by Kali Altsoba
They stumble and stagger through thick snow and ice as murder gains on them, catching up before they reach secondary forts and gun pits. Survivors form a schiltron halfway across the gentle plateau, well outside the smoldering rim of Iqaluit. DRA armtraks crest the ridge and have a clear line-of-sight. They circle ahead and down the flanks, shooting 10cm and 5cm rapidos point‑blank into young Inuit chests and limbs, coating the brilliant white snow with dark stains.
The “Last Stand of the Gardes Nunavut” will be remembered in Alliance ballads and in GovNeb and theater recreations over years of war to come. Yet, the reality is a tale quickly told. Survivors of the broken ridge-line are engulfed on the gentle plateau above their ruined city, far short of the secondary trench and forts toward which they strain. No quarter is asked by Gardes or offered by krasnos. The last 1,000 Gardes form a three‑sided square (military geometry is just different). The fighting is over in minutes. Tomorrow, Georges Briand will report to a hushed Lok Sabha, already reeling with bad war news: “la Gardes Nunavut meurt, mais ne se rend pas.”
Indeed, the Gardes dies but it does not surrender. Two ranks lie and kneel to let a third shoot overhead. The last officers stand in the tight interior, shifting a squad here or there, trying but failing to fill all the yawning breaches as more Gardes fall dead with each passing second. Officers in all-white armor are stained dark red all over from a ruptured artery of a choking girl, or colored gray with a boy’s splashing brains. Gardes drop with hammering maser blows to the chest, or double over with ripped‑open bellies, or torn away jaws, or genitals, or knees or limbs.
Among the Daurans, broken arms and legs from thudding kinetic ice-balls from the other side of the ridge still hang limp, waiting on death or a laser saw. Outdated liquid-and-ultrasteel armor turns white hot with absorbed energy, searing flesh to the glowing metal, tearing skin and chunks of muscle as a screaming girl frantically strips-off a scalding breastplate or a young boy tears at the molten greaves that eat into the flesh of his thigh. Phosphor and frag grenades sail overhead in both directions, in deadly flocks that land with murmurations of mortality. Phantom drummers beat time inside dead krasno HUDs. Ghostly projections walk unaware in the carmine carnage, singing boastfully of past centuries of martial glory and imperial achievement.
At the end of the fight firing lines are no more than 10 meters apart. Across ice and snow in a morning meadow, youths strange to war and forever unknown to each other shoot off limbs and faces. The three-sided square collapses to two, then to a single thin and ragged line kneeling in blood-sodden snow. The last 200 Gardes deliver a final volley then rise as one: “Charge!”
They make a yelling, cursing, murdering, staggering charge. They use empty maser rifles as waddies, explode frag grenades at suicide distances, flail with fists of futile rage. If war is all about “guts and glory,” well this is mostly guts. Torn out and strewn in gray heaps on red snow.
To toast victory, Shishi force open the mouths of mortally wounded shtrafniki and even krasnos, forcing them to drink raw trench samogon that’s poured down their throats. If they can’t wake enough to swallow, cruel Shishi amplify stimulus pain through HUDs and eye implants.
Even the dying must worship the new God of War as they give up their ghost under Popayá’s thin, orange glow. All are made to moan “Za Jahandar!” before being allowed to die.
If Jahandar could think how to make the dead worship him as well, he would do it.
***
An age of reason and of reasonableness just ended on the ruddy snow and ice. There’s no justice here. No enlightenment or higher cause to explain this away and deem it all worthwhile. Just hate and death as a horde of krasnos marches up and over a snow-bound hillside, moving in numbed files, killing Inuit with electric fire and being mown down themselves. Why do they do it? Is it just because hateful Jahandar orders it and servile generals and his Shishi thugs obey?
Court historians, pimps to his vanity of power, will recount this “Battle on the Ice’ as if it was an elegant Astrana waltz from older and better times, before the Grim Times. They’ll write it out as a baroque concert, talk of combat on blue-ice as a clash of force and resistance, filled with crescendos of plasma cannon and rippling arpeggios of maser fire. Purchased portraits will paint this war and battle as the epitome of Jahandar’s intelligent design, as expression and fulfillment of his high artistry, a grand symphony springing full-grown from his unique transcendent genius.
