Profiteer

They must be underground. From the stone and the low-tech construction, the place they were in could date from the first colonization of Bakunin. Back before the cities decided to jell. These corridors were built, probably, when the Church was sovereign over a large section of what was now part of Godwin. These halls could snake under the city forever.

 

However, he had the feeling that there was a cathedral above them somewhere.

 

Now that they had stopped, the only sound was the echo of dripping water.

 

“So where—”

 

Dom put his fingers to his lips and began to increase the gain on his audio input. He thought he could hear something else.

 

Tetsami’s breathing became a thunderous bellows in his ears as he upped the gain. He tried to have his onboard computer filter out the noise and was only partially successful. He muted her breathing, but suffered a periodic deafness every time Tetsami exhaled—

 

But there was something else.

 

He might not know a word of Latin, but he knew where it was coming from.

 

“This way.” Dom followed the sound.

 

It was long going, with a lot of false turns and backtracking. But eventually they came to a wooden door behind which was a spiral staircase. From up the staircase came the sounds of a midnight service. Dom took the lead and started upward. Tetsami followed.

 

They circled upward, past more wooden doors that opened onto more underground corridors. When the stairs ran out, they found themselves in a niche recessed behind a Gothic stone arch. Dom looked out of the darkened space and into the floodlit cavern of a stone cathedral.

 

He grabbed Tetsami and started for the doors. They ran in the shadowed space beneath the choir loft, along the narthex.

 

The Church of Christ, Avenger, had tried to recapture the architectural glory of the Terran Middle Ages. The ceiling arched way above the assembly, dwarfing the human worshipers. A Hegira C-545 could be comfortably parked in the nave. The silhouette of Schwitzguebel, Bakunin’s largest moon, was visible behind a stained-glass rose window high above the altar.

 

As they ran, Dom desperately hoped that no one noticed them.

 

Their shadowed hallway followed the main chamber. To their left, the only thing separating Dom and Tetsami from the ranks of seated worshipers was a fluted stone pillar every three meters. To their right they passed niches containing the odd—some very odd—saint.

 

Dom kept an eye on the throngs of faithful gathered in the pews of the nave. The crowd had a few nonhumans— though no true aliens—and seemed to be quite involved in their devotion. What worried Dom was the fact that every ten meters or so, they passed the back of a paladin’s body armor. The Church’s muscle was invariably facing the crowd. He couldn’t count on that to last.

 

They stopped short of the main entrance, opposing the altar. There were two paladins guarding the doors, facing into the nave.

 

“Shit.”

 

Tetsami shook her head. “They go to a lot of trouble to keep their faithful in line—”

 

“Let’s get off the floor before someone spots us.”

 

They faded into another niche recessed into the right wall of the narthex. It was another spiral staircase, this one going upward. They ended up on a balcony overlooking the service and all the paladins.

 

Dom was running out of ideas. “Know how this place operates?”

 

“Caught their holo show a few times.” She shrugged and continued to catch her breath.

 

“Does it look like the battlesuits are guarding the worshipers?”

 

Tetsami nodded. “Must take tithing very seriously.”

 

If the guards were for an external threat, they wouldn’t be watching the faithful quite as closely. Dom retreated from the balcony. “If we’re lucky, the guards will disappear when the crowd leaves. We just have to wait.”

 

So they waited.

 

They sat on a stone bench carved into the wall. Tetsami faced down one end of the hall, Dom the other. The paladins didn’t move.

 

There was a long pause before Tetsami asked, “You native to Bakunin?”

 

“I thought it was bad form to ask that.”

 

Dom heard her chuckle. “No, the question you don’t ask is why a nonnative came to the planet in the first place.”

 

“No, I’m not native.”

 

There was another long pause. Then Dom asked, “Why do you ask?”

 

“Sometimes seems Bakunin’s got the monopoly on god-junkies.” Dom had never really thought of it that way. “Do things get this weird off-planet?”

 

“It’s not easily escaped. Wasn’t this planet founded on socialist atheism?”

 

Tetsami chuckled again and waved at the cathedral. “The Founding Commune would toss their collective lunch if they saw this display.”

 

“At least there isn’t a state religion.”

 

“There will be—five minutes after someone founds a state on Bakunin.”

 

“We should both live that long.”

 

The priest went on interminably. It was beginning to become clear why there was heavy security. It had slowly dawned on Dom that two-thirds of the worshipers wore restraint buckles on wrists and ankles. He was looking at a captive audience. Most of them were prisoners of the Church.

 

After a while Tetsami asked, “Would it be bad form to ask what nuked you?”