Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  The front third of the FOP caves in, trapping two of the rookies in the forward spotter room where they halted on Tedi’s silent order. The burning Buffalo comes partway down, swaying over their heads, threatening to follow falling plates of broken roofing into the hole. Then it falls, crashing into a suddenly open, exposed Rikugun forward outpost totally surrounded by Alliance troops. The descending hulk crushes both trapped girls before they can move or scream.

  Tedi is disgusted with herself, but she has no time for recrimination as strangely accented voices outside the gaping hole shout out their discovery in Universal Standard. Natural light is pouring into the FOP. Two men in odd fatigues and blue helmets peer down. The second man sees Tedi and the brown eyed girl.

  “It’s a locust nest!”

  “Quick! Grenades!”

  “Hurry, hurry!”

  A sound of trigger guards being released.

  A low hissss, then another hissss.

  “Apples in the hole!”

  Two black balls drop out of the low, fading sky above the hole. Tedi yells at the brown eyed girl, who’s standing without her helmet on. Not knowing what to do or where to dart, with the FOP now wide open, stripped naked like a deshelled turtle.

  “Cover, now!”

  Tedi dives for the floor of the FOP as a frag explodes up and behind her. The other little black ball of potential wounds and death bounces between leaning carbyne panels from the broken roof, then blows somewhere above the brown eyed girl’s head, grazing her with small bits of shrapnel. Her bright oval face looks bewildered as it starts to streak with scarlet trickles of warm, thick blood. She’s lucky. It’s a scalp wound. She stays standing where she is, confusedly passing her right hand through now blood matted, close cropped, night black hair. It glistens ruby wet on top. She flinches as her probing fingers find a long, jagged scalp tear.

  “Get down!”

  Three seconds later, two more sharp bursts of light and sound explode beside and beneath the exposed girl with beautiful eyes and perfectly clear skin, and fatal innocence of the moment. This time the spinning fragments of poisoned shrapnel cut the child soldier down where she naïvely stands, severing her spine but kindly ending consciousness of pain before she can realize it and scream. Just before she dies she looks pleadingly, with infant astonishment, directly into Tedi’s eyes. It reminds Tedi of the time her sister on Lentvaris silently implored her help with a bad playground injury, a gash in her leg. She didn’t know what to do then, either.

  This is so much worse.

  This is irredeemable.

  This is all her fault.

  As Tedi scurries up and out the bolt hole she looks one last time at the dead girl lying in two still connected pieces, a widening circle of pooling blood on the floor of the smashed FOP. Only now, as her eyes fix on the ruby, oozing head wound does she finally realize what it is about all the new girls that has been so obvious for weeks yet unseen by her, tickling at her mind. ‘She isn’t bald!’

  At least, not like her and Leyla and all other original recruits of the Women’s Combat Brigade, who are as hairless as blind newts, depilated from toe to crotch to crown. The new girls have close cropped or close shaved hair so tight against their scalps the line and shading is hardly visible. But they have hair.

  ‘Kolno Barracks dropped the old rule!’

  ‘How did I not notice before just now?’

  And why are you thinking about it now?

  There are two Blues peering in.

  They both have lethal intention!

  And swarms more enemy outside,

  all around your exposed position!

  Are you hurt, Tedi? Are you stunned?

  Did the grenades that killed her get you too?

  What the hell’s the matter with you, girl? Get out!

  Don’t you know you’re all alone, Tedi?

  Don’t you know you’re in the Yue ming?

  Do you hear that? The scrabbling claws of daemons!

  Ox Head and Horse Face are racing here to catch you!

  They’ll hand you over to King Yan to judge, and then to Death.

  Don’t you know everyone wants to kill you, daemons and men?

  Run, Tedi! Run for your life!

  In truth, she never really saw any of the new girls. Never really looked at them, in all the time she was with them. Not in months. Not in three weeks she spent with them in the FOP. It’s her unwritten rule. It’s the rule of all veterans.

  ‘Best not to get to know replacements.’

  ‘They have so little time to live.’

  So do you, Tedi! Get out, now!

  There’s no time to grab your helmet!

  Leave it, Tedi! Climb, climb faster!

  All she has is what she strapped on before the Buffalo breaks through: her knife, her sidearm, and three grenades. She pulls hand-over-hand up the carbon rungs on the exit ladder. Just outside the open rear hatch Tedi is climbing toward, a Blue guard takes the safety off his maser. The whole, broken open FOP is surrounded.

  Fury

  Tedi pokes her head outside the e-skin of light and sound camo of the FOP, only her bald head and pale green shoulders showing. She eases herself up, less than half a meter above the desert floor. The rest of her body is hidden by a light camo refractive shimmer that looks just like the surrounding sand and rocks.

  A tall, shadowy man in blue utes is standing barely two meters away, his maser ready and humming. He’s the rear guard of the squad that’s now pouring fire into the broken FOP, from two sides and on top. He was told by his NCO to wait for anyone inside to climb out of the broken hiding hole, then kill her. So why doesn’t he do it? Doesn’t he know the rear bolt hole is here? Can’t he see her shiny head floating above the sand? As her eyes adjust to the natural light of late afternoon she sees the Blue is standing with his back to her, utterly unaware that she’s there.

