“Fine. So we headed in the right direction, but there’s no way to get there. Not from here.”
Wilson ran his fingers along the corners. “There has to be a secret door or something. Why would they create a corridor only to have it dead-end? It makes no sense.”
San lowered herself to the floor and crossed her legs. While Wilson kept searching, she slowed her breathing. San became aware that Wilson had stopped and now watched her, but she ignored his insistence that visions wouldn’t come without serum. She repeated a mantra that welled up from deep memory so that within a minute the words took hold and began opening the back of her mind, forcing everything to slip by in a vibrating haze that had both no mass and infinite weight simultaneously; her body melted away as if it consisted of hot gelatin. When San’s eyes snapped open, she floated in the corridor above where the illum-bot hummed through her head.
San sped through the wall. The other side opened into an immense rock cavity that extended so far it appeared to go on forever, disappearing in clouds of smoke and dust. Steel girders wrapped their way upward toward the ceiling, hundreds of feet overhead and marked by bright white lights that cast a strong glow throughout the space. Beneath her worked teams of men. She failed to spot a single robot on the work floor, and half of the welders smoked cigarettes, sending gray streamers to well upward and around the girders where they formed a layer of haze. The sound of drilling and arc-welding nearly deafened San. She hurried forward, above where a warship had begun to take shape, its outer bulkhead secured in massive steel cradles. San was about to return to Wilson when a group in Proelian robes caught her attention.
The abbess and two other nuns moved through an opening in the ship’s half-assembled bulkhead, bouncing over sharp metal sections and heading toward the partially assembled bridge. San sped toward them. By the time she caught up, the nuns bowed their heads. In front of them stood a man who wore similar robes, but white, blackened in spots where they’d contacted ships parts or machinery. The man pulled the welding mask from his head to reveal a face wrinkled with concern.
“Your Excellency,” Sister Frances said.
“What is it?”
“Everything is on track. The two students are preparing for their mission aboard the Bangkok and Jerusalem.”
“Do they understand what’s needed?”
“Zhelnikov and Win will die, Your Excellency.”
At first the man said nothing. He glanced upward and San wondered if he could see her, and he held the pose for so long that she almost moved behind a girder to hide.
“When the Sommen first came to us at Fatima,” he continued, “we did not know. We thought they’d come from hell itself.”
“I was not there,” Sister Frances said. “I was still in Africa, in hiding.”
“The Sommen dragged all of us into the field where their ship had landed, and one of their priests emerged from his ship.”
“Your Excellency,” one of the other nuns hissed. “You’ve seen a priest?”
“Silence!” Sister Frances said. “This is the bishop.”
“It’s all right, Abbess. These are dangerous times and I don’t mind the question. Besides, I’m too old to weld all day.” He nodded at the other nun. “Yes. And I’ve spoken with one. As close as one can get to speaking, at least. This was before the Sommen had given us their translation tech or language documents.”
“What did he want?”
“It. The Sommen have no sex, no gender; they are parthenogenetic, reproducing asexually. It wanted to know all about the three secrets and the miracle, the ancient messages from the early twentieth century that everyone except us had forgotten. We had already heard reports of Sommen atrocities regarding other remnants of faiths on Earth and so were sure that at some point they would finish us off. It was a sight I’ll never forget. Their priests cannot support their own body weight under gravity, did you know that? Four of their warriors, huge creatures, held this monstrosity on their shoulders and it hissed at me, urging me to repeat myself if it didn’t understand my words or if it wanted more detail. I told the story slowly, because I wanted to stay alive as long as possible. When it was over, the thing just stared—with those black globes they call eyes. Sommen eyes look empty and soulless, filled with malice, and it never blinked. Not once. It was all I could do not to suffocate from the ammonia that escaped from its face mask.”
A horn sounded, startling San. One by one the welding lights blinked out. The men and women shuffled off the floor, some of them laughing and talking to each other as another group filtered in from a distant portal. She moved closer to hear the bishop continue.
“At the end, it entered my mind,” he said.
The abbess shook her head. “That would have been difficult, Your Excellency.”
“It was not. It was magical. I saw their faith—not just what we read in the texts, I saw it, experienced it through the eyes of Sommen from the start of their civilization and then all the way to the present. It is real, Abbess. These things in their text: they actually happened. Imagine if we didn’t just have the testaments, but also the literal memories of their contents, downloaded into our brains from one generation to the next; we could see what Moses saw, and hear it. That is their faith, and it is why they die for it, always. God has spoken to them, and commanded them to war. I just hope it is our God.”
“What does this all mean, Your Excellency?”
The bishop lit a cigarette and stretched. San noticed that the man’s face was gaunt; the backs of his hands looked lean and striped with veins. These were strong hands that had worked all their life and she knew enough about the faith to know how unusual it was. He had to have been the first bishop-welder in the Church’s history.
