GUERRILLAS
II.
Sang had lost his ability to discern passage of time meaningfully. He had stubbornly attempted to retain his temporal sensibilities, zealously so. But it was futile. Sang was like an insect trapped within a glass jar upon the walls of which biochemistry and physics precluded any possibility of acquiring a firm footing. He arrived at this devastating realization when a Stasi guard shocked him into rude conscious awareness one evening - none of the political category detainees housed in the ‘’Yellow Misery’’ ever actually slept - they’d simply find themselves exhausted to the point of semi-consciousness.
Sang was also far from certain if it were day or evening - he merely assumed that the biological rhythms of his wake and rest cycle (likely further ingrained by the habitual regimentation of military training) had remained basically intact, and that when he found himself exhaustedly at rest on the freezing cell floor, there was no bedding or even a steel plank affixed to the wall.
When the Stasi Oberst - the ranking officer who had been present when he was first arrested - had asked him to recite his full name and detainee number he then, for the first time, demanded Sang relay to him the exact date. Sang replied that approximately a month had passed, addressing the commandant as herr Oberst and averting his eyes at all times. The commandant punched Sang in the teeth and grabbed his testicles, savagely twisting them, then pounded him to the floor with his fists upon the nape of Sang’s neck.
‘’Is it your intention to feign madness in order to avoid punishment, you Chink pig?’’ screamed the officer.
‘’No...Herr Oberst’’, Sang croaked.
‘’Then you take myself and the Party for fools?’’
‘’No, Herr Oberst!’’
‘’You have been here for two years! Even your wife had denounced you! You have always sympathized with the imperialists! It is the sole reason why you volunteered for duty with the Ministry! You are an agent of the imperialist client state of South Vietnam!
‘’No, Herr Oberst!’’
It continued like this for weeks. Perhaps months. For a time, the Oberst did not visit for many many days. Nor did the Feldwebel who arrived daily to feed him a ration of bread and water, occasionally supplemented by a meager broth of vegetables and tiny, stringy morsels of putrid bacon fat. Sang was able to capture a greater sense of passage of time during this particular torture - he was starving to death, and as his body wasted away, he could discern, approximately, the duration of his ongoing captivity. Once, the Oberst and two of the NCOs Sang had seen regularly within the block he was housed set up a folding card table immediately in front of his cell, and proceeded to dine on Jagerschnitzel and goulash.
They continuously offered to allow him to join them and feast if he would sign a confession admitting to being an agent of the United States and their allies in the Republic of Vietnam. Sang simply turned his back on the agonizing spectacle, seated in the lotus position, contemplating methods to kill himself (as he had done since his arrival). Sang had in fact arrived at Bautzen 24 days previously - he had not eaten for the preceding 8 days. Sang Nam Wong was dying, and in so doing was passing the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit curriculum with the equivalent of high honors. Yet Sang had no way of knowing this. Nor of discerning the fact that much of the horror that he was enduring appeared to bear the proverbial stamp of creative design by a single architect of psychic and physical torture.
Oberst Wolfgang Wiegand was, in many relevant, though sharply distinguishable capacities, as much of a man lacking a true past and identity - at least as regards the intimate and circumstantially unique criteria that is rationally associated with such psychological configurations - as was Sang Nam Wong, albeit for reasons significantly more purposeful than those of his trainee-acolyte-prisoner.
Wiegand of course held political and aesthetic sympathies, some of which he was committed to with rare and singularly focused savagery, but these things that so moved him owed to what he viewed as the will of an immutable force - not necessarily God, rather something far more intelligible and seemingly present while at the same time virtually impossible to render descriptively intelligible.
GUERRILLAS
III.
‘’We will burn the old grass, and the new will grow’’.
-Saloth Sar
Location: Kratie, Khmer Republic (Cambodia) - near the Mekong
Year: 1972
Date: December 25
‘’He calls himself the Black Father’’, Dragutin uttered, sotto voce. Dragutin never spoke above a whisper, at least he never had in Sang’s company. Sang had learned over the preceding years that the habits a man exhibits at war can be considered his true dispositions. At least this was true in the case of the war Sang was fighting against the Red Khmer. A highly personal, yet incongruously dispassionate, war. A war that Sang had named, though only in his own psychic dialogs - never aloud, The War of the Monsters. Sang acknowledged Dragutin’s remark by briefly - silently - meeting the other man’s eyes.
