Heretics (43 page)

Now, with Kugara's lips punishing his hard enough for him to taste blood, he discovered he liked it better.

Now that she was in front of him, with only her calves between his thighs, he yanked the jumpsuit down as far as his hand could reach. With it down to her thighs she managed to remove it herself with a few lethally quick kicks. Enough to show that he had never really had her pinned down.

Not that it mattered at this point.

She straddled him with crushing force. He took her throat in his mouth just hard enough to feel her pulse race under his tongue. She dragged fingers down his back with such force that it was hard to believe she didn't have claws. She screamed when he entered her, and he roared when he came.

At the end of everything he let go and they floated free, holding each other.

A long time after he thought she had fallen asleep from the exertion, she asked him, “Do you think we're going to die?”

Nickolai closed his eyes and said, “Everyone dies.”

“The most feared change is a change of mind.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“The church is the work of an incarnate God. Like all God's works, it is perfect. It is, therefore, incapable of reform.”

—JAMES GIBBONS (1834-1921)

The riots started in Sydney, around the diplomatic compound by the old Confederacy spire. By the time the news reached the halls of the Apostolic Palace, the security had already collapsed. The first accounts were confused as to what had happened, and by the time the Vatican had access to the transmissions, so did everyone else on the planet.

Cardinal Anderson stood in a corner of the pope's offices, watching His Holiness view the communication from Khamsin. It was shortly after three in the morning in Rome, and the pope still wore his bedclothes and slippers.

On the holo, a Caliphate officer shouted Arabic into a shaky camera held by someone else. The image jerked as it moved outside. Anderson's monks in the intelligence department had already identified the frantic man on the holo as Colonel Ahmad Abdallah, a regional commander for Khamsin domestic security in the southern hemisphere. The transmission changed focus to the city behind Colonel Abdallah, which intelligence had identified as Al Jahra, a coastal community of about eight million people, dominated by resort hotels and whatever recreational facilities were allowed by the Ministry for Suppression of Vice.

It was normally one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.

Not now.

Abdallah and his anonymous cameraman had moved to the street, which was packed with people fleeing the city center. Behind the mass of the panicked crowd, which caught Abdallah and his cameraman in its inexorable flow outward, the sky burned.

It was as if the heavens above the city had torn themselves open to reveal a rain of fire. It wasn't until individual particles of the fiery heavens grew and slammed into the city skyline that it was clear what was happening. Things were falling from orbit, individual objects in meteoric descent to the surface, so many that they blocked out the sky and the heat of their atmospheric entry set the sky on fire.

And these objects were not meteors.

Molten raindrops the size of small buildings slammed into Al Jahra's skyline, each impact vibrating the image in the holo. Each site of impact glowed as if the blow had broken through the crust of the planet to allow something infernal to shine through from the core. From each site, something rose up from the glowing impact. Whipping tendrils, taller than the buildings, sprang up from the depths to wrap around the skyline. The tendrils grabbed buildings and appeared to fold them, pull them down.

The image in the holo whipped around and faced the direction the crowd had been fleeing, away from the city, just in time to see a glowing teardrop from the fiery sky slam into the road in front of them.

The holo went dark for a moment, then faded in. The image rose from ground level and showed the crowd struck down by the force of the close impact. Many were struggling to their feet, but many were not. All forward motion had stopped as everyone faced the glowing wall that blocked their path. It undulated, like something alive, shooting out tendrils to deconstruct everything in the physical world around them—rocks, buildings, trees, the road itself.

Something walked out of the glowing wall, as if it were so much smoke. The glowing near-human form spread its arms and spoke in Arabic.

An old man trembled before it, on his knees. His clothes were bloody, and he appeared to have broken his arm falling after the impact. He closed his eyes and started praying.

One of the glowing tentacles whipped from the edges of the crowd and struck the man. The old man jerked as if he had been impaled in the back, his jaw went slack, and his flesh seemed to fold within itself as if he was being turned inside out. After a quick glimpse of bone and blood, the old man was gone.

The crowd erupted into chaos, screams of terror, prayers for deliverance, as hundreds of glowing tendrils shot into the crowd, striking them down. Before the scene died, there was a brief flash, an almost subliminal image of a thousand people, men, women and children simultaneously being torn apart from the inside.

Cardinal Anderson felt as if they had just received a tach-comm from hell.

The pope was silent for several moments, staring into space.

“We have a translated version, Your Holiness,” Cardinal Anderson said.

The pope shook his head. “I do not want to watch that again. God help all of them.” He turned to look at the Cardinal with haunted eyes. “Perhaps you can tell me what was being said?”

Cardinal Anderson nodded and pulled up the transcript on his personal comm.

“I am transmitting against orders from the Ministry of External Relations. I am outside Al Jahra, and we have been receiving blasphemous transmissions for the past twelve hours. We are under attack by something calling itself Adam. It claims it is God. The sky itself is tearing open. People are trying to—”

Cardinal Anderson looked up from the transcript. “The statements become less coherent from that point, once they get caught in the crowd.”

“The apparition spoke.”

“Yes. That was clear. It said, ‘It is now time to choose what God you serve.'”

The pope nodded. He was younger than Cardinal Anderson, but he seemed to have aged twenty years in the past few months. “Am I imagining it, or was the voice familiar?”

“No, it was. I had the waveform checked, and it is an exact match for Kennedy's transmission, the one we showed Mallory.”

“Mallory called this thing Adam as well.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“Do we know how this became public?”

