by Kali Altsoba
He turns a corner of the chalk staircase and is startled to recognize an angry looking, beautiful young woman he befriended when she was his patient on the hospital ship Red Rover. He can’t believe it. ‘Gods, it’s her! I knew Susannah was on Lemuria, but it’s such a big world I didn’t expect to run into her like this, not without warning. What do I say?’ It’s only a small lie, told to himself alone.
When he made the unscheduled diversion he knew this sector of First Trench was held by Argos 7th Division, and that the Enthusiastics is Susannah Page’s outfit. Now that he sees her glowering at some far off foe as she ascends the chalk stairs, he wishes he had not been half so clever. He has no idea what to say or do.
***
Frustrated by failure in her recent reconnaissance-for-dinner that found only a cranky, filthy, cūlus of a head cook, and disgusting gray soup she throws angrily into the nearest disposal unit, Susannah is mad as hell. She’s heading to the surface to kill someone. No, she really is!
‘I’ll go out on my own, do sniper duty in the Yue ming after everyone gets back from the raid.’ She’ll go out in a gilly suit after the sides settle back into routine patrolling, as they always do after one of these clashes. They return to the careful probing and scouting of lines that demarcates most days and nights in Lemuria’s endless trenches, in its pits and dugouts and funk holes and shit and stink. Patrols often move right past each other in Dark Territory, but sometimes they clash. ‘I’ll just wait ‘till one comes by and then … another notch! This one Gross Imperium.’
Or one patrol stumbles into the sights of an enemy FOB and an alerted four deuce sends over plummeting mortar shells that whistle on the way down. Or the FOBBITS in the Forward Operating Base open sheeting maser fire. Or a human sniper or small bot gun takes out the point of a patrol with a sharp crack! in the bleak night, and he tumbles into void and nothingness, with all he is and was, and might one day be, gone in an instant of light and sound. ‘Fuck him.’
“I’ll pick off some Todt newbie, sarg,” she’ll promise, to justify the request to go out all alone, “before he settles in and gets used to his billet. Before he sets up one of their FOPs. I’ll make his mother weep.”
Susannah needs to work off her smoldering anger at the war. In this moment of ascending the first tranche of chalk stairs, that anger is irrationally focused on a walleyed cook who didn’t care that he served ill made soup to fighters eating their last meal. She knows from experience that shooting up some Rikugun who walks across her sights will help. For a day or a week, at least.
She’s not thinking about anything farther ahead when, to her astonishment, as she turns a corner of the staircase to head to the elevator to the surface she sees Lee. He’s walking right at her. Or at least, heading with urgency for the stifling mess tent she just left, one flight down the steps to the right. Already, she detects a slightly dental odor of cloves. It’s his signature scent. Her perfectly repaired heart literally skips a beat. She feels a second brief flutter as her subconscious hits her with pumping adrenalin. She feels her face and neck then her whole torso flush strangely as she gulps a fast breath and struggles to regain the stern composure she enjoyed just a moment before.
Lee looks right at her as she holds her breath in anticipation of what he’ll say and do after all these lonely months apart. She does it consciously this time. Tense, expectant, excited, warming all over. All over. She tosses her dark hair back, off her face. She thrusts her firm breasts out, just a little, to catch his eye. Lee doesn’t hesitate or stop. He keeps walking, right past her. As if she isn’t even there.
It’s clear he recognizes her, but that leads only to a curt nod and simple motion that she should join his naval parade of doctors, nurses and orderlies. The trail is following him like little cockboats in the wake of a man-o’-war. It’s not a personal or friendly gesture. Nor an unfriendly one. It’s no more or less than the usual and oh-so-official gesture a senior officer makes to a simple private whose utility he’s commandeering. The gesture of a superior in the military hierarchy, not of a friend or a confidant or a potential lover. Susannah is surprised and deeply hurt by it.
