by Kali Altsoba
with his martial cloak all around him.’
The rest are shouting at him. “Get back into your truck, you mute pirate!” They’re surprised he has a voice to answer them.
“What did I do? What’s the matter with you all?”
“You’re the matter! Come here, you dumb fuck.”
“Words must be said…”
“He’s dead. He can’t hear you.”
“What does it matter, anyway? They’re just words.”
“I think we have to…”
“Let’s go! It’s cold!”
They’re not so callow as they seem, not yet. They’re hiding from the truth of the snow grave they leave behind, from the first death most of them see right up close. They’ll recall it as long as they live. Even the three lads who survive for a whole two years more on Amasia, who will see thousands upon tens of thousands of deaths at the black walls, or deep inside the Yue ming, the obscure region that divides Lemuria between the dead and the soon-to-be dead. Even as they do grow callow, colder and more heartless, this unnamed and unforgotten child soldier they bury hastily under ice beside a forest rollbahn will haunt them over all other dead.
The next day, a second boy low down with food poisoning and frost gangrene despairs. Valdeon was vocally upset at the snow hole graveside, complaining that no one really cared or they’d have remembered Limburger’s name and not tried to bury him like he was a rondelle of moldy cheese. He accuses, even though he couldn’t recall the dead boy’s name, either. He sits isolated and morose all night in the rear of a half-empty blue Troika cargo pod. When the convoy stops to empty urine bottles, stretch legs and relieve bowels still leaky from the blue meat they ingested days before, Valdeon wanders into the thick roadside woods. Like a sick cat, he knows he’s about to die and wants to do it alone and unseen.
They search for an hour. Calling out with puckered foreheads, they look as far as 150 meters past the edge of the eerie, snow carpeted woods. Whipping sheets of windblown snow are black and bleak in the night, except where top strobes and their headlights bounce light back from individual, whirling flakes. The wanderer never calls out or comes back to the stalled convoy. They just never see him again. The gunsō orders everyone to climb back onto the idling ski trucks and the convoy to drive on, at speed. They don’t know the secret spot where the missing boy lay down, so they leave no name sign or place marker behind.
“Winter wolves can have him,” the freak announces, jarring them all with the naked truth of his robusto clarity of vision, at least when it comes to death.
The Stinking Bishop cries constantly inside a grotto he makes between ammo crates in the rear of the pink Twilight. The crew are sympathetic at first and try to comfort the inconsolable boy, but his weak sobbing scratches and needles at their brains for hours on end. It’s worse than the freak. They can’t stand to hear the Bishop whimpering on and on about his swollen, blackened feet and sensationless fingers. About the poison pain in his guts, or how he misses his old room at home on Daegu and how he misses his mother. He weakly calls out her name, over and over. Their hands and feet are cold and full of hurt, too. They have mothers back home, too. Well, maybe not “Private Flameout,” as they call the freak. Maybe not the gunsō, either. Finally the mercury ball boy can’t take it anymore.
“Shut the fuck up, you wus!”
A chorus echoes the command, as boy after boy shouts guilt and frustration back into the cargo pod. It makes no difference. The sobbing still comes at them.
“Stop crying!”
“Shut up!”
“Momma ... Momma.”
“She’s not here. Shut up about her!”
“Momma ... Momma.”
“Gods, someone make him stop!”
“I’d rather listen to stupid Nitōhei Flameout drive his ghost cab again.”
It’s the first time the white eyed freak hears his trip nickname. He grins widely. When the crying, Stinking Bishop finally stops sobbing and moaning they’re glad. Guilty, but relieved. They leave him alone in his empty church, his crate burrow, enjoying the quiet. Enjoying not having to think about him or his stupid mother. They talk excitedly about other things. They talk about beer, and girls and home. They’re winter dry of compassion. After an hour of wonderful silence the lads in the front cab hear a muffled report from between two large cases of crystal ammo.
“Godsdamn!” the gunsō exclaims when they stop the pink Twilight and find The Stinking Bishop lying in a puddle of blood. “We’re lucky he didn’t explode the whole convoy!”
