Heretics by S. Andrew Swann Read Free Book Online

that a good idea?”
    â€œHe’s a big tiger,” Kugara said, “he can take it.”
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    Kugara stood on the platform, watching the black webwork crawling by outside the Protean’s transparent sphere. She wondered exactly when the universe had gone off the rails of reason. She was a mercenary soldier from Bakunin. A more straightforward life you probably couldn’t find anywhere. Even her dubious genetic past was, in the terms of the Bakunin Mercenary Union, more of an asset than a complication.
    She had a job, she did it, and she was paid. At least until Mosasa had entered the picture.
    Until Mosasa, her story had been ugly but comprehensible. Unlike a lot of Bakunin émigrés from Dakota, she wasn’t running from the draconian dictatorship that gripped the second inhabitable planet circling Tau Ceti. Haven got the nonhumans like Nickolai, the moreaus, the weapons that weren’t based on a human genome. Dakota got the Frankenstein monsters, the human-based creations. Unlike Nickolai’s ancestors, the engineers that created Kugara’s bloodline were condemned in their own time. Macro-scale genetic engineering of humans was probably the only heretical technology that was heretical before the first attempts to do it were made.
    Somehow, there were still enough products of that technology to be exiled to Dakota and denied assimilation in either the human world or the smaller realm that Nickolai’s kind had made. Just one ugly little planet that formed an ugly little government.
    Kugara hadn’t gotten the bad end of that deal. In the stratified castes that formed Dakotan society, the warriors that were born into the DPS, those that survived training at least, were probably the best treated. It meant that Kugara was one of the few Dakotan citizens who could legally leave the planet.
    In her case, she had left to perform an assignment, the execution of a family of Dakotan escapees who had fled the regime. She had no problem dealing with the opposition leader and his wife. It was the teenage girl that had given her a twinge of conscience.
    Sparing the girl had marked her official retirement from the DPS. Even five years afterward she still had no real understanding of why she had chosen that point to chuck her entire life and assume a dangerous exile on Bakunin. But, five years later, she understood the person she had been before her exile even less.
    Mosasa must have understood her, though; because he knew exactly how to pull her into his employ. He made a credible promise to make the Dakota bounty on her head disappear. If that was all, she might still have said no, but he could do the same for the girl she had spared. So she had no choice.
    After that, the universe had become surreal, twisting beyond the simple dirty facts of her own life. It started before the Protean had held a nuke at bay, even before the Eclipse had tached into the Xi Virginis system and discovered the star wasn’t there.
    Kugara thought that it had all begun when she had sat in a bar with that damn tiger Nickolai and he had informed her that Tjaele Mosasa was a construct controlled by a salvaged Race AI.
    That fact shot through her world like a single neutron fired into a critical mass of questions. She could still see that chain reaction blowing apart her image of the universe, an explosion that the Protean wasn’t going to save her from.
    Hell, the Protean just makes it all worse.
    As much as Nickolai’s fatalism annoyed the hell out of her, in some ways she envied him. Nickolai at least had a lens through which all of this made some sort of sense. For all his angst, he never doubted his own ability to understand the world around him. He never doubted that the world around him could be understood.
    Kugara could use some of that faith right now. She could use some antidote to feeling she was living in the fever-dream of some drug-addled schizophrenic.
    This is just what I yelled at Nickolai for,