In a democracy, the government is elected to run the affairs of state on behalf of its citizens - those who voted against its election, as well as those who voted for it. The government is entrusted with the budget - how much we are asked to contribute and where all that tax money is to be spent. It handles everything from trade negotiations with our neighbors, to enacting laws against spitting on the sidewalk and giving public servants the finger [Ed - This is a time honored tradition on your planet. Especially in America, we are told]. It is also responsible for defense and the general well-being of the population under its protection. And so it was with Hamarbakir, the most powerful and fanatically democratic nation on the planet, Chikaros.
Recently, however, we have received a report which claims that the Hamarbakiran government has in fact been far from honest with its people.
Chikaros is not the only planet in the Argoyne system, in fact there are three others, only one of which is habitable. It is known, by those who live in its dark forests and windswept tundra, as Echito. Further from the sun than is Chikaros, Echito has a cooler climate and therefore a shorter growing season. One harvest per year [Ed - A year being four hundred and sixteen days, each of which is 20 Earth hours long] is the norm, here, unlike on Chikaros, where two, or even three harvests may be planted and gathered in the three hundred and two, 26 Earth hour long, days that constitute its year. And because Chikaros' polar axis is precisely ninety degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, its seasons blend almost seamlessly into one another. Echito, as well as receiving less warmth from its sun, also suffers with a polar axis tilted thirty degrees. Its seasons are very marked, and the spring sun is barely strong enough to melt the snows of winter, let alone warm the soil in time for planting.
Life is hard on Echito.
Life is easy in some parts of Chikaros. So easy, in fact, that over the last three hundred years, the considerable energy of most of its people has been directed, almost exclusively, towards the pursuit of pleasure and personal 'growth'. Countries which form the so-called 'First Among Nations' of Chikaros, are the most technically advanced, as well as being the richest. They represent only fourteen percent of the global population and consume nearly forty-eight per cent of global resources. Many of their people have slavishly enrolled in part time classes covering everything from self-awareness (following the teachings of mystics and gurus, who are now listed among the richest two percent of the First Among Nations' population) through home economics, and on to astrophysics. Throw in, thanks to medical advances, sexual gratification without the inconvenience of childbirth and you have a recipe for population decline and eventual extinction - to say nothing of the fact that someone has to clean the dirty dishes, or at the very least, place them in the dishwasher. What can be done? Well, the answer is immigration, as it often is. You once had a civilization on Earth, called Rome, which relied entirely on non-voluntary immigration to service it. At one time, we're told, the Romans in the city of Rome itself numbered less than half a million, but they used upwards of three million slaves to run things while they lay about eating, throwing up, eating again and having a generally lewd time of it.
Mass immigration from Echito to a part of Chikaros called Hamarbakir, which claims to be the most advanced [by definition, therefore, the First of the First Among Nations], started more than four hundred years ago, when three thousand reluctant and confused families were literally uprooted from their primitive log cabins and unceremoniously dumped in the middle of downtown Loos Anilis - one of the largest cities in Hamarbakir. There they were put to work doing menial tasks no Hamarbakiran wanted to do and generally treated like house pets.
It took a lot of effort and precious time to teach them their duties, as well as the Hamarbakir language - time which their new employers would much rather they spent actually doing the jobs they were brought in to do. So, the Hamarbakiran government decided it would be a good idea if more people were brought from Echito and placed in holding camps, where they could be taught the language and learn a few basic skills, like sweeping up the streets, cooking, cleaning and such, before being moved the household they would work in for the rest of their lives. This, of course, did not sit well with every migrant from Echito. There were riots in the camps, all of which were put down with extreme brutality by the local police. Every one of the twenty induction camps, built to the south of Loos Anilis, became simmering cauldrons of bitterness and hatred. They also became overcrowded as the Echitos bred rapidly and even more were imported from their home planet to fill new quotas.
Ironically, this translocation of so many people raised the standard of living on Echito, as those that remained found themselves with more room, while labor saving farm equipment sent from Hamarbakir - as a form of reparation - replaced the absent workforce and maintained the harvests at pre-emigration levels. Similar sized harvests but fewer consumers meant people got fat on Echito. They also grew more indolent and more like their Hamarbakiran neighbors; and like their neighbors, their population began a slow decline. In three or four generations, their leaders knew there wouldn't be enough people who actually enjoyed working the land and making things to work the land and make things. In fact, they decided, what they really needed was Hamarbakir's workforce - descendants of their own former nationals - back on Echito; but not as equals, as a new ' working class'.
What we had here was an opportunity for discord, perhaps even interplanetary conflict; and it didn't help when a delegation from Echito was kept waiting for three weeks before being allowed to put its case for limited repatriation to the Hamarbakiran House of Proxies [Our translation]. The answer was swift and absolute. No way! The Echitos returned home seething and vowing retribution. Problem! They had no army, and no weapons. Solution, enlist the help of a country on Chikaros, full to overflowing with religious fundamentalism and hatred for Hamarbakir, who had both.
