Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  Toni turned slowly back around to face the two of them. “Why can’t we land?”

  “We don’t have a contragrav, damn it!” Stefan told her. “This ship can’t land.”

  Toni II raised her hand as if she were about to backhand the kid with the gun. Toni spoke before her twin’s arm could move. “Don’t play games, kid. We know the specs on a x252 cargo ship.”

  “What about the specs on this cargo ship?” Karl asked. After a pause where both Tonis stared at him, he said, “I thought so. You had no idea—”

  “Idea about what?” Toni II practically screamed at the man. Toni wanted to yell at her to calm down, but showing any form of discord between them in front of their captives would be worse than an emotional outburst.

  “The Daedalus was customized to carry the same load as a 252 with the tach capability of an x252. That required stripping away extra mass that wasn’t part of the tach-drive or life support—”

  “Like the fucking contragrav,” Stefan interjected.

  “As well as structural components that were only required for a descent into a gravity well,” Karl concluded. “Over the years we’ve tuned the Daedalus to tow mass in excess of 125% any other 252 series cargo ship.”

  “You just can’t land,” Toni whispered. She almost wanted to laugh at how badly her first foray into piracy was going. They’d managed to steal a ship that couldn’t even make planetfall. What the hell were they going to do now? They had no resources—

  “What’s your cargo?” Toni II asked them.

  Stefan snorted and muttered something that sounded like, “Great pirates we got here.”

  Toni was inclined to agree with the sentiment.

  Karl sighed. “About half our load has been off-loaded—anything valuable, sealed courier packages and the like, were taken off first. We were waiting for a surface-bound transport to take the remaining containers.”

  “Containers of?” Toni II asked.

  “Agricultural products, tropical fruit mostly.”

  “Fruit?”

  “Fruit,” Karl said. “On Styx, the margin for exotic foodstuffs is incredible. What little growing capacity they have is dedicated to staples, no reserve left for luxury items.”

  Toni II looked at her and said, “Fruit,” as if she couldn’t quite understand the meaning of the word. Toni felt the same stunned expression on her face. She turned around and looked at one of the comm displays and called up the cargo manifest and started reading.

  “Pineapple, banana, mango, papaya, kiwi . . .” Four full containers of the stuff. Tons of fruit.

  Tons.

  Toni tapped on the display and realized that she hadn’t been thinking like a pirate, and it was time she started. They couldn’t land, but there would certainly be orbital stations that could accommodate the Daedalus. And, this being the free-for-all Bakunin, there had to be someone in the market for what they carried. “Mr. Stavros?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to be pirates for a bit longer. We’ll be taking your cargo to finance a berth to dock somewhere in orbit, and to find passage . . . somewhere. Once we take care of that, we’ll release your ship back to you.”

  “If you are going to be pirates a bit longer, my I suggest erasing the log and the cockpit surveillance video?”

  “Dad? You’re helping them?”

  “Shh, Son. Just making the best of a bad situation.” Toni glanced over to a small display showing the data recorder for the cockpit. She stopped it, and after drilling through the advanced menu, she found the command to purge all the recorded data.

  “What’s the point of that?” Toni II asked. “There’s still surveillance footage from the rest of the ship, and if we purge all that, they still have data from the air lock back at 3SEC—”

  “It’s just better if there isn’t a record of what happens in this cockpit,” Karl said. “When I make an insurance claim against your theft of the Daedalus.”

  “Dad?”

  Toni turned around. “You don’t want this ship back?”

  “A claim on the lost cargo will just cover my costs, not my losses. My son already explained the disruption of my business. If you really do wish to provide me some compensation, allow me to make a claim on the ship itself. I own it free and clear, and its loss would bring a hefty settlement . . .”

  Toni had a sudden realization, and Toni II articulated it. “And you’d like to combine it with the proceeds from selling it on the black market here on Bakunin?”

  “A black market implies an illegal sale,” Karl said. “That’s an inappropriate term since there are no laws here.”

