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  The Worshippers and the Way

  ( chronicles of an age of darkness - 9 )

  Hugh Cook

  Hugh Cook

  The Worshippers and the Way

  Prologue

  It was purple. It stood taller than any ordinary man, and its muscles had been pumped up to obscene dimensions by long dedication to that brutal form of exercise known as pumping iron. Its hair was heaped up upon its head in a monstrous topknot, for that hair had been uncut through all the days of its life. It wore long, flowing robes of a purple which matched its skin, and as it entered the dim-dark of the laboratory it looked for all the world like a High Priest of one of the Wild Tribes entering upon the bloodstained gloom of some obscure temple of torture.

  But this purple-bruted thing was no creature of the Wild Tribes. No. This muscle-pumped bodybuilder was Asodo Hatch, a student of a Combat College which had been designed to produce Startroopers for the Stormforce of the Nexus.

  Asodo Hatch had graduated from Combat Cadet to Startrooper at the age of 30, and now at the age of 31 he was pursuing Higher Level Studies, concentrating on those areas in which he had proved to have special aptitudes – linguistics, law, theocratic sociopolitics and xenopolitics. Therefore know him from the start as a scholar, an intelligent man with a well-developed understanding of politics and religion – a man who was not so much a creature of his own time as a rightful citizen of any time which could properly claim to be civilized.

  Unfortunately, we come upon this muscle-bruted purple creature in a time which was not civilized at all. We come upon it in the Empire of Greater Parengarenga during the reign of the wizard of Ebber then known to the world as Plandruk Qinplaqus. We come upon this Frangoni warrior during the days of a great Age of Darkness, when the great Khmar of the Yarglat had yet to bring a uniting discipline to the anarchic continent of Tameran, and when the high-visioned dreams of Aldarch the Third had not yet brought a similar uniting vision to Yestron.

  We come upon this purple-skinned thing at a time when it was cautiously entering the laboratory – the shadowy, unoccupied cavern at the rear of the Combat College. It had come there in response to an anonymous word-processed invitation which it had found stuck to his door with a piece of chewing gum. The chewing of "chewing gum" is one of those commercially-inspired compulsive behaviors typically associated with financially dynamic high-tech civilizations; the habit had been ubiquitous in the Nexus itself, and still survived in the Combat College, even though that College had been isolated from the Nexus for over twenty millennia.

  So Asodo Hatch entered the laboratory, and in that laboratory he found a corpse. Of this, much might be made, were it a unique or unusual experience. But, quite apart from his studies in the Combat College, Hatch had been for seven years a soldier of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, and in those years he had devoted a great deal of time and effort to the production of corpses from the basic living material, and so the discovery of one extra and additional corpse lying about the planet did not unduly distress him. He was however surprised to find that the corpse was that of Hiji Hanojo, the Ebrell Islander who was the Combat College instructorship; for amongst the students of the Combat College it was widely believed that the long-missing Hiji Hanojo had been mugged and murdered near the Hot Mouth, and that his body had been discarded into the depths of that hole.

  Such was the length of time which had passed between Hiji Hanojo's disappearance and his discovery that Hatch initially made that discovery by olfactory means. In the usual course of events, nobody made the trek to the laboratory, since it was an extensive but utterly empty chamber at the end of a long and barren tunnel driven into the heart of the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para Lash. Hence the nondiscovery of that corpse.

  But obviously someone had known it was there, since someone had left the anonymous chewing-gummed message which had first compelled Hatch to make the long and uninviting walk to the laboratory.

  Asodo Hatch did what was necessary.

  He reported the death to Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control who ran the Combat College. Senk ordered that the body be removed to the cure-all clinic for autopsy.

  To help him with that grisly task, Asodo Hatch requested and received the assistance of his brother Oboro Bakendra Hatch, who was the older of the two, and who was three years his senior. The two then won the assistance of the Pang female named Shona, who was a strong-stomached and imperturbable specimen of womanly warriorhood. These three then press-ganged the services of the short and scuttling Ebrell Islander who went by the name of Lupus Lon Oliver, who proved exceedingly reluctant to assist, for he had scant acquaintance with death-in-the-flesh, and was in no hurry whatsoever to acquire any.

