Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  But she had no God to renounce, and her soul, such as it was, was given over to data analysis. And the idea of having the capabilities of a Mosasa inside herself gave rise to an emotion in her akin to lust.

  A metallic taste filled her mouth and she realized that she had bitten her lip hard enough to draw blood.

  Why the hell not? Most covenants like this involve blood one way or another. The thought made her grin. You know, I think I might be a little crazy right now.

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  “Take my hand and tell me yes.” He held out his right hand, palm up, to take hers. There didn’t appear to be anything remarkable about it, and when she grasped it, it felt like a hand. It felt human, flesh and bone. For a moment, she thought she held the hand of the universe’s best con man.

  She looked up into his face and said, “Yes, I’ll join you.”

  A jolt ran up her arm, and the world went white. Before she lost all her connection with the universe around her, she heard a small still voice whisper, “Welcome, Rebecca Tsoravitch.”

  It might have been her imagination, but it sounded like Mosasa.

  Her awareness tumbled down a white hole inside herself. For several moments she could see every moment of her life in holographic clarity, as if every memory was part of a mega-bandwidth data stream passing by her for analysis. She was able to absorb details faster than real time. Connections between disparate elements of her life suddenly made sense.

  She saw why she joined Mosasa, not only why, but understood herself on a level that had been impossible. It was as if she had access to her own source code . . .

  There were discrepancies, bits that disrupted the flow of memories, frames of a narrative hidden in random chunks of her childhood, her university studies, her life as a government employee on Jokul. It was as if a steganography expert had salted her life with data from something much different. If she had been limited to her old level of awareness, the impression would never amount to more than a hunch, a sense of something wrong.

  But she was better trained than that. She found within herself the tools to tease out one hidden thread from its thousand fragments. To coalesce individual bits into coherent data.

  Someone else’s memory.

  How long? Yesterday? A dozen years? A hundred?

  Twenty.

  Twenty years ago, and two million kilometers away from a star that she knew was Xi Virginis.

  Adam wore a form that was recognizably human, but however human his body appeared, it was not human, and it floated in hard vacuum, bombarded by radiation, where no human body could ever live.

  Adam stretched his arms, naked before the burning white orb of Xi Virginis. Two million kilometers from the surface of the star, he floated within the corona, blasted by heat, magnetism, and radiation that attempted to tear apart his physical form. At the same time, the molecule-sized machines that repaired his body sucked their power from the energy-saturated environment.

  It was a battle that, at this distance, the star lost. Adam chose his location because it was the equilibrium point. Any closer, and the machines would not be able to repair his vessel quickly enough in the face of the radiant bombardment.

  Adam looked into the star with eyes that had been rebuilt to accommodate luminosities a million times beyond those a human eye perceived. Behind him, a complex net of sensors captured a spectra a thousand times broader and fed the data directly into his consciousness. He saw the granular texture of the photosphere two million kilometers below, the raging dark storms throwing gossamer filaments deep into space—in some cases beyond the orbit in which he floated.

  The flares did not concern him, because he was not only here. Adam embraced the star Xi Virginis from a thousand distinct points around the equator, all watching with the same mind, the same desire, the same anticipation. The loss of some to the star below was only to be expected. Like the star system itself, Adam’s bodies were only matter and energy. Mutable. Disposable.

  As Adam watched with two thousand eyes, ninety-five spheres drifted past him in equally spaced, degrading orbits. Each was dead black and lightless against the stellar photosphere, its radiation emission nothing compared to the energies blasting from the star. As each passed beneath Adam, he could see a gravitational lens distorting the photosphere beyond, the only sign of the incredible mass hidden within the darkness of each object. Mass each one shared with a twin that was already light-years away. Mass that had once been part of the Xi Virginis planetary system—a planetary system that no longer existed.

  Each passed below him in a carefully timed equatorial orbit, one after the other. By the time the first had gone a full circuit, it had become detectable only by the distortions its mass made in the visible surface of the star.

  At the third circuit, their degrading orbits took Adam’s creations below the photosphere, past the point where the star’s energies would break any normal matter into its constituent atoms.

  However, the ninety-five spheres were not normal matter. They weren’t matter at all in the conventional sense. Each was a wormhole torn in the fabric of space, leading to another place years separated in space and time. Each one constructed on the same principles that had been used in the first wave of human colonization four centuries ago.

  Of course, never had so many been constructed at once. The mass and energy required had consumed the vast majority of the Xi Virginis planetary system.

  What Adam needed to do with his ninety-five wormholes required substantially more matter and energy.

  Below him, the star began to change. A dark thread appeared on the equator, bisecting the boiling photosphere. Not quite a single line, but a series of long trails marking each wormhole’s transit below the star’s visible surface. Black sunspots feathering across the surface, each millions of kilometers long and a thousand Kelvin cooler than the rest of the surface. Plumes of plasma burst upward from the cometlike head of each dark sunspot, as if the star was losing its life’s blood, as if the star itself knew it was dying.

