The flashes continued along the breadth of Adam’s forces, but now the flashes no longer took Adam’s forces with it. He opened his awareness to everything the cloud had perceived and saw thousands of Protean attackers, wave after wave of small egg-shaped probes.
At Adam’s bidding, his own forces maneuvered to the widely spaced asteroids in their midst. Unlike the Proteans, Adam was not willing to risk his own in a suicide mission. Not when there was an alternative.
In a hundred dense iron-nickel asteroids, the amorphous remnants of the cloud coalesced and burrowed in, leaving a broad, straight tunnel facing the attackers. The tunnels were uniformly smooth and coated with a fine web of superconducting material. In each case, after a few minutes, the surface temperature of the infected asteroid rose a few degrees Kelvin, and whatever magnetic field existed became stronger and oriented along the axis where Adam’s will had inserted itself.
“Now,” Adam spoke, unnecessarily on the bridge of the Voice.
A hundred asteroids began firing their contents at the
Proteans. Each asteroid had become a gigantic linac, shooting its core material through the improvised barrel, pushed by massive charges oscillating through the length of the superconducting tunnel; charges that fluctuated just enough to provide some aim.
The asteroids vomited themselves out into space in streams of mass and energy. The first wave came through the Protean lines at a quarter of the speed of light, but only a dozen of the Protean eggs suffered a direct hit, vaporizing into balls of plasma. Hundreds of others had the ability to maneuver around the incoming dumb projectiles.
Adam still smiled.
The second wave of projectiles came in at half the speed of light, on the same track. They collided with the first set of projectiles just behind the Proteans. The impact, combined with the salting of fissionable material, resulted in a devastating eruption of energy, A sterilizing wave strong enough to overwhelm even the Proteans’ shields.
Ten more waves were on the way before the radiation of the first explosions reached Adam’s sensors.
He raised his arms as if conducting an orchestra, facing the empty bridge of the Voice. The mass of displays switched on their own, following Adam’s intention, showing views of the rippling waves of explosions filling the volume of space once occupied by uncontested Proteans. The eruptions of energy blurred into each other, one explosion swelling as another faded, until it appeared as if a massive hand was swirling a rag of plasma and light cleaning dirt off of the surface of space.
The Hand of God, Adam thought.
Date: 2526.7.31 (Standard) Mars-Sol
For a hundred million years the two-kilometer Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. For the past three hundred, the ancient Dolbrian artifact had been covered by an environmental dome to protect it from the corrosive effects of the thin terraformed atmosphere.
The first asteroid hit only ten kilometers from it, wiping away a hundred thousand centuries in a blast of heat, light, and kinetic energy.
More asteroids fell, lumps of iron and nickel turned from inert rock into self-guided missiles. Half their mass left a charged trail between Mars and the asteroid belt. The remaining mass was more than enough.
As the planet turned under the onslaught, the first of the Protean spires came under attack. The logarithmic curves of the elevator, grand and delicate and impossibly strong, were no match for a five- hundred-meter chunk of rock slamming into its base.
Light, smoke, and superheated rock boiled up the shaft as it began its slow reentry into the atmosphere. The woven material began to unweave, individual threads slashing through the atmosphere until the heat of reentry made the threads unbond and the sky rain superheated carbon.
From their crystalline redoubts deep under the Martian surface, the Protean remnants watched the world end. The rocks grew larger, pounding the surface, punching holes in the crust. Within an hour, centuries of terraforming was rendered moot as the surface again became uninhabitable.
The millions of minds that formed the culture of Proteus faced their end as one. Mars was only one place, and only one point in time. They had done what they could.
If they had done their job well, Adam would be too consumed with victory to see the actual attack. It was unfortunate that they couldn’t save Earth to do so.
Date: 2526.7.32 (Standard) Earth-Sol
Adam came late.
The revised ultimatum gave a lie to his omnipotence and claims of Godhead. Not that any of the fifteen billion souls on the planet had means to exploit that weakness. The first day had seen riots and looting on a global scale, the few charged with keeping order absorbed into the mass of humankind who had decided that order was no longer relevant. People died, buildings burned, and old grudges were violently settled. And above the riots, lights washed across the night sky.
The riots dissipated by the second day, as the cities emptied and the churches filled. Few knew of the fate of Mars. Communications had broken down, and the human world had shrunk to the distance a person could travel and the reach of someone’s voice. Those who had telescopes, and who had chosen to watch the alien structures growing on the surface, saw the cascade of destruction but had few they could tell.
The cadre of scientists in the few widely scattered observatories that remained operational could only console themselves that they were the first to see the end approaching. One of those observatories was in Vatican City, so Pope Stephen XII knew that the Proteans had failed.