  “Dad, you’d really sell the Daedalus?”

  “Actually, I was hoping that our pirates here would broker such a deal for us. Better to keep the Stavroses out of it for the sake of the insurance investigators.”

  Toni stared at the man who was, only a few subjective minutes ago, trying to kill her to defend his ship. “You’re asking us to sell your ship?”

  “I’d be willing to give a commission for a quick sale.”

  “Dad!”

  “Do we have a deal?” Karl asked.

  Toni looked up at her other self and saw the same befuddlement in her face. They both said, simultaneously, “You have a deal.”

  Karl Stavros evidently had prior experience with the environment around Bakunin. As he said in an aside to Toni, “A necessary skill for any successful operator in my profession.” As he guided her though the complex web of orbital platforms and contract negotiations, she wondered exactly what that profession actually was. He didn’t strike her as someone who made his money hauling fruit.

  So what were you carrying in those “sealed courier packages”?

  Even with the assistance of someone who knew the vicinity, they still couldn’t find a destination for the Daedalus. Ten times the normal inbound traffic stalled everything they tried to do. Just the intense level of radio chatter made it hard to communicate. It took several long minutes just for an orbital platform to respond to their query, and almost always the response was, “Wait a moment while I clear these other ten calls I have ahead of you.”

  Those moments were closer to hours. Hours talking to habitats named Crowley, Luther, Hamilton, Light of Our Lord, General Fabrication Facility 23, Lingam, Hellfire Steel, Yoder, Nirvana, Dead Dog, Wisconsin . . .

  It became increasingly clear that they were going to be drifting in the Daedalus for a while. After the initial urgency faded into a frustrating routine of opening a channel, sending a burst, and waiting for a response, Toni II spoke up, “Maybe we should look into what the hell’s happening here?”

  Toni looked over her shoulder at herself and it struck her that however frustrating it was for her, it must be an order of magnitude worse simply watching them hit virtual wall after wall.

  Karl leaned back and rubbed his eyes, both of which had developed considerable shiners. “Your sister’s right. We’re not going to get docking privileges anywhere, any time soon.”

  Toni stared at Karl, then looked back at Toni II. She’s probably thinking the same thing I am.

  Sister.

  “Thoughts, Sis?” Toni asked her.

  Her newly christened sister smiled. “Let’s try and get into someone’s data net.”

  They couldn’t hook into any paid data stream here without an account on the planet to draw from, but there were plenty of streams that were various flavors of free. Of the ones the Daedalus could pick up on, there were half a dozen news feeds.

  Her “sister” bent over Toni’s shoulder and touched the console screen selecting the feed from the Jefferson Commune Interplanetary Free Press.

  The first headline made Toni suck in a breath. “Oh, boy,” she whispered.

  The past couple of hours had distracted her from the reason they had hijacked the Daedalus in the first place. She had never doubted herself or her sister as to what was going to happen—but it hadn’t hit her on a gut level until she saw
it glowing in a news holo.

  Stefan, who had been snoring in one of the crash chairs, woke up and walked up to the three of them muttering, “What’s this?”

  Toni didn’t answer.

  The headline read, WORMHOLE NETWORK UNDER ATTACK?

  The holo began playing a high-resolution image, obviously enhanced, showing something she had only imagined before. A stretch of interstellar space showing two large distortions, both mirrored spheres reflecting stars other than the ones surrounding them. The two spheres were frozen in time, the distance between them impossible to judge.

  “Just twenty-five days ago, an alien wormhole appeared at the fringes of our solar system. Its presence was announced with an unprecedented burst of tachyon radiation that was detected by several places simultaneously, most notably by—”

  “I asked,” Stefan interrupted, “what is this?”

  Toni’s sister responded before Toni could. “It’s the reason I’m here holding a gun on you rather than beating virtual marines to a pulp. Now shut the hell up.”

