* * *
“I think we’ve got what’s called ‘a situation,’ el-tee,” Braddock said. “Farm tools and axes may not be much, but it’s more than a match for whatever force we can muster against them.”
“I don’t want that to happen, dammit,” she hissed. Tomlinson’s last report had been the first page in the last chapter of tranquility; the next move would be a very short-lived battle between the Marines and a few thousand frenzied villagers, and she and Braddock both knew that the Marines would not be among the victors. “Tomlinson,” she called over the comm link.
“Yes, ma’am,” answered the young corporal’s voice, a bit uneasily.
“Tomlinson, tell Father Hernandez that he and one other person – only one – of his choice, can come out here. Tell him, again, that we don’t want trouble, but that we’re dealing with something – someone – that’s very dangerous and his people need to stay where they are for their own good. You got that?”
“Roger, ma’am. Right away. Out.” He sounded relieved.
Jodi watched through her binoculars as Tomlinson called out to the priest who waited by the gates.
“Here they come,” Braddock said as Father Hernandez and a somewhat younger man whom Braddock knew to be on the council quickly passed out of the gate and came toward them at a brisk walk. Hernandez, in fact, was walking so fast that the other man occasionally had to trot to keep up. The gunnery sergeant went out to meet them.
“Listen, Father–”
“No, my son, there is no time for talk!” Hernandez brushed by Braddock as if he were a pocket of cold air. “I know that Satan has already worked his powers upon you, and that you are now his unwitting servant. My only hope is that you can yet be saved from his clutches!”
“Wait!” Braddock cried, torn between tackling the old man and risking the consequences or letting him charge into the tines of Reza’s claws. He decided that he had no choice but to opt for the latter.
Storming into the little clearing, Hernandez found only Jodi. “Where is he?” Hernandez demanded, his eyes darting into the shadows of the trees that lay around him like the bars of a cage. “Where is the servant of the Antichrist?”
“Father Hernandez,” Jodi said evenly, straining to control the anger and fear that sought to creep into her voice, “if you turn around, very slowly, you’ll see.”
“Enough games, child!” he said angrily. “There is no–” He felt a tap on his arm, and turned to find his companion staring at something behind them, his eyes wide with disbelief.
Following his companion’s gaze, Hernandez found what he had come for. “Mary, mother of God,” he whispered as he crossed himself.
Backlit by the sun, Reza was an animate shadow that soundlessly stepped a pace closer to the elderly priest and the councilman. Jodi had not seen or heard him get up and move to where he stood now, even though he had been right beside her a moment before. More fascinating, however, was that when she did not look directly at him, if she looked at Braddock or the priest and Reza was only in her peripheral vision, he completely disappeared, as if he were an illusion, not really there.
“Please, father,” she said quietly, keeping her eyes riveted on Reza, “don’t make any sudden moves or threaten him. He has been very cooperative, but he’s a complete unknown. Anything might set him off.”
“What has he said to you, child,” Hernandez said through his astonishment at the apparition before him, “to convince you that the ways of Darkness are best?”
Jodi shook her head. “Father, he hasn’t said a word other than what I believe to be his name, which is Reza. I don’t think he knows our language, or if he does, he’s either forgotten it or has just chosen not to communicate with us.”
“Foolish child,” Hernandez chided softly. “So easily have you been led astray.” He held up the wooden crucifix that hung from around his neck on a length of ivory cord. “As darkness flees from the light, so too does Evil retreat from the sign of the cross.” Like a mythical vampire hunter, pushing the stunned councilman aside, Hernandez stalked toward Reza, the crucifix thrust before him just like the weapon he believed his faith to be.
“Father, no!” Both Jodi and Braddock reacted instantly, trying to stop the priest from carrying out this lunatic act of self-destruction, but they may as well have been miles away. In a movement so swift that it barely registered in Jodi’s brain, Reza’s sword sang from the sheath on his back, the ornate blade reflecting the glory of the sun as it sought its target. The air was filled with the ring of metal striking bone, and Father Hernandez crumpled to the ground at Reza’s feet. As he fell, the tip of Reza’s sword caught the cord of the crucifix, deftly lifting it from around the priest’s neck and prying the cross from Hernandez’s powerless hands. With a tiny flick, the cross flew into the air to land in Reza’s outstretched fingers.
