Africa Zero (21 page)

The
cathedral, as it had been called, was more the size of a medieval church.
Wooden frameworks had been erected as a support and guide for mortared blocks
of stone. There were no people here, but to one side there was a large slave
stockade. I napalmed the building then drove straight at the gate to the
stockade. My autoguns took out the soldiers in the two watch towers, then
turned their attention to a whole troop of God soldiers who were attacking from
behind. I knocked the gate flat and drove on top of it. There must have been
two hundred slaves in there, all of them chained and yoked. My autoguns were
now spitting only the occasional shot. Behind were the bodies of about a
hundred God soldiers strewn across the street. Five thousand of them, that
first soldier had told me. I wondered how many I had accounted for and how many
were running. I drove on into the stockade and with the laser I targeted the
wall mounts for the chains. After I’d hit about three, the slaves got the idea
and started feeding the chains through the loops on their yokes. Once I’d hit
every mount I got out of my seat and got out of my tank.

The
slaves stood their ground as I approached. They started to back up when I drew
my QC laser. I stepped in and grabbed the nearest one by his yoke.

“Keep
still, idiot. I’m freeing you,” I said as he struggled.

He
did as I said and I inspected the locking mechanism of the yoke. A short burst
from the laser cut through a forged bar and the yoke fell open.

“Thank
you, master,” said the man.

“I’m
not a master,” I said, handing him the laser. “Free your fellows. There’s
weapons out there you can use if you wish. Or you can get out of here. Don’t
put on their helmets.”

He
looked puzzled and it was convenient that a God soldier chose that moment for a
suicidal attack. He ran into the compound yelling and firing his Optek. He hit
about three slaves and was coming at me before one of the autoguns tracked and
fired. One shot, cleanly through his helmet. He went down like a brick.

“Leave
their helmets alone,” I said, pointing at the soldier’s helmet. Blood was
pulsing out of the entry hole. The exit hole was a torn mess out of which
brains and skull fragments had flowered. I returned to my tank.

It
was a long night. By dawn the fighting was over and the looting and
celebrations begun. Many of those celebrations involved doing unspeakable
things to the captives. I guess cruelty is catching. Some of the slaves found a
store of stakes, and soldiers were soon decorating every street corner, either
on stakes or dangling over fires. As I sat in my tank in the ruins of the small
cathedral, awaiting Gurt’s arrival, I saw one of the Clergy dragged screaming
out of a building. They stripped him and hung him upside down, split him open
and slowly pulled his intestines out. His wife and his two children they were
kinder to. They only raped her a couple of times in front of the children
before beating the three of them to death with the butts of their Opteks.

Gurt
arrived with an escort of ten freed slaves to keep others from taking his
captive. Other slaves followed, yelling and threatening. One woman ran at the
black-clad figure with a carving knife in her hand. Gurt casually took the
knife out of her hand and shoved her back into her fellows. I climbed out of my
tank and walked to meet them. When I got there, Gurt had the bound captive
brought forward and thrown at my feet. It was all very dramatic.

“Bishop,”
he said.

“Give
him to us!” yelled someone in the crowd, and that yell was taken up by others.
No one had used an Optek against one of their fellows yet, but it looked likely
to happen. There was much jostling and people began to push forwards. I did my
little trick with my face and the jostling at the front of the crowd stopped.

“He
is mine!” I shouted, and some bastard shot me.

The
bullets of course had no effect other than to put holes in my  outer covering
and ricochet away. When I stood there looking at them with my ceramal face,
unaffected by the round I had taken in my chest, the crowd got a little
quieter. Someone said, “Oh shit.” I put my face back on, reached down and
hauled the Bishop to his feet. He’d been badly beaten and seemed not to know
what was going on. I looked at Gurt.

“You
coming?” I asked.

He
nodded. I tucked my captive under my arm, leapt up onto the tread of my tank
and went inside. He followed. When I later asked him what had happened to the
two women I discovered that they had fled on discovering his eating habits.