This is a pretty complicated situation, but it get's worse. Hamarbakir is by far the best protected of the 'First Among Nations' nations. Its annual defense budget far exceeds those of the next ten richest. Next in line, in terms of wealth and military power, comes a close knit confederation of nations, the 'Taropei Union', which were all formerly self-governing, but which opted to join together to better compete with Hamarbakir, both politically and economically. Sadly, it is torn by self-interest and a reluctance on the part of its many peoples to relinquish their former right of self-determination to a central body which is un-elected, widely mistrusted and held in total disrepute because of bribery scandals which have dogged it from its inception. Several members have been long-time allies of Hamarbakir. That, too, has caused fault-lines to manifest themselves, especially in the area of foreign policy.
Like Hamarbakir, the Union is suffering from a falling population, and has long had a policy of controlled immigration, to provide cheap labor to run its factories, laundries, hotels, and catering industry. Despite this outward demonstration of control, however, illegal immigrants are arriving from Hamarbakir - after transiting Majica - in ever increasing numbers across its thousand-mile [Earth equivalent] land border. Because they have no documents, and are 'on the run, so to speak', they are forced to hire themselves out on an ad-hoc daily basis to low pay industries, like agriculture and construction, at wages almost consistent with slavery.
It is clear that the Union feels threatened. For instance, it's a widely held view in political circles there that, 
rather than addressing the problem of exponential birthrates, exporting the problem [Hamarbakir denies turning a blind eye to the fact that workers are sneaking away] has become policy - even dogma - to [inept] Hamarbakir politicians. This can be clearly shown to be the case with Majica, Hamarbakir's neighbor to the south, which provides food, water, medical supplies and a map showing where the border with the Union can be crossed without detection. The information pack, printed by the Majica Ministry of Information, also gives the addresses of organizations in the Union who will help an 'illegal' obtain housing, food stamps and medical treatment. What was once commercially and socially expedient - the importation of low-paid workers - now, according to pro-government spokespeople, threatens the very fabric of society, in the 'Taropei Union', and its long history of tolerance, freedom, and equality under the law. So, where is the scandal in all of this, you might ask? Well, we'll tell you.
It all began deep in the heart of Umbeka, far to the east of the Union of Taropei. It was poor country, full of people who boasted they would die, rather than go on living under the yoke of a tyrannical, pro-'First Among Nations' potentate. And they did die, in their thousands, until, one day, a religious leader was smuggled back into the country and became the focus of a revolution; a revolution which, according to its supporters, would not stop with the overthrow of the potentate, but would roll across the entire world, uplifting the oppressed and destroying those who stood in its way. Those who did not believe, or convert, would be put to death. Those who transgressed against the ancient religious laws would be put to death. Even if a person did not come from Umbeka, dying as a martyr for these beliefs would bring you an afterlife filled with prolonged sexual pleasure and a quite respectable donation to your family from a grateful Umbeka government.
When Echito approached the Umbekas with offers of money or precious metals, they were seemingly outraged. They needed no reward for doing their god's work, they protested. However, a deal was eventually done in private, and a plot was hatched. A plot so breathtakingly simple in concept that it was truly elegant. Using a small group of 'warriors-for-freedom', currently operating from bases in Kajak, Umbeka's neighbor to the southwest, they weren't going to plant bombs or assassinate a political leader - it was far more devious than that. They were going to use Hamarbakir's technology against itself. They were going to hijack a transport carrying expended nuclear material from one of Hamarbakir's seventeen fission reactors into space and crash it into the ground, irradiating a thousand square miles for fifty millennia or more. It was ambitious, yes, but they believed it was entirely feasible. All they needed to do was identify a target for the transport to crash into and they could begin to plan.
The day it happened dawned like just another working day in downtown Astma, Hamarbakir's largest city on the west coast. People thronged the shopping arcades or sat at sidewalk cafe tables, eating their first meal of the day. Some were making their way into the two hundred stories Masra Industries Plaza building, on twenty-eighth and National, when a massive explosion shook the city. A tall plume of billowing smoke rose to ten thousand feet before the prevailing wind picked it up and carried it west.
At first, people thought it was a thunderstorm. Then word spread it was a chemical plant in Yukars, an industrial sector of the city, to the southeast. Someone else thought maybe one passenger transport had crashed into another one at Froup Souta Mona airport - known worldwide as ' FSM' - away to the northeast. In fact, the explosion was so powerful it was impossible to determine the direction the blast came from. It was a full hour before the truth emerged. Not the entire truth, of course. No way were the political leaders of Astma - nor indeed of Hamarbakir - about to tell their citizens that they had been subjected to contamination from the initial blast and subsequent dispersal of highly lethal, radioactive isotopes. The Umbeka had pulled off a masterstroke! In one, fell, swoop, they had taken out the financial heart of the 'beast' and rendered it impotent. That was not strictly true, of course, but the leaders of Umbeka were no less addicted to spin and self-aggrandizement than were their Hamarbakiran counterparts.
