An oval hatch was open at its upper end. From this orifice a cocoonlike cylinder of silver extended to the ground, supported on two metallic rails.
Jesus took one look at the silver tube and realized it was a free-form lift. Whatever had been contained within this giant structure had passed outside via this lift.
“So for five thousand years, you waited here. Perhaps this was once a mountain or an island. The sand covering your incubation tank was washed away, blown aside, until nothing remained but this flat land, and your vessel was revealed.” Jesus of Nazareth shook his head. “We both waited for so long.”
He was overcome by a strong desire to look inside the strange vessel.
He wanted to see what sort of technology, what sort of devices had kept the life-form that called itself Asura alive and growing for five thousand years—the processors and power sources, the memory inserters, the oxygen generators, and all other such devices. He thought briefly on the vast amount of oxygen and nutrients a life-form would need to consume over such a long period of time. Of course, none of these necessities could be gathered along the way during a journey through the void, and attempting to store and transport that much material would be an inelegant solution, to say the least. Which left only one option: the designers of the vessel had used some sort of atomic compositing device to manipulate matter and create the needed stores from the air. The devices that controlled that process would be extremely delicate, allowing for no margin of error whatsoever; managing them would require a processor’s judgment, guided by a powerful neural memory web. Which was how his enemy, the destroyer, had managed to wait here for so long.
His second task was to ensure that this incubation tank was never used again. He turned the beam filament of the ultrahigh frequency generator toward the towering object in front of him. When he squeezed the trigger, the atmosphere around him twanged like a slender piano wire. Ripples spread on the surface of the object, quickly becoming rapid waves. Moments later the giant object vanished altogether. A faint mirage shimmered in its place for a moment until that, too, disappeared. It all happened without the slightest sound.
Another incubation tank was surely out there, somewhere beneath the waves, but he had no way of finding that.
The sea stirred, pushing toward Jesus’s feet. It drenched the edges of his tattered robe, and he disliked the feel of the cloth clinging to his legs. But for a long time Jesus stood unmoving, looking out at the sea.
He had done all that Shi wanted. The realization of God’s will must always be done to the fullest, and it gave him great honor to have played even a small part in bringing God’s designs to fruition. It was, in fact, the entire source of his own volition to live.
Jesus of Nazareth knelt in the driving wind.
“Great Shi. My Father who art Heaven. I have done as you commanded. Please, forgive the sinning Samarians. Summon them to you. Shi, the world is tired, blind, already moving toward a funeral procession of its gods. Shi, Father who art in Heaven. Already there are none who live upon the land, none left to worship you. Shi, will this world never again know her former days of glory?”
The words of his prayer were lost in the wind. Gradually, shadows deepened across the sky and land, while the wild white waves danced and sprayed.
“Shi! How can it be that man never earned your forgiveness? I know we are sullied by evil and sin, that our hands are stained with blood, and yet . . .”
The direction of the wind shifted, and an icy cold breeze struck the back of Jesus’s neck.
“Shi . . .”
All that was left to him was prayer now. Yet he swallowed his words as he felt the presence of something behind him in this wasted world of wind and surf and sand.
Who’s there?
The presence was almost inorganic in its absolute stillness. Whoever it was was not even breathing.
Who are you?
Drops of cold sweat trickled down the Nazarene’s back like tiny insects made of ice. He could feel his mouth grow as dry as the sand beneath his feet.
He realized he was in a place of absolute death. Were he to stand, his life would surely end.
So what do I do?
His metabolizer was running at maximum capacity. He felt the tingle of the insulin as it spread through him, thinning as it reached his hands and feet. Each passing second brought him closer to death.
The wind ceased. All sound vanished. In that instant, he ran, swift as a shadow. Something in Jesus’s chest felt hot, as though he had been burned. He still had two small cylinders in his pocket; he fished them out and tossed them over his shoulder. Then he pulled off the magnetic field generator wrapped around his left arm, pressed the switch, and threw it on the ground beneath his feet.
