She rose early every day and worked with her father, mother, and their close advisor, George Anderson, well into the night. Recruiting replacements for the defectors. Finalizing locations for new churches, and then getting them up and running. Overseeing construction. Security. Travel. Logistics. Moving money. She had even been called on to help with doctrine and sermons—trying to fill the void left by Brother Joshua, who was now God-knows-where.
Despite the Ellies providing state-of-the-art comms to help things along—or maybe because of it—there were also persistent miscommunications and misunderstandings. She soon landed the role of peacemaker, rushing hither and yon to put out fires, smooth ruffled feathers, and broker compromises.
Her account, technically, was the Templeton family. Since her first romantic encounter with Carlos Templeton, son and heir to the mighty Senator Ashley Templeton, Jasmine had been dispatched to Oregonia Province more times than she could count. Her amorous time with Carlos was an adequate side-benefit to the trips. But most of the friction between the PetrolChurch—more specifically her father—and the Ellies took her far afield more than she liked. The Gang of Seven, their oversight committee, were spread all over the Commonwealth, and they were moving almost constantly, while the rapid spread of the PetrolChurch demanded ever more shuttle diplomacy.
The only other plus in her evolving position was that she was in semi-regular contact with her brother, who enjoyed special favor with their Ellie benefactors. Even that was bittersweet, though, as their interactions were almost always on a business footing, dealing with some administrivia, conflict, or problems both weighty and banal.
Among the stresses in her dealings with her brother was the pressure to deliver quick wins, for their impatient Ellie overlords. The mad rush for progress too often yielded new setbacks and crises, foisting even more work upon her.
The PetrolChurch’s first foray into the humanitarian relief business had been a disaster, with their donated Consortium airship attacked, overturned, and burned by migrant-refugees. The Ellies admonished her family for their reckless handling of Consortium equipment. The death of one of their beloved Ministers, Dawnita Jackson, murdered by the mob, didn’t even seem to register with the Gang of Seven—infuriating her father. As both sides fumed, Jasmine was certain the entire deal would unravel. She half hoped it would. But a rupture with the Ellies would prove a losing outcome for her family. Retribution may not come right away, but it would certainly come. Only her brother’s rotation to the Consortium defused the airship crisis, but the arrangement to pull Alias away felt to her like hostage taking, and there were more crises in waiting.
Her father’s natural impulse—driven by his Christian sense of mission and fueled by his new-found access to resources—was to surge to alleviate the humanitarian crises that cropped up all over the Commonwealth. Even after the first disastrous relief mission, he jumped at the chance to send supplies to the victims of clashes between Chinese refugees and native Latino and Korean enclaves in California-Sur. Makeshift hospitals in the shanties of Old Chicago, where food riots were brutally crushed by the Great Lakes Provincial Militia. Medicines to the site of a terrorist explosion at the rail hub to the Commonwealth’s capital in Winnipeg.
Her father increasingly acted without the approval of the Gang of Seven, knowing they would reject most of the aid missions. For their part, the Ellies increasingly delivered their direction through her brother Alias, forcing him to intervene time and again and countermand their father’s direction. The Gang of Seven were increasingly determined that the PetrolChurch—to include her father, all his ministers, and all their assets—not deviate from its specified mission. Her family was to set up churches and apothecaries in designated locations, distribute approved pharmas, sermonize to pacify populations deemed restive by the Ellies, and keep their noses out of any other business going on at the churches, which they started referring to as facilities.
Jasmine shared her father’s inclination to focus on the suffering unleashed by the vicissitudes of the world, and she shared his heartache the many times they ultimately did nothing. She took some comfort in knowing they were doing more tangible good, for more people, than they had ever been able to do as one of the innumerable transient ministries crisscrossing the Commonwealth. With more work falling onto her shoulders every day, she was also silently relieved to avoid an even more crushing load.
