Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  The heavy base struck her victim in the throat, just under the chin. Parvi saw the face of a light-skinned woman, almond eyes wide with surprise, mouth snapping shut on a gasped intake of breath. The woman fell backward, body blocking the entryway.

  Parvi jumped over the woman’s body and out the door, hoping to clear it before another guard closed off her escape. She dove behind a storage cabinet, the closest cover, expecting grabbing hands or firing weapons to stop her at any moment. She crouched and wondered why she was still alive. She listened, and all she heard was a sucking wheeze: the woman she had struck, trying to breathe.

  The improvised club shook in her hands, her grip so tight, her knuckles hurt.

  After several moments of hearing nothing but the woman’s sick, wet breathing, she risked a glance around the edge of the storage cabinet.

  Nothing. No one else but the woman sprawled on the floor, half in the interrogation room.

  The woman was unarmed?

  Parvi saw no sign of a weapon, no side arm, not even a stun rod. She pushed the thought away. SOP was to not have interrogators bring any weapons within reach of a dangerous prisoner. The woman wasn’t the threat, her backup was.

  Parvi looked frantically for that backup.

  Across the hall she saw a control room behind an armored window. The consoles and holo displays inside were vacant and dark. The visible corridor was empty of anyone except her and the choking woman. Parvi took a few tentative steps back into the corridor, and nothing appeared to challenge her.

  She glanced back at the control room. Inside, mounted against the wall, stood a weapons locker designed to rack high-wattage lasers or plasma weapons. She wasn’t sure which, since it had been years since she’d studied Caliphate weapon specs—and because the cabinet stood empty.

  She ran to the woman on the floor. It was too late. The woman’s throat had swelled and turned purple, and a thin trail of blood leaked from the mouth and nose that no longer even pretended to breathe. The woman’s eyes still stared with the open-eyed expression of someone startled by unexpected company while using the rest-room.

  Parvi tossed the club aside and tried to clear the airway and get the woman breathing again. As she tried rudimentary first aid, Parvi told herself that it wasn’t guilt that drove her, but the fact that this woman was the only person available who could tell her why the soldiers assigned here emptied their weapons locker and left their post.

  Whatever Parvi’s motives, the woman had sunk beyond revival.

  <>

  * * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Fallen Idols

  “It is better to ally along shared interests than shared ideals.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Beware allies of necessity.”

  —Sylvia Harper

  (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard)

  250,000 km from Salmagundi - HD 101534

  Just twenty meters from her cell, Parvi found Tjaele Mosasa. The door to his cell stood open, revealing a utilitarian cabin beyond. At first, the lack of movement inside lulled Parvi into thinking the room was empty. Then, as she crept past, keeping an eye out for the friends of the woman she had killed, she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

  A foot.

  She turned to stare into the room and saw Mosasa sprawled on the floor, slumped in a corner of the room, unmoving, so still that he could have been part of the bulkhead. She stared for several moments, frozen in place.

  Mosasa had been her employer. In some sense he still was, even after the disaster with the Eclipse. Also, despite appearances, he wasn’t human. He was a construct run by an old Race AI. So the fact that Mosasa didn’t move or breathe didn’t immediately indicate something was wrong. The body Mosasa wore mimicked human metabolism only for the benefit of the humans he interacted with. There was no need for him to have a pulse, or breathe, or show any motion beyond what was mechanically necessary for him to move.

  “Mosasa,” Parvi whispered.

  She hated working for him. She, along with most of the rest of humanity, saw AIs as evil, almost demonic. She especially hated the fact that working for Mosasa had been necessary. It was because of him, of it, that she’d been able to support her family’s relocation from Rubai. Because of Mosasa, she was able to pay the outrageous fees of the smugglers without her family having to bear the weight of the debt. Without Mosasa’s employment, her brothers and sisters might still be working off a half-legal indenture somewhere on the ass-end of the Indi Protectorate.

  “Mosasa?” Slightly louder this time.

  His employment gave her a compass. He gave her direction when she was an aimless refugee. As much as she detested their relationship, she was much more frightened of being cut adrift withoutanything to hang on to.

  She ran into the cabin and yelled, “Mosasa!” For the moment she spared no thoughts for Caliphate guardsmen and crew. No thoughts for her own escape. Her only thought was the idea that Mosasa, as much as she hated him, was most of her world now.

  She grabbed his shoulders and shook, his body’s dead weight about twice as dense as a man’s should have been. His head rocked back on his neck to face her. She pulled away. Mosasa’s eyes stared up at her, open and static. The dragon tattoo still curled around the side of his bald head, slightly phosphorescent against his dark brown skin— except where the skin had burned away. Four charred trenches cut across the face of the dragon so deeply that Parvi could see the glint of a metallic skull underneath. The burns were mirrored in the opposite side of Mosasa’s skull. Almost as if a pair of burning hands had cradled Mosasa’s face.

