Stalinichka

I

Aleksander Djosephvitch Sanpierre (Александр Джозефович СенПьер) of HM The King's First Light cavalry sat on the small metal stool in his quarters in the Forward operating base, which consisted of several prefabricated structures, two nuclear generators which powered their photon field generator to protect them from the cold, and a series of helicopters and APCs which their unit used to patrol the barbarian wastes.

He fired up his corneal implant and began to compose a message. It was snowing outside of his encampment in the Sierra foothills and the wind would have blown over their camps were it not for the repulsion field generators which his unit had erected. The Generators may have blocked out the high winds but they did not sound any more pleasant. The hum of the generators and the wind bumping against the 200-nanometre charged photon field produced the sound of wind battering agianst glass coupled with a constant whine of an electric motor. The field would light them up as bright as a winter solstice tree If the barbarians had access to imaging equipment able to discern between VUV and standard UV which was ever-present in the planet’s atmosphere they would have been able to spot them, an additional benefit, the thick snow likely would prevent much of the light from spreading more than a few kilometres. So they were reasonably safe from the enemy.

Halfway through composing his message Aleksander stopped, she prefers analogue he thought, besides it was unlikely that in the sanitorium she would be able to receive uncensored messages to her deck, besides as the courier would take three days at least to deliver the letter it would no longer take with it sensitive information about their position and would be able to be delivered uncensored.

Alexsander went to the waist-high metal cabinet, the first drawer of which held a pad of thick white paper, and an old mont blanc fountain pen which his father had gifted to him. He folded back down the lid of the cabinet into a desk and began to write.

3 July 2076

My Dearest Natalia,

The Nationalist forces broke our lines on Sunday morning. I apologize for the error that I’ve not been able to write to you for a fortnight. Our company had to retreat past what once had been Reno. They aimed to push us back into the mountains and indeed we have retreated into the Sierra foothills. Our scouting reports have told us they were met with resistance from our comrades in the city.

Seeing the antifascists in action again reminded me of the long-ago battles, in the stories father used to tell me. In cities that have long since been abandoned and rebuilt. The heroic exploits back when all we needed to push them back was some mace and our fists.

Though personally, my sympathy is with the old guard antifascists who took up arms to defend their communities, rather than selling out and going political like the Communist Party of New California (those miserable cunts) as a representative of His majesty's government I cannot condom too heavily the “correct” and “peaceful route” which our friends back in Francisgrad (Францискград) choose. After all, it’s an open secret that the imperial parliament exists for the express purpose of keeping anti-government forces from overthrowing the monarchy. In this regard I consider the emperor to be a wise man, however, a constitutional monarchy, with imperial ambitions is itself a contradiction to the socialism which he claims to have integrated, and which I am supposed to be exporting to the barbarian wastes lest they fall to Trumpism. I’ve a feeling that old Karl would not support HM’s ambitions of “Greater California'' or as HM the King would probably like to call it “der Großkalifornischreich”.

All in all my men have been in good spirits through the fighting, I’ve not had to use much of the nanites in my supply and I only had to reattach one arm. One man’s eye was hacked by a drone that got within wireless range of our position, but we quickly took it down before the virus could spread to the rest of the division.

We believe that The Nationalists will soon retreat back into Mormon territory soon, there is no reason for them to attempt to hold this desolate barren place. In truth I believe that our mission to civilize these people while good intentioned may not be accomplishing the objective of preventing the rise of another Trump. The bastard has been dead for over 50 years and his people legitimately believe him to have been their mossiah. The fact that the Mormons of Deseret tolerate that barbarian cult is evidence enough that HM The King was wise to limit the role of religion, though I do know you disagree. And I think it no coincidence that both of them share opinions on Women, Queer people, Jews like myself, Black people and the Old Natives. It seems to me that their loyalty is more to the aesthetic of their former empire than to any true principles of faith or even the truth of how impotent that nation was.

I hope to hear back from you soon my love, I’ve enclosed the locket we exchanged at our wedding. In the event that I do fall into barbarian hands, I do not wish for it to be tarnished by them. I hope that they will not confiscate it from you but you mustn’t use it to attempt to kill another orderly. Those people are there to help you and I don’t believe I will be able to continue to convince them to keep you should you attempt it again.

