In the Year of Our Lord 2202

by Edward Lee

  Sharon closed her eyes. “Spec 2 Kim Katherine. She was the regiment’s transfer and reallocation tech.”

  “I’m very sorry.” Matthew exhaled, about to broach an unpleasantry. “As humans, of course, we despair when our friends and fellow Christians die. But God so loved the world that He gave us eternal life. We’re really being selfish, aren’t we, when we mourn those who die? Your dom-mate, Captain-Reverend Peter, the others? They’re in God’s mansion now, everlasting in perfection. But you and I must go on, with our duties, our lives.” The Major-Rector leaned closer to Sharon. “The man who attacked you today—I need to know if you’ve ever seen him before—before we launched, that is. Do you know his name? Have you ever been personally acquainted with him?”

  Now the official business was at hand. Sharon had to remind herself that this wasn’t just a supervisory chat. It was a debriefing. “No, sir. I’ve never seen him before in my life, not even since we launched.”

  “What are your impressions of him, I mean, now that it’s all over?”

  She didn’t have to reflect. “He must be part of the Red Sect. I’ve read a lot about them in the newsflats since I received my Dinar clearance, data not released to the general public.” Then the eerie remembrance floated back across her mind. “It was what he said, just before I threw the coolant at him. He said, ‘Under heaven lay umbra.’ Those words are part of their credo or something.”

  “‘Under heaven lay umbra, hiding the chosen,’” the elder recited the intercession in its entirety. “A convoluted way to suggest that somewhere between God and the earth are an ungodly chosen people—the Red Sect themselves, no doubt—who are hidden from the rest of the world by something—some abstraction, perhaps. Hence, the ‘umbra,’ a shadow of some sort, a shading. Federate Intelligence has always believed this to be a planetary reference, such as the shadow projected during an eclipse.”

  With all the havoc that the so-called Red Sect had inflicted over the last hundred years, they affronted any logic that existed in the fundamentals of terrorism. Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Moslems and Atheists alike were all open targets to this secret terrorist regime, but in doing so they never made any demands, never made any political statements, never insisted on prisoner exchanges. They just demolish churches and mosques and murdered people, all without saying why. No one knew who their leader was, no one knew anything about their organizational base—indeed, no one even knew what they believed in. They weren’t Druze nor Haddinites, they weren’t Red China Underground nor Fourth Commitern, nor were they Luciferics. All of these terrorist organizations, in the death and destruction they wrought, made their ideals, beliefs, and demands perfectly clear.

  But not the Red Sect.

  They killed and hid. They destroyed and kept silent. They perpetuated the most appalling acts of sexual atrocity, religious blasphemy, and cultural taboo…all without ever saying why.

  They’d unleashed a gengineered virus in Africa and killed 100,000,000. From suicidal air-skiffs, they’d dropped phosphorous bombs on Westminster Abbey and the Washington Cathedral on Christmas Eve. In ’192, they’d commandeered several thousand tons of Agent Blue and defoliated 50 percent of the protected sectors of the Rain Forest. And in ’179, they’d gassed the Sacred College of Cardinals.

  A year later they’d nuked Vatican City with handmade plutonium devices and killed the Holy Father.

  “They’ve never made their agenda known,” Matthew continued. “It’s possible that they don’t even have one. But be that as it may, we’ve got a serious problem here.”

  Sharon understood at once. “If one Red Sect member got onboard, there could just as easily be others.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I presumed he used a counterfeit ID pass, switched identities with a genuine crewmember?”

  “No,” the officer answered. “The entire crew is accounted for. Our intruder somehow stowed away and found some effective means to—”

  “Hide,” Sharon finished, “as if in shadow. As if within an umbra.”

  Matthew seemed dolorous now. As chief of the Edessa’s security, the responsibility was ultimately his to protect the crew from terrorist infiltration. Yet now he seemed deceptively shaken, even afraid. “Anyway, you know that your Federate Restricted Information Clearance forbids you from telling anyone about what happened.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “We can’t have an outbreak of panic twenty billion miles from Earth.” His gaze narrowed at her. “The reason I asked if you’d ever seen your assailant before is based on what we saw and heard on the digitape. When he entered the cove, he specifically asked for you.”

