Cenotaxis (2 page)

"Who appointed you the savior of humanity, Imre Bergamasc?"

"That's something I'd very much like to sit down and discuss with you."

I had the advantage of him. Anything he wanted to say to me, I already knew. "There's no point," I told him. "I don't recognize your legitimacy, and I never will."

"You won't even hear me out?"

"No. Humanity is under no threat here. Go on your way and pursue your holy war without us."

This message was reinforced by the sector commanders of the Containment and Quarantine force established by the Round, the systems closest to Earth. Earth is a shrine, they said, a memory that should not be disturbed. Little did they know of the truth, and little did the enemy care. He wanted in, and he couldn't have known that C&Q had originally existed to keep Earth in check, not protected. We who live here are far more than naive agrarians, living out our years in placid contentment.

War, therefore, was inevitable.

I will never forget my first glimpse of it. I was standing on a hillside at night, on the far side of the world from Station Zero. The sky was clear and the air crisp. I wore a light camouflage suit with a pack held lightly over one shoulder. There was a pistol on my hip. One of a dozen people all similarly dressed, we gazed as one up at the burning stars.

The battle for the skies of Earth was of mythic proportions. Exploding munitions and their targets burned brightly, like short-lived suns, scintillating and dying along with the machines that created them. Meteor storms of shrapnel and debris rained from on high. Magnetic storms raged.

C&Q loyalists landed batteries on the ground with which we could pepper lower orbits, keeping the enemy at arm's reach where more powerful forces could flail at them. We didn't want to be involved, but we had to defend ourselves. The entire planet shifted to combat footing.

Just fifty years have passed since that day. Fifty years of conflict. Yet it seems that I have been fighting Imre Bergamasc all my life.

The war begins; the war ends. Everything between, and beyond, those two points is equal in God's eyes.

My enemy has become accustomed to my defiance. The latter days spent in my stone cell seem luxurious compared to my early captivity, when Bergamasc raged around me like a perpetually breaking wave, a hurricane with no still centre. He has captured me; to all appearances he has won; but the victory he claims is hollow, and he suspects it even now.

"You're a fraud," he rages. "All this talk of God is just a smokescreen, a fantasy you've concocted to justify your own sense of grandeur. It's not going to achieve anything."

"God is real," I insist. "You'll come to accept that, one day."

He laughs mockingly. "It was once considered a dreadful sin to deny the existence of the Holy Spirit. The Catholic enclaves still teach such things. I can tell you that I've never been less terrified of Hell than I am at this moment."

I lean my head back against the wall of my impersonal, plastic cell. "Your words make no sound," I tell him, "in God's ears."

Bergamasc makes a small gesture. The door opens behind him and a striking woman walks in. Slender, almost skinny, she has a hard, muscular look and gold flecks in her black eyes. I've seen her before. I know her name. Her every movement is a whiplash.

"My turn?" she says to Bergamasc, and he nods with nostrils flared. They are two paces apart, but the air between them fairly crackles. They share a history I know nothing about.

"I'll be back when you tell Helwise what I want to know," the enemy says. "How long that takes, Jasper, is entirely up to you."

"You're going to torture me?" I feel my heart beating hard as the cold woman approaches.

"The answer to that question," she says, "lies entirely in your hands."

Bergamasc leaves us alone. Helwise MacPhedron, chief spy and torturer of the new regime, doesn't waste time with talk. I almost respect her for that—even as I rage against the way she turns almost a million years of knowledge about the human body to such a monstrous purpose. My flesh is much more resilient than that of the original humans, for all my willingness to ape their primacy, but in her hands it is clay.

It's a long day, one of the longest, endured only because of my certainty that it will end. It always does. And I do not renounce my faith. How can I, when every moment of my life reveals the true existence of God?

Dawn.

I wake in a tent somewhere, somewhen. Light filters through the synthetic fabric, suggesting early morning. Crickets whirr and birds call. Wind sighs. I can hear people moving about, but for once I am spared the sounds of warfare. For a long while I don't move, glad simply to be free of pain.

