Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.
(To the greater glory of God.)—Unofficial Motto of the Society of Jesus
Father Dan Dwyer, SJ, was old Navy. Tallish, at almost exactly six feet, broad shouldered, blue-eyed, and red-headed, Dwyer looked to be approximately in his mid-twenties though he was, in fact, many times that. Although temporarily detached, he still wore on his blue dress uniform the insignia of a naval captain. As a matter of fact, he not only wore the uniform that said he was old Navy, he had enough ribbons running up from left breast pocket nearly to shoulder, indicating medals of high enough quality, to prove it. Navy Cross, Silver Star . . . somewhere in the Pentagon floated a recommendation for the Medal of Honor, though that was at best an outside shot.
There had been a day when Dwyer could have worn Marine Corps uniform, other than dress blues, if he'd wanted. That, though, had been generations earlier, before the Posleen War.
He'd lectured and sermoned, fought and bled, as soldier and sailor, both, and of both God and the United States, since he'd been very young priest, fresh out of the Jesuit's uniquely severe cursus. He'd done it in Vietnam. He'd done it marching back from the Chosen reservoir in Korea. Though he'd been something of a legend for those things, in the Naval service, equally he'd been legendary for his remarkably well-stocked sacramental wine cabinet, aboard ship, which was always nestled nicely between and among the sacramental scotch, sacramental bourbon, sacramental vodka and rum, sacramental cognac and armagnac, sacramental grappa . . .
Dwyer had been, for most of his life, a highly functioning alcoholic. An act of will and of love had put an end to that. Rejuvenation via galactic technology, or GalTech, had erased the damage of years of drinking and even removed the addiction, a matter of genetic manipulation, rather than psychiatric reasoning or counseling. What it could not do, or at least had not, was remove the psychological need for euphoria arising to oblivion in the face of endless, limitless pain.
"God," whispered Dwyer, looking around at what remained on the bare seven hills of Rome, "God, You know I could use a drink about now."
"Shush," said the Jesuit's companion, Sally, walking beside him. "You don't need anything of the kind." Her finger pointed at an odd sight. "And there's someone who might be able to help," as if being lost could be Dwyer's motivation to break his vow of sobriety.
Swiss Guards in their traditional uniforms patrolled the mostly unmarked and unbounded pathways of the city. While the guards carried halberds and baselards, a kind of short sword, they all had quite up to date rifles slung across their bodies, as well. The slings were of the type that hung from both shoulders, leaving the rifle with its muzzle down, free to be taken in hand by the carriers.
Rome had changed. The hills were there, of course; the Posleen showed generally little interest in remaking natural geography. The bridges stood still; the Posleen had no skill whatsoever in building them and found them useful enough to preserve where possible (especially so, as Posleen could not swim at all). The foundations, if nothing else, of the Forum Romanorum could be found. They could even be seen from many of the seven hills. And why not? There was absolutely nothing else high enough to block the view. Old Rome had survived the incursion of the Posleen better than had New only in that there were, at least, some traces of Old Rome left.
That said, the Flavian Amphiteater? Gone. The arches of Constantine, Titus, and Septimius Severus? Gone. Column of Trajan? Gone. The three remaining columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux? Gone. Pantheon? Gone. No wonder Dwyer felt the need for a drink.
On the south edge of the city the pyramidal tomb of Caius Cestius was not merely gone, the Posleen had hit it with a large enough KEW, or Kinetic Energy Weapon, to destroy it and leave a rather large and deep crater in its place. The crater had, in time, become a small lake.
And that's what hurt the remaining Romans the most, even more than the destruction of the Vatican, the loss of the ancient heritage that had proclaimed, "Once we were the greatest." To the extent that real rebuilding was ongoing, Rome was being reconstructed as the Rome of the Caesars, not the Rome of the popes, of Garibaldi, or of Mussolini.
This was not particularly uncommon across the Earth, as people who had lost all sense of normality labored to recreate the world that had been mostly erased by the Posleen. And if the Italians had lost more than most, what better reason was needed to recreate a world even more ancient than the one they had recently known?
The Vatican was not among even the foundations of the ruins remaining. The very rocks that had made up the Basilica of Saint Peter had been taken down, crushed, reformed and vitrified to produce one or another of the pyramidal structures favored by the aliens. These, in turn, now swarmed with jackhammer wielding workers, cutting the rock free to rebuild human structures. In the interim, Mother Church, as it had sometimes in the very early days, once again operated from tents and caves. The Society of Jesus was no better off.