  She doesn’t hesitate.

  It’s her only chance.

  She leaps, like a puma.

  She wraps her left arm around his neck, pulling herself onto his back. Her legs circle his waist, crossing at the ankles so that she rides him like a knapsack while she squeezes all air out of him. His three day beard scratches the skin of her forearm as she tightens her chokehold around his neck, lifting and pulling his head back with steady pressure. He flails wildly, but with such pressure on his windpipe he can’t call out for help. Quick and sleek as a puma sinking teeth into the throat of a forest deer, she stabs him. He yields silently to her knife as it finds a hinge of his body armor and slides deeply into his side, in-and-out three times fast, snick, snick, snick. It finds a new vital part each time: lung, kidney, liver. With the third stab her knife comes out bright, egg yolk yellow. He staggers. She jerks his head back with her left arm and cuts his throat. She drops her feet to the ground as he slumps, easing his quivering body down to bleed out into the warm, southern sand.

  Slick with the tall man’s blood, keenly smelling the bitterness of his leaking bile which covers her knife and smears across his frothing throat, Tedi embraces his ruin. It’s not the first time that she has knifed a man. He’s her fifth. She listens intently, hearing strange, excited voices overtop the FOP. She arms and hurls two frags toward the sounds, hissss hissss. She waits for a staggered, muffled pump ... pump, hears wild screams then a silence that tells her she hit the mark.

  Then she runs.

  Faster than she ever did.

  Faster than she thinks she can.

  Run, Tedi! Run for your life!

  After a fifty meter dash Tedi rolls into a glassy crater. She waits for half a minute, knife erect in her left hand, pistol in her bloody right hand. Listening for sounds of pursuit and murder. She sprints off in a new direction. And again, and again and again. Never moving in a straight line, halting and displacing in non-repetitive zags then zigs. She times to three, shifting the zig-zag pattern every two minutes. She’s more like a desert sidewinder or ghoul snake than a superbly fit young woman running for life and limb.
Racing back to find Leyla, who she thinks is waiting for her across the black. She loses track of time and place as a red sunset bleeds into a rare moonless night. She pauses her crater hopping to rehydrate and inject spray electrolytes, once she reaches a hiding place that training and instinct deem a safe distance from where she throat sliced the careless Blue guard.

  He was from Caspia.

  Loving husband, father of five.

  Quite a decent fellow, actually.

  He’s gone now. Already forgotten.

  She slows her pace but continues moving, all through the night, navigating by Orion’s stars. She moves crater to crater, feeling a careful way across broken and unfamiliar terrain under the blackest of Amasian skies, a two day moonlessness that occurs once every three months. Only now does she realize with an electric start that she’s all alone deep inside Dark Territory.

  Without her HUD.

  With no idea where she is.

  Cutoff from all maps.

  Without any coms or IFF.

  Tedi curls fetally inside a shallow crater where she at last allows herself to fall into a restless sleep. Her pistol is armed and humming, gripped tightly between her arms and knees. She rests fitfully, thoughts and dreams drifting back to the gaping hole where she left the brown eyed girl in a half moon of her own blood. And two more WCB kids, crushed into jelly under a mortally wounded Buffalo, spark spitting and metal bones groaning as it collapsed their personal Universes into an unknowable singularity called Death.

  ***

  Tedi awakes with a start. A hard rain is splattering her face, running into her eyes and open mouth and down her throat. It’s the first rainfall in weeks, releasing into the parched desert air as an orgasmic monsoon. She rolls onto her back to swallow warm rain that falls straight down, into her mouth. It’s coming down so hard she has to fight off a choking fit. It tastes clean and warm, like the desert.

  It’s raining so hard, Tedi thinks that Nature must want to make up for her Old Woman dryness all at once. Water floods over the sand flats, gushes of runoff that the impervious desert can’t take in. The flash flood threatens to fill Tedi’s crater and drown her if she doesn’t move. She rolls onto her belly and pops her head up to get bearings and gulp breathable air. She looks into a dull, gray dawn.

  ‘What’s that?’ Her heart leaps as she sees two Blues lying just past the lip of her shelter, not three meters away from her head. Maybe less. She clutches her pistol, brings it forward into a two-handed firing position, pointblank range from her prone enemy. She has no idea when they arrived. ‘What are they doing, lying there in the rain? If they see me they’ll jump me, and cut my throat! Can I shoot or stab them both before they do it? Which one do I shoot first?’

  The flashing water washes over and around both Blues, swiftly piling bits of small wreckage against them as it splashes atop too fine and already waterlogged sand. Blocked from absorption also by thick underlying yellow clays, the rushing water has no place to go once it fills up the sand and craters. Flashing, fast water streams into Tedi’s crater, filling it beneath and around her. She knows that she has to leave in the next seconds. She has to get over the crater lip, or she’ll drown.

