The Crimson Deathbringer

by Sean Robins

  Kurt ignored me. “Security’s very lax. The Xortaags’ physical appearance makes it impossible for some Commandos to blend in, but everyone else could walk in and out of any Xortaag settlement as long as they speak their language, wear their uniform and don’t forget to wear make-up. This makes bugging operations very easy. We’re going to place bugs in all major Xortaag installations.”

  “Just make sure not to put any bugs in their bedrooms,” I said. “We don’t want to end up listening to them having sex, do we?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the commander of the fleet,” growled Allen. “The epitome of discipline and maturity.”

  I showed great restraint and didn’t stick out my tongue at him. Very mature of me.

  “They do not have sex,” said Tarq.

  I raised my eyebrows. “What now?”

  “The Xortaags have sex only to procreate,” explained Tarq, “and they do not want children in the fleet, for obvious reasons. The only exception is Mushgaana, who is infatuated with beautiful women, both Xortaag and alien, and does not try to control himself.”

  “Says the man who hid two porn stars in his quarters for a month,” said Venom.

  Tarq continued, “He regularly has female company, usually the most attractive women among the Xortaags or the indigenous population.”

  “It’s good to be the crown prince,” I said.

  Liz frowned and hit me in the arm, much harder than usual.

  “How did you know this?” asked Kurt.

  “I have my sources,” said Mr. Poker Face.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you to share with your friends?” I asked him.

  “No,” said Tarq. “My mother thought me my friends would stab me in the back the first chance they get.”

  I opened my mouth, but Liz raised her hand and stopped me. “I got this,” she told me, turned to Tarq and with a husky voice that was a perfect imitation of mine said, “Paranoid much?”

  Milan - May 19, 2048

  Driving a Ford Mustang GT6, Kurt noticed Oksana was breathing faster and shallower than usual and saw a few small beads of sweat on her forehead. He told her in Russian, “Relax. I’ve done this ten times already. It’s a cakewalk.”

  The girl was brave, but it was her first mission, only a few weeks after coming to Winterfell. Kurt had specifically chosen her for this mission because it was just a bugging operation that he judged to be pretty straightforward. He was trying to break her in gently.

  They’d learned the Xortaags’ language and mannerisms using MICI. They were wearing the aliens’ dark gray uniforms, and they used facial prosthetics and disguise to look exactly like the enemy. Kurt couldn’t help smiling every time he glanced at Oksana’s unibrow. The intel gathered by some of the bugs indicated Prince Mushgaana had decided to move into a luxurious mansion that previously belonged to a billionaire. Kurt wanted to bug the mansion before the prince arrived. He’d turned the auto-drive off on purpose. The Mustang was built to be driven.

  From the back seat, Sergei told Oksana, “Take yourself in your hands. Kurt’s right. This is very easy.”

  Kurt had asked them to speak Russian, saying he needed to practice, even though now he could learn any language perfectly using MICI. He asked Sergei, “Take yourself in your hands?”

  “It means calm down,” said Sergei.

  “We’re in no danger,” Kurt told Oksana. “Security’s almost nonexistent. Plus, with the memories MICI’s implanted in our brains, we don’t even need to pretend we’re Xortaags. I honestly feel I’ve been living a double life, one as a human, one as a Xortaag.”

  “Does your Xortaag alter ego have a wife?” asked Oksana.

  Kurt shook his head. “Trust me; you don’t want to know.”

  The Commandos didn’t see anyone when they arrived at their destination.

  The mansion Mushgaana had chosen as his private residence had three floors, with a large balcony facing the main gate, and was surrounded by a private park. Oksana stood outside while Kurt and Sergei went inside and started bugging the rooms. Kurt found it strange there was nobody in the building but decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. They used smart-dust bugs, which were tiny listening devices a couple of millimeters wide. The bugs were practically invisible; the real challenge was to place them somewhere they wouldn’t be accidentally swept away by a cleaning crew.