He’s not dead. He flinched, and only managed to blow off a small part of his temple when he shot himself with a kinetic pistol a careless officer or indifferent guard left behind, inside the cargo hold. His rhythmically breathing brain pulses gray-and-wet beneath a perfectly neat hole in the side of his skull. They cover him in blankets to his chin and leave him lying glassy eyed among the crates.
There’s nothing they can do to help or fix him, not way out here in the arctic night and north Lemurian wilderness. Not with little pink bubbles frothing slowly from the hole he made to let them out, like escaping parishioners. Without saying it, they wish he was back there still, crying while curled between his crate walls, swathed in stupid gobs of thick orange ointment like some pagan priest. Wailing about his blackened feet and hands, calling for his momma and to be allowed to go home to his old room in a small village on Daegu.
That’s better than the next five hours, the time it takes for The Stinking Bishop to pass from gurgling to death. To make his pilgrim’s progress from the Thousand Worlds to that far off world which is to come, if any is. If it’s not all just more of the black. Black leading to black, as half of them now suspect. Before he leaves, they hear every labored breath and rattle on the way from his personal City of Destruction, as he moves through the fearful Valley of the Shadow of Death, strides past his Vanity Fair to Mount Zion and the Celestial City. Or is just to an irrevocable Oblivion that he goes, to Perdition? When it’s time, they stop and lay The Stinking Bishop’s small body unburied at the side of the rollbahn, inside a rut of dirty snow and ice. Then the convoy hurriedly drives away, in a loud silence.
Trees grow fewer and thinner as Supply Convoy #75347 approaches the forest-tundra line. Spindly trunks of poplar and black pine stick out of deep snow banks in sparse, black branched copses that look impossible of leaf or life when warmth returns. An unbearable whiteness marks where ice horizon meets a short, daytime sky. It’s a seamless, glaring oneness: white-on-white on brighter white. They’re almost there, almost at the end. Nearing the actual black for the first time ever, drawing closer to the edge of the mysterious Yue ming they have heard so much about and fear yet long to see. One of the more imaginative boys thinks he hears daemons whispering in the woods. He’s wrong. He’s still too far away. It’s only the breathing of the dying trees.
The rollbahn is a dirty logistics tributary pissing itself into a river of Rikugun effort on Amasia. It ends with a sudden lurch, meeting and spilling into the wide arterial Nordbahn-Sudbahn that runs pole to pole behind Third Trench. There’s no other road north for the last 522 klics of their journey. This is where the combat engineers stopped bashing down trees during Year One. This is where General Oetkert’s initial invasion met the sinuous black, snaking northward behind ACU blocking forces, impeding him as he tried to move armies around the flank. Until there were no more flanks on Lemuria, and the mole armies went underground.
Guards have no choice, They let the ridiculous looking, colored convoy on the Nordbahn. The great supply road is protected by spaced gunpits and two Royal Guard Corps of three divisions each. They stretch all the way down the dragon’s spine of Lemuria, one corps north of the equator, the other winding south. Ask the big rig and wrecker drivers and you’ll hear that the main job of the Royal Guard Corps is to extort any and all supply columns passing up-and-down the Nordbahn-Sudbahn. They exact what they call ‘contributions’ from cargo haulers, hoarding and reeving supplies meant for
frontline troops and selling them into the vast black markets of Amasia. That now includes other combat units, competing for supplies in a universe of dwindling resources. Food powders and hard grains are especially coveted. But the guards are thin on the ground this far north. Their checkpoints are more spaced out. The little convoy passes multiple security checks but avoids a shakedown. Few guards who smirk from heated roadblocks as they pass think that this wreck of a pikey caravan is humping any swag worth stealing. And it’s too cold to come out of the guardhouses to check. So they’re waived on.
