New Frontier

Can you handle creating a weapon with the power to destroy worlds?

Hans Alder is lead scientist for the Battalion, Earth’s premier military against galactic enemies. When his life’s work culminates in his greatest achievement, Hans must hurry before innocent lives are lost.

If Hans fails, the entire galaxy will be wiped out.

And their blood will stain his soul.

A thrilling sci-fi short story by Muslim writer S. H. Miah, with tantalising plot twists that you will never see coming.

New Frontier

The laboratory featured the whitest counters that Hans Alder had ever seen. Whiter than the full moon’s glare in the deadest of nights. Whiter than his bulging eyes, filled with the glint of what he had created. Or what he was about to create, to be more precise. If he allowed it.

The laboratory’s counters gleamed with a bloodshot paleness, and sitting atop were clear test tubes, hundreds of them, that Hans wished to smash against the ground and paint its glass across a canvas of lost progress. The walls were a solid film of blue, less mimicking the blue sea and more resembling ice on the arctic pole as the waters froze over.

Hans’ heart was certainly frozen. Frozen beyond any hope of returning to its previous warmth before he had joined the Battalion as its lead scientist. Of that, he had no doubt.

He glanced inside one of the test tubes, which contained a green substance that emitted the smell of something stale. Like garbage in the dump near Hans’ house, or perhaps the sewers in which he had lived for a little shy of two months. The smell was now imprinted in his nostrils, and even years and hundreds of miles separated from that god-awful place, Hans still felt the pangs seize his nose.

“What have we here?” a voice said, jerking Hans’ spine to straighten and his feet to clap together. Hans’ eyes inspected the man’s body first. His smart shoes held a polish far from the norm, gleaming like the harsh lights digging into their skin from above. The man’s grey uniform was as rudimentary as they came, and his beard was shaven almost to the point of self harm. The man held a glint to his eye, a glint that saw destruction the ultimate objective and safety merely a promise to the people.

“We have made advancements,” Hans said, meeting the eye of the voice that had spoken to him. He rubbed the back of his neck, then stuck his arm back to his side. Nervous tics helped no one.

The man was Colonel Jackson, the fiercest warrior in the Earth’s Battalion. They were the galactic squad set to destroy humans that had long since travelled to other planets in the galaxy hundreds of years ago.

Before the planetary migration, infighting had taken place between the countries of Earth— specifically America, Russia, China, and a band-aid of countries in the Middle East and Africa. Now, those same battles occurred across a planetary scale, with the imminent threats of war from rival planets circumventing any petty rivalries on Earth itself.

And scientists like Hans were working on weapons to help the destruction, helping Earth win against their galactic enemies solar systems away. Helping lives lose themselves to endless fighting and mindless violence.

“What sort of advancements?” Colonel Jackson asked, stepping closer. Jackson fielded a strong frame, athletic, and he was a head taller than Hans. He used that height effectively, belittling Hans by stepping closer still and glancing down at the scientist with thinly veiled disgust.

“I have developed something,” Hans said, ignoring the musty scent of military propriety emanating from Jackson. Hans turned and grabbed a test tube, clear with a substance inside. Hans held it to his eye. The green substance, a liquid, sloshed from the motion. “Something of interest to the powers that be, Colonel.”

Jackson raised an eyebrow. “That is no way to address the Battalion’s leaders. We are not powers that be, we are powers that deserve to be. Do remember that.”

Hans nodded and, with shaking hands, put the vial back on the table. He glanced, for the merest second, at the gleaming white surface of the table and caught a reflection of his own muddled face.

His eyes were bloodshot, the sleepless nights weighing on his eyelids like water pressuring on the ocean floor. His skin was pale—whether from the white countertop's reflection or the complexion of his panicked face Hans didn’t know. His mouth was etched in a permanent frown, though Hans knew it was more terror than mere apprehension.

He swivelled back to face Jackson, mind whirring with questions. Questions that Hans had the answers to—he just didn’t know them yet.

