“I don’t know,” she said.
Fully conscious now, he could feel bruises and lacerations all over his body. Beyond the door and the unfamiliar faces, he could hear groaning and a few voices that were familiar. He pushed himself toward the doorway, and the humans moved aside, like a curtain parting upon a diorama of the apocalypse. Out here the floating debris included parts of chairs, broken weapons, buckles torn off of crash webbing, spheres of blood, and human teeth.
The group of humans that had seemed so overwhelming when he had opened his eyes turned out to be only three unevenly dressed human males. One wore a black jumpsuit constructed of flexible body armor. The other two were in green overalls stitched with Caliphate markings. Many more similarly dressed humans were all over the passenger compartment, the green outnumbering the black. They moved in chaotic clusters around four bodies, trying to render first aid.
“What happened?” he asked, breathing in the scents of blood, fear, and death.
“Firefight,” Kugara said. “Then a rough takeoff. The ship must have hit ten G’s without any time to secure anyone or anything. Especially you.”
Nickolai could see the path he must have taken—streaks of blood and fur marred the floor leading from the front of the compartment all the way to the broken door he’d pulled himself out of.
He counted four critically wounded people, the focus of all of the attention that wasn’t being given to him. Three were the green-clad Caliphate people, and the last was an ancient-looking bald man in a blood-spattered white coat.
One of the humans moved and the familiar face stunned Nickolai. Dr. Dörner hovered to his left, going to help treat one of the fallen Caliphate crew, a large bandage covering the base of her skull. He couldn’t make sense that she was here, a member of the science team from the Eclipse. Then he saw Dr. Brody, similarly bandaged, with an apparently broken arm strapped to his chest.
Last, by the old man in the white overcoat, the priest, Father Mallory put pressure on a massive wound in the old man’s torso. The back of Mallory’s skull was marked by the same hasty field dressing as the others, in the same place.
A memory surfaced, and Nickolai realized that Mallory had been there, by the tach-comm.
And now he was here, an admitted Vatican agent, in the belly of a Caliphate troop transport.
Does it make less sense than the fact I walk among humans?
Less sense than the fact I am not dead?
Less sense than the fact I don’t want to die?
All his life, his world had been defined by well-marked boundaries of defined extent. Now he hung weightless in a ship of wounded human beings and found that he no longer knew where those boundaries were, or even if they still existed.
Someone treating one of the wounded called out, “I need help here.”
Nickolai pushed against the ceiling and drifted over to render whatever aid he could.
Mallory’s blood-soaked hands shook as he lifted them from the hole in Shane’s chest, a hole that was now filled with military-grade surgical foam. His hands ached from holding Shane’s lung inside his body.
Mallory stared at the chaos inside the dropship, his thoughts bouncing around like he had during the spacecraft’s ascent. He knew the jitters and the fragmented thought process were the dual symptoms of intense fatigue and the crash coming from reaching the limit of his old implants. In some sense he was lucky that they were weightless; under gravity he might have collapsed.
For some reason he kept thinking about the fact that he still wore the same clothes he had worn on the Eclipse.
The feeling of déjà vu was uncomfortable. The people around him wore the same blank expressions, the same sense of displacement, that he remembered from the masses of refugees that fled across the surface of Occisis during the overthrow of the Junta. He had been barely an adult, just old enough to be a marine, and his choice to fight the revolutionary loyalists had put him in the bloodiest fighting in New Dublin. After the battles were over and the city was a mass of rubble and burning cathedrals, the surviving members of his unit had withdrawn into the countryside, right into a refugee camp.
Not really a camp. No one had imposed any organization upon the outflow of civilians from the city. Ten thousand people had just stopped in a large cow pasture, close enough that the smell of the burning city hung in the air. Mallory could still feel their eyes following him and his comrades as they walked toward the command station. The night had been cold, and the devil’s eye of Alpha Centauri B drenched the scene in a dirty red glow.
The stares came from lawyers, children, laborers, servants, and nuns. All wore the clothes they escaped with, and all wore the expression of people permanently displaced from a world that no longer existed. The stares accused Mallory, saw him not as a liberator, but as a harbinger of a new world that they didn’t understand. A world that might not welcome them.
In the confines of this dropship, Mallory saw the same dead stare he had seen in those refugees from New Dublin. He saw it equally in the eyes of the Caliphate crew and in the Salmagundi militia who had discarded their helmets. He saw it in the man Flynn, who was helping one of the Caliphate casualties. He saw it in Dörner’s face as she tied a primitive dressing across Alexander Shane’s chest before moving to the next casualty of the firefight. He saw it in Brody, who hung back, his broken arm rendering him more a hindrance than a help.
He saw it in Kugara’s stare as Nickolai rose and pulled himself out of a supply closet like a pagan god digging himself out of Hades. Mallory looked at the genetically engineered tiger, the one person who didn’t have the expression of a refugee. Nickolai didn’t wear any expression Mallory could read. It might have been partly hidden by the black, featureless eyes, but there was also something else in the cast of his face, the way he regarded the chaos around him, that seemed fundamentally different from the Nickolai he had known aboard the Eclipse.
