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Plight of Sinai by Masada
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Plight of Sinai
Date: 17 October 2008, 4:26 pm
PLIGHT OF SINAI
Chapter one: Revolutionary Ardour
There are few moments when one fully controls his fate, thought Himosee as he pressed his plasma pistol firmly into Nedamee's chest, but when the right time comes one must seize his opportunity, or face the weight of regret for eternity. At least, that was his way of rationalizing events, and perhaps even giving him some comfort in what he was about to do.
"The Covenant... do you still believe their teachings were true?" he asks dispassionately.
Nedamee was heavily tied to a chair. As General Counsellor of the Covenant, he had leadership of the Colony world of Sinai. The planet had, until recently, been primarily a touristic location and as such had always been easy to govern. Dealing with political dissidents was not Nedamee's specialty, especially if the political dissidents in question kept him hostage. Nedamee tried to remember his religious teachings from his days at university. Think; think, he thought, what was I supposed to say to unbelievers? Remind them of the faith, yes that's it... focus on what our faith has brought us...
He raised his head slowly, and as if reciting from a distant memory, he told Himosee" Our Elite race were merely savages when we met the Holy Prophets. We fought with spears and stones; we believed the stars were unreachable. Has our faith not allowed us to master nature, to take control of our destinies towards the Great Journey and salvation?"
"THIS IS NOT WHAT I ASKED! DON'T GIVE ME YOUR RHETORIC BULLSHIT" Himosee yelled.
Then as suddenly as this outburst came, he remain silent for a moment. He looked around as if truth could be found in this large office. A dim purplish light covered the room, making it impossible to distinguish between the ornate decorations that were, with precise detail, applied to the walls. The only way that Himosee distininguished Nedamee from the darkness was the sharp, bright, orange light that poured through the windows. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, the colony's air was heavily polluted by the ill-maintained ships which arrived daily, who often spilled radioactive waste into the atmosphere. In a few months, the planets' normally beautiful blue skies turned into a hellish yellow, and removed any distinction between day and night.
Several minutes passed in this fashion, until Himosee woke from his daydreaming and continued in a calm voice "Look into the streets old one. Do you not see the corpses pilling up? None of us have jobs anymore. This whole god-damn world has gone to hell. The inhabitants, the Elites, OUR brothers – the people we're supposed to represent have either died of hunger and disease or been 'pacified' by the military."He turned around and faced the window, then points towards the streets. "Does this look like salvation to you?"
"Himosee, you have always been the most promising of my Elite staff. I want you to know, that I was going to promote you to deputy Counsellor-General. This can still be done, Himosee, just put your weapon down, we can discuss things. We are amongst Elites, we can talk things through in a more sophisticated manner, can we not?" Nedamee hoped that if he could not reason with him, perhaps he could buy some time. The Brute security guards were bound to come and help him, perhaps they were even here already, waiting for the right time to move and rescue him?
"I worked in the administration of this colony for years. That is until you let the Covenant ruin this place. Nedamee, wake up, there is no one left to work for. The schools are shut; the city is filled with corpses, Sinai looks like a war-zone, even though no battle took place here. We have failed our people."As he said those words, Himosee was lost in his memories again, to a time when this planet used to be a pleasant place to live in. It all went wrong, he thought, when the Covenant leadership were keen on transforming Sinai into a grave-world.
As per ritual, Covenant warriors killed in battle deserved proper burial. For lower caste castes such as grunts and jackals, furnaces were enough. But Elite ceremonies where more elaborate. Traditional Elite funerary processions often lasted days during which poems and chants recounting glory achieved on the battlefield are recited and the family is honoured for giving a fierce warrior to the covenant. With the turn of the war going for the worse, understanding to which family the dead belonged to was an administrative nightmare. To simplify this task, the Prophets decided to send all the bodies to a colony which would effectively become a universal grave. But despite Elite leaders' rhetorical desire to honour the dead, no colony wanted in practice to receive 1.4million corpses to bury every month. That's when the prophets wisely decided they would pay whoever accepted the responsibility. Nedamee, as political leader of the colony found this a brilliant way to enrich himself. He was nicknamed, appropriately so, the merchant of death. Unfortunately for the local population, this radically transformed the small colony into living nightmare.
