Recoil Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  Also by David Sherman and Dan Cragg

  Preview for Wings of Hell

  Copyright

  To Second Lieutenant Jose Lugo, Jr., USA

  RVN 1967–1971

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Montgomery Homestead, Haulover

  Chad Montgomery stepped onto the porch of his house just as the sun rose over the eastern horizon. His face contorted and his jaw twisted side to side in a great yawn; his back arched and he flung his arms out to the sides to force more air into his lungs. The last dregs of sleep gone, breathing easily, he turned to face the red orb and watched its wavering disk, only its upper half yet visible. In moments the sun rose completely above the horizon, and the disk wavered less, became brighter, too bright to continue looking at. He rested his eyes on the green and red fields that spread halfway to the horizon to his east and south, to where they butted up against the native trees, and smiled. The grapelopes, beetpeas, and spinmaize were native to Haulover, but their proteins and amino acids were fully digestible by the human system and provided nutrition as good as any of the vegetables imported from older worlds in Human Space; imported seeds were so expensive to grow locally that the native foodstuffs quickly became standard fare. And they were mighty good tasting. Those fields were the Montgomerys’ third crop, and Chad was certain the harvest would bring in enough to allow him to pay off the loan he’d taken out to start the farm.

  He smiled again, hearing the homey sounds and tinkling voices of his wife, Connie, and elder daughter, Margery, as they fixed a hearty farm breakfast. A moment later the light voice of his younger son, Mitchell, joined with the voices of the women, and it was obvious from the “shoo”s and “careful there”s that the youngster was trying to help but was getting in the way more than helping.

  Chad sucked in another deep breath then blew it out. He turned his head at a footfall next to him and smiled at his firstborn, Clement.

  “Claire’s still abed?” Chad asked.

  “Sure is,” Clement said with a shake of his head. “That girl’ll never make a proper farmwife.”

  Chad chuckled. “We’ll fix that. Your mother has another one in the oven. We’ll give its care to Claire. Then she won’t be able to be a slug-a-bed.”

  “Gonna be a ‘C’ name?”

  “Of course. Clif for a boy, Corine for a girl.”

  Clement eyed his father. “You don’t know yet?”

  Chad shook his head. “We decided we’d like to be surprised this time.”

  “So how long do I have to wait before I know whether my youngest sibling is a brother or a sister? Mama’s not showing yet.”

  “Seven months.”

  Clement looked out over the fields and nodded. “Smart timing, there. The crop’ll be in, and Mama will have time to recover before the next sowing.”

  “Right. We might want to be surprised by the new one’s sex, but that didn’t mean we wanted an accident.”

  Clement nodded again. He remembered his father telling him the deciding reason for the family’s emigrating was that their home world had adopted strict population-control measures, capping family sizes at three children. But Chad and Connie wanted a large family. Connie had been pregnant with Mitchell when they left to make a new home here. The first three had come at three-year intervals, but Mitchell was five years behind Claire. Thanks to the demands of settling in a new world and starting the farm, child five, whether Clif or Corine, would be four years behind Mitchell.

  From inside, they heard Connie tell Mitchell to run upstairs and drag his sister out of bed before she missed breakfast. Mitchell laughed delightedly at the prospect and tromped away to do his mother’s bidding.

  “Life is good,” Chad murmured.

  “It is,” Clement agreed.

  “Let’s—”

  Whatever Chad was going to say was cut off by Mitchell’s scream.

  Strictly speaking, Spilk Mullilee had no business being there. The constabulary was treating it as a crime scene, and the police believed that the planetary administrator would only get in the way. Haulover’s attorney general was also concerned that, if there was a political aspect to the alleged crime, the presence of the planetary administrator might jeopardize the findings of the crime scene investigation. And Haulover’s minister of war chimed in with a protest that if the incidents were the work of an unknown enemy force, the planetary administrator could be putting himself in unnecessary danger.

  Spilk Mullilee ignored them all. It was the thirteenth such incident in less than four months and, as planetary administrator, he believed it was his duty to see the site for himself. He couldn’t continue to wait idly for Robier Altman, a Confederation of Human Worlds under minister of state who also happened to be an old friend, to reply to the message he’d sent almost a month ago.

  So even though, strictly speaking, Spilk Mullilee had no business being there, he had to be present at the investigation. After all, the planetary administrator was responsible to the Confederation for everything that happened on his world.

  Looking to the east and south, Mullilee saw fields of native vegetables, stretching halfway to the horizon, rich fields that would provide nourishment for thousands once they were harvested. If they were harvested. Looking north and west, where the farmhouse and outbuildings with the machinery needed to work the farm should have been, all Mullilee saw was devastation. He’d already looked at images of the farm when the buildings had been there. Now the view was biblical—not one stone left standing on another.

  Literally.

