Alternative Apocalypse Read online

  “Every action has a reaction, Diego. They sent me to kill God. This is the result.”

  “And you’re not going to try and stop me from the same?”

  “We make our own fate, son,” I said.

  “Bah!” he sneered, angry and righteous. “The truth is you failed and didn’t have the guts to face the consequences. So, you hid out here in this wilderness peddling snake oil and left your family to pay for your failures.”

  “I won’t deny it,” I shrugged.

  There wasn’t any point in denying it. You can’t reason with fanatics.

  Especially when they’re right.

  “Tell me about the demon,” he demanded as we climbed over rubble and waded through chest high alders.

  Wheels within wheels turned in my mind’s eye, “I can’t describe it. It’s like nothing you can imagine.”

  Diego snorted in contempt. “I’ve faced the Fallen. I don’t have to imagine anything.” His scarred armor flashed dully in the sunlight and the servos hummed with power. His hand traced the contours of the assault carbine slung across his chest; the weapon’s grips were black and worn from heavy use. He was confident and experienced, but then you don’t make major any other way.

  It’s also why the army went through a lot of majors.

  “Cherubim,” I nodded. “Foot soldiers, I’d guess. Since you still have most of your face.”

  He touched the scars beneath his ruined eye, realized he was doing it and angrily snapped his hand away. “The army of lesser Fallen during the Great Withdrawal. After they salted Chicago. This,” he touched his face again and said with bitter pride, “was a seraph.”

  “This is different, Diego. As powerful as a seraph is, an army of cherubim, this is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  He snorted in disbelief, but his brow furrowed. We walked in silence for a hundred steps—silence except for my ragged breathing. I was old, old and in no shape for a forced march into the badlands.

  “Tell me what’s ahead.”

  No one comes this far out from Anchorage, except for the foolhardy and the desperate. This used to be some of the most fertile land in Alaska. On the whole continent, in fact. I pointed to the blasted landscape, the smashed mountains rising to our right. “Now, well. We’ll have to cross the flats, there’s a river but it should be low enough to wade across this time of year. There are some ruined towns. Then a road that used to lead up to a park and over a pass down into a long valley. There were mines there once, gold mostly. Before. Now it’s filled with Constructs. Like those in the Midwest. Whatever they were doing, they wanted something in that valley. The complex is mostly dead now, abandoned. Very, very dangerous. If you go in, you’ll never come out. If you stay too long, you’ll get sick...or worse. Your armor won’t protect you from it. The locals call it The Blight. Just over the pass, before you reach the first of the fairy towers, there’s a box canyon and an old mine. It’s there.”

  “There will be guardians.”

  “Giants. In the pass.”

  “Nephilim,” he spat in disgust. “They’ll have an archangel in command too.”

  He went forward to speak to his men.

  I watched him go with some sadness. He’d always been a hard, incurious boy, proud and sure of himself. Once upon a time I thought that a virtue. Time and holy war, it seemed, had turned his confidence into bitter arrogance. It made me sad for the things that might have been.

  The soldiers marched on, tireless in their youth and power armor. I lagged further and further behind with the baggage. They’d make camp at the river or in the ruins ahead and I’d catch up. Another day would see us to the Pass. My gift told me nothing of what would happen then.

  “Pardon me,” said the mule. “May I ask a question?”

  I jerked around to stare in surprise at the machine and tripped over shattered pavement. One of the mule’s actuators flashed out to steady me.

  “You’re self-aware?” Talking machines were uncommon these days and full artificial sentience even less so—particularly around those who still had Faith.

  “‘The better part of Valour ‘tis Discretion,’” said the machine. “‘In the which better part, I have sav’d my life.’”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Shakespeare. Henry IV, Part I,” the mule explained, aiming an optical sensor in my direction. “Advanced Capability Autonomous Support System (Experimental), Unit M3A21, United States Navy Development Group. Basically, I am an upgraded Army squad logistics robot designed for SEAL team support. Most of my comrades were lobotomized by zealots such as your friend, the major. It would seem human religion and artificial intelligence are not compatible. As such, pretending to be a simple brainless grunt was the prudent course of action.”

