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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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“The establishment’s greatest disgust is reserved for those who love the wrong person.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.”
—ANATOLE FRANCE
(1844-1924)
The first time Nickolai Rajasthan came to the planet Bakunin, he had come in disgrace. The priests of his homeland had ruled he had sinned too gravely, or perhaps more important, too publicly, for him to continue life as a scion of House Rajasthan.
The royal family on Grimalkin was powerful enough to do as they would in most cases, and should a tiger of Rajasthan have a dalliance with the lesser-born—even if it was in violation of the scriptures—there were rarely any consequences. Nickolai’s peers had all dallied with servants before the family had chosen a mate for them.
But his peers’ indiscretions had never lasted long, and had been discreet.
Nickolai had the bad sense to care for the female he bedded.
Worse, he had the arrogance to believe his position protected him. His affair with his panther lover had extended into months, and his family had become alarmed enough to finally put an end to his foolishness. They rushed him into an arranged marriage and sold the lowly object of his obsessions to a family far from the seat of House Rajasthan’s power.
But his family could not save him. His lover was already pregnant by the time she left the halls of House Rajasthan. His miscegenation was a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, but having his unnatural lusts produce issue was an abomination that could not be tolerated; the birth of his half-breed children too public a mark of his wickedness.
His lover, complicit in the evil, bore witness as her and Nickolai’s unclean offspring were drowned in a river and their bodies left to float out to the ocean. Then she was taken to the temple and flayed alive.
Nickolai’s family wasn’t powerful enough to spare him punishment, but they were powerful enough to prevent him suffering the fate of his lover. Though, after her death, he did not wish to be spared.
Despite the pretense of mercy, in many senses, Nickolai’s punishment at the hands of the priests of St. Rajasthan was worse than what was done to his lover. Her pain had an end.
The priests brought him to the temple and cut off his right arm with the same ritual knives they used to skin his lover. Along with his arm, the priests were amputating his role as a sacred warrior. The pain of the operation was secondary to maiming him in a way that permanently removed him from the chosen. His kind had been designed as warriors by their Fallen creators, and though their creation was in disobedience to God, the path of the warrior was a form of worship to the most high.
The amputation was intended to take that form of communion from him.
But it was not enough of a punishment. He was meant to contemplate his sins for the remainder of his life. So the priests forced him to kneel before a mural of St. Rajasthan at the end of days, when He would return bearing a flaming sword to cut down the wicked, the unholy, and the Fallen. Nickolai was forced to look up into the snarling face of his species’ savior as He stepped out of the clouds, tall as a mountain, bringing a blade of flaming judgment down upon the unworthy.
It was the last thing he was ever meant to see. As he stared into the painted face, one much like his father’s, the priests took a red-hot iron and burned out his eyes.
The final part of his punishment was exile. The priests dropped him, blind and maimed, onto the planet Bakunin, to die a beggar among the Fallen on that lawless world. He was abandoned as far from God as the priests could take him.
Alone in the chaotic urban sprawl of Bakunin’s largest city, surrounded by the smell of men, Nickolai knew he was damned. Many like him would have given up at that point, adding suicide as a final entry on their list of sins.
Not Nickolai.
Damned he was, but he would not give up what honor he had. He would not allow the priests that satisfaction.
And because he was a Rajasthan, descended from creatures genetically engineered for war, he did not have to resort to charity or self-murder. He only had to allow himself to be employed by the Fallen.
Such niceties did not matter to Nickolai anymore. The priests had cast him beyond redemption. He had been cast beyond God’s grace as surely as the naked devils that hired him to intimidate their enemies. He’d been cast out to live among them, so he swallowed his unease and lived among them.
By the time Mr. Antonio contacted him, he was so used to ignoring that unease that he barely questioned the offer to restore his arm and his eyes for some unspecified service. When Mr. Antonio’s doctors were finished, Nickolai’s ties to the Fallen were buried in his own flesh.
Mr. Antonio had bought his service, and possibly his soul, by replacing the flesh the priests had taken. The cybernetics were unclean by any measure, but Nickolai could
see.
And he was more willfully blind than ever.
The price was to prostitute the sacred art of the warrior, and become a mercenary. The price was to be employed by something worse than man. Mr. Antonio required Nickolai to enter the service of an AI calling itself Tjaele Mosasa. Nickolai had numbed himself to what working for the Fallen had cost his soul, but this was a different order of sin. Even the humans recognized the evil that AIs represented. Were this any place other than the lawless, stateless planet of Bakunin, Mosasa would not be suffered to exist.
But Mr. Antonio had bought Nickolai’s service, and Nickolai joined the AI’s expedition eighty light-years beyond official human space, to the star Xi Virginis, the first of several hidden colony worlds founded as the last human interstellar regime had collapsed. Nickolai was allowed only the consolation that he joined the AI only to betray it. The dishonor of the act weighed on him, but the fact that Mosasa existed weighed even more.
That was what Nickolai told himself, even as Mosasa’s expedition came upon the Xi Virginis system and found it missing, erased by some diabolic force, leaving no trace of the star or of the colony planets in orbit around it. He told it to himself even as his sabotage caused the ship’s tach-comm to explode, leaving the damaged ship stranded eighty light-years beyond known human space. He told it to himself, even as he confessed his sins to the human priest Mallory; even as the ship limped into orbit around the closest refuge, another lost colony world; even as the damaged ship broke apart, and the crew’s escape pods were scattered on the surface of the planet Salmagundi. Nothing made him question his core values, his position in the universe, or what the universe actually meant.
