by Kali Altsoba
“Bastards!”
“Bitches!”
“Schlampes, all of them!”
“We’ll show them.”
“Let’s pay them back for what they did to Jacko.”
Its nothing deeper than lines fed to them in basic training and by politruks, about who started the war and why they’re here, invading Genève in self-defense. It’s more than enough.
The whole Fahnlein seeks “justice for Jacko” in the next village. Over six hundred frail oldsters and women with minor children are herded into the local Life Temple. Doors are bolted, outer walls soaked with incendiary chemicals and the Temple is set on fire. The whole Fahnlein encircles the blaze, shouting and shooting down anyone who tries to escape the leaping flames.
That means shooting point-blank small children lifted up to broken windows by frantic, pleading mothers locked inside. Then they shoot down the wailing mothers. Or push their faces back inside the burning building. As it loses integrity and collapses the Temple emits a choking cloud of smoke that smells of incense and burnt child. At least they’ll never forget the smell.
In the weeks that follow anyone who hesitated while Jacko’s mates “flamed the Temple” finds it more prudent to volunteer for cleansing squads doing similar work. Or for any other anti-resistance sweeps. Or any dirty job they can get to prove they’re on the team. They made Jacko a martyr to their cruelty, now they morph themselves into tortured saints of Grün virtue and Purity.
When asked about it later one young veteran who took part shrugs and says “War does not make people tender.” No one in the Fahnlein ever mentions Jacko or the execution or the burned-out Life Temple again. He’s another nonperson who disappears into the maw of Pyotr’s war, joining tens of millions gone before him. Billions more will follow, all across Orion.
This thing could go on for a very long time.
***
Not everyone succumbs to raw circumstance. One reactivated old gunsō, a thirty-year veteran sergeant of the peacetime Rikugun, gray flecks starting to streak his black curls, stops to share rations with a Krevan refugee mother and three hungry children hunkered at the roadside.
Her thick flowing hair and slender angular face reminds him of his daughter. Her little one smiles at him and reaches out a little hand out for the hard biscuit he offers, just like his granddaughter did on the morning he left Zug, the day he reported to serve as a conscript in Pyotr’s army and war. “Here you go, poor things. Eat, eat. Madam, take this for your children.”
The disheveled, blank-faced young mother says nothing. She makes no gesture. She does not hold out her hand to receive his offered rations of hardtack biscuits and a squeeze-tube of cheese. She was gang-raped twice, over four days and nights of screams and pain and beatings and humiliation. The older kids are scared and blank. Only the youngest looks and smiles at him.
When his company commander hears about it the older sergeant is reprimanded, then paraded before his unit and formally charged with “lending aid and comfort to the enemy.” He’s lucky that there’s no young SAC officer nearby. Four days on half-rations of hardtack and water and two weeks double-duty are his only punishments. Far worse is laughter and teasing by the younger soldiers in his own unit. It never stops. Women of the attached Auxiliary Corps are the cruelest and most brazen.
“Do I look like your daughter, too, dad?”
“I’m hungry. Can I have your rations, papa?”
“Sure looked like you wanted to give her a fourth kid, granddad”
“You old fool! Don’t you know they’re the enemy?”
The old hand lowers his head into the gale of mockery and slogs forward. The war has become a bizarre place he no longer understands, where he’s rewarded for murder and mayhem yet mocked and punished for feeding another man’s hungry daughter.
Data search: colonization.
Result: sleepers.
Historia Humana, Volume III, Part V (a)
Like the DNA-arks, sleeper-ships used only primitive lightsails past the initial boost phase and before braking. Although multi-generational, they were very small by our standards: shorter than a mercury ball pitch and about as wide. Larger mass limited them to 7% lightspeed, forcing one-way voyages lasting up to five centuries, the maximum ever attempted by pioneers. Today, most of the Thousand Worlds lie far beyond that era’s reach, settled by later quantum drive ships. It is hard for us to imagine the devotion and toughness needed to spend lifetimes confined inside such primitive vessels, even suspended in a stasis pod. Though all were caught up or passed by faster ships that left decades or even centuries afterward, we owe them much.
