Emancipation and Exodus

The Hyperion, Part IV, by Blackjack555

The Battle of G Deck, as it was remembered by the people who were apparently watching us from the security cameras, was probably the most scared I have ever been in my life. In final count, we drew six hundred infected or so from the wards where they had congregated closer to the main transit shaft, while another two hundred and change from the eleven wards astern of ward G-9 awakened and were mobile enough to join the fight. There were more than that, but no one has numbers for how many of the thousands of patients and staff aboard the Hyperion eventually came at us. I didn’t care about numbers at the time.

I remember that battle in flashes. Getting my rifle knocked from my hands and leaping after it, a combat knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. Decapitating an infected with a power-assisted kick, only to have my leg get stuck in another infected’s torso. Wrenching that leg free, watching that infected try to stagger forward before falling over dead, recovering my rifle, firing it full auto into the horde down the corridor, feeling a moment of relief as the high-powered 10mm rounds sheared through the swarm, then feeling that hope die as the corridor filled up with more of them. Hearing the thunderous roar of Private Schultz’s heavy autocannon, held in reserve because it would cause too much collateral damage if anyone was still alive but that wasn’t an issue anymore now was it, and seeing the huge 15mm HE/Flechette rounds tear through the infected, passing through four or five of them before reaching minimum arming distance and detonating to spray hypersonic tungsten shards like tiny buzzsaws through the air, reducing targets to a fine red-brown mist. Seeing Highlander go down under a mob of the things, then a moment later get back up roaring some ancient battle cry and swinging the powered claymore he carried on his back, devastating his attackers with every swing while the shockwave as it hit home threw them back. Fighting back to back with Ragnarssen, my empty rifle slung on my back in its hard-case, my sidearm in one hand and a modified assault shotgun in the other, the bright muzzle-flashes illuminating the faces of the snarling, angry horde of infected trying to close in on us.

Whisper, our marksman, firing her 12.7mm DMR as fast as she could pull the trigger, its anti-armor rounds punching through lines of infected, stopping to reload, being tackled by an infected, pushing off from it and a privacy divider, pulling her SMG in mid-leap, and executing a perfect three-point landing after a graceful mid-air pirouette while firing accurate bursts the whole time, a move made possible by relentless training and enormous cybernetic enhancement. Reforming our defensive formation at the door to the main transit shaft, grateful to finally have a solid wall at our backs, and continuing to fire. A rippling wave of gore as remote anti-personnel charges dropped by Highlander during our advance detonated, buying us enough time to reload. Taking a spot on the outer edge of our formation because I was out of ammunition, extending my armor’s gauntlet blades and using them and my knife and falcata (for those who don’t know their blades, that’s a fifty centimeter blade that curves a bit forward with a thicker bit near the end, so that when you go to, say, slash a limb off an attacker, it cuts with more force than a straight blade of the same size) to keep the attackers away from the inner ring so they could keep firing.

This update by Blackjack555:

Excerpt from a letter to the editor of the New Valaisian Herald in response to Antonov's editorial by Anya Gregorovich, 2596

I was born and raised in Delta Procyon, a three-planet star system on the outer edges of the UFMR's former sphere of influence. Unlike many of the states descended from the ancient Soviet Union, ours was, notionally, a free and open democracy. In truth, it was no such thing. There were no rules like those in New Jefferson that curtail corporate influence or limit any given candidate's ability to advertise. Instead, elections were dictated by the megacorporations back in the Core Worlds.

You see, Delta Procyon was remarkable in one aspect: by some freak accident of nature, Petrovadorsk, one of the three worlds under its domain, had an enormous amount of so-called "heavy metals" critical to industrial processes. Naturally, the megacorps wanted to mine it for all it was worth, but since clean extraction processes are pricey, large-scale mining would render Petrovadorsk mostly uninhabitable, and for a while after assimilation the mining operations were kept in check by elected officials whose main platform was to do just that. Unfortunately, the corporate powers got word of this and decided to get involved in the electoral process the year before I was born.

