Gabriel nodded. “Not much grey in the areas she works, it has to be said,” he agreed.
“Of course, it’s all honour and glorious battles and The Good Fight when we join the service,” Hoat philosophised. “We’d all take those missions if we had the choice. The police force thing gets old.”
“I imagine those who do it for the appreciation are often disappointed.”
“And how,” Hoat said companionably, then leaned in on the pew where he was sitting, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I hear Ariel is actually her sister.”
Once again Gabriel had to analyse this, before realising that Senior Sergeant Barnaby Hoat knew who Ariel was, but not that she was Ash’s sister. Gabriel, in contrast, knew Ariel was Ash’s sister … but only vaguely, tangentially, that she was world-famous and that pictures of her were everywhere.
“I guess it makes Vandemar’s secret ops a bit more difficult,” the Archangel allowed, “having a notorious sister like that.”
“Imagine a family with those two,” Hoat marvelled. “Their parents must be proud,” his face fell. “Only I heard they were orphans. Some nastiness at an ambassadorial compound in the Protectorates.”
“They’re actually triplets,” Gabriel said, wondering just how much Hoat had heard about the Vandemars.
“Well I’ll be,” Hoat’s thick eyebrows shot up. “What does the third one do?”
“From what I hear, she’s the mechanical and electronic foundation of this century’s technological revolution,” Gabriel said dryly. “A behind-the-throne inventor of some sort.”
“Best sort to be, maybe,” Hoat said.
“How do you figure?”
The Senior Sergeant shrugged massive shoulders. “Just what I’ve heard from the tech boys who come in here,” he said, “not that there are many, these days. People are already forgetting the Atonement, you know. They say it’s not safe to be a tinkerer or a builder, these days. Too many big boys out there with their eyes on the patents. Too many big boys looking out for competition.”
“There was a time when competition used to spur humanity to do amazing things,” Gabriel said.
“Well, these days it just spurs us to do the same old shitty things we always have,” Senior Sergeant Barnaby Hoat mourned, then cheered up once again. “Still,” he went on, “if you’re going to be an inventor, you can have worse sisters than Ariel and the Balrog, right?”
“Plenty worse,” Gabriel agreed.
“You know what balrog means?” Hoat asked enthusiastically. “It means fire demon. An author in the Nineteenth Century made it up. That’s a pretty stylish call sign, right?”
“It was the late Twentieth Century,” Gabriel corrected him gently, “and a balrog was a Demigod,” he’d read the books a couple of times over the years – even seen at least a couple of the movies thanks to a generously-appointed church or two. “It also means second in Xidh,” he continued, “which was sort of a weird coincidence that got me thinking this might be … a thread worth pulling on.”
“What’s Xidh?”
Gabriel sat back on the hard pew, staring reflectively into nothingness for long enough that the Senior Sergeant began to look as though he regretted asking.
“A dead language,” he finally replied.
Inevitably, as thinking priests usually did, Hoat asked the question.
“Isn’t it Vampires that can’t go out during the day?”
And Gabriel, of course, gave the obvious answer. As well as being obvious it also happened to have the benefit of being true, at least on some level.
“There’s no such things as Vampires.”
“Oh,” Senior Sergeant Barnaby Hoat was momentarily taken aback by this, but evidently decided not to believe a word this desperately hairy little swarthy Archangel was telling him. “Anyway, they need to be in a coffin or a grave or otherwise just out of the sun, nothing really to do with holy ground, isn’t that right?”
“True enough. We Angels can sunbathe all we like, as long as the ground has been consecrated according to whatever faith the building is part of. And not many of us like to sunbathe in church graveyards. Not even those of us with bodies slightly more aesthetically pleasing by modern standards,” he gestured self-deprecatingly at his thick torso.
“Never been high on my list of priorities either,” Hoat admitted.
Later, as evening was falling and Hoat was clearing up after the day’s minimal assortment of confessions and services and advice-giving, Gabriel made coffee in the little kitchen nook.
