The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  His Second Platoon was next door, holed up in the Didgeridoo Art Gallery, or what was left of it. The Third was holding his other flank, behind the Humpty Doo Hardware store, whose roof was on fire. The Fourth had escorted all of their casualties back up the road to a lure shop, after Jack had cherry-picked most of their combat ready soldiers to replace the walking wounded and non-ambulatory they were relieving. That reduced his Company’s effectiveness by a quarter. Pretty good odds, he thought.

  The F-22s had torn up the front lines of the Javanese, forcing them to retreat into the residences and businesses scattered throughout the landscape, which reminded Captain McNabb of southern Colorado, and a brown-haired cowgirl there. The bombers which had been circling, waiting for their chance to get in on it, filed in to drop their payloads on the buildings. Blast after blast blew the roofs off, leveled walls, and drove the surviving invaders out into the open again, where the F-22s could get at them once more. Now they were like a swarm of angry bees. Very angry bees. Company C had been stung.

  Thirty miles off the coast of Perth, an older generation ballistic missile submarine received an encoded directive from St. Louis. The code was decrypted, verified, counterverified, and confirmed again. The renamed N.A.S. Virginia had a job to do. All crew were called to battle stations. The Captain and Commander inserted their keys, put in separate authentication passwords, and selected target coordinates, double confirmed, then keyed in an ordinance sequence identifying specific tubes to be activated. A launch system began for two side by side tubes. An alarm sounded throughout the boat. The seconds clicked away, and the sea poured forth its fury into the sky, to arc up and begin back downwards, past the apex of their flight.

  Sur Moerdani stood under the portico, with a perfumed handkerchief held to his face. Even with his diminished forces having removed the corpses for nearly eight blocks in every direction, the sickeningly sweet smell of decay rose through the humid air. Below him, the Caliph’s city rotted. A lifetime of hard work, of planning, and sacrifices, all gone. He had begun as a middle class merchant’s son. And worked so hard in school. He had been the first in his family to go to college, then to medical school. His family had been so proud of their son, the doctor. Sur had become a virologist, a government researcher, an important person. Then the world had gone crazy.

  Like most Indonesians, like most people in the world, to be honest, he had snickered as the greedy, selfish, arrogant, fat Americans fell. Laughed as they killed one another. It had been wonderful.

  But then the Jews had been caught alone in their racist sandpit and played nuke your neighbors. Even that hadn’t been enough to save them. Allah had made sure that every weapon the Zionists used against the faithful, from nuclear weapons to their evil genetic virus, eventually was turned against the serpents. But the Turkish Flu had mutated more than once. It had swept not just the Middle Eastern states, and not just Israel, but Asia from the map, as well. All but Indonesia. Because of him. He had saved his people…for a time. Now it was all gone.

  At the edge of his courtyard, a chubby Indonesian woman in a filthy Versace gown paused from studying her ruined manicure to look up at the sky, where a small boy was pointing. His eyes followed hers, to the two side by side exhaust trails arcing overhead. ‘Not again’, he thought. ‘What do they hope to accomplish with more virus? They’ve already killed everyone they can kill with their virus…’ Caliph Moerdani’s thought was never completed.

  Seventeen hundred miles to the East, they couldn’t see the flashes of ligh t, or feel the heat from the two explosions that disposed of all the bodies in Jakarta, living and dead, turning them to ash. The invaders didn’t know that the Caliph and all his surviving supporters had entered the upper atmosphere, either. It would take all night, and half the next day, to convince them that they had lost.

  It was ironic that the surrender of the Indonesian Muslim forces happened in the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church. After not being able to reach Moerdani, or anybody else in Jakarta, their commander had correctly assumed that they were on their own. His forces had been reduced to less than eleven thousand men. Captain Jack McNabb and Sgt. Chittum stood together and watched the Muslims stack their arms. For once, he couldn’t think of anything smart to say. He never could get used to the continual ringing in his ears after every battle. This time it was so bad that his balance was off.

  A week later, the surviving Muslim troops had been deported back to Indonesia, where ninety percent of them soon died from the virus they had been exposed to upon landing and making contact with the immune carriers. The fallout from Jakarta had drifted East, but remained north of Australia’s coastline. Jack lay on a lounge chair on Mindil Beach, comparing the Aussie sunset to others he had seen. He had some letters to write, for the next mail ship headed home.

  Across the sand, the Australian loudspeakers played “America The Beautiful”, his national anthem, in honor of their New American allies. The Starless Stripes flew proudly in the warm ocean breeze.

  “And now, the end is near, and so I face, the final curtain…”

  The last lights went out in Indonesia. The crew on duty at the helm of ‘The Eyes of Texas’ carefully monitored every visible change on the surface of Earth from above. As their attitudinal jets shifted their orbital path, they got a good luck at most of the land area of the planet, at one time or another. The digital photographs on the display monitor showed the comparative views a quarter century ago with the same views today. In a normal world, the two sets of images would have been reversed. One would expect that as time went on, the technological advance of civilization would have created more and more points of light on the continents below. The effect of the Balk was that the opposite had transpired. Closest to them, a blotch of yellow indicated the Orange Free State in Southern Africa, with pinpricks of light radiating outwards for a few hundred miles around it. The rest of Africa had returned to its original state as ‘the dark continent’. On the upper horizon, Europe shown as brightly as ever. As they traversed their way around the globe, they would see a vast darkness through most of the world.

