Shining Steel

Chapter Ten

“Then said he unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom."-St. Luke 21:10

It was amazing, John thought, how readily the small tribes signed up when they were promised booty and did not need to choose sides between empires. Faith did not come into it, really, although his messages had made an appeal to defend Christianity. Ordinarily, when recruiting allies, the other side would also be recruiting, so that the small tribes would not join for fear of later reprisals against the losing side; the Heaveners, however, seemed totally ignorant of the preparations being made against them. Furthermore, they had a reputation for incredible wealth-which meant good looting-and no reputation at all for fighting. The True Worders had been a long-standing threat for most of the small tribes; the Heaveners were newcomers no one had learned to fear. With the Chosen swearing neutrality, John had had no trouble in picking up dozens of volunteer companies.

Of course, he had made a point of the decadence and evil of the Heaveners, while downplaying their armament.

His own armament had increased significantly; bombs that would probably have been of little use wasted in open battle against the Chosen would be quite effective against the hillside defenses of the Heaveners, so John had appropriated the entire True Worder stockpile.

The final result of his preparations was the largest, most heavily-armed army Godsworld had ever seen, all prepared in incredible haste under his command. By the third of August John was finally satisfied; on the morning of the fourth of August, after the necessary invocation and brief dedicatory service, he led his troops out of the immense camp one day's march east of Marshside, and on toward the Citadel.

In the hectic days of gathering and equipping his forces he had had no time for lesser concerns; as a result, Miriam rode beside him. He had never decided what to do with her; for some reason he could not define he was reluctant to send her to New Nazareth as an ordinary captive, to work and be taught the true faith. He told himself that she could be useful, and simply brought her along wherever he went, even though in fact, she had as yet been of no use whatsoever.

He called a halt at noon, for lunch and a rest, and watched with pride as the vast company neatly settled to the ground. Glass-tipped spears flashed redly in the sun; harness jingled and blades rattled. A murmur of voices began.

Satisfied, he swung down from his own mount and was reaching for his provisions when he heard the sound, low and harsh, but growing quickly louder. It was a little like the whir of a spinning wheel at first, but by the time he looked up to find its source it was already rising into a screaming roar.

Motion caught his eye; he turned just in time to glimpse something huge and glittering. Before he could focus on it it howled directly overhead, the sound plummeting from an ear-piercing shriek to a dull rumble. He whirled, trying to follow it, but it was gone over the horizon before he could make out anything but a shining blur.

The murmur of voices died, then was reborn as a babble that quickly mounted into shouting chaos. The one question that he could hear clearly, over and over, was, “What was that thing?"

John felt a cold uneasiness in his belly as he remembered Isaac Fisher's words: “There were weapons back on Earth that make machine guns look like children's slings."

Then the thing reappeared on the horizon and swept toward him again; the sound followed a moment later. John began a loud prayer. “Oh, Lord, we are gathered here to fight in your name…"

He paused; something was happening. A small piece of the thing was splitting off, dropping down toward him. He forgot his prayer and started to call a warning, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the thing passing overhead.

The smaller part did not pass overhead in a flash; instead it slowed and dropped nearer, until it was hovering over the army's vanguard. It was almost flat, roughly triangular, and black and silver in color-silver around the edges, black at the center. John could not be certain of its dimensions against the empty sky, with nothing to give it scale, but judged it to be four or five feet across.

“People of Godsworld!” The voice boomed out suddenly, coming from the hovering device; John started, as did almost everyone.

“People of Godsworld!” the voice repeated. “You are marching against the People of Heaven, thinking to destroy the Citadel and loot the protectorate. This is your only warning; we have the means to defend ourselves. We have weapons that could shatter Godsworld like a hen's egg hit by a sledgehammer. Turn back now, return to your homes, and no ill will befall you; continue on and you will be destroyed. This is your only warning. We do not wish to harm anyone, but any further advance in our direction will be met with force.” John noted that the voice had only a slight Heavener accent. The device hung silently for a moment longer, then swooped away with only a faint buzz.

“It's a Devil's trick!” John bellowed as the thing shrank into the distance. “Forward, march! In the Name of the Lord!"

With some scattered hesitation, his men got to their feet; with more hesitation they formed lines. John saw, with some distress, that a few were falling out, stepping aside, even turning to run. He drew his sword and waved it over his head. “In the Name of the Lord, we march on!” he shouted as he spurred his mount forward.