The key tek was ‘suspend,’ first used to treat catastrophic trauma such as industrial accidents and war wounds. Suspend halts all biofunction at a molecular level, eliminating food, space, and psychological limitations in colony ship design and operation. Most sleepers were scientists, but not all. Ordinary folk in whole families went, too, as demanded by the vast majority who agreed that Humanity was not comprised solely of technicians. AI ‘nanny-bots’ tended the sleepers and banks of zygotes and unfertilized eggs, and sperm, to be used to replace the dead or make new colonists to more rapidly expand settler populations in the fragile period right after planetfall.
Some sleeper ships were destroyed in collisions with uncharted dust. Others drifted off-beam as assists were turned off when Sol’s economy dipped or a system war broke out. Later, Z-pinch fusion and quantum-drives that antiquated light sailing overtook sleeper-ships still in transit. Some were out 400 or 500 years, then caught up by larger vessels that left decades or centuries afterward. They were told that worlds promised to them had been colonized by settlers already there, under an ancient claim-right of terra incognita. Most sleepers abandoned their old lightsail ships and destinations, agreeing to transship to join already settled worlds.
A few refused, taking new-type engines but declaring they would continue on to vastly more distant stars. It is not known if they ever got there. We lost all contact as they sailed off in secret, boosting new deuterium-tritium drives to unterraformed systems at the farthest ends of Orion, or perhaps even beyond. A few are thought to have tried to cross The Gap to the Perseus arm, which is still not possible even today. Most worlds of Orion grew indifferent to sleeper fates or were glad to see the last OE fanatics leave.
Between lightsails and our quantum drives was the era of the Gas Dynamic Mirror thruster that skipped the “inherent instability of plasma problem” by deploying solenoidal magnets in linear reactors. Their speed eliminated Hohmann transfer orbits. GDMs thus made a revolution akin to the prior OE jump from ships of sail taking two years to circumnavigate the world to skycraft taking an hour. Or as one Mars engineer put it: “GDM really stands for Godsdamn fast!” Sol became a true neighborhood.
Deuterium-tritium fuel was abundant and cheap. Psych stress was reduced by shorter trips. As was exposure to radiation and bulky food and life-support. GDM ships became the new galleons of Sol system trade, a single design good for both trade and war. They carried more cargo (or armor and weapons) and went from point A to B without the bother of Hohmann transfers. Trade and tourism led all the Sol worlds to build space elevators, further leaping system tek and wealth. Artificial gravity beyond simple spin lay far in the future, but the main breakthrough came in this boon time, a virtuous spiral of technological-economic advance.
Colonization of far-off worlds already being terraformed by AI-bots remained unattractive to most. And why not? This was a happy age, the First Satya Yuga in history. Why leave? Besides, using GDM drives capable of 0.3 light speed still meant decades spent between stars. Most folk anticipated greater velocity breakthroughs in their own near-futures, or their children’s. So they postponed leaving, then never left at all. Only 13 GDM ships ever left Sol.
Kagoshima, Nagoya, and Yokohama were key players in early Orion history. They founded prosperous colonies under those names that ultimately merged into the Grün elite in a cultural-political-military a
lliance that changed the history of Orion. Their many descendants are a force in Imperium cultural and military syncretism still, becoming even more prominent after the Great Purge (see Dowager, SAC, Broderbund). Eight GDM ships settled in what later became Dauran space: Idaho, Kashi, Liaotung, Novgorod, Odessa, Rio, Shanghai and Vatsa. Those worlds were soon closed to outsiders by the ‘Hermit Empire,’ as successor Dauran worlds remain sealed to farfolk today by the tyrant Jahandar, the ‘Father of the Grim Revolution.’
