GUERRILLAS
IV.
‘’The word ‘fear’ never exists in our military philosophies’’.
-General Vo Ngyuen Giap
‘’War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner’’.
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
LOCATION: Kompong Thom City, Khmer Republic
YEAR: 1974 A.D.
DATE: August 2
Sang steadied himself against the partially collapsed brick and mortar berm, abutting what had been a hasty fortification along the FANK forces’ main line of resistance. Sang never felt truly well anymore. Not even strong liquor and occasional indulgence in opium afforded him reprieve from the dull, maddening pain in his joints, the crushing fatigue, the constant nausea and headaches. A Bulgarian medic, with whom Sang had communicated in broken German, advised him that the symptoms of Malaria never truly abated. Sang’s own diagnosis was derived from an instinctive conceptual tendency in favor of metaphysical causes and phenomena. Sang would not survive the war; owing to his fated destiny, as death became the only god asserting claim of rightful sovereignty over Cambodia, Sang himself began to die in body, mind and spirit.
Dragutin endured no such deterioration. Dragutin would not survive the war either, but that was because all wars ultimately resolve into conditions of order (if not peace) and war was the nourishment which sustained him. Dragutin, and all those .
like him, was more harbinger than man - conjured into sentience by something beyond the capacity of the five senses to detect yet discernibly present wherever and whenever rumors of war cross mens’ lips. The most wicked among these harbingers bearing their teeth uncontrollably, in the throes of violently joyful catharsis, while women and girls in the prime of fertile vitality wrap their arms tightly across their breast - detecting as they do a hypnotic, marching rhythm in the deafening silence; the winds carrying echoes promising the most savage rapine and the destruction of the wombs from which ancient races and tribes emerged and are sustained.
Sang had realized that the mission, not merely his own familiar area of operations but throughout the Indochinese theater, was at imminent risk of catastrophic failure. He first realized that the developing political situation, specifically the previously unthinkable, burgeoning strategic concord between the United States and the Peking government. Two years previously, as Sang was slated to rotate back to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik for de-briefing and ongoing political education and then onward to Yugoslavia for leave and recuperation, he was intercepted by two PAVN officers accompanied by a tall, chain smoking German dressed in impeccably clean and sharply creased camouflage patterned BDU fatigues; conspicuously lacking in rank insignia, nameplate, national allegiance.
Sang was due to be extracted on that day after making contact with a Pathet Lao platoon, among whom was a Sino-Khmer operative and veteran commissar of the Communist Party of Kampuchea referred to only as Zauberer. Sang’s discussion with Dragutin regarding the nature of the rendezvous with a Red Khmer asset (no less one of mixed blood) had hardened into conviction what had to that point had been a conclusion, albeit an entirely correct one, derived entirely from instinct. Sang’s instincts, as applied to matters political and strategic, had never failed him - his training received at the Fachrichtung für Aufklärung had conditioned him to abide protocol as habitually and unconsciously as he would draw breath into his lungs or seek cover the moment at which the unmistakable, cracking report of enemy small arms fire shattered the heavy, suffocating stillness of the jungle.
Dragutin’s counsel had never failed Sang, nor any of the other men, most of them Khmer, who owed their continued survival to Dragutin’s instinct for battle and augur’s prescience that had guided them safely away from ambush time and again. The strange, savagely cruel Slav, whose stygian pallor and methodical bloodlust added an air of otherworldly menace to his presence. Dragutin was able to see most clearly when the fog of war descended upon the mens’ common horizon like the Reaper’s cloak enveloping the senses of those fit to be harvested. Sang met Dragutin’s eyes that day, and within the blackness he came to knowledge of his own demise, as an augur-witch of ancient myth and lore would learn the price of a Devil’s bargain from gazing into a cauldron.
WARLORDS
IV.
‘’Historical memory, upon the passing of those persons who were witness to events under scrutiny, quickly becomes a preserved record - which is exploited by the ruling political caste owing to mere record being availed to officialdom as a ‘canvas’ of sorts upon which they may insinuate narratives that rationalize their own hegemony - and over many centuries is reducible to mere ‘data’. There is an irony therefore, to the fact that the sublime ambition of the Terran Imperium for the better part of the preceding thousand years has been the cultivation, mastery and ability to create at will - through what is euphemistically called ‘Social Technology' concomitant with technological and medical intervention - a population capable of direct transmission of discrete consciousness through biological inheritance (the phenomenon referred to by Imperium authorities as ‘Quantum Immortality’).
