The Tower

Contents

To Stan

(Sorry there are no pirates in it)

All things are full of gods

Plato

The basement is dark and quiet.

A figure, stripped to the waist and kneeling takes the blade in his right hand and draws it across the skin at the joint of his left arm and shoulder, tracing the scar of a previous cut. The blade is sharp and the scar opens easily, letting blood run down skin quivering at the bite of the knife.

‘The first,’ he says, his voice low in the darkness. ‘This blood binds me in pain with the Sacrament. As it suffers, so must I, until all suffering will end.’

He switches the blade to his left hand and repeats the cut on his right shoulder.

‘The second,’ he says, continuing the ritual learned from a hospital worker in the southern Turkish city of Ruin, a man loyal to the cause who had faithfully recorded everything the dying Sancti said through their delirium and suffering. The knife continues to cut, drawing fresh blood from old wounds, carving the same pattern he has seen on the bodies of the sacred monks, captured on a camera phone by the same spy after their suffering had finally ended. It is a ceremony that remained secret and locked in the Citadel at the heart of Ruin for thousands upon thousands of years. The enemies of the church believe that the death of the Sancti and the breaching of the Citadel mark the end of the old ways.

They are wrong.

When the ceremony is over he cleanses his wounds, flushing them with saline solution before drying them and sealing them with superglue that stings as it binds the flesh back together. The pain sharpens his mind, and so does its purpose. Only through suffering can redemption be reached, and only through sacrifice can the enemy be beaten.

He dresses quickly, buttoning his high-collared shirt to hide the scar on his neck and fixing his tie. Only a very few know him by the name he wears, down here in the dark:
Novus Sancti,
keeper of the scared flame.

But he is not alone in the shadows. There are others, many others like him who have devoted themselves to the silent and secret protection of God’s sacred mission on Earth. They are everywhere, woven into the fabric of society – law makers, politicians, opinion formers – the crosses round their necks the only sign that they serve a higher law than those of the lands they live in. They are Legion, for they are many, an army waiting to be mobilized when judgement day draws near.

And that time is now. He knows this to be true, for he has seen the signs and felt the call inside him. God has spoken to him and now he will answer.

He slips on his jacket then mounts the stairs back up into the modern world like a man rising from the dead.

Reborn.

Renewed.

Ready.

Merriweather looked up at the bank of screens.

Something was wrong.

He glanced behind him though he knew he was alone in the control centre. Everyone else was at the inter-departmental party they threw each year to mark the start of the Christmas holidays. Merriweather wasn’t big on parties. He didn’t drink and couldn’t do small talk so he’d volunteered for the caretaker watch to garner some points with colleagues on the Flight Ops Team and bag a little heavy-duty processor time to crunch the deep space data he was working on for his PhD.

He leaned forward in his chair and cocked his head to one side, listening to the chatter of the hard drive. Some people could listen to a car engine and tell you what was wrong with it, others might hear one bum note in a symphony played by a sixty-piece orchestra, Merriweather knew computers – and this one definitely sounded hinky. There was a hitch in the processing tone, like a broken tooth on a clock wheel or a fresh scratch on one of the classic 45s he liked to collect. He stroked his knitted tie nervously as he considered what to do. Unlike the other techs at the Goddard Space Center, Merriweather was strictly old school. He wore a tie every day, along with pressed trousers, horn-rimmed glasses and neatly combed hair – just like his boyhood heroes, the Houston mission controllers of the sixties and seventies. He also liked rules and order. He didn’t like it when things went wrong.

A tap on his keyboard banished the Pillars of Creation screensaver, the most famous image taken by the Hubble telescope, controlled from this room and currently orbiting Earth six hundred kilometres above Merriweather’s head. He ran through the standard checklist of the latest telemetry: temperature normal, speed steady, all systems green, no fluctuation in the solar wind – nothing abnormal.

He typed in a string of commands and the big screen on the wall flashed up an updated image from the main reflector feed. It showed the luminous swirl of Cosmos-Aztec6, thirteen point four billion light years away – the furthest system ever observed from Earth.

The processor crunched again, making Merriweather wince, then something happened that he had never seen before. An application auto-loaded on to his desktop, a large window filled with numbers.

‘Virus,’ he said. ‘We have a virus!’

No response. No one there.

The numbers remained on screen for a few seconds then disappeared. Merriweather tapped the keyboard and shook the mouse. He kicked back, rolling his chair away from the desk and across the floor to another workstation. Same thing: frozen screen, frozen keyboard. The processors chattered feverishly as they continued to feed on whatever digital poison had somehow found its way into the pristine system.

The main screen flickered and Merriweather looked up. The image was beginning to shift and disintegrate. Whatever had locked him out was now taking control of the guidance systems. The telescope was moving.

He fumbled for a desk phone, knocking the receiver to the floor, pulling it up by the cord and stabbing a button marked ‘Dr Kinderman – cell phone’. On the screen the image continued to break up as the telescope turned. In his ear the ringing tone began. Somewhere down the hall a Marimba tune rang in synch with it.

Merriweather clamped the phone under his chin and went through every reboot command he could think of to try and unlock the keyboard. Nothing. The ringing tone continued in his ear. He dropped the phone on the desk and launched himself towards the exit.

Outside in the corridor the Marimba was louder. It was coming from Kinderman’s office. He arrived at the door, knocked once out of habit then opened it.

The state of the office came as a complete shock: wrenched-open drawers, papers everywhere, books all over the floor. The cell phone was on the desk. It shimmied a couple of times, vibrating in time to the ring, then stopped. In the silence that followed Merriweather heard the crunch of the pernicious code coming from Kinderman’s terminal. He moved cautiously into the room, wading through drifts of paper, until the monitor came into view. He stopped dead when he saw the message on the screen:

MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER

Shepherd took a deep breath then let it out slowly, trying not to make a sound as he edged forward down the dark corridor, gun first towards the solitary door. It was open slightly, the splintered timbers around the lock evidence of how many times it had been kicked in over the years. Somewhere above him the Virginia winter wind moaned through broken windows, filling the derelict townhouse with whispering voices. It was two below outside, probably colder in here, but he was sweating beneath his body armour.