“Yeah.”
 
“Good.”

That settled it.

Nesterov arrived next. Koldin knew his footfall before the door opened.

The Peshtulan stepped in carrying a long canvas roll beneath one arm and a cigarette packet in the other. He was human, narrow through the waist and shoulders but built with the compressed strength of somebody who had spent most of his life carrying equipment. Even at ease something about him appeared held under tension.

Not nervousness. Readiness.

Nesterov could sit motionless for an hour and still give the impression that he was waiting for permission to move very quickly.

He saw Koldin.

“Alive?”

“Barely.”

“Good.”

He crossed over and slapped Koldin once on the shoulder.

Defort said, “He assaulted a civilian.”

Nesterov looked at Koldin.

“Did he deserve it?”

“Yeah.”

“Then not civilian.”

“Zhat's not how that works,” Mehrab said.

Nesterov removed his boots.

“It is in Peshtul.”

“No,” said Gnidenko from the doorway, “it isn't, blyat'.”

Everyone looked.

Gnidenko stood there holding two bottles of something brown and smiling as though he had been waiting specifically for the opportunity to contradict a fellow countryman.

Nesterov pointed at him.

“Traitor.”

Gnidenko entered.

He too came from Peshtul, though anyone expecting this fact to make the two men similar would have been disappointed. Where Nesterov seemed permanently coiled, Gnidenko appeared permanently released.

He had an answer for everything, usually an inappropriate one.

Sometimes several.

Koldin had once listened to enemy propaganda broadcast across a valley for nearly ten hours. The recording had accused VSEA forces of serving foreign masters, dying for merchants, betraying their species, and being abandoned by their own commanders.

Gnidenko had replied to every sentence.

Not through a transmitter, just aloud.

When the recording claimed VSEA soldiers were starving, Gnidenko shouted that the enemy should send sausages. When it said surrender would guarantee humane treatment, he asked whether bedding was included. When it threatened annihilation, he demanded they hurry because he had an appointment.

By the second hour even Obs’rt had stopped telling him to be quiet.

Gnidenko set the bottles on the table. Boisrond looked at them suspiciously.

“Alcohol?”

“Tea.”

“That's alcohol.”

“Fermented tea.”

“That's alcohol.”

“Cultural difference.”

Boisrond moved his coffee farther away.

Gnidenko noticed the televox set in the corner was dark.

“Nothing on?”

“No,” Defort said.

“Tragic.”

He switched it on.

Static.

Then a local broadcaster speaking rapidly in Tilmuhlan.

Gnidenko listened for several seconds.

“What did he say?”

Koldin translated loosely, only understanding roughly half of what was being said.

“Weather.”

“What's the weather?”

“Wet.”

Gnidenko nodded.

“Excellent service.”

The room gradually arranged itself for sleep.

Weapons went into racks. Belts came off. Boots and footwraps were placed where they might achieve the theoretical state known as dry.

Boisrond went to the kitchen and returned with a bowl filled with beans and sausage, despite having apparently eaten dinner earlier. He sat on his cot, consumed it, drank another cup of coffee and lit another cigarette.

Mehrab wrote in a little medical notebook.

Defort cleaned the contacts of a portable transmitter while pretending not to.

Nesterov opened the canvas roll and inspected tools used with the squad's heavier weapons. He checked each object and returned it to exactly the same place.

Gnidenko listened to the radio until a political speech began and then supplied his own commentary.

“-and through sacrifice,” the broadcaster said in trade speech, “the people of Olissingen will-”

“Eat dinner,” Gnidenko said.

“-continue the great work of national-”

“Getting bugs out of my underwear.”

Defort laughed. Obs’rt's head turned. Gnidenko lowered the volume.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Continue,” Obs’rt said.

Gnidenko looked surprised.

The baxxid settled near the end of the room, folding himself into the resting posture his species used. His artificial hand removed his light-filter lenses that he always wore during the day and placed them inside a protective case.

Without the lenses, his eyes somehow looked strange, even if they were the normal, black eyes that all baxxid's had. 

Koldin lay on his cot.

Around him were people he knew well enough to trust with things that mattered and poorly enough that entire portions of their lives remained inaccessible.

Boisrond and his impossible metabolism. Defort and his foolishness. Mehrab and wherever he had come from. Obs’rt and the inward machinery of baxxid thought. Nesterov from far Peshtul. Gnidenko from the same place and somehow another world entirely.

They lived in one room because somebody had placed their names on the same organizational chart.

This was how armies manufactured intimacy.

Not through affection.

Through proximity.

You learned how someone slept. How they coughed. Which foods they stole from the kitchen. Whether they snored. Whether they prayed. Whether they cleaned a rifle before or after eating. Which man became silent when frightened and which became talkative.

Eventually these facts became more trustworthy than biography.

Lights went out one by one.