In the Year of Our Lord 2202

by Edward Lee

  “So, what’s this ABZ genotype?”

  “All we know about the Red Sect is that they’re a secret organization formed at least a couple hundred years ago. They wanted themselves to be exclusive so when genetic-engineering technologies grew advanced enough, they cultivated their own gene-marker—ABZ—and from there on, ectogenically produced a first generation. Similar to the Christian Federate’s Public Reproduction Law which called for all pregnancies to be in vitro, to screen out all disease genes. Only the Red Sect took it a step further.”

  Sharon wasn’t sure she understood. “Then how does this genotype make them exclusive?”

  “They can only reproduce with themselves.”

  “So, it’s a reproductive marker,” Sharon got it.

  “Right. Something about split nucleotides, introns, RNA implants, egg-head shit like that.”

  Sharon frowned, but now she understood. “There’d be no susceptibilities for disease—just like the Christian populace—and there’d be no dangers of biological defects from inbreeding, because those genes would’ve been screened out as well.”

  “And because they can’t reproduce outside of the Sect, they don’t have to fertilize their eggs in vitro anymore.” Tom winked at her again. “They do it the good old-fashioned way. The old tube-steak injection.”

  Sharon recoiled at the words, just as her years of sexual desensitivity training had taught her to. “You’re awful,” she told him.

  “Hey, it’s what nature intended, so don’t jibe me with all that nunnery crap. And if you tell me you don’t think about it yourself—then you’re a liar.”

  Sharon rejected the comment. Yes, she did think about it on very rare occasions—just simple unformed curiosities—and went immediately to Confession when she did. By doing so, she was absolved, and even the priests would tell her that this was normal, since all men and women were born in original sin. She was happy that she’d worked so hard to quell these sinful musings. She knew that many did not. And the few times when her dreams turned sexual, she didn’t worry about it. In the last ecumenical council, the Pope had declared that dreams did not equate to sin.

  “Shit, I’ll bet you’re even a virgin, aren’t you?” Tom, rude as ever, asked next.

  “Of course!” she retaliated. “And it’s none of your business anyway, so stop talking about things like that. I only came in here to see—”

  “To see the dead meat, that’s right. Let me find the right chip-pin and I’ll open the bag.”

  Sharon’s gut sunk again. Simply the way he’d said that—I’ll open the bag—sounded utterly grotesque. But then again, she knew she shouldn’t be here, and she could easily walk out right now.

  But she didn’t.

  As Tom perused a ring of chip-pins, Sharon looked back up at the holochart, noticed the name of the medical officer who’d signed off on the autopsical scans.

  W.O. Simon.

  “Who’s Simon? I thought the ship’s physician was Commander-Deaconness Esther.”

  “She is. Dr. Cold Hands we guys call her. She doesn’t have proper clearance, so she couldn’t do the post, doesn’t even know what happened. You’ve been debriefed, right? You know that you can’t mention what happened to anyone.”

  “I’m fully aware of that, Private,” she couldn’t resist. She’d worked hard for her rank, didn’t like to be talked down to. “Major-Rector Matthew already had me in.”

  Tom laughed. “We call him Major-Rectal Mattie. The guy’s a dork and a half.”

  “He seemed like a capable and patriotic officer. As usual I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Fine, but to answer your question, Simon is a medical warrant officer who used to be with Security Corp. So the mission signed him on as Dr. Esther’s assistant. But if you ask me, Simon’s daddy must be one of the Christian Joint Chiefs ’cos I can’t see any other way for a guy that dumb to make warrant officer. He’s so dumb he couldn’t find his asshole with both thumbs and a bucket of servolube.”

  “Well I didn’t ask you!” she exclaimed over more profanity.

  “Say it a little louder, sister. I don’t think they heard you back on the Epsilon Eridani Outpost.”

  Sharon continued to frown objection, but he was right. This wasn’t the place to be raising her voice. Her eyes drifted back to the holochart. “So, it’s true about the mark, I see.”

  “The Red Sect mark? Oh, yeah. Every member of the Sect has it.”

  “I’ve only read about it, never seen one. It’s like a tattoo or something, right?”

