Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  As the Xanadu drifted toward the darkness, Stefan stared into the gaping maw of the Abyss.

  He could feel it staring back.

  The blackness expanded in front of him, hiding the stars and consuming wreckage until the view out the display was completely blank. He braced himself for an impact that never came, even as all the telemetry data of the frozen controls stopped reading any velocity or direction at all. According to the ship’s sensors, the Xanadu had stopped moving.

  It was as if, outside the hull, the universe had ceased to exist.

  The interior lights went red, and a small insistent beep started warning him of the exterior air lock door opening. He pulled his gamma laser out and turned the pilot’s chair around so he could face the air lock. The door was directly to the rear of the crew cabin, between the two access ways that led aft and down to the two small cabins that were all the living space on the Xanadu.

  The air lock door was an oval of polished brass etched with delicately ornate scrollwork, the only view inside through a porthole modeled after an ancient sea vessel. Because of the tiny size of the window relative to the door, and the slight tilt downward, Stefan could only see vague shadowy movement inside the air lock itself.

  The red light in the cabin began flashing, and the electronic warning beep became a screaming alarm as the elaborate latches holding the air lock door shut began to unscrew themselves.

  Stefan’s eyes widened and he glanced at the console. According to the display, the outer door was still open. The interlock had failed or had been overridden. When the air lock door opened, it would expose the cabin to vacuum.

  Stefan started hyperventilating, trying to suck in enough oxygen to survive until he got the door shut again. He pushed himself up out of the chair to float toward the air lock, just as the door opened.

  He grabbed a tooled leather strap to anchor himself against an expected outrush of air. But the air remained impossibly still as the brass entrance of the air lock folded up into the ceiling on well-oiled hinges.

  His visitor stood flat on the antique carpet of the air lock as if the Xanadu had its own gravity. Surreally, the man was naked, wearing not so much as a belt. Stefan stared, disbelieving his own eyes showing the open outer door of the air lock. Beyond the naked man, the darkness writhed, throwing whips and eddies of itself into the air lock, but not past his visitor.

  The man’s nakedness did not project vulnerability. Instead, the man’s pupilless eyes bored into Stefan projecting arrogance and an unspeakable power.

  When the apparition spoke, Stefan’s bowels turned to water.

  “You have sinned against Me.” The voice came from a too-human throat, but the words resonated through the hull of the Xanadu as if the darkness itself spoke.

  “No, no, I haven’t,” Stefan said, shaking his head and crying. He lost his grip on the laser, and it floated between them, ignored.

  “I have offered My hand, and you have raised your hand against Me.”

  The words were like blows, and Stefan curled himself into a ball, shaking his head and saying, “No, no. It was them, not me. I wanted no part of this fight.”

  “Yet here you stand in the midst of this evil.”

  The man was not a man. Stefan knew he faced Adam, Mallory’s Antichrist. And, joined with the terror that racked him, Stefan felt an explosive kernel of impotent hate for the priest that cast him here, alone.

  Adam walked from the air lock, ignoring the absence of gravity as he strode to where Stefan floated. Adam reached out and touched Stefan’s face. It felt nothing like the hand of God or the Devil. It felt human as Adam raised Stefan’s chin so he faced him.

  “So here you are. Do you have any reason why I should not send you the way of all flesh?”

  Stefan looked into Adam’s face and blurted, “I’ll kill the priest for you.”

  Adam stopped moving, and Stefan caught something like surprise in his expression, in the hesitation.

  “I know where he is,” he said. “I can take this ship, find him. He’s caused all this. You must want him to suffer—”

  Adam’s grip tightened just enough so Stefan stopped talking. “Do you presume to know the mind of God? You are an insect, less than nothing. Obscurity headed for oblivion. What can you give Me that I will not take for Myself?”

  “He expects you to kill him,” Stefan said.

  “So I will.”

  “But if I do it, it will hurt him more.”

  Adam stared at him, the surprise now deeply etched in the otherwise perfectly sculpted face. His grip loosened on Stefan.

