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  GUILT IN INNOCENCE

  A Tale of The Scattered Earth

  By Keith R.A. DeCandido

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2011 by Keith R.A. DeCandido

  Cover Design by Aaron Rosenberg

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  About the Scattered Earth series:

  Many authors.

  Many worlds.

  Many storylines.

  One grand setting.

  Read each set, and then keep reading to see how they ultimately connect

  as the Scattered Earths come together again!

  AVAILABLE & UPCOMING TALES OF THE SCATTERED EARTH

  The Birth of the Dread Remora – by Aaron Rosenberg

  Crossed Paths – by Aaron Rosenberg

  The Second Veil – by David Niall Wilson

  Resistance Falls – by Steven Savile

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  This one's for Marco

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Primary thanks obviously have to go to Aaron Rosenberg, Steve Savile, and David Niall Wilson, the demiurges behind The Scattered Earth, who were kind enough to invite me to play in their sandbox.

  Secondary thanks go, oddly, to the 1998/1999 television show Young Hercules and former Simon & Schuster editor Anne Greenberg, who hired me to write two novels based on that show. My second YH book, The Ares Alliance, involved Yoruba mythology (the plot revolved around a bit of a spat between Ares and Ogun), and sparked my interest in such, which led to the basis of the Olodumare Hegemony.

  Speaking of which, the people of this novel—the Olodumare Hegemony and the fallen Oyo Empire—are very loosely based on the Yoruba people of the western part of Africa on Earth. However, we are also very far from the present day (in more ways than one), and any differences in traditions and culture should be attributed to that and author's choice.

  Other helpful folks for various and sundry reasons include Jaime Costas, Laura Anne Gilman, Gerard Houarner, Neal Levin, Dale Mazur, Marco Palmieri, Tina Randleman, Wrenn Simms, and, of course, GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido, a.k.a., The Mom.

  Finally, thanks to them that live with me—human, canine, and feline—for support and wonderfulness, always.

  As there is guilt in innocence, there is innocence in guilt.

  —Yoruba proverb

  ONE

  Oshun

  The Eso swung its deadly claw at Folami's head.

  The sharp point was a nanosecond away from cutting through her protective face mask and her skull when the claw suddenly changed direction, whipping past her. Folami felt a whisper of air on her cheek, heard the whistle of the claw slicing through the air by her ear.

  After telekinetically shoving the claw aside, Folami stared fiercely into her foe's eyes. Much of the Eso's body had been genetically altered: skin to a chitinous substance, fingers to rock-hard bone claws, a prehensile tail, all body hair removed.

  But the eyes remained human.

  Within a second of Folami's making eye contact with the Eso, her foe fell to the ground, dead, unnatural tail writhing desperately and mindlessly in the dirt, claws reaching upward, dead eyes gazing blindly upon Kaduna Township's dismal night sky.

  She had used her mind to destroy his.

  The battle was happening in what had once been a public park, located near the smoking ruins of what had been a refinery owned and operated by the Kaduna Mining Corporate. Most of the trees had been leveled and the grass scorched by the refinery explosion that had necessitated the arrival of Rufiji Cavalry Company, to which Folami had been assigned. Worse, it had rained recently, and the ground was muddy and hard to gain purchase on.

  That was the tenth Eso that Folami had killed, and she was barely making a dent in their numbers. However, it was more than had been managed by War Chief Tobi and the rest of Rufiji.

  At least the gas is finally starting to clear, she thought, looking up dolefully. From the moment they'd arrived at Oshun, there'd been a green miasma choking the air thanks to the refinery explosion.

  Looking down at the Eso she'd mindblasted, a small part of Folami felt pity. The Eso were human once, but the last remnants of the fallen Oyo Empire, which continued to fight against the Olodumare Hegemony, had tampered with them, mutating them from human beings into killing machines with no memory of their previous lives.

  Folami's training didn't allow her to feel such pity for long. Nor to completely comprehend the irony. For Folami was also the result of genetic tampering. Generations ago, the Olodumare Hegemony selectively altered the genes of many of its citizenry in the hopes of breeding telepaths. They were successful to a degree, as many of the descendents of those subjects, such as Folami, were able to harness their minds. As a tenth-level—the highest rating in Hegemony history—she wielded the powers of telepathy, able to read minds, and telekinesis, able to move objects with her thoughts.

  She had been trained to become Ori-Inu, one of the Hegemony's cadre of telepathic agents, all memories from her life prior to training erased.

  Reading fellow humans was always easy for Folami. She understood the human thought processes by virtue of having them herself, along with a strength of perception that few, if any, shared. But the Eso were another story entirely. They had learned their lesson from the war. While the Hegemony's decisive victory had been the destruction of Yemoja, the world that served as the Oyo Empire's seat of power, it had been the Ori-Inu who had proven to be the most damaging to the Oyo during the war, using their ability to harness the mind to very good effect.

