NationStates Jolt Archive

Port Harmony, Northlands Province, The Greater Undershi Empire

Simon DeChants gazed out of the windows of the passanger car as the train passed the airport. Row after row of military VTOLs sat out in the open, Crusader Mk. IIs of the Imperial Undershi Air Force.
As he watched, one came in for a landing. Slow. They were slow when they landed, not like when they strafed or ducked and wove during a battle. For some reason, he couldn't help but make a mental estimation - could he hit that VTOL from the woods near the base with a shoulder-launched AA missile?
No. He couldn't - they'd cut back the woods too far. He'd need to get in closer, or use a more advanced, heavier, computer-assisted, launcher.
As that thought went through his mind, he glanced through the railroad car.
It was mostly empty, but done up nicely - dark wood panneling, brass knobs on the baggage hold overhead.
He was the only norm there, the only person in the train car who wasn't a True Undershi... and he knew that the others there knew that. They avoided eye contact. They ignored him.
There were three of them - a Lieutenant in black, with a Division number in silver on his shoulder, under the IIS patch and the rank badge.
On the front of his uniform jacket, he wore a little pin, a little rectangle with little enamel squares on it. Representations of status information. His personal details, to anyone who knew how to read the Undershi military code it was in... a simple code - after all, all it protected was blood type, rank and serial number.
Under the little badge, he wore a tiny silver pin, a crucifix and crossed rifles. An anti-partisan badge - that IIS man had spent time hunting rebels or insurgents through the forest... or even had just helped hunt down the last pockets of terrified refugees when some new territory was taken.
The monster.
Simon shuddered as he remembered a mass crucifixion he'd witnessed in the Undershi Empire, during his time there as a reporter.
There'd been about three hundred of them, mostly women and children, nailed to little wooden crosses all along the assembly yard of a factory complex in Paxton, where the workers had tried to strike when the Undershi occupation was new... when they hadn't known what would happen if they tried to resist.
The IIS man there had been a brutal pig, like most IIS men were... and so he'd crucified one family member of each reluctant worker. The workers had rioted then, and he'd had to decimate them to keep order... but after that... after that, they were willing to work.
The train rolled along, past a barracks where the True Undershi Air Force pilots slept.
They were jogging, two hundred and fifty inhuman young men in sky-blue uniforms, hardly sweating as they ran laps around the parade ground in the center of their camp.
In the middle of the yard, tied to a wooden tripod, a True Undershi, probably the commander of a ground-crew or something, not one of their precious pilots, took a flogging. The sergeant's arm brought the lash down...
The train moved on.
Simon had to hand it to them - they were as brutal to each other as they were to the people they enslaved... at least, they were a far as he could tell.
He needed to refocus... he glanced at the other two men in the train car. A True Undershi in the light grey of the Undershi Army, an enlisted man.
His rank tabs said he was a Logistics Sergeant... a clerk.
Simon watched as he fiddled with a pen, going over a printed out document. A buissness man, basically... only, one in uniform.
All True Undershis wore their uniforms at all times, just as they carried their side-arms at all times. A very militarized society.
The last man in the train car was the man from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - the man meant to watch him as he did his job.
Not a pleasant society. Not at all.

Nordton, Northlands Province, The Greater Undershi Empire

Simon watched his watcher as the train pulled into the station.
The spy was a big man, like all True Undershis, those genetically altered freaks.
He wore a light grey uniform, that of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs... it lacked any other insignia, something rare in the Undershi Empire.
When they arrived at the station, Simon was the first off the train. He watched from the platform as a work gang of norms, that horrid Undershi word for unaltered humans, unloaded crates from the cars behind the passanger section.
They worked in chains, manacled to one another in a line, with barely any slack in the chains they wore.
He watched them - they had the look of Paxtonites about them... Paxtonite radicals, taken from their homeland to the north to avoid their spreading of their ideas of revolution.
They were muscled, and tanned, and in spite of the cold they worked shirtless, their breath fogging as they sweated. They moved the crates at least as quickly as a bunch of free men would have... at least, that was Simon's opinion.
They always looked over their shoulder, though... to the Overseer from the Ministry of Production, who stood behind them in white half-armour, automatic shot-gun slung as he held an electrified bludgeon, a cattle-prod crossed with a flail, meant to be used on recalcitrant workers.
He didn't use it, not even once.
Rather, he watched, and occassionally helped in the work.
He towered over the workers, easily over two meters in height. A monster.

