The cisterns were full and overflowing into pipes that drained down to the garden patch. To Talbot’s eyes the water looked skuzzy, but that could be addressed without much effort.
“Skeletons were all out in the open,” Talina told him as she led the way from the last of the domes. “We didn’t know it then, but they were probably killed by mobbers. That, or something we haven’t seen yet.”
“It’s a big planet,” Talbot agreed, thinking of the various creatures that had attacked him while he trekked through the forest down south. He could count at least five creatures that weren’t on the list of known predators. And that included an oversized cucumber-looking thing.
Talbot followed Talina down to the garden. Located on the southern end of the base, it grew on soils that had washed down from the higher exposed basalt. The place reminded him of a smaller Mundo: lettuce, cabbages, pepper plants, lots of garlic, mint for tea, some tomatoes, broccoli and squash all growing in a riotous mixture.
“What do you think?” Talina asked. “Enough to feed a hundred people?”
“Maybe. They’ll need corn and potatoes from PA, some grapes, an apple and cherry tree or two, some blueberry bushes. Now that I get a better look, I make this to be about seven acres. From the height of the surrounding trees, the soil’s deep enough the garden could be expanded. Maybe all the way down to the end of the mesa.”
Talina nodded, her careful gaze scanning the edge of the forest. “Let’s check the solar panels and battery packs. Looks like two aren’t working. And if the batteries are shot, that’s really going to compound our problems.”
Turned out that if there was a weakness to Tyson Station, it was the power. The motors were burned out on two of the solar towers, and whoever last had been responsible for the batteries had left them untended, only two took a charge, and even then, they only tested at fifty percent.
“We really going to strand nearly a hundred people out here?” Talbot asked.
“We could drop them at Mundo. Maybe hope they’ll kill Diamond and Leaper. On the other hand, as much as I’ve got a grudge against those two quetzals, I’m not sure that dropping the Unreconciled on top of them wouldn’t be a crime against quetzaldom.”
“It’s just hard to get my head around. All right, so they ate other human beings. What kind of sins do people have to commit to leave them totally beyond redemption?”
“I’m not the person to ask, given some of the things I’ve done. And to members of your family, no less. But here’s the thing: I know the sins I’ve committed. If we can believe Shig’s analysis of the Unreconciled, they think everything they’ve done is in preparation for the coming struggle.”
“And you think that putting them out here will keep us all safe?”
“Guess we’ll see, huh?” She pursed her lips as she looked around the base. “And maybe they’re not the psychotically insane and twisted monsters that everyone thinks they are. I mean, I don’t know what really happened on Deck Three, but dropping the Irredenta out here gives us the chance to see just what kind of trouble they might be.”
“Tal, I was trained, wearing combat armor, and I almost didn’t make it. You and I both know that no matter what these people did, it’s going to be a death sentence for a lot of them.”
She turned her alien-dark eyes on him. “Doesn’t matter where we put them, people are going to die. How many of your marines, let alone the Turalon transportees are still alive? It’s just how things are here.”
“Yeah. Welcome to Donovan.”
Talina had walked to the western side of the escarpment, was staring out at the endless tops of the trees. A tension lined her forehead, pinched her full-lipped mouth.
“What is it?”
Talina hesitated, started to speak, then shook her head. “You feel something out there?”
Talbot let his gaze roam the treetops. “Feel . . . like what?”
Talina turned, grunted. “Probably nothing.”
But Talbot noticed that she kept looking back over her shoulder at the thick forest, as if something unseen were nagging at her.
THE CLEANSING
Now, with our internment coming to an end, I can take a moment and look back. Remember the Harrowing and Cleansing, and what it meant for all of us.
I understand now: Had we just been given the Revelation, it would have been rejected out of hand as an insane abomination. We had to be broken down, our illusions about life and morality destroyed. It’s an old cliché, but like a field, we had to be prepared before a seed could be planted that would eventually bear fruit.
First was the fear. When Ashanti reinverted to normal space and we understood the full scope of the disaster that had befallen us, we realized that, no matter what, some or all of us were going to starve to death. Trapped. Here, in this ship, in the black immensity of space.
Then came the fight: the attempted mutiny led by Irdan and Brady Shaw. Its failure at the hands of the crew. How could they just have shot human beings down like that? We’d lived with these people for close to three years during the transition. Only to have them murder our leaders in the hallways.
We knew disbelief and rage when we discovered that the hatch had been sealed. That we were not only doomed but trapped in the limited warren that was Deck Three.
What followed was a mind-numbing despair—the kind that left even me weeping, defeated, and broken.
Then the rations were cut.
How clever the universe is. It let us observe the worst in humanity while teaching us the ultimate lesson: Survival is conflict.
Raised within the warm and secure womb of The Corporation, we could not have been more shocked by this rude and disturbing awakening. The depth of the deception we had been living back in Solar System was as traumatic for us as the ensuing starvation. As we wasted away in an agony of hunger, it became clear that altruism was a myth. Everything The Corporation had taught us to believe was a sham and a lie.
We witnessed the base brutality of the human soul.
