Off Armageddon Reef (6 page)

The world they'd named Safehold was a bit smaller than Old Earth. Kau-zhi was considerably cooler than Sol, and although Safehold orbited closer to it, the planet had a noticeably lower average temperature than Old Earth. Its axial tilt was a bit more pronounced, as well, which gave it somewhat greater seasonal shifts as a result. It also had a higher proportion of land area, but that land was broken up into numerous smallish, mountainous continents and large islands, and that helped to moderate the planetary climate at least a little.

Despite its marginally smaller size, Safehold was also a bit more dense than mankind's original home world. As a result, its gravity was very nearly the same as the one in which the human race had initially evolved. Its days were longer, but its years were shorter—only a bit more than three hundred and one local days each—and the colonists had divided it into only ten months, each of six five-day weeks. The local calendar still felt odd to Kau-yung (he supposed it made sense, but he
missed
January and December, damn it!), and he'd had more trouble than he expected adjusting to the long days, but overall, it was one of the more pleasant planets mankind had settled upon.

Despite all of its positive points, there'd been a few drawbacks, of course. There always were. In this case, the native predators—especially the aquatic ones—presented exceptional challenges, and the ecosystem in general had proved rather less accommodating than usual to the necessary terrestrial plant and animal strains required to fit the planet for human habitation. Fortunately, among the units assigned to each terraforming task group, Mission Control had included a highly capable bio-support ship whose geneticists were able to make the necessary alterations to adapt terrestrial life to Safehold.

Despite that, those terrestrial life-forms remained interlopers. The genetic modifications had helped, but they couldn't completely cure the problem, and for the first few years, the success of Safehold's terraforming had hung in the balance.

That had been when Langhorne and Bédard
needed
Shan-wei, Kau-yung thought bitterly. She'd headed the terraforming teams, and it was her leadership which had carried the task through to success. She and her people, watched over by Kau-yung's flagship, TFNS
Gulliver
, had battled the planet into submission while most of the colony fleet had waited, motionless, holding station in the depths of interstellar space, light-years from the nearest star.

Those had been heady days, Kau-yung admitted to himself. Days when he'd felt he and Shan-wei and their crews were genuinely forging ahead, although that confidence had been shadowed by the constant fear that a Gbaba scout ship might happen by while they hung in orbit around the planet. They'd known the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor, yet they'd been too agonizingly aware of the stakes for which they played to take any comfort from odds, despite all the precautions Mission Planning had built in. But they'd still had that sense of purpose, of wresting survival from the jaws of destruction, and he remembered their huge sense of triumph on the day they realized they'd finally turned the corner and sent word to
Hamilcar
that Safehold was ready for its new inhabitants.

And that was the point at which they'd discovered how Bédard had “modified” the sleeping colonists' psychological templates. No doubt she'd thought it was a vast improvement when Langhorne initially suggested it, but Kau-yung and Shan-wei had been horrified.

The sleeping colonists had volunteered to have false memories of a false life implanted. They hadn't volunteered to be programmed to believe Operation Ark's command staff were gods.

It wasn't the only change Langhorne had made, of course. He and Bédard had done their systematic best to preclude the possibility of any reemergence of advanced technology on Safehold. They'd deliberately abandoned the metric system, which Kau-yung suspected had represented a personal prejudice on Langhorne's part. But they'd also eliminated any memory of Arabic numerals, or algebra, in a move calculated to emasculate any development of advanced mathematics, just as they had eliminated any reference to the scientific method and reinstituted a Ptolemaic theory of the universe. They'd systematically destroyed the tools of scientific inquiry, then concocted their religion as a means of ensuring that it never reemerged once more, and nothing could have been better calculated to outrage someone with Shan-wei's passionate belief in freedom of the individual and of thought.

Unfortunately, it had been too late to do anything about it. Shan-wei and her allies on the Administrative Council had tried, but they'd quickly discovered that Langhorne was prepared for their resistance. He'd organized his own clique, with judicious transfers and replacements among the main fleet's command personnel, while Shan-Wei and Kau-yung were safely out of the way, and those changes had been enough to defeat Shan-wei's best efforts.

Which was why Kau-yung and Shan-wei had had their very public falling out. It had been the only way they could think of to organize some sort of open resistance to Langhorne's policies while simultaneously retaining a presence in the heart of the colony's official command structure. Shan-wei's reputation, her leadership of the minority bloc on the Administrative Council, would have made it impossible for anyone to believe
she
supported the Administrator. And so their roles had been established for them, and they'd drifted further and further apart, settled into deeper and deeper estrangement.

And all for nothing, in the end. He'd given up the woman he loved, both of them had given up the children they might yet have reared, sacrificed fifty-seven years of their lives to a public pretense of anger and violent disagreement, for nothing.

Shan-wei and the other “Techies”—just under thirty percent of the original Operation Ark command crew—had retired to Safehold's southernmost continent. They'd built their own enclave, their “Alexandria Enclave,” taking the name deliberately from the famous library at Alexandria, and rigorously adhered to the
original
mission orders where technology was concerned.

