[Apotheosis 03] Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Okay,” Kugara said, “That was our gun. We don’t get a second chance at this.”

  Nickolai edged up to the road, pressing his body to the ravine wall and peering through the undergrowth. “They’re still coming.” He could hear the engines now, only a couple of kilometers away. “Get into position, we’ll only have a few seconds.”

  The others joined him at the edge of the road as he heard the massive machine’s gears shift and the brakes engage for the upcoming turn. Just as the first wheel passed their position, he heard the brakes lock and the wheels scream as the truck and its thirty meters of cargo tried to stop and avoid the sudden obstacle.

  The last tire passed their position, and the cab was already around the turn. Nickolai jumped out onto the road, followed by the others. At this point, with the whole truck in danger of fishtailing off the road, the driver was not going to be paying attention to any rear-facing cameras.

  Nickolai ran after the trailer, which was still screeching to a stop, the tires burning a reeking trail of scorched synthetics. He vaulted onto the back, grabbing and tearing free a corner of the tarp. The others were behind him, running, and he reached down and scooped up Brody by the good arm and tossed him under the tarp. Dörner jumped up on her own, and Kugara practically threw Tetsami/Flynn after Brody. He reached down for Kugara, and she climbed his arm as if it was a ladder.

  Everything shuddered to a stop.

  Everyone froze in position on the back of the bed. Nickolai held his breath and flexed his claws, anticipating discovery.

  Instead, the engine revved, and the truck started backing up. After backing ten meters or so, it began to move forward again, very slowly. As it rounded the curve, Nickolai saw the marks it had left in the pavement, leaving the road to avoid their sinkhole and chewing up five meters of ruts on the opposite side.

  Once around the turn, the driver accelerated back to speed, and Nickolai dropped the tarp over himself and the others.

  Kugara whispered in the darkness, “Okay, that worked, but we still lost our gun.”

  After a few more minutes, they rolled to a stop again. Nickolai crouched at the end of the truck bed, under the tarp, holding taut a heavy length of chain that had been one of four that had been securing one of the rear anchor points of the truck’s cargo.

  The machine was massive enough that the others had been able to move back and hide within a large recess between a pair of massive tanks. Nickolai stood guard at the rear, the chain their only real weapon. He crouched in the darkness and waited, as the truck sat idling.

  For what it was worth, he prayed.

  Light leaked into the world under the tarp, but not from his end. He turned his head, keeping the rest of his body still, silent, and ready to pounce.

  Someone had lifted the tarp up near the cab. He heard someone talking to the driver. “Glad those Proudhon assholes finally let you out of Godwin.”

  “Yeah, how it works, ain’t it? First comes an army, then the goddamn forms.”

  “Taxes will be next.”

  “Don’t I know it, but whatcha going to do?”

  This was Bakunin ... wasn’t it? Nickolai had no love for the lawless order that he had lived in during the years of his exile. The anarchy seemed fitting, the epitome of the Fallen themselves. But these men were talking in terms that would have been inconceivable to any Bakunin native a year ago. Not just the existence of a de facto State, but the fatalistic acceptance of it.

  Could Mosasa’s absence be so critical?

  A man leaned his head in under the tarp, shining a light against the side of the machine. Nickolai froze, crouched in deep shadow. The man read off a long serial number aloud. Then he said, “Good. Our fabrication building has been running at two-thirds capacity ever since the old primary power plant decided to melt its core all over the place.”

  “You lucked out, this was the last terawatt reactor left in Godwin.”

  The tarp dropped. “And to hear management bitch, it was priced like the last one on the planet.”

  “Where’s it go?”

  “Follow the signs for the auxiliary fabrication building. There’s a lot marked out for you. We’ll get you unloaded within the hour.”

  The truck started up and slowly rolled forward. Nickolai whispered to the others, “I’ll take the lead, get ready to follow.”

  He wrapped the chain tightly around his forearm, so he could carry it quietly, and crouched down so he could peer out from under the tarp while disturbing it as little as possible.

  The truck weaved between buildings and drew to a stop near the center of the complex. When it stopped, Nickolai whispered, “This way.”

  They had pulled up next to one of the buildings, with little more than a meter to spare. It gave as good cover for them as he could hope for. The five of them slipped off of the truck, Nickolai in the lead, Kugara taking up the rear and landing with a sharp intake of breath. His muzzle wrinkled when he caught the scent of her wound. It needed attention.

  Later, he promised himself.

  He looked along the wall, and neither direction seemed promising. There was no access into the building along the length of the truck, and past the ends of the truck, no sign of cover.

  “Down here,” Flynn/Tetsami whispered. He looked down and saw him crouching to look under the bed of the truck. Nicolai looked underneath. A large grate was set in the pavement underneath the truck, part of a storm drain.

  “You think we can slip out that?” he asked Nickolai.

  The grate itself was big enough to accommodate a human, though Nickolai would find it a squeeze. He shifted through spectra until he could see a large volume of air passing through. “It’s big enough—for most of us.”

  “Okay,” Kugara said, “I’ll get it open, you guard our rear.”