Sang appreciated Dragutin’s company. In the way one is comforted by familiar landmarks or enjoys the implicit feeling of safety when gripping a familiar weapon. Dragutin - like Sang himself - was too obviously devoid of truly human characteristics to inspire genuine affection in his fellow man. Dragutin’s black eyes - there were no whites visible - were an anatomical oddity so unfamiliar to Sang that he momentarily thought the man blind before realizing the impossibility of such a thing. As he spent time in the bush with the man Sang came to realize not only was he not blind but that he had vision comparable to that of a carnivorous, nocturnal animal.
Dragutin’s black eyes - all pupils - would widen slightly during night ambushes. He’d gaze out into the treeline, his grotesquely, abnormally long and slender fingers would grip the stubby, MP-40 submachine gun - the weapon appearing like a child’s toy in the huge, obscenely lanky man’s albino hands - and Sang would discern a subdued, but desperate, excitement. Sang believed he could smell the homicidal appetite wafting from Dragutin’s pores. Musky, ruttish - almost like the scent of a woman at peak arousal, yet not - it was revolting. Not in an unhygienic way - not dirty - just sickening. It reminded Sang of the sensation he’d endured as a small boy, upon seeing a dead body for the first time.
He was overcome by a peculiar and irrational shame - as if he were viewing something that should be purposefully avoided; experiencing the contradictory, and overwhelming, sensations of primitive sensory infatuation and desperate revulsion simultaneously. Draugutin whisper-hissed, continuing his monologue as he slowly, purposefully, smeared black face paint about his cheeks.
‘’The mark of the true Khmer is his black skin. They say he consults astrologers and believes that magicians can smite his enemies. A black bastard and his witch doctors!’’
Dragutin laughed at his own cleverness. Dragutin’s laugh sounded like a whispered scream. Or the whirring of an overworked engine perhaps. An affectation. A creature of malformed inner constitution affecting the spontaneous moods and whims of a man. The Montagnards feared him - this terrible, Stygian creature. Yet they revered him for keeping them alive. A living totem; evil against evil.
Dragutin excelled at bartering for goods, as men whose only home is the battlefield often do. He’d come into possession of a quantity of American cigarettes, some of which he’d traded to a GRU operative for a Brandy spirit, highly coveted in Dragutin’s homeland. During those periods - those terrible hours and days - when their squadron was not in the bush, he would imbibe recklessly. And in these moments, stuporous confessions would issue forth, with Sang acting as silent confessor.
At times, Dragutin would lapse into liturgical Arabic, obviously beseeching God for absolution. At others, he would relay what he had witnessed in his years - deliberately so, as he spoke in German (the lingua franca he shared with Sang), which was comfortably intimate in a way that the Russian language was not.
Sang was shocked to learn that the man was nearly 50 years old. Although it was not a formal breach of protocol for a man of such advanced age to be involved in direct action missions, it was unheard of - even within the ranks of what GRU and ministerium für staatssicherheit referred to, in typically Byzantine nomenclature, as ‘’Political Assistance Element’’ forces. Dragutin however did not appear a day over thirty. This was partially attributable to his strange anatomy, the oddly lanky - yet tautly muscular limbs - the shockingly Stygian pallor of his skin, as if no blood ran beneath the alabaster surface. Not a wrinkle, a stress line near the eye, a gray hair to be seen. There was a peculiar, adolescent ebullience to his demeanor, oddly incongruous with his tightly controlled, silently gracile economy of movement. Dragutin was unsettlingly alien - even to Sang. Sang who he made Confessor.
During Dragutin’s intoxicated larks, he spoke of Leningrad.
‘’We put them to siege until they ate themselves…like a colony of rats,’’ he relayed in his screeching whisper to Sang the Confessor.