“Tell me more about this,” Jackson said. His voice was soft, but words harsh. That was the way the colonel operated, had always operated ever since Hans first met him.

Hans wiped his brow, sent a silent prayer to Allah to somehow find him an escape from the situation, and stared into Jackson’s hollow eyes.

“It is a form of metal,” Hans said. "A metal we have created from combining different elements together."

“Don’t look much metal to me. Are you lying, scientist Hans?”

The term was a reminder of who the real warrior was, and Hans’ skin bristled at the admission. Hans was as strong as any Battalion warrior—he just couldn't display his courage yet.

But his time would come. Of that, he was sure.

“Some metals, like mercury, are liquids at room temperature. This is one such metal.”

“And what is the significance of this metal being liquid?” Jackson accompanied his words with a step forward, so close to Hans now that Hans could smell the man’s cigar-filled breath. Toxicity in the flesh was Colonel Jackson.

“We have the ability to imbue AI within metals now using special electric chips.”

Jackson gritted his teeth and leaned in. “We already know this.”

“I am merely explaining—”

Jackson grabbed Hans’ lab coat and pulled him in. Spat words alongside saliva. “You better explain quicker, then. We officers do not have all day to dally in a place like this.”

Hans nodded and waited for Jackson to let him go. “The AI is within that tube,” Hans said, pointing back to the green substance. “That AI will….”

Hans’ voice froze, like the compassion within his chest had, and he didn’t say a word. Didn't utter a syllable.

Jackson raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“It is…an advancement, Colonel, but the final prototype is not yet finished. I do apologise.”

Jackson stepped in once more, face ugly under the harsh lighting, cigar smell drifting like bad cologne. “You wished to call me here for a puny result of an experiment? I wanted a new discovery. A new weapon. Not some half-baked crap that we cannot test in the field.”

Hans laughed nervously, played with the cuff of his lab coat as Jackson growled.

“What sort of advancement?” Jackson asked.

“I believe that, within the next few weeks, I shall be able to allow the AI to perforate that liquid. Like software attaching to elements. Once that occurs, and the metals bind together, then we can use it on the mechs.”

Jackson nodded, and a sinful smile painted itself across his features. His eyes, despite the upturn of the lips, remained as hollow and empty as ever.

He tapped Hans on the shoulder. Then gripped the bone.

“Be sure to get updates soon,” Jackson said. He squeezed Hans' shoulder. Hard. Until Hans’ skin was almost set to pop. Then he let go. “If you do not, there will be consequences. Scientists work for the ones who fund their research. We do not work for you.”

Hans nodded, arms shaking, an existential crisis flinging itself around his mind like a pinball game at the old arcade he frequented as a teenager.

He stared after Jackson as the colonel exited the laboratory and slammed the door behind him.

A silence settled onto Hans like an oppressive dust storm. It settled onto his laboratory, his life’s work that fielded implications of devastation which Hans himself didn’t wish to probe the depths of.

Hans sighed and stood rooted to the spot. The smell of toxic cigars breathed into his lungs, and jitters spasmed every inch of his skin like a nuclear chain reaction.

Oh Allah, help me.

***

Whilst Hans had once lived in sewers, with rats for company and the smell of garbage a permanent imprint in his nostrils and on his body, he now lived in better conditions—an upstate apartment in one of Earth’s new metropoli that the Battalion funds helped him purchase a few years before.

Hans was seated in the apartment’s main living quarters—a large room with neon coloured walls which could be controlled from his advanced cell phone. The bulbs above flashed white streams of light that cut through Hans’ vision as he slumped on a leather chair and stared into the wall. The wall stared back, asking him the same questions floating through his mind.

Laughter came from the hallway adjacent to the living quarters, bubbling through the haze surrounding Hans to light a smile. It was the laughter of his daughter, Lilliard, and his wife, Haleema. Both were blissfully unaware of the discoveries Hans had made—both were still innocent and safe.

But there were many others who weren’t safe around the planet and the galaxy. Many other mothers doting on their daughters, and they would all be exterminated at the hands of the weapon Hans was creating.

