In the end, by taking eighteen people aboard the Khalid, they could get an older Centauri dropship, owned by native Bakuninites so it came more heavily armed than the Khalid, a scout vessel from the Protectorate, and a lonely SEC fighter whose AWOL pilot was on the edge of his life support.
With those assets added to a quartet of new vessels converted to Mallory’s cause, their command was willing to allow Parvi to make her expedition down to the planet.
Somehow, now it’s my expedition.
All that was left was to select her people for the mission. People willing to take the same risk she was about to. The scientists, Dörner and Brody, were both coming. Parvi wanted to see some way around it. Even if this wasn’t strictly a military operation, she still felt uncomfortable shepherding civilians through it. But if they did make it down, they were the ones who had information on Dolbrians and the Dolbrian cult.
Beyond them, she wanted some military support, and support that was familiar with the ground on Bakunin. The place was dangerous in the best of times, and they had no idea what the situation was like on the ground right now. That left her with only one choice for backup.
She found Kugara in the galley of the Daedalus, a small shotgun cabin with a long table down its axis, reminding the crew that the ship was designed with artificial gravity in mind. Kugara added to the illusion by holding herself in place by wrapping her legs around the bench seat affixed to the alleged floor. The sight of her “sitting” at the table was disorienting, especially when Parvi floated in sideways.
Parvi wondered about the woman. It had been Mosasa’s decision to recruit her. Anyone from Dakota made Parvi a little uneasy—though after working for an AI for so long, the feeling was probably a little disingenuous. Anyone who successfully led a charge on a Caliphate dropship deserved a little respect. Enough that Parvi wondered why she had ceded her initial control of the situation to Mallory.
Kugara lowered the bag she was eating from as Parvi entered.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up.”
“You were?”
“You’re planning a wild goose chase down to Bakunin, and if you actually get to the surface, you’re going to want some sort of backup. That’s me, right?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“And you still have those two scientists going, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Kugara nodded. “I know why. Mallory has decided that his battle is going to be a military battle in orbit, angels storming heaven, sword in hand.” She smiled slightly when she said that, as if enjoying a private joke. “Not much role for an academic in that scenario, is there?”
“No.”
“There’s a deep psychic need for people to do something in a crisis, however pointless. They’ve been given that chance. Why do you want to do this?”
Parvi looked at Kugara and found herself asking, “Why did you let Mallory take charge of this?”
“I’m no great leader, Captain Parvi. The only reason people followed me is because I started killing people if they didn’t. I’ve never been one of the good guys. Mallory might be talking half bullshit, but any Jesuit that can take charge of a squad of Caliphate engineers, with their consent, has got to have some leadership qualities.”
“You don’t agree with his assessment of Adam?”
“Oh, come on. The Antichrist? There’s been more of them than there’ve been popes. You’re avoiding my question.”
Because I don’t have an answer? “I think Shane may be right, that a direct confrontation may be pointless.”
“You don’t believe Mallory’s going to recruit his navy?”
“No. I think he is.”
Kugara stared at her. After a while, Parvi said, “I don’t want to be part of an epic battle. I don’t want to be a foot soldier in humanity’s valiant last stand. I’ve seen enough war and enough people die. If there’s some other way I can fight this thing, I want to take that chance.”
“How slim a chance, you think?”
“I guess we have a two-in-five chance that we make it safely to the surface, if I’m right about the capabilities of the Khalid’s tach-drive navigational system. Once on the surface, I think the chance of Shane’s Dolbrian speculations panning out are the same order of magnitude as Mallory pulling off a military victory.”
After a long pause, Kugara said, “So it doubles our chances. You can count me in.”
“Thank you.”
“But there are two other people you need to talk to.”
“Who?”
* * * *
Flynn Jorgenson took his quarters with the other Salmagundi natives, but even so, Parvi got the sense the young man was not comfortable with them. When she approached him, his response was to wave her out of the cabin and away from his fellow countrymen. Once they were alone in an empty corridor, he asked her, “What exactly do you want from me?”
“I’m planning a descent—”
“I know.”
“Kugara suggested I talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Because you seem to have some knowledge about Bakunin.”
He frowned. “About two hundred years more out of date than yours—” He tilted his head, as if he were listening to something. He nodded and rubbed his temple.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“We’re fine, chicky.” He pursed his lips and looked her up and down, as if assessing her. It was not a comfortable look; it was cold and judgmental. Not nearly as deferential as he had acted most of the times she had seen him. “Dolbrians, huh?”
“There’s a chance—”
“Do you know what’s down there?” Flynn asked. “Do you really have any idea what’s down there?”
