Cenotaxis by Sean Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

told myself, would never work.
    "It's all right," I said to Alice-Angeles. "We're going to win the war, so it's important we be courteous—even forgiving—along the way. He's only doing what he thinks is right."
    "You really believe you can stand up to the entire galaxy?" Bergamasc asked me.
    "I see only one man in front of me. One man challenging God. The odds, you'll find, are heavily stacked in my favor."
    "I guess it depends on where you're standing," he said.
    "I know exactly where I'm standing." I pointed at the common grave nearby, where five of my own troopers lay. "Your man is buried over there. You can collect him later."
    "Thanks, but that's okay. There are plenty more like Al where I come from."
    His lack of concern surprised me. What kind of leader spoke with such disdain of a fallen comrade? Only later did I learn that the soldier called Alphin Freer is a member of that class of human called "singletons," whose identity has been copied many times over, making the issue of an individual's death much harder to measure than the demise of a single body.
    "Get him in back inside," I told Alice-Angeles. "I want us in Malan by nightfall." By the time dawn strikes Station Zero, I really meant. "If he moves so much as a finger, knock him out."
    "What happened to being courteous?" Bergamasc asked as she shoved him back toward the six-wheeler.
    I put the switch back into my pocket. "I have limits."
    "You and me both."
     
    Those words seem prophetic to me later, as I reflect on his ultimatum in my cold, stone cell. Was he warning me, even then, that we might come to such an end? Does he too have a rudimentary sense of the future as a place that already exists, that our only mission in life is to find our way there, by whatever means we possess in our individual natures?
    The day he took me into his custody couldn't have been more different. I was frog-marched at the centre of a cordon of no less then twelve soldiers in full battle dress, two of them Alphin Freers that obviously held a grudge for their twin's demise in Lop Nur. They paraded me in front of a vast assembly of captured frags, while Imre Bergamasc brooked no uncertainty over his intentions.
    "Behold the man you call your God! Not so grand now, is he?"
    The assembly was silent and unmoving. All I heard was the susurrus of breath, multiplied a thousand times over.
    "I am proud of you," I told them, moved by their resolute stillness. "You are the true inheritors of Earth!"
    A rifle butt knocked me to the ground, but not before my words were picked up by the frags nearest me and passed in whispers through the ranks. Too late, my cordon hauled me unceremoniously from view. I heard the murmur rising through the walls as rough hands thrust me to the ground.
    "He's a one-man crusade," commented a massive, heavily scarred man leaning against one wall with arms folded across his barrel chest. "Look at him, taking all our glory."
    "Save it, Render." Helwise was there too, and a fourth person I hadn't seen before: a slight blonde woman with green eyes. She watched me closely as I struggled to my feet and stood, waiting with dull certainty for the next blow. The solid iron links of my chains were supposed, I assumed, to be symbolic, yet in a strange way I had never before felt more triumphant.
    Here they were, the members of the pretender king's inner circle, all in one spot—and I among them! If only I'd had a bomb, or a single word that would convert them all.
    "Is everyone on this fucking planet a frag?" Helwise asked as the sound of the crowd grew louder still.
    "There's no shame in that," I told her.
    "This guy isn't a frag," said one of the Freers. "He's a Prime."
    "There's no shame in that, either."
    "I know," Bergamasc agreed, and I understood for the first time, then, that he was a Prime too, a deliberate throwback to the oldest form of humanity. He circled me like a hungry predator. "Why do they follow you?"
    "They follow God."
    "Whose will is handed to them by