by Kali Altsoba
“Who are you calling over?” More rookies gather around to hear the answer. But no old hands shift or move. They’re listening, but indifferent.
“God,” the praying woman finally replies. All the veterans are genuinely surprised to hear it. The nubian never seemed religious before today.
“Well I know that. But why all the hand waving?”
“I want him to visit me.” The new girls laugh or giggle. They think the woman may have Lemuria rot, a thing they’ve heard rumors about. It’s a severe mental deterioration that always ends in mutilation or suicide.
“What, here in The Black?” The incredulous fresh girl is still so close to being a civvy she says ‘the black’ in caps, like civvies do. The vets hear the upper case and think: ‘She’s too raw. She’ll not last long.’
Now an older trench mate joins the ridicule of the kneeling woman. “Only Yue ming daemons and Ox Head dwell with us here in the black.”
The frosch feel a chill. Is it coming from outside? Did someone open the outer bunker blast door? Is it the cold breath of the daemon lord passing by to count the soon-to-be-dead? ‘Don’t say his name!’
“What the fuck can you want with a visit by your stupid god out here?”
“I really need to see him,” the praying woman answers matter-of-factly as she stands up to her full 2.5 meter height. Her heritage is Watusi and she grew up on a low gravity planet. She’s a half meter taller than anyone in the bunker.
“Why?” another new girl asks, looking way up, with her hands on her hips. “What you gonna say to him?” She’s emboldened by the snickering and teasing, falling back into her school dropout part of leader of a girl gang of bullies. She has the tats to broadcast her old, civvy role. Her whole torso is covered in them.
The nubian says boldly: “If’n I sees ‘im, I’m gonna shoot the bastard.” The new girls all laugh again, concluding that the tall woman really is mad. But nearby old hands nod in grim understanding. Three years of constant attrition in ‘dark satanic mills’ of suffering on Lemuria have ground the veterans down.
Tedi hardly knows anyone in the ranks anymore, not even among follow on cohorts that came to Lemuria right after hers, as reinforcements. She looks over this new lot with mild, bated interest. One girl is playing with a kitten whose head and tiny pointy ears, but no more, poke out from inside the undervest of her pale green utilities. A small paw reaches up, pulls and pats a silver necklace the petite girl wears around her neck, against regulations. She’s still a civvy at heart. ‘She’s not much more than a kitten herself.’ Tedi turns her face away with deliberate indifference. She knows this one is almost certainly doomed. She’ll get the kitten killed, too, she’s so unready. ‘How did she escape Kolno?’
“No attachments,” Leyla told Tedi most sternly two years ago. “They won’t last. Spare yourself.” That was just after they became lovers for the first time. Tedi never realized that it was part sage frontline advice, but also preemptive jealousy.
She agrees with Leyla about replacements. ‘Best not to get to know any of the new girls,’ she reminds herself as she watches the little one playing with a hidden kitten. ‘Or some of the older ones,’ she concludes, glancing at the still muttering and loudly praying nubian. The crowd of girls around has dissipated, except for one newbie who’s sitting cross legged on the floor watching every gesture.
***
After she bunks down another batch of frogs brought back from Xiamen, Tedi has nothing to do. Her day’s duty is done, but the lodestar of her nights is too far away: Major Celik is back at Brigade HQ tonight, briefing on One Battalion’s forward dispositions. It’s very hot, so Tedi lies naked on a low parapet that forms the front of the major’s command hut, to watch meteors fall. Her oval, blue eyes drown in the black night sky. Delicate, gold whisker lines are barely visible.
Thousands of tiny lights streak across and down the curve of Lemuria’s sky, like swarming fireflies in frantic mating rituals, burning out in an orgasmic instant as Amasia moves through trails of dust and grit of a small cometary cloud. Tedi doesn’t know that she’s watching flotsam from the same convoy that brought her here. The end of 40,000+ fighters from a destroyed troop transport, and megatons of colored protein powders from two broken cargo ships that expired in the same hour she arrived in system. It’s all that’s left from a forgotten event when Admiral Magda Aklyan led White Sails in a fast raid against a convoy making the hard run from Nix to the Thalassa coast of east Lemuria. It’s the third and the last time this cometary tail will glow in the Amasian night sky. The colored powders are nearly gone, the rainbow debris cloud much smaller than the first two times it made short loops sunward, dropping its heaviest loads of broken bulkheads, bits of engines, and tens of thousands of frozen bodies. Most of the bodies and larger body parts and metal wreckage are burned up and gone, settled across Amasia as gentle ash.
Tedi follows a telltale glint of a warship, a spacecraft large enough to sharply reflect light from around the curved horizon of the planet. It’s visible as a solitary bright star moving swiftly across the arch of her personal heavens, against the granular backdrop of the constant fall of Aklyan induced meteors. Beyond that is the broad, paused pinwheel of the Milky Way. That familiar slab of cosmos, the most prominent wedge of spacetime and glowing gas and matter visible to naked eyes from any one of the Thousand Worlds of Orion, is 160,000 light years across. Yet it’s but a lonely firefly, one of hundreds of billions, flickering in the long night of the Universe. Beyond human time and vision and reach is the true swarm of stars in endless galaxies that make mock of the intense emotion of the black.
