by Moshe Ben-Or
“League of Aryan Girls. Four hundred of them. Bulging bellies everywhere. Every last one pregnant with the seed of her Brave Aryan Hero.
“They load up, all happy and chatty and smiling. Going home to have their filthy spawn. And the thing taxies out, and starts down the runway. Rocket-assisted takeoff, like a bat out of hell, so it gets up out of missile range as fast as possible with its bloody precious cargo.”
Miri had gone all quiet and still all of a sudden, but he didn’t care.
“So… What happened?” she asked hesitantly.
“So the damned transport is about sixty meters up in the air above the runway, nose pointed upward at forty-five degrees, going maybe three hundred kilometers an hour, rocket boosters blazing, when the limpet goes off – WHAM! And the whole wing folds upward – CRUNCH! And the thing just flips upside-down and pancakes into the ground – SPLAT!” chortled Yosi, pantomiming the doomed transport’s fall with his hands.
“Pieces flying everywhere! Freaking beautiful!
“And then the fusion bottle pops – KABOOM – massive blue fireball – and sets all the grass on fire.
“The bastards went nuts. Helicopters hosing down the woods, reaction forces rolling out, mortars, artillery, gunfire from the perimeter towers…
“Half the base was out there in twenty minutes flat, beating brush. They thought it was ground fire from outside the perimeter, see?
“And while they’re all running around out there like chickens with their heads cut off, getting blown up by their own mines trying to get to the wreckage and whatnot, we sneak into the one place no one is paying any attention to – their base cathedral.
“It was the first thing they’d built after the perimeter mines got laid down. They were still stringing wire out in the exclusion zone and the towers weren’t even up yet, but their bulldozers were already clearing ground for the foundation. Massive white building, golden steeple with a ten meter cross on top, stained glass…
“We get in there and it’s freaking ridiculous on the inside. Gold leaf and crimson silk everywhere, swastikas and crosses all over the place, and a massive mosaic of Saint Hitler over the altar, blessing his Aryan flock. Pews enough to seat three thousand, easy.
“So we say to each other, man, this is the right place, we’re set! Then we climb up into the rafters and go to sleep. In the middle of the night, after the bastards are done lining up coffins in front of the altar, we set up pretty much every bit of ordnance we’d brought.
“And in the morning, it’s all perfect. They’ve got pretty much the whole damned garrison packed into the place for the funeral. It’s standing room only.
“The moment the priest opens his mouth, we set off the limpets under the pews by the entrances. And of course they all rush toward the altar, away from the blasts, when the bouncing betties we’d planted in the first row of coffins spray shrapnel right at them. Then we swing back in through the stained glass windows and start dropping grenades and smoke from the rafters.
“You should’ve seen it! Pure pandemonium, blood everywhere, guts hanging from the chandeliers, bastards trampling each other, screaming… They even started shooting at each other in the smoke and the confusion.
“When it was all said and done, we’d killed maybe another two hundred, and wounded six times that. And we got away clean. Four hours later, their engineers were still trying to clear all the booby traps we left behind. Betties with motion detectors and limpets on timers and toe poppers scattered all over the place…
“Half their first category wounded bled to death waiting for care. It was awesome!” he exclaimed, grinning triumphantly.
Yosi turned around into the deafening silence.
Miri was staring at him with saucer-sized eyes, hands over her mouth, shaking like a leaf. Her face was a mask of fear and nauseated revulsion. He needed no Talent to perceive it, now that he was paying attention.
That must have been why she’d turned off her poncho. Trying to get some cold air, so she wouldn’t throw up.
“You… murdered… four hundred pregnant women, and shot up their funeral, and you’re… happy? You…” she muttered at him accusingly, tears rolling down her cheeks.
And suddenly the world just turned red. How dared she?
“Murdered?” growled Yosi, eyes flashing with rage, “Murdered, you say?
