Starliner(63)

The recording lens in Chick Colville's helmet lurched upward as he and five other mercenaries climbed through the top hatch of their vehicle. They jumped down to the pavement of cracked concrete and ran in a squat, as if forcing themselves against a fierce wind.

Colville was the last man. The troopers to either side of him fell, one like a sack of potatoes, the other twisted onto her back, a ragged tear in her thigh and a look of disbelief on her face when her visored helmet rolled free.

The muzzle flashes of the shots that felled them twinkled from twenty meters up the spire of the cathedral. Ricochets sparked away in puffs of powdered concrete.

Chick Colville was slower than his comrades because he carried the flamethrower. The fat nozzle rose into the field of view as he aimed. Recoil from the jet of metallized napalm shifted the viewpoint back a further step, but the flame rod arched between the concrete struts like a thread into the slot of a needle. An explosion cascaded sparks both inside and outside the cathedral.

Ran walked forward, seeing only the projected hologram. Vendors offered fruits at the edge of his awareness. He heard Wanda say harshly, "No, we don't want any!"

The cathedral's bronze doors had been blown into the sanctuary; cannonfire had cut completely through the stone post between the right and center portals. There was no one alive in the circular nave. The floor was littered with rubble and bodies.

"Careful, Ran," Wanda said. Her hand was on his arm, guiding him. "There's three steps."

The last snipers had used a scaffolding supported at mid-height by a wooden trellis. It was ablaze. A corpse hung from a crossbeam, and two bodies which had fallen to the floor also burned from Colville's flame.

The mercenaries preceding him stumbled over litter in their haste to reach the door behind the wrecked altar. An APC's automatic cannon fired into the nave. White flashes filled the air with shell fragments that, for a wonder, seemed to hit nobody.

A trooper from Colville's squad hurled a satchel charge through the doorway. Someone on the other side threw it back. Everybody flattened. There was a flash and a jolt. Everything jumped, and the rockdust lifted in a clinging pall. Colville scrambled to his feet.

In the hologram, a stone statue of the Virgin lay broken on the floor of the sanctuary. Wanda murmured a warning, but Ran's feet were already avoiding an obstacle which had not moved in thirty years.

The flamethrower was the weapon of choice for clearing the room beyond, but before Colville's nozzle steadied, two mercenaries jumped into the doorway firing their automatic rifles. Other troopers lobbed grenades past them. One of the men fell, but the other ducked clear just as the grenades slammed black pulses through the opening.

Wobbling like a drunk, Chick Colville reached the doorway with a woman from another APC carrying a magazine-fed grenade launcher.

Originally the space beyond had been a dressing room for the officiating priests. The followers of the Prophet had opened out the walls to create an inner sanctuary as large as the nave.

There were hundreds of people inside. Most of them were children, old folks, and the sick or wounded. They were chanting hymns, nodding to a dozen tempi. The eyes in their upraised faces were blankly glazed.

A handful of adult men, naked except for the sheen of blood, were cutting the throats of the others with butcher knives.

One of the healthy males, tonsured as a priest, turned and faced the recording lens. He bayed something that would have been madly unintelligible even if the helmet had recorded sound. The priest thrust his knife into the neck of an infant and jerked the blade forward through the tough gristle of the child's windpipe. When he tossed the spouting corpse aside, its head and torso were connected only by the spinal column.

The flame rod struck the priest in the face, then swept right and left across the big room. Ten seconds worth of fuel remained in Colville's bottles. When he had expended it, the abattoir had become a funeral pyre for dead and dying alike. The flames leapt and shuddered as the grenadier emptied her weapon also, and other mercenaries loosed into the charnel nightmare which the fire erased.

The recording ended.

Ran Colville sank to his knees. Wanda was holding him. "Are you all right?" she said. "Are you all right?" When he finally heard her voice, she was shouting.

Ran put his arms around the woman. He spat out words like bursts of automatic gunfire. "My Dad said, 'When you're old enough, kid, I'll show you; but you won't understand.' But he didn't show me. He died. And I found his chips. I watched them. I didn't understand."

He drew in a shuddering breath. "Only now I think I understand."

Wanda patted his back awkwardly, then eased him to his feet. "I don't know about you," she said, "but I could use a drink."