by Kali Altsoba
Other horrors wear him down. Like the night a single long distance shell is fired by enemy gunners, maybe as an inside joke over there. Or just to harass Rikugun frontline morale, more than in expectation of doing damage. It lands a lucky hit on a Mammoth parked under good camouflage behind Yuki’s bunker. He runs into the pitch night to see two silhouettes waving frantically from inside the top of the fast burning armtrak, its internal fire extinguishers failing. He races toward them, but the orange-red men are torches and slip down inside, beyond his reach. He listens to them scream for a minute, peals of panic and pain echoing as if heard meters under water or from behind a thick, stone wall. The death sounds and too familiar burned meat smell turn him as pale as a condemned man standing at the foot of his own gallows. What is it about roasted meat? He decides it’s the Yue ming daemons. They must like it fixed that way, they do it so often.
That night one of the older NCOs calls a muster. He has ordinary but kindly brown eyes that sometimes look unnaturally old and wise. He’s built like a Dauran cowboy, all shoulders and muscle. He smells dry and white, like winter in south Lemuria. His voice is gravely and resonant with threat as he screams at the replacements like a howling arctic blizzard. “You do what I do if you want to live out here, you stupid shits! Nothing different!”
They know he means it, every syllable. That he’ll punch and kick and punish them for the smallest disobedience or deviation. So they do what they’re told and live another day or week. The youngest start calling the older master sergeant “Uncle.” He’s only 23 years old, but it soon catches on. Inside a week “Uncle” has all ten fresh recruits in his squad following him everywhere, like lost ducklings waddling after a farmer in a barn in a thunderstorm. Old hands laugh when they see his little train of newbies. Instead of “Uncle” they call him “Mother Duck.”
***
Yuki has lost all thrill of combat, but he still has to go out on patrol. As a combat veteran, he’s expected to show the incoming kids how it’s done. One time a Beard strobe catches the patrol creeping across Dark Territory, probing a Three gunpit. He drops another bit of soul as heavy rapidos open up brilliant white fire just as strobing frequencies penetrate his EM camouflage. The patrol goes to ground.
“Get up, now!”
“I can’t. I can’t.” That one gets a swift kick in the ribs.
“Move, move!” shouts Mother Duck.
“Which way, Uncle?”
“Straight ahead, charge the guns!”
The patrol runs manically right at the spitting guns, without any tactical order or evasion. Not from mateship or comradery or brothers’ bonds, certainly not from courage. Just dumb, stark fear that if they stay put every one of them will surely die. And some fear of Uncle, too. Some die anyway, alone in the midst of many, running harder and faster, with more adrenal pumping than any moment in their lives. Their forfeit, violently and suddenly abbreviated lives. Four newbies tumble and fall. They’re silently dead or screaming wounded on the ground, according to which body part the rapido’s blast punches a wine red hole through: calf, thigh, shoulder, head. Enemy gunners keep firing without pause or mercy. They receive none when Mother Duck, Yuki Hoth, and the last ducklings reach the gunpit.
Four enemy are alive inside the pit, even after grenades go off that Yuki and Mother Duck toss ahead as they charge in. A tall, cursing man and two frightened, wounded boys are beaten to death instead of shot by the enraged arrivals. The lone woman in the pit is knifed in a frenzy of white hot hate and fright. So many times that later, when they lift her corpse off the rapido to turn it around and fire at more Beards spotted running away from another gunpit, she comes apart in their bloody hands. Yuki’s adrenal rush passes with that, though his heart never stops pounding as patrol survivors search all four bodies and both gunpits for food and intel. Yuki looks for soma or any other drugs. Then they head back across Dark Territory.
Two mornings later, Yuki’s company is called out from a Badger Hole bunker by urgent shouting from a lookout on the parapet. They emerge to see one of their own 200 meters out from First, lashed to an old, partially disabled flame bot on the edge of Dark Territory. He was captured during the night, after losing contact due to an HUD issue while on patrol. He’s gagged, but not drugged. His eyes are full of terror. The grim Beards who are doing this want him to feel each bit of pain that’s coming with the breaking dawn. They’re from the gunpit, and pissed about the knifed woman Yuki and two kids cut apart and dumped in disrespected pieces.
