Heretics (24 page)

Abbas didn't take Shane's revelations particularly well. Parvi was surprised that the woman didn't gun them all down, right there. If anything, the potential importance of Mr. Shane made everything worse. If the man was telling the truth, he was the exact veneer of legitimacy that the Caliphate was looking for.

And it did nothing to help Abbas get her handful of techs out of Adam's path.

She ordered the trio of Shane, Dörner, and Brody to an unused quarter of the landing quad, along with Parvi and Wahid. Away from Dr. Pak's body, but not out of sight of it.

Three nervous-looking techs held them under guard, occasionally looking up at the sky. In the time since Dr. Pak had fallen to the ground, the eclipsing band of darkness had grown to dominate the whole sky. It had also taken on a less uniform color, as if it had a granular texture or a variable opacity.

It didn't look as if they had enough time.

Just as the crew around the dropship began disconnecting umbilicals to the ground station, Parvi heard someone scream out in Arabic. The only word she recognized was “Allah.” She turned in the direction of the voice.

The sky boiled.

What had been pockets of granular detail swelled downward and became pendulous, and dropped downward like huge drops of oil. The oil drops glowed in outline with the darker colors of the spectrum, blues and deep violets. The glow contributed to the surreal twilight.

“This can't be good,” Wahid whispered.

The pulsing liquid sky illuminated itself. Electric-blue flashes traveled across it, within it, resembling lightning hidden within a thunderhead, but more regular, purposeful, slow, and deliberate.

If the band of material girdling Salmagundi kept closing in, eventually it had to lose its integrity. That seemed to be what was happening, but rather than breaking apart, it seemed to be condensing.

The heavy-looking drops separated from their host in waves, a slow-motion rain that filled the sky with spheres of burning violet and electric blue. There was no sense of scale, but what looked like tiny drops from the ground could have been hundreds of meters across.

The band in the sky fragmented, composed completely now by droplets of itself, as if they were watching a holo on cloud formation stuck on continual zoom.

Abbas screamed orders, all of which Parvi suspected boiled down to the Arabic equivalent of “move your ass.”

The character of the light changed, taking on a rosy tint.

One by one, the dispersed droplets suspended in the sky changed their color. Or, more likely, the atmosphere around them had begun to contribute to their appearance.

“Wahid, you have any idea how long it takes from atmospheric entry to reach the surface assuming a free fall from infinity?”

“That depends on the gravity, the terminal velocity of the object, what kind of atmospheric breaking—”

“
Guess!
”

“Five minutes?”

“We're screwed.”

 

“I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship
Eclipse
which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis. Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago—” Once Mallory started transmitting back home, Kugara talked to the six black-uniformed guys who'd come storming in with Mallory. “Who are you people?”

“They're Ashley Militia,” Flynn said.

“So you guys are what passes for an army on this planet?”

“We're the personal guard for the Grand Triad,” one of them said, “under the command of Alexander Shane.”

Another one asked, “Who are you?”

“Me, I'm just a mercenary that took the wrong job.” She looked down at the still-unconscious Nickolai. “Are we on the same side here?”

No one denied it.

“You guys saw the dropship out there?”

They nodded.

“I think we want to be on it.” She looked at the four guys without guns and asked, “Think you can carry him?” She pointed at Nickolai.

“You want us to—”

She turned to Flynn and asked, “So did anyone store any weapons down here?”

“By the guard station there might be—”

Flynn was cut off by the Protean's voice.

The Protean actually grabbed Mallory and pulled him away from the tach-comm.
“Now!”

Mallory stumbled back from the holo and Kugara yelled, “Does anyone need to be told twice?”

In moments, it appeared to Parvi as if the entire sky burned, as thousands of spheres became the heads of burning trails that obscured everything behind them.

On the ground, the crew redoubled their doomed efforts. Parvi looked at their guards. They had their weapons tilted down at the ground, as they stared slack-jawed up at the fiery sky—

“Put down the fucking weapon!” A woman's voice yelled from across the landing quad. “Get on board the damn dropship! Now!”

It wasn't Abbas.

Parvi turned to see Julie Kugara running at them from a trapezoidal building at the opposite end of the LZ. Parvi barely had a chance to register surprise at her survival before one of the techs aimed his weapon in her direction.

“No!” Parvi yelled at them, but the tech's head vanished in a haze of red mist even before the words touched her lips.

Suddenly they were in the midst of a firefight.

The Caliphate techs that were still outside the dropship dove for cover or converged on Kugara, who led a group of men who carried a strange mix of laser carbines and antique slugthrowers. The techs dropped as if they'd walked into a buzzsaw.

Suddenly, someone tackled her to the ground.

She looked over her shoulder and saw Shane looking down at her. “Stay down,” he said. “You're the pilot.” He coughed and spat up a mouthful of blood.

“You're hurt.”

“You're not,” he wheezed and rolled off of her so she could see the right side of his topcoat soaked with blood.

She tried to put pressure on the wound and looked up to see that one of the men Kugara led was Francis Xavier Mallory. And behind them, four black-clad men carried the unmoving body of Nickolai Rajasthan.

This isn't happening
.

Wahid grabbed her shoulder as a whine filled the air above them. She realized that their guards were no longer anywhere near them.

