#ice war

I'm not here for honor.

New ones are 'more efficient', 'smaller thermal signature', yeah, fuckin great. Just means they come through the tube cold as fuck. Average loss of 5C, AND you can't use them to get some feeling back in your fingers.

Last one I sucked had ice chunks in it. Whatever meat flavor got separated out. Like chomping on ice chips and oxo cubes.

Bad enough we can't get anything solid in this psuits, but now its liquid and cold? Fuck.

Seems like the bodies working the asteroid belts finally had enough of making somebody else rich. Or maybe the company just missed a shipment and they're trying not to starve. 

Good news is, plenty of water to be had around here. And we're used to shitty-to-no grub anyhow, so a week on quarter rats ain't exactly life changing.

Supply always plans for this shit regardless, it’s why we got a buffer cache. It’s way fuckin less than it should be, cause brass is worried about theft and enemy raids, but it's still there, and the HQs got hydroponics going as well if the shit really hits the fan.

Course, if supply is disrupted for long enough – well, it's happened before, and shit gets real fucked, real quick. A body gets hungry enough and all the civilization leaves it in a hurry. 

This place is so fuckin barren that shit devolves a lot quicker than back home, too. No forest to scrounge in, no locals to pillage. Only people left to turn on are each other.

Bodies start dropping bodies to take their rations, or -- that other thing. Those that aren’t willing to go there start to eat bits of their psuits, furniture, boots, anything even remotely edible, and some things that aren’t. Anything to fill their bellies.

Course, sometimes it makes the bodies real eager to fight. Rumor spreads that the enemy’s sitting on a pile of supply and suddenly that private who's all doom and gloom and The Real Monster Is Man becomes fucking foaming at the mouth rambo.

Some bodies are saying brass withholds supply for just that reason, but that’s horshit. A hungry body can't fight for shit. A hungry body is weak and stupid. A hungry body doesn’t think too hard about who it’s hurting to feed itself.

‘S why Brass is scared shitless about supply getting disrupted. It’s the last thing they’d let get fucked up on purpose, speak to any CO and all they fucking talk about is supply. We're all way the fuck out there by ourselves, and if there's a mutiny, earth ain't gonna be able to send a relief force for months. That’s what the enemy was, to start, a mutiny. ‘Course, they mutinied for other reasons. Probably.

Take Backwards over there, we call him that because once he managed to put his psuit on backwards. Bypassed the safety locks or something, fuck if I know. Shaved the back of his head all strategic like in a mirror, left a little moustache and eyebrows, then drew the gunny's face on there with a marker. Fucker took watch like that, with the mask opaque, then when someone wanted to get past he'd clear it and say some stupid line, like "What are you lookin at? About face!"

Only thing is, he couldn't see shit like that, so he ended up doing it to gunny himself. Made him do PT all backwards, we were all cracking up so hard we couldn't fucking breathe.

War is hell, yeah. But at least this war is fought by people, and people are people no matter what they're doing. Everybody cracks a joke or two to keep sane. And just like you got The Funny Guy in your office, theres The Funny Guy in the platoon -- not the same guy, though, I think.

Not sure gary down the office has the same kinda humor as One-Two, who likes to shout "Grenade! Grenade!" to get us all to go prone, then starts making noises like they're shitting in their psuit -- which knowing One-Two, they probably are.

Then there's the darker stuff, the stuff that never makes it into the dispatches, where a body's feet get frozen off and they ask the medic if they'll still be able to play the bagpipes. Or when a body gets shot and freezes ass up, like they're a porn star or something, and somebody says they'd hit it if she wasn't so frigid.