Prophets

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Limbo

Faith is the first casualty of economics.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

A bad peace is even worse than war.

—Cornelius TACITUS (55-130)

Date: 2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

Fortunately for Mallory’s spiritual well-being, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, like 80 percent of the Occisis military, was Roman Catholic. So it didn’t threaten his cover to spend his early morning hours attending the Church of St. Thomas More, the only traditional Catholic Church in Proudhon.

Mallory had discovered that, despite Bakunin’s origin in a strain of socialist anarchism that viewed organized religion with the same zealous hatred as they did the State, the planet’s current incarnation was much more tolerant of the former than the latter. In fact, just searching a directory for a house of worship he had found nearly a hundred “Catholic” churches. Almost all of which represented some splinter faith or apostate creed, ranging from Vodoun variants to a conservative sect that held to Latin service, mortification of the flesh, and the denial of nonhumans into the Kingdom of God.

But the Church of St. Thomas More recognized the same pope Mallory did, and fortunately the recognition was mutual.

The church itself was a windowless ferrocrete-and-steel structure that looked as if it started life as some sort of maintenance structure, perhaps a power substation. The building made up for the lack of architectural detail by being wrapped in a massive mural showing the Stations of the Cross in sequence around the walls of the building. The artist had used some sort of active paint, so each scene looped through a simple animation; in one scene Jesus repeatedly falls under the weight of the cross; in another, a Roman soldier pounds a nail into Jesus’ hand over and over; in another, His body is taken down, repeatedly, never reaching the ground.

Above the entrance, He is placed in his tomb. As Mallory entered, the picture showed Jesus rising and taking a step toward the sealed doorway. Unlike Mallory, the painted Christ never reaches the entrance.

Inside, the layout was more utilitarian; no giant distracting murals, just a large crucifix on the wall above the altar bearing an elongated and strangely antiseptic Christ carved in unpainted black hardwood. Mass had yet to start, and people were still finding their seats on the long pews. Mallory stopped by the basin and crossed himself before finding an unobtrusive seat in the back.

He couldn’t help thinking how appalled this diocese’s namesake would be at the very nature of Bakunin. Mallory suspected that, despite the protests of Bakunin’s socialist founders, Thomas More, the man who wrote Utopia, a man who prized harmony and order, would find on this planet its antithesis.

When the priest came to officiate, Mallory did his best to abandon his worldly thoughts. He didn’t know what was ahead of him, but he had an uneasy feeling that this could be the last chance he would have to receive communion in the Church.

The unease redoubled when he walked back down the aisle after receiving the Eucharist. Sitting next to the aisle, alone on a pew, was Jusuf Wahid. Mallory wanted to ignore the man. He didn’t like the feeling of his spiritual life mixing with the fictitious Fitzpatrick’s.

Wahid gave him no choice.

Mallory walked past Wahid’s pew without acknowledging the man’s presence. However, as soon as he walked by, Wahid stood and slipped into the returning line behind Mallory. “Keep going toward the door,” he whispered, breath hot and sour against the side of his neck.

Mallory tried to gauge Wahid’s intent, but he couldn’t get a feel from his whisper. It could have been a threat, a request, or a plea.

Mallory kept walking past all the pews and went outside ahead of Wahid. As soon as they got outside, Mallory turned around to face him. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Saving our asses, Fitz.” He pushed Mallory’s shoulder, turning him toward an aircar that was parked crooked on the pedestrian walkway in front of the church.

“What are you talking about?”

“Apparently, our boss has a good reason for hiring us.” He ran over to the aircar, pushed back the canopy, and jumped in. “Come on,” Wahid hooked a thumb at the rear seat.

Mallory climbed in and found himself next to a duffel bag. The top was partly unzipped, and inside he could see the barrel of some sort of plasma weapon.

The aircar lifted off before the canopy had closed completely. Looking over the seat in front, Mallory could see a similar duffel bag resting on the seat next to Wahid.

“What’s going on?” Mallory asked.

“Someone has taken objection to Mr. Mosasa’s little field trip. The lady and the tiger were ambushed last night.”

“What? Kugara and Rajasthan? Are they all right?”

Wahid slid the aircar into the frenetic mess that passed for air traffic in Proudhon. The dashboard began a plaintive beeping as proximity alarms began calling for attention that never came. “They’re fine,” he said as he pulled the aircar up in a climb to pass above a slow-moving taxi. “I think the frank bitch might have cut herself. They took out a hit team of at least ten guys with a pair of effing handguns. And they took prisoners. You believe that?”

For some reason, Mallory thought about what Parvi had said last night about Mosasa.

“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?”

Wahid shrugged. “They got there late.”

“Sure, but they knew where Kugara and Rajasthan were.”

“Yeah, I see . . .”

“Professional paranoia, right?”

“Right,” Wahid dug out his own gamma laser from the duffel next to him. “Though if there’s an ambush waiting, they should have targeted us by now.”

“Maybe they aren’t here yet—”

“Or they’re waiting for the others.” Wahid shot the canopy back, letting in a blast of hot dry air. “Let’s get out of the open.”

Mallory stepped out onto the black sand and felt as if he were stepping into the anteroom of purgatory, if not Hell itself. He kept watch with the laser as he pulled the duffel out and shouldered it.

Wahid followed, stepping up next to him. “It’s like a fucking graveyard.”

“Yeah,” Mallory said. He looked over at a trio of pitted statues that dominated the center of the clearing. Most of the fine detail had been worn away, but he could make out enough to see a trinity familiar to him from his theology studies. Three women, one barely adolescent, another obviously heavy with child, and a third, crooked and stooped.

Maiden, Mother, and Crone . . .

This had been a Wiccan settlement. Mallory wondered what had happened to it. He realized that on a spiritual level he was far more disturbed at the emptiness of the place than he was at the original inhabitants’ pagan sensibilities. It felt very much like he was walking on a grave.

Oddly, his thoughts turned to the Dolbrians, whose known legacy amounted to a few monumental artifacts and the planets they terraformed. All those planets, including this one; were they this village writ large?

Was all of humanity living on top of a cosmic grave?

Mallory couldn’t help but feel a slight shiver at the thought.

“See something?” Wahid asked him.

Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, having gone though only the typical public education on Occisis, wouldn’t have any clue about religions other than traditional Roman Catholicism. Wicca and the Triple Goddess would have been lost on the man. So Mallory just said, “No. This place just gives me the creeps.”

Mallory looked at the sky, still red with the too-long dawn of Bakunin’s thirty-two-hour day. Then he scanned the ruins of the village, looking for likely spots that could hide a waiting enemy. There were a number of buildings with good line of sight on the clearing, but he didn’t see signs of anything hostile. One of the blind-windowed Tudors that faced the park and the Goddess trinity sat on a bit of a rise, somewhat removed from its siblings. It would provide the occupants cover and a good view of all the approaches to it.

“Let’s take cover,” he said as he headed for the building.

He was halfway there when it exploded.