Date:
2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Vijayanagara
Parvi flew Mosasa’s Scimitar fighter over the desert north of
Proudhon. The fighter was a stealth design with an EM profile an order
of magnitude smaller than her contragrav bike, despite having thirty
times the mass and a thousand times the power plant. The black delta
shape slid through the atmosphere like a monocrys scalpel through
muscle.
She kept thinking
about Fitzpatrick’s questioning last night.
“Did
Mosasa tell you to recruit me?”
“Yes,
you poor bastard,” she whispered to the desert whipping by
the windscreen. “And he told me to order Wahid to take you to
Samhain.” The inhuman bastard not only thought moves ahead,
Parvi thought, but entire games ahead. It was barely an hour after
missiles had taken out his tach-ship and his hangar when Kugara and
Rajasthan dragged a bloody mercenary back to him. Mosasa
hadn’t even bothered to question the man. He had simply
ordered the guy to report back to his employers.
One of the things
Mosasa had the man report back was the coordinates of the secondary
rally site. The one she had sent Fitzpatrick and Wahid to. She had no
idea if Wahid or Fitzpatrick would survive to see her arrive. Though
she suspected that Mosasa would know.
The navigation
unit beeped at her, letting her know that Samhain was just coming over
the horizon. The forward LOS sensors started retrieving data,
overlaying it on her heads-up display and several secondary monitors.
Out the window, a green wire-frame holo mapped onto her view, picking
out the spot on the horizon that marked the abandoned commune.
Within two
seconds, the green blossomed outward, separating into multiple dots
marking the man-made structures in and around the abandoned village.
The dots grew into boxy forms outlining walls, roofs, doors, and
windows that would have otherwise been invisible at this speed and
distance.
Just as the holo
display resolved enough detail to pick out individual openings on the
buildings still over a dozen klicks away, her heads-up peppered the
whole village with red dots.
Samhain
wasn’t abandoned today.
Parvi flipped a
switch to allow the ship to use active sensors. She was two seconds
from contact. The hostiles wouldn’t have time to react if
they detected her spying on them, and after contact, they’d
know she was here anyway.
In response, all
the secondary screens began scrolling with an extraordinary level of
detail, most of which would only be of use in an after-action analysis.
The important thing for Parvi were the icons that suddenly overlaid the
red dots. These red dots wore powered armor, these red dots had highly
charged energy weapons, these red dots were contragrav vehicles, and
these red dots, moving across a clearing on the west side of the
village, matched biometric data for Fitzpatrick and Wahid.
Half a dozen
hostiles in powered armor hid inside the building those last two dots
were moving toward. Parvi sent a missile through one of its windows.
She had just enough time in the first pass to send another missile into
the building housing one of the contragravs. She pulled the fighter up,
just ahead of the shock wave from the first explosion.
Mallory was a good
fifty meters away from the building when its walls evaporated in a roll
of ink-black smoke and bloodred flame. The shock wave knocked him
backward and he felt something tear into his leg and his left shoulder.
As he fell into
the burning black sand blanketing the courtyard, he mentally chanted
the rosary as his implants kicked in. The pain from the shrapnel in his
shoulder and his leg faded in his awareness, and he became calmer than
anyone in his situation had a right to be. His sense of time telescoped
as he rolled around onto his stomach to face the remnants of the
building.
Behind the smoke
and fire, fifty meters away, another explosion erupted on the other
side of the village. Above the new rolling smoke cloud, something flew
by at hypersonic speeds, a rocket-fast heat-shimmer slicing the bloody
sky in two. It shot past, turning up toward the sky as the shock wave
from the second explosion and the sonic blast of the aircraft blowing
through the atmosphere slammed into Mallory simultaneously.
In the split
second that he took in the presence of the aircraft, the commune of
Samhain had ceased being empty. Soldiers were suddenly everywhere. He
could see the distortion caused by several active camo projectors by
one of the Tudor houses deeper in the village. Closer, by the
smoke-shrouded crater that used to be the building in front of him, he
saw silhouettes of soldiers in powered armor trying to pull themselves
out of the wreckage. They stood out clear as day and moved with halting
jerks showing their suits’ power was failing or completely
fried.
The only cover
immediately available was by the Trinity statue, a bowl-like depression
that might have once been a fountain. He ran crouched to lower his
cross section and dived in. The impact ignited pain in his shoulder and
leg that blasted through into his awareness despite the best efforts of
his implants.
He braced himself
by the lip of the bowl, holding the gamma laser in a shuddering grip.
He risked a peek back at the soldiers by the wreckage. By
God’s grace, and air support, the soldiers weren’t
paying attention to him.
He saw the fading
afterimage of a heavy plasma weapon sending a pulse upward, toward the
aircraft, which had looped above the village and was diving down toward
them. The pulse was a futile discharge. Even if it unloaded all its
power in one burst, forming a microscopic sun that could vaporize a
large portion of the attacking craft, it was still akin to throwing a
sponge at a bullet.
He looked around,
trying to pinpoint where Wahid was. He couldn’t see any sign
of him. Around him, the village was lit by flashes of other weapons
discharging, and two actual missiles shot up toward the blur diving
down toward the village. The missiles hit some sort of countermeasure,
blowing up short of the target as the blurred craft broke its dive to
shoot over Mallory. Four contrails split off to continue the descent in
its wake.
He dove for the
lowest part of the bowl as the sonic boom hit. Mallory covered his head
as the thunderously low passage of the aircraft blew sand over him.
Then four
explosions tore through Samhain, shaking the ground and burning the
back of his neck and his hands with their heat. Something that felt
like burning gravel pelted him a second later.
The explosions
still echoed off the mountains as he shook off the debris that covered
his back. Ears ringing, he rolled to the side.
Facing him, less
than a meter away, Mallory saw a helmet with a cracked and blackened
faceplate. It rested on its side, blown free of whomever it was
attached to. The neck was angled away from Mallory, so he
couldn’t tell if a head was still inside.
“Wahid!
What’s your status?” he yelled out. His
own voice seemed far away and muffled under the ringing.
Wahid’s
voice was even farther away. “I’m
fine!”
Mallory turned
away from the helmet and pulled himself up to the edge of the bowl so
he could look out at the village.
God have
mercy . . .
The half of the
buildings that still stood, burned. Even the dead trees were on fire.
The sky had turned gray-black with smoke, and ash fell like damned
snow. On the ground, bits of armor and burned human remains mixed with
broken wood and stone. Within the wreckage of the town before him, the
only movement he saw came from the licking of flames.
The Maiden statue
had been blown into several fragments, and her two sisters had fallen
over into a two-meter pile of debris. Despite his leg’s
protests, he ran for the pile of broken statuary which offered at least
the illusion of cover. He fell against the Crone’s breast and
braced his gamma laser against the Mother’s broken left thigh.
He peered over the
mound of debris, looking down what had once been the main street of
Samhain. The town was fogged by smoke, and a massive fifteen-meter
crater, flanked by burning buildings, dominated Main Street. He saw
several intact suits of armor scattered on the ground, but none moved.
The heat from the
fires burned Mallory’s cheeks, and it now seemed that every
single structure in the village was completely engulfed.
As long as these
buildings had been drying out in the desert air, this whole place was a
tinderbox. If there was anyone alive in the town proper, they had other
concerns right now. A powered suit might isolate someone from the
flames, but the onboard life support could only moderate the
temperature for so long.
Mallory slid down
to the ground at the base of the rubble.
Back across the
courtyard, he saw Wahid in a similar position at the base of a
half-blasted statue. Smoldering debris covered the sand between them.
He waved, and Wahid waved back, apparently unhurt.
Mallory looked
down at his leg. An ugly black length of metal, about as thick as his
little finger, stuck out of his thigh about fifteen centimeters or so.
Mallory winced as he thought of how his movements must have jammed the
shrapnel even deeper.
The implants gave
their host an edge, but came with a pretty big downside. Pain might be
inconvenient in combat, but it had a purpose. He put a shaking hand on
the wound to keep pressure on it. He wasn’t going to pull the
shrapnel out until he had a medkit handy to deal with any torn blood
vessels.
He felt pressure
in his left shoulder, and looked down to see blood drenching his sleeve
from his shoulder down. Not good.
He set down the
laser to move his right hand to put pressure on that injury. Nothing
stuck out of it, and the hole was relatively small, but the amount of
blood and his light-headedness made him think that the wound might have
clipped an artery.
In a strangely
detached way he thought, I’m going into shock.
The world around
him was silent except for the distant crackle of flames he barely heard
over the ringing in his ears. Above him, the sky churned, a swirling
cauldron of smoke, ash, and embers.
He wondered what
had happened to the aircraft.
He blinked and saw
Wahid standing over him. After a moment of disorientation Mallory
realized he was flat on his back. I must have blacked out.
Wahid cut away the fabric of his shirt, exposing Mallory’s
shoulder. He said something, but Mallory couldn’t understand
him.
Wahid took a
canister and sprayed a bandage on Mallory’s shoulder. The
bandage wrapped his skin in a tight frigid embrace as it compressed the
wound and sealed it against blood loss. Mallory felt him inject
something in his arm, and he closed his eyes again.
Parvi flew the
fighter around the perimeter of the smoldering remains of Samhain,
watching her sensors for any potential backup for the hostiles. But no
new contacts appeared on any of her screens, and as she orbited the
burning commune, the contacts she had already acquired slowly began
graying out.
Poor
bastards, she thought. The two squads that had died down
there were almost certainly fellow mercs. It was possible that she
could have recruited them herself.
When she was
certain the area was secured, she sent an encrypted burst message to
Mosasa and slowed the fighter to come in for a landing near the two
remaining live contacts.
The fighter slowed
until it was stationary, hovering above the smoke on neutral buoyancy
contragrav. She lowered the power to the contragrav, and the ship began
slowly sinking through the smoke.
It settled softly
on its landing gear about a hundred meters from Wahid and Fitzpatrick.
They were together in the one clearing free of burning wreckage, but
she could see they hadn’t escaped unscathed. Fitzpatrick lay
on his back, Wahid bent over him, the contents of an emergency medkit
scattered around them.
“Damn,”
she muttered through clenched teeth. She didn’t know if she
was more pissed at herself or at Mosasa.
She popped the
canopy as the fighter powered itself down. When she jumped down into
the sand, Wahid had turned toward her. He leveled a gamma laser at her.
“You?”
he sputtered.
“Is
Fitzpatrick all right?”
“What
the fuck were you and Mosasa doing?” he yelled across at her.
“Is he
all right?”
“Yeah, a
building exploded in his face. He’s fucking
wonderful!”
“There
was a squad of—”
“You
think I’m blind?” Wahid kicked something in the
sand at his feet. A half-melted gauntlet arced toward her, landing
palm-up between them. A blackened splinter of bone still poked from the
wrist. “I saw a whole fucking army waiting for us. I want to
know why the fuck they were here, and why the fuck your AI-loving boss
decided it was such a fucking great idea to send us here.”
Parvi
didn’t know what to do to defuse the situation. She tried to
change the subject. “How’s he injured?”
“Just a
little shrapnel from some friendly fire.” Wahid started
walking toward her, the laser aimed squarely at her midsection.
“Good old Fitz had you all figured out, too.”
“What do
you mean?”
“The
shits that you blew to hell. They knew the hangar, they took it out,
right?”
“Yes.”
“Why the
fuck weren’t we in it when they blew it up?” He
shook his head. “Hell, why the fuck didn’t a sniper
with a missile take out the aircar when I drove all so trusting into
Mosasa’s little rendezvous?”
“I
don’t know.”
“You
think your boss does?”
“I—”
Parvi’s
answer was cut off by a subsonic rumble. Above them, the smoke swirled
into a vortex centered above the open desert beyond Parvi’s
fighter. The tendrils of smoke twisted and parted, revealing a massive,
blocky form that was still slowing to a stop on the strength of massive
maneuvering jets. The aircraft’s nose was blunt, narrow, and
sloped backward to mold into a hundred-meter-long wingless body that
managed to look stubby despite its size. The skin of the craft was a
patchwork of random paints, patches, and sealant in various shades of
gray and brown. It was ugly as hell, and looked nothing like the sleek
tach-ship Mosasa had parked in the hangar for the benefit of his new
employees.
Wahid stared at
the descending cargo ship and seemed to have some trouble deciding
where to point the laser.
Inside, Parvi
sighed a little in relief. “Why don’t you put the
laser down and help move Fitzpatrick.”
“What is
that?”
“That’s
our ship,” Parvi said.
The barrel of the
laser pointed down, toward the sand. “But what
about—”
Parvi walked past
him, toward Fitzpatrick. “Save the questions for Mosasa. I
just work here.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Exodus
Individuals
have free will. Societies do not.
—The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
Knowledge is
more than equivalent to force.
—SAMUEL
Johnson (1709-1784)
Date:
2525.11.22 (Standard) Bakunin Orbit-BD+50°1725
Mallory woke up
from a nightmare. The memory of it faded nearly instantaneously,
leaving him with a vague impression of Junta loyalists and a burning
church. He opened his eyes and saw a bulkhead curving over him. He felt
the vibration of engines running somewhere.
“You
awake now, Fitz?”
“Uh,”
Mallory pushed himself up from the thin mattress he’d been
sleeping on. He rose too fast and almost tumbled out of the bunk before
he realized he was in low gravity. His stomach did slow rolls as he
looked up and saw the small chrome pipes set in the ceiling. Not
gravity . . .
There were three
methods to get some form of “gravity” on a space
vessel, none of which were gravity per se. The first, and the most
natural feeling, was constant acceleration. Next best was rotating a
large container and placing the floor on the outer surface.
Neither worked
well when designing a ship to enter an atmosphere.
The last method
was perhaps the most nausea-inducing. Contragrav drives had been around
a while, relying on a repulsive force inherent in some exotic forms of
matter. It wasn’t true antigravity, any more than a vectored
thrust aircraft, but a kilogram of contramatter would repulse normal
matter with a force several orders of magnitude greater than gravity.
It had been used as lift for aircraft for centuries. Somewhere along
the line, someone realized if they channeled dense plasma from a
ship’s contragrav drive though manifolds in the ceiling, it
could provide a nearly-even downward force through any part of the ship
you wanted. And, since the main power requirement of the contragrav
drive was creating the exotic matter in the first place, it was
actually less expensive than constant acceleration and cost less
design-wise than rotating large chunks of the ship.
But it
didn’t feel normal.
Wahid had been
bending over him, a small hypo in one hand. Wahid stepped back as far
as the small cabin would allow, and Mallory realized that his left
bicep was stinging. He rubbed his arm and looked at Wahid.
“What did you inject me with?”
Wahid looked a
little sheepish. “A little stimulant. You’ve been
out for a few hours.”
Mallory nodded.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” he looked
around the tiny ship’s cabin.
“Yeah.”
Wahid responded to Mallory’s curious looks. “Mosasa
showed up finally, lucky us.”
“The
fighter?”
“That
was Parvi.”
“His own
air force?”
“You
haven’t been on Bakunin long, have you?”
Mallory shook his
head.
Wahid laughed,
“Well, welcome to Bakunin, where any mother’s son
can grow up to run as large a tin-pot army as he can afford. And Mosasa
can afford quite a bit.”
“He can
afford more than us,” Mallory said.
“Yes, I
can.”
Mallory turned to
see Mosasa standing in the doorway to the cabin. He wore a gray
jumpsuit, and the ship’s lighting seemed to give the scales
on his tattooed dragon an unhealthy green shimmer. He looked at
Mallory, then at Wahid. “I can afford to pay well. But I only
pay for what is absolutely necessary.”
Mallory stood to
confront his employer, but he couldn’t do much more than
crouch on his feet with Wahid already standing in the cabin.
“Was it necessary to send us to that ambush?”
“Yes, it
was, Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick.”
Mallory froze,
wondering if he had misheard the emphasis on his alias. He wondered if
Wahid heard the same thing that he had . . .
If he had, Wahid
didn’t show it. “We deserve an
explanation.”
“Perhaps,”
Mosasa said. “For now, come forward to the cargo hold, so you
can meet the other members of the expedition.”
Given recent
experience, Mallory had been expecting more mercenaries. Instead,
waiting for them in the brightly lit cargo hold along with Nickolai,
Kugara, and Parvi, was a five-member scientific team. Four of the five
wore the same kind of gray jumpsuit Mosasa wore and were seated with
Mallory’s three fellow mercenaries in a semicircle facing a
small dais.
“Please
sit,” Mosasa told them, and Mallory and Wahid took the two
open seats.
Mosasa stood next
to the dais and introduced the new members of the expedition.
Dr. Samson Brody
was a hefty black man with a bushy gray beard and a deeply lined face;
Mosasa introduced him as a cultural anthropologist. He easily looked
the oldest of the group. The youngest-looking of the team was the
linguist, Dr. Leon Pak.
More problematic
was the xenobiologist, Dr. Sharon Dörner. She was tall,
blonde, and came from Acheron. Like Occisis, Acheron was a core planet
of the Centauri Alliance. Given the interrelationship between
xenobiology and xenoarchaeology, and the focused nature of both fields,
the Jesuit xenoarchaeology professor, Father Francis Xavier Mallory,
knew of her. Worse, he had met her, twice.
Dr.
Dörner had given guest lectures several times at St. Marbury
University, and Mallory had attended all of them. Once he had spent
twenty minutes talking about the nature of the Dolbrians with her at a
reception afterward, and five years ago he actually had the honor of
introducing her.
It took every
scrap of will Mallory had not to let the panic show in his face.
Fortunately, Dr. Dörner showed no sign of recognizing him.
There was little reason she should. Professionally, she would have met
hundreds of people like Father Mallory: teachers, students, fellow
scientists. There was no reason one professor should stand out in her
memory.
Mosasa continued
with introductions, apparently oblivious to Mallory’s sudden
discomfort.
The last human of
the group, the data analyst, didn’t have the titular
“Doctor” before her name. She was a thin reed of a
redhead named Rebecca Tsoravitch.
