The Worshippers and the Way coaaod-9

by Hugh Cook

"He cheated!" said Gan Oliver, seeing that Lupus was coming across badly. "Hatch cheated!"

  "All's fair in the Season," said Shona stoutly.

  "The Season!" jeered Beggar Grim. "You're a woman. What would you know of the Season?"

  "Shut up," said Shona. "Shut up or I'll rape you."

  Which provoked Grim to venture a further unfortunate witticism, which led to him shortly finding himself face down on the deck while Shona tore the hair from his head in handfuls. The room roared applause as Grim thrashed and screamed. The younger Combat Cadets indulged themselves in hysterical ululations.

  "Silence!" shouted Gan Oliver in fury. "Silence! There are real men at battle!"

  But the show being played for real in Forum Three was better than that being widescreened from the illusion tanks, at least for the moment. So Gan Oliver was ignored. Except by Scorpio Fax, who had just then entered Forum Three, and who immediately began to work his way through the crowd toward Gan Oliver. Fax, freshreleased by the cure-all clinic, was shaky but still resolute. In his pocket, Fax had a knife, a small knife made from cellophane cooked up over burning painkiller tablets.

  A small knife – but a sharp knife.

  One could kill with such a weapon.

  And Scorpio Fax fully intended to kill Gan Oliver, and thus to win himself the fair Penelope as his bride.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The scenario: for the purposes of the competitive interactive wargames being played out in the illusion tanks of Dalar ken Halvar's Combat College, it is assumed that a Nexus ship crewed by the Nu-chala-nuth has mutinied. Asodo Hatch is the captain of that mutinous MegaCommand Cruiser. Lupus Lon Oliver captains the MegaCommand Cruiser loyal to the Nexus which has been sent to destroy the mutinous ship.

  Who of the gods can know, or know

  If we be flesh or shadow, or By doom are damned to judgment or to judge.

  And was it sin when with her sweat -

  Or was the act salvation?

  So.

  So this is how it was.

  The two MegaCommand Cruisers were blind, dead and disabled.

  The ship captained by Asodo Hatch was on a collision course with that which was ruled by his rival. Hatch and his men had suited up in their deepspace battlearmor. The space armor, and the lightbattle Weapons Minor which came with those suits, were powered by corrosion cells, powerpacks in which small quantities of antimatter were destroyed by controlled contact with normative matter.

  At the moment, Hatch's MegaCommand Cruiser was still drawing on its emergency power supplies to maintain its artificial gravity. So for the moment, all the armor-suited warriors were firmly orientated to the floor. They were anchoring themselves in preparation for the opening of the airlocks.

  "All men anchored," said San Kaladan, when he was sure the job was done.

  "Very well," said Hatch. "Open the airlocks."

  Hatch wanted all his men out of the ship before it collided with Lupus's helpless craft, so he had no time to cycle his people through the airlocks in the conventional manner, one or two at a time. That would have been intolerably slow. So he was going to open his ship to the night.

  "Opening the airlocks… now," said San Kaladan.

  All through the MegaCommand Cruiser, airlocks opened. The ship's atmosphere boiled out into the vacuum, carrying with it a brief blizzard of papers and unanchored detritus. Hatch felt the air-tug tide of the venting atmosphere pull at his suit, then subside.

  "Interior pressure is zero," said San Kaladan.

  "Pressure at zero," acknowledged Hatch.

  Then, with San Kaladan at his side, Hatch left the bridge, and ventured through the airless corridors of the ship. He moved clumsily in his armor. The cumbersome armor, black upon black, was swollen at the joints where extra engineering protected the machinery. In the corridors, Hatch met with other battle-warriors similarly suited, their features invisible behind the bulbous faceplates of helmets. Those faceplates were tinted against radiation and blast – tinted so heavily that they were almost black. This was an army of shadows, an army of night. An army of armored creatures insectile with antennae.

  "Free yourselves," said San Kaladan, seeing that some men were being slow to free themselves from the various devices which they had used to anchor themselves as the ship vented its air.

