Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sean tried not to hover as Harriet walked unaided to the astrogator's couch. She was still shaky, and her missing memories refused to return, yet she had to smile at his expression. Tamman sat beside her and slipped an arm about her, and she leaned against him, wishing she knew how to thank them for her life.

But, of course, there was no need.

"Well!" Sean flopped into his couch with customary inelegance. "Looks like your body-and-fender shop does good work, Brashan."

"True," the Narhani replied with one of his clogged-drain chuckles. "And while I regret my inability to repair your implant, Harry, I must say your patch gives you a certain—" He paused, seeking the proper word.

"Raffishness?" Sean suggested, his smile almost back to normal.

"Thank you, kind sir." Harriet stroked the black patch and grinned. "I glanced in the mirror and thought I was looking at Anne Bonny!"

"Who?" Brashan's crest perked, but she only shook her head.

"Look her up in the computer, Twinkle Hooves."

"I shall. You humans have such interesting historical figures," he said, and her laughter lifted the last shadow from Sean's heart.

"I'm really glad to see you up again, Harry, and I'm sorry you can't remember what happened. The rest of us'll put together a combined implant download later, but for now let's turn our attention to what we got out of it. Aside, of course, from the reincarnation of Captain Bonny."

His wave gave Sandy the floor, and she stood.

"Speaking for myself, Harry, I'm delighted you're back. Tam's been doing his best, but he'll never make an analyst." Tamman made a pained sound, and Harriet poked him in the ribs.

"However," Sandy went on with a grin, "our ham-handed Marine and I have recovered a fair amount from our purloined computer, and our original hypothesis was correct. It was a journal. This man's."

Sean gazed at the image in the command deck display, mentally turning the hair white and the skin to parchment, and recognized the lonely, mummified body from the tower bedroom.

"This is—or was—an engineer named Kahtar. Much of his journal's unrecoverable, and he didn't mention the planet's name in the portions we've been able to read, so we still don't know what it was called originally. But I've been able to piece together what happened."

She looked around, satisfied by the hush about her. Even Tamman knew only fragments of what she was about to say, and she wondered if the others would react as she had... and if they'd have the same nightmares.

"Apparently," she began, "the planetary governor closed down the mat-trans at the first hypercom warning, then began immediate construction of a quarantine system under the direction of his chief engineer. Who," she added wryly, "was obviously a real whiz.

"Things weren't too bad at the start. There was some panic, and a few disturbances from people afraid they hadn't gotten quarantined soon enough, but nothing they couldn't handle... at first." She paused, and her eyes darkened.

"They might have made it, if they'd just shut down their hypercom. Their defenses destroyed over a dozen incoming refugee ships, but I think they could have lived even with that... if the hypercom hadn't still been up.

"It was like a com link to Hell." Her voice was quiet. "It was such a slow, agonizing process. Other worlds thought they were safe, too, but they weren't, and, one by one, the plague killed them all. It took years—years of desperate, dwindling messages from infected planets while their entire universe died."

Icy silence hovered on the command deck, and she blinked misty eyes.

"It... got to them. Not at once. But when the last hypercom went silent, when there was no one else left—no one at all—the horror was too much. The whole planet went mad."

"Mad?" Brashan's voice was soft, and she nodded.

"They knew what had happened, you see. They knew they'd done it to themselves. That it had all been a mistake—a technological accident on a cosmic scale. So they decided to insure there would never be another one. Technology had killed the Empire... so they killed technology."

"They what?" Sean jerked up, and she nodded. "But... but they had a high-tech population. How did they expect to feed it without technology?"

"They didn't care," Sandy said sadly. "The psychic wounds were too deep. That's what happened to their tech base: they smashed it themselves."

"Surely not all of them agreed," Harriet half-whispered.

"No." Sandy was grim. "There were some sane ones left—like Kahtar—but not enough. They fought a war here like you wouldn't believe. A high-tech war intended to destroy its own culture... and anyone who tried to stop them. Harry, they threw people into bonfires for trying to hide books."

