The Voices of Martyrs

by Maurice Broaddus

  “So how does this all play out?” Sleepy asked. “We become the villains they assume us to be?”

  “One man’s villain is another person’s Star Child. Do you know how we’re seen? Human chimpanzees. Immature, in need of constant guidance. Emotional, not rational. Unreasonable and easily excited. Without religion, only superstition and fanciful mythologies.” She nodded to Knowledge Allah. “Criminals with no respect for private property. Filthy. Excessively sexual. We are niggers left to fester and shamble in the undercities.”

  “Us and the Irish.” Uncomfortable in the awkward pause left by his attempt at humor, Sleepy pulled another hair from his chin and examined the kinky strand against his fingertip.

  “Their blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus used to keep us in our place. We are but noble aborigines. Such is the result of their gradations of mankind. Here I am, too black for their tastes, too white for yours, trapped by their index of nigrescence.” Deaconess Blues manned a station, the controls warming the dirigible to a full-throated bluster, pulsing with steam. Baffles and stanchions, ballasts and air ducts pumped furiously. “Where is our justice?”

  “Justice? There is no justice, there is Just Us,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Aluminum and iron oxide are elements of the fabric doping. This zeppelin ought to be filled with helium or another inert gas. However, as our purposes are of a more combustible nature, I’ve filled our little dirigible with hydrogen. I wouldn’t advise any more of your chiba indulgences.” Her stiff upper lip set to grim resolve, she remained unruffled by the chaos springing up about her.

  “I ain’t down with no suicide run,” Sleepy said. “This brother don’t go out like that.”

  “Yet, our best-trained, best-educated, best-equipped, best-prepared troops refuse to fight!” Knowledge Allah recited with an evangelical fervor and a sneer of contempt. “Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!’”

  “Who’s going to fight for The Cause if our best keep taking themselves out?”

  “An arm, a leg perhaps. But not the Head,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “I am not one to shrink from such deviltry. Besides, it’s not suicide. We are meant to be among the stars, signals from the heavens, showing others the way home.” Deaconess Blues stepped from her perch to meet Sleepy eye-to-eye. “Nor are we asking you to come.”

  “What?” Sleepy’s sated gaze fixed on her.

  “We accepted you because we saw your potential. Ancient tribes had truth tellers and history keepers and storytellers. You are like one of those ancient griots. We give you the space to tell stories. Our story.”

  “Vainglorious,” Knowledge Allah echoed.

  “I detest long goodbyes,” Deaconess Blues said.

  Sleepy glanced from one to the other, tasked and dismissed. His lips parted to protest, but no sound escaped. He backed out toward the rear of the deck, ignoring his sense of relief while wanting to feign the injured party. As if he was deemed unworthy to partake in his own struggle.

  “You smell that?” Deaconess Blues called out, her skin like luminescent butter. A static charge hung in the air. “The air smells like freedom.”

  “Freedom or death,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “We fly into glory.”

  “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”

  “Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.”

  Sleepy raced along the back roads desperate to beat the landing of the mothership. A great shadow filled the sky, the pride of the empire. Clouds blackened into banks of ominous dark swirls by the endless entropy of Night. The wind howled. The gleaming overcities and jutting spires must look so different from up above, Sleepy imagined. Air raid lights filled the sky, spotlights on the stage of the night sky. The dirigible, their Bop Gun, moved with implacable grace, an airborne whale, strident and regal.

  “My message is simple. Tonight the Star Child… all of us will be free. By any means necessary. Freedom or death.

  “I exist between time outside time. In the between places. I am the voice of truth in these troubled times.”

  By the time Sleepy pulled up, a throng of people had gathered, held in check by too few constabularies. The Ave’s tower, impregnable and arrogant, saluted them. Slowly, the ovoid silhouette of the Bop Gun came into full view. The crowd burst into a roar of applause and cheers. As if in response, the behemoth canted forward in a sharp downward arc. Sleepy stared, filled with profound apprehension. The crowd became a pantomime of motion and fury and panic. Knowledge Allah stood before the grand bay window. Backlit, his grand gestures were perfectly visible to the spectators as the ship careened earthward.