  “Let me,” Stefan said. “Let me rob that man of his destiny. Let him die not in the glory he seeks, but at the hands of someone he chose to discard. Let my obscurity be his final punishment.”

  Around them, tendrils of darkness floated, curling, probing the walls, slipping into the control systems of the Xanadu. Adam let him go, and Stefan floated, and caught himself against the swirling darkness. The black curled around his legs and arms, sliding inside his jumpsuit. Its touch was cold and light, like the last breath of a corpse.

  “Will you serve Me as your God?” Adam asked.

  “Y-yes!”

  “Then, as you ask, you will become My instrument of vengeance.”

  The darkness poured over Stefan, filling his eyes, nose, and mouth. His fear died in a single explosive burst, and when the smoke cleared, Stefan Stavros was left with only a single glowing coal of hate.

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

  Barely six minutes passed between the time that Mosasa’s revelations convinced Dacham to go ahead with the Proteans’ plan against Adam, and the time Adam lashed out in his rage, taching half of the Voice’s fleet insystem.

  It felt an eternity to her.

  Adam’s attack consisted of the fifty most advanced tach-ships human technology had been able to produce. Each of the fifty ships carried an army, a virtual world, of Adam’s chosen on board, and each one carried an embodiment of Adam himself.

  It was also the starkest demonstration of Adam’s central flaw that Rebecca had yet seen. Adam’s self-image as a God meant that omniscience was an integral part of his identity now. The thing that was Adam literally could not accept an unknown into his universe; it threw the would-be God off-balance, caused more mistakes, and rendered Adam’s own reactions unpredictable.

  The situation on Bakunin caused him to completely break his pattern. Here, he was no longer interested in ultimatums, or conversion. Here, he was only interested in punishing defiance, turning his attention to the world that so defied him.

  And when he launched those ships, he had no idea that defiance was much closer to hand. At the instant the attack ships vanished into tach-space, the only embodiment of Adam for light-years was the eidolon on the bridge of the Voice. The only presence of Adam’s mind was within the thinking matter infecting the Voice. For three and a half seconds, fifty other Adams would be lost in the tach-space between the Voice and their opposition.

  For a people freed from the constraints of the flesh, three and a half seconds could be a long time.

  Mosasa moved first.

  His revelation to Dacham and Rebecca had been what made this possible. She had suspected, on Earth, that Mosasa was not quite as limited to her mind as he had implied. He had confirmed that. His individuality was as distributed as Adam, every convert to Adam’s reign beyond the flesh carried some small fraction of him, less a whole version of Mosasa, than a single cluster of neurons in a vast network, more rarified than even Adam’s chosen. The chosen may live only as thoughts within the pattern of thinking matter that made up Adam’s body; Mosasa’s mind was made of patterns implanted within those thoughts.

  Rebecca’s mind just happened to house the part of Mosasa that had achieved self-awareness again.

  It also meant that, in the confines of the Voice, when Adam was at his weakest, most alone, and most psychologically unstable, he was suddenly confronted with a billion
images of his Nemesis, Mosasa. Mosasa had no effect on the physical world, but he could manifest himself across the breadth of Adam’s chosen, appearing before all of the senses Adam possessed.

  It was enough to completely break Adam’s tenuous grip on sanity. The God attacked his own, striking down millions of his chosen to burn out the image of Mosasa. Mosasa seemed unmoved in the face of the onslaught and pushed himself into the God’s own mind.

  The battle of wills was opaque to Rebecca; she suffered the same limitation as Adam, unable to see within another’s mind. It was a limitation Mosasa did not seem to share. The only thing Rebecca could see of the battle was the spasms of Adam’s identity though the physical matrix that infected the Voice.

  For a moment, it seemed that Mosasa might single-handedly defeat Adam . . . But less than a second after the attack began, she heard an unearthly scream echo through her own head. A scream in Mosasa’s voice.

  Following the scream, she heard Dacham’s voice.

  “Our turn.”

  The Proteans’ plan to attack Adam had been much more insidious than a straightforward military attack, as powerful as the dead Protean colony was.

