by Kali Altsoba
Shadows
The boys who died in the shallow crater where Andreas Krobot rotted out were frosch replacements. They ‘bought it’ on their first day on picket duty. They lay side-by-side, leaving images of their faces in hardened mud for gawpers to visit later. Beside faceless Andreas Krobot, two meters to one side. When the bearers turned the boys over, bagged them and took them away, Yuki saw the deathmasks in mud clay as clear as charcoal artist tracings. He stood over outlines where two idiot boys lay dead, alone together in the mud. Where they squatted in the darkness slurping poison from a yellow puddle that first light easily shows had thin orange tracings from the last gas attack. The damn fools were so innocent they drank poison from the bottom of a filthy crater, not even seeing the rotten dead man who so bravely occupied this precious place for Pyotr two weeks earlier.
For a week after that, Yuki diverts his mind from lost friends any way he can. With drugs, with frantic holo sex, with conscious repression, and with catatonic hollowness. He never uses their names, even inside his silent mind. He pushes all thoughts about the murky death of Andreas Krobot away. But his efforts to forget his friends only makes room in his head for strangers, for two boys lying face down beside, you know who, at the bottom of a stupid crater that’s no more special than tens of millions of other craters that pockmark Dark Territory and beyond. He goes back to the shadows crater a week later, during a heavy rain that drives off the trench tourists. By the time he gets there, rain erases the silhouettes and it’s just another crater. By morning, it’s filled with oily orange water and diluted poisons and has three dead field mice floating in the pool at its bottom. By then, Yuki is back in his bunk, arranging emptiness into a verse he calls Shadows.
Squish, squash! The oozing corpses sound
as we carelessly press them underfoot,
leaving clay silhouettes in sodden ground.
In the clay at my feet, cold faces stain
the crater floor where they lie face down.
I see their clean features still, drawn plain.
They flinched low beneath a rising flare,
dove below spandau rounds scudding hard
and hot, to end their youthful fear and care.
To end all they were or ever might be;
Rupture hate, hope and ardent dreams.
End their potent individuality.
As we lift them out, carved shapes remain
like cookie cutout men in ochre dough.
Later, they’ll quick erode in steel gray rain.
Two boys sucked on the poison teat of war,
drank yellow death lurking in a crater pool.
Innocent and fair, unmarked by wounds or gore.
No exploded flesh or white burning bone,
no exposed gut or brain, gray greased and wet.
Intact, still pure, we bagged them to ship home.
Don’t tell their mothers how they really died.
Drowning in vomit, faces hung like black ghouls
on Hallow’s Eve. Guts all on fire inside.
Old hands already know what Yuki learns the hard way serving on the black wall, that personal friendships can’t stand against the hurricanes of death blowing over Amasia and across Orion. He thought he’d be friends forever with Jack Lee and Kurt, Usman and Tura, and especially Andreas Krobot. The only boys in Two Company whose names he learned in the rush to war. He thought they’d bond for life, like happens in all the books and memex vids he watched when he was civvy.
They’re all dead. Five might-have-been, could-have-been, should-have-been, lifetime friends. He lost two the first time he got into a minor firefight, and felt his manhood swell. Two more he lost to sheer bad luck, when a lazy shell decided that two boys having a cold breakfast were worth targeting. He used his combat knife to scrape bits of the last one, you know who, off his boot a month ago, sitting on wet ochre clay as something vital inside him curled and calcified. He has been carrying it around ever since, like a stone baby in his gut he can never birth.
‘Replacements are dumb shits.’ They don’t know anything. Not when to duck (right fucking now!) or when it’s OK to standup in a slit trench (never!). They’re expected to die quickly and usually do. It’s a dumb but common superstition that one man’s death out here in the black spares another man’s life. So the old hands are secretly glad when a ‘frog’ dies. They think that means one of them will live another day or week or month. If surviving at the black wall can be called living.