‘’Then…the day came when we became the rats…when the Svabos could not…relieve us. War of the rats’’. The strange, vampiric Bosniak affected a grotesque caricature of a tragedian theater mask, then immediately smirked and chuckled:
‘’A Partisan girl attempted to pass behind our lines as the front finally collapsed…I took her for myself but I did not…have her. She was Belarussian or a Jewess. I had to know what it was like, we were starving you see…the Svabos sent no food. I cut her heart out for myself, and the taste was like the meat of a gelding calf. I butchered the rest and gave it to the men…I tried to render it unrecognizable as what it was. Some knew, and could not eat of her…others did not care. I only ate her heart…I remained ravenous, but I could not stand the taste to leave my mouth, to be corrupted by the taste of a girl’s fat and hock. Vaht you say, Chinese? Do the Khmer have hearts like this?’’
Sang the Confessor, adapted as he had to the function, would meet Dragutin’s eyes and say nothing. Dragutin was not acting as a braggart - he was far beyond interest in such puerile hobbies and fascinations. He was trying to reassure Sang of his vestigial humanity. Sang was not deceived. Nor was he fearful or disgusted by his comrade. He felt a pang of affection, inspired by the fact that the other man thought such things still mattered.
‘’There is an enduring mystery to the origins and significance of human cultural practices, especially those relating to religious sacrifice as military protocols. In short, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the manner in which Sovereign acts of violence become institutionalized is particularly opaque and unknown. It has been posited by Anthropologists who study ancient societies that the, apparently universal, practice of human sacrifice - and particularly infant sacrifice - had its origins in prehistoric epochs when Man was threatened by predatory animals within his environment.
It is easy to imagine the most primitive of anatomically and behaviorally modern humans discovering that sometimes, perhaps even more often than not, if a Sabre-Toothed Tiger or a Bear arrived at the entrance of the cave-dwelling, having detected the olfactory signature of human quarry, the beast could be appeased by the offering of an infant, and upon devouring the offering would leave, having been sated.
Similarly, there are practices, sacramental as well as pragmatic, relating to the conduct of warfare that share similar if not identical primordial origins. Surviving documentation of the epoch prior to WARDAY, specifically the century preceding, officially sanctioned homicide within military contexts. More philosophically inclined races and societies tended to posit that warfare, incident to the cunning of Reason and the hand of God in human affairs, arrived similar to the Seasons. Subsequent epochs, addled with a bias for conceptual modeling according to rigidly quantifiable data inputs, suggested that competition over material monopolies of coveted resources led to periodic instances of war as a sort of restructuring mechanism; presumably essential to the maintenance of massively scaled organization patterns.
What is significant for purposes of the development of SECE doctrine as well as the understanding of the truly ancient origins of the motives that did and do lead men - collectively and severally - to sustain at all costs the institution of Sovereign violence, involves occulted knowledge that was lost to historical awareness, owing certainly in part to purposeful suppression of this information by Ecclesiastical and Political authorities. Those motives virtually always, if not axiomatically, included the need to satisfy a basic chemical dependence upon compounds that could only be harvested from human beings - and only by the physical destruction of the human that is the vessel of the substances in question.’’
-Doctor-Professor Woldemar Mohamet al Husseini, Phd, MD, ‘’Applied Biochemical Mechanisms and Command and Control Protocol in Military Cybernetics (Addendum to EYES ONLY report on ZAR-TX PROJECT to LeMay Alexis Huber) 3029 AD (1046 AWD).
WARLORDS
II.
LOCATION: FOA-DZAC ‘’VILLANOUS REDEEMER’’ in ORBIT of TRAPPIST 1e (39.6 Light Years from Earth)
YEAR: 3039 A.D./1056 A.W.D.
DATE: DECEMBER 1
Al Husseini steeled himself with a silent prayer, completing the ( habitually familiar) ritual by conjuring a mental image of his Mother, while also recalling the warm - almost hot - sensation of his late wife’s embrace. The Arab surgeon associated these wonderful, agonizingly remote, visions with the smell of fragrant poppy flowers and strong coffee - Husseini had not smelled non-synthetic coffee beans nor poppies (or any flowers not grown shipboard in hydroponic gardens, from narrowly selected strains; characterized by a cloying, overly cultivated scent) in over a decade. Nor had he experienced the touch of a woman.
