Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  Snowfall migrates like a slow motion avalanche into alpine valleys below the peaks, as temperatures turn south along with Yuki. Long valleys half filled in with snow and ice look like flat, blue-white lakes when bathed in quintuple moonrises of the Winter Solstice. A severe cold snap heralds worse to come as the southern polar region welcomes the lowest temperatures in 400 years. The air turns so frigid Yuki hears the night sky creak. Except for patrols sent out by overeager officers, only ghost bears move in the white laden woods. During the biggest blows sentries spend more time digging out buried slits or listening posts than watching for the enemy. It affects electronics, too. Sometimes a hardy infiltrator crawls right up to a picket or FOP and sticks a black dagger into an unwary throat or gut or groin.

  More often, during the deepest, howling blizzards both sides just stay put. Men fear to venture out and die alone ten meters from the hutch they left just to take a piss, only to fall into an unmarked drift. They know that their screams and cries for help must go unheard inside a wildly whirling wind, by other men who will not come out to look even if they hear. So piss freezes in yellow buckets in every corner of each room, adding its tartness to the odor of the overused air. A few gung-ho officers who insist on “blow patrols” sometimes don’t come back from foolhardy, useless missions. Men from patrols that return without their officers say they called out, say they looked, say they waited, say they saw and heard nothing as they searched for the captain or major in a whiteout gale. Other officers get the message. All blizzard patrolling stops.

  Soldiers catch their breath as inhaled air shapes tiny, sharp ice crystals in their throats and lungs. Lips whiten, crack and split. Mouths dry as moisture is sucked out from warm bodies into an arid ice desert. Teeth ache as they conduct subarctic cold to jawbones that hold them. Men pant like exhausted dogs, taking many little short breaths because they’re rightly afraid to drink in too deeply the jagged, lung ripping, potentially lethal coldness of the hostile subarctic air.

  There’s always some activity, even so. On any morning that more moderate temperature permits, a FOP guard in blue utes hears snow crunching underfoot under the trees as an enemy scout creeps close. The guard knows a Rikugun is out there, but never shoots. The scout stops at his usual spot, lifts up his icy visor and calls out of the gray mist, his hot breath whiting the air: “Hey squidy, surrender!”

  Every day the Alliance sentry yells back: “Fuck you, locust!” His words float over to his grinning enemy on a puff of frozen steam escaping from warm, pink lungs. Neither man even warms his weapon anymore. Each day the scout makes his way back to his frozen slit unmolested, puffing little white breaths that mark his path to the watching ACU guard like a boy’s model steam train under the trees. Both sides like the jocular, ritual matins. It’s weeks before anyone tells an officer. When a stiff little shit lieutenant on the RIK side orders the Alliance FOP fired on the next morning, his men frag him instead. They roll his body into a deep drift.

  A frontline peace breaks out in several high mountain valleys. Although the artillery shoots daily overhead, mainly at each other, frozen armies mostly leave each other alone. Soon an illicit across-the-lines trade spreads to opposing FOPs, trickling back to pickets and then into the trenches. A local black market is driven by novelty goods, by boredom, and by cabin and barracks fever. Also by common knowledge that no soldier on either side started or wants this war, and all would end it yesterday if they could. Once the officers get in on the trading game, taking a cut of cross line profits or also just relieved to take a break from fighting, the unofficial truce takes off and spreads up-and-down the all white vales.

  It’s different up north, in the deserts and on the Great Plain savannah. Maybe it’s the extreme heat that hots the blood in The Sandbox, where hate and fighting continue unabated? Who knows? Who cares? Not anyone in the frozen antarctic sectors. They’re too busy to care, trying to stay warm and alive and not bored. To keep HQs happy and unaware both sides train with pistols, grenades and masers on warmer days, without trying to engage each other. Patrols deliberately pull up short, shoot up a few big conifers, chip a rockface outcropping, and go back. Then some lieutenant or captain files a falsified After Action Report to a distant HQ that will never come out to check. The sides keep a careful distance while on required patrols, yet grow oddly familiar. Like a hunter who knows the wary wolf pack in the woods from tracks, even if he never sees it. They understand that winter is the common enemy this far south. Winter and the war. And their own far off generals.