And, even more unforgivably from the perspective of Langhorne and Bédard's new plans, they'd refused to destroy their libraries. They'd insisted on preserving the true history of the human race, and especially of the war against the Gbaba.

That's what really sticks in your craw, isn't it, Eric?
Kau-yung thought.
You know there's no risk of the Gbaba detecting the sort of preelectric “technology” Shan-wei still has up and running at Alexandria. Hell, any one of the air cars you're still willing to allow your command staff personnel to use as their “angelic chariots” radiates a bigger, stronger signal than everything at Alexandria combined! You may
say
that any indigenous technology—even the
memory
of that sort of tech—represents the threat of touching off more advanced, more readily detectable development, but that's not what really bothers you. You've decided you
like
being a god, so you can't tolerate any heretical scripture, can you?

Kau-yung didn't know how Langhorne would respond to Shan-wei's threat of open defiance. Despite his own position as Safehold's military commander, he knew he wasn't completely trusted by the Administrator and the sycophants on Langhorne's Administrative Council. He wasn't one of
them
, despite his long-standing estrangement from Shan-wei, and too many of them seemed to have come to believe they truly were the deities Bédard had programmed the colonists to think they were.

And people who think they're gods aren't likely to exercise a lot of restraint when someone defies them
, he thought.

Pei Kau-yung watched
Hamilcar
's distant, gleaming dot sweep towards the horizon and tried not to shiver as the evening breeze grew cooler.

“Father.
Father!
”

Timothy Harrison muttered something from the borderland of sleep, and the hand on his shoulder shook him again, harder.

“Wake
up
, Father!”

Timothy's eyes opened, and he blinked. His third-born son, Robert, Matthew's grandfather, stood leaning over the bed with a candle burning in one hand. For a moment, Timothy was only bewildered, but then Robert's shadowed expression registered, despite the strange lighting falling across it from below as the candle quivered in his hand.

“What is it?” Timothy asked, sitting up in bed. Beside him, Sarah stirred, then opened her own eyes and sat up. He felt her welcome, beloved presence warm against his shoulder, and his right hand reached out, finding and clasping hers as if by instinct.

“I don't know, Father,” Robert said worriedly, and in that moment Timothy was once again reminded that his son looked far older than he himself did. “All I know,” Robert continued, “is that a messenger's arrived from Father Michael. He says you're needed at the church. Immediately.”

Timothy's eyes narrowed. He turned and looked at Sarah for a moment, and she gazed back. Then she shook her head and reached out with her free hand to touch his cheek gently. He smiled at her, as calmly as he could, though she was undoubtedly the last person in the world he could really hope to fool, then looked back at Robert.

“Is the messenger still here?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Does
he
know why Michael needs me?”

“He says he doesn't, Father, and I don't think it was just a way to tell me to mind my own business.”

“In that case, ask him to return immediately. Ask him to tell Father Michael I'll be there just as quickly as I can get dressed.”

“At once, Father,” Robert said, not even attempting to hide his relief as his father took charge.

“Michael?”

Timothy paused just inside the church doors.

The church, as always, was softly illuminated by the red glow of the presence lights. The magnificent mosaic of ceramic tiles and semiprecious stones which formed the wall behind the high altar was more brightly illuminated by the cut-crystal lamps, which were kept filled with only the purest oil from freshwater kraken. The huge, lordly faces of the Archangel Langhorne and the Archangel Bédard gazed out from the mosaic, their noble eyes watching Timothy as he stood inside the doors. The weight of those eyes always made Timothy aware of his own mortality, his own fallibility before the divinity of God's chosen servants. Usually, it also filled him with reassurance, the renewed faith that God's purpose in creating Safehold as a refuge and a home for mankind must succeed in the end.

But tonight, for some reason, he felt a chill instead. No doubt it was simply the unprecedented nature of Michael's summons, but it almost seemed as if shadows moved across the Archangels' faces, despite the unwavering flames of the lights.

“Timothy!”

Father Michael's voice pulled Timothy away from that disturbing thought, and he looked up as Michael appeared in a side door, just off the sanctuary.

“What's this all about, Michael?” Timothy asked. He paused to genuflect before the mosaic, then rose, touching the fingers of his right hand to his heart, and then to his lips, and strode down the central aisle. He knew he'd sounded sharp, abrupt, and he tried to smooth his own voice. But the irregularity, especially so soon after the Visitation, had him on edge and anxious.

“I'm sorry to have summoned you this way,” Father Michael said, “but I had no choice. I have terrible news,
terrible
news.” He shook his head. “The worst news I could possibly imagine.”

Timothy's heart seemed to stop for just an instant as the horror in Michael's voice registered. He froze in midstride, then made himself continue towards the priest.

“What sort of news, Michael?” he asked much more gently.

“Come.”

It was all the priest said, and he stepped back through the door. It led to the sacristy, Timothy realized as he followed, but Michael continued through another door on the sacristy's far side. A narrow flight of stairs led upward, and the priest didn't even pause for a candle or a taper as he led Timothy up them.