*
In due time, even the soles of jackboots dissolve into tracks.
Riverine was his name—the new kid—battalion initials and nursing-kilt folds still starched and pressed clear with gold and dark blue piping from a mechanical loom. Penal regiment, vassal state, signal corps, maybe? No. The carrier feels herself swallow. Her knee drum against the handguard and curved Bakelite magazine of her automatic carbine. She had flung his chest-transceiver out the troop compartment days ago, when—patched through the thing’s frequency sixty-klicks and a razor gulch beyond—she felt a tuning fork sink, worm, amplify and inflame the surgical scab above her breast—hearing some distant corporal-carrier howl, olive drab and nylon netting molten and overturned, oozing with boil-wracked skin, cooking gunpowder and incinerating ceramic into a ditch.
No more quinine-steroid tablets. No more dark chocolate or lemon powder to cycle, dissolve on the tongue. No more second opinions, sterilized scalpels, honey-petroleum salves. No more frontier shrines. No more night-carrier. At midday she crested down from the foothills and eased the tank into the open plateau between two dunes, toggling shut the electrocardio valves, the last of the inner inertia radiating wireless down the back of her spine and into crusting skin. Dozens of others to the northeast, mopping up after the paratroopers and internal agitators—must have slumped to parade rest too—making way on some highway dividing line or piling up by village wells, a barrier reef against the mass exodus of mule trains, pot-metal sedans and elderly shepardesses—or were shuddering alive, crews positioning about: main guns, engineering plows, jerry-rigged howitzers, wire-guided missile batteries swiveling, belching blinding plumes of white and blue.
Before lunch as she slouched forwards and saluted westward, muttering a shitty battalion mantra about eternal revolution and stardust—picturing curtain rods on mercury rivers and smoky, surefire crowds leaping over golden balustrades and stomping, crushing underfoot some grand wizard’s nose—he stood alongside: knees locked, ramrod straight, his right thumb touching the brow, rifle stock flush with the ground, displacing sand grains which massed in a diamond around the buttplate. Mass. Mantises to roaches to fleas and lyme-ridden ticks, twisting over a concrete barrier as rebar and glycerin drums split, seared and cubed through the heart.
Still he prods, stirs, and tips back his tinned beets.
“Sixty seconds,” she quickly said, feeling a finger trace an external water drum, around the fraying strap that bundled in position the officer’s lockbox. “Then I need your hand. We’re free of the Mescalines, see. And the sun’s straight out. They never fire their mortars when the sun’s out.”
“Why?” His right shoelace was loose—his left halfway gone, the hide and what remained of some bone reinforcement propped up to air out upon the gradual curve where reactive plates and an assemblymonger's acetylene torch broke file and began to rise for the commander’s hatch, the wilting main barrel. “Is it the heat?”
She shrugs. “They’re long past that, since we pushed deep. Now it’s culture, or their pride. Or they know each duckling in one of those convoys has an inner carousel full of those time-compression warheads.”
“Compression warheads?”
“What you’ve loaded in our main breech, but airtight. All lovely and sterile. Able to turn crags and their little encampments into blood custard,” she replied. Maybe he didn’t buy that one. A single pass from a hologram-blotting bird and twenty limbs strewn in the rising dust would suffice. “It creates a chain reaction, naturally. Call that a one and done.”
“One and done…what happens if you get sick, ma’am? Or otherwise incapacitated?”
“Your charges come first. Final carrier contingencies are confidential. Statute a thousand-and twenty three-something.” Muscle twitched, touched nerves. A verse escaped, flat and unbidden: “Assuming there is enough locomotion to the tracks and the main armaments, the carrier, as the seniormost officer, moves and returns fire.”
“Assuming. Assuming you, well, we, cover enough ground. At the rate we’re going, I don’t think I’ll have any. Charges, I mean. I feel-”
“I like you. And your feelings," she responds. “In fact, we’ll be at their gates soon—and the rest'll come shuffling out, nodding along and blubbering about their feelings. And the quartermasters liked your feelings enough to hand you a rifle, didn’t they?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good.” A glorified crutch, she mused. But as the right arm of the state, it’ll brain their walls all the same. “If they ever score a lucky hit after dark, I’ll chamber a shell and readjust. You’ll dismount as motor infantry.” A quick glance downwards to his lap. The tin of beets had gone empty, serrated rim and saliva stinking, curdling red. “Speaking of which…show me. Run point.”