“Where’s the Cortana headed?” he asked casually. He’d already had a vague idea of her location and heading, of course, which was why he had intercepted her on his voyage. But he hadn’t gone to the minor effort of finding out her destination, even though a brief enquiry by the church conglomerate would have told him.
“I suppose if I tell you it’s classified, you won’t care,” Hoat said with a smile.
“I won’t care either way,” Gabriel agreed, “but you don’t need to tell me,” Hoat seemed relieved by this, so Gabriel dropped the subject. Chances were good that they were already in foreign waters and had no business there. “Are you feeling better?” he changed the subject. “Not shaky anymore?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” Hoat replied, with another puzzled, embarrassed chuckle at how he’d ‘come over all wobbly’ shortly after meeting the Archangel. “Still not sure what that was all about. It must’ve just been like you said – the shock of it.”
“It happens.”
“What about you?” Hoat asked, taking his coffee gratefully and sitting back down at the pews where Gabriel had unobtrusively spent most of the day.
“Me? I’m fine,” Gabriel said in surprise. “I hate boats, but this thing’s really more like a steel subcontinent, isn’t it?”
Hoat laughed. “And not much faster,” he agreed. “No, I meant – I know where you’re going and who you’re on your way to see, but I don’t know why.”
“Ah. Best reason of them all, really,” Gabriel told the Intervangelist. “Saving the world.”
“Ah,” Hoat echoed, smiling. “When the world needs saving, the Angels turn to the soldiers, is that it?”
“More or less,” Gabriel felt the sun vanish below the western horizon, and pushed himself to his feet. He groaned as his legs and back creaked. “Have I mentioned I’m getting too old for this?”
“Yup,” Senior Sergeant Barnaby Hoat grinned broadly. “It was the first thing you said to me when you arrived.”
“Hah,” Gabriel laughed humourlessly.
He went upstairs to the deck, bade farewell to the good Senior Sergeant and shepherd of the Cortana’s bedraggled and directionless flock, and launched himself into the sky after the sun.
GABRIEL’S PLAN
Gabriel had a plan for humanity. Whether it was exactly the same plan he’d been trying to execute with his contacts on the outside, whether it was something he’d even shared with them in any detail, he didn’t like to say. He was fairly sure the plans overlapped, but they weren’t entirely 1:1. Not anymore. They couldn’t be, because they weren’t in possession of all the facts.
It was, however, a plan he’d been trying to bring to fruition for hundreds – for fucking thousands – of years.
In his plan, the veil lifted from the world to reveal a furious, boiling mass of mostly-hairless apes who had been asking questions for upwards of two millennia and getting no answers, every last one of them growing steadily more pissed off each time an answer failed to materialise.
They had been told that God would take care of them, guide them, judge them. Once upon a time it might have been true, but it wasn’t the case anymore. Humanity had come to realise, painfully slowly over the course of centuries of bloodshed and tragedy, that the repeated mantra God is watching you was just something that was being said by other human beings. They had come to realise that at some point, the Big Voice had gone away and a lot of opportunists had rather seamlessly started to say the sa
me crap in unison so you could barely see the join, and then a hundred generations had gone by and cheese-in-a-spray-can was invented and suddenly everyone went, “hang on…”
And they’d gotten cleverer, and meaner, and more creatively spiteful. They’d had to, because there were so many of them that ‘just being the same species’ wasn’t enough to make them all get along anymore. In fact, all getting along was no longer on the table, and at that point it became a matter of horrible, heartbreaking triage. There wasn’t enough stuff to enable simple cooperation to work. It was a miracle – a miracle, indeed, enacted by a great and frozen monster the likes of which humanity was not ready to confront – that they had even survived the Twenty-Second Century.
Besides, as far as the human race was concerned, there were no other species. So all being the same was a meaningless distinction upon which to base a concept of universal harmony. It flew in the face of common sense and self-preservation.
