Chapter Twelve
A couple hours sleep was all that any PatriotRanger needed to fuel the long trek to Mount Victoria. Chow was quiet and tense: MREs eaten around a small campfire in the damp, foggy clearing outside of the bunker where most of the squad had slept. They shared their jelly and chocolate, and prayed for victory in a linked ring of arms around waists and shoulders.
Their AEGIS were being swarmed by Loaders when they went to hop in and load up. Alpha had done good: they were Padfoot Mark-IVs, made for the swampy conditions of the jungle. As AEGIS went, Padfoots were light, slim, fast machines that were hard to sink, easy to extract from bogs, and flexible enough to play among the trees. Just as well—there were an awful lot of bogs, and an awful lot of trees.
Alpha jogged up to the side of his own AEGIS and jumped up, catching a rail. He hung from the side of it, and his voice reverberated over the tooth-deep hum of the Praxis overhead. “Alright—Five, Twelve. You’re on the ground, Fiver with the flamethrower, Twelve keeping an eye on the Runner carrying the generator. Niner, I want you as gunner on the big guy over there. Mike, you’re taking Padfoot E610. You pack your gear inside and load up for rearguard. Fall out!”
Mike stiffened in the rank as the cries of ‘Sir-yes-Sir!’ rang out around him and the others split, efficiently finding their suits and positions. He wasn’t any good in an AEGIS, and Alpha knew it. Scowling, he ran over and drew to attention. “Sir, requesting change of position, Sir!”
“If you think I’m letting you take ground, you’re nuts.” Alpha looked down at him from his greater height. He yanked out a Coronal extrusion cord and plugged it in. The Padfoot whirred and clunked, the cockpit entry folding out. “Ten’s riding gunner with you: you just need to steer.”
Mike put his hands on his hips. Not exactly to form, but it would help get his point across. “I can’t effectively treat injuries without hands, Sir!”
Alpha’s mouth sloped to the side, eyebrows arched. The ‘dammit, Mike’ face, a signal of impending victory. Mike stared at him. Finally, Alpha rolled his eyes and pulled his visor down. He slid into the cockpit. “Fine. Swap with Fiver, and move your ass before I kick it across the clearing.”
Fiver was running through his firearms check, inspecting the flamethrower one of the Loaders had delivered. He stopped and looked over when Alpha called his name. “E610, Sir?”
“That’s the one. One-Four’s driving E612—I want the two of you to stay close together at the front in case we come under fire.” The cockpit closed up with heavy clunks and the high-pitched whir of screwing bolts. Alpha’s voice transitioned seamlessly from vocals to BCI.
“Hell yeah. It’s your fuckin’ funeral, Mike.” Fiver grinned, and threw him the flamethrower barrel.
“I’ll be fine. You never blast them long enough, anyway. I like my dinosaurs well-cooked,” Mike caught the gun and slung it around.
Fiver barked a laugh. He shed his armor down to the bodysuit underneath, and cut for the Padfoot Mike had given up. Mike sniffed, and collected the fuel tank for the flamethrower. He was arranging it around with his pack when Alpha bounded over, extending a metal and composite hand as large as Mike’s torso. “Give me everything you don’t need, psycho.”
“Yessir.” Mike wasn’t complaining. His hip was sore from lying on the hard ground, healswarm or no healswarm. He trimmed his kit down and loaded the stuff he wouldn’t need straight away into the gear bay. Another thirty pounds was nothing for the machine, but it made all the difference to him.
“Good man,” Alpha said, and strode away to the front.
The cheer that had suffused the squad around the campfire turned down to a simmer as they pushed out into the world of green and brown that loomed around the relative safety of the base. The jungle swallowed them whole. Soon, the only sounds were the stamping of the AEGIS and the BCI radio chatter between Sixie and Symon as they pitched the field reports back and forth. With God on the line, Mike focused his attention on preparing the cocktail of stims, supplements, and other drugs that would keep them at their peak while they were on the road. The guys in powered armor had a delivery system; the rest, he’d do manually when they made camp. He was afraid to even think about the conversation with Alpha. Not for the first time, he wished he could split and run separate terminals, divide his attention and think without Command listening in. Avoiding the memories was a futile effort. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop thinking about the women.
There were three Laws, along with the Commandments, that had been drilled into them from the moment they were hauled out of the recovery center. They were the things which elicited instant death by scourging: the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, lying with or discussing relations with human women, and questioning the absolute authority and reality of the Host, the Lamb, or the Guardians. Blasphemy had always seemed strange to Mike: it was impossible to deny the power of the Host and Guardians after seeing them burn men to death with a glance. The second law had never crossed his mind until now. He had come to terms with his fallen nature early on, and had never considered fucking anyone outside of his own squad. The first… well. It was vague, vague enough that it was impossible to know whether or not one was transgressing until it was too late.
He could only hope that Symon was as sympathetic as Alpha seemed to think he was. The whole mess gnawed at him, worried him, because he had no firm way to refute what Alpha had said. The fact also remained that Alpha and Symon were still alive after having committed what Mike was certain ought to have been mortal sins. If they had gotten away with it, Mike supposed that they hadn’t done anything worthy of punishment. And if so, what did that mean? It was unlikely Twofer was dead, punished for something Alpha and Symon were not, and far more likely that he had done something right, figured something out more quickly than they had. Alpha’s AEGIS, striding at the front of the line, held no answers for him.
