[Apotheosis 03] Messiah

  Nickolai crouched through the doorway, and a second later he heard the door hiss shut behind them. They were in a large storeroom, filled with tools and spare parts piled on shelves lining the walls. A cylindrical elevator shaft dominated the far end of the room. As he watched, the elevator dinged, and the doors slid open.

  Nickolai leveled the gamma laser at it, but the elevator was empty. He glanced back around at Flynn, who was still semiconscious and groaning.

  Next to him, Kugara said, “His Tetsami alter ego is still wired into the network here.” She reached out and touched Nickolai’s chest. He looked down at her as she said, “Carbine’s drained. I need to raid your arsenal.” She pulled one of the other gamma lasers from his improvised bandolier. “Let’s get moving.” She gestured to the elevator.

  The elevator took them down four sublevels and let them out into another storeroom. They put down Flynn, and Nickolai handed Dörner and Brody the last two lasers he carried.

  Dörner looked up at him and said, “Why are you giving me this?”

  “Because you probably can’t handle the recoil of this,” he said, taking out one of the slugthrowers.

  He joined Kugara by the door to the storeroom. It opened a crack, and Nickolai could see out on to a subway platform crowded with people, about half heavily armed. He counted at least fifty in his line of sight.

  “So what’s the plan now?” he asked.

  Before Kugara could answer, an electronic voice echoed across the platform. “I’m in control here, so nobody fucking move!”

  There was a metallic screech from out of their line of sight from the storeroom. He could hear someone out there groaning in pain. The echoing PA system said, “That was so not a good idea. Get the hell away from those controls.”

  “What the hell?” Kugara whispered.

  Inside the room, a speaker above them said, “Okay, chicky. You and the tiger better clear them out.”

  “Tetsami?” Kugara whispered.

  “Christ in a sidecar, who do you think? Move it, you think this is easy for me?”

  Nickolai cast a glance back at Flynn as Kugara pushed her way through the door. She yelled to the mass of people, “Okay, everyone, toss weapons on the ground and move yourself out the nearest exit. Now!”

  Nickolai followed and found himself on a long wide platform in a massive arched chamber. A maglev train sat on one of two sets of tracks, the front end smoking slightly with the smell of overheated ceramics. The driver was backing away from the controls as if they had just bit him.

  Nickolai stood behind Kugara and growled.

  Over the PA, Tetsami called out like the voice of God. “You heard her. Drop the guns and move it. You do not want to piss off her friend.”

  The mass of people moved toward the exits, away from him and Kugara. Only about half tossed weapons down, but Nickolai didn’t much care about the others as long as they didn’t choose to level their weapons in their direction.

  In less than a minute the platform was empty, and he heard doors sliding shut, sealing them off.

  Next to them, the train stood on the track, doors open.

  Kugara turned to him and said, “Get Flynn.”

  The maglev smoothly accelerated and slid into a tunnel aimed deep at the heart of the Diderot Mountains. Flynn took up one of the passenger benches, the bandage on his gut now mostly dark with blood. Kugara and Dörner had found a first-aid kit by the driver’s compartment and were trying to improve on the wound’s dressing.

  Nickolai wrinkled his nose because Flynn had already started smelling of death.

  Kugara reached to peel away the old bandage, and Flynn grabbed her hand. “No time,” Flynn groaned.

  “Lay back,” she said, “we’re on the way to the mountain. We need to stop the bleeding.”

  He shook his head. “No time. Gram did what she could, but we’re cut off from the network.” With a shaking hand, he reached up and pulled the socket out of the base of his skull. “We’re out of range of where this thing works.”

  “The train,” Dörner said, “it’s still moving?”

  “Autonomous.” He pulled himself into a near sitting position to lean against the window. “We only have five minutes.”

  “Five minutes for what?” Nickolai asked.

  Flynn looked up at him and smiled, his teeth glistening red from his own blood. “Your stop.”