So they got meaner, and they fought like rats in a sack, and they casually poisoned their planet and killed one another with gleeful malevolence, all the while protesting – universally – that they were the good guys. They crashed back into the howling-monkey darkness of prehistory even while clawing their way towards technology, enlightenment, and unspeakable creative beauty. They were, in short, human beings. And oh yes, Gabriel had a plan for them.
Sometimes, it was said, when rats were packed together in their own dead and their own faeces for long enough, what you got was a king. And it was not regal, or noble, or decent in the slightest. But it still counted.
Granted, the world would be a burned-out car by the time the doors opened. The stink of it, the cloud of filth as the sack opened and the rats hit fresh air, would be stupendous beyond belief. Eyes would water. Scented wossnames would be held up foppishly in front of offended noses. There would probably be fainting.
Dear God, it would be glorious.
And then humanity, teeth bared and patience long since boiled away, would swarm off the Earth like a great pestilence in fantastical cobbled-together machines that they had wrung from the very stones of their suffering, dying shithole of a planet. They would shed their homeworld like a sharted-in pair of boxers and stride boldly into the universe, genitals out and pimply hindquarters shedding the caked-on filth of two-millennia-and-counting of imprisonment and neglect.
And the message they left behind on the scabby, reeking, sobbing chunk of rock they’d been left clinging to, the message they had in answer for all the fear and uncertainty and loneliness, would be resounding and unequivocal. It would summarise everything that was terrible and magnificent about the human race, and the things they had been forced to do to survive, to rebuild an attempted semblance of the world from which they had been unjustly cast. It would be the ultimate expression of independence and scorn, the final word to the deadbeat Father who had abandoned them.
God, it would say.
Fuck all Your laws. We’re leaving.
Sincerely,
Humans.
Of course, to get to this beautiful, eye-misting pay-off, Gabriel accepted that he would need to keep humanity from completely eradicating one another or ruining the planet to such an extent that it just burned them off its surface altogether. And that wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, considering it was a sentient, environment-controlling species and it was actually its own extinction on the line, it was going to be disgracefully hard.
That was why he’d been forced to accept help from the most dreadful of quarters. It had worked, but it had been harrowing and he didn’t think it was going to work again – and if he had his way, the option would be taken off the table permanently in any case. But that left only one alternative, which had been the goal all along. In order to finally see his plan through, he would need them.
And that was a damn shame, because when it came to deadbeat and negligent guardians, God wasn’t even the greatest offender.
THE VISITOR
“That,” Ariel declared, “was the fu- the most pointless day I’ve had the pleasure of living through,” evidently noting that her aunt’s mild eyebrow had not descended after the almost-swearword, she further amended, “this year. Not that I don’t have high hopes for September to December, but this one’s going to be hard to top. I thought Wednesday had been bad, but today…”
“It got windy,” Ash said, “so you had to stop draping yourself over couches in your undies in a tent, walk a bit, and drape yourself over couches in your undies in a building instead.”
“It sounds ghastly,” Aunt Agñasta, who must have been jetlagged to within an inch of her life but Jarvis couldn’t see any sign of it, spoke with a very similar false sympathy.
Ariel snorted. “I didn’t walk. Two hundred oiled slaves carried me there on a giant stone ox. I draped myself over it,” she added, giving Jarvis a little twinkle as he set a platter of meel patties52 on the table and returned to the kitchen for more dishes, “just to stay in practice.”
“I hear it’s just like draping oneself on a bicycle, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis said. “One never really forgets.”
“A bicycle’s way less comfortable though,” Ariel said with a grin, serving Aunt Agñasta some patties before loading up her own plate.
“And how much did they pay you to suffer this unthinkable deprivation?” Ash asked.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Ariel shrugged.
“You poor child,” Aunt Agñasta murmured.
“Technically we’re supposed to do a session tomorrow as well,” she said, “but after today they’ve decided to run with what they have and do a shoot inland for the September issue.”
