“At least we know he can’t control most of the hostages,” Cromwell commented. “I’m sure you noticed that.”
Woodward sat back in his big chair and nodded. “Yes, when he began to object to a normal incarceration, it was pretty clear that whatever he did to the girl has severe limits. We’re not going to have to fight some sort of zombie army.”
Robey just shook his head. “Sir, what’s the difference? I mean, if he can target us here in Olivet and he can shoot down the shuttles, then he has us hostage, too.”
“Not at all,” Cromwell told him. “In fact, until now I wasn’t certain of just how much relative power and equipment he might have. Now I know. It’s why he keeps our people. Deep down, even he suspects that we’re in no true danger here. If it wasn’t for them, we could just curse this place and go.”
“Then why deal with him? Wouldn’t they be just as well off passing over to the Lord as being like—like that?”
“We’re going to try and save them all, or as many as we can, son. That I promise,” Woodward assured him. “Right now, we’re going to play along a bit. Rather interesting that they held out the old Three Kings canard here but never mentioned it out there. I wonder if our pirate captain realizes just what a miserable spot he’s in?”
Robey respected these two men, and if they didn’t seem worried then he saw no reason to stew on their behalf, but he realized that eighty-seven lives were still at stake, maybe a few more on their side. “So what do we do now?”
“We pray, as always, and trust to the Lord,” Karl Woodward told him seriously. “And, later on, our engineers and technicians will go with their engineers and technicians, and maybe by midnight we’ll know just what kind of weapons they had on that ship, which ones they removed, and just what their targeting and energy capabilities are. By morning we should know more about that ship and have its schematics analyzed than the original crew probably knew. And by the end of our meeting tomorrow we should have access to their underground information, particularly if we can reclaim your woman friend. I can’t guarantee we can free her from whatever infernal device they’re using on her, but I do think that we may well be able to listen in on them.”
“And then,” added Thomas Cromwell, “the Lord will enable His terrible swift sword.”
It was difficult to say if Eve was any better or worse than the day before, or even if she could feel such things, but at least the old pirate captain was learning. This time she had her old robe on, and it even looked like somebody had cleaned it. It didn’t take away from the woodenness of her actions, but it did seem to give her a little dignity.
Woodward, Cromwell, Robey, and several others had spent the entire night in the strangest gathering Robey could ever have imagined, a kind of combination prayer meeting, strategy session and technical argument with experts up on Sinai. He was out of his depth from the start and he knew it, so he mostly tried to concentrate on prayer and, as they kept urging him, getting some sleep. He couldn’t do much of either one, though. They had all those comrades, including the outgoing and intelligent Eve made little more than a robot, and they had weapons from an interstellar combination warship and freighter mounted in a defensive ring so that they could blast anything trying to land that they didn’t like—and, of course, anything taking off as well. It seemed like a standoff, and that meant exactly that. The Doctor would never make a serious deal with these evil people, nor could anybody trust them in the first place even if you tried. And they could blow Olivet to hell, or Heaven, or wherever, leaving those on the ground stranded as much as the locals here and those up above helpless to do more than take a measure of revenge.
But if you looked at Woodward, you’d swear that there wasn’t much to worry about. Robey began to wonder if being almost two hundred years old wasn’t pushing the envelope on the mind. They could repair, regenerate, or grow new almost any part of the body these days, but just because you could replace brain cells didn’t mean that you operated like you did in your twenties, or thought as quickly and clearly. Science had moved the bar on longevity and quality of life by a great amount, but there was still a bar there.
Cromwell, somewhat the heir apparent, was different. There was no question the man was a true believer, a fanatic, and in top physical and mental form for taking on all comers. But his own dark and violent side was in some ways as scary as that pirate’s, and there was also some of the same “the end justifies any means” attitude to his actions and beliefs. Everybody at least knew about Karl Woodward, once considered one of humanity’s smartest human beings, a genius in any field that interested him, professor, lecturer, researcher, who, after the Great Silence, one day announced that he had deduced through research and logic the truth of Christianity and embarked on his new crusade, alienating just about every one of his old intellectual colleagues who thought he’d gone over that fine line between genius and madness and also alienating just about all of traditional Christianity by rejecting most of it as “corrupt and stupid.”
Woodward was also convinced that the Great Silence was at the heart of current day religion; that in fact humanity was in the “post Apocalypse period” on Earth and that was why they’d been cut off. Not being on Earth, not being there for the Second Coming, they had denied themselves a part in it. Now the rest of humanity was in a desperate war between those evil forces not involved in the matters of Earth and those other celestial civilizations who were waiting for them.
Robey had been born and raised to believe that, as had the other young people of The Mountain and its mission. Now, though, he was beginning to wonder if maybe Woodward wasn’t as divinely inspired as he seemed. It was very easy to believe within the ship’s society and within a traditional missionary frame. It was getting a lot harder, with real evil beneath them and around them holding real guns.
Now, out in the sun once more, facing his former partner under the control of that evil, he felt no sense of holy mission, none of God’s presence, only a kind of hollow and hopeless sense of inevitable doom. Even his one instruction from Cromwell, his one job, as it were, in whatever they were plotting, was conditional and not exactly something that he thought would do any good.
“Well, what do you think?” Captain Sapenza asked them. “What do your people tell you?”
“Your engines are shot. Your bubble’s cracked clean through,” Cromwell told him. “There’s no repair for that kind of thing. You have to replace the entire aft engine system, and there’s little chance of finding one of those in good shape that would fit your system these days. The only thing salvageable is your freighter module, but that was never intended to land intact like that. There’s no way to get it back up. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“We—suspected it, but without the kind of diagnostic equipment and experts you had, and the scanners, we didn’t know for sure. Well, that leaves us with Plan B.”
“Which is?” Woodward prompted.
“You’ll have to take us all with you.”
Woodward laughed. “Oh, really? And why should we do that? We’ve already established that you do not have sufficient hostage incentive for that.”
“I will kill them, or worse,” Sapenza warned him.
“I’m sure you will. People have been doing that to Christians for a very long time, and, unfortunately, in an abominable twisting of belief on its head, so-called Christians have been doing it to others. Still, we have a word for it—‘martyr.’ Those who break and voluntarily go with you lose their souls. Good riddance. Those who don’t and die for it will find themselves welcomed at the new temple in Jerusalem and become written as saints in our newest testament. Or, to put it another way, you blew it, Captain Sapenza. You have nothing to offer. Rot in Hell.”