[Apotheosis 03] Messiah Page 3

  “You have seen the works of the entity calling itself Adam. Adam represents the ultimate fear that drove us all to reject those Heretical Technologies. Adam is the temptation we tried to deny ourselves, power without any restraint or moral consideration. Adam represents the antithesis of humanity, the Adversary of every single faith, creed, or philosophy.

  “We have seen Evil, and it is not in the tools Adam uses. It is not in the technology. The Evil is Adam itself. The Evil that places any inhabitant of this universe on the level of its creator. The Evil is rule based on the whim of a would-be god. The Evil is in the cancerous belief that would deny existence to any that do not adhere to it. Because of this, and with the authority God grants me and the Church, I herby grant absolution for all those who have used Heretical Technologies, and their progeny—specifically, the Proteans and their kin—who chose to follow the laws of God and man. Any who rise up now to resist this Evil, have my blessing and that of the Church.”

  Since that broadcast spread across the system three days ago, Mallory had brought together an alliance of nearly fourteen hundred ships. Enough so that they could use nearly half in this unmanned attack against that Adversary.

  Toni II glanced at display for the comm channel for the Khalid. It had been dead silent since the dropship tached into low orbit over Bakunin. Should have tached into low orbit. Even more than running the blockade, that maneuver with a tach-drive so close to a gravity well was insanely dangerous. Any craft less sophisticated than the Khalid would have found the task impossible; the advanced navigation systems on that ship made the attempt only barely possible.

  They had probably lost the ship and everyone on it.

  Over the common channel, across the whole fleet, Mallory spoke, “Ready the computers to synchronize on my signal.”

  Toni II looked up at the main holo display. The display showed a large slice of a star field looking out along the path of Bakunin’s orbit. There was nothing inherently remarkable about the area of space, other than the fact that it once held the system’s single wormhole.

  But the enhanced processing on the image drew highlights on what occupied that space now.

  A near-invisible cloud of uniform density spread out in an arc. Though vast, the mass was so diffuse as to show no ripples in any mass sensors, and so dark as to reflect no radiation at all back into the system. It took a Centauri spy platform to find it, even when they knew where to look.

  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 the way Adam had done with Khamsin.

  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.

  “It’s how Parvi said to fight this thing. Dump as much energy in as small a space as possible.” She rubbed her face, and Toni II saw the strain in her features. Taking over as the nominal captain meant that she had been getting a lot less sleep than her elder self.

  Toni II saw the pain upon mentioning Parvi’s name and realized that her twin was thinking of the Khalid and held the same doubts about Parvi’s suicidal snipe hunt that she had. They had lost their one pilot who’d had direct experience in combat with this thing.

  “I don’t think—” Toni II had been about to console her twin, but she was interrupted by a sudden burst of radio chatter. The other Toni fell back to monitoring the command console.

  “Well, we achieved something,” she muttered while checking the new incoming transmissions.

  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.

  The Daedalus was a heavily modified craft. The interior had been retrofitted to hold much more cargo than a stock craft of its design, at the expense of no longer having any sort of artificial gravity or being able to reenter an atmosphere. The Daedalus would be unable to land even if the blockade was lifted.

  There were other advantages for a family business that had made at least half its income from contraband.

  Former family business, thought Stefan Stavros.

  He had seen his birthright stolen out from under him, and he had seen his father capitulate again and again, until he thought he no longer knew the man. He had dutifully waited for his father, the man who had built their livelihood, built this ship, to come up with a strategy, some sort of plan to retrieve the Daedalus from these pirates. It didn’t matter what the priest, or the Valentine bitches, or any of them thought they were fighting. Stefan didn’t believe in the Antichrist or the end of the world, all he saw was him, his father, and their ship being hijacked into a war they shouldn’t have any part in.

  But instead, his father, Karl Stavros, seemed to have joined in with the insanity around them. They had once prided themselves on being above dirtside politics; the Daedalus had always been a nation unto itself. But now that the priest was ready to wage war, Stefan had given up on waiting for his father to act.

  Stefan pulled himself through a gap between the nominal ceiling of the upper cargo deck and the skin of the ship. The space was designed to hold a manifold that would vent contramatter plasma from the ship’s contragrav generator in order to provide some measure of pseudo-gravity for the ship’s occupants. The manifold had been stripped, along with all the contragrav support systems, when the cargo capacity of the Daedalus had been upgraded. The space occupied by the manifold had been too small to be reclaimed.

  Not in any obvious fashion.

