“I don’t know, I just know I don’t like ultimatums.”
“Neither do I.” She thought of Adam and a cloud of machines that would take her apart, molecule by molecule, if she didn’t accept him.
It.
And should it touch you, you become his servant, or something else crawls into your skin.
Parvi shuddered and prayed that these displaced technicians could get the Khalid fixed and powered in half an hour.
Parvi watched the techs as they scrambled over the ship and pulled cables and hoses from the Khalid and from access panels recessed in the tarmac. Somehow they managed to get the two to mate up.
She felt a small surge of optimism when one of the techs crawled out from the open belly of the ship and gave his comrades a thumbs-up.
Then she heard Wahid’s voice say, “What the fuck?”
“What?” She looked away from the Khalid, and saw that their guard was paying more attention to the woods behind them than he was to his two prisoners. Wahid had turned to look behind them as well. “We have company,” he whispered.
Parvi looked back so she could see what Wahid was talking about.
A quartet of people approached them from out of the woods. The man in the lead looked ancient; a tall, hairless wraith emerging from the trees. Three people moved behind him: a young man with Asiatic features, a tall, blonde woman, and a older man with skin darker than her and Wahid put together. Parvi stared but couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“That can’t be—” Wahid said.
“Dr. Pak, Dr. Dörner, and Dr. Brody.” Parvi pushed herself to her feet. “It’s them.”
It was them, and they had been through hell. Pak looked shell-shocked, Brody cradled a broken arm, and Dörner wore the expression of someone ready to die or kill someone. All wore blood-spattered field dressings on their necks.
The old man leading them was someone she had never seen before. He definitely wasn’t from the Caliphate. He was too ancient even for a command position in the Caliphate military, and he wore civilian clothes that were archaically cut and styled—in addition to looking slept in.
Parvi heard shouts from near the Khalid. At least one voice was the familiar sharp bark of Sergeant Abbas. “No,” Parvi muttered as she ran toward the quartet. From behind her she heard their guard shout something in Arabic and Wahid shout, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Keeping her from doing something stupid.”
“What about you? Damn it!”
She heard feet running behind her, and she glanced back toward the Khalid and saw a half-dozen armed techs, led by Sergeant Abbas, converging on the newcomers as well. Abbas’ face was contorted in an expression of anger and fear that didn’t argue for this going well.
Parvi turned back and watched as the old man stopped his advance at the edge of the LZ, waiting for his welcoming committee.
Good, Parvi thought, no sudden moves that could be misinterpreted. We might get out of this without anyone getting hurt—
Something slammed into the back of her head, and she fell face-first into the tarmac about fifteen meters from the old man.
Shane’s six militiamen led Mallory in a dead run through the woods. Normally, he wouldn’t have had a problem keeping up. He had better training than these men ever had. But what Shane had done inside his skull messed with his ability to move, and he found himself stumbling after them as if he was in a constant forward fall that never quite hit the ground.
The plan, such as it was, meant to get Mallory into the tach-comm facility while Shane and the remaining civilians from the Eclipse served as a distraction. Mallory didn’t like it, but Shane had him out-gunned and outnumbered. So it was Shane’s show, even if the old man’s goals coincided with Mallory’s.
Several times Mallory bounced off of trees, and several more he found one of his escorts grabbing his upper arm to help steer him or keep him from falling over. His implants, unaware of his disorientation, responded to the adrenaline and further confused his sense of space, time, and distance. The rush though the woods telescoped until it felt as if they’d been running for hours.
According to the militia’s chronometers, when they reached the northeast corner of the spaceport, it had taken them less than seven minutes.
Mallory had a few seconds to survey the situation. Trees and underbrush pushed right up against the edge of the facility, which consisted of ten buildings of various sizes in a rough ring around a central landing area. The buildings showed their age, sloughing off layers of ferrocrete that piled in rust-colored mounds at the corners of the buildings. Traces of paint were tiny abstract flecks adhering to pitted walls. Signs were weathered and unreadable, and landing lights were nonexistent. The only sign that the port was kept marginally functional was the fact that the LZ itself was clear of debris, and the doors were all clean and appeared usable.
Of course, the dropship dominated everything. Size-wise it was on the outer edge of what this facility was designed to handle. The Medina class was practically all lifting body, no wings to speak of, which gave it a squat narrow profile, something like the shape of a prehistoric flint arrowhead.
Mallory could see people swarming the lower areas, connecting umbilicals carted from one of the other buildings. None of them wore combat fatigues or armor, and he only saw a few carrying weapons. Mallory wondered if he found that reassuring or not.
Suddenly, all the crew by the ship turned away from them, and Mallory could just make out Shane approaching from the opposite side of the compound.
“Come on,” one of the guards said, grabbing him.
While the ground crew was distracted, they dashed for the building with the tach-transmitter. The door stood open, saving them a bit of time.
Inside, Mallory felt even more the sense of a building neglected to just the edge of functionality. Paint had chipped, peeled, or disintegrated off of every surface, leaving fine piles of dust that collected at the base of each wall. While the building had power, more than half of the light fixtures—fully enclosed and apparently intended to be permanent—remained dark. Where there had been chrome trim, on doorways and wall panels, the metal had gone cloudy and spotted.
