Prophets (41 page)

Kugara stepped back from the fence and looked around. “Left or right?”

“Most of the buildings were clustered on the eastern end.” He pointed.

“Right it is, then.”

After walking a minute or so, Nickolai said, “This is recent.”

“I noticed. Those trees are still bleeding whatever they use for sap where they cut the overhangs.”

“What are they protecting?”

“You know, I don't really give a shit. We obey the signage and get the guards to call in the cavalry.”

Nickolai looked through the fence as they walked, but the woods were still too dense for him to see much of anything on the other side. “Then what?”

“What?”

“What do we do then?”

She spun around. “You know what I want? I want you to shut up.” She turned and marched off along the fence. Nickolai followed without asking any more questions.

Not vocally, anyway.

The fact was they were stranded nearly a hundred light-years away from Bakunin. The
Eclipse
was most likely destroyed, along with their nominal employer. Nickolai doubted that a far-flung colony like this would be willing to expend the time and resources to return them—if the Fallen here were even willing to deal with a nonhuman like him. . . .

Dying would have been simpler.

There was a gate only a few hundred meters farther along the fence. It opened to a rough road that was little more than a muddy track. There were signs of a couple of heavy tracked vehicles traveling this way not too long ago. The weight of them had left trenches six to ten centimeters deep in the earth. He saw some sign of foot traffic around the gate, but none that went more than ten meters away from the fence. All of the tracks were the club-shaped boots of the Fallen.

A guard shack sat about five meters inside the fence, to their right. The gate itself was designed to slide aside for the large traffic on the road. Inside the sliding gate was a smaller human-sized doorway, hanging open.

“Hello?” Kugara called out.

Nothing stirred. The guard shack was apparently empty.

She looked around. “I don't get it.”

Nickolai took a deep breath and shook his head. “No humans here, not for hours. But . . .”

“But, what?”

“I smell old fires, explosives. Human blood.”

“Jesus. And they just leave the door open?”

“Maybe there's nothing left to protect.”

Kugara pulled her small flechette gun and pointed it at the ground. “If you would do me the favor?” She nodded to the open gate.

Nickolai supposed that he should be grateful that she did him the favor of at least making the pretense of asking. He walked over to the door. There was some logic to being the experimental subject here; any traps were going to be scaled for a human intruder and might not affect him as badly. Even so, he suspected that tactics was only a secondary consideration in having him take the lead.

He pushed the gate with his artificial hand, and it swung inward. He had to crouch and step through sidewise to avoid touching the frame of the door, which could still be charged.

No traps were sprung on him, no sudden stun fields, and no guards emerging from the trees. Nothing happened other than leaves rustling in the breeze and the door slowly creaking shut. He walked over to the guard shack. It was a small temporary structure with one-way windows, barely twice as wide as he was; just tall and deep enough for a human to stand comfortably inside.

Around back was the entrance, which hung open like the gate. He opened it, and no one was inside.

“Nickolai?” Kugara shouted, still on the other side of the fence.

“No one's here!” Nickolai shouted back from behind the guard shack.

There wasn't room for him inside the building, but its shallow depth put the control panel within easy reach. He touched the panel and called up a series of small views of the perimeter fence. A few more taps, and he was looking at a series of views, presumably from inside the fence. He saw a number of temporary structures, and what looked like a landing area, but no people and no vehicles.

Also, many of the buildings showed signs of withstanding some sort of firefight. The area between the structures showed debris and shrapnel.

He heard Kugara approach him, but he was still startled when her voice came from near his right elbow.

“What the
HELL
is that?”

It only took a moment for him to realize what she was talking about. A camera had just panned to bring into view something that didn't belong here. Something that didn't belong anywhere, as far as Nickolai was concerned.

The camera panned from a series of temporary prefab buildings to something that Nickolai couldn't classify as a building or a plant or a geological feature. It was a twisting crystalline structure that seemed to grow out of the ground and repeatedly fold into itself as it reached up into the sky. The camera kept panning over more geometric forms that seemed to have been born out of the hallucinations of a Paralian mathematician.

Nickolai stared at the images in the small holo and couldn't turn them into anything more than pure abstractions. If the shiny forms held a function, he couldn't discern it.

“What is it?” Kugara repeated.

“It must be what they were fencing in.”

“Is it some sort of natural formation?”

He shook his head. “There's no sign of anyone here. If these are the comm channels,” he tapped on a quiet part of the console removed from the security cam display, “there's no talking going on around here.”

“So we have some sort of firefight, and an evacuation.”

“That's what it looks like.”

“And
that.
” She gestured toward the holo that was panning back across the crystal enigma.

Nickolai nodded. “And that.”

“It would be just our luck to make landfall in the middle of a war.” She stepped back and gestured down the road with her gun. “Well we should check out exactly what kind of mess we're facing. I'm almost glad our flare gun failed.”

The small outpost nestled in an oblong clearing in the woods, one that
had
been some sort of impact site. When they walked from the woods to the clearing itself, Nickolai could see the signs in the trees. Many were blackened, and the massive hexagonal plates that passed for bark had sloughed off the trees that still stood at the perimeter, revealing a dull-red interior that seemed to be a sign the tree was dying. In front of the wounded sentinels, their broken comrades had been piled into deadfalls on the edges of the clearing.