“We got to get to the ship,” he yelled at her.

The ground pulsed with a slowly strengthening rhythm. The whine got worse. She yelled at Wahid, over the noise, “Get his feet.”

“Are you kidding?” he yelled back.

She looked back at the two scientists; Brody had a busted arm, but Dörner wasn't obviously hurt. “Dörner, help us get him to the ship.”

“But they're shooting—”

Above them the sky lit up with a trail that felt close enough for her to touch. Parvi swore she felt the wind as it passed by. For a moment it burned against her retinas, a flaming teardrop of molten metal twice the size of the dropship.

Then it slammed into the trapezoidal building, the one that Kugara had emerged from.

Parvi felt as if the ground turned liquid under her feet, as the ripples from the impact crashed below her. She sucked in a breath tainted by the smell of burning ferrocrete and superheated metal.

She grabbed Shane's shoulders and yelled, “Now!”

She pushed herself up unsteadily against ground that still pulsed, and she realized that she was feeling wave after wave of impacts, just like the one they had just witnessed.

Brody took a leg in his good hand, and the four of them raced Shane toward the dropship. Kugara's people were back on their feet after the shock wave, and the remnants of the Caliphate techs were retreating to the
Khalid.

Behind Kugara, Parvi saw the outline of the trapezoidal building, silhouetted against a towering fountain of glowing metal. The fountain resembled an abstract slow-motion interpretation of a volcanic eruption. Glowing tendrils twisted into the sky from the impact site, arcing out over the whole spaceport.

“We're so screwed,” she whispered as they made a desperate run toward the dropship. Any moment she expected one of those tendrils to collapse on them like a falling tree.

Even if they made it, she saw several fallen Caliphate techs, and couldn't see Abbas being particularly welcoming anymore.

It wasn't an issue.

When they made it to the
Khalid
, Kugara and Mallory helped them up and in. Inside, Kugara's people had definitive control of the situation. Sergeant Abbas sat, slumped in a corner, clutching a hole in her belly, and the techs had dropped or lowered their weapons.

Parvi pushed through to the cockpit as she heard one of the Caliphate techs saying, “We don't have room for that half-dead morey!”

“You want me to shoot enough people to make room?” Kugara shouted back.

Parvi dived for the controls, started as abbreviated a preflight checklist as she could get away with, and began powering up the contragrav. She called back, “Everyone on board?”

“Everyone who's coming!” Kugara shouted back.

Parvi slammed the controls to seal the external door. She cranked up the contragrav and withdrew the landing skids. Everything checked out for flight on all the readouts she could make sense of—everything except the proximity radar, which was going absolutely nuts with contacts all over the place.

Out the viewscreen the world was insane, the sky boiling with incoming meteor tracks, and a molten hydra whipping at the sky right in front of them.

Bizarrely, the building still stood, black against the glowing base of the tendrils. She pushed the dropship back and up, to get away from the thing, and as the dropship rose, she began to see more impact sites whipping their long threads across the landscape, everywhere Parvi could see.

She desperately searched for a part of the sky that was safe, or a low-altitude path that avoided the pulsating impact sites. But every sensor was saturated with information. No path seemed clear enough.

Then the hydra in front of them reached for the dropship.

Parvi tensed for the impact, but the tendrils stopped short. They hung motionless, burning in the viewscreen. She stared at a tendril hanging in midair, barely meters from the dropship.

“Okay, you ready to fly us out of this—holy shit!”

Parvi didn't take her eyes off the view in front of her. “Take the nav chair, Wahid.”

“What the hell is—”

“I don't know.”

“Why is it just sitting—”

“I don't know.”

“What are you going to—”

“You're going to shut up and get a course plotted back toward home, and you're going to push this drive as hard as the computer will let you. We're taching as soon as we're safely out of the atmosphere.”

She pulled the dropship back on its contragravs, away from the frozen hydra. As she did, she saw a complex shadow rippling across its glowing surface, as if it were restrained by a black net. The tendrils strained against the net, then seemed to liquefy and pour down, back to the ground, leaving a complex black webwork hanging in the air like an alien fossil.

“What
is
that?” Wahid asked.

“I don't have any more information than you do,” Parvi replied.

“We've got to get out of here!”

“Damn it, where? I can't see any route that isn't alive with contacts. I can't find clear airspace anywhere.”

“Just punch it! It's not getting any clearer.”

Parvi had already come to the same conclusion and primed the main thrusters to blow them through the maelstrom that the upper atmosphere had become. All they could do is pull enough G's that they limited their exposure, and hoped they slipped between the contacts.

She called out, “Secure everyone!”

As she spoke, the view out the windscreen whipped apart. The black alien skeleton flew apart and re-formed around the dropship. Almost every single proximity alarm rang out at once. And suddenly she looked through a black web, her view outside fragmented into hundreds of tiny angular facets.

The net itself pulsed slightly, rippling upward past them.

“That's it,” Wahid said, “we're fucked.”

Parvi sucked in a breath, not quite believing it when she said, “No.”

Not every proximity alarm was flashing. The ones topside forward were clear. And as she looked at the other sensors, the airspace in that direction was clearing out.