New Project
Hey drunks and readers just announcing a new novella in the works. Set in the same time frame as The Mere Tide it follows Private Reshetnikov Syvatoslav Tarasovich as he and the 113th моторизованный гвардейский (Motorized Guards) endure the impoverished psychosis of camp life immediately preceding the war between the Russian Federation and The Interim Colonial Government.
Excerpt as follows, expect the novella to be available in February:
In the cold and cauterized dark they rose into the early morning and squatted along the rim of a scraggly incline like crows on a wire and waited for dawn. They made no fires and they didnt talk and they didnt move. When he looked east there was a gray light aggregating on the hills and he alone rose and started down the knoll like some mute apparition shifted out of the blackness himself blacker yet as though a vaporous shade slipped out of a provisional dream.
He came onto the little clay trail where nothing grew and walked the barren strip to the riverbank. He knelt and sipped from the frigid waters like a penitent. When he look up again Aquarius was waning. The autumnal equinox. No sound but the flowing of water and who knew the eras it had flowed. This fragile uncharred earth. He peered into the waters to see what image might be given back but he was not there and was not there.
They filed down the slope under a moon half-hung in day. Sweating despite the chill. Through the highlands of the Urals and to the south where the Mughalzar Hills rolled endlessly away. Land untouched by the hands of man likes ome prelapsarian reserve. Some looked deep into the open country and he one of them for every man knew the hour was coming when they would cross that border and every man knew that hour they would die. And they would die to the absolute last.
Days to come like gold. They ate out of tin cans like an armed company of destitues. Metal forks with bended tines. Their beards grew and grayed with dust. They reached the muster where the division had rallied. The sprawling miles of camp shrouded under a tarp that would mask their presence from satellites and drones at too obtuse an angle. A mladshiy leytenant directed them to a tent where they dropped their gear.
He slumped onto a cot and it capsized and he sat on the floor and held his face in his hands and then he was asleep.
By the sixth of October their pay was a week late. Him and nine others requested mast and a trio of yefreytors ripened their corpuses with brass knuckles and billy clubs. They lay in their canvas tent around the coal stoves. In the long march from Ufa Siyanin had distilled vodka in his rucksack and he produced it now and they got drunk and Upensky produced his needles and spoons.
In the anesthesized haze that followed they sortied out and fell upon the first they came across, mechanics from the 113 th . The pound of fists loud in the motor pool. He squared off with a man in an orange jump suit. He ducked the wrench but not the screwdriver and it augured his bicep and he punched the man and grabbed his hair and bit off his ear. The man howled murder and he punched him in the throat. The man doubled over choking, clutching his neck. He started rifling his pockets and then he was watching the wrench rise, watching it fall.
He woke in a hole in the earth. A half-finished well perhaps. He thought it raining and when he looked up he saw a ring of men around the mouth of the hole pissing down. But it was raining too, the shroud being pourous to water. He slumped down. A knot had formed above his temple. In the nights he leaned with his ear to the wall as if he’d log by vibration alone the tectonic motions of the molten abyss. As if somewhere in his gyrus lay the primordial germ knowledgeable of the cataclysmic tides of the long ago on which they ride. Or perhaps a pebble some miles aneath his place of rest. Towards the middle of the week pieces of paper fluttered down. He looked up. Syanin stood at the rim.
завтра, he said.