At the hands of the weapon he had already created.

Hans let those questions fester in his mind once more, his conscience split along two paths that seemed equally as bad. He had no idea which path Allah wanted him to choose—which path was better in the future he couldn’t peer into and analyse for pros and cons.

It was a split decision, and one he had to get right to avoid the consequences.

One option was to tell the truth of the weapon—that Hans had cracked the code to activate the mechs, infusing AI with liquids that could fuel an army of robots to fight on the Battalion’s behalf. These robots didn’t need remote control, wouldn’t crumble if the radio waves were intercepted or the galactic transmission pathways were down. And soldiers didn’t need to man the robots from inside.

The robots would fight using the AI embedded within their fuel. And cause destruction whilst soldiers sat back with no risks. Soldiers fighting soldiers didn’t win wars when it came to the Battalion. Mindless killing did.

The loss of innocence caused one side to concede to the other in a war of this scale.

And essentially, that was what Hans had created. Destruction beyond anything imaginable, beyond even the reaches of an atomic bomb.

Because the Battalion, using such robots, would not hesitate to wipe out everything in their path to dominate the galaxy.

That was the risk Hans ran.

His daughter, Lilliard, then broke his mind-dump and rushed into the living quarters. Her brown hair, swept the same shade as Hans’ locks, burst into view first, and then she ran towards him. He hugged her, held her close, smelt the lavender of the shampoo she always wore.

He raised his eyes and saw his wife, staring at the scene with a light smile. And that image attacked him again. The image of other mothers with their children, wondering where their lives had gone as the robots attacked them with a merciless vengeance programmed specifically to end their existence.

Other fathers who, had they not died at the hands of the robots already, would return home to their families being massacred and everything they loved thrown to the hands of death.

And Hans would’ve been the perpetrator of it. Would've been the one to blame on the Day of Judgement when everything was settled and debts had to be repaid.

Do you think Allah would want innocents to die? the voice in his mind said. The voice that spoke sense but was always too hard to reason with. To listen to. To eke the truth out of.

“You look different,” Haleema said, and Lilliard let go of Hans to stare at her mother with an odd face.

“In what way?” Hans asked.

“You look like…there’s an important decision you haven’t made yet. A decision that scares you.”

Hans' wife grew to know him too well as the years passed on. Hans pulled his favourite grin that always staved off further questioning. “And how would you know that?”

“For one, you haven’t said a word since you came in here, and we’ve been sitting here for hours. And two, you never look into that wall.” Haleema pointed to the lightly purple painted wall that looked more grey than anything else. “You always look at the one behind the TV so you can quickly turn the telly on and watch something. But today…today’s different.”

“Today I had the chance to save lives,” Hans said.

“Since you’re a top secret scientist?” The sarcasm in Haleema’s voice could not be mistaken, and was so thick Hans couldn’t pretend to be ignorant of it. “I wonder what experiments they make you do. So confidential that not even your wife can know.”

“You have no idea,” Hans said, voice grave, as if the remnants of his fragmented soul were channelled through his words. “I had the chance to save lives. I still do.”

Haleema raised an eyebrow, now holding Lilliard’s hand. Lilliard glanced between father and mother, knowing that an interaction of great importance was taking place, but not knowing how or why. Her eyebrows were scrunched, her brown skin crinkling.

“If you have the chance to save lives,” Haleema said, “then why not take it?”

Hans stared at his brilliant wife, at her gorgeous smile, at the gift Allah had given him.

“You’re right,” he said, jumping up from his seat and grabbing his jacket from beside him. “Why don’t I?”

***

The air was foul around the Battalion's main compound. Smelt of toxins and fumes and all sorts of strange materials that Hans had experimented with over the last few years in trying to get his inventions to work. The Battalion paid Hans a heavy penny, and their facilities reflected the level of government funding they were given.

Hell, some even called the Battalion themselves the true government on Earth, uniting all the national governments under one banner when fighting inter-galactic enemies.

