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Page 20.
13. Dreams Gone
 It started out wrong: There was that oppressive morning atmosphere, polar wasteland, bleak abyss of frigid hell.
Jared walked nervously. A small white dot hovered momentarily behind a grimy window. It was a human face, narrow with suspicion. Jared quickly looked away. His gaze fell upon the forbidding monster drum: The looming North Wing of the Olympia House, thundering in the silence by its sheer size.
Someone shrieked. Jared whirled.
It was a clothesline, pulled by a fat, pasty arm. Jared walked on; what was there to fear, except Mbe’s secret police? He now thought of the uniform less agents of the National Police. Was Mbe making good use of them?
Gunshot! Jared tensed, ready to throw himself on the ground. But it was merely a door. Other doors banged. A voice uttered a slurred, unintelligible curse.
Shadowy figures, of little substance in the wan light, stepped into the cold morning.
A whistle shrilled in the thin air, loud as a rocket making a dead fall.
None of the people walking with Jared looked at him. To them he was probably just another derelict drifting in and out on the strong legs of a fast-dying youth Perhaps, a drifter from Kublec or Daltonia or some other ill-famed destitution world, who had found a woman in the tenements and would stay a few weeks before moving on.
At the intersection of Victory and Olympic he ran from the oppressive shadow men, clambered up an embankment. A vac train rushed him away into thick traffic and he tried to forget what he had seen.
All was finished.
Jared walked to the Starmeer, fought his way in through rioters, got into the hall, but was unable to even get close to his boss, President Cyrus Mbe.
Jared saw, as the one delegate went down in a spate of blood, that Ankhfire had just achieved an most important propaganda victory. Those among the followers of Ankhfire who would throw their lives gladly and deliriously away for their faith had just witnessed their inspiration. The Ankhmen, the warriors, had destroyed the UGO order, and now ruled a tide of war. Fools that they were, Jared thought, they were manipulated by the Raskians, but those in turn were fools for not understanding that they had just sentenced themselves and everyone else in the human galaxy to death and slavery at the hands of a thousand vengeful alien races.
“People of the galaxy!” Chase screamed. “We are at war! Join us in the holy war! Help us overthrow this vast, rotting empire, which refuses to change, refuses to rightfully dissolve the empire formed under the guise of protection in the early days after the revolutions!”
Jared looked across the aisles, to the dais, and saw the new look of determination on Cyrus Mbe’s dark face. There was no alternative: Mbe must take control of the government right now, right here, or they were all doomed.
Agony of agonies.
Something moved with a dull, loud roar against the portal from outside, and when Jared looked, he saw a great crowd of people pressed against the thick glass. The body of the suicidal Ankhman lay on a litter, surrounded by policemen and Ankhmen. “Ankh, Ankh!” came the cry of the growing masses outside and Ankh sympathizers inside the hall.
More delegates walked out, and Eystrigg sounded hoarse yelling, trying to get them to stay.
Jared thought Eystrigg must hurt himself pounding that ivory block.
Alan Chase, followed by a phalanx of Ankhmen, moved down the ramps. Policemen and delegates stayed out of his way.
“Ankh, Ankh,” came the massive roar of the people.
Alan Chase stood before the Ark of Convention in the pit, erect and angry before the bristling hooded microphones. His face was white, tinged with scarlet mottle at its knife-sharp folds. Silence surrounded him, made everyone stop and look at Chase, while the distant crowd crowed: “Ankh, Ankh!” and the eternal stars, tiny flames, silent and watchful, nodding unintelligible messages with blurry faces, hung suspended as time itself. Chase blazed at the chairman: “We can no longer live side-by-side with this Monster of Iniquity!” as he pointed toward Cyrus Mbe and the Mercury delegation.
Don’t do this, Jared pleaded inwardly. Not now, not with alien fleets heading our way.
Chase and his Ankhmen strode away through a small door leading to private chambers.
Echoes rolled around the hall: -iquity, -iquity, -iquity…
The main portal groaned and people around the dead man jumped back.
A second thundering groan came as the macroton glass portal bulged. The crowd outside roared ever more loudly:
Ankh! Ankh! Ankh! Ankh!
The body disappeared from the litter. Noise beyond noise. It all happened quickly. The floor and the walls shook, and Jared was knocked to the ground but quickly rose again to clutch a banister.
The portal was down. That had made the deep, pounding noise.
Ankh. Ankh. Ankh. The holy name. The holy litany. The litter, the body, the uniforms and the Lacrymans were lost among a tidal wave.
Ankh, Ankh, they shouted, and a man with blood on his face ran past Jared. The man yelled something, but Jared could only hear Ankh, Ankh, the blood cry of the rabble, cry of sacrifice and martyrdom, all in service of the ruthless, invisible manipulators who were really orchestrating the fall of democracy for their own short-term profits and power. This Ankhfire madness was only the beginning of the end for Mercury Free Port City and the entire human status quo as dominant force in the Hither Galaxy.
Now shots rang out.
Looking over his shoulder, Cyrus saw Eystrigg go down as a man with a weapon stood over him at the dais, emptying the gun into the dying Chairman’s twitching body.
It was the beginning of the end. By now, not only the Raskians but the aliens as well would know that Mercury FPC and the UGO were coming apart at the seams.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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