by Kali Altsoba
He hardly makes any little notes, so little happens to inspire him. Instead of a rare and exotic offworld dish he anticipated, the taste of the black is closer to his mother’s poor cooking. Always the same bland fare of milky fish and seaweed. He decides somewhat ruefully that war tastes like salted fish. Always, the fighting happens somewhere nearby. His war is sprinkled on top of endlessly dull days and stupidly unfulfilling nights, like the candied icing on too expensive cupcakes in a baker’s window when he was a child. He would look, then go home to fish and seaweed. He’s in the war but standing outside that same colorful shop, seeing war pinkly through a thick pane that forbids him to ever touch or taste or know it. He’s eager to break the glass. He hungers for the war. He wants to devour combat.
It stays quiet for another month in his sector, except for the small infrequent artillery duels. Major fighting moved away just before the 400th took up position, reaching north and south into the forests and desert beyond the equatorial savanna where Yuki’s division goes down the cozy Badgers’ holes. Even patrols into Dark Territory meet very few enemy, and when it’s Yuki’s turn, none at all. A live-and-let-live attitude is creeping into the thinking of troops on both sides of the black, in this sector anyway. It’s making Rikugun officers rage. It’s unofficial, of course.
Yuki hates it, too. He’s desperate to experience combat, never having seen it. He volunteers for two night patrols and one by day. He wants to meet squids and Beards face-to-face and kill his first enemy, not shoot aimlessly into the dark as he did that one time alarums and strobe flares went up while he was on guard duty in a shallow FOP. The only thing he thinks he fears is a pointless death. He wants, he needs, he longs to go into a terrible, heroic fight. He’ll survive it, of course. ‘I know I will. Then I’ll be a hero! Then I can speak and write about the war!’
Yuki smells of disappointment, of black ink hopeful artist days and nighttime failed artist inkings. He feels held back as an artist and a man by not yet knowing the joy of battle and thrill of war. His combat lust is the last virgin’s yearning, an echo of a romantic boyhood gone stale at the end of a Romantic Age gone terribly wrong, all across Orion. He frets from boredom into his secret diary, as much of Orion had secretly fretted over 300 years, about dull, boring peace. ‘I’m missing the war!! The single greatest adventure of my blessed generation and I’ll miss out if we don’t attack soon! What can it mean if Pyotr and the Imperium win this great war before I go into action? I won’t be able to fulfil my destiny!!!’ He’s a better writer than his adolescent !!! punctuation suggests, but less of an analyst than his amateur military speculations prove. He’s feeling far too sorry for himself.
At least he does until Two Company loses its combat virginity, and three good men, in its first ever battle. That is, the first three confirmed as dead, with bodies to bag up and ship back home, letters for the captain to write to families, and all that other shit. Two other boys failed to return over the edge of Dark Territory a week ago. But they’re still listed as missing-in-action. So that doesn’t really count.
Truth be told, one can hardly call the encounter that killed Two Company’s first three men a “battle.” More of a firefight. A brush up, even. OK, yeah. It was a skirmish in the dark, the whole thing lasting less than two minutes, engaging at most a couple of dozen fighters, from both sides. Still, two minutes of stark terror and truly weird excitement in an otherwise zombie section of the black. Yuki was there, too, out in Dark Territory on his fourth patrol when his squad crossed paths with an enemy squad in the pitch dark, and someone opened fire. Until both sides rethought the whole thing, disengaged and ran for cover in opposite directions.
It wasn’t even much of a skirmish, truth be told again. Not given the backdrop of an immense Fourth Orion War war stretching the length of the spiral arm and now well into Year Three of utterly brutal indecision and attrition. A huge conflict that has pushed hundreds of millions of soldiers into the grave, made dust or vapor of them, or left them drifting as frozen flotsam from destroyed convoys. Spilled them out some fat troopship gutted like a sturgeon, squeezing her caviar and future of the species into vacuum seas. Billions more civilians are gone to nothing from savage orbital bombardments, gone from brutally destroyed cities, gone from still burning worlds. Vapored by nuclear and plasma fires hailing down from orbit.