  Hatch clumped ponderously down the corridor to the nearest airlock. All its doors were jammed open. Open to the night. He entered the airlock and stood in the last doorway. Stood on the edge of the immensities of eternity. He could exit simply by stepping from the ship. By stepping out into the deepness and darkness of space.

  "Ship's gravity dies in three," said San Kaladan. "Three.

  And. Two. And. One. And. None."

  The ship's artificial gravity died away to nothing. Hatch floated. He took hold of the rim of the airlock's outermost doorway and hauled himself forward. He began to float outward, out toward the coldness of deep space.

  As Hatch quit the ship, he felt a wave of coldness sweep over him. He knew the sensation was entirely psychological, for his suit insulated him perfectly against the numb death of the vacuum.

  Nevertheless: he felt what he felt, and he could not deny it.

  He was still moving, still floating away from his ship, slowly but surely. If he did nothing to stop himself, he would float forever. For the time being he chose to do nothing. When the two MegaCommand Cruisers collided, he did not want to be too close.

  So Hatch floated in space, his ship sliding through vacuum at a constant velocity, on a collision course with the helpless hulk up ahead. From here he could appreciate the huge bulk of the MegaCommand Cruisers, vast leviathans of the intergalactic depths, colossal in their menace. Both ships were outlined in the darkness by patterns of winking lights: electrical emergency beacons which had come on automatically when their asmas failed. Hatch was reminded of fish he had read about, fish which lived in the lightless abysses of the ocean depths, and which were patterned with self-generated luminescence.

  The best energies of the Nexus had gone into the design and construction of those ships, for the wealth and reach of the Nexus had automatically increased the number and the strength of its enemies, as if by the operation of an inexorable law of physics.

  Though the Nexus had paid lip-service to the highest of ideals, it had ultimately, in truth, been a society of high-energy warlords.

  Hence in the Nexus – a society of incredible wealth – poets, architects, musicians and healers had had to struggle for survival, while those who devoted themselves to games of death and war were richly rewarded.

  Thus the greatest creation of the Nexus was the MegaCommand Cruiser, a battle machine capable of fulfilling the worst scenarios of Ultimate War.

  Members of the Free Corps were typically oblivious to the probable consequences of the military dynamics which had governed the Nexus for so long, but Hatch was ready to believe that there was a good chance that, were the Chasm Gates ever to be reopened by miracle or by a vaunting renaissance of high technology, then the Nexus might well be found in ruins.

  While Lupus Lon Oliver thought that a great Age of Light surely now dominated the Nexus, Hatch darkly suspected it to be peopled by hairy savages runting around in the wasteland ruins of cities ten thousand years dead. If Hatch's grim premonitions were right, then the Nexus truly lived only here, here in this illusion tank universe where two dead ships cruised through frictionless space toward the moment of collision.

  There was no sound but for Hatch's breathing, the beating of the blood in his ears, and the white noise deliberately generated by the suit itself – absolute silence being bad for the soul. So floated Hatch, and with him in the darkness floated his forces, the wink-lights of their suits creating transient constellations in the abyss. From the enemy's direction there was no answering light.

  Where was Lupus Lon Oliver?

  Not in his ship, surely.

  Surely he couldn't be so stupid, so blind to what had happened.

&nbs
p; Or could he?

  Hatch imagined Lupus on the deck of his MegaCommand, staring at dead screens.

  That MegaCommand Cruiser was coming ever-steadily closer as Hatch and his battle-suited warriors drifted through the vacuum.

  Hatch's men began firing rocket flares at regular intervals. By the green-white ignition of the flares, Hatch saw vast swathes of the bare hull of the enemy ship. But none of the enemy. What was Lupus playing at?

  – He's still in his ship.

  – He must be.

  – He doesn't realize!

  If Lupus did not realize that the two ships were on a collision course, then he would have no good reason to abandon ship.

  Hatch flicked the chin switch that would allow him to speak with his troops by means of the modulation of electromagnetic waves of a particular frequency. There was a special name for this electromagnetic communicator, but Hatch found he had momentarily forgotten it, because he used such primitive devices so seldom.

  It was -

  Vidrolation, of course, that was it.

