Starfist: Hangfire (25 page)

Juanita smiled. "I want to be there for that. Will you promise to let me watch, let me participate a little, even?"

Johnny nodded.

"And then what?"

"Ah, and then, my dear Juanita, ‘all roads lead to Rome,’ as they say."

Juanita Cruz, known as the "Old Woman" on Havanagas, was a procuress for the mob. From her headquarters on Wanderjahr she scoured all of Human Space, recruiting young women and boys for employment in brothels, the ones she owned and the ones on Havanagas and other worlds that the mob ran. She was a key figure in the prostitution rings the mobs ran on a dozen other worlds too. The obscure bar near Brosigville's spaceport on Wanderjahr where Dean and Claypoole had spent a boozy afternoon two years before was merely a front.

Juanita was not really that "old"; middle-aged, really. Nor was she that bad looking. Her stern, businesslike demeanor—hair pulled back into a severe bun, no-nonsense clothes, and lack of makeup—just made her look dumpy and grandmotherly. Johnny Sticks found himself more than a little attracted to Juanita, and she knew it. While she did not encourage his advances, she never rebuffed them either, Johnny, who had the pick of the most beautiful women on the planet, was used to getting any woman he wanted. He knew he couldn't do that with Juanita, however, because she was more than his equal in the mob hierarchy, so instead he settled for the verbal cat-and-mouse game they played.

Business, after all, is business.

"Ah, gentlemen." Prost greeted them as they approached his desk. "Good to see you've come back."

He smiled wanly, as if saying, Good to see anybody come back after an interview with Paoli. It was obvious he was surprised he'd ever seen them again. "I'm sorry, your consorts departed long ago. They, uh, thought you'd be retained, er, beyond a reasonable time." He gave another sickly smile. "Well, would you care to spend the night with us?" Dramatically, like the three musketeers drawing their swords, they presented the cards Paoli had given them. "Well," Prost exclaimed, "I am impressed, very impressed.

Johnny doesn't give these out to everyone. Take your pick." He waved his arm at the carrels.

"I don't know if I can get it up anymore, Mr. Prost, with someone listening to every little fart we make," Claypoole said.

"Yeah," Dean said, speaking loud enough to be sure whoever was monitoring them heard the remark.

"Some people get their jollies listening to other people's farts." The other two laughed. That'd give Mr.

Paoli's goons something to think about.

Now that it was out that they were under surveillance—something they'd known all along anyway—it was all right to talk openly about being spied on.

Since Katie had gone home and it was too late to go after her, Claypoole had decided to spend the night. Besides, he did not want to find her in the company of another man, which was probably just where she would be at that hour.

Pasquin looked around for the girl who had winked at him before. Suddenly, almost as if called, she appeared from around the other side of the room, a bright smile on her face. He waved at her and smiled back.

"Please sign our guest register, gentlemen," Prost said He shoved an old-fashioned ledger at them.

Boldly, Pasquin picked up the antique pen, dipped it into the inkwell and signed "John Hancock" in huge black letters. "That's striking a blow for liberty!" Prost exclaimed with a flourish.

The girl gave her name as Marilyn, and despite the fact that Pasquin knew the room was bugged, as soon as she started to undress he forgot all about it. Quickly, he began to shed his own clothes. He watched her in the mirror. Suddenly, she had a strange little device in her hand, like that thing Culloden switched on to shield their conversation in the car. In the other hand she had—Then everything went black.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"The Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles." That was the charter name of the human world commonly called "Kingdom." The formal name was used only by the theocracy in its formal pronouncements and publications. Everyone else, including the government of the Confederation of Human Worlds in its official pronouncements and publications, simply called it "Kingdom."

Sometime during the twenty-third century, when Human Space hadn't spread far enough to include the planetary system around a particular nondescript Class G star, the leaders of a number of small or disregarded religious sects—and splinter groups of well-established religions—thoroughly dissatisfied with what they saw as the rampant materialism and humanism of the day, and further convinced the day of reckoning wasn't as near to hand as they would have it, pooled their churches' not inconsiderable resources to purchase a starship. The starship shuttled back and forth a number of times and eventually brought some two million like-minded colonists to an Earthlike planet orbiting the non-descript, off-the-beaten-path, star.

