THE BRIGHTSIDE & MONGER WAR
by Noel K Hannan
Two hundred and fifty years after the Worldships left Earth, and the Brightsiders and the Mongers had partitioned and begun lifetimes of bitter warfare, Ankh and Banshee fell in love.
They met in the least romantic of circumstances. Ankh was teaching a class of podders Morality Tales when his schoolpod was attacked by Banshee’s Monger special operations team, a fledgling outfit on their first and last mission. Of course, they were caught and held in the schoolpod’s passive gumweb. The virgin warriors bit down hard on their tongues and took the imbedded poison. Banshee’s implant was faulty. She hung there among her dead comrades, black clad from head to toe like big flies, crying softly, not because she had failed but because she was still alive. Ankh approached her, frightened smoke-smeared podders clinging to his legs, and gently removed her fearsome warmask. Coils of flame-red hair spilled out over the genetusks that curved up in wicked arcs from her lower jaw, and she regarded the pale young Brightsider with nothing short of hatred through emerald eyes and a curtain of sweat-damp locks. She scowled and spat the dead poison sac into his face. It left a streak of vile purple goo through the short blonde hair on his left temple. He thought that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
After Banshee was passed into the custody of the Polite Police and
spirited away into the forgotten bowels of Brightside, Ankh couldn’t get her
out of his mind. He thought about her as he taught his class
and looked at the strands of pink gumweb still hanging from the clean white
tiles of the schoolpod ceiling. He
decided to get himself appointed as Banshee’s ReEducation Angel.
Their first sessions together were nightmarish. Banshee fought in the suspended crucifix of the web, trying to move her hands enough to tear out Ankh’s pale white throat, but they had clipped her geneclaws and of course she was well secured. He tried to stay out of spitting range in the confines of the custody pod while attempting to soothe her with rehabilitory platitudes from the ReEducation Angel Manual, Volume One.
“Anger and hatred are negative forces, and entirely illogical. The gumweb is unbreakable, why do you still resist it?”
“You know we mean you no harm. Monger prisoners-of-war are re-educated and released, not punished. All you have to do is learn, and you can go home. Don’t you want that?”
Banshee’s anger was a red cloud concealing all reason from her. All her training, all the Monger battle indoctrination - they were not prepared for capture and imprisonment, they were prepared to die valiantly in the service of Mongerkind. She had heard about this insidious form of interrogation, where gentle, considerate Brightsiders cajoled information with empty promises of rehabilitation and repatriation. On the face of it, all you had to do was smile - admittedly not easy with genetusks - and agree, and maybe they would be true to their word. But her information said otherwise. No Monger warrior had ever been sent back alive. It was all lies.
Ankh became increasingly despondent at ever penetrating the armour of Banshee’s conditioning. His colleagues at the schoolpod ridiculed him and he was carpeted by the Mastertutor for arriving late for work because of his commitment to the ReEducation Angel project.
“Civic duty is commendable,” said Mastertutor Ono, standing in his plush office with his back to Ankh, overlooking the arcologies of Brightside’s eastern zone below. Arcoworkers scurried like insects along the ribbed nylon tracks between the bloated fruit-bearing trees. “And responsibilities to your employment is quite another. You are setting a bad example to the podders, Ankh. I had big hopes for you, my boy. I know you have dreams of becoming a Mastertutor yourself. But if there is no change in your attitude, Ankh, I don’t see how I can keep the conscription board away much longer.”
The mention of military service sent an icy shiver down Ankh’s spine. It was his worst nightmare. Imagine having to strike another person, even an enemy. Imagine killing someone. The thought was too terrible to even contemplate. He resolved to set his alarm earlier and to give Banshee one week to respond to his please. After that.... he would have to make a choice. His attraction to her, a sworn enemy, was as illogical as her stubborn refusal to be rehabilitated. Surely she knew that all she needed to do was acquiesce, and she could go free?
Two days into Ankh’s self-defined final week, during a particularly tedious bout of questioning, Banshee’s mask finally slipped, in the most unusual of circumstances.
“The Brightsiders are peace-loving people,” Ankh had repeated for the several-millionth time. “We wish only to reach a settlement with the Mongers, so that no more of our people have to die.”