The councilman dropped to his knees and began to pray for deliverance with eyes tightly closed as Jodi and Braddock knelt beside the fallen priest.
“Oh, shit,” Jodi cried. “You stupid old fool, I tried to warn you.”
“I don’t see any blood,” Braddock remarked quietly. His eyes and hands worked over Hernandez’s body, but there did not appear to be any sign of injury. “Reza’s sword was so bloody fast I didn’t even see where it hit him,” he muttered. But then he saw the swelling near Hernandez’s hairline, where the flat of Reza’s sword must have hit the old priest’s head.
Hernandez moaned, and his eyes flickered open. “Has the beast fled?” he whispered.
“Father,” Jodi said, relieved that he seemed to be all right, “just be thankful you’re still alive, although I can’t figure out how. Where are you hurt?”
“My head,” he groaned, his face wrinkling in pain, “but that is not important. Where is the child of Satan?”
“At the moment,” she told him, taking a quick glance at Reza, “your demon is giving your crucifix a good looking over.”
That was something Hernandez did not expect to hear. “That cannot be!” he exclaimed. Struggling mightily against the hands that sought to gently restrain him, he propped himself up on his elbows to see for himself.
There, as Jodi had told him, stood Reza, raptly staring at the crucifix in one hand, his sword held easily at his side in his other, the shimmering tip held just above the ground. He turned the old wooden cross over in his taloned hand with great care, as if it were a priceless family heirloom that had survived generations of hardship to arrive safely in his hands. Then, as if noticing the others for the first time, he leaned over Hernandez and dangled the cross by the cord from his fingers. Speechless, the old man reached for it with one trembling hand, and the cross came away in his fist.
“This cannot be so,” he whispered. “All my life, I have believed that evil must flee from God’s sign, but Satan has somehow transcended even this.”
“Have you ever considered,” Jodi told him, “that maybe you’re not being confronted with something evil? Just because he’s different, he’s not necessarily the work of the devil, you know. Braddock and I are different from you, but you didn’t seem to have too much trouble accepting us.”
Hernandez shook his head, stubborn to the last. “It is not the same.”
“No,” Jodi said, “it’s not. It looks like he’s more like you than we are.”
“What does that…” His voice died as he watched Reza pull something from a black leather pouch at his waist. Looking at it carefully, as if not sure of what he was seeing, an almost-human expression – longing, perhaps – crossed his face before the inscrutable alien mask descended once more. Squatting down, Reza held out his hand to Hernandez, palm up. Something small glittered on his palm.
Slowly reaching forward, careful to avoid the rapier claws at the ends of Reza’s fingers, Hernandez came away with a chain that was attached to a small crucifix that might be worn around one’s neck. The metal of the crucifix and the chain had long since oxidized to an inky blackness, but the few spots where the origin
al material showed through left no doubt that it was made of silver. Rubbing his fingers over the surface of the cross, he was rewarded with a dull glimmer of beauty. Holding the cross from the chain, he looked at Reza. “This is yours?”
Reza seemed to concentrate for a moment, then slowly and deliberately nodded his head.
Hernandez could not say what lay in the green eyes that were fixed upon him, but he could not honestly tell himself that he believed this stranger was lying to him, or was in any apparent way an instrument of evil.
