Heirs of Empire

aren’t entirely impossible. We’ve found several dispensations scattered over the last six hundred local years— almost a thousand Terran years—and most of them seem to be fairly pragmatic things like kitchen-sink chemistry and pretty darn empirical medicine and agriculture. We’re still groping in the dark, but it looks like there’ve been some ‘progressive’ periods—which, unfortunately, seem to provoke backlash periods of extreme conservatism. The key thing, though, is that the Church is continually on the lookout to suppress anything that even looks like the scientific method, and without that there’s no systematic basis for technological innovation.”

“And people put up with it?” Tamman shook his head. “I find that hard to accept.”

“That’s because of your own cultural baggage,” Sandy said. “You come from a technical society and you accept technology as good, or at least inevitable; these people have the opposite orientation. And remember that the Church knows God is on its side; they have proof of it several times a year when the Voice speaks. Not only that,” her excited voice turned grimmer, “but their version of the Inquisition has some pretty grisly punishments for anybody who dares to fool around with forbidden knowledge.”

“Inquisition?” Sean looked up. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Me neither,” Harriet said. “I had to stop after the first little bit, but Sandy and Brashan waded through the whole ghastly thing.” She shuddered. “Even the little I read is going to give me nightmares for a week.”

“Me, too,” Sandy murmured. Her bright eyes were briefly haunted, and she brooded down at the deck for a long, silent moment. Then she shook herself. “Like a lot of intolerant religions, their Inquisition stacks the deck. First, they’re only doing it to ‘save souls,’ including that of the ‘heretic’ in question, and they’ve picked up on the theory of the mortification of the flesh to ‘expiate’ sins. That means they’re actually helping the people they murder. Worse, they’re never wrong. Their religious law enshrines the use of torture during questioning, which means the accused always confess, even knowing how they’ll be put to death, and—” she looked up and met Sean’s gaze “—the actual executions are even worse. Pour decourager les autres, I suppose.”

“Brrrr.” Sean’s lips twisted in revulsion. “I suppose any ‘church’ that packs that kind of whammy probably could keep the peasants in line.”

“Especially with the advantage of a whole secret language. They can promote universal literacy in the vulgar tongue and still have most of the advantages of a priestly monopoly on education. And they’ve got a pretty big carrot to go with their stick. The Church collects a tithe—looks like somewhere around twelve percent—from every soul on the planet. A lot of that loot gets used to build temples, commission religious art, and so forth, but a big chunk is loaned out to secular rulers at something like thirty percent, and another goes into charitable works. You see? They’ve got their creditor nobles on a string, and the poor look to them for relief when times get bad. Sean, they’ve got this planet sewed up three ways to Sunday!”

“Damn. And they’re the ones sitting on top of the quarantine ground station!” Sean shook his head in disgust.

“They sure are,” Harriet sighed.

“Yes, they are,” Sandy agreed, “but remember that we’re still putting the whole picture together. We’ve just filled in a big piece, and discovering this ‘Holy Tongue’ gives us a Rosetta Stone of sorts for the vulgar languages, as well, but there’s a lot we haven’t even begun on. For instance, there’s something called ‘The Valley of the Damned’ that sounds interesting to me.”

” ‘Valley of the Damned’?” Sean repeated. “What sort of valley?”

“We don’t know yet, but it’s utterly proscribed. There may be other, similar sites, but this is the only one we’ve found so far. It’s up in the mountains of northern Malagor, outside the reach of our remotes. Anyone who goes in is eternally damned for consorting with demons. If they come back out again, they have to be ritualistically—and hideously—killed. It looks to me like the preliminaries probably take at least a couple of days, and then they burn the poor bastards alive,” she finished grimly.

“It sounds,” Sean mused, “like whatever’s in there must represent a mighty serious threat to the Church’s neat little social structure. Or they think it does, anyway.” He frowned, and then his eyes began to gleam. “Just where, exactly, did you say this valley is?”

Chapter Nineteen

Sean snaked around the feet of the towering summits at a cautious four hundred KPH. His sluggish speed had made the journey long and dragging, but it was the best he could manage, for the cutter’s terrain-following systems were down. That forced him to fly hands-on, which was a pain. But few things were harder to spot than a stealthed cutter with no active emissions and flying low, slow, and nape-of-the-earth through mountains, and until they knew the quarantine system wouldn’t swat atmospheric targets, anything that might draw its attention was right out.

Inconsequential thoughts flickered as he concentrated on his flying. All the unoccupied seats in the twenty-man cutter made Israel’s human crewmen uncomfortably aware of just how alone—and how far from home—they were, yet it was even worse for Brashan. They had to leave someone aboard the battleship at all times, and his nonhuman appearance made him the obvious choice. He’d taken it better than Sean could have, especially since they’d agreed to forego any com signals that might be detected. Not only was Brashan barred from sharing their exploration trip, he couldn’t even know what they’d found until they got back to tell him!

The cramped valley narrowed further, and he dumped another fifty KPH. It was nerve-wracking to fly solely by Mark One Eyeball (well, Mark Two or Three, given his enhancement) through the inevitable distortion of its stealth field, and he swore softly as they came up on an acute bend.

“The Force, Sean,” Sandy whispered in his ear. “Use the Force!”

“Jerk!” he snorted, but there was an edge of laughter in his retort and tense muscles loosened back up a bit. He spared her a brief smile, then returned his attention to his console as their valley joined another. He checked his nav systems and headed up the new gorge with a small surge of excitement. It was even narrower and twistier, but they were getting close enough that this one might take them all the way in.

He made another forty kilometers, then cursed again—less softly—as the valley ended in a steep cliff. He halted the cutter and lifted it vertically, hugging the rock wall. The dim light of Pardal’s small moon washed scrubby trees and bare rock as tumbled mountains fell away on every side, and Harriet sucked in a sharp breath beside him as they topped out.

“I’m getting something on passive!” Sean went into an instant hover, and his sister closed her eyes, communing with her sensors, then scowled. “I can’t resolve it, Sean, but it’s coming from just beyond that next mountain.”

Sean banked the cutter, angling down and around the side of the next peak, and she opened her eyes.

“Now I’ve lost it entirely!” she groused.

“Good,” he said. “If it’s line-of-sight, it can’t see us, either. And for your information, sister mine, our objective is ‘just beyond that next mountain,’ if you and Sandy have it plotted right, so it sounds like we’re going to find something when we get there!”

Tamman grinned at him, but Sandy plugged her own feed into Harriet’s console to study her recorded scanner readings.

“Not much, is it, Harry?”

“No.” Harriet turned her own attention back to the data. “I make it at least six distinct point sources, though.”

“Yeah. But did you notice the one at about oh-two-one?”

“Hm?” Harriet frowned, then nodded. “Lots stronger than the others, isn’t it? And there’s something about it … Damn. I wish I had a link to Israel’s computers! It reminds me of something, but I can’t think what.”

“Me neither. Tam?”

Tamman glanced at the emissions through his own feed and shrugged. “Beats me. Most of those look like