by Sean Robins
The Akaki government was delighted the Xortaags had suddenly changed their mind and accepted the peace treaty, and no one had suspected his involvement.
Mushgaana’s brothers had wanted to kill their spy to keep their cooperation with Tarq a secret. Tarq helped her fake her own death and hide for a while. She was on her way to Kanoor now. Who knew what wealth of information she would bring with her, especially since Tarq, despite all his previous efforts, knew very little about the enemy. Every single agent he had sent to collect information on the Xortaags had turned up dead after a very short time.
He wondered how Jim, Kurt, Elizabeth, Keiko, or the rest of the humans whom he now considered dear friends would react if they ever found out.
Especially Jim, a man after my own heart. He would make a good Akaki, with his tendency to make fun of friend and foe.
There was no need to wonder about Allen: The old man would kill Tarq on the spot without hesitation.
Tarq himself had once told Barook they did not have to feel guilty about their plan to use Earth as bait. It would be only a matter of time before the Xortaags attacked Earth. Earth would be the logical next target after Kanoor was conquered because it was the second closest planet to Alora. This reasoning was still valid but did very little to alleviate the mind-numbing pain he was feeling now.
Tarq considered not sharing this information with the others. Morale was rock-bottom already, and there was no telling how the humans would react to this news. They might even blame him and his strategy for all those deaths. He considered if he would have planned things differently if he knew this would happen but after some thought decided they had not had another choice, massive civilian casualties or not. Still, he was glad he had not known. He would have found it much harder to sell the plan.
His human friends would eventually find out. It would be better if they heard it from him. He picked up his PDD and sent out a message, calling for a meeting the next day. Then he locked the door of his office and pulled on his antennae so hard the severe pain made him lose his balance and fall on the floor.
I held my head in my hands and tried to push down what I had eaten for breakfast, barely managing it.
Having seven hundred million deaths on your conscience was a damned thing.
Just as we thought things couldn’t get worse, Tarq told us about the carnage. He did it in a meeting during which I toyed with the idea of shooting first him and then myself in the head; Liz fainted; Kurt covered his face with his hands and was as motionless as one of the dead for a long while; Allen, his mouth twitching, looked like he was about to kill both Tarq and Barook, and Barook kept yelling, “We did not know! How were we supposed to know?”
I thought about this long and hard, asking myself if we could have done something differently to spare all those lives. The answer was a resounding “no,” and everyone, including our resident military experts Kurt and Allen seemed to agree. The Xortaags had four times as many space fighters as we did, and there was no way we could have defeated them in a direct air/space battle. Our only hope, as Tarq had laid out from the beginning, was to surprise them by taking advantage of their two glaring weaknesses: the fact that they didn’t expect any resistance on a planet under the influence of their mind control device, and their absolute inexperience in ground warfare.
And still, my conscience, assisted by the ever-present Venom, wouldn’t leave me alone, as if I hadn’t been depressed enough already. Somehow it was all my fault. I should’ve done more. I should’ve found a solution. I should’ve let the forces under my command stand with Earth’s defenders, even if this meant all of us would go down in flames.
Mark Twain had once said, “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience I would poison him.” I was wondering if he was right. On the other hand, if I wanted to change my image as a closet racist, it was probably better not to quote Mark Twain.
I couldn’t put the mental image of all those dead people out of my mind, nor could I stop the indescribable terror that image caused. The whole thing was made infinitely worse because the rest of humanity had forgotten about the dead—forgotten anything that happened during the Xortaag invasion. I wondered what it’d be like to have that voice in your head, a voice capable of making you forget the life and death of those you loved, and shuddered. I’d felt sorry for myself having to put up with Venom! I swore I wouldn’t forget the deaths, that even the nameless would be honored. The dead men, the dead women, the dead children were all mine.
They will be avenged.
What helped me go through the immediate aftermath of the Xortaag invasion without losing my sanity was Liz’s presence and love. Watching humanity fall was bad enough, but we had months to mentally and emotionally prepare for that. Knowing that the Xortaags had pulled a mini-Thanos and a big chunk of humanity just disappeared with a figurative snap of their fingers—or pushing a button, or touching a computer screen, or however the hell else they activated their Mind Fuck Machine—was a supremely bitter pill to swallow. So bitter, in fact, it would’ve been enough to push any sane man over the edge. Every time I started to lose it, she’d take my hands, look in my eyes and say, “Jim. We’re here. We’re alive. Billions of people are still alive, too, and they need us. We can’t fail them. Think about them. Think about the children.” And I’d relax fractionally and thank her, and that motivation would last for a little while.
Both Liz and I took sleeping pills that night; still, I kept jolting awake out of nightmares about seven hundred million dead men, women, and children—infants, toddlers, babies. So what that they didn’t all die. Too many did. The few times I dozed off, Liz woke me up by talking, shouting, or crying in her sleep, and when that happened, I repeated to her what she had said to me. Oddly, that was just as helpful as having her say it. Not that any of it could help for more than a few minutes. At the middle of the night, she hugged me, put her head on my shoulder, and cried her heart out, bitter tears rolling down her face. I didn’t even try to console her with words anymore; instead, I just held onto her in a tight embrace, trying to give her some small comfort in my arms.
