Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  What’s that? You agree? Rikugun’s neglect of logistics from day one is the problem; that its hasty chickens are coming home to roost? Actually, the fact that chickens aren’t coming home to roost is the problem. Egg production was the first food industry to disappear, when Supply Services faced a short term protein power shortage after White Sails blew two cargo ships away, raining a cometary rainbow tail onto Amasia that lasted three years. General Johann Oetkert recklessly let men eat all the chickens in near rear areas, confident that he would win soon with his planned First Shaka Offensive. Most other fowl also disappeared. More losses of vital food convoys marked the ending of Year Two. That’s when Supply Services lost control of unshorn sheep that the fool Oetkert ordered slaughtered, because he was sure to win in Year Three with the Second Shaka Offensive. Dairy cattle are heading to slaughterhouses now. Why not? We’re going to win this year!

  All that is why Scrounger’s stumble into an abandoned nectar farm that no one else had ransacked and wrecked was so unexpected. It was his finest hour in the toughest job in Two Company, and his last. Angry over being roughed up unfairly, even though it is true that he sold about half the nectar to a rear area commissary, he disappears on his next deep expedition. It’s all terribly suspicious, given what he tells the battalion colonel just before he leaves. “I know a farm valley no one else has searched yet, ripe with barns stuffed with corn. I’ll take the big troika.”

  Orders are issued for his arrest when he stays AWOL for two weeks. Everyone likes to think the lucky bastard is hiding out in his secret valley, growing fat on corn that he roasts every morn and night. Though they all know it’s far more likely that he’s dead. They remember his nectar fondly, though not his name. They don’t know the name of the new Scrounger, either. And they don’t give a godsdamn.

  Yuki ate one nectar pod in a safe corner of an off duty funk hole. He traded the other one to his doper in Three Company; got a full month’s supply of robusto for it, from his pusher. That’s how good the nectar was. ‘Yes, that was a good day.’ Yuki recalls the honey as he kneels behind the stone wall, halfway up an emptied valley lying between opposing alpine armies.

  Other men in his platoon kneel or lie prone atop packed snow and behind the low wall, better to aim stubby trench masers downhill. A few are still firing at retreating enemy, now mere black specks against the crescents of distant, barchan snowdrifts. It was a small scale ACU probe, easily repulsed by the infantry alone. Yuki never even bothered to fire his weapon. He almost never does anymore. Not even to defend himself. ‘They’re not my enemies, and you’re not my friends.’

  Not all the dead are lying down. The first night Two Company retook the wall a practical joker with something of an artistic touch positioned five, white-yellow dead standing up. He made them hold hands in a playful ring, like they’re acting out a child’s game. They stood still, silently at play, for two days and nights. Until a confused shell, landing on what it thinks are attacking Blues, breaks the ring and ends the macabre game. Two frozen corpses still stand upright, but crookedly.

  Farther down are a dozen more standing corpses. They have been positioned by far more cruel and vulgar jesters, without the intent of the harmless artist who made the first merry-go-round of corpses. These dead are stripped naked, laid on top or right behind one another in gutter poses of frosted necrophilia. The battalion taii laughs out loud when he sees the obscene statues, while making a rare visit to the fighting lines. He declares the frozen klibas will make for good target practice. Some men laugh coarsely, and not just to please their colonel. Yuki doesn’t care about the dead or the laughter. ‘I’m a soldier. I’ve seen worse than this.’

  The taii orders more whitish-yellow popsicles dragged to the sloped meadow half a klic in front of the recaptured stone wall. As each incoming round arrives, shattered pieces of ice flesh fly off a standing or kneeling or crouching figure, like bits of brittle maple candy or chunks of thick glass struck with a hammer. Silent wolverines and lynx come after dark to slink away with the bite size bits of meat.

