The Heretic (Beyond the Wall Book 1) (21 page)

‘By who?’

‘I’ll get to that.’

‘When?’

‘When I trust you.’

‘I may not wait that long.’

‘I’m thinking it wasn’t you I was supposed to bring. It was the ship.’

‘You think it still has access to the Core networks?’

‘No. If it did, they’d certainly be tracking it. But if it could connect one way to the Core, it might have been able to connect the other way too.’

‘You think it has information stored somewhere in its own systems?’

‘That would explain a great deal. Why they didn’t just destroy the ship back at the port, but had to fire on us to keep us from escaping; why the Consul is so interested. There’s more to this than even I know.’

‘You can’t keep me in the dark forever.’

‘Time. That’s all I ask. There are things we need to attend to first.’

‘Like what?’

‘We’re picking others up.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So we pick up whoever walks up to us?’

‘We’ll know them when we see them.’

‘I need to know what I’m getting into, preacher.’

‘You’re just as much on the run now as we are. They want that ship and they’ll kill whoever gets in their way.’

‘I’ll take my chances. There’s something I need to know. The kid’s brother, Ishmael.’

The preacher’s face contorted in sadness. ‘Yes?’

‘Did he know what he was getting into?’

‘He wasn’t supposed to die, but he knew the risks.’

‘You taught him what to say to me,’ Shepherd said. ‘So he’d sound like a mechanic and get me outside.’

‘Yes.’

‘He knew the risks.’ Shepherd didn’t believe it.

‘I wish it had been me.’

‘You owe Jordi now and you always will. You’ve taken away from him the only thing that ever really mattered to him.’

‘You had a brother once.’

‘I said I wasn’t buying what you were selling.’

The preacher gazed at him, then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about our history?’

‘Not much,’ Shepherd said. ‘What the Magistratus tells us, which I suspect is half-truth at best.’

‘I need a pipe. So land this thing and let’s get some fresh air.’

Jordi woke slowly and, for a long while, struggled to comprehend where he was. Intense white light stung his bleary eyes and he shrank from it. His mouth was dry; he felt sluggish and drowsy. There was no pain, only a crawling numbness—as if his skin and body were not his own.

Jordi forced open his eyes and blinked quickly, willing them to adjust to the light. Eventually, and painfully slowly, he was able to glance around. The cold, sterile steel room that met his gaze was frighteningly unfamiliar: steel cabinets, snaking hoses, a bank of screens. A single steel table, laid out with instruments he didn’t recognise. An intense white light shone from above, and a bitter smell hung in the air.

It wasn’t until the ache in his muscles washed over him that he was reminded of the night the Peacekeepers had come to his village. The memories flooded back and overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and saw his brother’s broken body, hung like meat; then the discarded bodies of the villagers, the crows tearing at their ashen flesh. In his ears he could hear the thunder from the Peacekeepers’ weapons as he ran to the freighter, the raging storm above him as he fumbled with the hatch.

Vaarden’s dead face appeared in front of his eyes and Jordi could feel his hands balling into trembling fists.

So many dead.

Unwilling to move, energy slowly leeching from his body, Jordi wept.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

A Preacher's Tale

AS DUSK fell, the preacher perched on a fallen tree over which he had laid a thick wool blanket. The flickering light from the fire played across his face. It picked out the dark crevasses of his scars and glistened in his eyes. For a moment, he looked ghostly and unreal. Charcoal clouds gathered overhead so there was no chance the smoke from the fire would be seen, if anyone was even looking for them in this alien place. The navigational systems had no name for the system, or for the planets within it. For this tiny moon the preacher had directed him to, there was only a number: FN-1657.

Now, sitting in the warmth of the fire, away from the bitter winter of Herse, Shepherd felt suddenly, absurdly, relaxed. In his hands he held a flask of hotleaf, and the scalding liquid gave him comfort. Beyond the group sitting around the fire, towards the middle of the clearing, he could see the outline of Soteria’s hull and the dense forest on the other side, encircling her. The preacher pulled deeply on his pipe, clutched in a weathered hand, then blew wisps of vapour back into the fire. Shepherd drank from his flask and waited.

‘We don’t know everything, of course,’ the preacher said slowly. ‘The Magistratus has seen to that. But we know some. For thirty years, preachers have foraged for every scrap of learning about where humankind came from. Especially those scraps that aren’t in the hands of the Magistratus. Humankind has existed far longer than the Magistratus will admit; thousands of years. They called the planet that once was their only home many things—Terra or Tellus, Gaea, Jord, Earth. Maybe more than that, but in some way all of them referred to her as our mother.’

‘How do you know this?’ Shepherd asked.

‘The Magistratus maintains an archive,’ the preacher replied. ‘Contained within it is everything the Magistratus knows of our history.’

‘Not possible,’ Shepherd said. ‘Something like that really existed,
someone
would know about it. There’d be talk, somewhere.’

‘Not everyone believes right away. You’re entitled to seek your own path. To say otherwise is the Magistratus’s way, not ours.

‘The men and women who serve and protect the Archive are born into it. They know nothing else. To them, it is the highest calling. They are taught from birth to believe the Archive is the key to the Republic’s survival. They have no access to the data beyond that which is required to maintain it, but they are fanatical in their love for it. The Magistratus calls these people the Librarians.’

‘Like I said, how do
you
know this?’ Shepherd asked again.

‘Some time ago—I’ll not say how—we liberated a handful of files from the Archive. And of course we collect whatever scraps of data we can from across the Republic. We collate and we analyse, and we protect what we record.’

‘Where is it kept?’

