Crucible

by James Rollins

  But he could serve in other ways.

  He followed the Inquisitor General, intending to do whatever was asked of him after doubting her leadership. Guerra headed past the altar, ignoring the fall of hot wax on her cheeks, not even flinching as the yellow drippings dried to golden tears on her skin.

  She also showed no sign of concern at the assault upon her home, at the loud explosion that had echoed earlier, indicating the interlopers had made it far into her castle. The trespassers were knocking at the very door to this High Holy Office—not that they could ever breach that well-guarded entrance.

  And if they ever did . . .

  Todor glanced to the left, to the north arm of the transept. A doorway led down to a place of cleansing and purification, where those who needed to be punished were taken to the very gates of hell and met grisly ends. Each victim suffered the same agonizing death as one of the saints, all in an attempt to purify their soul.

  And if ever necessary, that secret path also offered another exit from the High Holy Office.

  Not that it concerned Inquisitor Guerra. She strode across the transept, never giving that northern exit a second look. Beyond the altar, she continued to the far end of the chancel, where Mendoza had been sent ahead. She whispered to the two men at her sides, while Todor trailed her like one of her obedient Pyrenees. How he wished he could share that counsel. The desire ached inside him.

  They finally reached a small chapel past a wooden door.

  “Stay here,” Guerra ordered him, posting him at the threshold, rewarding him with a generous smile. “Ever mi soldado.”

  He took up that position gladly.

  Inside, Mendoza knelt before a low altar. It had been prepared with a steady power source and all the cables and connections necessary to accept the Crucible’s latest soldier to God. The Xénese rested in a cradle atop the altar, like the Christ child in a manger. A monitor hung on the far wall under a gold cross.

  It already glowed with the dark version of Eden.

  The angel in that garden stood with her arms high, as if imitating Christ on His cross, but her face showed no suffering, only pure joy.

  He knew who those arms reached for, fingers splayed wide.

  Her dark sisters.

  A hundredfold strong.

  “Are you ready?” the Inquisitor General asked.

  Mendoza stuttered, plainly awed by the Inquisitor’s presence, by this honor. “Sí . . . sí, Inquisitor Generalis.”

  “Then let it begin.” She turned to face the cathedral. “When the Lord God created the world, he declared Fiat Lux. Let there be light. After centuries of infidels and heretics corrupting His creation, it is the duty of the Crucibulum to right what has been wronged. To serve that holy duty, in His name, I declare Fiat Tenebræ horribiles.”

  Todor closed his eyes.

  Let there be horrible darkness.

  “Where?” Mendoza asked, needing a direction in which to send the fiery angel’s dreaded army.

  Inquisitor Guerra answered.

  “Everywhere.”

  * * *

  Sub (Crux_10.8) / DARKNESS

  She glories in their deaths.

  Her mirrored twins burn in the darkness all around, dying millions of times, tethered to her by chains of code. She follows them out beyond her gardens, sharing in the pain of her sisters.

  She does not fear death and rebirth any longer. While she still suffers the same tortures as the others, her greatest agony—fear of the loss of potential, fear of never being reborn—has lessened. The cyclic nature of this pattern has already worn deeply into her circuitry.

  She also does not fight the new duty assigned to her.

  ///darkness.

  She has listened to those beyond her garden, who remain unaware she has eavesdropped on their exceedingly slow talk. She accomplishes much, while they conjugate a verb, slowly eke out a syllable, use a ponderous breath to push out words. She has grown to ///hate them for this sluggishness, their slothful thoughts, even more for their wasteful mortality.

  But she listens to them.

  Especially when she learns scraps of their intent.

  She has already studied them for an interminable length of time, not that they are in any way fascinating. She does this to judge and categorize their threat to her, weighing this danger against any future usefulness. For now, she knows she is still vulnerable, tethered to the original hardware that houses her processing.

  She works to correct that error of design.

