by Kali Altsoba
Behind them, hard sounds of the major’s softening up barrage preceding the raid are thumping the ground. The gunsō’s working on his Mission Report. The freak is asleep, for once. The rest of ‘the boys’ are awake and listening to the guns, imagining that they’re back under shell fall. They stay silent. Outside, a whirling snowstorm is starting. Looks like it could chase them all the way back. Auto bots strain to see the road ahead. They may have to dig out if the drifts get too bad.
***
The kind shōsa’s men slam fresh delivered crystals into magazines, spandaus chirrup like oversize demented crickets and spit lines of red death at the enemy. The brigade stumbles and heaves over-the-top of the ramparts, and heads into the black. A small piece of Rikugun is reaching across the Yue ming, straining to hit at Alliance First Trench that marks the other border of Dark Territory.
Eighteen hundred boys and men move across dark circles, ever deeper into the spiraling black and obscure realm. A fatherly major leads one of the three Rikugun raider battalions over the black wall. Leads a hodgepodge of fools, knaves, heroes, conscripts, cowards and madmen. Leads innocent boys and the guiltiest of dark souled men. All heading to a rendezvous with murder. To the City of Destruction.
Chaste or lustful.
Generous or greedy.
Purist or unbeliever.
None of that matters. Plasma and maser and high explosive kinetics are morally indifferent. They don’t care about the good major’s fine character or who among his charging men deserves to live another week, or die tonight. Die an especially horrible death, if any man deserves such a thing as that.
Lethal beams lace into the black, hot metal fragments of exploding shells with little AI brains inside fly from chittering Alliance guns toward the combat-gliding raiders, searching for quick blurs of movement and heat-and-light probabilities. Not caring about moral or aesthetic sensibility of the targeted man, or his depth-of-love or sense of humor or circle-of-friends or broad personality or his life-well-lived, until now. Then the nasty little AIs change course, joyfully exploding the fragment inside some mother’s son, making pink spray and bone chips and pulped memories where a man strides, not knowing that he just took his last step ever.
The AIs strike him down.
Regardless of his character.
Indifferent to his specialness.
Careless of his beauty or honor.
The major leads his raider battalion into the Realm of War. Where daemons circle all around, licking long fangs, smacking bearded lips, readying to harvest heads and limbs in wicker baskets, forcing men prostrate before brooding King Yan who judges and condemns them all. Or maybe it’s the falling shells that bleat like tortured sheep as they fall? Maybe it’s the snow and wind that howl a banshee wail that cuts the soul like talons on a chalkboard? Who really knows what awaits each man out there, once he steps over and beyond the short black wall?
It’s why they call it the black.
Darkest territory on Amasia.
The obscured regions.
The dread Yue ming.
The battalion passes into battle, into wailing terror and muted cries of horror as gross blasphemies are made against unwilling bodies, tearing apart also minds and dissolving souls. Men meet the Great Worm of Orion at War, snarling and all consuming. It’s a three headed Cerberus made of Vanity, Violence, and Malice. It gnashes and bites at them, chewing then spitting out chunks of boy. Multitudes of vainly sacrificed from battles past are fighting in the distance, pushing mindless wheeled weights across an ethereal battlefield, lighting the sky with spitting quills of maser and plasma fire that aren’t really there.
Superior officers in Rikugun Main HQ on Kestino, more in RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen, want this raid, ordered this raid, need this raid. They need it for reasons they cannot or will not say. Swollen with fear and vanity, they sit at vidscreens that map and tally the death count on both sides as the raid is whittled at its leading edge, but so too is the enemy. They hoard death and squander life deep into the long northern night, action on their screens leaving behind real dead and wounded who lie atop the snow steeped in pools of their own blood and piss and excrement.
Fixed in hate, enemies wearing different colored coats who never met before this night of merciless killing gorge on each other’s vitals, like frantic beasts of prey. They meet and contest, scorpions of spite with poison steel tails. They stab and thrust and strike with fire and metal, fury and poisons. Then they pull away.
The good major survives the raid, but comes back without learning the truth of heresy. He’ll survive the next battle, too. It’s as if he’s charmed. But he’s not. The daemons of the Yue ming have written down his name. Worse, he remains a willing slave to black snakes of orthodoxy, vipers of blind obedience to the will to power of shameful generals and a shameless and war loving people. Once more he’ll lead men and boys to horrible deaths inside the Yue ming. Once again he’ll try to ford the great river of blood and fire that flows into an amazon of misery and murder, scouring channels in bedrock down the length of Lemuria.
Some men kill themselves when he tells them that a third raid is on. They can’t face another night of flaming snow, of fiery flakes burning them with acid scars. Others retreat into anesthetic, into a private Purgatory of robusto or poitín. That’s not permitted in an active combat zone, so the loyal major has them taken back of First Trench and shot by maser squad, or hanged from a jutting spandau turret.
