In Her Name

I only wish that I had had more time with this one, he complained to his God. Over the years they had never really had a chance just to sit down and talk, and for the most inane of reasons, it seemed to Hernandez now. But he could not turn back the clock, and his own time among the living was swiftly winding down. No matter, he thought, I will make do with what is given me.

“Reza, tell me. Let me help you reach for what lies beyond that threshold. If you are willing to open your eyes and your heart, Salvation awaits you.”

“Father, I have studied your God, and the gods of many other religions. But salvation for me lies with none of them, for I am merely a part – painfully separated – of a greater being, the Kreela. Perhaps the Empress answers to your God, for in truth I do not know if I consider Her to be ‘the Creator,’ as you believe of your God. All I know is that Her blood is in my veins, and for a short time I could hear Her voice, and the voices of the billions of Her Children, singing in my blood, in my heart. We were one as I never was before, and have never been since. She commands the living and the dead of Her people, Father – all who have ever lived and died with Her blood in their veins.”

That, indeed, was a revelation to Hernandez, but he had no time to contemplate its meaning. Behind him, the cool female voice announced, “Shuttle APX-954, now boarding for transit to C.S.S. Hera. All passengers are to report to Gate 73B…”

Reza gathered his flight bag and a smaller one that contained gifts – souvenirs and chocolates – for Eustus and his troops.

Time! Hernandez cursed. Would you not give me just a few precious minutes, Lord? No, of course you wouldn’t!

“Reza,” he said hurriedly, stepping closer and dropping his voice slightly so as not to be overheard by the passengers streaming by toward the gate, “in my profound ignorance, I once accused you of being the Antichrist, of being Satan’s instrument. I know that I was terribly wrong, but now I must wonder if you are perhaps the opposite. Many think of angels – even Christ Himself – as being always kind and peaceful, menacing toward none. But that is not really true. Some of the angels are warriors, Reza, and the Prince of Peace has powers of destruction that defy imagination.” He looked Reza in the eye, knowing this would be the last chance he would have in this life to try and understand this miracle/curse that had changed his simple existence forever. “What are you, Reza? What are you really?”

“I am no angel, Father, nor am I your Messiah. If anything… if anything, you may think of me as Adam without his Eve, cast out of the Garden with no hope of ever returning.” Reza smiled the best he could and extended a hand to Hernandez. “Take care, Father,” he said, “and may your God smile upon your soul.”

Hernandez watched him as he left, swallowed up in the slogging torrent of military and civilians who were still crowding onto the shuttle. “Goodbye, my son,” he said sadly. “You shall always be in my prayers.”

He stood there, alone, and waited until the shuttle lifted its squat bulk into the sky. As its contrail finally disappeared from the sky, it struck him that perhaps Reza’s words were truer than the young man had himself believed.

“An Adam without his Eve,” Hernandez muttered as he shuffled toward the far distant exit to the terminal. He stopped then, turning his attention again toward the sky and the invisible stars beyond. “Or the prodigal son who is yet to return home?”

Twenty-Eight

Over a year after Nicole’s wedding, Reza found himself in a predicament whose resolution eluded him, and he did not have either Nicole or Jodi from whom he could draw strength. In what Reza considered a wretched twist of fate, his company, reinforced with a battery of artillery and a tank platoon, had been ordered to Erlang on a “civil unrest” mission. His job was to ensure that the flow of metals and minerals from the planet’s mines to Confederation shipyards continued uninterrupted. He had been briefed that the two major political and demographic factions on the planet had been having troubles getting along for the last few years, but recently tensions had risen sufficiently to arouse Confederation concerns, enough to sponsor the mission Reza found himself stuck with. Since it was an undesirable duty and the Red Legion happened to be in that area of the Rim, it was assigned to them. And, since “shit rolls downhill,” as Eustus was so fond of saying, Reza’s company got the job.

Civil unrest, Reza thought acidly, a growl escaping his throat. No one had bothered to tell him that the planet was about to erupt into open civil war, with him and his Marines trapped in the middle. On one side there was the Ranier Alliance; on the other, the Mallory Party. Both seemed very similar at first glance, but as with many things human, it was the underlying details that led to disagreement, bitterness, and – eventually – bloodshed.

From what Reza had been able to piece together from the wildly diverging accounts of the colony’s existence that he had extracted from the library database, a colonizing expedition led by one Ian Mallory had landed on Erlang nearly two hundred years ago. The colonists numbered over fifty thousand men, women, and children from the Grange Cloud asteroids. They had decided to risk all they had for the prospect of something better and had pooled their money to buy an outdated ore hauler from a bankrupt Grange mining firm. They refitted it themselves for the seven-month voyage that would take them to the Promised Land. Reza was not an expert in the art of starship construction, but he had to marvel at the courage of these people, that they had traveled so far in what was no more than a hulk awaiting the breaker’s torch.

But they paid a steep price for their dream. The old ship’s engines were not as reliable as the colonists had hoped, and by the time they finally made planetfall over a year after they left the Grange, nearly five thousand of them had died of starvation and disease.

Abandoning the ship in a stable orbit from which it later could be tapped for raw materials and its few remaining supplies, the colonists descended into their Eden in the landing barges they had brought for the purpose. Miraculously, all but one landed safely.

Unlike so many similar expeditions, which often suffered countless hardships only to meet with ultimate disappointment and, in many cases, death, the Mallory expedition had truly found the Garden of Eden. A sister to what Earth must have been in the age before homo sapiens, their new home – Erlang – was a priceless and beautiful gem of blue skies and green valleys, of towering mountains and seas teeming with life. Despite the losses of their loved ones and the nightmare of the long voyage, the Mallorys had found their dream, and over the years their colony grew and prospered.

Some three hundred years later, the Raniers arrived. Unlike the Mallorys, Therese Ranier and her fifteen- thousand followers were upper-class descendants of the shipbuilders of Tulanya who had decided to emigrate to a newly-discovered world, even farther-flung from the human-settled core worlds than Erlang had been.

Unfortunately, their ship, despite being generations newer and designed from the outset to transport a colony expedition, had an engine mishap that fortuitously left no permanent casualties in its wake other than its primary stardrives. By no small miracle, they happened to be close enough to Erlang’s system to make it there in a few months on their auxiliary drives. Had the stardrives failed much before or after they did, Ranier and her group surely would have perished in the vast wasteland of space that separated Erlang and her closest neighbors, for there would have been no ships nearby to heed their distress calls.

The arrival of the Ranier ship signaled a change in the peaceful agrarian life of Erlang’s inhabitants. It did not take the newly arrived minority long to determine that the Erlangers – the Mallorys, as they eventually came to be called – knew and cared little for the capitalistic concepts in which the Ranier group had been raised and took for granted. When they came, the Raniers found little more than a barter economy, with virtually nothing in the way of industry except for textiles and the manufacture of basic farming implements. And while they deeply appreciated