I don't know why I resist my enemy's torturer. After all, the truth is as much theirs as it is mine. It belongs to all humanity.

They should have to work it out for themselves. Perhaps that's it. They wouldn't believe me if I did try to tell them. Prophets are, after all, without honor in their own country. Prophets and gods.

The fabric of the tent rustles. A head pokes through. Completely hairless with high cheekbones and a full mouth, its owner, another frag, is a female known to me as Alice-Angeles. The Fort she once belonged to died with all the rest, leaving her with a condition not dissimilar to autism. A fragment of a much larger, absent whole, she possesses certain skills of organization and resource management that make her invaluable during our days of guerrilla offensives.

She speaks rapidly and without inflection. I am, at this moment, just another resource to be managed.

"Engagement in fifty minutes. The Apparatus asks you to reconnect."

"Yes, of course. Thanks for advising me."

Alice-Angeles leaves without acknowledging my gratitude.

"Bring me up to speed," I instruct the gestalt.

The Apparatus's tone, as it does as I ask, is not disapproving. It knows there's no possibility of me playing hooky. I just need to get my bearings. "Teams Epsilon, Omicron, and Mu are in position to penetrate the security perimeter. We have confirmed the enemy's jamming frequencies and have tested our alternate communications systems. They will be effective until we enter the compound, at which point we will revert to encrypted radio."

I still haven't quite pinpointed the day. "What about enemy movements?"

"None since midnight. Freight and passenger transfer remains suspended in both directions."

Ah, yes. We are attacking the base of the Paratlantis orbital tower. In the days of the Old-Timers, before humanity reached out to space, this location was known only for an unnamed volcano bubbling out of the intersection between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the equator. It subsequently grew into a sprawling island, only partly natural, which at least three times in the nine hundred millennia since has been a major hub of industry and politics for the globe. The destructive power of the volcano beneath is carefully contained. For longer than nearly everyone living, the tower above has stood as a symbol of Earth's connection to the stars.

We aren't going to bring it down, although I'm sure the enemy would like to at times. The falling cable would cause too much damage. Instead we intend to send carefully timed packets of nanotech seeds codenamed Crucis-8 swarming up the tower to Smitherman City in geosynchronous orbit and beyond, there to infect the enemy's fleet. We've trudged for days across the ocean floor and tunneled our way through the island's basaltic heart. In the lush forests surrounding the abandoned city, we await our chance.

It looks as though that chance has come. Bergamasc had suspended movements up and down the tower in response to an earlier attack, leaving the entire route clear of traffic. Fearing the embargo might soon end, I'd stayed up late the previous night making final preparations. Several teams will attack at once, and I will be in one of them.

A leader stands alone, but that's no excuse to avoid the front line.

"Watch the horizon," I tell the Apparatus. "If they spot us here, we're caught between a rock and a high place."

"I believe the phrase you're referring to—"

"I know, I know. Just keep an eye out and leave the aphorisms to me."

Alice-Angeles awaits me outside the tent with a dozen other frags in full battle dress. Active camouflage tests paint the grove with strange blind spots and mirages. My empty armor stands a meter taller than me but is as slender-limbed as a stick insect. I crouch and lean backward into its open thorax. Gentle manipulators tuck my limbs protectively around my trunk as the thorax sighs shut. The suit cradles me like a parent would a child. It takes little more than a second to interface my motor centers with the suit, so I feel as though I am moving my own limbs. The suit stands. I test weapons, communications, and life support. The Apparatus does the same, and our results match.

"We're ready," says Alice-Angeles, her whisper almost husky over the maser intercom we've developed to bypass the enemy's jamming systems. Narrowband lights wink all around me as the suits exchange information at superfast machine rates. In some cases the camouflage is so good I can only discern each suit by the wireframe outline mine casts over the view of the leafy backdrop.

"Proceed."

We glide in single file through the undergrowth, barely parting the bushes as we pass. Our artificial feet leave no impressions to show that we've been there. Birds sing on, undisturbed, even though we pass within meters of their perches. I watch idly as one of my troopers goes some distance from his assigned path to avoid breaking a single strand of spiderweb.

