De Soya waited.
“It was about one klick across with lots o’ their spidery low-g bamboo towers takin’ up much of the center space, Father. The inner shell wasn’t spherical or smooth, but more or less followed the shape of the outside of the rock, you know.”
“Potato,” said Father Captain de Soya.
“Yessir. And all pitted and cratered on the inside, too, Father. Lots of caves and grottoes everywhere … like dens for the pregnant Ousters, I suppose.”
De Soya nodded in the darkness and glanced at his chronometer, wondering if the usually concise sergeant was going to get to the perceived sins in this account before they had to stow the confessional for C-plus translation.
“It must’ve been pure chaos for the Ousters, Father … what with the cyclone howlin’ as the place depressurized, all the atmosphere flowin’ out o’ the two blasted air locks like water out of a bathtub drain, the air all full of dirt and debris and Ousters blowin’ away like so many leaves in the storm. We had our external suit phones on, Father, and the noise was unbelievable ‘til the air got too thin to carry it—wind roarin’, Ousters screamin’, their lances and our lances cracklin’ like so many lightning rods, plasma grenades goin’ off and the sound bouncin’ back at us in that big rock cavern, the echoes goin’ on for minutes—it was loud, Father.”
“Yes,” said Father Captain de Soya in the darkness.
Sergeant Gregorius took another breath. “Anyway, Father, the orders’d been to bring in two samples of everything … adult males, space-adapted, unadapted; adult females, pregnant and not pregnant; a couple of Ouster kids, pre-puberty, and infants … both sexes. So Kluge’s team and ours got busy, stunning and bagging ’em. There was just enough gravity on the inner surface of the rock … one-tenth-g … to keep the bags in place where we left ’em.”
There was a moment of silence. Father Captain de Soya was just about to speak, to bring this confession to a close, when Sergeant Gregorius whispered through the screen and darkness separating them.
“Sorry, Father, I know you know all this. I just … it’s hard to … anyway, this was the bad part, Father. Most of the Ousters who weren’t modified … space-adapted … were dead or dying at this point. From decompression or lance fire or grenades. We didn’t use the deathbeam wands issued to us. Neither Kluge nor I said anything to the lads … just none of us used the things.
“Now those adapted Ousters went angel, their bodies turnin’ all shiny as they activated their personal forcefields. They couldn’t fully extend their wings in there, of course, and it wouldn’t have done any good if they had … no sunlight to catch, and the one-tenth-g was too much for them to overcome if there had been any solar wind … but they went angel anyway. Some of them tried to use their wings as weapons against us.”
Sergeant Gregorius made a rough sound that might have been a parody of a chuckle. “We had class-four fields, Father, and they were batting at us with those gossamer wings … Anyway, we burned them away, sent three from each squad out with the bagged specimens, and Kluge and I each took our remainin’ two lads to clear out the caverns as ordered …”
De Soya waited. There was less than a minute before he would have to end confession.
“We knew it was a birthin’ rock, Father. We knew … everybody knows … that the Ousters, even the ones who’ve turned the machines loose in their cells and blood and who don’t look anythin’ like human … they haven’t learned how to have their females carry and bear children in pure zero-g and hard radiation, Father. We knew it was a birthin’ rock when we went in the goddamned asteroid … I’m sorry, Father …”
De Soya stayed silent.
“But even so, Father … those caverns were like homes … beds and cubbies and flatscreen vid sets and kitchens … not things we’re used to thinkin’ Ousters have, Father. But most of those caves were …”
“Nurseries,” said Father Captain de Soya.
“Aye, sir. Nurseries. Wee beds with wee babies in ’em … not Ouster monsters, Father, not those pale, shiny things we fight against, not those damned Lucifer’s angels with wings a hundred klicks across in the starlight … just … babies. By the hundreds, Father. By the thousands. Cavern after cavern. Most o’ the rooms there had depressurized already, killing the little ones where they lay. Some o’ the little bodies had been blown out in the depressurization, but most o’ them were tucked in tight. Some o’ the rooms were still airtight, though, Father. We blew our way in. Mothers … women in robes, pregnant women with wild hair flying in the one-tenth-g … they attacked us with their fingernails and teeth, Father. We ignored them until the windstorms blew them out or they died a-choking, but some of the infants … scores of them, Father … were in those little plastic respirator cases …”
“Incubators,” said Father Captain de Soya.
