Messiah (46 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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He would purge such heresy from His body the way He would purge it from this system.
His remaining ships tached into the system, toward Bakunin.
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
On the surface of the moon, Schwitzguebel, a trio of Adam’s ships tached very near the surface, close to the spine where the Proteans launched their mines into the outer system. The arrival was sudden, and close, and in the fraction of a second it took for the Protean guards to raise a shield around their outpost, Adam was already within it.
Outside the defensive hemisphere around the spine, the universe faded, the light from outside red-shifted and slow. Within its confines, the trio of warships floated on their contragravs like deadly insects trapped in amber.
Weapons formed along the spine, firing bursts of plasma at the invaders, but before even the first shot connected, the ships disintegrated, blowing apart into a uniform cloud that consisted of little more than matter and Adam’s will. The cloud settled to the lunar surface, and began incorporating mass into itself.
The Proteans tried to extend their reach as well, but they had spent too much of their energy and attention on the organization of the spine, the shield, the defensive weaponry. When they pushed outward, through the mass of the moon, they found Adam surrounding them.
The ground around the spine glowed, and began shooting gossamer threads, injecting itself into the mechanism. Many were severed or absorbed by black tentacles reaching out of the spine itself, but many got through. The threads wove themselves around the spine, sinking in, constricting the existence of the occupants.
The shield fell, and the spine began launching mines again.
This time, however, it fired on different targets.
Suddenly the Protean defenders, arrogant in their opposition to the one true God, found themselves and their vessels confronted by their own creation. Their ships would be consumed in tachyon plasma, and one of the first to vanish in Adam’s purifying fire was the
Wisconsin
.
Now that this Adam had a villain to focus His anger upon,
this
Adam broadcast His ultimatum to Bakunin.
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
It took a long time to convince the command of the planetary defenses to rejoin the centralized PSDC control. The personnel in charge of the orbital shield enforcing the blockade of the planet had been purposely segregated from the normal chain of command of the Proudhon Defense Corporation; their organizational tree branched off at a much higher level than Colonel Bartholomew had started. They were intelligence and covert ops people who were naturally suspicious of the chaos in the military.
However, the fact that they had coalesced about ninety percent of the ground forces under Bartholomew’s command, made their argument more convincing. More convincing than Mallory’s presence. And the staff with those duties also understood the situation beyond Bakunin’s immediate orbit.
And that situation was deteriorating.
The remaining defending ships were facing off with new forces from Adam, and they weren’t doing well. The defending Protean ships were exploding in bursts of tach-radiation even before engaging with Adam’s forces.
One of the Valentines said quietly, “He must have attacked Schwitzguebel...”
Mallory nodded. Adam had turned their defensive apparatus, such as it was, against them. He turned to Colonel Bartholomew and said, “We’re going to have to defend ourselves here, on the ground.”
The colonel shook his head. “How do you fight that?”
“Put as much energy in as small a space as possible,” Mallory said. “Dump everything you have into the target from as far away as possible. He only has a few vehicles for the attack, we can orient the orbital linacs at them as they approach, and AM-bomb whatever lands.”
Interference rippled across all the displays in the comm center, each one suddenly showing Adam’s face.
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Reject the Protean evil that denies me, or face their fate. Worship me and you will partake of my paradise forever.”
Behind Mallory, one of the Valentines said, “Oh, fuck.”
 
Next to her, Toni said, “Oh, fuck.” Toni II watched Adam’s transmission with her and wondered why she was surprised. They knew this was coming, and they knew what long odds they were facing. When he mentioned the Proteans by name, she reached out and grabbed Toni’s hand.
“If I go back to our dropship,” Toni said, “I can help organize defense of the city.”
The colonel turned away from Mallory and looked at the two of them. “You?”
One of the soldiers in the comm center with them said, “Sir, while the ship appears to be a Caliphate design, heavily damaged, it was not showing a normal profile or maneuvering capability in flight.”
The colonel nodded and looked at Toni. “It’s a Protean artifact, isn’t it?”
“It is now,” Toni said.
The colonel turned to the soldier who had spoken. “Sergeant, make sure they get back to their dropship.”
The sergeant said, “Yes, sir!” Then he pivoted to face her and Toni. “Follow me,” he said, leading them back out of the comm center.
As they walked out into the maze of corridors under Proudhon, Toni II asked her other self, “You think you can defend against
that
?”
“We have a chance, don’t we?” she whispered. “A little time and I think we can seed a shield that might keep him out. For a bit.”
For a bit.
They walked on in silence for a long time. Toni II began to realize that their borrowed time was almost up. With Adam closing in on them, they probably wouldn’t last the day. Even Toni, her Protean self, probably wouldn’t escape Adam’s wrath. Toni didn’t even have the illusion of choice, having embraced Proteus; Adam had already marked her for destruction.
Toni’s thoughts must have been traveling in the same direction. She said, “You know, if it ends up being death or joining him—”
“No, Toni.”
“If you can survive by—”
She grabbed Toni’s hand and said, “No.”
Not without you.
They followed the sergeant back up through the nearly empty concourse, and to the landing zone. They pushed through a small knot of solders to go back outside to board their ship.
It wasn’t there.
“What?” Toni II said, running up to the edge of where their dropship had landed. The ship was gone, as well as most of the landing surface itself. Instead, she stood at the edge of a ragged crater twice as wide as their ship’s footprint.
Toni whipped around to their escort and said, “What happened to our ship?”
“An AM grenade,” came the response. The voice came from farther behind them than she had expected. Toni II turned, just in time to see the flash from a plasma weapon.
 
