Infinite Day (97 page)

The little bald man behind the desk gasped as he entered
. Just over a year ago I was a troublesome student; I am now a hero
.

Vero smiled. “Good morning. I have a single request. I would like to see an original document.”

The man gave a bow of deference. “By all means, Sentinel Enand.”

Vero looked up at Trichetov's painting of Moshe Adlen that hung on the wall. “I want to see his testament. The original.”

There was a hesitation. “An unusual request. But in your case . . . I think I can oblige.”

Vero was taken down to an air-conditioned vault and shown to a table. A neat metal box was brought to him, and inside he found the three pages of the letter preserved in perfectly transparent silicate sheets. The handwriting was poor, but it didn't take him long to find the key line. “
If I was going to say anything more, I would have said it here.
”

As the librarian hovered behind him, he stared at it and felt himself smile. Sure enough, the period was odd.
It's too round, too smooth, and apparently in a slightly different shade of ink.

“I need a microscope. Please.”

“A microscope?”

“At least ten-thousand times magnification. If you can't find one, then I shall have to take this away to a laboratory.”
And I could do it, too.

“Certainly. A moment. There's a lab upstairs. I'll get one.” Then he fled with an unseemly haste.

Five minutes later, the librarian was back with a microscope. Vero adjusted it and then focused on the period.

As he had suspected, it was text; probably, he decided, carved by an electron beam on a tiny metal disk. Vero's hands were trembling as he read the words.

I want to say something for posterity here. I may be wrong—indeed I hope I am wrong—but I do not feel that Jannafy's forces were totally destroyed nearly half a century ago. I was there at the end, and I saw things that made me think. Not so much at the time. I was frankly scared and overwhelmed with the situation. We had terrible decisions to make, and we had to make them on our own. As is well known, ours was a hasty operation. Too hasty. I think in the planning there was the concern that, if we lingered, we might in some way be destroyed or, still worse, corrupted by the forces of the Rebellion. We wanted Jannafy; we knew he had destroyed the Centauri colony. We ignored the ship they had made. We assumed it to be a single multihull vessel and that Jannafy intended to put distance between him and us. We assumed the ship was conventional so that there would not be time to effect any sort of escape. We knew the blast radius of the polyvalent device would be at least a hundred thousand kilometers. We assumed they would not be able to escape. I think we assumed too much.

In the years that followed, my doubts grew. I became aware that what we had seen were perhaps seven separate vessels linked together. I also realized that, in the time it took for us to leave the Centauri system, at least some of the rebels might have had the time to flee into the mysterious and perilous realm of Below-Space.

I agonized over what to do. Should I express my concerns and try to force a tired and war-weary Assembly to expend its resources on an inordinately expensive—and potentially quite futile—chase among the stars? It seemed to me unwise. Space is big. Men and women were putting the past behind them; there was a new and healthy mood in the Assembly. And personally, I had no desire for any more destruction or pursuit. And yet I knew that my silence could create a future threat to the Assembly. What was I to do? In the end I solved the dilemma, at least to my satisfaction, by having the sentinels created. I concealed the specific focus of my concern and simply gave them a mandate to watch out for the return of evil. Whether I acted wisely or not is for a higher court to decide.

But I should say it was not just the fate of the Assembly that drove my decision. I felt we had perhaps been over-ruthless with Jannafy and his people. If some part of them had survived, then it seemed to me that it might be due to the desire of the Gracious One to give them a second chance, in the hope that their end might be better than their beginning. May it be so. The matter thus passes from my hands.

Finally: to you who have found this, let me say, if my fears have been justified then I offer you my sincerest apologies.

Vero switched off the microscope and rose to his feet.

“Thank you,” he said, and without another word left the archive. At the entrance to the library he turned to Trichetov's portrait.

“Apologies accepted,” he whispered.

Vero returned to the ADF offices. He had been given a room there, an endless supply of fine coffee, and was already known by some as Mr. V.

I'm beginning to feel at home,
he thought as he sat in his office looking at some of the files he had brought with him from the
Sacrifice.
He was uploading them onto a new computer that seemed to have unbounded memory and speed.