  When they were done and went back outside, Kurt saw Oksana leisurely chatting with a couple of Xortaag soldiers. She joined them and said, “Mushgaana’s on his way right now. This is why the place’s empty: He’s coming with his own assistants, servants, and guards.”

  Sergei said, “You know, we could put a bomb in here and get rid of him once and for all.”

  “And jeopardize our mission in the process?” Kurt asked. “You’ve got to see the bigger picture here.”

  “Do you want to stick around and see him?” Oksana asked. “I’d like to know what the Xortaag king looks like.”

  “He’s the crown prince, and no, we’re done here. Let’s not push our luck.”

  “Can I drive?” asked Oksana.

  “I just said ‘let’s not push our luck,’” Kurt said but threw her the car keys.

  Oksana floored it as soon as they got in. The Mustang’s engine roared, and the car made a jackrabbit start. Kurt said, “Take it easy. We’re trying to keep a low profile here.”

  Driving like a madwoman, Oksana replied, “You worried cops might stop us?”

  Sergei pointed out of the car’s window, “Look!”

  A shuttle had appeared in the sky right above the mansion. It landed close to the building at the same time the Mustang passed through the main gate.

  “Seriously, slow down a bit,” Kurt told Oksana, who was having too much fun to listen. She started driving faster, her eyes sparkling.

  Mushgaana stepped out of the shuttle, reading a report on his PDD. Suddenly, at the very edge of his mental powers’ range, he sensed an independent, thinking human mind for just a fraction of a second. His eyes widened, and he stopped in his tracks. He tilted his head in the direction he had sensed the human’s thought. He concentrated his telepathic powers, ready to order the shuttle pilots to fly off the ground, follow and capture the person whose mind was not controlled by the Voice of God.

  But this time he did not feel anything.

  With the Voice of God in operation, this is impossible, Mushgaana thought. He had listened in on a few human minds in the last days; it was ineffably boring how thrilled they were to serve their gods. The only thing that was at all interesting was that the humans saw their gods differently, mostly in their own image as to race and ethnicity but not always. Some of the dark-skinned people imagined a long-haired blond man while some of the white-skinned saw a bald Asian with his hands folded in his lap.

  Mushgaana figured he was so bored he was imagining things. He shrugged it off, resumed reading, and walked into the mansion.

  It drove me crazy thinking about the dead people and about their families not remembering them. I hadn’t been close to my mom, but I freaking remembered her. I felt sad about her death and her life, wondered what she’d been like before her illness. I worried about how people would feel if they did get their memories back someday. How would they cope?

  All this was made worse when Oksana told us her sister’s question about why God allowed the murders. I believed in a deity more than I didn’t, but that was as far as it went. I figured there was no point in wondering since whether God existed or not, he/she/it clearly had no intention of dropping by for a chat. I thought most religious people (except Liz of course) were delusional or making it up, so I didn’t see them as able to help much with the trauma. So maybe that was part of why I partnered with Tarq to pull off one of his practical jokes. The other part was that I really needed the distraction.

  The collective trauma after the fall of Earth and the subsequent bloodbath brought a glaring shortcoming in Winterfell’s design into sharp focus: The Akakies didn’t have a
religion, so they hadn’t built a place of worship in the base. We had several people who had day jobs but would moonlight as clergymen for various religions, including Liz’s priest, a Commando whose name was Father Philip. I personally would’ve preferred not to have Catholic priests around, but since there were no children in Winterfell, I figured it’d be safe.

  At some point, all the men/women of the cloth in Winterfell got together, and in a coordinated effort lobbied Tarq to assign a place of worship. My wife joined forces with them, saying she’d missed Sunday sermons and “proper confessions.” Tarq, who saw no benefit in this, and in fact, considered the whole religion thing a complete waste of time, relented, probably just to get rid of them, and gave them a floor of one of the barracks under the condition that members of all religions share it.

  Little did he know his problems had just started.

