Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  “Then take these pills! By the way, you’ll just have to learn to live with your visions and dreams. Your profile and neuro scans say they’re permanent.”

  ‘What?”

  “Buck up, marine. Take these meds every day, and you’ll go back into the line where you belong. Rejoin all your marine friends in your old platoon.”

  ‘My whole fucking platoon is dead, bitch.’ He takes the proffered meds from her outstretched hand. She manages not to cringe when he touches her palm. His fingers are shaking again. He drops one of the pills. Little green one.

  She smiles. It’s clearly forced. It’s unkind and unfamiliar to her face. She struggles to hold the thing in place. It’s physical. Nought to do with character.

  He reaches out for help, one last time. “I don’t have friends up there anymore. Everyone is dead. Except for this one guy whose name I never caught, fellow with burned hands and a weird haircut. Looks like a horse comb. Can you…”

  “That doesn’t really matter right now, does it? About the hair, I mean, or the man whose name you don’t even know. Or about your missing platoon.”

  ‘They’re not missing. They’re dead.’

  “This is the Army. You’ll have a brand new platoon to command in no time! I was in New Beijing just last week. There are always fresh fighters arriving from offworld, and more coming out of the training camps here in West Lemuria.” She smiles at him again, more tightly this time. More forced and cold, uncaring and unpitying. Her lips stretch so tautly her mouth looks like it might crack.

  Joachim pleads as he hasn’t pleaded for anything in over a year: “Can’t I stay here just a little longer? I like talking to the other doctors. I think it’s helping.”

  “There’s a war on,” she chides, as if she’s in fucking charge of it. “You’re a trained and valuable military asset. You can take another pill if you need to. I’ll up the dose ‘till you feel better.”

  “It’s just that, you know, the talk therapy is much bet...”

  “We need you back on the frontline, lieutenant!” She snaps hard at him. He’s a whiner. And worse, he’s screwing up her positive control group. She wants him separated from the rest of her experimental data, so the independent variable stays isolated and the dependent variable of her two minds proposition will be proven emphatically, as she fully intends it to be. Now she’ll have to jig the stats, find something that disqualifies him to make the results stay statistically significant.

  “Remember the motto of the Marine Corps: Nullum Secundum.” She says it like talkers do in propaganda vids, all upbeat and civvy and hollow. Soulless and official, like she is. She says it like she has a fucking right to say it, but she doesn’t.

  “We can’t allow a minority to hold back the majority.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He wants to hit her for her impertinence. He wants to hit all civilians who talk up the war but never go to its obscure regions. Never wrap a mohawk man’s hands in torn bandages taken from a young enemy medic they cut in half with hot light.

  They’re from a far, different country.

  A far different moral Universe.

  They're not part of the war.

  He owes nothing to them. Nothing.

  She’s already walking away, spinning on a higher heel than allowed to military personnel but which she knows shows off her finely turned, athletic brown calves. Joachim has a sudden vision, of another brown limb stuck in churning tank tread. He vomits into his mouth, then swallows it down. He throws all the pills she gave him in the wastebasket. He finagles a last day in recovery, but the next morning Shah flounces into his room and pronounces him discharged, hard impatience in her voice. “Lieutenant Suri, you’re cured. Or close enough.” She hands him a set of gray discharge papers, sending him back to the line before the day is done.

  Joachim gets his first promotion, to 1st lieutenant. And he gets a new platoon, as Doctor Shah predicted. Actually, it’s the same one as before: 2nd Platoon, 4th Company, 1st Battalion, 22nd Marine. It just seems new ‘cause with all the old hands dead it’s full of scrubs and newbies. He’s the last original. Even the cropped man is gone. Joachim can’t discover where. Reassigned or killed. Who knows?

  He feels all dead inside.

  Hardly talking, never caring.

  Indifferent to all and everyone.

  He’s his own personal fog of war.

  Something has changed. It doesn’t phase him even when he’s told to report to Battalion HQ. Nothing registers high or low anymore. His superiors assume it’s neuro drugs, but he flushes them into the nearest Organic Waste Disposal Unit. Maybe it’s juice of the soma plant he takes secretly at night, self-medicating with bottled bliss to dull thoughts and cloud too vivid memories, to hide from ghosts?

  Nah! It’s not that.

  You know it’s not that.

  He knows it’s not that.

  He walks all the way back to Battalion HQ and steps into the major’s office. He salutes. He stands at attention. But he’s uncaring as to cause or purpose of this ordered visit. He’s uncaring about anything. He likes and respects this major. He’s one of the old hands recovering from a multiple wounding. Not the usual riffraff of the old 22nd Marine, not the usual Dismal and broken officer. Joachim has to admit, even the new replacement grunts are getting better now that the 22nd was bloodied, is spoken of as ‘old hand’ and ‘battletested’ itself. ‘How odd is that?’

  It doesn’t interest or please Joachim when the major tells him why he’s standing there, through a thick Narym accent. “Yore up for a big medal, loo’ten’ant! For valor! I’m rec’o’mendin’ you for a Silver Comet, boy, with star clusters.”

