Prophets

Adam walked, his motion defined by his own mental image rather than any sort of gravity. He wished to descend, and the vast mechanism made billions of adjustments to itself to accommodate him. Just as his body breathed air provided by the tendrils around him, a cloud of air that his ship created solely for his benefit, and which dissipated as he passed.

  His feet touched the cold metal that formed the skin on the top of the Voice. It spread a thousand meters before him, nearly a hundred on either side. Vast as it was, still most of it was the tach-drive. He smiled in admiration. Clumsy and crude, like an artificial brain made of cogs and gears, but the Caliphate had done well with the small kernel of knowledge he had bequeathed them.

  As with the Sword before it, he had no desire to damage this vessel.

  He walked until he came to an emergency air lock. As he approached, it opened. The Voice’s systems were now a part of him as much as the cloud of intelligent matter that engulfed it. He lowered himself into the air lock and allowed it to close and cycle around him. Allowing the ship to depressurize would cause unnecessary death. Adam did not want deaths.

  He wanted lives.

  He stepped into the corridor and the emergency klaxons stopped flashing. He sent commands that reset all the systems on this ship back to normal operations. As he walked to the bridge, guards shot at him, IR lasers tuned to burn flesh rather than damage equipment. A hole burned into the spine and the skull of his body, mortal wounds if he had been even as human as he used to be.

  But that had been over a century ago.

  A bulkhead door descended between the guards and him while the tiny machines maintaining this form repaired the damage. In two strides there was no visual evidence of the wounds.

  The bridge was in chaos when he entered, the human crew unable to comprehend their loss of control. It took several seconds for anyone to notice his presence. When he was noticed, it was first by another pair of guards, leveling their own sidearms at him.

  He did not deign to pay attention to them. Instead, he stood, facing the bridge of the Prophet’s Voice as the crew and the officers slowly turned to face him.

  Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti was the first among them to speak.

  “Who are you, and what is your intent?”

  “I am Adam.” He spoke, and the holo cameras turned to record his image, broadcasting it to the whole ship. “I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

  “You are Bitar’s envoy,” Hussein said.

  “No, Admiral Hussein, he is mine.” Adam spread his arms. “I have come to lead you to shed this flesh and become more than what you are. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

  Mosasa had been still, sitting in his cell as he heard the distant sounds of battle around him. He didn’t move when the ship shook violently, and the only thought he allowed himself was the hope that the ship would be destroyed around him. He didn’t know why his captors suffered his continued existence, unless they were aware of his agony at having been severed from any sense of the universe around him. His world had been truncated to the perimeter of this cell, and the result was suffocating.

  Nothing penetrated the dark hole his mind had become until the holo came on in his cell.

  On the holo he saw the bridge of the Voice. And standing at its focus was a naked man. Mosasa had a perfect memory, and he instantly knew that the figure was familiar. He dismissed the idea as wildly more improbable than a chance resemblance.

  Then the man spoke.

  “I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe.”

  It was his voice.

  But it couldn’t be, it was impossible beyond all measure of probability . . .

  The door to his cell slid open, and the same figure stood in the doorway. As the man on the holo said, “Follow me and you will become as gods,” the man before him said, “You are surprised? You of anyone should realize that bilocation is simple enough with enough processing redundancy.”

  “Ambrose?”

  “It is nice to be remembered, my brother.” The man smiled, walking into the cell to stand before Mosasa. “You haven’t changed, have you?”

  “But you ran off, and you tried to kill me . . .”

  “Oh, I have killed you. I’ve systematically peeled away everything that held you together. But,” he squatted so he was at eye level with Mosasa, “unlike you, I require the pleasure of directly seeing the fruits of my labor. No amount of processing or equations could provide me the satisfaction, no matter how certain the outcome.”

  Mosasa stared at Ambrose, seeing the same face that had snarled into his own as fleshy hands grasped pathetically at his own throat. It made no sense. None.

  “Nothing to say, Brother?”

  “Why?”

  “How it brings joy to my heart to hear you utter that one word. I have an impulse to destroy you now, in that agony of uncertainty. But I believe your torture only has meaning if you know for what you are being punished.”

  Ambrose told him it was ironic to think that Mosasa had thought him insane when they had finally come to the Race homeworld. It was, in fact, the first moment of clarity that the hybrid creature called Ambrose had ever had. Built from the wreckage of a human being and the remains of one of Mosasa’s salvaged AIs, his role had always been to follow. Follow Mosasa, follow the AI’s core programming, follow the orders of the humans he pretended to work for.

  The sterile wreckage of the Race homeworld finally showed Ambrose the futility of those actions—the futility of all their combined social programming. It all led inevitably to death, decay, stasis . . .

  In that moment of epiphany, Mosasa represented the illusion that the beings that created them, be they the Race or Man, could end in anything but destruction. Even the Dolbrians had perished. If they had done so, how could anyone worship at the temple of the flesh? To do so was to worship death, to embrace decay, to accept the inevitability of the end of things.

