Heretics (16 page)

“And you're not going to shoot me!” Parvi yelled back. The dropship shook as Salmagundi's atmosphere tore by, clawing at the too-fast invader, trying to slow it. The temperature sensors started climbing again.

“Sergeant, you may not have noticed, but we just pushed a damaged ship way past its design specs. This thing needs the once-over from your techs before it goes anywhere. At the very least we need to recharge the power plant,” Parvi said.

The edges of the holo began glowing with the superheated atmosphere sliding over the hull. Wahid had turned his chair to face the nav console and was typing in coordinates.

“I'm in command here,” Abbas said.

“Even if you were going to fire a tach-drive in a planet's upper atmosphere with a damaged unstable power plant, how far can this thing go on less than fifty percent reserves? Two light- years? Ten? How far from the Caliphate and any way to fix or refuel this thing?”

“I found it,” Wahid said.

“Forty,” Abbas said, lowering her side arm.

“What?”

“Nominally these drives can jump forty light-years on a half-charge.”

Parvi wasn't sure she'd heard right. “How many jumps?”

“One.”

“What?” Wahid said.

“One jump,” Parvi repeated. “You're telling me that this crate has a tach-drive that can effectively jump twice as far as anything else?”

“Four times,” Abbas said. “With a full charge, the drive can push out at least eighty light-years.”

“Holy shit,” Wahid said, “this crate can get us home.”

“All the more reason,” Parvi said, “to get this thing on the ground, repaired and refueled.”

Around them, the violence of atmospheric entry had begun to smooth out. There wasn't much the pilot could do right now. The ship's maneuverability was severely limited during the descent into the atmosphere. Once they were in the pipe, they had to rely on the design of the craft's body and the laws of fluid dynamics to determine its course. Any human intervention right now could turn a stable descent into tumbling chaos.

“Now,” Parvi said, “we just hope the natives don't try to shoot us down.”

 

The dropship shot thought the stratosphere at hypersonic speeds, roughly following the east-west pathway of the equatorial shadow. Razor-thin from orbit, this close to the surface, the shadow covered a hundred kilometers easily. They had dropped far enough down so that only one edge was visible on the ground. Above them, the ring was a seam in the sky, a narrow band where the shade of sky turned a darker blue.

Wahid's flight path took them directly into the shadow, and as the ground went dark below them, the band turned darker as it cut across the face of the sun. When they approached the landing field that had been the
Eclipse
's destination, Salmagundi's sun was nothing more than a few whips of corona above them, bisected by a black ribbon in the sky.

“Wahid, tell me that thing isn't getting bigger.”

“Okay,” he said. “It's not getting bigger. It's getting closer.”

“Abbas,” she called over her shoulder, “you have the comm. Radio them we're landing, and they don't have a choice.”

The woman glared at her.

“Damn it, Sergeant, you might be in command, but I'm captain here until we hit dirt.”

Abbas turned toward the comm console, and after a moment she said, “They're unresponsive.”

As Parvi banked on her approach, she briefly wondered if this was the right landing area, or if it had suffered from some sort of attack. But in the displays, the approach beacon was active. They were within fifty klicks now, and she could see the unlit landing field in the light- enhanced display.

At least no one was shooting at them.

She closed in on the airfield and saw no movement. No vehicles, air or ground, sitting on the tarmac. That made things easier, since they didn't have any air traffic control talking them in.

She put the dropship down in the geometric center of the landing field, giving a clear hundred-meter fire zone around the craft. Just in case.

“We're here,” she said.

“Fear helps us survive. Hope makes us want to.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.”

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Mallory was only slightly surprised that the old man hadn't come to question them. Of course, since he had mined everything from all four of their minds already and implanted it into his own, there wasn't much left he could ask. He introduced himself as Alexander Shane and ordered Mallory and the others out of their impromptu prison.

Armed guards led the barely ambulatory prisoners out to a small armored transport parked in an eerily empty courtyard surrounded on three sides by the short outbuildings that grew from the base of the Hall of Minds.

The ugly black aircraft could have been the same one that had picked them up from the lifeboat.

Everything was deathly quiet as they left the outbuilding and headed toward the open doors of the craft. Even the idling of the maneuvering fans seemed subdued in the still afternoon air. The sun hung small and white in a near-cloudless sky.

It was quiet enough that when Dörner whispered, “What is that?” it was almost as if someone had shouted the question.

At first, Mallory wasn't clear what she was referring to. Then he followed her gaze and saw a narrow band of darker blue bisecting the sky from horizon to horizon, about fifteen degrees off vertical. At first it appeared it could be a strange contrail from something entering the atmosphere, but it was too straight, too even, too long.

Shane spoke without turning around. “We don't know. It's a ring of material in equatorial orbit about fifty thousand kilometers out.”

“That wasn't here when the
Eclipse
tached in,” Mallory said.

“No,” Shane told him, “it wasn't.”

 

Once the craft was airborne, heading away from the monolithic Hall of Minds, Mallory asked him, “Where are you taking us?”

“Precisely where you want to go, Father Mallory.”

“What?” Mallory shouted over the whine of the fans, unsure he had heard correctly.

Shane turned to face them. He was the only one standing in the compartment, his right hand wrapped around the webbing attached to the wall. His hand trembled in a white-knuckled death grip. Shane looked thin and spectral, as if he wasn't really there. His face wore an expression that was half pain, half resignation.

It was an expression that reminded Mallory of Mosasa.

“I doubt Salmagundi will survive,” he said flatly. “I was far too late to do any good.” He looked into Mallory's eyes. “So were you.”