"Well," muttered Father (Captain) Dan Dwyer, SJ, to his companion and fiancée,
Sally—short for . . . well . . . among other things short for Shlomit Bat Betlechem-Plada Kreuzer—"At least the Society has its own cave."
Father? SJ? Fiancée?
Yes.
Somewhere in an interior pocket of the priest's uniform tunic rested a copy of the latest Papal Bull, De Propagatione Fidei, which translated as, "Concerning the Propagation of the Faith." The language of the thing was Latin, of course. What it meant, in practice, was, "We've taken it in the shorts. Go ye forth and multiply. Yes, Father, yes, Sister, THIS MEANS YOU. Oh, and while you're at it, work on getting us some converts, too. And, no, you are not freed of the responsibility of getting married before you propagate."
Nor was that all the Bull did. One result of the Posleen invasion, and the learned preference for expending men and preserving women—coldly put, the factories for the next generation of plasma cannon and rail gun fodder—was that the imbalance between the sexes of the human race was close to five to two, female. For Catholics, for whatever reason, it was more like three to one. After consultation with some learned Moslems and Mormons, the Pope had seen fit to authorize and encourage polygamy, along with a vigorous castigation of celibacy, and a side sneer at homosexuality, for a set period of seventy-five years. For some Catholic women, the reaction was something like, "Crap, you mean I can't have one of my own?" From others it was, "I just knew there was a merciful God. Thank Christ that I won't have to do all the coddling myself." For men, reactions varied from the common, "Yayyyy!" to the almost as common, "Shit; one woman is difficult enough. You're telling me I have a duty to deal with up to four of them?"
Of course it was never that simple. It couldn't be that simple. We're talking about the Roman Catholic Church here. There were forms to fill out, questions to answer, interviews to be sat, shrieks to be endured.
Tradition: It's what's for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and Holy Communion.
"Can you find the caves?" Sally asked, an amused smile on her Marlene Dietrich look-alike face. Sally had once played a German part, of sorts, in the one film she had starred in. Thus, when she'd had a choice on what appearance to take, she'd decided to adopt a well known German face, as well.
Neither the catacombs nor Rome itself meant much to Sally, except perhaps as the place from which had originated the crushing of the revolt of 66 to 73 AD and that of Bar Kochba, the city that had ordered the destruction of the Temple. It might even be said that she took a perverse satisfaction in the leveling of the city. She tried to feel ashamed of that but simply couldn't. Sally could hold a grudge.
Dwyer shrugged and answered, "I used to be able to find the catacombs. But then there were more landmarks to guide me." He paused, looked around, and corrected himself. "Back then there were some landmarks to guide me."
He stopped by the passing Swiss Guardsman Sally had pointed to, a member of the Legio Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis, to ask for directions. The "Legio" had once been "Cohors," back when the guard had been considerably smaller. Now, with nearly thirteen thousand members, there was some call for upping the title from Legio to Exercitus. The Swiss Guard was not only the army of the Vatican, it had also become the police force for the city of Rome . . . such as remained.
Rather than give so many streets and corners and lefts and right, the guard simply pointed directly, and said, "The Via Appia lies that way. Follow that away from the city about three kilometers. To you," the guardsman added, recognizing the American uniform, "that would be about two miles."
Though the ground was strewn with shards and some bones, Dwyer could see no obstacle to bar their path. Thanking the guardsman, he and Sally moved onward in the direction they'd been shown.
"Watch out for abat holes and grat nests," the guardsman called after them.
The abat were colony animals, more or less rodent-like, while the grat were largish, wasp-like creatures who fed on the abat. The abat had come with the Posleen ships and were essentially ineradicable. Thus, humanity would just have to learn to live with the grat, or risk being overrun by the abat.
"We will," Dwyer called back. "We know about the abat. My fiancée and I have been around."
He'd been born in Galway, Repubic of Ireland, before emigrating to the United States to enter the seminary. Sometimes, the brogue still came out, usually under stress. It used to come out under the influence of alcohol, but that had been a while. As with many of the multitudes of Irish who had come over, Dwyer had fallen in love with the United States of America more or less instantly. He'd become a citizen during his eleven years of Jesuit training.
Thereupon, seeing no special reason not to serve in the military or naval service, thinking he owed his adopted country much, and his superiors having no objection, he'd joined the Navy as a chaplain. He served sometimes aboard ship, sometimes on the ground with Marine infantry or, once, combat engineers. Dwyer had marched on frozen feet, in Korea. He'd battled flames aboard the USS Enterprise. He'd been shelled silly a few times in Quang Ni Province, Vietnam, and taken rifle in hand in and around Da Nang and Hue. He'd been wounded, twice, not counting the burns from the Enterprise. Also not counting any bodily damage incurred during the Posleen war.
