Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Messiah (35 page)
That was almost a mental equivalent of wandering guideless through the dark tunnels under the Diderot Mountains. He was not a monk or a philosopher. He had been as mediocre in his religious training as he had been exceptional in the skills of a warrior. And his spiraling thoughts led him to a core of self-doubt that pondered if those deficits in his upbringing were responsible for his new understanding of God.
I know what is right.
If the Ancients had the foresight that Lazarus believed, if they were truly the hand of God in the universe, Nickolai was convinced that whatever remnants they left behind would be with this in mind, something like Adam. If the Ancients’ creation was divine, free from the hubris of Mankind’s creation of their ancestors, wouldn’t they have left them some means to know their mind?
Perhaps some way to call upon them?
That was it. It had to be. Like Nickolai’s faith, like Mallory’s, Lazarus’ had a defining moment for the end times. For the monks here, the end point of the current world was the return of the Ancients.
What if, buried in these caverns, was something that Lazarus believed would call them back? If so, Nickolai could now understand the lie, the reluctance. What kind of burden would it be to hold the secret of the end of the world, to have the responsibility of deciding when and how it would start?
Even if he didn’t share Lazarus’ faith, he understood the burden. If Nickolai had the means, how easy for him would it be to open the door of Heaven and allow the vengeful spirit of St. Rajasthan to descend upon the Fallen and the Saved alike?
He knew his job would have to be to convince Brother Lazarus that it was time to open that door.
Brother Lazarus had fasted and meditated since the exiled scion of Rajasthan had left his sight. He sat on the floor of his meditation chamber, facing the embedded slab of rock bearing the Ancients’ hand. He sought to empty his mind of all distraction, all the clutter the external world tried to pour into his flawed vessel of a being.
He needed to see the chaos around him, around the universe, with the perspective of the Ancients, where the distance of a million years rendered them all so much dust drifting though the tabernacle of the Ancients’ creation.
From that distance, did what Adam bring upon them truly matter?
The decision weighed heavily upon him.
He did not only protect the small bit of the Fifteen Worlds’ sovereignty on this planet. He also protected the secrets they had found here. It was disturbing, a sign in and of itself, that Nickolai suspected that there was anything here to find. However limited his knowledge, the fact that the Barrier was here, under this mountain range, was only known to six people. All of them resided in the monastery. No one who knew about it was ever permitted to leave.
Now it seemed, according to Nickolai, that the Proteans knew of the Barrier.
Did Adam?
Was either of them so much closer to the Ancients than he was?
He looked up at the rock covered with the script of the Ancients; the stone was passive, as it had been all the millions of years since the Ancients’ departure. If he had been of another faith, he might have prayed for wisdom.
He had three choices.
First was to do nothing. If Adam came to the Ancients’ world here, take that as enough sign that this Adam was to be their successor in the Ancients’ plan.
Second was to accept Nickolai’s sincerity, and take him and his companions to the Barrier.
His last choice was uncomfortable to contemplate. The first of his faith to come here and discover the Barrier had decided what it must have meant. It was a doorway to the Ancients themselves, a doorway that had to be protected from those not ready to pass through. They kept its existence a secret, and to prevent its premature revelation, they buried explosives throughout the complex network of caverns leading to it. Every monk to hold Lazarus’ position had a detonator implanted in his skull. With a thought, he could seal the Barrier beneath a hundred million tons of the Diderot Mountains.
Perhaps it would be safe then . . .
But perhaps not.
And perhaps the Barrier itself would be destroyed in the process.
Was now the time for their return, and if it was, or wasn’t, did his decision matter? Was the decision his, or was he deluding himself? His faith called upon him to see in terms of millions of years; the thought that it all fell upon
his
head was the height of arrogance. He was nothing.
his
head was the height of arrogance. He was nothing.
What was his duty?
His reflection was interrupted by a high-pitched whine. His nose immediately picked up the scent of vaporized metal and superheated rock.
He sprang to his feet. Someone was shooting.
He heard a cry, and the scent of blood mixed with hot metal and smoke. He ran for the door, his thoughts perilously close to firing the explosives that would bring the mountain down around them.
Through the doorway, he heard more EM rifles, one cry had become a chorus, and the blood he smelled now merged a half-dozen species. His hermitlike existence meant he had never succumbed to the local tradition of bearing arms at all times. He now regretted resisting that impulse.
In the hallway, he took one step toward the armory as Brother Simon ran around the corner toward him. He had been a native convert, and would have carried a weapon, if his right arm still extended past his elbow. He clutched the bleeding stump as he ran, eyes glassy and skin pale, obviously heading toward Lazarus even though he seemed unaware that his leader was in the hallway until he was almost upon him.
When Simon saw him, he stopped short, stumbled, and fell into Lazarus’ arms.
“Proudhon betrayed us,” he groaned.
Heavy footsteps preceded a large shadowy figure into the hallway after Simon. The figure filled the corridor, almost as wide as it was tall. It moved deliberately, with a mass that shook the stone floor beneath it. In form it was a headless armored torso as wide as Lazarus was tall, with legs thicker than Lazarus’ torso, clawed hands large and powerful enough to tear even Gregor the ursine in half with a twist of the wrist. One of those claws pointed at Lazarus and Simon, aiming a cluster of weapons at them, any one of which would probably leave them a thin smear on the ground.
“Brother Lazarus,” it called to him.
The voice was familiar.
