The consciousness-expanding grandeur of the aurora exploded beneath the firmament of Apollo’s Reach in an incandescent cloudburst of brilliant neon waves. The city below bristled with a neoclassical constellation of vertiginous spires, gleaming sculpted columns and domed architectural marvels of a civilization far advanced and racially pure.
From a floor near the top of a multi-tiered mega-hangar overlooking Airfield Prime – the largest such facility for arriving and departing intergalactic vessels on the planet and an engineering marvel unmatched the galaxy over – Scipio stood solemnly ensconced in the electric hum of his Mount’s quantum drive as it stood idling inside the robotic steed’s cavernous metallic chest, its AI system subtly mimicking the natural mannerisms of the horse – an animal not indigenous to the rolling plains and lofty wooded foothills of Apollo’s Reach, itself home to a stunning array of megafauna across various species.
At age ten, Scipio – like every other living male member of the nobility on Apollo’s Reach – took part in the Trial of the Black Sun, during which he trekked – according to tradition – through a treacherous stretch of sparsely-foliaged desert on a continent in the planet’s southern hemisphere, where humanoid reptilians walk upright or crawl on many legs with constellations of pearlescent teeth wet with venom. With mouthfuls of pallid needles and fat hooked incisors, they hide and stalk in the dark and lay traps with the cleverness of men. The time-honored tradition holds that if the boy makes it through the desert, then he is fit to lead in whatever capacity the elders prescribe.
And upon completion of the Trial, the boy is awarded a Mount – constructed by the Imperial Council of Engineers – based on whatever creature most accurately symbolizes the fighting spirit of the boy receiving it, as determined according to an exacting number of well-thought-out criteria passed down through the ages.
However – today – nestled in this particular Mount’s belly is a payload of orichalcum nitrate soaked in rocket fuel, expertly crafted by Scipio to address an existential crisis presently facing the Aryan populace of Apollo’s Reach. Scipio’s heart began to tighten in his chest as he focused on the mission at hand and fixed his gaze on a distant vessel which reflected eerily in the electric blue of his eyes, as the events that led toward this fateful day flashed before him.
Three days prior, Scipio’s family farm was attacked by negromorphs, a class of alien slave laborers imported from Nubia 6 – a nearby jungle planet – a few decades ago in one large shipment of several hundred thousand slaves by the Void Merchants, an alien merchant class which have symbiotically lived alongside the Aryan masters of Apollo’s Reach for several decades. Visibly pleased with their newfound home, away from the sweltering jungles of Nubia 6 and its myriad colossal predators; the negromorphs themselves were initially seen as docile and obedient workers, once fitted with the standard issue neural inhibitor chip, which issued a shock when detecting abnormal adrenaline spikes.
And despite the creatures’ exceedingly bestial appearance – possessing four arms, a vaguely humanoid visage with wide fanning nostrils and beady shark-like eyes sunk deep in the sockets – some of the more feminized denizens of Apollo’s Reach, having spent inordinate amounts of time inside the vast pleasure-domes contained within the Merchant mothership, began a habit of obnoxiously proclaiming their solidarity with the negromorphs, in what was largely no more than a perverse display of social signaling.
The House of Borealis – the noble family to which Scipio belongs – owned vast tracts of land worked by a nearby community of merry peasants in a nearby village who adored – and were thus fiercely loyal to – Scipio’s father. Their family’s great fortune had come along with mastery over the harvesting of the planet’s most valuable and plentiful resource: electrum.
The difficulty in harvesting the vast electrum deposits of Apollo’s Reach – which are used as the Aryans’ primary power source and in the manufacture all manner of electronic components – lie in the fact that its bioluminescent stalks possess a powerful electromagnetic charge which paralyzes the brains of men and the guidance systems of harvester drones, and consequently the electrum – that was for many generations farmed by hardy Aryan peasants garbed in high-tech protective suits – now teem with skulking, feral negromorphs sold into slavery by the Void Merchants who plucked them with drones from the steaming fetid jungles of Nubia 6 – whose orbit hangs nearer the system’s central star than that of Apollo’s Reach – and subsequently bred them in great numbers within their vast six-sided mothership.