He'd retired, eventually, from the Navy and, to the extent it was possible, the priesthood. His drinking had gotten considerably worse by that time. That's how they'd found him, drunk, with his recall notice for the Posleen War.
"The entrance here used to be a sort of . . . well, a sort of a two story temple," Dwyer said. "I remember it clearly . . . six columns, the two centrals ones grayish, the others a shade of brown." His voice sounded terribly wistful, as if those six columns meant something distinct from the ruin of the city.
"It's hardly the only thing that's been lost," Sally observed. "What are a few columns and some tons of rock and mortar compared to five billion people?"
"I know, dear, I know."
Sally looked dubiously at the entrance. It was flush with the ground. A tarp set up on poles covered it to protect the relics and martyrs below from the elements. Two of the oddly uniformed Swiss Guards stood outside it, their halberds resting against the tent poles. Odd uniforms or not, the weaponry in their hands was modern and first rate, products of Sig Sauer in Switzerland and updated for the Posleen war.
"Oh, God, I'm an idiot," Sally said, while chewing her lower lip. "I should have thought of this; I can't go with you, Dan. I'm pushing the limits of ship-AID-flesh contact as it is, even with the ship anchored in the Tiber near the Lago di Traiano, no manmade interference, the AID under guard in Magliana, and the booster. Going underground? No way."
"Yes, I see that. Hmmm." The priest turned to what he thought to be the senior of the Swiss Guards, though that guard looked to be the younger. Just how the priest knew that the appearance was false was hard for him to put a finger on. Perhaps it was something in the younger-seeming guardsman's eyes. Dwyer asked, "Is there a coffee shop or a decent restaurant nearby?"
"Yes, Father," the Guardsman answered. "But I wouldn't recommend it for a woman unescorted and alone. I wouldn't recommend anyplace in the City for a woman unescorted and alone. These weapons," and the guard indicated the resting halberds with the muzzle of his rifle, "are not just for show."
"Sally might surprise you," the priest answered. "Even so, can you . . . ?"
Instead of answering, the Guardsman touched a button on a small box clipped to a belt around his waist and said, "Wachtmeister von Altishofen to Headquarters. Send me . . . ummm . . . Hellebardier de Courten: Service to the high clergy."
Dwyer wasn't really high clergy. Yet the Wachtmeister recognized the uniform which gave a sense of sacerdotal rank. The ribbons on the priest's chest von Altishofen didn't recognize, but there were enough of them to suggest real combat service. That was "high" enough, he likely thought.
"Affirmative, Herr Wachtmeister," came the response, barely audible from a small speaker apparently located somewhere in the Guardsman's morion.
"It will be just a few minutes, Father."
"You know this is all silly, Dan," Sally muttered. "You don't need to make an honest woman of me. I'm yours for the asking and have been ever since . . ."
The first major wave of Posleen to erupt northwards from Mexico had been destroyed, albeit at the cost of the destruction of the US Army's Eleventh Airborne Division (ACS). One might have expected that, given the rate of Posleen reproduction, the next major wave would have simply moved north unopposed. There never was, however, another major wave. The first, before it was crushed, had denuded the area along the border and deep past it of nearly everything edible. Subsequent waves, of which there were several, never made it very far into the United States before starving. After a while, when many had gone north only to disappear, the rest of the Posleen stopped trying. Their legends contained many stories of which the moral was something between "Curiosity killed the cat" and "Danger, Will Robinson."
That Posleen-made barrier, however, didn't stop them from breeding. Pressure within Mexico, therefore, continued to build.
As things turned to shit for the Posleen in the American southwest and Mexico, pressure had built on some weaker clans by those more powerful, driving those weak ones to find someplace else, anyplace else, to live. That was generally southward and eastward. As Central America narrowed toward the south and east, these fleeing clans were forced into closer and closer proximity, greater and greater competition for food, and more frequent and bloodier interclan battle.
Fortunately, from some points of view, the Posleen could eat each other. And, of course, they did. Yet as clans were shattered and reformed, as new chiefs arose from the carnage, there came a time when there was only one clan, and that composed of the remnants of dozens of others, left in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, only one place for that composite clan to go, and only one good route to get there.
That clan—so said Intelligence—was the Clan of Gora'sinthaloor. That place was Panama. And that route was, roughly speaking, the Pan-American Highway where it entered that part of the Costa Rican Province of Puntarenas seized from the Posleen by Panama while Panama was under the rule of the dictator, Boyd.
