Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  He just makes heroic little notes,

  talking into his sleeve, for his art.

  He despises himself for doing it.

  Everyone hoards and hides their smallest possessions and comforts: an extra protein powder ration, a brick of cheese or bit of chocolate. They share nothing. Not freely like he did with Redbeard in the crater. Especially, they hide a hemp stick or vial of soma, uppers and downers, poitín and opiates, robusto flakes, and smoother stuff they buy from corrupt medics. Most medics Yuki knows have been driven by the war into alcoholism or atheism. Never to abstention.

  Troops don’t share, they trade. The demand for tradable booty in the frontlines is so great it leads to daily thefts, and thus to swift and brutal soldier’s justice. He sees it clearly now. How demand for black market trade is endless and endlessly corrupts. How the weak sell their little goods, then sell themselves to the strong. How callow men poke at vacant bunks and break into footlockers of men out on raids. How bearers turn out the pockets of badly wounded and corpses, poke into cavities in bodies still warm and bleeding before they’re carted to mass burial pits or rear area, military crematoria. Men volunteer to carry unconscious wounded to near rear aid stations, or to carry any grievously hurt man in need of a litter. They do it to get away from the shell falls, and to better rob the wounded man along the way. Whenever caught, the thieves always say that if they didn’t do it then a rich doctor or nurse or other rear area shit will steal from the wounded man instead.

  “And who deserves this hurt man’s few things more, captain? Some rear area toff or his only true comrades-of-the-line, someone from his own company?”

  “Sergeant of the Kempeitai, over here!”

  “Please sir, I know he was unconscious, but he wanted me to take his things.”

  “Hands behind your back, soldier.”

  “I was going to keep them safe for him.”

  “Sergeant, this cur stole from our heroic wounded. Shoot him.”

  “Wait, I swear it! I was helping him.”

  “Against the rampart, now!”

  “Wait! What?”

  “Squad, present masers.”

  “A firing squad? No! Wait!”

  Yuki got through his three first months on propaganda and naïve enthusiasm. His next three, he needed large dozes of dextroamphetamine. RIK Medical Corps is happy to give out ‘dex’ in unlimited quantities. Boxes of the stuff are left in the corners of bunkers, packets handed out by fistfuls at field kitchens. Yuki always has dex in his pocket and in his bloodstream. Adrenafil, too, as much as the medics will give him or he can trade for or steal. It’s not as good as soma or robusto, but it’s less risky and a helluva lot better than dex.

  Those were the hardest months. All his mates from Basic were dead and he acquired a reputation as a weird loner. So he took even more dex and stole dozes of modadrene, which doctors were less willing to give out so freely. He bought extra moda from a skinny Fixer in Three Company, using the usual trade goods of the black, and the near rear markets: protein bars, a bottle of poitín, porno, sex. Then he moved on to soma and robusto. Nothing worked. He sank into nihilism.

  He needs something every day just to make it through each day. He finds it in the illicit robusto trade that flourishes in the slums of Orion cities and now reaches outward with the war, couriered to fighting worlds via a stream of replacements and crews riding convoys. It pours out of spaceports, fans to the frontlines hidden on fleets of maglev trains and on acoustic trucks carrying tightly packed protein powders to grow field mockmeat, or coarse grains to make into trench gruel and bread. It floods inland from the far Thalassa coast, to the wounded black, delaying the desperation that resides there but not helping it or ending it. It’s on the other side, too, moving west-to-east. Both high commands worry about the effect on morale and impose severe penalties for trafficking. Still, robusto slithers into the enormous rear area black markets. It offers a brilliant quickening to lives everyone knows are too short in any case. Wrung out and forfeit lives, like Yuki’s.

  As his habit grew the price rose. He paid with rations, then with his next R&R pass. Finally he went all the way. He offered men kliba, rough submissive sex. He learned to say “oral or anal? How do you like it?” He became the thing he used to say he despised, and did. Abused, self-loathing, a pathetic submissive. An unloved creature other soldiers call a “whore of the black” as they turn him over, then pass him around. The war has hold of him. All seeing, all possessing, all consuming. It’s suffocating him, destroying him as war always destroys men who must wage it but didn’t start it and no longer believe in it, but can’t escape from it. Yuki is falling over an event horizon into his own singularity, into oblivion.

  He is one of life’s weak people who take robusto because he senses that he’s a failure, then fails utterly because he takes robusto. He can’t get through nights without it anymore, not when the dreams come and the down spiral repeats. Now he takes robusto because of terrible dreams and has the dreams because he takes robusto. Tonight he’ll double dose, and try to steer his first dream to psychedelic places. An hour ago he remembered a verse he learned in school, though he can’t recall the ancient author who seems to understand him so well though millennia separate him from the black. ‘To die, to sleep ... to end the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.’ He wishes it on most days, especially today. He needs robusto tonight, knowing that Redbeard is lying out there, broken on wet yellow clay less than a klic away.