  "Crew," said Hatch, speaking over his vidrolator. "Crew, this is Captain. Just before collision you must brake. Remember your physics." Some would resent this lecture, but he had to give it.

  Nexus Startroopers typically made stupid mistakes when forced to fight in spacesuits in hard vacuum and zero gravity, for they spent most of their careers living and working at standard gravity in natural atmospheres. "Remember your physics. When the ships collide, our ship will slow down. Nothing will diminish our own forward velocity, so we must use rockets to slow ourselves down. So remember: just before collision you must brake."

  Hatch's MegaCommand Cruiser – empty, airless, abandoned, dead – was like a big piece of paper being carried along by the wind.

  His men were like a thousand scraps of confetti being carried along by the same wind. And Lon Oliver's ship was like a fist poised in space.

  When the fist slammed into the big sheet of paper – when Lon Oliver's ship collided with Hatch's wreck – then the bits of confetti would be swept onward by the wind.

  That was how Hatch visualized it. Intellectually he knew that he, his men and his ruined ship were sliding through the frictionless vacuum of space with nothing to drive them forwards and nothing needed, but he preferred to think of them as being driven by a wind. The image comforted him. He had never liked deep space, and he did not like it now.

  "Just before collision you must brake," said Hatch, allowing himself to admire his own calm, his own sense of timing.

  Not just after. Just before. When the ships collided, Lupus's ship would soak up some of the momentum of Hatch's ship, and thus the Startroopers would be swept past the tangled wreckage. By braking beforehand, they would be able to close with Lupus's ship more quickly. Hatch was looking for the edge. Hatch wanted to get on board Lupus's ship as soon as possible. To take Lupus by surprise, if Lupus hadn't already worked out what was going on.

  – Has he worked it out?

  It was basic. Or was it? Maybe Lupus was still sitting inside his glorified tin can trying to work out what had happened.

  Maybe Lupus thought Hatch had devised some miraculous way to kill the asmas on Lupus's own ship while preserving those aboard his own vessel. Maybe Lupus thought that this was a repeat of their last battle scenario, and that Hatch was trying to hide himself somewhere in the hope that his enemy would quietly expire of starvation.

  "Sir," said San Kaladan.

  Hatch resented the interruption. He was about to tell San Kaladan to shut up – when he caught himself. There had been something not quite right in Kaladan's voice. Something sickly.

  Fear?

  "Switch to intimate," said Hatch.

  "Switching," said San Kaladan.

  "Can you hear me?" said Hatch, broadcasting in the intimate mode, which involved sending out electromagnetic signals too weak to be picked up by ordinary suit receivers at any distance greater than thirty paces.

  Both men could, however, hear anything broadcast at full power by the Startroopers floating with them out in the vacuum.

  "Yes," said San Kaladan. "Clear if not loud."

  "Then speak your mind," said Hatch.

  There was a pause. Hatch wished he could see San Kaladan's face. But instead there was only the armored suit and the big bulbous faceplate. The faceplate was black, and reflected the lights of the big sliding MegaCommand Cruiser, and the ignition of a flare. Holding a conversation like this was grotesque. It was more like a seance with the dead than a consultation with the living.

  "Sir," said San Kaladan diffidently.

  And Hatch wished they were free in the flesh so he could place one of his big hands firmly on San Kaladan's shoulder, establishing physical contact, abolishing the inhibiting effect of his captaincy. But all he had to negotiate with was this effectively disembodied voice.

  "Sir," said San Kaladan. "I've been thinking."

  "Speak," said Hatch.

  "I have a wife and children on Borboth."

  Borboth was the home planet of the Nu-chala, the servant of the great lord who was the spiritual leader of the congregation of Nu-chala-nuth.

  Of course, a wrecked MegaCommand Cruiser floating helplessly in deep space would in due course become a coffin for all its crew. San Kaladan would never see his wife and children again.

  That was no great tragedy as far as Hatch was concerned, for San Kaladan was in truth nothing but a transitory software artefact, an interactive feature of the wargaming environment of the illusion tanks. Nevertheless, the software artefact named San Kaladan behaved like a human being and could only be effectively managed by treating it as if it was in fact possessed of full humanity.