“Aye,” whispered Sergeant Gregorius, his voice tiring at last. “And we tightbeamed back, what did they want us to do with ’em? With all the scores and scores of baby Ousters in these incubators. And Commander Barnes-Avne beamed back …”
“To continue on,” whispered Father Captain de Soya.
“Aye, Father … so we …”
“Followed orders, Sergeant.”
“So we used the last of our grenades in those nurseries, Father. And when the plasma grenades were gone, we lanced those incubators. Room after room, cavern after cavern. The plastic melted around the babes, covered ’em. Blankets ignited. The boxes must’ve been fed with pure 02, Father, because a lot o’ them went up like grenades themselves … we had to activate our suit fields, Father, and even so … it took me two hours to clean my combat armor … but most of the incubators didn’t explode, Father, they just burned like dry tinder, burned like torches, everythin’ in ’em burnin’ bright like little furnaces. And by now all the rooms and caverns were in vacuum, but the boxes … the little incubators … they still had atmosphere while they burned … and we turned off our outside phones, sir. All of us did. But somehow we could still hear the crying and the screams through the containment fields and our helmets. I can still hear them, Father …”
“Sergeant,” said de Soya, his voice hard and flat with command.
“Aye, sir?”
“You were following orders, Sergeant. We were all following orders. His Holiness has long since decreed that Ousters have surrendered their humanity to nanodevices they release in their blood, to the changes they have made with their chromosomes …”
“But the screams, Father …”
“Sergeant … the Vatican Council and the Holy Father have decreed that this Crusade is necessary if the human family is to be saved from the Ouster threat. You were given orders. You obeyed them. We are soldiers.”
“Aye, sir,” whispered the sergeant in the darkness.
“We have no more time, Sergeant. We will talk about this at a later time. For now, I want you to do penance … not for being a soldier and following orders, but for doubting those orders. Fifty Hail Marys, Sergeant, and a hundred Our Fathers. And I want you to pray about this … pray very hard for understanding.”
“Aye, Father.”
“Now say a sincere Act of Contrition … quickly now …”
When the whispered words began to come through the screen, Father Captain de Soya lifted his hand in benediction as he gave absolution. “Ego te absolvo …”
Eight minutes later, the father-captain and his crew all lay back in their acceleration couches/resurrection crèches as Raphael’s Gideon drive activated, carrying them instantaneously to Target System Mammon by way of terrible death and slow, painful rebirth.
THE GRAND INQUISITOR HAD DIED AND GONE TO Hell.
It was only his second death and resurrection and he had enjoyed neither experience. And Mars was Hell.
John Domenico Cardinal Mustafa and his contingent of twenty-one Holy Office administrators and security people—including his indispensable aide Father Farrell—had traveled to Old Earth System in the new archangel starship Jibril a
nd had been given a generous four days after resurrection to recover and regroup mentally before beginning their work on the surface of Mars itself. The Grand Inquisitor had read and been briefed enough on the red planet to form an unassailable opinion—Mars was Hell.
“Actually,” Father Farrell responded the first time the Grand Inquisitor had mentioned his conclusion aloud about Mars being hell, “one of the other planets in this system … Venus … better fits that description, Your Excellency. Boiling temperatures, crushing pressures, lakes of liquid metal, winds like rocket exhausts …”
“Shut up,” the Grand Inquisitor said with a tired turn of his hand.
Mars: the first world ever colonized by the human race despite its low rating of 2.5 on the old Solmev Scale, the first attempted terraforming, the first failed terraforming—a world bypassed after the black-hole death of Old Earth because of the Hawking drive, because of the imperatives of the Hegira, because no one wanted to live on the rusty sphere of permafrost when the galaxy offered a near-infinite number of prettier, healthier, more viable worlds.