Suddenly, as far as anyone could tell, there were no anti-corporate candidates. It's not that they didn't try to run. The corporations simply bought up all the advertising time any network would sell them and sank trillions of marks into aggressive attack ads on anyone who opposed them until they simply disappeared. There was no way for anyone who opposed them to get a word in edgewise, and within a few years, Petrovadorsk became the largely uninhabitable hellhole that it is now. Meanwhile, on Greenland and Skjallsgrad, the politicians grew rich and fat off of donations from those corporations. A total plutocracy formed, the spawn of corrupt politicians and their shadowy corporate backers, and of course the organized criminal networks that had always plagued the areas the Union could not be bothered with policing. When the Union fell, the local governor and his corporate friends assumed direct control, and it got even worse. My father died of a horrible wasting disease from working in the mines on Petrovadorsk. My mother was killed a year later during one of the riots protesting the arrest of a political candidate who somehow managed to challenge the plutocrats and was framed, badly, for the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl. The real culprit was the governor and we all knew it, but there was just nothing that could be done. My mother, angry over the death of my father and a thousand other things, was out protesting when the government "peacekeepers" opened fire with machine guns. This sparked a miners' revolt on Petrovadorsk, which they opened by using stolen radioactive materials to build a small nuclear weapon and crashing it into the yacht of a visiting executive. Thousands died during the brutal suppression of the revolt and the mass reprisals on the other worlds.

The first time I heard of New Jefferson was when their Marines landed on Greenland. It took them a week to dismantle the entire corrupt edifice. They raided the governor's compound, a den of depravity and brutality that shocked even the hardened men of New Jefferson Marine Corps, and killed the governor and his cronies in a firefight. They rooted out the organized crime syndicate that ran our entire shipping industry, with the blessing of the corporate overseers, who liked having a face other than their own to use as they brutalized anyone who tried to fight for workers' rights. Those who survived capture were brought before a court of the general public, presided over by a judge who had been imprisoned some time before on fake charges because he dared to make decisions based on the law rather than what the corporations wanted. I personally sat on the juries of several trials. In a move that I was very surprised by at the time, they actually sought out and found legal counsel for the accused, no small task since most of the lawyers who weren't corporate shills on trial for some of the atrocities had been long since run out of business or murdered, and were quite thorough in gathering evidence and seeing that the innocent were cleared of charges.

I fell in love with a Marine sergeant and moved with him to New Jefferson's capitol world when the unit was pulled back eighteen months later. By that point, Delta Procyon had become a New Jefferson protectorate. Orbital industry was booming, Petrovadorsk was slowly being restored to something like a habitable world, and people actually seemed hopeful for the future, something that I had never seen before, but there were just too many bad memories for me to remain.

I provide this background to give context to my response to Antonov's piece. He claims that New Jefferson is a subtle tyranny in the making, but I have seen, I have lived, what happens without the very rules he claims are meant to cement the establishment's claim on power, and if this is tyranny, I prefer it to the kind of "free" society that befell my home system. What he does not understand, I think, is that people like Altman can make speeches and whip the crowd into a frenzy, but it is only a passing fancy, backed by a small but highly vocal fringe. In truth, the vast majority of the population regard him as insane. I have talked to them, I have looked at what people discuss on the forums and in social gatherings. Sure, Altman's supporters may shout louder than anyone else in the room, but that's because most everyone else won't dignify them with a response. Antonov is right to remain vigilant regarding the patterns of history and the mistakes of the past, but in this case, he is seeing the smoke from a campfire and concluding that the whole forest must be on fire beneath the leaves.

Headline news bulletin, Hypernet News Network home page, 2596 by Blackjack555

Aggressive Screening Measures Imposed on Ships Passing Through Epsilon Indi System, Others
As fears of plague grow, the AIC naval command has begun enforcing screening for pathogens on any ship passing through the commercial hub systems of Epsilon Indi, Crown, and Peridot, along with several less trafficked hub systems. These systems handle a tremendous volume of interstellar trade traffic within the AIC. Experts fear that the delay this creates my harm interstellar trade, but agree that the plague needs to be contained.

Race Riots on New Cologne End After Eighteen Hours of Destruction
Protests on the AIC core world of New Cologne that turned into violent mass riots have been put down by AIC military forces with airborne gunship support. The protesters are demanding the removal of the 4.7 million refugees currently living on New Cologne, and an end to the unemployment benefit reductions imposed to pay for housing the refugees. Police attempting to disperse the protesters surrounding one of the camps were met with thrown debris and incendiaries. The rioters then stormed the camp as the violence spread. Local law enforcement was only barely able to contain the rioters to one district until military forces from nearby Fort Rammstein, one of the planet's largest military bases, arrived with armored vehicles and gunships. While many rioters chose to give up at that point, intense clashes between rioters and military units lasted for several hours. The death toll is unknown, but includes several thousand refugees and is believed to include at least six thousand of the rioters and hundreds of bystanders.

Emergency Scientific Summit Held on Victoria
Epidemiologists and researchers from dozens of nations met today on Victoria, in the AIC state of Britannia. The stated goal of the summit is to unify research efforts into the plague currently sweeping across human space in the hopes of coming up with a more effective means of combating its spread.

