Prophets (6 page)

Fortunately, if that hypothetical Caliphate spy took an interest in his arrival, there would be little to John Fitzpatrick that would arouse any suspicion. Ex-Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick had a checkered career with the Occisis Marines that ended with a court-martial convicting him of assault on an enlisted man. Fitzpatrick had been a career man, no family, who had been about Mallory's age and body type.

He was also conveniently serving a twelve-year sentence, allowing the Church to appropriate his identity. He was exactly the type of man who ended up on Bakunin.

The only part of Fitzpatrick's history that had to be fabricated for Mallory's cover was his pardon and release.

Mallory kept his breath steady and his stride unhurried. His training was coming back, and this time mentally counting the rosary did calm his heart rate and his breathing. It helped that he knew what the threats were. Realities were always easer to deal with than his imagination.

The calm was necessary because there was the off chance someone had some sort of monitor pointed at him. Standard security in any sensitive area—and the LZ certainly was that—not only had video and audio surveillance, but had biometric sensors keyed to stress levels from pulse, skin temperature, kinematics, and facial expression. Civilians were mostly unaware of that level of security until they tried to smuggle a weapon into a bank or a bomb into a government building.

As blasé as these security guards appeared, if Mallory's heart level reached a certain level, or his body language said the wrong thing, they would probably escort him into some private room for a little conversation.

Even if nothing resulted from that, it would raise John Fitzpatrick's profile beyond acceptable levels. Because of that hypothetical Caliphate spy, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick needed to be completely unremarkable. Just another bit of human flotsam washed up on the shores of Bakunin—lost in the thousands who came here every day looking for something that only this lawless place could provide.

He walked right by a pair of the guards and into the concourse. He heard a snippet of dialogue as he passed . . .

“You placed the bet. Fifty grams, pay up.”

“You sure it's been a month?”

“Yeah, and Szczytnicki hasn't used deadly force once.”

“Damnation and taxes! You putting tranks in his coffee?”

“Give it up, Hōgai—” The doors whooshed shut behind Mallory, cutting off the guard's words.

The concourse was not exactly what he had expected. He was familiar enough with Bakunin's history, and he had done what research he could manage in the two weeks he'd been given. The whole planet was supposedly a maelstrom of lawlessness and piracy, a reputation that led to certain expectations.

Those expectations didn't include the gleaming concourse that greeted him to the city/spaceport Proudhon. Somehow, Mallory expected the chaos of Bakunin's political climate—an economy constructed around criminal gangs, private armies, and an aggressive social Darwinism that was worthy of the Borgias—to be reflected in its aesthetics. He expected a building choked with street vendors and beggars, a trash-covered update of an ancient novel by Dickens or Gibson.

Instead, he stood on a spotless floor of polished black granite tile edged with stainless steel.

A crystal skylight arced above him, whose individual panes magnified the view above so he could see the ships traveling above Proudhon in excruciating detail. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of vessels visible in the artificially-enhanced sky following so many intricate paths that it seemed a patent impossibility that a single craft could escape a collision somewhere. The fact that traffic flowed at all, without such a disaster, seemed a sign of divine favor.

The concourse was filled with a mass of people in a ground-bound echo of the traffic above. A precise waltz that, however chaotic and patternless, flowed without incident—the people molecules in a turbulent, frictionless fluid.

The floor in the vast space was dotted with tall metallic kiosks, the kind that usually offered directory and comm services. Mallory walked toward one, merging into the fluid crowd.

It could have been a concourse on any of the core planets with a single disconcerting exception. Every person carried a sidearm of some sort. Shoulder holsters predominated, but he saw a fair share of weapons carried on the hip. He saw slug-throwers, lasers, and one plasma rifle slung over a woman's shoulder.

He'd read up a little on the Bakuninite fetish for going around visibly armed, enough that he wore a surplus Marine-issue laser sidearm, but he hadn't really thought what walking among an armed population might feel like. He hoped most of these people knew how to handle all that ordnance.

He was glad for his own sidearm. Not so much out of fear of the gun-toting public, but because the weaponry was so ubiquitous that he began noticing the few people who appeared unarmed. If he'd not walked off the transport with a gun on his hip, someone might have noticed him.

He stepped in front of one of several arched niches in the kiosk and looked at the single-viewpoint holo display it beamed at his arrival. The menu itself was a little overwhelming, much more than the typical listings for currency exchange, vehicle rental, hotel reservations, and the other common traveler's needs. From here he could order up an escort of any given gender and/or species. He could reserve a private surgical unit for procedures lifesaving, cosmetic, experimental, or—anywhere else—highly illegal. He could order a car, or a tank, or a small fighter aircraft. He could have someone deliver a Gilliam Industries manpack plasma cannon in wattages ranging from ludicrous to completely insane. There was a complete directory of mercenaries available for hire . . .

Mallory reached in and touched the holo icon for currency exchange.

Immediately he was bombarded with scrolling data, moving graphs and charts, as if he'd been dropped in the middle of the commodities exchange on Windsor.

Bakunin, stateless as it was, had no single currency. And while there was a de facto standard—everything was nominally tied to the price of gold, so much so that currencies were valued in grams—the fact was, unless you had precious metal in hand, everything floated. He was looking at a hundred different currencies, all native to Bakunin, issued from all sorts of agencies—the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation; the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective; Lucifer Contracts Incorporated; the Rothbard Investment Group; something called the Bakunin Church of Christ, Avenger . . .

