Messiah (42 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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“Close enough to affect navigation?” Toni asked her.
“It will be when the mines—” She exhaled slowly as the display lit up with dozens, if not hundreds, of overloaded drives blowing apart and dumping energy into imaginary space. “Holy—”
“Is it Adam?”
“You mean
was
it Adam?” Tach-bursts still sent waves across her sensors. “There’s going to be nothing there now but highly charged plasma. We’re in for a hell of a light show in about an hour.”
Toni flipped on the intercom and told the passengers, “We just had sensors pick up an intrusion into the outer system. The tach-mines seem to have destroyed it—but we will have to sit tight for a bit before we fire ours.” She turned to Toni II and asked, “You think our mines will zero in on our drive?”
“They’re supposed to only target things originating from outside the syst—what?”
“What?”
“Another tach-signature, smaller, same type of drive—” She watched dozens of mines go after the newcomer.
“I don’t get it?” Toni II said, “The timing is just too . . .” She trailed off and looked at Toni as if she might be able to dissuade her from the thought that had just occurred to her. But from Toni’s expression, the exact same thought had occurred to her.
“He launched his fleet before he tached insystem.”
The second wave of explosions was still happening when a third tach-signature appeared. Mines swarmed it, but not as many.
“That’s fifty ships,” Toni II said, “At the rate these are consuming mines, he’ll have a clear shot after another four or five ships tach in.”
Toni turned on the intercom. “We’re going now. It might be a little rougher than we expected.”
“Do you think—” Toni II started.
“I’d rather deal with tach-radiation messing with our drive than with one of Adam’s fleet. If we wait for it to clear, they’ll be in.”
Toni II nodded.
The sensors lit up with another of Adam’s martyr ships. Almost every reading on the tach-drive was in the high yellow. All pushed into the red as Toni primed the ship for the jump.
“Here we go!”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The cabin resonated with a massive smashing sound, and suddenly Toni II was thrown against the harness holding her in the chair. The acceleration kept up, trying to throw her out of her seat. Another crunch, as if something was slamming into the skin of the dropship, and the whole thing began vibrating and she had the sense of spinning violently.
The gee-forces were so intense that she could barely lift her head to look up at the main holo. Her eyes widened; all that appeared in the holo was a view of the ground, their ship pointed nose down at the spine of Bakunin’s only continent, descending so close and so steep that she saw nothing of ocean or sky.
Every readout below the main screen, those that still worked, showed dangerous levels of everything, from airspeed to surface stresses. The temperature sensors had maxed out, and the gee-forces tach-drive itself showed a string of zeros, as if the drive had not followed them along for the jump.
We tached into the atmosphere? God help us.
She couldn’t lift her arms, and her vision was going gray from the spinning acceleration.
“We’re going to make it,” came her voice, but not from her. She moved her eyes so she could see the pilot’s chair, and Toni still sat at the controls. Even against the forces trying to shake the dropship apart, she sat upright and still, hands palm down on the console in front of her. Toni kept repeating the words, like a mantra, but to Toni II’s graying vision, she didn’t seem to be doing anything else. She wanted to scream at her to fire the maneuvering jets, fire the contragrav—but even with her dimming vision she saw that that side of the control console was dark. Like the tach-drive, the contragrav and the maneuvering systems had died so thoroughly that they might not even exist anymore.
They were a brick in free fall, and there wasn’t anything they could do.
The shaking was so violent, the acceleration so bad, that Toni II began to hallucinate. The walls of the cabin around her seemed to stretch and ripple as if they had become semiliquid. In front of her, the view of Bakunin approaching them shrank as if the planet was retreating down a tunnel—right before the screen went blank.
The cabin descended into darkness as even the displays that still worked flickered and died. After a half-second, the emergency lights came on, giving the cabin an other-worldly red glow.
The shaking had eased, and Toni II realized that she no longer felt on the verge of passing out. She could move, too. She turned toward Toni and asked, “What happen . . ?”
She trailed off when she realized that Toni seemed completely unaware of her now. She sat upright in the pilot’s chair, eyes rolled up into her head, and didn’t even appear to be breathing. Toni II reached out to her, but stopped before she touched Toni’s shoulder.
Toni still held out her arms to the control console, but now her hands had sunk into the console, as if she was now part of the dropship.
Toni II lowered her hand. Whatever Toni had done, or was doing, it seemed to have gained control of their descent. The last thing they needed was to have her distracted.
She wanted to check on the passengers, but the viewscreens were all dead.
However, now that their flight felt stable, she could undo the crash harness and push herself upright. On wobbly legs she moved back and opened the manual release on the door to the passenger cabin.
She looked in on the red-tinted cabin and was gratified to see Mallory in his seat, conscious and apparently uninjured.
But he was alone.
She looked at him and said, “Shane, Tsoravitch?”
Mallory pointed over at the air lock.
 