  Th ere were some things which couldn’t be seen from space, though. The unmarked graves of three 99% White guards who had refused to be blackmailed into treason by the conspirators, and disappeared. The buried reports of confessions by other failed testtakers, made months before the Speaker’s assassination, ignored and hushed up to keep from damaging morale. And the truth that a conspiracy doesn’t have to be bulletproof, to be devastating.

  Even after the arrests and interrogations following the attack on New Orleans, a lot of distrust persisted within the Unified Command of New America, especially of nonNordic personnel. It was only after every soldier, every guard, and every supply clerk had been re-tested and those tests double checked, that some tension eased out of the ranks, like a pent up sigh.

  The damage to the morale of the Secret Service was deeper. Their humiliation was tempered with wounded pride that they had been infiltrated to such a degree. Follow-up investigations of the McNabb assassination, in a report released months later, found that a half dozen Secret Service guards had refused to be blackmailed. That was scant comfort to their comrades who had passed the test, and never had to weigh whether they would have turned, or not. But all in all, it was discovered that as many as twenty persons, including the families and friends of guards, had attempted to report the blackmail efforts. Had it not been for an institutionalized paranoia of genetic taint, the plot could not have moved forward as it had. Some of those reports had been made to the men’s superior officer. The Captain had plugged those leaks. But more damning, others had been made to different branches and offices who had been hesitant to act on them and thereby expose how many test-failures were in positions of trust.

  In time, this led to an institutional overhaul of the Secret Service into an elite force which took pride as much in its genetic quality, as its combat efficiency. A new caste system emerged in the New American Unified Command, based on the
sliding degree of racial phenotype. Promotions began to be based on degree of Nordicism, at least unofficially. The evolution of priorities was incremental, but profound.

  The Chicago Protocol Treaty of 2036 was signed by all of the members (New America, the Republic of Texas, Quebec, Greater Germany, France, England, the Russian Empire, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the Orange Free State, and even Deseret) with representatives present. It officially set the population limit of each orbital platform or stationary super-orbital station at 10,000 persons, and limited inter-solar defensive systems to non-nuclear weapons. The long-term effect of this treaty was to encourage the construction of more stations and platforms, at greater distances from Earth, rather than larger stations, in near orbit. Like on Earth, things tended to spread out, and separate, in space. That was true of people, too.

  Fifty Years After The Balk

  There were three heirs in contest for succession to the Speakership of New America when Jack McNabb passed away after nearly fifteen years in office. The relatively short rule of Kip McNabb before Hope’s husband had his heart attack while visiting the first New American permanent colony station on Mars in June of 2051 had paved the way for a dynastic inheritance. Jack had been in the right place at the right time to step into the highest office on the continent. His sister being the Speaker’s widow, and throwing her public support his way, made the ascension bloodless.

  But now, with the beloved leader not having named a successor, Hope was left with the unenviable task of choosing a new ruler from among her rival relatives and descendants. Jack had only been forty-five when the diabetic stroke had killed him, an early death in any time. It had been an especially severe shock considering the extended lifespans becoming more and more common. Cancer had been defeated with the finetuned mapping of the human genome, as had most other diseases and ailments with a partially genetic causation. Diabetes, too, but the recently deceased Speaker McNabb had feared being overthrown or deposed if he revealed his weakness, his sickness, to even his doctors. He had literally rather die, than show a vulnerability. And so, he had.

  White January snow fell softly over the slow river, as Hope sat in her rejuvenation therapy bath, staring out the window above the arch. Even in her mid-fifties, she found that her heart could still be broken. Silent as the snow, she said a prayer for wisdom to make the right choice for her family, and for her people. Her tears joined the essential oils to float in droplets along the surface of the emulsion. She would miss her little brother, as much as she missed her husband, and her dad before them. But she wasn’t just weeping for the dead. Hope wept for the living, for their expanded opportunities, and their diminished choices.

  The matriarch of the McNabb Dynasty had some diminished choices of her own to consider. No woman could be Speaker, in the long tradition of post-Balk New American society. But she could, and would, be the kingmaker. No matter which choice she made, some would be offended, perhaps to the point of rebellion. She had to make sure that her choice did not cause a civil war, or a schism within the family.

  Sean Walker, the oldest potential successor, was twenty-eight, married to a noble lady from the Russian Empire’s higher echelons, and had two small children, both girls. His second wife was a local girl from New Denver. She hadn’t conceived, yet. Like his ancestors, Sean was a Mormon, but practiced the faith more in honor of them, than in loyalty to the pacifist agrarian society which was officially a New American protectorate, now, in the Western half of the continent. Sean was the current Governor of Colorado, as his mother had been, before him. She also had been the Speaker’s second wife, even though she had kept her family name.

