“Your friend,” Maybell said, tanned brow furrowed in thought. “Who is she? What kind of trouble is she in?”
Davin opened his mouth to reply. Usually, at this point, some kind of semi-believable lie would flow off the tip of his tongue like water over a waterfall. Lying in situations like these was second nature to him. But this time, nothing came. He stumbled over his words for a minute, then shut his lips, looked away, and sighed.
Maybell pushed off the pew, stood, and stepped to the lectern on the shallow platform. “Davin . . .” He picked up an old, worn, leather-bound Bible and gestured with it. “Francis is a community devoted to living by this book. And this book tells us to obey the governing authorities. To honor them. If I were to help you, that would be dishonoring to authorities of the Space Force who are looking for you right now. Why should I do that?”
His small but piercing eyes bore down on Davin with unwavering self-certainty. The man couldn’t be convinced by anything but the words in that book. Sierra would’ve known what to say. But Davin? All he had was the truth, but he could hardly believe the truth himself right now.
“I doubt you’d believe me,” Davin said, feeling helpless and small.
Maybell held the Bible against his chest, wearing an earnest expression. “There’s only one way to find out.”
Davin sighed and leaned back against the hard, wooden pew. “Probably don’t pay much attention to galactic news out here, but, uh . . . Prime Minister Falco has a daughter named Sierra.”
Maybell’s brow furrowed in concern. “The prima filia?”
Davin nodded. “Yeah, the prima filia. Her space yacht was attacked, and we happened to be in the same area where it happened. We rescued her and had to hightail it to get away from her attackers. But they pursued us, eventually caught up to us, and . . .” An ache pulsed in the hollow of his chest. “Long story short, we lost two of our friends and they took Sierra back.”
“Who?” Maybell asked, visibly struggling to keep track of everything in his mind. “Who were the attackers? The kidnappers?”
Davin almost laughed. “That’s the least believable part.”
Maybell pressed his lips into a thin line and patted his fingertips on his Bible. “I believe some things that many people find wildly unbelievable. Try me.”
This fellow was turning out to be different than what Davin expected.
He gambled on the truth: “The Space Force. Some agents of it, anyway.”
Maybell took a step back, then turned away and paced in a circle. He set his Bible back on the lectern and directed a weighty gaze at Davin. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Davin said emphatically. “I saw their uniforms, all black with silver buttons.”
“And their frigates!” Strange chimed in. “Had to belong to the Space Force. Three of ‘em.”
“Somebody in the Carinian government wants Sierra dead,” Davin said. “And we’re trying to prevent that from happening.”
Maybell stretched out his arm to plant a leathery hand on the lectern and stared down at the ground, his features contorted with conflict.
“Even if what you’re saying is true,” he said slowly and carefully. “We can’t help you.”
Davin panicked. “What? Why not?”
Maybell shook his bald head. “We came to Santa Maria to getaway from all the violence, the intrigue, the politicking. We came here to live a holy and simple life, separated from the world. We’ve seen what happens when our fellow believers meddle in the grand affairs of nations and politics. They try to influence the world, but the world ends up influencing them.”
“We’re not asking you to influence the world,” Davin said. “Just to help us get off Santa Maria.”
Strange scooted to the edge of the pew. “They’llkill us if they find us! Don’t you understand that?”
“The authorities don’t bear the sword in vain,” Maybell snapped back. “You must’ve known what you were up against.”
“Theauthoritiesare the bad guys!” Davin exclaimed. “Do you know what they would do to us? To Sierra? Toyou if you got in their way?”
“All the more reason why we should stay out of it,” Maybell said with finality. “I’m sorry, Davin. Your business is not my business.” He turned around and cross his arms over his chest, looking away.
Kiki thrust up to her feet with fire in her eyes. “You call yourself aChristian.”
Maybell looked over his shoulder with a troubled face.
“Well, so I do,” Kiki went on. “Do you remember the parable of the Good Samaritan?”
Maybell turned back around to face her.