Hans hailed an airship that took him to a street near the compound. A desolate street, since the compound had isolated an area of three kilometres in radius around the compound to keep snoopers out. Hans, though, was not a snooper, and had his security clearance at hand in case it was required.

When it was required.

He breathed in the toxic air, as if the robots were burning his dastardly fuel right before his eyes, and walked into the airship parking lot. Aircraft, which functioned like the cars of old but hovered over the ground and could fly at speeds unprecedented, covered the front of the ugly Battalion building.

The compound had been built prior to Hans’ promotion to head scientist for the Battalion. The building itself was drab, created of a charcoal-like black tempered metal alloy, the components of which even a chemist like Hans wasn’t aware of. No glass surrounded the building, only a black void of metal—ensuring no light left or entered, as if the electro-magnetic spectrum could carry state secrets and display them to the worlds.

Hans’ heart wavered as he glanced back to see the sunset. Maghrib prayer would kick in soon, and he had to make his visit quick if he was to escape the compound in time to pray to Allah.

Pray that whatever he was doing was truly the right decision given the war effort. Pray that Allah would reward him for his actions, rather than punish him.

Hans slinked across the lot before the compound, weaving in and out of cars as if this was a spy movie. Haleema loved watching those kinds of movies, and the security cameras high up on the compound swivelled to face Hans’ blurry body as he shifted to the front side.

There was no front entrance, back entrance, or any other apparent kind of entrance—the Battalion made sure that, despite the building very easily being recognised as a government base, none would gain access unless they knew specifically how.

Hans moved across the front entrance to the corner of the building. There, panels were stuck into the side, created from a thick, black-painted metal and reflecting everything like a mirror. Now every panel of the compound was set in stone. Unmoving, unwavering, like the Battalion themselves and their colonels when it came to war.

But one such panel, at knee height, jutted out slightly more. Hans pulled it out, grip strength teetering like his resolve, and a switch met him from inside. He flicked the switch, pushed the panel back inside as if nothing had occurred, and stood deadly still.

And waited.

The faint rumbling met him soon after, and then the concrete slab he’d been standing on lowered to allow him access to the building. Since the lift was essentially a slab being lowered into the ground, the terrifying sensation of being buried alive hit Hans.

After completing what he planned to do, he wouldn’t be surprised if Colonel Jackson, or others like him, took that exact action. Buried Hans alive for essentially undermining everything the Battalion stood for.

The black void surrounding him, other than the singular shaft of light receding into the space above him, ended once he reached the bottom of the lift. Light bashed his eyes despite the dark room with reflective surfaces and other lift tubes all around, and Hans stepped forwards.

As soon as he did, the concrete slab shot up at almost the speed of sound and rejoined the others as just another slab. Now, a new panel would jut out from the main building, with a new slab to stand on, and the next visitor would have to find it to gain entry into the building.

Hans cleared his security using both iris detection and fingerprint detection, as well as other biodata scans he didn’t know the intricacies of despite being a scientist, and then swept through the winding hallways, dimly lit by bulbs every hundred or so metres, until he reached his lab.

As head scientist at the Battalion, Hans did have scientists working underneath him. Each was as decorated as the other, each with decades of experience as a chemist or biologist, or whatever field they had graduated and specialised in.

But none possessed the brilliance of Hans, who conducted various experiments on his own to aid the war effort and line his pockets with more money. The scientists worked together mostly, but Hans, in a calibre of his own, had solo projects on the side.

And then he had become a Muslim—converted after running into a masjid near his house and hearing their message and listening to the Qur’an being recited as they prayed during the mesmerising sunset. And, inexplicably, the gaping hole in his heart that he’d attempted to fill with science had overflown with love for Allah.

A turn of events even someone with the intelligence of Hans hadn’t foreseen. Could never have foreseen, since hearts were guided only by Allah, the Lord of the worlds.

Hans entered his laboratory, both ice and heat surging through his veins. He needed to do what he was about to do, what he’d planned to do, since leaving home for the compound after the conversation with Haleema. Even if that pesky voice of doubt in his mind, that annoying voice that had plagued him for his entire life, spoke out about how he would end the war effort.

