Prophets (24 page)

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.

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)

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—

“Huh, what?”

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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“Why?”

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 . . .

“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.

“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.”

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.