“What the fuck do you know about murder, you stupid little twit? I was twelve, get it? What did you do when you were twelve? Play with dolls, yeah? All happy and innocent, not a care in the world?!”
Mirabelle nodded weakly, trying to scoot away from him.
“Oh no you don’t!” he exclaimed angrily, grabbing her leg so she couldn’t get away.
“You stay right here and you fucking listen to me!
“I was twelve. Scrawny little kid, not much bigger than you are now. We were having a pool party. I was chasing my baby sister Rachel around the backyard. It just so happened that I’d chased her right to the back door of the house when the sirens went off.
“The gas hit the far side of the yard first. No one by the pool stood a chance. Rachel was just standing there screaming. She was six, what else was she going to do? I grabbed her and dove through the back door. The house AI sealed the doors behind me to keep the gas out.
“But it was too late. We both had it on us. Just a few microscopic drops, but that was enough.
“I ran down to the bomb shelter in the basement with Rachel still in my arms. Hashem gave me strength, I didn’t even notice the weight. We had antidotes for nerve gas, I could recognize the symptoms. But there was sytoxin mixed in with the nerve gas, and I didn’t realize it…
“And by the time I started paying attention to the house AI, it was too late. Back then, there were no antidotes for sytoxin. If you didn’t get it off you before it got absorbed, you were done.
“You know what it’s like to have sytoxin poisoning?
“It’s a prion. You don’t even have to inhale it. All it takes is a few molecules getting on your skin. It soaks right through and multiplies inside your body, hijacks your own flesh to kill you.
“Your blood starts making tiny little clots everywhere, until all the clotting factors in your bloodstream are used up. Then it gets so thin that your blood vessels can’t hold it. It goes right through the walls, because there are no clotting factors in it anymore.
“You just bleed and bleed, and bleed. You bleed from your nose and your mouth, and your ass, and your ears, and your tear ducts. You sweat blood, you cry blood, you piss blood, you puke blood. The blood gets out into your lungs, and you start coughing bloody spray.
“Then everything starts shutting down. Your kidneys and liver first, because the sytoxin clogs them up. You get cramps. The whole world feels like it’s spinning. Your lungs start filling up with bloody mucus and you drown, by millimeters. Your heart starts going crazy. You can feel it thumping around, like it’s going to jump right out of your chest. And it feels like you’re on fire the whole time. Inside and out. Take that chelation treatment you went through and multiply it by a thousand, and you’ll know how it feels!
“Your body tries to live. It tries to make more blood. It constricts your blood vessels. It tries to make more clotting factors. It thinks that the poison might be something you ate, so you throw up, again and again and again. You can’t keep anything down.
“The kidneys try to clear themselves, but they can’t. You pee constantly, but all that does is dehydrate you more. You get thirsty, but the water you drink just runs right out again as bloody sweat and bloody urine.
“And then you can’t move, and the thirst just eats at you. Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and all you can taste is your own blood.
“It takes hours. Days, even, to die from sytoxin.
“Rachel cried at first. Then she sobbed. Then, when she didn’t have the strength to sob anymore, she just whimpered and moaned.
“And then the whimpers slowly faded away…
“A
nd there was nothing I could do.
“‘Help me’, she’d begged, ‘Help me, Yosi’.
“I was her big brother, I’d always protected her…
“But all I could do was hold her and feel her lifeblood run through my fingers until she was just… gone.
“But me, I’m lucky, see? I have partial immunity. One in a billion. The Omicronians killed nine and a half million of my friends and neighbors that day, but they didn’t kill me!”
“Shut up!” he exclaimed as Mirabelle started to open her mouth to reply, “Shut the hell up and listen!
“I was one of the lucky ones.
“No one could touch me with their bare hands and live. My sweat, my blood, my saliva were pure poison.
“I couldn’t kiss a girl. I couldn’t comfort a friend. People had to stay a hundred meters upwind from me unless either I was stealthed up or they were.
“I could barely heal. Every little scratch meant an infection and pills, and shots, and regen shells or a dunk in a regen tank.
