Rites of the Righteous, page 9
Lucia turned and stormed off, leaving her crew to stare at each other in bewilderment. Mindy broke the silence. “Is she all right, Roland?”
“No.” His reply brooked no further discussion.
As one, they turned to follow Lucia’s retreating back. They walked in silence, each grinding teeth against the flood of fears and questions begging to be spoken aloud. Pike met them at the gangplank for Exit Wound. He greeted them with a string of profanity and a frown so deep Roland thought his eyes were going to disappear altogether. Roland chose to head off a shouting match between Lucia and the commandant before it could get going. “Stow it,” he rumbled from deep in his chest. “We do not have time for this. We need to get to Gethsemane fast.”
“Do you give the orders now, Corporal?” Pike snarled.
“Yes,” Roland replied. Something in that syllable touched Pike’s anger. There was no threat, no bullying or macho posturing to be found. The statement wore the weight of finality wrapped in a polite request backed by overwhelming firepower.
Pike blinked. His jaw flexed, and he shook his head like an animal trying to dislodge biting insects. “Fuck it, then. Let’s go.”
“We need to stall OmniCorp,” Lucia said. “We need a head start.”
“Don’t you worry, LT,” Pike said, ushering them toward the boarding hatch. “When Maid of Orleans gates in, they’ll be stuck here for at least two days, maybe three. I’ve made goddamn sure of it.”
“That’s enough time to find him,” Mindy said.
“And bring him down,” Roland added.
They passed into the corvette, and their conversation was interrupted by a stern-looking brunette who greeted them on the reception deck. “Manny!” She blurted as soon as they were all inside. She hurled herself into his chest and wrapped him in a tight hug. He returned the gesture awkwardly, and she released him after several uncomfortable seconds. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, Catrina,” he answered.
“I’m okay too, Cat,” Pike drawled. “If you care, I mean.”
Catrina graced her uncle with a perfunctory smile. “You’re always fine.”
Pike conceded the point with an affable head tilt. “True enough. Get stowed and get cleaned up, troops. We de-brief this day-bacle in ten minutes.” The commandant slapped a control panel on the wall. “Skipper!”
“Go for Fischer,” a voice replied from a speaker.
“We need to be in Gethsemane yesterday, how copy?”
“We’ll push ourselves to the front of the line, Commandant. Standard jump from their gate is nine days this time of their solar cycle. I can do it in four.”
Lucia’s face brightened. “We’ll beat him there!”
Pike nodded. “With time to spare. See you in the conference room in ten minutes, LT.”
Roland followed Lucia to the cabin they shared. Too large for a regular bunk, Roland was forced to bivouac in a storage room. A cot for Lucia had been added, but beyond that the metal cube held nothing but their gear. Inside, Roland let the door slide closed behind him before putting a hand on Lucia’s shoulder. She spun, and for a moment Roland thought she might yell at him. Instead, she threw herself at his chest and sobbed into his shirt. Great heaving gasps racked her body, and she fell against him as if her legs could no longer support her weight. Roland held on to her and lowered them both to the floor so she could sit.
He said nothing. He had no words for this moment and did not think Lucia wanted him to find any. He just held her and let her cry. Her tears soaked his shirt, and Roland was suddenly struck by how odd it was that he could feel them. Guns and knives and bombs bounced off his skin without leaving a mark, but the tears of one woman burned like acid. He decided this was a good thing and let her cry.
When she stopped, he leaned back to look at her. She leaned back to meet his eyes with a small smile. “You okay?” he asked. The stupidity of his question hit him a tenth of a second after the words left his mouth. Too late to save himself, he tried to smile. “Relatively, I mean.”
“Oh, I’m great, Corporal,” she said. “Outstanding, really.”
He tried again. “It’s not an easy thing to get over. What happened with Grimes, I mean.”
“He could have killed me.”
Roland did not trust his voice to respond to that.
