by Kali Altsoba
It’s a routine amputation. The toes are ash gray, stuck to pestilential combat socks. It’s Lemuria foot, a severe fungal infection that takes too many otherwise ablebodied fighters out of the line. Junior officers are told to make sure all fighters change into dry socks as least twice a day, and troopers are under strict orders to dry their feet nightly and use lots of fungicide powders. Still, to get off combat duty some incubate the fungus. It’s a less obvious form of self-wounding.
‘Is that what happened here?’ Lee asks himself. ‘Why does a fighter in a south central desert have Lemuria foot? The trenches down here are parched and hot, not sodden or frozen.’ Lee wants hard answers. “Orderly. Explain this man’s condition.”
“He’s from way up north, sir. A transfer from the Dauran Gate. He was killing popovs up there a week ago, or so he said.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Pretty sure, yes sir. Look at his utes and battle kit. They're new and bright blue. Not shitty desert color. Not like us faded-and-forgotten bastards in the 7th.”
“That explains the trench foot and new utes. But what’s with the flower?” The patient is wearing a fresh white rose, pinned to the right breast of his blues.
“He’s with the 2054th Infantry. They’re from Helena, sir.”
“Yes, so?”
“You know what Helenes are like, sir, with their endless poetry about the land. Ever heard the PM go on about his homeworld? I like him, but sometimes…”
Actually, Lee has heard Georges Briand wax on about the beauty of Helena. In person, as a matter of fact. Over a whole decanter of Baku scotch, inside great clouds of Kars blue tobacco.
“Anyway, they call themselves the Rosenkavaliers. It means Rose Division, sir. They all wear ‘em, those white roses. Do anything to get ‘em, and always fresh. Superstitious, I s’ppose.”
“It’s more likely an old world military tradition, not a superstition.”
“Maybe. They sure are good fighters, sir. Which nobody would’ve predicted, not about Helenes, that is, not before the war. I always heard they were too soft and too intellectual to join the military. It’s why so few go career. Oh, sorry sir.”
“Carry on, corporal. I like your style. Don’t change it.”
“Thank you, sir. Off the record? I hear their logistics guys will do anything to get fresh roses before a fight. They smuggled ‘em from offworld at first. Crates of perfumed white roses hidden in with pink crystal ammo and spare hand maser parts! Can you imagine that, sir?”
He can. Also how General Lian Sòng’s face must have looked when she found out that some of her precious cargo space was used to bring flowers to Amasia. If only on privateers, and paid for directly by her soldiers. Still…
“Now that Rose has bin’ here awhile, they got a farmer’s co-op growin’ their flowers along the Panthalassa coast, just for their guys sir. They all volunteer the credits, and since it keeps the local economy goin’ in that area, I hear New Beijing winks at the deal. You gotta admit sir, that’s pretty sweet.”
Lee agrees such dedication to tradition is impressive, and that growing flowers in the middle of a war has a certain appeal, but he doesn’t like the implications of having a Rosenkavalier with a fresh rose on his operating table. It means that Rose Division is getting ready for action in a hitherto quiet sector.
His keen instinct for strategy kicks in. ‘Moving a northern outfit into the line down here means MI knows RIK is about to make a big push in this area. Or we are. Either way, it’s going to get busy in my surgeries.’
Lee finishes cutting, leaving it to a male nurse to suture severed veins and glue a skin flap over the stump. Before leaving, he uses his medical override authority to order the erstwhile Division Mess Tent #3 converted to a permanent Medical Corps Field Surgery. The new med battlestation will serve the Enthusiastics and three supporting, Second Trench artillery batteries.
“And for the sake of whatever mechanical and stress tested gods engineers worship, and for our surgeons’ and patients’ sakes, tell the Corps of Engineers to rip out this ridiculous tent!”
“Yes general.”
“It’s stifling in here. Let the chalk breathe! Even I know that! Also tell them to install surgical filters and disposals. Seal the floor. We don’t want what we do here to get into system organics and recycling. Gods forbid! And get some good air in here, surface air, pumped in at the right pressure. I have the worst headache!”
It hardly seems possible, but the displaced cook looks more surly than when Susannah first saw him six hours ago. His frigate is on the bottom. He’s rowing a ship’s boat, no more. The decision to commandeer his tent sends him scrambling to find another cavern to commission. Surgeries take priority, sure, he gets it. “But fighters gotta eat, too.” He’s not wrong. He has a real job to do. Besides, it’s not his fault he’s a cook. He used to work in a mockmeat growing factory before the war, before he got shanghaied. That’s why the Army thought he would know all about food. And now the next meal shift is queuing and complaining that they just got back from a raid and there’s no hot food waiting.
Lee calls New Beijing to place a high priority order for a maglev delivery of three months supply of suspend, smart field dressings and sterile powders, 1,000 med cots, medical incinerators, sterilizers, and dozens of essential items needed by the Combat Support Hospital he just established in the chalk cube, and five surrounding caverns that will serve as its triage and recovery rooms. Troops will call the new underground CSH the “Kitchen.” As in “get this poor boy down to the Kitchen, before he bleeds out.” Or “you’ll be OK son, you’re in the Kitchen.”
