Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  Excited or scared youths at the station who are heading to Kolno Barracks in the next few minutes are a lot different than the young men in gray. Volunteer or conscript, they’re far more innocent and idealistic, much less cocksure than the privileged bullies in mouse suits. They mill together, huddling from searing heat and humidity, unsure what to do next. Until they’re hustled off the platform and threatened into ranks by a swarm of hasty RIK noncoms.

  “Form ranks!”

  They look at each other in confusion.

  “Right fucking now, godsdamnit!”

  Not one recruit has any idea how to do it. They’re herded by barking NCOs like Dauran spring lambs, barging and bashing into each other as they run off the hyperloop platform down a wide ramp to a full parade square outside the station. They’re assembled in the square in rough rows, not just with threats and shouts but slaps and punches, until they resemble something like a military formation.

  “Lose the fucking hats! Toss ‘em. Make a pile, at the rear!”

  Hats of all kinds fly short distances in air, landing in a growing pile behind the last ranks of confused recruits. Round ones, square ones, berets and bowlers, worn old favorites and brand new birthday hats. They soon form a soft, felt pyramid.

  “Drop those godsdamn bags!”

  They look bewildered but obey, dropping their last civilian possessions past the clothes they wear. Plops and thuds and thunks sound all across the parade ground as recruits drop valises at their feet, or backpacks or hand totes, sacks and duffels, rucksacks and haversacks, holdalls and old satchels.

  “What is it about ‘make a pile’ you don’t fucking understand?”

  They pick them up again, the backpacks and duffels and holdalls. They aren’t sure they’re supposed to break ranks to achieve the mission, but there’s no other way to make a baggage pile. You can’t toss an overloaded tote like you can a hat. So they bump and jostle and carry them to the rear, where they make a large heap.

  ‘My best things are in there!’

  ‘When will I get my stuff back?’

  “Reform ranks!”

  They’re just a tad better at it this time, although two laggards from the second row are caught out like children playing musical chairs. One pushes her way back in. The second takes a punch in his shoulder from one of the NCOs, then moves.

  “Distribute!”

  They’re tossed identical, string wrapped packages by semi dumb carrier bots. They scoot quickly up-and-down the files of gawping RIK candidates, plopping odd cubist bricks out of stubby square shoots, then turning hard on whirring gyro wheels before repeating the cube distribution down each file in the formation.

  “Pick it up, but don’t open that until you’re told to!”

  “Ready to hike! Down the blacktop, right turn march!”

  “Move your asses, godsdamnit!”

  The NCOs really seem to like calling on the gods to damn the recruits. The invocations echo with faint blasphemy in the ears of most youngsters. These days, the Black Faith barely trickles into the Empire from the exiled Brethren on Fates and Terra Deus, but ancient doctrines of male superiority and predestination are seeped into the wider culture, into its unquestioned rites and rituals. That includes the traditionalist Shipcka household, where blaspheming the gods is just not done.

  You ain’t heard nothing yet.

  Get used to blasphemy, kid.

  Combat is blasphemy.

  Besides, the gods are dead.

  Pay attention, or you’re next.

  After more groping and bumping each other into a semblance of files that now form into a single column, they’re marched around a tight bend and onto the main road to Kolno. Waves of shimmering heat rise from its black, hard carbon surface. It’s so much hotter on the road than on the maglev platform or in the square.

  “Kolno Barracks, double time march!”

  ‘Oh gods, in this heat?’

  ‘I’m wearing the wrong shoes.’

  “Too sloppy! Triple time!”

  ‘What the hell is triple time?’

  “Start running!”

  “Right godsdamn now!”

  It’s just over 9.2 klics to Main Gate at Kolno Barracks. Half the recruits decide that whoever built the drop off station so far from its only destination was an idiot or a sadist. He was neither. He was, however, a drill instructor for 80 years before he retired and became a contractor military architect. He believed in drill and hard discipline above all things, especially in training runs. His cremated dust is baked into the blacktop under their feet. It was the old bastard’s last request.

  “Move it, you filthy dog cookers!”

  The jogging, panting, huffing, confused recruits shuffle a little faster. The rich land they’re sweating through is lush and humid. Junglar thick, sticky and sickly hot. Dark skinned civvies from three small villages smile and laugh as the recruits tramp through each in turn. Children stop whatever they’re doing to watch. Many impishly salute while others run ahead or behind the perspiring recruits laughing and pointing, lolling bright pink tongues in imitation thirst. A few older children run right alongside the recruits for a klic or more, offering to sell sugarcane sticks to suck or chunks of bitter, yellow-and-black kola nut to chew.

  “Kola give you energy!”

  “Wake you up, good!”

  “Two credits, one nut!”

  “Five credits, one cane!”

  “Fifty credits, one water!”

  The NCOs let it happen. Except for the water. They’ll send a truck back later to collect a cut of the roadside cane and kola trades; and to pick out what they want from the pile of broken open baggage at the platform, now guarded by thuggi from the villages. They’ll take the best stuff to Pusan to sell at cut rate prices to the usual cooperative bazaar merchants. Then they’ll give the Camp Commander his tithe of the profits. Villagers doing guard duty get the luggage and the leavings.

