Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  The man she had taken from beneath the Vatican was not just a man. He was an agent of Proteus, of the colony that had made a last dramatic stand against Adam’s invasion of Earth. He was, in some sense, the father of the Protean colony that had hidden under the Martian surface. Nearly two centuries ago, he had shepherded the last Protean egg from the destroyed colony on Bakunin, and had taken it to Mars, where it grew into a new crystalline city duplicating the old.

  So, when Adam threatened, before Proteus sent its ships to fight his fleet, it had sent Dacham to Earth on a diplomatic mission to the Vatican. He had been successful in getting the pope himself to transmit absolution for the Protean race, should they but face the evil that was Adam. But the real mission was not gaining that absolution.

  It was the pope’s transmission itself.

  Not just the rebroadcast of the recording of Khamsin’s fall to Adam, or Mallory’s last tach-comm from Salmagundi—even though both were important warnings to a humanity unaware of Adam’s approach. To the Protean strategy, the transmission was an important distraction.

  It had drawn attention to the Proteans’ military attack. Dacham’s true mission was an exercise in massive misdirection. The whole operation was meant to distract from the Protean’s real opposition to Adam, one much more subtle.

  When he had explained himself and the Proteans to her and Mosasa, the Proteans’ plans were obvious in retrospect.

  Adam’s major flaw was his own arrogance. He had inherited the long view of society and social systems that the Race had bequeathed to their AIs, but that was not omniscience. The AI Mosasa had been well aware of that, and Adam had used his brother’s psychological need to fill in data holes to lure him out to Xi Virginis and to his own destruction.

  But Adam, in his drive toward godhead, had ignored or forgotten his brother’s own fatal lesson. Adam could no longer perceive the edges of his own knowledge; he no longer accepted the existence of unknowns in his view of the universe. It was why the Protean attack could be a surprise, and why Adam had shown no impulse to think any deeper about the Proteans after their destruction.

  There were no secrets from God.

  And just as she was getting her mind around Dacham and the Proteans, and had started formulating a plan, Adam surprised them all by a blatant display of his fatal flaw.

  The Voice’s sudden departure to Bakunin was completely unexpected, as was the state of the system when they arrived. She had been as shocked as Adam was to find out that the people here had not only formed a vast fleet of refugee ships, but had somehow managed to neutralize the cloud of matter that was supposed to spearhead Adam’s invasion.

  For once, it was only the Voice.And Adam. And several billion souls that had sold themselves to him.

  The Voice hung in the outer system seven AU from Bakunin and the mass of the opposition fleet. The majority of its “crew” existed only as minds within the thinking matter that now made up the whole of the carrier and the ships that rode with it. Almost none of Adam’s chosen here were physically embodied. Being one of the first to accept Adam’s offer of godhead, Rebecca was an exception, she still had a body that may have still had some slight continuity of existence with her prior human form.

  Also, her experience during Earth’s invasion had shown her that retaining a separate physical form was required in order to continue differentiating herself from Adam. The minds that swarmed the matter of the Voice might have retained some nominal individuality, but the border between their egos and Adam’s seemed to degrade over time. Adam might not read minds, but his existence in and of itself was an attack on his subject’s individuality.

  Rebecca enforced the barrier between her ego and Adam’s by keeping a physical body as much as possible. Remaining separate was the only way that a fight against Adam was even conceivable to her. Now she saw, in the absence of Adam’s cloud, a possibility that not only the fight, but Adam’s defeat became conceivable.

  Even as Adam rallied his attention to Bakunin, and the impossible resistance he found there, Rebecca turned her attention inside herself, into a realm that Adam couldn’t perceive.

  Dacham stood on a high platform in the mountains, overlooking the city of Godwin. He stared into the distance, the side of his face almost invisibly twitching.

  “You have to move now,” she told him, “while he is distracted.”

  Dacham turned to look at her, and his expression was grave. “No. He’s still too distributed. Once we move, once he knows we’re here, that is the end of our infiltration.”

  “Damn it! We have him isolated, one ship, alone. You want to wait until he burrows into another planet?”

  He turned back to face the vision of Godwin. “Of course not!” He clenched his hands into fists. “But this is bigger than what I want, bigger than Bakunin . . . The plan is to build our strength.”

  “Adam is never going to be weaker than he is right now.”

  “You can’t ask us to undo all that—” Something resonated through the virtual scene, a feeling of disruption, partly barely audible sound, partly a sense of dread. Dacham looked at her and asked, “What was that?”

  “Adam is launching all the tach-capable ships on the Voice,” Mosasa’s voice came from behind them.

  They both turned to face the tattooed pirate. Mosasa looked them over and said, “He’s placed himself on each one of those ships, and every one of them is going to tach into the system in a moment. No ultimatum. He is going to take that refugee fleet and turn it into himself.”

  “He’s breaking his pattern?” Rebecca said.

  “You cannot know the depths of his rage,” Mosasa told them. He turned to Dacham and said, “If now is not the time, it never will be.”

  “He is still distributed across the whole Voice. We still need to isolate him from ourselves.”

