The steel walls hummed. Cold air funnelled in through the ventilation ducts. The corners of his book shone yellow under the pale light, where the pages had been stained by tar and nicotine. He had smoked through the whole carton of Lucky Strikes and started his second reading of United Martial Covenant and the Birth of New World Order. It did not take him long to realise that he was reading things he had merely forgotten that he already knew. With each line of text, his mind seemed to precede his eyes. It made him wonder whether memories could rekindle through experience the same way. Only time would tell.
He turned the yellowing sheets forward to page 213. The title at the top of the page read:
“Chapter 12: A World Divided”
He read, skimming through the introductory paragraphs, as usual:
The formation of the Martial Covenant ushered in two major global divides – one external and the other internal. The first divide was between the eastern and western spheres, fulfilled by the signing of the East Grid Pact two years after the Martial Covenant. The second, internal division emerged from the promulgation of so-called “Martial Order,” giving rise to the soldier societies known today as the “martial metropolises.”
The proliferation of the free martial economy and the influx of Private Military Corporations in the wake of the first skirmishes between East and West gave rise to a vast demographic shift, as millions of people all over the world turned to the martial profession (the first converts invariably being soldiers from the national militaries). 1 A few short years after the signing of the “Mercenary Act,” the headcount of private militias across the UMC nations surpassed that of national military personnel. 2 Growth continued to surge until, by 2050, more than 10 percent of the adult population in the entire western sphere was employed by the PMCs, comprising more than 150 million soldiers. Sociologists regard this period as the early formation of the “Martial Class.” 3
In the early years of the UMC, martials and civilians lived among one another as common citizens of the nations. However, a sharp increase in violent crime coupled with the global media’s sensationalisation of events such as the notorious Vincent Caine Incident4, there emerged a sociological division between civilians and soldiers, a divide founded on fear. Long and arduous political disputes at the supranational level finally led to the 45th annual Assembly and the passing of UMC Council Resolution 01-45, bringing into effect the “Martial Autonomy Act” of the same year. This marked the beginning of political separation between martial and civil order. Three years later, the construction of the first martial capitol of the First UMC Region, Sodom Metropolis, was complete. Within the last 20 years, more than 25 martial metropolises have been built within national territories across the Three Regions, with five more cities still under construction.5
To this day, the “Principle of Division” between civilian and martial society remains one of the fundamental doctrines of UMC law and politics. Whereas sovereignty over civil society resides with the governments of member nations, jurisdiction over martial order lies exclusively with the UMC, through the Council of Nations and their several executive Commissions. This, effectively, resulted in the formation of two “internal worlds” within the western sphere itself – one governed by the laws of the nations, and the other by the laws of the UMC. For the purposes of government, citizens of civil and martial society alike were accorded equal right to vote at UMC Council elections, although martial citizens are prohibited from taking office…
He was about to turn the page, when two loud thuds sounded on the door. He closed the book just as the door slid sideways into the walls and daylight spilled into the room, and a dark, silver-lined silhouette appeared at the doorway, leaning at the shoulder against the door frame.
“We’ll be landing in an hour,” said Celyn. “Better get geared up.”
He laid the book aside, shifted his legs over to the side of his bunk and pressed his palms into his sore eyes.
“Did you sleep?”
He groaned deeply, answering the question with a bloodshot glare. He fished around the pockets of his coat for his last pack of cigarettes, which he soon discovered to be empty. He compressed the pack in a fist and threw it bitterly aside.
“Hey,” Celyn called. “Nine o’clock.”
A fresh carton of Lucky Strikes sat in the corner by his feet.
“I stopped by to give them to you earlier but you were asleep.”
He picked up the carton of cigarettes and studied it closely. There was only one place it could have come from.
“You know Duke?”
“Through the grapevine,” said Celyn. “Never seen so many damn dregs in one place.”