  Flynn had them carry him to the controls at the front of the train. Nickolai listened as Flynn told them, haltingly, that Tetsami had managed to penetrate far enough to see that Bleek Munitions’ HQ in the mountains was very aware of the attack on their facility, and they had been ramping up their security since it started. And unlike the facility they had just left, the security in the mountain consisted of a unit of PSDC military.

  There was no way through at the end of the line.

  However, the train flew through caverns only slightly modified from the lava tubes that Tetsami remembered. While in Bleek’s network, she had been able to pull a full map of the known tunnels, and there were several places where the tunnels intersected with the subway.

  Flynn sat at the controls, doing something to override the computers piloting the train. Then he leaned against the wall and whispered to himself. Nickolai barely heard the words, “Ten. Nine. Eight ...”

  At three, Flynn pulled the emergency stop and the train screeched to a halt. “We’re here,” he said.

  “Okay,” Kugara said, “Nickolai, get his feet.”

  “No,” Flynn said, shrugging away from Kugara’s reach.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” she said.

  “I’m too injured,” he said. “I’ll slow you down, and bouncing me around isn’t going to help what life I got left. Without me, you’ll have half a chance.”

  Kugara shook her head as Nickolai gently pulled her away from Flynn.

  Flynn said, “Look, wherever you’re going, I’m not making it there like this. At least, driving this thing, I can make you harder to follow.”

  Whatever Nickolai’s faith might believe of Flynn, or the transgressions his people had made, Flynn had been a worthy ally. He had the soul of a warrior. Nickolai placed his right hand gently against Flynn’s bandaged wound and breathed in the scent of blood. He whispered, “May the spirit of Saint Rajasthan join you in your final battle.”

  The blessing felt blasphemous spoken in the tongue of the Fallen, but Flynn deserved to hear it. Flynn looked up at them and said, “Go on, move it!”

  When Flynn was alone on the train, he shut the doors and started it moving again.

  “Just you and me, Gram.”

  He heard a sniff and looked next to him and saw Tetsami’s effigy standing there right where the tiger had been. Her cheeks were wet, and she was semitranslucent, as if she was leaving the land of the living before him.

  “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” she said, his own burning eyes making her a liar.

  “We had a hell of a ride.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Ever wanted to see how fast something like this can go?”

  He reached up and started turning off parts of the train’s navigation system. Turning off collision avoidance sensors, and the computer that held the train under a safely controllable speed.

  The velocity sensor started cranking upward, and the tunnel lights began shooting by impossibly fast, becoming a blurred streak in the windscreen.

  The frictionless maglev only gave a slight pressure of acceleration as it climbed toward double the velocity it was rated for. The only sound it made was air ripping by outside, muffled through the train’s skin.

  “I always thought I’d die on this hellhole,” she said.

  “If I could, Gram, I would have sent you off with the others.”

  The velocity peaked, hovering around eight hundred klicks an hour. At this rate, in thirty seconds the train should slam into the station like a bullet. Fast enough that he probably wouldn’t even be aware of the colli
sion.

  “If Adam came now,” Tetsami said, “I think I’d say yes.”

  “Gram?”

  “My last resurrection went pretty well,” she said, “and I don’t want you to di—”

  A violent rhythmic thudding interrupted her, as the train suddenly started trying to shake itself apart.

  “What the hell?” Flynn shouted at the console. It was vibrating too hard to make out clearly, but the velocity meter was racing backward. The accelerator was on full, but the train was still slowing down.

  “Damn it, they figured out some way to slow us down.”

  It took a second for him to realize what had happened. The HQ always had, as a last resort, the ability to shut down the track. If they nuked the magnets holding this beast up, the train would stop—but at the speed it was going, it would stop catastrophically, probably taking out a good part of the tunnel with it.

  Instead, someone had the bright idea of shutting off every other magnet in the track. Not enough to have the train fatally kiss the ground, but enough to slow it down violently.