  Mosasa smiled. “There’s something I need to tell you about myself.”

  Fifty ships spread out from the Prophet’s Voice in response to Adam’s orders. On board each were the embodiments of Adam’s chosen. Most still resembled human beings; others had made a fuller break with their humanity. All the ships carried a fragment of the embodied Adam with them, their omnipresent God directing their actions.

  Adam had decided that there was too much at stake to allow any individual’s decision to interfere with His plans. The defiance here could not be allowed to stand, and all His people would have to see and appreciate the fruits of such defiance.

  Though Adam saw only the shell around the minds of his chosen, He saw that they all understood what it meant when He did not grant His offer to these people of Bakunin. They all understood that these people had passed beyond saving.

  The ships spread out, facing a fleet of thousands massed insystem, refugees from all the nearby corners of human space.

  Aboard each of the fifty ships around the Voice, tach-drives began powering themselves up, as Adam integrated Himself into the sophisticated Caliphate navigation systems. The systems in control of the tach-drives were, in many respects, the descendants of the hardware that had given Adam His birth—and allowed Him to become the brain of fifty ships.

  Adam faced His opposition without fear and without any reservation. Before Him was the rump end of an extinct humanity, an evil reflex moving a body already dead. Nothing these still-breathing corpses could array against Him could blunt the tide of destiny or turn it aside.

  He had faced much more with much less.

  At His command, all fifty ships leaped into tach-space, and for a little less than three and a half seconds, they ceased to exist.

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Mallory’s people had cleaned up the control center of the Wisconsin. The only signs of the attempted takeover were a few scars in the walls and bloodstains where the bodies had fallen. Crew from the Daedalus manned the room now, the Wisconsin’s own crew having been decimated by Stefan’s attempted coup.

  Mallory led the other commanders of the fle
et into the room, and they all filed in to stand behind the traffic control console. On the main holo, an image of a large spaceship floated. The coordinates scrolling by on the bottom of the image showed that the ship was seven AU away, roughly where the cloud had been.

  The other Valentine sister was sitting at the main traffic control console below the holo. “It tached insystem about eighty minutes ago,” she told them. “The tach-pulse from the arrival was huge—thought I was seeing another wormhole for a moment.”

  Mallory had never seen the Ibrahim-class carrier that the Caliphate had developed, but he knew that was what he was looking at.

  Tito, leader of the Bakunin fleet, squinted at the holo and said, “Doesn’t look like much.”

  The general from the SEC shook his head and said, “My God.”

  “What?” Tito didn’t seem to get it.

  The general explained. “That dot, floating off the starboard side? That’s a Medina-class troop transport.”

  “No, you got to be—” Tito leaned forward. “Damnation and Taxes, that thing is huge.”

  “About half the size of the Wisconsin,” said the Valentine by the console.

  More dots were flying off the carrier, almost as if the kilometer-long craft was disintegrating.

  It’s launching everything.

  “Any transmissions?” Mallory asked. “Has he broadcast an ultimatum yet?”

  “Not a peep.”

  The change in tactics felt ominous to Mallory. Still, right now they had the advantage in numbers. “We need to attack, now.”

  “Are you sure?” one of the Indi leaders asked. “Maybe—”

  “Now,” Mallory said, “while he’s physically isolated. While his forces are confined to his ships—”

  Red lights and angry beeps erupted from the consoles all across the traffic control consoles.

  “What the hell is happening?” yelled the SEC general.

  Valentine shook her head, “Tachyon bow shock from forty or fifty ships incoming. I got dozens of ships calling for attention.”

  “What?” The general looked up at the holo where the Voice was slowly disgorging its fleet.

  “That image is an hour old,” Mallory said. “He tached his fleet insystem.”

  The general shook his head. “You can’t use a tach-drive tactically—”

  Mallory snapped, “We did, with less accurate drives.”

  “No, the accuracy isn’t—”

  “I’m picking up detonations,” Valentine said. She looked up at them. “We just lost contact with fifteen Indi ships.”

  Mallory slid to a comm console and pulled up his own channel and started transmitting orders to his fleet. The other members of the leadership only hesitated a moment before taking their seats and opening channels to their own fleets. In that brief hesitation, Valentine kept calling out casualties: Five Centauri ships, three from the SEC, another from the Bakunin fleet.

  “These are the most advanced ships out there,” Mallory said, “but we have numbers. Tell them not to engage one to one. Group four or five of ours to concentrate fire on one of theirs.”

  Another three Indi ships, a loss for the Union of Independent Worlds, a Centauri ship wounded but still with life support. And, finally, a confirmed kill of one of the hostile forces.

  Above them, Valentine called up a holo that gave a strategic view of the space around Bakunin. Mallory glanced up and saw a great swath of blue dots, and in their midst, only a tiny sprinkling of red.

  The numerical advantage was overwhelming.

  “Concentrate your fire,” Mallory told his fleet. “Concentrate as much energy in as small a space as possible.”

  Another red dot went gray—along with twenty blue dots. The horrifying thing was, with the lopsided numbers, that kill ratio was acceptable.

