Jack Yeovil - Demon Download

It wasn't an official examination. The fight was taking place in a private gymnasium, with no assessors in attendance. But Chantal knew that without Mother Kazuko's say-so she wouldn't be advanced within the Society of Jesus.

The only thing she really had over her master was height, and so she used it as best she could, trying to keep the other woman at the end of her toe-points as she used balletic high kicks, and tapping her head with fingertip blows.

It wasn't enough, but it was somedung.

At last, it was over. Chantal's leotard was a shade darker with perspiration, but Mother Kazuko, who fought in loose white pajamas, was unaffected. She seemed never to sweat, like a lizard.

They bowed to each other, and Chantal wiped the sweat off her face into her hair and collapsed against the climbing frames on the wall. Mother Kazuko steadied her.

"It is all right to be tired, Sister," she said, her English still thckly accented, "but it is sometimes necessary to conceal your fatigue."

Chantal straightened out, and put her hands on her hips. She breathed deeply. Her pains went away, slowly.

Mother Kazuko smiled, exposing rabbit-teeth. "Good. Remember, the Calling of the Jesuit is much like the Path of Ninjutsu, the Way of Stealth."

There was a sound like a gunshot. Chantal turned in its direction, assuming a fighter's crouch, knee flexed to launch a kick.

The sound was repeated. It was a slow handclap, gradually building into applause. A priest came out of the shadows, clapping steadily.

Chantal recognized Father Daguerre, and ran to his arms.

"Sister, how you have grown."

"Sanskrit."

Father Daguerre tried to smile. "No, Sister Chantal. We are grown-up now. We must be wary of wasting our God-given abilities on show."

"She is young," Mother Kazuko said, "she is still learning."

Father Daguerre kissed Mother Kazuko's hand. "She has learned much already, Mother Superior. You have taught her well."

"I have merely brought out what the Lord put inside her."

They left the gymnasium. A troop of postulants were doing Tai Chi exercises in the courtyard. Two young priests in shirtsleeves and shorts were standing, checking instruments, by a helicoptor whose blades were circling lazily.lt was a sunny day. The choir were practicing. The dojo was giving the St Matthew Passion with the Philharmonic this commencement.

Inside the PZ, Sao Francisco was a pleasant city.

"It's been too long since you visited me, Father Daguerre. How is my momma?"

"As ever. She sends her regards."

"How long are you staying?"

"Not long. This is not a visit in the proper sense. I've come from Papa Georgi."

Chantal stopped walking. Since Georgi ascended the Throne of St Peter she had only seen him in public audiences. He bad withdrawn to some extent from his old friends. She had thought he was avoiding her.

"I am to take you to the Vatican. A mission has been found, which requires your…special skills."

A cloud passed over the sun. Suddenly, in her damp leotard, Chantal felt chilly.

"The helicopter will airlift you to SFX. I have a Vatican jet waiting there. Will it take you long to get packed?"

"I've been packed for five months, Father."

"It is good."

At last, Sister Chantal had a mission.

Chantal's first mission was a simple matter of plugging an infoleak from a church in Turin. It turned out that the Pan-Islamic Congress had a sleeper virus going around that was creating APOSTATE programs, and that the Ayatollah Bakhtiar was using the Turin hole to infiltrate the UEC Several leading Greek Exiles, active in the Macedonian Liberation Movement, had been killed by "invisible" men, assassins who didn't register on the datanet. She solved the systems breakdown simply, with some patchwork reprogramming, and traced the Ayatollah's undercover man by his palimpsest computer signature. She had wanted to bring him in for questioning, but he had suicided rather than face the interrogators of the Opus Dei. In the ruins of his hotel room, she had read the last rites over the man, praying that his God would recognize her ritual.

This was not the contemplative life she had imagined nuns led when she was a little girl. Mother Kazuko had explained to her that many of the major forms of combat had been invented by members of religious orders. English monks on the crusades, under the influence of the Biblical prohibition against spilling blood, had come up with the Friar Tuck-style quarterstaff technique as a way of crushing the skulls of the infidel without making them bleed. In the Far East, many of the martial arts had been developed for the self-defence of itinerant monks and priests. If the way of the Cross and the Sword was peculiar, it was at least well-travelled.

Since Turin, she had been deployed on average five times a year, had seen action on every continent—including Antarctica—and won herself several papal decorations she could never wear openly. Fadier Daguerre, her first master, passed her over to Mother Edwina, the English nun who served as a control for the Jesuits' covert activities, and to Cardinal Fabrizio DeAngelis, the Vatican's top computer jock. She became a valued arm of the church.

In a back street in Edinburgh, while tracing a missing Vatican banker and a suitcase full of negotiable bonds, she had been faced with the hardest choice of all. An assailant she could not easily disable had come at her with a knife. She shot without a conscious thought, as she had been trained, read the last rites over his bleeding corpse, and did her self-imposed penance for months afterwards. It had not got easier, but it was part of her calling. Like her father, she was prepared to die for her beliefs. Unlike him, she had learned to kill for them.

Between assignments, she worked out of apartments within the walls of the Vatican itself. Officially, she was a computer programmer and a translator in the Vatican Library. She saw Pope Georgi frequently, but the old intimacy between them seemed to have evaporated with his elevation. She wondered if the Pope still visited her mother. When he had been a Cardinal, Georgi had frequently dined in secret with Isabella Juillerat, and Chantal wondered sometimes if their relationship had ever run deeper than it appeared to. The Camerlengo, Cardinal Brandrcth, took an interest in her, and encouraged her to modernise the Vatican's slightly archaic computer systems. She pursued her own researches, and published widely, either as a collaborator with Father O'Shaughnessy or as sole author. She taught a course in Dublin, filling in for the Father when he was indisposed, and found students hadn't changed since her days at the Seminary. The novices still smoked dope, listened to prohibited Russian records and had thoughtless affairs.

Occasionally, she would try to use her contacts in the international intelligence community to dig into her father's still-open case file. None of the bodies who had conducted official or unofficial inquiries into the assassination had come to any concrete conclusions. It was generally agreed that the assassin had been Snordlij Svensson, a freelance working out of Rekjavik, who was himself killed within six months in an entirely unsuspicious domestic accident. Extensive examinations of Svensson's credit lines and accounting software had failed to isolate a specific employer for the Juillerat Sanction.

Having a daughter who was a sister had upset Isabella Juillerat for a while, but she had become reconciled to it. However, whenever Chantal saw her mother, Isabella would try to convince her to transfer to a more high-profile, glamorous branch of the church. With her qualifications, there was no reason Chantal should not rise to a cardinal's hat. Sooner or later, thanks to Vatican LXXXV, there would be another woman Pope, and, as Isabella pointedly said, "it has to be someone…"