Prophets (13 page)

At the moment that wasn't his concern either.

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

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

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

“Perhaps,” Parvi said. “Talk, then.”

“Not here,” Mallory said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The universe is full of coincidences.”

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

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

“Did you?”

“How could I?” she asked. “Did you?”

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

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

“Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

Parvi laughed. “You're being paranoid.”

“Wahid has a good point about professional paranoia.”

“You should go get some sleep.”

“Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

“You aren't anything special, Fitzpatrick.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“You chose to be here.”

“That doesn't mean that Mosasa didn't plan for me to be here.”

“His AIs aren't magic.”

Mallory shook his head. “You aren't going to answer me, are you?”

“What's the point? What if I told you that he had every intention of luring you here, hiring you, and taking you off toward Xi Virginis? Would that make any difference at all? Would you quit and go hire off to fight some corporation's brushfire war?”

Mallory got the strong feeling that Mosasa and Parvi knew quite well why he was here and were exploiting it for some reason. Unfortunately, Parvi's assessment of the situation was accurate. Confirming that knowledge probably wouldn't change what he was doing.

“I still would like to know why.”

“Asking that question would presuppose that Mosasa is in the habit of telling me the reasons he does things. I assure you, he doesn't.” There was an edge to her voice, and it was hard to tell if the displeasure she felt was directed at him or Mosasa.

“Perhaps I should bring this up with him,” he said.

“Perhaps you should.” When Mallory turned to go, Parvi added, “For what it's worth, he has me recruit a lot of people.”

“What?” He turned around again.

She looked off toward the tach-ship back in the hangar. The displeasure hadn't left her face or her voice, but he began to feel that it wasn't directed at him. “He has me recruit a lot of people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that for the past five years I've been paid very well to make sure certain people signed with the BMU. You're one of many, like I said. Nothing special.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

She turned and glared at him. “Because the pay is damn good for negligible risk,” she snapped at him. “This conversation is over.”

The anger was directed at him now, but Mallory got the sense that it was only because he was convenient. He thought back to how she acted around Nickolai and Kugara, and even before that, when he'd pointed out the tiger that almost had to have been Nickolai at ProMex.

If she
didn't
approve, Mallory wondered how she felt about Mosasa. Working for a Race AI was several steps beyond working with Nickolai. The Church certainly placed machines outside the sphere of God's grace.

She walked to the door, and he asked a last question even though he didn't expect and answer. Not here.

“Why do you work for him?”

She stopped and without turning around she repeated, “Because the pay is damn good for negligible risk.”

Mosasa sat in his office lit only by the holos surrounding him. One showed the interior of the hangar and Sergeant Fitzpatrick watching Parvi leave. He barely paid attention; it was just a small drop in the ocean of information that enveloped him, part of a current caused by the mass of the Vatican trailing its massive slow-moving fingers in the human information stream. A necessary data point that would keep him connected to human space after his ship passed into the information desert between here and Xi Virginis.

It was a very odd question. It had been literally a century since he had doubted himself. He had built himself so many layers of decisions, so many preplanned branch-points, so many models of so many outcomes, that he never had cause to be uncertain . . .

The void he faced, the empty in the vast space of light-years between the core of human space and the colonies clustered around Xi Virginis, would be the most isolated he had ever been since his return to Procyon.

More than anything else, Mosasa dreaded uncertainty. Ever since he had abandoned his fleshy body to inhabit the remains of one of five salvaged Race AIs, he had inherited the AI's desire to perceive all of its data environment.

There had been five of them, almost a single mind between them.

He was the only one left.

Two had been sacrificed long ago to help fulfill the military directive of the AI's programming. The quintet Mosasa had been part of had managed to bring down the old Confederacy and break the human political hegemony.

The other two Mosasa had lost on the Race homeworld itself when they had finally returned. So long after the war, after the human quarantine of the Procyon system, the Race was dead.

All
of them.

What mankind had done, in trapping them on the surface, was to force them to revisit the racial reluctance toward direct physical violence. The taboo that rendered them so weak against mankind.

Unfortunately, they had developed that taboo for a reason. It had been the only thing that had allowed them to survive as long as they had. As soon as enough of them had cast aside such reservations, the results were devastating. Cities in ruins, the entire ecosystem devastated, a planet that was only marginally habitable to begin with had become sterile.

It was a devastating discovery, and possibly due to his imprinted human personality, Mosasa had been the only one mentally strong enough to survive seeing the pointlessness of their victory over the Confederacy.