For centuries after the death of Old Earth, Mars had been such a backwater planet that the WorldWeb had not established farcaster portals there—a desert planet of interest only to the orphans of New Palestine (the legendary Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had been born in the Palestinian relocation camps there, Mustafa was surprised to learn) and to Zen Christians returning to Hellas Basin to reenact Master Schrauder’s enlightenment at the Zen Massif. For a century or so it had looked as if the huge terraforming project would work—seas filled giant impact basins and cycladferns proliferated along River Marineris—but then the setbacks came, there were no funds to fight the entropy, and the next sixty-thousand-year-long ice age arrived.
At the height of the WorldWeb civilization, the Hegemony’s military wing, FORCE, had brought Farcasters to the red world and honeycombed habitats into much of the huge volcano, Mons Olympus, for their Olympic Command School. Mars’s isolation from Web trade and culture served FORCE well and the planet had remained a military base until the Fall of the Farcasters. In the century after the Fall, remnants of FORCE had formed a vicious military dictatorship—the so-called Martian War Machine—which extended its rule as far as the Centauri and Tau Ceti systems and might well have become the seed crystal for a second interstellar empire if the Pax had not arrived, quickly subduing the Martian fleets, driving the War Machine back to Old Earth System, sending the dispossessed warlords into hiding among the ruins of FORCE orbital bases and in the old tunnels under Möns Olympus, replacing the War Machine’s presence in Old Earth System with Pax Fleet bases in the asteroid belt and among the Jovian moons, and finally sending missionaries and Pax governors to pacified Mars.
There was little left on the rust world for the missionaries to convert or the Pax administrators to govern. The air had grown thin and cold; the large cities had been plundered and abandoned; the great simoom pole-to-pole dust storms had reappeared; plague and pestilence stalked the icy deserts, decimating—or worse—the last bands of nomads descended from the once noble race of Martians; and little more than spindly brandy cactus now grew where the great apple orchards and fields of bradberries had long ago flourished.
Oddly, it was the downtrodden and much-abused Palestinians on the frozen Tharsis Plateau whose society had survived and thrived. The orphans of the ancient Nuclear Diaspora of A.D. 2038 had adapted to Mars’s rough ways and extended their Islamic culture to many of the planet’s surviving nomad tribes and free city-states by the time the Pax missionaries arrived. Refusing to submit to the ruthless Martian War Machine for more than a century, the New Palestinians showed no interest now in surrendering autonomy to the Church.
It was precisely in the Palestinian capital of Arafat-kaffiyeh that the Shrike had appeared and slaughtered hundreds … perhaps thousands … of people.
The Grand Inquisitor conferred with his aides, met with Pax Fleet commanders in orbit, and landed in force. The main spaceport in the capital of St. Malachy was shut down to all but military traffic—no great loss, since no merchant or passenger dropships were scheduled in for a Martian week. Six assault boats preceded the Grand Inquisitor’s dropship, and by the time Cardinal Mustafa set foot to Martian soil—or Pax tarmac, to be precise—a hundred Swiss Guard and Holy Office commandos had ringed the spaceport. The official Martian welcoming delegation, including Archbishop Robeson and Governor Clare Palo, were searched and sonic-probed before being allowed clearance.
From the spaceport, the Holy Office group was whisked via groundcar shuttles through decaying streets to the new Pax-built Governor’s Palace on the outskirts of St. Malachy. Security was heavy. Besides the Grand Inquisitor’s personal security force, the Pax Fleet Marines, the Governor’s troopers, and the Archbishop’s contingent of Swiss Guards, there was a battle regiment of Home Guard armored infantry encamped around the palace. There the Grand Inquisitor was shown evidence of the Shrike’s presence two standard weeks earlier on the Tharsis Plateau.
“This is absurd,” said the Grand Inquisitor on the night before flying to the scene of the Shrike attack. “All these holos and vid images are two standard weeks old or taken from high altitude. I see these few holos of what must be the Shrike and some blurred scenes of carnage. I see photos of the Pax bodies the militia men found when first entering the town. But where are the local people? Where are the eyewitnesses? Where are the twenty-seven hundred citizens of Arafat-kaffiyeh?”
“We don’t know,” said Governor Clare Palo.
