S. Swann - Prophets

“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.

CHAPTER FIVE

Pilgrimage

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)

Date: 2525.11.05 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

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.