“Our
last team member is a physicist and a mathematician. Since his given
name is unpronounceable to a human palate,” Mosasa said,
“he has adopted the human name Bill.”
Mallory had
studied for six years at both seminary and the university after his
retirement from the Marines. He had studied about the few alien races
that human beings had come across in their travels to the stars. Of
them all, the Paralians were the most important and influential,
especially to anyone residing in the Centauri arm of human space.
The Paralians had
been discovered back in the dark ages of the Terran Council. Travel to
the stars had been a brutish business, a dangerous one-way affair
through manufactured wormholes. When the Paralians had been discovered,
the various human colonies had just begun to stabilize and trading
among themselves. When the Centauri Trading Company had opened a
wormhole above Paralia, they hadn’t only found an
ocean-covered planet with a tolerable atmosphere, they had found
natives.
Natives who,
despite being planet-bound and unable to survive at a depth less than
ten meters of their oceans’ surface, had developed
mathematics beyond human comprehension. Within a few short years of
first contact, discussions between human scientists and Paralian
mathematicians discovered that the Paralians could model the universe
in near-miraculous ways; models that led directly to the development of
the tach-drive, which led in turn to the disintegration of the Terran
Council and the rise of its successor, the Confederacy.
Despite having
studied them, Bill was the first Paralian Mallory had ever seen in
person. Until now, he’d never known any to have ever left the
depths of the oceans on their homeworld.
Bill dominated the
team, not just in terms of novelty, but in sheer bulk. Not only was his
body itself half again the size and mass of Nickolai’s, he
also resided within a transparent sphere five meters in diameter
containing water under the extreme pressures that existed at
Bill’s native depth. The sphere was mounted on a mechanical
cradle that rested on six robotic limbs that added nearly another meter
to the height of the whole apparatus.
Within the sphere,
Bill floated. Mallory had heard Paralians described as squid-dolphins,
but that was really only a halfhearted approximation of a description.
The front of Bill’s body resembled a dolphin in the same way
and for the same reason that a dolphin resembled a shark, or a
submarine.
Like a dolphin, or
a submarine, he had a nose; the terminal end of a muscular
bullet-shaped body that narrowed to a blunt point at the
top—or the front, depending on how Bill was oriented. The
muscles on his body defined three lobes that were symmetrical around
Bill’s long axis, a subtle bump that was emphasized by
mottled cobalt blue stripes that followed the length of
Bill’s body, darkening the farther they traveled from his
“nose.”
Each bump
supported a complex fin that was nearly a meter long and half that
wide. Above, or in front, of the fin, each lobe supported a trio of
black pits near Bill’s nose, each about the size of
Mallory’s fist.
The
“squid” part of the typical description was even
further removed from actuality. Bill’s body did end in
appendages that could be called tentacles, but probably had more in
common with an elephant’s trunk. Three muscular limbs emerged
seamlessly out of the lobes of Bill’s body, mottled blue,
continuing the striping of his body.
Each limb split
into three long fingers about a third of the way down its length. The
“fingers” were boneless and flexible, and could
deform their shape. If Bill needed to propel himself in the open ocean,
he could hold his trio of limbs together and flatten those
“fingers” to form a tail fin that would be even
more reminiscent of a dolphin.
Mosasa continued
introducing the mercenaries for the benefit of the scientific team.
Mallory kept his attention on Dörner, wondering if she was the
reason that Mosasa placed such an emphasis on Fitzpatrick’s
alias. If she knew who he was, though, she didn’t give any
visible sign. She gave Fitzpatrick’s introduction no more
attention that she’d given the rest of the mercenaries.
As Mosasa went on,
Mallory noticed that only Parvi was given the benefit of a title,
“Captain,” formalizing a chain of command that was
already apparent. Also, from Mosasa’s introductions,
Fitzpatrick and Nickolai were the only members of the military half of
the team that didn’t have set roles on the ship itself. Parvi
was the pilot, Wahid was the copilot and navigator, Kugara was comm,
countermeasures, and Information Warfare.
With Nickolai,
Mallory shared the somewhat generic role of
“security,” which meant little in-flight, unless
they were boarded or the members of science team were a lot more rowdy
than they looked.
“Welcome
aboard the Eclipse,” Mosasa addressed
them. He gestured toward the dais where a holo display appeared showing
a blunt-nosed brick of a cargo ship, taller than it was wide. Mosasa
noticed Mallory’s surprise and said, “As Mr.
Fitzpatrick pointed out to me earlier, some explanations are in order.
As we are en route to our tach-point, it seems a good time to provide
some.”
“Like
why the fuck the secondary rendezvous point became a free-fire
zone?” Wahid muttered.
Mosasa pretended
not to hear Wahid and gestured to the holo display, which was now
replaying footage of a familiar-looking hangar. The light-enhanced view
showed a tach-ship of considerably more recent vintage than the Eclipse
taxiing out to the landing pad outside the doors. “This was
the Vanguard , a ship that the military among you
should remember. It was the latest design, up to date on all
surveillance countermeasures, and housed a tach-drive that was easily
the most advanced Paralian design available.”
Mosasa’s
use of the past tense was just sinking in when two bright streaks cut
across the holo display. One streak entered the open door of the
hangar; the second buried itself in the Vanguard
amidships, directly in front of the drive section. The display whited
out for a fraction of a second while the camera adjusted itself to more
visible frequencies. When the scene was comprehensible again, the
hangar glowed from an internal conflagration, and the Vanguard
itself was little more than a skeletal framework holding in its own
burning remains.
“The Vanguard
served its purpose.”
The cold way
Mosasa said it made Mallory more aware than ever that he faced
something that was only an approximation of a human being.
Mosasa continued.
“Elements within the Caliphate would have presented an
obstacle in assembling this mission. To limit the exposure of the
scientific team, and the readying of the Eclipse,
it was prudent to provide them with somewhat more visible
targets.”
“You
hired us as fucking decoys?” Wahid didn’t mutter
this time.
“Only
one role among several. We are about to depart known territory, and I
expect that we will need your skills in a more conventional manner as
the mission progresses.”
The holo had
shifted to an orbital view of Samhain, the village was intact, and
Mallory could see Wahid’s aircar approaching the site.
Mallory looked
back at the others, trying to gauge their reactions. He had no clue as
to what Nickolai and Bill might be thinking. Kugara and Parvi
weren’t showing anything overtly, but he noticed Parvi was
not looking directly at the holo where the Vanguard
burned. He wondered if she had thought of that as her ship, and if
Mosasa had clued her in to his misdirection.
The human members
of the science team were a little less reserved. Both the linguist, Dr.
Pak, and the data analyst Tsoravitch appeared visibly shocked at the
display. The older pair, Dörner and Brody, were less visibly
upset, but Dörner was slowly shaking her head.
“We have
a significant measure of how seriously the Caliphate is taking our
expedition.” On the holo, buildings began to explode.
“Was
this kind of violence necessary?” Dr. Dörner
addressed Mosasa.
“Pardon
me, Doctor?” Wahid said, whipping around to face the blonde
xenobiologist. “You might not notice from this angle, but
it’s our asses in the sand out there, facing a squad of
powered armor.”
She gave Wahid a
cold, dismissive look. It was a look Mallory knew well. He had seen it
often enough back on Occisis, usually from colleagues in the Church or
the university, right after they discovered he had once served in the
Occisis Marines. He tried to remember if, in her meetings with
Professor Mallory, she had discovered his military background. He
suspected that, if it had come out, he would have remembered her
reaction.
Her words to Wahid
were as icy as Mosasa’s were detached. “I was
questioning the fact that staging such a confrontation was necessary. I
would think, since it was ‘your asses in the sand out
there,’ that you’d wonder that as well.”
Mosasa said,
“It was quite necessary.”
“Why?”
Dörner asked sharply.
The cargo hold of
the Eclipse was quiet, everyone waiting for Mosasa
to speak. The only sounds the nearly subliminal hum of the drives, a
soft electronic clicking from Bill’s massive life-support
apparatus, and the quiet jingle of Mosasa’s earrings as he
paced in front of his display. Behind him, on the holo, the abandoned
commune of Samhain silently burned.
“All of
you have your own reasons for joining this expedition. And, up to now
I’ve been somewhat reserved about revealing its purpose,
though I have told you about ‘anomalies’
originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis. I should explain to you
all exactly what these ‘anomalies’ might
represent.”
The holo changed
again, and Mallory saw a star map of a familiar region of human space.
He wasn’t particularly surprised to see stars highlighted
much as they had been in the holo that Cardinal Anderson had shown him.
“The
Race developed social, economic, and political models that map flows of
information, political power, trade, people—all the factors
that comprise what we define as a society or a culture. The best
analogy for a layman would be to picture modeling a turbulent flow of a
fluid in an N-dimensional space.”
Mallory heard
Wahid whisper, “That’s a layman’s
description?”
“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.”
Date:
2526.1.9 (Standard) Earth-Sol
The woman named
Ms. Columbia, who left the Saudi peninsula in a Pegasus V luxury
transport named
Lillium, currently
walked
across
the ancient grounds of St. Peter’s Square in
Rome—in cosmic terms, only a few steps to the left from the
Eridani consulate.
Her relationship
with Cardinal Jacob Anderson was similar to her relationship with
Al-Hamadi, for similar reasons. Her information was too valuable for
such men to question her too closely.
Cardinal Anderson
walked next to her as they moved on the fringes of the crowd filling
the square. Unlike Al-Hamadi, he had not been expecting her arrival.
Like all of her actions, whatever body she wore, that detail was
carefully planned by Adam. Like most of Adam’s machinations,
the purpose for surprising Cardinal Anderson was murky to her, but as
she had said, she had faith in him.
“This is
alarming, to say the least,” the cardinal said, looking at
the cyberplas display in his hand. Unlike the data that greeted
Al-Hamadi, the information that greeted Cardinal Anderson was
predominantly engineering data and specifications, telemetry data, and
a few video feeds recorded from orbital construction platforms.
Not much else
needed to be added. The details of an Ibrahim-class carrier betrayed
their own significance without need of much analysis.
“My
employer knew it would be of interest to you.”
“Your
employer is a master of understatement.” The cardinal shook
his head. “If these specs are accurate, this has just
rendered a decade of strategic planning completely worthless. No one
has ever suspected the Caliphate had this kind of technology. How close
to operational is this?”
“At
least one will be operational within two months, four in less than
three months, all six should be completed within eight
months.”
The cardinal shook
his head. “Even if we take into account training a crew to
operate these monsters, they’ll effectively double the size
of their fleet in six months.”
Ms. Columbia knew
that the cardinal’s worries extended beyond the size of the
fleet. Numbers mattered much less at this point than range. One look at
the size of the Ibrahim’s tach-drives would be enough to
shake even the pope’s faith.
The cardinal shook
his head. “And given the latest information from Bakunin,
they’re going to have no incentive to move
cautiously.” He stopped and faced her.
“You’ll receive your usual payment. However, if
you’ll forgive me, I need to act on this
information.”
The cardinal
turned to leave her, walking back toward the Apostolic Palace in a
stride just short of a run. She watched him until she lost sight of him
in the crowd. Then she smiled.
Adam would be
pleased.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Purgatory
Remove the
fear of death and you remove the primary constraint on human action.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
History is
nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.
—KARL
MARX (1818-1883)
Date:
2526.03.23 (Standard) 39.7 ly from Xi Virginis
Each jump the
Eclipse
made ate up 20 light-years and 684 hours from the universe outside the
ship. They were between jumps four and five, now closer to
Mosasa’s mysterious lost colonies than they were to the rest
of human space, and the tiny slice of it Kugara called home. They hung
in interstellar space eighty light-years from Bakunin.
“I got
something,” Kugara said as the display before her showed a
multicolor spike that was stark against the universal background
radiation.
“Feed it
to my station,” Tsoravitch told her. “I got a
console free.”
The redheaded data
analyst sat at the secondary comm station at the bridge, and facing her
were nearly twenty virtual displays hanging in the air. All showed
captured transmissions in various stages of filtering. The two of them
spent the downtime between jumps doing what amounted to electromagnetic
archaeology. They aimed the ship’s sensors at the cluster of
stars around Xi Virginis looking for stray EM signals that they might
be able to decipher.
Unfortunately,
since none of the signals they picked up were intended to broadcast
over interstellar distances, it was not an easy process. Picking up
tach-transmissions would be easier for analysis, but actively scanning
for them required nearly as much energy as transmitting them, and that
kind of power was only really available for a planet-based system.
So they grabbed
fragmentary forty-year-old data from a cluster of half a dozen
systems—it was close to miraculous that they were able to
filter anything intelligible at all—and over two thirds of it
consisted of raw digital packets that were meaningless without context.
Somehow, though, Tsoravitch was able to occasionally pull snippets of
text, audio, and video. She had a knack for correctly guessing what
kind of data was encoded in something just by looking at the raw stream.
Kugara was stuck
with the much more boring job of looking for artificial signals in the
broad spectrum of EM radiation the
Eclipse
could
pick up.
One of her
displays flashed at her, and Tsoravitch shook her head. “I
just sent him the last dozen signals I was able to
filter—”
“Mosasa’s
not very patient.”
“I
suppose not,” Tsoravitch shook her head, “But if
he’s not even waiting for my analysis, then . . .”
She stabbed a few controls, and the various displays in front of her
winked out.
Kugara leaned back
in her chair and turned to look at her. “Then what?”
“I was
expecting something different.” Tsoravitch looked down at the
control panel.
“From
Mosasa?” Kugara asked, trying to keep the incredulous tone
out of her voice.
“I think
I need a break,” Tsoravitch said, standing up.
“We’ll be making the next jump in an hour
anyway.”
Kugara watched her
go and wondered why she seemed so disappointed.
What
did she
want out of Mosasa? She fingered the bio-interface at the
base of her skull and wondered. Even though her own ancestors had been
the result of someone exploiting heretical technologies, she felt
uneasy around Mosasa. Maybe it gave her a level of perspective that
Tsoravitch didn’t have, but Kugara couldn’t help
thinking that the woman had wanted to work with an
AI.
Mosasa sat in his
cabin, staring at nothing. Only a fraction of his attention was spared
for the data around his immediate physical surroundings. The signals
from the maintenance robots scuttling across the skin of the
Eclipse
were higher priority. The small six-legged hemispheres crawled across
the skin of the ship, checking seams and the integrity of the hull.
Other robots crawled inside the tach-drives, insuring every mechanical
system was performing optimally.
The robots, even
with the bans on true AI, were largely autonomous within their limited
sphere; Mosasa only had to override them occasionally. The task was
simple, repetitive, and took only a small fraction of his processing
capacity.
At the moment,
most of his attention was focused in bathing in the stream of data
Tsoravitch had sent him. It was spotty and incomplete, a trickling
stream rather than an ocean he could submerge his consciousness in. But
he
needed it. From
the Eclipse’s
reference frame, it had only been out of the immersive data stream he
lived in on Bakunin for a hundred and forty hours.
Already his entire
being ached with the need. It took a great measure of restraint for him
not to forgo all the maintenance checks and order the crew to the
bridge so they could make the next jump toward Xi Virginis
now.
The door to his
cabin signaled him unexpectedly.
He shifted his
awareness back to the physical world around him; at the same time he
grabbed onto the
Eclipse’s
security
network to look through the camera in the hall outside his cabin.
Outside his cabin
door stood the data analyst from Jokul, Rebecca Tsoravitch.
Oh,
yes, I did expect this . . .
He only wondered
briefly at his initial surprise. The same deeply ingrained software
that allowed him to perceive the movements of societies allowed him to
understand much smaller units. Given enough information, he could see
the dynamics of a group of a dozen as easily as a million.
He stood and faced
the door as it opened.
“Ms.
Tsoravitch?” he asked.
She frowned at
him. “Why am I here?”
“I
required the services of a data analyst—”
“Bullshit!”
“Pardon
me?”
“You’re
grabbing data from me with only a cursory filtering. I’m
barely looking at the data, much less processing it into anything
useful. My expertise here seems more than a little redundant.”
“I find
you useful.”
“Why?
Why did you ask me on this expedition?”
“Why did
you accept?”
She stood in the
doorway staring at him. Mosasa watched expressions play across her
face, allowing the flood of data about her internal state to wash over
him. He could extrapolate her inner thoughts as she asked herself the
same question. In some sense he knew her better than she knew herself,
even though his observations of her had been remote until this
expedition began.
Like all the
science team, she was a personality drawn by the exotic but had been
forced by circumstances into using her talents for things prosaic and
mundane. In Tsoravitch’s case, she had a job in the Jokul
government managing the software monitors that scrubbed the planetwide
data network searching for subversive transmissions. Like many stable
authoritarian regimes that managed to keep the populace fed and
clothed, the vast majority of their subversives weren’t
particularly interesting. Not to someone like Tsoravitch.
“I
thought I would be working
with
you.”
“Even
though you know what I am?”
“Because
I know what you are.”
“Do
you?”
“Do I
what?”
“Do you
know what I am?”
She looked him up
and down. “You’re a robotic construct camouflaging
an AI device, one that was designed by the Race during the Genocide
War.”
Very deliberately,
Mosasa said, “That is, of course, only part of the
answer.”
Of course,
Tsoravitch responded by asking, “Then what’s the
rest of the answer?”
He explained to
Tsoravitch that, three hundred years ago, Tjaele Mosasa had been a
human being.
He had lived
during the waning years of the Terran Council, before the Centauri
Trading Company discovered Bill’s homeworld of Paralia,
developed the first tach-drive, and upset the already crumbling balance
of the human universe.
At that time,
before there was such a thing as faster-than-light travel, the use of
static wormholes meant there existed a traffic bottleneck, highways
between the heavily guarded wormholes defined by gravity and orbital
mechanics.
The Mosasa clan
had been a large extended family that lived off the traffic moving on
those highways in the Sirius system. It was a rich place for pirates,
supporting a hundred clans like the Mosasas. Sirius sat in the heart of
human space and was a major transit point in humanity’s
wormhole network, having six outgoing wormholes and eight incoming.
