“And no reinforcements,” said Bonnie. “There’s just us.”
“We don’t stand a chance, do we?” said Midnight Blue.
“Not a hope in hell,” said Bonnie Bedlam.
At first Owen and Hazel had to walk on either side of Moon, with their hands hovering over their weapons, because once the lepers recognized a Hadenman, they either ran or tried to attack him. The atmosphere got very bad very quick, until Owen identified himself, and just like that the mood changed. People came running from all over to meet the legendary Deathstalker, and once he’d vouched for the Hadenman, things calmed down a lot. Everyone wanted to meet the great hero of the rebellion, and he warmed in the glow of appreciation, and was soon at his most charming and gracious. Hazel smiled determinedly in his shadow, and did her best to be polite. Owen kept his smile steady as he clasped hands that weren’t always complete, and had a kind word for everyone. No one wanted to get close enough to Hazel to shake her hand. Soon the crowd around them had got so dense no one had room to move anymore, so Owen led the way to the compound before the main gate, and the crowd sat facing him in neat rows, filling the great open space.
Owen had never felt at ease in front of large audiences, but the hero worship was unnerving him even more, so he overcame his natural tendency for speech making and opted for a questions-and-answers session. After a little prompting, people began introducing themselves and asking questions, most of them so familiar to Owen that he could have answered them in his sleep. Soon the lepers became just another audience to him, a little better behaved than most, as he began telling them about his time in the rebellion, or at least the parts that were suitable for public consumption, with Hazel chiming in now and again with what she considered telling points. The lepers treated them both with great respect, and Owen and Hazel couldn’t help but warm to them. It had never occurred to them that the lepers might be fans of theirs just like everyone else.
Eventually Owen ran out of things to say, and introduced Moon. The audience listened quietly as he talked of his adventures with Owen and Hazel. A voice from the audience asked if he considered himself a traitor to his people, and Moon thought for a moment before finally saying no, that his people were traitors to Humanity. He actually got a soft patter of applause for that.
Time went by quickly, and Owen was surprised when Oz murmured in his ear that his hour was nearly up. Owen wasn’t sure what he’d expected from a colony of lepers—perhaps shambling, death-like figures clanging a bell and shouting, “Unclean! Unclean!” These quiet, warm, friendly people were a revelation to him. Previously, he’d seen his commitment to fight for them as a duty. Now he saw it as an honor. They’d been through so much, it didn’t seem fair to him that they should have to face the Hadenmen as well.
He announced at last that he had to leave, and a roar of protest went up. He explained that Mother Beatrice had a meal prepared for them, and the mention of the Saint’s name was all it took to clear the compound. Owen looked at Hazel.
“So, what do you think?”
“They’ll fight,” said Hazel. “But then I never doubted they would. Only hard-line fighters could survive in the face of all they have going against them, even before the Hadenmen. But God knows how long we can hold this place against an army. Moon?”
The augmented man frowned. “I confess I find it hard to understand what the Hadenmen are doing here anyway. The colonists don’t have anything worth taking. There must be something else here, something we’re missing.”
“Keep thinking,” said Owen. “If we knew what it was they wanted, maybe we could just give it to them. Or destroy it. Then maybe they’d go away and annoy someone else.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Hazel. “Once the Hadenmen find out we’re here, it might well motivate them to raze the whole Mission to the ground just to get us. We did, after all, destroy their plans for Brahmin II. And the Hadenmen have never been the most forgiving of people.”
“True,” said Moon.
“Oh, shut up,” said Owen. “I’ve got enough problems to think about.”
“I think a new one may be heading our way,” said Hazel quietly. “Take a look at what just showed up.”
They all looked, with varying degrees of disbelief, as a skeletally thin creature lurched toward them. Well over six and a half feet tall, the newcomer wore a long black dress of tatters, belted around an impossibly thin waist to support a sword on one bony hip and a gun on the other. She wore lace-up boots, long green evening gloves with holes, and a battered witch’s hat with long purple streamers flying from the top. Her face was covered with white pancake makeup, pointed up by two bright red cheeks, and metallic green lipstick and eye shadow. She moved with an uneven, determined gait, her legs barely bending, as though the knees didn’t work properly. She looked a lot like a marionette who’d cut her own strings, done something very nasty to the puppeteer, and then gone out into the world to do as much damage as possible before someone finally stopped her.