  These four then carried out the grisly task of removing the corpse of Hiji Hanojo to the Combat College cure-all clinic, which, despite its name, was quite incapable of curing anything so radical as death.

  Once the corpse was in the cure-all clinic, the unembodied Teacher of Control who went by the name of Paraban Senk performed a careful autopsy by means of remote-controlled instruments. On autopsy, Senk found that Hiji Hanojo had been murdered. He had been choked with a plastic bag, an item which Senk recovered from the throat of the rot-stench corpse. Inside the plastic bag was a sample of semen, which proved on analysis to be that of a dog.

  Who had the capacity to commit such a crime?

  Paraban Senk surveyed the psychological profiles of all 502 people then training in the Combat College to see which of them might have been capable of such a crime. The answer? All of them! This was not surprising. Murder is one of the universal human crimes, a crime of which virtually everyone is capable; and those who trained in the College were systematically tutored in the arts of slaughter.

  Furthermore, as a part of their training for war, the students of the Combat College had all been tutored in the most sophisticated of all psychological techniques to allow them to survive full-force interrogation, which made it unlikely that Senk would be able to trick one of them into making a confession.

  Who then had an alibi?

  Since Hiji Hanojo had been dead for an uncomfortable number of days – a very uncomfortable number of days in the opinion of Lupus Lon Oliver, who had thrown up thrice while helping to remove the body from the laboratory – nobody had an effective alibi.

  Who then had a motive?

  The obvious motive for killing Hiji Hanojo was to supplant him as instructor. The instructorship was lucrative; there was only one such job; and virtually everyone in the Combat College wanted that job. Senk recalled a time – well over a thousand years ago, now, but the memories of the unembodied Paraban Senk were imperishable – when instructors had been systematically assassinated at a rate of twenty a year.

  Senk did not want to see a repeat performance of such mayhem.

  Accordingly, Paraban Senk announced that all students whose training was due to terminate in less than three years were disqualified from contention for the instructorship; and, furthermore, that the competitive examinations required to select a new instructor would not be held for three years. Senk also made it clear that a similar policy would be enforced should the next instructor also meet with a violent end.

  This ban and the accompanying delay constituted a kind of rough justice designed to cheat the murderer from all possibility of immediate profit, and to deter any future would-be murderers by removing the temptation of the possibility of quick-gain profits consequent upon a killing. Now, even if Hiji Hanojo's unknown murderer was the person who ultimately won the instructorship, at least that person would be denied the immediate profits of that instructorship.

  This was very important, for most crime is commi
tted to seek a quick gratification; and there are few people who would take great and murderous risks to win the uncertain chance of securing the prize of a job some three years in the future.

  And whoever had killed Hiji Hanojo, it was certain that the securing of Hanojo's job was uncertain, for there were at least a good half-dozen elite students who had a serious chance of winning that position in competitive examination. The half-dozen in this elite group consisted of the Frangoni warriors Asodo Hatch and Son'Sholoma Gezira; the Ebrell Islanders Lupus Lon Oliver and Sefton Ten Guy; the Pang male named Darius Flute; and the immigrant from Shintoto who went by the name of Scorpio Fax.

  But even so – even at that early date, nobody seriously doubted that the ultimate competition would be between the Ebrell Islander Lupus Lon Oliver and the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch – because those two had already established themselves as the best of the best.

  Chapter One

  Singlefighter: aka Scala Nine singlefighter: a Nexus warmachine, a flying hunter-killer designed for deployment in a planetary atmosphere. It is powered by corrosion cells, in which small quantities of antimatter are destroyed by controlled contact with normative matter. The corrosion cells will power the machine for three days without recharge.

