Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

The pulsing liquid sky illuminated itself. Electric-blue flashes traveled across it, within it, resembling lightning hidden within a thunderhead, but more regular, purposeful, slow, and deliberate.

  If the band of material girdling Salmagundi kept closing in, eventually it had to lose its integrity. That seemed to be what was happening, but rather than breaking apart, it seemed to be condensing.

  The heavy-looking drops separated from their host in waves, a slow-motion rain that filled the sky with spheres of burning violet and electric blue. There was no sense of scale, but what looked like tiny drops from the ground could have been hundreds of meters across.

  The band in the sky fragmented, composed completely now by droplets of itself, as if they were watching a holo on cloud formation stuck on continual zoom.

  Abbas screamed orders, all of which Parvi suspected boiled down to the Arabic equivalent of “move your ass.”

  The character of the light changed, taking on a rosy tint.

  One by one, the dispersed droplets suspended in the sky changed their color. Or, more likely, the atmosphere around them had begun to contribute to their appearance.

  “Wahid, you have any idea how long it takes from atmospheric entry to reach the surface assuming a free fall from infinity?”

  “That depends on the gravity, the terminal velocity of the object, what kind of atmospheric breaking—”

  “Guess!”

  “Five minutes?”

  “We’re screwed.”

  “I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship Eclipse which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis. Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago—” Once Mallory started transmitting back home, Kugara talked to the six black-uniformed guys who’d come storming in with Mallory. “Who are you people?”

  “They’re Ashley Militia,” Flynn said.

  “So you guys are what passes for an army on this planet?”

  “We’re the personal guard for the Grand Triad,” one of them said, “under the command of Alexander Shane.”

  Another one asked, “Who are you?”

  “Me, I’m just a mercenary that took the wrong job.” She looked down at the still-unconscious Nickolai. “Are we on the same side here?”

  No one denied it.

  “You guys saw the dropship out there?”

  They nodded.

  “I think we want to be on it.” She looked at the four guys without guns and asked, “Think you can carry him?” She pointed at Nickolai.

  “You want us to—”

  She turned to Flynn and asked, “So did anyone store any weapons down here?”

  “By the guard station there might be—”

  Flynn was cut off by the Protean’s voice.

  “The other is here. Now. Go. Run now.”

  The Protean actually grabbed Mallory and pulled him away from the tach-comm. “Now!”

  Mallory stumbled back from the holo and Kugara yelled, “Does anyone need to be told twice?”

  In moments, it appeared to Parvi as if the entire sky burned, as thousands of spheres became the heads of burning trails that obscured everything behind them.

  On the ground, the crew redoubled their doomed efforts. Parvi looked at their guards. They had their weapons tilted down at the ground, as they stared slack-jawed up at the fiery sky—

  “Put down the fucking weapon!” A woman’s voice yelled from across the landing quad. “Get on board the damn dropship! Now!”

  It wasn’t Abbas.

  Parvi turned to see Julie Kugara running at them from a trapezoidal building at the opposite end of the LZ. Parvi barely had a chance to register surprise at her survival before one of the techs aimed his weapon in her direction.

  “No!” Parvi yelled at them, but the tech’s head vanished in a haze of red mist even before the words touched her lips.

  Suddenly they were in the midst of a firefight.

  The Caliphate techs that were still outside the dropship dove for cover or converged on Kugara, who led a group of men who carried a strange mix of laser carbines and antique slugthrowers. The techs dropped as if they’d walked into a buzzsaw.

  Suddenly, someone tackled her to the ground.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw Shane looking down at her. “Stay down,” he said. “You’re the pilot.” He coughed and spat up a mouthful of blood.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “You’re not,” he wheezed and rolled off of her so she could see the right side of his topcoat soaked with blood.

  She tried to put pressure on the wound and looked up to see that one of the men Kugara led was Francis Xavier Mallory. And behind them, four black-clad men carried the unmoving body of Nickolai Rajasthan.

  This isn’t happening.

  Wahid grabbed her shoulder as a whine filled the air above them. She realized that their guards were no longer anywhere near them.

  “We got to get to the ship,” he yelled at her.

  The ground pulsed with a slowly strengthening rhythm. The whine got worse. She yelled at Wahid, over the noise, “Get his feet.”

  “Are you kidding?” he yelled back.

  She looked back at the two scientists; Brody had a busted arm, but Dörner wasn’t obviously hurt. “Dörner, help us get him to the ship.”

  “But they’re shooting—”

  Above them the sky lit up with a trail that felt close enough for her to touch. Parvi swore she felt the wind as it passed by. For a moment it burned against her retinas, a flaming teardrop of molten metal twice the size of the dropship.

  Then it slammed into the trapezoidal building, the one that Kugara had emerged from.

  Parvi felt as if the ground turned liquid under her feet, as the ripples from the impact crashed below her. She sucked in a breath tainted by the smell of burning ferrocrete and superheated metal.

  She grabbed Shane’s shoulders and yelled, “Now!”

