Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  Add to that six men in body armor who were equipped as if they were riot police rather than infantry. They bore completely novel insignia with a legend that read “Ashley Militia.” Without the helmets, the men in the black armor were marked by square tattoos across their foreheads. The one with the least had four tats, the one with the most had at least seven, though some were lost under his hairline.

  Those tats grouped those guys with two of the civilians, a young guy with a single tat on his forehead, and the worst off of the injured, a hairless old man with more than a dozen of the things ringing his head. The remaining civilians were remnants of the same scientific expedition the mercenaries came from.

  As she dressed, Toni told her what else had come out.

  “The mercenaries and the science team did go as far as Xi Virginis.” Toni told her an abbreviated version of what had brought these people back to Bakunin, about the disappearance of the star Xi Virginis, about the Caliphate’s massive new carriers, about the descent of Adam to the colony planet of Salmagundi.

  “So the guys with the tattoos are from Salmagundi?”

  “Yes. As far as they know, theKhalid was the only ship to escape.”

  “Do we believe them?”

  “I think so. How much mass and energy would anyone need to launch that attack on the wormhole network?”

  “A whole star?”

  “It had to go somewhere.”

  “So what do we do now? It doesn’t sound like this Adam is going to stay put.”

  “I called together a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “That ‘one more thing.’“

  * * * *

  Nickolai Rajasthan floated alone in one of the half-filled cargo compartments of theDaedalus. Mallory hung by the open door, looking at the massive tiger, wondering if he was asleep or not. The tiger breathed evenly, his broad, striped back facing Mallory. Cargo netting floated next to him, an improvised zero-G cot, but the tiger wasn’t using it.

  Mallory drifted through the door, and Nickolai’s tail twitched.

  “What is it, priest?” Nickolai’s voice was flat, almost mechanical in comparison to the growl of barely repressed emotion Mallory had grown to expect from him.

  “You’ve been down here almost since we docked,” Mallory said.

  “Human rooms do not accommodate me well.”

  “You should be part of the discussion about what’s happening.”

  “What is there to discuss?”

  Mallory grabbed a handhold on the wall and pulled himself to a stop in front of Nickolai. The tiger raised his head and stared at him with alien black eyes. Nickolai’s feline expression had always been alien to Mallory, but now he thought he could see echoes of the shock that he saw in the human faces on board these two ships. Even the militiamen from Salmagundi showed the same mix of depression, disorientation, and survivor’s guilt. He had spent the last two days doing his best to console those who were willing to talk to him.

  “We need to talk about Adam,” Mallory said.

  “Adam?”

  “The Other, the thing that overtook Salmagundi.”

  “I know.” Nickolai touched the side of his skull next to his eye. “You saw my pointless martyrdom. I only ask what there is to discuss about Adam.”

  “We need to decide what to do.”

  “There is nothing we can do. Our actions are futile.”

  “Are they?”

  Nickolai glared at him.

  “If it was pointless, why did you do what you did?”

  “I was purging an abomination from my flesh. As the scriptures say, ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.’“

  Mallory wondered if Nikolai was intentionally baiting him with the literal interpretation of Matthew. He suspected that the tiger might be trying to push the conversation into a different track.

  Someday, Nickolai, we may debate theology. Not now.

  “Why then?” Mallory asked. “Why did you choose that moment? Why accept the implants in the first place.”

  “I was weak,” he said. “The priests were right to condemn me.”

  “Why did you condemn yourself?”

  Nickolai said nothing.

  “On Salmagundi you maimed yourself the same way the priests of Grimalkin had. Why? What sin carried that cost?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me many things back on theEclipse. None weighed this heavily on you. What changed on Salmagundi?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Priest. Nothing does.”

  “Our choices matter, Nickolai. Everything we do matters, if only to ourselves.”

  Nickolai snorted. “I chose to die an honorable death. I chose to meet my God with at least my pride intact. But here I am, my body tainted by the darkest of the Fallen’s sins. How does my choice matter?”

  “Do you want to die, Nickolai?”

  “That isn’t what...” He pulled slightly on the cargo netting and turned his head away from Mallory. Even in zero-G, his posture looked weighed down, beaten. “Leave me.”

  “No.”

  “What?” The word came out in an atavistic growl that made the deepest primate corner of Mallory’s brain scream at him to run.

  “I won’t abandon you here.”

  “Don’t taunt me!” Every rough syllable out of Nickolai’s throat screamed predator.

  “Talk to me, Nickolai.”

  The sound of an awful, coughing growl filled the cargo bay. It took a moment for Mallory to realize that Nickolai was laughing.

