It was enough to completely break Adam’s tenuous grip on sanity. The God attacked his own, striking down millions of his chosen to burn out the image of Mosasa. Mosasa seemed unmoved in the face of the onslaught and pushed himself into the God’s own mind.
The battle of wills was opaque to Rebecca; she suffered the same limitation as Adam, unable to see within another’s mind. It was a limitation Mosasa did not seem to share. The only thing Rebecca could see of the battle was the spasms of Adam’s identity though the physical matrix that infected the
Voice.
For a moment, it seemed that Mosasa might single-handedly defeat Adam . . . But less than a second after the attack began, she heard an unearthly scream echo through her own head. A scream in Mosasa’s voice.
Following the scream, she heard Dacham’s voice.
“Our turn.”
The Proteans’ plan to attack Adam had been much more insidious than a straightforward military attack, as powerful as the dead Protean colony was.
Dacham had not been the only agent they had sent to Earth.
They had sent thousands. All to await Adam’s call. All to accept it.
All of them had been perfectly human in form, as Dacham had been. And thanks to the Protean attack, and the pope’s broadcast, the possibility that such wolves were in the midst of the human sheep had never occurred to the god Adam.
So Adam had brought all of them into his bosom. Ten thousand human beings carried the minds of the ancient Protean cult. Ten thousand humans who already had the knowledge of living centuries without a fixed fleshy form.
Unlike untold billions who found Adam’s transformation paralyzing in its novelty, the Proteans were at home in Adam’s environment. Some had lived within such a state longer than Adam had existed.
In his rage, first at the defiant Bakunin seven AU away from him, then at the monstrous appearance of Mosasa within his own mind, he paid no attention as the distribution of the minds within the
Voice
shifted around him. The first few microseconds, the chosen in proximity to him—the ones damaged or erased at his lashing out at Mosasa—were replaced by certain members of the chosen from Earth. In his battle with the phantom Mosasa, Adam did not pay attention as his consciousness flowed like water back toward his embodied self on the bridge of the
Voice
.
Adam showed no reaction to the Protean presence, until the body within the
Voice
began a physical separation. The continuous swarm of nanomachines that filled every space on the
Voice
—the structure, the wiring, the air itself—had been forcefully split into two groups. Adam’s tenuous, almost autonomous, connection to the body of the ship had been forcefully cut.
“What is this?” Adam screamed. His voice resonated in the walls of the bridge, but no further. While his fully conscious incarnation realized that he was encapsulated on the bridge of the
Voice
, hundreds of Protean agents roamed the remaining environment of the
Voice
finding the semiconscious remnants of Adam’s psyche that had been severed from their conscious direction.
On the bridge, Adam lashed out at his confinement. The bulkheads twisted, shedding electronic equipment as the metal superstructure began to flow and remake itself. Around Adam, the walls themselves formed into dozens of long segmented arms that tore into the bulkheads, ripping at the invisible barrier, trying to tear free into contact with the greater cloud infecting the
Voice.
Somewhere, seven AUs away, Adam’s tach-ship fleet winked into existence, completely unaware that Adam’s incarnation on the
Voice
had been trapped.
The physical structure of the bridge tore itself apart, as if the room was having a psychotic tantrum. Matter threw itself against the walls, piercing the envelope Adam found himself in, but the cloud within the mass of the
Voice,
now a Protean cloud, withdrew from any physical contact with the matter piercing the bulkheads of the bridge.
A third cloud formed, a buffer between the bridge and the rest of the ship, a spherical presence invisibly englobing the bridge and Adam’s incarnation. The invisible sphere was made with the minds of a thousand Proteans, a cabal of the first ones. The thousand had lived the longest; they had tread upon the surface of Titan before a terraforming accident consumed all life upon that moon and spawned the ban upon self-replicating nanomachines.
Each one of the thousand had been human long before a pirate named Mosasa found his derelict spacecraft and participated in Adam’s birth. Each one of the thousand, if not for the Protean creed they had founded, could have become Adam themselves.
Adam screamed again. “What is this defiance? Who raises their hand against the living God?”
The bridge was no longer recognizable as a human construct. The mass that had formed the walls, the chairs, the holo displays, the air itself, had all coalesced into glowing streams of coherent matter whipping around, striking at the sphere englobing it. The only thing still recognizable was Adam himself. His body, naked and perfect, floated in the center of a perfect sphere of boiling chaos.
As Adam railed, the
Voice
itself fired a series of maneuvering jets, giving it a very slight vector down, away from the bridge. Above the bridge, bulkheads dissolved, leaving a hole large enough for the globe containing Adam to drift out into space.
The
Voice
increased its thrust, separating itself from the flickering irregular sphere containing Adam’s wrath. Within, Adam’s fury had begun to consume matter itself, the temperature increasing as the swirling mass became a barely controlled plasma. When Adam cursed them now, it was no longer in a human voice; there was no air for speech, and his human embodiment had begun to burn.
I shall destroy anyone who defies Me.
As one, the thousand responded,
We know.
And then there was light.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Holy Ghost
“If you shoot, shoot to kill.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“We should regard all force with aversion.”
—WILLIAM GODWIN
(1756-1836)
Date: 2526.8.10 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
“If you can do something,” Kugara yelled. “Do it
now!
”
Kugara was barely three meters from them, popping around cover and snapping shots from the biggest handgun Flynn had ever seen.
