by Дэн Симмонс
In the twenty standard days during which the Grand Inquisitor stayed on Mars, he learned to hate it far more than he thought he could ever hate Hell itself.
The simoom planetary dust storm blew every day he was there. Despite the fact that he and his twenty-one-person team had taken over the Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of the city of St. Malachy, and despite the fact that the palace was theoretically as hermetically sealed as a Pax spaceship, its air filtered and boosted and refiltered, its windows consisting of fifty-two layers of high-impact plastic, its entrances more air-lock seals than doors, the Martian dust got in.
When John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa took his needle shower in the morning, the dust he had accumulated in the night ran in red rivulets of mud into the shower drain. When the Grand Inquisitor’s valet helped him pull on his cassock and robes in the morning—all of the clothing fresh-cleaned during the night—there were already traces of red grit in the silken folds. As Mustafa ate breakfast—alone in the Governor’s dining room—grit ground between his molars. During the Holy Office interviews and interrogations held in the echoing great ballroom of the palace, the Grand Inquisitor could feel the dust building up in his ankle hose and collar and hair and under his perfectly manicured fingernails.
Outside, it was ridiculous. Skimmers and Scorpions were grounded. The spaceport operated only a few hours of the day, during the rare lulls in the simoom. Parked ground vehicles soon became humps and drifts of red sand, and even Pax-quality filters could not keep the red particles out of the engines and motors and solid-state modules. A few ancient crawlers and rovers and fusion rocket shuttles kept food and information flowing to and from the capital, but to all intents and purposes, the Pax government and military on Mars had come to a standstill.
It was on the fifth day of the simoom that reports came in of Palestinian attacks on Pax bases on the Tharsis Plateau. Major Piet, the Governor’s laconic groundforce commander, took a company of mixed Pax and Home Guard troopers and set out in crawlers and tracked APC’s. They were ambushed a hundred klicks short of the plateau approach and only Piet and half his command returned to St. Malachy.
By the second week, reports came in of Palestinian attacks on a dozen garrison posts in both hemispheres. All contact was lost with the Hellas contingent and the south polar station radioed the Jibril that it was preparing to surrender to the attacking forces.
Governor Clare Palo—working out of a small office that had belonged to one of her aides—conferred with Archbishop Robeson and the Grand Inquisitor and released tactical fusion and plasma weapons to the beleaguered garrisons. Cardinal Mustafa agreed to the use of the Jibril as a weapons’ platform in the struggle against the Palestinians, and South Polar One was slagged from orbit. The Home Guard, Pax, Fleet Marines, Swiss Guard, and Holy Office commands concentrated on making sure that the capital of St. Malachy, its cathedral, and the Governor’s Palace were secure from attack. In the relentless dust storm, any indigenie that approached within eight klicks of the city perimeter and who was not wearing a Pax-issued transponder was lanced and the bodies recovered later. A few were Palestinian guerrillas.
“The simoom can’t last forever,” grumbled Commander Browning, the head of the Holy Office security forces.
“It can last another three to four standard months,” said Major Piet, his upper torso bulky in a burncast. “Perhaps longer.”
The work of the Holy Office Inquisition was going nowhere: the militia troopers who had first discovered the massacre in Arafat-kaffiyeh were interviewed again under Truthtell and neuroprobe, but their stories remained the same; the Holy Office forensic experts worked with the coroners at St. Malachy’s Infirmary only to confirm that none of the 362 corpses could be resurrected—the Shrike had ripped out every node and millifiber of their cruciforms; queries were sent back to Pacem via instantaneous-drive drone regarding the identities of the victims and—more importantly—the nature of the Opus Dei operations on Mars and the reasons for the advanced spaceport, but when a drone returned after fourteen local days, it brought only the ID’s of the murdered and no explanation of their connection to Opus Dei or the motives for that organization’s efforts on Mars.