The investigations carried out by various Hamarbakiran agencies revealed, in news reports that were broadcast regularly to an ever more astonished public, a liturgy of incompetence, arrogance and mendacity. Just who they should blame for this atrocity was simple and the voters demanded immediate retribution. The administration obliged, unleashing a ferocious aerial bombardment on Kajak, followed by a ground assault - involving not only their troops, but those of the Union of Taropei and other 'Dear and reliable friends'. Unfortunately, the group responsible were no longer in Kajak, so this achieved very little - except to increase the equity value of Hamarbakir's armament manufacturers and guarantee the future funding of universities involved in research on particle physics, laser technology and missile guidance systems. In other words: it was business as usual.
Well, not quite.
It seems that, about this time, notes, memoranda and reports started leaking from the Hamarbakir Bureau of Justice, whose employees had been roundly criticized by the Hamarbakiran Intelligence Department. The H.I.D. are an external information gathering agency, not permitted to operate on their home soil. At least three of these memoranda suggested, quite unambiguously, that the H.I.D. had known about the attack well before it happened and had failed to inform the Internal Security Agency, 'Justice', and three other agencies, until afterwards, when they claimed to have misplaced the agent's report and then managed to get the date of the attack wrong. Another memorandum seems to suggest that members of the elite, Disaster and Emergency Management Group (D.E.M.G.) were moved into Astma a full eighteen hours before the attack. Why? What were they there for? Cynicism, of course, is the mark of an advanced civilization. Politicians are corrupt - that's a given. They lie - that's a given, too! But facilitate the efforts of their enemies to kill their own citizens? That just has to be a first, doesn't it?
It took slightly more than a year before the bloom wore off the relationship between the new Hamarbakiran administration and the electorate. Prior to that, it was considered unpatriotic, even treacherous, to criticize the valiant, if ineffectual, efforts of the government to bring the perpetrators of the atrocity to account. Slowly, however, the suspicion began to grow in the minds of some of Hamarbakir's more thoughtful citizens that this government of theirs maybe had a hidden agenda, or at the very least, an ulterior motive for its actions, post 'Cadrata-seventeen' - the day of the attack - if not before, if the leaked 'Justice' memoranda were to be believed. [Readers should note: the third quarter of the year is called, Cadrata, so Cadrata-seventeen is the seventeenth day of the third quarter of the year.] What worried them was the decision by the leader of the administration, President Iatos Guma Guda, to declare war on the following countries: Umbeka, Kajak (which was already pounded to a pulp), Jakusa, Lasa-Ot, Gorga, Okak, Kora (North Kora that is, not South Kora, which "is a true and trusted friend in these troublesome and worrying times," as is another former enemy, the Republic of Usar). Hoona is too poorly developed to even muster an effective army, and its borders were slowly being eroded by Umbeka and North Kora until recently. Its leader, Hana Mirisoma, speaking from her ramshackle palace in Umlan Province, praised the stand being taken by Hamarbakir against the forces of chaos.
Now, those Hamarbakiran citizens who had IQ's higher than room temperature soon realized that not all of these countries were in the same camp as Umbeka - a regime that was steeped in ancient religious texts, the meaning of which many of its followers disagreed upon, and that was committed to the destruction all non-believers. All, however, including Umbeka and its satellites, had populations which were growing at an exponential rate, and whose numbers would ultimately threaten the pre-eminence of Hamarbakir, if not its actual survival as a nation. According to yet another recently leaked memorandum, someone, somewhere, deep in the bowels of 'State' (the department responsible for the long term preservation of 'All that which is Hamarbakiran') suggested that the global population could do with some 'thining out'. President Iatos Guma Guda's assistant 'took it to the hill', and came back with a big, "Go for it!", from the House of Proxies. The President pressed his stubby little thumb on the thumb scanner and set his massive war machine in motion.
The first attacks commenced two days after Sadrata-twelve, the following year (Sadrata being the second quarter of the year). Upwards of five hundred missions were flown over Umbeka territory, alone. More than four hundred missions were flown over Jakusa, Lasa-Ot and Gorga by Union of Taropei pilots. Seven dams, fourteen reservoirs and countless bridges were attacked and destroyed. The civilian death toll across these four countries alone stood at more than thirteen million. It has risen daily, until now, six weeks later, it stands unofficially at nineteen million - a figure which President Iatos Guma Guda's press secretary strongly refutes. "There have been some collateral fatalities," he croons, in the well oiled, double-talking, lingua-franca of the politician, "however, it is and has always been the policy of this and previous administrations to target only those who would do us harm."
