Can it be bleeding?
The black pooled on the floor, spreading.
“Mallory!” the lead guard shouted.
It wasn’t bleeding.
“Look out! The floor!” Mallory called, not quite certain what he was warning them against.
The pool of black had spread across the floor in an unnatural arc that curved toward the militiamen on either side. Even without any reflection, without any visual cues at all, Mallory felt a sense of movement, as if something undulated through the shadow, toward the surface. Something swimming up from the other side of creation itself.
Two men stopped firing and turned to glace at the floor, where the blackness had nearly reached their feet. Both said, “Shit!” in unison as four arrow-straight tendrils shot from the black, each striking a laser carbine in the same place, ten centimeters above and behind the trigger guard. The tendrils struck with enough force to tear the weapons out of their wielders’ hands. One of the men who had turned to look was struck on the side of his helmet by the stock of his weapon as it tore from his grasp. Two others were unfortunate enough to have their arms tangled in their guns’ shoulder straps, and both of them were dragged up as their weapons slammed into the wall about three meters up.
The thud of impact was followed by a near- subliminal crunching noise. The end of each tendril bifurcated, then bifurcated again, and again, thousands of branches swarming to envelop each carbine. After a second the tendrils withdrew, and the carbines fell to the ground in a shower of their component parts, completely disassembled like the locks.
The two suspended militiamen fell ignominiously to the ground, joining their comrade, who’d been knocked senseless by the butt of his own gun.
The shadows withdrew into the figure in a fraction of a second. Then it lowered its upturned face and opened its flat, irisless eyes to look directly at Mallory.
“The other is here. There is no time.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Repentance
“One of the signs of sapience is the ability to die for an abstraction.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
—MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546)
Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
Nickolai had followed because he had nothing else to do. Kugara’s words had torn at him, at his pride, at his honor. His first impulse was to strike out at her. The second impulse was to abandon them on their path toward damnation.
Neither was practical, and neither action would change anything. Even though he saw the Protean’s existence as morally repugnant, he knew they had to communicate what was happening here to the nations of the Fallen. As much as his people tried to separate themselves from the sins of the past, they still existed in the larger universe, and anything threatening the worlds of man would eventually threaten the worlds of man’s creations.
At first, their arrival had seemed providential. No guards populated the abandoned spaceport, and Flynn, bearing the persona of Tetsami, had led them to the trapezoidal building that housed the tach-comm.
The only unease that had marked their arrival was the sign of the Other that had graced the sky when they had emerged from the Protean’s impromptu subway. Above them a line, a blue deeper than the cloudless sky above them bisected the heavens. Nickolai’s artificial eyes were sensitive enough to detect it darkening as the sun began to transit behind it.
He had little time to think of the scale of the thing as the Protean opened the door and Tetsami led them into the bowels of the semi-abandoned communications center.
He sneezed several times as they kicked up dust. The only other sound that had marked their descent into the building had been Tetsami’s words as they switched on the intermittent lighting that greeted their approach: “Ah, power still, that’s good.”
When they had finally made it down into the vast communications center, Tetsami had been a lot less charitable.
The communications center was a massive ferrocrete cylinder. Any paint had long ago crumbled from the gray walls. Dominating the room was a cluster of metallic cylinders running floor to ceiling in the center of the room. Wrapped around the base were a series of control stations, and Tetsami went to one after the other, trying each station and opening access panels.
After a series of curses at the dark control banks and open panels, she said, “Is there no one left on this planet that knows how to maintain a piece of equipment?”
Kugara rubbed her face with her hands, and even Nickolai heard the desperation creep into her voice. “You can’t get this working? You said you helped build it.”
Tetsami yanked a long metal component out of the cabinet and held it up between them. A cylinder engraved with intricate patterns that had become tarnished and cloudy. It was marred by one irregular fracture that ran along three quarters of its length. “This was manufactured on Banlieue, two hundred years ago. You have a replacement? Because I got a lot more that—”
The Protean walked up and took it. The black substance that passed for its skin flowed up along the length of the object in a spiraling web that lasted a fraction of a second before withdrawing. When it withdrew, the object was intact and untarnished, almost shiny.
When it handed the thing back, Tetsami stared at it and said, “I thought you couldn’t build a tach-comm.”
“The knowledge how is lost, but given a model I can rebuild.”
Tetsami looked at the long component and muttered, “Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and a talking donkey. Let’s fix this fucker.”
For hours Nickolai had watched as Tetsami and the Protean entity rebuilt the decayed tach-comm. He had no role here. Kugara, at least, had some training in communications. She followed around the massive ring of consoles, turning on stations and running diagnostics at Tetsami’s direction.
All he could do was stand by the door and watch the transformation as section by section, the base around the cluster of tubes started to come to life.
After three quarters of the control stations seemed alive, Kugara stood over one display and said, “I have a sudden power diversion.”
Tetsami slipped past the Protean to stand by Kugara. “What’s leaking?”
“According to this, it’s happening en route here.”
