by Daniel Gibbs
Al-Lahim walked over and came in from the other side of the pew to sit beside Henry. His eyes glanced over the interior. Matching the multi-denominational intent of the organization, the Mission was laid out without any definite leaning toward any specific Christian sect. There was even a nave in the side corner marked with Arabic calligraphy and a star chart projector. "I've looked over your record," he said.
"I'd imagine so."
"There are those in CIS who think there is more to what happened on the Laffey," al-Lahim said carefully. "Officers who are skeptical of the outcome."
Henry pursed his lips and shook his head. "I'm not saying anything," he said firmly.
"I understand. I just wanted you to know. In case you decide your silence has gone on long enough."
Henry kept his eyes intently away from al-Lahim. To do this, he focused attention on Jules' pulpit that he typically would never give. The wonder and warmth of a church he'd known as a child was gone.
Instead, all he felt was a cold uncertainty, and Li's words now echoed in his soul. The taunting remarks about it all being superstition, made by people who lacked the scientific knowledge to understand the world. Was that, in the end, all this was? Was all the death and suffering to protect one's faith a cosmic joke, the equivalent of a philosophical cargo cult fighting and dying over immaterial trinkets? His discussions with Vidia came back to him. His words. "If God's out there, he lost interest in humanity long ago," he mumbled to himself, while wondering which possibility was worse. A divine creator giving up on his creations out of frustration for their flaws? Or the entire thing being nothing but a made-up fable people continued to cling to for comfort.
Looking at the lovely wooden cross set into the wall behind the pulpit, just below the opening to display the baptismal behind it, Henry found he missed the old certainty that faith gave him. The belief there was a force of good in the universe, and all of the struggles and suffering in life were not in vain. Now all he had was the certainty that humanity and other forms of life were doomed to the same cycle of mistakes and sins.
He wanted to tear his eyes away anyway, and Jules gave him a reason when he returned, another figure in tow. This person walked with a slight limp as well as a bandaged head and arm. With Jules between them, he couldn't make out who. At least, not until they were close enough that Jules was no longer blocking his view.
"What the—" he managed before remembering he was in the house of God, and cursing was unacceptable.
"I see you're familiar with my best asset on-planet," al-Lahim said.
Henry's head whipped over to regard al-Lahim with widened eyes. "Your best asset?" he blurted out, shocked.
"I’m glad you've made it back to Lusitania safely, Captain Henry," said Cristina Caetano, her blue eyes glistening like crystal. "As you can see, we're going to need your help."
The transport flatbed pulled up to the port side of the Shadow Wolf. With a gentle touch to the accelerator, Pieter Hartzog drove the vehicle up the ramp and into the hold proper. Once it was in place, he killed the engine and stepped out the driver's side door to find Tia waiting. "How did it go?" she asked.
"Fine. I inspected everything," Pieter said. His accent was from the neutral world Oranje, settled by Afrikaan-speaking South Africans, the Boers who once bedeviled the British Empire. He had the lightest skin of the entire crew, which was little surprise to anyone familiar with the Boers. His sandy blond hair was partly combed, and his blue eyes were rimmed with black. "The fuses are top quality, got some good wiring too. New manifolds for the drives too." He glanced around. "Any news from the Captain?"
"Felix called him a while ago to let him know Jules is in the clear," Tia said. "And we just got a crapload of money into our account from the Lusitanian government. It looks like this job paid after all."
"Ah, thank God," Pieter said. "I could do with a vacation now. Maybe go somewhere if we're going to be stuck on planet for a while."
Tia gave him a smile, which turned a little sly as she asked, "So how's the kid getting her land legs?"
Pieter turned to see Samina was just now getting out of the truck. She was moving cautiously. "Got a bit to go," he said. "Gravity's a bit heavier here than she's used to. But she's already tired from the repairs. I'll give her the first break period, so Brig and I can get started."
"That works for me," Tia said. She checked to see that Samina was heading up the stairs to the exit for the hold.