“Let me drive,”
Flynn called out inside his own head, grabbing Tetsami’s attention as forcefully as possible.
“Sonny, you remember what happened the last time you did that in a firefight?” Tetsami didn’t even try to subvocalize as they cowered behind an aircar. Alarms began sounding all around them. Tetsami muttered, “Fuck.”
“Damn it, Gram, do you want to get to a terminal or not?”
“What are you—” A gunshot blew out a windshield, peppering them with clear polymer fragments.
“We don’t have the time!” Flynn shouted, reaching the end of the sentence before he realized she had relinquished control back to him.
He sprang up from his crouch and dove for the contragrav van, putting it between him and the shooters. He heard shots slam into the side of the van, but he made it. He pulled open the cabin door and crawled inside. It took a moment to orient himself from ground level, but before the door swung shut behind him, he started charging the contragrav.
The whine of the generators was enough to draw more fire. Slugs blew holes in the thin skin of the craft, and the windshield shattered.
“Where the hell are you going in this thing?”
“Only thirty meters, Gram.” He maxed out the generators so the bricklike vehicle achieved a negative buoyancy and started rising. Once they had risen ten meters or so, Flynn risked a look up. He figured his head was out of sight from shooters on the ground now.
Even so, he only popped up long enough to confirm his impression of the motor pool layout. At the rear, opposite the doors to the outside, was a workshop separated from the parking area only by a two-meter partition wall. He looked down inside the shop and saw it was unoccupied except for a pair of two-seater aircars. It looked as if someone had been cannibalizing the parts from one to maintain the other.
What drew Flynn’s eye, past the diagnostic equipment and cabinets of tools, was a rolling cart with a comm unit on it, covered in a protective plastic tarp.
Good enough.
He ducked down, goosed the jets to give some forward momentum, and cut the contragrav power by 58%.
Cut to about a third of its mass below neutral buoyancy, their brick obligingly plunged in a slow-motion parabola to nose into the far wall of the motor pool a bit less than three meters above the ground.
The impact slammed him into the footwell, but he recovered to jump out the door.
Inside his head, he heard Gram’s voice shouting the words
“Jesus. Fuck.”
Over and over again.
As he rolled across the oil-stained ferrocrete floor, he thought at her,
“Get ready to do your thing!”
He came to a stop under the more gutted of the two aircars.
Behind him, holes peppered the partition wall, and some energy weapon blew a burning chunk out of it close to where the contragrav van continued its slow descent, crushing tables, rolling carts of tools, and grinding a massive hole in the wall with a screeching of abused metal that threatened to upstage the alarm system.
He crawled along behind the aircar back into the corner with the comm unit. He reached up and yanked the plastic sheeting from it and said, “Now, Gram!”
He mentally withdrew, and felt her pick up the slack as she pulled the main comm off the cart. Bullets slammed into the aircar bodies behind them. She muttered something about interface cables, pulling a mess of cable out of their pocket. The object was like a multicolored octopus with too many legs, cables of various colors and thicknesses led into a hard ball of emergency repair tape. The kludgy object had followed them from the
Daedalus
, custom-made by Tetsami. One black optical cable, about a meter long, led back to a small magnetic socket that fit into the dimple in the base of their neck. That had come from a security camera back on Salmagundi. The rest of the device was made from salvaged cables that Tetsami had picked up from the
Khalid
and the
Daedalus
. The homemade adapter was necessary for her to use her skills with a neural interface whose specs were two hundred years out of date.
Tetsami found the right port on the comm and plugged in a short lime-green cable. Two little lights embedded in the knot of tape shone green up at her. Flynn felt her smile as she took the black cable and attached it to the port on their neck. Flynn felt the click of the connection in the bones of their jaw.
Flynn braced himself mentally as his view of the world dropped away.
The two of them shared the same sensory input, so when Tetsami dropped into a software interface, he dropped along with her.
The world went black and silent, and he knew from experience that it meant that whatever Tetsami had jacked into had no actual interface for someone using it like this. The void only lasted a moment. Tetsami walked across the face of the deep and pulled existence out of nothingness. A blue field, an infinite plain, emerged from the dark, covered by geometric forms in every color that Flynn could imagine. Glowing trails sprouted between the shapes, arcing and looping in a three-dimensional tangle.
Flynn knew that she was designing a user interface on the fly, and he was somehow seeing the network this comm was connected to.
Then, he felt Tetsami using their hands, or some analog of their hands, to start picking up the shapes, twisting them, manipulating them, pulling conduits from one and plugging into another. Soon, her individual actions were indistinguishable as shapes and lines sped by too fast for him to absorb. He was left with a staccato sequence of machine-gun impressions.
Embedded in the abstract movement of shape and line, he caught flashes of the outside world: Kugara firing her massive cannon at the closing gunmen; twenty armed men charging the entrance of the motor pool; people in some sort of control room yelling commands; a warehouse with workers abandoning crates of weapons to run toward the exits; Nickolai standing, fur matted with blood from a shallow wound in his side, holding a gory length of chain, five men face-down on the pavement in front of him.
Over all of this, his ears remained in the real world, hearing gunshots and sirens.
Tetsami’s voice came to him, almost too fast to understand,
“holyshitgetouttotherealworldnowdamnitnow”
He felt a mental push and the virtual world tumbled away, and he found himself blinking and looking at the underside of the motor pool’s ceiling.
“keepmepluggedingodhelpuskeepmepluggedin”