Increasingly often – Aryan mercenaries began to accompany the merchant vessels on their expeditions and use their specialized skillsets – honed against the various megafauna and lesser-sized but disturbingly cunning game of Apollo’s Reach – to capture particularly powerful and aggressive negromorph specimens, which are then tamed through use of a collar equipped with powerful neural inhibitors which cut off signal to the brain through intense shocking of the spinal cord.
When the negromorphs first saw use in the field, their duller brains – nigh impervious to electromagnetic waves – allowed them to lumber among the sprawling electrum patches more-or-less unaffected and without the high cost of EMP dampening equipment and its consequent maintenance. Additionally, the negromorph’s quadruple arms allow him to quickly traverse high peaks where electrum often collects in large deposits.
And so – in the same form it always manifests – the slave trade exists primarily as a transactional relationship between the ruling elite and racially foreign vice peddlers, with the working class ultimately left to suffer only the deleterious effects.
Though the Void Merchants’ arrival would eventually spell doom for Scipio’s clan and others, the bargain they struck with the Aryans of Apollo’s Reach at first seemed fortuitous for all parties involved. They arrived aboard a vast mothership two generations past, seeking asylum from a nameless enemy beyond the void from whence the now-dreaded merchants themselves emerged. Initially, they wore the mask of the sycophant – getting in the good graces of the ruling class through vast stores of wealth brought with them from, presumably, their alien homeworld – then later the mask of friend and advisor to the ruling class, given the merchants’ near preternatural understanding of finance and their varied means of innovative bookkeeping, which at times appeared to generate wealth out of thin air.
And the merchants – through a network of backroom dealers and blackmailers – eventually proposed to the ruling class of Apollo’s Reach the prospect of replacing the Aryan electrum workers with slaves imported from the savage wilds of Nubia 6. Slave labor – the merchants said – will be less efficient per unit, but will make up for this in their sheer numbers and – in the end – the mass replacement of Aryan workers will result in a tremendous saving of wealth and thereby boost the economy. Also – they said – it will only affect this one sphere of the economy, which they asserted involved jobs which were presently beneath the dignity of Aryans to perform.
Tragically, many unscrupulous landowning families among the Aryans of Apollo’s Reach leapt at the opportunity to drastically cut costs by switching to negromorph slave labor and eventually Scipio’s family – in effort to remain competitive with rival clans unleashing hordes of slave workers to pick electrum on their vast tracts of land – came around as well, much to Scipio’s dismay and against his better advice. In fact – following this distasteful episode – Scipio began thinking more and more of a life off the farm, away from where the wretched negromorphs had sucked the soul from a once wholesome trade and its Aryan practitioners.
The negromorphs themselves were of dull wit and erratic temperament – neutralized mostly by the paralyzing capabilities of the shock collar – but were possessed of apelike strength and a near imperviousness to pain and to the brain-paralyzing effects of close proximity to raw electrum – given the absence of the part of the brain susceptible to its effects – which rendered them a valuable commodity. And thus the negromorphs were purchased by the hundreds of thousands and set to work in vast and remote fields across the planet.
As a result, the displaced Aryan electrum workers suffered great indignity at the loss of their trade. Embittered, the workers rioted for a time and expressed great discontent, but – out of necessity – they eventually moved into other trades and built their lives anew. Resentment grew among the disparate Aryan castes, but eventually the displaced electrum workers of Apollo’s Reach and their progeny adjusted to the new status quo and life moved on as if nothing much had changed after a few years had passed.
And – although few remember – another curious phenomena occurred once the electrum workers were driven out, many of whom fell into great despair at their diminished economic prospects. The ever-enterprising merchants began peddling various illicit goods and services to the ousted workers – such as intoxicating liquors and tablets brewed aboard their vast ship and usurious loans – driving many into deaths of despair or lives of crippling addiction and debt slavery while simultaneously opening numerous fresh revenue streams for the rapacious merchant class. However – in the aftermath – an increasingly-individualistic segment of the population chalked the deaths up to lack of personal accountability on part of the displaced electrum workers and the merchants more or less avoided any real backlash.
