by Kali Altsoba
Soma is Yuki’s most hoarded, prized, desperate possession. Yet he surrenders it to the natural communism of war, in a place of utopian brotherhood where all is shared in a transcendent sense of community. If either man makes it out alive, he’ll never feel this intense a human bond again. Not with his crew, not with some future wife or child. Never. It happens only here, in the black. Never again. It’s the thing that enrages the Yue ming daemons. Listen carefully! Hear them gnash teeth and rend their own flesh in rage at this pause in Yuki’s and Redbeard’s war?
The urge to share without holding back sweeps through them with the rush of the soma. They reawaken to possibilities of normal life, without war. Reawaken to the sweetness of good will and small, ordinary things, shared under the open roof of the world. To the joyous sound of raindrops splattering on the hard yellow clay they sit on. A crisp noise the last biscuit makes as they snap it carefully into two perfectly even pieces. Neither man ever tasted food as good or drank water as rejuvenating. Surviving death together combines with the lingering narcotic to elevate all their senses to acute levels, while smoothing off the rough edges of their predicament. Until they forget about the war, to focus solely on the now.
It’s the one true thing Yuki wanted. It’s why he volunteered, came out here to find it in the black. He thought it would fill up his art with insight and wonder. Now he doesn’t care about that. He just is, here with Redbeard. He lives in the perfect now. But there’s one last thing that he has yet to understand about war. He doesn’t know that this is an experience so rarely intimate, so impossible to achieve anywhere else, that it becomes a memory that ruins a man for life. And for living.
After they finish smoking the smooth, soothing, silky narcotic they pool and share all that they have, turning out secret pockets to gather joint possessions on a patch of dry clay between them. They find a thumbnail light, two HUD chips, four hydration pills, five salt tablets, a single plasma shield contact lens, and two pink crystals (one burned out) for a stub maser. They push all that aside.
In a second little pile is the true treasure. A chunk of hard cheese, a hardtack biscuit in a tin box and a slab of dark chocolate. The last is pulled out triumphantly by Redbeard from the bottom of a hidden pocket inside his dirty auburn uniform. He grins widely as he breaks the slab in two and hands the slightly larger piece to Yuki. They munch happily, Redbeard with two biscuit crumbs clinging to tangled, bushy whiskers that reach all the way down to the “V” of his neck.
They’re delighted to see a sniffing, female shrew look down hungrily at their feast. She has been searching out food for a voracious litter even while she wears another pregnancy, as is the prolific nature of her species. She hesitates to scamper over the floor of the crater to seize a crumble of biscuit that Yuki sets out for her on a clump of yellow clay. But then she clasps the precious crumb tightly in tiny, spike teeth as she runs back up the crater lip. Sharing their treasure with the shrew makes them truly happy. It seems impossible that the war can resume for them now, that they’ll ever fear or hate at the level needed to reach over and cut a man’s throat ‘just because he wears dirty brown and I’m clad in filthy green.’
***
That’s when a heavy mortar shell lands next to the crater, hurling several tons of dirt and water skyward then back on top of them. Yuki is deafened by intense noise and tumbles head-over-ass under a huge displacement of air and clay. The only thing that saves him from the blast is the fact that he’s already near the bottom of a three meter deep hole. The mother shrew, safe on the other side, scampers off in terror but without dropping her little crumb. She doesn’t get the war, either.
Everything goes pitch as ejecta falls back down, landing on top of Yuki. He’s lying stunned and spreadeagled on his face under an immense weight that pushes him down. He’s trapped under pressing soil, limbs pinned beyond ability to move or lift, as if he has been nailed to a thick wood floor with huge spikes by a sadistic torturer. He gulps a mouthful of crumbly clay before his brain can shut his mouth and eyes protectively. He can’t cough it out because so much more weight of soil is falling on top of him, crushing all air out of his lungs. He feels the loose clay he swallowed sliding down his throat, choking him. A sudden rush of terror hits him more intensely than anything in his life. ‘Air, I need air! I’m going to die!’
