Rikugun

by Kali Altsoba

  Clearings fill with rough, even violent, courting sounds of clashing mountain goats and rutting deer. Woods reverberate with roaring black bears and howling of arctic wolves, all white coats fast turning brown. Hidden burrows scuttle with secret, quick sex by frantic, cheating shrews and quietly humping hares. Patches of sky darken and clear suddenly, with the passing of flitting harems of chittering sparrows chasing the cock-of-the-flock, king of lechers. The woods fill with lusty red thrushes, black-and-white alpine swifts, ten thousand tiny songbirds strutting their little stuff like afterschool teenage boys crowing and competing in front of shyly watching girls. Snowpack silence gives way to the cacophony of the joy of sex, bringing a new year’s promise of renewed hope and life.

  And renewed war. For with the spring thaw, all the valley truces melt away as well. The first artillery barrage of the fighting season announces the end and the beginning. Men leave the pine huts reluctantly, watching from afar as shells crash down and burn up all the winter hamlets. Orders arrive from far off Brigade HQs and raids are made to retake the stone houses farther down the valley sides. Nature and the unnatural both resume. It’s the start of Year Four of the war on Amasia.

  ***

  There’s too much trauma among the troops. Small sounds and a quick flash of movement along a branch or across a bright skin of subsiding, crusty snow elicit urgent queries up-and-down the line and over company HUDs.

  “What was that?” someone whispers loudly.

  “Where?” Yuki asks plaintively, tensing. Feeling more wronged than Job by his dead god. It’s not Fear that makes him jump. It’s that trickster Hope with her warm sunlight. He hates her for bringing back the war with the warmth.

  “Over there!” comes the quick answer, with a pointing arm and hand.

  Shots ring out from a maser, wildly searching in the pointed direction. Finding nothing. Only breaking branches heavy with spring snow, frightening a possum rigid and stinking where he lies, pretending to be as dead as any of a litter of men’s thawing corpses in the wood.

  “Fuckin’ dog cookers!” Yuki yells, and joins the shooting. He’s not angry at the enemy he’s trying to kill or fighting for Rikugun. He’s angry at being startled and scared. It’s the most passion he has shown in months.

  Even so, he’s not as hot as the lecherous sparrows who flit and dart and chirrup for mates and hunt for living food all through the woods. All around Yuki, as the days brighten, warming spring air fills with hunters and black soil pushes up fresh sacrifices of squirming worms and grubs. Nature’s eternal wars are also reviving.

  The shooting in Yuki’s section sets the valley on edge. There’s rising fear of a sudden Alliance rush across the vale, of the first organized attack of the fighting season. That’s when a rustling field mouse, or an unwary hare or incautious fox provokes excited firing in another sector, farther down the line. Until everyone is shooting and the sound joins a cascade that fills the whole 400th frontage.

  Finally, angry officers call in from battalion HQ ordering “Weapons safeties on!” and “Everyone shut the fuck up and stop all the shooting!”

  The forest falls into silence. It only slowly eases back to making quiet noises as dazed wildlife recovers from the mad outburst. The possum comes back aware to its plodding life; the field mouse decides her discrete burrow is the better part of valor; the fox snaps at the mouse’s disappearing tail but misses, and trots away hungry but determined; the snow hare, ugly with first brown camo patches, dashes across a clearing, unwary of a young coyote lying in ambush. Every animal and man and woman in the valley resumes ordained and necessary business.

  Not so Yuki. He no longer believes in ordination or necessity or the war. He believes only in the absurdity of living and dying behind the black. Even so, he’s going to have to decide what to do. An ACU attack is pouring into the valley and will soon be climbing up this side, to overrun his position. At last, it’s the first probe of Year Four in the extreme south. RIK HQ in Xiamen is watching. General Oetkert is still pissed there was so little action in this far southern sector while his Second Shaka Offensive sputtered and failed in The Sandbox and at The Veranda.

  Sitting a high picket watching the enemy attack form up, the rim of the Mount Sheol dale below Yuki looks to his jaundiced eye like a huge, stained toilet bowl. He exhales a frosty fog of pessimism to match a yellow-green, poisonous looking gas just starting to coat the valley floor. It’s creeping ghoulishly into every crater and crevasse down there, clinging to trunks of spindly conifers shorn of needles. It slimes jutting rocks and yellows the snow. It forces men to scramble into sealed helmets in ‘an ecstasy of fumbling,’ shutting tight their HUDs just in time. Or not. Three newbies on forward observation duty down the valley side don’t know how to seal their masks. Yuki watches as they break cover, falling and clutching at their throats as they gulp down poison gas, roll over retching, hack cough and die.

  It has been awhile since Yuki fired a spandau. Since the mountains yawned to see the armies clash in the wrinkles of stone blankets they made by turning. Since he took life with concentrated light and energy. Will he do it again? Can he kill men and women in blue who are combat leaping toward him, when he no longer sees them as his enemies? ‘Here they come, same as always.’

  The enemy’s mortars pace 500 meters ahead of his leaping infantry. It’s a short range, rolling barrage, pounding ground in front of a pell-mell advance, looking to explode hidden mines before any loping runner reaches the stone wall where Yuki stands. It’s not a big attack. It’s just a lonely battalion making the first dawn probe-in-force of the springtime, the renewed fighting season in the deep south.

