Heretics

  That fact shot through her world like a single neutron fired into a critical mass of questions. She could still see that chain reaction blowing apart her image of the universe, an explosion that the Protean wasn’t going to save her from.

  Hell, the Protean just makes it all worse.

  As much as Nickolai’s fatalism annoyed the hell out of her, in some ways she envied him. Nickolai at least had a lens through which all of this made some sort of sense. For all his angst, he never doubted his own ability to understand the world around him. He never doubted that the world around him could be understood.

  Kugara could use some of that faith right now. She could use some antidote to feeling she was living in the fever-dream of some drug-addled schizophrenic.

  This is just what I yelled at Nickolai for, wasn’t it?

  “What’s it like out there?”

  Kugara turned to look at Flynn. He stood next to her, looking straight ahead at the black mass chewing through the rock ahead of them. Actually, he seemed to be looking through it.

  “Is it Flynn or Tetsami asking?”

  He turned to look at her with a slightly wistful expression. “Both of us.”

  “Out where?”

  “Everywhere. The last news we know of is nearly two hundred years old.”

  Kugara sighed. “I don’t know if things are better or worse.”

  Flynn shrugged and turned back toward the front. “Is Bakunin still there?”

  Kugara shook her head. “Yeah, there’s still a place called Bakunin. Me and Nickolai were part of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union.”

  “Mercenaries’ Union?” From the way he cocked his head, she thought it was Tetsami talking. “When I left, things weren’t that organized.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “In my time, everyone was their own contractor. Squad level was about as high as the hierarchy went.”

  Kugara tried to imagine life like that, completely at the whims of employers without any backup. “I guess too many mercs got shafted.”

  Tetsami gave her a humorless chuckle. “I suspect more that the army the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation put together never had any incentive to disband.”

  “Army?”

  “Long story. The short version: the Confederacy tried to take the planet over by hiring everyone with a gun.” The words trailed off and Tetsami turned away from Kugara and the view outside.

  Kugara placed a hand on his shoulder. Or is it her shoulder? “Are you all right?”

  “It’s getting kind of hard not to think about my past. It wasn’t particularly pleasant.” Tetsami wiped a hand across Flynn’s face. “Now I’m embarrassing Flynn.” After a moment, she whispered, “Myself too.”

  “You were in that war?” Kugara asked, feeling a sudden odd kinship with the long-dead woman living in Flynn’s skull.

  “Everyone who came here was. The city, Ashley, is named for a commune that was slaughtered in that war. Ugly business for an ugly planet.”

  Kugara had often thought the same thing about her homeworld, Dakota. She gently squeezed Flynn’s shoulder.

  After a moment, Tetsami surprised her by asking, “Did you leave anyone behind on Bakunin?”

  “What?”

  “Husband? Lover? Girlfriend?”

  Kugara lowered her hand. “No,” she said, “I’ve never had a knack for lasting relationships. Did you?”

  “No,” Tetsami answered, “I didn’t leave anyone behind.”

  “Why’d you lie to her, Gram?” Flynn’s voice asked inside their head.

  “I didn’t lie to her,” Tetsami silently answered. “There was no one left to leave behind.”

  “So? He left you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “If you don’t want to talk about Dom, why did you ask her about who she left behind?”

  Jonah, Tetsami thought quietly to herself, his real name was Jonah Dacham.

  “Gram?”

  She sighed and shook Flynn’s head. “I’m tired. You drive for a while.”

  “Gram, wait a minute—” Flynn said out loud.

  “Flynn?” Kugara asked.

  Tetsami tuned out the conversation, withdrawing her consciousness into a dark corner of Flynn’s mind where no one could hear her curse or weep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Inquisition

  “Don’t assume you know what the enemy wants.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.”

  —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Father Francis Xavier Mallory had been many things in his lifetime: a Jesuit priest, a xenoarchaeology professor, a captain in the Occisis Marine Special Forces, and until recently an undercover agent for the Vatican Secretary of State. At the moment, none of that seemed to amount to very much.

  His captors had tossed him into a room separate from the others. His holding cell was not designed as a prison, but appeared to be just a spare office or storeroom in the city’s large central building. The ceiling panels shone diffuse light into a stark off-white cube that was empty of any furniture. The door was thin and translucent enough to show a fuzzy representation of the hallway beyond. It wasn’t intended to be secure, and Mallory judged that it could be easily forced.

  However, there would be no point in doing so. Even if this planet wasn’t isolated, eighty-some light-years from the mass of human space, there’d still be nowhere to run to. Talking to his captors was the only option he had to improve the situation.

  Unfortunately, the ad hoc nature of his prison spoke to how desperate and chaotic the situation here was. He didn’t need the evidence of a mushroom cloud or his captors’ assertion that there were a hundred and fifty ships invading this star system to know that. He saw the knife edge of war in the empty streets of the city, the armed soldiers that were only one third in uniform, the tension in the posture of those who carried the guns, the fear in the eyes of everyone else. It hung starkly in the stillness of the air as they rushed him and the other two ambulatory refugees from the Eclipse to the spire marking the center of the city.

