Heretics (23 page)

He dodged past it, jumping over the tendrils that were withdrawing from the disassembled carbines. Beyond was a hallway that led to what Mallory assumed was the main communications control center. Beyond the end of it he heard growling and shouting.

By the time he reached the doorway, he could smell the blood.

The world seemed to slow down as he stepped across the threshold—his old marine implants amplifying what they could with his fatigued, abused body. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar man holding a shotgun. The stranger was taking a step forward, toward the scene of the carnage.

Mallory tackled the man, deflecting the shotgun and forcing the man to the floor. Then the two of them slammed into the ground, Mallory pinning the stranger beneath him. The shotgun tumbled a meter or so out of the man's reach.

Mallory turned his head to see Kugara bent over Nickolai. The tiger sat on the floor, propped up against a chair. The right half of his body was so soaked with blood that the fur appeared a solid, glossy black. Kugara shouted, “No!” as she grappled with the tiger's left wrist. Nickolai clutched a gun, small and toylike, in his massive hand.

Mallory heard the supersonic whine of a needlegun firing, accompanied by the smell of vaporized metal and charred flesh.

“
Nickolai!
” Kugara's voice sounded so raw that Mallory's throat hurt in sympathy. “No, you shit! You—Flynn! Tetsami! Help me here!”

Mallory could see the side of Nickolai's face, and that itself was too much to look at. A massive wound cut across his face, between his brow and the bridge of his nose, leaving an ugly hollow where his eyes had been.

If it had been a suicide attempt, it had been a horribly poor one, because Kugara screamed, “Now! He's still breathing.” She finally turned toward Mallory. Her eyes widened. “Mallory?”

“Kugara, what—”

“
Get the fuck off of Flynn and help me!
” she screamed.

Mallory got off the man and grabbed the dropped shotgun. He looked back toward the doorway and saw that two of the unarmed militiamen had followed him.

He yelled out, “Medic!” hoping that the Salmagundi militia made a practice of supplying their soldiers with first aid equipment.

The black-clad pair took a step into the room and took one look at Nickolai and froze. “What the—”

With the helmets covering their faces, Mallory didn't know who spoke. He swung the shotgun in their direction and shouted, “Help him!”

The pair paused a beat. Then they both reached for their belts and pulled out small white packages. They ran up to Kugara, who was still futilely trying to keep pressure on the massive shoulder wound. Their moves were oddly synchronized, and Mallory had the thought cross his mind:
If they have other people in their skulls, how many do they have in common?

Kugara didn't bother asking who these men were or where they had come from. She started shouting orders at them, and to their credit, they didn't hesitate in carrying them out. One worked on the facial wound, the other on the shoulder. They sprayed emergency bandages into the gaping wounds, the white turning pink as it mixed with Nickolai's blood.

“He's in shock,”

“How much blood volume was lost?”

“How much blood volume does this thing have?”

“His
name
is Nickolai.”

“Damn it, the wound's too big, I'm out here.”

“You have to—”

“Grab that bleeder!”

Mallory looked back at the hallway, and the rest of the team were being ushered into the room by the enigmatic black figure that had greeted them. The last two still held intact laser carbines, for all they were worth.

The two men helping Kugara didn't wait for her to say anything. One of them yelled, “Thomas, Kyle—get out your medkits and get over here.”

Mallory watched, slowly lowering the shotgun. The black-clad militia did what they could to stabilize Nickolai. They got the wounds sealed, and—one after the other—they plunged canisters against Nickolai's torso. The small, fist-sized canisters were unfamiliar in form, but Mallory knew what they did. They were small packets of highly oxygenated blood substitute. Of course they were designed to keep a human victim from crashing from blood loss. Nickolai not only had probably twice the blood volume as the average man, but appeared to have lost a bigger fraction of his volume than the units were designed to cope with.

They used all six on him, and even Mallory could tell his breathing was getting worse.

“I'm losing his pulse!” one of the men said.

“No!” Kugara shouted. “We can't lose him.”

Mallory had forgotten about the black humanoid. When it spoke, the voice sounded like the angel of death.

Kugara turned and screamed at the thing. “Fuck you. Fuck you and your other. We need to help Nickolai!”

The entity, whatever it was, paused, as if it didn't understand Kugara's words.

“I've lost his pulse!”

Kugara pushed the men away and straddled Nickolai's chest. She started doing compressions.

Kugara ignored him, stopping the compressions to move over to Nickolai's mouth and perform rescue breathing. The black figure started walking toward her. The militia stepped away from Nickolai's body. Mallory moved forward, unsure what he would be able to do to this thing that could withstand sustained fire from four laser carbines. The shotgun wasn't going to do much.

Kugara raised her mouth from Nickolai's and looked up at the thing looming over her. Her face was so pale that it was hard to believe the blood covering her wasn't her own.

“You want our help, help
him
.”

“What the hell?”

“To hell with his consent! You can fix those fucking widgets for Tetsami, fix him!”

Kugara leaped off of Nickolai's unmoving chest and ran to Mallory. She grabbed the shotgun from his hands before he was sure what she was doing. She leveled the shotgun at the alien thing and spoke in a flat tone that chilled Mallory's blood. “You're going to fix him, you Protean monstrosity.”

“Fine,” Kugara said, and pumped a shell into the tach-comm. A display holo exploded in a shower of sparks and fragmented electronics.

