Heretics (10 page)

They wouldn't allow her to keep doing this; they would send someone in.

They didn't.

She tested the straps with all the force she could muster. She flexed her arms until she felt as if she was pulling her shoulder sockets out of joint. No reaction, not even an admonishment.

Her muscles strained until a thin sheen of sweat coated her entire body. Blood wept from abrasions on her wrists where she pulled against the straps binding them. They burned where her own sweat blended with raw bleeding flesh in a slick, painful mess.

No movement in her restraints.

She relaxed and lay back, gasping breaths of hot, dry air that was now tainted by the ferric scent of her own blood.

She blinked the sweat-blur from her eyes and looked at her right arm. Her jumpsuit was soaked red from mid-forearm down, her skin raw to just under the meat of her upturned palm. Her palm pulled against the wrist strap that had been angled to accommodate her shorter-than-average reach.

Perhaps she had been too direct.

She flattened her right arm against the metal surface it was tied to and folded her thumb across her palm to make her hand slightly narrower. She pulled, and her hand withdrew a few centimeters under the strap.

Teeth gritted against the pain, she pulled her hand, twisting her wrist back and forth against the lubrication of sweat and blood. Her skin tore against the strap, her thumb felt as if it was being dislocated, and arching her shoulder to pull her arm back wrenched every muscle in her back.

But after several minutes of struggle, her wrist came free.

She fell back, panting, holding her right arm up, bent at the elbow, staring at the area at the base of her thumb where the skin had been nearly flayed off by her effort.

No psychological game should have allowed her to get this far. For some reason, they had left her unattended. Just losing the contact of her skin against the strap holding her should be firing off an alarm for even the most inattentive guard.

Did that matter?

Not yet.

After a few moments to breathe, she worked on the rest of her restraints. After what seemed a very long time, she rolled out of the interrogation chair and got unsteadily to her feet.

“Now what?” she whispered to the stark white room.

It wasn't as if they had left the exit unlocked. There wasn't even a handle on this side. She was just as trapped now as she'd been when bound to the chair.

But at least she wasn't helpless.

She knelt next to the interrogation chair and fumbled with the controls that positioned the articulated portions of the device; arms, legs, neck. She was able to loosen a long segment meant to cradle the heel of someone's foot. She pulled it free and had a metal cup on the end of a meter-long steel pole. Not perfect. The pole was slick with grease and too thin for a good grip, but it was long and heavy enough to be dangerous when swung with enough motivation.

She stood on the seat of the chair and tested it against the spherical sensor array in the center of the ceiling. The array exploded in a satisfying crash of electronic shrapnel, leaving a trail of dangling optical conduits connecting to nothing.

Hopefully that left her hosts blinded.

She hefted her improvised mace and stationed herself against the wall next to the doorway.

Someone would have to come, eventually.

 

The sound of the door opening startled her. She hadn't been quite asleep, but fatigue had lulled her into a half-conscious state where hours or minutes might have passed without her being aware of it. She turned toward the doorway next to her, tightening her grip on her improvised weapon. She saw a flash of khaki overalls, a green Caliphate shoulder patch with a crescent on it, and she swung her weapon.

The heavy base struck her victim in the throat, just under the chin. Parvi saw the face of a light-skinned woman, almond eyes wide with surprise, mouth snapping shut on a gasped intake of breath. The woman fell backward, body blocking the entryway.

Parvi jumped over the woman's body and out the door, hoping to clear it before another guard closed off her escape. She dove behind a storage cabinet, the closest cover, expecting grabbing hands or firing weapons to stop her at any moment. She crouched and wondered why she was still alive. She listened, and all she heard was a sucking wheeze: the woman she had struck, trying to breathe.

The improvised club shook in her hands, her grip so tight, her knuckles hurt.

After several moments of hearing nothing but the woman's sick, wet breathing, she risked a glance around the edge of the storage cabinet.

Nothing. No one else but the woman sprawled on the floor, half in the interrogation room.

The woman was unarmed?

Parvi saw no sign of a weapon, no side arm, not even a stun rod. She pushed the thought away. SOP was to not have interrogators bring any weapons within reach of a dangerous prisoner. The woman wasn't the threat, her backup was.

Parvi looked frantically for that backup.

Across the hall she saw a control room behind an armored window. The consoles and holo displays inside were vacant and dark. The visible corridor was empty of anyone except her and the choking woman. Parvi took a few tentative steps back into the corridor, and nothing appeared to challenge her.

She glanced back at the control room. Inside, mounted against the wall, stood a weapons locker designed to rack high-wattage lasers or plasma weapons. She wasn't sure which, since it had been years since she'd studied Caliphate weapon specs—and because the cabinet stood empty.

She ran to the woman on the floor. It was too late. The woman's throat had swelled and turned purple, and a thin trail of blood leaked from the mouth and nose that no longer even pretended to breathe. The woman's eyes still stared with the open-eyed expression of someone startled by unexpected company while using the rest-room.

Parvi tossed the club aside and tried to clear the airway and get the woman breathing again. As she tried rudimentary first aid, Parvi told herself that it wasn't guilt that drove her, but the fact that this woman was the only person available who could tell her why the soldiers assigned here emptied their weapons locker and left their post.

Whatever Parvi's motives, the woman had sunk beyond revival.

“It is better to ally along shared interests than shared ideals.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Beware allies of necessity.”

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Just twenty meters from her cell, Parvi found Tjaele Mosasa. The door to his cell stood open, revealing a utilitarian cabin beyond. At first, the lack of movement inside lulled Parvi into thinking the room was empty. Then, as she crept past, keeping an eye out for the friends of the woman she had killed, she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

A foot.

