Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“Praetor !”

Isaiah claps my shoulder from behind. His wide eyes stare back at me, distorted by the curve of his faceplate. “Sir, they’re dead! We need to put out the fire!”

For the first time in what seems like ages I notice the rest of my guard. The prefects stand around the corners of the room as I arranged them, covering the exits, the silver foil of their uniforms writhing with fragments of reflected flame. They grip not flamethrowers, but dousers. Part of me wonders how they could have held back; how could anyone feel the Spirit in this way, and not bring down the fire? But the Spirit recedes in me even now, and descending from that peak I can see that God’s work is all but finished here. The heathens are dead, guttering stick-figures on the floor. Their refuge has been cleansed, the altar that once concealed it lies toppled on the floor where I kicked it just—

Was it only a few minutes ago? It seems like forever.

“Sir?”

I nod. Isaiah gives the sign; the prefects step forward and spray the chapel with fire-suppressants. The flames vanish; the light goes gray. Crumbling semicremated corpses erupt in clouds of wet hissing steam as the chemicals hit.

Isaiah watches me through the smoky air. It billows around us like a steam bath. “Are you all right, sir?” The sudden moisture lends a hiss to his voice; his respirator needs a new filter.

I nod. “The Spirit was so—so…” I’m lost for words. “I’ve never felt it so strong before.”

There’s a hint of a frown behind his mask. “Are you—I mean, are you sure ?”

I laugh, delighted. “Am I sure ? I felt like Trajan himself!”

Isaiah looks uncomfortable, perhaps at my invocation of Trajan’s name. His funeral was only yesterday, after all. Yet I meant no disrespect—if anything, I acted today in his memory. I can see him standing at God’s side, looking down into this steaming abattoir and nodding with approval. Perhaps the very heathen that murdered him lies here at my feet. I can see Trajan turning to the Lord and pointing out the worm that killed him.

I can hear the Lord saying, Vengeance is mine .

An outcast huddles at the far end of the Josephus platform, leaning across the barrier in a sad attempt to bathe in the tram’s maglev field. The action is both pointless and pitiful; the generators are shielded, and even if they weren’t the Spirit moves in so many different ways. It never ceases to amaze me how people can fail at such simple distinctions: shown that electromagnetic fields, precisely modulated, can connect us with the divine, they somehow conclude that any coil of wire and energy opens the door to redemption.

But the fields that move chariots are not those that grace us with the Rapture. Even if this misguided creature were to get his wish, even if by some perverse miracle the shielding were to vanish around the tram’s coils, the best he could hope for would be nausea and disorientation. The worst—and it happens more than some would admit, these days—could be outright possession.

I’ve seen the possessed. I’ve dealt with the demons who inhabit them. The outcast is luckier than he knows.

I step onto the tram. The Spirit pushes the vehicle silently forward, tied miraculously to a ribbon of track it never touches. The platform slides past; the pariah and I lock eyes for a moment before distance disconnects us.

Not shame on his face: dull, inarticulate rage .

My armor, I suppose. It was someone like me who arrested him, who denied him a merciful death and left his body lingering in the world, severed from its very soul.

A pair of citizens at my side point at the dwindling figure and giggle. I glare at them: they notice my insignia, my holstered shockprod, and fall silent. I see nothing ridiculous in the outcast’s desperation. Pitiful, yes. Ineffective. Irrational. And yet, what would any of us do, cut off from grace? Would any straw be too thin to grasp, for a chance at redemption?

Everything is so utterly clear in the presence of God. The whole universe makes sense, like a child’s riddle suddenly solved; you see forever, you wonder how all these glorious pieces of creation could ever have confused you. At the moment, of course, those details are lost to me. All that remains is the indescribable memory of how it felt to have understood , absolutely and perfectly… and that memory, hours old, feels more real to me than now .

The tram glides smoothly into the next station. The newsfeed across the piazza replays looped imagery of Trajan’s funeral. I still can’t believe he’s dead. Trajan was so strong in the Spirit we’d begun to think him invulnerable. That he could be bested by some thing built in the Backlands—it seems almost blasphemous.

Yet there he rests. Blesséd in the eyes of God and Man, a hero to both rabble and elite, a commoner who rose from Prefecthood to Generalship in under a decade: killed by an obscene contraption of levers and pellets and explosions of stinking gas. His peaceful face fills the feed. The physicians have hidden all signs of the thing that killed him, leaving only the marks of honorable injury for us to remember. The famous puckered line running down forehead to cheekbone, the legacy of a dagger than almost blinded him at twenty-five. The angry mass of scars crawling up his shoulder from beneath the tunic: a lucky shockprod strike during the Essene Mutiny. A crescent line on his right temple—a reminder of some other conflict whose name escapes me now, if indeed I ever knew it.

The view pulls back. Trajan’s face recedes into an endless crowd of mourners as the tram starts up again. I barely knew the man. I met him a few times at Senate functions, where I’m sure I made no impression at all. But he made an impression on me. He made an impression on everyone. His conviction filled the room. The moment I met him, I thought: Here is a man untroubled by doubt.

There was a time when I had doubts.

Never about God’s might or goodness, of course. Only, sometimes, whether we were truly doing His will. I would confront the enemy, and see not blasphemers but people. Not traitors-in-waiting, but children. I would recite the words of our savior: Did not the Christ Himself say I come not bringing peace, but a sword ? Did not Holy Constantine baptize his troops with their sword-arms raised? I knew the scriptures, I’d known them from the crèche—and yet sometimes, God help me, they seemed only words, and the enemy had faces .

None so blind as those who will not see.

Those days are past. The Spirit has burned brighter in me over the past month than ever before. And this morning—this morning it burned brighter still. In Trajan’s memory.

I get off the tram at my usual stop. The platform is empty but for a pair of constables. They do not board. They approach me, their feet clicking across the tiles with the telltale disciplined rhythm of those in authority. They wear the insignia of the priesthood.

I study their faces as they block my way. The memory of the Spirit fades just enough to leave room for a trickle of apprehension.

“Forgive the intrusion, Praetor,” one of them says, “but we must ask you to come with us.”

Yes, they are sure they have the right man. No, there is no mistake. No, it cannot wait. They are sorry, but they are simply following orders from the bishop. No, they do not know what this concerns.

In that, at least, they are lying. It isn’t difficult to tell; colleagues and prisoners are accorded very different treatment in this regime, and they are not treating me as a colleague. I am not shackled, at least. I am not under arrest, my presence is merely required at the temple. They have accused me of nothing.