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?”
“Mallory’s navy is growing, and a few of our fellow refugees are trading for the food we have—the Daedalus has—in the cargo hold.”
“And you got two bottles?”
“Actually our motley crew all got one to a person. That one’s yours.”
The bottle had been unsealed, and a curving zero-G spout screwed on. He suddenly smelled the sharp burn of alcohol and glanced over at Kugara. The bottle was at her lips as she sucked a shot through the thin spout that was screwed onto her bottle. She lowered the bottle and sucked in a breath. “Wow,” she said. “That’s good.”
Nickolai wrinkled his nose, “Is it?”
“Try it. This stuff probably runs fifty grams a shot in Proudhon.”
Nickolai raised the spout to his lips and sucked in a mouthful. It hit his mouth like it did his nose, a sharp burn that tore down his throat, leaving an almost uncomfortable warmth in its wake. The warmth filled his gut and worked its way through his extremities, felt most in the leather of his nose.
He sneezed.
Kugara laughed. “Cover your mouth when you do that.”
He blinked, eyes stinging in the sudden atmosphere of atomized whiskey englobing his head. He pushed himself to the side with a foot, whipping his tail around to keep himself oriented toward Kugara.
“Strong,” he said, taking another sip from the bottle, a small one this time.
“You’ve got to be the most graceful thi
ng I’ve ever seen,” she told him.
“When did you start on that bottle?”
“About eight months ago, if you go by the clocks on Bakunin.” She pulled her legs up and folded her arms so that she floated in a sitting position. “You know there’s a very good chance that we’re going to die before we get to the surface?”
Nickolai took another sip of his whiskey. It no longer burned, and the warming liquid felt pleasant rolling down his throat.
“And,” Kugara continued, “if we don’t, we’re going to be flat-footed on the planet, watching a wild goose chase when Adam does to Bakunin what he did to Salmagundi.”
“You could stay here, with the priest.”
“Come on.” She shook her head, and her hair drifted out around her head, reminding him of how the wind had caught it when she had been driving the aircar that last night on Bakunin. “I am not one of the good guys, Nickolai. Never have been. If Adam showed up right now and said choose, if I didn’t it would only be because my soul, bloodstained as it is, belongs to me. No one else.”
“But you’re going with Captain Parvi?”
“I’m just playing the odds. The chance of either plan working is vanishingly remote. However, in case one does, the better shot of living through it is on the surface.” She took another long draw from her bottle.
“If we make it there.”
“That’s the spirit.” She chuckled and let her bottle float away. “What about you? I suggested Parvi talk to you, if only to knock you out of your depressive funk. I didn’t expect you to join in on our little suicide mission. Mallory’s Crusade seems more your style.”
“I fight better with ground under my feet.”
“You seem to do pretty damn well in zero-G.”
“You can’t engage spacecraft in hand-to-hand combat.”
“There is that.” She unfolded her legs, and with an economical push of her toes against an anchor point in the floor, started a slow drift toward him. The motion reminded him that, since the return of his vision, she was the only person he had seen who didn’t seem clumsy.
She reached up and stopped her forward motion with a hand against his chest. She sucked in a breath and asked, “Is it because it’s a suicide mission?”
“What?”
“Are you still trying to kill yourself?”
“Kugara, I was never trying to kill myself.”
“What? Tearing off your arm and shooting yourself in the skull with my gun? That wasn’t a suicide attempt?”
“It was Adam. He was starting to control me. Those were his prostheses and I needed to stop him.”
She reached up and touched the side of his face, fingers tracking the fur next to the orbit of his eye. “What about this, what I asked to save you.”
“Why did you?”
“You were going to die.”
“Does that matter? I betrayed you all. I served the thing we’re fighting.”
“Nickolai—”
He reached up and pulled her hand gently away from his face. His own half-empty bottle of whiskey floated away from them. “What do you want from me?”
“What do you think?”
He pushed her away. “You’re drunk,” he said, quietly. “And you’re arrogant, pigheaded, and annoying as all hell.”
“I think you should leave.”
“Why?” She caught herself from drifting away by grabbing one of the straps securing the hardsuit suspended in the center of the room. “I should leave you to wallow in more self-pity? Boo-fucking-hoo. You’re not living the pure life of some fantasy holy warrior. Grow up!”
He felt the fur stiffen along his back, and his face wrinkled in the beginning of a snarl. “Kugara, I’ve given you license—”
“Give it a rest. If you mention once more about my angelic ancestry, I swear I’m going to rip off your tail and feed it to you. I’m no fucking princess because I got parents from some guy spraying holy jizz into a sacred quim—”
“Enough!” Nickolai roared and pushed off the floor in a straight-line leap at Kugara. He swung his arms up in an underhand blow that could be mortal if he had been angry enough to extend his claws.
However, claws or not, he was drunk enough to forget who Kugara actually was. Kugara’s face broke out into a hard smile as she dropped down in front of him. As he passed through where she had been, he looked down and saw her smiling up at him, still holding on to the strap. Then, quicker than any human could have moved, she let go and slammed her palms into the floor behind her, simultaneously bringing both feet up to slam into his gut.
