The fall of Brazilia

The fall of Brazilia

By Patrick James Cappa

Ragged storms ride the coast below as Slio Gomez walks through the muggy, stinking air of the Favela that stands below his more civilized neighborhood. A few men sit in a tin shanty on the side of the trail, noisily playing "Guerede", a simple gambling and drinking game. They drink Pinga, a simple and potent local alcohol. From most passersby they would have solicited charity, or perhaps challenged them to a game of Guerede, but not Slio. As Slio approaches, they hunker down and grow quiet, pretending to be part of the wall behind them in the hopes that the predator walking past won't see them. Slio smiles gently to them, a disarming smile set in a scarred but handsome, sun darkened face. His smile sends chills down their spines, and all three of them breathe a sigh of relief as he passes by. Once past, one of the men subtly touches his thumb and forefinger together to indicate he thinks Slio is an asshole. The men quietly laugh at this rude and defiant gesture. It's a statement they would never openly make to Slio. It would likely be their last act on earth.

Slio, you see, is an enforcer, and a damn good one. He was hired by the Bortella Grande Corporation when he was 14 years old. He was originally hired to run messages as a simple errand boy. Being ruthless themselves, they quickly recognized Slio's penchant for bravery and ferocity, and he was promoted to gun caddie, under the Late Jorge Doskoro. Gun caddies are apprentice enforcers, and they graduate to enforcer if they survive the 5 year training. Doskoro was a frighteningly brutal man who taught Slio all the possible ways to wage war, conduct corporate espionage, and frighten and harass human beings. Such skills are highly valued at Bortella Grande.

Bortella Grande Corporation, also known as "BG", runs the last powered factory on Brazil's east coast. They maintain a military computing array, and a server farm for military use. They also manufacture many important things: war boats, map readers, electric handguns, electric rifles and sniper computers, batteries, engineering and police computers, cameras, electric bikes, electric chainsaws, and radios, among many other things. Such commodities fetch extraordinarily high prices on the open market. However, most of these wonderful items go to Brazil's fragmented and failing military government to assist in war efforts. These days the war is mostly against insurgents and domestic terrorists, as the real enemy in the Orient has been quite effectively subdued. The remainder of these wonderful things from a bygone age go to the town's corrupt elite, mostly enforcers and government men, and the upper management of Bortella Grande, who live in fancy homes in the hills above Prenal. 

The town, Prenal, is the tattered and war-torn remains of a once great Brazilian city. Now mostly a poor fishing village in the bay below, and what remains of an industrial town in the hills above. Prenal managed to survive the last war better than most. The war is often simply called "lo foi fin" in Brazilian, which means the "last war", and equivalently, the "final war", though some still call it world war 3. Most other Brazilian cities fared much, much worse, and so now, Prenal is, sadly, the industrial heart of the Brazilian empire. The empire is old, sick and failing, and so is Prenal.

Prenal has that one remaining sprawling BG factory complex, and various restaurants, artisan shops, smithy's, potters, and glassblowers that all depend upon the wealth the factory brings in. 

Surrounding the town are massive favelas: ramshackle, piecemeal huts and homes that house the workers and indentured servants of BG, but also house fishermen, servants and tradesmen. In the favelas, chickens, cattle and dogs run loose, alongside packs of orphans and gangs of thugs. Since the military has no interest in the poor that behave themselves, they never bother to police the favelas. A loose system of governance has been established in the favelas that can be summed up as "might makes right".

Those who are lucky enough to live above the town are the wealthy, though their wealth is nothing compared to before the war. They might have servants and horses, and many hold land in the interior of the country, maybe farms and ranches, but nobody has cars, TV's or telephones anymore. The wars, a desperate lack of resources, and the slow, vicious decline of the empire took those away from even the wealthiest Brazilians. There is no gasoline left, and almost no heavy industry outside of BG's factories. Still, the wealthy get to run what's left of the government and the military. But things have been changing.

Things are getting even worse, if that were possible. Taxes too high, food prices too high, corruption too high, opportunity too low, and a strong and disenfranchised youth. A recipe for revolution, and lately, revolution has been creeping into the edges; rumors and gossip of insurgents and terrorists starting to win battles. This is a revolution, Slio silently opines, that would surely be crushed by the empire; crushed brutally by men like Slio. Slio would relish the opportunity.

