[Apotheosis 03] Messiah Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  LAST PROLOGUE - The Sacred and the Profane

  CHAPTER ONE - Heretics

  CHAPTER TWO - Catechism

  CHAPTER THREE - Apostles

  PART SEVEN - Demons

  CHAPTER FOUR - Testimony

  CHAPTER FIVE - Idolatry

  CHAPTER SIX - Reincarnation

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Denominations

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Unbeliever

  CHAPTER NINE - Trials

  CHAPTER TEN - Atonement

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Sins

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Reformation

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Father of Lies

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Guardian Angel

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Heaven’s Gate

  PART EIGHT - Apocalypse

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Blasphemy

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - False Prophet

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Holy Ghost

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - Underworld

  CHAPTER TWENTY - Anathema

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Heavenly Host

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Black Mass

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Lake of Fire

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Infidels

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Reliquary

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Congregation

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Doubt

  PART NINE - Deus ex Machina

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Meditation

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Desecration

  CHAPTER THIRTY - Forbidden Fruit

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Ascension

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Cathedral

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Benediction

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Tabernacle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Apparitions

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Souls

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Angel

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Last Supper

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Beatification

  CHAPTER FORTY - Armageddon

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Enlightenment

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Salvation

  LAST EPILOGUE - Apotheosis

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Eternity

  APPENDIX A: - Alphabetical listing of sources

  A NEAR-INVISIBLE CLOUD OF UNIFORM DENSITY SPREAD OUT IN AN ARC.

  That cloud was, in effect, Adam. It was dormant, a body waiting for the arrival of its consciousness—a cloud of nanomachines vast enough to saturate the surface of Bakunin.

  They were going to destroy it.

  Data scrolled by, showing Mallory’s ghost fleet of empty, near-derelict tach-ships signaling back their status. Their computers were all synced, their drives hot, the damping coils on their drives disabled. Toni II shuddered just thinking of so many ships taching simultaneously. She glanced at the status of the Daedalus’ drives. They were still cold, inert to the surge these ships would generate . . .

  The meters monitoring tachyon radiation spiked.

  The ships were underway. She looked back up at the holo of the cloud. Right now, nearly seven hundred ships were taching into a dangerously small volume in the center of it. Unfortunately, the light from their arrival would take nearly an hour to reach them.

  “Fourteen seconds,” her sister said from the captain’s chair. She leaned back and said, “It’s over now, one way or the other.”

  “Do you think it worked?” Karl asked.

  Toni II could see the comm channels all lit up by chatter, and she could see why. The tachyon radiation meters had slammed the upper limits of their resolution across the board. If the Daedalus hadn’t shut down their tach-drive completely, a good part of their engine would have burned out even with the damping coils.

  Mallory’s voice came over the general comm channel, telling the fleet to render what aid was possible to the damaged ships in range.

  Please, after all this, let us have destroyed it.

  DAW science fiction and fantasy from S. ANDREW SWANN

  Science Fiction:

  THE APOTHEOSIS TRILOGY:

  PROPHETS (#1)

  HERETICS (#2)

  MESSIAH (#3)

  THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER TRILOGY:

  PROFITEER (#1)

  PARTISAN (#2)

  REVOLUTIONARY (#3)

  THE MOREAU NOVELS:

  MOREAU OMNIBUS (#1-3)

  FEARFUL SYMMETRIES (#4)

  Fantasy:

  DRAGONS AND DWARVES OMNIBUS

  (Novels of the Cleveland Portal)

  BROKEN CRESCENT

  GOD’S DICE

  Copyright © 2011 by Steven Swiniarski.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1538.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  First Printing February 2011

  eISBN: 9781101481264

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To John and Adam

  in the morning.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Wisconsin

  Father James Mallory—Roman Catholic Priest and veteran of the Occisis Marines.

  Alexander Shane—Former leader of the Salmagundi government.

  Toni Valentine—Former lieutenant in the Styx Security Forces under Styx System Security Command (3SEC)

  Toni II Valentine—Ghost of Toni Valentine.

  Karl Stavros—Former captain of the Centauri trading vessel Daedalus.

  Stefan Stavros—Karl Stavros’ son.

  Bakunin

  Nickolai Rajasthan—Exiled scion of the House of Rajasthan. Descendant of genetically engineered tigers.

  Vijayanagara Parvi—Mercenary pilot from Rubai

  Julia Kugara—Mercenary from Dakota. Descendant of genetically engineered humans. Former member of Dakota Planetary Security (DPS)

  Dr. Sharon Dörner—Xenobiologist from Acheron.