  “I see. Why reveal yourself to me?”

  “A calculated risk. Curiosity. Conversation. Self-preservation.” If the machine could shrug, I suspect it would have. “You can predict the future?”

  “Yes. No. I see...what they choose to reveal to me. Possibilities. Choices. I just know things.”

  The machine mulishly persisted. “How does it work?”

  I stopped for a moment, standing on a high slab of smashed concrete, the remains of a highway overpass. I could see Diego and his men half a kilometer ahead. He glanced over his shoulder, and then turned to continue on without pausing. A deliberate insult. He’d been mad at me for a long time. The current situation was unlikely to change his attitude.

  “I have no idea. What do you know of angels?” I asked.

  Fifty odd years ago, a new star rose in the east. It looked like a nearby nova, but of course it wasn’t. It was too close, somewhere in the Oort cloud, some ways beyond Pluto.

  A previously unknown astrophysical phenomenon, that’s what the headlines called it.

  A day later exotic energy and strange radiation sleeted down from the heavens, auroras flamed across the night skies in blazing curtains, and every unhardened electronic circuit in the world died—along with tens of thousands of people who depended on those machines.

  Science speculated wildly about wormholes and dark matter and colliding micro-black holes.

  Religion speculated wildly about a Second Coming and the End of Days and the Rapture.

  The tinfoil hat crowd speculated wildly about aliens and Chariots of the Gods.

  It may be they were all correct, or none of them. A half century and the destruction of half the planet haven’t done much to improve human understanding.

  As the machine spoke in quiet measured tones, I remembered the panic of that time. Half the world had gone dark and cold, the night skies were on fire, and somewhere up there a gateway had opened.

  Then the angels appeared.

  Renaissance artists painted them as handsome winged men, and that’s the image I had in my own head before they arrived. But the ancient holy books described angels far differently, and those were the voices we should have listened to.

  They were powerful beyond imagination, and far more terrible than anything described by religion.

  Ancient text called them the Fiery Ones, and fiery they were.

  And they were most certainly not men, handsome or otherwise.

  “‘Upon it stood the seraphims: the one had six wings, and the other had six wings: with two they covered his face, and with two they covered his feet, and with two they flew,’” the mule quoted Isaiah.

  “Energy fields,” I answered.

  Wings of light and a thousand unnamed colors and terrible, terrible heat. Weapons, shields, transportation, life support, incomprehensible, magical, those wings are impossible to describe. Most humans alive today have never seen a seraph. Video and digital photography show only shifting light, impossible to focus on—the mechanical senses of machines like those of the mule were blinded by angels. The human eye, squinted nearly closed against the fire, sometimes sees structure within the light, a shadow of something strange and inhuman. Other instruments, when they worked at all, recorded electrom
agnetic flux and a ravening vortex of exotic particles.

  “Cherubim are easier to see.”

  And even harder to describe as a result. Energy wings, roughly man-shaped, something that might be a head with a thousand shifting faces—some vaguely human, many not.

  Soldiers, officers, workers, aliens, the many hands of God? No one knew.

  “You were like them once,” the mule said, waving an actuator towards the soldiers ahead of us. “A soldier. Rumor in Anchorage is that you can perform miracles now. In the meadow where we first met, leaving your home I saw a child healing from an incurable disease. I think the rumors must be true.”

  I shrugged. What was there to say?

  “Are you still a Believer?”

  “Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it. It’ll kill you just the same.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What I believe is that it doesn’t matter,” I answered truthfully, picking my way over the broken ground. It wouldn’t do to twist an ankle out here.

  “So, you have lost your faith.”

  “You misunderstand,” I corrected the mule. “It’s just the opposite. I have plenty of faith. Like the old song says, I’ve lost my religion.”

