Prophets

by S. Andrew Swann

  “When a system is closed, such as a planet without space travel or interstellar communication, a Race AI was designed to accurately model social movements, political and technological change, migration and demographics. Over time, I have scaled up that model until I have been able to accurately map the progress and development of all of human space within an acceptable margin of error.”

  An audible “harrumph” came from the science team.

  Mosasa smiled. “Did you have a question, Dr. Brody?”

  “No questions,” Brody responded. “No questions at all.”

  “But you think the advancement of the Race’s social sciences to have been overstated?”

  “I have trouble believing in the miraculous,” Brody said.

  Mosasa seemed to smile even wider. Mallory wondered why Dr. Brody had agreed to accompany this mission if he didn’t believe Mosasa’s claims.

  “Leaving miracles aside,” Mosasa went on, “these models are very finely tuned. Enough so that I can detect when a system stops being closed. When a new source or sink appears, be it information, people, or trade goods, the drift in actual data versus the model will suggest strongly the nature of the new interaction.”

  Unlike Dr. Brody, Tsoravitch the data analyst had leaned forward and was hanging on Mosasa’s every word. She nervously brushed a strand of red hair off her face and asked, “Is that’s what’s happening by Xi Virginis?”

  “The data points to Xi Virginis as the source—”

  “Are there human colonies out there?” Kugara blurted out the question Mallory didn’t dare voice.

  “Yes.” Mosasa said. “Several. All founded during the collapse of the Confederacy. Because of their placement and history, the Caliphate has had an ongoing interest in preventing knowledge of them propagating to the rest of human space.”

  What? “The Caliphate knew about these worlds?” Mallory said, suddenly less concerned about his cover.

  “High levels of the Caliphate have known of them for quite some time, thus their interest in stopping this expedition. As to Dr. Dörner’s original question; the necessity of violence was required to draw out and neutralize the Caliphate’s somewhat limited resources on Bakunin. By doing so, we’ve ensured the safety of the expedition.”

  “I don’t follow,” Wahid said. “What’s to stop the Caliphate from just pouncing on us now?”

  “We’re no longer their problem. Their public attacks, combined with my public advertisements for mercenaries to travel toward Xi Virginis, has alerted every intelligence agency with an asset on Bakunin that the Caliphate is hiding something in that region of space. There’s no secret for them to protect anymore. My small expedition means nothing when they need to rally whole fleets to lay claim to this sector of space before a rival does.”

  Lord have mercy on us all.

  A sick dread slithered into Mallory’s belly. Mosasa had just admitted to engineering the conflagration that the Church had been trying to prevent. Samhain was nothing. Mosasa was engineering an interstellar war to provide cover for his expedition.

  “Damn it,” Wahid snapped. “If everyone already knew there were colonies out there, what the fuck is the anomaly you’re talking about?”

  “Out here,” Mosasa gestured to the holo, “there’s also something else. Something alien that defies the Race’s modeling capabilities, that radically alters the equations at every point of contact.” He faced his audience with a grin that would not be out of place on a portrait of the Devil. “Out there is something completely unknown.”

  PART TWO

  Burnt Offerings

  The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not

  God.

  —Oliver WENDELL Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sectarianism

  Your friends gain more from your failures than your enemies.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  In every case the guilt of war is confined to a few persons, and the many are friends.

  —PLATO (ca. 427 Bce-ca. 347 Bce)

  Date: 2525.12.12 (Standard) Earth-Sol

  Yousef Al-Hamadi walked slowly as befitted his age. He made his way through the gardens outside the Epsilon Eridani consulate, arms folded behind him. His official title was Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations, which meant he was the nominal head of the Eridani Caliphate’s intelligence operations and in charge of the Caliphate’s covert activity outside its claimed borders.

  In large part, it boiled down to cleaning up the messes of other segments of the convoluted rat’s nest of agencies and organizations that made up the Caliphate’s intelligence community.

  Following him at a respectful distance was the tall dark woman he knew as Ms. Columbia.

  “Did you have a long journey to Earth?” Al-Hamadi asked as he stopped in front of a large fountain spilling cascades of water across a plain of mosaic tile that formed intricate interlocking patterns with a stylized Arabic script that quoted verses from the Qur’an. Six hundred years ago, in the time of the last Caliphate, the fountain would have been an extravagance. However, to a species that had made Mars habitable, the arid waste of the Rub’al Khali was almost an afterthought.

  “My travel caused me little concern.”

  Al-Hamadi smiled to himself. He couldn’t keep, being in the information trade, from trying over and over to pry some scrap of intelligence from the woman herself. However, Ms. Columbia did not reveal a single fact that she wasn’t ready to part with. Not that he expected much. As carefully and flawlessly crafted as Ms. Columbia’s identity was, the person playing the role would not be prone to sophomoric slips of the tongue.

  In the pocket of his jacket, Al-Hamadi had a cyberplas chit with a terabyte or two of detailed information on Ms. Columbia’s persona. Data which, he was sure, would bear scrutiny from whatever assets he cared to assign—despite the fact that he was certain it all was a carefully engineered fraud.