Husseini drew an association between the poppies and his late wife that transcended obvious metaphors - a wreath of poppies was laid at his young bride’s grave as she was interred, amidst a chorus of grieving wails in the Urdu tongue (of which Husseini had no competency) and Arabic death prayers.
Huber had afforded her a State funeral; a gesture of gratitude to his loyal, and brilliant, adjutant. However, this was not merely a matter of social graces and a common sympathy between men whose fates and fortunes are tethered to one another as like a pair of coupling serpents; rather, the cancer that had ravaged Farrah al Husseini in body and mind and ultimately extinguished the flame of her young life was indicative of gross genetic incompatibility.
The fact that a Surgeon-Minister candidate, of consular portfolio and an adjutant to LeMay Alexis Huber no less, would be permitted to wed a woman based upon personal affinities and desire while not encumbered by the law requiring such unions to be permitted only after formal approval incident to full genetic investigation (encompassing years if necessary) was grounds for enormous controversy. Huber’s presence at the poor woman’s burial was, without exception, both edifying and horrifying to the mourners. It also precluded in absolute terms any discussion of suspected impropriety surrounding the matrimonial union of al Husseini and his late bride. Any such utterances would carry a death sentence for the declarant.
There was a cruel imposition, perhaps intentional, on Husseini’s living memory, owing to Huber’s aforementioned intervention. Any recollection of Husseini’s beloved was tainted by the viscerally devastating memory of that terrible day when her remains were committed to the Earth. Consequently, any memory of that day was dominated by the image of Huber, laying a wreath at graveside, in the finest black uniform of a Martyr Caste Executioner.
The aroma of flowers, the sickly scent of ozone and decay that emanated from the body of Huber himself, hearing utterances spoken in the Urdu tongue, any of these stimuli prompted a sensation of deep inner dread in the mind and heart of the sensitively introverted Husseini. A combined bouquet of these memory triggers nauseated the Minister Surgeon to the point of incapacity.
Space being at a premium, there were no greenhouse gardens aboard Fleet Orbital Arcologies, save those obsolescent vessels that continued to house Spaceborne populations; Husseini thus was largely spared painful encounters with sensory triggers that tended to inspire memories of that terrible day when Huber, like some terrible harbinger, bestowed upon him a graveside visit. The exception was when summoned to Huber’s chambers by the man himself, to act as an audience of one for the purpose of counsel or - less frequently - the direct transmission of secret orders.
Huber himself seemed to secrete a perfume of death - what seemed to be a combination of ozone, a subtle indication of cauterized flesh and cells, and a gluey aroma of biomechanical lubricants. In and of itself, the effect was not, however unpleasant, revolting. What had rendered the aromatic sensation practically unendurable was the stench of decay, wafting from the coveted ornament, situated at a place of pride, upon the piano in Huber’s quarters.
Huber was a classically trained pianist of not insignificant ability, although he had not played - at least not before witnesses - since the time prior to sustaining his injuries. The instrument itself, situated in his quarters, had been a gift of the SECE upon ascendancy to Martyr Caste rank. During the final SECE zone assault operation that had been carried out on Earth, the piano had been discovered amidst similarly ancient relics, housed in a semi-hardened structure near coastal Mextecka within immediate proximity to the designated zone perimeter.
It was not unheard of for coveted artifacts of pre WARDAY vintage to be discovered in Mexteca and Yucatan - as the region was situated outside of what had been the primary strategic battlespace on WARDAY. However, the discovery of any ‘pure’ art object or musical instrument of any ancient vintage was an exceedingly uncommon occurrence. The ornament - as dreaded by Husseini as coveted by Huber - that adorned the prized artifact was neither ancient nor rare; and its placement, Husseini perceived immediately, owed to a compulsion - intrinsic to Huber’s psyche - to deliver mortal terror, visceral as well as monumentally symbolic, upon all things within his dominion.
