[Apotheosis 03] Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  It tried to remove its hand, but it was trapped inside her body, and it began to scream as the sensation in its claws and fingers were gradually lost.

  She spoke to it, without turning around. “You are evil,” she said quietly, almost inaudibly beneath the thing’s keening pain and terror.

  The thing that had been Stefan Stavros fell away from Rebecca’s back. She turned to face it. It held a truncated arm accusingly toward her, its twisted muscles throbbing and writhing unnaturally beneath its skin. It stared at her with a single cloudy eye embedded in a noseless face. Its twisted face was dominated by slavering fanged jaws that probably couldn’t form words even if this thing still understood language.

  She stared at the abomination and said quietly, “You are evil, and you must be destroyed.”

  The stump of the arm that had attacked her began glowing. The cloudy cyclopean eye widened, and it shook its limb as if trying to extinguish a fire. The glow grew, sliding into its body, outlining the veins beneath the skin.

  Before the glow consumed it, it proved her wrong by possessing enough language to croak, “Adam! Help me!”

  Its words remained longer in the air than it did.

  The first sensation Toni II was aware of was a burning in her lungs. She sucked in breath after breath, gasping, as she slowly became aware that she breathed air. Her lungs burned, her joints ached, her mouth was numb, and it felt as if someone had kicked her repeatedly in the stomach, but she was alive, and breathing air.

  It was a few moments before her memory came back fully, and she remembered what they had been running from. She opened her eyes. They burned and watered in the light. Her arms flailed for a handhold to orient herself as the full horror of what had happened sank in.

  No, not her. The reality of it struck her harder than the aftereffects of being exposed to vacuum. Her sister, her other self, had given herself over to the demons to give them the chance to escape. It wasn’t right. Toni was the real one; she was Toni II, a ghost. She was the interloper in this universe. She should have been the one to sacrifice herself.

  And if they blew it now, the guilt would be even worse.

  Her hand found the edge of a supply cabinet, and she grabbed it as if it was a lifeline. Holding onto it, she looked around for Mallory.

  He floated only a meter away from her in the air lock, his face a mass of blood and bruises.

  Fuck.

  She grabbed his shoulder with her free hand and pulled him over. His nose and mouth were clogged with blood that had nowhere to go in zero-gee. She opened his mouth and shoved her fingers in to dislodge a gory mass of half-frozen blood. He was still unresponsive, and she released her anchor so her other hand could support the back of his head as she bent over him to provide rudimentary rescue breathing as she racked her brain for the medic training on zero-gee chest compressions.

  To her relief, that wasn’t necessary. She only gave him five breaths and he started coughing into her mouth. She let him go and spit out a mouthful of Mallory’s blood.

  He gasped and wheezed and said, “Made it?”

  “Yes, and we need to get out of here and to the Daedalus. If it’s still here.”

  He nodded and said something about getting spacesuits next time. He fumbled for the air lock door with bruised and swollen fingers. Toni II stared at the door, realizing how mundane it looked. Utterly ordinary—while on the opposite side of the Wisconsin things had become Hell itself.

  How close is Stefan to us now?

  The air lock slid open, and someone waited for them on the other side. A woman blocked their path, upside down in relation to them, unbound red hair fanning out around her head. The woman was smaller than Toni II, pale, freckled ; a complete stranger to her.

  Not, apparently, to Mallory.

  “Tsoravitch?” Something in Mallory’s voice made this woman’s appearance seem suddenly ominous.

  “Sergeant Fitzpatrick,” she said. “Or should I call you Father Mallory?”

  Sergeant Fitzpatrick? Who the hell is Sergeant Fitzpatrick ?

  The woman turned and looked at Toni II, “You must be one of the Toni Valentines.” She smiled and said, “Don’t worry about your sister, we got to her in time.”

  The statement brought relief and apprehension in equal measure.

  Mallory’s voice sounded shaky. “The Voice picked you up with everyone else who stayed on the Eclipse. How did you escape Adam?”