Most infamously, and unfortunately for the chance of peaceful settlement of Orion, the GDM ship Deus ex Machina carried the austere Sword Brothers (or Broderbund der Ritter) to arid Terra Deus, drear foundation world of the old Ordensstaat. Its departure was marked by an act of religious violence that shook the whole colony movement. Worse, it carried secret, illegal DNA banks and reserves of human zygotes later used to clone concubines and dāsa slaves. Such gross violations of the rules of colonization changed the colony movement and all history. For as is well-known, the Brethren later allied militarily with the House of Oetkert, together building out the original Imperium, thereby bringing interstellar war and their austere Black Faith to a third of Orion.
The last GDM ship was Baffin, which settled icy Nunavut, the only colony established on a near-ice planet no one wanted. Its determined and radical, but mostly harmless, traditionalists kept apart from the politics of Orion for centuries, refusing to join any of the three star empires whose borders they abut. They only joined the Calmar Union after coming under direct threat from the Dauran Empire during the Third Orion War. Nunavut’s long tradition of independence is preserved today in a distinctly traditional culture almost lost before its founding, and the main reason for its founding. Its eventual confederation with the Calmar Union was made on special terms, with a unique exemption from universal Calmari meat and other animal husbandry laws that permit certain cultural practices and peculiar dietary habits that are banned elsewhere.
Flowers
Madjenik has left the southern fires behind, moving stealthily through the still standing Gold Oak Forest north of burned-out Pilsudski Wood. They’ve gone as far west as Jan intends, so the whole company cheers when he gives the order: “Turn hard and due north, for Toruń.”
The trekkers are running out of vital supplies. Water they gather from streams as they move, but all food is gone or gone black. Including ration kits taken from the last RIK dead. Even the very last “dicks of death” are gone. That’s what Tom Hipper called horrible mini-mockmeat sausages in the RIK ration kit. Everyone pushed off eating the foul things to last. Then they had to eat them, the last ration of any kind taken from the last dead enemy they left behind in Pilsudski Wood. Two days later and even Tom admits to his squad during a short rest:
“I sure could eat one of those dead dick things now. Don’t suppose anybody has one? No? Yeah, thought not.” Four days later and they’re trying to live off handfuls of wild berries, but they just give everyone the blue runs. Madjenik reaches a crisis point. Too many fighters are too weak from hunger to go farther. Jan calls the company NCOs and Zofia over to talk it out.
“Zeke, you’re a true woodsman. Give it to me straight. Is there any way we can scrounge enough food in these woods for so many fighters?”
“Of course, sir. But only one way. You know what it is.”
“Is it come to that?”
“You know it has!” Zofia snaps at him. She’s been impatiently worried about the food problem for many days, and even more his inability to see the solution and act on it.
“What? What do you mean?”
“It came to that three days ago, captain.”
Her criticism of his leadership in front of others always hurts more because he knows she’s right, and that all along she has seen right through him and the problem he’s stalled on.
“OK, it’s agreed. We hunt.”
Tom Hipper says: “I recommend that we camp right here for two days, rest and restock the mockmeat bins. Err, with the real thing this time.”
“Again, agreed. You take care of that Tom. Zeke, we’re going to have to rely on you to dress the kills and prepare all live meat for cooking. I don’t think any of us know how.”
“Not sure I do, sir. Never done it before either.”
“At least you know these animals better than any of us, no?”
“Sure. But I was a game warden before the war, never a hunter.”
“You still know more than me. Do the best you can.”
“Well, once we have meat it should cook exactly the same as mockmeat.”
“Put someone else on the cooking part. I want you in charge of the prep work.”
“OK, I’ll get Third Platoon to rig some cooking gear. They’ve got engineers.”
“Good.” Jan turns to Zofia. “Lieutenant, since you’re so keen for this and so sure it’s the right thing to do I’m putting you in charge of the killing. I hear you’re pretty good at that.”
