Heretics (32 page)

Toni gasped.

Even before she read the whole thing, two words leaped out at her:
Xi Virginis.

“Karl?” Toni asked after the shock had subsided.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a medical bay on this ship, or did you gut that for weight too?”

 

Parvi sat alone in the cockpit. Five hours ago, Kugara had finally admitted she needed rest. Parvi needed rest too; she had been operating on as little sleep as Mallory or Kugara. She had been exhausted even before breaking out of her cell on the
Voice.

The thought of sleep was intolerable.

Her eyes ached, but every time she closed them she saw the face of the nameless woman who had come to let her out of the interrogation room. Over and over she told herself it had been an accident, an understandable reaction . . .

Given the time to dwell on it now, and a mind stumbling in drunken, sleep-deprived circles, Parvi realized that she
had
been thinking. And her reaction had more to do with her feelings about the Caliphate than they had to do with escape.

That woman, that nameless corpse, had died because of what the Caliphate did on Rubai. Parvi had taken that woman's blood for that sin, even though the dead woman had probably never set foot on Parvi's homeworld, even though the dead woman was a maintenance tech who probably never fired a weapon in anger.

She transmitted robotically, requesting aid from ship after ship where silence seemed to be the kindest response. Meanwhile the millstones in her exhausted mind kept grinding finer and finer.

She flew fighter missions, first for the Expeditionary Command, then for the resisting Federal forces. Those missions weren't only air-to-air against known hostiles. She had fired missiles into spaceports and orbital platforms, she had taken out supply depots and communication centers, and she had sent penetrating antimatter bombs into command and control bunkers. The Revolutionary forces had never been in the habit of locating such things away from civilian populations.

The harder the target, the greater the collateral damage, and she had gone after very hard targets.

Her hands shook.

She stared blurrily at the control panel in front of her.
Is this why I agreed to work for Mosasa? The real reason?

Could he have seen so deep into her to know that she would be willing to work for an abomination as long as it meant that she wouldn't have to
use
the only skills she had to sell?

The only shooting conflict her AI employer had ever used her for was picking off the Caliphate ambush in Samhain: an abandoned commune where the only people present were Wahid, Mallory, and a bunch of hostiles in powered armor.

Could she have done that mission if the commune wasn't abandoned? If there were more than empty buildings around the hostiles? If the missiles she fired resulted in piles of anonymous civilian corpses?

Parvi placed her face in her hands. It wasn't just all the blood upon her hands, it was the fact that it was meaningless. On Rubai the fight against the Revolutionary government had been doomed from the start. If she didn't know that when she served the Protectorate, it was apparent when the Protectorate pulled out of the conflict and she joined the Federal resistance.

How many died because the resistance couldn't accept they had lost? How many people had she killed, whose death served no purpose, who were just incidental to a battle that was lost before a shot was fired?

How many were exactly like the woman on the
Voice
? Killed in a spasm of pointless violence that accomplished nothing. Changed nothing. Meant nothing.

She looked upon things like Mosasa, Kugara, and Nickolai as monsters, perversions of science, the products of heretical technologies who should be feared or pitied. She believed it because that was what she had been taught all her life. But how could she see Nickolai as a monster after the things she had done? At least in his case he had no choice in what he was.

How could she despise Mosasa when he had tried to save her from herself, when she didn't realize she had needed saving?

She whispered into her hands, “Why did I attack her before I knew if she was armed?”

She almost missed the comm flashing an incoming transmission. She raised her face from her hands and looked at the small blinking light up in the corner of the display. She reached out and tapped it. A woman's face appeared in the holo, a thin knife-edge of a face framed by dark hair in a short military cut. A towel draped around the woman's shoulders, and from the way it moved she could see that the woman, like her, was in a zero-G environment.

“This is L-Captain Toni Valentine of the Centauri cargo ship
Daedalus,
responding to your request for assistance.”

“The longer you wait to hear the news, the less likely you will like it.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Beyond the bosom of the Church no remission of sins is to be hoped for, nor any salvation.”

—JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564)

Cardinal Jacob Anderson sat in a darkened room in one of the more recently constructed buildings in Vatican City. Unlike the structures around St. Peter's Square, the small structure didn't attempt to appear contemporaneous with the Renaissance. Unremarkable and utilitarian, it sat at the fringes of Vatican City, while ninety percent of it burrowed underground.

The upper levels, the visible face of the structure, appeared as a typical office building from the last century, a minimalist era that favored stark geometry polished free of any extraneous line or curve. Even the people who worked in the building didn't know about the labyrinthine nerve center that dwelled beneath it, and had dwelled beneath the last fifteen buildings that had occupied that spot.

The room where Cardinal Anderson sat had once been part of a set of Roman catacombs. For several hundred years it had served to hide men and treasure during war-time. Then, in the twentieth century, it had been reinforced and armored at great expense to provide shelter for a nuclear holocaust that mankind somehow avoided. It had hidden nearly the whole of the papacy and attendant bureaucracy during the darkest times of the Terran Council. Today, rearmored, reshielded, and with its own environmental systems, it served as the nerve center for Vatican. Communications and data fed down into the archives here, while an entire monastery of data analysts examined and reexamined the state of the human universe.

These were the men who had discovered the outflung colonies based on a stray tach-comm transmission that had never been intended to reach this far. These were the men who had filtered and deciphered Brother Kennedy's enigmatic transmission that he had shown to Father Mallory.

