Paolo Mauritz carefully examined the calendar. Although it was very nearly the 218^th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, no celebrations were being prepared on the Space Ship Intrepido. Nor were they on the other interplanetary battleships in the space fleet speeding onwards in diminished numbers towards the Anomaly. This was one year Post Revolution whose anniversary many heroic comrades of the Twenty Fifth Reich were no longer able to celebrate.

If Paolo was honest to himself, which was virtually impossible under the constant scrutiny of security cameras, he was more pleased than saddened to be excused the obligation of observing his revolutionary duties. The long round of committee meetings, celebratory parades and the inevitable expense of extra taxes that would be levied to pay for all the festivity was never much of a time for pleasure. It was just another opportunity to identify those reprobates who lacked the quality of absolute loyalty. This was how it was and how it had always been. More exactly, this was how it had been in the two centuries since Comrade Schleiermacher almost single-handedly and certainly heroically toppled the accursed Twenty Fourth Reich.

That earlier empire had been one of unspeakable oppression and dire poverty but one whose territory was of almost exactly the same extent as that of the glorious Twenty Fifth Reich. This consisted of the continents of Europe, Africa and much of Asia as well as approximately a third of all colonised space up to humanity’s furthest reach in Saturn’s orbit.

The remaining two thirds of Earth’s surface and colonised space was divided between the forces of the unutterably despicable Latin Federation and those of the sly and inscrutable Manchurian Empire.

Paolo knew from experience just how merciless and cruel these evil empires were. The Ninth Army’s Stormbringer Fleet had been reduced from a proud force of several thousand destroyers, battleships and spacecraft carriers to less than a hundred stragglers. The journey to here, the furthest destination to which such a space fleet had ever been consigned, from the Reich’s military bases on the Moon had been beleaguered by battles and skirmishes with the other two empires’ warships. Heavily armed space fleets under the flags of the forces of evil in the Solar System were racing across space to the same mysterious destination as the Intrepido. It comforted Paolo that the enemy forces had suffered losses at least as great as those inflicted on the not entirely invincible Ninth Army and its hundreds of thousands of infantry, space pilots and ancillaries.

The scale of the mutual damage was the more remarkable given that modern warfare no longer employed the tactic of destroying and vanquishing enemy forces. Although the fleet had at its disposal an arsenal of nuclear, antimatter and biochemical weapons that could reduce their enemies’ equally vast fleets to radioactive dust, this was weaponry the Ninth Army was reluctant to use.

The golden space ships of the Manchurian Empire and the black ones of the Latin Federation possessed arsenals equally as destructive as that of the silver Stormbringer Fleet. Any attempt to actually use such weapons would result in a retaliatory response that would reduce the Reich’s hugely expensive investment to nothing more than just yet another interplanetary radiation hazard.

The modern strategy of space warfare was to capture and redeploy the enemy’s forces. This was why vast numbers of infantry were still required. Paolo’s heroic comrades were crammed together in cramped dormitories that were packed into every centimetre of habitable space not required by the life-support systems, the engine room or military hardware. Interplanetary warfare was a murderous game in which victory was signalled by the victor having successfully transformed the colour of the seized space ships’ outer shells to the silver sheen of the Glorious Revolution.

The game of modern warfare was truly deadly. The attrition, devastation and casualty count of a single battle was truly appalling. Thousands would die in each minute. As often as not a captured ship was so damaged that it was no longer capable of continuing to travel across the vast distances of empty space. In fact, frequently the victors of such a battle would face not the slaughter and torture they’d already administered on the wretched survivors of the enemy vessel, but a long slow death as the life-support systems broke down.

There were many brave comrades in abandoned space craft who were now starving, thirsty and gasping for air. But at least the heartless Orientals or subhuman Hispanics who had so ineffectually defended their ship had suffered torments much greater than did the plucky, but doomed, survivors.

“You called for me, comrade?” asked the ship concubine who stood stiffly to attention outside Paolo’s cabin.

“Yes, yes,” said Paolo hurriedly as he let the woman into his cabin.

