Fucked in the Name of Empire; or, Death to Fucking America

fiction by Akasha Neely

Jade McCall’s heart was mosh-pitting inside of her chest. Every time her foot thudded off the pavement, a wave of nausea percussed through her stomach like the blast beat of a drummer in a subterranean venue. She kicked off the side of a nearby building and landed hard against a fence. The metal spires on top skewered her fingers. She grimaced and hoisted her hundred and forty-five-pound frame over the fence. She crumpled to absorb the impact as she landed and stared at her fingers that weren’t bleeding—instead they had little indentations from where she had grabbed the fence. “Motherfucker,” she muttered.

“Shoot that bitch,” said one of the officers pursuing her.

She had counted five in total. Their faces obscured by Kevlar helmets and their bodies bulky with armor. Jade was scared to death. Her hands shook as she braced them against the cold asphalt to stand up. Her knees clicked together like some shit out of the Wizard of Oz and chill bumps broke out on her forearms, telling a story of terror in braille. Jade bounded around the corner of the building. The night sky was illuminated with dozens of flashing lights advertising everything from skin bleaching to the latest room and board streaming services.

The ping of a round ricocheting off the building in front of her brought Jade back to her senses and she forced her feet to pound the pavement faster. The sky opened up and the heavens shed cold tears. Jade’s feet slid every few steps because of the oil being drawn to the surface by the rain.

Something hit her from her 3 O’clock and Jade tumbled to the ground. The pursuers swarmed her and soon Jade was being kicked, punched, and electrocuted with stun batons. She did her best to block her vital points and cover up. The water and mud in her eyes made her vision kaleidoscope as the impacts to her head caused her eyes to lose focus.

Cold. Every bit of warmth was being sucked out of her by the steel bed beneath her. She opened her swollen eyes and let the shitty fluorescent light attack her retinas like a fucking Samurai hacking at a tree during the feudal era. Jade turned her sore neck to the side; the steel sink and toilet combo was about a foot from her head. “Same old jail,” she muttered to herself.

The cell door buzzed and a tall slender woman wearing a business suit and about Jade’s complexion walked into the cell. Jade stood up despite herself. A damn broke inside of her and her mind was awash in a deluge of memories and pain and hurt. Two officers of compliance flanked her and stood at attention when she paused in front of Jade.

“Leave us,” Adelisa commanded.

“Aye, Ministress Adelisa,” the officers said in unison as they exited the tiny jail cell.

Adelisa waved her palm and a small digital docket appeared with Jade’s mugshot photo. “Thirty-one-year-old, five-foot-seven inch, a hundred- and forty-five-pound, Black female wanted for intergalactic terrorism was apprehended last night unharmed by several officers of peace –”

— Jade snorted.

“Anyway, how did I just know I’d find you here? Why do you do this? Why do you have to make life so hard for yourself? Why are you violating the terms of your exile? It was exile or execution. I was hoping to never see you again. Jade, I could have helped you. You could have one of the highest positions in the American empire with your military service background. Two Black women at the helm of the most powerful empire in the history of mankind. You could have been great.”

Jade was still swimming through the deluge of memories – and drowning. Adelisa and Jade, two privates in the American army. All the trouble they got in together. Adding filthy jokes to running cadences, stealing people’s clothes while they showered, they were just looking to have fun and break up all the monotony and structure around them. Adelisa dyed her hair purple one time so she and Jade (Jade being her buddy always got caught in the undertow) had to wake up every hour on the hour and go downstairs to the Sergeant of the Guard in a different uniform that was then inspected for deficiencies and if any were found they would have to do pushups or squats. This went on from 1800 at night to 0600 in the morning the next day.

“Fuck you, Chancellor of the American Empire, Prime Ministress Adelisa” Jade’ s fist clenched, and she stared through Adelisa’s pretty brown eyes. “I’ll never spend another second of my life in service to this xenocidal empire. They brainwashed us and forced us to do unspeakable things in the name of interplanetary democracy.”

Adelisa grabbed Jade around the neck and shoved her against the wall. In the tiny cell, Adelisa’s six-foot-one-inch statuesque frame seemed almost surreal against how tight and cramped the cell was.

