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                              Chapter Twenty-Three

   Sean tried not to hover as Harriet walked unaided to the astrogator's
   couch. She was still shaky, and her missing memories refused to return,
   yet she had to smile at his expression. Tamman sat beside her and slipped
   an arm about her, and she leaned against him, wishing she knew how to
   thank them for her life.

   But, of course, there was no need.

   "Well!" Sean flopped into his couch with customary inelegance. "Looks like
   your body-and-fender shop does good work, Brashan."

   "True," the Narhani replied with one of his clogged-drain chuckles. "And
   while I regret my inability to repair your implant, Harry, I must say your
   patch gives you a certain-" He paused, seeking the proper word.

   "Raffishness?" Sean suggested, his smile almost back to normal.

   "Thank you, kind sir." Harriet stroked the black patch and grinned. "I
   glanced in the mirror and thought I was looking at Anne Bonny!"

   "Who?" Brashan's crest perked, but she only shook her head.

   "Look her up in the computer, Twinkle Hooves."

   "I shall. You humans have such interesting historical figures," he said,
   and her laughter lifted the last shadow from Sean's heart.

   "I'm really glad to see you up again, Harry, and I'm sorry you can't
   remember what happened. The rest of us'll put together a combined implant
   download later, but for now let's turn our attention to what we got out of
   it. Aside, of course, from the reincarnation of Captain Bonny."

   His wave gave Sandy the floor, and she stood.

   "Speaking for myself, Harry, I'm delighted you're back. Tam's been doing
   his best, but he'll never make an analyst." Tamman made a pained sound,
   and Harriet poked him in the ribs.

   "However," Sandy went on with a grin, "our ham-handed Marine and I have
   recovered a fair amount from our purloined computer, and our original
   hypothesis was correct. It was a journal. This man's."

   Sean gazed at the image in the command deck display, mentally turning the
   hair white and the skin to parchment, and recognized the lonely, mummified
   body from the tower bedroom.

   "This is-or was-an engineer named Kahtar. Much of his journal's
   unrecoverable, and he didn't mention the planet's name in the portions
   we've been able to read, so we still don't know what it was called
   originally. But I've been able to piece together what happened."

   She looked around, satisfied by the hush about her. Even Tamman knew only
   fragments of what she was about to say, and she wondered if the others
   would react as she had . . . and if they'd have the same nightmares.

   "Apparently," she began, "the planetary governor closed down the mat-trans
   at the first hypercom warning, then began immediate construction of a
   quarantine system under the direction of his chief engineer. Who," she
   added wryly, "was obviously a real whiz.

   "Things weren't too bad at the start. There was some panic, and a few
   disturbances from people afraid they hadn't gotten quarantined soon
   enough, but nothing they couldn't handle . . . at first." She paused, and
   her eyes darkened.

   "They might have made it, if they'd just shut down their hypercom. Their
   defenses destroyed over a dozen incoming refugee ships, but I think they
   could have lived even with that . . . if the hypercom hadn't still been
   up.

   "It was like a com link to Hell." Her voice was quiet. "It was such a
   slow, agonizing process. Other worlds thought they were safe, too, but
   they weren't, and, one by one, the plague killed them all. It took
   years-years of desperate, dwindling messages from infected planets while
   their entire universe died."

   Icy silence hovered on the command deck, and she blinked misty eyes.

   "It . . . got to them. Not at once. But when the last hypercom went
   silent, when there was no one else left-no one at all-the horror was too
   much. The whole planet went mad."

   "Mad?" Brashan's voice was soft, and she nodded.

   "They knew what had happened, you see. They knew they'd done it to
   themselves. That it had all been a mistake-a technological accident on a
   cosmic scale. So they decided to insure there would never be another one.
   Technology had killed the Empire . . . so they killed technology."

   "They what?" Sean jerked up, and she nodded. "But . . . but they had a
   high-tech population. How did they expect to feed it without technology?"

   "They didn't care," Sandy said sadly. "The psychic wounds were too deep.
   That's what happened to their tech base: they smashed it themselves."

   "Surely not all of them agreed," Harriet half-whispered.

   "No." Sandy was grim. "There were some sane ones left-like Kahtar-but not
   enough. They fought a war here like you wouldn't believe. A high-tech war
   intended to destroy its own culture . . . and anyone who tried to stop
   them. Harry, they threw people into bonfires for trying to hide books."

