Prophets

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Hallowed Ground

Sometimes the crazy person is right.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Never make the mistake of assuming the universe is sane.

—August Benito GALIANI (2019-*2105)

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

Nickolai followed Kugara through the woods. It was mostly clear and downhill, meaning they made good time, probably doing better than eight kilometers in the first hour. That made it all the more annoying when a pair of aircraft passed within a klick of them, heading to their northeast, back to where their lifeboat landed.

Kugara stated at the shadows visible through the canopy and said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Should we go back?”

Kugara stared after the aircraft and sighed. “No, we’re closer to the outpost you spotted.” She turned around. “Hand me the flare gun.”

Nickolai reached into the emergency pack and retrieved the flare gun. It was the last in a long list of signaling devices stowed on the lifeboat and, being the one object not reliant on electronics, it was the one that had survived their lifeboat’s impact. Unfortunately most of their high-tech equipment had either taken too much of a beating or was burned by the same shielding breach that had fried the internal electronics of the lifeboat itself. Only the ship’s distress beacon survived all of it, and they couldn’t take that without taking the whole lifeboat. So they only had a single flare gun that was included in the sparse survival kit almost as an afterthought.

He handed it, butt first, to Kugara.

“Let’s hope they see this,” she said. “We have only, what, three more flares for this thing?”

Nickolai nodded.

She backed up, looking upward, as the sound of aircrafts’ maneuvering fans receded. She held the gun two-handed, pointing up and away from both of them while looking for a hole in the forest canopy. She smiled as she looked up to a ragged blue opening in the green above them.

She aimed the gun upward and fired.

Nickolai heard a click followed by a sharp snap. Nothing happened. Then the gun started hissing.

Kugara screamed, “Shit!” and tossed the flare gun away from her, running toward Nickolai. Before the gun hit the ground, a horribly bright red flame shot out the barrel in a continuous stream. Even with his eyes auto-adjusting, the forest was briefly turned into a two-tone image in blazing red-white and ink black. The air filled with the smell of molten metal, burning leaves, and the toxic smell of melting synthetics. The hiss grew into an insistent low-level roaring, not quite as loud as the aircraft engines in the distance.

Kugara, running blind, tripped on a dead branch. Nickolai stepped forward and caught her before she fell face-first into the dirt.

“Damn Mosasa,” she shouted into his chest. “You’re supposed to check those things periodically!”

The air choked with acrid smoke as the light died, finally sputtering out. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

She pushed away from him. “I’m fine.” She turned around and stepped over to the smoldering crater where the flare gun had landed. She stared at the remains of the gun. The barrel was still recognizable, but the mouth was black, fading to a series of rainbows back toward where the handgrip and the trigger used to be. Those parts had been synthetic, and were melted where they hadn’t burned away completely.

The smell of it made his nose itch. His eyes watered, but while he expected his eyes to itch, he realized he didn’t feel anything at all. Like my arm . . .

“Well, that’s a lost cause,” she said. She looked up at the wisps of smoke trailing up through the trees. “And if they see that, they’re better spotters than I’ve seen. Back to Plan A.”

Kugara picked up the pack she dropped, looked at her compass, and resumed the walk to the outpost. He followed. If luck and the terrain was with them, they’d reach it within the hour.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the smoldering remnants of the flare gun, they found the first sign of civilization. About five hundred meters from their destination, they faced a ten-meter-high fence. The fence was shiny new and dotted with signs saying, “Restricted/Warning/No Admittance.”

Kugara looked at the signs and said, “I guess they speak English here. Dr. Pak will be disappointed.”

Nickolai looked up at the top of the fence. Small black spheres topped fence posts, sign of either a stun field or surveillance devices. Probably both.

Kugara stepped back from the fence and looked around. “Left or right?”

“Most of the buildings were clustered on the eastern end.” He pointed.

“Right it is, then.”

After walking a minute or so, Nickolai said, “This is recent.”

“I noticed. Those trees are still bleeding whatever they use for sap where they cut the overhangs.”

“What are they protecting?”

“You know, I don’t really give a shit. We obey the signage and get the guards to call in the cavalry.”

Nickolai looked through the fence as they walked, but the woods were still too dense for him to see much of anything on the other side. “Then what?”

“What?”

“What do we do then?”