  NCOs ride alongside the ragged column of runners. They’re on ugly, Rikugun acoustic bikes that make a thin thrum, thrum sound as they hover above shallow gutters on either side of the blacktop road. The green bikes stink of oil and rubber. NCOs stink of sweat and corruption. The surrounding jungle stinks of vegetative rot and fetid humidity. Some recruits swear at the too fast pace, stumbling in their stupid civilian shoes that cut into heels, bloody and blister ankles. They resent the older gunsō and two dozen gochōs who ride easily beside the column on greasy, three-man bikes. The fat sergeant has a bike all to himself, perching on it smugly, like a toddler with a fistful of sticky sweets. Two dozen buzzing corporals fill the imaginations of sweat soaked recruits with promises of petty cruelties to come.

  Finally, the panting column comes into view of Kolno Barracks and everyone forgets the misery of their first training run. The files slow, moving in excited awe past an immense holo image of Pyotr Shaka III. It stands 200 meters tall, gazing down upon them like some kind of neon heavenly father. They pass right between his wide, straddling legs, then under the camp Main Gate. As they pass through, they read its famous motto glowing in silver and black: ‘We Are Born to Die.’

  Tedi thinks she can’t express her love for Pyotr better. He’s the Romeo of her martial imaginings, object of her devotion to duty. She’ll not be stifled in a foul civilian vault, strangled by boredom and conformity. Not with a great and exciting war taking place all around her, beckoning her to its thrills and adventures. She’ll breathe healthsome, battle air in service to her undying love for the Imperium. She may be the most effusive girl in the column of recruits to think that way, but she’s not the only one. It’s why most of them are here, with something to prove.

  Kolno’s keepers watch from twin Gate Towers as raggedy recruits file past. A tin eared military band plays brassy, uninspired marches that sound more like dirges. The trainers watch with merely professional interest as 2,000 fresh youths move onto Kolno base to become their charges for the next ten weeks, under their absolute control. They look down without emotion on the
cheap, flag draped, fife-and-drum parade that repeats several times daily. Only the recruits and emotive outsiders find it moving. Far off watchers on civvy memexes tear up with urgent loyalty as they see volunteer youth marching into Kolno, before marching off to find eternal glory in devout service to a dying state that sees them as war fodder.

  Camp instructors are fervent as novae to temper and train the arriving files of malleable youth, but cold as interstellar medium to their individual interests and personalities. Kolno Barracks imbibes 8,000 recruits every morning and pisses out the same number each night. They march in, then out ten weeks later, headed to Pusan Spaceport and thence to war. For each incoming class, between closings of Main Gate lie ten weeks of rugged, brutal, and even lethal combat school; for sometimes, a cohort graduates with fewer alive than started. That will be true for Tedi’s cohort, each recruit looking up he marches in, as if to see a god in stern, holo Pyotr. A few will prove weak or just unlucky. Either way, they’ll never leave Kolno alive. They don’t know it or think that it’s possible, yet they march directly from their mother’s house to the barracks to the grave. They’ll miss life and the war. No enemy will kill them. They’ll number in the war’s casualties nonetheless.

  None of that is clear to happy, giddy Tedi Shipcka in the scorching Kolno heat. From the first moment on the station platform she feels an intensity of the now, a hypervigilance for little daily events of life never experienced before. Kolno is a closed world, shut off from the rest of Orion, with life and death rules unto itself. Yet every hour that she’ll spend there, each day inside, promises to bring her into contact with something new. Good or bad or tragic, but never dull or boring.

  The recruits are halted three klics inside the grounds, assembled in 20 platoons of 100 each. Most look lost as ants on the immense, black carbon parade square. The long, hot, oval interior camp exists in spartan contrast to urgent greenery that crowds the 124 klic base circumference, held back from invasion and occupation by anti organics built into laser defended fences. The lethal walls are surmounted by fifty meter high towers spaced at regular intervals, with two more squat towers between each tall pair. It’s as much a prison as a camp, but most recruits are too awestruck and flattered to have made it inside Main Gate to see that reality.

  Central Dormitory is called “The Doughnut” by all cohorts who reside there, in shifts. Its dark chocolate exterior broods in ugly gloom over the flat black plain of an achingly hot, artfully simple, oddly dry campus. It dominates a shimmering, black carbon desert paved all around to three klics in all directions. The nickname is inevitable, for it’s an immense circular building ten stories high and a full klic in circumference. It dwarfs all other buildings that spoke down five, laser straight avenues: officers quarters, instructor barracks, windowless infirmaries, armories, hoverbike and armtrak garages. It feeds, sleeps, shits and showers 144,000 recruits in three diurnal shifts. It has a punishment ground at its very center, a perfect plaza where exhibitions and executions are performed. They’re watched by the cohorts from rows of inner facing windows. There’s one or two per week, varying with the quality of cohorts moving through different parts of a 10 week combat course.

