“How could you keep this secret?” Dörner stared at him, her voice cracking. “This is the most important archaeological discovery in the entire history of—”
Lazarus growled at her. “This place does not exist for the amusement of idle academicians!” He rose from the crouch, and his body language was so tense that both soldiers moved to train weapons on him. “Your concept of history, of time, of species—it is all nothing in the eyes of the Ancients. They left us words and artifacts millions of years beyond our understanding—”
“Brother Lazarus,” General Lubikov interrupted. “I would like to remind you who is still in charge here.”
“I brought you to the Barrier,” Lazarus responded. “What else do you want from me?”
“Perhaps you might go on a bit about the part of that ‘scripture’ you’ve managed to translate. I’m guessing it might have something to do with what’s on the inside of that barrier of yours.”
The Barrier...
The voice was a whisper, an echo of an echo as Lazarus spoke. The words itched inside Nickolai’s skull as if a memory just on the cusp of consciousness. Lazarus continued talking lowly, as Lubikov led them across the chamber toward the Barrier itself.
Lazarus was giving his interpretation of what he knew of the Dolbrians and what they left here. It was hard to tell if he was speaking the whole truth, though the attitude of resignation that hung on the canine seemed to argue that they’d hit the end of his secrets.
According to Lazarus, the Dolbrians—the Ancients—were a self-created God. The Ancients had seeded not only the few dozen planets popularly ascribed to them, they had seeded everything. All life that anyone was aware of was the product, directly or indirectly, of the Ancients’ intervention. What artifacts they left behind were landmarks for whatever sapient life came after their creation—messages to be unraveled when their creations were ready for ascendance.
“Ascendance?” Lubikov asked.
“The Ancients were not some monolithic entity,” Lazarus said. “They were thousands of races over millions of years, races that shared a single faith; a faith that moved them to give us all life, and a faith that calls those who are ready to join them.”
“Your faith?” Nickolai asked.
Lazarus bowed his head. “I know far too little to claim such. There are depths beyond which I lack the understanding to see, and this is how I know we are not ready.”
“Uh-huh,” General Lubikov said as they reached the edge of the Barrier. He gestured at the black dome, so featureless it seemed a flat wall before them now. “So how does this fit into all this?”
“The Barrier is not mentioned in what we’ve translated. I do not know what is beyond it.”
Lubikov shook his head slowly. “Brother Lazarus, have I mentioned what a rotten liar you are. I can hear in your voice when you hedge. What do you suspect is behind this thing?”
“It’s a doorway,” Lazarus said. “It is the way through which our kind will meet the Ancients.”
“How do you get through this thing?”
“You don’t.”
Lubikov looked over at the scientists and Kugara. “This is what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”
Yes . . .
Nickolai rubbed his temples. The alien voice in his head was becoming stronger. He was afraid that again he might start losing volition, might start seeing Adam or Mr. Antonio emerge from the shadows. He backed away from the side of the Barrier.
Dörner nodded and looked at Brody, who said, “Yes, I’m sure the Protean was directing us to use this, somehow. The Dolbri—the Ancients clearly would have the capability to defend against Adam.”
Lazarus whipped around to them, warning, “This is not a weapon!”
“But,” Dörner said, “if it’s a doorway, a means of contact, can’t we ask for help?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Lazarus said.
“Yet you’ve never been inside,” Lubikov said. He waved one of the soldiers forward. “Sergeant? Are you carrying a bomb kit?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. I want you to get a probe out and see some analysis on this dome.”
“Don’t test this,” Lazarus said.
“Go ahead, Sergeant.”
“Do not test this!” Lazarus ran toward the man, but the other soldier stepped forward, blocking his way.
“Don’t worry, Brother Lazarus,” Lubikov told him. “No one is touching this thing until we know what it’s made of.”
Lazarus moved fast and managed to slip by the soldier, but only received a gauntleted fist to the back of his head. The monk dropped to the ground.
Yes . . .
Nickolai kept backing away, and Lubikov started shouting orders to back up and give the sergeant some clearance. The one soldier dragged Lazarus’ semiconscious body away from the Barrier, and the general led the civilians after him. They stopped about thirty meters away, fifteen meters past where Nickolai stood.
Kugara stopped by him and asked, “Nickolai? Are you all right?”
Yes...
“I don’t know.” The word still echoed in his head, and he couldn’t take his gaze off of the Barrier. He sucked in a breath and corrected himself, “No, I’m not.”
“Come on,” she said, pulling him back to the others. He didn’t turn around, his gaze locked on the sergeant kneeling at the base of the Barrier. He noticed something as the sergeant worked on constructing a small device.
The edge of the Barrier, where the black surface met the ground, cleanly intersected the innermost line of carvings nearly in half. Why would the Dolbrians do that? Why cover their own carvings?
They didn’t . . . came the response to his thought, the words painfully alien in his brain—dark, monotone, familiar.
“Who?” he whispered to himself, even though he was already beginning to understand the answer. He stood, unmoving, unsure if he was unable to move because of the alien presence in his skull, or because of the shock of understanding what it was.
Near his feet, Brother Lazarus grumbled and pushed himself up from the ground. General Lubikov called out, “When you’re ready, Sergeant.”
The sergeant nodded and took a few steps back with a control unit. He manipulated the controls, and a trio of small triangular drones rose from the site where he’d been kneeling.
“No!” Lazarus shouted, as the drones flew a small formation into the Barrier. The drones moved as if the blackness didn’t exist, disappearing inside with no resistance at all. A half second passed, and the sergeant called back, “Sorry, sir. I lost contact as soon as they crossed—”
A grinding noise filled the chamber, resonating through the floor, screeching painfully in Nickolai’s ears. Then the Barrier came alive, sprouting huge black tendrils, whipping through the static-charged atmosphere fast enough to crack the air. Someone shouted, “Run!”
Before the sergeant could move, a black mass slammed into him, crushing him to the floor hard enough that Nickolai heard the servos on his armor seize up and snap. Another black tendril slammed down, hammering across the man’s upper torso, pieces of it splitting apart to drill into his body so when it lifted, it took the sergeant’s corpse with it.
Nickolai stood frozen to the spot, staring at the suddenly animate Barrier, listening to the alien voice in his skull.
They didn’t build this.
We did.
Nickolai started walking forward.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Apparitions
Planning is always necessary, but never sufficient.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Don’t tell me what can go wrong, tell me what will go wrong.”
—AUGUST BENITO GALIANI
(2019-*2105)
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 7.2 AU from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The Prophet’s Sword emerged from tach-space four and a half days after departing from the converted planet Ecdemi. Adam had left the 61 Cygni system as soon as He was aware of t
he first tach-comm signals showing that things were not right in the system around BD+50°1725. Bakunin was a core planet, but not a capital, and His view of the social, cultural, and political webs binding Bakunin led Him to relegate it as a low priority. Without His brother’s influence, and with the influx of refugees, the anarchy should have been busy consuming itself awaiting His salvation.
Instead, He heard the death rattle of the cloud awaiting His return. It was an echo in tach-space that resonated twenty light-years away. He had felt the resonance as hundreds of tach-drives exploded, wiping His presence from the system.
Adam responded to the insult, even though he knew that the Prophet’s Voice had tached away from Earth. The timing meant that His Earth self had left before the impressions of the vaporized cloud could have reached Sol. Earth’s Adam had left not knowing the extent of the resistance, the evil, that had grown around Bakunin.
The Adam from Ecdemi knew what He might face.
And when the Sword tached into orbit around Kropotkin, at nearly the exact location His self from Earth had arrived, Adam was unsurprised when the Sword’s control systems saw hundreds of tach-drive signatures, all on vectors toward His ship. He stood on the bridge, spreading His arms as if to welcome the incoming horde of small tach-ships.
He smiled.
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
“We have a tach-signature,” Toni II said, staring at the unexpected reading on the dropship’s navigational computer. The dropship was a virtual twin of the Khalid, without the damage. She sat next to Toni in the crew cabin, while their three passengers—Mallory, Rebecca, and Shane—sat in the back.
“Close enough to affect navigation?” Toni asked her.
“It will be when the mines—” She exhaled slowly as the display lit up with dozens, if not hundreds, of overloaded drives blowing apart and dumping energy into imaginary space. “Holy—”
“Is it Adam?”
“You mean was it Adam?” Tach-bursts still sent waves across her sensors. “There’s going to be nothing there now but highly charged plasma. We’re in for a hell of a light show in about an hour.”
Toni flipped on the intercom and told the passengers, “We just had sensors pick up an intrusion into the outer system. The tach-mines seem to have destroyed it—but we will have to sit tight for a bit before we fire ours.” She turned to Toni II and asked, “You think our mines will zero in on our drive?”
“They’re supposed to only target things originating from outside the syst—what?”
“What?”
“Another tach-signature, smaller, same type of drive—” She watched dozens of mines go after the newcomer.
“I don’t get it?” Toni II said, “The timing is just too . . .” She trailed off and looked at Toni as if she might be able to dissuade her from the thought that had just occurred to her. But from Toni’s expression, the exact same thought had occurred to her.
“He launched his fleet before he tached insystem.”
The second wave of explosions was still happening when a third tach-signature appeared. Mines swarmed it, but not as many.
“That’s fifty ships,” Toni II said, “At the rate these are consuming mines, he’ll have a clear shot after another four or five ships tach in.”
Toni turned on the intercom. “We’re going now. It might be a little rougher than we expected.”
“Do you think—” Toni II started.
“I’d rather deal with tach-radiation messing with our drive than with one of Adam’s fleet. If we wait for it to clear, they’ll be in.”
Toni II nodded.
The sensors lit up with another of Adam’s martyr ships. Almost every reading on the tach-drive was in the high yellow. All pushed into the red as Toni primed the ship for the jump.
“Here we go!”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The cabin resonated with a massive smashing sound, and suddenly Toni II was thrown against the harness holding her in the chair. The acceleration kept up, trying to throw her out of her seat. Another crunch, as if something was slamming into the skin of the dropship, and the whole thing began vibrating and she had the sense of spinning violently.
The gee-forces were so intense that she could barely lift her head to look up at the main holo. Her eyes widened; all that appeared in the holo was a view of the ground, their ship pointed nose down at the spine of Bakunin’s only continent, descending so close and so steep that she saw nothing of ocean or sky.
Every readout below the main screen, those that still worked, showed dangerous levels of everything, from airspeed to surface stresses. The temperature sensors had maxed out, and the gee-forces tach-drive itself showed a string of zeros, as if the drive had not followed them along for the jump.
We tached into the atmosphere? God help us.
She couldn’t lift her arms, and her vision was going gray from the spinning acceleration.
“We’re going to make it,” came her voice, but not from her. She moved her eyes so she could see the pilot’s chair, and Toni still sat at the controls. Even against the forces trying to shake the dropship apart, she sat upright and still, hands palm down on the console in front of her. Toni kept repeating the words, like a mantra, but to Toni II’s graying vision, she didn’t seem to be doing anything else. She wanted to scream at her to fire the maneuvering jets, fire the contragrav—but even with her dimming vision she saw that that side of the control console was dark. Like the tach-drive, the contragrav and the maneuvering systems had died so thoroughly that they might not even exist anymore.
They were a brick in free fall, and there wasn’t anything they could do.
The shaking was so violent, the acceleration so bad, that Toni II began to hallucinate. The walls of the cabin around her seemed to stretch and ripple as if they had become semiliquid. In front of her, the view of Bakunin approaching them shrank as if the planet was retreating down a tunnel—right before the screen went blank.
The cabin descended into darkness as even the displays that still worked flickered and died. After a half-second, the emergency lights came on, giving the cabin an other-worldly red glow.
The shaking had eased, and Toni II realized that she no longer felt on the verge of passing out. She could move, too. She turned toward Toni and asked, “What happen . . ?”
She trailed off when she realized that Toni seemed completely unaware of her now. She sat upright in the pilot’s chair, eyes rolled up into her head, and didn’t even appear to be breathing. Toni II reached out to her, but stopped before she touched Toni’s shoulder.
Toni still held out her arms to the control console, but now her hands had sunk into the console, as if she was now part of the dropship.
Toni II lowered her hand. Whatever Toni had done, or was doing, it seemed to have gained control of their descent. The last thing they needed was to have her distracted.
She wanted to check on the passengers, but the viewscreens were all dead.
However, now that their flight felt stable, she could undo the crash harness and push herself upright. On wobbly legs she moved back and opened the manual release on the door to the passenger cabin.
She looked in on the red-tinted cabin and was gratified to see Mallory in his seat, conscious and apparently uninjured.
But he was alone.
She looked at him and said, “Shane, Tsoravitch?”
Mallory pointed over at the air lock.
The dropship appeared in the upper atmosphere in a burst of displaced air and radiation. The engine housings boiled white hot, shedding heat shielding like curls of burning paper as it tumbled down toward the ground below. The dropship shuddered and yawed as it plummeted, the air slamming against the asymmetry of the damage, spinning it around its downturned nose.
Boiling, molten fragments of the engines trailed behind it, granting a throbbing red underglow to the plume of white smoke the dying craft dragged through the air. The skin of the ship
glowed now with the friction as it slammed through layers of air in a near vertical descent.
Close to the tip of the nose, a black patch appeared, a dead spot on the glowing skin of the dropship, perfectly circular. The spot grew, a growing circle of black that ignored the friction of the atmosphere, and absorbed the energy without comment. The blackness rolled back over the descending ship, hugging it like a second skin. It pulled itself over the burning engines, collapsing against the remaining structure, enveloping the flames and cutting off the plume of smoke.
The dropship, now little more than a blackness cut out of the sky, stopped yawing, and without a visible means of propulsion, it began to level off its angle of descent. Five kilometers up, and it was no longer plummeting. It flew along the spine of the Diderot Mountains, going five times the speed of sound.
Its presence altered dozens of units of the Proudhon Defense Corporation, some of which had devolved into autonomous commands attempting to hold on to one city or another, others that believed they still owed allegiance to a larger mission. Some of the latter had never received any orders rescinding the blockade, and those scrambled fighters to intercept the alien craft.
The ones who radioed warnings, received a rebroadcast of Colonel Bartholomew’s broadcast and a statement that the ship was on a diplomatic mission to Proudhon.
But some didn’t radio warnings, and some ignored the responses.
Energy weapons cut across the blackness of its skin, absorbed into the alien ship. Missiles fired at it failed to lock on properly, exploding fore or aft, or tumbling down into the mountains.
The one-sided dogfight followed the ship along the spine of the mountains, until it passed by the mountain outpost of Bleek Munitions. As the ship passed over the camouflaged outpost, two shadows separated from the speeding ship, so small that none of the trailing fighters spared them any attention as they plummeted into the side of the mountain.