by Kali Altsoba
All but one is new. A one eyed boy is a little bit older, at 20. He kicked around Supply on backwoods worlds for two years before coming to Amasia, always sent to do the shitiest jobs in the worst places. His one eye is slate gray, set in a simple face as undistinguished as he is. On the other hand, he’s completely hairless, thus marked off as a Gross Imperium washout. Before that happened, before he lost his eye to a sniper instructor, it had a vivid blue color. It danced lively in an innocent face. It’s faded to dull and silent gray now, like the boy himself. The empty socket on the other side is covered by a black patch, glued permanently in place. He asked over and over, but Rikugun refuses to give him a new eye.
“Please sir, I need it to see. So that I may serve Pyotr better.”
“Come on, kid! You’re in Supply. Rikugun hardly needs you, with one eye or two. Request denied.”
“But I could do so much bet…”
“Denied. We have warriors in long lines ahead of you, waiting for eyes.”
The one eyed boy has been on Amasia for six months, shifted from outfit to outfit as spare menial labor, until he ended up back in 32nd Supply, itself a low totem outfit. The rest of ‘the boys’ have been on the ground for less than a week. That’s just long enough that they still think they want to “see some real action.” Long enough to lie about fantasy sexual conquests past, and to brag about personal heroics to come. Not long enough to know that they look and sound like fools, or that that’s how they’re seen by the two older vets and all their officers.
‘More combat virgins for the Amasian whore,’ smirks the older private. He’s all white-on-white robusto freak eyes, squinting down the rigid line of boys in pale green utilities as he takes his own lazy place at one end. He’s slovenly looking by his nature and on purpose. He was a firebrand once. Now an untucked shirt and stained teeth are his last, fading bits of rebellion.
The squat gunsō stands just far enough away from the end of the line to display his higher rank. He’s career Rikugun. A man of no particular ambition, with dull, stupid, ‘yes man’ eyes. Peacetime NCO eyes. Eyes that never query, never waver, never dispute, never lead, never inspire. None of the combat virgin boys like the squat sergeant, but they really hate the robusto freak private. Especially since he’s so obviously content to stay a simple nitōhei forever. Unlike them.
‘Doesn’t he have more ambition than that?’
‘Doesn’t he want to serve Pyotr and the Empire?’
‘Serve both to the best of his ability, like we all do?’
Well, all but one. The one eyed boy is beyond such naïveté. Yet even he despises the freak’s effervescent cheeriness and “stretched” addict’s look. He’s maybe five or six years older than the recruits, but he looks sixty or seventy years beyond them. Abuse of the illicit drug is wearing him out prematurely. And real fast.
Extreme dosing gives the freak an artificial sense of vitality, the buoyancy of a permanent high. But like all artificial highs, it comes at a downer price. Instead of extending his lifespan as ordinary suspensor does in much lower doses, the street version is accelerating all his cellular ageing. Each day he burns hot as an unstable, over bright star, shedding corona shells of a hundred future days.
One of the boys who has seen robusto abusers die in the barrios back on Daegu figures “the old man” is about six months from full “flameout.” Even though the rest really don’t like the veteran, and avoid his company like a plague carrier, they don’t wish that on anyone. Not after they hear from the barrio kid what it’s really like. You can tell, he says, by how far natural eye color fades, leaving all white-on-white and hyper sensitivity to light. The freak has pearl white eyes.
In a thousand cities of the Imperium, abusers get artificial eyes to hide their addiction, to keep up a public fiction of normal life as long as they can. That’s not possible in the black. Or it didn’t used to be, back when Rikugun executed anyone with giveaway, all white robusto eyes. That was before all the casualties. Now, it needs even useless men like the freak veteran to fill out the ranks, along with the one eyed boy it won’t give even a single eyeball. Rikugun is running out of men.
The portly captain, a big gut hanging over the polished buckle of his RIK issue black belt, looks down the uneven line of boys with open disapproval. He hasn’t bathed yet. He smells of last night’s cheaply bought gin and underage ‘comforter,’ a Rikugun euphemism for a sex slave shipped inland from the coast. He stinks of his own sweat, of stale rosewater and dried out semen. Also of this morning’s late breakfast of salt mocksardine paste and onions, smeared over black bread.