She had snarled and spat a bloody clot of phlegm into his face when he got to close. Something snapped and he hurled the hard plastic-coated manual he had been reading from straight at her, screaming “Why won’t you let me help you? I love you and you’ll rot in here or get killed trying to escape and I love you!”
The book had bounced off her face and split her nose.
She was silent and startled and hung there in the web, immobile, staring
at him. She probed gingerly at her
injury with a long pointed tongue.
“How can you love me?” she growled softly. They were the first words she had spoken to him. “I am your enemy. I came here to kill you.”
He regained his composure and retrieved his book from the tiled floor of the detention pod. He wasn’t sure what to say next. His manual dealt only with the gentle destruction of a prisoner’s resolve with logical, peaceful, inarguable sentiments. It said nothing about breaking their noses.
“I’ve loved you since I first saw you,” Ankh heard himself say. He approached her, well within spitting distance, the manual held loosely at his side. “We are not enemies. Only the credo of the Monger makes us enemies. There is no need for us to be at war.” He placed his hand on her blood-smeared cheek and she snapped at him at first, but when he did not withdraw, she let him keep it there. She thought it felt......nice. Yes, nice.
“The credo of the Monger is all I know,” said Banshee. “War with the enemy Brightside - total control of the Worldship - a return to Earth to destroy those who dared to banish us into space. I was born in Hive Thirty-Eight, Vat Seventy-Three, Valhalla Legion. I have no mother or father. Monger is my family. I graduated from Valhalla seven days before my mission to Brightside. This is all I know. I know nothing of your.....love, Brightsider. You are my enemy.”
“If we are enemies, at least let us know our enemy’s name,” said Ankh, pacing the floor of the detention pod and invisibly returning to an orthodox procedure from his manual. “My name is Ankh. It means -”
“ - Peace. I know. We are taught your naming conventions in our Intelligence Studies. And I am Banshee. It means - “
“- an ancient wailing creature of mythology, a harbinger of death,” said Ankh, smiling. “We have our own Intelligence Studies, too. You see, are we so different?”
A flicker of a smile crossed Banshee’s face. Ankh saw it and his heart fluttered. His perseverance was being vindicated but above all his affection was being returned, even in this tiny manner. He didn’t think she was faking. He didn’t know that she would not have known how. Monger warriors were brutal and cruel but they were not liars. They had a code of honour that even a Brightsider would understand.
Ankh’s ReEducation Angel supervisors were pleased with the progress he was making with Banshee - a particularly difficult case in their opinion - and reported the matter to Ankh’s Mastertutor, Ono, informing him how impressed they were at the conduct of his schoolpod in allowing their brightest tutors to participate in the Angel project. The report landed on Ono’s desk the same morning as the conscription request from the Self-Defence Forces. Ono read the report, and carefully omitted Ankh’s name from the request return, condemning instead Sportstutor Pollen and the Applied Agriculture teacher Bethlehem to their year defending Brightside. Ankh was blissfully unaware of how close he had come to being handed a gun.
“Tell me more about a Brightsider’s love.”
They had graduated, with the permission of the Angel supervisors, into a lower security level where Banshee could be seated in a restraint chair yet be allowed full upper body movement. It was far more civilised than the crucified stress-position of the gumweb.
Ankh had abandoned the ReEducation Angel manual. His sessions with Banshee were freeform and unscripted. His supervisors encouraged this, pleased with his flair for, as they called it with wicked humour, ‘soft torture’. Ankh thought of it as no such thing. He was simply trying to win the love of a woman, and persuade her to renounce the war culture that was poisoning her.
“The love of a Brightsider is a wonderful thing. We love the air we breath, the flowers we grow, the animals we tend, and the men and women whose lives we protect by defending ourselves against Mongerkind. There is no greater love than the love of a Brightsider.” He paused and looked deep into her fiery eyes. The fire softened slightly. “You should be honoured to be the recipient of such love. It is a precious thing.”
Banshee’s eyes flared. Ankh settled back into his seat with a sigh, knowing he had said a wrong word and angered her. Had he preached too much? Had their relationship gone beyond a point where he needed to constantly harangue her?
“You speak as if I know nothing of love,” she said, her voice harsh but tinged with sadness, as if he had wounded her with his insinuation. “Mongers know how to love. Our love is the love of our race, and our desire for revenge and retribution. It is this that you do not understand, Brightsider -”
“Ankh,” he interrupted. “Please, call me Ankh.”
