Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Well, fuck me! Eyes, too—went the distance, did you?” The odious little man took off a pair of sunglasses, and before pocketing them, Nickolai could see a streaming display showing several views inside the club, where dozens of naked men and women danced for a packed crowd. He was briefly astonished at the clarity of the image, making him realize that his new eyes were an order of magnitude more sensitive than the ones the priests burned out of his skull. The man rubbed the bridge of his nose. “When you coming back to work?”

  Nickolai wondered to himself if he had simply passed this way by oversight, or if on a subconscious level he had planned it.

  “Mr. Salvador, I gave you my notice.”

  Salvador laughed. “ ‘Notice,’ he says.” He broke off, coughing. “Really, Nick, I forgive you.”

  Nickolai noticed movement out of the corner of his eyes.

  “And, in fact, I’m feeling real generous. I’m not even going to dock you for the two weeks you missed.” Salvador smiled at Nickolai. “A blind one-armed morey was more a novelty than a bouncer—but fully functional? That’s useful.”

  Nickolai could smell the quartet of humans circling behind him. And when he heard Salvador use the ancient slur “morey,” Nickolai knew he had come this way on purpose.

  He shifted his weight on his digitigrade legs to lower his center of gravity and positioned his arms in preparation for a confrontation. He looked down at Salvador, who was oblivious to Nickolai’s shift in posture or what it meant.

  “I no longer work for you,” Nickolai said.

  “Nick, Nick, Nick. I cut you slack because you aren’t from round here. You don’t know how it works on Bakunin. You owe me, tiger-boy. You think a cripple like you’d survive half a day in East Godwin without my protection? You think that ends when you get some flesh hacker to make you nice and pretty? No, you work for me until I give you notice.”

  Nickolai shook his head. “No.”

  “Nick, I’m disappointed. For a morey, it seemed you had good sense.” Salvador shook his head. “Don’t mess him up too bad.”

  The four figures behind him converged. Nickolai didn’t need to see them to understand their positions. He could hear the heavy footfalls, and he could smell their sweat. Four males, large ones, and their strides carried a mass beyond their size. Either powered armor or heavy cybernetic implants, and because he heard no servos, Nickolai thought the latter.

  He pivoted on one digitigrade leg and crouched to face his attackers. He also did something he had never done while bouncing for Salvador—

  He extended his claws.

  Four perfectly matched enforcers. Hairless, with muscles so clearly delineated that they might have been taken for dancers inside the club. Time slowed as adrenaline sharpened most of his senses. His vision was already sharper than it ever had been, even in the thick of combat training.

  Two grappled him just as he turned, wrapping their arms around his waist, aiming to take him down and make him vulnerable to the others’ attacks. Nickolai was already braced against their momentum; they were of secondary importance.

  Primary was the man swinging a pipe at his new eyes.

  Nickolai grabbed the man’s wrist with his left hand and thrust up with his right, at the elbow. Nickolai could feel a jarring sensation in his shoulder as his new arm connected. However, whatever Nickolai might have felt was dwarfed by what his attacker must have felt when his elbow—cyber-enhanced or not—gave way in the wrong direction.

  The man’s gasping intake of breath had barely begun to turn into something more urgent when the second attacker brought his own club to bear. Nickolai blocked the blow with his new right forearm. The impact shuddered through his whole body, but the new limb withstood it.

  That man stopped a moment, as stunned by the lack of reaction as if he had been hit himself. Nickolai did not give him a second chance. His own cybernetic hand struck out, claws first, into the man’s neck. It was a blow developed by the warrior-priests of Grimalkin that simultaneously crushed the wind-pipe and opened the jugular. The man instantly dropped his weapon to clutch his throat.

  The two men grappling him had just realized something was amiss. They weren’t warriors, and they weren’t prepared to deal with one.

  Nickolai brought his right elbow down on the back of one’s neck, dropping him, and as the last one let go, Nickolai brought the first attacker’s weapon—still clutched in that man’s hand—down on the last one’s skull.

