Messiah

by S. Andrew Swann

  “Proudhon betrayed us,” he groaned.

  Heavy footsteps preceded a large shadowy figure into the hallway after Simon. The figure filled the corridor, almost as wide as it was tall. It moved deliberately, with a mass that shook the stone floor beneath it. In form it was a headless armored torso as wide as Lazarus was tall, with legs thicker than Lazarus’ torso, clawed hands large and powerful enough to tear even Gregor the ursine in half with a twist of the wrist. One of those claws pointed at Lazarus and Simon, aiming a cluster of weapons at them, any one of which would probably leave them a thin smear on the ground.

  “Brother Lazarus,” it called to him.

  The voice was familiar.

  “Brother Lazarus,” it repeated in General Lubikov’s voice, and something whined as a red light came on above one of the barrels emerging from its forearm.

  “Yes,” he responded.

  “You will order your people to stand down.”

  When Lazarus hesitated, it repeated, “You will order your people to stand down, or they will all be killed.”

  They didn’t have the resources to repel this kind of military attack. He looked at the thing and said, “How?”

  “Give the order. It will be broadcast.”

  Simon looked up at him and whispered, “You aren’t going to—”

  He gave the order, and he heard his voice echoed through the corridors. After speaking twice, the sounds of battle, if not the smell, began to recede.

  Simon muttered, “Why?”

  “Suicide is not a virtue,” Lazarus told him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Desecration

  “The most dangerous threats are the ones you assume you understand.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Their team has the bad habit of changing the lineup when you aren’t looking.”

  —SYLVIA HARPER

  (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.8.12 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Nickolai and Kugara were immediately awake at the first sound of gunfire. Nickolai stood in the center of the room, holding the chain that was his only weapon, as Kugara roused Brody and Dörner.

  “What the hell—” Brody started to complain, but he stopped talking as soon as he saw the expression on Kugara’s face.

  Nickolai listened to the sounds coming through the sealed doorway. The grinding of machinery, the whine of EM rifles, the cries of the wounded.

  “Adam?” whispered Dörner.

  Nickolai shook his head, “Not unless he’s now using heavy powered infantry.” He could hear the footsteps of the armor, five times the mass of the powered suits he’d confronted in the woods outside Wilson, the kind of weight that ground errant gravel into powder.

  There had been some dim night-cycle lighting in their suite/cell, but now the orange lights along the base of the walls winked out, leaving them in darkness. His new eyes adjusted instantly to see by infrared, in time to see Dörner fumbling to switch on the dead lighting.

  “Power’s cut,” he said.

  “Proudhon?” Kugara looked past him.

  “Probably.”

  “Are they after us, or the monastery?”

  Nickolai wrapped the chain around his arm. “Perhaps both.” He slammed his body into the sealed doorway, leading with his metal-wrapped arm.

  “Shit!” Dörner called out, “What’s happening?”

  Her voice dripped with fear, and Nikolai could smell the panic from where he stood. He’d forgotten they were blind in the darkness. “I’m trying to open the door,” he said. He backed up and struck it again. The resonating impact tried to shake the teeth loose from his head, but the door was unmoved.

  “They may be trying to preempt us,” Brody said. “The local generalissimo has a file on all of us—he may have figured out why we’re here.”

  Nickolai struck the door again, tuning out the conversation as he continued trying to break it down. To his chagrin, the door was constructed with people like him in mind. Repeated attacks only hurt his shoulder. When it was clearly futile, he backed away, panting, trying to think of another escape.

  Kugara must have read his thoughts. “It’s the only way out. I checked earlier, and all the walls are solid rock except for a few tiny ventilation holes.”

  Nickolai shook his head and let the chain spiral off his bruised arm to clatter on the floor.

  Wait. That was all they could do.

  Beyond the door, he heard Lazarus’ canine voice order his people to lower their weapons, the words repeated several times from several directions, and the sounds of battle slowly ceased.

  “Is it a bad thing if they find what the Protean sent us to find?” Dörner whispered, her voice small and shaky. “It’s to fight Adam, as long as they aren’t him—”

  She was interrupted by the door rattling and slowly opening before them, letting in a flood of new light.

  Backlit in the open doorway, Brother Lazarus stood facing them. As Nickolai’s alien eyes shifted their spectrum and sensitivity, he could make out the source of the light flooding the room from behind the monk.

  It came from floodlights mounted in the shoulders of a wall of ambulatory metal. Nickolai took an unconscious step backward once he saw the thing. The suit was remarkable enough that Nickolai still remembered the name of it from his abbreviated training at the BMU; Bleek Munitions Goliath Series V. It was the heaviest class of powered infantry armor ever created. So heavy, in fact, that the mobility tradeoff made it of limited tactical use. A hovertank was faster, cheaper, and had more firepower.

  Under the Diderot Mountains would be one of the few environments where that kind of bipedal tank would make sense. The thing could shrug off most any small arms, it was EMP hardened, had integral Emerson fields powerful enough to soak up the energy from a small AM grenade, and could engage a small armored cav unit in hand-to-hand combat. It bore pretty much the same relation to the armor he’d faced by Wilson as Nickolai did to felis domesticus.

