Soothingly, Greg said, “That’s not a good idea. You can start by telling us your name.”
“Mark Stonebridge,” the young man replied, downcast.
Blondie sat bolt upright. “Are you related to Archibald Stonebridge, the Chief Financial Officer of the Swordsman Church?”
“He is my father,” the young man said softly.
“You were excommunicated by your father,” Blondie continued.
“Yes.”
“Then, I know why you’re here,” Blondie stated.
“Because I’m gay?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she replied, “but more likely because it is important to know one’s enemy, and there are few better ways to learn than from an insider.” She stood and strode over to him. “Welcome aboard, Mark!” She took his hand, pulled him to his feet and gave him a hug. “Mark, welcome in from the cold. You have nothing to fear from us.”
Helen Frankel said, “Unless, of course, you want to.” She tipped her head to one side and grinned evilly and sensually at the same time.
“That brings up a good point,” Greg thought out loud. “We are enclosed in a small space, and there is no sense adding more stress than we have to. Sexual tensions will tear us apart faster than anything else I can imagine. I think the safest thing to do for the duration of the trip is to call a truce on all sexual activity. I know that for some it will be more of a hardship for some than others.” He looked at Blondie. “But I think for all our sanity it is the wise thing to do.” There was a general murmur of reluctant agreement.
“Mark, there is something you can do for us. We need to put the current Swordsmen’s activities into their historical perspective. I suspect you are well versed in church history. Fill us in on the church’s early formation and the basic teachings. The more we know about what we are up against, the better we can find the weaknesses.”
Mark gathered his thoughts and spoke slowly. “Before I talk about the Church, I need to tell you about myself and my great-grandmother. She died a year ago. She lived to be a hundred and fifty. She outlived her husband, her children and some of her grandchildren. I was her care-giver for the last three years of her life. Her husband was one of the criminal masterminds that took over the church.”
For the next two hours Mark explained the theological basis for the Swordsman religion. He described its origins in Japan and how the church had been hijacked by organized crime when it expanded to America. The original teachings of Shimazaki Tanaka had preached on the streets of Tokyo were now so intertwined with the needs of the criminals running the church they were difficult to separate. Mark described in detail the origins and history of the Swordsman church’s extermination campaign against the Muslims. The Jews fell under Swordsman fire during the heaviest years of the assault on Islam by refusing to join in the fight against their perennial enemies. The Jews knew they and the Muslims and were not the Swordsmen’s real enemy. The Christians were. Once sufficient opposition had been cleared and the Swordsman church had gained strength, the criminal machine inside the church began its assault on Christendom.
Mark was careful to point out that Swordsman criminal enterprises did not look like traditional criminal enterprises. They did not deal in drugs, gambling, slaves or prostitution. They left those businesses for the established criminal families. Killing all the Muslims was one thing. Assaulting organized crime was another. They took over respectable businesses and using the criminal techniques of murder, bribery and extortion ruthlessly eliminated their competition. What they had not expected was that business women, and the Americans in particular, were equally willing to use the same tools in defense of their personal empires. The current impasse had the militantly male Swordsman organization grappling in mortal economic combat against the predominantly female business sector with marginalized corruption-riddled governments paralyzed between them.
“All who oppose them are in danger,” Mark wrapped up. “These people are petrified that God will strike them down at any time. They have come to believe their own rhetoric. They are terrified if they do not purify the human race before whatever deadline God has in mind, He will exterminate them along with the rest of the human race. For those of us who do not believe as they do, the danger is real. For us, we have three choices, convert, flee or die.”
When he had finished, Mark sat down exhausted.
Blondie sat beside him. “You did well. Thank you.”
Looking more like a boy than a man, he smiled weakly.
Dr. Michelle Turner asked, “Mark, am I to understand that these men are living their lives totally stressed out with the idea the world might end at any moment?”
“Yes. They are afraid they may already be too late to stop the coming apocalypse.”
She smiled. “Now I understand. Swordsman males have much shorter life expectancy than the rest of the male population. The median life expectancy for a male in our society is 95 years. Men typically work well into their eighties. It is not unusual to see men in the general population reach 130 and women, including Swordsman women, living to 150. Swordsman males typically die in their fifties. Very few live past their sixties. I know much of this is due to stress, but I never understood the root causes. Thank you.”
“You know, that explains the family structure,” Tanya Keller pointed out. “If the women are surviving their men in substantial numbers and have no means of support, they would tend to gravitate to the nearest male that can support them and their children. It is not uncommon for an older Swordsman male to accumulate two or three additional females with children in his household.”
Mark said, “When a Swordsman dies, the nearest male kin or the husband of the nearest female kin must absorb the widow and children into his household. As a form of compensation, he is permitted to have sex and additional children with the widow. He is expected to quickly arrange marriages for the marriageable teenagers and set them up in their own households until he has reduced his household to a manageable size.”
“Is there a limit to how many wives he can accumulate?” Linda Danvers asked.