The dirt is astonishing in its sheer weight and immovability. He’s pinned flat on his stomach, eyes and mouth and nose pressed hard into wet clay, heavy soils piling onto his head and shoulders, pressing on his back and legs. He feels like an elephant is standing on his back and another is squatting on his legs. Mercifully, he loses consciousness. That’s why he doesn’t feel Redbeard digging frantically with both hands under his half exposed right arm, straining to pull Yuki up-and-out. Doesn’t feel him yanking on his collar to lift his face out of the wet mix of clumpy yellow clay and looser topsoil. Doesn’t feel calloused fingers pushing into his throat, digging out clots of loose dirt, opening a path for air to flow in again.
When Yuki comes to after a minute he’s still three quarters buried by dirt, on his stomach atop a pile of jumbled rocks and soil. His head and face and a shoulder are free. He sucks air up his nose and blinks, but he can’t cough or breathe through his mouth. When he tries, he chokes. Redbeard is on his knees beating desperately on his back, having pushed filthy fingers up his nostrils to gouge out yellow dirt blocking that other vital airway. Yuki sputters, gags twice, vomits, and finally he breathes. ‘Was ever air so sweet? I’m going to live!’
Redbeard shouts with relief to hear Yuki cough. He digs out the rest of him from under a thousand weight of new dirt that fills in half the crater. They’re atop a fresh cone of loose clay and topsoil that rises to less than two meters from the lip, unaware of how fatally higher the crater floor is than before the shell threw ejecta inside. Redbeard stands up to stretch his back, sore from all the digging. He smiles down at Yuki and reaches out a wrinkled hand to help him stand up, too.
A whistling, screeching sound bullet strikes Redbeard in the right temple as he stands and his head and neck rise above the lip. Half his skull explodes in what looks to Yuki like a slow motion science recording from grade school. Or the time he watched an overripe watermelon dropped from the back of a careless acoustic transport. Blood spatter and bits of gray, crenelated tissue pattern one side of the crater. More of it lands on Yuki, smearing the sleeve of his extended arm. There’s no poetry in this awful, ugly thing, in Redbeard’s sudden and useless death. Only coarse physics of gravity and wind, and bullet impact velocity and air resistance. That’s what decides the precise way his lifeless body falls straight to the ground.
‘He died with no sense of style at all, like most men do in battle.’ Yuki feels cold. He looks into the cracked open skull as he wipes an ounce of gray gyri off his yellow clay streaked utes. He feels nothing, again. Except inner coldness and a vague, hollow sense of loss. A shared moment of chocolate and cheese and the pregnant shrew clutching a prized crumb, all that is gone forever. Yuki pulls on his helmet, taps his HUD, signals to the still perfectly concealed sniper: ‘Friendly incoming. Don’t shoot!’ She replies. ‘IFF confirmed. Safe passage granted.’
He scampers out of the crater, rolls into a low crouch, hesitates briefly, then begins a zig-zag run across the last stretch of Dark Territory. He knows the sniper has his back. He doesn’t know that she’s Klava Nast, the wildly famous “Specter.” Her unit is rotating through the 400th’s sector, training girl snipers in the specialist WCB units, passing on skills from the Women’s Sniper School set up on Koblenz and recruiting these days from the whole of Imperium Province 37. He doesn’t know that HQ moved her into his sector to get her away from hunting parties that intend to end her and her fearsome reputation, which is spreading over the milneb.
Yuki wouldn’t care about all that even if he knew. He’s worried about trigger happy pickets along the perimeter of First, but makes it back OK, his HUD blaring out IFF info all the way. He heads to a waiting MI
debriefer to explain how he got lost, and how he lost his prisoner shy of the eastern side black wall. Then he reports to Mother Duck to tell him he’s OK, although he knows no one in Two Company really gives a damn about him. Except that they don’t want to be a man short if the enemy retaliation raids tonight.
Soma
“How many did we lose?” It’s Yuki’s second debrief. This one is quicker and less formal. More real and useful, less officer-with-a-stick-up-his-ass.
“It went to shit with that second ‘precision barrage’ our brilliant frog captain ordered.” Mother Duck is angry. Yuki braces for a storm of vulgar criticism.