The cabin was not scaled for someone Nickolai’s size, so he seemed even larger and more imposing than he actually was. Add to that the blood matting his fur, and Mallory understood why the militiamen and the Caliphate crew members pulled themselves back out of his way as he emerged.
A long time ago, when his ancestors roamed the jungle, they were figures of worship . . .
The Caliphate techs stared at the tiger, and Mallory realized how thoroughly demoralized they must be. Aside from the wounded woman who wore the hash marks of a technical sergeant, none of the others ranked above corporal. This wasn’t a combat unit; they were all dressed like maintenance crew. Kugara and the Ashley Militia had cut their numbers in half. And even with half the numbers of the remaining disarmed Caliphate crew, the militia made a much more impressive force.
“Has anyone checked out the cockpit?” Mallory called out as he pushed away from Shane, who now at least seemed stable. He hadn’t heard anything from Parvi since the panicked command to secure everyone.
Dörner looked back from the Caliphate sergeant and shook her head.
Mallory pulled himself along using the shreds of cargo webbing that dangled from the walls. He passed Brody, who glanced up at him and said, “I guess we survived.”
Mallory could hear the toxic threads of guilt already infecting the man’s voice. Dörner had told him what had happened to Dr. Pak. “Would you come with me? I may need help in the cockpit.”
“I only have one arm.”
“Everyone else is dealing with the injured.” That wasn’t quite true, but Brody didn’t point that out as he followed him to the cockpit. Mallory pulled himself through the forward corridor, pushing aside dense clusters of floating debris that had drifted forward when the acceleration ceased.
“What happened in that building?” Brody asked. “Where did the tiger come from?”
“Nickolai and Kugara were there for the tach-comm, same as us.”
“What happened to him? His eyes?”
Mallory didn’t answer. Instead he gently pushed a large ammo crate from in front of the cockp
it door. When he pressed the controls to open it, the doorway slid aside and jammed halfway, hung up on a large dent in the center.
“Mallory?” Brody called after him.
“Come with me,” Mallory said, pulling himself sideways through the half-open door. When he was through, floating free in the cockpit, he turned his head and said, “God help us.”
“What is it?” Brody asked from the other side of the door.
“Go back and get the medics up here! I have Parvi and Wahid, and they’re both unconscious and bleeding.” Mallory heard Brody withdraw and start yelling down the corridor for assistance.
Wahid floated in the middle of the cockpit, half his face swollen into an ugly, bloody bruise. He didn’t appear to be breathing. Mallory grabbed for him and pulled the man close. He opened Wahid’s mouth to clear the airway, and out came a ugly blob of mucus and dark blood.
God have mercy on him.
He looked over to Parvi. She was still strapped in the pilot’s chair, and to his relief he saw her chest move. At least she was still alive. Her white hair was marred by a dark red streak where something had struck her, and her arm floated above the console in front of her, as if she were reaching for the viewscreen.
On the viewscreen, nestled against a starry backdrop, was a familiar planet.
He stared at it uncomprehendingly. They had been over a hundred light-years away. No ship could cross that distance in a single tach-jump. None. It was impossible.
But Bakunin floated in the viewscreen, mocking his notion of the possible.
They had returned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Babel
“The universe does not lie, but that doesn’t mean you understand what it is saying.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592)
Date: 2526.7.16 (Standard) 1,750,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Parvi stands on a plateau on one of the windswept canyons on Rubai, where the constant equatorial winds have ablated away all but the hardest bedrock. The sky’s a constant brown from windblown dust, and the sound of the air slipping past rock sounds like the planet itself is crying. She stands in her old uniform from the Expeditionary Command, atop one of the five- hundred-meter granite fingers that reach up from the floor of the canyon.
Across the top of the granite pillar, a lone figure sits facing her. The seated woman wears khaki overalls with a Caliphate shoulder patch. Her face is light- skinned, framed by black hair, and she stares at Parvi with almond eyes. Her throat is swollen and black with bruises. When she opens her mouth, the inside glistens red with blood.
Parvi knows she is dreaming, but still backs up a step.
“I know what this is,” the woman says in a hoarse voice, barely audible. Blood drips down her chin and for a moment Parvi is reminded of Mosasa. “I’ve heard all of it.” The woman coughs.
“What have you heard?”
The woman whispers, spitting blood, and Parvi can’t make out the words. She walks forward, but it doesn’t help. “Please, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”
The woman doesn’t react to the words. Parvi realizes that the woman is still talking. She speaks in a stream of consciousness, only a third of which is actually audible. Parvi stands still until she makes out, “All of them running around, you’re the only one listening to me.”
Something grips Parvi’s heart, a desperate fear. Even with her awareness of the dream world around her, she has a sense that the words are important, vital. She has already lost too much of the woman’s statement to the roaring wind and her own interruptions. She closes her eyes and focuses her mind on what’s being said.
“I hear them say ‘Protean.’ The Protean was on Salmagundi. The Cult of Proteus would be the only beings who would fully understand what Adam is. What Adam is capable of. The Protean knew what could face Adam.”
