Gemini [WIP]

Chapter I

It was a nice day in the compound, one of the few before the stifling summer heat set in. I adjusted the reel of CAT-7 on my shoulder and dismounted my horse, walking him the last few steps over to the hitching post in front of the barn that served as the main warehouse and logistics center. A few bearded men stood gathered around talking and smoking pipes on the covered porch. Their wide brimmed hats, beards, and suspenders would have made me think Amish, if it weren’t for the highly accessorized rifles hanging from tactical harnesses they all wore. The deep shade of the porch couldn’t hide the predator’s glint in their eyes as they all looked at me as I mounted the stairs.

“Morning fellas,” I nodded and tipped the brim of my hat at the group.

“Morning, Brother Paul”, said a beefy, red-faced man with a bright orange beard. “Re-wiring the system again? I heard Brother Leon complaining the rats have been twice as hungry since we emptied the silos. Said they chewed right through the trunk line.”

I shifted the reel on my shoulder, trying to get the hard plastic reel out of the groove it had worn on the ride over. “Hadn’t heard about that, but I’m not surprised. We could use a few more cats around here. Or maybe give a couple of the boys some BB guns and let them go nuts.”

A gaunt young man at the rear of the group spoke up. “I don’t see why we bother with any of this tech stuff anyway. Just a backdoor for the degenerates to sow their poison.” He punctuated the sentence by spitting an impressive stream of tobacco juice over the railing, into the flowerbed below. A few of the other men made knowing eye contact with each other before looking down and puffing heavily on their corncob pipes.

“Now now, Brother Jude, technology is a tool given from God just like any other. The fact that it’s being abused and twisted by the sinners of these latter days isn’t anything new. God gave man all manner of tools, it is up to us to use them righteously. That rifle on your shoulder could be used for murder or to defend your family. Despite the evil being wrought by the godless, we can still use computers as a tool to bring glory to God.” He picked up a leaflet from a small pile sitting on the table near him and shook it at Jude. “Would you like to learn how to do manual typesetting to make these?”

Cowed, Jude looked at the floor and shook his head, his beard waggling. “No, Brother Samuel. You're right, of course.” He spat again, somehow contritely.

I shrugged, not really caring about the religious implications of computers. My job was to keep them running, not listen to sermons about them. I could smell the coffeepot inside, and wanted to get in before it was emptied. “Well, sounds like I’ve got a long day ahead of me then. Wish me luck with the rats.”

“Of course, we won’t keep you from your work. Good day, Brother Paul.” Samuel clapped me on the shoulder unoccupied by the reel, hard enough to make my knees buckle a little. I tried to turn my wince into a smile and nodded at the group, removing my hat as I walked into the barn. Inside, shafts of light came through at a high angle from gaps in the boards, illuminating long blades of dusty air. They fell on a mazelike confusion of crates, boxes, barrels, and a bobbing sea of women’s heads, covered by bonnets. It hummed with activity inside, the women navigating the narrow pathways around the various containers and pieces of equipment, making notes on clipboards. At the rear, under the loft, was a cluster of desks where men dressed similarly to the ones on the porch, except for the hats, which were hung on a line of pegs on the far wall.

I headed to the incongruously modern metal door between the row of hat pegs and the coffee station. The pot was still half-full, at least. The reel seemed to get heavier as I crossed the last few feet to the door and made a perfunctory knock on the door before opening it.

Inside, the room was brightly lit by a few naked fluorescent tubes mounted in a hanging metal fixture. The warm air was filled with the hum of computers and the ozone smell of hot electronics. A small vent fan mounted in the cinder block wall whined at full speed trying to exhaust heat, but was woefully inadequate. Despite the crudeness of the room, it was clean and well swept. A bank of servers flickered in the corner, neatly bundled wires running up into the ceiling.

A chubby man, white shirt stained with sweat at the collar and armpits sat behind a heavy metal desk. I could see that he had already had breakfast by the crumbs trapped in his wispy beard, which seemed to grow primarily from his neck, leaving his chin clear but for a few long whiskers. Rapidly shifting reflections danced over the surface of his thick glasses and the sheen of his sweaty forehead as he hunched over his keyboard.

