One Last Flight: Book One Of The Holy Terran Empire

by Carlos Carrasco

  “I don’t object.”

  The engineer grinned. “Excellent! A second deck will allow your Strumpet to transport up to fifty, maybe sixty passengers. The fit will be a little snug, but then the trip to Aldiss is just a forty-four hour ride. We’ll have to add a few extra stalls to the head of course and have the plumbing adjusted accordingly. The bad news is that your Magneto outboards are shot, I’m afraid. There’s nothing to be done about them and your Crysteel sheathing is so patchy as to be useless...”

  “How long do figure before she’s at least fit to fly?”

  Asaph wagged his head for several seconds before finally answering, “Working round the clock, I can have your pretty little Strumpet ready to fly in round ‘bout forty hours.”

  “Well then, I’ll leave you to it, Chief Greeley,” I said shaking his hand again. “I’ll just need a minute to pick up a change of clothes and some sundries.”

  “Of course,” he said and returned to his makeshift seat on the stairs and to the study of my ship’s schematics.

  I climbed the ladder to the top deck. From the recessed closet in my quarters, I pulled out a duffle bag of clothes. A tool chest on the closet floor hid three grenades in a false bottom compartment. I fished them out and put them in the bag. From the cockpit, I retrieved the case of bio-enhancers and then headed back to the ship’s stern. At the galley I stopped briefly to pluck the last two bottles of rum from their case.

  I handed one of the bottles to engineer Greeley. “Here’s a little something for taking care of my Strumpet, Chief.”

  The engineer’s face lit up. “Why thank you, Captain Gaelic!”

  We shook hands one more time and I made my way down the loading ramp. The nuns did not seem to have budged an inch. I waved the bottle before them. “What do you say ladies, party at my place?”

  “It’ll be a party of one, I’m afraid,” Estrella said with a smile. “There are some duties that I cannot pawn off on my sisters.”

  “You’re leaving me?”

  “After I show you to your suite, yes,” she said. “I’ll be free after Mass tomorrow morning. It’s at 08:00 hours. The church isn’t too far from your rooms. I’ll wait for you there.”

  “I guess it’s just you and me kid,” I said to Sister Elizabeth.

  The young nun laughed and, if I wasn’t mistaken, blushed.

  Sisters Estrella took my arm and dragged me away from the young nun. After another slidewalk and elevator ride the nuns dropped me off at a cozy, two-room suite. I shot up immediately after they left and thought of having a drink while I waited for the bio-enhancers to get to work. I stared at the bottle instead, my mind, suddenly a dulled blank. I felt drained emotionally, enervated; like something vital and ineffable had been sluiced away from the heart of me. I kicked off my boots and, bottle in hand, entered the suite’s interior room. Inside, there was a bed centered against the far wall. I placed the bottle on one of the bed’s side tables, shrugged out of my vest and dropped my gun belt on the carpeted floor beneath it. I then laid down, expelling a weary sigh. It was a large bed, more comfortable than any I had been on in a long, long time.

  I fell helplessly into deep and dreamless sleep.

  16

  A melodious chime stirred me from sleep. Hearing the pleasant but unfamiliar sound repeat, I experienced a few moments of disorientation while waking to my new surroundings. The chime played a third time before I realized that there was someone at the door to the suite. I got up and rubbed sleep from my eyes. I walked to the front room through a mental fog, a miasma of a dull, diffused ache in my head and a rising uneasiness in my guts. I opened the door in mid yawn.

  Sisters Estrella and Elizabeth were on the other side, bright-eyed as sunrise.

  “Is it time for Mass, already?” I asked.

  They smiled.

  “Mass is over,” Estrella said.

  “Oh.”

  “We didn’t see you at church so, we thought we’d check up on you,” Estrella said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said through another yawn. “I overslept.”

  “It’s okay,” Estrella said, “You must have needed the sleep.”

  “Um… I guess…”

  “We can come back,” she said. “If you’re still tired.”