Harriet covered her mouth, trembling with a personal terror they all understood too well, and Tamman hugged her.

"Sorry," Sandy said gently, and Harriet nodded jerkily. "Anyway, they didn't quite get all of it. The Valley of the Damned was a sort of high-tech redoubt. There'd been others, but the mobs rolled over them—sometimes they used human wave attacks and literally ran the defenses out of ammunition with their own bodies. Only the valley held. Their energy guns didn't need ammo, and they threw back over thirty attacks in barely ten years. The last one was made by a mob on foot, in the middle of a mountain winter, armed with spears and a handful of surviving Imperial weapons."

She fell silent once more, and they waited, sharing her horror, until she inhaled and went on in a flat voice.

"The attacks on the valley finally ended because the others had managed to destroy their technology, and, with it, their agriculture, their transport system, their medical structure—everything. Starvation, disease, exposure, even cannibalism... within a generation, they were down to a population they could support with an almost neolithic culture. Kahtar estimated that over a billion people died in less than ten years.

"But—" her voice sharpened and she leaned forward "—there was, obviously, one other high-tech center left: the quarantine HQ. Even the most frenzied mob knew that was all that stood between them and any possible refugee ship, however slight the chance one might arrive, and the HQ staff rigged up a ground defense element in the quarantine system itself. It's nowhere near as powerful as the space defenses, but it's designed to smash anyone or anything using Imperial weapons within a hundred klicks of the HQ."

"Oh, crap," Sean breathed, and she smiled tightly.

"You got it. And there's worse. You see, the command staff may have set things up to keep the mobs from smashing the HQ, but they agreed with the need to destroy all other technology."

"I don't think I'm going to like this," Tamman muttered.

"You're not. They moved out of those ruins near the Temple, put the HQ computer on voice access, set the shipyard up to handle all maintenance on an automated basis, and manufactured a religion."

"Oh, Jesus!" Sean moaned.

"According to Kahtar, who was pretty much running the valley by then, the port admiral had some sort of vision that turned the bio-weapon into the Flood and Pardal into Noah's Ark. But this Flood was a punishment for the sin of technological pride into which the 'Great Demons' had seduced mankind, and the 'Ark' was a refuge to which God had guided the handful of faithful who had resisted the demons' temptation. The survivors were the seed corn of the New Zion, selected by God to create a society without the 'evils' of technology."

"But if that's true," Brashan said, "why didn't they destroy the valley? If they had the capability to set up ground defenses, surely they had the capability to strike Kahtar's people."

"There was no need. There were never more than a hundred people in the valley, and it was a vacation resort before they forted up, without any real industrial base. They were trapped inside it, with too little genetic material to sustain a viable population, and the new religion had a use for them—one so important it didn't even pull the plug on their power supply."

"Demons," Harriet murmured.

"Or, more precisely, a nest of 'lesser demons' and their worshipers. The valley gave their religion a 'threat' that might last for centuries to help it get its feet under it. What we walked into was Hell itself as far as the Church is concerned, and that's why anyone who has anything to do with it must be exterminated."

"Merciful God." Sean looked as sick as he felt. The warped logic and cold-blooded calculation that left those poor, damned souls penned up in their valley as the very embodiment of evil twisted his guts. He tried to imagine how it must have felt to know every other human on the planet was waiting, literally praying for the chance to murder you, and wanted to vomit.

"I think Kahtar went mad himself, at the end. Some of the others walked out of the valley when the despair finally got to be too much—walked out knowing what would happen. Others suicided. None of them were interested in having children. What future would children have had on a planet of homemade barbarians itching to torture them to death?

"But Kahtar had to find something to believe in, and he did—something that kept him alive to the very end, after all the others were gone. He decided, against all evidence and sanity, that at least one other world had to have survived. That's why he wired his journal into the main computers. He left it there for us, or someone like us, so we'd know what had happened. And that's why he included something very important for us to know."

