Prophets

Date: 2525.11.07 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

It was like he had told Mr. Salvador, “Do you forget why we were created?”

Nickolai began to understand why his ancestors were created. Why he existed. Not just the knowledge of what scriptures and history taught, of how mankind—the fallen creation of God—had the arrogance to create thinking creatures to serve man, to praise man, and to give glory unto man.

Nickolai had known that he was descended from creatures designed to fight in wars that man didn’t have the stomach to fight himself. He had known that when all the petty human governments coalesced into the Terran Council that mankind had renounced their creation and cast it out, exiling it to Tau Ceti at a time prior to tach-drives when the only interstellar travel was through a manufactured wormhole, effectively one-way.

He knew where he had come from, but on some level he hadn’t understood it. He didn’t understand until he found himself bound in service to the false god, man. Until he found himself retracing the steps of his ancestors.

This was why he was created—and this was why that creation was such a great sin.

But he had pledged himself, so he walked the path that Mr. Antonio had set for him. And that path was very well prepared.

There was already an explanation of why Nickolai was searching for work as a mercenary, and how he had come by prosthetics that cost much more than his income from Mr. Salvador would have allowed. Any investigation would show that the reconstruction was paid for by one of Godwin’s many loan sharks—a Mr. Charkov. This debt to Mr. Charkov could not be paid on a bouncer’s salary.

To add verisimilitude to the fictitious story, any money Nickolai would receive beyond basic living expenses would disappear directly into an anonymous account that could, with effort, be traced to Mr. Charkov.

So, as dawn crawled over the slums of the city of Godwin, Nickolai walked into an unfamiliar quarter of the city. The Godwin where he had lived in exile had been a city that smelled of smoke, sewage, and crumbling ferrocrete, its sound a mélange of arguments in every possible human language.

Here, west of central Godwin, the streets no longer smelled of garbage and rotting architecture. While the air was still rank with the stink of the Fallen, it didn’t stick to his fur. The streets were broader and less crowded, and the cacophony of human voices was less aggressive.

Nickolai walked, because a taxi would be uncomfortable and expensive, but also because actually seeing the human hive of Godwin was still a novelty. His vision with his digital eyes was an order of magnitude sharper than his real eyes had ever been and worth the occasional headache. He could read the holo-script crawling up the side of buildings five or ten klicks away. He was able to see the enigmatic human expressions on the drivers of the aircars soaring above him.

And he could see as much as hear and smell the difference in the neighborhood around him. The broad avenue of West Lenin wasn’t cracked and buckled like the old streets near his apartments. The walls of the buildings around him were still in the colors of steel and stone intended by the builders, not the garish tapestry of graffiti that wrapped the structures where Nickolai lived.

Most different were the human inhabitants. They seemed cleaner, better dressed, and were less prone to obviously avoid his path.

The Godwin branch of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union was a plain onyx-black cube of a building nestled between a bank and an expensive-looking escort service. The windowless building had a single door and no decoration other than a small bronze plaque with the initials BMU engraved in it. As he approached it, he could faintly smell ozone, a sign of an active broadband Emerson field ionizing stray air molecules.

Nickolai entered the building and faced a long hallway lined with holo screens—the nearest of which showed his approach and the entrance of the building from several points of view and at several different frequencies. One density scan showed a partially exploded skeletal view of his body where the recent reconstruction of his arm was plainly visible, showing bones metallic, dense, and much too smooth and regular to be organic.

He walked along the hallway, past his own image, and past images of a more expected variety—pictures of military hardware, from hand weapons to hovertanks; Paralian-designed assault craft with military-class tach-drives down to manpack contragrav units. Much of the hardware bore trademarks of Bakunin-based industries. The arms industry was the largest sector of the Bakunin economy, supplying not only the bottomless domestic demand, but also equipping probably half the militaries in human space—every government that didn’t have the resources to equip its own military and a few that did.

Every human government.

Despite historical ties to Bakunin, the nonhuman inhabitants of the Fifteen Worlds—the loose confederation that included Nickolai’s homeworld of Grimalkin—avoided any ties to human space; cultural, diplomatic, or economic. Despite being a de jure part of the Fifteen Worlds’ sphere of influence since the last days of the Confederacy—when it was the Seven Worlds—Bakunin’s thriving export industry rarely sent anything off in the direction of Tau Ceti.

And, despite the professionalism of the receptionist, it was clear in the man’s voice, his posture, and the smell of fear on his skin that the alienation was mutual. The Fallen were still afraid of their creations.

“Can I help you?” asked the receptionist before Nickolai was within six strides of the semicircular desk at the end of the hall.

Nickolai waited until he stood in front of the desk before speaking. “I am here to obtain membership in the Mercenaries’ Union.”

“Oh,” the receptionist nodded, “of course.” The man did well hiding his fear. Someone with the half-dead senses of the Fallen might have completely missed the man’s discomfort.

Nickolai was tall enough to see over the top of the desk and look down on the receptionist. He watched as the man’s hand moved away from a handheld plasma cannon holstered behind the desk. Nickolai frowned slightly. There was little honor in the nasty-looking handgun. It was a single-use desperation weapon—firing it would release all the energy in its fifteen-centimeter-diameter barrel in a cone of plasma at temperatures that would vaporize all organics, most synthetics, and a good many metals in a cone that would fill most of the corridor Nickolai had just walked down.

“We require a one-kilogram deposit as a reserve against your first year’s dues,” the man told him.

Nickolai nodded and pulled a chit from his belt, placing it on the desk. The man waited for Nickolai’s hand to completely withdraw before taking it. “Very good. If you go to one of our interview rooms, you can post an alias and a résumé for our clients, and schedule yourself for a skills assessment. After that we’ll archive your DNA signature, and you’ll have access to our databases and all our facilities. You’ll get an ID badge, but you don’t need it for our services as long as you can present a biometric ID. Welcome to the BMU.”