As I ever was and ever shall be, yours,

Aleksander

Aleksander folded the letter thrice, and unbuttoned the neck of his uniform, reached under his undershirt and removed a silver heart-shaped locket from his neck. Affixed to the locket was a pink and ivory cameo. He placed the locket into a padded envelope which he drew from his cabinet, along with the folded letter. He then paged the denshchik to retrieve the parcel, and instructed him to see to it that the parcel was promptly delivered to the hospital in Anchorage. The denshchik, an enlisted conscript from the north-western provinces by the name of Ernesto Portillo Sáenz de Norte, however after the succession and adoption of the new imperial language had changed his name to be Эрне́ст Рюрикович Са́нктус, Ernest Rurikovich Sanktus, though Alexsander would regularly address him by his patronymic and with the informal ty as opposed to vy which he would be obligated to address a man of inferior rank under normal circumstances. This lack of formal custom had endeered Alexsander to the enlisted men as the kindly squadron surgeon and a friend to men women and nonbinary folk of all status. In the minds of his superiors it was an affectation, a mannerism much like how people in the Imperial Capital had taken to calling each other товарищ (Tovarisch), or Kamerad if they worked in the Imperial Court, in lieu of formal, gendered forms of address. The worst he could be called for this would be a "class reductionist" or, “Tankie”, or, a Сталиничка (Stalinichka) if an interlocular felt compelled to be particularly insulting and ironic at the same time.

Rurikovich took the package in his left hand, saluted sharply Aleksander gave a half-hearted salute by bringing his hand up to his temple as if to wave off his servant, such that he could be alone with his thoughts if only for a brief time.

II

Natalia Ivanovna Sanpiere looked out the frost covered window of her room at her view of the mountains. It was July but the snow was falling in a blizzard. It had been the only one that had to be made so far that year from her vantage point in the Fire island compound her southward view allowed her to see the massive sky drifters float into the stratosphere, where they would release their clouds of vapor and create the valuable precipitation which the world greatly needed. This was part of the empire’s three pronged plan to stave off the disastrous effects of climate change caused by the Old World.

The cloud drifters were effectively giant dirigibles which held tanks of specially engineered water designed to form good clouds which would reflect some sunlight into space this had the added effect of producing localised powerful snowstorms and effectively rendered summers into a light winter and winters into a cold spring. Except for the latitude where she lived, here it snowed year round save for a brief fleeting breath of spring for three weeks a year during which time she could look out of her courtyard and see the midnight sun.

Then there were the dense forests and rapidly grown trees which the empire planted and was now waging a campaign to plant in the protectorate. These trees were designed to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than normal ones. and it was a tragedy that the nationalists refused to let it happen. The trees, the drifters, the fake snow, these were all things that The King's Government said would help.

But to her "environmentalism" or Klimakatastrophe conjured up stories her mother told her of screaming pink-haired obese women, she imagined it was one of these women who came up with the idea for this policy of “fighting climate change", after all the Republic of Deseret and the Trumpists of the New Confederacy claimed that the climate wasn’t changing, and this was instead a punishment from God for race-mixing, feminism and that the narrative about climate change was just a jewish conspiracy, but her husband was a jew, but the Trumpists said that the country that once was the United States was a proud and noble country and that the Empire of California had destroyed everything. As her husband said: The Trumpists told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. But who should she believe, some scientist in a lab coat her lying eyes, or the man on the internet who claimed that Trump had been anointed by God, her head hurt and she decided that she needed to take another pill. This was a complicated issue, one offered her the feeling of safety and superiority, the other made her feel insignificant. But she couldn’t let the doctors know that, to do so would be a repudiation of her worldview and mean that she was in fact in a mental hospital, and was in fact a mad-woman and that her dear husband was in fact correct that all that she had come to believe, things she had killed a man over, murdered the prime minister over, was in fact a lie brought on by allowing some stranger on the far end of the world to prey on her insecurities. The thought vanished at the speed of light, and she began to wonder why the birds had returned to Anchorage bay.

A nurse knocked at the front door of her suite, which was larger than the normal hospital room at King’s National Security hospital and Rehabilitation Facility. But she was special, she had a garden, her own bedroom, her own living room, and her own bathroom all with the finest furniture, imported from Italy, a refrigerator, and access to a kitchen where she could, with supervision, use knives to cook. She was allowed to have alcohol and her own food but was under constant surveillance and was required to be in therapy for 5 hours every day and to take whatever medication her doctors ordered her to. Natalia of course thought of this to be a light punishment for murder but had no real complaint when it was applied to her in effort to rehabilitate her.

Natalia acknowledged that the nurse could enter the door and she came in bearing a plastic tray with a folded envelope and a necklace on it. She watched the nurse set them down upon her table, and back out of the room, not making eye contact.