Heretics (25 page)

The entire dropship vibrated, and the resonances formed a voice that she felt more than heard.

She didn't need to be told twice. She aimed the dropship straight up the center of the widening cone of clear airspace and fired the jets pushing the acceleration to just short of having everyone on board lose consciousness.

The dropship shook, and the temperature gauges oscillated wildly. The atmosphere might have been clear of descending mass, but it was still hot and turbulent from its passage. The black web unfolded around them, forming the boundary of the clear airspace as the view from the windscreen became abstract patterns in heat, smoke, and light.

At five kilometers up, she saw the well-defined borders of the cleared area crumble around them. Suddenly, dozens of masses headed toward them at supersonic speeds.

She started doing what evasive maneuvers she could as she unleashed the maneuvering jets full bore, crushing her into her seat and fuzzing the edges of her vision. She held on to the edge of consciousness with bloody nails, telling herself that she had taken more G's when she was a fighter pilot.

But not sustained, and not without an appropriate flight suit to keep the blood in her head.

The dropship tore through the upper atmosphere, threading through the burning contrails of a falling sky. All the time the oversized Caliphate dropship jittered like an imam at a Proudhon strip club.

They shot out above it two seconds before Parvi noticed, and three seconds before she blacked out.

“Our fates are stranger than we are willing to admit.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Rebecca Tsoravitch stood on the outskirts of the abandoned city of Ashley, reborn, seeing and feeling with a depth and detail that was inconceivable to her an hour ago. The pulse of knowledge cascaded through her in waves, data from every remote sensor distributed across the inhabited surface of Salmagundi. Adam embraced the planet, each of his chosen landing part of his . . .

Essence? Influence? Body? Soul? Mind?

None of the words quite captured the concept within which she and 250,000 of Adam's other chosen had descended to the surface of Salmagundi. The polymorphous entities were colonies of machines more numerous and more varied in function than the cells that made up a human body, durable, mutable, capable of reproducing any mechanical function bounded only by the limits of the matter comprising them.

Adam's embrace of Salmagundi was carried out by a quarter million of these machine colonies. They were crewed by the mind of one of the chosen, but their substance consisted of Adam's consciousness.

That was one of the first truths she'd known about Adam's new world. When she took his hand and dissolved her flesh into his mechanical cloud of thinking matter, she knew that her self still had boundaries. There was a definite point of division, even with her body yet unformed, between her and not-her. That was not so with Adam. His identity, his self, ranged everywhere outside of herself.

It was his most valid claim for godhead. Within the cloud he was, in fact, omnipresent. When she looked up at the threadlike forms tracing across the sky, the tendrils of thinking matter arcing from the landing site outside the city, she looked up at him.

Omnipresent, she thought safely within herself, but not omnipotent. Adam was not perfect. Standing in her temporarily human body, she smiled at a thought that no longer even felt blasphemous.

Her mind was now much larger than her body, and it accommodated data streams from each of the quarter million landing sites. She had quickly adapted her consciousness to interpret the flood of data. She experienced little disorientation from the flood of information—more every second than her old brain would have been able to perceive, much less understand. Her sudden adaptation to her new consciousness, like the odd bits of memory implanted within her own, seemed a gift that Adam had granted her unawares.

She saw enough of the data flowing through the cloud to tell that none of the other chosen seemed to monitor the whole of the bandwidth as she did.

So she saw the Caliphate dropship escape, aided by a damaged, half-sentient Protean artifact. She saw enough data on the ship itself to know it carried the survivors of the
Eclipse
, aside from Mosasa, Bill, and the late Dr. Pak. She watched it tear out of the atmosphere and wink out in a burst of tachyon radiation.

She could not see into Adam's thoughts, but she briefly felt his anger slice through the cloud like a thread of metallic hydrogen.

So she knew that this god could fail, however slightly.

While one part of her now multifold mind pondered Adam's divinity, or lack thereof, another walked with her body along the streets of Ashley.

God or not, she was here to serve Adam's purposes. It was a fair trade for what she had been given. She was here to help fulfill Adam's desire for a diversity of mind. Each of Adam's chosen now walked the planet, finding the scattered population, and offering the same choice that Adam had offered her—transcend the flesh, one way or the other.

Something in the culture of Salmagundi meant that many more chose Adam's path than she expected. On the Caliphate vessels, only a third chose to join him. That meant two thirds of the crew of the
Prophet's Voice
went “the way of all flesh”—a slightly larger percentage than from the
Sword.
Here, on Salmagundi, the proportions were nearly reversed, with better than sixty percent deciding to become Adam's chosen people.

It also meant the execution of better than a third of the planet's population. Part of her was appalled, and part of her mourned, but nothing in her could bring herself to regret her own decision to live.

Even so, she had access to see every denial, the face of every man, woman, and child who chose to fight Adam's representatives rather than take their hand. She saw each face, and she remembered them.

None had yet fallen before her. The streets her eidolon walked had been evacuated long before her arrival; no one here to offer salvation or damnation. Buildings stood empty, embraced by a wind warmed by the descent of the chosen, wrapped by enigmatic shadows cast by the combination of evening light and the luminous tendrils that crossed the sky above her.

The form she wore was as human as the body she had cast aside. She had even chosen to wear clothing; though such protection was unnecessary now, the sensation of the wind tugging the fabric against her skin comforted her.