Parvi strained to focus on the voice, her eyes shut so tightly that her scalp hurt. The whispering voice continued, closer.
“It says to find those that came before it. The Protean came from Bakunin. What came before it. Before us. On Bakunin. The ancient ones, relics, the only ones we know of that were as powerful as Adam.” The voice broke off into a coughing fit.
Parvi’s eyes flew open and she was no longer dreaming. She was in the back of the passenger compartment on the Caliphate dropship, staring at the old man from Salmagundi, strapped to a makeshift stretcher attached to the wall, coughing up mouthfuls of blood.
“Help here!” Parvi called out from her own stretcher, “Medic!”
Parvi watched as three men worked to save Alexander Shane, the senior member of the Grand Triad of Salmagundi, as he tried to drown in an internal flood of his own blood. The surgical foam they had used to seal his chest wound had failed during one of his coughing fits.
After they stabilized Shane, Parvi worked on freeing herself from her own stretcher. One of the men who’d been working on Shane placed a hand on her shoulder. “You’re wounded.”
She looked up at the guy, and recognized the English-speaking kid who’d been waving a plasma cannon around on board the Voice. He still wore the overalls of a maintenance tech, but they were spattered with blood. From the unscathed look of him, it wasn’t his own.
“How many pilots do you have aboard this thing?” she half-groaned, half-growled.
“But—”
She surprised herself by uttering a syllable that would have been more at home coming from the morey tiger’s throat. It did its job; the kid backed off.
As he did, she saw the extent of the mess. The wounded and people with blank, shell-shocked expressions mixed with ragged soldiers in fetal positions trying to sleep. She saw the morey, huge and inhuman, folded over himself in the corner, snoring. She saw Dörner and Brody near him. She saw Sergeant Abbas strapped to another stretcher, abdomen bandaged, her unconscious face ashen and glistening with sweat.
She also saw Wahid.
Couldn’t someone have covered his face?
She turned to look at the kid from the Voice, who wore the same expression of blank resignation, an expression of someone looking out at the world who had lost the desire to even attempt to place it into a larger context.
None of the Caliphate crew were armed. It was clear who was in charge here at the moment.
“Where is Kugara?”
He said something in Arabic that didn’t sound complimentary. When she didn’t understand, he said, “In the cockpit.”
Parvi winced a little, thinking of Kugara at the controls. She had recruited the woman, and while she had been part of the Eclipse’s bridge crew and had just enough cross training to fly a tach-ship in a pinch, Parvi had seen her test scores. The woman could go toe-to-toe with the tiger in hand-to-hand or light infantry, but her piloting scores were in the low 200’s.
She pulled her way toward the cockpit, past Wahid. She felt her gut tighten, but she forced herself to defer her emotions. She couldn’t allow herself to react until she knew what was happening.
She drifted through the wedged-open cockpit door and saw Kugara and Mallory, both manning comm displays while the familiar globe of Bakunin hung centered on the main viewscreen in front of them.
Parvi allowed herself to feel a small measure of relief that they had returned to the world she was familiar with. The Caliphate’s new tach-dive had operated as promised.
Something felt wrong though.
Kugara spoke without raising her head from the scrolling comm display before her. “I don’t fucking believe these people. We have injured here—”
Mallory responded in a weary voice, “We’re on a Caliphate ship—”
“That should matter here?”
“These aren’t Bakunin natives we’re talking to. The nationality matters, especially to people fleeing a war.”
“A war?” Parvi said. The exclamation was loud enough that
it set her head ringing slightly. She reached up and touched the bandage on her scalp and groaned loudly as her entire head threatened to burst open.
Mallory and Kugara spun around to face her. “Parvi!” Mallory said. “You’re injured! You shouldn’t be up here.”
Kugara reached out to steady her. “Let’s get you back—”
Parvi slapped Kugara’s hand away, “Don’t patronize me. Don’t touch me!” She glared at Mallory, “What war?”
“You need to rest—” he began.
“And you don’t?” She pointed at Kugara. “She’s got an excuse—she’s not human. You look like the walking dead. How long since you rested?”
“Please, calm down,” he said. “We’re trying to contact another ship or orbital habitat that can treat our wounded.”
“What?” Parvi sputtered. Was Kugara that lame a pilot? “Get the hell out of the pilot’s chair so I can land this thing.”
“We can’t land,” Mallory said.
“Well I sure as hell can. Move it!”
She reached for the chair Kugara sat in, and discovered that forcing the issue wasn’t a great idea. Even if Kugara hadn’t been the descendant of some genetic engineer’s design of an über-warrior, the woman had nearly half a meter height on her, and corresponding advantages in muscle mass and reach. Parvi didn’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow she ended up floating upside down in the center of the cockpit, the abdomen of her uniform balled up in Kugara’s fist.
It was then she realized half of Kugara’s own fatigues were covered in blood. “We can’t land,” she snapped at Parvi. With her free hand she slapped a control on the console, and the cockpit filled with the sound of a transmission.
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