On Genève, conservation of wild fauna is an almost sacred way of life in which all locals take fierce pride, connected to their pride in the old growth forests. Some in Madjenik cleave to a rigid animal rights ethic from before the war, and resist the idea of a hunt. They can’t understand how ancients managed it or accepted mass slaughter of herd animals every day. Others feel real nausea when thinking about eating an animal. The majority are simply used to cheap synthetic proteins, to mockmeat, so they’ve never given much thought to a long-settled moral issue. Jan orders the NCOs to make sure every single fighter eats a share of live meat once it’s ready.
Zofia leads out a hunting party of Madjenik’s five best shots. Her snipers bring down a brace of hares, several partridge, five wild turkeys, an elk and two white-tail deer. They skin and clean and cook the meat with improvised microwave roasters made from spare masers. It’s not a lot of food to share among so many, but it’ll keep them going. If they can get over being so sick.
It’s the first real, natural meat anyone ever eats. Nobody eats real animal flesh in Orion anymore, especially on an agro-planet like Genève. Cattle are kept for dairy, sheep are just for sheering, chickens and geese and guinea fowl make eggs. That’s it, other than grown mockmeat.
Mockmeat is plentiful and cheap and suits most people just fine. Grown in hanging slabs of insensate protein in industrial vats, it can be molded and chemically flavored to taste like beef, fish, pork, chicken, mutton, gazelle, bison, snake or any desired or exotic flavor. Developed for quantum colony ships nearly two millennia ago, mockmeat is now a basic industry across Orion.
Most worlds ban live meat. It’s reduced to a rare, illegal indulgence of bored and wealthy epicureans. Beyond that tiny market there’s little demand where mockmeat is readily grown and available. Larger-scale eating of real meat is confined to poorer Dauran ‘real meat’ worlds where backward people hunt and fish because they must and herd animals are penned and slaughtered as in the past. It’s also allowed on Nunavut in the Calmar Union, where ancient cultural practices are historically and legally indulged and exempt.
Half the Wreckers throw up their first stomach full. It’s a physical, not moral reaction. No one ever slaughtered a food animal before, so the elk and birds are badly and unsafely gutted, contaminating the flesh. They learn quickly, however, from necessity. Hunting parties fan out every day as they resume movement through the deep woods, filled with animals. Another few days of no longer dining a graceful distance from the slaughterhouse and everyone in Madjenik gathers around the cooking masers to dig dirty fingers into the greasy gore of a large spit-roasted moose. They chew its cut flesh with real pleasure. Hunger is worse than complicity.
Another 200 klics north-northwest through the Gold Oak Forest and Madjenik stops at the startling edge of a wide meadow. A dark forest canopy and a must of silver-pine needles and decomposing oak and maple leaves and other lichen-rotted windfall enshrouded them for weeks. Suddenly, the dank gives way to clear air and canopy opens to a vista filled with stars overhead.
Madjenik is standing at an old botanical border planted by the AI-nanobots to mark the boundary between separately managed old growth forests. In this case, the borderland between the Gold Oak Forest they’re leaving and Toruń Wood, just across the wide clearing. A gentle breeze carries delicate scents from yellow-and-white honeysuckles and huge hordes of scarlet Trumpet-vine blossoms running alongside the meadow. Beyond the line of yellow and scarlet stretches a broad and open field full of late summer blossoms. Tens of millions of daisy-like white flowers wave and dance in a gentle breeze. They all stop to stare and to breathe it in.
“Those old nanny-bots sure had green thumbs, didn’t they?” one trooper in the lead platoon remarks as they break out from under the forest canopy.
“You mean green widgets, or whatever.”
“Did they even have hands?”
“Who cares?” says a third man, hurrying to pause and look. “Just look what they did! It’s like breathing ambrosia.”
“You’re right. It’s genius! Yet again! What marvels they were. Master terraformers.”