In the beginning, when the interpersonal violence broke out, we dropped the bodies down the chute. Sent them to the hydroponics.
It was Irdan—who would become the first of the Prophets—who realized that it was a waste. All those calories, the protein, and fats. He was the first to begin the Harrowing.
See the cunning of the universe? Indeed!
Upon the revelation of Irdan’s actions—that he had cooked and eaten another human being—most had a feeling of revulsion. Thought the consumption of human flesh was abhorrent. A few sought retribution; Irdan killed them when they came for him. Nor did he leave them to waste, but promptly processed their meat and organs.
The Harrowing was over and the Cleansing began.
With it, so did the beginnings of the Revelation.
I remember the guilt I experienced the first time I ate human flesh. The self-revulsion. At the same time, I relished the sustenance. The relief from the hollow pangs of starvation.
This was meat.
This was life.
I knew it was Sally McKendricks, mother of two, whose meat I was cutting up and chewing.
But that night I slept with a full stomach.
For a time, following that, I was lost. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Disgust. A loathing of who I’d become. How low I would sink just to live another day. To keep breathing. To be rid of the hunger pangs.
Irdan—always in the forefront of the universe’s will—was the one who told me: “Batuhan, they’re not dead. They’re inside us. Living through us.”
And that night I had the dream, a vision.
Nothing like those bestowed upon the Prophets.
This was just a simple understanding: The universe had put us in such dire circumstances to serve a purpose: This was its will.
If killing and eating another human being was the universe’s will, it could not b
e a crime, an abomination, or a sin.
Consuming another human being was immortality.
7
The increase in gravity was the first indication of the beginning of the end. Security Tech II Vartan Omanian felt it as he rose from Svetlana Pushkin’s bed. Cocking his head, he could hear it, feel it through his bare feet. Ashanti had changed. The sound and vibration of the ship, the air, even the surrounding sialon hinted of hard acceleration.
Vartan made his way to the toilet, relieved his full bladder, and re-crossed the small room to Svetlana’s bed. Nominally, as a member of the Messiah’s Will—as the enforcers were called—he slept in the men’s dormitory. His rank, as Second Will—or the second in command of Batuhan’s enforcers—granted him certain privileges. That included access to available women as long as they weren’t ovulating.
Among the Irredenta, the tracking of a woman’s cycle was of paramount concern. During those critical days during ovulation, she became the sole property of the Messiah—and if more than one female was fertile at the time, the responsibility of the First Chosen to inseminate.
Those who had objected to the True Vision of the Prophets when it came to women and reproduction had long since become immortal. Vartan had been responsible for most of the disciplinary actions. The one thing the Irredenta couldn’t afford was any hint of division or strife. Those who might have doubted, who suffered from a lack of faith, would finally discover Truth in their next existence. After they’d been consumed, purified, and reborn.
Vartan himself had once doubted. Back then. In the beginning. But he had learned, adapted, and as the universe taught, survived.
Privately he wondered if his ex-wife, Shyanne Veda, didn’t still doubt. As Second Will, he had her and her few friends watched. With the death of her year-old son a little over a year ago, she’d had a period of recalcitrance and grief, but had acted in no overt manner to demonstrate any apostasy or disbelief in the revelations of the Prophets. Now she doted on six-year-old Fatima, her remaining daughter.
But then, they all had secrets. Private thoughts that each of them desperately hoped the universe wasn’t privy to.
We live in fear.
Vartan stopped at the side of the bed, staring down. Svetlana slept on her right side; her long body lay mostly exposed, a twist of sheet around her midriff and left thigh. The swirl of her long brown hair curled behind her head. Her arms were bent, hands tucked next to her lips.
He settled himself on the side of the bed and dialed up the room light to dim. As he did he felt the ever-so-faint change in acceleration. The ship had just kicked it up a bit.
“Hey, wake up.”
She shifted onto her back, blinked her brown eyes. “It’s been three times already. You’re an animal. Let me sleep.”
“Ship’s boosting. Gravity’s changed. I think we’re starting the long burn toward Capella III. Listen. Feel.”
She did, coming fully awake. Sitting up, she wiggled past him, stood. “I feel heavier.”
“Ashanti is killing delta vee. It’s actually going to happen. Just the way the Prophets said it would.”
She studied him, brown eyes pensive, the light casting shadows across the complex patterns of Initiation scars that marked her as the second of the Messiah’s four wives. After the Cleansing, she had been one of the first to offer herself to the newly acclaimed Messiah, had borne his first two children, and was waiting to see if she’d conceived the third.
Vartan reached up where she stood before him, ran his fingers along the long scars that marked her body. At his lingering touch, she shivered, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back to let her hair cascade down her back.
“The path of souls,” he whispered, tracing down the line of scar that led to the thick mat of her pubic hair. He gave the curly mat a light tug, causing her to stare down at him with irritated eyes.
He softly asked, “Do you really believe that the souls of the dead have followed the same route my fingers just did? That they were reborn inside you?”