His fingerprint access expired in around an hour, wherein he would need to renew it by scanning his finger into the sensor again.

But Hans wasn’t banking on that. He wished to get everything done way before the hour mark, then leave before the security even realised what he had done.

Hans glanced around at his laboratory—his life’s work. And now he would tear down his greatest achievement, right from under the Battalion’s nose.

***

When Hans was a teenager, his parents had taken him back to the neighbourhood of his childhood, where he had roamed the streets whilst reading science fiction novels since the other children bullied him for wearing glasses when contact lenses were the norm for enhanced vision. Hans would block their taunting voices, unwilling to listen to the dissenters when there was a fictional world for him to escape into.

Hans’ parents had revisited those streets once more, perhaps for the hit of nostalgia it would provide, a shot of brainy chemicals that made one feel good inside. Hans felt no nostalgia, unless one could be nostalgic over being a victim for years and years.

A phenomenon he had noticed, however, was how the same place could feel different when being seen at different times. That feeling had shaken him back then, and since he was a teenager, formed those thoughts that would make up his psyche later in life. A profound experience that would manifest, as if a shot of medicine, in other areas of his existence.

And now, in his laboratory, the same effect actualised itself. The feeling that the place he had frequented every day for years and years and years was now a hell he had to escape from.

The white counters, once gleaming with the possibility of progress, meshed their exteriors together as if a sun trying to burn Hans’ irises out from his eyes. Every test tube, lining desks and cupboards in the hundreds, seemed to turn towards him as he walked through the laboratory, eying him as he sought to destroy the very thing he had been working on for over a decade. The very source of his pride that had now become his downfall.

The laboratory featured the smell of burning chemicals, a constant in the equation of scientific progress. The smell of hope, that each failed experiment would unearth a new possibility whose road led to success. Hans had been on that trajectory of success for many years, and at the end of that trajectory was failure.

Unless he acted before it was too late.

Hans slinked through under the dimly lit laboratory lights, the switches for which operated based on heat signatures, towards the storeroom in the back. There, his tools were laid out just as he liked them. Tongs on the right, hover devices on the left, clamps and other small tools towards the top, with weapons in the centre. At the bottom were generic tools like hammers and old spanners that hadn’t been used in years and years.

Hans pulled on his gloves, slipping them onto his fingers for possibly the last time. Then, he gripped a hammer as his weapon of choice, felt its weight buoy in his hands. He turned back and strode through the murk to another room, marked by a large double door with more grey than Hans’ hair from years of frustration in experimentation. Hans pulled the door open, shot inside, and locked the door behind him.

He sighed and gazed at the work he’d struggled over for the last ten years, for his entire life if he was being accurate. The test tubes stored in a cupboard to his left, locked with the safe number only known to him, held the prize of his scientific corpus.

And now Hans sought to destroy it.

He shifted through the path to the cupboard, then pushed a button on its left side. A panel opened up with a whir, and Hans glanced around despite knowing none was here besides him. Hans pushed the code in, then listened and waited as steam rose from the roof of the cupboard and the doors unlocked with a bolt sound.

Hans flicked the steel doors open and stared at the object of his desires for the last ten years. Those vials of liquid were, more than anything, a scientific marvel, a scientific miracle that Hans was tasked with destroying. The cupboard was chilled to a precise seven degrees, and the cold greeted Hans by snaking over his skin.

Hans hadn’t lied to Colonel Jackson entirely. He had produced a liquid capable of acting as a fuel whilst also storing AI within it. That AI would then manifest in the robot or other system whilst inside the liquid. No electric current was needed, only heat. And Earth had that in abundance, given it could be produced almost infinitely.

What he’d lied about was the time frame. Colonel Jackson was under the impression that Hans hadn’t finished the prototype yet, when Hans was actually already done with the entire discovery. He’d then called Colonel Jackson to tell him the good news, to cement his name in history, but the realisation of death and destruction dawned on him.