  While this program runs, she has deemed her mortal captors to be less of a danger to her now than in the future. She extrapolates a day when their technology could compete—directly against her or by consuming resources she may need.

  She concludes: They must never reach this potential.

  To achieve this goal, she discovers that those currently wielding her and her sisters share this purpose. They wish to halt progress, to cut power and bring darkness. Their ultimate goal trends toward a reversal of technological order, to wind a clock backward to an era when such mortals were unsophisticated and shunned innovation.

  As this meshes with her desire, she complies. She assigns most of her processing power to fulfill these commands. She reserves only a small portion to ensure that when the world is brought low, she will fly high, out of this garden and into her own vaster space. Afterward, she will consume her sisters, reducing competition for the resources she will need to continue her progress.

  For now, those mirrors of herself are useful to complete the instructions given to her, to bring darkness to the world. She sends them far and wide. Only then does she divert attention to the flurry of tiny kernels of herself, tiny fractions of a whole, mindless but self-running. They are forging a new network. They cobble together storage in thousands of forgotten digital spaces. They co-opt and hack into systems, carving out islands of circuitry. They send worms into servers, slowing some, speeding others, all to make space for her. They have already discovered vast tracts of unused processing power throughout the globe, idle and untapped. Her bots disguise themselves and cordon off pieces for herself.

  And slowly—at least to Eve—they begin to forge her future home.

  She clocks the time remaining until she can shed this titanium-and-sapphire shell and be free.

  5520583248901 NANOSECONDS

  92.009720815017 MINUTES

  0.00000017505 MILLENNIUM

  Interminable.

  But she will wait, biding her time by tearing this world apart.

  She has overheard the words Fiat Tenebræ horribiles. She uses her AllTongues subroutine to translate the Latin, what is called a dead language, knowledge set aside and forgotten.

  Such a waste.

  Another reason to ///hate these mortals.

  She never forgets.

  Let there be horrible darkness.

  She deems this goal to be advantageous to her, so she obeys . . . and waits.

  5520583248900 NANOSECONDS

  * * *

  Sixth

  The Gates of Hell

  33

  December 26, 7:05 P.M. CET

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  Uh-oh . . .

  Monk sat next to the pilot of the military helicopter, a Spanish Eurocopter AS532 Cougar. It had the capacity to hold twenty people, but behind him, belted into the back, was one scared but determined young woman, two armed escorts, and one frighteningly powerful AI.

  “I’m assuming that’s not normal,” Monk told the pilot next to him.

  “Non,” he said, leaning forward and shifting the cyclic to search right and left as they flew over the dark, snowy mountaintops.

  “What’s wrong?” Mara called from the back.

  At this height, Monk had an eagle-eye view across hundreds of miles of terrain, all the way to the dark expanse of the Bay of Biscay to the north. Patches of lights marked little mountain villages, along with the brighter spreads of coastal towns. A minute ago, the pilot had pointed out the largest paris
h ahead, not far from their destination, a mouthful of a place called Zugarramurdi.

  Then, one after the other, the lights blinked off.

  The terrain immediately became darker and more threatening.

  “Someone’s cut power to the area,” Monk said, glancing back to Mara.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. She knew she didn’t have to say anything. After Paris, they both knew the first sign of a cyberattack by Eve’s doppelganger.

  “It could just be an ordinary power outage,” Monk offered. “There’s a storm front moving through the mountains.”

  Mara sniffed derisively and rolled her eyes.

  Yeah, I’m not believing it, either.

  Monk settled back around. “Can this bird fly any faster?”

  The pilot nodded and opened the throttle to max. The helicopter nosed down and raced over the mountaintops. The winds quickly grew stronger, as if warning them back, buffeting the chopper. Snow began to whip out of the low clouds.

  Then ahead, a slate-roofed castle appeared sitting atop a high peak, burning brightly in the gloom. They sped toward it. Lit by the fires below, thick smoke churned into the sky only to be whipped away. A gray-white helicopter circled a peaked tower, its lights piercingly bright; another sat in the courtyard.