“Four days’ work, one of which they decided to let you take off,” Ash marvelled. “That’s rough for a quarter-million.”
“And I got to keep the undies,” Ariel added.
“Pity they wouldn’t let you keep one of the oily slaves,” Ash, much to Jarvis’s quiet envy, was largely unaffected by Aunt Agñasta’s sternness, and so could get away with remarks that might otherwise earn a disapproving look. “At least he could have done the dishes. There’s probably not even enough material in the undies to use them as dishcloths.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, Ms. Vandemar,” Jarvis called from the kitchen.
Roon was grinning widely as she took the bowl of greens Jarvis brought to the table next. Perhaps Roon was also unaffected by Agñasta Mulqueen’s notorious icy censure, come to think of it, which meant that it was really only Ariel and Jarvis who were … but since Roon hardly ever talked anyway it didn’t exactly matter.
They’d gathered at a time that probably wouldn’t be considered traditional dinner time by most families, but for them was more or less normal. The most unusual part, indeed, was that they were eating together in the first place.
Aunt Agñasta had returned in the early evening on Wednesday, two days previously, bringing their number to five and more or less obligating the sisters to host a full-family meal. She’d been “settling in” since then, which was Agñasta Mulqueen for “sleeping at strange times and suffering from digestive instabilities that everybody will pretend are not taking place on pain of death”, and today had been the first day of her official presence at Tumblehedge. Dinner had been postponed by Ariel’s disastrous third day of shooting for Cosmeta and the minor typhoon that had not only driven them inside this time, but also destroyed some of the props, one of the main camera arrays, and ruined the lighting continuity.
On any normal day, Jarvis would serve the girls whatever he’d prepared for dinner whenever they were ready to eat it, anywhere between six in the evening and sparrow’s fart the following morning, and then eat by himself in the “servants’ chambers”, which were actually a very nice series of lounges. With Aunt Agñasta back in the house, he toned down his butling a little53 but couldn’t turn it off entirely.
Thus, he cooked and he served, and then all five of them ate together. Ariel and Ash continued to snipe at one another good-naturedl
y, Aunt Agñasta joined in with great relish amidst regaling them with a full report of her recent trip, and Jarvis joined in wherever he felt he had something to contribute.
When the doorbell chimed, Jarvis stood up and collected himself, returning to his role.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“Silas,” Aunt Agñasta warned. As usual, it took him a moment to remember that was his legal name.
“Sorry, Agñasta,” he said, “force of habit,” then he inclined his head with maximum-insolence butlerity, turned and glided from the dining room to chuckles from the Vandemars.
The bell chimed again before he made it to the entranceway and passed the dark monitors. The surveillance system hadn’t been effective since polarity treatments hit the underground market and everyday criminals learned to blur themselves out of security footage, so Jarvis didn’t use it to see who was at the door. Ash had more elegant solutions, not available to the general public, at her disposal anyway. And that was nothing to what Roon was capable of creating.
So he had no idea what to expect when he opened the door, just that it was a single figure and wasn’t carrying any identifiable weapons or toxins.
The one thing more formidable than Ariel stepping into a room was when her two sisters were with her. That, in Jarvis’s experience, could be somewhat overwhelming to first-timers. He’d lived with it for years, and even he was occasionally dazzled by any one of them at a time, let alone all three. When they sat around a table and chatted while they ate, as they were currently doing, the temptation to just sit and slowly starve while watching and listening to them was frankly a little bit scary. He had no idea how the kidnappers and thugs Ash took down on a regular basis felt when they saw her taking aim – but he was sure, if they did see her, they felt a certain blissful tranquillity in their final moments.
Compared to Gabriel, the Vandemar triplets were nothing. Your eyes and your brain told you that you were looking at an ape, a caveman, a missing link with enormous grey-black wings. Your soul told you nothing. It just sang.
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