Heretics Read Online Free PDF Page B

places the surface had split along the grain of his fake musculature, to leak a clear fluid that wasn’t quite blood.
    â€œThis is an evil place,” he said turning so he could actually look at her. “You heard what this man said, didn’t you?”
    Kugara looked into his slitted green eyes and sighed. She didn’t get Nickolai. The back story of this little crystal enclave—if she trusted Flynn and Tetsami’s story—made her feel uneasy too. The idea that she stood in what amounted to a colonization by a culture that had not only accepted heretical technologies, but embraced them and built upon them. The idea of being surrounded by billions of microscopic machines that were busy reproducing themselves and primed to consume whatever nearby matter they needed to do whatever it was they did—it made her skin crawl.
    But evil ?
    That was a bit much coming from someone who wouldn’t even exist without the benefit of someone using similarly heretical technologies five hundred years ago. Someone who had also willingly and knowingly allowed himself to be employed by an AI.
    â€œWe stay put until we have a viable exit,” she told him.
    â€œYou don’t understand,” Nickolai whispered.
    â€œAnd you still don’t get a vote,” Kugara snapped. “You lost the right to have an opinion when you sabotaged the Eclipse ’s tach-comm. For all I know, you wanted the ship to blow up.”
    Flynn looked back and forth through the exchange, gripping his shotgun and edging away from Nickolai as if he expected the tiger to try and force the issue.
    Kugara wasn’t worried. She had spent over half her adult life in the service of Dakota Planetary Security, where she was trained to deal with threats considerably more dangerous than Nickolai. She was confident she could handle him unarmed.
    Even if Flynn didn’t quite realize what it meant to be a DPS veteran, Nickolai did. He didn’t do anything beyond grumble inarticulately in his native tongue. After a few long moments, he asked, “The other lifeboats?”
    Kugara shook her head. “Almost certainly caught in the blast.”
    Nickolai lowered his head and closed his eyes.
    Guilt?
    Guilt would be an appropriate response for someone who didn’t believe that the mass of humanity were Fallen, the walking damned, and thought the AI Mosasa was synonymous with the devil himself.
    Kugara looked at Nickolai’s downcast face and wondered if it was possible to understand him.
    She turned to Flynn and asked, “The people in charge here, are they likely to help us?”
    Flynn shook his head, and his laugh had very little humor in it. “The Triad is primarily interested in keeping things from being disruptive.”
    â€œA nuclear weapon is pretty damn disruptive.”
    â€œI never said I agreed with their reasoning.”
    â€œDamn, do these bastards even know about Xi Virginis?”
    â€œI don’t know what they know. I’ve been out of touch ever since this—” He gestured at the crystal walls with his shotgun. “Since this landed.”
    Kugara was at a loss for what to do. She was stuck with Nickolai on a planet that was actively hostile to offworlders, equipped with nothing but a nearly empty emergency kit, a needlegun, and the clothes on her back. It was tempting to hunker down and stay out of sight, but where would that ever end?
    And then there was Xi Virginis, the Eclipse ’s original destination. Mosasa had hired a crew of mercenaries and scientists to hunt down an anomaly. But even with the resources of an AI, Mosasa had not expected to find the entire star system missing . That had been enough to panic him. The Eclipse had tried to send a tach-comm back to the core of human space, she still remembered the too-human strain in Mosasa’s voice:
    If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it’s this. This changes everything.
    But