Free Heretics by S. Andrew Swann Page A

think—”
    A new voice spoke, “Bait.”
    Mallory turned to look at the door, where the bald man with the tattooed scalp stood in the doorway facing them. He looked stooped now, as if he had aged a decade in the few hours since Mallory had seen him last. Dr. Dörner stood up and started to say, “What did—”
    â€œWhat did I do to Dr. Pak? The same thing I did with all of you. He will recover.”
    Dr. Dörner took a step toward the man, but two armed men in black militia uniforms stepped out to flank him. Dr. Dörner stopped in her tracks and glared at their host. Mallory saw an uncomfortable echo of her expression in the old man’s face.
    He heard Brody whisper, “No . . .”
    The old man turned to face Brody with an unpleasant turn of the lip that only very charitably could be called a smile. “Dr. Brody has an excellent grasp of our culture considering how briefly he’s been exposed to it. Down to how we honor those who contribute to our identity.” He tapped a finger to his brow, where the glyphs were tattooed.
    Dörner turned toward them. “What is he talking about, Sam?”
    â€œI told you, their Hall of Minds is a ritual space. They use it to record and pay homage to their ancestors.” He looked at the old man and said. “I’m right about the tattoos?”
    Their host nodded.
    â€œWhat about the tattoos?” Dörner asked.
    â€œThere’s only two ways a recording of a human mind can be useful. The first is to implant it in an AI. And since AIs are illegal, most of what I’ve read on the subject is probably apocryphal. The other—”
    â€œOh, no,” Dörner whispered.
    â€œâ€”is to download it into another living brain.” Mallory looked at the old man’s skull and the tattoos there. Was that it? Did each of those marks represent another human being whose mind had been copied, one that had been downloaded into this man’s skull?
    Did that mean he had just done the same with the four of them?
    To Mallory’s horror, the old man looked directly at him and nodded slightly, as if he knew what Mallory was thinking.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Martyrdom
    â€œThere is no such thing as someone with nothing to lose.”
    â€” The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
    Â 
“No one is more dangerous than a man convinced he is about to die.”
    â€”AUGUST BENITO GALIANI (2019-*2105)

Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) 300,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534
    Vijayanagara Parvi, captain of the Eclipse , had been strapped down in an interrogation room on board the Caliphate carrier the Prophet’s Voice for several hours now. Nothing marked the passage of time, the light never wavered, and except for a few perfunctory questions when they’d dragged her in from the dying Eclipse , she had been without human contact since.
    She knew nothing about what was happening beyond the featureless walls of this room. She didn’t know the fates of the remaining bridge crew of the Eclipse , or Bill for that matter. Mosasa, Tsoravitch, Wahid, they had all been separated as soon as the Caliphate’s soldiers took them from the wreckage of the Eclipse . She had never even seen what happened to Bill. The Paralian had been trapped in the cargo hold in his massive six- meter environment suit. For all she knew, their “rescuers” never even bothered to remove Bill from the remains of their ship.
    She took some minimal comfort from the thought that the rest of Mosasa’s expedition had made it down to the planet’s surface. But only the gods knew what the Caliphate’s intentions were—
    That’s a lie. I know exactly what their intentions are.
    Before she became a mercenary on Bakunin, she had been a fighter pilot for the Indi Protectorate Expeditionary Command. She had piloted a drop fighter against the separatists on Rubai, a planet that—until the Revolution—had been her home; a Revolution