“Come in, come in, and close the door before you let all the dust in here.” said Duncan, waving his hand at me without looking up from the three screens arranged on his desk. He sighed, make a few more rapid keystrokes, and leaned back in his chair to look at me while I dropped the reel with an unceremonious clang. I rubbed the groove it had worn into my shoulder and grimaced.

“You heard about the trunk line? Those damned rats went through it again. I need you to get out there, find the damage, and splice it. There’s a reel of fiber up in the loft stores, ask one of the sisters to help you find it.”

“Morning to you too, Brother Duncan. I was planning on re-running the CAT in here, since that’s been chewed up pretty well too. I was thinking we could run it in some of that PVC we-“

He cut me off, waving his hands and screwing up his face. “No time for that Paul, the trunk line has to take priority. Without that, we’re cut off from the field. This is a critical time! If we don’t-“ He cut himself off. Duncan was the chief technology officer for the Flock, as well as the spymaster. I worked with Duncan, but not for him. My role wasn’t need-to-know regarding operations. But, you spend enough time around someone and some information slips through.

I knew the missionary corps of young men and women sent out into the broader world to proselytize were serving two purposes. Ostensibly, they were there to spread the message of the Gospel as the Flock saw it, but their true purpose was reconnaissance and occasional covert operations. The Flock was grown out of one of those lovely outfits that liked to bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors pre-Schism. I wouldn’t be here if I had other choices.

[tbd] owned the airwaves, fiber, and telecom systems and most of everything else that was left after the Schism in the late 20’s. Maintaining a website for an organization as politically incorrect and oppositional as the Flock was out. In order to coordinate his little pawns, Duncan’s main means of communication via social media to coordinate them. Without the trunk line, our one connection to the greater digital world, the operation was blind.

“I’ll put the CAT runs on hold for now, then. Gonna grab some coffee and head out.”

“Yes fine, if you must. Just don’t bring it in here. You know I can’t stand the smell.” Despite being a highly competent tech nerd, Duncan was a hardliner in the ideological ranks in the compound, and eschewed caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. His only vice, to my knowledge, was a carefully hidden directory of pornography hidden deep within the compound’s computer network. I’d only found it by chance, digging around for a corrupted file a few months back. Seeing as he and I were the only people that worked in the guts of the IT systems, it was as safe a place as any to hide it. I’m not one to judge, seeing as I had my own secrets to hide.

I left the computer room, making sure to shut the door securely behind me. Obnoxious as he may be about it, Duncan was right – a dusty, drafty old barn was no place to run your IT department out of. However, it was one of the few electrified buildings available to use, so we had to take what we could get. I looked to the coffeepot and saw to my dismay that the last remaining dregs in the pot were rapidly boiling into tar. With a sigh, I looked out into the large open room of the barn, trying to pick out one bonnet from the bobbing sea of the dozens of women bustling around the crowded floor.

After a moment, I spotted Jo up in the hayloft, verifying cartridge counts on a pallet of pistol ammo. Dodging through the busy workers, I made my way up the open staircase and worked my way around the railing to her. Engrossed in her work, she didn’t notice my approach.

“Morning, Jo.” She jumped a little, and spun around, cheeks coloring as she recognized me.

“Brother Paul! You startled me! Hold on, let me finish my count.” Muttering a running count to herself, she quickly opened the small boxes of 9mm cartridges, verifying they were full. She tutted as she found a few that were missing several rows of bullets and made a note with a red colored pencil on her clipboard. Marking the incomplete boxes with an x and placing them on the top of the stack, she closed the lid of the green metal ammo box holding the boxes and snapped the catch closed with a grunt.

“Someone’s been skimming bullets again. Brother Samuel will have them flogged when he finds out who it is. It’s getting harder and harder to get shipments with the Degens expanding into Mexico.” A lock of her glossy black hair had slipped out from under the edge of her bonnet and she tucked it back in with a practiced swipe of her finger. “But that’s not why you’re here. What’s going on?”