  She pushed herself up unsteadily against ground that still pulsed, and she realized that she was feeling wave after wave of impacts, just like the one they had just witnessed.

  Brody took a leg in his good hand, and the four of them raced Shane toward the dropship. Kugara’s people were back on their feet after the shock wave, and the remnants of the Caliphate techs were retreating to the Khalid.

  Behind Kugara, Parvi saw the outline of the trapezoidal building, silhouetted against a towering fountain of glowing metal. The fountain resembled an abstract slow-motion interpretation of a volcanic eruption. Glowing tendrils twisted into the sky from the impact site, arcing out over the whole spaceport.

  “We’re so screwed,” she whispered as they made a desperate run toward the dropship. Any moment she expected one of those tendrils to collapse on them like a falling tree.

  Even if they made it, she saw several fallen Caliphate techs, and couldn’t see Abbas being particularly welcoming anymore.

  It wasn’t an issue.

  When they made it to the Khalid, Kugara and Mallory helped them up and in. Inside, Kugara’s people had definitive control of the situation. Sergeant Abbas sat, slumped in a corner, clutching a hole in her belly, and the techs had dropped or lowered their weapons.

  Parvi pushed through to the cockpit as she heard one of the Caliphate techs saying, “We don’t have room for that half-dead morey!”

  “You want me to shoot enough people to make room?” Kugara shouted back.

  Parvi dived for the controls, started as abbreviated a preflight checklist as she could get away with, and began powering up the contragrav. She called back, “Everyone on board?”

  “Everyone who’s coming!” Kugara shouted back.

  Parvi slammed the controls to seal the external door. She cranked up the contragrav and withdrew the landing skids. Everything checked out for flight on all the readouts she could make sense of—everything except the proximity radar
, which was going absolutely nuts with contacts all over the place.

  Out the viewscreen the world was insane, the sky boiling with incoming meteor tracks, and a molten hydra whipping at the sky right in front of them.

  Bizarrely, the building still stood, black against the glowing base of the tendrils. She pushed the dropship back and up, to get away from the thing, and as the dropship rose, she began to see more impact sites whipping their long threads across the landscape, everywhere Parvi could see.

  She desperately searched for a part of the sky that was safe, or a low-altitude path that avoided the pulsating impact sites. But every sensor was saturated with information. No path seemed clear enough.

  Then the hydra in front of them reached for the dropship.

  Parvi tensed for the impact, but the tendrils stopped short. They hung motionless, burning in the viewscreen. She stared at a tendril hanging in midair, barely meters from the dropship.

  “Okay, you ready to fly us out of this—holy shit!”

  Parvi didn’t take her eyes off the view in front of her. “Take the nav chair, Wahid.”

  “What the hell is—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why is it just sitting—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to—”

  “You’re going to shut up and get a course plotted back toward home, and you’re going to push this drive as hard as the computer will let you. We’re taching as soon as we’re safely out of the atmosphere.”

  If we ever get safely out of the atmosphere.

  She pulled the dropship back on its contragravs, away from the frozen hydra. As she did, she saw a complex shadow rippling across its glowing surface, as if it were restrained by a black net. The tendrils strained against the net, then seemed to liquefy and pour down, back to the ground, leaving a complex black webwork hanging in the air like an alien fossil.

  “What is that?” Wahid asked.

  “I don’t have any more information than you do,” Parvi replied.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Damn it, where? I can’t see any route that isn’t alive with contacts. I can’t find clear airspace anywhere.”

  “Just punch it! It’s not getting any clearer.”

  Parvi had already come to the same conclusion and primed the main thrusters to blow them through the maelstrom that the upper atmosphere had become. All they could do is pull enough G’s that they limited their exposure, and hoped they slipped between the contacts.

  She called out, “Secure everyone!”

  As she spoke, the view out the windscreen whipped apart. The black alien skeleton flew apart and re-formed around the dropship. Almost every single proximity alarm rang out at once. And suddenly she looked through a black web, her view outside fragmented into hundreds of tiny angular facets.

  The net itself pulsed slightly, rippling upward past them.

  “That’s it,” Wahid said, “we’re fucked.”

  Parvi sucked in a breath, not quite believing it when she said, “No.”

  Not every proximity alarm was flashing. The ones topside forward were clear. And as she looked at the other sensors, the airspace in that direction was clearing out.

  The entire dropship vibrated, and the resonances formed a voice that she felt more than heard.

  “Take the path. Find those that came before me.”

  She didn’t need to be told twice. She aimed the dropship straight up the center of the widening cone of clear airspace and fired the jets pushing the acceleration to just short of having everyone on board lose consciousness.

  The dropship shook, and the temperature gauges oscillated wildly. The atmosphere might have been clear of descending mass, but it was still hot and turbulent from its passage. The black web unfolded around them, forming the boundary of the clear airspace as the view from the windscreen became abstract patterns in heat, smoke, and light.

  At five kilometers up, she saw the well-defined borders of the cleared area crumble around them. Suddenly, dozens of masses headed toward them at supersonic speeds.