  So burning down from out of the sun

  The weapon struck -

  Hooked down from sundark sky -

  From sundark blindness burning -

  Brightness inexplicable in a shock

  Which sheered the dark to light,

  And by this revelation wreaked – - so burning down from out of the sun, burning down from out of the blind brightness, the singlefighter struck, and the hapless foe screamed in pain across the Openband, and wrecked went down in flaming agony. As the enemy fighter fell, Lupus Lon Oliver sent his own craft plunging down the gravity well. Down from the sky he came, his singlefighter hurtling down, low and lower, so low that the warning klaxons shrilled and screamed:

  "Pull up! Pull up!"

  Lupus pulled up, pulled out, pulled hard, wrenching his craft away from disaster in a wetness of sweat and orgasmic release, and screamed in triumph. In the throes of his battle-glory, he had a momentary vision of red-hot blood. The blood was seared across his vision-screens. The entire world was blood: blood made blind, blood made glory, triumph's glory, victory.

  "Ah," said Lupus, easing the singlefighter into a long slow barrel roll, feeling the sweetness easing to languorous content as the cosmos rolled about the axis of his craft, the briefness now completeness.

  "Ah… "

  Yes.

  But even already now this phase was passing, sliding, going, gone, with the sheen of all colors loosing their gloss, with the world becoming routine, the crashed wreckage of the downed enemy fighter now nothing but an inert blip on his locator screen.

  Lupus eased his singlefighter round in a long slow circle and made a visual inspection of the wreckage which lay far, far below. From this height, it was still only a blip, a blip unbenefited by any theatricals of smoke and fire, a blip amidst the sands of a desert pigmented with a bright red not so terribly different from that of the Plain of Jars.

  "Mission complete," said the voice of Lupus's singlefighter, the voice of his ship. "Illusion ends in a ten-pulse. Counting now. Ten. And. Nine. And."

  The training sequence was finished, so Lupus would automatically be returned to the world of the Combat College at the end of the ten-count, unless he elected otherwise.

  "Eight. And. Seven. And."

  And then Lupus knew what he wanted.

  "Six. And. Five."

  What Lupus wanted was not the blip seen from a distance but the real thing seen at close quarters. He wanted a close-to-close with the work wrought by his hands, wanted the smashed heat of the ruptured metal, the bloodworks of the dead, the confirmed corpse, the smashworks, the blood-dust smoking under the crunching heat, the proof.

  All this he knew in a moment – one of those moments when thought outraces speech.

  "And. Four. And."

  "Kill the count," said Lupus abruptly, tilting his joystick and spilling his singlefighter down through the sky, down in a canted spiral, a gyre of gain. Victory by descent. Stooping to conquer, he sought the proof, the fact, the flesh. Thus he sought because, for all his much-proclaimed allegiance to the dataflow civilization of the Nexus, Lupus was still a true child of Dalar ken Halvar, still intellectually wedded to the proofs of brute matter, to weight and inertia, the stubbornness of intractable physical form and the proof of the senses.

  His projected and anticipated and indeed habitual and inescapable and unavoidable and wanted and needed gloating – the heart of his nature, this! the heart of his life! – would be confirmation, and confirmation a reassurance, the measurement of a mass of scrapmetal wreckage a sure proof of his superiority. To Lupus, triumph in combat was ever important, since it gave him assurance of that the manifest superiority which was to him both the source of his wellbeing and the justification of his life. So Lupus Lon Oliver eased his Scala Nine singlefigher down and down in that closing gyre, down and down until the blip on his visual display became a wrecked machine.

  So descending from the heavens -

  So descending – Lupus Lon Oliver – Lupus, the hope of the family Oliver – descended from the heavens in a buzzard's declining circle then grounded his singlefighter on the vermilion sands of the scragland desert. Grounded with a slight bump, for his landings had always been sloppy – no grace of glory there. Grounded within javelin distance of the wreck.