Owen let his hand drift casually down to the gun at his side. The black-clad witch lurched to a halt before him, waited a moment to make sure all her parts had caught up with her, and then glowered at Owen in what she clearly thought was a friendly fashion.
“Welcome to Hell, Deathstalker. I’m Sister Marion. Bea’s second in command. I run the place while she’s busy being saintly. I was going to be a Saint too when I was younger, but it turned out I didn’t have the right attitude. So they made me a Sister of Glory, and sent me out to kick righteous ass on the kind of missions the Church doesn’t like to talk about in public. Then I caught leprosy, and they sent me here. Bastards. Still, a nun serves God wherever she’s sent, and God knows this bunch needs all the help it can get. You can say hello now.”
“Hello, Sister Marion,” said Owen, doing his best to appear entirely unperturbed. “That’s a very striking outfit you’re wearing.”
The nun stretched her green mouth in a disturbing smile that showed far too many teeth. “I dress like this to mess with people’s heads. And the makeup and gloves help hide the skin lesions. People here will tell you I’m an eccentric. Or a loony tune. Don’t listen to them. We all have our own ways of dealing with our condition. Mine is just a little more dramatic than most. Now get your asses in gear and follow me. Bea’s got dinner waiting, and there are things we need to discuss.”
She turned around sharply, swayed for a moment, and then marched stiff-leggedly off without looking to see if anyone was following. Lepers scattered to get out of her way as she strode on, as implacable as a force of nature and twice as dangerous.
“So that’s a Sister of Glory,” said Moon.
“Yeah,” said Hazel. “I don’t know what the Hadenmen’ll make of her, but she scares the crap out of me. Did you notice she didn’t blink once the whole time she was talking to us? That nun is in serious need of psychotherapy. And possibly a hole in her head to let the devils out.”
“You don’t get invited to be a Sister of Glory because of your even temperament,” said Owen. “Personally, I think she’s the most encouraging thing I’ve seen since I got here. Just pull her pin, throw her at the enemy, and stand well back.”
“I just hope we can defuse her afterward,” said Hazel. “That is a very dangerous person.”
“You should know,” said Owen.
They set off after Sister Marion, and followed her back to the main building, maintaining a respectful distance at all times. They picked up Bonnie and Midnight along the way. Bonnie admired Sister Marion’s dress sense. Midnight managed a frosty greeting. A small crowd of colonists tried to follow them into the main building, not wanting to miss anything. The Sister explained it was a private meeting. One colonist made the mistake of objecting too loudly, and just a little too rudely, and Sister Marion head-butted him in the face. The other colonists discovered they had pressing business elsewhere and managed a semi-dignified retreat. Sister Marion led her guests inside, leaving the unconscious colonist to lie in the street outside until he remembered his manners. Or at least his name.
To no one’s surprise, the meal turned out to be mostly vegetables, spiced up with flavored protein cubes and bottles of a vicious-looking blue wine distilled from local produce. Owen didn’t recognize anything on his plate, which given his previous experiments at finding something edible in the jungle reassured him somewhat. He made polite noises to Mother Beatrice and crunched his way determinedly through one unpleasant surprise after another, then washed everything down with lots of wine, which turned out to be fierce but surprisingly palatable. Everyone drank a lot of it, except Moon. Mother Beatrice in particular put the stuff away as though it were water. No one said anything, after a few guarded glares from Sister Marion. Presumably being a Saint was hard on the nerves. Owen watched Sister Marion stab her food with knife and fork as though it might try to escape at any moment, and cleaned his plate with a sense of accomplishment, hoping against hope for a decent dessert. Unfortunately, he must have overdone the polite appreciative noises, because Mother Beatrice immediately served him a second helping. Owen smiled bravely down at his heaped plate, chewed his way slowly through something very like scarlet seaweed, and listened to Mother Beatrice talk about the planet’s history so he wouldn’t have to think about what he was eating.