“Ankh,” she acquiesced, with a tilt of her head. A week earlier she had still been trying to bite off his face. Now she had a range of almost cute gestures. Progress, indeed.
“It is love that drives us to victory,” she continued. “You assume that we hate you but we do not. Hatred, as you said, is a negative force. Were we to hate Brightside it would deflect us from our ultimate goal - the control of the Worldship, the return home. Brightside merely stands in the way. This is what you do not understand. A Monger is capable of love, Ankh. The love of the Legion to which a warrior belongs, the love of battle, the love of victory -”
“-the love of an enemy?”
Her mouth opened and closed slightly, stunned by his question. For a fleeting second she was just a vulnerable girl, not a fearsome warrior, and he recklessly leaned across the table and kissed her full on the mouth, taking care not to cut himself on her genetusks. She gasped and spluttered as he sat back down, shocked at his own impetuosity.
“What was that?” she asked.
“We call it a kiss,” Ankh replied. “Did you like it?”
She licked her lips, her face curious. “What does it do?”
Ankh rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t do anything. It’s a gesture of affection.”
She nodded sagely. “Monger Legionnaires have a similar gesture of affection. It is the highest form of respect to leap on warrior’s back and wrestle him to the ground, then mark the back of his neck with your tusks.”
Ankh swallowed hard. Not for the first time he was glad she was tied up. She let out a barking laugh.
“Ha. That was an untruth. Did you believe me?”
He spluttered a nervous laugh. She had cracked a joke!
“No, the highest endearment of a Monger warrior is to cut the head off a dying comrade, using his own bladed weapon, and then to use that weapon to slaughter twenty enemies in his honour.”
There was no humour in her voice this time. Ankh stared at the fearsome visage he had just recklessly kissed, and realised he still had a long way to go to tame this savage beast.
“What do you mean she’s gone?”
The guard stared back at him, silent to the redundant question. He had lost an arm in the breakout and a medic was attending to his wound, clamping a graft housing over the bloody stump. He was in no mood to entertain a hysterical young tutor.
All around them were the smoke-blackened signs of battle. Ankh listened as the guard repeated his story. They had come in force to take their people back, a slamship penetrating the hull, foam sealing the outer break, nosecone peeling open and spitting Monger troopers out like semen.
“A veteran squad, no virgin soldiers these. Sonic stunners, sticklebombs, masers. We stood no chance. They killed all the Kind Police and rescued the Monger prisoners.”
Ankh dropped to his knees in despair, head in his hands.
“The girl. Banshee. The one I had been visiting, remember? They took her too? Did she go gladly?”
The guard’s brow creased as he pondered the question. “The girl. No, the girl fought them. She did not want to go. A Monger electrostunned her and carried her off.”
Ankh’s heart leapt and sank in a split second. He had discovered that his love was reciprocated and then he had lost the giver of that love in the same breath. He sank back to his haunches, and cried.
Banshee had been away for Monger for a little over a month. She awoke as the stolen maintenance brute crossed through one of the many portals from the Nogozone into her nation, and she took a great lungful of heavy, dirty Monger air.
She lifted herself up on her elbows, sore and groggy from electroshock, and surveyed her surroundings. She was laid out in the open rear of a tracked Brightside arcology drone along with five or six Monger corpses - it was hard to tell from the tangle of limbs - and half a dozen extremely alive warriors in black special operations clothing. Some of the corpses were dressed the same, some wore the white overalls of the Brightside detention units. There seemed to be no other living prisoners. The warriors grimaced and growled at her. Their uniforms were marked with sigil of a Legion unknown to her. She sensed their displeasure at the loss of their comrades in return for her escape, and shrank back into the corner of the drone, drawing her knees up to her chin. She felt threatened and vulnerable. They were unfamiliar feelings, and ones that she didn’t like at all.
Monger rolled by as they headed through its streets. Banshee looked upon it with new eyes, comparing its dark innards to the clean lines of Brightside. Monger was a world turned inside out, the conduits and passageways of its commerce and lifebloods visible and pumping, its engines of industry filling the air with a ceaseless hum. Rusty gantries hung from the Worldship’s inner hull, with colonies of precarious dwellings clinging to them like tumours around an organ. Architecture like a madman’s vision of hell, where the recycling of scrap was taken to its ultimate limit, a war economy where everything was satisfied for the greater good. A gutted, hollowed out world, that Banshee called home.
