by Dan Davis
Fraser sighed and stopped walking. They were at the corner of the town where one road turned and led along the rear wall and another pointed toward the center of town. “You want to see our church, Lieutenant? It’s going to be another hour maybe before they clear that rubble out.”
In Ram’s ear, Stirling muttered a warning. “Is this guy hiding something about those Wayfarers, those collaborators? Get him to tell you about them, sir, don’t let him fob you off.”
“I’d love to see your church, Mayor Fraser.”
“Then follow me.”
They walked past a wide, single floored building with a series of large doors right along the front. Two of the doors were open, revealing two men working on a tracked vehicle with a long flatbed trailer to one side.
“You operate trucks up here? Why?”
“We sought peace in remoteness but we can’t afford to be isolated and our people travel to other towns to trade for stuff we can’t make here. Medicines, especially. And we have to bring in huge amounts of timber for fuel from the forest, hence the cat and the trailer there and the other trucks and vehicles we operate.” He pointed to another open door where a man was covering an ATV with a heavy tarp. More small vehicles were already covered.
“I have to say, Mayor Fraser, this place is amazing to me. If it wasn’t for the solar panels, the vehicles, and some of the gear, I’d swear it was three or four hundred years ago. Or more.”
Fraser nodded, his eyes glinting. “Well, that’s exactly what I was talking about before, Lieutenant. We’ve slipped into living this way because this is a reaction to our environment. It’s a natural way of life that our ancestors lived for thousands of years before we invented our way out of it. And we never intended to build a medieval town or anything like that. Not at all. Physical defense, functionality, and building materials dictate the layout and the forms in just the same way that it did for the people who used to build this way. And yet we have changed. My buddy Albert likes to say that all the antisocial people were killed and only the agreeable folks like us survived because we were stronger together in these groups. Maybe he’s right. But I know that I am not the man I was. I’d never built anything larger than a circuit board and I’d never even held a gun much less fired one. But the biggest change has been in my character. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the world and it’s very possible that everything I helped to build here gets destroyed and that my children will not make it either and yet I know that this is precisely how humans are supposed to live. It’s good for our souls. Do you understand that?”
“No,” Ram said. “I’m sorry, not at all.”
Fraser shrugged with the easy confidence of a man who knows he’s right, no matter what anyone else thinks. “Here’s our church.”
It was a plain building clad with white weatherboard, much like many of the houses. “It’s very nice.”
“Do you have any experience with faith, Lieutenant?”
Ram cleared his throat. “I’m Indian, so Christianity wasn’t really a big part of my upbringing.”
“God is for all of humanity, Lieutenant but I didn’t mean Christianity specifically. Just any form of faith.”
Ram cleared his throat again. “It was never a part of my life. And I never needed it.”
“Ah,” Fraser said, nodding. “I know exactly what you mean. Come on inside.”
The ceiling was high above and light poured in from windows running around below the roof as well as from a huge window at the far end. It was white and bright and there were a couple of statues carved from wood and painted here and there. Two rows of pews led his eyes to the front where there was a table covered in a white cloth on a raised area. Ram realized it was the first church he had ever been in.
“It’s very… peaceful.”
“You seem uncomfortable.” Fraser grinned. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to convert you. Do you know why I’m so proud of this church? It represents civilization. For years, all we did was utilitarian. We needed weapons, food and water, shelter. Fuel, power, warmth. Every time we moved to a new place, found a new home, one of the first things we did was to set up solar panels, charge batteries. There was always so much to do and in the snatched moments in between fulfilling our physical needs, we prayed or listened to sermons in the open air or in shelters. So few priests made it but the ones that did were like the priests of old. Strong men, strong as iron, and tempered by their faith. When we built this town, one of the first things we did, after the walls, was to build this church so that we might tend to our spiritual requirements, deepen our moral character, develop our civility. Strengthen each of us and also our community.”
“Right,” Ram said. “That’s great. What can you tell me about the collaborators who—”
A deep voice echoed from the other end of the building. “You’re unconvinced, Lieutenant.”
Ram turned to see a tall man with a big head over his priest’s clothes coming toward him, smiling. He had a white collar and everything.
“I’m convinced,” Ram said as the priest came close. “Religion gives people strength, I don’t doubt it.”
“People,” the priest said looking up. “But not you?” He smiled and held out his hand. “I’m Robert Yellowhair, nice to meet you, Rama Seti. Hey, I remember when I saw you beat that alien, man, that was really something. Really something.”
“Thanks, yeah it was something, alright. Nice to meet you, er, Robert. The Mayor was just showing off your church.”
“We’re all very proud of it. I know I am. Before this, I hadn’t even seen a church for almost six years. Not a proper one. It’s remarkable what we’ve achieved here and even if it ends one day, I’ll give thanks for every single day that we had here and for every service I’ve conducted under this roof.”
“You really expect to be attacked again?”