The atrocity is timed to a solar trigger, so that all Two Company watches the kid scream and burn as the first red rays of daylight reach into gray gloom and set off the weapon. A cursing sniper ends the kid’s suffering after just a few seconds of white hot incineration. Before he stops screaming, the crisped boy’s mates vow that they’ll never take any Iron Three alive again. Two nights later a hunter patrol keeps bond with the burned up lad. After Yuki’s raiding party overruns a FOP he personally garrotes two auburn clad enemy trying to surrender. Others die in other ways, the same old ways or inventively cruel new ones. So it goes, atrocity loaded onto retaliation, piled onto vileness and atop vengeance on both sides of the black.
All of it is just local hate, not even connected to the larger war. It’s more and less than about the war. It’s personal. No one involved gives a shit about the war raging across Lemuria, let alone the fight for Orion. This savagery is about who’s directly across the black, as men and women secede from Humanity into isolated camps of hostile tribes of a few thousand each. The war becomes far more and far less than its official causes, slogans, or justifications. Hate is finding lowest levels, like a flood. It seeks least paths of resistance as it spills over the spiral arm.
Yuki’s better self argues with his worst self, as he hides from himself inside standard military law. ‘If I do these things only as a soldier of Rikugun I can save Yuki Hoth, a special and decent young man with a bright moral future.’ He says in his mind that nothing indecent that he does out here matters. He’s a soldier, and Pyotr’s subject. ‘If the Imperator’s cause is wrong, if the war is unjust and all my acts in it are crimes, Pyotr’s is still the greater criminal and obedience to his will must wipe the crime of his war and all its littler crimes out of me.’
Yuki is better than that, better than this ancient soldier’s dodge. Better than a morally childish pose of heroic nihilism, of absolution of atrocity by acceptance of “superior orders.” As a balm, it doesn’t last. Yuki is too honest and intelligent to fool himself with fine distinctions that any first year ethics student must easily demolish. His better self wins the argument. That is what destroys him. Lying on a hard bunk he returns to a passage from an ancient text, a memoir of a young lad about his own age also pulled into a war much bigger than himself. It was a long since forgotten fight among ancient foes, presenting the same evils and soldiers’ dilemmas. Like Yuki, the lost youth lived among ‘ruins, dirt, and ashes’ and with a writer’s dreams. He, too, was surprised not by joy but by his own vileness. By his ‘pride in gruesomeness, delight in decay, enthusiasm in destruction.’
Yuki sits up with a start. At last he understands. He confesses, not to any gods but to himself. ‘My innocence is dead. It is murdered by the war.’ Then he accepts it all. ‘I am a murderer. They are my crimes, not Pyotr’s. We are all his spotted soldiers, made dalmatians by our crimes. No one among us is spotless anymore.’
His trench mates are changing, too. Becoming harder with each dull day spent on watch or in a bunker, each grim night of fearful patrols and sudden skirmishes. They’re better at tactics, at coordinating as a fighting unit rather than firing wildly as panicked individuals like they did the first few times. They’re soldiers now, with true veteran skills. No longer just eager boys in uniform playing at soldiering. This transformation has costs. Combat skill comes at a high price. For like Yuki, they’ve shed all their innocence, lost their boyhoods, carry cast iron in their souls.
They, too, enjoy simple pleasures like a qu
ick sleep, a slab of fresh cut bread, a purloined bottle of beer, a shared camp song full of the melancholy bliss of death so familiar to all at the front. Yet they’re boxed out, closed off from normal things. Some of them will be lost boys forevermore. Separated by wartime experiences from subtler pleasures, a kind word or act, a snippet of birdsong, a shapely cloud scudding across an azure sky, a girl’s laughter with no irony or bitterness in it.
