Messiah (28 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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Rebecca Tsoravitch?
A rather unremarkable red-haired woman floated in the chamber with them now. She looked at Abbas and said softly, “You are dying.”
Abbas stared at Tsoravitch. “Who are you?”
“My name is Rebecca, and I represent Proteus.”
“Proteus?”
“And we can save you, if you wish it.”
Abbas shook her head, “I will not deny my faith.”
“We are not Adam, and we do not ask for worship.”
“What do you ask for?” Shane said.
“Nothing,” Tsoravitch said. “But should we heal you, you become one of us, with all that implies. If you ask for our aid, you are asking to join us.”
Abbas shook her head. “No.” She closed her eyes and Shane stared accusingly at Tsoravitch.
“How can you allow this woman to die?”
“Because that is her wish.”
Abbas’ breathing became shallow and Shane pressed against the wound, but he couldn’t do anything. She was already in shock, and he felt her heart shudder and stop. He tried to revive her, but there was nothing he could do.
He looked at Rebecca, unaccountably angry for a woman he barely knew. She quietly said, “If we are to oppose Adam, we must be different from him.”
He took his hands off of Abbas’ wound and stared at them. They were slick with blood.
“She refused us,” Rebecca said, her voice defensive.
“She didn’t know what she was saying,” Shane said, staring at the bloody mess in his hands. “She wasn’t aware—”
“She was lucid,” Rebecca’s voice sounded sad, and Shane found himself reliving memories of her from four different perspectives: Pak seeing her as brilliant but scatterbrained, Dörner’s quiet disdain for someone nominally her peer but without a doctorate, Brody’s vicarious appreciation of her youth and enthusiasm, Mallory’s unease over her innocence and her closeness to Mosasa.
He knew that this was not the same woman his other selves knew aboard the
Eclipse
, and yet, she was.
“If she hadn’t woken up?” he asked.
“If she had not been able to express her refusal, we could have saved her. Reluctantly.”
“Reluctantly?”
“We must allow consent to the Change. Denying someone consent is a grave transgression.”
“Graver than letting someone die?”
“What Proteus does, what Adam does, is more transformative than death. When you’re touched by the Change, willingly or unwillingly, you cease being unique. To become us—”
“The pilgrim must provide consent, devotion, and information,” Shane said.
“You know of us?”
Shane chuckled. “In my head right now are several years’ worth of study on the Protean cult, from three different people. The point, the preservation of your culture, is the archival of all the souls who give themselves to you.” He smiled grimly. “Did you ever make it down to Salmagundi?”
She hesitated a moment before she said, “Yes.”
“Then you know that I have as good an idea of the implications of that as anyone.” He rubbed his temples and thought about the four people he had taken into the Hall of Minds. Mostly he thought about Dr. Leon Pak, who had been so damaged by his involuntary ascension into the Hall, and who now lived only as a piece of Alexander Shane. “And I know what you mean by consent.”
“I am sorry about your friend.”
Shane shook his head. “She was not my friend. Far from it. She killed Dr. Pak.”
“What? How do you—”
“She was a Caliphate sergeant who found herself in command. She tried to hold the chaos together, but she was out of her depth. I was. We all were.”
“Who are you?”
“The name Alexander Shane would mean nothing to you. Without Salmagundi, it probably means nothing, period. But I have received the minds of those you do know, Pak, Brody, Dörner, Mallory.”
Rebecca stared at him.
“I see I’ve surprised you.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Would it surprise you that being a pilgrim of Proteus would be the closest I can come to fulfilling my duty to my posterity without the Hall of Minds?”
“You wish to accept the Change, and all it implies?”
“If you answer me one question.”
“What is it?”
“What exactly have the Dolbrians left behind on Bakunin?”
 
Stefan threw himselves against his enemy.
He created copies of copies, building the flesh of himself from whatever matter drifted into the path of his anger. He paid little attention to the finer aspects of these bodies. They were simply mechanical tools to bring his mass in contact with the hated one. They crawled through the corridors of the core, filling them to the point that their limbs tangled, and the weaker of his bodies found themselves crushed against bulkheads even in zero-gee.
It didn’t matter. Each of his bodies was a personification of his white-hot rage, and nothing would halt its advance, not even other instances of himself.
He multiplied them, hundreds, thousands. The bitch with the plasma cannon could only hold him off for so long. Her resources were finite, his weren’t. As she vaporized one wave of his anger, he created twice as many of himself behind it. Each time, he sank his anger deeper into his creations, growing their teeth into fangs, fingers into talons, giving spikes to the bone that penetrated through the flesh.
His legion backed them to an air lock to a dock that had been long since evacuated. The narrow corridor they were trapped inside met the main corridor in a T, and the host that was himself fed the main corridor from both directions, pushing itself toward them. He scrambled over himself, the stronger of his avenging personas crawling over and through the weaker. They moved through a haze of their own skin and blood.
One pulse of light, and his advance was erased in a haze of gray ash, but there were more than enough bodies to spill in and fill the gap. Stefan, as distributed as his mind had become, focused all his instances of himself on his enemy’s narrow corridor, a corridor filled with choking gray ash and covered by a thin black tarlike char. For several minutes he pushed wave after wave of himself against them, reveling in the uselessness of the bitch’s plasma cannon. But unease came from another source.
He felt something, a growing sensation akin to having a leg go numb. At first he focused himself only on his mission, but the sensation persisted and spread until he could no longer ignore it. Furious at being diverted from his game, he turned his attention to the strange numbness within himself.
And what he saw terrified him.
 