  The space was barely wide enough to accommodate him as he pulled himself along the long, flat conduit. The only light came from a small pinpoint lamp embedded in a sweatband on his brow, and that only showed him four or five meters before the curve of the ship’s skin blocked his view.

  He had to crawl about twenty-five meters to reach his destination; an inaccessible junction nestled between the rearmost cargo bulkhead and the tach-drive. Not a place he’d want to be if the tach-drive was active, but fortunately the priest’s directives to power the plant down completely made Stefan’s destination as safe as anywhere else on the ship.

  The junction itself was a cylinder about five meters across, half filled by pipes for the tach-drive’s power plant. The other half had been filled by similar pipes serving the contragrav’s power plant. Since the removal of the contragrav, the junction was half empty, leaving a space wide enough for Stefan to pull himself inside.

  Flipping himself to face “down,” away from the skin of the ship, he could fit as long as he kept his legs bent in a crouch. He floated there, the hair on his arms standing up, the air still, cold, and smelling faintly of ozone.

  Looking down the length of the junction, a large metal cylinder was nestled in the gap, over two meters in diameter, one flat end facing him
, the brushed-metal surface broken only by a small metal door about thirty centimeters on a side.

  He flipped open the door. Behind it was a recess that held a trio of anachronistic metal dials and a thick metal lever.

  Stefan carefully dialed the combination on each dial. Even though the massive safe was purely mechanical—no electronics to tie into the ship’s systems or announce itself to any sort of passive scan—an incorrect combination would break the seals on several packets of inert chemicals housed in the walls of the device that would, when combined, ignite a powerful reaction that would render the contents so much undifferentiated ash.

  When he spun the last dial to the correct number, he pulled the lever and the end of the cylindrical safe swung outward effortlessly on meticulously engineered hinges. The massive door was as tall as he was, but the walls of the safe were a half-meter thick, leaving a chamber a little better than a meter in diameter.

  Stefan reached in and began pulling out long metal boxes.

  He opened one that held currency reserves from a dozen different planets. The only thing in there of any particular use was the gold, which he removed.

  The second drawer was the more important. He drew it out and opened it to reveal a half-dozen gamma lasers, a couple of caseless slugthrowers, a military-spec stun rod, and a set of heavy-duty Emerson field generators.

  The next drawer held a plasma rifle, several stun and fragmentation grenades, and a couple of hyper-velocity needleguns.

  He stared at the cache of weaponry and whispered, “Sorry, Dad, if you’re not going to fight back, I am.”

  They had a timer warning them, but Toni II was unprepared when the display showing the space around Adam’s cloud went blank. Before she even had time to gasp, the computers monitoring the sensors started damping the output. Once the output had fallen down into levels the display could handle, it washed the bridge in eye-burning light.

  Her sister, now just a black shadow eclipsing the sunlike brightness pouring from the display, damped the display further.

  The Caliphate man said something in Arabic that sounded like a prayer. Karl simply said, “My God.”

  Adam’s dark cloud had become a cloud of boiling plasma, as bright as a second sun, expanding outward in a rolling wave of light and energy that smeared a burning arc across the ecliptic.

  Toni II stared at the display in awe.

  From the captain’s chair, her sister whispered, “I didn’t think we could do something like that. It’s as big as the wormhole explosion.”

  Toni II felt the same brief surge of optimism, until she thought of the fact that Adam had done this nearly a hundred times over across all of human space.

  They had done it once, and it cost half their fleet.

  Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The air was cold on the western slope of the Diderot Mountains. Brother Lazarus stood at a cavern entrance high up in the side of the only mountain range on Bakunin’s only continent. He faced the fading glow in the sky above, muzzle twitching in the frigid air. Then he looked down at the battle-scarred sprawl of Godwin illuminating itself below him.

  The city, the planet itself, seemed unmoved, as if anything happening beyond its fuzzy anarchic borders was beyond its concern. There were more important things for the people on the ground here, political and military dramas that needed to play themselves out, regardless of what fiery apocalypse painted itself across the sky.

  In that respect, Brother Lazarus thought Bakunin shared kinship with the Fifteen Worlds that held nominal authority over the planet.

  As the last of the glowing fires disappeared from the sky, a voice came from behind him. “Brother Lazarus?” To a human ear, the novice’s voice would have been a series of inarticulate half-growls. To Lazarus’ canine ears, it was actually a fair approximation of his native language. He turned around and spoke in English. “You may use your own tongue, Brother Simon.”