As important, Jasmine was reticent to dive into the myriad convulsions of violence. The dangers of her current responsibilities were plenty to keep her preoccupied, especially when she was forced to travel. The Big Five churches had already started to take notice of their business and were taking subtle steps to curb their progress. Meso-American Catholic protectores torched the church in Oklahoma City, just hours after she had left the ribbon cutting. In Minneapolis, African immigrant gangs had dragged the young pastor, along with seven new parishioners, from their church, bashing in their skulls, hanging them from a footbridge, and lighting their bodies on fire. She blamed Chinese mafia leaders in Atlanta when a mob tied one of their ministers to a truck and dragged her up and down the street—onlookers cheering—until only her hands and feet dangled from the bumper.
Her fear graduated to near-terror every time she departed their church headquarters, and she increasingly found herself doubting her resolve. She periodically toyed with the idea of disembarking from the airship in—wherever the hell she was that day—and disappearing forever into the anonymity of the sweltering shanties and skeleton cities.
She never followed through, though. It wasn’t God’s mandate for her. Her father and mother would die from worry and heartbreak, and she wouldn’t last a day by herself in the Wilds. She would be safer in her place, despite the mortal dread that came with each trip.
All she could really do was hound the people in charge to bolster security, including badgering Alias to elevate the matter through Ali Ibn al-Rashid. She even mentioned it to Carlos Templeton, hoping he would encourage his father to invest more resources. Her father and mother did what they could with Gilbert Calden, their official liaison with the Gang of Seven, but he had no power or pull. While the Ellies were always nonplussed to see their investments go up in flames, and their objectives delayed, they were notoriously frugal, and the PetrolChurch sometimes seemed like it was a just a curious experiment for them. To her father’s continuing anger, the loss of his ministers and their parishioners bothered the Ellies less than the destruction of their assets, and at that point is was a profitability game. “Managed risk,” Calden once said dismissively.
Security improvements came, slowly, beginning with “messaging” tactics she didn’t expect. Plain-clothes Consortium Security Forces gunned-down the bosses of the local Catholic protectores. Their mercenaries retaliated against the African gangs too, deploying aerial drones to gas five city blocks around the site of the attack. Later still, in Atlanta, five nameless Chinese men were caned to death in the street and strung up to streetlights, an offering by the mafia bosses to maintain peace—and presumably business—with their kleptocratic Ellie counterparts.
The Ellies later responded to their pleas with funding for defense training for the church’s clergy, leadership, and staff—awkwardly setting aside the ministry’s pacifist tenants. Hand to hand combat. Crowd dispersion. Basic fortification of fixed positions. Small arms. Low-grade explosives. Gas. It was curious to Jasmine that Senator Baumgarten proposed the idea in the Gang of Seven meeting, as he was always more penny-pinching and unconcerned. Of course, nothing was ever free with the Gang of Seven, which mandated new standard operating procedures to accelerate recruiting parishioners for security. Their so-called “morality-patrols.”
Protection by the devoted is probably cheaper than deploying Consortium Security Forces, paying mercenaries, or bribing provincial militias, Jasmine figured.
Jasmine took some heart in the incremental progress she saw, not only in security, but also in the rapid spread of the church. But it all was taking a toll
on her father, who was slowly losing his balance in serving both his spiritual convictions and the designs of their corporate masters. The harsh words of the defectors on the day the big-top ministry dissolved—their extended family for years—had stuck with him. With all of them.
Jasmine joined him on his walks through the paltry forests on the mountain, which offered him some distraction and solace, despite the macabre swaths of dead trees. He had learned the names of all the plants—dead and alive—that lived on the mountains. He had taken to walking more, sometimes shirking his responsibilities in the church to do it.
He doodled the same geometric figure over and over—on his wrist-plat. On scraps of paper. She had even seen him tracing it on tables with his finger.
A globe? But the lats and long don’t connect right, she thought the first time she peered over his shoulder to see what he was doing.
