Prophets

  The idea of going to an abandoned commune named Samhain of all things, made Mallory feel uneasy in a way that had little to do with potential Caliphate hostilities.

  Is that the actual staging area? If the hangar was a decoy, what about us?

  Could the primary use of the mercenary team be to draw out the Caliphate? If Mallory’s assessment of the situation reflected reality, Mosasa’s actual site for his Plan B was probably far away from where they were going right now.

  Wahid piloted the stolen aircar across the desert barely three meters over the sand, topping three hundred klicks an hour. Samhain was small enough that at the speed they were going, it seemed to appear instantaneously, sprouting from the black dunes. Wahid had to bank severely and turn the aircar in a large loop around the commune before he had decelerated enough to come to a landing.

  Mallory knew that outside of the megacorps that dominated the urban centers like Proudhon and Godwin, the main political unit on Bakunin was the commune. On Bakunin, communes were sovereign political entities that he understood, at least on an intellectual level, to be much more diverse than the socialist etymology of the term might suggest. He just didn’t know quite how diverse.

  This commune was little more than a village. There were some signs that a dome had covered the site at some time in the past; ocher steel fingers pointed up from the ocean of sand in a rough circle around the perimeter. Within, buildings still stood, beaten an even bone gray by wind and weather. Windows were empty black sockets staring blindly from crumbling facades that once mimicked the Tudor style of medieval Terra.

  Wahid parked the aircar in an open stretch of sand that had once been a park, now only marked by eroding statues and long dead trees that clawed, barkless and leafless, toward the rust-colored sky.

  Mallory opened the duffel bag on the seat next to him and withdrew the plasma weapon that sat on top. He frowned. It wasn’t much use at long range and sucked energy like an overloaded tach-drive.

  “What’s up?” Wahid asked.

  “I don’t trust this,” Mallory said. He pulled out a short-barreled gamma laser, replacing the plasma hand cannon. The laser was a matte-black rectangle with an oblong hole cut in one end for a hand grip. Otherwise it was shaped, and weighed, much like a brick. Almost all of that weight came from the power cells; it was as much a power hog as the plasma cannon. However it had the benefit of accuracy, distance, and the ability to overload even military-grade Emerson fields with two or three seconds of continuous fire. He took the laser in hand and shouldered the duffel bag.

  “Trust what?”

  “Do you think Mosasa wants to risk leading the Caliphate, or whoever, to his real staging area? Does a missile attack on the hangar sound real to you? If they knew what was there, why’d they wait until after the ship lifted off to attack?”

  Wahid shrugged. “They got there late.”

  “Sure, but they knew where Kugara and Rajasthan were.”

  “Yeah, I see . . .”

  “Professional paranoia, right?”

  “Right,” Wahid dug out his own gamma laser from the duffel next to him. “Though if there’s an ambush waiting, they should have targeted us by now.”

  “Maybe they aren’t here yet—”

  “Or they’re waiting for the others.” Wahid shot the canopy back, letting in a blast of hot dry air. “Let’s get out of the open.”

  Mallory stepped out onto the black sand and felt as if he were stepping into the anteroom of purgatory, if not Hell itself. He kept watch with the laser as he pulled the duffel out and shouldered it.

  Wahid followed, stepping up next to him. “It’s like a fucking graveyard.”

  “Yeah,” Mallory said. He looked over at a trio of pitted statues that dominated the center of the clearing. Most of the fine detail had been worn away, but he could make out enough to see a trinity familiar to him from his theology studies. Three women, one barely adolescent, another obviously heavy with child, and a third, crooked and stooped.

  Maiden, Mother, and Crone . . .

  This had been a Wiccan settlement. Mallory wondered what had happened to it. He realized that on a spiritual level he was far more disturbed at the emptiness of the place than he was at the original inhabitants’ pagan sensibilities. It felt very much like he was walking on a grave.

