Both of them had weapons out, large capacity slugthrowers. Both of them were heading toward Nickolai, separating to flank his position. The duo must have seen something suspicious. Climbing up out of their plane of vision had bought him some time, but only a few moments. The branch holding him didn’t have enough growth to hide him completely, and if these two had any enhanced optics at all, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
He had to neutralize them somehow. Even if they passed him by, they were headed straight for the commune he had just left.
Nickolai watched them spread apart, and shifted his focus to the one coming closest to his tree. As he watched, he slid the rope off his shoulder, uncoiling it and folding it in half.
Below him the closer of the two armored figures slowly walked within a couple of meters of the tree, both hands on the weapon, scanning the woods ahead.
Nickolai threw the folded loop of rope down to hook underneath the barrel of the weapon. His target did the expected and looked up at the motion, raising the barrel of the weapon to track the threat, which meant the rope had slid down as far as the elbows when Nickolai jumped off the opposite side of the branch above, holding the ends of the rope. The objective had been to simply disarm his opponent, but the rope went tight around the suit’s arms, the rigidity of the armor gave enough purchase to bring his target fully off the ground to meet Nickolai as he descended.
The slugthrower fired a few rounds wildly, blowing chunks out of the tree above, before Nickolai slammed into the shooter’s chest. The impact shook the weapon free to tumble to the ground below. And after a fraction of a second of shocked paralysis, suspended five meters up, Nickolai let go of his rope and the two of them followed it.
The armor slammed its back into the forest floor, Nickolai fell on top of it with his full weight, landing with a cracking sound and the smell of ozone. A gauntleted fist came up toward Nickolai, but he easily dodged the blow in time to see the other suit of armor, tracking a slugthrower in his direction. He leaped off his supine opponent and flattened himself against the tree as the other gun sprayed bullets, blowing splinters from the tree and throwing up clumps of dirt all around him.
The echoing gunshots faded, and he heard running footsteps crunching along the forest floor. In front of him, the other one rolled over and was trying to get up, the armor making grinding noises and flashing distorted camouflage.
As the footsteps closed, he reached around the trunk and took hold of the staff that still leaned against it. He saw the gun’s barrel come into view, and he whipped the three-meter length of pipe down in a spinning arc that landed across the gunman’s forearms. The slugthrower hit the ground as Nickolai jumped to the side and spun the staff to plant one end in a jarring impact against his opponent’s faceplate.
The impact would have been deadly for anyone not in armor. In this case it was simply disorienting, and the victim took a half step back. That was enough of an opening for Nickolai to step to the side and swing the staff down against the back of a half-bent knee, sending his opponent falling backward.
He heard movement behind him, and he pivoted to bring the staff down on the back of the other’s helmet, plowing the faceplate into the ground just short of the fallen weapon. He spun to bring the opposite end of the staff down on the other one’s knee, jamming the armor’s joint and bending his staff nearly in half.
As his two armored foes struggled to get to their feet, he cast the bent staff aside, scooped up the slugthrower, and jumped back to the tree, covering them both with the weapon.
“No sudden moves.”
“Bastard!” He heard a muffled female voice yelling inside one of the suits; the one facedown with the camouflage now repeatedly flickering between black static and a slowly rolling image of a much-too-magnified forest floor. “You fucking furry bastard!”
The other person sat up and turned toward Nickolai. “Now what?” the voice was male, and broadcast through the suit’s speaker. Nickolai could still hear the woman cursing to herself, and he suspected she wasn’t aware that he could hear her.
He kept the gun leveled at the two of them. “Remove the helmets and toss them over here.”
The pair did as he asked, tossing the two helmets by his feet. Nickolai faced a man and a woman, both dark-haired with dusky complexions. The woman had a nosebleed.
He asked them, “Are you in contact with anyone else?”
“Of course we are. Our backup is going to be here any moment, so you better get moving.”
“So you work for the PSDC?”
“What?”
“You two work for the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation?”
The woman said, “Hell, no!”
“So should I believe you have an open radio channel with those PSDC hunter-killers flying around?”
“I—”
Nickolai leveled the gun at the man and said, “It would be wise not to lie to me. Now you’re going to tell me who you are, where you came from, and what the PSDC is doing here.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Idolatry
“Never assume you’re on the winning side.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“No victory has been more than a defeat postponed.”
—AUGUST BENITO GALIANI
(2019-*2105)
Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Their names were Sacha and Ingrid Simonyi. They were natives of Wilson, and members of the Wilson Civil Militia—a military organization that had only existed for the past two months. The Wilson Civil Militia existed because the PSDC was in the process of taking over the whole planet.
“What exactly do you mean, ‘taking over the whole planet?’ ”
Sacha sounded incredulous. “You don’t know? It’s not as if they’ve been subtle about it.”
“You were on that dropship,” Ingrid said. “The crash landing three days ago.”
“Tell me what they’re doing.”
Nickolai listened, and according to the Simonyis, the PSDC was in the process of doing something that conventional wisdom said was impossible. They were imposing a State on Bakunin.
The first forays into what would become a full-out civil war began nearly six months ago, shortly after Nickolai had left the planet with Mosasa’s expedition. What the PSDC did was only obvious in retrospect—they started subcontracting the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union to provide security for several major corporations. In a cost-saving scheme, the companies paid the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation, and the PSDC paid the Mercenaries—many of whom were imported from off-planet.