She turned to stare into the room and saw Mosasa sprawled on the floor, slumped in a corner of the room, unmoving, so still that he could have been part of the bulkhead. She stared for several moments, frozen in place.

Mosasa had been her employer. In some sense he still was, even after the disaster with the
Eclipse
. Also, despite appearances, he wasn't human. He was a construct run by an old Race AI. So the fact that Mosasa didn't move or breathe didn't immediately indicate something was wrong. The body Mosasa wore mimicked human metabolism only for the benefit of the humans he interacted with. There was no need for him to have a pulse, or breathe, or show any motion beyond what was mechanically necessary for him to move.

“Mosasa,” Parvi whispered.

She hated working for him. She, along with most of the rest of humanity, saw AIs as evil, almost demonic. She especially hated the fact that working for Mosasa had been necessary. It was because of him, of
it
, that she'd been able to support her family's relocation from Rubai. Because of Mosasa, she was able to pay the outrageous fees of the smugglers without her family having to bear the weight of the debt. Without Mosasa's employment, her brothers and sisters might still be working off a half-legal indenture somewhere on the ass-end of the Indi Protectorate.

“Mosasa?” Slightly louder this time.

His employment gave her a compass. He gave her direction when she was an aimless refugee. As much as she detested their relationship, she was much more frightened of being cut adrift without
anything
to hang on to.

She ran into the cabin and yelled, “Mosasa!” For the moment she spared no thoughts for Caliphate guardsmen and crew. No thoughts for her own escape. Her only thought was the idea that Mosasa, as much as she hated him, was most of her world now.

She grabbed his shoulders and shook, his body's dead weight about twice as dense as a man's should have been. His head rocked back on his neck to face her. She pulled away. Mosasa's eyes stared up at her, open and static. The dragon tattoo still curled around the side of his bald head, slightly phosphorescent against his dark brown skin—except where the skin had burned away. Four charred trenches cut across the face of the dragon so deeply that Parvi could see the glint of a metallic skull underneath. The burns were mirrored in the opposite side of Mosasa's skull. Almost as if a pair of burning hands had cradled Mosasa's face.

Worst was his mouth. His mouth was locked in an expression caught midway between surprise and agony. The teeth were charred black, and the dark hole beyond emitted a fetid stench that mixed ozone, burnt synthetics, and roasting flesh.

Parvi shook her head.

How? How could this AI, this grand manipulator, this spider sitting in the center of an infinite web—how could he die? How could he let himself be destroyed?

“How?” Parvi stumbled back out of Mosasa's cabin. She was more alone now than she had been in the Caliphate's isolation cell.

She ran.

 

Parvi ran through the empty corridors of the
Prophet's Voice
, trying to understand what was happening. The corridors were empty, and the comm kiosks were dark—not that she was going to try to use the
Voice
's communication network. She only had a rudimentary battlefield knowledge of Arabic; she could understand words like “explosive,” “restricted,” and “no entry.” If she had to, she might be able to pilot something, as long as the design was familiar.

Navigating a computer system with Arabic menus was beyond her. Not to mention it would give her position away.

But her position shouldn't be a secret to anyone. She had left one corpse in her wake, and these corridors should all have several levels of redundant sensors, not just for security, but for systems monitoring and simple maintenance.

Why hadn't a security detail mopped her up?

Fifteen minutes after escaping from her cell, she had the first part of her answer.

She was edging past a series of storerooms, the corridor lights flashed, and all the comm units in her sight came alive with the same transmission. A holo appeared, showing a handsomely sculpted man from the shoulders up. The face was severe, clean shaven, European. The man's eyes were black, a black so deep that she thought it was a flaw in the holo.

The man spoke in Arabic, a voice rich, deep, and commanding. The voice echoed though the corridors, resonated through the walls—as if every speaker on every console in the entire ship was tuned to his broadcast.

The man spoke again, this time in a language she knew well, English. “The time for your decision is nearly at hand. I have been generous. You have had twenty-two hours to consider your commitment to the flesh. Two hours remain. Come to me and join those who have taken the step into the next world. Reject me, and face the way of all flesh.”

The message repeated in Persian and Punjabi.

“What the hell is going on here?” Parvi whispered. “Who
is
that?”

One thing seemed clear. The guy with the ultimatum was not in the Caliphate chain of command. And as much she was an enemy of the Caliphate, she wasn't entirely sure that this guy's message was a good thing.

Any time someone said, “join me or else,” it was a bad sign.

The holo faded and the wall-mounted comm units became dark again. Parvi decided to examine one of the kiosks. Now it seemed evident that the people running this ship had priorities other than trying to find her.

For one thing, their network was dead.

Parvi tried everything she could think of, up to and including kicking the machine, to get something other than a dead holo projector. Nothing. Whoever was running the broadcast had shut down the
Voice
's communication systems.

She stared at the blank screen, thinking of Mosasa's charred face, wondering where the others were—Bill, Tsoravitch, Wahid. She should try to find them—

“Don't move!” a voice called out to her, an Arabic phrase she happened to know.

Damn it!
She closed her hands into fists. Her escape was over, and she hadn't managed to do a damn thing to harass the enemy other than kill some poor woman who was probably part of the janitorial staff.

The voice jabbered on quickly in Arabic she couldn't follow.

When she didn't respond, she felt a hand on her shoulder spinning her around to face a kid barely out of his teens, wearing overalls like the woman that had opened her cell. He pointed the mouth of a wide-bore plasma cannon in her direction.