Pieter was already climbing up onto the truck's bed. He remained on his knees, to put less strain on his back for the task ahead. "Any sign of when the Captain will be back?" he asked before reaching over and pulling the first box off of the stacks of boxes and cases present.
"Any time now, I'd think." Tia shrugged. She took the box from him and noted it contained the large fuses needed for the ship's main power systems. She walked the case over to the side of the hold and set it down. "He told Felix he was coming back, but maybe he decided to check up on Jules before he comes back in. He needs his time, so I won't call him unless it's an emergency."
"That's good," Pieter said. "The Captain needs a break too. I hope he's relaxing with his friend."
"Don't we all." Tia chuckled. She glanced up to see Felix and Yanik entering the hold. "Alright, everyone, let's get this unloaded. We've still got repairs to make."
It was often that Paulina Ascaro and Martzel Aiza argued. This did not weaken their marriage as it might others, since Martzel knew full well his wife was an arguer when he met her, while she trusted him whatever their differences were. However, this was not the usual argument about family purchases or the children or what color sheets should go on their bed.
Ascaro was on her feet, tired of confinement to the bed. Her husband heard her speak and set his hands on her shoulders. "Please, don't ask me to do this," he pleaded. "You need us here."
"I need you safe," she insisted. Nearby, Xabier, Marta, and little Carmen—the youngest at seven years of age—were pretending not to be listening. "Martzel, everything's up in the air now. I'm not even sure who the Prime Minister is, or if we have one. The RSS is running everything. I might be arrested at any time."
"You're an assemblywoman. They'd never—"
"Under the State of Siege, they would. They would arrest Vargas himself, if there's a Prime Minister to order it." Ascaro clenched her remaining hand, then loosened it to take her husband's in hers. "If you go to Zalain, there are people who you can stay with. You'll be safe."
"If you're correct about it, we won't be," Martzel answered. "They'll come after us anywhere."
"Not until they consolidate enough control here. And if I fail, they'll have me anyway." She shuddered, and Martzel took her into his arms to try to reassure her. "I'm scared," she admitted in a low voice.
Martzel didn't answer, and she knew why. He was terrified.
The children came over, and it became a family embrace. Ascaro tried and failed to resist the thought that it would be the last one she ever enjoyed.
There was a sharp knock on the door. The five jumped at the noise. Ascaro swallowed while Martzel approached the door, wondering if this was it. If Travada, or whoever was giving him his orders, was coming to drag her away. Would he at least spare her family?
The woman who entered was in a blue medical uniform, not a black suit. Relief filled Ascaro. It was the chief nurse for the floor, Nasira. "Madame Assemblywoman, the surgeons are ready," she said, her Portuguese spoken with a Moroccan accent.
Ascaro didn't hide her relief, even if her fear wasn't entirely purged. "As am I," she said, self-consciously bringing her left arm up to see the stump that used to be the lower part of her forearm.
Nasira nodded and stepped in. A male orderly pushed a stretcher in. She laid upon it and, with her family following, was off to the surgical bay to replace her destroyed limb.
James Henry thought he was going to go mad. Here he was, standing in his friend's mission, and meeting the leader of Lusitania's fascist movement for the sec
ond time and in the same place as before. It was enough that he took a moment to force himself to consider her appearance.
While before she'd been dressed like a government minister, Caetano was now covered in plain clothes, very dull and quite worn, in fact. While she kept something of the calm and controlled demeanor he'd noted before, to Henry, she looked like she'd been through hell. Not just the bandages visible on her, but her bagged eyes and fatigued look robbed her of the poised appearance he'd seen before. There were healed wounds on her face, and she was favoring an arm as if it had also been hurt. She seemed to be a different person—almost.
Caetano nodded to al-Lahim. "Major," she said with Portuguese-accented English. Her voice seemed to be a little warmer than Henry remembered, yet weaker.
Al-Lahim nodded. "Good to see you've recovered more. You're too valuable an asset to lose, Garbo."
It was clear Miri was surprised too, but hers was mild compared to the shock on Henry's face.
