Heretics

  Almost involuntarily, Toni focused the scan on the scout’s pilot. She already knew what she would see, but some part of her wished she was wrong. She adjusted the density level on the scan, and momentarily, the passenger and most of the life suit disappeared from the display. All she saw was the thin metal rings that joined the helmet to the suit, hovering above the metal framework of the pilot’s chair. She decreased the density and the pilot’s bones resolved themselves into a prostrate skeleton staring up at her through the grainy display.

  Upping the density a little more and flesh poured onto the bones. Like a slow-motion image of someone being hit by a plasma cannon played in reverse.

  When she was done, Lieutenant Toni Valentine stared at the unconscious face of Lieutenant Toni Valentine.

  It took two hours standard for Toni to recover her future self from the damaged scout craft. She had to match course with the drifting ship, go EVA, and attach a couple of warning beacons to the crippled ship’s hull so it could be recovered later. Then she had to manually free the emergency release bolts that separated the control pod from the rest of the ship. Moving the pod, which contained her other self, as well as the control systems and life support of the dying ship took the bulk of the time.

  Having her own scout pull the pod free was a delicate process where one misstep could end up piercing the pod. She needed to avoid any loss of atmosphere from the pod, because she had no idea if her doppelganger had the chance to seal her suit.

  She also wanted the pod intact because it held the ship’s memory. Telemetry, comm, and sensor signals, back to the last time the scout had docked and uploaded data to the station’s main data store.

  In other words, as much as her unconscious twin, the pod contained the information on what happened—a question that was taking on more than a purely professional interest for her.

  Toni’s scout returned to the station with the other ship’s control pod attached to its abdomen like a parasitic twin. Towing the pod, about a quarter of a normal scout’s mass—about a third of what was left of her twin’s ship—pushed her own ship’s capability near the limit. She had to do some fancy orbital maneuvers around the wormhole so that she had enough reaction mass to match velocity when she docked back at the station.

  Umbilicals routed Toni’s life support to the alien pod, while Toni piloted the too- massive scout back home with a hard vacuum in her own control pod. She ran her own environment suit at three-quarters capacity so she could last the whole way back.

  Fortunately, 265 days of hard-core training and conditioning had made her body effective in adverse conditions, and she hardly noticed the effects of the low-oxy mix until she docked and was able to pressurize her command pod. She felt a brief period of light- headedness as she stripped off her spent environment suit, but it barely registered.

  She violated several sections of the manual as she tossed parts of her suit on the floor in her scramble out the air lock, but after the ponderous trip back to the station she was seized by a sense of urgency that had been brewing ever since she saw her own transponder radiating from the ghost ship. Jumping into a spare environment suit would be about twelve minutes quicker than recharging the one she was wearing. It was the one thing so far she could safely rush—and she took the opportunity.

  The mass sensors still showed signs of respiration and circulation in her double, and the life-support monitors on the shuttle—which were currently connected to the extra pod—showed a good O2/CO2 cycling. Those were the only monitors she had on her twin’s life signs. The fact that Toni II was stationary in the pod gave circumstantial evidence she was still in a suit-induced coma, but because most of the brains in Toni II’s command pod died with the power systems on the other ship, there was no direct way to monitor Toni II’s life signs. Toni would have no real idea what was going on with her until she got her into a medical unit on the station.

  That was going to take another EVA.

  Fortunately, the station had an emergency docking umbilical that was flexible enough to snake around the docked scout craft and limpet onto the dead pod’s air lock. It took another half hour for Toni to rig the connection, check the seal, and return to the station. For all the urgency she felt, it was as if she was swimming upstream through cold machine oil on Loki.

  Toni blew the lock on the dead command pod and let free the warm smells of shit, piss, and fear. Toni II didn’t move from the pilot’s chair, and her face was barely visible through a polarized faceplate. The smell told Toni that she’d made the right decision in salvaging the whole command pod. Toni II’s suit was venting into the cabin. Exposed to vacuum, the suit would have failed.

  She walked clumsily in the cramped space. The station’s rotation and the impromptu connection to the scout made everything in the cabin lean at an awkward angle, toward the rear left corner of the cabin. When she reached her older self, she broke the seal on the helmet, pulled it off, and let it drop and roll to that corner of the cabin.

  Suddenly face-to-face, Toni felt a surge of dread that originated deep in some common cultural subconscious. Leaning forward in the one-person cabin, Toni stared at her own face, separated from it only by their mingled breaths. She found herself backing away until she felt the curving panel of the pod’s metal ceiling cold on the back of her neck.

  The rational part of her mind screamed at her. This wasn’t an omen, for God’s sake. This wasn’t some psychodrama where she was meeting her Jungian shadow self. She was a lieutenant in the Stygian Security Forces, about as far away from folktales and fantasy as you could get.

