Messiah: Apotheosis: Book Three

  He let the door shut on her.

  We’re all doomed.

  Not that Lubikov had lied about how Mallory’s forces were doing. The only real falsehood he had provided them was the fact he had communicated anything with Mallory. Such a gambit, while possibly useful, was outweighed by the certainty that Adam would perceive it as a slight against his power, and Adam had agents on Bakunin waiting for his call.

  He was perhaps the only one who found the absence of such a call disturbing.

  There was a full-fledged war occurring though the system. He was one of the few within the PDC power structure high enough to see the intel reports from off-planet. Parvi’s resistance was remarkably holding its own against the onslaught of Adam’s forces.

  But he knew, at best, Mallory’s “fleet” would have a pyrrhic victory.

  He walked down a hallway toward Bleek Munitions’ communication center. The several Marines guarding the area snapped to attention for him. He told them to stand down and asked, “Is the meeting room ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lubikov nodded and walked past, into a plain-looking conference room. Seated around a table were twelve men and women from all parts of the Proudhon hierarchy: military, civilian, executive. He allowed the door to slide shut behind him with a hiss, sealing out most of the EM spectrum that wasn’t explicitly cabled into the room.

  “I apologize for my tardiness. I had another meeting that ran a bit late.”

  The room broke out into simultaneous chatter, though it was mostly the civilians. The military folks in attendance, even the two who outranked him, showed a little more deference. He let the questions hang in the air as he took a seat at the conference table.

  Everyone’s here...

  He continued, as if everyone wasn’t trying to talk over each other. “I also want to thank you all for coming. I suspect this is the first time most of you have met each other, in any context.”

  “What exactly is this?” asked the loudest questioner. Geoff Talbot was an engineer and chief of PSDC’s air traffic control operations. He was well placed to control not only physical access to the planet, but off-planet communications as well. If Bakunin was locked in a box, he held the keys. “ATC Operations are not under military jurisdiction.”

  “This is highly irregular,” said a dark woman named Kim Hyung. She was deputy CFO, and in charge of the day-to-day financing of the PSDC and its military machine.

  Lubikov smiled and looked at the faces of the people staring at him. “You are all here because the situation we face is highly irregular.”

  All of the people he faced were holo projections. They had all called in from various points around the planet, and none of them had been told who else would be attending. One of the military attendees, General Yolanda Davis, Eastern Division Command—roughly Lubikov’s peer, though she functionally outranked him by being in charge of the forces around the PSDC’s capital, the city of Proudhon—looked at him and said, “You said that this was an intelligence briefing, General Lubikov. What are civilians doing here?”

  “The same thing you are, General Davis. Asking what could possibly bring this group of people together. This particular group.”

  Lubikov wasn’t particularly surprised when he saw Talbot’s eyes widen slightly. The people in this room wouldn’t be here if they were stupid. And Lubikov suspected a few of them would actually understand as soon as they recognized who they were in the meeting with.

  For the ones who hadn’t yet put the pieces together, Lubikov said, “If you look across this table, you’ll see representatives from every segment of the PSDC. The people here, in large part, run this planet now.” He folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward. “That is not all we have in common.”

  The talking ceased. Everyone here had reached a point of actual power, where his or her decisions made a definitive impact on the PSDC and, by extension, the whole planet. They were perhaps the twelve most strategic people on Bakunin at the moment, and he had spent months quietly finding out who they were, ever since he realized that he could not have been the only person recruited by Mr. Antonio.

  General Davis broke the silence by asking, “What, exactly, are you saying, General Lubikov?”

  “That each of us here has given allegiance to someone other than the executives in Proudhon.” Objections began cascading across the table, and Lubikov added, “to someone calling himself Adam.”

  The brief pause the name caused in the objections was all the confirmation he needed, had he needed any. The pause was followed predictably by loud denials. Of course, none of these people were willing to admit such a thing.

  He leaned back and said, “I have proof, of course.”

  That led to a slowly growing silence.

  “What possible proof can you have?” someone muttered.

  “Choosing to be an agent of this being, Adam, impacts far more than your loyalties. He grants rather particular gifts to his agents in positions of power, a foretaste of what he has promised you. But this gift does mark you, in subtle and very specific ways.”

  Kim Hyung shook her head and announced, “I am not going to indulge you any further. I am going to report—”

  “Please sit down, Ms. Hyung.” He squeezed all his considerable command experience into the order, and she responded like a green recruit being verbally smacked by a drill sergeant. Lubikov stood himself, looming over the holo representatives around the table. “Each one of you, were you not servants of Adam, would be dead right now.”

  General Davis dropped all of her military pretense. “What the hell are you talking about, Alexi?”

  “I’ve researched all of you for months, and all of you were specially targeted over that time frame. An agent of mine, at some point in the recent past, hit each of you with a C-rad weapon.”

  “What is—” Hyung started.

  “Coherent Radiation,” Davis answered. “A nasty black ops weapon, like a gamma laser, low enough energy that the target doesn’t even feel it—until their teeth fall out and they start puking up their stomach lining.”

  “Oh, my God . . .”

  “Every one of you should have died of radiation poisoning over the last three weeks,” Lubikov said.

  “You’re lying,” Talbot said. “You’re insane.”

  “More important,” Lubikov said, “if the PSDC Board of Directors receives this information, I have little doubt that Adam would be displeased by the quality of your service.”

  Someone started to say, “You can’t . . .”

  Davis shook her head, “Of course he can. You’ve always been a ruthless, self-serving bastard, Alexi.”

  Talbot looked across the table at her, “You can’t seriously be suggesting that he—”

  “Shut up, Geoff, I’ve known about you for at least a year.”

  Talbot just stared at her and gaped.

  Davis looked around the table then back at Lubikov. “I think you have everyone’s attention. And I do not think this little gathering has Adam’s approval.”

  “No.” Lubikov steepled his fingers. “But if you were given the same information I was, I suspect you all know that Adam’s stated plans have seriously diverged from what we were told to expect.”

  Several people nodded slightly.

  “You did not gather us all here to tell us that the refugees cluttering up the system are more organized than expected,” Davis said.

  “No. Not even to tell you how they’ve managed to beat back Adam’s advance for now.” Lubikov noticed surprise on several faces. Not everyone here was high enough in the hierarchy to have fresh intel from off-planet. “Adam has reinforcements. His opposition does not. Nothing extraplanetary need concern us.”

  “What, then?” Davis asked.

  “Currently, there is an attempt on the part of this opposition to recover some as-yet-unknown Dolbrian artifact.”

  If his audience was not still in the throes of shock and denial, he expected his statement would have been
met with derisive laughter. As it was, he was met with a sea of blank, disbelieving virtual stares.

  “You’re right, Geoff,” someone said, “he is insane.”

  Lubikov touched the surface of the table, calling up a holo in the middle of the table. In it, Nickolai Rajasthan was in the process of neutralizing five armed men, armed with nothing more than a length of chain. The scene flipped between that and Julia Kugara shooting up the motor pool. “This group secured entry into the Dolbrian tunnels under the Diderot Range.”

  One of the junior officers present looked at Lubikov and spoke for the first time, “With due respect, sir, how can a group of three or four insurgents be of any importance, wherever they are?”

  “Those insurgents are the only people to have successfully run our blockade of the planet. They come directly from the organized opposition to Adam. They came here with the specific intent to access these Dolbrian artifacts, whatever they might be.”

  General Davis shook her head. “What makes you assume they understand any more about Adam’s strengths, or his hypothetical weaknesses, than we do?”

  “Because they are facing his advance now and winning, for the moment. Because they’ve faced him before, and survived.” He changed the display, and started giving them a short history of what he had reconstructed of the late Tjaele Mosasa’s expedition. He gave them a history of the Eclipse and the people who had been on it. When he was done with his summary, he leaned back and said, “These actors know and understand what we’ve pledged allegiance to, perhaps more so than we do. Which leads me to suspect that the battles we’re watching above us are a distraction, a feint—and the real threat lies under our feet.”

  General Davis shook her head. “A group of four people ? This is in your jurisdiction. You should be quite able to task a squad, a dozen squads, to deal with them.”

  “Oh, they will be dealt with.” Lubikov smiled.

  Talbot’s face was actually changing color, and he seemed so angry he was having difficulty speaking. “Good lord! Then why the hell have you pulled us all together? You’re risking exposing all of us.”

  “I am hoping one of two things. First of all, I need to know if any of you know from your contact with Adam or his agents, what it is this ‘group of four people’ are looking for. What the threat actually is.”

  No one spoke up.

  “No one?” Lubikov spoke.

  “I think you know more about this than any of us,” General Davis said.

  “And the other thing you’re risking all of us on?” Talbot snapped.

  “Do any of you have the capability of warning Adam of this threat?”

  Again, silence.

  “None of you?” Lubikov asked incredulously. “None of you have a means to contact Adam?”

  Talbot shook his head. “And if I did, the first thing I’d do would be to tell him what a reckless servant he has in you.”

  “I know,” Lubikov said. He scanned the faces across the table, looking each one of the holo images in the eyes. He figured he owed them all that much respect. As he did, he typed out an order over an encrypted channel.

  General Davis sighed. “Now what, Alexi? You’ve crawled out on a limb here. Any more grand plans?”

  He nodded, “Always.”

  Across the table Hyung’s image vanished in a flash of white light and static.

  Davis, and several others barely said, “What?” and four more attendees followed Hyung, vanishing. Talbot stood and screamed at him, “You traitorous motherf—” his words consumed by a white light.

  General Davis’ eyes were wide as she stared at him and said, “Alexi?”

  Three more attendees vanished around them. The remaining ones were scrambling out of their seats trying to run.

  “You said I was a ruthless, self-serving bastard,” he told her as her own holo disappeared in a flash of light.

  Lubikov leaned back in his seat, alone in the conference room now. On a display inset into the table, text scrolled by as a dozen Special Forces squads messaged back the code words for a successful mission.

  Adam’s agents all met their fates in varying ways, but all involved extreme overkill that vaporized not only them, but the buildings they had been transmitting from. He disliked the collateral damage, but the gift that Adam gave them would mean that there was a possibility of surviving anything short of complete destruction.

  And since he had the means...

  He tapped a few more commands out on the console, and even the encrypted history of this meeting, and his orders out to his men, began to erase itself. No one person knew the scope of what he had just done, and he had placed enough layers of deniability between the act and himself that no one should connect it to him, especially since there were twenty-five other attacks, killing strategic personnel within the PSDC who had no particular connection to Adam, including key leadership positions within the Board.

  He waited a few minutes, and then the door started buzzing insistently. He touched the controls to release the seals on the door, and said, “Come in, my conference is over.”

  The door slid open and a breathless Marine ran in and came to attention.

  “At ease, son. What is it?”

  “Sir, we’ve just received words of a coup.”

  Lubikov straightened in his chair and said, “A coup, you say? An insurgency?”

  “We don’t know, sir. We’ve just heard of a series of coordinated attacks all across the planet. At least fifteen, including a bomb that took out the top floor of Proudhon corporate headquarters.”

  He stood up and asked, “The Board?”

  The Marine shook his head, “We don’t know if there were any survivors.”

  Of course, there were survivors. Lubikov had carefully planned the survivors as well as the victims, and while the Board that was left would, of course, know nothing of the attack that placed them in power, none of them would have any reluctance in seizing the opportunity. They might even, in fact, exploit the general perception that they had been behind the “coup.” Fear was a useful emotion in wartime.

  And all would help camouflage Lubikov’s own actions.

  “Do we know the source of the attack? Was it Proudhon Defense Corporation personnel?”

  “Sir?”

  “If it was a coup, the attack was probably staged by our own forces.”

  “No word yet.”

  Lubikov nodded. “I want everyone under my command to shift communication protocols. All comm traffic to any unit is to come though here on an encrypted channel. Complete blackout otherwise, and I want reports on anyone breaking that order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For the time being, Lubikov would be the de facto ruler of everything west of this mountain range. He also guessed that it would take several days for the PSDC to recover from the event. But they didn’t have several days.

  That meant that he had to take advantage of what he did know now, before Adam regrouped and took this planet. He intended to be on the winning side of this—

  Whoever won.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Doubt

  “They never help you for your sake.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “It is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another.”

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON

  (1732-1799)

  Date: 2526.8.12 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The Wisconsin had changed. The Proteans had rebuilt the structure after the damage of Stefan’s attack. In less than a day, a new Wisconsin hung in orbit around Schwitzguebel, glittering like an alien jewel. Pieces of the original remained, melding into the new Protean artifact. Toni II suspected that those areas only remained to appease the sensibilities of the few living occupants who remained human.

  The very few.

  She, Mallory, and a handful of crew from the Daedalus were the greater part of those remaining. Everyone else had evacuated, died during Stefan’s attack . . . or d
idn’t count as human anymore.

  Toni II stayed in the Daedalus, in the cabin she had shared with her “sister.” It was one of the few places she had access to that was free from the influence of Stefan, or the Proteans.

  Her injuries weren’t that severe for someone who had gone EVA without a suit—some bad bruises, a horrible earache, and lungs that insisted on coughing up blood every twenty minutes or so. She had suffered worse in basic training on Styx. Even so, they gave her an excuse to stay there, nursing her injuries, trying not to think of what was happening outside the Daedalus.

  What had happened to her sister. Her other self.

  She slept in fits and starts, interrupted by her own coughing, and nightmares of a thousand Stefans crawling over each other to reach her. And when she woke, she felt waves of self-loathing for retreating into this cabin while the battle raged around them.

  The Proteans are in charge of that now, aren’t they?

  The Proteans actually seemed to have some chance against Adam’s forces.

  She was pretty much irrelevant. She didn’t even belong to this universe. A cosmic mistake, an irrelevancy...

  She was coughing up more of her lungs into a bloody rag when the buzzer sounded on her door. She lowered the rag, careful to keep the fabric wrapped around the contents so that the mess wouldn’t fly free in the tiny microgravity aboard the docked Daedalus.

  “What?” she called out, her voice hoarse and weak.

  “Can I come in?” her own voice answered.

  “I—” Her voice choked on the taste of her own blood. She hadn’t seen or heard her sister since Toni shoved her and Mallory into the air lock. She had learned since how Toni, her younger self, had survived, and Toni II didn’t know if she wanted to face that.

  She didn’t know if she could.

  Outside, herself said, “Please?”

  Toni II finally answered, “Come in.”

  The door slid open, and Toni pulled herself into the cabin. They looked at each other, and Toni II stared into her other self’s face, looking for some sign of a change, some mark showing that she had joined the Proteans. She didn’t see any, other than the fact that her sister was still alive.