After fifteen days of dust storm, more reports of continued Palestinian attacks on convoys and garrisons, and long days of interrogation and evidence sifting that led nowhere, the Grand Inquisitor was happy to hear Captain Wolmak call on secure tightbeam from the Jibril to announce that there was an emergency that would require the Grand Inquisitor and his entourage to return to orbit as soon as possible. The Jibril was one of the newest archangel-class starships, and it looked functional and deadly to Cardinal Mustafa as their dropships closed the last few kilometers to rendezvous. The Grand Inquisitor knew little about Pax warships, but even he could see that Captain Wolmak had morphed the starship to battle readiness: the various booms and sensor arrays had been drawn in beneath the starship’s skin, the bulge of the Gideon drive had sprouted laser-reflective armor, and the various weapons’ portals were cleared for action. Behind the archangel, Mars turned—a dust-shrouded disc the color of dried blood. Cardinal Mustafa hoped that this would be his last view of the place.
Father Farrell pointed out that all eight of the Mars System Task Force’s torchships were within five hundred klicks of the Jibril—a tight, defensive grouping by space-going standards—and the Grand Inquisitor realized that something serious was in the offing.
Mustafa’s dropship was the first to dock and Wolmak met them in the air-lock antechamber.
The interior containment field gave them gravity.
“My apologies for interrupting your Inquisition, Your Excellency…” began the captain.
“Never mind that,” said Cardinal Mustafa, shaking sand from the folds of his robe. “What is so important, Captain?”
Wolmak blinked at the entourage emerging from the air lock behind the Grand Inquisitor: Father Farrell, of course, followed by Security Commander Browning, three Holy Office aides, Marine Sergeant Nell Kasner, the resurrection chaplain Bishop Erdle, and Major Piet, the former groundforce commander whom Cardinal Mustafa had liberated from Governor Palo’s service.
The Grand Inquisitor saw the captain’s hesitation. “You can speak freely, Captain. All in this group have been cleared by the Holy Office.”
Wolmak nodded. “Your Excellency, we have found the ship.”
Cardinal Mustafa must have stared his incomprehension.
“The heavy-duty freighter that must have left Mars orbit the day of the massacre, Your Excellency,” continued the captain. “We knew that their dropships had rendezvoused with some ship that day.”
“Yes,” said the Grand Inquisitor, “but we assumed that it would be long gone—translated to whatever star system it was bound for.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wolmak, “but on the off chance that the ship had never spun up to C-plus, I had the dropships do an in-system search. We found the freighter in the system’s asteroid belt.”
“Was that its destination?” asked Mustafa.
The captain was shaking his head. “I think not, Excellency. The freighter is cold and dead. It’s tumbling. Our instruments show no life on board, no systems powered up… not even the fusion drive.”
“But it is a starship freighter?” questioned Father Farrell.
Captain Wolmak turned toward the tall, thin man. “Yes, Father. The H.H.M.S. Saigon Maru. A three-million-ton ore and bulk freighter that’s seen service since the days of the Hegemony.”
“Mercantilus,” the Grand Inquisitor said softly.
Wolmak looked grim. “Originally, Your Excellency. But our records show that the Saigon Maru was decommissioned from the Mercantilus fleet and rendered into scrap metal eight standard years ago.”
Cardinal Mustafa and Father Farrell exchanged glances.
“Have you boarded the ship yet, Captain?” asked Commander Browning.
“No,” said Wolmak. “Because of the political implications, I thought it best if His Exc
ellency were aboard and authorized such a search.”
“Very good,” said the Grand Inquisitor.
“Also,” said Captain Wolmak, “I wanted the full complement of Marines and Swiss Guard troopers aboard first.”
“Why is that, sir?” asked Major Piet. His uniform looked bulky over his burncast.
“Something’s not right,” said the captain, looking at the Major and then at the Grand Inquisitor. “Something’s very much not right.”
More than two hundred light-years from Mars System, Task Force GIDEON was completing its task of destroying Lucifer.
The seventh and final Ouster system in their punitive expedition was the hardest to finish off.
A yellow G-type star with six worlds, two of them inhabitable without terraforming, the system was crawling with Ousters: military bases out beyond the asteroids, birthing rocks in the asteroid belt, angel environments around the innermost water world, refueling depots in low orbit around the gas giant, and an orbital forest being grown between what would have been the orbits of Venus and Old Earth in the Old Sol System. It took GIDEON ten standard days to search out and kill a majority of these nodes of Ouster life.
