Prophets

  “One aircraft,” Nickolai said.

  The world went white, then red. The vibration threw him on the ground as he realized that there was no way he should be aware of hitting the ground. He landed on his side and felt the ground beneath him rumbling, oscillating in a great sine wave under his good arm. Around him there was a great groaning, as if the planet itself was in agony.

  The light faded to red and he saw a distinct edge, a hemisphere engulfing them, marking the limit of the light, the red saturating everything outside.

  Then the light faded a bit more and he could see the shadow of one of the nearby buildings. It stood nearly at the outside edge of the hemisphere, which was the only reason he could see it.

  Nicolai watched the building disintegrate in slow motion, the shadow of the building dissolving. More detail became visible, even as his eyes adjusted. Flames rolled across the ground, too slowly.

  “What is this?” he whispered.

  The fireball crawled by, wrapping itself around the hemisphere.

  The slow rumbling of the ground ceased, and the world stopped screaming its death cry. He pushed himself up and got to his feet.

  “What is this?” he repeated.

  Behind him, he heard the voice of Flynn/Tetsami. “They nuked us. The bastards nuked us.”

  “How . . .” Nickolai raised his artificial hand before him. A nuclear blast should have fried the electronics. And his eyes—an EMP should have destroyed them and probably a good part of his brain, too, as closely as they were wired to it.

  Kugara echoed him, “How are we still alive?”

  “The Protean,” Flynn/Tetsami said. “It has an Emerson field that’s far beyond anything else . . .”

  Kugara put a hand on his arm, the real one, and asked, “Are you all right?”

  He watched the slow-motion holocaust outside the hemisphere surrounding them. He shook his head and said, “No.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “No. Leave me alone.” He stared out and wondered if it would be possible to walk through the barrier. Her hand stayed on his arm. “Please?”

  Her hand dropped and he heard Flynn/Tetsami say, “Leave him be. It’s a bit much to absorb. As far as I can tell, we’re safe in here.”

  He heard them walk away.

  It took minutes for the hemisphere to fade. He stood at a razor-sharp barrier between the untouched earth and a sheet of black glass. The air was rank with the smell of fire. The air itself seemed to have burned, filled with a fine gray ash that limited visibility and made his nose itch.

  Probably poison to breathe.

  Not that he cared much. He had walked to the edge of hell, and now at least it looked the part. The only sound was a distant crackle that he suspected was the forest around them burning to the ground.

  He coughed and wondered if the slow suicide of standing here was preferable to walking into the Protean den. He was certain that the structure would offer shelter from the radiation and the fallout. But at what price, he didn’t care to guess.

  Damned or not, out here at least my soul is still my own.

  Then he saw a humanoid shadow moving through the fog of smoke and ash. He coughed again, and tried to focus his eyes to better resolve the shadow, but suddenly his new eyes didn’t follow instructions. He blinked and shook his head, and saw the shadow approaching from another angle.

  What?

  His military training leapfrogged all the idle emotions he’d been having. The enemy had dropped paratroopers into the blast zone. He needed to take cover and warn Kugara and Flynn/Tetsami. They were the only ones armed. He turned toward the Protean crystal—

  And only saw more gray ash and an approaching humanoid form. He turned around.

  Surrounded.

  He glanced back toward the first figure and realized something. There was only one shadow, fixed in his field of vision wherever he looked or turned his head. The approaching shadow moved with his gaze, left or right, up or down.

  He heard a gentle clapping as the figure finally emerged completely from the gray haze around him. Mr. Antonio, his image anyway, stood in front of him, softly applauding him.

  “You have done me proud, Mr. Rajasthan,” he said. “You have delivered Mr. Mosasa to a just and appropriate end.”

  “How are you here?” Nickolai whispered, hoarsely.

  Mr. Antonio tapped the side of Nickolai’s head, next to his right eye. “I never left you.”

  “Why?”

  “To see as you saw, my good servant. I see you desire your freedom, but not quite yet.”

  “I did as you asked.”

  “And more. But you have seen evil, have you not?”

  Nickolai nodded.

  “Then please, be well and bide your time until I tell you how that evil is to be dealt with.”

  Nickolai stared into the effigy of Mr. Antonio, who he knew was not really there, and realized that he had no choice.

  “Excellent decision, Mr. Rajasthan. In time you will see yourself first among your kind.”

  “Nickolai, Nickolai!”

  Nickolai opened his eyes to Kugara’s voice. He was momentarily disoriented, his last memory was talking to the image of Mr. Antonio in the midst of the ash. Now he looked up at Kugara’s face and above her a shining crystal ceiling that seemed to twist itself into some fractal vanishing point.

  He sat up and asked, “What happened?”

  “The shield dropped, and you collapsed.”

  Nickolai felt his temple, and thought about the eyes that were wired deep into his brain.

  “Are you all right?” Kugara asked.

  “No,” Nickolai said, “I don’t think so.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Conversions

  Before declaring victory over your opponent, make sure you are playing the same game.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  Everyone is expendable.

