Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  He knows she has him. He pleads with her, voice to voice. Promising not to shoot her if she leaves him be. He says that he’s just like her, a soldier sent to the desert for reasons he doesn’t understand. He’s lying. He really enjoys war. Likes killing stray locust like her, at a distance. He volunteered for sniper duty.

  “Please, don’t! I won’t shoot. I’ll let you leave.”

  “Damn right, ‘cause I won’t let you live.”

  “Then I surrender.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll pass the long gun up to you. Here it is.”

  A barrel snout pokes up through the open air cap. She pulls back, thinking he’s going to shoot her, then she grabs it and yanks the long gun out. It’s not loaded, so she tosses it onto the sand.

  “You can go now. I can’t shoot you.”

  “You could have a second gun.”

  “I don’t, I swear it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I have a family on Rodinia, two girls younger than you.”

  It’s a mistake to say “girls” to Tedi, who left three dead ones behind two days ago. “Fuck you and your girls!”

  She mocks and taunts him as she arms and drops in her last frag and slams the vent closed. Pom! A puff of gentle, white smoke rises followed by a mortal groan. He’s stunned, lacerated in a dozen places and bleeding from five separate puncture wounds. She waits for two hours, her ear to the ground as he slowly dies, weeping to himself. When no more sounds come from below, after his low moanings stop, Tedi moves on to the next crater.

  Heroism no longer seems the stuff of character and idealism, as she believed once. Back when she was a little girl listening eagerly to tales her Kaigun dad told her about ancient wars and his naval honor, about bravery and how the Imperium would march and sail off to war and glory under magnificent Pyotr Shaka III. She was so proud of her Dad and brothers when they went to the wars. War isn’t a matter of courage. She knows that now. It has almost nothing to do with courage. She has seen too many ‘heroes’ die out here, in the black. Nine out of ten who get combat citations or medals, she figures out on her own, are no more heroes than cowards. Most are guys or gals who lose their belief in living, who give up on their own lives and decide to go out in a flash of mad nihilism. It only looks like courage to civvies and politicians. And in memex propaganda.

  Alone in a way that’s the single rarest thing in war, that most crowded and collective of all human activities, Tedi has time to think as she walks between craters, climbs in, climbs out, scouts ahead with naked eyes, does it over again and again. On the third night of her contemplation she comes to a conclusion on an old issue and debate, one folks in the trenches argue about all the time. ‘Dark Territory belongs to those who walk across it standing up.’

  She quickly self corrects. ‘Wait, I’m standing and walking in it and I don’t own it.’ She self corrects again. ‘So, that’s wrong. It doesn’t belong to anyone. I guess that’s why we call it no-one’s-land.’ Corrects yet again. ‘No, that’s wrong, too. DT belongs to the biggest guns. Artillery is the God of War and the Yue ming.’ She likes that thought. She thinks it’s hers, though it sounds almost too clever to own. ‘I hope Leyla will agree, and be proud of me when I tell her.’

  She’s pleased with her tactical and moral insight, so tickled that she doesn’t notice her boots are making beaver tail sounds as they slap! sand that’s still all surface wet from the flash flood. Doesn’t see a deep crater three-quarters filled with stagnant, greenish water until she trips over a long dead corpse lying along its rim, and falls over it and headfirst into the crater. She tries to climb out but slips back, again and again, unable to grip its jaundice glass sides, slick with slimy strands of surface algae that burst into life after the first hard rain in months. She teeters, falls backward, flounders in rancid water over two meters deep. She’s only kept from drowning by chance, alone in one forgotten crater among the hundred million ugly holes pocking the wounded face of Lemuria.

  Her feet slip and shift, but something’s down there, underneath her, and her feet find it. An armtrak hood, perhaps? Maybe a crashed Jabo with intact cockpit? Anyway, something big and hard and hidden in murk. Whatever it is, it gives her enough purchase to catch hold of a broken bit of carbyne planking jutting out of the glassy crater rim. She pulls herself out with difficulty, dead tired as she half rises awkwardly on a short bench of yellow clay that starts just beyond the rim.

