Prophets (37 page)

“Stow everything you can for reentry.” Mallory told her. “It isn't going to be pleasant.”

“Yes—”

“When you land, don't leave the vicinity of the lifeboat unless you're in immediate danger. These things will try to cluster their landings, and if you stay by the beacon, I can probably reach you before anyone else.”

He could hear the hesitation in her voice before she said, “Yes.”

The air went dead for a moment, then he heard another voice. “Mallory?”

He thought he recognized the voice. “Kugara?”

“Yes. Had some issues to clean up here before I hunted down the radio.”

“Everything all right with you?”

“We're alive here.”

“Did you hear Dörner?”

“The tail end. Rendezvous at boat five?”

“Yes.”

“I'm shutting down to conserve power. See you on the ground.”

“See you on the ground.” He shut down his own transmission.

When the PA gave him the ten-minute warning, he had already stowed everything in the cabin and strapped himself into an acceleration couch. Mallory felt the rotation of the cabin as it turned the bulkhead he was strapped to toward the direction of motion.

The planet's atmosphere announced itself with a vibration and the beginnings of pressure in his gut as the lifeboat began to decelerate. The vibration continued, intensifying. The fist in Mallory's gut kept pressing, joined by invisible thumbs pressing into his eyes and a choking pressure in his throat. His pulse throbbed in his ears, vying with the sound of his cabin shaking apart.

Another sound joined the vibration, a demonic wind. The sound of superheated atmosphere shredding past the shielding of the lifeboat. Mallory's vision grayed, and the cabin plunged into darkness. He didn't know if his eyesight failed or if the emergency lighting died.

The vibration, the roaring of the atmosphere, and the pressure all increased until it felt as if the lifeboat was about to collapse into a crumpled ball and burn up.

It didn't, and after a short eternity the shaking stopped and the pressure eased. The boat had made it into the atmosphere, and the braking hadn't incinerated it. He felt weightless again, but this time it was because he was in free fall.

The lights flickered back on and he felt the drag of gravity as the lifeboat hit its terminal velocity.

Mallory swallowed and waited for the jerk of the drag chute. For several long moments he imagined the chutes failing, and the lifeboat slamming into the ground at full speed. The wait was long enough for him to pray that the shock of the initial impact would kill him instantaneously, before the bulkhead above him slammed down like a boot crushing a cockroach.

He tensed, fists clenched, eyes closed, expecting the fatal impact at any moment. His implants drove adrenaline through his system enhancing his perception and reaction times to absolutely no effect except to distort his time sense to the point he had no idea how long he had been falling.

When he felt the sudden deceleration pressing into his gut, it took him a few seconds past the panicked shock to realize that he hadn't slammed into the ground. The chute had deployed.

Thank you, Lord,
Mallory thought. He stared up at the bulkhead above him with watering eyes and whispered, “If it isn't too much to ask, after all this, please grant me a soft landing.”

The boat slammed into something, rolling forward until something snapped, resonating through the cabin. The whole lifeboat slid forward, shaking and tumbling. The cabin flipped over completely four times before coming to a rocking, unsteady rest.

It took five seconds after the boat stopped moving for Mallory to get his bearings. The lifeboat had rolled so that the original floor was at a forty-five-degree angle sloping down from his feet toward the ground. He dangled from his acceleration couch, facing down.

He undid the straps, one by one, feeling the whole descent in every joint. That combined with the crashing fatigue that was the aftereffect of his implants hyping his metabolism. Climbing out of the couch was a complicated maneuver, disengaging himself from the acceleration couch without falling the three meters into the bulkhead below him. He had to hold onto the crash webbing while he undid the buckles. Even though he was prepared for the drop, he released the last buckle too fast and almost dislocated his shoulder rolling out.

He hung on, half standing on the sloped floor, half dangling from the harness. Standing there, it struck him full force.

If he had made it, the others had a good chance, too. And Brody was going to need some help. He let himself go, falling to lean against the bulkhead where the cot was still stowed. He pulled out all the emergency gear.

He took out the comm unit and tried raising the
Eclipse,
but got no response. But he didn't expect one.

He tried to call the two occupied lifeboats, but didn't get a response there either. While he could see the beacons for the lifeboats with Brody and Kugara, both stationary, he couldn't raise them.

He clipped the unit to his belt. He could try periodically once he got moving. Until they were in contact again, the plan was to rendezvous at lifeboat number five.

Thankfully the range given by the beacon put all the lifeboats within a fifty-klick radius. Lifeboat five, fortunately, landed close to the center of the cluster. So while Mallory was about thirty kilometers from Kugara's lifeboat, he was about fifteen kilometers from lifeboat five. Nickolai and Kugara had ten more klicks than he did to get to the rendezvous, but that was still closer to them than Mallory's lifeboat.

Though it still remained to be seen where it was they had landed. All kilometers were not created equal. Despite the lifeboat's best efforts, it was still quite possible that they had made landfall someplace impassable.

Mallory edged up to the door to the lifeboat. Like the floor, it was canted at a forty-five-degree angle. Next to the controls, a line of lights flashed green. So according to the lifeboat, not only did the mechanism work, but the environment on the other side of the door was in the acceptable range of temperature, pressure, and oxygen content.

If he believed the sensors, it was safe to open the door.

It occurred to him that this was the last time he would have to rely on the lifeboat for his survival. Outside the door, it would just be him and God.