  “No, no,” I said, opening wide the door. “I’m up. I’m good. Come on in. I’ll just need a few minutes. Have a seat ladies… sisters.”

  The nuns entered and I pointed them towards the couch in the living room.

  “If you would leave the door open, we would much appreciate it,” Estrella said as I started to close the door behind them.

  I reopened it. “Um… Okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  Estrella and Sister Elizabeth sat down and, with almost perfectly synchronized movements, smoothed the folds of their habits and adjusted the rosaries that hung from their cinctures. Their wimpled faces beamed matching smiles at me.

  “Like I said, I’ll just need a few minutes,” I said, picking up my boots, duffle bag and case of bio-enhancers before retreating to the bedroom.

  “Take your time, Gael,” Estrella said.

  The nuns pulled small, leather-bound books from their habits and opened them to a page marked by one of several colored ribbons. They crossed themselves, closed their eyes and softly recited a short prayer in Latin, the ancient language of their religion. When they were done with their prayer, the nuns began reading aloud, but quietly, from their books. I watched them for a few moments. Mostly they took turns reading passages, only occasionally reading one together.

  I closed the door to the bedroom and dropped my stuff at the foot of the bed. I stripped, shot up and hit the shower. I was nearly done rinsing the last of the soap off my body when a wave of nausea swept over me. My abdomen seized up suddenly and I doubled over and vomited. The nausea began to recede almost immediately after the one, painful spasm, but I kept my head down, under the jet of water, until the puddle of greenish bile at my feet broke up and disappeared down the drain. I then dialed the temperature knob to its coldest setting and let the frigid waters dispel the attendant lightheadedness.

  Well, that’s new, I thought. I had been suffering through spells of nausea for weeks now, but this was the first time vomiting had been induced by one. I refused to think about what the spewing might bode.

  I finished up in the bathroom and then upended the contents of my duffel bag over the bed. I set one of the grenades to the side and hid the others under the mattress. I quickly sorted through the clothes and dressed. I donned the vest, slipped into my boots, put on my gun belt and clipped the grenade to it. Lastly, I prepped a small go-pouch with a syringe, three vials and a rubber tourniquet and attached the pouch to my belt.

  The nuns were done with their prayers when I opened the door between the two rooms.

  “Hungry?” Estrella asked as she and Sister Elizabeth rose to their feet.

  “Famished.”

  And I was. They took me to a brightly lit diner not too far from my suite where I ate heartily from a platter heaped high with pancakes, eggs, bacon and fried onion and pepper-strewn potatoes. The nuns had small bowls of oatmeal and sliced fruit. Between mouthfuls I asked them about their lives as nuns. I listened in earnest to their detailed descriptions of their daily routine. It was comprised of a whole lot of praying both scheduled and formal and extemporaneous, singing, reading and meditating interspersed with sundry chores. They left the station once a year, half the convent at a time, alternating their visits to Haven between the Easter and Christmas seasons. While planetside only the scenery changed. They still spent the bulk of their time praying, singing, reading, meditating and doing chores.

  “It’s all so very ordered,” I said at the end of my meal. “Predictable and… well, routine. Don’t you ever just want to ditch the habits and the rules and run wild?”

  They smiled and shook their heads.

  “No,” Sister Elizabeth said. “But occasionally I do miss surfing.”

 
“Surfing?” Estrella and I asked in equal surprise.

  “I grew up in a beach house on Telavyra, you see,” Sister Elizabeth explained. “I spent most of my childhood in the water.”

  The image of the mousey young woman atop a surfboard brought smiles to Esty and me.

  “I was quite good at it, I’ll have you know,” the young nun said, a dash of defensiveness in her tone.

  “I have no doubt that you were, sister,” I said with a laugh. “What about you, Mother Superior … Dymphna, is it? Is there anything you miss?”

  “Dancing,” Esty answered with an emphatic nod of her head.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not allowed to dance,” I said.

  “There’s no prohibition against dancing,” Esty answered. “There just hasn’t been any opportunity for it since I joined the order.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to fix that,” I said.

