by J A Bouma
“Thankfully, was living with Mama Mara by this time, and had found Jesus Christ. Without him, I don’t know what I would have done!”
“Gone c-r-r-r-azy?” Alexander said, mimicking her rolled Rs.
To which she twisted up her face and put both hands on her hips in feigned disgust. “Are you mocking me, Master Zarruq?”
“Wha—what are you talking about? Wouldn’t think about it.”
One end of his mouth curled upward trying to suppress a giggle. Then it slipped. And so did Rebekah, shaking a finger at him while opening her mouth wide in laughter, showing him those wonderful white teeth of hers.
“I hope the bit of shut-eye did you some good, my boy,” Father Jim said, sauntering over and sitting on the other side of Alexander. He chuckled and patted his knee, adding: “Because soon you’ll be back into the fray of things!”
Alexander smiled, saying nothing. He appreciated being rescued, and knew it was his duty to join the Ichthus Resistance, or the Christian Remnant, or whatever it was that was left of the Church. But wondered what Father Jim had in mind, what he and Ford and the others had been cooking up the past year—and whether he wanted any part of it. Yet voicing his doubts he did not.
“Any word on what the world suffered earlier today?” he said instead, nodding up toward the ceiling of the hydrocraft still humming with forward velocity.
The cardinal took a breath and frowned, shaking his head. “Not a word! A total blackout on DiviNet sites and the WeShare social media platforms. Even OneWorld News has been silent.”
“That’s changed, chief,” Ford said, rushing up to the cardinal with a slate device, an image resting on the thin sapphire display. Max Bacchus himself, the propaganda-meister of Solterra Republic, wearing a powder-blue jacket with a shirt of a similar shade, ruffles poking out and hair matching with streaks of yellow.
“What’s this?” Father Jim asked.
“The Republic’s response to the full-on display of global cray-cray from sea to shining sea! It was just sent over. Very instructive, it is.”
“How so?” Alexander asked, leaning toward the device and eager for news.
“Beats me. Just came as a flagged item through the secure channel from HQ.” Ford punched the image and it began to play:
Bacchus laughed, his teeth displayed through a wide, jovial grin as the man snapped his head back in a full-on guffaw. “Come now, surely you jest! The apocalypse, the end of the world, is that what people are saying?”
An unknown woman giggled and confirmed that was the word on the street.
“Oh, pish posh! It was nothing more than a bit of natural phenomenon that gave quite a show in one corner of the world. Nothing more. Just some sort of solar eclipse, if I heard right from the Ministry of Facts, with a meteor shower for an extra dose of flair. So if you were lucky enough to have witnessed the once in a lifetime phenomenon, then good on you!” The man giggled. “The end of the world…What will people think of next?”
Had to give the man credit. He played the part perfectly, spoon feeding the daily dose of Republic disinformation and alternative facts. Helped that the polis was more than willing to slurp it up, trading truth and transparency for peace, prosperity, and progress—For Humanity!
“In other news…” Bacchus said, taking a hand to his hair to smooth a stray lock back into place. “We have some exciting news out of Panligo!”
Alexander stiffened at the mention of Panligo, the memory of his father championing the new religious assembly rushing to the fore. Father Jim stood, grasping the slate device with a straining hold, waiting for the news.
The carnival barker pressed his lips together into a knowing smile, letting a few beats of anticipation tick by. Ever the propagandist! Then a clip of B-roll flashed up on the slate device, and Bacchus announced, “We have ourselves a Summus Sacerdos! I present to you our new Supreme Sacradi.”
Alexander was forced to his feet alongside Father Jim with a gasp, the image of the new Panligo leader blazing across the screen.
It can’t be…
Father Jim equally gasped at the sight, a tremor taking hold of his hand and nearly dropping the slate device at the reveal.
“Colonel Sanders!” Ford said.
“What was that, lad?” Father Jim muttered, brow furrowed and face fallen.
