Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  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.

  Lord, do I look pissed.

  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—

  What a fucking mess.

  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.

  I’ve failed. After all these years, I’ve failed Him.

  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 view-screen. “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.”

  I guess He has a sense of humor.

  “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.

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ANNUNCIATION

  “All signs in Heaven point to the ground.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

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

  —William Shakespeare

  (1564-1616)

  Date: 2526.6.6 (Standard)

  Earth - Sol

  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.”

  “And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.”

  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.”

  “I do, Your Holiness.” He gestured toward the crowd. “What are you going to tell them?”

  “To have faith in our Lord. What else can I tell them?”

  * * * *

  Date: 2526.6.6 (Standard)

  Khamsin - Epsilon Eridani

  The administrative center of the Eridani Caliphate was on the planet Khamsin, primarily within the city Al Meftah. The government center was dominated by massive office buildings, truncated pyramids that shone mirrorlike under a purple sky dusted with the specks of dozens of moonlets, squatting like incomplete cenotaphs for a cybernetic Valley of the Kings.

  The being currently wearing the form of Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations, Yousef Al-Hamadi, stood on top of one of the smaller buildings on the edge of the government center. The body was old, infirm, and unfamiliar. Its occupant leaned on the cane perhaps less skillfully than the late Al-Hamadi might have.

  But any physical signs of Al-Hamadi’s departure were easily dismissed as the effects of stress and age. The flesh was vulnerable to the pressures inherent in Al-Hamadi’s job, even with the best efforts of Caliphate medicine. No one looked at Al-Hamadi now and expressed any surprise that the job took its toll on the man.

  Even so, it would have been better had Al-Hamadi chosen to serve Adam. His position was key, and there was ever so slight a chance that someone might realize that the intelligence behind his eyes now belonged to a AI salvaged from the wreckage of the Race’s homeworld, one of Adam’s disciples.

  From behind him, a voice called in Arabic, “Sir?”

  He turned Al-Hamadi’s visage to face the newcomer. “Yes?”

  The man wore the uniform of Naval Security, the branch of the Caliphate military in charge of guarding the buildings in the government sector here. He came to attention, even though Al-Hamadi had no military rank per se. As the highest ranking minister in the Caliphate’s tangled and baroque intelligence community, Al-Hamadi was probably at the top of this naval officer’s command chain.

  “All the present acting ministers have arrived, sir.”

  Al-Hamadi’s mouth formed a grim smile. “Very good.”

  He followed the officer down, under the broad receivers for Khamsin’s largest tach-comm array, and into the bowels of the Ministry of External Relations.

  * * * *

  All twenty-seven cabinet-level ministers were represented in the conference room when the current Al-Hamadi entered. Fifteen were actually the ministers themselves, those who had been physically present on the planet when the incident happened. Another six were represented by holo projections broadcast from remote locations throughout the Epsilon Eridani system, anywhere where the lag from a light-speed signal wasn’t a bar to actual dialogue. The balance was made of acting ministers here for those who were greater than a few light-minutes’ distance away, either in-system or abroad.

  At least one, the Minister of Engineering Projects and Mining, may have been a casualty of the unexpected attack on the wormhole network. He had refused to leave the mining hub stationed in Epsilon Eridani’s rich asteroid belt until he had confirmed the evacuation of everyone in dangerous proximity of W2, W7, and W9. Of course, the area of mining operations was too broad and too dispersed for that to be insured. He stayed even after the explosions started, and after W7 was the third to go, Khamsin lost contact with him and the hub.

  By the time W9 went, Khamsin had lost all contact with the asteroid mining operations.

  All twenty-seven ministers—real, acting and virtual— turned to face him as he walked to the head of the conference table. He walked slowly, leaning heavily on the cane, extending the silent moments before he spoke. In addition to raw power, Al-Hamadi had a particular gravitas that he had bequeathed to his successor.

  The ministers remained silent as the figure of Al-Hamadi stood at the head of the conference table. Behind him a holo schematic of the Epsilon Eridani system hung in the air. Ten flashing red spheres marked various points in orbit, half within the wide band of Epsilon Eridani’s primary asteroid belt. Much larger translucent spheres centered on the red ones, marking the limits of lethal radiation from the wormholes’ destruction.

  “Forty-eight hours ago,” he addressed the ministers with Al-Hamadi’s voice, “unknown forces launched a deliberate and systematic attack against the ten wormholes in orbit around Epsilon Eridani. The attack began when ten wormholes tached into the outer system with a residual velocity close to three-quarters light speed. It ended with the last impact on W5 a little over twelve hours ago. The attack has not only wiped out the wormholes themselve
s, but also sixty to seventy-five percent of our asteroid mining capacity. Also, every tach-drive that was under power insystem has suffered substantial, possibly critical damage because of a tachyon burst released by the impacts. The main planetary tach-comm receiver has just been brought back on-line in the past hour. We will be able to transmit within another one to two hours.”

  He paused, allowing the news to sink in. The ministers who had charge of military or scientific issues wore the most stunned expressions. Most of the others present were focused on the immediate effects of the micro-novas in the outer system, the lost mining capacity, the damage to transport and communication, the human cost to the people who had worked and lived too close to the event.