Yuki’s first fight is nothing like that. Just a quick and crazy masering back-and-forth and lots of panicked yelling and darting green and red IFF symbology on whistling, shrieking HUDs before the two squads disengage and turn back to their own lines. Three men are down before Yuki finally fumbles his safety off and fires wildly into the blackness. Still, it’s his first firefight and it thrills him. Firing his maser at the enemy like that makes him feel like a man, at last.
“Minor skirmish” is how they write it up in the 400th ID’s Official Log. Even that’s only because the division is so new to the black that its officers are eager to establish battle cred, to show HQ the division is pulling its weight at the front. A few months more and not even so terse an entry will be made for a routine patrol and minor dust up, with hardly any casualties to speak of. Let alone write down.
Yuki thinks he did well. He tells his sleeve that he did, that he came through his “baptism by fire” and is a combat veteran. He thinks he wants more combat. Especially after he hears that the three men were killed not 100 meters from where he stood firing blindly. He hears the weak fools “bought it” without firing their stub masers, sliced up like overripe mangos cut out of thin peels. Their deaths in the same action where he first shoots at the enemy validate his skill and courage.
He thinks that he wants to taste the iron of war. He still thinks of war as an elemental force not to be resisted but experienced, like a lightening storm hurtling over the horizon of the Great Plain of Lemuria, or a wild sea storm just beginning to crash the shore on Oceanus. Dangerous but exciting, swift in its violence and passing. Full of the lust of the eye. A wanton whore of violence he can fuck. He doesn’t understand that this war isn’t a tornado, it’s a front full of flood waters. It isn’t a nor’easter coming on shore only to be tamed, it’s a tsunami rising to drown everyone he knows and everything he is. So he stands outside, to watch the rain.
He did well enough, his NCO tells him. In his fire baptismal he fumbled, then fixed and aimed his maser, flipped the safety to off after first misfiring with it on. Yeah, he fired blindly into the darkness without syncing to the IFF images on his HUD. He felt and saw return fire snarl over his head. That’s what really thrilled him, not shooting at the enemy but being shot at. He knows then he’s not like the three dead boys, cut apart standing stupidly with cold weapons. Thinking of his first firefight, he swells with pride, buoys up with endorphins and manly vitalism. ‘I’m stronger than I realized,’ he tells his little notes. ‘I’m brave, too!! I stood my ground and fired my maser better than ever, back in Basic. I think I hit one of the enemy!!’ He didn’t, but that’s OK. There’s a helluva lot more enemy over there.
It barely dents his newfound self-respect when Andreas tells him that two of the three dead are their friends, Usman and Tura.
“They’re dead, Yuki. Dead!”
“It’s terrible.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“They died for the Empire.”
“Who cares about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re dead, gone!”
“Yes, but they died as heroes.”
“What’s wrong with you? They’re dead!”
Yuki vows to immortalize them in his future writing, the first of his “brothers of the barracks” and “comrades in arms” lost to the “tragedy of war” that he came out here to experience. It’s his deepest secret and certain destiny. He’s on a moral mission to record the war for his generation in a great work of literature that will live down all generations to come. He’ll turn Usman and Tura into literature, make them greater than they were in life. Make them symbols
not of a lost generation, but a noble one: youth dedicated to higher purpose and the glory of the Imperium.
He makes a few patriotic notes like that, but he can’t remember anything that was special or personal about either of the two dead boys. They’re already going gray to him. He called them “friends” and “comrades” back in Basic, but he has yet to find his true art and muse. He has talent, but it’s still stuck in juvenilia. So he writes their stories into his sleeve as paper maché footnotes to the abstract glory of Pyotr and Rikugun and the Imperium. He plays it back at night, disappointed that his best war work sounds like a propaganda text made for the civvy memex.