  Suddenly, she feels a tearing pain as something hard and bitterly sharp and alien rips into her shoulder. She shrieks a wild and inarticulate bellow, releases a cry of primal pain and fear as she falls to her knees and clutches at the wounded spot. Her mind yells multiple warnings to her body to get up and turn around, right fucking now, even as she shouts out loud: “What the hell was that?!”

  She tenses as taut as a violin string as she painfully turns her head, and sees a huge, scared, panting squid standing over and behind her. He’s dripping yellow mud and water from his soaked blues. His serrated knife is raised, poised to plunge into her again. His flat face is contorted with mortal and murderous concentration. Tedi sees him with a jolt of rapid fire surprise and anger at her own stupidity, wandering and musing on nothings in Dark Territory so that she never saw him. Then it hits her: ‘He’s the corpse I tripped over, lying outside the hole! You idiot, Tedi Shipcka! You’re an idiot! Talking to yourself about rainbows! Now he’s going to kill you for it!’ She shouts out loud: “Leyla, help me! Leyla, help!”

  It’s senseless.

  It’s pointless.

  It’s pitiable.

  The big Blue played possum during her approach, which was less stealthy than she thought, making flapping beaver tail footfalls. He lay unmoving, afraid to strike with the only weapon he had, his knife. Hardly daring to breathe. Sure that if he does she’ll pull her sidearm and that her pistol will sound click clack and end his life. Praying that her slapping feet pass him by.

  He waited, lying still as she moved toward him. Tensing to strike, until she stubbed against him and fell over his legs, head first, down into the crater, thereby surrendering all advantages of weapon and high position. As she struggled against drowning, splashing, foundering noisily against slimy, yellow clay and glassed rim sides, he rose and raised his wicked looking knife. Its blade is serrated into a sawtooth, to snag and better rip out his enemy’s flesh and guts. Only the acute angle at which Tedi climbed out of the crater, then half rose, prevented his first cut from being her last. Even so, he has badly torn up her shoulder.

  He’s an enormous bear of a man, with black skin and a shock of curly hair that she sees clearly because, like her, he wears no helmet. He yells in dismay as he hears her scream of pain and sees her blue eyes as she swivels her head to see who or what hurt her. ‘The bitch is still alive!’ He swings his huge knife down like a machete. It’s a fatal mistake, his swinging instead of thrusting short and hard into any part of the small, half sized body helpless below him. Tedi rolls hard into his legs, knocking him sideways and backwards before he can land the murder blow.

  She’s on him in a fury, hitting, tearing, punching, stabbing into his arms, torso, face and belly, over and over with her own flashing, black diamond blade. It snicks and slips in-and-out, through fingers and hands and meaty forearms held out to protect against the whirring buzz saw Tedi and her black-and-red blade become.

  Furious. Infernal. Pitiless.

  Futile. Hopeless. Pathetic.

  Panicked. Frightened. Enraged.

  He’s soon bleeding from a hundred cuts to his arms and face, a dozen stabs to his chest and guts. Inside another minute he stops resisting and twitching, and lies still. Tedi straddles him at the waist with her knees, stabbing him five more times in the gut and once through his heart to be certain. She rolls onto her back, heaving great gulps of air and adrenaline and winces from pain.

  “A good, big man beats a little woman every time.” That’s what smirking male instructors told her on the second day
at Kolno Barracks. She showed them up, time and again. With unmatched skill and quickness on obstacle courses and in marksmanship, and avoiding snipers. Even if three times they made her wear a punishment bag filled with wetted down laterite. And swore and belittled her and all “wannabe women fighters.” And tossed her around like a ragdoll in hand-to-hand training. Until she slammed the heel of her hand hard into the jaw of one too cocky NCO, leaving him stunned on the drill ground while she trussed him and declared. “You’re my prisoner now. Get up, you filthy Blue! March!”

