Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #22 January 2016 | Page 13

tragedy, for I can never play the violin again.” It is
one of his old jokes, we all know he lost his fingertip
in a childhood accident.

The drone of the airship’s engines is all
pervasive. At night the sky blazes with stars, the
veldt below grey in the moonlight. It feels as if we
are not moving.

“Worse if you’re a lonely woman,” Elsa says.

The depot at Uganyika has grown vastly
and is no longer simply a marshalling yard. Shops,
cinemas and theatres have been built, along with
the more usual tonics for the troops: taverns and
brothels.

Something hard hits me in the chest, a boot,
thick-soled, calf-height, in good condition.
Suzi throws the other boot at my head.
“Catch.”

I find myself doing what is expected of me.
Going out with Kosygyn, Elsa and Suzi, we all drink
heavily, get into fights, run from the military police,
and spend our back pay in the usual, unimaginative
ways.

Days 385 - 405
Now we do have a cause to celebrate. We are
being sent back behind the mountains for leave. All
of us, for fourteen days.
We are issued new assault rifles and
sidearms, leave the MG240 and Banlite behind, and
escort a column of walking wounded and stretcher
bearers along one of the corduroy roads, now two
lanes wide. The frozen forest has been clear-felled
for a hundred meters each side of the road.

Along the shore are huge stacks of lumber,
mahogany, teak, ironwood, bleached by the sun,
now drenched in near continuous rain. Great fungal
bracts grow out of the log ends, some are white,
others an unsettling orange, a third type looks like
wet, rancid meat, the gangrenous, livid red of a
flayed wound. Further along are heaps of ivory,
caged lions, mangy and listless, and crate upon crate
of food: melons, bananas, guava, all neatly packed
and labelled, all slowly rotting in the mo