Heretics (45 page)

Mallory did a quick calculation in his head and decided that the transmission from Khamsin was now nine or ten days old. He couldn't turn away from the transmission, even though he knew what was going to happen. He knew it even before he saw the sky burning with the trails of millions of objects entering the atmosphere.

Both sisters said quietly, “What
is
that?”

“Adam,” Mallory responded. “It is Adam coming to Khamsin like he came to Salmagundi.”

On the screen, the dropships—Mallory didn't have a better name for the huge teardrops of molten metal—tore apart a distant urban horizon. Glowing tendrils reached from the teardrops to consume the city. Then the image was of a mass of people thrown to the ground by the force of a nearby impact.

Stavros muttered something in Greek that might have been a curse or a prayer. Mallory counted the rosary in his head. The Valentine sisters simply said, “Shit.”

Adam walked into view, glowing, larger than life, speaking Arabic to the fallen people before him. Walls of whipping tendrils surrounded the crowd. A wounded old man bent his head, as if to pray, and one of the tendrils tore the man inside out before consuming him. The crowd panicked, but there was nowhere to run, and the tendrils took everyone, man, woman, and child.

The holo faded to black before the image of the pontiff returned.

“For centuries,”
the pope continued,
“all human society has recognized three basic evils. Religious or secular, we have not tolerated any experiments in these Heretical Technologies: Self-replicating Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and the genetic engineering of sapient beings. Each brings its own unique dangers, and each has been responsible for the loss of countless lives over the past five hundred years. For five hundred years we have seen these things, in and of themselves, as anathema. But evil does not reside in matter, in knowledge, in science. Evil lives in the heart. It lives in the soul. It is our choice to follow a moral framework we acknowledge as outside ourselves, or descend to one written to accommodate our own petty desires, our hubris, our narcissism, our solipsism, our nihilism.”

The pope looked out of the holo as if he were trying to force his will through the intervening light-years.
“You have seen the works of the entity calling itself Adam. Adam represents the ultimate fear that drove us all to reject those Heretical Technologies. Adam is the temptation we tried to deny ourselves, power without any restraint or moral consideration. Adam represents the antithesis of humanity, the Adversary of every single faith, creed, or philosophy.”

“How can you fight that?” Stavros whispered. “How can anyone fight something like that?”

“That is how you fight something like this,” Mallory said.

God help us all
, he thought.

 

Parvi knew about the Vatican's transmission before anyone from the
Daedalus
bothered to tell her. She was in the cockpit of the dropship, running last-minute diagnostics for the launch less than six hours away now.

While she worked, and shortly after the Vatican's tach-comm started repeating through Bakunin's star system, the comm array on the
Khalid
began lighting up. Not with the Vatican's message, but with sudden new interest in Mallory's upstart navy.

After the first hundred queries queued up in less than a minute, Parvi knew something was up. Once she read a couple of messages, she knew what it was.

She made her way across into the
Daedalus,
and entered the cockpit just as the pope's message was ending. Parvi broke the silence that followed by saying, “It looks as if you're getting your navy, Mallory.”

One of the two Valentines said, “What do you mean?”

“Have you been paying attention to incoming queries while you were watching this?”

The Valentine by the console switched displays and showed a comm more active than the one on the
Khalid.
“Five hundred queries?”

“You were in that transmission,” Parvi asked Mallory, “weren't you?”

“Yes, they got the tach-comm from Salmagundi.”

“I think you're going to be very popular all of a sudden,” Parvi said.

“Eight hundred queries, now.”

 

The command staff met about thirty minutes later. They had just reviewed the Vatican's holo again, and to Parvi, the atmosphere in the cargo hold seemed to contain equal parts dread and optimism.

When the holo ended, Toni said, “The last numbers I have from Beth have a little under a thousand new vessels expressing interest in following Mallory's defense.”

The Caliphate representative spoke, “W-We need to discuss what we are going to ask of them. H- How—” His voice choked up. Parvi felt for the man; she had felt the same sense of dislocation when Rubai fell. It had been intense enough that most of her comrades at the time had fought the Caliphate less out of duty than out of denial. How could the regime you were raised in, that you fought for, just one day cease to exist?

She had watched the colonel on the holo and saw in his eyes the familiar denial as the sky fell down around him. She saw it in Mallory's eyes, in the eyes of the stuttering Caliphate tech: the desperate clinging to the idea that there was something out there left for them to fight for.

The Salmagundi representative placed a hand on the man's shoulder, nodding in agreement. “We have a fleet,” he said, “but we have few resources. Do we just wait for Adam to arrive? Can we negotiate with Proudhon to establish a base of operations? Force the issue with them?”

Mallory shook his head, “We can talk to the PSDC, but if they're recalcitrant I don't want to take any action that would damage their defensive position. Their orbital defenses will be the last line against Adam.”

“Can they defend against what we've just seen?”

“The sheer mass of it . . .” The Caliphate representative trailed off.

“That might be the key here,” Toni said. “Our point of attack.”

“What do you mean?” Mallory asked.

“Mass,” Toni said. “You described a ring fully around a planet. Enough vehicles entering the atmosphere to blot out the sky. This is a lot bigger than the super-carrier you were talking about.”

“Yes?”

“Basic logistics question: where did the enemy forces come from?”

