by Edward Lee
“I wonder what Matthew was doing with it.”
“I’m sure the General-Vicar will ask the same question,” Sharon suggested. “But what I’d like to know even more is exactly what kind of biochip is this? It could be ancillary—for use in a customized—meaning unauthorized—processing system. It could simply be programmed for use in a safeguarded file. Or it could’ve been built specifically to override Federate cryptographs designed by Federate Intel.”
“Is there any way to find out?” Tom asked.
“Sure. I could run it through a diagnostic test, but I’d need authorization from the General-Vicar.”
Tom’s brow raised. “Yeah. And I’ll bet you could also run it through a diagnostic test without authorization from the General-Vicar. What’s the harm? Luke doesn’t even know about it, and with this mission and all, he’s got a fuckin’ shit-load on his mind anyway.”
Sharon grimaced. “Was it really necessary for you to say that?”
“What? Mission?”
“What’s your point, Tom?”
“My point is it makes more sense to run the test ourselves. It could be nothing. And if it turns out to really be an illegal cryptograph-breaker…then we’ll tell Luke.”
Sharon put the tiny biochip in her pocket. “I’ll think about it.”
“In fact, I’ll bet we could run down to the lab right now and test it,” Tom prodded on. “The ship’s practically empty. No one would be the wiser.”
Sharon scowled back. “Don’t try to make it sound so innocent, Tom. You want to find out if this chip could be used to decode the onboard Federate Intel banks.”
“Yeah? Well don’t try to tell me you haven’t considered the same exact motherfuckin’ thing.”
Another cringe at his language. But…he’s right, she admitted. If the biochip turned out to be what she thought it was, she could theoretically bypass the safeties in the ship’s Macro-Analysis Computer.
I could find out what’s really going on.
It was a tempting prospect. She thought of the Book of James: Blessed are they that endureth temptation, but the ordinarily powerful scripture didn’t seem all that compelling right now. “I’ll think about it,” she repeated.
“And it looks like you’ve got something else to think about too.” Tom’s attention shot to the other side of her mod. “There’s all kind of funky shit blinking on that screen over there.”
“What!” Not an abort! Sharon fretted. She spun in her seat but was relieved when she noticed that her secondary holoscreen was merely signaling a long-range MADAM relay.
“These come in all the time,” she said. “It’s just a notice from the Extrasolar Array, sort of like a weather report.”
Words ticked across the screen:
C.F.S. EDESSA MEAN TRAJECTORY WILL COINCIDE WITH THE FOLLOWING NON-THREATENING ASTRONOMIC PHENOMENA: WAIT
“We’re waiting,” Tom said.
GRID: APPROX 15 HOURS RIGHT ASCENSION
80 DEGREES NORTH DECLINATION
PHENOMENA: ECLIPTIC VESTRAL
APPARENT SUB-ASTEROIDAL DETECTION: WAIT
“What’s that mean?” Tom asked.
“The radiotelescopes on the Extrasolar Array just discovered a small asteroid,” Sharon told him. “It’s nothing particularly special these days. Light refractions have been known to hide asteroids, planetoids, and even large planets for hundreds or thousands of years before they pop up on the surveys. It’s because of ion debris and large noble gas rings in galactic orbits. An eclipse, for instance, will suddenly block differential starlight—then the Extrasolar Array detects the asteroid.”
“Oh,” Tom remarked, unenthused.
“It should process the exact cause in a few seconds.”
She kept her eyes on the screen. Then—
NOW OCCURRING IN M34 BLUE-DWARF SYSTEM
ECLIPTIC VESTRAL DUE TO OCCULATORIC UMBRA
Sharon and Tom both stared at the last word.
Squinting, Tom began, “An occulatoric—”
“Umbra,” Sharon finished.
— | — | —
PART SIX
“Here we have no everlasting city,
but we seek one to come.”
—Hebrews 13:14
— | — | —
(I)
Brigid saw black. Just black, with the faintest razor-line streaks of perfect white that could only be stars. She was “running.” Flying, bodiless.
She was free.
Her psychic eyes felt bereft of lids. The breath-like discorporate thing that was her face felt exponentially more alive than flesh. Now her soul was her body, stripped of flaw and physical stricture.
Carry me away…
Time meant nothing. The notion of distance was pointless. On she soared, but racing toward—what?
She pondered what might happen if her physical body—back in its desensitized cell—simply died. Would she be free like this forever?
She could not imagine anything so perfect.
Next, she began to see.
She saw a green border, like a fence. She saw an immense square hundreds of miles high that seemed surrounded by the fence. Closer, the fence began to sparkle, as if impressed with swarms of tiny lights or lit gemstones.
Closer.
Then, closer.
She saw now that the immense square was actually a cube. It shined like nothing she could ever describe. Golden glass was the only simile she could think of.
The cube had twelve entrances—twelve gates.
The gates stood open, inviting her.
God be praised! she thought and glided into one of the gates, for now, she knew where she truly was, just as General-Vicar had promised when he’d whispered to her over the sensory-dep cell’s intercom the single focus-word:
“Heaven.”