As a Senior Scientific Officer in the Reich’s Biochemical Corps, Paolo had many privileges denied the lowly infantry not so blessed with pure ethnicity. These included the rare honour to sleep in a room of his own. Even so, it was still very cramped. There was enough space for a desk at which Paolo could sit and a narrow bed that could accommodate him and one of the Ninth Army’s Official Concubines. For a senior prostitute who might, on an average day, have sex with seven or eight of the ship’s officers, this was opulence indeed. Only Revolutionary Officers and senior military staff had the luxury of yet more spacious accommodation. They also had access to more ethnically pure and erotically enhanced concubines than Paolo would ever be permitted.

The concubine Vera lived in a crowded dormitory as spartan as any occupied by the infantry. Her only relief from duty would come if her ethnic profile warranted the dispensation of serving as a mother to a new Aryan Revolutionary. There was an insatiable demand for young revolutionaries in a Reich depleted in equal measure by constant warfare and periodic purges. This dictated the need for even the less genetically pure to reproduce.

One and a half thousand years of ethnic cleansing in the three very similar empires—whose characters had changed only in professed ideology and not at all in practice—had narrowed the human race to three distinct ethnic groups whose purity was forever being refined. All comrades of the Reich were of Aryan stock, cleansed of all Semitic, Negroid and Slavic traits. And in spirit this purity was equally true of the Hispanics of the Latin Federation and the Han Chinese of the Manchurian Empire.

Like Paolo, Vera had blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes. Unlike Paolo, whose hair was very short, she wore her locks long and loose over her shoulders. This distinguished her from women who pursued a more respectable profession in the Reich whose similarly long hair was tied in plaits.

“Which services do you require, comrade?” the concubine asked.

Her body betrayed evidence of the duties she’d already performed in the service of other senior comrades. There was a slowly darkening bruise over one eye and her skin-tight leather suit was ripped just above the crotch where it had been pulled off too roughly.

Paolo wasn’t at all sure what he wanted. It was only boredom and the need for distraction that had persuaded him to take advantage of the facilities provided by the Ninth Army’s brothel. There really wasn’t much else for him to do, any more than there was for the ragged remains of the fleet’s infantry. His duties wouldn’t really begin until the ship arrived at the Anomaly at which point he would be preoccupied in analysing the exotic biochemistry of the aliens the Reich was certain it harboured. It was hoped that the Anomaly should provide the Revolutionary Army with military innovations that could bring about the final long-awaited conquest of the other two warring empires and at long last bring ethnic and ideological purity to the Solar System.

At the very least, it would end the wars that had slaughtered billions of brave comrades since the earliest days of planetary conquest.

Vera had all the attributes Paolo desired in a woman. But then so too did every other young woman in the Reich. Those whose skin was too brown, whose arse too large, lips too thick or nose too long could never survive the purges that maintained the purity and wholesomeness of the Reich’s ethnic profile. The purges also served the salutary function of eliminating those who might question an ideology that was no different in substance to any other that had arisen since the first nuclear wars of the twentieth century. And this was notwithstanding the ever changing terminology used by each successive dominant ideology.

“My body is yours to do with whatever you wish, comrade,” Vera assured the Scientific Officer.

As it should be, thought Paolo as he divested himself of clothing to reveal a body that had benefited from the medical services available only to the elite. His life had been prolonged well beyond that of the proles and other menial classes, but at less than ninety years old he had still visibly aged. His hair was greying and he had less stamina than just twenty years earlier.

The fucking that followed was joyless and perfunctory. Creativity in the amorous arts was scarcely encouraged, though the restrictive rules relating to sexual activity amongst the lesser classes didn’t apply to Paolo. He was free to fuck this woman in the arse, ejaculate on her face and even let her swallow his penis in her mouth. Paolo didn’t have the imagination or inclination of some of his fellow officers to physically torment the woman he fucked. The crueller sports were practised most by those closest to the Revolutionary Bureau who were known (but not to the ill-informed masses) to let discarded bodies pile up in the dungeons of their palatial mansions: the victims strangled, mutilated and disembowelled.

The lesser classes were housed in cramped dormitories whether they lived on a space ship or elsewhere. They had little choice. There was no world beyond to which they could escape, whether on an irradiated and ravaged Earth or on colonies isolated in inhospitable space. The only sex they were allowed was solely with partners selected on the basis of ethnic compatibility and limited to what was strictly required by the Reich to produce the next generation of comrades. Women were denied any role beyond that of mother or domestic provider. However much they were officially deemed to be equal to men, what use were they beyond serving as vessels for reproduction and to extol the splendour of the Revolution? The Reich needed soldiers, not nappy changers.

