Rather they all had visions of getting rich, reliving the relatively affluent lifestyle they had enjoyed before their own society had been torn apart. Most of them were ill-prepared for life in the west. Few of them had any useful skills and they were destined for low-paying jobs (assuming they could find one), low cost housing, and an existence just above the local poverty line. Their kids would have better opportunities, but that was of little interest to these men.
The situation wasn’t helped when it was discovered the culinary units also served alcohol and some of the less disciplined younger men, and a few kids who didn’t know any better, had got drunk before anyone could stop them, fuelling further resentment at the crusaders.
It would have been so much simpler if there had been someone around to greet them, showing someone cared, even if they were just going through the motions, someone they could vent their anger and frustration on.
Zarif watched the main group of agitated young men closely: some were a little drunk, but they all gradually worked themselves into a lather. After a few minutes Zarif realised most of the stirring was the work of one wild-eyed youngster he recognised from his own village. Omar was a fanatic: one of the dangerous, self-righteous zealots he was trying to avoid. Omar was quite capable of walking into a market place full of innocent people wearing an explosive vest, and not think twice about the devastation carnage he could wreak on innocent people, people he had lived amongst all his life. Radical leaders brainwashed people like Omar to advance their own cause. None of whom had any intention of making the ultimate sacrifice themselves.
The other refugees were angry and frightened for their future, but without a target for their aggression, they didn’t know what to do. Omar, on the other hand, was a dangerous extremist who was focused on destroying the lives of vulnerable people, for whom maiming and creating as much fear as possible was the aim, because of the long-term impact this had on communities.
One thing prevented any immediate escalation in violence. There was nothing to hand they could employ as a weapon. A good riot needed ammunition, in the form of stones, bricks, bottles, and fuel for Molotov cocktails. They had nothing but plastic eating utensils.
Given the lack of a target and no tools to create a decent riot, the group coalescing around Omar slowly lost its shape when their initial excitement at taking action waned. They realised if there was nobody to witness a protest, there was little point in making one.
The older men sheepishly broke away and re-joined their families. Then a scuffle broke out and quickly escalated into a full-blown brawl. Zarif wasn’t sure what started it, but he suspected Omar had said something imprudent to one of the other men, who had decided to defend his honour against this obnoxious young man.
“That’ll be enough of that shit,” Bruce muttered under his breath. “Let’s get that fucken' dickhead out of there.”
We can’t. Every one of these bodies is precious to us.
“Not this one: he’ll be more trouble than he’s worth. Send him back to where he came from, wherever that happens to be. Besides, he’ll get the shit kicked out of him if he stays there.”
While he was outwardly calm and collected, Bruce was fuming. However, he had learnt a few things about keeping control of his emotions. These days he only lost his rag completely on special occasions.
He wasn’t sure if the MPU or the Transcendents who had just popped back into his consciousness after being absent for some time had picked up on this yet. He had expressly asked Dick and Shelly not to go off half-cocked and start uploading large groups of people to the asteroid and then onto Skid until they were completely ready. He understood the need to test the process, but it didn’t mean they should go and hoover up a whole shipload of refugees, then leave them to fend for themselves on the asteroid without any form of preparation. What the fuck was that supposed to be testing? It was little wonder some of them were already going stir crazy and worrying themselves to death.
The more Bruce thought about it and put himself in the position of the people on the asteroid, the more agitated he got.
“Fuck you, Dick,” he grunted, and sent a message to Dick, his idiot brother Trev, and Sue, to make it clear they needed to prioritise the preparation of migrants from all backgrounds and cultures for their arrival on the asteroid, as well as a life on Skid. He cc’d Shelly Shaw as an after-thought. She was supposed to be providing some structure and direction for the other three, but Bruce suspected she had her hands full keeping Ronald D Chump on message. Chump had such a big ego he was convinced he was still in control of his own destiny, despite repeatedly being reminded otherwise.
Zarif couldn’t believe his eyes. One moment Omar was trying to extricate himself from the brawl, and the next he wasn’t there. He simply vanished. Zarif struggled to suppress a chuckle while the others slowly realised the focus of their rage had vanished before their eyes, leaving them grasping at thin air. Where had Omar gone? Had the crusaders just employed a new super-weapon in their fight against the influx of refugees?
Eighteen
“Thank God that’s out of the way,” Bruce muttered to himself. He’d had managed to endure the wedding rehearsal with as much grace as he could manage. It had been about as much fun as having his teeth pulled and he knew from the way Ngaio had behaved that she felt the same. It was harder for her. He was used to the way his mother decided to take control of events, and then proceed to deliver her version of what she thought was right and proper, even if everyone else had agreed to a different course of action.
He turned his attention to Dick. “What’s going on up there, mate?” Bruce asked pointedly.
Dick had rather hoped Bruce would ignore the pitiful riot attempt on the asteroid and the resulting scuffle. Deep down he knew there was no chance of this happening and he regretted he hadn’t dealt decisively with the situation himself.