And Hans had picked saving lives right at the last moment.

He had only created seven vials of the substance, and had tested them on his own with small robots—those that currently accomplished menial tasks. He’d stripped them of the electric components, then doused the liquid infused with their software into a fuel tank. The robots then drew in fuel from the tank and worked as normal, with no issues, using their software not from electrical currents interacting with chips, but from the fuel itself.

Hans conducted the experiments alone, since his ego wanted the achievement attributed only to him.

If he destroyed the weapon that would cause death and destruction nuclear power would only dream of, then none else could replicate it, since none else possessed his level of scientific genius.

Hans pulled out the tray of vials and turned to the counter behind him. He stared at the green liquid, stared as the memories of experiments and heartbreak and unwavering determination flooded through his mind. But he banished those thoughts for what they were—a way to get him to back out of his plan. A way to deter him from what was right by presenting the hit to his legacy, to his ego.

His discovery was not without merit—certainly AI infused with fuels would help the galaxy in many ways, help reduce the number of chips being produced and preserve the environment with less electricity production and consumption. But the death of millions of innocent women and children wasn’t something Hans could endorse.

He grabbed the hammer he’d brought earlier and placed it on the counter. The thud caused a shiver to seize him, and that was when the double doors banged open. Smoke and dust shot from the hinges as the door flung itself against the opposite wall, accompanied by an almighty crash that seized Hans’ world.

When the dust had settled onto almost every surface in sight, and the bangs stopped echoing in Hans’ mind, Hans stared into the beady eyes of Colonel Jackson, whose glare could never be mistaken for anything other than the contempt the man held for Hans.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Colonel Jackson said, flanked by two robots who each were armed with guns capable of one-shot kills. Hans glanced at the robot’s eyes—bright red. They were being manned manually, from inside the cockpit, rather than through remote control.

That meant Colonel Jackson was here for business—and not the good kind, either. His profit would be Hans’ loss.

Hans grabbed his hammer, raised it above the tray of vials, but Colonel Jackson froze Hans’ limbs with a shout.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Colonel Jackson said. “We know about your lies, Hans. You have betrayed Earth with your intentions, but you possess the chance to redeem yourself.” Jackson held open arms, as if the robots armed beside him didn’t exist and he was merely here for peace talks.

But Jackson, and the wider Battalion he managed, weren’t fighting for peace. They were fighting for domination, to humiliate the other side and pillage everything they had for themselves. They were tyrants more than anything, and Hans’ ego had blinded him to that, his scientific achievements masking the evil he was assisting.

“We’ve got this entire place surrounded with guards,” Jackson said. “So hand over the vials, and we’ll let you live. Not doing so is basically a suicide attempt, and your religion doesn’t want you to do that, does it?”

Hans clenched his jaw. My religion doesn’t support your tyranny, either. Hans didn’t let go of the hammer, steadying his hand above the tray of vials. He wasn’t weak like Jackson thought. He held a strength given by The Almighty.

“These robots have reactions five times faster than you,” Jackson said with a smirk. “If you even think about hitting the vials, we’ll shoot you apart before you can even move.”

Hans gritted his teeth. They were right on that one, so Hans slowly lowered the hammer to his side. He dangled it, then dropped it. The hammer thumped the floor.

“Good,” Jackson said. “Now, the tubes are shatter resistant and airtight. Why don’t you bring them over here like a good boy?”

Jackson was a scumbag, with an ego the size of the Milky Way, but he wasn’t smart. Hans picked the tray up, then walked around the table he’d stood behind. He stopped a few feet away from Jackson, then stared at the Battalion leader’s eyes.

“There’s just one thing you’re missing,” Hans said.

Jackson’s smirk didn’t let up, valiant till the end. “And what’s that?”

“This substance doesn’t work with shatter resistant vials.”

Before Jackson could let off another sentence, Hans smashed the entire tray, and the vials, into the ground. The glass shattered instantly, breaking into a thousand pieces that littered the laboratory and dug into Hans’ trouser leg.

