Heretics

Did he know?

  Could he have seen so deep into her to know that she would be willing to work for an abomination as long as it meant that she wouldn’t have to use the only skills she had to sell?

  Collateral damage.

  The only shooting conflict her AI employer had ever used her for was picking off the Caliphate ambush in Samhain: an abandoned commune where the only people present were Wahid, Mallory, and a bunch of hostiles in powered armor.

  Could she have done that mission if the commune wasn’t abandoned? If there were more than empty buildings around the hostiles? If the missiles she fired resulted in piles of anonymous civilian corpses?

  I could have. I could—but—

  Parvi placed her face in her hands. It wasn’t just all the blood upon her hands, it was the fact that it was meaningless. On Rubai the fight against the Revolutionary government had been doomed from the start. If she didn’t know that when she served the Protectorate, it was apparent when the Protectorate pulled out of the conflict and she joined the Federal resistance.

  How many died because the resistance couldn’t accept they had lost? How many people had she killed, whose death served no purpose, who were just incidental to a battle that was lost before a shot was fired?

  How many were exactly like the woman on the Voice? Killed in a spasm of pointless violence that accomplished nothing. Changed nothing. Meant nothing.

  She looked upon things like Mosasa, Kugara, and Nickolai as monsters, perversions of science, the products of heretical technologies who should be feared or pitied. She believed it because that was what she had been taught all her life. But how could she see Nickolai as a monster after the things she had done? At least in his case he had no choice in what he was.

  How could she despise Mosasa when he had tried to save her from herself, when she didn’t realize she had needed saving?

  She whispered into her hands, “Why did I attack her before I knew if she was armed?”

  She almost missed the comm flashing an incoming transmission. She raised her face from her hands and looked at the small blinking light up in the corner of the display. She reached out and tapped it. A woman’s face appeared in the holo, a thin knife-edge of a face framed by dark hair in a short military cut. A towel draped around the woman’s shoulders, and from the way it moved she could see that the woman, like her, was in a zero-G environment.

  “This is L-Captain Toni Valentine of the Centauri cargo ship Daedalus, responding to your request for assistance.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Witness

  “The longer you wait to hear the news, the less likely you will like it.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Beyond the bosom of the Church no remission of sins is to be hoped for, nor any salvation.”

  —JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564)

  Date: 2526.7.18 (Standard) Earth-Sol

  Cardinal Jacob Anderson sat in a darkened room in one of the more recently constructed buildings in Vatican City. Unlike the structures around St. Peter’s Square, the small structure didn’t attempt to appear contemporaneous with the Renaissance. Unremarkable and utilitarian, it sat at the fringes of Vatican City, while ninety percent of it burrowed underground.

  The upper levels, the visible face of the structure, appeared as a typical office building from the last century, a minimalist era that favored stark geometry polished free of any extraneous line or curve. Even the people who worked in the building didn’t know about the labyrinthine nerve center that dwelled beneath it, and had dwelled beneath the last fifteen buildings that had occupied that spot.

  The room where Cardinal Anderson sat had once been part of a set of Roman catacombs. For several hundred years it had served to hide men and treasure during war-time. Then, in the twentieth century, it had been reinforced and armored at great expense to provide shelter for a nuclear holocaust that mankind somehow avoided. It had hidden nearly the whole of the papacy and attendant bureaucracy during the darkest times of the Terran Council. Today, rearmored, reshielded, and with its own environmental systems, it served as the nerve center for Vatican. Communications and data fed down into the archives here, while an entire monastery of data analysts examined and reexamined the state of the human universe.

  These were the men who had discovered the outflung colonies based on a stray tach-comm transmission that had never been intended to reach this far. These were the men who had filtered and deciphered Brother Kennedy’s enigmatic transmission that he had shown to Father Mallory.

  The one that quoted Revelation.

  With war erupting between the Caliphate and Sirius and her allies, Cardinal Anderson had nearly lost hope of hearing from Father Mallory again. He feared that Mallory had vanished just as all the other agents sent toward Xi Virginis had. Given the technical abilities of the new Caliphate tach-ships, he had suspected that all of them had fallen to Caliphate forces.

  But the transmission he watched now contradicted those easy suspicions.

  Father Mallory’s upper body floated in a holo display, his face haggard and unshaven, wearing military fatigues that bore no insignia except a few splatters of blood. The display was frozen as one of the trio of monastic data analysts changed the focus and contrast to highlight part of the background.

  “This area here,” the analyst said, “has enough detail that we could match it to historical designs. It is a component from Banlieue Data Systems Incorporated circa 2350; it was used extensively in shipborne tach-comm units. On the ground there are numerous blood splatters, but what we can see in the transmission appears to come from one source. Of the humans that appear briefly in the background we have positive identification on one, Julia Kugara, an officer who deserted Dakota Planetary Security to become a mercenary on Bakunin. We’ve assembled a dossier on her for you.”

  “The black man, at the end?” Cardinal Anderson asked.

  “We haven’t come to any conclusions about that yet.”

  “Play it again, from the beginning.”

