It was the pope’s transmission itself.
Not just the rebroadcast of the recording of Khamsin’s fall to Adam, or Mallory’s last tach-comm from Salmagundi—even though both were important warnings to a humanity unaware of Adam’s approach. To the Protean strategy, the transmission was an important distraction.
It had drawn attention to the Proteans’ military attack. Dacham’s true mission was an exercise in massive misdirection. The whole operation was meant to distract from the Protean’s
real
opposition to Adam, one much more subtle.
When he had explained himself and the Proteans to her and Mosasa, the Proteans’ plans were obvious in retrospect.
Adam’s major flaw was his own arrogance. He had inherited the long view of society and social systems that the Race had bequeathed to their AIs, but that was not omniscience. The AI Mosasa had been well aware of that, and Adam had used his brother’s psychological need to fill in data holes to lure him out to Xi Virginis and to his own destruction.
But Adam, in his drive toward godhead, had ignored or forgotten his brother’s own fatal lesson. Adam could no longer perceive the edges of his own knowledge; he no longer accepted the existence of unknowns in his view of the universe. It was why the Protean attack could be a surprise, and why Adam had shown no impulse to think any deeper about the Proteans after their destruction.
There were no secrets from God.
And just as she was getting her mind around Dacham and the Proteans, and had started formulating a plan, Adam surprised them all by a blatant display of his fatal flaw.
The
Voice
’s sudden departure to Bakunin was completely unexpected, as was the state of the system when they arrived. She had been as shocked as Adam was to find out that the people here had not only formed a vast fleet of refugee ships, but had somehow managed to neutralize the cloud of matter that was supposed to spearhead Adam’s invasion.
For once, it was only the
Voice.
And Adam. And several billion souls that had sold themselves to him.
The
Voice
hung in the outer system seven AU from Bakunin and the mass of the opposition fleet. The majority of its “crew” existed only as minds within the thinking matter that now made up the whole of the carrier and the ships that rode with it. Almost none of Adam’s chosen here were physically embodied. Being one of the first to accept Adam’s offer of godhead, Rebecca was an exception, she still had a body that may have still had some slight continuity of existence with her prior human form.
Also, her experience during Earth’s invasion had shown her that retaining a separate physical form was required in order to continue differentiating herself from Adam. The minds that swarmed the matter of the
Voice
might have retained some nominal individuality, but the border between their egos and Adam’s seemed to degrade over time. Adam might not read minds, but his existence in and of itself was an attack on his subject’s individuality.
Rebecca enforced the barrier between her ego and Adam’s by keeping a physical body as much as possible. Remaining separate was the only way that a fight against Adam was even conceivable to her. Now she saw, in the absence of Adam’s cloud, a possibility that not only the fight, but Adam’s
defeat
became conceivable.
Even as Adam rallied his attention to Bakunin, and the impossible resistance he found there, Rebecca turned her attention inside herself, into a realm that Adam couldn’t perceive.
Dacham stood on a high platform in the mountains, overlooking the city of Godwin. He stared into the distance, the side of his face almost invisibly twitching.
“You have to move now,” she told him, “while he is distracted.”
Dacham turned to look at her, and his expression was grave. “No. He’s still too distributed. Once we move, once he knows we’re here, that is the end of our infiltration.”
“Damn it! We have him isolated, one ship, alone. You want to wait until he burrows into
another
planet?”
He turned back to face the vision of Godwin. “Of course not!” He clenched his hands into fists. “But this is bigger than what I want, bigger than Bakunin . . . The plan is to build our strength.”
“Adam is never going to be weaker than he is right now.”
“You can’t ask us to undo all that—” Something resonated through the virtual scene, a feeling of disruption, partly barely audible sound, partly a sense of dread. Dacham looked at her and asked, “What was that?”
“Adam is launching all the tach-capable ships on the
Voice
,” Mosasa’s voice came from behind them.
They both turned to face the tattooed pirate. Mosasa looked them over and said, “He’s placed himself on each one of those ships, and every one of them is going to tach into the system in a moment. No ultimatum. He is going to take that refugee fleet and turn it into himself.”
“He’s breaking his pattern?” Rebecca said.
“You cannot know the depths of his rage,” Mosasa told them. He turned to Dacham and said, “If now is not the time, it never will be.”
“He is still distributed across the whole
Voice
. We still need to isolate him from ourselves.”
Mosasa smiled. “There’s something I need to tell you about myself.”
Fifty ships spread out from the
Prophet’s Voice
in response to Adam’s orders. On board each were the embodiments of Adam’s chosen. Most still resembled human beings; others had made a fuller break with their humanity. All the ships carried a fragment of the embodied Adam with them, their omnipresent God directing their actions.
Adam had decided that there was too much at stake to allow any individual’s decision to interfere with His plans. The defiance here could not be allowed to stand, and all His people would have to see and appreciate the fruits of such defiance.
Though Adam saw only the shell around the minds of his chosen, He saw that they all understood what it meant when He did not grant His offer to these people of Bakunin. They all understood that these people had passed beyond saving.
The ships spread out, facing a fleet of thousands massed insystem, refugees from all the nearby corners of human space.
