Prophets (38 page)

He looked up to the bridge at large. “No mention of Admiral Bitar's speech or Xi Virginis is to occur beyond the people present here. You are not to discuss it among yourselves unless a superior officer is present and has given permission. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” from the bridge crew.

“If anyone mentions the disappearance of Xi Virginis to any of you, you will only confirm that command is aware of the situation. That is the only statement permitted. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked down at Captain Rasheed. “I want you to detail a science officer and someone from the medical staff to analyze that tach-broadcast. Now.”

Mosasa stared at the holo, where the security cameras showed the spidery form of the
Jizan
drawing the wreckage of the
Eclipse
into itself. A dozen robots, and a half dozen men in hardshell EVA suits, crawled through the wreckage by the drive section like fat white aphids invading a rotten log. The invaders connected cables, secured debris, and attached umbilicals from the Caliphate ship to what remained of the
Eclipse
's power and life support . . .

He barely listened to Parvi as she talked to the crew of the
Jizan,
guiding them through the heavily modified and severely damaged systems. For all the activity, movement, the babble around him, he felt as alone as he had ever been at any point in his ersatz life. His world had shrunk from the universe to the claustrophobic prison of the
Eclipse
. For the first time in hundreds of years, he felt trapped inside his own skin.

He had built his identity on being aware. Unknowns were solidly delineated areas to explore, not this vast all-encompassing darkness.

The Caliphate should not be here. Not yet. Not with this kind of force. They had no political or economic impetus to launch their reclamation of the colonies out here so soon. Travel time and the limits of tach-drives made it impractical for them to take physical possession. Of course they'd come out here eventually, but only after the forces impelling the various states out here had reached a political equilibrium
and
they put in place the infrastructure to support the journey out here.

It should have taken
years
.

But the Caliphate was here, with a whole fleet of ships.

Mosasa knew his view of the future was imperfect, and the smaller the scale of the projection, the less accurate it was. But this wasn't a simple error or a slight divergence. This was a wholesale failure to see a major shift in resources on a planetary scale.

It was enough of a failure to completely shatter his faith in his understanding of the universe. Seeing the patterns of political, social, and economic energy had been as basic to his worldview as the ability to perceive color.

He looked at his hands and had difficulty being fully convinced that they were actually there.

I am Mosasa,
he thought,
but I am also a machine. Can I be sure that I ever left the
Luxembourg?
Can I know that I've not just suffered a prolonged hallucinatory systems failure?

“Mosasa!”

He looked away from the holo and saw Parvi looking at him. He should be able to understand the emotion in her face, but right now he found himself unable to interpret it. “Yes?”

“Did you hear what I said?” Parvi snapped.

“What?”

“They're ordering us onto the
Jizan,
” Parvi said. “That means losing contact with all our comm gear—God only knows what they're intending to do to the planet. Our people are down there.”

“What do you want me to do?” Mosasa asked.

Parvi stared at him, and he thought he could understand her expression now. She was afraid.

An hour later, Admiral Hussein sat in a briefing room with a group of engineers, scientists, and medical officers. On the table between them was a frozen image of Admiral Naji Bitar.

“We've done a comprehensive analysis of the transmission itself,” said Lieutenant Abdem, one of the
Voice
's senior communications engineers. “It is unquestionably from the
Sword
's tach-transmitter. The encryption protocol is embedded in the hardware, and every transmitter is imperfect enough to give a unique temporal distortion to any broadcast. No way to duplicate it precisely.”

Admiral Hussein nodded and looked toward the medical officers.

“We've checked every biometric marker we can given the data transmitted. Voice-print, facial structure, iris variegation, kinematics. All are consistent with Admiral Bitar's medical profile.”

“What about his emotional and psychological state?”

“It seems unusual,” said Lieutenant Deshem, the psychologist. “The admiral is displaying no abnormal stress levels at all.”

“That is unusual?”

“Consider what he's reporting to us. This represents a radical change—even if it's a positive one, change always engenders a stress response.”

“Could he be lying?”

“There's no indication of that from what we can analyze. It seems that he believes everything he's saying in this transmission.”

“Any sign of external influences, drugs, hallucination . . .”

Deshem shook his head. “He is lucid to all appearances—”

“But?”

“His body language, at the end of the transmission, it seems to suggest that he is withholding something. As if he's not telling the whole truth.”

Hussein shook his head. Aside from all the technical resources they had, he could tell the same thing just from the deliberate vagueness of how Bitar phrased things.
“You will receive a more personal contact within eighteen hours standard after your arrival. You will have a more in-depth briefing on what we have discovered here.”

Before he could ask another question, his personal comm buzzed for his attention. The
Jizan
was returning with what was left of the
Eclipse
and her crew. He excused himself and listened to the briefing from the captain of the
Jizan
on what they had found, and what the
Eclipse
had been doing so far from human space.

What he heard was not reassuring.

Never discount the possibility you might live through it.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

Those who are prepared to die are unprepared to live.

—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

Nickolai had mentally and spiritually prepared to die. Because of that, he found it disconcerting to open his eyes in the dark confines of the lifeboat and realize he still drew breath. He lay there, strapped to the jury-rigged acceleration couch, staring up into complete darkness, wondering if he was being rewarded or punished.

His last memory had been the slam into atmosphere. He had thought the shielding had failed the way the boat had shuddered.

He smelled blood.