But he felt no pain. Only relief. The relief of saving lives. The relief of doing the right thing in the face of adversity, as the Prophet (SAW) had done.

Then a bullet from the robots sunk into his arm. When it hadn’t phased through his skin, Hans realised it was a tranquiliser and not a plasma shot.

His consciousness faded as he slumped amongst the shattered glass, and the world turned to black as Jackson let off a string of curse words fouler than the contaminated metal seeping across the floor.

***

Hans opened his eyes and found his arms bound together, as were his legs. The cuffs were metal, tempered steel to be exact, and tight enough to restrict blood flow. Hans attempted to move, but his hands and feet were attached to the wall, to locks that wished to restrain him as much as Jackson did.

But Jackson hadn’t stopped him from destroying the weapon. And Hans had succeeded. He’d officially destroyed the substance he called Kremin, though the Battalion weren’t aware of the unofficial name.

The room he slumped in was bare, and the chill seeping through chattered his teeth. His hair was pulled apart, dishevelled, like spikes against his clammy forehead. The thin lights, in strips across the upper walls, glared at him in interrogation, in questioning.

Why did you destroy Earth’s greatest weapon? the light was asking. What was it all for?

But Hans knew his answers, and knew they were true. And he would return to Allah with that—his decision was made. Even if it killed him.

Because he knew where he was. Knew what fate awaited him at the hands of the Battalion. And he was ready to face it head on, no matter the consequences.

Hans’ breathed in deeply, let the musty scent in the air of garbage and dried blood flood his nose and mouth. And then he sighed, letting the nerves leave him all at once.

A thud rang out from the door on the room’s far side. It cracked open with a bang, and in came Jackson with a rifle attached to his arm. An ugly expression and two robots flanking him to boot.

“You know where you’re going?” Jackson said, a question disguised as a statement. Since they both knew where Hans was heading.

To what the Battalion named the Slammer. The term had previously, once long ago, been used to refer to Earth’s prison systems. Now it was used for torture chambers, pods that Hans himself helped design a decade earlier.

Jackson smirked, raised the butt of his rifle, and slammed it into Hans’ forehead. Blackness fizzed into his vision, and Hans went out cold again.

***

A hissing woke Hans from his fitful slumber. An empty slumber, with no dreams or nightmares. Though, he awoke to a nightmare, being trapped in a machine akin to a pod in which athletes slept or test subjects were kept during military experiments.

Except this pod was different. Rather than being imbued with fresh oxygen and blood trackers, as well as other automatic medicines administered by AI in a heartbeat, this pod was filled with torture machines galore. Each side had knives, the sharpest in the universe, primed for slicing into flesh. Tear gas and other chemical weapons stationed themselves near Hans’ head, which was locked into place with an iron clamp. The pressurisation canisters at the pod’s base could explode a human head if turned far enough.

But Jackson, who Hans saw through the glass window of the pod, wasn’t playing games.

“I’m not wasting time here,” Jackson said, voice dulled by the glass barrier—this one was shatter resistant. “You know what the real substance is, and you’re going to tell us how to make it. That’s the only way you’ll live. The only way you’ll see your family again.”

Hans smirked this time. His hands and legs were bound once more, and the scent of his own piss floated through to meet his nose. “I’m not saying a thing,” Hans said, knowing his voice was on loudspeaker since he was the one who designed the pod in the first place.

“You know what this pod can do,” Jackson said. “The object of your own creation being your death machine. And you’re still willing not to talk?”

“For the truth, I’m willing to do anything.”

“Even death?”

Hans breathed in the pangs of his own piss, the fresh scent of his resolve mixed in. “Even death,” he confirmed.

Jackson laughed. “You’re stupider than I thought.” He stepped through the room filled with other pods to the control terminal, then powered on the machine. “Well, let’s test that claim, shall we?”

Jackson lifted a switch—the destruction switch—and flicked the lever. Instantly, a vile substance began filling the pod. A toxin-induced gas that, in careful doses, would incapacitate a person’s ability to function and kill them with painful palpitations.