  “Yes, sir. And during his comm-call, he named me specifically too. He said, ‘I’m going to get you, Sharon.’”

  Matthew contemplated this, resting his chin atop two outstretched fingers. “And your Federate Occupational Specialty is—”

  “Thirty Delta 50, sir. I’m mainly just a nav-processor and redundancy-systems monitor. At all times, the coordinates in the back-up navigational drives are constantly matched with those programmed into the central Macro-Analysis Computer. I monitor the data matches. If there’s a discrepancy, I send it to operations.”

  Matthew’s old face perked up at a thought. “So, you have access to the mission’s coordinates?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Potentially, then, could you alter the ship’s course?”

  “No, sir. It’s an operational impossibility. No one on board can do that. It’s all pre-programmed. Even if an emergency situation occurred—say, a comet spur, or we found ourselves approaching an uncharted asteroid belt—the MAC would change our course automatically. The only thing special about my job is that it sometimes makes me privy to navigational information about course trajectories and debark descriptions. That’s it.”

  “Then, even if the assailant had killed you, the ship’s course wouldn’t be affected,” he said more than asked.

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, but then, the Red Sect, since their formation, have never made sense, at least not in any way that seems logical to the Christian Federate. If he truly wanted to sabotage the mission, there are dozens of other stations on the ship that would prove far more vulnerable.” Matthew’s gaze narrowed again, more darkly this time. “Hmm. The mission. I suppose we have to ask ourselves why the Red Sect would go to such trouble to sabotage a routine resupply mission in the first place.”

  “Maybe it’s—” but Sharon cut herself off. It was not her privilege to offer hypotheses to a senior officer unless directly asked.

  But Major-Rector Matthew looked right back into her eyes, his own eyes clearly troubled. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s not a routine mission at all.”

  (III)

  Sharon believed what Major-Rector Matthew had said earlier—that it’s actually selfish to mourn those who die. They’re in God’s mansion now, everlasting in perfection, he’d affirmed. “So, I guess that means I’m selfish,” she muttered to herself. She walked down the central manway, heading back to her dom-room, knowing how oddly empty it would feel without Kim there. True, she and Kim had never really been friends, but at least they got along. Sharon kept close-mouthed about her objections to some of Kim’s habits. For one, Kim sometimes lied on her time-file at the cove, and for another, Sharon knew that Kim was seeing several men on the ship—a severe violation of the Christian Federate Military Code. But Sharon never said anything— only God could judge.

  God. Not me.

  She hadn’t really been close to Susanna or Leslie, either; nevertheless, she liked them. And Captain-Reverend Peter had been one of the nicest tech commanders she’d ever worked for. Sharon knew she’d miss them all very much. No, she shouldn’t mourn, but, now that she thought of it, even Christ mourned, didn’t He? My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, He said on the Mount of Olives at Gethsemane the night before He died, even unto death.

  She couldn’t shake the lingering des
pair; she seemed to be dragging it along behind her like a cape in tatters. By now, the bodies of Kim, the Captain-Reverend, and the others would have been summarily cremated in the central fuel cell, their ashes jettisoned into space, and since the dead were no longer mourned, no funeral services were held, just the ship’s lone chaplain reading the Final Rites. Though she’d been born well after the passing of Public Law 482 (the Eugenics Act of the Christian Congress), her biological parents—both missionaries for the Defense Corp—had been killed during a revolt in the state formerly known as California. She’d been four at the time, too young to even remember them—and too young to mourn.

  Until today, in fact, she’d never personally witnessed death.

  Perhaps that explained the despair, even after all her conditioning in the technical convents.

  Death was new to her.

  “Hey, sister! There she is!”

  The voice startled her; her contemplations had left her walking down the manway in a daze. A handsome face smiled at her—though the smile seemed a bit sly— and at once she found herself looking at a tall handsome man, blue-eyed, thirtyish, dressed in security fatigues. He stood at parade rest, beneath the transom which read: property station: restricted, and he was holstering a Webley Model 2000 automatic caseless revolver—the standard sidearm for Security Corp. His name tag read: thomas, pvt-i.