“Not really,” Mark replied. “As a practical matter, the church discourages one man having more than three women living with him. Legally he is married to only one of them so they can avoid bigamy laws. The others are guests in his house, and who could deny charity to widows and children? Once the children other than his own were out of the house, there was no obligation to care for the widow unless she had additional children with him. Keep in mind children with genetic defects like Downs or dwarfism were either passed off to government institutions or quietly starved to death. Their parents were often subjected to enforced repentance programs for having brought a deformed child into the world. Most of the time, such children were abandoned at birth.”
A round of silent shudders passed through the group as they considered condemning such babies to a slow death.
Dr. Miller spoke into the silence, changing the subject. “With all this talk about lifestyles, we should think about our lifestyles. We should think about healthy diets and keeping ourselves well.”
“No proper lifestyle is complete without exercise,” Helen offered. “I can help there!”
The mood brightened quickly. Responsibilities and sleep schedules were arranged. Chores were divided and a semblance of order developed. Helen organized exercise classes. Extensively schooled in several forms of hand-to-hand combat, she was equally well qualified to teach lower impact ways to keep in shape. She challenged the others to spar with her and promised not to hurt anyone.
The computer on Greg’s ship taught the computers on the two shuttles how to recognize and use voice commands and programmed them with war game simulations. With three game stations in each shuttle and two in the main ship, many of the passengers became addicted to the games and had to be reminded of their other duties. Greg’s command chair and his quarters remained sacrosanct. Even Blondie and Brownie left him alone once he retreated to his quarters although everyone assumed he w
ould have been happy to share with them.
Greg sparred in a variety of martial arts forms with Helen for half an hour each day. Equally matched, the workout was good for both. Greg explained his mastery of the martial arts as having spent too much time hanging out with a bunch of bored Marines. The Marines taught him technique, but more importantly, they taught him attitude. He did not tell her the Marines had been his school gym instructors at the remote Space Force tracking station on the fringe of the solar system where he was one of a dozen dependents. Greg and Helen’s bouts frequently drew a crowd there being little else amusing to do. Greg and Helen developed their own little formalities. At the beginning of each session, they shook hands. Greg raised Helen’s hand to his lips and kissed it. Before each round they bowed formally to each other. At the end of each session they hugged, and the crowd heartily responded with, “Eeuwww! Sweaty hug!”
This is not to say that everything went perfectly. There were fist fights. There were screaming matches. Helen was assigned to mete out the punishments which usually consisted of extensive regimens of calisthenics under her supervision. Thanks to Helen’s discipline, by the end of the voyage these soon to become pioneers were fitter and stronger than when they had come aboard.
When, toward the end of the voyage, they seemed ready to kill each other, Gloria programmed the ship’s computer to play music designed to be calming and soothing. Gloria had a substantial music collection, but Greg’s dwarfed even hers. Gloria had asked him about it once and he told her he started collecting the music as a way of dealing with his mother’s death. He had witnessed her death in a pirate attack when a laser had sliced open her suit and exposed her to the vacuum of space. For ten year old Greg, his mother’s death had been especially gruesome. The music helped, but in spite of efforts to avoid conflicts, an off-hand comment by one person would send another scurrying off to hide or sulk as was their temperament.
There was tremendous relief when Greg announced that the following day everyone would need to find some place to strap down for the transition back to standard drive. The joy was palpable. All three ships stank. The combined life support systems were not up to the task. The lone personal hygiene unit had needed to be repaired more than once. When it was not operating, those people who needed to use the facilities were forced to climb back into the housing modules in the shuttles’ cargo bays to use the ones there. While there was no shortage of oxygen thanks to a modification they made on the water hydrolysis equipment which supplied fuel for the shuttle engines, the air filters could not remove enough of the odors generated by all the people and all the food preparation in such a small area.
Dr. Harrison had induced some of the seed in the animal feed to germinate, and it was thriving in the carbon dioxide rich environment. Everyone credited him with preventing the carbon dioxide level from reaching the point where it would be dangerous. The plants grew in a soil rich in biomass, and they thrived. The fresh corn was a welcome addition to the ship’s food stocks. Whenever anyone tried to thank him, he always credited the flight engineers for hooking up the additional lighting which enabled the plants to survive.
The flight engineers and the civilians with mechanical inclinations had their hands full keeping the ships operating. In spite of the fact that the ships were designed to operate with minimum maintenance, their life support systems were overtaxed with the current population and needed constant attention. One would have thought that the addition of twenty-eight humans to the 100 colts, 200 calves, 50 baby camels and 50 baby buffalo that were the ship’s normal load on the life support system would not have been that big a deal, but it was.
For the majority of the passengers, strapping in meant returning to the seats built into their containers. This was an ordeal none relished. The four shuttle pilots returned to their ships, and the four oldest passengers were allowed to take the remaining real seats in the shuttles and the cargo ship.