His last mass was held before the refugees that packed St. Peter’s Square. His last profession of Catholic belief came underneath a sky that burned with the fires of hell.
As mass ended, a streak of flame reached down from the heavens to strike the dome of St. Peter’s, blowing the shell apart, raining debris down on the crowd. The inside of the cathedral glowed a painful red-yellow, as the skeletal remnants of the dome folded into the light. Windows and doors glowed with the same bright light, as the walls seemed to twist themselves apart, turning and folding into dimensions that didn’t exist. Around the perimeter of St. Peter’s Square, buildings collapsed into amorphous masses of bifurcating tentacles that seemed to be made of the same burning light as the sky.
From out the chaos that had been the cathedral, a humanoid form walked down the stairs toward the pavilion where the pope had been conducting mass. The stairs, the pavestones in the square itself, and the forty-one-meter obelisk in the center of the square remained the only visible remnants of human architecture.
The pope turned to face the visage of Adam. Adam towered over the man, arms spread as his new cathedral rose behind him.
“Do you choose to serve me?”
Pope Stephen XII bowed his head and said, “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.”
The figure of Adam stepped closer and placed his hands on the pope’s shoulders. He asked again, “Do you choose to serve me?”
The pope raised his gaze to meet Adam’s. “I also believe that you are an abomination, a force of destruction, conceived in hubris and the denial of God.”
“Then you shall not see paradise,” Adam said as the pope’s body disintegrated in front of him.
Adam raised his head to face the panicked throngs of St. Peters and said, “Do you now choose to serve the God that is before you?”
Cardinal Anderson stood with Jonah Dacham in one of the deepest rooms of the Vatican archives. They had watched the slow disintegration of their ties to the outside world.
By the time the sky burned, they only had data feeds from a few select points within Vatican City itself. When the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica crumbled, they lost even that.
At that point Cardinal Anderson released all the monks working here to go to their cells, meditate, and find their peace.
“We were too late,” he said to Dacham.
“The Proteans were always a small community. The options we had were always limited.”
“Did you know this would fail, then?”
“I knew that military success was unlikely,” he said. “And to be honest, the plans of Proteus never hinged on the whim of one man.”
“You were always going to attack him?”
“Not me,” Dacham said. “I am no longer part of Proteus. I’m a man, just like you.”
“Mars, the attack, would that have happened without the Church’s absolution?”
“No, it wouldn’t have.”
“But then what do you mean—”
Anderson was interrupted by a segment of the armored wall pulling itself apart from the inside. A disturbingly organic orifice irised open, letting in a painful light. Anderson crossed himself and prayed.
The figure who stepped through the opening was disarming in her human appearance. Average height and build, flame-red hair, a face that spoke of handsomeness as much as attractiveness.
“I am Rebecca,” she said to them. “I am here to offer you a new life as a servant of Adam. You will have power beyond imagining.”
She reached out her hands, one toward Anderson, one toward Dacham.
To his surprise, Dacham stepped forward and took her hand.
It suddenly became clear what he meant when he said the Proteans didn’t rely on the whim of one man. Their plan wasn’t the battle above them.
Their plan was Dacham.
Adam’s servant stared at him and Cardinal Anderson shook his head and said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
The woman stared deeply into his eyes. The last thing he ever heard were her words: “I’m sorry.”
SECOND EPILOGUE
Judgment
“Now comes the mystery.”
—HENRY WARD BEECHER (1813-1887)
CHAPER FORTY-TWO
Exorcism
“If you have a choice between bang and whimper, choose bang.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The Lord will open a way for me though the midst of them . . . For that I was born.”
—JOAN OF ARC (1412-1431)
Date: 2526.7.33 (Standard) 1,000,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Mallory sat on the bridge of the Savannah, which had been, in a prior life, an intelligence ship for the Centauri Trading Company. It was a massive observation platform, a full half of its toroidal volume made up of various kinds of observation and communications gear. It was one of the first of about two dozen actual military vessels that had joined the cause of fighting Adam in the days after the pope’s broadcast.
Most of the recruits that directly supported Mallory were likewise from the planets associated with Centauri. Occisis and its allies were the strongest base of the Church and home to those who’d be most influenced by the pope’s broadcast.
However, that didn’t mean that the other mass of ships in Bakunin space ignored the transmission. Several fleets had begun forming, loosely associated with the broad cultural arms of human space. There was a small group mostly of Sirius refugees. Refugees from Indi had formed three competing groups, and stranded natives of Bakunin were coalescing with groups of unapologetic pirates and lonely representatives of the Union of Independent Worlds.
But Mallory’s group, the first to start organizing, was the largest.
It was also the first to start doing something.