Thus was founded the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles. It was hard going at first. The colonists didn't have the full panoply of occupations that were normal for settlement on new worlds. While one may find farmers, husbandmen, woodsmen, teachers, machinists, and truck drivers among the ranks of religious fundamentalists—metallurgists, biologists, and medical technologists tend to be in short supply in those ranks.

The leaders of those half-dozen sects weren't willing to surrender their dream of a shining city on a hill to an impoverished agrarian landscape, nor were they willing to give up the benefits of modern medicine in favor of a short, brutish life. So they had their followers build a walled compound outside Haven, the capital city of Kingdom. They hired contract workers from off-world to live in Interstellar City, as they called the walled compound, to provide the talents and skills they didn't have in their own populace and, meanwhile, to prevent contact between the off-worlders and the Chosen People.

The attempted isolation didn't work.

The off-world metallurgists and geologists had to cooperate and coordinate with the miners, smelters, and machinists of Kingdom. The biologists, botanists and zoologists both, had to work with the farmers, husbandmen, woodsmen, and hunters. The medical technologists had to teach the doctors, nurses, and midwives. Etcetera.

Quickly, a religious overseer was assigned to accompany each off-worlder every time one left the walled compound in order to assure that there would be no contamination. The citizens of Kingdom weren't allowed into Interstellar City, not even as cooks, maids, or janitors.

At first the attendant overseers were able to prevent contamination, but that lasted only for the first generation. The ruling theocrats attempted to bring up later generations to believe theirs was the only righteous way of life and only heretics lived off-world.

Yet some in each generation saw for themselves that the off-world scientists and technicians with whom they came into contact bore neither horns nor barbed tails. Even when the off-worlders said nothing that was not absolutely necessary to their work, they showed there was good in other places—and how they moved, dressed, and spoke suggested that life elsewhere could be better than it was on Kingdom. Some of those among the common people who didn't have access to the modern medical technologies the theocrats kept to themselves, or to the other modern conveniences and comforts, reasoned that anything had to be better than the short, brutish lives they led.

Beginning with the third generation, there was at least one rebellion in each generation, some large enough that the theocrats were forced to request Confederation assistance in putting them down. The first intervention convinced many in the Confederation government that Kingdom's theocracy deserved the rebellions it faced. After that, the Confederation intervened only when the lives of the contract workers, most of them citizens of member worlds, were threatened.

It became a game. When the theocracy wanted help badly enough, it manufactured an incident to blame on the rebels. The Confederation then had to intervene, however unwillingly. The Confederation never, ever intervened before such an incident.

The shuttle blinked out of Beamspace just long enough to send out a radar pulse and get the blips back, then popped back into Beamspace. That deep in a gravity well and its attendant atmosphere, any longer than a blink at the speed the shuttle traveled would overheat the hull. The onboard computers analyzed the returned blips in nanoseconds and set a course change. The shuttle blinked out of Beamspace, fired vernier jets to make the course correction, blinked back into Beamspace. The shuttle repeated the process. Any active radar that picked it up when it was in Space-3 would probably see the widely separated blinks as unconnected anomalies.

The shuttle's braking jets were already on full when it blinked out of Beamspace for the last time. It shuddered violently before its wings extended and bit into the atmosphere, then almost lazed onto the ground in a near perfect landing a few kilometers from the village of Eighth Shrine. Its maw clanked open and four vehicles of a design not previously seen on Kingdom roared out. The vehicles were mud-colored, bore strange symbols, and were obviously armored and armed. As soon as the vehicles were a hundred meters away from it, the shuttle lifted off and rapidly gained speed until it was able to blink back into Beamspace, not to be seen again until it blinked back into Space-3 on its next relay to the surface of the planet.