For some reason, Mosasa had now started to see the void between the stars as the desert on the Race's homeworld—absent of data, absent of people, absent of his creators . . .

Absent of God.

Mosasa dismissed that line of thought and shifted data streams. He had just noticed some local information movement that seemed to flow from the direction of the Caliphate. As expected, placing the destination Xi Virginis on a public database had begun to provoke a reaction.

It is harder to choose your friends than your enemies.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859)

Mosasa's briefing had lasted through the evening, and Nickolai walked outside into a darkened spacecraft graveyard. His new eyes saw every star and every ship with razor clarity. He looked up and allowed himself to feel his own smallness.

He stretched his fingers out until his claws emerged, black on one hand, gunmetal gray on the other. In his real hand, he could feel the tendons stretch and the joints crack. In the artificial hand, he only felt the slight feedback as what passed for flesh wrapping it felt a slight increase in tension.

“So, can I buy you a drink?”

It took a second before he realized the question was addressed to him. He turned his head away from the stars to look down and see Kugara, the Angel, looking up at him.

“You look like you could use a friend,” she told him.

Nickolai turned away. He had fallen out of the habit of looking at people during conversation. “Do I?” he asked. He wasn't quite sure how else to respond. He owed her respect, not only because she wasn't human, but because he would be working with her for the foreseeable future.

He snorted and shook his head, because the irony of that thought wasn't lost on him. Personal feelings were what condemned him in the first place.

“Did I say something funny?” Kugara asked.

“No,” Nickolai told her.

When the single word faded, Nickolai realized how quiet it was out here in the desert.

“You aren't going to elaborate on that, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” Kugara said. “How about that drink?”

Kugara had her own transportation, an old contragrav aircar that had the turquoise-and-black markings of a Proudhon Spaceport Security Vehicle, though the skin was now dominated by the matte gray primer color of flexseal patches. It had an open canopy, so it could handle Nickolai's height, though when he got in, the craft briefly suffered a hard tilt to the right before the sensors encouraged the underpowered injection unit to compensate for the mass distribution.

To make room for his legs, Nickolai had to push his seat all the way back, and in response the craft tilted rearward for a moment.

“Gad.” Kugara said, watching a few red lights on the dash display in front of her. “Guess no aerobatics with you in the car.”

She waited until the craft found its level, then she punched the vector jets, shooting the protesting vehicle across the desert and back toward the city.

Nickolai looked at Kugara. Her hair trailed back in the wind, and her face was dominated by a clenched grin that Nickolai would normally attribute to a huntress just prior to a kill.

“What do you want of me?” he asked.

“We're on the same job,” she said against the wind. “Can't I buy a comrade a drink?”

“I notice I'm the only one to whom you offered.”

“We both need an ally, scion of House Rajasthan.” She turned that predatory grin toward him and said, “Despite what the maps say, you're not in the Fifteen Worlds anymore.”

Kugara took him to a bar in a part of Proudhon run-down enough to have been in his old neighborhood in Godwin. It was part of a mall that had taken over an old assembly building. The space was large enough that none of the shops and restaurants inhabiting the space felt the need to build ceilings. The bar was one of the few that felt the need for actual walls.

It took a few moments for Nickolai to realize that Kugara had chosen this place with him in mind. With the ceiling of the original assembly plant a good forty meters above them, he could walk around without ducking. In addition, the bar had circular tables and stools that allowed him to sit without being crammed in a human-sized booth, or wedging his tail into a tall-backed chair.

She let him pick a table. He took one to the rear of the place, putting as much distance between himself and the human crowd as he could. The stares from the patrons were becoming familiar, and he barely noticed the crowd edging away from him. He sat with his back to the wall and wondered what he should think about Kugara's interest in him. He wondered if this was part of Mr. Antonio's plan.

A pitcher of amber liquid slid in front of Nickolai, and Kugara took a seat across the table from him. She had a mug filled with black liquid, with a head the color and texture of foam insulation.

“Allies, you said?” Nickolai asked her.

She raised her glass. “Have a drink,” she told him. “To a profitable mission.”

Nickolai had worked around humans enough to understand the custom. He took the pitcher in his hand and raised it, echoing the toast. Proportionately, the pitcher fit his hand about the same way her mug fit hers. “A profitable mission,” he said. He took a swig with her and set the pitcher down. It wasn't the spiced ale from Grimalkin, but it was more tolerable than most human beverages.

She looked at his pitcher, then at her own mug. Nickolai's pitcher was nearly half-empty, where the head in her mug had only lowered a couple of fingers. “I can see you're an expensive date.”