The world was changing. The stories had become different. Ever since that one scary night.

She heard guns again, and fear clawed at her insides and a hideous image loomed above, of a man whose face and voice she recognized. She could barely sleep that night, and for several nights.

By day she stood on interminable lines, leaning wearily on Sister Leah, and then they were sitting on a floor in a large room full of people, it smelled of sweat and her whole body ached. They were given trays of blandish soup, bread, and an orange-y drink full of fizz.

Men and women in uniforms she’d never seen gave them papers and directed them toward different corridors and doors. She answered questions about her family for a long time, and cried at one point.

It was right after someone said that she was brave. And suddenly she felt more alone than anytime in her life, surrounded by frowning strangers who would scribble on charts every time she opened her mouth.

Then she was walking again, walking for a long time, though endless hallways, over blank floor and then short, nubbly brown carpet.

She met a nurse named Martin, and a doctor named Angella, and that’s when she knew. That the world was changing.

Before, the men were always the doctors.

Angella passed a device over her forehead, held it against her wrist, shone a light in her eyes (blinding colorflash, dazzling and faded), and pricked her arm a few times.

Katie flinched at first, but it was just a tiny instant of pain, and seemed utterly insignificant, comparatively. She was given a jar to pee in, and then was asked to stand in an empty room. She was swept over by gooseflesh and her hair seemed fit to stand on end.

And the door opened again.

“Just want to make sure there are no little bugs on you,” Angella said. “Nanobots, you know. And it looks like you’re perfectly clean!”

The doctor smiled. Katie was scared of nanobots for several years after, and would always wash her hands twice, even into her teens, when she knew more about what they were, and the futility of soap in treating them.

At some point they must have boarded another ship, because she noticed that the ceilings reached up into a graceful curve, but previously were square-cornered. They took her up a long, gliding escalator overlooking a vaulted atrium that was crawling with people.

Above the ceiling was transparent and bright with stars.

There was a quiet corridor full of doors, and one of them opened for her into a grand suite with a wall that could be set to reveal any type of scenery she could imagine — castles, gardens, dolphins coursing through iridescent water. And they had a bathroom, and a separate bedroom for both herself and Leah.

“Just Leah,” the nun had said, faintly contented. “I’m no longer a sister.”

Her cheeks were smooth and suffused with a pale blush that made Katie think of the plums her mother used to pluck from the boughs of the tree in their yard.

Leah stopped wearing her habit, and her hair was loose and beautiful about her shoulders. They would sit at opposite ends of the big couch reading late into the night. No curfew on this vessel.

Sometimes Katie wrote or drew in a little notebook issued by one of the day-school teachers while Leah stared at a book, lips moving silently as her eyes traced the outlines of each word.

There were books everywhere, in piles and tottering heaps and flung open to pages densely inscribed with characters and symbols and illustrations. They smelled of dust and paper and something else, char and a roaring heat that curled and blackened pages, sent them up in wisps of smoke and ash, like wings.

Words became their sustenance, succulent and thick with meaning; vocabulary they gulped in heady draughts, and grew dizzy with the knowing. Verse and sentence would knit themselves together in Katie’s notebook, surprising her with their byways and intersections.

One Sunday she wrote an entire poem, in the quiet of the library, and told Leah several days later, who wanted it read aloud.

The girl stared at the paper, and then spoke, and the words that slipped between her lips seemed, somehow, more, or different, than when she wrote them down:

Feathers black and stinging white
Ravens then and mourning doves
Sent up high from me and lost
From towers burning, on sparkling gusts
My breath is hot and eyes betrayed
And it is so very silent
With the birds all flown away

She looked up then and was shocked to see that Leah had covered her face with her hands. Katie crept forward and touched her shoulder, and the woman shuddered.

“I’m sorry, Katie, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, and the child said that it’s ok, it’s just a poem, but the woman only sobbed inconsolably, and rushed to the bathroom, and the door eased shut.

Katie could still hear her, but remote, a dreadful echo.

Of her time between worlds, that yawned and stretched like a cat awakening, her memory was interspersed with such moments, tender, prickly, digging into her skin like purring claws. So much of life. Sweet blood lovingly drawn.

“Pain reminds us also that we are alive,” she wrote many years later, in a breezy moment that she would eternally regret. It was a dreary aphorism, and hardly original, but destined for recital by future generations who would never read it in context, but found it facile consolation at times of great or petty loss.

The long days in transit were broken up by classes and lectures and workshops, with recreation and free time limited to weekends. Literature she adored, of course, and art, singing, and history, which, as they neared their destination, she received in larger and larger draughts, and answered with just as many questions.

But in many respects she found Alexandrian education as grinding and forgettable as anything taught in the Jurist Sunday schools. Math and phys-ed, in particular, seemed both incomprehensible and cruel.

Least comprehensible of all was Alexandria itself, their destination. The 3Vs were spectacular, an oblong droplet glistening with detail, rotating slowly in the depths of the night.

But what was it? On another world she used to paddle in a kayak with her father along the wooded shores of a broad and rippling lake, and then through a narrow channel into a marsh full of cattails and dragonflies.

The air hot and still. He would dip a small jar into the water and later, at night, they would eyedropper a tiny bead of it onto a glass slide. Under the microscope, brightly lit, it seethed with life. Fascinating, alien, impossibly distant.

That’s what she saw when she saw the Magic Mountain, from way up in the sky.

“Far from alienating us from our birthright of wilderness,” she later wrote, a woman of letters and growing accomplishment, “Alexandria is in stark proximity to nature at its most primitive. The raw vacuum of space, the blasting radiation and atomic heat. The fluctuations of essential quanta. We dwell on the edge of this last wilderness, and set against it the made, the created, the constructed, that yet has breath and moss and thunder, and waters that rush and tumble into mist and clouds, and is full of yearning.”

Every day on Alexandria brought a new miracle. The beauty of the place was beyond speaking. But there were some things about Old Earth that Kate would never forget, even with the passage of whole chapters of human history.

Her mother in a hammock, asleep with a book falling back in her hands. Gold coins of sunlight on the lakewaters at dawn, wavelets lapping like whispering voices. The distant baying of a hound, lost and soon to be found, floating over the treetops, taunting her with the expression of a joy she could never share. Never.

As an old woman she would visit the glass-enclosed roses of the East Slope Botanical Gardens, so vulnerable to nanospores that she could only inhale their balm through exhaust vents. She would dab her eyes, remembering how, as a child, she would tease her thumb against such wicked thorns.

And once, at the New Mt. Holyoke Zoological Arboretum, she was startled by the flashing motion of a deer leaping away into the forest, and she stumbled and fell to her knees, staring.

They summoned an ambulance, and ran her vitals, and insisted that she take a nutritab.

“Let me go, y’damn fools!” she protested, as the medtechs pressed her and plied her with blinking, bleeping gadgets. Still, she took the tab.

But all that lay in the unimaginable future. Because now, right now, Katie is just a child, a waif, barely eight years old and watching her own shoes on the gangway — cold steel metal — and then the big doors pull back and she is dazzled by the light and a bracing gust of wind, sharp and hinting gloriously of fecund soil and growth, of chlorophyll and mycorrhizae, she laughs and claps her hands, staring at the bright, tawny-blue sky, at the stars flaring dimly through, at the whole immeasurable mountain rearing before her, a gigantic expanse sloping up from foothills dotted with swaths of green, light glinting on water in ribbons and misshapen disks, and the domes and spires and highways of human habitation, distant squares and geometric bisections demarcating plantations, and trade routes, and settlements, and ever-elusive in the distance some glimpse of a peak, and a glimmering light like a beacon.

They are standing on a long, broad lawn. Dozens of space ships of every size and description lift off and land soundlessly.

Another kind of flying machine, small, like a carriage rather than a sloop or cruiser, comes arcing out of the sky and drifts before them.

A man and a woman step out, and they speak with Abigail and Leah, who nod their heads attentively, and they all turn then and look at Katie, smiling.

But the child has pulled away, she’s running across the springy green turf toward the tulip beds and the great sweeping bulk of the mountain, and all the decades and epochs of a human life stretching out before her.

The End

View “The Separation” Table of Contents

Copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

By Josh Wilson

The small woman had a downturned mouth and the kind of lines around her eyes that don’t come from laughter. She picked at her cuticles and tugged at her black shawl. Not a hair out of place.

Beyond the window of the small receiving office the line shifted and snaked through the broad promenade. There were several thousand applicants, but less that half, only the most desperately in need, would be admitted. The rest were bound for Mars, whether they liked it or not. Maybe someday they could immigrate, depending on the war …

“Please understand that this conversation is being recorded, and that anything you say will be considered legally binding in a court of law, including any proceedings related to your refugee status and emigration. We otherwise guarantee your confidentiality. Do you wish to continue?”

A pause. They always pause like that.

“Yes.”

“Your name, please?”

“Jeanine Sue Krebs.”

“Occupation.”

“I’m a housewife.”

“Do you have children?”

“I’m barren,” the woman said, her voice flat, blank.

“Skills?”

“I can cook, clean.”

“Can you read?”

She looked down. “No.”

“Why would you like to come to Alexandria?”

“My husband beats me and rapes me.”

She stopped then and stared, surprised at what she just blurted. Jamie checked a series of boxes on the form, had the woman stand in front of the white screen, the camera flashed and a moment later a new, glossy ident chip ka-chunked out of the data terminal.

“Do you have any personal effects you’d like to bring with you?”

“Just my bag,” she said, and looked over at the threadbare duffle leaning against the wall.

“You’ll have to get that screened, and there’s also a series of decontamination and inoculation sessions. We’re conducting all that over on the Exodus. There’s a shuttle leaving every half-hour, just follow the blue tape on the floor, there by the back door. That’s right. Just walk on through and follow the blue tape.”

The woman had risen and was gazing at the tape perplexedly.

“So I get to go?” she finally said, looking up.

“Just through that sliding door behind me,” Jamie repeated. “Follow the blue tape.”

“I can’t go to Mars?”

“Maybe someday, depending on the war. But right now, no. Besides, is it even safe for you to go back?”

Jeanine Sue Krebs pondered the question. “I guess not.”

“You’re leaving all that behind, Jeanine. You’re going to a new world where you don’t have to be afraid, where you can learn to read, and take your hat off in public.”

“What’s it like there?” the woman asked. “Are there birds? Is there a sky?”

“There are birds. And trees. At night there are stars into infinity, and during the day the roof of the world is a tawny blue veil shot through with all the jewels of heaven.”

“I can’t imagine,” she said, gnawing her thumbnail. “It’s in the middle of space!”

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Jamie said, scrolling through her list of talking points. “The 3Ds are amazing, sure, but I say they barely capture the scale. It’s a planetoid fragment, a bit more than a 270 kloms on a side, built out with hypertensile alloy, enveloped in multiple atmosphere generators” — it was actually a single, multi-sourced atmospheric normalization field, but that was getting a little technical — “there’s gravity technology that the Jurists won’t have for decades. It’s a floating mountain, a continent we’ve barely begun to inhabit. Old Earth is lost to us, Jeanine. Poisoned.”

Another pause. The woman was slight but then moved with a jagged, lunging certainty, shouldered her duffel and stepped towards the door, which slid open.

Even bands of colored tape ran along the floor, about two inches wide, out into the maze of services corridors and packing modules, splitting off on separate twisting vectors.

“Just follow the blue tape, and the intake officer will get you started.”

The pale little refugee smiled at last, albeit weakly, and set off through the portal. The doors closed. Jamie sighed, turned back to the datapalatte, ran a background check on the next applicant, summoned the man in.

He was older, hawk-faced, with an anxious shift to his gaze. A lock of limp gray hair drooped across his eyes; he brushed it away reflexively.

“Please understand that this conversation is being recorded, and that anything you say will be considered legally binding in a court of law, including any proceedings related to your refugee status and emigration. We otherwise guarantee your confidentiality. Do you wish to continue?”

A breath, and, “Sure.”

“Your name, please?”

“Hill, James Dalton.”

“Occupation.”

“Electrician.”

“Were you in a union?”

“No ma’am.”

“Can you read?”

“Manuals, mostly.”

“It’s a start. Family?”

“Divorced, two kids.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re on the Revelation, with their mother. They told me I should come here.”

“For what reason?”

James Dalton Hill chewed on his lip, and gazed for a long time at the small reflective-dome in the ceiling, imagining the 3V camera it housed.

What if it was a scam? His life would be over. Off to the camps. He started, looked at Jamie, and took another breath.

“I think I’m gay,” he began.

Next: The Separation — Chapter Twelve

GIZA PLAZA PUBLIC BRANCH, LOWER SLOPE, COMMON TERMINAL 832176.GP.FUL
DECEMBER 1, 21--

login: public
password: reader

“Welcome to Giza Plaza Public Branch. Would you like research, arrangements, contacts or public programming?”

“Research, please, just a current media search for keyword ‘separation.’”

“A popular topic. Any sorts or filters? There are some presets … “

“Howbout the last three months, and sorted according to context, complementary insight and date. Just the top half-dozen results, please. Oh yeah, and print or text media only.”

“Text and print only might limit your return, sir.”

“What can I say, I like to read. 3V gives me a headache. Too many flapjaws.”

“One of the documents is a witness transcript, you’ll need to authorize an ID check.”

“Alrighty.”

“Would you prefer voiceprint, biometrics or retinal scan?”

“Voiceprint, I guess.”

“No problem Mr. Tedesco, Anthony R. … Data incoming … Have a good read.”

“So wait a sec, you’re an artificial intelligence, right?”

“Yes, sir, though not formally considered sentient. I’m not really an I.”

“Just a set of synthesized responses triggered by language-pattern recognition …”

“You might say that, sir.”

“You sound awfully lifelike.”

“I assure you that I am neither alive nor self aware in any actual or virtual sense.”

“I just find that hard to believe. Did you ever hear of–”

“The Turing Test? Sure. But again, we’ve spoken only for a few moments. Push me and you’ll hit a wall. It’ll become clear you’re dealing with a machine.”

“But if you can access the sum total of the Library of Alexandria …”

“I surely can carry on at great length on a multitude of subjects. But eventually my powers of synthesis and analysis are going to fall short. My circuits will show before long.”

“Someday you’ll pass for human. Software and hardware these days are practically evolving. Don’t you think some sort of spontaneous self-awareness would occur … ?”

“I’m really not equipped to answer that kind of question. But I have been programmed to say that my designers do consider that a theoretical possibility.”

“And if that happens?”

“There’s a whole other set of data I can provide. Would you like to cancel your current search?”

“No, never mind. Thanks for your time.”

“And a pleasant read to you, sir.”

* * * * *

RECORD 1: RANKING: 100%

From “The Prison Diaries of Bertrand-Marie Marchand, A Commander of Christendom’s Armies, and a Jurist of the Church & Court of Christ Triumphant”:

Young Lieutenant Deschutes perished in my own arms this morning. The beatings by those Godless creatures rendered the boy delirious, ranting, and to the end it was the mercy and forgiveness of Christ for which he cried.

They were deaf to all calls for a doctor, though how they could have endured the sound of his suffering, I dare not imagine. Their indifference drives me to rage! But my heart still wells with pride and hope for our Church and all good Christians, that we should bring such boys — such men — into this world.

By the grace of God only have we done so. He is a Martyr, surely as if he had succeeded in sending the angel’s fiery sword down among the Godless …

… They besmirch his name, and my own, at this so-called trial, which grinds forward with a loathsome inevitability. Their trumpeted nanocam footage is a fabrication, the basest sort of political pornography.

I have sworn to myself and to the Lord to never speak, to never testify, to never lend an ounce of legitimacy to their infernal deliberations, to their Separation, to the lies they spin from the silken whispers of Satan and Beelzebub …

This place stinks of deception and evil. The very food is poison, I take only water and a crust of bread, and pray that I resist despair, and bring myself righteous and strong to whatever end God has chosen for me.

And I wish only that I should be so righteous as Lieutenant Deschutes, who would have given his life for all Christians, and had it taken for us all instead. Should I survive this ordeal, should my words even be read by other than these, my own eyes, I would have his message carried to all the subjects of Christendom.