  Dr. Samson Brody—Cultural anthropologist from Bulawayo.

  Flynn Jorgenson—Former forestry surveyor from Salmagundi.

  Brother Lazarus—Leader of the Dolbrian cult on Bakunin. Descendant of genetically engineered canines.

  General Alexi Lubikov—Commander of the Western Division of the Proudhon Security Corporation.

  The Prophet’s Voice

  Rebecca Tsoravitch—Former data analyst from Jokul, in the service of Adam.

  Jonah Dacham—Agent of Proteus.

  Tjaele Mosasa—Recorded personality of the pirate who recovered the AI that became Adam.

  LAST PROLOGUE

  The Sacred and the Profane

  “Know what is evil, no matter how worshiped it may be.”

  —BALTASAR GRACIÁN (1601-1658)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Heretics

  “The establishment’s greatest disgust is reserved for those who love the wrong person.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Religion has done love a great service b
y making it a sin.”

  —ANATOLE FRANCE

  (1844-1924)

  The first time Nickolai Rajasthan came to the planet Bakunin, he had come in disgrace. The priests of his homeland had ruled he had sinned too gravely, or perhaps more important, too publicly, for him to continue life as a scion of House Rajasthan.

  The royal family on Grimalkin was powerful enough to do as they would in most cases, and should a tiger of Rajasthan have a dalliance with the lesser-born—even if it was in violation of the scriptures—there were rarely any consequences. Nickolai’s peers had all dallied with servants before the family had chosen a mate for them.

  But his peers’ indiscretions had never lasted long, and had been discreet.

  Nickolai had the bad sense to care for the female he bedded.

  Worse, he had the arrogance to believe his position protected him. His affair with his panther lover had extended into months, and his family had become alarmed enough to finally put an end to his foolishness. They rushed him into an arranged marriage and sold the lowly object of his obsessions to a family far from the seat of House Rajasthan’s power.

  But his family could not save him. His lover was already pregnant by the time she left the halls of House Rajasthan. His miscegenation was a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, but having his unnatural lusts produce issue was an abomination that could not be tolerated; the birth of his half-breed children too public a mark of his wickedness.

  His lover, complicit in the evil, bore witness as her and Nickolai’s unclean offspring were drowned in a river and their bodies left to float out to the ocean. Then she was taken to the temple and flayed alive.

  Nickolai’s family wasn’t powerful enough to spare him punishment, but they were powerful enough to prevent him suffering the fate of his lover. Though, after her death, he did not wish to be spared.

  Despite the pretense of mercy, in many senses, Nickolai’s punishment at the hands of the priests of St. Rajasthan was worse than what was done to his lover. Her pain had an end.

  The priests brought him to the temple and cut off his right arm with the same ritual knives they used to skin his lover. Along with his arm, the priests were amputating his role as a sacred warrior. The pain of the operation was secondary to maiming him in a way that permanently removed him from the chosen. His kind had been designed as warriors by their Fallen creators, and though their creation was in disobedience to God, the path of the warrior was a form of worship to the most high.

  The amputation was intended to take that form of communion from him.

  But it was not enough of a punishment. He was meant to contemplate his sins for the remainder of his life. So the priests forced him to kneel before a mural of St. Rajasthan at the end of days, when He would return bearing a flaming sword to cut down the wicked, the unholy, and the Fallen. Nickolai was forced to look up into the snarling face of his species’ savior as He stepped out of the clouds, tall as a mountain, bringing a blade of flaming judgment down upon the unworthy.

  It was the last thing he was ever meant to see. As he stared into the painted face, one much like his father’s, the priests took a red-hot iron and burned out his eyes.

  The final part of his punishment was exile. The priests dropped him, blind and maimed, onto the planet Bakunin, to die a beggar among the Fallen on that lawless world. He was abandoned as far from God as the priests could take him.

  Alone in the chaotic urban sprawl of Bakunin’s largest city, surrounded by the smell of men, Nickolai knew he was damned. Many like him would have given up at that point, adding suicide as a final entry on their list of sins.

  Not Nickolai.

  Damned he was, but he would not give up what honor he had. He would not allow the priests that satisfaction.

  And because he was a Rajasthan, descended from creatures genetically engineered for war, he did not have to resort to charity or self-murder. He only had to allow himself to be employed by the Fallen.