“The man Ford and I saw,” Lucy answered, “on one of our missions to retrieve the Shroud of Turin before the Republic leveled the Ministerium. That official with the upper Solterran echelons.”
Except Alexander knew him as someone entirely different.
There he was, a tall man with bronzed skin and wide shoulders and an aged gut, head flush with a mane of white hair, mouth adorned by a goatee and a mustache curled at both ends like handlebars—bearing a striking resemblance to Alexander.
Martin Zarruq. His father.
Alexander’s head swam with a dizzying mixture of confusion and dumbfounded disbelief, his stomach clenching with anxious dread at the meaning of it all. His father, some sort of high priest of the newly constituted religious assembly of worldwide spiritualities?
“Bloody hell…” the cardinal muttered, the man seeming to forget himself with the tongue slip.
“Wait a darn second,” Ford said. “The man said Summus Sacerdos. A Sacradi. As in some sacred, priestly type—a Panligo Pope, even?”
“In a way. The Summus Sacerdos designation was originally used for the pagan high priest of Rome’s ancient religion, the most important position in the ancient imperial religion.”
“And Sacradi?” Lucy said.
“As near as I can tell,” Father Jim said, “it is a neologism. A mash up of two separate words meaning community gods.”
“With old man Zarruq as the head honcho,” Ford said. “The high priest of his new Panligo community of the gods.”
Father Jim nodded, going silent.
Alexander slumped into the couch, the full measure of the truth of his father’s involvement in the pagan abomination realized.
Father Jim joined him, shutting off the slate device and handing it back to Ford, face fallen and drained of color. “Just like the Republic to appoint a Pope-like figure to their new cultic abomination! This raises the stakes to a whole new level, I fear.”
And the stakes of Alexander’s own involvement…
His head throbbed with the news, the reality quickly becoming a horror that he was now directly pitted against his father. Light versus dark. Good versus evil. Ichthus versus the Republic.
Father versus son.
Was he ready to face such a horror? Did he have a choice?
Yes, he realized. He did. Something Jesus said, in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 10, came rushing from memory: ‘Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.’
In the quiet of the moment, Alexander knew what he had to do. And without anyone knowing, he committed to whatever it took to follow Christ and save his Church.
Taking up his cross like thousands of the faithful before him.
“Then there was that bit of propaganda,” Ford added, “from that fruitcake Max Bacchus about the magic show up top.”
“Which was a total lie,” the cardinal muttered. “Probably concocted by the Republic to shield the true nature of it all!”
“A lie? Which part?” Alexander asked.
“The only bit of intel we received from the field is that this was a worldwide phenomenon.”
He stiffened and glanced at Rebekah, confusion mixed with worry flushing her face.
“What do you mean by worldwide phenomenon?”
“Just what it sounds like, homefry,” Ford answered. “The whole twilight-zone affair—from the darkened sun to the crimson moon to the fading and falling stars and earthquake—all of it was felt and seen across Solterra. But you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t ha
ve eyes around the world like we do. The Republic has put the kibosh on anything that might inform the polis of the imminent collapse of civilization.”
“So one sector of Solterra would only think they themselves had experienced the unexpected cosmic display.”
Father Jim nodded. “Precisely. The Patron simply hand-waved away the event as nothing more than a fluke of nature, as the OneWorld News report attested, rather than the super-natural phenomenon that it was.”
Alexander shifted and folded his arms, a worm of worry winding its way through him. “And that’s what you think it was, Padre? Supernatural phenomenon. Something from—” he swallowed, the truth of it hard to voice. “From the Lord himself?”
“Yes, Cardinal Ferraro,” Rebekah joined in, “what do you make of what happened? Was it the work of God?”
“Yeah, chief,” Ford added, joining the conversation, “is this the end of the world as we know it, or what?”
The soft beep-beep-beep of an indicator alarm interrupted the discussion, bringing the group back to the moment. Something from the front.