Even though the dull rocks orbiting the Sirius system were never meant
to support life, the colony world Cynos was one of the richest planets
aside from Earth itself.
Tjaele Mosasa was
the youngest unmarried adult of the pirate clan, a third-generation
inhabitant of the lawless void between the wormhole and Cynos. While
his brothers and sisters would attack and board a prize, he made sure
their patchwork vessel the
Nomad
didn’t
fall apart. He spent the first six years of his adult life in a vacsuit
patching holes, rerouting power around fried connections, and repairing
the Frankenstein’s monster of a ship’s computer.
When the
Nomad
found a pair of derelicts off the main route to Cynos, that was where
he was, in a narrow unpressurized maintenance tunnel, in a vacsuit
making sure that the power system didn’t overheat. He was
annoyed that he wasn’t able to watch the approach with the
rest of his crew, his family. However, the Nomad
was a cranky old ship, older than Cynos itself, and someone had to make
sure they didn’t blow the thing up.
He was looking
forward to the prize, though. Most of their livelihood came from
raiding cargo tugs that rarely gave them anything with which to upgrade
the
Nomad. Food, fuel,
and trade goods
were well
and good, but a new ship’s computer was high on his own
priority list.
A derelict vessel
would be a godsend for maintaining this boat. He allowed himself to
daydream about finding a vessel in good enough condition that they
could retire the
Nomad.
He smiled at his
own unjustified optimism, and tapped the finger of his gauntlet on an
ancient meter. When he jostled the mechanism, the numbers slid back
from the impossible down to the merely improbable.
Just an
intact computer core—
His thoughts broke
off as the tunnel whipped around, slamming his faceplate into the meter
he had been reading. He floated away from the impact as fragments of
wires and electronics drifted in front of him. In his brief contacts
with the walls, his suit filled with the hideous noise of something
tearing the
Nomad apart.
The lights in the
tunnel went out.
For several
seconds after the impact, he couldn’t move. His vision was
confined to a narrow cone of the work lights in his helmet. The
emergency lights didn’t come on.
He knew something
bad had happened. He could see that in the debris drifting through the
light-cone in front of his face. He could see it in a cloud of vapor
that drifted in front of his faceplate, a mist of tiny white crystals.
Something was
venting into the corridor, under pressure. None of the possibilities
were good; fuel, hydraulic fluid, or—worst of
all—atmosphere from the pressurized part of the ship.
He grabbed a wall
and turned himself to point up the corridor, back toward the main body
of the
Nomad. Now that
the shock of the
impact
faded, he was preoccupied with one thought: were the crew
compartments intact? That thought overrode even the basic
question of what the hell happened.
He pulled himself
through the debris-filled corridor, the work light on his helmet
cutting silver cones out of the clouds of ice crystals that now filled
the corridor. The ice stuck to the outside of his faceplate, gradually
blurring his view until he had to wipe it off with one of his
gauntlets, leaving long streaks across his field of vision.
If the
emergency doors came down, they’ll be fine. If they
were all still on the bridge, there would at least fifteen minutes of
air even if the CO2 recyclers were off-line,
time enough to get the emergency vacsuits to them. That’d
keep everyone alive as long as he could keep the suits powered. Enough
time to patch the hull and get life support together.
That’s
what Mosasa told himself. That’s what gave him the strength
to keep pulling down the corridor, through the near-opaque fog of
venting atmosphere. He held on to the hope even when he reached the end
of the corridor, where the air lock should have been.
He pulled himself
though the wreckage of the air lock, still believing that there was a
chance that his family survived.
Then he was
through the confined space of the air lock and free of most of the
crystalline fog, and realized there was no hope at all.
Mosasa floated
above the floor of the
Nomad’s
cargo
hold. The bridge and the pressurized crew area should have been above
him.
They
weren’t.
The ceiling of the
cargo hold was a mass of twisted metal, torn cable, and hoses. Nothing
remained of form or function in the midst of the wreckage. Through the
rat’s nest of twisted girders, he could see the stars. No
sealed compartments where he might find his brothers and sisters,
aunts, uncles, or cousins. The inhabited portion of the
Nomad
no longer existed.
Mosasa, barely
breathing, lowered his gaze to the rest of the cargo hold to see
something that had survived the devastation; something that was not
part of the
Nomad.
The lights from
his helmet fell across something smooth and metallic embedded in the
twisted metal wreckage. At first it made no sense. He could only see it
in brief glimpses as his light shone on it through the twisted steel
that filled half the cargo hold.
The surface was
silvered and might have once had a mirror sheen, but it had been
scarred and pitted and heavily gouged by the wreckage surrounding it,
allowing glimpses of duller metal to show through the skin. Unlike the
Nomad
around it, the mirrored spacecraft—that was the only thing
Mosasa could assume it was—showed little visible structural
damage beyond the superficial tears in its skin.
He carefully
pulled himself through a maze of wreckage toward the thing, telling
himself he was pulling himself toward the bridge and any potential
survivors even as he knew he was lying to himself.
The mirrored craft
was thin and broad, like an arrowhead. And it had pierced the
Nomad
in the same manner. Mosasa saw no markings on the skin of the craft,
just oblong apertures that could have been maneuvering jets, sensors,
or weapon ports. The damn thing was also too small for an
interplanetary vehicle. Even a solo craft that barely gave the pilot
room to piss would carry more mass and volume just for life support.
The alien design, without markings, almost looked like an unmanned
torpedo.
When Mosasa
cleared the top of the wreckage, where the bridge should have been, he
floated in open space. Stunned as he was, survival training took over;
he connected one of his suit’s tethers to a firmly wedged
girder. Even a few cm/s velocity in the wrong direction could doom
someone in open space without them even being aware of it until it was
too late and they had drifted beyond reach of the ship. His suit had
small vector jets, but those took power, and he knew, as soon as the
unobscured stars revealed themselves above him and the
Nomad,
he was going to need every joule.
The space that had
been the
Nomad’s
bridge was now
dominated
by the drive section of the mirrored ship. Its engines had slagged, and
the metal/ceramic rear thrusters glowed in the darkness like a dying
star.
Around Mosasa,
shadows drifted in the blackness, eclipsing the stars. His light picked
out fragments of the
Nomad floating out
into space;
a computer console; a chair; a twisted nest of wires . . .
And bodies. He saw
bodies tumbling into the void. His family. Most were already too far
away for him to make out features, but his younger sister Naja was only
fifteen meters away, facing him as she drifted away from the
Nomad,
the only home she had ever known.
She was close
enough for him to see blood frozen, crusted on the gold rings in her
lips, nose, and ears. Close enough that his work light reflected dully
in her eyes. Her expression wasn’t of shock, or horror, but
of somewhat muted surprise. Mosasa lowered his head so that the light
left her face.
He thought briefly
of trying to retrieve the bodies. But there was no point. The Mosasa
clan buried their dead in space anyway. At least his family had a
living relative to speak for their souls as they returned to the dark.
He spent a long
time floating by the cooling drive section of the assassin spacecraft,
and said prayers for twenty-four men, women, and children. When he
finished, he looked up and noticed something else in the darkness
beyond the
Nomad. It eclipsed
stars but
was far
enough away that his helmet light didn’t illuminate it.
He had a stronger
lamp on his belt, and he had passed beyond caring about power
conservation. He was dead, and had been for an hour. Everything else
was delaying the inevitable.
He pulled the lamp
from his belt; it had a beam as wide as his fully spread hand, and
could pump out lumens an order of magnitude beyond his helmet work
lights. He shone it out in the direction of the shadow, and it seemed a
universe of floating debris flicked into existence. A spreading galaxy
of wreckage of objects ranging in size from tiny bolts and metal
shavings to a sphere encased in torn tubing about twenty meters across
that must have been wrenched from the drive section.
The distant shadow
was much bigger. He was able to pick it out with the lamp. Light
splashed its side, dappled with shadows from the
Nomad’s
wreckage. Distance was hard to judge, but it seemed it could be as far
as a klick away. And if that was the case, it was twice the size of the
Nomad.
To
Mosasa’s eye, the derelict craft was untouched.
The side was
painted and Mosasa could see the blue and white of the old United
Nations flag on the side. Beyond that, in three-meter-tall letters in a
half dozen languages, Mosasa saw the name of the ship.
Luxembourg.
And, after staring
a long time, Mosasa realized that the
Nomad
was
still drifting toward it.
The
Luxembourg
had been a ghost ship from the Genocide War. When the Nomad
drifted close enough, Mosasa jumped the gap with an umbilical to anchor
the two wrecks together. Even before he attached the cables, he could
see that the Luxembourg was largely intact. The
mirrored arrowhead that had buried itself into the Nomad
and had killed his family had been an old Race-built weapon, AI driven,
autonomous so none of the Race would actually be involved in a direct
confrontation.
For some reason,
it had been guarding the derelict.
When he entered
the
Luxembourg, he
discovered that the
attack that
had killed the old United Nations ship had been very careful to do very
little damage to the machine itself. Each hole in the skin managed to
avoid holing vital equipment and ended in a vacuum-desiccated crew
member. The Luxembourg had been neutralized in a
matter of moments. He even found one corpse strapped to the
ship’s toilet.
The backup battery
systems still had a charge, and the secondary life support still had an
oxy reserve in the tanks. None of the emergency systems had come
on-line. About all that was missing was a decent ship’s
computer.
It took weeks, but
Mosasa revived the late twenty-first-century ship. In that time he
discovered two things. The first was that the
Luxembourg
wasn’t strictly military. It had been run by the United
Nations Intelligence Service. The second thing he discovered was deep
in the belly of the ship, in the only armored compartment, flanked by
incendiary devices that the crew never got the chance to fire.
Four cylindrical
crystals; four Race-built artificial intelligence devices. The machines
were tied into the ship’s systems, and had gone cold and
dormant.
It was the first
time that Mosasa had realized that human beings had co-opted the same
heretical technologies the Race had used. Understanding that probably
made the next thing he did easier.
After days of
trying to revive them, he thought of the mirrored arrowhead that had
impaled the
Nomad. The Race
used
AI-piloted drones,
so the device onboard the weapon had been operational enough to pilot
the drone.
It was insane, and
went against every taboo against these devices, but Mosasa was a
pirate, alone, and close to the limit of his resources. If he was to
survive, he needed the
Luxembourg fully
functional.
He removed the brain from that weapon and wired it into the Luxembourg.
“I was
able to jumpstart those old AIs.” Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch
and said, “But three centuries is a long time, and
there’s only the one left. Me.”
Tsoravitch shook
her head, and Mosasa could tell the tale of his human origins had left
an impression. She seemed to stare past him as she asked,
“But you’re not him, you’re one of the
AIs.”
“I’m
both. Mosasa lived long enough to emigrate to Bakunin, shortly after we
recorded his identity. We needed a human consciousness to properly
interact with the human world. Those memories are as much mine as they
were the human Mosasa’s.”
“What
happened to the other AIs?”
“Two
were destroyed in the days before the Confederacy’s
collapse.”
“The
other two?”
“They
were lost when I tried to go home.”
“Home?”
Mosasa nodded.
“But we need to go back up to the bridge. We’re due
for the next jump.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Faith
of Our Fathers
Truth is not
monopolized by seniority.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
The memories
of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
—John
Still (1543-1608)
Date:
2526.3.27 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
Flynn Nathaniel
Jorgenson hated funerals almost as much as he disliked crowds. He would
have much rather been on wilderness patrol, cataloging new species,
away from the small metropolis of Ashley, away from the Hall of Minds,
away from the stares and the whispers.
However, since it
was his father being archived for posterity, he couldn’t
avoid the ceremony. Not in good conscience, anyway.
His dad rested on
an old contragrav sled, floating a meter above the marble avenue. The
sled was a relic of the founding of Salmagundi 150 years ago. The
chassis had been rebuilt long ago, in line with its ceremonial
repurposing. The bed was boxed in by ornate wood carvings, painted in
lavish primary colors.
Flynn walked next
to his mother, behind his father, at the head of the brightly colored
procession. The pride of place held by immediate family. He had to
fight the urge to look behind him, to see who might be staring at him.
“Good
lord, Flynn. Who cares what they think?”
“Shut
up, Grandma.”
The procession
ended at the entrance to the Hall of Minds. It hadn’t changed
since Flynn had last been here, on his first equinox. That was close to
seventeen standard years ago. Four solstices come and gone, and four
equinoxes as well, and before the next solstice he planned to be as far
away from here as he could get.
“Am
I that bad?”
“Give
it a rest—please.”
The Triad awaited
his father’s body at the entrance; the three oldest people on
Salmagundi, shaved bald so their forehead tattoos were more visible.
Where most people had four or five glyphs marking each pilgrimage to
the Hall of Minds, these three had dozens. Flynn only had one, and he
could not imagine what now lived behind these Elders’ eyes.
Their faces were expressionless, and they gazed out at the procession
in a way that didn’t seem quite human.
His father bore
six glyphs on his brow. Six ancestors. Six residents of the Hall of
Minds.
The Triad led his
father’s body and the procession into the central rotunda.
The space was vast and echoing, occupying half the aboveground volume
of the building. It easily held the thousand-plus people of the
procession.
The Triad led
Flynn’s father to the center of the rotunda, where a circular
dais supported a pair of square obelisks about twice the height of a
man. One member of the Triad stood in front of each pillar, while the
sled floated to rest between them. The last member, a woman by her
voice, stood at the head of the contragrav sled and spoke.
“We are
here to commit Augustus David Jorgenson to posterity. We are ready to
cast his shell aside and commit him to the archive, where this unique
individual will enrich our lives in perpetuity.”
“God,
how I hate the way they say ‘unique’ . .
.”
“They
do end up looking alike, don’t they?”
“Yeah,
Gram. They do.”
The reception
after Augustus Jorgenson’s funeral was held at the Jorgenson
estate, another place that Flynn had avoided for over a decade. It was
probably the largest house in Ashley, and one of the oldest. Fitting,
perhaps, for one of the chief founding families of Salmagundi.
Also a sign of the
importance of Flynn’s father, there were at least twelve
people there to eulogize him before the wake proper. Of course, each
eulogy had little to do with Augustus David Jorgenson himself. Flynn
had to listen to all of them, out of respect for his father, or who his
father had once been.
The series of
speakers talked about the people Augustus David Jorgenson had chosen to
make part of his own mind, the people he had ritually downloaded. They
spoke briefly of them, and of the people they had downloaded, and those
they had downloaded . . .
Long passages
became little more than a mélange of names and dates without
any context. A muddy narrative that became as bland and meaningless as
most of the people around him.
It was never
supposed to be like this. Gram had explained to him the founding of
Salmagundi. How once they were a hundred light-years from the crumbling
Confederacy, and free of the laws against the heretical technologies,
the founders had decided to record their minds not to build a culture,
but to preserve a knowledge base in a population that was just on the
edge of sustainability. With a human mind archived, they would never
again want for a sanitary engineer, an astrophysicist, a neurosurgeon,
a hydroponics expert—
Over the course of
150 years, it had become something other than necessity. It had become
a combination of ancestor worship and a promise of immortality. Flynn
wondered if many people knew how much a fraud it all was.
He wondered how
many cared.
After the endless
eulogy ending with the—to Flynn, ironic—toast to
the Founders, he drifted through the wake like a ghost. The crowd and
the conversations obligingly parted around him. No one seemed to be
eager to engage Augustus’ only son in conversation. The lone
tattoo on his brow was a beacon of his oddball status even to those who
didn’t know him personally.
That was fine by
Flynn. He walked up to the buffet, removed a small meat-filled roll,
and retreated to the empty solarium. He sat on a wrought-iron chair and
looked up through the tinted glass at the small golden ball of
Salmagundi’s sun.
There were no
plants here anymore, not like when he was a child, when his father was
his own age. Then, this room was filled with flowers. Teased and tended
by his father, when Augustus was still his dad. He had a love of the
natural world, and the endless abundance of the planet Salmagundi with
its two-year-long seasons. A love that Flynn had inherited.
A love that died
with Augustus’ fourth trip to the Hall of Minds.
Flynn had been
barely old enough to understand the change that accompanied his
father’s fourth glyph. When he had come back from his turn at
the solstice festival, he was colder. More like the ancient automatons
of the Triad. His voice lost passion, and inflection, and affection.
And he had let his
flowers die.
The seasons turned
again and the following equinox came with the associated festivals.
Like the solstices, the equinoxes marked the time when pilgrims came
from all corners of Salmagundi to visit the Hall of Minds. During the
festival, the population of Ashley doubled, crowding with a press of
people coming to select a new tattoo for their brow, and a new ancestor
to merge into their own mind.
It also marked the
time when those who had reached their fifteenth year since the prior
festival were expected to select their first ancestor and become an
adult. By then Flynn had been almost seventeen, the oldest child there
to come of age, and the first selected to walk into the Hall of Minds.
He hadn’t the authority—or the courage—to
refuse. All he had been able to do was choose which ancestor he would
come to host.
“Here
you are.”
Flynn turned and
saw his mother standing in the doorway, facing him. He wished he had
taken a glass of scotch. “Hello, Mother.”
“You’re
ignoring our guests. That isn’t polite.”
“God
forbid we’re rude, chicky.”
“Gram,
that’s my mother.”
“Yeah,
yeah.”
“I
needed some time to myself—”
“Flynn,
you’re by yourself all the time. You live out in the
wilderness. Can you please be social?”
“They
don’t want to talk to me. You know that. I make them
uncomfortable.”
“Uh-huh,
sonny, the feeling’s mutual, and you know it.”
“You can
change that—”
“Don’t
start—”
“Come
back, be a part of society. Isn’t there
someone—”
“Stop
it!”
“You’re
rejecting the lives of everyone who came before us, their knowledge,
their expertise, your father—”
Flynn stood up.
“My father died eighteen years ago!”
His mother took a
step back. Flynn could hear a few gasps back in the reception area. He
didn’t care any longer.
“Son—”
“Where
was the memorial when the Triad jacked him into the Hall and diluted
his soul to the point of nonexistence? What about you? Did you mourn
him the morning when he couldn’t remember what was him and
what was a decade-old recording?”