Banshee had been brought across close to her own hive, the local divisional commander would be her Valhalla Legion chief. He would no doubt want to see her immediately.
The drone rolled on through streets dripping with electrical conduits, sagging glassfibre communications webbing and steaming pipes. Mongers shuffled by, going about their daily business, hidden beneath cloaks and hoods. Mongers who were not warriors - even those who administrated and supported the war - were second class citizens. All Monger’s ruling elite were warriors.
The sullen rescue squad dumped Banshee unceremoniously on the steps of the divisional headquarters, along with three corpses in the white custodial uniforms. As the drone sped away, she overheard the warriors planning days of feasting and drinking to celebrate their successful mission, and to mourn their dead comrades.
Banshee stared up at the huge grey steel doors of the headquarters, disorientated and confused. The doors swung open and headquarters staff came out and retrieved the corpses. Dazed, she followed them inside and reported her arrival to the clerks.
And then, her nightmare began.
“How much information did you disclose?”
“Nothing. I followed procedure.”
Fire in her veins, electroshock applied through the diamond plate floor to naked feet. Banshee squealed and danced.
“Why are you doing this to me? I am a loyal warrior. I did nothing but fail to complete my mission!”
“Then how are you still alive? That is not standard procedure. All Monger special forces operatives are fitted with poison sacs.”
“Mine was faulty.”
The disembodied voice fell silent, as if discussing something that they did not wish Banshee to hear. Banshee recognised the voice of the main interrogator as that of Killdevil, her Legion chief.
“That is impossible. You chose not to die.”
“That’s not true! I tried to take it. It was faulty.”
Another blast of blue fire, throwing her off her feet. She was naked in the featureless grey chamber. She landed heavily, grazing the backs of her thighs.
“You lie, warrior.”
“I’m not! I cannot lie. I don’t know how! You taught me how to kill, how to die. But you never taught me how to lie!”
“Centuries ago, the Monger were banished from Earth for crimes they did not commit, and because they refused to lay down their arms in the face of aggressors who would destroy them.”
“This is true. This is spoken.”
“The banishment condemns Mongerkind to share the Worldship with the Brightsiders, agents and co-conspirators of this wrongful punishment.”
“Death to Brightsiders. Destruction to all their ways.”
“The Monger creed calls warriors of all Legions to join glorious battle, destroy Brightside and return to Earth to wreak vengeance on those who cast us out, that we may once again breath the air of the world of our birth.”
“This is true,” said Banshee, her voice hollow. “This is spoken.”
The interrogation - or “debriefing” as they referred to it - lasted for days. It reduced her to a sobbing heap. She had left Monger a proud, idealistic warrior - now she was a physical and mental ruin. What had she done to deserve this?
They released her, apparently happy with her version of events, but with a discharge notice. To Banshee, it was as if they had killed her. She was a warrior, born and bred into a warrior society. A discharge notice - ironically, it stated ‘mentally unfit’ as the reason - was equal to a death sentence.
She was shunned by her hive brothers and sisters and excluded from her Valhalla Legion, the worst possible insult. Clanless, she was given a menial job in a military stores unit staffed by mental and physical defectives. She lasted an hour before overpowering the disabled veteran appointed to oversee their work, and became a fugitive, on the run in Monger.
There was only one place for her to go and only one person who could help her.
“Tutor Ankh!”
“Uh?”
He had been daydreaming again. The class of podders had got out of control while he stared into his register, far away, and now Agritutor Oasis had come into the pod and discovered him. She was bound to report it to Mastertutor Ono - the recent conscription of two of their members into the Self Defence Forces had set all the remaining tutors at each other’s throats in an effort to escape the draft. Now, no misdemeanour would go unreported between colleagues if it meant that their own chances of staying out of the war could be bettered.
“I’m sorry, Tutor Oasis, I’ve not been getting a lot of sleep lately.”
“So I see. Catching up in school time then?”
“No, I mean - “
“There is a message for you, on the terminal in my office.”
He was surprised. Who would contact him on Oasis’ terminal? “A message? Who from?”
Oasis was tight-lipped and brusque. “It is untagged. That in itself is very rude, but if you could ask your ...... friend ....... to use your personal terminal in future, I would appreciate it.”