  “Shit!” Flynn called out, the train forcing his voice into a vibrato and trying to shake his intestines out the wound in his belly. The velocity dropped under a hundred klicks an hour, and the shaking got worse, and now it sounded as if a massive hammer was trying to pound the underside of the train apart.

  Now only every third magnet is powered, Flynn thought, holding on to the bench with a death grip. His heart pounded, as the fear gripped him. They had dropped far below the speed of instant death. At seventy-five klicks an hour, there was a good chance that he’d live through a collision at least long enough to feel it.

  But whoever was playing the track knew what they were doing. The train slowed to little over twenty klicks per, and it finally ground itself to a halt, sliding into the station with a hideous screech and a shower of sparks.

  Through the windows he saw a welcoming committee of about twenty guys in powered armor.

  He sucked in a painful breath, amazed that he was still alive, and said, “It may disappoint the tiger, but I’m leaning toward surrender.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Anathema

  “Hell grows out of a desire for Utopia.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”

  —ARISTOTLE

  (384 BCE-322 BCE)

  Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Mallory and the other commanders watched the main holo on board the Wisconsin. Across the holo, a galaxy of blue showed the largest fleet ever formed by man. The adversary only had fifty ships.

  Only fifty.

  But as Mallory watched blue lights blink out, he began to wonder if the numerical advantage mattered. The battles were akin to watching a squad of Occisis Marines go up against an army of UN peacekeepers from the 21st century. The red dots showed some attrition, but not nearly enough.

  A flash obliterated a red dot, and the Indi commanders said something to each other in Mandarin. Tito said quietly, “We got one.”

  Mallory nodded gravely. Adam was down to thirty-eight ships, but at a cost of over two hundred of theirs. Those losses were barely sustainable, and of a magnitude to make him pray that he hadn’t chosen the wrong path.

  At the control console, the other Valentine said, “Oh, no.”

  Her sister said, “What is it?” before Mallory got the question out himself.

  “The Othello just wiped out three merchantmen attached to the Adam Smith.”

  “What the hell?” Tito snapped at the mention of the Adam Smith. It was the largest and most heavily armed of the Bakunin native fleet. The Othello was part of the SEC forces, a dreadnought that was one of the more sophisticated military vessels in the fleet. He turned toward General Lafayette and said, “Do you train your people?”

  “It must be some mistake—”

  “Damn right it is! Three ships to friendly fire. Three?”

  “Eight,” Valentine said. “The Othello has claimed eight ships now, including the Adam Smith.”

  Both Tito and General Lafayette were stunned into silence.

  “The Othello is compromised!” Mallory shouted. “It’s part of Adam’s fleet now! Concentrate fire on it!”

  Valentine passed on the orders, but color drained from her face as she did. She shook her head and started reading off the names of ships, “Sun Tzu, Liverpool, Ulysses, Mjöllnir, Lincoln, Shiva—damn it, we’ve got dozens of ships suddenly turning on our own fleet.”

  It’s like fighting a virus. “Same rules of engagement as Adam’s fleet. One of ours starts attacking, give it a wide berth and concentrate fire.”

  Valentine typed at the console, and suddenly the lonely red dots in the midst of their fleet were joined by another twenty yellow ones.

  Now there were over fifty enemy ships to contend with, and the losses were no longer sustainable. He heard muttering from the command next to him and realized that they had come to the same conclusion.

  “We need to stage a retreat to regroup.” Tito said.

  “We’ll be slaughtered like this,” General Lafayette said. “We need to disperse our forces.”

  One of the Indi commanders asked, “Can we reprise the attack you made on the cloud?”

  “No,” Mallory said, “That was a static target, and we had time to synchronize hundreds of tach computers. We don’t have a known fixed target, or time. But we do need to retreat to buy time.” He addressed Lieutenant Valentine. “Every ship that has a charged tach-drive, jump at their own discretion off the ecliptic and away from Bakunin.”