“Seems like our mutual friends have chewed through the trunk line this time.” Rats were a constant drain on the compound’s stored goods, often seeming to chew things up out of nothing but spite, and I knew she had a special vendetta against them. I’d seen her nail several to the floor with a well-thrown knife. I knew better than to ask where she learned that skill, though. “I need a splice kit and probably 100 feet of fiber line. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“Of course, all the cables are over here.” She walked past me towards a dusty pile of shrink-wrapped cylinders stacked in a corner. Of course, I knew where we kept that stuff, I was in there often enough. I just wanted an excuse to talk to Jo. While most of the women in the compound were submissive, fearful little creatures kept under the rough hands of the men, Jo was unusually independent and had a sharp mind and a sharper tongue. Like me, she was a fairly recent “convert” to the cause. I suspected that she, also like me, wasn’t here out of ideological commitment, but rather out of a lack of other options.

It also didn’t hurt that she was rather good looking, her pale complexion and sharp features made all the more apparent by contrast when compared to the broad, placid faces and straw blond hair that most of the women and men bore in the compound. The founding families had all been of Swedish pioneer stock and hadn’t strayed too far off the farm in terms of breeding. Jo’s dark hair and wicked little smile stood out enough on their own, but combined with her intelligence and the fact that she remained unmarried a year post-baptism meant she wasn’t necessarily popular among the other women.

“How much did you need again?” She asked, ready to mark it down on her clipboard.

“I haven’t been out there yet, actually, I’m not sure but usually its not more than a hundred feet. Usually the rats get bored after twenty feet or so, but you’ve gotta replace the whole section between nodes.” God knows why they kept chewing on the stuff. I’d tasted it myself once out of curiosity, but it just tasted like plastic to me.

Jo spooled out a length of cable and put one end into my hand while she measured out the rest in sections of her wingspan. She’d done this plenty of times, it was clear.

“…eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. That should be about 100, you’ll have to trim it in the field.” She operated the built-in cutter on the reel and severed the cable with a snap. The cable maintained the shape it had been in and easily formed back into a coil in my hand. I put my arm through it and hung it from my shoulder, glad it wasn’t the CAT-7 reel again.

“Thanks, Jo. You know, I could use another pair of eyes out there finding the section that got chewed on. You feel like getting out in the sun for a bit?”

She looked around nervously. “I would like to, but I can’t just leave work here. Brother William has been working us twice as hard lately, and I’m already on thin ice for sleeping in and missing Sunday devotional.”

I hate to see a bird in a cage.

“Let me see what I can do, stay here.” Jo watched from the loft, trying not be obvious, as I made my way down to the floor and over to the carved oak desk that Brother William, the warehouse steward, sat behind a pile of ledger books, papers, and several half-empty mugs of cooled coffee. I eyed the latter enviously as I approached, keenly aware of my lack of caffeination.

“Excuse me, Brother William?” His bald pate, spotted with age and crossed by a few scant grey hairs, caught the light as he raised his head from his books and looked up at me blearily. His eyes were cloudy and jaundiced, surrounded by deep wrinkles, behind a pair of thick reading glasses. He took them off, slowly and deliberately, folding the temples and placing them in front of himself before interlacing his fingers and clearing his throat.

“Yes, Brother Paul? What’s so important you must distract me from my work? Things are busy with all the new acquisitions, you know.”

“To the point then – the trunk line’s down and I need another pair of eyes to find the problem. I’d like to take Jo with me to help.”

William leaned back in his chair, I couldn’t tell if the creaking sound was the wood or his ancient bones. He looked around the warehouse until he spotted Jo up in the loft, obviously trying not be obvious. He frowned deeply in only the way someone missing most of their teeth can do, generating more wrinkles than I thought possible on one face. He sighed and leaned forward again, carefully placing his glasses back on his nose.

“Fine, take her.” He picked up his pen and started scribbling again. “I suspect she’s been pilfering ammunition anyway, better to keep her sticky fingers out of my inventory.”

“Great, thank you Brother.” He grunted and made a dismissive motion with his hand, once again shutting out the world around him in favor of the simplicity of his figures. I turned and walked away, caught Jo’s eye and gave her a thumbs up. She met me at the door, struggling to contain her smile. I wished she wouldn’t try so hard.