Red rover, red rover, send them over
Karma Karzai
Red rover, red rover, send them over
Copyright 2014 Karma Barndon
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
About Karma Barndon
Connect with Karma Barndon
Chapter One
17 September 2115.
The United Nations Secretary-General has issued a State of Emergency for the world and warned citizens to remain vigilant, after militants loyal to Martian separatist leader Mang Guld stormed UN headquarters in New York yesterday to demand the withdrawal of world peacekeeping forces from the Red Planet.
A witness, who asked not to be identified, described the Martian terrorists as massive. "They were some big green inbred aliens, let me tell you," the witness said. "They just walked right in the lobby and pointed these laser beams at reception, and everyone just ran." According to UN officials, the militants belong to the notorious and outlawed Red Rover gang, who have been calling for Deimosian independence since the 2113 Martian occupation.
The emergency began at 9.38am on the east side of Manhattan Island known as Turtle Bay, where an estimated 30 armed men wearing crimson-red regalia arrived outside the building in five armoured vehicles, and ran inside before UN troops had time to react. The stunned troops were herded into a group and locked in the lobby’s coatroom. The militants locked the front doors and headed for the elevators, riding them to the floor of the Secretary-General to present their demands.
CNN correspondent Jill Bill was one of the first on the scene and filed this exclusive report:
“Well I’m here today at Turtle Bay in Manhattan, where terrorists have invaded the headquarters of the United Nations in a provocative move the government could see as an act of war, and let me tell you, things here are tense. The Secretary-General has just been dragged out from under his desk and shot twice in the legs after making a gesture to the militants they perceived as insulting, and now all I can hear is screaming from down the hall. I think they might be executing the cleaners now, or maybe the kitchen staff. I don’t know but I’m outta here! This is Jill Bill from CNN, bringing you the lowdown from down low.”
Disclaimer: widespread panic has lead to doubts over the veracity of witness claims, and the truth may be a touch blurry.
Chapter Two
The Red Rover gang was founded in 2100 by the elusive and mysterious Martian Mang Guld, who shot to prominence in the 2090’s after his scintillatingly spine tingling rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ at the inaugural screening of ‘Martian Idol’ went viral on YouTube, with 6 Trillion hits galaxy wide.
Guld was borne into the Deimos tribe, an ancient people indigenous to the defunct moon formerly known as Phobos. The tribe fled the moon just before it was rendered inhospitable due to sulphur-dioxide saturation of the atmosphere. His father had been a member of Mars’ Defence Ministry and was involved in the infamous Olympus Mons-gate scandal in 2051, before dying suddenly after Mang’s birth after getting trampled at the 2060 Battle of the Moons charity concert in the chaos that followed the controversial crowning of pariah planet Venus as galactic champions.
The Martian dominated crowd had wanted the Martian band to win, complaining Venus was cheating, and bellowing that they all played like girls. Guld senior’s body was found on the floor by local police after the crowd cleared. The coronial report noted that the body was found covered in confetti and toilet paper, like “a pancake full of holes, or a waffle.”
Guld’s mother was an exotic dancer from Northern Syberistan. She met Guld snr in a camp bordello, on the front lines of Valles Marineris during the Three Day War in 2058, when he came in for the mandatory ‘comfort visit’. Apparently it was love at first sight, and they couldn’t stop touching her. He promised he would come back for her as soon as the war ended. A day later, when the war was over, they packed up and moved into an inner city bed-sit in central Marsia, where Guld’s mother fell pregnant.
Mang was born, and then his father died, in 2059. Mang was subsequently raised by his mother and her motley band of work colleagues, who cared for Mang in the staff quarters while Mama danced all day round the Gentleman’s Club stage. Modern anthropomorphic discourse suggests the dichotomy of nature versus nurture could in some way explain Mang’s descent to the dark side, but academics and sociologists still disagree on the exact cause. Regardless of the external indicators, that predisposed Mang to a life less lived, he grew up to become the founding father and supreme leader of one of the new worlds and galaxy’s most ruthless and vicious terrorist organisations, the Red Rovers.
The Red Rovers emerged in 2100, preliminarily as a political platform for the Deimos tribe in the face of blatant institutionalised discrimination by the ruling Martian majority, whose pure ethnicity ensured them superiority over the Deimos and other mixed descent tribes in the new world.
Despite an initial mission statement that espoused peace and declared the group’s aim for political moderation and engagement in the parliamentary process, in their passive and non-violent liberation campaign seeking independence for the State of Deimos from the nation of Mars, the group appeared menacing to authorities. To complicate matters further, the State of Deimos did not actually exist, in a physical sense, because the homeland the Rover’s referred to was in fact, the now defunct Moon of Phobos, which had completely disintegrated years earlier in a massive combustion of sulphur and argon gas.
The homeland the Red Rovers wanted now, like a lucky dip, was the Valles Marineris National Park, home of the Three Day War of ’58, and regarded as one of the most inhospitable places on Mars, with its desertified wastelands and bubbling sinkholes and cactus ridden paths causing more than one traveller over the years to fall victim to the deep, dank mystery and danger of the terrain. The Red Rovers had a short-held belief that they could replicate Phobos’ environment in the winding valleys and deep gorges of the park, and create an uninterrupted utopian society of their own in the wild.
Guld declared to the galaxy, in the Declaration of the Rights of Humanity document, that the Deimos people simply wanted to live in freedom on their own land with their own national identity: “They want to determine their own lives, and they want to be on their own away from the Martians. These are our basic political goals. We are not separatists or nationalists, we are not communists, we are not terrorists nor are we fantasists but what we are is a people who want sovereignty over ourselves and we want land to call our own.”
However, it was not long before the Red Rovers contorted their promise of peace into one of violent militant tactics against the Martian elite. They embarked upon a soul-crushing campaign of aerial bombardment, with white phosphorous bombs raining down on the Martian landscape for three months, before officially declaring war on Mars in 2111.
The Rovers were subsequently defeated, and then subjugated by Martian forces, with many forced into internment camps in the desert. Now the war appeared to have entered a new phase, with the Rovers going galactic, precipitating the situation at hand at the UN headquarters.
