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⚒️ All Quiet in the Lupus Tunnel

by Joel Glover

Warfare is commercial theatre. My dad said that to me, around a lip full of dip. We were watching a news clip about something happening in San Fernando, or Sacramento, somewhere like that. Dad spat into his cup and took a deep pull on his oxygen cylinder.

I learned later that everything is a show.

My pop was putting on a show as his lungs clogged up with fluid; he showed me what it meant to be tough. To be American.

The teachers at David Duke High were putting on a show, pretending they knew something useful that we needed to know, that they were still relevant. Later, when you saw them packing your bags at the supermarket, or picking you up on a rideshare app, or waiting tables, their show changed; they pretended they didn’t have to do these jobs to make ends meet.

All the politicians in their expensive suits were putting on a show, too; they were pretending that anyone was listening to them, that they weren’t all in it for themselves.

When I joined up my drill instructors put on a show too. They were tough, and mean, and they were proud to be wearing the Battle Flag on their lapels. But they must have known that half of us were just there to get the skills to leave the country behind without a backwards glance.

Just like I did.

I couldn’t apply to join Cavendish, their recruitment stations were banned in our State. So I had to join an Abantu, instead. Dad spat and said it was their revenge for slavery and shit, taking white men and using them in their wars. Called me a traitor to my race.

Last thing he ever said to me.

When I got up into space, I found out it's all the same with different names. 

Everything about Zambesi Miombo is a show.

They act like one of the big boys, like a rich and powerful Abantu. But they know, just like everyone else, that if you ain’t Blue, you ain’t shit. Cavendish have the most modern weapons, the newest technology, the fastest transport. We make do with second best.

But when you come from nothing, second best seems like a miracle.

ZMA has its own manual of operations, written by Charlie something. It’s all about turning our weaknesses into strengths. 

You have to be patient, the manual says. You have to rely on your firing team.

Some of the manual is out of date. 

No need to conserve fuel, even for Zambesi Miombo—the Cavendish fuel cells don’t ever fail their warranty. 

No need to conserve ammunition when you can melt it down from pretty much any asteroid in the black.

Food can be a real problem though.

I didn’t know that until it became a real problem for me.

We had been chasing some bandit contractor, out in the Lupus Tunnel, when the ‘ponics systems started to fail. Of course, no one told us. Soldiers are like mushrooms, we do best when we are kept in the dark and fed shit. Or so the bosses think. We noticed though, because our blood scans started to falter, iron and mineral levels decayed at faster than expected rates. The sergeants got on the fire-teams about taking the green supplements, but when you all get sick at once it isn’t an interdisciplinary SNAFU, its organisational TARFU. 

Without the ‘ponics there was no fresh food, and we didn’t have enough dried food to last us back to base without cutting our rations. The air started to get strange too, too thin, fuggy.

A rumour started that we were bypassing other Abantu facilities trying to get back to a home dock rather than being overcharged.

Hu-jin, Huge One we called him on account of his small size, or Chinese Hugh because we had a Welsh Hugh too, asked a navigator if we were going the quickest way and the guy got all shifty—that’s when shit got really fucked up.

The crew slammed the bulkheads shut, keeping themselves on one side with the food, meds, and us on the other with the guns.

Then they carried on.

After a week, we were starving and delirious.

Hu-jin joked that everything is edible, once. Then he put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

That was the point where Winston put some of the training from the manual to the test, and started sending out a distress signal. He turned the hull of the ship into some sort of resonator. It was uncomfortable, like living inside a sousaphone, our teeth aching day after day.

The crew cut the power to the resonator.

They plunged our entire side of the ship into darkness, but we used batteries from our small craft to keep it running and eventually they turned the lights back on.

We sat, in the dark, hungry, and waited to die.

We were lucky the Freedom Caucus found us.