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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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But whoever was playing the track knew what they were doing. The train slowed to little over twenty klicks per, and it finally ground itself to a halt, sliding into the station with a hideous screech and a shower of sparks.
Through the windows he saw a welcoming committee of about twenty guys in powered armor.
He sucked in a painful breath, amazed that he was still alive, and said, “It may disappoint the tiger, but I’m leaning toward surrender.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Anathema
“Hell grows out of a desire for Utopia.”
—
The Cynic’s Book
of Wisdom
 
“Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”
—ARISTOTLE
(384 BCE-322 BCE)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Mallory and the other commanders watched the main holo on board the
Wisconsin
. Across the holo, a galaxy of blue showed the largest fleet ever formed by man. The adversary only had fifty ships.
Only fifty.
But as Mallory watched blue lights blink out, he began to wonder if the numerical advantage mattered. The battles were akin to watching a squad of Occisis Marines go up against an army of UN peacekeepers from the 21st century. The red dots showed some attrition, but not nearly enough.
A flash obliterated a red dot, and the Indi commanders said something to each other in Mandarin. Tito said quietly, “We got one.”
Mallory nodded gravely. Adam was down to thirty-eight ships, but at a cost of over two hundred of theirs. Those losses were barely sustainable, and of a magnitude to make him pray that he hadn’t chosen the wrong path.
At the control console, the other Valentine said, “Oh, no.”
Her sister said, “What is it?” before Mallory got the question out himself.
“The
Othello
just wiped out three merchantmen attached to the
Adam Smith.
”
“What the hell?” Tito snapped at the mention of the
Adam Smith
. It was the largest and most heavily armed of the Bakunin native fleet. The
Othello
was part of the SEC forces, a dreadnought that was one of the more sophisticated military vessels in the fleet. He turned toward General Lafayette and said, “Do you train your people?”
“It must be some mistake—”
“Damn right it is! Three ships to friendly fire.
Three?
”
“Eight,” Valentine said. “The
Othello
has claimed eight ships now, including the
Adam Smith
.”
Both Tito and General Lafayette were stunned into silence.
“The
Othello
is compromised!” Mallory shouted. “It’s part of Adam’s fleet now! Concentrate fire on it!”
Valentine passed on the orders, but color drained from her face as she did. She shook her head and started reading off the names of ships, “
Sun Tzu
,
Liverpool
,
Ulysses
,
Mjöllnir, Lincoln
,
Shiva
—damn it, we’ve got dozens of ships suddenly turning on our own fleet.”
It’s like fighting a virus.
“Same rules of engagement as Adam’s fleet. One of ours starts attacking, give it a wide berth and concentrate fire.”
Valentine typed at the console, and suddenly the lonely red dots in the midst of their fleet were joined by another twenty yellow ones.
Now there were over fifty enemy ships to contend with, and the losses were no longer sustainable. He heard muttering from the command next to him and realized that they had come to the same conclusion.
“We need to stage a retreat to regroup.” Tito said.
“We’ll be slaughtered like this,” General Lafayette said. “We need to disperse our forces.”
One of the Indi commanders asked, “Can we reprise the attack you made on the cloud?”
“No,” Mallory said, “That was a static target, and we had time to synchronize hundreds of tach computers. We don’t have a known fixed target, or time. But we do need to retreat to buy time.” He addressed Lieutenant Valentine. “Every ship that has a charged tach-drive, jump at their own discretion off the ecliptic and away from Bakunin.”
“It’s too dangerous to use tach-drives tactically like that,” General Lafayette said.
“It’s all we have,” Mallory shook his head.
After a few minutes of tense silence, Lieutenant Valentine said, “We have tach-pulses from our ships.” On the holo, blue dots began winking out. “Several ships have their drives disabled. We’ve lost the
Independence.
”
“We need a strategy to segregate Adam’s ships,” Mallory said. “They’re vulnerable in isolation.”
“We’re getting stronger tach-pulses ...” On the holo, the remaining red dots began winking out, leaving the yellow, infected ships behind.
“They’re retreating?” Tito asked.
Mallory realized that the Caliphate ships had drives an order of magnitude faster than any his fleet had. They were following the retreating ships’ trajectories—and they would be there waiting, crucial seconds before the slower ships fell out of tach-space; thirty-eight red dots, facing the refugee fleet one-on-one.
He had just signed the death warrants for thirty-eight more ships.
But their fleet was spreading out, less of a target. It was the right order for the vast majority of their forces . . .
God help them all.
“I have a ship headed for the
Wisconsin.
”
“Ours or theirs?” Mallory asked.
“A single unarmed luxury passenger ship. Transponder IDs it as
Xanadu.
”
General Lafayette said, “It’s the ship that bastard stole after his attempted coup—”
“Warn him off,” Mallory said.
“Warn?” General Lafayette sputtered. “Shoot him down.”
Mallory glared at the general. “Warn him off, and if he doesn’t change course,
then
shoot him down.”
A smaller holo popped up, showing the approaching craft. Telemetry data sped by below, enough for Captain Valentine to say, “That’s not a docking vector, and he’s still accelerating.”
Lieutenant Valentine said, “He’s not responsive.”
Mallory shook his head, “Shoot him.”
 
