Heretics (18 page)

The first pair of men stayed in the lobby to guard their exit while rest of them headed deeper into the building. Mallory walked with two militiamen flanking him, while the others eased up ahead, checking each doorway and intersection.

Even after the passage of the point team, Mallory could make out the footprints in the dust. The other party had gone ahead down the same corridor and had not come back this way.

The question was, why? Were they trying to use it themselves, or prevent others from using it?

In the lobby, the prior footprints had been all on top of each other, an indistinguishable, abstract mass. Once in this corridor, Mallory had divided his attention between the footprints—half obscured by the point team's passage—and keeping his own eyes on the corridor, checking ahead and behind. Because of that, it took him a dozen meters or so before he noticed the truly odd thing about the footprints they followed.

One set was barefoot.

Another wasn't human.

Mallory stared at the first intact paw print, as wide as his own foot was long, and whispered, “Nickolai?”

One of his guards shook him sharply for breaking silence, and pulled him after the point team, who had just reached the head of a stairwell going down.

Mallory tried to piece together how Nickolai could be here. He didn't know where that lifeboat had landed, and for all he knew it could have put down within a few hundred meters of this place. But such a coincidence strained credulity.

Was he trying to sabotage the tach-comm like he had done on the
Eclipse
?

Mallory's gut tightened. When the tiger had made his confession to him, Mallory thought he had seen a glimpse of his soul, gained a small bit of understanding. Seeing that paw print here at such a critical point drove home to Mallory the fact that he didn't know Nickolai at all.

How does someone act when they believe themselves damned? When they believe everyone around them is damned as well?

The point team waited by the stairwell for them to catch up.

Nickolai, and whoever accompanied him, had gone down these stairs and had not come back up. The two point men descended to the first landing and, after checking the area, waved the rest of them down.

They descended three flights like that, down to a large square room of badly lit ferrocrete. This room was relatively dust-free, so no footprints showed on the smooth gray floor. The ceiling was a maze of pipes and conduit above them, and a half-dozen doors surrounded them.

Only one of those doors was in the wall that faced them. That door was open a crack, the floor at its base cluttered with small lengths of wire and tiny screws.

The air was filled by the subliminal hum of a nearby power plant. The air itself felt alive with potential, the electric atmosphere teasing up the hairs on Mallory's arms and the back of his neck.

The militiamen pushed him back toward the minimal cover of the stairwell as they formed two ranks to flank the open door. Mallory pressed himself against the wall, praying for some sort of guidance.

Mallory could shout a warning to Nickolai and whoever was with him.

But he didn't truly know who was enemy or ally here. He had been hired along with Nickolai. They had been on the same mission. But Nickolai had betrayed that trust. Just like Mallory had.

They both had served other masters.

But were these armed men any more on his side? He hadn't been given much time to think, but in some sense these men served a culture founded on an abomination. What they did here, with the human mind, was akin to a ritualistic rape of the soul. How could whatever Adam offered be worse?

Instead, God granted him a reprieve from that decision.

The door slid open while the militiamen were still approaching. The open doorway revealed a jet-black human figure, a nude hairless male who was as perfectly smooth and symmetrical as a statue. Mallory might have thought it
was
a statue, until it spoke.

 

Parvi groaned and rolled onto her back. Wahid put a hand on her shoulder to restrain her, though she wasn't the focus of attention right now. In the few moments Parvi had blacked out, Abbas had her people ring the newcomers.

Everyone stared at the old man, everyone except the tech holding a plasma rifle pointed at Parvi's midsection. Parvi's head throbbed, and her vision was slightly blurred. When she had blinked everything back into focus, she realized that the old guy didn't look that great himself. He was hairless, but the flowing white topcoat and a glance at his eyes gave Parvi an impression of a mad prophet fresh from the mountainside, an image that would be complete if the man had a long wild head of hair rather than a scalp covered with tattoos.

He stood with arms spread, partly blocking the three others.

Abbas was cursing to herself, and several of the people holding weapons on the newcomers looked uncomfortable.

Abbas shouted at the newcomer, “
I
am in command here.”

“I am certain that is the case, Sergeant. But I think I need to talk to your commanding officers.”

“Whatever you think,” Abbas said. When she paused for breath, Parvi could see her jaw clench with barely contained rage. “You don't get to decide. You are all talking to me here and now.” She pointed to one of the mechanics, one holding a gamma laser. “If he doesn't start explaining himself, shoot the woman.”

Parvi lurched to her feet, yelling, “No!”

The guy with the plasma rifle tried to cover her, but suddenly she was in the midst of his Caliphate fellows.

Someone by the old man yelled out a surprised, “Parvi?”

If Abbas had been holding her side arm, Parvi probably would have been dead. Instead, the sergeant intercepted Parvi's panicked grab for the mechanic with the gamma laser, rotated her arm under Parvi's shoulder, and used momentum to allow Parvi to pass in front of her as she folded Parvi's arm back up between her shoulder blades. Parvi grunted as Abbas shoved her arm up and forced her down to her knees.

“By all that is holy, woman. Do you think the Caliphate doesn't give its engineers combat training?” She glanced over at the guy with the plasma rifle and shouted something in Arabic. The guy looked embarrassed and grabbed Wahid and hauled him to his feet.

Abbas jerked Parvi's arm, and Parvi felt her eyes water.

“Do you know these people?”

“They're from the
Eclipse
,” Parvi said. “The three in back were part of the science team.”

“What are they doing here?” Abbas snapped.