He transfers Sid Kowalski into the Orderly Service, pending fulltime training. He has no more open spots after Sid signs the papers, beaming at the walleyed cook as he does so. Sid grew up on a dairy farm. He hated being a cook’s helper.
Lee Jin is a good man and an excellent surgeon. He’s an even better administrator. The Alliance needs more men like him. A lot more. Because he’s right, as usual: Rikugun is going to make a big push in the south latitudes. The Enthusiastics and Gross Imperium are going to go at it hard.
“What’s that?”
“Oh fuck!”
“DELUGE!”
Wicked
Enthusiastics have moved farther south, past the edge of The Sandbox desert band. They’re holding the line along Tornado Ally, refitting in what’s supposed to be a quiet sector after a terrible fight with the Todts that closed out the second year of war on Amasia. Susannah and her division mates took on Gross Imperium over two months of all out fighting, back-and-forth over the dunes. Enthusiastics blunted that part of the largest offensive by Rikugun since the Year One invasion.
The fools! They learned nothing from the failures of the first year of fighting. They attacked right into the teeth of Lian Sòng’s main trenches. The fight in The Sandbox thus brought defeat of Gross Imperium for the first time in its centuries long and storied history. They led the attack! A cut-and-thrust that reached over the black, prematurely striving to reach the Panthalassa coast and win the war.
It was long.
It was brutal.
It was bloody.
It decided nothing.
Except both divisions were fought out and moved to quieter sectors to recover, though not across from each other any more. Argos 7th Assault was even shifted to Third Trench for awhile, away from any combat at all, though still harassed from time-to-time by missiles and long range artillery. Then back to the line.
“It’s a quiet sector. Your troops can rest up. They deserve it and they need it.” That’s what General Lian Sòng told Nadine Yupanqui in New Beijing after the Shaka Offensive was repelled, when Enthusiastics suffered over 40% casualties.
It wasn’t quiet at first. Rikugun tried a pretty big attack at six weeks in. Two full divisions, a corps level assault. It cost a lot more Enthusiastics their lives. It cost yet more their limbs or their sanity. It forced courage and endurance out of them yet again. And
like all other offensives on Lemuria, it petered into futility.
Then things calmed down for a long while. The 7th even stands down from combat alert and starts to truly “rest and refit,” always expecting to fight again in weeks. Instead, the whole war goes quiet, bringing a lull in fighting that lasts for over a year as everyone pauses to recover from the initial bloodbath on Lemuria. Except for chronic raiding leading to slow attrition, the war seems stalled. It’s not. It just moves elsewhere, fought by navies over oort supplies and asteroid belts, ice moons, and gas giant bohr zones, and on other worlds. Just ask the tired crews of White Sails if the war stopped for a year. Or go ask Wysocki’s Wreckers, who travel offworld as a marine force on mission after mission, killing and dying.
The enemy most hated by Enthusiastics also moved to another sector, farther north. But an odd thing happened before that shift. In the big fight in The Sandbox, Enthusiastics faced and killed women on the other side for the first time. Yeah, it seems Rikugun is wearing down, getting low on men maybe? In any case, they’re attaching gender segregated, all male officer, Women's Combat Brigades to male divisions. MI has to admit, the new all women units are pretty well trained. Some even seem to fight better than the traditional all male divisions, the regular ones.
“Got something to prove to their misogynist overloads,” is all that General Leclerc says about it on his latest visit to Amasia.
“Seems so,” General Nadine Yupanqui laconically agrees.
Lian Sòng even expresses a little sympathy for Grün women overall, before assuring her friend that nothing will stand in the way of her armies killing as many of them as possible. “After all, Gaspard, we’ve been killing Dauran women by the bushel for many months, in the far north.”
***
It gets duller for Susannah with Gross Imperium moved away. Sure, she hates the locusts across the black. But mostly, she stands picket day-after-day or goes on uneventful night patrols. It’s not what she wants. But there’s nothing she can do about it. Susannah and the Enthusiastics settle into routine defense of a precise band of Dark Territory, in so called Tornado Ally. They hunker under gentle grass dunes to wait out seasonal tornados that arrive from the austral mountains with the last foehn winds. They even get leave, enough days to leave the line and head to true hinter zone R&R camps. And once, all the way to New Beijing.
‘Maybe it’s for the best that Lee and I are so far apart,’ she thinks sometimes, when really lonely. ‘He’s so far above me in rank and social station it can’t work.’ In her repaired heart, she wants it to. She managed to bump into him three times in the month after they met outside his ersatz battle surgery. Or maybe he bumped into her? She’s still not exactly sure how they met up again and again. Only that she felt enticed and excited at the mystery of him, and puzzled why such a man of accomplishment would be so flustered in her presence, and she in his. Just like they were in Red Rover’s rehab room and halls. She liked his little tricks and shy, boyish stunts and games. She liked walking the hall, not knowing if he’d show up around the next corner she turned. It made corners interesting.