In the months following Huber’s catastrophic injuries, he was afforded the most revolutionary - in technology and technique - medical treatment available; such that he was able (against all advices and beseeching admonitions) to return to duty in just shy of an Earth year from the date of his being maimed. Mextecka remained under extended quarantine, owing to the caution attendant outbreaks of Space Sickness on Earth and Earth’s satellites (natural and man made). Early in the deployment, Huber spontaneously toured the secure encampment of the refugee population, still quarantined as they were owing to the emergence of the outbreak in what had been their intimate living space.
As Huber reviewed this wretched column of humanity, rendered languid and hollowed out by enduring horror as they were, some behooved him in the ancient dialect to spare their first born infants children, who had miraculously survived the slaughter perpetuated by the Terminals. Others repeated trance-like utterances, long forgotten fragmented prayers begging deliverance from Providential wrath. It was clear they believed Huber to be the Angel of Death itself, having arrived to complete what the SIckness and the monsters it created had been unable to. Husseini shuddered as he recalled Huber’s macabre parade through the foul camp of these wretches, damned by their own accidental survival and thereby availed to the far crueler fate of Huber’s sadistic whim
Huber happened upon a boy - not an infant but whose adolescence was not yet fully emergent. The boy had flowing hair that was the color of tree rosin and the consistency of freshly broken straw; the youth’s grey eyes betrayed no fear even as Huber seized him by the head. Huber kissed the boy on the lips, pressing his destroyed, ichthyic face against the child’s soft yet taut flesh. Within seconds Huber had severed the boy’s head cleanly - Husseini observed the cruel sacrifice from less than three meters from Huber’s flank. The Arab doctor was certain that he discerned a lingering consciousness in the beautiful youth’s eyes - blessedly only for a duration of several seconds - as Huber held the severed head aloft as an excitable fisherman might admire a prize catch in the shimmering of the afternoon sun.
Huber displayed the youth’s severed head atop his prized piano. As the perfume of its decay began to emanate from the disintegrating soft tissue, a nauseating odor came to populate the entirety of the vast FOA ship. Long after the repugnant process was complete, and all that remained of Huber’s ornamental trophy was a brittle skull and keratin strands of what had once been flaxen hair, Husseini could still discern the evil odor. To this day it seemed to linger as a permanent, foul miasma within Huber’s personal sanctum - even about Huber himself. Husseini had cultivated, early in his service, the ability to suppress compulsion to gag when summoned to Huber’s quarters - or his presence. To the present, decades on, he continued to respond to the scent of the grave and the sight, and memory, of the youth’s severed head.
Huber was enamored with eyes - he forbade SECE Martyr Caste Executioners who, owing to injury or destruction to optic tissue, had been augmented with cybernetic vision implants from serving in his bodyguard detachment. Huber opined to the stoically erstwhile Husseini that the eyes of subordinates conveyed awe, fear, reverence - and, alternatively, intention to mutiny, hatred, or prideful arrogance. He demonstrated an opposite, yet congruous, preference for the eyes of ZARTAX to be completely inorganic - Huber demanded the cyborg be rendered in his own image, and to observe the world as he himself did.
The doors to Huber’s quarters silently parted when Husseini was precisely three feet from the security scan perimeter in the Executive corridor - this owed both to the fact that the Doctor’s movements had been tracked from the moment he left his own quarters by panoptic relay (contemporaneously observed at all times by Huber’s personal guard echelon), and also so as to provide clear range, safely outside of Huber’s quartered location, to assault and neutralize the threat in event Husseini had been compromised or if Husseini was not in fact present at all, but what in fact appeared by relay to the SECE guards was merely a phantom image, transmitted to spoof security measures.
There were, of course, sensors within the Executive corridor that detected and registered Husseini’s body heat, rate of respiration, and molecular disturbance as he moved along the passageway, but of course, such data could also potentially be imitated by an assassin on a suicide mission in service of a truly adept enemy.
Husseini stepped across the threshold of Huber’s massive quarters - four SECE echelon guardsmen, in shipboard armor, flanked his path - situated two by two. The squadron commander, unarmored, wearing a deeply black service uniform, removed his peaked cover and momentarily dropped to one knee, as was the purpose of his presence, SECE forces on protection detail did not waste movement in the form of honorific gestures - to do so could cost their executive charge his life. Husseini offered a barely perceptible nod to the kneeling adjutant, freeing him from his formal repose. The man rose and abruptly stepped clear of the Minister-Surgeon’s path.
