Heretics (40 page)

Mallory didn't doubt their significance. Relevance was another issue.

Dr. Dörner responded to his puzzlement by saying, “I think Shane believed that the Protean referred to the Dolbrians when it said, ‘Find those that came before me.'” She said it as if repeating the original words in a different order might cause her statement to make more sense.

“Mr. Shane is awake?” Mallory asked. “He came out of his coma?”

“No,” Dr. Brody said. “But before he completely lost consciousness he said a few things to Captain Parvi.”

“He did?” Mallory looked at Parvi, who looked even smaller now than when he first met her, withdrawn and distant, as if she were receding toward some spiritual vanishing point. “Why didn't you say something earlier?”

“Because I may have hallucinated the whole thing.”

Mallory looked at the scientists, then back at Parvi. “What you heard must have meant something to these two.”

Parvi rubbed her temples. “Frankly, I'm not sure what he said anymore, I've talked too much about it, so I can't tell if I'm remembering what—” Her hands froze and she muttered, “I'm an idiot.”

“What?” Mallory said.

“The archive recordings on the
Khalid.
All the surveillance should be running whenever the ship's under power. Let me grab Kugara and we can find out exactly what the old man said, memories or not.”

 

Their group, five strong with the addition of Kugara, displaced the three Caliphate techs who had been running the communications for Mallory's recruiting effort. The trio hung back, watching them from by the door.

Kugara pulled herself into the seat by the main communications console and said, “You realize I don't read Arabic?”

Parvi turned to the trio of Caliphate techs. “Can one of you help out translating?”

While they worked to get Kugara access to the surveillance records, Mallory asked Dr. Dörner, “Why the Dolbrians?”

“The Protean's statement,” she said. “The Protean on Salmagundi was the remnant of a probe sent from Bakunin. When we left Salmagundi, we received a message, presumably from the same Protean. ‘Find those that came before me.' What does that mean?”

Mallory shook his head. “I don't think it is particularly clear—”

“Think about it, Father,” Brody said. “Dr Dörner has told me about your university background. You must have touched on the Proteans, their belief system.”

Mallory nodded. “The elevation of reason above all else, the equating of the mind with the soul, the denial of any moral dimension to scientific and technological development—”

Dörner snorted. “So a good Jesuit believes scientific inquiry can be sinful?”

“I said development,” Mallory said, “not knowledge.

And any inquiry done with ill intent can itself be an immoral enterprise. But Dr. Brody was about to explain how we get from Proteans to Dolbrians.”

Brody sucked in a breath. “Well, as distasteful as their practices might be, the Protean cult, as manifested on Bakunin during the era of the Confederacy, did have some moral constraints. They took on no converts that didn't willingly come to them. They were loath to use their technology beyond their self-imposed boundaries, both cultural and geographic. Their colonization efforts, of which this Protean was one, were intended to go far beyond the limits of mankind's expansion both in space and time.”

“Granted,” Mallory said.

“If that's the case, our Adam must be as anathema to them as they were to us. And the Protean's actions on Salmagundi seem to bear this out. It was trying to help us—”

“It was telling us something important,” Dr Dörner said. “It was telling us that what came before it might help us against Adam.”

“So you think it was referring to the Dolbrians?”

“They were the most technically advanced civilization on Bakunin before the Protean commune was established,” Brody said. “And Bakunin is the site of one of the largest Dolbrian star maps ever discovered. There's even a cult devoted to protecting it.”

Mallory hadn't studied the faith of St. Rajasthan in the seminary, but Dolbrian worship was covered extensively. He also knew of it, just as a logistical matter, from his graduate studies in xenoarchaeology. The Dolbrian star maps were politically important artifacts back in the days of the Confederacy, when political power was directly related to how many colony worlds a political faction had. The star maps showed the planets that the Dolbrians had terraformed, and that intelligence granted an advantage to whoever found and translated the maps first.

That all ended with the fall of the Confederacy, which coincided with the discovery of a huge Dolbrian complex under the mountains on Bakunin containing a star map covering a swath of the galaxy larger than any human had ever traveled. The rights to the star map and the Dolbrian complex were granted to the Seven Worlds in return for a diplomatic shield against a Confederacy invasion of the planet.

The Seven Worlds had since become the Fifteen Worlds, the Confederacy had collapsed, and what had been small pockets of cultish Dolbrian worship had become unified, organized, and established their holiest site on Bakunin with the tacit acceptance of the Fifteen Worlds.

“Even if the Protean was talking about the Dolbrian cult on Bakunin, what makes you think this is helpful advice?” Mallory asked.

“The Proteans were on Bakunin a century before there was ever any definitive evidence of a Dolbrian presence on the planet,” Brody said.

“Given their advancement,” Dörner added, “it is likely that the Protean colony on Bakunin had knowledge of the Dolbrian presence beyond what we've ever had access to.”

Mallory sighed. “This is a very tenuous chain of supposition you've built.”

Brody said, “We're not in a position to ignore any possibility.”

“We're also not in a position to waste any resources—”

From the comm console Kugara said, “So is this what you were talking about?”

Mallory looked over, and the main viewscreen now showed a holo image of the
Khalid'
s passenger compartment. The scene was a bloody mess, dead and wounded haphazardly secured to the walls, debris and globules of blood floating in the air.

By the largest cluster of wounded he saw the unconscious figures of Parvi and Shane. Shane looked dead, pale parchment skin spattered with thin blood from the hastily patched hole in his chest. Parvi's white hair was half crusted with blood, and the end of a long braid floated free.