Without a word of greeting or waiting for Susannah to comply, Lee continues down the grubby, scuffed up chalk stairs, striding purposefully right past her. He disappears down the way she just came up, now indisputably heading for Division Mess Tent #3, where a filthy and walleyed cook is about to lose his frigate to a vastly superior force. She calms herself, taking several deep and steady breaths. Then she laughs out loud. She flashes an unconscious smile as she twirls into the wake position, taking up rearguard to Lee’s little fleet review.
She’s almost happy in the moment. She bobs down the chalk stairs behind the last, crisply dressed orderly in Lee’s impromptu line of battle. For the thought has just hit her that the surly cook, who thinks himself master and commander of his own closed off ship at sea, is about to lose his little kitchen vessel to a superior ship. She pictures the fat cook as a frigate floating on the fringes of a great line of battle. Not a ship-of-the-line. The cook is too weak to hold so honored or vital a place. But he’s sailing too close to the enemy, whose admiral will dispatch him in a single roar of broadside guns. She’s eager to witness his imminent destruction, to watch “Admiral Lord Jin” wreck a trapped and desperate enemy. She wants to see the cook’s little kitchen warship burn and sink, and watch him gasp and drown. War doesn’t make survivors more tender. Susannah is no longer the happy, loving, unwounded girl she once was. That girl she left behind on Glarus. Now she too is a stone killer, bearing hard grudges. It never occurs to her that she’s living her life almost in imitation of the sniper bot that brought her low.
***
High above the chalk cube of Mess Tent #3, a brilliant desert dawn erupts over a dismal plain. Ultrasteel skeletons and carbyne cadavers from months of fighting lie bare, silent under ugly streaks of rising, orange-yellow luminescence. Broken armtraks are tangled up with smashed blockhouses, bits of reeved trench plate, and wrecked war bots. Closer to the black walls are carcasses of Earthworms, big diggers used by engineers to deepen trenches. Hard old bones greet the first rays of another dawn at war, rearing over an uncovered dinosaur graveyard.
Among the wrecks lie over 220 fresh, blue clad corpses. Others lie in green utes, with blotchy red patches and missing limbs or heads. Some bodies are alive, crawling or slowly dying, men and women no friend can reach through the intense infantry fire and random shelling. For a vicious nightfight continues into a new day, as Gross Imperium and the Enthusiastics contest for a useless bit of the Yue ming whose saving or fall will make not a whit of difference to the war.
Out here in Dark Territory, as far as unaided eyes can see, there are burned shards of metal and strewn char that once were parts of death machines. Torn and twisted biowire and fiber optics from exploded armtraks and bots sputter still, while e-sensors flash wild warnings to no one listening anymore. A tall, detached periscope still swivels and peers on its own, confused by the odd angle at which it extends skyward and why its cold AI master, or a warm hand, won’t answer its baleful queries. Layered sheets of trench armor knocked out of place by days of heavy shelling protect nothing but dead men and sterile sand. Smoking craters where some distant gun just landed a white or blue plasma ball overlap with older wounds to the landscape’s pocked and pitted face. Fresh holes overlie older pits from two months or six months or a year before. The exposed and churned, chalk and sand topography looks like a primordial lunar surface pounded by meteors.
A few bot guns still in place are alive to movement, searching the rubbly plain for tardy patrols and hurt survivors from the latest night raid. Live targets they might locate and kill, even as wounded lie moaning in the open and stragglers try to hide among the battle ruins. A motion siren abruptly wails and a not-so-bright autobot fires a green laser at the indicated spot. Sound and gun are both set off by a small, purple-and-tan gecko close chased by a tawny desert fox.
The fox abruptly
stops its violently interrupted hunt and darts the other way, in panicked flight from exploding noise and light. The gecko ducks under a nearby carbyne sheet and bobs three times, making boastful, upside down push-ups in temporary safety. Then it drops, landing on its feet to start a little hunt of its own, scampering and scrubbing for black beetles that burrow into the cool, shaded sand. Streaks of red and green lasers whip the ground around the still dashing fox, tattooing two emptied blockhouses. The gecko finds a crunchy beetle. It oozes in its jaws, six black legs kicking frantically in air as it gives up its ghost to the Hard Shelled God of Coleopterans. Thus a new day begins in central Lemuria.
