The Heretic (Beyond the Wall Book 1)

by Lucas Bale

  The Consul’s own vessel was a leviathan, five or six times as long as Soteria and sleek like a whale. It moved slowly, and the lightning from the centre of the breach coursed over it like a blanket of electrical fire. As Soteria hurtled towards it, Shepherd could pick out the gun turrets evenly spaced along the sides and across the top—he counted eight in all, and guessed there’d be another five on the other side. Bile rose in his throat as he banked away to change the angle. The cruisers appeared not to have picked up Soteria yet, and he didn’t slow.

  Two gunships dropped out of the cruisers and flew towards Herse.

  As if suddenly moved by some unknown command, they turned and arced towards Soteria.

  The tunnel was fifteen seconds away. Shepherd knew the gunships would meet them first. ‘We might be out of moves, preacher.’

  ‘Then it’s been a worthy attempt,’ the preacher replied grimly. ‘We will be remembered. We’re not alone.’

  ‘Eulogies are for the dead,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’re not dead yet.’

  He banked slightly away from the tunnel’s opening, forcing the gunships to follow. Did they know she was unarmed? Would that affect their tactics? No gravity up here, so energy management is different, but their pursuit curves won’t change. Keeping speed would normally be essential. Soteria was faster up here—heavier, with drives that would outclass the gunships. Their pilots would know that. They would choose a lead pursuit, a course which aimed in front of her, to compensate for her greater speed, but they would have to turn late and tight to avoid overshooting. The gunships would only get one chance at a firing solution and Soteria would only get one shot at escaping. The tunnel would soon close.

  Speed and energy are essential. They know that, they’re anticipating that. So do something different. As the gunships closed on a lead pursuit, gaining a pure and perfect firing solution, the shrill whine began, just as Shepherd had hoped. The moment it pierced his ears, he yanked the controls hard and broke left into and across the path of the oncoming gunships.

  They fired.

  Soteria rolled and descended beneath the hail of pure white, rocking violently as a small clutch of missiles cannoned into the hull. The rest arced harmlessly away.

  Klaxons screamed and the console lit up red, the orange halo across the blueprint of the ship gone and replaced by something infinitely more serious.

  Hold on, baby.

  The gunships had overshot, their chance gone, but there was no time for relief. The tunnel began to close.

  We’re still too far! Shepherd hammered the throttle to full and aimed for the centre of the aperture. This is it, girl. Protect us one last time. He watched the sphincter of azure and white curl towards the centre, closing inexorably and terminally, as they hurtled towards it. He had never entered a tunnel this tight, had no idea what it might do to the hull.

  They were close now.

  She rocked in his hands as if wind were tearing at the wings and the fuselage. He fought to keep her level and straight. Every half-second is crucial. You can’t lose speed. He had never seen a tunnel closing from this close up. Almost on top of him and, for a moment, he was taken by its beauty. Beauty is so often wed to wildness. Play the hand you have. Never give in.

  The tunnel closed behind them.

  Shepherd left the preacher in the cockpit and found himself running to medical. When he got there, the door was already open. The woman he’d seen at camp, tending to Jordi, was leaning over the boy again now. He was lying still on the cot, his eyes closed, naked but for his underwear. His body was bruised and bloody, and Shepherd winced at the sight of the wounds on his leg and his ribcage. Someone had wiped his face, but the dirt and blood was still smeared around the edges and caked in his hair. He looked too young.

  ‘How is he?’ Shepherd asked.

  The woman turned to him. She was older than he remembered—perhaps the bright lights in medical picked out more of the lines on her face, or perhaps the events of the last twenty-four hours had aged her. She stared hard at him before she spoke. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood and his ribs are broken,’ she said. ‘There’s an infection in the leg. I gave him some of the medicine you brought, but I don’t yet know if it’s strong enough to stop the infection.’

  ‘Use anything you need in here,’ he said.

  ‘That was my intention.’