Not until he met the Protean.
On the surface of Salmagundi, Nickolai met a relic of a human evil that transcended the hubris that created beings such as himself, such as Mosasa. The Protean was a creature born of self-replicating nanotechnology; the worst and most dangerous of the three great heretical technologies. Life itself, soulless and born, not of God, but of humanity’s desire to
be
God. Everything Nickolai believed told him that the Protean was the Adversary, Satan himself personified, an evil that Mosasa couldn’t even aspire to.
And the Protean was frightened of something, some Other an order of magnitude worse than itself, something that had consumed Xi Virginis.
When that Other descended upon Salmagundi, Nickolai finally learned who he’d been serving. Mr. Antonio, who had bought Nickolai’s fealty by granting back the flesh that the priests had taken, was in service to the Other. The Other, who called itself Adam and claimed a mantle of divinity for itself.
Nickolai
had been the servant of the Adversary. Not Mosasa, not the Protean, not Fallen humanity . . . it had been
him
. In an epiphany of shame on Salmagundi, Nickolai reprised the priests’ punishments, tearing free his cybernetic limb and placing a gun to his temple to destroy his cybernetic eyes.
His story should have ended there, a single death before the Adversary’s advance. Only one among billions.
But the Protean was there, and it did not let him die.
When Nickolai awoke, he was approaching Bakunin for the second time. And, like Adam before it, the Protean had given him replacements for what the priests had taken; a right arm twin to his left, and eyes as black as the Abyss.
The second time Nickolai Rajasthan came to the planet Bakunin, it was as a warrior against the Adversary.
CHAPTER TWO
Catechism
“The first casualty of a Revolution is the Revolution itself.”
—
The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
 
“The revolutionist is a doomed man.”
—MIKHAIL A. BAKUNIN
(1814-1876)
Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Earth-Sol
Rebecca’s understanding began, at last, when she watched the world end.
Her entire life to that point—her work as a data analyst for the Jokul Autocracy, being recruited for Mosasa’s doomed mission to Xi Virginis, her capture by the Caliphate, her acceptance of Adam’s offer of becoming part of his secular godhead—as clear as every memory was within her enhanced mind, all of it meant nothing, worthless trivia, pointless data from a meaningless life.
She had chosen survival, as if her own existence carried some sort of meaning in the face of what Adam was. Before her arrival here, as a self-aware part of Adam’s consciousness, she had believed that had sufficed. Survival was enough of a goal, an end in itself.
Before her arrival at Earth, the belief in the rightness of her self-preservation was unshaken. Even when she was shown Adam’s less-than-divine origins, as a half-AI, half-human cyborg, psychotically digging in the ruins of the dead world of his creators—
that
did not shake her faith in her own continued existence. Even when she watched the jealous God Adam rain his host upon the unbelievers, bringing those willing to shed their flesh into his fold, and destroying those who did not. Even when she watched him consume the lives on Salmagundi and Khamsin—watching with awareness inconceivable to her once-human self—she watched, and understood, without questioning her choice to live.
She clung to her own existence even after Adam tached the
Prophet’s Voice
into Earth’s solar system, as he had Khamsin’s, and broadcast his ultimatum to the inhabitants —
“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Worship me or become as dust.”
She buried herself within the womb of the
Prophet’s Voice
, the ship that had carried this embodiment of Adam. She observed with a consciousness that could range across the breadth of Adam’s existence, processing information from the breadth and depth of the thinking matter that consumed spacecraft, asteroids, cities, and people with an omnivorous and insatiable hunger. Like her role on Jokul, monitoring data streams for the totalitarian government, she observed everything with a terrifying omniscience. Like Jokul, she saw all the evils, great and small. She saw with great clarity the horrifying machine she was a part of.
And like Jokul, she dared not judge. She dared not act. The evil she watched could consume her without a thought. She saw what even the slightest dissent brought, and she intended to survive.
So she did nothing that might possibly draw Adam’s attention.
She intended to survive.
Even if that meant being party to the death of billions.
She intended to survive.
Even if it meant being Adam’s hand, reaping souls for a god she did not truly believe in.
Earth would be no different.
As at Salmagundi and Khamsin before, the mass of Adam’s host formed itself around the Earth. She became part of that host, distributed across the sky, but individualized in her own awareness. Through a million eyes descending through the atmosphere, she saw Adam’s army fall from the sky. White-hot teardrops of matter slammed into cities, pouring their substance into the craters they made, extruding tentacles to probe the structures around them, disassembling buildings and pulling them into themselves.
It was no different.
But it
was
different.
She saw, in the southern hemisphere, a dozen glowing masses fall in the old diplomatic compound around the Confederacy Spire. Threads of glowing, thinking, mass twisted up the sides of the kilometer-tall symbol of man’s last attempt at a unified government. For a moment, the spire glowed, encased in a net of alien will, then it folded in on itself, the walls of the structure pushing down, falling inside itself as the structure imploded without so much as a wisp of dust to mark its passing.
In the middle of Asia, the buildings of the Forbidden City briefly folded inside out before disintegrating in a mass of glowing tendrils. In the Arabian Peninsula, the Kaaba itself was struck as two million terrified pilgrims watched the holy site implode to reveal glowing humanoid simulacra proclaiming Adam’s divinity in a host of languages.

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