Prophets

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Communion

It is harder to choose your friends than your enemies.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859)

Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

Mosasa’s briefing had lasted through the evening, and Nickolai walked outside into a darkened spacecraft graveyard. His new eyes saw every star and every ship with razor clarity. He looked up and allowed himself to feel his own smallness.

I am a scion of House Rajasthan, direct descendant of St. Rajasthan himself. A line bred for five hundred years to fight and to rule.

I am an apostate sinner who held his own will above that of the priests, his masters, and the laws of God.

I am an unclean servant of the Fallen and of things worse than the Fallen.

He stretched his fingers out until his claws emerged, black on one hand, gunmetal gray on the other. In his real hand, he could feel the tendons stretch and the joints crack. In the artificial hand, he only felt the slight feedback as what passed for flesh wrapping it felt a slight increase in tension.

What am I, really?

“So, can I buy you a drink?”

It took a second before he realized the question was addressed to him. He turned his head away from the stars to look down and see Kugara, the Angel, looking up at him.

“You look like you could use a friend,” she told him.

Nickolai turned away. He had fallen out of the habit of looking at people during conversation. “Do I?” he asked. He wasn’t quite sure how else to respond. He owed her respect, not only because she wasn’t human, but because he would be working with her for the foreseeable future.

He snorted and shook his head, because the irony of that thought wasn’t lost on him. Personal feelings were what condemned him in the first place.

“Did I say something funny?” Kugara asked.

“No,” Nickolai told her.

When the single word faded, Nickolai realized how quiet it was out here in the desert.

“You aren’t going to elaborate on that, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” Kugara said. “How about that drink?”

Kugara had her own transportation, an old contragrav aircar that had the turquoise-and-black markings of a Proudhon Spaceport Security Vehicle, though the skin was now dominated by the matte gray primer color of flexseal patches. It had an open canopy, so it could handle Nickolai’s height, though when he got in, the craft briefly suffered a hard tilt to the right before the sensors encouraged the underpowered injection unit to compensate for the mass distribution.

To make room for his legs, Nickolai had to push his seat all the way back, and in response the craft tilted rearward for a moment.

“Gad.” Kugara said, watching a few red lights on the dash display in front of her. “Guess no aerobatics with you in the car.”

She waited until the craft found its level, then she punched the vector jets, shooting the protesting vehicle across the desert and back toward the city.

Nickolai looked at Kugara. Her hair trailed back in the wind, and her face was dominated by a clenched grin that Nickolai would normally attribute to a huntress just prior to a kill.

“What do you want of me?” he asked.

“We’re on the same job,” she said against the wind. “Can’t I buy a comrade a drink?”

“I notice I’m the only one to whom you offered.”

“We both need an ally, scion of House Rajasthan.” She turned that predatory grin toward him and said, “Despite what the maps say, you’re not in the Fifteen Worlds anymore.”

Kugara took him to a bar in a part of Proudhon run-down enough to have been in his old neighborhood in Godwin. It was part of a mall that had taken over an old assembly building. The space was large enough that none of the shops and restaurants inhabiting the space felt the need to build ceilings. The bar was one of the few that felt the need for actual walls.

It took a few moments for Nickolai to realize that Kugara had chosen this place with him in mind. With the ceiling of the original assembly plant a good forty meters above them, he could walk around without ducking. In addition, the bar had circular tables and stools that allowed him to sit without being crammed in a human-sized booth, or wedging his tail into a tall-backed chair.

She let him pick a table. He took one to the rear of the place, putting as much distance between himself and the human crowd as he could. The stares from the patrons were becoming familiar, and he barely noticed the crowd edging away from him. He sat with his back to the wall and wondered what he should think about Kugara’s interest in him. He wondered if this was part of Mr. Antonio’s plan.

A pitcher of amber liquid slid in front of Nickolai, and Kugara took a seat across the table from him. She had a mug filled with black liquid, with a head the color and texture of foam insulation.

“Allies, you said?” Nickolai asked her.

She raised her glass. “Have a drink,” she told him. “To a profitable mission.”

Nickolai had worked around humans enough to understand the custom. He took the pitcher in his hand and raised it, echoing the toast. Proportionately, the pitcher fit his hand about the same way her mug fit hers. “A profitable mission,” he said. He took a swig with her and set the pitcher down. It wasn’t the spiced ale from Grimalkin, but it was more tolerable than most human beverages.