That doesn’t stop him looking with contempt on five arriving frogs, new boys transferred into Two Company from Battalion Reserve to replace the three dead boys and two lads still MIA. He holds back from directly engaging the newbies. He scorns them. ‘You haven’t tasted the thrill of combat, as I have. I should teach you...’ But he doesn’t. He thinks it’s them, but it isn’t. It’s his choice not to talk to them, not to offer comfort when he hears the youngest whimper in his bunk at night. He only makes a little note about “how newbies react to the war.”
Yuki still thinks combat is like child’s play, only with bigger and much louder toys. He learns to look tough rather than be tough, walk taller, put on a stern face and grimaces beyond his years or acting ability. His new pose is ridiculous. That’s what Jack Lee and Kurt tell him the day before they’re killed, eating cold rations and hard bread from a hip pack, well beyond the parapet edge. A stray round lands right inside their funk hole. The nasty AI shell that spotted them leaves nothing behind except curling yellow smoke and a black bread rind. A brown field mouse with exceedingly clean, big ears scurries over and snatches it. She takes it back to a burrow filled with little ones. She barely makes it past a Great Plains ratsnake.
Yuki never gets to say goodbye to Jack or Kurt because the stretcher party that goes out to collect them when their ID emitters stop broadcasting comes back with empty, folded up stretchers. “You can’t carry or bury red mist,” one of them tells Yuki, and shrugs. Jack Lee and Kurt were his last two friends from Basic Training back on Oceanus, ever since Andreas Krobot went missing in Dark Territory.
It’s routine.
No big deal, really.
It happens all the time.
Nothing that can’t be dealt with, if one is as tough as Yuki says he is. Not at all daunting for a trench poet who speaks into his sleeve alone in his bunk at night, after losing his last friends in Two Company, whispering: “War is sweet.” Then in doggerel: “We brave few whom honor take, shall drill and die for glory’s sake.”
There’s no angst in his cheap rhyming. No protest or rejection of Pyotr’s bright shining lies about Purity and Grün Destiny and the Lost Children of the Imperium. Only a “cold virtue of slaughter” and “the perfect symmetry of Amasia’s plain, where black eagles overfly fulfilled manhood, and ten million heroes lie.” That’s how he deals with the loss of four friends, how he tries to turn death into art in one of the black verses he whispers into a hidden recorder dot sewn into his sleeve.
Some men lose their battle lust only to have it replaced by vicious enjoyment in inflicting pain and cruel death on any living creature that they can: rats they bash with entrenching tools, birds they shoot pointlessly over the ramparts, snakes they stomp on, corpse flies whose wings they pluck, captured and vulnerable men. Yuki loses his combat lust differently, not to superior moral insight or intellectual rejection of killing and elevated disdain for war. It’s not so intellectual or spiritual. It’s more physical. More basic and vulgar. It’s what the Yue ming daemons want.
After his first confirmed kill he was excited. He dreamed for weeks before he did it, a long shot with his maser that scorched a saboteur the watcher bots IDed when he tripped an e-wire. It’s so far out everyone claps him on the back for his skill, but too far to go see the body. It lies out there for days. One morning it’s just gone. Scavengers, probably. He’s angry, because he planned to sneak out and take a souvenir off the corpse. He thinks he’s that tough. So he’s startled to be sickened by self-loathing after making a second kill. By the time he gets to four dead men and two women his self-loathing becomes a dull, permanent moral numbness.
Murder is all around. Purity ideology and Imperium loyalty filled his needs before. Now a quiet voice nags at him nightly, says he’s losing the best parts of himself bit-by-bit into a cesspool of war. It gets louder with each kill he makes. Until the official lies and slogans aren’t enough to drown it out. He needs a deeper explanation, a justification for what he’s doing he can actually believe in. A thing bigger than him. And an answer to the question: “How did Yuki Hoth, honorable man, future artist, and loyal servant in Pyotr’s Rikugun become a murderer?”
