Heretics (46 page)

Kugara knew when the dropship separated from the
Daedalus
. Soon after, she felt a gentle acceleration push her back into her seat. She licked her lips and her heart started racing against her will. This was it, and there was a good chance she had just begun experiencing the last twenty minutes of her life.

She knew just enough about flying a spacecraft to understand how difficult what they were attempting was. Even if the tach-drive on this boat was accurate enough to put them in place within the two-hundred-meter margin of error this maneuver required—which was asking for a miracle all by itself—Parvi still had to line up the
Khalid
's momentum and acceleration vectors to match with the orbital insertion path they needed to follow. A few degrees pointed in the wrong direction relative to the planet and they could tach in precisely on target but on an outbound path straight into the free-fire zone.

Off in the other direction, they could make a too-steep entry into the atmosphere and lose control of the ship.

She looked at the scientists and Flynn, across the central aisle from her and Nickolai. They looked as unconcerned as the crowd of refugees filling the balance of the cabin.

Was she the only one who understood how risky this actually was?

She felt a heavy, furred hand touch her knee. She looked up at Nickolai, sitting in a custom-built seat made out of two human-sized ones. The wide straps of the crash harness looked tiny against his broad chest. His feline expression was enigmatic as he quietly said, “You are afraid.”

“Of course I am.”

“There is nothing as useless as someone obsessing over something she can't change,” he said.

Kugara stared at him, listening to the echo of her own words from Salmagundi. “You asshole, how long have you been waiting to say that?”

He squeezed her knee, and she could feel the hint of claws pricking though her jumpsuit. Then he pulled it away. “You were right,” he said.

“Does this mean you've stopped condemning yourself?”

Nickolai shook his massive head. “Do not ask too much of me. I am still all that I am.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But,” he continued, “I am beginning to think that things may be more complicated than I have allowed in the past.”

The dropship jerked and accelerated on a new vector. Kugara caught her breath and grabbed Nickolai's hand back. “I don't like not being in control,” she whispered.

“We control how we face the end of things,” he said. “A heart of a warrior beats in your breast.”

A little too fast,
she thought. “Do you really believe it is the End Times?”

“I've been taught the signs that precede the end of things, and there have been many of them. But we are not privileged to know God's will until St. Rajasthan himself returns from heaven, bearing a flaming sword, and leading an army of prophets into this world to divide the just from the unjust.”

“For all we know, that's already happened.”
As insane as things have gotten, it wouldn't really surprise me either.

“No,” Nickolai said, “if that happened, we
would
know.”

Over the PA, Parvi's voice announced, “We are about to engage the tach-drive. Hang on, it may get rough all of a sudden.”

Nickolai gently squeezed her hand.

 

Parvi lined the
Khalid
up relative to Bakunin as closely as the navigational system allowed. Her velocity and acceleration vectors precisely paralleled the entry path from low orbit, just at a remove of about a million klicks out.

She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. Everything now was up to the tach-drive computers. She set the coils to charge—

And a horizon slammed into the viewscreen with a physical blow that shook the length of the
Khalid
. The viewscreen was cut in two, above a black sky, below the sunlit blue of ocean.

She didn't have time to absorb the fact that they had survived the tach-jump without going wide either deep into the atmosphere or up into the fire zone. She had more to worry about trying to keep the
Khalid
from vibrating apart. They dove into the atmosphere too steeply and were slamming into air sooner than Parvi wanted. The horizon's curve vibrated, flattening, as the blue below her gave way to the white of Bakunin's massive northern icecap.

The consoles before her flashed red warnings in Arabic. Half came from the contragrav. It had been primed to provide lift for reentry, but some time in the Khalid's recent violent history, some part somewhere in the contragrav system had been invisibly pushed too close to failure. The instantaneous taching into a gravity well had stressed part of the charged contragrav past the failure point. The manifold was venting exotic matter plasma into space, causing the Khalid's acceleration downward to increase. She had to rely on atmospheric braking entirely by the time she crossed the pole and into the dark side of Bakunin.

The planet kept rising beneath her, distorted in the viewscreen from the heat of reentry. The
Khalid
streaked through the arctic Bakunin night supported by nothing more than momentum and its own limited aerodynamics.

Parvi did what she could to flatten the attack angle of the spacecraft, because at this angle of approach, they might not clear the ice cap. She pulled the nose up, and in a desperate move, fired the maneuvering jets on full.

The burst of acceleration thrust her into her seat and added to the hypersonic velocity they needed to bleed away, but it did what she hoped and corrected their approach angle.

No way I'm going to bring this in for a ground landing.
She started tweaking their course southeast as the ice sheet slid away behind her. The horizon rose ahead of her, more slowly now. She hit the controls to enhance the images out the viewscreen.

Bakunin's only continent raced by below her. The mountains forming its spine sped by to her left, the ship still dropping incredibly fast. The coastline zoomed toward her. She gingerly goosed the controls again, turning the
Khalid
slightly to parallel the coastline.

The dropship protested, shaking and thrusting her against her seat. The brick of a craft was not designed for gentle maneuvers without the benefit of its contragrav. The
Khalid
started a yaw back and forth that stopped just short of throwing them into an uncontrolled tumble.

And I was thinking taching in was the hard part . . .
The horizon crept toward the top of the viewscreen. The nighttime coastline raced by below them, and the Diderot Mountains disappeared off to the west.

“Everyone, brace yourselves,” she called into the PA system.

In the viewscreen the coast whipped by too fast and close to make out any detail, the ocean a blur. Proximity warnings lit up the navigation console as Parvi made one final attempt to flatten out their flight path.