  “No, not a tattoo. It’s a birthmark, another thing they genetically bred into themselves. It’s blood-red, covers the entire chest, and it’s the same pattern on each and every one of them. Creepiest thing you’ve ever seen. And now if I could only find the right fuckin’ chip-pin, I’d be able to show it to you.”

  As profane, egotistical, and rude as Tom clearly was, he did seem to know a lot about this most mysterious terrorist sect. Sharon’s curiosity wouldn’t let go. “The newsflats are always talking about how no one knows anything about the Red Sect. But it seems to me all you have to do is capture a member and interrogate him.”

  “Never happen, sister.” Tom still bumbled with the chip-pins. “Red Secters are hardcore motherfuckers—er, sorry. These fuckin’ people—even the chicks— make the Christian Army Rangers and the fuckin’ Marine Corp 2nd Spacebome Division look like a bunch of hundred-and-fifty-year-olds sucking slop through straws at a priest hospice. We’ve captured dozens of Red Secters.”

  “Don’t you interrogate them?”

  “To my knowledge only one of them ever lived to make it to an interrogation cove. I was there on TDY. They bring this guy in after he smoked an entire day nursery full of little kids. Used napalm sticks. Anyway, the interrogation techs put hydro-clamps on him, crushed his ankles, knees, and elbows lickety-split. The guy didn’t give up any intelligence info, not a peep, and he didn’t even scream. Just laid there on the table and smiled. So, then they cut a hole in his skull with a gammadrill and start sticking hot-probes into the pain centers of his brain. The fucker just laughed till he croaked.”

  “But you just said that dozens have been captured.”

  “Right, but before we can slap on the magcuffs, they kill themselves.”

  “What, poison lancets or something? Sub-lingual Trichlorex tabs?”

  “Fuck, no. They commit suicide with their bare hands. Serious. Finger in the eyeball to the brain, self-strangulation, stuff like that. I caught one myself once. Remember when the Washington Military District was on Alert State Orange? I was on rover patrol when a Red Secter set off a mag-pulse bomb at a Navy convent. It made all the sisters spontaneously hemorrhage. I caught the sick piece of shit over at the rectory; he slit the abbess’s throat and was raping her right on the altar while she bled to death—”

  Sharon quailed.

  “—and I catch him, see? I’d like nothing more than to put a full-beam milliwave burst right into his fuckin’ head but I got orders from the F.O.D. to bring him in alive. Before I could run halfway across the chancel, the fucker grabbed his own head and twisted it around till his neck broke.”

  Sharon tried to shove the image away. Ask another question, she told herself, if only to escape the graphic discourse. “It just seems strange that this cult can exist for all these years, killing millions of people, but nobody knows anything about them.”

  “You don’t know anything about them, general pop doesn’t know anything about them, and even Security Corp doesn’t know much. But I know plenty.”

  Enthused, Sharon’s eyes widened. She waited. “And?”

  “Oh, well, I can’t tell you. Your clearance isn’t high enough.”

  Sharon fumed. “You really are a—”

  “Asshole?”

  “If I used language like that, yes, I’d say that would be the word I was looking for.”

  Tom was clearly enjoying this. “Damn straight. Asshole is my middle name, sweetcakes.�
�

  “That’s Spec 5 sweetcakes to you,” Sharon came right back. “And addressing any female personnel, regardless of rank, in a sexist or otherwise degrading manner is punishable by solitary detention of no less than seven days for first offense, not to mention an Article 15, monetary fine, and extra duty. I should report you.”

  Tom glowered at her. “Yeah, which you won’t do because then you’d have to explain what you’re doing in a restricted unit without permission.” Then he cracked a smile and slapped her—if a bit hard—right on the back. “Jesus, sister. I’m only joking! You techgirls really need to lighten up!”

  Sharon fumed a bit more, shaking her head at herself for ever even talking to him.

  “I can tell you some good shit,” he continued, still fiddling with the ring. “Like for ten years they had a mole in Transportation Corp, and he was the Bishop-Chief’s right-hand man. This guy knew all the Army’s hazmat and weapons routes. That’s how the Red Sect pulled all those successful heists.”

