Heretics Read Online Free PDF

and Nickolai here was incidental. A coincidence.
    But it was very hard to believe in coincidence after working for Mosasa.
    Was this thing part of your plan? She looked up at the sky. Above her, the stars were beginning to appear. Are you still up there? Is the Eclipse still up there? Or did you both fall into the atmosphere and burn?
    She looked back at the horizon.
    The only surveillance devices she had were her own eyeballs, but she had satisfied herself that no vehicles were approaching. No team coming to bat cleanup after the nuke. She didn’t know if that was troubling or not. With the forest reduced to ash around them, the survival of the Protean’s crystal enclave would be visible for a hundred klicks in any direction. Did they care? Were they waiting for something?
    Are they otherwise occupied?
    She coughed in the metallic-tasting air and decided that she was done trusting the little rad counter.
    She walked back to the largest cluster of crystal forms. Within about twenty paces she was inside without ever passing a door as such. The walls folded around her path until they obscured everywhere except where she was going and where she had come from. Eventually she arrived at a space that could have been a room, or simply a space in the midst of the fractal superstructure of the crystalline walls surrounding her.
    Two people waited for her. The first to stand was Flynn, a lanky, sandy- haired young man with a single elaborate glyph tattooed onto his forehead like a cubist third eye. He was a native, and if Kugara was to believe him, the tattoo represented an additional personality living in his skull—a woman named Kari Tetsami who shared a Dakota ancestry with Kugara, and who had probably been dead for close to a hundred and fifty years. To hear Flynn talk about it, the colony on Salmagundi took ancestor worship to its logical extreme. It creeped her out.
    â€œAnything?” he asked. Kugara had only known the guy for a couple of hours, but she could already tell the difference between Flynn or Tetsami talking. Right now the earnest expression was completely Flynn.
    â€œNothing visible approaching,” Kugara told him. “But anyone with a good line of sight can tell this place is still standing. If they’re serious about wiping it off the planet, I’d expect another nuke.”
    â€œWe should leave,” Nickolai grumbled lowly.
    She turned to face her fellow survivor from the Eclipse . He still sat, staring off past Flynn and Kugara, into the semitransparent walls. His muzzle wrinkled in distaste, exposing his massive canines when he spoke.
    â€œWe should leave,” he repeated.
    Nickolai’s ancestors, like Kugara’s, had been the results of centuries-old, largely military genetic experiments. Unlike Kugara, though, the heretical experiments that created Nickolai’s kind had not begun with human DNA. So, while Kugara’s people had interbred until there was no way to tell from looking that she was not completely human, there was no mistaking that Nickolai had descended from some strain of Panthera Tigris. He had black and orange striped fur, easily stood three meters tall—almost a full meter on Kugara’s height—and topped the scales at five hundred kilos, all muscle.
    â€œAnd what if they lob another nuke at this place before we’re clear?” Kugara said. “At least we know that’s survivable here.”
    Nickolai flexed the claws on his right hand. His claws glinted gray and metallic as he scraped them along the crystal floor next to where he sat. If it wasn’t for the damage he’d sustained in their descent, the metal claws would be the only sign his arm was artificial. But the pseudoflesh that had covered the arm had been torn off between shoulder and wrist, and the mechanism that formed his arm was covered now by a white spray bandage. The bandage was meant only as an emergency measure. It was smudged and dirty, and in a few