  Our various part-time priests, rabbis, imams, pujaris, monks and the rest of the clergy couldn’t agree on a single thing. They kept arguing about everything and complaining to Tarq so much that they finally got under his admittedly thin skin. Winterfell’s men of God soon learned the lesson the rest of us had learned a while back: If you got on Tarq’s bad side, a prank would be coming your way.

  Come to think of it; if you got on his good side, you’d have a prank coming your way too. It was a damned-if-I-do-and-damned-if-I-don’t kind of a situation.

  Tarq asked me for help, saying that I was the only human he knew with a sense of humor comparable to the Akakies. I wondered if I should be insulted, but once he told me his plan, I happily accepted—only after talking to Liz. I was sure she’d divorce me if I participated in Tarq’s new prank without her prior approval. After Liz gave me her blessings, I put a hand-picked team together, and by hand-picked, I mean people who didn’t much care about the possibility of going to hell once they died. I didn’t even ask Sergei and Matias. I was sure both of them would turn me down, being deeply religious men. Kurt, Keiko, and Allen refused to participate, saying the whole thing was childish and not worth the effort. They chided me for stooping so low as to become Tarq’s accomplice in one of his distasteful pranks. The only person from our inner circle who joined in was Oksana. She said she was up for anything that would distract her from her sister’s suicide. I thought she felt the same way I did about religion—and saw this as a chance to prove herself to Winterfell’s commander.

  Operation Wrath of God—yeah, the Xortaags weren’t the only people with a God-complex—commenced on May 23, at 3 AM sharp.

  Dressed in black full tactical wear and SWAT balaclavas, with Oksana following me closely, I kicked Father Philip’s door open. We entered his quarters, and I shouted at the top of my voice, “On the ground! Don’t move a muscle, you punk, or I’ll shoot you in the legs and feed you to my dogs while you’re still alive!”

  A bit too much?

  Father Philip put up a fight, but we’d caught him with his pants down—literally. Oksana kneed him in his belly, we handcuffed him, dragged him out of his quarters, and joined the other teams who were busy doing the same thing to all Winterfell’s clergymen/women. Most of the poor bastards were scared out of their wits. They stared at us with wild eyes and shouted incomprehensible nonsense, thinking this was some sort of religious purge.

  We had ten operational MICI units. I pushed Father Philip into one of the units, shouting with the most exaggerated southern accent I could muster, “This is revenge for the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre!”

  A couple of Catholic priests fainted.

  We threw them all in the MICI units at the same time, a few people in each unit, and imprinted two simple messages on all their brains, “When thou hear the secret word, thou shalt feel and show love to the members of other religions more than thyself, thy family and thy friends” and “Thou shalt forget everything that happened this night.”

  Tarq didn’t tell us what the secret word was.

  Tarq called the Winterfell’s clergy to a meeting in the Command Center the next morning. They all showed up, wearing their respective formal attire. They sat with their own people, chins up in holy indignation, and gave the other groups the cold shoulder. I stood in the back, watching the show, rubbing my hands together in anticipation. Some people on my team started placing bets on what would happen next. Tarq, wearing a gold embroidered dress, a belt of gold and a crown adorned with jewels, walked into the Command Center and stood in front of the room. He looked at everyone, smoked his pipe, waited a few minutes to create suspense, and then very solemnly, like a king declaring a new decree, said, “Titties.”

  All the priests, rabbis, imams, and others stopped breathing for a second. The Command Center became so quiet you could hear a butterfly flapping its wings. Then they ran to the members of other religions and hugged them, all crying in each other’s arms and begging forgiveness for all past wrongdoing. They professed undying brotherly/sisterly love and promised to live in harmony at each other’s side forever. A Catholic priest and an imam got into a fight over which one loved a rabbi more. This was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Oksana was shaking so hard with laughter she had to lean on me for support; otherwise, she would have lost her balance. Someone made a video of the whole scene, which went viral in Winterfell. I would’ve made millions if I could put it on YouTube.

