by Kali Altsoba
Poom poom … poom poom … poom.
Well after there are no targets left, he methodically pulls the twin triggers. He stops shooting only when the cropped man gently puts burned hands atop his and pleads with his eyes, not for mercy for the enemy but for Joachim’s sake.
He was in combat delirium.
Now he turns nearly catatonic.
All vitality leaves his limp body.
All light drains from his soulless eyes.
He stays locked in that way for hours.
A heavy counterattack washes over the silent gunpit, sweeping up the remains of 22nd Marine, who join the pursuit of the last RIK armor with rockets, smart shells, yelling and vendetta. Armtraks and ATCs with far fewer hover grenadiers inside are fleeing across Dark Territory at wild acoustic speeds. Long columns of disarmed and dispirited green clad troops, survivors protected from the wrath of marines by determined MI guards who arrive after the fight, head the other way. Their disheveled and sullen ranks start a long march to the sea, and prison camp.
Joachim takes in and remembers none of it. His face is streaked with dirt and blood from a slight wound over his right eye he still hasn’t noticed. He has a badly split lip. His pale blue marine utes are covered in dark filth from the trench, and oily splashes of bright green rapido coolant from the overheated gun. He feels strangely calm, passive after his prolonged fit of ferocious action. A receptacle of nothingness, aching with post coital stillness and sadness.
He often feels like that.
Empty, full of dull silence.
This is more intensely dull.
He glances at the cropped man with the seared hands, the only other survivor from his platoon. He looks no better, and maybe worse, but he seems to have more sense. He tugs at Joachim’s sleeve with his slightly less burned hand until his dazed comrade-of-the hour sits down, slumping beside discarded rapido barrels that cling onto strips of the cropped man’s skin. They’re still slow cooking, like mockbacon on a forgotten skillet left on low heat.
Joachim stares emptily at mohawk man, who stares silently back. He spits out a taste of iron blood and looks over two broken teeth from behind the gap where a small bit of spent shrapnel split his lip wide open. He still doesn’t feel any pain. He just noticed the teeth pressing against the inside of his cheek, and scooped them out with a dirty finger. He throws them away.
Exhausted beyond words, they say nothing at all. Joachim finally realizes at some dim level that he owes a debt. He kneels beside the cropped man and dresses his bleeding hands, gingerly, genuinely, and most gently. He uses a wound kit he takes from a dead Rikugun medic he cut in half 10 meters from the bottom of the outer rampart. He remembers to look there because he saw the medic’s green eagle armband flail as he fell, back when Joachim shot him into two halves.
They still do not speak a word.
What can be said to one another?
What’s the point of any words?
It starts to rain, not drenching but steady. Parched beyond thirst, they drink greedily from a simple wash tub filled with dank runoff, trickling down from a high crack in the rampart that predates the fight. Someone shoved the tub there to keep water off the rapido platform. The crack should have been patched up weeks ago, but this is a ‘quiet sector’ and repair crews are busy in more important places. Joachim scoops out twinned handfuls and holds them up to the burned man’s lips. He can’t serve himself with thick bandages on and they can’t find any cup or dish. They sit down again to wait for relief, but no one comes by for hours. By then, most of the blonde girl’s blood that stained the platform is gently washed by rain.
Everyone is off in the Yue ming, chasing enemy survivors, finishing them with quick blades coated in slower poisons, with grenades and bright, gushing flames. Mercy strains to drop from the heavens like the gentle rain that falls onto Joachim and the cropped man, but the skies are dry of it. The longest day of Joachim’s life fades away into a blood red, midsummer sunset that takes an hour to finish far out over the silent Panthalassa Sea. Night falls across the rapido pit, twin black barrels pointing oddly skyward in mute salute to the darkness. Two men stay mute to the war. They’ll never speak of what happened or to each other about anything. Words between them can have no meaning after the crime they shared.
They can’t eat or sleep, so weary and past caring. To sleep is to counterfeit death, and death is too much all around. So they sit in silence, watching the sunset, then counting the stars. They can’t fight anymore, either. The madness of the dawn is gone, sunk with the hot sun in cooling water in the west. It’s as spent as the darkened crystals that lie discarded on the black earth beneath the cooled off gun. They’re so past caring, so beyond the vital spark, that should a second attack come in this starry moment neither man could or would defend himself or the other.
Mind
To everyone’s surprise, the misfits of 22nd Marine stood firm when everyone assumed they would run. RIK MI at Amasia HQ at Xiamen on the coast counted on it, while Alliance MI in New Beijing never expected an attack in the Dismal’s quiet sector. Their stand blunted General Oetkert’s hope for a breakthrough at The Veranda hinge that would force Lian Sòng to shift over some of her ARGs. 22nd Marine was in the key spot. Its line wobbled; its line cracked; its line was briefly penetrated; but its line held. It’s marines start to call themselves the “Dismals.” They mean it as a defiant boast against the RIK, but even more to their own side.