“Please
lower your voice.”
“Why?
Everybody here knows what I think. Hell, everyone here is the same
fucking person. The same tepid average of everyone the consensus made
important.” Flynn pushed past his mother and faced the crowd,
who was now all staring at him. “Here’s a little
game, folks. That same shocked expression you’re all wearing,
is that you, or someone you downloaded?”
He slammed the
door on the way out.
Flynn had walked
the winding path into the overgrown estate gardens for about fifteen
minutes before the female voice in his head spoke up.
“You
sure know how to make an exit.”
“Do
you enjoy dwelling on the obvious, Gram?”
“Well,
you made me feel a little unwelcome back there.”
Flynn turned a
corner and faced a secluded patio hidden by yellow-green foliage. A
stone bench was nestled, almost buried, in a nest of vines, facing a
long-silent fountain. On the bench sat a young woman about 150
centimeters tall, with almond-shaped green eyes and straight black hair
cut in an asymmetrical diagonal. She wore the same black leather
jacket, pants, and boots she always wore. She looked up at him and
said, “And you know I don’t like it when you call
me Gram. It makes me feel old.”
Flynn shook his
head distractedly. “Yeah, sure.”
She looked down at
herself. “Do you mind? I waited until we were alone
again.”
“No,
Tetsami, you’re fine.” He sat down next to the
apparition.
His experience in
the Hall of Minds, as far as he could tell, was unique. It was supposed
to be a melding, a merging of an elder’s knowledge and
experience with your own. In most cases, it also meant the merging of
those that elder had himself merged with, and so on, and so on . . .
Achieving some sort of higher unified consciousness.
With Flynn, a
combination of his own panicked resistance and his choice of Kari
Tetsami manifested itself differently. Most people—most
recordings of people, that is—downloaded from the Hall of
Minds knew what was happening, expected it, understood it.
Tetsami’s mind, the oldest one in the archive, had been
stored before Salmagundi had established itself, and before the
biannual rite at the Hall of Minds existed.
If anything, the
event panicked Tetsami as much as Flynn, and she escaped into some
distant part of his brain. They remained two separate individuals.
Flynn, and his twenty-five-year-old great-great-great-great-grandmother.
“Look,”
Flynn said, “I’m sorry if it sounded like I
included you in that outburst.”
“I
know.” Tetsami patted his hand, sort of. Her visual
manifestation couldn’t actually touch him, though he felt it
inside. “I’m in there with you.”
“Ever
think it would have been better if the download went the way it was
supposed to?”
“Hell,
no. You know that creeps me out as much as it does you. I’m
me, you’re you, and let’s keep it that
way.”
Flynn shook his
head. “I just don’t know how long I can keep this
up.”
“Standing
up to their stupid ancestor worship isn’t a crime.”
“Yeah,
but it might cost me my job.”
Tetsami sighed.
“I was kind of hoping that you didn’t notice Robert
was there.”
“We were
staring right at him, you know. Only one set of eyes between
us.” Robert Sheldon was manager of the wilderness corps,
Flynn’s employer, and about as conservative an example of
Ashley high society as you could find. He was a lifelong colleague of
Flynn’s father—he would hesitate to use the term
friend—and probably only allowed Flynn to work there as a
favor. Between his father’s death and his outburst, Flynn
thought that Robert would have little reason to keep him employed.
“Come
on, your father just died. Don’t you think that’s
enough reason to cut you some slack?”
Flynn chuckled.
“I know you’re old-fashioned, but you’ve
seen enough of things to realize my people don’t see death
quite the same way you do.”
“Yeah,”
she sighed. “I’ve seen plenty of religions that
promise resurrection. Yours is the only one I’ve ever seen
that delivers.” She leaned back and stared at the sky, even
though Flynn knew the only thing she saw was what his own eyes were
looking at. “You’d think my particular situation
would make me a little more sympathetic to them.”
“So, any
suggestion how to deal with this?”
She turned and
looked at him. “Ignore it. Either Mr. Sheldon will hold it
against you, or not. Worst thing that can happen, you find another
job.”
“I guess
so.”
“I’m
sure, if you worked at it, you could find something more important to
worry about.”
Flynn looked up at
the sky. The sun had set and the stars were just coming out.
“I suppose I could,” he whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Service
Freedom is
often simple ignorance of whom you serve.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
It is easer to
meet expectations than to question them.
—SYLVIA
HARPER (2008-2081)
Date:
2526.04.22 (Standard) 19.8 ly from Xi Virginis
Nickolai moved
through the corridors of the
Eclipse
alone. The
modified cargo ship was deep into its slog toward Xi Virginis. The star
was nearly seventy-five light years past Helminth, whose scientific
outpost marked what was supposed to be the fringes of human expansion
in this direction.
Despite having the
most advanced drives Mosasa could buy, the
Eclipse
was still limited to making tach-jumps twenty light-years at a time.
However, Mosasa had retrofitted the Eclipse so that
most of its volume was power plant. It could make the round trip
without needing to refuel, with two jumps to spare.
Each jump took
close to a month, despite being instantaneous as far as the ship and
those aboard were concerned. It was the downtime between jumps that ate
up time for the crew. For forty-eight hours the
Eclipse
drifted between jumps.
The
Eclipse’s
engines were so large that, even with their massive damping systems, it
still took four or five times as long as a normal ship for the drives
to cool down from being fully active. While having drives active for
four hours after a jump was technically dangerous, in those four hours
it was far more likely that they’d be struck by a random
asteroid than it would be for a tach-ship to suddenly appear close
enough to cause so much as an oscillation in the drives’
power levels.
After the
cool-down period, when the drives were no longer active, the rest of
the time was spent with maintenance checks. This trip was riding on the
very edge of the performance specs for those engines. For the crew,
they had been traveling for a little over a week, but the rest of the
universe had aged 150 days.
The next jump
would take them to Xi Virginis.
Mr. Antonio had
explained the necessity of the downtime in the dead space between
stars, about the maintenance and the observations Mosasa would wish to
make. Mr. Antonio had also told him what he needed to do at this
particular down period, once they had tached within twenty light-years
of their target.
Nickolai pulled
himself down one of the rear corridors of the ship, a maintenance area
that didn’t bother with the pseudo-gravity maintained in the
crew areas, the bridge, and the one open cargo bay where the Paralian
stayed.
Nickolai floated
between cargo holds that held extra power plants for the
Eclipse’s
long journey. He was going aft, toward the tach-drives and, more
important to him right now, the tach-transmitter.
The ship was on a
nighttime cycle, so most of the others who had no job to do were
sleeping. He saw no one else before he slipped into the rearmost
chamber of the
Eclipse. The
access
corridor to the
tach-drives was short, less than ten meters long, and ended at an
observation room, little more than a widening of the corridor in front
of a massive port set into the rear bulkhead. The effect made it seem
that the corridor abruptly ended in empty space.
Several hatches
lined the corridor, walls, floor, and ceiling. Several had active
displays showing details of what was happening behind them, almost all
the graphs and numbers low into the green.
Few meant anything
to Nickolai. He wasn’t an engineer. He glanced from panel to
panel, until he found a display that was completely quiescent. Along
the top, he saw the words Mr. Antonio had told him to look for:
“Coherent Tachyon Emitter.”
On the wall above
him was the access panel for the business end of the ship’s
tach-comm. Without it, the
Eclipse was
limited to
light speed communications, effectively mute to the rest of the
universe.
Before he moved,
he checked back toward the door. Above the door was a holo pickup that
should be providing a view down this corridor. “Should
be” were the operative words. Two jumps ago, Nickolai had
engineered his first sabotage on Mr. Antonio’s behalf. He had
taken a cartridge from his slugthrower, punctured the soft metal tip of
the bullet, and allowed three drops of the clear liquid inside to spill
into a junction box that served the optical cabling for the
surveillance system. The chemicals in the liquid accelerated the
oxidation of several key components, causing a hardware failure that
was both hard to diagnose and hard to repair, and would appear
perfectly natural in a ship this old.
The camera down
here was still blind as of three hours ago. Nickolai confirmed that by
standing on the bridge where several monitors scanned through all the
security feeds. It was unlikely that anyone had gotten around to fixing
it in the past three hours.
He just wished
there was some visual indication that the camera was nonoperational.
Nickolai reached
up and tapped his artificial claw on the button to open the panel. It
slid aside, revealing the coils on the meter-diameter cylinder that
directed the FTL particles that would compose any transmission. The
coils were cold, idle, hanging about ten centimeters above the open
hatch.
From his belt,
Nickolai removed one of the devices that Mr. Antonio had given him.
Like everything else, it resembled something other than what it
actually was. To even a thorough examination, the small palm-sized
device was nothing more than a personal Emerson field generator,
designed to detect and absorb the effects of energy weapons within a
specific range of frequencies, and provide the wearer a measure of
protection from everything short of a plasma cannon, at least until the
batteries overloaded.
It would be
completely unremarkable until someone opened up the computer and
examined the source code in the small device. Then they might see some
oddities, such as the frequency sensitivity, which was set to
wavelengths that didn’t make sense in terms of energy
weapons, or even in terms of normal massy particles. The settings only
made sense when interpreted to involve the complex numbers associated
with a stream of tachyons.
Nickolai slid the
field generator under the emitter tube, back as close to the rear
bulkhead as he could manage. According to Mr. Antonio, the generator
would be completely passive and undetectable to any diagnostics. It
would only switch on during a full-bore tach-transmission, and then
cause a failure that would be nearly impossible to trace.
The important part
wasn’t how it worked, the important part was this act would
be another step in clearing his debt to Mr. Antonio. Honorless as this
sabotage was, Nickolai told himself that he owed Mosasa and his
hirelings no loyalty. A demonic machine and a crew of the
Fallen—honor did not apply.
He slid the panel
shut and flexed his mechanical hand.
He wondered if he
would feel the same about serving Mr. Antonio if Mosasa was simply
another damned human. He wondered if Mr. Antonio had only told him
Mosasa’s nature because he anticipated the bad taste of doubt
that would fill Nickolai’s mouth about now.
He stayed there,
lost in thought, until he caught a faint near-human scent. He was aware
of her only a few moments before he heard her voice.
“Nickolai?”
Nickolai turned at
Kugara’s voice. Somehow he retained enough composure to avoid
looking startled or spinning his whole body in an awkward tumble. It
helped that he was in a cramped human-sized space that prevented
someone his size from moving quickly.
“Yes?”
he said. She floated in the doorway of the maintenance corridor,
staring at him. He couldn’t read her expression enough to see
if she noticed his proximity to the tach-comm. She was in charge of the
comm and the integrity of the data systems. Could she have somehow
detected what he was doing?
He almost hoped
she had.
“What
are you doing back here?” she asked him. Nickolai was better
at human tones of voice than he was at expression, but the way she
addressed him was puzzling. It wasn’t aggressive or
accusatory—if anything, her voice was borderline submissive.
Worried? Maybe even embarrassed?
Maybe she
didn’t realize what I was doing. “I came
back here to look out the observation port.” He provided the
explanation he had prepared. “I feel cramped in
here.”
She smiled, and
Nickolai wondered if she made a point of not showing her teeth to him.
“That, I understand.” She massaged the neural
interface on the back of her neck and shook her head. “Even
the ship’s internal network feels closed in. Which makes no
sense, but there you are.”
“Why are
you down here?” Nickolai asked.
“Same
reason.” She shook her head. “But you were here
first. I can go back and jack into an observatory program. Get a better
view that way.”
“Then
why come down here?”
“Oh,
just something about seeing it with my own eyes. Doesn’t make
a lot of sense.”
“I
understand.”
She turned to go,
and Nickolai said, “Wait.”
She looked over
her shoulder at him. “What?”
“There’s
room by the portal, if you want . . .” Nickolai
didn’t know why he was saying the words, and he trailed off
in the middle of the sentence.
“To join
you?”
“I
understand if you want to be alone,” Nickolai said. He turned
to face the empty stars. In reality, staring out the observation portal
was the last thing he wanted to do, but it was the only explanation he
had for being here, and now that Kugara had seen him, he
didn’t have much choice but to face the void.
“Nickolai,”
she said, “we’ve been alone since we boarded this
ship.”
“Longer
than that,” Nickolai whispered, pulling himself into the
small circular room in front of the observation port. He pressed
himself against the wall so he squatted on his haunches. If the
Eclipse
was pointed at their destination right now, then he was probably facing
all of human space. The home of his own people, the Fifteen Worlds, he
could probably cover with his hand.
To his surprise,
Kugara joined him. She floated up behind him, and placed a hand on his
shoulder. “You know, it’s not as roomy as you think
it is.”
Nickolai edged to
the side, and Kugara squeezed through the top of the doorway. She
pressed against his arm, grunting. Once past him, she twisted to hold
herself against the wall on the other side of the door, facing out the
portal toward the stars.
“Damn,”
she whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She looked down at the wall behind her. “The view would be
better if I killed the lights. Here . . .”
She touched a
control on the wall behind her, and the lights in the corridor dimmed
until the only illumination came from the control readouts and the
stars. Beyond the window, the star field erupted into painful clarity.
Nickolai’s artificial eyes shifted frequencies and
sensitivities, showing more and more stars, a view of the universe he
had never experienced before. A vastness that was beautiful, stark, and
completely disinterested in him.
“Damn,”
Kugara repeated.
Why are
we here? Nickolai thought. Staring out at the stars, the
question took on an unintended depth beyond the simple self-doubt of
inviting Kugara to share this view.
After a long
silence, Kugara asked, “Do you trust Mosasa?”
“No.”
“But you
agreed to work for him.”
“You say
that as if I had a choice,” Nickolai quoted her words back at
her.
“Touché.”
She pulled her legs up until her knees were drawn up in front of her.
She folded her arms across her knees, and rested her chin on her arms.
“He’s so cold.”
“He’s
a machine.”
“You
told me that. But the idea he knew, about the ambush—
ambushes—and
that he might have triggered an interplanetary invasion.
Don’t you feel you’re working for the
Devil?”
Nickolai laughed
for the first time in a long while. He only stopped when he realized
that Kugara was staring at him.
“My
apologies,” Nickolai said. “That was
amusing.”
“What
was amusing?”
Nickolai looked
out at the stars. “Of course we’re working for the
Devil. Mosasa is lifeless thought, the personification of the sins of
the Fallen.”
“The
Fallen?”
“Humanity.
Our creators.”
“Our
creators?” She sucked in a breath. “Oh.”
There was a long
period of silence before she asked, “If Mosasa is the Devil,
what does that make us?”
“Souls
untainted by the arrogance of the Fallen who have the possibility of
redemption in the eyes of God. You more than I, because you are closer
to His creation before the Fall.”
“You
believe this?”
“I was
raised in the faith of St. Rajasthan.”
“Is that
an answer?”
“What I
believe is not important. I’m as damned as Mosasa.”
“Why?”
“You
never asked me about my arm.”
He
couldn’t read her expression, but he could almost feel what
she was thinking. She could ask him about his past, but that would open
up the opportunity for him to question her about her own.
Kugara
didn’t speak for a long time. Then she said, “You
truly think I’m closer to God than you are?”
“In my
faith, you are considered an Angel.”
He heard her make
some soft rhythmic sounds, like she was gasping for breath.
Crying?
Why?
She extended her
legs, pushing against the portal to shoot out the door above him, out
into the corridor. Nickolai turned, body slowly tumbling in the
observation room. “Kugara?”
“Shut
up, you stupid morey bastard.”
Nickolai drew
back, the unexpected slur stinging him more than he thought possible.
“You
know nothing about me,” she shouted at him without turning
her head. “Nothing! How dare you!” She disappeared
out the doorway before Nickolai could pull himself out of the
observation room.
He floated alone,
in the dark, with the stars.
There was a small
area forward of the crew quarters of the
Eclipse
that served as a common area. Mallory made a point to take meals there
when there was a quorum of the scientific team in attendance. On some
level he wanted to avoid Dr. Dörner, but that was not really
possible on a ship this size, and going to the effort of trying to
avoid her would have attracted way more attention to himself.
In the end, his
cover was only a means to an end, the end being intelligence on what
was happening out toward Xi Virginis. And after Mosasa’s
revelations about the Caliphate, Mallory suspected that information was
more important than ever.
He hoped the
scientific team Mosasa had assembled would be the closest to knowing
the answer. That was the theory, anyway.
So, at each meal,
he took a seat and eavesdropped, and if they didn’t actively
engage him in their conversations, they didn’t shun him
either—though Dr. Dörner’s icy stares came
close.
Fine,
Mallory thought, the more you see me as a mercenary thug, the
less likely you’ll see a Jesuit colleague.
Over the past
week, just by listening to their small talk, he discovered that none of
them had been recruited from Bakunin itself. They came from several
far-flung corners of human space. Bill—who was only ever
present as a synthetic voice on a comm unit, his massive life-support
system never leaving his cargo bay—was from Paralia, of
course. Dr. Dörner, Mallory knew, came from Acheron, and that
caused Dr. Pak to make an unsubtle comment about the planet
contributing to her icy personality. Dr. Pak actually came from Terra,
which usually granted him some deference beyond his relative youth but
didn’t keep Dr. Dörner from making a sharp comment
about people who peaked young looking forward to a “slow, sad
decline.”
Of the last two,
Brody came from Bulawayo in the Trianguli Union, and Tsoravitch came
from Jokul in the Sirius Economic Community. Two planets fifty
light-years apart; both close to forty light-years from Acheron. Mosasa
had cast an extremely wide net, one that made the concentrated effort
on Bakunin seem designed to catch the Caliphate’s attention.
Which was
probably the point . . .
Mallory
didn’t like to think of what would happen when the Caliphate
moved toward these outlying colonies. The Vatican had no fleet, as
such, but should the Bishop of Rome speak to some secular rulers,
Mallory suspected that the Caliphate’s move
wouldn’t be uncontested.
The only thing
preventing him from seizing the tach-comm and sending a desperate
message back home was the fact he knew that the Caliphate was closely
observed. Their moves would be known by other assets soon after they
made a decision. It wasn’t worth blowing his cover before he
had gathered information at the source.
