The viewing public was about to be treated to a full hour of prerecorded commercials. It would be a little time before anyone in the Church organization realized that something had gone desperately wrong with their programming. By then he hoped to be out of the building.
Once the commercials got under way, Tetsami covered the guards and the tech back to the cell room. Dom had to drag the wounded emcee, who was crying. All six-including the two unconscious guards—ended up in the cell. Dom didn’t bother deactivating the field, he pushed them through, one at a time, to fall unconscious on the other side.
“Now—” he began.
“Now,” Tetsami finished, “we get the hell out of here.”
* * * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mergers
“Alliances are based on the premise that the parties involved benefit more from screwing the rest of the world than from screwing each other.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.”
—Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
Just outside the door of the high-tech holo studio was an anachronistic maze of stone corridors. The hall was dimly lit by recessed fixtures that tried to imitate torchlight. In recessed niches sat religious statues. The statues were either martial in nature, or they were horrific.
Either the Crusades or the Inquisition.
As they ran through the halls searching for an exit from the catacombs, Dom passed one that was particularly disturbing. He only caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough for the whole picture to register. The sculpture showed a pair of hooded figures lowering a pathetic-looking individual into a vat. What was in the vat wasn’t clear, but the victim’s expression left little doubt that it was extremely unpleasant.
Dom did not like the memories that conjured up.
Too many nightmares to wake up from.
“You didn’t handle yourself—” Tetsami paused for breath “—like an exec back there.” From the tone of Tetsami’s voice, it was a compliment. “And what do people. Really call you? I’m not going to be. Yelling ‘Dominic Magnus.’ In the middle. Of the next, firefight.”
They were fugitives running for their lives and he almost told her to call him Mr. Magnus. He had to remind himself he wasn’t at GA&A anymore. He was just another piece of human flotsam washed up on the shores of Godwin now.
But only for the moment.
“Call me Dom.”
Tetsami nodded.
The catacombs were endless. They ran past dozens of heavy iron doors. The doors were windowless, but Dom figured that behind them sat material for future programming. Every few seconds he stopped at one and tried to open it.
He stopped when one finally opened, releasing the fetid stench of mold and rot. Beyond the door was a windowless cube, the stone walls covered with black-green slime. In the center, a humanoid skeleton that still bore a few scraps of flesh completed the effect.
Flabby white vermin scurried away from the light.
Behind him a breathless Tetsami said, “Ugh.”
They went another five minutes without finding stairs or a window. The farther they went while still in the Church’s domain, the greater the chance God’s servants were going to land on them.
Dom stopped Tetsami at an intersection. “We’ve got to get some bearings before they start after us.”
“We’re getting nowhere,” Tetsami agreed, panting.
They must be underground. From the stone and the low-tech construction, the place they were in could date from the first colonization of Bakunin. Back before the cities decided to jell. These corridors were built, probably, when the Church was sovereign over a large section of what was now part of Godwin. These halls could snake under the city forever.
However, he had the feeling that there was a cathedral above them somewhere.
Now that they had stopped, the only sound was the echo of dripping water.
“So where—”
Dom put his fingers to his lips and began to increase the gain on his audio input. He thought he could hear something else.
Tetsami’s breathing became a thunderous bellows in his ears as he upped the gain. He tried to have his onboard computer filter out the noise and was only partially successful. He muted her breathing, but suffered a periodic deafness every time Tetsami exhaled—
But there was something else.
He might not know a word of Latin, but he knew where it was coming from.
“This way.” Dom followed the sound.
It was long going, with a lot of false turns and backtracking. But eventually they came to a wooden door behind which was a spiral staircase. From up the staircase came the sounds of a midnight service. Dom took the lead and started upward. Tetsami followed.
They circled upward, past more wooden doors that opened onto more underground corridors. When the stairs ran out, they found themselves in a niche recessed behind a Gothic stone arch. Dom looked out of the darkened space and into the floodlit cavern of a stone cathedral.
He grabbed Tetsami and started for the doors. They ran in the shadowed space beneath the choir loft, along the narthex.
The Church of Christ, Avenger, had tried to recapture the architectural glory of the Terran Middle Ages. The ceiling arched way above the assembly, dwarfing the human worshipers. A Hegira C-545 could be comfortably parked in the nave. The silhouette of Schwitzguebel, Bakunin’s largest moon, was visible behind a stained-glass rose window high above the altar.
As they ran, Dom desperately hoped that no one noticed them.
Their shadowed hallway followed the main chamber. To their left, the only thing separating Dom and Tetsami from the ranks of seated worshipers was a fluted stone pillar every three meters. To their right they passed niches containing the odd—some very odd—saint.
Dom kept an eye on the throngs of faithful gathered in the pews of the nave. The crowd had a few nonhumans— though no true aliens—and seemed to be quite involved in their devotion. What worried Dom was the fact that every ten meters or so, they passed the back of a paladin’s body armor. The Church’s muscle was invariably facing the crowd. He couldn’t count on that to last.
They stopped short of the main entrance, opposing the altar. There were two paladins guarding the doors, facing into the nave.
“Shit.”
Tetsami shook her head. “They go to a lot of trouble to keep their faithful in line—”
“Let’s get off the floor before someone spots us.”
They faded into another niche recessed into the right wall of the narthex. It was another spiral staircase, this one going upward. They ended up on a balcony overlooking the service and all the paladins.
Dom was running out of ideas. “Know how this place operates?”
“Caught their holo show a few times.” She shrugged and continued to catch her breath.
“Does it look like the battlesuits are guarding the worshipers?”
Tetsami nodded. “Must take tithing very seriously.”
If the guards were for an external threat, they wouldn’t be watching the faithful quite as closely. Dom retreated from the balcony. “If we’re lucky, the guards will disappear when the crowd leaves. We just have to wait.”
So they waited.
They sat on a stone bench carved into the wall. Tetsami faced down one end of the hall, Dom the other. The paladins didn’t move.