“It means we must continue. We are on the right path, no matter how difficult it seems, even when it involves murder. The Sommen spared the Church for one reason: Our teachings and our miracles, everything matches their prophecies regarding the final days of the universe. They believe our Armageddon is their Armageddon. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. Some details of what I witnessed must remain hidden; they are not in the Sommen texts but I’ve shared them with those who need to know.”
He paused to take a drag from his cigarette. “Send the children to Sommen space. If Zhelnikov’s allies get technologies that forced the Sommen to abandon their home system, they could use them to destroy us. Already he and his pet, Win, plot to take over this little excursion and we’ve intercepted transmissions from him to his associates. They expect him to divert to a research station just across the border in unauthorized space. We don’t know exactly where it is or why he needs to get there.”
“A research station outside the human zone?” the abbess asked. “Is he mad? Who built it?”
“Zhelnikov, using private funds to keep it secret. We already sent an emissary to the Sommen, notifying them of the breach in treaty and assuring them that the station was beyond Fleet’s control—unauthorized. Even if your students fail at their mission, we hope the Sommen may succeed; I hate that we must send these young people.”
“Then why send them, Your Excellency?”
“The treaty must hold. And because if the Sommen find this research station, there is no guarantee Zhelnikov and his abomination will be there. Lastly, we need intelligence. Maybe your agents will succeed in their mission—travel into Sommen space and discover why so many of their conquered worlds have been abandoned. I have only a guess at what our enemy fears, Abbess. Even if we can learn a tiny bit firsthand it could help in ways you can’t grasp.”
San began moving away. She fought, trying to drift back toward the group to hear more, but soon she flew through the air as if yanked by gravity, a force pulling her back into her body where she snapped her eyes open and gasped. Wilson shook her back to reality.
“San!”
“What?”
“Sister Joan sent someone looking; I can hear them shouting for us.”
“Wilson, I’m scared.”
“Why? Do you realize that you just practiced the vision without serum? What did you see?”
“We’re walking into a Sommen trap. They’ll be waiting for us. The Order doesn’t just want me to kill a brother I’ve never met, they know there’s a good chance we will all die during the process. Show me the way back; we should return.”
San moved through the hall, her cloak billowing as she struggled to keep up with Wilson, who wound his way through the corridors and made one turn after another. When she finally recognized their surroundings, San stopped him.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Have you found a way for us to get out of this?”
San laughed, grateful for the humor and its effect on her fear. “Yes. We go through it. I didn’t tell you all that I learned; I saw the bishop himself. For whatever reason, Fleet and the future of Earth depends on us to get into Sommen space and learn what we can. This is a risk we have to take, and even if we found a way to get out of it they’d just send someone else.”
“So?”
“So, what if they send others, who die in our place? I can’t live with that on my conscience, knowing that I was too frightened to be a member of Fleet after all.” San pulled at Wilson’s cloak, leading him forward. “We must do this.”
Before long they arrived at Sister Joan’s laboratory, its hatchway sealed. San heard voices on the other side. She did her best to key in the entry code but her hand trembled and it took three tries to get it right before the hatch cycled open. Such will be the wormholes, she thought. Doorways into unknown worlds, passages like those twisting their way beneath Ganymede’s ice, but which led to an unknown destination—one she knew held her fate.
“Well there you are,” Sister Joan said. “Our two missing. Care to explain what were you doing, San?”
“I was looking for something, Sister.”
“And did you find it?”
San nodded, her hands ceasing to tremble. “Yes.”
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Win moved through the Higgins in shock. His servo harness snagged every so often on angular pieces of equipment that jutted out from the tight passageways and more than once he tumbled head over foot in zero g. Men and women passed, crew members in loose orange environment suits, and every one of them squeezed themselves against the wall, doing their best to get out of his way and not stare. A sense of embarrassment grew in Win’s chest. At first the attention worried him, forcing him to move faster to get to his destination, but soon he became enraged. The crews’ minds were impenetrable, like the captain’s. Still, expressions of horror flickered across their faces as reflections of what he’d become: a tall skeletal figure with an inhuman head, barely a caricature of human form. On the one hand he understood; on the other, how could such people—pale reflections of humanity themselves—look at him with disgust? Even knowing ahead of time that Fleet officers had all been genetically altered for optimal performance in a warship, he still felt ill at the sight, all of them the same: compact masses of flesh and muscle that were as wide as they were tall, and whose heads loomed large because of extra bone matter. I am as human as they are.
A female voice crackled over a loudspeaker nearby. “Five hours to burn time.”
“You.” Win stopped a passing crewman. “Which way to the ashram?”
“Stay on this passage, through the next three intersections. On the fourth go up. Keep going to the end and the ashram passageway is somewhere up there.”
“You can’t upload the path into my suit?”
The crewman laughed. “No. Even though the Higgins has the standard semi-aware outfitting and electronic coms packages, our mission parameters state that we can only use them for critical functions. Minimization of electronic signatures.”
“You people. Insane.”