  Dacham had not been the only agent they had sent to Earth.

  They had sent thousands. All to await Adam’s call. All to accept it.

  All of them had been perfectly human in form, as Dacham had been. And thanks to the Protean attack, and the pope’s broadcast, the possibility that such wolves were in the midst of the human sheep had never occurred to the god Adam.

  So Adam had brought all of them into his bosom. Ten thousand human beings carried the minds of the ancient Protean cult. Ten thousand humans who already had the knowledge of living centuries without a fixed fleshy form.

  Unlike untold billions who found Adam’s transformation paralyzing in its novelty, the Proteans were at home in Adam’s environment. Some had lived within such a state longer than Adam had existed.

  In his rage, first at the defiant Bakunin seven AU away from him, then at the monstrous appearance of Mosasa within his own mind, he paid no attention as the distribution of the minds within the Voice shifted around him. The first few microseconds, the chosen in proximity to him—the ones damaged or erased at his lashing out at Mosasa—were replaced by certain members of the chosen from Earth. In his battle with the phantom Mosasa, Adam did not pay attention as his consciousness flowed like water back toward his embodied self on the bridge of the Voice.

  Adam showed no reaction to the Protean presence, until the body within the Voice began a physical separation. The continuous swarm of nanomachines that filled every space on the Voice—the structure, the wiring, the air itself—had been forcefully split into two groups. Adam’s tenuous, almost autonomous, connection to the body of the ship had been forcefully cut.

  “What is this?” Adam screamed. His voice resonated in the walls of the bridge, but no further. While his fully conscious incarnation realized that he was encapsulated on the bridge of the Voice, hundreds of Protean agents roamed the remaining environment of the Voice finding the semiconscious remnants of Adam’s psyche that had been severed from their conscious direction.

  On the bridge, Adam lashed out at his confinement. The bulkheads twisted, shedding electronic equipment as the metal superstructure began to flow and remake itself. Around Adam, the walls themselves formed into dozens of long segmented arms that tore into the bulkheads, ripping at the invisible barrier, trying to tear free into contact with the greater cloud infecting the Voice.

  Somewhere, seven AUs away, Adam’s tach-ship fleet winked into existence, completely unaware that Adam’s incarnation on the Voice had been trapped.

  The physical structure of the bridge tore itself apart, as if the room was having a psychotic tantrum. Matter threw itself against the walls, piercing the envelope Adam found himself in, but the cloud within the mass of the Voice, now a Protean cloud, withdrew from any physical contact with the matter piercing the bulkheads of the bridge.

  A third cloud formed, a buffer between the bridge and the rest of the ship, a spherical presence invisibly englobing the bridge and Adam’s incarnation. The invisible sphere was made with the minds of a thousand Proteans, a cabal of the first ones. The thousand had lived the longest; they had tread upon the surface of Titan before a terraforming accident consumed all life upon that moon and spawned the ban upon self-replicating nanomachines.

  Each one of the thousand had been human long before a pirate named Mosasa found his derelict spacecraft and participated in Adam’s birth. Each one of the thousand, if not for the Protean creed they had founded, could have become Adam themselves.

  Adam screamed again. “What is this defiance? Who raises their hand against the living God?”

  The bridge was no longer recognizable as a human construct. The mass that had formed the walls, the chairs, the holo displays, the air itself, had all coalesced into glowing streams of coherent matter whipping around, striking at the sphere englobing it. The only thing still recognizable was Adam himself. His body, naked and perfect, floated in the center of a perfect sphere of boiling chaos.

  As Adam railed, the Voice itself fired a series of maneuvering jets, giving it a very slight vector down, away from the bridge. Above the bridge, bulkheads dissolved, leaving a hole large enough for the globe containing Adam to drift out into space.

  The Voice increased its thrust, separating itself from the flickering irregular sphere containing Adam’s wrath. Within, Adam’s fury had begun to consume matter itself, the temperature increasing as the swirling mass became a barely controlled plasma. When Adam cursed them now, it was no longer in a human voice; there was no air for speech, and his human embodiment had begun to burn.

