NOT JUST THEN

© Dana W. Paxson 2005

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NOT JUST THEN

1544 4D

The day ground onward. They counted up their forces, their wounded and dead. Of the original two hundred and four, sixty were still able; seventy-five were dead; fifty-seven were badly injured or maimed, and would require treatment in the City vats; and the remaining twelve would heal with basic field care.

Of the leads, five remained, under one top lead and the surviving officer who had partnered with Bermarin, a tall bony Gellin Sintherou Coll member with thick eyebrows and a wide mouth, named Yuss.

The soldiers retrieved the roast koppis, which had been tumbled from their cooking frames into the dust by the blast, and finished cooking them late that day. They finally ate, after extracting all the bits of shrapnel from the sizzling meat, after their hunger and exhaustion overrode their nausea, after they had tended to the slashes and carvings of the scythewire, after they had bagged and stacked the bodies and their unmatched parts, after they had stared in fear around at the unmoving mountains for any moving thing, after they had spent a long two hours calling in, trying to get a relief train to bring replacements and take the dead and injured back to the City.

Six of the badly wounded died that night, their blood too depleted to keep them from shock even with the company’s meds. Wrapped in his thermal sleepsack, Andrew dozed in brief snatches, nodding and jerking to consciousness, again and again, hearing the blast and the buzz of the wire and the shrieks and the moans of the wounded, smelling death like shit and vomit suffocating him, until finally exhaustion drove him down.

He tried to believe himself dreaming it all, lying in Leil‘s arms in the City, but when he woke he would look up and see the burning stars and remember Nurumin‘s words, and then he would look up to the sentry posts and hope that nothing more would come, not just then.

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