  Blues on the other side of the valley see the macabre target practice and don’t like it one bit. Yuki knows they’ll react, and wisely expects that his position will be attacked soon, to make some kind of stupid point about the vanilla popsicles and respect for the dead, or something. ‘How about respecting the living instead?’ He’s sure his position will be probed. He’s not wrong. An attack is coming.

  ***

  One morning Yuki wakes up pleasantly and oddly warm. He wonders why. Then he realizes he’s snowed in, his one man slit buried under a hood of gray-white snow that seals in body heat as tight as a Nunavut ice house. It’s like he’s curled inside the den of an antarctic fox. On his HUD he sees the whole of Two highlighted onscreen, also buried in their slit trenches under deep, clean, crisply white snow. Some are instinctively curled up like him, in tight fetal position inside their snowbound slits. They look on his HUD like little green grubs. A few images are stretching or sitting or standing upright, having climbed out already.

  He tries, but he can’t get out on his own. The snow cover is too heavy to lift, and he can’t dig at it from the inside where his body heat and breath melted the surface until it refroze as hardened ice. He hates to do it, hates to draw attention to himself or ask anyone for aid, but he simply has no choice. The slit is deep and the snow on top at least a meter high. He sends a signal over his HUD asking for help, then waits and waits. He watches while 100+ green, coiled fetuses stir. One by one they uncurl, begrudgingly emerging from warm, contented wombs back into the common world of weariness and woe. The company recovers everybody else before three men finally trudge over to dig out the weird, robusto loner.

  Yuki isn’t liked. Not anymore. He reaches up a hand and they help him climb out, rising into brilliant sunshine that glares blindingly off the ice and snow. When he regains vision he looks over to the enemy line on the other side of the valley. There are no tracks anywhere in the virginal blanket that covers the entire glen. Suddenly a first mortar shell whistles and bangs overhead. He sees seven more black dots rise from behind the enemy frontline, and grow bigger. He’s about to leap back inside his slit when he hears Mother Duck.

  “Just the usual breakfast hello.” He’s talking to a rook, reassuring a recruit who looks as green around the gills as his pale RIK utes. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  Winter

  The war is unnoticed by the mountains. Its passing is as harmless to high rock as the dancing austral aurora. Mount Sheol smothers corpses under her avalanches of snow and ice. She erases trenches, pushes all broken war machines downslope with unstoppable rock slides brought down by the banging of useless artillery. A himalayan landscape tolerates men’s winter hacking at trees to build poor abodes atop a surface skin of dirt and ice. Trees will grow back while the huts pass away, carried by melt water or murder into the deep valleys. The war will leave nothing behind on Mount Sheol. Not even scars. No man or machine will mark or master her summit. Even meadow grasses and mosses will straighten and rise after all the hardnailed boots and armtrak treads that crush them move on and rust out. The only victors here can be Rock and Ice and Time. All this too shall pass.

  ***

  Behind the lines on each side of the deep valley bowl where 400th ID is locked in for the long southern winter, opposing armies build 18-man log huts to sleep sheltered from the endless, icy wind. Pine branch insulation makes interiors smell wonderfully fresh, clean and woody. An unspoken frontline truce returns that lets all the hutches be. Plunging shells ordered by distant HQs whistle overhead, to land misdirected on Mount Sheol’s sides. Men grin to hear the thuds!

  Against all sound defensive logic, the hutches congregate into hamlets. They grow cozier with each cartload of thin food that’s manhandled up the mountain over corduroy roads. Powders mostly. You have to melt clean snow or icicles, stir in some indeterminate colored powder, and cook whatever it is slowly over wood fires. At least it’s warm in the gut. Men feel od
dly safe within the little clusters of pine huts. At night, they smoke makhorka and hemp around the wood stoves and tell stories false and true about hot sex. And far more often, about hot food. Yuki listens as others sing old folk songs from prewar times, often dissenting from the favorites: ‘The Girl I Met in a Tavern’ and ‘My Old Grün Home Town.’ No one sings war songs. All agree with Yuki’s silent opinion that war songs are for civvies who know fuck all about war. So no one has to actually say it.