  I shall destroy anyone who defies Me.

  As one, the thousand responded, We know.

  And then there was light.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Holy Ghost

  “If you shoot, shoot to kill.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “We should regard all force with aversion.”

  —WILLIAM GODWIN

  (1756-1836)

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

  “If you can do something,” Kugara yelled. “Do it now!”

  Kugara was barely three meters from them, popping around cover and snapping shots from the biggest handgun Flynn had ever seen.

  “Let me drive,” Flynn called out inside his own head, grabbing Tetsami’s attention as forcefully as possible.

  “Sonny, you remember what happened the last time you did that in a firefight?” Tetsami didn’t even try to subvocalize as they cowered behind an aircar. Alarms began sounding all around them. Tetsami muttered, “Fuck.”

  “Damn it, Gram, do you want to get to a terminal or not?”

  “What are you—” A gunshot blew out a windshield, peppering them with clear polymer fragments.

  “We don’t have the time!” Flynn shouted, reaching the end of the sentence before he realized she had relinquished control back to him.

  He sprang up from his crouch and dove for the contragrav van, putting it between him and the shooters. He heard shots slam into the side of the van, but he made it. He pulled open the cabin door and crawled inside. It took a moment to orient himself from ground level, but before the door swung shut behind him, he started charging the contragrav.

  The whine of the generators was enough to draw more fire. Slugs blew holes in the thin skin of the craft, and the windshield shattered.

  “Where the hell are you going in this thing?”

  “Only thirty meters, Gram.” He maxed out the generators so the bricklike vehicle achieved a negative buoyancy and started rising. Once they had risen ten meters or so, Flynn risked a look up. He figured his head was out of sight from shooters on the ground now.

  Even so, he only popped up long enough to confirm his impression of the motor pool layout. At the rear, opposite the doors to the outside, was a workshop separated from the park
ing area only by a two-meter partition wall. He looked down inside the shop and saw it was unoccupied except for a pair of two-seater aircars. It looked as if someone had been cannibalizing the parts from one to maintain the other.

  What drew Flynn’s eye, past the diagnostic equipment and cabinets of tools, was a rolling cart with a comm unit on it, covered in a protective plastic tarp.

  Good enough.

  He ducked down, goosed the jets to give some forward momentum, and cut the contragrav power by 58%.

  Cut to about a third of its mass below neutral buoyancy, their brick obligingly plunged in a slow-motion parabola to nose into the far wall of the motor pool a bit less than three meters above the ground.

  The impact slammed him into the footwell, but he recovered to jump out the door.

  Inside his head, he heard Gram’s voice shouting the words “Jesus. Fuck.” Over and over again.

  As he rolled across the oil-stained ferrocrete floor, he thought at her, “Get ready to do your thing!”

  He came to a stop under the more gutted of the two aircars.

  Behind him, holes peppered the partition wall, and some energy weapon blew a burning chunk out of it close to where the contragrav van continued its slow descent, crushing tables, rolling carts of tools, and grinding a massive hole in the wall with a screeching of abused metal that threatened to upstage the alarm system.

  He crawled along behind the aircar back into the corner with the comm unit. He reached up and yanked the plastic sheeting from it and said, “Now, Gram!”

  He mentally withdrew, and felt her pick up the slack as she pulled the main comm off the cart. Bullets slammed into the aircar bodies behind them. She muttered something about interface cables, pulling a mess of cable out of their pocket. The object was like a multicolored octopus with too many legs, cables of various colors and thicknesses led into a hard ball of emergency repair tape. The kludgy object had followed them from the Daedalus, custom-made by Tetsami. One black optical cable, about a meter long, led back to a small magnetic socket that fit into the dimple in the base of their neck. That had come from a security camera back on Salmagundi. The rest of the device was made from salvaged cables that Tetsami had picked up from the Khalid and the Daedalus. The homemade adapter was necessary for her to use her skills with a neural interface whose specs were two hundred years out of date.