"What?" Sean asked.

"The last of the original HQ crew didn't just put the computer on voice access, Sean. They knew there were still at least some enhanced people in the valley. People who could have ordered the Voice to denounce their precious religion if they'd been able to get close enough to access the computer, because they could have overridden voice commands through their implants once the last of the original 'priests' were gone. So they disengaged the neural feeds. The only way in is by voice, and they had an entire damned army sitting on top of it to keep everyone but the priesthood out of voice access range. With the quarantine system set up to wax anybody who tried to use Imperial weapons to shoot their way in, there was no way a handful of old, tired Imperials could get to them."

She paused and met their horrified gazes.

"Which means, of course, that we can't get to them, either."

Sean sat in the cutter bay hatch, high on Israel's flank, and gazed sightlessly out through the wavering distortion of her stealth field. They were still making progress on their linguistic programs, helped by the fact that they were no longer afraid to use their remotes at full range as long as they stayed outside the Temple's hundred-kilometer kill zone, yet two weeks had passed since Sandy's bombshell, and none of them had the least idea what to do next. The only good thing was that Harriet was completely back on her feet now—she was even jogging on Israel's treadmill again.

He sighed and tugged on his nose, looking very like an oversized, black-haired version of his father as he contemplated the problem. He'd expected difficulties getting into the Temple, but he'd never anticipated that they wouldn't even be able to use Imperial small arms! Hell, they might not even be able to use their own implants, so how did four humans—and one Narhani, who'd be mobbed on sight as an incontrovertible "demon"—break into the most strongly guarded fortress on the entire goddamned planet?

There was, of course, one very simple answer, but he couldn't do it. He couldn't even think of it without nausea. Kahtar's journal indicated "the Sanctum" was heavily armored and deeply dug in, but they could always take the place out with a gravitonic warhead, and Israel could launch hyper weapons from atmosphere. They could hit the Temple before the quarantine system even began to react, and if the computer went down, so did the entire system. Unfortunately, they also killed everyone in Pardal's largest city—almost two million people, by Sandy's estimate.

He squeezed his nose harder. His clever stratagem to get them down had worked, all right, and he'd poked their collective heads right into a trap. They couldn't take off—assuming they'd had anywhere to go—without the quarantine system killing them for trying to leave the planet, but there wasn't any way to shut the system off from the planet!

"Sean?" He looked up at Sandy's voice. She was standing at the far end of the bay, waving at him. "Come on! You've gotta see this!"

"See what?" he asked, climbing to his feet with a puzzled frown.

"It's too good to spoil by telling you." Her expression was strange, and she sounded amused, frightened, excited, and surprised, all in one.

"At least give me a clue!"

"All right." She eyed him with an odd, lurking smile. "I didn't have anything else to do, so I sent a remote back to take a peek at the village we pulled Harry out of, and you won't believe what's going on!"

"Well, Father," Tibold closed the spyglass with a click and grimaced at Stomald, "it seems His Grace was unimpressed."

Stomald nodded, shading his eyes with his hand, and tried not to show his own despair. He hadn't expected Bishop Frenaur to accept his unsupported word without question, but he certainly hadn't counted on this.

Mother Church's blood-red standards advanced up the twisting valley, blue and gold cantons glittering, and metal gleamed behind them: pikeheads and muskets, armor, and the dully-flashing barrels of artillery.

"How many, do you think?" he asked quietly.

"Enough." The Guard captain squinted into the sun, frowning. "More than I expected, really. I'd say that's most of the Malagoran Temple Guard out there, Father. Call it twenty thousand men."

Stomald nodded again, grateful Tibold hadn't said, "I told you so." The Guard captain had argued against sending the good word to the Temple. Unlike Stomald, Tibold wasn't a native-born Malagoran, but he knew the Temple regarded Malagor as a hotbed of sedition, and seeing that armed, advancing host, Stomald was just as glad he'd at least agreed to send his news by semaphore rather than taking it in person.

