Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  The guys weren’t heavily armed, basically just shotguns and rifles. She stepped over the guys in the bathroom doorway and bent over to pick up a shotgun off the floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick! Why do you think I kept asking if you were sure about this? We’re criminals now, kid. Wrap your head around it.” She checked the load on the shotgun. It had a full load, ten shots worth of caseless ammo.

  “Who are you planning on shooting?”

  “Anyone who tries shooting us, for starters.” She ran to the open doorway and looked around for more guards. She didn’t see any in evidence, and with the cameras dead, she was probably unobserved. The air smelled rank with smoke and ozone from the mining lasers.

  Yeah, we wanted to do something about that, didn’t we? she thought privately. If the things were automated, she could pinpoint the control center and get in to hack—

  Over to her right, where the Protean egg/seed was, there was a violent flash of purple light and a blast of hot air. Hot embers and gravel shot by the doorway and Tetsami had to duck inside to avoid being pelted. When the light faded, a nasty mechanical whine filled the air.

  “What the hell?”

  “We’re too late. They blew it up.”

  Tetsami wasn’t so sure about that. She ducked outside to look in that direction.

  They hadn’t blown it up.

  The matte-black ellipsoid hadn’t moved, but the ground around it had. It now floated at the center of a ten-meter-diameter crater that was nearly hemispherical. The perimeter of the crater encompassed the area where the heavy mining equipment had been. Of the mining lasers, or the tons of earth that had been underneath the Protean seed, there was no sign. As Tetsami watched, the near-mirror surface of the hemispherical crater crumbled as the soil began collapsing back into the hole.

  “Somehow,” Tetsami whispered, “I think it didn’t need our help.”

  The mind focused on the anger, a stable rock in the swirling maelstrom of emotion that filled its empty world. Whatever was responsible for the destruction of Xi Virginis—whatever intelligence was behind the cloud that had damaged the egg—that entity had to pay. The mind didn’t know how, but it clutched to that single desire.

  The mind would see that entity cease to exist. It would erase it from the face of the universe. It would destroy the thing on an altar of the mind’s righteous fury.

  With the anger, came focus and a dim awareness of the universe outside the egg.

  The mind could not use all the egg’s senses at once, but it realized that if it focused on a narrow array of the sensory capability, it could see, after a fashion. Despite the subjective eternity in which the new mind had floated in the dark womb of the egg, it had in fact only been 2.38 seconds since the mind had revived.

  As slow as the new mind moved in comparison to the old, it still had time to assess the presence of the mining lasers pumping terawatts into the egg. That energy had been absorbed and used by the lowest autonomic functions of the egg to repair the physical damage. The lasers themselves, as pure energy weapons, posed no threat to the egg itself.

  However, the mind knew their purpose. The beams were an attack.

  Like the cloud.

  The mind reacted before it even understood the ramifications of the act. It extended one of the quantum fields enveloping the egg out to a diameter past the extent of the mining lasers. Space rippled, tore, and reformed in a shell around the egg, letting out a flash of light as a sphere of matter ten meters in diameter was twisted elsewhere. The energy required to destroy the lasers was barely balanced by the release of energy caused by the vanishing matter.

  What have I done?

  The mind did not understand its own actions. It had acted without thinking and had done something violent, aggressive, and probably counterproductive. Reviewing the record of the incident, it could see that human beings had piloted the lasers.

  It had been under no risk, but it had killed nine people.

  The anger leeched out of it as it wondered what it had become.

  Tetsami heard Flynn’s panicked thought, “What the hell IS that thing?”

  Tetsami started taking slow steps backward. She knew what it was, conceptually, but seeing the thing there, a matte-black hole in reality hovering over the crater, ignited a visceral fear. One nasty thought in her direction, and both she and Flynn could cease to exist.

  “Freeze!” someone yelled at her. “Drop the shotgun!”

  Tetsami glanced behind her and saw a trio of Sheldon’s security goons leveling more shotguns at her. She spread her arms, holding the gun by the barrel to keep them from freaking out and shooting her.

  “I’m not your biggest problem,” she said.

  One of the other guards had already come to that realization. He was looking past her, where the egg/seed was. “Fathers save us,” he whispered.

  Klaxons sounded throughout the compound. Someone in the stellar security staff must have just realized that they were down three mining lasers and one prisoner.

  The first guard decided to stay on task, though. “Drop the gun, Flynn, and get on the ground. I will shoot you.”

  “Do what he says, Gram.”

  “Don’t rush things, kiddo.”

  She did her best to remain calm and move slowly. No need to add to the chaos. She slowly knelt down, arms out, still holding the shotgun by the barrel.

  “I said, drop the fucking gun!”

  She carefully laid the gun next to her as she lay facedown on the ground.

  One of his friends yelled, “Holy shit!” and started pumping shells toward the crater.

  A distraction was a distraction, and Tetsami used it to roll away into a drainage ditch next to one of the prefab buildings. More shots exploded above and behind her, but none came near her. She scrambled out of the mud and crawled up to the lip of the ditch to look over back toward the crater.