Ankh chanced leaving the podders unattended as the office was just along the corridor. He slid in behind Oasis’ excruciatingly tidy desk and thumbed recall on the terminal.
MESSAGE FOR TUTOR ANKH. RECEIPT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.
- ACKNOWLEDGED -
YOU MUST HELP ME. I AM A FUGITIVE. MONGER HAS SCORNED ME. I HAVE NO ONE TO TURN TO. YOU SHOWED ME HONOUR AND LOVE.
His hands gripped the corners of the desk. It was Banshee!
“Have you finished?” Oasis at the door of her office, a steaming mug in her hands.
“Leave me!” Ankh barked. Oasis’ eyes widened in shock at his outburst. She spluttered and scuttled away, no doubt heading straight for the Mastertutor’s office.
Ankh had surprised himself with the ferocity of his rebuff, but he had to read the message in private. What were the penalties for communicating with Monger citizens over unmonitored channels? He shuddered to think.
I HAVE TAKEN REFUGE IN THE NOGOZONE. I NEED YOUR HELP, ANKH. I NEED YOUR HELP.....
The Nogozone stretched the entire length of the Worldship, a lawless warren of tunnels, shafts and conduits, along which flowed the lifeblood of both Monger and Brightside - water, air, power and waste. Many battles had taken place here in the early stages of the war, until both sides had suffered greatly through loss of critical life supports. Thus the Nogozone had earned its name, and it was a rare military operation from either side that breached its sanctity, other than as an escape route. It had become a home for deserters and miscreants and undesirables, particularly from Monger, but it was a refuge for a fair share of disillusioned Brightsiders too. Not all Brightsiders were obedient citizens.
It took Ankh many hours to find Banshee. Her message had contained rudimentary coordinates of her position based on the communication grid she had clipped into to contact him, which narrowed down her location to a cubic half-kilometre. The Nogozone was three-dimensional, and finding her even in that small box would take time.
There were many unguarded routes into the Nogozone from the Brightside quarter. Paranoid Monger used up vital resources trying to secure its own border, but Brightside considered this unnecessary, which explained why it was a favourite escape route for Monger commando units such as the one that had extracted Banshee. Ankh, armed with a helmet-mounted beamlamp and a screwdriver, slipped into the zone through an air-ducting and vanished into the forbidden darkness.
Ever the methodical tutor, Ankh mentally quartered the cube he had located her in and began a painstaking search. Many times he was surprised by families of hunched people - Mongers or Brightsiders, he could not tell - nursing blind, zone-born children in squalid alcoves among humming machinery. He saw packs of opportunist rodent creatures cruising the tunnels, looking for easy pickings, which he sent scattering before him with the harsh beam of his lamp. He heard a pack descend on someone or something helpless and the screams echoed along the dark passageways, nightmare voices.
When he finally found Banshee, many hours later, she was huddled on the shelf of a louvered heating unit, sucking warmth, filthy from head to toe and bleeding from many cuts sustained through her arduous passage through this dark realm. Her eyes flared feral as his beamlamp illuminated her face and she leapt at him, clipped claws scrabbling for his face. But she was weak and he fended her off easily until recognition dawned over her face.
“Food!” she hissed, “You have brought me food?”
He was deflated. “No. I....I didn’t think.”
“I’m starving!” she gasped, drawing herself up into a tight ball above the humming heater. “I asked you in the message to bring me food. Are you a fool?”
“I didn’t think,” he repeated glumly, climbing up on to the shelf next to her. It didn’t strike him that this was the first time he had been this close to her while she was unrestrained. She didn’t seem so scary anymore - just a dirty, hungry, frightened girl.
“I was in so much of a hurry to find you,” he explained. “But now I have, you can come back with me, and I’ll feed you-”
“No!” she exclaimed. “I cannot go to Brightside. I am a prisoner of war. Brightsiders died when the commandos rescued me. I would be executed for sure.”
Ankh snorted. “We don’t execute prisoners! We re-educate them. All the same, you’re probably right to be worried. The Polite Police would take you in to custody. I couldn’t hide you forever.”
She looked up at him, eyes wide and bright in the darkness, completely vulnerable. One of her genetusks was chipped. “Will you come back with food, then, Ankh? I am so hungry.”