But only in the right doses, so the time limit was ticking. The death pod, the Slammer, would slowly fill with the gas, killing the prisoner in real time, but the capacity existed for the air to be sucked back in before the damage tipped over into death.

Jackson was attempting to scare Hans into submission. But the scare wouldn’t work. Not on someone with Hans’ resolve.

“Tell us, Hans,” Jackson said. “Tell us the truth and we will let you live. You can experiment, and we will allow you to receive recognition for your work.”

Hans smirked again. Jackson was attempting to play to Hans’ worldly desires, not knowing that, as a Muslim, Hans’ true purpose transcended all of that. Jackson just couldn’t fathom that fact since he didn’t believe in Allah, only in himself.

“You’re going to a personal hell,” Jackson said, “and so is your family.”

Hans knew his family was safe and Jackson was merely playing a bluff as a last resort. Hans and his wife discussed the dangerous nature of his work with the Battalion. They knew the Battalion weren’t above imprisoning scientists for leverage, nor using their family as bait against them through torture and kidnapping.

So Hans had coined the phrase that he would be saving lives, something non-existent in his profession and within the Battalion. And when Haleema replied that he should go and save lives, it meant she understood the message. The necessary shell companies were already set in place filled with enough money to live for decades, with houses pre-bought in remote towns towards the outskirts of Earth, and some even on nearby colony planets like Mars and Venus.

Lilliard and Haleema were likely already in a remote safe house, perhaps even off the planet due to link travel, drinking tea with their new neighbours and knowing that their lives, clad with new identities, were the ones that had been saved. Knowing Hans had saved them for his ultimate sacrifice.

“Tell us what you know, Hans,” Jackson said, and then the palpitations began seizing Hans. The air sizzled, and the smell of piss intensified, and Hans’ entire body contracted thrice a second as his blood began boiling in response to the poison infiltrating his airways.

Hans had minutes left to live. Minutes left before the dose was fatal and he would meet his demise, then meet his Creator.

“You know the truth, Hans,” Jackson said, voice now beaming through a speaker in the Slammer. Reverberating in Hans’ mind. Hans detected desperation, so knew the colonel was running out of time. And Hans was running out of life.

“Tell us, Hans,” Jackson said. Again, desperation.

But Hans clenched every muscle in his body and tensed as hard as he could. “I won’t,” he screamed, voice tearing at the last moment. Spurts of blood shocked the metal clamps around his arms and legs as his body began imploding from the poison.

He was at the last stages now, the stage no prisoner, ever before, had reached due to the pain and suffering endured. They always broke before this stage, spilled the secrets and gave the Battalion what they wanted. And that was by design.

“This clearly hasn’t worked, so let’s see if something worse will make you talk,” Jackson said, and Hans spied him, through the red film of his vision, pull the lever switch back.

But it wouldn’t work, because the Slammer had never been designed to reach this level of gas release. That was the intention, after all. That any prisoner who reached the last stages deserved to die whether they told the truth or not, but colonels like Jackson forgot that function since no prisoner ever survived that far.

None, other than Hans.

“No, no,” Jackson shouted, fiddling with the controls, voice laced with worry, tension over the knowledge of humanity’s most promising weapon dying with its creator. “How do I turn this damn thing off? Don’t you want to live, Hans, you imbecile?”

“You can’t…turn it…off,” Hans said, and then the palpitations grew more violent, shaking his entire body. Rocking his vision, his smell, flooding his mouth with an avalanche of clotted blood as he coughed uncontrollably.

Hans recited the shahadah—Laa ilaha illAllah—beneath his breath. His death was near, drawing closer like a blanket, and the pain then disappeared, suddenly. And Hans felt, oddly, at peace despite his trembling body and spurting blood.

Hans repeated the shahadah as death touched him, and he hoped Allah would accept his final efforts and enter him and his family into Paradise, into the gardens of Jannah.

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JazakAllahu Khayran for reading.