  Worst was his mouth. His mouth was locked in an expression caught midway between surprise and agony. The teeth were charred black, and the dark hole beyond emitted a fetid stench that mixed ozone, burnt synthetics, and roasting flesh.

  Parvi shook her head.

  He’s gone...

  How? How could this AI, this grand manipulator, this spider sitting in the center of an infinite web—how could he die? How could he let himself be destroyed?

  “How?” Parvi stumbled back out of Mosasa’s cabin. She was more alone now than she had been in the Caliphate’s isolation cell.

  She ran.

  * * * *

  Parvi ran through the empty corridors of the Prophet’s Voice, trying to understand what was happening. The corridors were empty, and the comm kiosks were dark—not that she was going to try to use the Voice’s communication network. She only had a rudimentary battlefield knowledge of Arabic; she could understand words like “explosive,” “restricted,” and “no entry.” If she had to, she might be able to pilot something, as long as the design was familiar.

  Navigating a computer system with Arabic menus was beyond her. Not to mention it would give her position away.

  But her position shouldn’t be a secret to anyone. She had left one corpse in her wake, and these corridors should all have several levels of redundant sensors, not just for security, but for systems monitoring and simple maintenance.

  Why hadn’t a security detail mopped her up?

  Fifteen minutes after escaping from her cell, she had the first part of her answer.

  She was edging past a series of storerooms, the corridor lights flashed, and all the comm units in her sight came alive with the same transmission. A holo appeared, showing a handsomely sculpted man from the shoulders up. The face was severe, clean shaven, European. The man’s eyes were black, a black so deep that she thought it was a flaw in the holo.

  The man spoke in Arabic, a voice rich, deep, and commanding. The voice echoed though the corridors, resonated through the walls—as if every speaker on every console in the entire ship was tuned to his broadcast.

  The man spoke again, this time in a language she knew well, English. “The time for your decision is nearly at hand. I have been generous. You have had twenty-two hours to consider your commitment to the flesh. Two hours remain. Come to me and join those who hav
e taken the step into the next world. Reject me, and face the way of all flesh.”

  The message repeated in Persian and Punjabi.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Parvi whispered. “Who is that?”

  One thing seemed clear. The guy with the ultimatum was not in the Caliphate chain of command. And as much she was an enemy of the Caliphate, she wasn’t entirely sure that this guy’s message was a good thing.

  Any time someone said, “join me or else,” it was a bad sign.

  The holo faded and the wall-mounted comm units became dark again. Parvi decided to examine one of the kiosks. Now it seemed evident that the people running this ship had priorities other than trying to find her.

  For one thing, their network was dead.

  Parvi tried everything she could think of, up to and including kicking the machine, to get something other than a dead holo projector. Nothing. Whoever was running the broadcast had shut down the Voice’s communication systems.

  She stared at the blank screen, thinking of Mosasa’s charred face, wondering where the others were—Bill, Tsoravitch, Wahid. She should try to find them—

  “Don’t move!” a voice called out to her, an Arabic phrase she happened to know.

  Damn it! She closed her hands into fists. Her escape was over, and she hadn’t managed to do a damn thing to harass the enemy other than kill some poor woman who was probably part of the janitorial staff.

  The voice jabbered on quickly in Arabic she couldn’t follow.

  When she didn’t respond, she felt a hand on her shoulder spinning her around to face a kid barely out of his teens, wearing overalls like the woman that had opened her cell. He pointed the mouth of a wide-bore plasma cannon in her direction.

  Oh, Sonny, you don’t want to shoot that thing where you’re pointing. That kind of weapon could clean out a corridor for nearly twenty meters, but you didn’t want to point it at a wall, unless bathing in thousand-K-degree plasma backwash was your idea of fun. Parvi held her hands up, afraid that the kid was twitchy or suicidal enough to actually fire that thing at her.

  The kid shouted Arabic at her, in the universal human impulse to break linguistic barriers through sheer volume.

  “English?” Parvi whispered.

  The kid looked befuddled for a moment, then said, “Who are you? Are you with Him?”

  “Him?” Parvi floundered a moment until she realized he must mean the guy on the holo. “No. I’m Vijayanagara Parvi, captain of the Eclipse.”

  “You are not with the Devil?”

  The Devil? Something in the kid’s eyes made her think he wasn’t being metaphorical. “No, I work—worked for Tjaele Mosasa.” Strangely enough, until she had found Mosasa’s body, she would have thought the two synonymous.

  She watched the kid as he looked over the remnants of her uniform, the one bloodstained arm, the name stitched above her breast, the BMU patches.

  “You fly a tach-ship?”

  “I told you, I am captain of theEclipse.” Was, she thought. I was captain.