She looked at his pitcher, then at her own mug. Nickolai’s pitcher was nearly half-empty, where the head in her mug had only lowered a couple of fingers. “I can see you’re an expensive date.”

Nickolai pushed his chair back and said, “If you’d rather be alone—”

“Stop it. God, you have no sense of humor.”

“What is it you want?”

She shook her head and took another sip from her mug. “I want someone to cover my back. I had the bad sense to go spouting off about Dakota back there . . .” She looked down into her mug. “Sometimes I am an idiot.”

“If you don’t like working with Wahid, you can find another job.”

“You say that as if I have a choice.” She lifted her mug and drained about half of what remained. She slammed it down on the table, and after a few moments of silence, she added, “At least you picked up on the fact Wahid seems a bit twitchy. I was beginning to think you were completely oblivious. And you can add that haughty bitch Parvi to the list.”

“Parvi?”

“Oh, can’t you sense how overjoyed she was to have us in the team?”

“I assume you’re trying to be humorous again.”

She laughed. “You can say that. So, Nickolai, how do you feel working with a bunch of humans?”

“Mosasa isn’t human.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that, didn’t you? Mind expounding on that little tidbit?”

Nickolai pondered his options for a moment. The fact he carried a rather large secret with him made him reluctant, but Kugara was the only other member of the team he would feel comfortable having as an “ally.” He also thought she had a point that they both needed one. This mission was going to take them far outside the grip of the BMU, the only law recognized by their nominal comrades. And would he want to trust his life to humans like Wahid or Parvi, or even Fitzpatrick?

Nickolai finished his pitcher and told Kugara what he could about Mosasa. “Our employer,” Nickolai said, “doesn’t just work with AIs. He doesn’t own them.”

“Meaning?”

“He is them.”

Kugara lowered her mug. The glass hit the table with a slightly liquid squeak. A similar sound seemed to come from her throat. After a moment she said, “Shit.”

“Tjaele Mosasa is a construct controlled by a salvaged Race AI device. The ‘man’ who briefed us is no more real than my right arm.” He held the arm in front of him; fingers spread so the metallic claws were visible.

She looked at his arm. “That’s a prosthetic?”

Nickolai made a fist and lowered it to the table. “Yes. It is.”

“It’s very well done, I couldn’t tell at all.” She finished off her dark beverage. She stared at the foam sliding down the edges of her glass. “Why would an AI hire a group of mercenaries?”

“It may be exactly what he said it was.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it is.” Kugara looked up from the shreds of foam in her glass and asked him, “But if you had a choice, would you be walking into this?”

“No.”

“Damn straight.” She looked over at the bar. “I think it’s time for a second round.”

She never asked him why he had no choice in the matter, or why he had a prosthetic arm, or why a scion of House Rajasthan had deigned to prostitute his skills as a mercenary on Bakunin. He returned the favor.

By the end of the third round, and his third pitcher, Nickolai finally felt a comfortable softening of the edges of his perception. Even before coming to Bakunin, he hadn’t been much of a social drinker. What little alcohol he consumed was usually ceremonial, toasting saints, fellow warriors, or the person of the sovereign. He was somewhat surprised at how he enjoyed being comfortable with another person, whoever it was.

That might have been why it took him that long to notice their shadow. A trio of men, who had entered some time after he and Kugara had arrived, sat at a corner booth that had a good view of Nickolai’s table. They weren’t obviously watching them, but they also weren’t doing much drinking, or laughing, or talking. The trio might be in civilian clothes, but Nickolai was sensitive to motion and body language, and even out of the corner of his eye he could tell they had body armor restricting their movements under the loose overalls they wore.

Without moving his gaze from Kugara, he cycled though his new spectral sensitivities. When he downshifted the spectrum toward the infrared, he could see square hot spots on their belts that were most likely active Emerson field generators.

The body armor could be innocent, insofar as anything was innocent in the violent mess that was Bakunin, but an Emerson field sucked enough power that you didn’t turn one on unless you imminently expected to be targeted by some energy weapon, otherwise you’d suck the massive power sink dry long before the field would be of any use.

Nickolai did his best not to shift his body language. Raising his pitcher to his lips he said, “Three men behind you.” He kept his attention on the three men in his peripheral vision. Either they were very good at covering their reaction, or they didn’t have audio surveillance on them.

