Prophets (7 page)

And the galling thing was that what it implied was correct. In the palace halls on Grimalkin he might have seen fit to scar someone for such an expression—much less one of the Fallen. However, here he was, in service to the naked devil himself.

“Mr. Rajasthan?”

Nickolai realized his attention had wandered, which was disturbingly unlike him. “Forgive me, sir. I was reminded of Grimalkin for a moment.”

If Mr. Antonio noticed how forced the honorific sounded, he showed no sign.

“I understand how it is being stranded in an alien land.” His smile faded. “Perhaps more than you'd know. But if you would please return to the present moment, however unpleasant the venue?”

He set a case down on the padded tabletop between them.

“The time has come for you to repay my generosity.”

“What exactly do you require of me?”

“Your services as a mercenary.”

Nickolai said nothing. There was little to say. He had agreed to the devil's bargain. He could almost hear the priests laughing at how far he had fallen, down to prostituting the sacred craft of the warrior.

“I need an agent to attach to a private expedition. You are going to be that agent.” He turned the case around and opened it.

“How did you acquire—” Nickolai began, but cut short the outburst.

“A symbol of your service, Mr. Rajasthan. A token from he who gave you succor when you were shunned.”

He knows exactly what this means,
Nickolai thought.

In the padded case was an antique slugthrower. The design was old, as old in fact as the design of Nickolai's species. However, the handgun was obviously of a post-exodus model. The ancient humans who had designed Nickolai's ancestors for warfare never would have bothered to add gold plating, scroll-work, or mother-of-pearl to something they saw as strictly utilitarian. They certainly never would have engraved quotes from scripture—not that the scripture in question existed at the time the first of these guns had been manufactured.

The 12-millimeter firearm Mr. Antonio had was one that belonged in the ceremonial guard in the temples and palaces on Grimalkin. It had probably been blessed by the temple priests.

Nickolai remembered well when he had passed his first trial as an adult of House Rajasthan. After twelve hours of uninterrupted sparring with priests and acolytes, he had limped, bruised, bleeding, undefeated, up the 367 steps to the cenotaph of St. Rajasthan. At the top, before the statue of the first speaker of his faith, his mother had presented him with a weapon much like the one Mr. Antonio showed him.

The words she spoke were not in the corrupt tongue of the Fallen, but came from the scriptures of his faith:

Years later, when the priests had come for him, they had taken the gun. They had told him it had been melted down. It had become unclean from his touch.

Now, Mr. Antonio was not only returning his eyes and his arm but, in some sense, his honor as well. In another sense, he was taking all the remnants of honor he had left.

Could he accept the kind of debt this represented?

Nickolai looked into Mr. Antonio's eyes and knew that the deal had already been made, and the debt went deeper than any material accounting. The man he now served was just making the deal explicit in terms he knew Nickolai understood.

Nickolai reached over and picked up the weapon. It was too large for any human to handle comfortably, but it rested perfectly in Nickolai's new hand. The weight felt good, as if it completed the reconstruction of his missing limb.

Mr. Antonio smiled.

“So how do I become this agent you require?”

“You will need to join the Bakunin Mercenaries' Union. That will give you the contacts to apply for the position I need you in.”

Nickolai sighted down the barrel of the new weapon, nostrils flaring with the scent of gun oil. “You are certain that I will be hired for this position?”

“Mr. Rajasthan, I have no doubt of it.”

It was like he had told Mr. Salvador,
“Do you forget why we were created?”

Nickolai began to understand why his ancestors were created. Why he existed. Not just the knowledge of what scriptures and history taught, of how mankind—the fallen creation of God—had the arrogance to create thinking creatures to serve man, to praise man, and to give glory unto man.

Nickolai had
known
that he was descended from creatures designed to fight in wars that man didn't have the stomach to fight himself. He had
known
that when all the petty human governments coalesced into the Terran Council that mankind had renounced their creation and cast it out, exiling it to Tau Ceti at a time prior to tach-drives when the only interstellar travel was through a manufactured wormhole, effectively one-way.

He
knew
where he had come from, but on some level he hadn't understood it. He didn't understand until he found himself bound in service to the false god, man. Until he found himself retracing the steps of his ancestors.

This
was why he was created—and
this
was why that creation was such a great sin.

But he had pledged himself, so he walked the path that Mr. Antonio had set for him. And that path was very well prepared.

There was already an explanation of why Nickolai was searching for work as a mercenary, and how he had come by prosthetics that cost much more than his income from Mr. Salvador would have allowed. Any investigation would show that the reconstruction was paid for by one of Godwin's many loan sharks—a Mr. Charkov. This debt to Mr. Charkov could not be paid on a bouncer's salary.

To add verisimilitude to the fictitious story, any money Nickolai would receive beyond basic living expenses would disappear directly into an anonymous account that could, with effort, be traced to Mr. Charkov.

So, as dawn crawled over the slums of the city of Godwin, Nickolai walked into an unfamiliar quarter of the city. The Godwin where he had lived in exile had been a city that smelled of smoke, sewage, and crumbling ferrocrete, its sound a mélange of arguments in every possible human language.

Here, west of central Godwin, the streets no longer smelled of garbage and rotting architecture. While the air was still rank with the stink of the Fallen, it didn't stick to his fur. The streets were broader and less crowded, and the cacophony of human voices was less aggressive.

Nickolai walked, because a taxi would be uncomfortable and expensive, but also because actually
seeing
the human hive of Godwin was still a novelty. His vision with his digital eyes was an order of magnitude sharper than his real eyes had ever been and worth the occasional headache. He could read the holo-script crawling up the side of buildings five or ten klicks away. He was able to see the enigmatic human expressions on the drivers of the aircars soaring above him.

