“Sit!” the security officer instructed. “Facing me!”
They did as instructed, and Gun Ron Chin looked directly in the Mesok’s huge, menacing red eyes and smiled. “It is wasted on me, Holy One. I’m as null as they come.”
Krisha tried to scan the hypno’s surface thoughts to see what was going to happen next, but he had quite a good meditative blocking scheme. He would go far in the Church. Still, he made no further effort to hypno either of them, and didn’t even engage in much conversation.
They docked first with a cruiser, where they were marched off and through an elaborate decontamination procedure. At the end, Krisha was given a green robe of the standard Order and Gun Roh Chin got into the first pair of pants and shirt he’d worn in ages. It actually felt funny, the shoes in particular. Then they were taken to separate cabins, small and locked from the outside as well as being guarded, where each took the opportunity to freshen up.
The wait dragged on, and eventually the captain decided to go to sleep. Oddly, it was the soundest sleep he could remember having in recent memory. In fact, it took a physical shaking to wake him up.
The Mesok let him throw some water in his face, then he went out and down the corridor until they reached a larger room. The soldier knocked, there was a muffled reply, and the door was opened for him and he stepped through.
He found himself facing three officers, all, to his surprise, Terrans. One was a very dark man with broad features and curly snow-white hair who wore the rust-gold uniform of the navy and the insignia of a commander. The second was a younger man of Chin’s own stock, Han Chinese most certainly, wearing medical whites. The third was a tiny but exotically pretty young woman who looked little more than a girl, but who wore a green robe with golden trim. Some sort of mixed Asian stock, but it worked. Not for the first time did he wonder why all the really gorgeous ones turned out to be clergy. And not just clergy. She must have been far older than she looked to have attained the rank of elder bishop, a rank different from but equal to his old and now lost friend Morok.
She was certainly the highest-ranking Terran of any profession that he’d seen outside of a Terran world.
“Captain, I am Commander Agaguwak,” said the dark military man. “This is Doctor Chu, and we are honored by the presence of Her Eminence Ming the Holy Kwo.”
He gave a mild seated bow to each in turn but said nothing.
“We have verified that you are who you say you are,” the commander continued, “and that is remarkable in itself considering the files Her Eminence brought with her. You must appreciate, Captain, that you vanished into enemy territory over nine weeks ago and your ship and crew were turned over to us by the Exchange two weeks ago with a story that you’d all vanished on this remote frontier world, along with Mycohl and Exchange personnel. Your sudden reappearance, let alone the manner of it, is causing a considerable stir.”
“Nine weeks,” Chin repeated. “It seems like a lifetime.”
The commander cleared his throat. “Do you just want to tell us what happened? In your own words? This is being recorded, of course.”
“Of course,” he responded. “I will do what I can.” And, with that, he did—after a while, oblivious to the fact that he was, perhaps, giving too much detail for them. He spared little, not even Krisha’s own horrors, since, after all, they were going to read all this out of her mind anyway and he was just being used to corroborate her story which, of course, had to sound like total insanity to them. The fact that she believed it was beside the point.
When he finished, they took a short break, and he was able to get a drink of water. When they regrouped, it was Her Eminence who started it off.
“You realize, of course, that you both are heretics,” she said calmly.
“Holy One, my views before and after have barely altered and were always known to the Inquisition,” he pointed out. “In spite of that I was a member of and participant in an Arm. As to the truly heretical portions, I was not able to witness them, being null, nor was Sister Mendoro due to shock after a particularly vicious attack by an evil force that is most un-heretical and, I assure you, very, very real. We merely report them as part of the record, with, I might personally add, the conviction that the Mycohlian and Exchange personnel reported what they truly believed. McCray’s subsequent actions, I believe, confirm that.”
“Do you think they actually spoke with the gods?” she pressed.
“I believe that they think they did,” he responded carefully. “I don’t think that their minds, any of their minds, even the Mycohl master’s, had the ability to actually see and perceive anything on that plane. It would be like one born blind attempting to interpret something purely in terms of color, lighting, and shading. Their minds gave shapes to things that have no shapes as we understand them, and voices with normal qualities to things that have no need of that sense.”
“And the Mycohlian claim that we are the spawn of demons with their help?” she asked sharply.