Although Paolo had the license to be as sexually adventurous with Vera as he wished, as he was with any concubine he fucked since he’d been promoted to his current senior status, he never really enjoyed it as much as he did when making love with his wife, Isabella, who’d been selected for him by his parents rather than by a Revolutionary Committee equipped with the genetic profiles that governed most people’s lives. Their passion for one another had flourished despite the relentless surveillance that followed his every movement in the irradiated city of Schleiermacher Five, once known as London, which could easily identify sexual activity whose exact purpose was not for gene transmission.

Paolo took perverse pleasure from Vera’s woefully obvious lack of pleasure at the liberties he was taking when he thrust into her. But it was while his penis was deep inside her arse that a holographic display abruptly appeared and filled his room. Paolo was pleased to see that it wasn’t an emergency alarm. He’d had more than enough of those already.

The first such emergency took place when the Intrepido had barely travelled beyond Mars orbit. On that occasion, the ship was attacked by Manchurian Empire battleship destroyers. This was the only time Paolo had ever seen a person not of pure Aryan stock and a shocking sight it was too. This was when he conducted an autopsy on the Han Chinese cadavers left behind after the attempted invasion was successfully repulsed. There could be medical secrets known to the Manchurian Empire that could only be discovered in a corpse.

The second occasion was a rather more perilous incursion by Latin Federation robots that had managed to penetrate through several rings of the ship’s defences before they were destroyed. He saw these machines force their way over the corpses of heroic infantry who’d done little more than slow down the black lumbering engines’ progress. Even behind the screens where he and the other elite scientists cowered, there was a real risk that he might be killed. Fortunately, robots were not programmed to capture and torture so at least his death would be mercifully short.

On this occasion, however, the holographic display was merely to summon the elite officer class to the central auditorium normally put to the service of broadcasting propaganda and, very occasionally, useful information.

Paolo reluctantly released his semen into Vera’s mouth. Naturally, he insisted that she swallow every last drop. After he dismissed the concubine he pulled on his tightly fitting officer’s silver uniform. He then dashed down the long corridor to one of the elite escalators that were out of bounds to the infantry and ascended a dozen levels to the largest open space in the ship not reserved for food production.

Two or three hundred senior officers were filing in ahead of him through doors appropriate to their status and genetic purity. Paolo envied those of the purest ethnicity. Outwardly they appeared to be no different from anyone else but inwardly they were blessed by a degree of genetic purity measured not against that of Comrade Schleiermacher (whose autopsy it was rumoured betrayed genetic traces of Semitic origin), but by a model of excellence increasingly refined since the Fourth Eurasian Republic had purged the very last extant Negroid.

Paolo might not be the most senior officer in the room but at least he didn’t belong to the more junior ranks. They had to stand at the back of the auditorium and, unlike the senior officers, had to do so every day for the mandatory four hour seminars in Twenty Fifth Reich Socialism. These seminars served to instruct the officers of a glorious tradition that dated back to the very first socialist republics at the dawn of the nuclear age, but also noted that the very similar regimes in the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany were mere amateurs in totalitarianism compared to those of the third century Post Revolution.

The most senior ranks were arraigned on the podium at the front. They were attired in the same tight-fitting silver suits that all officers wore, but were ostentatiously festooned with medals and epaulettes. The most senior officers also sported silver helmets. These were worn only by those of the inner elite who had graduated from one of the top one hundred military academies.

None of the assembled less senior officers spoke to one another as they solemnly sat in their designated seats, whilst those on the podium gossiped carelessly amongst themselves.

The most senior officer was the Party Secretary, whose status was greater than either the General or the space ship’s Captain who sat on either side of him. He rose languidly and strode over to the centre of the podium. As was appropriate to his status, he sat down on the raised armchair that hovered behind the lector. Speeches were customarily several hours long and it was imperative that the Party Secretary shouldn’t get too tired.

