Stefan no longer had a face to smile with.
If he had, he would have grinned harder.
He no longer inhabited a body. His flesh had only been a vessel, much like the Xanadu had been. His identity now lived in a complex matrix of microscopic machines that had permeated the matter of the Xanadu. Adam’s machines were as hardy as bacteria, and the linac attack had only sterilized a fraction of those machines where Stefan’s identity lived.
As the cloud moved, only slightly deviated from the Xanadu’s original vector, the small chunks of solid matter within it dissolved. Stefan consumed them, transforming the wreckage into more of the cloud containing him. Less than two seconds from the destruction of the Xanadu, all that was left was an undifferentiated cloud of matter.
Matter that was almost entirely Stefan.
On the holo, the approaching ship disintegrated after a single salvo; vaporizing into a cloud of wreckage that glowed briefly before turning completely dark. Mallory stared at it with unease, sensing an ugly familiarity in what he was seeing.
“Is anything going to hit the Wisconsin?” he asked Lieutenant Valentine.
“We’re not picking up any solid mass left, the ship entirely vaporized. It’s going to blow right by us.”
“Damn,” Tito said, “Lucky shot—”
“No,” Mallory said, “That cloud, what’s left, is that going to hit the Wisconsin?”
“It’s on the same trajectory, more or less. It will brush the Gamma hab—”
“Evacuate the Gamma habitat now!” Mallory shouted. “And fire everything you can into that cloud!”
With the alien sense of the cloud, Stefan saw the Wisconsin resume its attack upon him. It was too little, too late. Projectiles and lasers penetrated through his unsolid mass, and while the plasma weapons burned away some of himself, his cloud was moving so fast that, by the time they were in range to do damage, he was already touching the Wisconsin.
The tiny machines that made up the whole of Stefan Stavros struck the surface of the rotating Gamma habitat, remaking themselves into something more cohesive; a liquid condensate forming on a hundred-meter stretch of the great windows facing the core. Below the condensate, thread-fine holes burrowed through meters of insulated and armored plastic, glass, and polymer. Millions of holes drilled down from vacuum to air, none much wider than the individual nanomachines.
Beneath, on the underside of the great blue-tinted windows, the view darkened, the surface clouding as Kropotkin’s reflected light was further refracted by Stefan’s entrance. The white clouds embedded in the window’s surface darkened as if they were actual storm clouds.
And like a storm cloud, there was, eventually, rain.
This rain, however, was solid black, and where it fell, matter melted and pooled, becoming more of itself. Beneath the storm, people ran toward the elevators to the core, but some were unlucky enough to find themselves beneath Stefan’s rain. People screamed as the black drops scalded their skin and burrowed inside their flesh, mechanically disassembling them on a molecular level, until their bodies lost cohesion and they fell on the already black ground, skin bursting apart to spill more black liquid onto the pulsing ground.
At the center of the chaos, a pillar formed, the matter reassembling itself into a copy of Stefan Stavros. In a human body again, Stefan looked around with human eyes, amazed at what he was wreaking.
For a hundred meters in every direction, the living, moving shadow that was him, had claimed the surface of the habitat. The edge of his influence pushed itself outward, to the base of one of the gaudy tourist hotels. Stefan’s darkness climbed up the edges, to embrace the building, pull its matter into itself. Stefan poured himself through the doors and windows, consuming the structure until its own mass pulled it down, crushing itself and the people still trapped within.
Stefan’s blackness crashed over the mound of debris in a wave, covering it, flattening it, digesting it.
So this is what a God feels like, Stefan thought.
His fury was immeasurable. Not only had the priest played with all their lives, risking everyone in a futile war against Adam, but Mallory had also conspired to deny him this.
The priest, and all who followed him, deserved the unmerciful hand of judgment. His minions would die, and the priest himself would be torn apart.
As Stefan’s anger grew, the mass around him became more agitated, growing tentacles and feelers that whipped by, cracking like whips, smashing into themselves and their surroundings. He walked forward, to the edge of his circle of influence, and past it, leading ten thousand square meters of boiling chaos like a cape behind him.
He spread his arms and looked up toward the artificial heaven, and the core beyond the false tint of the sky. “I’m coming for you, Mallory!”
On the command holo, they watched Stefan raise his arms, as behind him the Gamma habitat dissolved into a barely coherent mass of undifferentiated movement.
Toni II watched the chaos at her console and muttered, “That evil little bastard.”
“How do we fight something like that?” said one of the fleet commanders behind her.
“First, we get people out of the way,” Mallory said. “Evacuate the Wisconsin.”
“You’re going to abandon—”
“Yes, because, by the grace of God we have that chance.” Mallory leaned over her and pointed at the holo. “This isn’t Adam, and he doesn’t know what he is doing. Adam takes things over, subverts them. Even when he was destroying Khamsin and Salmagundi, he was building as much as he was tearing down.”
“This is an attack,” the general said. “There wasn’t even the pretense of offering conversion.”