  Jack’s first wife had borne him a son, too, albeit two years later. Jack Cavanaugh, named after his dad, was the twenty-six year old Congressman from Virginia. Like many in the New American neo-feudal polygamist structure, his mother, Tracy, had also kept her maiden name. Over the last few decades, that had become the custom among noble circles, to mollify the fathers of betrothed daughters. Jack was the father of an infant son, and had not yet taken a second wife. His only spouse was the sole heir of a wealthy Virginia noble family, too.

  Jack and Sean both had younger brothers, two and one of them, respectively, but they had all foresworn their right to inheritance in order to present a united front in support of the older siblings. If they hadn’t, Hope’s decision would have been even more complicated than it was. Still, the involvement of Julia and Tracy, as two aggressively competing mothers, made compromise between the familial branches a distant dream, at present. They both acted as if they were sure that their eldest had been the Speaker’s favorite, and intended successor. Neither of them were correct. Both of them knew it. Hope was ashamed to be glad that Kelly had passed away two years before, following Josh. The force of her personality behind Sean would have been unstoppable. Having the united RLDS congregations aligned with him, like the Virginian nobility on the other side, was bad enough.

  And then, there was Mary. Hope’s oldest daughter was more of a leader than Hess had turned out to be, but because of her gender, his name had been forwarded as a claimant to the office, instead of hers. Hess was not the Speaker’s son, but as his nephew, by adoption if not by blood, he had a solid claim, as well. Mary, who had never married, had known Jack McNabb better than anyone, and more than anyone knew, except for Hope, herself. She had taken his death the hardest, and was still in mourning, a month later. The choice had been put off for too long, already, though. The memorial ceremonies from St. Louis to Moscow to New Chicago on Mars had long finished. Governors from Luna to Emerald Coast had asked if it was okay to raise their flags from half-staff, yet. People wanted to move on, in this fast-paced world, and off of it, where mining ships zipped from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to the growing orbital colonies, and back, daily.

  This morning, Hope had been forced to intrude on Mary’s self -imposed seclusion to ask her to endorse Hess’s claim. Mary had told her that she didn’t care, that nothing else mattered, any more. Hope had taken that as tacit approval. It was as good as things were going to get.

  After her rejuvenation bath, Hope sat down with the halffinished manuscript of Jack’s hand-written memoirs. Somebody would have to ghost-write the last chapters of that, too. She had always been the kind of fool who believed in happy endings.

  The End…of the new beginning.

  Acknowledgements:

  Special thanks must go to my beautiful wife, Tina, who not only inspired and encouraged me to write this series, but helped me in the guerrilla publicity and marketing of it, as well. I also want to express my appreciation to Michael Clayton, whose in-depth reviews and discussions helped me to refine and hone the plot development far beyond what it might have been, otherwise. Much gratitude, too, to those who have posted reviews of my books on various websites and blogs. My purpose in writing this trilogy was to awaken people to the potentiality of balkanization, and what could, perhaps, follow. I do not want any of my friends, family members, or loved ones to wake up behind enemy lines, when ‘The Balk’ hits. Not ‘if’. When.

  Ezekiel 33:7-11 1599 Geneva Bible (GNV)

  7 So thou, O son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and admonish them from me.

  8 When I shall say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt die the death, if thou dost not speak and admonish the wicked of his way, that wicked man shall die for his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thine hand.

  9 Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it, if he do not turn from his way, he shall die for his iniquity, but thou hast delivered thy soul.

  10 Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel, Thus ye speak and say, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we are consumed because of them, how should we then live?

  11 Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live: tur
n you, turn you from your evil ways, for why will ye die, O ye house of Israel?

  A Century After The Balk

  His dogeared copy of ‘Founding Father’s Son’ lay across the 2100 A.D. centennial translation of the Holy Bible, approved by the Church of Israel. The two official government publications were mandatory, but Thomas Jefferson McNabb was the kind of old-fashioned moderate who preferred to keep the volumes separate, rather than combined as the stricter denominations published them, these days.

  Aside from his Great Grandfather’s biography and the scripture, T.J. didn’t own any other print books. The collected libraries of human history were available on demand as neural downloads, even for Organics like himself. If, like millions of others, he was willing to surrender his Numircan citizenship and undergo GeMO-therapy for the offworld colonies, memory enhancement was one of the several mutative options available.

  For the colonies which required a greater phenotypic shift from the Organic base norm, of course, post-vitro mods were prohibitively expensive and complicated. The system-wide celebrity and dynastic heir-apparent had his niche in life chiseled out for himself before he was conceived, the old fashioned way. T.J. could no more have been preborn a Troll with a skeletal structure engineered to survive the gravity well of Bol’Shoy on Kepteyn b, or a Gill able to breathe the atmosphere on Gliese 832 c, than he could have been born an Asian. Of course, both of those colonies were a half a lifetime’s flight away. The kids born with those mods had plenty of time to grow to maturity at half light speed before they arrived in the new worlds.

  Royal and Noble families of Citizen and Taxpayer status were allowed unregulated reproductive privileges, but the Residence and Lumpen classes were eugenically matched to continue the Ethnicity Resegregation Initiatives which had been legislated by his grandfather, just before the Northern and Western Hemispheric Union.