Black Sunshine

Chapter 11 - For a Few of Us the Religion of the Streets was Sisterhood, but for the Rest it was Cruelty

It was moments like this that the Bishop of Ruin was glad he didn’t have a nose. The man across from him was sweating profusely. He thought about what a disgusting habit that was, and turned away. His single eye closed so he wouldn’t have to see. It didn’t work.

“Go ahead,” he said, “you were just telling me about my facility in the outskirts? Some sort of incident with the workers?”

“I’m so sorry, your eminence. Someone broke in, and stole the erm,” the man stammered again, and he could feel his anger rise again, “they unhooked the power source? And sort of, erm, ran off with it.”

The Bishop of Ruin looked at the man in barely concealed annoyance.

“Was the work disrupted?”

“A few workers snapped out of the trance, but we promptly put them down.”

“How many is a few, Stubbs?”

“17, your eminence.”

“Out of hundreds?!” he slammed his fist against the desk, “Why are you bothering me with such trivial matters?”

“Well, without the erm-”

“Yes, the power source. That girl. What about it?”

“Well, erm, without her powering the device,” Stubbs mopped his face with a white cloth from this jacket pocket before putting it back, disgusting, “the rest will start to snap out of it, and you will be left with no one to fix your-”

“No one fixing my ship is an unacceptable outcome. How did you let this happen?”

“Me? Well, I-”

“You know what, that’s not important. You failed me.”

“No, your eminence, I have a- that is to say I could-”

“Enough excuses, Stubbs.”

With a thought the man in front of him began to turn bright red. At last, his skin was a proper color. Blood poured from the man’s nose, ears, and mouth, and his flesh began to melt. Within a few minutes, he was mostly a puddle on the floor but the last remnants of his foul skeleton stubbornly refused to melt. The Bishop of Ruin snarled, an impressive feat for a being without a mouth, and the last of Stubbs was goo.

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Mother Superior entered with a bow.

“Get one of the slaves to clean this mess up, and get me the security footage from the outskirts facility.”

Mother Superior bowed again, and left silently. It was unnerving, the way they moved, but it was a necessary evil he told himself. He had to get that damnable ship fixed and leave this insane planet before it infected him with its madness. Had he known just what he was getting into, he would have told the science council where they could shove their assignment.

“I just had to jump at the chance to explore uncharted territory chasing a spatial anomaly,” the Bishop of Ruin muttered to himself.

The Bishop of Ruin was not his real name. He hated having to use the trappings of the street gangs of what the locals called a city, but in this lawless, technologically inferior wasteland he did what he must to survive.

Mother Superior returned with the tape. That’s right, tape. What an archaic and useless thing to have to use. He watched the footage from the warehouse

He watched the footage from the warehouse again. His face scrunched.

He watched it again. His fist clenched.

He watched. He grabbed the desk with both hands and flipped it across the room.

The crash did little to soothe his anger.

He took a deep breath.

He screamed.

Every piece of glass cracked and then shattered.

He breathed slowly, finally calm again. This was going to be alright, he assured himself. That girl had a chip. He could have the nuns track her down, same as they did the first time.

“Mother Superior!”

Mother Superior appeared behind him silently.

“Take me to the nuns that failed, and then gather every possible nun you can spare. When I return I want to have my office back in pristine shape.”

She bowed, and he shuddered.

He followed Mother Superior as she walked silently down the halls of the Cathedral he had purchased for this charade. She led him down the stairs to a crypt where on three stone slabs were the women whose masks had been shattered. About the only thing Stubbs had done right in this situation was bring them back to the Cathedral.

It was unfortunate that their minds were also shattered when the masks were. It was a flaw he wished he could eliminate but the ship was so close to being fixed. Even with this weakness, these three would be serviceable as nuns again. He simply needed to fix them. A simple matter for the technology he had brought here from his ship.

He sighed.

Turning to the computer banks, he typed in several long strings of code. A machine began whirring to his left, spitting webs of matter and reforming the shattered masks. Symbols flew across the screen in what would have looked like a random pattern to the casual observer. The diagnostics he ran began returning errors for the pathways that were destroyed by this defiant demon saboteur. Patching their neural networks with deft keystrokes was child’s play to him, and before too long, they were in satisfactory shape.

“That ought to do it.”

He fastened the demon masks to their faces, as they were finished being fabricated. One at a time the women sat upright with the click of a button, and stood in front of the slabs. They were shortly joined by others two or three at a time. When Mother Superior returned, the nearly two dozen nuns in perfect unsettling unison kneeled in front of him for instruction. He hated that they were necessary.

With a click, the screen behind him came to life with the footage from the warehouse incident. He had to force himself to not look at it again, so that he could remain calm, and give orders. He looked over the kneeling group of nuns in front of him as he pointed to the paused footage of the power source being carried by that demon.

“Bring her back at any cost.”