He was off with his rifle, scooting forwards down from the deck— barefoot—off the lip and into the sands, his free hand fumbling in a kilt pocket. Then it drew back—swinging upwards, copper jacket and lead ball peeking out, streaking dirty the webbing of his fingers. The bolt slacks open: stripper clip and corroded, indigo-brass casings snapping, charging down to seat, nest with oak and blued steel. A little wheeze, and his right uniform cuff comes loose, drooping. His index had barely grazed the safety, still locked forwards. Runes. A minted child.
Her eyes traced, watching the fabric pile and roll under her thumb. A short cock of his head. A truncated glance at the automatic carbine swinging, gently clinking against her thigh. He let out a whimper as a nail cleared, terminated only with the base of the epaulet on his upper right shoulder. The embossings on sunburnt skin and subfoundations clustered, shattered, bickered, rose and fell in inches and moles and threshing burns. Leper’s oak, a rolling pony, a shallow school of smelt–terracing up from where there is an intake officer’s soldering iron met beneath the fat, enough to cauterize and isolate the layer where skin flexed. Too young and talisman-devoid to metastasize. Too old and cross-cut to erupt, to articulate, to be weaponized and press ganged in waves. Hundreds, thousands of them were—before the palatial gates were dynamited and a high priestess’s tattered robes fluttered atop a pike—when the phosgene failed and the enemy bled the frontier in fire, scrubbing, purging blockhouses and brass-studded palominos to smoldering, croaking husks. The veterans packed the youth halls and state clinics every turn of spring for their yearly dose of penicillin and subsumption inhibitors. Emaciated, graft-swollen figures in overcoats shuffling, limping, wheeled motionless in wheelchairs and miniature rickshaws. One, rocking themselves on an overturned janitorial bucket, had edged over to the neighboring kvass dispenser—pressing a damp cheek of porcelain to its lower flank, feeling the fluorescent glass and smoky black tremor: ticking cool and uniform and inert with an internal compressor.
“You’re unsecular as they come, huh?” She says at last, snapping open the officer’s lockbox. “At ease. So…I suppose you’ll know. You’ll know what I want you to do.”
He strikes the bolt home, hefting the stock to port and takes hold of a syringe, toying with the plunger. The carrier unslings, sets down her carbine and stoops—angles to be prone—bracing her shoulders against a reinforcement rib.
“Those vials. Three milliliters,” she calls, "of Lidocaine II. And hold the methandriol. Top it all with amphetamine.”
Transmission, weld seams, deadwood trimmings snared between the little brushings. The carrier clucks her tongue. A finger tracks the tank’s belly, olive drab and bare, glistening steel cut like contrails. At the base where a rivet met a band of exposed wiring, she finds it—pitted, a mass half the size of a lump of oxtail fat, squirming, pushing back against its mesh divider and electrical prongs stuck in its gills—flashing open, shut, exposing a short ventricle and bare, dangling nerve. Her lip purses. She backstrokes entirely into view, feeling the heat radiate from the thing into the weeping, yellowed crust branded, spreading. She mutters, raps a knuckle against a track wheel. She feels its abdomen for any current. She senses her crust tingle, finally crack and fracture—oozing black into her undershirt. She shouts. She feels the syringe thread, pivot into her hands. She claws for the topmost clasp in her field jacket. She grunts, jerks her head, and kicks air. She crumples her garrison cap. She twists a dislodged prong back into position deep into its circulatory system, socketing the opposite end towards the channel feeding under the ammunition carousel, the lead-acid batteries. She jabs in the hypodermic tip. She tests the plunger. She dreams of a sterile bolt of gauze. Of a carbine barrel nuzzling her jaw. She squeezes, digs, dry heaves.
She injects.
The carrier stands, swaying forwards. A leg jitters, stiffens to thread upward the sling of her carbine. Riverine’s gaze was elsewhere. Figures in burlap and thickened mohair shimmer, trace and bob with a lone tripod along a painted horizon. In the troop compartment past his rear vision—aligned parallel with the elevation sights of the rifle, low were the moans of some deserted partisan behind a vinyl curtain.