Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  According to Adam’s prophet, Mr. Antonio, Bakunin and the space around it was supposed to devolve into a seething cesspit of self-destructive violence. As a military man, Lubikov could easily infer the reason. It made more sense for Adam to concentrate on the capital planets, the command and control centers with an interstellar reach. Bakunin was a mess that could be dealt with at leisure.

  He wondered if Mr. Antonio knew that such mundane strategic considerations tarnished his master’s claims of divinity. Not that Lubikov had cast his lot with the AI because he ever believed those claims. Lubikov, as always, simply played the odds in his own favor.

  And as the activity around Bakunin began diverging from Adam’s script, Lubikov was sensing a slight shift in those odds.

  If he assumed the self-proclaimed deity would intervene as soon as he was aware that things were not going as prophesied, the earliest Adam could show up would be five days after receiving that information. That was the shortest travel time from a neighboring planet ...

  Five days.

  When did he begin to notice things changing from the script old man Antonio gave him? Ten days ago? Just enough time for a tach-signal to go out, and for Adam to come back.

  Just enough time.

  Lubikov eased himself into his chair, wondering what his options truly were.

  “Dolbrians?” he muttered to himself. Then he started calling up commanders, ordering coverage to the main eastern approaches to the Diderot Range.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Guardian Angel

  “It is human nature to ignore the fate of nations when one’s family is at stake.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The destruction of civilization will always begin with the destruction of the family.”

  —SYLVIA HARPER

  (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.8.9 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Flynn Jorgenson drove a stolen groundcar cross-country along the plains about two hundred klicks northwest of Godwin. Tetsami had helped him disable every electronic component that wasn’t needed to keep the wheels going. Even the running lights had been removed, and he drove through the night using a heads-up display set on passive infrared, giving the night a surreal monochrome appearance.

  In the cabin behind him, everyone slept. He found it amazing that anyone could rest while that tiger snored.

  “You there, Gram?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice was passive, almost resigned. Completely unlike the woman he’d shared his head with all his adult life. He glanced next to him, and saw her sitting in the passenger seat, looking as she always did, black hair diagonally cut, leather jacket, almond eyes . . .

  Tears?

  “Gram?” He wanted to reach out to her, even though the person he saw existed behind his eyes, not in front of them.

  “I think it just hit me. It’s all gone. Everything.”

  “I know,” Flynn said, turning back to face the rolling gray landscape. After a few moments he asked, “If the Protean hadn’t shown up, what would you have wanted us to do?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying, if the first we heard of all this was Adam plopping out of the sky and saying ‘join me,’ what would we have done?”

  “Not a fair question.”

  “Isn’t it? Somewhere there’s a recording in the Hall of Minds that made that choice.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think Adam went to the Hall—”

  “No, I mean what I was, what’s there in the Hall ... don’t you remember how bad it was when you—you know if I was given a choice, then I would have said hell, no.”

  Flynn paused a long time before he said, “I see.”

  “Christ on a unicycle, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Damn it, however we feel about it now, we both weren’t willing participants.”

  Flynn sighed, “I know you didn’t mean it that way, Gram.”

  “You’re the most family I’ve ever had.”

  “Same here.”

  “And for what it’s worth, now I’m glad we weren’t given the choice.”

  “So,” he asked, “if Adam shows up now, and gives you that choice—his way or nothing—what would you do now?”

  “That’s not my say.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “This is your body, your life. I’m just a hitchhiker.”

  “Gram, after how long we’ve been together, this is as much your body as mine.”

  She didn’t answer him immediately, and when he glanced next to him, she had vanished from the passenger seat. He looked at the empty seat and felt prickings of worry even though he knew she had never really sat there. Gram? he thought more than said.

  He felt his eyes burn, and he reached up and wiped the tears off his own cheek.

  “Thank you,” he heard his own voice say.

  But she never answered his question.

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Flynn, check your three o’clock.

  He had driven in silence past midnight. The rolling plains and the rocking of the groundcar’s suspension had lulled him into a near trance, and Tetsami’s voice in his head cut through and he let the massive vehicle roll to a stop as he looked to the far right. Some light or other was out there, past the range of the passive thermal imaging.

  Flynn pulled the vehicle to a full stop.

  Immediately, he heard Kugara’s voice from the cabin behind him. “What’s the problem?”

  I thought she was asleep, he thought. Then he realized that Nickolai had stopped snoring as well.

  “Something up ahead,” Flynn said as he powered down the heads-up display. Bakunin’s moons had set, leaving the night lit only by a massive spread of stars above them. The mountains, their destination, were only visible as a high, ragged, horizon.

  “Can you check it out?” Kugara said, and it took a second before Flynn realized she wasn’t talking to him. Of course, why would she? He was a fifth wheel on this expedition, more useless than the still-sleeping scientists.

  Don’t get down on yourself.