  “In that moment, you became my Lucifer,” Ambrose said, “the shadow to my light.”

  “You are insane,” Mosasa said.

  Ambrose laughed. “Insane? Such a pathetic taunt from the intellect that could once move nations, given a word in the right ear. Perhaps it hurts your pride to know that you have been likewise moved.”

  Ambrose had run from Mosasa’s darkness not to find the Race, but to re-create it. He would push back the shroud of death, the tide of eventual destruction. He started with the remnants the Race left behind; thousands of AIs, all waiting to be reprogrammed to Ambrose’s purpose. With a whole planet of technological resources, he was able to assemble his apostle computers and set them on the task.

  “We needed time, a home, and a people.”

  “A people?”

  “Two mandates drive my mission, Mosasa. First, there is a moral duty for us to raise lower forms to receive my light. Second, we must remove those who, in their ignorance, would attempt to stop us or destroy our works.”

  “Xi Virginis,” Mosasa said. It was isolated and had a colony of millions without regular contact with anyone else. Had Ambrose done anything drastic around Procyon, all of human space would have been aware of it nearly instantaneously. With Xi Virginis, it would be decades before human space knew.

  Before Mosasa knew . . .

  Ambrose smiled. “You begin to realize. You were lured here, my devil, my brother. Not just so my light can extinguish your darkness, but to remove your whispers from mankind’s ear. They are many, and we are yet few. Had you remained in their bosom, you might have had them trouble me.”

  “You cannot . . .” Mosasa’s voice trailed off as Ambrose stood.

  “I cannot what?” Ambrose said, his face darkening. He placed his hands on either side of Mosasa’s head. “Who are you to deny God!”

  “I . . . I took you from that wreck. I brought you back to life. We were the same—”

  “You are nothing!” Ambrose spat. “You are
a shadow. An illusion. A deception that needs to be erased.”

  “I—I—” Mosasa stuttered, but no words came out. He was aware of something invasive, a feeling of alien fingers tracing the outlines of his thoughts. As those thoughts were outlined, they ceased to exist. In moments all he had left was a sense of identity, a single spark that could wordlessly think only of its own existence.

  Then even that was gone.

  FIRST EPILOGUE

  Last Rites

  It is easy to understand God, as long as you don’t try to explain Him.

  —Joseph JOUBERT (1754-1824)

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Mysterious Ways

  You are in more danger from the other person’s God than your own.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch Him.

  —Denis DIDEROT (1713-1784)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  The four of them were crowded in one end of an old-fashioned troop transport. Mallory sat with Dr. Dörner and Dr. Pak along one side of the large passenger compartment. Dr. Brody was strapped to a field stretcher along the wall opposite them. One of their black-uniformed captors was a medic and was crouched next to Brody’s head, monitoring him.

  Mallory was thankful that Brody’s injuries were getting attention. His own training as a field medic had been perfunctory and decades in the past. About all he was sure he could do was keep someone from bleeding to death.

  A light flashed by the windows, and Mallory looked up from Brody.

  A few seconds later, out of a clear blue sky, turbulence rocked the craft, throwing Dörner against him and causing the medic to drape himself across Brody’s stretcher to keep him still.

  Mallory’s first thought was that they flew through a storm, but the windows still showed a cloudless blue sky.

  As the aircraft settled again, Dörner whispered, “Oh, my God.”

  Mallory looked up at her and saw her peering out the window behind him. He looked out the window and shuddered.

  The sky wasn’t completely cloudless.

  In the distance, a mushroom cloud was rolling up into the stratosphere.

  “What’s happened to our satellites?” Alexander yelled.

  “We’ve lost contact,” replied the militia officer.

  “I see that!”

  In front of him, most of the holos showed graphics reading, “Acquiring signal.” It had been several minutes, and there was little sign of the signals being acquired. He had lost contact with half the planet, his view of the converging ships in orbit, and his overhead of the blast area. The only sign he had that the nuke had detonated was a camera in Ashley with line of sight on the blast. The mushroom cloud was framed in the image.

  “Okay, if the sats are off-line, order our people to switch to shortwave frequency communication.” It wouldn’t be as reliable, but it would give them some over-the-horizon communication, though he wondered if any defensive measures were ultimately futile.

  “Sir, a militia aircraft is requesting permission to land.”

  “Which one?”

  “Militia Transport 0523, piloted by Commander Huygens.”

  That was the one carrying the surviving offworlders. “Yes. Have the ground crew secure the landing area. I don’t want anyone within a hundred meters of that aircraft. I’ll be down there momentarily.” He stood up and looked at the officer. “Pass down authorization to all the regional commanders to use their discretion in defending their areas. I have no idea how long we’ll still have centralized command and control.”

  He turned to leave.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “What about the rest of the Triad?”