  —Dimitri OLMANOV (2190-2350)

  Date: 2526.6.10 (Standard) Khamsin 235-Epsilon Eridani

  Yousef Al-Hamadi walked down a hallway of unpainted metal. He didn’t carry his cane because the microgravity of Khamsin 235, like all the 732 asteroid-sized bodies that passed for Khamsin’s moons, was too slight to require it. Khamsin 235, while not nearly the largest, was just dense enough to have gravity strong enough to prevent a human being on its surface from jumping into orbit under his own power.

  It still was weak enough that he quickly got into the habit of holding onto the ubiquitous guardrails that lined every corridor; otherwise an errant step could send him headfirst into the ceiling, bad leg or not.

  The fact he was here at all was exceptional. He headed the Caliphate’s balkanized intelligence community, which meant that he was placed as far away from actual operations as one could be and still be an intelligence officer. He collected data, set priorities, and gave orders to implement the policies and objectives of the Caliphate government.

  It had been years since he had so much as debriefed a field operative. The fact that he was present at this facility was an anomaly. The officers here, a complement of fifteen men, had no clue that he had been coming until his ship radioed for clearance to dock.

  Not only was he not officially here, this facility didn’t officially exist. In any bureaucracy the size of the Caliphate, there were endless black holes and cul-de-sacs where money and resources could drain away without any accountability. While Yousef despised the corruption and petty agendas this bred within the government, he was not above using such techniques for his own purposes.

  As long as such purposes served the Caliphate.

  The officers here only knew this place as Detention Facility 235. Even they had no clue that, ultimately, the knowledge of this place’s existence was limited to them, Yousef, and a few of his trusted deputies. Even the engineers who had designed and built Facility 235 had no clue what moonlet, or even what star system, Facility 235 was being built in.

  It existed so that Yousef could interrogate p
ersons whose imprisonment might prove otherwise problematic. It was a prison that could hold, at most, a half dozen people.

  At the moment, it only held one. One whose questioning he didn’t trust to anyone else.

  A mess of my own making, he thought, I assumed too much.

  If there was anything he hated, it was being manipulated. It had become clear to him in recent months that not only had he been manipulated, but the entirety of the Caliphate had been, through him.

  At least I caught her. But the thought was little comfort, with all the Caliphate’s functional Ibrahim carriers nearly a hundred light-years away.

  He stood at one end of a long air lock at the end of the corridor. Next to a massive door, indicator lights flashed red, then yellow, then green. Finally, the automated door opened with a pneumatic hiss.

  The air lock beyond didn’t lead outside; instead it was a continuation of the corridor, a hundred meters long. It was an additional layer of security, as this section of corridor was only pressurized when someone needed to walk from the operational side of the facility to the actual prison. Normally the corridor lacked atmosphere, and the environment in the prison was completely separate from the guards’.

  When he walked through the door on the opposite end of the corridor, the lights cycled again as the corridor depressurized behind him. And, for the first time in six months, he breathed the same air as Ms. Columbia.

  He pulled himself through the corridor by the handrail so quickly that his feet barely touched the floor. His path ended in the main interrogation room at the heart of the prison. It was little more than a control console before a number of display units. Three could be seated at the controls, and there was room for about half a dozen spectators in back.

  Right now, it was just him. His first task, once he seated himself, was to ensure it remained that way. He sealed the room, made sure that all the recording facilities were off-line, and switched all monitoring equipment onto a closed circuit that ended at the walls of the prison.

  For now, at least, it would just be him and the enigmatic Ms. Columbia.

  He switched on the monitors for her cell. Several displays came to life before him showing various angles from various spectra, all showing an athletic, dark-skinned woman, naked and restrained on a large table. Tubes attached to her body fed her, while other tubes removed her waste. Wires connected to her nervous system and gave him feedback on other displays showing biometric data, life signs, and cerebral activity.

  He opened the comm channel to the cell and spoke. “It is time for you to answer some questions, Ms. Columbia.”

  Her head was encased in a helmet, a wire-studded white hemisphere that hid most of her face from view, so she would see and hear only what he wanted her to see and hear. Even so, he saw the hint of an ironic smile cross her lips.

  “Yousef? I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Yousef frowned. His voice was altered through the system. Anyone who sat in this chair would project exactly the same flat, authoritarian voice into the chamber. The filters were designed not only to remove identifying tonal characteristics, but emotional inflection as well. She couldn’t possibly identify who was speaking to her, so she was guessing.

  Reacting to that guess would be providing her information. He wasn’t about to play that game with her.

  “You will need to answer our questions fully and accurately, or we can make this experience unpleasant.” Still that damn smile. “You have sold the Caliphate large amounts of intelligence information over the past decade. Who else have you sold this information to?”

  His hands hovered over the control console, prepared to encourage a response from her. He had prepared for a long and arduous interrogation session, and expected that he would need to resort to invasive techniques that would leave little of his captive left.

  He was quite surprised when he heard her respond. “Of primary interest to you would be my contact in Rome, Cardinal Jacob Anderson who is, more or less, your equivalent in the Vatican. I have been working with him as long as I’ve been working with you. However, the information he’s received over the years has been slightly different. He only received the specifications for the Ibrahim-class carriers after you had a fair complement available.”