“I know, and if this was Adam himself, he would be in control of all the systems on this platform before manifesting like that.” Mallory asked Toni, “How long before we can evacuate everybody?”
She swallowed and found her mouth painfully dry as she spoke. “I don’t know if we can. The Alpha habitat is packed with refugees. The elevators can only handle so much traffic to the core.” The poor bastards in Gamma are already piled twenty deep around them, she thought.
Mallory turned to Toni the younger. Toni II took one look at her own face looking back at her and realized that her sister felt the same drag of guilt that she did. It was their fault, however inadvertently, for bringing Stefan Stavros here. Their act of piracy on the Daedalus had, in large part, created this monster they faced.
“Captain,” Mallory said, “can you go to the docks and make sure that there’s an orderly evacuation, and make sure none of those ships leaves half empty?”
“Yes.”
“And get the command off on the first ship out.” He waved at the others, the nominal leaders of their massive disintegrating fleet. “They’ll need to establish command and control somewhere else.”
“What about—”
“I’m staying. I’m praying my presence will keep Stefan focused here and give everyone a chance to escape.”
Her sister nodded and snapped at the others, “Come on, let’s move it.”
They left Toni II and Mallory alone in the control center. On the holo, it looked as if Stefan had taken over a full quarter of the Gamma habitat. He was approaching the first axis elevator.
“Where’s his father?” Mallory asked her.
“I don’t know. But I think he’s down there, somewhere.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Heavenly Host
“Do not underestimate anyone’s capacity for irrational hatred.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“God is a sadist.”
—ROBERT CELINE
(1923-1996)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Karl Stavros walked away from the hotel that had served as the diplomatic center of Mallory’s war against Adam. The structure was abandoned now, emptied by people fleeing to one of the main elevators up to the core. Karl knew the math, and suffered no illus
ions that he might make it to the core and an outbound ship.
From where he was, he could see what they were all running from. Looking down Gamma’s axis, he could see a stain, as if someone had spilled ink across the whole of that end of the habitat; ink that moved, pouring toward him.
Refugees and guards alike ran away from it, past him.
He watched as the threads of darkness wrapped themselves around the vast glassy pillar that was the aftmost elevator. He could see thorough the windows enclosing it, into the elevator cabin and the tiny figures of way too many people inside. The darkness formed a chaotic helix around the shaft, and as he watched, the material shattered, an implosion of vaporized plastic disintegrating into boiling white clouds. Only a second later he heard the sound of it, the sound of a mechanical giant screaming in agony. Then, he saw the elevator cabin tumbling downward to disappear into a writhing mass of black threads and smoke. Even over the cacophony of the shaft falling apart, he thought he could hear the people scream.
He walked toward the destruction because he had heard the monster’s voice.
How can he do this?
He was through the crowd now. Everyone who had managed to run from the spectacle before him was now behind him. The air had become cloudy from the collapse of the elevator shaft, the toxic smoke made his eyes water, his skin itch, and held the visibility down to ten or fifteen meters. It smelled of burning rubber, acetone, and overheated transformers combined with an oily stench as dark as the chaotic stain Stefan had brought on board with him.
Around him, out of his sight now, he heard tearing metal and the crumbling of buildings.
“Stefan!” he called out. “Stefan!” He broke off, coughing in the acrid air.
Around him, the air suddenly filled with whipping black tendrils, tearing around him in a wide circle, blocking his path forward or back. They reached in toward him, not quite touching him. He froze where he was, and in front of him he heard his son’s voice.
“Father.”
The writhing mass of black parted to reveal Stefan. He stared at Karl, the same as he had always been, except for his face. The Stefan that looked at Karl now had erased almost all emotion from his expression. Karl looked into his son’s eyes, and could have been looking into the soul of a machine.
“What have you done, Stefan?”
“What have I done? What have I done?” he stepped toward Karl, out of the whirling chaos. “I have become something more than you ever expected of me. I come here as the vengeance of a God.”
“You’ve sold your soul.”
“You sold my birthright for much less, old man.”
“Is this what you are? A mass murderer?”
He grinned at Karl. “I’m much more than that.”
Karl shook his head and said. “No. You aren’t.” He looked into the eyes of the thing that was once his son and said. “It is all you are. You are only defined now by the blood you shed.”
“Father?”
“I have no son.”
Stefan screamed and the swirling darkness collapsed and consumed them both.
“We’ve lost contact with the Gamma habitat,” Toni II said to Mallory. She flipped through sensor after sensor, but the assault on the Wisconsin had finally taken its toll on the larger structure. The stress had caused system failures across the board, and the change in mass distribution showed warnings all across the structural indicators.
The rotating Wisconsin had already picked up a dangerous shimmy, the oscillation period was over five minutes, not fast enough for the occupants to feel it, but each time she called the schematic up, she saw three or four more major structural elements pushed past their design specs.
“How’s the evacuation?” Mallory asked.
