The ground here felt unnervingly empty of even the soul of the Fallen. The presence of blood and flesh was out of place in the midst of these metallic beasts. For once, on this planet, Nickolai felt out of place not because he was not human, but because he breathed.
The sphere led him to a building that, despite its size, seemed lost in the midst of hundreds of square kilometers of decomposing aviation history. The hangar was a trapezoidal prism of gray, pitted metal. A massive rolling door, close to two hundred meters in width, dominated the side of the building that faced Nickolai. A ferrocrete landing pad sat in front of the hangar, blown clear of sand for about three hundred meters in every direction.
Even with the huge empty space, the wreckage that surrounded this place seemed to loom over Nickolai.
If not for a small red light glowing above a small, human-sized entrance off to the side of the huge rolling hangar door, the cleared surface of the landing pad, and the faint scent of the Fallen drifting on the air, it would have given every appearance of being long abandoned
In this desolate place, the stink of the Fallen was almost reassuring.
“Please wait for the ready light, then enter,” the sphere told him, then floated back off into the maze of dead aircraft.
Nickolai walked up to the smaller door with the red light. When he stood a meter away, the red light changed to green. In his mind he briefly pictured himself crossing some irrevocable threshold, that by passing through this door he would no longer be able to turn back.
He wondered at himself. Why would he suddenly think he had choices now?
He ducked through the too-short doorway and walked into the hangar. He felt a tingle in his artificial arm and behind his eyes as he entered, similar but more intense than what he had felt when crossing the EM shielding of the dungeon where he had met Mr. Antonio.
The tap of his claws on the ferrocrete floor echoed in the vast space as he stepped inside. The hangar was windowless and ill lit, but his eyes focused everything into sharp relief almost instantaneously.
Dominating everything was the dark silhouette of a tach-ship. Little more than a featureless shadow, it loomed over the small gathering of humans by one of its downturned stub wings. The meeting area was defined by a cluster of folding chairs, bordered by the edges of a single spotlight shining down from the scaffolding above.
Nickolai walked slowly, noting the scents and positions of the human mercenaries as he approached. He saw three under the spotlight: two males and one female. That raised his level of caution because he smelled at least two females in the air here, and that meant there were others out of sight, probably inside the ship.
The three he could see had been talking among themselves, but they stopped as soon as they noticed him approaching. They turned toward him, and he could tell by their relaxed posture that they didn’t yet see him fully.
These are warriors? he wondered to himself. Unless they had his eyes, they had blinded themselves by sitting in the best-lit place in this hangar. Until they heard him approach, they had been paying more attention to each other than to the vast unprotected space surrounding them. Had he wished to kill them, Nickolai guessed he could finish off two of them before the third realized something was wrong.
“Holy shit,” the taller of the men whispered. Nickolai suspected that he wasn’t supposed to hear that.
Nickolai walked up to the fringes of the spotlight and stood facing the three humans. He was gratified not to smell the stink of fear around them.
The shorter man walked forward. He was squat and light-skinned, the top of his head barely reaching Nickolai’s sternum. The man thrust his hand out. “I’m Staff Sergeant John Fitzpatrick.”
The other man laughed and said, “You were Staff Sergeant, Fitz. You ain’t in the Marines anymore, geehead.”
Fitzpatrick’s hand hung between them for a few moments. Nickolai knew the human gesture the man was inviting, but Nickolai didn’t move his own hand. He could not bring himself to touch the flesh of the Fallen. Unclean he might be, but there were still limits.
When Fitzpatrick realized that he wasn’t going to shake hands, he closed his hand and hooked his thumb toward the other man behind him. “And that gentleman is Jusef Wahid—”
“Jusuf,” the other man snapped.
“Sorry, Jusuf Wahid.”
Wahid was tall for a human and had darker coloring and narrower eyes than ex-Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick turned and gestured toward the last human in evidence, the female. “And this is Julia Kugara.”