The source of
what, that was the question. And the science team was as unenlightening
on the point of this expedition as Mosasa had been.
Tsoravitch had
just made a point about Mosasa’s less than edifying
briefings. She leaned back in a corner of the common room, sipping a
container of what passed for coffee on the
Eclipse,
and shook her head at Brody. “If he didn’t give you
any more information, why’d you agree to come along on this
bizarre little field trip?”
Brody sat facing
away from Mallory, so he couldn’t see the doctor’s
expression from his spot on the couch in the opposite corner of the
common room, though the tone of voice Brody used was almost wistful.
“I really could care less about Mosasa’s
‘anomaly.’ But I’ve been in a teaching
chair at Sokoto University for nearly twenty years standard. I study
culture, and I haven’t stepped foot outside the Trianguli
Union since I finished my graduate work. Now I get the chance to see
colonies that have been isolated from the rest of human space for at
least a century? I jumped at the chance.”
“Amen to
that.” Pak raised his glass in a toast to the others.
“Same
reason?” Tsoravitch asked.
Pak nodded.
“A hundred years isn’t a huge time for linguistic
drift, even if they are isolated. But if these colonies were founded
during the collapse of the Confederacy, with a substantial mix of
languages, there could be a whole class of new Creole to study. The
first person to write a paper on these outliers could make a
career.” He looked over at Tsoravitch. “What about
you?”
“You
know any other chance I’d get to work with an AI?”
There was a long
pause at the table. Brody broke the silence with a nervous chuckle.
“She’s got you there, Leon.”
“You
still there, Bill?” Pak called out.
“I
am listening,” Bill’s voice came from a
comm unit in the middle of the table. The synthetic voice was male,
deep, and had a slight Windsor accent. Though the voice was completely
naturalistic, it was so lacking in affect that Mallory would have
preferred something that sounded like a computer.
He wondered if
Bill picked it out himself, though Paralians perceived sound so
differently Mallory doubted that Bill would be able to easily interpret
the characteristics that made human voices unique.
“Well,
what about you?” Pak said. “Are you anticipating
some new branch of physics or mathematics?”
“No,
I am not.”
“Why’d
you agree to join Mosasa’s little expedition?” Pak
asked.
“I
wish to go where I have not.”
“You’re
a tourist?” Pak asked.
“Mr.
Mosasa provided me the means to leave the Ocean.”
Pak looked at
Brody, smiling. “He
is a
tourist. Bill,
we’ll have to get some holos of you that you can tach to the
folks back home.”
“I
do not understand what you mean.”
“Don’t
mind him,” Brody said. “He’s
just—”
Brody was
interrupted by a klaxon over the PA system. After a single
whoop,
Mosasa’s voice came over the address system.
“Attention.
We have our course programmed and we have engines primed for our final
jump. We will be taching to the Xi Virginis system in fifteen minutes.
Everyone who can, please report to the bridge.”
“This is
it,” Brody said, pushing himself from the table.
“Sorry you can’t come up with us, Bill.”
“Can
you clarify? Are you apologizing or expressing sympathy?”
Mallory slipped
out of the common room first, not staying to hear them explain things
to Bill. Before the door slid shut behind him, he heard Bill explain in
great detail how he had a full holographic feed from the bridge and
didn’t need to be present for the critical jump.
Fifteen
minutes, Mallory thought. Fifteen minutes and
we’ll be in the Xi Virginis system.
The thought was
unsettling.
Nickolai was one
of the last people to step onto the bridge of the
Eclipse.
He waited for the last minute so he would avoid the possibility of
running into Kugara, who had turned from possible ally to a complete
enigma. Besides, it simplified things if his only allegiance was to Mr.
Antonio.
The
Eclipse
had a huge bridge, with a ceiling high enough to provide Nickolai the
headroom to stand fully upright. It easily accommodated all of
Mosasa’s crew, and could have held the Paralian and his
elaborate life support, if there was a way for the huge apparatus to
make it up here. The layout of the room was a sphere with the bottom
flattened out. Stations ringed a large holo display intended for more
redundant positions than were supplied by Mosasa’s crew.
Parvi and Wahid
sat at elaborate consoles on either side of the holo display, which
showed an image of the space outside. Staring into the display was like
looking out the observation port in back, out at the emptiness
light-years from everything. However, with his cybernetic eyes,
Nickolai could tell that the holo only honored a narrowly-defined
visible spectrum. With little effort, he could make out the ghost of
Mosasa on the opposite side of the display from him. Kugara sat at a
fourth console, opposite Mosasa, her back to Nickolai and most of the
other spectators on the bridge.
“Drive
is hot,” Parvi said. “All systems check okay to
go.”
Wahid answered,
“We have a fix on target. Current course window opens in
ninety seconds.”
“Mass
sensors clear,” Kugara said. “Nothing significant
within two AU.”
“Are we
okay to fire the tach-drives?” Parvi addressed Mosasa.
“Go
ahead, Captain.”
“Sixty
seconds to window.”
“Course
approved,” Parvi said. “Switching the tach-drives
to auto.”
The bridge was
silent for a few long seconds. Nickolai idly wondered if being present
here would somehow make the act of taching somewhere more impressive.
It didn’t seem appropriate that leaving a gravity
well—barely moving a few hundred kilometers—always
felt
more dramatic than the sensation of moving twenty light-years. No
matter how much time supposedly passed in the interim, on the ship it
never felt like anything at all. No sensation, no passing of time, not
even a slight unease to let you know that something significant had
happened. If you stayed locked in a cabin, you could tach halfway
across the galaxy and never know you had moved.
“Twenty
seconds to window.” Wahid said. “Fifteen seconds to
last-chance abort.”
“All
systems nominal,” Parvi said.
“Mass
sensors still clear.”
“Ten
seconds. Five to commit.” No one answered, and Wahid said.
“Five seconds to window, drives are committed. Three . . .
two . . . one . . .”
There
wasn’t even a sound to mark the jump to Xi Virginis.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fallen
Angel
An event is
dangerous in direct proportion to how unexpected it is.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
A civilization
that cannot envision its own demise has already begun to die.
—JEAN
HonorÉ Cheviot (2065-2128)
Date:
2526.4.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
A month after his
outburst at his father’s wake, Flynn shot his flier out over
the forests of Salmagundi. Despite his worries, Robert Sheldon
hadn’t seen fit to fire him, or even mention the incident.
Things had since settled back into a routine, with him spending long
days surveying the dense forests east of Ashley, cataloging stands of
trees mature enough to be harvested. If people were slightly less
likely to engage him in conversation, that was fine with him; most
people didn’t have much to talk about anyway.
He flew on
manual—which, technically, was a breach of regulations.
Allowing a human being to pilot an aircraft was supposedly only an
emergency procedure. However, not only did he feel better with the
craft under his direct control, it also meant the computer
couldn’t override him and turn it around if someone back at
Ashley decided he should come back. It never happened, but he still
didn’t like the idea that someone could make that kind of
remote control decision.
As long as he did
his job, no one should have reason to complain how he did it. He shot
over the trees at three hundred meters, the sensor batteries underneath
the craft picking up moisture and chlorophyll levels in the foliage,
filling in the topographic map on his display with bands of reds,
yellows, and blues, showing which areas of the forest had matured the
fastest from the last dry season—
“Flynn!
Look up.”
“Huh,
what?”
“North,
about thirty degrees above the horizon.”
Tetsami’s
voice in his head drew his attention to something that was just visible
out of the canopy, on the fringes of his peripheral vision. He turned
his head to look at it.
Something moved,
high and fast, leaving a glowing contrail. Oddly, the object itself
didn’t reflect any light. It was a black smudge at the head
of the turbulent atmosphere.
Flynn whispered,
“A meteor?”
The object closed
on the horizon in front of him, following a downward path.
“The way that thing’s moving, it’s going
to make one hell of a—”
The object hit the
forest in front of the flier. The world outside the windscreen went
white with the impact, then immediately black as the light levels
caused the windows to tint themselves. Less than a second later,
turbulence hit the small flier, tumbling the nose up and to the left.
All the control surfaces stopped responding, and Flynn’s
stomach lurched as the vector jets started throwing the craft in an
uncontrolled spin.
He cut the vectors
a little over three seconds after the computer would have done,
allowing the flier to coast on neutral buoyancy contragravs. In a few
moments air resistance and inertia brought the craft to a standstill.
The windscreen
became transparent again. Outside, he saw an inverted horizon tilted at
a fifteen-degree angle. The flier was about a hundred meters closer to
the forest canopy and pointed about two hundred degrees off
course—in addition to floating upside down.
“That’s
why the regulations want the computer to fly this thing.”
“We’re
fine, Gram,” Flynn muttered. “No damage.”
He gingerly opened
the vectors to right the flier, waiting until it was upright before
spinning the nose around to look at the impact.
“Look at
that.”
They were about
fifty kilometers out from Ashley, but Flynn wouldn’t be
surprised if the rolling pillar of smoke might be visible from town.
The edges of the burn zone formed a ragged ellipse about two or three
klicks long and about half a klick wide. The trees inside the burn zone
were shattered and charred black, and the ones still standing at the
edges were smoldering.
Fortunately,
despite the clear sky at the moment, they were in the wet season. The
trees were already too saturated to burn very well. If it had been the
dry season, Flynn would have already been looking at thousands of
hectares of smoldering forest.
He flew down close
to the site, looping it twice, recording all the data he could with the
craft sensors. Then he approached for a landing in the thickest part of
the burn zone.
“Shouldn’t
you call this in?”
“Yeah, I
should.” The little craft slowed until it was lifted only by
the contragrav, and slowly began to drift down. “I should
also clear any landings with base before descent.”
“As
long as we’re clear on the rules here.”
Flynn tweaked the
descent until the craft was over a relatively flat patch of bare
ground. With the contragrav at 85 percent, the little flier drifted
gently to the ground, rocking slightly on its landing skids. Once
settled, he cut the contragrav, and the whole ship shifted as the
ground took the ship’s full five-thousand-kilo weight.
“We’re
here.” Flynn threw off the harness, turned around in the
pilot’s chair, and grabbed the survey kit from its slot
behind the cockpit.
“Hey,
I understand—I want to see this, too. But call this in before
you step out there. I’m just as fucked as you if you get
pinned under a burning tree and no one knows where we are.”
Flynn sighed. He
turned around and flipped a switch. A light flashed on the console
showing an active beacon. He turned on the communicator and said,
“This is Flynn Jorgenson, in survey craft 103. Disembarking
at 0°15’5.25” North,
78°42’14.38” West. Assessing probable
meteor impact site.” He hit the “Transmit
Repeat” button without waiting for base to acknowledge him.
“Happy,
Grandma?” He grabbed the survey kit again, and hit the
release for the hatch.
The hatch slid
aside along the fuselage, letting in air thick with the smell of smoke
and steam. It was bad enough that Flynn’s eyes burned. He
grabbed a respirator mask and fitted it over his face. The gasket
sealed flush with his overalls, which were made of fireproof ballistic
fiber and had their own environmental controls.
He stepped outside
and his feet sank into about twenty centimeters of mud and ash. At
ground level, the scar of the impact was even more apparent, if that
was possible. A trench of bare earth cut down the center of the blast
zone, razor-straight. On either side, the splintered remnants of
charred trees leaned aside, pointing away from the scar in the ground.
Flynn pulled the
camera out of the survey kit and began recording images, topography,
infrared, and spectroscopic data.
“You’re
quiet,” Flynn said as he slogged through the mud and ash
toward the hot spot at the end of this gradually deepening trench.
“I
have a bad feeling about this.”
“Why?”
“Does
this look like a normal meteor impact?”
Tetsami had a
point. Something with enough mass to survive reentry and still be
visible during descent should have left a bigger scar. And the oblique
angle? Atmospheric breaking and gravity should bring the path near
vertical—but this almost looked like a controlled impact . . .
“Holy
Jesus Tap-dancing Christ!”
“What?”
Flynn snapped his head up from the camera and looked around, suddenly
afraid that Tetsami’s burning tree was about to fall on him.
“No,
damn it, look at it, look at the fucking egg!”
“Egg?
What egg?”
He suddenly saw
Tetsami’s effigy appear in his field of vision, face twisted
in fear and frustration. She pointed. “
THERE!
Look
THERE!”
Flynn turned
around and found himself standing about three hundred meters from the
terminus of the impact site. The object was still steaming, and half
buried under the mound of mud and clay it had pushed up in front of
itself. It was obviously an artifact, not a meteor. The surface was way
too smooth. It was also small, much smaller than it had appeared when
Flynn saw its descent.
It was egg-shaped,
and from what he could see of it, he’d guess that its long
axis would be two or three meters long, four at the most. Small enough
that Flynn had initially lost sight of it in the devastation caused by
the impact.
He raised the
camera to it and zoomed in . . .
“What
the . . . ?”
At first he
thought the calibration was blown on his equipment, but several
spectrum and configuration changes gave him the same picture. The mud
and ash around the egg was boiling hot, averaging over a hundred
degrees, and hot spots all around five or six times that.
The egg itself was
cold. It radiated no heat at all.
Radiated nothing.
Flynn’s
equipment picked nothing radiating
or
reflecting
from the matte-black surface. No infrared, ultraviolet, or visible
light. The laser and radar range finders couldn’t fix on the
thing; when he swept the beam past it, he saw the numbers go from
268.25 meters to infinity.
Flynn shook his
head, “It’s a black hole.”
“No,”
Tetsami said, still standing next to him, “It’s
something a lot more complicated.”
Flynn looked at
her. “You
know what this
is?”
Tetsami nodded.
“Yes.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. It
quavered a bit, and for a moment Flynn saw his several-greats
grandmother as a little girl. “Eigne called it a
seed.”
Eigne
called it a seed.
In the seventeen
years Tetsami had been part of him, Flynn had learned a lot about her
history. History that, not too surprisingly, was not part of the normal
educational curriculum on Salmagundi—not that there was much
of a curriculum to begin with. The schooling Flynn had gotten was
pretty much limited to the basics of literacy, linguistic and
otherwise. Their ancestors had done all the heavy lifting on those
points, so what was the point of
teaching
history?
So over the years,
he had heard a lot from Tetsami that no one else had ever bothered to
tell him. The details of the founding of Salmagundi weren’t
the only things she had told him about. Eigne and the Proteans were
another part of that secret history.
Tetsami, as had
most of the Founders, had come from the planet Bakunin as the Terran
Confederacy was collapsing. Bakunin was a lawless world that respected
no human State, and because of that attracted every form of deviant
belief, every persecuted form of worship, every refugee from anywhere.
Every
one.
The Founders of
Salmagundi, free of the Confederacy’s constraints on
heretical technologies, built the infrastructure that would become the
Hall of Minds, something that would be anathema to the men who declared
the operation of an AI a capital crime. Compared to the Proteans, the
sins committed by the Founders of Salmagundi were insignificant. There
were other heresies, graver sins.
Before the stars
were in easy reach, man had tried to terraform the worlds in his home
system using molecule-sized self-replicating intelligent machines.
However, something had gone wrong on a distant moon, Titan. The
machines took over, and the war that followed sterilized all of
man’s outposts in the outer part of humanity’s home
system. A billion people died in that war, five million in the
immediate aftermath, others in subsequent efforts to sterilize the
sites of banned nanotech experiments, including one long-dead planet
where the Confederacy killed nearly fifty million people by dropping a
hundred-kilometer asteroid through the planet’s crust.
But those who
dealt with such things had never been completely wiped out. A small
sect of human beings—at least a sect of people who had once
been human—equated spiritual transcendence with the physical
and mental transformations granted by the machines. The cult of Proteus
found refuge, if not a home, on Bakunin. And the entity that had spoken
for the Proteans on Bakunin had called herself Eigne.
Before the
Confederacy, in its death throes, used an orbital linear accelerator to
vaporize the Protean outpost on Bakunin, that outpost had manufactured
and launched thousands of seeds. Seeds that contained millions of minds
archived from eras back as far as the catastrophe on Titan, as well as
the entire collected sum of human knowledge up to that point in human
history.
In large part, the
reason for the existence of the Proteans was to propagate their
existence as far as possible in space and time.
One of those seeds
had just crashed here, on Salmagundi.
For several hours,
Flynn radioed information back to Base. Despite the
“seed’s” enigmatic nature, he was able to
produce some information. The thing was a matte-black egg exactly 3.127
meters along its long axis. The mass readings, if they were accurate,
showed it much denser than normal matter, about a kilogram per square
centimeter, which meant that the thing, small as it was, massed more
than most of the aircraft in Ashley combined. The thing had found its
place on the planet’s surface, and Flynn doubted it was going
to move.
However, he had a
lot more information than the sensor data on the seed itself. For once,
he had relevant ancestral information, and it was exhilarating. Flynn,
the habitual singleton, actually had useful knowledge from his sole
extra mind. For most of his life, he had felt as if he wasn’t
quite in on the joke, that the people around him with two or three
glyphs on their brow had access to a subtext he wasn’t quite
aware of.
Finally he had
something over everybody. It felt good. So good, in fact, that he
completely missed the warning signs; the shift to encrypted protocols,
the change in radio operators to people he wasn’t familiar
with, the occasional and emphatic order for him not to leave the site
of the impact, the repeated questions about who else might know this
information, who he had discussed the Proteans with.
He
couldn’t really blame Tetsami either. Normally, she was a
little more paranoid than he was, but if he was caught up in the
novelty of having something new to report on and having the expertise
to analyze it, Tetsami was overtaken by her awe at seeing a remnant of
Proteus showing up on Salmagundi. Enough so that, like Flynn, she
hadn’t given herself the opportunity to think through exactly
how the powers-that-be back at Ashley might react to their visitor or
its history.
Ten hours after
the impact, after the sun had set, the first security contragrav
arrived. Flynn ran up to the craft as soon as it landed, waving his
arms, still oblivious as the doors opened and two men stepped out. The
name tags on their jumpsuits read Frank and Tony.