We’re dead, we are so fucking dead.
The words kept tumbling through Toni’s head, almost disconnected from her body. She braced on one knee, forward foot hooked in a support strap on what had once been a wall, rear foot pressing hard against a floor-to-ceiling light fixture. Her position on the wall was about five meters in front of Mallory and her sister. She held the plasma cannon facing down toward the main corridor, her aim rock solid on the center of their corridor. The aperture was focused just tightly enough for the cone to wash the walls just three meters ahead of the intersection.
That intersection had become a pretty good approximation of hell. In the moment before the next wave, every surface by the intersection steamed. The only light came from the undamaged corridor behind her, and the exposed parts of the bulkhead that glowed red. The air was a noxious combination of burning chemicals and burning flesh. It made her gag and made her eyes water.
Then the attack came again. The demonic things erupted out of the corridor, pulling themselves into Toni’s line of fire. Each round, the things seemed less human. They scuttled crablike along the walls and each other, unconcerned when their skin burned from contact with the superheated bulkheads, or their talons gouged out the flesh of their slower companions. They moved fast, filling the corridor with grasping claws and teeth—
And Toni closed her eyes and fired a pulse from the cannon. She opened her eyes, her vision still intact, and glanced at the readout on the cannon’s instrumentation.
The energy level had fallen deep into the red. One more shot, maybe two.
So fucking dead.
She heard the scramble of claws, and the sizzle of flesh touching red-hot metal, and prepared for her last shot—
And the entire corridor wrenched itself to the left. She barely held on to the cannon, but she lost her anchor and had to scramble with her feet to keep from losing her position on the wall. She awkwardly brought the barrel to bear against the still unseen horde and screamed to Mallory, her sister, and any God that was listening, “
What the hell was that?
”
 
Stefan looked outward with his new, uncertain senses. He tried to see what was happening to the Gamma habitat and the larger portion of himself, but he was blind to that part of him. The best he could do was to peer outward, down the elevator shaft his essence had used to enter the core.
As he watched, the
Wisconsin
suffered a wrenching vibration. The shock was not only felt in the structure of the space platform, Stefan felt it in himself, as if someone was twisting a knife in a still too-human gut. Another shock followed, and another, and Stefan’s numbness flared into the fiery pain of an amputated limb.
For a moment he looked out and saw nothing, just a blackness where the Gamma habitat was. Then, as a thousand invisible hammers tried to smash apart the
Wisconsin,
the shadows fell away from his view. He saw into space—a black sky dominated by Schwitzguebel’s horizon and the blue crescent of Bakunin hanging in the sky. At first he didn’t understand what had happened. A whole third of the
Wisconsin
was missing. He should see into the Gamma habitat—
Then the mirror blocking his view tumbled away, taking its view of Schwitzguebel and Bakunin with it.
A thousand other mirrors tumbled free between the core and the Gamma habitat. The two-kilometer-long cylinder hung before him, behind a mass of floating wreckage, torn mirrors glittering like stars in the midst of twisted girders and fragments of pipe. The habitat itself was black, the great windows into the habitat opaque with Stefan’s presence within.
But something else clung to the surface. Along every support that held the habitat to the core, Stefan could see a crystalline deposit, almost like frost, coating the scaffolding that held the
Wisconsin
together. And the crystals were venting gases, each one the root of a growing, sterile cloud.
He tried to reach out to himself within the habitat, but it was like trying to touch the moon below him. And, unlike Adam, he had not been given a century to become confident in his own omnipotence.
More shocks tore at the
Wisconsin,
and the last pieces of scaffolding holding the Gamma habitat in place fell away. Stefan watched it drift, driven by the gas venting from the alien crystal frost growing on its surface.
He watched it tumble with agonizing slowness, down toward the moon’s surface, trailing a cloud of ice crystals.
When he felt the numbness extend into what was left of himself in the core of the
Wisconsin,
he did not ignore it.
 
Around them, the
Wisconsin
tried to shake itself apart. Toni had to let go of the wall, because floating in the center of the corridor now was a more stable firing platform.
Whatever was happening, it was violent enough to threaten the structural integrity of the
Wisconsin
itself. She found herself hoping for a hull breach. Dying in a vacuum seemed preferable to being torn apart by a horde of mutant Stefans.
Whatever was shaking the
Wisconsin
apart, it was enough to give their attackers pause. The demon horde held back.
The bad thing about it was that she had more time to think, beyond the mechanical process of firing again and again. She licked her lips and called back, “Is there still power to the air lock?”
“Yes,” Mallory said. “What are you—”
She heard the air lock door to the empty docking bay open as the whole station groaned. He sister called out, “You think we can make it?”
Toni pressed her lips into a hard grin. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
You know what I’m thinking.
She heard them back into the air lock as another, weaker shock wrenched the corridor around her. She stretched with her foot and kicked back toward the air lock. “Aim for the air lock across the axis. It’s the most straightforward for you to get to. Kick out as hard as you can. At most, you have half a minute before you black out.” She stopped next to the controls and looked back at Mallory and her sister. She saw her own face drain of color as her other self realized what she was doing.
“Wait—”
The scrambling noises resumed, and Toni saw the Stefan things reaching around again to pull themselves into her corridor. Toni hit the controls to shut the air lock. “Sorry, I got to keep this asshole away from this door.”

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