Not the bloody business of butchering the young that it is in fact. Not wanton, feckless Kurshid ordering all wounded Gardes Nunavut murdered where they lie, then turning to finish his noonday meal and wine. Not a torrent of pain and misery that doesn’t stop when the shooting ends. Not 100,000 Dauran families reduced to grief and poverty, bereft of beloved children or breadwinners. Not tens of thousands of orphans, amputee beggars, and burned-out lands. Not 130,000,000 Inuit deported and bound over to brutish slavery. None of that. Scholar-whores in Jahandar’s court will write only of the majesty of his power. Write of his glory, not krasno guts.
Abreks
The atmosphere on Krakoya I is riven with immense storms stirred up by the tokamaks that split the sky. Lashing, torrential rains drench everything in dark, heavy droplets. Rivers of run-off chase receding oceans that surged 40 klics inland over shattered shorelines as tsunamis, watery and military, overflowed the edges of continents and ran into the cities. Flotsam-and-jetsam of a broken world now lies jaggedly embedded in a meter of mud, all the way back to the shore. Already, the fleet under Aleksandr and army under Royko have moved on, to Krakoya II.
Old liquid-armor shuttles were given to Röhm Krump when the DRA got stolen drop-ship tek from Jahandar. They decant 20,000 Shishi to the smoldering surfaces of the Twins. The Shërbimi Informativ Shteteror is the cruel elite among millions of Dauran special police. Shishi are feared, hated and hateful men, and essential to Jahandar’s tyranny. They go where his will or whim sends them. Today, that’s over Daura’s frontier, silent and closed for decades. They follow drunken, raping, arsonist krasnos into helpless cities on the Twins. Now Krump is coming down.
General-Commander of all Shishi, the angular reed Röhm Krump stands on the Bridge of DRN Leonine beside Admiral Fedor Aleksandr, whose also flanked by General Mikva Royko. They’re looking out the Main Scuttle at black bombardment clouds rising from Krakoya II. As they watch, Krump’s boney left hand slithers into the pocket of his black robe to massage blue eyeballs, klack klack. The scene will repeat at more ruined worlds in months ahead.
Krump is the most feared and hated man in Daura, after Jahandar. His visage inspires terror, his silence provokes dread, his yellow mantis-eyes promise that you’ll be eaten alive, but only after he has had fun tearing and tormenting you. His only purpose and message is murder. Personal and solitary or massive and politically instructive, it doesn’t matter. Murder is the same.
Like his Shishi, he dresses as a quasi-warrior monk from Old Daura folk tales, frocked in a collarless black robe without visible seams. The flowing garments hide Krump’s thinness and the small implements of torture he always carries. The black robes announce him and all Shishi. There’s terror in a swish heard outside a door. Mind-numbing terror if you also hear klack! klack!
Black Robes are masters of hidden places from where no one returns. They revel in the image of their dread master. Like him, they inspire insane fear in all who gaze on them and flee. They’re proud of a fearsome reputation, of the night terrors they engender. They hunt and purge counter-revolutionaries real and imagined in Jahandar’s febrile mind. That meant class enemies who rejected the Grim Revolution, then believers in the Old Ritual who rejected The Jahandar.
To terrorize and control his necessary terrorists, Jahandar brought old Sachi mafia into SHISH. He promoted only men of the Abrek tribe of the Blue Mountains outside Dambatta. Soso knew their villages and understood them at a primal level. They knew him, too, as far as anyone could. Like him, the mountain men came from a rough people, littl
e more than bandits and with a twisted code of honor. Their traditions matched his instincts: blood feuds lasting generations, sly and cunning violence, cruel murder of whole extended families of any enemy, masked as honor. They doled out dogged and dog’s-head retribution for every minor insult or offense. Barbarians.
