaped open and glowing red inside. Susannah sees a dark glow of radiating suffocation across the stifling room. A claustrophobic, but ACU approved, regular and exact room. Subterranean coolness of the chalk overcome by bread ovens and too many eaters, and by dull witted obedience to Army regs.
When the ACU Engineering Corps got orders to build all frontline kitchens underground it had already set up hundreds above ground in rear areas. All rigid, hard sided tents, erected strictly by-the-book. A little puzzled to be working down here, they resolved the dilemma by resorting to two Army regulations books: one on proper set up of a tent, the other on standard excavations. The first reg book said: “Excavation will end within 1.2mm standard deviation of any and all cleared surfaces.” The second one told them how to set up a mess tent. Engineers dutifully lasered out a cavern to exact specifications for a Standard Cubicle Army Mess Tent, plus 1.2mm, then set up a regulation ceramic fiber tent inside, and moved on. There’s lot’s more chalk to laser. Yeah, that’s exactly right. They set up a tent, underground. Inside a cube cut into cool, bedrock chalk.
“OK girls ‘n boys, we finished carving out the cube.”
“Call the Tent Unit down. They’re waiting topside.”
“Hey, good job! This hole looks perfect.”
“Start erecting the tent walls son. Yeah, over there.”
Then it was the turn of Supply Services. Those rubes carted in a complement of flattop stoves, bread baking ovens, long gray mess tables with retractable seats, protein drink and food dispensers, functional but totally-off-limits-at-the-front and disconnected beer taps that no one thinks to just cancel outright, and every fighter gazes longingly at over every meal, including breakfast. Lastly, they dropped off three, bright green ACU Organic Waste Disposal Units.
It’s beyond the ability of the ACU bureaucracy to set up a kitchen and mess in a perfectly sterile, cool chalk cavity the engineers cut out with lasers. “Not in this man’s Army!” Or woman’s either, apparently. So it never occurred to anyone in Supply Service, or if it did they kept the stray and heretic thought to themselves, to forgo anything prescribed. Not the ceramic weave tent or any other standard issue item. Not even the beer taps they installed, but left disconnected.
That’s regulation, too.
Strictly by the book.
And that means, no beer.
It was the puritanical former Secretary of Defense, Josephus McPhee, who eliminated beer and wine from all ACU bases and Navy ships, declaring nothing stronger than coffee would be allowed. It’s why everyone in the military refers to coffee as “a cup-‘o-joe.” General Gaspard Leclerc has just approved a petition to lift the beer ban, but right now that’s moot since there’s no transport capacity to move any to or on Lemuria. Still, NCU warships are a tad happier than before.
Even 500 meters underground a proper ACU field kitchen must be “pitched and pegged on a smoothed, flat surface, with top and bottom access panels open to permit regular air flow and circulation.” Never mind that so called free flowing air must be pumped in under high pressure. Or that an utterly impervious structure doesn’t permit air flow when walls and roof abut chalk rock at regulation 1.2mm, open at the top or not, so that the air pressure is uncomfortable, painful and even dangerous. Or that 800 troopers per meal shift, at 10 shifts per day, eat and breathe and sweat inside, the bread ovens glow red, and insulating ceramic fabric traps all that heat so that it feels hotter than on an AI cargo ship making a perihelion sling.
Why do it? Because there’s been no time to rewrite prewar regs that say: “Every mess tent must be set up in the same chickenshit, by-the-book way, each and every single godsdamn time, or some martinet colonel will kick your sorry ass upside your earhole!” Well OK, regulation don’t actually say chickenshit or godsdamn or kick your ass. But they do say “Engineering and Supply must follow strict SOPs, no matter what environment they are working in.” Yup, including rui
ning a beautifully sterile, cool as summer ice, deep chalk enclave totally safe from bombing or bombardment ‘cause it’s 500 meters below the surface!
“Hello? Supply Services HQ? Tent Unit #73 here.”
“Whaddaya want, Mac?”
“Were done at…” He lists the sheet coordinates, then advises: “Division Mess Tent #3, in The Sandbox, 7th Assault sector, is all set up. We’re finished here. It’s your turn.”
