Prophets (46 page)

“Sir, a militia aircraft is requesting permission to land.”

“Which one?”

“Militia Transport 0523, piloted by Commander Huygens.”

That was the one carrying the surviving offworlders. “Yes. Have the ground crew secure the landing area. I don't want anyone within a hundred meters of that aircraft. I'll be down there momentarily.” He stood up and looked at the officer. “Pass down authorization to all the regional commanders to use their discretion in defending their areas. I have no idea how long we'll still have centralized command and control.”

He turned to leave.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“What about the rest of the Triad?”

Alexander paused. They were still locked in the conference room, out of contact, probably quite aware they were prisoners now. “Send a man in to brief them. And if, for any reason, you lose contact with me, let them go.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander left for the landing area.

“What did they nuke?” Dörner asked, her voice shaking.

“I don't know,” Mallory told her. For all they knew, they had landed in the midst of some planetary conflict. It would explain the armed rescue.

What disturbed him was how close that blast seemed to be to where Kugara and Nickolai's lifeboat had landed. Even if they weren't in the immediate blast radius, the area was all wooded, primed for deadly firestorms.

If they were lucky, they'd have been rescued by another of these transports.
But they were heading to rendezvous at lifeboat five . . .
Mallory prayed that they weren't hiking through the forest when the bomb went off.

Only partly comprehensible radio traffic leaked in from the cockpit.

“I think we're landing,” Pak said.

Mallory looked back out the window and saw their aircraft maneuvering for landing at the outskirts of a small city.

From the segment of the city he saw, he'd guess population at around a hundred thousand. The city itself was laid out in a radial design around a park that surrounded a tower that loomed three times higher than any other building in the city.

Size and placement, more than architecture, made him think of a cathedral in a medieval European city.

The other thing he noted was there was no visible damage. The only outward sign that they might be in the midst of some sort of conflict was the fact the streets seemed almost empty.

The craft hovered, and after more indecipherable radio traffic, it descended. As soon as the machine rocked back on its landing gear, a soldier stepped up and drew the massive side door open, letting in wind and the painful whine of the transport's fans as they powered down. One of the men stood in front of the three of them. Mallory didn't need to see the man's face behind the visor to know they weren't supposed to move.

Behind their guard, the rest of the soldiers disembarked from the aircraft. From the small view Mallory had of the LZ, he could see that those soldiers were filing out to join a cordon around the whole landing area. A last soldier joined the medic in lifting Brody's stretcher. The pair carried Brody out of the aircraft.

Dörner stood up. “We need to go with him!”

The last guard turned his weapon so its barrel was pointed at Dörner's abdomen. Mallory took her arm and pulled her back to her seat. “He's getting medical attention. There's nothing you can do.”

She yanked her arm away. “Keep your hands off me.” However, she remained seated.

“Someone's coming,” Pak said.

Mallory leaned a little to the side so they could see past their guardsman. There was someone coming though the cordon. The man wasn't in uniform. Instead, he wore a white collarless shirt and black pants under a white topcoat that hung near to the ground and trailed behind him like a cape. The man was bald and was old enough that his age had become completely indeterminate. Somewhere over seventy years standard.

There was no hair on his head, and his brow and scalp were marked by a series of tattoos, each roughly about ten centimeters square. All were abstract designs, self-contained, and each apparently unique. He walked up to the doorway and said, “You're dismissed.”

Their guard came to attention, turned to the newcomer, nodded, and marched out of the aircraft. The newcomer pulled himself up into the aircraft and faced the three of them.

“What have you done with Dr. Brody?” Dörner said.

“The injured man? He's being tended to.”

“We need to see—” Dörner began.

The man cut her off with a gesture. “Please, some courtesy. This is my planet, at least for the moment. And you are trespassing.”

“Our ship suffered a catastrophic failure,” Mallory said. “We were coming here for help.”

“And the other ships?”

“Other ships?”
Dörner and Pak exclaimed at the same time.

“I have at least one hundred fifty spacecraft confirmed, before they took out our satellites.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You are going to tell me their intentions.”

Mosasa had said that the Caliphate would be massing whole
fleets
. They were here? Now?

“Why is the Confederacy here?” The man repeated.

“Not the Confederacy,” Mallory said. “The Confederacy doesn't exist anymore.”

“Who, then? Who did you bring here?”

“I think those ships are from the Eridani Caliphate. They are going to want to stake a claim on this section of space.”

“You think,” the man faced Mallory. His mouth formed a hard line. “
You think?”

“I'm as surprised by their presence as you are.”

“I find that hard to believe. You would have me believe you are not a party to an invasion fleet? The first offworlders to arrive in a century?”

Mallory shook his head. “You can debrief us separately. We can give you all the details you want.”

“I will.”

“They haven't attempted contact with you?”

“They—”

The radio in the cabin squealed with static and started its incomprehensible babble again. Almost simultaneously, one of the guards stepped up to the doorway. He held a small comm unit.

“Sir, we're getting an unauthorized transmission.”

The man took the comm; the volume was high enough that Mallory could hear it.

The voice was familiar. The last time he had heard it, it was quoting Revelation.

No, Mallory thought, it was not the Caliphate. It was something much, much worse. . . .

No escape is final.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

None are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

—JOHANN WOLFGANG von Goethe (1749-1832)

“One aircraft,” Nickolai said.

