by T Q Chant
“Or when something sucked their brains out,” Yvgena suggested as Williams rose to go and join Ortuz.
“Try not to sound like you enjoy the concept so much,” he reproved Yvgena mildly.
“Does look like there was a firefight in here, and one that happened after the launch – see the way some of the bullet holes are on top of the explosion damage?”
“You some sort of cop?” Cahaya asked Williams as he tasked some of Snoopy's drones to examine the damage.
“Nope. Know firefights though.”
“She was standing here.” Ortuz's voice was meditative as he stirred empty cartridge cases from some sort of primitive slug weapon with the toe of his boot. “Judging from the brass, she expended a lot of ammunition.”
“Really bad marksmanship.”
“Maybe, Williams, but she couldn't have been that bad. Whatever she was shooting at had to be on the wall, so definitely not a human target.”
“This place is starting to give me the creeps,” Cahaya muttered. The immersion headset allowed him to fully parse the enormous amount of data Snoopy was feeding to him; that meant he was already far more intimately familiar with their environment than anyone else on the team.
“Maybe that's why they didn't tidy up in here. Place creeped them out.”
“What're you thinking?” Williams asked.
“That we're not up against your common raiders. We've seen a lot of evidence that the hostiles are deeply superstitious. The fact that they appear to have left their own to rot and not cleaned up as they did at the colony site is the strongest evidence yet.”
“Getting some weird residue readings.” Cahaya pulled the immersion set from his face. His normally cheerful round features were troubled. “Snoopy's got everything – can we maybe do the analysis back at basecamp? Or even better, back on the ship?”
**********
“Isn't Okafor just wonderful?” Bethany gushed as she guided Samrit out of the hospice.
She walked with faltering steps, but not because of the almost-healed wound in her leg. Looking into herself, she realised it was because she was apprehensive. Afraid?
“Mmmm? Yes, I suppose.” She plastered a smile on her face, something about Bethany's sudden stillness telling her that that was the wrong answer.
Rule number...
“He's lovely. It was very kind of him to offer to help me adjust to my Saved life.”
The smile returned, and Bethany leaned in conspiratorially. Samrit felt the warmth of the other woman's body on her arm. “His father is... influential, as well.”
Samrit was obscurely glad to change the subject, to get more information. She had come to realise she was constantly hungry for data. “Jonathon is newly Saved as well?”
“He led his people to us some months ago. As a prophet of his people he holds an honoured place amongst us, and speaks on their behalf to the Near-Raptured.”
“Society here is stratified?” There was a sharp edge to her voice that surprised her.
“Oh, Samrit, you have a lot to learn. A hierarchy is perfectly natural, you see it around you all the time. It is how the Bright Ones ordained the working of the world. The Near-Raptured lead us and receive our veneration on behalf of the Raptured and the Bright Ones. The newly Saved, like you, are seekers for the Truth, and through your seeking will find your station in society.”
Samrit nodded along to this, remembering a similar lesson from her... mother? Aunt? It had not rung true then, but now it seemed to make sense.
They passed a windowed door on one side of the long corridor – tunnel? – down which they were walking. Glancing in, Samrit realised it was a maternity ward, and a busy one at that. Row after row of simple cots held pregnant women while robed nurses moved amongst them.
“Beautiful, isn't it? Our congregation grows every day.” Bethany reached over with her free hand to pat Samrit's belly. “I'm sure it won't be long before it's your turn.”
There was again that strange sensation at the other woman's touch, but also an odd revulsion. It wasn't the same feeling as when she had looked into her prospective husband's liquid brown eyes. Maybe revulsion wasn't the word, but so many of her words had been lost when she had gone to the Bright Place – maybe because they were sinful.
“And what's beyond the ward, behind the sealed doors?” Samrit asked, hoping to distract Bethany. It seemed to work, as the other woman’s eyes clouded over.