  “I didn’t,” Tsoravitch responded.

  Toni II stared at her. “You didn’t?”

  Tsoravitch kicked lightly against a wall to cleanly rotate herself so that her vertical orientation matched theirs. “I was one of Adam’s chosen. When he gave me his choice, I took it.”

  Mallory shook his head. “It’s over now, then. You know I won’t join him.”

  “I said was.” Her voice lowered and her expression became grim. “You wounded him worse than any physical attack. You hit him in his most vulnerable point, his self-image as a God. Were he here now, there’d be no talk of conversions. He has condemned this entire system and everyone in it.”

  “I know,” Mallory said. “I knew it when he attacked without giving his ultimatum.”

  “Not everyone,” Toni II said, “he did something to Stefan, if the thing wrecking the station is Stefan.”

  “It probably amused him to send one of your former allies to destroy you.” Tsoravitch shook her head. “I have seen Adam up close for far too long, and his personality is far from divine. He is angry, vain, arrogant, vindictive, petty, narcissistic ... and he is not quite sane.”

  “If you aren’t one of Adam’s chosen,” Mallory asked, “what are you?”

  “Proteus.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Infidels

  “Never assume another’s beliefs are irrelevant to your own.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The religion of one seems madness unto another.”

  —THOMAS BROWNE

  (1605-1682)

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

  The tunnels under the Diderot Mountains were interminable. With every branch, Kugara was reminded that she had wanted Flynn with them because Tetsami was the only one they had with direct experience with these passages. The four of them moved slowly through the underground, their only light coming from a cheap flashlight from the same emergency kit she had used in her doomed attempt to patch up Flynn.

  They followed Nickolai, because he had the best vision, even if the black Protean eyes gave his face an empty skull-like appearance. He saw much deeper into the caverns than the flashlight reached, and warned them away from drops and dead ends.

  And, occasionally, he would direct Dörner and Brody’s attention to some part of a cave wall. Kugara would see nothing, but more often than not the two chatted about Dolbrian carvings and wished aloud for Dr. Pak, the linguist.

  Either they were going in the right direction, or the remains of the Dolbrians were particularly thick on the ground down here. She bet on the latter.

  She had been pushing them forward ever since Wilson, focused on the reason they came here, but now that they had escaped all the intermediate obstacles, it sank into her exactly how hopeless their job here was. They didn’t even have a clear idea of what it was that they were looking for, or where.

  She didn’t like the ugly thought that she hadn’t considered the end of their little mission before now because she had expected them to die long before they had reached this point. It was as if the universe was using their own survival to mock them.

  Dr. Brody seemed oblivious to the fact that they were on a Snark hunt, when he called over, “Can you bring the light closer over here?”

  Kugara obliged, walking closer to the edge of the passage by Brody and Dörner. The two scientists stared at the wall, and as Kugara brought the light closer, she could see the odd script that she was already sick of—complex interpenetrating lines looping around and through themselves to form rep
eating triangular patterns.

  Dolbrian graffiti, as far as Kugara was concerned. It was unlikely that any random chicken scratches would make a bit of difference.

  “No,” Dörner said, “This is wrong.”

  “What’s wrong?” Kugara asked.

  “This writing is supposed to be a hundred million years old,” Dörner said. “But I can see tool marks and scratches that should have worn away a long time ago. This is much more recent.”

  From the darkness, Nickolai said, “Perhaps there are still Dolbrians down here.”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Dörner said, “A hundred million years is too long for—”

  “Listen,” Nickolai hissed.

  The chamber fell silent.

  At first, all Kugara heard was their own breathing. Then, slowly, she became aware of something else. A soft, rhythmic, clicking noise that was vaguely familiar.

  It was the same sound Nickolai made when he walked barefoot through the caverns with them. The sound of claws on stone, and it was coming from a lot more than two feet, from more than one direction.

  “Where?” Kugara whispered, stepping in front of Brody and Dörner.

