Messiah

  Stray missile, she thought, missed us . . .

  She pushed herself up from their guide, who raised his head and spat out a mouthful of dirt. “Shit!”

  Parvi called out from behind her, “Everyone all right?”

  A chorus of assents followed, muffled in Kugara’s shell-shocked ears. She didn’t look at the others. She was more focused on the rubble around them.

  From out of nowhere it seemed, a half-dozen machines had risen from spots in the rubble. Lean, ovoid things about a meter across, hovering on small contragravs, rotary cannons dangling beneath their chassis. The hunter-killer drones, jarred awake by the explosion. The only reason they hadn’t swarmed them already was because they stood in the preprogrammed safe zone.

  She stared at one, and it stared back with a single blank mechanical eye. It was the first good look she had at one of these things. They weren’t military spec, which she probably could have guessed from the improvised nature of the Wilson militia. These were commercial security drones, designed for patrolling warehouses, not war zones.

  It didn’t make them less intimidating.

  “That was close,” she whispered.

  In front of her, their guide repeated, “Shit!”

  She turned to him and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No. We’re screwed!”

  “What is it?” Parvi asked from behind her.

  “Just look!” He waved ahead of them, where the missile had landed.

  In front of them was a new crater blown clear of most rubble. Kugara saw the twitching remains of two more of the HK drones on the edge of the crater, one only a few meters away.

  “What’s the matter?” Parvi asked

  “That blast removed all the landmarks,” he told them, “I don’t know where the safe corridor is anymore.”

  “The blast should have cleared the mines,” Parvi said.

  “Look around,” Kugara said.

  After a moment, she said, “Oh.”

  “We have to go back—”

  Kugara grabbed his shoulder before he walked past her. “Not so fast.”

  “What do you want?” he said, “There are six of those things waiting for anything to take a step off the path.”

  “We got a shotgun,” she said.

  “You start firing that thing, they’ll swarm you.”

  “Even in the safe zone?”

  “It’d be a little useless if they allowed a hostile to randomly stroll into a safe area and start shooting.”

  Kugara shook her head and looked at the floating death machines.

  Parvi asked her, “Do you have an idea?”

  “They won’t shoot each other,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” the guard asked.

  Kugara didn’t pay attention to him. “They’re cheap commercial units, and I see two or three manufacturers. They must be relying on transponders to ID each other . . .”

  “What are you thinking?” Parvi asked as Kugara handed her the shotgun.

  Kugara smiled grimly at her. “I’m going to get us a transponder.” She bent down and picked up a large chunk of broken ferrocrete and hefted it in her hand. She looked at their guide and asked, “Before I go any farther, I don’t suppose they issued you with an ID chip that would get you past these things?”

  “No. The supply crew gets them, but not the guards, in case the prisoners—what are you doing?”

  Kugara chucked the chunk of ferrocrete in a lazy underhand arc in front of the nearest robot. “I’m testing a theory,” she whispered. The robot didn’t fire on the rock, or her. Whatever threat algorithms it possessed didn’t parse the rock as a problem. It did, however, follow the moving object with its sensors and track it with its cannon.

  “Hopefully, that’s good enough.” She turned back to their guide, who stared after her throw as if he expected the rock to explode. “Okay, now tell me, if we were going straight, how much farther were we going to go before we turned again?”

  “What?”

  “How much farther—”

  “I told you, the landmarks are gone!”

  “Guess, damn it, before another stray missile lands on us!”

  He shook his head and said, “Four, five meters?”

  Kugara stepped out over the edge of the crater, in a straight line. She turned back to the others behind her. “I’m going to need a distraction. When I call out, all of you throw chunks of rubble past the machines, that way—” she pointed away from the crater.

  Parvi glanced from her to the twitching wreckage of the nearer of the two damaged HK drones. “What makes you think the transponder is still working on that thing?”

  “I’m guessing,” Kugara said as she edged farther into the crater, two, three meters, until she was as close as she was going to get to the wreck. Another ten meters to clear. She took a few deep breaths. The transponder was probably well sealed and on its own redundant power supply. It was a piece of hardware you didn’t want to fail in the field. And the way the thing was twitching, the other robots would have been paying it some attention if its transponder were dead.

  But still . . .

  “Now!” she yelled at the others.

  She launched herself in a sprint to the twitching wreckage, putting everything she had in an all-out push to get to the thing in the fraction of a second the flying rubble bought her. If any of them could make it ...

  Something tore though the dirt by her feet and she leaped the last two meters, landing on top of the downed machine.

  She sucked in shuddering breaths as beneath her, the servo arm that used to carry a cannon kept pushing into her stomach, as if it was trying to elbow her off of it.

  “Made it,” she whispered, not quite believing it.

  She looked up and saw four of the HK robots surrounding her. Back by the edge of the crater she heard their one-time guide mutter, “I never saw anyone move that fast.”