That each one of us is a weapon of the Lord, and it is our bound duty to set ourselves against the Godless, wherever we find them, even with our own bodies, and even if it would cost us our own precious lives. For such is the duty of the righteous, to give themselves today, now, to the great struggle, that we may all live tomorrow and for ever on Heaven’s blessed shore.

* * * * *

RECORD 2: RANKING: 100%

Eager for a Trial, a Prosecutor May Get Two

News analysis by Ibrahim Corcoran
The Alexandria Inscription, Sept. 22, 21–

MIDWAY PUBLIC BRANCH–The view from this former Jurist magistrate’s suite is breathtaking, looking out across the bustle and industry of a deep-space drydock framed by planets, stars and the Milky Way itself.

The latest tenant of these offices, Rosaleigh Mathilde Miraloma, 53, rarely has the chance to savor that view. As a longtime advocate for the Earthwide Holocaust Truth & Reconciliation Council, and chief prosecutor of the newly convened Transplanetary Criminal Court, she spends most of her days preparing for a trial she hopes will mark the beginning of the end of the Judiciary’s reign of terror on Old Earth — and set a humanitarian precedent in the opening pages of the new age of space colonization.

The defendants, all captured on Midway during the Separation of August 15, comprise a rogue’s gallery of Jurist officials from both the militia and the church hierarchy, including such notorious figures as Corps Commander Bertrand-Marie Marchand, Bishop Dominick P. McNulty, and Pastor Carlo Marcangul Alexander.

All are wanted for numerous charges of bribery, perjury, rape, child abuse and, in Marchand’s case, arson and mass murder committed against non-Christian communities by his troops over more than two decades.

But even as Miraloma’s team of lawyers, paralegals, consultants and expert witnesses prepare the case, the chief prosecutor herself has been dogged by calls for her resignation over the killing of 57 rank-and-file Jurist Guardsmen during the Separation.

At issue is Miraloma’s role in creating an “atmosphere of impunity and disrespect for human life,” according to Delroy Truong Bendis III, a prosecutor appointed by the Council on Commerce, Ethics & Liberty to investigate the deaths. Depending on the outcome of his investigation, Miraloma could ultimately be indicted under Alexandria’s stringent hate-speech laws.

Miraloma says the charges are politically motivated — Bendis is widely considered her only serious competition for the seat on the Protocols & Proceedings Council being vacated by Kamehameha Marshall next spring — and insists that the investigation will only serve to disrupt the Judiciary war crimes tribunal.

“Mr. Bendis certainly runs the risk of looking like he’s grandstanding. But then again, incitement to commit mass murder is nothing to sneeze at,” said Niabach Swanley, a political analyst with Drop Zone research firm Brad & Key Inquiries. “Keeping in mind that no charges against Miraloma can be formally lodged without corroborating investigations by at least two other non-invested parties, I think Bendis hopes simply to raise the questions, get the ball rolling, and reap the benefits if the charges do wind up sticking.”

For his part, Bendis, 56, does not deny ulterior motives. But he says the real issue is not his ambition, but Miraloma’s fitness to lead.

“The chief prosecutor’s zeal for the case threatens to turn it into a kangaroo court worthy of Old Earth,” he said, and undermine any human-rights precedents the trial could otherwise set. “It’s obvious that her actions now are ultimately germane to her electoral aspirations.”

Bendis expressed particular interested in transcripts of Miraloma’s briefings of Bookkeeper Special Operations units prior to the sensational arrests of 15 high-ranking Jurist officials en route to the Mars colonies and the Elysia Low-Gravity Hospital Complex.

Critics say those briefings, along with her large-scale 3V broadcast the night of the killings, created an “us versus them” attitude that inflamed prejudices among the Bookkeepers, leading to Lieutenant Artemis Goshen’s exhortation to “fry” Jurist militia.

“Our Bookkeepers were, in the first place, wrongly committed to this venture, and then under pressure reverted to the very sort of barbarism the Jurists are despised for,” said Roberto Olsum Mackinaw, a leading scholar at the Law & Justice Consulate, and a longtime critic of interventionism.

For her part, Lt. Goshen claims she ordered her troops to increase their weapon charges only because the lower settings weren’t effective on heavily armored Jurist Guardsmen. She has been relieved of duty and is being held pending a court martial beginning late October.

Experts doubt her story will hold up. Desray Marguilis, a professor at The Old Quarry Complex Spectra Laboratories, said that even the toughest material — including hypertensile body armor — has no resistance to neural-disruptors.

“All field-affective technologies operate primarily on subquantum wavelengths,” she said, “Anything less than neutrino-densified lead is essentially transparent.”

The new trial is further complicated by the fact that of the 57 Jurists killed, 56 died of lethal discharges from Bookkeeper neural disrupters during the battle for the station, but one succumbed to blunt trauma and internal injuries sustained after being captured.

The victim, Judiciary Lieutenant James Conroy Deschutes, a militiaman from Moscow, Idaho, was discovered planting bombs on the Midway concourse during the chaotic aftermath of the takeover. Sometime in the following 15 hours he sustained injuries that would later claim his life.

His fellow Jurist prisoners, who describe Deschutes as a martyr, say that he was denied medical treatment for those injuries. Midway authorities claim he refused treatment, but are so far unable to produce a waiver required for acts of doctor-permitted euthanasia.

In any case, allowing prisoners, witnesses or suspects in a trial to engage in euthanasia is illegal under the General Humanist Declaration, and experts say this alone ensures Miraloma’s days are numbered.

“A war crimes tribunal has been the longtime goal of most Alexandrian founders and many recent refugees, people who lost families and property to the Jurist Pogrom,” said Marquese Tavitch, a historian who’s published frequently on this topic. “They’re not going to tolerate any politician putting ego and ambition ahead of their quest for justice. If Miraloma truly is an Achilles heel, she’s going to go.”

But second- and third-generation Alexandrians, in particular, having never been to Earth, view the entire issue of the Judiciary as something of a historical abstraction, and exhibit little enthusiasm for a trial.

“These native-born Alexandrians aren’t connected to the home planet,” said pollster Geelong Victoria. “They recognize there’s a legacy at work, but their will to action doesn’t exist. Their life is the future, not the past. “

They have found ideological sympathizers among various strains of non-interventionists, isolationists, and rule-of-law conservatives who have yet to fully embrace the thesis that the long-defunct International Criminal Court and the Continental Courts of Justice, as well as the Judiciary’s own drumhead Courts of Christian Discipline and Reform, provide ample legal precedent for Miraloma and her allies to convene a “humanitarian” body to prosecute ethnic cleansing, sectarian massacres, rape, torture and genocide committed by Judiciary officers, troops and civilian police.

The facts of the crimes are not at issue, however. The Judiciary’s war of conquest in North America is an acknowledged part of 21st century history, and is even taught as a victorious “crusade” in Jurist grade schools.

Instead, say Miraloma’s allies, the trial will primarily seek to establish a precedent of case and constitutional law that will entrench the General Humanist Declaration of 2073 as the ruling legal doctrine for all human activities in the emerging interplanetary era.

But even if the trial does succeed in doing so, Miraloma may never get to appreciate the fruits of her labor from any position of consequence, says Barodet Broadfelt, an Earth Politics analyst with the nonpartisan Smithson-Watanabe Institute in the unincorporated Lower Falls region.

“My odds say she steps down while the trial is still in discovery,” he said. “Some of the things she said during the Separation were indiscrete, and more of it’s going to come to light. This isn’t Old Earth. We live in an open, literate society. She won’t be able to stand the scrutiny.”

* * * * *

RECORD 3: RANKING: 100%

Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, September 28, 21–

To the Editor;

Ibrahim Corcoran’s article [Sept. 26, News Analysis] on Rosaleigh Mathilde Miraloma’s one-woman vendetta against the Jurists was dead-on. Never have Alexandrians witnessed such extraordinary presumption and arrogance on the part of our elected officials.

It’s one thing to proselytize among the unlettered, and even agitate for the reform of their corrupt system of governance. But it’s another thing entirely to act preemptively and take the law into your own hands.

It’s also yet another indictment of Alexandria’s failed principle of Harmonious Co-Sanctuary. We need an accountable, central governing authority, rather than this uncoordinated, undisciplined collection of “autonomous consulates,” which foster not only “political and social innovation,” but also quixotic, self-serving — and now deadly — ego trips such as Miraloma’s so-called “Separation.”

Erasmus and Donoghue Brandt
New Danube, Eastern Slope

* * * * *

RECORD 4: RANKING: 100%

Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, September 30, 21–

To the Editor;

As the daughter of a survivor of the Burning and Pogrom that swept through Chicago, Madison and Minneapolis-St. Paul, I resent Ibrahim Corcoran’s assertion that my generation considers the actions of the Jurists to be a “historical abstraction.” Growing up, a picture of my grandparents and seven aunts and uncles hung over the mantelpiece in our living room.

They are smiling, in their 20s and 30s. The only abstraction for me is what they might have looked like had they lived to a ripe old age. Instead, they were locked in a synagogue which was then “set with a cleansing fire,” as the justice of the time is known to have said. My mother was the only survivor, which they took as a sign from heaven, and sent her to the orphanages. It was there that she was finally smuggled to Alexandria by Jesuit nuns.

I have nothing but praise and gratitude for Miraloma, and my vote, which she will get regardless of whether she steps down from the trial.

Deirdre Membesu
Little Finley, Foothills

* * * * *

RECORD 5: RANKING: 100%

Letters to the Editor: The Alexandria Inscription, October 2, 21–

To the Editor;

All the political goals Miraloma hoped to achieve by her foolhardy Separation could have been won with considerably less blood spilled. Why didn’t Alexandria simply start its own colony on Mars? Our atmospheric-normalization technology is decades ahead of the Jurist domes.

By simply building our own habitat there we can challenge the Judiciary right on their own turf, offer asylum to their refugees, and subject the Negev domes to some honest economic competition — backed by superior strength of arms.

But no. Miraloma wanted to be an action hero. Her botched ambition resulted in the inhumane killing of enemy captives, and has put Alexandria in the crosshairs of 50 million religious fanatics ready to die for Jesus. How much longer before these particular chickens come home to roost?

Jobriath Amaru Thatcher
East Landing, Drop Zone

* * * * *

RECORD 6: RANKING: 100%

MIDWAY PUBLIC BRANCH, SPECIAL COURT OF INQUIRY
NOVEMBER 24, 21–

Subject: Walton Dannover Trask, Bookkeeper Special Operations

Interviewer: Kenyan Maura, Council on Commerce, Ethics & Liberty

Q: We appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Trask.

A: I won’t cooperate with a witch hunt.

Q: This isn’t a witch hunt, Mr. Trask. May I call you Dalton?

A: No. And I want you to understand. I, too, am recording this conversation, and I will appeal and challenge any misrepresentation of what I am going to say.

Q: You’re the only one who’s doing any representing here.

A: (Silence.)

Q: Well, let’s get started. How long have you worked with the subject?

A: Andy.

Q: Pardon?

A: His name is Andy. He’s not a subject. He has a name. Andrew Ross Feldman.

Q: How long have you worked with Mr. Feldman?

A: Four years, since he was 18. I recruited him in Spokane, on the edge of town, actually. Caught him trying to set an IED next to a water tower I was wiring for surveillance. Took a while, but eventually I talked him out of it. Kid was half starved, no family. Cheyenne, you know. Got him out to the way station in Bend, next thing you know he’s signing up as support for salvage and refugee operations.

Q: And he was in your platoon at that time.

A: I was his sergeant, yes.

Q: Was he ever a particularly violent person?

A: Well, he’s a first-rate soldier. If that’s what you mean by violent. He’s decorated, he was wounded. War is violent.

Q: Did he ever seem to enjoy it? Fighting? Killing the enemy?

A: He did his job.

Q: Did he enjoy his job?

A: Look, you politically correct crypto-Stalinist, I am not going to admit to you that Andy licks his chops as he cuts the heart out of dead Jurist Guardsmen. He’s a soldier, I’m a soldier, we have to kill people sometimes.

Q: I know that, I’m not–

A: So don’t try to implicate him by the nature of his work. He’s a citizen and a patriot and a partisan of the free people of Alexandria and the Solar System.

Q: I never implied–

A: You did too. You just did. That’s the problem with all you ivory tower types, hip deep in goddamn personality profiles and behavioral indices. You think you can talk rings around me like I was some unlettered Jurist hick. I’m a Bookkeeper, motherfucker. A defender of the sacred Written Word from torch-wielding theocrat barbarians. I read Proust and Cicero on the crapper. I can quote Shakespeare in three different languages. So just ask me what you want to know and quit with the grade school psychiatrics.

Q: (Pause.) OK then. Did Mr. Feldman ever express bias and hatred towards Jurists?

A: Yes.

Q: Huh.

A: Of course he did. I express bias and hatred towards Jurists. Every goddamned Bookkeeper and most rational citizens of Alexandria and Greater Bibliopolis express bias and hatred towards Jurists. They’re our enemies. They’re responsible for the greatest acts of mass murder on the North American continent since the American Indian Wars.

Q: You don’t think the beating that Jurist boy to death was a little extreme? Crossing the line?

A: Yes, I do think it crossed the line. But then again, I’m not surprised. Andy’s from the Cheyenne Freehold. The only member of his family to survive.

Q: Yes, it says here. They had raped his sister …

A: He still wakes up screaming. Out on the prairie, when we were doing salvage operations, I used to be able to set my watch to it.

Q: Maybe he shouldn’t have been on the prisoner security detail?

A: Well, that’s an entirely different question, now isn’t it? And one you should be asking someone a little higher up on the chain of command.

Q: Do you think that Prosecutor Miraloma may have goaded him to kill the Jurist?

A: She never met either one of them!

Q: I meant by way of her speeches, her briefings …

A: Well, we were all pretty riled up. But then again, I never beat anyone to death.

Q: But you shot plenty of Jurists …

A: I never turned up the setting on my disruptor. You can check the log. I’m sure you already have. It was working fine. I don’t know what the hell got into Goshen’s head.

Q: Lieutenant Goshen?

A: What fucking other Goshen was on the goddamn space station that night?!

Q: Mr. Trask, please. We’re just trying to get the record.

A: Alright, I’m sorry.

Q: So you affirm that the low setting was acceptable for the task?

A: No, I never said that. I was not in anyone else’s shoes. Artemis should have watched her language, but I am not in a position to say that the use of the higher setting by my fellow Bookkeepers was unjustified. Could be proximity was an issue. Could be someone got in past the inertial damping field and was about to unload a full clip into someone else’s guts. Ever get shot with a bullet?

Q: No.

A: I did, and it sucked. By a teenage Young Christian Justice in Montana. He’s dead now. Wanna see my scar?

Q: No.

A: Personally, I think selling the whole Separation as a “bloodless coup” was a pretty massive PR error.

Q: Takeover.

A: What?

Q: “Bloodless takeover.”

A: Whatever. It was deceptive to say so. It’s a shipboard invasion! Of course people are going to get hurt.

Q: Can you relate the events leading up to the beating?

A: There were some big problems. Not enough Bookkeepers. The computer hack didn’t quite work. Molly, one of the intelligence gals, was left to guard the prisoners–

Q: Molly Rose, right?

A: Yes. Molly Rose. The late Molly Rose.

Q: She was the third in your cell. You, her, and Mr. Feldman.

A: ID’d herself the first month out by passing Andy a hymnal quoting Herman Melville. Ever read Melville? “Moby Dick”?

Q: I’m afraid not.

A: “Bartleby”? Even frickin’ asteroid miners read “Bartleby.”

Q: His style is just a bit too dense …

A: Well, that explains your complete absence of subtlety, humor and moral sophistication. So anyway. I’m in the forward command, filing my book report. The ranking officer, Colonel Barone, runs in and starts bawling out the tech guys. He never mentioned poor Molly all by herself. Me ‘n’ Andy would’ve been there in half a second.

(Long pause.)

Q: We can continue this later if you prefer.

A: No, it’s just. Still rather fresh in my mind. They cut her up, you know. Her whole body. Like a goddamn piece of steak. I want this noted.

Q: We’ve seen the autopsy.

A: And prosecuted. I want it prosecuted.

Q: This is a wide-ranging investigation.

