Heretics (6 page)

The walking blasphemy that was the combined persona of Flynn and Tetsami had told him what this ebon thing was. The technologists from Titan, who had been trying to terraform a distant moon in Terra's own system, had not been destroyed by the destruction of Saturn's moon. Their minds, at least, had survived the disaster to carry their infection elsewhere.

They called themselves Proteans and had created a colony on the lawless world Bakunin, one of the only places that would suffer their existence. And as the Confederacy collapsed, that Protean colony was completely wiped out—but not before it had propagated, spending its few centuries of existence sending probes away to spread its infection to planets thousands of light-years away and millions of years in the future.

They were a very patient evil.

And it was an evil that had walked straight from the scriptures of St. Rajasthan to confront Nickolai. The black thing standing before him was the personification of the Fallen's arrogance, the embodiment of the greatest sin ever committed.

But as it spoke, Nickolai knew in his soul that it told of something worse than itself. Something present here that went beyond the great sins from the scriptures.

Something that could rip a star from the sky.

“
The other is here.
”

“The other?” Kugara asked. “What is the ‘other?'”

The Protean looked through her. “
The other is what damaged me. The other stole what we were and left only a shell. The other will turn all that is into itself.
”

“This doesn't sound promising,” she said, looking the thing up and down. “And our Protean host doesn't sound all there.”

“Don't,” Nickolai half growled though clenched teeth.

She turned to face him, lithe and muscular in her movements, her own voice nearly a growl itself. “Don't what, Nickolai?”

“Don't make light of this.”

“
I cannot repair myself. Too much of what I was is no more,
” The figure slowly turned to face Flynn, who might at the moment be Tetsami.
“You spoke of a tach-comm.
”

From the way Flynn's body backed away, Nickolai knew it was still Tetsami speaking, “The old spaceport.”

“
Where?
”

“I—”

Kugara, strangely fearless, stepped between the two. “What do
you
want with that?”

“
Warning must be given, to those the other would consume.
”

Kugara waved at the crystalline architecture around them and said, “You built this. You blocked a fucking
nuke!
Can't you just build a tach-comm?”

“
I am incomplete, I try but I cannot repair what I no longer know. You will tell me where this is.
”

 

Hours later, the three of them, along with the Protean, rode on a circular platform mounted in the lower third of a twenty-meter transparent sphere that tunneled through the ground, toward Tetsami's spaceport. A blue light came from a cluster of spheres that rolled on the ceiling above them as if magnetically attached to the inner surface.

Outside, Nickolai saw solid rock and earth flowing around them, held back by a black fractal net that emerged from a semifluid mass that poured through the tunnel ahead of them, flowing in complete ignorance of gravity, swirling hypnotically clockwise as it consumed the matter that sat in their way.

Behind them, the webwork that held the earth away from their sphere coalesced in another fluid mass that swirled much like the forward mass. That one seemed to be reconstructing the strata that the one ahead consumed.

It was impossible to judge how fast the Protean's vehicle swam through the rock. After an initial acceleration, their velocity was constant. The rock beyond the fractal webwork was too ill- lit and sped by too fast for even Nickolai's artificial eyes to make out any detail. He shifted through spectra, and the only hint at how fast they moved was given in the infrared, where he saw that the rock itself glowed from the friction of their passage.

That heat didn't penetrate the sphere around them. Neither did sound. The air within the sphere was oddly silent, any vibrations from the wounded rock around them muffled to nonexistence. He could hear everyone breathing.

Everyone but the black figure of the Protean.

He watched the earth slide by and barely twitched when Kugara reached up and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Nothing has changed.” He had a brief impulse to tell her of the vision he had had right after the bomb had gone off. How he had seen his original employer, Mr. Antonio, the man who had hired him to join Mosasa, who had told him to sabotage the tach-comm on the
Eclipse
.

But, of course, Mr. Antonio hadn't been there. It was only a dream. A waking nightmare before he had lost consciousness.

“Everything has changed,” she told him.

He shook his head. “We still walk among the damned.”

“Oh hell, I give up.” Kugara let go of him.

He turned to look at her, and despite the fact that he was still largely oblivious to human expression and body language, he didn't need to smell her to feel the frustration and repressed rage coursing through her body.

She stared into his face, as if she was looking for something. Whatever it was, she didn't appear to find it. “You're such a self-absorbed asshole.”

“What?”

“I won't tell you what to believe. But it would be real nice if you could get a grip. I get it. You fell down on the wrong side of your religion. So, there's nothing you can do about it?”

“No, I've passed beyond—”

She shouted him down. “Then stop dwelling on it, you narcissistic morey fuck!” The words didn't echo in the sound-dampened sphere, but they resonated in Nickolai's gut. Her voice lowered to a harsh whisper. “There is nothing as useless as someone obsessing over something he can't change.”

She left him standing there in shock. He was not used to anyone talking to him like that, even after he had been exiled. The Fallen might not have respected his position in House Rajasthan, but they respected tooth, claw, and rippling muscle.

But Kugara wasn't one of the Fallen.

She walked back over next to Flynn, and he quietly asked her, “Was that a good idea?”

“He's a big tiger,” Kugara said, “he can take it.”

