A shirtless bald man was bent over one of the consoles. He was one of the few good hackers Stefan had gathered for his crew. “Reggie! How are we on getting access to a tach-ship?”
“I’m throwing the stats up on the screen,” he said. “Problem is anything big enough for us already has some crew on-board.”
“Highlight the ships that don’t have a crew present.”
“Like I said, they’re too small—”
“Just do it!”
A half-dozen berth numbers flashed across the screen. He noted the craft types; all two- or three-person ships. Two were on the opposite side of the Wisconsin from the control room.
“Unlock berths 87 and 102.”
“Okay, but it isn’t going to do us any good—”
Reggie was interrupted by cursing that seemed to come from just below the catwalk. “Quick!” Stefan shouted down at him.
Reggie did something at his console and the green “docked” light started flashing amber. “There, but—”
Below, Stefan heard Davis’ voice call out, “Get the fuck out of my shot!” Followed by two or three shotgun blasts.
What the hell? Between here and the Daedalus, there had to be at least twenty of his people. Even if they completely collapsed, that squad of EVA suits couldn’t move quickly enough to get here.
“What’s happening outside?” he called down to security. No one answered him. He looked at the other stations, as he heard another shotgun blast, but the consoles were deserted.
They could have gone to reinforce Davis, but somehow Stefan doubted it.
Well, if these bastards fold at the first sign of resistance, it just means I’m not obliged to worry about them.
He pulled out a grenade and his gamma laser.
Mallory and Toni turned up the corridor toward the main control center for the Wisconsin. They passed three dead and disarmed members of Wisconsin security and open doors marked “authorized personnel only.” The one at the end of the corridor was still closed, but Mallory saw the dome of a security camera set above it. He leveled his shotgun at the camera and said, “When they come out—”
He never finished the sentence, because the main door opened and four of Stefan’s thugs started walking right toward them. The one in the rear had a plasma rifle.
Mallory immediately lowered his shotgun as the guy with the plasma rifle screamed, “Get the fuck out of my shot!”
The three men in front of him scattered to flatten against the walls, but before he fired the plasma rifle, Mallory and Toni fired, hitting him in the chest and stomach and sending him in a microgravity tumble back through the doorway.
One of the three others pointed a gamma laser in Mallory’s direction, and Toni pumped a shell into him. Another one fired, but had no idea how to aim from a prone position and merely melted the polymer sheathing on the ceiling behind Mallory.
With two more shots, Toni and Mallory cleared the hallway.
He and Toni held their position, flat against opposite walls, staring into the small slice of the control room visible through the open door. Beyond, Mallory could see ranks of unmanned consoles, and part of what looked to be a pile of blue-jumpsuited corpses piled against the far wall. His military training kept him from reflexively crossing himself, but he did offer a whispered prayer for the victims.
He saw some movement going away from their position.
Toni glanced at him, and he pointed at the open door, and made a gesture with his hand, slowly.
She nodded, and they eased up on the doorway along opposite walls, aiming the shotguns to give them a decent crossfire on the entrance. They were within a meter when a hand darted out from around the doorway, tossing a small round object into the hall between them.
He barely had the first syllable of the word “grenade” out his mouth when the world was filled by a blinding white flash and a roaring as if the Wisconsin tore itself apart around him.
Toni II stopped her squad when they reached the main corridor leading to the Wisconsin’s control room. She could see signs of a firefight, and she told the main body to hang back while she went forward.
No peep of resistance met her advance, and as she walked through dissipating white smoke, she saw a quartet of hostiles decorating the entry of the control room. The corpses weren’t armed with the Wisconsin-issue security shotguns. She saw three high-power gamma lasers and a plasma rifle. Good thing they were dead.
Then she saw Toni.
“Shit!”
She bent down, fearing the worst. But, while Toni was unconscious, she was breathing. As she sighed with relief, she heard someone coughing behind her. She spun around and saw Mallory on his hands and knees, coughing and spitting up blood.
Toni switched on the external speakers on her suit and asked, “Are you okay?”
Mallory pushed himself up and looked up at her. “Someone hit us with a stun grenade!” he practically shouted at her. “Speak up!”
“Are you okay?” she repeated.
“Alive! They must have evacuated the control room!”
Toni groaned behind her, and Toni II bent over to help her up. Mallory stumbled past them, commandeering a gamma laser to go check out the control room.
Toni II called out, “Wait!”
“They’re gone,” Mallory called back. “All they left was a pile of bodies.”
Next to her, Toni said, “I’m all right.”
I’m sure you are, Toni II thought.
She walked Toni into the control room after Mallory. He had already taken over a console and was speaking to a holo that showed a conference room filled with very surprised-looking people.
Toni II set her sister down on a chair and asked her, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Toni blinked up at her. “Yes. Fine.”
Behind her, Mallory said, “I think we’re now commanding the Wisconsin.” She turned to face him, and he was shaking his head at a blank holo, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with the information. He looked at her and said, “You think your squad can secure the core?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Father of Lies
“Never underestimate the ability to rationalize one’s own self-interest.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Life is the art of being well deceived.”