  “Thank you, sir. But I…”

  “I’m pro’mow’tin’ you captain. Long ova doo, too. That was some goddamn straight shootin’ you did, boy. Held up a whole bri’gade ‘ah damn low’custs, and anodder five com’pan’knees of them grays, the Rats. Jeez, co’man’does! Killed may’bee half o’ them, damn near all by yore’self.”

  Joachim listens from inside a miasma of indifference.

  “You dee’zerve this medal son, and I’m glad ’ta see you git it. Be good fer duh whole damned bat’tal’yon, an’ the 22nd Marine! Pee’poll oughta know that we got a gen’u’ine hee’ro in this rat’s ass outfit. Wright well done, boy’o! Nullum Secundum! What say you, marine?”

  “Oorah.” Joachim says it rather than shouts it. Without any of the usual, chest thumping marine emphasis. It almost has a question mark at the end. The award ceremony is held a week later, back in a rest area behind Second Trench, before assembled 1st Battalion. Joachim takes it all in stride, the meds and the medal, the soma and salutes, the accolades and afflictions.

  He copes.

  He adapts.

  He exists.

  He endures.

  He suffers.

  He submits.

  He tries for a month to bear up through the gray evening of his life. He suffers silently, sinking deeper into depression with every footfall that leads him back to the war. ‘Where is my bliss?’

  Behind, nothing but death.

  Forward, nothing but death.

  He’s walking a slough of death.

  In loneliness and moral despond.

  A pilgrim in wilderness wandering.

  “He had them into the slaughter house, where was a butcher killing a sheep. And behold, the sheep was quiet and took her death patiently. Then said Death, ‘You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and put up wrongs without murmurings and complaint. Behold how quietly she takes her death! And without objecting the sheep suffered her skin to be pulled over her ears.”

  Two days before his reconstituted platoon is slated to go back to First Trench, Joachim folds his dress uniform from the ceremony to regulation corners then places the glowing Silver Comet on top. He undresses. Naked, he folds his utes and lays them neatly on the cot, beside his dress Blues. He lays out his complete, well ordered battle kit in neat, regulation precision atop his cot. He sets onl
y his Basic Tactics Manual on the floor, pushing it under the bunk with his foot. He steps outside the blast hatch to sit naked and alone on the rim of a clean, well lighted officer’s barracks 35 klics behind Second Trench. He sees a morning lark flit overhead and a red kestrel right behind, on the hunt. He listens to a distant barrage rolling in like warm waves on a sand beach. He lifts his captain’s pistol, puts it in his mouth, and blows his brains all over the grass.

  Is it a protest against the nihilism of war? A failure of his spirit to reconcile with battle’s evil, horror and moral compromises? His long hurt and humiliation? Or is it an older sense of indelible failure that makes him do it? No one in his unit or anyone in 22nd Marine can say. They’re all misfits, too. His combat utes are given to a new man, about his size. A disappointed major from Narym packs up his clean, dress uniform and medal and sends them home. An attached official lie says: “Captain Joachim Suri Jr. was killed-in-action by enemy fire as he stood his last post. He served with honor, integrity and courage, and in the highest tradition of the Corps.”

  His mother weeps when she gets the news, as mothers always do. His father sheds no tear. Joachim Suri Sr. leaves his wife alone in her wet mourning, puts on his best hat and tweed jacket and heads to the neighborhood pub, to show off the shiny medal and to boast of his hero son.

  Endure

  Major General Gaspard Leclerc is the powerful Minister of Armaments of the Calmar Union, and one of a few key members of Georges Briand’s War Cabinet. On top of which, he belongs to a tight inner circle within the War Hawks who surround the prime minister with advice. With regard to getting things done, to targeting needed change in the vast Alliance bureaucracy, Briand calls him “my personal guided missile.” That’s an understatement. He’s closer to a nuke.

  He’s about to leave for his second inspection tour of Amasia, traveling the thin bohr road, or Giraffe’s Neck, as some in the Hornet’s Nest on Caspia call it. He meets first with the current Head of Political Intelligence, that’s the civilian outfit hosted within MoD in Lowestoft-on-Stamos. The man was recalled to this job from his prior position as a deputy with SGR on Kars. Admiral Maçon suggested it, thought it might shake things up to cross fertilize the two main civilian intel agencies. Leclerc said about that: “I think the shit metaphor gets it about right.”

  He can’t believe what he’s hearing from the smug, chief political analyst in the Hornet's Nest, passing a hand soothingly over his bald pate in an unconscious gesture of complete self-approval. He ought to be more self-conscious. As current Head of CIS, he should recall that his three predecessors were all fired in disgrace.

  “Daurans are not an existential threat to us, to the Grand Alliance,” he assures Leclerc, before again patting his dome. He’s not naturally bald. He had his head depilated to please his wife. She liked it so much he had his whole body done. He used to be hairy as a monkey. He’s as smooth as a porpoise down there now.

  “Is that so? The considered view around CIS, is it?”