It was their first time in combat. Everything had gone to shit. There was miscommunication from the top down. They had bad intel and thought the house was empty. Adelisa… Adelisa… Jade was so scared. It was a trap. Adelisa… Adelisa… bloody on the floor. She had been shot… a lot. The barbecue smell. Jade pulled her out of the house, under heavy and effective fire from the enemy. She could remember the rounds coming so close to her head that she could see them in midair. The ground was hot and even hotter when you’re facedown dragging another body to cover behind the bushes. Jade didn’t see her until their unit got back to earth. She needed assistance round the clock and Jade wouldn’t let anyone else take Adelisa from her charge. In those budding days, their romance had blossomed from two teenaged pranksters to battle scarred lovers. Jade was using her martial arts training from the army and started laser-cage fighting to help make ends meet.

Adelisa’s lips collided violently with Jade’s. It was just like everything else in their relationship: intense, short, and passionate.

Adelisa’s chest heaved up and down. An uber roach crawled from behind the sinktoilet and started to make its way up the wall across from them.

“Where do you want to go? I’ll have a transportation pod ready in about fifteen minutes to get you the fuck off my planet and out of my life forever,” Adelisa said as she handed Jade a few thousand credits.

Jade wasn’t too proud to take the money, but still continued her onslaught, “So that’ s it? We’re just going to pretend like we never happened? You can’t erase me, bitch. I gave up so much for you. I loved you – I still do. I love you even though I don’t know who you are anymore,” Jade reached out and pressed Adelisa’s side.

Adelisa flinched, “You fucking asshole.”

Jade knew Adelisa still felt the effects of being shot. She knew her bones still hurt when it got too cold out. Her pain would warn them when a storm was coming back when they were married and lived together. Algometric weather forecast.

“My bones still hurt too,” Jade said.

“

Where do you want to go? I will not ask again, Jade.”

“Asteroid 217,” Jade said.

Adelisa’s eyes rolled and she let out a heavy sigh. “Why were you even here in the first place?”

“I thought she was here – my mom,” Jade’s voice had lost its edge.

“She’s dead, Jade. I feel for you, I do.”

A few minutes later she waved the officers of compliance back.

“Escort Ms. McCall to a transportation pod to asteroid 217,” Adelisa said in professional voice.

As Jade and the officers were walking away, Adelisa called out to her:

“Jade, if you ever step foot on this planet again you will be executed.”

The hills scattered across the desert landscape like acne on a pubescent face. The town was small – only a few wooden buildings. Staccato gunshots could be heard in the distance every so often. She stepped over an old man passed out still holding an empty bottle of whiskey.

“Nice to see you today, Mr. Mayor,” Jade said aloud to the unconscious and drunk elected official. Jade walked to the building in the center. The tavern had several horses outside tied to a hitching post. The jetpack charging station was also full. After Jade entered, she walked straight to the back, through some double doors, through a curtain, through another door and into the harem.

Jade waved her hand to open the haram’s menu. She hated seeing Adelisa and the effect it always had on her. She was nothing more than a scared child back there. Jade needed a palate cleanser. She scrolled through headshots of hundreds of sex workers until she found a young man that would be of use to her.

The young man, called Simon, and Jade giggled and smiled whenever they made eye contact over the small table they now shared. It was haram policy to wait at least fifteen minutes after consuming the sickly orange flavored prophylactic before sexual activity. A kindly old woman employed by the haram dropped off the STD scanner. Two negative results later and they walked up the stairs into one of the prepared rooms on the second floor.

Simon was roughly five-foot-eight inches tall and not too much thicker than Jade was. His youthful face belied his twenty-six-earth year chronological age. Jade instructed him to lie on his back. She took off her pants and underwear and straddled his face.

His tongue felt ecstatic inside her. Jade moved her hips in figure eights as the sensation spread throughout her body. She moved back and forth and up and down – her breathing getting more and more intense. A wave of anger came over her as she thought of Adelisa grabbing her and kissing her. She could feel the rage and passion tapping on her thigh. At first, it was like the sword of Damocles, just hanging above her head tapping on her thigh. The sword had fallen through her skull and was impaled in her torso. Fire and poison radiated from the sword and entrenched themselves in her veins, tapping on her thigh. Tapping on her thigh – she realized that she had been smothering Simon this whole time and he was trying to tap out on her thigh.

“I am so sorry,” Jade said as she sat back on his chest to allow him to breath.