"You've got to be... no, this is insane," Henry got out. He glared down at al-Lahim. "You're telling me that CIS has the most powerful damned fascist in all of Lusitania on the payroll? What… what the hell are you people doing?"
"She's not what she appears to be, Captain," al-Lahim said. "She's not a fascist in her heart."
"She isn't? Could've fooled me!" Henry angrily retorted. His eyes shifted from al-Lahim to Caetano and back to al-Lahim. "How many innocent people have been hurt by her followers? How many people has she put in prison because they crossed her?" He gestured to the rest of the pews. "How many homes and businesses and churches were vandalized because she whipped people into a fascist frenzy?!"
"Too many to count," Caetano replied. Her voice was not only weak now, but there was a slight tremor to it. It sounded like vulnerability.
Henry ignored her and kept his attention on al-Lahim. "And you're telling me CIS is behind all of this?"
"No. We didn't engineer her rise to power," al-Lahim replied. "In fact, we had nothing to do with her until a few years ago. She came to us, Captain."
Henry's reaction went beyond skepticism to outright disbelief. He was not going to buy they had nothing to do with this. It was outrageous to think that. "Let me get this straight… a ranking member of the PdDN just walked into the Coalition Embassy and said, 'Hey, I'm a senior official of the political party that beats people for walking into the Coalition Embassy. I'd like to work for you secretly. Where do I sign up?'" The bitter sarcasm practically dripped from his voice.
"It didn't quite go that way, and we were quite skeptical for a time," al-Lahim said. "My superiors dismissed her initially as plotting a stunt against us. It took her time and a lot of effort to convince us of her sincerity."
By this point, Caetano was sitting down. "I find your anger interesting, Captain," she said, her tone quiet, still a little controlled. "You talk like a man driven to genuine moral outrage, but you and I both know you've compromised your own morals before. You couldn't avoid doing so while working for men like Duarte Vitorino and Frank Lou."
Henry glared at her. Her point still struck home. He was not the fresh-faced Coalition officer he once was, standing for truth, justice, and freedom. He was a spacer trying to survive, and that meant moral compromises he once would never have imagined taking. His face twitched from the shame he felt at knowing it was true.
And yet... "I've bribed people, yeah, and I've even shot people trying to hurt me and mine, or steal things from me or my employers," Henry admitted. "I've smuggled things, broken laws, even threatened a few times. But I've never beaten an innocent family for saying the wrong thing. I've never taken someone's freedom from them as you have."
Caetano's lowered her eyes and nodded. "You are correct on that," she began. "I've done far worse. I deserve to be hated for it. But for the good of everyone, please, hear me out. We don't have much time left to stop Vitorino and the League."
The admission finally drained enough of the anger from Henry that he relented for the moment. "You were injured in the bombing," he said.
"Nearly killed, despite my safeguards," she replied. "I was fortunate I was able to slip away in the chaos."
"What about your guy Carvalho? He's working for Vitorino now."
"And he’s a part of Vitorino's pact with the League," Miri added.
Caetano's expression darkened. "He wasn't there for the bombing. Oh, I underestimated him. He wanted greater power, that I knew, but I thought he wanted it inside of the PdDN. His aspirations are higher, and I have no doubt he intends to overthrow Vitorino as well. He knew everything needed to seize power."
"So what safeguards are you talking about?" Henry asked. "Against the bombing? Were you behind the bombing somehow?"
"Yes and no," she replied. "They were never supposed to be used. I had plans to, if necessary, set them off when the Assembly was not meeting. To make it look like an unplanned detonation."
"Why?" Henry asked. His anger was mostly gone, but he had no intention of giving Caetano an inch.
"Because it was part of my plan to destroy the PdDN," Caetano said. "Utterly and completely."
"You wanted to destroy your own political party?" Miri asked.
"That's been my goal for the last fifteen years of my life," Caetano spoke every word in a confident, relieved tone, as if she were releasing a burden through admission, "to stop the rise of fascism in Lusitania. I was going to humiliate the PdDN utterly by making them look like they'd botched a coup attempt."