He ignores the older nitōhei and gunsō at the end of the line of Daegu boys. He knows them. He despises both men. “I have a job for you kid shits,” he snarls, squinting from heavy lidded, fat padded eyes. The gratuitous, vulgar insult comes naturally to him. Especially since he’s feeling pleased with himself after a half night in the camp brothel. It’s a well laid in place, with plenty of choices to dwell over and enjoy. Where there are Rikugun, pimps and brothels always appear. And men like the captain. Not even Third Caste, yet he waddles around a supply base stinking of kliba sex and bellowing orders at boys who don’t get how low status this fat fool really is. How none of the other officers will drink with him.
The captain is a regular in the kliba hut. He never gets women on his own. He always has to pay for it, or like last night, rape an Amasian kid shipped into the base to service men like him. He’s still just drunk enough, and he’s always fool enough, to believe that the dark haired, bronze skinned Amasian girl in the rented cubicle meant the things she said about his fine looks. He’s stupid and vain enough to believe her forced flattery about his great stamina and perfect performance.
“You’ll take 400 ammo crates and 100 crates of maser printing powders to the boys at...” He reads out grid coordinates indicating a tundra base in the high north country, above the forest zone but just below the popov section, or Dauran Gate, that hinges way out from the RIK line, jutting into arctic flats held by the ACU.
‘Damn, I hate popovs! Glad we don’t havta deal with any of them on this sour soup of a trip. Barbarians! Why they’re our allies is beyond me.’ The squat, black sergeant hasn’t met a real popov, a Dauran, but he has strong views about them.
The oily taii turns to the older men, smirking contempt at the addict but saying nothing to him. He raises a flabby hand. He points a manicured but still ugly, and this morning also filthy, finger menacingly at the gunsō. “You, sergeant,” he barks in a reedy voice, oddly high pitched for so large and round a man.
“Yes captain?”
“You’re in charge of this pathetic expedition. Fuck up like you did last time, and I’ll have those chevrons off you faster than you can wipe your pikey ass.”
He can’t help the vulgarities, and stopped trying a long time ago. He thinks it makes him tougher, more manly. He thinks about his insecure manhood all the time. It’s because he’s fat. He tosses an order scroll, light as cigarette paper, to the gunsō and finally turns to the freak, deigning to notice the stupidly, but cunningly, grinning man at last. The taii sneers every word.
“Never had to deal with drecksau flameouts like you on Cretan. Seems they let anyone into Rikugun these days.” It’s time for his second breakfast. He whirls with surprising agility on a polished, black heeled boot, and waddles off toward the Officer’s Mess. His heels clack! on the flagstones of the truck park. The sound reminds the one eyed boy of his five weeks of aborted training at Kolno Barracks.
The gunsō sighs as he rerolls the supremely thin and light scroll and tucks it like a soma cigarette behind his ear. “Right, the cargo’s in Warehouse 160, Section 5a. We gotta pick up the trucks first. Let’s go!” They shuffle ahead in a raggedy column of twos, the freak all alone at the rear. Befuddled conscripts, a white eyed veteran, and a short sergeant all wear the same unit flash on their left shoulder: RIK 32nd Supply. No distinctive emblem or image adorns it, just the unit number and function. The divisio
n is from northern Daegu, and the least desirable and most despised outfit to hail from a homeworld famed across the Imperium for its men’s battle prowess and a storied, military heritage. Half the planet won’t even acknowledge that 32nd Supply is Daeguan.
Everyone heading across the vehicle park to designated snow trucks for the trip north knows that they’re second tier recruits, although new boys still fantasize about being something much more one day. They might only be third tier, or even fourth. They trained for lowly Supply Services at a wretched camp near Rudimina, not the renowned combat center at Kolno Barracks. All except the one eyed boy. He put in a month at Kolno before he was washed out and frog marched through Main Gate, sent down to Rudimina in hairless disgrace. The 32nd has no special status. If they forget their lowly station and worthlessness, every self-important officer and fancy badged special police or regular shit in Rikugun reminds them.