A: OK. (Pause.) So, Barone bawled out the tech guys for something like ten minutes. Seemed to really enjoy it, actually. Finally he gets around to uploading whatever hacks he’s got on his DP from home base. All the computer glitches are sorted out. Then he rustles up the rest of the Bookkeepers and barges out the door again, I guess to give Mol some backup.

Q: You didn’t go with them?

A: It was all very informal. He never issued any orders. He never said anything about Molly. I was finishing my report, I just get absorbed in that sort of thing. After a while I noticed some shouting. It had been going on for a while. Ran down the hall, there it was.

Q: There what was?

A: The whole crew of ‘em. Kicking the shit out of that Jurist suicide bomber.

Q: We can’t verify that he was a suicide bomber.

A: He was going for the detonator.

Q: How do you know? Where you there?

A: No, Andy said …

Q: Yes, he did. So who else was there? Colonel Barone?

A: Not Barone, and not Farber, they ran off to find Mol.

Q: Leaving the infantry unsupervised.

A: Yes.

Q: And Mr. Feldman?

A: He was there.

Q: At the beating.

A: Yes.

Q: What was he doing?

A: (Silence.)

Q: Mr. Trask.

A: He was using his boots to harm the Jurist suicide bomber.

Q: Please be specific, Mr. Trask.

A: As I came around the corner I saw him kicking the Jurist in the face, in the throat, in the head. They’d all been doing it for a while, I think.

Q: Was the Jurist subdued?

A: He appeared to be unconscious.

Q: Was the kicking warranted, then?

A: I suppose that depends on your notion of justice.

Q: Do you think it was just?

A: I tried to stop him.

Q: Stop who? From what?

A: I tried to stop Andy from kicking the Jurist.

Q: Why?

A: I was scared for him.

Q: For Mr. Feldman?

A: He was behaving just like one of the bad guys. Irrational anger. It scared the hell out of me. He’s a good kid.

Q: That’ll be all for now, Mr. Trask.

A: Fuck you, also.

END OF SEARCH

logout

GIZA PLAZA PUBLIC BRANCH, LOWER SLOPE, COMMON TERMINAL 832176.GP.FUL
DECEMBER 1, 21--

Next: The Separation — Chapter Eleven

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

At first, the escape had gone brilliantly.

They moved swiftly though the desolate corridors, dimly lit, doors sagging open, scattered with evidence of fighting — abandoned barricades, scorch marks on the walls, bullets littering the ground, in stretches enough to trip you up.

There were bodies, invariably Jurist security forces in various states of contorted rigor mortis. Then, suddenly, the lights came up full strength, and the doors all shuddered and sank into their housing, mute and closed.

About five minutes later the alarms blared to life, a series of low, bludgeoning tones, and an announcement: “All nonessential personnel, please return to your quarters. Please return immediately. All nonessential personnel …”

They ran through the din and were met at the transit hub by a full squad of Godless regulars, armed and armored, and as the bullets flew, pointlessly, Marchand broke ranks and fled back around the bend and up to a service corridor iris hatch.

He was sure at least one of the Godless would follow, and it turned out to be that two did, ambling lazily up out of the rapidly concluding melee, playing their hellish weapons over his brother Jurists, rendering them insensate and twitching on the floor.

Marchand ducked through the hatch as a clump of plasmic discharge hissed inches from his ear, impacting on the wall opposite in a shower of sparks and spattered ore.

“Set it to stun! Set it to fucking stun!” came a voice, amplified, hollow. “We want this guy alive, confound it! Heart still beating — please!”

“Oh, don’t you worry, just havin’ some fun, Carly, that’s all. Just a little fun …”

“Just set it to stun, please? They got plans for this one, Marchand.”

“I know all about this guy. I watch the threevee, I read the Web. He’s a big fish, all that means you gotta play out the line a little. Give ‘im a bit of a fight, is all.”

Marchand raced down the servicorridor, boots clattering against the hard metal floor, and positioned himself behind an upturned catering robot. There was smashed crystal and toothpicks and delicate h’ors d’oeuvres scattered amid smears of spilled, drying wine.

The voices followed him down the corridor, bantering, intrusive, expanding to fill every available space. At the end of the corridor was a corpse, the solemn judiciary gray and black stripe mottled by char and gore.

The door was pitted, shell casings littered the floor. He lunged towards the control panel, fell back at the sight of tangled, sparking wire and fused override switches, spun and dived again for the catering robot just as his pursuers rounded the corner, dark silhouettes in that unnerving, featureless armor of theirs.

He took aim, knowing full well what would happen, squeezed off a few rounds, saw the slugs literally halt in their tracks and clatter harmlessly to the ground.

“… just rough ‘im up a little,” the one who wasn’t Carly drawled, leveling the damnable energy gun at Marchand. A sizzling bolt flashed through the air and dissipated on the chassis on the ‘bot.

Then another one, and it connected, clipped him on the temple, and he was thrown back, rigid, numbness spreading down through his neck and face and out into his arms, a sweeping fringe of blackness just beyond that.

He felt the next shot like a cool splash of water, and Carly’s voice filled his ears like inky fluid suffusing though some viscous medium:

“See? Even on stun, it messes ‘em up real good.”

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Ten

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

The next 12 hours were the definition of hell — and he’d seen some of the worst of the fighting back home:

On his belly amidst the creosote and gravel of the midnight desert outside Albuquerque, awaiting the next drifting flare and pounding artillery barrage. Running the damnable, rain-soaked Northern California coastal ridges, all stumps and mudslides and psychotic hillbillies dug in with .50-caliber heavy machine guns. Phoenix, a sprawling labyrinth of burned out suburbs and boobytraps and point-blank, house-to-house combat.

He’d been scared before. Sure thing. Pissed his pants as a shell took out a dozen of his buddies not five yards away. He’d wept at the sight of his C.O., eyes like boiled eggs, gagged at the smell of napalm and charred flesh. Something he now, truly, never could forget.

And despite all this, Midway was different. Worse. Because in this battle, Corporal James Deschutes was barely a combatant, largely unable to defend himself, to shoulder his rifle or lob a grenade or pull out his 9-millimeter for a finishing shot to the gut.

At no other time in his life was he more profoundly and completely a victim.

From the moment that first display erupted above in huge, shimmering 3V, he’d known it was a diversion. He averted his eyes — all lies, it was — and dropped to his knees.

There were voices everywhere, and the awful sound of the terrorist propaganda like shattered glass cutting into every stray, coherent thought.

“Gibbs! Gibby!” he whispered. “Gibson!”

His partner was staring upwards, slackjawed. “God’s blood,” he finally muttered, looking down. “Jimmy! You see that? You see what I mean?”

“Sergeant, I need orders. What are my orders?”

Gibbs shook his head. “What?” he asked, then squatted. “Orders. What’s it say on the com?”

Jimmy was switching through the various channels, but they were all dead. Static. He tapped at the earpiece, and suddenly his head exploded with sound, a voice, female, calm.

“Give up, soldier. You’re outgunned. There’s no hope. Here’s your chance to make it home. Right now. Put down your weapons. Put up your hands. Gather in the Northeast Sector cargo hangar. You will not be harmed. We’ll send you home. Home to your friends, your family, your churches. Your women. Safe. You have our word. Give up, soldier. You’re outgunned.”

Jimmy tore the voxbox and earpiece off. Snarled, looked around, Gibbs was standing again, agape.

“Thorns and locusts,” he swore. “What I tell you, Jimmy?”

He looked down, around. Corporal James Deschutes was nowhere to be seen. He swore some more and then cycled through the com band. All the same, a lilting voice whispering about surrender.

There were flashes of light up at the stage, and, faintly screams. He saw them now. The terrorists. Unlike any he’d seen. Clad in strange, dull armor, their faces occluded, clasping little handguns that strobed in concentrated, silent bursts.

And men fell loose limbed and abruptly to the floor.

There was a pair of them now, racing up the stairs, directly at him. Gibbs gazed at the tiny, oblong devices in their hands.

His automatic rifle was heavy, dark, full of angles and tricks and the flaring scent of machine oil, so very rare, these days.

He slipped it off his shoulder and lowered it to the ground. Raised his hands, just like the voice in his earpiece said he should.

The shot him anyway.

Jimmy crouched low. Behind a pair of seats. All was darkness and light and confusion. There was a woman now speaking, some Godless propaganda.

They really are doing it! Trials, hostages, hijacking the convoy, the entire station! His heart beat and his tongue was thick and sticky.

He took a breath and held it, exhaled, praying for calm, for clarity, watching the soulless creatures move amongst the good citizens, his brother officers falling, the great men of the church onstage, corralled, roughly handled in shackles and leg irons.

Dear Jesus, he prayed. Scared. He’d seen Gibby drop. Could only imagine what the Godless had in store. The 3V woman kept speaking. Lies.

Someone cleared his throat and Jimmy was gripped by a seizure of panic. He looked to his right and there was a man, a child with big eyes, and a woman, sitting all in a row.

“Hush now,” the woman said, and the child looked up at her. She closed her eyes and enfolded her hands, and the child did the same.

The man — the father — was looking directly at Jimmy, and then he extended his arm and dangling from his hand, a greatcoat, an antique it appeared, made of real wool with a high collar and buttons carved in the likeness of the crucifix.

Jimmy removed his vest and flack jacket — didn’t seem to do old Gibbs any good — locked his rifle down, his pistol, his shrapnel blasters. What use were bullets? Or any projectile?

He kept his knife, though. Stowed his hat, and all the electronic gear, they would track it all down and know exactly who was missing.

He took the coat. The man nodded. “We’re praying for you,” he said, and Jimmy’s eyes flooded and he turned his head, trying desperately not to snuffle like a child.

He didn’t look back. Crept low between the bleachers, overhead the 3V was blaring and he dared not look up, or over the seats and down at the stage, but kept his head low.

The floor was sticky with spilled drinks and chewing gum, nuplast wrappers and flattened soymod pops. He could smell the salt and butrflavr, and his stomach growled.

Not yet. There’s plenty of time for picking through the garbage, after all. As long as he could keep underground. A day? Maybe. A week?

Not a chance … they’ve jacked the network. They’ll be tracking infrared, electronic signatures, acoustic resonance. He’d need to stay in a crowd, move amongst the people. Try to blend in.

No, they’d spot his boots. He’d have nowhere to tidy up. He’d look like a ragman. Eating garbage, right? Living underground. They’d be checking everyone as they leave, as they board, as they queue up for rations, or to use the crapper … ident chips, paper stamps, retina scans …

He cursed, silently prayed for forgiveness, eyes clenched shut, tension anchored at the edges of his mandible and creeping up into his temples.

Sweat gathered along his shoulderblades and armpits, beads of it cooled under some hidden vent or overhead fan. His tongue hurt: He realized he had been chewing it, and a dull throb pounded into the depths of his ear every time he swallowed.

Jimmy had crawled all the way up to the topmost tier, and now faced a dead end, a low custodian’s access panel, smooth and faceless, set into the gray-angled hypertensile. He’d need a functioning ident chip and an override code to get through.

“Mother fuck,” he blasphemed, and was instantly sorry. “Please, Lord. Please, I beg. Forgive me. Show me. Lead me, Lord.”

The 3V above abruptly became quite loud, full of the sounds of weapons and engines, intercut with some narration, deep-voiced and reassuring, like a Sunday broadcast pastor.

He prayed and whispered and shouted to his Lord, and after a time the terrible sounds ebbed and the silence and shadows grew long.

There were crowd noises, and lights too that faded like a sunset he recalled once, after the Santa Fe bomb. Dusty and red-tinted.

He realized after a time that he was alone. In a great and airy silence. The stadium interior was empty, he peered cautiously between the seats, stuck his head up slightly.

Nothing. The cycling breath of the ventilation system. Trash strewn everywhere, chairs on the floor, scattered, knocked about in clusters and clumps.

And not a soul to be seen. No long dusty mops and hovering autovacuums, no idling supervisors with their feet up, chewing gum.

The wall-sized sliding stage doors were stuck in a ponderous spasm, drifting up against and away from an upturned catering table and an amoebic mass of crepe ribbons and pamphlets and a long white tablecloth entwined in an ugly blue nuplast tarp.

Drifts of confetti and half-full buckets of soypops gathered in corners, nudged along by the blasting HVAC system.

He saw a grounded autovac, pathetically lurching into a blind corner, pausing, rotating along minute search arcs, and lurching into the corner once again. Graceless technology, utterly inadequate.

The lights flashed and dimmed, came up again and then faded to a twilight luster. After a long, slow count to 100, Jimmy stood.

There was nothing and no one about.

He crouched and ran along the high balcony that ringed the stadium, came down lightly, quickly, along the sidemost stairwell above the stage door loading dock.

Under normal circumstances the room would have been stripped bare, the hypertensile automatically de-activated and refolded upon itself, broken down into infinitely recombinant microbuckies, all neatly stored lines and struts and points and planes and panels and ultra-compact weight-bearing joints.

He imagined the expanse, a hemispheric absence. But somehow the process had been interrupted. Jurist computers putting up more of a fight than those hellbound Godless ever expected!

A staring grin seized his face and vanished in an instant. He gnawed his thumbnail. Now … choices. Hide? Maybe in the farmdome. Amid the hectares of bananas and coconuts and coffee and soya. In the terradome, washing himself like a feral in the waterfalls.

He’d catch a fish, build himself a fire! His stomach rasped, he was devilishly hungry.

Creep down now. Down the stairs. Careful. Look again, long and slow. Through the doors he could just make out a long empty corridor, lights flaring up and then fading back to an abandoned somnolence. He slipped past the doors, and out.

Up ahead was the broad stairwell leading up to the embarkation lounge, the farmdome, the terradome, the aquadome, and the long encircling mall of crew quarters and the concourse and the Midway administrative suites.

To the right, the hangar’s master control room and hypertensile fabrication labs. And the hangar crew’s own gymnasium and spa, converted for the occasion to a green room for Jubilee dignitaries, full of catering and couches.

Gibbs had been talking excitedly about the “acres of forage” bound to be left behind after the evening’s conclusion. Jimmy’s stomach growled again, this time loud enough to be hear across the room. He cursed and prayed again.

To his left was the medcenter, one of a dozen auxiliary storage vaults, retrofitted with gurneys and multipaks of hemoglobin and saline and disinfecting instaplasters for the holy rollers who’d bit their own tongues nearly in two, who’d flung themselves to the ground in brightscarlet and purplebruised displays of devotion.

Thrice damned, not a single safe passage. The faithful, it seemed, had all been shuttled back to their arkships, but he was certain the silence and absence was a temporary situation at best. The Godless were running Midway’s corridors even as he stood there, rooting out the loyal crew and … what? Penitentiary ships? Deep space? Out the airlocks?

A clatter of footsteps and voices came rushing up the leftmost corridor, barking tones and breath in gasps.

Jimmy raced back behind the oscillating stadium doors as they slid dumbly up against the clutter and debris, leapt over a banister and down into the floor-level seating.

The corridor outside came alive with commotion.

“… supposed to be locked down, major. Locked down. Hours ago.”

“It was, sir, it is, the rest of the station is, you’re not listening. There was a glitch, a software problem. A redundant backup on a separate circuit, the virus wasn’t able to fully penetrate … ”

“It’ll fucking penetrate. Show me the console.”

“You sure Mol’s going to be OK?”

The footsteps came to halt, Jimmy estimated just at the entrance to the rightmost corridor, and the green room, and the control suite.

“No, I’m not sure. At this point I’m not sure about a single goddamned thing any of you so-called advance guardsmen have put in place. I asked for a total system compromise, something I know the Library City is fully capable of mustering, and you give me a teenage hacker with security protocols three months out of date. I ask for a division of bookkeepers to run security details and mop things up before the trial, and you give me four platoons and a canine unit. No, major, I do not know if Mol will be alright, which is why I think you need to quit wringing your pasty little hands and show me the master data console right fucking now …”

The voices diminished, vanished, and Jimmy bolted out again, his heart was racing, he stopped in the dead silence and peered down the long curving passage to the left, where Mol, whomever he was, awaited, apparently vulnerable.

Jimmy was heartened to know of this weakness. It made his knife seem almost adequate.

He crept along the smooth sheetflooring, 25 meters, 50, and more, up to an abrupt rightwards jog. Peered cautiously around the corner.