Lucia turned and rested her cheek on Roland’s chest. “But he didn’t. He had me cold. I couldn’t stop him...” Her voice caught in her throat. “I was helpless. Totally helpless. I didn’t think that...”
“That you could be helpless?”
“It sounds so stupid, but...” She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ve been so, I don’t know... unbeatable? For a while now. I think I forgot how scary it can be.”
Roland understood this part. “When you are in the moment... In the fight, I mean, it’s easy to forget the stakes. You think about the fighting, the mechanics of the hitting and the shooting, mostly. Sure, there’s fear, right? But also anger and focus and there just isn’t time to ever really think about what losing might mean.”
“Exactly,” Lucia said. “Except it’s worse for me. The things in me... Dad’s machines. They change my brain when I get stressed. They take away all the doubt, all the fear. It’s just action, reaction, plan and execute. All at seven times the speed of a regular person. I can tell which hand a guy is going to punch with because I have time to watch the muscles tense in his neck, Roland. It’s nothing but information and decisions. Automatic.” She shifted to move away, positioning herself on her knees in front of him. “He beat me, Roland. And when he had me by the neck, I knew what the next move was. I saw myself die, and for the first time...”
“You couldn’t stop it.”
Fresh tears filled her eyes. “Exactly. He needed one-quarter of a second to finish the job. And do you know how long a quarter of a second is for me? How long I had to think about that? I had to watch it happen. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
Finally, Roland had something to add. “Yes.”
Lucia blinked. “Really? But you’re so... indestructible.”
“That hasn’t always been the case, Lucy. I’ve seen my death coming before. I don’t talk about this much, but when the Red Hats set off that bomb, it took eighteen seconds for my team to recover me from the surface of Venus. Eighteen seconds at seven hundred degrees and thirteen hundred psi with a ruptured exposure suit that managed to be just good enough to keep me awake and alive for all of it.” He could not remember the last time he had told anyone about that day. He tried to sound strong and failed. “Eighteen seconds is a very long time when your eyeballs are boiling in your skull.”
Lucia stared at him. “You never told me that.”
“It’s not something I like to talk about. Now you know why. And I mean, really know why. You would not have understood before. Now you do. We are in a very elite fraternity, you and me. A brotherhood of people who shouldn’t be alive and know it.”
Lucia hugged her arms tight and shuddered. “How did you ever get over it?”
“I didn’t. It’s not something you get over.”
“You,” Lucia said while shaking her head, “are not helping.”
“Hear me out. You don’t get over it because there’s nothing to get over. You got lucky. I got lucky. We did not die when we were supposed to.” Roland twirled one big black finger in the air. “Yay us. We get to fight another day. It’s not fate, it’s not a sign. It’s just stupid random circumstance.”
“But what about the next time? What happens when you don’t get so lucky?”
“You die, Lucia.” Roland did not like even saying the words out loud. He never lied to Lucia, though, so he forced them out and moved on to what he felt was the more salient point. “Luck is an unreliable ally. It’s up to us to learn from this time so there won’t be a next time. You’ve figured out that not every battle is won or lost on skill. Great. But that doesn’t mean we throw our hands up and stop trying to stack the deck, right?”
“That makes sense, I suppose. But it won’t prevent the nightmares.”
“Nothing does.”
“Christ, you are bad at this. It’s a good thing I love you, because...” She stopped. “You know what? I got nothing.” Some of the sparkle returned to her eyes. “And what lessons do we take from today, then?”
“Well, Grimes got himself heavily augmented. First question is, how heavily?”
Lucia’s brow scrunched into deep furrows. “He’s still slower than me, but not by much. At least as fast as Mindy. Maybe faster. Hard to gauge his strength, but it felt like hitting a bag of wet sand. Plenty of MyoFiber and OsteoPlast under the skin.”
“How’d he beat you?”
Lucia thought about that for a moment. “He didn’t try to stop me from doing anything. He knew I was too fast, but he also knew I couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. So he ignored defense and focused on hitting me while I was attacking. Shit! That was stupid of me.”
