Chapter Six
Lord’s Cradle. Two weeks before.
No one said a word about Twofer the morning after he disappeared, but there was a tension in the squad so dense that Mike could have cut it with a wire. He saw it in the taut jaws and wary eyes of his brothers, in their slow turned heads and hunched shoulders. They were barely ready for lineup when the door opened, and the Knight Lieutenant and his corporals entered the common area. As one, every Sam dropped to one knee, his right fist crossed over his heart. Mike averted his eyes. He was fresh out of the shower, but as the Host moved past him, their white uniforms rustling softly in the thick silence, he felt fresh sweat prickle on his lip and under his arms.
The Host went into their rooms—perfectly neat as always, thank God—and into the shrine. When they came out, the corporals drifted off towards the room that Twofer had shared with Sev and his fireteam, while the Lieutenant stayed outside, surrounded by the Sams. Alpha looked up when the rest didn’t dare to, sweeping the room with his eyes. “One-Six, Ten, go get the maundy basin and wash the Knight Lieutenant’s feet.”
There was no cry of ‘Sir yes Sir!’ for that order. Without a word, Sixie and Ten rose and saluted, and then hustled into the shrine to get the tools they needed. Mike held his place, torn between reverence and fear. The Templars were a day early for their regular inspection, and when the lesser Host emerged with a full satchel of something, he pressed his lips together in a thin line and hoped they did not pay him any mind.
The platoon sergeant worked them ferociously that morning. He heaped abuse, making them fight him, making them scream with the effort of obeying his direction. Mike was too exhausted to think by Yard. His feet felt like they were chained to blocks of stone that he had to jerk up with each step. None of the others were much better. There was only so much your healswarm could do against raw fatigue while you were awake. He kept their biofeeds live on his corona, recording their stats through the day. They were all stressed, according to the computer, and no one had slept well the night before.
After training, he watched Sev and Alpha walk together around the perimeter of the sunny dome where they decompressed, talking with bowed heads. The others broke into couples and fireteams, putting their backs to the yard overseer. Mike wandered between these small, disengaged groups, bearing witness. If morale dropped beyond a certain threshold, he was supposed to file a report. If he did, the Chaplain would take the entire squad apart for confession and questioning. Mike listened in to their conversations, but there was no mention of Twofer. All they talked about was getting back out into the jungle. That was something he understood: it was easier out there, with a gun in your hand and the wind in your hair, the enemy in front, God pushing you from a distance instead of watching you over your shoulder. It was a kind of freedom.
Mike finally went to Sixie, sitting alone in the shadow of a sports shed. That in and of itself was unusual. He was one of the most social of his brothers, always willing to talk. When Mike drew up, Sixie said nothing, but instead offered him his vaporizer. Mike accepted, and crouched on his heels beside him.
“Everyone’s acting like they’ve got ants up their cracks today,” Mike said, feigning airiness. He watched the distant forms of Alpha and Sev as they passed by the guard tower. Alpha had been dealing with his strange mood the way he did everything: by working harder, pushing more, saluting faster, polishing his boots with concentration so complete you could have kicked him and he’d ignore you, engrossed in scrubbing up a perfect spit-shine.
“You think? Tsch.” Sixie shook his head. “Did you do what I said in mess yesterday? You get a look at the squad history?”
“Not yet. Why?” Mike tensed a little. This was dangerous talk, especially out in the yard. There were three other squads out there with them.
“It’s important. You should do that later tonight. Not out here.” Sixie glanced at him, slow-eyed. “And have a chat to Symon.”
“Symon? What the hell’s he got to say about anything?” Symon was their Watcher, their logistics man. Watchers flew the planes that dropped them, piloted the robots that escorted them, managed their radios and relayed commands and marching orders. He could staff fifteen simultaneous Terminals by himself. He could be in a virtual meeting with Alpha while he talked to Air Traffic Control about the plane he was flying and relayed the Host’s commands over the Net to the squad.
