The science team seemed fairly straightforward, including a linguist, a data analyst, an anthropologist, and a xenobiologist. Add to that a Paralian, who was an expert on theoretical physics and went by the alias Bill. The nature of the team pretty much demonstrated that Mosasa expected to encounter a human colony out here.
The mercenary team was interesting.
Not only had the Eclipse been sabotaged, it had harbored a Vatican spy. The presence of a Vatican agent gave weight to the idea that the Eclipse was actually the impetus that set the Voice and her sisters in motion early.
When the Eclipse’s crew was brought on board the Voice, Admiral Hussein made it a point to meet the most diplomatically sensitive crew member first, the Paralian.
Having one of the creatures on board the Voice was troublesome, and he intended to show the creature the respect he would any diplomatic envoy. It was also a logistic issue, since the creature’s life support resided in a machine that was nearly six meters tall and five wide. There was no way it would fit in any of the human spaces in the Voice, so at the moment their alien guest resided in an unpressurized loading bay that served one of the hundred spacecraft that formed the Voice’s battle group.
A set of engineers was scrambling to figure out what to do with Bill once the fleet had to reattach to the carrier.
It also meant that a face-to-face required an environment suit, and the only record was the low-res holo camera embedded in the chest of that suit. Out here, open to space, blocked only by a safety grille across the thirty-meter docking portal, there was none of the sophisticated monitoring equipment they had in the interrogation rooms. Not that all the physical monitoring in the world would make sense looking at Bill.
To his surprise, Bill, or, more accurately, the communications software Bill used, was as fluent in Arabic as it was in English.
Admiral Hussein questioned the creature over the comm link, watching the tentacled bullet-bodied thing for some clue to its emotional state. It was as hopeless as trying to read the mood of a jellyfish.
Even so, the history Bill provided him was congruent with the stories from the others and the Eclipse’s logs. All had been hired by Mosasa to uncover some sort of ill-defined anomaly originating from the direction of Xi Virginis.
It also confirmed the details of what they found there, or failed to find there. It provided a wealth of technical details especially on how the Eclipse ended up damaged and inbound to this system. Most of those details were completely opaque to Admiral Hussein, but they would help the engineers in going over the wreck of the Eclipse.
It was that technical discussion, opaque as it was, where Bill complicated the diplomatic issue.
“I am impressed with your ship,” Bill radioed from his electronic voice box. Even in Arabic, the words carried a Windsor accent.
“What do you mean?”
“I never would have thought human engineers would be able to build a tach-drive that worked beyond the asymptotic barrier.”
Admiral Hussein just stared at the creature in its glass globe.
“I apologize, was I unclear?”
“No, go on, please.”
“Even the highest acolytes of our universities within Paralia have failed in designing a stable generator that could manipulate a field complex enough to move the asymptotic barrier. In theory it was always possible, but the dimensions involved increase with the cube of the distance, so solving the equations for a three-dimensional reference frame—”
“Bill?”
“Yes, Admiral? Do I need to explain something?”
“Just tell me how you know the capabilities of this ship?”
“Simple observation; the data provided when the Eclipse’s own drive failed provided enough data to describe a boundary model of your drive capability. The mass/drive ratios visible on this ship speak to an unorthodox sixfold redundancy or a new drive design. Mosasa implied that his expedition would be the impetus driving the Caliphate outward, meaning you left after us, yet arrived before us, despite the necessity of supplying and outfitting a vessel this large for a hundred-light-year journey.”
“I see.” Admiral Hussein turned away from the Paralian and looked out the grate and toward the stars. The planet they were here for was a small blue-white disk, brighter than the stars behind it.
He had known that these capabilities would be known as soon as they were used, but it was discomforting to realize that even the Paralian considered them extraordinary. He was not in the habit of questioning his government, but for several moments he wondered where the expertise had come from.
“What is it you see?” asked the Paralian. It took a moment for Admiral Hussein to realize that it was in response to the last thing he had said. He turned to face his massive guest and was about to explain the figure of speech when his suit’s comm called for his attention on the command channel. He switched the comm from the closed channel he shared with the Paralian and immediately heard Captain Rasheed’s voice.
“Admiral Hussein?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“We just detected an energy spike on the other side of the planet. We don’t have visual contact yet, but it’s consistent with the Sword’s tach-drive signature.”
“Are you sure?”
“It has to be an Ibrahim-class carrier. No other drives leave as large a footprint.”
Instead of an envoy, Bitar comes in person?
“I’m coming to the bridge.”
Admiral Hussein turned the comm back to the Paralian’s channel. “I have to go now,” he told it.
“Is there a problem?”
“No,” he lied.
Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
In less than an hour, Alexander had confirmation that the last of the militia aircraft was safely out of the red zone. He ordered the drone aircraft bearing the nuke to head for the target. In ten minutes, the low altitude airburst would vaporize everything at the impact site. On the security footage, the two offworlders still stood with Flynn.
