by Erik Hanberg
Shaw felt his breathing slowly return to normal. It was still too bright to see anything. He tried to focus on what he was hearing, but it was impossible to make out. The light and the noise were overwhelming compared to the tomb of the capsule. There were several voices around him—he got the sense he was in the middle of a small crowd, but so far only one voice had spoken directly to him. He strained but couldn’t pick up anything identifiable in their language. He listened to the noises beyond the low voices. The cacophony was melting away, and he could sense a hum of activity from all directions that he recognized immediately. Earth. A city, likely a major city. How was that possible?
“Would you like some water, Brother Byron?” The voice asked.
Shaw nodded. Brother Byron?
He felt a cup against his lips and took a sip of warm water. He risked opening one eye. Squinting into the light, he could barely see the man offering him the glass. He closed his eye against the glare and kept drinking.
“Thank you,” Shaw said.
“It is I who should be thanking you.”
“For what?”
“For coming in the hour of our greatest need.”
Shaw opened both eyes again and studied the man more carefully. A mop of grey curls sat on top of a long thin face with an angular chin. Under the chin was a white tunic with a bright red cross at its center. The cross had serifs on the ends of each bar. Not the Red Cross then. What did it mean?
“Are you some sort of a priest?”
“A monk, actually. And a knight. You may call me Brother Florian.”
“What happened?” Shaw asked, then clarified. “Up on the Walden. Are Ellie and Jane OK?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Nothing. It’s like I blacked out after I…”
“Stabbed Taveena Parr. Yes, we know. I’m being instructed not to tell you anything yet about what happened on your ship.”
“Instructed?” Shaw hollered.
“I apologize, Brother Byron. All will be revealed in due course, but we can’t linger here. Our common enemy has already deployed missiles, drones, and a bot swarm toward our location. Our countermeasures are holding, but it’s never wise to stay out in the open for so long. And we can’t count on the ruins to protect us.”
“Common enemy?” Shaw asked. “Ruins?” He opened his eyes wide—the light had finally ceased to bother him—and looked around. Through the small group of men around him (all monks as well, he noticed) he could see that he was surrounded on all sides by familiar crumbling arches. The arches were thousands of years old, once a center of gladiator sports and Christian persecution. And he had crash landed right in the middle of it.
“No…” Shaw whispered.
“The Eternal City,” Florian said, with a sweep of his hand. “Welcome back to Rome.”
Brother Florian and his entourage were whisking Shaw back to the Vatican in a vehicle that was part limousine and part tank. Thick windows separated him from the outside world as the vehicle rushed through the wide—and startlingly empty—Roman boulevards.
“Why am I in Rome?” Shaw asked. “Did Taveena mean for me to come here? Or someone else? Or was it dumb luck?”
“I can’t say right now,” Florian said. “And strap in. We’re expecting incoming fire in ninety seconds.”
“OK, then explain this. How are you both a priest and a knight?” Shaw asked, sliding into the seat harness and locking it tightly. He glanced at his arms and hands as he did so. His Altair ring and wrap were both gone. Once again, he couldn’t get the answers he needed himself.
“I am a member of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, but most people just know us as the Knights Templar. The order was formed originally a thousand years ago as a military order during the Crusades but it was disbanded a few centuries later. After Italian Disunification and our righteous battle with the Northerners began, the Holy See reformed the order. Now we help protect both the lives and the souls of everyone in the Papal States.”
Shaw tried to process that. “Why did you say I’d come in your hour of greatest need?”
“I told you—we have a common enemy. We’re in a battle with the Lattice cartel—the same people who voted to kill you and your family if you weren’t off the Walden in a week. Friendly kind of people.”
“So Ellie and Jane are still alive?” Shaw clarified. It was the logical assumption, but Shaw needed confirmation. But Florian stayed quiet. “I still don’t fully understand why the cartel is fighting against the Papal States,” Shaw continued, hoping he could get Florian to let something else slip. “The Italian civil war predates the Lattice—as I know better than anyone. Why are they involved?”
“The cartels want to save face. The civil war reignited during the chaos of the Dark Eighteen Days without the Lattice—much like the violence elsewhere. But where most of the world quieted after the Lattice was restored, our war has only intensified. The Lattice stops war, they used to say? What a terrible joke.
“Zella Galway and the rest of the Lattice cartel want this war to be over. And fast. They’ve been arming our enemy for months. And unfortunately, we are losing. We once had half of Italy, but we’ve lost significant ground. Our defenses are continually shrinking. At this pace, in a day or two, all we will control is what you can see from the top of Saint Peter’s Basilica.”
“Incoming!” a man in the front of the tank shouted. Shaw heard immense booms and saw bright flashes on either side of the tank. It rocked perilously at one moment but didn’t swerve as it kept on its path.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Shaw said a few seconds after the blasts had stopped.
“Most of Rome is under our defensive shielding against the satellite network of space-based lasers that the cartel runs. That doesn’t leave them much for an assault. They usually don’t use missiles because they don’t want to damage the ruins—although I guess they made an exception for you.”