Shane coughed up blood and spittle, which floated free with the other debris in the compartment. The sound was distorted, amplified against the muffled sound of the chaos around him. Kugara manipulated a control, and the cockpit filled with Shane's distorted wheezing.

After another wet, wracking cough, his eyes flickered open.

“I know what this is. I've heard all of it.”

The holo still showed the view from the ceiling above the crew compartment. The sound from Shane's lips was barely audible, but Kugara had managed to tease out his voice and have his whisper thunder from the comm console.

“Somebody, listen to me! Please!”

The crowd around Shane moved in their chaotic dance, not noticing the old man's whispered plea. His head darted around and the barely conscious Parvi turned her head slightly toward him. The filters on the electronic ear were so tight on Shane that Parvi's words were almost impossible to catch, but Shane obviously heard them. He turned his head toward her.

“I know now. I've had time to think and put the pieces together. I have all these old threads of knowledge, and it took this to knock some sense into me. Now I'm probably dying, and all of them are running around. You're the only one listening to me. And you probably don't understand a word.”

He coughed again. “I hear them say ‘Protean.' The Protean was on Salmagundi. The Cult of Proteus would be the only beings who would fully understand what Adam is. What Adam is capable of. The Protean knew what could face Adam. Find those that came before it. Before us. On Bakunin. The ancient ones, relics, the only ones we know of that were as powerful as Adam. Do—” Shane broke off, violently coughing up blood, and his image was soon lost behind the group of people trying to stabilize him.

“I didn't dream it,” Parvi whispered.

“This is still very tenuous,” Mallory said.

“More tenuous than your phantom navy?” Dörner asked.

“They're not allowing landings on Bakunin,” Mallory said. “We can't even communicate with the surface beyond PSDC traffic control.”

Parvi kept staring at the holo. “There may be a way around that,” she whispered.

“Desperate plans are only reasonable in retrospect.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“I will not do nothing.”

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

An impromptu meeting of the equally impromptu command staff gathered in the same cargo bay where everyone had met earlier. It was less crowded now, with just Toni from the
Daedalus,
senior members of the surviving groups of Caliphate and Salmagundi military, Mallory, and Parvi.

Parvi spoke slowly, laying out her plan to reach the surface of Bakunin. As she described the details, she wondered why she was even proposing following the lead of the two scientists. Even though Shane chose her to babble to, she didn't have any particular connection to him. But there was one point where she agreed. She saw little chance of confronting Adam with conventional methods.

She wondered if Mallory thought that if he stood before the gates of hell, God would intervene. In Parvi's opinion, whoever cranked the wheel of the universe had larger concerns than theirs.

When she finished, everyone was quiet for a moment. Finally, Toni said, “You want to do
what?
”

“The PSDC can cordon off approaches to the planet because of the wide perimeter they set. Once a craft is in low orbit, the orbital platforms start having blind spots. The greatest coverage is over the one landmass, an approach across the ice caps and the ocean on the opposite side—”

“That's not the issue,” Toni snapped at her. “It's getting to low orbit.”

“I told you,” Parvi said, “the
Khalid
can tach in.”

“If it was that easy,” said the ranking Caliphate tech, “half of these ships would be doing it.”

“I never said it was easy,” Parvi said. “It's dangerous as all hell.”

“I don't think it's even possible,” Toni said. “Unless you got a magic tach-drive on that dropship, trying to get any accuracy that close to a planetary mass is suicide. You're as likely to tach into the core as you are into low orbit.”

“Actually,” Mallory said, “given the capabilities of that new Caliphate drive, the
Khalid
is probably the only tach-ship within light-years with a nav system advanced enough to do it.”

Parvi nodded. “I think it's better odds than trying to dodge an orbital linac.”

The militiaman from Salmagundi asked, “Is that the real question?”

“What is the question, then?” Parvi asked, even though she knew the answer.

“We are trying to make some sort of stand here. I'm willing to do that, however hopeless, because I saw that thing take apart my home. But now we're talking about throwing away the few assets we do have. At least a pilot and our single armed ship on something that seems even more desperate.”

“We can offer a trade,” Parvi said.

“What?”

“After the people we
need
to take down to the surface, we'll have space for twenty paying passengers.”

Toni shook her head. “I don't believe anyone's going to be willing to take that risk.”

It took less than a day to prove Captain Toni Valentine wrong. Just broadcasting an intent to run the PSDC blockade generated a significant interest even without broadcasting the specifics how. Even after establishing secure channels so that the details could be discussed without PSDC eavesdropping, there were several vessels in a desperate enough state to willing exchange their own ships for a possible ticket groundside.

In the end, by taking eighteen people aboard the
Khalid,
they could get an older Centauri dropship, owned by native Bakuninites so it came more heavily armed than the
Khalid,
a scout vessel from the Protectorate, and a lonely SEC fighter whose AWOL pilot was on the edge of his life support.

With those assets added to a quartet of new vessels converted to Mallory's cause, their command was willing to allow Parvi to make her expedition down to the planet.

All that was left was to select her people for the mission. People willing to take the same risk she was about to. The scientists, Dörner and Brody, were both coming. Parvi wanted to see some way around it. Even if this wasn't strictly a military operation, she still felt uncomfortable shepherding civilians through it. But if they did make it down, they were the ones who had information on Dolbrians and the Dolbrian cult.

Beyond them, she wanted some military support, and support that was familiar with the ground on Bakunin. The place was dangerous in the best of times, and they had no idea what the situation was like on the ground right now. That left her with only one choice for backup.