“I don’t see how saving the planet from destruction caused a war.”
“Imagine for a moment if no scientist had ever come up with the idea of global warming.”
“No one would notice that the earth was inexplicably warming?” Michael asked.
“I’m asking you to imagine. Maybe they blamed it on the natural fluctuations of the Sun. Anyway, the earth would have continued to steam along, utterly dependent on oil. Eventually, as it became scarcer and more expensive to procure, people would have looked to other sources of readily available power.
“They would have turned to coal because they would be unafraid of the carbon. They would have turned to natural gas because they wouldn’t worry about methane escaping the fracking process heating up the atmosphere. In short, everyone would have had enough energy without needing to fight over oil in Antarctica, they probably would never have even looked for it there. It was the scarcity of energy that led inexorably to that conflict.”
“Okay, I see your point,” Michael said.
“I have come to believe that this fear of climate change was the Beast predicted in Revelation. Without that fanaticism, we never would have needed Marks, we never would have adopted a one-world currency, and the four horsemen never would have come to kill Billions of people with the war and the Culling. In short, worship of the Beast brought about all of that.”
“Be careful, Priest,” Luthor cautioned. “You’re dangerously close to sounding like a 2180 fanatic. Take it from me, you don’t want that.”
“The difference between me and them, is that I don’t dispute the science nor presume myself a judge.”
“Or blow anybody up,” Thaddeus added.
“Certainly not. I simply observe and make connections to the scripture. For me and for many others,” Roc nodded to Tanya, “including your parents, these prophesies have challenged and changed us. How else could they be so true if not for the influence of God?”
“Roc, I’m a scientist,” Luthor said, “as a scientist I’ll always concede a good point when I hear one. Your prophesies are impressively coherent. My issue is, and always has been, with God. What sort of all-powerful being would allow two billion of his creatures to starve to death without stopping it? You claim he is loving, but those are not the acts of a good person. Good people do not allow evil to happen if they can prevent it. The God you believe in would certainly have the power to stop whatever he wanted. Imagine if I sat back and just sold 126 to the highest bidder, instead of working to make sure everyone could have it. I would be starting another future war.
“We will probably fail, but each of us has already risked our lives several times over trying to stop evil. God didn’t even try. He just let everyone slaughter each other. So even if he did exist, I would never believe in him, because I will not follow an evil being.”
“You would blame the acts of man on God?” Roc asked quietly. “It was not God who killed so many, it was us. We built bombs and missiles and guns and shot them at each other. We fought over something as frivolous as oil. Who are we to blame God for our stupidity?”
“But God did not stop it!”
“No, he did not,” Roc replied. “What would it have taken for Him to stop such a war? God would have had to restrain, stop, change, and direct individuals and change their decisions. In short, He would have had to remove their free will. But free will is God’s ultimate gift to us; unfortunately, many of us use it to choose evil instead of good.”
“You weren’t there,” Luthor said, “you can’t possibly understand how horrible it was. If your God exists, he should have done whatever it took to stop it.”
“Let me ask you Luthor, for what would you give up your free will? What would be so valuable that you would trade it so that someone else could pull your every string? Your every thought?”
Luthor didn’t respond. He sensed Roc was trying to corner him into a place he had no interest in going.
“Through his great mercy, the Lord will never take our free will. It is too important; He let His only son die to protect it. Without free will we would be robots incapable of love, goodness, or unfortunately—evil. Humanity’s sin is ours alone and we are the only ones who are responsible for it. Do not blame God.
“But perhaps His greatest mercy is that He is willing to use our war and our sin to exact His wrath. Instead of supernaturally destroying us on top of our war—as we deserve for our millennia of wickedness—He instead accepts the war that we chose anyway as enough to punish us.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you priest?” Luthor said.
“I have had almost 50 years of ministry. I took a vow of celibacy for most of that. I have had plenty of time to consider the problem of evil and the prophesies of the end times.”
Luthor did not engage any more, but walked on in silence. Mercifully no one tried to talk with him. Luthor hated talking about God, religion, or faith. He didn’t really know why, but it made him angry. Today he was even angrier, because for the first time in his life he had met someone who could go toe-to-toe with him in debate. Not that he had any intention of converting. Leave that to Tanya, she had kept one foot in the church even after they all fled to the country. She wouldn’t move in with him, even wanted to get married in the name of a God that she sometimes claimed she didn’t believe in. At least Luthor was consistent. He knew there could be no good god that allowed what happened to him in Antarctica, regardless of Roc’s arguments.
Chapter 18:
Outskirts of New York City, United States of the West
Vika, why aren’t you a Saber anymore?” Michael asked. Again. Luthor was thankful Michael hadn’t shown such persistence in questioning his own past. “Why leave the coolest job in the world to be the secretary for a professor?”
“Careful, Laramy…” Vika replied.
“If you’re going to punch me, then get on with it,” he said defiantly, “but I’m not going to stop asking. Is it so wrong that I want to know the person who’s saved my life?”
Vika softened a little. “Fine, but I will only tell you once. I don’t like recalling it.”