She looked past the extra work that landed on her and her mother as best she could, and she joined her mother whenever she could for meals, knowing it helped console him. She tried to engage him in conversation when she saw him tracing the same figure.
The sense of futility had nonetheless started to overcome him, and his need to compensate began to manifest itself in meetings with the Gang of Seven. The big-top ministry had never been in a position to provide the levels of assistance he envisioned, but with the Ellies nominally behind them, every missed opportunity to aid people in crisis prompted her father to push them more angrily for more aid, more supplies, and more freedom to operate. He began advocating for better working conditions in Ellie businesses as well, citing moral obligations and (reluctantly) increased productivity.
His appeals for aid invariably met with disingenuous “appreciation,” from the Gang of Seven and more reminders to focus on the spiritual needs of the workers. The church’s job, they repeated with increasing irritation, was to encourage hard work and clean living by convincing workers and malcontents that God’s Will demanded it and hellfire would greet those who strayed. The laws of the land were the laws of God. The only real cures for life’s “misfortunes”—the thirst, hunger, lost limbs, burns, blood poisoning, cancers, sterility, birth defects, etc. God had a Master Plan, and the Book of Job was its bedrock.
His appeals for better working conditions met only a stony silence.
To Jasmine’s chagrin, the Gang of Seven employed Alias to do more and more of the reminding. From son to father, they were instructed to leave corporate affairs to the business executives. The Ellies were living up to their end of the deal. Weaning meds (and pharmas), church construction, vehicles, increased protection, and good pay for ministers—especially for the Goodwell family. Plus, the added expenses of comms, their fancy headquarters Church, and the mounting costs of travel, mostly to deal with the aftermath of Minister Goodwell himself. They were tiring, Alias explained, of the incessant demands. The constant whining.
Jasmine had watched Alias try his best to thread the needle between familial loyalty and his job of delivering disappointment their father. He tried, admirably to Jasmine’s way of thinking, to put things into context and refresh their father’s perspective. But in the end, her father had to swallow his principles and his outrage. The collateral damage was inevitably more tension between Alias and their father, who had started accusing Alias of taking their side. Jasmine and her mother intervened when they were on hand, desperate to de-escalate, but they were often gone when the flare-ups happened.
While Jasmine did her best to console her father, she also implored Alias to blow off his father’s recriminations.
It’s just the toll the job’s taking on him, she assured her brother.
His true character was humility, tolerance, and love—including a deep love for his only son. Jasmine prayed her brother would see past their father’s misplaced anger and avoid drifting further into the orbit of the Ellies.
Her father nevertheless seemed intent on making things worse. He was relentless in his quest to make the PetrolChurch a true instrument of God. When their new church in California-Sur dispatched a message that unrest in the shanties of Los Angeles was being met with water embargoes and aerial gas attacks, he added brutality to his list of grievances for the Gang of Seven.
There was nothing new about the kind of repression on display again in Cali-Sur. Beatings, disappearances, and “corporate recaptures” of protest areas were commonplace. There had always been only the thinnest veil covering the complicity of the Commonwealth’s Twenty-Eight Families, the international consortiums, and the underworld of mafias, warlords, and cartels. Though unrest was almost always blamed on malcontents and agitators among the masses, there was no shortage of finger pointing among the Ellies, when it suited them.
So, when Alias learned that their father intended to demand an emergency meeting of the Gang of Seven to discuss law-enforcement tactics, Alias contacted Jasmine, who immediately recruited their mother to dissuade her father from again tempting fate. Whatever was happening to the people of Cali-Sur, however abhorrent, it was not for them to interfere.
We’re trapped, Jasmine despaired. Willing and complicit partners. But we haven’t come to terms with it. Dad must come to terms with it—and soon.
“Alias, you have to come in person,” she insisted when he called. “We have to be united—as a family. If dad is going to swallow this, it can’t be delivered by you over the V-plat. He needs to see you. To see all of us together.”