His speech began as always with a long and effusive account of the greatness of the Twenty Fifth Reich, the honourable example of Comrade Schleiermacher and the virtues of General Secretary Heidegger and his comrades in the politburo who were working tirelessly for the greater good of the citizens of the Twenty Fifth Reich and its projected ten thousand year dominance. There was also a much more entertaining condemnation of the evils perpetrated by the Manchurian Empire and the Latin Federation. Much was made of how the Latin Federation had systematically and cruelly annihilated those of Aryan blood, a process that continued ever since the capitalist, but Aryan, regimes of the North American continent were overthrown by the more populous Hispanics of the south and had totally reversed the trend of ethnic cleansing that had been the case during the first five centuries of the nuclear age.

Finally, after an hour and a half of the usual diatribe, full of praise for the glories of the Reich and expressing inflammatory hatred for the two rival empires, the Party Secretary at last got to the main point of his address.

“We are now confident that thanks to the wisdom and foresight of our glorious leaders, the Intrepido will arrive at its destination within days,” said the Party Secretary in even more sombre tones than those he’d used to lambast the enemy forces for attempting to sabotage the mission. Throughout the voyage the nature of the mission’s destination had been kept a closely guarded secret from most officers and all the infantry and ancillary staff. As a senior scientific officer, Paolo had been better briefed than the vast majority of those in the auditorium, but in truth, beyond knowing that the destination was known as the Anomaly and that it possibly harboured an alien biology he was very nearly as ignorant as anyone else. He assumed that it might well be an alien space craft or invasion force, but the fact that the forces of the Twenty Fifth Reich had no mandate to vaporise it in a cloud of antimatter suggested that it might have some perceived strategic value.

The Party Secretary’s statement of the nature of the Anomaly was quite unlike any address that Paolo or any of the gathered officers had ever heard before. The language was couched in the usual revolutionary correct language that attributed any useful scientific discovery to the advances of Revolutionary Socialism and any potential threat as a mere blip in historical destiny that should nonetheless be persecuted with the utmost prejudice.

But the substance of his address was not what Paolo expected.

There had been many peculiar and fleeting events observed and recorded throughout the territories of the Twenty Fifth Reich. Many of them were contradictory to the ethical and even ethnic foundations of civilisation. There had even been the transitory appearance of a man with black skin, even though it was well over a thousand years since the last Negroid had died in a West African concentration camp. Some of these apparitions had been large objects, but they were usually comparatively small, and always random and very peculiar. They appeared at almost any place and with no prior warning. They had been verifiably monitored by the same surveillance systems that enforced the orthodoxy and peace of the Reich and guarded it from its enemies.

At first it was assumed that these apparitions were the result of military experiments by the other two empires in the Solar System. This, it was revealed, was one reason why the state of perpetual war that had persisted for more than one and a half thousand years had become much more vicious in the last few decades. This was why the Reich had obliterated the Leukothea asteroid and why the Latin Federation destroyed the Himmel colony in Saturn’s orbit and the million gallant comrades who lived there. The account of both events was new to Paolo, though many lesser victories and atrocities had been trumpeted incessantly by the Reich’s media.

However, it was soon discovered that the military intelligence of the other two empires was equally as ignorant of the source of the strange phenomena as even the Twenty Fifth Reich. It was determined that the only possible source had to be alien to the Solar System. Furthermore, it was discovered that these apparitions occurred at their greatest density close to the object that was the space ship Intrepido’s destination. And this destination was so remote from any strategic military position that it could only be of alien origin.

The Party Secretary paused. He had been speaking for three hours now, but his trained and practised voice, enhanced by biotechnological implants, could easily continue uninterrupted for many more hours though usually on issues of much less substance.

“I will now ask you not to applaud,” said the Party Secretary, which was unusual in itself because the standing ovations that followed a speech from such a senior figure normally lasted about half an hour. “The matters which will now be conveyed to you by the Chief Scientific Officer are of a highly classified nature and must not be disclosed to anyone outside this chamber. Any evidence of this will be treated as a security matter and will result in a thorough investigation.”

This usually meant torture and death for a pre-determined percentage of officers. The higher the security rating the higher the corresponding percentage would be set. Nobody, even those on the podium, could be guaranteed to survive such a purge, especially as it was generally rather random in nature.

The address from the Chief Scientific Officer was as poorly eloquent and as politically correct as that given by the Party Secretary, but it did contain dramatically more information however much it was couched in Revolutionary rhetoric.