* * *

The
Bishop was a diminutive little man of about sixty years. His face was brown and
wrinkled and he only had a few scraps of white hair on his head. At some time
in his past he had lost an eye and the socket was filled with a glass eye of
the wrong colour. During the journey back to my cave he remained sullenly
silent, his gaze fixed firmly on the floor. When we arrived and after I shut
down the tank, I turned to him.

“What’s
your name?” I asked him.

He
looked up at me with his good eye wide open.

“I
am Dextroth the one true vicar of Christos the one true God,” he said, perhaps
expecting me to be impressed.

“Where
did you get your weapons, Dextroth?”

“The
one true Drowned God provides,” he said.

In
retrospect I wished Gurt had grabbed one of the Upper Clergy rather than this
individual. I doubted I’d get much sense out of him.

“Who
were the Drowned God’s agents in this case then?” I asked.

“This
information is the privilege only of the one true God’s Vicar and his Clergy,”
he said. It seemed to me that he was incapable of saying any sentence without
injecting a ‘one true’ into it.

“Skin
him?” Gurt suggested.

I
thought not. I’d seen his type before amongst the Sheta-protestanti. It
wouldn’t have surprised me had he been a member of that group at some time in
his past.

“No,
bring him,” I said.

We
exited the tank and I led the way to a stair from the cave. This took us up to
a steel door which would only open for me. Beyond the door was one of the
laboratories I used for research, repairs, all sorts of things. I had Gurt tie
Dextroth to a chair then I checked through storage compartments until I found
what I wanted. It took about an hour to get through the bullshit, but the
scopolamine derivatives did the trick. I got the name I wanted and this caused
me some amusement. By way of the river-cave door we went to the wing. I let
Gurt have his way with the old man there and we left what remained of him with
the rest of the cockroaches.

Once
back at the complex I immediately checked to see which of the shuttles was
ready to go into orbit. A huge flying-wing heavy lifter was due to leave in one
hour. I hurried to find Susan and soon learned that she was up on the main JMCC
station. With Gurt I went up to her office, and while Gurt fed himself I had a
conversation with Molly.

“How
does my JMCC stock stand at present?” I asked.

“You
are still the primary shareholder with fifty-eight percent of the stock,” the
AI replied.

“Okay,
but I gave Jethro Susan powers to act on my behalf. What have been her main
moves over the last few months?”

“Jethro
Susan has increased JMCC mining interests in the asteroidal belt.”

“And
that’s mainly Enmark territory, isn’t it?” I said.

The
AI emulation of my long-dead friend confirmed this for me.

“If
I died, Jethro Susan would receive most of my stock and immediately assume cardinal
status. What would happen if she died as well?”

“The
stock would go on the open market and Fearson would assume the directorship.”

“How
does Fearson stand on the increased mining activities?”

“He
is against them. His preference is for further development of JMCC banking and
stockbroking.”

“So
if he assumed the directorship the mining development would be scrapped.”

“This
is most likely.”

I
thought about that. It was the Enmarks who had supplied weapons to the Army of
God. They probably intended to shove JMCC out to the belt by killing off myself
and Susan, thus promoting this Fearson to the Directorship. This did not prove
that Fearson was necessarily guilty of anything, though I suspected he probably
was. All that remained for me to figure out was what purpose the Enmarks had
for Gurt’s kind. If, indeed, it was the Enmarks who had created the sauramen. I
was beginning to have my doubts. Did the Enmarks plan all-out war? It was time
to nip things in the bud.

“Molly,
I want you to direct link me to the Enmark AI,” I said.

It
took a minute or so, then a completely different voice spoke to me. This was
the gruff and irritated voice of a man.

“Enmark
AI online,” he said. “What is the purpose of this communication?”

“Hello,
David, it is the Collector here. Look under file code ABG413,” I said.

Most
of the major Family AIs are downloaded mind recordings of important humans who
died long ago. Molly Canard I had put in charge of JMCC a thousand years ago.
It had been her idea to have a memplant installed. When she died at the ripe
old age of two-hundred-and-five I’d downloaded her memcording into the JMCC
system. Her psychological status had made it impossible for her to be like me.
She would have self-destructed after only a few years. In the JMCC system it was
possible to change her program and remove those self-destructive aspects of her
character. David Enmark had been a different case altogether.