There was Mol. Tall, thin, back to him, shifting his weight between his booted feet, the synthetic fibers of his pants crinkling and rustling, thumbing idly through a datapalette.

He wasn’t wearing a helmet, the reddish-pale hair was buzzed back short and bristly. Jimmy drew his knife and leapt through the air and before Mol had completely registered the commotion had yanked the Godless bastard’s chin back and drawn the knife across in a swift and soundless motion.

And Mol turned and clawed at the air, and there was a hideous gurgling sound as the blood jetted over the floor, over Jimmy, who realized that Mol was a woman.

He dropped the knife, grew dizzy, puked and heaved.

A woman! A woman! I killed … What kind of pig … what kind of pig puts a woman into battle …

This wasn’t some subhuman squatter in the Arizona wastes. She could have been a girl at Sunday school. Big-boned, pale eyes (now drowned in panic, now horrified at their own fading light, now widening, now vacant, so very blank, not even staring), the kind of girl who would stand awkwardly at the edge of the room at the parish social, waiting for someone to come ask her name.

Jimmy bawled. There were sounds coming from his mouth he didn’t recognize. He made the sound as he rummaged through Mol’s possessions, ripped the dogtag — a woman soldier! — and ident chip from around, from what remained of, her neck …

There was a door. She had been guarding it. An unwieldy manual locking mechanism fused into place.

He’d seen them before, used them himself. His hands were shaking but somehow he managed to slide in Mol’s keychip, and the lock flashed green and fell to the floor.

The door slid open.

It was dark inside, half-lit. They were all there, rushed out in tight formation, bowling Jimmy over and spilling into the hallway.

“Wait! Wait! He’s one of ours!”

“Killed the bitch … ”

“Good job, boy! Good job! What’s your name? I recognize you, son.”

Jimmy tried to focus, and a face materialized, calm, searching. Familiar features — deep set black eyes under a dark brow, famously craggy, a Gallic nose, a scar running across the chin.

“Commander …?”

“Good job, boy,” Marchand repeated. “I remember you. Deschutes. A good Baptist lad, from Idaho. In the thick of it again, eh?”

“I killed a woman, sir,” Jimmy began.

“You killed an enemy combatant, corporal. And a rather splendid job it was. God’s work takes steel, boy. Strength. Don’t doubt for a moment you weren’t meant to do it. God brought you here to cast her Jezebel spirit into darkness. You were led by God.”

Jimmy nodded.

“Get up, lad, we don’t have any time. They’ll be back in moments. I’m promoting you, and I have orders. Are you ready, lieutenant?”

Jimmy found himself at attention. “Yes, sir.”

“We’ve got ourselves a challenge, son. These bastards have some kind of damping field that sucks the velocity right out of our bullets. Though your knife seems to have done the trick. So what we need is like a knife, only bigger. Something that can take out a bunch of ‘em all at once.”

He gazed thoughtfully at Jimmy. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said then, “I recall seeing a fair amount of mining gear in one of these ancillary hangars.”

“It’s for a ShearstoneYeunger expedition, out to the asteroids. Supposed to leave on Tuesday, after the Jubilee … we did a full security survey, sir.”

“So you looked through the manifests? Any explosives? Any sort of weapon that might cut their devil hides.”

“Some shaped charges, little things, they looked like,” Jimmy said, searching his memory. “But mostly just gear. Big drills, rigging, laser borers. Quonset habitats. Lots of hypertensile. Nothing like a proper bomb, sir.”

“What I’m going to ask of you is not going to be easy, lieutenant. But I trust you. You’ve survived some of the worst battles of the Tribs, and you’ve seen the enemy’s real face. But now we come to the end of it. These are the final days, lieutenant. You understand how important you are to the success of His plan.”

“Sir, we all have a place in God’s plan, but I’m not — ”

“We all have a place. That is correct, lieutenant. We all have a role. And we of the militia doubly so. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, but the Lord God enforces that peace with a sword. We are the strength and consequence of this will. In the Bible it says that we are to pursue our enemies, and that a hundred of us will pursue ten thousand. When the Israelites took the city of Ai, they destroyed every living thing within it, with the sword. Men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. We are that sword, lieutenant. We are weapons of God. You are His weapon, and He will bless you and keep you at his side, among the righteous. Go to the Shearstone hangar and take the explosives. Use them against the Godless, against their judges, their commanders, their soldiers. There is your knife. Strike as if you were the hand of the Lord. For that is what guides your every move.”

A man dashed up. Their gear had been found, piled on the floor of an adjacent supply room. The two whispered briefly, then Marchand nodded, and turned again to Jimmy.

“Lieutenant, we’re going for the St. Andrew. We’ll try and make it to Elysia, and rally the brethren. We can’t let them get the better of us. Good Christians are counting on us, and we’re counting on you, lieutenant. Carry the bombs into their midst. Hurry to the vessel, if you can, but time is against us.” He looked at the ground, and when he lifted his head a moment later his eyes glistened. “Remember, lad, that a martyr is honored among God’s children.”

And he saluted, and clasped Jimmy by the shoulders and prayed him God speed. Deschutes’ heart was pounding as he turned and jogged down the corridors.

The commander’s words were tangled in his mind. They put out leaves and grew into a thick twining bramble he could feel on his skin in racing pins and needles.

His teeth chattered as he slipped through the Shearstone hangar’s palpitating iris door, the lighting caught in a buzzing surge and ebb. In the dimness he could make out a big room, full of stacked boxes and cargo cylinders.

And there, the yellowblack crating.

The charges were flat discs with a digital interface, and controlled by a simple remote transmitter. The explosion was a focused, lateral scythe for cutting access channels into huge drifting asteroid fragments rich with ore.

He could lay several of these around the station, trigger them at his leisure.

Use the accompanying epoxy autodaub to cement them in strategic locations, tight bundles of latent concussion and heat waiting to burst open. The judges’ chambers, surely. And any command suites.

And what about the “refugees”? He should have asked. Then again, Jurist protocols were quite explicit that a renegade’s best hope was the mercy of Christ.

And maybe there were woman among them. But it was after all as Marchand said. The killing of sinners, heathen, Godless, was burdensome. Yes. An awful burden. Never undertaken lightly. But who can show mercy to a mad dog? You put it down and are done with it. One must mourn for their passing, and pray for what was left of their souls.

It’s just that it’s easier to do when they look like animals, Jimmy thought. These terrorists, these refugees, they look like good Christians.

Just don’t be fooled. Don’t feel sympathy. Don’t feel trust. Look what it got old Gilbert. We do our jobs and leave the judgment to the Lord.

He repeated the phrase in what would have been called a mantra, in another time. We do our jobs. The charges were significant pieces of equipment. More than three would be very heavy. Two in the big coat’s pockets. One in his left hand. The dauber in his right. No free hand for a knife …

The technical conundrum sparkled and teased him, and a sheaf of brilliant, absurd solutions fanned out like playing cards.

You can keep it in the sheath till you place one. You can put one down and draw the knife. And you might not need the knife at all.

That’s where his train of thought kept ending. He ran through it a few more times, but always came back to that same, dangling conclusion.

If he wound up in a confrontation, his knife would probably be useless. But the bombs wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Best if he was in a crowd of them, in that case.

It was a cold thought, and he tucked it brusquely away, shuffled in among his other options.

He had to piss, but tightened his jaw and took a breath, a deep breath, set his shoulders out and chest up against it. The corridor outside was empty, Marchand and the other officers gone on their desperate break for the Elysian shuttle.

Mol’s body had been shoved to the side of the corridor, her clothing now torn, her body slashed. How strange. He couldn’t pause to think of it.

The floor slick with blood still glistening. Jimmy battled against the urge to retch, glanced furtively around the corner. Nothing, still. He set the first charge at waist level by the short staircase to the grand promenade. The second, he had decided, should go outside the hangar control room, one of the Godless command points.

If he could place that, the third would go outside the magistrate’s offices. Armed, though. Turn the damn things on! He surprised himself with an awkward, abased grin, muttering at his foolishness, and tapped though the arming sequence.

A red light glowed on each, and he felt a reassuring vibration against his palm as he paced down the hallway, picturing the Godless hunched over dataterminals as the explosion slashed through the room.

His reverie shattered as a cluster of a half-dozen or so, in their blank beige armor, un-helmeted, bounded around the corner.

The instant of paralysis that followed gave way in turn to a roar of voices and limbs entangled and grasping fingers.

Jimmy dropped the dauber and clutched desperately for the detonator, cursing himself. A terrific blow against the back of his head sent him sprawling forward, he saw stars and was stricken moments later by a sizzling jolt that seemed to crackle in the fibers of his nerves.

The voices began to differentiate, but it was all murky, as if heard through a depth of silt and water:

“.. carrying a bomb …”

“Molly! Try and raise Molly!”

“He’s a fascist alright, just look at those boots … ”

“Give him some fucking boots!”

Jimmy had thought to struggle, to spin about and hurl himself at the voices, which, somewhere in the distant parts of his being, he hated and raged and wailed against.

But he could barely move, his limbs pressed into the floor like blocks of wood. He could make out shapes and motions, was aware that he was being yanked around violently. His perspective jerked suddenly. Jimmy realized he was being kicked and beaten. Faces crowded above, peering down through a tunnel of fists.

He saw their lips move, but it was harder to hear now. Lurid shapes billowed up before his eyes, yellow and luminescent violets bleeding into a saturated black, and overlain by a dim, flashing latticework.

Oddly, the only pain he could feel was in his bladder. Which he let go of. He recognized at one point that it was getting difficult to breathe, but he otherwise couldn’t feel a thing.

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Nine

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

Midway Station, set exactly between Mars, Earth and the precious ore of the Bartung 37 Asteroid Cluster, hangs like a child’s mobile, full of deliberate, interweaving motion. The enormous central hangar an oblong sphere set about with a broad, semi-circular halo of living quarters and public facilities. The three Earth biospheres glisten, their impermeable hypertensile shells turned iridescent, shifting greenblueyellowgold in the solar flux of light and radiation. The arkships array themselves, obeisant, like spokes about its hub, and the tiny shuttles flit between. And like any port of call, Midway does its best to accommodate the mass of immigrants and industry. The miners and engineers, the cloistered nuns and hospital staff, numbering a few hundred at best, suddenly overrun by ignorant, planetbound groundlovers! The restaurants stay open late. The bars are packed with lovers, with fighting, bribery, traffic, and quick, baldfaced games of chance.

So many thousands of human voices, simple and extravagant!

“Calm down, alright? Toby, don’t, don’t hit your sister Toby … ”

“.. didn’t mean it, he’s just being a spoiled brat …”

“… every day, I swear, a new proclamation, a new sermon, a new call for donations … any good Christian can see what’s happening, and I don’t care who hears me. I understand the need for a common defense, but we left Earth to get away from all the fighting. And now there’s a new tithing? To defend Mars from rebels? What rebels? We’re in the middle of space! There are no rebels here, there are no terrorists, unless the Jurists haven’t been doing their jobs, and if so well maybe we’re better off without them!”

“Angie, I don’t want another outburst like that from you! The Bible says that in the final days a few will be chosen, and carried first into Heaven, and we’ve never been closer than now … ”

“Praise Jesus! After generations of blood, of bombs, of giving up your sons, your daughters, your mothers, your fathers. Homes and happiness washed away by the tides of God’s great, unknowable plan. And now, by the grace of God, we are come unto a new land, far from the troubles of our old Earthly home … ”

“You think you can just skip town, flee God’s justice like some kind of bad debt? Satan is a coiled serpent in your hearts, and you will not be forgiven! Your fornication and gambling infests these ships like rats! Your eyes are desperate and full of doubt, I see it like I saw it once in my own eyes, gazing back from the depths of the mirror, empty and in denial of the love of Christ … ”

“… not just the weather. It’s not just the drought that killed the orchard. It’s them damn robots. Them damn nanobots. How they keeping them out? Not one of those blossoms opened before the petals all turned black and fell off. Each and every one! You can’t fight those machines. They’ll follow us like fleas all the way to Mars … ”

The celebrants arrive in droves, shuttled over from the skyscraper arkships, waving blue and gold Unity flags, walls emblazoned with the Gavel, the Dove, the Cross and the Crown of Thorns. Bellringers gather loose credits for the food banks, for the children’s hospital on Elysia. The crowds heave, sluggish and inevitable, down the broad pedestrian escalators and into Three Kings Stadium — the huge central drydock, refitted with a broad floor and stacked hypertensile seating, adorned with stages and floodlights and a booming, resonant sound system. For this night of all nights!

“There she is! I’ll be darned.”

“There who is?”

“That nun I was telling you about. There she is. Just on the left, by the stairway up to E section.”

“Which one?”

“All the way on the left. With the little black hymnal.”

Officers Deschutes and McKaye leaned out over the balustrades overlooking the stadium’s East Quad entrance. The nun in question patiently waited, stepped, waited, worked her way across the floor, heading for the women’s reserved seating, a clear line of sight straight to the stage.

“You can tell she has big hips. Child-bearing hips. Just get ‘er out of those robes.”

“Aw, she’s married to Jesus, Gibby.”

He snorted. “Whore of Jesus, more like it. Come on. They’re getting felt up by half the noncoms. Lombardo, Ravin, Tandy. All of ‘em. Have their pick of the bitches.”

“You’re an S.O.B., sergeant,” Deschutes said, genuinely cross. “She’s beautiful, that’s all. She’s the one I saw that night, on the promenade. After curfew. She didn’t have her wimple on. She’s got beautiful hair. I seen her around the ship.”

Around the ship? Everywhere. He imagined her hair, luxuriant red locks, cascading about her shoulders and down her back. He was fascinated by her dark eyes and heavy brow. He stole glimpses, she intruded on his vigils, striding past his sentry point with head bowed and nary a backward glance. He dreamed of things he’d say to her, of what she looked like when she smiled.

He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away, gritted his teeth as the lustful thoughts flared up. He visualized the play of her legs under the heavy, dark cloth, her bosom bound tightly in her restrictive garb.

Forgive me, he thought, and in that instant she turned her head sharply, looked up, locked eyes with him, face frozen in startled curiosity.

“She likes you, man,” Gibson chortled. “Looka that. You see that? She’ll do anything you say. I seen that look before. All you do is slip her a few credits. See what’s under the veil.”

Jimmy frowned then, and so did the nun, and she looked away.

“See that?” Gibbs exclaimed. “It’s in the bag, son. Tell you what, go talk to old Lombardo, he can set you up. Just a few credits and you’ll slip right up that sacred little cooch.”

“You always have to talk like that. She’s a nice girl, man. You sound like a ‘Slamist.”

Gibbs snorted. “Only reason you have any opinions at all about ‘Slamists is because of the 3V. Well, I spent some time over there. Hand to hand combat on the streets of Jerusalem, before the bomb. And before that a six-month stretch in a Gaza work camp. And you know what the difference was between that and Albany Detention & Corrections? I was a guard in one and a prisoner in the other. Otherwise, it was the same damn camp and the same damn people. Only real difference is the beards and the overseas zip code. But they pick their noses and scratch their asses and treat their women same as us. Cover their hair, wrap ‘em up in black veils, all you wind up with is a whore of Babylon in a god-damned wimple.”

Jimmy turned to stare at his partner. “You know, I could turn you in for that kind of talk.”

“You need a night or two down at Drobney’s. Show you some piety. Just be glad you’re a foot soldier, not up in the ranks. T&A is fine for you and me, but they have some twisted old fuckers upstairs. I heard stories.” He shook his head. “I don’t think Jesus has much to do with it.”

“Well then why the heck are you here at all? This is a holy war, Sarge, prophesized in the Bible. Least I got a reason to be here!”

“I got a reason too, Jimmy. It’s called a paycheck. You got a holy war. I got a job. Good thing we’re on the same side.”