Greater things have no meaning for them. No one in Two Company follows war news, except in the vaguest way. And then only about happenings on Amasia. Every other battle or campaign seems too distant, irrelevant to what they must do tonight or tomorrow. Besides, they no longer believe Rikugun’s milneb. Inside the frontline bunkers, they keep music or story memex channels on at all times, switching off their hearing in bored indifference when a RIK or SAC propagandist comes on the milneb to excitedly announce “Bulletin: important war news!”
Sometimes the battalion’s politruk corrals the offenders. Then he forces the whole of Two Company to take in his “reeducation lessons,” about the Pure cause at stake in the war, about the greatness of the Oetkert dynasty, the cultural genius of Pyotr Shaka, and invincibility of Rikugun. Worst of all is when he makes them listen to official war news on the Imperial Channel that they know is more lying hokum. “Listen for your own good so that you may better serve the Empire, here on the frontline of Purity and Imperium glory.” It’s what the politruk says self-importantly to them every time. They hate the thick headed little shit. One man is seriously planning to frag him. He hopes to do it before the next Five Moons.
None of it matters. Not the news, the latest vid, the politruk or tactical updates from Battalion or Division or Corps HQs. Whatever their mood, whatever their experience or prewar views on love and life, whatever they now think about the godsdamn war, tomorrow everything changes. For tomorrow Two Company must make a reconnaissance-in-force of the enemy’s black wall. Orders are to “bring back at least five prisoners, alive.”
Yuki fears to cross over again. He’s afraid to go back into the midnight realm of combat that’s eating him hollow bit-by-bit, like a slow cannibal. He sits still all through the night, alone on an island of silence. He finally stirs, readying his battle kit as a bilious morning arrives, breaking the dark horizon behind him with bitter, yellow light it pisses into Dark Territory. Dawn is here. Wretched, cold and lethal. The patrol will move partway out, then wait for night’s return. ‘There’s a time for words in war and a time to sleep. I can do neither. What kind of soldier am I?’
He already knows the answer.
Piss poor and useless.
And he’s getting worse.
Officer
It’s a common saying in Rikugun trenches that “our lives are like a toddler’s pants: real short and full of piss-and-shit.” The shorthand version is “Piss & Shit” or just “P&S.” Nothing more needs saying, not after someone shouts “P&S!” and all the old hands laugh bitterly with resentful resignation. It’s iconic, tagged onto anything that veterans hate or disapprove. Especially stupidly dangerous orders or a chickenshit dress uniform inspection by a strutting martinet from some deep hinter area HQ. Or a bad line officer who treats any and each complaint with the tired skepticism an overwrought mother reserves for her dirty and quarrelsome children. If a senior officer is standing nearby, all brass-and-braid, all brandy-and-boasts, straight from HQ with a burning bright idea in his head and his stiff cock in his hand, veterans whisper or silently mouth “P&S.” They know a real dirty job is about to be announced and they’re going into it. At least it makes the old hands grin in dreary resignation of a sure cluster fuck to come. That’s all HQ organizes these days, Charlie Foxtrot after Charlie Foxtrot. HQ is all about cluster fucks.
Yet they howl inside with inchoate anger. They hate a regime that makes war with no sense of who they are or the value of their lives, without ever asking their input on how Rikugun could do it better. They hate arrogant officers who have only spent a few days at the black yet force them into Dark Territory on senseless raids, to satisfy tactical vanity or to advance a career. They hate a skillful enemy who kills more cruelly every month, whom they kill just as cruelly. Hate that he seems a little stronger than the week or month or year before, even as Rikugun is always a little weaker. They rage against the stalemated fight on Amasia, furious that they can’t get through the black, for it’s their war too. Rage that civilians on faraway worlds praise them only so they can ask of them: “Can’t you do more?”
Rikugun soldiers don’t fight for Pyotr or their social betters, for the three High Castes. Not anymore. They don’t fight for imaginary “bands of brothers” and they won’t fight for old elites who sneeringly call them “outcastes” or “pikies” even as they are sent to defend the privileges of the Imperium. Won’t fight for High Caste officers who stay far from the front, in HQs distant from ‘the feast of vultures and the waste of life.’ Won’t fight for Pyotr or Purity or ‘Lost Children’ worlds. Won’t even fight for each other, but only for themselves. A month or a year or three years ago they lost every virginity they had to the rapist called War. They’re old and hurt, cruel and cynical, and full of rage. Gang raped by the war. Mindfucked by combat and the black. They fight only for hate, for shame, and for themselves.