  “You think you can help me?” he finally told Mallory. “Why would you want to?”

  “I am called to do what I can.”

  “And you think you can do something? You think you wish to?” Nickolai’s arm shot out, grabbing the front of Mallory’s jumpsuit. Even with Mallory’s special forces training and the implants, Nickolai had pulled him in front of his snarling face before Mallory’s body had decided to react. Nickolai’s nose wrinkled, inhaling the exhaust of Mallory’s belated fight-or-flight reflexes.

  “Why? You wish to know why?” Nickolai’s voice had dropped all pretense of human enunciation. The words he spoke were still English, but twisted unnaturally by a feline tongue, teeth, and palate. The syllables distorted into growls, purrs, and hisses that were only comprehensible because of the agonizing slowness of his speech. “You are right, it was more than the unclean artifice of the Fallen grafted onto my own flesh. Do you know what I paid for that arm? Those eyes?”

  “They were payment for your service, to sabotage Mosasa’s expedition.”

  “Do you know to whom?”

  “You said his name was Mr. Antonio.”

  “Do you know to what?”

  To what? Mallory stared at Nickolai a moment, trying to decipher the meaning of the question. In some sense, up to this moment, he had assumed that Nickolai was the Caliphate mole he had been concerned about. The universe had not since given him the time to consider other possibilities of whom Mr. Antonio might represent.

  What he might represent.

  Nickolai didn’t allow him to answer. He spoke low and growling, his breath washing across Mallory’s face. “It named itself Adam.”

  Of course, Mallory thought. With the resources at Adam’s disposal, there would be agents doing his will in human space. Any form of invasion or conquest required basic intelligence about the target, and such agents usually provided more than intelligence.

  “I was in service to it. The weight of that alone ...” Nickolai tightened his grip on Mallory’s jumpsuit. Mallory hear small rips as some seams started giving way. “But the arm, the eyes; those were more Adam’s than my own. It saw what I saw, and it almost...”

  “Almost what?”

  “Almost had me kill Flynn.”

  “What?”

  “The man was repairing the tach-comm, and Adam appeared to my old damned eyes, and told me to kill him. I understood what it was then, and when I refused, my arm began to move
itself.” Nick looked at the fist balled up in Mallory’s jumpsuit and grunted, releasing his grip, allowing Mallory to drift back, away from him. “Do you still wish to save me, Priest?”

  Mallory brushed against the wall and grabbed a short handle, stopping his retreat. “You’re wrong.”

  “That’s a bold statement,” Nickolai growled.

  “It wasn’t futile,” Mallory told him. “For all the power Adam has, the one thing he wanted from you was to stop our communication. He didn’t want us to use a tach-comm. He might have succeeded the first time, but because of you he failed the second. He failed.”

  “We’ve gained nothing from it.”

  “No, Nickolai,” Mallory said. “If nothing else, we’ve gained one important thing.”

  “What?”

  “The knowledge that Adam is fallible.”

  * * * *

  Kugara pulled herself though the air lock connecting the Daedalus and theKhalid. She floated into the main body of the dropship. Shadows cloaked the passenger compartment, the lights low to conserve energy. The wounded and the corpses were gone, the wounded to the medical bay in the Daedalus, the dead into space sent to orbit Kropotkin aided by a few words from Mallory.

  Now, emptied of people and debris, the Khalid looked like a ghost ship. Aiding the impression were the damaged seats and the blood spatters on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, anywhere a zero-G droplet of blood had found an end to its path. The stains had faded from red to rust, near-black in the dim light.

  She stared into the aftermath of the escape from Salmagundi and briefly wondered whether the cost was worth it. Now that they were back in familiar territory, it looked less and less as if they had really escaped what had happened to Salmagundi. They had just gotten a little ahead of Adam. If he was behind the destruction of the wormhole network, it seemed unlikely that he was going to be content staying where they had left him.

  And our other choice was what? Offering ourselves up to him?

  She had already served one master that had required obedience bordering on worship. She had no desire to repeat the process.

  She floated, silently, until she heard steady breathing, coming from the direction of the cockpit.

  Ah, found you.

  She grabbed a wall and pushed herself in the direction of the cockpit. Pulling herself through the doorway, she found Parvi. Parvi had strapped herself into the pilot’s chair and had a number of comm channels open in holos in front of her station. Most silently scrolled text by. A couple showed static pages waiting for some sort of response.

  Parvi herself slept soundly in front of all of it. Her eyes were shut, her white ponytail floating free behind her head, her arms drifting in front of her, one hand intersecting one of the holo displays.