The dropship appeared in the upper atmosphere in a burst of displaced air and radiation. The engine housings boiled white hot, shedding heat shielding like curls of burning paper as it tumbled down toward the ground below. The dropship shuddered and yawed as it plummeted, the air slamming against the asymmetry of the damage, spinning it around its downturned nose.
Boiling, molten fragments of the engines trailed behind it, granting a throbbing red underglow to the plume of white smoke the dying craft dragged through the air. The skin of the ship glowed now with the friction as it slammed through layers of air in a near vertical descent.
Close to the tip of the nose, a black patch appeared, a dead spot on the glowing skin of the dropship, perfectly circular. The spot grew, a growing circle of black that ignored the friction of the atmosphere, and absorbed the energy without comment. The blackness rolled back over the descending ship, hugging it like a second skin. It pulled itself over the burning engines, collapsing against the remaining structure, enveloping the flames and cutting off the plume of smoke.
The dropship, now little more than a blackness cut out of the sky, stopped yawing, and without a visible means of propulsion, it began to level off its angle of descent. Five kilometers up, and it was no longer plummeting. It flew along the spine of the Diderot Mountains, going five times the speed of sound.
Its presence altered dozens of units of the Proudhon Defense Corporation, some of which had devolved into autonomous commands attempting to hold on to one city or another, others that believed they still owed allegiance to a larger mission. Some of the latter had never received any orders rescinding the blockade, and those scrambled fighters to intercept the alien craft.
The ones who radioed warnings, received a rebroadcast of Colonel Bartholomew’s broadcast and a statement that the ship was on a diplomatic mission to Proudhon.
But some didn’t radio warnings, and some ignored the responses.
Energy weapons cut across the blackness of its skin, absorbed into the alien ship. Missiles fired at it failed to lock on properly, exploding fore or aft, or tumbling down into the mountains.
The one-sided dogfight followed the ship along the spine of the mountains, until it passed by the mountain outpost of Bleek Munitions. As the ship passed over the camouflaged outpost, two shadows separated from the speeding ship, so small that none of the trailing fighters spared them any attention as they plummeted into the side of the mountain.
The black ship made an impossible right-angle turn and accelerated toward Proudhon. Below it, black shadows melted into the snow below Bleek’s hidden outpost. The shadows rolled uphill, gathering mass from the snow-pack and the rock beneath, coalescing into two humanoid figures.
 
When Rebecca had knees again, they felt a little weak. The hyperawareness she’d gained as Adam’s disciple had not gone away, even if the scope was more limited now, and she had viscerally lived through Toni’s chaotic descent into Bakunin’s atmosphere. And even though their jump to the surface wasn’t any different than multiple prior descents she had made as part of Adam’s host, this had been the first time as an individual. Her brain, rewired and distributed it might be, still had a lifetime of training that what she had just done was supposed to be fatal.
But she and Shane had managed to reassemble themselves in front of Jonah Dacham’s goal, the mountain facilities that had—long ago—housed his own company during the Confederacy’s assault on Bakunin. Here they could find passage into the mountain’s complex set of chambers, and find the Protean barrier, and possibly have a chance of disabling it.
The pair of them walked past the edge of the holographic projection that masked the site from outside observers. On the other side they were greeted by twenty soldiers from the PDC, braced, weapons leveled at them.
 
The hostile fighter escort broke off from the dropship as they entered Proudhon’s immediate airspace. True to the colonel’s word, they had safe passage once they got within range to communicate. The ship set down in the midst of a half-abandoned spaceport, and once it touched ground, the black second skin withdrew and faded, leaving the smoldering remains of an unflyable aircraft.
Mallory was first to disembark.
He walked out into blazing daylight, on to the surface of Bakunin, and into a surreal negative reflection of the first time he had come here, nine months ago. Then, it had been night, and he couldn’t see the city for the landing lights. Today, Kropotkin shone down oppressively on a bleached-white skyline that looked like the bones of some giant creature sinking into the desert.
Before it was all lights, and movement, and noise... now the silence was as stifling as the heat. The few aircars he did see moving didn’t feel like the lifeblood of a bustling city, they felt more like flies buzzing around a corpse.
The cluster of white towers marking the center of Proudhon were marred by soot and fire damage, and one ended slightly short of the others, the roofline ragged and black. He felt as if he was looking at a ruin.
There was another stark contrast to his prior arrival. The last time he arrived, which could have been to this same LZ, he hadn’t been challenged. The anarchic flow of immigrants was allowed to mix into Proudhon without any obvious intervention by any authority. He had walked straight from the air lock into the city proper without so much as filling out a form.
This day, fifteen soldiers stood between him and the concourse, about fifty meters away, wearing uniforms that seemed slight modifications of the jumpsuit Parvi had worn when he had first met her.
He stood at a safe distance and made no sudden moves. Behind him, he heard the Valentines deboard the ship after him.
He called to the soldiers, “My name’s Father Francis Xavier Mallory. Colonel Bartholomew invited me.”
The soldiers split into two groups flanking an aisle to the concourse. One of them stepped forward and waved at Mallory. “Follow me,” he said.
The three of them stepped forward to follow the soldier into the concourse. Mallory spared a glance back at the dropship.
It was never going anywhere again. The rear engine housings had collapsed in on themselves, and were still steaming. Half the skin of the ship looked as if it had peeled away.
Inside the concourse, he faced more wholesale changes. It was a different place than the one that greeted him last time, but it was obviously part of the same complex, the black granite floor with the accent of stainless steel was familiar. But it wasn’t spotless. Trash had gathered in the corners, and the surface was dull, scuffed, and stained.
There was no surging crowd. The halls were mostly empty except for a few military personnel and the occasional guard. Above them, the crystal skylight that had once shown an enhanced view of the sky above was a flat dark gray. And the few terminal kiosks they passed all seemed to be dead.
The three of them were led through the concourse, to a near-abandoned subway, where a single train car took them into the center of Proudhon. As they rode on in silence, Mallory said a short prayer for the people who used to inhabit this city.
The train came to a stop in a vast station lined with marble and neoclassical columns. Advertising holos were inset into the walls, but all showed a graphic logo for the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation. He didn’t read all of the flashing text, but what he did read was enough:

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