Like Jahandar, Abreks say they abjure and despise treachery as the worst of vices. Yet they would betray their own fathers if that brought them the sweetness of blood-feud revenge. They were revered by Soso’s people in his boyhood, not as the cruel outlaws they were but as heroic resisters to occupation by Dauran troops and police. As brave irreconcilables, men who refused to prostrate before the hated emperor or any law, all ‘foreign shit’ to ethnic Sachi. They lived outside rules except their outlaw-code, and were admired for it. Their motto was framed by an old brute, a feuding clan leader called Koba: “Always make your enemy’s mother weep!”
It was a ridiculous, mythic-heroic ideal to which Soso aspired with all his boy’s corrupt, longing heart. Especially after seeing two young Abreks tortured and hanged in Dambatta town square by the Dauran military, defiant to the last twist of hemp around their bandit necks. The executions excited Soso like nothing else he saw on Sachi. They impressed him with the raw power of the state to use violence even against the hardened men who came down from the Blue Mountains. He never forgot the lesson learned that day, to cow and coerce with terror, to win and to rule using public torture and death. There’s much of Old Daura in Soso-Jahandar.
When Jahandar wants hot blade work done without pity or conscience he sends in his night hounds, under tight Abrek control. His mountain-men will be the masters of conquered worlds. Once the DRA finishes mopping up it will leave on the new drop-ships, leaving behind small occupation garrisons and roving packs of murder hounds. Tens of thousands more Black Robes are spewing onto Nunavut, Chemin des Dames, and Portus Cale. More worlds will follow.
Krump is an exception to Abrek control of the Shishi, an outsider Jahandar has somehow let rise to the very top. He’s not one of the tribal Blue Mountain men from Sachi that his uncles vetted for him and sent to Nalchik. Even arriving with an imprimatur from his father’s brothers, Jahandar accepted only one in two of the mountain men. On principle, he killed all rejects.
Yet Röhm Krump is not even from Sachi, let alone the Blue Mountains. He was never vetted while Soso’s uncles lived. He came to high power after they grew old and died, even as Jahandar stretched too long into his own future, after Soso lost the last living links to his past.
Krump proved too usefully sadistic to Jahandar not to employ and promote. He earned his place with loyalty and blood, murdering his own predecessor and mentor in a gleeful bloodbath of torture and chopping. But the Tyrant now has doubts about his top killer, always with him the first step toward murder and purge.
‘Have I left Krump in place too long? Does he challenge me behind his insect smile? Is it time for my mountain men to cut this Director down and cut him up? He would not be the first Shishi to betray me!’
Krump is indulging wet, crimson dreams as he watches Krakoya II crumple into black under the kinetic shelling. As he thinks on the mission to come, he unconsciously fondles and strokes a mockleather holster of an unusually ornate sachi hanging off his belt. With his left hand he rolls over hardened, bright-blue eyeballs in his pocket: klack klack! He’s lost in foreplay to an orgasm of killing. An orgy of blood and sadism has started. He longs to wade in the slaughter.
“Commander Krump, your shuttle is ready.” He has to shuttle down: both Ones and Twos blew out the bases of all planetary elevators after the last Little Ships left, to deny them to their conquerors. “Fucking inconvenient,” is Mikva Royko’s comment as he, too, boards the shuttle.
***
Krump’s black-cloaked men are on every ship in the DRN and inside every battalion of the DRA. They watch admirals, generals, junior officers, even individual krasnos. They seek and see treachery everywhere, as do their mantis-master and the brooding paranoid back in Astrana. Already five captains have been arrested and purges of their ships are underway. Victims don’t need to provoke, and guilt is never an issue or in doubt. Shishi pounce with predator quickness on the most wispy suspicions of treason or of future disloyalty, on stray thoughts so small they’re unknown to the accused. When a Black Robe passes by, casting a cold eye on life and death, all Daurans shudder with primal fear. It’s real, stark terror, beyond even the kind experienced about ‘ghouls’ or ‘Blue Onis’ in childhood’s nightmares. Adult dreams are worse, because they’re real.
Black Robes debarking onto the invaded worlds step into landscapes battered and torn by DRN orbital bombardments, and step into populations past breaking point. Docile, obedient, heads hanging, resigned to their fate. On Chemin des Dames, over 30 million civilian corpses lie amidst city ruins and rubble churned by bombardment, then heavy ground fighting. Shishi make KRA prisoners carry and cremate all dead in industrial kilns. When the clean-up job is done they force 50,000 wounded KRA into the ovens and burn them alive. Others are thrown on pyres.