  Everything burnable had been turned to ash. The bricks and stone pulverized to sand and dust. Even the plasteel and the metals in the farm equipment had melted to slag.

  Despite the concerns of the constabulary, Mullilee was careful to keep out of the way of the technicians who sifted through the wreckage. Mullilee flashed on a trid he’d once seen of twenty-first-century archaeologists excavating a Neolithic site, how they’d sifted dirt through a large sieve, winnowing out small bits that might be something other than dirt. Some of the techs on the site of the Montgomery homestead looked just like what he’d seen in that trid. Others, bearing objects that pinged or bonged or flashed colored lights, stepped carefully about the site, keeping off ground that hadn’t yet been sifted. Whatever they were doing was, to Mullilee, indistinguishable from magic; he knew neither the tools they manipulated nor what they did.

  What did Mullilee expect to see here, anything that the techs couldn’t find more easily and quickly than he could? Nothing, which was why he kept
off ground they hadn’t covered, and otherwise stayed out of their way, carefully not doing anything to interfere.

  He hoped the techs would find something that would tell them—and him—more than they’d gotten from the first three homesteads, and from the more recent ones that had been destroyed the way this one was. Something like what happened to the people. Eight people were missing here: the Montgomerys, their four children, and two hired hands. That brought the total missing in the thirteen incidents to sixty-seven people, people who seemed to have simply vanished, except for a few tiny bits of white stuff that may or may not have been human bone.

  A new world such as Haulover expected to lose people in the beginning. But not to have them simply vanish. With their homesteads so thoroughly destroyed.

  Office of the Planetary Administrator, Haulover

  We need help, I need help, Mullilee wrote in another message to Robier Altman. The Haulover Constabulary and the Ministry of War have concluded that the homestead destructions and missing people are the work of enemy military operations. But they have no idea who, or why. Do you have contacts who can get us help, or can you direct me to the appropriate office in the Heptagon?

  I’m desperate.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  ONE

  Home of Jimmy Jasper, Tabernacle, Kingdom

  It was sunup on the sixth day of the seventh month when Jimmy Jasper and his wife, Zamada, sat down to a meager breakfast as they did every morning at that same time. As one of the Men of the Spirit, Jimmy had no time to dawdle over his meal that morning. He had a full schedule to meet that day: visits to the sick, a funeral in the afternoon, two prayer meetings, one with the swing shift going on duty at the mines, and a planning session with other elders for the Holiness Camp scheduled to commence later that month. So, preoccupied with his pastoral duties, he dug in with hardly a word to his wife.

  The bowls of oatmeal steamed in the cool morning air and the chicory root coffee, sweetened with brown sugar and laced with goat’s milk, filled their tiny kitchen with its rich aroma. Zamada, left to her own, would have preferred real coffee, but it was expensive and Jimmy insisted on chicory root because he believed it helped with digestion. And what Jimmy Jasper wanted in his home was law; Zamada obeyed her husband as any devoted consort would, to the letter of that law.

  Jimmy had only lifted the first spoonful of oatmeal to his lips when the house shook violently and the air was split by a great explosion.

  “Accident at the mine!” Zamada said, half rising out of her chair.

  Jimmy paused, head canted toward the mines, as if anticipating another blast. A long, loud, screeching roar filled the air all about them and through the window the pair saw a brilliant flash of light. “No, I don’t think so,” Jimmy said calmly, reflectively. He stood as if in slow motion. The spoon in his hand clattered on the table unnoticed. An eerie calm seemed to have come over him. “Is it—?” he whispered. Then, “Stay here,” he ordered Zamada, and in two long strides was out the door.

  Jimmy caught his breath at what he saw outside. The sky was filled with tongues of fire almost too bright to bear looking at directly. Waves of tremendous concussive sound washed over Jimmy Jasper like a stiff breeze, ruffling his clothing, raising the dust in the street. His neighbors stood outside their houses, faces turned toward the heavens, eyes transfixed on the mighty display overhead. Someone began to wail in terror and immediately others began moaning and screaming and calling upon God to protect them. But not Jimmy Jasper. He, of all the assembled, knew positively and without question what was happening. That knowledge surged through him and suffused his spirit with the joy of heavenly rapture. He fell to his knees, his face filled with happiness, tears of glory streaming down his cheeks and arms uplifted to the sky, and he shouted in his powerful, commanding voice, “Hallelujah! Dear Father, it is the Sign! It is the Sign! Lord God Almighty, thank You! Thou hast given us the Sign!”

  The Tabernacle Rock of Ages True Light Christian Church, established two centuries before in a remote mountainous region on Kingdom, had never boasted a very large congregation, but the faithful had been true to their Pentecostal roots through all those long years. Tabernacle itself began as a riproaring, everything-goes mining camp called Hard Times. It had grown to a town of about ten thousand inhabitants by the time Jimmy Jasper was born some forty years before the Sign. The name of the town had been changed to Tabernacle by Jimmy’s great-grandfather when the members of the Rock of Ages sect came to outnumber the miners. In time, those workers who did not convert moved elsewhere.

