Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  And those that worshiped at the altar of Proteus had, despite everything, embraced the changes that the technology had wrought within them.

  When the Protean stepped back from Nickolai’s body, the tiger appeared unscarred. Even the face was rebuilt.

  Nickolai’s chest moved with a regular rhythm. Kugara approached him and knelt to place a blood-soaked hand against the now-pristine fur on the tiger’s neck. She rested her fingers over his carotid and her shoulders shook weakly as she said, “Thank you.”

  “Symmetry allowed modeling of the missing limb. I had no surviving model for rebuilding the eyes.”

  Kugara looked down at Nickolai’s face, touching the side where he had fired a gun into his own skull. Still unconscious, he didn’t move when she lifted the lid on his left eye.

  The eye was completely black, a featureless orb mirroring the blackness of the thing that had repaired him.

  “Can he see?” Kugara asked, staring into the solid blackness of Nickolai’s new eye.

  “I used myself to model the sensory pickups. He will see as well as I. We must repair the tach-comm.”

  * * * *

  For the next fifteen minutes, the communications center was a scene of barely organized chaos. Once Nickolai wasn’t in crisis, the Salmagundi militia started balking at being ordered around by Kugara, at least until Flynn, the native who’d been carrying the shotgun, explained that they were all trying to do the same thing here: get a tach-comm message off, warning about Adam. In Flynn’s case, he called Adam the “Other.”

  It seemed an apt name.

  Flynn was also Tetsami, one of the founding members of Salmagundi, and someone who had helped build the systems for this facility.

  The presence of Flynn/Tetsami made Mallory wonder at God’s providence. The presence of the Protean made Mallory wonder if he had truly lost his way. He couldn’t help but wonder at his own path, when his goals coincided with something that was unquestionably Godless, if not pure evil.

  He stayed with Nickolai, since he wasn’t much help with the repairs. A few times, Mallory placed a hand on Nickolai’s right arm, trying to feel some sort of distinguishing feature. He couldn’t feel any. The only truly obvious sign of what had happened was, when he examined both arms, he could tell that the right one was an exact mirror image of the left, down to the markings on his fur, and a few incidental scars.

  “It’s on-line,” Kugara said from across the room. “We got the tach-comm running.”

  Flynn closed the control panel where he had replaced the last component. “So now we need to set the transmit destination.” He looked at the Protean. “Who do we call?”

  “We must warn my colony on the planet Bakunin.”

  “Uh, we can’t do that,” Flynn said.

  “We must!”

  Mallory swore the floor shook with the Protean’s words. He stood, and two militiamen reached for their useless laser carbines.

  “No,” Flynn said, “They don’t exist anymore. The Protean commune was wiped out when the Executive Command from the old Confederacy shot an orbital linac at it.”

  “No...”

  “They’ve been gone for nearly two hundred years.”

  The Protean shrank into itself. Its voice seemed to crack. “That was the only chance. They could have fought against the other. Without them it is only I. It is lost.”

  “To hell with that,” Kugara said. “We got this thing running. We’re going to transmit somewhere—”

  Mallory walked up to her. “I have some coordinates where you can aim this.”

  She looked up at him. “You’re going to call the pope?”

  “It’s why I was sent here.”

  She nodded. “Hell, if they’re expecting a call from you, maybe they’ll take all this seriously.”

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ragnar ö k

  “Never stand between an armed man and the exit.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Not the end of the world? It’s always the end of the world!”

  —Marbury Shane

  (2044-*2074)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard)

  Salmagundi - HD 101534

  Abbas didn’t take Shane’s revelations particularly well. Parvi was surprised that the woman didn’t gun them all down, right there. If anything, the potential importance of Mr. Shane made everything worse. If the man was telling the truth, he was the exact veneer of legitimacy that the Caliphate was looking for.

  And it did nothing to help Abbas get her handful of techs out of Adam’s path.

  She ordered the trio of Shane, Dörner, and Brody to an unused quarter of the landing quad, along with Parvi and Wahid. Away from Dr. Pak’s body, but not out of sight of it.

  Three nervous-looking techs held them under guard, occasionally looking up at the sky. In the time since Dr. Pak had fallen to the ground, the eclipsing band of darkness had grown to dominate the whole sky. It had also taken on a less uniform color, as if it had a granular texture or a variable opacity.

  It didn’t look as if they had enough time.

  Just as the crew around the dropship began disconnecting umbilicals to the ground station, Parvi heard someone scream out in Arabic. The only word she recognized was “Allah.” She turned in the direction of the voice.

