The Heretic

by Joseph Nassise

  Michaels went on, but Duncan knew by the man’s sudden tension that this was a delicate subject. “You’ll also need to replace the missing man in your unit.”

  Cade’s answer was swift. “My team is fine as it is, sir.” There was an edge of steel in his voice.

  Duncan tensed, his hand involuntarily moving to the hilt of his sword. He knew there had been a problem with the last knight assigned to Williams’s team, but the file lacked any details.

  The Preceptor apparently wasn’t about to bend on this issue just to keep the Echo Team leader happy. “We’ve been attacked, Williams. I want every unit at full strength, particularly yours. You can either pick another team member, or I’ll assign one myself. It’s that simple, and I’ll allow no argument on the issue.”

  Duncan fully expected an outburst from Williams and he stood ready to impose himself between the two men.

  Cade surprised him, however. Instead of arguing, the team leader simply pointed past the Preceptor at Duncan, and said, “Fine. I’ll take him.”

  Duncan didn’t know who was more surprised, himself or the Preceptor.

  “He’s the head of my security detail, Commander,” Michaels objected. “Surely there is someone more suitable. Someone not currently under such heavy assignment.”

  “Again, with all due respect, sir, I would prefer not to add another team member this soon. If you are forcing me to do so, then it is my right to select the man I want, as the Rule itself outlines. I’ll take the sergeant. If he’s good enough to guard you, he should be good enough to be on my team.”

  Trapped by his own logic, the Preceptor had no choice but to agree, much to Duncan’s dismay.

  5

  Cade left the Preceptor’s office with his new teammate in tow, only to find the other two members of his command team waiting in the hallway outside. It seemed they’d been summoned by the same industrious initiate as he had. With an assignment of this magnitude ahead of them, he was reminded again how lucky he was to have men of such abilities under his command.

  The two men couldn’t have been more opposite from each other. Master Sergeant Matthew Riley was tall, black, and generally imposing, with wide muscular shoulders and a clean-shaven head. His usual grim expression seemed to have taken on an additional weight after learning what had happened here the previous evening. Sergeant Nick Malone, on the other hand, was slim, short, and white, with curling reddish-brown hair and the type of smile that had you constantly looking over your shoulder, waiting for the practical joke. Riley was demo and weapons; Malone, computers and electronics.

  They’d been with Cade for several years. If he was the mind of Echo Team, they were its heart and soul. Their courage and dedication had been tested under fire time and time again. He trusted them implicitly.

  He quickly filled them in on the details of their new assignment and introduced them to Lieutenant Duncan. As he did so, Cade thought about his impulsive decision to use his Sight while in the Preceptor’s office and of the resulting flash of power it had shown centered around the new man’s hands. It would be interesting to see how the other men in the unit reacted to Duncan’s unique gift when they learned about it.

  But they’d deal with that later. For the moment, it was time to get to work.

  “All right, here’s how we’re going to tackle this. Riley, I want you focused on the identity of the attackers. I want to know who they are and how they got inside. Malone, you’re in charge of security. I want this place searched top to bottom. I don’t care if the Preceptor’s team has done so already; we’re going to do it again, our way. Check the electronic surveillance records from last night, see what you can find. Duncan and I will meet with the medical team and see what we can learn from the bodies.” He looked at each of them in turn, waited for their nods of agreement. “The Preceptor’s given us carte blanche on this one, so if you need equipment or personnel, don’t hesitate to requisition them from the locals. Any questions?”

  All three shook their heads.

  “All right then. Let’s get to it.”

  A makeshift mortuary was set up in one of the gymnasiums, the base infirmary being far too small to handle the number of casualties they were facing. The bodies were laid out in long rows stretching the length of the room, teams of physicians were moving among them with portable computers, trying to match faces, dental records, and fingerprints against the commandery’s personnel records. It was obviously going to be a long and tedious process.

  Cade picked a row at random and gave a couple of the bodies a quick, visual inspection. While he was no doctor, he’d seen his share of combat wounds. Bullets and explosives had their own unique signatures and were relatively easy to identify. But to Cade’s dismay, nothing here looked familiar, which meant they were up against something out of the ordinary.

  Once the medical team finished with a body, a recovery team moved in. It was their job to collect any of the Order’s communal property that might still be useful; the arms, armor, and equipment that were routinely issued to each soldier. Personal effects were collected for later distribution to the other men who were close to the deceased, for the majority of the Order’s members were without family aside from their brethren. As Cade watched the team gently lift the body he had just examined so they could remove the bulletproof vest, he was struck anew at the sacrifice these men made for the sake of their fellow human beings. Forced to live in secrecy, without family, without friends. Yet dedicating their lives to protecting the innocent from things that no sane man would choose to face.

  It was a remarkably lonely life, in many respects.

  A life he was too well-suited for, it seemed.

  “Can I help you?”

  A dark-haired man in a white lab coat stood nearby, a questioning look on his face, a look that quickly disappeared when Cade turned to face him.

  The other man started, but recovered quickly. “Commander Williams. Forgive me; I did not recognize you at first.”

  “My unit’s in charge of the investigation.” Cade jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the rows of the dead. “What can you tell me about them?”