  The human Simon smiled, carefully avoiding any dominant show of teeth. “I prefer the practice,” he said in the canid language. “With your permission, of course.” He continued in English accompanied with a short bow.

  “As you wish. You have news?” Brother Lazarus idly wondered if the canid voice irritated Simon’s human throat as much as human languages irritated his own.

  “A courier from the north says there’s rumors of a tach-ship successfully running the PSDC blockade—plunging into the ocean north of Wilson.”

  Brother Lazarus turned to face north, even though Wilson would be far beyond the horizon. “Known survivors?”

  “The area’s still in open revolt. There’s no real telling.”

  Brother Lazarus wondered if Brother Simon realized he had shifted from “resistance,” to “revolt.” It was a measure of how things had changed here, quite apart from any fires in the sky.

  “Thank you,” he told Simon.

  “Do you wish us to try and gather more news of this?”

  “No. We have our own charge to protect.”

  “But any survivors may have news of what is happening,” Simon gestured at the sky which had burned. “This may be a sign.”

  Brother Lazarus shook his head. “There have been signs great and small. But if the time of the Ancients’ return is truly at hand, such knowledge will become apparent soon enough.”

  PART SEVEN

  Demons

  “Our humanity were a poor thing were it not for the divinity which stirs within us.”

  —FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Testimony

  “If you bring a knife to a gunfight, you better be good with a knife.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Battles aren’t won by the best equipped. They are won by the least restrained.”

  —DIMITRI OLMANOV

  (2190-2350)

  Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Nickolai Rajasthan stood at the edge of a temporary camp about fifteen kilometers from the shoreline where the Khalid had gone down. They had been moving carefully on foot, cross-country toward the nearest visible city, and they had taken up residence in what seemed to be an evacuated commune. The emptiness of the place was ominous after seeing the pillars of smoke from the city to their south.

  More ominous were the occasional aircraft he saw with his enhanced Protean eyes. Heavy attack craft bearing the markings of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation; hunter-killers designed to take out hardened ground defenses. The ugly machines floated low and slow on their contragravs, seemingly unconcerned about potential counterattack.

  None came close enough to be a threat to their group, or—more accurately—none came close enough to consider their group a target of opportunity.

  Most ominous, and what made Nickolai’s nose wrinkle, was the smell of fire and death that hung everywhere. The smell of battle was so pervasive that it became sourceless—a background sensation that strung his nerves tight but gave no direction for the threat. Just standing here was exhausting.

  They had already wasted a day hiding in the commune, using food and shelter that the occupants had left behind. He understood the need to gain some intelligence about what was happening here before moving on, but the time weighed on him.

  It gave him time to think . . .

  He had fallen so far in the eyes of his faith that there should be no redemption for him. He had given himself, however unknowingly, over to the service of the Evil One. He had been spared, and he still couldn’t decide if his life from that point was a gift from God, or an added punishment for his transgressions.

  Or both.

  But he thought of Kugara and could no longer believe that he was irrevocably damned.

  Then light washed across the bare earth perimeter of the commune, his ink-black shadow cutting a featureless hole in the ground before him. He turned around and looked up into a night sky that had become daylight-bright.

  His Protean eyes painlessly accommodated
the brightness of the new asymmetrical sun that had bloomed in the Bakunin sky. He could focus in deeply until he saw the roiling clouds of burning plasma that consumed the nanomachine cloud that Adam had bequeathed to Bakunin’s outer solar system.

  “It has begun,” he whispered.

  He heard a familiar voice next to him. “My God.”

  Nickolai turned away from the fire in the sky and looked down at Kugara standing next to him. Her face was washed by the unnatural light as she stared upward, her eyes narrowed to slits. He reached out and touched her shoulder.

  She turned to face him, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have stared at that thing.”

  “Why are you out here? It’s Parvi’s watch next. You should be getting sleep.”

  “I’m finding it hard to sleep through the end of the world.”

  She turned back toward the sky, and Nickolai pulled her back around to face him. “You shouldn’t stare at that.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.” His hand still rested on her shoulder, and she reached up and placed her hand on top of it. Her hand was tiny against his, even though she was taller than most human women. “How can you be so calm?”

  Nickolai snorted. “I am not calm.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  She squeezed his hand, and he felt a strength that rivaled his own. A strength inherited from the same place as his. For all that she appeared human, her ancestors had come from the same genetic labs as his. The same hubris that led to Mankind’s fall from grace, had led to both their births.

  Around them the light faded.

  “We can’t wait here much longer,” he said.