“Tsoravitch was part of our expedition to Salmagundi. She was taken aboard the Prophet’s Sword when I was.” Parvi stared at the woman. “How did you escape that?”
“I didn’t.”
Parvi stared at the woman.
“Gram, does that mean what I think it does?”
Tetsami was unusually silent within his skull. But Tsoravitch answered for her.
“I was taken by Adam. At this point, the flesh I’m wearing is irrelevant.”
“What the hell?” Parvi shouted at Shane. “What did you lead us into?”
“It’s all right,” Tsoravitch said. “I served Adam, but I changed my mind.”
“What?” Parvi said.
“Later,” Tsoravitch said, turning to Shane. “Where are the rest of them?”
“Already gone.”
“Damn. We better move, then.” Tsoravitch turned and started down a corridor where the polished stone gradually gave way to unworked tunnels of rock. Shane ushered Flynn and Parvi to follow. As they moved, Shane asked, “Do they know where they’re going?”
Parvi shook her head. “Not until you tell us what she meant by, ‘changing her mind.’ ”
Shane gave them the story of the Proteans, and how they had subverted Adam with Tsoravitch’s help. As he told the story, they walked deeper into the tunnels under the mountain, and Tetsami finally spoke up in the back of Flynn’s mind, This is getting too familiar.
What?
Everything . . .
Shane explained what had happened on Earth, how the Proteans who had been on Mars had infiltrated the population, to become parts of Adam’s chosen. Flynn found himself asking questions, prompted by Tetsami, until they came so quickly that he ceded control over to her.
“Who was he?” Tetsami asked with his voice.
“Who?” Shane said.
Flynn watched himself step up to Tsoravitch and grab her shoulder. “Who was he?”
The woman looked into his face and shook her head, “Later, there’s no time now.”
Flynn stared into the woman’s eyes, and he felt his heart begin to race. “Tell me. Who, of all the people in contact with Proteus, who would this Adam have known?”
“We need to—”
“Who?” Flynn felt an edge in his own voice as Tetsami spoke.
Tsoravitch stared into Flynn’s eyes—Tetsami’s eyes—and said quietly, “Jonah Dacham.”
“Dom?” Flynn’s voice whispered. He could feel tears burning the edge of his vision.
Tsoravitch placed a hand on Flynn’s shoulder and said, “We need to move. The rest of your team is in danger if they try to—”
She was interrupted by the sound of an explosion.
Brother Lazarus ran. He had started running as soon as the enraged Barrier had bisected the soldier holding him. His mind was in a panic, not just from the physical danger, but from the spiritual as well. He did not know what kind of threat angering the Ancients would mean, but he knew that it was beyond his understanding. What the soldiers had done...
It wasn’t only a threat to their existence; it was a threat to the very meaning of their existence. By prematurely approaching their creators, they might cancel that creation, destroy the path their descendants had toward their enlightenment.
This blasphemy had to be stopped, and he only had one tool to do it.
He ran while the Barrier went mad with bloodlust. He found the edge of the chamber and ran along the wall, away from General Lubikov, away from the signals jamming the implants in his skull.
He reached the opposite side of the chamber from the general, and he could feel the implants make contact with the network of explosives that filled all the caverns between here and the surface.
A rumble shook the ground beneath his feet, and above him, the Milky Way began breaking apart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Angel
“The greatest mysteries we face are those we hide from ourselves.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.”
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
(1865-1939)
Date: Unknown Unknown
Nickolai walked into darkness. The Barrier let him through as if it had less substance than a shadow.
What is this?
It is what came before . . .
His stomach tightened at the Protean’s voice in his head, but with it came an odd sense of peace, as if he had found the path he was meant to take. Even in the darkness, he kept walking forward.
The air he breathed was dry, stale, and very still. He heard nothing except the scrape of his claws on stone as he walked forward. He stopped when he thought he should have walked beyond the other side of the Barrier.
He stood there wondering. This place couldn’t be empty, since it made no sense that the Proteans would place such a barrier around an empty spot on the ground. He asked the voice in his head, What is it? What were you protecting?
No response.
“What is it that came before?”
The Protean voice was gone.
He felt an ache in his eyeballs and he rubbed them. They felt odd in a way, and in another way, they felt almost normal for the first time in two years.
Nickolai shook his head. “You led me here! Where did you go?”
An oddly lisped female voice said, “Sorry, Kit.”
He raised his head and blinked his eyes. It was disorienting for a moment, because he couldn’t adjust the spectra and magnification of his vision. He had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the light, and it sank in that his eyes were, suddenly, normal. He looked toward a brighter spot on the floor and realized that he saw with the same vision he had been born with.
He walked toward the spot of light, an island in the darkness, and saw a body laid out beneath the sourceless illumination. The body was onyx black, muscular, male, and polished smooth of not only every imperfection, but of most fine detail. No hair, no nipples or fingernails, no small wrinkles . . .