The female stepped forward and looked Nickolai up and down. He realized that she was even taller than Wahid. Where Wahid was thin and bony, Kugara was lithe and muscular. She was the first human he had ever seen who didn’t appear clumsy.
“So what do we call you?” she asked.
“My name is Nickolai Rajasthan.”
Nickolai had been living with the Fallen for over a year, but he had only been seeing them for a handful of days. Despite his new eyes, he was still blind to the meanings of facial expressions and body language. Judging by tone of voice and the scent cues that surrounded him, Wahid was the most nervous at his presence.
Fitzpatrick said, “I believe I saw you a few days ago, at the military exchange.”
“Perhaps you did.”
“Small world,” Wahid said. “That’s one hell of a coincidence.”
Kugara snorted. “God, aren’t you a paranoid shit, Jusuf?” She looked Nickolai up and down, her face changing to an inscrutable human expression. “Not like Nickolai here can blend into a crowd at ProMex. Don’t mind him,” she addressed Nickolai. “Jusuf thinks everyone is a spy.”
Wahid snorted. “Everyone can benefit from a little professional paranoia.”
Nickolai growled a little in discomfort that he hoped the humans didn’t perceive. He glared at Wahid and asked, “Who exactly would I be spying for?”
The odor of fear gratified Nickolai as Wahid backed up a few steps and held up his hands between them. “I wasn’t accusing anyone of anything.”
Good, he doesn’t actually know anything, Nickolai thought.
“I was with the Occisis Marines for ten years before they cut me loose,” Fitzpatrick said. “What outfit were you with?”
“I was with no ‘outfit.’ ” Nickolai shook his head. “I served my clan, House Rajasthan.”
“What does that mean?” Wahid asked.
“It means he’s a member of the royal family on a planet that chooses their leaders based on their prowess at hand-to-hand combat.” Kugara turned to look at Wahid. “So don’t piss him off.”
“How do you know so much about it?” Wahid asked.
“My father came from Dakota,” Kugara said, “so don’t piss me off.”
Nickolai caught his breath. With all the information Mr. Antonio provided about the nature of Mosasa, his business, and the type of people he might hire, never was the possibility broached that someone from Dakota might be present.
Dakota.
Dakota was one of the original Seven Worlds, founded when the men of Earth decided that they would no longer live with their damned creations. Having stolen the mantle of God, the naked devil chose to cast his handiwork into exile. It was an exodus of all the sapient products of their genetic engineers.
But more than the chosen were exiled. The Fallen hadn’t only raised lesser creatures to become their warriors. They had twisted themselves, re-creating their own flesh into something that was not chosen and was not fallen. And those of once-human ancestry had settled on only one of the old Seven Worlds.
Dakota.
Nickolai could now see the subtle differences that marked Kugara as not quite human. Her scent was different—fainter and less offensive. Her motions were more fluid—quicker, stronger.
He had never met one of the Angels of Dakota. Of all those here, Kugara was closest to God, someone whose flesh bore the mark of God’s own creation without being marred by the sin of arroga
nce that damned the rest of the Fallen.
He might have said something, but someone chose that time to announce, “So has everyone been introduced?”
The new voice came from the shadowed perimeter of the hangar. A male voice, which was disconcerting since he had not smelled the speaker, still couldn’t smell him. Nickolai turned his head, and his eyes shifted spectrum until he saw the newcomer in the darkness. A hairless human form, as tall as Kugara and darker than Wahid. The man wore a gray coverall that covered most of his body. His most distinct feature was a massive tattoo of a fantastic creature drawn with luminescent dye; the neck of the beast emerged from the collar of the coverall, wrapped around the man’s neck, and curled around his left ear, leaving the profile of the beast’s face drawn across the side of his own.
Mosasa, Nickolai thought, giving the apparition its proper name.