Deluge
It’s an odd Universe where two people who long for many months to see each other, talk to and touch each other, never really expecting to be able to do it, are suddenly given the chance by random fate, or the gods, or the iron dice of war, or chaos theory, or whatever. Then they say and do exactly nothing, deep inside an emotional paralysis so tight it’s as if they were both jabbed with suspend.
Lee knows that the Enthusiastics are on Lemuria and Susannah is somewhere in this sector, but he really didn’t expect to run into her on a staircase 500 meters below ground. He nearly freezes, then walks past her in silence. With a flicker of unspoken order to join the queue. It’s everything he never wanted from their reunion, which he has daydreamed and night fantasied about for half a year.
With a quick laugh and toss of her brunette mane, Susannah accepts the oddity of being commandeered by Lee just above and outside Division Mess Tent #3. It’s on a par with the sheer randomness of everything in her life since getting shot in the heart by a bot. So she turns around from her intended path to use the company sniper rifle to kill a Todt, to instead follow ‘Admiral Lord Jin.’ That’s what she mockingly calls him, at the head of his convoy. ‘He deserves it, stuffy old crow!’
She knows Lee is no coward and would never abandon anyone, like Lord Jim abandoned the passengers of the Patna. She just likes to tease him with a punning name from an old, salt sea story he read to her onboard Red Rover, as she lay in a recovery bed lost in past centuries and his brown, almond eyes. In other old books, she learned about battle lines and broadsides and ships of fighting sail. With a start, she realizes that she’s been drowning in Lee’s old worlds for months.
The other draftees in the medical flotilla are different. Some are bewildered but obedient to the assertive admiral. A few are grumbling quietly, which is every sailor’s right. The stretcher bearers are all morose. Silent and uncommunicative. Some look utterly vacant. The bearers are sweating already, though still outside the mess tent. Shoulders are stained damp, encumbered by heavy padding to stop wide straps cutting into them. They were supposed to go off shift after 48 hours trench duty when Lee shanghaied them. They know from incoming reports of fighting overhead that they’ll never catch a break today. Not with the downhill trickle of wounded starting that will soon become a racing torrent of pain and woe.
They had just finished a hard tour in DT, humping wounded back, when Lee waylaid them in the chalk. They carried a dozen or more insensates over bombed out rubble, weaving through laser wire nets and along the rim of collapsing trench walls, past craters filled with clumps of hiding, frightened youths. All that sweat dripping way, they were targeted by red snipers and barking spandaus that forced them low with chasing streams of plasma balls. It was a normal day for them.
Called out to pick up an ambushed patrol from the night before, they stepped gingerly around unrecognizable corpses and on bits of broken, dead soldiers. As they always did without meaning to. It was like stepping on fallen leaves out there, in the denuded forest of the dead and dying called the Yue ming, the obscure and obscene land between the lines. They had mortal as well as morbid promises to keep, and klics and klics to go before they, too, might catch a sleep. Then they came on something special, even in their experience. A platoon of combat virgins, kid replacements from an ill trained Amasian division, holding the line beside the veteran Enthusiastics. They were all dead, killed while stupidly standing still, stiff and upright in parade ground formation. It was their very first hour behind the wall and they thought that’s what soldiers did, stand in rows looking soldierly.