Small group bonds dissolve with every casualty, submerge into Kokytos under the Jobian weight of suffering the black demands. The war is too vast, the death rate too great, for bands of friends to form or last. Combat in this war is too bloody, too swiftly destructive for the consolation of comradeship to take hold. Not when pals who sit next to you at breakfast chatting gaily lie at your feet dead by lunch or dinner. Or don’t show up at the next breakfast and no one asks why, or says their name out loud. “Poor blighter, looks like he bought it,” is their only epitaph. The next morning, another nameless stranger sits across from you at breakfast.
It’s impossible to make replacement friends, although some of the new boys reach out to Yuki to try. He doesn’t want to learn their names or stories or become friends. No one lasts out here, in the mud and blood and shit and randomness. Not long enough to make worthwhile the emotional investment he’d need to think of another man, a newbie, as a real person let alone a brother. He won’t grieve later. He understands that there’s only a brotherhood of death once you get to the black.
‘Life out here is better lived alone.’
‘Friendships out here are always fatal.’
‘To hell with friendship. Who needs it?’
‘Fuck all friends. I’ll survive alone.’
Yuki is all alone, surrounded by tens of millions. He has friends only in his verse, which he no longer writes in praise of Pyotr and the Imperium. Or as heroic doggerel in six perfectly metrical feet, or in rehashed classical themes celebrating Rikugun drive and seishin courage. He finds his art in darkness, in brutal realism. It’s not the voice he came to the war to hear speak his words or expected to emerge from his mouth into his sleeve. But it is his voice. A voice of stark truth that rejects all the lies of his youth, from six months or a year ago: “bonds of brotherhood.”
He didn’t expect this. He volunteered thinking he’d find his art inside a special comfort and intimacy that can be found only in war. At least, in war as he learned about in books and memex vids about the olden times and Rikugun ferocity in the Third Orion War, the one before the despised ‘Golden Peace.’ He expected a kind of brother’s war fought alongside friends like he never had before, in school or in childhood. He got the idea from lying history classes and from poems about the Old Rikugun; from memex and milneb vids, purveyors of the worst official lies; from veteran RIK teachers brought to his school to speak, along with recruiters.
He thought he’d be part of a “band of brothers,” keeping company with his “comrades of the barracks,” and lots of shit like that. Now he knows the war will strip him of everything he has, maybe of everything he is. That killing and dying in war are done inside a cascade of solitudes. He has lost idealism about Rikugun and the Imperium, too. He sees they aren’t ready to wipe away rigid class structure and all that ideal meant for his service. He understands now that there will always be high born Grünen and mere pikies like him. He’s coarse, despised, lower caste.
The loss of friends he thought he’d have for life darkens each day. He shrinks from any sign or offer of comradeship. He sits and eats alone. He hardly talks. He suffocates in the sight of strange new faces, a constant stream of replacements for missing Two Company veterans. He finds his only solace in a moated castle of solitude he builds around himself. It’s not enough, so he turns at night to the soft red light of an inhaled hemp tube or tiny robusto flake on the tip of his tongue. He’s starting to think about and desire little else. Yuki is utterly lost in the war.
***
>
Faces slip into the past in other ways than death. Men are carted away frozen with suspensor, waking and recovering in some near rear med facility only to be randomly reassigned to another unit after med leave is used up. That’s why old hands never report sick and conceal any light wounds they get. They fear being reassigned. Fear being sent to an undermanned unit where they’ll have to start all over, learning which of the NCOs aren’t shitheads and who the specialists are. Go to units where even old hands arriving new get the worst food and nastiest, most dangerous jobs. Where veterans who transfer in remain outsiders, as nameless and unwanted as a bawling newbie come from a dropship that came in too fast on the coast, because it was being chased down by AI Wasp interceptors.