He nodded and slipped from the shelf of the heater. “Now I know where to find you, I can be back here in a couple of hours. Here, take these.” He gave her his padded jacket and a spare pocket beamlamp. “If those funny things come near just shine the beamlamp in their eyes, They can’t stand it, they’ll run away.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen them before, a few days ago, when I first came here. One of them was the last thing I had to eat.”
He swallowed hard and tried to fight the rise of bile in his throat. She was good at reminding him what she was.
“I’ll be back soon.”
“Be swift.”
He felt compelled to voice his feelings. “I love you, Banshee.”
“I know you do,” she said, “and that is why you are going to help me. Go now. I hunger.”
Ankh returned to the Nogozone later that day with a parcel of food for Banshee, which she devoured immediately, some blankets and spare cells for the beamlamp. He begged her to return with him to Brightside, even if it did mean imprisonment again. He was frightened for her in this dark place, with its monsters and hidden dangers, but she was adamant that she was staying. She was, after all, a Monger warrior. Maybe the denizens of the Nogozone had more to fear from her than she did from them.
He visited her many times over the following days. Sometimes he had to wait hours for her past their agreed time of meeting, as she explored this dark new world she had chosen as her home. She would arrive back at her hide breathless and dirty and sometimes bloody. He thought she was hunting the fat rats or preying on the other inhabitants of the Nogozone, even though he unquestioningly brought her everything she could possibly need. She never offered an explanation for her behaviour, he never asked for one. His love for her was completely unconditional.
“Do you still love me, Ankh?” she asked, quite unexpectedly, one day after he had waited two hours for her to return from one of her wanderings. He was crouched in her nest of grubby blankets, sullen and sulking at her absence.
“Of course I do!” he snapped, and it sounded unconvincing even to his own ears. He softened his tone. “Of course I do. That is why I come to you, day after day, and bring you food, and wait here for you when you know I have come-”
“If you really loved me,” she said, squatting on her haunches in the dim light in front of him, “you would come to here to live with me.”
He was shocked. It was the first time she had suggested it.
“Leave Brightside? I could never leave. How would I survive here? You only survive because I bring you food and clean water.”
She smiled a wicked smile and leaned closer to him. Her breath was hot on his face, hot and foul. “I appreciate what you bring me, but I don’t need it to survive. I could provide for us both here, Ankh.” And he knew exactly what she meant. His stomach flipped.
“I - I don’t know,” he said, drawing his knees up to his chin. A strange thrumming was building up through the metal floor, an uncomfortable vibration passing through the thin soles of his boots. Banshee appeared not to notice.
“We must be together,” she urged, gripping his legs. “We cannot go to Monger - we would both be killed. We cannot live together in Brightside - I would be imprisoned, you would be punished for aiding an enemy.”
“Re-educated,” Ankh corrected. “In Brightside, no one is punished.” The thrumming was audible now, no longer simply a vibration, and was accompanied by a harsh metallic clattering like the bashing of cymbals. Faint blue light, like electrical arcing, shimmered in the darkness.
“We are both outcasts,” Banshee continued, oblivious to the rising crescendo. “Our love makes us fugitives from our people. Only the Nogozone offers us sanctuary. You must come here to live, Ankh. I love you.”
His heart leapt. She had said it! She had actually said it! He leaned forward to kiss her, and as he did so the beam of his helmet lamp swung down the narrow passageway outside her hide, and swept over the death black flanks of the source of the noise, a ton of tracked dirty steel heading their way. He was suddenly aware that the noise had risen to a deafening crescendo, he had barely heard the last few words Banshee had spoken. Still on her haunches, her body was half in the passageway, in the thing’s path. Ankh reached forward and grabbed her filthy smock, and hauled her in.
The black steel monster cruised by with a thunderous roar, a medusa’s nest of prehensile limbs tipped with blades and flails and scouring heads of steel cords, all ricocheting off the passageway’s metal walls in clouds of sparks and dislodged debris. Banshee lay on top of Ankh, panting, as they listened to the sound of the thing die away. The rank smell of burnt ozone, hot oil and sheared metal hung in the air.
“Cleaning drone,” she said, in answer to the bewildered look on his face. “Fully automated. Some of them are as old as the Worldship. They pass this way all the time. Sometimes they wake me up.”
