Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  It wasn’t an impossible criteria. The Indi Protectorate had manufactured thousands of such exploration vessels in its heyday. But those that were still around were old and cranky. The one ship he’d gone to visit today, in his opinion, would require divine intervention to make it as far as Tau Ceti. The only other possibility so far had the ill luck of having a pilot who actually bragged about doing black ops work for the Caliphate.

  He was walking back to his hotel from the hangar, when he saw an odd heat-shimmer out of the corner of his eye. He had been retired for forty years, so he didn’t react as quickly as he should have. By the time he realized the significance of the visual distortion, the man in the cloak was standing directly in front of him.

  The cloak was a military-grade personal camo projector, looking like a cubist heat-shimmer about one and a half times the size of a man in full combat gear. Mallory stopped short when he saw the distortion and realized that there was a near-invisible something standing on the walkway in front of him.

  He took a step back and felt a metal-clad hand between his shoulder blades. A quick glance back showed more optical distortion, headache-inducing at this range. He was close enough to see the shimmer of the tiny fly-sized optical pickups that orbited the cloaked figure—allowing the occupant to see outside his own photon-twisting cocoon.

  The pair had him trapped in a long alley between a featureless gray hangar and a tall office building that showed no ground-level entrances for about twenty meters in either direction.

  “Welcome to our fair planet.” A voice came from the shimmer in front of him. The voice was amplified, emerged from somewhere around chest level, and was much too cheerful.

  From behind him, came a slightly staticky version of the same voice. “We here represent the Proudhon Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Your donation is greatly appreciated.”

  Just a few meters away and to the rear, Mallory caught sight of a window—little more than a retail clothing display, but close enough to be an escape. He was ducking down and around the man behind him before he had really started thinking about it; adrenaline and his implants were doing the thinking for him.

  Behind him, he heard one of them say, “I really hate new people.”

  Mallory drew his sidearm and took aim at the window, pointing the barrel between the breasts of the animated mannequin posing in the latest fashion from Banlieue.

  Probably should have just given them my money.

  The reliable old slugthrower barked in his hand three times, and Bakunin again defied his expectations. Instead of fragmenting, the window simply showed three pancaked slugs embedded in a tight grouping above the mannequin’s chest.

  What clothing store has bulletproof windows?

  Something hard and metal slammed into his back and he collided face-first into the undamaged window. His sidearm went sailing down the alley. The breath jarred from him, he collapsed on the ground, rolling up to face his shimmering attackers.

  “I guess,” said the one with static in his voice, “you just don’t want to do this nice.”

  Mallory spat from a bloody lip. “I guess that was a bad idea.”

  “Bad idea, he says.”

  “That’s funny.”

  An invisible gauntlet reached down and grabbed the front of Mallory’s shirt, and Mallory got the sickeningly surreal vision of most of his torso disappearing as the man lifted him to his feet.

  “For your own benefit we’re going to have to educate you out of these bad ideas.”

  Mallory’s feet left the ground and his back slammed into the wall. He could hear the servos grinding in his attacker’s unseen armor. In his head, Mallory began praying, preparing for the worst.

  This close, Mallory could only see the world through the distortion of the camo projection. Through the angular ripples of the projection, he saw a bright flash erupt from the ground behind the man holding him. A ball of smoke rolled upward from the flash, revealing a circle of the walkway melted to black slag. The air was suddenly rank with the smell of hot metal and burned synthetics.

  “What the fuck?” The man holding him dropped him and backed away. Mallory staggered against the wall but remained upright. His two attackers were standing right next to him, but Mallory had the sense that he was no longer the focus of their attention.

  “Okay, boys, playtime’s over.” The new voice came from a petite woman standing at the mouth of the alley, back where Mallory had come from. She had brown skin and straight white hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a white jumpsuit with a shoulder patch that Mallory couldn’t make out at this distance.

  Her most distinguishing feature was the razor-thin gamma laser carbine she held pointed down the alley at them.

  “This ain’t your business, lady.”

  The woman cocked her head. The barrel of the carbine didn’t move at all. “You know, it might be a good idea for you to think about whether you should be telling me what is and isn’t my business.”

  “Now wait a goddamn minute—”

  “Cool it, Reggie.”

  “Now you going and using my name, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “She’s BMU, Reggie.”

  “I don’t give a shit if she’s the fucking pope—”

  “Well, I do. Rolling a tourist isn’t worth the trouble.”

  The woman added, “Listen to your brother, Reggie.”

  “What? No one said anything about who—”

  “I told you. BMU. Understand?”

  After a long pause, Reggie said, “Okay, cut our losses. Fuck it.”

  Both shimmers moved away leaving Malloy alone in the alley.

  The woman walked down the alley. Without the distortion between him and her, he could now see the shoulder patch on her jumpsuit. It wasn’t too surprising to see the initials “BMU” embroidered in gold on a red field. Below the initials were a crossed sword and rifle.