And he could
see
as much as hear and smell the difference in the neighborhood around him. The broad avenue of West Lenin wasn't cracked and buckled like the old streets near his apartments. The walls of the buildings around him were still in the colors of steel and stone intended by the builders, not the garish tapestry of graffiti that wrapped the structures where Nickolai lived.

Most different were the human inhabitants. They seemed cleaner, better dressed, and were less prone to obviously avoid his path.

The Godwin branch of the Bakunin Mercenaries' Union was a plain onyx-black cube of a building nestled between a bank and an expensive-looking escort service. The windowless building had a single door and no decoration other than a small bronze plaque with the initials BMU engraved in it. As he approached it, he could faintly smell ozone, a sign of an active broadband Emerson field ionizing stray air molecules.

Nickolai entered the building and faced a long hallway lined with holo screens—the nearest of which showed his approach and the entrance of the building from several points of view and at several different frequencies. One density scan showed a partially exploded skeletal view of his body where the recent reconstruction of his arm was plainly visible, showing bones metallic, dense, and much too smooth and regular to be organic.

He walked along the hallway, past his own image, and past images of a more expected variety—pictures of military hardware, from hand weapons to hovertanks; Paralian-designed assault craft with military-class tach-drives down to manpack contragrav units. Much of the hardware bore trademarks of Bakunin-based industries. The arms industry was the largest sector of the Bakunin economy, supplying not only the bottomless domestic demand, but also equipping probably half the militaries in human space—every government that didn't have the resources to equip its own military and a few that did.

Every
human
government.

Despite historical ties to Bakunin, the nonhuman inhabitants of the Fifteen Worlds—the loose confederation that included Nickolai's homeworld of Grimalkin—avoided any ties to human space; cultural, diplomatic, or economic. Despite being a
de jure
part of the Fifteen Worlds' sphere of influence since the last days of the Confederacy—when it was the
Seven
Worlds—Bakunin's thriving export industry rarely sent anything off in the direction of Tau Ceti.

And, despite the professionalism of the receptionist, it was clear in the man's voice, his posture, and the smell of fear on his skin that the alienation was mutual. The Fallen were still afraid of their creations.

“Can I help you?” asked the receptionist before Nickolai was within six strides of the semicircular desk at the end of the hall.

Nickolai waited until he stood in front of the desk before speaking. “I am here to obtain membership in the Mercenaries' Union.”

“Oh,” the receptionist nodded, “of course.” The man did well hiding his fear. Someone with the half-dead senses of the Fallen might have completely missed the man's discomfort.

Nickolai was tall enough to see over the top of the desk and look down on the receptionist. He watched as the man's hand moved away from a handheld plasma cannon holstered behind the desk. Nickolai frowned slightly. There was little honor in the nasty-looking handgun. It was a single-use desperation weapon—firing it would release all the energy in its fifteen-centimeter-diameter barrel in a cone of plasma at temperatures that would vaporize all organics, most synthetics, and a good many metals in a cone that would fill most of the corridor Nickolai had just walked down.

“We require a one-kilogram deposit as a reserve against your first year's dues,” the man told him.

Nickolai nodded and pulled a chit from his belt, placing it on the desk. The man waited for Nickolai's hand to completely withdraw before taking it. “Very good. If you go to one of our interview rooms, you can post an alias and a résumé for our clients, and schedule yourself for a skills assessment. After that we'll archive your DNA signature, and you'll have access to our databases and all our facilities. You'll get an ID badge, but you don't need it for our services as long as you can present a biometric ID. Welcome to the BMU.”

The most dangerous impulse is to feel safe.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

In this business you never let your guard down.

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

So far, since arriving, Mallory had investigated close to a dozen ships that conceivably could be contracted to go as far as Xi Virginis. Unfortunately, the nature of the trip put severe limits on the kind of vessel that he could hire. The ship had to be able to power several twenty light-year jumps without refueling and needed the capability to skim hydrogen from whatever source happened to be available, since there wouldn't be any processing centers along the way.

It wasn't an impossible criteria. The Indi Protectorate had manufactured thousands of such exploration vessels in its heyday. But those that were still around were old and cranky. The one ship he'd gone to visit today, in his opinion, would require divine intervention to make it as far as Tau Ceti. The only other possibility so far had the ill luck of having a pilot who actually bragged about doing black ops work for the Caliphate.

He was walking back to his hotel from the hangar, when he saw an odd heat-shimmer out of the corner of his eye. He had been retired for forty years, so he didn't react as quickly as he should have. By the time he realized the significance of the visual distortion, the man in the cloak was standing directly in front of him.

The cloak was a military-grade personal camo projector, looking like a cubist heat-shimmer about one and a half times the size of a man in full combat gear. Mallory stopped short when he saw the distortion and realized that there was a near-invisible
something
standing on the walkway in front of him.

He took a step back and felt a metal-clad hand between his shoulder blades. A quick glance back showed more optical distortion, headache-inducing at this range. He was close enough to see the shimmer of the tiny fly-sized optical pickups that orbited the cloaked figure—allowing the occupant to see outside his own photon-twisting cocoon.

The pair had him trapped in a long alley between a featureless gray hangar and a tall office building that showed no ground-level entrances for about twenty meters in either direction.

“Welcome to our fair planet.” A voice came from the shimmer in front of him. The voice was amplified, emerged from somewhere around chest level, and was much too cheerful.