  ‘Drown in a desert! How’s that for irony?’ Oddly for the daughter of a father who spent his whole adult life in the Imperial Navy, in Kaigun, she never learned to swim. Back when she was still “My Little Girl,” he tried to coax her to dive into ocean waves on a wide beach outside Lentvaris on Daegu, explaining to her the ancient tradition that all naval families swam. She said, hands on hips: “Jeepers, Dad! You don’t have to swim in space.” He never had an answer to that.

  She feels panic rising along with warm, swirling, pooling water. She switches her pistol to her left hand, clutching her last frag in her more certain right hand, biting down hard to arm the firing pin, but not yet releasing it. Fearing its hissss will give her closeness away, she keeps biting. Her whole body tenses with acute anticipation, like when she makes love and is just ready to climax. ‘Combat is like orgasm,’ she thinks. Not for the first time. Under fire or on top of Leyla.

  Not now, Tedi. Not now.

  You don’t have any time.

  The waters are rising fast.

  You better make your move.

  Then she smells it. It’s unmistakable. The sickly sweet odor of putrefaction, bouquet of the black. It fills her nostrils, a combination of hydrogen sulphide and badly rotten meat, garnished with other musty decomposition and a trace of liquid feces dissolving into fast runoff waters. She carefully resets the grenade to “off.” She sinks below the crater edge, letting flash waters wash around her shoulders, gripping the crater wall with her ribbed soled boots. She pops up for a second look to confirm. Yes, both men are dead. ‘Have been for several days, judging by the smell.’ Tedi climbs out of the fast filling crater. She kicks both corpses hard, just to be sure. Then she crater hops away from them for two hours nonstop, heading toward the rising sun and her eastern home with Leyla and Rikugun.

  The rain halts as quickly as it started, leaving wisps of languid steam curling over hot sand as the desert finally deigns to open its dryness. The morning sky parts into a rainbow that arches over the Yue ming, offering to link the armies with a fairy bridge that none can ever cross. Men and women look up from east and west to watch the wondrous labor of prismatic light. Some marvel at the pristine colors, cheer up for a moment. Others feel gloomy and foreboding urges and think it’s the work of daemons. Everyone thinks something different about the colored bridge to nowhere, recalls fleeting memories of ugliness and pain or joy and home.

  For Tedi, resting briefly on her back on wet sand, the wide rainbow promises a path back to Leyla. She watches wistfully as it fades and dims, until it’s gone into glare. ‘Stupid, childish thought.’ She chides herself, realizing she’s indulging fantasy too long. ‘Get up, girl. Move it!’ She gives the self order as if she’s still leading the half-squad of dead girls she left behind inside the broken FOP.

  A lappet faced vulture rises and banks in wide circles overhead. He’s watching Tedi move across the tan desert far below. He’s riding thermals without beating his wide wings, guide feathers extended and subtly moving. He watches Tedi dart from crater to termite mound, to wrecked armtrak, then back into a half crater. He’s done this before, patiently waiting for someone to make a kill shot far below, before he descends to feast on human carrion. He doesn’t care in what color his food comes wrapped. She looks up as his shadow passes, sees him as a tiny, black dot circling and circling, without moving its wings. She hopes it’s not a drone, calling down mortars to seek and end her.

  Tedi leaves the vulture behind as she spends two more days and nights slow crawling or rapidly scuttling and scooting from one crater to the next pit, over to a broken machine thence back below a crater rim. She’s going more north-south than west to east after dark, befuddled without her HUD. She pays for that mistake with three close calls, evading a bot gun by sheer chance then two snipers who try to take her out but miss.

  The first one tries a long shot. His sound bullet pings! off a nearby wreck, sending her diving into scorching sand and broken glass. She crawls off as the inept sniper starts shooting at something or someone half a klic to her left; a jackrabbit or a gust of wind blown sand that showed movement on his scope. Five mikes later, she’s glad to hear an anti-sniper mortar find his blind, its happy smart shell ending his nuisance life in a loud boom! of exploding fire and melted sand. She doesn’t care if he was Alliance or Rikugun. He was a danger to everyone. He probably wasn’t trained. Just a regular trooper with a scope attached to his stub maser, sent out to fill his unit’s sniping quota and a line in some captain or major’s AAR.

  The second silent killer is much more skilled but far too bored and cocky. He waits too long to shoot, watching in wry amusement for over fifteen mikes as Tedi crawls then scoots closer to him, unaware that he has her in his long gun’s liquid sights all along. Carelessly, when he finally shoots he jerks just a lit
tle and misses her by a centimeter. No more. Now he’s too close. A hunter becomes the hunted. Instinct and an observer’s eye for terrain cover tells Tedi where to find his hole. She makes a mad dash straight for the spot, while he jams and stumbles through a panicky reload as he sees a flash of green fury head right for him. She can’t see his duck blind through all its light camo, but she knows she’s on top of it and out of his sights when no second shot seeks her out. She probes for a hinge or lid, her arm disappearing below the elbow into the blind’s refract camo. She finds an air vent with her invisible fingers. She can’t see it but pulls off the cap by feel alone.