  The doctor frowned at the abruptness of the Echo Team commander’s request. “I’ve only just started my examination of the bodies. I can’t possibly. . .”

  Cade cut him short. “I know you haven’t been at it for very long. All I want are your initial impressions. Start with what killed them.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”

  “Why not?” Cade asked. He thought he knew the answer and was just looking to the doctor to confirm his own premise.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  “So far I haven’t found a single bullet wound. Or anything else you might expect in the aftermath of a confrontation with a group of well-trained and well -armed attackers, the kind that would be needed to overwhelm a location like this, for that matter. No knife cuts. No telltale patterns indicating the use of fragmentation grenades, or any modern explosive at all, in fact.”

  “What?” Duncan asked, incredulous, but Cade simply stared at the doctor, waiting for him to go on.

  “I’ve looked at fourteen bodies so far. Seven had their guts torn out. Four were decapitated. Two seemed to have been killed by a high fall; their bones pulped almost beyond recognition. The last one drowned.”

  “Drowned?” Cade hadn’t expected that last one.

  “In the fountain in the courtyard,” the doctor replied. “Something tore him up pretty good afterward, but it was the water that killed him.”

  “So what are you saying, Doc?” Duncan asked.

  Clearly unhappy with being put on the spot, but knowing he wasn’t going to be left alone until he answered their questions, the doctor sighed, and said, “If I had to take a guess, I’d say that nothing human killed these men.”

  Exactly what Cade had expected.

  6

  What are we stopping for this time? Duncan asked himself, and not for the first time that afternoon. After speaking
with the doctor, Cade ordered up a pair of trikes, and the two of them had set out on an inspection of the estate’s perimeter. They’d stopped several times so far. Each time Cade would dismount in order to examine something more closely, and each time Duncan had to wonder why. An unadorned section of outer wall. A clump of bushes. A tree with several broken branches. None of them appeared to have any relevance to the mission at hand, and it wasn’t long before Duncan grew impatient with the entire process. He kept his mouth shut, though, unwilling to question his new commander’s methods. It would have been different were he in charge, but since he wasn’t, there wasn’t much he could do but grimace and bear it.

  They’d covered roughly two-thirds of the perimeter so far and had just emerged from a dense stand of trees into a small clearing near the edge of the estate. This time, Duncan left his trike’s engine idling and refrained from dismounting.

  He watched as Cade carefully examined a rough, muddy patch of ground not far from where he’d parked his trike. A small, trickling stream ran nearby and the commander moved over to that next, bending to look at it more closely. The stream was running from the mouth of a metal culvert some ten feet away, a culvert that run underground beneath the commandery’s outer wall, placed there to help facilitate runoff during the spring months as the thick winter snow melted and flowed downhill.

  Duncan knew from inspecting the plans prior to the Preceptor’s arrival that, while the pipe was large enough to admit someone, it narrowed in the middle and was bisected by a mesh barrier that stopped anything larger than a rat from crossing from one end to the other. There was no way the attacking force had penetrated the grounds at that point, and Duncan couldn’t imagine what it was the commander found so intriguing.

  He watched in amazement as Cade went down on one knee, dipped two fingers into the brackish stream, then brought those fingers to his lips. The gesture was so out-of-place that Duncan finally turned off the engine of his trike, dismounted, and walked to the commander’s side.

  “What is it?” he asked, crouching to examine the water for himself.

  “Not sure yet…” Cade said, distractedly. He moved forward, carefully watching the flow of water as it emerged from the culvert. He must have seen something, for he suddenly stepped forward and stuck his head into the pipe’s opening.

  A second passed.

  Two.

  Then, “A light! Quickly!”

  Duncan jumped to obey. He hustled back to the trikes, pulled a high-powered floodlight from the saddlebags on his own machine, and swiftly returned to Cade’s side.

  “There’s something inside. Something moving,” the Knight Commander said, as he took the device, switched it on, and shined it into the depths of the culvert.

  Something was jammed about twenty feet inside the pipe.

  Something that was too big to make it through the narrowing opening that led to the other side.

  Something that wore the red insignia of a Knight of the Order.

  They wasted no time in going in after him, whoever he was. Duncan was smaller, so he was chosen to make the extraction while Cade radioed for help. As he lowered himself into a crouch and crawled inside the culvert, flashlight in hand, Duncan could hear his commander barking orders into the radio.

  “I need a medical team and a transportation unit dispatched to the south wall, section 193, immediately. Prep the medevac chopper and have the pilot standing by for immediate takeoff. If we need him, he’s going to have to move swiftly. Also, get ahold of the forensic team and…”

  Duncan tuned him out, concentrating on the task before him. The inside of the pipe smelled strongly of rotting algae, and, beneath it, he could taste the thick scent of blood. He noted that the water beneath his feet was tinged with a slight shade of red. Seeing it, he understood what it was that had caught Cade’s attention. He had to give the man credit; he knew he would never have noticed so insignificant a detail from the back of a moving ATV.

