Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  “Yuki stoned is Yuki stiff.” Everybody laughs. He doesn’t hear them inside his robusto high. He wouldn’t care if he did. He’s past caring about himself. About cruel words. About any of them. He’s past caring about anything beyond his next robusto fix. Tick tock. A winter minute leaves.

  ***

  Yuki is not alone in his deepening gloom that’s heading to fatalism. A similar mood infects many Rikugun in the extreme south. He’s not alone in his desertion fantasies or quailing because of the long odds against success, and fear of the hard punishment. He’d be shocked to learn how many in Two Company have insomnia and the same thoughts. He doesn’t know this because he never talks to anyone. Medics know that only the numbing drugs they hand out are keeping suicides down. Thoughts of prideful service and winning medals and “bands of brothers” don’t move or inspire most men anymore. Talk of proud mothers and fathers or distant lovers waiting on homeworlds for their return and passionate embrace no longer convince. Slogans about defending home and higher causes, of having a sure purpose in the Universe, don’t cut it anymore. Not for the longtimers, men age 24 or 25 who can’t face another Amasian winter or another year of war.

  Today is a little less cold than most days. Yuki is on sentry duty. He takes out a small slice of mockmeat he secreted inside his coat. It’s his ration for the week. Things are getting worse for Supply Services each month. Rations have been cut four times since this winter began. He reaches into his coat and retrieves a crust of black bread. He places the thin strip of mockmeat atop the old crust and eats both together. He chews warily, even sneakily. It has been months since he was in the crater with Redbeard, way up north. Months? More like a lifetime ago. He doesn’t remember sharing food with a man he just met, his last real human contact.

  As he chews he composes an idle memorial to the old man who killed himself at the stone wall, garbling ancient words with his own, uncaring what’s his or the dead man’s. Or a dead poet’s, who once keened over some scrabbly sword fight for mossy rocks millennia ago. Just like Yuki and the dead man fought to protect a dumb rock wall from dead men who never wanted it either. The verse tumbles from him like yellowed snow melt off a log cabin’s overladen eaves.

  “Cold on ice he lies,

  beside a fence of stone.

  So much blood he shed,

  then he shed his own.

  His frail body lies broken,

  on Amasia’s rack.

  I have all his stolen things

  tied up in a sack.”

  Does he grieve for the praying man as he downs a bitter meal of bobs and scraps and half stolen verse. Does he grieve for himself? Does he grieve for anything? Not even Yuki knows. Even his grief has turned gray.

  ***

  After hunger and sleep, a third basic urge of youth during the dark winter days and nights way down south is met by masturbation. Most prefer it to copulation in frigid log cabins high in the southern mountains. Sex wastes energy and means getting at least partially undressed, something no one consents to do except male kliba, who will do anything for robusto. Not the handful of Women Auxiliaries in Rikugun support camps in the deep vales below Mount Sheol’s pathetic hutches.

  “You have to pay with a loaf of bread!” one of Yuki’s squad complains.

  “Who can get a whole loaf, except the bakers?” asks a second.

  “That lot! They have sacks of flour they hoard!” It’s a third man.

  “Or you must bring real jam or a slice of mockmeat,” says an angry lad.

  “It’s what I heard, too,” confirms a cold and skinny boy, with a pimply face.

  “That means they’re only fucking officers down there,” says the first boy.

  “You’re right. They have all the real jam, and extra rations of bread.”

  “I won’t give up my mockmeat to fuck one of those pampered bitches!”

  “They’re all hags anyway. Ugly as hairless dogs.”

  They’re not, but it mollifies ‘the boys’ to think so. It helps more that in the bitter cold sexual appetite shrivels along with their equipment. They’re all under age 25, yet think and talk and act like old men approaching Final Age. They value sleep and hot food more than sex. Constantly cold, again like old men they always return to food as the only pleasure left to them. Even a few moldy potatoes taste orgasmic when slow roasted in a wood stove.

  Rikugun officers don’t have to worry about desertion in the austral mountains, as they do in temperate and hot sectors. Yuki’s right. From here, there’s no place to go and no way to get there. You can’t just decide to leave and walk off. Walkers freeze to death in a day or less. Besides, men are too afraid of being eaten by ghost bears or antarctic white wolves. Tales told about ghosts are tall as the mountain.