Perhaps Jodi is right, he thought. Although Satan could choose any form he wished, why would he choose such an easily penetrated disguise? Were there not better forms in which to deceive the simple folk of Rutan? The chameleon seeks to blend in with its surroundings, he thought now, not to stand apart from them. Hernandez’s people had been segregated from the human sphere for many years, making Rutan a place where different ways of any sort were viewed with skepticism, especially since the harshness of life ruled heavily in favor of community over individuality. Just as Jesus had shown his disciples the need to seek out and touch those who were wretched in the eyes of their fellow men, so too had Hernandez striven to reach out to others. Not with his staff or a scathing tongue, but with his love and compassion. He was not yet ready to dismiss his fears that this Reza was an instrument of the Devil. But he was prepared to consider the alternative, that this was a man like any other in the eyes of God, flawed and imperfect, molded of the same clay by His hands. For Hernandez, that was still a great leap of faith, but it was a chasm he was sure – in time, at least – he could cross.
But for now, holding the tiny crucifix in his hand, he could not restrain himself from asking one more question of the stranger looming over him. “Do you believe in God?”
Reza cocked his head to one side in what Jodi now thought of as some kind of Kreelan gesture or body language, and then he looked to her and Braddock, in turn, as if for help.
“I don’t think he understands the question Father,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s almost as if he can sense your thoughts or feelings and react to them, and not the words you say. But that’s only been with very simple or obvious things. What you’re asking now, especially after what he must have lived through in the Empire, goes well beyond the simple and obvious, even if you just want a yes-or-no answer.”
Hernandez nodded, favoring Reza with a smile that was sincere, if not entirely trusting. “So true,” he said. The priest was more inclined to believe in Reza now, because he was sure that a demon under Satan’s power would have tried to deceive the priest with an answer, be it yes or no, because Hernandez wanted so badly to hear it.
Somewhat relieved, he would be content to wait for the Truth to be revealed.
* * *
As evening turned to night, the trio began to tire under Reza’s unflinching gaze. It was not long after four bedrolls were brought from the village and a fire started that all of them were ready for sleep.
All, that is, except Reza. Eschewing the bedroll and the fire’s warmth for the lonely chill of the nearby darkness, he knelt on the ground at the edge of the grove and stared into the star-filled sky.
“Do you suppose he is praying?” Father Hernandez asked. The possibility that this strange man knew of the existence of God was quickly becoming an obsession with him. Hernandez was aware that he was falling into that spider’s web, but he was powerless against the force that propelled him into it.
“He might,” Braddock said. “But it looks more to me like he’s homesick as hell… ah, sorry padre.”
Hernandez waved it off “I am used to it by now,” he sighed, gesturing at Jodi, who rolled her eyes. “But what makes you think he is homesick and not simply praying, perhaps confessing for killing those on the bridge this morning?”
Jodi frowned, not so much at Hernandez’s curiosity at Reza’s beliefs, but that he automatically seemed to equate the killing of anyone or anything – regardless of the circumstances – to some form of murder. She was not happy to have to kill anyone, either, but there were circumstances that justified, even necessitated, the taking of another being’s life. In the war against the Empire, the Kreelans had laid the ground rules: fight and have a chance or die. Even among humankind, the score was often the same. Jodi had been forced to kill a man once as he brutally assaulted and then tried to rape a woman in a suburban park on Old Terra. Jodi had not known either of them, she had only been a casual stroller-by, but her duty then had been every bit as clear as the duties she had sworn in her commissioning oath to undertake on the part of her race. She had felt terrible after the fact, was sickened by the knowledge that one human being could do something like that to another when the survival of their entire race was in jeopardy in a much larger war. But she had never, not once in all the years that had passed, regretted shooting the man when he turned with a knife to fight her off. He had been an enemy to everything Jodi believed in, perhaps even more so than the Kreelans were. To Jodi, not having tried to help the woman would have left nothing inside her but intolerable guilt. Perhaps if Father Hernandez underwent a similar experience, he might gain an appreciation for what lay beyond the idealistic cloak of his pacifism.