“Lovely,” Shaw said. “What do they use when they don’t use missiles? You said something about swarms?”
“Yes, Bot swarms and drones. We see any attack coming, obviously, thanks to the Lattice. And we have our own bot swarms and drones we can deploy, which usually destroy them before they get to us. In short, the AI that runs our defenses and the cartel’s AI that runs their assaults are reasonably good at cancelling each other out.”
“That sounds awfully pointless.”
“It is. But how long did the troops spend in trenches in World War I just looking at each other? As in Ecclesiastes: ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’”
“In other words: Same shit, different day.”
Florian nodded, conceding the point, if not the phrasing.
“Tell me, why else has the cartel sided with Northern Italy against the Catholics and the Papal States?”
“Why else?” Florian asked. “I don’t understand, I just told you.”
“’Trying to save face?’ That’s not enough of a reason. Why else are they fighting you?”
Silence in the vehicle. Florian was closed-lipped and no one else was going to challenge him. Or were they? Shaw looked around the cabin, seeking eye contact. He found a young monk, and his eyes rested on him.
“We provoked them,” the young monk said after a few seconds of Shaw’s scrutiny.
All the other eyes in the vehicle turned to him.
The young man was even younger than the rest of the monks. He was more somber than they were, and his eyes didn’t leave the floor once he’d volunteered the information. With his dark hair and olive complexion, he was the only one of the group that struck Shaw as actually being Italian.
“Provoked them?” Shaw echoed.
“We have been researching ways to destroy the Lattice. Again,” the young man said. “We were starting to get somewhere, when—”
“How?” Shaw interrupted. “I spent months working the problem with two of the smartest people wh
o have ever lived. How did you make progress when they couldn’t?”
The young man deferred to Florian, who said, “We don’t know if we truly made progress at all. There was a direction of research we were pursuing that triggered alarm in the head of Ada Dillon and other Lattice scientists. That was when they started funding the Northerners’ war against us.”
“So you don’t know if it’s actually a workable solution to take down the Lattice,” Shaw confirmed.
“We know we started down a path that spooked them. That’s all we know,” Florian answered.
“Any idea how long it would take to get to the end of the path?”
“None. The research team and I have studied the problem from every angle. We think we have a workable idea in practice but we don’t know how it would actually be implemented.
“And it is beside the point anyway,” Florian added before Shaw could interject. “We’re not trying to destroy the Lattice anymore. There’s no time and it wasn’t getting us anywhere anyway.”
“What are you trying to do now then?”
“Survive.”
Shaw thought. “So it’s not that the Catholics have become anti-Lattice Zealots all of a sudden. You’re just throwing anything you have against the wall and seeing what sticks.” He shook his head.
The young man said, “The Holy See believes—”
Florian cleared his throat and the young man stopped. “Brother Alberto forgets that he does not speak for the Holy See, only the Holy See can do that.”
“Yes, Brother Florian,” Alberto said, lowering his eyes.
“The Lattice is a tool for our enemy,” Florian said. “Isn’t that a common battlefield strategy? To jam your enemy’s communications, even if it takes out yours as well.”
“You saw what happened the last time the Lattice went down. You were willing to risk all that again for your cause?”
“Our cause is righteous,” Florian said, his chin held high.
Shaw did not doubt that he believed it. Dangerous. “Catholic terrorists kidnapped me when I was a child, so forgive me for saying that you’re full of shit.”
“Not every Catholic freedom fighter agrees with what—”
“Terrorists,” Shaw said acidly. “Catholic terrorists kidnapped me. Not freedom fighters.”
“Said the man who rained spheres down on Geneva, who smashed the buildings inside the lead dome in Nevada causing everyone to flee, and who caused a hotel to catastrophically blow up in orbit. Surely you know more than anyone that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
“The spheres over Geneva weren’t targeted at anyone, they were targeted at the lake! No one died from a falling sphere! No one died in Nevada! The hotel—”
“—was a tragedy, of course. And it was an accident. But you would not have us judge you by it, and we shouldn’t be judged by the actions of everyone who agrees with us, either. In fact…” Florian kept speaking but Shaw tried to tune him out.
He looked around at the six monks in the vehicle with him instead of responding. Florian was the oldest of them. The four monks packed around him were young and eager, bright-eyed with their confidence in their cause. Of course, they were. They were told they were knights. Even Shaw felt a tremble in himself at that word. The idea of being a knight—a real knight—was powerful and alluring.
But Shaw remembered the other young men he’d met who were just as passionate. Erling who had killed himself to destroy the Lattice. Ono, who had died in the control room of the Nevada Lattice Installation trying to do the same thing. Roddy, who had been sucked up by the demagogue Bouchard in Poligny and who had cheered for the execution of Shaw’s friends.
What was it that Grace had said to him during their interview on her airship? “There’s no end to what you can get a young man to do. All in the name of a righteous cause.” He wondered if that were true of these men as well. Only Alberto kept his head down, as if he were embarrassed to be in the vehicle with Shaw.