“But I had a gun and I could fight back!
“Our parents were morons and heretics, but the Preparedness Law and the Education Law saved us despite their idiocy. We had arms, ammo, medical supplies, everything we needed, and we knew how to use it.
“And so we fought. We avenged. And when we died, we died on our feet, fighting like human beings, not on our knees, whimpering and begging, and praying for miraculous salvation like helpless cattle!
“But there were unlucky ones. The ones whose parents had betrayed them worse than our parents had betrayed us.
“I used to know a girl named Liza. Two weeks ago would have been her twenty-eighth birthday. My parents were bad enough, but hers, hers were really off the deep end. They didn’t even want to abide by the damned Education Law.
“We had a whole townfull of those loons. So nuts that no one even wanted to come near them.
“But, you know, they just wanted to sit and wait passively for the Moshiach without lifting a finger and depend on Hashem to make miracles on command to protect them, as if He was, Heaven forbid, their personal slave. So our imbecile parents simply let them be. ‘Cause it was ‘their right’ to believe whatever they wanted to believe and raise their kids the way they saw fit, ok?
“That’s why everyone had come out there in the first place, to embrace peace and get away from the militarists who were the real obstacle to happily getting along with the neighbors.
“‘Cause, you know, if you’re just good to others, they’ll be good to you, too, right? Even if the neighbors’ religion says that you’re the spawn of Satan and killing you is a mitzvah, you can just get along, yeah? ‘Cause everyone is really good, deep inside, and there are no evil nations or evil people, just folks who are misunderstood!
“The scumbags in the planetary government even helped those pacifist monsters to hide their kids from the school registrar, so the feds wouldn’t find out.
“If those perverts had had sex with their kids from age four on, or beat them bloody every day, the government would have stopped them immediately. But turning their children into helpless little sheep, why that form of child abuse was a-ok!”
Yosi’s fists clenched hard enough that his fingernails almost drew blood from his palms.
Thinking about Liza’s demented parents and what they had done to their daughter always made him want to smash things. He hadn’t actually smashed things for quite a few years now, but this time, if he wasn’t careful… He could taste the urge of it, trying to overwhelm him.
“Liza was at summer camp halfway to the other side of the planet from me when the Omicronians landed. Hiking out in the middle of nowhere, so they didn’t get hit with any of the chemicals and the nanites. A couple of dozen or so girls aged eleven through fifteen, and a pair of camp counselors. Not a single gun between them. Not even vibros.
“For about nine months, they just hid in the woods and prayed. Then the Omicronians found them.
“Normally, the Archduke’s brave Aryan warriors would simply have shot them all, and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. But right around the same time our Navy finally shows up, and there’s a big old fight in the outer system.
“So the Omicronians’ company priest gets an idea, to propitiate Saint Hitler and all, and Liza’s bunch get handed over to the League of Aryan Girls.
“You paying attention yet? Huh?” hissed Yosi, “’Cause it gets better!”
“The Aryan Girls herded everyone into an old barn, like cows, and threw them some hay to sleep on. For food, they’d pour the contents of the garbage can from their cafeteria out into a troth, and let Liza and her friends pick through it for about ten or twenty minutes. Then they’d beat them back with cattle prods and take the garbage away.
“And every day the Aryan Girls would take one of Liza’s friends, strip her naked, hang her up by her wrists, and whip her front and back with thorns and barbed wire, to avenge the suffering of the Aryan Christ at the hands of the untermenschen. When she was nice and well tenderized, they’d crown her with a bramble wreath, and nail her to the cross up above the feeding troth. Every day, they’d jab her with a cattle prod, to see if she was still alive. Once she wouldn’t twitch anymore in response to the cattle prod, they’d take a vibro and stab her through the side, then pull her off the cross and toss her into a ditch right outside the perimeter, to rot. And then they’d take another, and offer the next sacrifice.
