The boy’s eyes widened, and he began to struggle in Shankar’s grip with gravity-toned muscles surprisingly strong for his size.
Wong licked his lips. “Uh, this is a bluff, right, Captain?”
Sweat was draining into Adeti’s eyes. It was surprising how much it stung. “If it’s a bluff, it has to be believable,” she said, “right up to the point where I pull the trigger. For that reason,” she continued logically, “I have to believe I am going to pull the trigger, to the extent there is a real danger I might do so.” She yelled at the church’s empty interior. “DO YOU HEAR THAT?”
Wong frantically raised his weapon, but could see no living thing but a large and ponderous fly buzzing lazily in circles, black in the beams of coloured starlight, a sudden vivid emerald in the golden light from the fibre optics.
“Beëlzebub,” said Adeti. “Lord of the Flies. You thought that was a great joke, I’ve no doubt. Thought we’d never get it. But for there to be flies here, they’d have had to be introduced deliberately by the settlers, along with the earthworms and the dead elephants and magpies. And who’d deliberately introduce a disease-carrying organism?” Her hands fond the cocking lever.
“Don’t,” said the boy on the altar, staring upward at the gun.
The windows blazed suddenly with light—white light, reddened through the saints’ faces. Then the shockwave followed, shaking God’s faithful in their frames. A few glass eyes, hands and faces punched out of their putty and tinkled down on the floor of God’s house. The doors, the very heavy alloy doors, rumbled on their hinges.
Then the air was quiet, with a distant clap of thunder as the shrinking blast wave met itself on the other side of the planet.
“Well I’ll be damned for a bastard,” aid Adeti, staring out in the direction of Dispater Crater. “We got it coming out its hole.”
“We got something,” cautioned Shankar, crouched down with her back to the wall.
Wong stared in consternation at a gigantic greenbottle fly, legs wriggling impotently in the air, trying frantically to buzz itself off the ground with wings that were either damaged or impotent now the fly was flipped on its back. Wong increased the magnification on his EVA suit goggles. The insect’s back was covered in a regular grid of tiny emerald cells.
“Black in red light,” said Wong. “In 23 Kranii-light, a perfect solar collector. 23 has virtually no green in its spectrum.”
“First solar-powered insect I ever did see,” said Adeti. “Whoever the Devil is, he doesn’t need to peek in windows to listen to conversations. Unless I order all my locks shut and keep the flies out of my ship, that is, which I believe I did yesterday. We’ve been bugged, ha, ha, ha. Reborn-in-Jesus’ Devil has been listening to us ever since we landed, one way or another.”
“I could have told you that.”
The voice came from halfway up the aisle. Reborn-in-Jesus had entered via some unseen door, and walked ten metres across the church toward the altar before Adeti had even noticed him. Adeti attempted to keep a grip on her anger.
“You could have told us the flies were the Devil’s?”
“That boy’s father has already been killed by the Devil,” said Reborn-in-Jesus. To add insult to injury, he appeared to be accompanied by his entire extended family, other members of which were appearing from the dark behind him. His wife came up to stand by his side. “He’s suffered enough. Let him go.”
“I,” said Adeti, “have a quota to fill. Your Devil has, oh, let’s say thirty seconds to prevent me from shooting this boy, point blank range, through the head.”
“But what if we already killed it, chief?” said Shankar. “What if it can’t come, because it’s dead?”
“Then we’ll just have to expand our killing portfolio to include the whole settlement,” said Adeti, “and no-one will be any the wiser. You people could have been a sight more cooperative. To my mind that makes you all murderers worthy of my justice.” She looked up in confusion as a bright red object arced across the tracery of broken glass in the wall like a star shell. Prophets’ faces crawled across her like holy amoebae.
“Uh, Chief,” said Wong, shifting his own weapon into a low port position, “you’re bluffing very well.”
“Maybe a little too well,” said Shankar. Again the red beam scanned across the sky like a coal-fired lighthouse. When saintly silhouettes had stopped sweeping across the floor, Adeti’s weapon was up and levelled at Shankar’s chest, and Shankar’s was up and levelled at Adeti’s.
“There’s really no need for either of you to do this,” said Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus reasonably. “The Devil will do it all for you.”