  He raised a clenched fist. “Vainglorious,” Sleepy whispered.

  Everything happened at once, a series of images broken into shards of memory one tried to forget. The roar of the crowd, an exhalation of panic. An explosion. A billowy fire cloud, a phoenix springing toward the heavens. The smell of India rubber burning. Shrapnel of stone. A body, encircled in flames, stumbled two steps then collapsed. Fiery scraps blew about in the night breeze. The injured structure suddenly unable to bear its own weight, the tower collapsed. The terrible crash, thunder flattening the eardrums. Smoke and flame, thick and choking, burning the lungs with each inhalation.

  “Revolution”

  Watching the skeleton of the Bop Gun continue to burn—its tattered shell buckled upon itself—Sleepy waited, carried along by the undertow of the crowd. The constabularies, with their thick night sticks and steel-riveted riot shields, cordoned off the scene. Fear glazed their faces. He spied no one immediately fleeing and prayed that the prisoners had been moved. He feared that they remained trapped beneath the ground, escaping slaves caught in a cave-in. Soon, among the wreckage and destruction, black bodies scrambled from the underground, a stream of ants fleeing their hill. Some of the constabularies fired at the escaping prisoners. Something stirred inside Sleepy. The caustic smoke stung his eyes, his vision little more than watery blurs. Soot-tinged spittle dropped to the ground.

  The voices rose into a chorus. Knowledge Allah. Deaconess Blues. His father. Lost in the din was his voice. Sleepy felt the anger. The urge to join the fight. To retaliate. Blinking through a haze of pain, he ground his heel into the desiccated earth and punched the nearest guard, a tacit signal to the crowd to surge forward. The horde spilled in every direction, blind fury, pent-up aggression in search of a target. A mob of chaos, arms swinging blindly, clubs battering senselessly. Sirens sounded. Bodies clambered through barbed wire. In the ensuing mêlée, Sleepy was arrested. To the chants of “Let him go,” the constabularies clapped him in irons, his expression more frustrated than fearful. At the precinct house, the questions came fast and furious. “Who were involved in the organizing?” “How did you get involved?” “How many were there?” “Who were the leaders?”

  Sleepy fought his revolutions his own way.

  And raised a single fist.

  The Valkyrie

  Second Lieutenant Macia Branson leapt into the dark abyss and descended into a purgatory of red tracer fire. The night sky held her close as the air whipped about them, reducing her world to the deadening screech of white noise. She plummeted toward the earth, not knowing where they might land. In trees. In water. Into the midst of a Heathen patrol. All she knew for sure was that they would land somewhere in Holland. She prayed that she would be at least close to her drop zone. She was deployed in service of The Order and had a duty to perform.

  The church was mother, the church was father.

  A grassy knoll rushed toward her, and she braced for the jolt of impact without looking down. The rush of the ground toward them, despite their training, could still send a jolt of panic through a soldier. Besides, she enjoyed holding onto the peace of the horizon for as long as possible to steady her.

  Her knees slightly bent, she dropped her chin to her chest and ten
sed her neck muscles. The earth slammed into her, her body twisting and bending in automatic reaction, giving in to the crash, a rag doll carried by the current of momentum. She slid down an embankment before coming to a halt. Slogging through three inches of pooled water, she knew what she’d find when she checked her gear. Nothing would work right. Her flight suit was only designed for controlled descents. The best tech went to the evangelical deployments. The rest of the church’s military was left with equipment full of glitches, if not flat-out defective. With so many theaters of operations, the troops’ equipment had been rushed into production and not battle-tested. Like many of her fellow soldiers. Her hard landing smashed the communication relay, and her leg bundle, full of extra ammo and rations, was nowhere to be found. At least the familiar weight of her Stryker XM9 pulse rifle, though it was a generation out of date, comforted her like the embrace of an old friend.