  He crouched low, darted side-to-side, and finally passed into RIK First Trench on the word of Klava Nast. He got an extra ration of fruchtequark when he showed up, a rare ‘return’ from going MIA in the black. There were extra servings from One Platoon because it took so many casualties. He hoards the second ration as he hoards all food, to eat alone and unbullied later. Or to trade for robusto, should he run out on a day kliba trade is lagging. It’s made with cold grain and sour curds that bitter his lips and teeth. He drinks the thick fruit soup slowly, lying in a bunk waiting for Four Company to leave. Two portions. It really has been a rare day.

  He decided not to trade the second portion. Didn’t need to. Yesterday, before the raid, he paid an intimate price for a secret square of spiced robusto. Now he slips it from a hidden pocket he sewed into his blanket. He keeps the thin blanket purposefully filthy, so no one will want to share it or steal from it. He unfolds the tiny paper furtively, tears off two small corners and puts both under his tongue. The silky, seductive chemical is the only thing restraining him from holding a frag grenade tight against his gut. It’s a wildly alluring thought that comes back to him each gray morning, follows him all day, and slips into the bunk with him at night.

  All Yuki’s coined faith is spent. He teeters, one foot on and one off his long, winding path of moral denial. Or he did until today, until the happy day he spent in a crater with a stranger he called Redbeard. His day of truth, of his brotherhood of the black. He won’t go back to lies. No matter how useful they are out here. After all is said and done, when all the bodies are burned or buried, he knows that he’s nothing special. Every day he lives and each new brush with death confirms it. Especially today, when Redbeard’s gray splattering death left him so sober and clear that he never wants to be sober again. Never.

  At last he looks into the secret place idealists fear most to go, and seldom tread without falling into despair. He recalls his fury in the Beard frontline. He wonders if he killed the barbarossa man’s friends. He wonders for what reason Redbeard spared then saved him. He asks the question no army wants a soldier to ask, ever. ‘Why? Why must I do these things? My gods, what have I done? What am I doing? Look around, Yuki. All is ruin. All is the black. Am I too ruined by the war? No, I admit it. I’m ruined by me. I failed the great test of all war. Not of courage but of kindness. It’s not just about my survival, it’s about the survival of decency amidst the indecent. Yet I know that my soul is dead. War and I conspired t
ogether, to murder my decency. I am a stone killer and stone dead. I murdered Yuki Hoth.’

  Now that he’s back from the crater where he left Redbeard’s unburied corpse, the men of Two Company seem utterly dull and indifferent. Almost inert. Distant, unapproachable, lethargic and unworthy. Like the war he once worshipped but no longer believes in, he doesn’t believe in them anymore. Alone with a bowl of cold fruchtequark and double robusto flakes under his tongue, he realizes with flash blinding clarity that he truly doesn’t care about them. Not one man in his squad, platoon or company. He doesn’t care if anyone comes back from the raid. Doesn’t care who they kill or maim on the other side. Doesn’t care about anyone in the battalion or division. Doesn’t give a fuck for his too proud homeworld, or higher purpose or civilization, or Purity or claims to Lost Children, or Rikugun or Pyotr.

  ‘Hundreds of millions more will die in this war, and fighting will still go on. What does it matter what I do inside that bigger fact? I don’t care who wins or loses, no more than about these ugly louts and bullies in my Company, about the Brute, Coward, Fixer, Fool, Joker, Murderer, Musician, Pusher, Rapist or Thief.’

  ‘I don’t care about anyone in the Four Platoon raider party. I don’t care about the Beards and Squids on the other side. Someone will die tonight, and tomorrow, and more on the day after the day after that. It doesn’t matter who. Not to me.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be my enemies, across the black. Why? Redbeard my enemy? Not mine! You’re my band of brothers? My left buttock! Comrades of the barracks? Pahhh! I spit on you, I spit on it all! I piss on Pyotr Shaka and his war!’

  He isn’t just knackered and bitter, bone weary of combat. He has done it. He has arrived at the truth of heresy. He believes in unbelief. He is a free man. He no longer cares about anyone in the war because he truly understands that the war doesn’t care about him. It doesn’t care about anyone it sucks into its gaping red maw, chews up and shits out, black and corrupt and mangled and stinking. The war is an immense carrion animal, unconcerned with color or cause. Only death.

  He was not a bold youth who wanted to change all the worlds, and imagined that he mattered to them. He always believed in things much bigger than himself. In moral progress, in the gods, in Pyotr and the Imperium, in love and literature, in the lyricism woven into the fabric of Nature. His answer to bleak core Grün belief in an endless cycle of suffering and redeath was to live on the margins of now, in the dull but pleasant miasma of poetry and minor scholarly pursuits.

  He was a kid. Now he’s a man, with experience of war. Now he knows that childish option, living inside literature, was always false. Anyway, it’s closed to him by what he has become in the war. That door is forever shuttered behind his stolen youth, no matter what he whispers up his sleeve in his bunk alone each cold morning. It’s as far away from his now as his mother’s cottage, adjacent to a surf beach on Oceanus. He doesn’t care about art or culture or literature, about cosmic meaning or philosophy of the good life well lived. He doesn’t care if the Universe itself winks out in the next second or minute or hour. ‘Good fucking riddance!’

