Around them the light faded.
“We can’t wait here much longer,” he said.
Nickolai talked to Parvi at dawn.
Captain Vijayanagara Parvi was a small woman, who barely stood past Nickolai’s waist, but she had no problem looking up at him and saying, “I’m not going to take a bunch of civilians into a war zone.”
The ruddy orb Kropotkin was pushing up over the eastern horizon haloed by a garish blaze of swirling color, making Nickolai wonder how much smoke was in the upper atmosphere.
“We came down here for a reason,” Kugara told her.
“I know that,” Parvi snapped back.
Nickolai smelled fear and frustration in the woman, thicker than the scent of old battle that had sunk into the grounds around the abandoned commune.
“I will scout out the situation in the city,” Nickolai told her.
“We only have the one gun,” Parvi said.
Nickolai handed over the laser carbine, the single piece of weaponry that made it out of the Khalid before it sank. “I don’t need it.”
Parvi took the laser and shook her head. “We only have the three of us trained to protect these people.”
“And one gun,” he told her. “I’ll return before nightfall. I will find some safe refuge for these people. Then we will do what we came here to do.”
In some sense Parvi was his commander; enough that, should she have ordered him otherwise, his vocation as a warrior might not have allowed him to leave. But she looked at him for a long time and finally said, “You’re right. This place is little better than camping out in the woods. I just wish we had some comm gear for you.”
Nickolai shook his head. “Any transmission source will attract unwanted attention.”
Parvi nodded and, almost hesitantly, said, “Good luck.”
For all the contempt Nickolai had felt for the Fallen before now, he knew that Parvi held the same contempt toward him and his genetically-engineered kin. It was a common enough sentiment, but with her it had always been rather close to the surface. Close enough for her words, and the obvious sincerity, to take him aback.
“Thank you.” If anything, his sincerity was more disconcerting.
When he left her to equip himself from the abandoned commune, Kugara followed him. No words passed between them as he found a modular utility shed that had been left wide open during whatever diaspora had claimed this place. He paused in the doorway and looked back at her.
“Are you going to object?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You’re going to insist on coming with me?”
She smiled. “You’re a big boy, and I know that I’m the only person running around these woods that can take you in a fair fight. Besides, our short little Hindi needs some sort of backup.”
Nickolai tilted his head and looked at her and couldn’t fathom her amusement. “Even if I’m unarmed?”
She walked up and placed a hand on his chest. “We both know that even without a weapon you’re not unarmed.” She leaned forward on her tiptoes to whisper close to his tilted ear. “I still feel the scars on my back.”
Nickolai straightened up and felt a surge of embarrassment, followed by an inappropriate wave of desire. He took hold of her hand and lowered it. “I think—”
“Besides,” she told him, obviously enjoying his discomfort, “you’re getting a weapon now, aren’t you? Machete or staff?”
He let go of her hand and said, “Both.” The shed had held firearms at one point, but had been stripped of them, leaving only lonely piles of rounds and a couple of power cells. However, there were lockers of tools and other equipment, including sheathed machetes and utility knives, and several thin lengths of pipe that could be workable quarter-staffs. He buckled the largest machete he could find to his thigh, and took a length of pipe that seemed heavy enough to do real damage. After some thought, he also took a coil of rope and slung it around his shoulder.
Once he was ready to go, he looked at Kugara and said, “No arguments?”
“Are you planning to commit some sort of noble sacrifice in penance for your sins?”
“What? No, I—”
“Good.” She walked up to him and said. “You’re actually doing something proactive rather than moping over the fate of your soul.”
“Don’t mock me!”
She moved more quickly than he could follow, and she was pulling his head down for a punishing kiss before he realized what was happening. He felt her tongue brush his, then she let him go.
He stared at her.
“I like you angry,” she said.
“I have to go.”
“But you are coming back.” It wasn’t a question.
Nickolai slipped into the woods and headed south, toward the city. The city’s name was Wilson, judging by a few random bits of paperwork at the dead commune. It was a city small enough and far enough north, that Nickolai hadn’t ever heard of it in all the time he’d lived on Bakunin.
He moved quietly and carefully past tall, widely spaced trees. He used his enhanced eyes to their fullest; every few steps he stared hundreds of meters deep into the woods around him.
It was the eyes that warned him, better than his hearing or his sense of smell. Halfway to Wilson, he saw movement through the trees almost a klick away. He saw the hard-texture finished surface of something man-made, then a flash of something tree-colored but not a tree.
Nickolai ducked behind a tree, leaned his improvised staff against it, extended his claws, and pulled himself up the trunk.
He drew himself up against a branch as thick as he was, and lay flat against it, staring at the approaching figures. As they came closer, he studied them. Two men in powered armor. They had cheap active camouflage, the surface of their suits changing color and pattern dynamically to match their surroundings. If they were still, they would have been hard to perceive, but in motion—even at a slow walk—Nickolai’s eyes had no trouble making them out. As he thought, the spectral sensitivity of his eyes shifted until, camouflage or not, the two approaching figures stood out starkly against the surrounding woodland.