  Then it dawned on her…

  “You’re the securitech…from the data cove,” she said.

  “That’s a fact. Call me Tom.” He shook his head, smiling as if impressed. “I’ll tell ya, that was some fast action you pulled back at the cove.”

  Sharon could think of nothing to say in response.

  “You feeling all right? Sometimes it’s easy to get shook up.”

  “I’m…fine. Thank you for inquiring.”

  “Ooo, yeah, you really put the drop on that dude. Did you see the way his whole face kinda busted off his head when he fell over?”

  Sharon gulped at the mental replay of the image. “Really, it’s not something I feel very good about.”

  Tom cocked a brow. “Aw, come on. That freak had it coming and then some. And you gave it to him in spades. All I did was a little clean-up.”

  Sharon was unnerved. “We killed a man today. We’re not supposed to kill. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Ever hear of that?”

  Tom winced funkily. “Gimme a break. Ever hear of this, sister? ‘Whoso sheddeth blood, his blood shall be shed’? Sounds to me like the Book of Genesis says it’s okay to kill killers. That guy deserved airing out. You should get a medal for the job you did.”

  I just turned one down, came the ironic thought. Still, this discourse bothered her, and she didn’t want any more of the same. “I have to go, Private. God be with you.”

  “Aw, sister—so heartless. I gotta stand this guard-post for the next twelve hours. You’re the first pretty face to come along all shift, and now you’re leaving. Just my luck.”

  She intended to keep on walking—she didn’t like the innuendo. But she also knew that standard sentinel shifts were only eight hours maximum. “Twelve hours?” she questioned. “Isn’t that unduly long?”

  He chuckled. “Sister, I don’t know what unduly means but if you ask me, it’s too long.”

  Next, she found herself appraising him. She noticed five 3-year service strips marking his blue fatigue sleeve. “It’s none of my business, Private—”

  “Call me Tom—”

  “—but how is it that you’ve been in the Christian Federate Army for fifteen years but you’re only a private E-1?”

  Another chuckle. “I made it to buck sergeant once—for about two days. Let’s just say I’ve got a language problem.”

  Did he mean a learning deficiency? “Your English sounds fine to me.”

  “Not that kind of language problem. And I quote the Christian Code of Military Justice: ‘All men and women in service, regardless of branch, will refrain at all times from offensive language, gestures deemed to be obscene, and any and all mannerisms, locutions, and behavior that can be defined as profane.’”

  Then Sharon remembered his absolutely atrocious language after he’d shot the Red Sect man back at her cove.

  “Ain’t that a fuckin’ kick in the dick? I got two Silver Bishop Stars, two Médaille de Laterans, and a fuckin’ Vatican Medal of Honor, and I can’t make E-2 because I cuss on occasion. One day I’m gonna tell the CO to kiss the back of my fuckin’ balls. What’s he gonna do? Bust me down to fuckin’ E-0?”

  Sharon winced. “Please!”

  He leaned over closer to her, as if to reveal a secret. “That’s why I’m standing this damn twelve-motherfuckin’-hour guard shift. Punishment, you know? My sergeant reported me—for cussing after I shot that guy.”

  “Well, you deserve it,” she retorted. “It’s ungodly to talk like that.”

  A quick facial expression sluffed her objection off. “God doesn’t give a shit if I cuss. Just as long as I get the job done. Think Christ fuckin’ cares if I say shit, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker? I believe in Him. I accept Him as my lord and savior. He doesn’t give a flying tenpound fuck how I talk.”

  “Really, I’ve got to go—”

  “Hey, wait.” Tom lightly grabbed her arm, tugged her back and winked at her. “Don’t you even want to know what I’m guarding?”

  She was about to respond with an emphatic no, but simply his tone of voice got a hook in her.

  “All right, Private. What are you guarding?”

  Now he leaned so close, she could feel his breath on her ear. “Him.”

