Messiah (45 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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But they were too large.
He heard shouting over the rotors and the roar of wind. Looking up from the three casualties, he realized that these
weren’t
humans.
Holding on to the edge of a door opening into a swirling darkness, he saw a figure that could have been pulled from the legends of his ancestors. Nickolai knew he looked at an image out of the past, because of the white fur in the tiger’s snarling profile. There had been no white tigers born to his kind since shortly after the time of St. Rajasthan.
The white tiger was half a head taller than Nickolai and had broader shoulders. He wore woven fabric armor colored a muddy camouflage brown, streaked with soot. He had been wearing a helmet at one point, but the only signs of that now were the bloody mats in his fur where the straps had pressed down on his skull. In one hand he held an ancient belt-fed machine gun.
The white tiger shouted the same unknown language the humans had been speaking, and a line of other tigers, fully armored and helmeted, dove past him, out the open door and into the darkness beyond.
The white tiger leaped out after his squad.
Nickolai jumped out after them, just before an RPG shot through the darkness and into the open door behind him. A burning hand spiked with shrapnel pushed him down into the muddy ground as the helicopter exploded behind him.
He raised his face from the mud and looked up.
An ambush,
Nickolai thought,
the enemy saw the landing...
It was night, raining, and because of the light from the burning helicopter behind him, he only saw a circle around the immediate clearing. The terrain was rocky, mountainous, and the only sign of the enemy were muzzle flashes from outcrops that were little more than shadows. The tigers, his warrior ancestors, were pinned down behind the poor shelter of a couple of boulders.
This is why we were created, why humans made us.
He was looking at a battlefield on Earth, a war where his kind served as man’s proxy. His fingers dug into the muddy ground beneath him, as a part of him ached for armor or a weapon. He tried to push himself upright, but then he felt where the shrapnel had torn across his back. He fell back down with a groan inaudible for the gunfire.
He looked at his doomed ancestors and shouted at them. “This is man’s war. You’re sacrificing yourself for—”
Nothing?
Was that what he was being shown? Was that what he wanted to take from this scene?
The white tiger stood up and shouted something in that unfamiliar language, leveling his machine gun at the hidden enemy. The meter-and-a-half-long barrel hammered fifty caliber rounds into the night, the muzzle flashes lighting up the whole mountainside. The white tiger ran toward the enemy, screaming words inaudible under the roar of the weapon in his hands. The area around the enemy position exploded with dust and fragmenting rock, and they attempted to return fire.
Nickolai thought he saw the white tiger struck twice before he reached the outcrop that sheltered the ambush and disappeared behind it. After a crescendo of gunfire, everything went silent.
For several moments the only sound was the crackling of the burning helicopter, and the rushing of the storm around them. The white tiger’s comrades started calling after him, but there wasn’t an answer.
Nickolai knew there wouldn’t be one. He could smell the blood.
He watched the others cautiously stand and take stock of the situation, one stepping into command. They all ignored Nickolai as they assessed the perimeter and started moving out.
He watched them go, to continue their original mission.
The white one’s sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.
 
“What, then?” Angel asked him when the darkness returned.
He pushed himself up from the stone floor. The wounds from his vision were gone. He looked at the rabbit facing him and said, “He did it to save his comrades.”
“And?”
“And for himself,” Nickolai said. “As limited as his choices were, he still had a choice. For all that man might have made him, and placed him where he was, he was still himself.”
“I think I like you, Kit.”
“What I’m seeing, is it real?”
“As real as you are.”
“What about you?”
Angel laughed.
 