Eight
centuries ago David had been one of JMCC’s best mining engineers, but far too
fiercely independent to fit in well. I’d liked him-— his attitude had been much
like mine. When he tried to form a breakaway cooperative, rather than shoot him
down in flames I financed him and let him get on with it. The solar system is
big. There’s room for everyone ... or there was then. He formed his little
company shortly after Molly was downloaded into the JMCC system. Immortality
attracted him and he decided to get himself a memplant. He built his mining
cooperative into a huge corporation over the next century and when he died
during a risky mercury-mining expedition—he’d always liked to keep his hand
in—he was downloaded into the Enmark system. Because of my initial financing of
his operation I retained a large proportion of Enmark stock. The details of
this were kept in archive file ABG413 and I had never until now used the power
that controlling interest gave me.

“You
bastard,” said David Enmark.

“Yes,”
I said, “and a bastard with cardinal status. Who’s Director there now?”

“Callum
Manx Enmark. He’s distantly related and a canny bugger,” David replied.

“I
take it that he’s taken exception to JMCC interests in the belt?”

“Yes.”

“He
had the Army of God supplied with weapons and the instruction to kill me?”

“Yes.”

“What
about Jethro Susan?”

“That’s
Alex Fearson’s job.”

“I
see. What can you tell me about the project in Madagascar?”

“The
sauramen are a recent discovery. It is posited that they are the private
project of JMCC or the Jupiter Bank,” he said reluctantly. The Jupiter Bank—a
Corporation but not a corporate Family. The people and AIs that ran it usually
kept in the background making pots of money out of other people’s disputes and
deals.

“Go
on,” I said. He didn’t want to answer me, but he was the Enmark AI and I had
the controlling interest, so he was incapable of not answering.

“Callum
believes the sauramen are the fodder for someone else’s private army. An army
formed as a counter to his steadily growing Army of God. His God soldiers he
plans to use as storm troopers to take the other Family stations. He has
training stations and an assault craft manufactory in the belt.”

The
reply was terse but it provided me with much of the information I required.

“Very
well. I now assume the Directorship of the Enmark Corporation. Tell this Callum
to stand down and await my arrival. Also give the order that all operations in
the belt are to cease immediately,” I said.

“Issuing
order now. You are—”

David’s
voice was cut off with a buzz of static.

“Molly,
what happened?”

“There
was an explosion aboard the Enmark station. Their system is now offline.”

“Shit...
Put me in contact with Jethro Susan.”

“She
has been monitoring.”

“Susan?”

“I
heard you,” replied my wife, and there was a flickering in the middle of the
room. Her projected hologram appeared hovering a few centimetres above the floor.

“You’ll
deal with Fearson?” I asked her.

Rather
than reply she reached forward and adjusted the feed from her holocamera. The
hologram expanded across the carpet to show a hovering corpse with its neck
twisted out of place. Jank stood over this corpse, his wig and cosmetic work
mussed to expose the scales on his head and face.

“Fearson?”
I asked.

She
nodded in reply.

“And
I see Jank appears rather familiar,” I ‘said.

She
shrugged.

So,
Jethro Susan was responsible for the sauramen.

“When
did you find out about Enmark’s plans?” I asked.

“Not
until now. We knew one of the Families was supplying a fanatical group on Earth
and building up their numbers. It’s been going on for seventy years. We
couldn’t find out who was responsible so we started the Madagascan project as a
counter to it. That was fifty years ago,” she replied.

“We?”
I asked.

“The
Jupiter Bank.”

“I
see.” I looked at Gurt, who seemed to be concentrating on his food. I wasn’t
fooled. He was taking all of this in. I thought about what she and the Bank had
done. It occurred to me that for an Army of God whose beliefs did not encompass
such Godless things as evolution, the perfect enemies would be people whose
ancestry could be directly traced to the dinosaurs. This was also the kind of
irony that Susan loved.