  Then a brand new general arrives at RIK Division HQ and everything changes. Patrols are ordered out and told not to come back without ACU prisoners. Stupid stumbling assaults are ordered by HQ and made by men who wade into combat through waist deep snow. When a mortar drops on a man the hole it makes is pink.

  “We lost another two guys today.”

  “For what? Why are we doing this?”

  “We have to capture a few acres of rock so our general gets a medal.”

  ACU troops respond in kind and to scale. Each assault brings a counter assault, leading the rookie general to escalate. Escalations match each provocation by the other side as the war dumbly resumes under the low roof of south Lemuria, though the fighting lacks the intensity of hate up north, past where the foehn winds fade.

  Yuki’s sleeve is frozen this morning to a pile of flat stones where his left elbow rests on a low stone wall, supporting a humming maser held in his right hand. Ice crystals have formed inside a tiny tear, freeze burning his skin. If anyone touches stone or metal at this temperature, exposed skin freezes. Stuck to a foreign object, it tears away in strips and scraps. Fortunately, it’s so cold that his small cut doesn’t bleed. Ice covers the surface wound like white coagulant, freezing blood in place. He’s careful not to touch his maser, whose warmth would restart the bleeding.

  Yuki read about Nunavut and other ice worlds before the war, but he never saw anything like this cold on Oceanus, where the oceans never freeze and snow is almost as rare as a rainless day. He’s astonished that his breath condenses to frost inside his nostrils and over his moustache, giving it a frosted thickness five times normal. He looks like a Cossack, all fur and frost and ferocity. Though he doesn’t feel ferocious, as the severe cold air stings his teeth and lips whenever he opens his mouth for another biting gulp.

  Prone beside him, lying on the snow, is a mortally wounded man. His hands are brown with his own congealed blood. He holds them crossed over his chest as it heaves up-and-down. He’s wheezing, forcing hard-to-take, ice needle breaths. His moustache is thickly white, but much fuller underneath than hardly bearded Yuki’s. His beard is so thick and frosted, as are his bushy brows, he looks like a fabled Yeti. He’s mumbling something, barely audible. No, not mumbling. He’s reciting a traditional Life Temple prayer, only with a uniquely Amasian edginess.

  “Death, who rules over all the Thousand Worlds,

  hallowed be thy holy name. My time is come,

  thy will be done, on Amasia as across all Orion.

  Give to me, oh Death, on this day, my last relief.

  End now my suffering, for I have endured enough.

  Leave me not with daemons of the gray Yue ming,

  But lead me, oh Death, out of Dark Territory.

  I ask not to go to bright, well-lighted uplands,

  Only for release from the trials of my flesh.

  Deliver me from the endless evil of battle.

  Oh Death, yours is the empire, power and glory.

  Oh, Death, you alone live forever and ever. Amen.”

  Before he passes he looks up at Yuki, whispering hoarsely. “Thank yu, son. ‘Dems real good words yu wrote. An’ don’ worry, yu kin do it. We’se all soldyahs hiyah. Dyin’s easy for duh likes ah us. I gots duh patience ta endoor it now. Afta all dis, it’s gonna be easy ta be dead.” With a last little white puff of air, he’s gone.

  He was handsome once, the dead man. He had skin as white as lime yet was raven haired and bright red li
pped. He was a good fighter, too. Loyal and strong. He saw seven battles and slew a hundred Blues, maybe more. Now he lies sallow cheeked and stiff, slowly turning blue himself. ‘Just another stupid casualty of an even stupider war.’ Yuki thinks, matter-of-factly: ‘At least in this cold he won’t stink, not until spring comes, anyway, when things start to grow in him and under him and all around.’ Yuki has lost all his poetry. He’s a rank materialist now.