Salem, the last remaining warship of the American Panama squadron then left afloat, was duly dispatched to support the boys and a few girls holding the Balboa Line across what had been the Costa Rican border. Holding, was perhaps not the precise word, in the sense that the meat doesn't hold the meatgrinder; it just slows it down a bit. That's what the Panamanians—to say nothing of the Posleen normals, cosslain, and kessentai—were doing, grinding each other to sausage.
Part of that grinding machine was CA-139, the USS Salem.
Rather, it had been part of the grinder. With Posleen tenar swarming from every direction, with all three main turrets damaged, seven of nine secondaries shot away, smoke pouring out from a dozen places, the normal captain, Goldman, and his bridge crew dead, and the ship's auxiliary chaplain and a scratch bridge crew directing the counterflooding to keep her asymmetric below-the-water-line hits from capsizing her, Salem was pretty much out of the fight.
And furious about it.
"Turn around!" her holographic avatar screamed. "Bring us back around! I've still got two secondaries and I can aim my mains by turning the ship. Turn around, I said, you drunken Catholic bastard!"
"Salem," that auxiliary chaplain, Father Dwyer, S.J., had answered, his brogue leaking through, "you're a lovely girl and a lovely ship. But you've no business being in command of yourself. There is no good you can do now commensurate with the good you'll be able to do after a refit. Now, I'll make you a deal. You stop being a bitch and let me command—let me save—this ship without interruption, and I'll . . . I'll stop drinking . . . by the love of the saints, I will. But if you don't, I'll toss your blasted AID over the side, and bring the ship back for refit without you."
"You can't talk to me that way!"
Dwyer didn't answer. He simply went and took the AID from its armored box, then began walking to the edge of the metal platform half encircling the ruins of the bridge.
"You wouldn't dare!"
Dwyer began to wind up for a long toss. "Boston College baseball," he announced, over one shoulder. His arm began to straighten, as if for a long fly when . . .
"Stop! I'll shut up."
The father did stop, if barely.
"Will you really stop drinking?" the avatar asked.
"To save you, yes."
"I didn't know you cared."
"Then you have much to learn."
"Would you really have tossed me," Sally asked.
"Not a chance," the priest answered. "But I had to give you a good excuse to overcome your conditioning and values."
"True," she agreed.
The Wachtmeister interrupted by coughing politely. "Your escort is here, Miss. And, Father, you may proceed."
The caves were narrow, cramped, dusty and musty. No amount of cleaning seemed able to do much about any of that. They were well lit enough, though, for easy navigation; the Indowy-produced light panels on ceilings and walls lending a gentle but pervasive yellow glow.
Briefly, Dwyer laid a single ungloved hand upon the walls of the catacombs. For just a moment, he felt an almost electric connection with his predecessors, those early co-religionists who had met here . . . that, and with their all too frequent martyrdom.
There were slits, many of them, carved into the tunnels at varying heights. These, Dwyer suspected, were firing ports. He stopped at one doorway, its thick steel door hanging open, and followed a very narrow—too narrow for a Posleen—corridor to a room. There, in the Indowy-made light, he saw about what he'd expected to see, a firing slit and step, a quarter cylinder of galactic metal armor, a simplified range card, a crucifix, and a field telephone.
Yep; no wonder the Posleen never penetrated the catacombs very deeply.
Having fought the Posleen in the close confines of a warship's interior, Dwyer could just picture the poor beasties, stuck here below in a traffic jam of flesh, bleating, panic-stricken as they were trapped, fore and aft, by the fallen bodies of the others.
It hadn't been easy, but after a time Dwyer had learnt a degree of Christian compassion even for the inhuman enemy. That that enemy had spared him once, when he need not have, had helped.
Leaving the underground bunker, Dwyer proceeded further down into the Earth. The Wachtmeister had told him that any changes in direction would be clearly marked with the "IHS" symbol of his order. This he found to be true as the cavernous tunnel branched and that symbol, together with an arrow, directed him leftward.
"Turn left here, miss," Hellebardier de Courten said, as he and Sally reached the entrance of an unusually large shack, about a third mud brick, a third wood, and a third cardboard, set back from the Appian Way about forty feet. Two burly, beefy guards, swarthy and with hair sticking up above the collars of their t-shirts, each armed with a shotgun, stood in front of the shack's main entrance. They and de Courten nodded warily at each other.
Reaching the entrance, Sally looked over the menu, hand-scrawled with chalk on a large blackboard. "Oh, crap," she said. "I forgot about this. I can't eat any of it."
"Miss?" de Courten asked, his head cocking to one side.