While the money from Lucifer Contracts seemed the most stable, Mallory opted for the notes from Proudhon itself. While the charts told him that he could spend offworld currency as readily as anything else, it was something else that could attract attention—and be more readily traced.

A few icon presses later, the kiosk gave him a chit worth about three kilograms in PSDC currency. He pocketed it and started a hunt for a hotel.

Once he left the concourse, and he was free of the landing lights, he could take in the rest of the nighttime city. Once again, the planet Bakunin sidestepped his expectations, making him wish he had been provided more than the two weeks he'd been given to study his destination.

Everywhere else he could think of, there was an attempt to separate a port from the adjacent urban center. There were dozens of reasons for that, from safety and noise concerns to the fact that a geographical bottleneck made regulations easer to enforce on traffic.

None of these issues seemed to concern the urban planners who designed Proudhon—

Proudhon the spaceport and Proudhon the city not only coexisted, but interpenetrated, two metallic neon-outlined animals in the midst of devouring each other. Landing strips became causeways, high-rises became conn towers, and through it all, weaving between the buildings, the ever-present spaceport traffic dodging not only itself, but also aircraft never meant to leave the atmosphere—everything from aircars to luxury tach-ships vied for its own chunk of the air above Proudhon.

Over everything, a cluster of twelve floodlit white sky-scrapers were the only sign of architectural order. Mallory suspected that those were the headquarters of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation.

He had reserved space in a hotel only a few klicks from the concourse. There didn't seem to be a need to go farther afield before he got his bearings here. Bakunin was only a means to an end anyway. It was possible that he could make all the arrangements he needed without leaving his hotel room.

The Hotel Friedman was a retrofitted luxury liner that had grounded and never taken off again. He had only skimmed the description, but it apparently had been outbound from Waldgrave nearly two hundred years ago and suffered mutiny by the ill-treated and underpaid crewmen. During the height of the Confederacy, leaving Bakunin again would invite capture and repatriation of the ship, as well as possible death penalties for the crew members stupid enough to try and fly it away. Instead, the crew sold it to a speculator who then bought the pad it landed on and went into the hotel business.

The reservation chit the kiosk had produced let him into the hotel. His room/cabin wasn't one of the more expensive suites. Like everything else he did, he chose a room based on how likely the selection was to attract attention. He made a point of selecting something in the middle range.

Once in his room, he decided he probably could have saved a few grams of currency and gotten the cheapest room they had.

The Friedman must have dated from a truly decadent episode of Confederacy history, and the current owners had made an extensive effort to preserve the two-hundred-year-old opulence. Walking into the cabin was like walking into a page in a history book; a history book written from the point of view of a post-revolutionary Waldgrave historian who had a point to make about fascistic capitalist excesses.

Every surface in the cabin was detailed in carved hardwoods that age and oxidation had only made richer. All the visible hardware was detailed in engraved brass. And, most lavish—especially when Mallory reflected that this was designed as a cabin in a ship that had to enter and leave a gravity well—was the size. It was really more a suite than a cabin, with three separate rooms. There weren't any windows, but a large holo unit could be programmed to show recorded views of just about any planet in human space, as well as a few that only existed in some artist's imagination.

Mallory set down his duffel bag, found a setting on the holo that actually showed the real-time view of Proudhon outside the skin of the hotel/ship and sank into the leather couch that dominated the living room.

Welcome to Bakunin,
he thought.

A soul's value tends to appreciate considerably after it is sold.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

—FRIEDRICH Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nickolai had
met
Mr. Antonio before, of course, but—thanks to the reconstruction Mr. Antonio had paid for—this was the first time Nickolai had ever
seen
him.

To Nickolai's new eyes, the man looked weak and pathetic even for one of the Fallen. He was thin, with twiglike limbs and a long narrow face. His hairless skin was aged, wrinkled, and dry. What hair he had was white and as thin as the rest of him. He smelled of the end of life. However, as close as this man might have been to death, for Nickolai he just wasn't close enough.

They sat in a room in a Godwin club that sold privacy like Nickolai's old employer sold exhibitionism. The room was sealed to vibration, light, and EM-transmission. Nickolai knew the screens were active because he had felt a disorienting tingle in his new artificial parts when he had crossed the threshold.

Beyond that, the room wasn't quite designed for the type of meeting Mr. Antonio wanted. Leather harnesses dangled from the ceiling, chains dangled from the walls ending in velvet-lined cuffs, racks lined another wall holding leather straps, paddles, and various electrical devices. The dominant piece of furniture was a long padded table with various articulated arms that seemed designed to hold a wide variety of attachments.

Humanity's passion for sin was wide, deep, and more infinitely detailed than any Nickolai had known. Next to the lusts of the Fallen, his own transgressions seemed almost childlike, laughable.

“Are you used to the prosthetics now, Mr. Rajasthan?”

“Yes,” Nickolai said, even though he was privately unsure. Just this morning he had torn the handle off the bathroom door in his apartment, and almost daily he had headaches from looking at a world that was too sharp to these new eyes. However, he wasn't going to admit weakness to one such as Mr. Antonio.

“Excellent,” Mr. Antonio said, in his uncomfortably fluid language. He smiled, oblivious to the aggression he showed to Nickolai with the flash of his teeth.

Although,
Nickolai thought,
perhaps not so oblivious
.

Despite appearances, there were two things Nickolai knew about his human benefactor: the man was not stupid, and he was not weak. It was quite possible that Mr. Antonio knew exactly what was implied with the flash of his own tiny canines.