   Harriet covered her mouth, trembling with a personal terror they all
   understood too well, and Tamman hugged her.

   "Sorry," Sandy said gently, and Harriet nodded jerkily. "Anyway, they
   didn't quite get all of it. The Valley of the Damned was a sort of
   high-tech redoubt. There'd been others, but the mobs rolled over
   them-sometimes they used human wave attacks and literally ran the defenses
   out of ammunition with their own bodies. Only the valley held. Their
   energy guns didn't need ammo, and they threw back over thirty attacks in
   barely ten years. The last one was made by a mob on foot, in the middle of
   a mountain winter, armed with spears and a handful of surviving Imperial
   weapons."

   She fell silent once more, and they waited, sharing her horror, until she
   inhaled and went on in a flat voice.

   "The attacks on the valley finally ended because the others had managed to
   destroy their technology, and, with it, their agriculture, their transport
   system, their medical structure-everything. Starvation, disease, exposure,
   even cannibalism . . . within a generation, they were down to a population
   they could support with an almost neolithic culture. Kahtar estimated that
   over a billion people died in less than ten years.

   "But-" her voice sharpened and she leaned forward "-there was, obviously,
   one other high-tech center left: the quarantine HQ. Even the most frenzied
   mob knew that was all that stood between them and any possible refugee
   ship, however slight the chance one might arrive, and the HQ staff rigged
   up a ground defense element in the quarantine system itself. It's nowhere
   near as powerful as the space defenses, but it's designed to smash anyone
   or anything using Imperial weapons within a hundred klicks of the HQ."

   "Oh, crap," Sean breathed, and she smiled tightly.

   "You got it. And there's worse. You see, the command staff may have set
   things up to keep the mobs from smashing the HQ, but they agreed with the
   need to destroy all other technology."

   "I don't think I'm going to like this," Tamman muttered.

   "You're not. They moved out of those ruins near the Temple, put the HQ
   computer on voice access, set the shipyard up to handle all maintenance on
   an automated basis, and manufactured a religion."

   "Oh, Jesus!" Sean moaned.

   "According to Kahtar, who was pretty much running the valley by then, the
   port admiral had some sort of vision that turned the bio-weapon into the
   Flood and Pardal into Noah's Ark. But this Flood was a punishment for the
   sin of technological pride into which the 'Great Demons' had seduced
   mankind, and the 'Ark' was a refuge to which God had guided the handful of
   faithful who had resisted the demons' temptation. The survivors were the
   seed corn of the New Zion, selected by God to create a society without the
   'evils' of technology."

   "But if that's true," Brashan said, "why didn't they destroy the valley?
   If they had the capability to set up ground defenses, surely they had the
   capability to strike Kahtar's people."

   "There was no need. There were never more than a hundred people in the
   valley, and it was a vacation resort before they forted up, without any
   real industrial base. They were trapped inside it, with too little genetic
   material to sustain a viable population, and the new religion had a use
   for them-one so important it didn't even pull the plug on their power
   supply."

   "Demons," Harriet murmured.

   "Or, more precisely, a nest of 'lesser demons' and their worshipers. The
   valley gave their religion a 'threat' that might last for centuries to
   help it get its feet under it. What we walked into was Hell itself as far
   as the Church is concerned, and that's why anyone who has anything to do
   with it must be exterminated."

   "Merciful God." Sean looked as sick as he felt. The warped logic and
   cold-blooded calculation that left those poor, damned souls penned up in
   their valley as the very embodiment of evil twisted his guts. He tried to
   imagine how it must have felt to know every other human on the planet was
   waiting, literally praying for the chance to murder you, and wanted to
   vomit.

   "I think Kahtar went mad himself, at the end. Some of the others walked
   out of the valley when the despair finally got to be too much-walked out
   knowing what would happen. Others suicided. None of them were interested
   in having children. What future would children have had on a planet of
   homemade barbarians itching to torture them to death?

   "But Kahtar had to find something to believe in, and he did-something that
   kept him alive to the very end, after all the others were gone. He
   decided, against all evidence and sanity, that at least one other world
   had to have survived. That's why he wired his journal into the main
   computers. He left it there for us, or someone like us, so we'd know what
   had happened. And that's why he included something very important for us
   to know."