  The floating black seed was leaking. Black poured out of it, spilling into the crater below it, oily tendrils that seemed almost tears in the fabric of space.

  “Why the hell are they shooting at it?” Tetsami whispered.

  “Do you see the same thing I do? It ATE those mining lasers.”

  “Yeah, and a shotgun shell is going to do what, exactly?”

  The three guards must have come to the same conclusion, as the firing ceased. They stood, facing the crater, as the egg dissolved into a viscous pool in the crater.

  “Did they shoot a hole in it?” Flynn sounded confused.

  Tetsami shook her head. Whatever was happening, it was not that simple. The black pool in the crater was no longer the black nonstuff that had made the egg. She could see reflective highlights and ripples. There was something there.

  No. Tell me you aren’t going to do that, she thought as one of the guards knelt down and poked the substance with the barrel of his shotgun.

  Black tendrils shot up the barrel, crawling across the man’s arm before he could react. His two companions stumbled back as a net of shiny black threads wrapped every surface of his body. He didn’t move, aside from a tense vibration. His eyes bulged as the net seemed to tighten, the threads forming it thinning.

  For a moment it gave every appearance that the net was going to crush the man alive. Then the threads constricted and pulled into his flesh. His head snapped back and he released a strangled gurgling sound. His body shook as the tendrils withdrew along his arm and down the shotgun.

  He collapsed backward as the last black filament let go of the gun barrel. He fell into a fetal position on the ground, hyperventilating. The parts of his skin that Tetsami could see bore a fine webbing of welts that corresponded to where the fluid web had penetrated.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Tetsami answered Flynn. She inched along the ditch on her stomach, away from both the crater and the guards. The guards, at least, were paying her no attention. Their focus was divided between dragging away their f
allen comrade, and keeping an eye on the black-filled crater.

  The black began rolling out of the crater. The liquid spread out, over the lip, in a strangely geometric webwork.

  The guards ran, pulling the welt-covered guy to his feet so he could stumble along after them. Tetsami pushed herself to her feet, but she felt a thundering panic in her gut that wasn’t wholly her own.

  “We got to get out of here!”

  “Damn it, Flynn, that’s what I’m doing. Let me drive!”

  However, Tetsami hadn’t done quite enough to accommodate Flynn’s emotions. She felt him desperately grasping for control as she tried to run up out of the ditch. Their nervous system spasmed from two sets of conflicting motor instructions, and both of them took a running face-first tumble into the ground. Gravel dug into Flynn’s face and tore the meat of his left arm though his shirt.

  He barely realized that Tetsami had completely withdrawn as he tried to get on his feet. When he did, pain shot through his ankle all the way up his leg, intense enough that his leg collapsed when he put weight on it.

  He fell on the ground again and looked behind him at the advancing black spiderweb. It was as if the personification of the Abyss was reaching for him. The strange order of the tendrils reached the first of the prefab buildings, and it crawled up the walls of the building as if it was some non-Euclidian vine.

  Flynn flipped on his back and started pushing away from the advancing web with his good foot. The advancing web held to some strange geometry and, as it closed, he saw that within the holes formed by the black tendrils, the regular web pattern was repeated by thinner tendrils. Even closer, and he saw that inside the smaller webs, there was even a thinner pattern repeating.

  The ground changed under the fractal net. Irregularities smoothed out, and the muddy surface turned uniform and smooth. Flynn only managed to keep ahead of the web because its advance slowed. The web enveloped two large prefab buildings. Flynn glanced and saw a dozen people running for the perimeter fence.

  It seemed like a good idea, if he could get to his feet.

  Now that the web’s advance seemed complete, he tried to push himself upright. But his ankle collapsed under him with a blinding flare of pain.

  Shit! I’m sorry, Gram.

  Just shut up and crawl.

  Flynn crawled, putting distance between himself and the web as fast as he could manage. It didn’t feel nearly fast enough.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the enveloped buildings moving, folding in on themselves. He stopped and stared, because they weren’t collapsing. Instead the walls fragmented and each piece slowly turned on an impossible axis, as if each building was a puzzle box being manipulated by an unseen giant. Also, like the web itself, the motion seemed to replicate itself on smaller scales, each rotating fragment itself formed by dozens of smaller rotating fragments. The material of the buildings changed character from dull utilitarian metal into something lighter and more reflective.

  Like a cloud, or a snowstorm—

  Damn it, Flynn, move your ass!

  Someone had decided that two outbuildings turning into rolling cloudbanks constituted a threat. Shots came from the direction of the perimeter fence, some striking too close for comfort.

  “Don’t those idiots realize how well that worked the first time?”

  “As you point out, they’re all too much the same person. They keep making the same mistakes.”

  Flynn pushed himself to try and put at least one building between him and the shooters.As he did, he saw something streak through the air toward the closest alien building/cloudbank.

  A missile? Flynn thought.

  The missile sailed through it, and buried itself in the surrounding woods before exploding. Flynn felt a hot wind as the roar of the explosion rolled past him.

  The hole in the cloud healed itself.