The mayor and the priest exchanged a glance. “It’s inevitable, I’m afraid,” Fraser said. “We’re as prepared as we can be. We’ve got a thousand firearms inside these walls, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, a small number of heavier weapons and explosives of various kinds. But could we fend off a single battle tank? What if ten thousand men came screaming out of those woods one night, with ropes and ladders?”
“Is that likely? Ten thousand attackers?”
“It’s happened in the lower forty-eight.”
Robert Yellowhair nodded. “That’s right.”
“We’ll fight with everything we have and we’ll make whoever attacks us as sorry as they’ve ever been. But we have to be realistic.”
The priest folded his hands. “We spent years seeing camps and towns fall, from attack or from divisions within spilling over into violence. We’ve done everything in our power to make this community strong and stable. Our people are making babies and we’re in this for the long haul but we must not delude ourselves. The world is a dangerous place still. It will always be dangerous while the evil Hex are on our planet.”
“Father Robert’s right.”
“I thought they left you alone?” Ram said. “And that it’s other humans who are the danger?”
“That’s true,” Fraser said. “But the Hex don’t allow us to establish order on a large scale and that’s why we’re fated to live in such a violent world.”
“They don’t allow you to establish order?”
“A few times, we’ve seen or heard of large areas coming under someone’s control. There was the New State of Washington about eight years ago and they apparently had control of all the area that used to be the old state and even beyond, into Oregon. They had a legislature and a governor and they started clearing out the cities like Olympia and they were making headway into Seattle. They had a police force although they were more like a military force than they were in the old days, just rounding up the gangs and killing them rather than passing them on to somewhere else.”
“Sounds brutal.”
“If you give people a choice between brutal
and chaos or brutal and order, what do you reckon they’ll choose?” Fraser said. “Everyone loved hearing what was happening. I was thinking of going down there.”
“We all were,” Father Robert said.
“What happened to the New State of Washington?” Ram asked.
“The Hex came with aircraft and ground troops and just started killing. They flattened the whole of Olympia, destroyed every building, killed everybody. With other cities, other towns, they were less thorough. Killed as many of the police as possible, though, and then they left.”
“They just wiped out the state government?” Ram asked.
“The Hex want us in chaos. They want us disorganized because we’re no threat to them like this.”
“It wasn’t just Washington,” Father Robert said. “I heard other states were getting back on their feet before the Hex kicked them down again. Even L.A. got hit, if you can believe that.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe that?”
“After the invasion, Los Angeles was basically the worst place in North America. All that city, all those people, just turning on each other. Gangs claiming territory in endless warfare. Every now and then we’d meet someone who’d gotten out of it and we heard how the gangs were getting fewer but bigger until there was just one group in control of basically all the inhabited parts of the city. I’m sure their order was brutally enforced but it was order of a sort, over hundreds of thousands of survivors. For a while.”
“The Hex attacked L.A.?”
“Small towns are okay, seems like, even a few thousand inhabitants strong but we’re scared to form into any sort of confederations or anything, in case they come for us, too.”
“But how do they know?” Ram asked. “I thought you said you weren’t monitored all that closely?”
“They have satellites, we know that, and they have aerial reconnaissance I’m sure, but they wouldn’t understand what we were up to at all without the God damned Wayfinders. Sorry, Father.”
“It’s alright, Ewan, they are damned by God. They are traitors to God and to their people and they will know no salvation while they serve those unholy monsters.”
“Why do they do it?”
Fraser rubbed his brow before answering. “For a very long time, we were entirely ignorant of their existence. We’d heard that the Hex abducted a lot of people rather than kill them and there were all kinds of rumors about what they wanted with us.”
Father Robert nodded and checked off his fingers. “Science experiments, sexual slavery, fights to the death for entertainment, and for meat, were the main ones I heard.”
“Maybe all that’s true, we have no idea but we do know that some were being indoctrinated,” Fraser said. “And eventually released. Sneaking back into the population. Some reporting back on what we were doing, what we were thinking. Others were like agitators, you know? Stirring up trouble, sowing seeds of doubt and misinformation.”
Father Robert’s face was grim. “And others were proselytizing.”
“They were what?”
“Attempting to convert humans to the Hex religion.”
“And what is the Hex religion? In my briefing it said they worship the Orbs? How does that work?”
“In my professional opinion?” Father Robert said. “It’s purely satanic.”
“Right,” Ram replied. “Okay.”
“We don’t know all that much,” Fraser said. “We think that they consider the Orbs to be sentient. The race that we call the Orb Builders reached a higher plane of existence through technological development and were enlightened, I guess. They became the Orbs, somehow.”
“You can see how the Hex might believe this and you can see it might be an attractive thought to the weak-minded,” Father Robert said. “After all, isn’t it what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years?”
“What’s that?”
“Worshiping technology.”
Ram scratched his nose. “Is it worship? Or is it deep appreciation for the things that technology has done for us?”
“Anything that takes us further from our salvation is bad for us as individuals and for our communities. And that is what all our high technology does for us, deep appreciation or not. The Hex and their converts worship technology as if it was God. They believe the Orbs created all life in the galaxy, not God.”