“There’s no place for weakness or wounded in our New Order.” Krump says it to the governor at conquered Delphi, last of the eastern Krevan worlds to fall to Jahandar. He bends his stick-insect arm at the elbow and wrist to make an angular point klack! klack! “If you can’t work you won’t eat. No useless mouths! Jahandar has proclaimed it, so you must enforce it.”
Whenever Jahandar bays his Shishi howl back and gather to him, eager for their master’s grace. He speaks and they leap to obey. He but points and they murder. He wishes coyly “will no one rid me of these troublesome folk?” Without further orders, the night dogs massacre cities and empty whole worlds in his name. Perverted, morbid, brooding Jahandar knows no other way.
Shishi race from shuttles on two-man gyro-bikes and in six-man hovers in a hit-them-hard-and-swift tactic they call the “spreading fan.” They’ve used it before, on a hundred Dauran planets. On world after world, they round up befuddled and shell-shocked survivors to mete out preemptive terror as a warning against resistance. They make raping, murdering krasnos who landed first seem benign. They surpass in terror and cruelty the worst Imperium marauding.
Packs of night dogs slaver to ride down any who even think of opposing Jahandar’s near-divine will. They kill every real and each imagined resister they meet, and all their family. And any friends whose names are screamed out under sudden and brutal tortures carried out in homes and in the streets. There’s nothing subtle about the Black Robes. They conduct a blood orgy the like of which the quiet worlds of Krevo and the eastern Calmari systems never saw before, not in a millennium. Not since the horrors of the First Orion War, when genocide was policy on every side. Shishi obliterate tens of thousands of villages, sack hundreds of towns, empty dozens of big cities. All to encourage the rest to obey. They’ve done it all before, across 287 Dauran worlds.
Only now they fan out to torture and murder on non-Dauran worlds peopled with virgin victims who don’t understand that no resistance whatever can be offered, not even a look. No act is too small, no word too little not to pay the blood price. Not even a raised eyebrow of dissent is allowed to any ‘foreign shits’ on the conquered worlds. Black Robes kill publicly and as bloodily as terrible imaginations allow. Most kill because they enjoy wielding naked power over crying and begging victims, or love blood and bone and brutality. A few do it because they fear falling afoul of Jahandar’s terror if they don’t, aghast to die as they have seen so many die under a blue-glowing sachi axe. ‘That could be me, if I appear less than zealous in my master’s service.’
Whenever Röhm Krump’s hounds arrive in a village or town, local heroes die first. They offer themselves to the blue-humming blades, “but please let my wife and children live.” More sensible men hide with their families, to live a few hours or days more. It doesn’t matter. Shishi murder without regard to sex or age or guilt. They cut down old and young. For children, they reserve a cruel, curved fire-blade th
ey called a “flammard.” A new, gold-handled “flame sword” is tucked into Krump’s belt as he stands on Leonine’s Bridge above the new conquered worlds: Krakoya I and II, Chemin des Dames, Delphi and Portus Cale. It rides next to his sachi until he lands, draws it out, turns it on, and calls for his hollow guards to “bring me a farfolk child.”
Black Robes do their brutal work joyously, wading in rivers of gore. They chop victims to instructive little pieces with laser-hatchets they reverently called sachis, to honor the weapon’s origin world and inventive sadism of their boss, Soso-Jahandar. They dump headless torsos on doorsteps of neighbors, leave cleaved-limbs at random homes to increase the terror, and hang all severed heads in town squares as exhibits of the Tyrant’s swift injustice. Back in Daura they are so feared they always walk in the open in collarless robes among cowed populations, with only a sachi in their belt. They know no one will dare touch them, or its many friends will glow blue by nightfall. It’s not long before sheeting terror has farfolk worlds also cowering from resistance.
Terror works. If you are truly bloody and terrible. No half-measures. You must really terrorize a population to control it, especially if it is so much more advanced and sophisticated than you are. Especially if you are from a backwoods place like Sachi. Or are Jahandar’s men.