  This was interesting but she expected something more exciting. “What about the organization itself? They seem to be protesting the Christian Federate and any other major global religious-political system. But it’s never been revealed what they believe in.”

  “Oh, we know that,” Tom said in confidence. “Er, I mean, Federate Intel does. I found out a lot when I TDY’d with them.”

  He’s so annoying! Sharon thought. She had to temper herself. “All right, so what do they believe in?”

  “A devil,” Tom said flatly.

  This stunned her. Many devil-worshiping terrorist cults came into existence after the Christian Federate took over the northern hemisphere. “Devil-worshipers. So, they’re allied with one of the satanic factions? The Luciferics, the Ardath-Lils?”

  “They aren’t allied with anyone. They exist and function within themselves.”

  “The Luciferics worship Satan through Baalzephon and Panzuzu. The Forge worship Nergal. The Black Adventists worship Aldinoch. What ‘devil’ does the Red Sect worship?”

  “This devil,” Tom said.

  He’d finally found the correct chip-pin; he unlocked the bag and unzipped it, first revealing only the dead terrorist’s face.

  Sharon blanched, stepping back at the sight of the cadaver. Oh, God. The fleshless face grinned through bared teeth. Eyeballs remained bright in their sockets; the effect created an illusion of a raving stare.

  “This devil right here,” Tom went on. Now he pushed back the body-bag’s polykevlar cover entirely, disclosing the utterly nude corpse.

  Crusted blood ringed the tiny punctures from the flechette shots. The skin on the arms and legs appeared even whiter than the skull-face.

  But the impact of the vision came not from the cadaver’s extremities, nor even from the hideous stripped-to-the-bone face.

  The birthmark.

  The Mark of the Red Sect, she thought.

  From nipples to groin, the chilling pattern stretched in a perfect blood-red. Like an inverted triangle, only coarse-edged.

  “Stare at it,” Tom said, “and you’ll see the details.”

  She did so, and soon enough, like an optical trick, the subtle inconsistencies began to form in her vision. Nuances of darker scarlet suggested an antediluvian face, vacant ovals for eyes, and an opened maw like a bottomless chasm.

  A face from Hell, Sharon thought in a gasp.

  Upturned hooks around the nipples sufficed for horns.

  “See. I told ya it was creepy.” Tom closed and relocked the bag. “Sometimes I get nightmares from that face.”

  Sharon had her eyes closed, but a ghost of the image lingered. She grit her teeth to shake off a chill. “When I was in my 400-level of tech school, I took several teratologic and ancient myth classes as well as an entire training cycle of demonology. I never saw any emblem, symbol or drawing like that.”

  “Same reason you never knew that the Red Sect are demon-worshipers,” Tom reminded. “All that information is sitting under a big-time security classification. Nobody has access to it except for Federate Intel, Defense Corp, and the Pope and a few of his bishops in the Vatican Security Counsel.”

  “But you were with Federate Intel for a while,” Sharon reminded him. “You know a lot of the information. What else do you know?”

  Tom’s sly grin returned. “I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if I didn’t think you were cool. After all, you could blab. Then I’d be in the Lunar Detent Center till the next millennium.”

  “For goodness sake, I won’t blab!”

  Was it her imagination, or did his eyes roam up over her bosom?

  “Remember the crystal-morph scare about five years ago?” Tom began.

  “Latest gengineered designer drug,” Sharon recalled. “Organic nano-particles would enter the bloodstream and create their own brain-receptors in the temporal lobe. Instant clinical addiction after one use. The Anti- Narcotics Corp destroyed all the labs in a sting operation. Problem solved. But that wasn’t Red Sect, it was a Korean Cartel.”

  “It was Red Sect,” Tom corrected. “Sure, the news-holos said it was the Koreans, but it was really Red Sect. And it wasn’t Anti-Narcotics Corp, either.”

  “Federate Intel?”

  “Yep. They busted all the regional labs all over the Federate in less than eight hours. But the distribution point was in Old Besthesda, the ghettoblocks. When F.C.I. Special Ops raided the place, there was only one Red Sect member there, and he’d rigged the whole place with C-11 charges. Just before he snapped the trigger, he yelled out ‘Death to the Christian Federate and all enemies of Kilukrus.’”