  The narrator continued. “Xi Virginis traveling at a velocity three quarters of the speed of light. Compiled from several sources, we have a series of images from the impact.”

  On the holo the view shifted, with the wormhole to the right now about a quarter of the way to the stationary one on the left. Toni now realized that the stars reflected in the right-hand sphere were noticeably blue-shifted, and the sphere itself was slightly distorted from the perfect round shape of its target.

  The picture shifted again, and now the right- hand wormhole was halfway to its target. Both wormholes showed distortion in their reflected star fields, as if there were ripples in their nonexistent surface.

  The next image had the distance between the wormholes quartered, and both showed extreme rippling distortion; in addition, both seemed to stretch toward each other.

  The image cut away to a far distant perspective showing the explosion of impact. A new star glowing brighter and brighter, causing the stars around it to fade until it was a lone boiling white spark in a empty black sky.

  “No reliable casualty estimates exist as of yet, but damage to tach-drives and communication devices have been extensive throughout the system. As much as two-thirds of tach-ships and three quarters of the interstellar communications infrastructure—”

  Karl looked at both Tonis and asked, “What did you mean, ‘This is the reason.’ ”

  “The same thing was happening around Sigma Draconis. All three wormholes.”

  “All three—” Karl began.

  “Just listen,” both Tonis said simultaneously.

  “—first transmissions were received indicating this was not an isolated event. We have confirmed that communications have come from Earth, Occisis, Cynos, Khamsin, Shiva, Windsor . . .”

  Toni listened to the litany of systems.

  Every wormhole in the old network had been destroyed. Every single one—tearing apart communications and transportation capabilities as it went. As the commentary went on, it was clear that most of the tach-comm messages, confirming the destruction, were messages sent before the actual impact, describing the wormholes coming insystem to the wormholes orbiting Alpha Centauri, Sirius, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Eridani . . . .

  While a few planets, like Bakunin with only its single wormhole, had a few surviving tach-comms afterward, many, like Earth—itself with seven wormholes—had gone silent.

  Now, within the past week, people had started taching into the system. Many were escaping from Earth, where the Terran government was attempting to seize every tach-capable ship as soon as they tached in. Or they were from Cynos, where the Sirian government had instituted martial law with the strong implication that war with the Caliphate was imminent.

  There was no word coming from Styx. It was one of the places with a communication blackout, and the Daedalus was apparently the first ship to arrive here from Sigma Draconis.

  “Lieutenant Valentine,” Karl said, “I think you and your sister may have done us a favor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Baptism

  “You never receive the punishment you expect.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “No man sins by an act he cannot avoid.”

  —ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430)

  Date: 2526.7.15 (Standard) 1,750,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  All Nickolai knew was pain; an all-consuming visceral agony whose intensity erased everything else from his consciousness. He lost even an awareness of self. He became, for a time, nothing except a single sensation divorced from any context and meaning.

  The first coherent thought he had was an unanswered plea to God. Why don’t I die?

  The single half-prayer echoed through his mind until the agony receded enough for another thought to form, a thought that brought with it a fear as intense as the pain.

  Perhaps he was dead and in hell.

  What was hell but a void filled with pain and empty prayers?

  No, somewhere, he felt himself breathing. He felt pressure on his chest, and he became aware of a mechanical thrum.

  Engines . . .

  Voices as well, indistinct human voices masked by the sound of engines and the rush of blood in his ears. The engine noise suddenly stopped, and with it the pressure eased on his chest. A sense of his body returned as the sensation of gravity left. The return of that sense of himself gave a locus to his agony, in his skull, behind his eyes.

  Behind where his eyes had been.

  Memories and thoughts returned in a disorganized rush as he understood exactly what he had done. How could he be alive? He should be dead in a pool of his own blood.

  Distantly he heard a voice, “Move it, damn you. Help get this off of him.”

  Kugara’s voice.

