Prophets (5 page)

“Have you been paid?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Yee said. “Quite handsomely. If you have any further need—”

Nickolai ducked down and walked out the door of the examination room.

Nickolai stood outside Dr. Yee's offices for a long time, facing the city of Godwin. The chaos of noise and scent was familiar, but he hadn't been prepared to
see
the city for the first time. A clot-red dawn sky scabbed over the nightmares of a mad architect. There was no coherence to the blocks, spires, and twisted forms that made up the buildings of central Godwin. Aircars sped by at every level, dodging pedestrian walkways and tubes that seemed to connect buildings at random. What spaces weren't filled by buildings, and traffic and people were flooded by massive holo displays throbbing with colors too saturated to have originated in this universe.

Godwin was an ugly, overbearing city. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

New eyes also made him more aware than ever that he was alone among the Fallen. Thousands of people moved around him. All in his sight were human. He had known their scent and had become used to the dull miasma of fear that followed the sons of men around him.

This was the first he had seen their faces. They showed a palette of expression that was alien to him. Most stared at him. Most gave him a wide berth. Most were as short as Dr. Yee.

Nickolai smiled, and that caused the humans nearest to him to turn away and walk faster.

Eventually, he began the long walk back to his apartments. He could have taken a cab, but few were built with the descendants of St. Rajasthan in mind. Most of the world of the Fallen was too small to fit Nickolai. Occasionally, he would stop and close his eyes, because it was easier to remember his way without the visual distractions.

He had reached his neighborhood on the desolate fringes of East Godwin when he heard a familiar voice call his name.

“Yo, Nick, that you?” The words were uglier in this mouth than Dr. Yee's. It was fitting, because the mouth belonged to an uglier person. Nickolai slowly turned to face the speaker. “Has to be, can't be too many tiger-men this side of Tau Ceti, can there?”

The squat man talking to him had just walked out of a bar rank with the smell of alcohol and human musk. The garish pink holo above the entry spelled out “Candyland” in cascades of undulating pink flesh. It was almost a visual expression of one of the scriptures' names for human beings, “Naked Devil.”

“Well, fuck me! Eyes, too—went the distance, did you?” The odious little man took off a pair of sunglasses, and before pocketing them, Nickolai could see a streaming display showing several views inside the club, where dozens of naked men and women danced for a packed crowd. He was briefly astonished at the clarity of the image, making him realize that his new eyes were an order of magnitude more sensitive than the ones the priests burned out of his skull. The man rubbed the bridge of his nose. “When you coming back to work?”

Nickolai wondered to himself if he had simply passed this way by oversight, or if on a subconscious level he had planned it.

“Mr. Salvador, I gave you my notice.”

Salvador laughed. “ ‘Notice,' he says.” He broke off, coughing. “Really, Nick, I forgive you.”

Nickolai noticed movement out of the corner of his eyes.

“And, in fact, I'm feeling real generous. I'm not even going to dock you for the two weeks you missed.” Salvador smiled at Nickolai. “A blind one-armed morey was more a novelty than a bouncer—but fully functional? That's useful.”

Nickolai could smell the quartet of humans circling behind him. And when he heard Salvador use the ancient slur “morey,” Nickolai knew he had come this way on purpose.

He shifted his weight on his digitigrade legs to lower his center of gravity and positioned his arms in preparation for a confrontation. He looked down at Salvador, who was oblivious to Nickolai's shift in posture or what it meant.

“I no longer work for you,” Nickolai said.

“Nick, Nick, Nick. I cut you slack because you aren't from round here. You don't know how it works on Bakunin. You
owe
me, tiger-boy. You think a cripple like you'd survive half a day in East Godwin without my protection? You think that ends when you get some flesh hacker to make you nice and pretty? No, you work for me until I give
you
notice.”

Nickolai shook his head. “No.”

“Nick, I'm disappointed. For a morey, it seemed you had good sense.” Salvador shook his head. “Don't mess him up too bad.”

The four figures behind him converged. Nickolai didn't need to see them to understand their positions. He could hear the heavy footfalls, and he could smell their sweat. Four males, large ones, and their strides carried a mass beyond their size. Either powered armor or heavy cybernetic implants, and because he heard no servos, Nickolai thought the latter.

He pivoted on one digitigrade leg and crouched to face his attackers. He also did something he had never done while bouncing for Salvador—

He extended his claws.

Four perfectly matched enforcers. Hairless, with muscles so clearly delineated that they might have been taken for dancers inside the club. Time slowed as adrenaline sharpened most of his senses. His vision was already sharper than it ever had been, even in the thick of combat training.

Two grappled him just as he turned, wrapping their arms around his waist, aiming to take him down and make him vulnerable to the others' attacks. Nickolai was already braced against their momentum; they were of secondary importance.

Primary was the man swinging a pipe at his new eyes.

Nickolai grabbed the man's wrist with his left hand and thrust up with his right, at the elbow. Nickolai could feel a jarring sensation in his shoulder as his new arm connected. However, whatever Nickolai might have felt was dwarfed by what his attacker must have felt when his elbow—cyber-enhanced or not—gave way in the wrong direction.

The man's gasping intake of breath had barely begun to turn into something more urgent when the second attacker brought his own club to bear. Nickolai blocked the blow with his new right forearm. The impact shuddered through his whole body, but the new limb withstood it.

That man stopped a moment, as stunned by the lack of reaction as if he had been hit himself. Nickolai did not give him a second chance. His own cybernetic hand struck out, claws first, into the man's neck. It was a blow developed by the warrior-priests of Grimalkin that simultaneously crushed the wind-pipe and opened the jugular. The man instantly dropped his weapon to clutch his throat.

The two men grappling him had just realized something was amiss. They weren't warriors, and they weren't prepared to deal with one.