  She didn’t accept all their bullshit then, still just a gullible, impressionable kid of seventeen. Three years of real combat later, with many a bigger man scored as notches on her blade handle and another lying at her feet waiting to join her marks, she roars like a lioness over her latest kill. “I proved it false, and again just now. Where it really matters, out here. So screw all you hinter world shits. Fuck all you assholes in Basic, and all the stuff you never taught us! We taught ourselves!”

  She doesn’t care that she’s violating every black sound and stealth protocol. Pain is surging through her throbbing shoulder and it feels good to finally say it all out loud. After three years of filth and death and humiliation on Amasia. Tedi rests for ten mikes, then creeps two klics away from the kill spot. She halts, lies down. She can go no farther. She’s losing blood and consciousness. Just before she passes out she realizes that she’s nearly out of time.

  ***

  In a delirium, she’s back in the crater drowning in runoff and pain, or just outside it reliving the fight. Not always winning. In her febrile visions, the big man comes at her again and again, slashing and hacking her with his jagged machete knife.

  She’s tugged awake by a hard yank. She reaches instinctively for her knife, groping at her boot top where she keeps it, sudden fear engorging her throat. ‘No! Not now, not after all I’ve been through, I can’t die now!’ Raging frustration with the unfairness of it all fills and overcomes her. ‘I know I killed him, I know it!’ Before she sees who’s still tugging at her or can strike a blow she feels a familiar hand close on her own, holding back the clenched knife from striking. She hears the most unexpected voice. “Calm down Tedi, my darling. It’s me.”

  She’s astonished.

  She’s bewildered.

  She’s overjoyed.

  She’s enraptured.

  Through a febrile haze she feels Leyla reach down, help her rise. She’s lifted from the ground, and pulled close. ‘It can’t be. Not out here. It must be my fever.’

  “I’ve been looking for you for three days.”

  “Is that you? Are you my Leyla?”

  “Where you ‘bin, kiddo?”

  Leyla looks tired and wan, almost old. Like a horse ready for its last trip, to the knacker. She has a set of heavy smart bandages wrapped all around her back and hip, a smaller white wrap around an ungloved left hand. She’s smiling inside her helmet, behind an amber HUD. Sheer joy at finding and seeing Tedi is dancing in her azure eyes. And love. She’s mother-friend-lover all at once.

  They stare at each other for what seems forever, before Tedi flings herself into Leyla’s open arms, sinking and sobbing onto her warm and welcoming breasts. Exhausted, relieved, surprised by joy, overcome by pain, fainting with disbelief. Tedi’s chest heaves with wild and uncontrollable sobs. She’s crying like she never has since she was a very little girl. So is Leyla. She’s weeping deeply. They sink to the ground together, ending in a sitting embrace.

  Leyla holds on despite the pain Tedi’s tight hug is bringing to her unhealed wounds. She gently strokes the smooth curve of Tedi’s bald and badly sunburned dome, brushing off dried, green algae left from her unexpected crater bath. She soothes Tedi’s sobbing like a mother comforting a badly hurt child. Tedi’s upturned face is streaked with white rivers where tears wash away three day’s thickness of ochre clays, pond scum, and tan desert dust. Leyla bends her olive face down and kisses Tedi tenderly on both eyelids, then softly and chastely on the lips. She reaches out her good right hand to help Tedi rise. “Let’s go home, kid.”

  There’ll be time enough to report in, for discipline and AARs. Time to explain to Mr. Jowls and MI back at Brigade HQ what happened at the FOP. To explain why an experienced combat officer released herself from medical care against all doctors’ orders, to head alone into DT in violation of standing regulations, so that she could find her godsdamn front wife. There will be time for punishment for all that, too. But for the moment, they summon each other back to life, back from the edge of darkness. They limp home to RIK’s black wall, still over a klic distant. A wounded 20-year old supported by a wobbly, bandaged major half again her age.