  The rebels had therefore again altered the engineering of the Eso so that their thoughts barely registered as human anymore. It had taken several encounters before Folami could even go so far as to isolate their thought patterns, and even then, she couldn't make heads nor tails of what they were thinking. Sounds like nothing she'd ever heard, colors she didn't recognize, violent images that even her mind couldn't process properly. An occasional human thought, left over from when the Eso were properly human, poked through the horrible chaos, and indeed those had sometimes given Folami a proper point of reference.

  As far as Folami knew, she was the only Ori-Inu who had mastered the trick of mindblasting the Eso to kill them. Humans, again, were not a problem—if she so desired, she could kill all the survivors of Rufiji Company with only a few seconds' concentration. But with the Eso, their thoughts were like quicksilver, difficult to get a hold of. Killing them with her mind expended effort, and she needed to ration that.

  The half-dozen Eso converging on Cavalry Chief Olugbanma were almost on him, and the cavalry chief's Ayoka rifle could only go so far, surrounded as he was.

  Folami ran toward him, setting up in position so the Eso were between her and Olugbanma and she set up a crossfire with her own Bayo pistol, using her telekinesis to make her aim true. The heads four of the Eso exploded in a rain of blood, bone, and brain matter.

  She left only two alive, and Olugbanma was able to handle them.

  "You couldn't kill the other two, save me some ammunition?" the cavalry chief asked, b
ut Folami was already moving on. She didn't even notice the disdain or the lack of gratitude, as it was far too common among the cavalry to get worked up over.

  Another Eso was bearing down on Cavalryman Olafemi, swinging one claw toward Olafemi's torso. Folami hopped onto the rebel's back. Given a choice between telekinteically halting the Eso's claw—moving against the creature's momentum—or simply getting Olafemi out of the way, she chose the latter. It expended less energy, though it did put the cavalryman in the rather undignified position of being knocked on his ass from her mental shove.

  He'll thank me later, Folami thought as she gave a similar push to the Eso's claw, making its swing faster, stronger, more violent—and longer. The claw impaled the rebel in the left part of its own chest. It didn't go very far—it took a powerful strike to make it through that chitinous skin—but it was enough to open a wound.

  She moved to leap off the Eso's back, but the rebel slashed at her with his other claw, the blade catching her face mask.

  Yanking her head back, she managed to escape with damage only to the mask and not her person. Now I'm really grateful the gas is dissipating, she thought worriedly. As soon as she was clear, she projected right into Olafemi's mind: Cavalryman, now! Still on his back, Olafemi fired his Ayoka on full automatic right into the wound the Eso had given itself.

  Two dozen armor-piercing rounds tore through the Eso and ripped a gash halfway across the rebel's chest.

  With that opening, Folami was easily able to telekinetically grip the two ends of the wound and pry them further apart, eventually cleaving the Eso in two.

  The upper part of the rebel—the part that had the brain, that was still managing to send impulses to the rest of the body—wriggled about, but the lower portion lay still.

  Like all Ori-Inu, Folami wore skintight body armor. Black, with red trim, the armor protected Folami and enhanced her strength. Her telekinetic abilities could make her stronger still.

  Which was good, as all that strength was required to break the claw off the dead rebel's appendage.

  With a crack that would have echoed throughout Kaduna Township if the sounds of battle weren't so overwhelming, Folami did so, then took a moment to catch her breath. Need to take it easy—there are still about seventy of the filthy buruku left.

  Hegemony cavalry armor was designed with strength in mind rather than agility, so Olafemi looked like a beached whale trying to clamber to his feet. With a smile, Folami took pity on him and mentally lifted him upright.

  "Thanks," the cavalryman said, but his surface thoughts indicated that he resented needing the help.

  Not dwelling on it, Folami moved on to fight more Eso.

  She still needed her telekinesis to make the claw useful, as her own unenhanced strength was insufficient to drive the claw through the rebels' chitin, but the effort would be less than that of mindblasting.

  Using a big rock as her springboard, Folami did a running leap, coming down on the back of another Eso that was about to kill Cavalry Master Apara, driving the claw through the rebel's head. Even as blood splattered everywhere, Folami yanked the claw back out, tucked into a roll, and jumped to another rebel.

  The stench of the blood was starting to get to her, now that her face mask with its nasal filters had been torn.

  She managed to kill another four Eso that way, but on the fourth, she drove the claw too far into the rebel's head to gain a handhold. Mentally yanking it out was an option, but before she could try, three Eso converged on her.

  Reaching out, she mentally grabbed the four fresh Eso corpses, and threw them all at the three newcomers. The distraction of having to claw through the corpses of their fellow rebels was enough to allow Folami to take out her Bayo pistol and blast the rocks they were on to pieces, trapping them. She then telekinetically grabbed the claws from one and rammed them into the other two.

  Surrounded for the moment only by Eso corpses, Folami cast her mind outward to the entirety of Kaduna Township. The civilians had long since been evacuated. About a quarter of the Eso who'd attacked here were dead now. Meanwhile, Rufiji Company's complement had been cut in half.

  Damn it, she thought, the mission was supposed to be over…

  Seven hours ago, Folami had been on the flight deck of the Hegemony Cavalry Vessel L'owuro, returning to Ife from a mission to Orunmila, when the distress call from Oshun had come in.