  The image jumped, and Mallory moved into frame again. His expression was worn, almost beaten. When he turned his head, Cardinal Anderson could see a bandage covering a wound in his neck.

  “I am Father Francis Xavier Mallory. I am transmitting from a planet named Salmagundi in orbit around the star HD 101534. I arrived here on the tach-ship Eclipse which had been engaged in a scientific expedition from Bakunin to Xi Virginis.” The picture distorted slightly and Mallory’s voice gained a vibrato where the technicians attempted to digitally remove some growing interference. “Our expedition arrived at the location of Xi Virginis approximately two weeks ago. The entire solar system is gone. The star, the planets, and a human settlement of one million people no longer exist. This colony, Salmagundi, where . . . bzt . . . is under attack. The Caliphate has forces here, but the attack is . . . bzt . . . from a third party, an entity identifying itself as Adam.”

  Some commotion happened behind Mallory, with several armed men moving around behind him. The woman, Kugara, was briefly visible, apparently directing the men to move a large feline body. Anderson held up his hand and the replay stopped.

  “The nonhuman?”

  “We have limited information. There was one nonhuman of a Rajasthan strain on the BMU employment rolls contemporaneous with Kugara and Mallory’s alias, however the image here is too brief and of too low a quality to permit positive identification.”

  “You have a dossier on this Rajasthan from the Mercenaries’ Union?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  “Continue.” Anderson lowered his hand.

  “The Caliphate is here in force,” Mallory continued as rolling digital artifacts vandalized his face. “Several hundred ships . . . But the attack is not . . . bzt . . . peat, this is not a conventional . . . bzt . . . a giant ring in orbit . . . bzt . . . ently a nanotechnological basis . . . bzt . . . and Adam’s motive is quasi-relig . . . bzt . . . it or himself as a God, offering conversion or destr . . . bzt . . . Caliphate
is not the origin . . . bzt . . .”

  Anderson listened intently to the distorted transmission, as if by just listening hard enough he would be able to decipher some extra snippet of dialogue that the monk’s software had been unable to filter.

  But he heard nothing new. He watched and listened as the signal continued to degrade, thanking God that the damage to the Church’s tach-comm receivers and one hundred and twenty-five light-years had not completely obliterated the information in the signal.

  Mallory’s last incomprehensible sentence was interrupted by a dark, ominous voice: “The other is . . . bzt . . . Go. Run now.”

  Mallory stumbled back from the holo. Something large and black blocked the view for a moment, “Now!”

  The shadow blocking the view from the holo moved away, revealing the briefest view of Mallory leaving the room, following Kugara and the others. Several moments passed, the image degrading in pulsing waves, and intermittent static mixing with the rising sound of . . . something.

  Then something almost human stepped into view of the holo. At first it seemed to be a naked man cloaked in shadow, but that wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t draped in shadow. His skin was just black, dark as the void between the stars. His face wasn’t right either; it lacked creases, imperfections, the hint of hair. The eyes were featureless black spheres set behind smooth lids that didn’t move. When he spoke, the teeth were black as well, straight, smooth and symmetrical.

  He—perhaps the better pronoun would be “it”—It spoke now, but the words were wrapped in impenetrable static. Behind it, something crawled up the walls, a moving black net that seemed to segment the world behind the faux-human apparition. The degrading image began to vibrate, as if the building housing it was starting to collapse. Beyond the undulating webwork behind the thing, the walls started to glow white. The black apparition turned to face the intensifying light, and the image froze.

  The last comprehensible image from the tach-comm transmission was the silhouette of the black human-shaped apparition facing an intense light, arms spread. A close examination revealed that the human form had been caught in the midst of transmuting into something else. Tendrils were frozen in the midst of erupting from the thing’s back and upper arms. The fingers on its hands were splitting from each other, the gaps between them extending halfway to the wrist in the midst of an obscene elongation.

  Cardinal Anderson looked at his handheld comm. On it were the dossiers on Kugara and the tiger. Also on it was an attempted transcript of what the apparition had said. It was based solely on lip movements as the audio was too degraded during the final minutes of transmission. It was also incomplete, as the degradation of the image, the thing’s barely human face, and the lack of contrast all made the transcription a nearly impossible task.

  But not quite impossible.

  “The Other comes,” Cardinal Anderson read. “It brings the change without choice or consent. It will destroy all it does not consume. If any children of Proteus hear the warnings of your vessel, you must defend those who do not accept.” He looked up from the transcript.

  “That is all we have, Your Eminence. It did us the favor of repeating the message four times. We derived most of the message by interpolating the repeats. Still, at best it is an approximation; we are probably missing about a quarter of the data.”

  “You’ve done well with what we have. The reference to ‘Children of Proteus,’ is that what I think it is?”

  “It appears so, given Father Mallory’s reference to nanotechnology.”

  Cardinal Anderson knew the history of the Protean cult. They were a once-human population who saw the runaway Terraforming of Titan not as a disaster, but as a step toward some sort of transcendence. The Proteans saw the act of being consumed by their machines as some sort of sacrament—a satanic reversal of the Eucharist.