  “Parvi?” Kugara said.

  Parvi jerked against the chair’s harness, and her eyes snapped open. She shook her head and looked over her shoulder at Kugara. “What is it, I’m working—”

  “You’re sleeping.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We’re having a meeting.”

  “Who’s having a meeting?”

  “All of us.”

  “Which ‘us’ is that?”

  Kugara sighed. “I don’t know if you noticed, but everyone here is in the same boat. We’ve lost our employer, the Caliphate technicians have de facto deserted, and the guys from Salmagundi don’t have a planet anymore from what we can tell.”

  “And our hosts?”

  “Yes, them too.”

  “Great. What are we going to establish in this meeting?”

  “What we need to do.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. Adam and the possibility he might be on his way here.”

  Parvi grunted and disengaged the harness holding her into the seat. “Well, someone better establish a command structure, or this is going to end up messier than the last couple of days have been.”

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Conclave

  “No logical method of describing the universe can be completely wrong.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “I never met an atheist that was not just a man of faith disappointed once too often.”

  —Marbury Shane

  (2044-*2074)

  Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard)

  1,750,000 km from Bakunin - BD+50°1725

  Mallory and the tiger were the last to arrive, even though the “meeting room” was another cargo bay only a single bulkhead away.

  They slipped through the door, and Mallory could feel the air temperature rise about ten degrees just from the press of bodies. He hoped that the Daedalus’ life support was capable of handling so many warm bodies in one spot. By his count they had twenty-three people; a dozen between the Caliphate and the Salmagundi militia; the trio of civilians; the four crew members of the Daedalus; and the four remaining mercenary crew of the Eclipse.

  One of the Daedalus crew pulled herself toward him. He couldn’t tell if it was Toni or Beth. “It’s your show,” she told him.

  He moved, pulling himself along some cargo netting, until he was more or less the center of attention. He swallowed slightly. He felt an uncharacteristic bit of stage fright. Even though he didn’t minister to a congregation, he had taught and lectured, speaking to audiences larger than this for most of his life after the marines.

  This was different. Before, his authority was a given. His students never had cause to question his role as instructor. No one in an auditorium had ever shouted down his right to speak. His role here was nowhere near as clear-cut. To the survivors of theEclipse, he was a spy, little more trustworthy than Nickolai. To the natives of Salmagundi, he was part of an alien invasion that probably wiped out their planet—at the very least changed it beyond recognition. To the Caliphate technicians he was at best the representative of a rival power, at worst an enemy combatant. To the crew of the Daedalus he was just another refugee, a story little more interesting than that of anyone else here.

  He lowered his gaze and silently prayed for strength and conviction.

  “Thank you all.” He looked up at the Caliphate crew. “I asked for this meeting, not because I have any inherent authority, but because I knew it had to be done.” He turned and faced the Salmagundi militiamen. “We’ve been cut off from those whom we serve. The only direction we have now comes from ourselves.”

  “What is your point?” The challenge came from the Daedalus crew, the young man, Stefan.

  “The point,” Mallory told him, “is we face a common problem, one extending far beyond us, this ship, or even this star system. We need to agree on a course of action.”

  Someone in the Caliphate ranks snorted and one of the Salmagundi militiamen said, “What, exactly? We saw our skies turn to fire, our home disintegrating around us.”

  “The Prophet’s Voice,” one of the Caliphate men said, “was completely possessed by this thing.”

  Dr. Dörner cleared her throat and said, “The only sane thing to do is try and get out of its way.”

  “Or surrender,” Dr. Brody added.

  “Take it as God?” Another Caliphate tech spoke broken English and concluded in harsh Arabic whose negation was clear even to a nonspeaker.

  Toni or Beth spoke. “We need to get warnings out. If this Adam is as powerful as you say, everyone needs to gather what resources they can to defend themselves.”

  Someone, Mallory didn’t know who, shouted, “There’s already a war between Sirius and the Caliphate.”

  At that, the Caliphate ranks started shouting, the agitation moving across their group slowly as the English speakers translated. Their words merged together, but there was a clear assumption that some aggressive, provocative act must have sparked hostilities.

  One said something that must have offended Dr. Dörner, and she started shouting back. The shouting spread to the Daedalus crew, and then the entire room was a cacop
hony of people shouting at cross-purposes.

  Mallory said, “Please, please—”

  He was interrupted by an ear-splitting roar. The sound cut through the arguing and left a stunned silence in its wake. Nickolai said, “Allow the priest to speak.”