It was the Protean from Salmagundi.
“It’s a shame, Kit. You bring him all this way and he just doesn’t work out. ‘Course, none of them did; guess that’s why they bottled this up.” The voice was heavily accented, and it was hard for Nickolai to make sense of it.
He looked up from the Protean’s body and called into the darkness, “Who are you?”
“Sheesh, no need to shout.” The darkness retreated from a figure standing about ten meters from him, a nonhuman figure. Like him and the other natives of the Fifteen Worlds, this stranger had descended from some human’s design. In this case, her ancestors had been built from a lepus strain.
She was a large rabbit and her presence here was completely incongruous.
“Are you from Brother Lazarus’ monastery?”
“You effing serious?” She laughed at him. He noticed that a scar on her cheek pulled her mouth up in a sarcastic smile. “Do I look like a nun to you?”
“Who are you, then?”
“Call me Angel.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Talking to you, Kit.”
He looked down at the inert body of the Protean. “What did he do wrong?”
“He didn’t ask the right questions.”
“What are the right questions?”
“That’s a good start.”
The air filled suddenly with the squishy sounds of human language. It was a language that Nickolai did not understand. He blinked a few times, uncertain of where he was. The air was cold, blowing down on him from a vent in the ceiling, rustling his fur. The floor was no longer stone under his feet. Instead, he stood on a slick linoleum floor. The air smelled faintly of unfamiliar chemicals and warm electronics.
Flanking him were ranks of shelves that held bulky electronic components, blinking lights, snaking cable. Light came from outside the room, from an unseen window.
“Where is this?” he whispered quietly. The human voices continued their own argument, ignoring him.
No one answered, and Nickolai thought of Angel’s warning.
He asked the wrong questions.
He sucked in a breath of air-conditioned air and decided not to ask anything else before he understood what he was asking and why. If there was a reason for him being here, it would become apparent.
He walked by the racks of equipment, toward the voices, the light, and the unseen window. Something about this place, this room, felt wrong. Nearly at the end of the aisle of equipment, he realized that the wrongness came from the ceiling. It was made like nothing he had seen before, large square tiles nested in a thin metal frame. He reached up and touched it, and the tile lifted off of the frame, and he saw the ends of crude wire suspension holding up the metal.
He let the tile fall.
He turned and took a closer look at the rack next to him, trying to identify the equipment. There were labels, some handwritten, marking the sockets where the cables entered. Again, the script was unfamiliar.
He concentrated on the people speaking. The voices seemed to come from the other side of this rack of equipment. He still couldn’t make out the sense of it, but the accent began to feel familiar to him. The speakers, two men, had a tang to their voices that reminded him of Parvi.
He edged past the end of the racks and looked around to see the human speakers. They had their backs to him, one older and tall, the other shorter, rounder, and a few decades younger. A large clunky holo display stood between them. Semitranslucent, hovering over the archaic holo projector was an exploded view of someone descended from St. Rajasthan. He saw bones and teeth, muscles diagrammed on half the body, furless skin pulled taut across the other half.
He looked at the racks of equipment—old, ancient computers of the same vintage as the holo between the men.
No, that isn’t a descendant of St. Rajasthan.
He stood in an ancient laboratory. Hundreds of years gone, where mankind first conceived of their Fall. He stared at the scene, fascinated and repelled.
Why would I be shown this?
The older man shook his head and spoke with a shaky voice. He turned away from the holo of Nickolai’s unborn ancestor. Nickolai saw the man in profile and saw that his cheeks were wet. The younger man took his arm and spoke gently to his elder. Nickolai watched in confusion, wishing he could understand their tongue. The old man was upset, and what caused the distress, the tears, the why of it, was suddenly very important to Nickolai. Was there something about his origins, his ancestors, that he should know? Something that brought this long-dead man to tears...
Why was the old man upset?
He looked at the young man comforting his elder and realized that it wasn’t the right question. The two men were paying no attention to the holo with the anthropomorphic tiger that could have been the dissection of one of Nickolai’s cousins. Their incomprehensible speech could be about anything.
Anything.
Nickolai saw the grief and pain in the old man and realized that it might have nothing to do with St. Rajasthan, or the Fall of Man. This human, this person, had life beyond the holo, beyond this room, beyond Nickolai. He saw an old man in pain, and a young man attempting to provide comfort. These men might be the midwives of his species, but that did not define them.
Nickolai blinked, and the men were gone. He stared off into the blackness wondering what it meant.
“You already know, Kit.”
He looked to the side to see Angel standing, looking off in the same direction he had been staring.
The words hung in the suddenly still air. “You know my thoughts?”
“Sorta have to do that to do my job.”
“What are you?”
“I’m what you can understand, Kit.”
An explosion ripped through the cabin. Nickolai was thrown against the wall, and he dug his claws into combat webbing to keep his feet as the floor tilted down and the rotors above began to oscillate ominously. The cabin around him vibrated with the rotors. Smoke filled the cabin, and Nickolai smelled fire.