“Right,” Ram said. “And that’s what these guys in the robes are selling to people?”
“There’s more to it than that but most people are wise to it now and when someone starts down that road, generally they get rounded up and put a stop to. Last few years, we don’t see Wayfinders at all unless they’re surrounded by Hex guards.”
“Wayfinders? That’s what you call them? Why?”
“That’s what they call themselves,” Fraser said.
“In English, at least,” Father Robert said. “In Spanish they call themselves Los Pioneros, which means pioneers, you know? Like pathfinders. I heard from one of my cousins, come up from Arizona, they were calling themselves nah-e-thlai which means something like a guide. Probably they’re doing the same all over the world, telling the Chinese and the Indians and the Japanese the same nonsense. But whatever they call themselves and whatever they call their religion and their false gods, what they’re preaching is evil. It’s to betray the human race and go over to the Hex.”
“But no one does that, do they?”
“Some people fall to temptation.”
“What are they tempted by? What happens?”
“They get somewhere safe to live, with plenty of food and all the rest.”
“What, there are Hex-run cities?”
Fraser shrugged. “We don’t know for sure that these people get what is promised but yes, we’ve seen people convert and then the Hex take them away.”
“So they’re bribing them?” Ram asked.
“Exactly,” Father Robert said. “It is the temptation of earthly rewards. It’s selling your soul. As I said, it is satanic.”
“They took some people and made them these Wayfinders. Why not just round everyone up and indoctrinate all of us?” Ram said. “What’s the difference?”
“We think that they want willing participants. They want people to decide for themselves. The Wayfinders claim they can’t force people, just open their eyes to the truth.”
“But it’s just desperate people doing whatever they have to in order to survive,” Ram said.
“There’s still a choice,” Fraser said. “The Wayfinders come around every now and then and ask to speak to us. We always say no and they leave. We’re a solid community here, guarded by our faith. There’s plenty of easier prey out there in the world.”
The priest nodded meaningfully at Ram. “Atheists.”
“Oh yeah? What’s wrong with atheists?”
“Nothing at all,” Fraser said, smoothly.
“They are metaphysically vulnerable,” Father Robert said, ignoring the mayor. “Some wise souls like Ewan here learn to embrace Christ. Those that do not are as powerless to indoctrination as babies are to a threshing machine.”
“Well,” Ram said, patting the stock of his weapon, which was as big as the priest. “Luckily for me I have my own threshing machine right here and it can mow down Hex like wheat at harvest time.”
“You sound angry, Lieutenant,” Father Robert said.
“I’m not angry,” Ram replied. “But you should be.”
“I should? At who?”
“All of you. Angry at the Hex and at the traitors who have betrayed us.”
Father Robert shrugged. “I forgive them.”
Fraser nodded.
“Why have you forgiven them?” Ram was incredulous. “They don’t deserve it, whatever their reasons.”
The priest and the mayor glanced at each and Father Robert replied. “Forgiveness isn’t about whether they are worthy to receive your forgiveness but whether you are strong enough to grant it.”
“That sounds great and all but what does it mean in pr
actice?”
“Isn’t it obvious? It means if you truly forgive someone it frees you from the weight of holding it. Whether they or anyone else knows about it isn’t necessarily important. It’s about you, not them.”
Ram did not know what to say. Just then, his ear crackled and Cooper spoke, the sound of drills hammering in the background. “We’re through here, sir, and the rubble is almost cleared. Shall I start to unlock it or do you want me to wait?”
“Hold for me, Cooper, I’m coming now.” Ram smiled down at the mayor and the priest. “Thank you, gentlemen, I appreciate the information. We’re almost ready to attempt entry. There’s no booby traps or deadly gas or anything like that but it’s probably a sensible precaution if you move all your people away from that quarter of the town, just to be on the safe side.”
“Alright, I’ll see to it.”
Ram had one more look at the church before he left it. He did not feel the presence of a god or anything like that but it did feel incredibly peaceful and calming inside. It made him breathe more deeply and he almost wished he could stay longer. When he noticed the priest watching him with a small smile on his face, Ram turned and made his way back to the tower.
Soon, Ram stood in the doorway to the ground floor of the tower while Cooper bent to the center of the steel hatch and tapped in the codes on his handheld device. It pinged, audibly, and Cooper tapped in something else in response.
“That’s it,” Cooper muttered and stepped back out of the way. Motors whirred under the hatch and slowly it hinged up, screeching as the edges ground against pea gravel and pieces of rock rumbled as they slid down. Underneath, it was black as deep space but only for a moment, before lights flickered on.
“What is that?” Stirling said, watching through Ram’s feed.
“It’s an elevator,” Ram replied. “Alright, everyone, assembled on me. We’re going in.”
8.
“I don’t want to divide the team,” Ram said to Stirling on the command channel, “but I don’t want to end up stuck down there, either.”