Prophets (17 page)

Parvi flew the fighter around the perimeter of the smoldering remains of Samhain, watching her sensors for any potential backup for the hostiles. But no new contacts appeared on any of her screens, and as she orbited the burning commune, the contacts she had already acquired slowly began graying out.

Poor bastards,
she thought. The two squads that had died down there were almost certainly fellow mercs. It was possible that she could have recruited them herself.

When she was certain the area was secured, she sent an encrypted burst message to Mosasa and slowed the fighter to come in for a landing near the two remaining live contacts.

The fighter slowed until it was stationary, hovering above the smoke on neutral buoyancy contragrav. She lowered the power to the contragrav, and the ship began slowly sinking through the smoke.

It settled softly on its landing gear about a hundred meters from Wahid and Fitzpatrick. They were together in the one clearing free of burning wreckage, but she could see they hadn't escaped unscathed. Fitzpatrick lay on his back, Wahid bent over him, the contents of an emergency medkit scattered around them.

“Damn,” she muttered through clenched teeth. She didn't know if she was more pissed at herself or at Mosasa.

She popped the canopy as the fighter powered itself down. When she jumped down into the sand, Wahid had turned toward her. He leveled a gamma laser at her.

“You?” he sputtered.

“Is Fitzpatrick all right?”

“What the fuck were you and Mosasa doing?” he yelled across at her.

“Is he all right?”

“Yeah, a building exploded in his face. He's fucking wonderful!”

“There was a squad of—”

“You think I'm blind?” Wahid kicked something in the sand at his feet. A half-melted gauntlet arced toward her, landing palm-up between them. A blackened splinter of bone still poked from the wrist. “I saw a whole fucking army waiting for us. I want to know why the fuck they were here, and why the fuck your AI-loving boss decided it was such a fucking great idea to send us here.”

Parvi didn't know what to do to defuse the situation. She tried to change the subject. “How's he injured?”

“Just a little shrapnel from some friendly fire.” Wahid started walking toward her, the laser aimed squarely at her midsection. “Good old Fitz had you all figured out, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“The shits that you blew to hell. They knew the hangar, they took it out, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why the fuck weren't we in it when they blew it up?” He shook his head. “Hell, why the fuck didn't a sniper with a missile take out the aircar when I drove all so trusting into Mosasa's little rendezvous?”

“I don't know.”

“You think your boss does?”

“I—”

Parvi's answer was cut off by a subsonic rumble. Above them, the smoke swirled into a vortex centered above the open desert beyond Parvi's fighter. The tendrils of smoke twisted and parted, revealing a massive, blocky form that was still slowing to a stop on the strength of massive maneuvering jets. The aircraft's nose was blunt, narrow, and sloped backward to mold into a hundred-meter-long wingless body that managed to look stubby despite its size. The skin of the craft was a patchwork of random paints, patches, and sealant in various shades of gray and brown. It was ugly as hell, and looked nothing like the sleek tach-ship Mosasa had parked in the hangar for the benefit of his new employees.

Wahid stared at the descending cargo ship and seemed to have some trouble deciding where to point the laser.

Inside, Parvi sighed a little in relief. “Why don't you put the laser down and help move Fitzpatrick.”

“What is that?”

“That's our ship,” Parvi said.

The barrel of the laser pointed down, toward the sand. “But what about—”

Parvi walked past him, toward Fitzpatrick. “Save the questions for Mosasa. I just work here.”

Individuals have free will. Societies do not.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

—SAMUEL Johnson (1709-1784)

Mallory woke up from a nightmare. The memory of it faded nearly instantaneously, leaving him with a vague impression of Junta loyalists and a burning church. He opened his eyes and saw a bulkhead curving over him. He felt the vibration of engines running somewhere.

“You awake now, Fitz?”

“Uh,” Mallory pushed himself up from the thin mattress he'd been sleeping on. He rose too fast and almost tumbled out of the bunk before he realized he was in low gravity. His stomach did slow rolls as he looked up and saw the small chrome pipes set in the ceiling.
Not gravity . . .

There were three methods to get some form of “gravity” on a space vessel, none of which were gravity per se. The first, and the most natural feeling, was constant acceleration. Next best was rotating a large container and placing the floor on the outer surface.

Neither worked well when designing a ship to enter an atmosphere.

The last method was perhaps the most nausea-inducing. Contragrav drives had been around a while, relying on a repulsive force inherent in some exotic forms of matter. It wasn't true antigravity, any more than a vectored thrust aircraft, but a kilogram of contramatter would repulse normal matter with a force several orders of magnitude greater than gravity. It had been used as lift for aircraft for centuries. Somewhere along the line, someone realized if they channeled dense plasma from a ship's contragrav drive though manifolds in the ceiling, it could provide a nearly-even downward force through any part of the ship you wanted. And, since the main power requirement of the contragrav drive was creating the exotic matter in the first place, it was actually less expensive than constant acceleration and cost less design-wise than rotating large chunks of the ship.

But it didn't
feel
normal.

Wahid had been bending over him, a small hypo in one hand. Wahid stepped back as far as the small cabin would allow, and Mallory realized that his left bicep was stinging. He rubbed his arm and looked at Wahid. “What did you inject me with?”

Wahid looked a little sheepish. “A little stimulant. You've been out for a few hours.”

Mallory nodded. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” he looked around the tiny ship's cabin.

“Yeah.” Wahid responded to Mallory's curious looks. “Mosasa showed up finally, lucky us.”

“The fighter?”

“That was Parvi.”

“His own air force?”

“You haven't been on Bakunin long, have you?”

Mallory shook his head.

Wahid laughed, “Well, welcome to Bakunin, where any mother's son can grow up to run as large a tin-pot army as he can afford. And Mosasa can afford quite a bit.”