Behind him, Colonel Bartholomew shouted orders, and soldiers ran from the comm center to carry out various tasks to shore up the defense of Proudhon. Mallory called back to the colonel, “We only have a limited time to get the orbital linacs on-line—”
“Just a moment, Father Mallory. We’ll handle everything.”
Mallory frowned. The colonel was ordering his men out of the comm center, but he hadn’t started giving commands to the PDC forces they had just managed to knit back into a single force. Most of the planet was waiting for word back from this room.
Something wasn’t right.
He started organizing open channels on the console before him, so they could give global commands to the entire planet. As he did so, he heard the colonel tell him, “Father Mallory, can you step over here a moment?”
Mallory pushed his chair around to face the colonel. There were only four people left in the communications center, and the other three were all looking at him.
“What is it, Colonel Bartholomew?”
“I want to thank you. After the disastrous assassinations that wiped out a good fraction of the PSDC command, you were able to help me knit the whole back together. Without that . . .” He gave Mallory an unnerving smile.
“Thank you, but I think that army is waiting for some direction from the command here.”
“I know. But we need to come to an understanding first.”
“What?”
The colonel nodded slightly and the two remaining solders got up and grabbed Mallory’s arms, lifting him up from his seat.
“I want you with me,” the colonel said.
For some reason, it didn’t surprise Mallory. He shook his head. “You mean you want me with Adam.”
“You know you’re fighting a doomed battle. Even with the Proteans, it’s hopeless. He is much too powerful.”
“He is evil.”
“Is worship so high a price for what He grants us?” The colonel smiled at him. “Besides, you know your opposition to Him ends here, one way or another.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Beatification
“God speaks to fewer ears than hear him.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“You cannot know God as He is if you cannot know the world as it is.”
—ST. RAJASTHAN
(2075-2118)
Date: Unknown Unknown
Nickolai took a step back in surprise. No one in his prior visions had seen him. Of course, in both cases, the participants had been otherwise occupied.
St. Rajasthan narrowed his eyes, and Nickolai noticed that the left one was cloudy with a dilated pupil. The fur around the saint’s muzzle was thinned with age, and he was missing his left canine tooth. The hand he gestured with was gnarled with the beginnings of arthritis. All those details were overlooked in the accounts of him Nickolai was familiar with.
“You smell odd, son. Do I know you?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
“No!” The words stung Nickolai, even though he knew that St. Rajasthan had stayed aboard the colony ship, like Moses, never stepping foot in the Promised Land. There were apocryphal scriptures that told of unbelievers who also remained behind to murder him.
That couldn’t be his purpose here.
“Your denial is too sharp. Why else would you stay behind on a dead ship? But sit down, my friend. We will pretend you speak truth.” He patted the bench next to him, and Nickolai walked around and eased himself down next to the founder of the only faith he had ever known.
“You are one of the Atavists, aren’t you?” he asked Nickolai.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You wear no clothes, my friend.” He turned to look at Nickolai with his unblind eye. “Then, again, you deign to use language.”
Nickolai looked at St. Rajasthan and noticed that he did wear something like a human jumpsuit tailored for digitigrade legs and a tail. He wondered what the point of it was.
When did we stop emulating human dress?
“I am not from this place,” Nickolai said. “Or this time.”
St. Rajasthan turned to look up at Haven. “So am I to think you are lying, or insane?”
“I am not a liar.”
“I shan’t fault you for your madness, then. Do you care to say what place and time you do come from?”
“The year is 2526, I come from a planet named Bakunin.”
“Four centuries in the future? Our kind still lives?”
“Only for the moment. We are facing an evil that may be the end of us, and them.” Nickolai nodded back toward the corridor where the human corpses were.
“What evil do you face?”
Nickolai explained Adam, and what Adam was. When he was done, St. Rajasthan chuckled. “You seem to be a much more interesting prophet than I.”
“I am no prophet.”
“That’s right, we agreed you were insane.” The Saint folded his arthritic hands before him and bowed his head. “I have been praying and meditating here for days. Asking for some sign from God. Do you think you are that sign?”
Nickolai stared at the old tiger, and saw the weight of age as well as a much heavier weight. It was unsettling to him. St. Rajasthan had always been an abstraction, a label for a set of writings, of ideals, of immutable rules. Part of Nickolai wanted to dismiss the image before him as some deception, a challenge to shake what little faith he had left.
But something in him knew that what he saw was truth.
Our prophets come from the same clay we all do.

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