Prophets

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tithes

The most dangerous impulse is to feel safe.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

In this business you never let your guard down.

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Date: 2525.11.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

So far, since arriving, Mallory had investigated close to a dozen ships that conceivably could be contracted to go as far as Xi Virginis. Unfortunately, the nature of the trip put severe limits on the kind of vessel that he could hire. The ship had to be able to power several twenty light-year jumps without refueling and needed the capability to skim hydrogen from whatever source happened to be available, since there wouldn’t be any processing centers along the way.

It wasn’t an impossible criteria. The Indi Protectorate had manufactured thousands of such exploration vessels in its heyday. But those that were still around were old and cranky. The one ship he’d gone to visit today, in his opinion, would require divine intervention to make it as far as Tau Ceti. The only other possibility so far had the ill luck of having a pilot who actually bragged about doing black ops work for the Caliphate.

He was walking back to his hotel from the hangar, when he saw an odd heat-shimmer out of the corner of his eye. He had been retired for forty years, so he didn’t react as quickly as he should have. By the time he realized the significance of the visual distortion, the man in the cloak was standing directly in front of him.

The cloak was a military-grade personal camo projector, looking like a cubist heat-shimmer about one and a half times the size of a man in full combat gear. Mallory stopped short when he saw the distortion and realized that there was a near-invisible something standing on the walkway in front of him.

He took a step back and felt a metal-clad hand between his shoulder blades. A quick glance back showed more optical distortion, headache-inducing at this range. He was close enough to see the shimmer of the tiny fly-sized optical pickups that orbited the cloaked figure—allowing the occupant to see outside his own photon-twisting cocoon.

The pair had him trapped in a long alley between a featureless gray hangar and a tall office building that showed no ground-level entrances for about twenty meters in either direction.

“Welcome to our fair planet.” A voice came from the shimmer in front of him. The voice was amplified, emerged from somewhere around chest level, and was much too cheerful.

From behind him, came a slightly staticky version of the same voice. “We here represent the Proudhon Chamber of Commerce.”

“Your donation is greatly appreciated.”

Just a few meters away and to the rear, Mallory caught sight of a window—little more than a retail clothing display, but close enough to be an escape. He was ducking down and around the man behind him before he had really started thinking about it; adrenaline and his implants were doing the thinking for him.

Behind him, he heard one of them say, “I really hate new people.”

Mallory drew his sidearm and took aim at the window, pointing the barrel between the breasts of the animated mannequin posing in the latest fashion from Banlieue.

Probably should have just given them my money.

The reliable old slugthrower barked in his hand three times, and Bakunin again defied his expectations. Instead of fragmenting, the window simply showed three pancaked slugs embedded in a tight grouping above the mannequin’s chest.

What clothing store has bulletproof windows?

Something hard and metal slammed into his back and he collided face-first into the undamaged window. His sidearm went sailing down the alley. The breath jarred from him, he collapsed on the ground, rolling up to face his shimmering attackers.

“I guess,” said the one with static in his voice, “you just don’t want to do this nice.”

Mallory spat from a bloody lip. “I guess that was a bad idea.”

“Bad idea, he says.”

“That’s funny.”

An invisible gauntlet reached down and grabbed the front of Mallory’s shirt, and Mallory got the sickeningly surreal vision of most of his torso disappearing as the man lifted him to his feet.

“For your own benefit we’re going to have to educate you out of these bad ideas.”

Mallory’s feet left the ground and his back slammed into the wall. He could hear the servos grinding in his attacker’s unseen armor. In his head, Mallory began praying, preparing for the worst.

This close, Mallory could only see the world through the distortion of the camo projection. Through the angular ripples of the projection, he saw a bright flash erupt from the ground behind the man holding him. A ball of smoke rolled upward from the flash, revealing a circle of the walkway melted to black slag. The air was suddenly rank with the smell of hot metal and burned synthetics.

“What the fuck?” The man holding him dropped him and backed away. Mallory staggered against the wall but remained upright. His two attackers were standing right next to him, but Mallory had the sense that he was no longer the focus of their attention.

“Okay, boys, playtime’s over.” The new voice came from a petite woman standing at the mouth of the alley, back where Mallory had come from. She had brown skin and straight white hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a white jumpsuit with a shoulder patch that Mallory couldn’t make out at this distance.

Her most distinguishing feature was the razor-thin gamma laser carbine she held pointed down the alley at them.

“This ain’t your business, lady.”

The woman cocked her head. The barrel of the carbine didn’t move at all. “You know, it might be a good idea for you to think about whether you should be telling me what is and isn’t my business.”

“Now wait a goddamn minute—”

“Cool it, Reggie.”

“Now you going and using my name, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“She’s BMU, Reggie.”

“I don’t give a shit if she’s the fucking pope—”

“Well, I do. Rolling a tourist isn’t worth the trouble.”

The woman added, “Listen to your brother, Reggie.”

“What? No one said anything about who—”

“I told you. BMU. Understand?”

After a long pause, Reggie said, “Okay, cut our losses. Fuck it.”

Both shimmers moved away leaving Malloy alone in the alley.

The woman walked down the alley. Without the distortion between him and her, he could now see the shoulder patch on her jumpsuit. It wasn’t too surprising to see the initials “BMU” embroidered in gold on a red field. Below the initials were a crossed sword and rifle.

She also had a name embroidered on the left breast of the jumpsuit: “V. Parvi.”

She bent over and picked up Mallory’s slugthrower.

“Thank you,” Mallory said.

“You’re welcome,” she stepped over to him and handed him his gun. This close, she wasn’t just petite, but tiny. She was a full head shorter than his Occisian build—barely 150 centimeters, if that. “But don’t go thinking that anything on this planet’s free, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.”

The woman was named Vijayanagara Parvi. She belonged to an organization with the somewhat generic name of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union—she was a recruiter. Apparently, Father Mallory’s alias, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, had just been recruited by Ms. Parvi. Of course, she told him, he didn’t have to sign up with the BMU. However, it made economic sense. If he didn’t, he would owe the BMU for her services, and he wouldn’t have the benefits of being a member of the union.

Of course, the primary benefit would be that he would cease being a target for bottom-feeders like Reggie and his brother.

“The way it works on this planet,” she told him, “you need to be part of something scarier than the shitheads who want a piece of you.”

In the end, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick went along with her pitch. The whole situation fit so seamlessly into Mallory’s cover he chalked it up to divine providence. It didn’t even matter that he had the strong suspicion that Reggie and his brother were employed by Ms. Parvi and the BMU to help recruit new blood. Signing up for the BMU was something that Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick would do even without the extra incentive.

He also felt a level of security when Ms. Parvi confirmed many of the details of Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s history. Mallory’s cover seemed to have stuck, however rushed it had been.