  No one human, Kugara thought.

  She slid off of the half-dead robot, and winced when her foot hit the ground. She glanced down and saw her right shoe was stained dark with blood. She gritted her teeth and flexed her toes. The pain was awful, but her toes moved, and she could feel them squish against the gore in her sock. Shrapnel. At least her foot seemed mechanically sound.

  She grabbed the edges of the machine and lifted through the pain. Luckily, the thing weighed less than its mass. It still had partial contragravs running—just not enough for neutral buoyancy.

  She walked it back to the others.

  They were able to cross the blast crater by slowly walking across, all of them surrounding the near-dead machine. They carried it like a hostage through a tense standoff. The other robots watched, but didn’t get in their way.

  On the other side, it only took a few moments for their guide to find the right landmark and get them back on the safe path out again. They left the dead robot, and this time Parvi led with the guide and the shotgun.

  Kugara hung back and let Nickolai help her limp along on her wounded foot. Once they were back on their way out, he asked her, “Was that a smart thing to do?”

  “Can’t let you take all the damn-fool risks now, can I?”

  “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Then you had better keep up.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Atonement

  “Heroism comes when all other options have been exhausted.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  (1803-1882)

  Date: 2526.8.5 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Vijayanagara Parvi led her people through the back alleys of Wilson. She glanced back at Kugara, limping next to the tiger, and thought, My people?

  She was appalled at herself, at her paralysis. In a sick way, it was why she was down here, and not with Mallory in what—if she was honest—had to be the most likely route to fi
ght Adam. She had lost the ability to command. Having the responsibility over other people’s lives had become an intolerable burden, and left her nearly unable to function.

  Three times now, both Kugara and Nickolai had taken the initiative—and she didn’t have the wherewithal to even raise an objection.

  Above them, the sky was already gray with smoke, and the sounds of the battle seemed to be closing in on them.

  If I continue as I have been, I will get us all killed.

  Her knuckles whitened on the shotgun. After inadvertently killing an unarmed woman on the Prophet’s Voice, she doubted she would ever be able to make that kind of split-second decision again. Not without second-guessing herself.

  She led them to a mouth of an alley that opened up to a street, across from a block of office buildings that had burned down around the wreckage of a downed troop transport. Through the smoke of the smoldering wreckage, she could see the Wilson militia, only half of whom seemed to be wearing powered armor, making a retreat down the street, away from the main line.

  She peeked around the edge of the building and could see flashes of energy weapons burning their way through the smoke. She ducked back around and felt her heart trying to slam its way through her rib cage. She tasted copper in her throat and heard a low growl from the tiger.

  Of course, he can smell the fear . . .

  It was worse than what she felt during the doomed resistance on Rubai, worse than what she felt on the Prophet’s Voice.

  “Okay,” she whispered, reining in the panic. “This is what we have to do.” She checked the shotgun and handed it off to Kugara. “You need to get everyone to the mountains.”

  “Me?” Kugara sounded incredulous.

  Parvi nodded, solidifying her own decision. “We have two missions here,” she told her. “Mallory wants to make contact with the PSDC.”

  “What?” It came from several people at once.

  “Whatever you might find in the Dolbrian caverns, the PSDC is the last line of defense this planet has.”

  Everyone stared at her, and it was Flynn who spoke up. “Are you crazy, woman? The PSDC has to know what’s going on in orbit; they ain’t jamming their own communications. If they haven’t contacted Mallory and his savior squad, it’s ’cause they have more of a hard-on for running this effing planet.”

  “Everything we’re doing is a long shot,” Parvi said. “Besides, someone has to open a hole in the line so you can get through.” She looked at Kugara and said, “It’s your show now.”

  She glanced back around the corner, and made a dash for the wreckage across the street. As far as anyone saw, she was just an unarmed civilian, so no one targeted her. Behind her, she heard Flynn’s voice say, “Jesus Tap-dancing Christ—” before the sound was washed away by something large and explosive taking out a trio of men in powered armor about fifteen meters away from her.

  Even though she had no idea how she was going to open a hole, her heart had calmed, and her breathing had become steadier. She leaped over a crumbling wall and dropped into the ruins of the dead office complex. Twisted metal and broken ferrocrete towered over her, scorched black. She stood on a sliding pile of broken glass, gravel, and rubble that still steamed. The air choked her with black smoke and the smell of burned synthetics. Through watering eyes, she saw the armored side of the downed troop transport, more intact than it should be.

  She scrambled toward it and found the side door open. The inside was hazed by white smoke from an invisible electrical fire and lit only by what little sunlight leaked in the open door. It took a moment for her watering eyes to adjust to the dim light and make out the details of the wreckage inside.

  Two corpses sprawled across the interior of the wrecked transport. By the door were the remains of someone who’d had his upper body completely sheared away, probably by being half out the door when the transport hit. The other wore a helmet and comm gear that suggested he was the pilot. He was still strapped in a crash harness, and the impact had blown him to the back of the compartment, still attached to his chair.