Ford grinned. “Showtime.” He headed back to join Jin at the controls.
Alexander looked at Rebekah, who shrugged. The pair went to the front to investigate.
Halfway there, Alexander caught his breath at what he saw through the darkened maw of ocean blackness outside, barely illuminated by a pair of headlights. For their lights were joined by dozens more.
Two rings of white lights indicating a large circular structure, with another thicker set at the center looking like windows peering out into the ocean depths. It was massive, the size of a sports stadium from back home. Getting closer, another set of orbs ringed by lights on the outer edges came into focus, then three more. Far smaller than the main hub, but giving the impressions of more pods connected by corridors. It was the largest underwater station Alexander had seen, and the prospects of him living inside for who knew how long did not thrill.
A string of blinking red lights guided them into the belly of the beast, where illuminated walls pressing in against their hydrocraft guided them forward until they emerged into a larger docking bay, a massive circular pool of parked personal submergence vehicles, larger and smaller hydrocrafts than their own, docked with mysterious purpose.
What is this place…
“Home sweet home, kiddos,” Ford said, as if answering Alexander’s question. The man eased their yellow PSV toward an open bay blinking green until a mechanical arm took over out front, drawing them into position.
A series of thuds and clangs resounded inside, causing Alexander not a small amount of anxiety. Soon the docking sequence was complete.
What awaited them out in the world above was anyone’s guess.
Chapter 6
Mediterranean Outpost.
Ford’s heart picked up pace as the yellow hydrocraft came to a shuddering halt, the water undulating in shades of white and yellow and green from lights mounted to walls of the docking bay. The arm outside the front windshield held the PSV securely between a pair of fish that looked like they’d seen better days, their dull-gray hulls visibly pockmarked from action and streaked by a palette of browns.
A purr sounded from the dashboard with an incoming call from up above. He punched the pulsing yellow circle, activating the call.
A woman with fair skin and a dark buzz cut greeted them, with piercing green eyes and a diamond stud accenting one side of her nose. Not what he expected, but he could deal.
“Greetings,” she said. “You are being the Ministerium marauders, I presume?”
Ford nodded. “That we are, little missy.”
Those eyes narrowed into a curious gaze, and her lips flattened into a smirk. “We shall see…” A vibration shuddered from up above as something latched around the hatch at the top of their fish, giving them the means of escape. She said, “You’re cleared. We will be seeing you on the other side, cowboy.”
Showtime…
Hopping out of his captain’s chair, Ford shuffled to the red ladder stretching toward the hatch up top. Ever since he was a kid, he’d heard tales of exploration and adventure in the farthest stretches of the seas. People thought space would be the final frontier, and the near-Earth parts of it had been charted. But trekking across the galaxy to reach the farthest stars was for the birds, and darn near impossible anyway until recent advances in technology.
It was those stories of undersea adventure that had kept him going from Daddy’s binge-drinking beatings. Kept him sane and near well kept him alive—the promise of wide-open plains of water and the freedom to make something of yourself, the comfort of anonymity and the prospect of escaping into a world the farthest thing from his dust bowl hellhole on that peanut farm south of the Mason-Dixon.
Never in a million Noramericana summers would he have dreamt he’d be pushing through a yellow hatch into one of the first research stations of the United Earth Oceanic Assembly! Yet there he was, crankin’ the red airlock handle and flippin’ the lid and pushing into one final interior hatch leading to the outside world—
Here goes nothin’…
—right before he popped his head up and a pair of strong, dark hands pulled him through and tossed him like a rag doll to a hard metal grating floor, water shimmering with those whites and yellows and greens underneath.
“What the hot Hades…” he moaned, a bell ringing in his head from the force of the drop. He went to all fours when he heard the distinct chic-chic of a weapon being cocked at the back of his head.
“Don’t move…” a rumbly, rattly man said, sounding like he smoked a carton of hashish a day and ruining his childhood dream. And it pissed Ford off.