   "What?" Sean asked.

   "The last of the original HQ crew didn't just put the computer on voice
   access, Sean. They knew there were still at least some enhanced people in
   the valley. People who could have ordered the Voice to denounce their
   precious religion if they'd been able to get close enough to access the
   computer, because they could have overridden voice commands through their
   implants once the last of the original 'priests' were gone. So they
   disengaged the neural feeds. The only way in is by voice, and they had an
   entire damned army sitting on top of it to keep everyone but the
   priesthood out of voice access range. With the quarantine system set up to
   wax anybody who tried to use Imperial weapons to shoot their way in, there
   was no way a handful of old, tired Imperials could get to them."

   She paused and met their horrified gazes.

   "Which means, of course, that we can't get to them, either."

                                     * * *

   Sean sat in the cutter bay hatch, high on Israel's flank, and gazed
   sightlessly out through the wavering distortion of her stealth field. They
   were still making progress on their linguistic programs, helped by the
   fact that they were no longer afraid to use their remotes at full range as
   long as they stayed outside the Temple's hundred-kilometer kill zone, yet
   two weeks had passed since Sandy's bombshell, and none of them had the
   least idea what to do next. The only good thing was that Harriet was
   completely back on her feet now-she was even jogging on Israel's treadmill
   again.

   He sighed and tugged on his nose, looking very like an oversized,
   black-haired version of his father as he contemplated the problem. He'd
   expected difficulties getting into the Temple, but he'd never anticipated
   that they wouldn't even be able to use Imperial small arms! Hell, they
   might not even be able to use their own implants, so how did four
   humans-and one Narhani, who'd be mobbed on sight as an incontrovertible
   "demon"-break into the most strongly guarded fortress on the entire
   goddamned planet?

   There was, of course, one very simple answer, but he couldn't do it. He
   couldn't even think of it without nausea. Kahtar's journal indicated "the
   Sanctum" was heavily armored and deeply dug in, but they could always take
   the place out with a gravitonic warhead, and Israel could launch hyper
   weapons from atmosphere. They could hit the Temple before the quarantine
   system even began to react, and if the computer went down, so did the
   entire system. Unfortunately, they also killed everyone in Pardal's
   largest city-almost two million people, by Sandy's estimate.

   He squeezed his nose harder. His clever stratagem to get them down had
   worked, all right, and he'd poked their collective heads right into a
   trap. They couldn't take off-assuming they'd had anywhere to go-without
   the quarantine system killing them for trying to leave the planet, but
   there wasn't any way to shut the system off from the planet!

   "Sean?" He looked up at Sandy's voice. She was standing at the far end of
   the bay, waving at him. "Come on! You've gotta see this!"

   "See what?" he asked, climbing to his feet with a puzzled frown.

   "It's too good to spoil by telling you." Her expression was strange, and
   she sounded amused, frightened, excited, and surprised, all in one.

   "At least give me a clue!"

   "All right." She eyed him with an odd, lurking smile. "I didn't have
   anything else to do, so I sent a remote back to take a peek at the village
   we pulled Harry out of, and you won't believe what's going on!"

                                     * * *

   "Well, Father," Tibold closed the spyglass with a click and grimaced at
   Stomald, "it seems His Grace was unimpressed."

   Stomald nodded, shading his eyes with his hand, and tried not to show his
   own despair. He hadn't expected Bishop Frenaur to accept his unsupported
   word without question, but he certainly hadn't counted on this.

   Mother Church's blood-red standards advanced up the twisting valley, blue
   and gold cantons glittering, and metal gleamed behind them: pikeheads and
   muskets, armor, and the dully-flashing barrels of artillery.

   "How many, do you think?" he asked quietly.

   "Enough." The Guard captain squinted into the sun, frowning. "More than I
   expected, really. I'd say that's most of the Malagoran Temple Guard out
   there, Father. Call it twenty thousand men."

   Stomald nodded again, grateful Tibold hadn't said, "I told you so." The
   Guard captain had argued against sending the good word to the Temple.
   Unlike Stomald, Tibold wasn't a native-born Malagoran, but he knew the
   Temple regarded Malagor as a hotbed of sedition, and seeing that armed,
   advancing host, Stomald was just as glad he'd at least agreed to send his
   news by semaphore rather than taking it in person.