  He grabbed her arm and pushed her ahead of him down the corridor. “You come with me.”

  * * * *

  The kid with the plasma cannon led her through the strangely empty corridors of theVoice. As they moved, she began to smell something in the air. A hint of smoke the recyclers couldn’t quite scrub out. As they moved down through levels, she caught a word painted on a bulkhead wall that she recognized: “docking.”

  Docking what, she couldn’t read. However, they passed by two massive blast doors, sealing access to something, blinking red warnings, and bearing huge Arabic letters in scare orange that Parvi didn’t really need to able to read. Only two types of shipboard failures rated that kind of warning, and it didn’t appear that they were close enough to the engines to be concerned about some sort of radiation leak.

  The doors here were more widely spaced, and only to their right side. All the doorways were huge and recessed enough to accommodate the kind of blast doors that they had just passed. The one the kid stopped in front of was barred by a basic pneumatic door that slid aside without any prompting by the kid.

  “Holy shit,” Parvi whispered.

  She had gotten some idea of theVoice’s size, both from the original approach when she got some glimpses of the Caliphate ship, and from the amount of running around that she had been doing. But it hadn’t sunk in. Not until the door opened to show her a hundred-meter-long maintenance bay large enough to accommodate a mid-sized tach-capable dropship.

  Here were some of the missing crew. She saw at least a dozen people, men and women, in the same khaki overalls. Most were crawling over the ship parked in the bay. The dropship was a blocky lifting body that only made the slightest concession for maneuverability in an atmosphere. The skin had been a matte black non-reflective surface meant for a stealthy EM profile, but the surface had been scarred by dozens of fresh wounds. Something close by had exploded, peppering the rear third of the craft with shrapnel and peeling away the top layer of the craft’s skin.

  A trio of overall-clad men converged on the open door. One held a small gamma laser, the other a laser carbine, the third held a wrench about fifteen centimeters longer than Parvi’s forearm. They all shouted questions at the kid. She made out two words. One was “English,” and the other was “pilot.”

  They grabbed her and marched her to a less-crowded corner of the maintenance bay. A tallish, dark-skinned man in BMU fatigues sat waiting for her.

  “Wahid?” she said, as her escorts pushed her down to sit on a crate next to him.

  “I was wondering when they’d dig you up.”

  Their captors didn’t seem to care much about their dialogue. They just took a step back, and the guy with the gamma laser stood guard while the others ran to return to the work going on by the dropship.

  “Dig me up? What the hell’s going on down here?”

  “It ain’t obvious?”

  Parvi glared at him.

  Wahid looked at her and said, “Since Adam took over the ship—”

  “Who’s Adam?”

  Wahid stopped and asked, “Where have you been the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Our Caliphate hosts put me in an interrogation room and promptly forgot about me.”

  “You didn’t see his message, then.”

  “Anything like the one about fifteen minutes ago?”

  “I don’t know. His messages don’t reach here.”

  “His messages don’t—Wahid, you better start from the beginning.”

  * * * *

  Shortly after the Voice took on the survivors of the Eclipse, there had been an attack. Wahid didn’t know who the battle was with, but it was large enough to scramble all the Voice’s spacecraft. Judging from the PA announcements that he could hear from his cell, all hell had broken loose. At the time, Wahid thought the planetary defenses had taken issue with the Voice’s approach.

  Within an hour after the first scramble, and after feeling at least a couple of worrisome impacts through the hull, Wahid heard the first broadcast Adam sent through the ship:

  “I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. I have come to lead you to shed this flesh and become more than what you are. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

  Shortly afterward, Adam gave the crew an ultimatum.

  They had twenty-four hours to join him or “pass the way of all flesh.”

  He had been giving the crew updates every hour or so after that. When Parvi asked about the empty halls, Wahid said most of the crew had gone toward the bridge. Some to join Adam, some to fight—none came back.

  Wahid had been in his cell about twenty hours before a guy with a gamma laser opened the door to his cell and said they needed a pilot.

  * * * *

  “Why do they need a pilot?” Parvi asked, “Doesn’t the Caliphate have enough of those?”

  “Look around.” Wahid waved at the maintenance bay. “These people
are mechanics, support staff. That dropship was the first casualty to limp back here after the shooting started. Its crew was shifted to another ship as soon as they off-loaded. These maint guys were working on it when something, probably another ship limping back from the fight, flew into the neighboring maint bay and exploded. Took out that whole bay and severed the main trunk lines connecting this bay to the rest of the ship. Power, data, life support—all cut. Couldn’t even get the door open.” He pointed to the belly of the dropship, where a rat’s nest of cables dropped out of open panels of the ship and spread out on the floor to disappear into other access panels. “These guys managed to connect the systems in this bay to the dropship. The damage was mainly on the hull. The other onboard systems were intact enough to restore the functions of this bay, and open it back up.”