“Having seen firsthand how we are such vessels of corruption, and knowing that we cannot save ourselves but must rely on others, most particularly the Church and its Holy Angels, I find it at least credible, as depressing as it is to me.”
“You are a dangerous man, Captain,” she responded coldly. “Morok fought many battles to protect you because you beguiled him into believing you were serving the Holy Church, but you left your protector to the demons. I, for one, find it most telling that the purest and best of an Arm was destroyed while only you and a priestess on the edge of falling into your evil ways come out—whole!”
His eyebrows went up. “Am I being debriefed or am I on trial? If I am on trial, where is my interlocutor? I believe I have rights as a citizen and a military officer.”
The commander sighed. “Captain, none of this happened in civil time nor during any period of service. *Yqu were at the time a member of an Arm of the Holy Inquisition. In that regard, jurisdiction is assumed by the Church, not by civil or military authority. I am here merely as a witness.”
He stared at them all in disbelief. “This is unprecedented!” he objected. “Never before to my knowledge has a civilian, even one ordered into the service of an Arm, been subject to Church discipline. Has the Mizlaplan changed in nine weeks? Have the Lawgiver’s Books, which have stood for thousands of years, been suddenly altered?”
They made no reply, none of them, and he stared at each in turn. They’re scared of something, he realized suddenly. They’re terrified. “Something has happened, hasn’t it?” he asked at last. “Something horrible. If the law is to be so twisted against me, I believe I have a right to know what it is.”
“Captain—” the commander began, but the priestess silenced him. “Enough!”
The military man finally lost his temper, even in the face of one so high. “Holy Mother, I will not be silent! This man is right! And if exception is made for him, then the Law crumbles, and we become no better than the rest!”
“Your impertinence risks more than your career. Commander,” she warned. “You are dangerously close to joining him!”
“Then so be it! I know to whom this record will go. I am content to let those higher than you judge my soul. If military code were to be in place or not at the whim of every officer, this ship would soon come apart, this fleet rendered inoperable. I have no authority to stop you from taking this man, but if I am here merely as window dressing rather than as an honest observer and officer, then I commit a greater sin by allowing it! I will speak!”
She was furious, but she had enough control to keep it under. Finally she said, “Very well, make your pretty little speeches and tell him what you will. It will make no difference.”
Chin hoped the inference wasn’t lost on the commander. Records could be doctored before they were sent. On his ship, however, records could also be kept, copied, and stored in more than one place.
The commander seemed like the kind who knew the ropes pretty well. The kind of man the Mizlaplan could ill afford to discard before a possible war.
“This is what we have come to, Captain, in the short time you were missing,” the officer said to him. “Such a scene as we just had would have been unthinkable only ten days ago. The great balance is coming apart at a speed that frightens all of us who truly believe in this system. In eleven different parish zones clergy have seized control of all civil government and suspended all rights. Ad hoc Inquisitions have been formed producing rule by terror without cause. As much as ten percent of the navy is in open mutiny, killing their clerics and going wild. Some crossed the border in suicidal raid on Mycohl ships and worlds bringing us to the brink of war. In response, the Inquisition has arrested and subjected to brutal mind control many of our top officers, even those intensely loyal, and key commercial, diplomatic, and scientific leaders as well. People who love their Church are becoming terrified of it, and the word cannot be suppressed.”
Gun Roh Chin heard this, and even though he understood he was appalled. Not here. Not the Mizlaplan. “Spacers,” he said.
“Huh? What’s that?”
“Spacers first. The navy going right through this stuff. It enters, corrupts, releases the worst. The Inquisition flies from point to point. I saw what they can do to even one who is ordained. Our core is solid. It was meant to be. But they don’t need to rot our core. If we don’t have faith in each other, and trust, and mutual respect of clergy and lay people, that faith cracks.” He stood and stared at the tiny priestess. “You say I am to be treated as a priest, under religious laws. Very well. Under religious law the Inquisition cannot investigate itself. I demand an immediate hearing before the only one qualified to judge a member of the Inquisition charged with heresy. I demand judgment by a Holy Angel!”
The blood drained from her face. “How dare you! No layman may have Audience!”