The Mission had originally been nothing more than a very basic hospital and graveyard, in a clearing cut from the jungle with energy weapons and flamethrowers. It had to be renewed daily, or the jungle crept back. There was a landing pad just big enough for one ship to land and take off. A lot of the colonists had died at first. The shock of the disease, the diagnosis, and being dumped on Lachrymae Christi was simply too much for many people, and they just lay down and died.
The lepers had to bury their own dead. No one but them ever touched foot on the leper planet. The graveyard quickly became overcrowded, so the colonists let the jungle take it back. The plants consumed the bodies overnight, so no one had to watch. There were still headstones, with names and dates. For the comfort of the living, not the dead. Rows and rows of markers, with no room to walk between them. It didn’t matter.
Everyone knew Lachrymae Christi was where lepers went to die.
Mother Beatrice changed all that. Weary of the compromises and politics that were already creeping into her new Church, she made it her business to discover people who had a taste and a talent for such work, and happily handed it over to them, so she could get back to what she considered real work for a nun. And so she went to Lachrymae Christi, to give hope to the hopeless, because no one else would.
It never occurred to her that she was doing something very brave, or noble, or even self-sacrificing, risking her life in a place no one cared about, for people Humanity had discarded. She went because she thought she was needed, because she thought she could do some good.
Because she was Saint Bea.
The lepers took heart from her quiet determination not to be beaten by circumstances, or to give in to despair. She gave them back pride in themselves, and encouraged them to make as much of their lives as they could, while they still could. And she never once pushed her religion on them. To those who asked why God had allowed such a horrible thing to happen to them, she said,
God has a plan for all of us
. And to those who said they didn’t believe in God, she just smiled and said,
That’s all right. He believes in you.
The lepers worked hard because she worked harder, and believed in themselves because she believed in them. They became a colony in truth at last, establishing small settlements farther and farther out in the jungle. It was a basic kind of life, but better by far than they’d had any right to expect. Everything was going so well. Until the Hadenmen came to Lachrymae Christi.
Owen got some of this from Mother Beatrice’s words, and some from Sister Marion’s acid interventions, and some he’d known already from talking with the colonists. It fitted with what he’d previously heard of the Saint of Technos III. He studied her unobtrusively while he was eating, looking for some kind of halo, or a sense of self-righteousness, but Mother Beatrice came across as reassuringly normal and level-headed. But there was still something about her, something . . . focused. Owen wondered idly if that was how people saw him sometimes. He realized Sister Marion was snapping at Mother Beatrice, and paid attention. The Sister didn’t take any nonsense from anyone, not even Saint Bea.
“If you don’t ease up on your workload, you’ll end up in one of your own infirmary beds,” said Sister Marion angrily. She hadn’t taken her witch’s hat off for dinner, and the long plumes bobbed emphatically as she glared at Mother Beatrice. “You work harder than anyone else, and you don’t get nearly enough sleep. You’re no good to anyone dead on your feet from exhaustion. And you needn’t think I’m going to take over as head nurse. I can cope with the bandages and bedpans, but I’m no good at talking to them, or holding hands and mopping brows, and all that nonsense. That’s your department.”
“Hush, Marion,” said Mother Beatrice affectionately. “After my time on Technos III, this is a picnic. Besides, I’ve never needed much sleep.”
Sister Marion glowered at her, unconvinced. This was an argument they’d clearly had many times before, and would again.
“We need to know more about the Hadenman attacks,” said Owen, pushing away his plate. It was still more than half full, so Hazel immediately transferred its contents to her own plate. Owen wasn’t surprised. Hazel would eat anything if she was hungry enough. He concentrated on Beatrice. “How long is it between each attack? Normally?”
“Sometimes days, sometimes hours,” said Mother Beatrice. She sounded suddenly tired. “The Hadenmen first came just over a month ago. There was no warning. No ultimatums. We were completely unprepared. The first we knew was when some of the outer settlements stopped answering our calls. Then the first refugees arrived, bringing tales of death and destruction. The few who’d tried to surrender were cut down without mercy. We lost a lot of people, until I gave the order for the outer settlements to be abandoned. Then the Hadenmen came here. We’ve strengthened our fortifications, and everyone here has learned to use a weapon. The Sisters of Glory have proved excellent teachers. And then there’s Colonel William Hand, and Otto. You’ll meet them later.”