  The fight had lasted five seconds.

  Nickolai turned around to face Salvador. The man had backed up to the doorway of his club and was holding a cheap laser handgun pointed at Nickolai.

  “You fucked up bad here, Nick.”

  It was Nickolai’s turn to laugh. “Mr. Salvador, I am a scion of the House of Rajasthan. I have been trained to shed blood since before I could speak, and it is the highest sacrament of my faith to offer the blood of the Fallen to God. Do you think I cannot kill you before you decide where to aim that toy?” Nickolai struck with his new arm. The laser spun out into the darkness and Salvador gasped, cradling a lacerated hand. Nickolai leaned in toward him, so their faces were only centimeters apart. “Do you forget why we were created?”

  “You can’t do this, Nick. People will find you.”

  “My name is Nickolai.” Nickolai stood up. “And, despite the pleasure it would give me, I am not going honor you with death at my hands.” He glanced back at the four attackers, all quite literally fallen now. “And if you value these men, you should get them medical attention.”

  Nickolai turned and walked away.

  “This is a big mistake, Nick.” Salvador shouted after him. “You’re going to regret it!”

  “I think not,” Nickolai growled to himself in his native tongue.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pilgrimage

  The risks we see are often those we’ve already overcome.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.

  —FRANCOIS De LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (1613-1680)

  Date: 2525.11.05 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  He had left the spaceport on Occisis as Father Francis Xavier Mallory two weeks after meeting with Cardinal Anderson.

  Somewhere, in the logs of the Centauri Alliance, Father Mallory continued on a missionary journey to the Indi Protectorate. And over a year from now, when the transport made planetfall on Dharma over 160 light-years from Occisis, someone identified properly as Father Mallory would disembark and begin some good works in the name of Mother Church.

  The man who no longer was Father Francis Xavier Mallory had slipped off the long-distance passenger ship before it tached out of the system, when it made an unscheduled maintenance stop on the fringes of the Occisis planetary system. By a carefully engineered coincidence, a private freighter was docked at the same orbital maintenance platform having fixes made to its life-support system.

  The ancient Hegira Aerospace freighter had a manifest that listed a number of destinations around the core of human space: Ecdemi, Acheron, Styx, Windsor . . .

  Bakunin, typically, was absent from the itinerary. It was a planet that was rarely logged as an official destination. However, being one of the core planets, it was much closer than Dharma. A single blink of the tach-drive and nineteen light-years and twenty-seven days vanished.

  The longest part of the journey was cruising in from the fringes of the Bakunin planetary system. The captain explained that, since there was no real traffic regulation around the planet, it wasn’t safe to tach in too close to the planet. Having one ship tach in or out too close to another while their own drives were still active could cause dangerous power spikes in the engines. Even though all tach-ships had damping systems to both quickly cool down active drive after a jump and control any dangerous spiking, most planets still had strict regulations giving timetables and “safe zones” for all scheduled traffic.

  In the case of Bakunin, this captain
thought it was just safer to tach in several AU out from the planet, where the chances of interacting with another tach-drive was close to nil.

  Forty days after he left, Mallory walked out of the Hegira freighter onto the surface of Bakunin. He walked out into the chill night air, onto a dusty landing zone lit by the glare from dozens of landing lights. The night sky was a black-velvet sheet, the only stars were the engines of spaceport traffic, and the skyline of the city itself was a near subliminal shadow beyond the lights.

  The stark-white light was cut briefly by orange as an antique shuttle took off from a pad about half a klick away. Mallory spent a moment watching the ascent. Graceful it wasn’t. The shuttle was an insignificant lumpy fuselage on a column of flame. The roar of the ascent made Mallory’s molars ache. The orange light faded long before a slight warm breeze carried the burnt chemical smell of the shuttle’s engines toward Mallory. Within a few seconds, another, more distant craft headed skyward.

