Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Now,” Parvi said, “we just hope the natives don’t try to shoot us down.”

  The dropship shot thought the stratosphere at hypersonic speeds, roughly following the east-west pathway of the equatorial shadow. Razor-thin from orbit, this close to the surface, the shadow covered a hundred kilometers easily. They had dropped far enough down so that only one edge was visible on the ground. Above them, the ring was a seam in the sky, a narrow band where the shade of sky turned a darker blue.

  Wahid’s flight path took them directly into the shadow, and as the ground went dark below them, the band turned darker as it cut across the face of the sun. When they approached the landing field that had been the Eclipse’s destination, Salmagundi’s sun was nothing more than a few whips of corona above them, bisected by a black ribbon in the sky.

  “Wahid, tell me that thing isn’t getting bigger.”

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s not getting bigger. It’s getting closer.”

  “Abbas,” she called over her shoulder, “you have the comm. Radio them we’re landing, and they don’t have a choice.”

  The woman glared at her.

  “Damn it, Sergeant, you might be in command, but I’m captain here until we hit dirt.”

  Abbas turned toward the comm console, and after a moment she said, “They’re unresponsive.”

  As Parvi banked on her approach, she briefly wondered if this was the right landing area, or if it had suffered from some sort of attack. But in the displays, the approach beacon was active. They were within fifty klicks now, and she could see the unlit landing field in the light- enhanced display.

  At least no one was shooting at them.

  She closed in on the airfield and saw no movement. No vehicles, air or ground, sitting on the tarmac. That made things easier, since they didn’t have any air traffic control talking them in.

  She put the dropship down in the geometric center of the landing field, giving a clear hundred-meter fire zone around the craft. Just in case.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Faith

  “Fear helps us survive. Hope makes us want to.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Mallory was only slightly surprised that the old man hadn’t come to question them. Of course, since he had mined everything from all four of their minds already and implanted it into his own, there wasn’t much left he could ask. He introduced himself as Alexander Shane and ordered Mallory and the others out of their impromptu prison.

  Armed guards led the barely ambulatory prisoners out to a small armored transport parked in an eerily empty courtyard surrounded on three sides by the short outbuildings that grew from the base of the Hall of Minds.

  The ugly black aircraft could have been the same one that had picked them up from the lifeboat.

  Everything was deathly quiet as they left the outbuilding and headed toward the open doors of the craft. Even the idling of the maneuvering fans seemed subdued in the still afternoon air. The sun hung small and white in a near-cloudless sky.

  It was quiet enough that when Dörner whispered, “What is that?” it was almost as if someone had shouted the question.

  At first, Mallory wasn’t clear what she was referring to. Then he followed her gaze and saw a narrow band of darker blue bisecting the sky from horizon to horizon, about fifteen degrees off vertical. At first it appeared it could be a strange contrail from something entering the atmosphere, but it was too straight, too even, too long.

  Shane spoke without turning around. “We don’t know. It’s a ring of material in equatorial orbit about fifty thousand kilometers out.”

  “That wasn’t here when the Eclipse tached in,” Mallory said.

  “No,” Shane told him, “it wasn’t.”

  Once the craft was airborne, heading away from the monolithic Hall of Minds, Mallory asked him, “Where are you taking us?”

  “Precisely where you want to go, Father Mallory.”

  “What?” Mallory shouted over the whine of the fans, unsure he had heard correctly.

  Shane turned to face them. He was the only one standing in the compartment, his right hand wrapped around the webbing attached to the wall. His hand trembled in a white-knuckled death grip. Shane looked thin and spectral, as if he wasn’t really there. His face wore an expression that was half pain, half resignation.

  It was an expression that reminded Mallory of Mosasa.

  “I doubt Salmagundi will survive,” he said flatly. “I was far too late to do any good.” He looked into Mallory’s eyes. “So were you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Brody said.

  “The fleet of Caliphate ships,” he said. “That was one thing. We couldn’t fight an army, but perhaps we could negotiate some accommodation, a surrender that left us some measure of our culture, our autonomy. After all, what do we care about power struggles in the remains of the Confederacy?”

  “But—” Mallory started to say.

  Shane cut him short with a sharp gesture with his left hand. “Don’t pretend to have an argument I haven’t considered. I know the history of the Caliphate as well as you—by definition. It’s moot, anyway. We aren’t facing the Caliphate.”

  “Then what are we facing?” Mallory asked.

  “The thing that consumed Xi Virginis,” Shane told him. “The creature calling itself Adam. It has given us an ultimatum. We have roughly sixty minutes left to make our decision.”

  “What decision?” Dörner asked.

  “Salvation or damnation,” Brody said. “Are we on the side of the chosen, or of the infidel?”

  “To follow him,” Shane said, “or pass the way of all flesh.”

  Outside the aircraft, the light dimmed as the sun was eclipsed by the band crossing the sky.

  “Where are we going?” Mallory asked again.