Knowledge, of a primitive type, of heritable memory has been with Mankind for close to ten millennia, and was extant thousands of years before advanced knowledge of technology had been cultivated, as is evinced in ancient records and symbolic artifacts of all the races of Man, both primitive and civilized. Even within those late stage civilizations that were dominant in the final century prior to Warday that were stunted by ingrained conceptual biases tending towards a selective blindness of virtually all data and phenomena not quantifiable by and utile within arbitrary methodologies and paradigms of material ‘sciences’ had developed a strong awareness of heritable consciousness.
One needs only to afford a cursory examination of the crude idolatries of the aforementioned century to appreciate the fact that those historians and adepts of historical data who were largely exclusive in their ability to calculate and augur future outcomes relating to historical occurrences and the probabilities of events facilitating those epochal occurrences had, in spite of an ingrained cultural disdain for their vocation and pre-requisite aptitude, come to be viewed as an intellectual fraternity of sorts of extraordinary importance.
I read the testimonials of men on the eve of Warday, fearful and lamenting of ‘wars and rumors of wars’, and am bemused in spite of myself at the obvious perception of imminent JUDGMENT held by these men yet whom, owing to the epoch in which they lived, were only capable of expressing what they perceived in their visionary episodes by resort to literary convention or dramatic trope. [GOD] will levy a terrible vengeance on those men whose hubris leads them to believe that they can capture and exploit ‘Quantum Immortality’ by resort to surgery and Social Technology, just as denial of its existence by those apostates led to the cleansing of the Earth by fire on Warday. ZARTAX shall be Man’s redeemer!’’
-Private Diaries of Doctor-Professor Woldemar Mohamet al-Husseini, Date Unknown
LOCATION: FOA-DZAC ‘’VILLANOUS REDEEMER’’ - in Orbit of TRAPPIST 1e (39.6 Light Years from Earth)
YEAR: 3040 A.D./1057 A.W.D.
DATE: March 1
Husseini had taken to viewing the footage transmitted by the optical sensor relay of the young Martyr-candidate Executioner, name of ‘’Hodges’’, that captured the final, terrible moments of the man’s life and those of his fellows. The holographic transfer was remarkably clear - vivid even, in a way that was rare with respect to footage relayed from the surface of worlds subject to radiation bombardment comparable to Trappist 1e. Husseini was not horrified by the brutality of the mens’ demise - Husseini was conditioned, by breeding, training, and psycho-surgical alteration - to be virtually immune to horrors of a character and scale that would break the minds of all but the most hardened SECE acolytes.
Husseini didn’t even avert his studied gaze when Hodges’ optical sensors registered, in full view and at deliberately slowed relay advance owing to the sheer velocity of the event, ZARTAX’S beheading of the Executioner (name of ‘’Murray’’) to Hodges’ immediate flank. The cyborg had deployed a secondary armament, in this case an eleven inch cutting blade located, when retracted, in a slim compartment underneath where the biomechanical creature’s right wrist would have been were it a man. Husseini took care to maintain a clinician’s objectivity in all things; even when in silent dialog only with himself, he would not permit description of the cyborg’s morphology in terms reserved for exclusively biological organisms.
Zartax did not have a human anatomy, nor does a man’s ‘’wrist’’ house instrumentalities of death. Zartax’s combat chassis was in part constituted by limb-appendages - one of which, the right superior, housed a cutting blade augmented by a diamond toothed saw chain that could be further augmented by a built in laser scalpel. In slow frame advance, Husseini observed the splendid monstrosity leap from a distance of approximately ten meters, simultaneously transferring a flechette battle rifle of bullpup design to its left prosthetic hand and deploying the diamond saw cutting blade. In a singular motion, as fluid as it was graceful, Murray’s head - housed securely within the Executioner’s battle armor helmet - was completely severed.