  Shepherd nodded and left. He walked quickly along the corridor until he reached the door to the passenger quarters. He pressed his palm against the panel and it slid open. A dozen terrified faces stared back at him; he searched the room until he found the one he was looking for. The jowled customs official was sitting in one corner, knees pulled up to his meaty chest. Shepherd stalked over to him and hauled him to his feet. He pulled the pistol from its holster and forced it up under the man’s jaw.

  The fat man pulled away, terror flaring in his wide eyes, but Shepherd held him tightly, a fist closed around his lapels.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to get away,’ he stammered. Then the fear in his eyes fell away and his face grew hard. Through tight lips he sneered, ‘I never wanted any of it. I didn’t believe like the others. I just wanted the money and a place to live that had heat and didn’t have rats. Food that wasn’t rotten.’

  ‘They’ll be looking for you. You’re a danger to everyone here.’

  ‘No more than you,’ he said. ‘I’ll disappear in my own time. I have as many tunnel co-ordinates as I could download. The Magistratus will change the access codes, so they won’t last forever, but I can still sell them on Jieshou. They’ll never find me after that.’

  ‘I find out you gave any of these people up, I’ll find you.’

  For a moment, the man was silent as his eyes searched Shepherd’s. Then he sneered, ‘Empty threats. You think I’m more afraid of you than I am of a Consul? I made my choice, and selling these fools gains me nothing. Now, you’ve said what you had to say—be on your way, or shoot me.’

  Shepherd let the pistol drop as he watched the man’s expression shift to one of loathing. Then he turned away and went to his quarters to sleep away the tunnel.

  Shepherd found his quarters suddenly cold and alien to him. The comfortable familiarity was gone, replaced by something dark and unknown. He gazed at his desk, but was afraid to sit at it. Through the window outside, the strobed stars appeared like lines, but even the soft glow they cast seemed colder. He realised his throat was dry, and he leaned into the steel sink and washed his face and drank. As the adrenaline slowly drained away, his legs began to feel weak and brittle. He closed his eyes and, for a moment, he was on the horse again. Free. That’s what this is all about—being free. Is it worth it? Is it worth the price we will all have to pay?

  He collapsed onto his cot and slept.

  When Shepherd woke, his head was full of fog and his tongue was dry. His muscles ached because the adrenaline had long since seeped away. He dressed and opened his door. The preacher was waiting for him outside his quarters, standing tall and filling the doorway. Shepherd sighed. He let me sleep first. How kind of him.

  ‘Those men deserved proper burials,’ the preacher said quietly. His face was set, emotionless, but his eyes burned with sadness and resentment. ‘In war, people die. Yet they were human beings—misguided, but human nonetheless. We’re not animals.’

  ‘Those men would have killed us all in a heartbeat, and felt no remorse.’ Shepherd’s voice was hard and bitter. ‘Neither do I.’ It was a lie, and he knew it.

  When the preacher didn’t reply, Shepherd felt compelled to say, ‘We had no choice. We needed something to level the field.’ It felt like an excuse.

  ‘Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right, or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.’

  Shepherd grabbed the preacher’s arm as the tall man turned to leave.

  ‘Back there,’ Shepherd said. ‘The systems she put in play. Did you recognise them?’

  For a lo
ng time, the preacher said nothing. When he spoke, he looked tired. ‘No,’ he said, watching Shepherd. ‘But I remember talking to an old tech once, back in the service. He told me about a class of prototype vessels—five were built, I think—which were all decommissioned because the power plants consumed too much fuel when the experimental defensive modes were engaged. They were built to be Peacekeeper transports, at a time when it was felt that spurning weapons for better armour, more speed and new defensive technology was preferable. The techs thought getting the Peacekeepers into a fight quickly, and the ship out again, was better than having the ship slug it out with whatever firepower the other side might have—especially when it was unlikely the other side would have very much.’

  ‘You think Soteria was one of these prototypes?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They were all destroyed. Or so I was told.’

