A few icon presses later, the kiosk gave him a chit worth about three kilograms in PSDC currency. He pocketed it and started a hunt for a hotel.
Once he left the concourse, and he was free of the landing lights, he could take in the rest of the nighttime city. Once again, the planet Bakunin sidestepped his expectations, making him wish he had been provided more than the two weeks he’d been given to study his destination.
Everywhere else he could think of, there was an attempt to separate a port from the adjacent urban center. There were dozens of reasons for that, from safety and noise concerns to the fact that a geographical bottleneck made regulations easer to enforce on traffic.
None of these issues seemed to concern the urban planners who designed Proudhon—
What am I thinking? There were no planners . . . except maybe God himself.
Proudhon the spaceport and Proudhon the city not only coexisted, but interpenetrated, two metallic neon-outlined animals in the midst of devouring each other. Landing strips became causeways, high-rises became conn towers, and through it all, weaving between the buildings, the ever-present spaceport traffic dodging not only itself, but also aircraft never meant to leave the atmosphere—everything from aircars to luxury tach-ships vied for its own chunk of the air above Proudhon.
Over everything, a cluster of twelve floodlit white sky-scrapers were the only sign of architectural order. Mallory suspected that those were the headquarters of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation.
He had reserved space in a hotel only a few klicks from the concourse. There didn’t seem to be a need to go farther afield before he got his bearings here. Bakunin was only a means to an end anyway. It was possible that he could make all the arrangements he needed without leaving his hotel room.
If so, so much the better.
The Hotel Friedman was a retrofitted luxury liner that had grounded and never taken off again. He had only skimmed the description, but it apparently had been outbound from Waldgrave nearly two hundred years ago and suffered mutiny by the ill-treated and underpaid crewmen. During the height of the Confederacy, leaving Bakunin again would invite capture and repatriation of the ship, as well as possible death penalties for the crew members stupid enough to try and fly it away. Instead, the crew sold it to a speculator who then bought the pad it landed on and went into the hotel business.
The reservation chit the kiosk had produced let him into the hotel. His room/cabin wasn’t one of the more expensive suites. Like everything else he did, he chose a room based on how likely the selection was to attract attention. He made a point of selecting something in the middle range.
Once in his room, he decided he probably could have saved a few grams of currency and gotten the cheapest room they had.
The Friedman must have dated from a truly decadent episode of Confederacy history, and the current owners had made an extensive effort to preserve the two-hundred-year-old opulence. Walking into the cabin was like walking into a page in a history book; a history book written from the point of view of a post-revolutionary Waldgrave historian who had a point to make about fascistic capitalist excesses.
Every surface in the cabin was detailed in carved hardwoods that age and oxidation had only made richer. All the visible hardware was detailed in engraved brass. And, most lavish—especially when Mallory reflected that this was designed as a cabin in a ship that had to enter and leave a gravity well—was the size. It was really more a suite than a cabin, with three separate rooms. There weren’t any windows, but a large holo unit could be programmed to show recorded views of just about any planet in human space, as well as a few that only existed in some artist’s imagination.
Mallory set down his duffel bag, found a setting on the holo that actually showed the real-time view of Proudhon outside the skin of the hotel/ship and sank into the leather couch that dominated the living room.
Welcome to Bakunin, he thought.
CHAPTER SIX
Geas
A soul’s value tends to appreciate considerably after it is sold.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
—FRIEDRICH Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Date: 2525.11.06 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Nickolai had met Mr. Antonio before, of course, but—thanks to the reconstruction Mr. Antonio had paid for—this was the first time Nickolai had ever seen him.
To Nickolai’s new eyes, the man looked weak and pathetic even for one of the Fallen. He was thin, with twiglike limbs and a long narrow face. His hairless skin was aged, wrinkled, and dry. What hair he had was white and as thin as the rest of him. He smelled of the end of life. However, as close as this man might have been to death, for Nickolai he just wasn’t close enough.
They sat in a room in a Godwin club that sold privacy like Nickolai’s old employer sold exhibitionism. The room was sealed to vibration, light, and EM-transmission. Nickolai knew the screens were active because he had felt a disorienting tingle in his new artificial parts when he had crossed the threshold.
Beyond that, the room wasn’t quite designed for the type of meeting Mr. Antonio wanted. Leather harnesses dangled from the ceiling, chains dangled from the walls ending in velvet-lined cuffs, racks lined another wall holding leather straps, paddles, and various electrical devices. The dominant piece of furniture was a long padded table with various articulated arms that seemed designed to hold a wide variety of attachments.
Humanity’s passion for sin was wide, deep, and more infinitely detailed than any Nickolai had known. Next to the lusts of the Fallen, his own transgressions seemed almost childlike, laughable.
I’ve been among them too long.
“Are you used to the prosthetics now, Mr. Rajasthan?”
“Yes,” Nickolai said, even though he was privately unsure. Just this morning he had torn the handle off the bathroom door in his apartment, and almost daily he had headaches from looking at a world that was too sharp to these new eyes. However, he wasn’t going to admit weakness to one such as Mr. Antonio.