He nodded slowly, eyeing the fresh carton of cigarettes with suspicion. No random act of kindness among martials was to be trusted. He looked down again and noticed a half-pint flask which he had overlooked. He picked up the flask and examined the earth-brown liquid through the sunlight.
“Scotch…”
“Your poison, right?” Celyn wore a sideways smile.
“Did Malachi put you up to this?”
“No,” she assured. “It’s from me. A parting gift. For the road. Hell, if you live long enough to finish those smokes, you’ll have gotten further than any of us thought you would.”
“Thanks,” he replied, ironically. He closely examined the top of the scotch bottle and saw that the seal had already been broken.
“I took a swig,” said Celyn. “I was curious.”
He unscrewed the top of the flask, scrutinized the muzzle, sniffed, took a short gulp and exhaled. “Do you know the difference between scotch and ambrosia?” he asked, coming to his feet.
“One of them doesn’t taste like stale urine?”
“Alcohol gives you at least one day of hell for every high,” he said, answering his own question. He set the scotch down on the counter and started to get undressed.
“You prefer pain to pleasure?”
“This may come as a shock to you,” he said, “but people have more need of pain than they do of pleasure.”
Celyn watched the clothes pry off his body and ogled his loins as the clothes came off and the sunlight kissed the lean, scarred flesh. “You… like to suffer?” she muttered.
Hearing the distraction in her voice, he stopped at once and turned quick enough to see her eyes quickly shoot up from his bare groin to his sober mien.
“Suffering is not the same thing as pain,” he said.
When he finished putting on his undergear, he lowered himself back down on his bed and started tearing the plastic cellophane off the carton of cigarettes.
“Eli wants to talk to you,” said Celyn. “He’s on the third deck, port side.”
Her arms uncrossed and her shoulder left the door frame.
“Wait,” he called out as she was about to leave.
“What is it?”
There was a pause.
“Why did you keep it a secret from him?” he asked
The tense silence sustained for a while before Celyn hung her head with a weary sigh, presaging confession…
“A little while ago, Eli and I had tried… something.” Celyn looked away as soon as the confession was made. “It didn’t last long,” she added, quietly, and fell silent again – the sort of silence that suggested there was more to the story.
“Did the Commission find out?”
“No.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Do you have to ask?”
He rephrased: “Why did you start?”
She shook her head. “Not a damn clue,” she said. “I guess it’s like the neuralists say … We’re born sick.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Another tense pause. This time no answer followed. There was an emerald twinkle in Celyn’s eyes and a subtle smirk crept up the side of her face. She stepped forward and reached her hand out over the wall opposite the bed. A panel glowed and the seams of a recess appeared. The wall opened, revealing an assortment
of gear laid out like disjointed pieces of exoskeleton. “Get geared up,” she said, turning away. “Third deck. Port side.”
The doors shut.
Upon closer inspection, he saw the gear in the wall-closet was all pristine, marked with the blood red insignia of his caste. It was the same gear from the wartech commercial he had seen the other day – another “parting gift” from Malachi, no doubt.
His body moved independent of his will, instinctively piecing the gear together layer by layer over his limbs and torso, until the elastic strips of black and grey textile hugged him like new layers of sinew and his front, back and limbs were panelled with a hardened shell. He squeezed his fist and an exhilarating potential of strength filled his limbs like an elixir.
He stepped out of his cabin and was braced by the helter-skelter of a miniature city within a roofed, cavernous space. The low rumble from the cabin amplified tenfold. Moving platforms and automated walkways ferried hundreds of full-geared martials up and across. Stocked armouries were being raided. Overhead, the roof of the place was long and conically curved and the sky above was as immaculate, azure, violet and amber as the heart of an open flame. A fleet of Peryton soared at the carrier’s flanks, ushering them through the wild blue yonder. Vague memories of being flown out to the warzones flashed through his mind as the conveyor belt walkway ferried him along the fuselage.