  Oddly, his thoughts turned to the Dolbrians, whose known legacy amounted to a few monumental artifacts and the planets they terraformed. All those planets, including this one; were they this village writ large?

  Was all of humanity living on top of a cosmic grave?

  Mallory couldn’t help but feel a slight shiver at the thought.

  “See something?” Wahid asked him.

  Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, having gone though only the typical public education on Occisis, wouldn’t have any clue about religions other than traditional Roman Catholicism. Wicca and the Triple Goddess would have been lost on the man. So Mallory just said, “No. This place just gives me the creeps.”

  Mallory looked at the sky, still red with the too-long dawn of Bakunin’s thirty-two-hour day. Then he scanned the ruins of the village, looking for likely spots that could hide a waiting enemy. There were a number of buildings with good line of sight on the clearing, but he didn’t see signs of anything hostile. One of the blind-windowed Tudors that faced the park and the Goddess trinity sat on a bit of a rise, somewhat removed from its siblings. It would provide the occupants cover and a good view of all the approaches to it.

  “Let’s take cover,” he said as he headed for the building.

  He was halfway there when it exploded.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Divine Intervention

  God favors the side with bigger guns.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  There is only one decisive victory: the last.

  —KARL von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)

  Date: 2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Vijayanagara Parvi flew Mosasa’s Scimitar fighter over the desert north of Proudhon. The fighter was a stealth design with an EM profile an order of magnitude smaller than her contragrav bike, despite having thirty times the mass and a thousand times the power plant. The black delta shape slid through the atmosphere like a monocrys scalpel through muscle.

  She kept thinking about Fitzpatrick’s questioning last night.

  “Did Mosasa tell you to recruit me?”

  “Yes, you poor bastard,” she whispered to the desert whipping by the windscreen. “And he told me to order Wahid to take you to Samhain.” The inhuman bastard not only thought moves ahead, Parvi thought, but entire games ahead. It was barely an hour after missiles had taken out his tach-ship and his hangar when Kugara and Rajasthan dragged a bloody mercenary back to him. Mosasa hadn’t even bothered to question the man. He had simply ordered the guy to report back to his employers.

  One of the things Mosasa had the man report back was the coordinates of the secondary rally site. The one she had sent Fitzpatrick and Wahid to. She had no idea if Wahid or Fitzpatrick would survive to see her arrive. Though she suspected that Mosasa would know.

  The navigation unit beeped at her, letting her know that Samhain was just coming over the horizon. The forward LOS sensors started retrieving data, overlaying it on her heads-up display and several secondary monitors. Out the window, a green wire-frame holo mapped onto her view, picking out the spot on the horizon that marked the abandoned commune.

  Within two seconds, the green blossomed outward, separating into multiple dots marking the man-made structures in and around the abandoned village. The dots grew into boxy forms outlining walls, roofs, doors, and windows that would have otherwise been invisible at this speed and distance.

  Just as the holo display resolved enough detail to pick out individual openings on the buildings still over a dozen klicks away, her heads-up peppered the whole village with red dots.

  Samhain wasn’t abandoned today.

  Parvi flipped a switch to allow the ship to
use active sensors. She was two seconds from contact. The hostiles wouldn’t have time to react if they detected her spying on them, and after contact, they’d know she was here anyway.

  In response, all the secondary screens began scrolling with an extraordinary level of detail, most of which would only be of use in an after-action analysis. The important thing for Parvi were the icons that suddenly overlaid the red dots. These red dots wore powered armor, these red dots had highly charged energy weapons, these red dots were contragrav vehicles, and these red dots, moving across a clearing on the west side of the village, matched biometric data for Fitzpatrick and Wahid.

  Half a dozen hostiles in powered armor hid inside the building those last two dots were moving toward. Parvi sent a missile through one of its windows. She had just enough time in the first pass to send another missile into the building housing one of the contragravs. She pulled the fighter up, just ahead of the shock wave from the first explosion.