   He shook that thought off and pressed his lips together. Surely God had
   sent His angels to Cragsend for a purpose. He didn't promise His servants
   would always be bright enough to see His purpose, but He always had one.
   Of course, sometimes it wasn't a very safe one. . . .

   "What do you advise?"

   "Running away?" Tibold suggested with a smile, and Stomald surprised
   himself with a chuckle.

   "I don't think God would like that. Besides, where would we run to? We're
   backed up against the mountains, Tibold."

   "Just like a kinokha in a trap," the Guard captain agreed, wondering why
   he wasn't more frightened. He'd thought his young priest was mad at first,
   but something about him had been convincing. Certainly, Tibold told
   himself yet again, those hadn't been demons. He'd seen too much of what
   men, touched with God's immortal spirit, were capable of in time of war.
   No, if they'd been demons, Cragsend would be a smoking ruin peopled only
   by the dead.

   And, like Father Stomald, he could think of only one other thing they
   could have been, though he did wish they'd been a bit less ambiguous in
   their message. Still, he supposed that was his fault. He was the damn-fool
   idiot who'd shot the first of them down. Even an angel might forget her
   message with a bullet in her head, and the others had seemed more intent
   on getting her back than dropping off any letters.

   He snorted. The other local villages and towns-even Cragwall, the largest
   town in the Shalokar Range-had sent their priests to stare at the wreckage
   and hear Father Stomald's tale. Tibold had never realized just how
   powerful a preacher Stomald was until he heard him speaking to those
   visitors, bringing forward other villagers to bear witness, describing the
   angel who'd spoken in the Holy Tongue even while the sanctified oil blazed
   upon her. It was a pity he couldn't have a word or two with the commander
   of that army, for he'd brought everyone else around. Of course, his
   audience had been Malagorans, with all a Malagoran's resentment of foreign
   domination, and Tibold knew better than most how jealous the Temple was of
   its secular power. Whoever was in command down there had his orders from
   the Circle; he was hardly likely to forget them on the say-so of a village
   under-priest, however eloquent.

   Tibold reopened his glass to study the standards once more. Columns of
   smoke rose behind them-columns which had once been farmsteads and small
   villages. The people who'd lived there had either come to join the
   "heresy" or fled to escape it, and he was grateful they had, for the smoke
   told him what the Guard's orders were. Mother Church had decided to make
   an example of the "rebels" and declared Holy War, and her Guard would take
   no prisoners.

   "Well, Father," he said at last, "I don't see much choice. I've got five
   hundred musketeers, a thousand pikemen, and four thousand with nothing but
   their bare hands. Even with God on our side, that's not a lot."

   "No," Stomald sighed. "I wish I could say God will save us, but sometimes
   we can meet our Trial only by dying for what we know to be right."

   "Agreed. But I'm a soldier, Father, and, if it's all the same to you, I'd
   like to die as one-without making it any easier for them than I have to."

   "I don't know of any Writ that says you should," Stomald said with a sad
   smile.

   "Then we'll fall back to Tilbor Pass. It's less than four hundred paces
   across, and it'll take even this lot a few days to dig us out of that."
   Stomald nodded, and the Guardsman smiled crookedly. "And in the meantime,
   Father, I won't take it a bit amiss if you ask God to help us out of the
   mess we've landed ourselves in!"

   "You're joking!" Sean stared at the images from the remote. "Angels?"

   "Yep." Sandy's eyes sparkled. "Wild, isn't it?"

   "My God." Sean sank onto his couch. All the others were gazing as fixedly
   as he at the display.

   "Actually, it's not as crazy as it sounds," Harriet mused. "I mean, we
   obviously weren't mortals-not with bio-enhancement, grav guns, and plasma
   grenades-and if you aren't mortal, you're either a demon or an angel. And
   I've been back over your reports." Her voice wavered, for the others had
   prepared their promised implant download. She still had no memory of the
   event, but the download had shown it all to her through her friends' eyes.
   She shivered as her mind replayed the image of her own bloody body,
   awaiting the torch, then shook herself. "It looks like the only two they
   saw clearly were Sandy and me."

   "That's what I gather from what this Father Stomald is saying." Sandy
   switched to an image of the priest and smiled wryly as she recalled the
   last time she'd seen the broad-shouldered, curly-haired young man with the
   neatly trimmed beard. He looked far more composed now as he stood talking
   to the hard-faced soldier at his side.

