by Kali Altsoba
The convoy doesn’t stop. He’s swept past mother and child, across the stolid emptiness of an eternal but aching land. Moving past abandoned farm houses and empty villages, he sees more mothers and children waiting, but none as defiantly memorable as the red haired wonder with the strange pale child. Waiting for what? By midafternoon it all blends into the great plains of his memory, under a open and faultless prairie sky. All but her. He promises himself that he’ll never forget her. Always remember her beauty and defiance and humanity. That’s what Yuki still hopes and thinks, before his dark time comes, that he can breathe in the beauty of a moment or of a woman and find art in life and in the war.
‘Nearly there, at last!’ He exults as the trucks bunch, slowing to crawl past a cratered section of road. The long CSPs at the front and rear of the column must contend with a prairie storm that’s rolling over the plains, soaking everything in sheeting rain. The winds are too fast for the swarms to hold together, but everyone knows that high wind won’t stop dive bombing Goldies or strumping AI Wasps. Column defense switches over to AA missiles. Craters are all around, reaching into fields on either side as far as Yuki can see. Yet crops grow among the holes. They look to Yuki like clumps of old man bristles on a plague pocked face.
Ten klics from the hindermost black he sees a majestic, solitary oak standing unbowed by the war being waged all around, and understands why and where all the local men are gone. The oak is the only thing left whole in what was once a small park, at the center of a village that’s burned down entire. From its thick lower branches, three meters off the soil beneath, hang a dozen folded, dried out, sadsacks. Crumpled, wrinkly, bloodless carcasses of hanged partisans. All male.
‘That’s about all that can be said of them.’ He’s disappointed to find that death is so leveling, so commonplace. So lacking in individuality and special meaning, missing the artistry of tragedy. So banal. An odd and unbidden thought arrives. ‘All hanged men look alike.’ He’s right. Their faces are the same shade of moldy blue, like rotten cheese. Bloated and oversized, sallow, sagging in sacks of loose skin covered in postmortem stubble. Yellow-red ichor leaks from their ears and eye sockets, and pecked off noses. There are only black holes where their eyes are missing. A murder of crows ripped and tore and feasted on ripe, hung carrion. The birds went for the softest and best bits first, the dead eyes. They always do, pulling them whole from stringy stalks, tossing them up, swallowing with a caw! caw!
All around the oak the ground is covered with bits of torn clothes discarded by the disrespecting crows. Torn rags are coated in big squirts of white guano that look like spilled cottage cheese and smell like chalk mixed with lime. It’s all made worse for Yuki by seeing the hanging oak in a drab, overcast and rainy sky. Dim sunshine without redeeming color leaches through banks of dark clouds to frame the vacant, inhuman faces of the hanging dead men. They look back at him out of black murder holes. ‘Whose fathers were they? Whose sons?’
The division does the last five klics to the rear edge of Third Trench on foot. They sing marching songs and ballads as they tromp gaily past stands of birch trees and abandoned, but tidy farms. The singing is carried off by the strong winds, that also wave neat fields of grain in bright shades of gold, silver, green and red.
“The Blue Army and its Beijing Bitch
won’t keep our Lost Child from us!
From the taiga to the Thalassa sea
Our Green Army is forging ahead!
We are the flames of an Orion wide fire!
We bring Pure Liberation in our guns!
We march from Kestino to Orion’s far edge!
The Green Army is the strongest of all!”
The crops are holed here and there by violent gouges, scooped out bowls of missing black soil where some missile landed, aimed at something no longer there or maybe never there at all. Otherwise the land is quiet. Except for the singing and the tramp! tramp! of RIK combat boots. They pass a grizzled farmer in an old hat, working dutifully around three big craters that pock a square field of amber grain. The old man ignores the passing battalions as he goes about an ancient business, weeding and warding off insects from what’s left of his precious crop. Yuki thinks a thought he never had once on his watery, landless homeworld of Oceanus.
‘You can grow anything here.’
‘As much as you need or want.’
‘What a shame all is ruined.’
A bird of prey soars high overhead, riding thermals while looking down for field mice it hopes are disturbed from their straw lined burrows by the poking and pulling old farmer, or by the tramping! and singing column in Rikugun green. The bird causes great excitement among the bored, dusty column of marchers.
“Look boys, look!” Yuki shouts out, pointing up. “A black eagle!”
“God’s look at that!”
“See it soar? Look!”
“It’s an omen of victory, for sure.”
Actually, it’s a common black hawk, but no one in the marching column knows the difference. They’re all from Oceanus, which barely has even white gulls on its sparse islands, all covered with built-out Humanity.
The column reaches the rear of Third Trench at dusk, the border marking the easternmost of three walls forming a complex defense-in-depth facing west. Dark Territory is still 700 klics farther on, past two more active RIK lines, just over the three meter parapet that’s all that shows above ground of black wall that reaches down to bedrock below. The first enemy is beyond that, on the other side of DT. Some will be in camoed FOPs, but most remain in a mirror set of parallels and communication and supply trenches, serviced also on the Alliance side by buried maglevs and hard surface roads, protected by ranged artillery and layers of CAP as AI Wasps curl in high circles and low orbits overhead. Over 1,400 klics width of contested land. Tens of thousands of klics stretching north-to-south. All of it a killing ground, a merciless abattoir. And far below it? The City of Destruction.