Wave of Defaults on National Debts to AIC
At least a dozen of the AIC's smaller member states have defaulted on their debts to the overall government, citing a combination of sudden spikes in the demands on their economies and declining income from rapidly decreasing interstellar trade. Rumors of secessionist groups gaining strength in many member states are common, but no officials could be reached for comment at this time.

Excerpt from a report by the AIC Navy to the AIC Department of Defense on Trundholm concerning events on Saint Dominic, 2597

The center of Caleruega, the capital city of the world and republic of Saint Dominic, is a pedestrian area between four streets called Trinity Square. In the center of the Square is the Martyrs' Rotunda, in commemoration of those who died under a less than pleasant government in the world's early history. This rotunda is revered with sanctity by most citizens of the Republic; they are seen as the spiritual founders of the nation.

The government of Saint Dominic, perhaps influenced by the Catholic principles of its foundations and its culture, previously announced it was going to be 'brotherly' towards the refugee population. Such a proclamation was deeply unpopular among the people, who were desperately afraid of an outbreak of the New Harbin Plague on their worlds. The Chancellor of Saint Dominic had announced that refugees would be allowed to integrate into broader society following medical screenings to ensure they were not sick. Upon mass uproar, the Department of Health announced that all refugees would be given armbands with red crosses on them at all times to alert the public that they may still be sick; likewise, residences of refugees not living in refugee housing would have to similarly have that red cross symbol.

Such symbols, intended as a public health measure, were instead harbingers of something far worse. The spark, however, was lit at Trinity Square, where a tour group of children and their parents, the former attending Saint Pantaleon's Primary School, were being introduced to the area. One rather curious child ran up to the Martyr's Rotunda while singing, something considered gravely insulting.

As such, according to drone-based aerial surveillance, one particularly angry member of the crowds noticed the red cross armband on the child and ran up to her, brandishing a knife, and stabbed the child multiple times. The bulk of the tour group of refugees ran up to the attacker and attempted to pry him away. It was at this time a large crowd of Saint Dominic natives surrounded the refugees. A large brawl ensued, and some of them were brandishing blunt objects. Drone feeds indicate that no refugee among that group, adult or child, survived.

Trinity Square is surrounded by government buildings, including the Department of Public Health. This building in particular was then surrounded by an increasing contingent of angry citizenry, beyond just the initial mob. Intercepted messaging feeds from their personal communicators reveal that the news broke of "refugee violence" soon after the initial group murder and spread through Caleruega rapidly. Several hundred citizens soon began targeting refugees.

While some surrounded the Department of Health building, others apparently figured out that the refugee tour group was from Saint Pantaleon's; a large mob subsequently converged around that school, forcing all the faculty, children, and nearby refugees into the building. There, one member of the mob somehow gained control of a bulldozer (who had contacts in the local construction industry; whether this bulldozer was manual or automated is uncertain) and destroyed the school, with all the people inside of it crushed under its treads. Copycat crimes against refugee schools and domiciles ensued shortly thereafter. Both the initial crime at Saint Pantaleon's and later incidents shared a communal chant, translating to "nits make lice! nits make lice!" in Galactic Standard.

Similar hate crimes occurred throughout Caleruega. Via drone feed, it was observed that refugees were killed via simple beatings, asphyxiation, blunt objects, sharp objects, vehicular assault, fire, acid, firearms, and explosives. Refugee homes and schools were subject to similar attacks, as were government buildings.

It was at this time when AIC forces, loyal to the integrated forces and not the Saint Dominic government, were then deployed to quell the instability. Armed forces, including infantry, light vehicles, and tanks, surrounded Trinity Square to confront a mob of people surrounding the Department of Health building. Anticipating a fairly easy riot control action, they were caught off guard when infantry and armor forces of the Saint Dominic Army surrounded them and opened fire, using tanks to destroy the AIC's armor.

Further AIC deployments in Caleruega were activated and engaged rioters and Saint Dominic forces in full-scale urban warfare. Large swathes of the city were destroyed, in part due to rebel-controlled air strikes. Further destruction of refugee homes and schools continued, some by military forces. One apartment complex of four towers was destroyed by detonating bombs in the lower floors of the easternmost tower, causing each tower to fall into each other not unlike dominoes.

All exit routes from Caleruega were blocked off by rebel forces attempting to prevent reinforcement by other AIC garrisons in the metropolitan area. All those suspected of being refugees or supporters of refugees were murdered unceremoniously.

The situation is still developing.

Thank you very much. Do you have any thoughts on recent updates?

Thank you for this, then; I can understand it's a titanic work, two years worth as of the time it was posted here and only more since.