The blur of ocean spread to fill the entire viewscreen, and the
Khalid
hit the water like a bullet. The jolt of the impact threw Parvi against the harness, wrenching her neck and nearly slamming her face into the control console. The shuddering jolts continued, accompanied by a roaring loud enough to make her ears hurt. Unpleasant mechanical noises resonated through the body of the dropship.

The motion stopped with a groan.

Parvi looked up at a dead-black viewscreen and a control console that consisted of blank display or flashing red Arabic characters. She released the crash harness and stumbled out of the chair, surprised by both the sudden presence of actual gravity and the fact that the floor tilted down forward and to the right.

It wasn't quite as surprising as the fact she was alive.

She climbed uphill to the open cockpit door and called back, “We had to ditch in the ocean off the western coast. Each of your chairs should have an emergency kit mounted beneath it. Inside will be a red flotation pack. Get it out and hold on to the kit. Don't inflate it until you're outside the ship.”

A mad scramble filled the cabin as everyone released the crash harness and grabbed for a kit. A few people stumbled in the increasingly tilting floor.

Fortunately, the main air lock was on the uphill side of the tilt. She opened the inner door and pulled herself inside. She looked out the air lock window and saw stars.

We might live through this.

There was a bang and a hiss, and the cabin lights went out. The air lock faded into dull red emergency lighting. Parvi braced herself against the wall and looked back into the darkened cabin. “No one panic. We're going to file out the air lock. When you reach the door, activate the flotation device and jump out. One at a time, quickly and calmly. Everyone understand?”

She heard enough assents to open the air lock door.

She grabbed the manual release, turned it, and the door creaked open, letting in a cool breeze smelling of sea salt and overheated composite. The first person climbed up past her, a young man, one of the civilians. He held out the bricklike floatation device. The object was red and black polymer with a large yellow blister on one side, a small strap on the other. The wording on the thing was in Arabic, and the man looked to her and asked, “What do I do?”

“Put your hand through the strap, press the yellow blister until you hear the inside break, then jump. Don't let go.”

He nodded and looked outside. He muttered, “Shit,” and pressed the yellow blister. Parvi heard a distinct snap; then he jumped into the night. She glanced at the water, already disturbingly close to the air lock, as the guy splashed down and went under. The water bubbled violently for a moment. Then a three- meter sphere of translucent red material, segmented like an orange, popped up out of the water, holding the surprised young man inside.

She ushered out the civilians as rapidly as possible, until the water around the ditched
Khalid
was bobbing with red spheres. She managed to keep the evacuation orderly, even as the cabin behind her started to fill with water and the ocean waves began cresting over the bottom of the air lock. By the time the last civilian was out, the floor tilted away from Parvi at nearly seventy degrees, and Nickolai was standing on the opposite wall, knee-deep in water, lifting people toward the air lock.

They got Flynn and the scientists out as the water rose above the door. Parvi was standing in the midst of a deluge sluicing up over her thighs, yelling down, “Come on, there's no time.”

Someone shouted below her, but she couldn't hear it over the roaring water. Then a damp furry arm thrust Kugara at Parvi. Parvi grabbed her and pushed her outside. She heard her scream “Nickolai!” as she splashed out into the ocean.

Parvi struggled against the current looked down into the roiling water filling the ship and hollered, “Nickolai!” She could see nothing below her; even the emergency lights were gone at this point. She held out an arm and repeated, “Nickolai,” even though she knew that she had nowhere near the strength to pull a waterlogged tiger out of the depths.

Something, somewhere on the
Khalid
broke apart with a snap that shook the whole ship and pulled the nose even further downward. The water blew in at a redoubled rush and Parvi felt her grip slip away. She fell back into the cabin, plunging into pitch-black water, immediately losing her sense of up and down.

She shook her head frantically in a silent panic as she felt the water wrap itself around her chest, trying to push its way into her nose and her mouth. She flailed her arms around, desperately reaching for an anchor, or a landmark, something.

Her hand felt something hard, muscular, and covered with slick waterlogged fur. Even as she touched his arm, she felt Nickolai wrap it around her chest. Suddenly she was moving, pulled along by him, and the world had direction again.

And once she knew where up was, they broke through the surface.

She gasped lungfuls of air, holding on to the tiger's chest, for once not caring who he was. She blinked her eyes until her vision cleared, and looked up at the creature who had saved her life.

Nickolai wasn't looking at her.

She turned her head, and through the bobbing red spheres, she could see the first light of dawn. It backlit the coastline which, miraculously, seemed only about ten kilometers away, if that. Even more miraculous, they were in sight of one of Bakunin's coastal cities. The skyline was silhouetted against the blood-red clouds, maybe only twenty klicks south along the coast.

But, as she watched, she realized the pillars of clouds against the skyline weren't actually clouds.

It was smoke.

The city was burning.

“Beginnings are inseparable from endings.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“So far as a man thinks, he is free.”

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Adam felt the Protean attack as if they were tearing the flesh from his bones. Every flash that destroyed part of the cloud not only took with it his hard-won followers, but also a part of himself. No matter how diffuse his existence was, no matter the fact that his embodiment here, in this solar system, was only one of many.

The assault was still intolerable.

He took control of the cloud, because his followers, for the most part, were still too inexperienced in their new existence to react. They were unaware of their own vulnerabilities. To save them, he ordered the cloud to condense, coalesce into thousands of points across a wide swath of the asteroid belt. Even as the Protean attack flashed dozens of times, blowing holes through Adam's presence in this solar system, the coalesced spheres of matter shielded themselves, building a shell dense and inert enough to deflect the suicidal explosions.