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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Divine Intervention
God favors the side with bigger guns.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
There is only one decisive victory: the last.
—KARL von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)
Date: 2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Vijayanagara Parvi flew Mosasa’s Scimitar fighter over the desert north of Proudhon. The fighter was a stealth design with an EM profile an order of magnitude smaller than her contragrav bike, despite having thirty times the mass and a thousand times the power plant. The black delta shape slid through the atmosphere like a monocrys scalpel through muscle.
She kept thinking about Fitzpatrick’s questioning last night.
“Did Mosasa tell you to recruit me?”
“Yes, you poor bastard,” she whispered to the desert whipping by the windscreen. “And he told me to order Wahid to take you to Samhain.” The inhuman bastard not only thought moves ahead, Parvi thought, but entire games ahead. It was barely an hour after missiles had taken out his tach-ship and his hangar when Kugara and Rajasthan dragged a bloody mercenary back to him. Mosasa hadn’t even bothered to question the man. He had simply ordered the guy to report back to his employers.
One of the things Mosasa had the man report back was the coordinates of the secondary rally site. The one she had sent Fitzpatrick and Wahid to. She had no idea if Wahid or Fitzpatrick would survive to see her arrive. Though she suspected that Mosasa would know.
The navigation unit beeped at her, letting her know that Samhain was just coming over the horizon. The forward LOS sensors started retrieving data, overlaying it on her heads-up display and several secondary monitors. Out the window, a green wire-frame holo mapped onto her view, picking out the spot on the horizon that marked the abandoned commune.
Within two seconds, the green blossomed outward, separating into multiple dots marking the man-made structures in and around the abandoned village. The dots grew into boxy forms outlining walls, roofs, doors, and windows that would have otherwise been invisible at this speed and distance.
Just as the holo display resolved enough detail to pick out individual openings on the buildings still over a dozen klicks away, her heads-up peppered the whole village with red dots.
Samhain wasn’t abandoned today.
Parvi flipped a switch to allow the ship to use active sensors. She was two seconds from contact. The hostiles wouldn’t have time to react if they detected her spying on them, and after contact, they’d know she was here anyway.
In response, all the secondary screens began scrolling with an extraordinary level of detail, most of which would only be of use in an after-action analysis. The important thing for Parvi were the icons that suddenly overlaid the red dots. These red dots wore powered armor, these red dots had highly charged energy weapons, these red dots were contragrav vehicles, and these red dots, moving across a clearing on the west side of the village, matched biometric data for Fitzpatrick and Wahid.
Half a dozen hostiles in powered armor hid inside the building those last two dots were moving toward. Parvi sent a missile through one of its windows. She had just enough time in the first pass to send another missile into the building housing one of the contragravs. She pulled the fighter up, just ahead of the shock wave from the first explosion.
Mallory was a good fifty meters away from the building when its walls evaporated in a roll of ink-black smoke and bloodred flame. The shock wave knocked him backward and he felt something tear into his leg and his left shoulder.
As he fell into the burning black sand blanketing the courtyard, he mentally chanted the rosary as his implants kicked in. The pain from the shrapnel in his shoulder and his leg faded in his awareness, and he became calmer than anyone in his situation had a right to be. His sense of time telescoped as he rolled around onto his stomach to face the remnants of the building.
Behind the smoke and fire, fifty meters away, another explosion erupted on the other side of the village. Above the new rolling smoke cloud, something flew by at hypersonic speeds, a rocket-fast heat-shimmer slicing the bloody sky in two. It shot past, turning up toward the sky as the shock wave from the second explosion and the sonic blast of the aircraft blowing through the atmosphere slammed into Mallory simultaneously.
In the split second that he took in the presence of the aircraft, the commune of Samhain had ceased being empty. Soldiers were suddenly everywhere. He could see the distortion caused by several active camo projectors by one of the Tudor houses deeper in the village. Closer, by the smoke-shrouded crater that used to be the building in front of him, he saw silhouettes of soldiers in powered armor trying to pull themselves out of the wreckage. They stood out clear as day and moved with halting jerks showing their suits’ power was failing or completely fried.
The only cover immediately available was by the Trinity statue, a bowl-like depression that might have once been a fountain. He ran crouched to lower his cross section and dived in. The impact ignited pain in his shoulder and leg that blasted through into his awareness despite the best efforts of his implants.
He braced himself by the lip of the bowl, holding the gamma laser in a shuddering grip. He risked a peek back at the soldiers by the wreckage. By God’s grace, and air support, the soldiers weren’t paying attention to him.
He saw the fading afterimage of a heavy plasma weapon sending a pulse upward, toward the aircraft, which had looped above the village and was diving down toward them. The pulse was a futile discharge. Even if it unloaded all its power in one burst, forming a microscopic sun that could vaporize a large portion of the attacking craft, it was still akin to throwing a sponge at a bullet.