“Through there? That's where... where some of those who have been found unworthy by the Bright Place are. They are kept safe and cared for until they can be...”
Bethany's voice trailed off, and something told Samrit not to press the point further, or to ask why they would put the unworthy so close to the next generation of the faithful. Something told her it was something she should find out.
Rule number six.
CHAPTER TWO - FIELDWORK
“Got something here.”
Having established that the jSpace facility was as deserted as the rest of the planet appeared to be, the team had got down to some proper intelligence gathering. Snoopy's drones had done the initial sweep of the colony site as soon as they arrived and had confirmed a lack of anything living in a twenty klick radius (much to Cahaya's disappointment). Now it came down to a detailed, hard-target search of the remnants, using both drones and eyeballs in case the drones had missed anything on the first cursory sweep. They'd started with the admin and security buildings, two of the few remaining buildings that were at least partially intact, and even then standing as fire-scorched skeletons.
Yvgena and Williams were searching what was left of the agri-tunnels. Whoever had trashed the settlement had done a real number on the production facility, not only burning the tunnels but throwing caustic chemicals over the plants and overturning the planters.
Yvgena was crouched in front of one of the long composite tubs. She put her shoulder into it and used the full strength of her squat body to shove it back onto its feet. Something hard and synthetic rolled out from under as she righted it.
Williams scooped it up. “Tac helmet. Security optimised.”
“Da. Standard IGC issue.”
“Bullet strike.”
“Da. Might not have been fatal.”
Williams pushed a gloved finger into the hole. It was at a pretty sharp angle, the bullet obviously hitting from the front. It could have been slowed enough and hit at the right angle that it would just have given the helmet's owner a bad headache rather than ruining their entire day. She upended the helmet and shook the loose growth substrate out of it. “Bloodstains.”
“Probably not enough to indicate a fatal compromise,” Yvgena suggested, taking the helmet and peering in. “No chunks of brain.”
Cahaya's icon blinked in the corner of her vision. “Go.” He'd be monitoring all of their feeds through Snoopy, lurking somewhere not far from Kora, who was providing overwatch for the team. Williams didn't like Kora much, found her hard to read, but she felt a lot safer with a battery of multi-function firepower ready to rain hate on anyone who came at them.
“Is the memchip intact?”
“Hard to say – some damage here, may not just have been to the helmet.”
“Bring it in and I'll hook it up.”
Williams killed the channel and rolled her eyes at Yvgena.
“Da – he's a little bit in love with her.”
Cahaya had spent most of the rest of the day with the helmet, cleaning the blood and fertiliser out, then carefully extracting the chip. It had been clipped by whatever old-fashioned slow-slug had defeated the ballistic protection (must have been a hell of a round), but using Snoopy’s suite of physical and virtual tools he'd been able to patch together at least some of Cane's remaining life after the pod had been launched.
“Girl likes to swear,” Miller commented as they clustered round the bot at basecamp. They'd moved from their initial setdown site after clearing the area and had set up in the ruins of the security building. Snoopy lurked on
top of a desk in the chief's office while they rest of them sat around on whatever seats they'd been able to salvage. Miller had hauled his foamform chair there.
Williams stirred her self-heating meal – Bondai shrimp stew, apparently – and glared at Miller. “Fucking right she does, mate.”
“She's smart, too,” Ortuz said. “She doesn't just suit up and charge them. She knows she can't kill them all, so she's just trying to survive and only takes them on when she has to.”
“If they had just left her alone...”
“Exactly, Yvgena. That's what makes me think they actually wanted her for something, wanted her alive. Look at the footage – we've all seen at least one incident where they could have put her down with lethal force but held off until they could try to grab her.”
“Yeah, boss, right up to the point where they try to drown her in shit and then shoot her in the head.”
Cahaya brought up the final few minutes of Cane's increasingly desperate struggle. She'd been in the tunnel system, probably having stashed her Achilles suit out in the desert, doing a bit of recon and trying to steal supplies. That had gone to shit when the colonists had emptied the waste reprocessing tanks into her subterranean world, forcing her to the surface.