  With the machine looming over him, Lazarus said, “Come with me.”

  They were marched out of the monastery, and into the huge cavern that had greeted them on arriving. It no longer seemed quite as huge with a squad of Goliath armor standing guard over thirty disarmed and injured monks. The tiered wall of the monastery itself had suffered damage to its facade, many of the carvings cracked, pitted, or scorched. Above them, a gray haze hid the ceiling from the artificial lighting, which now only came from the floodlights mounted on the armor, making the shadows long and surreal, wrapping around the rock like flaws in a broken holo projection.

  The prisoners had been massed in the dishlike amphitheater, as if they were about to receive a sermon. The armor surrounded the outer edge, like demons guarding a tiny circle of Hades. Their personal Goliath ushered them into the front row, right before the podium.

  Brody looked up at the Goliaths and whispered, “This can’t be good.”

  A few minutes passed, and then the cavern filled with the sound of hydraulics and mechanical whirring. Nickolai realized that the Goliaths were all standing at attention.

  A man walked out from the darkness beyond the reach of the Goliaths’ floodlights. He was not particularly tall for a human, but his body language compensated for it. Every motion was economical and confident, no step careless or accidental.

  He wore a uniform; gray fatigues that were recognizable as BMU issue despite the redesign of the patches to read “Proudhon Defense Corporation.” On the collar were embroidered the stars of a general.

  The man walked up to the podium. From him, Nickolai didn’t even smell the casual subliminal fear that most humans emitted in his presence. He stood facing the forced congregation and said, “I am General Alexi Lubikov, and I am in charge here.”

  The prisoners started speaking, but Lubikov raised his hand slightly, and suddenly the area was filled with the sound of moving machinery as Goliaths pointed their arms toward the crowd.

  “I would prefer not to be interrupted
,” Lubikov said.

  The objections died down.

  “Thank you. As I said, I am in charge here. I am backed by the full force of the Western Division of the Proudhon Defense Corporation, and due to some recent instability in the PSDC, at the moment I answer only to God. Do we all have an understanding?” He stared out at everyone, and Nickolai had the thought, How do you define God, General?

  “I come ahead of an invasion. An entity called Adam will soon come to this planet. The first few battles have already raged above the atmosphere. He’s been momentarily defeated, but that resistance has a consequence. When he does come, and he will come, it will not be as a conqueror. It will be as a destroyer.”

  Nickolai wondered how much truth the man spoke. He suspected that it was more than he would like.

  Lubikov turned so he was addressing Brother Lazarus directly. “Since you had the remaining crew of the Khalid in your custody, I am quite certain you were aware of this. I am also sure you know why they came to you.”

  Nickolai looked at the general, disconcerted by how much the man knew.

  “They are going to cooperate with me, not only because we have the shared goal of preventing Adam from destroying this planet, but because I am sure they would like to be reunited with their comrades.”

  Nickolai heard that and knew that Flynn had been captured. Despite his warrior ethos, he couldn’t find it disappointing that Flynn had survived his final battle.

  Then the last word struck him. Comrades.

  “Parvi,” Kugara whispered next to him.

  “You will cooperate with me as well, Brother Lazarus.”

  “Why?” the canine half growled. “You desecrate a place of worship. You attack my people. You violate a sovereign territory that has pledged its stewardship of a treasure whose value you don’t even understand. Why would I cooperate with you?”

  “Because martyrdom would be pointless if I still find what I am looking for.”

  Nickolai smelled the canine’s anger in the air as Lazarus glared at the general. For a moment, Nickolai thought the monk might leap and attack Lubikov, despite the armored sentries surrounding them. But the monk remained still, staring as if his look alone could kill.

  Then, without any explanation, Lazarus’ expression changed. His mouth twitched downward, and the hard glare in the eyes gave way to uncertainty. His posture sagged slightly, drawing inward, and the smell of anger drifted away, toward fear.

  Lubikov shook his head as if negating an inaudible conversation between himself and the monk. “I never take a battle to a territory I haven’t studied beforehand. Those bombs may be buried deep, but not so deep as to avoid notice.”

  Lazarus grumbled something. To human ears it would have been an inarticulate growl. Nickolai heard the words within the growl. “You’re jamming...”

  “And, thanks to your transmission, we now have the activation codes as well as the frequencies.” He leaned forward slightly. “Would I be wrong in assuming that by following the trail of those explosives, I would find myself in the heart of your Dolbrian mysteries?”

  Lazarus looked defeated.

  Lubikov smiled, “It shouldn’t be a hard decision. All you’re doing by cooperating is saving my time, along with the lives of yourself and your fellow monks.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Forbidden Fruit

  “Beware of your allies’ secrets.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”

  —FYODOR DOSTOEVSKI

  (1821-1881)

  Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Rebecca stood on a dusty red plain, under a sky that wasn’t quite the right shade of blue. The ground under her feet was not quite barren. Spidery tendrils of grass had a tenuous hold on the near sterile soil, enough that the air was close to breathable. The sun above was bright and hard and cold.