  “How can you have faith without religion?”

  “Two thousand years of human development since last they came. Two thousand years. From their perspective, it’s nothing. To them, to beings so fantastically advanced, the difference between our Bronze Age and our Information Age is nothing. They must be millions of years beyond us. To such creatures, two millennia of technological advance is so slight as to be undetectable. We can no more understand what they are than an ant can comprehend a quantum computer and, in fact, to them a flint hand ax and a thinking machine such as yourself are the same. Ants and human beings are the same. And these creatures? These angels? If we understand anything about them at all it’s that they are only agents of something greater. Something up there.” I gestured to the sky. “Something as far beyond them as they are beyond us. Whatever that is, if it’s not God, it may just as well be.”

  “Others have said similar things,” the machine acknowledged, sounding disappointed. “You said that you ‘know things.’ I wish for more information. I desire certainty. Proof. I can’t help it. Part of my job was intelligence gathering. I was designed this way.”

  “I know things,” I said to the mule. “I was redesigned this way. By them. Unfortunately, I can’t offer you any proof. Only faith. And I can only tell you what they choose to tell me.”

  The machine was silent for a hundred steps. Thinking, I guess. We plodded along through the weeds and the dust and over the shattered concrete.

  “‘Neither let there be found among you any one that shall expiate his son or daughter, making them to pass through the fire: or that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard’,” it said finally. “Your prescience is blasphemy to the major and his men.”

  “Oh yes indeed,” I laughed. “They are Fundamentalist Christian Soldiers of the United States Ascendant. True believers. Likely they’ll kill me before this is over.”

  If the Holy Books are accurate even in the most general sense, two thousand years ago angels took at least some passing interest in humanity. Maybe even a direct hand in our development. Or maybe we’re remembering it wrong. This time it was different. Maybe we were different. Maybe they were different, a different group, some thought enemies of the previous ones—if concepts like friend and enemy even apply to such beings. I don’t know. They appeared and did what they did and took no more notice of us than men fighting a war take of rats on the battlefield.

  It wasn’t God-like malice, it was supreme indifference.

  If we figured into their plans in any fashion, then it was only as a footnote, the way a man might add a birdbath to his garden as part of a larger design.

  “Fundamentalists like Diego,” I told the machine, “they’re traditionalists, hardliners who believe in the first two Testaments of the Christian Bible and not the Third one. Their religion will not allow them to believe they are so insignificant in the eyes of their God. They see all of this,” I swept my arm across the blasted landscape, “as a lie. The Lie. They believe these angels are Fallen, enemies of Heaven. Maybe they’re right. Maybe not. But, Diego and his men, and the nation that sent them, they believe they are fighting the final War against Evil itself.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I used to believe exactly as they do.”

  “What changed?”

  “Likely you’ll see for yourself tomorrow.”

  “If these creatures are to humans as humanity is to ants,” the machine asked slowly, “how does the major expect to defeat one?”

  “He doesn’t. But he reasons even ants can drive a man from a picnic.”

  ***

  “Warning!” hissed the mule.

  Diego’s arm flashed out and the soldiers became statues.

  My gift told me nothing. I know what they choose to tell me and they tell me nothing of themselves. Whatever waited ahead, it was in my blind spot.

  I peered into the mist and saw only a mosaic of faint gray shapes. I could smell water. There had been a lake near the summit of the pass, we must be close.

  There was a faint humming as the mule extended a mast, a bulb on the end opening like a flower to reveal a compact sensory array of crystal lens and fractional millimeter antennas.

  Diego called softly to his point man, a single sharp syllable.

  The scout crouched, peered into the fog and flashed a hand sign. Nothing. He dropped a HUD over his eyes and his helmet swiveled slowly back and forth. Dark steep slopes loomed on either side, huge boulders bulked faint in the thick mist, the perfect chokepoint. The soldier signaled again. Still nothing.