  What little glimpses he had of traffic told him that the spaceport extended way beyond the little slice he could see. One bright mote had to be aiming for a landing pad a dozen klicks away.

  He lowered his gaze toward the concourse adjacent to his LZ. He could only make out the doors and a few windows beyond the glare of the landing lights. The rest of the building was nothing but a black silhouette against a blacker sky.

  Since no one had taken it upon themselves to tell him where to go, Mallory shouldered his single duffel bag and headed there.

  His arrival was nearly surreal in exactly how much he was being ignored. No one asked for his identification, no one was running a security checkpoint, not so much as a customs office. The Proudhon Spaceport Security personnel stood on the fringes of the LZ, clustered next to the lights with a calculated disinterest that was conveyed even at a hundred-meter distance.

  It would almost seem that the effort spent manufacturing the identity of John Fitzpatrick, ex-Staff Sergeant in the Occisis Marines—down to removing and reapplying unit tats—had been wasted.

  However, the manufactured John Fitzpatrick knew better.

  Proudhon Spaceport Security might avoid all the forms of customs and immigration usually tended to by a nation-state, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know who and what arrived and departed the allegedly stateless rock of Bakunin. Proudhon was the only spaceport on the planet, which gave the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation considerable latitude on what they were able to require of ships arriving and leaving. Those ships at least pretended to provide passenger and cargo manifests, and the PSDC at least pretended it wasn’t enforcing import, export, or immigration restrictions on allegedly sovereign individuals. But whatever the pretense, the PSDC had a lot of antiaircraft—ground based and orbital—backing up whatever it did decide to enforce.

  So, while no one asked for John Fitzpatrick’s carefully constructed passport, that didn’t mean that no one knew John Fitzpatrick was here. As he walked across the LZ toward the concourse building, he ran the worst-case scenario through his head—a Caliphate agent in place and knowing of his arrival.

  Fortunately, if that hypothetical Caliphate spy took an interest in his arrival, there would be little to John Fitzpatrick that would arouse any suspicion. Ex-Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick had a checkered career with the Occisis Marines that ended with a court-martial convicting him of assault on an enlisted man. Fitzpatrick had been a career man, no family, who had been about Mallory’s age and body type.

  He was also conveniently serving a twelve-year sentence, allowing the Church to appropriate his identity. He was exactly the type of man who ended up on Bakunin.

  The only part of Fitzpatrick’s history that had to be fabricated for Mallory’s cover was his pardon and release.

  Mallory kept his breath steady and his stride unhurried. His training was coming back, and this time mentally counting the rosary did calm his heart rate and his breathing. It helped that he knew what the threats were. Realities were always easer to deal with than his imagination.

  The calm was necessary because there was the off chance someone had some sort of monitor pointed at him. Standard security in any sensitive area—and the LZ certainly was that—not only had video and audio surveillance, but had biometric sensors keyed to stress levels from pulse, skin temperature, kinematics, and facial expression. Civilians were mostly unaware of that level of security until they tried to smuggle a weapon into a bank or a bomb into a government building.

  As blasé as these security guards appeared, if Mallory’s heart level reached a certain level, or his body language said the wrong thing, they would probably escort him into some private room for a little conversation.

  Even if nothing resulted from that, it would raise John Fitzpatrick’s profile beyond acceptable levels. Because of that hypothetical Caliphate spy, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick needed to be completely unremarkable. Just another bit of human flotsam washed up on the shores of Bakunin—lost in the thousands who came here every day looking for something that only this lawless place could provide.

  At the moment, dear Lord, just provide me with anonymity.

  He walked right by a pair of the guards and into the concourse. He heard a snippet of dialogue as he passed . . .

  “You placed the bet. Fifty grams, pay up.”

  “You sure it’s been a month?”

  “Yeah, and Szczytnicki hasn’t used deadly force once.”

  “Damnation and taxes! You putting tranks in his coffee?”