Both of them had weapons out, large capacity slugthrowers. Both of them were heading toward Nickolai, separating to flank his position. The duo must have seen something suspicious. Climbing up out of their plane of vision had bought him some time, but only a few moments. The branch holding him didn’t have enough growth to hide him completely, and if these two had any enhanced optics at all, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
He had to neutralize them somehow. Even if they passed him by, they were headed straight for the commune he had just left.
Nickolai watched them spread apart, and shifted his focus to the one coming closest to his tree. As he watched, he slid the rope off his shoulder, uncoiling it and folding it in half.
Below him the closer of the two armored figures slowly walked within a couple of meters of the tree, both hands on the weapon, scanning the woods ahead.
Nickolai threw the folded loop of rope down to hook underneath the barrel of the weapon. His target did the expected and looked up at the motion, raising the barrel of the weapon to track the threat, which meant the rope had slid down as far as the elbows when Nickolai jumped off the opposite side of the branch above, holding the ends of the rope. The objective had been to simply disarm his opponent, but the rope went tight around the suit’s arms, the rigidity of the armor gave enough purchase to bring his target fully off the ground to meet Nickolai as he descended.
The slugthrower fired a few rounds wildly, blowing chunks out of the tree above, before Nickolai slammed into the shooter’s chest. The impact shook the weapon free to tumble to the ground below. And after a fraction of a second of shocked paralysis, suspended five meters up, Nickolai let go of his rope and the two of them followed it.
The armor slammed its back into the forest floor, Nickolai fell on top of it with his full weight, landing with a cracking sound and the smell of ozone. A gauntleted fist cam
e up toward Nickolai, but he easily dodged the blow in time to see the other suit of armor, tracking a slugthrower in his direction. He leaped off his supine opponent and flattened himself against the tree as the other gun sprayed bullets, blowing splinters from the tree and throwing up clumps of dirt all around him.
The echoing gunshots faded, and he heard running footsteps crunching along the forest floor. In front of him, the other one rolled over and was trying to get up, the armor making grinding noises and flashing distorted camouflage.
As the footsteps closed, he reached around the trunk and took hold of the staff that still leaned against it. He saw the gun’s barrel come into view, and he whipped the three-meter length of pipe down in a spinning arc that landed across the gunman’s forearms. The slugthrower hit the ground as Nickolai jumped to the side and spun the staff to plant one end in a jarring impact against his opponent’s faceplate.
The impact would have been deadly for anyone not in armor. In this case it was simply disorienting, and the victim took a half step back. That was enough of an opening for Nickolai to step to the side and swing the staff down against the back of a half-bent knee, sending his opponent falling backward.
He heard movement behind him, and he pivoted to bring the staff down on the back of the other’s helmet, plowing the faceplate into the ground just short of the fallen weapon. He spun to bring the opposite end of the staff down on the other one’s knee, jamming the armor’s joint and bending his staff nearly in half.
As his two armored foes struggled to get to their feet, he cast the bent staff aside, scooped up the slugthrower, and jumped back to the tree, covering them both with the weapon.
“No sudden moves.”
“Bastard!” He heard a muffled female voice yelling inside one of the suits; the one facedown with the camouflage now repeatedly flickering between black static and a slowly rolling image of a much-too-magnified forest floor. “You fucking furry bastard!”
The other person sat up and turned toward Nickolai. “Now what?” the voice was male, and broadcast through the suit’s speaker. Nickolai could still hear the woman cursing to herself, and he suspected she wasn’t aware that he could hear her.
He kept the gun leveled at the two of them. “Remove the helmets and toss them over here.”
The pair did as he asked, tossing the two helmets by his feet. Nickolai faced a man and a woman, both dark-haired with dusky complexions. The woman had a nosebleed.
He asked them, “Are you in contact with anyone else?”
“Of course we are. Our backup is going to be here any moment, so you better get moving.”
“So you work for the PSDC?”
“What?”
“You two work for the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation?”
The woman said, “Hell, no!”
“So should I believe you have an open radio channel with those PSDC hunter-killers flying around?”
“I—”
Nickolai leveled the gun at the man and said, “It would be wise not to lie to me. Now you’re going to tell me who you are, where you came from, and what the PSDC is doing here.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Idolatry
“Never assume you’re on the winning side.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“No victory has been more than a defeat postponed.”
—AUGUST BENITO GALIANI
(2019-*2105)
Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Their names were Sacha and Ingrid Simonyi. They were natives of Wilson, and members of the Wilson Civil Militia—a military organization that had only existed for the past two months. The Wilson Civil Militia existed because the PSDC was in the process of taking over the whole planet.
“What exactly do you mean, ‘taking over the whole planet?’ ”
Sacha sounded incredulous. “You don’t know? It’s not as if they’ve been subtle about it.”
“You were on that dropship,” Ingrid said. “The crash landing three days ago.”
“Tell me what they’re doing.”
