Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

members of these groups were rounded up and
shipped off to serve in Goliath’s deadly mines.
    These new slaves began dying from the harsh
conditions just as quickly as the previous miners had—faster, in
fact, because few concessions were made to alleviate their
situation. In itself this caused Kyril little concern, since he
didn’t care for these people anyway—but there was still the problem
of who would do the mining once these groups were all gone. The
solution the Emperor’s boyare came up with was to genetically
engineer human beings adapted specifically to the high-gee
environment.
    The slaves were subjected to long and
involved series of “experiments”—most of them little more than
pseudo-scientific excuses for torture—to determine the specific
characteristics the new breed would need for survival. Genetic
material from the different groups was used, and a race of
heavy-gravity natives was bred. These new humans were stronger and
had greater physical stamina to withstand the high gee forces. They
were slightly shorter and had a lower center of gravity, to keep
them stable and help them avoid stumbling. They had quicker
reflexes to deal with a world where objects fell at a much faster
rate. They had denser bones and stronger hearts and lungs. In an
attempt to breed better slaves, Kyril had unwittingly bred a new
subgroup of super humans.
    The problem with breeding humans, of course,
was the long maturation period. Virtually all the unmodified slaves
had died and the oldest members of the new breed—who’d been started
in the mines as six- and seven-year-old children—were barely
fourteen when Kyril was finally assassinated. The program continued
for a couple more years under Kyril’s successor, Nikolai IV,
largely through inertia and because the program had remained
strictly secret.
    Once the facts became public knowledge, there
was an Empire-wide backlash against the horrors. The slavery was
immediately ended, and Nikolai proclaimed an immediate and
permanent ban on all human genetic manipulation. That left the
Emperor with two major problems: reparations to the survivors of
the period that the Jews were already starting to call (with barely
concealed cynicism) “the Metamorphosis,” and the ongoing problem of
how to mine the metal-rich high-gee planets. There were long and
spirited debates, and for one of the few times in history the
oppressed peoples themselves were actually given a voice in the
decision.
    The former slaves who traced their heritage
back to the Romany were the most bitter about what had been done to
them. Their people had always been clannish and independent, and
they followed in that tradition. They asked for and were given a
small fleet of ships so they could leave the confines of the Empire
and seek their own world elsewhere among the stars. For over eighty
years nothing more was heard of them—until an explorer ship for the
ever-expanding Empire stumbled across the heavy-grav planet
Newforest and its Romany inhabitants. The imperial feelings of
guilt had cooled considerably by this time, however, and the world
of Newforest was absorbed into the Empire—though not with the
entirely willing consent of the planet’s citizens.
    The descendants of God’s Purgers continued to
adhere to their sect’s fundamentalist beliefs. They spurned as much
contact as they could with the material world, and wanted as little
to do with temporal authorities as possible. Unlike the Romany,
they didn’t want to break away altogether, since part of their duty
was to present an example for other people to follow. The imperial
government ceded them a different mineral-rich high-grav planet to
mine, a world its inhabitants called Purgatory. These people paid
nominal homage to the tsar and, as their prime export, traded the
valuable ore, but otherwise had little contact with the rest of
humanity.
    The Jews were another matter entirely. They
had survived so many pogroms and purges over the past