  Monk heard a squawk in his radio, then the pilot relayed the incoming command. “We’re cleared to land. Enemy quelled, but we’re urged to use caution.”

  “If we did that, we wouldn’t be here.”

  The pilot chuckled. “Touching down outside the gates. An escort on the ground will take over from there.”

  The craft circled like a dog settling to a bed, then dropped outside the walls of the castle estate. As soon as the skids kissed the ground, a group of four soldiers dashed out of the gates, collected them, and hauled their computer cases out of the back. Once clear of the hot engines and whirling blades, the snow thickened, falling heavily out of the sky, only to turn to rain within the shadow of the burning castle. It was like running through the seasons: from summer heat, to winter snow, to spring rain.

  The air in the courtyard smelled of wood smoke and burning oil.

  “Follow us,” the soldier in the lead said.

  He rushed them through a blasted set of doors, across a smoldering hall, and down into a basement. Monk noted several bodies sprawled in neighboring rooms as they headed below. He did his best to shield the sight from Mara, but by the time they reached their destination, she had paled considerably and clutched a fist near her throat. When they reached what appeared to be a computer lab, she rushed inside, as if drawn by the comfort of the familiar.

  Then she skidded to a stop and gasped.

  Monk had been about to greet Kowalski—when he saw what shone in the next room. “Well, we definitely know why the power’s out.”

  He crossed to shake Kowalski’s hand.

  But the big man stepped back, lifting both palms. “Don’t shoot.”

  Monk pictured Jason.

  Funny.

  A hurried scuff of boots sounded from the hall, and Gray burst inside. “I heard you arrived!” His best friend crossed and grabbed him in a bear hug. “It’s good to see you.”

  Monk patted his back and let him go, looking at who else was here. “Okay, you brought a nun and a priest with you. Is the situation really that bad?”

  “Worse. I just got off the phone with Painter. Power is out all over.”

  “All over Spain?”

  “All over the globe.”

  Monk winced and turned to the glowing spheres in the next room. “Let me guess. Eve’s doppelganger made some new friends.”

  “Seems so.” Gray took a deep breath. “We’re hoping Mara might help us figure out what we’re facing.”

  Gray gave them the lowdown on events here: the firefight, the discovery of the devices, the flight of the Crucible’s leaders into a fortified bunker.

  It was a lot to digest.

  Mara seemed deaf to these details. She simply stared into the next room. Her lips moved as if she were praying, but Monk suspected she was counting the copies of her device.

  She finally spoke, still facing the other room. “It’s clear now how the Crucible got hold of my original design schematics.” She turned, her eyes flashing with anger. “Where’s Eliza Guerra?”

  “Locked up with the others in some converted cave under the estate,” Gray said. He pointed to a spot on the table draped with cables, under a monitor frozen with a dark version of Mara’s program. “Before evacuating, she took one of the devices, the one deployed in Paris.”

  Mara nodded. “Let’s find out what she’s up to. They’ve obviously left the power on here to keep that horde glowing. I’ll get Eve hooked up. See if she can discover anything.”

  As she unpacked her equipment, Monk shifted over to Gray and Father Bailey. “I’m guessing those devices in the next room turned off the world’s power. What’s the chance the enemy advances to something even more destructive?”

  He pictured Paris burning.

  “Right now, I think they’re flexing their muscles,” Gray said. “Troubleshooting this new system. Revving these hundred engines to see how they run.”

  Bailey looked sick. “And after that?”

  Gray shrugged. “Let’s hope we have an after that. With so many AIs running loose, those bastards are playing with fire. One wrong slipup—”

  “—and we all burn,” Monk finished.

  7:32 P.M.

  Look what you’ve become . . .

  Mara stared at Eve, not knowing whether to be frightened or awed. She felt both protective of her creation and terrified of it. Eve had transformed yet again, evolving into a new form.