He paused at the password-protected file that contained the scanned copies of the priest's books.

I really don't need these. I know the principles, and I'll never use them. I ought to erase them.
Yet he did nothing.
It's knowledge, and I don't like destroying that.
So, in the end, he copied over the file.

Vero enjoyed being the center of attention at the ADF offices. He had only to go and get coffee and everyone clustered round him asking him questions.

“Tell me, Mr. V., what do you think is going to happen next?” a tall blonde woman with a very self-assured manner asked him.

“From the campaign plan we saw, I'd guess that the Dominion will move slowly, world by world, toward us.”

She looked dubious. “I've seen the files you brought us on that. But it's almost a month since the battle of Bannermene. We had that assault at Jigralt, which we now understand. But other than that, there have been no further major attacks.”

He looked at her. “I suspect the campaign plan will hold. The difficulties of long-distance communication require a strategy like this. If they take a fairly direct path to Earth, there are twenty-four worlds between Bannermene and here. I suspect they'll fall one after the other. Like dominoes.”

“Dominoes?”

“Dominoes was . . . a game. Two teams pushed against each other on a field, I think. Sometimes they all fell over, one after the other. Or so I've assumed.”

“How interesting.”

Although, as we have just seen, Vero could be wrong on little matters, he was generally right on weighty ones. But today was an exception; he was wrong on the serious matters, too.

Very badly wrong.

32

T
wo days later, on the second of February at 9:22 Jerusalem time, the Dominion launched a simultaneous and massive attack on twenty-two of the worlds between Bannermene and Earth.

These pages recount the tale of Merral D'Avanos and his friends. Justice cannot be done here to what happened on that terrible day, to the heroism and tragedies as the men and women of the Assembly resisted the men, creatures, and machines of the Dominion.

Others may tell, at length, of the great battles in space and air and on land and sea. They can recount the bloody encounters on the attacked worlds; the fighting on their plains and deserts, in their forests and parks, in their cities and villages. They can speak of the enemies that appeared: the attack skimmers—like those on the
Sacrifice
—that raced across planetary surfaces, destroying all defensive installations; the giant Krallen, with rockets mounted on them, that demolished any resistance; the machines like giant caterpillars that uncoiled out of the sky before slithering slowly through towns wrecking buildings; and the terrifying attacks by slitherwings.

They can describe how, in places, the new-forged weapons of the Assembly were able to hold back the attackers for a time, while elsewhere the enemy was so powerful as to sweep all before it. They can recount the few, brief victories: how at Manprovedi, an entire battle group was lured into an asteroid belt; how at Fanoa, an army of Krallen was destroyed on ice; how at Tiberat, a freighter destroyed a suppression complex; and how on Kheldave an entire Dominion task force was lured onto lava fields and cremated.

They can tell too how in places baziliarchs appeared, casting terror before them like a cloud, and how, in response, the angels of the Lord of All emerged from heaven and fought against them in a fury so awesome that skies seemed split apart by fire and thunder.

Such other, fuller accounts may do justice to the courage shown by those who resisted the lord-emperor's attacks. They may speak more adequately of the women, men, and children who yielded their lives to fission bombs, kinetic energy weapons, and the claws and teeth of Krallen rather than let the flag of the Lamb among the Stars be replaced by the serpent of the Final Emblem.

Of these matters, others may tell. Here though, we must briefly speak of the losses. One by one, the worlds fell. Ragtag bunches of survivors escaped through closing Gates with burned ships carrying wounded and bearing tales of worlds aflame. Within minutes, the death toll amongst the Assembly had run into thousands, and then tens of thousands, and, finally, by the time all the Gates were closed and communications terminated, the figure was in the millions.

Within twenty-four hours of the start of the attack, all twenty-two worlds had surrendered. Across a long cylinder of space, Assembly worlds were now under the control of the Dominion. At their closest, the lord-emperor's forces were now barely thirty light-years from Earth. Only two worlds, Ramult and Harufcan, stood in the way.