This thought drives the strange smile on Slio's face as he shows his creds, and enters the gated neighborhood where he lives. He knows in his heart he would likely sit on the losing end of a revolution, as his worldview and profession require that he hate people, especially poor people, with chips on their shoulders. His job often involves the selective "removal" of "disruptive" people, most of them poor and disenfranchised. To him, they pose a threat to his country, to his way of life. He is happy to dispose of them. 

In front of him, his beautiful house looms. He doesn't realize it, but this is the last time he will gaze upon the lovely sloping lines of the stucco walls and earthy ceramic tile roofs of this place. The fine wrought iron fence, covered in ruthless spikes, that surrounds his palatial home. The fantastically groomed garden that lines his front walk way. The stunningly beautiful women that constitute what may be called his harem. All pass his eyes unnoticed. He has marching orders.

He is in and out in a few minutes, quickly kissing his favorite wife goodbye. She is beautiful beyond words: golden skin, long legs, childbearing hips and curly black hair. She enjoys her position as lead wife and might even love Slio in some weird way, but she still hopes, every time he leaves, that he never returns. Lead wife just means fewer beatings. She rubs a bruise on her ribs as she silently watches him go.  

He has his trek bag, always full and ready to go at a moment's notice. In his hand he carries the fine electric rifle that earned him all this ridiculous wealth, and flopping from one side of his belt is a steel machete that has tasted human blood many times, and opposite that, his handgun, a small, old-fashioned center-fire revolver that is only useful from close range. The rounds in the revolver were hand packed by Slio himself. Gunpowder rounds are hard to get these days.

He walks back down the hill into the town proper to meet his own gun caddie, Armon, a few other enforcers, and the technicians they are to escort. The men playing Guerede stare open mouthed at Slio's war gear, then exchange worried glances at each other. 

Down the hill, along the main street, Slio sees Armon leaning against a railing with the other gun boys. Armon is chewing Motato, a pungent mixture of cannabis, coca leaves, tobacco, and several local grasses and herbs. A rich man's drug and pass-time, and he is showing off, now of all times. Preening like an idiot.  

Armon, Slio's gun caddie and still merely a boy of 17, is wearing the peasant shirt his late father gave him, but the technical pants of a field enforcer: waterproof, snakebite-resistant, fitted pants with many pockets and a built in gun holster. His young, angular brown face is eager, and a little on edge, probably from the Motato, and he is clean shaven and obviously ready to get on with it. A 100 kilometer journey into the grasslands and mountains to the Northwest is a long journey, especially when escorting someone. 

The sun baked, battle hardened enforcer greets Armon with a hearty slap to the face. "Spit it out, fool!" He says. In the hybrid language, "Brazilian", that descended from Portuguese, Spanish, and English, it comes out "Le scupe, fowl!" 

Armon, never daring to show a scowl to his teacher/adopted father/master, dutifully and nonchalantly spits out what would cost a half day's wage to anyone in the Favelas. A beggar sitting nearby will later pick up the wet wad and sell it for an old chicken, and he will eat well that night. 

Armon, completely unashamed, even proud, of his wealth and profession, wordlessly ties Slio's trek bag to his own and shoulders the load effortlessly. Together they walk past the heavily armed guard shacks that ring BG, and pass several eerily quiet production facilities, to get to the large BG building that could be called "engineering". The other gun caddies steal glances at Slio as they walk. He is a hero to them; a battle hardened soldier that commands fear and respect. 

Inside and up a rusting flight of stairs, they meet with what's left of BG's field engineering team. 

...

The briefing doesn't take long. Afterwards, once on horseback and headed Northwest with Armon and the other caddies riding point and the engineers safely surrounded by 3 enforcers, Slio reflects on it... 

Communications with BG's western team went dark almost a month ago. The power went out two and a half weeks later. BG was able to keep this silent for a couple days more, but eventually word got out to the workers that the western team was likely dead and the power was down. The workers rioted when they were "temporarily reprieved" from work for the fourth day in a row. A fire they set, which would have been automatically controlled if the factory had power, had instead raged long enough to completely gut the metals reclamation plant, severely damaging BG's recycling capacity. The first engineering team, sent out on day one of the outage to follow the pipeline west, never reported and never returned. Worse still, a group of terrorists, "The Kingdom of Bo-Aza", they called themselves, were launching raiding parties against Brazil's military positions to the North of Prenal, attacking what remained of Sao Paulo. Without the military hardware, communications and strategic computing power BG could provide, the Brazilians were at a huge disadvantage. The terrorists were emboldened, as if they knew exactly how weak Brazil had become.