—WILLIAM HAZLITT
(1778-1830)
Date: 2526.8.9 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
On the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Godwin, General Alexi Lubikov faced the setting sun. The office he stood in used to belong to the CEO of Lucifer Contracts Inc., one of the largest private legal enforcement entities that had ever existed on the anarchic planet Bakunin.
It, along with nearly every other private security firm on the planet, had been absorbed into the Proudhon Defense Corporation, a fully owned and operated subsidiary of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation. It was the inevitable end result of a long unstable existence.
General Lubikov leaned against the desk and pondered his own long, unstable existence. The body he wore was closing on eighty years, most of those in the employ of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. The BMU had treated him well, and he lived today mostly due to the large amount of hardware the BMU had implanted in his body; both arms and legs, both eyes, lungs, liver, heart ...
Even so, he knew he was nearing the end of things.
Which was why he had accepted Mr. Antonio’s offer nearly a year ago. And why, as he led the western command of the Proudhon Defense Corporation to take over Godwin and drive toward the sea, he had felt as if he was a near-invulnerable force of destiny. The entire course of the civil war here on Bakunin had played out exactly as Mr. Antonio had described.
Almost . . .
The last ten days had seen a divergence from the script.
He had seen the intelligence reports on what was happening off-planet, reports that did not pass below his own rarified security clearance. The PSDC had control of every known tach-re
ceiver on the planet, and had securely clamped down on more conventional communication. So, as far as Lubikov knew, the knowledge of Earth’s final transmission had not passed beyond Proudhon’s leadership.
Even so, that transmission was more than enough to disturb the course of Mr. Antonio’s prophecies. In it, the Vatican made a direct appeal to fight Adam, which in itself was probably enough to move a good part of the Christian population away from provincial concerns like a Bakunin civil war. But in the transmission was a graphic record of the fall of Khamsin, the Caliphate capital, showing Adam offering his transcendence of the flesh, and showing the ugly consequences of not accepting his gift.
Lubikov found the existence of the transmission disturbing. It was a flaw in Mr. Antonio’s prophecy. Word of Mr. Antonio’s master should not come before the master himself.
And, in the face of that communication, the flotilla of refugee ships above his head, which were supposed to be disorganized to the point of irrelevance, had begun aggregating into something like a fleet.
And the fire washing the sky . . .
No, the force I have joined with is not infallible.
But, then, nothing in this world ever was.
A sourceless voice announced, “The prisoner is here, General Lubikov.”
He cleared his throat and said, “By all means, show her in.”
Lubikov turned around as the door opened. A woman walked in, alone. She was short. Lubikov was not particularly tall, but this woman’s head only came up to his sternum. Her hair was white where it hadn’t been shaved by the medics, her skin a dark brown which made the high visibility of her yellow-green jumpsuit all the more intense. Her right arm was in a cast, and she walked with a pronounced limp.
Lubikov waved over to one of the chairs in front of the desk. “Have a seat.”
Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“You should save the paranoia. I wouldn’t have spent the effort to dig you out of that building and bring you here if I was going to do something untoward.”
She sighed and shuffled over to the chair and sat down. She looked up at him and asked, “So who are you?”
Lubikov walked over to the bar service and poured himself a vodka. He didn’t really metabolize alcohol anymore, but he had grown used to the warmth it gave him. “Care for a drink?” he asked her.
“No, thank you.”
He poured a glass of water anyway, and set it on a table next to her chair. “In case you change your mind.”
“What do you want?”
He chuckled and drained half his glass. “What do any of us want?” He set down his glass on the desk. “Another day. To see the sun rise one more time. That’s all it really boils down to.” He sat down on the edge of the desk and flipped a few switches embedded in its surface. The windows obligingly turned pitch-black, and the air filled with a near subliminal hum that faded to nothing more than a slight itch behind his inner ear.
“What I want from you, though, is a little conversation.”
She glanced at the windows. “What did you do?”
“The prior owner of this office had reason to be even more security conscious than most people in Godwin. We’re quite private now.”
“Who are you?” she asked again.
“I’m rather boring. Let’s talk about you.” He folded his arms and stared at her. “Vijayanagara Parvi, veteran of the Indi Protectorate Expeditionary Command. Assigned to the revolution on Rubai. When they pulled out, you remained with the Federal forces eight months after the central government fell to the Revolutionary Council. You came here and became a BMU member in good standing. Your last employer was Mr. Tjaele Mosasa of Mosasa Salvage, who has been notably missing since an attack on his place of business by a squad in the employ of the Eridani Caliphate—” He paused and gauged her reaction. “Have I got that right?”
“Yes. If you have access to the BMU biometric database, you know you do.”