From the descending platform, the earth below was hidden behind a floor of cloud and the airborne leviathan plunged into the mist just as the platform stopped. The glazed walls of the fuselage went snow white and the amber light of sunset was swallowed away, reappeared, then disappeared again in abrupt shifts.
He crossed the passage to the third deck, protruding out of the portside of the airship. A large demi-dome of clear glass proffered a complete panorama of the sunset sky. The deck was empty, all but for one solitary figure, standing at the end, hands crossed at his back, sights set over the Earth.
“Evening commander,” greeted Malachi without turning.
He came up silently beside him. The opaque, black glasses glinted with the light of the setting sun. The two men stood in silence for about a minute before Malachi’s head slowly rotated toward him. “Sleep well?”
“No,” he replied, keeping his eyes forward.
“Nightmares, huh?” Malachi hummed and nodded slowly, then turned his sights back to the sky. “That’s how it always starts.”
“What does?”
“Coming off the neurals.”
He regarded Malachi sideways. “How would you know?”
“Oh I know a lot more than you think I do.” A grin twitched across Malachi’s face and disappeared instantly. He slowly removed his glasses and stared directly and unblinkingly into the sun. “After a while,” he continued, “the nightmares start to spill over and become reality.” His voice became profound and redolent. “Before you know it, they start when you’re awake and end when you go to sleep. You get to a point where you don’t know whether you’re asleep or awake anymore. You start to spiral down a hole, a deep, dark hole. And when you get to the bottom of that hole, you find a choice: The way of the coward – suicide. The way of humility – submission. Or…” Malachi’s eyes pierced through Saul’s temple, into the deepest confines of his thoughts. “The way of pride,” he added darkly. “Convince yourself that the whole damn world’s insane – everyone except you, of course.”
When Malachi said the word “insane”, for a moment he heard Pope’s voice echoing over his speech. His fists clenched instinctively and a flutter of rage rose in his chest and set his heart pounding, deepening his breaths.
Malachi seemed to note his rising passion with a contented smirk, and then looked away again. “That scar on your seal,” he said. “You did that to yourself?”
“I do not remember.”
“They cleaned you…” Malachi hummed and his smirk widened into a grin. He looked away again. “How long ago?”
“A year and…” he stopped and restated. “Three hundred and sixty-three days.”
“It feels surreal afterwards, doesn’t it? Like being born again.”
His interest was roused anew. “… You defected?”
“I must have.”
He looked away. “And then you submitted.”
“So did you.” Malachi’s head turned to him again and this time the rest of his body followed. “They never force us, you know. They’re pretty clear about that. They always give you the choice. You have to submit every time, just like the first time.”
“How do you know that for sure if you cannot remember?”
“You know,” Malachi answered. “Deep down, everyone knows.”
Their gazes remained locked.
“There’s one thing that confuses me about you, though,” Malachi digressed. “I remember the moment I came to, after they wiped my slate clean. Everything before that point was a blur. The Commission gave me my caste, my neurals, my account with the martial banks, my new address. They briefed me, handed me a fresh contract and sent me on my way. Never looked back. Couldn’t look back. I was all alone. The Commission were the only people in the world I could trust and I knew that if I didn’t, I would end up… well… like you.” He stopped and turned. “But, you didn’t … Why not?”
“As you said; certain things you just know,” he replied. “Sometimes the mind has reasons that reason itself is blind to.”
Malachi chuckled and turned away. He shook his head and the chuckle escalated into a hopeless, raspy laugh.
The airship descended from the clouds and the curved horizon over the war-torn land appeared. They had crossed over the boundary between East and West. Razed earth presaged their entry into the airspace over the Wall of Fire.
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?”
“A pitiable one,” Saul replied, turning away
Malachi purred contemplatively. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“The system depends on death to function.”
Malachi chuckled.
“Well, based on that little piece of wisdom, I guess the whole natural order’s fucked up.”