“Mr. Shane,” one of the militia officers said shortly after he ordered the nuke into position.
“What?”
“We have developments in orbit. I’m putting the feed on holo one.”
The main display in front of Alexander shifted to show the schematic of the space around Salmagundi. It had changed since he had left the rest of the Grand Triad to their debate. When he’d left the meeting room, there had been a dozen unidentified spacecraft, one identified as the source of the lifeboats and of the offworlders standing in the security footage showing on holo five.
The red-highlighted spacecraft was no longer shown on the schematic. Now on the fringes of the image, Alexander saw thirty or forty blue icons pushing in from the edge. As he watched, three more appeared in range.
Closer in, in orbit above them, there were suddenly dozens of vessels.
“What the hell?”
“Our observatories are picking up dozens of spacecraft just now taking up positions in orbit.”
“How many?”
“At least sixty.”
Alexander settled back into his seat, staring at the screen. He had moved, but not quickly enough. He watched the icons maneuver in discreet jumps as observations were made and fed again into the model he was watching.
The militia officer spoke again, “We have sixty-three confirmed contacts. Sixty-five. Sixty-eight.”
“Stop counting,” Alexander whispered. Salmagundi had, maybe, a dozen craft capable of orbit. All dated from the original colonization. The Confederacy was about to descend upon them, and there was nothing they could do about it.
“Mr. Shane? We need confirmation to detonate the nuke.”
Alexander looked at the security monitor. Flynn and the offworlders were looking up.
“Mr. Shane, sir?”
Tetsami faced the newcomers and said, “Forgive me if I’m a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man’s land.
You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you’re doing a hundred light-years from what’s left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”
She looked from the tall woman to the taller moreau. Her own genes, at least the genes for the last body that had been exclusively her own, had come from Dakota. However, unlike the three-meter-tall furry tiger-man, just by looking, there was usually no way to tell someone from Dakota from a human whose genetic history didn’t include a couple of genetic engineers trying to “improve” something a few centuries ago. A century or two of mixing bloodlines and the more-or-less “normal” human morphology dominated.
One thing was clear, the presence of tiger-boy proved that this couple was as definitively from off-planet as their nameless Protean.
But from Dakota? What the hell was going on here?
It didn’t get better.
The woman, Kugara, did most of the talking. She told Tetsami and Flynn about their ship, the Eclipse, and the ill-fated expedition it made to Xi Virginis. The story uncomfortably synced with the Protean’s warnings, and Tetsami tightened the grip on her shotgun. Even more than when the nonhuman pair walked into the deserted outpost, she stared at them looking for some sign of infection, some wrongness, some symptom that these two had been touched by the same darkness that had consumed the Xi Virginis system.
Then Kugara mentioned his name.
Tetsami jumped backward, leveling the shotgun at the space between Kugara’s gut and Nickolai’s groin. “What was that name?” she yelled at them, finger aching against the cold metal of the shotgun’s trigger.
What the hell? Gram?
Shut up!
The tall woman backed up, stopping only when she bumped into the tiger. “Mosasa, Tjaele Mosasa.” Nickolai put his arm around her in a gesture that was almost protective.
“What the hell does that bastard have to do with this?” Tetsami screamed at them. The barrel of the shotgun shook, and she concentrated on steadying her aim.
What, you know this person?
Shut up!
It could just be someone with the same name . . .
“SHUT UP!” Kugara looked at her as if Tetsami had just lost her mind. I just said that out loud, fuck. “Mosasa,” Tetsami said. “Tjaele Mosasa.”
“Yes.”
“Bald, lots of earrings, dragon tattoo, looks like a pirate?”
“Yes.”
“Christ on the cross with his tap-dancing apostles!” Tetsami leveled the shotgun at Kugara’s head and yelled, “You work for that robotic bastard?”
Nickolai stepped in front of Kugara and it spooked Tetsami so much she almost shot him in the chest. “Yes,” Nickolai said. “We are members of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union, and we were hired by Mosasa. But Kugara wasn’t aware of what he was until I told her.”
“You know what that amoral Machiavellian machine actually is?”
“I did,” Nickolai said. “She didn’t.”
Tetsami raised the shotgun so it was centered on Nickolai’s face. The tiger didn’t even flinch.
Gram, what are you doing? She felt Flynn pushing to take control back, but she wouldn’t let go. “Then why shouldn’t I blow your head off for working for that thing?”
The tiger stared down the barrel of the shotgun and said, “If you wish to kill me, kill me.”
“Damn it,” Kugara’s voice came from behind the tiger as she tried to push past his arm. “Thanks to Nickolai here, that amoral Machiavellian machine is probably dead.”
The barrel lowered a fraction. “What?”
