Death of a Starship (25 page)

“
It says...” Menard stopped.
Spinks stood before him, panicked, angry, breathing hard. A man
with a soul. Right?

Who was human in God’s
eyes?

Oh, Lord, such a challenge You
have set Your followers. How shall we know who is deserving of Your
grace?

Menard could have lived a thousand
years to mediate and pray upon that question. In that moment, he
would have given almost anything for the chance to do
so.

Spinks rushed on, with the look of
a man battling time. “The Patriarch knows, some of his advisors do.
The angels...are xenic hunters. That’s who they protect against, at
the Prime See. Me and mine.”

“
You and yours.”
The Patriarch
knew
. He didn’t doubt those words, not here and now, though it was
betrayal of Ekumen Orthodoxy. To know a thing about God’s creation,
and then deny it...that bordered on sin. But they knew. He could
have wept.

Bitterness flooded back into
Menard’s soul, God suddenly too far away. What was Russe about? Why
did the Xenic Bureau exist then, he wondered. To let the hierarchy
know when the truth had drawn too near. No wonder they’d sent the
angel with him. They’d been afraid Menard might actually stumble
onto the truth.

Anger flared into the bitterness.
“And that Golliwog?”

“
We have...projects. Improvements.
Works in progress. Things we’ve learned.”

“
Angel killers,” said the priest,
trying to keep his unworthy emotions out of his tone of
voice.

“
Killers and much, much more.
We’re trying to walk through c-transition, too, Chor Episcopos. In
sheer self defense.” Spinks glanced back at his restive Marines.
“Enough questions. We are out of time. You’re either convinced, or
you never will be. Choose now.”

Menard shook his head, eyes filling
with tears. “You offer to take my memory. Such a bargain, my
knowledge in exchange for my life. The world is sinful enough
without me compounding it with error. Your answer leaves me no
closer to God or to the truth, Lieutenant. Shoot me now and have
done with it.”

Spinks waved the Marines over.
“Drop him in the rock with the rest of them. Maybe he’ll have
another chance someday.”

‡

Menard tumbled through space,
praying. He was headed for the syrupy red glow that had swallowed
both Dillon and
Pearl
. Albrecht and the angel were just glittering fog in the
vacuum, drifting away from the xenic ship. He wondered which fate
was worse. The little homing rocket the Marines had strapped to his
back kept his course true, but Menard didn’t even try to fight
it.

A snatch of an old hymn crossed his
mind, “Oh hear us when we cry to Thee; for those in peril on the
sea.”

Down he went, into the red, rolling
slowly as he fell into whatever time trap had protected the
rockship, and the truth, this last century. Would he go to God now?
It was an event horizon down there, a sort of imitation black hole.
Menard’s soul might be trapped in the last second of his life til
eternity drew to a close.

Even that stirred his imagination.
He might see the end of time. God’s plan come to fruition. That
would be worth delaying his salvation.

In his last moments in this
time, Menard saw batteries on
Dmitri
Hinton
glow with the ionization of
prefiring. Setting the contact trail to their targets along
Hoxha
’s hull. It was like
calling shots, though he couldn’t imagine how long it would take
Spinks to blast this monster into junk. Then he realized it was
not
Hoxha
that
Hinton
sought to kill. There was a blaze of energy as missiles from a
distant source struck the Naval ship.

St.
Gaatha
, come calling for her dead angel and
her fallen priest.

Civil war had arrived, even
without
Hoxha
.

“
Too late, McNally,” he said as he
committed his soul to God. “Watch out for rocks.”

That final word was swallowed in
the blue deeps of time as fire erupted around Menard in the
heavens.

‡ ‡ ‡

About the
author:

Jay Lake lives in
Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing
projects. His books in traditional print for 2011 are
Endurance
from Tor Books,
and
Love In the Time of Metal and
Flesh
from Prime Books. His short fiction
appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a
winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a
multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be
reached via his Web site at
http://www.jlake.com/
,
or
http://www.twitter.com/jay_lake
.