  ‘You’re thinking one got missed.’

  ‘The New Republic’s no utopia—people do what they need to in order to survive. It’s possible someone got one of them out. Unlikely, but possible.’

  ‘Why unlikely? I see Magistratus technology in the Bazaar all the time.’

  ‘The vessels I was told about had a second function; they were battlefield reconnaissance specialists.’

  ‘Intelligence gathering?’

  ‘Among other things. They were fitted with surveillance technology—cameras that could see in various fields, recording and communications devices and so on. But the real trick was that they had a comms sub-link into the main intel hub back at the Core. They could network in through long-range wire transmissions and send data back to facilities in the Core.’

  ‘Technology like that, she must have a tracker?’

  ‘If she did, I’d know about it.’ The preacher nodded to the device lying on the console. ‘I think we’re safe.’

  ‘But you’re not happy about this—I can see it all over your face. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘I was asked to facilitate your delivery to a specific location.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘I’ll get to that.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I trust you.’

  ‘I may not wait that long.’

  ‘I’m thinking it wasn’t you I was supposed to bring. It was the ship.’

  ‘You think it still has access to the Core networks?’

  ‘No. If it did, they’d certainly be tracking it. But if it could connect one way to the Core, it might have been able to connect the other way too.’

  ‘You think it has information stored somewhere in its own systems?’

  ‘That would explain a great deal. Why they didn’t just destroy the ship back at the port, but had to fire on us to keep us from escaping; why the Consul is so interested. There’s more to this than even I know.’

  ‘You can’t keep me in the dark forever.’

  ‘Time. That’s all I ask. There are things we need to attend to first.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We’re picking others up.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So we pick up whoever walks up to us?’

  ‘We’ll know them when we see them.’

  ‘I need to know what I’m getting into, preacher.’

  ‘You’re just as much on the run now as we are. They want that ship and they’ll kill whoever gets in their way.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances. There’s something I need to know. The kid’s brother, Ishmael.’

  The preacher’s face contorted in sadness. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did he know what he was getting into?’

  ‘He wasn’t supposed to die, but he knew the risks.’

  ‘You taught him what to say to me,’ Shepherd said. ‘So he’d sound like a mechanic and get me outside.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He knew the risks.’ Shepherd didn’t believe it.

  ‘I wish it had been me.’

  ‘You owe Jordi now and you always will. You’ve taken away from him the only thing that ever really mattered to him.’

  ‘You had a brother once.’

  ‘I said I wasn’t buying what you were selling.’

  The preacher gazed at him, then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about our history?’

  ‘Not much,’ Shepherd said. ‘What the Magistratus tells us, which I suspect is half-truth at best.’

  ‘I need a pipe. So land this thing and let’s get some fresh air.’

  Jordi woke slowly and, for a long while, struggled to comprehend where he was. Intense white light stung his bleary eyes and he shrank from it. His mouth was dry; he felt sluggish and drowsy. There was no pain, only a crawling numbness—as if his skin and body were not his own.

  Jordi forced open his eyes and blinked quickly, willing them to adjust to the light. Eventually, and painfully slowly, he was able to glance around. The cold, sterile steel room that met his gaze was frighteningly unfamiliar: steel cabinets, snaking hoses, a bank of screens. A single steel table, laid out with instruments he didn’t recognise. An intense white light shone from above, and a bitter smell hung in the air.

  It wasn’t until the ache in his muscles washed over him that he was reminded of the night the Peacekeepers had come to his village. The memories flooded back and overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and saw his brother’s broken body, hung like meat; then the discarded bodies of the villagers, the crows tearing at their ashen flesh. In his ears he could hear the thunder from the Peacekeepers’ weapons as he ran to the freighter, the raging storm above him as he fumbled with the hatch.

  Vaarden’s dead face appeared in front of his eyes and Jordi could feel his hands balling into trembling fists.

  So many dead.

