Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

the surface, floppy-limbed,
with remarkable speed and efficiency. The sky, still crowded with
conflict, rocked above him.
    He was hurled into a hole in the ground. He fell through low
gravity and landed in darkness on a heap of bodies, a tangle of
limbs. Med cloaks were wrapped around the injured, but many of the
cloaks glowed bright blue, the colour of death, so that this chamber
in the rock was filled with eerie electric-blue shadows.
    More bodies poured in after Luca, tumbling on top of him. The
mouth of the tunnel closed over, blocking out the light of battle.
There was a second of stillness. Luca squirmed, trying to get out
from under the heap of bodies.
    Then the stomping began. It was exactly as if some immense boot
was slamming down on the asteroid. The people in the chamber were
thrown up, dropped back, shaken. Splinters of bright white light
leaked into the tunnel through its layers of sealing dirt. Luca found
himself rolling, kicked and punched. Ignoring the pain in his
shoulder he fought with his fists and feet until he found himself
huddled in a corner of wall and floor. He hugged his knees to his
chest, making himself a small, hard boulder.
    Still the slamming went on. He could feel it in his bones, his
very flesh. He closed his eyes. He tried to think of the Conurbation
where he had been born, and joined his first cadres. It had been an
open place of parks and ruined Qax domes. In the mornings he would
run and run, his cloak flapping around his legs, the dewy grass sharp
under his bare feet. He had never been more alive - certainly more
than now, sealed up in this suit in a hole in the shuddering
ground.
    He huddled over, dreaming of Earth. Perhaps if he dug deep down
inside himself he would find a safe place to live, inside his memory,
safe from this war. But still the great stamping went on and on, as
he remembered the dew on the grass.
     
    Luca. Novice Luca.
    He had never understood.
    Oh, logically he knew of the endless warfare at the heart of the
Galaxy, the relentless deaths, the children thrown into the fire. But
he had never understood it, on a deep, human level. So many human
dead, he thought, buried in meaningless rocks like this or scattered
across space, as if the disc of the Galaxy itself is rotten with our
corpses. There they wait until the latest generation joins them,
falling down like sparks into the dark.
    Luca.
    He tried to remember his ambitions, how he used to feel, when the
war had been a fascinating exercise in logistics and ideology, a
source of endless career opportunities for bright young Commissaries.
How could he have been so dazzled by such fantasies?
    It was as if a great crime was being committed, out of sight.
Whether humans won this war or not, nothing would ever be the same -
nothing ever could compensate for the relentless evil being committed
here. We’re like those wretched children on New Earth forced to
commit atrocities against those they love, he thought. We can’t go
back. Not after what we have done here.
    Luca. Luca. ’… Luca. You are alive, like it or not. Look at me,
Novice.’
    Reluctantly, shedding the last of his cocoon of grass-green
memory, he opened his eyes. He was still in the chamber of dirt.
There was no light but the dimming glow of med cloaks. Nothing moved;
everybody was still. But the stomping had stopped, he realised.
    And here was Dolo’s Virtual head, a fuzzy ball of pixels, floating
before him, glowing in the dark.
    ’I’m in my grave,’ Luca said.
    ’Less melodrama, please, Novice. The Navy knows you’re here.
They’re on the way to dig you out.’
    ’Teel - ’
    ’Is dead. So is Bayla, our anti-Doctrinal religionist.’ Dolo
reeled off more names, everybody Luca could think of in the units he
had met. ’Everybody is dead, except you.’
    Teel was dead. He tried to remember his feelings for Teel, that
peculiar wistful love reciprocated by her on some level he had never
understood. It had been everything in the world to him, he thought,
just hours ago, and even after what he had seen of the child soldiers
on New Earth and the rest, his head had been full of dreams of
fighting alongside her - and, yes, of saving her from this place,
just as she had understood. Now it all seemed remote, a memory of a
memory, or the memory of a story told by somebody else.
    As if they were back in the seminary, Dolo said, ’Tell me what you
are thinking. The surface of your mind.’
    ’I have no sense of the true scale of this, the moral