  Every human government since then had destroyed the dangerous cult wherever they reappeared, destroying any attempt to reproduce the technology that formed the basis of the Protean god. Of the three great heretical technologies, it was the closest to heresy in the original meaning of the term.

  Anderson had believed that the last remnants of Proteus had been wiped off the surface of Bakunin during the last violent spasms of the Terran Confederacy. The name “Proteus” had not appeared outside a historical document for generations. No government had acted to suppress anything like the Protean colony on Bakunin since the fall of the Confederacy.

  The thought that they may still exist was a frightening prospect. Anderson thought of nearly two centuries passing for a culture where moral constraints on technological advancement did not exist.

  What then would they be afraid of?

  Cardinal Anderson thought of the Book of Revelation again, the unwanted stepchild of the New Testament. “I am not about to rewrite millennia’s worth of the Church’s eschatology for a single event,” the pope had said. Cardinal Anderson began to wonder.

  He looked at the comm in his hand and started sending messages. He needed an audience with His Holiness and time to transmit on the tach-comm.

  As quickly as he could move the information, the Church’s allies needed to know that the coming war was not with the Caliphate.

  Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard) Khamsin-Epsilon Eridani

  Within the heart of the Ministry of External Relations of the Eridani Caliphate, in the capital city of Al Meftah, Yousef Al- Hamadi couldn’t help but allow his gaze to stray to the clock display on the main holo in the briefing room. As he sat on one side of a conference table, facing a small squad of intelligence officers, he listened with half an ear as he kept thinking, Almost time.

  Much of the briefing was taken up by status reports on the expeditionary successes of the two remaining great Ibrahim-class carriers. The Prophet’s Tears and the Prophet’s Blood had succeeded in isolating Sirius, and it was expected that the Caliphate’s weakened rival would shortly capitulate if it hadn’t already.

  It was a scenario that Adam had foreseen decades ago, given the Caliphate’s history with Sirius, and the expansionist factions in the military. Given the tools and the pretext, the social forces within the Caliphate mandated that it would try and absorb its rival. Even when the leadership knew that the death of the wormhole network went beyond the Caliphate, by then irrevocable decisions had been made.

  On Khamsin, the state of war allowed the imposition of martial law. That gave Al- Hamadi control of, among other things, the entire communications network. All tach-comm communications, including those by the military, were under the control of the intelligence community.

  Almost time.

  Adam had marked his arrival for his servant. He would come to Epsilon Eridani forty-four days standard after the destruction of the wormhole network.

  Today.

  On the third hour of the briefing, the comm set into the conference table beeped for his attention. Given the sensitive nature of the security briefing, the message could only be something of immediate and far-ranging importance.

  He held up a hand to halt the analysts’ chatter and answered the call.

  “What is it?” he asked, already half- knowing the answer.

  “Sir, we have the signature of an Ibrahim carrier taching insystem. Transponder and encrypted transmissions identify it as the Prophet’s Voice.”

  As one, the analysts’ expressions brightened. The incursions into Sirius’ domain had been the desire of the military. The intelligence services had been less enthusiastic. Most of the senior people in this room had believed it prudent to keep at least one of the carriers insystem for defensive purposes.

  For them, the return of the Voice was good news.

  It was, of course, but not for the reasons they imagined.

  “Call all the cabinet-level ministers back here for a briefing, and establish a secure channel to the Voice. Make sure the Naval Minister is called to my office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Also, effective immediately, all tach-comm traffic is t
o be queued to await approval by my office. No exceptions.”

  “Yes, sir. God is great.”

  He turned off the comm without responding. He faced his analysts, “We will resume this later. I have to meet with the Naval Minister.”

  The Naval Minister waiting in Al- Hamadi’s office was not happy. “What is the meaning of this?” he snapped as the being pretending to be Al- Hamadi walked in to greet him.

  “It is necessary for us to speak before I allow you to communicate with the Voice.”

  “You allow me?” The minister stood up as the door closed. He was a large man in height and in girth, and towered over the elderly form of Al- Hamadi. “You presume way too much. Your secret police, all your little intelligence gnomes, you have no legal authority over military matters.”

  Al-Hamadi leaned on his cane and looked up into the minister’s livid face. “The Caliph declared a state of emergency that placed all extra-planetary communications under my authority.”

  “That was only for civilian—”

  “All communications.”

  “You know as well as I that your power doesn’t extend to military communications.”

  Al-Hamadi smiled. “Then why are you arguing the point with me, and not with the Caliph’s deputies?”

  The Naval Minister sucked in a breath and backed down. “This is not the time for that kind of power struggle.”

  “No, it is not. We are on the verge of history here. Petty arguments over bureaucratic niceties do not become us.”

  “When can I have an uplink to the Voice?”

  “As soon as we’re done here,” Al- Hamadi laid his cane down on the desk and stretched his fingers, straightening his legs until the joints creaked.

  “What is it you wished to discuss then?”

  “Your future,” Al-Hamadi said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You have the same choice Al- Hamadi had.” He straightened up, shedding the infirmities that came with Al-Hamadi’s body. He turned around and the Naval Minister stared at him.