Under the gunsō’s direction, the lads load up an odd looking ménage of snow trucks. Supply Convoy #75347, as they are now officially designated, comprises a hodgepodge of seven ill matched surface haulers, ranging from a heavy halftrack to two very old Twilights and four Troikas. The latter are commandeered, civilian ground haulers. Ice road huggers native to north Lemuria, from before the war. Troikas are larger than the Twilights, with three retractable front end skis instead of two. They scud atop northern ice roads, or hardtop covered in packed snow.
Twilights are little more than motorized sledges, with retractable front wheels to allow double superceramic skis to descend. They aren’t true offroaders. They’re multi wheeled with treading in back, not half-tracked like Supply Service purpose built trucks. Cabs have two rows of three seats, allowing for winter clothing. They can sit five across in the short arctic summers. Built for commercial winter hauls before the war, they move faster and cleaner over heavy snowpack than imported, RIK forced air or acoustic sky hovers that blow up their own blizzards underneath, choking air intakes and sometimes bringing the cargo birds down. The downside is that Twilights and Troikas really need graded or paved road to deploy skis, dig in thick rear tread, and move at speed. There aren’t enough of those kind of roads to cover all the long Rikugun black, so natural ice surfaces will have to do. Like a finger lake or frozen river or ice road. There are lots of those up north.
It was the Chief Quartermaster who discovered that the ski toed winter haulers were useful for arctic transport, allowing him to use larger and better cargo haulers in southern sectors of black that really matter. He ordered military versions scratch assembled at forced labor plants clustered around captive cities on the occupied Thalassa coast. They’re bigger, faster and more stable than the local types. They have four times the cargo capacity of indigenous models and secure weather seals and internal heaters. But there are none of the official hybrids in the truck park today. Or at least, that’s what the gunsō is told by the Distribution Officer.
“They’re all out already, making more important runs. You rooks and rubes take the old, civvy shit. That’s what’s approved for the sector run you’ll make.”
So ‘the boys’ pile into the battered, requisitioned snow trucks that aren’t even repainted in RIK green. All four Troikas are blue, one Twilight is red, and the other one is a vivid, embarrassing commercial pink. Only the halftrack bringing up the rear looks remotely military, painted in dull Rikugun green. Nor are they authorized to pull special clothing or rations for the trip. No double insulated suits and miniature field kitchen to keep water and coffee and food always hot inside the cab. Adding indignity to insult, they have to wait at the truck part exit while a long line of slow hovering armtraks and ATCs pulls in. And wait, and wait.
After three hours, their unkempt and unorthodox supply convoy at last pulls away from the depot. As it does, a bulked up gate guard wearing about six layers against the night, topped off with a ridiculous faux sheepskin stolen from a local woman, mocks them as they pass his kiosk. He mocks them! That’s how low rank and low caste they are and look.
“Ya’ll look like a Life Temple procession heading out to incinerate dear ‘ole granny, or maybe that fuckin’ flameout ya’ll got with ya. What a freak!”
“You’re the freak!” One of the braver boys taunts back. He’s noticeably taller than the rest, a simple trick of growing up on a lower gravity planet that yet gives him a confidence the other boys lack.
The gate guard laughs, and points: “Where’s yore shiny tinsl’ and pretty lights at? Don’t ya’ll drop granny in da snow, ya hear?”
The older veteran makes an obscene gesture at the guard, who tries but fails to drop the portcullis back across the gate to stop the convoy, so he can retaliate by putting the freak on report. Maybe even in the depot brig. Instead, the veteran tosses to him a verbal grenade, framed in the usual mixed up language of Amasia, a coarse patois picked up and used in rear areas on both sides of Dark Territory these days, years into the war. “Liu mang, votre mutter est einen Blue Oni bitch!”
The guard sputters something indecipherable as Supply Convoy #75347 pulls away from the yawing gate. Probably something about how they’re all whoresons and that the freak’s mother “is a Calmari cunt and a flameout, too.”