“How bad?”
“Real bad. One Platoon is almost gone. It’s got 22 killed, 14 wounded, two missing.”
“And Two? How about Two?” Yuki can’t bring himself to say “us.”
“We lost four guys KIA, five wounded, seven missing. Make that six, now that you showed up.”
‘Damn, that’s fewer guys to pick from if we have to go back across.’ Yuki has to ask. He needs to know. He doesn’t want to go back, even if he was the one who fucked it all up. “Did we get enough prisoners to satisfy MI?”
“No prisoners survived.” Mother Duck says it without an edge or complaint, surprising Yuki with calm resignation and lack of blame for him.
“You had at least five. What happened?”
“We had to kill ‘em all when the second barrage came in short, right on top of us. That’s when you got separated with your Beard. Too much flash bang and argy bargy to herd ‘em back here. We dropped ‘em in DT and took cover ‘till the capt’n was finished. Then we skedaddled back. Guess you did the same?”
“Yeah. Like you, no choice. I dropped that Beard as soon as the shells started. Maser shot inside a crater.” It’s the only time he mentions Redbeard, closing out the truth of their rare moment of brotherhood with a lie about murder. He doesn’t care if the sniper challenges his account in her mission AAR, to run up her score on the leader board. Yuki lives only in the moment, each moment.
“Too bad. Even one tongue would have been better than none.”
Yuki knows what mission failure means. Tonight, someone will go out to try again. MI is insisting on it. Battalion is angry about the lost Beard prisoners and too many casualties with nothing to show for them. Four Company’s captain get’s the job. He’s ordered to make a “visit” right into an alert, aroused enemy line.
“No helping it,” says Mother Duck. “Orders are straight from Division. Some officer back there is real pissed, so Four has gotta go across tonight. Just two klics north of here.”
At least the captain is an old hand, with dozens of patrols and three successful raids on his record. Not like the creased frosch who fucked up everything yet says his tactics are affirmed and wants to try again. Even better, Four’s captain already has an Order of Pyotr. That means he’ll use tactics that work. And since he already has a medal, he won’t be looking to win accolades with the lives of his men. It’s OK to have a hero in your unit, ‘cause he’s likely done trying to be one. The other kind of officer, the type still on the make for a combat citation, they get men killed.
“It won’t be like we did it. Not another long distance cluster fuck like the new captain ordered, right out of the Officer Candidate School manual. A direct assault on a fully manned rapido pillbox, as a fuckin’ diversion!”
Yuki has never heard Mother Duck so angry. Or so critical of the company’s officers. “It’s good to know that Four has a captain who will do whatever he can to carry out orders with minimal danger to his men. Maybe the boys will be OK.”
“Yeah, maybe. But the enemy gets a vote, you know.”
“Always.” In fact, Yuki doesn’t care what happens. As long as he doesn’t have to go. He only cares that Four gets some prisoners so the battalion can relax.
Later, he visits Three in search of something “to take the edge off.” He knows a guy there who knows a guy, who’ll get him decent stuff. Soma to dull the ache of a sudden, stronger than ever bout of his perpetual angst. Since he got back from the crater where he was nearly buried alive, he has a never ending claustrophobia. A growing sense of black walls closing all around him, of solitude in overcrowded trenches, living among recycled dead souls he doesn’t give a shit about anymore.
He thinks he caught a cold crossing DT, or maybe in the Beards’ trench, or maybe in the rain in the crater he shared with Redbeard. Doesn’t matter. He stifles a sneeze. When he’s alone after the Four raiders depart, he’ll ‘break the windows of memory,’ escape from the black for an hour or three, adrift in a somatic dream. Unless the soma is off, a bad batch that takes him only into nightmare.
***
Yuki knows that he might be wounded on the morrow. Will he be left behind by his squad, to bleed alone in the dark? He might be impaled on a narrow shard of shattered carbyne parapet, or again lie face down in muck and filth, this time with no one to dig him out. His “mates” don’t care if he lives or dies or is horribly wounded, no more than he cares about them. They aren’t a band of brothers, like he hoped for before the black. What matters is that any one man’s death leaves all the others shorthanded, while a wounding forces two or more men to carry their now useless comrade to an aid station, along with their own burdens and bundles.
