Heretics

  Kugara looked into his slitted green eyes and sighed. She didn’t get Nickolai. The back story of this little crystal enclave—if she trusted Flynn and Tetsami’s story—made her feel uneasy too. The idea that she stood in what amounted to a colonization by a culture that had not only accepted heretical technologies, but embraced them and built upon them. The idea of being surrounded by billions of microscopic machines that were busy reproducing themselves and primed to consume whatever nearby matter they needed to do whatever it was they did—it made her skin crawl.

  But evil?

  That was a bit much coming from someone who wouldn’t even exist without the benefit of someone using similarly heretical technologies five hundred years ago. Someone who had also willingly and knowingly allowed himself to be employed by an AI.

  “We stay put until we have a viable exit,” she told him.

  “You don’t understand,” Nickolai whispered.

  “And you still don’t get a vote,” Kugara snapped. “You lost the right to have an opinion when you sabotaged the Eclipse’s tach-comm. For all I know, you wanted the ship to blow up.”

  Flynn looked back and forth through the exchange, gripping his shotgun and edging away from Nickolai as if he expected the tiger to try and force the issue.

  Kugara wasn’t worried. She had spent over half her adult life in the service of Dakota Planetary Security, where she was trained to deal with threats considerably more dangerous than Nickolai. She was confident she could handle him unarmed.

  Even if Flynn didn’t quite realize what it meant to be a DPS veteran, Nickolai did. He didn’t do anything beyond grumble inarticulately in his native tongue. After a few long moments, he asked, “The other lifeboats?”

  Kugara shook her head. “Almost certainly caught in the blast.”

  Nickolai lowered his head and closed his eyes.

  Guilt?

  Guilt would be an appropriate response for someone who didn’t believe that the mass of humanity were Fallen, the walking damned, and thought the AI Mosasa was synonymous with the devil himself.

  Kugara looked at Nickolai’s downcast face and wondered if it was possible to understand him.

  She turned to Flynn and asked, “The people in charge here, are they likely to help us?”

  Flynn shook his head, and his laugh had very little humor in it. “The Triad is primarily interested in keeping things from being disruptive.”

  “A nuclear weapon is pretty damn disruptive.”

  “I never said I agreed with their reasoning.”

  “Damn, do these bastards even know about Xi Virginis?”

  “I don’t know what they know. I’ve been out of touch ever since this—” He gestured at the crystal walls with his shotgun. “Since this landed.”

  Kugara was at a loss for what to do. She was stuck with Nickolai on a planet that was actively hostile to offworlders, equipped with nothing but a nearly empty emergency kit, a needlegun, and the clothes on her back. It was tempting to hunker down and stay out of sight, but where would that ever end?

  And then there was Xi Virginis, the Eclipse’s original destination. Mosasa had hired a crew of mercenaries and scientists to hunt down an anomaly. But even with the resources of an AI, Mosasa had not expected to find the entire star system missing. That had been enough to panic him. The Eclipse had tried to send a tach-comm back to the core of human space, she still remembered the too-human strain in Mosasa’s voice:

  If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it’s this. This changes everything.

  But Nickolai had sabotaged the tach-comm.

  And this crystalline outpost had grown from a probe that had been headed for somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, a probe that had passed too close to whatever had happened to Xi Virginis. Whatever had consumed—and that was the word Flynn had used—the Xi Virginis system had caused severe damage to the probe, leaving only the remains of the AI autopilot to escape to the nearest inhabited star system.

  Much as the Eclipse had done . . .

  “Whatever we do,” Kugara said, “our first priority has to be to communicate back.”

  “How?” Nickolai whispered.

  “There’s got to be a tach-comm on this planet somewhere.” She looked at Flynn. He looked back at her blankly.

  “Somewhere?”

  There was a subtle shift in the way Flynn held his shotgun. His hips cocked slightly, his eyes narrowed, and his expression lost most of its innocent qualities. “Kugara,” he said, and she could tell it was no longer Flynn speaking, “You seriously underestimate how deeply these guys tried to bury themselves.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, there were some rumors that they kept a spaceport mothballed—”

  “But?”

  “We’re talking about something that’s had a century and a half to crumble apart. Not to mention we’re half a continent on the wrong side of Ashley from it.”

  “You know where it is?” Kugara asked.

  Tetsami chuckled. “I was there when we built the place—”

  “Tach-ships?” Nickolai asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Tetsami said. “People might actually leave our little utopia.”

  Kugara leaned against a slick fractal wall. “We need to head there then.”

  Tetsami arched an eyebrow. “What about ‘viable exits?’”

  “We need to contact—”

  Nickolai interrupted her. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” she asked.

  Nickolai slowly got to his feet, looking off toward where the passageway seemed to twist deeper into the heart of the structure. Flynn looked off in the same direction, and Kugara finally saw it as well.

  Something moving.