Old decommissioned carriers were used to transport the corpses to Sinai. There, a grunt and jackal personnel, supervised by Brutes were supposed to dig the graves, recite the honours, and proceed the thousands of Elite bodies that arrived daily. The grunts were terribly understaffed, and quickly began to abandon reciting the traditional Elite obituary and dumped the bodies as fast and unceremoniously as possible. As the death toll from the front multiplied, the grunts then decided it was wiser to put 2 bodies in one grave. Then it was 3. Soon the grunts and jackals were digging large open air mass graves into which the constant flow of bodies was dumped. The Capital city was surrounded by the stench of death. After that, tourism, which was the colony's main source of income, had ended drastically. Nedamee had argued that money would come instead from the corpses that poured onto the colony. Despite promises of economic aid to the needy, most of the money went to Nedamee's bank account in High Charity.
With the dead left to rot in the toxic air, diseases spread virulently, first to the poor grunts and jackals who lived in slums, and later even to the traditional Elite middle-class. Riots erupted frequently. Those were severely crushed by Nedamee with the help of Brute troops. Unfortunately for him, Nedamee did not understand that the Brutes were purging the Covenant Party, the Colony Administration and various strategic positions of Elites. In a reign of terror that lasted two years, Elites were accused of heresy, discredited, tortured for merely complaining that the colony was turning out for the worst. Hundreds of Elites were executed daily. Elite schools were shut down, and became the defacto headquarters and torture chambers for the new Brute regime. The old guard soon made place to Brutes, who slowly eroded control of the colony from Nedamee's . For a colony populated almost exclusively by Elites, they formed now only a minority in their own state.
These were the thoughts that filled Hisomee as he stood silent, staring blankly at a bust of the Prophet of Truth. Nedamee, too was lost in his thoughts. He slowly began to realize that his colony in all effect and purpose was no longer his. It was the Brute's. No rescue party was ever going to come. He quietly began to recite the Twenty Plights of the Prophets, a song that warriors chant while expecting their deaths. Hisomee was awaken from his thoughts by the familiar tone of the song.
"You don't deserve to sing the song of a warrior" He said "I don't offer you a blindfold, facing your death will perhaps restore some of your honour"
Accepting his inevitable death, Nedamee looked straight into Hisomee' s cold hard eyes and replied, quite possibly for the first time, in full honesty "You may not understand my decisions, but I lived my life as faithfully as possible to the Covenant teachings. The Great Journey – the task to become a God- is not made without great sacrifices. Death is a step necessary to rid us of those whose sins hold us back from salvation. I did my duties to the Covenant. I die as a martyr."
"You will not have that glory, fool. You die an old lonely man. Hated by all and killed by your own apprentice. You are no martyr, but a mere murder!" Hisomee snapped back.
Nedamee mumbled in a low voice some indistinguishable prayers. Or, perhaps was it merely whimpers, wondered Hisomee. He quickly drew his pistol and fired 3 successive shots, the first missed and burned a large whole into a metallic desk behind Nedamee. The next two passed through his skull, exploding it into bits and pieces which spread all over the dark room. Blood spilled over Truth's bust. The bust with its hands pointing towards the sky seemed to pray for Nedamee's. A fitting reward for one so obsessed with the Covenant religions, cynically remarked Hisomee.
"There."A small pause" It's done". He said aloud, as if expecting his hardships to vanish away by magic.
As blood poured from Nedamee's body, a deafening silence had absorbed the room. Hisomee's hands began to tremble uncontrollably. His unrestrained trembling shook his very body to the core. He took life. Was he not a God? A God posses the power of life and death on His believers. Was that not his position before? Nedamee's life belonged to him, to him to do as he pleases. He had found a faster way than the Covenant to obtaining deity. He expressed cautiously a big grin that suddenly became an outburst of laughter. Uncontrollable for minutes, he laughed as if everything in his whole life had been the funniest comedies. His educated mind quickly kicked back in; this was a laugh of desperation not of joy; the laugh of Elite who senses death approach and comforts himself with a last sign of joy.
Hisomee was seized by spasms that brought him to his knees. Still shaking, he threw away his plasma pistol that landed unceremoniously on Nedamee's remains. He searched franticly through his pockets. Emptying badges, security keys and discarded them as if they burned him.
"Where are YOU" he pathetically cried.
And then he stopped. He had found it. With his long sleek fingers he took 3 small pills. He stared at them with passion before he quickly gobbled them. Abruptly his spasms stopped. His eyes widened and quickly became blood-shot. All the muscles in his body lay loose. His neck hurt badly, he tried to lift his arm but it felt like it weighed a million tonnes. He dropped to the floor, motionless, staring into the dark ceiling with wide red eyes. He appeared almost as a second corpse.
