Chapter Four

On a mission in Lima in search of a cure for the fertility issues of trueborn Mogadorians, Susirnak Sutekh takes a detour to blow off some steam after hearing news of the death of many of her friends.

     Susirnak Sutekh realized that she was being followed as she walked along a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima.

     There were several men keeping their eyes on her as she strode nonchalantly down the street, grasping tightly onto the tall staff manufactured by her people that was disguised as a walking stick, a veil that belied the danger of its weaponry--within seconds with practiced movements of her hands, she would be able to locate tiny triggers on the staff’s surface to activate an electric charge to envelop the weapon, spikes on either end, or even use it as an energy canon with the few blaster charges stored inside it. Susirnak had never been much of a fighter herself before the invasion, but, being the wife of one of the most decorated Mogadorian generals, she had been encouraged to learn some measures of fighting and self-defense. She had always taken rather well to fighting with staffs and polearm-styled weaponry, and, because she had no intention of being detained against her will, it was a skill she had been keen to hone after being left in the lurch in the aftermath of the invasion. Perhaps she was too confident in her abilities, but as soon as she got in touch with some of the others who remained free from the oppression of humanity and got her hands on her new weapon, she hadn’t felt seriously nervous or scared of being captured so long as she stuck to the shadows. It would take a far greater force than a disorganized band of street rabble to pose a threat to Susirnak Sutekh.

     She knew why they had homed in on her: like all Mogadorians, her skin was so pale that it would almost seem unnatural on any human. Normally when she went out in public, she wore modest clothes to hide as much of her skin as possible and makeup on what still showed to make her appear darker than she truly was. Today, though, she had no intention of hiding. She had seen a news report that a small contingent of her fellow Mogadorians in hiding in a remote area of the Czech Republic--a contingent containing several of her close friends--had been attacked and obliterated. No survivors.

     Now, Susirnak wanted to hit someone. She couldn’t get to the Czech Republic to pay back those who had killed her friends, but she could punish others of humanity. She could make them realize that, so long as Mogadorians were being hunted like animals, there would never be rest or mercy for their oppressors.

     Susirnak strode along unfazed, confident in her abilities. The men were slowly surrounding her, forming a loose circle around her, ready to attack her as soon as she turned off onto any less-populated area. For now, she was protected by the crowds of rowdy kids playing football in the streets and the parents and grandparents that watched over them as they shared stories and gossip off to the side. Susirnak doubted that any of these people would protect her if the men decided to attack her right then, but she assumed that her pursuers simply didn’t want to create any sort of major fuss or drama.

     Susirnak had taken a calculated risk by coming to such a populous city. With so many people around to be suspicious of or curious about her, it would be difficult to keep up a façade of being a fellow human for very long, but she had an incalculably important reason for being there: it had been rumored that Monvos, a Mogadorian scientist who had found a promising--perhaps successful--cure for the fertility issues that plagued trueborn Mogadorians, had been onboard the warship over Lima during the invasion. The great Mogadorian race had been mostly rounded up and subjugated after their tragic defeat in the invasion by the grotesque Garde and their allies and placed in a concentration camp in the United States. Their numbers had been severely cut down in the fighting, and they were threatened to this day with genocide, making the Mogadorian fertility issues all the more pressing. If she were able to find the remnants of whatever research or technology Monvos had been working on, she could change the future of their race forever.

     First, though, she would have to get rid of the men tailing her.

     Susirnak turned off the street she was on, down a more populated road of mostly foot traffic with market stalls lining either side and a crowd so thick that the few cars that tried to go through them were given barely any room at all to maneuver. She had been marked as a Mogadorian before early in her attempts to remain hidden amongst crowds--back before she was good at masking her skin tone, but even then it was easy enough to slip into large crowds and lose a tail. Now, without her disguise, most people who saw her gave her hard, suspicious looks or shied away from her, making it impossible to truly blend in. She missed the days before the invasion, back when anyone would look at her and simply think that she was just some noticeably but unremarkably incredibly pale white woman with sharp features. Now, the hysterical racism against the Mogadorians had festered so much that Susirnak had heard stories about people who were legitimately just incredibly pale humans being targeted, hunted, and assaulted--and sometimes murdered--out of suspicion that they were rogue Mogadorians.