  Still, she had to force herself to touch a neck that was hers, and not hers, and feel a pulse that was hers, and not hers. The pulse was strong, steady, and much slower than her own.

  Toni carried the surprisingly light body to the emergency medical bay. She stripped her other self naked and lowered the body into an articulated chamber that resembled a prone version of the universal resistance machine in the station’s gym. Toni watched the metal carapace envelop Toni II, and felt strange relief when she could no longer see the flesh of her double.

  She’s not much older then me.

  No, she’s not any older than me.

  Impossible . . .

  What the hell happened to you? Toni thought. What’s going to happen to me?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Omens

  “You cannot see the future if you cannot see the past.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.”

  —CONFUCIUS (c. 551-479 BCE)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Earth-Sol

  Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia and Vatican Secretary of State, sat alone in his offices in the Apostolic Palace. In front of him, holo displays set into his desk scrolled by intelligence information from across the breadth of human space. Of late, much of that information concerned the Eridani Caliphate and their proxies. Within the past six months, the Caliphate had made technical advances in warship design that placed almost the whole of human space within tactical reach of its military. Their new Ibrahim-class carriers were a potential threat to every one of their rivals.

  At the moment, though, he was paying little attention to data from the Caliphate.

  In front of him, for perhaps the thousandth time, he played a holo recording. It began with a static whine and an image that flowed in and out of focus, distorting itself. Part of it was degradation from sending a tach-signal so far; part was because the image came from the nose of a swiftly moving tach-ship trying to focus its sensors.

  The heavens spun around the display until it centered on a blue orb, a planet so similar to Earth it was almost painful to look at.

  The voice that emerged, at least to begin with, belonged to a Vatican agent. Cardinal Anderson thought that these might have been the man’s last words.

  “. . . with Xi Virginis . . . bzzt . . . have lost visual contact . . . ”

&
nbsp; Xi Virginis sat eighty light-years beyond the official limits of human space. But that hadn’t stopped humans from colonizing. And it didn’t stop those colonies from being important. The man sending this transmission had been sent to make contact on behalf of the Vatican, long before the Caliphate sent its Ibrahim carriers to do the same thing, more forcefully.

  Interference blurred the holo and the planet. At least it appeared like interference, some artifact of transmission, or encoding. However, very many people had analyzed the holo, and what obscured the view of the planet was not any side effect of the transmission.

  Something was coalescing in space between the camera and the planet. A cloud of black specks.

  When the holo spoke again, it was a different voice that spoke, more of arrogance than of fear. “. . . bzzt . . . coming toward . . . bzzt . . . behold a great . . . bzzt . . .”

  The cloud of black motes moved purposefully toward the planet.

  “. . . seven heads . . . bzzt . . . crowns upon . . . bzzt . . . the third part of the stars . . . cast . . . bzzt . . .”

  The transmission died.

  “Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” quoted Cardinal Anderson to no one in particular.

  Nine months ago, he had sent the last agent to investigate the source of the enigmatic transmission. Nine months. That had been before they knew about the Caliphate carriers that would put those colonies firmly in the reach of the Caliphate. Before the escalation of tensions that prevent serious consideration of anything outside their own borders.

  But Father Mallory was still out there, somewhere. They had enough intel from Bakunin to know now that, despite Caliphate interference, he had been able to leave on an expedition to Xi Virginis.

  Beyond that, nothing.

  Unless Mallory’s expedition had access to the new Caliphate tach-drives, the earliest they could have reached their goal would have been less than a month ago, more reasonably, within the week.

  It was quite possible that the Caliphate could have beaten them there.

  Anderson stared at the transmission and wondered what Father Mallory faced now.

  “God help him,” Cardinal Anderson whispered.

  From the ornate desk in front of him, an assistant’s voice emerged, “The trade representative from Sirius has arrived.”

  He waved, and the troubling holo disappeared from in front of him. “Send the man in,” he told his assistant.

  It was time to return to work.

  PART FOUR

  Crusade

  “There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.”

  —ST. AMBROSE (340?-397)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Miracles

  “Problems are never solved, only replaced.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.”

  —NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (1769-1812)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Julia Kugara stood on a crystalline outcrop and stared as the sun set on a wasteland. Stretching for kilometers away from her, what had been a forest was now little more than a vast bowl of coals and cooling ash. Close to the horizon, at the limits of visibility in the haze and dimming light, she thought she could see where the burnt trees regained some semblance of individuality as blackened logs scattered like toothpicks. Beyond that, she could see the roils of smoke as the forest beyond still burned.

  She wondered how many of her comrades from the Eclipse had died in the blast. The radius of the damage stretched far past where her lifeboat had dropped her and Nickolai, and the lifeboats were supposed to cluster their drops.

  What kind of sick universe has me and the tiger as the only survivors?