However, on the night of the Autumn Harvest – during Scipio’s twentieth year – events were set in motion that would forever change life on Apollo’s Reach. Returning home from one of his frequent hunting trips deep in the endless wilderness of the Ancestral Forest, Scipio arrived at the towering marble-block gatehouse positioned at the end of the road which wound through his family’s estate and up to the towering central keep, perched atop a low hill near the center of the walled compound. Immediately, Scipio knew something was amiss, as the gate stood open and this was never done on Apollo’s Reach where all manner of strange beast roam and must be kept out of estates and villages with high walls of gleaming marble and stone.
In a flash, Scipio bolted down the road toward home on back of his galloping Mount, past sprawling vineyards on either side of the flagstoned drive, through which furtive shapes darted in the twilight, cowering low in darkness in the wake of his Mount’s thundering approach.
Spotting them with a keen hunter’s eye, Scipio dashed between the verdant rows of plump grapes – descended from seeds brought to the planet by its first Aryan settlers – and rode down the negromorphs, trampling them underfoot of his hulking Mount’s cleated metallic hooves and bearing down on them with vicious repeated blows from the immense broadsword Scipio wielded near-effortlessly with the aid of a powered exoskeleton fastened inconspicuously over the orichalcum mail covering his arms and shoulders.
Having eliminated the straggling negromorphs, Scipio circled around and stormed back up the road leading to the keep where he prayed his family would be. Along the final stretch, another small pack of negromorphs crawled up over the bank of the moat toward Scipio, who instinctively reached for his belt where a metallic cylinder lay seated in its worn leather holster. In roughly a second, a bell-shaped handguard of interlinking metal unfurled around Scipio’s hand and the cylinder telescoped outward several feet, ending in a razor-sharp point.
Charging forward, Scipio skewered two of the negromorphs, one of which was pierced through the heart and died instantly once the lance was jerked free and another who – at the press of a button along the hilt – was repelled off the end of the lance and immediately trampled to death. Seconds later, his Mount trampled another’s skull into wet paste and bit the remaining creature so severely about the neck that it quickly died and was tossed limply aside.
With the drawbridge clear, Scipio dismounted and instructed his Mount – through vocal command – to linger nearby in the woods, as the Mount’s sheer mass made navigation of the keep’s narrower halls and stairways impractical. Before the loyal creature departed, Scipio punched in a code on the device mounted to his gauntlet and a panel slid open beneath the saddle to reveal a shoulder-mounted particle cannon, typically used to take down megafauna in the wild forests and plains of Apollo’s Reach. Having removed the weapon and clipped it in place on the exoskeleton behind his right shoulder, the gleaming metal steed trotted mechanically back out the gates as the cloaking device activated and it phased out of sight, on the way to a little clearing past the tree line to the west of the keep.
With a creeping sense of dread constricting his heart in its icy grip, Scipio headed inside. And what he saw that day was of such unutterable hideousness that he never shared more than cursory details with another soul, commenting only in later years that the typically dull-minded and generally disinterested creatures had acted with chilling cruelty and enthusiasm in the killing and dismemberment of their victims and left no survivors. And that inside the keep he found the negromorph alpha of that particular pack feasting upon flesh and brain from broken skullcaps as if scraping clean the meat from watermelon rinds and – leering at Scipio – grinned demonically in a way he’d never witnessed before, despite being raised around the negromorphs since early childhood. And so he hoisted the shoulder-mounted cannon taken from the back of his Mount on its articulated rail system as the negromorph began to charge and blew a great hole in the abomination’s chest, rending its upper torso into two ragged wet bone-ridden halves of charred smoking organ and meat.
Caught in the grip of mind-rending trauma and stricken with deep unfathomable grief – a chill crawled up Scipio’s spine as he heard the sound of a commotion downstairs and – after a minute of terrible silence – the sound of many footsteps echoed dully up the spiral staircase leading to his present floor. Thinking quickly, Scipio dashed into a study on the same floor, in which he knew there to be a cleverly hidden saferoom with surveillance equipment located behind a false bookcase. Safely ensconced in his chamber, Scipio watched through closed circuit monitors as a sickening sight unfolded.