The Anomaly was not of a nature that could be properly determined. It was clearer what it wasn’t, rather than what it was. It wasn’t a black hole, a wormhole or composed of baryonic matter. It wasn’t solid and it wasn’t made from dark energy. It was, however, growing at an alarming rate, as were the number of incidents of apparitions. Whatever it might be, it was a threat to the power and ambitions of the Twenty Fifth Reich.

If it was indeed manufactured by an alien intelligence, from beyond the Solar System, then this was sufficient reason for the highest possible military preparedness. No alien culture was likely to be compatible with the interests of the Reich. It couldn’t possibly be ideologically correct as Comrade Schleiermacher’s wisdom and philosophy was unlikely to have spread far beyond Saturn. It was unlikely to be ethnically pure, merely by virtue of not having had the blessing of an ancestral history based in North West Europe. It was very likely that such aliens would not even be human, possibly not even biological. Such abominations could not be permitted within the compass of the heliosphere.

On the other hand, there was much that could be learnt from an alien civilisation. Although the Reich’s mission was to eliminate any alien presence in the Solar System with the same ruthlessness employed on the Slav, the Arab, the Negro, the Celt and the Turk, it was also to gather as much knowledge of alien technology and biology as was possible. It might even be necessary to pretend to tolerate this alien presence in the unlikely event that it wasn’t predisposed towards aggression.

After the Chief Scientific Officer sat down, again with a request that there be no applause, he was followed by an address from General Von Baden. The General was decorated with a huge weight of medals but wore a rather less splendid helmet than the one adorning the Party Secretary. Just as the Party Secretary was well schooled in revolutionary rhetoric and the Chief Scientific Officer in revolutionary science, he was a military man who understood the strategies and tactics of modern warfare. This was despite the fact that the purges hit hardest those who merely by virtue of being on the battlefield had come into contact with the enemy and had therefore been inadvertently exposed to their propaganda.

This was the first time that Paolo got a realistic appraisal of the damage inflicted on the Reich’s space fleet by the other two empires’ space fleets which were also converging on the same destination. It was rather worse than he’d thought. Only a tenth of the ten thousand space craft launched on this mission at crippling expense had survived. This was much the same for the enemy fleets. However, the destructive firepower in the arsenal of just one of the larger battle cruisers could scorch the surface of an inner planet and make it uninhabitable for many millions of years. The combined armoury of antimatter and nuclear devices, let alone the more exotic biochemical and dark energy weaponry, was enough to destroy a moon or make a serious dent in the atmosphere of an outer planet. This had already happened on Jupiter many centuries before when the Great Red Spot had been transformed into an even greater radioactive storm. The General was confident that should it be necessary to disable an alien force the Ninth Army had the capacity to seriously discourage any alien from venturing any further into the Solar System.

“It is hoped that such expensive weaponry will not be needed,” remarked the general. “We would prefer that it were used to eliminate Manchurian and Latin scum. Such a battle would be heroic but not one of you assembled in this room would ever live to celebrate again the glories of the eternal Twenty Fifth Reich, whose future is assured thanks to the wisdom and courage of our magnificent politburo and that of General Secretary Heidegger himself.”

The hands of the assembled officers twitched nervously, unsure whether to applaud given the instructions not to do so. Every eye studied the faces on the podium. And then with relief, they could see the Party Secretary put his hands together. With that the whole auditorium erupted into the applause that more naturally followed any praise of the government and its wisdom. This applause lasted a palm-numbing forty-five minutes that occasionally descended in tempo only to be brought to a fresh crescendo by those, generally of lesser rank, who most wanted to affirm the fervour of their loyalty.

And then finally, and at last, Paolo could join his fellow officers as they silently filed out now enthused with renewed revolutionary spirit.

Paolo carried away two messages that he reviewed in his mind. One was the imperative to ensure that neither he nor anyone else should discuss this meeting. He had already survived several purges. He’d even had to spend a terrifying month in a Reich cell that had cost him his fingernails and required emergency surgery on his crippled legs before the Great Purge of 207 P.R. had run its course.

And the other message was the realisation that as a senior scientific officer in Biochemistry he might soon very well be practising his research on very exotic life-forms indeed.