  Up north, when a deserter is caught he’s shot, his head impaled on a pole for all others to see. It reminds any whose loyalty to Pyotr and Purity is flagging what that loss of martial devotion will mean. Heads stuck up high are blasphemed and pecked at by cawing daws and circling vultures, who drop down to rip and feast. The headless body is catapulted klics into Dark Territory. It’s left there, unblessed by the Black Faith, abandoned by Purity and Pyotr, an invitation to trench rats to gnaw and to ghoul snakes to slither inside to nest and breed more little snakes.

  “To encourage all the others,” says RIK Main HQ in Xiamen when it orders restoration of these punishments, all ancient Broderbund penalties for treason. The change comes at the start of Year Four. General Johann Oetkert orders it personally. “No deviations. No exceptions. No reprieves. And no more protests. Just fucking do it, colonel, or you can take your traitorous man’s place on the tip of a steel pike. I can arrange for your head to be displayed by sundown. Decide.”

  It works. After a few thousand gruesome executions, desertions almost cease. Although MI knows in secret that it’s more true to say deserters are quietly going the other way. They used to go east, try to reach the coast via hinter zones. These are now heavily patrolled by SAC and Kempeitai police who take you right to the execution sites. So they’re moving over or under DT to the other side. Holding up little white flags, braving the daemons of the Yue ming, and auto bots and snipers from both sides, surrendering to Alliance. Rikugun HQ counts on the black to kill most who try to make it across. It decides it needs internal discipline more than it fears loss of intel by a few desertion cases that men in the trenches can’t confirm. It squelches reports of success and continues the beheading-catapulting policy.

  Self-inflicted wounds are increasing as a result. The mountains outpace every other sector of the black except the arctic north, where men can’t bear deep cold any better. Talk of self wounding is widespread in the winter hutches of 400th ID. The best ploy, most men agree, is to hold one arm over the parapet or a hand up high above it, clenching a glowing hemp stick between your fingers, hoping to be lasered by a sniper. Lasers are best. If you’re lucky, the wound will be repairable but you’ll get some rear time out of it. Even if the sniper uses a powerful focused maser and you lose the whole hand or have it amputated, that’s a big win. It brings at least a month or more in a rear area rehab while they fix a prosthetic or grow a replacement. Most men would trade a few hours of pain for a month of R&R.

  But it’s risky. Self wounding can bring on a courts martial, leading to a firing squad. It’s a capital offense on both sides of the black. General Sòng is nearly as ruthless in suppressing self mutilation cases among Alliance as is General Oetkert for Rikugun. Medics and doctors in all the armies are under strict orders to report any and all suspected cases, especially wounds or burns to hands, feet, arms, legs or other easily replaceable, nonessential body parts. The kind that can be grown in near rear protein vats. You can try to buy a medic, but it will cost you. Failure to report a case means the medic takes the miscreant’s place in front of an officer tribunal, then in front of a stone wall facing eight level, humming masers. Though that’s changing. It’s so costly in precious medics that the rule is hardly enforced by the ACU
since Year One, and hardly ever these days even by Rikugun. DRA is still killing medics over self mutilation cases up at the Dauran Gate. But then Jahandar and Krump and his Shishi kill everybody, sooner or later.

  More desperate men stand up to take a worse hit, to the body. They hope a big wound might be survivable and sound more plausible in triage. But you better be ready to die if you’re going to try it: body wounds are unpredictable. The smartest hold suspensor injectors in both hands, ready to stop fatal damage and pain the instant that they’re hit. A very, very few lucky ones holed big in the body manage to jab themselves fast, and are invalided back to the coast. They become the envy of everyone who stays behind. But most who try the suspend trick aren’t so lucky. They’re killed outright. Snipers on both sides are superb, and they don’t like to be used by the enemy to dodge the war with a ‘good wound.’ Stand up and they’ll take the kill shot, to the head. Even so, a lucky few with big body wounds make it out, all the way out, to a cozy rear area hospice. They send back a coded word or more often, they become a rumor. Then all who remain have fantasies about it.