  Above her, tracer fire continued to crisscross the night sky, the light of exploding flak almost reminding her of fireworks. Almost. The proximity alert lit up on her rifle.

  “Fishes,” Branson challenged.

  “Loaves,” a familiar voiced responded softly from the shadows. “Your comlink down, too? Where the hell are we?”

  No one was happier to see Prefect Sergeant E. Kenneth Dooley than Branson. Short, quick-thinking, and ugly as a catfight, when Dooley first joined the ranks, the older soldiers took to calling him “Doo-Doo.” That lasted until the first time they saw him in a firefight. He stalked a battlefield with defiant determination, daring the Heathens to hit him.

  “I’d guess five to seven miles from our DZ, judging from the firing,” Branson said.

  She didn’t bother to check the digital telemetry or maps in her helmet subsystem. Half the time she found the continual stream of information and dogma sermons more hindrance than help. “Which way do we head?” Dooley asked.

  “Where else? Toward the firing.”

  They both knew it was a bad drop. The navcom signal was down across the board, so they set about cobbling together their unit the old-fashioned way. They spread out, slow and tentative. When unfamiliar soldiers joined them and saw Branson—many replacement soldiers filled their ranks for this mission—a sense of relief lit up their faces. It was as if they sensed they were in good, experienced hands. Other officers complained that she was friendlier with the enlisted men than she was with them. She didn’t care. The front line was where she belonged; she even volunteered for patrols. The uniform meant something to her.

  Branson watched with weary eyes as this latest batch of green recruits checked through their rucksacks and readied their weapons. She waited for them to regroup before taking final stock of what the service had her working with this time.

  “When are we gonna see some action?” asked a square-jawed, broad-shouldered glamor boy with curly blonde locks. He still stank of military school.

  “Who’re you?” Dooley asked, with the casual contempt mixed with pity of a boxer who wholly outclassed his opponent. He had little patience with replacement soldiers.

  “The name’s …”

  Dooley bit into a well-chewed cigar stump and swished it about in his mouth until it found its comfortable crook. “Stow it. I don’t wanna learn your name. Learning your name is the first step to getting attached, and I sure as hell ain’t getting attached to no replacement. From here out, you’re Goldy.”

  “What do they call you, ma’am?” Goldy turned to Branson.

  “Second Lieutenant Branson. You want to try to call me something else?” Her stare made him turn away.

  Goldy spied the ink along Dooley’s arm. “What’s the tattoo?”

  Dooley pulled up his sleeve to fully reveal the image of a woman astride a white horse on his arm. Long, blonde hair covered by a silver helmet, with blazing blue eyes peering from underneath it, she carried both a spear and shield. “A Valkyrie.”

  “What’s a Valkyrie?” Goldy asked.

  “Collectors of the favored dead. They chose the slain heroes to be taken to Valhalla. If a warrior saw one before a battle, he’d die during it. I want the Nils to always see one coming.”

  “You got to be careful with all that myth talk. You don’t want to be seen as a Nil or a sympathizer.”

  “A Heath. They’re Nils if they have no gods; Heaths if they worship the wrong ones.”

  “Still, choosers of the slain? Nice …” Goldy’s voice trailed off. Dooley had turned his back and stalked off to be about his business.

  Branson pretended not to have noticed the interaction by studying the maps on her view screens as Goldy approached her. “How’d it go with Dooley?”

  “We’re dutch,” Goldy said, without any trace of irony. “We hit it off swell.”

  “Give it time. Newbies have to learn how to slip in between the seams.”

  “I get it, ma’am,” Goldy said, obviously bored with the lesson.

  “Pack ’em up, we’re moving out,” a new voice shouted out. First Lieutenant Gilbert Meshner. “Mush” behind his back.

  Of course, he’d been chosen for this mission. Branson spat.

  Meshner wandered through their makeshift camp like a distracted tourist. A mop of black, greasy hair and dead, gray eyes gave his face a grave severity. He was little more than a petty dictator who used vindictiveness in the guise of discipline. Rumor was that, when they’d parachuted into Chiapas, Mexico, a Nil had charged Meshner. By the time the rest of the men got to him, the two had played “kata tag,” and the Nil lay dead at his feet. But otherwise, Mush’d long since developed a reputation for taking long walks away from the action. The men tried to joke it off as Meshner’s luck masking as skill, but no one knew what to make of him.

