[Apotheosis 03] Messiah Read online

  In front of the Daedalus, a massive cylinder hung along the axis of the spinning superstructure. Dwarfed by the three habitats paralleling it, it still dwarfed the Daedalus, its open end large enough to accommodate a dozen ships of similar size at once.

  As the Daedalus flew inside, slowly braking, she saw the inner surface of the cylinder covered with docked ships of every description.

  Ahead, a docking arm hung down from the inner surface. It was attached to a counter-rotating ring mounted on the inside of the massive cylindrical dock, so her target seemed stationary.

  She broadcast to the ship’s passengers to secure themselves for docking.

  The docking maneuver itself was painless. She barely felt the nudge when the Daedalus mated to the docking arm. But once the connection was secure, the arm retracted and matched the rotation of the Wisconsin. The transition wasn’t violent, but it was just enough to make her slightly queasy.

  As the docking arm drew the Daedalus into the embrace of a docking cradle, warning lights across the control console flickered from amber to green as the ship’s subsystems switched to external power.

  She felt herself sink into the seat as the habitat’s spin gave her the sense of gravity, however small, for the first time in over a month. “This is Captain Valentine. The Daedalus is safely docked. You’re free to move about the ship. The command staff should meet me at the main air lock.”

  Captain Valentine. Command staff. The words still felt wrong in her mouth. Inside, she was still a lieutenant, AWOL from a force that probably no longer existed. The Daedalus was crewed with refugees and run by a pair of pirates. She felt that acting as if they were bound by some larger command structure was only pretending; any moment, some group or other would recognize this all as a fantasy and the whole structure would fall apart.

  She pushed herself up slowly in the low gravity and walked toward the door. Even with daily exercise regimens, her body was suddenly confused about having a definitive “down.”

  She reached the air lock and saw that Mallory’s command structure still held for the moment. The representatives from the Caliphate crew and the Salmagundi crew stood waiting next to Karl Stavros and her other self.

  Toni II stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder, “Good luck, Sis.”

  Toni hugged her twin and wondered briefly if she was being narcissistic. “Thanks,” she whispered. “Keep things together back here.”

  Her twin was probably the one person who didn’t need to ask about the vague unfocused fears that gripped Toni at the moment. She just patted Toni’s back and said, “I’ll handle it.”

  She let go of Toni II and said, “I’m handing you command of the Daedalus.” She turned to the other three and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Welcome to the Wisconsin.” The woman who greeted them after cycling through the air lock was tall and had her blonde hair cut very close to the scalp. She wore a navy-blue jumpsuit that bore some very subtle matte-black chevrons on the sleeves. She held out her hand, and Toni shook it. “We’re taking you to the Gamma habitat, where all the delegations from the Centauri fleet are being housed.”

  The Centauri fleet.

  Toni felt another wave of wrongness. This was not the Centauri fleet; anything deserving such a name probably was battling Adam in the space around Occisis, if it still existed. The “fleet” Mallory had gathered together were refugee craft that just happened to largely come from planets in the Centauri Alliance, those most readily influenced by the last transmission from the papacy. Predictably, as information on what was happening filtered through the thousands of ships huddled in Bakunin space, groups tended to form around existing political lines; a small Sirius fleet, three fleets from Indi, a fleet formed from Bakunin natives and outlaws allied with a handful of ships from the Union of Independent Worlds, and a small contingent of recent arrivals from the Eridani Caliphate.

  So Mallory’s group was the Centauri fleet. And with the possible exceptions for the native Bakuninites, only about ten percent of all of those were actual military vessels.

  Their guide led them around an upward curving corridor until they reached an elevator down to the Gamma habitat. They walked through a large air lock, and into a square chamber about ten meters on a side. Once the air lock sealed behind them, the whole thing started moving down. The image of massive walls sliding past made Toni realize that they were enclosed on three sides by massive windows.

  Then the walls peeled away, leaving the view of the Wisconsin unobstructed as the elevator continued to slide downward. She heard a few sharp intakes of breath from her people.

  Even though she had seen it on approach, the display on the Daedalus’ bridge did not do the view justice. Seeing the Wisconsin with her own eyes, separated only by a half-meter-thick window, slammed home the scale of the thing.

  The long tube of the Gamma habitat unrolled beneath them, stretching a kilometer before and behind, topped by an unbroken surface of windows, behind which Toni could now see details of topography: hills, streams, trees, buildings. And past the end on one side, the mottled gray surface of Schwitzguebel slowly spun; In the other direction, the ruddy orb of Kropotkin burned; and between the two, mirrors were suspended in a spindly framework like chrome-winged butterflies caught in the web of some massive mechanical spider.

  Then the elevator descended through the ceiling of the vast Gamma habitat. Suddenly, the vast windows were above them and the sky lightened from black to blue. The transition was so sharp that Toni suspected that the color was designed into the windows to provide for a more natural-looking sky. Even so, the sky was alien in that instead of a single sun, there were hundreds of reflections of Kropotkin shining down on the two-kilometer strip of land below them.