Chapter Nine
Winterfell - April 17, 2048
Oksana called her sister for the tenth time that day, with no response. She was beginning to get worried.
Anastasiya was clinically depressed as the result of months of physical and mental abuse she had suffered in The Harem. Escaping that horrid place and joining the Resistance had done wonders for Oksana’s mood and state of mind. It had provided her with something to strive for, and she was too busy trying to prove herself to her new comrades to let the past consume her. But it’d had little effect on her sister. She’d always been sensitive and easily wounded, and Oksana believed that had attracted the most sadistic clients to her; she had little ability to hide behind a shell of indifference. Her tears had been like nectar to the monsters of The Harem.
Unsurprisingly to Oksana, Anastasiya had taken the fall of Earth worse than most people. The horror was always with her. MICI had assigned Oksana to the Commandos, but the machine somehow didn’t work on Anastasiya. Tarq had explained to her that MICI was ineffective for a small number of the population, and her unlucky sister was one of them. This meant she was essentially a prisoner in Winterfell. If she stepped outside the force field protecting the base, she’d be affected by the Xortaag mind-controlling machine. She’d found it worse knowing that others, everyone, was now enslaved as she had been. It didn’t matter that the Xortaags weren’t interested in raping human bodies. They’d raped human minds, and that horrified her. “Why has God let this happen?” she kept asking Oksana.
Oksana didn’t believe in God anymore, but she’d kept that to herself. “God gave us allies so we can win.”
“But what if the Xortaags win?” Anastasiya had whispered.
Oksana wasn’t going to leave her sister alone to brood in her quarters. She wanted to take her to meet new people. If that didn’t work, they could always cont
inue the chess game they’d started a couple of days ago. They’d been playing chess routinely since they were kids. Sometimes it was the only thing that could distract her sister from her dark thoughts. Oksana called her sister again, but her PDD didn’t answer. She went to Anastasiya’s quarters, knocked on the door and called her sister’s name. Still no answer.
Oksana tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Still calling Anastasiya’s name, she pushed the door open and found her sister’s body hanging from the roof of her quarters. Her face was paper white, her body gently moving in the draught from the open door.
“Moya sestra!”
People in the adjacent rooms heard Oksana’s anguished wail and came in to find her hugging her dead sister’s body on the floor, sobbing convulsively, with chess pieces from an overturned chess board scattered all around them.
I was in Winterfell’s clinic, picking up sleeping pills, when Anastasiya’s body was brought in so that the doctors could make one last desperate effort to save her life. It was too late, even with Akaki technology.
Anastasiya was the first person to commit suicide in Winterfell, but she wasn’t the last. During the next few weeks, and despite our best efforts—we set up counseling sessions, support groups, and even a suicide hotline—several other people who couldn’t deal with the emotional burden of having witnessed the fall of human civilization and/or had lost loved ones in the subsequent mass murder took their own lives. Early on, it didn’t help that there was no way to know who had died since the survivors didn’t remember the dead. The only way to find out was to call and inquire about a friend or relative and listen to someone’s mother or sister or husband say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know that person.” Many people at Winterfell made such calls. One confused response was enough to let you know the worst had happened.
Interestingly enough, two of the regular participants of our support groups were our macho war-machines, Allen and Sergei. The one person who never attended was Kurt. He was more distant and reclusive than before, having built even higher walls around himself.
Those of us who didn’t kill ourselves had to find a way to deal with the trauma. Terror was the prevalent emotion, coupled with rage and hatred for the invaders. I tried to keep my feelings in check by keeping myself busy. There was a lot of work to be done.
Liz took it upon herself to support Oksana through her grief and loss, pointing out that she didn’t have anyone in Winterfell. Given how Oksana looked, I thought a lot of guys would happily lend their shoulders to her to cry on. In her efforts to soothe Oksana, Liz was joined by Keiko—at this point, they were besties—her two sisters and Sergei, who had also lost a younger sister to suicide, and as he put it, “could feel Oksana’s pain.”
One evening, during dinner, Liz told me Oksana’s story.
“She had a rich family,” said Liz. “She and her sister grew up wanting for nothing. They were both sent to a private school and had very good educations.”
I said, “Which explains her tendency to quote Shakespeare left, right and center,” and attacked my steak.
“When they were teenagers, their mother ran away with another man. Their father, broken-hearted, wasted all his money on drugs, alcohol and other women and ended up shooting himself in the head.”
“Those Russian women,” I said.
“Ukrainian. It’s a different country.”
“I knew that.”
“The two sisters found themselves alone and with no money,” Liz continued. “An old family friend told them he could get them a job that paid very well in a casino in New York. The two sisters traveled to the U.S., only to find themselves trapped by the Russian mafia, forced to work in The Harem.”