“What was?”
“I fought him like I did the last time. Even after I realized he was augmented. I beat him so easily before. I just assumed...”
Roland smirked. “So your mistake was?”
“I did not respect him. His training and skills, I mean.”
Roland nodded. “Exactly. He was a Balisong, Lucy. These are some of the best-trained operatives in the galaxy. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but he’s better than you are. At a minimum, he’s now stronger than you too.”
“Are you saying I can’t take him?”
“I’m asking you why you would even try. Life is not a fair fight, Lucy. When I had to fight Haraldson in his giant AutoCat, how did I win?”
“You cheated. Manny sabotaged his cooling system.”
“Exactly. We’re here to do a job and get home alive. Not submit to stupid dick-waving contests. Only idiots and psychos go for those.”
Lucia’s smile was pure and bright with no trace of her earlier upset. Some piece of information must have fallen into place when he was not looking. “And Grimes is certainly no idiot,” she said with a wink.
CHAPTER TEN
“We are going to beat Grimes there by several days, right?” Manny asked the question as if the answer might have changed.
“At least four days before him,” Fischer replied.
Exit Wound was not a large vessel, and its lone conference room barely contained the tense knot of people wedged inside. Three of the four fixers from Dockside, Captain Fischer, Christopher Pike, and Catrina Caulfield filled the chairs around a small table. The representative from Earth’s Department of Espionage and Clandestine Operations, a sallow man named James Klebold, sat in an additional chair wedged between Pike and Caulfield. Stoop-shouldered and balding, the DECO man could not hide his discomfort. He shifted in his chair and a thin layer of sweat lent a waxy sheen to the expanse of his forehead. Roland, as necessitated by his bulk, remained standing. However, his choice to loom over the anxious analyst wore the distinct air of sadistic pique.
Manny continued, “Our first chance to grab him will be as soon as he steps out of customs.” His lip twitched while he considered this. “But I don’t think that is the right time.”
Lucia nodded her agreement. “That is going to be a big public place. Too many curious eyes and twitchy security forces. If we get caught up by the authorities, the memory core could end up in an evidence locker.”
Mindy shook her head. “That is a worst-case scenario, boss. If the Elders even suspect that there is human code or whatever in that thing, they will destroy it without any kind of process. They’ll see it as an abomination, and us as the worst kind of sinners for wanting it.”
“Are they smart enough to realize what it is if they get it?” asked Roland. “I mean, it probably just looks like a standard memory core to them.”
“They’re religious, but not stupid. It’s obviously a cybernetic memory core. Once they see who’s really fighting over it, they’re gonna look real hard at the damn thing. When they get to poking around all that weird code, they’ll get confused.” She shook her head for emphasis. “‘Confusing’ is a real bad thing to be on Gethsemane, Ironsides. The standard practice for Elders of the Faith is to destroy anything they don’t understand.”
“Great,” Roland grumbled. “I guess we have to let him get off the ship. But then what?”
“Where can he go, Mindy?” asked Lucia. “Who might help him?”
“He can’t go to the Temples or the Knights, either. His body mods limit him to Sodom and Gomorrah, and of course the Underworld.”
Pike could not stifle a snort. “And I thought Dockside had stupid names for things.”
Lucia shared Pike’s bemusement. “Knights? Really?”
Pike guffawed, loud and rude at the same time. “Oh, Gethsemane is goddamn lousy with warrior monks. Dozens of different orders. Most of them are really just shitty fraternities for rich pricks.” Pike made a rude gesture with both hands. “It’s the Templars, Fratres Millitae, Stefanites, and the Teutons who are the real problems. Those four gangs of self-important assholes run kinda light on the brains and heavy on the violence.”
Mindy pressed her palms together under her chin and cast her eyes upward. “In God’s name, of course. Can’t forget that part. So it’s the good kind of violence. Saintly, even.”
“They any good?” Roland did not think he was going to like the answer, but the question had to be asked.
