Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  Mr. Antonio waited to be addressed.

  “ ‘What a piece of work is a man,’ ” the other man quoted, without turning around. “ ‘How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty—’ Do you know that, my friend?”

  “Shakespeare?”

  “Yes, it is. Hamlet. ‘In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god!’ ” He finally turned and faced Mr. Antonio, a striking figure even in the starlight; tall, hairless, with flesh as sculpted and flawless as an ancient Greek statue. Apollo, was Mr. Antonio’s first thought, though Prometheus would probably have been a more apt comparison. “Is our mole in play now?”

  “Yes, Adam.”

  “You have done well. Your acts have helped ensure our success.”

  “Thank you.”

  Adam turned away to face the star field surrounding them. As he turned, the red dot of Kropotkin grew in size with vertigo-inducing rapidity. The stars rotated and twisted as their point of view shot around the star.

  “I believe you are unsure about this,” Adam said as the planet Bakunin swelled in front of him, a white ball with a strip of blue girdling its middle. One green-gray continent cut from ice cap to ice cap dividing the single ocean. The landmass was in the process of rotating from light to dark, the half of it east of the Diderot Mountains shadowed and alive with city lights.

  “I have no doubts in you,” Mr. Antonio said.

  Adam chuckled. “You also know that it’s futile to try and hide your feelings from me. I see the pulse of civilizations. The workings of your mind are no mystery.”

  Mr. Antonio nodded. “I am certain you know the importance of what I do. I’m afraid I do not.”

  Bakunin grew quickly in front of them, mountains shooting by, and the darkened eastern desert zooming toward them. The lights around the spaceport/city of Proudhon swelled. “You wonder about the importance of Tjaele Mosasa.”

  Proudhon moved off to the left and the image turned gray as it adjusted for the lack of light. It fell toward a monochrome section of desert filled with ranks of disabled spacecraft.

  “If he is a threat, why not—”

  “Destroy him?” Adam asked. “He will be destroyed.”

  Their point of view fell toward a single hangar in the midst of the aircraft and stopped a dozen meters from the ground. The image was static, but Mr. Antonio could see a lone figure entering the hangar, the unmistakable form of Nickolai Rajasthan.

  “I could have—”

  “No,” Adam said. “Our actions have been precise for a reason. Mosasa would see an unsubtle attack and not only avoid it, but divine the purpose behind it. No. He has to be drawn from his lair to unfamiliar territory where he will be near blind.” The point of view shifted until they seemed to hover just over Nickolai’s right shoulder, the tiger’s massive foreshortened profile filling the universe in front of them. “Our agent will strike when the quarry is helpless.”

  “I defer to your wisdom.”

  “Now, though, with our pieces in place around Mosasa, we should retire our Mr. Antonio.”

  “How next should I serve?”

  “There are things on Earth that should be addressed as soon as my brother begins his tragic expedition.”

  Mr. Antonio left Adam with a new name, a new appearance, and a new spacecraft.

  Replacing the old Indi-built scout was a Paralian-designed luxury transport. Rather than the cramped one-person cabin, the Pegasus V craft had a lush suite with wood paneling, leather seats, carpeting, and solid brass controls. Instead of an ancient serial number, the side of the sleek craft bore a name, Lillium.

  The person who slipped behind the controls of the Lillium bore no resemblance to Mr. Antonio, despite having been him until about fifteen minutes ago. Instead of the old wrinkled creature with wispy white hair who had hired Nickolai Rajasthan, the pilot who flew the Lillium from the bowels of Adam’s spacecraft was a middle-aged woman of African descent. Her hair was black and wrapped her head in tight braids, and her face was smooth except for the beginning of age lines around the eyes. She had the long, lithe form of someone who had grown up in slightly less than Earth gravity, and the musculature of someone who trained in gravity somewhat higher.

  Her name was now Ms. Columbia, and she and Lillium were headed to Terra, in the heart of human space.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Portents

  The Devil is in the details, and God is right there egging him on.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

  —VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)

  Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Mallory found Mosasa’s response to his question more unnerving than a confirmation would have been. He would have been more comfortable if Mosasa had at least given the impression he knew something of what was happening in the vicinity of Xi Virginis. Mallory looked at his fellow mercenaries and wondered if any of them, like him, had reasons for being here other than answering Mosasa’s ad.

  There was the massive wall of fur and muscle named Nickolai Rajasthan. Mallory didn’t know exactly how he felt about working with someone whose ancestors were created specifically to wage war as a proxy for man. The fact that Nickolai existed was a testament to how unfit man was to play God, creating life not out of love, but solely as a tool for destruction. But according to half a millennium of Church doctrine, Nickolai was spiritually as human as Mallory was, despite his origins.

  Then there was Julia Kugara who, if she wasn’t just trying to bait Wahid, was a descendant of the same genetic engineers who had created Nickolai’s kind. Even in the twenty-first century—when men thought little, if anything, of molding animals into short-lived faux-humans to kill and die in mankind’s stead—even then, men had an inkling of evil when they rebuilt human beings. Even before the secular governments placed the techniques that produced Nickolai’s kin on the list of heretical technologies, it was supposedly illegal to genetically modify human beings. Which didn’t mean it didn’t happen, and happen often enough that descendants of those shadowy experiments still existed.