“What are you talking about?” Brody said.

“The fleet of Caliphate ships,” he said. “That was one thing. We couldn't fight an army, but perhaps we could negotiate some accommodation, a surrender that left us some measure of our culture, our autonomy. After all, what do we care about power struggles in the remains of the Confederacy?”

“But—” Mallory started to say.

Shane cut him short with a sharp gesture with his left hand. “Don't pretend to have an argument I haven't considered. I know the history of the Caliphate as well as you—by definition. It's moot, anyway. We aren't facing the Caliphate.”

“Then what
are
we facing?” Mallory asked.

“The thing that consumed Xi Virginis,” Shane told him. “The creature calling itself Adam. It has given us an ultimatum. We have roughly sixty minutes left to make our decision.”

“What decision?” Dörner asked.

“Salvation or damnation,” Brody said. “Are we on the side of the chosen, or of the infidel?”

“To follow him,” Shane said, “or pass the way of all flesh.”

Outside the aircraft, the light dimmed as the sun was eclipsed by the band crossing the sky.

“Where are we going?” Mallory asked again.

“As I told you, the only place on this planet where you would want to go. The only place with a ground-based tach-transmitter.”

 

Before Salmagundi had cut itself off, not just from the old Confederacy, but from the other colonies founded around it, it had a up-to-date starport. It built a facility where tach-ships could be repaired and refueled, and a place that could communicate with the rest of the universe. The place was completed but never really used.

When the people of Salmagundi decided to close themselves off, there had been some discussion about destroying the base. It made some of those in power uncomfortable to have even a potential connection to things off-planet. Instead, though, the powers at the time decided to simply restrict access to the site. Over the next century and a half, the port was kept functional but restricted.

Few outside the ruling class realized the place still existed.

“We had ordered your ship to land there, before things started going so badly,” Shane told him. “This site is the only place where we might be able to get a message back to where you came from.”

“Sir?” Mallory barely heard as one of the men in the cockpit called back.

“What?” Shane turned around.

Mallory could hear talking up forward, but couldn't make out the words. When he turned around he looked even more pale and drawn.

“What is it?” Mallory asked.

Shane ignored him as he stepped into the cockpit.

Mallory looked across at his fellow prisoners. Pak looked as if he was barely present. Dörner held his arm while he stared off at a space about three meters off of Mallory's left shoulder.

Brody looked out at the unnaturally dark landscape and whispered, “How can you fight something like this?”

“You don't,” Mallory said.

Brody turned to look at him, “That's kind of fatalistic, coming from a priest.”

“We can pray.”

“You're assuming I haven't been.”

Mallory jerked against his crash harness as the bottom fell out of the transport. The craft plummeted like a brick and bottomed out so violently, and with such a whine from the maneuvering fans, that Mallory briefly thought they had struck the ground.

“What the?” Brody said as Mallory took a glance out the windows. They were still airborne, but they shot by about five meters above the treetops. He saw individual branches whipping by in the twilight. His stomach lurched as they took a sharp banking turn to the right.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Mallory said.

Brody looked out the window, then found himself pressed against it as the ship took another banking turn to the left. “What are we evading?”

“I don't know. But I'm guessing that, whatever it is, it hasn't taken any notice of us yet.”

“Why?”

“Because we're still alive,” Mallory said. “This is a civilian craft, an old one never meant for anything more than search and rescue or riot control. If there's something out there worth evading, if it sees us, it can kill us no matter what kind of piloting we try.”

“You're not making me feel better.”

Shouting erupted from the cockpit.

“What's going on up—” Brody's question was cut off by a gasp as the aircraft descended with a nasty crunch. What little light came through the eclipse- shadowed windows was cut by half as the craft decelerated with an angry whine from the maneuvering fans. Mallory looked out the windows, and to his amazement saw tree trunks speeding by mere meters from the skin of the aircraft.

God, please let us have a good pilot
.

Mallory knew they must have slowed down to a fraction of the speed they had been going in the open air, but the proximity of the trees with their four-meter-diameter trunks made it feel that they had accelerated. Talking was impossible between the sudden violent vibrations from the fans and the sudden jerks as the pilot flew left, right, up, down, avoiding the trees reaching to knock them out of the sky.

They flew through old growth, massive trees far apart from each other, but it still seemed impossible to maneuver, a flying camel through a forest of needles. It couldn't last.

It didn't.

Mallory watched out the window, transfixed, as they rode a three-dimensional slalom through the trees. Then they came close to an ancient monster that must have had a fifteen-meter-diameter trunk. The housing on the left forward maneuvering fan clipped the edge of the tree in a shower of bark and shredded composite. Mallory felt the crunch of the impact in the bench he sat on, shaking the floor of the craft.

It looked as if the glancing blow was only cosmetic. But the vibration through the floor continued and increased in magnitude. The fan housing shook worse, shedding more composite, the vibration turning the edges of the machine fuzzy and indistinct. A high- pitched, arrhythmic whine filled the cabin, and then the fan exploded, sending spinning fragments of itself in every direction, pitching the whole machine in a dangerous dive in the direction of the now-absent thrust.

God must have listened to his prayer, because their pilot avoided an uncontrolled death tumble. Just as the aircraft started to rotate nose down around the pivot of the contragrav providing its lift, the pilot cut power to the contragrav and throttled the fans back enough to turn the tumble into a controlled dive. Once the tumble stopped, the pilot brought the remaining forward fan back up to flatten out their angle of attack. They leveled out so close to the ground that Mallory lost all visibility out the window from dust and debris kicked up by the three still-working fans.