S. Swann - Prophets

I’ve been among them too long.

“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.

And the galling thing was that what it implied was correct. In the palace halls on Grimalkin he might have seen fit to scar someone for such an expression—much less one of the Fallen. However, here he was, in service to the naked devil himself.

“Mr. Rajasthan?”

Nickolai realized his attention had wandered, which was disturbingly unlike him. “Forgive me, sir. I was reminded of Grimalkin for a moment.”

If Mr. Antonio noticed how forced the honorific sounded, he showed no sign.

“I understand how it is being stranded in an alien land.” His smile faded. “Perhaps more than you’d know. But if you would please return to the present moment, however unpleasant the venue?”

He set a case down on the padded tabletop between them.

“The time has come for you to repay my generosity.”

“What exactly do you require of me?”

“Your services as a mercenary.”

Nickolai said nothing. There was little to say. He had agreed to the devil’s bargain. He could almost hear the priests laughing at how far he had fallen, down to prostituting the sacred craft of the warrior.

“I need an agent to attach to a private expedition. You are going to be that agent.” He turned the case around and opened it.

“How did you acquire—” Nickolai began, but cut short the outburst.

“A symbol of your service, Mr. Rajasthan. A token from he who gave you succor when you were shunned.”

He knows exactly what this means, Nickolai thought.

In the padded case was an antique slugthrower. The design was old, as old in fact as the design of Nickolai’s species. However, the handgun was obviously of a post-exodus model. The ancient humans who had designed Nickolai’s ancestors for warfare never would have bothered to add gold plating, scroll-work, or mother-of-pearl to something they saw as strictly utilitarian. They certainly never would have engraved quotes from scripture—not that the scripture in question existed at the time the first of these guns had been manufactured.

The 12-millimeter firearm Mr. Antonio had was one that belonged in the ceremonial guard in the temples and palaces on Grimalkin. It had probably been blessed by the temple priests.

Nickolai remembered well when he had passed his first trial as an adult of House Rajasthan. After twelve hours of uninterrupted sparring with priests and acolytes, he had limped, bruised, bleeding, undefeated, up the 367 steps to the cenotaph of St. Rajasthan. At the top, before the statue of the first speaker of his faith, his mother had presented him with a weapon much like the one Mr. Antonio showed him.

The words she spoke were not in the corrupt tongue of the Fallen, but came from the scriptures of his faith:

This is a symbol of your service, my son. A token from He who gives you succor when you are shunned.

Years later, when the priests had come for him, they had taken the gun. They had told him it had been melted down. It had become unclean from his touch.

Now, Mr. Antonio was not only returning his eyes and his arm but, in some sense, his honor as well. In another sense, he was taking all the remnants of honor he had left.

Could he accept the kind of debt this represented?

Nickolai looked into Mr. Antonio’s eyes and knew that the deal had already been made, and the debt went deeper than any material accounting. The man he now served was just making the deal explicit in terms he knew Nickolai understood.

Nickolai reached over and picked up the weapon. It was too large for any human to handle comfortably, but it rested perfectly in Nickolai’s new hand. The weight felt good, as if it completed the reconstruction of his missing limb.

Mr. Antonio smiled.

“So how do I become this agent you require?”

“You will need to join the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. That will give you the contacts to apply for the position I need you in.”

Nickolai sighted down the barrel of the new weapon, nostrils flaring with the scent of gun oil. “You are certain that I will be hired for this position?”

“Mr. Rajasthan, I have no doubt of it.”

Date: 2525.11.07 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

It was like he had told Mr. Salvador, “Do you forget why we were created?”

Nickolai began to understand why his ancestors were created. Why he existed. Not just the knowledge of what scriptures and history taught, of how mankind—the fallen creation of God—had the arrogance to create thinking creatures to serve man, to praise man, and to give glory unto man.

Nickolai had known that he was descended from creatures designed to fight in wars that man didn’t have the stomach to fight himself. He had known that when all the petty human governments coalesced into the Terran Council that mankind had renounced their creation and cast it out, exiling it to Tau Ceti at a time prior to tach-drives when the only interstellar travel was through a manufactured wormhole, effectively one-way.

He knew where he had come from, but on some level he hadn’t understood it. He didn’t understand until he found himself bound in service to the false god, man. Until he found himself retracing the steps of his ancestors.

This was why he was created—and this was why that creation was such a great sin.

But he had pledged himself, so he walked the path that Mr. Antonio had set for him. And that path was very well prepared.

There was already an explanation of why Nickolai was searching for work as a mercenary, and how he had come by prosthetics that cost much more than his income from Mr. Salvador would have allowed. Any investigation would show that the reconstruction was paid for by one of Godwin’s many loan sharks—a Mr. Charkov. This debt to Mr. Charkov could not be paid on a bouncer’s salary.

To add verisimilitude to the fictitious story, any money Nickolai would receive beyond basic living expenses would disappear directly into an anonymous account that could, with effort, be traced to Mr. Charkov.

So, as dawn crawled over the slums of the city of Godwin, Nickolai walked into an unfamiliar quarter of the city. The Godwin where he had lived in exile had been a city that smelled of smoke, sewage, and crumbling ferrocrete, its sound a mélange of arguments in every possible human language.

Here, west of central Godwin, the streets no longer smelled of garbage and rotting architecture. While the air was still rank with the stink of the Fallen, it didn’t stick to his fur. The streets were broader and less crowded, and the cacophony of human voices was less aggressive.

Nickolai walked, because a taxi would be uncomfortable and expensive, but also because actually seeing the human hive of Godwin was still a novelty. His vision with his digital eyes was an order of magnitude sharper than his real eyes had ever been and worth the occasional headache. He could read the holo-script crawling up the side of buildings five or ten klicks away. He was able to see the enigmatic human expressions on the drivers of the aircars soaring above him.