The preacher smiled and shook his head, never taking his eyes from Shepherd’s. ‘There are too many who would profit from dissemination skewed by self-interest. And were the Magistratus to find what we have—’ The preacher paused and stared long into the fire. For a while he said nothing and Shepherd saw grief uncoil across his face. ‘What is contained within that vast Archive tells us that humankind is predisposed to ruin itself. We are ruled by greed, lust, envy; motivated by egoism and self-interest.’

‘I don’t need an Archive to know that,’ Shepherd said as he tossed a stone into the fire. The wood shifted and sent sparks curling into the night air.

The preacher chuckled. ‘Yes, on that you may be right.’

‘So you know what happened to that planet?’

‘We do,’ the preacher said. He pulled on his pipe again, deeper this time, as if the tobacco would numb something that was wasting inside him. ‘Two centuries ago, it was their own shortsighted self-interest which cost them their home. Instead of living within the limits of the world around them, they existed recklessly, gluttonously. They consumed and discarded with no thought to their own future. They
raped
their planet. Pillaged her of every ripe fruit she so generously gave them. Destroyed the air with poison to run their vehicles and their lives. No planet is without limits, and eventually she gave in.

‘Summers grew hotter and winters colder. Slowly to begin with, but perceptibly enough. Their leaders met time and again, but reached no agreement. They were concerned only with their insular lives—not with the future of their children and grandchildren. Some even said that there
was
no danger. Others cared only for coin.’

‘How many people lived on this planet?’ Shepherd asked.

‘We don’t know for sure. Perhaps as many as five billion.’

‘Five billion?’

‘Seems almost impossible, doesn’t it? Now we live on planets spread across a dozen systems, yet there can be no more than a few million of us.’

‘How did it happen?’ Shepherd asked. ‘The end of that place. What exactly happened to them?’

‘There came a point when Terra couldn’t contain herself. The Magistratus calls it the First Cataclysm. On that, we agree. Some believe Terra sought retribution on those who had abused her generosity. I doubt it—it’s more likely the planet just couldn’t sustain any more damage. Almost the whole human race died in the First Cataclysm, which lasted nearly half a century. Those that survived were reduced to living off the scraps available to them from the dead. But, eventually, even they perished.

‘Yet some, powerful men beyond the leaders with wealth and influence, had been wise enough to predict the First Cataclysm. They employed educated men who gave them everything they needed to find a way. And they escaped.’

‘The Corporation,’ Shepherd said. ‘As the Magistratus was then known.’

‘Yes.’

‘How many died, exactly?’

‘Again the Library is incomplete, but we think almost everyone.’ Shepherd closed his eyes, his heart beating just a little faster, but he couldn’t bring himself to even imagine such an event. The preacher continued. ‘Their progress in understanding the way that the universe was built had been considerable—but it still remained an unsolved puzzle until a man came along named Edward Visser.

‘Visser?’ Shepherd asked. ‘As in the Visser Tunnels? They were named for a man?’

‘Visser’s grandfather had written on the existence of what we now call the Visser Tunnels. It was little more than a theory then, and most thought that travelling through them was impossible. But Edward Visser, like his grandfather, was desperate to prove them wrong. And good that he did. The men who employed him sought to build vessels that could travel through the tunnels and across the universe.’

‘The Corporation couldn’t save everyone.’

‘So they tell us,’ the preacher said. Before Shepherd could answer, another voice from behind them spoke.

‘What is it like?’

Shepherd turned and saw Jordi on the ramp to Soteria’s hold. He was wrapped in a wool blanket and leaning on a crutch from the medical bay. He limped towards them.

‘You should be resting,’ the preacher said.

‘I don’t want to sleep anymore,’ Jordi said quietly as he sat down beside them. ‘Being in a tunnel. What does it
feel
like? What does it look like?’

Shepherd stared at the fire and remembered what his first time had been like. The first breach, being sucked into the searing azure, white light. The ship had been old, nothing like Soteria. It was heavy and cumbersome, battered and temperamental. It quaked as they shuddered through even the shortest tunnel. He had thought it might tear apart and he’d be hurled into space, his skin and flesh ripped from his bones. He’d watched in terror as tools had fallen from their hooks and bounded around the cabin as he sat, strapped in tight to a tiny wooden bench. He’d gripped the nylon straps so hard they’d bit into his hands and drew blood.

When the ship finally breached and they dropped into sublight, he’d unclipped himself and staggered on brittle legs to a bathroom, where he threw up and cried.

He’d been nine years old.

‘It’s a rush, kid. Nothing like it.’

‘Can you imagine the way it must have changed their world?’ the preacher said. ‘They existed on a single planet, alone, without any understanding of what lay beyond them. And then they were able to travel beyond the walls Mother Terra had created for them.’

Walls are built for a reason
, Shepherd thought.

‘What do you know of Terra?’ The preacher stared at Shepherd as he asked this, as if it were a question he had articulated a thousand times before and each answer he’d received was to be collected, analysed and then locked away forever. A measure of how much humankind had progressed.

‘Not much. I’ve heard stories, rumour and innuendo, but nothing more.’

‘And what do you make of those stories?’

‘I can understand why a billion, or even five billion, people living together on one planet wouldn’t last long.’

‘You’re a cynic.’

‘No more than you.’

‘You sensed that, did you?’ The preacher tapped the leaf from his pipe and began to refill it from a small leather pouch that he’d retrieved from inside the folds of his coat. ‘What I know, what I have read over many years, and what I have seen, leads me to believe that we as a species, as we have evolved so far, are destined to exterminate ourselves. And now that we have the ability to spread out across the universe, it will simply take longer.’

‘You know the problem with you preachers? You make everyone so fucking miserable.’