Heretics (26 page)

She had pushed her bluff as far as she could. The displays had instantly shown him that she was priming the ship for an interstellar jump.

She rotated in the pilot's chair, ducking to avoid Stefan's grappling arms. He passed over her without even the illusion of gravity. Toni gripped the chair's arms and pushed herself up to head-butt him in the solar plexus. Not the most elegant hand-to-hand tactic in zero-G, but effective. She heard him gasp as his whole body slowly tumbled back and up toward the ceiling.

Stefan's dad, Karl, obviously had more experience with weightless fighting. He had the sense to stay by his seat. Jumping like his son might be dramatic, but against a trained opponent it set you up for flailing in midair, unable to connect with anything.

Instead, Karl had unhooked a length of the crash webbing from the safety harness, a strap that ended in a heavy buckle. He swung it in a whistling arc up at her head. She had just enough time to raise her left arm to block it. The webbing struck her forearm, and the buckle swung, barely grazing her cheek as it wrapped around her arm.

Karl yanked, pulling her off-balance enough that the left side of her body came off the chair, just in time for Stefan to push off the ceiling at her. She dodged, pulling on the strap herself, so that Stefan's fist hit her shoulder rather than her face. The blow sent her slamming into the floor between Karl and the pilot's chair. She rolled, but not quickly enough to avoid Karl's boot connecting with the side of her head.

The impact stunned her and she felt another foot, Stefan's or Karl's, slamming into her back above the right kidney. She clenched her fists and pushed off of the floor. Something, foot or fist, connected with the lower part of her face, sending her up off the ground trailing an arc of tiny floating spheres of blood. Behind the bloody constellation, she blurrily saw Karl grinning at her.

The crash webbing was still wrapped around her forearm. She twisted it tight and pulled hard. Karl's smile vanished as the gap between them closed in an instant and her right fist found a temporary home on his left temple. It wasn't a great punch, but it was enough to bounce his skull off the bulkhead behind him.

Then a forearm wrapped around her neck and she knew she was screwed. Stefan had her in a sleeper hold, and she didn't have any leverage to break it.

Then she heard her own voice: “That is
enough!
”

As her sight dimmed, she looked up and saw Toni II standing in the doorway, holding the confiscated slugthrower.

Toni felt the arm around her neck loosen. She saw herself shake her head and move the gun to point at Karl. “Don't think you're getting away with a human shield. I can always shoot him first.”

The arm let her go.

“Into the seats. Now!”

Karl and his son did as they were told, giving Toni's head a chance to clear enough to be embarrassed about being overpowered by a couple of unarmed civilians.

“Get back to the controls,” Toni II told her. “I'll cover these two.”

Toni nodded and pulled herself back into the pilot's seat.

Karl said, “What the hell is this? You aren't Styx Security.”

Toni sucked a glob of blood off of her lip and couldn't find it in herself to be angry at the guy. “Not anymore,” she said.

She flipped the comm station back on, and suddenly the cockpit was filled with squawking warnings in half a dozen languages.

“They're going to shoot us down!” Stefan said.

“No,” Toni said. “Not as long as we're unarmed and tracking away from the station. They're pissed, not trigger-happy.”
As long as they don't know who's on board.

The tach-drive controls were all glowing a happy green at her. The only red spot on the control board was on the display that should have been showing the all-clear from traffic control. There'd be a long wait for that; fortunately it was simple enough to tell the nav computer to ignore it.

“Where are you taking us?” Karl asked.

“Where else do pirates go?” Toni responded.

“Bakunin?” her own voice said from behind her.

“You got it,” she said.

She engaged the drive, there was a short whoop warning that they hadn't gotten clearance, Stefan muttered, “Oh shit,” and on the viewscreen the dirty gray arc of Styx ceased to exist.

 

Colonel Horace Xander, the second- highest ranking member of Stygian Military Intelligence on the 3SEC command station, stared at his personal comm unit as he strode alone through the corridors toward his cabin. His hand shook slightly, the only outward sign of the mixture of frustration and fear that churned though his guts.

He couldn't believe that bitch had turned up.
Bitches
, he corrected himself. He should have been in control of the situation, should have been able to co-opt them—

He had just spent the last hour doctoring all the electronic records, both for traffic control and internal station surveillance. Everything connected to Lieutenant Toni Valentine was safely sealed behind a wall of top-secret encryption reserved for the blackest of black ops. It was a hole for data that was more final than outright deletion, and less apt to raise questions.

Now, less than thirty minutes to zero hour, with every layer of the Stygian Command in conference trying to understand what was happening and how to react to it, he got a summons on his personal comm. The text itself was unremarkable, “We must discuss what is abroad in the world.”

It was a code phrase, one that had been established long ago, when he had accepted an offer. It was not a deal he could avoid now, not now that He was coming. But the message had come from his cabin, meaning He was already here.

He stepped into his cabin as soon as the door slid aside for him.

The room was large, at the moment lit only by a wide viewscreen showing a slowly moving view of Styx from the edge of the 3SEC platform. Sigma Draconis had just set beyond the horizon, leaving the planet a single thin arc of glowing white under the stars.

A human figure stood silhouetted against the viewscreen. “I never tire of watching the stars, Colonel,” He said.

The door slid shut behind Colonel Xander with a soft pneumatic hiss.

“The stretch of space and time represented in a single glance at the sky, it is humbling, isn't it?”

“Y-yes.”

“And if you saw with my eyes, how much vaster your view would be. You would understand. All life stands astride an abyss, a void that would consume everything that was, everything that is, everything that will be.”