“Kugara!” Mallory yelled, “What are you doing?”

She pumped another shell into the shotgun and shot another round into the tach-comm. “You want to phone home? Fix Nickolai! Now.”

“You must stop!”
Black tendrils flowed out of the thing's legs like a hellish shadow reaching for Kugara.

She stared at the thing and said, “What did I consent to, Protean?”

The tendrils stopped.

“You can defend yourself?” Kugara loaded another shell into the shotgun with a metallic chunk. “But that's it, isn't it? So here's your choice. Fix Nickolai, attack me, or watch the tach-comm go bye-bye.”

“Kugara,” Mallory whispered, “we need the tach-comm.”

The militiamen who still had carbines were coming to the same conclusion, leveling their weapons at Kugara. She aimed the shotgun at the tach-comm again, oblivious to the lasers pointed at her, or beyond caring.

To Mallory's surprise, the black thing, the Protean, said,
“I cannot make him as he was.”

“Whatever you can do, do it
now!
”

The Protean knelt over Nickolai's body and placed its hands on his chest. The hands deformed into a flowing webwork that spread across Nickolai's body, covering him in a black net. The threads thickened and pulsed, closing the holes in the net, until Nickolai was completely contained in a pulsing black cocoon.

“Christ preserve us,” Mallory muttered.

After a few moments, the cocoon reversed itself, flowing back into the thing's hands. When the black became a pulsing webwork withdrawing from Nickolai's body, Mallory noticed that dozens of threads withdrew from holes in the floor around Nickolai's body. The prone tiger was surrounded by an outline of holes in the ferrocrete floor.

When he saw the web withdraw from a new right arm that hadn't existed moments before, Mallory answered his own question.
Raw material
.

He had known, as soon as Kugara uttered the word, “Protean.” But it hadn't truly sunk in until now. The realization ignited a primal fear, one that was worse than the fear associated with AI, or the technologies that were used by Salmagundi to replicate the minds of its citizens. The wars mankind fought with genetic engineering and with thinking machines were awful, but understandable.

The kind of heretical technology he saw in this figure of blackness went beyond those. The misuses of this kind of self-replicating nanotechnology had taken more lives than the other two combined. When the terraforming of Titan went wrong, it left nothing recognizable on the surface. A million people gone at once, over a billion total in the years afterward from accidents and attempts to contain the spread of the technology.

And those that worshiped at the altar of Proteus had, despite everything, embraced the changes that the technology had wrought within them.

When the Protean stepped back from Nickolai's body, the tiger appeared unscarred. Even the face was rebuilt.

Nickolai's chest moved with a regular rhythm. Kugara approached him and knelt to place a blood- soaked hand against the now-pristine fur on the tiger's neck. She rested her fingers over his carotid and her shoulders shook weakly as she said, “Thank you.”

Kugara looked down at Nickolai's face, touching the side where he had fired a gun into his own skull. Still unconscious, he didn't move when she lifted the lid on his left eye.

The eye was completely black, a featureless orb mirroring the blackness of the thing that had repaired him.

“Can he see?” Kugara asked, staring into the solid blackness of Nickolai's new eye.

For the next fifteen minutes, the communications center was a scene of barely organized chaos. Once Nickolai wasn't in crisis, the Salmagundi militia started balking at being ordered around by Kugara, at least until Flynn, the native who'd been carrying the shotgun, explained that they were all trying to do the same thing here: get a tach-comm message off, warning about Adam. In Flynn's case, he called Adam the “Other.”

It seemed an apt name.

Flynn was also Tetsami, one of the founding members of Salmagundi, and someone who had helped build the systems for this facility.

The presence of Flynn/Tetsami made Mallory wonder at God's providence. The presence of the Protean made Mallory wonder if he had truly lost his way. He couldn't help but wonder at his own path, when his goals coincided with something that was unquestionably Godless, if not pure evil.

He stayed with Nickolai, since he wasn't much help with the repairs. A few times, Mallory placed a hand on Nickolai's right arm, trying to feel some sort of distinguishing feature. He couldn't feel any. The only truly obvious sign of what had happened was, when he examined both arms, he could tell that the right one was an exact mirror image of the left, down to the markings on his fur, and a few incidental scars.

“It's on-line,” Kugara said from across the room. “We got the tach-comm running.”

Flynn closed the control panel where he had replaced the last component. “So now we need to set the transmit destination.” He looked at the Protean. “Who do we call?”

“Uh, we can't do that,” Flynn said.

Mallory swore the floor shook with the Protean's words. He stood, and two militiamen reached for their useless laser carbines.

“No,” Flynn said, “They don't exist anymore. The Protean commune was wiped out when the Executive Command from the old Confederacy shot an orbital linac at it.”

“They've been gone for nearly two hundred years.”

The Protean shrank into itself. Its voice seemed to crack.
“That was the only chance. They could have fought against the other. Without them it is only I. It is lost.”

“To hell with that,” Kugara said. “We got this thing running. We're going to transmit somewhere—”

Mallory walked up to her. “I have some coordinates where you can aim this.”

She looked up at him. “You're going to call the pope?”

“It's why I was sent here.”

She nodded. “Hell, if they're expecting a call from you, maybe they'll take all this seriously.”

“Never stand between an armed man and the exit.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Not the end of the world? It's always the end of the world!”

—MARBURY SHANE (2044-*2074)