Burn by Bill Ransom Page B

one month ago. One man, Colonel Rico Toledo, engineered this holocaust. He murdered the Master and hundreds more with full support of the papist conspiracy, here in Costa Brava and in the United States.”
    Here the huge screens rolled footage of the wall of mud that smothered ViraVax, filmed in the light of a dozen flares from an Agency Dragonfly. Ten kilometers of a lush tropical valley were scoured to stone. The valley floor was a sea of mud embedded with human debris—clothing, tools, farm machinery, twisted shards of metal buildings. But the one image that Noas had steeled himself against did not appear.
    No bodies!
    Commander Noas enhanced the image on his console and sat back in surprise.
    Where are the bodies?
    There had been no time to remove them, and the commander was one of the few who knew how many hundreds of souls lived on and under that site.
    Not counting the Innocents, of course.
    The Innocents, the Down’s syndrome workers, were not human by a technicality. But they occupied bodies, very valuable bodies, and not one of those two thousand bodies on his roster was visible.
    They must have sealed off, he thought. They’re buttoned up in there, and either Hodge doesn’t know it or he’s throwing out a smoke screen.
    More than anything, this was what Commander Noas wanted to believe. If either possibility was true, then the Master may be alive. The commander had to admit another line of thought.
    What if something got loose with the Master there? he wondered. What if the dam was our own cover for a contamination incident?
    Contamination would mean, at minimum, a six-month shutdown for inspections, which might lead to further delays. But his real worry centered on the uncomfortable visibility of this vital facility when their camouflage had been working so well.
    If the problem was only sabotage and the dam, then shutdown time would be cut from six months to the month that it might take to dig them out of there. Some value could be gleaned from exposing the Catholic terrorists. ViraVax out of commission for six months, however, meant that some very important Children of Eden would not get their prepaid replacement organs. It meant that the Catholic, the Mormon and the infidel farmers squeezed in two growing seasons where they should have none—a delicate reversal that could offer hope to the hopeless.
    With hope comes resistance.
    And with resistance came the Jesus Rangers, and the inevitable casualties among his troops. David Noas would gladly sacrifice a dozen dams if it meant keeping ViraVax on-line.
    Through his Sidekick Noas requested copies of any ViraVax transmissions from the weeks immediately prior to the incident, as well as aerial footage of the dam. The commander turned back to Hodge’s soporific non-briefing.
    “This is the time that we must act,” Hodge said. “We must become the terrible swift sword of our own deliverance, and we must strike down the forces that murdered our Master and laid waste his holy work. Our flaming sword must smite the faithless vermin and these godless idolators from the face of the earth. The Garden of Eden is at hand, and the fruits thereof shall be plucked by the faithful. Are you faithful?”
    The entire chamber shook with a resounding “Yes!”
    “Shall we take back the Garden from those who defiled it?”
    “Yes!”
    Commander Noas did not like this turn of events. Security was already on yellow alert, no other incidents had been reported and so far, no media. The deaths of the Vice-President and the President’s husband occupied the secular press completely.
    A sudden rush of Gardeners to arms in the wake of the Master’s death would guarantee total confusion among their own people. If their blood-lust outraced their selection of a leader, then the life’s work of thousands of people would be for nothing.
    Coupled with a contamination situation in Costa Brava, the Children of Eden would be fragmented, paralyzed and hunted down as anathema all over the