He shook that thought off and pressed his lips together. Surely God had sent His angels to Cragsend for a purpose. He didn't promise His servants would always be bright enough to see His purpose, but He always had one. Of course, sometimes it wasn't a very safe one... .

"What do you advise?"

"Running away?" Tibold suggested with a smile, and Stomald surprised himself with a chuckle.

"I don't think God would like that. Besides, where would we run to? We're backed up against the mountains, Tibold."

"Just like a kinokha in a trap," the Guard captain agreed, wondering why he wasn't more frightened. He'd thought his young priest was mad at first, but something about him had been convincing. Certainly, Tibold told himself yet again, those hadn't been demons. He'd seen too much of what men, touched with God's immortal spirit, were capable of in time of war. No, if they'd been demons, Cragsend would be a smoking ruin peopled only by the dead.

And, like Father Stomald, he could think of only one other thing they could have been, though he did wish they'd been a bit less ambiguous in their message. Still, he supposed that was his fault. He was the damn-fool idiot who'd shot the first of them down. Even an angel might forget her message with a bullet in her head, and the others had seemed more intent on getting her back than dropping off any letters.

He snorted. The other local villages and towns—even Cragwall, the largest town in the Shalokar Range—had sent their priests to stare at the wreckage and hear Father Stomald's tale. Tibold had never realized just how powerful a preacher Stomald was until he heard him speaking to those visitors, bringing forward other villagers to bear witness, describing the angel who'd spoken in the Holy Tongue even while the sanctified oil blazed upon her. It was a pity he couldn't have a word or two with the commander of that army, for he'd brought everyone else around. Of course, his audience had been Malagorans, with all a Malagoran's resentment of foreign domination, and Tibold knew better than most how jealous the Temple was of its secular power. Whoever was in command down there had his orders from the Circle; he was hardly likely to forget them on the say-so of a village under-priest, however eloquent.

Tibold reopened his glass to study the standards once more. Columns of smoke rose behind them—columns which had once been farmsteads and small villages. The people who'd lived there had either come to join the "heresy" or fled to escape it, and he was grateful they had, for the smoke told him what the Guard's orders were. Mother Church had decided to make an example of the "rebels" and declared Holy War, and her Guard would take no prisoners.

"Well, Father," he said at last, "I don't see much choice. I've got five hundred musketeers, a thousand pikemen, and four thousand with nothing but their bare hands. Even with God on our side, that's not a lot."

"No," Stomald sighed. "I wish I could say God will save us, but sometimes we can meet our Trial only by dying for what we know to be right."

"Agreed. But I'm a soldier, Father, and, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to die as one—without making it any easier for them than I have to."

"I don't know of any Writ that says you should," Stomald said with a sad smile.

"Then we'll fall back to Tilbor Pass. It's less than four hundred paces across, and it'll take even this lot a few days to dig us out of that." Stomald nodded, and the Guardsman smiled crookedly. "And in the meantime, Father, I won't take it a bit amiss if you ask God to help us out of the mess we've landed ourselves in!"

"You're joking!" Sean stared at the images from the remote. "Angels?"

"Yep." Sandy's eyes sparkled. "Wild, isn't it?"

"My God." Sean sank onto his couch. All the others were gazing as fixedly as he at the display.

"Actually, it's not as crazy as it sounds," Harriet mused. "I mean, we obviously weren't mortals—not with bio-enhancement, grav guns, and plasma grenades—and if you aren't mortal, you're either a demon or an angel. And I've been back over your reports." Her voice wavered, for the others had prepared their promised implant download. She still had no memory of the event, but the download had shown it all to her through her friends' eyes. She shivered as her mind replayed the image of her own bloody body, awaiting the torch, then shook herself. "It looks like the only two they saw clearly were Sandy and me."

"That's what I gather from what this Father Stomald is saying." Sandy switched to an image of the priest and smiled wryly as she recalled the last time she'd seen the broad-shouldered, curly-haired young man with the neatly trimmed beard. He looked far more composed now as he stood talking to the hard-faced soldier at his side.