They pull off the Nordbahn at dawn on the 6th day. They aren’t stopped at all after they turn west on another unpaved feeder road, this one crossing through the defense-in-depth of three Rikugun black wall lines. They cross over Third Trench, pass though the rear area of Second, and head for the back side of First, right on the edge of the Yue ming. Where daemons wait. As they slow to approach First, they hear artillery booming from gun parks astride the terminal road. Overhead, they see missile trails claw the sky, heading west over Dark Territory, seeking the enemy’s black walls and depots. This is as close as any have come to the war.
For an hour they’re lost, as the last supply road ends abruptly. They stop, in a no place, a purposeless Purgatory. They turn around and go back five klics to find out where they went wrong. They come at last to an even more ragged byway, a dirt feeder road that’s hardly more than parallel ruts. It brings them to the black.
***
They’re startled to enter a dark wood, still standing amidst craters and oddly thick for a spruce copse so close to the permafrost line. The rut road lurches to a stop, delivering them to the foot of a small, balding hill that rises to a low 20-meter crest. On the other side is the rear edge of RIK First Trench. The gunsō checks. Grid coordinates are right but the signage is all wrong. This is supposed to be an outlying suburb of The Icebox. But to one side of the supply terminus a battered sign leans back crookedly. In glowing, red letters it says Acheron.
“Halt! That’s it, boys.”
A not friendly, not unfriendly, gendarme holds out his right hand in a STOP! pose. In every language, on every world, in all the ages, the curt gesture says: “I’m the police. Obey!”
“Scroll,” he demands, without looking at them with any interest at all in slate colored eyes. They’re not feral or feckless or friendly. They just are. The slothful gendarme hands the scroll back to the sergeant, lethargically. He hasn’t yet looked at any of ‘the boys.’ He stands unspeaking. Dull. Bored. Uncommitted.
“Where do we go from here, sir?”
“What do you mean? You can’t go anywhere from here.”
“But we need to unload these supplies.”
“Past this point and you’ll come under direct enemy fire. You’ll havta unload those trucks and hoof it.”
“How far?”
“It’s a klic to the bunker.” He half points behind him, where a wavering banner flaps indifferently on a short pole. It’s hard to make out. They can’t read the unit number. Even the color is neutral. Probably once pale green, but it might be gray or even faded blue.
“Right boys, out of the trucks. Start unloading.”
They climb out of the six ski trucks and half-track. Serra da Estrela, last of the Four Cheeses with frost gangrene, made a bit of a recovery over the last two days and looks like he might pull through after all. His corrupt hands and high fever make him useless as a porter, however. They can smell his foul odor as he waves his orange, gooey hand in the air, batting away a persistent wasp who stings him. Then he starts to pick wriggly white maggots from his blackened, rotting foot.
“You stay here, with the trucks.”
“Yes sergeant. Sorry.”
“Can you handle a weapon?”
“No, I don’t think so. I lost three fingers yesterday.”
“You, private.” The sergeant points to one of the better off boys, with only a little frostbite on the tip of his nose. “You stay with him. Guard the trucks.”
The healthy boy is upset to have to stay with a smelly cheese, when everyone else gets to go and see the black at last. But he picks up a maser and tries to look soldierly, at the far end of the seven parked vehicles, away from Serra da Estrela. The other fourteen boys, the robusto freak, and the gunsō unpack their first hump load of crystal ammo out of one of the Twilights, and move toward the low hill. They work in pairs, carting five stubby crates of small arms crystals. Six haul a double long box of heavy spandau magazines, secured with hemp rope handles.
The aloof gendarme sneers inwardly as he watches them sweat and work. He says nothing. He doesn’t offer to help. ‘I’m elite, not like these sick looking losers. They’re not even proper nitōhei. That’s the rank these privates wear, but it’s not their real function. They’re worker bees, not fighters.’