The man from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cleared his throat, and Simon nodded vaguely, and began to walk towards the waiting car. For some reason, he could not take his eyes off the norm slaves as they worked, struggling to lift and move the boxes, sweating as they strained.
Then he was at the car, rounding a corner, and he could no longer see the workers... but the image stuck with him as he got into the big black car with the man who was meant to be watching him.
The driver was an IIS enlisted man, who gave his "guide" a mild nod of acknowledgement, but ignored Simon himself.
Typical.
The guide gave directions - they were going to see the steel works, and then they would stay the night at the home of a local True Undershi "farmer" before heading south to the capital.
Simon wondered what was meant by "farmer." Probably something like the slave owners of the American south... probably, except this was Northlands Province, so the slaves would be blond and have blue eyes.
The Undershi didn't care about race when it came to who they enslaved... that much he'd learned the first day he was in the Empire.
The only thing that mattered was whether or not you were enhanced, a True Undershi or a norm.
Sure, there were free norms, Janissaries and scientists... but most norms were slaves. Such was Undershi culture. No wonder he didn't like it.

Nordton, Northlands Province, The Greater Undershi Empire

The steel works were impressive. They reminded Simon of the Ruhr Area in Germany, as did much of what he had seen in the Undershi Empire. It was all very industrial, all very grim.
Everywhere he looked, there were signs of the intolerable conditions under which the workers slaved away. Guards in the white armour of the Occupation Police, with vicious attack dogs and norm Janissaries who were no less their creatures marched through the streets. They marched with helmets on, automatic shotguns held at the ready, with rounds chambered.
He saw one of them shoot a feral dog for no reason, just turn to see it rooting through the garbage in an alley, then fire, killing the creature.
He saw feral children too, little creatures of rag and bone that wandered about the city, shivering in the cold. Bad conditions.
The workers in the factory were all unaugmented humans, all norms, and it showed - when he stood on an observation balcony with his guide and a pair of Occupation Police guards and looked down onto the main floor of a working factory, it seemed to him to be an odd sort of... of hell. A grim, industrial hell such as reminded him of the worst of the conditions of the workers that most other nations had abandoned long ago, left behind as relics of the Industrial Revolution.
He noticed overseers from the Ministry of Production walking along the lines, armed with electrified truncheons like the one he'd seen at the train station. These men used them, though - they shocked and struck out with careless cruelty, forcing the workers towards greater speed.
As if noting his shock at the conditions, his guide explained quite calmly:
"Those norms are brute labor, unskilled, unintelligent, fit for nothing else but this sort of work... no need to worry about them." Those words shocked Simon, but he didn't say anything. He was an outsider, someone who they had let into their country to report on the conditions within. They almost certainly either knew or suspected that he was a spy, probably knew he'd been in his nation's military... but he still had secrets to keep.
The tour ended a little later, as they passed through mile after mile after mile of steel works onboard an elevated train. He could see the pens, paved areas, open to the elements and surrounded by razor wire, where men were kept like cattle.
His guide, smirking at his discomfort, explained:
"Those are Processing Areas. When we draw new levies from the raw surplus labor, they're sent there until we break them in and assign them housing." Simon nodded, shocked beyond words.
The actual housing was better, but still grim and industrial - grey concrete towers, massive and imposing, with tiny windows. His guide offered to take him on a tour of one, but he declined, explaining that he was tired.
The guide nodded, accepting his explenation, then went back to his travelogue:
"There is one bathroom for each floor - that's for every ten families - although each apartment has a cold-water sink. On average, there are sixty people to a floor, in ten family apartments. The parents work in the factories, and the children join them at sixteen. Until then, they're educated - taught to add, subtract, multiply and divide, plus basic reading and writting. Any truly brilliant individuals are sent to special schools, where they might achieve some measure of social advancment. Mostly though, they just work at the tasks their parents had." Simon nodded, gazing down into an alley where children played amoung the sacks of rotting garbage.
His guide noted where his attention had been drawn, and commented dryly:
"Typical norm behavior. Filthy little vermin, really. It's only through the goodness of our hearts that we enslave them, and don't do the world a favor and kill them all."