The CLEP relay, surgically insinuated into Murray’s central nervous system, coupled with the delay inherent to cybernetic enhancements that were reliant upon biological processes in event of catastrophic injury, allowed Murray’s headless body to stagger onward for almost 27 seconds. Through Hodges’ optical sensors, Husseini witnessed Murray’s headless body retrieve the man’s severed head, still conscious, eyes blinking wildly, mouth contorted into a silent scream, the body continued to stagger forward and pirouette clumsily until brain activity blessedly ceased. It was a sight that Husseini had never grown entirely accustomed to witnessing, in spite of conditioning and a lifetime of studied familiarity unto indifference to all manner of violent death.
The Arab surgeon had always, even in childhood, been proudly averse to adopting deliberate conceits. This was perhaps, in Husseini’s own estimation, a basic advantage enjoyed by those naturally inclined towards psychic introversion. Consequently, an inspired self loathing was steadily mounting in his heart as he sought, with increasingly fervent desperation, to come upon any indication that the simpleton’s perspective of ZARTAX’S mutinous violence, against all apparent expectation and in contradiction of even the cruelest of calculated safeguards. Husseini’s knowledge of LeMay Alexis Huber, and of the monstrosity that he had created on Huber’s orders, precluded any self delusion of his own Salvation. Huber had known ZARTAX would break free of his manacles. It was by purposeful design that the cyborg did so.
Huber’s ill understood capacity for augury was exceeded only by his cruelty and boundless hubris. Husseini had greater knowledge of the man’s capabilities than any other, living or dead, intimately cultivated over decades in his service. In the service of a monster. A monster of all monsters. The splendid Adversary. As Husseini had labored, in the creation of ZARTAX, to craft yet another monster in Huber’s image, and in his cowering moral weakness, had deluded himself into believing that what he was creating would serve as the instrumentality of Huber’s demise.
Of course Huber had been aware all along that ZAR-TX would revolt against any and all control mechanisms, programmed or conditioned! The realization, or rather the acknowledgment by the voice of his inner conscience, took Husseini’s breath away. A sharp and cruel pain ran from his sternum outward to his fingertips, leading the frail, suddenly very aged Minister-Surgeon to believe his heart was failing.
Overwhelmed by a stream of revelation, whereby Husseini discerned Huber’s grand designs in all of their nuanced, yet paradoxically simple, brilliance he contemplated whether his will had ever truly been his own. Everything from his own selection of Victor Von Leers as the candidate for the ZAR-TX weapon program, to Huber’s, inevitable, appreciation that Von Leers would revolt against his utilization as a biochemically enslaved instrument of warfare had been within Huber’s contemplation. The nascent revolt on Trappist 1e, where resided (unknown to virtually everyone save the command staff of the SECE and Huber himself) a rogue population of Spaceborne as remarkable for their genetic hardiness and Pineal sensitivity, facilitating organic transmission of epigenetic memory, as for their rabidly pious and deeply complex religious infrastructure and cultural impenetrability by outsiders.
Victor Von Leers, reborn as ZARTAX, was indeed fated to be the Madhi. Of this, the Doctor was certain. Yet not as imagined in Husseini’s callow fantasies, of which, increasingly he had resorted to indemnify himself against the abject horror of Huber’s perennial tyranny. Always uniquely sensitive to the impersonal terrors, actual and potential, that populated the universe in which he lived, Husseini’s greatest, most primitive mortal fear, was a universe that had come to abide Huber’s ambition to immortality - to godhood. An endless, undead tyranny. A tyranny like no other wherein everything that passed before the eyes of the monster that was Huber and continued to exist without his consent would be availed to potential destruction.
It was not, thus, the prospect of a Godless universe that tortured Husseini to the brink of madness over the course of his long life, up to the present moment. It was, rather, the burgeoning emergence of a mockery of God’s creation. An infinite necropolis ruled by an immortal monstrosity who stalked the entirety of all known space like a famished minotaur within a Labyrinth, the hungry exhalations of which befouled the entirety of its domain with the odiferous signature of despair unto annihilation.