  “As I told you, the only place on this planet where you would want to go. The only place with a ground-based tach-transmitter.”

  Before Salmagundi had cut itself off, not just from the old Confederacy, but from the other colonies founded around it, it had a up-to-date starport. It built a facility where tach-ships could be repaired and refueled, and a place that could communicate with the rest of the universe. The place was completed but never really used.

  When the people of Salmagundi decided to close themselves off, there had been some discussion about destroying the base. It made some of those in power uncomfortable to have even a potential connection to things off-planet. Instead, though, the powers at the time decided to simply restrict access to the site. Over the next century and a half, the port was kept functional but restricted.

  Few outside the ruling class realized the place still existed.

  “We had ordered your ship to land there, before things started going so badly,” Shane told him. “This site is the only place where we might be able to get a message back to where you came from.”

  “Sir?” Mallory barely heard as one of the men in the cockpit called back.

  “What?” Shane turned around.

  Mallory could hear talking up forward, but couldn’t make out the words. When he turned around he looked even more pale and drawn.

  “What is it?” Mallory asked.

  Shane ignored him as he stepped into the cockpit.

  Mallory looked across at his fellow prisoners. Pak looked as if he was barely present. Dörner held his arm while he stared off at a space about three meters off of Mallory’s left shoulder.

  Brody looked out at the unnaturally dark landscape and whispered, “How can you fight something like this?”

  “You don’t,” Mallory said.

  Brody turned to look at him, “That’s kind of fatalistic, coming from a priest.”

  “We can pray.”

  “You’re a
ssuming I haven’t been.”

  Mallory jerked against his crash harness as the bottom fell out of the transport. The craft plummeted like a brick and bottomed out so violently, and with such a whine from the maneuvering fans, that Mallory briefly thought they had struck the ground.

  “What the?” Brody said as Mallory took a glance out the windows. They were still airborne, but they shot by about five meters above the treetops. He saw individual branches whipping by in the twilight. His stomach lurched as they took a sharp banking turn to the right.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Mallory said.

  Brody looked out the window, then found himself pressed against it as the ship took another banking turn to the left. “What are we evading?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m guessing that, whatever it is, it hasn’t taken any notice of us yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re still alive,” Mallory said. “This is a civilian craft, an old one never meant for anything more than search and rescue or riot control. If there’s something out there worth evading, if it sees us, it can kill us no matter what kind of piloting we try.”

  “You’re not making me feel better.”

  Shouting erupted from the cockpit.

  “What’s going on up—” Brody’s question was cut off by a gasp as the aircraft descended with a nasty crunch. What little light came through the eclipse- shadowed windows was cut by half as the craft decelerated with an angry whine from the maneuvering fans. Mallory looked out the windows, and to his amazement saw tree trunks speeding by mere meters from the skin of the aircraft.

  God, please let us have a good pilot.

  Mallory knew they must have slowed down to a fraction of the speed they had been going in the open air, but the proximity of the trees with their four-meter-diameter trunks made it feel that they had accelerated. Talking was impossible between the sudden violent vibrations from the fans and the sudden jerks as the pilot flew left, right, up, down, avoiding the trees reaching to knock them out of the sky.

  They flew through old growth, massive trees far apart from each other, but it still seemed impossible to maneuver, a flying camel through a forest of needles. It couldn’t last.

  It didn’t.

  Mallory watched out the window, transfixed, as they rode a three-dimensional slalom through the trees. Then they came close to an ancient monster that must have had a fifteen-meter-diameter trunk. The housing on the left forward maneuvering fan clipped the edge of the tree in a shower of bark and shredded composite. Mallory felt the crunch of the impact in the bench he sat on, shaking the floor of the craft.

  It looked as if the glancing blow was only cosmetic. But the vibration through the floor continued and increased in magnitude. The fan housing shook worse, shedding more composite, the vibration turning the edges of the machine fuzzy and indistinct. A high- pitched, arrhythmic whine filled the cabin, and then the fan exploded, sending spinning fragments of itself in every direction, pitching the whole machine in a dangerous dive in the direction of the now-absent thrust.

  God must have listened to his prayer, because their pilot avoided an uncontrolled death tumble. Just as the aircraft started to rotate nose down around the pivot of the contragrav providing its lift, the pilot cut power to the contragrav and throttled the fans back enough to turn the tumble into a controlled dive. Once the tumble stopped, the pilot brought the remaining forward fan back up to flatten out their angle of attack. They leveled out so close to the ground that Mallory lost all visibility out the window from dust and debris kicked up by the three still-working fans.

  They kept moving five minutes past the point where Mallory thought they should have crashed. It took another half minute to realize that the craft had managed to land.

  “Everyone out!” Shane called from the cockpit.

  The militiamen grabbed the quartet of prisoners and shoved them out of the aircraft just as the side doors slid open. Mallory stumbled out into a semi-clearing in the woods where dust and dead leaves were still settling from their arrival. The fans still whined as they spun down. Above them, a break in the canopy a hundred meters above showed a slice of deep purple sky cut in two by a black band.