Tedi remembers a childhood verse her mother whispered to her, when putting her to bed at night. Only now it’s filtered through her own experience on Amasia:
“Tis the darkest evening of the year
and stars are lovely, bright and deep.
Across the milky visage navies veer
and creep. And Death comes ever near.”
She wonders where the little moving star is going, and for which vain side in all that vast, empty-yet-so-very-full blackness it fights. She sees a ‘vic’ of three faster stars making quick pursuit, racing along the same vector as the first brilliant white light, which is weaving and accelerating and evading as best it can. She watches until the solitary star suddenly blinks out. ‘Did they kill it?’
They missed. So the three pursuing lights go into a weaving search pattern, that will almost certainly turn up nothing. ‘It must’ve been a phantom. Turned on light bender camo and went to evasive action. Was it theirs or ours?’ She doesn’t care. She rolls off her back onto her right side, head resting on a bent arm. She closes her eyes and thinks of Leyla. She settles into the soft, blue-green tuft grass that migrates up and onto the earth covered parapet during the summer months, when the desert edge sees its only rains. The tuft grass is like the stars, indifferent to the war. It acts to its own rhythms and reasons, as if the war is someplace else and life goes on as it has since AI nanny bots plunged their seed deep into Amasia.
A black scorpion scuttles past her, searching for its mate. Not knowing it was cracked and crushed under a cruel boot heel an hour ago. Tedi watches it warily, but relaxes once its frantic lost lover’s search takes it down onto the cooling night sand. She falls into a deep, languid sleep. A moist warmth envelops her groin as she starts to dream of caressing her lover’s voluptuous, olive curves, opening wide her own austral regions to Leyla’s exploring fingers and probing, expert tongue.
The war seems very far away.
The grass feels soft beneath her breast.
The stars are safely distant and cool.
***
Tedi spends most off duty time inside Leyla’s HQ hut, cooking and humming happy little songs. If you saw her do it and didn’t know she was just a few miles behind the black on Amasia, you’d think it was still peacetime and she was back in Lentvaris on Daegu, cooking a family meal in her mother’s green tiled kitchen. She’s proud of herself a
nd Leyla, content to be where she is, very much in love. The war is all around yet hardly seems to matter. Only vaguely does she appreciate how novel her position is, compared to most other WCB women.
They’re hardening toward the war, angry and frustrated. They take it out on local civvies more often than before, beating them routinely. Robbing and killing them, too. Tedi did her share of bullying and stealing in Year One, but she’s lost the taste for it. She thinks it’s because she’s a better person. Maybe she is. But it’s also true that Leyla sees to it that Tedi has plenty to eat and lots of pretty things to decorate their shared, protected quarters. Unlike other women in her company and battalion, who scrounge for extra food and sleep duty tours in cold bunkers under parapets of the first line of black wall. It’s always the way with front wives.
Then come new orders that will send Tedi into Dark Territory for an extended tour in a Forward Observation Post. When she queries the order, Leyla is told by a leering male officer: “Rank has its privileges, Major Celik. Yet even your sweet front wife has to serve Pyotr from time to time, outside your bed. You can have your pretty little sergeant back to play house when we’re done using her.” Leyla salutes and spins on her high black boot, leaving HQ without argument because she knows that arguing will do no good. Also that the drecksau is right. It’s Tedi’s turn to do FOP duty out in the black.
Still, Leyla’s growing less tolerant of stupid Rikugun chauvinism than before. Less willing to accept the usual Grün machismo. Not after burying so many brave girls in the soils of Central Lemuria and the hot grains of The Sandbox. Not when Grün womanhood has proven itself in battle, met the last test of men and passed. ‘Idiots! Do they think a woman takes a maser blast any less well than a man? Or is it that they can’t imagine me having anyone but them between my legs?’
That night, their last together for as far into the future as either can see, Leyla holds a quietly sobbing Tedi close until just before dawn. Then they say the Grün Prayer for the Dead, as is their ritual before one of them leaves to go on patrol or to battle or into the black. Tedi chants the ancient cadence of the departing.
“Do not stand by my grave and weep.
For I do not sleep, below the soil.
I ride free on whirling winds that blow
across a Thousand Worlds, and more.
I ride the tides and eddies’ swirls.
I do not rest or regret, nor do I toil.
Look for me in the new springtime.
In white and yellow flowers I’ll dress,
to dance for you in a dervish dream.
I am the pure desert and the driven snow.
I am warmth, and rain and morning’s glow.
I am the sound of dawn’s last hush,
the beating wings of a morning thrush.
I am swift uplifted. I am prism light.
I reach down to you as starry night.
So go, leave my green graveside.
Do not walk so slow, but run away!
Neither weep bitter for my receding tide.
For I shall come to you again, and again.
I shall visit daily. I shall stand beside
you and with you, in dreaming sleep.