  She started doing what evasive maneuvers she could as she unleashed the maneuvering jets full bore, crushing her into her seat and fuzzing the edges of her vision. She held on to the edge of consciousness with bloody nails, telling herself that she had taken more G’s when she was a fighter pilot.

  But not sustained, and not without an appropriate flight suit to keep the blood in her head.

  The dropship tore through the upper atmosphere, threading through the burning contrails of a falling sky. All the time the oversized Caliphate dropship jittered like an imam at a Proudhon strip club.

  They shot out above it two seconds before Parvi noticed, and three seconds before she blacked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Rapture

  “Our fates are stranger than we are willing to admit.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Rebecca Tsoravitch stood on the outskirts of the abandoned city of Ashley, reborn, seeing and feeling with a depth and detail that was inconceivable to her an hour ago. The pulse of knowledge cascaded through her in waves, data from every remote sensor distributed across the inhabited surface of Salmagundi. Adam embraced the planet, each of his chosen landing part of his . . .

  Essence? Influence? Body? Soul? Mind?

  None of the words quite captured the concept within which she and 250,000 of Adam’s other chosen had descended to the surface of Salmagundi. The polymorphous entities were colonies of machines more numerous and more varied in function than the cells that made up a human body, durable, mutable, capable of reproducing any mechanical function bounded only by the limits of the matter comprising them.

  Adam’s embrace of Salmagundi was carried out by a quarter million of these machine colonies. They were crewed by the mind of one of the chosen, but their substance consisted of Adam’s consciousness.

  That was one of the first truths she’d known about Adam’s new world. When she took his hand and dissolved her flesh into his mechanical cloud of thinking matter, she knew that her self still had boundaries. There was a definite point of division, even with her body yet unformed, between her and not-her. That was not so with Adam. His identity, his self, ranged everywhere outside of herself.

  It was his most valid claim for godhead. Within the cloud he was, in fact, omnipresent. When she looked up at the threadlike forms tracing across the sky, the tendrils of thinking matter arcing from the landing site outside the city, she looked up at him.

  Omnipresent, she thought safely within herself, but not omnipotent. Adam was not perfect. Standing in her temporarily human body, she smiled at a thought that no longer even felt blasphemous.

  Her mind was now much larger than her body, and it accommodated data streams from each of the quarter million landing sites. She had quickly adapted her consciousness to interpret the flood of data. She experienced little disorientation from the flood of information—more every second than her old brain would have been able to perceive, much less understand. Her sudden adaptation to her new consciousness, like the odd bits of memory implanted within her own, seemed a gift that Adam had granted her unawares.

  She saw enough of the data flowing through the cloud to tell that none of the other chosen seemed to monitor the whole of the bandwidth as she did.

  So she saw the Caliphate dropship escape, aided by a damaged, half-sentient Protean artifact. She saw enough data on the ship itself to know it carried the survivors of the Eclipse, aside from Mosasa, Bill, and the late Dr. Pak. She watched it tear out of the atmosphere and wink out in a burst of tachyon radiation.

  She could not see into Adam’s thoughts, but she briefly felt his anger slice through the cloud like a thread of metallic hydrogen.

  So she knew t
hat this god could fail, however slightly.

  While one part of her now multifold mind pondered Adam’s divinity, or lack thereof, another walked with her body along the streets of Ashley.

  God or not, she was here to serve Adam’s purposes. It was a fair trade for what she had been given. She was here to help fulfill Adam’s desire for a diversity of mind. Each of Adam’s chosen now walked the planet, finding the scattered population, and offering the same choice that Adam had offered her—transcend the flesh, one way or the other.

  Something in the culture of Salmagundi meant that many more chose Adam’s path than she expected. On the Caliphate vessels, only a third chose to join him. That meant two thirds of the crew of the Prophet’s Voice went “the way of all flesh”—a slightly larger percentage than from the Sword. Here, on Salmagundi, the proportions were nearly reversed, with better than sixty percent deciding to become Adam’s chosen people.

  It also meant the execution of better than a third of the planet’s population. Part of her was appalled, and part of her mourned, but nothing in her could bring herself to regret her own decision to live.

  Even so, she had access to see every denial, the face of every man, woman, and child who chose to fight Adam’s representatives rather than take their hand. She saw each face, and she remembered them.

  None had yet fallen before her. The streets her eidolon walked had been evacuated long before her arrival; no one here to offer salvation or damnation. Buildings stood empty, embraced by a wind warmed by the descent of the chosen, wrapped by enigmatic shadows cast by the combination of evening light and the luminous tendrils that crossed the sky above her.

  The form she wore was as human as the body she had cast aside. She had even chosen to wear clothing; though such protection was unnecessary now, the sensation of the wind tugging the fabric against her skin comforted her.

  At the end of the abandoned street she walked towered a building that dominated everything else in Ashley. Here was Adam’s Grail.

  The Hall of Minds.

  This was one of fifty such structures across the planet, temples to the stored memories of Salmagundi’s ancestors. Inside existed every generation for the past one hundred and seventy-five years.