At first the lack of scent made him think he watched a holo projection, but when Mosasa moved, Nickolai heard the scrape of his—its—feet across the concrete. Mosasa had been waiting, soundless and motionless, in a corner of the hangar.
Mosasa walked out into the light.
“So this is your job?” Wahid asked Mosasa.
“I am Tjaele Mosasa,” it responded.
“Yeah,” Wahid said. “Your ad didn’t say anything about hiring his kind.” He didn’t point at Nickolai, but he still felt all the human and near-human attention shift toward him. Nickolai also noticed Kugara fold her arms and take a step toward him while still facing Wahid. She didn’t say anything, and Nickolai didn’t know quite what to make of the movement.
Mosasa chuckled. “Mr. Wahid, if you find yourself queasy about heretical technologies, you’d perhaps best leave us now.”
Wahid started to say something, but Fitzpatrick placed a hand on his shoulder. It was Fitzpatrick who asked, “What do you mean?”
“It means Mosasa is no more human than I am,” Nickolai said quietly. Mr. Antonio had told him what Mosasa was, and also told him that Mosasa did little or nothing to conceal his nature. Mosasa would expect his potential employees to research him. That meant that Nickolai didn’t have to hide the fact he knew that the thing standing before them was as much a machine as the floating sphere that had led him to the hangar.
Nickolai and his kin, extending to those like Kugara, represented the first of the three Great Sins of the Fallen—what Mosasa had called heretical technologies. Mosasa represented the second, the creation of nonliving machine intelligence. To the followers of the true faith, it was even more unforgivable. With genetic engineering, humanity had only twisted life that had existed beforehand. With artificial intelligence, the Fallen had the arrogance to create thought without life.
To serve Mr. Antonio was a disgrace. Mosasa was an abomination.
And yet, Nickolai still stood here. He wondered if it was because he had completely lost the faith of his mothers, or if he had fallen so far from grace that it no longer mattered what he did.
Nickolai didn’t know how the others might feel about Mosasa’s true nature, or if they had done enough research to uncover it. In either case, Nickolai couldn’t read their reactions to his comment, and Mosasa himself didn’t elaborate or explain.
Mosasa only glanced at Nickolai, then back at Wahid. “Mr. Rajasthan is here because the BMU has scored him better than any of you on just about every combat skill outside piloting and Information Warfare.”
Fitzpatrick shook his head and asked, “Are you expecting a war?”
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Mosasa said. “If I knew what to expect, this expedition would not be necessary.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Acolyte
Everyone worships the God that promises them what they want.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
—VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)
Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) 0.98 ly from BD+50°1725
The man Nickolai Rajasthan knew as Mr. Antonio had left the planet shortly after his last meeting with the tiger. Anyone who monitored his departure from Bakunin would have watched the small short-range craft and noted a trajectory that would take the ship toward Banlieue. Even the energy signature of the departure would have matched a small one-man craft taking the sixteen light-year journey. If the observer did the calculations based on energy expenditure and tach-drive capability, they would expect Mr. Antonio to arrive at the 355-year-old Sirius colony within about three months standard.
All of which was a carefully-engineered falsehood.
The craft Mr. Antonio piloted was a rather pedestrian scout ship, a one-hundred-year-old knockoff of a two-hundred-year-old design from the Centauri Trading Company. It had been built in one of the factories orbiting Angkor back when there was a cohesive Indi Protectorate expanding for the sake of expansion. Its construction was functional and ugly, a metallic sheath wrapping the tach-drive that comprised 80 percent of its mass and 98 percent of its volume. The whole ship formed a blocky truncated cone whose outline was defined by the construction of the scout’s drives.That outline was only broken by two protrusions; the command blister on top and the single parasitic drop ship attached to a docking ring underneath.
Thanks to the Indi Protectorate’s explosive expansion during the years of the Confederacy, and its subsequent decay in the years since, these inexpensive Indi craft were ubiquitous in human space and unlikely to attract any attention even when heavily modified.