When they were done, Admiral Aldikacti called for a physical conference of the seven captains aboard His Holiness’s Ship Uriel and revealed that the plans had been changed: the expedition had been so successful that they would seek out new targets and continue the attack. Aldikacti had dispatched a Gideon-drive drone to Pacem System and received permission to extend the mission. The seven archangels would translate to the nearest Pax base, Tau Ceti System, where they would be rearmed, refitted, refueled, and joined by five new archangels. Probes had already targeted a dozen new Ouster systems, none of which had yet received news of the massacre along Task Force GIDEON’s swath of destruction. Counting resurrection time, they would be attacking again within ten standard days.
The seven captains returned to their seven ships and prepared for the translation from Target System Lucifer to Tau Ceti Center Base.
Aboard H.H.S. Raphael, Commander Hoagan “Hoag” Liebler was uneasy.
Besides his official capacity as executive officer of the starship, second in command to Father Captain de Soya, Liebler was paid to spy on the father-captain and to report any suspicious behavior—first to the chief of Holy Office Security aboard Admiral Aldikacti’s flagship, the Uriel, and then—as far as the Executive Officer could tell—all the way up the chain of command to the legendary Cardinal Lourdusamy. Liebler’s problem at the moment was that he was suspicious but could not articulate the cause for his suspicions.
The spy could hardly tightbeam the Uriel with the dangerous news that the crew of Father Captain de Soya’s Raphael had been going to confession too frequently, but that was precisely one of the causes of Liebler’s concern. Of course, Hoag Liebler was not a spy by training or inclination: he was a gentleman of reduced circumstances, forced first by financial constraints to exercise a Renaissance Minor gentleman’s option of joining the military, and then constrained further—by loyalty to his Pax and Church, he convinced himself, more than by the constant need for money to reclaim and restore his estates—into spying on his captain.
The confessions were not all that out of the ordinary—the crew was made up of faithful, Church- and confession-going born-again Christian soldiers, of course, and the circumstances in which they found themselves, the possibility of a true and eternal death if one of the Ouster fusion weapons or k-beams made it through defensive containment fields, certainly added to the urgency of that faith—but Liebler sensed some extra factor at work in all these confessions since Target System Mammon. During the lulls in the vicious fighting here in Target System Lucifer, the entire crew and Swiss Guard complement of the Raphael—some twenty-seven hands in all, not counting the bewildered Executive Officer—had been cycling through the confessional like spacers at an Outback port whorehouse.
And the confessional was the one place at which even the ship’s Executive Officer could not linger and eavesdrop. Liebler could not imagine what conspiracy could possibly be afoot. Mutiny made no sense. First, it was unthinkable—no crew in the nearly three centuries of Pax Fleet had ever mutinied nor come close to mutiny.
Second, it was absurd—mutineers did not flock to the confessional to discuss the sin of a planned mutiny with the captain of the ship.
Perhaps Father Captain de Soya was recruiting these men and women for some nefarious deed, but Hoag Liebler could not imagine anything the priest-captain could offer that would suborn these loyal Pax spacers and Swiss Guard troopers. The crew did not like Hoag Liebler—he was used to being disliked by classmates and shipmates, it was the curse of his natural-born aristocracy, he knew—but he could not imagine them banding together to plan some evil deed directed his way. If Father Captain de Soya had somehow seduced this crew into treason, the worst they could do was attempt to steal the archangel—Liebler suspected that this remote possibility was the reason he had been placed aboard as a spy—but to what end? Raphael was never out of touch with the other archangels in the GIDEON Task Force, except for the instant of C-plus translation and the two days of hurried resurrection, so if the crew turned traitor and attempted to steal the ship, the other six archangels would cut them down in an instant.
The thought made Hoag Liebler physically queasy. He disliked dying, and did not wish to do so more than necessary. Moreover, it would not help his career as a restored Lord of the Manor on Renaissance Minor if his service duty was remembered as being a part of the Crew That Turned Treasonous. It was possible, he realized, that Cardinal Lourdusamy—or whoever was at the apex of his espionage food chain—might have him tortured, excommunicated, and executed to the true death along with the rest of the crew just to conceal the fact that the Vatican had put a spy aboard.