“You just ask him about that. He’s got some interesting ideas, old Symon.” Sixie held his fingers out, and Mike passed the vaporizer. He took a small drag, and offered it back before he stood, leaving Mike to watch him wander away.
Much later, in the dim light of their room, Mike lay in Alpha’s arms and stared at the blank wall in front of his nose. He had slept a little after sex—one of those weird, dozy half-sleeps where he closed his eyes for two hours that passed in five minutes. He had held on to his residual pleasure for as long as possible before doubt and guilt set in. The latter was normal; the former, unusual. He didn’t understand how his men—they were as much his as Alpha’s, in some ways—had soured so much overnight.
During their last tour in Papua New Guinea, Twofer took a bullet while they retreated along the banks of the Amazon with the Dragon hot on their heels. They were on search and destroy somewhere—command hadn’t told them exactly where—when close to thirty Raptorines burst out of the jungle behind and above their position. Trapped without backup on the ass-end of a steep hill, they’d had no choice but to run down and regroup on flatter ground. Mike remembered the mad plunge through the jungle in the dark, branches slapping his helmet like claws. They’d lost them in a swampy valley flat, hiding out in the mud and mangroves.
When they regathered, they were wet, angry, itching to meet the enemy hand to claw on even ground, but Twofer limped straight over to Mike. His armor was smoking, the front black and twisted. He made it to within arm’s reach before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the ground.
“Well, shit,” Mike said. He bought his pack around and reached up to pull a nanite extrusion from his corona. It came out as a thin, gleaming wire that he touched to Twofer’s coronal jack. The biofeed downloaded, and immediately, he knew that something was terribly wrong.
“How bad is it?” Alpha asked. Mike already had Twofer’s armor off and his manual surgeon’s tools out by the time that Alpha came over. He had the others in foxholes and behind makeshift barricades to secure their site. They’d thrown out a false trail through the water to break away, but the chance of being found was high. Raptorines were tenacious, man-eating abominations. They’d be searching.
“Some kind of explosive NVD. It’s taken out his entire swarm.” Twofer had lost a lot of blood. The bullet had struck him in the sternum, and thank God for that: it had shattered the bone, but his ribs had kept the worst of the charge from shredding his organs. Without a healswarm to stop the bleeding, Mike had to clean and pack it manually. He wedged the tip of a wound filler into the hole. “We’ll see.”
Alpha watched on, his gun cradled in his arms. The lines beside his eyes were deep in the creeping shadows of the early morning. “God damn it, Twofer. You aren’t allowed to die ’til the War’s over, you hear me?”
No Nephilim wanted to die before the end of the War. Without victory, they remained soulless. Without souls, there was no redemption. No Yetzirah. All they could look forward to was Hell, forever. “I know, Sir. We’ll have to keep infection at bay and hope he doesn’t get any of the Big Three. I’m keeping an eye on it… last thing he needs is a dose of Sunny.”
Whatever had been in those bullets had stopped Twofer’s wounds from healing, but he when he regained consciousness, he’d dragged himself up and hauled ass for the tense three-day march to base. Mike’s diagnosis was sound: Twofer had lost his entire healswarm, and despite their efforts, the wound festered in the jungle air. There was no way to get him a new one: the
Sams had to help hold the base against the main force who had been on their heels the entire way back. Mike had done surgery on the necrotic tissue the old-fashioned way, down in a bunker that vibrated with the impact of every shell overhead.
He’d grappled with forceps and alcohol and gauze for close to two hours while Sev stood guard and prayed. Twofer survived by the grace of God, but he’d been left with a messy star-shaped scar the size of a human fist that his new swarm never quite fixed.
And that was the heart of it, Mike thought. His absence festered in them all like that open wound had. They were missing his luck, his familiar scar and quirky smile. Twofer was the best gamer in the platoon, a real crack shot: he got together on the network and played Homeland nearly every night with his brothers and his friends outside the squad. Tonight, no one had played the game after chow. No matter how good the circumstances, the reality was that he’d disappeared as suddenly as if he’d been killed. Mike needed to find the source of this sudden infection. It was time to look at the squad history.