As he entered a trance, his mind was racing: he saw the wide and green plains of his childhood; his parents were next to him, smiling as they always did. Then a loud roar. He looked into the sky. Bodies dropped. It was raining corpses; the land suddenly became grey and dark, filled with organs, blood and skulls. He looked around. His parents were at his feet beheaded. A corpse dropped behind him. He slowly turned around to recognize his wife. She spoke to him. Told him she loved him. As Hisomee reached to kiss her, her body decomposed in worms that ran into his mouth and suffocated him. He coughed frantically as he tried to breathe.
His cough had awoke him.
He was trembling again, he realized. He slowly remembered what had happened. The gun. The hostage. Now the corpse a few feet away.
"What an idiot I am. I murder a political leader and I stay here patiently waiting to get myself caught. One day these pills will get me killed" He remarked disdainfully to himself.
Although the Covenant Party denied the existence of drug addiction, its use was widespread in the army and the lower classes. The most common drug was the K-pill mainly because of the ease to obtain it. Originally intended by the Covenant army to decontaminate polluted water and allow it to be fit for consumption, the K-Pill began to be used as a means in itself. The K-Pills were toxic to the body ,slowly killing the nervous system,. but giving the user feelings of relief and relaxation in a deep trance-like state. Towards a more terminal patient, the K-Pills also gave wild hallucinations, since the nervous system, in its last phase of terminal decay, cannot distinguish between real impulses and imagined ones.
"Two cycles! I stayed here two whole cycles. And no guards" He told himself "I'm either the luckiest Elite alive or no one actually cares about this colony anymore."
He left the general counsellor's office as quickly as he could. He emerged out of the Colony Organization Bureau from a back entrance and proceeded cautiously to head towards home. At the deepest moment of the night, the sky was as bright as ever, giving a surreal aura to the empty streets. Walking in a fast pace, he didn't even notice the corpses that were littered throughout the capital. Political opponents, vengeance murders or merely opportunistic ones, deaths by irradiation and the thousands of once pround Covenant Elites awaiting burial all lay on the streets as a common pile of undifferentiated carcases. The body count was so high that no one could, or cared, about removing them anymore.
The large elegant boulevards were now but a mere shadow of a decaying society. For Elites like Himosee they represented the hard cold truths of the Covenant. They showed to the whole world what the Covenant brass wanted to hide. Their wars have devastated countless worlds, killed generations of young. Every conquest was bought at a terrible cost – that of life.
As Himosee walked towards home, he saw a figure in the distance. Mechanically he looked for his pistol only to realize he had discarded it.
"Hey Himo... you don't look OK? Did that idiot Nedamee make you work until this late again?"Himosee unbelievingly realized that it was an old friend of his, Avee, who greeted him in his usual matter-of-factly tone.
"No..no.. nothing like that... What are you doing here in the middle of the night?" Replied Himosee, trying to avoid thinking of his bosses' cold corpse back at the Colonial Bureau.
He was greeted by a warm, hearty laugh" You call this the night?" He answered" The sky is so fringing bright I can barely sleep anymore. I don't know when I work or when rest"
"Yeah... I guess the same is true of me too, brother." Himosee faintly agreed.
"Hey you don't look too good. And by that I mean even worse than usual. That's it, were going to the Grunt's Treat Bar weather you like it or not. A good drink would do you some good" remarked Avee jokingly.
"Fine I'll go with you. Just say you needed an excuse to go get drunken again old fool" Said Himosee while trying his hardest to sound upbeat.
"Haha you crack me up every time Himo... C'mon let's ..." Before he could finish his sentence. An overpowering roar was heard from the sky. Himosee started to tremble uncontrollably again. He remembered his dream in which the rain of death was preceded by a similar roar in the sky. As slowly as he could he turned to look up. He was terrified of what he was about to see lest his dreams were a prophecy.
What he saw terrified him in a way he thought was no longer possible. He look at Avee who's mandibles were wide open in stupefaction" Avee... you know... something did happen tonight... "himosee said "and the True Gods, in their sadistic justice, have come to punish me of my sins. Tonight I said I controlled life and death, but in reality I am a simply a worm compared to them"
Himosee rolled in a ball and began sobbing. He reached in his pocket for some K-pills. He found none left, and he began sobbing even harder.
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