Prophets (33 page)

“Where it came from is irrelevant,” a man agreed from across the room.

“It is only irrelevant if it is not a harbinger of a greater threat,” she told them all. “Need I remind you where its trail points back to?”

“Coincidence,” someone muttered.

“No evidence at all—”

“You are looking for problems where there are none—”

“Once it is destroyed—”

Alexander let the dialogue shoot back and forth without enforcing any rules of order. A limited amount of chaos was necessary so that when the final consensus was reached, every member could feel their voice as having been part of coming to it.

Usually, though, consensus was quicker in arriving. Rarely did the members' opinions diverge on anything of substance. However, this session was as anomalous as the event they debated.

What concerned the woman, and a substantive minority of the Grand Triad membership, was the fact that the review of what records existed showing the object's entry into the system revealed a path that led from the direction not of the of Confederacy, but of a star that had vanished from Salmagundi's sky a decade ago.

Alexander remembered the event from three different points of view: his own and two more that had been bequeathed to him from the Hall of Minds since then. It had been a subject of interest and debate in Salmagundi's scientific community a decade ago when Xi Virginis winked out of the sky. Then, the debate in the Grand Triad had been whether to expend the resources to investigate. There had even been a half-dozen advocates for building a tach-ship to send to the Xi Virginis system.

Alexander remembered the debates. They had lasted for nearly an entire season, and in the end Salmagundi's essentially insular nature won out. The star had not exploded, and the scientists accepted the idea that something had simply caused it to burn itself out.

The thought that the object Flynn Jorgenson described was somehow a remnant of that event was disturbing. Enough that members of the Triad who, like Alexander, had been present during that first event were dusting off the rhetoric from the earlier session as if the decade-old incident were still being debated.

The Great Triad had a memory broad and deep. No member forgot any slight, any error, any insult—to the point that every word spoken had such a ponderous history associated with it that it was wondrous that anyone spoke at all.

The debate launched into a tangent about Xi Virginis, and Alexander was about to use his authority as the chair to rein in the arguments when the comm on the table in front of him began flashing. He picked up the device and hit the receive button. The device was muted, so the caller's voice was translated to text that silently scrolled across the screen in front of an image of the woods southeast of Ashley.

The text jerked, stuttered, and mistyped some words, and Alexander could almost hear the panicked excitement of the caller embedded in the fragmented text.

“WE LOST THE MINGLASERS. OBJECT EMITTED SOME SORT WEAPON. DESTROY TWO OUTBUILDINGS MULTIPLE MISSLE HITS.”

The text kept scrolling past an image of a ruddy translucent dome shedding the effects of multiple missiles.

“Order!” Alexander snapped at the room before him. The arguments broke off instantly, and a sea of elderly tattooed faces turned toward him.

“There has been a development,” Alexander said. He then piped the feed from his comm to the room's main display screen and unmuted it. The flat, shaky images came from someone's handheld comm. As the view of Mr. Sheldon's camp filled the giant curving screen above the meeting table, another missile trail sliced the right side of the image in half, ending in the skin of the hemisphere. The hemisphere beyond the rolling explosion turned a deeper red, almost black, as smoke and flame lapped across the surface.

The voice accompanying the image was shaky. “The thing has taken hits from every missile we have. I have no idea how, but it has a mass-capable Emerson field.”

Alexander spoke to the comm in his hand, “Can you please repeat the damage?”

The speaker took a deep breath and said, “We lost the mining lasers and crew. It . . . ate . . . two of our outbuildings closest to the impact site. The shield you see there is two hundred seventy-five meters in diameter.”

“Has it grown? Moved?”

“No.”

“Then conserve your weapons. Let us consider it.”

“Did you hear me? The mining crew is gone. We don't even have bodies.”

“Conserve your weapons.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander remuted the comm and looked out at the Grand Triad. “It seems,” he said, “we face a larger threat than we anticipated.”

The debate erupted again. This time Alexander waited only until the first obvious lines of argument played themselves out. When he spoke, he was the first one to mention nukes.

It was admittedly drastic, but he was protecting their whole way of life.

More individuals are born than can possibly survive.

—CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

Sometimes you get a miracle. Don't expect another one.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.

—CHARLES the BOLD (1433-1477)

For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive. A very slight physical jerk as all the indicators on the console in front of her soared toward the red. None showed dangerous levels, but the drive came out of the jump hotter than it should have. The one damping coil that they'd gotten back up to 75 percent capacity was much too narrow an aperture to cool off the drives. The indicators were still edging upward.

Parvi held her breath until, one by one, very slowly, the readouts started going back down.

“Isn't that a beautiful sight?” Wahid said, and Parvi silently agreed.

Then she realized that he wasn't talking about the fact that the
Eclipse
's engines weren't going to melt. She looked up and saw a blue-green planet filling most of the holo above the bridge console.

“I have radio traffic all over the place,” Tsoravitch announced. “Video, audio, data traffic. Our sensors are completely saturated. I have commsats, and at least half a dozen major population centers on the coast of the main continent.”

Parvi saw Mosasa smiling out of the corner of her eye.

“We made it,” Wahid said over the PA system. “We fucking made it!”

Parvi looked at the planet hanging in the holo as she asked, “How close are we?”

