Heretics (4 page)

Somehow a good part of the engines had simply been
removed
. There was no sign of metal fatigue or any stresses on the frame of the scout. It was as if someone just unbolted a large section of the main drives and left them on the other side of the wormhole.

As the display peeled back the cockpit, she saw that there was one passenger in a life suit. The sensors picked up the movement from breathing and circulation—slow and comatose. If it was like the life suit Toni was wearing right now—and there was no reason to believe otherwise—when the ship started critically losing life support, the user could, as a last resort, trigger the suit to drug themselves into a resource-saving coma.

Almost involuntarily, Toni focused the scan on the scout's pilot. She already knew what she would see, but some part of her wished she was wrong. She adjusted the density level on the scan, and momentarily, the passenger and most of the life suit disappeared from the display. All she saw was the thin metal rings that joined the helmet to the suit, hovering above the metal framework of the pilot's chair. She decreased the density and the pilot's bones resolved themselves into a prostrate skeleton staring up at her through the grainy display.

Upping the density a little more and flesh poured onto the bones. Like a slow-motion image of someone being hit by a plasma cannon played in reverse.

When she was done, Lieutenant Toni Valentine stared at the unconscious face of Lieutenant Toni Valentine.

 

It took two hours standard for Toni to recover her future self from the damaged scout craft. She had to match course with the drifting ship, go EVA, and attach a couple of warning beacons to the crippled ship's hull so it could be recovered later. Then she had to manually free the emergency release bolts that separated the control pod from the rest of the ship. Moving the pod, which contained her other self, as well as the control systems and life support of the dying ship took the bulk of the time.

Having her own scout pull the pod free was a delicate process where one misstep could end up piercing the pod. She needed to avoid any loss of atmosphere from the pod, because she had no idea if her doppelganger had the chance to seal her suit.

She also wanted the pod intact because it held the ship's memory. Telemetry, comm, and sensor signals, back to the last time the scout had docked and uploaded data to the station's main data store.

In other words, as much as her unconscious twin, the pod contained the information on what happened—a question that was taking on more than a purely professional interest for her.

 

Toni's scout returned to the station with the other ship's control pod attached to its abdomen like a parasitic twin. Towing the pod, about a quarter of a normal scout's mass—about a third of what was left of her twin's ship—pushed her own ship's capability near the limit. She had to do some fancy orbital maneuvers around the wormhole so that she had enough reaction mass to match velocity when she docked back at the station.

Umbilicals routed Toni's life support to the alien pod, while Toni piloted the too- massive scout back home with a hard vacuum in her own control pod. She ran her own environment suit at three-quarters capacity so she could last the whole way back.

Fortunately, 265 days of hard-core training and conditioning had made her body effective in adverse conditions, and she hardly noticed the effects of the low-oxy mix until she docked and was able to pressurize her command pod. She felt a brief period of light- headedness as she stripped off her spent environment suit, but it barely registered.

She violated several sections of the manual as she tossed parts of her suit on the floor in her scramble out the air lock, but after the ponderous trip back to the station she was seized by a sense of urgency that had been brewing ever since she saw her own transponder radiating from the ghost ship. Jumping into a spare environment suit would be about twelve minutes quicker than recharging the one she was wearing. It was the one thing so far she could safely rush—and she took the opportunity.

 

The mass sensors still showed signs of respiration and circulation in her double, and the life-support monitors on the shuttle—which were currently connected to the extra pod—showed a good O
₂
/CO
₂
cycling. Those were the only monitors she had on her twin's life signs. The fact that Toni II was stationary in the pod gave circumstantial evidence she was still in a suit-induced coma, but because most of the brains in Toni II's command pod died with the power systems on the other ship, there was no direct way to monitor Toni II's life signs. Toni would have no real idea what was going on with her until she got her into a medical unit on the station.

That was going to take another EVA.

Fortunately, the station had an emergency docking umbilical that was flexible enough to snake around the docked scout craft and limpet onto the dead pod's air lock. It took another half hour for Toni to rig the connection, check the seal, and return to the station. For all the urgency she felt, it was as if she was swimming upstream through cold machine oil on Loki.

 

Toni blew the lock on the dead command pod and let free the warm smells of shit, piss, and fear. Toni II didn't move from the pilot's chair, and her face was barely visible through a polarized faceplate. The smell told Toni that she'd made the right decision in salvaging the whole command pod. Toni II's suit was venting into the cabin. Exposed to vacuum, the suit would have failed.

She walked clumsily in the cramped space. The station's rotation and the impromptu connection to the scout made everything in the cabin lean at an awkward angle, toward the rear left corner of the cabin. When she reached her older self, she broke the seal on the helmet, pulled it off, and let it drop and roll to that corner of the cabin.

Suddenly face-to-face, Toni felt a surge of dread that originated deep in some common cultural subconscious. Leaning forward in the one-person cabin, Toni stared at her own face, separated from it only by their mingled breaths. She found herself backing away until she felt the curving panel of the pod's metal ceiling cold on the back of her neck.