  The same method, standing up to take a clear head shot, but without holding onto hope or injectors, is a common means of suicide-by-sniper for any who want to die but lack courage or skill to kill themselves. Or you can hug a grenade. Easier to do and more certain than a maser in the mouth. Miss or flinch at the last moment with a stub maser and you’ll end up drooling for life into your soup. Though only a short life, because the Kempeitai will surely finish you off for trying.

  ***

  If a sentry falls asleep, he’ll freeze to death. He’ll be standing stiffly when his relief shows up, to see why he didn’t report or return. Heated combat suits keep pickets alive in the antarctic mountain heights that crease the sky of the austral zone. Gloves and boots are a problem, so pickets way up high at night are told to change posts every two hours to avoid extremity frostbite, or death from a total heater suit failure. High or low on the mountainside, nothing can be done about a sudden squall that traps men outside. The worst howls will blow powdery snow in your face so hard that it feels like standing in a rain of steel needles.

  It’s not uncommon for pickets sick with fever and near the end of a five day modafinil dose to fall asleep while on guard duty. One kid was shaken awake at his post by an angry Kempeitai police shit making spot inspections. He pulled his sidearm and shot the sick boy right on the spot. No questions asked, no chance to answer or plead or beg. So pickets start using electric shocks in gloves or boots, trying to stay awake and alive. Though in the deep cold sometimes not even that works on frozen hands and feet that can feel nothing at all. If the hand or foot is black the next morning, off you go to the medical hut to have it chopped off. “But you can’t leave the mountain. There’s no way to get back down, until spring.”

  Officer abuse is routine. One courier is executed after losing his way in a wild blizzard, failing to deliver a message expected by the new 400th ID general, who grows impatient. He wants to launch a raid into the howling, thinks it will provide the raiders with excellent cover as they approach the Alliance line. Even though any assault will change nothing in the war except his career path. “We can’t have lapses,” the fat general chirps as he signs the warrant, before returning to a high stack of whole grain waffles soaked in ounces of silken nectar. His orderly just commandeered several crates of it, a hoard large enough to last even his general’s greedy gut for months. Two other division commanders got to the black market first. They have the largest hoards of pods. One of them also stole the Scrounger who found the honey. He transferred him, under a different serial number, onto his HQ staff. Turns out the Scrounger also had a shitload of corn hidden away.

  As winter lingers overlong, boredom among ‘the boys’ rises into rage. Men will do almost anything to escape cabin fever and the company of others whose every word and gesture, voice and facial crease, is become sickeningly familiar. It gets so bad that some volunteer to go out on combat patrols. Sometimes they never come back. No one knows if they’re taken prisoner or, more likely, fell into, or dove into, a snowdrift concealing a crevasse. If they did, they drowned under a suffocating weight of fluffy crystals and won’t be found ‘till spring. Sometimes, searchers find sets of wolf tracks atop the snow, and odd dragging marks that begin where a followed trail of boot prints stop. A few times, the tracks are bigger, much more bear like. Rumors fill the ranks about savage kermodes hunting men on the picket line, but no blood is left behind when the pickets disappear.

  Winter wolves and the ghost bears don’t kill pickets. They don’t have to. For scavengers, the war is a time of true bounty, the mountains a place of plenty. Large and small, they pick through thousands of frozen bodies, intact or cut down to bite size pieces by helpful local butchers called mortars. The chunks are hauled off to forest dens or warm snow caves, or down into little burrows at the base of a thin black pine. Scavengers are the war profiteers of the subarctic. Like flies and rats farther north, they grow fat on death even during winter. Only people want for food, civilians and fighters both. Rikugun and DRA are most needy, but even on the Alliance side real hunger is growing. And with hunger, trench ennui deepens and fighting motivation gets harder. This is what the war is become for most in it.

  ***

  Late winter nips at Yuki like a chasing coywolf’s teeth at the darting tail of a fleeing snow rabbit. He thinks there must be only hard ice and whirling snow in all the Thousand Worlds. He remembers no other environment, no life prior to the yellow-white thickness that gapes onto him and covers the land in a white shroud as far as he can see. He wonders why he has any memories at all. He thinks it would be easier to die than to remember all that he has forgotten, and all that he wants to forget.

