Heretics by S. Andrew Swann Read Free Book Online Page B

Jesuit priest, a xenoarchaeology professor, a captain in the Occisis Marine Special Forces, and until recently an undercover agent for the Vatican Secretary of State. At the moment, none of that seemed to amount to very much.
    His captors had tossed him into a room separate from the others. His holding cell was not designed as a prison, but appeared to be just a spare office or storeroom in the city’s large central building. The ceiling panels shone diffuse light into a stark off-white cube that was empty of any furniture. The door was thin and translucent enough to show a fuzzy representation of the hallway beyond. It wasn’t intended to be secure, and Mallory judged that it could be easily forced.
    However, there would be no point in doing so. Even if this planet wasn’t isolated, eighty-some light-years from the mass of human space, there’d still be nowhere to run to. Talking to his captors was the only option he had to improve the situation.
    Unfortunately, the ad hoc nature of his prison spoke to how desperate and chaotic the situation here was. He didn’t need the evidence of a mushroom cloud or his captors’ assertion that there were a hundred and fifty ships invading this star system to know that. He saw the knife edge of war in the empty streets of the city, the armed soldiers that were only one third in uniform, the tension in the posture of those who carried the guns, the fear in the eyes of everyone else. It hung starkly in the stillness of the air as they rushed him and the other two ambulatory refugees from the Eclipse to the spire marking the center of the city.
    He hadn’t seen Dr. Dörner or Dr. Pak since they hauled him off the ground transport and threw him in here. Dr. Brody he hadn’t seen since the medics had rushed him off the troop transport that had airlifted the four of them out of the forest where their escape pods had landed.
    He said a short prayer for Brody’s safety.
    How long? An hour?
    The passage of time weighed on him. He knew that the situation was degrading, and he suspected that it wouldn’t be long before the people who had taken him prisoner would completely lose control of the situation, if they hadn’t already.
    The Eclipse , Mosasa’s ship, was probably destroyed. He wondered if the people here on Salmagundi witnessed what happened.
    They were tracking our approach, they must have seen it, and they still treat us as the vanguard of an invasion . . .
    Then again, for a colony that had so purposely removed itself from human space, wasn’t an invasion exactly what the Eclipse was?
    Somehow he needed to get word back to the Vatican about the situation here. That meant access to a tach-comm transmitter, which, given the insular planet-bound nature of this colony, they might not even have. The isolation he felt was palpable, worse even than what he had felt on the Eclipse when the shipboard tach-comm had disintegrated along with his cover. Not only a physical isolation, a hundred light-years away from the center of the Church, but a spiritual isolation he had felt ever since the Eclipse had tached into the space where the Xi Virginis system should have been.
    No , Mallory thought, I’ve felt it ever since Bakunin. Ever since I understood what Mosasa was . . .
    What he had been.
    He looked up at the ceiling, past it, thinking of the Eclipse launching the lifeboats. Mosasa had been on the bridge with Wahid, Tsoravitch and Parvi. Most likely they hadn’t escaped the massive failure that had caused the lifeboats to launch, which meant they were almost certainly dead. Along with the Paralian, Bill, whose massive life-support apparatus couldn’t have moved outside the Eclipse ’s cargo bay, much less boarded one of the lifeboats.
    Even Nickolai and Kugara were more than likely gone. He had radio contact with them after their lifeboat had launched, but nothing since. Anything could have happened with their lifeboat’s