The world went white, then red. The vibration threw him on the ground as he realized that there was no way he should be aware of hitting the ground. He landed on his side and felt the ground beneath him rumbling, oscillating in a great sine wave under his good arm. Around him there was a great groaning, as if the planet itself was in agony.

The light faded to red and he saw a distinct edge, a hemisphere engulfing them, marking the limit of the light, the red saturating everything outside.

Then the light faded a bit more and he could see the shadow of one of the nearby buildings. It stood nearly at the outside edge of the hemisphere, which was the only reason he could see it.

Nicolai watched the building disintegrate in slow motion, the shadow of the building dissolving. More detail became visible, even as his eyes adjusted. Flames rolled across the ground, too slowly.

“What is this?” he whispered.

The fireball crawled by, wrapping itself around the hemisphere.

The slow rumbling of the ground ceased, and the world stopped screaming its death cry. He pushed himself up and got to his feet.

“What is this?” he repeated.

Behind him, he heard the voice of Flynn/Tetsami. “They nuked us. The bastards nuked us.”

“How . . .” Nickolai raised his artificial hand before him. A nuclear blast should have fried the electronics. And his eyes—an EMP should have destroyed them and probably a good part of his brain, too, as closely as they were wired to it.

Kugara echoed him, “How are we still alive?”

“The Protean,” Flynn/Tetsami said. “It has an Emerson field that's far beyond anything else . . .”

Kugara put a hand on his arm, the real one, and asked, “Are you all right?”

He watched the slow-motion holocaust outside the hemisphere surrounding them. He shook his head and said, “No.”

“Are you injured?”

“No. Leave me alone.” He stared out and wondered if it would be possible to walk through the barrier. Her hand stayed on his arm. “Please?”

Her hand dropped and he heard Flynn/Tetsami say, “Leave him be. It's a bit much to absorb. As far as I can tell, we're safe in here.”

He heard them walk away.

It took minutes for the hemisphere to fade. He stood at a razor-sharp barrier between the untouched earth and a sheet of black glass. The air was rank with the smell of fire. The air itself seemed to have burned, filled with a fine gray ash that limited visibility and made his nose itch.

Probably poison to breathe
.

Not that he cared much. He had walked to the edge of hell, and now at least it looked the part. The only sound was a distant crackle that he suspected was the forest around them burning to the ground.

He coughed and wondered if the slow suicide of standing here was preferable to walking into the Protean den. He was certain that the structure would offer shelter from the radiation and the fallout. But at what price, he didn't care to guess.

Then he saw a humanoid shadow moving through the fog of smoke and ash. He coughed again, and tried to focus his eyes to better resolve the shadow, but suddenly his new eyes didn't follow instructions. He blinked and shook his head, and saw the shadow approaching from another angle.

His military training leapfrogged all the idle emotions he'd been having. The enemy had dropped paratroopers into the blast zone. He needed to take cover and warn Kugara and Flynn/Tetsami. They were the only ones armed. He turned toward the Protean crystal—

And only saw more gray ash and an approaching humanoid form. He turned around.

He glanced back toward the first figure and realized something. There was only one shadow, fixed in his field of vision wherever he looked or turned his head. The approaching shadow moved with his gaze, left or right, up or down.

He heard a gentle clapping as the figure finally emerged completely from the gray haze around him. Mr. Antonio, his image anyway, stood in front of him, softly applauding him.

“You have done me proud, Mr. Rajasthan,” he said. “You have delivered Mr. Mosasa to a just and appropriate end.”

“How are you here?” Nickolai whispered, hoarsely.

Mr. Antonio tapped the side of Nickolai's head, next to his right eye. “I never left you.”

“Why?”

“To see as you saw, my good servant. I see you desire your freedom, but not quite yet.”

“I did as you asked.”

“And more. But you have seen evil, have you not?”

Nickolai nodded.

“Then please, be well and bide your time until I tell you how that evil is to be dealt with.”

Nickolai stared into the effigy of Mr. Antonio, who he knew was not really there, and realized that he had no choice.

“Excellent decision, Mr. Rajasthan. In time you will see yourself first among your kind.”

“Nickolai, Nickolai!”

Nickolai opened his eyes to Kugara's voice. He was momentarily disoriented, his last memory was talking to the image of Mr. Antonio in the midst of the ash. Now he looked up at Kugara's face and above her a shining crystal ceiling that seemed to twist itself into some fractal vanishing point.

He sat up and asked, “What happened?”

“The shield dropped, and you collapsed.”

Nickolai felt his temple, and thought about the eyes that were wired deep into his brain.

“Are you all right?” Kugara asked.

“No,” Nickolai said, “I don't think so.”

Before declaring victory over your opponent, make sure you are playing the same game.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Everyone is expendable.

—Dimitri OLMANOV (2190-2350)

Yousef Al-Hamadi walked down a hallway of unpainted metal. He didn't carry his cane because the microgravity of Khamsin 235, like all the 732 asteroid-sized bodies that passed for Khamsin's moons, was too slight to require it. Khamsin 235, while not nearly the largest, was just dense enough to have gravity strong enough to prevent a human being on its surface from jumping into orbit under his own power.

It still was weak enough that he quickly got into the habit of holding onto the ubiquitous guardrails that lined every corridor; otherwise an errant step could send him headfirst into the ceiling, bad leg or not.