(II)
Heaven? Sharon thought.
The chapter before her eyes described Heaven.
But the moment of truth—or at least truth as some perceived it to be—was at hand.
At 0700 hours, the General-Vicar had called Sharon, Tom, Dr. Esther, and Simon into the conference cove. A holoscreen angled up at each of them, the screen itself lit with The Revelation of St. John the Divine.
The Holy Bible’s final missive: The Book of Revelation.
“This is most difficult, but most wondrous,” Luke told them. “I am now obliged to reveal our mission’s objective in its entirety, and when I’m done, all of you—all of you faithful Christians—will realize the magnitude of this blessing.”
“What gives, sir?” Tom asked. “There’s a lot of weird shit going on in this ship. We deserve answers.”
“You’ll get them,” Luke promised. “All of you.”
“Where are the rest of the securitechs?” came Tom’s next brusk query.
“They’ve been posted on routine patrols about the ship. Their purpose here is topical. They don’t need to know what I’m about to tell the four of you and, to be frank, I don’t think many of them could handle it.”
“Why isn’t Brigid here, sir?” Sharon asked.
“She is…indisposed at the moment.”
What did that mean? The cove seemed to hang in silence, as if anticipating a sudden cacophony.
General-Vicar Luke maintained his staunch military poise and tone of voice, but Sharon, for the first time, detected something beneath the trained veneer. Something exuberant.
“I’ll begin by telling you this,” he said. “Eighteen months ago, our most recently deployed Extrasolar Array began feeding back a series of partial analytical messages from the north celestial quadrant, something—a possible planet or asteroid—located between earth and the constellation known at Ursa Minor.”
“The Little Dipper,” someone said.
“Grid triangulations confirmed that—what I’ll refer to for a moment as the target-object was relatively close on the tracking point, only about ninety billion miles. The Federate Exploratory Corp immediately launched sub-light probes, and one
of these probes landed on the target-object.”
Tom scowled. “Come on, sir. What’s this all about? And why are we sitting here with New Testament files open in front of us?”
Luke ignored the question and went on: “An asteroid indeed had been charted, but with features that clearly aren’t natural.”
Now the cove really quieted down.
Luke projected a large holomural at the front of the cove.
A cube, Sharon thought. And…a fence.
The diagram on the mural matched the inexplicable analysis file she’d seen on Kim’s station-link.
“It looks like a tiny fence—” Dr. Esther began. “Yes, a fence is one way of describing it,” Luke affirmed. “Or more accurately a wall. The spectroscopic surveys that were uplinked from our probe to the Extrasolar Array determined that this wall is composed of exactly twelve different crystalline compounds, the most significant of which is a vitreous form of quartz known as—”
“Jasper,” Sharon said aloud without thinking.
Luke looked at her. “That’s right, Specialist. A once-valuable gemstone known as jasper. Other constituents of this wall included sapphire, calcedony, emerald, beryl, amethyst, and others. Look at your holoscreens. Read Chapter 22, verse 19.”
Sharon read the words of the Apostle John:
And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the forth, an emerald…
“Go to verse 16.”
And the city lieth four-square, and the length is as large as the breadth—
“A…cube,” Simon muttered.
—and the city measured twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the heighth of it are equal.
My God, Sharon thought.
The holomural flashed a new image, something Sharon had already seen but had no way of understanding: another one of Kim’s File and Store analyses.
Re: MADAM and ESA-2 Photospectroscopy Probe Order
De: Data Reg c/o Security Corp
READ: Cartographical Probe results: positive for Target-Object (interior) configuration.
—fixed geometric object (in exactitude):
HEIGHT: 1500 unrefracted miles.
LENGTH: 1500 unrefracted miles.
WIDTH: 1500 unrefracted miles.
Observations: Target-Object exists as a fixed perimeter in geometric exactitude.
The gravity of the situation roughened Luke’s voice: “In the First Century A.D., John describes the city of Heaven as being surrounded by a wall of precious gems, the first foundation of which is jasper. Then he describes the physical dimensions of Heaven itself: a cube that is 12,000 furlongs high, wide, and long. A furlong is an eighth of a mile.”
Another screen flashed:
12,000 furlongs = 1,500 miles
By now, no one really needed to be told, but Luke clarified it anyway. “The technology that God has given us the intelligence to develop has now revealed to the Holy Christian Federate…the actual physical location of Heaven.”
Tom’s voice sounded parched. “And we’re going there. Now.”
“Yes,” Luke confirmed.
(III)
No one said anything to anyone for hours. Sharon sat in her data cove, pretending to work, pretending to monitor the holoscreens as if it really meant anything at this point. Now, the jesus is watching you sign seemed inhibiting. Tom remained in the same room, pacing back and forth, muttering under his breath. Brigid lay motionless in her sensory-deprivation cell, her consciousness elsewhere. The other securitechs were none the wiser, simply walking their guardposts and checking their bulkheads. General-Vicar Luke sat quietly in his quarters, reading Chapter 21 of The Revelation of John the Divine over and over again. Commander-Deaconness Esther stood alone in the ob-cove, staring at the stars, silently reveling in their wonder.
