The Crimson Deathbringer by Sean Robins

Author:Sean Robins [Robins, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Creativia
Published: 2019-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

I held my head in my hands and tried to push down what I had eaten for breakfast, barely managing it.

Having seven hundred million deaths on your conscience was a damned thing.

Just as we thought things couldn’t get worse, Tarq told us about the carnage. He did it in a meeting during which I toyed with the idea of shooting first him and then myself in the head; Liz fainted; Kurt covered his face with his hands and was as motionless as one of the dead for a long while; Allen, his mouth twitching, looked like he was about to kill both Tarq and Barook, and Barook kept yelling, “We did not know! How were we supposed to know?”

I thought about this long and hard, asking myself if we could have done something differently to spare all those lives. The answer was a resounding “no,” and everyone, including our resident military experts Kurt and Allen seemed to agree. The Xortaags had four times as many space fighters as we did, and there was no way we could have defeated them in a direct air/space battle. Our only hope, as Tarq had laid out from the beginning, was to surprise them by taking advantage of their two glaring weaknesses: the fact that they didn’t expect any resistance on a planet under the influence of their mind control device, and their absolute inexperience in ground warfare.

And still, my conscience, assisted by the ever-present Venom, wouldn’t leave me alone, as if I hadn’t been depressed enough already. Somehow it was all my fault. I should’ve done more. I should’ve found a solution. I should’ve let the forces under my command stand with Earth’s defenders, even if this meant all of us would go down in flames.

Mark Twain had once said, “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience I would poison him.” I was wondering if he was right. On the other hand, if I wanted to change my image as a closet racist, it was probably better not to quote Mark Twain.

I couldn’t put the mental image of all those dead people out of my mind, nor could I stop the indescribable terror that image caused. The whole thing was made infinitely worse because the rest of humanity had forgotten about the dead—forgotten anything that happened during the Xortaag invasion. I wondered what it’d be like to have that voice in your head, a voice capable of making you forget the life and death of those you loved, and shuddered. I’d felt sorry for myself having to put up with Venom! I swore I wouldn’t forget the deaths, that even the nameless would be honored. The dead men, the dead women, the dead children were all mine.

They will be avenged.

What helped me go through the immediate aftermath of the Xortaag invasion without losing my sanity was Liz’s presence and love. Watching humanity fall was bad enough, but we had months to mentally and emotionally prepare for that.

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