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.
One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
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.
The stark-white light was cut briefly by orange as an antique shuttle took off from a pad about half a klick away. Mallory spent a moment watching the ascent. Graceful it wasn’t. The shuttle was an insignificant lumpy fuselage on