  Tedi takes in The Doughnut and all Kolno, as if in a trance. She startles back to awareness when fresh orders are screamed right into her face by what seems to her the first in a comical, cookie cutter procession of red faced clones. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s adrenaline. Maybe it’s youthful imagination. Whatever it is that causes her vision, ‘it’s really fucking weird.’ The NCO screaming in her face assumes a ranting, stamping, stomping, ridiculously funny shape of a toy soldier. When she looks at the others, the image transfers. She watches them goosestep on rigid peg-legs, wooden arms swinging stiffly back-and-forth, white gloved hands cutting into the fetid air. They wear tall black hats on top, with painted chinstraps. Bright red cheek dots match their cholera red coats, whose red is unrelieved until it reaches a wide, white belt. Black bands crisscross absurdly barrel chests. Black painted trousers cover their silly wooden peg-legs, shiny black shoes below that.

  Then she realizes where it’s coming from. The image leaps into her mind from a favorite storybook about The Wooden Soldier War that her Dad read to her out loud when she was a very little girl. Over and over, since it was her favorite book. She almost laughs at the corporal who’s still shouting at her and the other recruits nearby. She stops thinking that screaming, wooden toy instructors are funny when they order her and all other newbies to strip naked.

  ‘What? Naked?’

  “You heard the order. Strip, now!”

  ‘No. They can’t mean… here?’

  “Get buck naked, now!”

  The recruits look at each other in astonishment, then slowly peel off their last civilian clothes and drop them in crumpled piles at their feet, on top of discarded civvy shoes. Their feet start to bake on the hot black surface. They want to hop from foot to foot but they can’t under the gochōs unblinking glares, so they turn their ankles side-to-side instead. Until they’re told to “stand fucking still, sprogs!” Everyone is young. Everyone is confused. All are in an immodest mixing bowl of gender, indifferently poured, with no way up the slippery sides to get out. Two of the watching gochōs leer at naked girls, a third checks out the nude boys. The rest are busy barking and snapping at only half undressed recruits, hurrying them to finish stripping. Humiliated young men and women stand in silence, the naked and the nude awkwardly and rudely exposed to each other. Standing close together and as wide apart as they can. Most are a little in shock. Some bolder ones laugh too loudly at the absurd scene they all make. It’s a mistake. They’re stung across sweating buttocks with a cracking whip by a cruel NCO, then screeched at by the fat gunsō. He dismounts his bike at last in order to rage at them right to their faces.

  “Shut da fuck up, sprog! Duh resta ya, attention! Yer’ all in duh army now, chil’drin. We’ll ‘ave none ‘aw dat laughing an’ odder civvy shit.”

  Tedi clumsily disrobes into a calculated robbery of her individuality, but only after hesitation and delicate embarrassment befitting her youth and inexperience. She bends one arm carefully across to hide her naked breasts, the other stretches a hand low to cover her exposed genitals. Young women from provincial cities or one of a thousand towns and villages join with girls from cities like Lentvaris and Rudimina, standing exactly like shamed and blushing Tedi. Nude boys miserably cross hands over hanging crotches and stare skyward. RIK psychologists are just starting humiliations intended to strip away the unique coveralls all civvies wear, consciously and unconsciously. They’re preparing recruits for the drill instructors, who will supplant unique reactions to faux combat stimuli, replacing them with a group response and group identity over the next ten weeks. Sweeper bots scoop up the raggedy piles of discarded clothes and jewelry of a previous life, and carry them away for sorting, reselling or incineration.

  “Eyes front!”

  ‘What will they do to us next?’

  “At attention!”

  Arms snap to sides.

  Feet ache with heated pain. Breasts sag or stand out, nipples erect on no longer covered female chests. Genitals hang limply on uncertain boys, in miserable rows of naked, scared and credulous youth standing with arms held rigid and down.

  “Don’t fucking move!”

  Five hundred little trap doors open and spinning robo sprayers rise up five meters over their heads, Down comes a hosing with a mixture of pink disinfectant and shockingly cold water. Pink steam rises above the blacktop around their feet as diluted jelly jets out of a thousand nozzles, soaking everyone in medicinal froth. The heavy sweat brought out on every naked and nude body by the blazing Carmé sun washes away. A cold rinse, and sprayer bots hurry underground. The recruits smell like clean newborns. In a few minutes, they’ll look like hairless day olds.

  Two thousand bot shavers appear from ground vents, displacing the sprayers. They leave no hint of stubble behind, treating with raw equality males and fe
males as they dart around each recruit depilating head and androgenic hair with hundreds of thousands of tiny laser strikes. Even tiny, infant vellus hairs on the women are incinerated. Air is rank with a stench of burnt protein. From even a short distance away, no observer can now distinguish bald, shiny, mortified, ridiculously naked from the nude. Even gender melds, leaving only modestly different hues of skin that glisten black, brown, tan-gold, or pinkish-white in about equal numbers.