Aboard each of the fifty ships around the
Voice
, tach-drives began powering themselves up, as Adam integrated Himself into the sophisticated Caliphate navigation systems. The systems in control of the tach-drives were, in many respects, the descendants of the hardware that had given Adam His birth—and allowed Him to become the brain of fifty ships.
Adam faced His opposition without fear and without any reservation. Before Him was the rump end of an extinct humanity, an evil reflex moving a body already dead. Nothing these still-breathing corpses could array against Him could blunt the tide of destiny or turn it aside.
He had faced much more with much less.
At His command, all fifty ships leaped into tach-space, and for a little less than three and a half seconds, they ceased to exist.
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 350,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Mallory’s people had cleaned up the control center of the
Wisconsin
. The only signs of the attempted takeover were a few scars in the walls and bloodstains where the bodies had fallen. Crew from the Daedalus manned the room now, the
Wisconsin’s
own crew having been decimated by Stefan’s attempted coup.
Mallory led the other commanders of the fleet into the room, and they all filed in to stand behind the traffic control console. On the main holo, an image of a large spaceship floated. The coordinates scrolling by on the bottom of the image showed that the ship was seven AU away, roughly where the cloud had been.
The other Valentine sister was sitting at the main traffic control console below the holo. “It tached insystem about eighty minutes ago,” she told them. “The tach-pulse from the arrival was huge—thought I was seeing another wormhole for a moment.”
Mallory had never seen the Ibrahim-class carrier that the Caliphate had developed, but he knew that was what he was looking at.
Tito, leader of the Bakunin fleet, squinted at the holo and said, “Doesn’t look like much.”
The general from the SEC shook his head and said, “My God.”
“What?” Tito didn’t seem to get it.
The general explained. “That dot, floating off the starboard side? That’s a Medina-class troop transport.”
“No, you got to be—” Tito leaned forward. “Damnation and Taxes, that thing is huge.”
“About half the size of the
Wisconsin
,” said the Valentine by the console.
More dots were flying off the carrier, almost as if the kilometer-long craft was disintegrating.
It’s launching everything.
“Any transmissions?” Mallory asked. “Has he broadcast an ultimatum yet?”
“Not a peep.”
The change in tactics felt ominous to Mallory. Still, right now they had the advantage in numbers. “We need to attack, now.”
“Are you sure?” one of the Indi leaders asked. “Maybe—”
“Now,” Mallory said, “while he’s physically isolated. While his forces are confined to his ships—”
Red lights and angry beeps erupted from the consoles all across the traffic control consoles.
“What the hell is happening?” yelled the SEC general.
Valentine shook her head, “Tachyon bow shock from forty or fifty ships incoming. I got dozens of ships calling for attention.”
“What?” The general looked up at the holo where the
Voice
was slowly disgorging its fleet.
“That image is an hour old,” Mallory said. “He tached his fleet insystem.”
The general shook his head. “You can’t use a tach-drive tactically—”
Mallory snapped, “We did, with less accurate drives.”
“No, the accuracy isn’t—”
“I’m picking up detonations,” Valentine said. She looked up at them. “We just lost contact with fifteen Indi ships.”
Mallory slid to a comm console and pulled up his own channel and started transmitting orders to his fleet. The other members of the leadership only hesitated a moment before taking their seats and opening channels to their own fleets. In that brief hesitation, Valentine kept calling out casualties: Five Centauri ships, three from the SEC, another from the Bakunin fleet.
“These are the most advanced ships out there,” Mallory said, “but we have numbers. Tell them not to engage one to one. Group four or five of ours to concentrate fire on one of theirs.”
Another three Indi ships, a loss for the Union of Independent Worlds, a Centauri ship wounded but still with life support. And, finally, a confirmed kill of one of the hostile forces.
Above them, Valentine called up a holo that gave a strategic view of the space around Bakunin. Mallory glanced up and saw a great swath of blue dots, and in their midst, only a tiny sprinkling of red.
The numerical advantage was overwhelming.
“Concentrate your fire,” Mallory told his fleet. “Concentrate as much energy in as small a space as possible.”
Another red dot went gray—along with twenty blue dots. The horrifying thing was, with the lopsided numbers, that kill ratio was acceptable.
God forgive us,
Mallory prayed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
False Prophet
“Power will always fall to weaknesses it has denied possessing.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.”
—JOHN ADAMS
(1735-1826)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 1,500,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Stefan Stavros slept uncomfortably in the cabin of a stolen three-passenger tach-ship. The old
Xanadu
had been designed in the most decadent days of the SEC, before the Caliphate existed. Even if this ship was a reproduction, it had been the toy of some mega-rich corporate mogul. Inside, it was all gratuitous leather, brass, and hardwoods. The control console was all inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl.
Also, it stank. The air was rank with the smell of piss and feces. As well as the sweat and blood crusted on Stefan’s clothes.
His escape had gone perfectly, up until he was ten minutes away from the
Wisconsin
and tried to engage the fully charged tach-drive.
The bastard computer had asked for a password.
Somehow, the idea that some paranoid corp type had owned his escape route had never entered into his plans. His repeated attempts to engage the tach-drive all failed. And when he gave up and tried to pilot the craft conventionally, to remove himself from the doomed fleet, he had found out that the prior owner was a vindictive sadist.