  The miners moved not because the Rock of Ages congregation persecuted them. No, they moved on because the hand-clapping, singing, shouting, weeping congregants, speaking in tongues and rolling in the dust in an ecstasy of religious fervor, were really hard to take, especially on Saturday nights when a hardworking guy only wanted to go out and tie one on. First the whores moved on, those that didn’t convert; then the publicans; then the shops stopped selling thule and tobacco, and before you knew it, a working stiff couldn’t even pee in the street after dark without a bunch of the Jesus freaks confronting him, singing, praying, begging him to convert, the Holy Spirit virtually oozing from every pore. No, those old boys moved because the Rock of Ages people were, for the ordinary, fun-loving workingman, one colossal pain in the ass.

  So Jimmy grew up (Praise the Lord! as he often put it) surrounded by the loving, caring, righteous fold of his ancestors’ church. Long before his time the mines had come into the possession of the Rock of Ages Church, which ran them with the same rigorous enthusiasm with which its adherents read their Bibles. Jimmy worked in the mines as a young man. The labor was hard and the work made him hard, physically and mentally, and it was good because it was dangerous and made him fear his God. He joyfully joined his companions far beneath the earth, singing an old miner’s song (lyrics suitably sanitized!) as they worked:

  An angel with his glimmering light

  Guides us down into the night.

  Some dig for silver, some dig for gold

  As we lift our praise to the God of old!

  By the time Jimmy reached his twenties he discovered that he had a voice for preaching—and could he preach! His voice was so powerful with the spirit of the Lord that it rang through the chapel during services and tickled the innards of the worshippers. His preaching particularly affected the women. Jimmy Jasper was tall and handsome, broad-shouldered with an unruly mop of auburn hair and piercing blue eyes that transfixed his listeners as he preached. Sometimes women fainted, especially when he preached on a text from the Old Testament, and at such times he appeared to them as Moses himself come out of the desert or Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac or even Noah, herding them into the Ark of Paradise!

  So by the time he was forty, Jimmy Jasper was a prominent member of the Rock of Ages True Light Christian Church. “In my name is Prophecy!” he often thundered to rapt congregations, quoting from the Book of Revelation, 21:11, “ ‘Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.’ My message to you, dearly beloved, is clear as crystal: Repent or be damned!”

  The Rock of Ages sect consisted of four-and-twenty separate congregations meeting individually in homes and common buildings around Tabernacle. The sect did not approve of formal church buildings but, like the Christians of old, preferred to meet wherever the faithful gathered. Huge cathedrals were a worldly abomination and a perversion of the Word to them. So the members were free to worship wherever they wanted. They propagated their faith among themselves with prayer chains, worship services, family prayer, and mass gatherings. Formally the sect had no ministers; it was led by laymen obsessed with teaching the Gospel rather than enforcing rules or seeking power through church offices. Church hierarchies were another corruption of the Spirit that the Rock of Ages condemned as blasphemous. It avoided the power struggles so common among the larger and older denominations.

  Anyone among
the brethren could preach; all that was required was the ability to read the King James version of the Holy Bible and to demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, which, when manifested during a meeting, was seen as special authority from God to preach. Some were better at that than others, of course, and the best preachers were often demanded by their congregations to preach before them.

  Jimmy Jasper became one of the most popular of that breed, so popular, so forceful, so dynamic, that he began to take on the mantle of a leader and soon found himself, not by design, replacing many of the far older men of his church in that role. It was then that he quit the mines and devoted himself full-time to the business of the church.

  But there was one slight area of disagreement among the Rock of Ages congregations: evangelism. Propagating the Word through missionary work was a basic tenet of the sect, but in the years immediately preceding Jimmy’s birth, the evangelistic fervor had slackened. This was due, in part, to the remoteness of Tabernacle from the large population centers on Kingdom and, in part, to the lack of resources to support missionary work. Money from mining operations was needed for capital improvements and could not be diverted to other purposes because it was the only source of income for the people of Tabernacle.

  But it was the bitter opposition to their preaching by the long-established and powerful churches and sects dominating religious life on Kingdom that had stymied the sect’s evangelistic fervor. Their missionaries had been persecuted and laws had been passed to prevent their preaching in the cities and larger towns dominated by the other sects. Many members were uncomfortable with the sect’s giving in to this opposition, but in time the majority, influenced by the practical-minded visionary preachers among them, was content to wait patiently for the Revival that prophecy said would begin with a Sign from heaven. Then and only then would the Word spread among humankind, followed by the Millennium. And until that Sign was given, the Rock of Ages people would keep the flame of faith burning at Tabernacle.