Elsewhere on the island, three other teams power up in readiness for our arrival. We are Team Alpha. All four teams carry doses of Crucis-8, plus explosive charges we will lay to make it look as though our intention was further sabotage at the tower's base, not its top.

We walk stealthily but steadily for an hour, rocked in our artificial wombs like zygotes in ages past. The day is crystalline and beautiful, too perfect for war, and I am reminded again of my early days. But war doesn't stop for weather, or reminiscences. As many battlefields have been stained red under fair skies as foul.

The edge of the forest comes into sight. Through the branches I can see the crumbling walls and fallen roofs of the city's northern outskirts. A series of rotten concrete columns, spaced a dozen meters apart, mark where a maglev transportation system once led to the ocean's edge and, from there, to the rest of the world. Now, only hypersonic aircraft connect the base of the Paratlantis tower to the enemy's base camps. Supplies rocket down the cable by force of gravity, and swoop away when atmosphere's fingers begin to grip.

At the forest's edge I raise a needle-tipped hand and call for a halt. This is our last chance to turn back. Take one more step and we are committed.

"Give me the latest telemetry," I instruct the Apparatus. "Raw data will do." A torrent of images, ranging from dagger-sharp to grainy and indistinct, floods through my brain. I see nothing untoward.

"We await your word," husks Alice-Angeles.

"I know," I tell her. "I'll give it to you in a moment, when I'm sure what course is best."

I cannot immediately identify what arrests me on the brink. If telemetry tells me the way ahead is clear, shouldn't I believe it? Our objective is right there before us, a perfectly straight line rising up from the heart of the decaying cityscape, the only thing for miles around not corrupted by age. Ripples of rainbow light move along it as the sun shifts in the sky. What am I waiting for? What has made me nervous, deep down in my gut?

We stand there a full hour, as motionless as mantises waiting for prey to happen by. I can sense the frags stewing in their idleness. They need something to do beyond checking and rechecking their preparedness. They need an objective. But that alone is not reason enough to move forward. There is too much at stake. Should the enemy catch us here, much will be lost. I have seen too many of my companions fall in recent years. The shame of withdrawal weighs like a feather on the scales of life, compared to that.

"We're pulling out," I eventually tell the others. "It's not safe."

"Telemetry indicates—"

"I know what telemetry indicates, Alice-Angeles. Regardless, we are aborting the mission and retreating to our camps. Inform the other teams."

"But we're right here, right now—"

"And we will be back." In my mind I relive the sights and smells of a burning flagship that Bergamasc sends me in an attempt to shame me. "When the right day comes, we'll be here."

Word spreads through the troops and we retreat into the forest. I feel only surety, but the unease of my companions haunts me. I can hear it over the silent maser channels and see it in the way they walk: Webs break and flowers crush underfoot without a second thought. If they could know what was in my mind, they would be reassured. If I could share with them the certainty I feel, their doubt would be assuaged. But I am apart from them. They must take me at my word. There is no other way.

Half an hour into our sullen journey, red lights flash across every mental screen. The Apparatus sends an alarm, but we have already reacted, pulling with unnatural speed under cover and adopting compact crouches that reduce our visibility even further.

A deafening sonic boom rolls across the island, followed shortly by two more. I trace the progress of the three hyperjets as they swoop back up into the stratosphere, leaving a rain of powered combat drones falling in their wake. In aerodynamic mode, they are dart-like, the size of a child, with stubby navigational fins. On reaching land they sprout six legs and can move as fast as a panther. Their forelimbs are equipped with blades, projectile weapons, and cutting lasers. Their individual intelligences are small, but combined they can be formidably focused.

Whistling and spinning, these potent machines of death rain down upon the decayed city of Paratlantis.

A murmuring starts up. Maser eyes wink and flash.

"How did he know?"

"How did he...?"

"How...?"

I don't say anything. There's no need. Had we proceeded as planned, we would have been running for our lives along the empty streets, pursued by hordes of deadly drones. Instead we are alive. I have saved us all.