  Mallory knew little of Dakota, the one planet those genetically-engineered humans had made their own after their exile. It was part of the Fifteen Worlds, one of a pair of habitable planets orbiting Tau Ceti—the less inviting one. From what Mallory did know, Dakota was even more xenophobic and insular than the rest of the Fifteen Worlds.

  Considering how close it was, Mallory wondered how large a population of Dakota expatriates lived on Bakunin. He also wondered if it was only her father that carried a genetic engineer’s legacy and how much of Kugara’s genome was artificial.

  Finally, there was Jusuf Wahid who came from Davado Poli, a small world that was a remnant of Epsilon Indi’s aggressive expansion two hundred years ago; the wrong location and history to be a Caliphate agent. Still, Mallory couldn’t help being suspicious of him; even though logic dictated that if the Caliphate was trying to be covert here, it would do its best to use an agent who wasn’t an obvious Muslim.

  But was there a reason for the Caliphate to be covert? As far as Mallory knew, they had no reason to suspect that the Church knew about the transmissions from Xi Virginis, so they would have no reason to hide their own interest.

  Last, there was Mosasa himself. The man was tattooed and jeweled like a pirate from another century. And, according to Nickolai, he was as nonhuman as the tiger. Mallory didn’t know exactly what that meant. The cursory research he had been able to do on his potential employer had produced the tantalizing fact that Mosasa Salvage had existed on Bakunin almost since the founding of the anarchic colony. The salvage yard actually predated the city of Proudhon. And the images of the salvage yard’s owner from nearly three hundred years ago showed a man very similar in appearance to the Tjaele Mosasa who stood before him now.

  If Mallory had deigned to risk a more aggressive investigation, tracking down associates and so
on, rather than keeping a low profile in his hotel room, he suspected he might have uncovered a few interesting explanations for Mosasa’s apparent longevity.

  Wahid muttered something about wanting to know who he was working with.

  “Well, you know now. If you want to leave, you can be replaced.”

  Wahid gave Mosasa a wide smile. “Don’t mind me. It’s all good.”

  Mallory shook his head. Wahid was the kind of wiseass that annoyed him, especially in a military setting.

  “Thank you.” Mosasa turned to face all of them. “If you could all take your seats, there are contracts to sign, and then a short briefing.”

  After Mallory put his alias and genetic signature to a single sheet of cyberplas containing the most pithy legal document he had ever read, Mosasa stood between his seated mercenaries and the shadowed tach-ship and described the mission.

  “This is primarily an intelligence gathering mission,” Mosasa told them. “There have been a number of political, economic, and scientific anomalies appearing throughout known human space for at least the past five years standard. I have traced the source to an area of space in the vicinity of Xi Virginis—”

  “What do you mean ‘anomalies’?” Wahid asked.

  “Has everyone read the nondisclosure clause?”

  That had been one of the pithier parts of the agreement. It simply warned that if the signatory leaked any details of the job, operational or otherwise, Mosasa reserved the right to shoot whomever leaked.

  When everyone confirmed they understood that particular detail, Mosasa continued.

  “To explain these anomalies, I need to explain some history. I assume you are all a little familiar with the Race and the Genocide War?”

  The reference to the Genocide War was a complete non sequitur to Mallory. Of course he was familiar with it. Occisis was founded during that war, a war started covertly by the amoeboid Race decades before humanity reached for the stars. When the Race was discovered manipulating human affairs on Earth, the result was an accelerated spread to the stars and the rise of the twenty-first century United Nations as one of a series of despotic Terran governments.

  The founders of Occisis were the survivors, and nominal victors, in mankind’s first interstellar war, a war that ended with the near extermination of the first alien species humans had contact with. Since the war, no member of the Race had been allowed off its homeworld. As far as Mallory knew, the old United Nations battle stations still blasted anything that attempted to fly in or out of the Procyon system.

  “That’s all ancient history,” Wahid said.

  “A little over four hundred years,” Mosasa said, “not quite ancient.”

  “But there’s a point to you going over this?” Wahid asked.

  “The point is that there are several details about the Race that aren’t mentioned in popular history.”

  “Like?”

  Mosasa grinned. “Perhaps you know why a spacefaring race trying to contain human expansion didn’t just drop a large asteroid on Earth?”

  Wahid didn’t, but Father Mallory, the xenoarchaeology professor, suddenly knew exactly what Mosasa meant. But since that wasn’t true of Fitzpatrick, Mallory remained quiet as he mentally fit all the pieces together.

  Mallory knew the reason the Race didn’t bombard Earth was because the Race had evolved several cultural quirks against direct confrontation. Direct aggression was a strict taboo, so dropping a big rock on another planet was unthinkable, no matter how threatened they felt.

  That didn’t mean the Race was peaceful. Far from it. The Race was ruthlessly adept at indirect violence, cultural judo where they encouraged enemies to destroy themselves, leaving their own pseudopods free of blood. By the time the Race had a unified government and reached the stars, they had developed sociology, politics, and anthropology into actual sciences, predictive sciences. With enough information, they could predict the economic, demographic, and political landscape of a city, nation, or a whole planet decades into the future.