  “It’s too dangerous to use tach-drives tactically like that,” General Lafayette said.

  “It’s all we have,” Mallory shook his head.

  After a few minutes of tense silence, Lieutenant Valentine said, “We have tach-pulses from our ships.” On the holo, blue dots began winking out. “Several ships have their drives disabled. We’ve lost the Independence.”

  “We need a strategy to segregate Adam’s ships,” Mallory said. “They’re vulnerable in isolation.”

  “We’re getting stronger tach-pulses ...” On the holo, the remaining red dots began winking out, leaving the yellow, infected ships behind.

  “They’re retreating?” Tito asked.

  Mallory realized that the Caliphate ships had drives an order of magnitude faster than any his fleet had. They were following the retreating ships’ trajectories—and they would be there waiting, crucial seconds before the slower ships fell out of tach-space; thirty-eight red dots, facing the refugee fleet one-on-one.

  He had just signed the death warrants for thirty-eight more ships.

  But their fleet was spreading out, less of a target. It was the right order for the vast majority of their forces . . .

  God help them all.

  “I have a ship headed for the Wisconsin.”

  “Ours or theirs?” Mallory asked.

  “A single unarmed luxury passenger ship. Transponder IDs it as Xanadu.”

  General Lafayette said, “It’s the ship that bastard stole after his attempted coup—”

  “Warn him off,” Mallory said.

  “Warn?” General Lafayette sputtered. “Shoot him down.”

  Mallory glared at the general. “Warn him off, and if he doesn’t change course, then shoot him down.”

  A smaller holo popped up, showing the approaching craft. Telemetry data sped by below, enough for Captain Valentine to say, “That’s not a docking vector, and he’s still accelerating.”

  Lieutenant Valentine said, “He’s not responsive.”

  Mallory shook his head, “Shoot him.”

  The being that had been Stefan Stavros watched as the Wisconsin’s defenses locked onto the Xanadu. Even a nominally peaceful entity like the Wisconsin, in the lawless sphere of Bakunin, had an impressive array of defensive measures. Any attacker that came toward one of the habitats would face arrays of missil
es, and energy weapons ranging from chaotic frequency lasers that would tax any ship’s Emerson field to pulses of coherent plasma that contained enough energy to render many such fields irrelevant.

  The Xanadu was rocketing down the Wisconsin’s axis of rotation, and facing one of the more intimidating defenses. The Wisconsin’s linac accelerated its mundane iron-nickel projectiles along its two-kilometer length before directing them out a cannon along its axis.

  Stefan grinned as the linac discharged a tight grouping of shots, balls of metal smaller than the tip of his finger, but tearing through space at a speed near a third of light-speed. A dozen iron marbles spread out in a circle about thirty meters across, intersecting the Xanadu’s path.

  Only one of them hit.

  That was enough. The kinetic energy of that small projectile was enough to vaporize it and about fifty cubic meters of the Xanadu instantaneously. The stress of the impact caused a massive failure of the structure, the ship fragmenting along its length, its hull buckling, and the engines—losing the containment for their reaction chamber—erupted into a fiery ball.

  In less than a microsecond, the Xanadu had been transformed into a cloud of wreckage made of boiling gases and fragments not much bigger than the linac bullet that had hit it.

  Stefan no longer had a face to smile with.

  If he had, he would have grinned harder.

  He no longer inhabited a body. His flesh had only been a vessel, much like the Xanadu had been. His identity now lived in a complex matrix of microscopic machines that had permeated the matter of the Xanadu. Adam’s machines were as hardy as bacteria, and the linac attack had only sterilized a fraction of those machines where Stefan’s identity lived.

  As the cloud moved, only slightly deviated from the Xanadu’s original vector, the small chunks of solid matter within it dissolved. Stefan consumed them, transforming the wreckage into more of the cloud containing him. Less than two seconds from the destruction of the Xanadu, all that was left was an undifferentiated cloud of matter.