  Here the javelin distance mentioned is that distance to which the gymnastic dart can be thrown by the average male athlete on any of the Standard Planets of the Nexus, those many planets which are so alike in their conformity to norms of atmosphere, of gravitation and of mooncycle illumination that theorists have conjectured into life an unknown race of masterful and long-gone Experimenters in order to allow for a thesis of organized and systematic creation which could account for their many and indisputable similarities.

  Thus Lupus landed, and Lupus said – "Pah!" said Lupus, breathing out a tension which he had previously not acknowledged, a tension which he had thought to have been drained away by the sweet joys of victory.

  Now he was truly relaxed – or at least so he thought. It was only natural for him to have been tense earlier on, for had he lost his battle then he would have fallen in flames, and though this was an illusion tank, nevertheless – If he were to be defeated in an illusion-tank battle then the moment of loss would be the same as in life, the fear the same, the pain the same, the shock the same, and the damage to his sense of superiority an equal reality. So the illusion tanks were never a game, not entirely.

  So when he grounded the singlefighter, when the tension eased off for real, Lon Oliver felt uncommonly tired.

  Yet eager regardless.

  "Door," said Lupus, his voice pitched for Command. "Open."

  "Environment inimical," said the door.

  The singlefighter's exit door was a cautious device, sometimes over-cautious; an "inimical environment" could be anything from a hot beach dosed with ultraviolet radiation at suntan grade to a hard vacuum infested with deflation mines.

  "Elaborate," said Lupus.

  "Ubiquitous carcinogens in multiplicity," said the door.

  It did not list the carcinogens in question or itemize their effects. Not yet. Not when there was no need. The military designers of the Nexus had been acutely cautious of the dangers of information overload, particularly in a battle environment; consequently, Stormforce machines were apt to give a bare minimum of information, and would typically give too little rather than too much.

  "Carcinogens?" said Lupus. "Is that all?"

  "Environmental exposure threatens long-term health degradation," said the door.

  Lupus did not laugh. Did not even smile. In the days of his adolescence, he had sometimes had difficulty in taking illusion- tank scenarios seriously. The earnestness of machines such as the singlefighte
r's door had struck him as being risible. But these days he took his training very seriously, for what happened in these tanks would have consequences in the real world.

  The murder of Hiji Hanojo, the killing which had taken place just over two years previously, had opened up the possibility that Lupus Lon Oliver might be able to win the instructorship of the Combat College. In just under a year, he would face the terminal examinations which would decide whether he succeeded in that ambition – or was expelled from the Combat College forever. There was only the one instructor's position. And to win it, Lupus would have to defeat Asodo Hatch in combat in the illusion tanks. Lupus addressed himself to the door.

  "Priority over-ride," said Lupus, again in the tone of Command. "Door. Open."

  "You wish me to open?" said the door.

  "Confirmed," said Lupus.

  "I refuse," said the door. "In my judgment there is no combat justification for the contemplated adverse environmental exposure."

  Lupus was taken aback. He had often had arguments with the door of a singlefighter, but never before had he had one refuse point blank to do his bidding.

  "You will open," said Lupus, "or I will eject from this singlefighter."

  "Then you will probably die," said the door smugly. "Ejection from a grounded singlefighter carries a high risk of death."

  In exasperation, Lupus grabbed the shipkill lever and wrenched hard, thus destroying the ship's mainbrain, wrecking its power supply and killing the door and every other utility. With that, the manual controls became operative. Lupus grappled with the controls, then threw open the singlefighter's single gullwing door.

  Hot air washed into the singlefigher.

  Lupus sat in his seat, absorbing the heat, listening, watching, waiting. Waiting for something to happen. The air was curiously scented with the unmistakable smell of hashish. Now where could that possibly be coming from? There was no plant life anywhere in evidence – only a lowslung landscape of uninspiring red dust warped into a series of unimpressive undulations. With difficulty, Lupus clambered out of the cramped confines of the singlefighter and jumped down to the desert. He landed hard. He staggered, almost fell, then recovered his balance.