“There is nothing natural about the war economy,” he replied darkly.
“An Ares-caster…” Malachi shook his head and snorted. “Ask yourself this: What has peace ever done for the world?” he inquired rhetorically. “War is progress. It’s always been that way and it always will be. All the world industries are bound to bloodshed. Without us – without the martial economy – the whole race comes to a grinding halt.”
“Do you believe that this world was written in nature too?”
“Do you doubt it? Take a good look.” Malachi waved a gesturing hand over the view of the war-torn land. “It’s the perfect system: All day every day, ships come and go from the martial cities to the war zones. They only bring back the survivors, refining the race, making the system better one death at a time, keeping power in the hands of the strong. I even hear the Council is drafting laws to allow high-casters to start reproducing. It’s all heading in the same direction. I hate to break it to you, but guys like you are just defects that the system shakes off from time to time.”
Malachi’s dark eyes were bleak and austere and the voice which related the philosophy of pitiless indifference was psychopathically passive. The cold and imminent touch of total oblivion did not seem to perturb him one iota. Like all martials, he was a walking corpse, an automaton, a bodily shell driven only by the will to power, fearless, emotionless, boundless potential for cruelty… All these were the symptoms of the neurals.
The bleak eyes turned to Saul again.
“Did you ever consider the possibility that you were born for this?”
Saul rested to consider, and answered the question with another question.
“Do you believe in freedom?” he asked.
Malachi nodded. “When nature plays you a tune, you dance to her music or you die. That’s the only freedom any of us get. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you wi
ll … sooner or later.”
Saul reached into a compartment of his utility belt and took a fresh cigarette pack, tapped the bottom of the pack against his hand and pulled out a king-sized smoke.
“May I?” inquired Malachi, before he could raise the cigarette to his lips.
He stopped and regarded Malachi with an askance frown. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite place what it was. He gave the cigarette to Malachi.
“Have you ever asked yourself why it all came to this?” Malachi digressed as he cocked his head forward to light the cigarette.
“The Gaia Revolution, the PMCs, the Covenant…”
“I’m not talking about the history.” Malachi interrupted, inhaled deeply and exhaled. “I mean, really; why? The whole race has damn near everything it needs in infinite supply and still we go on fighting. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.”
Saul took out another cigarette and put it in his lips, feigning indifference. “Even if you satisfy every human desire, the desire for power will always remain. That is the only reason there has ever been war.”
Malachi nodded slowly and assentingly. “That’s right,” he said, taking another deep draw of smoke. He exhaled and grinned. “Blood is money. Money is power. War is power. That’s why millions of people all over the world are migrating to the war metropolises. They’re all looking for a little piece of that power. And they’ll sell their lives to the martial world to get it. Whether you like to admit it or not, that’s what you did too.”
Saul’s fist clenched and the anger bubbled up again. He took the cigarette from his mouth and discretely tossed it aside.
“You know it,” said Malachi. “And you can’t handle it, can you…? That’s why you gave it all away.”
His hand shot up and latched around Malachi’s collar, thrust him up against the wall with a bang and the cigarette fell from his lips. The adrenaline burst from his chest into his limbs, filling him with murderous intent. “You talked to Pope…”
The delay in Malachi’s answer was confession enough. The insidious sideways smirk reappeared. “That’s it … good,” he purred, sinisterly. “Show us what you’re really made of.”
His fist tightened with restraint, His breaths became constricted and feral. The moment he became conscious of it, the fingers trembled loose. He quelled his passion. The rush of wrath seemed to have shocked him a lot more than it did Malachi, who burst into laughter as soon as he let go:
“Bra-vo,” he mocked.
“The Commission know…”
“No,” said Malachi, turning away. “I spoke with your neutralist long before you told me anything about going rogue. If you were going to lead my men into a battlefield, I wanted to make sure you were fit for the job. The Commission debars defectors from the warzones for a reason. Martials like you are a threat…”
At that moment, they were interrupted by approaching footsteps. Both heads turned toward the deck entrance, where a figure appeared, ambling with a slow and cavalier gait. The long barrel of a rail rifle rested over the tops of his shoulder blades like a bat.