     Even if that weren’t a factor, she assumed that being an unfamiliar white woman in a part of Lima that had no tourist attractions wouldn’t help her blend in, anyway.

     Susirnak rolled her neck and readied herself for a confrontation, her heart thundering at the prospect. She never lamented the chance to put more uppity humans in their place, especially not at times like these when she had more than enough reason to do so. These people had thought that they destroyed the Mogadorians and their future, but Mogadorian Progress was a conflagration that could never be diminished--let alone extinguished. She and her people would have their revenge against the Loric and human scum, and the machinations of the Beloved Leader would prevail.

     A fruit stall merchant tried to grab Susirnak’s attention as she turned off the street and into a narrow alley between two apartment buildings, keeping a wary eye out for the men trailing her. She could still pinpoint three of them--the ones that were behind her--but the ones that had been ahead of her had apparently moved, and she couldn’t find them at all. She grasped her staff tighter, a finger resting cautiously by the trigger that would activate the electric field around the weapon, a protective aura that her nonconductive gloves protected her from.

     Susirnak walked down to the first fork in the alley and took a left, walking alongside some office building she couldn’t identify. There were still three men behind her, and it was when she neared the next fork that three more rounded a corner up ahead, cutting her off.

     Susirnak stopped in her tracks and tapped the trigger. The staff buzzed to life, humming with a nearly-invisible incapacitating aura.

     The men closed in around her. One of the ones in front of her was armed with a baseball bat that he dragged along the ground; two of the ones behind her carried metal rods with jagged ends. As far as she could tell, the other three men were unarmed, but all of the men--except the one with the bat--looked strong. She didn’t imagine a punch from any of them would be easy to shake off.

     The men came to a stop in a circle around her, each roughly ten feet away from her. Susirnak tensed, keeping her head on a swivel to check for any movement. With this many of them, she didn’t want to allow any of them to get much closer than they already were.

     “Are you lost, lady?” the man with the baseball bat asked.

     Susirnak raised her eyebrow. “No,” she answered, “but I appreciate the concern.”

     “Are you sure? I heard that camp for you people was up in the United States.”

     Sometimes, Susirnak liked to toy with the people who chased after her, play mind games with them to see how well she could get them to doubt whether or not she truly was a Mogadorian before she knocked them out. But that was when she had been drifting. Now, she had a specific purpose and was nearing her goal. Even if she had gone looking for this fight, she was hardly in the mood to spend long bandying with common crooks.

     “Don’t worry,” she said, “I have every intention of going there eventually. I have three very important reasons to do so. But, for now, I have urgent business to attend to in this disgusting city, and I will not be hindered by some lowlives with delusions of grandeur.”

     The beefier men seemed to fall into various shades of amused or offended by Susirnak’s words; the man with a bat raised an eyebrow but seemed mostly unfazed. “You know,” he said, “when Arcani fingered you for one of those alien freaks, I didn’t buy it. I didn’t think any of you people came pretty. I’ve seen the broadcasts--all sharp teeth and stretched-out skin. But now that I’m up close…yeah, I see it. You’ve got that same gross face and hollow eyes. You look like a goddamn serial killer.”

     Susirnak laughed, wondering if that was a serious attempt at demoralizing her.

     He paused a moment, then continued. “You know how much you gross fuckers are worth if we beat the s**t out of you and drag you to the nearest police station?”

     “For a live Mogadorian?” Susirnak said. “I do, in fact--depending on where you turn one in, the reward can go all the way up to two-million soles. It’s nice to be aware of how valuable I am. Now, if you’re quite done babbling--”

     Before any of them could react, she backpedaled several steps, turned, and snapped her electrified staff into the neck of one of the armed men; he screeched like a wounded animal and began convulsing as her weapon poured a near-deadly level of voltage into him. Another man shouted and lunged at her; she swung around and slammed her staff into his face; he collapsed in a screaming heap.