The horse took a few steps, then stopped and shied as the larger flying craft came roaring up at them again from behind the eastern hills. This time it was lower in the sky than before, and seemed to John to be diving directly at him; without thinking, he slid sideways off his horse to the ground, rolling as he hit.

Something flashed, and men screamed behind him. He struggled to his feet, sword still in his hand, and looked around for an enemy he could strike-or for something he could use against his flying foe.

The enemy was gone again, but this time its passing had not been harmless; supply wagons were ablaze, and John could see men lying sprawled at the roadside, blood running freely. Screams and shouts battered at him.

Then the wedge-shaped thing was back, and the voice announced, “This land is under the protection of the People of Heaven; you have fifteen minutes before further action will be taken against intruders."

John shook his fist at it, sword flashing. “Darn you! Damn you!” There was no way he could strike at it. He had never thought before about the difference flying machines could make in a battle.

Habakkuk was shouting something at him; without bothering to listen, John shouted back, “We march on, those of us who dare to fight for the Lord!” He remounted his horse. “We have fifteen minutes to find cover! Those of you who are too cowardly to face the Devil's minions, turn back now; the rest of us will pray for your souls when we've triumphed!"

He spurred his mount forward again; when he had gone a few yards he glanced back and saw that his army was ripping itself in half. Some men were following him, pressing forward, while others had turned back. There was no pattern or order to it, simply two mobs sorting themselves out from one another.

He kept his horse walking forward; Habakkuk was, as usual, at his right hand, and to his surprise he saw Miriam following close on his heels.

“What are you doing?” he called.

“I want to see what they do to you,” she called back. “I've been waiting for this for months!"

He had calmed considerably, as he always did when the actual instant of crisis was past, but her reply irritated him anew; he turned away and ignored her. Instead of worrying any further about Miriam, he called to Habakkuk, “Go back with them-see if you can turn them around when they're over their initial fright.” He pointed at the reteating half of his army.

“Yes, Captain,” Habakkuk said; he saluted, then turned his horse and spurred it to a gallop, back toward Marshside.

By the time the fifteen minutes were past the two groups had separated completely, a widening gap forming between them, and Habakkuk was in the midst of the retreating group; he was not yet trying to turn them, but merely riding along until the moment seemed right. At the head of his own half John was trying to pick up the pace, as his reduced force was still far from any decent shelter, anything that might shield them from whatever mysterious power had sliced up a dozen men and set three score wagons ablaze.

The triangular thing had hovered overhead the entire time, occasionally changing position; now, as it hung close above the center of John's loyal troops, the voice suddenly called, “Cover your eyes! Cover your eyes!"

John glanced up and then, without thinking, covered his eyes with his arm.

Even so, he saw the flash; the light seemed to burn into his eyes, pouring around his forearm and even through it, so that for an instant he could see the shadow of his own bones.

Then the shockwave hit him, and everything vanished.

He awoke slowly and painfully, blinking unsteadily up at the uncomfortably bright, greenish-yellow glow of the ceiling.

That glow answered the first question that anyone asks when waking up somewhere different from where he or she went to sleep; John knew where he was, he was inside the Heavener stronghold.

That left a myriad of other questions, however.

How had he come here? What had happened to his men? It seemed obvious that his army had been soundly defeated; where did that leave his people? What had that flash been? Why had the flying thing shouted a warning to the attacking troops to cover their eyes? What was he doing here? And just where in the Heavener fortress was he, and how could he get out?

He turned his head; his neck was stiff, but he ignored the sharp twinge of pain.

He was lying naked in a bed, covered by a soft white sheet and surrounded by more of the familiar and hated golden plastic walls that seemed to be in everything the Heaveners built. A small table stood nearby, and the walls were dotted with various mysterious panels and protrusions. The bed was not flat; it seemed to be fitted to his body in a wholly unnatural way. It was extremely comfortable, which immediately made him suspicious. Life was not meant to be comfortable; the pleasures of the flesh were snares and delusions. They weakened a man's will.

“Please do not attempt to get out of bed,” a pleasant voice said from an unidentifiable source; it had only a trace of the Heavener accent, and John was unsure if the speaker was a man or a woman. He turned his head back the other way, looking for whoever had spoken, but the tiny room was empty save for himself, the bed, and the table. There were two doors, one opposite the foot of the bed and one to his left; to his right the center of the wall contained a large panel that might have been a shuttered window.

