Prophets (10 page)

Of course that made sense. If you were preparing military action, where you were sending the mercenaries was a valuable piece of intel you wouldn't release, even to an allegedly closed database run by the BMU. After all, the members of BMU only owed loyalty to you after they were hired.

However, a few ads did give that sort of information, where it wasn't obviously mission critical to keep it secret. Most of those were prosaic things like jobs as trainers, cargo escorts and security, some of the Information Warfare jobs where geography was irrelevant, jobs as bodyguards or security where the show of force was of more deterrence value, and the one listing that captured Mallory's attention—

“Team needed to protect scientific expedition to vicinity of Xi Virginis.”

The one thing more corrosive to a culture than a taboo without purpose is having no taboos at all.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.

—DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1465-1536)

Nickolai, now a fully vetted member of the BMU, walked out of a cab on the fringes of the city/spaceport of Proudhon. Dusk was advancing, and the city behind him was already shimmering with light. He had gone through all the union's testing, and despite the degradation of using his skills for the employ of the Fallen, there had been something sweet about completely dropping his constant restraint and allowing himself to fully exercise his training. He couldn't help but enjoy the fact that he had demolished the robotic sparring partner they had sent up against him in the armed hand-to-hand exercise.

All the tests had felt less than serious to Nickolai. He didn't understand how they could rely on tests that measured people when nothing was at stake. His coming-of-age trials on Grimalkin had been much more difficult—and conducted by priests who would maim without hesitation.

If he hadn't been wary about his new arm, he would have had a perfect score on hand-to-hand combat. With firearms, his score had been less than appropriate for a scion of House Rajasthan, but that had been largely due to new eyes—when he had fixed on a target, he was able to do better than he ever had with a gun, but if he was off, he was completely off. Still, when the bull's-eyes were averaged with complete misses, his marksmanship greatly exceeded what the BMU considered average.

Judging by the solicitations he had received before his testing was even completed, the Fallen considered him a desirable commodity.

The cab flew away behind him, leaving him on a desolate stretch of road that stabbed arrow straight into the desert around Proudhon. The road was stamped with the logo of a company that would have taken a toll from any travelers when this road had a destination in mind. However, the original destination of this highway had been reclaimed by the desert, and the company that built and maintained the way there had similarly vanished.

The road was made of the same grainy ferrocrete that formed most of the landing strips and launchpads in the spaceport/city. Nickolai wasn't used to walking on the material; the streets of Godwin were of cheaper construction and more prone to cracking. Like the temples of Grimalkin, the roads in Proudhon felt as if they were meant to endure an eternity. Solid, flat, and permanent under the pads of his feet . . .

Though, Nickolai saw, like much of the world of the Fallen, that impression was an illusion. The edges of the hundred-meter-wide strip of ferrocrete no longer retained the sharp edges of the streets in the city. The abrasive black sand ground the edges away, advancing a dozen centimeters in a battle it would eventually win. It might take a century or two, Nickolai thought, but the sand had time.

Flanking the ancient highway, ranks of spacecraft of every size and description marched off in all three directions away from the city. Many of the corpses in this aviation necropolis showed bare metal skin, blasted by wind and the volcanic sand. Most had holes in their fuselages showing where some vital component or other had been removed. The skins that still showed markings were graced by a babel of tongues, most of which Nickolai didn't understand.

One of the few he could read graced a small, ornate tach-ship that bore the markings of the Grimalkin royal house. The tach-ship appeared to have been shot down, which Nickolai found alarming. But the seal gracing a half-melted control surface was wrong. It wasn't until he forced his too-new eyes to focus on the tail of the gutted tach-ship, and the illustration shot into headache-inducing relief, that he realized what was different about it. The seal bore the image of a tiger's head holding a blue planet in its jaws, wearing a crown made of seven stars.

Seven
stars . . .

The tach-ship was from the age when the chosen people ruled only the
Seven
Worlds, before the fall of the old Terran Confederacy. The ship was at least 175 years old. He spent a few moments wondering how the markings might have survived the blowing sand. He finally decided that it must have been salvaged from orbit.

“Homesick?”

Nickolai spun around, because he hadn't sensed anyone approach. He was immediately tensed and ready to strike out, but there wasn't anyone behind him. Instead, a metallic sphere about the size of his closed fist floated in the air about two meters behind him.

“What is this?” Nickolai growled in his native tongue.

“Security for Mosasa Salvage,” the sphere responded in kind. More disturbing than the fact that the machine spoke his language was the fact that it did so without any trace of the soft accent of the Fallen. He could be talking to one of the temple priests.

Of course, that was unlikely.

“I am here to apply for an advertised position,” Nickolai said.

The sphere orbited him like a tiny moon. “Yes, Mr. Rajasthan, we've received your data from the BMU. Rather impressive scores, especially for someone who's recently recovered from such traumatic injuries.”

Nickolai didn't let his surprise become visible on his face. The surprise was only momentary. How many scions of Rajasthan were in the BMU database, how many were on Bakunin? Anyone with the resources would be able to get almost his entire history on this planet based on his appearance alone, and given the information he had from Mr. Antonio, the owner of Mosasa Salvage had resources to spare.

“You should follow me,” the sphere said, finishing its orbit and floating off ahead of Nickolai.

“Where?” Nickolai asked.

“To the hangar,” it responded, “with the others.”

Nickolai followed the floating sphere through a maze of grounded aircraft and aircraft parts, the pads on his feet warmed by sand that still retained the day's burning heat even as the sun set behind the mountains. The air smelled cold and sterile: metal, oil, and the hint of something long burned.