Well, we’re still here . . . “Two thirds of the craft have un-docked and are underway. People are still coming up from Alpha and Beta. There aren’t going to be enough ships.”
“I know.”
“The computer is recommending that I stop the habitat’s rotation.”
“What?”
“Damage to the Gamma habitat is throwing the whole platform off-balance. If the center of gravity shifts too far off axis, the whole place could fly apart.”
Mallory rubbed his face, and she wondered how this guy found himself in this position. To look at him, he was asking himself the same question, and it aged him. “We have to do it, then, don’t we? We have to maintain the integrity of this place as long as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, sending the commands to the computers of the Wisconsin’s control systems. Alarms sounded in the control section as the computers began to prepare the emergency jets to bring the rotation of the Wisconsin to a halt.
Something about the act made Toni II aware of her own mortality. This was a desperate act, firing massive jets of matter tangent to the platform’s rotation. It was such a desperate move that there was no immediate way to resume the rotation once it stopped.
All the habitats were going to suffer a lateral acceleration of nearly a quarter gee for close to a minute. The havoc that would cause didn’t bear thinking about . . .
In the core, the sense of movement wasn’t nearly as bad, but she experienced a feeling that her chair was tilting as amber warnings all across the operation’s systems flashed over to angry red.
She glanced up and saw the destruction evident in the holo of the Beta habitat. Her eyes focused on one of the ornamental rivers that snaked through the landscaping around the administration buildings. It had sloshed to the side, spilling over the left bank, until the rotation ceased. Then water left its bed completely, to disperse into the air.
She shut down the display and turned to Mallory. “We should go.”
Mallory shook his head. “Stefan is focused on me.”
“And how will he know you’re on one of those ships? Magic? There’s nothing left to do here, and you’re at least the symbolic head of this fight.”
“If you want to go—” Something buzzed from the control consoles, interrupting him. “What’s that?”
“The tachyon—” She turned around and stared at the display. “Oh, my God.”
“What is it?”
She changed the main holo back to the schematic of the battle, and the chaos of blue-and-yellow dots. A new red dot appeared in their midst. One of Adam’s tach-ships had returned insystem.
“The Prophet’s Voice,” she said.
The small red dot suddenly spawned fifty children as the Voice launched the remaining ships in its fleet.
“God help us,” Mallory whispered.
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 1,780,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The damaged Voice appeared in the midst of battle, ahead of the explosive light from its Adam’s demise. Its arrival caused engines to overload on thirteen nearby ships which had otherwise undamaged tach-drives. Half of those were ships claimed by Adam and his followers.
With the Voice’s arrival, several hundred Adams queried and sent information, each intending to commune with another part of Himself and expand His omniscience. The lie of that omniscience was proved by the Adams’ confusion at the unresponsiveness of the Voice. Such was Adam’s arrogance that not one of Him considered the implication of the massive hole in the Voice’s hull, clearly excising the bridge.
As the Voice plunged through the thickest heart of the fighting, it launched the remaining half of its complement of ships. Adam’s first salvo had been made with fifty tach-capable ships, heavy craft, heavily armed. What remained were another fifty highly maneuverable fighter craft, not tach-capable, but even more heavily armed.
Adams queried these ships, sending orders, directing them to troublesome spots in the battle. It wasn’t until those ships ignored Him that He began to realize, collectively, something was wrong.
The realization was confirmed by the obliteration of a score of his captured ships in a hail of antimatter missiles. The Protean fighters tore through the mass of the fleet, taking on Adam’s c
hosen and vaporizing those who still clung to their master.
Unlike Adam’s last encounter with Proteus, he now faced an opponent as numerous, and more maneuverable. Worse, his chosen were immediately faced with his fallibility as his own vessel, The Prophet’s Voice, began unloading its own considerable arsenal, eliminating would-be attackers in miniature imitation of the furious immolation of the first Adam to die.
And at the expanding edge of the new Protean advance, a small fighter threaded its way past an exodus of refugee craft, toward Bakunin’s moon, Schwitzguebel.
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Stefan was vast. He was now the entire Gamma habitat, and his body had begun probing into the core of the Wisconsin for his Nemesis. The elevators between the core and the Gamma habitat were gone, but pillars of blackness extended up from the habitat as Stefan reached for the heart of the Wisconsin with clumsy new fingers.
It took care, though, to feel his way inside. His sense of scale was upended by this new existence, and his first attempts to connect with the computers that ran the Wisconsin had the effect of a human trying to pick gnats out of spider’s web. His control over the blackness that was himself was not fine enough, and he ended up tearing pieces of the habitat apart in frustration.
He had to calm himself. Flailing blindly, he could inadvertently kill the object of his hate, and he wished to face Mallory and see him suffer.
As he had watched his father.
He felt a twinge of something when he thought of that. He did his best to ignore it. He had a purpose here, and as unfamiliar as his new existence was, he knew enough to be able to complete that purpose. If he couldn’t control his new body as finely as he needed, he always had his old one.
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