  As one, a thousand Adams smiled.

  When she finished watching the alien memory she had reconstructed, she thought to herself, What the hell have I agreed to?

  It was with a deepening dread she realized that the fragment she had just seen with her own mind’s eye was one of several thousand that had been scattered throughout her consciousness.

  She wondered if Adam knew what she remembered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Born Again

  “No one is absolutely certain what they will do in a crisis.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The past at least is secure.”

  —DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Wormhole Σ Dra III-Sigma Draconis

  Lieutenant Toni Valentine had spent the four days since her twin’s arrival alternating between talking to Styx Command and doing her own analysis of the dead scout ship’s brain. Both were exercises in frustration.

  Styx Command had about twenty screens’ worth of questions above and beyond the standard ghost debrief. And while the follow-up by Command was queued up behind a bunch of other intelligence matters that were above her pay grade, the last word was to expect someone from Command within twelve to seventy-two hours.

  The sooner the better; Toni didn’t know if it was good procedure for her to debrief herself. Let her twin recover in the medbay until someone else showed up. It would make Toni’s life easer.

  It should, anyway.

  The fact was, the nature of this ghost plagued Toni with an unprofessional curiosity, and it was all she could do not to pop the medbay and shoot her twin full of stimulants so she could ask her what the hell happened.

  Instead, she satisfied herself with a systematic interrogation of her twin’s scout. That was frustrating in itself. The most direct means she had to decipher what happened, the ship’s transmission logs, were distressingly empty. The last flight Toni II had taken had pro
vided no radio contact with anyone, no attempt to hail anyone, no data transmissions back to the station. Nothing.

  A standard course, a spiral approach toward the wormhole, so simple it was completely enigmatic. Even so, the recording of Toni II’s vitals showed signs of panic.

  Was she under attack?

  Toni couldn’t find any sign of it. There were no strange contacts on any of the scout’s sensors.

  However, the tach-drive showed signs of disabling damage. Damage that existed before the data started recording. What could cause that kind of overload?

  The strangest part of the recording happened at the point the craft passed into the wormhole threshold. Parts of the ship started failing, and the damaged tach-drive spiked and went off the meter.

  She was interrupted by the medbay alarm.

  Her patient was conscious.

  Lieutenant Toni Valentine snapped awake and started hyper-ventilating. She was bound, confined, everything closing in on her. She struggled, and heard the alarm of the med system.

  I’m in a medical bay . . .

  She struggled to calm herself. Somehow she had made it. She had survived the brush with the wormhole and the malfunctioning tach-drive. She took a few deep breaths and unclenched her hands. If she was in a medbay, that meant she was safe. If she had survived the wormhole, that meant she was twenty years of space and time away from Styx and explosions cosmic and bureaucratic.

  She had just convinced herself that she was safe when the cover to the medical bay opened with a pneumatic hiss and a rush of air. Toni looked up and saw herself bent over her. Not an older version of herself.

  Herself.

  The exact same face she woke up to in the morning.

  “Oh, hell no!”

  Toni popped the cover on the pod, lifting it up and away from her doppelganger.

  She heard herself say, “Oh, hell, no!” It had the same strange character as listening to a recording, her own voice not sounding quite right when not originating within her own head.

  She formed a reassuring smile that she didn’t feel and told herself, “You can probably imagine I have a few questions.”

  Toni II stared up at her as if she had lost comprehension of the English language.

  “We can get you dressed and get you some solid food before we—”

  Toni II grabbed her wrist. “Fuck SOP, what’s the date?”

  “We can—”

  “The date!” Toni II looked at her with eyes filled with fear and desperation. Something dropped in Toni’s chest, looking at herself with that expression. There was a terror there that went far beyond the existential dilemma of unexpectedly meeting yourself.

  Toni pulled her arm away. “June fifth.”

  “June fifth, ’26?”

  Toni nodded.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Her double jumped naked out of the pod and ran to the wall and one of the ubiquitous computer display screens. Toni II stared at the date/time stamp as if she expected—or maybe hoped—Toni had been lying. She kept shaking her head as if she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

  “What is it?” Toni asked.

  “You should have seen it already.”

  “Seen what?”

  “We have less than twelve hours before it hits.”

  “Before what hits?”

  She turned around and looked at Toni and said, “I don’t know what, but I know we don’t want to be around here when it does.”

  Toni stepped up and placed her arms to block her double. The fact that the ghost was some version of herself had allowed her to lower her guard, but the woman was still a security risk. Standard operating procedure was to treat ghosts as captured enemy combatants until debriefed and cleared by command. “We can talk about it in the interview—”

  Toni II ducked, folded her arms and scissored her way out of Toni’s grasp and ran down the hall.

  “Shit!” Toni snapped at Toni II’s retreating backside. She had lowered her guard too much. Lulled into thinking the other woman was unarmed and naked, so what could she do?

