Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  “It’s my HUD,” he explains plaintively, yet again. “It just won’t work right.” They look down, refusing to meet his gaze or answer. They’ve heard excuses too often. “I cleaned it,” he adds hopefully. No one wants to hear about it.

  One night he takes a secret sip of soma juice, raising a floating and sparking wall of psychedelics between his consciousness and the Universe, between him and his squad, between him and the whole sorry war. It doesn’t help. It just makes the ghosts he shoots at turn purple-green with wavy, gorgon hair. They know he’s going to get himself killed one day. Probably some of them, too. Like, real soon. He isn’t a good soldier. It’s the one thing everybody agrees on, including Jedidiah.

  Only one girl in his squad even talks to him, beyond what little talk combat cooperation demands of her when they share a slit on the line. The others all think and say he’s “damn bad luck.” They avoid him like a black cat shadow or sidewalk crack or weeping bulkhead. “Jinxed, he is. Keep clear o’ that one,” an uneducated, superstitious Argos private with ruby bright eyes tells the ‘fresh meat’ arriving as replacements for lost or sent-home-wounded Enthusiastics. “He’ll git ya killed bafor’ duh sarjant teaches yu how to wipe yore asses widout gittin ‘em shot off.”

  When Jedidiah’s squad goes on watch they secretly draw straws behind his back to decide who will stand picket in the same two fighter slit trench. Even Ava Mack, the only one who talks to him, pulls a straw. She’s pissed that her carefully chosen carbon fiber is the short one. The others slink away in pairs, a tad guiltily, but far more glad of their good fortune than upset for her bad.

  Come nightfall, Jedidiah stands picket alongside his reluctant and only friend. They're in a standard slit, one of a dozen lookout and firing stations laid out as a tripwire 200 meters parallel to First Trench, just over the edge of Dark Territory. In this quiet sector, ‘First Trench’ means a clutch of dirt covered dugouts linked by shallow saps, not a continuous line of deep field works. At the center of the position, 60 black mounds cluster in a dugout concentration called Gastown. No, not the big trench city that sprawls behind the black farther north. This is more of a trench village. It’s not even on the sheets yet, not the official name, anyway. It’s just called Sector 135752. The name is local, with an especially malicious origin.

  Ava laughs when Jedidiah asks how the humpy trench hamlet got named. She has hazel eyes and matching hair that she wears longer than most women who serve behind the black. She pushes an annoying loose strand under her unstrapped helmet before she answers. She has a light Argos accent, not too educated. And a sh-sh-shall we s-s-say, ve-ve-very s-s-slight st-st-stutter.

  “It cuh-cuh-cums fru-frum the last dee-vi-shon to hold it b-b-before we te-te-took over.”

  “But why Gastown?”

  “A new co-co-company got wi-wi-wiped-out in a bl-bl-blister ge-ge-gas attack, nearly ev’ry one o’ ‘em. But we te-te-took it back frum the da-da-damn lo-lo-custs when we cum up here.” She looks real proud. Her too long hair is again leaking out from under her headgear, framing her smallish, girlish face. Again she pushes away the disobedient strand.

  Jedidiah winces as his only friend in a hundred parsecs finishes the staccato explanation. Not because of her stutter. He just doesn’t understand trench humor. It’s another thing that separates him from others in the squad. Now that he knows the poisonous way this place got its nickname, he likes it even less than before.

  He also doesn’t like that Ava loads her trench rifle with tapas rounds, vicious inside-to-out, antipersonnel incendiaries. If she’s caught, the enemy will turn her maser around and incinerate them both from the inside out. That’s the unwritten soldier’s code out here, same for both sides: ‘Use it on us, and we’ll use it on you.’ Same goes for her long and serrated combat knife. Its jags are used to snag an enemy’s guts as it’s snicked in and pulled out.

  ‘They’ll use that on us both, too.’ He says: “You’re not supposed to load tapas or jag your knife like that. You could get us into trouble.” The irony of the warning is lost on him, he’s so worried about being burned or jagged later tonight.

