“I don’t know.”
“You think your boss does?”
“I—”
Parvi’s answer was cut off by a subsonic rumble. Above them, the smoke swirled into a vortex centered above the open desert beyond Parvi’s fighter. The tendrils of smoke twisted and parted, revealing a massive, blocky form that was still slowing to a stop on the strength of massive maneuvering jets. The aircraft’s nose was blunt, narrow, and sloped backward to mold into a hundred-meter-long wingless body that managed to look stubby despite its size. The skin of the craft was a patchwork of random paints, patches, and sealant in various shades of gray and brown. It was ugly as hell, and looked nothing like the sleek tach-ship Mosasa had parked in the hangar for the benefit of his new employees.
Wahid stared at the descending cargo ship and seemed to have some trouble deciding where to point the laser.
Inside, Parvi sighed a little in relief. “Why don’t you put the laser down and help move Fitzpatrick.”
“What is that?”
“That’s our ship,” Parvi said.
The barrel of the laser pointed down, toward the sand. “But what about—”
Parvi walked past him, toward Fitzpatrick. “Save the questions for Mosasa. I just work here.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Exodus
Individuals have free will. Societies do not.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.
—SAMUEL Johnson (1709-1784)
Date: 2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin Orbit-BD+50°1725
Mallory woke up from a nightmare. The memory of it faded nearly instantaneously, leaving him with a vague impression of Junta loyalists and a burning church. He opened his eyes and saw a bulkhead curving over him. He felt the vibration of engines running somewhere.
“You awake now, Fitz?”
“Uh,” Mallory pushed himself up from the thin mattress he’d been sleeping on. He rose too fast and almost tumbled out of the bunk before he realized he was in low gravity. His stomach did slow rolls as he looked up and saw the small chrome pipes set in the ceiling. Not gravity . . .
There were three methods to get some form of “gravity” on a space vessel, none of which were gravity per se. The first, and the most natural feeling, was constant acceleration. Next best was rotating a large container and placing the floor on the outer surface.
Neither worked well when designing a ship to enter an atmosphere.
The last method was perhaps the most nausea-inducing. Contragrav drives had been around a while, relying on a repulsive force inherent in some exotic forms of matter. It wasn’t true antigravity, any more than a vectored thrust aircraft, but a kilogram of contramatter would repulse normal matter with a force several orders of magnitude greater than gravity. It had been used as lift for aircraft for centuries. Somewhere along the line, someone realized if they channeled dense plasma from a ship’s contragrav drive though manifolds in the ceiling, it could provide a nearly-even downward force through any part of the ship you wanted. And, since the main power requirement of the contragrav drive was creating the exotic matter in the first place, it was actually less expensive than constant acceleration and cost less design-wise than rotating large chunks of the ship.
But it didn’t feel normal.
Wahid had been bending over him, a small hypo in one hand. Wahid stepped back as far as the small cabin would allow, and Mallory realized that his left bicep was stinging. He rubbed his arm and looked at Wahid. “What did you inject me with?”
Wahid looked a little sheepish. “A little stimulant. You’ve been out for a few hours.”
Mallory nodded. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” he looked around the tiny ship’s cabin.
“Yeah.” Wahid responded to Mallory’s curious looks. “Mosasa showed up finally, lucky us.”
“The fighter?”
“That was Parvi.”
“His own air force?”
“You haven’t been on Bakunin long, have you?”
Mallory shook his head.
Wahid laughed, “Well, welcome to Bakunin, where any mother’s son can grow up to run as large a tin-pot army as he can afford. And Mosasa can afford quite a bit.”
“He can afford more than us,” Mallory said.
“Yes, I can.”
Mallory turned to see Mosasa standing in the doorway to the cabin. He wore a gray jumpsuit, and the ship’s lighting seemed to give the scales on his tattooed dragon an unhealthy green shimmer. He looked at Mallory, then at Wahid. “I can afford to pay well. But I only pay for what is absolutely necessary.”
Mallory stood to confront his employer, but he couldn’t do much more than crouch on his feet with Wahid already standing in the cabin. “Was it necessary to send us to that ambush?”
“Yes, it was, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.”
Mallory froze, wondering if he had misheard the emphasis on his alias. He wondered if Wahid heard the same thing that he had . . .
If he had, Wahid didn’t show it. “We deserve an explanation.”
“Perhaps,” Mosasa said. “For now, come forward to the cargo hold, so you can meet the other members of the expedition.”
Given recent experience, Mallory had been expecting more mercenaries. Instead, waiting for them in the brightly lit cargo hold along with Nickolai, Kugara, and Parvi, was a five-member scientific team. Four of the five wore the same kind of gray jumpsuit Mosasa wore and were seated with Mallory’s three fellow mercenaries in a semicircle facing a small dais.
“Please sit,” Mosasa told them, and Mallory and Wahid took the two open seats.
Mosasa stood next to the dais and introduced the new members of the expedition.
Dr. Samson Brody was a hefty black man with a bushy gray beard and a deeply lined face; Mosasa introduced him as a cultural anthropologist. He easily looked the oldest of the group. The youngest-looking of the team was the linguist, Dr. Leon Pak.
More problematic was the xenobiologist, Dr. Sharon Dörner. She was tall, blonde, and came from Acheron. Like Occisis, Acheron was a core planet of the Centauri Alliance. Given the interrelationship between xenobiology and xenoarchaeology, and the focused nature of both fields, the Jesuit xenoarchaeology professor, Father Francis Xavier Mallory, knew of her. Worse, he had met her, twice.
Dr. Dörner had given guest lectures several times at St. Marbury University, and Mallory had attended all of them. Once he had spent twenty minutes talking about the nature of the Dolbrians with her at a reception afterward, and five years ago he actually had the honor of introducing her.
It took every scrap of will Mallory had not to let the panic show in his face. Fortunately, Dr. Dörner showed no sign of recognizing him. There was little reason she should. Professionally, she would have met hundreds of people like Father Mallory: teachers, students, fellow scientists. There was no reason one professor should stand out in her memory.
Mosasa continued with introductions, apparently oblivious to Mallory’s sudden discomfort.
The last human of the group, the data analyst, didn’t have the titular “Doctor” before her name. She was a thin reed of a redhead named Rebecca Tsoravitch.
“Our last team member is a physicist and a mathematician. Since his given name is unpronounceable to a human palate,” Mosasa said, “he has adopted the human name Bill.”