Slio, thinking on this, is impressed at how well BG and the local powers had suppressed this information. If not for the power outage, and his subsequent mobilization in quelling the riots, Slio wouldn't have known any of it. Fires and riots were too commonplace to cause concern, even in the nicer parts of town. But a power outage had never occurred. The dam and electrical transmission pipeline hadn't failed in Slio's whole thirty-something years of life, and he had never heard of such a thing. He isn't quite sure how BG had kept news of the outage from spreading through the whole countryside. Threats and intimidation only go so far; perhaps people are afraid of the real consequences of the power going out. There's a saying in Brazil: "don't talk of death, or he might appear".

Slio, and the other enforcers, Kiez and Martinez, are to keep the engineers safe as they follow the transmission pipeline and find the breech and fix it. Three enforcers and three engineers makes this an expensive trip for BG. This is obviously important. 

The engineers have a large supply of technical equipment on horses and a double horse rig with a large spool of high conductance electrical transmission line on top. It is assumed that the separatists must have gained access to the secure pipeline, after disabling the safety features somehow, and cut the transmission lines by hand, which is a suicide mission for whoever attempts it. But maybe they were zealous enough. Slio had heard of suicide warriors using airplanes as guided bombs from his enforcer training under Doskoro, but he wasn't sure if he actually believed it. What was the point of fighting if one's death was assured?

Of course, eventually one's death was always assured. 

...

The first day goes well, although the engineers find no power and no forced breeches anywhere in the pipeline. They sleep under a beautiful sheen of stars that night. The engineers seem nervous and edgy, and Slio and Armon leave them mostly alone, only issuing security orders and opinions on camp set up. Armon takes first watch with one of the other caddies. 

As Slio falls asleep, he can hear Armon bragging about Slio to the boy. He tells him the story he always tells, about Slio's expert quelling of the Argentan independence movement in the south by systematically killing every person that held power within the movement. It made him mildly famous because state radio played up the project, telling everyone that Slio had traveled over a thousand kilos through Buenos Aires and the Andes mountains, and killed a hundred men, all for Brazilia (and, of course, a fat payday). Slio enjoyed the attention, and the claims were essentially accurate, in both number and substance. In his mind, he kills for Brazil as much as he does for money. Brazil has been good to him. 

Slio wakes early, and calmly sits in the cool morning air and watches the sun crest the horizon. Armon now sleeps quietly beside him while the older enforcer, Kiez, stands guard. In the dim light, Slio reflects: This should be an easy job. They had managed nearly 15 kilometers today, even with the head engineer, a slight man named Aresco, stopping every kilo to plug in his computer and run diagnostics on the pipeline. The other two engineers, Pepi and Marina, didn't seem to do anything but sit patiently, watching their peer work. The insurgency, the Bo's, as they were commonly called, should be farther to the North and wouldn't attack a band with 3 enforcers anyway. There are no settlements between Prenal and the mountains where the dam is located. An old, rotting road winds lazily through the high grass. This job should be "bana bread", as the locals say. A piece of cake...

Slio, however, finds his jaw clenched with anxiety. He finds he is often resting his gun hand against the hilt of his pistol, as if waiting for things to go wrong. He feels like, maybe, things have already gone wrong. 

...

However, 5 days pass uneventfully as they make their way through the softly rolling midlands of the state of Parana, slowly gaining elevation. The bombed out ruins of the once massive city of Curitiba are barely visible through the haze of the lowlands in the distance. Small patches of trees, the remnants of once great jungles, still cling to the Southern slopes of the hills here. In the dry heat, grass now encroaches even on these old patches, drowning out the jungles, killing the old world. 

The initial nervousness of the engineers is slowly replaced with a friendly calm, as though they were just on holiday. This only serves to increase the foreboding Slio feels, though he hides it well. The female engineer, a small, round faced woman named Marina, slowly warms to Armon, and begins teaching him bits of engineering and historical information, perhaps as a mothering instinct, or she sees his potential as an engineer, or there's an attraction there, or maybe just because she's the type of woman that prefers to talk often. 