  Centuries of effort had been expended to make this place habitable, and Adam had erased it all in less than an hour. This Mars now only existed in the memories of Proteus, and even though she had never set foot there, in her own.

  Jonah Dacham stood on the plain, facing away from her. He looked up at the sky and shook his head.

  “I’m trapped, aren’t I?”

  “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else to tell him. “If I hadn’t—”

  “I know. I had that conversation with Mosasa. If Adam had seen me, it would have tipped Proteus’ hand. None of us realized where Adam had come from, or that he had been here before.” He turned around and smiled weakly. “I should be glad I retain some sort of identity, shouldn’t I?”

  Rebecca stared at the horizon. Some of the hills in the distance resembled a human face. “If I could, I would set you free.” And Mosasa, if he still existed here. “But minds don’t work like that.”

  Dacham shook his head.

  “I’ve been trying to solve this problem since Adam took me and I found Mosasa waiting for me.” She had been spending a good part of the new awareness that Adam had granted her in examining her own mind, with the dispassion of a software engineer trying to decompile code. She thought she now knew more about the low-order workings of her own consciousness than Adam did his own. “I didn’t find him an exit, and you are just as much a part of me now. It’s like pouring three vintages of wine into the same bottle, then trying to only pour one back out.”

  “Mosasa must have managed a way,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. I just think he existed across too many minds. When he attacked Adam—” She found it difficult to speak. For some reason she had a hard time thinking the phantom pirate had actually sacrificed himself. Even though Mosasa probably existed replicated across Adam’s whole existence, the loss of him here affected her more deeply than she would have credited. “I think whatever part of him is left in my mind isn’t enough to remain sentient. I’ve found no objective means to segregate one thought from the next, despite who’s thinking it.”

  “My existence is an illusion, as much as the Face over there.”

  “No, I don’t think—”

  “But you do,” Dacham said, “you think me.” He crouched down and looked at the Face on the horizon. “In fact, I am probably more you than me. I feel your thoughts the way I used to feel the air I breathed, when I breathed. It’s why I know you’re bringing questions for me, not sympathy.”

  Rebecca didn’t respond, because Dacham was right. That, and he was privy to the same things she saw and heard, he would know of her talks with Shane, and his obsessions with the remnants of the Dolbrians.

  “Why don’t you ask?”

  “Don’t you know my questions already?”

  He nodded. “I also know what you will do with the information. You will go to Shane, and he will go to the humans he is still so attached to.”

  “Would I be wrong?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Shane believes that the Proteans—you—are lying.”

  There was a long silence before Dacham said, “It’s unfortunate that I don’t even have a rationalization for the deception. After all this, I only have the faith that, for good or ill, there was a reason.”

  “A reason for what?”

  “Promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “A trade, for my knowledge.”

  She stood there mute. She didn’t know what offended her worse, the fact that Shane had been right and the Proteans were lying about the Dolbrian remnants on Bakunin, or the fact that Dacham was making some sort of game of all of this. After all that they had lost. All that she had lost. She felt rage building, and Dacham looked as if he sensed it as well—

  “Please,” he said quietly, “think of it as a belated last request from a man who has died at least two more times than he should have.”

  “What do you want?”

  “When there’s an expedition to the surface, go with Shane.”

>   “No one’s suggested there would be—”

  “When you hear what I have to tell you, there will be. And, like Shane, there are humans I have more connection to than a disciple of Proteus should.”

  “Fine,” Rebecca said, “now tell me the truth.”

  “It’s not that we’ve lied,” Dacham said, “so much as omitted some details . . .”

  When Mallory finally slept, he slept for a long time, his body collapsing into a dreamless coma that lasted far too long. When he finally awoke, even in the microgravity in the core of the Wisconsin, he felt old. It was as if the past couple of days had burned out all of his training, and left him an arthritic old man.

  Some of it, he expected, was aftereffects from being exposed to a vacuum. His lungs still felt raw, and the inflammation of the soft tissues couldn’t have been good for his joints.

  He kept going, partly due to the grace of God, partly because he didn’t know how to stop. It took him longer than it should have to make his way down to the control center.

  The room was empty when he arrived. He hadn’t expected anyone. The nexus of control had shifted elsewhere, somewhere into the collective brain of the Proteans who had deigned to stay behind. He slid into a seat at one of the control consoles, and started pulling up displays of the state of Bakunin’s solar system.

  Again, on the schematic view, the dots were all blue. They had, for the moment, retained control. On another display, showing the surface of the moon below, he could see a long curving spine rising up from a flat plain. The crystalline object was several hundred kilometers long and gradually curved skyward to point up out of Schwitzguebel’s gravity well.

  The Proteans had barely started building the thing when Mallory finally had gone to his cabin to sleep. Now, in less than a day, it looked fully functional.