His legion backed them to an air lock to a dock that had been long since evacuated. The narrow corridor they were trapped inside met the main corridor in a T, and the host that was himself fed the main corridor from both directions, pushing itself toward them. He scrambled over himself, the stronger of his avenging personas crawling over and through the weaker. They moved through a haze of their own skin and blood.
One pulse of light, and his advance was erased in a haze of gray ash, but there were more than enough bodies to spill in and fill the gap. Stefan, as distributed as his mind had become, focused all his instances of himself on his enemy’s narrow corridor, a corridor filled with choking gray ash and covered by a thin black tarlike char. For several minutes he pushed wave after wave of himself against them, reveling in the uselessness of the bitch’s plasma cannon. But unease came from another source.
He felt something, a growing sensation akin to having a leg go numb. At first he focused himself only on his mission, but the sensation persisted and spread until he could no longer ignore it. Furious at being diverted from his game, he turned his attention to the strange numbness within himself.
And what he saw terrified him.
We’re dead, we are so fucking dead. The words kept tumbling through Toni’s head, almost disconnected from her body. She braced on one knee, forward foot hooked in a support strap on what had once been a wall, rear foot pressing hard against a floor-to-ceiling light fixture. Her position on the wall was about five meters in front of Mallory and her sister. She held the plasma cannon facing down toward the main corridor, her aim rock solid on the center of their corridor. The aperture was focused just tightly enough for the cone to wash the walls just three meters ahead of the intersection.
That intersection had become a pretty good approximation of hell. In the moment before the next wave, every surface by the intersection steamed. The only light came from the undamaged corridor behind her, and the exposed parts of the bulkhead that glowed red. The air was a noxious combination of burning chemicals and burning flesh. It made her gag and made her eyes water.
Then the attack came again. The demonic things erupted out of the corridor, pulling themselves into Toni’s line of fire. Each round, the things seemed less human. They scuttled crablike along the walls and each other, unconcerned when their skin burned from contact with the superheated bulkheads, or their talons gouged out the flesh of their slower companions. They moved fast, filling the corridor with grasping claws and teeth—
And Toni closed her eyes and fired a pulse from the cannon. She opened her eyes, her vision still intact, and glanced at the readout on the cannon’s instrumentation.
The energy level had fallen deep into the red. One more shot, maybe two.
So fucking dead.
She heard the scramble of claws, and the sizzle of flesh touching red-hot metal, and prepared for her last shot—
And the entire corridor wrenched itself to the left. She barely held on to the cannon, but she lost her anchor and had to scramble with her feet to keep from losing her position on the wall. She awkwardly brought the barrel to bear against the still unseen horde and screamed to Mallory, her sister, and any God that was listening, “What the hell was that?”
Stefan looked outward with his new, uncertain senses. He tried to see what was happening to the Gamma habitat and the larger portion of himself, but he was blind to that part of him. The best he could do was to peer outward, down the elevator shaft his essence had used to enter the core.
As he watched, the Wisconsin suffered a wrenching vibration. The shock was not only felt in the structure of the space platform, Stefan felt it in himself, as if someone was twisting a knife in a still too-human gut. Another shock followed, and another, and Stefan’s numbness flared into the fiery pain of an amputated limb.
For a moment he looked out and saw nothing, just a blackness where the Gamma habitat was. Then, as a thousand invisible hammers tried to smash apart the Wisconsin, the shadows fell away from his view. He saw into space—a black sky dominated by Schwitzguebel’s horizon and the blue crescent of Bakunin hanging in the sky. At first he didn’t understand what had happened. A whole third of the Wisconsin was missing. He should see into the Gamma habitat—
Then the mirror blocking his view tumbled away, taking its view of Schwitzguebel and Bakunin with it.
A thousand other mirrors tumbled free between the core and the Gamma habitat. The two-kilometer-long cylinder hung before him, behind a mass of floating wreckage, torn mirrors glittering like stars in the midst of twisted girders and fragments of pipe. The habitat itself was black, the great windows into the habitat opaque with Stefan’s presence within.
But something else clung to the surface. Along every support that held the habitat to the core, Stefan could see a crystalline deposit, almost like frost, coating the scaffolding that held the Wisconsin together. And the crystals were venting gases, each one the root of a growing, sterile cloud.
He tried to reach out to himself within the habitat, but it was like trying to touch the moon below him. And, unlike Adam, he had not been given a century to become confident in his own omnipotence.
More shocks tore at the Wisconsin, and the last pieces of scaffolding holding the Gamma habitat in place fell away. Stefan watched it drift, driven by the gas venting from the alien crystal frost growing on its surface.
He watched it tumble with agonizing slowness, down toward the moon’s surface, trailing a cloud of ice crystals.
When he felt the numbness extend into what was left of himself in the core of the Wisconsin, he did not ignore it.
Around them, the Wisconsin tried to shake itself apart. Toni had to let go of the wall, because floating in the center of the corridor now was a more stable firing platform.