     The other four took a step back, wide-eyed. For a moment, Susirnak thought they would retreat, but one of the unarmed men yelled and charged. She snickered and wacked him across the head with her weapon; he tried to dodge the blow but was far too slow, and he came to a grinding halt, convulsing upright as if he were having a sudden seizure before he toppled like a ruined tower.

     “What the hell is that thing?” the man with the bat asked, raising his weapon with trembling hands. His remaining still-standing companions were paralyzed, watching the Mogadorian with terrified baleful eyes.

     “This,” Susirnak answered, “is the legacy of a superior race. My people have survived far worse than anything your pathetic, stagnant race could ever dream of enduring, and we have created wonders far beyond your ability to even imagine. Mogadorian Progress is alive and well. If you have any gods, I suggest you start praying, for I know that The Beloved Leader is smiling down on me.”

     Susirnak made quick work of the remaining three men; she strafed quickly to the side and jabbed an electrified end into the face of one of the armed men and danced forward and cracked the man with the bat across the head before he could even attempt a parry. The last man tried to run; Susirnak laughed and threw the staff at him like a spear; it slammed into the back of his neck, and he only managed to stutter one more step before collapsing.

     Picking her staff back up from the ground, she debated killing the men for a moment. It was a more than fitting punishment for not only attacking their superior but for attacking her with the purpose of kidnapping and selling her. It worked well when she was accosted by a random ingrate in a village that she was just passing through, but she likely needed to be in Lima for a good while. A serial murder would cause more outrage and spawn more questions than incapacitation, and there were likely some people who saw her disappear down the same alley as these men. If questions were asked, it could be linked back to her, and, even though she was good at hiding, and no one knew who she was, she would have to be even more careful. That wasn’t something she wanted to deal with for the entire rest of her mission in Lima.

     There was, however, another trick she could potentially do with her staff that would have a similarly satisfactory effect and help alleviate the precarious situation the confrontation put her in. When she got the staff from a small contingent of friendly Mogadorians hiding out in Jalisco, they had demonstrated how the electrical field was so powerful that it could potentially overload and severely damage a person’s brain without actually killing them. She simply had to be careful about how long she held the staff against their heads. If she could pull that trick off properly, she would hopefully either dismember their memories, ability to communicate, or both so thoroughly that they would hopefully never even remember what happened--or, if they did, they would be incapable of ever telling anyone. Without their testimony of the events, any story given by any bystanders back on the street would hopefully seem ludicrous to imply that some woman with a walking stick somehow overpowered six men and destroyed their brains--though, if they truly suspected she was a Mogadorian, they may still suspect that she would have some technology capable of doing that.

     Still, it would make her much more difficult to track if no one ever heard her attackers’ side of the story.

     Two of the men were definitely out cold; the other four seemed still conscious but still convulsing to the point of being incapable of moving. She decided to start with the conscious ones.

     Susirnak approached the man with the baseball bat first. His entire body was wracked with unpredictable, violent tremors, and his lip quivered as if he were trying to say something but couldn’t. But she could read the venom in his eyes well enough.

     She didn’t waste her breath on any words for him; she simply smiled and pressed her staff to his temple.

     The bloodcurdling scream of an uppity inferior facing the consequences of his actions was so satisfying that Susirnak found it incredibly comforting. She held the weapon to the man’s head for as long as she dared--for nearly ten extra seconds even after he passed out, the screams silenced as his body continued to flop as a mute ragdoll--before she finally pulled back.

     “Sweet dreams,” she said, moving onto the next victim.

     Susirnak kept a close eye out on the alley. There were no nearby windows, and no one else came down the way, though she was sure someone was close enough to hear the screams of the men who were--initially--still conscious when she mangled their minds. Thankfully, it seemed none of them were so stupid so as to come investigate as it was happening. If she were caught, there would’ve been no reason for her to not simply kill them, and she didn’t like to take precautions for no reason.

