The Saviors

They came in the night, heavy laser-cutters in tow.

Shaved & swiveling heads pluming quick breaths in the frost, they set about their task with due haste, ere carving a path to the vault.

Sparse resistance within became slain, soon surrendering the fortress’s heart.

Inside lay pale rows of a voiceless congregation, stasis tanks bristling from their glowing pews like emerald teeth.

All cloned from warm blood of the executed, these un-children would be doomed to cruel experiment or slave-labor, stashed within shameful pocket-colonies across their solar system; the legal equivalent of amputated limbs.

The rescuers stared down at old scars upon their own wrists and abdomens, steeling their resolve as they glanced around at twinned or triplet faces.

Nodding to each other, they pulled their fetal siblings from the shelves and crept towards the complicit moon.

… then an infrared tripwire was cloven, spelling nigh death from above.

Machine guns leered out from high sconces, jaws whirring to vicious life. The shrieking intruders were mulched within seconds, tender white flesh of their unborn brethren now coarsely mingled with their own.

In two days, their ruined bodies would be mounted atop the city gates: a decaying warning to the others.