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Joe Vasicek is an independent author of speculative fiction, whose work I originally stumbled on back in 2020 through one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. Since then, I've read a couple of his other short stories (like this one, as freebies). A devout Mormon, his faith, as he notes in the Foreword here, informs all of his life including his writing; but in the SF he writes under his real name, he eschews explicit religious references. When he wants to incorporate the latter, as he does here, he writes under the pen name of J. M. Wight. This short e-story, which I ran across earlier this year, was my first introduction to his work in that incarnation, and to his series character Zedekiah Wight. (The identical last names suggest to me that the character might be something of an imagined "ideal self" for the author.) "Bloody Justice" is undoubtedly a teaser for the rest of the Zedekiah Wight corpus.

Zedekiah Wight is a fanatically religious vigilante with lethal combat skills, a penchant for quoting Scripture (his favorite book is Isaiah), and a particular zeal for stamping out sex trafficking and slaughtering sex traffickers, for which he sees himself as an instrument in God's hand. His character has some similarities to Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane (who's my favorite REH hero). But whereas Solomon is a Puritan scion of Elizabethan England, Zed lives in a far future in which the Earth has long since become uninhabitable, and humanity has spread across the stars. Since fallen human nature remains unchanged, this gives sex traffickers a much vaster scale on which to operate. Then as well as now, their "sordid business" remains illegal. But as captain of the well-armed spaceship Voidbringer, Zed and his loyal crew aren't interested in making citizen's arrests. Nominally, their primary mission is to rescue captives. But Zed takes a bloody-minded delight in inflicting lethal divine vengeance. When, early in this story, the Voidbringer intercepts what they know to be a slave ship, it becomes possible that the latter agenda might in this case preclude the former ...so the question is, which agenda trumps the other?

Our primary viewpoint character here is Eve, a super-intelligent A.I. whose holographic avatar (which "she" has internalized as a self-image) is a beautiful human woman in her 20s. She's a key part of Zed's crew, though here we're not told how she joined it; there are hints that her presence may not be wholly legal, especially since Zed's freed her from her "AI safeguards." Be that as it may, she's very committed to the partnership; she finds Zed quite interesting to work for, though even with the "emotional assessment algorithm" she's created for her own reading of his moods and character, she's not able to read him perfectly. (Since we see him through her eyes, that's an excellent narrative strategy on the author's part, preserving his protagonist's enigmatic quality.) Eve's actually a very well-drawn, and even likable character (I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of AI, but if all of its manifestations were as engaging as she is, I could be more reconciled to the technology :-) ).

Except for faster-than-light space travel (which was tacitly tolerated as legitimate even by "hard" SF purists from the very beginning of the genre's pulp magazine era in the U.S.), all of the technology here could be credibly imagined as an extrapolation from existing knowledge. This is basically straightforward action-oriented space opera, with danger, suspense, excitement and (very) bloody combat, such as might have appeared in the SF magazines of the 1920s and 30s; but here there's much more focus on character, and on human moral and spiritual issues. The tale is a quick, one-sitting read. Despite the author's Mormonism, there's nothing necessarily to indicate that Zed or his human crew are supposed to be Mormons as such. There's some mild bad language here, mostly of the d- and h-word sort, from the head villain and sometimes from Eve (we can assume that her speaking style was programmed into her by the secular-humanist programmers who created her), but none of that posed any issue for me in this context. Despite the premise, there's no sexual content.

Our villains here happen to be (or, at least, to think of themselves as) Moslems, and to be ethnic Arabs, judging from their names. This extrapolates from the fact that in the contemporary world, the only countries where slavery remains legal, and that still support a slave trade, are those where Sharia law (which regulates slavery, but doesn't forbid it) remains in force. However, that isn't to deny that in the contemporary world a great many of the traffickers who trade illegally in sex slaves are European-descended or of other ethnicities than Arab; that probably the great majority of these are of no religion rather than Moslems (and some undoubtedly profess other faiths); and that many Moslems would deprecate slave trading and trafficking as much as any other decent persons do. I would assume the author knows this, and presumes that it would be no different in the far future. Given that assumption, I didn't take the story as Islamophobic propaganda. (If I would discover that I was wrong, it would definitely affect my rating very adversely!)

A more serious issue arises from the fact that Biblical faith and ethics sees God as preferring the repentance of the wicked rather than the death of the wicked; supports the legitimate authority of the State to establish and enforce justice (provided that it actually does so) rather than encouraging lethal vigilantism in the name of God; and has as its focus the proclamation of a message of forgiveness and redemption. Viewed from that perspective, Zedekiah Wight is not genuinely a very sterling poster boy for Christian values (though he may reflect contemporary stereotypes of what Christians are like). Nonetheless, I was prepared to view him as "a work in progress," whose spiritual journey and character arc in the subsequent works of the series remains to be seen. So I was able to accept him as he is for now, and appreciate the story on those terms.