  He knows that the problem of suffering is the inevitable human condition, not social hierarchy or corrupt politics or lack of good leaders, as he thought before coming out to the black to see it firsthand, naked and nailed to a torture table. He knows the questions that matter are inside the soul. Inside him, that he carries his answers like a weight of wrought iron wrapped around his wilted spirit. He’s too bitter, too trapped by fear to escape himself. He’s caught in the Cosmos, as lonely as the unbound stars and all the vile gods who rule them. ‘All the gods of my youth are dead. Why can’t I find some other gods? Because they have all left Orion.’

  All the famous literature he read in college is dead to him. He sees that it only referred to itself. All the great books of history he watched taught him nothing essential. Only the now of war is real to him. Not supposed origins or unforeseen endings. Not declared purpose or purposelessness. Not its disputed causes and all the false claims made by both sides, to justify sending out our heavily armed youth to slaughter your heavily armed youth. Not the comradery he was promised. Not any higher cause. Especially not the war’s higher lies about sacrifice and nobility.

  His illusions are shed.

  He must opt out of the war.

  He must follow the dead Buddha.

  He must get out of his own burning house.

  Above all he knows with utter clarity that ‘I, Yuki Hoth, have no high personal destiny. That even if the times are great, I am not. That I’m just a small, lonely man lying in a dank bunker with icy feet and an enervating hunger growling in my flat stomach. Lying all alone with rancor in my hollowed heart for all the lies that brought me to this place, and force me to face my final and fatal disillusion.’

  On most days he’s a curdled old man, although aged 21. He never feels young. Never feels bold with new hope, in love with beauty, intoxicated by an expanding universe of personal possibility. He can’t even remember his first kiss or first love, his first broken heart or first bedding. Nor his first fistfight as a boy, or first kill on Amasia. Yuki’s time of firsts is over. His sole and true and final love is Death. She comes to him when he calls to her at night, straddling him like a front whore.

  And yet, there are moments…

  Unexpected and unannounced,

  they take him by surprise,

  and he forgets the war.

  The old Yuki returns, distantly familiar to the hollow man he is become. A stranger from a broken, windowless past that surprises him with a burst of joy as he innocently stoops to scoop a handful of pine needles and crush their bitter scent against his palm and nose. Or when he reaches out to pluck a summer blossom, or chucks a long blade of sweet flairgrass, sticks it between his teeth and sucks its nectar. Or he will look up in startlement out of his slit trench or FOP and admire the majesty of Orion and the Milky Way spillage, pouring over a wide night sky.

  But such moments are fewer, more fleeting; the voids of his vacuum despair between them wider and emptier. After losing Redbeard, he’s drawn to Death like iron filings to a magnet. Without her, he’s always alone amidst the millions. With her, he is master of all he sees. Death bedded all his camp pals and frontline mates, ended all their forlorn grunting and sweating and weary lives with a shudder in her loins. Yuki embraces her, too, holds her image tightly to his breast each day, pushes into her every night. Thrusting angrily, yet always rolling off unsatisfied.

  He feels his losses fall between his fingers, like spilling grains of sand outside his mother’s home on Oceanus, a smell of milky fish and seaweed on the air. He can’t hold onto his past or see any future. Only endlessly repeating nows, and his each and every now is full of reddening rage, of pain and war and loss and nothing else. Feeling falsely vital this night with a double rush of robusto in his veins, he asks: ‘Where is my darling Death? I need to hump the bitch again tonight.’

  He falls asleep. Yuki’s time of darkness comes. He submits to the dread Will of the descending Kali Age, accepts its violence, wrath and despair. He’s a lost boy, like all the others of his lost generation. Without a past or a future, he exists only in the Moment of War, which becomes for him the Sum of All Things.

  Nectar

  RIK 400th ID is transferred to the deep south a month before the first iron frost hits in Year Three. “It’s quiet here,” the company CO announces. “You boys rest up for a few months before we go back north and glor-ee-ous Two Company and the whole of the mighty 400th wins this war for Pyotr all on its own!” A few new men cheer. Old hands like Yuki are stone cynical or just indifferent. It’s all P&S.

  Just more “piss and shit” dumped on the Company and Battalion and Division by rear area staff officers. Veterans believe that they’ll never be sent back north where it’s warm. They think they’ll freeze to death in the antarctic south before that happens. Most of them aren’t wrong. Strong night winds rustle stricken black pines overhead, to send
snow cascading into two man slits. The heavy snow softly buries struggling, hotly cursing men. They lose the first veteran that night. Looks like he just stopped struggling, stayed buried under the snow that filled his slit to two feet over the top, and went to sleep forever. The other veterans envy him.

  It’s silent in the austral mountains after the first heavy snows fall, marking the start of the war’s third and harshest winter so far. The almost anonymous fighting of a long war without change or flanks stretches so far south even the mountains have no names down here, just map numbers to guide in the artillery and a few AI bombers that screech and streak across the sky, accomplishing nothing. 400th ID occupies Mountain 375, although before they’re done the men will call it Mount Sheol. It’s a place of darkness where the dead dwell, righteous and the unrighteous together. It’s indifferent to their character or choices they make under the southern winter nights, cutoff from all life in Orion and from all the gods except War.