  “Who?”

  “Him. You know. That Red Sect piece of shit we aired out today.”

  The information astonished her. “You mean he’s still alive?”

  “Fuck no. He’s deader than dog-shit, fuckin’ cold meat on the slab. I’m guarding his motherfuckin’ corpse—”

  “Please stop talking like that!” she implored.

  “Sorry. Can’t help it.”

  “Anyway, you must be lying,” she felt sure. “I know the disposal regs. He would’ve been cremated right along with the others. Immediately. Deceased bodies aren’t allowed to remain on board during any sub-light mission.”

  “Hey, to you and me he’s a deceased body. But to CID and Security Corp…he’s fuckin’ evidence.”

  This information piqued her curiosity even more, to the extent that she ignored his profanity.

  Evidence, she thought.

  Tom elbowed her lightly in the side, that sly grin of his ever-present. “Wanna see him?”

  (IV)

  No, she didn’t want to see him, not objectively at least. But something deeper in her being needed to. She needed a last look at the man who’d murdered her colleagues and had tried to kill her.

  “Don’t worry, there aren’t any digicams here; it’s considered a security vault.” Tom took her past the bulkhead, quickly resealed the door behind them. Ahead of her stretched a single narrow corridor lined with pressure doors. A dark crimson light glowed overhead.

  “What is this place?” Sharon asked.

  “Security Corp’s property unit,” Tom answered, leading her on. “All restricted equipment—mainly weapons and comm gear—are kept here. Also, all classified logs, system specs, and data banks. And one more thing.”

  The last pressure door was marked: pathology. Tom used a chip-pin and took her in.

  Distress made Sharon feel as though eels were swimming rabid circles in her stomach. An acrid, antiseptic scent tinged the air. Tom switched on a lumeplate and suddenly the small unit shimmered in harsh white light. Initially, Sharon had to squint.

  A simple morgue platform occupied the center of the unit, and what occupied the morgue platform was a human form sealed in a silver steribag.

  “Don’t worry, he’s clean. First thing they did was rad the hell out of the son of a bitch. He can lay here at standard vessel temp and won’t start to stink for a year.”

  “Charming,” Sharon
said. A small holochart hovered above the platform; it read:

  DO NOT DISPLAY IN UNRESTRICTED AREAS

  NAME OF DECEDENT: Unknown

  DISPOSITION: Unknown

  T.O.D.: 1659 hrs C.F.S.T.

  COMMENTS (PHYSIOLOGICAL):

  C.O.D.: General organ-system failure due to multiple flechette [2mm] discharge into upper- and mid-chest region.

  OTHER: All facial tissues and musculature destroyed by profuse contact with data-line coolant potassium ethanolamine

  (GENETIC):

  1) 11-probe DNA scan affirms 2 positive tests:

  a) Decedent tested positive for ABZ Genotype Syndrome (artificially induced cytoplastic aspect exclusive to terrorist group known as “Red Sect.”)

  b) Decedent tested positive for congenital cutaneous nevus consistent with exclusive pigmental skin condition known as the “Red Sect Mark.”

  M.D. on Duty: W.O. Simon

  Clinical Recommendations:

  HOLD FOR EVIDENCE SECTION;

  CLASSIFY IMMEDIATELY

  “Oh no!” Sharon objected. “I might not be cleared high enough to see this!”

  “Relax,” Tom assured. “I won’t tell, and I already told you this cove isn’t ‘live.’ No digitapes and no aural sensors. That stuff’s not allowed in any restricted depository. That’s why they have dumb-ass grunts like me to guard the place.”

  This provided little relief; she was still technically breaking Federate Military Law. Not much I can do about it now, she figured. I’m already here. “ABZ Genotype Syndrome. I had plenty of training blocks on genetics, but I’ve never heard of that.”

  “That’s because ‘that’ is classified. New Vatican wants the general public to know as little as possible about the Red Sect…not that we know much anyway. Average Joe and Jane on the street would panic and jump to conclusions; they’d think the Red Sect are mutants, which they aren’t.”