Slio already knows Armon would make a great engineer. When Slio took on Armon as caddie, Armon showed an almost unnatural ability to disassemble, clean, and reassemble Slio's handgun. A year into his apprenticeship, Armon convinced Slio to let him file and reshape several of the parts of the trigger mechanism of the old relic. Afterwards, Slio could fire all 8 shots as fast as he could fan the hammer, and it never, ever jammed. 

Marina talks often of the engineering marvel the pipeline represents. To Slio, it is an unremarkable black tube about 4 meters in diameter that sits mostly buried, popping up out of the brown soil every kilometer to meet a small switching station, where Aresco plugs in his machine. Marina explains to Armon how a conductor works, how concentric rings of polysilicate armor protect the conducting line, how induction rings at the terminals tell them what's going on in the line below. Armon, not at all trained in physics, but already well trained in the art of war, asks her about the polysilicate armor. 

"Well, as enforcers, I'm sure you know of the terrible weapons of the orient-occident wars? Attacking energy infrastructure became the surest way to cripple your enemies during the last war (lo foi fin, she says), and the ship-fired kinetic weapons of the Indios were designed to destroy infrastructure as well as people. This," she waves towards the pipeline, "was Brazilia's response. An indestructible energy conduit." Pride beams on her face.

Slio, riding slightly behind the two of them, rolls his eyes and lets loose a small, disapproving "Snik". Saying something is indestructible is a great way to convince the universe to destroy that thing. He suddenly pictures the Bo-azans, drunkenly dancing around the pipeline like primitives with their blowguns and crossbows, gathering around a portable plasma cutter or something, slowly eating through the armoring. The universe loves irony.

Marina looks back at him and smiles. "It won the war. It kept the factories alive, and the war machine running. It has kept Prenal running for an age."

"Yes, and it has been good to Prenal, but nothing is indestructible." Slio remarks confidently. 

Marina shrugs, "Well, nearly indestructible, anyway. We wouldn't be out here if it was actually indestructible." She pops her lips at Armon with a defiant and flirtatious look in her eyes. Armon smiles and looks back at Slio with a goofy smile on his face. Slio keeps his face stern and unreadable. Armon's face grows a frown, but not at Slio. Armon is looking behind Slio, beyond him.

Slio quickly turns, following his gaze, his handgun already in his hand. But Armon stops him. "No, no, I just thought I saw something, but I didn't." 

But Armon's young eyes are right. 3 kilos off to the Southeast, the high grass is bent at an odd angle, and defying the soft wind. Slio whips his sniper computer and rifle out and brings it to his eyes, like looking through binoculars attached to a gun barrel. He pulls in the reins of his horse to slow her down.

At first he sees nothing as the old, wretched machine boots up, but then the scene appears on screen. He zooms dramatically, focusing on the grassy hill. There is definitely something hiding in the grass, but it's impossible to tell what it is unless it moves. Two birds rise up from the area, flying Northwest, towards them. It looks like a large animal lying in the grass. There aren't any large wild animals in the grass midlands, as far as Slio knows. They're all long dead.

For what feels like an hour, he sits and waits, but nothing more moves in his field of vision. The rest of the party, now full stop, nervously watches Slio and alternately, the horizon, as if a dragon were about to appear there. Kiez and the other enforcer, Martinez, have their own war computers up. Kiez gruffly says "nothing in infrared."

Finally, he sniffs and scrunches his face as he lowers the computer from his eyes. His rifle couldn't hit a target from 3 kilos anyway. 

He looks at Armon. "Good eyes. There is something there, but it's not moving." Armon nods as his eyes pull away and slide up the small frame of Marina. "It's good to be careful", he says to her, as the two spooked doves fly past overhead.

...

Another two days pass uneventfully, and Slio never again sees any evidence of someone tailing them. The high hills behind which the reservoir sits are now visible through the haze, only a kilo or two away. The party comes to a larger junction in the pipeline, a small building that reminds Slio of a guard house. The pipeline forms a cross here, splitting out to in four directions, though only to the southeast, in Prenal, is there anything at the end of the line.

Aresco stops his horse and pulls Slio aside. Aresco tells him, "We must camp now and run larger tests here. There's no power anywhere in the lower line. I don't think any of us were thinking we'd get this far." Aresco's lean face looks concerned. He looks older, too. Lines slice out from his squinting eyes, and his brow folds inward and down. Slio sees a familiar look in his eyes.