  “Give it up, Hōgai—” The doors whooshed shut behind Mallory, cutting off the guard’s words.

  The concourse was not exactly what he had expected. He was familiar enough with Bakunin’s history, and he had done what research he could manage in the two weeks he’d been given. The whole planet was supposedly a maelstrom of lawlessness and piracy, a reputation that led to certain expectations.

  Those expectations didn’t include the gleaming concourse that greeted him to the city/spaceport Proudhon. Somehow, Mallory expected the chaos of Bakunin’s political climate—an economy constructed around criminal gangs, private armies, and an aggressive social Darwinism that was worthy of the Borgias—to be reflected in its aesthetics. He expected a building choked with street vendors and beggars, a trash-covered update of an ancient novel by Dickens or Gibson.

  Instead, he stood on a spotless floor of polished black granite tile edged with stainless steel.

  A crystal skylight arced above him, whose individual panes magnified the view above so he could see the ships traveling above Proudhon in excruciating detail. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of vessels visible in the artificially-enhanced sky following so many intricate paths that it seemed a patent impossibility that a single craft could escape a collision somewhere. The fact that traffic flowed at all, without such a disaster, seemed a sign of divine favor.

  The concourse was filled with a mass of people in a ground-bound echo of the traffic above. A precise waltz that, however chaotic and patternless, flowed without incident—the people molecules in a turbulent, frictionless fluid.

  The floor in the vast space was dotted with tall metallic kiosks, the kind that usually offered directory and comm services. Mallory walked toward one, merging into the fluid crowd.

  It could have been a concourse on any of the core planets with a single disconcerting exception. Every person carried a sidearm of some sort. Shoulder holsters predominated, but he saw a fair share of weapons carried on the hip. He saw slug-throwers, lasers, and one plasma rifle slung over a woman’s shoulder.

  He’d read up a little on the Bakuninite fetish for going around visibly armed, enough that he wore a surplus Marine-issue laser sidearm, but he hadn’t really thought what walking among an armed population might feel like. He hoped most of these people knew how to handle all that ordnance.

  He was glad for his own sidearm. Not so much out of fear of the gun-toting public, but because the weaponry was so ubiquitous that he began noticing the few people who appeared unarmed
. If he’d not walked off the transport with a gun on his hip, someone might have noticed him.

  He stepped in front of one of several arched niches in the kiosk and looked at the single-viewpoint holo display it beamed at his arrival. The menu itself was a little overwhelming, much more than the typical listings for currency exchange, vehicle rental, hotel reservations, and the other common traveler’s needs. From here he could order up an escort of any given gender and/or species. He could reserve a private surgical unit for procedures lifesaving, cosmetic, experimental, or—anywhere else—highly illegal. He could order a car, or a tank, or a small fighter aircraft. He could have someone deliver a Gilliam Industries manpack plasma cannon in wattages ranging from ludicrous to completely insane. There was a complete directory of mercenaries available for hire . . .

  Saints preserve us, enough money and someone could stage a small planetary invasion without leaving the concourse.

  Mallory reached in and touched the holo icon for currency exchange.

  Immediately he was bombarded with scrolling data, moving graphs and charts, as if he’d been dropped in the middle of the commodities exchange on Windsor.

  Bakunin, stateless as it was, had no single currency. And while there was a de facto standard—everything was nominally tied to the price of gold, so much so that currencies were valued in grams—the fact was, unless you had precious metal in hand, everything floated. He was looking at a hundred different currencies, all native to Bakunin, issued from all sorts of agencies—the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation; the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective; Lucifer Contracts Incorporated; the Rothbard Investment Group; something called the Bakunin Church of Christ, Avenger . . .

  While the money from Lucifer Contracts seemed the most stable, Mallory opted for the notes from Proudhon itself. While the charts told him that he could spend offworld currency as readily as anything else, it was something else that could attract attention—and be more readily traced.