She'd made a dash for the agri-tunnels, and that's when they'd finally caught up with her. The holo broke up at that point, starred with corrupted data and static, probably due to water damage. Cahaya had cleaned it up to the point where they could see her take down a colonist, the flare of the gunfire adding to the distortion, and then turn and be confronted by the woman they had identified as Cho. Erstwhile security chief turned head psycho, it seemed. The other woman's eyes had been hard and filled with hate, and she hadn't hesitated in shooting Cane with a massive handgun.
“Well, no theory is entirely perfect.”
**********
Samrit's outings with Bethany became more extensive as the weeks wore on and she grew stronger. She started to get a feel for the size and layout of this hidden colony, or at least the area immediately around the hospital.
“The city must be huge.” She was looking along one of the few open-air sections she'd seen so far, the base of a deep chasm. It seemed to be the main food-production area for the settlement – while the chasm top was narrow, enormous mirror arrays had been created to shine light onto the rows of vegetables and stripfields of corn.
All of it carefully set up to be invisible to anything but the most intense aerial surveillance.
Bethany smiled. “We number in our hundreds of thousand now, I think. Our home goes on for miles underground.”
“But why must we hide?”
“Why, Samrit, we are not hiding...” Bethany began.
“We must shield ourselves until our strength and our faith are sufficient that we may face a galaxy of unbelievers and not falter,” a thin, rasping voice cut across Samrit's guide (and friend?).
Bethany spun round with a gasp and fell to her knees, bowing her head. Samrit just stared at the man who had spoken – if he was a man. He looked horribly diseased, his body wasted but misshapen with swellings around his neck and nodules growing on his face, one almost closing his eye.
He stared back at her with his one good eye, leaning heavily on a staff for support. Bethany was gently tugging on the hem of Samrit's robe, but she found herself transfixed. “Our enemies are many, you see. We have been waiting for generations – generations without number! – for when the time is right for us to reclaim the stars for our lords. Until that time, we cannot risk discovery.”
He limped closer, and Samrit flinched at the sickly-sweet smell of his breath. “I am given to understand that you are important to this next step, young Samrit.” His eyes travelled up and down her shape. “Not as a mother, I think – “
Cold water coiled through her belly
“– but the ways of the Bright Ones are mysterious.” He turned to Bethany, laid one gnarled hand on top of her head in gentle benediction. “You will be ready for the seed soon, my child, and will make an excellent mother, however.”
He started to hobble away, then turned and directed an almost angry glare at Samrit. “This one must learn our ways, of respect and deference. Put her to work in the fields so that she may learn humility through labour. And join her, so you may learn to discharge your own duties properly.”
“Yes, Honoured One,” Bethany managed to whisper. She surged to her feet as soon as the grotesque thing had hobbled back into his subterranean world. Samrit turned to her, opened her mouth to speak, and was shocked when the other woman slapped her across the mouth.
“That was Salvatore, a Near-Raptured, one of the highest!” she hissed. “Even a newly Saved like you should know to kneel before him!”
Samrit's hand flew to her face, feeling a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. “I – I – “
“Oh, Samrit,” Bethany cried, eyes going wide. “I'm so sorry I let my temper get the better of me! The Bright Way is the way of forgiveness.” Samrit found herself drawn into her arms and held tightly. “Please. From now on, do as I do. And try not to ask so many questions.”
“Ok. Following your lead and sticking to you like glue from now on. Please forgive me for getting you punished.”
“Oh, the fields aren't quite the hard labour the Near-Raptured imagine them to be!” Bethany trilled, all hints of the hissing anger of a moment ago gone. There was something – sadness? fear? – behind her eyes, though. “Not since the Unsaved joined us, anyway.”