  Unwilling to move, energy slowly leeching from his body, Jordi wept.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Preacher’s Tale

  AS DUSK fell, the preacher perched on a fallen tree over which he had laid a thick wool blanket. The flickering light from the fire played across his face. It picked out the dark crevasses of his scars and glistened in his eyes. For a moment, he looked ghostly and unreal. Charcoal clouds gathered overhead so there was no chance the smoke from the fire would be seen, if anyone was even looking for them in this alien place. The navigational systems had no name for the system, or for the planets within it. For this tiny moon the preacher had directed him to, there was only a number: FN-1657.

  Now, sitting in the warmth of the fire, away from the bitter winter of Herse, Shepherd felt suddenly, absurdly, relaxed. In his hands he held a flask of hotleaf, and the scalding liquid gave him comfort. Beyond the group sitting around the fire, towards the middle of the clearing, he could see the outline of Soteria’s hull and the dense forest on the other side, encircling her. The preacher pulled deeply on his pipe, clutched in a weathered hand, then blew wisps of vapour back into the fire. Shepherd drank from his flask and waited.

  ‘We don’t know everything, of course,’ the preacher said slowly. ‘The Magistratus has seen to that. But we know some. For thirty years, preachers have foraged for every scrap of learning about where humankind came from. Especially those scraps that aren’t in the hands of the Magistratus. Humankind has existed far longer than the Magistratus will admit; thousands of years. They called the planet that once was their only home many things—Terra or Tellus, Gaea, Jord, Earth. Maybe more than that, but in some way all of them referred to her as our mother.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Shepherd asked.

  ‘The Magistratus maintains an archive,’ the preacher replied. ‘Contained within it is everything the Magistratus knows of our history.’

  ‘Not possible,’ Shepherd said. ‘Something like that really existed, someone would know about it. There’d be talk, somewhere.’

  ‘Not everyone believes right away. You’re entitled to seek your own path. To say otherwise is the Magistratus’s way, not ours.

  ‘The men and wo
men who serve and protect the Archive are born into it. They know nothing else. To them, it is the highest calling. They are taught from birth to believe the Archive is the key to the Republic’s survival. They have no access to the data beyond that which is required to maintain it, but they are fanatical in their love for it. The Magistratus calls these people the Librarians.’

  ‘Like I said, how do you know this?’ Shepherd asked again.

  ‘Some time ago—I’ll not say how—we liberated a handful of files from the Archive. And of course we collect whatever scraps of data we can from across the Republic. We collate and we analyse, and we protect what we record.’

  ‘Where is it kept?’

  The preacher smiled and shook his head, never taking his eyes from Shepherd’s. ‘There are too many who would profit from dissemination skewed by self-interest. And were the Magistratus to find what we have—’ The preacher paused and stared long into the fire. For a while he said nothing and Shepherd saw grief uncoil across his face. ‘What is contained within that vast Archive tells us that humankind is predisposed to ruin itself. We are ruled by greed, lust, envy; motivated by egoism and self-interest.’

  ‘I don’t need an Archive to know that,’ Shepherd said as he tossed a stone into the fire. The wood shifted and sent sparks curling into the night air.

  The preacher chuckled. ‘Yes, on that you may be right.’

  ‘So you know what happened to that planet?’

  ‘We do,’ the preacher said. He pulled on his pipe again, deeper this time, as if the tobacco would numb something that was wasting inside him. ‘Two centuries ago, it was their own shortsighted self-interest which cost them their home. Instead of living within the limits of the world around them, they existed recklessly, gluttonously. They consumed and discarded with no thought to their own future. They raped their planet. Pillaged her of every ripe fruit she so generously gave them. Destroyed the air with poison to run their vehicles and their lives. No planet is without limits, and eventually she gave in.

  ‘Summers grew hotter and winters colder. Slowly to begin with, but perceptibly enough. Their leaders met time and again, but reached no agreement. They were concerned only with their insular lives—not with the future of their children and grandchildren. Some even said that there was no danger. Others cared only for coin.’