S. Swann - Prophets

“He had me recruit a lot of people . . .”

Including Kugara and Rajasthan? Mallory wondered. “Mosasa did say he brought in the best qualified candidates.”

Wahid laughed. “The best qualified candidates who applied for a dipshit babysitting mission. You see anything in his ad that would appeal to ninety percent of the mercs on this rock? How many hardcore bastards you think apply for security detail on a scientific expedition?”

“Point taken.” Mallory paused as his stomach unexpectedly tried to slam through his diaphragm as the aircar took a sudden dive under a pedestrian bridge. When their flight leveled, he asked Wahid, “So why’d you apply for this dipshit babysitting mission?”

“No offense, Fitz, but that’s none of your fucking business.”

Wahid took a chaotic route leaving Proudhon, weaving loops around and between buildings, and shadowing random cargo haulers both above and below. He also passed though three parking garages. His path was probably proof against anyone following, short of some tracking device on the vehicle itself.

Wahid explained that the latter wasn’t really a problem since he had stolen the aircar less than an hour ago. Mallory decided he had already been on Bakunin too long when he realized that the admission didn’t surprise him.

They shot out of the city, parallel to the mountains, and before Wahid dropped the aircar near the surface, Mallory could catch sight of Mosasa Salvage. It wasn’t hard to miss, with ranks of aircraft stretching across the desert in all directions. It was even easier to pick out now, with a column of smoke rising from the midst of the aviation graveyard.

“Something’s burning.” Mallory said as the aircar fell in its asymptotic dive to the desert floor.

“A couple of missiles took out the hangar,” Wahid said.

God save us, Mallory thought.

Wahid let that sink in as he flew the speeding aircar over the black desert sand at speeds that would have been suicidal within the congested airspace over Proudhon. They shot away from both Proudhon and Mosasa Salvage at this point. The white central towers of the city were tiny in the distance behind them, the pillar of smoke above Mosasa’s business now almost invisible against the morning clouds.

If someone—probably Caliphate agents—had targeted the hangar itself, that meant they had very good inside information.

“What about Mosasa? Is there still a mission?”

“Yeah, there is. Apparently, Mosasa had some information that the Caliphate was interested in what he was doing. He managed to relocate before someone targeted the hangar.”

Did he get the ship out?

Mallory had been expecting something from the Caliphate since he had arrived on this planet. Wahid’s news was almost a relief, the other shoe finally dropping. But beyond the attacks, something didn’t sit right with Mallory. Unlike Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, Father Francis Xavier Mallory had retired a full colonel in the Proxima Expeditionary Forces of the Occisis Marines. Colonel Mallory had as much or more command experience than he had on the ground, and because he’d been in the PEF, he had a lot of ground experience before they let him near a commission. That meant he knew tactics and planning and how to gauge an enemy.

It also meant he thought Wahid’s story made little sense. An enemy with enough intel to target the warehouse had enough intel to keep a watch on the target. It wouldn’t require much investment; just a spotter in the mountains or in one of the high buildings in Proudhon could keep unobstructed visual contact. And for all the technology you could use to obscure various mechanical sensors, Mallory knew no way anyone could hide a tach-ship launch from a trained human eyeball. The distortion of any visual camouflage would be detectable by someone who expected to see it, and any spotters would be expecting it.

Mallory didn’t believe that their attackers were incompetent, and it didn’t seem likely that they had the extraordinarily bad timing to have hit Mosasa after he left with the tach-ship . . .

But Mosasa was an AI.

He knew and planned for it. The ship, the hangar, those had to be decoys . . .

“Where are we going?” Mallory asked.

“The secondary rendezvous point.”

“That wasn’t mentioned in the briefing.”

Wahid shrugged. “Considering what happened to the primary staging area, that was probably for the best. I only knew the place because Parvi gave me the location when she called me.They relocated the staging area to the remains of a bankrupt commune.” Wahid continued, “Parvi called it Samhain . . .”

Samhain, Mallory thought. He remembered the meaning from his theology classes back at the university after he retired from the service. The old Celtic month of November, the pagan tradition that became All Souls Day and Halloween.

The idea of going to an abandoned commune named Samhain of all things, made Mallory feel uneasy in a way that had little to do with potential Caliphate hostilities.

Is that the actual staging area? If the hangar was a decoy, what about us?

Could the primary use of the mercenary team be to draw out the Caliphate? If Mallory’s assessment of the situation reflected reality, Mosasa’s actual site for his Plan B was probably far away from where they were going right now.

Wahid piloted the stolen aircar across the desert barely three meters over the sand, topping three hundred klicks an hour. Samhain was small enough that at the speed they were going, it seemed to appear instantaneously, sprouting from the black dunes. Wahid had to bank severely and turn the aircar in a large loop around the commune before he had decelerated enough to come to a landing.

Mallory knew that outside of the megacorps that dominated the urban centers like Proudhon and Godwin, the main political unit on Bakunin was the commune. On Bakunin, communes were sovereign political entities that he understood, at least on an intellectual level, to be much more diverse than the socialist etymology of the term might suggest. He just didn’t know quite how diverse.

This commune was little more than a village. There were some signs that a dome had covered the site at some time in the past; ocher steel fingers pointed up from the ocean of sand in a rough circle around the perimeter. Within, buildings still stood, beaten an even bone gray by wind and weather. Windows were empty black sockets staring blindly from crumbling facades that once mimicked the Tudor style of medieval Terra.

Wahid parked the aircar in an open stretch of sand that had once been a park, now only marked by eroding statues and long dead trees that clawed, barkless and leafless, toward the rust-colored sky.

Mallory opened the duffel bag on the seat next to him and withdrew the plasma weapon that sat on top. He frowned. It wasn’t much use at long range and sucked energy like an overloaded tach-drive.

“What’s up?” Wahid asked.

“I don’t trust this,” Mallory said. He pulled out a short-barreled gamma laser, replacing the plasma hand cannon. The laser was a matte-black rectangle with an oblong hole cut in one end for a hand grip. Otherwise it was shaped, and weighed, much like a brick. Almost all of that weight came from the power cells; it was as much a power hog as the plasma cannon. However it had the benefit of accuracy, distance, and the ability to overload even military-grade Emerson fields with two or three seconds of continuous fire. He took the laser in hand and shouldered the duffel bag.

“Trust what?”

“Do you think Mosasa wants to risk leading the Caliphate, or whoever, to his real staging area? Does a missile attack on the hangar sound real to you? If they knew what was there, why’d they wait until after the ship lifted off to attack?”