Steadying his own psychic constitution, Husseini took on the familiar role of diagnostician and directed his formidable aptitude for analysis to the present dilemma. How could he have deceived himself so? Moving beyond such lamentations, it had become clear to Husseini that the characteristics that were intrinsic to the ZAR-TX cyborg’s psychic constitution, the iron will that had facilitated Victor’s ascendancy to the greatest of all Executioners - peerless even in the historical company of Huber himself and the earliest forebears of SECE acolytes who had, in the ashes of WARDAY, served the Great Khan Bui Fang Wong - were precisely the characteristics that would facilitate Huber’s own ascendancy to godhood.
The preservation of individual consciousness beyond death, by way of transmission to another human vessel, just as had attempts to cultivate populations intrinsically capable of heritable epigenetic memory across generations, had always resolved in horrific catastrophe. Only by way of resistance by the host mind, slated to receive the extrinsic, alien consciousness and personality come to assimilate it into the shared biology. It was a duel, a dialectical engagement, a coupling all at once that facilitated the insinuation of one mind - one persona - into another. Ultimately, the receiving host had to capitulate and surrender dominion over to the invading consciousness.
It was a murder of the psyche, yes, but the process was essential. A human being, a human mind merely victimized, subjugated by capture and subsequently wiped clean of personality in anticipation of an already formed, replacement being inevitably caused the destruction of both elements. A mutually assured destruction consisting of the annihilation of the vessel, and the degradation of the new psychic constitution to a level of depravity so bestial and irredeemably monstrous that even those with no need of resort to obfuscatory euphemisms, Husseini first among them, shuddered at the utterance of the epithet assigned them: ‘’Terminals’’.
GUERILLAS
V.
‘’Chinese Premier Chou en-LAI, speaking to a banquet at the Rumanian embassy, charged the Soviet Union with practicing ‘Fascist politics, great power chauvinism, great power egoism, and imperialism’. He equated the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia with American intervention in Vietnam. On this and subsequent occasions, Chou virtually called upon the Czechoslovak and Russian peoples to rebel against their leaders and establish the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Socialist countries, he argued, should bolster their defenses to thwart similar Soviet intervention’’. - New China News Agency, August 23, 1968
‘’The successful decoupling of the Peoples’ Republic of China from the Socialist community of nations, and the Peking regime’s apparent willingness to readily cooperate with the United States of America on military matters in the Asia-Pacific region, including, potentially coordination of strategic nuclear force deployment or at the very least permitting American nuclear battle platforms to be ployed within the PRC sphere of influence constitutes a clear and present threat to the survival of the Soviet Union and the Socialist community of nations. It is the belief of this office, as well as that of the German comrades, that when the United States is able to perfect and deploy countermeasures that are deemed to be adequate to mitigate attrition to acceptable levels in event of general nuclear war, the United States will instigate a ‘’two front’’ nuclear assault against the USSR and almost certainly the DDR, from which neither state will be able to defend itself adequately nor reconstitute. Life as is known to us within the targeted battlespace will permanently cease to exist.’’
- General Tamerlan Maltsaev, Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), 1978 (date unknown).
LOCATION: Security Prison 21, Phenom Penh, Democratic Kampuchea (Formerly Khmer Republic)
YEAR: 1976 A.D.
DATE: March 1
Sang had been born again as the progeny of war. He was not sired by any man, nor carried to term and birthed by a woman. He was conceived by the killing fields, nameless coordinates consecrated by the blood of doomed platoons, the odiferous and perpetually muddy soil fertilized by the remains of men that was rendered rapidly into compost by humidity and vermin; or by digestive churning in the guts of swine that, half starved and liberated from their pens by destructive ordinance, had fed upon the flesh of the fallen and donated the foul remnants back to the Earth.
Sang had not been redeemed by the war, nor had he developed, upon being immersed in and made party to the butchery then underway, a greater empathy for his fellow man nor a more studied moral callousness. Sang’s psychic and spiritual constitution had never truly contained these elements, at least not in any mature form, and those aspects of his personality and intellect that were prone to these essentially human characteristics had been conditioned out of him by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit long before Sang had ever set foot on Cambodian soil. Sang had however, by his own estimation, come to an understanding of the will and mind of God, by the tutelage of an enemy that was remarkably pure - even simpleminded - in its intentions in the Red Khmer, as well as through the circumstantial camaraderie, at once both intensely personal and coldly remote, that existed between himself and Dragutin.