The observation platform was designed to survey vast volumes of space, and once they had a working theory of what Adam’s presence might look like and where it might be coming from, they had a constrained area to point its sensors.
It took several surveys at several different frequencies, before they found what it was they were looking for.
A nearly invisible cloud of uniform density, spreading out in an arc around Bakunin’s star, trailing from the path where the alien wormhole had tached in. The mass was vast in absolute terms, but so diffuse as to show no ripples in any mass sensors, so dark as to reflect no radiation at all back into the system. The cloud was only detectable as a slight occlusion of the starry background, barely detectable even by the advanced sensors on this spy platform, combined by a slight refraction along very long wavelengths.
But, once they found it, they could clearly define its extent. Little more than a vast cloud of dust.
“This is Central Command. Are the sacrificial lambs programmed?” Mallory spoke to an open channel that broadcast to the whole of his heterogeneous fleet. It was a question he’d been asking every quarter hour most of the day. This time, almost all the chosen vessels responded affirmatively.
The “lambs” represented about half his fleet. The past two days had seen a consolidation of people and resources, abandoning those vessels that were too low on supplies and power.
However, as near dead as the abandoned ships were, and as low on power, all had functional tach-drives. None had the power to jump so much as a light-year, but Mallory was asking much less.
He wished he could thank Parvi for the idea.
He called the private channel to the Daedalus. “This is Mallory. Has there been any word from Bakunin?”
It was another question he’d been asking periodically, and unlike the first one, the answer for this one never changed. Captain Valentine’s voice came back saying, “Still no word from the Khalid.”
Mallory said a prayer for the souls on board the doomed dropship and wondered, not for the first time, if he had been right in not trying to prevent it from going.
The last few lambs radioed their ready status.
This was it.
Mallory cast a glance at the holo that he had up monitoring the extent of the alien cloud in Bakunin’s outer system, half convinced that now that they were about to act some fundamental change might happen. It would move, suddenly become active, threatening them.
But it still sat, inert as it had presumably been since the wormhole had disgorged it. As it would presumably remain until Adam arrived.
Still, the light the platform received was an hour old, and Mallory couldn’t help but think about what unknowns might remain in those sixty minutes.
“Ready the computers to synchronize on my signal.” He pressed a button that sent out a burst transmission that would allow the computers to all start their programs at the right time to choreograph the delicate, deadly dance that was about to unfold.
At this point all the near-dead tach-ships were empty of people, running automated computer programs that controlled their navigation and their tach-drives. All of them simultaneously disabled their damping coils. Less than a second later, all of them disappeared from the observable universe.
Mallory had a counter programmed, overlaying the view of the cloud. It counted down from fourteen seconds, the amount of time the lambs would spend in tach-space in their travel from Bakunin space out to where the cloud waited.
When the timer hit zero, it rolled back up to 3560.
“Now,” Mallory whispered, “it either worked or it didn’t.”
The light of success or failure raced back toward him, and everyone else, from 3560 light-seconds away.
The plan was simple. Tach-drives interfered with each other. An undamped tach- drive could overload if too close to anything taching in or out. The destruction of the wormholes had damaged any tach-drives in the vicinity, and the Eclipse was fatally damaged when the massive tach-drive of the Voice had arrived too close.
What Mallory had done was simply have nearly seven hundred spaceships tach into the same volume of space occupied by the cloud, simultaneously, with their dampers disabled.
When the
new counter reached 3546, he had the first indications of success. The first chatter of radio traffic, ships with tach-drives overloading and burning out. Not among Mallory’s now- halved fleet—there had been warnings to shut down all the tach-drives in the fleet even though a third of the ships didn’t have the power to bring them on-line again.
While his warnings had been given to those outside his fleet, it wasn’t taken universally to heart, and he could hear dozens of ships announcing their crisis in a dozen languages.
He prayed for strength and ordered his own people to render what aid they could to any disabled ships in range.
The counter continued running down, and the distress calls leveled off at close to two hundred.
Please, God, let this be worth it.
He stared at the screen as the numbers dipped below sixty. He clenched his teeth, and for the last fifteen seconds, he didn’t breathe.
Zero.
Light washed the screen, and then the image went dark. Static washed across all the radio channels. He flipped controls, trying to get something, some indication of what happened, but everything seemed blinded, overloaded, or dead.
He finally found an optical sensor that hadn’t been pointing directly at the cloud. He ordered it to point at the space where the cloud had been.
For a long time he stared at what he had wrought, and finally said, “Christ preserve us.”
On the surface of Bakunin, it was nighttime on the western coast, and Nickolai Rajasthan looked up as the sky above him briefly became bright as daylight. With his Protean eyes, he could stare straight up into the sky and see the boiling heart of the plasma flames that consumed Adam’s cloud.
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