“Salut, amis,” hailed Duguay with a sly leer.
Their reply was a long and tense silence.
The arrival of the Cajun instantly dissipated the conversation.
Malachi cocked his head and put the glasses back over his eyes. When his head rose again, the bleak, dark eyes gazed through the opaque lenses.
“Remember my conditions,” said Saul.
“You remember ours…” There was an air of foreboding in Malachi’s reply. He took out a black neural canister, rolled two tablets into his hand and gulped them down at once, followed by a light exhale of relief. “Well, this was… interesting,” he said with a flicker of a smile. “I’ll see you in the field … comrade.” He left, brushing past Saul’s shoulder, then marched slowly past Duguay without so much as an acknowledging look and went out the exit.
“Problème?” the Cajun asked, coming forward.
“No.”
“Hmm… Bon.”
Saul remained on the edge of the deck, looking out over the shipside. The distance between them and the scorched earth had now closed considerably. Far ahead of the ship’s bow, the martial settlements of Tyumen emerged over the horizon. The bulbous turbines rotated at the ship’s sides shooting heavy blue jets of supersonic air and the ship slowed beneath their feet. The entourage of Preyton aircraft keeled to its sides, broke off from port and starboard and dispersed into the sky. To the east, two more of the leviathan air carriers descended from the clouds, southbound to the Eurasian Region of the Walls.
An alert sounded across the airship, signalling the landing.
When the signal stopped, the mestizo-Cajun swung his rifle around and banged the butt against the floor. He reached behind his back and took out a very familiar-looking bottle of earth-brown fluid, unscrewed the top and raised the bottle bottom-up, with the top shoved deep into his gullet. Three gulps later, he lowered the bottle, twisted his head and grimaced.
“Ech!” he burbled, eyeing the bottle disgustedly. “Pas mal…” he leered, then presented Saul with the drool-sodden scotch bottle.
“… Keep it.”
Duguay curled his lips. “Bien…” He put away the bottle. Then, gesturing toward the exit, bid, “Allez-allez.”
The Cajun followed beside him, down the passage to the main fuselage, and spoke (with unusual clarity) as he walked: “De boss man tink too much, ami… He gotta quit dat. Won’t do ‘im no good. Aahh, but he don’t know no betta’.”
“So… what do you think?” he asked, after a long pause.
“Chacun à son proper, ami,” shrugged the Cajun. “You a couyon – ain’t no doubt about dat. If I had what you had – merde – buy me out a bordello an’ a warehouse full’a’ ambrosia – maybe summa dis stuff right here, too.” He took another swig from the scotch bottle. “Lemme tell you sometin’ ri’ now, ami: Ain’ not but one ting in dis world what matter. Not but one law.”
“And what is that?”
“Balance! Plaisir et douleur. Dem fellas from the East Grid – dey got a word for dat…”
“…Karma.”
“Fameux!” broke the Cajun, with a raspy cackle.
Just as the other end of the passage was in sight. There was another profound motion from beneath and the loud rumble in the walls declined as the airship prepared for landing.
They emerged onto a walkway, at the head of a mass assemblage of soldiers, waiting in their assigned squads before the gates at the ship stern. T-minus five hours to assault.
“Well, live or die, som’n’ tell me dis de last time I’ll be seein’ ya, couyon,” Duguay raised his bottle one last time. “A vous” he toasted and then emptied the scotch into his gullet. “Zeerahb…” He belched, then threw the bottle aside. “À bientôt, commandant. ”
The vast settlement came into view as the airship settled on its landing pad. The doorways opened, filling the fuselage with a cold draft of scorched air and the red sun disappeared over the horizon.
C. 5: Day 364