Kugara managed to step around the tiger’s bandaged arm. “This furry prick sabotaged the Eclipse. He’s the reason we were on a lifeboat landing on this godforsaken world.”
Tetsami lowered the shotgun and shook her head. She still couldn’t get her brain around the idea that Mosasa, of all things, had followed her nearly two hundred years and a hundred light-years from Bakunin. She had come out here, so far, just to get away from that thrice-damned planet.
But this was Mosasa they were talking about. It’s quite possible that she was trapped, again, in some long-term plot created by the AI to manipulate the universe into some form that was more to its liking. The pair here might be just as trapped in the AI’s web.
“Anomalies around Xi Virginis?” Tetsami whispered. “But damn vague about them, I bet.”
“You know Mosasa?” Kugara asked her. “Good lord, how?”
Yeah, Gram, how?
Tetsami laughed. “Mosasa’s why I’m here, why this colony’s here. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was why Xi Virginis disappeared.”
“What?” both said in unison.
“Short version,” Tetsami told them. “I came from that pit Bakunin. I escaped the shitstorm that pretty much collapsed the Terran Confederacy. A shitstorm your friend Mosasa largely took credit for.”
“He’s not our friend,” the tiger said. “He was our employer.”
“Mosasa took credit for the collapse of the Confederacy?” Kugara asked.
“Oh, come on,” Tetsami said. “You just said you knew what he was. Don’t you know what those Race AIs were designed for? The kind of social engineering they’re responsible for? It’s how the Race waged war.” She lowered the shotgun and gestured with her free hand, taking in the whole horizon. “This planet was on a Dolbrian star map buried under the Diderot Mountains on Bakunin. A star map that one of Mosasa’s AIs just happened to find while the old Confederacy was trying a military takeover of the planet. A star map that got handed over to the Seven Worlds and caused enough chaos in the Confederacy’s congress that the whole shebang started collapsing under its own weight.”
The two of them stared at her as if she wasn’t speaking the same language.
“It’s the Fifteen Worlds now,” Tetsami said. “Go thank Mosasa for that. And the Dolbrians.”
“How do you know all this,” Kugara asked. “This planet’s been out of contact since it was founded—”
“I’m older than I look,” Tetsami said. “About a hundred and seventy-five years older.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Destiny
Nothing is so destructive as what we believe to be true.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
—EDMUND Burke (1729-1797)
Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
Nickolai stared at the man with the shotgun and tried to understand what was happening. Something—Mosasa, fate, or divine will—was conspiring to draw these threads around them. If what this man said was true, Mosasa knew of these colonies long ago. He would have known when they had been founded.
All of this, everything that was happening, could be the result of a centuries-old AI attempting to manipulate events.
He admitted as much, Nickolai thought, remembering the dialogue between Mosasa and Wahid when the Eclipse had just gotten underway.
“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.”
“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.”
At the time, Nickolai had been too preoccupied with his own ill-fated duty to Mr. Antonio to think deeply on the human politics involved. In retrospect, Mosasa h
ad offhandedly taken credit for possibly starting a war.
It also raised the question of exactly what Mr. Antonio was trying to accomplish. At first, it was simply an internecine battle between the Fallen. Even when Mr. Antonio told him of Mosasa’s artificial nature, Nickolai never thought of the implications.
Mosasa was designed to anticipate, to see the forces of society arrayed around him. See them and manipulate them. He maneuvered the Caliphate into moving entire fleets . . .
How did he not anticipate what Nickolai did? How did he not know until Nickolai made his testament to the human priest? How did he not know about Mr. Antonio or his employers?
Who was Mr. Antonio?
Nicolai forced himself to pay attention to more immediate concerns, like the man with the gun. Fortunately, he had lowered the weapon. The way the man talked, Nickolai wondered if it was because he finally trusted they weren’t a threat, or because he was overcome with some sort of contagious fatalism.
The man talked of the founding of this colony, named Salmagundi, by refugees from a war on Bakunin 175 years ago. The colonists came from destroyed communes and bankrupt corporations and planets in upheaval during the Confederacy’s long, slow collapse. Apparently, they were talking to one of the founders of that exodus, a woman named Kari Tetsami, who should be over a century dead. The man in front of them was also a man named Flynn Jorgenson, who was born on this planet.
He explained the Hall of Minds.
The concept was beyond appalling. It left Nickolai shaken and numb. To strip someone’s mind? On some level it was worse than constructing an AI. Not only was it the arrogance of imitating life, it was imitating a specific life. And to accept that heretical copy into yourself—it was a sin so intimate and profound that Nickolai had trouble conceiving it.
The priests see the world of Men as Hell only because they haven’t come here.
Kugara asked what was going on here, with the scars of battle, the abandoned structures, and the crystal edifice in front of them.
Nickolai had thought the revelations could not become worse. Then he heard the man who was a 175-year-old woman answer Kugara.
Prophets Page 32