A little later, their trip onboard the elevated railway came to an end at the other side of the city. A car was waiting for them, another big black car with another grim, silent, IIS driver.
They left the city, heading north. As they went, they passed a collumn of Undershi Army trucks heading the same way, filled to the bursting point with young men who had been chosen for service as Undershi Janissaries. Mostly they were young, and they looked scared.
Along the roadsides, they could see empty fields. It was winter, and the last harvests were already in. Simon tried to imagine the massive fields worked by machines and norm slaves... and he found a similar image from his childhood, when he'd watched a movie about slavery in the US. Slaves, picking cotton.
He asked what crops were grown there, and the man from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his guide, answered:
"Wheat, mostly, for export... that, and barley and rye, to make bread for the norms, and potatoes for their winters." Simon nodded, then went silent, and waited for the car to arrive at their destination for the night.

Yahkov Farm, Northlands Province, The Greater Undershi Empire

The car turned off the main road, as a big Dragon assault gun passed, a collumn of trucks behind it. His guide noticed his look, and explained:
"For the border. We're having trouble with our neighbors to the north." Simon nodded. No need to elaborate. Some new nation about to get crushed, no doubt... some new Province for the Undershi Empire.
The car drove along the dirt road, and Simon watched the terrain as it passed. Open ground. Fields.
Here and there, a cluster of trees broke the monotony of the open fields, but such sites were few and far between.
As they neared the main farm, he noticed the worker housing. Stone houses, small, with shingled roofs. They looked well-maintained, much better quality housing than that which was provided for the factory workers back in the city.
He asked about that, and his guide answered with a laugh:
"It's how we get them to work - we let them move their families out here, then tell them that they can have these nice homes... but, that if they even think about not doing their best, then we'll send them back to the factories or the mines. Anyways," he continued, "this is a model farm, not one of the big industrial ones, but rather a little family affair meant mostly to keep the Yahkov family occupided with work." he hesitated a moment, then added:
"You see, not every True Undershi can be a General, and Herbert Yahkov was the Victor of Nordton, cutting off the refugees as they ran... so when he retired, he was given this farm to keep him busy - he chose it, I should say. He did as he wanted, and got to retire to his vision of pastoral harmony." the guide laughed as he said that, and Simon just nodded. How Undershi, to see the managment of slaves in the fields as a restful retirement...
The car pulled up to the main house, an old mansion. Simon got out.