“We suspect a low-level person employed in the communication office of the Caliphate consulate smuggled out a recording.”

“I suppose their consulate is in a bit of a disarray right now.”

Cardinal Anderson nodded. “The recording implies that the Caliphate government is compromised at a very high level.”

“It also implies something else.”

“Your Holiness?”

“The specifications on an Ibrahim-class carrier. Beyond the aggressive range of the thing, it can also, I understand, make a tach-jump at the same speed as a tach-comm message. Adam arrived at Khamsin at about the same time as Mallory's message reached us.”

“He could be arriving now,” Cardinal Anderson said.

“Earth would be a logical target.”

“What shall we do?”

“Have you been able to communicate with the Caliphate consul?”

“No.”

The pope nodded. “Prepare our own communications office. I'm going to talk, and we need to transmit it as broadly as possible. Tach-comm to every inhabited system we can reach. I will make my statement about Adam.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“And go tell our guest. The Proteans will get their wish.”

The words of the Bishop of Rome left Earth on every frequency the human race used for communication, both faster and slower than light. As tach-comm bursts left the observable universe to find their receivers light-years away, the more sluggish radio transmissions left the planet in a slowly expanding sphere.

Roughly fifteen minutes from the time the pope began speaking in Rome, the first signals from the broadcast reached the surface of Mars. After another twenty minutes, a large section of Martian desert, where terraforming plants had yet to reach, began to change.

The first changes came to the topography, as the uneven surfaces flattened out over a circular area close to a million square kilometers. Every hump and ridge in the sand spilled out to form a surface close to perfectly flat. The light reflecting off the surface changed as individual grains packed themselves to refract less light. Within thirty seconds, the change was visible from orbit.

The entire area rose several meters as spiral ridges appeared, twisting across the uniform surface. Each spiral was less than a meter across, centered on a tiny hole in its center. The new features showed that the whole area slowly rotated in relation to the surface of the planet.

As the vast area rotated, the holes, millions of them, began to erupt. Each spit out a small projectile the size of a few dozen grains of sand. The teardrop-sized bullets shot from the surface at multiples of Martian escape velocity, trailing a molecule-thick thread behind them.

This was the point when the first human beings became aware that something was amiss. Traffic control officers in charge of regulating Martian airspace suddenly had computers screaming warnings of a huge, anomalous weather front spontaneously appearing on the Martian equator. Satellite imagery of the area showed a gigantic circular cloud, the wake of millions of tiny projectiles tearing through the Martian atmosphere. Even the threads behind them became visible from the contrail of water vapor and ice that coalesced around them.

On the surface, the sudden weather anomaly appeared like a column of clouds a thousand kilometers wide, stacked up through every layer of the atmosphere.

Martian traffic control began desperately warning the few aircraft in the area to steer clear of the anomaly as every sensor started telling them that the core of the cloud-bank was increasing in density.

The millions of tiny probes slowed as they reached the limits of the Martian atmosphere, velocity sapped by the weight of a few hundred kilometers of molecule-thick thread and the water vapor that had managed to condense on the thread in its travel upward. Even so, the motion was still twice escape velocity. As the threads climbed, the heads maneuvered very slightly, dancing on dynamic electromagnetic fields emanating from the threads themselves. The dance caused the threads to spiral around each other and to dip toward the center of their mass.

At the bottom of the massive columnar cloud, the desert around the base of the formation started to drop. Sand began to slide toward it and down, as if falling into a planet-sized hourglass. Above, the cloud formation began to tear apart in the Martian wind, revealing a single black spire, the edges starting nearly parallel to the ground at the surface, then shooting up in an hyperbolic curve that reached toward a vertical asymptote somewhere up above the atmosphere.

The surface of the spire was a thick braid of threads that themselves were braids of even smaller threads made from invisible braids of molecular monofilament.

Even before the top of the spire stopped growing into space, masses began riding up the inside of the spire.

It was not yet dawn in Rome when Cardinal Anderson opened the door to one of the most secure “guest rooms” in the Vatican. It was as luxuriously appointed as any of the apartments in the Apostolic Palace. The only distinctions marking these rooms as different were the absence of windows or any means to open the door from the inside.

The gentleman who had named himself Jonah Dacham had obviously been roused from sleep by one of the guards before Anderson's arrival. He sat in the living room, dressed but barefoot, his hair uncombed. He squinted against the light when he turned his head to face the cardinal's entrance.

“Good morning, Mr. Dacham,” the Cardinal greeted him. “Has your stay been comfortable?”

Jonah chuckled. “Believe me, I've stayed in worse places.”

“I've come to tell you that the pope has considered your request.”

“You've changed your minds.”

“His Holiness saw an example of what our Adversary wrought on Khamsin. He has granted what you asked. Our ability to influence State reactions to your actions is limited, but we have given you the absolution you asked. Those of Proteus have the forgiveness of the Church. You should inform your people.”

“No need,” Jonah said.

“What?”

“I presume the pope broadcast this announcement?”

“Yes.”

“Then they know already.”

“What will you do, then, Mr. Dacham?”

“I will continue being human.”

 

As Cardinal Anderson left the apartments where they kept Jonah Dacham, his personal comm alerted him. He brought it out to view the message that something unknown had, in the past hour, built a space elevator on the Martian equator.

He stared at the images of the massive artifact, whose shadow could be seen from as far away as Earth. One thought went through his head:
What have we unleashed?