  Boom! Boom!

  Pom, pom, pom, pom.

  Poom, poom, poom, poom.

  Rat-a-tat-a-clatter-tat.

  Yuki watches answering shells strike the opposite mountainside, shattering slabs and sending splinters of rock down as a hail of lethal shrapnel. But it only showers onto rooved Blue gunpits, rattling and scattering uselessly over hidden and well protected ACU bunkers. In his HUD array the dropping shells appear as brilliant white and yellow blossoms when they strike. Almost like childhood fireworks.

  Yuki slowly loads his heavy maser as he watches Blue infantry waddling like fat penguins across the valley floor, then turn upslope toward his position. They’re still in winter utes as they cross a greening meadow and ascend the shady side of the snow coated valley. He waits to hear the order, alongside a thousand fighters of Second Battalion. The thin green line stands with a single pace between each man, masers at the ready. It’s supported by a dozen heavy spandaus like Yuki’s, with two heavy mortar squads just behind, with three tubes each. Behind the rows of gunners and fighters are spilled stacks of crystal ammo packs, and cracked open crates of frag and flame rounds for the mortars.

  “Shoot!”

  The command streaks across his hearing and his HUD. Yuki doesn’t hesitate. He fires on semiautomatic, ripping up the little red triangles on his vidscreen. Still high on last night’s robusto flake, he tells himself that he’s shooting at targets, not real people, not real men and women. He tells himself that he doesn’t care as he expertly makes red lights go out, one by one. Yuki is a very good spandau gunner.

  The disheartened Blues turn and run back, abandoning a badly planned, failed attack. Only then does he shift focus from red symbology and his barking spandau to real dead and dying sufferers across the valley. To thrashing, bleeding, roughly amputated figures lying spliced or splayed on the plain below, in dark blue-and-red splotches atop the last white snow. He sees that they are indeed real men. Real women, too. Yuki Hoth has killed women this algid morning.

  At least 20 dead and wounded lie spread in a long file in front of his fire zone. More lie in irregular lines stretching away from the other spandaus, with crawling figures in between where a line of hand maser troops cut them down. More lie in oddly broken poses around smoking, yellow-black circles made by the plunging mortars. Yuki thinks that freshly made, yellow-black
mortar holes in the snowy meadow, with thin underlying dirt cast up around them, look like oversize daisies growing in some giant’s garden. He thinks the broken bodies look like dead bees. In his bitter vision, there’s no verse or beauty in flower craters or murdered bees.

  Yuki lets the Blue wounded crawl away, back toward their line. Something of the winter truce remains in him, it seems. Or maybe it’s a little bit of the old Yuki? When an angular man waving a white flag highsteps out from the hidden bunkers, Yuki holds back. He desists from sending stabbing plasma fire against him. This is a man waving to him, asking for a single, strained drop of mercy. Not a target.

  Or not just a target. When it’s clear the Rikugun gunners won’t fire, dozens of Blue medics and bearers come out to help the wounded back. Yuki and the other spandau crews let them go. The officers behind the gun crews are worried. What’s happening to the men? What’s happening to the war?

  “Shoot! damn you!”

  No one shoots. The medics depart with a grudging wave. The valley grows quiet again. It’s no longer clean or beautiful. The white snow pack is scarred with wide smears where men were dragged heels first by the medics and burial details. Its crust is broken by footfalls of a thousand pairs of combat boots and by plasma strikes that left sooty trails where shells dragged low, looking for targets. Surface snow is coated with black humus and broken rock churned by the explosives. Ugly chemical stains from expired flares and gas bombs rudely interrupt the whiteness with yellow smears, like mustard on stale white bread. Or bear shit on the snow.

  All around the valley lie broken, uprooted trees. Shallow craters are dark with shredded brown bark, and pine branches and showers of shaken evergreen needles that now coat the valley floor. The tart crater field looks like carefully spaced and tended public gardens, at least from where Yuki stands. Up close they’re ragged, ugly, barren. A lonely copse of embarrassed looking torso trees stands branchless and straight up. All their bark is gone, ripped off by blast waves from the mortars. The nude and naked trees are almost comical, swaying in place like pale skinned barracks lovers just exposed by the company Joker, who sneaked in and turned all the lights on high. Men point and laugh at the trees. Yuki doesn’t laugh.

  ***

  Yuki looks to the night sky, so clear and sharp this far south, watching distant nebulae. He knows that’s where a hundred new stars are aborning, erupting into joyous brilliance as they burst out of bright placentas of the gas clouds. They join thousands of sparkling and crackling brothers and sisters, bright blue and hot and eager to burn off the last wisps of cloudy dependence. The view is breathtaking.

  But this is not one of those moments. Not a time for old Yuki to appear as he thinks how the new stars will shine brilliantly and warmly as they mature, before reddening over time to settle into old age and finally, a cindery and well deserved slumber. He thinks only about the best and brightest stars, the youngest and most reckless. The foolish ones that are most like soldiers, destined for explosions of false and futile glory while still full of childish wonder and energy and desire. He thinks only about the wasted stars that die young in immensely stupid violence.