The being that had been Stefan Stavros watched as the
Wisconsin
’s defenses locked onto the
Xanadu
. Even a nominally peaceful entity like the
Wisconsin,
in the lawless sphere of Bakunin, had an impressive array of defensive measures. Any attacker that came toward one of the habitats would face arrays of missiles, and energy weapons ranging from chaotic frequency lasers that would tax any ship’s Emerson field to pulses of coherent plasma that contained enough energy to render many such fields irrelevant.
The
Xanadu
was rocketing down the
Wisconsin
’s axis of rotation, and facing one of the more intimidating defenses. The
Wisconsin
’s linac accelerated its mundane iron-nickel projectiles along its two-kilometer length before directing them out a cannon along its axis.
Stefan grinned as the linac discharged a tight grouping of shots, balls of metal smaller than the tip of his finger, but tearing through space at a speed near a third of light-speed. A dozen iron marbles spread out in a circle about thirty meters across, intersecting the
Xanadu’s
path.
Only one of them hit.
That was enough. The kinetic energy of that small projectile was enough to vaporize it and about fifty cubic meters of the
Xanadu
instantaneously. The stress of the impact caused a massive failure of the structure, the ship fragmenting along its length, its hull buckling, and the engines—losing the containment for their reaction chamber—erupted into a fiery ball.
In less than a microsecond, the
Xanadu
had been transformed into a cloud of wreckage made of boiling gases and fragments not much bigger than the linac bullet that had hit it.
Stefan no longer had a face to smile with.
If he had, he would have grinned harder.
He no longer inhabited a body. His flesh had only been a vessel, much like the
Xanadu
had been. His identity now lived in a complex matrix of microscopic machines that had permeated the matter of the
Xanadu
. Adam’s machines were as hardy as bacteria, and the linac attack had only sterilized a fraction of those machines where Stefan’s identity lived.
As the cloud moved, only slightly deviated from the
Xanadu’s
original vector, the small chunks of solid matter within it dissolved. Stefan consumed them, transforming the wreckage into more of the cloud containing him. Less than two seconds from the destruction of the
Xanadu
, all that was left was an undifferentiated cloud of matter.
Matter that was almost entirely Stefan.
 
On the holo, the approaching ship disintegrated after a single salvo; vaporizing into a cloud of wreckage that glowed briefly before turning completely dark. Mallory stared at it with unease, sensing an ugly familiarity in what he was seeing.
“Is anything going to hit the
Wisconsin?
” he asked Lieutenant Valentine.
“We’re not picking up any solid mass left, the ship entirely vaporized. It’s going to blow right by us.”
“Damn,” Tito said, “Lucky shot—”
“No,” Mallory said, “That cloud, what’s left, is that going to hit the
Wisconsin?
”
“It’s on the same trajectory, more or less. It will brush the Gamma hab—”
“Evacuate the Gamma habitat now!” Mallory shouted. “And fire everything you can into that cloud!”
 
With the alien sense of the cloud, Stefan saw the
Wisconsin
resume its attack upon him. It was too little, too late. Projectiles and lasers penetrated through his unsolid mass, and while the plasma weapons burned away some of himself, his cloud was moving so fast that, by the time they were in range to do damage, he was already touching the
Wisconsin.
The tiny machines that made up the whole of Stefan Stavros struck the surface of the rotating Gamma habitat, remaking themselves into something more cohesive; a liquid condensate forming on a hundred-meter stretch of the great windows facing the core. Below the condensate, thread-fine holes burrowed through meters of insulated and armored plastic, glass, and polymer. Millions of holes drilled down from vacuum to air, none much wider than the individual nanomachines.
Beneath, on the underside of the great blue-tinted windows, the view darkened, the surface clouding as Kropotkin’s reflected light was further refracted by Stefan’s entrance. The white clouds embedded in the window’s surface darkened as if they were actual storm clouds.
And like a storm cloud, there was, eventually, rain.
This rain, however, was solid black, and where it fell, matter melted and pooled, becoming more of itself. Beneath the storm, people ran toward the elevators to the core, but some were unlucky enough to find themselves beneath Stefan’s rain. People screamed as the black drops scalded their skin and burrowed inside their flesh, mechanically disassembling them on a molecular level, until their bodies lost cohesion and they fell on the already black ground, skin bursting apart to spill more black liquid onto the pulsing ground.
At the center of the chaos, a pillar formed, the matter reassembling itself into a copy of Stefan Stavros. In a human body again, Stefan looked around with human eyes, amazed at what he was wreaking.
For a hundred meters in every direction, the living, moving shadow that was him, had claimed the surface of the habitat. The edge of his influence pushed itself outward, to the base of one of the gaudy tourist hotels. Stefan’s darkness climbed up the edges, to embrace the building, pull its matter into itself. Stefan poured himself through the doors and windows, consuming the structure until its own mass pulled it down, crushing itself and the people still trapped within.
Stefan’s blackness crashed over the mound of debris in a wave, covering it, flattening it, digesting it.
So this is what a God feels like
, Stefan thought.
His fury was immeasurable. Not only had the priest played with all their lives, risking everyone in a futile war against Adam, but Mallory had also conspired to deny him
this
.
The priest, and all who followed him, deserved the unmerciful hand of judgment. His minions would die, and the priest himself would be torn apart.
As Stefan’s anger grew, the mass around him became more agitated, growing tentacles and feelers that whipped by, cracking like whips, smashing into themselves and their surroundings. He walked forward, to the edge of his circle of influence, and past it, leading ten thousand square meters of boiling chaos like a cape behind him.

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