He wears a crisp, all black uniform with silver trim, marking him to all who see as a feared servant of the Tennō’s secret police, an elect Kempeitai. He doesn’t know that Rikugun combat troops call all cocky, behind-the-lines gendarmes like him FLTs, or “fussy little toads.” Or that another common pejorative for military police among real combat troops is “chain dogs.” That comes from the solid silver emblem of his office hung ostentatiously around his throat, like an ancient gorget. Look close and you can see the Royal Cypher on it: Pyotr Shaka’s inlaid initials resting under an etching of a jade crown. The troops know what he does not. He isn’t a fighter, either. Not one of them. Not a combat soldier who maybe has a right to hold himself aloof from these raw boys from Supply Services who always stay behind the black, working only with crates, virgin to the life of craters. Fighters despise hollow men like the gendarme more, as slackers and hangers on and shirkers wearing prettified soldier suits.
The soulless gendarme watches ‘the boys’ leave with a load of heavy crates. He’ll never follow, never enter circles of suffering into which they descend. Nor is he welcome from whence they came. He is the least of men, standing mortgaged on the vital shoreline, alone under a neutral banner of pale self-interest and moral indifference. He’s one of a host of Uncommitted who yet wear uniforms in this Fourth Orion War. He swats at an angry hornet buzzing round him, pestering yet always evading his every strike and blow and reach.
As the lads from the ice truck convoy disappear from view he feels a sharp bite underneath his tunic. Not the hornet. Something else. He reaches in to scratch a stinging itch that never leaves him, not since the war began and he was sent here to guard the rutted feeder road to Acheron. He extracts his fingertip to find a little drop of blood on it, from an impaled louse hanging limp from his sharply pointed fingernail. The hornet buzzes him again. He swats at it uselessly. Another louse begins to crawl around underneath his uniform. It irritates. It itches. It bites.
The struggling porters leave him standing, scratching. They wander as if lost in the thin, dark woods that shouldn’t be here, not with the tinsel convoy this far north on the tundra. The straight path ahead is obscured by a near lightless arctic morn. A bedlam of mad gunnery assails their hearing as they crest the low rise, filling air with furious sound. They go into an instinctive crouch. It makes carrying the heavy crates more difficult as they slip and struggle down the strangely greasy, reverse slope of the hillock. They stop and take a hard breath at a narrow wash of muddy water at the bottom. It cuts right across their track. They drop the crates, hard. No one wants to cross, although the black stream is no more than ankle deep. A woeful tickle that can’t outlast the blacker morning rain that makes it.
It must be the body that makes them hesitate.
A slant of dawn gives it false, feverish eyes.
Beside it lies a thick pole, useless in the mud.
A dull drizzle coats them with a thin layer of ice crystals as they stare down at the woman’s body lying half-in the runoff stream, and half-out. She’s pale, cold and bloodless. Her left arm stretches out before them, as if pointing the way ahead. Her right palm is flattened, held out as if in warning.
With better light, as the day brightens into dull gray, they see that she has wide open, soulless eyes. Not febrile at all. Drained of hope and whatever color life gave them. Grayed by monochrome death. She’s five days dead, at least. Desiccated lips curl off her exposed teeth to present the signature grinning skull of all the surely dead, the lipless death’s face that’s common to abandoned corpses. The skull image is amplified by the smooth baldness of her head. The only thing that makes this face look different from the usual grinning visage death presents are three fine, cat’s whisker lines each side of her eyes. Some hurried scavenger pulled off her combat boots and socks, so that trickling brook water drips tiny icicles from exposed, blue-black toes. Maybe from guilt, a paper commissary token has been left behind to cover her intact eye. The other socket is black and gouged and its interior exposed. White larvae squirm inside it, feasting. The cloth of her uniform is fouled with grease and dried blood.
The white eyed freak stoops to read the unit tag half clinging to a dirty green collar. ‘The boys’ all wait nervously, sitting or leaning on the heavy ammo crates. The flameout laughs as he reads the stained flash out loud: “Charlotte Haron, RIK Women’s Combat Brigade, Gross Imperium.” He splashes over the rueful stream, calling back to the others. “Perfect. She’s perfect! This way to the Inferno! Follow me boys, over the Styx. It’s time for all that action you say you want.”