“You have an idea?” Parvi asked.

“There's only three choices,” Toni said. “One, Adam uses his nanotech wizardry to re-purpose the mass he finds insystem when he arrives. I don't think that's likely given the time frames we're talking about. It's also bad strategy, leaving his forces vulnerable for at least a few hours before his attack is at full strength. Second, the attackers tach insystem full force all at once. This is probably technically possible for him, but requires a hellacious amount of energy—”

Parvi shook her head, “Adam took out the entire wormhole network, as far as we can tell. Is energy really a problem for him?”

“That attack consumed an entire star,” Mallory said.

Toni nodded, “And if you track the path of the attack, it was precisely timed, and begun decades ago, hitting close to simultaneously. If Adam's resources were truly unlimited, he would be attacking every inhabited planet simultaneously as well. It is obvious from the Vatican's message that he didn't even attempt Earth and Khamsin at the same time.”

Mallory nodded. “He's building his strength. With control of the
Voice
he could approach any Caliphate planet without an immediate challenge. He will only leave the Caliphate when he thinks he has the resources to defeat any possible opposition.”

“You said three choices,” Parvi said, fearing the answer.

“The most likely option,” Toni said, “is that the bulk of Adam's force is already here.”

“How can that be possible?” asked the Caliphate representative. “Perhaps Adam might close on Khamsin with a stolen spacecraft, but how could such a force arrive with no warning?”

“No,” Toni said, “we had a massive warning that was impossible to ignore. So massive, that it obscured their arrival.”

“The wormholes.” Mallory said.

Of course
, Parvi thought. Adam sent his own wormholes into the core systems. They weren't just weapons to wipe out the wormhole network and disrupt communications and travel. They were also, themselves, a transportation conduit. Adam could have sent anything through the wormholes before they destroyed themselves. He could have sent a planet through if it was carved into sufficiently small chunks.

“So,” Toni said, “somewhere out there is a cloud of matter, waiting.”

“If it's there,” asked the Salmagundi representative, “and we can find it, how do we attack a cloud?”

Parvi thought of the
Khalid
's escape from the
Voice
and said, “We pump as much energy into it as we can.”

 

When the meeting broke up, Parvi left to board the
Khalid
and resume the checks for her descent toward Bakunin. When she reached the air lock connecting the two ships, she heard Mallory's voice.

“Captain Parvi?”

She pushed against the doorframe so she spun around to face him. “Yes?”

“Do you still intend to do this?”

“Are you telling me not to?”

“No.”

“But you think this is pointless.”

“I don't think the Dolbrians have any bearing on what's about to happen . . .”

“I hear a ‘but.'”

“We've had no communication with the surface for days, Parvi. That's bizarre. Bakunin is a completely lawless world; someone down there should be transmitting something, but all we have is a PSDC computer warning away anyone who attempts to land. Adam's our main concern, but we need intelligence from planetside.”

Parvi nodded.

“The
Khalid
has some secure tightbeam comm gear. When you touch down, I'd like it if your team gave us hourly updates on the surface conditions.”

“Yes, sir,” Parvi said, silently musing on the role reversal since she had recruited him fresh off the boat from Occisis, even if his persona then had been a sham.

She spun back toward the air lock, and as she made her way into the
Khalid,
she heard Mallory's voice call out to her. “It would be good if you could also find a PSDC officer we could actually talk with.”

If I manage to get this thing landed, I'll see what I can do about that
.

 

Four hours later, Parvi sat in the same seat where she had been sitting when the
Khalid
had lifted off from Salmagundi. This time, she was alone in the cockpit, and a selfish part of her wished Wahid was here with her—even though if he had survived he probably would have had better sense than to join her on this blockade run.

In truth, she was alone because she really didn't need any assistance. Ninety percent of what they were about to do would be routine piloting. The other ten percent relied more on the
Khalid
's navigational computers than it did on her skills as a pilot. She could probably swap places with Kugara and not change their chances of survival.

Unfortunately, that wasn't a comforting thought.

She reached her third double check and saw that the diagnostics weren't shifting from their optimal readings. She pushed herself up out of the seat and drifted over to the cockpit doorway. It was open, the door itself removed during the repairs to the interior, and as a noncritical repair, it had never been put back.

She hung in the doorway, looking back at the passenger compartment. She saw a sea of strange faces, none she had bothered to place a name to. The only familiar people were in back, by the rear bulkhead. The tiger, Kugara, Flynn, and the pair of scientists.

“Is everyone strapped in?”

She heard a chorus of assents. She glanced over at the air lock. She could monitor its status from the cockpit, but it was more comforting to see the door dogged shut with her own eyes.

She withdrew back into the cockpit and strapped herself in. She called back to the
Daedalus
, “This is Parvi on the
Khalid.
We are ready to separate.”

Toni—or Beth's—voice came back. “Copy that, separating the air lock now.” A dull clank resonated through the skin of the
Khalid
. “You're free. Good luck.”

“Pray for us,” Parvi radioed back. Then she brought the maneuvering engines on-line and pulled the
Khalid
away from the
Daedalus
.

“We only assume we know what we're doing.”

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

“Nothing wrong with fear; it lets you know you aren't dead yet.”

—AUGUST BENITO GALIANI (2019-*2105)