“We reported to the Vatican via archangel drone and when the drone returned, we were told not to tamper with the evidence,” said Archbishop. Robeson. “We were told to await your arrival.”
The Grand Inquisitor shook his head and held up a flat photo image. “And what is this?” he said. “A Pax Fleet base on the outskirts of Arafat-kaffiyeh? This spaceport is newer than St. Malachy’s.”
“It is not Pax Fleet,” said Captain Wolmak, captain of the Jibril and new commander of the Old Earth System task force. “Although we estimate that thirty to fifty dropships a day were using this facility during the week previous to the Shrike’s appearance.”
“Thirty to fifty dropships a day,” repeated the Grand Inquisitor. “And not Pax Fleet. Who then?” He scowled at Archbishop Robeson and the Governor.
“Mercantilus?” pressed the Grand inquisitor when no one spoke.
“No,” said the Archbishop after another moment. “Not Mercantilus.”
The Grand Inquisitor folded his arms and waited.
“The dropships were chartered by Opus Dei,” said Governor Palo in a tiny voice.
“For what purpose?” demanded the Grand Inquisitor. Only Holy Office guards were allowed in this suite of the palace, and they stood at six-meter intervals along the stone wall.
The Governor opened her hands. “We do not know, Your Excellency.”
“Domenico,” said the Archbishop, his voice quavering slightly, “we were told not to inquire.”
The Grand Inquisitor took an angry step forward. “Told not to … by whom? Who has the authority to order the presiding Archbishop and the Pax Governor of a world ‘not to interfere’!” His anger boiled through. “In the name of Christ! Who has such power?”
The Archbishop raised pained but defiant eyes toward Cardinal Mustafa. “In the name of Christ … precisely, Your Excellency. Those representing Opus Dei held official diskeys from the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace,” he said. “We were told that it was a security matter in Arafat-kaffiyeh. We were told that it was not our business. We were told not to interfere.”
The Grand Inquisitor felt his face flushing with barely subdued rage. “Security matters on Mars or anywhere else in the Pax are the responsibility of the Holy Office!” he said flatly. “The Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace has no charter here! Where are the representatives of the Commission? Why aren’t they here for this meeting?”
Governor Clare Palo raised a thin hand and point
ed at the flat photo in the Grand Inquisitor’s hand. “There, Your Excellency. There are the Commission authorities.”
Cardinal Mustafa looked down at the glossy photograph. Forms of white-clad bodies could be seen in the dusty red streets of Arafat-kaffiyeh. Even through the grain of the images, it was obvious that the bodies were mauled into grotesque forms and swollen from decomposition. The Grand Inquisitor spoke softly, fighting the urge to scream and then order these imbeciles tortured and shot. “Why,” he asked softly, “haven’t these people been resurrected and questioned?”
Archbishop Robeson actually attempted a smile. “You will see that tomorrow, Your Excellency. It will be abundantly clear tomorrow.”
EMVS WERE USELESS ON MARS. THEY USED ARMORED Pax Security skimmers for their flight to Tharsis Plateau. Torchships and the Jibril monitored their progress. Scorpion fighters flew space/air combat patrol. Two hundred klicks from the plateau, five squads of Marines dropped from the skimmers and flew ahead at low altitude, raking the area with acoustic probes and setting up firing positions.
Nothing but the shifting sand moved in Arafat-kaffiyeh.
The Holy Office security skimmers set down first, their landing legs settling into sand where grass had once grown on the oval city commons, the outer ships establishing and linking a class-six containment field that made the buildings around the plaza seem to shimmer in heat haze. The Marines had dropped into a defensive circle with the commons as their locus. Now the Governor’s Pax and Home Guard troops moved out to establish a second perimeter in the streets and alleys around the plaza. The Archbishop’s eight Swiss Guardsmen secured the circle just outside the containment field. Finally the Grand Inquisitor’s Holy Office security force exploded down the skimmer ramps and established the inner perimeter of kneeling figures in black combat armor.
“Clear,” came the leading Marine sergeant’s voice on the tactical channel.
“Nothing moving or alive within a kilometer of Site One,” rasped the lieutenant of the Home Guard. “Bodies in the street.”