  “Kilukrus?” Sharon questioned. “I don’t recall that name from any of my classes. It sounds Gaullic, or like something from the Brythons of pre-Roman England.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. See, there’s more to the story…” Tom’s words halted at a sudden high- pitched beep that seemed to be coming from his belt.

  “What the fuck?” From his belt he plucked a small black device with a small vidscanner on it.

  Then his jaw dropped.

  “What’s wrong?” Sharon inquired.

  But Tom snapped into an instant panic. One big hand grabbed her uniform collar and a split-second later he was practically throwing her toward the open pressure door. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of here RIGHT NOW! And seal the door behind you!”

  “But—”

  “NOW, God damn it! There’s a fuckin’ BOMB in here!”

  For a moment, Sharon’s heart seemed to stop. But when she turned for the mortuary’s exit, she stopped mid-step.

  “Let me help you disarm it!” she insisted.

  He roared back, “Would you get the fuck OUT of here! Seal the door behind you, then hit the general quarters alarm in the main access!”

  The beeping persisted. Tom was scrambling through the autopsy unit, checking frantically through the instrument drawers, looking for something. “What the fuck kind of a fucking morgue is this anyway?”

  “What are you looking for?” she yelled back over his rage.

  “A fuckin’ scalpel or knife, and I told you to get out of here. You’ll get killed.”

  Sharon had already decided she wouldn’t leave. Just as she hadn’t been scared earlier today when the figure on the slab had tried to kill her…she wasn’t scared now. She immediately noted the cadmium surgical laser nozzle hanging from its ceiling mount. She grabbed it, slapped it in his hand.

  “Good thinking,” he said, then yelled yet again, “Now get out!”

  Sharon pressed the power button on the laser, still not quite sure what he was up to. But soon she was wincing.

  An unpleasant scent rose up; Tom dragged the laser’s invisible cutting beam right across the cadaver’s abdomen. Innards quickly spilled out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Got a gut feeling—no pun intended.” Now his bare hands were reaching into the corpse’s opened abdomen. “It’s an old Red Sect trick. They’ll swal
low an RDX ball with a sleeper trigger. That’s why my field detector didn’t catch it. The circuits can’t be detected until the timer activates—Here it is!”

  From the gash of tilled innards, his red-splotched hands extricated a small node no larger than a robin’s egg. “Don’t just stand there! Open the—”

  Sharon was a step ahead, having already pressurized and opened the waste disposal chute.

  Tom threw the bomb into the hatch, after which Sharon smacked the DEPRESSURIZE & EJECT button—

  “Get down!”

  —just as the bomb exploded.

  — | — | —

  Part Two

  “The secret things belong

  unto the Lord our God.”

  —Deuteronomy 29:29

  — | — | —

  (I)

  Sharon and Tom, their uniforms damp with the sweat of sheer panic, stood painfully at attention in the Mission Commander’s quad. General-Vicar Luke was about as hard as they came, surviving two major wars and dozens of field actions. Right now, sitting behind his desk, he looked like a bust of Genghis Khan. Standing to his side—and not looking terribly happy either—was Security Corp Chief Major-Rector Matthew.

  “For the digital record, this emergency security inquest and punitive hearing has officially commenced,” he announced. “2004 hours, C.F. Standard Time.”

  Punitive hearing? Sharon thought, fairly outraged. I guess they’ve already decided that we’re all guilty. Some due process.

  Also standing at attention right next to her were the ship’s physician, Commander-Deaconness Esther, and her ungainly assistant, Warrant Officer Simon. All four defendants had galvanic-stress-analysis bands around their wrists. Any verbal response that was untrue would instantly be detected by the station’s lie-detection computer programs.

  “Dr. Esther,” the General-Vicar stated. He had an odd cleft chin, like two arthritic knuckles. “Was or was not the decedent in the morgue unit properly autopsied?”

  “Yes, sir,” the tall, statuesque woman replied with more than a trace of nervousness in her voice. “The decedent was autopsied via a standard tomegraphic-microscopy scan immediately after he was killed.”