He hit the control to open the door. It slid aside with a horrid scraping noise and stuck about halfway. Hot air blew in, carrying the scent of burned synthetics and woodsmoke. Though the open doorway he could see a slice of night sky, the purple tint and shimmering of the stars giving the reassuring feel of an atmosphere above him. The stars flickered in heat shimmers coming from the skin of the lifeboat.

He didn't want to wait for the shielding to cool off, so he found an insulating blanket in the emergency stores and draped it over the bottom corner of the open doorway. With that, he was able to pull himself up enough to look at the landing site without burning himself.

The lifeboat had landed in a hardwood temperate forest. The tumbling Mallory had felt early was the boat crashing through the forest canopy and tumbling to the ground. The force had been enough to tear a hole in the canopy for him to see the stars. The chute from the lifeboat's descent was tangled in the treetops, little more than a ragged shadow from where Mallory stood.

The lifeboat hadn't put down in absolutely optimal conditions, but it was closer than Mallory had any right to expect. The terrain was relatively level, and the forest was old growth with wide-spaced trees and underbrush that wasn't terribly dense. If lifeboat five was in a similar site, he could reach them on foot in a matter of hours.

He shouldered the medkit and the emergency pack from his lifeboat and set off in the direction of lifeboat five.

Great power does not foster great flexibility.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

The love of power is the love of ourselves.

—WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830)

After an hour of chaos, the bridge on the
Voice
had settled down into a more normal operation. The battle group had disengaged and spread out into a close formation around the
Voice
. The
Jeddah
and the
Jizan
had established radio contact with the
Eclipse,
and the
Jizan
was in the process of docking. And Admiral Hussein had recorded a revised diplomatic message for the planet, one that the
Voice
's communications officers were repeatedly beaming down to the surface. They still waited for a response.

And all the shipboard clocks turned over to mark a new day. As the timer on the main holo changed to read 00:00:00, one of the ensigns from navigation walked up to Captain Rasheed.

Admiral Hussein distinctly heard Captain Rasheed say, “That can't be right.”

“What's the problem, Captain?”

Captain Rasheed straightened up and said, “Give your report to Admiral Hussein, Ensign.”

“Yes, sir!” The ensign came to attention facing the admiral. “The observatory data we're receiving is not syncing with our mapped projections, sir.”

Admiral Hussein frowned. “You're not saying we're not on course, Ensign?”

“No, sir. The map projection is only wrong for one star.”

Captain Rasheed called over to the nav station and said, “Put the anomaly up on the main holo.”

In response, the main display for the bridge changed to show a segment of a star field overlaid with the vector map generated by the navigational system. The actual stars fit in the overlay, none off by a fraction of a degree. However, in the center of the display, a single red circle was disconcertingly empty. There was no sign of the star that should have been contained within the marker, it wasn't off by a degree here or there, it was just
gone
.

The text next to the empty circle read “Xi Virginis.”

Admiral Hussein's first thought was of their sister ship, the
Prophet's Sword,
which had tached to Xi Virginis barely a week before their own departure. Things had already gone far beyond the operational parameters of this mission; this did not feel good.

“Is some outer planet eclipsing the star?” he asked.

“We've been checking for something occluding our observations, sir. If anything is, it's showing no detectable radiation of its own, inherent or reflected, and it is far enough away not to interfere with any other visible landmark.”

Admiral Hussein leaned forward and said to Captain Rasheed, “I want every scrap of data you can get on Xi Virginis, and scan for any tach-transmissions from the
Sword
.”

“Yes, sir.”

Communications identified a signal almost instantaneously. They had a lock on a data transmission, a tach-burst specifically coded for the
Voice,
and the encryption wrapping it identified the
Sword
better than a fingerprint.

When the signal was decrypted, the main holo on the
Voice
's bridge filled with the face of Admiral Naji Bitar, the commander of the
Sword
's fleet. Hussein wondered if his discomfort over Bitar's grinning expression was simply a matter of decorum.

“Greetings, Admiral Hussein,” said Bitar's smiling face. “My communications officers have timed this to reach you upon your arrival. I wish to provide you with some good news. Our contact with the colony at Xi Virginis has been quite positive. Not only are they enthusiastic to ally with the Caliphate, but they have been willing to share technological advances that are . . . extraordinary.”

“Your observations will have detected that the star Xi Virginis has ceased radiating. This shouldn't alarm you. The colonists here have discovered a means to harness all the energy produced by the star. This technology is part of what they wish to share.”

“Needless to say, you must communicate home as discreetly as possible. The Caliphate has many enemies, and we cannot risk communicating this news back in any way that might alert them.”

Admiral Hussein heard Captain Rasheed pass some orders on to the communications officers, restricting physical access to the tach-comm.

“You will receive a more personal contact within eighteen hours standard after your arrival.You will have a more in-depth briefing on what we have discovered here. We are about to embark on a new age, Muhammad, my friend. God is great.”

The feed swapped Bitar's face for the green-and-white crescent of the Caliphate, then ended. Admiral Hussein didn't know what to make of the transmission. It felt inauthentic from the address all the way to his closing. There was an aggressive cheer pervading the message that was more than unprofessional. . . .

Creepy,
Hussein thought.
The word is “creepy.”

Captain Rasheed turned toward Hussein. A gulf of silence filled the bridge. All waiting for him.

Hussein had known the operation had changed as soon as he had seen the
Eclipse
. Now, after hearing Bitar's message, he wondered if there would be anything of the original operation left. At the very least, Bitar's short speech, bolstered by the missing Xi Virginis, completely revised Hussein's risk assessment.