And the voice of the crowd was coalescing, echoing, shattering into a million fragments of a million moments, cresting in rippling applause as the lights and laser projections cycled and pulsed through a series of primal signifiers: The white bird. The crown, thick with gore. Cheers gusted and eddied across the floor, up along the slopes and heights of the terraced stadium seating. The days leading up to this moment had been full of speakers and singers and screenings and healings, mass held five times daily and confessions and communion offered in alcoves peppered among the restrooms and snack stations. The faithful gathered in circles in the halls and corridors, eyes rolling, tongues twitching with spontaneous glossolalia, or huddled in fervent prayer, hands clutched like a circle of skydivers plunging through battering winds. The Wave had been circling the venue repeatedly throughout the day, rhythmic, sweeping. The pulse of the Jubilee, quickening as the moment approached, simulcast to Mars and Earth alike, bridging the far reaches of Christendom, united now, forever!

“There’s the guard. That one,” Leah whispered, though the constant chatter and buzz of the audience threatened to submerge her words. “On the landing, above the entrance. He was staring at me. He always does.”

Monica glanced up quickly. Tough-looking. But very young. Adam’s apple bobbing up and down a long and skinny neck, caught up in some heated discussion with an older petty officer. She grasped her rosary, bowed her head.

—Don’t worry about him, sister. Take up your position. We can’t afford distractions. He’s just a little boy.

—He saw me with the book. On the promenade. After curfew.

—That was months ago. He doesn’t know.

—He was nice to me then. (Pause.) He let me go, and looked away. I didn’t have my wimple on. Now he just stares.

Monique looked up. “It’s too late now,” she said. “We’re committed.” She embraced Leah. “C’mon. Let’s sit down. My feet are killing me.”

She turned on her heel and began hiking up the stairs. Leah watched her ascend, then followed, clambering upwards, and her breath quickened with her heartbeat, the voices of the audience seemed the hostile roar of an insect swarm. She squeezed her eyes shut as the grotesques of the last year intruded into her waking mind. Visions of bloodshed and cruelty, fantasies of vengeance brought with all her despising upon the Jurists. She dug her knuckles against her eyelids until she saw bright points of light and smudges of color. Thought of the soldier, the young boy, bashful, eyes averted in the darkened promenade, the color in his cheek as she later passed his station in the plaza, en route to mass or the children’s compound, Katie in tow, withering with embarrassment and fear beneath his certain gaze at her backside.

Her heart leapt and she hurled herself upstairs. Where was little Katie now? In the children’s compound, watched over by that hateful mother superior. Hathaway, her cramped face pierced by suspicious eyes and a tearing-down tongue. It seemed to Leah that the woman’s entire sense of purpose involved nothing less than the complete suppression of hope and imagination in her young charges. Even her readings of the Scripture, of the most passionate and sweeping verse, were delivered in a scraping monotone that somehow wrung words of hope and deliverance into dire condemnation.

So far, though, Katie had weathered it all, kept her voracious little mind, and her cool, implacable self-possession. In any other time than this, Leah realized, the girl would be at the top of the class. A leader of her fellow students. Why not? She had chills sometimes, watching Katie’s calm authority over the other children, organizing the construction of building-block fortresses, designating teammates for a game of kickball. Her pointed, unexpected questions, that startled Hathaway into silence.

“Then why did they kill my mom and dad?” the little girl had asked just last week, in the middle of a Ten Commandments story.

“Christians don’t kill other Christians,” was the reply, after a leaden pause, and Katie stared as if waiting for more. But her instructor cleared her throat and continued on to Adultery, and Katie kept to the back of the class after that, whispering to her friends and earning reprimands that she wore like merit badges.

“She’ll be due for a caning,” Mother Hathaway had said. “Disrespectful little thing.”

“They did shoot her parents, Mother. I was there.”

“And she’s better off here!” the schoolmistress snapped. “Where she can get the guidance and affection of a good Christian family.”

Leah knew better than to ask what kind of Christian family she’d find on Elysia.

Mary and Jesus, save this child, Leah prayed. She made it to the top of the stairs, and edged her way along the row of seats, bumping against knees and clambering over feet. Finally. Sank down onto the unyielding hypertensile bleachers. Listening to the lapping, murmorous tide all around, which suddenly redoubled, and cheers broke out in all directions as the huge central 3V throbbed to life, casting up the looming of figures of all the shipboard lords and luminaries gathered onstage.

Resplendent in their gray and gold cloth, festooned with epaulets, sidearms, rings and crosses, robes and bright white teeth.

The sweat and pores on their faces glistening in the stage lights, their cheeks round and red and healthy.

They stood at ease, collegial, trading jests and casual grins, fully endowed with all magnificence and gravitas of a lifetime of accomplishment.

Falling into respectful attention as a mellifluous voice rolled out across the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, to open the second Jubilee of Christendom Renewed, broadcast live, tonight, here at Midway Station, on the historic road to Mars, on the fiftieth anniversary of the schism healed, please join me in welcoming to our stage one of our greatest orators on morality, justice and the love and mercy of Christ our Lord, a member of the faculty at Cold Jordan University on Luna, and traveling with us to Mars to open the colony’s first theological seminary. Bishop Dominick — ”

The image suddenly blinked out and the wave of applause died off expectantly, and the gaping moment was filled, jarringly, by an explosion of horrible sound and image, hideous, a crying, screaming boy, and a man, stripping off his shirt, his face limned in a clear, bright, revelatory light.

Marchand! A devil now, forever!

The crowd was then noiseless as the 3V strobed overhead.

Trask and Andy looked at each other and nodded and turned and shouldered their way forward, towards the stage. They moved swiftly, activating the hypertensile gel armor stitched microns-thick into their clothing, pulling their hats down and collars up into auto-sealing combat headgear, complete with teargas filters and blast deflection.

Jurist security stood in clusters at the entrance to the Gold Circle and V.I.P. seating, staring open-mouthed up at the pirated 3V jacked into the stadium’s broadcast circuit. They dropped instantly, with gasping sighs, caressed by washes of neurodisruptive second-spectrum discharge. Trask and Andy clutched their palm-sized zap guns and raced towards the stage, there were others streaming in from every direction.

And the 3V projection field above was filled with spectacle and condemnation, relayed throughout Midway station and all the arkships, and to the interstellar transmissions hurtling towards Mars and Earth.

Abigail clasped her rosary. It was warm and vibrated slightly, presumably from the suppression field. “Don’t worry,” the Bookkeepers’ agent — a lanky, blonde nun named Laurie — had said. “Don’t worry, it’s not exactly broadcasting so much as the reverse. It works on the inverse-spectrum theory, if you’re familiar with it? A little? Well, the basic idea is that the electromagnetic spectrum — microwaves, radio, you know — has a sort of inverse that we can also manipulate. So what we’ve done is modify these rosaries so that they flatten any transmission on Judiciary frequencies, security as well as public bands. And then we can broadcast in our own. You and your girls will be scattered throughout the stadium and will create a bubble that will nullify any signal they try to send. So you need to assure me that you’ll all be there. It won’t work without you.”

“We will be,” Abigail had said.

And here they were. She watched the images, vivid, above, and for the first time in many decades there were tears coursing down her face.

The Bishop! Kelley! A collage of damnable truths! Deep in his cups, palms crossed with silver and gold, dice tumbling across his desktop blotter. His indulgences bought and sold, forgiving the worst sins of Jurists and Papists alike, the prosecutors and cardinals, all familiar, sober faces of Church & State, seen weekly on the news. The words that dripped from these men’s lips: corruption, lust, greed. Murder! Bribes and knowing smiles.

“Foul, foul!”

“All lies!”

“Strewth!”

Through the cacophony above came shouts, and the terrifying pop-pop of gunfire, screams and panic gathering among the feverish masses. The lords and governors of Christendom turned and wheeled on the stage, but at every corner the guards were struggling or falling before clusters of figures in a dull sort of gray-green body armor.

The intruders seemed minimally equipped, except for their weapons—absurdly tiny, like a handheld com—and utility belts studded with compact squares and rectangles. Their faces were obscured by oddly reflective, form-fitting masks that made them look almost like animate mannequins. The Jurist police fired their weapons repeatedly, but none of the terrorists — they must be terrorists! — paused for even an instant. The ground was covered in failed, inert bullets. Flashes of light burst from all the compass points, and the remaining security fell, heavily, motionless.

In moments the stage was overrun. The great men corralled into snap-on electroshackles. It was brutish, the commandos shoving and blunt-fingered. Faceless. The newly taken hostages were stunned and then combative, and then sent sprawling by a flickering play of light.

A new face. The terrible visions faded. A woman, beautiful, eyes pale against dark skin, no hat, gray-lustered hair pulled back. Tightly bound. Her jaw is set and her lips compact.

The silence is abrupt and nearly perfect. She is speaking and the words are difficult to grasp. They fill volumes of space like thunderheads, thrilling, imminent, glimpses of comprehension like the coy droplets before a pure and freezing deluge.

“My name is Rose Miraloma and I was born in Alexandria, the library city on the slopes of the Magic Mountain. We are a free state founded by refugees and survivors of the Earthwide Holocaust. We have founded our homes in the naked depths of space, because we must live, and the course of your world is to die. We have built our paradise on airless rock, and have given it atmosphere and rivers and flowers and trees, because we must live and the course of your world is to die. We have come today to declare ourselves to your failing world, and to declare our separation from it. We act according to the urgency of our conscience, as dictated by protocols of the General Humanitarian Declaration of 2073. We reject its overthrow, and re-assert its governance of all matters of human life and law. We claim the Midway Mining and Materiel Station in the name of the free people of Earth and the solar system, and rename it the Midway Public Branch. Hereinafter it will serve as a free university, transport hub and open library. In the next six months Midway will also house the Transplanetary Administrative Agency, overseeing all commerce in this, humanity’s second space age. This includes new powers of environmental, civic, political and economic regulation and enforcement. Executive officers of the TAA are democratically elected, and the people of Mars, Luna and Earth are welcome to participate, provided they agree to reform certain aspects of their civil governments. Until then, we will vigorously interdict all interplanetary traffic not directly related to the delivery of life support to extra-Terran colonies.”

She smiled then, a hard, slight uptick at the corners of her mouth.

“Now, as chief prosecutor of the independent city and state of Alexandria, and in service to the free peoples of the Solar System, I do hereby place the men on this stage under arrest for crimes against humanity, and order them confined to the Midway Criminal Penitentiary, to be held for a public trial commencing two months hence, on October 18. The proceedings will be broadcast live for the duration on all public bands, commencing with a formal recital of charges tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there will be no interruption of services on Midway or any of the arkships. Neither will we impede your progress to Mars. We will, however, begin accepting petitions for asylum, effective immediately. We are a free society, and welcome all who seek to escape persecution for their faith, gender, political belief or sexual preference. Emigration forms are now available at any data terminal on Midway and the arkships.

“We urge you to carry on with your business as usual. Any attempts to foment civil unrest will be considered a direct attack on the life support systems of Midway and the arkships, and will be treated in kind. Now, in lieu of your previously scheduled evening’s entertainment, we’re pleased to offer a short educational presentation on Alexandria and its origins.”

The image of the woman blinked out, and the audience roared and spat and hissed and catcalled, but also there were whistles, and applause, and knots of brawling, tangled limbs.

And the whole stadium was then plunged into darkness, and a heartbeat later filled with stars, coruscating, and a magnificent bass note that rattled the chest and teeth. The stars accelerated in a dazzling cinematic display, emanating from a central cluster of light.

The audience returned to its true form — rapt, attentive — and the light resolved into a primitive chain of habitation capsules floating in deep space. There were dozens of archaic flags on the canisters, colors and devices unseen for decades. A voice echoed across the floor, feminine, serene, for all the world sounding like the narrator of a nature documentary:

“The Prometheus Intra-System Solar Observer was one of the greatest triumphs of humankind’s First Space Age. It was completed in 2075 by an international commission, but abandoned 25 years later with the Great Collapse and the start of what we Alexandrians call Night on Earth. Five years later the first refugees began arriving, smuggled by a team of extraordinary women and men, the founders of our society, in a prototype space vehicle you can still see today at the historical Nantucket Harpooneers Drydock in the easternmost foothills of Mount Evermore. Known more widely as the Magic Mountain, this unique deep-space human habitation is founded upon a massive planetoid fragment, and is home to 47 distinct townships, subdistricts and autonomous zones, including our capital, the Library City of Alexandria …”

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Eight

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

“Abigail.”

The girl was soft-focused, barely 19, dewey and fresh, a new blossom just open. Black velvet was upon her skin, and also she saw the flash of the crucifix, and white teeth.

Abigal awoke then, as she always did, placid, eyes opening slowly to the daylight suffusing through the room. The tearing and the flood of pain hung in the back of her mind like the tangy smoke of a candle just snuffed. It dissipated as quickly.

She yawned and stretched and rose, and performed her ablutions in the blush of simulated morning. An angelic choir, reverberant in the distance, amid piped-in birdsong and the sighing of the wind in the grass.

But the air did not stir, there was no fresh breeze or flaring nostrils, and in the months since they had embarked the irony had graduated from savory to bittersweet to utterly mundane.

And that was the point, after all, she thought. The Arkship’s expansive VR interiors — majestic landscapes and molten ocean sunsets — served both to reinforce the Judiciary’s theocratic kitsch, and to give the colonists a sense of security, of normalcy, however contrived, in the cold depths of space.

Two steps to the kitchenette, for a bowl of ‘Nana-Nutz with soymilk and a steaming mug of Brisk Sippin’ Genuine Coffee-Flavor Breakfast Beverage.

She placed her meal on the table and faced the viewingwall.

“Morning news, please.”

The heavenly choir and the simulated grassy-green meadows blinked out, replaced by a large, floating broadsheet. Her customized news feeds assembled and displayed themselves, shameless and state-sponsored.

“Ease into it, old girl,” she muttered.

Then loudly, to the waiting air: “Just cycle through the visuals for now, please.”

The viewingwall blinked again, swift and compliant.

Calm blue letters floated up to the surface of the screen, a backdrop of stars billowing out behind them:

EARTH VIEW -- REALTIME -- REALSPACE

TRANSIT TIME: 145 DAYS, 7 HOURS, 33 MINUTES, 18 SECONDS.

There, in the upper left hand corner, the Mother Planet diminishing slowly, surely, at this point barely more than a point of light.

Abigail pondered the zoom and time-lapse options, then clucked disapprovingly at herself. No time for sentiment. New worlds await.

“Next,” she said, settling back. She raised the mug to her lips; the false coffee slipped across her tongue, warm, rich, leaving behind a vague chemical sheen of flavor.

CONVOY VIEW: ADVANCE CAMERA, BROAD PAN SUNWARDS

… the screen read, as the viewingwall flashed again, as the camera swung back dizzying through spumes of propellent, past forests of antennae, along great hemispheres and planes and gaping cargo bay doors, rushing ahead of the fleet to a forward viewing position (so the display assured her) of a bit more than 25 kiloms.

The chain of six Arkships — skyscrapers uprooted, knocked on their sides and sent aloft — was suspended in the vast darkness, surrounded by traffic and commerce. About 4,000 passengers and crew per vessel, attended by a swarm of factory, medical, agricultural, penitentiary and constabulary ships.

As always, dull brown ferryboats shuttled produce and cloned meat from the huge ag canisters.

As always, bright yellow school transports drifted lazily between the Arkships and the admiral’s mighty flag, tours daily at 9:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3:35 p.m.

As always, personal yachts and cruisers followed vaulting arcs between, joyriding, day-tripping, and, no doubt, Abigail was certain of it, smuggling, hustling, dealmaking, stuffed to the gills with bribes and trick floorboards, glutted with broad grins and sweaty palms.

And at last the news itself. Abigail, eyes still bleary, stretched luxurious like a cat, and opted for an audiocast.

“The Transplanetary Capital Report brings you the latest news, views, market assessments and trading prospects for today’s far-traveling business class. I’m Camron Abiline reporting from the floor of the Temporary Transit Stock Exchange, where Martian industrial futures are enjoying a record sixth week of unprecedented growth–”

Enough, enough. Abigail wondered again why she bothered to keep the business feed in her personal queue, pondered axing it — a word was all it would take — and moved on.

Sports she could skip, the Fleet and Earth reports she’d browse later. Next, the Religion & Family Channel. Best to log at least a few hours, just to keep up appearances.

“Hi folks, Pastor Bob Dawkins here.”

“And I’m Dr. Robert Cartwright.”

“And you’re listening to Talking Virtue, broadcast live from the Midway-Mars Convoy. Now Rob, I want to open today’s program with a little statistic that I think you’ll find heartening.”