Can I escape this?
He was not entirely without hope.
The ultramarine light of a lithium nuke suffused the flats. A massive white ball of flame expanded with hideous speed, boiling the sea and fusing the sand beneath it. Nearly five hundred meters in diameter, the fireball suddenly inverted behind Jesus as he ran, becoming a crater in the ground, swirling with energy. Like a giant wave crashing against an iron seawall, the fireball surged and swelled, trying to break through an unseen barrier.
Glumly, Jesus admitted to himself that his attack had probably failed to destroy his enemy. His opponent was clearly as well protected as he was. Ensconced within his own barrier, he would make his way through the sea of flame created by the nuclear explosion and launch an assault on the barrier that Jesus had erected on the flats. Still, even if his enemy had not been defeated, his assault would surely be slowed by the blast.
It was only another five hundred meters to his own pod—suddenly a despairingly long distance.
A small black object slid through the sky, white flame ejecting from its anterior: a hand-fired missile. He waved toward it with the laser gun attached to his wrist, and a brilliant arc of light split the sky, swallowing the missile entirely.
My enemy lives!
The black hatch of his pod was open before him. Something exploded behind his back, sending crimson flames streaming over his head. Stinging particles of sand followed, searing the air like glowing embers, but even as they began to strike around him he made it through the hatchway.
The hatch slammed shut automatically behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the dim interior light, he saw two silhouettes in front of the pod’s luminescent xenon wall.
“Now, you will take us to Shi.”
The figures’ cruel smiles turned Jesus’s despair to loathing. Trying to keep his spirit from crumbling altogether, he peered furtively around the inside of the pod. His two enemies slid forward from either side, their expressionless eyes glittering like stars.
They have me, Jesus thought, and his confidence guttered like a candle flame. Then, in his moment of greatest terror, he spotted something—there was still a way for him to escape! Leaping several meters in one bound, he reached out to the subspace positional circuit on the far wall.
In an instant, Jesus of Nazareth had vanished.
“Where’d he go?”
“He’s escaped!”
Siddhārtha and Asura exchanged bitter glances. A moment’s hesitation had cost them their advantage. There was only one thing left for them to do. It would be highly dangerous to pursue their enemy now, yet with every second they delayed, their ultimate victory became increasingly distant and less likely.
Siddhārtha reached out through the hatch to pick up Orionae and drag him inside. The cyborg’s protruding forehead cast a deep shadow across his largely featureless face.
Asura was focusing, expanding to her full height, as though listening for some far-off sound.
There was a panel near the ceiling on one of the side walls from which a transparent case extended, housing three multifaceted electrodes. On the floor below it sat a turntable platform large enough to support several humans. The cylindrical space above the turntable glowed with a faint reddish light. The rhythmic sound of a rotating scanner emerged from the structure nearby.
Asura nodded to Siddhārtha, who thrust Orionae’s body into the reddish light upon the platform, then jumped onto it himself. A fraction of a second later, Asura joined them. The sound of the revolving scanner increased in speed until it sounded like a storm.
Immediately before Siddhārtha lost consciousness, the image of a great galactic spiral burned with incredible brilliance inside his mind. The swirling light was made up of two distinct parts, one horizontal, the other vertical, and the waves of fusion energy erupting where they met soundlessly swallowed the darkness.
Unthinkingly, Siddhārtha screamed, and the sound of his voice held his consciousness for the briefest of moments. He remembered having seen this sight before.
One of the spirals is the Milky Way, the other is Andromeda.
He wondered briefly how he knew those names, yet decided almost as quickly that it did not matter. All he understood was that something terribly destructive was happening to these two galaxies, and that this destruction was not a natural phenomenon, but something caused by an external power.
. . . Yellow 17 in the New Galactic Age, the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 received a directive from Shi—
Siddhārtha’s waking mind melded with the void around him, and he was lost.