“For Reagan and the Zionists, The USSR represents the epitome of evil, but for us it is a great power neighboring us with its own security requirements and a doctrine that corresponds to them.’’
-Otto Remer
’’To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.
I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn't escape left or right because of the will of the driver. We shall meet again. I have believed in God. I obeyed the laws of war and was loyal to my flag.’’
-SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann
‘’Part of [Von] Leers’ political attitude is apparently due to his conversion to Islam, which was accompanied by a change in his name to Dr. Omar Amin von Leers. He is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.’’
-CIA report, October 24, 1957 on the partisan activities of Johann Von Leers
PROLOGUE (PART I)
LOCATION: Baikonur, Kazakhstan, USSR
YEAR: 1983 AD
Date: December 24 - WARDAY
Tamerlan Maltsev unceremoniously tore through a cream colored envelope – a peculiarly innocuous looking package, considering the purpose and contents of the parcel - that he’d retrieved from a hidden wall safe only moments prior: the envelope didn’t even bear a security clearance designation, it merely displayed a heraldic hammer and sickle situated atop a similarly ink-stamped globe.
Maltsev contemplated, ever so briefly, the basic absence of nuance that seemed appropriately characteristic of the Socialist heraldry that unfailingly adorned virtually every artifact generated by Regime officialdom. Nevertheless, it seemed somehow improper for the command authority directives that he now had within grasp to be conveyed in such prosaic format.
Of course, at the level of command authority that Malstev was afforded, evinced not merely by a Marshal’s rank but also by the physical presence of the other men within the ‘’conference hall’’ of the bunker, such formalities would have been superfluous. Maltsev found himself among none other than: Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Dmitry Ustinov, Minister of Defense of the USSR, Erich Honnecker, General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, Wojciech Jaruzelski , First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and Otto Remer - a man without title, portfolio, or since 1945, national citizenship nor discernible allegiance yet whom nevertheless was most responsible of all the men present for the decision to initiate the plan known to the men present (and select, thoroughly vetted and determined to be essential individuals who had been designated as Wartime Command Authorities) as Case Blue-Ryan.
As the gravity of the purpose which had called this committee to order began to penetrate Maltsev’s consciousness, he silently pondered the irony of the informality that reigned when the present quorum of tyrant-functionaries were assembled - acknowledgment of, and deference to, martial rank and seniority of office were not observed.
Within this most exclusive, and potently God-like, of fraternities wherein membership conferred exclusive dominion over the planning and waging of strategic nuclear warfare it was instinctively appreciated that strict adherence to explicit chain of command conventions would be gauche or even vulgar: thus, a tangible equality prevailed among the architects of mega-death - not unlike that described by pagan scribes and poets as existing between Olympian deities or, perhaps more appropriately comparative, the parity of status, subtly indicated, between the Luciferian cavalrymen of Scripture; beings prophesied to arrive ruthlessly in advance of God’s adversary, emergent before the vermillion fire of Hades, presaging apocalypse in the wake of shattered seals.
Maltsev was pleased with himself that his hands didn’t visibly tremble as he read aloud the protocol script (as he had done dozens of times in the course of command and control exercises and tabletop wargame scenarios) in the consummately deferential yet severe language of military officialdom that called upon the decision maker to order the initiation of CASE BLUE-RYAN. He had devoted a three day vacation (a princely luxury, in Maltsev’s estimation) to recreating and bonding with his bride and their young son and daughter, cloistered at Maltsev’s dacha - a sprawling yet not garish mansion in Sochi that had afforded him peace of mind on infrequent, but necessary, occasions. There was no reprieve, however, of mind, body, or spirit, for Maltsev during this final, brief retreat to his cloister.
Remer had called upon him at the dacha, his presence exuding a nakedly sinister, though invisible, aura - Maltsev never failed to notice the primitive fear and subtle yet unmistakable indicators of capitulation and abject submission to the aforementioned dread expressed in his wife’s body language and affect any time Remer was present. In the way intrinsic to women, Aisha Maltseva was a metaphysical weathervane - instinctively discerning ruthlessness and capacity for malevolence in others. Remer wore his capacity for sublimely controlled and purposeful violence on his sleeve - intuition, feminine or otherwise, wasn’t called for to perceive it; it was the aloof detachment and precision with which he both ‘’wore’’ and employed it that made an impression on those most sensitive to perceiving such essential nuances.