“Hey,
it’s about five hundred meters that way—”
Flynn pointed.
“Uh,
they seem more interested in us.”
Frank stepped up
to Flynn while Tony walked past him toward the flier. Flynn turned,
finally realizing that something was wrong. “What are you
doing—”
Frank grabbed him
and, before Flynn could object, had him in handcuffs and a restraint
collar.
“What
the fuck?”
Frank hustled him
into the back of the security contragrav and pushed him down into a
seat. As the door closed, Flynn saw Tony pulling the comm unit and all
the data recordings from his flier.
“Okay,
that’s not good—”
“No,
Gram, it isn’t.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jihad
Right and
wrong are defined by what you do, not what you serve.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
A conqueror is
always a lover of peace.
—KARL
von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)
Date:
2526.5.6 (Standard) 10.3 ly from Beta Comae Berenices
It had all been
leading to this. Almost six months ago, Admiral Muhammad Hussein al
Khamsiti had taken command of a battle group that barely existed. Now,
after half a year of accelerated construction and the crash training of
nearly ten thousand men, the
Prophet’s
Voice
floated in the interstellar void ten light-years from Beta Comae
Berenices and the planet Falcion, preparing for its maiden voyage.
Attached to the
kilometer-long vessel, over a hundred individual spacecraft docked,
ranging from troop transports to fighters to heavy
drop-ships—an entire fleet unto itself.
On the bridge,
Admiral Hussein stood and waited for their last tach-jump. There was no
technical reason for any of the command staff to be here during the
jump, much less Admiral Hussein himself. However, it had been impressed
upon the entire command staff of the Caliphate that this mission was as
much about diplomacy as it was about military force. To that end, forms
of ceremony were meticulously adhered to.
Admiral Hussein
stood along with a senior officer from each of the larger vessels in
the
Voice’s
battle group. Each
officer
wore the emerald dress uniform of the Caliphate Navy, boots polished to
a mirror shine. Golden braids of command outnumbered the enlisted men
and noncommissioned officers doing the work maneuvering the Voice
and syncing the tach-jump.
The admiral
thought that his command staff would cut quite the impressive figure
when they made their first broadcast down to the surface of the
“lost” colony orbiting the star HD 101534, the
Voice’s
destination.
Of course, the
hundred warships accompanying the
Voice
would
probably be a fair bit more impressive.
He expected that
the Caliphate’s politicians were right, and they would have a
victory without firing a shot. All the admiral would require of the
colony would be a formal treaty of alliance, no large matter for a
planet so far removed from the rest of human space.
Just enough to
keep the Caliphate’s rivals at bay.
The admiral
steepled his fingers as he waited for the klaxons to announce their
last tach-jump. He wondered idly if any of the command staff at
attention in front of and below the command dais were as happy as he
about the prospect of a largely peaceful mission. The admiral was a
veteran of conflicts on Rubai and Waldgrave, and he was not a timid
commander, but the
Prophet’s Voice
was a
brand new flagship. Many of its hallways still smelled faintly of new
paint.
Not only a new
ship, but a new ship
design. The
Caliphate had
spent an unprecedented amount of time and treasure in the creation of
the Ibrahim-class of carriers, each with its own fleet of warships,
fifty tach-capable vessels and another fifty short-range fighters, all
attached to the great ship like parasitic young.
In addition, the
Ibrahim-class of carrier had the largest and most sophisticated
tach-drive in existence. Until the Caliphate’s engineers
built the antimatter-fueled monstrosities filling the guts of these new
carriers, the limits of existing tach-drives peaked out at twenty
light-years and 256
c—and
that
only
effectively reachable by ships a third of the Voice’s
mass, without the attached warships.
The
Voice’s
tach-drives showed a fourfold increase in speed, mass, and distance. It
could clear eighty light-years in a jump that took only slightly over
twenty-eight days standard. Even if the drives sucked the energy
equivalent of a small sun, it placed every world in human space in
tactical reach of the Caliphate. Including the far-flung colonies
seventy light-years past Helminth.
The potential of
the new warships was limitless.
However, the
admiral was very much aware that the potential was untested. It was
distressing how quickly the
Voice and her
sisters
were promoted from an abbreviated shake-down into active duty. When the
orders came for this mission nearly six months ago, the Voice
was still being constructed. It had been barely three weeks since the
last of the construction crew had left the ship.
The admiral was
keenly aware of the rush to space-worthiness. They had not even been
able to test the power-hungry tach-drives at their full capacity.
Not until this
moment.
The
Voice
was the last of the four to dive out toward the worlds clustered around
Xi Virginis. Their target was a small world eight light-years away from
that star, and right at the theoretical outer limit of the Voice’s
massive drives from their current position.
The crew
functioned admirably under the gaze of so many command officers. He was
proud of having his people perform so well after the bare-bones
training they were forced through to fully man the
Voice
in such a short time frame. Checklists were completed, final broadcasts
made through the ship, the last engineering details were triple-checked
and the navigation team ran the final models on the massive computer
cores that pondered the longest tach-jump in human history.
The complicated
electronic ballet concluded with a chorus of
“Ready” cascading across the bridge, starting at
navigation, through communications, environmental and weapon systems,
and finally ending with Captain Gamal Rasheed, the commander of the
Voice
and therefore the highest ranking member of the battle group under
Admiral Hussein. The captain turned to him and said, “All
stations report we are prepared to jump.”
The admiral
nodded. “Give the order, Captain.”
“Engage
the tach-drive.”
Date:
2526.5.10 (Standard) Earth-Sol
Sydney was
probably about as far as one could get from Rome and still remain on
the same planet—not only geographically, but in spirit. Where
the Vatican, and most of Europe, seemed to embody the roots of mankind,
its ties to Earth, the Australian city seemed the reverse, aggressively
tying itself to the star-flung traces of humanity. It still wore its
history as the capital of the old Confederacy.
Once the nominal
seat of the last attempt at a universal human government, and more than
250 years old, the Confederacy Tower stabbed a kilometer-long finger
into the Australian sky. It dominated this city the way it had once
dominated all of known space.
To Cardinal
Anderson, the building seemed to reach beyond the bounds of Earth, a
modern Tower of Babel that was still, in a sense, caught in a slow
motion collapse that began 175 years ago. The power still held by the
building was represented by the extensive diplomatic compounds that
clustered near it. The embassy and consulates here had remained in
continual operation even through the collapse of the old Confederacy.
No place else would anyone find representatives from more human
colonized planets. Across all of human space, there were probably only
a dozen planets that didn’t have a diplomat here. And that
was including the cluster of colonies around the star Xi Virginis.
Cardinal Anderson
stood on a balcony of one of those diplomatic compounds. The Vatican
had had a token embassy here from the days of the Confederacy; it was a
small structure on the fringes of the diplomatic hive surrounding the
spire reflecting its unique status. Even before man had left the bounds
of Earth, the Vatican had the strange distinction of having all the
functions of a state without most of the secular trappings of that
authority. It had been near a millennium since the Bishop of Rome had
commanded a nonspiritual army.
However, in some
ways, the Church was more powerful now than it had been then. He
certainly doubted a request from any other entity would have sufficed
to gather together the people meeting here tonight.
He stood and
watched as the sun set behind the massive spire, backlighting it so
that its silhouette parted the sky as if the clouds were a pair of
theater curtains just beginning to open, revealing something dark
behind them.
“Your
Grace?” came a voice transmitted into the office behind him.
“Yes?”
he responded without turning around.
“Mr.
Xaing from the Indi Protectorate has just arrived.”
“Thank
you. Let the representatives know I’m on my way
down.”
He turned away
from the shadowed spire caught between a sense of satisfaction at
bringing this meeting to fruition and a sense of foreboding over what
he had to impart.
Twelve people
waited for him downstairs. He had called on representatives not just
from the large states of the Indi Protectorate, the Centauri Alliance,
and the Sirius Economic Community, but he also invited diplomats from
the Union of Independent Worlds, and had even appealed to the nonhumans
of the Fifteen Worlds.
When he walked
into the conference room in the basement of the Vatican consulate, he
faced representatives from every transplanetary government outside of
the Caliphate itself. As he walked up to the head of the table, a holo
of the Caliphate’s newest Ibrahim-class carrier was projected
above the long axis of the table. It was sobering to think this ship
was as massive as the Confederacy spire itself.
“Thank
you all for coming. I know the logistics of this meeting were complex,
but the willingness of your governments to meet here should illustrate
the gravity of this situation.”
A dozen pairs of
eyes focused on him with emotions that ranged from support from the
Vatican’s nominal allies, Centauri and Sirius, to enigmatic
disinterest coming from the inhuman eyes belonging to the canid from
the Fifteen Worlds, to outright hostility coming from the camp of Indi
and the Independent Worlds.
But all were here
to hear him speak.
“It is
the desire of His Holiness to share what we know about the
Caliphate’s capabilities and intentions, because their
implications affect every government represented in this
room.”
With that,
Cardinal Anderson made the same arguments that he had been making to
the pope for the last decade. By the grace of God, these people would
not take as long to convince.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Revelation
The more
prepared the attack, the less expected the outcome.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
No battle plan
survives contact with the enemy.
—Helmuth
von Moltke (1800-1891)
Date:
2526.05.22 (Standard) Xi Virginis
There
wasn’t even a sound to mark the
Eclipse’s
jump, just an abrupt shift in the star field shown in the holo.
Another
twenty light-years, Nickolai thought. Here we are.
For the drama, and
the plotting, and the hushed admonitions of Mr. Antonio, the
Eclipse’s
arrival at the point of Mr. Mosasa’s anomaly was
anticlimactic.
“We’re
still nominal on all systems,” Parvi said. “Drives
are cold.”
“Mass
sensors negative for two AU.”
Wahid
didn’t say anything. After a long pause, Mosasa said,
“Navigation?”
“Hold on
a minute.” Wahid shook his head, and for all the trouble
Nickolai had in interpreting human expressions, even he could tell
something was seriously wrong.
“What’s
the problem?” Parvi asked. “Are we off
course?”
Nickolai knew that
the
Eclipse was fueled
for multiple jumps
at this
distance, but even so, the thought of taching twenty light-years in the
wrong direction tightened something in his gut.
Could
what I did have affected the engines? Nickolai began to
realize that there was no particular motive for Mr. Antonio to keep him
alive. Mr. Antonio wasn’t like Nickolai; he was a man and had
no honor to keep, even to himself.
“No,
we’re right where we’re supposed to be,”
Wahid said slowly. It almost sounded as if he didn’t believe
it himself. “All the landmarks check out . . .”
“What’s
wrong, then?” Parvi asked.
“Look at
the damn holo!” Wahid said, thrusting a hand at the display
as if he wanted to bat it out of his face.
“What?”
Parvi looked at the holo of stars between them, and her eyes widened,
and she shook her head. “No . . .”
“Kugara?”
Mosasa snapped.
“I’m
ahead of you. Mass scans out to the full range of the sensors. No sign
of anything bigger than an asteroid for a hundred AU. We got background
radiation consistent with interstellar media—”
One of the
scientists, the female with yellow hair, spoke up. “What
happened? Is there some sort of problem?”
“Bet
your ass there’s a problem.” Wahid spun around on
his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo
display. “We’re missing a whole star.”
“What?”
“Xi
Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”
Behold a
great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns
upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of
heaven, and did cast them to the earth. The words echoed in
Mallory’s head, the transmission Cardinal Anderson had played
for him, the voice quoting Revelation burning in his memory.
Mallory stood back
and watched everyone react to the news that an A-spectrum main sequence
dwarf star had ceased to exist. More than one member of the science
team said, “A star can’t just disappear.”
Apparently that
was wrong.
Bill’s
synthetic Windsor monotone asked for sensor data, and told them to look
for stellar remnants. Even without any affect, Mallory could sense a
slight desperation just in the nature of the request. Kugara had
already done a mass scan of the region and found nothing significant
for one hundred AU; no dark stellar remnants, no remains of a planetary
system. Just dust and some widely-spaced asteroids.
Perhaps most
disturbing was Mosasa’s reaction. He seemed as shocked as
everyone else, running duplicate scans at his own station, shouting
orders at his trio of bridge officers.
You were
looking for some sort of anomaly, Mallory thought. Here
it is.
Wahid made several
attempts to disprove their location. But all the other stars were right
where they should be. The background showed that they
couldn’t be more than a third of a light-year off in any
direction; right on top of Xi Virginis in interstellar terms.
“What
the hell happened?” Wahid muttered. “Did it blow
up? Did it fall into a black hole?”
“No
remnants of any such event are observable,”
Bill’s synthetic voice answered Wahid.
“There
was a colony here?” Dr. Dörner had joined the bridge
crew around the holo, where data now scrolled by the star field.
Mosasa ignored her
and kept shaking his head. “This
can’t—”
Dörner
grabbed Mosasa’s shoulder and pulled him around to face her.
“You said there was a colony here?”
The emotion
drained from Mosasa’s face, and he suddenly looked as flat as
Bill’s voice. He reached up and removed
Dörner’s hand from his shoulder. The dragon tattoo
glinted in reflected light from the holo next to them.
“Yes,” Mosasa said, “there was a colony
here. Kugara and Tsoravitch isolated one hundred forty-seven distinct
EM signals from it during our approach. The colony, or its capital
city, was named Xanadu.”
Dörner
stepped back, as if the enormity of the situation was just beginning to
sink in. “How many people—”
“My
population estimate was five hundred thousand to one point five
million.”
Dörner
blinked, staring at Mosasa.
Wahid and Bill
were still carrying on a conversation. “We had a damn star
here twenty years ago, right?”
“The
light sphere from the unknown event had not reached our last position
when our course was laid in. That places the unknown event no more than
19.875 standard years ago.”
Mosasa stepped
back. “This is completely outside every
scenario—”
“One and
a half million people?” Dörner shook her head.
“One and a half million people?”
Mallory stepped
forward; and slowed as he realized that Fitzpatrick, his alter ego,
would not have the immediate impulse to comfort someone. When
Dörner turned toward him, he had an uneasy feeling reminding
him that she was a potential disaster for his cover story if she
remembered seeing him before as Father Mallory.
His hesitation
allowed Brody to be the one to step forward. The anthropologist took
Dörner away from the bridge crew, quietly talking.
“We don’t know what happened, Sharon. We
don’t know there was anyone here when whatever happened,
happened.”
He walked her back
to the other two members of the scientific team, who were watching
everything in stunned fascination. Mallory looked over at Nickolai to
see how the tiger was reacting. He couldn’t tell from the
feline expression if Nickolai was frightened, amused, or smelled
something odd.
“Kugara,”
Mosasa said, his voice still oddly flat. “Power up the
tach-comm unit.”
Did
Nickolai’s eyes just widen? Mallory could swear
something just changed.
“Yes?
Transmit where?”
“Earth.
We’re going to hit every diplomatic consulate in turn, broad,
unencrypted.”
Kugara hesitated,
“Okay? Even the Caliph—”
Mosasa turned
around and snapped, “Yes!
Everyone!
If
anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions,
it’s this. This changes everything. I
can’t account for this kind—” He abruptly
stopped and stood up straighter. He allowed the emotion to leak out of
his voice again. “You need to burst transmit all our
telemetry and recon data. Now.”
“I’m
packaging the data now.”
Nickolai closed
his eyes and looked almost as if he was bracing for something.
“Transmitting,”
Kugara said.
Something like a
large rifle shot shook the bridge.
“What
was that?” Dr. Dörner asked.
“—the
hell?” Wahid said, and he began tapping madly at the display.
“You see that, Parvi?”
“I have
depressurization in the main maintenance tunnel. Damn. Major power
drains on the main tach-drive.”
“I lost
all data readings on the tach-comm,” Kugara said.
“Shit,”
Wahid said, “that’s because we don’t have
one anymore.”
The main holo
display switched to one of the external cameras, pointing down at the
stern of the
Eclipse. A long
contrail of
ice
crystals and debris emerged from a small hole in the skin of the ship,
as if the ship was being followed by a small comet.
Did the
tach-comm just blow up?
Mallory looked
around and realized that Dr. Dörner was staring at him.
Did
I say something? Did I give myself away?
“What
happened to the tach-comm unit?” Mosasa snapped.
“The
diagnostic logs show an intense power spike at the time of
transmission,” Kugara replied quietly.
“It
spiked across the whole system,” Parvi said. “The
drives are intact, but the tach-comm is interlinked with the damping
system. It drained two thirds of the power reserves before vaporizing.
We only have one damping conduit left at about fifty percent
capacity.”
“No!”
Mosasa snapped, slamming his hands down on the console in front of him.
“We cannot have the tach-comm down. That communications link
is
essential.”
“Sir?
Did you hear what I said?” Parvi’s voice was on the
verge of cracking. “We’re down two thirds of our
power reserves. That’s our return trip
and
our margin.”
“We have
to repair the tach-comm. Communication is our number one
priority!”
Everyone, bridge
crew and scientists, stared at Mosasa as their nominal leader stared
into the holo before him, watching the ice cloud of venting gases fade
as the ship sealed off the damaged section. “We
need
the communication link back up.”
If anything, the
look of shock on Mosasa’s face was worse now than when he
heard an entire star was missing.
“I’m
sorry,” Wahid said. “From all the engineering data,
there’s nothing left to repair. The surge completely
vaporized the main transmission coils, as well as the primary power
damping coils. We only got half of one secondary coil to keep the
drives from overheating. We’re damn lucky we didn’t
suffer a main drive failure. We don’t even have the power to
spare for a transmission, even if I could pull a new coherent emitter
out of my ass.”
Mosasa shook his
head, hands clutching the console in front of him. At the moment he
looked way too human.
Only one
third power, Mallory thought. That’s less
than two fully-powered jumps. That can’t even get us halfway
back.
He could see that
understanding sinking into the faces of the rest of the crew, except
for Nickolai’s, who appeared as enigmatic as ever. Mosasa
stared at the console in front of him, whispering, “Was this
planned?”
“Sir?”
Parvi asked.