Whatever was happening, it was violent enough to threaten the structural integrity of the Wisconsin itself. She found herself hoping for a hull breach. Dying in a vacuum seemed preferable to being torn apart by a horde of mutant Stefans.
Whatever was shaking the Wisconsin apart, it was enough to give their attackers pause. The demon horde held back.
The bad thing about it was that she had more time to think, beyond the mechanical process of firing again and again. She licked her lips and called back, “Is there still power to the air lock?”
“Yes,” Mallory said. “What are you—”
She heard the air lock door to the empty docking bay open as the whole station groaned. He sister called out, “You think we can make it?”
Toni pressed her lips into a hard grin. “Your guess is as good as mine.” You know what I’m thinking.
She heard them back into the air lock as another, weaker shock wrenched the corridor around her. She stretched with her foot and kicked back toward the air lock. “Aim for the air lock across the axis. It’s the most straightforward for you to get to. Kick out as hard as you can. At most, you have half a minute before you black out.” She stopped next to the controls and looked back at Mallory and her sister. She saw her own face drain of color as her other self realized what she was doing.
“Wait—”
The scrambling noises resumed, and Toni saw the Stefan things reaching around again to pull themselves into her corridor. Toni hit the controls to shut the air lock. “Sorry, I got to keep this asshole away from this door.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lake of Fire
“Nothing is inconceivable to a doomed man.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(1844-1900)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Lieutenant Valentine pushed him into the air lock, and before he could react, the door was closing on them. The other Valentine faced the door and said, “No.”
Mallory pulled her shoulder. “She’s giving us this chance. Breathe.”
She nodded and started sucking in
deep breaths along with him, oxygenating the blood as much as possible. Holding their breath would end up doing severe damage to their lungs, and the pressure differential between their body and the vacuum outside would kill them a lot sooner than the lack of oxygen.
Survival tips drilled into everyone who left a gravity well, though Mallory didn’t know anyone for whom the knowledge made a difference.
She reached down and grabbed a strut on the floor that allowed her to crouch down and squat against the floor even in the zero-gee. Their legs would be the only propulsion they had. He mirrored her squat, then let go of the wall so he could break the cover on the emergency air lock release, and looked across at Valentine and held out his hand. She took his and nodded, not wasting the air to say she was ready.
He pulled the release and, above them, the outside door thrust itself open in a rush of air that went suddenly silent, a silence that became agonizing as each throb of his pulse plunged daggers into his ears. They crouched, and together pushed off.
The core was a massive cylinder with the docking space on the inner surface. The Wisconsin’s docks were mostly empty now, the inside covered with air locks and docking gantries. Directly across the center of the core, a twin of their air lock hung before them. Less than seventy-five meters, but it could have been another planet.
His eyes burned, and began to ache. His skin began to itch and burn as all the moisture sublimated from his skin. His tongue went dry and numb in his mouth, and it felt as if someone painfully twisted his testicles.
So slow. They were drifting toward the air lock so slowly. Nearly ten seconds and they hadn’t reached it yet.
He looked across at Valentine, and the only sign she still lived was the fact she blinked, once.
His gut was cramping now, his bowels trying to equalize the pressure. His chest was on fire as the vacuum tried to freeze-dry the tissues in his lungs. Every part of his body ached, and he felt his consciousness slipping.
Not now. Please, God, not now.
They were almost at the new air lock. His vision was horribly blurred, and he squinted to see the emergency entry lever.
Then they struck the surface. His reaction was sluggish, and he hit face first, smashing his nose and mouth into the air lock window. He felt the bones of his nose give way and a tooth come free, almost as if he was a bystander. He barely felt it, even as the blood burned frozen patches on his skin and mouth.
It was all he could do to keep his grip on Valentine, though his muscles were so cramped now that he doubted he could have let her go.
He pulled his brain together. His implants burned, dumping whatever they had left into his ragged metabolism. They were probably the only reason he was still conscious. He belatedly realized that they had reached the opposite air lock, and now they were drifting away.
He reached for the emergency lever and fumbled for it with a hand that felt as if it was wrapped in a mitten, a mitten that was on fire. For nearly half a second he pulled without any effect. The disorientation was great enough that he just kept pulling, without realizing he needed to anchor himself to have the leverage.
But he kept pulling and the effort dragged him and the unconscious Valentine back in contact with the door. Once he could no longer move forward, the lever moved backward, and the door slid open in front of him. They floated into the air lock.
Thank God. Thank God. Thank God . . .
But he was still losing consciousness. His vacuum-numbed mind took way to long to start looking for the control to close and pressurize the air lock. He was almost blind now; his vision blurred, blood red, and focused on a tiny window in front of his face. When he found the control, he couldn’t even be sure that it was the right one.
With a last prayer, he hit the controls and blacked out.
The air lock door shut behind her and she leveled the plasma cannon at the onrushing horde. Her aim was not quite steady because of a lack of anchorage, so she opened the aperture on full, and waited for the monstrous rush to come a full second closer to her.