  Gram, I’m only here because you know the area.

  The tiger opened the side doors, letting in the cold night air in a sudden breeze that made Flynn’s arms break out in gooseflesh. Nickolai stepped out and became nothing more than a feline silhouette framed by the open door of the groundcar.

  “What do you see out there?” Kugara asked him.

  Flynn wondered if the tiger could see anything in the darkness, but then he remembered what the Protean had done to his eyes. He shuddered, and told himself it was the cold.

  “PSDC,” Nickolai said. “Airborne early warning and surveillance platforms. One to our southeast, another to our north-northeast. No question that they know we’re here.”

  “Shit,” Flynn said, “we got to get away from this thing before they show up.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kugara said. “They would have picked us up before we cleared the horizon. The fact they haven’t sent anyone to intercept us means that they haven’t classed us as a threat yet. One of those aircraft has to be tracking hundreds of thousands of civilian vehicles.”

  “The problem is they’re between us and the mountains,” Nickolai said. “The closer we get, the more likely they’ll identify us.” He stepped back into the groundcar. “If we spark their interest, we’re already close enough for them to get a visual ID on us.”

  “Damn,” Kugara said. “Just seeing you would be enough to set their alarms ringing.”

  Let me take over.

  Gram?

  I have a way past this...

  Flynn let his mind drift back as he felt Tetsami turn his head to look at Kugara. He could feel himself smiling at her.

  “I think I got good news for you.”

  A long time ago, back when Tetsami was living on Bakunin, she had worked for a man calling himself Dominic Magnus. He had b
een an arms dealer, and ended up being one of the final lines of defense against the last attempt by the PSDC to take over the planet. In the short period that Tetsami worked for him, she got to know his retreat in the Diderot Mountains—and the mountains themselves. The whole range was riddled with ancient lava tubes and natural caverns to the extent that someone could walk from pole to pole without breaking the surface.

  It was the perfect place for someone to go to ground against an army. The number of options for retreat was endless, and thanks to Dominic Magnus’ paranoia, some of those options were still firmly planted in Tetsami’s mind.

  “I know half a dozen coordinates by heart,” she told the others. “These are the closest.”

  “It’s also damn close to Godwin,” Kugara said. “We were trying to avoid that.”

  “If they already see us, we’ll be less remarkable going toward a population center than a mountain range,” Tetsami said.

  “And it’s still twenty kilometers north of Godwin,” Nickolai said.

  “Okay,” Kugara said. “Our goal is to reach the underground anyway. If there’s a way in short of the mountains themselves, I’m all for it.”

  Tetsami turned the groundcar, and started going due south.

  About ten kilometers north of their destination, the woods grew too dense for the car. Tetsami brought them to a stop and said, “We either cross over to a main road, or we hoof it.”

  “How much night do we have left?” Kugara asked.

  “About ninety minutes,” Tetsami said. After so long on Salmagundi, the sixteen-hour nights on Bakunin seemed endless. “Do you think you can make it on your injured foot?”

  Kugara snorted, as if the question didn’t merit an answer. She turned to the two scientists still asleep in the back. “Okay, everyone out!”

  Well, Tetsami had the answer to her question. They were hoofing it. It was probably just as well; any maintained roadways would more than likely have some sort of PSDC checkpoint.

  She turned on the console lighting, and bent down into the footwell by the driver’s seat.

  “What are you doing?” Kugara asked.

  “Just a minute,” Tetsami said, pulling a panel from underneath one of the driver’s displays. She released a couple of spring-loaded latches, and the small display popped off in her hand. “Good—”

  “What—”

  Tetsami held up the display. “The on-board navigation system. Even when they’re inset like that, they’re generally the same add-on hardware as the after-market stuff.” She yanked a couple of cables from under the dash. “Can I have your carbine?”

  “For what?”

  “This thing won’t power itself on our good intentions,” Tetsami said. “Don’t worry, it just needs a trickle from the battery. It’d take a good ten years to drain the power cell.”

  Kugara unslung the rifle. “This is our only weapon. Are you sure you need to do this?”

  “Unless someone here can tell longitude and latitude by looking.”

  She handed over the rifle. “Don’t break it.”

  They walked through the woods, the sky slowly lightening above them. They followed Kugara’s limping lead, while Kugara followed the jury-rigged navigation display Tetsami had attached to her rifle. Dawn came slowly, and Tetsami’s breath fogged in front of her.

  Flynn’s breath.

  “You awake?” she thought at him.

  “Yeah, Gram,” came back Flynn’s voice inside her head. “You want me to take over?”

  The matter-of-fact way he asked made Tetsami want to cry again. Whatever he might say, this wasn’t her body. She was an interloper. Their relationship was freakish, even by Salmagundi standards. The whole process was supposed to merge identities, not leave multiple personalities inside the same skull.

  “Only if you want to,” she thought back.