He picked up his glass and toasted her. “I approve of an admirable lack of bullshit on your part.” He drank the contents and set the glass down next to him. “To answer your question, I am General Lubikov, commander of the Eastern Division of the Proudhon Defense Corporation. Which, as the successor to the BMU, you happen to be still an official member of.”
“I see.”
“I’m sure you do. And I suspect you knew the implications when you opened fire on our forces in Wilson.”
She nodded. “You’re going to treat me as a traitor.”
“That remains to be seen. Given your history, I suspect you know that alliances are mutable things. Now, shall we talk about Mosasa?”
Parvi sat in the corporate office, talking to General Lubikov for over an hour. She had few secrets at this point, and she also had a mission to open a communication channel between the PSDC and Mallory. So she concentrated on answering most of the general’s questions, trying to make an impression on him.
She told him what Mosasa was, and what his role had been in maintaining stability on Bakunin. She told him what she knew of Adam, about the destruction of Xi Virginis, and what had happened on Salmagundi. She told him of Mallory’s plan to resist Adam, and what he had done toward that end.
Almost everything.
General Lubikov, thankfully, did not treat her like a raging madwoman. He listened, nodded, and prompted her with questions about what was happening beyond the surface of Bakunin.
“And the reason you’re here?” he asked.
“Mallory wants to open a line of communication—”
“By committing a near-suicidal attack on a pair of my tanks and their infantry support?” He shook his head. “I believe you’re omitting something.”
“I was defending the civilians we brought down. We didn’t realize what was going on down here on the surface. There’s been no contact.”
“And I toasted your lack of bullshit. You realize that you were in medical stasis for three days? More than enough time for my forces to engage your friends five separate times? The fact that one of them is a giant tiger makes them stand out. A bit.”
Parvi stared at him, and he added, “Are you sure you don’t want that drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“I might also point out that since I do have access to the BMU database, I know who Nickolai Rajasthan and Julia Kugara are as well as I know who you are. What are they doing?”
Parvi debated whether to tell him. If the rest of her people had already engaged with Lubikov’s forces, she wasn’t going to tell him anything that he didn’t already know. Except why they were going where they were going.
She also knew that, if she didn’t give him a show of good faith, the gloves would come off, and they would make her give up the information. “Are you willing to help defend this planet?”
“That is an interesting question.”
“Will you stand against Adam?”
He drummed his fingers against the desk. “Despite the pretty lights in the sky, you have yet to convince me that such resistance is possible.”
“Do you understand what this thing is? What it has killed, what it has destroyed?”
“I wonder if you do, or if you are like the king who had his archers shoot arrows into the sky to battle the drought that was killing his people.”
“Adam can be fought.”
“I am certain of that. Can he be defeated?”
Parvi opened her mouth and realized that she couldn’t answer the question honestly. She was not certain that defeating Adam was even possible, much less with the resources they had at hand. She was not the best advocate for this fight. “Just open a communication channel with Mallory, and the fleet. Talk to them. It costs you nothing.”
“Perhaps it depends how you define costs. But you haven’t answered my question.” He stood up and took his glass back to the bar. “That glass I gave you, it’s only water.”
Parvi resisted reaching for it, even though she was parched.
“Shall I make it easier for you?�
�� Lubikov said. “We liberated a POW camp that was half full of ‘passengers’ from that little blockade run you pulled. They’ve all been debriefed. I have some idea what your team is doing, but I’d be more kindly disposed to your point of view if I heard it from you.”
“They’re our backup plan,” Parvi said.
“A couple of mercenaries and some social scientists?” Lubikov shook his head. “Backup for a fleet of how many thousand ships?”
“It’s a long shot.”
“What do you expect them to do?”
“Make some contact with the Dolbrians.”
Parvi heard glass rattle, but Lubikov said nothing. He didn’t even turn around. The silence extended a long time before he repeated, “Make some contact with the Dolbrians?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve been extinct for hundreds of millions of years.”
“The Protean, on Salmagundi, strongly suggested we seek them out.”
“I see.”
“Like I said, it is a long shot.”
Lubikov turned around. “Thank you for being so candid.”
“You will talk to Mallory.”
“I promise you, I am considering all my options. You, however, should get some rest.” He walked over to the desk, tapped some controls, and the windows regained their transparency and a weight in the air receded, clearing Parvi’s sinuses.
“Please,” Parvi said, “I don’t know how much time we have.”
Lubikov nodded as a pair of guards came in the room to take her away.
Lubikov watched the guards take Parvi away.
How much time do we all have?
From Parvi’s intel, Mr. Antonio’s master, Adam, was limited to the speed of these new Caliphate tach-ships. More or less as fast as a normal tach-comm signal.
Unlike Parvi, Lubikov knew exactly why Adam had not yet made an appearance. Mr. Antonio—the old man who recruited him to Adam’s cause, who Lubikov suspected was no old man—had provided Lubikov with a lot of information. Mr. Antonio gave him Adam’s script of how Bakunin’s future would play out for him, a script that Bakunin had followed up until the transmission from Earth.
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