I've learned to love the quiet of the ice. The perfect stillness of the plain in front of me, and the perfect silence of hard vacuum. Sometimes when I look long enough, my mind quiets too, and I don't even feel the cold anymore. My eyes, my mind, my soul, just a sheet of ice, frozen into the plain.

Then I'll feel the rumble of an artillery barrage and the fear comes back. I'll try to cry, but my suit will harvest the moisture from my tears before they even leave my eyes. I know I'm here to die. I don't know if command even knows I'm still up here. I never met a lookout before I was stationed here. I don't think they ever leave.

Hanging on the side of the torpedo transport, slipping through the water, feeling the rush of it over your dive suit. Ready to launch off and crack open anything you see move.

I can hear the things outside the sub. They're fucking talking, I swear. I can hear the ice scraping. God knows how many miles shifting, sublimating, getting ready to drop on the sub and crack us open. I can even hear them tunneling up there, tapping like fucking ASMR or some shit.

Of course, they can't lock down the whole army. The thing about forever war is that it's fucking expensive. When you're on the surface you can keep track of time by the thump of the supply drops landing from orbit. Someone's gotta move all that cargo. You got the cargo drivers, the accountants, the warehouse workers, medics, engineers, maintenance, eggheads. Most of the warmies get put up in a barracks that can house 20,000 on their first night. Hell, a lot of them get lost right there. And when the entire operation is constantly moving when the ice shifts, it's no wonder the whole thing's FUBAR.

Generally things get looser the deeper you get, and the further you get from headquarters. Permanent habs start to pop up, lots of modified gear. A bit deeper and there are markets, farmers, craftsmen. Even some artists. Command knows about them, but what can they do? They're already using everything they have to keep control of the grunts still in regiment. And the trade goes both ways. We couldn't survive without all the supplies that get "lost" along the way, but every single grunt up there is jonesing for a modified heater, an overclocked suit, or just a cheeseburger. You wouldn't believe the kind of food you can grow down here with sun lamps and recycled waste. First time I had a bread roll down here after years of rations and nutrient slurry, I cried.

"Miss you Ma, sure is cold, keep fighting the good fight." Yeah fucking right.

I got out before the big offensive to take Linea Kennet. They had to triple the number of MPs just to get enough bodies to the front. My whole unit got lost in the mix, stationed at some staging area for a week while command tried to get everyone in position for the push. With so many suits going through, it was easy to slip away from the barracks and bullshit my way past the MPs. They were mostly going after the scared ones, soldiers trying to sneak around and lost warmies.

"Orders from SGT. whoever, reporting to Station wherever," was enough to make them look past me to the next poor fuck.

It didn't take me more than a day to find a ghost unit. They were "stationed" at a tunnel junction, guarding nothing, just like every other unit. Had a mess hall, barracks, loading dock, even a command tent with a captain. No idea if the guy was really a captain or not, but he had the uniform and a clipboard. I think they might have even been doing real work, routing supplies through the tunnels. But not a single guy there had any orders. Half the unit were fixers, and the faces changed every day.

I spent a week there learning the game, figuring out how to move around the backline without getting stopped by MPs. A lot of the guys there would give you rations or stims for nothing, they had sources that could get as much as they wanted. Some of the vets had been there for years, but I wasn't going to stick around that close to the surface.

Packed some gear and headed deeper, following the freshest route I could get. The cracks in the transport routes and the unauthorized mole tunnels get patched constantly by the maintenance crews. Moles dig new ones as soon as the old ones freeze. Let me tell you, you don't want to be in one when it gets flooded. You could be frozen in there for weeks before your suit gives out. Turns out my route wasn't really good for shit, and I ended up hiking down there for two weeks, looking for passages behind loose panels and tunnels where the signs didn't match up with the official maps. I had been out of rations for two days when I stumbled into the enclave.

I held onto the rifle for a while. Didn't feel whole without it. But there's no one to shoot down here, and if some CO or MP comes down here, not having my service weapon isn't going to stop a court martial. Not that they'd get this far before a rebel guard took them out. I traded the rifle for some tools and a better bunk.

A "war correspondent". The brass had the whole regiment parading past that schmuck. He got the grand tour, all right. Got to see one of the big drills in action as it melted through a few meters of ice. I'm sure he had a lot to say about the tragedy and heroism of this war.

What they don't know is that's the first time that drill ran in months. No one wants to rock the boat. You start drilling and the seismometers have you pinned in minutes. It just takes one melt drone to bring down the whole tunnel on you. Nowadays trench foot kills more than bullets. Sweat pools in the bottom of your suit and you can't get out of it for days. We're out here dying of fucking 20th century diseases.

I've never seen an enemy soldier and I don't know anyone who has. Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone out there at all. Maybe they wised up and stopped sending people out here to die, figured they could just let the drones take care of it.