  She stepped over to the half-corpse, skidding on blood and the uneven floor, and relieved it of the sidearm holstered on its hip. The grip was sticky, but she was armed now.

  She peered into the depths of the wreck. Underneath the corpse of the pilot, she saw a long box with yellow-and-black warning stripes stenciled down its length.

  She had to push the pilot’s chair off of it.

  The wreck shook as something nearby exploded. She quickly checked the latches and opened the case. It was better than she had hoped, an AM grenade launcher with half a complement of grenades. It wasn’t terribly common; few people wanted to take ammo into a war zone that would spontaneously detonate if the super-conducting casing lost a charge. It would be safer lugging around a tactical nuke.

  But, apparently, the Wilson militia was pulling out all the stops, and she was just lucky that this thing hadn’t detonated during the crash.

  She shut the case, found the handle, and dragged it outside.

  She could hear the firefight in earnest, closing on her position—and on Kugara and the others. She scrambled, one-handed, up the tallest pile of twisted metal next to the downed transport. She glanced across when she cleared street level, and saw the bloody edge of the retreating militia, a line of powered armor, facing up the street.

  Across, in the alley, she saw Kugara at the corner of the building, holding the shotgun braced against the oncoming PSDC force.

  That force included a pair of hovertanks flanked by heavily armored infantry. As she watched, one of the tanks belched a blinding pulse of plasma from its cannon, clearing the street of a dozen armored defenders.

  Shit!

  Parvi shoved the case onto a flat slab of ferrocrete about three stories above the battle, part of one building that hadn’t completely pancaked together. She crawled after it. The space between the floors here was barely enough to open the case, and each time the tanks fired, she heard ominous creaking around her.

  She barely had time to plan where she was going to aim as she pulled out the launcher and loaded a surprisingly heavy antimatter round. She didn’t bother zeroing the sights; the tanks were so close that accuracy didn’t much matter. She just raised it, thanked the gods that there was still enough distance that she could aim down and still have the shot clear the rubble below her, and fired.

  Nickolai stood behind Kugara, his body an imperfect shield for the three other members of their party. Kugara glanced around the corner and said, “Tanks, they got fucking tanks!” She ducked back around and flattened against the wall as a shot of plasma took out a third of Wilson’s defending line. “I don’t know how she’s going to make us a hole in that. We’re going to have to back up and find another route.”

  Nickolai nodded, then froze when he saw something in the wreckage across from them; Parvi climbing up the wreckage, carrying a long case. He concentrated until the print stenciled on the case shot into focus.

  “She’s got an AM grenade launcher.”

  “She’s got a what?” Kugara snapped.

  Plasma washed the remaining defenders away as, above them all, Parvi readied the weapon. Nickolai yelled, “Everyone! Hit the ground now!”

  No one argued, and Kugara dove behind him as he dropped. Quick as he was, he was still looking up when the grenade hit. If he had still worn the eyes he was born with, the flash would have blinded him. With the Protean eyes, though, he could see into the intense glare as half a twisted hovertank was blown down the street, gouging pavement as it tumbled like a child’s toy tossed in a fit of rage. The noise was less a sound than an awful pressure on his skull and chest, a rumble felt though the ground that, for a moment, seemed to flow like water.

  Then it was over, except for a muffled ringing in his ears and a burning feeling in the leather of his nose.

  Behind him, through the ringing in his ears, he heard someone screaming, “My God! My God! What was that? What was that?” He thought it might
have been Dr. Dörner.

  Bits of gravel and debris still fell from the sky as he pushed himself up. He walked to the edge of the building and looked around the corner.

  The street where the PSDC attackers had been was unrecognizable. A crater extended forty or fifty meters across, and the facades of the buildings on either side had sheared off and collapsed into the hole. Of the PSDC attacking force, the only sign was the turret of the other tank, twisted and wedged upside down on the second floor of one of the faceless buildings. Of the infantry, he saw a gauntlet and a single boot, both over twenty meters from the crater.

  “We have our hole!” he called back.

  Kugara called back to him, “Where’s Parvi?”

  He glanced across the street to look where Parvi had been stationed, but the wreckage had collapsed in on itself. There was no sign of where she had fired the AM grenade.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sins

  “The more control one has, the more control one desires.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Power is not happiness.”

  —WILLIAM GODWIN

  (1756-1836)

  Date: 2526.8.5 (Standard) Earth Orbit-Sol

  The Prophet’s Voice orbited over a transformed Earth, an Earth populated by Adam’s chosen. One of the few thousand incarnations of Adam stood on the bridge of the Voice, receiving the good news of His works. The impressions He received were not as direct as His knowledge of things on the Voice; this version of Himself had no direct connection to the surface. But His other selves, and the select ones among His chosen, broadcast their knowledge and their sensations to Him.