Nickolai faced a wall. Painted on the surface was an old symbol, an eagle, wings spread, holding the schematic image of a planet in its claws. The icon was a symbol of the Terran Council, the totalitarian Earth government that preceded the development of tach-drives and the rise of the Confederacy.
The symbol was splattered with blood.
Nickolai turned his head and saw a long corridor, strewn with bodies. Dozens of unarmed humans lay where they had fallen, their blood staining the floor red. Looking down at the closest victim, he saw claw marks—more than would have been necessary to kill.
He walked along the corridor, passing the dead. Claw marks gouged the walls, and some of the bodies appeared partially eaten.
His journey ended by the doors to a large hemispherical room. The walls were transparent, revealing a shining blue planet hanging in a black sky, its reflected light washing away the stars behind it. Nickolai saw the tracery of the continents below the swirling white clouds and knew the planet he looked at.
Haven
.
Haven and Dakota, the twin planets orbiting Tau Ceti, were the first home of Nickolai, Kugara, and Angel’s nonhuman kin after their exile from Earth. Seeing the planet, after the ancient emblem of the Terran Council, made him uncomfortably certain who it was that sat in the center of the observation dome in front of him.
Even though the tiger staring up at Haven was smaller than Nickolai, and certainly less powerfully built than the ghostly white warrior of his last vision, Nickolai knew that he looked at St. Rajasthan himself.
St. Rajasthan turned to look at Nickolai and said, “Who is there?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Last Supper
“The only things that do not change are those things that have ceased to exist.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS
(121-180)
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Colonel Bartholomew sat Mallory at a massive array of communications gear that had been set up in an impromptu command center under the heart of Proudhon. Around him, dozens of other people were in contact with the parts of the PDC that still remained under centralized control. Those parts were re-coalescing as Mallory talked to colonels, captains, and lieutenants who had been cut off from their command structure by the failed coup.
It seemed that rumors of what was happening off-planet had propagated far enough that just seeing Mallory’s face and a retransmission of the pope’s last broadcast from Earth, gave Colonel Bartholomew enough gravitas to knit the chain of command back together.
One place he hadn’t been able to communicate with had been the temporary HQ of the Western Division Command—the man there was a General Lubikov. If he were there, he would be one of the highest-ranking operational commanders surviving.
The man had also taken his command at an outpost in the Diderot Mountains, right where he had dropped off Shane and Tsoravitch. That was why he kept trying the connection periodically. The general was on top of the Dolbrian ruins that his people were trying to reach.
He was shocked when he finally got a response to his transmission.
A young man’s face filled the holo in front of him, shouting, “—request you send assistance. We have suffered an attack by unidentified hostiles. Enemy has entered the chambers under the—”
Colonel Bartholomew pushed in front of Mallory, “Can you describe the enemy? How many? How were they armed?”
“There were two of them.”
“Two?”
“A man and a woman.”
Shane and Tsoravitch.
The colonel sounded incredulous, “How could two—”
He was interrupted when the view in the holo shook, and the man in the image turned around. Then the holo went dark. There was an upsurge in chatter around Mallory, as other communications channels began lighting up. “What happened?” he asked as he tried to get the channel to Bleek Munitions reestablished.
One of the other men in the communication center said, “We have reports of seismic activity centered on the Diderot Range, east of Godwin.”
Seismic activity? Bakunin is supposed to be tectonically dead.
Several others began repeating the report; someone mentioned “subsurface explosions.”
Mallory prayed for everyone inside the mountain.
 
“Flynn?”
“Yeah, Gram?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“It’s dark.”
“Can you move?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Cave in, I think.”
“Christ on a crutch, these caverns hold up for umpteen million years, then fall down on us?”
“Bomb, I think.”
“Shit. You think Parvi . . .”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Shane and the redhead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck! What
do
you know?”
“It’s dark, we can’t move, and we’re probably going to die.
”
 
“Hello?” Kugara yelled. “Is anyone out there?”
No one responded.
She lay on her back, staring at a fragment of the galaxy that had fallen from the ceiling. It was huge, about ten meters across, and probably weighed several hundred tons. Somehow, it hadn’t completely sandwiched itself against the floor, and the space underneath was almost enough for Kugara to stand upright—if her left leg hadn’t been pinned under another massive chunk of rock.
Of course, the rock falls on my uninjured leg.
She tried pushing the rock, but there was no way she could move it. Not only was it over two meters tall, it was holding up the fragment of the Galaxy that still glowed down on her. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she expected, probably because there wasn’t any more leg below where her thigh disappeared under the stone.
“Hello?” she called out again. “Brody? Dörner?
Nickolai?
”
She lay back down because she was out of breath. She felt chilled and clammy, and slightly faint. She was probably in shock. She should stop trying to pull her leg free. The pressure from the rock was the only thing keeping her from bleeding out.
Everybody dies,
she thought.
“Where are you, Nickolai?” she whispered. “I wanted to face this with you.”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) 7.2 AU from Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Adam had learned well. As His chosen and His embodied host tached into the system around Bakunin, He could read the signs and understand what had happened. The awareness bequeathed by the Race bore upon Him with an unnatural clarity, the tactical defeat of His predecessor selves cut through His hubris. The presence of the Proteans on Bakunin’s moon had enlightened Him.
His broadly-knit plans, as wide as all of human space, were incomplete. His model of human society was imperfect, it did not account for the Proteans, and when He fed the heretic culture into His model of the universe, when He took the uncharacteristically humble step of reassessing His view of the universe in light of their presence, He saw the foundation of His world change.
And He saw what they must do, how they must strategize.
The battle here was a feint, a way to draw His attention, to anger Him and distract Him from what He must do. And Adam’s cold fury, duplicated thirty-three times across the surviving ships of the
Sword
, was all the worse for the fact that He had almost allowed their defiance to stand. He had never conceived that some of those He brought into His Glory would be, in fact, agents of the Protean heresy. He understood now that the agents of Proteus must be concealing themselves in the mass of humanity He had yet to confront, yet to offer salvation.
But, now that He understood this, He could combat it. Thirteen of his ships tached back out of the system, each traveling to part of Adam’s far-flung host to warn Himself of the Protean menace.

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