Fear. The long sighted fear, the intelligent fear, the burning hot fear of the mind. Fear not just that one may die, since that fear is easy, but the fear that one's life was, in the end, worth little. That wind blown ash is all that will remain of a man's life. It's a fear that is almost always true, if you wait long enough.

It's obvious he never thought that maybe the pipeline was permanently dead. That something has gone terribly wrong, and they can't fix it. The knowledge, money and manpower to build a new pipeline no longer exists. 

Slio, looking into Aresco's brown eyes, sees for the first time the future without the pipeline, without the energy from the reservoir, without the factory. The end, finally, of the Brazilian military, of the Brazilian empire, of industry, of Prenal. The end of his civilization. Without the war computers they all rely on, the rebellion would finally win, and the Bo's would march into Prenal, kill the rich, and disperse the rest to small farming holds in the wilds. 

And that would be the end of it. There's no one else left to carry the torch. At least according to state media, Asia is mostly smoking ruins (the triumph of Brazilia's war machine). Australia and North America are mostly waste lands of desert interspersed with peasant farms and small towns. Europe, once the bastion of freedom and industry, is still alive, at least in the north, but not interested in technology, industry, or freedom; they have returned to the fiefdoms of old, to internal dramas of war, royalty, statehood and kingship. Africa is shattered and dying, embroiled in civil wars that date from before the last war.

So there it is, in this old engineer's eyes, Slio sees the truth. We all go back to the old ways. The old, old ways. The dark ages. 

Slio thinks: "this cannot be".

...

Over many hours, they run the tests. Most are only mildly interesting to watch. But then, as the afternoon winds down to evening, they set up for "the big test", as Aresco puts it. Pepi, the other engineer, has a large strange looking set of wires and metal coils out, and is hooking them up, one by one, to attachments in the floor of the building, and one large wire leads outside and is staked into the ground. Pepi is yelling things to Marina and Aresco, who are taking notes and working, feverishly, it seems, on their computers. Then, he is suddenly done, and comes out, wiping sweat from his brow. Aresco nods to him, checks his engineering computer and says "3000 ohms at 120 hertz". Pepi enters something on his computer. It buzzes momentarily.

There is a large white flash, and a crack like lightning too close. Thunder follows almost immediately. Smoke rises from the line staked outside. In the distance to the northwest, a deep rumble. A buzzing follows that Slio would later realize is the proximity alarms of the war computers. Slio's handgun is immediately in his hand. It's apparent nobody was expecting that. Marina stumbles and falls backwards, landing hard on her butt. Aresco, wide eyed, says "critical reverse fault?" In Brazilian, slurred together, it comes out "revras critifalla?"

Those words are his last words on earth. The thin whistle of a bolt breaks the stunned silence, and then the soft thump of the arrow hitting Aresco's torso. Slio, so well trained that he moves faster than thought, turns and fires almost immediately at the dark shape in the tall grass. Kiez and Martinez are almost as fast on the draw and add their bullets to Slio's. The shape in the grass falls over, gurgling. More bolts whistle through, each finding an target with another soft "thup" sound. Slio drops to the ground, and rolls into the grass. Then, stunned silence again until Aresco wheezes unintelligibly, stumbles and falls over, dead.

"The Bo's are here, get in the building!" Slio yells. Armon grabs Marina and Pepi's arms and runs to the building, almost dragging the two engineers behind him. Slio calmly surveys his surroundings, waiting for more. Kiez and Martinez are both down, and one of their caddies as well. The other caddies seem to have run off into the wild.

A small "thup" noise, and Slio turns left and fires. His eyes catch the eyes of a small boy, probably no more than 15 years old, and then the eyes are gone, replaced with a fine mist of blood as the large caliber bullet removes most of the boy's head. A elaborately carved blowgun drops from the child's now lifeless hands.

But it's too late. Slio feels the sting of the dart in his neck. The boy's aim was good. He sighs as he pulls the small wooden dart out.

The metallic taste is almost immediate. A sense of sick irony enters Slio's mind; Taka grass. He's used this poison before. A byproduct of old genetic modifications of wheat, the root extract of taka grass is a highly effective, but slow acting renal toxin. It's the Bo's preferred hunting method because it metabolizes after death so prey can be cooked and eaten. Taka poisoning is also reversible. It requires drinking ridiculous amounts of water, but it's possible to survive it. The problem is, if you don't know you've been poisoned, it only takes a few minutes before the taste is gone, and then you get strange symptoms that progress to death over the next few hours.