 

Kugara stood on the platform, watching the black webwork crawling by outside the Protean's transparent sphere. She wondered exactly when the universe had gone off the rails of reason. She was a mercenary soldier from Bakunin. A more straightforward life you probably couldn't find anywhere. Even her dubious genetic past was, in the terms of the Bakunin Mercenary Union, more of an asset than a complication.

She had a job, she did it, and she was paid. At least until Mosasa had entered the picture.

Until Mosasa, her story had been ugly but comprehensible. Unlike a lot of Bakunin émigrés from Dakota, she wasn't running from the draconian dictatorship that gripped the second inhabitable planet circling Tau Ceti. Haven got the nonhumans like Nickolai, the moreaus, the weapons that weren't based on a human genome. Dakota got the Frankenstein monsters, the human-based creations. Unlike Nickolai's ancestors, the engineers that created Kugara's bloodline were condemned in their own time. Macro-scale genetic engineering of humans was probably the only heretical technology that was heretical before the first attempts to do it were made.

Somehow, there were still enough products of that technology to be exiled to Dakota and denied assimilation in either the human world or the smaller realm that Nickolai's kind had made. Just one ugly little planet that formed an ugly little government.

Kugara hadn't gotten the bad end of that deal. In the stratified castes that formed Dakotan society, the warriors that were born into the DPS, those that survived training at least, were probably the best treated. It meant that Kugara was one of the few Dakotan citizens who could legally leave the planet.

In her case, she had left to perform an assignment, the execution of a family of Dakotan escapees who had fled the regime. She had no problem dealing with the opposition leader and his wife. It was the teenage girl that had given her a twinge of conscience.

Sparing the girl had marked her official retirement from the DPS. Even five years afterward she still had no real understanding of why she had chosen that point to chuck her entire life and assume a dangerous exile on Bakunin. But, five years later, she understood the person she had been before her exile even less.

Mosasa must have understood her, though; because he knew exactly how to pull her into his employ. He made a credible promise to make the Dakota bounty on her head disappear. If that was all, she might still have said no, but he could do the same for the girl she had spared. So she had no choice.

After that, the universe had become surreal, twisting beyond the simple dirty facts of her own life. It started before the Protean had held a nuke at bay, even before the
Eclipse
had tached into the Xi Virginis system and discovered the star wasn't there.

Kugara thought that it had all begun when she had sat in a bar with that damn tiger Nickolai and he had informed her that Tjaele Mosasa was a construct controlled by a salvaged Race AI.

That fact shot through her world like a single neutron fired into a critical mass of questions. She could still see that chain reaction blowing apart her image of the universe, an explosion that the Protean wasn't going to save her from.

As much as Nickolai's fatalism annoyed the hell out of her, in some ways she envied him. Nickolai at least had a lens through which all of this made some sort of sense. For all his angst, he never doubted his own ability to understand the world around him. He never doubted that the world around him
could
be understood.

Kugara could use some of that faith right now. She could use some antidote to feeling she was living in the fever-dream of some drug-addled schizophrenic.

“What's it like out there?”

Kugara turned to look at Flynn. He stood next to her, looking straight ahead at the black mass chewing through the rock ahead of them. Actually, he seemed to be looking through it.

“Is it Flynn or Tetsami asking?”

He turned to look at her with a slightly wistful expression. “Both of us.”

“Out where?”

“Everywhere. The last news we know of is nearly two hundred years old.”

Kugara sighed. “I don't know if things are better or worse.”

Flynn shrugged and turned back toward the front. “Is Bakunin still there?”

Kugara shook her head. “Yeah, there's still a place called Bakunin. Me and Nickolai were part of the Bakunin Mercenaries' Union.”

“Mercenaries' Union?” From the way he cocked his head, she thought it was Tetsami talking. “When I left, things weren't that organized.”

“It wasn't?”

“In my time, everyone was their own contractor. Squad level was about as high as the hierarchy went.”

Kugara tried to imagine life like that, completely at the whims of employers without any backup. “I guess too many mercs got shafted.”

Tetsami gave her a humorless chuckle. “I suspect more that the army the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation put together never had any incentive to disband.”

“Army?”

“Long story. The short version: the Confederacy tried to take the planet over by hiring everyone with a gun.” The words trailed off and Tetsami turned away from Kugara and the view outside.

Kugara placed a hand on his shoulder.
Or is it
her
shoulder?
“Are you all right?”

“It's getting kind of hard not to think about my past. It wasn't particularly pleasant.” Tetsami wiped a hand across Flynn's face. “Now I'm embarrassing Flynn.” After a moment, she whispered, “Myself too.”

“You were in that war?” Kugara asked, feeling a sudden odd kinship with the long-dead woman living in Flynn's skull.

“Everyone who came here was. The city, Ashley, is named for a commune that was slaughtered in that war. Ugly business for an ugly planet.”

Kugara had often thought the same thing about her homeworld, Dakota. She gently squeezed Flynn's shoulder.

After a moment, Tetsami surprised her by asking, “Did you leave anyone behind on Bakunin?”

“What?”

“Husband? Lover? Girlfriend?”

Kugara lowered her hand. “No,” she said, “I've never had a knack for lasting relationships. Did you?”

“No,” Tetsami answered, “I didn't leave anyone behind.”