  He bends over the warm corpse, furtively searching for anything valuable to trade that the dead man didn’t already give him in return for the prayer he wrote, without believing in the words. He’s hoping against hope to find a hidden robusto paper, but he’ll take whatever he can find, to trade. He gropes guardedly, using minimal movement lest an officer see him do it. Robbing the dead is punishable by penal duty or even summary execution. Yuki’s fingers reach a waxy, barren nectar pod crushed in a ball, and beside it a hard crust of black bread in a clever, secret corner of the man’s pocket. He leaves the yellow wax but takes the stale, frozen bread. He puts it right against his naked chest to thaw, and so that he can feel it near. He’ll save it to eat when he’s alone.

  He chuckles a little madly. ‘This cooling Yeti could appreciate the irony of my death by execution. If not, he needs to find a blacker god than King Yan. One with a sense of divine comedy dark enough to create this place. Vulcan maybe. Yes, that’s the one. A blacksmith god to make the black from hammered fire!’

  The stone wall hems in a high, snow laden meadow. Or it once did, back when it had four sides. Now there’s only one, with broken off right angles at each end. It marks off one edge of a short grass meadow that hasn’t seen an animal for three years, since before the war. So it serves no purpose at all. It’s ordinary in every way except that scattered around it are two dozen enemy dead. Some are rigid and unblemished, knees and arms bent in place in classic rigor position. They weren’t killed by Two Company, which retook the stone wall in a firefight and again holds the prize of a contested pile of shepherd’s rubble. They’re dead from cold, frozen by two exposed nights perched forlornly in defense of frigid rocks no one wants.

  It happens all over the far south, death by exposure to almost space like cold at these high altitudes. An abandoned farm halfway down the valley was taken by RIK, then fell silent. A small scout patrol of Blues came down Mount Sheol’s side to find out why. It reported to Division HQ that all RIK inside were dead, but not killed. “They just wore out,” the report laconically stated. A similar RIK report about the dead Blues at the stone wall is making its way back to Battalion HQ.

  Blues in the meadow died holding fast to a wall that holds nothing out or back. They fell asleep on webs of snow, and arachnoid drifts covered them over. Others were found frozen to death in another broken farmhouse where engineers arrived to repair holes in a recaptured shelter. Five men were curled inside old fashioned wood stoves, where they crawled to warm from residual heat. Weak from frostbite and trench infections, they fell asleep in unfamiliar warmth and lacked strength to climb back out when ash cooled and embers failed. Three gray looking Blues were pulled out alive and hauled away for interrogation. One man was dead from slow burns he never felt in his frostbitten hands and feet. The fifth died from monoxide asphyxiation. It was so cold that not everyone in the Rikugun patrol who saw the two dead men lying curled and covered in gray ash thought they had suffered bad endings. A major saw their looks of longing, and ordered the stove blown up.

  Yuki’s platoon came downhill to retake the stone wall, which only his general seems to want, and only because a general on the other side wants it, too. Or for some other reason that ordinary men and women in blue and green stuck in the mountains and ordered to fight each other to capture the abandoned meadow can’t comprehend. It’s the third time in a month the wall changed hands. High up as an eyrie, it must be valued for vivid sight and sniping lines. Well, by the generals anyway. Even the snipers don’t give a shit, since it’s too cold most days to go out to the wall to hunt. And they’ve lost the will. Yuki thinks of the wall and the small meadow behind it as a kind of anti-sauna only a fool would fight for.

  Still, why wasn’t it defended by the Blues when Yuki’s platoon approached? He was surprised no return fire reached out at him from the wall. None came either from rifle pits he knew were there, along the flank lines. Everyone was suspicious and wary until they saw a line of frozen Blues living up to their color in the flesh. They were fixed-in-place behind the wall, or crouched in the shallow rifle pits on either side. A whole platoon of dead holding the valueless position as ordered, after a fashion. Frozen in place. Honorable, admirable, stupidly frozen dead men.

  The dead Blues are unblemished, with just a few chewed here and there around the edges by small scavengers. They froze too quickly for larger carrion animals to gnaw off exposed fingers or feet, even after a pack of antarctic wolves tore off rigid gloves and boots to get at easier flesh. Even the wolves made little progress on rock hard muscle and bone, not before the different colored snowmen arrived and the leader of the white wolves decided on a tactical retreat. There’s lots more food preserved in the valley. No need to stay and gnaw on these particular corpses.