This thought made Hoag Liebler more than queasy.
He consoled himself with the thought that such an act of treason was not just unlikely, it was insane. It was not like the old days on Old Earth or some other water world that Liebler had read about where an ocean going warship goes rogue and turns pirate, preying on merchant ships and terrorizing ports.
There was nowhere for a stolen archangel to run to, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to rearm and refit the ship. Pax Fleet would have their guts for garters.
Commander Hoag Liebler continued to feel queasy and uneasy despite all this forced logic.
He was on the flight deck four hours into their spinup to the translation point to Tau Ceti System when the priority squirt came in from Uriel: five Ouster torchship-class destroyers had been hiding in the charged-particle dust torus of the inner moon of the outer gas giant and were now making a run toward their own translation points, using the G-type sun as a shield between them and the GIDEON Task Force. The Gabriel and the Raphael were to deviate from their translation arcs enough to find a firing trajectory for their remaining C-plus hyperkinetic missiles, destroy the torchships, and then to resume their exits from Lucifer System.
Uriel estimated that the two archangels could spin up to translation about eight hours after the other five ships had departed. Father Captain de Soya acknowledged the squirt and ordered a change of course, and Commander Liebler monitored the tightbeam traffic as Mother Captain Stone aboard Gabriel did likewise. The Admiral isn’t leaving Raphael behind alone, thought the Executive Officer. My masters aren’t the only ones that don’t trust de Soya.
It was not an exciting chase—not actually a chase at all, when it came down to it. Given the gravitational dynamics of this system, it would take the old Hawking-drive Ouster torchships about fourteen hours to reach relativistic velocities prior to spinup. The two archangels would be in firing position within four hours. The Ousters had no weapons that could reach all the way across this system to hurt the archangels: both Gabriel and Raphael had enough weaponry in their depleted stock to destroy the torchships a dozen times over. If all else failed, they would use the hated deathbeams.
Commander Lie
bler had the con—the priest-captain had gone to his cubby to catch a few hours of sleep—when the two archangels cleared the sun for a firing solution. The rest of Task Force GIDEON had long since translated. Liebler turned in his acceleration chair to buzz the captain when suddenly the blast portal irised and Father Captain de Soya and several others stepped in. For a moment Liebler forgot his suspicions—forgot even that he had been paid to be suspicious—as he goggled at the unlikely group. Besides the captain, there was that Swiss Guard sergeant—Gregorius—and two of his troopers. Also in attendance were Weapons Systems Officer (WHIZZO) Commander Carel Shan, Energy Systems Officer (ESSO) Lieutenant Pol Denish, Environmental Systems Officer (VIRO) Commander Bettz Argyle, and Propulsion Systems Engineer (GOPRO) Lieutenant Elijah Hussein Meier.
“What in the hell…” began Executive Officer (XO) Liebler and then stopped. The Swiss Guard sergeant was holding a neural stunner and it was aimed at Liebler’s face.
Hoag Liebler had been carrying a concealed flechette pistol in his boot for weeks, but he forgot about it completely at this moment. He had never had a weapon aimed at him before—not even a stunner—and the effect of it made him want to urinate down his own pant leg. He concentrated on not doing that. This left little room to concentrate on anything else.
One of the female troopers came over and lifted the pistol out of his boot. Liebler stared at it as if he had never seen it before.
“Hoag,” said Father Captain de Soya, “I’m sorry about this. We took a vote and decided that there was no time to try to convince you to join us. You’re going to have to go away for a while.”
Summoning up all the dialogue he had ever heard from holodramas, Liebler began blustering.
“You’ll never get away with this. The Gabriel will destroy you. You’ll all be tortured and hanged. They’ll rip your cruciforms right out of your…”
The stunner in the giant sergeant’s hand hummed. Hoag Liebler would have gone facedown onto the deck if the female trooper had not caught him and lowered him carefully to the deckplates.