If Yuki becomes the Wounded Man tomorrow they’ll curse him silently, anger growing with each trundling stumble and hard stubbed toe, each dropped stretcher pole and low, involuntary moan that slips from his lips to blame them for his pain. With each step that wearies his uncaring bearers they’ll hate him more, resent and envy his helplessness and departure from the black. He knows that they’ll think these things about him because that’s exactly how he feels about all of them.
If he dies, there will be no one to mourn the loss of his uniqueness, which he now knows is false as well. So far from greatness, he no longer believes in Yuki. He used to think that the sorrow of war carried by a soldier was just like the sorrow of love carried by jilted lovers everywhere. The kind of thing he used to think was the sinew of life. He knows that’s all wrong. What he feels is beyond sorrow or self-pity or mercy or brotherhood. What he and maybe everyone out here feels is sheer nothingness. Neither a bang nor a whimper. Yuki is become a hollow man.
Does he even care for himself? He isn’t sure. His sense of self bleeds into the black, until he feels dead inside as he thinks on where he is tonight. He scratches at bedbugs and lice gnawing at him under his befouled, unwashed clothes, still clumpy with Barbarossa crater dirt. He looks at resting comrades and is engorged with a hate that stuns him with its intensity. A hate he only ever felt before for the enemy, and even that rarely and always wrapped in fear. There is no fear in what he feels now. Only purified, raw hatred. The kind you can’t feel for strangers, like the enemy. The kind you only feel for someone you know, like Two Company.
‘Who are my real enemies after all?’ He doesn’t know. Has he ever known? He understands that he has no mates, no friends out here, not since he lost Usman and Tura, Jack Lee and Kurt, and Andreas Krobot. No old friends wait for him back on Oceanus, either. Not really, if you’re honest about it. The only ones who briefly escape solitude out here in the war are the few lucky men who sexually pair. And in the end they suffer worst of all, when their mate dies during a barrage or from a bullet through his eye or is cut in two by a rapido or steps on a ‘party popper’ mine. Then they grieve not a mate but a lover, as did the ancient poet:
“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Yuki knows that no one anywhere, ever, will feel anything like that when he’s killed. That no one except rare, starshell crossed lovers feel like that when a man in Two Company is killed, let alone in the battalion or division or Rikugun as a whole. The more usual thought out here is ‘thank the gods it wasn’t m
e.’ Then they fight over whatever little things he left behind in the barracks. He knows now that every man fends for himself in the end, maybe even the lovers. Despite fine prewar and memex talk about being “brothers of the barracks” and “comrades in arms,” each day the strongest men bully and rob, beat up and exploit, the weakest. They prey on smaller, lonelier men. On weak and isolated losers like Yuki.
Most men living alongside the black become thieves and hoarders like Yuki, but some remain scrupulously fair. An older jōtōhei is specially prized and sought out for his uncanny ability to slice black bread or a block of frozen mockmeat in precise, perfectly even pieces, using only his kabar. His unique skill saves a lot of men from stupid fistfights over how to share food. He learned it during a long stint in a military prison, before the war even started. That’s all he’ll say if asked. They usually pay him with a piece of whatever it is they ask him to slice up.
There are also real outsiders, desperate ‘black rats’ and ‘ghoul snake privates.’ They crawl into DT to search bodies of dead they come across while on patrol. No matter how mangled a corpse or how far along the decomposition, despite high risk of boobytraps waiting beneath a corrupted limb or torso, they poke and pull and roust and rob uncomplaining dead, who lie inert in all colors. They rob the living, too. In hinter areas on leave, anything carried by Amasian civvies is fair game for bullying thieves. Once, Yuki saw Rikugun force old civvy women to strip, right out in the open, then reave and sell their clothes and their little bits of things, just so they could go to a virtual brothel or buy a cheap half-slaved kliba. Yuki doesn’t do things like that, but nor does he ever try to stop them happening.