Hey, whatever happens, there’s still another me running around.
For a while at least.
She closed her eyes and fired the last burst from the plasma cannon. The point of contact of the plasma and the wall was too close to her. She felt superheated air sear her body, pressing her against the air lock door. Somehow, despite the agony of having her clothes melt into her flesh, she managed to hold her breath and not scream. Her body curled into a fetal position, the pain shattering her consciousness, destroying most of her coherent thoughts.
She maintained enough will and muscular control to pull the trigger again.
Nothing happened.
She opened her eyes, and her vision was blurred from pain. Her breath came in short gasps, the air still so hot it burned her mouth and lungs, but nothing like the agony that gripped what was left of her skin.
The corridor was dark now except for the red glow from the metal bulkheads. She floated, turning slightly so the corridor spun around her. The sounds of Stefan’s demons were muffled through her damaged ears. She tried to yell at them to come, finish her off, but all that came out was a horrible groan that tasted of blood.
She saw them, shadows emerging from the edges into the barely-lit corridor, the red light carving inhuman highlights on the otherwise shadowed forms. They slowed as they approached, no longer scrambling at her, as if they knew the delay was more painful than anything they could do once they reached her.
Do it, you goddamned bastard, DO IT!
Her attempts to scream left a haze of saliva and blood droplets in front of her.
But they left her floating as the light in the corridor slowly increased. A point in the floor, or the wall, or the ceiling, appeared to open, allowing in a soft yellow light. The spot grew, the light seeming to push back Stefan’s creatures. A faceted, translucent form unfolded from the light. The object grew as if it emerged from another dimension where the normal rules of geometry didn’t apply. Even through her blurred vision, the repeating facets twisted around themselves to the point where it seemed that there was much more inside the crystal than its volume could contain.
The demons seemed afraid of it, and tried to retreat back where they had come. But they stopped because a similar light was emerging from behind them.
The light seemed to reach out from the crystal, to touch the things that used to be Stefan Stavros, and the demons dissolved into the light. The monsters screamed as their bodies vanished around them, as if in a slow-motion replay of their deaths before the plasma cannon.
Toni closed her eyes. Stefan wasn’t going to end her suffering. She tried to shut herself down, remove herself from her body, from her life, by will alone. She found a dark place inside herself, as far away from the pain as she could manage, and huddled there, whimpering.
“Captain Valentine? Can you hear me?”
She was delirious; she couldn’t be hearing the voice she was hearing.
“Please, can you still hear me?”
She forced herself to open her eyes. Around her the world had changed, the walls were faceted crystal slabs that glowed softly. And floating in front of her was Alexander Shane, with a deep expression of concern furrowing his tattooed brow.
Of all people? You? How . . . random...
“If you understand, can you nod?”
She did so, weakly, wondering if she was conversing with a pain-induced hallucination.
“I want to help you, but you have to consent.”
She nodded.
“I’m with Proteus now. They have the capability to save your consciousness, but only if you join them.”
“P-roteus?” her lips cracked and bled as she forced the word out.
Shane nodded. “You would become one of them, and there’s no going back.”
She uncurled her burned hands from the trigger of the plasma cannon and reached out to him. She touched the white topcoat he wore, smearing red-tinted fluid across the front. She felt him
there, through the pain, and the touch convinced her she wasn’t hallucinating.
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered through bleeding lips.
Stefan watched the Gamma habitat implode in a flash of light upon the lunar horizon, and then all his eyes that saw outside went blind. He vainly tried to finish his one purpose here, the destruction of Mallory, the root of all the ill that had befallen him, but his attack dissolved into this alien light, a light that came like a cruel abrasive wind, tearing apart the pieces of his extended self.
He screamed for Adam’s help, but his new God didn’t answer. He didn’t hear, or He had better things to do.
The alien presence pushed aside his attempts to force his mass past it. The coherent mass of nanomachines that he controlled, that could force itself through steel and flesh in equal measure, broke upon their walls like a feeble breath against the side of a mountain.
He tried to escape, to vent himself out some breach in the Wisconsin’s skin, and flee into space to regroup and rebuild himself. But every avenue he tried, every bulkhead, every door, every tiny route to the outside was blocked to his passage. The others had wrapped themselves completely around the vessel, trapping him inside.
His identity coalesced as they sliced away more and more of him. His body reduced itself until he was nothing more than a single malformed fleshy golem, pulling itself along one of the many corridors paralleling the dock in the inner core. The thing that was what remained of Stefan Stavros couldn’t think properly anymore, too many pieces of his own consciousness had been lost with the parts of himself they had killed. He had not been quick enough to pull all of his mind back into himself.
He had also been sloppy in the creation of this one remaining body. Its legs were twisted and floated useless behind it, one arm was far longer than the other, and it stared at the corridor before it with a single off-center eye. What remained of its broken mind was just enough to know what it had lost.