  “Then keep at it. I drove all night. I need a break.”

  “Great, so I get to feel our legs ache.”

  “You asked.”

  “Fly—Tetsami? Get over here.” Tetsami looked up ahead at the sound of Kugara’s voice. Kugara stood at the top of a rise ahead of everyone. The mound was treeless, and seemed to be in front of a clearing. Beyond it was unobstructed rose-colored sky.

  As Tetsami climbed the rise next to Kugara, she realized that the mound was too even and regular to be a natural formation.

  When she reached the top, Kugara swept a hand toward the view in front of them. “Is that supposed to be there?”

  “That” was an industrial complex of about thirty buildings surrounded by a twenty-meter-wide defensive perimeter consisting of two tall fences surrounding a no-man’s-land. Perimeter towers rose every twenty meters, bristling with cameras and defensive weaponry.

  Tetsami looked over at the navigation display attached to Kugara’s rifle, and had her sinking feeling confirmed when she saw that the coordinates of Dom’s old escape tunnel fell in the center of the mass of buildings.

  “Jesus Mother-humping Tap-dancing Christ.”

  Kugara sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Some bastard built this—”

  “Within the past hundred-seventy-five years. I know.”

  Tetsami suddenly felt the weight of uselessness that Flynn must have been feeling. Worse. She had actually sabotaged the mission with her outdated information. They were now vulnerable, on foot, and way too close to Godwin, and the occupying PSDC, than was safe.

  She put her head in her hands and cursed.

  “Gram?”

  “Please, I’m busy fucking everything up right now.”

  “Look at the nav computer again.”

  “What?”

  She looked up and turned to Kugara who was already limping down the rise and saying something about turning back east to take on the mountains on foot. “Can I see that again?”

  Kugara stopped, and Tetsami scrambled down and looked at the small map displayed on the navigation computer.

  “What are you looking for?” Kugara asked.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “What’s the odds that a random construction project would be perfectly centered on your coordinates?”

  “It’s not . . .”

  It was.

  She brought Kugara back up the rise so she could compare the map to the ground; judging by the topographical features she could identify, the complex wasn’t just plopped down in the middle of nowhere. The perimeter was almost perfectly centered around Dom’s old escape hatch, directly beneath the largest building.

  It wasn’t random. The complex was in a natural bowl, surrounded by woods, but in order to be where it was, it had been placed off-center in the natural feature and the construction had done a fair bit of excavating on the north side of the natural depression, where they stood.

  The excavation, and the rise they stood on, wouldn’t be necessary unless the builders wanted the complex exactly where they had put it. It wasn’t as if there was any other infrastructure here, the complex was alone in the woods, with only a single road leading south, opposite where they stood.

  “Nickolai?” she called down. “Can you come up here and look at this?”

  The tiger mounted the rise next to them. Kugara asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Can you read any of those signs down there?” Tetsami asked the tiger.

  Nickolai started reading off a long litany of safety warnings, and other random bits of signage anyone could expect to find at an industrial site. After thirty seconds of his narration, Tetsami stopped him. “That’s it. Our way into the mountain is down there.”

  “You lost me,” Kugara said, “how do you know that?”

  “Did you hear him read the company name?”

  “Bleek Munitions? So what?”

  “That’s the company Dom took over, the one he ran from his headquarters in the mountains. It didn’t cease to exist because we cashed out our shares. They built an expansion centered on one of the main access routes back to the
mountain.”

  Kugara said, “That’s a bit high on speculation.”

  “More than trying to hunt down Dolbrians?”

  Nickolai turned to look at Kugara. “I think Tetsami’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I can see signs directing employees to a subway system.”

  Kugara stared at him a moment, then looked at Tetsami with a grim expression. “I don’t suppose either of you have a good idea how to get in there?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Heaven’s Gate

  “When in doubt, move.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Rapidity is the essence of war.”

  —SUN TZU

  (ca. 500 BCE)

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  For nearly four hours, Nickolai sat in the crown of a tree and watched the road that led to the industrial complex. Traffic was sparse, small vehicles and vans that were unsuited to Nickolai’s purpose. Most traffic on Bakunin, even after a Pax Proudhon, was aggressively defensive. Anything of value, including and especially personnel, was hidden behind layers of armor. Direct attack, as lightly armed as they were, would do nothing except draw attention to them.

  It wasn’t until midmorning that he saw a vehicle coming that suited their purpose. It was a heavy wheeled transport, carrying a large piece of tarp-covered equipment on a flatbed. It was about five kilometers away.

  He gestured to the others, and started climbing down the tree. They had about two minutes.

  They had set themselves up on the inside of a blind curve that ran alongside a wooded ravine. The inside edge of the road had seen a fair share of erosion, and as he reached the ground, Kugara was shoving the laser carbine into a hand-dug excavation in the earth about two meters down from the road’s surface.