She chuckled just as softly. Said, “I could feel it. Both times I conceived with the Messiah. Wasn’t anything like a regular orgasm. What began as more of warm honeyed feeling burst through my hips like a brilliant light that filled my uterus. An explosion of life that wracked my entire body.”
From her expression, the tone in her voice, he wasn’t sure if she was having fun at his expense. Or might have been just parroting the Messiah’s lines.
That was the thing about Svetlana. He could never quite know if she believed the revelations of the Prophets, or if she was the penultimate survivor who accurately assessed the situation and sided with the man most likely to prevail.
All of which made his relationship with her so fascinating.
“I see that look,” she told him with a grim smile. “You still wonder, don’t you? But let me ask you, do you really believe? Because I think, like me, you’re a survivor.”
Another lurch, increasing the sensation of weight.
She looked up, as if she could see through the decks to Ashanti’s AC. “It’s really going to happen. So, how do you think this will play out, Mr. Policeman?”
Vartan rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “No matter what the Messiah says or believes, they’re not going to welcome us with open arms. To them, we are going to be monsters.”
She reached down to lift his chin and stared into his eyes. “We’re alive, Vartan. As long as we are, there is hope and opportunity. And many of us are still under Contract. You were trained in law enforcement and security. You know of any law that says eating another human being is illegal?”
“No. But killing them for apostasy or heresy most certainly is.” He raised a hand to take hers. “We plead that Galluzzi, by starving us, forced us into the practice. That we could either die or bow to necessity.”
“Batuhan and the Prophets insist we’re the tools of the universe. The chosen,” Svetlana told him. “They believe. And so do most of the rest. After the Harrowing and Cleansing, the Revelations were like a straw floating on a sea of fear and guilt. The desperate not only grabbed onto it with two hands, it’s become the only salvation left to keep them afloat.”
He nodded.
Still staring into his eyes, she said, “You and I both know who among us might just be playing the game, keeping their heads down until the hatch opens. And when it does, they’re going to run right to the Corporation and condemn us all.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Another lurch of acceleration pulled at his body.
“Figure it out for yourself. Maybe we are the mystical chosen, and the universe will see to our ultimate triumph. Works for me. But when that hatch is finally open, I want to be positive that I, and my children, have a way out.”
8
Dan Wirth surveyed his domain. He was lord and master of The Jewel. As night fell on Port Authority, Dan leaned on the bar and chewed a chabacho-wood toothpick. The stuff wasn’t really wood, but close enough. The cells, so he’d been told, were a sort of polymer rather than cellulose—whatever the hell that was. Anyway, the wood was different than wood back on Earth.
Science wasn’t really Dan’s kind of preoccupation. Money was. And he was good at it. He’d made himself the second-richest person on Donovan—second only to Kalico Aguila.
Second.
Once upon a time, that fact had bothered him. He’d plotted various ways of murdering Aguila, seizing her assets, and turning himself into the richest man on the planet.
But then, just because Dan might have been a psychopath didn’t mean he was stupid.
Killing Aguila would have meant the collapse of Corporate Mine, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to go down and try to run the damn thing. Far better that the cunning slit of a Supervisor spent her time ensuring that fabulous wealth kept pouring out of those holes in the ground.
/> As long as her miners continued to patronize The Jewel, betting at Dan’s tables, drinking his booze, buying his pharma, and paying for sex with his whores, he kept making money.
He had enough trouble maintaining good will with the kind and gentle people in Port Authority. When it came to the Wild Ones who lived out in the bush, prospected and hunted, at least a fella could whack them up alongside the head to get their attention. It was the “upstanding” and “decent” folk that drove Dan to the brink of distracted madness. They had to be treated with kid gloves. It was a full-time job.
The result was that nothing that happened in Port Authority took place without his knowledge, and as it turned out, his blessing.
Thankfully, he had Allison Chomko to carry some of the load. Originally, he’d targeted her because she’d been vulnerable, beautiful, and he’d needed her knowledge of Port Authority. Back in the old days, he’d drugged her. Prostituted her for all the benefit he could get. What he hadn’t calculated into the equation was that she might be cutting-edge smart down under all that voluptuous beauty. He should have had a clue, given that both of her parents had been PhDs.
As she had taken over more of the management, become integral to the workings of Dan’s little empire, their relationship had become a great deal more complicated. He now wondered when, and under what circumstances, he might be forced to remove her from the equation.
That would be a tricky piece of work. Allison had her backers, including Step Allenovich, Talina Perez, Shig, and even Yvette. Not to mention a lot of the “respectable” women who had once been Ali’s friends. These days the righteous bitches might spurn Allison as a whore, but if there were so much as a hint that Dan had murdered her, the hypocritical slits would come after him with a rope.
Even as he thought about her, Ali emerged from the back with Desch Ituri hanging on her arm. The contrast was almost laughable. Ituri stood maybe five-foot four, stocky and black-skinned, with short curly hair and eyes like balls of obsidian. Allison towered over him, stately, elegant, a perfectly shaped Norse goddess of a woman with pale skin and silky silver-blonde hair that hung down her back. Sparkling blue eyes were set in a classic face. Laughter bubbled off of her lips as she reacted to something Ituri said.
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