  Stray thoughts stalk his mind until he falls asleep, while on watch of course. It always happens, no matter how hard he tries to stay awake. He ties a short rope to his leg to jerk it at intervals, but the trick doesn’t work. He trips over it when he stands up to report, when his corporal visits to find out why he isn’t checking in silently every 15 minutes over his HUD.

  “It’s not working,” he says, tapping it sheepishly. “Damn!” he exclaims after the corporal leaves, hissing curses over his shoulder. “Ava, my HUD’s out again.”

  It isn’t. He just forgot to load tonight’s company authentication code, so no HUD for klics around will ID his active IFF signal, because he’s not broadcasting one. Nor will he receive any coms or tac feedback. It’s a moronic error. She wants to scream at him but says only: “Don’t worry, wuh-wuh-we got mine.”

  He bangs his left hand hard on his helmet. Nothing. He squints into the dark, straining to see. Nothing. Ten minutes later Jedidiah falls asleep, leaning against the damp, dirty slit wall. When he awakens he’s alone. Ava is nowhere to be seen or heard. He grows evermore tense and nervous. More than usual. Real jumpy. His index finger hovers at his maser’s thin trigger. He’s sure something’s moving out there, past where he can see. He’s scared to shoot at a false target and get in trouble again, but scared not to shoot in case an enemy is creeping closer.

  Suddenly, he senses and hears movement. He doesn’t need an HUD to tell him he’s in real danger and bad trouble. He whirls and fires twice, wildly and without aiming. Slits twenty paces either way key-off-his-mark and blind shoot wildly into the black. In seconds the whole platoon is firing, then the whole company. Red and green steams of narrow light crisscross and rip apart the darkness.

  “Damn it man, stop ssssh-sshooting! It’s me!” Ava hops inside the shallow slice of cut ground they’re supposed to guard. Oddly, her stutter gets a little better whenever she’s in danger. Fear has the same effect on her palate as hooch. A long curl of forelock hangs over her frightened right eye. She isn’t wearing her helmet.

  “Where were you?” Jedidiah shouts. Scared witless, he breaks silent protocol, which hardly matters since he lit up the night with his wild shooting. He’s shaking head to toe, upset that he nearly shot his one friend in the squad with a shaky hand on a stubby maser. Just because he was spooked about his broken HUD. “I could have killed you!”

  “Shut up, will ya! I ha-ha-had to take a sssh-ssshit, is all.” Ava hisses as she slides into the long end of the slit and pulls her left-behind-blue-headgear on. Jedidiah notices a small water can in his friend’s hand, used to wash herself. “Yu-yu-you ju-ju-just mm-mm-mmissed me with that ss-ss-ssecond ss-ss-sshot.”

  He gapes at her, mute and incredulous. Left speechless by her blasé reaction to near death, by her profound ordinariness when facing accidental extinction. He can’t imagine risking getting shot just to take a crap. ‘She left the slit without her helmet, and with tapas rounds and a jag knife!’

  “Why didn’t you take your helmet with you?” he demands from stress and panic at what he nearly did to her. He’s still far too loud. “I could have killed you!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” A voice hisses from the next slit, somewhere on the right.

  “I fo-fo-forgot it, da-da-dat’s all. Shite and onions!” Her stutter skips right over her cussing, which lets Ava spew out quick foul mouthedness with the very best male cussers in the company. She’s kinda famous for it.

  Jedidiah’s shooting, and worse, his shouting, is a huge mistake. About 2,800 meters out in Dark Territory an alert sniper hears him. Klava Nast is 19-years old and the best pure shot in a brand new all female sniper unit RIK just introduced to Sector 135752. She’s sitting inside a snug ball of skill, wearing a desert ghillie suit, hidden in a camoed shooting perch atop an abandoned pillbox. Even off duty she smells a bit like urine. Unlike with Jedidiah, in her case
it’s an occupational signature. All snipers smell a little like the piss bags they wear.