Wahid was grinning, “A fucking bull's-eye. Point-seven-five million klicks out.”

“Shit,” Parvi stared at the meters on the console in front of her.

“What's the matter?” Wahid said.

“We're too close,” Mosasa said, the smile leaving his face. He turned toward Parvi. “How long before the drives cool to safe levels?”

Parvi shook her head. “I don't know. At the current rate, twelve hours, but we only have one damaged coil working. Venting continuously that long, it may start to degrade or fail entirely.”

“How much of a problem are we talking about?”

Parvi leaned back.“Worst case, if the coil fails completely, the drives will still go cold in about forty-eight hours all by themselves. Being hot that long increases the chance of an eventual failure. We're also vulnerable if someone operates a tach-drive too close to us. That will cause the drives to heat up again.”

“Damn.”

Mosasa turned to Tsoravitch. “Our first priority, make contact with the surface. We can at least warn away outgoing tach-ships and request them to send someone up for repairs. Bill? Are you on-line here?”

“Can you do anything to help cool the drives?” Parvi asked Bill.

“What kind of danger are we in?” she asked. “What if someone does tach in on top of us?”

“
A high-efficiency twenty light-year jump arriving within a two-million-kilometer radius will severely damage the drives. The effect drops off exponentially as the jump distance and drive efficiency decreases.
”

“I just wish there was an AU or two between us and the planet,” Parvi said. “How the hell did we get that kind of navigational error?”

“At this point,” Mosasa said, “Our main concern is contact. And once the drives are cold, I want preparations for landing.”

Alexander had never seen the Grand Triad gripped by such chaos. Only yesterday they had come to grips with the alien invader southeast of Ashley. Despite the objections of the Ashley Triad and the area lumber interests, Alexander had finally gotten consensus around the idea of using their limited nuclear arsenal to eliminate the threat from the invader. The site was far enough away from Ashley that they should be able to avoid dangerous levels of contamination.

Even in a worst case scenario, moving the city's population was preferable than allowing this alien infection to take root here.

But even as they had begun discussing the logistics of the strike in their ponderous manner, they faced another invasion.

On the massive holo screen facing the conference room an image showed a blunt-nosed tach-ship, a hundred meters long, hanging in space less than a million kilometers from Salmagundi. It was close enough that the satellite observatory feeding the image could pick out the rough patchwork of gray-and-brown repairs forming most of the ship's skin.

Inset over the image was a transmission showing a red-haired young woman with an unmarked brow. The sound was muted, but Alexander could read the captions on the looped transmission,“This is the Bakunin-registered tach-ship
Eclipse
. Our drives are hot and we request a safe zone around our position for the next twelve hours at least. We need assistance in repairing our damping coils, and would also like clearance to land within the next forty-eight hours.”

Next to the young woman's transmission was telemetry data gathered by the satellites when the
Eclipse
tached in, as well as transponder information from the ship itself that, predictably, corresponded with the woman's assertion that the ship was registered on Bakunin and was named the
Eclipse
.

Most problematic was the telemetry data, which showed a point of origin corresponding to Xi Virginis.

Just like Flynn's Protean artifact,
Alexander thought.

“We cannot let this craft land,” someone contended for the dozenth time.

“And how do we prevent that?” someone else countered.

“They may have information about the alien craft,” a third person said. “We need to direct them to a site that can be contained, and sterilized if necessary.”

Alexander looked at the
Eclipse
on the monitor. Was this the prelude to an invasion? It was clearly not a military vessel, and the sensors they'd been able to train on it showed that the ship's drives
were
hot. They were not trying to hide their presence, and they weren't being subtle about their transmissions. It was only a matter of time before some civilian received the
Eclipse
's transmissions.

And, worse, it wouldn't be long before someone started a dialogue.

It would be bad enough to have unfiltered alien information leaking into the carefully balanced society of Salmagundi, but Alexander had faith in the ability of their culture to absorb such shocks. It might actually be a good thing if the Great Triad had to deal with some public discontent. It might improve their flexibility.

What concerned Alexander, and what made this a grave event, was the possibility that information from Salmagundi might leak out to the Confederacy. Salmagundi's culture was based on technologies that the rest of humanity believed heretical, and history made it seem unlikely that the Confederacy, or its successor, would suffer the Hall of Minds to exist.

Of even more concern was the presence of the Protean artifact. That technology was even more antithetical to the Confederacy Alexander's ancestors had fled. The Confederacy had rendered entire planets uninhabitable to destroy the kind of self-replicating nanotech that the Proteans represented. An attack might only focus on the alien artifact, but Alexander couldn't count on that.

For all they knew, the
Eclipse
might only be the vanguard following the Protean artifact, determining how thoroughly they had been contaminated by its contents. In which case, simply destroying them might, in fact, provoke exactly the kind of devastating attack he wanted to avoid.

“We need to let them land,” Alexander said when one of the debating factions asked for his opinion. “If they put down in an isolated area, we can better control their contact with the population. More important, we can control the information they gather about us.”

“Engage the tach-drive.”

A chorus of “Yes, sir!” came from the bridge. The
Voice
's sisters may have preceded her by taking these huge leaps into the void, but the edge of excitement in the crew's acknowledgment showed that, for the men here, they may as well have been the first.