  Yousef sat stunned for a moment. He had discovered her duplicity through his own agents in Rome, but he had no clue that it had gone on for so long.

  “Once Cardinal Anderson knew of the Caliphate’s new strategic reach, the information was disseminated to Centauri, Sirius, the Union of Independent Worlds—”

  “Why?” Yousef snapped, forgetting his professionalism for a moment.

  “You always knew I served my own master. Your surprise does not become you. I couldn’t betray you. I was never your servant in the first place.”

  He pulled his hands from the console and breathed deeply, reining in his emotions. She knew, somehow she knew he was here, and exactly how he was reacting to her revelations. Somehow he had failed in the basics of the interrogation; he had allowed the prisoner to take control.

  He needed to leave now, delegate the questioning. Even if it would reveal his own embarrassing connections to this intelligence fiasco, he couldn’t trust himself to continue.

  “Yousef, you haven’t asked what you really want to know.”

  She was prodding him. He almost reached over to start the automated interrogation, the painful and irreversible stripping of her mind. His hand hesitated over the console. Does she want that?

  Could she have allowed him to capture her on purpose?

  “Yousef, you want to know who I work for. Why don’t you ask?”

  Why don’t I? Because she wants me to ask?

  He needed to regain control of the questioning. He moved his hand to the more pedestrian “incentive” controls. He could manufacture any level of pain he needed, nondestructively. He couldn’t allow her to provide him information as a means of control.

  He switched on a minor burning sensation across her right arm, strong and prolonged enough to show her who was controlling the situation.

  Her biometric readings, heart rate, brain activity, blood pressure, none of it changed.

  What?

  “Why don’t you ask me?” she prompted, still smiling.

  He upped the level and incorporated all her limbs. No change. He turned it up until her whole body should have felt as if she was trapped in a bonfire that never completely consumed her flesh.

  Not so much as a tensed muscle.

  He wasn’t a technical person, but he called up the diagnostics for his equipment and his connection to the prison cell. He couldn’t see anything wrong. His controls appeared responsive, but nothing he did showed any effect in the feedback from the prisoner.

  What is happening here?

  “Poor Yousef,” she said. “So predictable in your devotion, your assumptions, your confusion. Do you remember, you asked me once if I believed in God.”

  He looked up at the holo display and realized something was wrong with the image.

  Her lips weren’t moving.

  “I told you I did, but not the same as yours.”

  Her voice came from the system, but the prisoner on the holo wasn’t speaking. He touched the controls for lighting, sedation, rotating the table . . .

  Nothing.

  “Ask me who I work for, Yousef.”

  He shut off all the monitors and the audio feed.

  “What is this?” he whispered. The console and the displays were dark and silent in front of him. Scenarios whirled in his head. Could a rival agency have compromised this facility? Perhaps someone from the Caliph’s staff? Could—

  “Yousef.”

  He jumped at the sound of his name, sending his chair spinning and throwing his body into a slow, low-gravity arc toward the ceiling. He grabbed the quiescent control console to stop his movement. He turned his head in the direction of the voice.

  She stood in the doorway, facing him, naked, unarmed, and terrifying.
>
  “What is this?” he repeated.

  “Ask,” she said. “Ask for the name of my master, the name of your fate.”

  Yousef slammed his hand down on the emergency alarm button.

  Nothing happened.

  She stepped forward, smiling. “Do not rely on your machines. The three days I’ve been here have been long enough for my spirit to traverse the whole of this small moon.”

  He slammed the alarm button again, and a sharp blue arc of electricity leaped from the console, searing his arm and throwing him back to fall, slowly, onto the floor. He clutched his chest, gasping for breath, barely able to get the words out. “Who . . . are . . . you?”

  She knelt slowly over him and touched his cheek.

  “There is no God but Adam, and I am his prophet.”

  Her skin against his was warm, then hot, then burning. He tried to pull away, but she grabbed the other side of his face, forcing him to stare into her eyes. He grabbed her wrists, but her hold on him was impossibly strong. Inside his head he felt as if her long fingers caressed the surface of his brain.

  “Choose to serve my God,” she whispered to him. “Abandon your superstitions, your naive bonds of the flesh, partake of paradise within this world.”

  No voice came from his lips, just ragged shallow breaths as he felt her flesh melting against his, penetrating his. His heart hammered as his universe shrank to encompass only her dark, smiling face.

  There is no God but God!

  “I offer you life and an existence beyond imagining . . .”

  Somehow he retained enough of himself, enough mind and motor control, to spit into the demon’s face.

  Saliva dripped down the sharp edge of her nose. She gently shook her head and whispered, “Pity.”

  Yousef’s mouth opened in a soundless scream as her fingers sank deep into his skull. His arms and legs spasmed, jerking against the floor beneath her as his flesh turned plastic and flowed like thick paste. Her flesh rippled as well, pulsing and flowing, mixing with his. Even his clothing melted into an indistinguishable mass.

  The thrashing slowly ceased as her hands sank deeper into Yousef’s body, her flesh indistinguishable from his as she pulled her pulsating arms down along his body.