  Klava has ghoul gray eyes. They’re natural, yet hardly seem to blink, so they seem artificial. It’s as if she programmed her real eyes the way snipers program artificial corneal implants. She checks a passive huff duff scan of the section of line her directional light-and-sound sensors recorded when Jedidiah shouted. Her spotting scope confirms what she suspects. An enemy picket, and surely many more than one, is hiding whence the flashes and then yelling sounds came to her. It’s a manageable slant and well within range. She knows, because she killed three signalers near Gastown a week ago. Though not from this perch. She shot them one by one. The first man sneaked out to repair a motion detector. The other two, loyally but foolishly, went looking for their friend when he failed to report back.

  Three bodies lie where her long gun laid them out. Recovery teams are too scared of her, of skill so great they call her the “Specter.” They won’t venture far out to search, not more that a few hundred meters. Not until they know one of their snipers or mortars has taken her out. She’s a true pro, so she never uses the same blind twice. Conceal, target, shoot, displace. Do it again. Only if a blind is truly superior does she stay motionless as a web spider, letting prey come to her over days and nights of patient waiting. This is one of those special sites.

  Yesterday, she got one from exactly where she sits now. It’s a spot so good she has been silently waiting here ever since. She heard soft, female singing from a sound leaky FOP. Its baffles were malfunctioning unknown to its hopefully lyrical occupant. She shot that fool Blue right through her throat, in mid high note. She’s proud of that. Thinks it’s kinda funny. She hasn’t moved since, hoping the singer has loyal friends like the fixer did, who’ll come out looking.

  When she hears Jedidiah’s wild shouting she knows that she’s onto something bigger, more rich in targets. ‘Squids must have a string of close OPs in front of First Trench.’ She silently asks her HUD to project a map of likely spots where the enemy dug in, based on terrain probabilities and known Alliance tactics. It fixes the position easily, triangulating on a sound signature recorded in its signals bank a minute ago and confirming a 97% probability it’s the Blue picket location.

  ***

  The problem coursing through Jedidiah’s company is that everyone gorged on fat bilberries that morning, on the way back to the frontline after a week of short relief in a R&R camp. They were surprised by the bilberries, stumbling into a hidden field of tiny flowers and fruits left untouched for two years or more, only because they were abandoned by the local jam farmer and grew unmolested by picker bots, well off road in a real quiet sector.

  They found them in a corner tuck of a quietly flowing river, an hour’s march from the frontline but somehow forgotten or overlooked by everyone. The smallish field is perfectly sited to be missed, over and over. It’s in a tree lined angle between two supply roads where military traffic isn’t allowed to stop and no slow footed civvies live or are allowed at all.

  They ate their way across the field and back again, moving like a conga line of grain harvesters. They gorged on small, greenish-blue bilberries until their bellies could hold no more fruit. It was the best day of the war for many, including Jedidiah. Or it was until three hours ago, when everybody started to think about how good it would feel to empty an overfull gut of a big load of explosively under ripe berries. From about one hour ago, that’s all they can think about.

  The first man in the company to give in to irresistible cramps is startled by a strong stream of green-tinged, near liquid feces he produces. He tells his mates about the odd color, slyly yet almost proudly. They laugh and make obvious, vulgar jokes about how the whole company will soon be shitting out Rikugun. They say it through grimaces and growling discomfort, all at the same time.

  Most clear their bowels before heading out to the guard slits for a night’s duty. Hours later, those clear of their load of fruit agree that loose bowels were a small price to pay for such an excellent feast. They’re in a good mood about it, despite the gassy grunts and a chorus of straining moans they made in the ready bunker latrine before they deployed to their two fighter slits. Sounds that continue in this slit or that one, long after that the company is back and up-on-the-line.