Carefully, he rolled out from under Alpha’s heavy arm and stole away to the common room. He eased down at the table, and opened his desktop display. The corona could project an internal corneal display, or an external holographic projection. He chose the latter. His Bible reader was there, as always, the secret codes of prophecy to be found in the text highlighted with a soft golden glow. He drummed his fingers rapidly as he thought his way through to the troop directory. Accessing the squad history wasn’t illegal, not in any way, but he could imagine there’d be some scrutiny when Purity Control noticed that every Sam had gone to the same page.
The browser widened and loaded, and his fingers froze.
Every squad had a page on the directory that listed their stats, their achievements in the war, their major confessions and lapses of discipline, and their position in the kill ranks. They were Samuel-226, the 226th squad to bear their name. Their photo was much like all the other PatriotRangers squads: nineteen grim-faced, dark-skinned, dark eyed men towering over their Creche Chaplain… or it had been. The space where Twofer had been was closed in by One and Three, the way they now sat at mess.
Mike read the rest of his squad’s file twice over, wondering if he’d missed something in his disbelief. He hadn’t. Everything had been wiped from the file. Twofer’s Honors and Confessions were missing from their nine-year service history, a full four of which had been spent at the front in the trenches of Christchurch. Numbly, he closed the database and surfed through to Homeland. He logged into the game, and sure enough, Twofer’s top-ranking score was gone.
That hurt. That struck him like a fist to the gut. Mike drew a deep, stiff breath, and sat back. He knew that winded sensation well. It was fear.
It didn’t make any sense. Twofer had been raised above them, Saved. He was redeemed in the sight of the Lord. Why had they erased everything that he had left? Mike backed out of the VR and closed the game, backpedaling into the dull light of reality.
A small voice much like his own responded to his silent questioning. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
He rubbed the aching spot just under his sternum. Proverbs 3:5. Of course. Shame washed over him in a wave, but they settled him a little, those familiar words. Restlessly, Mike bought his Bible reader into focus. He could find comfort there, and perhaps answers. Grief and confusion was eating away at morale. A report would only draw the Chaplains down on them, and if the Chaplain wasn’t convinced, Purity Control would intervene. Mike ground his teeth. The Controllers were the instruments of God’s wrath. They were black, shiny as a scorpion’s stinger. Their feet never touched the ground, and their coronas whipped with thin extrusions, like tentacles. They could incinerate a soldier with a look. He didn’t want to risk a report. A good sermon and a pep talk from Mike, their counselor, had to be enough.
Mike bookmarked his place and skimmed through to Successions. Now that Revelations had been fulfilled, the Lamb had added the final two books that had been missing from the Bible: Ascension and Successions. Ascension reminded Mike of the Old Testament in a lot of ways, recording the history of God’s chosen people before the Collapse and the return of the Lamb. The Holy Spirit had struck down all of the unworthy in a single night. The blacks, the gays, the Jews who would not accept Him as their savior, the pacifists and wicked women. The Lamb anointed the Guardians, God’s avatars on Earth, with eternal life. He created the Host from mortal men, and bought forth food from the dead gardens in the failing Shards. He was their Savior, who delved into the Deep Net and restored their systems and data.
Successions was the inheritor of Psalms, praises and laws to the Kingdom of God on Earth, and told the story of the building of Yetzirah, where they would eventually go to join the rest of the Host, who dwelt in Heaven. Mike browsed that section while he mused, composing notes for a sermon in another window. He paused when the highlighted numbers and letters of the Bible codes blinked out, and the highlights moved to other, unrelated verses. At first, he wondered if he was too tired and his BCI was on the fritz. But then he noticed the new highlights spelled something.
“Need to talk.”
Mike’s tongue thickened in his mouth.
He was being hacked.