  He approved. So if I get stuck, I don’t block our escape.

  Kugara slid down on her belly and crawled under the trailer. After about a minute of quiet grunting, she had managed to slide the grate off the drain with only a slight scraping noise. She dropped down and waved the others after. Flynn went, then Dörner, and at last Brody who needed assistance with his arm in a cast.

  Nickolai had just lowered Brody down the hole when the truck’s engine started up. Below, he heard Kugara call up, “Move it!”

  He was in trouble. He could hear gears shifting already, and there was no way he’d be able to squeeze down there in time. In the moment he had left, he pulled the grate back over the hole with no pretense of stealth. The clang of the heavy grate dropping home was mostly covered by the truck’s engine. So was the sound of Kugara cursing him and asking what the hell he was doing.

  The trailer was already rolling.

  Nickolai reached up and grabbed an axle housing as it passed over him. He felt fur torn from his backside as he was dragged over the grate. He was dragged another ten meters before he kicked his legs up and pulled himself into the trailer’s underside.

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  Dörner’s sudden panic caught Kugara off guard, and she had to step forward, wincing on her wounded foot, and pull her off of the ladder to the surface. As she did, the truck’s shadow moved away from the grate and blue sky shone down on them.

  “What is he—” Kugara clamped a hand across the blonde scientist’s mouth and gave her a stern glare. Save us all from civilians in a combat situation.

  It should have been just her and Nickolai. They were trained for this sort of thing. She was more worried about Dörner and Brody than she was about Nickolai. The tiger could take care of himself.

  And judging from the lack of any commotion above, he hadn’t been spotted.

  Kugara slowly released Dörner. The woman was shaking. Very quietly, Kugara whispered, “Get a grip on yourself. Now.”

  Dörner shook her head. “We’re trapped. What do we do now?”

  Kugara hadn’t reached that point yet. They needed to get to the subway, with or without Nickolai.

  Preferably with.r />
  Next to her, Flynn whispered, “Can you get me to a comm console?”

  “I don’t know where this goes,” she whispered back. In both directions the storm drain led into inky darkness.

  “Left goes deeper into the complex,” Brody said. There was a stressed edge to his whisper, but he seemed more together than Dörner.

  “Okay. Flynn leads, I’ll take up the rear.”

  Dörner still shook, and Kugara squeezed her shoulder, “You can do this.” And I’ll be behind you pushing your butt down the tunnel.

  It seemed an eternity without light, crawling on hands and knees through the slime, listening to Dörner’s ragged breathing in front of her.

  The air was cold, and stank so bad of mildew and stagnant water that she could swear she felt algae growing in her sinuses. At least crawling kept the weight off her foot; she did her best to keep the wound out of the accumulated muck running along the base of the drainpipe.

  Right before they stopped, the tunnel had lightened enough that she could see the silhouette of Dörner’s bony ass in front of her. Flynn whispered back, “Another grate ahead. I think it’s in a building.”

  One by one, they all crawled into another catch basin beneath a meter-diameter grate.

  Flynn was right, at least insofar as she didn’t see sky above them, but the underside of a metal roof about twenty meters above them.

  “Okay,” she whispered, “all of you back into the drainpipe, just in case.”

  She braced for some objection from Dörner, but it seemed as if her momentary panic had passed. When Kugara was alone in the catch basin, she climbed the ladder up to just beneath the grate. She did her best to survey the area from her low angle, but the best she could manage was the determination that she was looking up into some sort of motor pool. She saw a couple of vehicles, and one wall of the building seemed open to the outside.

  Tactically, it was a bad way to enter a situation. A hostile could be crouching just three meters away from her hole ready to attack anything coming out. But the hostiles here had no idea they were here.

  Yet.

  She braced her good foot on the ladder and hooked her hand into the grate and slowly pushed up until there was enough clearance for her to look around at ground level. It was a garage. She saw several wheeled and tracked vehicles, even a couple of contragravs. Near the rear, a half wall sectioned off a mechanic’s workshop where two partly disassembled aircars were parked.

  The area was clear of anyone at the moment, and Kugara slid the grate aside as quietly as she could manage. “Come up,” she whispered down to the others, then she scrambled out of the hole and crouched between two parked vehicles.

  As the others crawled up out of the drain, Kugara split her time looking out the main entrance, hanging open to the rest of the complex, and the workshop at the opposite side of the garage.

  As Flynn came up next to her, she asked, “What can you do at a comm console?”

  “If I can jack into their network I can map out where we’re going, and probably disable their security.”

  “Can you do it without giving us away? Our only advantage is the fact they don’t know we’re here.”

  “I think—”

  Flynn’s answer was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice. “What the fuck do we have here? Don’t move!”

  Kugara was so hyped that the thought of actually surrendering peacefully didn’t cross her mind until her wounded foot was connecting with the man’s throat. The guy was in greasy overalls, and had been in the process of unholstering a weapon as he spoke. Her foot was slamming him into the side of a blocky contragrav van before he got it out.