He wondered if she realised how close she had come to being cut in half. Nothing seemed to scare her. He remembered she had just told him that she loved him. He kissed her full on her mouth but the moment had been tainted by his brush with death. Again he was reminded that they were very different creatures. Could he give up his people for her and live in this forsaken place?
“Many, many years ago, the Human Race lived on a place called Planet Earth. Planet Earth was very green and very beautiful, and the Human Race lived there happily with many kinds of animals and plants.
“But then the Human Race invented machines, and these machines produced nasty gas and horrible waste that polluted the green and killed the plants and the animals, and Planet Earth was no longer such a nice place to live.
“When things became so bad that even the air was not good to breath, the Human Race decided to build huge spaceships to send as many of its people out to the stars, to live in clean environments and find new planets on which to start again. There were many of these spaceships, known as Worldships, and they were sent out to all corners of the galaxy.
“On one particular Worldship, a quarrel broke out between two different peoples. An aggressive and warlike people had banded together and decided that they had been banished from Earth because it was they who had been bad, rather than the air. They wanted to return to Earth and get their own back on the people who had sent them away. Using weapons and violence, they seized control of the Worldship’s power source, and tried to turn the ship around.
“The rest of the people on this particular Worldship were peaceful and wanted to carry on and find a new planet, believing that they had been saved from the dying Earth. They did not want the bad people, who began to call themselves warmongers or Mongers, to take them back to Earth against their will. When the Mongers gained control of the ship’s power, the peaceful people, who called themselves the Brightsiders, decided that they must be stopped, and took control of the Worldship’s navigation computers, preventing the Mongers from finding their way home. The Mongers cut the power, and the Worldship stopped moving, neither going back to Earth nor going forward. This is called a stalemate.
“All this happened many years ago, before your father’s father’s father’s were born. Since then the quarrel has become a war, fought mainly on the outer skin of the Worldship, and many have died from either side. Many youngsters..... many..... many.... oh, fuck it!”
Ankh slammed the plastic manual into the desk top and ran from the pod, leaving thirty bewildered podders staring at an empty chair. Mastertutor Ono found them twenty minutes later, lured from his office by the sound of their playful rioting, and found a relief tutor to calm them down. He returned to his office where another form had arrived on his desk from the Self Defence Forces. Ankh’s behaviour had grown increasingly irrational over the past few days. This time, Mastertutor Ono felt that he had left him with no choice.
Banshee had not seen Ankh for many days. She tapped into the comms grid and left hourly messages for him, but none were answered. He had failed to turn up at all of their arranged meetings for the past few days, and she had even begun to wait for him at the proper time, but still he failed to show. Had she upset him? She remembered their last meeting where she had told him she had loved him and he saved her from the renegade cleaning drone. Perhaps her insistence that he join her permanently in the Nogozone had frightened him. Perhaps she had asked too much. Perhaps he was taking some time to think through a decision, or to get his affairs in order before joining her. Perhaps.
She had not seen him for ten days and became convinced he had been killed, or worse. There was only one thing left for her to do - she would have to enter Brightside and find him. It was a drastic decision for her to take - her Monger disfigurements marked her indelibly as the enemy, and her time in the Nogozone and turned her into a filthy, decrepit specimen. She mugged a zone dweller for an oversized hooded cloak and used the last of the fresh water that Ankh had brought her ten days previously to clean herself up as best she could. She found a section of mirrored steel plate and regarded herself in it. She looked like a nightmare apparition, even by Monger standards. If her hivemates could see her now ... she had forgotten that they had forsaken her, already. Maybe they were all dead by now. Life expectancy of Monger commandos was extremely low.
Mustering her courage, she clambered through one of the access points that Ankh had shown her before, and entered a remote and quiet passage in Brightside.
Banshee was free in Brightside for several hours before the Polite Police’s DNA scanners were alerted to her presence and she was arrested by a frighteningly efficient snatch team in a busy public thoroughfare. She put up no resistance. She had spent the previous hours wandering aimlessly through Brightside in a daze, unable to comprehend a way of finding Ankh, and blinded by the wonder of the place, which she had never really seen. It was so clean, she thought. White surfaces, no visible pipes or wiring, so many corridors and boulevards where people could sit and talk in peace and quiet - so quiet! - huge expanses of green, and the arcologies....! She was pressed up against the clean glass of a viewing balcony, frosting it with her breath as she looked down over the green sprawl when the Polite Police found her and fired pink gumweb over her, pinning her to the cool glass.