A coterie of Aryan officials from the Imperial Army appeared in the room where Scipio’s family met their demise, along with – to Scipio’s great shock – one of the Merchants’ religious leaders, as indicated by his traditional robes embroidered with foreboding occult symbols and the characteristic long oily tendrils which extend in undulating fleshy curls past either side of the reptilian mouth which stretches unnervingly around the sides of their bulbous froglike heads packed with glistening rows of little flat yellow teeth under dangling fleshy proboscises. A thick purplish tendril pulsated from under the cleric’s sleeve and seemed to disappear under the back of the senior officer’s uniform.
After a brief scan of the room, the senior military official began conversing with the Merchant Cleric, which to Scipio’s reckoning was inconsistent with the well-known law prohibiting non-Aryans from holding government positions of any kind or acting in any similar capacity on Apollo’s Reach.
“No sign of survivors so far” said the senior officer to the merchant cleric.
“Good. Reactivate the collars and sweep the castle” spat the merchant contemptuously in its harsh and grating dialect. “I haven’t yet seen the oldest boy’s corpse.”
“Of course” replied the officer meekly.
And – for the first time – Scipio began to realize how the balance of power had invisibly shifted in favor of the racial aliens on his homeworld.
“And hurry!” barked the merchant. “We needn’t any word of this getting out before the coming shipment” he said, referring to an upcoming shipment of negromorphs – only the second and by far the largest in the planet’s history – in which a bulk order of six million negromorphs were set to arrive at the sprawling slave block near Airfield Prime, advertised widely by merchant run news sources as the permanent solution to the slave scarcity question, in which negromorph labor would be affordable to all through a number of credit options.
Like a bolt of lightning, the recognition of familiar patterns dawned on Scipio from his teenage years spent studiously poring over Earth’s history. An inquisitive boy, Scipio studied for countless hours his family’s copies of the centuries-old holotapes which were originally contained in the library of the colonial ship that brought the first Aryans to the planet centuries ago, when the Aryan population of a dying Earth sent thousands of hulking vessels with cryogenically frozen passengers hurtling into deep space with the goal of one day colonizing distant worlds habitable to human life.
In the cavernous study of his family’s castle, Scipio learned of the Aryans’ subjugation on Earth by a cunning race of organized criminals known as Jews. He noted how they hijacked the Aryan psyche in myriad bizarre ways to put them at war with themselves and buried them in racial foreigners during the resulting periods of extended chaos. However – at the time – Scipio’s idyllic world so scarcely resembled that of pre-collapse Earth that few parallels could be drawn, even by a mind as sharp as his own.
Looking back through the centuries, he observed – through holographic AI reconstruction – millennia of Aryan struggle against enemies both internal and external.
He saw millions of Whites broken and raped under the yoke of Arab and Jewish slavers throughout the centuries of the Arab slave trade from roughly 1530 to 1780.
He later saw the importation – by primarily Jewish slavers – of millions of feral blacks to America, who would eventually be used in the earliest recorded instance of biological warfare – used against Whites in the Southern United States in 1863 – when several million blacks were unleashed within the ranks of the white population during a civil war which was itself orchestrated primarily by Jewish capitalists in the Northern half of the country. Immediately following the war, blacks were given the whip hand over whites until the Whites eventually wrested back power from a tyrannical government through revolutionary action. Roughly two hundred years later, Jews found a way to give blacks the whip hand over Whites once again and full-scale race war became inevitable as a direct result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade occurring centuries prior.
He then observed how Jewry used bribery and blackmail to seize control over the lawmaking, executive and judicial institutions in all Western countries and utilized that power to open the floodgates to unlimited mass immigration of all hostile foreign races, beginning in the 1960s, roughly one hundred years after blacks were freed from slavery solely as a means of destroying whites on behalf of mostly-Jewish textile merchants and bankers in the north during the American Civil War.
And finally, Scipio watched as the formerly Aryan nations of the world descended into bitter race war throughout the 2060s against the foreign populations which had been imported by Jews to bring about the Aryans’ racial extermination. And – after many brutal years of fighting – he watched his ancestors rebuild their fallen nations across the earth and – having solved the racial question once and for all – enter a heretofore unseen age of technological advancement, which continued unimpeded until the Aryan race was forced to flee the dying planet in its furious death throes many centuries later.