On that day, Remer had walked with Maltsev in the garden - and had gifted him a leatherbound book,inscribed by its author; a theorist of Jihad ,of political philosophy, of the histories of the races of men, all and sundry. Remer knew by way of his own near-legendary intuition that his comrade-colleague to whom he had gifted the book was an occulted Muslim. He knew what sort of appeal (or absence of one) would fortify Maltsev to execute an order that was diabolical in consequence if not in deed; that would make real that which up to that moment had only been extant as speculative musing(s) on the outcomes of game simulations - outcomes indicated numerically and sanitized by euphemism.
Remer had, quite adeptly, discerned Maltsev’s frailties - he knew that only an appeal to serve God unconditionally, issued forth by a pious killer whose faith was unimpeachable, could allow Maltsev to rationalize the fact that within days he would execute a series of protocols and orders that would culminate in hundreds of millions of the mega dead. God’s will was Armageddon: to prostrate oneself before it was piety, anything else was craven cowardice and complicity in one’s own damnation.
On that day, Tamerlan Maltsev, Marshal of the Soviet Union, with an icy countenance born of unconditional self-assuredness that he was acting as the sword and the arm of his Creator, issued the order for a pre-emptive decapitation strike against what was then the United States of America; followed 41 minutes subsequent by a secondary fusilade of intercontinental range missiles that struck every countervalue objective on the list generated by the Strategic Rocket Forces targeting computer.
It was Christmas Eve by the Gregorian Calendar. It was a moment that stopped time. It was a moment at which millions of human thoughts, motives and ambitions (and billions of permutations therein) ceased to exist instantaneously. It was the day that the world was born, its birth cry a hundred silent flashes hotter than a hundred suns.
ZONE ASSAULT (I)
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
-Stephen Crane
LOCATION: Sorelia, Alpha Akron
YEAR: 2999 AD (1016 AWD)
DATE: April 19-20
In the beginning, there was only Victor. Neither genius nor imbecile, neither intellectual nor proletarian, not a lover who’d inspired longing in the hearts of sensitive yet brutal men and sighing girls in the prime of their fleeting wildrose beauty, nor a killer who tallied the destruction of human lives by his own incongruously dainty hands with the savant enthusiasm of the statistician or birdwatching hobbyist. Victor Francis Von Leers was none of these things because he was all of them. And the less human Victor became the more completely he came to instantiate these terrifyingly human characteristics.
Victor, like every Executioner (soldiery had been formally done away with over a century prior to Victor’s birth) was susceptible to inferring the wishes of his masters - directives disguised within euphemisms and purposefully occulted by subcultural dialect. People who loathe the Executioner in all times, in all venues, among all races and tribes assign him a moral imbecility, a servile and cultivated ignorance, or an atrophied or undeveloped humanity in order to explain his dog-whistle perception of the sanguinary blood-pearls concealed by the shell of superior orders.
In reality, his aptitude stemmed from nothing that could be identified by way of any punitively objective analysis: the aloof detachment of the Executioner was coupled with an exceedingly pious aversion to discussion – let alone acknowledgment – of his vocation by any means save for oblique reference, innuendo or conspicuous omission. Acts in the service of God – in common with the name of God himself – were never to be identified nor described in the debased and feral dialects of men. Victor knew – with an unreasonable assuredness that only zealots can muster – that of all His children, God especially loves the mujahideen who sacralize the soil of the myriad worlds of His dominion by the spilling of blood upon it - and of these pious murderers, the Executioners were His very favorite sorcerers.
All of history up to the moment of his conception had conspired to create Victor – it allowed his father to be garrisoned to an Off-World killing field. A forlorn outpost where the man was gifted a terrified and virginal woman-child by her even more terrified mother and father; refugees who were fleeing ahead of a tsunami tide of murder, perpetuated by a lumpen caste of doomed and dying cannibals, sex fiends, and diagnosed terminals. Terminals were a mysterious and ever-present horror on any world or station where the diaspora of man lived, died, labored, or made war in deep space.