“Who said that?” he asked; his voice was a faint croaking. He swallowed, coughed, swallowed, and asked again, “Who said that?” This second attempt was better, but still thin and hoarse.

“Who said what?” the pleasant voice asked.

“Who are you? Who am I speaking to?"

“I'm Cuddles; I run things around here."

Another of the absurd Earther names, John thought. “Where are you?” he demanded feebly.

There was a pause before the voice replied, “I'm right here."

“Let me see you! Show yourself!” John's breath gave out after making this demand; he coughed feebly, then lay back to recover. He was still not at all sure what had happened, but he had apparently been injured somehow. This place was the Heavener infirmary, he was sure.

A panel on the wall beyond the foot of the bed glowed oddly, then seemed to vanish, leaving an opening into another room. A bland face smiled down at him. “Here I am,” Cuddles said.

John still could not be certain of the speaker's sex; the face was beardless, the black hair worn at a moderate length, the features fairly delicate but not clearly feminine. The skin was oddly dark, as if heavily tanned.

“Come in here!” John demanded.

“I can't do that,” Cuddles replied. “But someone will be there very soon. Here he is now."

The door to the left slid silently open, and John turned in time to glimpse the corridor beyond as a young man wearing a short white gown and white pants entered.

“Hlo,” he said, “I'm Liao Hasan.” The name was utterly incomprehensible to John, merely noise, even less meaningful than the other Earther names he had encountered. “I'm glad to see you awake.” The man had the thickest Heavener accent John had heard yet, and also had the same odd skin hue and eye formation as the woman who called herself Tuesday. That startled him; could Tuesday have been, not a freak, but a member of an unfamiliar race? John was familiar with the half-dozen varieties of dog on Godsworld, and had heard that on Earth there had similarly been three separate races of people, white, black, and brown, descended from Noah's three sons, but he had never before encountered any kind but his own; none of the original colonists had been Hamitic or Shemitic, though John had never heard any explanation of why the Japethitic race should be the only one to accept the true faith.

This attendant and Tuesday were surely not black, and even calling them brown would be a gross exaggeration, but perhaps they were another human variant that Godsworlders had forgotten.

“Who are you?” John demanded. “What am I doing here?” His voice cracked on the final word.

“I'm Liao Hasan; I'm a medical assistant here. You were brought here badly burned after your army was nuked three weeks ago; we've regrown your skin and repaired what other damage we found."

John ignored the claims of miraculous healing. “Nuked?” he asked.

“Yes, nuked; your army was destroyed with a clean fusion bomb. Intense heat in a very small area, but only a small shockwave, and virtually no fallout or secondary radiation at all-there's no fission, it's just an overload of a fusion power plant, not really a bomb at all."

John did not pretend to understand any of this explanation. “What happened to the others?” he asked.

Hesitantly, the man said something that John could not make out.

“It is not polite to speak in a language the patient does not understand, sir,” the neutral voice replied.

“Ah… all right, Cuddles, have it your way. Answer my question; am I authorized to tell him that?” John noticed that the ‘medical assistant’ did not look at the window when he spoke, but simply addressed the air over John's head.

“Yes, sir,” Cuddles replied calmly. “There are no additional restrictions on information for this patient."

“Well, we aren't sure how many people you had there to begin with; the central part of the advancing group was vaporized. There were even a few burns in the retreating group-that was a serious miscalculation. Out of the advancing group, we saved one hundred forty-seven men and one woman. Oh, and two horses. We aren't as good with horses-there aren't any back home."

“One hundred forty-seven men?"

“That's right."

“I had… well, after the split, I reckon I had six thousand men."

“I'm sorry."

John struggled to grasp the scope of the disaster. “The others are all dead?"

“It's possible a few fled before our rescue team arrived; I can't say for sure. The only reason you survived was that you were well ahead of the main body. The woman and about half a dozen men were up front; the rest were at the back. We were trying to avoid the retreating group."

“So I'm in your infirmary now?"

“We call it a hospital, but yes."

“And you're a doctor?"

“No, I'm a medical assistant-a nurse."

John stared for a moment, then dismissed the incongruity of a man claiming to be a nurse.

“Who's Cuddles? A doctor?"

