“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

Least, eldest—indeed only partial—Vector of the Cross, Jonah Heavener, rotated his base to view the oncoming trouble. Down that terrible way had sounded the savage call of one of these pale, hairy, ice-worshipping heathens and here his installed person had rolled upon his servile track. Life was merely over for Jonah, pain thankfully in the past, what with the opiate feed the tracked pod was linked to. If these pale heathens and dark heretics had any idea that he existed in a state of perpetual bliss among their starving, misery, watching them feud over the food scraps dropped in the center chute, they would be jealous indeed, rather than regarding him with the harsh pity that shone bleakly in their variously darkened eyes. What was more, he remained wracked with guilt—not the everyday guilt of the good catholic, not the survivor guilt that should have been his after his torso had been blown clear of Ice-Cat-7 and his hips cauterized as his crew were shredded and then slowly cooked within the smoldering hull, but the guilt of one who hovered painlessly and judgmentally in a mobility chrysalis ever looking in upon a purgatory peopled by damned souls; his Christian duty making of him a parody of the very Devil he so feared and hated, the cold hand guiding pain inward upon itself until it twisted and writhed in indescribable agony…

And here it came, the biggest, baddest heathen to drag chain, not to his own gate around the iron pile back among the deepest water source. His was the hand of pain. Food was dropped centrally, so that the Shades, the Darkies and the Pales would have to battle daily for their bread of life. The water, however, was portioned in three defensible alcoves. On those occasions when one kind had taken the water source of the other, he had simply shut down the aqua-feed until they truced out.

Jonah Heavener spent most of his time in the Observatorium, from where he could see the feed-chute court, with lens vantage over each alcove. Thirty years ago—years as were reckoned among the toplanders—when he had been freshly remitted from the Augment Academy, he had come to consciousness along this feedline and had lived vicariously through the lives of the damned beneath him, evermore immersed with their doings than with the infrequently glimpsed lives of his still whole brothers above—including James and Roland, ‘Right and Wrong’ as he had named them in his mind. He knew, deep down beneath the drug haze, that he needed a confessor, but as he withdrew into his numbness, looking out upon the damned in their doomed struggle, he had taken on the sympathetic view of the father. If the Dictor had bothered to come down here and look into his eyes, he would have been decommissioned and bio-scrapped. In the days before the return of Faith, when science and soulless ethics alone ruled, the Godless Authorities surely would have had a term for his spiritual condition. As it was, being the coldly sympathetic Devil-hand at Hell’s door was self-defining enough for him.

So he mused to himself as a gray-toothed smile that might have brightened less sedated eyes played across his face and his pod tracked to a stop before the Darkie Gate and he awaited the guest—who must have been a bad seed indeed.

For most of his term he had been partial to the Darkies—Mamluks they called themselves, harboring Muslim ambitions, mostly unversed in the precepts of Islam, but embracing it as other and opposite of The Order, which was predominantly Caucasian. They waited, squatting like great-haired vultures, naked—like all the damned—except for the genital girdle, for he who would be consigned to their mercy.

Jonah despised the Shades, the least numerous of the damned, as these were nominally Christian Latins, guilty of heresy, apostasy, sin, crime—fallen from his adhered belief. He judged them most harshly for being raised in his stern school and having turned their backs on God.

His hatred though—and his fascination—was reserved for the Pales, the increasingly numerous and militant neo-pagans, exclusively Caucasian like he, hatefully rejecting of the faith their race had adhered to for two millennia, so much so that they crudely and bitterly resurrected ancient displaced superstitions, childlike fantasies of elemental beings and the great deeds of heroes. Jonah—astonished that such brutally childish notions could take hold—at first attributed this peculiarity to a spontaneous group insanity, a mob’s madness, brought about by the ecological ruin perpetuated by the advance of the Ice.

The Order taught otherwise, as the Maledictine Creed clearly stated that all such manifestations of pre-Christian worship were, in essence, an emergence of The Lie of Satan on earth, every bit as corrosive to the Faith in Truth of man as the serpent in the Garden of Eden had been in Biblical Times. Thus Jonah’s empathy for some of these damned souls was therefore, in essence, a matter of his proximity to Hell and its Master and represented a very real attempt by The Father of Lies to subvert his faith.

How he so needed the Confessor and how he feared him!

The Precepts of The Order had proved correct oft times of late. Ten years ago, almost to this day—although he could never trust his chronological sense since his infusion with the chemical matrix necessary for his seamless interfacing with the chrysalis pod and the mobility track, to which he was wedded as one machine-like being—a copper-skinned man had been committed to his care, dressed in the ancient animal skin vestments of the animistic cults that had predominated before Christ’s original Soldiery had taken this land for his grace, only to have it subverted. By all rights and according to the vicious politics of race which this facility had been designed to thrive upon, this man should have been taken in by the Shades. However, this savage retrograte had embraced the Pales and they he, as his devilish powwows among them had become ever more intense.

Every year now, at about this time, which he knew to be in the dead of Winter—in a world ever more afflicted with that season—the Pales had attacked one or the other of the factions and taken their water source, to the point where he kept count of the years based on those regular occasions when he was called upon by The Code of Unction to dry them out until they complied. Now, just prior to what would be a more violent than hitherto attack on their enemies, an obvious chief of their kind was being conducted toward the gate of their bitterest enemies, the Darkies—or self-styled Mamluks—by his adept and inept understudies, Right and Wrong, James and Roland, ‘the Basement Warriors of Unction,’ the two vectors least desired in the field by their awesome Dictor, under the ever-drugged direction of Jonah Heavener, Turnkey of Purgatory, Augmented Vector of the Cross at the Womb of Cumberland Unction.

As the chains slinked closer, the monster dragging them grinned wider, the vectors escorting him waned smaller, the Mamluks at the gate glared the darker and the unseen Pales now clamoring in the no-man’s-land beyond howled the bolder, Jonah snarled under his breath as he charged the interior grid to keep the Mamluks back long enough for the official malediction, “Mother Mary, full of God’s Grace, I don’t mean to question your virtue, but this node is fucked as sure as a pregnant virgin in church on Sunday.”

And the Bell of Unction tolled deeply, with a reverberation that shook men off their feet and interrupted his opiate feed enough that he felt the awesome notes as an exquisite sword of pain thrust twelve times into the charred stump of his hastily-augmented ass.

And as those thunderous notes roiled the rockbound Womb of Unction, Jonah Heavener screamed unheard at the top of his lungs, “Lord, I’d rather die in a storm of heathen lead than suffer another winter as the Devil’s doorman!”

Something about the sickening pain evoked in his guts by the ninth tolling of the electric bell convinced Jonah that God had been listening, causing him to bite his lip to cover a grim grin.

To be continued in Perdition Enchained