  “Everywhere,” Nickolai whispered in return. His muscular back emerged from the shadows, coming toward her. He moved like a spirit, his black stripes almost a part of the darkness beyond. He had removed two more guns from the chain wrapped across his torso.

  Kugara’s stomach tightened as she heard growling animal sounds emerge from the caverns around them. What kind of monstrosity could evolve down here after a hundred million years? The noise seemed to come from everywhere at once, filling the darkness around them.

  “What’s out there?” she whispered.

  Then, all at once, a blinding light emerged from the darkness, from at least three sources, pinning their shadows against the wall behind them. She squinted against the light, briefly unable to reconcile the animal grumbling and the scrape of claws with the floodlights washing over them.

  Then she realized Nickolai growled back.

  Brody muttered something behind her that sounded like, “Of course.”

  A figure emerged from the shadows, a human figure. He wore a long robe of undyed linen, and had long blond hair and an untrimmed beard that came halfway down his chest. In contrast to his hermitlike appearance, he carried a sleek EM rifle that was the grown-up cousin of the little needle-gun she had left on Salmagundi. His rifle probably had a similar rate of fire, and could pump out flechettes at twenty thousand rounds a second. The main difference was that it could do so a lot longer, with ammo that massed four times as much—almost as destructive as a plasma cannon.

  Kugara stared at the new arrival as she whispered to Brody, “ ‘Of course,’ what?”

  The robed man looked them all over and said, in a somewhat hoarse voice, “I am Brother Simon, and I welcome you to the caverns of the Ancients.” He hefted his rifle. “But I must ask you to surrender your weapons, out of respect.”

  Nickolai growled something, and to Kugara’s surprise, Simon growled back.

  Behind her, Brody whispered, “The Dolbrian cult, that’s what.”

  Nickolai walked up to Simon and started handing the man his guns. Kugara watched, nonplussed, as the weapons passed from Nickolai to Simon, and Simon passed them to someone out of sight behind the spotlights’ glare. When he stepped back, he turned and looked down at Kugara. When she hesitated about disarming herself, he told her, “Beyond the lights are twenty heavily-armed monks. Let them have the gun.”

  Kugara nodded, noting that Nickolai still kept the chain wrapped around his torso.

  She walked up and handed her gun to Simon. He smiled. “Thank you.” He handed it off, and Kugara saw the hand that received it: furry, brown, and half again as large as Nickolai’s.

  Simon slung the rifle across his shoulder and said, “Welcome, friends. It has been a long time since we’ve properly received any pilgrims. Come with us and receive our hospitality.”

  As cheerful as Simon sounded, it was obviously not a request.

  Once they were Simon’s “guests” and the lights no longer shone in her eyes, Kugara could see the monks that Nickolai had mentioned. Only Simon was human. The rest of them were all nonhuman denizens of the Fifteen Worlds, descendants of the same period of history that gave rise to Nickolai’s ancestors, and hers.

  None were quite Nickolai’s kin. There were at least three felines, with fur ranging from spotted to jet black, but all were smaller than Nickolai, with narrower faces and finer bone structure. There were shaggy gray-and-brown canines, and a couple of small sleek forms that weren’t close enough for her to put a name to, and, most intimidating, an ursine that stood half a head taller than Nickolai, massed probably thirty percent more, and had to spend most of his time hunched over so badly she thought he might be more comfortable on all fours.

  She had been trained by Dakota Planetary Security how to handle most of the races of the Fifteen Worlds in hand-to-hand combat. She was good enough that she knew that she could beat Nickolai in a fight, maybe not a fair fight, but if you ended up grappling with a four-hundred-kilo tiger, “fair” shouldn’t be a top concern.

  The ursine—even in the confined tunnel—that she’d run from.

