Voidhunter: Faith Healer (Part 2)

I closed the comms link with a thought, and turned back to the agitated, desperate people with my heart in my mouth. But Digger was on the ball, as usual. Before I even had a chance to call on them to evac, sonic compliance grenades were thrown in ahead of black-clad men bursting in through every entry and exit door. The north entry teams were humans, standard fireteams of four. The ones from the larger southern doors were comprised of three human soldiers and one robot. UMA Panteras. They superficially resembled jaguars, but their necks and spines bristled with long javelin-like spines and sensors. Even my guts froze up a little at the sight of their matte black, lethal, low-slung bodies. The robots glided into the church hall on rubberized feet, any sound masked by the warbling screams of the grenades.

"This is a sanctioned entry! All citizens will be searched and identified!" The agonizing chorus cut as the leader of each fireteam yelled, their modulated voices booming through the room. "Hands in the air! Hands in the air! All citizens must be identified!"

A wave of terror gripped the room. The civilians not already down on their knees, sunk to the ground with their hands up. The faces I could see had shifted from hopeful to fearful and furious, and there were several people - men and women both - who had the look of people preparing to disobey.

"Good people of Tapajós, be at peace." I took a step back from the front of the crowd, and held my hands up like the rest. "These men of the government are here by God's will. Just stay calm."

The SNI soldiers swept the room, using the sensors on the ends of their rifles to scan the citizen identification chips in the wrists of everyone in the room. I glanced at the Panteras. The robots had taken up secondary positions to either side of the congregation, their skin humming with electromagnetic force. The pair of UMAs were capable of killing everyone in the room within seconds.

I was the last to be scanned. Two identically anonymous soldiers thundered up onto the stage, guns leveled. The guy on the right was the one in charge of scanning me, while his buddy kept his laser sight trained on my forehead. I started placidly at the barrel of the rifle pointed at my face. A triangle of bright red dots on the soldier's featureless visor tracked and registered my features, mapping my retinas. He found no errors. The chip implanted in my wrist left pulsed and beeped, like everyone else's.

"Ricardo Kusanagi." The man to the right of me ground out my name in a modulated, electronic voice. "You are being detained by the Party for antigovernmental religious propaganda and misinformation. Consent is mandatory. Get on the floor. Now."

With my hands still up, I slowly went to my knees, then my face. Calmly. A murmur of agitation passed through the crowd, and I felt the energy in the room shift from fear to rage. Now I was the one praying: praying the villagers wouldn't decide that now was the time to rise against their omnipresent fascist government.

I was cuffed, taken up under the elbows, then hauled up to my feet. You could have heard a pin drop in the crowded room. The Panteras scanned every face for compliance, shoulder cannons twitching like nervous whirlygigs on their shoulders. The crowd, to my great relief, were cowed by their presence. Except for one person.

"Lord protect you, Father Kusanagi!" Margarite burst out, once we were almost at the door. "You are a true healer! A miracle worker! Bless you! Bless you!"

God fucking dammit, Marguerite! For the first time since the operation had started, fear clutched at my gut with an icy hand.

The Panteras didn't fall out behind the soldiers as the SNI dragged me out the southern door. There were two more of them waiting outside, camouflaged against the peeling white paint of the church's exterior. They uncloaked as we passed by them, and moved to block the doors. I heard a radio voice mutter inside the helmet of the man to my left, but only caught two words. 'Invalids'. And 'Purge'.

"No! Wait!" I gasped before I could help myself, twisting back to the doors of the church. "Please! They're innocent people, they're just-"

The Panteras at the door opened fire on the hall inside, a thousand rounds a minute. The guns drowned out the screams, but not the smell, as bullets chewed through wood and flesh. It was all I could do not to start shouting in rage as the cops unceremoniously dragged me toward a sleek, unmarked black hovercraft. The whine of the engines drowned my shouting as more men ran past us, guns clutched in their hands.