“Yes, Adam.”

“Are you afraid, my son?”

He was afraid, deathly afraid down to his soul. He didn't know what to do, or what to say. So he froze in place, mute. The comm unit still shook slightly in his hand.

“It has already happened. Its light is racing toward us as we speak. There's no need to fear it. Styx is at a safe distance. I would not be serving my purpose if I allowed them to be harmed.”

Colonel Xander said nothing.

“But your fear is more personal, isn't it?”

He didn't want to, but he found himself speaking. The words “I'm sorry” ripped from his throat as if compelled just by Adam's presence. “I didn't think it would—I had no idea she—I didn't realize I risked—”

“Quiet, Colonel,” Adam said softly.

The torrent of words froze in Xander's mouth.

“You made a mistake. You allowed a foreknowledge of my plans to guide your actions. You risked revealing yourself, which would have made your position useless to me. You understand this?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you afraid?”

“You will punish me.”

Adam laughed, and Xander felt his heart freeze. The silhouette finally turned around from the starscape to face him. He could barely make out the outlines of His face, but he could see the edges of a smile that was frightening in its intensity.

“My poor Colonel Xander, you do not understand, do you?” Adam walked up and touched Xander's cheek with the palm of his hand. The tough was gentle, warm, and much too human. In fact, there was nothing to distinguish Adam from anyone else on the 3SEC station; he even wore the generic gray jumpsuit that was issued to all maintenance personnel. When He turned to touch him, Xander saw the name stitched on the jumpsuit's left breast, “Adam Newman.”

“You chose to serve me, however imperfectly. In the end, that is all I ask.”

“But—”

Adam moved His hand to cover Xander's lips. “There is only one thing I will not forgive, and that is opposition to me. Because that is not a sin against only me, but a sin against all life—it is the condemnation of all life into the consuming void.” He lifted his hand. “Do you understand this?”

“Yes.”

“The Race, who created what I was, destroyed all that they were. Do you long for their fate? Do you wish mankind to follow the Dolbrians into oblivion?”

“No.”

“Then I have no need to punish you.” He turned to face the viewscreen, this time standing next to Xander. “It is time for you to see the dawning of mankind's salvation, Colonel Xander.”

On the viewscreen appeared a new star, briefly brighter than Sigma Draconis.

“All signs in Heaven point to the ground.”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

Cardinal Jacob Anderson looked out a window of the Apostolic Palace at the crowd thronging St. Peter's Square. It was worse than usual, worse then Easter or Christmas—worse than any time he could remember. He knew the crowds backed up, filling Vatican City, and Rome itself was grinding to a halt.

Behind him, he heard a holo broadcast echoing from somewhere, barely competing with the muffled crowd noise that managed to leak in through the blast-proof windows. He heard the announcer say something about similar crowds massing in Mecca and Jerusalem.

“They're looking for guidance.”

Cardinal Anderson said, “Yes, Your Holiness.”

The man standing next to him was the Bishop of Rome, Pope Stephen XII. The pope looked out the window at the same crowd Cardinal Anderson did. As he did, the pope drummed his fingers against his thigh. More than anything, the uncertainty of the gesture disturbed Anderson.

“Do we have any more news, Jacob?”

He had just briefed the pontiff two hours ago, a full three hours after the first of seven new stars blazed in the sky. Even for Cardinal Anderson, Bishop of Ostia, Vatican Secretary of State, it took three hours to fully assemble the facts of the matter.

“No. The situation hasn't changed in the last few hours.”

“No changes in the casualty estimates?”

“They'll never be more than guesses. Almost everyone that was in contact with Earth evacuated in time—those that weren't, we don't even have an accurate census.” He gazed down at the crowd. Every one of them sought an explanation for the new lights in the sky, the chain of stars that defined, however briefly, the plane of the ecliptic across the heavens.

Those stars were gone now, each marking the fiery death of one of the wormholes orbiting Sol, human artifacts that had marked mankind's first tentative steps into interstellar space. Seven of them, all had gone within the space of a few hours, dying with a burst of radiation that damaged tach-drives throughout the solar system, and may have wiped out a thousand, or as many as a hundred thousand, people in the outer solar system.

“I've taken to studying the Book of Revelation recently.”

Cardinal Anderson looked across at the pope, a questioning look crossing his face. “Your Holiness?”

“Oh don't look so shocked, my son. I am not about to rewrite millennia's worth of the Church's eschatology for a single event. But it would do to re-familiarize yourself with it.”

The pope smiled. “Of course that is just the first and obvious interpretation. We also have the seven angels and the seven churches, the seven spirits of God, the seven seals, the seven trumpets.”

“Or it can be simply an obscenely powerful attack on the old wormhole network. Seven just happens to be a powerful number in the scriptures.”

“You believe it is coincidental?”

“No, Your Holiness.”

“No?”

“The attack came from Xi Virginis, and the last transmission we received was a quote from Revelation. I think our attacker is quite aware of the implications, and possibly timed things so that wormhole orbits had them all visible in the northern hemisphere at the same time.”

“You're presuming a planning window of centuries, just for a metaphorical gesture.”

“Considering the appalling amount of energy involved, it is more than a gesture.”

The pope looked up at the sky through the window. “I wonder what Father Mallory found out there.”

“It appears that whatever he found will be finding us soon enough.”

The pope adjusted his robes, looked at Cardinal Anderson, and said, “Pray that we serve God's will.”