Well, we at SciFi-Babe have only one response to make to that statement: PBLLLLTTTTTHHHHHHH!! That's a raspberry, in ' Yahoo Messenger' (TM) speak for those who don't know. [Ed - Our good friend Rhonda in NW Virginia gave us that useful snippet of information]
At a press conference held yesterday at the Presidential residence, our reporter, George Onslow, told us he attempted several times to have the president's press secretary confirm that his administration was aware of the true extent of the destruction their armed forces were unleashing on largely defenseless civilians. His reply was both swift and very, very scary. "You can't make a sulador without breaking the odd ovu."
At this very moment, there is little anyone outside of Chikaros can do to stop this terrible slaughter. Fires are burning in almost every city and town of any size in Umbeka, Jakusa and Lasa-Ot. Bombers have been heard as far inland as the Wara Mountains, and it is clear that Hamarbakir's newly established bases in Bargee, the easternmost member of the Union of Taropei, have been used to reach this distant region. This is totally against the agreement signed by Hamarbakir and the Union two months ago, under the sponsorship of the Assembly of Independent National Homelands, which stated that these bases were for 'defensive purposes only'.
The capitals of Okak and Jakusa now lie in ruins. Okak's deepwater port at Kumakayan has been destroyed. Its gas pipeline into neighboring Jakusa has been shutdown. Desalination plants at the port of Hefian in Jakusa have been reduced to rubble. And in Gorga, the capital, Karamya, has been hit by bombs encased in spent nuclear fuel. "They will remain irradiated for as long as our beautiful Astma," a tearful President Iatos Guma Guda said in a nationwide broadcast a few moments ago, which was also beamed to the troops manning the eight orbital platforms on which Hamarbakir recently placed particle cannon - "for the defense of our world against rogue comets." He took a few seconds to compose himself, then added, "We are taking heavy casualties, but our courageous armed forces are steadfast in their allegiance to you, the people of this great land, and will fight on until those who would bring us low are brought to book and held accountable."
By 'heavy casualties', the president really means: three coalition aircraft [translation] have been brought down by ground to air missiles - all fired in error by coalition ground defenses. Sixteen coalition soldiers were killed when a transporter, in which they were being ferried back from a forward observation post in time for their evening meal, was hit by a missile fired from an Hamarbakir aircraft which was also returning to base in time for dinner. Sergeant Hassa Unir was admitted to the emergency base hospital at Daresole Naval Base, Tamree, when she broke a finger while pre-flight checking a laser guided missile before loading it into the payload pod of one of the new Slingback Bombers. Her relatives have been assured, we're certain, that her life is in no immediate danger, which is more than can be said for the hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians who will not see the rising sun tomorrow.
A survey to be published in today's edition of the 'Hamarbakir Pioneer and Enquirer' gives a ninety-one percent public approval rating for President Iatos Guma Guda's actions. Furthermore, the news that the House of Proxies voted yesterday on a five percent increase in defense spending will sound alarms in every home, village, town and city outside Hamarbakir. Minister for Defense, Hashi Tama Gama, was reported to have told his advisors, immediately after the vote that, 'We're in this for the long haul'. The national flag is flying on every state buidling and along every thoroughfare in the capital: Karemsala. President Iatos Guma Guda and his administration have convinced Hamarbakirans that they face a powerful, heavily armed, enemy, dedicated to the erradication of their nation. And they have all swallowed that lie without a moment's hesitation. The people are on the streets, waving flags and chanting, 'Creator Bless Hamarbakir' and 'As one, we will overcome'. Who was it who said, 'the day this democracy develops an aggressive and self-interested foreign policy, which seeks to interfere in the affairs of other nations, it will cease to be a democracy?' Oh yes, it was the very first president of Hamarbakir, Alera Ferti Memor. His statue, with those wise words carved on its plinth, can be seen from the entrance of the present incumbent's residence. We wish he would take the time to stroll across the street and study them.
Editor's Note: As they were traveling from Chikaros to rendezvous with our own ship, on board which Sashi was returning from an assignment on Sekernefre, Ghi'Chon and his assistant, Ca'Houn, were killed. Even though their 'runabout' was registered to a company in Humigee, in the Union of Taropei, the Hamarbakir military claim its pilot failed to respond to three separate challenges, and that they were forced, reluctantly to, quote, 'blow it the fuck out of the sky', unquote. Our heartfelt sympathies are extended to their families at this time. We would desperately like to be able to say to them, 'Rest assured, we will avenge your deaths.' But we know this promise would be an empty one. Hamarbakir, to use an expression from an Earth television program, 'owns the bone', right now. All any of us can do is weep for the innocent who are dying in their tens of thousands as the bombs continue to fall.