  Yet, even for Yuki, time returns.

  Slow eons of frozen days are passing.

  Spring is coming back to the mountains.

  Spring

  Snow fills every hollow on Mount Sheol’s craggy sides, but it’s melting now. The start of each warm spring day uncovers lost soldiers who misstepped off a marked trail, disappearing beneath winter white. Deliquescing men emerge from soggy hollows. Dead men standing stiff frozen for months, uncover with the thaw. They have astonished looks on perfectly conserved faces. Some stand with arms upstretched in a last supplication to ‘Death, who rules all the Thousand Worlds.’ Others clawed at ice that covered them, or tried to swim against white undertow that pulled them down. When Yuki and others lift the thawing corpses out of the stinking holes they fill, bits of flesh tear away. Feet stay stuck to frozen ground. So they use shovels, cursing the war and the winter as they dig and scrape out last scraps of comrades and lost friends, and empty them into sacks. All except Yuki. He was and is friendless. He just digs where he’s told, as dry as the passing winter.

  After a year on the murdered northern plains the forests of Mount Sheol at first seemed friendly to Yuki, a plush carpet of warm evergreen laid over unforgiving slabs of rock, covered in blankets of snow. He survived the 400th wintering in the south, but all hope is lost when spring comes. For a last time, Yuki lets himself be seduced by icicles and hoarfrost landscapes and ice art, and by the warming that says days ahead might indeed grow more kind. He knows better, but he can’t help himself. Then four famished men from his battalion die poisoned, painful deaths from eating dark forest mushrooms they gathered from protruding, rotten stumps that emerge beneath the ice melt.

  The woods lose all allure for Yuki after that. Now even the oldest, kindliest, sheltering trees seem malicious. False and fickle. He’s glad when the big mortars start up again, beheading the treacherous trees, flaying them alive, leaving them as naked poles waving spindly arms in blue tinged clearings of polished ice. A woodland of skinny ghosts that seems well suited to the place. In predawn fog, headless trees look like Blue enemies advancing standing up, each tree a careful sniper, each shaded shrub a kneeling shooter ready to kill him with a well placed pulse.

  Small animal patt
ers startle him alert. He thinks infiltrators might be inside the company defense perimeter: a hungry squirrel searching for last fall’s missed nut, a red deer grazing on the first green shoots of alpine grass, a waking black bear looking for rodent holes or thawing, wrinkly berries to fill a growling winter stomach. He startles at the odd rattlings made by a slowly stirring possum. Jumps at the screech of a hunting snow owl just overhead. Shakes as a pine branch breaks under accumulated weight of spring snow, snapping from the trunk with a hard crack! to land with a pillowed thud!

  It’s not just him, though he’s the worst off in Two Company as the mountains come back to life and revive nerve wracking sound and movement, where before howling winds enforced a tyranny of snowbound silence on everything else. Now Yuki startles to hear trickling water coursing over rocks and falling into waiting streambeds; whistling warmer winds in the tops of tall pines; creaking tree limbs returning to level after dropping a hundredweight of snow and ice; bird song, as excited mates are sought and nests rebuilt; and the buzzing of first insects.

  A nova of vegetable procreation races up Mount Sheol’s sides, into the vales lying in hidden spurs and between the many snow capped peaks of surrounding mountains. Each new day the color of the south shifts farther from dirty white and closer to spotty green. Warming breezes blow down the high mountainsides over rushing, meltwater brooks. Warm wind splashes light spray from frothy surfaces of melt pools, soaking nearby rocks in a fine mist that turns white in overnight chill, but always evaporates quickly in the next morning’s warmth. Spring melt and growth brings rich, organic odors of rain and soil and peat and rot back to the valleys, along with fresh green mosses and grasses and fungi. Bursting into color are orange Fire Lilies and purple Giboshi and Columbines, and white Edelweiss, blue-and-white Larkspur, and Yarrow “old man peppers” on the steepest slopes. Yuki sees cloisters of Monkshood pray silent matins under violet-blue cowls.