The clearing itself was populated by two ranks of temporary buildings that marched down toward the opposite end of the clearing, where the site turned alien and crystalline. Seeing it with his own eyes, and not through a holo camera, Nickolai could see something he hadn't noticed through the security cameras; the buildings showed more combat damage the closer they got to the crystal. The buildings directly adjacent showed severe burning, shrapnel and blast damage. The abstract geometry of the crystals appeared untouched.

Nickolai could smell the remnants of explosives and old fire stronger than ever. He could also smell the scent of a human being.

“In front of us,” he whispered, “in the crystals, our one o'clock.”

Kugara turned to face that direction, and he heard a gunshot from some sort of slugthrower. The source was impossible to pin down precisely. The crystal structures vibrated in sympathy with the sound and contributed distorted echoes.

“Drop the weapon!” The accent was odd and distorted by the same crystal echoes, but it was understandable.

Kugara looked at him and lowered the flechette gun. That wasn't enough for the sniper. “I said drop it!”

Kugara tossed the gun on the ground in front of them. “We aren't part of what's happening here. Our lifeboat crashed—”

“Who are you? What is that . . . creature?”

“I'm Julie Kugara, my companion is Nickolai Rajasthan. We are crew members from the tach-ship
Eclipse
. Our lifeboat landed in the woods southwest of—”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?”

“What?”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?!”

“No,” Nickolai answered, interrupting Kugara.“The
Eclipse
was based out of Bakunin.”

“Bakunin?” The voice's tone changed, becoming less confrontational. “There's still a Bakunin out there?”

“As far as we know.” Kugara said. “We've been in tachspace for over six months.”

Nickolai saw a shadow move in the crystalline landscape. It resolved into a relatively young human male holding a shotgun. The man was shorter than Kugara and wore a pair of tan overalls. He walked with a bit of a limp.

“You two are really from Bakunin?” He brushed some hair from in front of his face, revealing a tattoo in the middle of his forehead. He was staring at Nickolai. “You talk?”

“Yes.” If it wasn't for Kugara's presence, he would have leaped and disabled this man already. He could tell this youth had no military training just by the way he held his shotgun and ignored Kugara's discarded weapon as he walked toward them. Considering how much attention he was paying to Nickolai, Kugara could probably clear the distance between them and disarm him before he realized she had moved.

For a moment, the man didn't seem to be paying attention to either of them, then he said, “Moreau, right? From the Seven Worlds?”

“It hasn't been the Seven Worlds for a hundred and seventy-five years,” Nickolai said. “It's the Fifteen Worlds now.”

“Of course it is. We've been out of touch.” He walked around them, keeping what he must have assumed was a safe distance. “A lot of you on Bakunin now? Since it became ‘officially' part of the Sev—Fifteen Worlds?”

Nickolai wondered what was going on. When this man first saw them, it seemed clear he had no idea who or what Nickolai was. Now he seemed to be aware of the history of Nickolai's people, at least up until one hundred seventy-five years ago. He wondered if he was in radio contact with someone else. He didn't see signs of the man wearing a radio, but that didn't mean anything. He could have anything implanted, could be in contact with anyone on the planet as far as they knew.

“There aren't very many; most are exiles, like me.”

“Bakunin's still a great place to run away from something?” He turned and looked up at Kugara, who was a good head taller than he was. “That your story? You running away from something?”

“I retired.”

“From?”

“Dakota Planetary Security.”

The man paused and took a step back, looking at her. He whispered to himself. Nickolai heard his nearly-subvocalized words, “Oh, boy, Gram.” Then, after a pause, “Go right ahead.”

There was a strange and abrupt shift in the man's body language. His grip on the shotgun changed, so he was now a lot more able to bring it to bear quickly. The cock of his head, and even his facial expression seemed different.

Most different was the voice. It suddenly seemed older, more confident. “Forgive me if I'm a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man's land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you're doing a hundred light-years from what's left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”

War does not exist when all parties have perfect knowledge.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

—Sir WILLIAM Osler (1849-1919)

Alexander sat in his impromptu command center within the Ashley Hall of Minds, trying to improve the glacial response time of the Salmagundi government. Even in the face of his coup, and his direct control of every police department, security agency, and militia on the planet, events conspired to move faster than Salmagundi could react.

On the screens before him, he could see the recon team securing the last lifeboat site. Three of the six lifeboats had been unoccupied, and they had secured the occupants of two others. The teams had sterilized the sites, using plasma grenades to reduce the lifeboats themselves to slag.

It was the kind of direct action the Triad spent days debating, worrying over its effect on the general population. As if the presence of offworlders and offworld artifacts would be somehow
less
disruptive.

At least that concern was moderated by the fact that they had already evacuated the civilian population from the forest east of Ashley in preparation for using their nuclear stores on Flynn Jorgenson's alien invader. The evacuation was fortunate on many levels. It helped ensure that no civilian agency came across the lifeboats before the militia got there—even with the intolerable delay caused by the Grand Triad's debate.

Alexander idly wondered if they were
still
debating.

The preliminary abbreviated debriefing conducted by the on-site commander with the four
Eclipse
crew members they had retrieved indicated that there were two lifeboat occupants who still remained at large. They were his immediate concern. He needed them in his control or confirmed deceased. His militia scouts had identified the lifeboat the missing two had landed in, and after slagging the wreck, they now engaged in a search pattern, spiraling out from the landing site. It concerned Alexander, because it placed a militia team in uncomfortable proximity to Flynn Jorgenson's Protean anomaly. He had the nuclear strike on hold, but the other militia teams had already retreated out of the red zone. Alexander did not want one of the militia teams in harm's way if he had to launch the attack. They weren't an expendable resource.