  He remembered her panicked expression when he raised the gun to his skull. Even though he had only seen human faces for a few short months, he could read the stew of rage and fear in his memory of her face. It seemed too clear now, etched in his mind’s eye like the ghost of a sun stared at too long.

  “Move! After what I went through saving this furry bastard—”

  Did she save me?

  Why?

  He heard several humans grunt, and something lifted off his body with a metallic screech. He hadn’t even been aware that he had been pinned down, but suddenly with it gone he felt his body gently lose contact with the floor.

  He felt someone touch his skull. He groaned and the hand snatched itself away. Several people muttered in human languages he didn’t understand, but someone did say in a shocked tone, “He’s alive?”

  Kugara’s voice responded, “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  Nickolai reached for his face, and the throbbing at his temples and behind his eye sockets. He felt his own fur sticky with blood, a fresh wound across his forehead. “Hurts,” he muttered, feeling weak for acknowledging it.

  “You put yourself through worse,” Kugara told him.

  That I have.

  Then he realized that two hands gripped his face, and the pain was suddenly forgotten. He touched fingers to his face and felt the roughness of his pads against the fullness of his eyeballs under closed lids.

  My arm? My eyes? Did I hallucinate everything?

  He pulled his hands away and forced his eyes open. His eyelids strained against gummed-up blood, but in a moment they tore open, flooding his gaze with light, a mass of unfamiliar human faces, and the specter of a right hand that should not have been there.

  He flexed his claws, and the humans around him backed off. All except Kugara, covered in blood that smelled of him. She remained stationary, weightless next to him, holding on to a handrail attached to a badly canted door.

  Nickolai stared at his claws, and all of them were black. He had expected the gunmetal gray claws on the right hand, the artificial one, the one that had been almost but not quite real. What he saw now, though, mirrored his left hand.

  Mirrored it precisel
y.

  Down to a hairline crack ending with a three millimeter-wide chip on the claw tipping his index finger. He turned his hands around to look at their backs and found that the mirroring was exact down to the striping in his fur.

  He looked at Kugara and asked, “How?”

  Her expression was unreadable, but her voice carried equal parts sadness and apprehension. “I’m sorry, Nickolai.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I asked the Protean to treat your wounds—” She shook her head, which caused her to drift slightly from the door and her hair to fan out in a ragged halo. “No, I demanded it. You were going to die, and I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could stop it.”

  He stared at her in disbelief, and she must have seen it as a rebuke, because she snapped at him, “Was I supposed to let you die? Let you bleed out on the floor because I might offend your sensibilities? To hell with—”

  “Thank you,” Nickolai whispered.

  “You can just take—What did you say?”

  “I said, thank you.” He clenched his hands into perfectly symmetrical fists. Quietly he said, “I did not wish to die. That wasn’t the point of what I did. Suicide is a sin.”

  Whatever relief it would bring.

  He raised his gaze and found his head aching again, this time from the unnatural clarity of his vision. Every edge in his field of view felt sharp enough to slice his retinas. He floated in a confined space, an equipment storeroom of some sort. The door bent inward at an odd angle, and a few streaks of blood marred its surface. Fur stuck to the thickest streaks, so it was probably his blood. Stenciled above the blood was the human script used by the Caliphate. It was illegible to him, but distinctive enough to be instantly recognizable.

  Most of the unfamiliar human crowd had backed away from the door now, and he could see a long chamber stretching to a bulkhead about fifteen meters away.

  Kugara still stared at him, as if she didn’t understand his last statement.

  “We’re on a Caliphate troop transport,” she said. He reached for a shelf that showed severe dents where his body had collided. The polymer sheath that should have kept the contents in place during free fall and high-G maneuvers fluttered in tattered shreds. As he used one of the shelf’s struts to pull himself into a vertical position relative to the door, the shredded polymer leaped upon his fur, clutching at him with a static embrace. Random debris and small packages of bolts, power cells, and ammunition floated in chaotic orbits between him and Kugara. “Where are we?”