Two reports say that the whole Alliance position was saved by holding long enough for a counterattack to throw back the RIK armor. Saved by a single rapido pit that piled over 2,000 dead infantry before it and held up thousands more who huddled in fear and would not approach or cross the black. So they weren’t there to overcome the tiger pit defenders, who then held up the main armtrak force and allowed Buffalo reinforcements from Third Trench to arrive and win out against reduced numbers of Mammoths and Mastodons. Someone is bound to get a medal.
***
The sector grows quiet once more, as slower days lengthen into full summer boredom. Repairs are made to gaps in black walls, while animate minefields full of coiled, curling, hissing snakes and screaming meemies are carefully nested in brand new patterns of interlocked deceit. Leave rotations and replacements mean the somnolent sector almost forgets the brutal fight that broke through black wall and shattered Dragon’s Teeth, only to stall out in armtrak pits of ACU preparation and resolve. The bruised armies on both sides settle back into routines of the black. The troops eat, defecate, get drunk, have sex when and where they find it.
They watch and wait for each other, secretly grateful no one is coming over tonight. They kill and wound only when patrols sent into Dark Territory stumble amidst the detritus of the last battle. More often, captains make sure they don’t make contact, especially when they hear the enemy a few hundred meters farther out. Back at Rikugun Onworld HQ, General Oetkert snaps his conductor’s stick in two, breaking his baton across his knee in rage at his defeat. Out where Joachim Suri and 2nd Platoon man the quiet black, marines think that they hear a single, isolated reed playing an eerie lament over the edge of the Yue ming every night.
It’s out of harmony
with any other sound.
It haunts the night,
as lonely as a loon.
Suddenly it stops.
It no longer cares.
Joachim and 22nd Marine resume the daily business of guarding the black wall, replanting nests and fields of animate mines, fixing breaches, huddling under the distant guns that resume their daily harassing fire. He feels nothing anymore.
Emptied.
Drained.
Numbed.
Anaesthetized.
Joachim’s head won’t clear. Perhaps the emptiness protects him from memory of what he did, from the terrible trauma he suffered and worse trauma he inflicted? Is it Nature’s balm, smoothed over his hurt mind to save it from itself? A kind of scar tissue for the mind? It might be. It probably is. But it’s also more
than that.
His soul is vacant.
He wants to scream.
He doesn’t see the point.
He doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it: he starts to remember little, discrete images. They sneak unbidden into his bunk at night, bloody ghouls come to thieve his contentment with soul dead emptiness. They’re shades of platoon or company ‘mates’ whose names he never tried to learn, lost to him forever yet who visit him every night. White specters of that day, his day of days. Coming to him most often is the pale ghost of the befuddled, beheaded girl. She keeps tapping her helmet. Gutted and clubbed and burned up youths in blue come to sit and stare at him, But not just them. More often he sees dead faces of men in green, and knows he killed them. One image he sees so often, so clearly, he thinks that he must be going mad. It’s a not-yet-corpse who feebly moves her arm, beseeching aid from under a huge mound of crushed and torn flesh. From the first night, every night, he sees that arm move and hears her low pleadful groaning, as if for the first time. As if he’s back there, watching the corpse pile made by the armtraks slowly crush her. ‘Why did I and the cropped man survive, and no one else in 2nd Platoon?’
He sees pleading Rikugun faces he sheared off at close range, flying limbs and holed torsos and headless boys in green or gray, tumbling to lie still at his feet. He sees a darkly looming armtrak, rolling into a long slit trench piled with dead and wounded. Bits of entrails and severed limbs whirl along its grinding treads as they spin, seeking traction in the greasy red slurry. The ghastly, ghostly driver laughs. It’s getting worse for him every day now. He sees the feeble arm and many other vile things with eyes wide open in the daytime, as whenever he looks down into a mess kit full of luncheon mockmeat. He knows he’s in real trouble, living not just on the edge of the obscure regions on Lemuria, but the edge of madness.
Company corpsmen give him extra trauma pills, hoping to knock down brain scaffolding that makes connections among neurons, erasing targeted memories long after they’re imprinted. ‘Guess I’m not one of the lucky ones Doctor ‘Jingle Bells’ talked to us about back at OTS. I got inoculated by his designer drugs and clever psych conditioning, yet here I am in the waiting room of the mad. I’m one of the others, he would say. The 20% who get jammed up first time out. Well of course I am. Shoulda known. Kinda did, I guess. It’s my lot in life.’ Front doctors concur with his intelligent self-diagnosis. After two weeks he’s moved to a rural recovery camp for special cases a few klics inland from the Panthalassa coast. It’s in a cricket chirruping, true quiet area, full of crippled in body or mind or both.