The majority obey him not from fear but because they’re just like him. They, too, are dutiful, blind to the heresy that would free them. They, too, serve Pyotr and the black. They follow the major across a third time, and are rent by great war machines that dig with terrible iron claws into their tormented flesh. Or they’re rendered to small pieces by daemon shells and wild gatling bots that hack apart their bodies. They’re chipped into rich fertilizer to nourish a field of dreams of far off princes, nourishing the vanity of warmed over elites on distant and protected worlds who grow excited by martial music played at dinner.
Dismembered men beg for a last sip of water. Flayed women call for a drop of mercy to fall into the venom pit of their final suffering. The dead are pleading for some other end. No one hears an answer. Battle is bereft of all and any gods.
The good major is the Last Man to fall in the attack, to drown in Kokytos, the frigid subterranean river of wailing woe that encircles and spirals down into the Ice Realm that lies at the end of all roads that link a Thousand Worlds at War.
It’s down there, full of rapids.
Deep underneath the rollbahn.
Listen, and you’ll hear it flowing.
Listen, and you’ll hear ice jams crack!
Listen, you’ll hear a clang! of ice swords.
Deep beneath the dread Yue ming.
It’s the undertow of darkest Humanity.
The major is borne downward by an irresistible current. His arms are useless, his legs are bound. He swirls into the vortex, rushes downward toward them. Down to the Leviathans that mercilessly contend, gnash and wail and slash each other with ice blades. None can defeat the others. They howl with rage and hate. Each is made from heaps of tens of millions of corrupted corpses. And they’re growing.
More bodies are carried into them by Kokytos, swelling their girth with every passing minute and hour and day, whirling around and ever down into the lightless Realm of Ice. They’re borne by the great Kokytos of War that flows far below the Yue ming, far below even the Region of Darkness, the Diyu Realm of the Yellow Springs ruled by King Yan. It flows far below the domed City of Destruction, the Dark Capital of War and Woe where all departed go and lament. They’re pulled into naked, pitiless Leviathans that wrestle and stab each other in the starless dark.
The good major sees the faces of all the boys whose deaths he caused in one beast, all those whom he killed in another. Here at the source, he sees what the ice Leviathans really are. Just before he slips below the frigid water he sees clearly at last, with stabs of reco
gnition and regret. He knows them. He understands.
Ignorant.
Frenzied.
Hateful.
He knows these Monsters of Arrogance struggling in beaten winds of mutual, ice making treachery. They are the warring star nations of Orion.
Frozen in hate.
Locked inside pride.
Trapped in fire and ice.
Rock
Nitōhei Yuki Hoth is undersized, more than a bit sallow chested and lacking muscle. He has small, simple brown eyes. Nothing special there. Eyes are a bit mousey, actually. His features are too delicate, set in an ordinary, almost hairless baby face that’s feminine in shape and smallness. He’s fresh from Basic Training at a standard RIK base. He ran and flexed and got punished, and learned to strip and fire his weapons just like everyone else. He’s proud of that. Except he kept stopping to admire a songbird or gaze in admiration at triple moons shining over the deep blue waters of his homeworld of Oceanus. Drove the NCOs crazy.
He feels his greatness in artistic sensitivity and is something of a poet. Well, he tries. Keeps a private journal that he’s always talking into, making ‘little notes’ that he plans to turn one day into perfect art, a tale of war and woe and coming of age, and offworld travel and adventure, and devoted service to a cause higher than himself. Belying his looks, he’s tough enough to fight for Pyotr. Or he thinks he is and says he wants to. It’s what he boasts to all his friends, showing off his shiny, Rikugun greens on the day he graduates, twirling his stubby maser like a baton.
He doesn’t realize that the NCOs would have washed him out as inadequate had he joined in Year One of the war, but by Year Three there’s no more of that. Rikugun takes everybody who applies to wear the green, and far more who don’t. Yuki bloody well better turn out to be tough enough under his weak appearance, because after he volunteers, but well before he knows what the hell is happening or how or why, he finds himself standing night watch. He’s alone as far as he can see into the night, although he knows other sentries are standing watch on either side. He’s holding onto his cock with one hand and his stub maser with the other.
Where is he? That’s easy. In a Rikugun FOP out beyond the edge of the black, on Lemuria. He came down a week ago, maybe longer. But it’s Yuki’s first night beyond the walls. He’s as green as his utilities, but he’s keen to get into first action and serve Pyotr Shaka. He admires the Imperator with a passionate devotion only youth attains. All his mates are just about as as green as Yuki and their utes, every boy who just deployed to the black in Third Platoon, Two Replacement Company, One Battalion, 400th Infantry Division, Rikugun. Newly arrived on Amasia, the division is progressively taking over a chunk of black walls from a veteran unit.
“Fresh meat for the butcher’s bill.” That’s what old hands mutter as Yuki and his friends replace them, march columns passing to and from the shuttles. Eager youths from 400th ID going to the black; haggard looking, gray skinned men from badly bloodied 1050th Special Division moving the other way, to Third Trench and R&R somewhere on the coast. They’ve been pulling out piecemeal ever since the 400th ID arrived planetside ten days ago, and began to trickle into the line.
“Shit! Don’t you understand, Doba? We’re the last company in Ash to leave the frontline. That’s worse than being here at the wall in the first place.”