Among clergy Dwyer was unusual, as most chaplains were unusual, in being subject to more than one master. One was God. The other was the branch of service, in his case the Navy. The third, and in many ways the most important, was the rail thin, cassocked man seated before him. Rather, it was the order that man represented.
That rail-thin, aesthetic-faced priest, Father Perales, an assistant to the Father General of the order, shook his head wearily. "Father," Perales said, "it isn't that she's an artificially created body; His Holiness has already ruled that, in the interests of propagating the faith, artificial bodies are, under certain circumstances, acceptable.
"And it's not that her intelligence is machine; since your former ship, the USS Des Moines, was declared by the Nuncio of Panama to be a Servant of God, which declaration His Holiness implicitly approved."
Perales stood, and began to pace behind his desk. His hands clasped behind him, only to be unclasped and reclasped. Reaching for the words, unclasping his hands and throwing his arms wide, Perales exclaimed, "But for the love of God, Father, don't you realize the problem? She's Jewish!"
"It's not kosher," Sally said. "Nothing here is fit for me to eat. Aboard ship I've got my own . . . oh, never mind. And damn, damn, damn; I was hungry, too."
"Ohhh," de Courten agreed. "Hmmm . . . there is a small Jewish restaurant—well, it's more of a bed and breakfast, if not much of a bed—not too far away. I don't know how strictly kosher they are but—"
"Lead on, Hellebardier," Sally said. "Maybe I can bend a rule if it's not too much of a bend."
"Jewish is a problem, is it?" Dwyer asked, rhetorically. He bent over and picked up the phone. He dialed a number he knew by heart.
"Is the Holy Father in?" the priest asked. After a short period of silence, while Perales stared open mouthed at his underling, Dwyer said, "Joe? It's Dan . . . yes, Dan from the United States . . . not bad, you? . . . Still in the Navy . . . sort of. Yes, it has been a long time. Why, sure, I'd love to come to dinner. Do you mind if I bring my fiancée? Well, we're supposed to get married next year but Father Perales seems to think there's a problem . . . well . . . she's Jewish, Joe . . . sorta Jewish, anyway. What's that? Oh . . . sure. But he's not really a pig."
Dwyer took the phone from his ear and, handing it to Father Perales, said, with pseudo-warmth, "His Holiness would like a brief word with you."
This highly limited menu, too, was handscrawled on a blackboard. As with the prior restaurant, there was a strong Italianate flavor to the offerings.
"Well," Sally said, after scrutinizing, "at least there's no pork on the menu. And I don't see any impermissible mixes like dairy with meat . . . no tref."
De Courten had the good grace not to mention the possibility that there might be pork on the menu, going under another name. Instead, he observed, "No Posleen on the menu, either."
"I couldn't eat those either," Sally answered. "Even if they were kosher, they taste, so I'm told, vile beyond description. And that's even if you hang 'em by the heels and cut their throats to let 'em bleed out." Indicating the door, she asked, "Shall we?"
Reaching for the door's handle, de Courten pulled it open for Sally, then, apparently having thought better of it, held up one hand to stop her and, taking his own rifle in hand, preceded her inside.
If it was an unusual event to see a Swiss Guard enter the restaurant, nobody indicated it. Yes, people, the few there were, looked up but, having looked up, immediately went back to their business. In most cases this was eating. One thing de Courten did notice that was a bit unusual was the bartender bending behind his bar as if returning a weapon to a handy shelf.
"It's clear, Miss," the Hellebardier said over one shoulder. "You can come in now." He held the door open for her, at least partly for the excuse it would give him to admire her gently swaying rear end as she passed.
I think she must be the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, the boy thought. A contender, anyway.
Sally entered as de Courten held the door. The Swiss boy's eyes never more than glanced down. Once inside, she stopped only long enough to accustom her eyes to the dimmer light inside. "Thank you, Hellebardier," she said.
The maitre d', if such a title could be given in such an establishment, came over immediately. "You don't look Jewish," he said to Sally, suspiciously. Then, turning to de Courten, he added, "and by your uniform you surely are not."
"It's the only religion I've ever followed," Sally answered. "Will you seat us?" Seeing that he would, Sally added, "And while we're here, I have a few questions about the menu."
Perales was never given the chance to question the Holy Father's words. Dwyer tried not to smirk as his superior's narrow face blanched under the telephonic tongue-lashing. Within a few moments of it, the senior priest had arisen from his office chair and come to a fair approximation of the position of attention. Perales gulped once, answered, "Yes, Holy Father," and replaced the telephone on its receiver.
"It seems I was in spiritual error," Perales said, after reseating and recomposing himself. "There'll be no problem with your fiancée, Jewish or not."