“Excellent,” Mr. Antonio said, in his uncomfortably fluid language. He smiled, oblivious to the aggression he showed to Nickolai with the flash of his teeth.
Although, Nickolai thought, perhaps not so oblivious.
Despite appearances, there were two things Nickolai knew about his human benefactor: the man was not stupid, and he was not weak. It was quite possible that Mr. Antonio knew exactly what was implied with the flash of his own tiny canines.
And the galling thing was that what it implied was correct. In the palace halls on Grimalkin he might have seen fit to scar someone for such an expression—much less one of the Fallen. However, here he was, in service to the naked devil himself.
“Mr. Rajasthan?”
Nickolai realized his attention had wandered, which was disturbingly unlike him. “Forgive me, sir. I was reminded of Grimalkin for a moment.”
If Mr. Antonio noticed how forced the honorific sounded, he showed no sign.
“I understand how it is being stranded in an alien land.” His smile faded. “Perhaps more than you’d know. But if you would please return to the present moment, however unpleasant the venue?”
He set a case down on the padded tabletop between them.
“The time has come for you to repay my generosity.”
“What exactly do you require of me?”
“Your services as a mercenary.”
Nickolai said nothing. There was little to say. He had agreed to the devil’s bargain. He could almost hear the priests laughing at how far he had fallen, down to prostituting the sacred craft of the warrior.
“I need an agent to attach to a private expedition. You are going to be that agent.” He turned the case around and opened it.
“How did you acquire—” Nickolai began, but cut short the outburst.
“A symbol of your service, Mr. Rajasthan. A token from he who gave you succor when you were shu
nned.”
He knows exactly what this means, Nickolai thought.
In the padded case was an antique slugthrower. The design was old, as old in fact as the design of Nickolai’s species. However, the handgun was obviously of a post-exodus model. The ancient humans who had designed Nickolai’s ancestors for warfare never would have bothered to add gold plating, scroll-work, or mother-of-pearl to something they saw as strictly utilitarian. They certainly never would have engraved quotes from scripture—not that the scripture in question existed at the time the first of these guns had been manufactured.
The 12-millimeter firearm Mr. Antonio had was one that belonged in the ceremonial guard in the temples and palaces on Grimalkin. It had probably been blessed by the temple priests.
Nickolai remembered well when he had passed his first trial as an adult of House Rajasthan. After twelve hours of uninterrupted sparring with priests and acolytes, he had limped, bruised, bleeding, undefeated, up the 367 steps to the cenotaph of St. Rajasthan. At the top, before the statue of the first speaker of his faith, his mother had presented him with a weapon much like the one Mr. Antonio showed him.
The words she spoke were not in the corrupt tongue of the Fallen, but came from the scriptures of his faith:
This is a symbol of your service, my son. A token from He who gives you succor when you are shunned.
Years later, when the priests had come for him, they had taken the gun. They had told him it had been melted down. It had become unclean from his touch.
Now, Mr. Antonio was not only returning his eyes and his arm but, in some sense, his honor as well. In another sense, he was taking all the remnants of honor he had left.
Could he accept the kind of debt this represented?
Nickolai looked into Mr. Antonio’s eyes and knew that the deal had already been made, and the debt went deeper than any material accounting. The man he now served was just making the deal explicit in terms he knew Nickolai understood.
Nickolai reached over and picked up the weapon. It was too large for any human to handle comfortably, but it rested perfectly in Nickolai’s new hand. The weight felt good, as if it completed the reconstruction of his missing limb.
Mr. Antonio smiled.
“So how do I become this agent you require?”
“You will need to join the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. That will give you the contacts to apply for the position I need you in.”
Nickolai sighted down the barrel of the new weapon, nostrils flaring with the scent of gun oil. “You are certain that I will be hired for this position?”
“Mr. Rajasthan, I have no doubt of it.”
Date: 2525.11.07 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
It was like he had told Mr. Salvador, “Do you forget why we were created?”
Nickolai began to understand why his ancestors were created. Why he existed. Not just the knowledge of what scriptures and history taught, of how mankind—the fallen creation of God—had the arrogance to create thinking creatures to serve man, to praise man, and to give glory unto man.
Nickolai had known that he was descended from creatures designed to fight in wars that man didn’t have the stomach to fight himself. He had known that when all the petty human governments coalesced into the Terran Council that mankind had renounced their creation and cast it out, exiling it to Tau Ceti at a time prior to tach-drives when the only interstellar travel was through a manufactured wormhole, effectively one-way.
He knew where he had come from, but on some level he hadn’t understood it. He didn’t understand until he found himself bound in service to the false god, man. Until he found himself retracing the steps of his ancestors.
This was why he was created—and this was why that creation was such a great sin.
But he had pledged himself, so he walked the path that Mr. Antonio had set for him. And that path was very well prepared.
There was already an explanation of why Nickolai was searching for work as a mercenary, and how he had come by prosthetics that cost much more than his income from Mr. Salvador would have allowed. Any investigation would show that the reconstruction was paid for by one of Godwin’s many loan sharks—a Mr. Charkov. This debt to Mr. Charkov could not be paid on a bouncer’s salary.