  Many more red icon squids and green friendlies died during a counterattack that was just repulsed by Yuki’s platoon. The freshest dead lie in red splotches along the white sides of Mount Sheol, far below the closer and near immaculate frozen sleepers who are unmarked by wounds. Yuki can smell fresh blood, even through the cold. It’s not from the new kills or unmoving, blue popsicle statues. It’s from three Rikugun dead, including ‘old man’ Yeti by his side. That’s the one thing he likes about winter fighting. Frozen corpses are the only ones on Amasia that don’t smell like rotting death. They have no olfactory identity of their own, but smell only of winter ice and maser grease. He also smells wolf droppings, left nearby the stone wall by the antarctic whites, as if in contempt for the Blue-Green idiots who keep sacrificing members of their packs for a pile of useless stones.

  ***

  Yuki stares across the frozen valley but doesn’t see it. He’s thinking about the one good day he had down here in the deep south, when Scrounger found a nectar farm in an unoccupied valley no Rikugun unit had reached or explored. All the green-and-black bees were dead from cold or abandonment. Scrounger had no trouble from them as he loaded a bounty of a thousand broken hives into an old Troika, one of the big military types specially built in forced labor camps on the coast. When he got back every man got two sticky slabs of yellow nectar. The rest of the pods were stolen by rear officers and HQ guard units. Or so Scrounger said.

  “I couldn’t stop them.”

  “We don’t believe you.”

  “Where’d you hide the rest of the nectar, you bastard?”

  “I tell you, godsdamn rear area officers almost took it all. You fellas in Two are lucky that I brought this much back. They wanted to confiscate our Troika!”

  Some men suspect that Scrounger sold the bulk of golden pods into the hinter zone black market. One said so out loud, provoking a fight. Only Mother Duck’s intervention kept Scrounger from an even worse beating when he told his accuser to “fuck off! And give me back those nectar pods, you ingrate!”

  Scrounger was mad as hell about being roughed over after delivering a half Troika of sweet nectar. He wouldn’t talk to anyone in Two who wasn’t an officer, not for a whole week. It was real fucked up. Still, that one night even the outermost company pickets were happy, munching waxy pods of frozen nectar in the FOPs. It got all over their gloves and weapons, like thick treacle. Then it froze again. So they charged their masers to melt the sweet, solid gold streaks and happily licked the last dribs of waxy stickiness off the warm, humming chambers of their guns.

  Foraging parties roamed a thousand klics back from Third Trench during the first winter of the war, looking back then only to supplement standard RIK rations. They moved twice as far during the second winter, and twice as far again over the third, now searching for more ba
sic supplies. Battalion scroungers travel as far back as 6,000-8,000 klics from the last edge of the black, until they run into coastal foragers coming inland on the same mission. Frontline troops resent the hell out of the more privileged coasters. There are murderous firefights between divisions over well stocked barns and coveted fields and livestock, with the frontline troops ready to use even lethal force against what they see as fat and pampered coasters and other “rear area shits.” Before it stops, thousands of Rikugun are dead.

  Executions follow. The fact that pitched battles are fought between determined RIK logistics units never makes it to the servneb, so civvies back on a hundred Grün homeworlds still think their menfolk on Lemuria are living off the fat of the land and endless fishes of the vast Okeanos. There are fish out there in the deep ocean, but gathering them far from shore is impossible, since the Okeanos now swarms with hostile fleets of subsurface boats. Each there to deny fish to the other.

  Foragers ransack cellars for stores of flour and mockmeat protein powder, for butter and grain, potatoes and tinned bread. Fifty million slaughtered sheep were just enough to keep Rikugun troops in the south going during the first year, along with irregular base supplies arriving from Thalassan depots as Kaigun convoys ran ‘The Gauntlet’ down to Lemuria from outer system bohr zones. By the third winter of the war, in the hard cold where Yuki and 400th ID stand in drifts up to the waist, there’s little left to find or forage in deserted villages and fallow fields. Rikugun occupation policies of rousting civvies and food confiscation sweeps are coming home to roost after three years of neglect of the land and farms. It happens because RIK generals always think their next plan will win the war. Or the next.