“Brother Lazarus,” it repeated in General Lubikov’s voice, and something whined as a red light came on above one of the barrels emerging from its forearm.
“Yes,” he responded.
“You will order your people to stand down.”
When Lazarus hesitated, it repeated, “You will order your people to stand down, or they will all be killed.”
They didn’t have the resources to repel this kind of military attack. He looked at the thing and said, “How?”
“Give the order. It will be broadcast.”
Simon looked up at him and whispered, “You aren’t going to—”
He gave the order, and he heard his voice echoed through the corridors. After speaking twice, the sounds of battle, if not the smell, began to recede.
Simon muttered, “Why?”
“Suicide is not a virtue,” Lazarus told him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Desecration
“The most dangerous threats are the ones you assume you understand.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Their team has the bad habit of changing the lineup when you aren’t looking.”
—SYLVIA HARPER
(2008-2081)
Date: 2526.8.12 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725(2008-2081)
Nickolai and Kugara were immediately awake at the first sound of gunfire. Nickolai stood in the center of the room, holding the chain that was his only weapon, as Kugara roused Brody and Dörner.
“What the hell—” Brody started to complain, but he stopped talking as soon as he saw the expression on Kugara’s face.
Nickolai listened to the sounds coming through the sealed doorway. The grinding of machinery, the whine of EM rifles, the cries of the wounded.
“Adam?” whispered Dörner.
Nickolai shook his head, “Not unless he’s now using heavy powered infantry.” He could hear the footsteps of the armor, five times the mass of the powered suits he’d confronted in the woods outside Wilson, the kind of weight that ground errant gravel into powder.
There had been some dim night-cycle lighting in their suite/cell, but now the orange lights along the base of the walls winked out, leaving them in darkness. His new eyes adjusted instantly to see by infrared, in time to see Dörner fumbling to switch on the dead lighting.
“Power’s cut,” he said.
“Proudhon?” Kugara looked past him.
“Probably.”
“Are they after us, or the monastery?”
Nickolai wrapped the chain around his arm. “Perhaps both.” He slammed his body into the sealed doorway, leading with his metal-wrapped arm.
“Shit!” Dörner called out, “What’s happening?”
Her voice dripped with fear, and Nikolai could smell the panic from where he stood. He’d forgotten they were blind in the darkness. “I’m trying to open the door,” he said. He backed up and struck it again. The resonating impact tried to shake the teeth loose from his head, but the door was unmoved.
“They may be trying to preempt us,” Brody said. “The local generalissimo has a file on all of us—he may have figured out why we’re here.”
Nickolai struck the door again, tuning out the conversation as he continued trying to break it down. To his chagrin, the door was constructed with people like him in mind. Repeated attacks only hurt his shoulder. When it was clearly futile, he backed away, panting, trying to think of another escape.
Kugara must have read his thoughts. “It’s the only way out. I checked earlier, and all the walls are solid rock except for a few tiny ventilation holes.”
Nickolai shook his head and let the chain spiral off his bruised arm to clatter on the floor.
Wait. That was all they could do.
Beyond the door, he heard Lazarus’ canine voice order his people to lower their weapons, the words repeated several times from several directions, and the sounds of battle slowly ceased.
“Is it a bad thing if they find what the Protean sent us to find?” Dörner whispered, her voice small and shaky. “It’s to fight Adam, as long as they aren’t him—”
She was interrupted by the door rattling and slowly opening before them, letting in a flood of new light.
Backlit in the open doorway, Brother Lazarus stood facing them. As Nickolai’s alien eyes shifted their spectrum and sensitivity, he could make out the source of the light flooding the room from behind the monk.
It came from floodlights mounted in the shoulders of a wall of ambulatory metal. Nickolai took an unconscious step backward once he saw the thing. The suit was remarkable enough that Nickolai still remembered the name of it from his abbreviated training at the BMU; Bleek Munitions Goliath Series V. It was the heaviest class of powered infantry armor ever created. So heavy, in fact, that the mobility tradeoff made it of limited tactical use. A hovertank was faster, cheaper, and had more firepower.
Under the Diderot Mountains would be one of the few environments where that kind of bipedal tank would make sense. The thing could shrug off most any small arms, it was EMP hardened, had integral Emerson fields powerful enough to soak up the energy from a small AM grenade, and could engage a small armored cav unit in hand-to-hand combat. It bore pretty much the same relation to the armor he’d faced by Wilson as Nickolai did to
felis domesticus.
felis domesticus.
With the machine looming over him, Lazarus said, “Come with me.”
They were marched out of the monastery, and into the huge cavern that had greeted them on arriving. It no longer seemed quite as huge with a squad of Goliath armor standing guard over thirty disarmed and injured monks. The tiered wall of the monastery itself had suffered damage to its facade, many of the carvings cracked, pitted, or scorched. Above them, a gray haze hid the ceiling from the artificial lighting, which now only came from the floodlights mounted on the armor, making the shadows long and surreal, wrapping around the rock like flaws in a broken holo projection.
The prisoners had been massed in the dishlike amphitheater, as if they were about to receive a sermon. The armor surrounded the outer edge, like demons guarding a tiny circle of Hades. Their personal Goliath ushered them into the front row, right before the podium.
Brody looked up at the Goliaths and whispered, “This can’t be good.”
A few minutes passed, and then the cavern filled with the sound of hydraulics and mechanical whirring. Nickolai realized that the Goliaths were all standing at attention.
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