  There’s little winter fighting. What there is centers on a few stone houses deep down the snow carpeted valley, each deemed a future strongpoint for the spring battle being planned by distant generals on both sides. To men tasked to take or hold them, these abandoned Mount Sheol homes are a focus of envy, not enmity. Each side is careful to do least damage even when they lose and withdraw. Right now RIK holds most of the stone lodges. Yuki knows that can change in a day or next week, but for now he’s billeted in one. He chips at boredom by inspecting intricate ice work that traces thickly down old fashioned window glass in the one frame the thundering artillery has not broken with echoing waves of sound.

  ‘Nature’s art gallery.’ It’s one of those evermore rare moments when a bit of the old Yuki returns, unannounced and unexpected. Pained with joy. The ice melts under his steaming, sculpting breath, trickling down the glass, forming a puddle on the stone floor. Once, he sneaks away from a sharp firefight down by the stone wall, slipping back to watch the ice art melt from the breathed warmth of his body. Killing time while his company killed the enemy, or was killed. It’s boredom and moral indifference that makes him leave. It’s freedom from Rikugun orthodoxy, not cowardice, that leads him back to the window. He thinks the renewed fighting is stupid, ‘just more piss & shit.’ He’s bored by battle, but not by the intricate ice.

  He finds beauty in glittering icicles hanging from trees and sharp outcroppings of bare rock, and in delicate hoarfrost patterns that form anew with each morning’s frozen mist. Once, he finds a perfect green leaf encased in ice so clear it almost isn’t there. It’s a relic from the prior summer, from another geologic and moral age, back when he still noticed the natural world subtly change around him. When he still stooped down to pick up small, beautiful gifts from Nature like a thin, grass blade or an idle gem quartz. When Yuki Hoth was still alive and young.

  ***

  Tick tock. A winter minute arrives. Time doesn’t move indoors in winter. It endures. Fighters hide all the clocks and muffle all alarms inside the pine hutches and down laser cut stone bunkers they carve out of the mountainside. The minutes turn like centuries, hours crawl past as eons. Time will not return until spring.

  Feet are always cold, even indoors. They hurt with each footfall on patrol. It’s worse standing sentry, hopping back-and-forth or stamping up-and-down, afraid because you can’t feel anything at all inside your boots. It hardly helps. Soon you can’t feel your lower legs. Blood vessels narrow as warmth in your extremities is withdrawn by your suspicious HQ brain, which is prepared to sacrifice useful but nonessential soldier-limbs to warm and protect itself to the last.

  Sentries postpone pissing as long as possible, because urine burns as it passes out a shriveled penis reluctantly pulled out of a tight, wool cocoon to do what must be done, sooner or later. All around the sentry posts steaming, yellow-green streams of piss disappear into holes hot bored in deep, crusty snow. When it gets too cold to piss outside, men pay medics to rig catheters and piss bags inside their utes. Back inside at the end of sentry duty, they unload hard packs of yellow ice.

  Frostbite is endemic. The worst cases took men out-of-the-line in Year One or Year Two, but that’s over, not allowed. You have to lose a foot these days to be relieved, and if they think you exposed it on purpose the courts-martial sentence is death by exposure. They march you out, strip you naked, and leave you in the snow. The execution party gets to divvy up the condemned man’s clothes. It’s not official, it’s just the way things are done as Rikugun drifts into barbarism. Lynx and wolverines and wolf packs gather to watch. Sometimes the dead man isn’t all-the-way dead when scavengers move in to collect meat not frozen like a brick.

  Whenever a real froster takes off his boots to dry his feet at a space heater or wood stove, sudden warmth makes festering wounds stink and everyone in the barracks gag and protest the foul cheese smell. The worst frostbite and perniosis cases are made to share confinement huts, to stay together inside freshly cut pine where they tend to their own and each other’s purple-black acral lesions. The death rate in those huts is off the charts. Some men sent to the huts don’t wait for Death to come for them, they hobble back out into the night cold and find her first.