  She also had a name embroidered on the left breast of the jumpsuit: “V. Parvi.”

  She bent over and picked up Mallory’s slugthrower.

  “Thank you,” Mallory said.

  “You’re welcome,” she stepped over to him and handed him his gun. This close, she wasn’t just petite, but tiny. She was a full head shorter than his Occisian build—barely 150 centimeters, if that. “But don’t go thinking that anything on this planet’s free, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.”

  The woman was named Vijayanagara Parvi. She belonged to an organization with the somewhat generic name of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union—she was a recruiter. Apparently, Father Mallory’s alias, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick, had just been recruited by Ms. Parvi. Of course, she told him, he didn’t have to sign up with the BMU. However, it made economic sense. If he didn’t, he would owe the BMU for her services, and he wouldn’t have the benefits of being a member of the union.

  Of course, the primary benefit would be that he would cease being a target for bottom-feeders like Reggie and his brother.

  “The way it works on this planet,” she told him, “you need to be part of something scarier than the shitheads who want a piece of you.”

  In the end, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick went along with her pitch. The whole situation fit so seamlessly into Mallory’s cover he chalked it up to divine providence. It didn’t even matter that he had the strong suspicion that Reggie and his brother were employed by Ms. Parvi and the BMU to help recruit new blood. Signing up for the BMU was something that Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick would do even without the extra incentive.

  He also felt a level of security when Ms. Parvi confirmed many of the details of Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s history. Mallory’s cover seemed to have stuck, however rushed it had been.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mysteries

  Knowledge is not the same as intelligence, and having too much of one often leads to having too little of the other.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  Sometimes it’s smart to know when to be a little ignorant.
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br />   —ROBERT Celine (1923-1996)

  Date: 2525.11.12 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Tjaele Mosasa sat in a small building in an aircraft graveyard on the outskirts of Proudhon. In the office around him, holo displays crowded the walls. The displays showed unfiltered broadcasts from across all of human space, chattering in every language of the human universe. The data from the signals varied in age from several days to several decades depending on whether Mosasa’s receivers were leeching a tach-comm broadcast or a slow light speed signal that wasn’t intended to communicate beyond a planetary system. The off-planet broadcasts cycled through signals every few seconds based on some custom filtering algorithms. A dozen other screens showed text data scrolling by quicker than any human would be able to read.

  The data flowing through the office, flowing through Mosasa, came from every aspect of human civilization. News broadcasts, soap operas, technical user manuals, tour guides, classified intelligence briefings, personal tach-comms, telemetry data from satellite diagnostic systems, pornography, patent applications, want ads, suicide notes, tax returns, census data—

  If someone, somewhere, digitized some scrap of data, it was Mosasa’s goal to route it through the hardware in this room. Even when he wasn’t present here, he had encrypted transmissions broadcast to receivers implanted in his body.

  Mosasa absorbed the data on a preconscious level. The software that formed the highest level of his consciousness, the part of him that thought of himself, was too complicated, slow, and unwieldy to process all the information he gorged on. That duty was reserved for an older part of himself, the part that was designed to process the data, to model it, to give him a view of the universe beyond this office.

  The individual holo broadcasts, reports, novels, technical manuals no more impacted his conscious awareness than a single photon. However, like a photon, he didn’t need to be aware of any particular data element for it to contribute to his image of the universe.

  The core of Mosasa’s preconscious mind assembled the unending stream of data into a view of the human cultural and political universe just as his eyes assembled an unending stream of photons into a view of the physical office around him. Both views were completely arbitrary constructions of Mosasa’s brain. Both were concrete and unquestionably real.

  He saw the twist and political outlines of the Alpha Centauri Alliance as well as the plastic cases holding the holo screens mounted on the walls around him. He could feel the proxy tendrils of the Vatican pushing toward the Caliphate as concretely as he felt the engineered leather of the chair he sat on.

  And from a dozen different subtle directions, he felt something pressing into fringes of human space. Information was leaking in from outside . . .

  Xi Virginis.

  Mosasa knew about the colonies in that direction of space. He knew about them since their founding. He was old enough to have personally known some of the people who had founded them.

  He had also known that they didn’t interact with the main body of human space. For a decade or so, those colonies’ only impact had been the knowledge of their existence in the upper levels of the Caliphate, the Vatican, and their proxies. Mosasa had seen that knowledge channel human actions on the highest levels, a stalemate where those in power did not act for fear of prompting their rivals to act. It was a stable equilibrium that should have endured for decades more.

  Something was tipping the equilibrium. Some unseen stream of data was feeding into the equation. Some unknown was moving the Vatican and the Caliphate. Mosasa saw the resources moving, but not the reason.

  But like a black hole moving through a galaxy, he might not see the source of the distortion, though seeing the effects was enough for him to give the location of the unknown.

  Xi Virginis.