  She leveled her needlegun in the direction of the passage, bracing herself against the slightly curving walls. There was nothing to aim at, though. Light didn’t move normally in this semitransparent fractal landscape. All she saw was a pattern of shadow moving across the walls, spiraling inward toward the opening on one side of the chamber where they were. It was as if the shadow gradually coalesced from a million fragments, only becoming complete when a solid humanoid figure stepped out of the passage to join them.

  It was shaped like a man, but not quite. A bald ebony figure whose surface shone like black glass. Whatever it was made of, it seemed to eschew minor details and imperfections: no wrinkles, no hair, no fingernails, no nipples, not even the bump of a vein marred the perfectly smooth skin. It stared at them with blank eyes that had no irises or pupils.

  It spoke. “The other is here.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Damnation

  “Those who don’t know their own mind cannot know another’s.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals.”

  —MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Nickolai Rajasthan had been a prince. He had been a blind exile in the streets of the most vile ghettos on the anarchic planet Bakunin. He had been a mercenary in the service of the Fallen. He had been a traitor to the AI Mosasa who was—until now—the closest he had come to facing the Devil himself. He had seen a nuclear weapon explode less than a hundred meters away, only separated from him by an impossible alien shield—

  But when this ebony apparition—an unliving thing cast in the image of the Fallen—walked out of its crystalline hive and told them, “The other is here,” Nickolai felt fear. He felt a deep spiritual dread unlike anything he had ever felt before.

  His beliefs, however tarnished by his presence in the human world, were born of a life with his own kind as scion of the House Rajasthan, trained by the warrior-priests of Grimalkin. While he had sinned, and sinned gravely, against the word of St. Rajasthan, he still believed. He believed that mankind had irrevocably fallen from grace for playing the role of God. First by twisting the flesh that God
had given to create engineered creatures like him and Kugara. Then by creating consciousness without flesh, thinking machines that had no knowledge of God. Then, finally, by trying to re-create the entirety of life itself, machines that thought, and replicated, and pretended to be alive.

  With the first, man had torn his planet with war, with the second he almost destroyed his culture, and the last had reduced entire planets to nothing but an undifferentiated mass of reproducing machines the size of a protein molecule.

  Man had turned away from these heresies, but too late for their own salvation. The beings who created Nickolai’s kind were fallen, and with them Nickolai had fallen as well. He had lived in their midst too long for his own redemption. Worse, with his presence here now, alongside the remnant of the ultimate arrogance, he felt not only himself, but the entire universe slipping further from Grace.

  The walking blasphemy that was the combined persona of Flynn and Tetsami had told him what this ebon thing was. The technologists from Titan, who had been trying to terraform a distant moon in Terra’s own system, had not been destroyed by the destruction of Saturn’s moon. Their minds, at least, had survived the disaster to carry their infection elsewhere.

  They called themselves Proteans and had created a colony on the lawless world Bakunin, one of the only places that would suffer their existence. And as the Confederacy collapsed, that Protean colony was completely wiped out—but not before it had propagated, spending its few centuries of existence sending probes away to spread its infection to planets thousands of light-years away and millions of years in the future.

  They were a very patient evil.

  And it was an evil that had walked straight from the scriptures of St. Rajasthan to confront Nickolai. The black thing standing before him was the personification of the Fallen’s arrogance, the embodiment of the greatest sin ever committed.

  But as it spoke, Nickolai knew in his soul that it told of something worse than itself. Something present here that went beyond the great sins from the scriptures.

  Something that could rip a star from the sky.

  “The other is here.”

  “The other?” Kugara asked. “What is the ‘other?’”

  The Protean looked through her. “The other is what damaged me. The other stole what we were and left only a shell. The other will turn all that is into itself.”

  “This doesn’t sound promising,” she said, looking the thing up and down. “And our Protean host doesn’t sound all there.”

  “Don’t,” Nickolai half growled though clenched teeth.

  She turned to face him, lithe and muscular in her movements, her own voice nearly a growl itself. “Don’t what, Nickolai?”

  “Don’t make light of this.”

  “I cannot repair myself. Too much of what I was is no more,” The figure slowly turned to face Flynn, who might at the moment be Tetsami. “You spoke of a tach-comm.”

  From the way Flynn’s body backed away, Nickolai knew it was still Tetsami speaking, “The old spaceport.”

  “Where?”

  “I—”

  Kugara, strangely fearless, stepped between the two. “What do you want with that?”

  “Warning must be given, to those the other would consume.”

  Kugara waved at the crystalline architecture around them and said, “You built this. You blocked a fucking nuke! Can’t you just build a tach-comm?”

  “I am incomplete, I try but I cannot repair what I no longer know. You will tell me where this is.”

  Hours later, the three of them, along with the Protean, rode on a circular platform mounted in the lower third of a twenty-meter transparent sphere that tunneled through the ground, toward Tetsami’s spaceport. A blue light came from a cluster of spheres that rolled on the ceiling above them as if magnetically attached to the inner surface.

  Outside, Nickolai saw solid rock and earth flowing around them, held back by a black fractal net that emerged from a semifluid mass that poured through the tunnel ahead of them, flowing in complete ignorance of gravity, swirling hypnotically clockwise as it consumed the matter that sat in their way.