  Sister Elizabeth loosed a small squeal of delight with a clap of her hands. “Ooh! I’d so love to see you two dance,” she said.

  “The public has spoken,” I said to Esty.

  “We’ll see,” she answered guardedly and with a glance at Sister Elizabeth which quickly quelled the young woman’s exuberance.

  I laughed at the exchange. The nuns fixed placid smiles on me.

  “So where to next?” I asked after drinking the last of my mug of coffee.

  “Are you up to a tour of the station?” Estrella asked.

  “Sure,” I answered.

  The tour began with the church. Saint Lefebvre’s was a massive, cross-shaped structure, constructed of giant blocks of a blue-veined and iridescent white marble. The church was a hundred yards in length and maybe two thirds as wide at the wings. It was five stories tall, except for eight, cross-topped spires that rose in four pairs from the extremities of the arms and the blue, gold and white tiled dome over their intersection. These spires and dome reached another twenty or thirty feet in the air, stopping just short of the ceiling. Saint Lefebvre’s gleamed like a polished piece of nacre and turquoise under the faux sunlight of the synthophoto cells which panelled the ceiling.

  The church sat in the center of a three hundred acre, park-like green space with a central pond, benches and a few picnic tables scattered throughout. The convent was behind the church, a squat two-story domed structure constructed of the same marble. The nuns spent nearly an hour walking me through the church, relating its history, explaining the iconography and naming the various saints whose statues regarded us somberly from their recessed niches along the wall. The tour of the convent was less thorough. It consisted of the convent’s vegetable garden, its anteroom, refectory and Estrella’s office. The convent’s interior, they informed me, was off limits to all but the sisterhood.

  We then toured the remaining lower levels of the station’s central spool. The station was orientated so that the command center faced the foundry and the Calabash nebula. These were considered the ‘upper’ levels and designated with even numbers, two through twelve. We spent the morning and afternoon exploring some of the ‘lower’ levels, one through eleven which contained the church and convent as well as housed an elaborate hydroponic farm, a pasture for the grazing of dwarf cattle, a massive gym with four olympic-sized swimming pools, and a huge and exquisite botanical garden.

  I listened attentively as the nuns spouted out facts and figures and detailed the routines that made up daily life on Krestor Station. Half way through the day’s tour we paused for the nuns to pull out the little books they called breviaries and recite one of their daily scheduled prayers. I took advantage of the lull to shoot up.

  The nuns did their best not to stare.

  The tour ended in the botanical garden. Estrella and I sat on a padded bench in a bower shrouded by cascades of wisteria. Our chaperone, Sister Elizabeth, busied herself with helping a pair of gardeners with their tasks. Estrella and I further fleshed out our pasts for each other but mostly we reminisced about our childhood in Arkum Valley. After an hour or so of waxing nostalgic over our past follies and the endearing foibles of various members of our commune family, the nuns escorted me back to my suite. Before they left me to attend to their unavoidable nun duties, the sisters invited me to join them back at the church at 1800 hours for Vespers, their evening prayers.

  I promised not to sleep through it.

  And I didn’t. I was too restless to sleep. Yet restless as I was, I was also very tired. It was a new, queer form of exhaustion that gnawed inward at my very will to live. For the nearly three hours that I waited for Vespers, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my thoughts churning and darkening, holding the vial of Kunthian Scarlet Lotus extract clenched tightly in my fist.

  For the first time since learning that I was stricken with Transuranic Cancer, I found myself angry at the fact that I was dying. Intellectually I dismissed complaints about the unfairness of life as sentimental self-indulgence and yet; I layed there railing at the fact that more than half of my life expectancy was to be sawed off, that I would be dead before my sixtieth birthday. As hard as being cut down at the prime of my life was to swallow, worse still was meeting up again with Estrella at the end. Yes, a part of me was glad to have sought her out and even relieved that we put the bad blood behind us, but another part of me latched onto a new cause for resentment.

  Estrella’s newfound faith.