Yuki thinks of men he can’t avoid by the defining function of their specialty. Although the way he tags them doesn’t really define them as men or encompass everything they do in the company. He job tags a Bearer, Builder, Cook, Courier, Digger, Engineer, Gunner, Mapper, Miner, Scout, Scrounger, Sniper, Tracker and Wrecker. The faces of the men behind these roles change with luck or fate, and with wounds or death. Yuki knows that their roles, and the play, go on and on.
Even inside his platoon he uses job titles to avoid names that make men seem individual and more real. At least, he does in his head and hidden journal. He lists all the usual occupational types like Medic, Spotter, Sweeper, and First, Second and Third Mortarman, but also the Brute, Coward, Fixer, Fool, Joker, Murderer, Musician, Rapist, Thief, and Trench Whore. He whispers little stories about them into his recorder. If officers catch him doing it they’ll have him shot as a spy.
It’s all he has left.
It’s his last personal thing.
It’s the last thing that makes him Yuki.
He voices little seeds of ideas but then lets them lie fallow, alongside his notes about the hanging bell oak, a beautiful redheaded mother and pale child, a hunting screech owl, a circling black eagle, boys on a barge indifferent to the war in a way he couldn’t understand then but does now. He speaks in vignettes, anecdotes and fragments of free verse. He records impressions of the smell and look of air and sky. He draws micro character sketches and episodes of bleak, insane absurdity. Mostly, those. He adds to his log each day, though he doesn’t know why he makes notes and verses and sketches, since he no longer cares about writing or literature.
A year ago literature was everything to him, the event horizon of his ambition. He wrote stories about youth pining for love, the siren call of homeworld seas, the unbeatable heroic might of the Imperium in arms. Some were actually pretty good, if sodden with natural juvenilia of a 19-year old student still fascinated by heroic moral posing. It’s the mark of his gender and age, and peacetime generation. He probably would have grown past all that, to reach a greatness of art and sensibility that is inside Yuki. Instead, more than most, he’s ruined by the war. He now cares about nothing and thinks indifferently about everything. ‘Fuck college and all the old ideas in all the old books and vids. Nothing I learned from old literature makes sense. Nothing I learned there prepared me for any of this.’
No vid or memex play, no elegiac verse or brilliant lecture, compares to the raw truths of the first five minutes he lived in combat. None of his old professors know the intense boredom of trench life that’s punctuated by wild adrenal rushes, by mad moments of violent exhilaration and death wishes made and granted. No outsider understands the muddle, mayhem and murder of the war being fought on Lemuria. No ancient book taught him how to stay warm with just a groundsheet during four hours solitary picket duty at the haunted edge of the Yue ming. Or how to keep feet dry while standing in a half meter of yellow clay runoff in a flooded FOP. How to salt bland, creamy curds of sahnequark that’s a mainstay of rations at the wall. How to sleep when ordered. How to sleep even while hoofing it to a jump off trench or down a long parallel to take up relief or man a rapido. How to sleep at all, knowing that tonight you’ll have to go into Dark Territory on another useless patrol. Or that on the morrow you’ll either face or make a dawn attack. How to stay awake, when every cell screams fatigue. How to stay calm, when all consciousness fills his mind with sights and sounds, and smells, of horror beyond imagining. Because they’re real and you’ve already seen them a hundred times.
No old professor clucking criticism like a fat hen over one of Yuki’s essays or exams ever taught him how to stick a combat knife in just the right opening of a ferocious enemy’s body armor, before he does the same to you. How to kill a man fast with a razor sharpened sapper’s shovel, under the neck to quickly remove his head. How two extremely tired fellows should pick up a wobbly corpse so that it doesn’t come apart and spill slippery black guts back into the foxhole they have to occupy next. How to use any small crinkle or undulation in surface terrain to reach the enemy’s lines undetected, then capture and return alive with a prisoner. Just because some dickhead officer at Battalion HQ has a hardon for interrogation that will lead to plans for a raid that accomplishes nothing except to get more men killed on both sides. Knowing how to survive here in the black doesn’t come from some elevated civilian’s philosophy about how to live “the good life.” There’s no living at the front. Only life or death. Yuki gets that now, and ingests robusto..