  Mallory took a few steps, wobbly from the invasive surgery and from the hellish flight, staring up at the slice of sky he could see between the shadowy trees.

  “It’s gotten bigger,” he whispered.

  The three other prisoners walked up next to him. Brody looked up at the sky. Dörner led Pak, who followed her like an automaton.

  “You’re right,” Brody said. “It is bigger.”

  Back by the aircraft, Shane stepped out of the open door and faced them and the six militiamen. “We have a problem.” Mallory wasn’t certain if Shane was addressing the troops or the prisoners, maybe both. “I had hoped that the fact the facility wasn’t active might have prevented it from being an obvious target. Our visitors seemed to have decided otherwise. There’s a dropship bearing Caliphate markings in the landing quad.”

  Dörner shook her head. “You must be kidding me,” she whispered.

  “The ship, from the profile, is based off of a Medina-class troop carrier. That means perfunctory weaponry, only really useful in air-to-air situations. So it is likely that the ship itself will not pose a threat. But it does mean we may have anywhere up to three units of heavy infantry to a full-blown ground cav unit—”

  Mallory listened to Shane’s analysis and realized he was listening to his own training speaking. It made Mallory slightly sick to listen to Shane repeat knowledge of Caliphate weapons and tactics, knowledge that he knew had only one source.

  “What we need to know,” Shane said, “is whether this dropship is actually still a Caliphate vessel.”

  “Sir,” one of the militia guards asked, “we’re being invaded. Does it matter who’s on that ship?”

  “Yes, it does.” Shane looked over at Mallory. “The Caliphate’s only interest here is imperialistic posturing. They just want to claim jurisdiction over this planet. This thing called Adam wants a lot more from us.”

  “Are we sure they aren’t the same thing, sir?”

  “At this point, no.” Shane gestured at Mallory. “But our mission here is to get control of the tach-transmitter so our friend Mallory can send a message off to his friends in the Vatican. You don’t have a problem with that, Father Mallory, do you?”

  Mallory shook his head. It was, in fact, his only hope for accomplishing his mission here. The disturbing thing was what it implied about the situation on the ground here. Shane couldn’t expect a response of any kind before Salmagundi collapsed. The tach-transmission itself would take over a month to reach the core systems.

  If they made it to the transmitter, it was likely to be their last act before Adam moved on his ultimatum.

  “We only have thirty-six minutes,” Shane pointed toward the edge of the clearing. “We’re about two klicks west of the spaceport. The tach-transmitter is in the trapezoidal building to the northeast. If we’re lucky, our visitors are more interested in the ship- maintenance areas. All of you—” He waved at the militiamen. “Your job is to get Mallory inside.”

  “What about you, sir?”

  “I don’t matter. All the cities have been on their own since we lost satellite communication. Mallory needs to make the transmission so they can authenticate it. I know the proper protocol, but if they see my face, it might raise some questions. I’m going to take the scientists and try to negotiate.”

  “Negotiate what?” Mallory asked.

  “Our surrender to the Caliphate.” Shane’s thin smile was a knife wound in his face.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Shibboleth

  “Never assume that the universe is limited to a finite set of possibilities.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “I seek God in revolution.”

  —MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN (1814-1876)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Once th
e dropship hit ground, Abbas said, “Now, Captain Parvi, get out of that chair.”

  Parvi turned around to face a gamma laser. She held up her hands. “We need to—”

  “You need to shut up and follow orders, you little Hindi bitch. You became surplus the moment we landed.”

  Parvi looked at the fury in Abbas’ eyes and decided that the sergeant had reached the point where she wanted an excuse to shoot her. Parvi reached down and undid the harness and stood up.

  “You too.” Abbas pointed the laser at Wahid.

  Wahid silently undid the harness and got to his feet.

  Abbas held them at gunpoint and opened the door back into the passenger compartment where about twenty frightened techs clutched a random assortment of mismatched weapons. Abbas called out something in Arabic, then turned back to the two of them and said, “In thirty minutes, the Khalid here is going to leave and tach home. If you shut up and follow orders, you live to be the pilot.”

  Abbas detailed one of the techs to take the two of them out of the ship and out of the way. Their guard walked them about twenty meters away from the ship and had them sit down on the pitted tarmac. Back at the dropship Khalid, Sergeant Abbas kept yelling at her crew of maintenance techs in Arabic.

  At least the Khalid had left the Voice with the one set of people who knew exactly what this ship needed to keep running. Parvi looked around at the complex. The buildings appeared dark and abandoned, and the surrounding woods encroached right up to the perimeter. “Now we just hope this place has what we need,” Parvi whispered.

  Wahid looked at the sky and said, “I think we need a miracle.”

  “We’ve had four or five so far. What’s another one?” Parvi looked up at the dark ribbon across the sky and asked, “What the hell is happening here?”