To add verisimilitude to the fictitious story, any money Nickolai would receive beyond basic living expenses would disappear directly into an anonymous account that could, with effort, be traced to Mr. Charkov.
So, as dawn crawled over the slums of the city of Godwin, Nickolai walked into an unfamiliar quarter of the city. The Godwin where he had lived in exile had been a city that smelled of smoke, sewage, and crumbling ferrocrete, its sound a mélange of arguments in every possible human language.
Here, west of central Godwin, the streets no longer smelled of garbage and rotting architecture. While the air was still rank with the stink of the Fallen, it didn’t stick to his fur. The streets were broader and less crowded, and the cacophony of human voices was less aggressive.
Nickolai walked, because a taxi would be uncomfortable and expensive, but also because actually seeing the human hive of Godwin was still a novelty. His vision with his digital eyes was an order of magnitude sharper than his real eyes had ever been and worth the occasional headache. He could read the holo-script crawling up the side of buildings five or ten klicks away. He was able to see the enigmatic human expressions on the drivers of the aircars soaring above him.
And he could see as much as hear and smell the difference in the neighborhood around him. The broad avenue of West Lenin wasn’t cracked and buckled like the old streets near his apartments. The walls of the buildings around him were still in the colors of steel and stone intended by the builders, not the garish tapestry of graffiti that wrapped the structures where Nickolai lived.
Most different were the human inhabitants. They seemed cleaner, better dressed, and were less prone to obviously avoid his path.
The Godwin branch of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union was a plain onyx-black cube of a building nestled between a bank and an expensive-looking escort service. The windowless building had a single door and no decoration other than a small bronze plaque with the initials BMU engraved in it. As he approached it, he could faintly smell ozone, a sign of an active broadband Emerson field ionizing stray air molecules.
Nickolai entered the building and faced a long hallway lined with holo screens—the nearest of which showed his approach and the entrance of the building from several points of view and at several different frequencies. One density scan showed a partially exploded skeletal view of his body where the recent reconstruction of his arm was plainly visible, showing bones metallic, dense, and much too smooth and regular to be organic.
He walked along the hallway, past his own image, and past images of a more expected variety—pictures of military hardware, from hand weapons to hovertanks; Paralian-designed assault craft with military-class tach-drives down to manpack contragrav units. Much of the hardware bore trademarks of Bakunin-based industries. The arms industry was the largest sector of the Bakunin economy, supplying not only the bottomless domestic demand, but also equipping probably half the militaries in human space—every government that didn’t have the resources to equip its own military and a few that did.
Every human government.
Despite historical ties to Bakunin, the nonhuman inhabitants of the Fifteen Worlds—the loose confederation that included Nickolai’s homeworld of Grimalkin—avoided any ties to human space; cultural, diplomatic, or economic. Despite being a de jure part of the Fifteen Worlds’ sphere of influence since the last days of the Confederacy—when it was the Seven Worlds—Bakunin’s thriving export industry rarely sent anything off in the direction of Tau Ceti.
And, despite the professionalism of the receptionist, it was clear in the man’s voice, his posture, and the smell of fear on his skin that the alienation was mutual. The Fallen were still afraid of their creations.
“Can I help you?” asked the receptionist
before Nickolai was within six strides of the semicircular desk at the end of the hall.
Nickolai waited until he stood in front of the desk before speaking. “I am here to obtain membership in the Mercenaries’ Union.”
“Oh,” the receptionist nodded, “of course.” The man did well hiding his fear. Someone with the half-dead senses of the Fallen might have completely missed the man’s discomfort.
Nickolai was tall enough to see over the top of the desk and look down on the receptionist. He watched as the man’s hand moved away from a handheld plasma cannon holstered behind the desk. Nickolai frowned slightly. There was little honor in the nasty-looking handgun. It was a single-use desperation weapon—firing it would release all the energy in its fifteen-centimeter-diameter barrel in a cone of plasma at temperatures that would vaporize all organics, most synthetics, and a good many metals in a cone that would fill most of the corridor Nickolai had just walked down.
“We require a one-kilogram deposit as a reserve against your first year’s dues,” the man told him.
Nickolai nodded and pulled a chit from his belt, placing it on the desk. The man waited for Nickolai’s hand to completely withdraw before taking it. “Very good. If you go to one of our interview rooms, you can post an alias and a résumé for our clients, and schedule yourself for a skills assessment. After that we’ll archive your DNA signature, and you’ll have access to our databases and all our facilities. You’ll get an ID badge, but you don’t need it for our services as long as you can present a biometric ID. Welcome to the BMU.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tithes
The most dangerous impulse is to feel safe.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
In this business you never let your guard down.
—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)
Date: 2525.11.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
So far, since arriving, Mallory had investigated close to a dozen ships that conceivably could be contracted to go as far as Xi Virginis. Unfortunately, the nature of the trip put severe limits on the kind of vessel that he could hire. The ship had to be able to power several twenty light-year jumps without refueling and needed the capability to skim hydrogen from whatever source happened to be available, since there wouldn’t be any processing centers along the way.