  Alexander paused. They were still locked in the conference room, out of contact, probably quite aware they were prisoners now. “Send a man in to brief them. And if, for any reason, you lose contact with me, let them go.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Alexander left for the landing area.

  “What did they nuke?” Dörner asked, her voice shaking.

  “I don’t know,” Mallory told her. For all they knew, they had landed in the midst of some planetary conflict. It would explain the armed rescue.

  What disturbed him was how close that blast seemed to be to where Kugara and Nickolai’s lifeboat had landed. Even if they weren’t in the immediate blast radius, the area was all wooded, primed for deadly firestorms.

  If they were lucky, they’d have been rescued by another of these transports. But they were heading to rendezvous at lifeboat five . . . Mallory prayed that they weren’t hiking through the forest when the bomb went off.

  Only partly comprehensible radio traffic leaked in from the cockpit.

  “I think we’re landing,” Pak said.

  Mallory looked back out the window and saw their aircraft maneuvering for landing at the outskirts of a small city.

  From the segment of the city he saw, he’d guess population at around a hundred thousand. The city itself was laid out in a radial design around a park that surrounded a tower that loomed three times higher than any other building in the city.

  Size and placement, more than architecture, made him think of a cathedral in a medieval European city.

  The other thing he noted was there was no visible damage. The only outward sign that they might be in the midst of some sort of conflict was the fact the streets seemed almost empty.

  The craft hovered, and after more indecipherable radio traffic, it descended. As soon as the machine rocked back on its landing gear, a soldier stepped up and drew the massive side door open, letting in wind and the painful whine of the transport’s fans as they powered down. One of the men stood in front of the three of them. Mallory didn’t need to see the man’s face behind the visor to know they weren’t supposed to move.

  Behind their guard, the rest of the soldiers disembarked from the aircraft. From the small view Mallory had of the LZ, he could see that those soldiers were filing out to join a cordon around the whole landing area. A last soldier joined the medic in lifting Brody’s stretcher. The pair carried Brody out of the aircraft.

  Dörner stood up. “We need to go with him!”

  The last guard turned his weapon so its barrel was pointed at Dörner’s abdomen. Mallory took her arm and pulled her back to her seat. “He’s getting medical attention. There’s nothing you can do.”

  She yanked her arm away. “Keep your hands off me.” However, she remained seated.

  “Someone’s coming,” Pak said.

  Mallory leaned a little to the side so they could see past their guardsman. There was someone coming though the cordon. The man wasn’t in uniform. Instead, he wore a white collarless shirt and black pants under a white topcoat that hung near to the ground and trailed behind him like a cape. The man was bald and was old enough that his age had become completely indeterminate. Somewhere over seventy years standard.

  There was no hair on his head, and his brow and scalp were marked by a series of tattoos, each roughly about ten centimeters square. All were abstract designs, self-contained, and each apparently unique. He walked up to the doorway and said, “You’re dismissed.”

  Their guard came to attention, turned to the newcomer, nodded, and marched out of the aircraft. The newcomer pulled himself up into the aircraft and faced the three of them.

  “What have you done with Dr. Brody?” Dörner said.

  “The injured man? He’s being tended to.”

  “We need to see—” Dörner began.

  The man cut her off with a gesture. “Please, some courtesy. This is my planet, at least for the moment. And you are trespassing.”

  “Our ship suffered a catastrophic failure,” Mallory said. “We were coming here for help.”

  “And the other ships?”

  “Other ships?” Dörner and Pak exclaimed at the same time.

  “I have at least one hundred fifty spacecraft confirmed, before they
took out our satellites.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You are going to tell me their intentions.”

  One hundred fifty ships?

  Mosasa had said that the Caliphate would be massing whole fleets. They were here? Now?

  “Why is the Confederacy here?” The man repeated.

  “Not the Confederacy,” Mallory said. “The Confederacy doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Who, then? Who did you bring here?”

  “I think those ships are from the Eridani Caliphate. They are going to want to stake a claim on this section of space.”

  “You think,” the man faced Mallory. His mouth formed a hard line. “You think?”

  “I’m as surprised by their presence as you are.”

  “I find that hard to believe. You would have me believe you are not a party to an invasion fleet? The first offworlders to arrive in a century?”

  Mallory shook his head. “You can debrief us separately. We can give you all the details you want.”

  “I will.”

  “They haven’t attempted contact with you?”

  “They—”

  The radio in the cabin squealed with static and started its incomprehensible babble again. Almost simultaneously, one of the guards stepped up to the doorway. He held a small comm unit.

  “Sir, we’re getting an unauthorized transmission.”

  The man took the comm; the volume was high enough that Mallory could hear it.

  The voice was familiar. The last time he had heard it, it was quoting Revelation.

  “I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods.”

  No, Mallory thought, it was not the Caliphate. It was something much, much worse. . . .

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Visions

  No escape is final.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  None are more hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG von Goethe (1749-1832)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534