“Oh, no, of course not! It's a comsim.” The final word was not any part of the Godsworlder version of English; the ‘medical assistant’ pronounced it even more strangely than he pronounced more familiar words.

“A what? Say it slowly."

“A comsim,” the young man repeated carefully.

John dug back in his memory, picking through the faint memories of childhood lessons about Earth and man's history there.

“Comsymp?” he asked, “Communist sympathizer?"

“No, no, comsim; computer simulation. It's not real, it's just an image the machines use to talk to you."

“Oh!” John had heard stories about machines that talked, machines that thought, or flew, or swam, or whatever, but he had not always believed them completely. He looked at the window; Cuddles smiled and nodded.

“Yes, I am a computer simulation,” Cuddles said. The image suddenly distorted and then reshaped itself, and John abruptly realized that what he had taken for a window was a screen of some kind on which the image of a face was projected.

“Cuddles, do you need me here?” Liao Hasan asked.

“No, I do not think I do,” Cuddles replied. “If the patient has no objection, you may continue your rounds."

“Do you mind if I go? Cuddles will take better care of you than I could, anyway, Mister… I didn't get your name."

With his army destroyed, John saw no need to dissemble-and he did not seriously doubt that his army was defeated, though perhaps not as thoroughly obliterated as the Heaveners claimed. “John Mercy-of-Christ, Armed Guardian of the True Word and Flesh,” he replied.

“Mister Mercy-of-Christ. Glad to have met you.” He turned to go.

“Wait!” John croaked.

The medical assistant turned back.

“What happened to my people?"

“I told you…"

“No, not the army; I mean my tribe."

“The True Worders? Oh, they've joined our protectorate as a client state; the treaty was signed four days ago. Cuddles can show you the tapes, if you like."

John looked back at the screen; the computer's bland artificial face gazed mildly back as Liao Hasan departed. “Would you like to see the tape of the treaty signing?” it asked.

“Yes,” John said, unsure of the proper way to address a machine.

“Do you have a preferred format?"

“Ah… no."

“Very well.” The face vanished from the screen, and John found himself looking at a gathering of people at a peculiar angle, as if peering up through a basement window. He was shocked to recognize all the Elders, and Habakkuk, on one side; on the other were various strangers in peculiar brightly-colored clothing.

The sounds of formal conversation swelled to fill the room, and John watched in horror as each of the Elders in turn first signed a paper, then pressed his hand to a metal plate. Finally, Habakkuk's turn came, and the ceremony hit a snag.

“This says ‘Armed Guardian of the True Word and Flesh'; that's not right,” said Habakkuk's familiar voice. “We don't know for certain John's dead, and you haven't deposed him. I'm just Acting Guardian."

“Just sign it and add ‘Acting’ after your name, then,” Lazarus replied.

“Let's get it over with,” Jacob called.

Uncertain, Habakkuk glanced about.

“Listen, even if John turns up alive, do you think we'll keep him around after what happened?” Paul Baptised-in-Fire demanded. “You're the Armed Guardian now, Habakkuk, like it or not. Sign the treaty; they want a military authority, and you're the best one we've got."

“All right,” Habakkuk said, as John struggled to rise to a sitting position. He accepted the pen and signed.

“Stop!” John called.

The scene vanished instantly, leaving the blank wall panel.

“You said that was four days ago?"

“Yes."

“Oh.” John sank back. A thought occurred to him. “You said a hundred and forty-seven men survived; what happened to them all?"

“One hundred and six were treated and released, and I have no information on their subsequent actions. Thirty-eight, including yourself, are now conscious but still hospitalized; all are due to be released shortly. Three are still comatose; one of those three may not survive, or at any rate may have suffered irreversible brain damage. Of the total, sixty-two ignored the warning to cover their eyes and may still be suffering impaired vision."

“What about the woman?"

“Miriam Humble-Before-God has been conscious and fit for release for over a day now, but refuses to leave until you do, Mr. Mercy-of-Christ. She left a message for you, to be delivered at your request."

“What's the message?"

The reply was not Cuddles’ voice, but Miriam's shriller one. “I told you I'd see you all fry, you bastard! You lived through this one, but I'll see you die yet-you aren't rid of me!"

“Oh, Jesus,” John muttered, fighting back tears of rage and frustration, “how did it come to this? What have I done wrong?"