She was taken to the same detention pod where Ankh had first come to visit her. She asked to see him but no one would speak to her. She remained in the silent pod for hours until a voice raised her from fitful sleep. The voice was flat, artificially generated from a routine in a database program, absolving her jailers of the terrible act it was about to commit on their behalf.
“Prisoner Ex - thirty eight. Monger citizen designation ‘Banshee’. You are charged with the murder of seven Brightside citizens during your escape from custody. How do you plead?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
“How do you plead?” the voice insisted.
“I want to see Ankh,” she said.
There was a pause. A subroutine ran and returned some data.
“Re-Education Angel ‘Ankh’ no longer reports to this detention pod. Individual is now a member of the Self Defence Forces assigned to the battlefront in Alpha Sector.”
Banshee’s heart fluttered. “No! He is a tutor, a gentle soul. I love him! He could never be a warrior! Never!”
“Individual is now a member of the Self Defence Forces assigned to the battlefront in Alpha Sector,” the voice repeated gracelessly. “How do you plead?”
She said nothing. She started to cry.
“In the absence of a plea by the accused, available data will be processed in order to generate a verdict and appropriate sentence. This may take a few moments. Please be patient.”
Banshee’s eyes widened as the cold voice fell silent. Sentence? Ankh had told her no one was punished in Brightside, only re-educated. What did the voice mean?
“The verdict has been reached. You have been found guilty. The sentence is disintegration.”
“Disintegration?” She clasped her hand to her mouth, just before a maser ray flickered from a hidden slot in the wall and wiped her cleanly from existence, as was the Brightsider way.
As a method of spooking the defenders, the Monger armoured division Iron Thunder broadcast their battle mass over the same channel used by the Brightsider footsoldiers for their helmet comms. The howling of the combat prayers and the blessing of the weaponry by the chaplain deafened the young Brightsiders huddled in their smooth steel trenches with the infinite blackness of space pressing down on them. Several ripped off their helmets and ate vacuum, dying even before the Mongers had even fired a shot.
Ankh held the gun in his hands like a dead weight, still unable to believe that he had been sent here. Even as he had gone through the stages of his call-up - the last interview with Mastertutor Ono where he had failed to satisfactorily explain his behaviour, the goodbyes to his secretly-relieved colleagues and his bewildered podders, the training camp, the swift and almost cursory training and finally the deployment - he had been convinced that it had all been some terrible mistake and that someone was about to call out his name and tell him just that and take him away from it all. It had never happened. Now he was here, with hundreds of others just like himself, no doubt hoping the same thing, about to defend Brightside against what intelligence sources held to be Monger’s biggest offensive in many years.
A thrumming passed through his feet, much deeper and faster than the warning he had felt from the drone in the Nogozone with Banshee. Banshee..... he had had no chance to contact her once he had been conscripted, everything had happened so fast, and he knew he had been under surveillance by the Polite Police in case he had tried to dodge his call-up. He wondered what had become of her. Strange, really, how he had lost her for the second time just after he had discovered that she really did love him. Would she be proud of him, he wondered, as a warrior? No. That was her way, not his. She loved him for what he was. He hoped that wherever she was, she was surviving. He suspected that she was. She was good at that.
A gasp rippled along the battle line. Cresting the horizon, where the hull of the Worldship dropped away into infinity, a Monger armoured division approached, vast destroyer leviathans riding on steel cables running across the surface. The song of the hypertensed cables whispered to the defenders through the soles of their boots. It sang of death. Beneath the flared ceramic armour skirts of the destroyers, cableskater troopers moved like swarms of insects, chrome suits reflecting starlight back into the void, fearfully beautiful.
The shrill whistle sounded across the helmet comms channel. The Brightsiders formed up on the ladders and ramps of the steel trenches, clutching weapons, waiting for the second whistle which would send them into battle. A black cloud had sprung from the lead leviathan - sticklebombs bearing down on them, evil little things that stuck to a spacesuit and blew hundreds of tiny holes in it and its wearer. One of the nastier, but by no means the only, methods that Monger had developed for young Brightsiders to die.
Second whistle.
Ankh took a deep, sweet breath.
Over the top..........
FIN
(c) ankh 2000