  I sat on a chair, leaned back, clasped my hands behind my head and enjoyed the show. I was beginning to see why the Akakies enjoyed pranks so much. Maybe Tarq was right: I did have the same sense of humor they had.

  The only problem was some people took the idea of loving the others a bit too far. We noticed it when a female vicar started ripping off a Buddhist monk’s clothes. My team had a tough time separating those two, and a few others who were following suit, apparently bent on having an orgy in the middle of the Command Center. Whatever they did after in the privacy of their own quarters was none of my business. Other than that, Operation Wrath of God turned out to be an unparalleled success.

  New York - May 29, 2048

  Major Josef Hernandez was jogging in a park near his home, enjoying the light evening breeze, having no care in the world.

  He was blessed to live under the protection of the gods and enjoy the bounty provided for him. He was a jet fighter pilot, but these days there was not a lot of flying going on. He was content to go to work, clock in and out, and go home to his beautiful wife and two small daughters, patiently waiting for the day when he’d have the opportunity to serve the gods.

  Josef’s only problem was he occasionally had nightmares. They were always the same: He and his friends were in a dogfight against alien spaceships that were much faster than their own jet fighter. A lot of his friends died, but he managed to shoot one of the spaceships down. He decided to talk to a psychologist about this recurring nightmare.

  He was running by a beautiful spring ringed with mossy stones, the water falling into a pool that reflected the surrounding green leaves, thinking about nothing in particular, when a sudden pain stabbed his left hip. He touched the place, and to his surprise found a dart there.

  Who’s shooting darts at me? he thought, then fell to the ground, unconscious.

  When he came to, he was sitting on a chair in a small and otherwise empty room. There was a window on one of the walls, through which someone looked at him and said, “Hurry up. This one’s awake.”

  And then the strangest thing happened. All his good feelings about living under the gods’ protection and his blissful desire to serve them evaporated, replaced by his last memories. To his horror, he realized his recent nightmares had actually happened. Feeling nauseated and terrified for his family, he got up and walked out of the room and came face to face with one of the most infamous people on the planet.

  Kurt said, “We need to talk.”

  With Kurt getting into kidnapping business, we finally got a few hundred experienced jet pilots, including a few who had fought the Xortaags and survived, which was no mean feat.

  One of our new recru
its was my old war buddy, Josef. It turned out both he and John Taylor had survived the Xortaag attack by parachuting out of their jet fighters after they were hit. I invited him for a drink in our quarters one evening and introduced him to Liz and Keiko.

  Joseph looked at all the movie posters Liz and I had put up the walls and chuckled. “Love what you have done with the place.” He pointed at Liz’s Chinese Evergreen in a corner and added, “What a coincidence. I have one exactly like this at home.”

  “I never used to keep plants, but I got attached to these in prison,” said Liz.

  “We have a lot of catching up to do, buddy,” I said.

  “You bet we have. Look at this.” He proudly showed us pictures of his twin daughters and said, “Meet Sofia and Mariana, and let me tell you this: There’s no way they grow up to be Xortaag slaves.”

  I felt jealous. His kids were adorable. I pined for a family of my own, and so did Liz. We often joked about two boys and two girls, but this wasn’t the best time to bring children into the world.

  “Nor my daughter,” said Keiko.

  Liz and I looked at her in astonishment. I asked, “Your what now? You have a daughter?”

  Keiko nodded. Liz said, “And all this time you didn’t mention that once?”

  Keiko shrugged. “Nobody asked.”

  Josef wasn’t too pleased to learn we were there when the remainder of his squadron came under attack and didn’t intervene. He said, “Your warning probably saved my life. If they’d caught us totally by surprise, I wouldn’t have had the chance to parachute. But let me get this straight: You were flying ten of these fancy space fighters, and you didn’t see fit to come to our help?”

  I crossed my arms. “We had a very good reason.”

  Liz, playing with her hair, said, “I tried to help, and I got demoted for it.”

  “I thank you with all my heart,” said Josef. “It’s good to see someone has some balls around here.”