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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: In a dismal future city locked in eternal warfare with unseen enemies, a bureaucrat charged with sorting out the good from the bad is confronted with his strangest prisoner ever.

eBook Publisher: Clocktower Books and Far Sector SFFH (magazine), Published: Clocktower Books, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2002

55 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [35 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [46 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [11 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [199 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [11 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [58 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [83 KB] , hiebook (KML) [83 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [53 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [9 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [12 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [42 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [20 KB]
Words: 3150
Reading time: 9-12 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The Advocate peered through a slot in the battered steel door and wondered: What is she?

A small woman huddled on a metal bench in a cell whose floor gleamed dully from many washings. A sickening aseptic smell hinted at the morning's cleaning--never quite enough to kill the fetor of old blood in the drains.

The Advocate walked across the echoing corridor to his office. He lit a cigarette and looked through the window at a patch of skyline. Rain trickled down the greasy glass.

Outside, beyond the collection of cubes comprising the Inquiry, stood the Lord's City. The outlines of the immense gray pyramids comprising its defensive perimeter were blurred with corrosive precipitation.

A distant explosion, felt rather than heard, shivered the floor underfoot. Sometimes there were several blasts an hour, but one never got used to them. Each one terrified, each one reminded of the horrendous fate if the infidels broke through the gates.

The Advocate sighed and turned back to his desk. He was a man in his fifties: portly, graying, with a deeply lined face. Smoke twirled forgotten about his head.

On the desk was a comlink with several buttons. He pushed one.

"Have the Questioner stand by. Better yet, have him come now, with his tools. Usually just the sight of them is enough to make these apostates talk."

"Aye, sir."

He felt a whiff of challenge as he smoothed down his white starched coat with the caduceus emblem on the breast pocket. In pre-Scriptural days, he knew, he would have been known as a psychiatrist. But his training would have been secular and blasphemous. How backward people had been then. But they had not had to live under perpetual siege like this. He, the Advocate, must choose certain prisoners to investigate: what was the enemy doing on the outside? With what sorts of demons did they consort in their false readings of the Book?