“Mallory’s navy is growing, and a few of our fellow refugees are trading for the food we have—the Daedalus has— in the cargo hold.”
“And you got two bottles?”
“Actually our motley crew all got one to a person. That one’s yours.”
The bottle had been unsealed, and a curving zero-G spout screwed on. He suddenly smelled the sharp burn of alcohol and glanced over at Kugara. The bottle was at her lips as she sucked a shot through the thin spout that was screwed onto her bottle. She lowered the bottle and sucked in a breath. “Wow,” she said. “That’s good.”
Nickolai wrinkled his nose, “Is it?”
“Try it. This stuff probably runs fifty grams a shot in Proudhon.”
Nickolai raised the spout to his lips and sucked in a mouthful. It hit his mouth like it did his nose, a sharp burn that tore down his throat, leaving an almost uncomfortable warmth in its wake. The warmth filled his gut and worked its way through his extremities, felt most in the leather of his nose.
He sneezed.
Kugara laughed. “Cover your mouth when you do that.”
He blinked, eyes stinging in the sudden atmosphere of atomized whiskey englobing his head. He pushed himself to the side with a foot, whipping his tail around to keep himself oriented toward Kugara.
“Strong,” he said, taking another sip from the bottle, a small one this time.
“You’ve got to be the most graceful thing I’ve ever seen,” she told him.
“When did you start on that bottle?”
“About eight months ago, if you go by the clocks on Bakunin.” She pulled her legs up and folded her arms so that she floated in a sitting position. “You know there’s a very good chance that we’re going to die before we get to the surface?”
Nickolai took another sip of his whiskey. It no longer burned, and the warming liquid felt pleasant rolling down his throat.
“And,” Kugara continued, “if we don’t, we’re going to be flat-footed on the planet, watching a wild goose chase when Adam does to Bakunin what he did to Salmagundi.”
“You could stay here, with the priest.”
“Come on.” She shook her head, and her hair drifted out around her head, reminding him of how the wind had caught it when she had been driving the aircar that last night on Bakunin. “I am not one of the good guys, Nickolai. Never have been. If Adam showed up right now and said choose, if I didn’t it would only be because my soul, bloodstained as it is, belongs to me. No one else.”
“But you’re going with Captain Parvi?”
“I’m just playing the odds. The chance of either plan working is vanishingly remote. However, in case one does, the better shot of living through it is on the surface.” She took another long draw from her bottle.
“If we make it there.”
“That’s the spirit.” She chuckled and let her bottle float away. “What about you? I suggested Parvi talk to you, if only to knock you out of your depressive funk. I didn’t expect you to join in on our little suicide mission. Mallory’s Crusade seems more your style.”
“I fight better with ground under my feet.”
“You seem to do pretty damn well in zero-G.”
“You can’t engage spacecraft in hand-to-hand combat.”
“There is that.” She unfolded her legs, and with an economical push of her toes against an anchor point in the floor, started a slow drift toward him. The motion reminded him that, since the return of his vision, she was the only person he had seen who didn’t seem clumsy.
She reached up and stopped her forward motion with a hand against his chest. She sucked in a breath and asked, “Is it because it’s a suicide mission?”
“What?”
“Are you still trying to kill yourself?”
“Kugara, I was never trying to kill myself.”
“What? Tearing off your arm and shooting yourself in the skull with my gun? That wasn’t a suicide attempt?”
“It was Adam. He was starting to control me. Those were his prostheses and I needed to stop him.”
She reached up and touched the side of his face, fingers tracking the fur next to the orbit of his eye. “What about this, what I asked to save you.”
“Why did you?”
“You were going to die.”
“Does that matter? I betrayed you all. I served the thing we’re fighting.”
“Nickolai—”
He reached up and pulled her hand gently away from 4his face. His own half-empty bottle of whiskey floated away from them. “What do you want from me?”
“What do you think?”
He pushed her away. “You’re drunk,” he said, quietly.
“And you’re arrogant, pigheaded, and annoying as all hell.”
“I think you should leave.”
“Why?” She caught herself from drifting away by grabbing one of the straps securing the hardsuit suspended in the center of the room. “I should leave you to wallow in more self-pity? Boo-fucking-hoo. You’re not living the pure life of some fantasy holy warrior. Grow up!”
He felt the fur stiffen along his back, and his face wrinkled in the beginning of a snarl. “Kugara, I’ve given you license—”
“Give it a rest. If you mention once more about my angelic ancestry, I swear I’m going to rip off your tail and feed it to you. I’m no fucking princess because I got parents from some guy spraying holy jizz into a sacred quim—”
“Enough!” Nickolai roared and pushed off the floor in a straight-line leap at Kugara. He swung his arms up in an underhand blow that could be mortal if he had been angry enough to extend his claws.
