S. Swann - Prophets

The first he had ever seen.

The creature was close to three meters tall, and if Mallory had to guess, he’d estimate mass at close to five hundred kilos, all muscle. It had a feline skull and striped fur and moved with a grace that reminded Mallory of a very well-trained martial artist. It wore only a gun belt.

“Never seen a moreau before?” Parvi asked.

Mallory realized he’d been staring and turned away from the giant cat. “No.”

“Get used to it. If you stick around Bakunin, you’ll see more.”

Hearing the tone in Parvi’s voice, Mallory turned toward her. “You sound like you don’t approve.”

Instead of answering him, she led him to one of the kiosks that dotted the floor here, on the opposite corner of the floor from the moreau.

“This ties into the closed BMU database,” she told him. “You can see live queries entered by anyone in the system, on-planet or off.”

“Off?”

“We have tach-transmit updates on an hourly basis—with a transmission delay, of course.”

“Of course.” It was disconcerting to think that a completely extra-legal entity like the BMU had outposts on other planets with enough resources to run a tach-transmitter. Mallory faced the kiosk and started running a few searches. The interface was familiar, like searching the want ads anywhere else—except the ads here were “team experienced with infiltration and underwater demolition,” “EVA-rated flight crew for Lancer-class drop ship, experience handling pulse cannon/ plasma weapon repair/maint a plus,” “IW hackers needed, good pay/benefits for low-risk industrial espionage . . .”

For the sake of his cover story, Mallory really looked though the ads searching for positions that resembled anything that might interest Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick. He’d gather a list of contacts that he could take back to the hotel. He hoped that his search for discreet off-planet transport would bear fruit before he ran into Parvi again and she asked him about his job search. With all the positions available, the longer he went without signing on with someone, the more obvious it would be that he was looking for something more then a source of income.

He went though a series of random sorts when he caught his breath.

Parvi had been staring at the tiger moreau, but she turned to face him. “Is something wrong?”

Mallory shook his head. “No.”

He didn’t even sound convincing to himself. The deceptions he had trained for with the Marines had involved not being seen by the enemy.

“Just.” He stumbled for words as he composed himself. “It just struck me, looking at all these listings . . .” He turned to look at her and the distress on his face was honest, even if his words weren’t. “And it hit me that my old life’s over. I’m really no longer part of the Marines . . .”

Parvi nodded. “I wish I could say you’d get over that.” She turned back to look at the crowd. The tiger moreau was gone now. “Everyone on Bakunin is running from something.”

Mallory nodded, turning back to face the kiosk. It was hard not to breathe a sigh of relief that she had bought his little improvised speech.

Please God, he silently prayed, let me understand what this means.

On the display, floating near the top of the holo, was a small listing waiting for him to touch it to see greater detail. The current sort was by job location, so various place names glowed brightest, the most common—filling most of the holo—being “undisclosed location.”

Of course that made sense. If you were preparing military action, where you were sending the mercenaries was a valuable piece of intel you wouldn’t release, even to an allegedly closed database run by the BMU. After all, the members of BMU only owed loyalty to you after they were hired.

However, a few ads did give that sort of information, where it wasn’t obviously mission critical to keep it secret. Most of those were prosaic things like jobs as trainers, cargo escorts and security, some of the Information Warfare jobs where geography was irrelevant, jobs as bodyguards or security where the show of force was of more deterrence value, and the one listing that captured Mallory’s attention—

“Team needed to protect scientific expedition to vicinity of Xi Virginis.”

CHAPTER TEN

Heresies

The one thing more corrosive to a culture than a taboo without purpose is having no taboos at all.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.

—DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1465-1536)

Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

Nickolai, now a fully vetted member of the BMU, walked out of a cab on the fringes of the city/spaceport of Proudhon. Dusk was advancing, and the city behind him was already shimmering with light. He had gone through all the union’s testing, and despite the degradation of using his skills for the employ of the Fallen, there had been something sweet about completely dropping his constant restraint and allowing himself to fully exercise his training. He couldn’t help but enjoy the fact that he had demolished the robotic sparring partner they had sent up against him in the armed hand-to-hand exercise.

All the tests had felt less than serious to Nickolai. He didn’t understand how they could rely on tests that measured people when nothing was at stake. His coming-of-age trials on Grimalkin had been much more difficult—and conducted by priests who would maim without hesitation.

If he hadn’t been wary about his new arm, he would have had a perfect score on hand-to-hand combat. With firearms, his score had been less than appropriate for a scion of House Rajasthan, but that had been largely due to new eyes—when he had fixed on a target, he was able to do better than he ever had with a gun, but if he was off, he was completely off. Still, when the bull’s-eyes were averaged with complete misses, his marksmanship greatly exceeded what the BMU considered average.

Judging by the solicitations he had received before his testing was even completed, the Fallen considered him a desirable commodity.

Then that is why we were born, was it not?

The cab flew away behind him, leaving him on a desolate stretch of road that stabbed arrow straight into the desert around Proudhon. The road was stamped with the logo of a company that would have taken a toll from any travelers when this road had a destination in mind. However, the original destination of this highway had been reclaimed by the desert, and the company that built and maintained the way there had similarly vanished.

The road was made of the same grainy ferrocrete that formed most of the landing strips and launchpads in the spaceport/city. Nickolai wasn’t used to walking on the material; the streets of Godwin were of cheaper construction and more prone to cracking. Like the temples of Grimalkin, the roads in Proudhon felt as if they were meant to endure an eternity. Solid, flat, and permanent under the pads of his feet . . .

Though, Nickolai saw, like much of the world of the Fallen, that impression was an illusion. The edges of the hundred-meter-wide strip of ferrocrete no longer retained the sharp edges of the streets in the city. The abrasive black sand ground the edges away, advancing a dozen centimeters in a battle it would eventually win. It might take a century or two, Nickolai thought, but the sand had time.

Flanking the ancient highway, ranks of spacecraft of every size and description marched off in all three directions away from the city. Many of the corpses in this aviation necropolis showed bare metal skin, blasted by wind and the volcanic sand. Most had holes in their fuselages showing where some vital component or other had been removed. The skins that still showed markings were graced by a babel of tongues, most of which Nickolai didn’t understand.