“A man is attacked by highwaymen on a road between cities,” Kiki said with an unbreakable stare directed at Maybell. “Robbed, beaten, stripped of his clothes. Left to die. A holy man passes by on the road, sees him, sees his blood and nakedness.” She paused, eyes not blinking. “Does nothing. Because the man is ‘unclean.’ Unholy. Of the world. Another man passes by, a Samaritan. Different race, different homeland. But he has compassion. He mends the man’s wounds, clothes him, brings the man to his own home.” Kiki paused again, letting it all sink in. “Which one are you?”
Maybell stared back, the tan skin of his face lined deeply, A profound silence pervaded the church. Dust particles wafted in sunbeams angled down from clerestory windows under the wooden rafters of the vaulted roof.
Davin heard fast-approaching footsteps outside the church. The side door from which they’d entered burst open. The bearded man—Jeremiah—rushed in, glanced at theFossa crew, then looked at Maybell.
“A shuttle just landed outside the village,” Jeremiah said. “What should we do?”
Davin instinctively stood, panicked. He watched Maybell, who stood with arms crossed, still thinking.
“Will you help us?” Davin pleaded. “Please.”
Maybell closed his eyes and drew in a long breath through his nostrils. When his eyes opened, he uncrossed his arms and headed toward the door.
“Come with me.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
It smelled like sawdust and lichen. Appropriate, considering the stack of logs piled on top of him. It had been a quick job, burying Strange and Kiki and himself under a mound of cut firewood between the wall of neatly stacked pieces and the chopping block, ax still sticking out of it. As long as they stayed still, their cover seemed impeccable.
Trying to keep his breaths shallow, Davin peaked through a few pieces of wood at the center of the village, where most of the Christians had stopped their work and stood on porches. The familiar, eminently punchable Lieutenant Corella sauntered across the gravel avenue snaking through the buildings with Maybell by his side. More Carinian troops, in dark uniforms with dull black body armor over their knees, elbows, and torsos, moved from house to house barging through the door to search each one.
“Surely you saw the ship as it came down,” Corella said. “An Orionite clipper. Hard to miss. We know it came down in this area.”
Davin breathed a sigh of relief. They hadn’t found theFossayet. Hopefully there weren’t any meteorological satellites in Santa Maria’s orbit. TheFossa would stick out like a turd in a swimming pool.
“We’ve been hearing shuttles in the sky for hours now,” Maybell replied with an admirably straight face. “I saw it once as it passed by in the distance, but it looked like your shuttle.”
Lieutenant Corella paused. His boot heels crunched in the gravel as he turned to face Maybell. “You’re telling me you didn’t seeany other ships come down from the sky?”
Maybell spread his hands apologetically. “I wasn’t watching, Lieutenant. I was working. It’s harvest season right now. We only have about seven hours of daylight to get the crops into the storehouses.”
Corella pulled up his tablet and swiped his gloved finger over it a few times. “You seen any strangers? Anybody skulking around the woods? Anybody looks like this?” He turned the tablet screen so Maybell could see.
Davin glimpsed an image
of himself—a screenshot of him inside theFossa cockpit. Must’ve taken it from their brief vizchat conversation after they’d crossed the border. His pulse jumped up a notch, even though it wasn’t anything he didn’t already know.
Maybell examined the tablet and shook his head. “No, sir. I’ve not seen that man.”
“No?” Corella said, staring at Maybell with his head tilted forward. An incredulous expression. “I don’t think I need to remind you that lying is a sin. Do I?”
Maybell spread a wry smile across his lips. “No. You don’t.”
“Alright, then.” Corella turned off the screen of his tablet and glanced around. “You mentioned you have a mill near here. Let’s take a look in it.”
Maybell breathed a laugh. “Lieutenant, we would know if someone had snuck into our mill. We’ve been working around it since sunrise.”
“Then I’m sure you won’t mind if we take a little looksie.” Corella smiled at Maybell in a way that communicated the town elder had no say in the matter.
“Of course,” Maybell said. “This way.”
Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as they walked away, disappearing between buildings. Davin relaxed a little. He listened to their voices trail off.
Then Davin heard heavy boots thumping along the wooden planks of a porch nearby. Feet stomped to the gravel and crunched across it, approaching the wood pile. Davin tensed. His butt cheeks tightened. The Carinian soldier, a scowling woman whose pockmarked face had probably never encountered makeup, paused by the chopping block to examine the ax. Her combat rifle hung from a strap around her shoulder, its barrel incidentally pointed at the wood pile. She reached out, touched the tip of the handle, ran her gloved fingers down it. Stopped. Abruptly wheeled around to face the wood pile and stepped toward it. She knelt beside it, about a meter from where Davin’s feet rested under a handful of logs.
The Carinian soldier grabbed a piece of wood, lifted it, surveyed the other pieces underneath it. She tossed the small log over her shoulder and reached down for another one. When her fingers wrapped around it, Davin realized it was resting right on top of his ankle. The moment she lifted it, she would see the end of his pants and his boot. He’d be exposed.
She lifted.
“Milena!” Corella’s voice called from a ways off.
The woman’s eyes snapped away, toward the direction the voice came from. She dropped the log back on Davin’s ankle. Bone-deep pain spiked up his shin. Davin gritted his teeth to prevent making a sound.
“Milena, come here!” Corrella called again.
The soldier straightened and hurried away. “On my way, sir!”
Davin peered through the logs again as the other Carinian soldiers worked their way down the scattering of houses and buildings. A handful threw open the side door to the church and stormed in.
A figure suddenly appeared in front of Davin, startling him. It was Jeremiah. The beard gave him away. He glanced over his shoulder, then started grabbing logs and tossing them off of Davin.
“Come on!” he whispered hoarsely. “We have to go!”
Once Davin was freed enough to wriggle out of the log pile on his own, Jeremiah moved to the next buried person—Strange. Kiki had already done an admirable job of unearthing herself on her own. Jeremiah helped removed a few of the heftier logs.
“This way,” Jeremiah whispered. “Hurry.”
The three of them, plastered in wood chips, followed Jeremiah in a straight line, keeping a lookout in all directions. Jeremiah led them across a field to the old, rusty shuttles. He pulled a pair of long keys out of his pants pocket as they found their way to a hatch on the underbelly of the shuttle. The tall grass did a decent job of hiding them if they crouched. Jeremiah slid his fingers along the edges of the hatch until he found the keyhole.
“I don’t know why Avis is helping you,” Jeremiah said, testing one of the keys in the keyhole. “But he’s a man of great faith, and I have faith in him.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Davin muttered.
Strange elbowed him and hissed between her teeth, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”
Jeremiah jiggled the key a few seconds, then pulled it out and tried the other. It worked. A bolt creaked under the panel of metal. He pulled out the handle, twisted it, and yanked the hatch door open with an angry, metallic crack. A light flickered on inside, illuminating a ladder stretching up into the body of the shuttle.
“Go ahead,” Jeremiah said. “Take what you need and go back to your ship. I’ll try to keep their attention away from the shuttles.”
Strange duck-walked past Davin and grabbed the rungs to lead the way. Kiki followed after her. Davin paused by the hatch. Jeremiah glanced at him, then at the hatch as Kiki disappeared up it.
“Go on,” Jeremiah said. “It’s not a trap. I promise.”
“I know it’s not,” Davin said, searching the man’s face and finding no guile. No deception. “You’re not the type to do something like that.” Davin offered his open hand. “Thank you. Please tell Avis we’re grateful. Tell him . . . tell him he’s been a good Santa Marian to us.”
Jeremiah pressed his lips together and knuckled his eyebrows, evidently not understanding Davin’s play on words. He supposed “Good Samaritan” and “Good Santa Marian” sounded more alike in his head than verbalized. Still, Jeremiah grasped Davin’s hand and nodded.
“God be with you.”