He took in big gulps of oxygen and said something that Jade couldn’t make out and didn’t quite care to at the moment. Once she was back perched atop his face like a horny bird of prey, she grinded harder. The harder she fucked his face, the less worthless she felt. The less powerless she felt standing next to Adelisa. She felt his tongue slip into her asshole where it fit snugly and the beast that she carried inside of her exploded into orgasmic rapture. Once she was finished – his face looking like a glazed donut – Jade passed him a couple of the credits from the money that Adelisa had given her. Simon thanked her and licked the snail trail she had left from his lips as he pocketed the generous tip. It was time for Jade to have a drink.

As soon as Jade stepped back into the tavern side of the house, she heard a gruff and sonorous voice call her name.

“

Jade! You crazy dyke butch bitch get over here!”

There was no mistaking Savage. Jade followed the drunken obscenities to a table off in the far corner of the tavern. Savage was alone with several empty bottles of beer in front of him.

Jade and Savage couldn’t be described as friends under any circumstances. Savage was a big loud, casually racist and misogynist, alcoholic piece of shit. Still, he was great on the battlefield. He and Jade were both mercenaries so they had participated in numerous missions together. Ironically they had also gone against one another in the theater of combat. Surprisingly, there were never any hard feelings (aside from her just hating who he was as a person) and both seemed to view war as just a job. Savage was also ex-army, he had just gotten kicked out a decade or so before she had even joined.

“How you been?” Savage asked as he waved toward where all the bartenders were standing in the back.

Xyl, a transwoman around Jade’s age, placed two cold beer bottles on the table in front of them.

“I’ll also have two shots of your finest cheapest whiskey,” Savage slammed some credits onto the table and Xyl disappeared into the back.

Xyl and Jade had hooked up a few times back in the day, but neither seemed to really get along with the other if there wasn’t alcohol involved. She just liked Xyl’s slang and the way she referred to other trans-girls collectively as “The Dolls.” Hell, Jade had even caught herself referring to “The Dolls” every time she had extended interactions with Xyl. Ever since Jade was younger, she would inadvertently pick up accents and slang from people without meaning to. Xyl set their shots down without making eye contact with Jade and scampered off.

“How the hell are you, you pretty, Black bitch?” Savage asked.

“I’ve been better,” Jade responded.

“Same,” Savage concurred.

“Jail!” They both said in unison with a sigh.

Five shady looking patrons sat down a couple of tables away from them. One poured a powdery substance onto the table, took out a razorblade, divided the powder into lines, then one by one they took turns snorting the lines.

Savage and Jade looked at each other, the new shared revelation lingered in the air like smoke from an extinguished candle, downed their shots simultaneously, then began to laugh uncontrollably.

“You first, love,” Savage said finally.

“Okay, you know how I got exiled from Earth after the Black and Indigenous rebellion a few years ago?” Jade said after downing her entire beer in a couple of gulps. She motioned to Xyl, who had been sneaking glances in her direction since she sat down, for another round.

“Yeah. Truth be told, I was never formally exiled like yourself, but it’s pretty much shoot me on sight if I’m ever caught back in America.” Savage threw down more credits as Xyl brought their drinks over.

“Well, I heard a rumor that my mother was back on Earth, so I went to go find her. I didn’t think I’d get caught. Besides, I haven’t seen the lady since me and my twin brother turned twelve. Anyway, the goddamn officers of keeping the peace through peaceful means picked me up.”

“That explains the bruises,” Savage said as he and Jade clinked glasses and laughed.

“I was fucking pissy on Faustus (Jade raised her eyebrows) It’s a moon of Asteroid Jute. Anyway, I got fucked up on Faustian rum to the point where I was having some paranoid delusions. I fired a few shots into the air and the goddamn police came and picked me up. Fucking weird place where you can’t just fire a gun if you want. I’ll take Asteroid 217 over those other places any day,” Savage punctuated his sentence by firing a round from his pistol into the air. “See? Nobody here bats a goddamned eyelash at what you do. I love it.”

Jade had to admit one of the reasons why she loved coming to Asteroid 217 was how safe she felt among all the lawlessness. It was an egalitarianism only seen amongst the hyperviolent. Mutually assured destruction trumped any bullshit honor amongst thieves doctrine. Every mercenary, petty criminal, galactic pirate, freedom fighter and queer haunted Asteroid 217. Villains, scoundrels, and rogues (oh my) called this desolate rock just outside of American jurisdiction home.