"He's kind of cute, isn't he?" Harriet murmured, then blushed as Sean gave her a very speaking look and she remembered what that cute young man had almost done to her. She rubbed her eye patch and gave herself another shake.

"Anyway, if we're the only ones he saw, it all makes sense. Their church is patriarchal—well, for that matter, most of Pardal is. Malagor's sort of radical in that respect; they actually let women own property. The thought of a woman in the priesthood is anathema, but there Sandy and I were in Battle Fleet uniform... which just happens to be what their bishops wear for their holiest church feasts. Add the fact that this patriarchal outfit has decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that angels are female—"

"And beautiful," Tamman inserted.

"As I say, angels are female," Harriet went on repressively. "They're also immortal, but not invulnerable, which explains how I could have been injured, and this Stomald seems to realize you three deliberately didn't kill anyone when you came in like gangbusters. Given all that, there's actually a weird sort of logic to the whole thing."

"Yeah," Sean said more soberly, and changed the display himself. The marching columns of armed men sent a visible chill through Israel's crew, and he sighed. "We may not have killed anyone, but it looks like maybe we should have. At least then we would have been 'demons' instead of some kind of divine messengers that're going to get all of them massacred."

"Maybe... and maybe not... ." Sandy was gazing at the advancing Temple Guard, and the light in her eyes worried Sean.

"What d'you mean?" he demanded, and she gave him a beatific smile.

"I mean we just found the key to the Temple's front door."

"Huh?" her lover said sapiently, and her smile became a grin.

"We don't want all those people slaughtered for something we started, however unintentionally, do we?" Four heads shook, and she shrugged. "In that case, we've got to rescue them."

"And how do you propose to do that?"

"Oh, that's the easy part. Those guys are a heck of a lot more than a hundred kilometers from the Temple."

"Hold on there!" Sean protested. "I don't want to see Stomald and his fellow nuts massacred, but I don't want to massacre anyone else, either!"

"No need," she assured him. "We can probably scare the poo out of them with a few holo projections without even a demonstration of firepower."

"Hum." Sean looked at the others, and his eyes began to dance. "Yeah, I suppose we could. Might even be fun."

"Don't get too carried away," Sandy said, "because what happens after we scare 'em is what really matters."

"What are you talking about?" Tamman sounded puzzled.

"I mean that whether we like it or not, the fat's in the fire. Either we let the Church massacre these people, or we rescue them. If we rescue them, do you think the Temple's just going to say, 'Gosh! Looks like we better leave those nasty demon-worshiping heretics alone'? And they're not going to go home like nothing happened, either, because if we save them, we reconfirm their belief in divine intervention."

"Great," Sean sighed.

"Maybe it is." He looked up in surprise, and she shrugged. "We didn't do it on purpose, but we can't undo it. So if the Temple wants a crusade, why not give it one?"

"Are you saying we should instigate a religious war?!" Harriet stared at her in horror, and Sandy shrugged again.

"I'm saying we already have," she said more soberly. "That gives us a responsibility to end it, one way or another, and we're not going to be able to do that without getting our hands bloody. I don't like that any more than you do, Harry, but we don't have a choice—unless we want to sit back and watch Stomald and his people go down.

"So if we have to get involved, let's go whole hog. The Church is too big, too static. Even the secular lords are lap dogs for it. But the only way Stomald's going to survive is to take out the Inner Circle... and that just happens to be what we need to do to get into the Sanctum."

"I don't know... ." Harriet said slowly, but Sean was staring at Sandy in admiration.

"My God, Sandy—that's brilliant!"

"Well, pretty darn smart, anyway," she agreed. Then she laughed. "Anyway, we're certainly the right people for the job!" Sean looked blank, and her grin seemed to split her face. "Of course we are, Sean! After all, we are the Lost Children of Israel, aren't we?"