Flanked by a brace of Large Ones, the Over Master in command of that phase of the planetside operations stomped off his command vehicle and glared around the village his Fighters had just ravaged.

The bodies of Earthmen lay on the ground, many still bubbling where the acid of his Fighters' weapons hadn't yet finished eating the flesh. The houses and other buildings of Eighth Shrine were scattered debris, struck by kinetic energy weapons designed to destroy steel and stone constructions instead of the flimsy woodframe used by these primitives.

The Master who led the raid scampered to the Over Master and bowed deeply. The Over Master inclined his head in response.

"Did you allow any to escape?" the Over Master growled.

"Yes, Master. Three of them fled, sufficiently uninjured to live long enough to carry word of the raid."

"Good!" the Over Master barked. "How are preparations proceeding?"

The Master in command of the raid nodded toward a hillside half a kilometer away. "Construction of the tunnel complex has begun." In the distance, clots of mud could be seen as they were flung from a hole in the side of the hill. Thanks to his workers and a nearby forest, when the digging was finished there would be little trace other than the opening in the hillside, and that would be camouflaged into invisibility.

When the Over Master grunted provisional approval of the tunnel works, the Master said, "I have placed squads in observation posts at these locations." He turned on his mapper and a true-color topo map of the area materialized in front of the Over Master. Seven squad-size observation posts were indicated. "Reaction platoons are stationed here." Three spots on the projection lit up with the symbols that indicated platoons.

The Over Master studied the map and compared it with what he recalled from his own maps. Then, satisfied that the observation posts and reaction platoons were stationed where he would have put them, he grunted "Good," turned to one of the Large Ones flanking him and issued the order to set up his command post.

"Now we wait," the Over Master said.

They waited for three days before a remote radar station reported rapidly approaching aircraft.

"Lock on and prepare to kill them on my command," the Over Master ordered.

Two Avenging Angels of the 357th Attack Squadron of Kingdom's Aerial Defense Corps approached the destroyed village at Mach 3. Avenging Angel was the name the Kingdomites used for the Strike Eagle, the ground attack aircraft used by the Confederation Navy and Marine Corps before they upgraded to the Raptor. It might be obsolete on a modern battlefield, but the Avenging Angel was quite deadly against ill-trained ground troops who lacked modern anti-aircraft weapons.

"Lead to Wing," the pilot of the lead Angel said into his radio as soon as their destination became visible on the horizon. "Give me cover at angels ten, I'm going down to angels one for a closer look."

"Roger, Lead." The wingman pointed his plane's nose up and hit the afterburners. The Avenging Angel gouted flame and shot upward.

The leader throttled back sharply and hit his braking jets. The sudden deceleration slammed him forward in his harness. The Avenging Angel bucked and, almost out of control, shed altitude. It was a crude maneuver, but effective for making an change in velocity and altitude. He was at altitude and four hundred knots when he over flew the village.

"What the...?" What he saw on the ground didn't look like the aerial or satellite photos he'd studied during the briefing. None of the buildings were there, though the roadways seemed to be intact. The few structures that were standing didn't at all resemble anything he expected to see in a subtropical agricultural area of Kingdom. He saw no people or farming equipment in the fields, but people were evident in the village itself. Most of them seemed to be carrying tanks of some kind on their backs; none of them waved at him when he waggled his wings.

"Bogie! Bogie!" the wingman suddenly screamed.

"Where?" None of the alarms in the lead's cockpit had gone off. He looked around wildly but didn't see anything approaching. Then he looked up.

"Sacred Yahweh," he breathed. Far above, where he should have seen his wingman's Avenging Angel, he saw only tumbling specks. The pilot hit the afterburner and yanked hard on the stick in case something undetected was coming toward him. The maneuver was in vain. An invisible force slammed into his aircraft and disintegrated it.

Both aircraft went down without getting off a message to their headquarters. Three hours after the air reconnaissance failed to report in, a battalion of armored infantry mounted up and headed toward the village of Eighth Shrine.