“Dr. Brody and—”
“Was he ever down in those tunnels?” he asked. “I was. You know what you have there? Thousands of kilometers of rock, and a couple of kilometers of carvings by a culture that died out a hundred million years ago. A few marks on a rock. That’s what’s down there.”
“You were down there?”
“Christ in a clown suit, woman. I’m why you’re giving Flynn the time of day. I came from that hellhole you want to risk your life to get back to. The woman who discovered those Dolbrian ruins was a friend of mine. All that’s there is a big fancy tombstone.”
“The Protean suggested otherwise.”
“That thing was damaged goods the moment it ran into Mallory’s Antichrist. I’ll take everything it says with a whole planet of salt, not that it was particularly clear in the first place.”
Parvi looked at Flynn and had the strangest sense of looking at someone wearing a mask. “I’m sorry I bothered you then.”
Before she could turn to go, Flynn said, “I didn’t say we weren’t going with you.”
“What?”
“Flynn thinks it’s worth a chance, and ...”
“And what?”
“Aside from Salmagundi, Bakunin’s the only home I’ve ever had. I would like to see it again before all hell breaks loose.”
* * * *
The ship had cycled to a nighttime schedule before Parvi had gathered herself enough to face the moreau. The thought of talking to Nickolai raised a combination of fear, disgust, and a deep-ingrained sense that the beings arising out of heretical technologies were wrong on some fundamental level she couldn’t quite articulate. She had been able to suppress it when dealing with Mosasa and Kugara because in both cases they appeared human.
Human enough that Parvi’s prejudices weren’t engaged on the fundamental emotional level that they were when dealing with something that wasn’t anywhere near human. The way it was when she thought of Adam and his chosen, or when she thought of Nickolai.
With the tiger, it was worse. Seeing him, the threat wasn’t abstract. Nickolai was a huge, muscular predator, clawed and fanged. He was a creature whose ancestors had been designed to rend flesh from bone before any genetic engineers had gotten hold of them. When they were done
they had taken a primordial nightmare that had—in its natural state—fed off of the flesh of Parvi’s ancestors, and had given it a human intellect and the ability to use human weapons.
Nickolai represented the ultimate failure of human sanity and self-preservation. So it took her a while to convince herself to enter a room alone with him. When she had, it was late enough that she expected to find the tiger asleep.
Hoped to find him asleep, giving an excuse to herself to withdraw for the evening.
However when she opened the door to the cargo compartment Nickolai used for his quarters, the tiger was very much awake. He occupied the center of the open space, the claws of his toes clutching a sheet of cargo netting tied tightly to the wall. He swung a large, long piece of steel around himself in an intricate pattern, stopping it suddenly with loud grunts that were half growls.
She recognized some of the moves from her own martial arts training, though some would only be possible with Nickolai’s feline build. Parvi stayed by the door, watching his deadly zero-G dance. Even if the metal rod he carried was weightless, the way he wielded momentum and inertia required massive strength and control, and she could picture any blow he landed with that piece of scrap metal being deadly, even to someone in a hardsuit.
He drew the weapon in with a circular flourish that just avoided his tail and brought it down so it was parallel to his body. When it came to rest, he raised his head to look at the door.
His eyes froze her; black, barely reflective, they gave the appearance of being holes deep into his skull. As if she didn’t look at some physical presence, but some vengeful spirit.
“You are frightened,” Nickolai said.
“No.” Parvi shook her head.
“Yes.” He wrinkled his nose. “I can smell it.” He released his feet from the cargo netting and pushed himself off, gracefully turning to face her, matching her orientation. “You fear and despise me. Why are you here?”
She stared at him. He was easily twice her height, five or six times her mass. The fingers on one of his half-human hands could probably wrap completely around her neck.
And he had once betrayed them to this creature Adam.
“I am here,” she said, “because Kugara asked me to talk to you.”
Bizarrely, it almost seemed as if his expression softened. “Why would she want you to talk to me?”
“Where we’re going, on Bakunin, is under the control of the Fifteen Worlds.”
“You are leaving the priest’s fight?” Nickolai snarled.
“There may be some means there to fight Adam.”
“And Kugara believes this?”
“You can ask her.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. “I do not fight well by proxy, I wish to see my enemy. I will achieve more on a planet than within a warship. I will go with you.”
>
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Redemption
“Much good is done to atone for past evil.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Lord give me chastity— but not yet.”