“I won’t bother you again.”
“That is a promise you can’t keep,” Vika said, “you bother everyone, everyday.”
Thaddeus clapped his hands. “Oh snap. Nice burn!”
“It happened after I was recruited to the Black Sabers. Their sniper had been killed and my perfect service record made me the obvious replacement.
“We were only given the toughest assignments. We trained together constantly, usually it was a month of preparation for each op. Over time the members of our unit grew very close.”
Luthor definitely didn’t like where this was going. It was only a matter of time before they asked him for his story. Anti-Luthor rattled his cage, screaming in Luthor’s mind to let him out.
“How is that bad?” Michael asked.
“Men find me beautiful,” Vika said, “and I was always the only woman in our unit which made it worse. After a while Captain Jacques became… obsessed with me. But I turned down all his advances. I didn’t think it would be wise to become involved with a member of my team. And he was arrogant. He thought that because he led the Black Sabers everyone should worship him, so he did not interest me.”
“What happened?”
“He wasn’t used to being turned down. So, one night in the shower room he cornered me,” Vika said.
Luthor ground his teeth in anger. He wanted all bastards like that strung up by their balls and burned alive.
“He said if I didn’t have sex with him, things would go badly for me. I rejected him anyway. Then he tried to rape me.”
“That polluter deserves to die,” Michael said, sounding every bit as angry as Luthor felt.
“He did,” Vika said, “before he was able to…enter me, I… I killed him.”
Luthor hadn’t seen that coming, but was delighted to hear that the man got what he deserved and that Vika had not been violated.
&n
bsp; “We fought. I crushed his skull against bathroom piping… then I broke both his legs… and his back, and … castrated him.”
“Holy crap,” Michael breathed.
“I confessed everything to his superior officer. I told him he tried to rape me. But Colonel Dimarin had been close friends with Jacques. They had worked together for years. I think Dimarin had hand-picked him to lead the Sabers. Unfortunately, he was also the one officiating my Court Martial.”
“They had to see it was self-defense,” Tanya said.
“No. No one believed that a woman would be capable of killing Captain Jacques himself in unarmed combat. Dimarin ignored the evidence and believed a made up a story that I had been plotting to kill him.”
“What evidence?” Tanya asked.
“Jacques had hidden-camera videos of me in the shower that he liked to watch. One was recording when I killed him.”
“Damn…” Michael said. “They saw what happened and still ignored it?”
“Dimarin liked his job too much to defend me. He sent me to prison—reduced to five years because of my ‘excellent service record,’ and I was dishonorably discharged. When I got out, Eli offered me a job and a place to stay.”
“I’m sorry, Vika,” Tanya said, giving the taller woman a hug. “Thank you for helping us.” Vika stood awkwardly, as if she had no idea what exactly a hug was.
“Do you think Dimarin is still running the Sabers?” Luthor asked.
“Possibly. But it has been six years, he has probably been promoted to general by now for his excellent service record.”
“But he could be the one behind all of this.”
“He could move the Sabers around Europe. But I do not know why he would want to steal your research.”
“That’s easy,” Luthor said, “it’s worth trillions of credits. That’s trillions with a T, if he gets a monopoly on it.”
“But that does not explain how he had access to your phone calls with Eli or why he would have an applied materials professor bugged in the first place.”
If not for the phone tap, Dimarin seemed to be a likely candidate for who’d framed and chased them. He had access to the Sabers, and presumably, the means to deploy them. But it didn’t make sense why or how he would have spied on Eli to know that Luthor had something worth stealing.
“What about those helicopter guys you shot?” Michael added. “How could a European official get that many people to the States? I would think there would be a lot of red tape to get a smogging helicopter in here.”
Vika just shook her head.
“The one thing that seems clear at this point,” Luthor said, “is that we really don’t know enough about the Sabers, even with Vika. Hopefully, Qwiz can uncover more.”
“Knowing who is irrelevant, Tenrel. Men chase us, we kill them. We stay alive.”
“When you put it like that,” Michael said, “it really doesn’t seem to matter. Of course, when we have Queen Badass herself on our team, I like our odds.”
Vika frowned in reply.
As they progressed away from the city-center the surroundings became ever dingier and unkempt. The buildings rising up around them no longer soared to astronomic heights. Brick and concrete chips littered the ground from where they had fallen off their sides as if the inhabitants of this quarter were trying to knock the buildings down with a chisel. Multicolored graffiti plastered every open wall and more than a few that weren’t open. Fewer solar farms had been built over the road, meaning fewer high-end storefronts above them and fewer businesses overall.
The culture of the homeless clustering the streets changed too. The rag-clad men and women that prowled these streets began appearing feral instead of pathetic. They hunted and stalked; they were underfed and dangerous. They stopped under a solar farm for the night. It was a mercy that the theft of money had become impossible since the advent of the CPI chips or they would have all been dead by morning.
#
The next morning Vika approached Luthor. The stench of suburbians and very hard concrete had made sleep elusive. It was the worst of both worlds, his intermittent periods of unconsciousness had been pock-marked by dreams of Antarctica. He woke up more than once after seeing blood on his hands. He was tired and frustrated and not in the mood to talk.