Slio, well hidden in the tall grass, opens his war computer and sets it to ambush mode. After a moment, it detects four heart beats in the grass, and three in the guard shack. Slio carefully tags the attacker's positions on the screen, raises his rifle, and fires three shots at each position, in quick succession. The gun and computer automatically compensate for his movements and fine tune his aim. Grass blades flying apart mark the bullet's trajectories. 

After a moment of waiting, he looks back down. Nothing alive out there now. 

This was obviously a war party following their movements, but the Bo's know what enforcers are capable of, and wouldn't have normally attacked in such low numbers. The critical fault must have spooked them into attacking. 

Slio slowly backs into the small hut, scanning the horizon, and once inside, closes the door and looks down at his charges huddled on the floor. Marina is crying and Armon is trying to console her. Pepi looks grim. "Aresco?" he asks. Slio shakes his head, and Pepi sighs, then waves his head at Marina. "She took a dart in her arm." Slio looks at her, as her small, round, tearful face looks up at him, pleading. "Me, too. It's Taka, so it's reversible. You need to drink lots of water. We don't have enough water for both of us. We need to get to the reservoir, now!" She brightens visibly as they help her up. He adds "The Bo's are dead. The others are dead or deserted." Her smile fades. 

They unhook the large cart of engineering equipment, and leave it at the scene of the battle. Now each person has their own horse. Slio forces down 4 liters of water, and makes Marina drink even more, wiping out their water supply. And then they ride west, up the now steepening slopes of the Serradomar mountains, towards the Reze do Diabo, the largest reservoir on the 2 continents of Occident Amero.

The thunder of the test must have warned any Bo's in the vicinity, and speed is of the essence, so they openly gallop their horses up the winding road, cutting the corners of the switchbacks where the trail allows. 

At the top of the next hill, the trees falls away and the view opens up, and Slio's hope sinks. Camp smoke in the valley, from several fires, almost surely Bo-aza camps. But standing defiant above that: the dam, a monstrosity the size and shape of which Slio has never dreamt.

Stretching away at least 3 kilos in each direction is a great earthen mass of adobe and concrete, long and straight, with a lazily sloping downward curvature that is difficult to look at without getting dizzy. Occasional windows and boxy building shapes punctuate the dam's slopes. Some buildings are burnt out, all of them have their glass windows broke. One is currently burning from the reverse fault, as it caused a capacitor bank to explode. At the ends of the dam, hazy through 3 kilos of air, the edges mate seamlessly with the hillside, which then curves off into the distance. 

Transmission pipelines snake out from the lower ramparts. Three wander towards the ruins of Curitiba, and off in the lowlands near the long dead city, Slio can now see the scars of what must have been a massive ordnance drop. The transmission lines slice resolutely through the area, and huge black and brown craters surround them. 

One crater, encroaching on the dead city, is much larger than the others, nearly 5 kilos across, and looks almost like an oblique asteroid impact basin. Slio gawks at it as his horse takes him down into the valley. It is the fabled "Vidysekkar shot": the remnants of the primary kinetic round of the Indio capital ship Vidysekkar. The shot was always an oblique hit, because the massive round was fired skyward from the other side of the planet, and orbited earth several times before hitting its target sideways with frightening precision. The ship was a renowned city killer. That ship, it is said, killed more people in the orient-occident wars than all previous wars combined. It broke the back of northern Amero by obliterating every city over a million people. It was a massive floating railgun, powered by hundreds of solar and thorium energy sources on a flotilla of supply boats that would scatter like roaches at the first sign of trouble. Sinking Vidysekkar's energy supply boats required a massive dedicated fleet, and took two years, during which time the interval between volleys got longer and longer, eventually stopping all together. It was a massive win for the occident, and turned the tide of the war. The Vidysekkar still floats, long abandoned, in the Orient Ocean. 

The view drops from his sight as they ride back into the trees in the valley. Slio can hear shouting now in the camps, so he readies his rifle and powers up his war computer, ready to start killing the Bo's as they appear in the clearing of the road. He feels his heart pumping frantically, spreading the poison through his body as he rides. He already feels the tightness in his abdomen, the first spasms of pain in his head and gut. 