  ***

  Leyla regained consciousness a few hours after her wounding, when Bisons smashed and overran her ocht gun strongpoint. Only suspend jabbed into her hip by an especially alert medic saved her life, as she lay in a long row of dead and mortally wounded after the battle. Her wounds looked so severe that all her own girls thought she was dead when they last saw her, lying inert. She wasn’t.

  “Just fucked up, especially my hip,” she tells another battalion commander after arriving back at First, looking like a white, half wrapped mummy.

  “They carried me to the dead pit.”

  “Not to a triage hospital?”

  “First Triage told the bearers I wouldn’t make it.”

  “Still, why go straight to the pit?”

  “They were trying to save time.”

  “Stupid bastards!”

  “Bitches, actually. But point made.”

  “How did you get back out?”

  “I got their attention just in time.”

  She sure did. Half conscious, she nearly blew away a stretcher bearer with her sidearm when she dropped her on a broken, bleeding hip from three feet up. The sudden pain brought Leyla fully around. The bearer ignored her, pretending she was dead and clearly preparing to leave her there. She was bone weary of carrying, after her tenth trip to the pit in just two hours. “I fired my pistol directly over the cunt’s head. I said, you want to be more careful, girl. Get me out of this death hole and into a field hospital or you can join me down here in two seconds.”

  Leyla insisted on going out into DT that night, as soon as they told her Tedi failed to report back and that all FOPs, including Tedi’s, went offline during the battle. She couldn’t stand to think of Tedi lying out there someplace, whether alive or dead. So she went looking for her missing love. That broke all the regs, medical and military. A frontline officer slipping out of a hospital bed with severe wounds, going alone into Dark Territory on a mission as hopeless and reckless of capture as it was heroically romantic? She knew it must put her in the shithouse with male superiors at Division. Yet even the very hardest women in WCB understood why she did it. Two risked severe punishment to help. The rest kept blackout about where she was, maintaining silence even when brusque MI men came to ask where the missing major had gone and why. They made threats against WCB to no avail.

  Leyla went out into the desert armed only with a med kit, a pistol, and an HUD sensor array pulsing in active search mode, but on a narrow and specific frequency she programed. It pulsed and pinged almost inaudibly, looking for a unique digital ID hidden inside a delicate silver necklace that Tedi absolutely refused to take off, “like ever!” Leyla gave her the secret, hidden beacon on their anniversary. The tag had barely a half klic range, so limping Leyla had to hobble search in a tight grid pattern that was half guesswork, half wishful thinking.

  Her love for Tedi couldn’t wait on wounds or weather or weariness. It was bigger than all of that. Bigger than the war. Other women understood, even if her male superiors at Battalion HQ didn’t. That’s why a kindly disposed WCB captain agreed to cover Leyla’s AARs in her place. She told the MI interrogator: “Major Celik is in recovery from battle wounds. She’s in a hinter hospital.” But Leyla was gone more than two days, and that couldn’t be covered up with a story or a lie. Not when her off
icer ID tattoo and IFF started pinging on MI screens, moving over Dark Territory. MI suspected that she might be a deserter. Or worse, a traitor going over to the enemy side of the black. They pushed hard. The captain broke.

  “Look, she’s out there looking for her lover, OK? She’ll either get killed or she’ll be back. Major Celik is a good officer and a loyal subject of the Imperium. Just give her one more day.”

  One of the MI officers was fond of his own front wife and agreed. Totally off-the-record. So after Leyla comes back with Tedi she’s only reprimanded and not courts-martialed and shot. But she and Tedi are separated on Brigade HQ’s orders. Leyla’s recalled to work a desk until she recovers fully. She hates her colonel for taking Tedi away, thinking ‘only a man would do it.’