The one that quoted Revelation.

With war erupting between the Caliphate and Sirius and her allies, Cardinal Anderson had nearly lost hope of hearing from Father Mallory again. He feared that Mallory had vanished just as all the other agents sent toward Xi Virginis had. Given the technical abilities of the new Caliphate tach-ships, he had suspected that all of them had fallen to Caliphate forces.

But the transmission he watched now contradicted those easy suspicions.

Father Mallory's upper body floated in a holo display, his face haggard and unshaven, wearing military fatigues that bore no insignia except a few splatters of blood. The display was frozen as one of the trio of monastic data analysts changed the focus and contrast to highlight part of the background.

“This area here,” the analyst said, “has enough detail that we could match it to historical designs. It is a component from Banlieue Data Systems Incorporated circa 2350; it was used extensively in shipborne tach-comm units. On the ground there are numerous blood splatters, but what we can see in the transmission appears to come from one source. Of the humans that appear briefly in the background we have positive identification on one, Julia Kugara, an officer who deserted Dakota Planetary Security to become a mercenary on Bakunin. We've assembled a dossier on her for you.”

“The black man, at the end?” Cardinal Anderson asked.

“We haven't come to any conclusions about that yet.”

“Play it again, from the beginning.”

The image jumped, and Mallory moved into frame again. His expression was worn, almost beaten. When he turned his head, Cardinal Anderson could see a bandage covering a wound in his neck.

“I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship
Eclipse
which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis.” The picture distorted slightly and Mallory's voice gained a vibrato where the technicians attempted to digitally remove some growing interference. “Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago. The entire solar system is gone. The star, the planets, and a human settlement of one million people no longer exist. This colony, Salmagundi, where . . . bzt . . . is under attack. The Caliphate has forces here, but the attack is . . . bzt . . . from a third party, an entity identifying itself as Adam.”

Some commotion happened behind Mallory, with several armed men moving around behind him. The woman, Kugara, was briefly visible, apparently directing the men to move a large feline body. Anderson held up his hand and the replay stopped.

“The nonhuman?”

“We have limited information. There was one nonhuman of a Rajasthan strain on the BMU employment rolls contemporaneous with Kugara and Mallory's alias, however the image here is too brief and of too low a quality to permit positive identification.”

“You have a dossier on this Rajasthan from the Mercenaries' Union?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Continue.” Anderson lowered his hand.

“The Caliphate is here in force,” Mallory continued as rolling digital artifacts vandalized his face. “Several hundred ships . . . But the attack is not . . . bzt . . . peat, this is not a conventional . . . bzt . . . a giant ring in orbit . . . bzt . . . ently a nanotechnological basis . . . bzt . . . and Adam's motive is quasi-relig . . . bzt . . . it or himself as a God, offering conversion or destr . . . bzt . . . Caliphate is not the origin . . . bzt . . .”

Anderson listened intently to the distorted transmission, as if by just listening hard enough he would be able to decipher some extra snippet of dialogue that the monk's software had been unable to filter.

But he heard nothing new. He watched and listened as the signal continued to degrade, thanking God that the damage to the Church's tach-comm receivers and one hundred and twenty-five light-years had not completely obliterated the information in the signal.

Mallory's last incomprehensible sentence was interrupted by a dark, ominous voice:
“The other is
. . . bzt . . .
Go. Run now.”

Mallory stumbled back from the holo. Something large and black blocked the view for a moment,
“Now!”

The shadow blocking the view from the holo moved away, revealing the briefest view of Mallory leaving the room, following Kugara and the others. Several moments passed, the image degrading in pulsing waves, and intermittent static mixing with the rising sound of . . .
something.

Then something almost human stepped into view of the holo. At first it seemed to be a naked man cloaked in shadow, but that wasn't quite right. He wasn't draped in shadow. His skin was just black, dark as the void between the stars. His face wasn't right either; it lacked creases, imperfections, the hint of hair. The eyes were featureless black spheres set behind smooth lids that didn't move. When he spoke, the teeth were black as well, straight, smooth and symmetrical.

He—perhaps the better pronoun would be “it”—It spoke now, but the words were wrapped in impenetrable static. Behind it, something crawled up the walls, a moving black net that seemed to segment the world behind the faux-human apparition. The degrading image began to vibrate, as if the building housing it was starting to collapse. Beyond the undulating webwork behind the thing, the walls started to glow white. The black apparition turned to face the intensifying light, and the image froze.

The last comprehensible image from the tach-comm transmission was the silhouette of the black human-shaped apparition facing an intense light, arms spread. A close examination revealed that the human form had been caught in the midst of transmuting into something else. Tendrils were frozen in the midst of erupting from the thing's back and upper arms. The fingers on its hands were splitting from each other, the gaps between them extending halfway to the wrist in the midst of an obscene elongation.

Cardinal Anderson looked at his handheld comm. On it were the dossiers on Kugara and the tiger. Also on it was an attempted transcript of what the apparition had said. It was based solely on lip movements as the audio was too degraded during the final minutes of transmission. It was also incomplete, as the degradation of the image, the thing's barely human face, and the lack of contrast all made the transcription a nearly impossible task.

But not quite impossible.

“The Other comes,” Cardinal Anderson read. “It brings the change without choice or consent. It will destroy all it does not consume. If any children of Proteus hear the warnings of your vessel, you must defend those who do not accept.” He looked up from the transcript.