—St. Augustine
(354-430)
Date: 2526.7.25 (Standard)
1,750,000 km from Bakunin - BD+50°1725
Nickolai assisted in getting the Khalid ready to accept passengers. The dropship was still spaceworthy, and to all diagnostics, ready to enter an atmosphere, but the interior cabin had taken a beating during the departure from Salmagundi. Although it was cramped work, he was the strongest able-bodied person available to do much of it.
It was probably fitting, in that much of the damage had been wrought by his own body crashing through the center of the passenger cabin. To fix the cabin, all the crash seating, however deformed, had to be removed and either fixed or replaced.
He wanted the physical effort; to think of little more than how to work free a strut twisted around a sheared bolt; to stop wondering if he was still Nickolai Rajasthan.
To stop wondering what it meant if he was, or if he wasn’t.
In some sense the speculation was futile. Everything he saw was a reminder that he had been touched deeply by transcendent evil. His alien eyes saw far beyond what even the mechanical prosthetics bequeathed him by Adam’s agent, Mr. Antonio, had. These eyes could perceive near-maddening detail in any light. He could see individual grains of dirt caught in the weave of the clothing worn by men on the other side of the ship, read the cockpit displays reflected in their eyes when they glanced in his direction, count their eyelashes. Were he to concentrate he could see into spectra far past the limits of his prior eyes—so deep into the spectrum that he only saw an alternate universe of streaks and twinkling lights.
The Protean had pulled him from the Abyss. And at first he thought it was evil denying his attempt at redemption, especially when it revealed his own guilty desire to live. It showed his weakness starkly to him as much as it did to the rest of the world.
But it led him to some heretical thoughts.
There were the three great sins of man, which led to his fall from God’s grace. All led to thinking beings that were creations of man, not God. The genetic engineers who created his kind, faux-humans from beasts. The technicians that created AIs, thought without life. Lastly, the ancestors to the Proteans, who created life itself from unliving matter.
But if the first sin resulted in beings that could still receive God’s grace, why not the others? If Nickolai’s race could be born of such a sin, and yet serve God, why not an AI? Why not a Protean?
He had spoken for the priest, and in doing so had come to his own epiphany, one he still struggled with. For there to be Good or Evil, there must exist a choice. The ability to decide between courses of action. Adam’s evil, at its core, was a denial of any choice.
But if that was the case, could the Protean be evil only by the nature of its existence? Could Mosasa? Couldn’t they, like Nickolai’s own ancestors, transcend the sin of their creators?
That was not a comfortable question, especially since he couldn’t decide if it was a true revelation, or simply an attempt to rationalize his own existence.
Maybe he just wanted to believe in a universe where he might be able to reclaim his own fate. It might be why he believed the priest’s talk about the Antichrist. If Adam was the Evil One come for the final battle, then it was a chance to redeem himself even in the eyes of the Grimalkin priests. Whatever sin someone carried upon his soul, those few who stood against the Evil One in the end times would receive special dispensation to enter the Kingdom of God. Even the Fallen who chose rightly would gain that privilege.
Perhaps even the Protean who had saved his life.
He had just unbolted a panel from the ceiling that had bent dangerously free of its anchorage when a familiar woman’s voice called him. “Nickolai?”
He looked around to see Kugara floating by the air lock where the two ships had been joined. She waved him forward.
Nickolai pushed off a wall, handing the broken panel to one of the Caliphate techs as he drifted over to her. She watched him approach and said, “You move well in zero-G.”
“What did you want?”
“You still look like you could use a friend,” she said, hoisting up a pair of bottles with one hand. “And a drink.”
Nickolai stared at her. He had lost track of how long it had been since she had first said that to him. Before they had left Bakunin, before they had found Adam and the Protean, before he knew what Mr. Antonio was, and before she knew he was a traitor ...
She patted his arm, the one that used to be artificial, and said, “Come on, this will probably be our last chance to relax and talk.”
Any other person, he might have reacted differently to the familiar touch, anything from a snarl to grabbing the offending hand and twisting it off of the owner. With Kugara, he couldn’t even bring himself to dislike the contact.
“So,” Nickolai said, “we’re allies again?”
“Were we ever?” She
waved him though the short air lock mating the ships together. “Come on.”
He followed her, pulling himself along the wall. She led him through the Daedalus until they came to a cargo compartment that mirrored the one Nickolai used for a cabin. This one was only occupied by a large powered hardsuit tethered to the floor in an upright position.
Kugara closed the door after them and tossed one of the bottles over to Nickolai. It was a slow, underhanded tumble that Nickolai easily picked out of the air. He looked at the bottle and said, “Whiskey from Buccinal? That’s about fifty light-years away. Where’d you get this?”