Heretics (29 page)

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.”

“You never receive the punishment you expect.”

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

—ST. AUGUSTINE (354-430)

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.

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—”

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.

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.

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 precisely.

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?”

“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.

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.