“Maybe I ought to start shooting now,” said Adeti, “just to prove how good my hand is.”
The light swept across the sky again; once more, wheeling shadows.
Adeti looked outward at the stars.
“What is that thing—?”
The ceiling shattered. Splinters of eye-stinging red-hot tile showered in all directions leaving burning tracks on the retina. A spinning cannonball of light smashed through the stone vault of the roof, crunched into the flagstones of the transept, uncoiled into a figure roughly the size and shape of a human being, braking itself in the air with wings no human being had. Its head was featureless; presumably it saw in areas of the spectrum human eyes were blind to. Its feet were spade-broad claws. Its hands extruded and retracted talons reflexively. The horns appeared to be radio aerials. What was the tail? A refuelling probe?
The skin was glowing. Parts of it were ticking erratically as it cooled.
“Oh my god,” said Wong. “We blew it into low orbit.”
“And it ended up exactly back here?” said Adeti. “Please.”
She acquired the Devil with the carbine, squeezed the trigger, and sent flashes of brilliance round the chamber. However, when the after-images cleared from her eyes, she could see that she had done little but move the dust around in the church. The creature bore lettering where its face should have been: THE CLEVER DEVIL, CONCEPT MODEL, INSTAR HOMINIS CORPORATION. Some of the writing was illegible where tungsten-cored shells had splattered like shied egg.
“A Made,” said Adeti.
“A low self-reliance Made,” said Shankar. “Not one of your interstellar Von Neumann jobs who made war on people-kind. Designed to be close to human beings, to look like them. That means it has a master nearby. At the end of the War Against The Made, all such units were destroyed, but some of the despicable rich who couldn’t stand a life without smart home help hid them.”
The handles on the main church doors rotated slowly in the metal.
The machine was moving up the aisle with the grace and speed of a bride.
“It used its wings to brake itself out of orbit,” said Wong. “And to steer itself. We can’t kill that. There’s no way we can kill that.”
The church doors slowly swung open. An EVA-suited figure stood in the entrance, holding a bulky device with a single ruby-red eye burning in the front of it.
The Devil turned. The air down the aisle crackled like bacon frying, sparks twinkled, and the Devil’s wings glowed orange, then yellow, then white, as if an invisible torch beam were playing on them. It backed away like a fiend from the sign of the cross, and the figure in the aisle walked closer. Again the crackle and twinkle, and this time the demon fled through the walls, leaving a devil-sized hole in Saint Michael.
The ruby eye winked out, and blowers began scrubbing the air of hydrofluoric acid exhaust, which were already beginning to etch the saints’ faces in the transept. The EVA suit helmet popped open.
“Heat sinks,” said Asahara. “You can’t use your heat sinks for orbital braking without overheating. I just overheated it a little more with a sampling laser. It’ll cool down and come back. We should leave.”
“What was it?”
“Instar Hominis personal servant. They were quite popular among general staff officers in the last days of the Dictatorship. The Dictator himself was reputed to h
ave several. Programmed to fetch and carry, lay out a chap’s uniform, and protect him from assassination. You’re right. We probably can’t kill it.”
“But we can leave and come back with a mining cruiser,” said Adeti, clicking her weapon back to standby.
“No we can’t ma’am,” said Shankar.
Adeti rounded on Shankar. “I beg your pardon, Gravitographer?”
“Ma’am, you were about to kill a child.”
“I was bluffing, mister.”
“No you weren’t, m’am. Ma’am, I’m arresting you for conduct unbecoming a Citizen.”
“We,” said Wong in a high and reedy voice, “are arresting you.”
Adeti’s weapon dropped from her hands in shock. She turned to Asahara.
“I am afraid, Captain,” said Asahara, “that I must concur.”
“I’m your offering,” said Adeti. “Your sacrifice for getting off this planet.”
“If that’s what you want to believe,” said Asahara.
Adeti nodded, raised the weapon onto her shoulder, turned, trudged out of the church. Slowly, the others followed her, less like a team following a leader than dogs holding a larger, heavier, animal at bay.
Her knees crunched down into the cupric dust. The weapon in her hands turned round, the muzzle under her chin.