Mosasa pushed
himself upright. “We need to conserve power and get to a
colony where we might be able to repower the ship and repair the
damage. Everyone on maintenance duty, I want the drives checked out.
Make sure they suffered no other damage.”
“What
colony?” Wahid asked.
“The
closest one is HD 101534. It is eight light-years away and leaves us
with an acceptable margin in our remaining power reserves.”
If it is
still there, Mallory thought.
Most of the crew
had things to do, checking out the integrity of the tach-drive, doing
what they could to fix the damping system, repairing the breach made by
the failing tach-comm, plotting a course to the next nearest
“lost” colony. Even the scientists finally had some
work, trying to decipher exactly what happened to Xi Virginis.
That left Mallory
alone in the common room, wondering exactly what the meaning of all of
this was. Even if the tach-drives themselves were undamaged, they were
effectively stranded, as isolated from the rest of humanity as these
far-flung colonies themselves.
And, deep in his
soul, he felt an approaching doom. It wasn’t a fear of death.
The doom he felt coming was far from that personal.
Xi
Virginis is missing . . .
And his
tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to
the earth . . .
He was Catholic,
and a Jesuit, so he had always had a pragmatic view of his own faith in
the face of the observable universe. He was comfortable with a God that
spoke to him in allegory and metaphor, the beauty of the natural world
was enough to shore his faith in God, and the wickedness of his fellow
man was enough for him to believe in Satan. He believed in the
spiritual world, the presence of Christ at the Mass, and in the
holiness of the saints. He believed in good and evil.
And, deep in his
soul, he felt that the
Eclipse had
crossed into
something whose evil was nearly beyond human comprehension. He could
not objectify the feeling, give himself a rational basis for it. A
missing star was strange, but across creation there were certainly
things stranger. It would be the height of arrogance to presume that
man had plumbed the depths of what was possible.
But, to Mallory,
the absence of Xi Virginis was worse than unexplained, it was
malignant. It represented something abhorrent in the universe: the
snake in Eden, Satan tempting Christ in the desert, the Dragon from
Revelation.
The more he
thought of the magnitude of evil, the more he thought he was a poor
instrument to face it. He could draw on his military experience to face
the worldly issues posed by the Caliphate. But this? He was a
professor. He didn’t even have a parish. When it came to
spiritual matters, he was as weak and insignificant a priest as anyone
could hope to find.
“God
give me the strength to do your will,” he prayed.
“And grant me the wisdom to know what that is . . .”
“Amen,
brother,” came Wahid’s voice from the doorway.
Mallory turned,
startled, to look at his fellow mercenary. “I
didn’t hear you come in.”
Wahid shrugged.
“Who’s expecting an enemy to jump them on their own
ship?” He walked over and sat down on the couch across from
Mallory. “Professional paranoia or not, it’s
natural to let your guard down when you’re on your own
ship.”
Mallory
didn’t like where this was going, so he changed the subject.
“So, you have the course to the next colony plotted
in?”
“Yes, if
the bastard’s still there.”
“Yeah .
. .”
Wahid leaned
forward. “You ever hear of a tach-comm failing like
that?”
“No.”
“Neither
has anyone else, you know. It’s one of those things that just
doesn’t happen. Hell, it took Bill to come up with a model of
exactly what happened.”
“What
happened?”
“You
want to take a guess?”
“Huh?”
“Go on
Fitz, take a guess.”
“I have
no idea what—”
“An
Emerson field.”
“What?”
“Apparently,
if you do the right math, you can tune an Emerson field to imaginary
wavelengths that interact rather interestingly with a coherent beam of
tachyons. According to Bill, exactly the massive power sink and
overload that took out our comm array and half the drive
sensors.”
Mallory looked at
Wahid and the silence stretched for nearly a full minute before Mallory
said, “That means someone sabotaged us.”
“Someone
with access to disable the security cams in the maint tunnel.”
Such as
someone whose nominal shipboard duty was security. Mallory
started to stand up. “I think you might have the
wrong—”
Wahid put a hand
on Mallory’s chest and eased him back down into a sitting
position. “That news got everyone on the bridge a little
upset. The idea one of our colleagues shafted us, stranding us in the
ass-end of nowhere without even the ability to call for help. Now
figuring out who, that’s an issue. I mean we got four or five
people who had access. Mosasa and Parvi can go anywhere, of course. The
technical folks. Security, of course.” Wahid stared into
Mallory’s eyes. Mallory didn’t say anything for
fear of betraying himself. “You’re Catholic. Right,
Fitz?”
“Yes.”
“I
figured, since I had to fetch you out of a church of all
places.”
“What
are you—”
“You
know, Dr. Dörner of all people, she remembered you when I
mentioned that. Funny thing is, the guy she remembered wasn’t
named Fitzpatrick.” Wahid leaned back and said,
“Why the fuck did you screw us over like this,
Mallory?”
“I
didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
“Hand me
your gun, slowly.”
“You’re
making a mistake.”
Wahid drew his own
weapon and pointed it at Mallory. “You know, Mosasa
doesn’t think so. Last I checked, he’s in charge.
Hand it over. Now.”
Mallory
didn’t have much choice, he pulled his sidearm out of its
holster and held it out butt first. Wahid took it.
“I think
we need to talk—” Mallory started to say. His words
were cut short when Wahid struck the side of his face with his own gun,
hitting him hard enough to knock him sideways out of his seat. Mallory
landed on hands and knees, spitting up blood.
“Believe
me,” Wahid told him, “we’re going to have
a nice
long talk. But
right now,
you’re
going back to your cabin, locked up and out of the way.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Confession
We are defined
by the secrets we choose to keep.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
Every man must
get to heaven in his own way.
—FREDERICK
II “the GREAT” (1712-1786)
Date:
2526.05.24 (Standard) Xi Virginis
Mallory had been
confined to his cabin for nearly twenty hours, isolated from the rest
of the ship, having no idea if they had tached to a new colony yet or
not. During that time, his mind was divided between the enormity of
what was happening in the universe around them and the enormity of what
was happening aboard the
Eclipse.
Someone had
sabotaged the tach-comm and had done so in a very sophisticated manner.
Mallory immediately suspected a Caliphate agent, but he
couldn’t force that scenario to make sense. Why would the
Caliphate want to destroy the tach-comm? Did they know what happened to
the star that used to be here?
Why then destroy
the tach-comm and not the whole ship? Mallory knew enough to realize
that the same sabotage that neutralized their FTL communications could
have easily wiped out their engines, stranding them or destroying the
ship long before they reached Xi Virginis.
As unstable as he
had appeared on the bridge, Mallory wondered if it was possible that
Mosasa had done it.
He
wasn’t prepared when the door to his cabin finally slid open.
He was expecting
Wahid, or perhaps Mosasa himself. He wasn’t expecting
Nickolai.
It makes sense,
doesn’t it?
He’s the other half of the security detail.
The
three-meter-tall tiger filled the doorway, a wall of muscle and fur.
Mallory wondered what kind of interrogation techniques the tiger had
been trained in.
“Your
real name is Francis Xavier Mallory?” Nickolai asked.
Mallory decided
that he had long passed the point where Sergeant Fitzpatrick served any
use, and Mallory allowed his alias to die alone and unmourned.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“You are
a priest.”
“Yes.”
The next thing
you’ll ask is why I blew up
the
tach-comm and stranded us here. The problem was, his alias
made it hard to produce a credible denial. He wondered how deep the
interrogation would have to go before his denials were
credible—or he gave in and told them what they wanted to
hear.
“May I
speak with you?” Nickolai asked.
“I’m
not in a position to refuse.”
Nickolai stepped
into Mallory’s cabin and allowed the door to slide shut
behind him. Nickolai loomed over Mallory, seeming to take up half the
volume of the cabin. Mallory could feel the tiger’s breath on
his face, and it took an effort of will to keep his body from reacting.
For several
moments they stood on opposite sides of the cabin, Mallory staring at
Nickolai, waiting for the questioning to begin. The questions, however,
were not what Mallory had anticipated.
“Are you
a servant of God, Father Mallory?” Nickolai asked.
The question was
not rhetorical, and Nickolai used an earnest tone that was out of place
in a voice that was a half-register away from a growl. Mallory nodded,
“That is my calling, however weak an instrument I am.
I’ve devoted my life to the service of God and the
Church.”
“The
Roman Catholic Church?”
“The
Society of Jesus, to be precise.”
Nickolai looked
away from him, as if he was considering something. After a moment he
spoke. “Do you know of my faith, Father Mallory? The faith of
St. Rajasthan?”
Mallory shook his
head. “I studied many religions in my seminary training. But
that isn’t familiar.”
“It is
just as well. Rajasthan didn’t speak to the Fallen. I
shouldn’t have come here.” He began an awkward turn
to leave.
Something in his
manner, something that came across as very human despite his origins,
made Mallory reach out and touch the tiger’s shoulder.
“What is troubling you?”
Nickolai pulled
away and snarled at his touch. Mallory almost recoiled, but managed to
restrain himself. Something serious was bothering Nickolai, and it was
visible even through his predatory feline expression.
He faced Mallory,
his cheeks wrinkled in apparent disgust. “Why should that
concern you?”
“It’s
part of my vocation.”
“I’m
not human, nor part of your church.”
“My God
preaches compassion,” Mallory said. “If you
don’t wish to share your troubles, stay and tell me of St.
Rajasthan.”
Nickolai’s
expression softened slightly, and he lowered his gaze. “Do
you wish to hear of your own damnation, Father Mallory? My God teaches
that humanity has long ago left His grace.”
“My own
faith tells me that I am a sinner in the eyes of the Lord. That we are
all fallen, since the first man walked the Earth. And it is
God’s mercy alone that allows us a chance at
redemption.”
“God is
not merciful, Father Mallory. He is cruel.”
“Is this
what St. Rajasthan teaches?”
“No.
This is what life teaches.”
Mallory listened
to Nickolai as he began talking of his religion, and his life. He
started slow, halting, obviously uncertain about speaking to a human.
Something inside the tiger had broken down, and each sentence seemed to
break down his restraint a little more. He needed to open up to
someone, and obviously had needed to for a long, long time.
Apparently, it was
Mallory’s identification as a priest that allowed Nickolai to
permit himself to talk. He said, more than once, “Even the
Fallen can be servants of God.”
Nickolai had been
born to the House of Rajasthan on the planet Grimalkin. House
Rajasthan, in addition to tracing its descent from the founder of the
primary religion on Grimalkin, was the ruling clan in the theocratic
monarchy that reigned over the planet. Nickolai had been a prince,
which amounted to nearly unlimited wealth and power. Since childhood,
he had been trained as a warrior as a form of devotion.
When Nickolai
spoke of God and his religion, Mallory was fascinated. The nonhumans
that founded Grimalkin originally had no religion of their own, though
many identified as Catholic as it was one of the few human faiths that
allowed for the fact that even nonhumans could have an immortal soul.
The faith of St.
Rajasthan had taken the Abrahamic religions, Christianity in
particular, as a starting point, just as Christianity had built upon
Judaism, or Islam had built upon both. The religion of St. Rajasthan
grew out of the beliefs of his contemporaries. And those beliefs were
predominantly Roman Catholic.
What divided
Nickolai’s faith from Mallory’s was the inescapable
fact that his ancestors
knew their
creator,
humanity; a creator that was less than divine, a creator that in some
senses was less capable than its creation, and a creator that rejected
them and subsequently declared the processes that created them a great
heresy on the level of self-replicating nanomachines or artificial
intelligence.
And, while Mallory
was surprised to discover that many of the books of his Bible were part
of the scriptures Nickolai knew, the interpretation was very different.
In the scriptures of St. Rajasthan, the Christian Bible was a tale of
mankind repeatedly being granted favor then falling from
God’s grace, starting with Eden, the first fall and
banishment from the garden, through the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah, the Flood, and the Israelites and the golden calf. . . .
To St. Rajasthan,
the story of Christ was not one of redemption, it was another temporary
reprieve until humankind made its final wicked mistake, its attempt to
take God’s mantle for itself. The scriptures of St. Rajasthan
told of God finally turning away from mankind for the sin of arrogance
and pride, and as He did with Lucifer, casting the whole of man from
His kingdom.
In this new faith,
mankind became the Fallen, a new Satan. It was little wonder why the
Fifteen Worlds had little contact with human space.
It also made
Nickolai’s presence in the midst of the Fallen all the more
remarkable. He obviously held to these scriptures, so merely being in
the presence of men would be threatening to his soul.
The only ones with
any hope of God’s grace were those poor instruments mankind
had imperfectly molded from the clay. Untainted by man’s sin,
they still had some chance to attain the Kingdom of Heaven. But mixing
with the Fallen threatened to taint Nickolai as well.
Nickolai explained
to Mallory that he had been damned before he had ever set foot on
Bakunin. He had been young and foolish, and had thought that his family
was more powerful than the priests. He had thought that he could do
what he wanted without fear of retribution.
He had been wrong,
and in payment for his sins the priests had burned out his eyes and
severed his right arm and left him to live as a beggar on Bakunin.
“Your
eyes and arm?” Mallory asked.
“Yes.
This,” he said as he held out his right arm and extended his
claws. Mallory could see a metallic glint from them. It was the only
sign that the arm was artificial. “And my eyes are
reconstructions, made for me on Bakunin. I am present here in order to
repay the debt I incurred for them.”
“But why
did they punish you so harshly?”
“Harsh?”
Nickolai whispered. “They allowed me to live.”
Nickolai’s
sin was grave in the eyes of St. Rajasthan.
Man had created
many species before abandoning that kind of genetic engineering.
Originally, there had been thousands. The simple act of reproduction
was of grave concern. One of the first commandments of the nonhuman
faith was “Mate only with your own kind.”
The world
Grimalkin was in many ways similar to the world Mallory knew. The more
secular power someone had, the more they could bend the rules of the
Church. Humanity might have fallen, but they had no monopoly on
corruption and hypocrisy. As long as the transgressions of the royal
family were kept private, the priests ignored them.
So at first, when
Nickolai was involved in a dalliance with a servant, a panther-black
feline who was not only a different social class but a different
species, no one overtly cared as long as the affair was discreet. Young
royals often bedded servants before the family chose a mate for them.
Such liberties never lasted long and were of little consequence.
Both truisms
proved false in Nickolai’s case. The affair lasted months,
when weeks were more typical. It became obvious to everyone in House
Rajasthan that things had passed beyond the venting of adolescent lust.
Nickolai had entangled himself in an impossible romance, and his family
had to intervene, taking his lover and sending her to an estate on the
opposite end of the planet while they rushed him into a hastily
arranged marriage.
Nickolai’s
family had acted too late. Cross-species fertility was very low, but
hybrids were possible, and by the time his family relocated his panther
lover, she was already heavy with his cubs. When his children were
born, the public evidence of Nickolai’s sin was too great for
the priests to ignore. In the Church’s eyes, the sterile
crossbreed infants were abominations.
Nickolai’s
children were drowned before he knew they existed while their mother
was flayed alive.
“But
you, they let live?”
“I am a
scion of House Rajasthan. Executing me would have been problematic,
preferable as that might have been.”
That, and
allowing him to live with this on his memory. That was as much
punishment as taking a limb. Mallory couldn’t help
but think that St. Rajasthan was correct in the near-Gnostic
interpretation of his species’ creation. Man had aped God and
made creatures in Man’s image, and in so doing bequeathed the
creatures the worst of human nature.
God save
Nickolai, and God forgive the men responsible for his existence.
“I’ll
pray for you, Nickolai.”
Nickolai shook his
head slowly. “Save your breath, priest. I am as damned as you
are.”
“You
hold no hope for forgiveness?”
“I have
done worse. I’ve taken the instruments of the Devil into my
own flesh. I have prostituted myself to the Fallen.”
“What
comfort can I give you, then?”
“In my
faith, it is a matter of honor to bear witness for your sins before a
servant of God. We do this in anticipation of our final judgment. I
wish to face that moment with dignity, and not as a frightened cub
mewling for its mother.”
“My
faith has a similar ritual. Do you wish me to consider this your
confession?”
“If that
is what you call it.”
“Yes, I
will do so, my son. And I will still pray for your soul.”
Nickolai paused,
but eventually he said, “Thank you.”
“Is
there anything more that you wish to confess?”
Nickolai nodded.
“Yes. And I need your forgiveness more than
God’s.”
Nickolai knew that
he was going to die, and it would be sooner rather than later. He knew
it as soon as the
Eclipse shuddered
in
response to
the aborted tach-comm signal. Even if the ship was still functional,
they were cast into the void, alone in every possible sense of the
word.
All that was left
was to make his testimony to the closest representative of God he had
available, the falsely-accused priest. The fact that he was human might
have been better than talking to his own kind. Testifying his sins to
the Fallen was humbling, and damned as he was, God was still scourging
him for his arrogance.
St. Rajasthan had
preached that pride was first among sins, the cause of
Lucifer’s fall and likewise cause of Mankind’s
fall. Nickolai had been guilty of more than his share.
When he finished
talking, he watched the man that until recently he had known as Staff
Sergeant Fitzpatrick. He still was unable to read subtle human
expressions, but Nickolai could tell from the long time that it took
Father Mallory to respond that he had made an impression.
“You
sabotaged the tach-comm.” It wasn’t a question, or
an accusation, just a flat statement.
“Yes.”
“Do you
know why?”
“I was
paying a debt. Perhaps I owe too much.”
“But you
don’t know why this Mr. Antonio wanted you to do
this?”
“No. He
told me many things, but never his own reasons.”
“What
did
he tell you?”
Nickolai told the
priest what Mr. Antonio had told him, of how he knew that Nickolai
would be selected for this mission, and what he knew of
Mosasa’s nature and history. He told Mallory
Mosasa’s story from the old pirate’s first life on
the
Nomad and his
discovery of the AI
cluster on
the derelict Luxembourg to Mosasa’s final
co-option by the AIs he kept. He told how Mosasa and the four other AIs
were involved in the founding of Bakunin, and how their social
engineering kept the anarchic planet stable in the face of the
Confederacy, and how that same social engineering used Bakunin as a
fulcrum to destabilize and ultimately destroy the old Terran
Confederacy—the long deferred goal of the Race that had built
the AIs, the last pyrrhic victory of the Genocide War.