I didn't even see the rifle butt that took me out. A crack, a thump, Digger's outburst of alarm in my ear... then darkness.

***

CEIDR Mission Proposal: Earth Iteration E-H198-FOC

From: C.I.C Sokolsky

To: Master Sergeant  Seung Min-Joon ('Angkor'), D.W.O-6; First Lieutenant Douglas Digger D.W.O-COMMS

Agent,

E-H198-FOC is a close near-future reality Earth in parallel to your Reality of Origination. On this version of Earth, the world's leading superpower is the Estado Integralista Brasileiro (Brazilian Integralist State, also known as the EIB) - a fascist Brazilian state established after the end of the Second World War.

In this timeline, the Nazis achieved a Pyrrhic victory over the Allies, succeeding only at great cost to Germany and Europe as a whole. Their regime was crippled by economic collapse, controversies over the Holocaust, and ongoing localized resistance to the dominion of the Reich. This, combined with Adolf Hitler's descent into early-onset fronto-temporal dementia led to German control of the Fourth Reich collapsing within a decade of their victory. However, the network of Fascist states it left behind continued on to form the basis of the current world order.

Brazil became a fascist state in December 1945 under a Nazi-sponsored Integralist president, João Carniera. Due to luck, available natural resources, and the peculiarities of Brazilian Integralism, the EIB rose to become the world's leading educational and technological powerhouse following the downfall of Germany. The Amazon rainforest has been all but destroyed, and a massive industrial-military complex built in what is now the most heavily populated, polluted nation on the planet.

CEIDR's intervention has been triggered by recent prototype testing of autonomous, biomass-fed war machines known as UMAs (Unidades Móveis Avançadas) in Brazil. Our agents on E-H198-FOC sent us a secretly recorded private event speech in which the president of the EIB, Gustavo Feliciado Salgrada, claims to be guided by 'angels' who have given him the secrets of creating 'un-hackable, intelligent, self-replicating war machines. These machines convert any and all available biomass (including foliage, corpses and carbon) into fuel. The Agency has observed this same pattern on the remains of other Earths in the H100 cluster. The inevitable result is a 'grey goo' scenario in which the robots iterate themselves out of human control and wipe all life from the planet as they virally replicate. These 'angels' that have contacted Salgrada are almost certainly the same Vectors that successfully Voided the other Earth timelines in this cluster.

The Integralists are developing UMAs in response to hostilities with Mexico, an independent socialist country which has so far withstood all attempts at invasion and colonization. The primary strategic goal is to prevent the immediate mass development of these Vectorized UMAs. UMAs are currently only present as isolated prototypes being tested by the SNI, the state's secret police, and the technology is so-far confined only to the President's inner circle at the highest levels. To achieve our goal, you will assassinate President Salgrada, as well as kill or compromise the Chief of ARMTEK, Brazil's state weapons development agency. Our Navigators predict that the resulting chaos will result in a 5-to-15-year delay in the development of UMAs and trigger a reactionary, machismo-fueled invasion attempt of Mexico. The anticipated Mexican Allied Forces victory over Brazil will result in the complete collapse of the Fourth Reich on E-H198-FOC. Given the centralized, authoritarian nature of the EIB, our Navigators have high confidence that dispatching the leadership will lead to the desired result.

Salgrada is rumored to have some form of incurable, progressive disease, the nature of which is a heavily guarded state secret. Because of this, your talents as a Biomancer - combined with the deep religiosity of the Integralists and their idealistic faith in the power of miracles - will be the lynchpin of our strategy. You will be given a comprehensive cover alias as Father Ricardo Kusanagi, a Camillite Catholic priest of the Clerics Regular, Ministers of the Sick. Please report to the commander of Unit 6 for your training brief, list of targets, and other details.

Good luck. This will not be a clean job, but it is an important one. Another Voidout in the H100 Reality Cluster could result in the collapse of that entire Nexus.

- CIC Sokolsky.