  God forgive us, Mallory prayed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  False Prophet

  “Power will always fall to weaknesses it has denied possessing.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.”

  —JOHN ADAMS

  (1735-1826)

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 1,500,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Stefan Stavros slept uncomfortably in the cabin of a stolen three-passenger tach-ship. The old Xanadu had been designed in the most decadent days of the SEC, before the Caliphate existed. Even if this ship was a reproduction, it had been the toy of some mega-rich corporate mogul. Inside, it was all gratuitous leather, brass, and hardwoods. The control console was all inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl.

  Also, it stank. The air was rank with the smell of piss and feces. As well as the sweat and blood crusted on Stefan’s clothes.

  His escape had gone perfectly, up until he was ten minutes away from the Wisconsin and tried to engage the fully charged tach-drive.

  The bastard computer had asked for a password.

  Somehow, the idea that some paranoid corp type had owned his escape route had never entered into his plans. His repeated attempts to engage the tach-drive all failed. And when he gave up and tried to pilot the craft conventionally, to remove himself from the doomed fleet, he had found out that the prior owner was a vindictive sadist.

  “You don’t think I’d let you do that now, do you?”

  The words still glowed on the holo above the unresponsive controls. Life support still seemed to work, but the waste recycling had stopped. And the Xanadu piloted its own course, going somewhere without Stefan’s intervention. Some preprogrammed rendezvous for the owner to track? Or was it just randomly launching itself out of the system to teach the would-be thief a lesson?

  For three days, Stefan had been learning that lesson. He had torn free the nails on his hands trying to pry access panels from the cabin walls, and he had smeared filth on his blue jumpsuit by trying to force the waste recycler to work. His hair was matted, and he wore three days of beard. His mouth was dry. He was dizzy from hunger and dehydration, and every passing hour made drinking his own urine seem like a more attractive option.

  He slept in fits and starts, startling himself awake with the vain hope that Mallory’s dupes had found him and were going to take him into custody. Each time, nothing was there but empty space, and each time the air was a little staler.

  The irony was he was trapped here because he didn’t want to die.

  Now he held a barely charged gamma laser, and fantasized about emptying the charge into his skull.

  In the pit of his despair, he saw a light flash. He blinked several times; half-convinced he had begun to hallucinate. The barriers between his dreams and his waking moments had been slowly crumbling...

  Another flash; multiple ones crossing the starscape unrolling before him. His brain slowly began to register something out there. He saw stars occluded by tiny motes of spacecraft flying—in astronomical terms, right next to him.

  He reached for the display controls—one thing the sadistic prior owner of the Xanadu did not deny him. He zoomed in on the flashes, thousands of kilometers away.

  He gasped.

  Tumbling under Kropotkin’s bloody glare, he saw an endless cloud of floating wreckage. He had no idea how many ships had been consumed. He saw engine fragments from six—no, eight—different varieties of spaceship, sections of hull, corpses and pieces of corpses, chairs, electronic components, pieces of contragrav reactors, air lock doors floating surprisingly untouched, all tumbling outward in a cloud of shimmering ice crystals.

  The Xanadu was headed directly at the expanding field of debris.

  He spun the ship’s sensors around, and saw himself surrounded. The Xanadu had drifted into the midst of Mallory’s grand fleet, and now on every side of him, he could see the fruits of Mallory’s futile war.

  He could point his view in any direction now and see the remains of ships that had been torn apart. His heart raced as he saw a sleek Caliphate vessel pivot into the midst o
f a group of cargo haulers not that different from the Daedalus and tear them apart like a rabid wolf dropped into a nursery.

  He stared into the heart of battle after battle as he drifted uncontrolled through a war zone, waiting for the strike that would peel the hull apart like an onion. But the Xanadu drifted through the chaos unscathed.

  He watched with impotent rage at the priest and his minions. What right did he have, to sacrifice these people in some vain impossible fight?

  The proximity alarms began wailing at him.

  He reset the display to the default view forward, and found himself gripped by a fatalistic chuckle. He wasn’t going to die in Mallory’s battle. It would be a collision with a random piece of space junk.

  The Xanadu,improbably, was aimed right for a large debris field from the battle. It was already passing through the gossamer glitter of an expanding cloud of frozen gases, and part of a control cabin larger than the entire Xanadu tumbled by him within a hundred meters. The original vector of the destroyed craft was close enough to the Xanadu’s that the wreckage passed by him with an almost majestic grace, showing first a curving metallic hull that slowly rotated to reveal the charred and melted interior.

  Ahead of him the stars started winking out.

  “What?”

  At first it seemed a flaw in the display. Perhaps something had collided with the sensors causing the bind spot. But the hole within the darkness wasn’t static. It grew. The Xanadu’s velocity relative to the wreckage was only a few meters per second, but the blackness was approaching faster than that. As he watched, a section of a winged lifting body belonging to a Centauri dropship drifted in front of the darkness, briefly shining in Kropotkin’s light, hanging in front of complete nothingness. Then it vanished.