Nickolai brought his right elbow down on the back of one's neck, dropping him, and as the last one let go, Nickolai brought the first attacker's weapon—still clutched in that man's hand—down on the last one's skull.

The fight had lasted five seconds.

Nickolai turned around to face Salvador. The man had backed up to the doorway of his club and was holding a cheap laser handgun pointed at Nickolai.

“You fucked up bad here, Nick.”

It was Nickolai's turn to laugh. “Mr. Salvador, I am a scion of the House of Rajasthan. I have been trained to shed blood since before I could speak, and it is the highest sacrament of my faith to offer the blood of the Fallen to God. Do you think I cannot kill you before you decide where to aim that toy?” Nickolai struck with his new arm. The laser spun out into the darkness and Salvador gasped, cradling a lacerated hand. Nickolai leaned in toward him, so their faces were only centimeters apart. “Do you forget why we were created?”

“You can't do this, Nick. People will find you.”

“My name is Nickolai.” Nickolai stood up. “And, despite the pleasure it would give me, I am not going honor you with death at my hands.” He glanced back at the four attackers, all quite literally fallen now. “And if you value these men, you should get them medical attention.”

Nickolai turned and walked away.

“This is a big mistake, Nick.” Salvador shouted after him. “You're going to regret it!”

“I think not,” Nickolai growled to himself in his native tongue.

The risks we see are often those we've already overcome.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.

—FRANCOIS De LA ROCHEFOUCAULD (1613-1680)

He had left the spaceport on Occisis as Father Francis Xavier Mallory two weeks after meeting with Cardinal Anderson.

Somewhere, in the logs of the Centauri Alliance, Father Mallory continued on a missionary journey to the Indi Protectorate. And over a year from now, when the transport made planetfall on Dharma over 160 light-years from Occisis, someone identified properly as Father Mallory would disembark and begin some good works in the name of Mother Church.

The man who no longer was Father Francis Xavier Mallory had slipped off the long-distance passenger ship before it tached out of the system, when it made an unscheduled maintenance stop on the fringes of the Occisis planetary system. By a carefully engineered coincidence, a private freighter was docked at the same orbital maintenance platform having fixes made to its life-support system.

The ancient Hegira Aerospace freighter had a manifest that listed a number of destinations around the core of human space: Ecdemi, Acheron, Styx, Windsor . . .

Bakunin, typically, was absent from the itinerary. It was a planet that was rarely logged as an official destination. However, being one of the core planets, it was much closer than Dharma. A single blink of the tach-drive and nineteen light-years and twenty-seven days vanished.

The longest part of the journey was cruising in from the fringes of the Bakunin planetary system. The captain explained that, since there was no real traffic regulation around the planet, it wasn't safe to tach in too close to the planet. Having one ship tach in or out too close to another while their own drives were still active could cause dangerous power spikes in the engines. Even though all tach-ships had damping systems to both quickly cool down active drive after a jump and control any dangerous spiking, most planets still had strict regulations giving timetables and “safe zones” for all scheduled traffic.

In the case of Bakunin, this captain thought it was just safer to tach in several AU out from the planet, where the chances of interacting with another tach-drive was close to nil.

Forty days after he left, Mallory walked out of the Hegira freighter onto the surface of Bakunin. He walked out into the chill night air, onto a dusty landing zone lit by the glare from dozens of landing lights. The night sky was a black-velvet sheet, the only stars were the engines of spaceport traffic, and the skyline of the city itself was a near subliminal shadow beyond the lights.

The stark-white light was cut briefly by orange as an antique shuttle took off from a pad about half a klick away. Mallory spent a moment watching the ascent. Graceful it wasn't. The shuttle was an insignificant lumpy fuselage on a column of flame. The roar of the ascent made Mallory's molars ache. The orange light faded long before a slight warm breeze carried the burnt chemical smell of the shuttle's engines toward Mallory. Within a few seconds, another, more distant craft headed skyward.

What little glimpses he had of traffic told him that the spaceport extended way beyond the little slice he could see. One bright mote had to be aiming for a landing pad a dozen klicks away.

He lowered his gaze toward the concourse adjacent to his LZ. He could only make out the doors and a few windows beyond the glare of the landing lights. The rest of the building was nothing but a black silhouette against a blacker sky.

Since no one had taken it upon themselves to tell him where to go, Mallory shouldered his single duffel bag and headed there.

His arrival was nearly surreal in exactly how much he was being ignored. No one asked for his identification, no one was running a security checkpoint, not so much as a customs office. The Proudhon Spaceport Security personnel stood on the fringes of the LZ, clustered next to the lights with a calculated disinterest that was conveyed even at a hundred-meter distance.

It would almost seem that the effort spent manufacturing the identity of John Fitzpatrick, ex-Staff Sergeant in the Occisis Marines—down to removing and reapplying unit tats—had been wasted.

However, the manufactured John Fitzpatrick knew better.

Proudhon Spaceport Security might avoid all the forms of customs and immigration usually tended to by a nation-state, but that didn't mean they didn't know who and what arrived and departed the allegedly stateless rock of Bakunin. Proudhon was the only spaceport on the planet, which gave the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation considerable latitude on what they were able to require of ships arriving and leaving. Those ships at least pretended to provide passenger and cargo manifests, and the PSDC at least pretended it wasn't enforcing import, export, or immigration restrictions on allegedly sovereign individuals. But whatever the pretense, the PSDC had a
lot
of antiaircraft—ground based and orbital—backing up whatever it did decide to enforce.

So, while no one
asked
for John Fitzpatrick's carefully constructed passport, that didn't mean that no one knew John Fitzpatrick was here. As he walked across the LZ toward the concourse building, he ran the worst-case scenario through his head—a Caliphate agent in place and knowing of his arrival.