  If he could, Yuki would sterilize the Universe with gamma bursters, spare it the burden of life and hierarchy of devouring. Instead, he whispers uselessly into his secret notebook: “Soldiers are born wailing into combat, persist in suffering, and die disappointed, dreary deaths. We arrive red wet, naked and alone, slimed in blood and ripping pain. Then we do it all again, over and over. We make more little people to wail, suffer and die here on Amasia and across all the Thousand Worlds at war.” He really is a miserable cuss.

  As he looks to the night sky he wants to go nova but he knows that he can’t. His is a damp squib of a life. His death likely will be as well. Might he age redly into contentment or old age? He knows that he never will. He’ll never grow cold, yet never have the guts to kill himself while hot and young. He kicks at a clump of ice in frustration. He’s filled with anger at the cold indifference of the war and the Universe, and engorged with envy for the blissful fatality of too hot stars.

  ***

  Fighting in the high dales in Year Four of the war on Amasia continues in the same patterns followed in Year One, Year Two, and Year Three. Through spring and the short alpine summer, the war goes on, before fading into a chill autumn. Then the southern winter, longer by itself than the other three seasons combined, descends on Mountain 375, on the valleys and slopes and fighters of Mount Sheol.

  RIK 400th ID was supposed to be rotated out, to go north to Tornado Alley or The Sandbox. Instead, it’s forgotten. Maybe punished by General Oetkert, who is thrashing about looking to scapegoat subordinate generals for his repeated attack failures on Lemuria. Pyotr Shaka is displeased. Royal uncle or not, Oetkert’s life is in danger, not least because viper Takeshi Watanabe whispers daily in Pyotr’s ear, like a minor Mephistopheles. The 400th and five more RIK divisions are left in the south for a second winter, told to hold onto worthless alpine valleys even as supplies dwindle and key battles for control of Lemuria take place farther north.

  Despair freezes men in place along with the halt to any movement. The cold seems deeper this winter than last. The veterans try to resume a winter truce, but HQs won’t have it. Over a fourth winter of midnight, antarctic war, the frontlines move less than five klics in any direction. Attacks are made and fail in blood and bone. Counterattacks follow, and also stumble in the snow and ice. When it’s over, after fighting for many months over a few acres of snow, another million lives are lost. Ten million more frozen souls sit dumb to the worlds, in adamant and ice.

  Hoarfrost again decorates with fine trace patterns jutting rocks, and windows on rebuilt pine cabins. The first snow comes early to Mount Sheol in Year Four. It falls onto weapons and inside utes, melts on necks and HUDs. It makes Yuki feel oddly lighthearted. Like he does in the first moments when he ingests robusto.

  He’s puzzled by it. He thinks it might be because he’s nearing final flameout, an end he would welcome. He does have the telltale all white-on-white eyes of a robusto freak, which makes him even odder looking when he’s outside in all white camo utes in an all white winter world. He floats on robusto through his second winter in the south, almost beyond suffering, inured to war and woe by the drug but also something else he doesn’t understand. He’s moving in a hoary mental fog from hour-to-hour, days merging into weeks, then into months. This is different. It’s innocent and revivifying. And then it happens. All at once and without cause.

  With boredom and despair deepening all around him, a gust of midwinter hope surprises his quickened senses. It’s nothing special. A tuft of bright snow falls from a fir branch, followed by a sharp crack! as the pine splits, releasing its bitter scent. It’s the smell that does it, evokes the boy hiding inside the broken, used up, beaten old man of 22 years. It smells like a distant sea, as fresh as Yuki’s forgotten childhood. Inside a moment, he remembers swimming in warm water on Oceanus with other happy children, his mother watching to make sure he’s safe. For the first time in over two years, he does an odd and unfamiliar thing. Yuki laughs.

  That’s the moment the sniper’s bullet finds him, exploding into his throat and out the back of his head. He falls like a flopping sea urchin from a stung child’s hand. Feeling bewildered yet grateful, he lolls onto a warm sand beach and gazes up to see wondrous, rolling white clouds in a blue sky. He hears sea birds calling and smells his mother’s cooking. Swordfish and boiled seaweed. Then he dies.

  Yuki Hoth falls into snow and history, another nameless number in a vast war system. He won’t be missed, not by Two Company or Rikugun. His replacement is already on the way. His war and his passing are barely recorded, his impact on the outcome no more than that of an escaped photon at last breaking a solar surface to race alone and purposeless across the entirely of a cold, indifferent Universe.

  Looking at his broken skull inside a widening circle of blood, wine red atop dirty white snow, the company Joker says to the Th
ief: “Shit! I gotta say, he was a miserable bugger, but at least he died laughing.”

  Mother Duck crouches to check vitals, although there’s really no point. It’s obvious Yuki Hoth is good and dead. As he collects ID and badges from the body the veteran sergeant reaches inside Yuki’s dirty trench jacket and locates a secret sleeve he’s seen him fiddle with every night, and talk into furtively at the oddest times. Mother Duck takes something out and slyly slips it into his leg pocket.

  Mutiny