Emotionally exhausted, Greg dropped the ship out of hyper drive and settled into orbit around the planet. As he established a stable orbit he wondered how quickly he would be able to head out again and where he might go. Somehow, being planet bound with his ticket to the stars orbiting above his head did not appeal to him. He would ride with it for now, but soon he would want to go. He was not Moses. These were not his people to be led to the promised land. Like the crews of the sailing ships that brought the Europeans to America, he wanted to think of these people as cargo and not passengers. However intently he wanted to leave and as carefully as he plotted his escape, he knew he had a responsibility to these people. They were his passengers and not cargo as much as he might wish otherwise. He could not merely drop them and run. He would need to see them safely to the surface and established in a sustainable community. Then he would be able to leave with a clear conscience. Of course there was the issue of the stolen ships. The cargo ship and the two shuttles were technically stolen, although, if he brought them back, perhaps, he might figure out a way to dodge punishment. Of course, how he would do that, he had no clue.
The four shuttle pilots donned their EVA space suits and headed outside to disconnect the hawsers holding the ships together as the first step of preparations for the descent to the surface. Everyone was glad the trip was over.
Greg announced it was safe to come out of the modules, and everyone crammed to the flight decks for a peek out the view-ports. There was a storm over the landing site, a situation only Greg found humorous.
HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER FIVE
THE SHUTTLE PILOTS RETURNED to the cargo ship’s flight deck after performing the separation procedures. The ships were still linked at their airlocks, but the hawsers securing the shuttles to the cargo ship during the trip had been removed and stowed in an empty container.
Greg and the shuttle pilots were debating the best way to descend to the planet’s surface when Myra hailed Greg. Keying off Greg’s subcutaneous sensor, the flight deck’s background music took an ominous presence almost like in a melodrama where the music portended an unsuspected disaster.
After formal identification procedures, Myra said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”
“Permission denied,” Greg snapped angrily.
The four women on the flight deck gasped. That request was never denied. Asking for permission was a formality, a pleasantry more than a true request.
“Stand off at one kilometer,” he continued. “Request permission to come aboard your vessel.”
“Aye, sir. Permission granted to come aboard, sir.” Her voice had a note of trepidation.
“Lt. Freeman, you have the con until I return,” Greg commanded.
“Aye sir. I have the con.” Blondie had routinely taken command of the ship when Greg slept, and delegating command to her was not a surprise.
Greg turned to Katherine. “Lt. Carlisle, stay here. Take the flight engineer position and monitor sensors and external systems.”
He had not called Katherine by anything other than her first name since the second day of the voyage. Her voice betrayed her concern. “Aye sir. Taking engineering control sir.”
“Brownie, Samantha, get me a tug.” The tension in his jaw revealed the depth of his anger.
“Yes sir. A tug sir,” Brownie stammered. “Right away, sir.”
“Command Mode!” Greg barked.
The ship’s computer answered, “Aye, Sir.”
“Delegate command to Lt. Freeman until my return.”
“Aye, Sir.”
“If I do not return in five hours, Lt. Freeman is ordered to complete our mission as planned and evacuate this ship. You will then return with no personnel to Earth in accordance with Directive 9.”
“Aye Sir, five hours and then Directive 9,” the computer responded.
Greg glanced at the two women gaping at him and said, “Always have a plan. Don’t even go to the bathroom without a plan.”
“Aye sir,” they responded meekly as he strode off in the direction of his EVA suit.
The
women sat in silence until they saw Greg’s tug leave in the direction of Myra’s ship.
“I think he was angry,” Blondie said.
“Very angry,” the computer responded as it abruptly killed the music.
“Excuse me?” Blondie said.
“Captain Solomon has only been this angry on three other occasions. On two of those occasions, people died.”
“How do you know this?” Blondie asked.
“I have Captain Solomon’s complete medical file, personnel file, confidential surveillance files and the data from the subcutaneous sensors placed in his back. I constantly monitor his vital signs for medical problems so he can get attention when he needs it. I can administer life saving drugs or stimulate his natural bodily systems in case of emergency.”
“Can we see the files?” Blondie asked.
“No, but you must act quickly. Both Captain Solomon and your friend are in danger.”
“Danger? From what?” Katherine asked.
“Captain Solomon,” the computer intoned.
“How can that be?” Blondie asked.
“Let me play you this recording. It is self explanatory.”
A young man’s voice appeared to emanate from a space to the left of the pilot’s seat. “Commodore Davidson? Lt. Andersen reporting as ordered, sir.”
An older man’s voice emanated from the right of the pilot’s seat. “Sit down, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you like a cigar?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“I read your deposition for the inquiry into the incident at the spacer bar in System Five. If I may summarize, you stated that you and your shipmates arrived to find Lt. Solomon already there. You stayed drinking for a long time of indeterminate length. Two men entered the room. Words were spoken between Lt. Solomon and these two individuals unknown to you and who you could not identify because you had been drinking. These individuals started shoving Lt. Solomon. He made no effort to retaliate until one of them struck him. A fight broke out between him and the strange men. You and your shipmates, fearing arrest, fled the scene leaving Lt. Solomon to fend for himself. You don’t remember much of the incident because you had been drinking. Is that correct?”
Solomon Family Warriors II Page 5