The rotor sound suddenly got much louder as a door slid open. The smoke vanished in a great roar of sucking air, revealing other figures. His eyes still watered from the smoke, and at first he only made out the bodies. At least three victims had been too close to the explosion when it ripped through the wall of the cabin. Under a ragged slice in the wall, Nickolai saw partly dismembered bodies dangling from crash harnesses. The bodies were almost fully covered by inert armor, except where limbs and heads had been torn free, and for a brief moment he thought they were humans.
But they were too large.
He heard shouting over the rotors and the roar of wind. Looking up from the three casualties, he realized that these weren’t humans.
Holding on to the edge of a door opening into a swirling darkness, he saw a figure that could have been pulled from the legends of his ancestors. Nickolai knew he looked at an image out of the past, because of the white fur in the tiger’s snarling profile. There had been no white tigers born to his kind since shortly after the time of St. Rajasthan.
The white tiger was half a head taller than Nickolai and had broader shoulders. He wore woven fabric armor colored a muddy camouflage brown, streaked with soot. He had been wearing a helmet at one point, but the only signs of that now were the bloody mats in his fur where the straps had pressed down on his skull. In one hand he held an ancient belt-fed machine gun.
The white tiger shouted the same unknown language the humans had been speaking, and a line of other tigers, fully armored and helmeted, dove past him, out the open door and into the darkness beyond.
The white tiger leaped out after his squad.
Nickolai jumped out after them, just before an RPG shot through the darkness and into the open door behind him. A burning hand spiked with shrapnel pushed him down into the muddy ground as the helicopter exploded behind him.
He raised his face from the mud and looked up.
An ambush, Nickolai thought, the enemy saw the landing...
It was night, raining, and because of the light from the burning helicopter behind him, he only saw a circle around the immediate clearing. The terrain was rocky, mountainous, and the only sign of the enemy were muzzle flashes from outcrops that were little more than shadows. The tigers, his warrior ancestors, were pinned down behind the poor shelter of a couple of boulders.
This is why we were created, why humans made us. He was looking at a battlefield on Earth, a war where his kind served as man’s proxy. His fingers dug into the muddy ground beneath him, as a part of him ached for armor or a weapon. He tried to push himself upright, but then he felt where the shrapnel had torn across his back. He fell back down with a groan inaudible for the gunfire.
He looked at his doomed ancestors and shouted at them. “This is man’s war. You’re sacrificing yourself for—”
Nothing?
Was that what he was being shown? Was that what he wanted to take from this scene?
The white tiger stood up and shouted something in that unfamiliar language, leveling his machine gun at the hidden enemy. The meter-and-a-half-long barrel hammered fifty caliber rounds into the night, the muzzle flashes lighting up the whole mountainside. The white tiger ran toward the enemy, screaming words inaudible under the roar of the weapon in his hands. The area around the enemy position exploded with dust and fragmenting rock, and they attempted to return fire.
Nickolai thought he saw the white tiger struck twice before he reached the outcrop that sheltered the ambush and disappeared behind it. After a crescendo of gunfire, everything went silent.
For several moments the only sound was the crackling of the burning helicopter, and the rushing of the storm around them. The white tiger’s comrades started calling after him, but there wasn’t an answer.
Nickolai knew there wouldn’t be one. He could smell the blood.
He watched the o
thers cautiously stand and take stock of the situation, one stepping into command. They all ignored Nickolai as they assessed the perimeter and started moving out.
He watched them go, to continue their original mission.
The white one’s sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.
“What, then?” Angel asked him when the darkness returned.
He pushed himself up from the stone floor. The wounds from his vision were gone. He looked at the rabbit facing him and said, “He did it to save his comrades.”
“And?”
“And for himself,” Nickolai said. “As limited as his choices were, he still had a choice. For all that man might have made him, and placed him where he was, he was still himself.”
“I think I like you, Kit.”
“What I’m seeing, is it real?”
“As real as you are.”
“What about you?”
Angel laughed.
Nickolai faced a wall. Painted on the surface was an old symbol, an eagle, wings spread, holding the schematic image of a planet in its claws. The icon was a symbol of the Terran Council, the totalitarian Earth government that preceded the development of tach-drives and the rise of the Confederacy.
The symbol was splattered with blood.
Nickolai turned his head and saw a long corridor, strewn with bodies. Dozens of unarmed humans lay where they had fallen, their blood staining the floor red. Looking down at the closest victim, he saw claw marks—more than would have been necessary to kill.
He walked along the corridor, passing the dead. Claw marks gouged the walls, and some of the bodies appeared partially eaten.
His journey ended by the doors to a large hemispherical room. The walls were transparent, revealing a shining blue planet hanging in a black sky, its reflected light washing away the stars behind it. Nickolai saw the tracery of the continents below the swirling white clouds and knew the planet he looked at.
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