Davin started to turn toward the ladder, then stopped himself. “‘Santa Marian.’ That is what you would call someone from Santa Maria, right?”
Jeremiah stared at him a second. “Yes.”
Davin nodded. “Okay, just making sure.”
He grabbed the ladder rungs and pulled himself up.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Orion Arm, in orbit around the planet Earth . . .
Cristiana rubbed her forehead and sighed heavily, looking out the observation window at the giant, glowing blue orb over which they hovered, waiting for clearance to descend.
Clearance. She always hated the word “clearance.” Submitting to some self-important, bureaucratic higher-up to give their nod of approval to her every move. What kind of warrior had towait for the permission to act in the heat of battle? To Cristiana, that sounded more like a slave.
Yet here they waited—her and Larkin—waiting for the Confed’s clearance to break atmosphere and join the fight in Jerusalem. The Champion of Triumph was strapped into the seat beside her, zooming in and out of a map of Jerusalem, studying its layout. Occasionally he would switch to a topographical view, then to a simple street map showing a complicated latticework of roads, then back to the bird’s eye satellite map.
“Strange city,” Larkin said, not lifting his eyes from the tablet. “It’s like a hundred cities built on top of each other with more and more remnants of the older ones the closer you get to the center.”
“Fascinating,” Cristiana said in a dry voice.
She glanced to the sides of the curved observation window at the two other Sagittarian cutter ships hanging in orbit, along with the squid-like drones attached by mechanical limbs to the cutter’s sleek, silver hulls. The Confed had an odd way of accepting help—halting them at the edge of the action and keeping them pinned down with these squid drones.
Cristiana’s eyes came across Larkin and rested on him in his light nanoflex armor, too distracted by his tablet to notice her. Or so she thought.
“Need something, Cristiana?” he asked, still not drawing his gaze away from the map.
She took in a breath and tore her eyes away. She couldn’t quite nail down her feeling about him, but a definitely mystery about him remained in her mind. A few missing puzzle pieces that made her wonder just how much more there was to the picture that she didn’t see.
“The volcano,” she said. In her mind’s eye, she was transported back to that bridge across the open maw of the volcano, riding on Starflash over the hellish lava. “You had a clear shot across the bridge. Why did
you spare me?”
Larkin’s fingers paused over the tablet screen. He looked up and scrutinized her for a moment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I missed the shot. Even champions miss from time to time.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t believe it. You had your sights on me, then you moved your crossbow.”
“I was starting to cook in my armor,” Larkin replied. “It was distracting.”
Cristiana let out a laugh. “You’re telling me you missed because of the heat? Right.”
Larkin’s lips tightened. His hand flinched down to a handgun holster attached to his thigh armor. A second later, Cristiana stared down the barrel of his gun. The champion glared at her with steely eyes and finger pressed to the trigger.
“If you’d like proof that I have no problem shooting you, just say the word.”
Cristiana stared back in tense silence, then slowly lifted her open hands.
“No,” she said quietly. “I believe you.”
Larkin kept his gun aimed at her a moment longer, then snapped it back down into its holster in a swift and fluid movement.
“Good.” Larkin returned to his tablet.
Cristiana sighed and looked out the window at Earth again. Before she could replay the interaction in her mind, an urgent comm alert flashed on the display screen attached to the ceiling and an alarm beeped.
Larkin slid his tablet into a side pocket on his seat and tapped a few buttons on the control panel in the seat arm. A video feed appeared on the screen from the cockpit, where the pilot, wearing HUD goggles, addressed them.
“Master Larkin, I just received notification that the Defenders of Glory are making a push into the Old City. I’ll bring it up on your screen.”
The pilot disappeared, and news clip footage replaced him on the overhead screen. A hovercam high in the air above the rooftops showed hundreds of armed militia rushing down an empty street. The camera tilted up to orient the viewers to the surrounds. A huge, skeletal umbrella arched into the sky above a hilltop layered with old, beige stones. Cristiana recognized one of the buildings on the hill—blue-tiled walls with an iconic gold dome set on top.
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 25