“Right, the Mess Tent Module container is already there, with a full crew.”
“Hey dude, let’s get set up in here. And make it fast.”
“Yeah, we got three more modules to unpack today.”
“Screw that. I got a cold case o’ beer waiting for me back at my barracks.”
“Where did you get beer?”
“It’s homemade shit. Picked it up at a little coastal town on my last leave.”
“Any good?”
“Like I said, it’s shitty. But whad ya gonna do, drink ‘joe’ all day?”
“Where do you want these godsdamn heavy ovens?”
“Over here, of course.”
“Right, rear wall, one meter spacing.”
***
Susannah grows more irritable with every gasp of hot air and sudden, stabbing ear pain. She glares scornfully and long at the sweating, dirty and crooked looking cook. He ignores her even harder than before, barking authoritatively past her cold staring to soldiers in line behind. His every syllable bores into her headache like an engineer’s drill cutting through rock chalk.
“Move along. I hafta clean these godsdamn tureens and boil up water for the surgeons.” He got a call ahead from some orderly who’s topside with a big time doctor, saying that Alliance Medical Corps is going to set up an emergency triage center and combat surgery in his mess.
He rasps, with a hint of cruel pleasure: “Hear that pounding overhead?” No one can hear anything over the heavy air pressure that’s blocking up their ears. “That’s a trench raid!” He says it like he knows, and they don’t. He adds with real malice: “The medics are gonna start carving faster than me, any minute now.”
Susannah winces at the ugly reference to emergency field surgery. Her conscious mind carries her back under the knife of Lee Jin, as she unconsciously touches two fingertips to her fully repaired left breast. She runs them slowly beneath its firm underside curve, as she often does, feeling hesitantly for chimeric scar tissue that’s never there when she searches with probing fingers. Or when she looked with care and unease on Argos, standing naked from the waist up before a mirror.
One time, on the hospital ship Red Rover, she came out of suspend to see Lee’s gentle face looking down with real concern. He quoted some odd poetry to her she had to look up later. He told her it was very old. Older than any of the colony worlds. She checked. It was. She searches memory to recall its bitter sweetness. ‘Death lies on you like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.’ She thought at first that Lee was too strange. Too much the odd duck. She quickly learned to appreciate his differences. She misses their talks.
It’s her turn. The skinny cook’s helper at the tureen smiles up at her hopefully. He smells of eggs, garlic and cold sausages. She feels a wave of nausea rising. She angrily snatches a bowl of barely warm, gray, ill looking soup from the kid. It’s full of burling lumps of indeterminate origin. ‘Probably some kind of crated mockmeat in here, overcooked by that filthy, walleyed fool for a week or more.’ She’s wrong. The mockmeat is much older than that. It’s also a little gray.
Susannah’s anger is indiscriminate. She sneers at the skinny kid then ignores him, furious that the tent is so damn hot but her gray soup is fetid and clotted with grease. She tosses back her head, tousling a thick mane of bright auburn hair streaked with sun blonde highlights. She spins ostentatiously but athletically on one foot as she throws her best dirty look at the scruffy grease cook. She scowls her fiercest scowl over a curved, shapely shoulder as she leaves. She doesn’t notice that he doesn’t notice, or at least is pretending not to. He’s already yelling more sour and sharp orders to his skinny helper, who scampers over at-the-double to placate the Lord of Lard.
Susannah stomps toward a white staircase leading out of the mess tent, chalk cavern. She’ll head up to find some other hollowed out chamber in which to eat. Hopefully one less hot, that doesn’t smell quite so foul. Then it occurs to her that, given the red faced cook’s pronounced walleye, she’s not sure the irascible bastard saw her skewer him with a lethal look such as only a bad cook deserves for serving such slop to tired fighters who have to stand duty or go “over-the-top” of the parapets and out into the black, into the Yue ming, into Dark Territory.
She’s suddenly sorry she was so mean to the skinny cook’s helper, who she finally recognizes as just a kid who never wronged her as the greasy cook did. She thinks: ‘Maybe I should go back, say something?’ Of course, it’s too late for that.