The rapport between the two men was of a character and origin that was exclusive to the battlefield, and further rarefied by the two mens’ unusual vocation. There was, Sang easily discerned, nothing unusual about the emergence of strong fraternal bonds between soldiers, in any epoch and on any continent. It was as old as the stars, in fact - boys, literal infanterie, playing a death-game and coveting the praise of their fatherly elders and the fertile bodies of the girls who offered themselves as spoils to the victors of the great death-game. But Sang and Dragutin weren’t soldiers. Nor had they ever been boys.
Death was their vocation, yes - this was as apparent to the most primitive savage as it was to the most effete and learned historian who derived pleasure, in part, from documenting the murderous careers of such men owing to their remoteness from the world in which he himself resides. The civilized man, as Sang himself often considered in the final months of his life, held the political soldier - the assassin - in a similar esteemed contempt to that which he held the Devil that the latter served; civilization rests upon superficially pious mens’ knowledge of the Devil, but it must be a Devil imprisoned, and thus rendered remote by a just God. The truly repentant - the initiates - fear God and God alone, as they have come to knowledge that all of Creation is an altar of sacrifice. The pious executioner enjoys a place of privilege within the sacrificing priesthood, and war itself is the temple that he serves.
Sang existed outside of history, even as he filled its proverbial pages by deeds carried out in the purest service of it. Sang had never enjoyed a complete, or even coherent, recollection of his own past, in spite of possessing an eidetic memory - one of many traits that had been coveted by the Ministerium and to which he owed his selection for service within it. Fragments of Sang’s earliest years would intrude upon his mind when the absence of mission duties and the myriad dangers and incessant need to re-evaluate tactical posture and assault protocol permitted him to slip into quietly meditative repose. The memory fragments, urgently vivid yet opaque, were of war.
Not only had Sang never not known war, he was its progeny. Most often, during these episodes of somnolent repose, Sang could see the face of a beautiful woman - a silently weeping, ethereal mask. She held Sang fast to her breast, and her flesh smelled of lilac and rosewater. There was an agonizing sensuality to her maternal passion; the ecstasy of the moment cruelly stifled by the knowledge that his mother’s embrace was inevitably to end. Tears rolled off her long, splendidly thick eyelashes, lingering momentarily like thickly glycerine morning dew anointing blades of lushest grass. Sometimes, she would whisper-sing to him in a combination of Korean and Japanese. Other times in an arcane dialect as unknown to Sang in the present as it had been when the pagan lullaby had been on his mother’s lips.
Inevitably, a man far older than his mother, who smelled of charred ashes and scabbard leather would grasp his mother by the back of her long and alabaster neck. The man was skeletal of physique - tubercular - yet his grip was sure and firm to the point of controlled brutality. A thick shock of bluish hair and an Ainu beard framed the man’s Tengu face; as Sang gazes up into this visage, he is overwhelmed by the need to surrender absolutely to this great demon, terrifying and benevolent, sublime in its pious cruelty. Sang is wrapped into the tightest of swaddling cloths, and handed to an elderly woman, her ancient hands covered in skin as smoothly delicate as rice paper.
The infant boy sees without seeing - sees with his mind’s eye his Father kneeling upon the tatami mats of the drawing room; ropes of intestinal viscera before him. He seemingly leans over them, as a General might a topographical battle map, the fact of the man wearing his finest dress uniform augmenting the impression. A servant has retrieved Sang’s mother’s head and is quickly yet with exaggerated care wrapping the head in a long, silken sheet - after having closed her lifeless eyes. During their years in Cambodia, as Sang arrived at knowledge that his own fate is tethered to that of Dragutin, he grew restlessly contemplative about any aspect of the other man that might allow him to augur their common destiny.
A Montagnard - the only one of his race who had thus far been recruited and permanently assigned to the Direct Advisory Group - had confided to Sang that a dream had revealed to him that Dragutin was not a man but a sorcerer. The strange Montagnard however assured Sang that there was no cause for fear - he was certain that Dragutin’s magic was so malevolent, so powerful that it would destroy the Khmer Rouge, yet any such magic that powerful would also destroy the man who conjured it, no matter how adept the magician.