  He kept the flashlight trained down the length of the pipe ahead of him and, as he got closer, he began to make out more details. The man was crammed into the pipe as far as he could go, his body squeezed into the narrower section ahead of him as if he’d been trying to fit inside and gotten stuck. His face and upper body were hidden from view, but Duncan could see the man’s hips and lower legs. The grey jumpsuit he wore was liberally stained with blood. One foot was bare, the boot inexplicably missing.

  “Med team’s on its way. How are we doing?”

  “Almost there,” Duncan answered back, squeezing himself forward a few feet more. The tunnel narrowed again, and he was forced to get down on hands and knees, the cold metal above pushing against his back. The water flowed over his hands and around his legs, chilling him further. “Just a few feet more.”

  His right hand touched the man’s boot.

  “Hey? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  There was no answer.

  Duncan swept his light over the other man, trying to assess his condition, but the narrowing scope of the tunnel prevented him from seeing anything. He was simply going to have to haul the man out and hope for the best.

  “I’m gonna try to pull him out,” he called back to Cade, warning him. He shut off the flashlight and jammed it through his belt, then he grabbed the man by both ankles and started shuffling backward, pulling as he went. Cade was waiting for him at the end of the culvert. Together they picked the injured man up and carried him over to a soft patch of thick grass and set him down gently. Cade checked for a pulse, then immediately turned his attention to the man’s wounds.

  “He’s alive, but just barely. Another ten minutes…”

  Duncan doubted the young initiate even had that much time left. A savage wound ran along the right side of the man’s ribcage. The gleam of bone and the softer pink of internal organs could clearly be seen. It looked to Duncan as if something large and remarkably vicious had come along and taken a bite out of the man. Other, smaller wounds were visible on his chest and face, round holes bored into his flesh. He’d already lost a tremendous amount of blood, and a thin stream of it continued to flow out of him as every second passed.

  “Where the hell is that emergency team?” Cade cursed, looking around frantically while trying to stem the flow of blood from the man’s wounds.

  It wasn’t working.

  Duncan was about to suggest putting the man on the back of his ATV and rushing for the manor house when Cade turned to him, and said, “We’re out of time. You’re going to have to heal him.”

  The newest member of Echo Team froze, stunned into immobility. It seemed like ages before he found his voice. “Heal him?” Duncan asked, incredulous.

  Unable to take his hands away from the man’s wounds lest he bleed to death, Cade could only snarl in frustration at his subordinate. “We don’t have time to play games, Duncan. I know you can do it. You can’t hide that from me. Quickly now, before it’s too late!”

  Duncan, however, had no intention of healing the man, fellow knight or not. He didn’t know how Cade had discovered the secret he’d kept hidden from the rest of the Order, but he wasn’t about to end eleven years of abstinence just because the man told him to do so.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snapped back, doing his best to act like he was ignorant of the truth.

  Whatever Cade said next was drowned in the sudden growl of an engine as a four-wheel-drive pickup raced into the clearing and stopped just feet away. The medics were suddenly kneeling beside their fallen comrade, ordering Cade to move aside as they worked frantically to keep the man alive.

  They did their best; but in the end, it wasn’t enough.

  The man’s wounds were too grievous, his body had lost too much blood. They worked over him for another five minutes after he’d gone, doing what they could to revive him, but eventually they gave up.

  As the medical team loaded up the body and prepared to depart, Commander Williams stepped over to Duncan’s side. Cade gripped his
shoulder, his fingers digging painfully into the muscles beneath. In a low voice that no one else could hear, he said, “The Enemy didn’t kill that man. You did. His death is on your hands.”

  Duncan watched, dismayed, as his new commander turned away, remounted his ATV, and, gunning the engine, took off through the trees toward the manor house in the distance, leaving him behind with the medical team to contemplate his actions, or lack thereof.

  For the first time in the eleven years since he’d made the vow never to use his unearthly ability again, Duncan questioned whether he’d made the right decision.

  They regrouped later that evening in the commandery’s great hall: Cade, Riley, Malone, and Duncan. The rest of Echo Team was officially on stand down, waiting for the senior members to determine an appropriate course of action, but they’d been placed on unofficial standby status by the senior NCOs. It was still too early in the investigation to need them, but that didn’t mean it would stay that way.

  Duncan was the last to arrive. Cade didn’t even turn to look at him as he crossed the room and took a seat at the end of the table near Master Sergeant Riley.

  The meeting immediately got under way. Cade turned to his number two, and asked, “Riley?”

  The team’s security and demolitions expert had been assigned the task of examining any evidence left behind by the attackers. He unrolled a large blueprint of the facility and its surrounding grounds on the tabletop for the other men to see. Clearing his throat, he said, “I started with the gate.” He pointed to the entrance into the compound, the same one they had all driven through several hours earlier. “You’ve all seen it. Clearly it’s how the attackers gained access to the grounds. Considering its condition, my first thought was that they had used explosives, but I was unable to find any blast marks or explosive residue on the gate, the columns, or the road. Nor did I find any damage to the gatehouse. My next thought was that they had taken a relatively large vehicle and simply driven through the gate, but the lack of paint residue or clear impact point ruled that out as well.” Riley shook his head. “Something came through that gate, something big. That’s about all I can tell you right now.”