And Warrant Officer Simon—
(IV)
Hurry, he told himself. Can’t get caught in here.
The makeshift thesium240 sheath fit precisely over the switch-coupler, just as they’d told him it would. The radiation-depleted cap would block any and all tampering sensors that the securitechs might be using in their heightened state of alert; it would sufficiently hide the tiny transceiver that Simon had just spliced into the coupler.
Yes. There.
It was just a simple trigger-override…but what he’d connected it to was one of the ship’s nuclear drive-heads. Simon fingered the toothpick-sized firing device that he’d attached to the inside of his uniform sleeve. All he need do now was snap the device in half and break the safety circuit.
The drivehead would detonate instantly.
The ship would be destroyed, and its destruction would be picked up by the radsensors on the Extrasolar Array. The Edessa would never return, leaving the Pope and the Vatican Security Council to determine that God’s wrath was the cause, that humankind had stepped too far. It would maintain proof of God’s existence but project a formidable warning sign: don’t come back.
But Simon had no intention of sacrificing himself for the mission. He would flee the ship in an escape skiff, to be secretly picked up later by a Federate Intel rescue cruiser.
There, he thought. Done. Time to get out of here.
But when he turned around to leave, there was a flechette pistol pointing right in his face.
Simon froze.
Holy fuckin’ SHIT!
His captor stood in a slanted shadow. All he could see was the gun, its ROUND IN CHAMBER light blinking green.
He tried to speak but fear made him mute. No lie, however intricate nor convincing, would work now. He’d been caught red-handed.
Only one option remained.
I-I-I have to detonate now.
It would only take a second for him to finger the firing device in his uniform and snap it in half. Even if he was shot in the process, chances were he could do it before he died.
His hand tremored at his side, his brain ordering it to move.
Do it! Do it!
But he couldn’t.
He simply didn’t have the balls to sacrifice himself for his duty.
He gave up. “Who are you?” he asked, defeated.
“Who do you think it is, you stupid asshole!”
Commander-Deaconness Esther stepped out of the shadow, lowered the pistol.
Simon nearly passed out. “You scared the shit out of me! I thought I was caught! What are you doing here?”
“Watching your back,” Esther gruffed in reply. “The securitechs are all over the place. You were supposed to wait till shift change.”
Only now did Simon’s heart resume a normal beat. “I hacked into the post roster. They won’t check here again for another twenty minutes.”
Esther seemed alleviated, if only slightly. “You should’ve stuck to the plan. You were supposed to rig the drivehead while I was decrypting the launch sequence for the escape skiff.”
“Calm down, it’s set to go off at my command. I just wanted to save some time,” Simon assured her. Already, though, the sight of her was making him tremble. His eyes roved the obvious curves of her body through her uniform, the large, high breasts jutting.
Her mouth turned up in a half-smile. “Save time?” She stepped right up to him, planted her hand to his crotch. “Save time for who?”
“Fuh-fuh-fuh—for you…”
They embraced at once, kissing ravenously.
God, I love you, Simon thought. Her kisses melted him.
Esther gently pushed him away after a last, wet kiss. “Not now. Later.”
“Why not now?” he pleaded.
She began walking away. “I have to go give that civilian bitch in sensory-dep some serious brain-damage,” she said.
Simon’s heart was thudding as he looked after her, watched her turn and walk out.
(V)
It was a labyrinth.
Perfection…
Brigid w
as like water; she was like music; she was like perfumed air. She swept through Heaven’s every recess, marveling at the sacred visions. Stratum upon stratum: ten thousand tiers of pristine light for every holy mile. Truly, this could be the tabernacle for unnumbered immortal souls joined in one faith, one love—a single flawless devotion.
A cube. A four-square. Geometrically inviolate, theoretically without limit. Invulnerable.
The true Temple of the Lord.
It’s all true! It’s all true! she rejoiced.
The tabernacle’s clear golden glass stretched on—forever. Like a crystal whose facets reflected and refracted light without end. Life was the light. Light was the spirit everlasting.
She soared and soared, looked on and on. Then—
Wait a minute, she thought.
If this was the tabernacle for the souls of the virtuous, then where were they?
Where were the souls?
Moreover: Where were the Angels?
Where was God?
Brigid’s psychical senses lit up—in terror.
She was remote-viewing into the physical depths of Heaven, but—
Heaven was empty.
(VI)
The nanobots, even at their smallest, could not be administered by a dermal air-shot, and she didn’t dare risk leaving a microneedle puncture on the skin.
Transvaginally would be so much safer.
This is more like it, Commander-Deaconness Esther thought. Simon’s Federate Intel channels had provided the best decryption programs; she’d broken the security door’s unbreakable password in all of a second.
Now she knelt before the open cell, gazing down at the nude, insentient body, envious of Brigid’s long mane of hair and vibrant, young skin. Brigid’s breasts shined as if shellacked in the warm pool of glycerin. Esther couldn’t help but touch them, squeeze them, as she felt a plush flash in her gut. She soothed a finger between the submerged sex, explored the slick folds, rubbed her thumb over the nutlike clitoris.