The rational part of her mind screamed at her. This wasn't an
omen
, for God's sake. This wasn't some psychodrama where she was meeting her Jungian shadow self. She was a lieutenant in the Stygian Security Forces, about as far away from folktales and fantasy as you could get.

Still, she had to force herself to touch a neck that was hers, and not hers, and feel a pulse that was hers, and not hers. The pulse was strong, steady, and much slower than her own.

 

Toni carried the surprisingly light body to the emergency medical bay. She stripped her other self naked and lowered the body into an articulated chamber that resembled a prone version of the universal resistance machine in the station's gym. Toni watched the metal carapace envelop Toni II, and felt strange relief when she could no longer see the flesh of her double.

No, she's not
any
older than me.

Impossible . . .

What the hell happened to you?
Toni thought.
What's going to happen to me?

“You cannot see the future if you cannot see the past.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.”

—CONFUCIUS (c. 551-479 BCE)

Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia and Vatican Secretary of State, sat alone in his offices in the Apostolic Palace. In front of him, holo displays set into his desk scrolled by intelligence information from across the breadth of human space. Of late, much of that information concerned the Eridani Caliphate and their proxies. Within the past six months, the Caliphate had made technical advances in warship design that placed almost the whole of human space within tactical reach of its military. Their new Ibrahim-class carriers were a potential threat to every one of their rivals.

At the moment, though, he was paying little attention to data from the Caliphate.

In front of him, for perhaps the thousandth time, he played a holo recording. It began with a static whine and an image that flowed in and out of focus, distorting itself. Part of it was degradation from sending a tach-signal so far; part was because the image came from the nose of a swiftly moving tach-ship trying to focus its sensors.

The heavens spun around the display until it centered on a blue orb, a planet so similar to Earth it was almost painful to look at.

The voice that emerged, at least to begin with, belonged to a Vatican agent. Cardinal Anderson thought that these might have been the man's last words.

Xi Virginis sat eighty light-years beyond the official limits of human space. But that hadn't stopped humans from colonizing. And it didn't stop those colonies from being important. The man sending this transmission had been sent to make contact on behalf of the Vatican, long before the Caliphate sent its Ibrahim carriers to do the same thing, more forcefully.

Interference blurred the holo and the planet. At least it appeared like interference, some artifact of transmission, or encoding. However, very many people had analyzed the holo, and what obscured the view of the planet was not any side effect of the transmission.

Something was coalescing in space between the camera and the planet. A cloud of black specks.

When the holo spoke again, it was a different voice that spoke, more of arrogance than of fear.
“. . . bzzt . . . coming toward . . . bzzt . . . behold a great . . . bzzt . . .”

The cloud of black motes moved purposefully toward the planet.

The transmission died.

“Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” quoted Cardinal Anderson to no one in particular.

Nine months ago, he had sent the last agent to investigate the source of the enigmatic transmission. Nine months. That had been before they knew about the Caliphate carriers that would put those colonies firmly in the reach of the Caliphate. Before the escalation of tensions that prevent serious consideration of anything outside their own borders.

But Father Mallory was still out there, somewhere. They had enough intel from Bakunin to know now that, despite Caliphate interference, he
had
been able to leave on an expedition to Xi Virginis.

Beyond that, nothing.

Unless Mallory's expedition had access to the new Caliphate tach-drives, the earliest they could have reached their goal would have been less than a month ago, more reasonably, within the week.

It was quite possible that the Caliphate could have beaten them there.

Anderson stared at the transmission and wondered what Father Mallory faced now.

“God help him,” Cardinal Anderson whispered.

From the ornate desk in front of him, an assistant's voice emerged, “The trade representative from Sirius has arrived.”

He waved, and the troubling holo disappeared from in front of him. “Send the man in,” he told his assistant.

It was time to return to work.

“There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.”

—ST. AMBROSE (340?-397)

“Problems are never solved, only replaced.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.”

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (1769-1812)

Julia Kugara stood on a crystalline outcrop and stared as the sun set on a wasteland. Stretching for kilometers away from her, what had been a forest was now little more than a vast bowl of coals and cooling ash. Close to the horizon, at the limits of visibility in the haze and dimming light, she thought she could see where the burnt trees regained some semblance of individuality as blackened logs scattered like toothpicks. Beyond that, she could see the roils of smoke as the forest beyond still burned.

She wondered how many of her comrades from the
Eclipse
had died in the blast. The radius of the damage stretched far past where her lifeboat had dropped her and Nickolai, and the lifeboats were supposed to cluster their drops.

Much closer, just a dozen meters from where she stood, the blast had been forceful enough to scour the ground clean, leaving a pitted, glassy surface that refracted slight rainbow shimmers in the evening light. About ten meters away from her, the glass stopped in a sharp line.

She spared a glance at the small disposable rad counter, one of the few items left from the lifeboat's emergency kit that had survived. It still showed safe levels of radiation. It was hard to believe the thing—but not any harder than believing she still lived.

She looked at the sharp line that marked the end of the nuke's destruction and wondered what frightened her more, that someone had dropped a nuclear weapon on her, or that something else had deflected it. It struck her in an immediate visceral way that the disappearance of Xi Virginis never had. For all the enormity of it, a missing star was an abstract concept.