Blinking, he adjusted the photoreceptors in his new eyes and the interior of the cabin came into focus. He saw the monochrome cabin in sharper relief than he'd ever be able to with his natural eyes, despite his species' excellent night vision. His sight edged into the infrared, and he could see the form of Kugara radiating heat next to him. He heard her breathe and found himself grateful.

The lifeboat had taken a beating. The lack of lights showed a general power failure, and the bulkhead above him had been bowed inward by the impact of landing. The cot had been blown out of its stowed position to dangle like a half-severed limb. The emergency stores had also broken free, scattering medkit, food packets, and survival tools all through the cabin.

He now appreciated the effort Kugara had put into extending the acceleration couch. It had taken both of them an hour to unbolt parts of the third and fourth couches and attach them above and below a standard-sized couch. The effort had probably saved his life, given the violent landing.

As it was, it was an agonizingly slow process, untangling himself from the harness, except for his right arm, which gave him no pain at all. It no longer even felt a part of him. Fortunately, given how unsteady he was, the lifeboat had come to rest with the acceleration couches on the bottom. He was able to peel himself out of the couch without falling over.

“Kugara?” He spoke to her, but she was unconscious. Bending over her, Nickolai could see a sheet of blood trailing over the side of her face from a wound in her temple. Something had struck her during the descent, probably when the storage compartments burst open. She groaned, and he searched through the wreckage for the remains of the medkit.

He grabbed the kit, half of which was missing, and did what he could to treat the wound. He was gratified to see that it wasn't as bad as it first appeared. It had bled profusely, but it was just a superficial tear in the skin. The blow causing it hadn't been enough to knock her out. She'd probably blacked out from the deceleration as Nickolai had.

She groaned a few times, but didn't wake up until after he had flushed the wound and had sprayed the last of the bandage on her scalp.

“Shit, that's hot.”

“You have a bad laceration.”

“Am I bleeding to death? Save that stuff.”

The can hissed and died. “It's empty now. You used most of it on my arm.”

She blinked and fumbled with her restraints. She raised her head and bumped it on his wrist. He barely felt it, but she flopped back, pressing her hands to her forehead muttering, “Shit.”

“Are you all right?”

“Where're the damn lights?”

He had forgotten that she would be unable to see. He stood up and looked at the scattered emergency supplies until he saw a flashlight.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting you some light.” He picked up the flashlight and turned it on, still amazed at how quickly his new eyes adjusted from the monochrome dark to the starkly colored cabin interior.

“Shit, warn someone, would you?” Kugara held her hand up between her and Nickolai, shading her eyes. He noticed he was pointing the light right at her. He moved the beam away and pointed it at the door to the lifeboat.

“Thanks,” Kugara whispered as she undid the harness holding her down.

Nickolai stared at the door. It was now oriented horizontally. The floor he stood on, with the acceleration couches, had been the right wall when this cabin had been part of the
Eclipse
. It was hard for him to tell, but it looked as if the frame had warped outward with the same impact that had dented in the bulkhead above.

Kugara stood up next to him, shaking her head. She looked at the debris on the floor, and the unpleasantly curving bulkhead above them, and said, “That was one rough mother of a landing.”

“Seems like it.”

“Don't you remember the descent?”

“No. I blacked out.”

She nodded. “Me, too. Right after the chute gave up.”

“What?”

“Sometime between reentry and the ground, the chute cut out and we hit free fall again.” She rubbed the bandage bonded to her temple.

Examining the door more closely, Nickolai could see that the frame was warped, bowed outward nearly five centimeters. The door itself had buckled a little, becoming very slightly concave. There was no way it was going to slide back home, even if there was power left.

“How do we open this?”

“Well, first we should get some heads-up on what it's like outside.” Kugara walked to the door and pulled open the emergency control panel for the door, the same one that had shown the schematics of the lifeboat's launch. It was one of the few panels that hadn't popped open during landing, and for a few moments it looked as if it never would. She strained against it, and the warping bulkhead seemed to have jammed it as badly as the main door.

Just before Nickolai stepped up to help her with it, the panel opened with a nasty screech that hurt his ears. It also released the smell of burned electronics.

“Damn,” she said. “It's dead.”

He wasn't surprised. However, he smelled something beyond superheated metal and roasted ceramics.

“Okay,” she said, “Maybe one of the other boats can give us an idea.” She hunted around on the floor and found the handheld comm unit. When she picked it up, half the unit stayed on the floor.
“Damn it!”

Nickolai took another deep breath. Under the smell of the dead lifeboat, he could smell cool air, the woody, earthy smell of some sort of plant life.

Kugara stared at the fragments of the comm unit and repeated, “Damn it!”

“I think it is safe to open the door.”

“What?”

“The skin's already been breached. Can't you smell the air?”

She wrinkled her nose. “All I can smell is my own blood gumming my nostrils.”

“By the panel you opened.”

She stepped back over to the door and bent down. “No, I can't smell—” She froze a moment. “Well, what do you know? I can feel a draft.” She stood up. “We must have hit hard enough to crack the shielding. The leftover heat from reentry must have been enough to fry the circuits in this thing.”

“So? How do we open the door?”

“There's a manual emergency release that should blow out the whole door mechanism,” Kugara said. She knelt and opened a red-and-yellow-striped panel to the left of the dead control panel. In a recess behind it was a T-shaped handle. She grabbed it and pulled it out to the right—which would have been up had the lifeboat been docked on the
Eclipse
and the floor had been the floor. The handle pulled out a lever that extended about fifteen centimeters. She looked back at Nickolai. “You might want to back up a bit.”