“I’ll be honest,” Savage narrowed his eyes and straightened his posture. “I was hoping I’d run into you because I got a job that you might be interested in.”

Another reason for coming to the tavern was the fact that it provided steady work. Clients would sometimes need a job done (everything from unclogging a cyber drain to taking up arms in a sectarian genocidal conflict half a galaxy away) and word of mouth would get them to the person for the job.

“How much?” Jade crossed her legs; she could still feel the wetness in her crotch from the young man she face-fucked in the back.

“600,000,000. Also, it’s a jump. We get the other 600,000,000 upon mission completion.”

Hot damn. That explained why the job paid so much. Jumps were always lucrative. They were also usually a lot more dangerous. She had done dozens of jumps with Savage. Normally the way they jumped was from just beyond a planet’s outer atmosphere. They were Super High Altitude Low Opening jumps and very few outside of the American military were qualified to do them.

“The American empire is after the zillion dollars worth of Lazarus minerals in that moon that the Black and Indigenous Liberation Association annexed a few years ago. The Americans have funded a group of loyalist to American capital to wage war on BILA and oust Ministress Zee as prime minister of BILA,” Savage gave her another shot before taking one himself. “BILA is expecting a shipment of weapons and supplies from Neo-China at 1300 tomorrow. The weapons are being air dropped via third party not affiliated with Neo-China. As you know, America has established a ‘No-Fly Zone’ over BILA.”

“I see,” Jade’s drunken mind caught on right away. “They want us to jump on BILA so that we can establish a drop zone for the shipment of weapons then gtfo.”

“Exactly. We need to establish an DZ quickly and collapse it quickly so we can get to our ground extraction point. In and out in fifteen minutes. The area will be completely clear of enemy combatants so it should be easy money.”

They had to be up early for the mission so Jade went back with Savage to the room he was renting at an inn a few doors down. Neither could walk in a straight line. Her bones hurt and that meant a storm was coming.

“I saw a deca-dragon one time,” Savage said as he fumbled to type in the code to open the digital door.

Jade just nodded in agreement. Even drunk, she knew he was full of shit. Decadragons were a type of tera-fauna. They hatched from planets and planetoid objects and devoured other planets and stars for food. They were gigantic and lived at the outer edge of the universe. The odds of seeing one were infinitesimal.

Savage tossed her a blanket and passed out on hover sofa. Jade found a spot under the coffee table and closed her eyes. Normally sleep eluded her and all she could see at night were the faces of the fallen; some were comrades, some were enemies, all had died violently. Body parts amputated via explosions usually danced around in her head before falling asleep. There were no mental health services for mercenaries. You just did it until either you put a bullet through your skull or someone else did. She was conflicted because she never stopped fighting in wars long after she renounced American galactic imperialism. Her dreams were either haunted by images of death or memories of Adelisa in sundresses making fungi bread and cookies on Saturday morning. Jade sometimes had trouble distinguishing which was worse.

Four jumpers in total: Jade, Savage, Sebastian, and Jackal. The four of them had jumped together in the past so Jade was pretty comfortable. The space vessel cloaked itself just before it entered the moon’s orbit. Soon they were ejected from a tube out the back and plummeting at thousands of feet per second.

Jade watched as the heads up display inside her helmet informed her of just how far she was from the planets surface. Her heart was in her throat because this was the most dangerous part of the jump. This was where suits cracked and people burned up on entry. This was where mathematical calculations got jumbled and jumpers slammed into each other. This was where life support systems failed to start.

She couldn’t think about that now. She was terrified and no matter how many times she jumped she never got used to the feeling of plummeting so far so fast.

“I was walking down the street one day,” Savage sang into the communicator. “I ran into a stranger. She asked me what I wanted to be I said an airborne ranger.”

“Airbooorne raangerrrsss lead the way,” the other three sang the old army cadence.

“I’m sitting in my foxhole, sharpening my kniiife. When up jumps the enemy, I had to take his life,” Savage crooned into the communicator.

“Airbooorrrrnneee rangerrrrrs lead the way,” they crooned back.

“Looks like we got a welcoming party,” Jade exclaimed. There were explosions and lots of smoke coming from the ground.