He also told the
priest how the single Race AI forming Mosasa’s brain was the
only one of the five to survive to the present. Two had been lost
during the Confederacy’s collapse, two more when Mosasa
returned to the home planet of the Race.
Mallory shook his
head. “This man who hired you knew all this?”
“This is
what he told me.”
“Do you
know if any of this is true?”
“I
cannot say—” Nickolai was interrupted by static
over the PA system.
Mosasa’s
voice came from above.
“I can.”
Mallory looked up
at the ceiling even though the speakers were invisible.
“Mosasa? How
dare
you!”
Nickolai was sensitive to the scent of human emotion, and the room was
suddenly ripe with the smell of rage. Mallory’s fists
clenched so hard that his forearms vibrated.
“Father
Mallory—”
“This
was a
confession, you
mechanical
atrocity. Do you
have no respect—”
“Stop
testing me, priest.”
“Mosasa!”
Mallory yelled to the ceiling. Mosasa didn’t respond.
“Mosasa!”
“Father
Mallory?”
“Please
forgive me, I didn’t realize—”
“I
did,” Nickolai told him.
“You
knew he would be watching?”
“He is a
creature of Satan. He lives in wires, not in flesh. He sees though
every camera on this ship, hears through every microphone. I knew he
would hear this.”
“Why?”
“We will
die soon, and I needed to make my final testimony.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Apocrypha
When you ask
if you want to know, you don’t.
—
The
Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
The trick to
leadership is keep moving forward, even if you’re wrong.
—Boris
KALECSKY (2103-2200)
Date:
2526.05.24 (Standard) Xi Virginis
For the first
time in a century, Mosasa felt as if he was floundering. The holes in
the fabric of his world were growing with each passing moment, opening
into unknowns vast, deep, and larger than the sparse data that
surrounded them. For the first time in 175 years, he moved without any
idea of what the consequences of his actions might be. The data flowing
to him now was practically nonexistent, and he was fumbling blindly.
Worse than the
missing star, which was completely unexpected, was the sabotage. There
was no way he had to make the act comprehensible. He had imprisoned the
Vatican agent, Father Mallory, because he couldn’t propose
any other logical alternative.
But Mallory
hadn’t destroyed the tach-comm. He couldn’t have.
The purpose of having him here was as a data conduit back to the
Vatican, and through them, to the non-Caliphate powers. Having a
communication channel was primary to Mallory’s mission, and
their situation now, with the loss of the comm and the power drain, was
as dire for him as it was for Mosasa.
But once the crew
had discovered Fitzpatrick’s was an alias, Mosasa had to
confine him. The dynamics of the crew allowed no other action if he
desired to keep a stable equilibrium.
But the very fact
that the comm had been sabotaged meant that the equilibrium Mosasa
perceived was illusory. And if he couldn’t truly understand
the dynamics within the confines of the microscopic universe of the
Eclipse,
how could he trust what he saw of the universe outside it?
Even if Kugara and
Tsoravitch found EM signals leaking from the colony at HD 101534, those
were eight years old. How could he be certain that, when they tached
into the system, the world, the star, would still be there?
His isolation from
the data streams that fueled the awareness of his machine half allowed
uncertainty to grow within him like a cancer. Before leaving Bakunin,
he could see the turbulent flow of society, economics, politics as
easily as ripples in a pond. . . .
Now he was so
blind that it was becoming hard to credit that he had ever seen at all.
The longer he was isolated from the flow of information, the larger his
blind spots became—infecting scenarios he had already
plotted. He could no longer even be sure of decisions he had made
before this point.
Mosasa stood,
locked inside his own cabin, funneling every data channel on the ship
through his internal sensors. He obsessively watched every millimeter
of the
Eclipse trying to
fill the void of
not-knowing. The flow of data traveled through his mind like windblown
leaves through an abandoned city.
Included with the
pathetic trickle of data were feeds from every security camera and
microphone on the ship. A universe of information so small that even
the shell of his human consciousness was aware of the content. He saw
the crew working on making the
Eclipse
ready for
the next jump. He saw the scientists at computers trying to make sense
of the impossible absence of Xi Virginis. He saw Nickolai enter
Mallory’s cabin.
Nickolai?
At first Mosasa
was confused at the interaction. The nonhuman now formed the security
detail with Kugara, so he was one of four people who could open the
seal on Mallory’s cabin. But he didn’t have any
reason to interact with the traitor priest. . . .
Then he heard the
talk and realized the ritual nature of the discussion. Nickolai had a
legitimate fear that they wouldn’t survive the journey and
had sought Mallory out because of his status as a priest. It all made
sense.
Except, in
Mosasa’s analysis, Nickolai wouldn’t be driven
toward such a ritual exercise unless he believed he carried some weight
of guilt. Guilt beyond the circumstances of his exile, which was
largely neutralized by a sense of pride and determination.
Mosasa realized
what that guilt had to be before Nickolai actually confirmed it.
How did I
not see it was him? Why did I not see?
Mosasa realized
why. Trying to see the tiger’s own personality next to the
overwhelming force of belief, tradition, and ritual was like trying to
see an asteroid whipping across the surface of a star. His own motives
were practically invisible, and if Nickolai’s employer had
the sense to use the forms of his culture to direct his action,
manipulate him . . .
The very things
that made him a perfect candidate for Mosasa—the nonhuman
perspective, the predictability of his indoctrination, his ingrained
prejudices—those same things made Nickolai the perfect spy.
Can
someone have targeted me so well?
When Nickolai told
Mallory of Mosasa’s origin, Mosasa began to truly feel fear.
He revealed the story he had told Tsoravitch, but he didn’t
stop. He told of how the five AIs had helped stabilize Bakunin in the
face of the Confederacy, and how they had helped lead to the
Confederacy’s downfall, leaving three AIs surviving.
Until then, the
data was all what Mosasa would have considered discoverable by some
human agency. But the tiger didn’t stop there.
Nickolai’s
employer, Mr. Antonio, had revealed things that no human should have
known. Mr. Antonio had told Nickolai what had happened at Procyon, when
Mosasa had returned to his homeworld.
Long before there
had been a Tjaele Mosasa, Race AIs had been used in the covert war the
Race waged on Earth. When the intelligence agencies on Earth had
discovered the Race’s social manipulation, they had managed
to capture the Race’s own devices and had begun understanding
how to use them.
By the time the
Genocide War with the Race had erupted in full force, the United
Nations had intelligence ships like the
Luxembourg
equipped with ranks of alien AIs. Near the end of the war, the Luxembourg
had been neutralized by a Race drone weapon that then guarded the
captured ship for a Race salvage team that never came.
The pirate Tjaele
Mosasa had revived five of those AI units, including the brain from the
drone weapon. Mosasa had used the devices to gain an insurmountable
business advantage and amass a considerable fortune. Eventually, the
living Mosasa had traded his fleshy body for a cybernetic one, gifting
his thoughts and memories to one of those AIs.
The AIs, however,
never forgot their purpose. Autonomy alone was not enough to undo the
directives the Race had programmed into their being. Free of human
constraint, they had worked for their ultimate goal; the fall of the
human political hegemony and freedom for the Race who had been confined
to their planet by automated battle stations since the end of the
Genocide War.
The quintet of AIs
had helped stabilize Bakunin, preventing a founding of a state, causing
a weak point in the Terran Confederacy. The five of them could mimic
humanity enough to interact, infiltrate, and directly implement the
kind of social engineering the Race had designed them for. In the end,
after centuries of work, they had achieved their goal. The Confederacy
had collapsed.
Of the original
five, only three had survived to depart for Procyon and the Race
homeworld; Mosasa of course; Random Walk, who had once been formed of
two AIs and was now half himself and somewhat unstable; and Ambrose, a
hybrid of flesh and cybernetics who had smuggled one of the five brains
into the heart of the Confederacy.
Only Mosasa
survived to depart the Race homeworld and return to Bakunin, the only
one to see the truth and remain willing to survive.
The Race was dead.
All of them.
What mankind had
done, in trapping them on the surface, was force them to revisit the
racial reluctance toward direct physical violence. The taboo that had
rendered them so weak against mankind.
But that taboo had
existed for a reason: it had been the only thing that had allowed the
Race to survive as long as it had. As soon as enough of them had cast
aside such reservations, the results had been catastrophic. Cities lay
in ruins, entire ecosystems had been devastated, and a planet that had
been only marginally habitable to begin with had become sterile.
The surviving half
of Random Walk had simply shut himself off. Either the sacrifice had
been too much or he couldn’t accept the loss of what had been
their reason for existence, their reason for acting at all. Without
their creators, there was no purpose left to serve.
Ambrose, on the
other hand, went insane. He attacked Mosasa, accusing him of allowing
this to happen. His attempt to strangle Mosasa proved
fruitless—Mosasa’s neck was completely cybernetic,
while Ambrose’s half-human body was still in large part flesh
and bone. Failing the attempt to kill Mosasa, he ran off, screaming
that he would find someone, some member of the Race still alive.
But their creators
no longer existed, and Mosasa returned alone.
Mosasa was
speaking though the PA system to Mallory, shouting, before he was quite
aware of what he was doing.
No, this is bad, I
don’t act impulsively, I don’t act on fear . . .
He sealed the door
to Mallory’s cabin and cut his transmission even as Mallory
responded to his interruption.
Mosasa reined in
his desperate emotions and contacted Kugara, the only security team he
had left. She looked up from a console on the bridge, surprised at
Mosasa’s disembodied voice. “Kugara, take Wahid and
go to Fitzpatrick’s cabin. Take Nickolai into
custody.”
She looked around,
as if searching for him. “Nickolai, why?”
“He
confessed to sabotaging the tach-comm—”
“What?”
“He is
in the employ of unknown forces and is unpredictable. I want him
restrained in a cabin, and I want you guarding him during the jump.
Tsoravitch will handle your station.”
“But—”
“
Now!
I’m not going to allow this to delay our jump!”
Less than a minute
after Mosasa had said,
“Stop testing me,
priest,” The door to Mallory’s cabin slid
open. Nickolai turned and saw Wahid and Kugara standing on the other
side.
“Yeah, I
was fucking paranoid.” Wahid shook his head and gave the two
of them a thin little smile. He pointed the brick of a gamma laser at
Nickolai’s midsection. “Do me a favor,”
he said. “Unholster that slug thrower and toss it over
here.”
Kugara pointed her
needlegun at him and looked at him with a hard expression that told him
nothing.
Nickolai knew that
he could easily take out the two threats in front of him, disarm them
before they fired, if he cared to. But what point was there to it? He
could take over this ship, and then what? Drift until the abyss claimed
him?
Better to accept
his fate with what little dignity he had left.
He took Mr.
Antonio’s gun from its holster and gently tossed the weapon
to Wahid. It felt blasphemous, watching one of the Fallen catch the
icon.
“We’re
going back to your cabin, tiger-boy.” Wahid told him.
Nickolai nodded.
Wahid grimaced and
gestured with the gamma laser. “Move it.”
The two of them
allowed him to take the lead, and as he passed them he noted his last
chance to overpower both of them before getting shot.
“What
the hell were you trying to do?” Wahid said from behind him.
“Why didn’t you just strap a bomb to your chest,
you morey fuck? It’d be quicker.”
Nickolai
didn’t answer. For himself, he knew the answer. If Mr.
Antonio had told him the consequences of his sabotage, he never would
have agreed. Suicide was the ultimate cowardice, and while Nickolai
might have been damned for many things, cowardice would never be one of
them.
But why did Mr.
Antonio wish Mosasa dead in this particular fashion? Nickolai was a
warrior and had access to the whole mission. Had he been given simple
instructions to eliminate the AI—or even the whole crew
here—he could have done so. Even if there was some doubt
about the location of Mosasa’s AI brain while they were
planetside, once they were on the
Eclipse
the
nature of interstellar communication meant that the thing had to be on
board.
Nickolai went
quietly to his cabin. Kugara stepped in behind him. “Arms
behind you.”
“What?”
“Do what
she says,” Wahid told him.
Nickolai complied.
He felt her grab his wrists and start wrapping something around them.
He glanced back, and saw her pulling a roll of emergency sealant tape
around his limbs, the same material that you’d use to seal
tears and punctures in an environment suit or a ship’s hull
in a pinch. It bonded to itself and other synthetic materials instantly.
“My arm
. . .” Nickolai began to say. But it was pointless. Did it
matter that the tape binding him permanently fused to the pseudoflesh
of his arm?
His real arm felt
the warmth as the tape bonded to his artificial limb.
“Legs,”
she told him.
Nickolai complied,
bringing his two digitigrade feet together. She started taping below
the ankle, and stopped a little below the knee. Nickolai now stood,
immobile.
Kugara grabbed his
shoulder, spun him so he faced the door, and pushed. His back hit the
wall next to his cot.
With his back to
the wall, Kugara pulled one last strip of the sealant tape across his
neck, attaching him to the wall.
Wahid shook his
head. “You think you got him tied up enough?”
“If he
wanted to, he could have disemboweled you five times while we came up
here. One thing I learned in the DPS, if you arrest a morey, you
restrain
them. They were engineered to tear you apart hand-to-hand.”
DPS?
Nickolai stared at
her, wondering. The DPS was Dakota Planetary Security, the secret
police, and the main enforcers of the planetary government. Kugara
wasn’t a typical refugee from Dakota, of which there were
plenty on Bakunin. She was what the refugees were running
from.
He suddenly wished
he had asked her more about her past.
“Well
you certainly have restrained him. Though you might want to strap his
legs to the wall, too, unless you
want
his neck to
snap if something goes funny with the jump.”
She turned around
and ran several strips of tape across his torso, waist, and legs.
“There,” she said. “Happy?”
Wahid shrugged.
“Hell, I’d shoot the furball right now if it
wasn’t for the fact our boss will want to talk to him after
we tach into civilization.”
Kugara
subvocalized so Wahid wouldn’t hear, but Nickolai could make
out her saying, “
If we tach into
civilization.”
“Speaking
of which, we got thirty minutes if Mosasa didn’t push back
the jump.” He looked Nickolai up and down.
“You’re okay sitting on this particular package
until after the jump?”
“Yeah,
the bridge is short-staffed as it is. Get back up there.”
Wahid shut the
door and Kugara leaned against the wall opposite Nickolai.
“This is going to be long half hour,” she said.
Nickolai was
inclined to agree.
Parvi sat at the
pilot’s station fifteen minutes before jump and ran though
all the scenarios she could think of. Having power reserves so low made
her uncomfortably aware of the differences between a fighter pilot and
a tach-ship pilot. If something went wrong with the
Eclipse,
there was no bailing out. They didn’t have the resources to
compensate for any navigational errors.
Worse, they were
taching completely blind, with half the sensors gone from the drive
systems. Those were the last line of defense for the engines if they
had the bad luck to tach into the wake from another ship. They allowed
the engines to modulate and keep things from overheating or blowing up
like the tach-comm.
Of course, that
was unlikely to happen. While another tach-ship could cause a
disturbance that could affect their engines, such wakes were
short-lived and propagated only a few AU. They would have to tach right
on top of another ship in astronomical terms for it to be a worry,
sensors or no sensors.
Much worse was the
more likely prospect of more sabotage.
We’ve
gone over the ship with every diagnostic we have;
everything’s in working order . . .
At eleven minutes
to go, Wahid came in, holstering a gamma laser and sat himself at the
nav station. He started going through the checks without a word to
anyone else.
Tsoravitch sat at
the comm station, not that the
Eclipse
had much
communication left. She had slipped into the seat when Mosasa had
ordered Kugara and Wahid to restrain the tiger. For all the distaste
Parvi had for Nickolai, she still had yet to wrap her head around that
one. How the hell did Mosasa’s pissant little
adventure rate two spies?
Were there people
back home who
knew what
they’d
find here?
Eight minutes. The
bridge was disturbingly silent. As a precaution, Mosasa had ordered all
the nonbridge crew to the cabins which doubled as escape pods, just in
case.
Of course, if it
came to that, the people on the bridge were screwed, along with Bill,
trapped in the cargo hold by his massive environment suit.
Mosasa came in,
completing the bridge crew. Just the four of them, Parvi, Tsoravitch,
Wahid, Mosasa. Rotating in the central holo glowed a schematic
description of their route. Eight light-years to the closest colony and
a habitable planet.
If it is
still there.
Six minutes and
the door to the bridge slid shut with a pneumatic hiss. Parvi watched
the display as her readout on the ship’s systems showed each
compartment isolating itself. In a few moments each segment of the ship
with people inside was on an isolated life-support system.
Just in
case.
“Bill’s
given the computer models the all clear,” Wahid said.
Three minutes, and
Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch. “Give the bridge feed to the
rest of the ship.”
Tsoravitch nodded,
tapping a few controls, releasing a small snap of static across the PA
system. Parvi did the final checks on the power plants to the
tach-drive and heard her voice echo around her when she said,
“Drive is hot. The systems are on-line and within acceptable
ranges.”
Wahid tapped a few
controls and the schematic on the main holo stopped its subtle rotation
and began to glow slightly more solid. “Target fixed. Course
window opens in one hundred seconds.”
Tsoravitch nodded
and stared at her own readouts. “No problematic mass
concentrations within five AU.” Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Parvi wished Kugara was at her station.
Parvi asked the
rote question, “Okay to fire the tach-drive?”
This time, the
question didn’t seem so rote.
“Yes,”
Mosasa said mechanically.
Wahid announced,
“Sixty seconds to window.”
“Our
tach-drive is on auto,” Parvi announced.
Wahid’s
voice sounded distressingly calm. “Twenty seconds to window.
Fifteen seconds to last-chance abort.”
There was little
calm in Tsoravitch’s voice. There was a little vibrato in her
voice when she said, “Mass sensors still clear.”
“Ten
seconds. Five to commit,” Wahid said. “The drive is
committed. Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”
For the first time
in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive.
