“You don’t think I’d let you do that now, do you?”
The words still glowed on the holo above the unresponsive controls. Life support still seemed to work, but the waste recycling had stopped. And the
Xanadu
piloted its own course, going somewhere without Stefan’s intervention. Some preprogrammed rendezvous for the owner to track? Or was it just randomly launching itself out of the system to teach the would-be thief a lesson?
For three days, Stefan had been learning that lesson. He had torn free the nails on his hands trying to pry access panels from the cabin walls, and he had smeared filth on his blue jumpsuit by trying to force the waste recycler to work. His hair was matted, and he wore three days of beard. His mouth was dry. He was dizzy from hunger and dehydration, and every passing hour made drinking his own urine seem like a more attractive option.
He slept in fits and starts, startling himself awake with the vain hope that Mallory’s dupes had found him and were going to take him into custody. Each time, nothing was there but empty space, and each time the air was a little staler.
The irony was he was trapped here because he didn’t want to die.
Now he held a barely charged gamma laser, and fantasized about emptying the charge into his skull.
In the pit of his despair, he saw a light flash. He blinked several times; half-convinced he had begun to hallucinate. The barriers between his dreams and his waking moments had been slowly crumbling...
Another flash; multiple ones crossing the starscape unrolling before him. His brain slowly began to register something out there. He saw stars occluded by tiny motes of spacecraft flying—in astronomical terms, right next to him.
He reached for the display controls—one thing the sadistic prior owner of the
Xanadu
did not deny him. He zoomed in on the flashes, thousands of kilometers away.
He gasped.
Tumbling under Kropotkin’s bloody glare, he saw an endless cloud of floating wreckage. He had no idea how many ships had been consumed. He saw engine fragments from six—no, eight—different varieties of spaceship, sections of hull, corpses and pieces of corpses, chairs, electronic components, pieces of contragrav reactors, air lock doors floating surprisingly untouched, all tumbling outward in a cloud of shimmering ice crystals.
The
Xanadu
was headed directly at the expanding field of debris.
He spun the ship’s sensors around, and saw himself surrounded. The
Xanadu
had drifted into the midst of Mallory’s grand fleet, and now on every side of him, he could see the fruits of Mallory’s futile war.
He could point his view in any direction now and see the remains of ships that had been torn apart. His heart raced as he saw a sleek Caliphate vessel pivot into the midst of a group of cargo haulers not that different from the
Daedalus
and tear them apart like a rabid wolf dropped into a nursery.
He stared into the heart of battle after battle as he drifted uncontrolled through a war zone, waiting for the strike that would peel the hull apart like an onion. But the
Xanadu
drifted through the chaos unscathed.
He watched with impotent rage at the priest and his minions. What right did he have, to sacrifice these people in some vain impossible fight?
The proximity alarms began wailing at him.
He reset the display to the default view forward, and found himself gripped by a fatalistic chuckle. He wasn’t going to die in Mallory’s battle. It would be a collision with a random piece of space junk.
The
Xanadu,
improbably, was aimed right for a large debris field from the battle. It was already passing through the gossamer glitter of an expanding cloud of frozen gases, and part of a control cabin larger than the entire
Xanadu
tumbled by him within a hundred meters. The original vector of the destroyed craft was close enough to the
Xanadu
’s that the wreckage passed by him with an almost majestic grace, showing first a curving metallic hull that slowly rotated to reveal the charred and melted interior.
Ahead of him the stars started winking out.
“What?”
At first it seemed a flaw in the display. Perhaps something had collided with the sensors causing the bind spot. But the hole within the darkness wasn’t static. It grew. The
Xanadu
’s velocity relative to the wreckage was only a few meters per second, but the blackness was approaching faster than that. As he watched, a section of a winged lifting body belonging to a Centauri dropship drifted in front of the darkness, briefly shining in Kropotkin’s light, hanging in front of complete nothingness. Then it vanished.
As the
Xanadu
drifted toward the darkness, Stefan stared into the gaping maw of the Abyss.
He could feel it staring back.
The blackness expanded in front of him, hiding the stars and consuming wreckage until the view out the display was completely blank. He braced himself for an impact that never came, even as all the telemetry data of the frozen controls stopped reading any velocity or direction at all. According to the ship’s sensors, the
Xanadu
had stopped moving.
It was as if, outside the hull, the universe had ceased to exist.
The interior lights went red, and a small insistent beep started warning him of the exterior air lock door opening. He pulled his gamma laser out and turned the pilot’s chair around so he could face the air lock. The door was directly to the rear of the crew cabin, between the two access ways that led aft and down to the two small cabins that were all the living space on the
Xanadu
.
The air lock door was an oval of polished brass etched with delicately ornate scrollwork, the only view inside through a porthole modeled after an ancient sea vessel. Because of the tiny size of the window relative to the door, and the slight tilt downward, Stefan could only see vague shadowy movement inside the air lock itself.
The red light in the cabin began flashing, and the electronic warning beep became a screaming alarm as the elaborate latches holding the air lock door shut began to unscrew themselves.
Stefan’s eyes widened and he glanced at the console. According to the display, the outer door was still open. The interlock had failed or had been overridden. When the air lock door opened, it would expose the cabin to vacuum.
Stefan started hyperventilating, trying to suck in enough oxygen to survive until he got the door shut again. He pushed himself up out of the chair to float toward the air lock, just as the door opened.
He grabbed a tooled leather strap to anchor himself against an expected outrush of air. But the air remained impossibly still as the brass entrance of the air lock folded up into the ceiling on well-oiled hinges.