  Looking at their nonhuman escorts, she began to wonder if Simon might have the same Dakota ancestry as she did. She wondered what she felt about that. More, she wondered how Nickolai felt. He had been living with the “Fallen” for so long, she wondered what it meant to him to be among God’s chosen people again. He didn’t give her any signs of what he was thinking. He followed their hosts, watching them with his expressionless black eyes.

  She did notice that the group herding them cast occasional uncomfortable glances at Nickolai. She didn’t know if that was due to caution on their host’s part, or something else.

  She walked to the rear, placing the two scientists safely between her and Nickolai, not that they had any real chance to protect them if things should turn ugly. There were just too many well-armed opponents too close.

  As they walked down natural corridors, deeper into the mountains, she whispered to Brody, “What do you know about these people?”

  “Dolbrian worship has been around for centuries, ever since the first artifacts were discovered. But it wasn’t organized until the fall of the Confederacy. The Fifteen Worlds—the Seven Worlds then—brokered a defense pact with Bakunin; the protection of their sovereignty against the other arms of the Confederacy, in return for the largest Dolbrian site ever discovered. The belief system found a center here, and among the populace of the Fifteen Worlds, it found ready converts—and the nature of the Fifteen Worlds meant that any citizen coming to Bakunin for the sake of a permanent presence here was probably one of those converts. Few others would willingly dwell on a human world.”

  Brody went on, at length. Many of the details were lost on Kugara, but she understood that they were, in some sense, treading on the soil of the Fifteen Worlds, and for a century or so, this nonhuman monastery had been the only official State presence on Bakunin, and could probably be considered a theocratic city-state, like a smaller cousin to Vatican City.

  Bakunin’s founders were most likely spinning in their graves so fast that they reached relativistic speeds, shrank inside their own event horizon, and disappeared into another universe.

  Kugara could see the attraction to this faith, though, especially after seeing firsthand the kind of mental violence Nickolai had done to himself because his belief that mankind—in some sense his creator—was, in fact, damned for hubris. Wouldn’t it be more comforting to place everyone on the same plane, having mankind be just another creature engineered by some ancient race? These guys also had an advantage over St. Rajasthan’s followers, and most other religions Kugara could think of; they had evidence of the existence of their god lying all over the place.

  More of the Dolbrian carvings covered the walls, but it was clearly of more recent vintage. Brody commented that h
e suspected it was either a sign of the monks’ devotion, or a decoy to lead any unwanted treasure hunters astray.

  Like us, you mean?

  She wasn’t expecting it when they reached the monastery itself. They walked through a cavern mouth, and suddenly, there it was: a massive cavern, large enough to park the Daedalus three times over within it. Across the vast space, a tiered wall faced them, covered with bas-relief carvings, arches, and fluted columns. It was almost a cathedral carved out of the stone itself. Below the wall, an amphitheater had been carved into the cave floor, with arcs of stone seats stepping down to a central podium.

  They were taken past all that, through one of the many archways in the cathedral wall, down a few dark passages, to end up in a large room with a heavy door. Simon told them to wait inside, then he shut the door behind them.

  Kugara turned to try the door, but on this side there wasn’t a handle, or any other obvious way to open it. She pushed against the brushed metal surface, but it didn’t budge. She shook her head and muttered, “Now what?”

  Brody walked over and sat down in one of several overstuffed chairs that filled the room. He groaned and rubbed his cast with his good arm. “I think we should be thankful no one is shooting at us for the moment.”

  Kugara spun around, about to say something sharp, but she saw the exhaustion in his face and held her tongue. He and Dörner weren’t soldiers, they were academics, and between the two of them he seemed to be doing better than she was. Dörner had folded herself into another chair, one built for someone Nickolai’s size, and almost seemed to disappear within it. On the Eclipse, Kugara remembered her as being cold, assertive, confident and—most of all—in control of herself.

  This Dörner stared into the middle distance through threads of stringy blonde hair, and her steely blue eyes now seemed to speak not so much of cold reserve, but of a thin sheet of ice that could fracture at any moment, releasing the dangerous rapids contained beneath.