She nearly wept with relief when Alias relented and finagled a flight from his latest visit with Patrick Baumgarten in Mid-Atlantic Province to the PetrolChurch’s new Silver King Cathedral. She got a special pass from the Templetons to enter the Nautilus compound, just to meet her brother at the tarmac when he landed. Despite his annoyance at having had to leave his trip early and fly across the Commonwealth, Alias was visibly happy to see her waiting for him, making her feel a little less anxious about the impending confrontation with their father.
But her joy in seeing her brother, and the united front she had cobbled together, did little to temper her father’s reaction. She had never seen him so angry. So, deflated and wounded from betrayal. Nevertheless, she knew it was the right move, and they eventually talked him out of again provoking the Ellies.
By the time she and Alias left the room, Jasmine even felt they had made some modest progress in re-anchoring their father, if only for the time being.
Now, able to steal a rare moment with her brother, she took another sip of her coffee and stared with him out across the valley.
“Do you think it worked?”
“For the time being,” Alias sighed. He was as frazzled as she was, and she was desperate to shift subjects. Her father’s state would play itself out in time, and she had few opportunities anymore to be with her brother.
“How’s life at the Nautilus?”
“Good, I guess,” he sulked. “It’s a lot more work than I thought it’d be.” Jasmine smiled in commiseration. “I don’t think we really knew what we were getting into.”
She hoped to add some levity to the fleeting moments they had left; she wanted him to associate home with happiness. “You seem to be getting a lot of time with Rashid. That’s gotta be nice.”
“It’s the only real upside to all this,” Alias replied. “He’s like Dad, in some ways, but more, I dunno—”
“Like you,” she interjected, knowingly. There had always been an unstated disappointment that Alias hadn’t inherited their father’s spiritual bent. She knew Alias felt it, and it weighed on them both. While her mother was more like Alias, Camila was somehow able to bridge the gap and connect with Jasmine better than their father did with Alias
Jasmine understood why Alias would gravitate to Rashid. Whatever machinations Rashid had for the PetrolChurch, she sensed that he wanted to keep Alias and her family out of danger as much as possible. Still, as feelings soured between her brother and her father, she couldn’t help but view Rashid as a threat.
“We’re lucky to have
him,” she acknowledged. “But ya know, we’d still be nothing if it weren’t for Dad. Without him, we’d never have escaped life in the Wilds. There’d be no PetrolChurch. No Rashid even.” It was a futile plug for her father.
Alias nodded. “Without Rashid, though, I’m not sure we’d have escaped the road.”
Jasmine was again desperate to change the subject.
“How’s Patrick?” She knew that whenever business—or damage control—had sent Alias to the Mid-Atlantic Province again, would certainly have made time to see Patrick Baumgarten, Alias’ only real connection to normal people his age. Well, as much as an Ellie’s life was normal.
“Good, I guess. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, the way they live. The food. The leisure games. The swimming in pools of water. …Girls.”
“Girls?” She saw the opportunity to lighten things up, and she pounced. Jasmine was thrilled to hear her brother was finally stepping out of his all-work, all-the-time self.
Alias squirmed and smiled. “Yeah. Some.” Warmth radiated in her heart.
“Some?! Plural?!” Of course, she had heard about Patrick’s taste for the carnal benefits of his station. Sex parties infused with alcohol, methylhol, and other psychedelics and pharma re-tuners. Taking advantage of young women from the lower classes—young women not unlike herself. But she pushed that from her mind, determined to be happy for Alias She flung an arm around his shoulders and squeezed playfully.
He smiled and squirmed uncomfortably. “Not sure why,” he said, composing himself, “but I’m always ready to leave after just a couple days.”
That’s a relief. She gave his shoulder another, more earnest and approving squeeze.
“What about you?” he asked. “I hear you make pretty regular visits to Oregonia. Carlos?” Remembering the bitter rivalry between her lover Carlos and Patrick Baumgarten, she couldn’t escape the awkwardness now lacing the conversation.
Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga) Page 20