  He hadn’t seen Dr. Dörner or Dr. Pak since they hauled him off the ground transport and threw him in here. Dr. Brody he hadn’t seen since the medics had rushed him off the troop transport that had airlifted the four of them out of the forest where their escape pods had landed.

  He said a short prayer for Brody’s safety.

  How long? An hour?

  The passage of time weighed on him. He knew that the situation was degrading, and he suspected that it wouldn’t be long before the people who had taken him prisoner would completely lose control of the situation, if they hadn’t already.

  The Eclipse, Mosasa’s ship, was probably destroyed. He wondered if the people here on Salmagundi witnessed what happened.

  They were tracking our approach, they must have seen it, and they still treat us as the vanguard of an invasion . . .

  Then again, for a colony that had so purposely removed itself from human space, wasn’t an invasion exactly what the Eclipse was?

  Somehow he needed to get word back to the Vatican about the situation here. That meant access to a tach-comm transmitter, which, given the insular planet-bound nature of this colony, they might not even have. The isolation he felt was palpable, worse even than what he had felt on the Eclipse when the shipboard tach-comm had disintegrated along with his cover. Not only a physical isolation, a hundred light-years away from the center of the Church, but a spiritual isolation he had felt ever since the Eclipse had tached into the space where the Xi Virginis system should have been.

  No, Mallory thought, I’ve felt it ever since Bakunin. Ever since I understood what Mosasa was . . .

  What he had been.

  He looked up at the ceiling, past it, thinking of the Eclipse launching the lifeboats. Mosasa had
been on the bridge with Wahid, Tsoravitch and Parvi. Most likely they hadn’t escaped the massive failure that had caused the lifeboats to launch, which meant they were almost certainly dead. Along with the Paralian, Bill, whose massive life-support apparatus couldn’t have moved outside the Eclipse’s cargo bay, much less boarded one of the lifeboats.

  Even Nickolai and Kugara were more than likely gone. He had radio contact with them after their lifeboat had launched, but nothing since. Anything could have happened with their lifeboat’s descent to Salmagundi.

  And there was the mushroom cloud.

  He only had the visual cues from the troop transport to place the detonation, but he had been in the special forces, and he was trained to interpret whatever intelligence he could in a battlefield situation. While his eyeballs didn’t have a lot of practice, he didn’t need to be precise in placing ground zero to know that the kill zone of the nuke covered the LZ for the two lifeboats he knew about. The nav computers for the lifeboats would have tried to cluster them, so it was likely the nuke covered all six.

  Unless the locals had another transport to evac Nickolai and Kugara separately from the survivors Mallory knew about, he had to count them as deceased along with the rest of the crew of the Eclipse.

  Please, Lord, let me know what I should do.

  The door to Mallory’s impromptu prison burst open. He looked up and met the eyes of the old man that had met them when their transport had landed. He wore what Mallory assumed was a civilian’s dress—a white collarless shirt, black pants, and a long white topcoat that hung to his ankles. The man was bald and had odd tattoos evenly spaced on his brow and scalp, all self-contained glyphs that reminded Mallory of Mayan hieroglyphs that had crossbred with blocky Kanji script.

  The man’s scalp glistened under the cold lighting. Mallory noticed that his shirt was wrinkled and sweat-stained, and the man’s face was even more deeply creased and shadowed than he’d expect from someone aged past their seventh decade.

  A pair of uniformed militiamen in visored helmets and black body armor flanked the bald man as he stepped toward Mallory. The man stopped, and the two black-clad escorts stepped to either side of Mallory, grabbing his arms and hauling him up from where he’d been seated on the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Mallory asked, not really expecting an answer.

  The bald man shook his head and turned away. The militiamen followed, leading Mallory out of the room. They took him through a series of corridors that were fairly unremarkable; the diffuse lighting and unadorned walls could have been in any office building anywhere. He had seen the outside of this building when they had taken him from the LZ, a tall, mostly windowless spire central to the city here. Taller than any of the other buildings and surrounded by acres of greenspace. The placement and architectural emphasis made it obvious that the structure was the focus of authority here.

  Mallory still didn’t know what that authority looked like: a democracy, a theocracy, or some sort of totalitarian dictatorship. Whatever form it took, it was close to some sort of crisis point. Of all the rooms they passed, most were empty. Here and there, chairs had toppled over, papers were scattered on the floor, and someone’s half-eaten breakfast or lunch sat on a desk where a monitor silently flashed for attention.

  He knew, from his exterior view of the building and from a basic sense of direction, that he had been locked in a room in one of the shorter wings of the structure that radiated out from the central spire. He also guessed that he was being taken deeper into the structure.

  However, he wasn’t quite prepared when they walked through a door and ended up inside the spire itself. From the outside, it seemed to be just a windowless office building; inside it was a single large, open space. The ceiling vanished hundreds of meters above him.