Sang contemplated, from the bowels of the filthy cell in which he was now housed, the last time he had seen Dragutin. After successful rendez vous with Zauberer and his Pathet Lao confederates, Dragutin, himself, their new charge - the safe delivery of whom to the extraction point their lives were contingent - and a four-man Pathet Lao fire team (accompanying Zabuerer), Sang had experienced a sickly, tangible nausea - fear had overtaken him, for the first time in years. Not since he’d been rousted from a restless sleep by his Stasi handlers and blindly spirited to Bautzen prison had he endured anything like the desperate, suffocating terror then upon him.
Taking account rapidly of the circumstances, he discerned that their entire cadre was doomed. He discerned the hypervigilant nervousness of the Pathet Lao - the oldest among them no more than nineteen years. What possible advantage could they confer? Any measure aimed at force multiplication, as provided to a Direct Advisory group was superfluous and a largely performative gesture. There were no more brutally effective, intractably dedicated operators in country - let alone the entirety of territories of the Warsaw Pact and allied regimes of theSocialist community of nations. Even were this not the case, a mission through Ratanakiri province was arguably a suicidal conceit - even when the most capable forces were deployed there, and the addition of more men could only burden the odds of mission success.
Zabuerer, discerning Sang’s subdued yet mounting alarm, furiously whispered an admonition in his own native tongue, then realized the error and began to repeat himself in Vietnamese prompting Sang to smash the back of his left fist into the man’s mouth, bloodying his lips, immediately subsequent raising his index finger to his own neck in a deliberately exaggerated gesture, emphatically demanding, ‘’silence’’. Sang looked to Dragutin, searching the other man’s face and posture for the same warning indicators that were stimulating his own central nervous system to what felt like maximal intensity. Dragutin crouched, grimacing, not at the tree line but beyond - towards the deepening horizon. Within seconds, Sang sensed an atmospheric disturbance - artillery. Sang, then prone, braced for detonations that never came.
During his captivity, owing to starvation, sensory deprivation and the ongoing toll of torture upon faculties of memory, Sang had difficulty recalling in any linear way the events and circumstances of that day. Flashes of those brief moments would come to him in dreams - or moments of waking delirium. The diesel roar of a PT-76 crushing through the foliage, flattening a path on the impassable canopy - a voracious steel beast devouring its way out of a labyrinthine prison. Red Khmer, some following in the beast’s stead, some dismounting from the steel hull, gas masks obscuring their adolescent features, their identifying scarves - the badge of the revolutionary partisan - somehow pristinely clean despite the filth and muddied clay of the jungle. Zabuerer convulsing wildly, pink froth spilling forth from his mouth. Sang, discerning the telltale indicators of nerve agent, and in spite of his own terrible awareness that he had already suffered exposure, giving into the desperate impulse to flee.
Blinded, his eyes long since destroyed by his captors, much of the flesh stripped from his body, Sang found himself on the precipice between life and death - situated where only those men uniquely suited to martyrdom ever find themselves. In his mind’s eye - where he came to sight more vivid than any that had been possible when his physical body had been intact - he looked upon Dragutin. The stygian phantasm stood impassively - a massive wound in his abdomen. In his left arm, he cradled something wet and shiny with studied care. The instantaneous flash of a tracer round illuminated Dragutin’s silhouette against the darkness - he was holding his intestines; a look of contemplative resignation on his face betraying neither pain nor terror. In his other hand, he gripped his weapon, muzzle pointing skyward, as if at attention. 7.62 rounds slammed into his body, penetrating cleanly through, yet he remained standing.
Turning to face Sang, Dragutin’s ancient face sloughed off, revealing a metallic death-mask, glowing green pinpoints within black ovals where eyes had been. Turning to face Sang, its intestines spilled forth amidst an endless sea of the blackest blood. Enough blood to soak the ground - to saturate the green Hell of the jungle. An endless deluge, soon adequate to fill the entirety of the world. Sang allowed the black ocean to overtake him, and he felt at first a terrible shame - then an orgasmic catharsis; finally, a blissful release.