No one foresaw this war.
No one controls this war.
No one knows how to end it.
***
Yuki wants to keep going, to get to the “real war.” But on his first night at the front all 400th ID is ordered to decamp in the back lines, on the near edge of Third Trench. It spills off-the-march into a strange cluster of low, rectangular barracks lined with nothing beyond wall bolted, carbon bunks. They’re stacked five high. There’s not even a low table to play stupid card games, to kill dull endless Time.
It’s a ghost town, yet oddly well kept. No one lives here, but millions of troops have spent a night on hard, punishing bunks inside the black box barracks. One night, before moving on to the war in the west or retiring eastward, to the Thalassa coast for R&R. The barracks town is called Purgatorium by the few Old Believers in the ranks of Rikugun, where most adhere to the Black Faith of the Broderbund or the new religion called Purity. Although growing numbers, especially veterans of fighting at the black, despise all the gods, old and new. Yuki doesn’t understand what the Old Believers mean until much later, when he too comes to see the black box town as a halfway house of souls lost along the low road to Pandemonium.
The spartan buildings reside in parallel rows, like black garden bricks marking off a stiff walkway that stretches as far as he can see, north and south. From orbit, the brick line ghost town marks the rear border of the frontlines as clearly as if a careful moku hanga draftsman from Nagoya traced it in ink on wood. It’s the start of the great killing zone of central Lemuria. Over a thousand klics away, on the far side of Dark Territory, there’s no line of brick onenighters. Alliance rear areas are more messy. Scramble zones of ad hoc barracks, camoed warehouses, armtrak parks, transit camps and mobile aerodromes. It’s a jumble, like the Alliance itself. A mix of moral purpose and martial chaos, fear and defiance. And a collage of colors: Calmari, Threes, Krevans, Helvetics, a half dozen rainbow minor Neutrals.
Yuki hops on a middle bunk, his legs dangling excitedly as he listens to camp tales and songs and the
usual boys’ lies about winning the big mercury ball game and balling all the girls afterward, “two at a time.” Yuki never played. Too small, too skinny. Too scared of the game and far more scared of girls. But he has to say something big to his new friends. So he boasts to Usman and Tura, Jack Lee and Kurt and Andreas Krobot, how he’s going to kill the first enemy he sees right up close, with his combat knife instead of shooting him with a stub maser.
“I’ll stick it in him deep, over and over again.”
“No you won’t. You’ll be too scared to do it.”
“No I won’t be! I’ll do it just like they showed us how in Basic.”
“That was a straw man. A dummy, you dummy!” It’s Jack Lee.
A veteran Badger who’s passing the other way in the morning, to the Thalassa coast for overdue R&R, overhears Yuki boasting and sees him waving his kabar. He turns on him with a snarl, dressing him down out of ash ringed eyes that have seen far too much of war over the past three years. More than his share, maybe.
“You fool!”
“What? Do you mean me?”
“Don’t you know what it is to kill a man?”
“Who are you?”
“You take away everything he is with your knife, all he was, all that he will or might be. You reduce his everything to nothing, to red drool on the duckboard.”
“Jeez, we’re just talking.”
“Talking? The time for talking is over. You need to listen, boy! Just talking, about killing a man?!” Beet faced with rage, he looks like he’ll strike Yuki. The rings around his eyes amplify his fury, make him look more like a mad killer.
“Stop, get away from me! I wasn’t talking to you.”
“This is what you boast? This is what will make you a man? How do you know he’s not the better man? Because he’s a Blue? You shitty little fool!”
The old Badger’s mates pull him away as Yuki’s squad gathers around him in group defense and puzzlement. Yuki’s popular, and half of them were thinking the same thing anyway. They admire him for saying it out loud, and tell him later. He’s scared of the angry old hand, but thrilled that his new friends rally to his aid.
The veteran is from Lugo, like all Badgers. In the centuries old, grand tradition of his moon, nearly destroyed by a ‘nudger’ at the end of the Third Orion War, he became an engineer to help rebuild shattered things. Then he was conscripted into Rikugun, and accepted that he had go to Amasia. He was happy to learn when he arrived that he could build things even here, right in the middle of vast destruction. He was glad that the bosses didn’t just want him to knock things down and blow things apart. He’s good at that, but really loves to build things. He worked on the remade maglev system, then deep bunkers, rear area HQs, and three RIK brothels.
He didn’t come to Amasia to cut men’s throats or blow out a fougasse under scared, charging boys wearing pale blue utilities. Yet he’s had to cut two throats of enemy who got into his slit one night. And once he blew up three boys charging higgledy-piggledy at his FOP with a flamethrower. He killed five with his maser. But last week he heard that his only son was killed wearing the green two months ago. It was a White Sails butcher-and-bolt raid, but he doesn’t know that bit yet.