He glanced at the lights again. Who turned them on? When Mallory looked back at the door, he realized it had been forced.
“There’s someone else here,” Mallory whispered.
He stared at the door. The locking mechanism, if that’s what it was, appeared to have been disassembled, the parts scattered on the floor. All around the base of the door were little wires, circuit boards, tiny little screws, parts of the plastic housing, gears, and bolts.
Also on the dust-shrouded floor were signs of more footprints than could be accounted for by their presence.
The lead guard held up his hand and gestured for silence as he looked down at the mess that had once been the door’s lock. Two more edged back to flank Mallory, their guns at the ready.
Three corridors led away from the empty lobby they stood in, two following the outer walls, the last going deeper into the structure. The leader checked each, and Mallory watched him search for more footprints or other signs of company. He came back to the lobby and pointed at two of the guards, then back at the two corridors flanking the entrance. The two nodded, and he waved everyone else to follow him.
The first pair of men stayed in the lobby to guard their exit while rest of them headed deeper into the building. Mallory walked with two militiamen flanking him, while the others eased up ahead, checking each doorway and intersection.
Even after the passage of the point team, Mallory could make out the footprints in the dust. The other party had gone ahead down the same corridor and had not come back this way.
They must be looking for the same thing, the tach-transmitter.
The question was, why? Were they trying to use it themselves, or prevent others from using it?
In the lobby, the prior footprints had been all on top of each other, an indisting
uishable, abstract mass. Once in this corridor, Mallory had divided his attention between the footprints—half obscured by the point team’s passage—and keeping his own eyes on the corridor, checking ahead and behind. Because of that, it took him a dozen meters or so before he noticed the truly odd thing about the footprints they followed.
One set was barefoot.
Another wasn’t human.
Mallory stared at the first intact paw print, as wide as his own foot was long, and whispered, “Nickolai?”
One of his guards shook him sharply for breaking silence, and pulled him after the point team, who had just reached the head of a stairwell going down.
Mallory tried to piece together how Nickolai could be here. He didn’t know where that lifeboat had landed, and for all he knew it could have put down within a few hundred meters of this place. But such a coincidence strained credulity.
Was he trying to sabotage the tach-comm like he had done on the Eclipse?
Mallory’s gut tightened. When the tiger had made his confession to him, Mallory thought he had seen a glimpse of his soul, gained a small bit of understanding. Seeing that paw print here at such a critical point drove home to Mallory the fact that he didn’t know Nickolai at all.
How does someone act when they believe themselves damned? When they believe everyone around them is damned as well?
The point team waited by the stairwell for them to catch up.
Nickolai, and whoever accompanied him, had gone down these stairs and had not come back up. The two point men descended to the first landing and, after checking the area, waved the rest of them down.
They descended three flights like that, down to a large square room of badly lit ferrocrete. This room was relatively dust-free, so no footprints showed on the smooth gray floor. The ceiling was a maze of pipes and conduit above them, and a half-dozen doors surrounded them.
Only one of those doors was in the wall that faced them. That door was open a crack, the floor at its base cluttered with small lengths of wire and tiny screws.
The air was filled by the subliminal hum of a nearby power plant. The air itself felt alive with potential, the electric atmosphere teasing up the hairs on Mallory’s arms and the back of his neck.
The militiamen pushed him back toward the minimal cover of the stairwell as they formed two ranks to flank the open door. Mallory pressed himself against the wall, praying for some sort of guidance.
Mallory could shout a warning to Nickolai and whoever was with him.
But he didn’t truly know who was enemy or ally here. He had been hired along with Nickolai. They had been on the same mission. But Nickolai had betrayed that trust. Just like Mallory had.
They both had served other masters.
But were these armed men any more on his side? He hadn’t been given much time to think, but in some sense these men served a culture founded on an abomination. What they did here, with the human mind, was akin to a ritualistic rape of the soul. How could whatever Adam offered be worse?
God grant me the strength and the wisdom to do Your will.
Instead, God granted him a reprieve from that decision.
The door slid open while the militiamen were still approaching. The open doorway revealed a jet-black human figure, a nude hairless male who was as perfectly smooth and symmetrical as a statue. Mallory might have thought it was a statue, until it spoke.
Parvi groaned and rolled onto her back. Wahid put a hand on her shoulder to restrain her, though she wasn’t the focus of attention right now. In the few moments Parvi had blacked out, Abbas had her people ring the newcomers.
Everyone stared at the old man, everyone except the tech holding a plasma rifle pointed at Parvi’s midsection. Parvi’s head throbbed, and her vision was slightly blurred. When she had blinked everything back into focus, she realized that the old guy didn’t look that great himself. He was hairless, but the flowing white topcoat and a glance at his eyes gave Parvi an impression of a mad prophet fresh from the mountainside, an image that would be complete if the man had a long wild head of hair rather than a scalp covered with tattoos.