  Behind them, the webwork that held the earth away from their sphere coalesced in another fluid mass that swirled much like the forward mass. That one seemed to be reconstructing the strata that the one ahead consumed.

  It was impossible to judge how fast the Protean’s vehicle swam through the rock. After an initial acceleration, their velocity was constant. The rock beyond the fractal webwork was too ill- lit and sped by too fast for even Nickolai’s artificial eyes to make out any detail. He shifted through spectra, and the only hint at how fast they moved was given in the infrared, where he saw that the rock itself glowed from the friction of their passage.

  That heat didn’t penetrate the sphere around them. Neither did sound. The air within the sphere was oddly silent, any vibrations from the wounded rock around them muffled to nonexistence. He could hear everyone breathing.

  Everyone but the black figure of the Protean.

  He watched the earth slide by and barely twitched when Kugara reached up and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  “Nothing has changed.” He had a brief impulse to tell her of the vision he had had right after the bomb had gone off. How he had seen his original employer, Mr. Antonio, the man who had hired him to join Mosasa, who had told him to sabotage the tach-comm on the Eclipse.

  But, of course, Mr. Antonio hadn’t been there. It was only a dream. A waking nightmare before he had lost consciousness.

  “Everything has changed,” she told him.

  He shook his head. “We still walk among the damned.”

  “Oh hell, I give up.” Kugara let go of him.

  He turned to look at her, and despite the fact that he was still largely oblivious to human expression and body language, he didn’t need to smell her to feel the frustration and repressed rage coursing through her body.

  She stared into his face, as if she was looking for something. Whatever it was, she didn’t appear to find it. “You’re such a self-absorbed asshole.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t tell you what to believe. But it would be real nice if you could get a grip. I get it. You fell down on the wrong side of your religion. So, there’s nothing you can do about it?”

  “No, I’ve passed beyond—”

  She shouted him down. “Then stop dwelling on it, you narcissistic morey fuck!” The words didn’t echo in the sound-dampened sphere, but they resonated in Nickolai’s gut. Her voice lowered to a harsh whisper. “There is nothing as useless as someone obsessing over something he can’t change.”

  She left him standing there in shock. He was not used to anyone talking to him like that, even after he had been exiled. The Fallen might not have respected his position in House Rajasthan, but they respected tooth, claw, and rippling muscle.

  But Kugara wasn’t one of the Fallen.

  She walked back over next to Flynn, and he quietly asked her, “Was that a good idea?”

  “He’s a big tiger,” Kugara said, “he can take it.”

  Kugara stood on the platform, watching the black webwork crawling by outside the Protean’s transparent sphere. She wondered exactly when the universe had gone off the rails of reason. She was a mercenary soldier from Bakunin. A more straightforward life you probably couldn’t find anywhere. Even her dubious genetic past was, in the terms of the Bakunin Mercenary Union, more of an asset than a complication.

  She had a job, she did it, and she was paid. At least until Mosasa had entered the picture.

  Until Mosasa, her story had been ugly but comprehensible. Unlike a lot of Bakunin émigrés from Dakota, she wasn’t running from the draconian dictatorship that gripped the second inhabitable planet circling Tau Ceti. Haven got the nonhumans like Nickolai, the moreaus, the weapons that weren’t based on a human genome. Dakota got the Frankenstein monsters, the human-based creations. Unlike Nickolai’s an
cestors, the engineers that created Kugara’s bloodline were condemned in their own time. Macro-scale genetic engineering of humans was probably the only heretical technology that was heretical before the first attempts to do it were made.

  Somehow, there were still enough products of that technology to be exiled to Dakota and denied assimilation in either the human world or the smaller realm that Nickolai’s kind had made. Just one ugly little planet that formed an ugly little government.

  Kugara hadn’t gotten the bad end of that deal. In the stratified castes that formed Dakotan society, the warriors that were born into the DPS, those that survived training at least, were probably the best treated. It meant that Kugara was one of the few Dakotan citizens who could legally leave the planet.

  In her case, she had left to perform an assignment, the execution of a family of Dakotan escapees who had fled the regime. She had no problem dealing with the opposition leader and his wife. It was the teenage girl that had given her a twinge of conscience.

  Sparing the girl had marked her official retirement from the DPS. Even five years afterward she still had no real understanding of why she had chosen that point to chuck her entire life and assume a dangerous exile on Bakunin. But, five years later, she understood the person she had been before her exile even less.

  Mosasa must have understood her, though; because he knew exactly how to pull her into his employ. He made a credible promise to make the Dakota bounty on her head disappear. If that was all, she might still have said no, but he could do the same for the girl she had spared. So she had no choice.

  After that, the universe had become surreal, twisting beyond the simple dirty facts of her own life. It started before the Protean had held a nuke at bay, even before the Eclipse had tached into the Xi Virginis system and discovered the star wasn’t there.

  Kugara thought that it had all begun when she had sat in a bar with that damn tiger Nickolai and he had informed her that Tjaele Mosasa was a construct controlled by a salvaged Race AI.