Yuki can’t sleep. He hears mice scurrying about the barracks, bravely moving among snoring men, restless men, sleepless men like him. They’re trying to get inside sacks of millet these monsters carried in from a Supply Services storage bin they recklessly broke open. They’re going to get into real trouble for that, but right now the men are happy to use the grain as ersatz pillows and bedding. One ‘poor, wee timorous beastie’ hip-hops onto the end of Yuki’s bunk. Thinking he’s asleep, the brown mouse sits up, calmly cleaning oversize ears. She’s unaware that he’s watching her, fascinated by her courage and hygiene, eternal concerns that have nothing whatever to do with him or the war. She’s not timorous. Not at all. She’s dedicated, for she’s a mother. After a minute of grooming she hops down and runs to a hidden nest where she’s raising five little ones under a vaulting roof of war.
Some men are like Yuki. They stay up all night, too excited to sleep this close to Dark Territory. They’re thinking that they’ll face first combat in the morning. Except they won’t, not for days. Not for weeks. The first enemies Yuki sees after a restless night are a batch of Alliance prisoners of war in a mesh pen under guard: several hundred Howlers, or “Beards” as Rikugun call traditionalist fighters of the Iron Kingdoms. They have begrimed hands and faces and wear dirty auburn utes, which look to be their only clothing. They literally haven’t changed in over three years. Not since they were captured in mass surrenders on Oberon or the Caliban moons. Not since they were brought to Lemuria as forced laborers. They’ve been working ever since on RIK fortifications, supervised by hard thumping Badgers.
The prisoners move listlessly, clearing wreckage from a recent ACU air raid. In thin morning mist they’re watched just as lazily by a handful of bored guards, and by Yuki. There’s no chance of escape and no place to run, so far behind Dark Territory. The only folks interested in shopworn prisoners are Yuki and his mates. They gather and gawp and point. They can’t believe these filthy, lazy, stupid men are the ferocious enemies of their training vids and combat virgin imaginations.
“They look so, well…”
“Ordinary?”
“Yes! Who can believe it?”
“Usman! Tura! Come see the enemy!”
“That’s the enemy?”
“My mother could beat them!”
“Why not? She beat you!”
With that the other boys lose interest and move off. But not Yuki. He walks up to the cage, gesturing to a man inside. This close, he notices that the only color break in the man’s dirty brown clothing is a pea green number in the flesh of his lower arm. It’s an irremovable RIK tattoo, with a tracker in the ink. The man’s hands are blistered, his dull eyes are downcast, his body language is downtrodden. His typical Three beard is worn long in the traditional style of nearly all men who hail from the Iron Kingdoms. But it’s too long, raggedy and filthy. Yuki sees a twig sticking in one corner. It has a tiny aphid walking on it.
The raggedy man won’t look up. Yuki moves closer, and starts to speak. He tries Universal Standard, revealing his confident innocence along with his morbid curiosity in anything and everything to do with the war. He chatters on about how Pyotr is “the Great Man of the Age” and how “the Imperium will win soon, and then you can go home to your family.” The tattered man-number looks nervously at the bored guards and shuffles to a corner. Yuki is confused. He still thinks in juvenile, universal terms. Despite his passionate Grünism, he’s a young artist who thinks that the same beautiful things speak to all people. That life is good and just.
He doesn’t see ugliness.
Doesn’t get cruelty or crime.
Has no idea that he’s looking at both.
The prisoners work and move in a shockingly slothful manner. Two are lying unmoving at the edge of the work perimeter, insensible from exhaustion or hunger or too many beatings. Maybe it’s the third thing, because every so often a guard stirs to prod a Beard. One is suddenly hit hard by a swearing, swarthy oaf guard, the only one who cares what the prisoners are doing or that they work at all. Yuki is surprised that he feels neither anger nor sympathy for the bearded men. They don’t engage his rage or contempt. Not yet. He’s too full of a budding sense of his own life and fate, too in love with his art and his exciting new experiences of war. These oddly languid men merely decorate his back scenes, like white farm houses, aspen glades, a beautifully defiant mother and pale silent child, and a set of hanging man bells tolling from an old oak.
Such wonderful, vivid subjects for his art! He moves away from the cage. He speaks softly and carefully about the dirty Beard and the other prisoners, and about the woman and child, dictating another of “my little notes” up his sleeve. That’s what he calls the secret log he updates with daily whispers. It’s a serious violation of security, strictly forb
idden by RIK and SAC counterintelligence. He’s nineteen years old and he has never met material like this before. He’s damn well going to record it, so he can think about it later. This is why he’s here. He wants to write.
***
400th ID moves into First at long last, taking over from departing, demoralized Badgers. Things seem oddly less soldierly to Yuki the closer he gets to the enemy. In place of orderly barracks, regular drill, and drab uniformity of base camp, he now lives in dark quarters amidst constant noise and disorder. Stretching into the far west is an immense chaos of broken ground and smashed dugouts, of caved in trenches and the first dead from his own side he ever sees. Long dead. Old, rotten dead. Dried up, barren. Not anyone he’s met or talked to, or called “friend.” He still hasn’t “seen any action,” as only civvies or virgins like Yuki and his friends call combat. His first month in the frontline of war is drear and boring. Unspiced.