His visitor stood flat on the antique carpet of the air lock as if the
Xanadu
had its own gravity. Surreally, the man was naked, wearing not so much as a belt. Stefan stared, disbelieving his own eyes showing the open outer door of the air lock. Beyond the naked man, the darkness writhed, throwing whips and eddies of itself into the air lock, but not past his visitor.
The man’s nakedness did not project vulnerability. Instead, the man’s pupilless eyes bored into Stefan projecting arrogance and an unspeakable power.
When the apparition spoke, Stefan’s bowels turned to water.
“You have sinned against Me.” The voice came from a too-human throat, but the words resonated through the hull of the
Xanadu
as if the darkness itself spoke.
“No, no, I haven’t,” Stefan said, shaking his head and crying. He lost his grip on the laser, and it floated between them, ignored.
“I have offered My hand, and you have raised your hand against Me.”
The words were like blows, and Stefan curled himself into a ball, shaking his head and saying, “No, no. It was them, not me. I wanted no part of this fight.”
“Yet here you stand in the midst of this evil.”
The man was not a man. Stefan knew he faced Adam, Mallory’s Antichrist. And, joined with the terror that racked him, Stefan felt an explosive kernel of impotent hate for the priest that cast him here, alone.
Adam walked from the air lock, ignoring the absence of gravity as he strode to where Stefan floated. Adam reached out and touched Stefan’s face. It felt nothing like the hand of God or the Devil. It felt human as Adam raised Stefan’s chin so he faced him.
“So here you are. Do you have any reason why I should not send you the way of all flesh?”
Stefan looked into Adam’s face and blurted, “I’ll kill the priest for you.”
Adam stopped moving, and Stefan caught something like surprise in his expression, in the hesitation.
“I know where he is,” he said. “I can take this ship, find him. He’s caused all this. You must want him to suffer—”
Adam’s grip tightened just enough so Stefan stopped talking. “Do you presume to know the mind of God? You are an insect, less than nothing. Obscurity headed for oblivion. What can you give Me that I will not take for Myself?”
“He
expects
you to kill him,” Stefan said.
“So I will.”
“But if
I
do it, it will hurt him more.”
Adam stared at him, the surprise now deeply etched in the otherwise perfectly sculpted face. His grip loosened on Stefan.
“Let me,” Stefan said. “Let me rob that man of his destiny. Let him die not in the glory he seeks, but at the hands of someone he chose to discard. Let my obscurity be his final punishment.”
Around them, tendrils of darkness floated, curling, probing the walls, slipping into the control systems of the
Xanadu
. Adam let him go, and Stefan floated, and caught himself against the swirling darkness. The black curled around his legs and arms, sliding inside his jumpsuit. Its touch was cold and light, like the last breath of a corpse.
“Will you serve Me as your God?” Adam asked.
“Y-yes!”
“Then, as you ask, you will become My instrument of vengeance.”
The darkness poured over Stefan, filling his eyes, nose, and mouth. His fear died in a single explosive burst, and when the smoke cleared, Stefan Stavros was left with only a single glowing coal of hate.
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) 7.2 AU from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Barely six minutes passed between the time that Mosasa’s revelations convinced Dacham to go ahead with the Proteans’ plan against Adam, and the time Adam lashed out in his rage, taching half of the
Voice
’s fleet insystem.
It felt an eternity to her.
Adam’s attack consisted of the fifty most advanced tach-ships human technology had been able to produce. Each of the fifty ships carried an army, a virtual world, of Adam’s chosen on board, and each one carried an embodiment of Adam himself.
It was also the starkest demonstration of Adam’s central flaw that Rebecca had yet seen. Adam’s self-image as a God meant that omniscience was an integral part of his identity now. The thing that was Adam literally could not accept an unknown into his universe; it threw the would-be God off-balance, caused more mistakes, and rendered Adam’s own reactions unpredictable.
The situation on Bakunin caused him to completely break his pattern. Here, he was no longer interested in ultimatums, or conversion. Here, he was only interested in punishing defiance, turning his attention to the world that so defied him.
And when he launched those ships, he had no idea that defiance was much closer to hand. At the instant the attack ships vanished into tach-space, the only embodiment of Adam for light-years was the eidolon on the bridge of the
Voice
. The only presence of Adam’s mind was within the thinking matter infecting the
Voice.
For three and a half seconds, fifty other Adams would be lost in the tach-space between the
Voice
and their opposition.
For a people freed from the constraints of the flesh, three and a half seconds could be a long time.
Mosasa moved first.
His revelation to Dacham and Rebecca had been what made this possible. She had suspected, on Earth, that Mosasa was not quite as limited to her mind as he had implied. He had confirmed that. His individuality was as distributed as Adam, every convert to Adam’s reign beyond the flesh carried some small fraction of him, less a whole version of Mosasa, than a single cluster of neurons in a vast network, more rarified than even Adam’s chosen. The chosen may live only as thoughts within the pattern of thinking matter that made up Adam’s body; Mosasa’s mind was made of patterns implanted within those thoughts.
Rebecca’s mind just happened to house the part of Mosasa that had achieved self-awareness again.
It also meant that, in the confines of the
Voice
, when Adam was at his weakest, most alone, and most psychologically unstable, he was suddenly confronted with a billion images of his Nemesis, Mosasa. Mosasa had no effect on the physical world, but he could manifest himself across the breadth of Adam’s chosen, appearing before all of the senses Adam possessed.