The main house of the farm had been some local Nord noble's manor way back in the medieval era, and it had been rebuilt and modified since then. The moat had been filled in, arrow-slits converted to windows with views... that sort of thing.
When the noble family that had lived in it had run into hard times, they'd sold it, and some self-made industrial magnate had bought it, then handed it down to his son... who'd lived there until the Undershi came, and took it from him and in one swift and brutal act reduced him to the same status as the merest laborer in the ironworks that he had owned.
The new owner, the retired General Herbert Yahkov, was waiting for him at the gate. The fence was exquisite, ironwork painted with black enamel. It was at least a product of the 1800s, a lovely detail... the General smilled as he noticed the foreigner observing his yard, and asked:
"Well, should I give you the tour?" Simon nodded, so he began:
"The fence was here when I came, in good condition then. It's still in good condition, although it has a few newer marks... I left them there for sentimental reasons." he gestured at a spot on the inside of the fence where the enamel was scratched and scoured, and continued:
"Bayonet marks, from the last moments of the previous owners." he smilled as he said that, as though it were a joke, which it obviously was not... Simon felt like wincing, but what could he do? Just nod, and say,
"Isn't that interesting." and hope for the best...
The tour took a while - it was a big house. He listened politely through the Undershi's tour, smilling as he showed off the library he'd captured, an already impressive collection to which he'd added scores of rare books, loot taken by Undershi armies, then sold to the "right" collectors at knock-down prices or sent off to the Cultural Directorate... a bunch of intelectual thieves, that was the Undershi, even if they were also soldiers and warriors...
He'd noticed something about Undershi architecture - they tended to have fewer rooms, but larger ones... unless it was their inner sanctums. They always seemed to sleep in tiny, claustrophobic rooms... they didn't seem to be able to relax unless they were secure, within a bunker.
The general's rooms were underneath the house, directly connected to both the armory he'd restored from its post-medieval use as a storage room and filled with modern shotguns and Gauss rifles and the communications room. The entire affair looked as though it had been designed for defense, and the other True Undershis of the farm shared that mentality - they, the four overseers who watched over the workers, all slept in the basement too.
The entire mansion was well decorated, even the armory and the basement. The dinning room was all teak and mahogany and red velvet, with a trio of heavy chandeleirs hanging overhead, crystal and gold sending rays of colorful light through the room.
As they ate, Simon noted who was at the table and who was not. His guide, the IIS driver, the overseers and the General himself... plus a few of the senior servants - an older man who the general introduced as "the finest piece of loot I ever took" - the old man was one Sebastian Kaufmann, formerly a Professor of Literature at the University of Nordton, before the war. He looked... sad. He was an intelectual - of course he would not enjoy his life as a slave. He looked old, older even than the sixty years he said he had. His life had aged him.
The others were... a few odd individuals. A smiling Slavic butler, a trusted norm from old Undershi Province, trusted enough to be allowed to carry a flail, the chief slave of the household.
An older Northlander woman, Marisa Rosch, who did the book-keeping for the whole operation... she'd been, she explained, an accountant before the war... and she would be, she explained quietly, a book-keeper for the General until she died.
The last person present was the most unusual - a young Northlander woman, one who looked a little under thirty and smilled with a fragile sort of look in her eyes...
Simon didn't learn who she was until a little later, when the soup was served and the conversation shifted from the General laughing over how he'd managed to convince the refugees in Nordton to give up the futile idea of dieing fighting that 'some troublemakers' had put them up to by having his men take the children of the refugees hostage - the children, he explained, had been left safely away from the fighting, so that they might have survived.
He'd had his men take the children hostage, and then he'd said that if they didn't surrender he'd start shooting their kids... so they'd surrendered, and he'd had his men put them in chains, then he'd had them put the children in a little shed - and here he began to laugh as though there was some joke he was telling - he himself had thrown a grenade into the shed where the children were huddled, weeping for their mothers.
When they were dead, then he'd told the prisoners quite calmly that they perhaps should have fought and died on their feet... but that they were never going to ever be in the positions to negotiate with the Undershi. He'd laughed as he said that, as had the overseers, although they had the looks of men who'd heard a joke too many times about them as they did. The IIS driver said nothing, did not react... and then, then his guide was speaking:
"Of course, we are past such things now." and the General had nodded quietly, and agreed:
"Yes. Yes, we are past such things now." and that was that - grim-faced norms had brought in the soup, and Simon had eaten along with the others, before the conversation turned to the norms at the table and their stories.
The general laughed as he explained, how he'd found the Professor, old-before-his-time Sebastian Kaufmann, in his offices in the University, back during the Sack that had immediatly followed the fall of Nordton.
A squad of Janissaries had been half-way through beating him to death for the hell of it when the General had intervened, and ordered them all flogged. Then he'd had a medic fix Sebastian up, and ordered him to help select the rare books worth looting personally from the University library.
He'd gotten his cooperation, of course... and so he'd chatted with the professor, and swapped quotations as he'd supervised a squad of white-uniformed Occupation Police as they'd loaded an Undershi Army truck full of crates of looted artifacts. Within a few hours, he'd already decided to claim the professor. He needed, after all, someone to organize his ever-growing collection of looted books and papers.
The younger woman, Simon found out, was Sebastian's daughter. The general had casually explained how he'd comendeered another truck and taken a single Occupation Police soldier along, as he went to the professor's house. On the way, he'd explained - get your family, and anything you can't bear to lose from your house. You'll never see it again.
While they'd driven, Sebastian had explained how he'd wanted to take his family to his office, since he'd heard that the Universities were being spared, but how his wife and daughter had refused to come, and had instead wanted to just stay inside their house and hide, hoping the occupation would go gently... but it hadn't.
At that point, the General smilled, and asked Sebastian to continue the story, which he did. Pushing away his soup bowl, he stood, and explained:
"I got home, and I saw that the door had been smashed open. I ran inside, and found my wife's body on the couch in the living room. My daughter was screaming... I looked, and I could see that my wife's neck had been snapped. I went upstairs, and found two Janissaries with my daughter. I shouted at them, and begged them to stop because one of their officers was on my side... they laughed." he seemed to be in pain, but he continued,
"I tried to get them off of her, even tried violence... but they just laughed, and beat me... and then... then he," as he said 'he' he pointed at the General,
"Showed up and shot them both. Then, then... then he said to hurry, that he didn't have all day to wait for me to get my family in order." the main course was coming in now, but he finished:
"He still had to search the National Library." as he finished, Simon couldn't help but glance at the girl... that explained the look in her eyes, that explained it...
He noticed something when he looked at her. She was looking at the General. She was looking at the General, and there was love and adoration in her eyes. She saw him as the man who had saved her... she couldn't have been more than fourteen when it had happened...
Somehow, seeing that look in the eyes of a woman made his feel sick, made him feel disturbed. He wondered what sort of psychological complex the psychologists back home would say she had. He didn't know, didn't want to know...
Over dessert, the General spoke of poetry, and commented on how his own attempts were always sadly lacking... at which point the girl defended him, arguing that his work was only different.
It was... odd. Others spoke of poetry then, but after only a few minutes of conversation about sonnets, the conversation shifted back to Undershi poetry... or, more precisely, why it was that the Undershi had never produced a poet worth mentioning... which snow-balled into why they had only produced a few artists, who painted towering cities and factories and cathedrals, and ignored the people within those cities and factories and cathedrals... or, if they did not ignore the human factor, painted it only suffering.
The conversation soon shifted to the only Undershi artwork to ever draw international comment - a series of paintings, titled "The Progress of Humanity."
The General mentioned that he had one of those paintings, so with dessert out of the way, they all followed him into a small room that seemed to be his study.
The painting hung on the wall, opposite the door, behind the desk. It was a bleak painting, all greys and blacks save the colors that came from fires... it depicted the burned-out wreak of a Northlander tank in the lower left corner, while a small farmhouse burned in the center, dominating all else in the painting, including the cluster of Undershi soldiers who met under a dead tree in its yard, and by the light of the burning house looked over a map.
A Viper IFV, done with a soldier's attention to detail, waited to the right. A small body hung from the tree, ignored, its ragged remains simply another element of the painting.
Such was Undershi art, when it was decent enough to truly be called art, and not just glorified architecture. Fitting, that the True Undershi 'New Race' would produce nothing of consequence artistically... fitting somehow. They were, after all, inhuman, and humanity was a fundamental part of the artistic process. Fundamental. Yet the General loved literature and poetry... could it be that they were not all utterly inhuman? Unthinkable... a horror... that human beings, or even things that were nearly human beings, could do such things to other human beings as the Undershi had done. Unthinkable.