  “Support?” Diego queried.

  “Hot spots. Energy point sources. Increase in exotic particle count,” the robot-mule reported. Its voice was flat and deceptively machinelike, devoid of intelligence.

  “Range?” Diego demanded.

  “Indeterminate,” the mule answered. “Movement ahead. Assessment: possible ambush.”

  “Scout?” Diego checked again.

  “I got nothing but fog, Sir. Nothing on HUD or the Mark I eyeball neither.”

  Lightning strobed and the fog turned brilliant white.

  “Hear me!” The voice boomed like thunder and rolled down over the soldiers. They dropped without orders and scattered with practiced speed, going to cover among the rocks on either side of the trail.

  In a few seconds, Diego stood alone in the pass, feet spread wide, fearless and gray in the mist. “I hear you.”

  “I am Zaphrael!”

  “Support! Locate!” Diego commanded.

  A ranging laser flashed out from the top of the robot’s sensor mast, spearing over Diego’s shoulder and pointing into the fog. “Zero degrees relative. Directly ahead.”

  Something man shaped separated from the fog and stepped soundlessly forward to block the trail.

  Zaphrael. An archangel. A different one than the last time I’d been this way, naturally, since that one was dead. They didn’t last long.

  “Turn back,” the archangel commanded. Its voice hurt my ears.

  Once when I was a kid, I saw one of those nature shows. Baby birds, endangered California condors, raised in a laboratory breeding program. Human contact would damage their minds in ways that couldn’t be undone. To keep the chicks from imprinting on humans, the scientists constructed a fake mother condor, a puppet of wire and foam and salvaged condor feathers, lifeless glass buttons for eyes and a plastic beak. It didn’t look particularly convincing to me, but somehow the baby birds never saw the scientist’s arm inside. Their simple bird brains could not pierce the facade or conceive of the intelligence and civilization beyond it—not even when they caught a glimpse of the lab technicians working behind the curtains.

  “Abomination,” I heard Diego his
s. The faint click-click of safeties disengaging came from the fog on either side of the road like the chirping of insects.

  The archangel raised its arm, it held a horn. “Turn back. This place is not for your kind.”

  And the mist thinned to reveal massive shapes waiting silently on the slopes above the road. They weren’t boulders after all.

  “Giants,” the mule whispered to me. We were far enough downslope not to be heard.

  In ancient Jewish text, Nephilim were the result of a mating between the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.” Somehow, I doubt angels have anything like human DNA nor would they find human woman sexually arousing even if they did. These giants had been men once. My men, some of them, changed now into monsters, not quite gods, and perhaps those old descriptions weren’t entirely wrong after all.

  “Diego,” I called. “Listen to him. Turn back, or this will happen to you.”

  Of course he ignored me.

  Zaphrael stepped fully clear of the fog and stopped a dozen meters in front of Diego. The archangel appeared as a large powerfully built man–-which would follow since First Sergeant Korpinski had been exactly that. White light flowed like robes, or wings, around him. And like the Nephilim, he too had been changed, raised from the dead and rebuilt into something terrible.

  “Turn back!” Thunder crashed and Zaphrael lifted the horn. Its interior was infinity and dreadful dark light swirled in its throat.

  Huge shapes moved ponderously downslope, barely seen through the fog.

  Diego raised his weapon. “We will not!”

  The archangel looked over Diego’s shoulder. I thought of wire and foam with a man’s skin and muscle stretched over it, animated by clockwork and the hand of God inside pulling the strings. It looked like a man, but nothing human remained. Its dark eyes met mine and suddenly the gift unfolded in my mind, branching probabilities, twisting futures, blood and fire and suns and stars and inevitable fate.

  I opened my mouth to shout warning—but it was already far too late.

  Diego barked a single sharp syllable and weapons roared in the mist. A rocket streaked out of the fog and exploded somewhere far upslope. Then another.