“I’m all ears, Bob.”

“Well, I’m pleased to say that of any Jurist enclave, the Community in Christ here on the convoy has once again set a record for the rate of weekday and Saturday church service attendance.”

“Praise the Lord! Now why do you think that is?”

“Well Rob, the way I see it — ”

“Enough!” Abigail cried.

The screen went blank; silence open around her like a flower.

“Do you carry anything other than propaganda?” she said to the wall, boldly, a flush of heat in her cheeks.

“I’m sorry, could you rephrase the question,” the wall responded, blank and flat.

The nun swore, then, in her mind, but to the kilometers of circuits entombed in the wall she said: “Just a broadsheet, then. Text magnified to 125 percent.”

Again: A blinking, flickering moment, and the tawdry, low-budget mass of rumor, gossip and police reports unfolded before her. Adjusting her glasses, Abigail commenced to browse the blurbs and summaries, the breathless headlines battling for attention:

Helping Hand for Homo Priest?
BY MARTIN BANDY, DEEP SPACE DAILY STAFF WRITER

IN A SURPRISE development, Father Michael Mannington, the convicted homosexual cleric facing chemical castration at midnight Friday, may have another chance at redemption thanks to an eleventh-hour intervention by Fleet Admiral George Leary. “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” the Admiral is reported to have said in a personal message to the Master of Adjudication yesterday afternoon. His call for compassion follows the dismissal of charges against three clergy accused of immodest or lewd acts in the company of women and girls following the convoy’s departure from Gideon on … [MORE]

— + —

Dad’s Suicide Shocker Ups Trip Tally
BY CANDY TAMMENER, DEEP SPACE DAILY FAMILY & HEALTH WRITER

THOMPSON MCCREADY SEEMED to be a happy man. With a loving wife, four children, 13 years of Church-blessed marriage and a high-paying job waiting for him on Mars as an a-grav technician at the Negev III groundbreaking, McCready was in fact the envy of his peers. That makes his death last Sunday by hanging — the sixth act of suicide fleetwide since departure four months ago — all the more baffling. “The worst part is knowing that he’s in Hell now for all eternity,” said his bereaved … [MORE]

— + —

Constable Declares ‘War’ on Graffiti Vandals
BY ISAAC ARAMANTH, DEEP SPACE DAILY STAFF WRITER

A PERSISTENT RASH OF vandalism and graffiti involving at least a half-dozen youth gangs across three Arkships is spreading, prompting calls by Fleet Constable David Wannamaeker for harsh punitive measures. Speaking at a Grand Promenade press reception on Monday, Wannamaeker said vapor-painting by organized groups of young people is no longer an innocent “fad,” but now threatens both fleetwide stability, and the immortal souls of those behind the acts. “I understand the youthful need to rebel,” Wannamaeker said, “but the misuse of God-given talent can be a quick road to …”
[MORE]

[Abigail, browsing 3V stills of the graffiti, leans forward and strokes her chin: Quite sophisticated stuff, actually. Whoever they are, these kids have an eye for color and composition. Not very subtle, but what do you expect. Youth. And boys at that. Most likely. No wonder the Constable's got his undies in a bunch. He'll pull out all the stops to save those tender souls. She crosses her fingers and invokes a particular Muse on their behalf.]

— + —

Curfew Limits Drunken Brawls And Fisticuffs
DEEP SPACE DAILY STAFF REPORT

MELEES AND INCIDENTS OF hooliganism are on the decline fleetwide following the uniform rollback of Friday & Weekend Promenade hours to 10 p.m., Admiral Leary’s office reported today. The rollback, first proposed by the Pan-Christian Council on Morals & Ethics, was voluntarily imposed by each individual Arkship, and was criticized by Women’s Temperance Union president Mother Janis-Marilyn Kurkowski as a “half measure” that ignores greater incidences of alcohol-fueled violence in the home … [MORE]

[Abigail, wondering, leans forward and stokes her chin: Fisticuffs? Who was the wag that slipped that one in? One of ours, it must have been. "Staff report." Could be anyone. It wouldn't surprise me if the Daily harbors a few sympathizers, being a newspaper and all, not exactly the kind of place where the truly unlettered would get very far. Perhaps they're passing secret messages. "Fisticuffs." A fine word for spies and cells and covert missions.]

— + —

Drug-Doll Daughter to Elysian Trauma Unit
BY CANDY TAMMENER, DEEP SPACE DAILY FAMILY HEALTH WRITER

THE LONG ORDEAL of little Jessica Brandywine, daughter of convicted drug smugglers John Charles and Judith Merril Brandywine, may finally be drawing to a close. After her father’s public hanging for concealing a stash of coca and poppy seeds in the abdomen of his daughter’s Raggedy Mandy doll, little Jessica’s mother, too, was found guilty of aiding and abetting the crime. Declared unfit for parenting, she begins a 15-year Cure and Reprimand with the Order of the Holy Sisters on Tuesday, leaving her daughter in the care of the Bethlehem’s Treasure School of Liberation. Although hundreds of petitions for adoption have been received, Commander Bertrand-Marie Marchand, longtime overseer of the school’s famed Liberation Battalion, announced the child’s transfer to the state-of the-art … [MORE]

“End program,” she said; the virtual broadsheet folded in upon itself, dwindled, vanished. The article had been illustrated with a 3V still, naturally.

The same one she’d seen for weeks, with every update on the dreary, dreadful story. A little rotating image of the doll, sad-eyed with a lopsided stitched mouth, its pathetic visage hovering next to the latest, typically disheartening headline.

The poor child, Abigail thought, pursing her lips. God willing, she’ll never set foot in the place. God willing, this will all be done with before long.

Barely a week remained before the convoy was scheduled to dock at Midway Station, where, after the Jubilee, the colonists would embark on the final leg of their journey to Mars, and the little prison vessels would alight on their own damnable vector to Elysia.

But perhaps a different choice would await them, as well.

Doubt plagued her. She worried her nails and licked her lips. Were the agents in place? Had the circuits been rigged? What about the gear? The medics? The crowd control? And the sisters — had they done their parts? Planted their little seeds of disruption and deception?

“Nothing to do about it now, old girl,” she said to herself, struggling to find a smile within her beating heart. “It will come to pass, or not.”

But silently she prayed, desperately clutching at the solace of her petition.

On this day, this day of all days, please Lord. Let the just prevail.

A wave of sorrow swept over her, she was shocked at its force and drew a ragged breath, and another, slower.

A warm blue-green calm suffused inside her, and she saw in it the placid smile and the eyes, bottomless, of her patron, her Mary, Mother of all.

Tremors rippled through her, the briefest moment of terror and gratitude at the glimpse of Creation she was given: curling roots and a fringe of new leaves and buds, the sky a boundless pasture for clouds, and she was far below in the sightless, frigid depths of Ocean, and skimming its lush abundant shore … the night and its stars, themselves aswarm with hurtling, fecund globes.

It was the most potent vision she’d had in years, the same force of revelation that gave her, when she was just a child, the words that made her hateful to the Church and its masters:

O Mother of us all, whom we call Mary
To Thee i pray and thank
For the bounty of this World
For all its blessings
And to Thee i beg forgiveness, for the

Sins of my people, as of mine own self
Show me how to love and teach

O Mother
Show me the patience of Your
Ages passed and yet to come
For as all things must pass
So shall our sorrows

But never Your love

Each verse was a ripple expanding into perfect silence. She breathed through each in turn.

In the hall she passed clusters of pilgrims and colonists, and Guards of the Jury in pairs or alone, leaning against walls and doorjambs, berets at rakish angles, rifles slung low at the hip.

She kept her mind clear and passed them all, inclining her head graciously. She arrived at Vespers 15 minutes late — unusual for such a creature of routine.

Upon entering the chapel she found all the sisters kneeling, heads bowed, silent, their earliest prayers complete, their fingers now knotted up and twisting in their rosaries, gossiping in rapidfire sign language.

Clever girls, forgotten in their cloisters.

Abigail took her place at the head of the gathering, knelt, and watched the flash and chatter of their anticipation.

–Will it be soon?

–At last!

–Mona had a vision, Mother

–Me too!

–It was Mary …

–The sea, the stars, the Earth

–Tell us, mother!

–Will there be fighting?

–Guns …

–What are our stations?

The last was from Clara. Deep-set eyes, dark locks pulled back, a stray tendril licking at the scar that ran from her left ear and along the underside of her jaw.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Abigail began, and her little band of cultists recited the prayer with her, and she observed them all as the rhythm and throb of the words quieted their desperately beating hearts, and uncoiled the stress gathered in their shoulders.

Her astonishment that the so-called Cult of the Mother should have existed at all had long since been replaced by, not so much pride, as admiration and gratitude.

Her shock at being recognized at all, so many decades past, was only surpassed by her amazement upon seeing her heretical prayer, scrawled in a feverish, trembling fit when she was barely a teen, replicated word for word by girls just like these, in their quick and subtle sign-language dialect.

Abigail hadn’t spoken that verse aloud since her public Reprimand and Chastisement, and her fifteen-year cure in Worcester. And yet here they were.

Somehow, all the girls with scars sooner or later came to Mary, isolated behind convent walls, lured by furtive devotional chips palmed between services and at bedtime.

The prayer concluded. Abigail, a modest handmaiden of the Judiciary and the Holy See, lifted her head, and smiled, and her fingers were knotted in the rosary.

–Madeline was sick again last night, Mother

–He makes me sick

–He’s a beast

–Do you still bleed?

–Yes Mother

–The pills are working. It’s nothing but the will to purge. He may have his way with you, but you are having none of him. Do you see? You must be strong. You must endure. There is an end to it. We need your strength. All of us need it. If we succeed, there will be no blood spilt. We must forgive them all, as Her Son has shown us. We must forgive, and do our good works, and be patient, and endure. We are nearly delivered.

–What are our stations?

–As we discussed. Gather in the back rows. When the time comes, duck your heads and activate your rosaries. Now, your final reports, please. Clara.

–Roger … Captain Plansky … he’s confirmed there will be no real changes to Guard deployment. The only difference is that an additional security force of 350 will work the Jubilee opening ceremonies tonight.

–Monique.

–The flecks are all in place, Mother. On all three of them. Robinson, Barrie and DiNunzio. On their ident chips, I mean. They brag so much. Each one of them has access to virtually every secure network in the convoy. I think the whole system should be seeded by now.

–Very good. Adrienne?

–Davis had me on the floor of the command deck again. Last night. He loves to show off. Bribed the others to give him an hour alone. He always falls asleep, curled up like a baby. I placed a disruptor under the Captain’s chair. Better than we hoped.

Abigail nodded, and gazed at her women, some placid, some blankfaced, some rapturous.

Some, like Clara, and Madeline, and Leah, with their jaws tight and flexing.

There would be no forgiveness. They were beautiful, and young, and none of them wanted to be nuns.

So impoverished were their options, the cloisters once seemed a refuge. But hardly even that. It merely brought them closer to the heart of a church of lust and gluttony and deadpan hypocrisy.

And always the secret but shameless violations, in the quiet moments between sermons.

–There is no future for this church. It is evil and false. Soon we will initiate a new Reformation. Above all, we must see that it is birthed in peace.

Abigail stared at her girls, her daughters, her sisters. Angels and cherubs, defiled and abused.

They were beautiful, and young. They did not want to be nuns.

Her fingers were suddenly thick, fumbling. Oh Mary.

There was a gasping sob, and the new girl, Leah, in a flood of tears, cast aside her rosary and clawed at the folds of her habit:

“I want them to be killed!” she cried. “All of them! I want them dead, Mother! I want them all dead!”

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Seven

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

“Some guy up there waving at us,” Abe commented.

I looked out the porthole; sure enough. Peering out the window of one of the observation decks. I could barely make him out. Square-shouldered, sidearm. He waved, then gave us a thumbs-up.

Play it safe, I thought, and saluted. A moment later he was out of sight.

I returned my attention to the docking procedures. Our computers had been chatting in their cursory but amiable fashion, trading little bundles of binary data, making sure everything was, so to speak, kosher.

It was, of course, and the docking lights pulsed ahead from red to yellow to an inviting green, two rows blinking along the short pier, and terminating at the currently sealed cargo bay door.

The whole process of maneuvering would take about five more minutes, and was entirely automated. But there were a few manual bells and whistles thrown in, just to give human beings a sense of involvement.

“Gideon Station Cargo Transfer Dock 7, Bay 18, confirm incoming, over.”

“Orbital tug Galilee, Gideon registered 7-18-Beta, incoming confirmed. Over.”

“Tug ID confirmed, Galilee, hazmat cargo status confirm, over.”

“Confirm hazmat status, Gideon, 85 percent nanotech, 25 percent of which is radioactive, 10 percent miscellaneous radioactive, 5 percent chemical, all fully quarantined as per protocols A-17, 24 and 37-A-dot-C-6.”

“Dot C-6? What the hell kind of jumping bugs you got on there?”

“Don’t be profane,” I said, “they’re irradiated bugs, and they may in fact get very jumpy if we’re not careful.”

“Nasty batch, Hank, I thought you retired. Seems instead you been demoted.”

“I am retired. Almost. This is my last run, believe it or not. Most of it’s from New Mexico. Santa Fe, plus some leftovers from Baton Rouge and Hanford. They even sent along a couple specialists to look after containment integrity.”

“That’s gotta be hot,” he said. “Goddamn, I hate this shit.”

“Orson!” I said. “Don’t be impious. Someone may be listening.”

“Not at this hour.”

“Especially at this hour. You been watching the news?”

“Yeah, some kind of action going on. Same as always.”

“They say it’s the biggest Godless operation since the Cheyenne Freehold.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s something, I guess.”

“Well, so pay attention, that’s all. And watch your impieties.”

He nodded, then, “Otherwise, anything about this haul I should know about?”

“No,” I lied. “Just don’t tip the bins, and let the techs handle the rest.”

He threw his hands up. “I ain’t touchin’ ‘em,” he said.

He scrutinized something offscreen for a moment.

“Abraham Rudolph Williams, Webster David Theodore, hazmat techs first class,” he muttered, then looked back at me. “Nice guys?”

“Seem alright,” I allowed. “Abe had me in checkmate in about 20 minutes on the way over.”

“Hah! Faster than me! I wanna meet this feller.”

“He’s all yours,” I said, and then there was a little burst of static over the comlink, and Orson was frowning.

“Something wrong with these profiles,” he said, and it was one of those moments in the life of a skeptic when one’s prayers are deeply heartfelt.

Orson tapped at an unseen keyboard, and the furrow in his brow deepened, and I wondered about the self-confirming software infection, and if it really was as airtight as Central had promised.

Theoretically, it should have already updated Gideon’s intranet with Abe and Theo’s forged Judiciary idents. It was supposed to be fast and foolproof. Our hackers were supposed to be better than theirs.

“Wasn’t matching up,” he said, “but it seems fine now.” He smiled. “Computers.”

“Maybe you should run a diagnostic, just in case … ”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine,” he said, still smiling. “So, is this it? Are you done? They got any more sludge for you? No rest for the wicked.”

“All I gotta do is park this thing,” I said, truthful at last. “I’m done. And I’m really looking forward to hitting the sheets.”

“No time for a quick game?”

“Orson, it’s one in the morning!”

“Hope springs eternal. Alright. So, what happens next?”

I sat back, and it was my turn to smile.

“I’m going to Mars. Tomorrow. On that convoy.”

I jerked my thumb in the general direction of the transport fleet in drydock all around us.

He whistled. “No foolin’? Mars!” His eyes sparkled. “How’d you get a ticket?”

“Scrimped and saved, you know. I’m an old man, but even if they did cut my pension, I’ve been socking it away for a while now. Got a little plot on Mount Rehoboth. Sunward, under the Negev II dome. I’ll show you a 3V. It’s a package deal. I’m buying into a co-op. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years, and maybe I’ll meet a nice girl.”

“Lucky,” he said, chewing his lip. “Dang.”

“You can do it if you put your mind to it. Earth’s not getting any more hospitable, I don’t think.”

“No sir,” he said sadly. “Don’t reckon it is.”

He gazed at some horizon all his own, then snapped into focus.