However, claws or not, he was drunk enough to forget who Kugara actually was. Kugara’s face broke out into a hard smile as she dropped down in front of him. As he passed through where she had been, he looked down and saw her smiling up at him, still holding on to the strap. Then, quicker than any human could have moved, she let go and slammed her palms into the floor behind her, simultaneously bringing both feet up to slam into his gut.
The momentum of the blow started him spinning up and over, and he shot a hand out to grab the hardsuit. He hooked an arm and halted his tumbling motion so he was upside down in relation to the suit. Kugara’s momentum carried her up past him, legs first, her back toward him. She grabbed the hardsuit below him and her hips twisted, bringing her legs around to get a scissors lock on his head.
He just had enough time to pull himself toward the hardsuit and get a joint lock on her left leg. Then her right foot came rocketing at his face, and he had to let go of his anchor to reach out and block it.
She pulled up into a sitting position, setting the both of them into a slow tumble. She bent forward to stare into his face as the walls spun behind her. “That’s how to get to you, isn’t it? Piss on a religion that doesn’t even want you anymore.”
“Don’t make me hurt you,” Nickolai snarled.
“Oh, just try to.” She grabbed his ears and brought her own skull down on his with a sense-numbing crash. Nickolai tumbled a moment, convinced his ears had been torn from his skull. He spent half a second stunned senseless, enough for Kugara to free herself, pushing herself backward off of his chest.
His shoulders touched a wall, and he instinctively threw his arms out to catch something solid for an anchor to stop his uncontrolled motion.
“Does it hurt, you arrogant prick?”
Nickolai blinked and focused his eyes on Kugara, who floated by the nominal ceiling, holding on to another strap anchoring the hardsuit. He licked his lips and tasted blood. “You wish to fight?”
“Are you just slow or—”
Nickolai didn’t allow her to finish. The taste of blood had moved him from simple rage into battle. She might have been engineered to face his kind, but she was drunk, emotional, and taunting him when she should have been preparing her defense. Before her sentence cut short, he was already in the air halfway toward her.
Again she dodged, but she made the mistake of pulling her
self around based on where she thought he was jumping, not where he actually was jumping. She spun around to attack empty air as he grabbed onto the top of the hardsuit. As she glanced around, looking for him, he tore free the buckle holding the end of her strap anchored to the hard-suit. She turned her head at the motion, saw him holding the end of the tether, and did the only thing she could do.
She let go.
The tether was woven carbon, broad and flat. Nickolai cracked it like a whip, sending a fast moving sine wave down its length to slam Kugara in the side of her head. She tumbled back from the anchor point, and Nickolai leaped from the shoulders of the hardsuit to reach her before she came to her senses.
He struck her with his shoulder, plowing her into the ceiling next to the strap’s anchor point. Before he drifted away, he grabbed the strap with both hands, near the base. He brought his knees up on either side of her torso, pinning her to the ceiling under him.
She blinked up at him, blood trailing from the side of her head.
“Enough?” he asked.
“Well, I finally got your attention.” She smiled at him.
“By blaspheming? Disrespecting the faith of my ancestors?” His arms and legs vibrated with the tension of keeping his muscles taut, legs pushing, arms pulling.
“So how do you intend to punish me?”
“What?”
She reached up and ran her hand along one of his trembling thighs. “You got me, what are you going to do with me?”
He stared at her, mouth open. He became aware of the smells filling the air around them. Blood, sweat, the tang of alcohol, and a heavy musk that made his nose wrinkle.
“Come on, Nickolai, you can’t really hide the fact that you like to play rough.” Her hand slid inside his thigh and she cupped his testicles. He sucked in a shuddering breath and pulled the strap so tight that it felt as if either the anchorage or his arms might give way.
“What are you doing?”
Her hand was hot against him, bringing forth his arousal despite the efforts of some part of his mind to deny what was happening. She whispered, “It’s a suicide mission, I don’t want to die alone.”
“This is wrong.”
“So?” She moved her legs so her hips pushed his thighs slightly further apart. She sat up so her head poked up between his trembling forearms. Her fingers traced the length of his penis. “I’ll let you in on two little secrets.” Her hand left to trail up his abdomen, leaving him in a state of aching arousal.
“First”—her fingers found the lowest nipple on the right side, under his fur, and traced slow circles around it—”part of my Dakota heritage means I metabolize alcohol very quickly.”
She reached up to the neck of her jumpsuit. “Second”— she ran her fingers down the front of the jumpsuit, allowing the fabric to unbond beneath her touch—”if you don’t want this, you can always let go.”