My love is endless as an ocean’s deep.”
Leyla kisses Tedi chastely on the forehead. Then she reprises with the required, ritual answer from an ancient Rig Veda, one that’s far older than the Imperium. More loving, more decent, more humane than the Imperium. It stands against everything that Pyotr and Purity fight for, want and need from Tedi and Leyla, loyal as they are, devoted to a vaguely understood cause as they both are.
“May your eyes rise up to the stars,
your life’s breath leave on the wind.
Go now, into the sky. Or enter the soil,
according to your own and proper nature.
Or go upon the waters, if that is your fate.
Take root in the plants with your limbs.
Only come back to me in the falling rain.”
The bunker top where they lie gives back warmth of the setted sun. Leyla strokes Tedi’s soft cheek as she falls asleep, running the tip of her little finger along gold filament cat’s whiskers around her closed, blue oval eyes. Her own eyes fill with tears and tenderness. ‘I never felt this way about anyone.’ She has never said it out loud, even to Tedi. ‘I’m out of control, and it thrills me.’
Later that night, before moving to the FOP duty station in Dark Territory, Tedi gets the official mission order. “Conceal, maintain contact, and report back on anything you see. Anything.” Then something new, a parting warning whispered by Leyla. “This could be big, Tedi. Be careful. Be safe. Come back to me.”
Wearing combat kit and with less than five mikes to go before leaving for the FOP, Tedi kisses Leyla lightly on the lips. She smiles and tries to look unworried as she tosses around their final ritual exchange, made when they expect or at least hope to meet again. “Better a pigeon today than a peacock tomorrow,” Tedi says it more lightly than her heart.
Leyla replies in a voice barely above a whisper: “Better copper that’s certain than gold that is doubtful. Goodbye my love.”
Tedi moves from the protection of First Trench into the obscure regions. ‘Why is it me who has to go? Why can’t Leyla send a new girl, so I can stay with her?’ She thinks she knows the answer. She thinks that Leyla can’t afford suspicion of favoritism for her front wife when it comes to assigning hard missions; that she’ll always order Tedi on patrol or to man a FOP when it’s her turn to go. She doesn’t know that Leyla tried to break all those rules, but Brigade HQ overturned her and reprimanded her for trying. Tedi leaves, still resentful. Without looking back.
Beetle
‘Maybe they’ll come tonight. Probably it’s tonight. The moons are right for an attack.’ Women of the WCB verge nervously along the lip of Dark Territory. Safeties are on, fresh pink crystal magazines stacked nearby. Alongside all male brigades, veteran fighters of the WCB await an unknown yet appointed hour. They wait on a coming storm of rage and death, maiming and madness and murder.
‘Will they come over tonight?’
‘Will I lose my leg tonight?’
‘Will I die tonight?’
‘Will it be tonight?’
It’s a rare, tenebrous night. All five of Amasia’s moons are set or showing dark side to a blacked out supercontinent below. No lights escape camo of the big cities. No town or village or solitary farmer’s house or prisoner hutch dares reveal the narrowest beam of light, to call down swarms of AI Wasps or strafing Jabos. ‘Will they come tonight? Is this my last night of nights? Gods, where is the day?’
***
WCB women are growing harder each day they stay at the black or carry out rear area sweeps into the last civvy areas. They’re uncaring of basic kindness or mercy, descending into barbarism just like the men. Some are naturally malicious, others become more wanton in their crimes because of the unexpected power over others that war gives to them, and to men. Power they never dreamed of having before the war, especially in the misogynist pits of Grün family life and society. Even the decent ones are losing themselves in a swirl of hate and rising arrogance of the majority, as opportunity begets cruelty and callousness. You see it in brutal beatings of prisoners. You see it in callow mistreatment of civilians. You see it in their hairless faces. You hear it in their harsh voices. They sound just like men.
“We’re winning the war!”
“Everywhere, we’re on farfolk worlds!”
“There’s not one enemy boot on any Grün world.”
“We’re winning everywhere because we’re superior!”
“We can do what we want, when we want.”
“When we take something, it isn’t stealing.”
“When we kill civvies, it isn’t murder.”
“Our people will us to do it. Purity demands it!”
“Pyotr’s and General Oetkert’s order forgives all our crimes.”
It’s ancient law. A superio
r order forgives the soldier’s deed, for ‘we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’ It’s the old excuse, and they seize upon it. The victory they assume, the war they wage for Pyotr and the Imperium, absolves anything they do, however they do it, to whomever they do it. Most really believe it, too.
“It’s righteous!”
“We deserve it!”
“We’re the winners!”
As the war and the supply problem both worsen in Year Four, rear area WCB foraging parties reave the last cans of milk, take butter and bread from starving civvies hanging on in the last outlier areas. They take the last food from farming mothers their own age who plead for mercy for their hungry children’s sake. “Get out! Alliance get out!” they yell, without waiting for an answer before kicking in flimsy doors of country cottages, expelling anyone inside into nights of cold.
“Why don’t you fight us to keep what you have?”