Haven.
Haven and Dakota, the twin planets orbiting Tau Ceti, were the first home of Nickolai, Kugara, and Angel’s nonhuman kin after their exile from Earth. Seeing the planet, after the ancient emblem of the Terran Council, made him uncomfortably certain who it was that sat in the center of the observation dome in front of him.
Even though the tiger staring up at Haven was smaller than Nickolai, and certainly less powerfully built than the ghostly white warrior of his last vision, Nickolai knew that he looked at St. Rajasthan himself.
St. Rajasthan turned to look at Nickolai and said, “Who is there?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Last Supper
“The only things that do not change are those things that have ceased to exist.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS
(121-180)
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Colonel Bartholomew sat Mallory at a massive array of communications gear that had been set up in an impromptu command center under the heart of Proudhon. Around him, dozens of other people were in contact with the parts of the PDC that still remained under centralized control. Those parts were re-coalescing as Mallory talked to colonels, captains, and lieutenants who had been cut off from their command structure by the failed coup.
It seemed that rumors of what was happening off-planet had propagated far enough that just seeing Mallory’s face and a retransmission of the pope’s last broadcast from Earth, gave Colonel Bartholomew enough gravitas to knit the chain of command back together.
One place he hadn’t been able to communicate with had been the temporary HQ of the Western Division Command—the man there was a General Lubikov. If he were there, he would be one of the highest-ranking operational commanders surviving.
The man had also taken his command at an outpost in the Diderot Mountains, right where he had dropped off Shane and Tsoravitch. That was why he kept trying the connection periodically. The general was on top of the Dolbrian ruins that his people were trying to reach.
He was shocked when he finally got a response to his transmission.
A young man’s face filled the holo in front of him, shouting, “—request you send assistance. We have suffered an attack by unidentified hostiles. Enemy has entered the chambers under the—”
Colonel Bartholomew pushed in front of Mallory, “Can you describe the enemy? How many? How were they armed?”
“There were two of them.”
“Two?”
“A man and a woman.”
Shane and Tsoravitch.
The colonel sounded incredulous, “How could two—”
He was interrupted when the view in the holo shook, and the man in the image turned around. Then the holo went dark. There was an upsurge in chatter around Mallory, as other communications channels began lighting up. “What happened?” he asked as he tried to get the channel to Bleek Munitions reestablished.
One of the other men in the communication center said, “We have reports of seismic activity centered on the Diderot Range, east of Godwin.”
Seismic activity? Bakunin is supposed to be tectonically dead.
Several others began repeating the report; someone mentioned “subsurface explosions.”
Mallory prayed for everyone inside the mountain.
“Flynn?”
“Yeah, Gram?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“It’s dark.”
“Can you move?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Cave in, I think.”
“Christ on a crutch, these caverns hold up for umpteen million years, then fall down on us?”
“Bomb, I think.”
“Shit. You think Parvi . . .”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Shane and the redhead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck! What do you know?”
“It’s dark, we can’t move, and we’re probably going to die.”
“Hello?” Kugara yelled. “Is anyone out there?”
No one responded.
She lay on her back, staring at a fragment of the galaxy that had fallen from the ceiling. It was huge, about ten meters across, and probably weighed several hundred tons. Somehow, it hadn’t completely sandwiched itself against the floor, and the space underneath was almost enough for Kugara to stand upright—if her left leg hadn’t been pinned under another massive chunk of rock.
Of course, the rock falls on my uninjured leg.
She tried pushing the rock, but there was no way she could move it. Not only was it over two meters tall, it was holding up the fragment of the Galaxy that still glowed down on her. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she expected, probably because there wasn’t any more leg below where her thigh disappeared under the stone.
“Hello?” she called out again. “Brody? Dörner? Nickolai?”
She lay back down because she was out of breath. She felt chilled and clammy, and slightly faint. She was probably in shock. She should stop trying to pull her leg free. The pressure from the rock was the only thing keeping her from bleeding out.
Everybody dies, she thought.
“Where are you, Nickolai?” she whispered. “I wanted to face this with you.”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 7.2 AU from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Adam had learned well. As His chosen and His embodied host tached into the system around Bakunin, He could read the signs and understand what had happened. The awareness bequeathed by the Race bore upon Him with an unnatural clarity, the tactical defeat of His predecessor selves cut through His hubris. The presence of the Proteans on Bakunin’s moon had enlightened Him.
His broadly-knit plans, as wide as all of human space, were incomplete. His model of human society was imperfect, it did not account for the Proteans, and when He fed the heretic culture into His model of the universe, when He took the uncharacteristically humble step of reassessing His view of the universe in light of their presence, He saw the foundation of His world change.