Fifteen dead boys were toppled over like a child’s row of dominoes, lying at the sandy bottom of a runner’s trench where they were hit and died as one. Their fresh, startled faces were just too much for one of the older bearers. He’d been on the line for four months with no R&R. Without saying a word, he pulled out his kinetic pistol and blew his brains all over the parapet. The rest kept moving. They had to. They bore up groaning or howling or oddly silent loads of bone and flesh. They stayed real low, stooping under carbyne rooves of broken supply and coms trenches. Sometimes they took secondary lances that spurred from the main line at 90˚ angles every quarter klic or so, to-and-from fighting rows and black walls with sniper niches and firing steps and rapidos built right in. At last, they dropped lumpy, red charges at a triage station and slumped against a smooth, cool, natural palm grown wall. They fell asleep instantly. Then Lee Jin came around the corner.
“You, stretcher bearers.”
“Sir, yes sir?”
“On your feet. Follow me. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going, sir?”
The little man wears a Medical Major General’s uniform, torn up quite a bit, it’s true, but still recognizable to any private in the Medical Service. So they stand up, pick up their stained, folded litters and follow in exhausted resignation. Follow him down perfectly even, cut chalk stairs to a painfully pressurized cavern demarcated Division Mess Tent #3. Then they wait at the entrance, for orders.
“They kept tripping up, out there,” their shift captain apologizes to Lee, as he drops anchor in the door jam of the kitchen and mess tent. He wants to survey its enclosed bay, looking for reefs maybe, before sallying with his shanghaied flotilla of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and stretcher bearers. The captain explains why this particular recovery unit is so entirely listless, when there’s a fight going on above.
He’s real tired and Lee is too dirty and his uniform too torn up from his tumble in the desert to impress as the head of the entire Alliance Medical Corps. He hasn’t noticed that on Lee’s stiff collar there’s a Medical General’s caduceus, its silver inlay framing a half-chevron embroidered with dark blue silk. Lee admires him for not noticing high rank, for caring far more about his bearers than his superiors.
“They troopered on, sir. All the way here, or I mean up top.”
“Up top where?”
“They left their last litter load up at First Triage Station, sir. That’s about ten stories down, into the chalk. You must have passed it on your way here.”
“Yes, I did. It was already getting busy. That’s why I hurried down here. But leave that aside. Why are these men so tired if the fighting is just starting?”
“Begging your pardon sir, but it never really stops. It just sort of … umm, well it kinda has a rhythm to it sir. Rises and falls. You know, like the Okeanos tides.”
“So, they were were out there all day, working?”
“Yes sir. And I’m sorry, sir, but back in DT, that’s Dark Territory sir, back in the last place my people worked the black, well sir, they kinda wore out sir. It got hard to walk. You see, their feet and legs kept squishing into old, soft corpses.”
“What?”
“I apologize for it, sir. Can’t be helped, sometimes,” he says it pointing down at the bearers’ boots. Lee is horrified to see a pulpy mess on the floor all around and under where the tired bearers stand, leaning on their rolled up litters. All their boots are coated in frothy pinkness.
“I see, captain.” Lee says softly, laying his hand on the officer’s shoulder to steady and comfort him, as if he’s pater familias. Or maybe like Clovis, laying on hands and his king’s healing touch? “Well done.” He walks over and clearly lays on hands, thanking each man and woman in the litter unit in turn, touching e
ach one in turn, stopping to softly stroke the worst off on her raw neck or a hurt face.
Susannah watches Lee look down carefully at the stretcher bearers’ hands as he shakes them, one by one by one. Sees tears well in his eyes as he grasps rough and calloused paws and realizes why they’re torn. She’s surprised by his surprise.
Everyone who spends any time here at the black can spot a stretcher bearer by his rough hands. Carbon fiber litter handles quickly deteriorate in combat. They get shot up and split into tiny, jagged spears, with bits broken off. They impale palms and fingers with needle sharp micro slivers, and splinters that are the devil to avoid and hard to remove. Flesh tears, bleeds and infects. Worse, some of the latest litters are made on Lemuria out of soft northern pine, made from godsdamn wood. They shatter into toothpicks when hit, and have to be held together with tape and wire. That’s how bad the supply situation is getting on the Alliance side.