The momentum of the blow started him spinning up and over, and he shot a hand out to grab the hardsuit. He hooked an arm and halted his tumbling motion so he was upside down in relation to the suit. Kugara’s momentum carried her up past him, legs first, her back toward him. She grabbed the hardsuit below him and her hips twisted, bringing her legs around to get a scissors lock on his head.
He just had enough time to pull himself toward the hardsuit and get a joint lock on her left leg. Then her right foot came rocketing at his face, and he had to let go of his anchor to reach out and block it.
She pulled up into a sitting position, setting the both of them into a slow tumble. She bent forward to stare into his face as the walls spun behind her. “That’s how to get to you, isn’t it? Piss on a religion that doesn’t even want you any more.”
“Don’t make me hurt you,” Nickolai snarled.
“Oh, just try to.” She grabbed his ears and brought her own skull down on his with a sense-numbing crash. Nickolai tumbled a moment, convinced his ears had been torn from his skull. He spent half a second stunned senseless, enough for Kugara to free herself, pushing herself backward off of his chest.
His shoulders touched a wall, and he instinctively threw his arms out to catch something solid for an anchor to stop his uncontrolled motion.
“Does it hurt, you arrogant prick?”
Nickolai blinked and focused his eyes on Kugara, who floated by the nominal ceiling, holding on to another strap anchoring the hardsuit. He licked his lips and tasted blood. “You wish to fight?”
“Are you just slow or—”
Nickolai didn’t allow her to finish. The taste of blood had moved him from simple rage into battle. She might have been engineered to face his kind, but she was drunk, emotional, and taunting him when she should have been preparing her defense. Before her sentence cut short, he was already in the air halfway toward her.
Again she dodged, but she made the mistake of pulling herself around based on where she thought he was jumping, not where he actually was jumping. She spun around to attack empty air as he grabbed onto the top of the hardsuit. As she glanced around, looking for him, he tore free the buckle holding the end of her strap anchored to the hardsuit. She turned her head at the motion, saw him holding the end of the tether, and did the only thing she could do.
She let go.
The tether was woven carbon, broad and flat. Nickolai cracked it like a whip, sending a fast moving sine wave down its length to slam Kugara in the side of her head. She tumbled back from the anchor point, and Nickolai leaped from the shoulders of the hardsuit to reach her before she came to her senses.
He struck her with his shoulder, plowing her into the ceiling next to the strap’s anchor point. Before he drifted away, he grabbed the strap with both hands, near the base. He brought his knees up on either side of her torso, pinning her to the ceiling under him.
She blinked up at him, blood trailing from the side of her head.
“Enough?” he asked.
“Well, I finally got your attention.” She smiled at him.
“By blaspheming? Disrespecting the faith of my ancestors?” His arms and legs vibrated with the tension of keeping his muscles taut, legs pushing, arms pulling.
“So how do you intend to punish me?”
“What?”
She reached up and ran her hand along one of his trembling thighs. “You got me, what are you going t
o do with me?”
He stared at her, mouth open. He became aware of the smells filling the air around them. Blood, sweat, the tang of alcohol, and a heavy musk that made his nose wrinkle.
“Come on, Nickolai, you can’t really hide the fact that you like to play rough.” Her hand slid inside his thigh and she cupped his testicles. He sucked in a shuddering breath and pulled the strap so tight that it felt as if either the anchorage or his arms might give way.
“What are you doing?”
Her hand was hot against him, bringing forth his arousal despite the efforts of some part of his mind to deny what was happening. She whispered, “It’s a suicide mission, I don’t want to die alone.”
“This is wrong.”
“So?” She moved her legs so her hips pushed his thighs slightly further apart. She sat up so her head poked up between his trembling forearms. Her fingers traced the length of his penis. “I’ll let you in on two little secrets.” Her hand left to trail up his abdomen, leaving him in a state of aching arousal.
“First”—her fingers found the lowest nipple on the right side, under his fur, and traced slow circles around it—“part of my Dakota heritage means I metabolize alcohol very quickly.”
She reached up to the neck of her jumpsuit. “Second”—she ran her fingers down the front of the jumpsuit, allowing the fabric to unbond beneath her touch—“if you don’t want this, you can always let go.”
His own emotions tumbled through him in a cascading, drunken stumble. His own compass of right and wrong had been in an uncontrolled spin ever since Salmagundi.
But this was wrong.
He let go of the strap with his right hand. Pain flared up his left arm as it took on the tension by itself. He saw a shadow cross Kugara’s face and surprised himself by recognizing the human expression.
Wrong, yes. But how wrong compared to what he had already done?
He reached up behind her and yanked the neck of her jumpsuit down her back, peeling it down her arms and torso. Her arms pinned, naked from the elbows upward, she smiled at him, exposing teeth in an unquestionably aggressive manner. “I knew I had you pegged.”