And He saw what they must do, how they must strategize.
The battle here was a feint, a way to draw His attention, to anger Him and distract Him from what He must do. And Adam’s cold fury, duplicated thirty-three times across the surviving ships of the Sword, was all the worse for the fact that He had almost allowed their defiance to stand. He had never conceived that some of those He brought into His Glory would be, in fact, agents of the Protean heresy. He understood now that the agents of Proteus must be concealing themselves in the mass of humanity He had yet to confront, yet to offer salvation.
But, now that He understood this, He could combat it. Thirteen of his ships tached back out of the system, each traveling to part of Adam’s far-flung host to warn Himself of the Protean menace.
He would purge such heresy from His body the way He would purge it from this system.
His remaining ships tached into the system, toward Bakunin.
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
On the surface of the moon, Schwitzguebel, a trio of Adam’s ships tached very near the surface, close to the spine where the Proteans launched their mines into the outer system. The arrival was sudden, and close, and in the fraction of a second it took for the Protean guards to raise a shield around their outpost, Adam was already within it.
Outside the defensive hemisphere around the spine, the universe faded, the light from outside red-shifted and slow. Within its confines, the trio of warships floated on their contragravs like deadly insects trapped in amber.
Weapons formed along the spine, firing bursts of plasma at the invaders, but before even the first shot connected, the ships disintegrated, blowing apart into a uniform cloud that consisted of little more than matter and Adam’s will. The cloud settled to the lunar s
urface, and began incorporating mass into itself.
The Proteans tried to extend their reach as well, but they had spent too much of their energy and attention on the organization of the spine, the shield, the defensive weaponry. When they pushed outward, through the mass of the moon, they found Adam surrounding them.
The ground around the spine glowed, and began shooting gossamer threads, injecting itself into the mechanism. Many were severed or absorbed by black tentacles reaching out of the spine itself, but many got through. The threads wove themselves around the spine, sinking in, constricting the existence of the occupants.
The shield fell, and the spine began launching mines again.
This time, however, it fired on different targets.
Suddenly the Protean defenders, arrogant in their opposition to the one true God, found themselves and their vessels confronted by their own creation. Their ships would be consumed in tachyon plasma, and one of the first to vanish in Adam’s purifying fire was the Wisconsin.
Now that this Adam had a villain to focus His anger upon, this Adam broadcast His ultimatum to Bakunin.
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
It took a long time to convince the command of the planetary defenses to rejoin the centralized PSDC control. The personnel in charge of the orbital shield enforcing the blockade of the planet had been purposely segregated from the normal chain of command of the Proudhon Defense Corporation; their organizational tree branched off at a much higher level than Colonel Bartholomew had started. They were intelligence and covert ops people who were naturally suspicious of the chaos in the military.
However, the fact that they had coalesced about ninety percent of the ground forces under Bartholomew’s command, made their argument more convincing. More convincing than Mallory’s presence. And the staff with those duties also understood the situation beyond Bakunin’s immediate orbit.
And that situation was deteriorating.
The remaining defending ships were facing off with new forces from Adam, and they weren’t doing well. The defending Protean ships were exploding in bursts of tach-radiation even before engaging with Adam’s forces.
One of the Valentines said quietly, “He must have attacked Schwitzguebel...”
Mallory nodded. Adam had turned their defensive apparatus, such as it was, against them. He turned to Colonel Bartholomew and said, “We’re going to have to defend ourselves here, on the ground.”
The colonel shook his head. “How do you fight that?”
“Put as much energy in as small a space as possible,” Mallory said. “Dump everything you have into the target from as far away as possible. He only has a few vehicles for the attack, we can orient the orbital linacs at them as they approach, and AM-bomb whatever lands.”
Interference rippled across all the displays in the comm center, each one suddenly showing Adam’s face.
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Reject the Protean evil that denies me, or face their fate. Worship me and you will partake of my paradise forever.”
Behind Mallory, one of the Valentines said, “Oh, fuck.”
Next to her, Toni said, “Oh, fuck.” Toni II watched Adam’s transmission with her and wondered why she was surprised. They knew this was coming, and they knew what long odds they were facing. When he mentioned the Proteans by name, she reached out and grabbed Toni’s hand.
“If I go back to our dropship,” Toni said, “I can help organize defense of the city.”
The colonel turned away from Mallory and looked at the two of them. “You?”
One of the soldiers in the comm center with them said, “Sir, while the ship appears to be a Caliphate design, heavily damaged, it was not showing a normal profile or maneuvering capability in flight.”