Her words caused Henry to shake his head. "And how would you do that without hanging yourself too?"
"I didn't care about 'hanging myself.' If all went according to plan, I would be written into Lusitanian history as a villain, a mad powermonger who nearly broke our world to take control of it," she pointed out. "If we can make this work, it may prove even better. I become the mad incompetent powermonger who let a traitor infiltrate her office and turn her plot against her." Caetano laughed. "Maybe that will play even better. The humiliation will tarnish the entire PdDN. The so-called defenders of the nation making its subjugation to the League possible."
Henry sat quietly in the pew, thinking about what she was saying. The ramifications of it. He still had trouble believing it. That Caetano was playing some kind of ridiculous long game to break the fascist movement on Lusitania.
He noticed Miri was looking with interest at her. "What was your plan?" she asked Caetano. "Arrange to have your apparent bomb plot exposed?"
Caetano nodded. "I have the evidence gathered in a safe place. When the time was right, I was going to ensure the warning was sent to police officers I knew to be anti-fascist. They would discover the bombs, and the investigation would lead them to the evidence. I was going to arrange my death so that it looked like I'd been trying to flee the planet."
"I was encouraging her to make it a proper faked death so that we could get her off-world," al-Lahim interjected. "But that's for another time. Right now we need to discuss our next step."
Henry crossed his arms in front of him. "What we need to do is get the hell off-world. I'm not sure we can do anything beyond that."
"Finding out their plan, I would think," Miri said. "The ship disappearances have nothing to do with what happened here. There's a larger plan beyond Lusitania, that much Vitorino made clear, and that's what they're being used for."
"Can we steal the information from their computer network?" al-Lahim asked.
"Not likely," Caetano replied. "Vitorino is cautious enough that any evidence of this plan will be carefully isolated from easy discovery."
"So, it's like I said." Henry shook his head. "There's nothing we can do here. We should leave. Find a way to get off-world."
"Their fleet will shoot you down before you're out of the atmosphere," al-Lahim said.
Caetano cleared her throat. "They won't if I'm there." When everyone was staring at her, she smiled thinly. "I hid ministerial authorization codes in the Ministry of Defense systems, just in case my subordinates launche
d their own coup and I had to move against them. I never informed Carvalho, so Vitorino won't know about them. I can use them to grant you departure rights. Then we'll have a limited window to get out to the Lawrence limit and jump."
"Good, now we just have to get back to the Wolf," Henry said.
"Not until you agree to my terms, Captain."
Henry pursed his lips and resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. Obviously, it was too much to hope she'd just let him and his crew go, even if she was a double agent in the fascist ranks. "And those terms are?"
"The obvious one," she said. "Help us stop the League of Sol."
6
For several moments, uneasy silence filled the Faith Outreach Mission. The silence ended with a harsh laugh from Henry. He shook his head as he did so before half-burying his face in his left hand. With his elbow propped up on his knee, it made him look like he was cradling his face. "Right, of course," he said. "Is there anything else you want with that? Galactic peace, maybe? Or will we aim low? Maybe I can snap my fingers and make the League vanish from Sagittarius?"
"She's not being facetious, Captain," al-Lahim said. "She means what she says, and for what it's worth, I'd like to have your help as well."
Henry leveled his skeptical gaze on the Coalition intel agent. "Yeah, I'm sure you would. I'm sure you'd take any help you could. But you seem to be forgetting something. I'm just a spacer. An independent spacer. I've got one ship and a shorthanded crew. They're a damned fine shorthanded crew, but still." There was pride in his voice as he said it, glancing from al-Lahim to Caetano. "You're asking me to take on the League? With what, good intentions?"
"I believe you are capable enough to contribute," Caetano said.
"Yeah, maybe I am, but that doesn't mean it'll work," he retorted. "We barely got away from one Q-Ship, okay? Just one, and they had a weapon that knocked out our systems with one shot. So how the hell am I supposed to fight something like that?"