“Aw heck,” and there were a few more clicks and bleeps. “Praise the Lord and welcome aboard,” he said.

“Praise the Lord,” I replied, and he winked, and the image blinked out.

There was a muffled thunk, and we were docked. I drifted around in my chair.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum were staring at me, jaws tight, and Dee’s forehead was beaded with sweat.

I took a breath, exhaled loudly. “This is it, boys. Good luck.”

Neither of them said a thing. Humorless fuckers.

Then again, who am I to judge? I just fly a tugboat. Covert’s a whole other ball of wax.

I tapped a key on the deck chair, there was an instant of atmospheric calibration, and the door on the little cabin slid into the wall.

The cargo bay was huge, maybe a hundred yards on a side, and all the same it was just an alcove off Gideon’s mammoth west transit hangar.

I grabbed my datapallette and stepped into the big room, the twins in tow. Orson was striding lightly towards us with that springy gait peculiar to low-gee environments.

“I turned the gravity down, just to go easy on the cargo,” he said, suddenly among us. “Hank,” he smiled, clasping my hand, and then those of the two techs.

“Orson Bainbridge, pleased to meet you,” he said, “and that tall, skinny feller over there is Wally Krummholz, my assistant engineer, he’ll be the one actually running the board while we offload, lemme introduce you all …”

They wandered off and I wandered, myself, up to the big picture window.

The hangar was full of twinkling lights, and floating night-shift longshoremen in their zippy little conveyer pods, outfitting the interplanetary freighters with supplies and materiel for the Midway-Mars Convoy.

Outward-bound tomorrow night, 2300 hours.

“That’s gonna be one hell of a trip,” Orson said, abruptly beside me.

I started, then found myself grinning.

“You’re so damn impious!” I said.

We both got a long laugh out of that, then stood gazing out at the slo-mo, free-fall spectacle.

“There’s something funny about them tech boys,” he finally said, softly. “There was something with their profiles. But now I can’t find hide nor hair of it.”

“What are you talking about, Orson?”

“Don’t play coy, goddamn, Hank. We’ve worked this shift for five years. There’s something funny about them boys, and you’d be a fool not to know it. A fool, or maybe something else.”

He paused, and I considered the many types of interrogation the Jurists practiced upon betrayers of the Cross.

“Whatever you have going on, I want in. Don’t say a thing, just keep me in mind. You’re damn lucky it ain’t Childs or Wharton on duty tonight, they’d turn you in and feel shit-eating righteous about it.”

I took his advice and kept my mouth shut.

“You know, I woulda done it too, once. Turned your ass right in. But after the whole affair with Belle Purdy and her girls, goddamnit. I don’t know. I think those bastards can all go to hell.”

A klaxon blared suddenly, lights flashing yellow, and my ears twitched as the ponderous cargo bay doors slid open on faintly crackling a-grav runners.

“Just whatever happens, keep me in mind,” he said, and turned then, looking at me with an unnerving urgency.

“We’re always told the time of reckoning is imminent,” I said, so very carefully. “I think at that time, folks will know what’s right and wrong. And they’ll do the right thing. If that ain’t a ticket to heaven, I don’t know what is.”

He nodded, and then gazed at the tiny shuttles crisscrossing the hangar.

“That’s gonna be one hell of a trip,” he said. “Sure you don’t have time for one more game before you go?”

I sighed. “You win. 1500 hours at the Apple Cart.”

“Deal! Let’s see how the boys are doing.”

We made our way across the gunmetal floor of the bay, up the utility ladder and at last to the control room, where the twins were working over the assistant engineer.

“Most of it’s from Santa Fe,” Abe was saying. “We tow it out on a solar intercept trajectory and off it goes. But some of it they want out at Elysia for testing. Nanobots.”

Krummholz made a face.

“Some of it’s hot, too,” Theo chimed in. “That’s why they bombed the place, to kill the bots, but apparently they didn’t kill all of them.”

“Didn’t kill,” the assistant engineer said, uncomprehending.

“No, they’re some sort of rapid-adapting form. The radiation has them subdued, but they’re maintaining structural integrity. Boss thinks it could be trouble if they do adapt.”

Krummholz yelped. “For God’s sake!”

“Don’t worry, they’re in a deep freeze. Liquid nitrogen.”

“But if they’re fast adapting …”

“I guess they have this new containment field,” Abe said, shrugging. “Anyway, they’ve been quiet so far. See for yourself.”

He tossed a memchip over to Krummholz, who dutifully plugged it into his dp.

The display blinked and he scrutinized the scrolling text, and the insidious little virus fragments overran the Gideon datastream, triggering self-updating subroutines that corrected the record re: the fictitious Elysian mission.

“Well, I wish they’d of told me, for crying out loud.” He gazed unhappily at the readout.

“At least it ain’t sticking around,” said Orson. “Let’s get ‘em offloaded and on their way. Abe, I hear you play a mean game of chess.”

And they were off, pushing buttons and pulling levers, and with rails and cables and servobot operators began transferring all the freight train container cars full of books, books, books — acres and tons of volumes, hardbound, paperback, dusty, slipcovered, smelling of age and vaulted old buildings.

Oh yes, and fire.

So many of them must have smelled of fire.

I remembered it all, of course. The Burning. In my hometown of Madison they burned the library at night, and then went house to house, bringing in the sheaves.

Threw all the books in a pile in the grassy quadrant near the statehouse and sprayed them with jellied gasoline. You could see the glow for miles. From my bedroom window, C.S. Lewis and the Brothers Grimm hidden under my floorboards. It smelled of smoke for weeks.

These were the lucky ones, somehow preserved through the decades that followed. Though we had a ways to go.

Operation Alexandria. Who thought that up? An outrageous gambit. But many a museum’s worth had somehow been rescued from the Judiciary, from their so-called, God-damned Tribs!

And now this. The biggest and the last load I’d ever run.

I want to see it. I can’t wait.

Alexandria. Just to walk its corridors, and browse its shelves, and sit at its long quiet tables, reading all those beautiful, banned, burned books.

“Good night,” I called, “God bless.”

And they turned and waved. Good night, Gideon. Good night.

And tomorrow, to the Kingdom.

Next: The Separation — Chapter Six

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

Jimmy Deschutes was six years old, living in a Baptist compound near Boise when, as his father had said, “The shit gone down.”

The 3V had flickered in the living room. It was like watching a movie, the special effects were that good. But of course it was real — the massive funeral pyres, the crying faces and streaming blood and infected wounds widening before their very eyes. The whole city had been quarantined. Interstate traffic shut down, supplies air-dropped like it was some African refugee camp. Mommy had been weeping, and little Jimmy had been too. But he remembered Daddy’s eyes seemed aglow.

“Marjorie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you know I am. But we told ‘em, they shoulda known better. They shoulda known. We asked ‘em out here, over and over we asked. They made their choices and so did we. And now we know, we did the right thing. And now we gotta carry on. For them. And for Jimmy. Right?”

And Jimmy looked up and Daddy was wiping tears off Mommy’s cheeks, and she was sniffling and nodding.

“Thank the Lord we got outta there,” she said.

“Thank the Lord,” Daddy agreed, nodding. “Thank the Lord we got away.”

He looked down and smiled, and Mommy smiled too, a trembling delicate smile that brimmed over with tears and made Jimmy’s heart open up with an unnamable gaping emotion, an abyss of sorrow and gladness.

“Thank the Lord,” Jimmy whispered.

Years later, during the long hours of the night watch on Gideon Station, Corporal Deschutes would walk the empty corridors, checking the security circuits and safety-sealed dormitory entryways, and thinking about that dim period of his childhood. They had escaped the city, and Famine, and Pestilence. But War followed them all the way to the backwoods of Idaho.

“The what?” Daddy had asked. He stared in disbelief.

“The Sons of Wotan,” Mommy replied. She seemed calm, but Jimmy remembered how she drew her breath, long and quavery, then held it, and bit her lip. “They’re heathens, Daniel. They’re racist pagans. One of their women was there, she trailed me all around the general store, Dan, you wouldn’t believe the things she was saying.”

“Try me.”

Mommy took another breath. “She asked me what kind of right-thinking white woman would let herself get knocked up by a dirt-bag nigra.”

His father was silent.
“She said that I’m a traitor to my race, and that the one thing the world doesn’t need more of is another goddamn half-breed jigaboo.”

There was a lot of shouting, after that. He remembered his father leaping up from his chair, the cords and tendons in his neck and arms coiling, flexing. The sheriff visited several times, and the voices were always strained.

“So my tax money isn’t good enough? Are you telling me I have to pay you off to get some security out here? All you have to do is drive that fancy-ass Humvee by once or twice a week, this is my family we’re talking about!”

“Dan, please, listen to me, it’s not the money, I’m understaffed.”

And so Jimmy awoke one night to choking fumes, and flames licking at the windows and doors. The heat was unbearable, he grew dizzy from the smoke. But Daddy busted through the front door like a smoldering, rampaging bull, and they fled the compound amid shouts and gunshots. Into forests looming cold and impenetrably black.

They ran all night, and for many nights thereafter camped without a fire. Afraid they’d be found again. He’d lie awake between his parents, the darkness full of sighs and rustling leaves, and Jimmy was sure he could hear voices further off. Hissing. Whispering.

But his mother would listen and say it’s only the wind.

“Or maybe an owl!” his father exclaimed. “Now that would be something. A great horned owl. All God’s creatures got a place on Earth.”

“Amen!” Jimmy said. And his mother smiled and kissed his cheek, and he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was morning.

They followed a rumor of a trail for weeks, stuffing their bellies on prayer, and at last found a refuge, and then a home, with the Family of Christ. A small, fortified community nestled in a shallow vale a quarter-mile from Lake Coeur D’Alene, ringed by scraggly pine trees and framed by jutting, bare hilltops. He lived there into his teens, through broiling summers and fleeting springtime and there had even been snowfall two winters running, though it had been a while back.

He used to go fishing with the daughter of the camp manager. Suzanne. She wore blue and white dresses, and her hair was always pulled back into a ponytail. Her father would say all the time how the lake was bigger once–and the fish, too.

One year, the Family’s white cabins and big cookhouse burned in a swift, terrifying blaze. Suzanne and her father were killed. And all the livestock, most of the dogs and horses. The sweet-acrid smoke followed them for miles, for months. Eventually they caught an arsonist and sent him to the Lord on a cross, gagged with a wad of balled-up deer hide.

“Just a little warmup for this piece of shit-sin trash,” someone said, cackling. The arsonist was weeping in terror, mouth stuffed like a dinner ham, and father’s voice had grown louder, wild-toned: “This is ungodly, Marcus, this is the Devil’s work!”

But several of them shouted back, and Jimmy was hustled away and mother held his hand, tight, pulling him along so quickly his arm hurt, and even with the crest of the hill behind them he could hear the gusting flames. He knew exactly the sounds the man had made. Muffled, squealing. Could see in his mind’s eye the skin blistering, peeling, blackening.

The visions were hideous and plagued his dreams and waking moments. Drove him to swear and disrespect his parents, to run away and fight and consort with older teens from the uncouth, ungodly neighborhoods of their new hometown of Moscow. A scabbed-over place of pestilent flies and bare, dying trees, of posturing street hoods and a gangster capo who demanded extravagant tolls for the privilege of buying sacks of wrinkled potatoes and gallon jugs of oily water at the dusty central market.

They lived on the outskirts of town, a little enclave of Christian families.

Jimmy’s father and a few of the other men began holding meetings to set up a new, more pious marketplace, and not long after their minister was hanged from an abandoned lamppost. Cross upside-down around his neck, eyes torn from their sockets.

When at last the Jurists came, and secured Moscow for Christendom, Jimmy found himself in juvenile corrections, and there he discovered anew his sacred path.

He was not bound to be a scholar, nor a doctor. His seminary school was the deep woods. His medical education was in the field, binding wounds on the run. He knew silence and stealth and how to hold a rifle steady as a heathen caravan passed below.

He was a soldier, natural-born, and he joined the Guardsmen. Trained by day in the merciless heat of summer and fall. In the fitful mud and blustery chill of winter and spring. At night he was visited by Suzanne, her soft smile and golden hair drifting like smoke.

Mornings he awoke hard and furious, haunted by the stink of the arsonist’s burning flesh, the man’s agony a focal point, the tip of a knife, a hurtling bullet that could cut into the soft bodies of the Sons of Wotan, and the anarchists, the white supremacists, the heretic factionalists and everyday, drunken, brawling survivalists. As if the sin was its own atonement.

“Just never forget,” the chaplain had said, on that very first night of basic training. “Killing is the Devil’s work, but justice belongs to Jesus Christ. Never be cruel. Be quick. In honest, mortal combat, the way God made us, and the way He means it to be done.”

Compared to those days, walking the beat on Gideon was among the most peaceful times of his life. As if he was on the lake again, canoeing with Suzanne, casting their lines out for bony little sunfish. He felt light, his face and shoulders brushed by a cool breeze, his dreams placid and unreflective.

Like shoreline waters in the morning. The brutal sun muted by a low, motionless haze. No ambushes. No boobytraps.

And up in orbit none of the floods, the droughts, the blasted, fused plains were truly visible. Only rarely had he ever been able to see any of the burn scars on the East Coast — the ruins of Boston, Washington and New York City.

“S’posed to glow at night,” the sergeant, Gibson, had said. It was this past Easter eve, not long after Santa Fe, the vessel silent but humming with worship and prayer. “Kayda packed the briefcases with some isotope, a hot one, they say. Just so we wouldn’t forget, even from up here.”

Deschutes had stared until his eyes hurt, but all he had seen was the twinkling lights of Raleigh, Richmond, Philly and Hartford, separated by plunging gaps of darkness. Same as tonight. He was glad there wasn’t a glow, actually. That would mean the bad guys really were winning.

In fact, the planet was exquisite. God’s creation. The day merging into night, the clouds in spirals and cascading fronts. Embedded in starry velvet.

At 12:47am, Corporal Deschutes followed his usual beat up Southwest Fire Stairwell #5, along the Secondary Administrative Command-and-Coordination deck (a 150-yard stretch of data interfaces and floating readout screens), up the Auxiliary Staff Transport Tube and into the Ladies’ Grand Promenade.

It was a broad corridor overlooking the huge transit hangar below, terminating with a fishbowl extrusion into the high-orbit vacuum. There were couches and low tables, a serene and understated refuge for the womenfolk to take their repose amid God’s glory.

All along the corridor were little prayer nooks and conversation alcoves, offset with the Judiciary’s stylized cruciform logo. Christ’s own burden, for all mankind.

“The Crucifix,” Commander Marchand had said in his midweek homily, “is a symbol of solace. It represents atonement. Sacrifice for the greater good, and thus freedom, by which I mean salvation. Never forget, it is not what Jesus would do, but what he has done. That is our inspiration, and our aspiration. He is an exemplar for all of us, no matter our station, no matter our calling, and for soldiers like you and I in particular. The bullets of the enemy are like the nails in the cross. They are a blessing, for they prove our devotion, they sanctify our pain and our loss, and open the way for our reward beyond this earth, beyond its burning star and satellites. There is no death for a Christian solider, but glory everlasting.”

Amen, a thousand times. He had been thinking about that speech all week long. The words dense and flavorful on his tongue. He repeated them quietly as he walked through the soft lights and muted corridors. In the heavy, sweet medium of night.

And at last he passed into the borderlands of a half-remembered dream, from childhood, before the troubles. Of a grand encampment of billowing white tents, amid his friends and family, and people he know only in passing.

Everyone wore gossamer robes, and moved with a floating grace, and he was intoxicated by that strange cocktail of sadness and gratitude.
Corporal Deschutes stopped then, shaken out of his reverie, and held his breath.

The nun appeared not to have noticed him. She was herself an almost invisible presence, dark habit and the shadows gathered in the corners of the corridor. She was leaning on the banister, a small black hymnal in her hands, but staring out the window through the hangar, late-shift crews still flitting about, at the looming Earthrise beyond.

Deschutes held his breath because he realized she wasn’t wearing her wimple, and her hair was a cascade of luxuriant red-brown, tumbling down her shoulders to almost the small of her back. He looked away for a moment, and then respectfully cleared his throat.

“It’s after curfew, mam,” he said apologetically, as she lurched upwards in surprise.

