Mainak Dhar - Alice in Deadland

'Three hundred?'

Appleseed withered in the face of Chen's rhetorical questions. The one thing that Appleseed had learnt about his Chinese boss was that when he asked a question, he rarely wanted an answer. Instead, he was usually passing judgment, and in this case, Appleseed knew that the judgment being passed could be deadly for him. Appleseed had been a career military officer in the old US Army, when as a Colonel based in Afghanistan he had been approached by some old mentors who had mentioned certain special projects they wanted him to help with. At the time, a million dollars in cash seemed to be worth the secrecy and subterfuge he had dealt with, and when The Rising had taken place, he actually thought that he had been chosen to be one of the elites to fight this scourge. Fifteen years later, he was not so sure anymore about who or what cause he really served. The money was no longer worth much, but he did have a wife and three kids, and he knew that if Chen ordered it, in an instant he could be reduced to being no more than yet another of the millions of slave laborers who lived and died without much fanfare in the many camps that sustained the utopian new world that the Central Committee promised to usher in. The only currency he knew and recognized that still mattered in this new world was power, and he was determined to cling on to that.

He straightened his back and faced Chen, whom he towered over.

'Yes, Sir. Over the past one week, we have had more than three hundred desertions in the force.'

Appleseed saw Chen's pale face darken and his fists turn red as he clenched the chair in front on him.

'That, General, is the problem of using the occupied to manage their own territories.'

Appleseed bit his tongue. He knew how badly the Chinese Red Army had been hit by retaliatory strikes by US nuclear forces in the days following The Rising, and while the erstwhile United States was little better than the Asian Deadland Appleseed oversaw, there was continued fierce resistance from bands of American guerillas that was bleeding the Red Guards dry. He knew that Chen and his Chinese masters badly wanted to nip in the bud any possible insurrection in Asia and that they were counting on him to do it. That was the single most important source of Appleseed's power. For the past fifteen years, he had managed the Asian Deadland with an iron fist, born out of extensive experience in Afghanistan before The Rising, a fiery grounding in counter-insurgency that had helped him decimate the Biters and bring into the Central Committee's fold most of the remaining human settlements. That was of course till that silly girl called Alice surfaced and the whole matter threatened to spiral out of control. He felt a familiar stirring as he recalled being alone with her. In his mind, he was a soldier who was doing his duty, but there were dark moments and dark deeds that he tried hard to not consciously face, for in his hearts of hearts, he enjoyed the power he held over others, the power to make them submit to his will, the power to make them beg him. He recalled all the grief this Alice had caused him and promised himself that the next time she was alone with him, she would be begging him for mercy.

Over the past two weeks, her cohorts had been bombarding the Zeus Intranet with messages, averaging more than three a day, and while Chen had flown in Information Technology specialists from Shanghai who would delete every posting within minutes, the seditious messages were slowly but surely having an impact. The hardest hit were recruits from the human settlements in the Deadland of what had once been India, and desertions had been on the rise. All attempts to track down the posters had proven to be in vain and the efforts at striking back against them had produced little by way of tangible results other than many scores of casualties.

'Eighty-five Red Guards have died in one week. Does that sound like something the Central Committee will tolerate?'

Appleseed had posed a rhetorical question to Dewan not unlike the ones being posed to him by Chen, and he was infuriated to see Dewan standing impassively in front of him.

'Goddamit, Colonel! You've been patrolling these areas for years. Don't tell me you don't know where these people can be.'

Dewan looked Appleseed straight in the eye, and waited for a few seconds before replying, as if weighing how best to phrase his reply.

'Sir, General Chen insists on flying in Red Guards straight from Tibet or mainland China who know nothing of the local people or terrain. That's why they walk into one ambush after another. If they let me and my boys get a free reign, we may actually produce better results.'

Appleseed turned on Dewan with a fury.

'Colonel, the reason he does that is because he is not sure whether any of the local troops can be trusted. I hope I don't have to remind you of the number of desertions we've seen over the past couple of weeks.'

Dewan thought of how to reply to that, and when he did, Appleseed noticed that the Colonel was not looking him in the eye.

'General, the boys are no longer sure of what the truth is. These posters from the Deadland are sending out messages that challenge the very reason we are doing what we are. I haven't really seen the Central Committee counter those with any compelling arguments other than to censor the posts and send out Red Guards against locations where the posts were supposedly uploaded.'

'Colonel, I hope you realize that such statements about the Central Committee border on treason!'

Appleseed noticed that Dewan did not flinch under the implicit threat, and an idea came to him.

'Colonel, would you say that anyone not in approved settlements can be considered at the very least a sympathizer, if not an active collaborator with the counter-revolutionaries among the humans and no more deserving of mercy than the damned Biters?'

Dewan was taken aback by Appleseed lapsing into the lingo used by Chen and his Chinese masters and his hesitation led Appleseed to press ahead.

'I take it that this Alice and her cohorts could not move so freely in the Deadland if the remaining human settlements there did not at least implicitly support her?'

Dewan did not know where this was going and he knew that anything he said would not help his cause, so he just stayed silent as Appleseed continued.

'So, Colonel Dewan, from your response, I take it that anyone still in the Deadland in unauthorized settlements is probably a human sympathizer of this Alice or have been subverted by the Biters and their supposed Queen. For years we have resisted taking active measures against the Biters in the Deadland because we wanted to minimize collateral damage among the human settlements there. Perhaps that equation has now changed.'

Dewan felt a chill go up his spine as he realized where this was going. Appleseed picked up his radio to call Chen.

'General Chen, I have a plan that may help us eradicate the threat we face once and for all'

As Dewan heard Appleseed outline his plan, he was seized with panic. He had to do something to warn Alice and the others, but there was no way he could do that without compromising himself.

***

'It's her!'

Over the last couple of weeks, Alice had slowly got used to this kind of reception whenever she walked into a human settlement in the Deadland. While Nikhil had kept up a relentless barrage of messages aimed at the Zeus troops, Alice had never really accounted for how fast the news would spread among the settlements. Most of the deserters found their way back to their settlements, and there they shared tales of the lies they had been told, of how the Central Committee, far from being a benevolent power, represented forces that had perhaps brought upon the catastrophe of The Rising in the first place to serve their pursuit of power. Most people found it hard to think of the Biters as anything other than the monsters they had always taken them for, but once doubts were sowed about the true nature of the Central Committee, they proved hard to undo. Add to that the heavy-handed tactics of the Red Guards and Chen, and one settlement after another had started to side with Alice.