He hadn’t been around Manya off and on all those years without learning something. “Very well. There is no civil law. There is no military law. If there is only Holy Law, then I must be given that right! If you refuse me, under Holy Law, I may be accused of heresy but you stand committing a heretical act on the record and in the presence of witnesses! Or do you abolish religious law as well? If religious law is abolished, then it is you who have surrendered to Hell, not I, for if we do not have that we have nothing at all!” He turned back to the commander. “How did she get here anyway? Was any hyperspace travel involved, sir?”
The commander, too, was shaken. “I cannot go that far, but I can go at least to your legal argument. Holy Mother, I’m sorry, but by your own definitions you have surrendered jurisdiction over this man.”
“And the priestess, too,” Chin reminded him.
The commander cleared his throat again. “Yes, yes, that is true. Holy Mother?”
Gun Roh Chin had never seen anybody that simultaneously furious and confused. Finally she resolved the logic loop as much as she was able. “Very well. Doctor, what do you say?”
The doctor, who’d been totally impassive through this, now spoke. “I would say, Holiness, that this man is both the sanest and the most dangerous man I have ever met.”
She gave up. “All right, then, Captain, I shall transmit your claim and demand to the office of the Most Holy Angel of this sector. If the Most Sacred commands it, you will have your audience. That, of course, would produce a de facto ordainment. A voluntary one at that And then, as a null, you will be remanded to the Inquisition for requisite surgery and psychochemical conditioning. And that happens to be my particular office.”
They led him back to his quarters, but in about half an hour the door opened and he was surprised, and pleased, to see the commander enter.
“I hope this is a visit rather than you joining me,” Gun Roh Chin said dryly.
“Oh, don’t worry so” much about that,” Agaguwak assured him. “I was acting under full authority from the bridge and even our clerical personnel were supportive. My job was to listen to your account and act according to what I believed was right at the end of it. A lot of us are like you, Captain. They don’t like what is going on and they don’t know what to do about it. Everybody’s scared, Captain. We’d have no hesitancy to go full into battle against a Mycohlian fleet, but this strikes at the heart of all we would be fighting for. Most of us have families, too.”
Chin nodded. “I understand.”
“You’ll appreciate, though, that I went as far as any of us could back there. There’s always been a lot of anti-Terran sentiment. You know that. We are the largest single racial group in the Mizlaplan, yet we’re one percent of the highest levels of the Church, there are no Terran admirals, no Terrans on fleet staff, and Terrans are only a minuscule percentage of the leadership anywhere.”
“That I was fully aware of. It is why I chose a civil career rather than a military one. At least there I could command my own ship.”
“Yes. Then you can understand the effect on many On High when a Stargin, a Mesok, and a Gnoll are sent off with two Terrans and only the two Terrans return. Return with an account that says that, with one understandable exception, all of the others who returned to their homelands were Terrans, too. A lot of the disturbances here have begun on Terran worlds and on Terran-controlled vessels. It’s not exclusively our race, but we seem to stand out. That’s why they sent Holy Mother Ming. They knew she was a rigid, inflexible fanatic—that’s why she’s risen to that rank—and so there could be no claims of racism when she would be judge, jury, and executioner. You turned the tables on her pretty neatly, but she’s a bad enemy. It seems to me that you bought some time but little else.”
Gun Roh Chin sighed. “Commander, I’ll be honest with you. I expected to be dead weeks ago. I am still amazed that I am here at all. I am here because I have one job, one task left to perform. The Holy Angels must be convinced. We must avoid a war that would not only destroy us but would place us, our families, and our descendants unto the end of time under the ultimate evil. The Holy Angels have so insulated themselves from our society that all of their information and viewpoints are filtered through a layer of Mother Mings. Under ordinary circumstances, they wouldn’t even send a report on us to them. The only hope I had was that the ordination binds all priests to Higher Law. I had thought—hoped is a better word—that Krisha would be sufficient. As a telepath, and a priestess, they could read everything out and know it was true. Now it appears that I will have to make a full commitment. I won’t pretend it does not matter to me, but I am a walking dead man anyway, each day being one I stole from the Quintara. If it takes my mind or my life or anything else, it doesn’t matter, so long as the Holy Angels get the direct and uncolored information.”
The commander nodded. “I can see now why you have survived, and why you are in this position. Few would have that kind of courage and dedication.”