“Shit,” Savage exclaimed into the communicator. “Someone must have tipped off the American loyalist we were coming. No easy money today folks.”

“

Just like Titan,” Jackal laughed into the communicator. “I’d feel weird if we ever didn’t jump into a hot drop zone.”

“Not gonna lie, it’d be nice,” Sebastian added.

The landing was rough and Jade was immediately fired upon. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from; it seemed to be everywhere at once. She had no idea where the others hand landed. I hear the choppers coming oh oh.

Jade’s face met the ground when the percussion wave from a nearby explosion knocked her over. She could see the tracer rounds flying over her head and decided it best to stay low to the ground while she unstrapped her rifle and got into a hasty fighting firing position. Jade laid there in the prone for a second before realizing she was completely exposed with no cover or concealment. They’re hovering overhead.

Jade crawled on her elbows to a nearby cluster of rocks.

“Have you seen the others?”

It was Savage. Jade was happy she found him. They could call in the ground team and get the hell out of there. A hot DZ meant an aborted mission and this DZ was scalding. Jade didn’t get a chance to answer as Savage’s head exploded into red mist and bone fragments. His body hit the ground hard. Jade jumped. They come to get the wounded. The hell with the dead. Airboooorrrrnnnne raaaaannngeeeeerrrs lead the way.

More faces exploded around her. A young soldier did a backflip from the high powered round that struck his torso. There must have been a sniper in the area. To her chagrin, as she looked around, they had landed in a valley. This meant that they were in a depression with other members of the BILA resistance and the enemy had the high ground. Jade couldn’t think of a worse place to be during a battle than a valley. My buddy’s in a foxhole with a bullet in his head. The medic says he wounded, but I know that he’s dead. Airbooorrrrnnneee rangerrrrrsss (shoot the son of a, shoot the son of a, why won’t you die?) lead the way.

She could just make out a faint glinting in the distance at her one o’clock. She opened fire and watched as the body tumbled head over heels into a ravine. Her stress level was so high that her hands were shaking, and she had trouble zooming her scope in to make sure the perpetrator was dead. Jade stood up and fell back over. She didn’t realize that she had twisted her ankle on the landing and now pain shot up her leg. The din of gunfire and explosions was deafening. Jade was having a sensory overload as she crawled, determined not to stay in one spot. Another explosion launched Jade into the air and she landed hard in a small patch of grass.

The smoke cleared and she tried to focus her rifle toward the fray as she took up a more stable kneeling position. Something hit Jade in the back and she fell forward. She didn’t have to see the blood to know she had been shot. By the time she saw the muzzle flash from the rifle that dealt her the coup de grace, the bullet had already bored its way into her forehead. Jade’s body slumped to the ground as the contents of her skull painted the rocks behind her with gore.

Ministress Zee, Prime Minister of the BILA, sat in the underground bunker with her advisors.

“So, our shipment has been intersected,” Zee kept her voice even. “What about the security? Dead? Oh, those poor souls. How did the rebels know where they were going to land? We even had security to ensure no one got any crazy ideas.”

“It gets worse,” an advisor said. “The American empire has sent an interstellar nuke to our coordinates. It should be here within three hours give or take. I guess they really wanted those Lazarus minerals.”

“If we’re going to be obliterated, we might as well send them a little parting gift,” Zee played with her braids nervously.

“The deca-dragon, ministress?”

“Precisely.”

In an hour an object exploded above the surface of the moon wiping out the BILA settlement and all who called the surface of this moon their home. It happened in an instant: a blinding white light followed by silence.

Something in the core of the moon was still alive. Something big that fed on nuclear energy. It had trouble breaking through the rocky surface at first. When it did it was huge and suspended in space. It’s scales were black and shiny; it’s body long and sleek. It was twice the size of Earth, which it found with ease, the nuke had left behind a scent trail.

The creature landed on the earth hard, wrapping its scaly body around the planet and sending it several hundred million light years away from the sun at the same time from its sheer weight. The ice sheet that used to be the Earth’s ocean was peeled from the planet like skin from a grape. The creature tore crust from the planet like flesh and ate greedily. It consumed the now rapidly cooling core of the planet in its fanged jowls and burped radiation back into outer space. The creature swallowed what was left of planet earth whole.