Now they don’t need tricks. Now they have coffee whenever he breaks away from heavy admin duties and she’s also off trench watch. She always leads him down to a cramped kitchen run by a particularly surly cook. She likes to provoke the walleyed cook by dangling Lee in front of him, the man who kicked him out of his old greasy haunt. She’s much nicer to his new skinny helper, who always brings them coffee on a tray. But she doesn’t know or ask his name. There’s a cruel and indifferent streak in her that Lee doesn’t like. She doesn’t like it either. She tries to change, to reform, to grow. Then she decides it’s just who she is.
It helps that Lemuria goes relatively quiet as the armies rebuild and recover, and rearm and reconsider. It gives them time, which they always spend together. They talk about anything and everything or sit across from each other in long and comfortable silences. The kind good friends share. Lee confides in her, far beyond her education or her security clearance. It’s heady stuff, especially when he comes back from some important meeting in New Beijing or far, far offworld.
He sends her odd vidtexts from a temporary hinter zone HQ, where he’s holed up. He wants her to agree that it explains the whole war. “It’s all true, millennia later! Just look what you and the Enthusiastics, Generals Lian Sòng and Nadine Yupanqui, are doing in south Lemuria! This could be an ancient Sol system war, or even Old Earth, for all the difference that time has made to the essentials!”
Susannah asks where the words came from and what they mean. He vids back: “They're observations on the nature of war by a host of ancient generals, including the Jade Eye himself! We must learn what our enemy said in the past if we are to understand this new war and how he thinks. Only then can we can defeat him!”
“Oh, OK. I’ll look them over, then we’ll talk.” She hits send, and her gentle response heads into the mystery of the milneb and wends its way toward Lee.
Susannah usually defers to Lee on big ideas. Not this time. She already knows how the enemy thinks. He thinks exactly the same as her. He wants to find her, and kill her. She wants to do the same to him. She doesn’t see any connection to niagara words from centuries, even millennia past. To her, all the old generals and kings and emperors in the vids talk vague nonsense. But she says nothing like that to Lee. She likes these moments of boyish enthusiasm in him. So she doesn’t tell him that all his fancy theories about war don’t matter even a little bit.
If she did say anything, it would be this: “All we do is patrol and raid and stop his raids. The war goes on, and on. The war you see more than me, the big war all across the Orion spur, is bigger but exactly the same. I don’t know what it means for history or strategy or how or when it will end, or who will win. But I get the hate. I understand hate. War is hate. Everything else you say means nothing.”
***
Susannah is feeling better these days. Physically, she can’t be fitter. Mentally, she gets by. She vids back-and-forth with Lee daily, after he pulls rank to give her milneb access like no other soldier at her level, bending then breaking all the rules to make possible their direct private coms. He’s exploiting medical prerogatives to the hilt. It’s endearing. Especially as he does it long before they become lovers.
During one of her ‘till then chaste visits to his quarters, he asks clumsily “do you want to take our relationship to the next level?” She laughs, mortifying him for saying it, before tossing her hair back and leaning in to kiss him deep and long on the mouth. Then she pulls him out of his stiff, starched uniform and he pulls off all her clothes. They fold into each other, right there and then.
It’s six months after they meet in the converted surgery. It takes him that long to get there, to even imagine that she might want to lie with him. Susannah is a healthy twenty-five year old woman who enjoys sex. He knows that now. But in fairness, she’s surprised about it herself. Lying naked after a more than usually sweaty bout of lovemaking, she tells him teasingly that even after they shower together: “You smell a little like cloves. I always thought it was something you had the laundry put in your uniform, for vanity’s sake. But it’s really just you!”
He looks deeply embarrassed, almost hurt. “Sorry,” he blushes at her.
“Nonsense, you smell lovely. I like cloves, especially in bed. Whenever I smell cloves in future, wherever you are, it will make me wet for you.”
“Well then, breathe deeply!” He reaches down between her spreading legs to start a new massage. He probes her deep wetness while brushing her softly with his fingertips, massaging her the way a great musician makes love to his viola. She releases a low moan and tenses under his deft strokes and gently probing fingers. ‘Oooh … mmmm … Gods! What is it about a surgeon’s hands?’
If he smells like cloves to her when naked, she is like sunrise on Argos. She’s salty to his touch and taste and tongue. Ready to take into herself the whole dawn, like the bright blue flowers in her mother
’s garden that turn toward the rising sun with eagerly opening petals. Wet with warm sweat and the dew of a whole world’s morning orgasm. Languid with humidity, all the day that follows.
Today she longs to see Lee face-to-face, body against body. To hold his slight but athletic form on top of her, feel him moving gently inside her. Not as a spectral floating holo or an oddly disembodied voice, all that’s allowed when he’s in some far off place on a naval mission so Ops Secret even his ultimate medical rank can’t cut through MI’s blocking programs. She wants to be with him here, now. Rolling in flesh-and-blood coitus. With moaning and vaginal wetness, semen and spasms of pleasure. Then to sleep…
The only problem is that the sex is too infrequent, mainly during short leaves whenever they can match up schedules. Still, it’s intense and satisfying when they find the time to be with each other. Afterwards, they spoon and talk for hours. She almost feels whole when she’s with him, except that she knows when she’s alone again her thoughts will return to Death.