They broke off the march when the sun began to fall, shielded in dense vegetation. The AEGIS had all taken on the muted, faded colors of the jungle around them. The squad formed a circle facing out, hidden amongst the mossy trees, and took turns to keep watch. Mike camped under the chassis of Sev’s AEGIS, warm in his powered down armor shell. He slept standing up until Alpha came to wake him for their turn.
“You know, none of this feels right.” He only spoke when they were up on top of Alpha’s Padfoot. Mike was in the gunner’s turret; Alpha sat beside him on the sloping hull, watching the jungle through binoculars.
“What?” Mike turned to look where Alpha was staring, wondering if he’d spotted a reptilian muzzle peering out from between the ferns.
“All of it. The disappearance, what the K.C. said, this mission.” Alpha swept the binoculars down. “I don’t like it.”
Symon hadn’t said a word to Mike since their conversation back in Lord’s Cradle. “No offense, Sir, but I’ve been saying that the whole way through.”
“Yeah.” Alpha leaned back, his pupils huge as he looked out over the dark forest. They caught the light from Yetzirah like cat’s eyes, reflective and unreadable. “I don’t like holding everything back from the others.”
“Have you told Bravo, at least?” Mike had privately admitted to the same thing on the long walk west, though he had decided not to mention it to spare Alpha the same. That the was the problem with lovers. You were sometimes just too damn alike.
“No. I don’t know what I’d say to Old Sam-B. He’s on edge. The others have been asking him about the squad history and Twofer’s missing score.”
Mike exhaled heavily, frowning. He thought for a moment, and then pressed his lips together, gathering his resolve. “I think you should put it to the squad. Come clean.”
For several minutes, Alpha did not reply. The wind rustled the palms and acacia, the ferns, and carried the fetid smell of old blood and stagnant water to their position. Now and then, they got a clean, cool blast from the south, coming from the distant sea.
“Yeah,” he said, at last. “Alright. You’re right. But it’s… You remember when the Knight Lieutenant came in? They took Sev’s keepsakes. Sev went in and found everything of Twofer’s gone. I don’t have any pretty answers for them, Mike.”
“Mmm.” Mike knew what he meant. “I believe in them, in the Host, and Twofer. I’d like to think he worked out something we’re still struggling to find.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking. The Bible says women are made to be wives, right? It’s all through the book. Wives and handmaidens. What if we’re meant to fish out these women from the arcology? I think maybe the Host would see it as lawful if it was… I dunno. Legit? There’s no rules about it.”
The Host had never laid down any laws on female Nephilim. The only thing they knew was that there were no females of their kind, by the Host’s design. It gave Mike pause. “You’ve got a point.”
“I mean, God hates us because we’re made from enemy genestock, right? Bad dust, no souls, Sodomites to a man. We can’t deny that shit. But I wonder if is this is actually some kind of test. Maybe we’re meant to take wives and become something better.” Alpha leaned forward, his elbow resting on his knee. “I mean, look at this place. It’s beautiful. Imagine what we could do with it if we could make our own squads without needing decanting labs and all the tech.”
Mike laughed, his fingers twitching on the trigger. It was a nice idea, and a Biblical one at that. Taking wives from the enemy was something the Host themselves did, though Mike had no idea what they did with them. From his medical training, he’d learned that women played a role in perpetuating the Host. He had never learned how… he assumed that they played some part in the decanting labs. Maybe it was their prayers and evocations which bought humans and Nephilim to life. “You know, it does actually make a kind of fucked up sense.”
“It does. I wonder if maybe we’ve been seeing it all wrong.” Alpha frowned in thought, reaching up to rub his mouth and jaw. “Let’s say that Twofer found this out, and he began to doubt the Host. He disappears—not because of what he learned, but because he lost his fear and awe. We’ve learned about this, but we’re still fighting for the Lord, fearing them. We haven’t been killed or lifted or even looked at funny, and they have to know that we know, Mike.”
Slowly, Mike nodded. He wasn’t so certain of the reasoning, but he couldn’t deny the facts. “We should have been ashed in our boots sometime during the last week.”
“I’m surprised we’re still here. It’s a cardinal sin to doubt or disobey.” Alpha was warming up to it as he spoke. “I think that’s the test. Lying is the sin; taking women of your own kind as wives is there in the Bible.”
“I think they’re supposed to be virgins,” Mike said. “But otherwise, yeah.”
“We should check that before we do anything. You can probably tell with a biofeed hookup.” Alpha shrugged. “But you see my point, though, right?”
Mike had no concept of what a wife actually entailed. He could even picture what a female Nephilim would look like. He knew she’d have one less rib. Functionally, though… what was the difference?
“You know,” he said. “You might actually be onto something there. But we have specific orders to destroy this place. That’s the mission.”
“Absolutely. But the orders didn’t say anything about killing any Nephilim women. Hell, they didn’t even mention there were women.”
“So… you’re thinking we blow up this Evehall, take the women, and then what?” Mike didn’t even know what a wife did. He assumed she’d be a killer, like every Nephilim he’d known. She’d probably be a soldier who could sling a gun and haul packs and fix armor like they did. For all he knew, though, ‘wife’ was actually some kind of cake.
Alpha grinned, flashing double rows of sharp, dog-like teeth. He reached up towards the gleaming white arc of Heaven overhead, and mimed gripping it, pulling it down. “We retake the world for the Lord. We teach them what they need to know, we do what we have to… and then we turn this place back into Paradise.”
