Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Heretics (48 page)
But, once they found it, they could clearly define its extent. Little more than a vast cloud of dust.
“This is Central Command. Are the sacrificial lambs programmed?” Mallory spoke to an open channel that broadcast to the whole of his heterogeneous fleet. It was a question he'd been asking every quarter hour most of the day. This time, almost all the chosen vessels responded affirmatively.
The “lambs” represented about half his fleet. The past two days had seen a consolidation of people and resources, abandoning those vessels that were too low on supplies and power.
However, as near dead as the abandoned ships were, and as low on power, all had functional tach-drives. None had the power to jump so much as a light-year, but Mallory was asking much less.
He wished he could thank Parvi for the idea.
He called the private channel to the
Daedalus.
“This is Mallory. Has there been any word from Bakunin?”
Daedalus.
“This is Mallory. Has there been any word from Bakunin?”
It was another question he'd been asking periodically, and unlike the first one, the answer for this one never changed. Captain Valentine's voice came back saying, “Still no word from the
Khalid.
”
Khalid.
”
Mallory said a prayer for the souls on board the doomed dropship and wondered, not for the first time, if he had been right in not trying to prevent it from going.
The last few lambs radioed their ready status.
This was it.
Mallory cast a glance at the holo that he had up monitoring the extent of the alien cloud in Bakunin's outer system, half convinced that now that they were about to act some fundamental change might happen. It would move, suddenly become active, threatening them.
But it still sat, inert as it had presumably been since the wormhole had disgorged it. As it would presumably remain until Adam arrived.
Still, the light the platform received was an hour old, and Mallory couldn't help but think about what unknowns might remain in those sixty minutes.
“Ready the computers to synchronize on my signal.” He pressed a button that sent out a burst transmission that would allow the computers to all start their programs at the right time to choreograph the delicate, deadly dance that was about to unfold.
At this point all the near-dead tach-ships were empty of people, running automated computer programs that controlled their navigation and their tach-drives. All of them simultaneously disabled their damping coils. Less than a second later, all of them disappeared from the observable universe.
Mallory had a counter programmed, overlaying the view of the cloud. It counted down from fourteen seconds, the amount of time the lambs would spend in tach-space in their travel from Bakunin space out to where the cloud waited.
When the timer hit zero, it rolled back up to 3560.
“Now,” Mallory whispered, “it either worked or it didn't.”
The light of success or failure raced back toward him, and everyone else, from 3560 light-seconds away.
The plan was simple. Tach-drives interfered with each other. An undamped tach- drive could overload if too close to anything taching in or out. The destruction of the wormholes had damaged any tach-drives in the vicinity, and the
Eclipse
was fatally damaged when the massive tach-drive of the
Voice
had arrived too close.
Eclipse
was fatally damaged when the massive tach-drive of the
Voice
had arrived too close.
What Mallory had done was simply have nearly seven hundred spaceships tach into the same volume of space occupied by the cloud, simultaneously, with their dampers disabled.
When the new counter reached 3546, he had the first indications of success. The first chatter of radio traffic, ships with tach-drives overloading and burning out. Not among Mallory's now- halved fleetâthere had been warnings to shut down all the tach-drives in the fleet even though a third of the ships didn't have the power to bring them on-line again.
While his warnings had been given to those outside his fleet, it wasn't taken universally to heart, and he could hear dozens of ships announcing their crisis in a dozen languages.
He prayed for strength and ordered his own people to render what aid they could to any disabled ships in range.
The counter continued running down, and the distress calls leveled off at close to two hundred.
Please, God, let this be worth it.
He stared at the screen as the numbers dipped below sixty. He clenched his teeth, and for the last fifteen seconds, he didn't breathe.
Zero.
Light washed the screen, and then the image went dark. Static washed across all the radio channels. He flipped controls, trying to get something, some indication of what happened, but everything seemed blinded, overloaded, or dead.
He finally found an optical sensor that hadn't been pointing directly at the cloud. He ordered it to point at the space where the cloud had been.
For a long time he stared at what he had wrought, and finally said, “Christ preserve us.”
Â
On the surface of Bakunin, it was nighttime on the western coast, and Nickolai Rajasthan looked up as the sky above him briefly became bright as daylight. With his Protean eyes, he could stare straight up into the sky and see the boiling heart of the plasma flames that consumed Adam's cloud.
“It has begun,” he whispered.
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Apotheosis
is concluded in Book Three:
Messiah
is concluded in Book Three:
Messiah
APPENDIX A:
Alphabetical Listing of Sources
Note: Dates are Terrestrial standard. Where the year is debatable due to interstellar travel, the Earth equivalent is used with an asterisk. Incomplete or uncertain biographical information is indicated by a question mark.
Â
St. Ambrose (340?-397) Bishop of Milan.
St. Augustine (354-430) Numidian Bishop of Hippo.
Bakunin, Mikhail A. (1814-1876) Russian political philosopher.
Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850) French novelist, playwright.
Beecher, Henry Ward (1813- 1887) American clergyman, writer.
Boerne, Ludwig (1786-1837) German political writer.
Butler, Samuel (1612-1680) English poet, satirist.
Calvin, John (1509-1564) French Protestant reformer.
Celine, Robert (1923-1996) American lawyer, anarchist.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834) English poet, critic, philosopher.
Confucius (
ca.
551-479 BCE) Chinese philosopher.
ca.
551-479 BCE) Chinese philosopher.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803- 1882) American essayist, poet, minister.
Frederick (II) the Great (1712-1786) Prussian monarch.
Galiani, August Benito (2019-*2105) European spaceship commander.
Gibbons, James (1834-1921) American cardinal.
Harper, Sylvia (2008- 2081) American civil rights activist, president.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864) American novelist.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826) American president.
Joan of Arc (1412-1431) French national heroine.
Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891) American poet, critic.
Luther, Martin (1483- 1546) Leader of German Re formation.
Manning, Henry Edward (1808-1892) English cardinal.
Milton, John (1608-1674) English poet. de Montaigne, Michel (1533-1592) French philosopher, essayist.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1812) Emperor of France.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German philosopher.
Olmanov, Dimitri (2190-2350) Chairman of the Terran Executive Command.
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809) American revolutionary writer.
Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662) French geometrician, philosopher, writer.
Rajasthan, Datia ( ?-2042), American civil rights activist, political leader.
St. Rajasthan (2075-2118) Tau Ceti nonhuman religious leader.
Rabelais, François (1495?-1553) French satirist.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) English playwright.
Shane, Marbury (2044- *2074) Occisian colonist, soldier. Webster, Daniel (1782-1852) American statesman, lawyer, orator.
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