  New walls reached up to embrace the windows and seal off the view, and the elevator slid softly to a stop. Toni’s legs ached now that she stood in something approaching a full gee standard. Karl looked a little wobbly, while the other two looked less so—they’d been living in zero-gee aboard the Daedalus for a much shorter time.

  The large doors opened on a broad flat area dominated by wheeled vehicles of every description. Beyond the parked vehicles, a line of trees hid the rest of the habitat from view, and above them, some sort of birds flew between them and the artificially blue sky.

  The guy from the Salmagundi militia had never been out of a gravity well before fleeing Adam’s “conversion” of his planet. Toni glanced at him staring at the habitat around him.

  Toni took a deep breath. She’d been space-borne so long, she had forgotten what it smelled like when air wasn’t canned and reprocessed. She smelled earth and water, and some sort of plant life that brought her near to a sneeze.

  Their escort told them, “Your hotel is this way.”

  Hotel?

  They followed her down a walkway leaving the vehicle pad, and through a small park that grew wild in such a way that it seemed part of the design.

  She hadn’t had the time to investigate the Wisconsin herself, so she wondered what its role had been in peacetime. It almost looked like a tourist destination, hotels and all. But what kind of tourists came to Bakunin?

  The more she thought about it, the queasier she became.

  Of course, the main attraction is the fact that there is no law. If you have money, and tastes for things that are frowned upon on your home planet...

  The hotel they approached radiated luxury the way a burning engine gave off toxic fumes. The walls arced upward, polished granite shining, windows glinting from behind brass frames, an intimidating mass of wealth that contrasted with the scene on the ground greeting them.

  The landscaping around the hotel was trampled into a uniform soggy mess; fences and handrails had been broken and replaced by only token repairs. A bench had toppled over. A geometric fountain had been shut off, and its basin was filled only with a film of dirty water dotted with trash. As they closed on the hotel, she saw several broken windows covered with reflective plastic sheeting. r />
  Their guide led them to a long queue that seemed much more orderly than the damaged scenery led Toni to expect. The order was enforced by a dozen stone-faced guards wearing blue jumpsuits and carrying nasty-looking laser carbines. At the head of the line, people filed slowly in front of a row of desks. Above the desks, a hand-lettered sign read, “Please wait in line until you’re registered and issued a badge.”

  Karl asked their guide as she turned to go, “Have you been having refugee problems?”

  “Nothing security can’t handle,” she responded, leaving them in line.

  “Looks like they had a riot,” Karl said under his breath.

  It took an hour to get through the line, and have the Wisconsin’s bureaucrats satisfy themselves and issue the four of them ID badges. The bored functionary that processed Toni showed only a brief flash of human emotion when he registered some obvious surprise that Toni had been issued space in one of the hotel’s penthouses. Apparently, though, his existence was dreary enough that the expression only lasted a few seconds, then he handed her the ID and called, “Next.”

  When the priest’s ship had arrived from Salmagundi, the nominal reason the pirate Valentine bitches had for taking Mallory’s refugees on board was in order to render aid to their wounded. The Khalid had brought them the first casualties of the priest’s war against the Antichrist. Stefan knew their names as Shane and Abbas. Shane was part of the odd tribe of men from Salmagundi, an old bald man bearing more tattoos on his scalp, it seemed, than all of his countrymen put together. Abbas was a much younger woman who had apparently been the highest-ranking member of the Caliphate soldiers Mallory had following him.

  They were both severely injured, and had yet to regain consciousness. The two took up most of the Daedalus’ limited medical resources, and a few hours after the so-called “command staff” left, a medical from the Wisconsin came up to transport the wounded to an actual hospital. Since Stefan was the only crew left who knew the medbay design, he didn’t even have to ask to be the one to assist the Wisconsin medics. The pirate bitch running his ship had no idea that he’d want to help move the wounded. Or that he had very good reasons to want to.

  Stefan met the medics and showed them the control systems on the two enclosed medbays housing Alexander Shane and Sergeant Abbas. Both victims were barely stable, and the medics were loath to take either out of the bays to transport.

  The medics were gratified when Stefan showed them how the medbay pods had been updated to be movable. Both had internal systems that could run independently of the Daedalus.With a little effort they could transport both Shane and Abbas to the hospital without disconnecting their life support.

  And Stefan was more than happy to accompany them.

  They moved the massive medbays out of the Daedalus and down to the Beta habitat level. When they reached the ground level of the habitat, a truck was waiting for them, a tracked flatbed cargo mover, since a standard ambulance couldn’t accommodate the large medbays. Stefan rode with the driver as the vehicle wove through a dense glass-walled city, windows shining with the hundreds of Kropotkins the Wisconsin’s mirrors reflected down on them.

  The medics were concerned with their patients, so Stefan talked to the driver, asking about how things were on the Wisconsin.

  “You might not see it here, but things’re a mess—”

  Stefan listened attentively as the driver told him how much things had gone to hell. The Beta habitat was largely given over to the administrative and operations staff of the Wisconsin. Alpha and Gamma were the tourist areas; hotels, casinos, brothels, and the sorts of entertainment one came for if one came to Bakunin for entertainment. Attractions with an additional premium attached for being safely out of the chaos down on the surface.