“While you are reviewing the protocols and procedures you are using to process these people through this transitional facility, we need to prepare them to successfully fend for themselves on Skid,” Bruce continued. “They don’t need much, they need a guide, the basics. An outline of what kinds of behaviour are acceptable and what’s not. We also need to work out what to do with rejects like the one we just dumped. Have I made myself clear that I expect you to look after this?”
“Yes, perfectly.” Dick nodded.
“Your SKUG concept is a good one. You just need to bring it to life now and expand it to cover the arrival of the newSkidians on the asteroid, so that we don't leave people in the dark up there.”
Bruce thought he’d been clear in his requirements. He knew what he wanted to achieve, but he had to delegate this task and rely on Dick, Trev, and Sue to bring it to life, because he really didn’t have the capacity to follow it up himself. He was aware Dick had decided to delegate the task but instead of giving him a public reaming decided to gently remind him of his accountability.
Dick was annoyed at being made to look like an idiot by his younger brother and his ditzy girlfriend. He had also been very explicit with his requirements, spelling them out in very simple terms to Trev and Sue. His mistake had been to leave them to it. He’d been having so much fun playing at being a big shot in the upper echelons of the United States government while the rug was pulled from under Chump’s feet, and being involved in imposing a new world order, he’d quite forgotten to make sure the tasks he had delegated were on track. He’d thought a certain level of authority meant you didn't have to get your hands dirty, but now he realised he was wrong.
“I’ll get onto it right away,” he replied, knowing he was going to have to leave the fun work in the big city to Shelly and the General for a few days. He wasn’t exactly scared of Bruce, but he did want to prove he was could live up to Bruce's exacting standards.
The frustrating part about it was just when he thought he had everything nailed, the fuck up fairy arrived.
Omar Ali trod water, watching the dirty old trawler he’d been aboard just mo
ments before slip beneath the waves. He reached out and took a hold of a wooden crate bobbing up and down beside him to provide some buoyancy and looked around for other survivors.
The last thing he had a clear recollection of was fighting with a group of men at the internment camp... but that couldn’t be true. It must have been a dream. He had been inciting them to riot and get the attention of the camp authorities. Omar had been certain the authorities would be forced to engage with them if they demonstrated the strength of their feelings and voiced their requirements.
Initially most of them had been keen on taking some sort of violent action to ensure they received the attention they felt they were rightfully entitled to. However, no one wanted to pull their living quarters apart to make primitive weapons. They were also reluctant to do anything which might be held against them in the future. Then one of the old men had taken a poke at him after he called them a bunch of old women for not trying hard enough.
He was desperate to get into Europe, but he wasn't a refugee in pursuit of a better life. He had a credible cover story, crafted by the leadership of the group he was loosely affiliated with. He wanted to sacrifice himself for a cause and become a martyr, even if he was a little vague about the movement’s aims. It had to be better than sitting around the house he shared with his family, with no job, no money, and being constantly bossed around by his mother, his sisters, and his father – in that order.
Omar wasn’t even particularly devout. He attended the mosque on a regular basis, but not because he believed in God. It was simply the done thing in his community, where non-conformance of any kind was frowned upon, and marked one out as an outcast. They had never spoken about it, but he believed his father felt pretty much the same, given his liking for decadent western music, and the way he poured hard liquor into his coffee on a regular basis.
He tried to gather his wits and decided it might be time to start praying because he could see he was in a bit of a fix.
The last thing he clearly remembered was standing on the deck of the ship as it began to turn turtle, looking at the water coming towards him, remembering he couldn’t swim. He was left with no choice but to jump, as all around him his fellow passengers began to wail, plead for help, and then leap off the old tub themselves. It was either that or to be trapped underneath it when it capsized.
Omar figured he must have bumped his head, or someone had landed on top of him, knocking him out, and the fight with the old men had been a fantasy. He knew a one-sided brawl against an angry group of older men was one he could never hope to win, but in his dream, he had been convinced it was a step on the pathway to martyrdom, so he hadn’t taken a step backwards. He felt a powerful rush coursing through him and was convinced this was the will of God lighting his path (he was mistaken, it was the drugs he had been administered before he was turfed out of the asteroid taking effect).
He let go of the crate, then realised it was the only thing keeping him afloat and he thrashed around in panic trying to latch onto it again. While he struggled to get a firm grip, he saw a small boat filled with shapeless white faces approaching. He waved at it frantically to get their attention with his free hand.
“Hang on, we’re coming!” he heard someone call out in heavily accented Arabic. An arm pointed in his general direction, and the boat headed toward him.
“Help!” he croaked, kicking his feet, and flailing his arms frantically to keep his head above water. Each time he called out, his mouth filled up with salty water, making him cough and splutter and panicking him a little further. He hadn’t realised sea water was salty. Who would have known?