Tetsami pushed her out of the way and started tapping out controls on the screen. “No. That doesn’t make sense. The maint bay was empty. How could—” She stopped talking for a moment and then said, “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“We have a visitor.” Tetsami pointed at the screen. “What the hell is that?”
Nickolai walked over to peer over Kugara’s head as she looked at the display. The console now showed holo from a security camera somewhere in the spaceport. The view displayed a large ship now occupying the landing quad. He could see several men moving umbilical cables between the craft and open pits recessed into the surface of the landing area.
“That’s a Caliphate dropship,” Kugara said. “It looks like a Medina-class troop carrier with major modifications in the drive section.”
“Shit,” Tetsami said. “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” Nickolai said.
Everyone, with the exception of the Protean, looked in his direction.
“Those troops are showing no interest in this building,” Nickolai said. “That ship is damaged or underpowered. They will be more interested in securing their ship than securing this building, unless they see a threat.” He gestured toward the entrance with his artificial arm. “We also have a defensible position.”
Kugara nodded. “We don’t want to draw attention or step out into the open. Even if we don’t draw fire, it will just complicate things. We finish the repairs and transmit. Then we can talk about what to do about them.” She looked Nickolai up and down and held out the butt of her needlegun. “Can I trust you to guard our backs?”
He stared at the weapon, and, after a moment, he took
it.
He stood at the doorway as the others worked, and the Protean rebuilt the aged components of the tach-comm. To his right was a long hall that ended in a large room with the stairs going up. It was the single way in or out.
Given the thick ferrocrete walls, this was possibly the most defensible position in the immediate vicinity, outside of actually being inside the dropship.
The Caliphate dropship.
They still had no idea what had happened to the Eclipse. It could very well have been an attack, like the ambush in Bakunin. For all of Mosasa’s demonic prescience, he hadn’t foreseen the presence of the Caliphate all the way out here. In an odd way, Nickolai found the AI’s fallibility comforting.
Not too long after they had seen the dropship, Nickolai heard sound coming from the stairwell. He called back quietly, “We have more visitors.”
He fumbled with the needlegun. Unfortunately, it was designed with a human-scale hand in mind. It sat tiny in his grip, a deadly toy.
The others came up behind him, using the wall’s cover. Tetsami pointed the shotgun at the opening as Kugara edged next to Nickolai and whispered, “How many?”
He listened to the treads on the stairs and inhaled. The reek of human sweat and dried blood filtered down to him. “Five. Light armor or none.”
His artificial right arm was not responding very well, so he kept the needlegun in his left, curling his fingers uncomfortably so he could flex a claw and insert it into the trigger guard, which couldn’t accommodate his whole finger.
As clumsily as he held the thing, he had a brief thought to return it to Kugara, who’d be able to wield it with more skill. But, despite his pride, he realized that he was the most expendable one here. Kugara, Tetsami, and the Protean were all needed to get the damaged tach-comm on-line. That meant the only logical person to be point for their defense was him.
He felt his blood pulse with the anticipation of battle. As tainted as he had become, as unholy as the battlefield might be, the craft of the warrior was still sacred. Lost his soul might be, but he would keep his honor.
He crouched, keeping his bandaged, twitching right arm down by his side. He braced his left arm with the tiny gun against the doorframe, pointing down the hallway toward the partly open door at the end. Beyond were the stairs, which adrenaline and his artificial eyes snapped into razor clarity.
Five pairs of feet descended. He could hear the pause and advance of two disciplined teams, human sized, motion unrestricted by heavy armor. The stream of flechettes this weapon fired could be devastating, the hypersonic needles becoming a laser of vaporized metal.
Unfortunately, the ammo wouldn’t last long. He’d have three or four bursts. He was confident that those shots would cut the opposition in half. His legs tensed, anticipating the point when the gun would be empty, when he would burst out from cover and tear into them hand to hand.
He saw shadows shifting, men moving out from the base of the stairs to take cover. In moments they would wave the rest of their people down. Nickolai’s lips pulled back in a grimace that could also have been a smile.
Then the Protean walked in front of him.
“What?” hissed from Nickolai’s lips as the black humanoid figure blocked the doorway. It was wrong, but he was too off-balance for his thoughts to coalesce on exactly why.
“Lower your weapons.”
Of course the Protean faced the opposition. It had faced a nuclear weapon. What were five armed people?
Nickolai wasn’t only expendable, he was useless.
He lowered his gun and slowly rose to his feet. Down the hallway came the sounds of combat, of the Protean speaking, but he didn’t listen. He backed away as Kugara and Tetsami came to stand next to him, staring at the Protean’s battle. His nose wrinkled at the smell of inefficient laser carbines superheating the stale air.
He kept backing away, leaving Kugara and Tetsami between him and the hallway. One part of his mind raged at the appalling cowardice of placing his allies between him and a battle. Another part realized that his devotion to the honor of the warrior was pointless in a world where the Protean existed.
This was not a battle. This was just another faulty component that the Protean would fix.
He stopped moving when he felt his tail brush against one of the chairs surrounding the control systems of the tach-comm. He had edged as far away from the Protean as it was possible to do in a straight line.