  “Never should’ve let the refugees in,” the man told him. The place had been overwhelmed. Most of the security force on the Wisconsin was in the Gamma habitat trying to keep things under control with all the “diplomacy,” going on. The driver spat the word in a derisive tone that exactly matched Stefan’s feelings.

  But Stefan had no intention of being a party to some war that had nothing to do with him.

  The hospital was overcrowded and understaffed, and no one paid any particular attention to Stefan. He followed along as the medics pushed the medical bays from the Daedalus into the emergency room. Removing Shane and Abbas from the safety of the medical sarcophagi was a tense process, but a successful one—in large part because the medical readings from each bay had been slightly altered to downgrade its occupant’s condition.

  The medics wouldn’t have known from the readouts, but it probably would have been perfectly safe to remove both patients when they’d still been on-board the ship. But had they done that, Stefan and the two medbays would have remained on the Daedalus.

  Stefan quietly moved the medbays out of the way of the medical staff as they went to work on Shane and Abbas. No one paid him any attention.

  It was clumsy for one man to move the units, but they were powered and could roll with just one hand directing them. Stefan took the pair of units back outside to the waiting truck, the driver leaned out the cab and said, “That was quick.”

  Stefan nodded. “Let me secure these and we can go back to the elevator.”

  The driver remained in the cab as Stefan eased both units onto the back of the truck. Then, out of sight of the driver, he opened a small access panel near the bottom of one of the medbay pods. Inside, nestled among a small arsenal of carefully packed weaponry, the handle of a military-grade stun rod was just within reach. He withdrew it, checked the charge, and sealed the compartment shut.

  When Stefan got in the cab with the driver, the man turned to say something to him, and his jaw connected with the stun rod. The driver jerked and flopped over, falling across the passenger seat.

  Stefan crawled over the man and sat down behind the controls, leaving the man in a drooling heap on the passenger seat. Stefan smiled and pulled away from the hospital.

  He knew that he couldn’t be the only person here who didn’t accept the idea of becoming a sacrifice on the altar of some idiot’s theology.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Unbeliever

  “More collateral damage has been done around a conference table than has ever been done on the battlefield.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  (1709-1784)

  Date: 2526.8.4 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Father Francis Xavier Mallory stood alone in a penthouse suite on top of one of the Wisconsin’s many hotels. He faced the window, looking down the long axis of the Gamma habitat. He could see half of this self-contained world from where he sat, and from a perspective high enough that the viewer could ignore the scars the influx of refugees had left, and the ubiquitous presence of blue-suited security guards.

  He stared out at the view and prayed for himself, and for the souls of everyone in Adam’s path. His hands shook slightly, and he clenched them into fists to quiet them. He didn’t remember the last time he had slept, but it had been before he had boarded the Savannah to command his attack on the ghostly presence of Adam in Bakunin’s outer solar system.

  When he closed his eyes, he could still picture the fiery hell that he had wrought, sterilizing the nanomachine cloud that was Adam’s foothold in this solar system. That moment was the point where he realized the weight upon him, the responsibility.

  He was certain it was God calling him to do this, to lead the defense of this planet in the face of a power barely within human comprehension. That faith should have given him comfort, but instead it filled him with an emotion akin to panic. His faith in God was strong, but his faith in himself became thinner with each passing moment.

  He was here to negotiate a unified defense of the system, but his one victory had placed him, and those that followed him, at
a steep disadvantage. He might have some credibility throughout the refugee fleet because of the tach-comm from the Vatican, but he had thrown away half his own fleet’s numbers to destroy Adam’s cloud. His Centauri fleet was now half the size of the next smallest group here.

  Worse, there were many people dead set against him because of the damage that attack had caused their own tach-drives. He had broadcast a warning for all ships in the system to power down their tach-drives—but the failure of some to listen did not make them blame Mallory and his people any less.

  He squeezed his fists and felt the pulse raging in his neck.

  I should see a doctor, he thought. He had old implants from his marine days, designed to optimize the performance of his body in combat. Normally, their effect should only last a half hour or so . . .

  It felt as if the implants had been jacking his body for days.

  I don’t have the time to see a doctor.

  The next twenty-four hours would be crucial in presenting a unified front when Adam made his eventual appearance. And, for all they knew, Adam’s attack could be in the midst of tach-space right now, on its way to claim another planet for its insatiable god.

  “After the negotiations,” he whispered to himself.

  Behind him the penthouse door whooshed open, and he turned to face the new arrivals. The four other members of the Daedalus’ command staff walked into the suite.

  Karl Stavros, still the nominal owner of the Daedalus, looked at Mallory and said, “Father, you look like hell.”

  Mallory turned to Toni Valentine, the de facto captain of the Daedalus and asked, “Any problems getting here?”

  Toni shook her head. “None. Though they seem to have a large refugee problem here. I can see why they refused us docking rights when we first showed up. Downstairs is a mess.”