Pike sucked air through his teeth. “Not gonna lie, Breach. For all their bullshit, the dipshits don’t suck at what they do. The Church can afford the best weapons and armor on the market. High-ranking Knights will probably have gear we’ve never seen before. And they live to fight, too. They start as kids and do the whole page, squire, yeoman, knight, thing and all that.”
“Old school, huh?”
“Super old,” Pike agreed.
Lucia rubbed her face with the palm of one hand. “Okay, so we need to avoid the... dear God, I can’t believe I’m saying this... we need to avoid the Knights.”
“It’d be best,” said Mindy. “But there’s also the Inquisition.”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” said Roland.
“No one ever does,” said Mindy.
Lucia took it upon herself to ask the next pressing question. “And what, pray tell, does the Inquisition do?”
“Well, boss, they make inquiries.”
Lucia fixed Mindy with a withering glare. “Mindy, if you don’t get more helpful, I’m going to tell Pike he can have you back.”
Mindy gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“We don’t want her,” Pike said, a touch too quickly.
“Right now, I’d sell your contract for a cup of coffee. Tell us about the Inquisition or get used to wearing green fatigues.”
“No deal,” Pike blurted. No one noticed.
Mindy stuck her tongue out at both of them. “You are really mean before you get caffeinated, Boss. The Inquisition is like the secret police or something. They look for criminals and traitors to the faith and stuff like that. They have no rules, no restrictions, and because they are on a mandate from God, they get total absolution for any sins they commit in the line of duty.”
“Are these dirty cops, or something worse?”
“Boss, you need to understand something. On Gethsemane, publicly disagreeing with the Church is a felony. Being in possession of a book or holo that is not on the approved list is a felony. Any drink stronger than sacramental wine is illegal. Dancing too close to your partner is illegal. Thinking about cheese between vespers and compline is a felony.” When no one seemed to understand her point, Mindy threw up her hands. “There is no goddamn way in this world or the next that the Elders can actually enforce all that stupid crap. Gethsemane has a hundred and ninety million people running around. Trust me. There is a ton of illegal shit going on because everything worth doing is illegal. They’d need a Knight on every corner just to keep up with minor citations. The Inquisition is how they keep it all under control.”
“Fear,” Lucia stated it plainly.
“Exactly, boss. The thought of one Inquisitor you can’t see does the work of ten Knights you can. Your friend at work? Might be an Inquisitor. That guy in the restaurant? He might be one too.” Mindy slowed, and something angry and vicious snuck out with her next words. “The system works really great too. People are encouraged to turn each other in to the Inquisition before they are caught. Not reporting a crime carries the same punishment as the crime itself, you see. Everybody has lots of motivation, right? Kids turn in their parents, brothers turn in their sisters...” Mindy’s voice trailed off.
“Friends turn in their friends,” Lucia finished.
“They sure do, boss.”
Manny finally spoke up. “This place sounds so great. How does it attract so many people?”
Pike answered this one. “Gethsemane is one of the few planets we’ve found with native edible plant life. It also shares a star with Eden’s Burrow. The Burrow is less hospitable, but it’s got lots of rare minerals and can also grow people food. The whole damn system is an agricultural paradise, kid.”
“King Fruit is from Eden’s Burrow,” Roland added. “They go for three hundred credits per kilo right now. It’s how The Dwarf got into smuggling.”
Mindy nodded her agreement. “Yeah, and since power on Gethsemane is all caught up in the religion, Church Elders live like kings of the profits from all the exotic food they export. The happy faithful live lives of relative ease because the Elders make sure the money trickles down to those who toe the line. People come from all over to take the Penitent’s Path, just so one day they’ll get to live in the Garden.”
“Do I even want to know what that is?”
“The Penitent’s Path?” Mindy almost smiled. “Why, it’s just the righteous penance a sinner takes to enjoy the earthly rewards of the Church’s faithful.”
“I don’t suppose,” Lucia said with a heavy sigh, “that this process is highly exploitative and or deeply unpleasant?”