“Filthy looking mentula.” She mutters to herself, refocusing on the hateful cook. He’s really not as bad as that. Not a verpa or mentula. For one thing, he’s much too fat to be properly called a penis, and really mean it. But a cūlus or an irrumator, a big butt or a bastard? Yeah, sure. Much better fit. Cūlus it is!
Lee taught her how to curse in Latin, after she asked where all the very odd words in his medical texts came from. She laughed for days afterward. Still, this particular bout might be a bit of heat delirium or come from standing an all night watch, because she asks herself most oddly: ‘Does he bite his thumb at me?’ It’s another odd phrase from something really old and hard to understand, that Lee gave her to read when she was onboard NCU Red Rover.
She looks down into the clotted mess of dull gray soup. ‘He probably spat in this.’ She means the mentula … err, the cock ... umm, the cook! She throws the soup, edible corn paper bowl and organic spoon and all the rest, into the nearest and insistently official ACU Organic Waste Disposal Unit #1. She doesn’t wait to hear the hum-snap-slurp telltale sounds that signals a laser masher inside is breaking down the bowl into basic organic molecules, before washing the yellow-green mess into a complex pipe system that runs from under the entire base to a deep rear disposal.
ACU does a lot with organics. More than she knows, or wants to know. Pipes flush all waste or half-eaten food into automated reconstruction of more edible cutlery, emergency field rations, and dry, tasteless flatbread biscuits called “hardtack” by the troops. Inedible waste is remade into stiff, cheap bunker furniture and lots of ultralight gurneys, like those stacked along carbyne or palm stem walls of every klic of First Trench and Second Trench on Lemuria. She passed a stack of gurneys and litters on the way down, along with a unit of unusually exhausted looking bearers.
On most days, Susannah laughs quickly and easily. She also gets on with most everyone. Superficially, she seems back to her old self, a pert brunette from Argos City with big, round, green eyes. They’re natural green, not gene spliced fake ones or postnatal fashion implants like so many lower class Grünen pay to have, buying backdoor doctors to manipulate in utero to emulate in their kids the jet black skin and green eyes of most of the social elite, the three High Castes of the Imperium. Some even dare to mimic the royal Oetkert-Shaka’s pure jade eye. But it’s risky.
Actually, she laughs far less often than before. More ironically than mirthfully, and now only with her voice and not also her flashing eyes. Her old, easy gaiety is gone. She’s more sober of mood, much more stolid than a once again healthy, and pretty and only barely 24-year old girl should be. Even if she spent almost-her-very-last birthday as a cold suspend on a hospital ship.
Lee Jin was chief of NCU’s top cybersurgical unit when he operated on her from orbit above Glarus by REMOTE, then again onboard the Red Rover. Yet, as she recovered and passed out from under his specialty care, he always seemed to find time to linger at her bedside to talk, read old poetry, teach her Roman swear words, or assist nurses with her rehab. He even brought her cake on her 23rd birt
hday. “I know because it says so on your chart,” he explained, pointing.
She came to look forward to his little visits, and was always pleased to see him standing there whenever she awoke from suspension. Or later, from forced recovery sleep. He showed her vids of the ripping wound in her heart that he fixed. He explained how he was slowly rebuilding her burned off breast. He promised to leave no scars showing at all. Later, after healing began, he just came to talk. Once, he gently laid his soft surgeon’s hand on top of hers. He was leaning in to assure her about her pending full recovery, while still talking in medicaleese about muscular and tissue regeneration in an obscurantist way only the most skilled and confident of cybersurgeons do, thinking everyone already gets it. His touch surprised, made her gut flutter in an unexpected way.
On later visits he told her confidential things about the other cases lying in various states of semiconsciousness around her, without revealing any names. He did it while walking her down the ship’s halls, gently touching her shaky elbow as she started rehabilitation and physiotherapy. The first two times he said he just happened to be going her way. After that, he simply smiled and reached out to support her unsteady arm. He reversed direction and went back the way he came, after ensuring a robo nurse helped her finish the therapy walk.