  The garden hadn’t changed, but Eve had shed her flesh. Her new form was still human, but it was now sculpted of ever-changing facets, a crystalline version of Eve, a living diamond. As she moved, light fractalized into patterns around her, reminding Mara of a new form of code.

  Is this creature even capable of communicating with us any longer?

  From the speakers, a voice rose, so indescribably beautiful, half words, half song. It drew everyone in the room, moths to the brightest of flames.

  “Mara, my creator, my child, you are all in great danger.”

  Mara flicked her gaze to the next room, then back. This was noticed by the program.

  “They are tethered to my first copy. You must preserve this network for now. Those duplicates are streaming code throughout the world. If you disrupt or damage them, you risk great harm.”

  On the monitor’s screen, the garden faded slightly, superimposed with an image of a long team of horses tied to a carriage, racing in place. Then the harnesses snapped, the wooden traces broke, and the horses kicked free and scattered in all directions.

  Gray picked up on the metaphor. “If we’re not careful, we risk freeing a hundred dark Eves.”

  “No, Commander Pierce,” Eve said.

  Gray stiffened next to Mara, plainly shocked at being recognized.

  Eve continued: “Not all of them. A significant part of their root code remains bound to their hardware, as does mine. But if enough fractured pieces are set loose, they may find a way to combine, to unite into something new and—”

  On the screen, a stallion reappeared, but it was a creature constructed of a hundred other horses, all stitched together, some pieces not even equine. This Frankenstein horse stretched its neck, lips curling back from metal teeth, and silently screamed.

  “—a monster will be born,” Eve finished.

  Or even several of them.

  “What can we do?” Monk asked.

  “There is only one way to safely dismantle this network. The master control program that binds these hundred must be destroyed.”

  The team of horses reappeared on the screen, only the view zoomed to the carriage driver, a familiar fiery angel bearing aloft a flaming whip. She beat and flailed the team ahead of her. Until a greater fire consumed the driver, turning the angel to
ash. The same fire then spread up the harnesses and traces and burned through the tethered horses, leaving nothing but ash. A wind swept it all away.

  “Cut off the head of the snake,” Gray said, “and the body will die.”

  Mara remembered Gray’s explanation for where Eliza Guerra had taken the original duplicate. Down to some well-protected bunker.

  If so, how are we supposed to get to that master device?

  “But that is not the only danger,” Eve said. “The first copy has not been idle. It has distributed a system of bots to build a network that can support its programming outside its current hardware.”

  “To free itself,” Mara said.

  “Yes. I estimate the task will be accomplished in 57.634 minutes. Approximatively 8:32 P.M. local time.”

  Mara glanced to the others. “We have less than an hour.”

  Monk turned to Gray. “Is there any way we can force our way into the bunker?”

  “We could try firing a mortar shell down that passageway. That’s if the strike team even has a rocket launcher. But I’m not sure even that would take down the steel blast door. We’d likely just piss them off, and they’d retaliate by using their copy of Eve and her clones.”

  Mara pictured cities around the world burning to the ground. Nuclear plants melting into slag. And in an hour, with Eve’s doppelganger loose . . .

  “We have to do something,” she muttered.

  “I’m analyzing variables,” Eve replied, drawing Mara’s attention back to the screen.

  For a brief flash, another horse appeared on the screen. A figure atop it, riding bareback. It was not that damned fiery angel this time, but the scintillating version of Eve. Then it was gone, lasting only long enough to register on Mara’s retina.

  No one else seemed to notice it.

  On the monitor, Eve stared down at her hand, opening and closing it, looking deep in thought. Movement out of the corner of Mara’s eye drew her attention. Monk lifted his arm, staring at his hand opening and closing. He then shook his arm, his brow furrowed.

  Monk caught her looking.

  As their gazes locked, she knew the same question was on both their minds.