  However, it was a fraud perpetrated by someone with a historical interest in feeding him very accurate and timely information. This was why he was conversing here, and not having Ms. Columbia taken to one of the airless moonlets whipping around Khamsin where he could ask questions about her and her employer somewhat more aggressively.

  “I’m glad your journey was uneventful,” Al-Hamadi responded to her non-answer. “I would find it unfortunate if you were delayed. Our meetings always seem so profitable.”

  “I hope you find this one as profitable,” she said as she handed him a cyberplas chit somewhat larger than the one he had in his pocket. This one fit in his hand and had an integrated reader. He touched a finger to one corner and the surface displayed a message in Arabic confirming his identity. He scanned through the contents of the storage device and frowned.

  He knew better than to ask where the information had come from.

  “My payment?”

  “Already done.” Al-Hamadi made a dismissive gesture, staring at the device in his hand. Her deliveries were always in person, never trusted to even an encrypted narrow-beam tach-transmission. Even so, the archive in his hand contained background info on events that only just hit his own intelligence feeds two weeks ago, and not in much detail.

  The detail here, as usual, required something just short of prescience. It certainly required the efforts of an entire intelligence service with agents on multiple planets and connections with dozens of organizations. A major transplanetary corporation at the least, and more likely one of the Caliphate’s rival governments—an entity served as much as the Caliphate by the passing of the information.

  Whatever the case, “payment” was almost beside the point for both sides of the transaction.

  “Is there something else you wished to discuss?”

  Yes. Who employs you? One of the Indi governments? The Centauri Trading Company? Maybe even Sirius?

  “Are you aware of the nature of the packages you deliver?”

  “On occasion.”

 
; “This latest one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea how troublesome this news is?”

  “Would it be worth my while to bring you news that was not troublesome?”

  “I suppose not.”

  Al-Hamadi scanned the package and wondered what Caliphate government report detailed the actions of the Waldgrave Militia on Bakunin, and where in the Caliphate bureaucracy it was buried. He knew that the Militia wouldn’t engage in an operation without at least the appearance of Caliphate authorization. There would be a report somewhere, approved by someone’s cousin on a planetary council just far enough away from the core that the operation would be well underway before Khamsin or Al-Hamadi heard word of it.

  If there were two foreign words beloved by the militant factions of the Caliphate, they would be fait accompli. This was how the Islamic Revolution on Rubai happened; just take the crumbling central government of Epsilon Indi, and a few dozen rogue militia cells, mix well.

  Technically, they aren’t rogue when so many politicians support them . . .

  The problem with the Militia was that they were an incredibly blunt instrument. Their idea of a covert operation was to not take credit for the aftermath. A private expedition toward Xi Virginis was troublesome, but only to persons who knew the significance of that area of space. For a dozen years standard, Al-Hamadi had managed to keep that significance a secret within the highest levels of the Caliphate, presumably far above the level of anyone directly involved with the Militia.

  Now that significance had leaked. The expedition from Bakunin was bad enough, but if Al-Hamadi had intercepted that information, it could have been dealt with quietly and without drawing attention.

  But the Militia had hired a small army of mercenaries to . . .

  Al-Hamadi shook his head. He wasn’t even going to try to second-guess their motivation at this point. He had a much bigger problem. The Militia’s clumsy actions had done everything but tach-comm every intelligence service in human space with the message, “The Caliphate thinks the space around Xi Virginis is very important. Please allocate all your spare resources toward determining why.”

  Do they even know? Al-Hamadi wondered.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked Ms. Columbia.

  “I doubt the same one as you.”

  “There is no God but God,” Al-Hamadi whispered in Arabic, half reading part of the mosaic underneath the rippling waters. “Sometimes I wonder if that is the case for some of us in the Caliphate. After the fall of the Confederacy, you would think we would be the strongest, most stable transplanetary government in human space. The one government founded not by some accident of history or stellar geography, but a rule based on a common faith, a common law, a common language.” He looked at Ms. Columbia, who wore the same distant expression she always did. “It seems that the more common ground we share, the more intractable the differences.”

  “That seems to be human nature.”

  “Or God’s will.” He turned around to start walking back to the consulate. “Please give my regards, and my thanks, to your employer.”

  Whoever that is, he thought.

  He and Ms. Columbia parted ways at the main consulate building. She left the grounds while he went deep into the bowels of the complex, to the secure tach-comm station. He slipped ahead of fifteen diplomats waiting for transmit time because he had the rank to do so, and because the messages he needed to send were probably the most important to ever cross this particular tach-comm array.

  The Eridani Caliphate was going to have to send its ships to Xi Virginis years ahead of schedule, and Al-Hamadi needed to get ahead of events before things spun out of control.

  Date: 2526.12.17 (Standard) Khamsin-Epsilon Eridani

  It took Al-Hamadi’s tach-comm transmission four days to reach Epsilon Eridani and the capital of the Caliphate. The day after Ms. Columbia’s revelations propagated through the Caliphate government, Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti, one of sixteen active-duty admirals in the Caliphate Navy, was enjoying the third week of an extended leave.