  Mallory was a good fifty meters away from the building when its walls evaporated in a roll of ink-black smoke and bloodred flame. The shock wave knocked him backward and he felt something tear into his leg and his left shoulder.

  As he fell into the burning black sand blanketing the courtyard, he mentally chanted the rosary as his implants kicked in. The pain from the shrapnel in his shoulder and his leg faded in his awareness, and he became calmer than anyone in his situation had a right to be. His sense of time telescoped as he rolled around onto his stomach to face the remnants of the building.

  Behind the smoke and fire, fifty meters away, another explosion erupted on the other side of the village. Above the new rolling smoke cloud, something flew by at hypersonic speeds, a rocket-fast heat-shimmer slicing the bloody sky in two. It shot past, turning up toward the sky as the shock wave from the second explosion and the sonic blast of the aircraft blowing through the atmosphere slammed into Mallory simultaneously.

  In the split second that he took in the presence of the aircraft, the commune of Samhain had ceased being empty. Soldiers were suddenly everywhere. He could see the distortion caused by several active camo projectors by one of the Tudor houses deeper in the village. Closer, by the smoke-shrouded crater that used to be the building in front of him, he saw silhouettes of soldiers in powered armor trying to pull themselves out of the wreckage. They stood out clear as day and moved with halting jerks showing their suits’ power was failing or completely fried.

  The only cover immediately available was by the Trinity statue, a bowl-like depression that might have once been a fountain. He ran crouched to lower his cross section and dived in. The impact ignited pain in his shoulder and leg that blasted through into his awareness despite the best efforts of his implants.

  He braced himself by the lip of the bowl, holding the gamma laser in a shuddering grip. He risked a peek back at the soldiers by the wreckage. By God’s grace, and air support, the soldiers weren’t paying attention to him.

  He saw the fading afterimage of a heavy plasma weapon sending a pulse upward, toward the aircraft, which had looped above the village and was diving down toward them. The pulse was a futile discharge. Even if it unloaded all its power in one burst, forming a microscopic sun that could vaporize a large portion of the attacking craft, it was still akin to throwing a sponge at a bullet.

  He looked around, trying to pinpoint where Wahid was. He couldn’t see any sign of him. Around him, the village was lit by flashes of other weapons discharging, and two actual missiles shot up toward the blur diving down toward the village. The missiles hit some sort of countermeasure, blowing up short of the target as the blurred craft broke its dive to shoot over Mallory. Four contrails split off to continue the descent in its wake.

  He dove for the lowest part of the bowl as the sonic boom hit. Mallory covered his head as the thunderously low passage of the aircraft blew sand over him.

  Then four explosions tore through Samhain, shaking the ground and burning the back of his neck and his hands with their heat. Something that felt like burning gravel pelted him a second later.

  The explosions still echoed off the mountains as he shook off the debris that covered his back. Ears ringing, he rolled to the side.

  Facing him, less than a meter away, Mallory saw a helmet with a cracked and blackened faceplate. It rested on its side, blown free of whomever it was attached to. The neck was angled away from Mallory, so he couldn’t tell if a head was still inside.

  “Wahid! What’s your status?” he yelled out. His own voice seemed far away and muffled under the ringing.

  Wahid’s voice was even farther away. “I’m fine!”

  Mallory turned away from the helmet and pulled himself up to the edge of the bowl so he could look out at the village.

  God have mercy . . .

  The half of the buildings that still stood, burned. Even the dead trees were on fire. The sky had turned gray-black with smoke, and ash fell like damned snow. On the ground, bits of armor and burned human remains mixed with broken wood and stone. Within the wreckage of the town before him, the only movement he saw came from the licking of flames.

  The Maiden statue had been blown into several fragments, and her two sisters had fallen over into a two-meter pile of debris. Despite his leg’s protests, he ran for the pile of broken statuary which offered at least the illusion of cover. He fell against the Crone’s breast and braced his gamma laser against the Mother’s broken left thigh.