  She had always enjoyed watching space on the viewer, and it was Eta-shift, an especially quiet time. That shift was the equivalent of late night, when most of the L'owuro crew was asleep. Only four of them were on the deck, the minimum required on the shift to ensure optimum operation.

  "Amazing view, isn't it?"

  Turning to her right, Folami saw one of those four people: the pilot, Cavalry Chief Adejola. Like many pilots, he'd shaved most of his head, leaving only a small, close-cropped batch of hair arranged in stylized "A" for atuko, or pilot.

  "Yes, it's spectacular."

  "I notice you only come up here when War Chief Tobi's off-shift."

  Smiling, Folami said, "The war chief doesn't appreciate 'nonessentials' on the flight deck."

  Adejola snorted. "Right. You're the most essential person on this ship. Rufiji Company's just here to run your code."

  "Maybe, but while we're in transit, I'm just a passenger." Folami shrugged. "I don't mind—it's nice to have the downtime, especially after that mission. Once the war chief's back on shift, I'm going to get some sleep."

  "Sounds vaguely strategic," Adejola said with a grin. "Well, I'm glad to have you up here."

  Folami frowned at that, as it wasn't something she'd ever heard before. The other reason she preferred to come up here during Eta-shift was that there were fewer people. For one thing, that meant there were fewer minds to overhear. Of course, she would never pry into a person's mind without authorization, and it would take extraordinary circumstances for such authorization to ever be given on someone in the cavalry. But Folami was too strong a telepath to avoid psionic eavesdropping altogether, and she sometimes caught surface thoughts. She was issued a psi-screen, of course, but she hated using it when she was awake.

  By coming onto the flight deck when it was all but empty, she got fewer looks of fear, hatred, and confusion, which were often matched by the thoughts. Flatbrains didn't like telepaths, and cavalry didn't like Ori-Inu.

  Before Folami had a chance to query Adejola as to why he was glad to have her there, though, the cavalrywoman at communications spoke. "Cavalry Chief Adejola, we have an incoming distress call!"

  "Source?"

  The cavalrywoman put a hand to her right ear to aid in making out the sounds that were coming through the receiver hooked around her lobe. "It's Hegemony—Code 47."

  Folami started. Code 47 was used by Orisha, those tasked with seeking out telepaths and making them into Ori-Inu.

  Manipulating a few controls on her console, the communications officer added, "Source is Oshun. There was a refinery explosion—an unknown gas has been released into the atmosphere. The Orisha is injured, and there are indeterminate casualties from the explosion and the gas."

  Adejola's primary thought was impossible for Folami to not sense: utter dread that he was going to have to wake War Chief Tobi up.

  "Getting something else," the cavalrywoman added. "The Eso have claimed responsibility and are now attacking Kaduna Township."

  Adejola cursed. "Mogbe. All right, wake the war chief up."

  "With all due respect, sir," the cavalrywoman said with even more dread than Folami had sensed from Adejola, "I'd rather that you did that, as the war chief's less likely to reassign you to scrubbing the hull."

  Adejola smiled. "Don't be so sure that he wouldn't, Cavalrywoman. But yeah, I'll do it."

  An excessively cranky War Chief Tobi stumbled onto the flight deck minutes later. He was wearing a hastily thrown-on dashiki, and nothing else. Folami had only seen the war chief in full uniform, and his excessively hairy, bony legs were something of a surprise. A
fter all, atop his head, he had close-cropped, thinning white hair. Like many men of status in the Hegemony, he had taken to wearing a thick beard, akin to that of Oba Isembi, which was the same white as what little hair he had.

  Even in his nightclothes, though, he had a Bayo pistol strapped to a shoulder holster.

  Loudly, Adejola said, "War chief on deck!"

  Much more loudly, Tobi declared: "Cavalry Chief, you have seven-and-a-half seconds to explain why you awakened me from a wonderful dream about the spectacular sex I was having with your mother." His words echoed off the unstaffed consoles.

  Swallowing, Adejola quickly filled the war chief in. Folami couldn't help but smile at the image that came into Adejola's head, which was of Tobi in bed with his mother, no matter how hard the pilot tried to banish it.

  "It's a lucky thing for you this was serious," Tobi said as he fell more than sat into the command chair. Technically, regulations were that whoever was in command of the flight deck sat there, but everyone on L'owuro learned quickly that only the war chief's ass was allowed to touch the seat. "Change course to Oshun, Cavalry Chief."

  "Changing course," Adejola said smartly.

  Tobi turned to his left. "Any other ships in the area?"

  The cavalryman at tactical—who had never actually been in the same room with the war chief before, and Folami felt his disappointment in the reality after hearing the reputation, though she suspected the hairy, bony legs had a lot to do with that—said, "No military ships, sir, no."

  "Cavalryman, do you honestly think I care about non-military ships?"

  Suddenly, the tac officer was less disappointed and more scared. "Uh, no, sir, I don't suppose you—"