On a two day leave in a hinter zone recreation park, Yuki gets stinking drunk with an armtrak driver. The older, coarser man offers to sneak him onto an armor park to let him climb inside his big machine. Yuki has seen them close up, but always tracking or hovering fast right past him. Never from the inside. Anything is better than trench boredom, so off he goes to the tank park.
“We wus maken’ an attack run,” the driver drunkenly recounts. “I follahed my capt’n into a huge crater at high speed, like a good wingman should. And I’m ah real godsdamn good winger.”
“You hovered straight in, or were you ground hugging?” Yuki has seen plenty of armtrak attacks, going in both directions. Enough to know that any driver has to choose: stay in hover mode and chance shoulder-to-air rockets, or go tracked?
“Man, you shoulda seen allah them Three bastards scatter! Like little bearded roaches when the lights go on all-at-once. That’s when half the godsdamn crater side blew apart in front of me. Musta been a fougasse, or something. Anyway...”
‘So, you were tracked.’
“I saw his beard up close when he got sucked into my intake. He looked real surprised. Still does! Ha!” He points to the Mastodon’s dark, redly stained front grill. Yuki only now sees that there are chunks of human remains clinging to the carbyne: a cord of intestine and half a face, bearded and with one astonished eye still staring back in mortal shock.
“My crew’s gonna hav’ta pick that shit out with tongs before we go out again. Stinks like mockmeat BBQ in the cockpit.”
He laughs, swigging another mouthful of gin from a silver flask. He deigns to play frontline philosopher to Yuki’s youth and inexperience. “Death and shit are the great equalizers, in war as in life.”
Yuki doesn’t seem too impressed. He vomits onto the driver’s fine black boots as the thought penetrates his drunkenness that the awful, burned-meat-and-hair smell he noticed earlier was once a man. With his own name and past life and aborted future. The driver is mad. Orders him off base. Threatens to call security. Yuki runs, shouting “go fuck yourself!” over and over. ‘I’m not like him’ he pleads to himself, during a subterranean maglev ride back to his outfit. ‘Not at all like him. Not mean and small and cruel and foul.’ It’s another month before he can eat mockmeat, and then only tinned or boiled. Never roasted. Never again.
Yuki’s right. He isn’t like the other men who seem to adjust more easily to the coarse facts of front life, become hard and callous and veteran. Yet, every day he gets more used to the violence, learns to suppress his quiet inner voice and just do what he’s told. Whatever he’s told. Including murder strangers. He takes pleasure in the consolations of a soldier’s life. A good biscuit or drink, snatches of song, stolen poitín, diverting tales on the
milneb and servneb, quick and easy sex. He gets that whenever he accumulates enough leave to visit a rear area holo brothel. He’s no kliba, not some submissive slut like the repellant losers and schemers he despises who service soldiers stuck without leave out along the black wall or in nearby barracks, in return for a few robusto flakes or hemp sticks, or just to avoid a beating. He has sex when he wants to, not when others want him or as a trench favor or service-for-trade for some bauble or drugs or for extra food.
He always waits for leave to have sex. Then, for just ten credits or so, he buys an hour’s relief with a raunchy holo program mounting him and grinding down inside a full sensor suit that later self-cleans. He’s far too shy to visit the official brothels where real Amasian girls and boys will have sex with you for even fewer credits than the holos, or for none at all. Just some mockmeat. Rikugun calls these young captives “comforters” and insists that they’re all willing prostitutes who go freely with its troops on R&R. In fact, they’re children who are raped repeatedly every day for little food and no pay. A sick joke that makes the rounds in Rikugun is that, like the sensor suits in the official RIK holo brothels, “those kids are self-cleaning too.” Yuki doesn’t like that joke.