The ground here felt unnervingly empty of even the soul of the Fallen. The presence of blood and flesh was out of place in the midst of these metallic beasts. For once, on this planet, Nickolai felt out of place not because he was not human, but because he breathed.

The sphere led him to a building that, despite its size, seemed lost in the midst of hundreds of square kilometers of decomposing aviation history. The hangar was a trapezoidal prism of gray, pitted metal. A massive rolling door, close to two hundred meters in width, dominated the side of the building that faced Nickolai. A ferrocrete landing pad sat in front of the hangar, blown clear of sand for about three hundred meters in every direction.

Even with the huge empty space, the wreckage that surrounded this place seemed to loom over Nickolai.

If not for a small red light glowing above a small, human-sized entrance off to the side of the huge rolling hangar door, the cleared surface of the landing pad, and the faint scent of the Fallen drifting on the air, it would have given every appearance of being long abandoned

In this desolate place, the stink of the Fallen was almost reassuring.

“Please wait for the ready light, then enter,” the sphere told him, then floated back off into the maze of dead aircraft.

Nickolai walked up to the smaller door with the red light. When he stood a meter away, the red light changed to green. In his mind he briefly pictured himself crossing some irrevocable threshold, that by passing through this door he would no longer be able to turn back.

He wondered at himself. Why would he suddenly think he had choices now?

He ducked through the too-short doorway and walked into the hangar. He felt a tingle in his artificial arm and behind his eyes as he entered, similar but more intense than what he had felt when crossing the EM shielding of the dungeon where he had met Mr. Antonio.

The tap of his claws on the ferrocrete floor echoed in the vast space as he stepped inside. The hangar was windowless and ill lit, but his eyes focused everything into sharp relief almost instantaneously.

Dominating everything was the dark silhouette of a tach-ship. Little more than a featureless shadow, it loomed over the small gathering of humans by one of its downturned stub wings. The meeting area was defined by a cluster of folding chairs, bordered by the edges of a single spotlight shining down from the scaffolding above.

Nickolai walked slowly, noting the scents and positions of the human mercenaries as he approached. He saw three under the spotlight: two males and one female. That raised his level of caution because he smelled at least two females in the air here, and that meant there were others out of sight, probably inside the ship.

The three he could see had been talking among themselves, but they stopped as soon as they noticed him approaching. They turned toward him, and he could tell by their relaxed posture that they didn't yet see him fully.

These are warriors?
he wondered to himself. Unless they had his eyes, they had blinded themselves by sitting in the best-lit place in this hangar. Until they heard him approach, they had been paying more attention to each other than to the vast unprotected space surrounding them. Had he wished to kill them, Nickolai guessed he could finish off two of them before the third realized something was wrong.

“Holy shit,” the taller of the men whispered. Nickolai suspected that he wasn't supposed to hear that.

Nickolai walked up to the fringes of the spotlight and stood facing the three humans. He was gratified not to smell the stink of fear around them.

The shorter man walked forward. He was squat and light-skinned, the top of his head barely reaching Nickolai's sternum. The man thrust his hand out. “I'm Staff Sergeant John Fitzpatrick.”

The other man laughed and said, “You
were
Staff Sergeant, Fitz. You ain't in the Marines anymore, geehead.”

Fitzpatrick's hand hung between them for a few moments. Nickolai knew the human gesture the man was inviting, but Nickolai didn't move his own hand. He could not bring himself to touch the flesh of the Fallen. Unclean he might be, but there were still limits.

When Fitzpatrick realized that he wasn't going to shake hands, he closed his hand and hooked his thumb toward the other man behind him. “And that gentleman is Jusef Wahid—”

“Jusuf,” the other man snapped.

“Sorry,
Jusuf
Wahid.”

Wahid was tall for a human and had darker coloring and narrower eyes than ex-Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick turned and gestured toward the last human in evidence, the female. “And this is Julia Kugara.”

The female stepped forward and looked Nickolai up and down. He realized that she was even taller than Wahid. Where Wahid was thin and bony, Kugara was lithe and muscular. She was the first human he had ever seen who didn't appear clumsy.

“So what do we call you?” she asked.

“My name is Nickolai Rajasthan.”

Nickolai had been living with the Fallen for over a year, but he had only been
seeing
them for a handful of days. Despite his new eyes, he was still blind to the meanings of facial expressions and body language. Judging by tone of voice and the scent cues that surrounded him, Wahid was the most nervous at his presence.

Fitzpatrick said, “I believe I saw you a few days ago, at the military exchange.”

“Perhaps you did.”

“Small world,” Wahid said. “That's one hell of a coincidence.”

Kugara snorted. “God, aren't you a paranoid shit, Jusuf?” She looked Nickolai up and down, her face changing to an inscrutable human expression. “Not like Nickolai here can blend into a crowd at ProMex. Don't mind him,” she addressed Nickolai. “Jusuf thinks everyone is a spy.”

Wahid snorted. “Everyone can benefit from a little professional paranoia.”

Nickolai growled a little in discomfort that he hoped the humans didn't perceive. He glared at Wahid and asked, “Who exactly would I be spying for?”

The odor of fear gratified Nickolai as Wahid backed up a few steps and held up his hands between them. “I wasn't accusing anyone of anything.”

Good, he doesn't actually know anything,
Nickolai thought.

“I was with the Occisis Marines for ten years before they cut me loose,” Fitzpatrick said. “What outfit were you with?”

“I was with no ‘outfit.' ” Nickolai shook his head. “I served my clan, House Rajasthan.”

“What does that mean?” Wahid asked.

“It means he's a member of the royal family on a planet that chooses their leaders based on their prowess at hand-to-hand combat.” Kugara turned to look at Wahid. “So don't piss him off.”