  The sky boiled.

  What had been pockets of granular detail swelled downward and became pendulous, and dropped downward like huge drops of oil. The oil drops glowed in outline with the darker colors of the spectrum, blues and deep violets. The glow contributed to the surreal twilight.

  “This can’t be good,” Wahid whispered.

  The pulsing liquid sky illuminated itself. Electric-blue flashes traveled across it, within it, resembling lightning hidden within a thunderhead, but more regular, purposeful, slow, and deliberate.

  If the band of material girdling Salmagundi kept closing in, eventually it had to lose its integrity. That seemed to be what was happening, but rather than breaking apart, it seemed to be condensing.

  The heavy-looking drops separated from their host in waves, a slow-motion rain that filled the sky with spheres of burning violet and electric blue. There was no sense of scale, but what looked like tiny drops from the ground could have been hundreds of meters across.

  The band in the sky fragmented, composed completely now by droplets of itself, as if they were watching a holo on cloud formation stuck on continual zoom.

  Abbas screamed orders, all of which Parvi suspected boiled down to the Arabic equivalent of “move your ass.”

  The character of the light changed, taking on a rosy tint.

  One by one, the dispersed droplets suspended in the sky changed their color. Or, more likely, the atmosphere around them had begun to contribute to their appearance.

  “Wahid, you have any idea how long it takes from atmospheric entry to reach the surface assuming a free fall from infinity?”

  “That depends on the gravity, the terminal velocity of the object, what kind of atmospheric breaking—”

  “Guess!”

  “Five minutes?”

  “We’re screwed.”

  * * * *

  “I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534.1 arrived here on the tach-shipEclipse which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis. Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago—” Once Mallory started transmitting back home, Kugara talked to the six black-uniformed guys who’d come storming in with Mallory. “Who are you people?”

  “They’re Ashley Militia,” Flynn said.

  “So you guys are what passes for an army on this planet?”

  “We’re the personal guard for the Grand Triad,” one of them said, “under the command of Alexander Shane.”

  Another one asked, “Who are you?”

  “Me, I’m just a mercenary
that took the wrong job.” She looked down at the still-unconscious Nickolai. “Are we on the same side here?”

  No one denied it.

  “You guys saw the dropship out there?”

  They nodded.

  “I think we want to be on it.” She looked at the four guys without guns and asked, “Think you can carry him?” She pointed at Nickolai.

  “You want us to—”

  She turned to Flynn and asked, “So did anyone store any weapons down here?”

  “By the guard station there might be—”

  Flynn was cut off by the Protean’s voice.

  “The other is here. Now. Go. Run now.”

  The Protean actually grabbed Mallory and pulled him away from the tach-comm. “Now!”

  Mallory stumbled back from the holo and Kugara yelled, “Does anyone need to be told twice?”

  * * * *

  In moments, it appeared to Parvi as if the entire sky burned, as thousands of spheres became the heads of burning trails that obscured everything behind them.

  On the ground, the crew redoubled their doomed efforts. Parvi looked at their guards. They had their weapons tilted down at the ground, as they stared slack-jawed up at the fiery sky—

  “Put down the fucking weapon!” A woman’s voice yelled from across the landing quad. “Get on board the damn dropship! Now!”

  It wasn’t Abbas.

  Parvi turned to see Julie Kugara running at them from a trapezoidal building at the opposite end of the LZ. Parvi barely had a chance to register surprise at her survival before one of the techs aimed his weapon in her direction.

  “No!” Parvi yelled at them, but the tech’s head vanished in a haze of red mist even before the words touched her lips.

  Suddenly they were in the midst of a firefight.

  The Caliphate techs that were still outside the dropship dove for cover or converged on Kugara, who led a group of men who carried a strange mix of laser carbines and antique slugthrowers. The techs dropped as if they’d walked into a buzzsaw.

  Suddenly, someone tackled her to the ground.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw Shane looking down at her. “Stay down,” he said. “You’re the pilot.” He coughed and spat up a mouthful of blood.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “You’re not,” he wheezed and rolled off of her so she could see the right side of his topcoat soaked with blood.

  She tried to put pressure on the wound and looked up to see that one of the men Kugara led was Francis Xavier Mallory. And behind them, four black-clad men carried the unmoving body of Nickolai Rajasthan.

  This isn’t happening.

  Wahid grabbed her shoulder as a whine filled the air above them. She realized that their guards were no longer anywhere near them.

  “We got to get to the ship,” he yelled at her.