Win continued down the passageway. This was a standard Fleet destroyer, whose corridors had been polished clean to a brilliant reflective white, the electronics and piping concealed behind resin bulkheads. Win compared it to the Jerusalem. In contrast, the Proelian ship’s passages had been simple gaps amid open pipe galleries and sieved fiber optic conduits so that Win imagined what would happen in those new ships if a coolant pipe burst, releasing superheated water in a jet that could cut steel. At least the Higgins’s resin would prevent such catastrophe; he’d already become lost in its maze of passages. Each intersection consisted of at least eight other access ways that led in every direction—up, down, and sideways. At what he guessed was the fourth intersection, he flew upward, squeezing past a pair of crew doing last-minute pipe welds through an access panel.
“Hey!” one of them shouted. “That section is off limits.”
When Win ignored him, the man shouted again. “Stop!”
The pipes sped by his view screen as Win yanked hard on handholds to go as fast as he felt was safe in zero g, and soon his muscles ached from not being strong enough to sustain the movement. The passageway eventually ended, sooner than he expected. Win tumbled into a T-shaped intersection and slammed into a bulkhead on the far side so that he saw stars. The lights in this section had been dimmed, replaced by red emergency ones formed by plastic half-spheres that hummed and flickered, not even providing enough illumination to see. Win whispered light amplification, replacing his view screen’s image with one painted in shades of green.
Now he was hopelessly lost. Win sensed the welder moving behind him up the shaft he’d just exited and he guessed the direction of the ashram, pulling himself toward the ship’s bow. Win closed his eyes. At first nothing came; this section of the ship had been shielded, wrapping Win in a cocoon of resin, metal, and ceramic, the combination of which blocked all his efforts to reach out, to see. Maybe, he thought, there was a material combination that could protect not just stray electrical signals from emanating into space, but mental ones as well.
Out of nowhere, another crewman appeared, blocking Win’s way. The man carried a stun rod; he held it out, the tip glowing blue and sending out tendrils of electricity, and Win saw the man’s environmental suit was a deep blue, a security patch on its right shoulder.
“You. This area is restricted.”
“I’m trying to find the ashram.”
By this time the welder arrived from behind, panting. “This guy blew past me. I told him he couldn’t come up here.”
The security crewman gaped in confusion. “The ashram?”
“The dome. At the top of the ship. All vessels are supposed to have been retrofitted with them, usually near the front and just behind the bridge.”
“You mean the coms center. Natural silica glass dome.”
“Yes,” said Win, wondering why he called it the coms center but not wanting to discuss it. “That’s what I mean.”
“You’re Zhelnikov’s guy.”
“I am.”
“Follow me.”
The welder slapped a hand against the wall. “That’s it? Shouldn’t you put him in the brig?”
“He’s authorized,” the other one called out over his shoulder, leading Win further in the direction he’d already been moving. “Don’t over think this, Chief, and go back to what you were doing.”
As they travelled, Win noticed a hissing from his helmet speakers. “Is there a ship’s communication frequency?” he asked. “All I’m getting is static.”
“No radio coms whatsoever, except in emergencies. That includes no external suit transmissions of any kind. But you can jack in with cables.”
“What about ship’s announcements?”
The security crewman laughed. “You’ll hear a message over the ship’s speakers. And”—the man pointed at a small box as they passed—“these are the ports where you can jack in or use a handset. They just finished installing them all over the ship, at fifty-meter intervals. It’s all fiber coms—like being back in the twenty-first century.”
The crewman arrived at a short passage that broke off above them
, where he disappeared and punched at an entry keypad. A thick hatch opened. Then the crewman backed out, making way for Win to pass.
“It’s kind of ancient stuff, but the Higgins is still a killer. Don’t let the old tech fool you. The layout, materials, and new weapons installations make this one of the Fleet’s finest. She’s got a few surprises and one day, she’ll be a Sommen killer.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“You’ll have to wait about seventy years,” the man said, laughing again. “God willing.”
Win swung his way through the hatch. He soared upward past the floor as the hatch closed behind him, until he bumped against the dome where he pushed himself downward. Win hooked his feet into loops, attaching himself to the deck.
At first all he saw was a solid green field dotted with spots, but Win switched off the light amplification and blinked in amazement. Stars surrounded him. As the ship spun, the Earth crept into view and filled the visible area above, clouds swirling in thick white masses over a deep blue ocean. For a second the colors woke something and Win smiled at the sensation, a reminder of summers in Charleston where the bay’s waters glistened deep blues and greens under a clear sky; they had not all been bad times. His mind wandering in such memories, Win forgot what he had come for, instead transfixed by his recollections.
An intercom crackled and beeped nearby; it took Win a second to work the access panel and pull out the handset, an ancient design that involved putting one end to a helmet receiver so the other end rested near his suit’s external speaker.
“You made it,” Zhelnikov said.
“Barely. The ship’s layout is a puzzle. I have no idea how to get back and they refer to the ashram as a coms center.”
“That’s because once we’re on mission, you will be our only means of sending messages. You need to contact your special friends, now. Handset coms may be monitored so I can’t say too much but we also need to know if you can communicate like the Proelian candidates.”
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