  Their footsteps echoed as they pulled him forward, across a roughly circular floor. Mallory stared at the walls, which at first seemed to be made of clusters of uniform stone pillars thrusting up into the emptiness above him. The pillars were all hexagonal and about a meter across, allowing them to nest seamlessly together.

  Looking down, toward the base of the pillars, Mallory realized that they weren’t stone. The grayish-brown matte finish fooled the eye at first, but a closer look showed them to be some molded ceramic composite. It was clear in the completely uniform construction, and the perfectly square access panels that repeated themselves on each face of the pillar, staking up in an apparently infinite regression toward the ceiling.

  What is this?

  The panels reminded him a little of the electronic access panels that had been on the Eclipse.

  “Where are we?” he asked. His voice was quiet, but still echoed enough to make the words startling.

  “The Hall of Minds,” the bald man unexpectedly answered him.

  The Hall of Minds?

  The words carried an ominous hint at what might be behind those access panels. AIs were a heretical technology throughout human space, along with macro-scale genetic engineering and self-replicating nanotechnology—all had resulted in uncountable death and destruction. The bans against them went beyond mere laws of some government, the bans were social and theological.

  But Salmagundi had been founded at least a century and a half ago, by refugees from the Confederacy’s collapse. They had purposely isolated themselves and had chosen to have no off-planet contact for their entire existence. They could have chosen to shed those taboos.

  “Where are you taking me?” Mallory asked.

  “To the anteroom,” the man said.

  As they walked him toward the opposite wall, Mallory was struck by the Hall of Minds’ resemblance to a cathedral. There was a dais central to the floor plan. On it were two obelisks flanking a raised area that resembled a sacrificial altar.

  The antechamber to the Hall of Minds didn’t resemble anything that could be found in a cathedral. It resembled an operating theater.

  The bald man led the way into a large room filled with stark white light and dominated by a series of padded tables. Above the tables large spidery robots were mounted in the ceiling, each hosting a half-dozen articulated arms that ended in cameras, probes, needles, and things less welcoming.

  “Wait,” Mallory said, “we need to talk—”

  The bald man waved him forward and the militiamen threw him facedown on the nearest table. The head of the table had a hole to fit his face; the men flanking him forced his face into it despite his struggles. He heard more people in the room and felt straps being pulled tight against his legs, his wrists, his neck, and the back of his head. He was trapped, facedown under the robot. All he could see was a small circle of the tiled floor under the table.

  His gaze locked on a dime-sized spot of blood on the floor below the table.

  He heard the bald man say, “I would advise you against making any sudden movements. This is a delicate procedure.”

  That only made Mallory struggle more, but he was held fast to the table, and all he could manage was tensing his muscles. “Please,” he said, “there’s no need to resort to this. We can talk.”

  “We don’t have the time to talk.”

  Above him, he heard a whine of motors and a steady clicking. He thought he could see the shadow of the robot move across the floor just at the edge of the table. “You don’t need to hurt the others. I’m a spy, but they’re only sci—”

  The word “scientists” caught in his throat as something cold and sharp stung the back of his neck. His eyes lost focus and the muscles of his face went slack. He tried to speak, but his mouth was flaccid and the only thing to come out was a long thread of drool.

  Anesthesia? His thoughts were as clear as ever. You don’t use anesthesia when you torture people.

  He felt nothing but a growing pressure on the back of his head and neck. However, along with the pressure was an alarming cacophony: buzzing, whirring, drilling. He smelled the stench of something burning, and watched as two drops of blood fell off of his face to land on the floor.


  Silently, Mallory began to pray.

  Ages seemed to pass while Mallory listened to the sounds of his body being violated. He felt the tugs on his flesh and the sensation of something invasive slowly sliding into the base of his skull. Eventually, though, the mechanical sounds moved away and ceased.

  The silence was so abrupt that briefly he believed he had lost his hearing.

  Then he heard the sound of footsteps approaching the table. He heard the bald man’s voice. “Good. No problems with the implant. I’m afraid we do not have the time to wait for you to heal or become acclimated to it. But your companions went though this without undue side effects. Do your best to relax your mind, it will go easier if you let go.”

  What are you doing?

  He heard and felt a metallic click at the base of his skull.

  It began to dawn on him: Hall of Minds.

  Then something cold and alien sunk its fingers into his brain.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sacrifice

  “It is the height of arrogance to assume you are unique.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.”

  —JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Mallory’s skull ached, a throbbing pressure that originated at the base of his skull and radiated inward, twisting threads of pain through his brain. At some point during the procedure he had blacked out.

  Before he was fully awake, he reached up. Someone with soft hands took his wrist and whispered, “Don’t do that.”

  He blinked and a blurry image of a woman’s face slowly came into focus. “Dr. Dörner?” he whispered, his mouth slurring the words.

  “It’s over,” she whispered. “I think they’re done with us.”

  Her blue eyes were edged with red and didn’t appear nearly as icy as he was used to. His first thought was, They’re no longer separating us?