  Ava isn’t the only one who left it too late, who disobeys orders and frontline trench discipline to sneak out of a two man slit on an urgent call of nature. Two newbies broke protocol half-an-hour before her. Just after that pair got back, three more veterans crawled away to dump their bowels. Everyone is still too relaxed from being on leave. They’re briefly reverting to almost civvy habits, preferring privacy to safety. A few seek solitude for a different reason. They’re like sick cats hiding under a toolshed in a backyard, until they feel better.

  “Pretty bad,” the company master sergeant tells his butterbar lieutenant, who has just two weeks on the line. “Manageable, as long as no locust sniper picks up their movements.” He laughs unexpectedly at his unintended pun.

  The butterbar gazes intently into his trench periscope, without seeing anything special. He doesn’t get the scatological joke. Or he’s just pretending not to. His own bowels are growling at him, threatening to embarrass him forever in front of the sergeant. He’s hiding it, but he has sweat beading on his brow as he clenches his sphincter as tight as he can. Rookie noise indiscipline is one thing. But rooks and vets taking unauthorized shit trips is another.

  Still, the sergeant persuades his lieutenant to let it go. “Sir, it might cause more ruckus to go the rounds and tell them to stay put and pucker up.” Three minutes after that wise decision is made, Jedidiah’s maser light show begins and a whole platoon illuminates the Gastown skyline with brilliant, panicky firing.

  The sergeant goes apoplectic when he hears back from the next two slits over that the culprit is the “worst godsdamn soldier in the whole company,” who spooked 200 meters of the line. And that now he’s shouting at the top of his lungs at his trenchmate. “Lieutenant, he’s giving away position! He’ll let any RIK observer or sniper out there with a huff duff detector zero in on the whole platoon. We could get incoming mortars.”

  “Take care of it, sergeant.” It’s the smartest order a frosh lieutenant can give, handing things over to his more experienced sergeant. This butterbar has already learned that. He might just make it after all.

  The sergeant screams over the company link at fighters in every slit that’s still firing to “stop shooting at shadows!” He adds with real menace. “Shut the fuck up, Haig! And everybody else, stay put! I don’t care how bad you want or need to dump your bowels.” Jedidiah never hears him. He forgot to code his HUD. Wouldn’t matter if he had: he took it off to yell at Ava.

  “That’s a godsdamn order,” the sergeant snarls at the company. “You have to shit yourself, you damn well do it! But you stay in your godsdamn slit to protect your trench buddy’s back and the platoon! One furrow shitter moves out of their slit and I’ll shoot him myself.” Ten minutes later the young lieutenant is squatting on a bucket, moaning, and even the sergeant is seriously considering creeping out of his slit to relieve himself of his share of the day’s gift. ‘Fucking bilberries!’

  Jedidiah is also feeling it, real bad. He’s kept in place only by a primal desire to stay hidden and another thought, almost as powerful, not to get in any more trouble by disobeying an order. But a third basic force is at work that’s more urgent, a nearly overwhelming urgency coming from somewhere deep in his gut that he can’t repress or resist any longer. ‘What do I do? Stay or go?’

  Another 10 minutes and he can’t hold it any longer, can’t take the surging cramps, the urgent pressure and a rising sense of panic that he might repeat what happened during the Lost Patrol. Nor can he do what the sergeant ordered that he must, what Ava warns him to do: defecate where he stands. Not in the two man slit trench he shares with her, leaning on its lip with maser out at the other end.

  ‘I can’t. I just c
an’t. Not in front of her.’ He’s still deeply ashamed about coming back to the company bunker in a smelly, soiled combat suit after he got lost on patrol, then pinned down. About dropping a pungent, two day load right inside his utes. Even after he showered and cleaned his blues, they still stank.

  ‘All because my HUD failed.’ He was embarrassed to the core and forever, even though it’s the one thing no one in his platoon or company teases him about or even mentions. They never once laugh at him or make a disgusted face as he passes by. Too many did exactly the same at one time or another, just not as infamously as the only man to survive alone in DT, to live to come back from the Lost Patrol.