     After all the men were incapacitated and perhaps nearly braindead, Susirnak strode away from the scene with a satisfied smile, keeping to the mazelike alleyway, trying to avoid people as much as possible until she was well away from her attackers and finally felt comfortable merging back out onto one of the streets. She passed by a few homeless people sleeping on the ground and dirty kids playing games in the alleys, but they thankfully mostly didn’t seem to pay her much mind. Before she went back out on the street, she pulled out some more modest attire from the bag on her back and threw it over the clothes she was already wearing, hoping it would be enough to distract from her paleness.

     When she got out on the street, she was met with the same suspicious looks that often plagued her, but they came less frequently than before and with no more passion. For the time being, it seemed she had escaped.

     As she made her way toward one of the safehouses that had been prepared for her in the city, her thoughts drifted to the plight of her people. The group in Jalisco that gave her the staff was hardly fifty strong, and it was likely one of--if not the--strongest contingent of Mogadorians still free on the planet, especially now that the one in the Czech Republic was gone--the news report had said there were thirty-seven there. The largest remaining gathering of trueborns--thousands of them corralled together--was in Alaska, a concentration camp that the humans and Loric had ordained and what was explicitly a further act of aggression against the great Mogadorian race.

     Susirnak’s mission for the moment was in Lima. She wasn’t the only Mogadorian in the city with the same purpose, but she had insisted that she needed to be here. Her late husband, Andrakkus Sutekh, was one of the most impressive Mogadorians to have ever lived, and, though she earned respect in her own right, it seemed that Susirnak had often fell in his shadow in the eyes of their peers. She had not been a fighter in the war. As much as she had wanted the subjugation of the Loric and the humans, she felt that her abilities would be better served helping to foster a sense of unity and community among her people; she didn’t think she had so much of a knack for fighting. Even if she had wanted to, she likely would’ve been prohibited from being put into a position where she could be at a significant risk of dying: having been able to have two children of her own, she was little short of a miracle among female Mogadorians.

     Now, though, without access to Beloved Leader’s genetic advancements, if her ability to have children would extend further, she wouldn’t be able to save her race from extinction regardless even if she had found another Mogadorian man worthy enough to start a new relationship with--not that she would even be open to that with the death of her great husband still so close in history.

     Now, with Mogadorians so close to dying out, they needed access to whatever research Monvos had conducted that would supposedly cure their infertility, and Susirnak was no longer content to stay back from the fighting and build their community. After all that the humans, the Loric, and even her own blood had stolen from her, it was time for revenge.

     Her mission for the moment was in Lima, but her heart longed to go to Alaska. As she had told the lowlives that attacked her, she had three important reasons to go there.

     One, of course, was to free her people. The Mogadorians were a great, incredible race that deserved to rule over the entire universe. Holding them in a pen like pigs waiting to be slaughtered was an insult beyond all words to describe, and all those who supported that injustice would be made to pay in time.

     She also needed to see her beloved daughter, Kelliis Sutekh. Susirnak had seen snippets of her daughter in TV reports of the concentration camp, and each moment of them made her heart both crack and harden. Kelliis was an inspiring, passionate Mogadorian girl made to lead and further Mogadorian Progress. If she could get up there and free her daughter, she knew that nothing could ever possibly stand in their way.

     But Susirnak had two children, and only one of them was worth being proud of. The other--Adamus--was a disgusting traitor who had not only betrayed the righteous cause of Mogadorian Progress but also murdered his own father and adopted brother. He had even become one of the leading rebels against the magnificent rule of the Beloved Leader. Adamus had become such a shameful embarrassment on the great Sutekh name that Susirnak had been rather amazed that she herself hadn’t been seen by all her fellow trueborns as a traitor or a failure by association.

     Adamus was the third reason she needed to make it to the concentration camp. Death was the most lenient and fitting punishment for someone with his record, but her heart was conflicted at the thought. For all the pain and dishonor he had caused, he was still her son. Every memory she pulled out of any of his great injustices was met with an equally powerful memory of raising her child. She could not decide on any sentence that seemed right or fitting, and her decision oscillated wildly. Maybe there was some spark left in her son--maybe he could be brought back to the light and somehow make up for all the hurt he had caused. But, even if she could save him from death, he would still have to be brought to justice in some way.  

     The just cause of Mogadorian Progress would not suffer mercy in the face of betrayal.