There was a bright, brief fountain of red, white and grey.
Asahara spoke hopefully to the cold air.
“It should be safe to leave now,” she said. “As long as we never come back.”
PLD38227 climbed steadily, though far too quickly for Brevet Captain Asahara’s liking in the heavy gravity gradient. Landing on neutronium-cored worlds had been part of flight training, but had been covered in only one single simulation, and that simulation had had no atmosphere. Still, the good thing about this particular atmosphere was that it would be over inside a minute.
She had, she reflected, calculated well. It did not look good, even for a Correctness Officer, to be the sole survivor of a mission, but to return having exposed an enemy of civic morality with the assent of all other team members—that was different. Adeti had been foolish; she had been blinded by the planet-sized prize at the heart of Ararat into jeopardizing her vessel and her crew, valuable state assets all.
Seconds away, the FTL drive unit telemetry was responding to remote guidance. Soon the ship would be locked together fit to go interstellar again. Wong and Shankar sat to either side of her, already asleep in their seats. Adeti’s suicide had neatly prevented any unpleasantness with inquests, investigations or moral guidance committees. The mining cruiser was within six hours of hailing now, over ten kilometres long, equipped with all the gear for core extraction and light armoured combat alike. The bluff had been effective.
The atmosphere had thinned sufficiently. She reached forward to the console to fire the ship’s single antimatter catalyzer.
A bright, brief new star blazed in the heavens. The Anchorite seriously doubted that it heralded the birth of a new Messiah.
The bluff had been effective. Letting them get free of the atmosphere had made them drop their guard, as well as being necessary for an explosion large enough to vapourize the ship without damaging the fragile local ecosystem.
He looked down at the family Reborn-in-Jesus.
“Best not visit the South End for a year or so. I’ll inform you when levels have returned to normal.”
Shun-Company glanced at Captain Adeti’s body, and the Devil walked solemnly over to pick it up, its claws retracted. Children were playing on its back, pulling at its wings.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked at the Anchorite. “Who are you?”
The Anchorite stared up at the distant stars. “I was a very, very bad man, which is all you need to know. Nowadays I’m trying to forget it, but it will keep following.” He watched as streaks of metal vapour fingerpainted the atmosphere. “A Type 39 prospector doesn’t have a comms suite fit to talk to anything it isn’t docked with. They sent no messages. Your farm is safe.”
Shun-Company nodded. “Thank you.”
“Hey, I live here too.”
One of the children ran in from the direction of the house. “Papai! A private agro ship saw the bad men’s vessel explode! They’re asking if we need assistance, they say they have goats and trees and radiation shielding and all sorts of stuff!”
“It’s an ill wind,” admitted Reborn-in-Jesus. “We could do with a new goat. One of those fancy new ones that gives carcinophagous milk. That’ll clean up Day-of-Creation’s lymphoma.”
The family nodded respectfully to the Anchorite, and the two groups parted, one walking back towards the house and the world’s one functioning radio, the other toward the ten-metre horizon.
the bust out
It was Kilodia Seven of the New State Calendar when Justice arrived on Mount Ararat. It arrived in the form of a Varangian-class heavy lifter—the military variant with the extended hydrogen collectors—touching down, as so many vessels did, in the South End Yard. This vessel’s captain, however, was careful to avoid landing her directly on top of Mount Ararat’s single suspiciously large cemetery, and used only chemical rockets for his descent; but chemical rockets, on a world with an atmosphere only around ten thousand cubic kilometres in volume, were dangerous in themselves when they were lifting a ship the size of the Varangian. Monoxide alarms went off all over the Reborn-in-Jesus household, and Shun-Company Reborn-in-Jesus gathered her children to her and handed out individually-sized oxygen masks hooked in to a single master cylinder.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, meanwhile, took the community’s single ass, Carries-the-Saviour, down to the South End Yard to complain.