And Mr. Antonio’s craft was heavily modified.
The original tach-drives had been bulky and inefficient and had been replaced by military-grade drives roughly the same size. Those drives were an order of magnitude more efficient than the ones they replaced and would complete the journey to Banlieue in less than twenty-four days standard, if that had been where Mr. Antonio had been headed.
If he had tached to Banlieue under full power, the hypothetical observer monitoring his departure would have seen a power spike five times what would have been expected from the cranky old ship. Instead, the smaller power surge to the military tach-drives took the scout a little over a light-year away from Bakunin. From Mr. Antonio’s perspective, the journey was instantaneous. From the perspective of the rest of the universe, the journey had taken a little over thirty-four hours.
Mr. Antonio powered down every system but life support, sat in a dark control cabin, and waited.
There was nothing remarkable about the area where the scout drifted. There was nothing of any substantial mass for light-months in any direction. Even the star Bakunin orbited was little more than a bright reddish star at this distance. The small scout and Mr. Antonio were lost in the big empty, more effectively invisible than if the scout had every ECM and counter-surveillance measure known to man.
He waited, and soon, he was not alone.
About an hour after taching in to this unremarkable volume of space, the reddish dot of Kropotkin, Bakunin’s star, vanished. Stars around the missing red dot began winking out in a growing circle. The circular hole in the star field kept growing as something large approached the scout, eclipsing the universe. In a few moments, all of the visible stars vanished.
The scout shook gently from a soft impact. The blackness withdrew from the viewport as if a cloth had been pulled back over the surface of the scout. When the black curtain withdrew, the scout was no longer floating in the void. Mr. Antonio’s ship drifted into a large, well-lit ovoid space. The walls swirled with tendrils that ranged in color and texture from matte black to chrome. Several of the chrome tendrils reached out and grabbed the scout, stopping its drift.
Mr. Antonio couldn’t see all the tendrils attach themselves, but through the viewport he could see the end of two tendrils deform to mimic mating surfaces to join the surface of his scout. He looked down at the systems monitors for his ship and saw the little fuel and oxy he had used in the one light-year journey was being replaced.
He waited until the green light lit up on the docking con
trols, showing that the primary air lock had mated and there was pressurization and oxy on the other side. Once it was safe to leave the confines of the scout, he released his harness and pulled himself though the command pod and over to the primary air lock.
He cycled through, and the air lock opened to a long, white, cylindrical corridor, the walls themselves the source of illumination. The shadowless white light combined with the featureless walls to give the impression of an infinite white universe surrounding him. The only visible spatial cues were the door to the scout’s air lock and a long cable floating unsupported in the center of the corridor.
Mr. Antonio pulled himself along with the cable, floating through the white. Slowly, weight returned, pulling him down, away from the scout. By the time he reached the end of the cable a slight sense of gravity gave him a definite downward direction.
The cable terminated in the floor of a small hemispherical chamber as white as the corridor that fed into its ceiling. The floor was flat, and slightly textured, which aside from the grayish cable, gave the only visual cues to the geography around him. If it weren’t for those two objects, he could have been standing in an endless white void.
The walls did not remain unbroken. A few seconds after his feet touched the floor of the room, an aperture appeared in the wall facing him. The walls withdrew from a circular portal. Beyond was ill lit, nearly black.
Mr. Antonio walked through, and to every appearance found himself standing outside.An unbroken star field wrapped around him in every direction, the view intense enough to be painful. One reddish dot glowed brighter than the others, but the star Kropotkin, even at only a light-year distant, was almost lost in the glare from the Milky Way that wrapped the universe around him. Having just been outside, he knew he was seeing way more stars than were normally visible to the naked eye, even in the emptiness a light-year from Kropotkin.
The aperture closed behind him.
Another man stood nearby, visible as a ghostly silhouette in the starlight. The man faced away from him, staring up at the ruddy star Mr. Antonio had just come from.
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