Huber stood in the westernmost corner of his quarters, to the immediate left of the massive observation pane. Husseini’s eyes betrayed him, involuntarily glancing at the skull adorning the ancient piano, the instrument itself situated atop a splendid Persian rug of ancient vintage. A fresh wave of nausea washed over Husseini as a memory of odiferous perfume of decay filled his nostrils.
As Husseini prepared to speak, Huber - his back still turned - raised his right hand to indicate, ‘’silence’’. Huber was viewing the visual data transmitted by the outward optical sensors of an SECE acolyte Executioner during Zone Assault deployment. Straining his eyes to discern the details of the holographic projection at distance, Husseini observed that the data originated from a deceased Executioner named ’Moneagle’
‘’Trappist 1e’’, Huber said as he abruptly beckoned Husseini forward to join him with a curt hand gesture.
‘’Tell me, Minister Surgeon, could our Prodigal have survived in theater?’’ Husseini breathed deeply, steeling himself, then responded with soft, deliberate annunciation, ‘’I believe so, Excellency. So long as a population of… so long as what ZAR-TX requires were available for harvest and consumption, in adequate quantity’’. Husseini was the only man to whom Huber spoke with nearly complete candor, yet he favored disclosure of sensitive data by rhetorical omission. By posing the question to the Minister-Surgeon regarding the probability of the continued viability of ZARTAX, he had informed Husseini of a permanent human population on the surface of Trappist 1e.
‘’Are you familiar, Minister-Surgeon, of the parable among the Spaceborne of the mad Shaman who aspired to godhood?’’ Huber asked, finally turning to face Husseini.
‘’No, I am not aware of it, Excellency‘, Husseini demurred, casting his eyes deliberately downward in a calculatedly subtle display of deference. Huber’s turned his gaze to the massive observation window, paused thoughtfully, then continued,
‘’There lived a shaman among the earliest Spaceborne, three generations removed from Earth. As all the generational Spaceborne, he’d lived his life knowing only the cylindrical walls of the great arcology wherein he lived, its hydroponic gardens that he tended to diligently, and the abyss of infinite space, in this case near Proxima Centauri. One day, the shaman slaughtered every last one of his fellows…men, women and children, none were spared.
He is said to have situated himself at the highest vantage point within the great cylindrical structure, and observed the void of space, never interrupting his scanning of the cosmos even to nourish or relieve himself, until finally succumbing to starvation. The suggestion of course, Minister-Surgeon, is that if a single, solitary mind remains to observe and perceive what no other mind has heretofore perceived, the solitary mind is the single arbiter of reality…it is an imprisoned god’’.
Husseini bowed his head, slightly yet perceptibly, to acknowledge Huber’s musings. As he did so, the Surgeon-Minister’s eyes were involuntarily drawn to the hologram projection of the data transmitted by Moneagle. One of Moneagle’s squadmates was abruptly struck by something too fast for the naked eye to adequately discern, with enough force to have severed his head. The headless body of the doomed Executioner remained standing for approximately 9 seconds, during which time it retrieved its own severed head. Husseini was certain he observed an ever so brief, but unmistakable, movement of the severed head’s eyes, accompanied by the telltale expression of mortal terror that can only be conveyed by a waking, conscious mind.
Husseini then thought of the beautiful youth’s severed head adorning the piano, he imagined it speaking to him, uttering in a whirring monotone,
‘’Death…is god…’’. The perfume of decaying flesh flooded Husseini’s nostrils, prompting the Minister-Surgeon to bow his head so as to be dismissed by Huber. By the grace of God, he was able to take leave of Huber’s company and return to the illusory safety of his own quarters before collapsing and vomiting. Mohamet al Husseini was more afraid in that moment than he had ever been in his long life; a life characterized by horrors most men would find insurmountable, but Husseini was an adept and making a friend of nameless horrors. Husseni had made acquaintance at long last of a horror that would not abide his demurrer, and all he was capable of was trembling and vomiting until the shock abated. Yet this horror had a name - and most ironically, Husseini himself had named it. Its name was ZARTAX.