Planet Mhâ-jhï

Death. The dark planet smelled like death. Escape from the smell of the female bodies, burning in the deep canons that covered the surface of the planet, was impossible. Thousands of slaves worked the funeral fire pits non-stop. The ash in the air slowly turned the black planet ghostly pale grey. The ash fell slowly onto the shoulders of the Mhâ-jhï man and his infant son sitting on a cliff overlooking one of the canyons. In the fire below, somewhere among the dead, burned the bodies of his wife and daughters.

The little boy, blissfully unaware of his father’s pain, slept peacefully across the man’s lap. The man looked at his son, tears silently running down his olive skinned face and mourned the woman who had abandoned them. Sweat glistened on his bare chest, his long black hair, which hung limply around his face, moved slightly in the hot wind. Inside, he was full of rage and confusion.

“What do we do now, Pohl?” he asked quietly. “What do we do now?”

What would the men of Mhâ-jhï do now that every female on the planet was dead? Grand- mothers, mothers, daughters, sisters, all gone. How would he raise his son without its mother? Moreover, what about his son’s future? The future of his beloved planet? His questions had no clear answers and nothing made sense to him anymore. The killing was senseless.

The insanity slowly spread from the elderly females, then to the mothers and then onto the young girls. The adult women killed the female children and then turned the knives upon themselves, slitting their own throats. The insanity was unstoppable and so were the rivers of blood that stained Planet Mhâ-jhï.

POHL

My name is Pohl, I am a Mhâ-jhï warrior trained to guard the royal family. It was in the line of duty that I shot the woman I love in the back, she killed our king and I almost killed her. However, I am getting ahead of myself. To fully understand I must go back to the day of my birth. According to our custom, the father takes his son from the mother immediately after she gives birth. My father placed me on a stone table, near a ritual well, in our courtyard. He, and my grandfathers, to wash off the birth blood, used the water from the well. They designed the ritual to remove any of the mother’s influence in order for me to grow into a strong man.

They chose a name for me and my father carried me back to my mother. She was supposed to be resting while my older sisters cared for her. However, my father, holding me in his arms walked into a room splattered with blood. She had killed my sisters and then herself. This moment in time, multiplied millions of times over, defined who I would become and what would become of my entire planet. This was the world I was born into and the world I had to leave behind.

Five years later King Val realized that for his people to survive we needed to find another planet with the precious resource we did not have anymore, women. My earliest memory was getting on a cold, hard ship herded together with boys my age and placed into barracks to start our training as warriors. The fleet consisted of ships each designed for different purposes, you trained to be a warrior or you trained to be a Specialist. Warriors fight, we are the strength of the Mhâ-jhï and the Specialists are the scientific elite. You did not choose to be one or the other; your family’s heritage chose for you. There was no freedom for anyone to decide.

I was from the warrior class and started my training as soon as I boarded that ship. My two bunkmates, Ren and Van, became over time my best friends. I was not as tough as they were but they helped make sure I did not fail. Van would accuse me of being a girl and Ren would patiently tell me it was okay to feel, but it was not okay to show it. Never show the pain.

For us weakness was an unforgivable sin and failure meant death. Our trainers beat both out of us and they spared no one. Especially not the royal princes. King Val had two sons, Rudolphe the oldest and heir to the throne, and Tai, the younger brother.

Rudolphe learned his lessons and the role he would one-day play quickly because he was born a natural leader. Tai was different. He was introverted and shy, but they beat him until he became a dangerous man who grew to love the pain.

I was fortunate to have my friends. They helped me learn to fake being a real man. On that ship, flying in deep space, I learned to kill and most importantly for a Mhâ-jhï warrior, how not to feel. I hid my heart even when my trainers handed me an alien woman as a birthday present when I turned fifteen. It was my first sexual experience and I pretended that it did not matter to me that she was not a willing participant.

I kept pretending that I had no feelings until I held the bleeding body of Rial in my arms. She looked into my eyes and I realized with shame the crimes I helped commit, had driven her insane. My heart began to beat again and against all that I was taught to believe, I escaped with her in a small, cramped fighter jet and nursed her back to life.It was taking care of her that I finally became a real man. We landed on Earth in 2035 A.D and for twenty years, have escaped the past. Now we may have no place to run. The ships have arrived and Earth will be the next victim of the Mhâ-jhï.