One moment changes Yuki forever. It arrives after the daily bombardment the opposing sides fire each dawn, looping over Dark Territory into each other’s First Trench. Sometimes, just to shake things up, skipping First to crater the near rear hinter zone or surprise hit Second Trench 50 or 75 klics away. These days, almost no one except frosch get killed. Because before the start of each “Good Morning!” shelling, or as troops call it, “breakfast barrage,” veterans of the black move under protective ramparts or deep inside barrage bunkers to wait it out. That’s what Yuki does on the morning of the day that changes him forever.
In the afternoon, he’s ordered out into DT along with 20 other men from Two Company. They’re sent to man an OP until dusk, then head out farther and make a 10 klic looping patrol. Routine stuff, in a quiet sector. Sure, something can go wrong. You can always run into a sniper bot or loner animate mine, or an enemy patrol doing equally stupid and useless loops in the other direction. But no one is expecting trouble beyond that. And on this patrol, no one except Yuki finds any.
It’s his 10th patrol over the edge of the black, leading to a moment nothing special in itself. Yuki is sent down a steep crater to learn what happened to missing pickets and identify three bodies. All around the sides are ghost images formed of half dried mud that retains the shapes of resting bodies of the prior night’s hiders, an unknown patrol (Blue or Green?) that rested, then moved somewhere else in the obscure regions. Below the level of ghost indentations he finds the bodies, at the very bottom. A minor misstep sees Yuki embed his foot in a half rotten corpse, lying where dirty yellow, pooled water is obviously full of absorbed poison gas.
Two boys succumbed to heavier-than-air poison by diving to the crater floor, taking cover from passing AI shells. Or maybe they were so stupid they drank the piss yellow water? When they pull the bodies out, the recovery party finds perfect face impressions left behind in the mud, like wax or plaster molds Yuki has seen Graves Registration make officer deathmasks from. As filthy gas water receded into the clay bottom, the face cavities dried and hardened into perfect deathmasks. Later, men from as far away as Second Trench will come to see them, paying a local entrepreneur to guide them to the spot. He’ll make a small fortune, before the little trench tourism site is washed away by the next heavy rain. He’ll be angry that he doesn’t think to cut them out and mount them inside one of the bunkers.
As the boys’ bodies are removed, Yuki slips and steps in the third corpse. He pulls his boot out of the yellow ochre mess of a man who has been dead much longer than the two boys. He’s lying face up. Well, sorta face up. He doesn’t have a face. It has rotted away, and been gnawed by corpse rats. Yuki listens with mild disgust to the suck! sound his left boot makes as he pulls it out of the corpse, but also with forbearance since this has happened before to him and to many others.
It’s routine.
No big deal, really.
It happens all the time.
He bends down dutifully to collect the dead man’s ID for MI to later sort and tally. He thinks that’s what’s really important out here, keeping things in regular order. Just as he does when writing in dactylic hexameter couplets, that he much prefers and admires to an
y other form of verse. He’s never even tried free verse.
The rotten face took a direct hit, and is unrecognizable. Even the color of the dead man’s utilities is unclear, blending yellow under a thick coat of ochre mud. It could be green or blue. It’s only when he reads the ID that Yuki realizes he’s standing in his best friend’s guts. He thought Andreas Krobot was a prisoner of war, but he’s right here, under Yuki’s boot heel. Oozing over its sides and toe like yesterday’s discarded porridge. Yuki vomits into the cracked open skull where a rapido dug out most of Andreas’ brain. That so disgusts him he does it again.
For an hour, Yuki stands silently beside the eerie mud tracings and the emptied site of his dead friend’s last remains, not so much refusing to climb out as unable. Until his lieutenant’s voice barks over his HUD, ordering him “out of the crater and back on the line.” Yuki still does his duty standing watch on the black wall and goes into Dark Territory when he’s ordered to, but he never volunteers and has no more combat lust. He pulls ever farther away from his company and even his squad. He lives as a catatonic. He never wears that pair of boots again.