“Before I joined the Corps,” Braddock told them quietly, not noticing the momentary glare Jodi leveled at the priest, “I spent my whole life in a little town on Timor. I worked as a mechanic after I got out of secondary school. I did all right, but I never would have gotten rich at it.” He smiled wistfully, suddenly remembering how awful it had been, how wonderful it had been. The long hours, the hard work, the ribbing he had taken from his friends because he studied in his free time instead of playing pool at the local bar. The loves he had had, had lost. It had been his home, and he knew it always would be. “I never saw anywhere else on that whole planet, just that little town. Doing or seeing other things was something I didn’t think about much, because I didn’t really have time for it, not when you have to do all you can just to get food on the family’s table.
“But then my draft notice was posted, and I decided to join the Marines. I figured it was a better shot than the Navy. No offense, ma’am.” Jodi shook her head. The two of them had shared times that had long since dissolved any seriousness in jibes about their rival services. “After the papers were signed, I felt good about it. My folks and little sister would have money to make ends meet, and I’d get to see something of the outside, which really began to appeal to me after a while. And fighting, that was something I’d always been good at, since I was a little kid. And if I was going to be fighting the Blues, so much the better.”
He looked at Reza. “It wasn’t like I thought it would be, though. Boot camp went by in a flash, all of us so busy we didn’t have time to think about anything but making it through the next day.
“But when I reached the regiment and saw what the war really meant to a grunt like me, to all of us, I suddenly realized that I’d probably never see home again, except maybe in a box. It hit me just like that. That night, while we were waiting to ship out to the fleet, I went off by myself a little ways and knelt on the ground, just like Reza there. I looked up at the sky, but damned if I could figure out which star was home, where Mom and Dad and Lucille were. All I wanted then, more than anything in the world, was to be at home, sitting in the kitchen and having dinner with my folks, or maybe having a beer with Dad out on the porch, a thousand other little things. I wanted to be home so bad that I just started bawling like a baby.” Braddock was silent for a moment, taking the time to look at the stars himself. “Since then, Father, I’ve seen a thousand other guys and gals do the exact same thing. He might be praying all right, but if he is, my money says that it’s not inspired by guilt from his work this morning. If he’s praying, it’s a wish to wake up from all this and be at home, wherever his home might be, tucked into a nice warm bed.”
The three of them were silent with their own thoughts for a while.
“Well, folks,” Braddock said, finally breaking the
spell and stretching out with obvious pleasure on the heavily padded bedroll, the first real chance to sleep that he could claim to have had for the better part of a month or more, “I think I’m going to shut down for the night. I don’t know about you, but this Marine needs his beauty sleep real, real bad. ‘Night, all.”
“Goodnight, my son,” Hernandez replied. He, too, was tired from the ordeals of the last weeks, and today especially. His mind was wound tight as a clock spring, but his body needed rest. “I think I will avail myself of sleep, as well. Goodnight, Jodi.”
“Goodnight, Father, gunny.” Jodi sat at the fire by herself for a while, still thinking about what Braddock had said. That Reza might be homesick had not occurred to her. She had naïvely assumed that Reza would be happy to be back in the Confederation, among his own people. She saw how precious the old letter from Colonel Hickock was to him and the respect he had shown Braddock after Reza understood that Braddock was a Marine.
But believing that Reza should be happy to be “home” again had been silly, she understood now. Whatever Reza was thinking, it could hardly be from a perspective akin to hers. After all, how long had he been under the Empire’s influence? Since early childhood? Since birth? And what – if anything – was left inside him that someone could point to and say, “That is human”? What did he really have in common with anyone in the human sphere, other than his genetic origins?
It was these questions that brought on a sudden wave of compassion for the dark, silent figure kneeling a few meters away. In the short time since he had been among them, he had demonstrated powers that made Jodi wonder if her disbelief in the supernatural, benign or otherwise, might be unjustified, and she wondered with uneasy curiosity at what other secrets might yet lay cloaked behind his green eyes. But for all that, he still boasted at least some of the frailties of his kind. He could shed tears of sadness, although she did not know exactly why he might be sad. Looking at him now, she knew that he could feel loneliness, too, just as Braddock had thought. Severed from the culture he had grown up in and whomever he might have been close to, how could it be any other way?
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