  "I share your sorrow," said Hatch. "I too have wife and children."

  "But," said San Kaladan, "we – we – we might still – "

  "What are you thinking of?" said Hatch, starting to get seriously alarmed.

  "If we made peace with our enemies, if we – well, we could rig the ship for survival – maybe there'd be rescue, someone must know – the Nexus could rescue us, we could – I mean, if we make a peace we've got a hope, but if we break both ships in battle there's nothing, it's all over, we're finished."

  Hatch listened to this badwork babble, this panic-speech. San Kaladan did not exist, was no more than a software phantom. But this software artefact could cause the logical equivalent of panic amongst other software artefacts if it was not settled down promptly. Or – or, in the worst case, it could kill Hatch.

  And Hatch, if killed in this illusion tank battle, would lose the competition for the instructorship of the Combat College, and would be exiled, forced out into the streets of Dalar ken Halvar, there to die for real at the hands of his Free Corps enemies.

  "We all must make our sacrifices," said Hatch. "Like me, for instance. San Kaladan… do you know where I came from?"

  "You came from the planet of Olo Malan, a planet in the Tulip Continuum, in the Permissive Dimensions. You – there was a city, Dalar Dalvar."

  "Dalar ken Halvar," said Hatch.

  "Ken Halvar, yes," said San Kaladan, accepting the correction. "Your home cosmos was cut off from the Nexus for twenty thousand years, but you had access to a tutorial facility, a Combat College. You were a Stormtrooper when the Tulip Continuum was reunited with the Nexus. That's all I know."

  "Then know this," said Hatch. "I brought the Way to my planet. I wrote a thesis which taught my city of Nu-chala-nuth.

  But that was not enough. To secure our freedom to follow the Way, we – there was oppression, religious oppression. So we had to stage a revolution. I was one of its leaders."

  "I didn't know that," said San Kaladan.

  "But that's what happened," said Hatch. "For the sake of our religion, I had to help lead a revolution. Unfortunately, my brother – my brother, Oboro Bakendra, he was bitterly opposed to Nu-chala-nuth and all that it stood for. He was a priest of the Great God Mokaragash. In the end – in the end I had to kill my broth
er. I had to cut down my brother. Then – then kill and burn an old man, Sesno Felvus, the High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash. I renounced the traditional god of my people and I killed the High Priest of that god."

  Hatch said this, then fell silent. He experienced a wailing desolation. He had now cut himself off from his people.

  Irrevocably. He had denounced his brother, his god, his high priest – in front of the witnesses in Forum Three. He would never be allowed to forget it.

  There was silence from San Kaladan.

  "That was the measure of the sacrifice I had to make," said Hatch. "Will you make a lesser sacrifice?"

  "It is an honor," said San Kaladan slowly. "It is an honor to die in the company of a martyr."

  It was a quote from the Ezra Akba, the holy book of Nuchala-nuth, and Hatch answered in kind, matching this quote with a quote of his own:

  "Blood answers to blood, and that which was speaks now to that which is, and so we hold the sun, and find the sun sufficient."

  In this context, "the sun" designated a killing blade, a blade bright with sunlight. Hatch had given voice to a part of the Martyr's Creed, and San Kaladan answered in kind:

  "We find the sun sufficient."

  "Then let us switch to the broadband and speak to our troops," said Hatch. "It's time to brake, time to fire rockets.

  Give them the order."

  Obedient to this command, San Kaladan switched from the intimate mode to broadband broadcast. He gave the necessary order, speaking brusquely, harshly:

  "Collision shortly. Prepare to fire braking rockets. I count.

  Nine. And. Eight. And."

  The enemy MegaCommand Cruiser loomed huge ahead. Somewhere in that ship was Lupus Lon Oliver, the enemy whom Hatch must seek out and kill.

  "And. Seven. And."

  The two ships were still some heartbeats short of collision.

  Had they started the countdown too soon?

  – Battle is no place for finetuning.

  Thus thought Hatch.

  Thus the Nexus doctrine. Thus the voice of experience.

  In any case, San Kaladan was still speaking:

  "And. Six. And."