He stood with arms spread, partly blocking the three others.
Abbas was cursing to herself, and several of the people holding weapons on the newcomers looked uncomfortable.
What’s going on here?
Abbas shouted at the newcomer, “I am in command here.”
“I am certain that is the case, Sergeant. But I think I need to talk to your commanding officers.”
“Whatever you think,” Abbas said. When she paused for breath, Parvi could see her jaw clench with barely contained rage. “You don’t get to decide. You are all talking to me here and now.” She pointed to one of the mechanics, one holding a gamma laser. “If he doesn’t start explaining himself, shoot the woman.”
Parvi lurched to her feet, yelling, “No!”
The guy with the plasma rifle tried to cover her, but suddenly she was in the midst of his Caliphate fellows.
Someone by the old man yelled out a surprised, “Parvi?”
If Abbas had been holding her side arm, Parvi probably would have been dead. Instead, the sergeant intercepted Parvi’s panicked grab for the mechanic with the gamma laser, rotated her arm under Parvi’s shoulder, and used momentum to allow Parvi to pass in front of her as she folded Parvi’s arm back up between her shoulder blades. Parvi grunted as Abbas shoved her arm up and forced her down to her knees.
“By all that is holy, woman. Do you think the Caliphate doesn’t give its engineers combat training?” She glanced over at the guy with the plasma rifle and shouted something in Arabic. The guy looked embarrassed and grabbed Wahid and hauled him to his feet.
Abbas jerked Parvi’s arm, and Parvi felt her eyes water.
“Do you know these people?”
“They’re from the Eclipse,” Parvi said. “The three in back were part of the science team.”
“What are they doing here?” Abbas snapped.
“This place was where the Eclipse was directed to land, before the engines blew and the lifeboats launched.”
Abbas dragged her upright and with an impressive show of strength pushed her into the arms of a couple more waiting techs. “Don’t challenge me again, Vijayanagara Parvi. You are useful but not indispensable.” She drew her own weapon and stepped over to the man and the remnants of the science team. She held the gamma laser up, pointing it at Dr. Dörner’s head. “Someone’s going to pay for that little display.”
“Please,” Parvi shouted, pulling against the men holding her, “don’t!”
“Fine,” Abbas said, “have it your way.” She moved her aim to the right and fired the laser straight through Dr. Pak’s right eye. His muscles spasmed once, and his body fell to the tarmac, a slight wisp of steam drifting up from a burnt-out eye socket.
Everyone, Caliphate techs included, stood in stunned silence.
“Does everyone understand now that we have no time for games?” Abbas said. She turned and looked at Parvi. “That was your decision. Don’t test me again.”
Parvi stared at Dr. Pak’s corpse with the sudden certainty that they were all going to die.
Abbas turned back toward the quartet and said, “My order stands. If he doesn’t answer my questions, shoot the woman.” She stared at the old man. “Tell me now what you want to tell my commanding officers.”
The old man lowered his hands and glanced about with too much detachment for someone who had just had a man killed in front of him. He sucked in a breath and nodded.
“My name is Alexander Shane. I am the senior member of the Grand Triad of Salmagundi. When your ships appeared in orbit, I took it upon myself to take control of the Triad and assume direct command of all military forces on this planet. I am here to negotiate our surrender to the Caliphate.”
Even ten meters away, Parvi could hear Wahid mutter, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Lower your weapons.”
Hearing the thing speak tu
rned Mallory’s guts to water. The voice was dark, resonant, and sounded unlike anything that should come from a human throat, a sound that did not come from flesh.
The Salmagundi militia did not listen to the thing’s command. They dropped against the walls and the floor to provide a smaller crosssection to target and leveled their laser carbines at the ebon intruder.
“Don’t move,” the lead guard shouted.
“The other is here. There is no time.” The thing took a step forward, through the doorway.
That was all the excuse the militia needed. The men were primed and on edge, and even with no visible weapons, the intruder’s very alienness threatened them. That alone made it more than probable that this thing was an emissary of Adam.
Four carbines fired, their beams only slightly visible because of the refraction of the superheated air the shots left in their paths. Where they hit the figure, the skin—if that’s what it was—changed texture from glossy to matte, to a black that was so complete that Mallory felt as if it marked a blind flaw in his own eye.
The militia held their carbines on the figure, firing continuously. In response, the figure stood still, arms outstretched, head back. It was on the verge of a blasphemous thought, but to Mallory, the thing’s expression almost reflected a religious rapture; as if he looked at a satanic negative of a Renaissance painting of Christ receiving John’s baptism.
It’s absorbing the energy, Mallory thought.
He called out to the militiamen, “Stop!”
They didn’t listen, continuing to fire. Perhaps they thought the deep, spreading black was some form of damage.
He moved from his cover. “You aren’t hurting it!”
“Get back,” the leader yelled at him. “We have to get you to the transmitter!”
“You don’t know what—”
“Move, Mallory!”
The deep, bottomless blackness grew, like a flaw in the universe, spreading down the thing’s legs, pooling at its feet.