“Tell me, Tenrel, what happened to you during the war?”
“Why do you ask?” he said carefully. He slapped another lock on Anti-Luthor just in case; he would not let that bastard out if he could help it. He didn’t want to take another swing at her.
“Call it fairness, call it the soldier’s code. I told you why I am broken, so now you share why you are broken.”
Luthor caught Tanya listening. He couldn’t tell her what happened, she was scared of him already. She’d leave him if she knew the rest. “What makes you think I am broken?”
She raised her damn eyebrow. “Don’t play games with me, Tenrel. You lose control often, you are a paratrooper who is afraid of heights, and you cry out every night. Or are you going to try to tell me that is normal for Americans?”
Years ago, he had discovered that the optimum sleep ratio was about four or five hours of sleep per night. If he did that, he minimized his dream time while eliminating most effects of sleep deprivation. Of course, even a single dream could ruin his day. Luthor could only assume Vika had a similar problem which is why she knew what his cries meant.
He glanced at Tanya again, she was still eavesdropping—so was everyone else for that matter. “I don’t like to talk about it.” Luthor decided to study the pot-holed pavement that hadn’t been replaced in twenty years intently.
“Not good enough, Tenrel.”
“I’m sorry you lost your career because of some horny commando, but that doesn’t mean I have to tell you about the worst smogging times of my life!” Luthor realized he was shouting and pointedly stared away from the others. Two homeless fought next to a subway entrance over a piece of edible trash.
“How many times do I have to save your life? Three, four before you will talk?”
Luthor felt like a cornered animal. My life is my own damn it! I don’t have to tell anyone about anything if they save me or not! I will not relive those goddamn memories again. If I tell anyone, I will have to hear about it for the rest of my life. Luthor snapped yet another padlock on his Anti-Self just to make sure it didn’t break out again.
“It’s a bad idea to open up that part of me. You won’t like what comes out.”
“Everyone has baggage,” Vika interjected, “the question is what you do with it.”
Roc turned to them. “Indeed. I have chosen to lay mine at the cross. You might consider doing the same, Luthor.”
“I will continue to carry mine,” Vika said, “it makes me stronger.”
Roc nodded in respect to the sturdy, determined woman.
“Jesus never showed up when we needed him in Antarctica, Priest. He isn’t strong enough to handle mine,” Luthor said.
#
Somewhere in the Suburbs
Water from the recent rain dripped off the rain gutters, plinking like a thousand cowbells as they emptied roofs. None of the streetlights worked in this area, but the ambient city light still glistened off the wet surfaces giving the area an ominous glow. Only a few barred windows were illuminated. Roc had assured Tanya that each of those rooms were certainly full, but if people lived out here, artificial light wasn’t a luxury they could afford—not to mention it was the middle of the night. Still, she wished there were some other sign of life. No homeless were visible in this quarter, they gravitated toward downtown where there were more scraps to find.
“Jose’s a broker of pretty much anything illegal,” Thaddeus told them, “and none of the other gangs bother him because they don’t want to mess with the Dog Pound. He’s also got his own security. He’d give worse than he got if anybody crossed him.”
Movement flashed in the periphery of her vision. It could have been her imagination, but it looked like a sligh
tly darker shadow had flitted across an alley. Solitary gun shots echoed off the graffitied brick walls like thunderclaps, proclaiming the danger before the storm. Tanya shivered. Eerie didn’t fully describe the feeling of being on the periphery of the city limits. She wished there were a word that described the nostalgia she felt for a lost age combined with the fear of being in the broken, dangerous form of that same place in the present. Alas, there was no such word to her knowledge, but that was the emotion that beat in her breast. Fear for her life and regret for the apostasy of oil economics.
She stuck close to Luthor as Thadd led them deeper into territory controlled ever more exclusively by gangs.
“Tread carefully, brothers and sisters,” Roc said, “we’re now in Dog Pound territory.”
“What are they anyway?” Michael asked, “a gang or something?”
“Something like that. Just way more powerful. DeShawn used to murder people for them,” Thaddeus said, “they’ll kill us if they think they can get half a credit’s worth of food for it.”
Tanya found it ironic that the carps seemed content to let the Markless kill each other in brutal gang violence, but if anyone started burning large amounts of wood or fossil fuels for heat, well, that was a different story. Not that anything could burn on a night like this one. The carps could also be summoned if there were some rampant human rights violation like slavery taking place. Interestingly, they didn’t consider murder a human rights violation. The USW had come a long way from the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” upon which the old United States had been founded. Now they based law on “Safety, Security, and Sustainability.” The death of Markless and suburban refugees affected all three of those areas positively. One less desperate person on the streets meant greater safety for both the people, better security for the state, and it meant more food and resources for everyone else, so it was overlooked.
“Right around this corner.” Thaddeus led them through an archway that had once been a functioning traffic light. Now devoid of purpose it had been turned into a billboard for Ostafal’s wares.
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