**********
The next day the team took Snoopy on another outing, up to the agri-tunnels. While his initial sweeps hadn't turned up a lot of evidence, now that they had a more defined area to work with, Cahaya could unleash his deep-analysis tools. Bee-like drones dotted around, seemingly at random, flashing lasers and other systems at things, while little crawling bots combed through the wreckage, starting where Yvgena had found the helmet and spiralling outwards, sampling and testing everything.
Miller was doing his thing as well. His was an older art, picked up in a violent youth in the DisUS. He claimed he'd learned it from an old man in the wilds of Montana, but the story varied depending on how many Bourbons the big man had poured into himself.
And all the while, one of Kora's drones – a blunt arrowhead of a craft, its purpose more obviously warlike than Snoopy's systems – circled overhead, a watchful guardian for them all.
“Ya, definitely took her further back into the datoran tinggi,” Cahaya offered, gesturing vaguely towards the broken mesa that ranged away above them.
“The sniffer dog agrees,” Dirchs grunted over the unit comm. He was backstopping Miller – the insult was good natured, the two of them old comrades from the Commonwealth Marines before they'd gone up and across into specops.
“Then, like Jesus, we must go into the high places?”
“Who the fuck is this Jesus character you keep mentioning, boss?”
“That at least is something you'd have learnt in the DisUS, Miller,” Ortuz told him sternly. “Alright. Kora, relocate to the agri-tunnels and link in with Snoopy. I want an expanding sweep out to twenty klicks as soon as you can get set up. Cahaya, you'll backstop. The rest of you, gear up and get ready to move if Kora finds anything.”
**********
The fields may not have been hard labour, in Bethany's opinion, but Samrit quickly realised she had no aptitude for growing things, or indeed any love for the work.
The supervisors put her and Bethany to work together in the long rows of vegetables, obviously judging them not fit for the harder labour of the corn. A part of Samrit's mind wondered why this work could not be mechanised, but instinct told her that Bethany's saintly patience had run thinner than normal under the hot reflected sunlight.
“How long do these punishment details last?” she asked her mentor on the fourth day, straightening up and trying to stretch the kinks out of her lower back and then shoulders.
“We are not being punished, Samrit. We
are being given the opportunity to repent and learn our duties.”
Almost without thinking about it, Sam let herself drop forward onto all fours and then stretched herself into an inverted V, sighing as the pose had the desired effect. She felt that familiar itch at the back of her mind, a voice trying to tell her something, a remembrance of her past life.
She rolled herself back up to her feet and realised Bethany was staring at her, eyes slightly wide. “What?”
“You were saying something when you did that. It sounded like praying, but not to the Bright Ones.”
Samrit felt her gut tighten in fear that she had somehow done something terribly wrong, that she had pushed this kind woman and her only friend away from her. “I was just stretching! That was all it was, a good way to stretch!”
Bethany rolled her own shoulders, speculation replacing horror in her eyes. “It did look good – show me what you did?”
“Well, I guess you could stand by me and follow what I do?”
There was something oddly familiar and comforting about the almost ritualistic stretching done in concert with another – right up until Bethany's foot slipped and she toppled sideways into Samrit, sending them both tumbling. They landed in a heap, both laughing, and somehow Samrit found herself with her arm round the other woman's waist as they lay next to each other, face to face.
They stared at each other for a moment, Samrit enjoying just how deeply blue Bethany’s eyes were. The sound of approaching feet broke the moment, and they clambered to their feet quickly, brushing themselves off.
Samrit's blood froze in her veins when she saw who was approaching, though she could not say why. A stocky, dark-haired woman led a particularly ragged, dirty group of people into the cornfield next to the vegetables the two women were tending.
“Alright, filth, get to work!” the woman snarled. The work crew – dressed mostly in ragged remnants of clothing that bore no resemblance to the simple, dignified attire of the Saved – dragged tools from a cart one was hauling and with no enthusiasm spread out into the field.