She spun around. “You know what I want? I want you to shut up.” She turned and marched off along the fence. Nickolai followed without asking any more questions.

Not vocally, anyway.

The fact was they were stranded nearly a hundred light-years away from Bakunin. The Eclipse was most likely destroyed, along with their nominal employer. Nickolai doubted that a far-flung colony like this would be willing to expend the time and resources to return them—if the Fallen here were even willing to deal with a nonhuman like him. . . .

Dying would have been simpler.

There was a gate only a few hundred meters farther along the fence. It opened to a rough road that was little more than a muddy track. There were signs of a couple of heavy tracked vehicles traveling this way not too long ago. The weight of them had left trenches six to ten centimeters deep in the earth. He saw some sign of foot traffic around the gate, but none that went more than ten meters away from the fence. All of the tracks were the club-shaped boots of the Fallen.

A guard shack sat about five meters inside the fence, to their right. The gate itself was designed to slide aside for the large traffic on the road. Inside the sliding gate was a smaller human-sized doorway, hanging open.

“Hello?” Kugara called out.

Nothing stirred. The guard shack was apparently empty.

She looked around. “I don’t get it.”

Nickolai took a deep breath and shook his head. “No humans here, not for hours. But . . .”

“But, what?”

“I smell old fires, explosives. Human blood.”

“Jesus. And they just leave the door open?”

“Maybe there’s nothing left to protect.”

Kugara pulled her small flechette gun and pointed it at the ground. “If you would do me the favor?” She nodded to the open gate.

Nickolai supposed that he should be grateful that she did him the favor of at least making the pretense of asking. He walked over to the door. There was some logic to being the experimental subject here; any traps were going to be scaled for a human intruder and might not affect him as badly. Even so, he suspected that tactics was only a secondary consideration in having him take the lead.

He pushed the gate with his artificial hand, and it swung inward. He had to crouch and step through sidewise to avoid touching the frame of the door, which could still be charged.

No traps were sprung on him, no sudden stun fields, and no guards emerging from the trees. Nothing happened other than leaves rustling in the breeze and the door slowly creaking shut. He walked over to the guard shack. It was a small temporary structure with one-way windows, barely twice as wide as he was; just tall and deep enough for a human to stand comfortably inside.

Around back was the entrance, which hung open like the gate. He opened it, and no one was inside.

“Nickolai?” Kugara shouted, still on the other side of the fence.

“No one’s here!” Nickolai shouted back from behind the guard shack.

There wasn’t room for him inside the building, but its shallow depth put the control panel within easy reach. He touched the panel and called up a series of small views of the perimeter fence. A few more taps, and he was looking at a series of views, presumably from inside the fence. He saw a number of temporary structures, and what looked like a landing area, but no people and no vehicles.

Also, many of the buildings showed signs of withstanding some sort of firefight. The area between the structures showed debris and shrapnel.

He heard Kugara approach him, but he was still startled when her voice came from near his right elbow.

“What the HELL is that?”

It only took a moment for him to realize what she was talking about. A camera had just panned to bring into view something that didn’t belong here. Something that didn’t belong anywhere, as far as Nickolai was concerned.

The camera panned from a series of temporary prefab buildings to something that Nickolai couldn’t classify as a building or a plant or a geological feature. It was a twisting crystalline structure that seemed to grow out of the ground and repeatedly fold into itself as it reached up into the sky. The camera kept panning over more geometric forms that seemed to have been born out of the hallucinations of a Paralian mathematician.

Nickolai stared at the images in the small holo and couldn’t turn them into anything more than pure abstractions. If the shiny forms held a function, he couldn’t discern it.

“What is it?” Kugara repeated.

“It must be what they were fencing in.”

“Is it some sort of natural formation?”

He shook his head. “There’s no sign of anyone here. If these are the comm channels,” he tapped on a quiet part of the console removed from the security cam display, “there’s no talking going on around here.”

“So we have some sort of firefight, and an evacuation.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“And that.” She gestured toward the holo that was panning back across the crystal enigma.

Nickolai nodded. “And that.”

“It would be just our luck to make landfall in the middle of a war.” She stepped back and gestured down the road with her gun. “Well we should check out exactly what kind of mess we’re facing. I’m almost glad our flare gun failed.”