Nickolai listened, and according to the Simonyis, the PSDC was in the process of doing something that conventional wisdom said was impossible. They were imposing a State on Bakunin.
The first forays into what would become a full-out civil war began nearly six months ago, shortly after Nickolai had left the planet with Mosasa’s expedition. What the PSDC did was only obvious in retrospect—they started subcontracting the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union to provide security for several major corporations. In a cost-saving scheme, the companies paid the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation, and the PSDC paid the Mercenaries—many of whom were imported from off-planet.
In only a few months the PSDC had a de facto police force in most of the major corporate centers across Bakunin. Most importantly, they had full control over both Proudhon and Godwin.
When they started disarming civilians, the shooting war started.
“They co-opted the biggest players on the planet,” Sacha told him, “The corporations had no choice but to ally with the PSDC. If they resisted, the best case had them losing their entire security force—and leaving themselves open to attack by a population that already saw them as traitors.”
“None of the corporations fought?”
“Sinclair Power is fighting them, or they were. We lost contact with the city two weeks ago.”
“What about Wilson?”
“Still a free city,” Ingrid said. “The half that’s still standing.”
“We’re on the fringes,” Sacha said. “Low priority while they’re having major battles south and inland.”
Nickolai nodded and stepped back until he stood next to the other gun. He bent over and carefully picked it up while covering them; neither of them tried any sudden moves. “You two aren’t military, are you?”
“We are now,” Sacha said. “Anyone who has a gun and isn’t drawing a PSDC paycheck is an enemy combatant.”
Nickolai couldn’t help but think of the fact that the custom in Bakunin was for everyone to go visibly armed. What happened here? Why is everything falling apart?
Was it Adam’s doing? Was his agent, Mr. Antonio, still here, shepherding the collapse? He remembered the old man, so apparently harmless, and how he had known just what to do and say to get Nickolai to do what he wanted. He could imagine that evil bastard burrowed into the hierarchy of the PSDC, making the right suggestions, just nudging them a little . . .
“Stand up. You’re going to come with me.” He pointed the gun at the helmets. “You can pick those up, but carry them with both hands.”
They stood, Ingrid’s camouflage flashing headache-inducing distortions of the woods around her, Sacha limping slightly on the damaged knee joint. When they picked up the helmets, Nickolai waved them ahead of him, back toward the commune.
“You took prisoners?” Parvi stared at him as he emerged from the woods, Ingrid and Sacha ahead of him. He could smell her anger from ten meters away. “You were supposed to find a safe—”
“You bastards are from the PSDC!” Ingrid snapped, “You’re from the BMU!”
Nickolai realized that Parvi’s jumpsuit still bore the patches from the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. She leveled her own gun at Ingrid and said, “Who the hell are these people, and what is she talking about?”
“While we were gone,” Nickolai told her, “the PSDC decided to take over.”
“Take over what?” Parvi asked. Everyone was silent for a moment, and Parvi’s eyes widened a bit. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“With the BMU as its army,” Nickolai said.
Parvi shook her head. “Of course. Why not? The rest of the universe has gone insane, why not this?”
They took Ingrid and Sacha to one of the abandoned outbuildings of the commune and Parvi had them remove their armor. Once they were stripped to their underwear, Parvi ordered Nickolai to wake Kugara and fetch the rest of their team.
Nickolai c
ame back with Kugara, Flynn, and the two scientists, Dörner and Brody. On their return, the two Wilson natives were seated on a couple of folding chairs, and the smell of fear and agitation had leveled off somewhat. Parvi paced, her weapon pointed to the ground, shaking her head and muttering the occasional curse in a human language that Nickolai did not understand.
Ingrid looked at Nickolai and asked, “There’s another war out there?”
“You don’t know?” Kugara responded. “There are tens of thousands of refugee ships all across this solar system. You haven’t heard any of this?”
“Communication has been jammed for months,” Sacha said. “We’ve been limited to line-of-sight transmissions since the PSDC started open warfare.”
“Of course those bastards have always had the high ground.” Parvi ran a hand through her white hair, pressing against her scalp as if trying to push back a migraine. “Why now? Why would they pull this shit at the worst possible moment?”
To Nickolai’s surprise, Flynn spoke, “I think I know.”
Everyone looked at the young man as if he had suddenly started speaking in tongues. By rights, he shouldn’t have any connection to what was going on here. He had been born and raised on a planet eighty light-years beyond what had been the accepted limits of human space; a planet that had isolated itself for close to two centuries.
But Flynn represented one of the novel heresies that Nickolai had been exposed to since he had last set foot on Bakunin. The culture of Flynn’s homeworld, Salmagundi, had taken ancestor worship to its logical extreme. They had kept vast data banks, containing the recorded minds of every human being that had ever lived on the planet, and the elders of Salmagundi had made a ritual of downloading those minds into their own. The half-dozen survivors from the Salmagundi militia, plus their critically wounded leader Alexander Shane, all bore glyph-like tattoos on their brows and scalp, one for each of the minds they had ritually taken.