“All we want is a haven for Catholics. The rest of the world may have turned their backs on God, but not here,” Florian was saying. “Vatican City couldn’t hold everyone seeking refuge, so Innocent the Fourteenth revoked the Lateran Treaty and laid claim to all the lands the Holy See had claimed before. Eventually, we seek—”
“Skip it. I’m not interested,” Shaw said. “The only thing I’m interested in is the fate of my family.”
“We are almost to the Vatican. The Holy See will answer all your questions in due time.”
Shaw’s eyebrows arched. He was going to have an audience with the pope?
Shaw was escorted into a dim room with high arched ceilings. The two members of the Swiss Guard who had accompanied him stepped back and waited at the door. Shaw moved toward the center of the room. From what he could tell, he was alone. He walked a few paces forward and studied the walls and the ceiling, which were covered in frescos.
The Sistine Chapel had been closed off to tourists from outside the Papal States ever since Disunification. Shaw wondered how many non-Catholics like himself had been allowed in the room over the last thirty-plus years. He would not have been surprised if he had been the first. He wandered until he was directly below Adam and God, the only fresco he recognized.
From the other side of the chapel, another door opened and four Swiss Guards entered, flanking a short man in a white robe and miter. “His Holiness, Pope Clement the Fifteenth,” one of the guards announced.
Then the guards too fell back against the wall, and the pope continued walking toward Shaw.
“Good evening, my son.”
Shaw opened his mouth, and then closed it again. “My son?” He finally echoed.
“I may be thirty, but as with all men on Earth, you are still my son,” Pope Clement answered.
“And what happened to my wife and daughter?”
“We’ll get to that. But please address me as Your Holiness.”
“I’m not Catholic, or even a Christian.”
“And yet even the American president would address the King of England as ‘Your Highness’ despite your war of independence. It’s respectful. And since I suspect we are about to have an argument, treating me respectfully is a good way to start.” Clement smiled, and surprised Shaw when he sat on one of the shallow steps in the middle of the chapel. He leaned back on his hands and looked up at the famous ceiling. “This is the room where they elected me, you know.”
“My family,” Shaw insisted. “What’s happening? Where are they? …Your Holiness.”
“I’m happy to report that Ellie and Jane are both alive. And healthy. I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news, however. They’re still in orbit. You’re the only one back on Earth.”
Shaw was squeezing his eyes closed, enraged. He’d failed. And now he was down here and his wife and daughter were still in orbit. He had escaped the cartel’s ticking clock, but they hadn’t.
“So Taveena… lived?” Shaw asked.
“She’s alive. She had scissors buried eight inches in her chest and yet she still was able to cold cock you so fast you don’t even remember it,” Clement answered. “She ripped the IV of blood from your wife’s arm and jabbed it into her own artery. Wulf and a small medical drone sewed her chest up. I’m amazed she survived. You too, for that matter.”
“Taveena needs Ellie and Jane as hostages,” he said, “but if she didn’t need me for military strategy, then I was disposable. Wait, I was disposable. Why didn’t she kill me? Why am I here?”
“Wulf argued that sending you away without the chance to hold your child was a fate worse than death. That you would be most punished by trying in vain to save your family from Earth than to share their fate.”
Shaw started breathing heavily again. “He’s right. I would have rather died on the ship with them.”
Clement clucked his tongue. “It’s a sin to wish you were dead, my son. But the truth is, his argument didn’t sway her. She sent you to Rome because she thought you would tr
y to save your family from the Lattice cartel—and herself in the process.”
Shaw snorted. “That sounds more like Taveena. But how am I supposed to do that?”
“By joining us, of course. We are at war with the same Lattice cartel that is threatening to kill your family. Clearly God is not done with you yet.”
Shaw stared at the young man on the floor. “Thirty,” Shaw repeated, shaking his head.
“Join me,” Clement said, patting the floor next to him. “How many people get a chance to sit in this room and just stare at Michelangelo’s works?”
Shaw hesitated a moment before sitting on the step next to him.
The pope smiled. “When my predecessor Pope Innocent the fourteenth passed, he was one hundred and four years old—the oldest pope by a decade. He had presided over Disunification quite ably but he passed during the eighteen days the Lattice was down. The conclave elected me just two weeks later—they believed that they needed a wartime pope to lead the Church during this troubling time.”
“And that was you?”
“I once was a chaplain in the Polish military before I became a bishop. That was more military experience than anyone else in the college of bishops had. With the war continuing—escalating, really—they felt that I would be their best hope, despite my age. Or perhaps because of it.”
“And are you their best hope?”
Clement was momentarily flustered. “Time will tell.”
“The pope is in over his head—is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Shaw caught his look and added, “Uh, Your Holiness.”
“Not at all, in fact. Consider that at the moment of our greatest need, the military strategist who has dealt the biggest blow to the cartel in history has landed in our laps.” Pope Clement put his hands up as if to say the conclusion was obvious. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“I wasn’t sent by God,” Shaw barked. “I was sent by Taveena Parr. And she has my family.”
“His work can be done through sinners just as well as saints.”
“You are awfully Catholic, do you know that?” Shaw said.