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.
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.
There is only one decisive victory: the last.
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.
“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