  I didn’t want to share Estrella with it and its seemingly innumerable duties, especially not with what little time together we had been allotted. I wanted more from her, more attention, more of what we used to have. However, I knew that woolen habit of hers would prove as impervious to my entreaties for more time and intimacy as a Knight Templar’s mechanized armor would to my bead pistol and fists.

  I stewed in that toxic mix of anger, resentment and yes, the first intimations of fear, until, quite out of nowhere, I imagined Drake chiding me, “There you go again, big brother, getting all maudlin. You’ll be weeping like a wee girl before the night’s through…”

  With a half smile and no small effort, I closed my eyes and forced my mind into a featureless blank. The roiling discontent quieted down by degrees until I was able to beat back the black broodings baiting me into the grip of despondency. I had finally calmed myself when my commband’s chrono chirped to tell me it was time to go.

  I left the vial on the bedside table besides the unopened bottle of rum.

  *****

  The church was sparsely filled when I arrived. The majority of the congregation was made up of station personnel but I did notice a score of Knights Templar spread across two of the center pews. I took a seat near the back just seconds before the service began. Two dozen nuns, with Estrella in the lead, entered the church through a side entrance near the raised section they referred to as the sanctuary. An equal number of men entered from the other side wearing the white, ankle-length and lace-trimmed surplices over their cassocks. In an orderly, synchronized fashion, the men and the nuns filed into the first two pews and opened their breviaries. After a short spell of silence, a string group which must have been on the gallery above me began to play. The voices joined the strings after several beats. Sometimes the congregation sang as one, but mostly they alternated between the men and the women as if they were conversing in song.

  It was beautiful and it all would have been utterly incomprehensible but for the translation I followed on the small screen embedded into the back of the pew before me. A few minutes into the prayers I began to feel feverish, light headed and the all-too-familiar first stirrings of nausea. Consulting my commband, I noted that my heart rate was elevated and my temperature was 100.3 and rising. I unclipped the pouch from my belt and proceeded to self-medicate.

  I was injecting myself when I noticed a small dark, round-faced boy staring at me curiously from a pew across the aisle. The woman at the child’s side whom I took to be his mother, turned in mid-song to see what had drawn her son’s attention. Seeing me shooting up, her eyes opened wide and the song died in her throat.<
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  She picked up the boy and placed him on her left side, blocking his view of me with her body. She then looked at me again. I shrugged sheepishly. She shot me a venomous, narrow-eyed glare. I answered with a wink. She screwed her face in disgust before turning it away from me, her nose imperiously leading the way.

  I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  Minutes later my temperature topped out at 101.1 and then began to fall. My heart rate returned to normal and the unease dissipated, leaving behind a body-dulling fatigue. I stopped following the prayers on the screen and, with eyes closed, lost myself in the music of strings and voices. The ceremony was over in a little less than an hour’s time. The congregation filed out of the pews, genuflected towards the tabernacle, crossed themselves and silently made their way out of the church. The young mother pointedly ignored me on the way out but her child shot me an over the shoulder glance. I flashed him a smile and a wink.

  Near the sanctuary, Estrella and Sister Elizabeth waited for their fellow nuns to exit out the side before making their obeisances and walking up the aisle to me.

  “Glad you could make it,” Estrella said.

  “So am I,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

  The nuns responded with gentle smiles before Estrella asked, “Would you like to join us and the rest of the convent for dinner?”

  “Sure,” I answered with a shrug.

  On the way to the refectory, in answer to my question about the need for musical acompaniament to their prayers, I was treated to a short discourse on the nature and history of what they called ‘the liturgy of the hours.’ In short, it was their church’s effort to follow the admonishment of Saint Paul to ‘pray without ceasing.’

  “And Saint Augustine tells us that those who sing, pray twice,” Sister Elizabeth added.

  “I see,” I said.

  I could not have been very convincing because Estrella immediately challenged with, “Do you?”

  “To be honest, no,” I admitted. “Regularly scheduled rote prayers have an air of…oh, I don’t know… an air of mumbo jumbo about them. Don’t you think so?”