At the end of the abandoned street she walked towered a building that dominated everything else in Ashley. Here was Adam's Grail.

The Hall of Minds.

This was one of fifty such structures across the planet, temples to the stored memories of Salmagundi's ancestors. Inside existed every generation for the past one hundred and seventy-five years.

It was a stark, windowless monument, a skyscraper in the midst of the smaller buildings surrounding it. Above the monolithic structure, the tendrils wrapping the sky found their focus, meeting above it, casting a soft yellow glow across the long slabs of its walls.

She walked inside as the sky behind the tendrils faded from rose to a deep purple. She walked through empty, echoing corridors lit only by faint emergency lighting. Doors hung open on either side, showing offices abandoned in the last stages of normalcy.

She wondered if, in the view of the people here, Adam
was
a God. At the very least she wondered how he fit within their belief system. Here was a culture that dedicated itself to feeding their dead to the machine for the purpose of resurrecting them sometime in the future.

What Adam offered, was it fundamentally different, or different only in degree?

She walked out into the grand space of the hall itself, pillars of memory storage reaching up to an invisible ceiling hundreds of meters above. The space was huge, cold, and gray, the air empty and still.

As she walked to the central dais, golden threads descended from the ceiling, threadlike probes that had been excreted by the tendrils now embracing the city. At the moment, those thread- fine probes—wires of living, thinking machinery—were as much a part of her as her lower lip, which she absently chewed as each of dozens of probes subdivided itself into a dozen more threads of microscopic thickness.

She folded her arms against her breasts, squeezing herself as she felt the probes reach out for the data storage. She breathed deeply as the first threads wove their way into the circuitry of the Hall of Minds. A bead of sweat stung her eye as she felt her nonhuman self brush the stored consciousness of someone long dead. The data itself was frozen, inert, unaware, waiting for a brain to be written upon.

The minds here had transcended the flesh. In a sense they were already Adam's chosen, waiting for her to revive them.

The vast chamber filled with the glow from the probes as they crawled over the surfaces, sinking their threads into each of the minds stored here, the hexagonal pillars of data storage alive with glowing threads as if the faux stone had spontaneously come alive and sprouted cilia.

When the data began to flow, it was a torrent, a flood, a deluge, a fountain of knowledge erupting from the prosaic Hall of Minds into the thinking cloud that was Adam's realm. The progress of awakening was invisible to her human eyes, but to her wider awareness, the part of her that controlled the threads connecting her directly to the circuitry of this building, it was as if she was caught in a tidal wave made of information—

More than information.

A tidal wave made of people's souls.

“The brighter the light, the darker the shadows.”

“Let there be Light.”

—GENESIS 1:3

Toni followed the older man—whose name was Karl Stavros—and his son to the bridge of the
Daedalus
. She was thinking wildly about what to do next. Her major concern was how many people were aboard. “You have to order your crew to secure themselves,” she told him, “in case the docking system fails before we get your ship clear.”

“Don't worry, there's no one here right now. The rest of the crew's on the station.”

That was a relief. Two civilians could be handled safely between her and her doppelganger. Four or five more, and it might be hard to maintain control of the situation without an excessive use of force. She didn't want to hurt these people if she could avoid it.

“What are you going to do?”

What
was
she going to do?

“We need to pilot this craft out of the docking facility, place it into a parking orbit, and wait for repairs.”

“Can't the computer do that?”

“Like I said, the communication links are affected. Even if we started an auto-disengage, there's a chance the comm might fail in the middle of it. We need a trained pilot to do this.”

They entered the bridge, and she directed the two of them to a pair of crash chairs by the doorway. “Get in those and strap in.”

Stefan, the son said, “But shouldn't someone be at nav—”

“Move it! We don't have time and I don't know what's going to happen.” Again, barking orders authoritatively got the two moving.

She wanted them in the crash chairs because once they they were strapped in, it would be hard for them to blind-side her, and if they were strapped in at the back of the cockpit, they wouldn't have a good view of what she was doing at the pilot's chair.

The first thing, she killed the main power to the communications station. The last thing she wanted was to talk to 3SEC traffic control. Then she slid into the pilot's seat.

She felt the pulse in her neck and a faint taste of copper in her mouth. She had a brief moment of doubt, but thought of the colonel, standing unprotected in a vacuum, pointing a gun at her. Along with it came another thought.

Her other self was a ghost, and an incredibly unusual one. Most ghosts go through extensive debriefings, but Toni II was caught up in a massive attack on the wormhole network. Even if they were able to avoid the colonel and any other moles in 3SEC, Toni II was too valuable for them to ever let her go.

The console looked very far away.

From behind her, someone said, “Lieutenant?”

Can't give them time to think.
She couldn't let them analyze what she'd been saying, or they'd realize that she had been making no sense at all—and had on at least two points contradicted herself.

She sucked in a breath and began the emergency disengage sequence.

The floor dropped beneath them as every connection to the station disconnected at once. The
Daedalus
was in free fall now, sliding out of the dock on momentum alone. As the ship fell through the dock toward the outside, she began running the nav computer through its paces, plotting the course for the tach-drive. A course to the only inhabited planet where it would be safe to tach in with a stolen vessel.

In response, the consoles around the nav station and the pilot's console began lighting green with status meters as the tach-drive charged up. Behind her, she heard Stefan yell, “What in the hell?” This was followed by the clicking of a crash harness disengaging.