  He peered over the mound of debris, looking down what had once been the main street of Samhain. The town was fogged by smoke, and a massive fifteen-meter crater, flanked by burning buildings, dominated Main Street. He saw several intact suits of armor scattered on the ground, but none moved.

  The heat from the fires burned Mallory’s cheeks, and it now seemed that every single structure in the village was completely engulfed.

  As long as these buildings had been drying out in the desert air, this whole place was a tinderbox. If there was anyone alive in the town proper, they had other concerns right now. A powered suit might isolate someone from the flames, but the onboard life support could only moderate the temperature for so long.

  Mallory slid down to the ground at the base of the rubble.

  Back across the courtyard, he saw Wahid in a similar position at the base of a half-blasted statue. Smoldering debris covered the sand between them. He waved, and Wahid waved back, apparently unhurt.

  Mallory looked down at his leg. An ugly black length of metal, about as thick as his little finger, stuck out of his thigh about fifteen centimeters or so. Mallory winced as he thought of how his movements must have jammed the shrapnel even deeper.

  The implants gave their host an edge, but came with a pretty big downside. Pain might be inconvenient in combat, but it had a purpose. He put a shaking hand on the wound to keep pressure on it. He wasn’t going to pull the shrapnel out until he had a medkit handy to deal with any torn blood vessels.

  He felt pressure in his left shoulder, and looked down to see blood drenching his sleeve from his shoulder down. Not good.

  He set down the laser to move his right hand to put pressure on that injury. Nothing stuck out of it, and the hole was relatively small, but the amount of blood and his light-headedness made him think that the wound might have clipped an artery.

  In a strangely detached way he thought, I’m going into shock.

  The world around him was silent except for the distant crackle of flames he barely heard over the ringing in his ears. Above him, the sky churned, a swirling cauldron of smoke, ash, and embers.

  He wondered what had happened to the aircraft.

  He blinked and saw Wahid standing over him. After a moment of disorientation Mallory realized he was flat on his back. I must have blacked out. Wahid cut away the fabric of his shirt, exposing Mallory’s shoulder. He said something, but Mallory couldn’t understand him.

  Wahid took a canister and sprayed a bandage on Mallory’s shoulder. The bandage wrapped his skin in a tight frigid embrac
e as it compressed the wound and sealed it against blood loss. Mallory felt him inject something in his arm, and he closed his eyes again.

  Parvi flew the fighter around the perimeter of the smoldering remains of Samhain, watching her sensors for any potential backup for the hostiles. But no new contacts appeared on any of her screens, and as she orbited the burning commune, the contacts she had already acquired slowly began graying out.

  Poor bastards, she thought. The two squads that had died down there were almost certainly fellow mercs. It was possible that she could have recruited them herself.

  When she was certain the area was secured, she sent an encrypted burst message to Mosasa and slowed the fighter to come in for a landing near the two remaining live contacts.

  The fighter slowed until it was stationary, hovering above the smoke on neutral buoyancy contragrav. She lowered the power to the contragrav, and the ship began slowly sinking through the smoke.

  It settled softly on its landing gear about a hundred meters from Wahid and Fitzpatrick. They were together in the one clearing free of burning wreckage, but she could see they hadn’t escaped unscathed. Fitzpatrick lay on his back, Wahid bent over him, the contents of an emergency medkit scattered around them.

  “Damn,” she muttered through clenched teeth. She didn’t know if she was more pissed at herself or at Mosasa.

  She popped the canopy as the fighter powered itself down. When she jumped down into the sand, Wahid had turned toward her. He leveled a gamma laser at her.

  “You?” he sputtered.

  “Is Fitzpatrick all right?”

  “What the fuck were you and Mosasa doing?” he yelled across at her.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yeah, a building exploded in his face. He’s fucking wonderful!”

  “There was a squad of—”