  But considering she knew the station as well as Toni did, she could do a hell of a lot.

  Toni punched the emergency lockdown codes into the console next to the door. Across the station, bulkheads came down, isolating each section. Toni paged through the security feed until she found her double trapped in a corridor halfway to the main control room for the station.

  “Why are you going there?” she asked the monitor. “Why would I go there?”

  Toni II stopped at a panel next to the lowered bulkhead and started punching in an override code. Toni activated the PA and said, “I did have the sense to change all the pass-phrases on the station. Now you just sit tight, I’m going to bring some clothes, and you and I are going to have a nice little talk.”

  Toni II looked up directly at the camera and said something. There wasn’t an audio pickup, but from her lips it looked as if she said something like, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Toni II returned to the console and started punching in codes.

  “No,” Toni whispered, “You aren’t going to try and guess . . .”

  She tried to deactivate Toni II’s control panel remotely, but she wasn’t a systems expert and that wasn’t a standard function. She remembered something about doing that sort of thing from her orientation training, but the details were buried in her brain deeper than the function was buried in the advanced options menu.

  Toni cursed herself. Recommended procedure for pass-phrase security was to use a machine-generated code, but such things were impossible for a human to remember. Toni habitually used the second-best method, sentences of five or six words with some random numeric component. In almost every case, that, combined with a biometric component, was more than secure enough for anything that wasn’t a black op in enemy territory. She’d been too freaked out by her own ghost to consider the security implications.

  This woman had the same brain she did. All she needed to do was ask herself what she would have changed the pass-phrase to in the same situation.

  Toni II cleared the lockdown before Toni could figure out how to kill the panel.

  Toni ran down the hallway after her, ducking past opening bulkheads. Twin or not, she suddenly had no compunction about using force to restrain the woman. The bitch was more dangerous than she gave her credit for.

  As she raced to the control room, one thought echoed through her head: Why the hell would I be doing this?

  It made no sense. She knew the SOP better than anyone. All she had to do was sit tight and endure the debriefings—

  “We have less than twelve hours before it hits.”

  “Before what hits?”

  “I don’t know what, but I know we don’t want to be around here when it does.”

  Toni thought of the remains of her double’s scout.

  “You should have seen it already.”

  Toni wondered what could make her panic. What could make her ditch even the pretense of procedure? What would cause her to run naked through a space station?

  What is it I should have seen?

  For the past few days her time had been spent with the bureaucracy associated with finding a ghost—which would be the one thing that would be different between her and Toni II. That was the nature of ghosts; they appeared in their own pasts and created a new universe that was different because its past contained a ghost. By definition, Toni II didn’t have her own Toni II showing up on her space station.

  Did she see something I haven’t?

  Toni burst into the control room. Toni II was sitting down in front of the console. All of the holo displays showed false-color views of what seemed, by the coordinates displayed on the imagery, different spectra slices of the same five degrees of sky.

  Toni wrapped her arm around her double’s throat, yanking her out of the chair so hard that the struts bolting the seat to the floor bent with an ominous creak. She slammed Toni II to the floor, placing her knee in the sm
all of her back.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” she yelled at herself.

  “Look,” Toni II gasped through the choke hold. “Center. Screen.”

  When she was certain that her double was immobile, Toni turned to look at the holo. She realized that the time stamp was dated nearly twenty- four hours ago and was speeding by at about four times real time. Sensor data scrolled by on the bottom of the screen, and at first the data didn’t make sense. Then she realized that Toni II had pulled up a tachyon overlay on the view.

  “You’re looking for a ship? There? You’re looking fifty degrees off the ecliptic and directly opposite Styx.”

  Toni II gasped, and Toni loosened her grip on her neck. Toni II sputtered and said, “Not a ship. Not anything like a tach-ship.”

  A flash erupted center screen, only visible in the false-color tachyon overlay. Just a tiny light flicking on and off, captured by the station’s sensors 23.56 hours standard ago—a tach-ship arriving.

  Toni felt an ominous chill. Anything that tached in close enough to fire the sensors should have radioed clearance.

  “The proximity alarm,” Toni whispered.

  “It isn’t a ship. By the time it’s close enough for the alarms, it’ll be too late.”

  Toni squinted at the sensor data, and several numbers didn’t make sense. “No, that can’t be right. Did you mess with the sensor array?”

  “Give me a break. Could you fake that screen in thirty seconds?”

  Toni looked down at her double. “Am I reading that right?”

  “Yes. Let me up.”

  Toni got to her feet. Her twin gasped a couple of times, rubbing her neck as she rose. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. Obviously, I wouldn’t either. But I already escaped this thing once. I don’t like the idea of being locked in a debriefing room when it happens this time.”

  Toni had already turned to face the console and began pulling up her own data streams on the tachyon pulse. “No, no, no. This has got to be—”