Prophets (18 page)

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.”

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.”

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

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

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)

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.