The colonel nodded and looked at Toni. “It’s a Protean artifact, isn’t it?”
“It is now,” Toni said.
The colonel turned to the soldier who had spoken. “Sergeant, make sure they get back to their dropship.”
The sergeant said, “Yes, sir!” Then he pivoted to face her and Toni. “Follow me,” he said, leading them back out of the comm center.
As they walked out into the maze of corridors under Proudhon, Toni II asked her other self, “You think you can defend against that?”
“We have a chance, don’t we?” she whispered. “A little time and I think we can seed a shield that might keep him out. For a bit.”
For a bit.
They walked on in silence for a long time. Toni II began to realize that their borrowed time was almost up. With Adam closing in on them, they probably wouldn’t last the day. Even Toni, her Protean self, probably wouldn’t escape Adam’s wrath. Toni didn’t even have the illusion of choice, having embraced Proteus; Adam had already marked her for destruction.
Toni’s thoughts must have been traveling in the same direction. She said, “You know, if it ends up being death or joining him—”
“No, Toni.”
“If you can survive by—”
She grabbed Toni’s hand and said, “No.”
Not without you.
They followed the sergeant back up through the nearly empty concourse, and to the landing zone. They pushed through a small knot of solders to go back outside to board their ship.
It wasn’t there.
“What?” Toni II said, running up to the edge of where their dropship had landed. The ship was gone, as well as most of the landing surface itself. Instead, she stood at the edge of a ragged crater twice as wide as their ship’s footprint.
Toni whipped around to their escort and said, “What happened to our ship?”
“An AM grenade,” came the response. The voice came from farther behind them than she had expected. Toni II turned, just in time to see the flash from a plasma weapon.
Behind him, Colonel Bartholomew shouted orders, and soldiers ran from the comm center to carry out various tasks to shore up the defense of Proudhon. Mallory called back to the colonel, “We only have a limited time to get the orbital linacs on-line—”
“Just a moment, Father Mallory. We’ll handle everything.”
Mallory frowned. The colonel was ordering his men out of the comm center, but he hadn’t started giving commands to the PDC forces they had just managed to knit back into a single force. Most of the planet was waiting for word back from this room.
Something wasn’t right.
He started organizing open channels on the console before him, so they could give global commands to the entire planet. As he did so, he heard the colonel tell him, “Father Mallory, can you step over here a moment?”
Mallory pushed his chair around to face the colonel. There were only four people left in the communications center, and the other three were all looking at him.
“What is it, Colonel Bartholomew?”
“I want to thank you. After the disastrous assassinations that wiped out a good fraction of the PSDC command, you were able to help me knit the whole back together. Without that . . .” He gave Mallory an unnerving smile.
“Thank you, but I think that army is waiting for some direction from the command here.”
“I know. But we need to come to an understanding first.”
“What?”
The colonel nodded slightly and the two remaining solders got up and grabbed Mallory’s arms, lifting him up from his seat.
“I want you with me,” the colonel said.
For some reason, it didn’t surprise Mallory. He shook his head. “You mean you want me with Adam.”
“You know you’re fighting a doomed battle. Even with the Proteans, it’s hopeless. He is much too powerful.”
“He is evil.”
“Is worship so high a price for what He grants us?” The colonel smiled at him. “Besides, you know your opposition to Him ends here, one way or another.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Beatification
“God sp
eaks to fewer ears than hear him.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“You cannot know God as He is if you cannot know the world as it is.”
—ST. RAJASTHAN
(2075-2118)
Date: Unknown Unknown
Nickolai took a step back in surprise. No one in his prior visions had seen him. Of course, in both cases, the participants had been otherwise occupied.
St. Rajasthan narrowed his eyes, and Nickolai noticed that the left one was cloudy with a dilated pupil. The fur around the saint’s muzzle was thinned with age, and he was missing his left canine tooth. The hand he gestured with was gnarled with the beginnings of arthritis. All those details were overlooked in the accounts of him Nickolai was familiar with.
“You smell odd, son. Do I know you?”
“No, you don’t.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
“No!” The words stung Nickolai, even though he knew that St. Rajasthan had stayed aboard the colony ship, like Moses, never stepping foot in the Promised Land. There were apocryphal scriptures that told of unbelievers who also remained behind to murder him.
That couldn’t be his purpose here.
“Your denial is too sharp. Why else would you stay behind on a dead ship? But sit down, my friend. We will pretend you speak truth.” He patted the bench next to him, and Nickolai walked around and eased himself down next to the founder of the only faith he had ever known.
“You are one of the Atavists, aren’t you?” he asked Nickolai.
“I don’t know what you mean.”