“Wow. Such an interesting story. I can’t wait to meet her,” said Cordelia.
My wife concluded, “Despite all this, which was probably enough to break anyone, she managed to have one of the most feared men on Earth killed.”
“Which, incidentally, got the two of us involved,” I said, playing with my wedding ring. “I guess we owe her one. If it were not for her, you and I would probably be busy kissing Xortaag ass right now. What do you think about inviting her for dinner one evening?”
“She wouldn’t come.”
“Why not?”
“She says you remind him of the kind of men who frequented The Harem.”
A big chunk of steak got stuck in my throat. I coughed so much I had tears in my eyes, much to Liz and Cordelia’s amusement.
“Relax. I’m kidding.” Liz laughed. “But in all seriousness, you’re a bit macho, and sometimes you can be downright chauvinistic. I assume that’s what you have in common with the kind of man that goes to a place like The Harem.”
I wiped my lips and glared at her. “If I ever visit The Harem, it’d be to pull a Robert Freaking De Niro in Taxi Driver, kill the goons and save the girls.”
She blew me a kiss. “My hero!”
Ten days after the fall of Earth, Tarq called a meeting in the Command Center and using one of his favorite holographic presentations filled us in on what had been going on.
The Xortaag fleet, unaware of our presence, had landed on Earth. By Tarq’s estimates, they’d brought nearly a million people with them. They immediately went to work: They started building settlements all over the planet, including two huge fleet bases where they kept their fleet: one in California and a bigger one in the Netherlands. It would’ve have made more sense to build a fleet base on top of a mountain range, some ten thousand feet closer to orbit, but it turned out the Xortaags really liked mild weather, and they preferred to live close to oceans, lakes, or rivers. They also started building a city next to each fleet base. They used thousands of humans as workers, both skilled and unskilled.
Tarq paused the presentation and said, “By the way, the Xortaags named the under-construction city in the U.S. City of God, and the one in Europe, Kingdom of God. Any thoughts?”
God-complex much?
I said, “No, no, no. Unh-unh. This’s where I draw the line. I went along with Deathbringer. I even might’ve thought Voice of God was better than your blah blah blah acronym. But there’s no freaking way I’ll call the Xortaags’ freaking city freaking City of God!”
“Suggestions?” Tarq asked dryly.
We had a lot: City of Cockroaches, The Zoo, and City of Pieces of Shit, to name a few. None of them sounded like a military target though, so everyone agreed with my suggestions: SH-1 and SH-2, standing for Slaughterhouse One and Two.
As in, we were going to slaughter every single Xortaag son-of-a-bitch residing in those cities.
Tarq resumed the presentation. We learned the Xortaags’ transport ships had started their journey back to their home planet, and more importantly, the convoy bringing the first groups of Xortaag colonists was already on the way to Earth.
“So, we have six months to defeat a fleet four times bigger than ours,” I said. “Just checking.”
“Day-to-day life on earth continues as before for the most part,” said Tarq. “In fact, people even look happier because the Xortaag’s OMC-BOWS makes them feel relaxed and content. The only difference is what we call the cullings. Whenever necessary, the Xortaags order the people they need, for example, construction workers, plumbers, or simple laborers, to show up in a certain location and get to work. They are housed and fed, but about as well as animals, and they get no medicine if they fall ill.”
When the presentation ended, we started discussing how to proceed. The first order of business was to collect information, looking for anything that might give us an advantage. We could do this in two ways: by the Akakies’ invisible spy ship flying in orbit, and by the Commandos’ various surveillance and information-gathering missions.
“Which just happens to be Kurt’s specialty,” I said.
“We’ve already learned a lot,” said Kurt. “For example, the Xortaags use our vehicles for ground transportation, which eliminates the need to bring their own. They mostly use trucks, but they have an affi
nity for muscle cars. Also, ladies and gentlemen,” he walked to the main holographic display and touched the screen; two real-life size images popped up. “Meet the Xortaags.”
One of the images looked like Conan the Barbarian: He had olive skin, straight black hair, and black eyes. The other was a perfect depiction of Hitler’s master race: fair-skinned and blond with cold blue eyes. Both men were tall and had ridiculously square jaws, like Superman in those old animated movies.
“You mean they all look like this?” I asked.
Kurt nodded. “The Xortaags use genetic engineering to shape themselves into their vision of a perfect warrior. They also have enhanced abilities compared to a human. They have stronger muscles, joints and bones, and a higher pain tolerance. They heal faster, and they have a quicker reaction time and a longer lifespan.”
“And the women?” asked Liz.
Kurt touched the screen again. Two more images appeared. They looked mostly like the first two except for very high cheekbones and thick unibrows. And boobs. Big ones. Obviously.
“For some reason, the Xortaags find unibrows sexy.”
“And what’re we supposed to do with this gem of information?” I asked.