Prophets

presented him with a weapon much like the one Mr. Antonio showed him.

The words she spoke were not in the corrupt tongue of the Fallen, but came from the scriptures of his faith:

This is a symbol of your service, my son. A token from He who gives you succor when you are shunned.

Years later, when the priests had come for him, they had taken the gun. They had told him it had been melted down. It had become unclean from his touch.

Now, Mr. Antonio was not only returning his eyes and his arm but, in some sense, his honor as well. In another sense, he was taking all the remnants of honor he had left.

Could he accept the kind of debt this represented?

Nickolai looked into Mr. Antonio’s eyes and knew that the deal had already been made, and the debt went deeper than any material accounting. The man he now served was just making the deal explicit in terms he knew Nickolai understood.

Nickolai reached over and picked up the weapon. It was too large for any human to handle comfortably, but it rested perfectly in Nickolai’s new hand. The weight felt good, as if it completed the reconstruction of his missing limb.

Mr. Antonio smiled.

“So how do I become this agent you require?”

“You will need to join the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union. That will give you the contacts to apply for the position I need you in.”

Nickolai sighted down the barrel of the new weapon, nostrils flaring with the scent of gun oil. “You are certain that I will be hired for this position?”

“Mr. Rajasthan, I have no doubt of it.”

Date: 2525.11.07 (Standard) Bakunin-BD +50°1725

It was like he had told Mr. Salvador, “Do you forget why we were created?”

Nickolai began to understand why his ancestors were created. Why he existed. Not just the knowledge of what scriptures and history taught, of how mankind—the fallen creation of God—had the arrogance to create thinking creatures to serve man, to praise man, and to give glory unto man.

Nickolai had known that he was descended from creatures designed to fight in wars that man didn’t have the stomach to fight himself. He had known that when all the petty human governments coalesced into the Terran Council that mankind had renounced their creation and cast it out, exiling it to Tau Ceti at a time prior to tach-drives when the only interstellar travel was through a manufactured wormhole, effectively one-way.

He knew where he had come from, but on some level he hadn’t understood it. He didn’t understand until he found himself bound in service to the false god, man. Until he found himself retracing the steps of his ancestors.

This was why he was created—and this was why that creation was such a great sin.

But he had pledged himself, so he walked the path that Mr. Antonio had set for him. And that path was very well prepared.

There was already an explanation of why Nickolai was searching for work as a mercenary, and how he had come by prosthetics that cost much more than his income from Mr. Salvador would have allowed. Any investigation would show that the reconstruction was paid for by one of Godwin’s many loan sharks—a Mr. Charkov. This debt to Mr. Charkov could not be paid on a bouncer’s salary.

To add verisimilitude to the fictitious story, any money Nickolai would receive beyond basic living expenses would disappear directly into an anonymous account that could, with effort, be traced to Mr. Charkov.

So, as dawn crawled over the slums of the city of Godwin, Nickolai walked into an unfamiliar quarter of the city. The Godwin where he had lived in exile had been a city that smelled of smoke, sewage, and crumbling ferrocrete, its sound a melange of arguments in every possible human language.

Here, west of central Godwin, the streets no longer smelled of garbage and rotting architecture. While the air was still rank with the stink of the Fallen, it didn’t stick to his fur. The streets were broader and less crowded, and the cacophony of human voices was less aggressive.