And yet they still go out into the Yue ming, still fight and die from rapido blasts and snipers, or animate snakes and screaming meemies. Still look down to see the blade of a serrated combat knife tearing their gray guts out, leak vile liquid as an enemy just as frightened twists her kabar, pulling it out fast only so she can shove it in again snick! snick! They still die abandoned on hardscrabble mountainside or lying atop tufts of tundra. They curl in blackened clumps on the great grassland prairie, as indifferent herds of bison and wild horse graze over old battlefields and around the corpses. They lie all dried out inside their last set of utes, in front of a desiccated FOP across a bit of a baking desert; a vicious ghoul snake slithers up their anus to nest. They lie rotting in a dank rat hole under the river brownlands; rigid and blue-balled atop a southern glacier. They’re food for cawing ravens and trench rats and bluebottle flies. Some will not be consumed for thousands of years, lying until then frozen and forgotten under layers of arctic or antarctic pack ice.
When the CO of Two Company gets the “raid at company strength, and bring back five prisoners” order from Battalion HQ, who got it from 400th Divisional HQ, who got it from RIK Onworld HQ in Xiamen, he tells his captains, who tell their lieutenants, who tell their sergeants to “see to it.” Old hands in the main Two Company bunker grunt understanding and nod and hand sign ‘P&S.’ Until a tough master sergeant they trust and respect, called “Mother Duck,” tells them to stop.
“Shut the hell up! Get some rest.”
“Yes sergeant.”
“Patrol is in four hours.”
“Yes sergeant.”
“Assemble here for mission brief at two-dark-thirty.”
Yuki stays awake all night, sitting beside his battle kit with other waiting men in a restless raider group. He’s not anticipating action eagerly as he used to, back when he was still a youth, six or ten or twelve months ago. Back when he thought of combat as a kind of thrilling game. He sits smoking a cheap hemp stick infused with soma juice. He’s not the only one puffing hard, trying to cloud his fears, at risk of also dulling combat instincts and reactions. Adrenalin is making his heart pound, filling his gut with battle angst. A small, cold feeling creeps up the back of his neck, right onto his scalp. It feels for all the Thousand Worlds like a living creature is moving under his skin, scratching at the base of his skull. It’s the soma.
‘Why are there so many of us?’ He shrugs off the unhappy thought as soon as he has it. He knows the answer, but he doesn’t want to dwell on it. He sucks hard on the soma stick. The answer thrusts into his brain anyway. ‘Because we’re going to be badly led by some shitty virgin officer, and casualties are expected. So they want more of us to go over-the-top to guarantee we
bring back the prisoners.’
He’s right. Battalion doesn’t trust the inexperienced, wobbly Two Company captain it tasked to lead this capture raid, or his right-out-of-the-academy tactics. He’s only been on Amasia a month. Still, he’ll lead out a mix of old hands and new men. Some of the greenhorns just arrived at First Trench last night, yet they’ll be going all the way to the other side of DT, where they’ll face their first fight on their first day, wandering in the black. Mother Duck is real worried about the raid and the cocky, frog captain. He gathers the rookie raiders in the jump off bunker to dole out reminders of basic combat tactics, well before the official mission brief by the brashly inexperienced captain is set to begin.
“Don’t run if you come under mortar fire. You, newbie. Listen up! If you run around in the black like headless chickens the shells will find you, and then you’ll be headless for sure.”
“They can see us in The Black, sergeant? What about our camo gear?”
Mother Duck can’t believe the naiveté of the question, or the Upper Case that he hears from this frosch kid. “Yeah, the AIs will ‘see’ you.”
“How sergeant, if I’m all camoed up?”
“They don’t care about camo. They’ll spot the dirt you stir while you walk, or the midges that scatter away from you. Or they’ll hear metal soles of your boots clang on some bit of discarded war shit. They’ll get you good. So pay attention!”