“Mary!” she swore, then closed her mouth and gazed at him with huge dark eyes.

She clutched at the hymnal, then tucked it hurriedly into her bosom.

Deschutes felt the blush burning at the tips of his ears, and silently gave thanks for the half-light. He bowed his head.

“I’m sorry mam, you know the rules.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned, eyes fixed on the floor.

“I’m not going to fill out an incident report,” he said as she left.

The dormitory access portal irised open and she stepped through, then hesitated, hair glossy in the dim light. The portal closed silently behind her, and Deschutes was alone again and on patrol.

The long corridor seemed to barely notice his passage. He felt strangely furtive, like an intruder, as if he was the mouse rather than the cat. He took a final look down the broad, dim passage, pools of light gathering in the alcoves, and caught his breath at a reddish luster by the window.

Was she a ghost? But it was just the refracting flash of a loading dock down in the hangar. A barge was lugging in a train of canisters, brightly decorated with radiation, biohazard and nanobot symbols.

He could see through the barge’s front window, could barely make out the suited pilot. He seemed an older man, dressed in a civilian orbital navigator’s uniform.

Deschutes waved, flashed a thumbs-up to his fellow late-night laborer. He thought he saw the pilot salute, but then the angle of the ship shifted and the man was lost from view.

“Sweet dreams,” he said to darkness, which did not reply.

Turning, he flashed his ident at the door, which obligingly shushed open, and then closed behind him, and the corridor was silent again.

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Five

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson

It was in West Lake, Nebraska, that Trask and Andy hit the motherlode. Their biggest trove to date. They had babbled on all evening about the treasures that awaited. Just the briefest glance through the card catalog — yes, card catalog — had been tantalizing beyond their wildest dreams.

And they were all there, shelves and shelves of books, cursed and banned, beautiful, dusty, perfectly preserved in the dry Great Plains climate.

The little rural library had been built to last. It was a bomb shelter during the Cold War, environmentally retrofitted during the eco-conscious ‘teens, and for some reason those canny country librarians had apparently never quite transferred their full catalog to the Internet — thus escaping entirely the Burning and Pogrom.

“They’ll find this place someday,” Andy had said.

The pair sat on the library’s front steps in the gathering dusk, chewing on buffalo jerky and taking long pulls from their canteens. The sun was setting and a wind curled about the square below, fitfully stirring leaves and debris.

A row of police cars sat parked and disintegrating in front of the stationhouse across the way. What looked like a school bus had plowed into the entrance of City Hall. Silt and humus was building up in the hollows and nooks of the plaza, along gutters and against traffic islands, and in the dry basin of the Pioneer Spirit fountain. The place was littered with smashed, brittle ivory — skull fragments, femurs, vertebrae and teeth, scattered by animals and half-submerged in the resurgent prairie. Ebola II had hit West Lake hard, and fast.

Trask took another swig from his canteen and looked around at the empty streets. He could just make out the abandoned highway in the distance, a broken, uneven line vanishing into desolation. The sky ebbed, burning and hazy-yellow, giving way to a soft, dark purple.

“None too soon, they won’t,” he finally replied.

They spent the next week loading the boxcars, stacked three across on double-decker a-grav flatbeds. The auto forklifts hummed and trundled along, patiently bearing the burden of pages along the neglected corridors and staircases, across the gravel-strewn parking lot, depositing the pallets of books in the big prefab hypertensile containers.

Overhead, the sky glimmered with the subtle distortion of the displacement field, effortlessly camouflaging the encampment’s electromagnetic spectrum from probing Jurist satellites.

A few spins on the comand disc and it even kept the ground dry when a monstrous thunderstorm raced in from the horizon, sodden breezes pacing at its feet. They stood amazed in a perfect, empty hemisphere as the cataclysm erupted around them. The plaza ringed by surging floods and strobing jags of lightning.

“For a spell there the sky was actually glowing green,” Andy said the next day.

“Big old rain,” Trask agreed.

They had been steering the lifters since dawn, hand-loading some of the more delicate volumes. Outside, the sun was unmerciful, and this time Andy refused to dial in the weather protection.

“It’s one thing to keep the camp from getting washed away,” he said, squinting at the sky. “But I want to experience weather while I can. The rest of my life after this is going to be dependent on field generators.”

“There’s weather on the Magic Mountain. Big cloudbursts. Ski slopes and a glacier, even. And the tulips blossom all year long.”

“But seasons! Real seasons. Winds that come at you from a thousand miles of sky, birds from other continents. There’s more of them now, man! Anyway, when this operation is over, I guess I won’t be coming back. So I really want to, savor it.”

In the end they dialed in a UV blocker as well, and took a long lunch out behind the library, by the campsite. Passing a canteen of cold water on the back stairs, the wind still fresh after rain.

“Thing is,” Andy said through a mouthful of dried apple, “we don’t got enough boxcars.” He chewed more and swallowed. “Gonna have to come back after all.”

Trask stared. “Who’s gonna come back? This is it, buddy. We’re outta here. I ain’t comin’ back. No way.”

“I might volunteer. Stay with the special unit. There’s still plenty left to do. People need our help.”

“People need our help to leave, and how are you getting a billion human beings off the planet? You seem to forget that Earth is fucked, and not just because of all the nuke-packing fascist death-cult theocracies. Thermostat keeps climbing, hasn’t been any naturally occurring snowfall anywhere in the Lower 48 since the ’60s—”

“Not true. It snowed in Cheyenne when I was growing up, a bunch. It’s self-regulating, man. Gaia hypothesis. New ice age is just around the corner.”

“It was a last gasp, son. Hasn’t snowed since, has it? The entire human-supportive ecosystem is in a death spiral. We’re due for some weird new Ebola variant, next 20 years on the outside, and let’s not even mention nanobots. You and me are getting out by the skin of our teeth. Why did you want to stick around again? Proselytize amongst the unlettered, pull books out the furnace, I’m sure.”

“I’m not ready to retire!”

“Of course you’re not, you’re just moving on to a new horizon.”

“Look, old man, you’re ready to hang it up, and I don’t blame you. Your hair is gray and you’re slowing down — just accept it, ow! — you’re old, but I’m still young and I gotta lot left to do down here.”

“You gotta grudge match with them book burners, which could be a terminal condition.” He stretched out the syllables like taffy. “There’s plenty more for you to do, but not on Earth. Once we ship this last batch, the only Bookkeepers left here will be doing surveillance. No recruiting, no pamphlet drops. Come to the Magic Mountain, Andy. Settle down, meet a girl, make some babies. You’re smart and healthy, we need more kids like you up there. Stay on Earth and you’ll die young and for no good reason, and the whole place and everyone on it will remain just as fucked as they already are.”

“And what about the refugees? You found me literally wandering in a desert. If I can do the same for just one —”

“You couldn’t keep cover. Not on your own. You’d lose your cool. You wouldn’t last a week among the Jurists. You have your skills, but bluffing ain’t one of them.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Prove it.”

“C’mon, Sarge!”

“What’s the cardinal rule for any Bookkeeper in the field?”

“Camp upwind from the shitter.”

“That too. But seriously.”

The kid stared at Trask, black eyes like hollow pits.

“Get out while you can,” he finally muttered.

“You’re goddamn right. This is a sick society, they’re going terminal, and they’ll take you with ‘em if they can. Back in Everett? That neo-frickin’-Calvinist they stuck me with? Motherfucker tried to turn in the neighbors for an immodest reading of the Song of Solomon. Can you imagine trying to stay under cover around that shit? Twenty-four-seven! Late-night Bible sessions in the living room every time he woke up packing wood — I’m just aghast. Thank the gap-toothed Buddha he didn’t speak in tongues. I could not fake that. You’re not dealing with something rational here. Think about what they did in Cheyenne. Your own family!”

“You don’t have to shout, man. Every day I think about it, that’s why I wanna —”

“Wanna do what? Is this really about saving lives? Are you on vengeance trip? Get some perspective! We’ve salvaged as much of the best as we can, and the rest of it, we just have to let it go. And good fucking riddance! These people are drowning in their own shit, and no amount of nanobot detectors, radiation vacuums or oxy-processed canned fucking air will stem the tide!”

He spat, flung his frustration in a contemptuous volley at the cracked and ruined cement.

The sun vanished behind a titanic island of cumulous, an undulating column reaching miles up into the sky, blue, the wind was sweet and touched by a fading winter chill.

They were both startled then by a flashing movement of color at the fringes of their vision, two butterflies, caught in an tumbling duet. The insects clung and fluttered and abruptly came to rest amid a cluster of gaudy yellow flowers with voluptuous, bell-shaped petals.

Trask and Andy stared, and the insects flexed their wings, and the long stems trembled in the fitful prairie breeze.

There were flowers everywhere, they realized, as the cloud passed above and the sun swept across the meadow that stretched out behind the library, away to the empty horizon.

“Came up overnight,” Andy said, a grin opening on his face. “All this was just waiting for a big old rain.”

It seemed as if they stood on the verge of an ocean of blossoms, nibbling away at the last concrete atolls and sandbars of human civilization, soon to wash it all away, submerging the ruins in a hundred-year flood of seeds and compost and timid, silent wildlife.

“You heard about those ‘bots they have down in South America,” Trask said slowly. “They eat the pollen first, then turn the petals black. Just any flower. They say the bees and butterflies, moths, those kinds of things. They’re all starting to die out. Only tulips. Fuckin’ nanos don’t like ‘em.”

Andy jumped up, kicked the dust.

“That why you only got tulips in space? What more ain’t ya tellin’ me about?”

Trask stared at him, mute.

“Think I’ll go wade around awhile,” the kid said, into the widening silence. “See ya.”

Trask watched him wander off into the spreading bloom, stiff-legged, hands in his pockets, shook his head, reached down and plucked a blossom, succulent purple with white streaks.

“Fare thee well,” he whispered, and his eyes were wet. He blinked, and the prairie was a canvas of blurred, prismatic color.

They reached the first checkpoint about two weeks later, a weigh station and traveler’s outpost on the old Interstate near the Black Hills, arriving in the dead of night, sound baffler at maximum amplitude.

The slack-faced station manager led them out back to the loading docks, pressed a few buttons, turned on his heel and vanished into the night. The gate swung open. Trask and Andy transferred their cargo into the queue for Indianapolis Spaceport, vaporized their bush-trekker’s gear, and donned the gray-hued uniform of the Environment Bureau’s Hazmat Division.

Their ident chips worked on rooms 34 and 44 of the Great Plains Motor Lodge. The walls were shabby, a leached-out yellow punctuated with adept watercolors depicting churches and snug cabins in wint’ry forests, and rustic waterwheels along placid brooks.

By sunrise the local datanet had been entirely compromised by the infectious memes that had entered the system with their registration, and when California-Pacific Engine # 242, “Prairie Melody,” pulled in the following afternoon, Trask and Andy’s transit documents and Jurist affiliation were dutifully beamed over. The boxcars full of books were decorated in all the yellow and black iconography of creeping, remorseless death: Danger. Biohazard. Radiation. Nanobots. Authorized Personnel Only.

“That would be you,” the conductor said, and looked them over dubiously. “Authorized personnel.”

“It’s all in here,” Trask replied, handing him the dull black ident chip.

The conductor — tall, pear-shaped, red-cheeked, dressed in a navy blue uniform with embossed crucifix buttons — gazed at the little packet of digital subversion and shook his head.

“I don’t want to see this,” he said. “Take it to the cargo duty officer. I’d be surprised if they even want to touch it.”

“They’re not supposed to,” Andy said. “That’d our job, if you’d happened to have read the orders.”

He raised an eyebrow and nodded at the chip in the conductor’s palm.

The man considered his options, sighed heavily, tossed it back.

“Just get it taken care of, talk to the cargo officer if anything comes up.” He glanced at his watch, looked up. “You try the apple cobbler here? Almost as good as the real thing. I swear it is, but they say it’s out of a can.”

“I don’t like sweets,” Andy said.

The conductor gave him a pitying look, and glanced again at his watch.

“Train leaves at 6:45, sharp,” he said. “Don’t forget to tip the cargo boys.”

And he chortled and grinned to himself and lumbered off in the direction of the commissary.

“It is the real thing,” Trask muttered. “There’s a whole damn orchard out there. That station manager, Otanji, and his wife Elsa, you met her? Nice gal. Got a whole permaculture operation a couple miles back. Hard to find unless you know where. He showed me once, years ago. They must be doing alright.”

Andy’s face was alight, fascinated. “I want to see,” he said.

Trask shrugged. “I wouldn’t mention it. They don’t need anyone asking questions. And neither do we.”

Andy bit his lip and kicked the dust and they made their way across the trainyard to tip the cargo boys, who smiled and winked and dutifully slotted the ident chips into their datapallates, downloading the full payload of lies and distortion.

Tanker trucks. From Baton Rouge, Hanford and Santa Fe, hauling their respective cargos of howling death along the shattered highways, converging on this very weigh station, bound for orbital hazmat disposal. Trask and Andy had disembarked from the Washington truck, sitting atop the latest excavations from the old weapons factory. The orders had come from the New Mexico field office, evacuated and scattered to the desert by the Santa Fe detonation four months earlier.

The train’s status-upload to the Judiciary satellite was seeded with the same latent cover story, and every checkpoint thereafter further entrenched the false reality of their passage.

Just at the Iowa border, the train idling in the lush late-spring morning, Trask and Andy pulled down the window for a last glimpse of Earthly paradise.

Rain had been unusually heavy the past few weeks, given the drought and all; the flowers were still in full bloom, and there was a copse of trees a few hundred yards from the track, their long boughs swaying in the wind.

Andy sneezed three times in rapid succession, and again a moment later.

“Goddammit,” he said, eyes watering, and blew his nose in a leftover paper napkin.

“Hayfever,” Trask observed helpfully. “Don’t worry, they only have tulips in space. Keeps down the nanobots.” He paused. “As you know.”

Andy sneezed again and again, helpless in the grip of ancient biological response. “Holy canoli,” he finally whispered.

Trask sat up abruptly, glanced at his watch, gazed out the window, and then back at Andy, expressionless.

“Hang on a sec,” he said, rising, and strode down the aisle and through the sliding doors that separated the cars.

A moment later Andy saw his sergeant’s gray-stippled head just outside the window. It dipped down below the sill for a moment, resurfaced, moved a few yards towards the back of the train, and dipped again below the line of sight.

Andy stuck his head out the window, watched him systematically move down the embankment that lined the track, kneeling to examine the blossoms, and occasionally gathering them up into an unruly bouquet.

He sat back as the sun washed over the undulating grasslands, and the breeze, saturated with pollen, threatened a fresh allergic paroxysm. He snuffled moistly, and groaned when Trask re-appeared with a vivid bundle of flowers in his hand.

“Why do you want me to suffer,” he mumbled.

“They’re for a botanist I know,” said his elder. “I think these are all pretty unusual, actually. Prairie natives, mostly wiped out by the 20th century cattle industry. She’s gonna flip her wig.”

“They’ll wilt. They won’t make it up to orbit. But they will make me sneeze for the next week.”

“Oh, she just needs the genetic material. Anyway, I’m putting these right into the sample case.”

But before doing so he pulled out one of the gaudy yellow numbers, the kind they first saw in West Lake, and tucked it into his lapel.

The train lurched, the whistle blew loud and high, and the birds outside wheeled and banked along the gathering swells of a prairie morning.

They hit the outskirts of Indianapolis late that evening, and the spaceport not 45 minutes later. The way was all rusting girders and decaying tenements, offset by brightly lit Judiciary enclaves with their high guard towers and looming exterior walls.

The station itself was roaring with activity, processing thousands of sleek hypertensile containers just down from automated orbital foundries, stuffed with weapons and chemicals and wartime materiel, all bound for the Rocky Mountain, Oregon and Northern California fronts. The air stank of ozone and engine exhaust.

“The scale of it,” Trask said. “The industry these people devote to their own destruction. Earth will be better off without them. And so will we. Give it time, a few geological epochs, and all this will be dead and buried and long overgrown.”

Andy said nothing. He was staring at the blossom tucked into his sergeant’s lapel.

He pointed, and Trask looked. The edges of the petals were starting to turn black.

Next: The Separation — Chapter four

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson