And he had as many of those as he wanted.
The shadowy conduits that connected his mass to the Wisconsin’s core began pulsing with mass moving inward from the Gamma habitat. Inside the core, the massive interlocking doors that sealed the now nonexistent shaft began crumbling as the darkness consumed them from the inside out. When there was no longer enough strength to bear their weight, the doors folded themselves into Stefan’s darkness, pulled in by swirling black tentacles.
Stefan pulled himself out of the chaos, floating weightless into the loading area. He watched the boiling darkness as he crawled out of it again. Then another Stefan, and another, and another.
From out of every connection to the Gamma habitat, duplicate Stefans floated out of the darkness. Each one exactly the same, each one wearing the same apocalyptic grin.
He was a legion unto himself, and he would have his vengeance.
Stefan invaded the corridors of the core. Some of him went to computer consoles to begin shutting down what was left of the Wisconsin’s brain. Others hunted the people who tried to flee his wrath. They’d shoot, but his bodies were more than what they had been, and the machines that lived within him, that created his body, repaired the damage as soon as it happened. Slugthrowers, shotguns, lasers, it didn’t matter.
And all he needed was for one of him to reach out and touch his victim, and he could tear though his attacker’s body the way he had torn through the Gamma habitat. They would scream sometimes, as their organs were disassembled within their bodies, then their skin would split open and spill out a pool of Stefan’s black essence as they completely dissolved. And given the raw material, and because it amused him, the black pool would reassemble itself into another copy of Stefan.
See, Mallory, I have my own army.
Captain Valentine burst into the control center and screamed, “What the hell are you two still doing here?”
Mallory looked up from the console next to Lieutenant Valentine and said, “There’s an incoming fighter from the Voice. It will be here in—”
“Fuck that!” Captain Valentine said, “We need to move!”
Mallory realized that she wasn’t holding a shotgun anymore. From somewhere, she had picked up a wide-aperture plasma cannon, complete with backpack generator. It would be hard to pick a less safe weapon to use onboard any space-borne environment.
Her sister said, “She’s right. I can’t get the defenses on-line—”
Captain Valentine pushed off the wall with her foot, grabbing Mallory’s arm to stop her forward motion enough to plant her feet on one of the consoles that had died during the course of Stefan’s attack. Her grip was like steel, and her eyes shone with a hard desperation. “We go now, before one of them gets here.”
He wanted to tell her to take her sister and leave him, but they were both right. There was nothing left to be done here. More than half the consoles were dead; they had no outbound communications left, and only spotty data coming from sensors that hadn’t gone off-line. The status of the Wisconsin, from life support to structural integrity, was all now a matter of guesswork.
He allowed her to push off with him in tow, and her sister pulled herself along after them.
In the corridor beyond, the absence of even the small measure of “gravity” from the Wisconsin’s rotation caused the air to be filled with all manner of floating objects: trash, pens, clumps of dirt, a shoe ...
There was no one immediately evident, but Mallory could hear a distant scream, and something like a laugh followed by a surreal echo.
She pointed to an upward curving corridor. “We haven’t launched the Daedalus yet, and I think we can make it around on the Beta side of the core.”
They had pulled themselves along the wall and the ceiling, toward the intersection, when Mallory heard a familiar voice shout his name. The sound was almost a chorus . . .
He turned to look behind him.
The corridor behind them had filled with copies of Stefan, dozens of them, crawling on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Worse, the copies themselves were imperfect. Some had missing or extra limbs; some were missing mouths or noses, or had them in the wrong place. Some had extra joints in their limbs, or had them freakishly elongated.
All the Stefans filled the corridor and pushed themselves forward, crawling over one another, reaching toward him as if he faced a Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell come to life.
A hand grabbed his collar and pulled. “Get behind me, damn it!”
Captain Toni passed by him, pulling herself forward as she pushed him back. She was already aiming the plasma cannon down the corridor.
As soon as he cleared her, she fired. The corridor in front of her flashed a brilliant, painful light, washing away the distorted Stefans. The afterimage in Mallory’s eyes lasted much longer than the burst from her cannon. When he blinked the corridor back into visibility, it was a featureless charred black, the air filled with a uniform gray ash.
“Come on,” she said. “That’s only going to hold him back a moment.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Black Mass
“The most lethal combination is evil and stupidity.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.”
—BLAISE PASCAL
(1623-1662)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Alexander Shane hobbled through the streets of the Beta habitat. The mass of people, most much quicker than he was, had disappeared, gone in their panicked evacuation. He moved slowly and deliberately, partly because of the barely closed wound in his chest, mostly because he had a semiconscious Sergeant Abbas leaning across his shoulders.
He probably should have left her as the staff fled the hospital, but something in him, perhaps the overlay of the priest’s personality on top of his own, prevented him. He hadn’t actually considered leaving her behind, even though he had seen her kill Dr. Pak, owner of one of the minds that formed his own remade personality.
Perhaps knowing what had happened on Salmagundi had just made him too aware of the value of human life. Anyone’s life. And only partly because he suspected that those who died out here would not have their minds given unto posterity.
Then again, maybe between the onslaught of four fresh minds on him, along with a gunshot wound and the destruction of his home planet, he wasn’t thinking particularly clearly.
He wasn’t aware of what the new alarms meant, and barely noticed as the ground beneath him seemed to tip out from under him. Not until everything seemed to fold out from beneath him and both his feet left the ground. The sensation was so unexpected that by the time he realized what was happening, he was out of range of anything he could grab to stop his drift.
Abbas groaned against him, and he gripped on to her as the ground drifted slowly away from them.
The reality of the situation began to sink in. The rotation had stopped. That meant they were probably far beyond evacuation. If he meant to evacuate from this place, the way the alarms and the announcements told him to, he needed to make it to one of the elevators that rose up into the too-blue canopy above him. Now, that goal, only a hundred meters or so from him, might as well have been on Salmagundi.
Hanging on to the unconscious Abbas, he realized that he could push against her mass, casting her doomed body away to direct his motion back at the ground, where he would be able to pull himself along.
Which would gain him what? If he reached that elevator, could he make his way through the people crowding there? It wouldn’t be an easy task, even if he were young and healthy. So he could cast her away for a chance to scrabble through a panicked crowd, and have the act be a shadow over his final few minutes.
Or he could stay with her, floating, with his self-respect intact.
There was something peaceful about floating here, removed from the chaos. Abbas had even stopped groaning.
He lightly brushed the hair from her face. He looked at
her and wondered if it was better to be aware of what was happening as the world ended, or better to sleep through it and never see the end coming.
He looked up and saw a shadow on the windows above, where mirrors shone down a hundred reflections of Kropotkin. It moved slowly, almost gently, above the sky, despite showing the deadly outline that Mallory’s memories told him were of an advanced Caliphate fighter design.
Shane did not know the exact details of where he was, but in the dozens of minds’ worth of knowledge that made him himself, he knew that that fighter was not flying anywhere near where spacecraft were supposed to go.
His instinct was confirmed with a hideous crunch as the fighter above them touched the window holding in the sky.
He held his breath as he watched the shadow stop moving. The sky below it clouded with a strange icy, almost pearlescent sheen. He heard distant sounds of cracking and snapping, as if the giant window was breaking apart.
The strange cloud grew more opaque, more solid, hiding the shadow from view. In seconds, the cloud grew to have a mass and a texture, as if some giant was pushing his finger through the surface of the window, and instead of breaking apart, the window stretched downward—
Shane watched, fascinated.
His trajectory was taking them underneath the bulging formation. He could see clearly that the cloud was no longer a cloud, but a massive crystalline stalactite, growing downward as he watched. The object was strangely familiar, a helical pillar twisting downward, and within semitransparent walls were more helixes, mirroring the form of the pillar. Structures within structures.
The thing the Protean built ...
Shane remembered the Protean’s landing site, and how, when it awoke, it had transformed half the camp around it into a strange set of crystal structures that resembled the helical pillar he floated toward.
He heard Abbas gasp. He looked down at her, and saw she had awakened, and was staring wide-eyed at the formation hanging in the air before them. It had already grown all the way down to the ground of the habitat. At the base, structures were folding into themselves, twisting and turning into something else.
“God save us,” Abbas whispered. “What is that?”
Dr. Pak had bequeathed him enough Arabic to answer her. “A Protean artifact,” he said, “and it is where we’re going.”
She looked down around them, then at him. “You—you surrendered Salmagundi to the Caliphate.”
“Neither exists anymore.”
“Where are we?”
“A space station in orbit around a moon of Bakunin.”
She shook her head and looked down. At first he thought she reacted to their height above the nominal floor of the habitat, but she raised a hand covered in blood. “I—I’m bleeding.”
He reached down and put pressure on her wound, which had pulled open at some point during their evacuation. It was nearly impossible to do, suspended in zero-gee, he ended up having to hug her, and with his upper body strength it wasn’t near enough. She started coughing.
“I remember,” she said quietly. “I was shot...”
They floated, a trail of ruby red spheres marking their slow drift toward the helix. As they closed, an opening seemed to appear within the ridges of the pillar. Shane couldn’t tell if the walls twisted apart in front of them, or if it was simply some trick of perspective hiding the opening until they were right in front of it.
“I was trying to save them all,” Abbas said. “God knows, that is all I tried to do.”
“Save your strength,” Shane told her, as they drifted into the pillar through the sudden opening. In moments, he lost sight of the outside, and the world became an endless series of crystalline facets without a definitive up or down.
They gently bumped up against a wall, or floor, or ceiling, that had a slight curve. The surface was disconcertingly warm, and vibrated a bit, almost as if something moved within it.
“Save it for what? We have fallen into the Adversary’s clutches.” She coughed and a cloud of red drops englobed their heads. “Adam will have his way with us soon enough.”
“This is not Adam’s domain,” came a voice from the crystal chamber around them. The voice spoke English and was eerily familiar to Shane, though he had never met the speaker. He looked up and saw a shadow moving in the translucent walls, it drew closer, folding inside itself and back until it was no longer a shadow, but a person emerging though some hidden pathway.
Rebecca Tsoravitch?
A rather unremarkable red-haired woman floated in the chamber with them now. She looked at Abbas and said softly, “You are dying.”
Abbas stared at Tsoravitch. “Who are you?”
“My name is Rebecca, and I represent Proteus.”
“Proteus?”
“And we can save you, if you wish it.”
Abbas shook her head, “I will not deny my faith.”
“We are not Adam, and we do not ask for worship.”
“What do you ask for?” Shane said.
“Nothing,” Tsoravitch said. “But should we heal you, you become one of us, with all that implies. If you ask for our aid, you are asking to join us.”
Abbas shook her head. “No.” She closed her eyes and Shane stared accusingly at Tsoravitch.
“How can you allow this woman to die?”
“Because that is her wish.”
Abbas’ breathing became shallow and Shane pressed against the wound, but he couldn’t do anything. She was already in shock, and he felt her heart shudder and stop. He tried to revive her, but there was nothing he could do.
He looked at Rebecca, unaccountably angry for a woman he barely knew. She quietly said, “If we are to oppose Adam, we must be different from him.”
He took his hands off of Abbas’ wound and stared at them. They were slick with blood.
“She refused us,” Rebecca said, her voice defensive.
“She didn’t know what she was saying,” Shane said, staring at the bloody mess in his hands. “She wasn’t aware—”
“She was lucid,” Rebecca’s voice sounded sad, and Shane found himself reliving memories of her from four different perspectives: Pak seeing her as brilliant but scatterbrained, Dörner’s quiet disdain for someone nominally her peer but without a doctorate, Brody’s vicarious appreciation of her youth and enthusiasm, Mallory’s unease over her innocence and her closeness to Mosasa.
He knew that this was not the same woman his other selves knew aboard the Eclipse, and yet, she was.
“If she hadn’t woken up?” he asked.
“If she had not been able to express her refusal, we could have saved her. Reluctantly.”
“Reluctantly?”
“We must allow consent to the Change. Denying someone consent is a grave transgression.”
“Graver than letting someone die?”
“What Proteus does, what Adam does, is more transformative than death. When you’re touched by the Change, willingly or unwillingly, you cease being unique. To become us—”
“The pilgrim must provide consent, devotion, and information,” Shane said.
“You know of us?”
Shane chuckled. “In my head right now are several years’ worth of study on the Protean cult, from three different people. The point, the preservation of your culture, is the archival of all the souls who give themselves to you.” He smiled grimly. “Did you ever make it down to Salmagundi?”
She hesitated a moment before she said, “Yes.”
“Then you know that I have as good an idea of the implications of that as anyone.” He rubbed his temples and thought about the four people he had taken into the Hall of Minds. Mostly he thought about Dr. Leon Pak, who had been so damaged by his involuntary ascension into the Hall, and who now lived only as a piece of Alexander Shane. “And I know what you mean by consent.”
“I am sorry about your friend.”
Shane shook his head. “She was not my friend. Far from it. She killed Dr. Pak.”
“What?
How do you—”
“She was a Caliphate sergeant who found herself in command. She tried to hold the chaos together, but she was out of her depth. I was. We all were.”
“Who are you?”
“The name Alexander Shane would mean nothing to you. Without Salmagundi, it probably means nothing, period. But I have received the minds of those you do know, Pak, Brody, Dörner, Mallory.”
Rebecca stared at him.
“I see I’ve surprised you.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Would it surprise you that being a pilgrim of Proteus would be the closest I can come to fulfilling my duty to my posterity without the Hall of Minds?”
“You wish to accept the Change, and all it implies?”
“If you answer me one question.”
“What is it?”
“What exactly have the Dolbrians left behind on Bakunin?”
Stefan threw himselves against his enemy.
He created copies of copies, building the flesh of himself from whatever matter drifted into the path of his anger. He paid little attention to the finer aspects of these bodies. They were simply mechanical tools to bring his mass in contact with the hated one. They crawled through the corridors of the core, filling them to the point that their limbs tangled, and the weaker of his bodies found themselves crushed against bulkheads even in zero-gee.
It didn’t matter. Each of his bodies was a personification of his white-hot rage, and nothing would halt its advance, not even other instances of himself.
He multiplied them, hundreds, thousands. The bitch with the plasma cannon could only hold him off for so long. Her resources were finite, his weren’t. As she vaporized one wave of his anger, he created twice as many of himself behind it. Each time, he sank his anger deeper into his creations, growing their teeth into fangs, fingers into talons, giving spikes to the bone that penetrated through the flesh.