The small outpost nestled in an oblong clearing in the woods, one that had been some sort of impact site. When they walked from the woods to the clearing itself, Nickolai could see the signs in the trees. Many were blackened, and the massive hexagonal plates that passed for bark had sloughed off the trees that still stood at the perimeter, revealing a dull-red interior that seemed to be a sign the tree was dying. In front of the wounded sentinels, their broken comrades had been piled into deadfalls on the edges of the clearing.

The clearing itself was populated by two ranks of temporary buildings that marched down toward the opposite end of the clearing, where the site turned alien and crystalline. Seeing it with his own eyes, and not through a holo camera, Nickolai could see something he hadn’t noticed through the security cameras; the buildings showed more combat damage the closer they got to the crystal. The buildings directly adjacent showed severe burning, shrapnel and blast damage. The abstract geometry of the crystals appeared untouched.

Nickolai could smell the remnants of explosives and old fire stronger than ever. He could also smell the scent of a human being.

“In front of us,” he whispered, “in the crystals, our one o’clock.”

Kugara turned to face that direction, and he heard a gunshot from some sort of slugthrower. The source was impossible to pin down precisely. The crystal structures vibrated in sympathy with the sound and contributed distorted echoes.

“Drop the weapon!” The accent was odd and distorted by the same crystal echoes, but it was understandable.

Kugara looked at him and lowered the flechette gun. That wasn’t enough for the sniper. “I said drop it!”

Kugara tossed the gun on the ground in front of them. “We aren’t part of what’s happening here. Our lifeboat crashed—”

“Who are you? What is that . . . creature?”

“I’m Julie Kugara, my companion is Nickolai Rajasthan. We are crew members from the tach-ship Eclipse. Our lifeboat landed in the woods southwest of—”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?”

“What?”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?!”

“No,” Nickolai answered, interrupting Kugara.“The Eclipse was based out of Bakunin.”

“Bakunin?” The voice’s tone changed, becoming less confrontational. “There’s still a Bakunin out there?”

“As far as we know.” Kugara said. “We’ve been in tachspace for over six months.”

Nickolai saw a shadow move in the crystalline landscape. It resolved into a relatively young human male holding a shotgun. The man was shorter than Kugara and wore a pair of tan overalls. He walked with a bit of a limp.

“You two are really from Bakunin?” He brushed some hair from in front of his face, revealing a tattoo in the middle of his forehead. He was staring at Nickolai. “You talk?”

“Yes.” If it wasn’t for Kugara’s presence, he would have leaped and disabled this man already. He could tell this youth had no military training just by the way he held his shotgun and ignored Kugara’s discarded weapon as he walked toward them. Considering how much attention he was paying to Nickolai, Kugara could probably clear the distance between them and disarm him before he realized she had moved.

For a moment, the man didn’t seem to be paying attention to either of them, then he said, “Moreau, right? From the Seven Worlds?”

“It hasn’t been the Seven Worlds for a hundred and seventy-five years,” Nickolai said. “It’s the Fifteen Worlds now.”

“Of course it is. We’ve been out of touch.” He walked around them, keeping what he must have assumed was a safe distance. “A lot of you on Bakunin now? Since it became ‘officially’ part of the Sev—Fifteen Worlds?”

Nickolai wondered what was going on. When this man first saw them, it seemed clear he had no idea who or what Nickolai was. Now he seemed to be aware of the history of Nickolai’s people, at least up until one hundred seventy-five years ago. He wondered if he was in radio contact with someone else. He didn’t see signs of the man wearing a radio, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have anything implanted, could be in contact with anyone on the planet as far as they knew.

“There aren’t very many; most are exiles, like me.”

“Bakunin’s still a great place to run away from something?” He turned and looked up at Kugara, who was a good head taller than he was. “That your story? You running away from something?”

“I retired.”

“From?”

“Dakota Planetary Security.”

The man paused and took a step back, looking at her. He whispered to himself. Nickolai heard his nearly-subvocalized words, “Oh, boy, Gram.” Then, after a pause, “Go right ahead.”

There was a strange and abrupt shift in the man’s body language. His grip on the shotgun changed, so he was now a lot more able to bring it to bear quickly. The cock of his head, and even his facial expression seemed different.

Most different was the voice. It suddenly seemed older, more confident. “Forgive me if I’m a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man’s land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you’re doing a hundred light-years from what’s left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”