  “We’re marching until high ground.” Meshner eyed Branson with something approaching scorn.

  Not a single man stirred. They turned to Branson in a tacit double check of the orders.

  “You heard the man. Let’s go, you scrotes!” Branson echoed.

  §

  The hills of Holland were supposed to be beautiful. The war had reduced them to greenspace ambush sites for the Nils and Heathens. The church embraced a holistic approach to fulfilling her mission: politics, technology, and the military. The Evangelical States of America already ruled their hemisphere, along with parts of Africa and Asia. The United Emirate of Islam controlled the rest of Africa along with Asia. Europe was up for grabs, a self-declared safe haven for atheists and heretics. Not that Branson cared. Nation. Religion. Tribe. Cause. There was always some supposed big idea to fight for, but in the end, all that mattered was that orders were obeyed and the mission carried out.

  A dense fog crept along the field, and an eerie silence embraced them. Pulse rifle fire left a distinct odor in the air, a mix of ozone and seared flesh. The smell of death. High ground took them the rest of the night and most of the next day to find. Patrols detected Heathen troops nearby. The men marched in silence, the only sound filling the air, the steady stamp of their boots slogging muddy earth. The waiting was the worst; that was what broke people. The constant state of alert, their minds imagining horrors behind every point of cover. Branson shoved that all aside.

  The momentary peace gave her a chance to read up on some of her newbies. Goldy held particular interest. His body was a stew of experimental psychotropics. For all of his country boy persona, he had once been a serial killer with a penchant for skinning young girls before his conversion. Fortunately, the church left nothing to chance when it came to one’s sanctification, even if it had to overwrite existing memories with new ones. Everyone needed redemption from something.

  Praise be the blood.

  “Where’s Goldy?” Branson whispered.

  “Making out with the toilet.” Dooley thumbed toward some bushes. He shifted his unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth as if suddenly aggravated.

  “My back teeth were floating,” Goldy muttered, as he caught their eyes watching his approach.

  “Tell the men to fix their ka
tas. We attack at first light. 0530. Meshner’s orders.” Branson withdrew her edged bayonet and fixed it to the front of her pulse rifle. The high-tech stuff was good for attacking an enemy at a distance, but the final cleanup was always up close. She would always know the face of her enemy. God have mercy on her soul.

  “Tell her what you told me,” Goldy said to Dooley.

  “What?” Branson held her gaze on the sergeant.

  “Nothing. Just campfire stories that old soldiers tell.” Dooley cut his eyes at Goldy, a silent cursing which he’d vent at some later opportunity.

  “I like stories,” Branson said.

  Dooley shuffled, flushed with mild embarrassment like a child caught speaking out of turn, which Branson found amusing. “You’ve already heard this one. During the American Civil War, a general kept getting these reports about how his men were afraid to be left for wounded on the battlefield. Not just afraid, but absolutely terrified, especially if they had to lay wounded at night. Try as he might, the morale of his troops kept sinking to new lows every day, but no one wanted to talk about it. The only thing any of them would say was that, if you fell in combat and you wanted to survive until morning, you should hide your breath so no one knew you were still alive.

  “One night, after an extended engagement with the enemy, the general walked his line. He often did this after a battle. You know, to pray for his men and clear his head. He saw some movement on the field between the two warring camps. A lone mook. He couldn’t tell if it was Yankee or Confederate, walked among the bodies. In the morning, the medics found the fallen bodies decapitated. Swore it was a woman with a sword.”

  “Don’t that beat all?” Goldy asked.

  Branson knew the story. She’d heard it many times before. From Meshner. “You and Lt. Meshner close?”

  “Not really. He just took a shine to me is all,” Dooley said sarcastically.

  “Must be your special brand of charm and wit.”