God's Crusade

Part One

Different Ambitions

May 2033

Mena growled to herself and slammed her index finger down so hard on the 'Delete' key that the keyboard leapt in the air, before landing back on the desk with a noisy crackle and thump. Across the small room, Marie-Claude turned and looked at the slumped shoulders of her frustrated roommate, welcoming the distraction from her own essay.

"Pissed off?" She asked in her accented English.

"Totalement...complètement et totalement énervé...totalement. Prêt à tuer la prochaine personne qui dit, Il va bien se passer bientôt." Marie-Claude grinned to herself, doubting that her friend would actually kill the next person who told her that everything would work out for the best, but she knew Philomena Middleton well enough not to asking her what was going so wrong online. Instead, she just sighed sympathetically and went back to her rather boring assignment, leaving Mena to sort out her own work or whatever she was doing, the ghost of a smile hovering on her lips as she recognised her own foolishness in her over-reaction to yet another impenetrable blockade. Marie-Claude knew that Mena would tell her what was going on in her head in time.

For the next fifteen minutes all was quiet in the room the two girls shared, the peace only disturbed by the click of their keyboards as Marie-Claude worked on her end of term paper and Mena went back to her seemingly never-ending battle against the controls buried in her computer, and via her Internet Service Provider, that were designed to ensure she could only surf 'safe' sites. Although she was a Prefect and one of the most senior girls in the school, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart who ran the convent school still limited her and all her fellow pupils to recognised sites which they deemed to be educational or informative, in line with the puritanical guidelines imposed by all Christian fundamentalists. Even then they had to be strictly 'age appropriate' according to the nuns, who seemed to think that eighteen and eight were much the same age.

It was that latter restriction that had caused Mena to hit the delete key so hard earlier. As a girl, or 'young woman' as she much preferred to think of herself, who had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday five months earlier, to be allowed only onto sites judged to be appropriate for an eleven year old at best was the ultimate humiliation. Unlike most of her fellow pupils who habitually and meekly accepted the nun's rulings, she fought an on-going battle with the limitations imposed on her by their frustrating computer controls. Certainly she was unique in the way she had never accepted that the sisters had her well penned in, and that she was never going to access sites outside those of which the nuns approved for a 'girl like her' in a million years. Every day she fought her frustrating little wars against the barriers placed in her way if she wanted to surf the web, to find out what was going on in the world outside the high walls of the convent, and after every holiday she returned hopefully to school with a memory-stick full of programmes that she had been assured would by-pass any controls. But, at the start of every term, she would discover that her allotted desk top computer had been modified so that she could not download into it the hunter-killer programmes she hoped would enable her to destroy the barriers that stood in her way, and another frustrating battle would begin, which she would inevitably lose.

The battle that had raged for years between herself and the Tech Support sister of the order of nuns who ran the school systems had been silently waged with no quarter asked or given on either side. The fact that, several years after her first attempt to bypass those annoying controls, Mena was still trying to find a way round them spoke volumes about her character and probably quite a lot about the Tech Support sister's dedication to her role in the convent too. Mena Middleton was by no means a typical convent schoolgirl, her determination and stubbornness matched only by her sparkling intelligence. But the Sister was clever too, using controls borrowed from the British Order, a Christian ally she hardly approved of but who had access to the most ingenious internet security.