But no Bo-aza appear as they ride through the camps. Only silence and the smell of cooking fires greet them as they ride through and on up the dam road. Slio's head feels tight now, and he sees Marina slowly slumping in her saddle. She's smaller, and so the toxin hits her harder. He rides up to her as a show of solidarity, but up close, he can see she isn't doing well. She's pale, with a dull, pained look on her face. 

They ride fast up the hill, Slio and Marina in front, Armon and Pepi behind. Slio can see people following on foot below, but the horses give them enough of a lead that he can focus on getting water before worrying about them. He can see behind him that the men wear no shirts, and carry crossbows. They are definitely the Bo-aza. He realizes that he will pass out soon, even if he gets water. Armon will have to defend them. 

As if to confirm his worries, as they near the top of the hill, Marina slides sideways off her mount, and goes tumbling through the thick grass on the side of the road, luckily stopping before she reaches the steeper incline of the side of the dam. Slio doesn't slow down, but yells back to Armon to protect her while he gets water. 

Then Slio crests the hill, as excitement and pain surge equally in him. And he looks out, not on a massive lake, but on a brown mud flat, completely devoid of water. He sees a river, far off on the horizon, meander through the dead lake, and exit through the side of a hill. The sides of the hill appears freshly excavated. The Bo's have destroyed the lake, not the pipeline. 

He stops his horse, and drops down off her. It's over. 

He looks back at Armon and Marina, now being surrounded by Bo-aza. His pained and scowling face, reflecting the late day shine of the wet, brown mud flat, tells Armon all he needs to know, and Armon throws down his gun, and drops to his knees. He points to Marina and Slio and speaks to the Bo's. 

Slio can't hear what they're saying, but they're saying something. His head is buzzing wildly. Armon yells to Slio to put down the gun. Slio, now too dizzy to stand, complies by falling over unconscious. 

...

Slio awakens to the flavor of green chlorophyll in his mouth. He tries to get up but is unable to. His gut is in knots, and his head throbs. He's bound to a large slab of wood by heavy hempen rope. He tries to speak, but his mouth is full of something green and slimy. His eyes are crusted, and his muscles are sore.

Marina is tied up nearby, also on a large wooden slab. She is unconscious, and breathes noisily from her nose. What appears to be a half cactus pokes out of her mouth.  Slio then realizes that's what's stuffed in his own mouth as well. 

They are in a gladed forest. Armon and Pepi are nowhere nearby. There is a Bo sitting against a tree nearby. He notices Slio's movements and calls out in a language Slio hasn't heard before. 

Moments later, a large man, darker skinned than most Brazilians and Bo's, approaches Slio, talking low with the Bo that was watching over them. Slio looks at him defiantly until he pulls a large bone and wood blade from his belt, bringing it slowly up to Slio's eyes. He holds it there a moment, hovering above Slio's head, then he swiftly grabs and pulls the cactus from out of Slio's mouth with the blade. He wipes it on Slio's arm and puts it away. 

"Hmm, impressive," the man smiles, showing white teeth against his black face, "you never even flinched." Slio coughs cactus flesh from his throat, as the man continues with a strange, unfamiliar accent, "you are an enforcer. You killed several of ours in the grasses. Your caddie, and the cactus blood, saved your life. The others, well, they have done nothing wrong but exist under the shoes of the empire. But you..." he waves his hand through the air dramatically, "you are famous murderer. Had we known, you would have died at the dam."

"Yes, I am an enforcer. I am a protector of Brazilia. I killed, yes, but I killed yours from self defense. That's why I was poisoned. By a young boy, who died bravely." Slio says haltingly, but defiantly.

The man snorts derisively. "Bravery is foolishness and arrogance renamed. Devan, nor his father Gorge, will be here to help the kingdom, nor the others, either. Bravery! Ha! You kill them, then honor their deaths? You are murderer, not warrior!"

Slio asks "then why am I alive?" 

The man considers this, tapping the hilt of his knife in his belt, as if to say "good question!" But he replies slowly, "your life belongs to the Governor of Surbo. She will decide. Word has already been sent."

"Surbo?" Slio asks. 

"Yes, this is southern Bo-aza, the state of Surbo, formerly held by Brazilia. Now it is the kingdom. We live the old way, without machines that none understand. A single man must be able to build something entirely with his own hands in a year or less for it to be allowed. No dams, no roads, no factories, no rifles." He holds up Slio's war computer. "No machines like this."