  Deep cold brings boredom that lasts months without relief, dropping many at the door of desire for oblivion. Some find it as Yuki does in poitín or soma, others in constant superficiality. In a chatter of stories and repetitive games. Severe cold lowers energy and activity. It seduces with drowsiness. While some fear to sleep, as too close a simulacrum of death, most men try to escape into it as best they can, off duty or on. They curl in larval lumps inside filthy utes that can’t be washed ‘till spring. They try, but insomnia infests the southern front like a plague.

  It’s not just that daytime ugliness and trauma returns to restless minds each night. It’s the modafinil they all take. They have no choice. It’s laced into the hot carbo mush that’s now the staple of every meal. The drug lets men operate on two hours sleep per night. While longterm use isn’t advised, wakefulness and extra hours of duty are essential in undermanned units suffering through the war’s third winter, heading into Year Four of a long war of attrition. Deployments stretch over years, not the months promised by RIK when the war began, oh so long ago. The psych downside is that everyone has even more up time to think about ugly things that are better kept repressed.

  Yuki is one of the worst insomniacs in Two Company, of course. He just lies awake listening to cockroaches scuttle or drying dirt from mud pack filler falling from the walls of his log cabin hut. Grim memories play and replay through frigid nights that don’t just seem endless but actually are, this far south this time of year. Every night lately, sneaking unbidden into his bunk comes a forbidden thought. It crawls and slithers under his thin blanket, to stroke and arouse him with warmly probing possibility: a raunchy fantasy about desertion from Rikugun. Only when this warm, illicit lover comes to him at night does he grow excited about anything. Then he comes alive to the caresses of Death, his coy mistress and final love.

  She comes again tonight, his first back in log barracks after a week at the stone wall. At first he plays out his usual fantastic scenarios of escape from Amasia and a return to his prewar life, full of homecoming welcomes by delighted parents and friends. Back home, he lies in his old room or walks along a warm sand bar on the thin shores of Oceanus, free of worry and war. He’s surprised, yet not surprised, when his mood turns intensely hostile to home. For the first time, on this night he admits ruefully but openly what he has always known. It isn’t in him to do it.

  ‘I can’t desert, I can’t. I’d never make it to the coast. I can’t get off this awful planet. And even if I could, somehow … I can’t go home again, not ever. How can I? Not like this. Just look at the ruin I am! I can’t ever go back.’

  Not back to foolish, patriotic parents who were so proud of the Imperium he volunteered to Rikugun to please them. Not back to his ridiculous, former civilian life of dull lessons and duller teachers who taught him nothing to help him in the black or in the war, or lying here all alone. Not back to pointless days filled with petty worries about things that didn’t matter then and never will again. He knows that he can’t leave and he knows he won’t live if he stays. He knows that his past is dead. As dead as his future. As dead as Redbeard. The war kills everything. It’s all there is or ever was or can be or will be.

  He decides he will no longer imagine alternate worlds or futures. Death is his only friend. Amasia is his only possible home. He accepts
the war. He sets aside desertion fantasies along with old memories of his onetime homeworld. He knows he’ll never see his family or home again. So he turns angrily against home, hates every thought and memory of anything that’s not the war. He forces his mind back to Amasia, back to this now, lying on a bunk in the frozen black that has cynically and cruelly turned all white. Yet he knows he can’t stay. He’s a nowhere man.

  He waited long enough. When he thinks no one’s looking he puts a half flake of robusto paper under his tongue and drifts away from Amasia the only way he’ll ever leave this fucked up and fucked over world of woes. But he’s not as stealthy as he thinks. A very bored man is watching from the next bunk. He sees Yuki’s simple brown eyes glaze over in his small round face. He says out loud what has become a Two saying, an icon of barracks life on the rim of the black. It’s cruel. It’s uncaring. It’s as sharply incisive and uncompromisingly true as subarctic air.