   "He's kind of cute, isn't he?" Harriet murmured, then blushed as Sean gave
   her a very speaking look and she remembered what that cute young man had
   almost done to her. She rubbed her eye patch and gave herself another
   shake.

   "Anyway, if we're the only ones he saw, it all makes sense. Their church
   is patriarchal-well, for that matter, most of Pardal is. Malagor's sort of
   radical in that respect; they actually let women own property. The thought
   of a woman in the priesthood is anathema, but there Sandy and I were in
   Battle Fleet uniform . . . which just happens to be what their bishops
   wear for their holiest church feasts. Add the fact that this patriarchal
   outfit has decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that angels are
   female-"

   "And beautiful," Tamman inserted.

   "As I say, angels are female," Harriet went on repressively. "They're also
   immortal, but not invulnerable, which explains how I could have been
   injured, and this Stomald seems to realize you three deliberately didn't
   kill anyone when you came in like gangbusters. Given all that, there's
   actually a weird sort of logic to the whole thing."

   "Yeah," Sean said more soberly, and changed the display himself. The
   marching columns of armed men sent a visible chill through Israel's crew,
   and he sighed. "We may not have killed anyone, but it looks like maybe we
   should have. At least then we would have been 'demons' instead of some
   kind of divine messengers that're going to get all of them massacred."

   "Maybe . . . and maybe not. . . ." Sandy was gazing at the advancing
   Temple Guard, and the light in her eyes worried Sean.

   "What d'you mean?" he demanded, and she gave him a beatific smile.

   "I mean we just found the key to the Temple's front door."

   "Huh?" her lover said sapiently, and her smile became a grin.

   "We don't want all those people slaughtered for something we started,
   however unintentionally, do we?" Four heads shook, and she shrugged. "In
   that case, we've got to rescue them."

   "And how do you propose to do that?"

   "Oh, that's the easy part. Those guys are a heck of a lot more than a
   hundred kilometers from the Temple."

   "Hold on there!" Sean protested. "I don't want to see Stomald and his
   fellow nuts massacred, but I don't want to massacre anyone else, either!"

   "No need," she assured him. "We can probably scare the poo out of them
   with a few holo projections without even a demonstration of firepower."

   "Hum." Sean looked at the others, and his eyes began to dance. "Yeah, I
   suppose we could. Might even be fun."

   "Don't get too carried away," Sandy said, "because what happens after we
   scare 'em is what really matters."

   "What are you talking about?" Tamman sounded puzzled.

   "I mean that whether we like it or not, the fat's in the fire. Either we
   let the Church massacre these people, or we rescue them. If we rescue
   them, do you think the Temple's just going to say, 'Gosh! Looks like we
   better leave those nasty demon-worshiping heretics alone'? And they're not
   going to go home like nothing happened, either, because if we save them,
   we reconfirm their belief in divine intervention."

   "Great," Sean sighed.

   "Maybe it is." He looked up in surprise, and she shrugged. "We didn't do
   it on purpose, but we can't undo it. So if the Temple wants a crusade, why
   not give it one?"

   "Are you saying we should instigate a religious war?!" Harriet stared at
   her in horror, and Sandy shrugged again.

   "I'm saying we already have," she said more soberly. "That gives us a
   responsibility to end it, one way or another, and we're not going to be
   able to do that without getting our hands bloody. I don't like that any
   more than you do, Harry, but we don't have a choice-unless we want to sit
   back and watch Stomald and his people go down.

   "So if we have to get involved, let's go whole hog. The Church is too big,
   too static. Even the secular lords are lap dogs for it. But the only way
   Stomald's going to survive is to take out the Inner Circle . . . and that
   just happens to be what we need to do to get into the Sanctum."

   "I don't know. . . ." Harriet said slowly, but Sean was staring at Sandy
   in admiration.

   "My God, Sandy-that's brilliant!"

   "Well, pretty darn smart, anyway," she agreed. Then she laughed. "Anyway,
   we're certainly the right people for the job!" Sean looked blank, and her
   grin seemed to split her face. "Of course we are, Sean! After all, we are
   the Lost Children of Israel, aren't we?" 

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                                                                       Framed