His own emotions tumbled through him in a cascading, drunken stumble. His own compass of right and wrong had been in an uncontrolled spin ever since Salmagundi.
But this was wrong.
He let go of the strap with his right hand. Pain flared up his left arm as it took on the tension by itself. He saw a shadow cross Kugara’s face and surprised himself by recognizing the human expression.
Wrong, yes. But how wrong compared to what he had already done?
He reached up behind her and yanked the neck of her jumpsuit down her back, peeling it down her arms and torso. Her arms pinned, naked from the elbows upward, she smiled at him, exposing teeth in an unquestionably aggressive manner. “I knew I had you pegged.”
She pulled her arms free and grabbed his ears again, but instead of head-butting him, she pulled her mouth to his in a crushing kiss. It was something he’d never done, as a feline muzzle wasn’t designed for it. However, he had lived with humans long enough to know the point of it. Foreplay, like grooming a mate’s fur with his tongue.
Now, with Kugara’s lips punishing his hard enough for him to taste blood, he discovered he liked it better.
Now that she was in front of him, with only her calves between his thighs, he yanked the jumpsuit down as far as his hand could reach. With it down to her thighs she managed to remove it herself with a few lethally quick kicks. Enough to show that he had never really had her pinned down.
Not that it mattered at this point.
She straddled him with crushing force. He took her throat in his mouth just hard enough to feel her pulse race under his tongue. She dragged fingers down his back with such force that it was hard to believe she didn’t have claws. She screamed when he entered her, and he roared when he came.
At the end of everything he let go and they floated free, holding each other.
A long time after he thought she had fallen asleep from the exertion, she asked him, “Do you think we’re going to die?”
Nickolai closed his eyes and said, “Everyone dies.”
<
* * * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Encyclical
“The most feared change is a change of mind.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The church is the work of an incarnate God. Like all God’s works, it is perfect. It is, therefore, incapable of reform.”
—James Gibbons
(1834-1921)
Date: 2526.7.25 (Standard)
Earth - Sol
The riots started in Sydney, around the diplomatic compound by the old Confederacy spire. By the time the news reached the halls of the Apostolic Palace, the security had already collapsed. The first accounts were confused as to what had happened, and by the time the Vatican had access to the transmissions, so did everyone else on the planet.
Cardinal Anderson stood in a corner of the pope’s offices, watching His Holiness view the communication from Khamsin. It was shortly after three in the morning in Rome, and the pope still wore his bedclothes and slippers.
On the holo, a Caliphate officer shouted Arabic into a shaky camera held by someone else. The image jerked as it moved outside. Anderson’s monks in the intelligence department had already identified the frantic man on the holo as Colonel Ahmad Abdallah, a regional commander for Khamsin domestic security in the southern hemisphere. The transmission changed focus to the city behind Colonel Abdallah, which intelligence had identified as Al Jahra, a coastal community of about eight million people, dominated by resort hotels and whatever recreational facilities were allowed by the Ministry for Suppression of Vice.
It was normally one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.
Not now.
Abdallah and his anonymous cameraman had moved to the street, which was packed with people fleeing the city center. Behind the mass of the panicked crowd, which caught Abdallah and his cameraman in its inexorable flow outward, the sky burned.
It was as if the heavens above the city had torn themselves open to reveal a rain of fire. It wasn’t until individual particles of the fiery heavens grew and slammed into the city skyline that it was clear what was happening. Things were falling from orbit, individual objects in meteoric descent to the surface, so many that they blocked out the sky and the heat of their atmospheric entry set the sky on fire.
And these objects were not meteors.
Molten raindrops the size of small buildings slammed into Al Jahra’s skyline, each impact vibrating the image in the holo. Each site of impact glowed as if the blow had broken through the crust of the planet to allow something infernal to shine through from the core. From each site, something rose up from the glowing impact. Whipping tendrils, taller than the buildings, sprang up from the depths to wrap around the skyline. The tendrils grabbed buildings and appeared to fold them, pull them down.
The image in the holo whipped around and faced the direction the crowd had been fleeing, away from the city, just in time to see a glowing teardrop from the fiery sky slam into the road in front of them.
The holo went dark for a moment, then faded in. The im
age rose from ground level and showed the crowd struck down by the force of the close impact. Many were struggling to their feet, but many were not. All forward motion had stopped as everyone faced the glowing wall that blocked their path. It undulated, like something alive, shooting out tendrils to deconstruct everything in the physical world around them—rocks, buildings, trees, the road itself.
Something walked out of the glowing wall, as if it were so much smoke. The glowing near-human form spread its arms and spoke in Arabic.
An old man trembled before it, on his knees. His clothes were bloody, and he appeared to have broken his arm falling after the impact. He closed his eyes and started praying.
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