“What?” Kugara said.

“Body armor, active Emerson fields, LOS on our table.”

“Armed?”

“Who isn’t?” Nickolai lowered the pitcher and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he whispered, “Handguns at most, holstered.” He scanned the bar crowd and didn’t see anyone else with the telltale of an active field.

Kugara pushed her glass toward the center of the table with both hands, and leaned forward with a smile, as if she was sharing some drunken confidence. “Corner booth, third from the front door?” she whispered.

Nickolai nodded and glanced up at the faraway ceiling. The unusual layout of the mall here made their position unusually exposed. One spotter in the scaffolding above could have a lock on their position almost anywhere they went. The current false-color IR view with which he saw the world showed him two glowing patches up against the ceiling.

He could focus tightly on them, two men in dark clothing. The two of them had taken partial cover near the HVAC duct that pumped cool air into the cavernous space below, and every time they exhaled they released a cloud of warm moist vapor into the cold dry air by the duct.

One spotter, one sniper . . .

“Brace yourself,” Nickolai said.

He dropped the pitcher and grappled the edge of the table, throwing the edge upward between him and the watchers in the ceiling. He relied on the fact that his reaction time was quicker than that of the Fallen surrounding him. As he dove for Kugara, the large mass of the moving table had already begun a chain reaction of crashing glass, splintering wood, and human shouts. The air was suddenly filled with the sharp scent of spilled alcohol. He pushed her into a booth against the same wall as the trio of men in the corner booth. They fell on the table between two couples, Kugara landing underneath him with a grunt, spilling the occupants’ beverages.

The man to Nickolai’s left stood up and yelled, “What the fuck—”

It was the last thing the man ever said. The beam from the sniper’s weapon was invisible in normal spectra, but Nickolai was still seeing the world with enhanced IR. He could see the heat of the weapon’s trail hanging in the air, tearing through the spot where his head had been a quarter second before, and where this man’s chest was now.

Nickolai felt the pulse of combat stretching his sense of time as he rolled on his side, off of Kugara. Adrenaline surged through his muscles, like an electric current, every hair awake, alive, and strung tight as the world slowed down.

Around him, the three others in the booth had just begun sucking in their breaths to scream. His gun was already in his cybernetic hand. He brought it to bear so fast that he could feel the air itself pulling against his artificial flesh.

The sniper’s accidental victim had yet to fall as Nickolai pushed himself upright with his free hand. Another blast from the sniper tore through the air, but his reaction time was much slower than Nickolai’s, the beam punching into the corner of the table where Nickolai’s head had been.

But, to Nickolai’s enhanced sight, the heat from the plasma gave a momentarily persistent trail pointing right back to the shooter. The 12mm in his hand spoke, spitting a meter-long tongue of flame that spoke in the voice of a wrathful God. The gunshot echoed thought the massive space, briefly silencing every other sound.

And as in the BMU’s training, when Nickolai fixed his new eyes on something, he hit it. There was a brief flare in the infrared as the sniper’s weapon vented plasma, then a shadowy human-shaped form fell from the ceiling.

“Shit!” Kugara yelled, throwing herself against his chest. At first he thought it was fear, the smell of it was rank in the bar.

But it wasn’t from Kugara.

She wasn’t cowering. She was bracing herself against him to give herself cover and steady her aim at the trio of men pushing toward him through the screaming crowd. Her left arm grabbed his side as she held her right out across his chest. In her right hand, braced against the inside of his left elbow, she held a dull gray handgun.

One of the three men pointed his weapon vaguely in their direction. She fired, and he heard a high-pitched buzz as a near-continuous razor-thin stream of silver erupted from the weapon. The smell of molten metal made his nose itch.

Kugara’s nasty little weapon was a hyper-velocity needlegun that fired flechettes at an obscene rate of ten or twenty thousand rounds a second, a speed that essentially vaporized the ammo into a tiny burst of superheated plasma on impact. The thing probably could only sustain fire for two seconds, but a two tenths of a second was enough to decapitate her target.

Around them, the patrons were surging out the exits of the bar in a panic. The two remaining hostiles were caught in the chaos, unable for the moment to close on them or level their weapons.

Nickolai scanned the scaffolding above them and didn’t see any sign of other snipers. The engraved 12mm icon Mr. Antonio had provided weighed heavy in his hand. He sucked in deep breaths of air scented with smoke, burned plastic, and human sweat.