In only a few months the PSDC had a de facto police force in most of the major corporate centers across Bakunin. Most importantly, they had full control over both Proudhon
and
Godwin.
When they started disarming civilians, the shooting war started.
“They co-opted the biggest players on the planet,” Sacha told him, “The corporations had no choice but to ally with the PSDC. If they resisted, the best case had them losing their entire security force—and leaving themselves open to attack by a population that already saw them as traitors.”
“None of the corporations fought?”
“Sinclair Power is fighting them, or they were. We lost contact with the city two weeks ago.”
“What about Wilson?”
“Still a free city,” Ingrid said. “The half that’s still standing.”
“We’re on the fringes,” Sacha said. “Low priority while they’re having major battles south and inland.”
Nickolai nodded and stepped back until he stood next to the other gun. He bent over and carefully picked it up while covering them; neither of them tried any sudden moves. “You two aren’t military, are you?”
“We are now,” Sacha said. “Anyone who has a gun and isn’t drawing a PSDC paycheck is an enemy combatant.”
Nickolai couldn’t help but think of the fact that the custom in Bakunin was for everyone to go visibly armed.
What happened here? Why is everything falling apart?
Was it Adam’s doing? Was his agent, Mr. Antonio, still here, shepherding the collapse? He remembered the old man, so apparently harmless, and how he had known just what to do and say to get Nickolai to do what he wanted. He could imagine that evil bastard burrowed into the hierarchy of the PSDC, making the right suggestions, just
nudging
them a little . . .
“Stand up. You’re going to come with me.” He pointed the gun at the helmets. “You can pick those up, but carry them with both hands.”
They stood, Ingrid’s camouflage flashing headache-inducing distortions of the woods around her, Sacha limping slightly on the damaged knee joint. When they picked up the helmets, Nickolai waved them ahead of him, back toward the commune.
“You took prisoners?” Parvi stared at him as he emerged from the woods, Ingrid and Sacha ahead of him. He could smell her anger from ten meters away. “You were supposed to find a safe—”
“You bastards are from the PSDC!” Ingrid snapped, “You’re from the BMU!”
Nickolai realized that Parvi’s jumpsuit still bore the patches from the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. She leveled her own gun at Ingrid and said, “Who the hell are these people, and what is she talking about?”
“While we were gone,” Nickolai told her, “the PSDC decided to take over.”
“Take over what?” Parvi asked. Everyone was silent for a moment, and Parvi’s eyes widened a bit. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“With the BMU as its army,” Nickolai said.
Parvi shook her head. “Of course. Why not? The rest of the universe has gone insane, why not this?”
They took Ingrid and Sacha to one of the abandoned outbuildings of the commune and Parvi had them remove their armor. Once they were stripped to their underwear, Parvi ordered Nickolai to wake Kugara and fetch the rest of their team.
Nickolai came back with Kugara, Flynn, and the two scientists, Dörner and Brody. On their return, the two Wilson natives were seated on a couple of folding chairs, and the smell of fear and agitation had leveled off somewhat. Parvi paced, her weapon pointed to the ground, shaking her head and muttering the occasional curse in a human language that Nickolai did not understand.
Ingrid looked at Nickolai and asked, “There’s another war out there?”
“You don’t know?” Kugara responded. “There are tens of thousands of refugee ships all across this solar system. You haven’t heard any of this?”
“Communication has been jammed for months,” Sacha said. “We’ve been limited to line-of-sight transmissions since the PSDC started open warfare.”
“Of course those bastards have always had the high ground.” Parvi ran a hand through her white hair, pressing against her scalp as if trying to push back a migraine. “Why now? Why would they pull this shit at the worst possible moment?”
To Nickolai’s surprise, Flynn spoke, “I think I know.”
Everyone looked at the young man as if he had suddenly started speaking in tongues. By rights, he shouldn’t have any connection to what was going on here. He had been born and raised on a planet eighty light-years beyond what had been the accepted limits of human space; a planet that had isolated itself for close to two centuries.
But Flynn represented one of the novel heresies that Nickolai had been exposed to since he had last set foot on Bakunin. The culture of Flynn’s homeworld, Salmagundi, had taken ancestor worship to its logical extreme. They had kept vast data banks, containing the recorded minds of every human being that had ever lived on the planet, and the elders of Salmagundi had made a ritual of downloading those minds into their own. The half-dozen survivors from the Salmagundi militia, plus their critically wounded leader Alexander Shane, all bore glyph-like tattoos on their brows and scalp, one for each of the minds they had ritually taken.
Flynn only had the one.
But that one mind, his ancestor, had been one of the founders of the colony, a woman named Kari Tetsami. And Tetsami had been a native of Bakunin.
Unlike the other people from Salmagundi, Flynn seemed to have a separate existence from the other mind he hosted. Nickolai sensed a change in his body language when the woman Tetsami spoke. It extended to his voice and his facial expression, and even his smell. Tetsami was less reserved, and more confident.
Parvi asked him, “You know why the PSDC has just gone insane?”
Flynn/Tetsami nodded. “Blame our mutual acquaintance, Tjaele Mosasa.”
Parvi narrowed her eyes and asked, “What the hell does Mosasa have to do with this?”
“What was he designed to do?” Tetsami asked.
“What does that . . .” Parvi stopped, staring at Flynn. After a moment she said, “Oh, shit. Of course. That selfish mechanical bastard.”
Dörner spoke up. “Do you mind explaining what you two are talking about?”