“He can afford more than us,” Mallory said.

“Yes, I can.”

Mallory turned to see Mosasa standing in the doorway to the cabin. He wore a gray jumpsuit, and the ship's lighting seemed to give the scales on his tattooed dragon an unhealthy green shimmer. He looked at Mallory, then at Wahid. “I can afford to pay well. But I only pay for what is absolutely necessary.”

Mallory stood to confront his employer, but he couldn't do much more than crouch on his feet with Wahid already standing in the cabin. “Was it necessary to send us to that ambush?”

“Yes, it was, Staff Sergeant
Fitzpatrick
.”

Mallory froze, wondering if he had misheard the emphasis on his alias. He wondered if Wahid heard the same thing that he had . . .

If he had, Wahid didn't show it. “We deserve an explanation.”

“Perhaps,” Mosasa said. “For now, come forward to the cargo hold, so you can meet the other members of the expedition.”

Given recent experience, Mallory had been expecting more mercenaries. Instead, waiting for them in the brightly lit cargo hold along with Nickolai, Kugara, and Parvi, was a five-member scientific team. Four of the five wore the same kind of gray jumpsuit Mosasa wore and were seated with Mallory's three fellow mercenaries in a semicircle facing a small dais.

“Please sit,” Mosasa told them, and Mallory and Wahid took the two open seats.

Mosasa stood next to the dais and introduced the new members of the expedition.

Dr. Samson Brody was a hefty black man with a bushy gray beard and a deeply lined face; Mosasa introduced him as a cultural anthropologist. He easily looked the oldest of the group. The youngest-looking of the team was the linguist, Dr. Leon Pak.

More problematic was the xenobiologist, Dr. Sharon Dörner. She was tall, blonde, and came from Acheron. Like Occisis, Acheron was a core planet of the Centauri Alliance. Given the interrelationship between xenobiology and xenoarchaeology, and the focused nature of both fields, the Jesuit xenoarchaeology professor, Father Francis Xavier Mallory, knew of her. Worse, he had
met
her,
twice
.

Dr. Dörner had given guest lectures several times at St. Marbury University, and Mallory had attended all of them. Once he had spent twenty minutes talking about the nature of the Dolbrians with her at a reception afterward, and five years ago he actually had the honor of introducing her.

It took every scrap of will Mallory had not to let the panic show in his face. Fortunately, Dr. Dörner showed no sign of recognizing him. There was little reason she should. Professionally, she would have met hundreds of people like Father Mallory: teachers, students, fellow scientists. There was no reason one professor should stand out in her memory.

Mosasa continued with introductions, apparently oblivious to Mallory's sudden discomfort.

The last human of the group, the data analyst, didn't have the titular “Doctor” before her name. She was a thin reed of a redhead named Rebecca Tsoravitch.

“Our last team member is a physicist and a mathematician. Since his given name is unpronounceable to a human palate,” Mosasa said, “he has adopted the human name Bill.”

Mallory had studied for six years at both seminary and the university after his retirement from the Marines. He had studied about the few alien races that human beings had come across in their travels to the stars. Of them all, the Paralians were the most important and influential, especially to anyone residing in the Centauri arm of human space.

The Paralians had been discovered back in the dark ages of the Terran Council. Travel to the stars had been a brutish business, a dangerous one-way affair through manufactured wormholes. When the Paralians had been discovered, the various human colonies had just begun to stabilize and trading among themselves. When the Centauri Trading Company had opened a wormhole above Paralia, they hadn't only found an ocean-covered planet with a tolerable atmosphere, they had found natives.

Natives who, despite being planet-bound and unable to survive at a depth less than ten meters of their oceans' surface, had developed mathematics beyond human comprehension. Within a few short years of first contact, discussions between human scientists and Paralian mathematicians discovered that the Paralians could model the universe in near-miraculous ways; models that led directly to the development of the tach-drive, which led in turn to the disintegration of the Terran Council and the rise of its successor, the Confederacy.

Despite having studied them, Bill was the first Paralian Mallory had ever seen in person. Until now, he'd never known any to have ever left the depths of the oceans on their homeworld.

Bill dominated the team, not just in terms of novelty, but in sheer bulk. Not only was his body itself half again the size and mass of Nickolai's, he also resided within a transparent sphere five meters in diameter containing water under the extreme pressures that existed at Bill's native depth. The sphere was mounted on a mechanical cradle that rested on six robotic limbs that added nearly another meter to the height of the whole apparatus.

Within the sphere, Bill floated. Mallory had heard Paralians described as squid-dolphins, but that was really only a halfhearted approximation of a description. The front of Bill's body resembled a dolphin in the same way and for the same reason that a dolphin resembled a shark, or a submarine.

Like a dolphin, or a submarine, he had a nose; the terminal end of a muscular bullet-shaped body that narrowed to a blunt point at the top—or the front, depending on how Bill was oriented. The muscles on his body defined three lobes that were symmetrical around Bill's long axis, a subtle bump that was emphasized by mottled cobalt blue stripes that followed the length of Bill's body, darkening the farther they traveled from his “nose.”

Each bump supported a complex fin that was nearly a meter long and half that wide. Above, or in front, of the fin, each lobe supported a trio of black pits near Bill's nose, each about the size of Mallory's fist.

The “squid” part of the typical description was even further removed from actuality. Bill's body did end in appendages that could be called tentacles, but probably had more in common with an elephant's trunk. Three muscular limbs emerged seamlessly out of the lobes of Bill's body, mottled blue, continuing the striping of his body.

Each limb split into three long fingers about a third of the way down its length. The “fingers” were boneless and flexible, and could deform their shape. If Bill needed to propel himself in the open ocean, he could hold his trio of limbs together and flatten those “fingers” to form a tail fin that would be even more reminiscent of a dolphin.