Dr. Sajani Shah is his therapist. She heads up the Psych Ward, although she’s trained principally in neuroscience. She’s a pretty, brusque and arrogant high caste Hindu with hazel eyes and dark hair, and legs that you know could wrap around you ‘till Tuesday. Research is her thing, not therapy. She’s far more interested in case data for a Kars University paper she’s writing than in Joachim Suri’s fears or experience or recovery. Still, after just three sessions he breaks down, tells her all about his detached battle trance during the fight and his nightmares and daytime visions ever since. She says, matter-of-factly: “Your trance wasn’t courage as you hoped or moral sickness or weakness as you fear.”
“What then, doc?”
“I call it ‘combat bliss.’ It’s a natural psychic defense facing…”
“Trauma?”
“Please don’t interrupt!”
“Sorry.”
“I was going to say, when facing real world combat situations.”
“Combat isn’t traumatic? I thought all…”
She advises, without comforting. “I said don’t interrupt. Now, on that gun box thing, your brain shut down as much consciousness as it could while telling your legs they simply weren’t allowed to run away.”
“My brain and legs had an argument? I sorta thought so at the start of it all, when I went a bit wobbly. But I dunno, doc. That seems kinda…”
“Yes, they did. Your brain told your whole body to ‘get small,’ as you marines say.” She’s pleased as punch to slip in the phrase, “but also to defend itself.”
“Who won the argument?”
She doesn’t hear or appreciate his weak attempt at humor. “You resolved that conflict by standing up and shooting that big gun…”
‘It was a twin barrel rapido, doc. Not a “big gun.” Told you that three times already. It’s not in your research notes?’
“… at your enemy until the threat was … hmmm, gone.”
She beams at him, proud of the clarity and clinical precision of her reading of his case file. She’s already written a full summary, with two footnotes. One on the pressing “problem of body-brain disjuncture,” the other one on the “body-mind delusion as found in classical philos…”
“Why would my mind do that?”
“Not your mind. There is no empirical evidence that ‘mind’ exists. Your brain. You do have one of those.”
“But I thought that mind and brain were con…”
“They’re not! What you don’t have is neurasthenia or traumatic stress or any psychological disorder.” She thinks those are all overused diagnoses by her softer, woolier thinking colleagues.
“So what hap..?”
“It was purely a natural and entirely physical response to strong fear stimuli.”
‘That’s what you think combat is? A gaggle of reactive stimuli?’
“Nothing psychological about it at all. No choice was involved, so there was no moral or character issue either. There! That should make you feel much better!”
“Yeah, sure. No character issue. Right doc, good. But what about my visions?”
“They don’t matter.”
“But that’s why I’m here, doc. Because my mind is playing tricks on me.”
“No it’s not. You’re here so that I can repair your brain.”
“Why? What’s wrong with it? Do I have a tumor? Please say yes!”
“Your primordial brain knew that if it let your legs give in to flight stimuli and run away, both it and your body would die. Your primal brain’s defiance of your higher brain raised adrenalin and stress in your body. The elevated levels are now receding and you are well on your way to full recovery.”
“But my visions are getting stron…”
“Nothing to do with your combat experience. You could swallow a stone or this e-stylus I’m holding, and your body would quickly turn it into an armtrak or a boulder in your mind. Errr… I mean in your brain.”
It’s the central thesis of her research. She’s sure of it. Trauma is all physical damage, subject to purely physical repairs. Visions don’t factor in, so she ignores his question and doesn’t mention them in his case notes. It’s all about the two physical brains. Joachim thinks it over. He decides his primordial brain must be ‘pretty fucking stupid’ and that Dr. Shah is not very much brighter, if it comes to that.
He doesn’t say anything.
That’s just not his way.
His words are gone.
Other doctors are kinder, more personal. They train him in meditation techniques to help him cope with loud noises and triggering smells. They teach him about other triggers that transport him to the worst place he ever was, vivid as if he’s there while inside the vision. It helps. They help.
He thinks he’s making a little progress.
For the first time in a week, he sleeps.
He still feels pretty hollowed out, but…
Dr. Shah stops the program. She pulls him out after five days. She tells him that he’s sleeping better only from “therapy placebo effect.” She gives him extra meds instead. “These pills are tailored to your adjusted neuro profile. I’ve been working with Dr. Snana Ojinjintka on these. Remarkable research! Have you back in action in no time. Swallow!”
“I’ve taken these for over a year.”
“This is a much high dosage.”
“They don’t work for me.”
“Well, if th
at’s your attitude, I can’t help you to get better. Do you want to get better, marine? Do you want to serve your star nation and make your family proud again? Well, do you?”
“Yes, of course doc. The get better bit, I mean.”