  Such niceties did not matter to Nickolai anymore. The priests had cast him beyond redemption. He had been cast beyond God’s grace as surely as the naked devils that hired him to intimidate their enemies. He’d been cast out to live among them, so he swallowed his unease and lived among them.

  By the time Mr. Antonio contacted him, he was so used to ignoring that unease that he barely questioned the offer to restore his arm and his eyes for some unspecified service. When Mr. Antonio’s doctors were finished, Nickolai’s ties to the Fallen were buried in his own flesh.

  Mr. Antonio had bought his service, and possibly his soul, by replacing the flesh the priests had taken. The cybernetics were unclean by any measure, but Nickolai could see.

  And he was more willfully blind than ever.

  The price was to prostitute the sacred art of the warrior, and become a mercenary. The price was to be employed by something worse than man. Mr. Antonio required Nickolai to enter the service of an AI calling itself Tjaele Mosasa. Nickolai had numbed himself to what working for the Fallen had cost his soul, but this was a different order of sin. Even the humans recognized the evil that AIs represented. Were this any place other than the lawless, stateless planet of Bakunin, Mosasa would not be suffered to exist.

  But Mr. Antonio had bought Nickolai’s service, and Nickolai joined the AI’s expedition eighty light-years beyond official human space, to the star Xi Virginis, the first of several hidden colony worlds founded as the last human interstellar regime had collapsed. Nickolai was allowed only the consolation that he joined the AI only to betray it. The dishonor of the act weighed on him, but the fact that Mosasa existed weighed even more.

  That was what Nickolai told himself, even as Mosasa’s expedition came upon the Xi Virginis system and found it missing, erased by some diabolic force, leaving no trace of the star or of the colony planets in orbit around it. He told it to himself even as his sabotage caused the ship’s tach-comm to explode, leaving the damaged ship stranded eighty light-years beyond known human space. He told it to himself, even as he confessed his sins to the human priest Mallory; even as the ship limped into orbit around the closest refuge, another lost colony world; even as the damaged ship broke apart, and the crew’s escape pods were scattered on the surface of the planet Salmagundi. Nothing made him question his core values, his position in the universe, or what the universe actually meant.

  Not until he met the Protean.

  On the surface of Salmagundi, Nickolai met a relic of a human evil that transcended the hubris that created beings such as himself, such as Mosasa. The Protean was a creature born of self-replicating nanotechnology; the worst and most dangerous of the three great heretical technologies. Life itself, soulless and born, not of God, but of humanity’s desire to be God. Everything Nickolai believed told him that the Protean was the Adversary, Satan himself personified, an evil that Mosasa couldn’t even aspire to.

  And the Protean was frightened of something, some Other an order of magnitude worse than itself, something that had consumed Xi Virginis.

  When that Other descended upon Salmagundi, Nickolai finally learned who he’d been serving. Mr. Antonio, who had bought Nickolai’s fealty by granting back the flesh that the priests had taken, was in service to the Other. The Other, who called itself Adam and claimed a mantle of divinity for itself.

  Nickolai had been the servant of the Adversary. Not Mosasa, not the Protean, not Fallen humanity . . . it had been him. In an epiphany of shame on Salmagundi, Nickolai reprised the priests’ punishments, tearing free his cybernetic limb and placing a gun to his temple to destroy his cybernetic eyes.

  His story should have ended there, a single death before the Adversary’s advance. Only one among billions.

  But the Protean was there, and it did not let him die.

  When Nickolai awoke, he was approaching Bakunin for the second time. And, like Adam before it, the Protean had given him replacements for what the priests had taken; a right arm twin to his left, and eyes as black as the Abyss.

  The secon
d time Nickolai Rajasthan came to the planet Bakunin, it was as a warrior against the Adversary.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Catechism

  “The first casualty of a Revolution is the Revolution itself.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The revolutionist is a doomed man.”

  —MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN

  (1814-1876)

  Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Earth-Sol

  Rebecca’s understanding began, at last, when she watched the world end.

  Her entire life to that point—her work as a data analyst for the Jokul Autocracy, being recruited for Mosasa’s doomed mission to Xi Virginis, her capture by the Caliphate, her acceptance of Adam’s offer of becoming part of his secular godhead—as clear as every memory was within her enhanced mind, all of it meant nothing, worthless trivia, pointless data from a meaningless life.

  She had chosen survival, as if her own existence carried some sort of meaning in the face of what Adam was. Before her arrival here, as a self-aware part of Adam’s consciousness, she had believed that had sufficed. Survival was enough of a goal, an end in itself.