A big blow is coming to the north country. Another one. Fourth this month. It’s starting already. Less than a klic down the road from the gate, Supply Convoy #75347 disappears into white, heading for the black.
***
Fifteen klics out of the depot, the ersatz little convoy is stopped by two gruff gendarmes in shiny black uniforms, with silver trim. They take a quick look at the gunsō’s order scroll and instantly ban him from the main north-to-south military concourse, the Nordbahn-Sudbahn that runs parallel to Third Trench. That wide road is reserved for different traffic than their poor sort.
“We can’t let you backside Supply Service boys clog up big feeder roads or the autobahn. Not with that ramshackle, ragout parade you’re driving. There’s a war on, you know. A real one. So keep the fuck off our road.”
“Yeah,” the second gendarmes jumps in, to mock. “You tyckners find another way north with those long toed gypsy wagons you’re driving.”
“How? Where do we go?”
“Use one of the forest roads.”
“That will take forever!”
“You’re all pikies, right? So you gotta know how to find a pike road!” It’s the first pun the dour, Third Caste policeman has ever made. Ever. In his whole life. He didn’t mean to, or realize that he has. Neither does anyone else, except the one eyed boy. He smiles to himself.
One of ‘the boys’ starts to explain that his mother was a Third Caste woman, even if she stooped to marry his admittedly pikey father. He doesn’t get very far.
“She shouldn’t have fucked an outcaste and made you. Move it!” Both police have dead, bureaucratic eyes. Black, beady, far too narrowly focused. Incapable of seeing any higher things. The dull eyes of a natural born cop.
“Move off. Now!”
Seven brightly colored, not very military looking trucks split onto a rough lane that takes them 40 klics back to the east before turning north. There they connect to a narrow forest road running parallel to the Nordbahn that is denied them. It’s unpaved, but covered in thick ice and packed snow. It was roughly knocked right through heavy northern woods four years ago, by combat engineers acting on Year One emergency attack orders. It was meant to be for onetime use. Now it’s a vital part of the RIK Supply Services system in the north. “A pathetic rollbahn,” the gunsō calls it. Heavy suspension or no, they feel each hard klic hit them in the ass as the trucks rock and bounce. They stop to rearrange ammo crates four times before they get them netted and tied down to the sergeant’s angry satisfaction.
The sinister little ice road wasn’t supposed to be needed after the first, sure-to-be-victorious ground campaign by mighty Rikugun. It was cut out of northern forest by tired, overworked engineers in the first weeks of the first summer of war. It was supposed to be a onetime, oneway feeder road to sup
port a never stopping triumph, westward to the Panthalassa coast and New Beijing. It only turned north because General Johann Oetkert had run into Lian Sòng’s unfinished defensive works in Central Lemuria, and sent division after division north and south looking to get around her flanks. By the time the roads and tired divisions got there, more black walls faced them, until they were continuous for nearly 23,000 klics, pole to pole. Meanwhile, engineers had hastily hacked and blown ragged paths through more than 8,700 klics of hill country and shallow valleys, pine forest covering all. Then the advance stopped, and onetime blast roads became permanent supply roads.
Stretched logistics battalions along with chronic fighting means higher priority for maintenance always goes to some other sector in the southern fighting zones. The 32nd Supply’s commanding general complains bitterly to Xiamen HQ about conditions in the far north. Engineers always retort that they’re too busy in active, and far more important, sectors to widen or pave the pathetic forest tracks like this rollbahn. So a rough cut, narrow ice road and 1,832 more just like it are evermore neglected, evermore pitted, rutted and ragged.
Over short summers, the ice road churns into mud ruts that harden to sundried cement. In winter, the deepened ruts fill with ice that lies under a crust of packed snow. In odd, unpredictable places, the combat engineers who carved the rollbahn through the forest left dozered tree stumps jutting out of the roadbed. They’re still there, if smashed and rolled and crushed by so many heavy military vehicles it’s more mounds than stumps the oddball little convoy bounces over. Still, whenever a Twilight or Troika hits one, every lad is tossed cursing from side-to-side.