“Where is everyone else?” another voice in very bad Arabic asked. Omar was grabbed by the collar and hauled over the side of the rubber craft, where he collapsed in the bottom, retching and heaving.
Omar pulled himself up to the side of the boat and vomited into the water, struck by the sudden realisation he might be the sole survivor. “What do you mean? There were several hundred people on the ship. I don’t know where they are, it’s only been a few minutes since I jumped.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? How many people did you say were aboard?”
“I am not really sure,” Omar replied. “Several hundred maybe. The engine died on our ship and the crew abandoned us.”
The sailors in the small boat looked at each other. This man might have had family and friends aboard. One of the sailors asked, with as much sympathy as he could muster, “You do realise that we can see nobody else? There may be passengers trapped in the hull, but we would still expect to see many more people in the water.” The sailor had seen it all before, but never anything quite like the loss of life on this scale.
“How can this be? Where have they all gone?” Omar demanded.
“You tell me, my friend. Can you tell me what happened after the distress call went out? It took us twenty minutes to reach you.”
One of the sailors handed Omar a bottle of water and he drank greedily. A thin survival blanket was wrapped around his shoulders to keep him warm.
“Where is everyone else?” he repeated. “They can’t have simply vanished.” Omar didn’t know what to make of this and vowed not say anything more to his captors. Perhaps the dream hadn’t been a dream after all. Maybe he had been booted out of a camp for starting a fight? But then why had he ended up in the water? Nothing made sense to him.
“We were in a detention centre waiting to be processed, and then..” The words tumbled out of him. He found he couldn’t help himself, despite his intention not to speak to his captors.
The sailors listened to his story and then looked at each other knowingly. Clearly the man was off his head. They’d seen it all before: desperate young men pumped full of drugs, hallucinating and ready to inflict as much indiscriminate carnage as possible when they realised they were being sent back to where they came from. This one was lucky to be alive. The medic opened his kit and made a great show of preparing a drip. A second sailor gave Omar a quick pat down for weapons, while another sailor covered them with an automatic rifle in case Omar became violent.
“We’ll put you on this drip,” he explained, “to replace some of your fluids so you don’t dehydrate. You lose a lot of water after being in the sea.”
What he didn’t add was that the drip also contained a powerful sedative. The last thing they wanted was for Omar to make a grab for their weapons and run amok. Much better to keep him quiet and give whatever home-made hooch he had running through his veins a chance to loosen its grip.
Tempers cooled once Omar Ali had vanished. Most of the older men put their enmity behind them and tried to make sense of what they had just experienced. This new phenomenon disturbed them.
Omar must have been spirited away and taken into custody for rabble-rousing and was being held somewhere else in the facility. They didn’t blame the crusaders: Omar was a trouble maker and none of them wanted anything more to do with him. What they didn't understand was how Omar had managed to disappear before their very eyes.
Western society must be far in advance of their own if it could make men disappear in an instant. In an odd sort of way, it vindicated their decision to seek a new life in the West. What powerful technology! If they could do that, imagine what else the westerners could do to improve their lives. These opportunities did not exist under the current regimes in their homelands. They felt both inadequate and victimised with this realisation. Why couldn’t their society develop this knowledge and expertise?
Zarif edged towards the group of men to eavesdrop on their conversation. He wasn’t convinced the crusaders had developed a new technology which could make people disappear, but he'd never seen anything like it, except in a science fiction movie.
He wondered whether Omar had somehow engineered this himself. Zarif wouldn’t put it past him. Omar was one of the few people aboard Zarif had known personally. They both came from the same small community and had gone to school together. Zarif suspected Omar was a sympathiser,
if not a direct member, of one of the local terror groups, but for the life of him he couldn’t work out why Omar had vanished into thin air.
Zarif didn’t learn anything useful from the discussion so he drifted back towards the space he had marked out for himself, poured a cup of coffee, and settled back to catch up on the news from home. His old home, he corrected himself. He had made up his mind that he would never go back there, no matter what happened. He had a momentary twinge of nostalgia for the village he had lived in all his life, before everything he held dear had been blown apart.
He watched the first few news stories run their course. Mundane stories about local people, and local issues, the heavily censored national segments, and then international footage supplied by a variety of large global news organisations.
One of the stories made the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he watched video footage of a capsized refugee vessel in the Mediterranean Sea. Zarif was sure this scene had been played out previously. Maybe it was the aerial drone footage from a different perspective.
“…another tragedy is unfolding off the North African coastline. A ship crammed with refugees sunk before help could arrive. The crew of the Italian Coast Guard patrol ship, the Sirio, managed to locate a sole survivor, a young man. This individual is currently suffering from mild exposure and is receiving medical attention before being questioned by the authorities seeking to discover the cause of this disaster. Hopefully, the survivor will be able to shed some light on the fate of the other passengers aboard. There have been no sightings of any lifeboats.”
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