Slio feels the heat rise in his face. He screams through his hoarse throat "Asshole, this is Brazil!" ("Cabron! Ese Brazilia!" echoes through camp).  

The man throws the computer on the ground and tries to step on it. The hardy construction refuses to break, and his foot is now hurt, as evidenced by the grimace he makes. He picks it up and smacks Slio across the face with it, drawing blood and dizzying him. He smiles, as he turns and walks away, and throws the computer into the woods. 

A few hours later, Marina groggily wakes up and they immediately pick her up on her slab of wood, and carry her off. 

For the next two days, they feed Slio a soft, mushy paste that tastes like banas and cheese. He feels better with each passing hour. He never sees anyone from his party. Every few hours, a guard comes and checks his ropes to ensure they're tight.  

At dusk on the third day, a group of Bo's come and pick up Slio and carry him into the center of camp, propping him up against a tree. The black skinned man comes and sits beside him, smiling ominously. There are quite a few people milling about, and most of them stop and gather round when they see Slio. They chatter in a language that sounds familiar to him, yet he can't understand a word of it. 

A large shirtless woman walks up to Slio. She is wearing bright orange pants that appear to be silk, and her heavy breasts dangle pendulously on her chest. The other Bo's lower their heads and step aside as she approaches. She says something in Bo-azan, and the people surrounding them all walk away, except a few with weapons drawn. She stands up straight, and crosses her arms in front of her. She then speaks to Slio, and the black man translates, in his most formal tone.

"The situation appears clear, according to your charges, that according to the laws of war, you were attacked first, and acted in self defense. Is this true by your eyes as well?"

Slio answers "yes."

"and you are Brazilians from Prenal? You are an enforcer?"

"Yes."

"Brazilia..." She pauses for a moment. "We have come to the conclusion that Brazilia is the last of a long line of falsehoods erected to serve a single god of greed. Empire after empire rose and fell, all striving to perfect this single thing: the theft of life and power from the earth. Life is hers, and hers alone, to give and take. The empires of man pretended it was theirs, but always they took it only temporarily, and were eventually forced to give it back. King Bo has renounced the ways of greed, and set hard and fast rules to maintain the balance of give and take that humans so often upset. We seek to ensure that no one can again build a new empire to take more that they give."

"You are slaves to the empire, and therefore our enemy. If you renounce Brazilia and her ways, you may remain here as a ward of King Bo. Your friends have all renounced the empire and agreed to live in peace among our people, and have sworn to serve the King, to destroy the empire wherever possible, but also to spare the lives of her people, where possible. The empire is dying, and the old world with it. King Bo offers you a way to live without the empire, without the old world and her failures."

A snarl grows on Slio's face. Anger and betrayal well in his heart. He thinks of his wealth back home, of the power he has over the lesser men of Prenal, of his giant mansion, of his wives. Brazilia gave him all that. He loves the old world. He loves the empire. He is the empire. Strong, defiant, ruthless, brutal. Powerful. This... this ideology is weakness, pliancy, frailty, death.

He screams unintelligibly at the governor, and wrenches an arm free of the ropes holding him. The woman steps calmly back, and nods to the translator. 

Slio barely feels the man's carved bone blade enter his side, but he is suddenly unable to breathe. Warmth runs down his side. His last breath dies prematurely in his throat, voicing only incoherent rage as blood and air bubbles out from his torso.

He slumps forward, and the plank of wood he's tied to holds him up. He looks around through dimming eyes, and sees his gun caddie, his adopted son, his apprentice, Armon, with no shirt on, standing freely with the Bo-aza people now gathering around him again. Marina stand beside him, also shirtless. Their faces are pained, full of fear, but not surprised. 

And suddenly he sees that the governor is right. The old world was only about power, greed and wealth. The need to move mountains and rivers to gather wealth, to harness power. The will to build the most terrible weapons imaginable just to steal from others. The will to subjugate whole groups of people to satiate the greed of a few. The need to violently rip apart the earth and suck up every little bit of wealth. It was all just taking and taking and taking, and now there's almost nothing left to take. 

The old world is gone; dead. And over the ages, as it slowly died, all the art, beauty and pretense of humanity was slowly stripped away, leaving only the heart of it. The ruthless, angry, brutally inhuman heart of it. 

And Slio Gomez was its bastion, its protector, its brave knight. He was as brutal, remorseless and inhumane as it was. And when he died, so did a little more of the old world.