“The Aryan Girls were there as a reward for the Archduke’s brave heroes. Every one of them was going to get his very own chance to make a perfect Aryan baby with his very own Aryan Girl.
“But Omicronian females have an IQ of about seventy, tops. Their only purpose is to make Aryan babies. Once they hit menopause, they just drop dead. ‘Submit graciously’, ‘all a woman knows she must learn from her husband’, and all that crap is built right into the DNA, down to the brain development genes being turned on by triggers present only on the Y chromosome, and pheromones in the male’s semen automatically turning on a permanent loyalty-submission response in the female. And until she’s bound to someone, the moment she hits puberty she’s like a damned cat in heat. You can’t just put one on a plane, much less a spaceship, and tell her where to get off. She’ll screw it up and end up who knows where, wandering around looking for a fuck. Then someone will just grab her and stick his dick in her mouth, and she’s his forever. So of course the Aryan Girls are always shepherded along by a special priest.
“The priest did the picking.
“He chose the two grown-ups on the very first day, no surprise there. They were just too damned dangerous to leave alive. The Omicronians couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t fought and why they’d let everyone be taken alive, but then they just shrugged and had themselves a double crucifixion. After that, there was always only one girl up on the cross at a time. Except once...”
“Please, Yosi, stop. No more,” interrupted Mirabelle in a pleading whisper.
She wasn’t trying to get away any longer. Now she just sat limply back, leaning on her hands in exhaustion. Her cheeks glistened with tears.
“She can feel everything I feel. But she doesn’t know why I feel it,” thought Yosi, and his burning anger was suddenly gone, replaced by an all-pervading heaviness that made him wilt from the inside out, as if his soul had turned to lead and pooled at the bottom of his lungs.
“I’m sorry, Miri,” he said, leaning in to wipe her cheek, “I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry.”
“No,” she replied, capturing his hand as it touched her, “It’s my fault. I didn’t realize… I always thought that people are people…
“I mean, I know that if the Empire took over Paradise, they’d ban our language and everything, and we’d all have to intermarry with them and take their names, or else only have one baby per couple. But I never thought that it could get worse than that.”
“They didn’t teach you much about the Archduchy, did they?” sighed Yosi wearily.
“Your parents just wanted to keep all the bad stuff in the universe away from their children. So they lied to you and made you helpless and set you up for the slaughter.”
“Do you hate your parents, Yosi?” she asked.
“I can’t hate mine. They didn’t understand what they were doing, did they?”
“It’s no use hating the dead,” replied Yosi with sad resignation. “It just eats you up inside. What is, is. Leave it be and do better than they did. That’s all you can do, in the end.”
Duke Reginald had told him that, once. If he repeated it enough, perhaps he would believe it. He almost did nowadays. Most of the time.
“So… do you think these aliens are just as bad?”
“I don’t know,” answered Yosi.
“To the Omicronians, we Jews are the Spawn of Satan, and the rest of humanity are just untermenschen – mud people and mongrel trash. Either way, they simply exterminate everyone. They just torture the Jews first, if they can.
“Pure Aryan Master Race, manifest destiny to inherit the universe, Racial Holy War, and all that evil crap. Nothing of import has changed, as far as they are concerned, in nine hundred years. They’d start the End Time War all over again, if they had the nova bombs to do it with.
“These cat people, who knows?
“They haven’t simply dropped gas and nanites all over the place. So that’s encouraging. They’ve nuked San Cristobal, but that could’ve been because of the Joint Mission, or simply because it was the capital.
“On the other hand, they’ll literally eat you for lunch and not think twice about it. They might turn out to be just as bad as the Archduke’s Finest, in their own special way. Heck, they might turn out to be worse.”
“But you’ll fight them anyway, right? No matter what.”
“That’s what we do,” he replied, “We fight. No matter what.”
Their gazes locked.
There was something new in those red-rimmed gray eyes. Something struggling to get out, past the scared little kid on the surface.