  The chain of failed CIS Heads began with the very last prewar director, Sanjay Pradip. Short work days. A bit too cautious. Appalling political instincts. Penchant for backdoor conspiracy with the old PM. He had to go. Next came two nonentities who treaded water in the first years of the war, happy to be in the job but not to do it, out of fear of getting it wrong and getting sacked. They got sacked anyway. The new man seems determined to go full bore bold. He learned the style from his old mentor at SRG on Kars, Virgiliu Nicolescu. May he rest in peace.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want so speak for everyone…”

  ‘But you will.’

  “Yes, I believe it is. They’ve shot their bolt. Hardly dangerous to us, with all that terribly outdated equipment and dreadfully old ships. I don’t know why some of the field reports, the AARs you in the military provide, are so … excitable.”

  “Never been in combat, have you?”

  “Why no. But I think my talents best serve the Union here, in intelligence.”

  “That may be so. It’s hard to see you serving at the front, given your talent.”

  “Why thank you, general. It’s nice to be appreciated. Can I just say that we see the bigger picture here at CIS on Caspia, even if poor General Lian Sòng and her MI staff can’t quite manage it on Amasia.”

  ‘Lian would have you for a snack and shit out your bones, you bloody fool. Three years into the biggest war in centuries and we’re still dealing with pompous fools like you as the Head of CIS?’

  “That’s off-the-record, of course. I’m sure you understand, general.”

  ‘I bloody well do understand. I understand that you’re an idiot not to know that Lian and I have been good friends for the better part of three decades! What is it about CIS that allows such fools to rise to cock-of-the-roost?’ Leclerc already knows the answer: distance from the war. “Of course. Between us. Understood.”

  ‘And between me and your boss, my friend, Gaétan Maçon. He’ll want to know that the man who sits where that popinjay Pradip used to drink tea is no bloody better. And so incompetent that he just said what he said without checking out my relationship with Lian Sòng or his superiors.’ Leclerc hasn’t slept well, as usual. He’s also just a tad more irritable than normal, which is pretty damn irritable. PM Georges Briand has taught him not to show it as much as he used to. He considers that a major contribution to the war effort. Seriously. Leclerc is that important.

  “Our main worries are behind us now,” the new Head prattles on, as unaware of the danger looming toward him as a dumb krasno in a sniper’s crosshairs.

  “Really? You’re not worried that we can hold along the great wall on Amasia? We have enough supply getting through now, enough ships at the LPs, more than enough skycraft, enough fighters and artillery on the ground?” The Head of CIS is not worth his salt. He’s oblivious to sneering skepticism in Leclerc’s tone and in his plain brown eyes, partly concealed by a camouflage hedgerow of brows.

  “We can always use more fighters and supplies. But we in CIS think that the ground war there has stabilized. That it’s well in hand. Our fine boys and girls out there will hold. Then we can take the offensive and wrap things up just as soon as we get reinforcements and resupply, which I know is your bailiwick, general. And if may I say, you’re doing a fine job.”

  The analyst couldn’t have chosen his cocky words and flattery or skeptical audience less wisely. Leclerc is so enraged he decides to have the man demoted and transferred to Amasia, to serve on Lian Sòng’s staff or far better, in a combat field intelligence position. It’s not peacetime. Men of bitter almond authority like Gaspard François Leclerc have the power to move mountains with a word. Ending the career of a smug civilian analyst is like removing a small pebble from his shoe.

  ***

  “That bald idiot replaced the fool Sanjay Pradip, but he’s not very much of an upgrade,” Leclerc angrily advises the PM. He still confides in Georges Briand as if they were out of power looking in. As if Georges is his maverick boss tacking into a contrary wind at MoD and Leclerc isn’t now a highly respected, and greatly feared, member of the War Cabinet. No longer the gadfly he was before the war, when all the War Hawks worried about the unpreparedness of the Union from far outside the inner circle of power. Now they are the inner circle of power.

  “Yes, we have not been well served by the civilian intel agencies.” The PM is puffing unusually calmly on a sensuously carved wooden pipe. Puff, puff.

  “Maybe we can learn something from Pyotr and Jahandar. We should damn well purge the lot of them in CIS. Not sure which side they’re on, sometimes.”

  “Now, now, Gaspard François Marie,” the PM chides him. He uses Leclerc’s full set of names when he needs to settle down this senior minister and political ally. The pipe he uses to settle down himself. He’s producing great clouds of blue perfumed smoke that smells of rosewood and sweetened brandy. Puff, puff.

  “No need for that kind of talk. Some idiots are useful, you know. We have sources in th
e Network that surpass what the Combine in MoD thinks it knows.”

  Briand has a wide web of informers embedded through the civil service and military, called the Network by those who are part of it. They're no longer under cover. Now his most loyal people are department heads, governors, generals and admirals. But there are also junior agents in SRG and CIS, and promotable majors and colonels, and ship’s XOs and captains recruited while assigned to the Hornet’s Nest. They supply secret info their superiors still hide from him, even now.

  They’re good at it. Brilliant in fact. But many are so junior in their departments and agencies that if they spoke up they might end up shipped to Amasia, or worse, a boondocks backwater world. Briand couldn’t run the war half as well without their hidden help. Too many self-important people out there are peddling personal and careerist bullshit. There are more cover-your-ass than how-can-I-help types.