A chorus of voices were raised behind him, but he didn’t pay ‘em much mind. All he cared about was the heat racin’ up the back of his neck at being bamboozled. And right after his trip down nostalgia lane.
So he did something about it.
Springing to his feet, he spun around and pulled an alley-oop trick out of his old Purifier hat, disarming the man without even a shot being fired.
“What the…” the mystery man said, a big, burly thing with leathery skin and long dark dreadlocks spun up into a mean hive. Face was masked with a dark-gray strip of black cloth, and he wore some sort of uniform of the same, but no insignia that he could see.
“Too bad, so sad, partner,” Ford said. “You’ve gotta—”
“John Mark! Put the gun down, if you please…”
It was the cardinal, pulled up top along with Alexander and Jin, the ladies, the Ukrainski doc. Pulled into a huddled group with weapons drawn on them by two chicks. One of which was the short, dark-haired Doberman he’d seen on the hydrocraft dashboard. The other looked like an exact replica, but with blond locks shaved just as close and blue eyes that were a bit hypnotic. Twins, by the looks of it.
Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.
Just his luck.
Ford stood, lowering his weapon but ready to use it if he needed to. Didn’t know what the hot Hades was going on. For all he knew, they’d walked into a trap. With no way out.
“Now, is that any way to treat a merry band of Ministerium marauders?” he said.
“The shibboleth,” the original short-haired chick said.
“The whatchamacallit?”
“I believe our welcoming party is asking for the passcode,” Father Jim said.
“Oh, is that all…”
Alexander came from behind the cardinal, tapping him on the shoulder. “It’s a reference from the Book of Judges, chapter 12. Something to tell friend from foe.”
Ford replied, “And how about open sesame?”
Short Blonde-Haired Chick suddenly raised a weapon at Ford, as did the burly dark-skinned man with a different gun and two others who looked like they’d been reared in Americana or Europa.
Which sent Alexander spreading his arms in front of Father Jim in protection and the others scurrying behind as well with muffled protests.
Ford dropp
ed his weapon and raised his hands. “Was it something I said?”
Alexander chuckled. “Actually, it was. The wrong password. But I’ve got the right one.”
“Then spit it out, homefry! No time like the present to save our backsides.”
“Sepio,” he said, raising his head high and withdrawing a round metal object from a pocket. That medallion he’d been gifted those many months ago from Theophilus, Master of the Order of Thaddeus, until he met his demise and passed the torch along to the kid.
Whispers rippled throughout the room at Alexander’s mention of a word Ford had heard a time or two from Kareema. Something about a Christian version of the former American Navy SEALS, but stamped by the Holy Spirit.
Short Dark-Haired Chick stepped forward, wielding a staff outfitted with a wicked head that glowed purple and pointed in their direction, electrical tendrils racing around it. A shiver ran up Ford’s spine at the familiar sight, something he had used a time or twelve with the Purifiers. Scythes, they were called. Its name pretty well told the whole story on its reason for being.
The woman took the medallion Alexander was holding out, flipping it over and sighing. Her face softened and she turned back toward her compadres, nodding and easing that wicked staff used to subdue unruly Unfits toward the floor.
Ford took in a measured breath, the tension easing from his shoulders and back and neck. Now they were getting somewhere, all thanks to Alexander’s shibboleth, or whatever the hot Hades it was.
She handed it back to Alexander. “The Order of Thaddeus Master’s medallion.”
Alexander stuffed it back into a pocket and nodded. “That’s right. I am him. And you all are part of the Ichthus Resistance, is that right?”
The woman nodded. “You are being correct. Nia, is my name.”
“That’s a mighty unusual one,” Ford said.
She glanced at him, unsmiling. “It is being a shortened form of Junia. Junia Kaminski.”
“Kaminski?” Sasha said, popping out from behind Father Jim, that moppy head of blond curls dancing with an extra skip in their step. “Are you being from Vostakana?”