Naked and perpetually crusted with blood and excreta, some holding severed heads aloft as trophy-totems, a smattering of self-anointed Shaman among them adorned with necklaces of ears and noses, fingers and toes, snatches and severed breasts, virtually all of them poisoned by radiation – their burned flesh consequently emitting an odiferous bouquet of ozone, cinnamon, and decay, their epidemic emergence on the soil of Alpha Akron had guaranteed that Ivirtually every one of the 31,403 Off World settlers would perish at the hands and teeth of the terminals.
At the epicenter of this pestilent maelstrom, Victor’s father, Victor Ungern-Sternberg Von Leers, was presented with the most coveted of war spoils – the auburn haired girl had yellow eyes, impossibly widened by a combination of wonder and fear. Her mother began to frantically disrobe the girl, so as to persuade Ungern to accept the gift by exhibiting the quality of her breeding stock; subsequently going as far as to invite Ungern himself, or his medical officer (the woman unaware that he’d been dead for months) to inspect the girl’s purportedly intact maidenhead.
Ungern read the faces of the maiden’s parents - any trace of emotional repression or control had collapsed; the expressions they wore were entirely open, a primitive honesty wrought by terror. He looked upon the girl - her left hand was flush against his lapel, the fingers of her right firmly clutching the sleeve of his battle service uniform. There was fear within the girl, but not pre-rational terror. She exuded an authentically dignified poise of a sort that could not be affected.
The girl’s mother let slip a whispered scream as the sound of a veritable battalion of Terminals, hurling themselves suicidally across the ‘’death strip’’ - an aptly named perimeter - which abutted the steel, lead and polycarbonate blast doors and barriers which constituted the frontier of the zone assault fortification. The damned legions hurled themselves over and over again at the obstacles before them. All the while issuing forth a futile, yet mightily vigorous, war cry in approximate unison - undoubtedly fueled by a combination of berzerkers’ rage and the torturous fury wrought by the gross enlargement of the pineal gland and concomitant overabundance of adrenaline coursing through the circulatory networks of the morbidly rotted yet staggeringly powerful bodies of the assaulting terminals. The girl herself however remained composed - discordantly so.
Ungern looked down, into the fair girl’s green-grey flecked yellow eyes, eyes neither cast downward in abject submission nor reciprocally meeting the non-verbal challenge with eager surrender, and nodded seriously - simultaneously breaking the fast developing compulsion to maintain eye contact with his feminine charge/war bride/hostage and briefly, but affirmatively, silently acknowledging the mother’s and father’s beseeching plea for safety from the horror just beyond the blast doors of Ungern’s domain.
The stoic officer, placing his arm securely around the gift maiden’s waist while hoisting his flechette battle rifle with the other, beckoned his three new charges - as well as a perimeter security gunner who sported a raw flash burn on the right side of his boyish face and a brute of a senior Grade Armory Sergeant - to accompany him below ground level, past the munitions depot and fallout shelters, and into the relative security of the siege barracks.
Preparing to take leave, he gently touched the girl’s face as a parting gesture - in doing so enduring pangs of longing and sorrow he’d not experienced in 20 years: until three quarters of an hour ago, he’d planned to remain on the planet’s surface upon verifying departure of the last evacuation vessel bearing non-expendable human settlers as cargo; welcoming immolation by the nuclear munitions which would be fired subsequent to his order for surface bombardment by strategic missile frigates situated in low orbit. Now, for the first time since his commision as a Novice Executioner, he desperately wished to live. Ungern’s decision, rendered by passion bereft of reason, on the surface of a damned world besieged by equally damned savages, would touch and concern the lives of every man and woman on every planet in the habitable universe for a thousand years to come.
I want to buy the physical copy of Steelstorm 1, it's out of stock on Imperium Press though. Are you going to release a physical book with all three parts in when you've completed everything or is it going to stay in parts?