  He was on a nearly eight-month leave while the Caliphate orchestrated a high-level reorganization of the Caliphate armed forces. Admiral Hussein, along with about a half dozen other admirals, had some time off while their new commands were created.

  Until a few months ago, Admiral Hussein had been in command of the defensive fleet around Paschal. It was a position he expected to retire from, until he received the orders to prepare for a reassignment of his command. At first he thought he had offended someone in the bureaucracy, and that he was being ordered back to Khamsin to fill some pointless office role until he could be forced to retire. However, when he had tached into his home system, he had been met by the Minister of the Navy himself, who had assured him otherwise.

  “You have been chosen to head one of the Caliphate’s newest fleets. Beyond that, all I can tell you is that it’s a great honor—until we call you back, enjoy your leave, spend time with your family.”

  So now he stood in the back garden of his third son’s house in the suburbs of Al Meftah, playing catch with his youngest grandson. Little Rahman was barely a toddler and would run after the ball in a lurching gait that seemed always on the verge of toppling over.

  Fortunately, the well-irrigated grass in the garden here was forgiving, and when Rahman did fall, which he did frequently, it was followed by a burst of laughter.

  When he laughed with his grandson, Admiral Hussein believed that God had specially blessed him. Until two months ago he had not expected to spend any extended time with his family until he retired.

  Rahman tossed the ball with a clumsy two-handed overhand throw that landed about a meter short of Admiral Hussein’s feet. The boy fell backward, sitting in the grass, and started giggling.

  Admiral Hussein took a step forward to retrieve the ball when he heard his daughter-in-law’s voice from the back of the house. “Muhammad!”

  He stood up, holding the ball in his hand, and saw the Minister of the Navy standing next to his son’s wife. He tightened his grip on the ball in his hand.

  “Forgive me, Admiral Hussein, but we’ve been forced to advance the schedule.”

  “My leave’s been cut short?”

  The minister nodded. “We need you for a briefing within the hour.”

  “I understand.” He turned toward Rahman, who was still giggling in the grass. “May I have a few minutes to finish playing with my grandson?”

  “Of course, Admiral. Your aircar will be waiting out front.”

  The minister’s car took Admiral Hussein to the administrative center of the Caliphate in the center of the city of Al Meftah. The center of the city was formed by massive office buildings—trapezoids of mirrored glass reflecting the turquoise sky and the daytime stars of Khamsin’s tiny moons. The aircar didn’t land at the Naval Ministry, but at a smaller building at the fringes of the government center. Admiral Hussein didn’t notice any obvious markings denoting the building’s function, but the roof was dominated by a ground-based tach-comm array and there were very few agencies that would rate their own separate interstellar communications link.

  One, of course, was the Ministry of External Relations.

  The Naval Minister led him down from the roof, deep into the bowels of the building to a conference room behind several layers of human and automated security. After the third checkpoint, Admiral Hussein looked down at his grass-stained civilian clothes and said, “I probably should have changed.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the minister told him, “Security has a full biometric profile on you.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I meant.

  Waiting in the conference room, seated at a long table were three other men, all also in civilian dress. Two he didn’t immediately recognize outside a uniform, but one man wore a traditional white cotton thawb. The ankle-length shirt contrasted with the more liberal dress of the other men, but also made the older man more immediately recognizable.

>   “Admiral Bitar, sir.” Admiral Hussein found himself standing at attention before the smiling, gray-bearded man.

  He had met Admiral Naji Bitar several times. He was perhaps the most senior officer in the Caliphate Navy. Bitar had been an admiral before Hussein had even commanded his own supply ship, fifteen years ago.

  Bitar stood, laughing, and clasped Hussein’s shoulder. “Well, I’m glad they chose you for this skullduggery. Considering how impromptu this meeting is, I think we can dispense with the formality.” He gestured toward the two other men in the room. “I believe you know Admiral Nijab and Admiral Said?”

  “By reputation. We’ve never met.”

  Bitar nodded, “I suppose not. Until recently you were serving what, twenty light-years apart?”

  The minister cleared his throat. When he had everyone’s attention, he said, “I believe we are all here. If you’d all be seated, I think we should begin.”

  The minister gestured and the lights in the room dimmed. As Hussein took his seat, a holo display lit up showing a schematic of some sort of spacecraft. It didn’t seem remarkable at first, until he recognized one of the tiny bumps on the long body as a Scimitar III fighter attached to a docking ring.

  That is huge . . .

  “You are looking at the newest vessel constructed for the Caliphate Navy. It is an Ibrahim-class carrier. It is the largest tach-capable ship ever constructed. It can move itself along with a battle group of a hundred daughter vessels in a single jump.”

  A fleet unto itself . . .

  “Originally, a year from now, we intended to deploy six of these carriers. However, events have transpired that require us to cut that schedule by more than half. Each of you will be commanding one of the four carriers that will be operational within the next five months.”

  “What events?” asked Admiral Bitar.

  The holo display above the table changed to show a star map.

  “These carriers were designed for a specific task, a long-range expedition to a cluster of stars near Xi Virginis.”