  The ground pulsed with a slowly strengthening rhythm. The whine got worse. She yelled at Wahid, over the noise, “Get his feet.”

  “Are you kidding?” he yelled back.

  She looked back at the two scientists; Brody had a busted arm, but Dörner wasn’t obviously hurt. “Dörner, help us get him to the ship.”

  “But they’re shooting—”

  Above them the sky lit up with a trail that felt close enough for her to touch. Parvi swore she felt the wind as it passed by. For a moment it burned against her retinas, a flaming teardrop of molten metal twice the size of the dropship.

  Then it slammed into the trapezoidal building, the one that Kugara had emerged from.

  Parvi felt as if the ground turned liquid under her feet, as the ripples from the impact crashed below her. She sucked in a breath tainted by the smell of burning ferrocrete and superheated metal.

  She grabbed Shane’s shoulders and yelled, “Now!”

  She pushed herself up unsteadily against ground that still pulsed, and she realized that she was feeling wave after wave of impacts, just like the one they had just witnessed.

  Brody took a leg in his good hand, and the four of them raced Shane toward the dropship. Kugara’s people were back on their feet after the shock wave, and the remnants of the Caliphate techs were retreating to the Khalid.

  Behind Kugara, Parvi saw the outline of the trapezoidal building, silhouetted against a towering fountain of glowing metal. The fountain resembled an abstract slow-motion interpretation of a volcanic eruption. Glowing tendrils twisted into the sky from the impact site, arcing out over the whole spaceport.

  “We’re so screwed,” she whispered as they made a desperate run toward the dropship. Any moment she expected one of those tendrils to collapse on them like a falling tree.

  Even if they made it, she saw several fallen Caliphate techs, and couldn’t see Abbas being particularly welcoming anymore.

  It wasn’t an issue.

  When they made it to the Khalid, Kugara and Mallory helped them up and in. Inside, Kugara’s people had definitive control of the situation. Sergeant Abbas sat, slumped in a corner, clutching a hole in her belly, and the techs had dropped or lowered their weapons.

  Parvi pushed through to the cockpit as she heard one of the Caliphate techs saying, “We don’t have room for that half-dead morey!”

  “You want me to shoot enough people to make room?” Kugara shouted back.

  Parvi dived for the controls, started as abbreviated a preflight checklist as she could get away with, and began powering up the contragrav. She called back, “Everyone on board?”

  “Everyone who’s coming!” Kugara shouted back.

  Parvi slammed the controls to seal the external door. She cranked up the contragrav and withdrew the landing skids. Everything checked out for flight on all the readouts she could make sense of— everything except the proximity radar, which was going absolutely nuts with contacts all over the place.

  Out the viewscreen the world was insane, the sky boiling with incoming meteor tracks, and a molten hydra whipping at the sky right in front of them.

  Bizarrely, the building still stood, black against the glowing base of the tendrils. She pushed the dropship back and up, to get away from the thing, and as the dropship rose, she began to see more impact sites whipping their long threads across the landscape, everywhere Parvi could see.

  She desperately searched for a part of the sky that was safe, or a low-altitude path that avoided the pulsating impact sites. But every sensor was saturated with information. No path seemed clear enough.

  Then the hydra in front of them reached for the dropship.

  Parvi tensed for the impact, but the tendrils stopped short. They hung motionless, burning in the viewscreen. She stared at a tendril hanging in midair, barely meters from the dropship.

  “Okay, you ready to fly us out of this—holy shit!”

  Parvi didn’t take her eyes off the view in front of her. “Take the nav chair, Wahid.”

  “What the hell is—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is it just sitting—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to—”

  “You’re going to shut up and get a course plotted back toward home, and you’re going to push this drive as hard as the computer will let you. We’re taching as soon as we’re safely out of the atmosphere.”

  If we ever get safely out of the atmosphere.

  She pulled the dropship back on its contragravs, away from the frozen hydra. As she did, she saw a complex shadow rippling across its glowing surface, as if it were restrained by a black net. The tendrils strained against the net, then seemed to liquefy and pour down, back to the ground, leaving a complex black webwork hanging in the air like an alien fossil.

  “What is that?” Wahid asked.

  “I don’t have any more information than you do,” Parvi replied.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Damn it, where? I can’t see any route that isn’t alive with contacts. I can’t find clear airspace anywhere.”

  “Just punch it! It’s n
ot getting any clearer.”

  Parvi had already come to the same conclusion and primed the main thrusters to blow them through the maelstrom that the upper atmosphere had become. All they could do is pull enough G’s that they limited their exposure, and hoped they slipped between the contacts.