But unlike Scipio, after many generations living in a relatively utopian civilization – in which social shaming was utilized to eliminate virtually all crimes and other acts of moral turpitude – hardly anyone still studied historical lessons from man’s age on Earth, especially those from a faraway planet that exists now only in tales passed down from elders, mostly in villages throughout the countryside. Some even think the tale of their Earthly ancestors to be myth entirely. In fact – at that time – Scipio himself mostly failed to identify relevant parallels between his world and the multiracial hellscape which once existed on ancient Earth.
But now – realizing the gravity of his situation and that the state was somehow in league with the merchants in executing and subsequently covering up his family’s murder – Scipio remained agonizingly silent as he watched with tear-filled eyes as the government cleanup squad swept the castle and hauled off the bodies for incineration. Waiting patiently for the right opportunity, Scipio finally exited the saferoom and escaped down into a hidden cellar before moving through an underground escape tunnel and out into the cool embrace of the night air, where his Mount waited nearby with its cloaking device engaged in the now pitch-dark clearing.
His mind raced with a litany of possibilities too horrible to imagine. And after he saw the carnage wrought by the rapacious negromorphs upon his sacred family and race – and consequently drew unmistakable parallels between the existential threat presently facing the Aryans of Apollo’s Reach and the near identical existential threat faced by the Aryan peoples of Earth millennia ago – he knew there was only one option.
Back in the present – atop the hangar overlooking Airfield Prime – Scipio took a deep breath and clutched tightly the quantum processing unit in his palm – still warm from its slot in the Mount’s CPU – and strokes the cold steel muzzle of his old friend – now wiped of all accumulated memory from the years spent with Scipio – before preparing the controls for remote flight through the use of sophisticated augmented reality goggles which allow control of drone flight through ocular tracking. For a brief moment, he dreams of a day in the future when he might rebuild his comrade using the memory core which they two filled with a plethora of wondrous memories over the preceding decade together.
Toward the horizon, the sheer sunblotting mass of the Merchant Mothership descended with its payload of six million negromorphs – mostly grown in vats within the hulking six-sided vessel – covertly prepared to initiate a genocidal culling of the Aryan population on behalf of the vile merchants who peddle solely in death, humiliation and vice.
Scipio applied slight pressure to the thin flexible plate in the palm of his glove which caused a set of gleaming metal wings – composed of segmented sections of featherlight interlinking plate – to unfurl from compartments on either side of the hulking metal stallion’s shoulder blades along with an array of small quantum thrusters attached to the underside of each wing. Scipio touched another panel adjacent to the first and the thrusters sprang to life with a dull roar. The mechanized Pegasus galloped stoically skyward in a low sharp incline, its legs churning air with clockwork synchronicity as the thrusters propelled it ever faster and through one of the yawning broadside hatches presently birthing obloid incubation pods filled with amniotic negromorphs, full-grown and beginning to wake in their fluid-filled pods. Seconds later, iridescent clouds of mushrooming smoke and debris shot cataclysmically from every orifice, bringing the vessel into a lurching nosedive, spewing flame and plummeting merchant corpses as it sank.
In the resulting chaos, Scipio slipped casually into a nearby freight elevator and down to ground level. Filled with intense emotion, Scipio remained outwardly calm made his way toward the outskirts of the capital – past the churning, distracted crowds and away from the conflagration rising above the enormous burning husk of the merchant mothership – and into the welcoming confines of the Ancestral Forest, where Aryan heroes lie entombed within the trunks of great gnarled redwoods and where their Mounts rest eternally in vast graveyards nestled deep within the forests furthest reaches – to begin a period of intense training, both mental and physical, in the hope that he can one day return and restore the Aryans to their rightful place as masters of Apollo’s Reach.
This is awesome.
Thanks! Maybe we’ll hear from Scipio again at some point 🤔
Great story. Could we get in contact so I can illustrate this story for you?
Where do I contact y’all?
You can add me on poast if you want. My name is the same as it is on here.