  Then the air was alive with missile tracks. Flynn curled into a ball and covered his head as explosions began echoing across the compound. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Heat burned his back and he could smell his own hair smoldering. His ears rang with the almost continuous roar of the missile strikes. They rang until he could hear nothing else but the ringing.

  He stayed like that until he realized the ground was no longer shaking, and his back wasn’t on fire. The ringing persisted, and he whispered, “Hello?”

  He could hear his own voice. He wasn’t deaf.

  Flynn rolled over and faced what should have been the sky. It took several moments to make sense of what he did see. Above him, he saw the underside of a semitransparent hemisphere two or three hundred meters in diameter covering most of the central portion of the temporary camp, a dome centered on the point the egg had landed.

  The skin of the hemisphere shimmered various shades of blue as missiles from the outside collided with the semitransparent shell. The weapons broke soundlessly against the perfectly curved skin in cascades of blue-and-violet-tinted flames and smoke.

  “Gram?” Flynn whispered.

  “Yeah, I see it, too.”

  “What is—” Flynn’s question was interrupted by a low voice that didn’t sound human.

  “It is coming.”

  Flynn lowered his gaze and faced a man, or something in the shape of a man. The speaker stood under the shimmering blue dome, in the midst of what had become a landscape of fractal crystalline geometry.

  The man was naked, hairless, and his skin was shiny midnight black, showing no fine detail. He stared at Flynn with featureless black eyes and, when he spoke, he flashed teeth that were perfect black mirrors.

  “It is coming here,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Harbinger

  Fear the new, but fear more the obsessive grasp on the old.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  There comes a point where the debate ends and you must pick up a gun.

  —DATIA RAJASTHAN (?-2042)

  Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  The Great Triad had been in continuous session for thirty days. Representatives from each Triad from each region across Salmagundi were here; over a hundred men and women, carrying the memories and experience of tens of thousands, representing the whole of the planet.

  Alexander Shane, the oldest human being here, bore fifteen tattoos across his brow; more than anyone else living. Seven of those marks represented people who had borne at least as many when they had lived. The combined wisdom of a thousand of Salmagundi’s past citizens informed every word he spoke, every move he made. As the senior among them, he was the one to preside.

  He sat, with the others at a great circular table in one of the many great rooms in the Ashley Hall of Minds. There were other halls where they could have met, in other cities, but the authority of the Great Triad came from their persons, and not their location. Ashley happened to be closest to the reason they met.

  Alexander watched the debate, contributing little of his own wisdom. He felt the pervasive panic as much as anyone else here. The presence of the offworld object threatened everything that their ancestors had built here.

  “We are relying on the words of this singleton Flynn Jorgenson as to the nature of this invader,” one of the younger women spoke. She only had ten tattoos across her brow and her hair still had hints of brown in the midst of the silver. “It could be prelude to an invasion.”

  “We’ve seen no evidence of this,” someone countered.

  “No,” she replied. “But Mr. Jorgenson’s statement is at odds with the facts. The trajectory of this object does not lead back to the old systems.”

  “It had been traveling for centuries,” another woman said, “and could have maneuvered any number of times before entering our space.”

  “Where it came from is irrelevant,” a man agreed from across the room.

  “It is only irrelevant if it is not a harbinger of a greater threat,” she told them all. “Need I remind you where its trail points back to?”

 
; “Coincidence,” someone muttered.

  “No evidence at all—”

  “You are looking for problems where there are none—”

  “Once it is destroyed—”

  Alexander let the dialogue shoot back and forth without enforcing any rules of order. A limited amount of chaos was necessary so that when the final consensus was reached, every member could feel their voice as having been part of coming to it.

  Usually, though, consensus was quicker in arriving. Rarely did the members’ opinions diverge on anything of substance. However, this session was as anomalous as the event they debated.

  What concerned the woman, and a substantive minority of the Grand Triad membership, was the fact that the review of what records existed showing the object’s entry into the system revealed a path that led from the direction not of the of Confederacy, but of a star that had vanished from Salmagundi’s sky a decade ago.

  Alexander remembered the event from three different points of view: his own and two more that had been bequeathed to him from the Hall of Minds since then. It had been a subject of interest and debate in Salmagundi’s scientific community a decade ago when Xi Virginis winked out of the sky. Then, the debate in the Grand Triad had been whether to expend the resources to investigate. There had even been a half-dozen advocates for building a tach-ship to send to the Xi Virginis system.

  Alexander remembered the debates. They had lasted for nearly an entire season, and in the end Salmagundi’s essentially insular nature won out. The star had not exploded, and the scientists accepted the idea that something had simply caused it to burn itself out.

  The thought that the object Flynn Jorgenson described was somehow a remnant of that event was disturbing. Enough that members of the Triad who, like Alexander, had been present during that first event were dusting off the rhetoric from the earlier session as if the decade-old incident were still being debated.

  The Great Triad had a memory broad and deep. No member forgot any slight, any error, any insult—to the point that every word spoken had such a ponderous history associated with it that it was wondrous that anyone spoke at all.