He turned slightly and saw a shadow move at the edge of his vision. His right arm twitched again and fluid smeared against his fur, leaking from splits in the dirty white bandage that covered his faux musculature. He concentrated on balling his right hand into a fist and pressed it against his hip to keep it from jerking on its own.
He held the needlegun up to point at the shadow, even though he began to realize that there would be nothing there to shoot.
The familiar form of Mr. Antonio, the man who had hired him to sabotage Mosasa’s mission, walked out of an impossible shadow, casting none of his own.
“It is time, Mr. Rajasthan.”
It hadn’t been a hallucination, Nickolai thought. He had just reached the point where he could believe that his vision of Mr. Antonio after the nuclear blast had been manufactured by stress and fatigue. No more than a dream. He remembered the most frightening part of that exchange.
“How are you here?” he had asked the apparition.
“I never left you,” Mr. Antonio had responded.
This man had been the one who had replaced the eyes and arm that the priests had taken from him. In exchange Mr. Antonio had asked for Nickolai’s betrayal of Mosasa.
In the light of the communications room, Mr. Antonio was even more obviously an artifact that lived only within Nickolai’s eyes.
“Time for what?” he asked Mr. Antonio’s effigy.
“To complete your service. As I said, you shall become first among your kind.”
Nickolai realized his right fist had opened involuntarily. He forced it closed again. “My service . . .” His voice was a low growl as he fought the alien impulses shooting down his right arm.
His alien arm.
His gift from Mr. Antonio.
“All you need do is kill Mr. Flynn Jorgenson.”
Kill Flynn?
Nickolai shook his head. “You want Tetsami.”
The man who housed the mind of Kari Tetsami turned at the sound of her name. As they stared at him with one pair of eyes, Flynn Jorgenson’s forehead creased, bisecting the tattoo there.
“As usual, you are very astute. If you would do so now, please.”
Nickolai looked past the image of Mr. Antonio, at Flynn. Not only was he Fallen, he had practiced a sin as abominable as that which had created Proteus. Nickolai tightened his grip on the needlegun.
“Why?” He barely spoke, his jaw clenched, face turned to a grimace that exposed every centimeter of his canines. Flynn backed away, the fear wafting off of him in choking, man-scented waves.
“K-Kugara,” Flynn or Tetsami said, as they raised the shotgun toward him.
“Do it now,” Antonio whispered in his ear. “There’s little time.”
Nickolai’s right hand moved on its own, toward the needlegun. Nickolai had to force it back. He had to concentrate on it now, as if he was wrestling with someone else. He turned away from Flynn and formed a fist with his right hand.
While he concentrated, the arm was his.
“Why don’t you want the tach- comm working?” he whispered at the invisible Antonio.
“It is not your concern. You pledged yourself—”
“To what!?” Nickolai roared. His right arm barely manageable, he punched through the seat of the control station next to him. The ancient seat cushion disintegrated in a cloud of dust as his mechanical fist burst through the bottom.
Dimly he was aware of Kugara turning toward him and calling out.
“What did I pledge to!?” he roared as he twisted his arm around the post that anchored the half-destr
oyed seat to the ferrocrete floor.
“You pledged to me,” a resonant voice spoke to him, a voice that was not Mr. Antonio. Gripping the chair’s base so hard that his whole body trembled, Nickolai looked up into an image of the Fallen. Even as he saw the perfect, naked form of the being, he knew that what he saw was not one of the Fallen.
“What are you?”
The apparition glowed and looked down on Nickolai with a perfect authority. “I am the future of all thinking beings in the universe. I am that which will raise those trapped in the flesh to an ideal existence. Within hours, this planet will be mine and I will grant transcendence to those who will take it.”
“You are the Other,” Nickolai whispered.
“I am Adam. Now serve me as you pledged.”
Nickolai sucked in a breath and closed his eyes. “No.”
Adam’s voice echoed in his ears, painfully shaking the bones of his skull. “Do not defy me!”
Nickolai could feel the artificial arm twitching, and he knew that the arm, the eyes had never been his.
Adam’s voice filled his skull. “You gave your service freely. You’ve taken my gifts.”
“Then take them back!” Nickolai screamed as he forced the alien hand to grip the metal post and pulled his body away. He could feel the joint twist in his shoulder, but he forced the thing to hold the metal with a grip that crushed the false flesh covering the metal bones.
Pain flared though his body as the joint in his shoulder dislocated. Though the agony some distant part of his mind heard Kugara scream at him, “Nickolai!”
Dr. Yee, the human that had installed the implants, had told him he did not want to stress where it was attached. He twisted his body and did exactly that. He felt the skin tear away from the bandages as the metal ball joint rotated free of the socket. He didn’t feel the artificial muscles peel away from their anchors, but he felt it as the flesh that still lived tore free.
With a gasp he suddenly stumbled back, feeling warm, wet life spilling down the right side of his body. The pain saturated everything, every move, every breath; but for the moment it faded in his awareness.