Marchey obeyed, tearing his gaze away from the weapon. “You don’t have much faith in your fellow-man for a priest,” he said, trying for sarcasm but his voice coming out flat-line.
“Please, Doctor. I’m no priest, and you know it.” He cocked his head. “But you’re an intelligent man. Surely you must wonder what I am, and how I got here. I wasn’t always Brother Fist, you know.”
“No?” Marchey said tonelessly. “Give me your arm.”
The old man offered his free hand, a bundle of twigs covered with wrinkled yellow parchment. Marchey took it, the cool dry skin like paper under his fingers. A silent command started the devices inside his prosthetics recording pulse, blood pressure, NFD, GSR, and a dozen other tests. Data whispered through his mind, the first bare threads in the warp of diagnosis.
Brother Fist settled back as if totally at ease, but kept his weapon centered on Marchey’s solar plexus. “I came here not quite a decade ago. Back then about a fifth of the people on Ananke were wildcatters. The rest were members of a religious commune calling themselves the Immanuel Kindred. It looked like a perfect place to drop out of sight, further my studies, and entertain myself by practicing my specialty.”
Marchey pressed a yellowed nail, let up. No color change. “What specialty is that? Slavery?”
A sardonic chuckle. “Nothing so crude. It is an art most often referred to as phagewar.”
“Never heard of it.” He began scanning Fist’s extremities, the wasted limbs under the black cassock thin sticks vined with blue-black veins.
“What a pity. It is a lovely combination of the most effective elements of psychological and guerilla warfare, covert action, intelligence-guided subversion, terrorism, sabotage, propaganda, disinformation, and brainwashing. It is war fought without an army and prosecuted from within. Many of its stratagems are modeled on that splendidly successful, highly adaptable, and wholly admirable creature, the virus. I was— and remain—one of the top theorists and practitioners of this art. Remember the Martian Rebellion against UNSRA? I was the architect of its defeat. After that I went freelance. Undergound, really. You would find my real name turning up quite often in certain sub rosa literatures.”
“A real Renaissance man,” Marchey mumbled.
“Renaissance is rebirth, my dear doctor. You are more right than you know.” He chuckled at some private joke.
“Anyway,” Fist continued, “that life grew tiresome after a while. The governments and MuNats I worked for were reaping what I sowed, and even what you would call the worst of them had these archaic compunctions that prevented me from implementing my sharpest-cut plans. Then there was the growing temptation to bite the fat soft hands that fed me only scraps. So I decided to seek an out-of-the-way place to contemplate my arts and exercise them as I saw fit. A laboratory, if you will, complete with human rats.”
Marchey had gone on to scanning and palpating Fist’s sunken chest. The combination of the old man’s sick pride in his work and what he was finding put a grim frown on his face. “Here,” he said heavily, “on Ananke.”
Fist nodded. “Just so. The Immanuel Kindred showed me the light, so to speak. They believed that man was made in God’s image, and so remaking space in man’s image served God. Isn’t that a lovely sentiment? They were friendly, open-minded, tolerant, trusting, pacifistic, and, most importantly, industrious. They worked twice as hard as the wilders, believing they served a higher goal.”
He sighed, tipping his free hand. “So many systems fail for lack of initiative. Their childish religion offered me possibilities far beyond what I could get from simply co-opting the politics of this place.”
“So you took over the Immanuel Kindred,” Marchey said to prove that he was still listening. This was nothing that he wanted to hear, but the more he knew, the better his chances. Moreover, the vague outline of an idea had occurred to him while he was examining Fist. A possible way out.
Fist showed him a sharkish smile. “I ate them alive, hallelujah and amen! Then I began turning them into something useful while bringing the wilders into the fold. On their knees, of course.”
“You did this all by yourself?”
“I was a wolf among sheep. Oh, I had a mercy to do the cruder bits of wet work. A Shock-trooper who’d killed an officer, deserted, and gone renegade.”
Marchey looked up, confused. “Scylla?” There were female Shock-troopers, but she seemed too young.
The old despot’s bubbling laughter made Marchey shiver as if ice water had been dribbled down his back. “My angel? Isn’t she a lovely thing? But no, she came later. The mercy was an expendable who finally met his defining fate. Although you could say that the best part of him lives on to this day.”
“Scylla’s exo.” Marchey stepped back. The woman inside that dead man’s battle armor didn’t even know it was machinery. As he had guessed before, she was just one more of this creature’s countless victims.
“Exactly. Why have you stopped examining me?”
Time to bite the bullet.
“I’ve learned all I can externally. Now I have to go inside.” He already had a pretty good idea of what he would find. If he was right, he might just have a chance after all. Besides, before he could work as a Bergmann Surgeon Fist had to be—
—unconscious.
Those rheumy eyes brightened with interest. “Ah, now you perform the uncanny procedure which has made your kind outcasts among your small-minded fraternity. I can hardly wait to see you in action.”
Marchey sighed. “Then we have a problem. You have to be unconscious for me to work.” He’d wondered what was going to happen at this hurdle; it was hard to imagine Fist giving up control for even a moment. But he must have known he’d have to.
“Oh yes, the sacred rituals of Bergmann Surgery.” That skeletal face took on a crafty look. “Tell me, does the name Dr. Keri Izzak ring a bell?”
“Yes.” Reluctantly.
“Who is she?” Fist prompted sweetly.
“She—she’s a Bergmann Surgeon, like me,” Marchey answered unhappily, feeling new tentacles of cold trepidation curl through him. Fist’s knowing Keri’s name couldn’t mean anything good.
“Not anymore. The lovely Dr. Izzak no longer practices your branch of medicine.” He chuckled. “Or breathing, for that matter. About a year ago I had her kidnapped and taken to a quiet place on Earth. There she was subjected to some tests of my own devising. It was a tawdry business, and cost me a considerable sum. But I think it was money well spent. And she allowed me to prove a theory of mine.”
The cold was all through him now. Keri dead?
He found his voice. “Theory?” he croaked. Keri dead to prove a theory?
Brother Fist wagged a bony finger at him in admonition. “You mustn’t forget that I am a scholar. A scientist. I started getting sick about three years ago. So I began learning everything I could about you people and your specialty—as you well know, it’s the most advanced form of medical technique presently available. Would you care to guess what I found?”
Marchey shook his head, both unwilling and unable to guess.
“A blind spot in the data. Something so simple that it has been overlooked all these years. It looked promising enough to be worth spending some of the credit my flock has so generously provided me on having a Bergmann Surgeon kidnapped and taken someplace quiet so I could put my conclusions to the test.”
Fist paused a moment to make sure Marchey was getting all this. The shocked, sick look on his face said that he was.
“Dr. Izzak had the honor of being the subject of the tests. Unfortunately, she soon understood what I was trying to prove. Such a bright woman. I had to dispose of her—and the hirelings who tested her, of course—to protect what I had learned.”