  More important, from a warfare standpoint, they knew how to change outcomes. They could see that if this political party received a large funding stream at the same time this corporation in another country was bought out and factories shut down, the end result would be a civil war in country number three.

  The Race had covertly used that expertise to severely undermine the situation on Earth for nearly seventy-five years before they were discovered.

  “Hold on.” Wahid interrupted Mosasa’s explanation. “Are you saying that some old Race bogeyman is telling you about ‘political, economic, and scientific anomalies’?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Mosasa answered.

  “You have an AI,” Kugara said.

  Of course, Mallory thought, even before Mosasa said, “In a sense, I’ve had several.”

  The Race’s warfare relied on artificial intelligence. Not only was it impossible to run their cultural modeling on anything else—even if humans could duplicate the coding—the only way they could fight against the humans in direct confrontation was to have autonomous weapons that could act without direction. The implication of those weapons, which fought long past the end of the war, was one of many reasons that possession of an AI device was still a capital crime in most of human space.

  Except on Bakunin, of course.

  But it went deeper than that. Everything slid into unnatural clarity for Mallory. With Nickolai’s comment that Mosasa wasn’t human, and that even a cursory search for records showed Mosasa Salvage and Mosasa himself being here for over three centuries, there was only one credible explanation.

  Mosasa wasn’t using a Race AI.

  He was one.

  The realization filled Mallory with a moral dread unlike anything he had felt before. He could feel a spiritual eclipse, where the anarchic mass of Bakunin drifted between this small gathering and the light of God, leaving them all in a darkness that was felt rather than seen.

  Mallory forced himself to listen to Mosasa explain the details of his expedition. Part of him wanted to leave now, convinced that he sat in the epicenter of something terrifying and godless. Another part, the soldier, the man who was here on a mission for the Church, knew that, if anything, it was God’s providence that had taken him here.

  And, in the end, Mallory knew that quitting this job was not something Fitzpatrick would do and would lead to many uncomfortable questions for someone trying to keep a low profile.

  That last decision was vindicated when Mosasa introduced the woman who was going to be the military commander for this expedition. When the petite, white-haired woman walked from the shadows of Mosasa’s tach-ship, Mallory made little effort to conceal his shock. It was not an emotion that Fitzpatrick would be hiding right now.

  “My name is Vijayanagara Parvi,” she introduced herself, looking at everyone assembled in front of her in turn. With the exception of Nickolai, Mallory noted. When she looked at Mallory, she said, “Some of you already know me.”

  This cannot be a coincidence, Mallory thought.

  Mallory waited by the exit to the hangar and watched Kugara and the tiger leave together. It only surprised him for a moment, as a moment of reflection told him that the two of them probably shared more in common than any other two members of the small mercenary squad that Mosasa had hired. They weren’t his primary concern at the moment. Not his, not Fitzpatrick’s.

  Wahid left on his own. If things had gone differently during the briefing, he might have chosen to follow him. Either surreptitiously, or in a gesture of false camaraderie akin to what he supposed was happening with Kugara and Nickolai. A drunken conversation might go a long way toward assessing Wahid’s potential dual allegiances.

  At the moment that wasn’t his concern either.

  His concern was the short white-haired woman who walked out of the hangar about fifteen minutes later.

  When Vijayanagara Parvi stepped alone into the night air, Mallory walked out in front of her. To her credit, sh
e didn’t appear too surprised.

  “I think we need to talk,” Mallory told her.

  “Perhaps,” Parvi said. “Talk, then.”

  “Not here,” Mallory said.

  She cocked her head. “Are you worried about Mosasa hearing this? He’s paying me more than he’s paying you.”

  “No,” Mallory cocked his head at the hangar. “Back inside.”

  Parvi shrugged and walked back into the hangar. Mallory already assumed that anything between him and Parvi would make it back to Mosasa. Back inside Mosasa’s EM-shielded hangar, he could at least be confident that would be the extent of it.

  Mosasa had gone, leaving the vast hangar space empty but for the two of them and the tach-ship. Once they were both inside, with the door shut, Mallory faced Parvi. “I was not expecting you to be part of the first job I have on Bakunin.”

  Parvi shrugged. “I’ve recruited a lot of people.”

  “So you don’t find it a little coincidental?”

  “The universe is full of coincidences.”

  “So when you recruited me, were you working for Mosasa?”

  “You’re acting as if I knew you were going to apply for this particular job.”

  “Did you?”

  “How could I?” she asked. “Did you?”

  “No.” Mallory was not about to admit that he had known the destination, if not the means to get there. But it was clear that if Mosasa had known his goal in advance, he had deftly manipulated Mallory.

  “Then I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

  Parvi laughed. “You’re being paranoid.”

  “Wahid has a good point about professional paranoia.”

  “You should go get some sleep.”

  “Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

  “You aren’t anything special, Fitzpatrick.”

  “That isn’t an answer.”

  “You chose to be here.”