S. Swann - Prophets

He heard them walk away.

It took minutes for the hemisphere to fade. He stood at a razor-sharp barrier between the untouched earth and a sheet of black glass. The air was rank with the smell of fire. The air itself seemed to have burned, filled with a fine gray ash that limited visibility and made his nose itch.

Probably poison to breathe .

Not that he cared much. He had walked to the edge of hell, and now at least it looked the part. The only sound was a distant crackle that he suspected was the forest around them burning to the ground.

He coughed and wondered if the slow suicide of standing here was preferable to walking into the Protean den. He was certain that the structure would offer shelter from the radiation and the fallout. But at what price, he didn’t care to guess.

Damned or not, out here at least my soul is still my own.

Then he saw a humanoid shadow moving through the fog of smoke and ash. He coughed again, and tried to focus his eyes to better resolve the shadow, but suddenly his new eyes didn’t follow instructions. He blinked and shook his head, and saw the shadow approaching from another angle.

What?

His military training leapfrogged all the idle emotions he’d been having. The enemy had dropped paratroopers into the blast zone. He needed to take cover and warn Kugara and Flynn/Tetsami. They were the only ones armed. He turned toward the Protean crystal—

And only saw more gray ash and an approaching humanoid form. He turned around.

Surrounded.

He glanced back toward the first figure and realized something. There was only one shadow, fixed in his field of vision wherever he looked or turned his head. The approaching shadow moved with his gaze, left or right, up or down.

He heard a gentle clapping as the figure finally emerged completely from the gray haze around him. Mr. Antonio, his image anyway, stood in front of him, softly applauding him.

“You have done me proud, Mr. Rajasthan,” he said. “You have delivered Mr. Mosasa to a just and appropriate end.”

“How are you here?” Nickolai whispered, hoarsely.

Mr. Antonio tapped the side of Nickolai’s head, next to his right eye. “I never left you.”

“Why?”

“To see as you saw, my good servant. I see you desire your freedom, but not quite yet.”

“I did as you asked.”

“And more. But you have seen evil, have you not?”

Nickolai nodded.

“Then please, be well and bide your time until I tell you how that evil is to be dealt with.”

Nickolai stared into the effigy of Mr. Antonio, who he knew was not really there, and realized that he had no choice.

“Excellent decision, Mr. Rajasthan. In time you will see yourself first among your kind.”

“Nickolai, Nickolai!”

Nickolai opened his eyes to Kugara’s voice. He was momentarily disoriented, his last memory was talking to the image of Mr. Antonio in the midst of the ash. Now he looked up at Kugara’s face and above her a shining crystal ceiling that seemed to twist itself into some fractal vanishing point.

He sat up and asked, “What happened?”

“The shield dropped, and you collapsed.”

Nickolai felt his temple, and thought about the eyes that were wired deep into his brain.

“Are you all right?” Kugara asked.

“No,” Nickolai said, “I don’t think so.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Conversions

Before declaring victory over your opponent, make sure you are playing the same game.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Everyone is expendable.

—Dimitri OLMANOV (2190-2350)

Date: 2526.6.10 (Standard) Khamsin 235-Epsilon Eridani

Yousef Al-Hamadi walked down a hallway of unpainted metal. He didn’t carry his cane because the microgravity of Khamsin 235, like all the 732 asteroid-sized bodies that passed for Khamsin’s moons, was too slight to require it. Khamsin 235, while not nearly the largest, was just dense enough to have gravity strong enough to prevent a human being on its surface from jumping into orbit under his own power.

It still was weak enough that he quickly got into the habit of holding onto the ubiquitous guardrails that lined every corridor; otherwise an errant step could send him headfirst into the ceiling, bad leg or not.

The fact he was here at all was exceptional. He headed the Caliphate’s balkanized intelligence community, which meant that he was placed as far away from actual operations as one could be and still be an intelligence officer. He collected data, set priorities, and gave orders to implement the policies and objectives of the Caliphate government.

It had been years since he had so much as debriefed a field operative. The fact that he was present at this facility was an anomaly. The officers here, a complement of fifteen men, had no clue that he had been coming until his ship radioed for clearance to dock.

Not only was he not officially here, this facility didn’t officially exist. In any bureaucracy the size of the Caliphate, there were endless black holes and cul-de-sacs where money and resources could drain away without any accountability. While Yousef despised the corruption and petty agendas this bred within the government, he was not above using such techniques for his own purposes.

As long as such purposes served the Caliphate.

The officers here only knew this place as Detention Facility 235. Even they had no clue that, ultimately, the knowledge of this place’s existence was limited to them, Yousef, and a few of his trusted deputies. Even the engineers who had designed and built Facility 235 had no clue what moonlet, or even what star system, Facility 235 was being built in.

It existed so that Yousef could interrogate persons whose imprisonment might prove otherwise problematic. It was a prison that could hold, at most, a half dozen people.

At the moment, it only held one. One whose questioning he didn’t trust to anyone else.

A mess of my own making, he thought, I assumed too much.

If there was anything he hated, it was being manipulated. It had become clear to him in recent months that not only had he been manipulated, but the entirety of the Caliphate had been, through him.

At least I caught her. But the thought was little comfort, with all the Caliphate’s functional Ibrahim carriers nearly a hundred light-years away.

He stood at one end of a long air lock at the end of the corridor. Next to a massive door, indicator lights flashed red, then yellow, then green. Finally, the automated door opened with a pneumatic hiss.

The air lock beyond didn’t lead outside; instead it was a continuation of the corridor, a hundred meters long. It was an additional layer of security, as this section of corridor was only pressurized when someone needed to walk from the operational side of the facility to the actual prison. Normally the corridor lacked atmosphere, and the environment in the prison was completely separate from the guards’.

When he walked through the door on the opposite end of the corridor, the lights cycled again as the corridor depressurized behind him. And, for the first time in six months, he breathed the same air as Ms. Columbia.

He pulled himself through the corridor by the handrail so quickly that his feet barely touched the floor. His path ended in the main interrogation room at the heart of the prison. It was little more than a control console before a number of display units. Three could be seated at the controls, and there was room for about half a dozen spectators in back.

Right now, it was just him. His first task, once he seated himself, was to ensure it remained that way. He sealed the room, made sure that all the recording facilities were off-line, and switched all monitoring equipment onto a closed circuit that ended at the walls of the prison.