  Even as the man started his stunned slide to the ground, Kugara saw a trio of other guys turning to face the commotion. They had been playing cards at a table that, as luck would have it, was set just out of sight of the storm drain. Two guys were grabbing weapons, and the third ran for the open doorway.

  “Shit!” she muttered as she dove back between vehicles.

  A gunshot thudded a hole through the skin of the contragrav next to her.

  The first guy coughed and groaned, holding his neck. Kugara grabbed the gun from his holster. Then she cursed. The damn thing was more for show than anything else, a high-caliber slugthrower almost as long as her forearm. Yes, a .50 caliber round could put down just about anyone, and punch a hole in anything short of mil-spec powered armor. But it was a revolver and she’d only be able to do it seven times.

  Not to mention the kick on the thing would make grouping multiple shots a bear even with her strength.

  “Well, they know we’re here now!” Flynn or Tetsami yelled across at her as another shot echoed through the garage.

  “If you can do something,” Kugara yelled back, “Do it now!” More gunshots, and Kugara popped up around the side of a grounded aircar and fired one shot at the two guys firing. The sound of the hand cannon firing shook the ferrocrete floor and the muzzle flash almost reached the groundcar next to the shooters. In response the two guys dropped for cover.

  The guy running reached the front of the garage and slammed a big red button mounted on the wall. A button Kugara really didn’t want pressed.

  Klaxons started cutting through the air.

  She ducked behind her aircar as return fire took out its windshield. “Flynn? Tetsami?” She glanced around and only saw the two scientists cowering back by the storm drain. She waved at them. “Back down, take cover.”

  She could at least keep them from being shot.

  More shots, and the contragrav van sprouted more holes. She popped back out for another cannon shot to keep the other two pinned.

  Four shots left. This will not end well.

  “Flynn? Tetsami?” She looked around and saw Brody evacuating back down the sewer after Dörner. Did Flynn have the sense to duck down there first?

  Then she heard the whine of the contragrav starting up.

  PART EIGHT

  Apocalypse

  “Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience . . . Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will.”

  —JOHN, LORD ACTON (1834-1902)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Blasphemy

  “Ideals may create a revolution, but base human motivation recruits its foot-soldiers.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Take mankind in general; they are vicious, their passions may be operated upon.”

  —ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  (1757-1804)

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 7.2 AU from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The Prophet’s Voice tached into existence in Bakunin’s outer solar system. It appeared just as Adam’s incarnations had already done dozens of times in other systems. Even if this particular copy of Him had only seen the direct conversion of three planets, other Adams in other ships had transmitted their own victories to Him. Through the lag of tach-space, their experiences became His own, and His became theirs.

  Despite being distributed across light-years, Adam was one.

  There was no question left of His ultimate victory, and He appeared before the glowing red pinprick of Kropotkin as if it was only a formality. The planet that his hated brother Mosasa had called home now bore no special characteristics, nothing to distinguish it from anywhere else Adam had brought His salvation. Even its chaotic political system had coalesced into a somewhat pedestrian State without his brother’s constant intervention.

  But He still had been forced to come here earlier than anticipated.

  Even before He looked out upon the latest realm to receive His Glory, that fact drew His attention more than it deserved, a small canker on an otherwise perfect body. It shouldn’t have concerned Him. It was not a flaw in His vision, simply a side effect of His servant’s failure. The transmission from Khamsin should never have been allowed.

  And those responsible should be punished...

  But that was for later. Now He prepared to bring
another world to Paradise. He opened Himself to His presence here.

  And He felt only the void.

  His cloud should be here, waiting for him, a diffuse mass great enough to envelop a planet within His embrace. But of His works, He felt no sign. He probed along frequencies known only to His chosen, and with the interminable hours of lag from light-speed communication, His agents on the planet itself responded to Him. They told Him of the plasma fires that had wiped His essence from the sky.

  For a few brief moments, Adam refused to believe what He was told. Those speaking to Him were fallible tools, infinitely more prone to error then He was. They were wrong. Their observations were flawed.

  But He could sense the still expanding cloud of inert dust, moving at improbable velocities away from where the Prophet’s Voice floated in dead space.

  And as denial faded, rage consumed Him.

  His was the mission to save all life from entropy, death, extinction. Such an act, such defiance, it was a blow to existence itself. It was the ultimate definition of evil.

  And Adam would crush all such evil before Him.

  Adam’s actions over the past twelve hours had taken Rebecca by surprise. For her, it had been just over three days since she had seen the Earth collapse under Adam’s hand, since she had decided that her continued existence was not worth allowing Adam to go unchallenged, since she had found Jonah Dacham. It was barely enough time to earn his trust.

  The man she had taken from beneath the Vatican was not just a man. He was an agent of Proteus, of the colony that had made a last dramatic stand against Adam’s invasion of Earth. He was, in some sense, the father of the Protean colony that had hidden under the Martian surface. Nearly two centuries ago, he had shepherded the last Protean egg from the destroyed colony on Bakunin, and had taken it to Mars, where it grew into a new crystalline city duplicating the old.