He lowered his gun and fired at the hostile on the left. His head snapped back with the force of the 12mm slug and he fell into the mass of the exiting crowd. The deadly silver thread of Kugara’s weapon touched the side of the other’s face, melting it into a red mist.

“They’ll have exits covered, whoever they are,” Kugara whispered.

“Good,” he told her. “They’ll have their hands full, then.” He rolled to his feet on the bench seat next to the corpse of the sniper’s victim. He held out his left hand about a meter above the table. “Over the wall.”

Kugara nodded, pushing herself upright. She stepped up onto his offered hand, pulling herself up on top of the wall with her left hand. She stood on top and crouched, aiming the needlegun alternately left and right. “Clear,” she whispered, then dropped down on the other side.

Nickolai spared a glance at the barroom behind him, looking for any other hostiles. The place had cleared out, the last stragglers pushing out the normal exits, leaving the floor a wreck of overturned tables, splintered chairs, and at least three corpses.

He heard Kugara’s voice, “Shit!” Followed by the highfrequency whine of her needlegun. He whipped around and leaped up at the top of the wall, cursing his brief division of attention.

He landed on top of the wall, his tail whipping for balance. The sounds of boots on the ferrocrete floor directed his aim down the alley between the bar and the next establishment.

A half dozen men in helmets and body armor had come around from the back of the bar. While they had caught Kugara by surprise, she had likewise surprised them. Two bodies lay sprawled in the alley, helmets trailing wisps of steam. The four others were scrambling for cover around the corner of the buildings as they brought their weapons to bear on Kugara, who was exposed in the middle of the alley.

Prone, she let another burst rip from her gun, emptying quicksilver plasma into the faceplate of the man closest to her. Her latest victim shot wildly, burning a smoldering groove in the wall next to him as he collapsed backward.

Nickolai braced the wrist of his mechanical hand and started pumping the trigger. The first shot hit one in the chest, throwing an electric ripple across his light ballistic armor—the sign of a dying Emerson field cycling down through the visible spectrum. It would have been good against an energy weapon like these men were armed with—and in a fire-team like this, having that protection would prevent friendly fire incidents—but it was useless against a 12mm slug of metal.

His second shot caught another man as he raised his weapon toward him. The slug caught the man in the gut, folding him over and tipping him facedown over a dead or unconscious comrade.

The last man received a bullet in the side of his helmet at the same time a razor-fine stream of flechettes tore across his throat, melting his armor and most of his neck in a cloud of blood and metallic vapor.

Nickolai leaped down from the top of the wall, a deep growl resonating in his chest. As Kugara got up from her crouch, he asked her, “Do you have more ammo for that weapon?”

“Only one clip; I wasn’t expecting an ambush.”

“Grab a gun from them,” Nickolai said. “We need to leave.”

She reached down and grabbed a gamma laser from one of the disabled soldiers. She pulled the faceplate off the disarmed man and stared into his face. “Fuck,” she said.

Around her, about half the men groaned. The one Nickolai had gut-shot rolled over on his back and fumbled clumsily for his weapon.

“None of you move,” Nickolai growled, gun braced. He aimed, but didn’t fire. He only had four shots left in the magazine. Fortunately, the man stopped moving.

“Kugara, move!”

Kugara backed away from the man on the ground, shaking her head. “I know these guys,” she whispered. Her voice got harder. “I worked with these guys! I was part of this unit!”

“Not anymore,” Nickolai told her. He stepped forward, looking at the man who had tried to grab a gun. Nickolai’s slug had pancaked against his armor, but that was the extent of his injury. He was probably in the best shape of the men left back here. Nickolai kicked the man’s weapon away and dragged him to his feet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Do you know this one?”

She walked over and removed the helmet, revealing a light-skinned man with graying hair and a bushy mustache.

“Wolfe?” she whispered.

“Nothing personal, Julie,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on Nickolai.

“Lead us out of here,” Nickolai told her.

“What are you doing with him?” Kugara asked.

“He needs to answer a question or two.”

She stared at him a moment, then quietly said, “Yeah.” She backed past the fallen men, covering them with the laser. She looked around and pointed with her other hand toward a narrow accessway that ran behind a suddenly empty series of storefronts. “That way.”

Nickolai followed, pulling the stumbling Wolfe after him.