Messiah Read Online Free Page B

as anywhere else on the ship.
    The junction itself was a cylinder about five meters across, half filled by pipes for the tach-drive’s power plant. The other half had been filled by similar pipes serving the contragrav’s power plant. Since the removal of the contragrav, the junction was half empty, leaving a space wide enough for Stefan to pull himself inside.
    Flipping himself to face “down,” away from the skin of the ship, he could fit as long as he kept his legs bent in a crouch. He floated there, the hair on his arms standing up, the air still, cold, and smelling faintly of ozone.
    Looking down the length of the junction, a large metal cylinder was nestled in the gap, over two meters in diameter, one flat end facing him, the brushed-metal surface broken only by a small metal door about thirty centimeters on a side.
    He flipped open the door. Behind it was a recess that held a trio of anachronistic metal dials and a thick metal lever.
    Stefan carefully dialed the combination on each dial. Even though the massive safe was purely mechanical—no electronics to tie into the ship’s systems or announce itself to any sort of passive scan—an incorrect combination would break the seals on several packets of inert chemicals housed in the walls of the device that would, when combined, ignite a powerful reaction that would render the contents so much undifferentiated ash.
    When he spun the last dial to the correct number, he pulled the lever and the end of the cylindrical safe swung outward effortlessly on meticulously engineered hinges. The massive door was as tall as he was, but the walls of the safe were a half-meter thick, leaving a chamber a little better than a meter in diameter.
    Stefan reached in and began pulling out long metal boxes.
    He opened one that held currency reserves from a dozen different planets. The only thing in there of any particular use was the gold, which he removed.
    The second drawer was the more important. He drew it out and opened it to reveal a half-dozen gamma lasers, a couple of caseless slugthrowers, a military-spec stun rod, and a set of heavy-duty Emerson field generators.
    The next drawer held a plasma rifle, several stun and fragmentation grenades, and a couple of hyper-velocity needleguns.
    He stared at the cache of weaponry and whispered, “Sorry, Dad, if you’re not going to fight back, I am.”
     
    They had a timer warning them, but Toni II was unprepared when the display showing the space around Adam’s cloud went blank. Before she even had time to gasp, the computers monitoring the sensors started damping the output. Once the output had fallen down into levels the display could handle, it washed the bridge in eye-burning light.
    Her sister, now just a black shadow eclipsing the sunlike brightness pouring from the display, damped the display further.
    The Caliphate man said something in Arabic that sounded like a prayer. Karl simply said, “My God.”
    Adam’s dark cloud had become a cloud of boiling plasma, as bright as a second sun, expanding outward in a rolling wave of light and energy that smeared a burning arc across the ecliptic.
    Toni II stared at the display in awe.
    From the captain’s chair, her sister whispered, “I didn’t think we could do something like that. It’s as big as the wormhole explosion.”
    Toni II felt the same brief surge of optimism, until she thought of the fact that Adam had done this nearly a hundred times over across all of human space.
    They had done it once , and it cost half their fleet.

Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

    The air was cold on the western slope of the Diderot Mountains. Brother Lazarus stood at a cavern entrance high up in the side of the only mountain range on Bakunin’s only continent. He faced the fading glow in the sky above, muzzle twitching in the frigid air. Then he looked down at the battle-scarred sprawl of Godwin illuminating itself below him.
    The city, the planet itself, seemed unmoved, as if