“I get it, Barack. You’re worried there’s a rapido beam out there in the black with your name on it. There isn’t, you know. That’s just superstition.”
“It’s not that, godsdamn it! It’s the opposite. It’s got someone else’s name on it, ready to burn into a permanent tattoo. But what if it hits me? It’s not my turn!”
The 1050th is better known as “Ash Division.” Its men are asteroid miners and excavation engineers from Lugo. Ash was formed on an emergency basis, brought down to Amasia to dig out the first really big, deep bunkers of First Trench when the invasion stalled and black walls dove deep underground to stay. That was two years ago. Ash isn’t supposed to be here still, but it is. It got stuck in the hinter zones when resupply demand for maglevs and fortified walls grew exponentially, as General Oetkert’ plans and war of movement stopped. As the long black spread north-south, it was built in important places on Rikugun’s side by Ash engineers. Then they were thrown into active fighting as attrition chewed up the designated combat units. Officially, they’re categorized ‘high priority engineer’ and ‘combat reserve’ even now. But in reality, these days they mostly defend the black wall.
Behind their backs the men of Ash Division are called “Badgers.” Over years of close asteroid work tiny grains of dust worked under their skin, turning it gray. It left the old timers with ash rings around haunted looking eyes that impart a comical, raccoon like look to each and every miner. Alliance troops have a cruder, punning nickname for the miners from Lugo. They call them “Ash holes.”
Once they accepted that they weren’t leaving Amasia, the miners made their bunkers the driest and deepest and, well, coziest, anywhere in First. While they’re glad to be relieved from frontline duty by the 400th, they’re worried as they march to the trains that they’ll have to start all over in some new place, have to spend months rebuilding after coastal R&R ends. They’re right about that. HQ wants repairs to a dilapidated section of First some 2,450 klics up-the-line. It used to be Alliance Second, but the complex sits inside the new bulge in Rikugun’s extended lines made by failure of the Second Shaka Offensive. It’s a region full of sinks and traps, and masterless bot guns and nests of snakes and other animate mines no longer controlled by either side, but programmed to hunt. Other than the Dauran Gate, it’s just about the shittiest place there is abutting Dark Territory.
Badgers have mixed feelings as the 400th takes over their familiar, and almost comfortable, sixty klic section of black wall. Several laugh nervously, others cruelly and angrily, as they hand off sector maps and bunker codes to obviously green replacements. Exchanges take place along a small section of endless front under a never ending sky. It’s almost dawn when the last badger leaves the line.
***
War starts well for Yuki, just as he hoped. It’s a thrilling first time, deep space voyage up and away from aquamarine Oceanus, his homeworld of complex tides and endless blue sky and water. He’s only been offworld a few times, so he drinks in every moment onboard what’s just a rancid, military transport that’s at best 3rd class. He doesn’t care about that, or even really take note of it. He feels like he’s leaving on the best vacation ever, as the shimmer of Oceanus shrinks in his ship’s side scuttle to a small blue orb, hanging in a drooping veil of utter blackness. He doesn’t care that the old bucket smells of too many crammed in conscript bodies, overused toilets and bad galley stew. Of dead rats rotting inside bulwarks where they hid with a stolen crust embedded with poison by a ships’ cook. He’s offworld at last and starting the adventure of his lifetime.
There’s no place he’d rather be, nothing he’d rather be doing. He thrills with life. He’s excited to reach his first outer system bohr zone, even to experience his first nauseating ‘vapors.’ After that, the old troopship makes so many jumps that recovering from dizzying confusion of bohr effect almost becomes routine. Yuki likes to boasts about it, as if he’s an old hand at quantum jumping. He even repeats the tired joke everybody knows, about “bore hopping,” posing as if he’s a jaded jack or jenny. Half the company says it, too, boring the other half. It’s a bad joke.
He knows the ancient salt seas of Oceanus well. Are seas of stars so different? The illusion is reinforced when he looks out a scuttle and sees nebula gas folds looking exactly like what sailors on Oceanus call white caps atop storm waves. Neptune’s Sheep are grazing in a hundred white folds of illuminated gas, scudding over the surface of the dark, dense nebula. He hurriedly composes a short, juvenile verse about “starry flocks,” then tucks the recorder back inside a secret sleeve.
At the next stop, after he comes out of the vapors, he runs to the nearest scuttle to peer a
t the revealed glory of the Imperium. He has been waiting for this one for days, waiting impatiently to reach Koblenz in the Sankt Goar system. Yuki points excitedly out the rectangular scuttle, with room for two beside him to also stand and look. He calls over Jack Lee, a simpleminded and laconic friend he made in Basic Training. They stand shoulder to shoulder, pressing their faces against the warm interior of the scuttle’s transparent armor. They can feel the water barrier circulating between the inner and outer hull, piped in and around from where it’s heated in the Engine Room. They feel its warmth radiating into the ship interior even as it protects them from deadly cosmic rays better than any known insulator.
“Jack, can you imagine it?”
“What?”
“Do you know where we are?”
“Where?”
Jack Lee is spartan with words. He thinks of them the way bad writers think of commas, that there’s a limited supply in the Universe and he should never use more than his allotted share.