  The unknown drew him, even though he knew that if he moved himself, it would further upset the equilibrium. He told himself that, as long as an unknown this large loomed within these far-flung colonies, the stability he saw was illusory.

  It wasn’t even really a decision. As soon as he knew that the unknown existed, there was a hole in the fabric of his universe. He would have to investigate it. The only decision was how he would do so, and what individual threads from the human universe he would pull in behind him to help patch the hole.

  Parvi looked at the list of names on the cyberplas sheet in her hand. She read the capsule biographies and shook her head. “Why go to so much trouble? There are plenty of scientists on Bakunin.”

  “Perspective,” Mosasa said. His tone was flat, as always, and it irritated Parvi how it never quite became mechanical. He should speak in a synthetic monotone; sounding like a disinterested human being was just wrong.

  She knew her irritation was irrational. An artificial voice could sound indistinguishable from human even when not spoken by an illegal self-aware AI. However, most programmers were polite enough to slip in some sort of audible hook, just so you knew there wasn’t a real person behind the speech.

  Parvi looked up at Mosasa.

  That was the other thing. He looked like a real person. A tall, sculpted man with hairless brown skin covered with photoreactive tattoos and body jewelry. He might have been handsome if it wasn’t for the dragon’s head drawn across the side of his skull and a third of his face. She knew that a long time ago there was a human being named Mosasa, and that man looked pretty much the way Mosasa looked now.

  She also knew that man had been dead for at least a couple of centuries.

  “What do you mean, ‘perspective’?” Her words echoed in the hangar while Mosasa stood with his back to her. He was doing something inscrutable to the drive section of a Scimitar fighter, an old stealth design from the Caliphate that had somehow ended up in the possession of Mosasa Salvage.

  “I am investigating something unknown,” he said without turning around. “An unknown whose shape implies an impact that could involve all of human space. Having a wide section of social and political background in personnel will be an aid to my analysis.”

  “I see.”

  “After you make contact with the science team and arrange for their arrival here, I will need you to assemble the military team.”

  “I don’t see any military personnel here.”

  “All in time.” He waved a hand, dismissing her.

  She sighed and turned around, walking out of the hangar.

  Parvi hated working for Mosasa. It made her skin crawl whenever she was in his presence. It was with a palpable physical relief that she walked out of the hangar and into the desert air on the outskirts of Proudhon. It wasn’t just that he was an AI. That was bad enough. The taboo against Artificial Intelligence devices of any sort were broad and deep in every human culture, dating from the Genocide War with the Race over four hundred years ago. Seeing what the Race-built AIs could do with their social programming was enough to put that tech in a class of evil only shared by self-replicating nanotechnology and the genetic engineering of sapient creatures.

  No, Mosasa couldn’t just be an AI, living on the lawless world Bakunin, the only place where he didn’t face summary destruction. No, Mosasa had to be an AI built by the Race itself, a remnant of an old weapon surviving long past the war for which it was built, a weapon that in some sick fashion had learned to mimic a human being.

  But Mosasa paid well, and Parvi needed the money.

  So she tucked the cyberplas sheet into her pocket, got onto her contragrav bike, and shot back toward Proudhon. She had a bunch of tach-comm calls to make on her boss’ behalf.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Initiations

  The shortest freeway will have the highest toll.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.

  —ABRAHAM Lincoln (1809-1865)

  Date: 2525.11.18 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  The whole process of registering as a member of the BMU alternately fascin
ated and appalled Mallory. The academic in him was fascinated with how the BMU operated and seeing the detailed workings of a society that operated on completely different premises than his own. The Marine in him was offended by the military pretense of an organization that, for the most part, didn’t have a chain of command above the squad level—un-uniformed and mostly unregulated. The Catholic in him kept seeing the implications of a world whose only military was essentially a group of semiorganized thugs for hire.

  To which, the academic in him responded, How is that different from most of human history?

  The more he saw of the way Bakunin worked, the more he saw parallels to medieval Europe; the social rationalizations and beliefs might be different, but the BMU reminded him of landless knights. All they lacked was dispensation from the pope to go on a crusade and keep them from ravaging the countryside.

  One major difference, though, was in the area of skill assessment. Apparently, any idiot with a gun and some money could join the BMU—gun optional. But if you wanted to be a working member, and do more that pay the union protection money, you needed a rating. You could put anything you wanted on your résumé narrative—experience in hand-to-hand combat, fighter pilot, special forces, covert ops—but what mattered was BMU’s own assessment.

  In the chaotic economy that was Bakunin, it was worth it to pay for a known quantity. Someone hiring a union mercenary was getting a known skill set. It might be more expensive than hiring random thugs off the street, but it was less prone to surprises. Also attractive to a potential employer, a lot of the BMU’s few regulations were specifically intended to prevent their members from turning on their employers. Hire someone from BMU, and you were assured that the whole weight of the union would fall on a member who double-crossed you. Of course the converse was also true; union members had the muscle of the BMU to back them if their employer ever double-crossed them.