He was wearing an EVA suit that didn’t quite fit—it had been made for another person, who was now buried in the South End’s newest plot. He hadn’t seen the grave before; he noted that it was carefully tended, the headstone exquisitely cut of locally-sourced siderite. A radiation-burst in Mount Ararat’s southern hemisphere some three New Improved Years ago had made it unwise to even visit the yard until recently; the burst seemed to have triggered a mutation in one of the funeral flowers, which had evolved a spectrum of carotenes and chlorophylls which combined to make both its leaves and petals almost black. The flowers had become a vigorous weed, and were threatening to engulf the gravestones. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus wondered what it was that was pollinating them. Somehow, however, the gravestones were never quite swamped, as if an invisible hand or claw had been trimming them. Certainly Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus would never allow his many children and godchildren to work in the South End Yard, even today.
The ship was massive and unstreamlined, designed for travelling through atmosphere at a sedate walking pace, taking its time to reach orbit. Mount Ararat’s modest atmospheric envelope had not even had time to raise a healthy glow on its leading edges. It pressed down into the regolith through ten mighty feet, each one the area of Reborn-in-Jesus’s house. It was evidently a cargo flight, as it had no windows apart from the pilot’s landing bubble; however, it bore the many-hands-joined emblem of the Government of Human Space, and was lightly-armed with short-range point defence accelerators and long-range dragnet missiles pulled along in its magnetic field. It had left the missiles in orbit—they circled ominously overhead in a perfect V every ten hours, like migrating geese.
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, being tracked by several point defence turrets, alighted from his ass, walked up to the ground-level emergency access hatch, pulled out a spanner, and banged politely on the metal. Oddly, his banging was answered by all manner of rhythmic and arrhythmic percussion from the ship’s insides, as if men trapped inside were banging on the inside walls with woodwork tools and dinner cutlery.
Then, a portion of the vessel’s aft section, formerly seamless, cracked open soundlessly, and a cube of battered metal the size of a church motored downwards to the ground, leaving a cuboid gap in the rear fuselage which, like a bullet loading into a breech, another metal cube slid out of the vessel to fill. In a matter of
seconds, the ship was whole again, and he would never have known an aperture had existed. Then take-off alarms began sounding, unspent fuel burners began sparkling around the ship’s underside, and Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was forced to take his ass behind a rock half a kilometre away before the chemical engines fired again and the ship lifted skywards on huge wasteful plumes of official government flame.
Coughing and fitting a respirator to his ass, Reborn-in-Jesus approached the landing site again. Horrid compounds were forming on the rocks around him, products of the devilish mixtures take-off-thrusters used as fuel.
The abandoned cuboid of starship-metal had neither door nor window—in fact, no surface features of any kind apart from a small, heavy-duty display screen at head height. As Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus approached, the screen came to life, cycling through a selection of languages, one of which was English.
KRANION SECTOR MORAL RECLAMATION AUTHORITY, KILODIA SEVEN
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
IT HAS UNFORTUNATELY BEEN NECESSARY TO LOCATE THIS MAXIMUM SECURITY PENITENTIARY INSTALLATION ON THIS WORLD 23 KRANII 3X. THIS IS DUE TO NON-EXISTENCE OF VESSEL’S ORIGINAL
DESTINATION
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded at that. Originally the colony vessel Utanapishtim, which had brought him and his family to the 23 Kranii system, had been contracted to stop at Designated Colony World 70, a worldly paradise lovingly terraformed from a Venusian hell not ten kilodia earlier, possessing fruited plains, purple headed mountains, and for all Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus knew, cigarette trees. Unfortunately, by the time Utanapishtim had reached Colony World 70, a Made war machine had revisited the 32 Kranii system and reproduced the Venusian hell. It had only been by chance that the captain’s system scan had also turned up a planetoid in the same system, not twenty kilometres across, whose surface freakishly reflected light in spectra indicating nitrogen, oxygen, and liquid water. How that could be had not concerned him—he had fulfilled his contract by delivering his settlers to their Very Small Promised Land.
THIS MAXIMUM SECURITY UNIT IS SELF-GOVERNING AND UTTERLY ESCAPE PROOF,
continued the viewscreen.
IT WILL DEFEND ITSELF IF DISTURBED AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERFERED WITH. IN THE TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE EVENT OF ESCAPE, AGENTS WILL BE DISPATCHED FROM WITHIN TO RETRIEVE ESCAPEES. A SIREN WILL SOUND