“This place was where the
Eclipse
was directed to land, before the engines blew and the lifeboats launched.”

Abbas dragged her upright and with an impressive show of strength pushed her into the arms of a couple more waiting techs. “Don't challenge me again, Vijayanagara Parvi. You are useful but not indispensable.” She drew her own weapon and stepped over to the man and the remnants of the science team. She held the gamma laser up, pointing it at Dr. Dörner's head. “Someone's going to pay for that little display.”

“Please,” Parvi shouted, pulling against the men holding her, “don't!”

“Fine,” Abbas said, “have it your way.” She moved her aim to the right and fired the laser straight through Dr. Pak's right eye. His muscles spasmed once, and his body fell to the tarmac, a slight wisp of steam drifting up from a burnt-out eye socket.

Everyone, Caliphate techs included, stood in stunned silence.

“Does everyone understand now that we have no time for games?” Abbas said. She turned and looked at Parvi. “That was your decision. Don't test me again.”

Parvi stared at Dr. Pak's corpse with the sudden certainty that they were all going to die.

Abbas turned back toward the quartet and said, “My order stands. If he doesn't answer my questions, shoot the woman.” She stared at the old man. “Tell me now what you want to tell my commanding officers.”

The old man lowered his hands and glanced about with too much detachment for someone who had just had a man killed in front of him. He sucked in a breath and nodded.

“My name is Alexander Shane. I am the senior member of the Grand Triad of Salmagundi. When your ships appeared in orbit, I took it upon myself to take control of the Triad and assume direct command of all military forces on this planet. I am here to negotiate our surrender to the Caliphate.”

Even ten meters away, Parvi could hear Wahid mutter, “You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

 

Hearing the thing speak turned Mallory's guts to water. The voice was dark, resonant, and sounded unlike anything that should come from a human throat, a sound that did not come from flesh.

The Salmagundi militia did not listen to the thing's command. They dropped against the walls and the floor to provide a smaller crosssection to target and leveled their laser carbines at the ebon intruder.

“Don't move,” the lead guard shouted.

“The other is here. There is no time.”
The thing took a step forward, through the doorway.

That was all the excuse the militia needed. The men were primed and on edge, and even with no visible weapons, the intruder's very alienness threatened them. That alone made it more than probable that this thing was an emissary of Adam.

Four carbines fired, their beams only slightly visible because of the refraction of the superheated air the shots left in their paths. Where they hit the figure, the skin—if that's what it was—changed texture from glossy to matte, to a black that was so complete that Mallory felt as if it marked a blind flaw in his own eye.

The militia held their carbines on the figure, firing continuously. In response, the figure stood still, arms outstretched, head back. It was on the verge of a blasphemous thought, but to Mallory, the thing's expression almost reflected a religious rapture; as if he looked at a satanic negative of a Renaissance painting of Christ receiving John's baptism.

It's absorbing the energy, Mallory thought.

He called out to the militiamen, “Stop!”

They didn't listen, continuing to fire. Perhaps they thought the deep, spreading black was some form of damage.

He moved from his cover. “You aren't hurting it!”

“Get back,” the leader yelled at him. “We have to get you to the transmitter!”

“You don't know what—”

“Move, Mallory!”

The deep, bottomless blackness grew, like a flaw in the universe, spreading down the thing's legs, pooling at its feet.

Can it be bleeding?

The black pooled on the floor, spreading.

“Mallory!” the lead guard shouted.

It wasn't bleeding.

“Look out! The floor!” Mallory called, not quite certain what he was warning them against.

The pool of black had spread across the floor in an unnatural arc that curved toward the militiamen on either side. Even without any reflection, without any visual cues at all, Mallory felt a sense of movement, as if something undulated through the shadow, toward the surface. Something swimming up from the other side of creation itself.

Two men stopped firing and turned to glace at the floor, where the blackness had nearly reached their feet. Both said, “Shit!” in unison as four arrow-straight tendrils shot from the black, each striking a laser carbine in the same place, ten centimeters above and behind the trigger guard. The tendrils struck with enough force to tear the weapons out of their wielders' hands. One of the men who had turned to look was struck on the side of his helmet by the stock of his weapon as it tore from his grasp. Two others were unfortunate enough to have their arms tangled in their guns' shoulder straps, and both of them were dragged up as their weapons slammed into the wall about three meters up.

The thud of impact was followed by a near- subliminal crunching noise. The end of each tendril bifurcated, then bifurcated again, and again, thousands of branches swarming to envelop each carbine. After a second the tendrils withdrew, and the carbines fell to the ground in a shower of their component parts, completely disassembled like the locks.

The two suspended militiamen fell ignominiously to the ground, joining their comrade, who'd been knocked senseless by the butt of his own gun.

The shadows withdrew into the figure in a fraction of a second. Then it lowered its upturned face and opened its flat, irisless eyes to look directly at Mallory.

“The other is here. There is no time.
”

“One of the signs of sapience is the ability to die for an abstraction.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”

—MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546)

Nickolai had followed because he had nothing else to do. Kugara's words had torn at him, at his pride, at his honor. His first impulse was to strike out at her. The second impulse was to abandon them on their path toward damnation.

Neither was practical, and neither action would change anything. Even though he saw the Protean's existence as morally repugnant, he knew they had to communicate what was happening here to the nations of the Fallen. As much as his people tried to separate themselves from the sins of the past, they still existed in the larger universe, and anything threatening the worlds of man would eventually threaten the worlds of man's creations.