  Much closer, just a dozen meters from where she stood, the blast had been forceful enough to scour the ground clean, leaving a pitted, glassy surface that refracted slight rainbow shimmers in the evening light. About ten meters away from her, the glass stopped in a sharp line.

  She spared a glance at the small disposable rad counter, one of the few items left from the lifeboat’s emergency kit that had survived. It still showed safe levels of radiation. It was hard to believe the thing—but not any harder than believing she still lived.

  She looked at the sharp line that marked the end of the nuke’s destruction and wondered what frightened her more, that someone had dropped a nuclear weapon on her, or that something else had deflected it. It struck her in an immediate visceral way that the disappearance of Xi Virginis never had. For all the enormity of it, a missing star was an abstract concept.

  This was immediate, concrete. She smelled the cooling ash, felt wind hot and dry enough to scour her skin, tasted a nasty metallic taste in the air.

  She walked the perimeter, a perfect hundred-meter circle centered on the alien crystalline artifact that seemed to have grown out of a much more prosaic backwoods encampment. There wasn’t much left of that encampment. The nuke had erased it from the face of the planet.

  She looked behind her, and the light from the fading sun captured the cluster of crystalline structures. The light reflected the structural details where the surfaces seemed to fold in on themselves in an infinite fractal regression.

  Proteus . . .

  The alien structure had obviously been the target of the attack. The presence of Kugara and Nickolai here was incidental. A coincidence.

  But it was very hard to believe in coincidence after working for Mosasa.

  Was this thing part of your plan? She looked up at the sky. Above her, the stars were beginning to appear. Are you still up there? Is the Eclipse still up there? Or did you both fall into the atmosphere and burn?

  She looked back at the horizon.

  The only surveillance devices she had were her own eyeballs, but she had satisfied herself that no vehicles were approaching. No team coming to bat cleanup after the nuke. She didn’t know if that was troubling or not. With the forest reduced to ash around them, the survival of the Protean’s crystal enclave would be visible for a hundred klicks in any direction. Did they care? Were they waiting for something?

  Are they otherwise occupied?

  She coughed in the metallic-tasting air and decided that she was done trusting the little rad counter.

  She walked back to the largest cluster of crystal forms. Within about twenty paces she was inside without ever passing a door as such. The walls folded around her path until they obscured everywhere except where she was going and where she had come from. Eventually she arrived at a space that could have been a room, or simply a space in the midst of the fractal superstructure of the crystalline walls surrounding her.

  Two people waited for her. The first to stand was Flynn, a lanky, sandy- haired young man with a single elaborate glyph tattooed onto his forehead like a cubist third eye. He was a native, and if Kugara was to believe him, the tattoo represented an additional personality living in his skull—a woman named Kari Tetsami who shared a Dakota ancestry with Kugara, and who had probably been dead for close to a hundred and fifty years. To hear Flynn talk about it, the colony on Salmagundi took ancestor worship to its logical extreme. It creeped her out.

  “Anything?” he asked. Kugara had only known the guy for a couple of hours, but she could already tell the difference between Flynn or Tetsami talking. Right now the earnest expression was completely Flynn.

  “Nothing visible approaching,” Kugara told him. “But anyone with a good line of sight can tell this place is still standing. If they’re serious about wiping it off the planet, I’d expect another nuke.”

  “We should leave,” Nickolai grumbled lowly.

  She turned to face her fellow survivor from the Eclipse. He still sat, staring off past Flynn and Kugara, into the semitransparent walls. His muzzle wrinkled in distaste, exposing his massive canines when he spoke.
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  “We should leave,” he repeated.

  Nickolai’s ancestors, like Kugara’s, had been the results of centuries-old, largely military genetic experiments. Unlike Kugara, though, the heretical experiments that created Nickolai’s kind had not begun with human DNA. So, while Kugara’s people had interbred until there was no way to tell from looking that she was not completely human, there was no mistaking that Nickolai had descended from some strain of Panthera Tigris. He had black and orange striped fur, easily stood three meters tall—almost a full meter on Kugara’s height—and topped the scales at five hundred kilos, all muscle.

  “And what if they lob another nuke at this place before we’re clear?” Kugara said. “At least we know that’s survivable here.”

  Nickolai flexed the claws on his right hand. His claws glinted gray and metallic as he scraped them along the crystal floor next to where he sat. If it wasn’t for the damage he’d sustained in their descent, the metal claws would be the only sign his arm was artificial. But the pseudoflesh that had covered the arm had been torn off between shoulder and wrist, and the mechanism that formed his arm was covered now by a white spray bandage. The bandage was meant only as an emergency measure. It was smudged and dirty, and in a few places the surface had split along the grain of his fake musculature, to leak a clear fluid that wasn’t quite blood.

  “This is an evil place,” he said turning so he could actually look at her. “You heard what this man said, didn’t you?”