Prophets (43 page)

The red-highlighted spacecraft was no longer shown on the schematic. Now on the fringes of the image, Alexander saw thirty or forty blue icons pushing in from the edge. As he watched, three more appeared in range.

Closer in, in orbit above them, there were suddenly dozens of vessels.

“What the hell?”

“Our observatories are picking up dozens of spacecraft just now taking up positions in orbit.”

“How many?”

“At least sixty.”

Alexander settled back into his seat, staring at the screen. He had moved, but not quickly enough. He watched the icons maneuver in discreet jumps as observations were made and fed again into the model he was watching.

The militia officer spoke again, “We have sixty-three confirmed contacts. Sixty-five. Sixty-eight.”

“Stop counting,” Alexander whispered. Salmagundi had, maybe, a dozen craft capable of orbit. All dated from the original colonization. The Confederacy was about to descend upon them, and there was nothing they could do about it.

“Mr. Shane? We need confirmation to detonate the nuke.”

Alexander looked at the security monitor. Flynn and the offworlders were looking up.

“Mr. Shane, sir?”

Tetsami faced the newcomers and said, “Forgive me if I'm a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man's land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you're doing a hundred light-years from what's left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”

She looked from the tall woman to the taller moreau. Her own genes, at least the genes for the last body that had been exclusively her own, had come from Dakota. However, unlike the three-meter-tall furry tiger-man, just by looking, there was usually no way to tell someone from Dakota from a human whose genetic history didn't include a couple of genetic engineers trying to “improve” something a few centuries ago. A century or two of mixing bloodlines and the more-or-less “normal” human morphology dominated.

One thing was clear, the presence of tiger-boy proved that this couple was as definitively from off-planet as their nameless Protean.

But from
Dakota?
What the hell was going on here?

The woman, Kugara, did most of the talking. She told Tetsami and Flynn about their ship, the
Eclipse,
and the ill-fated expedition it made to Xi Virginis. The story uncomfortably synced with the Protean's warnings, and Tetsami tightened the grip on her shotgun. Even more than when the nonhuman pair walked into the deserted outpost, she stared at them looking for some sign of infection, some wrongness, some symptom that these two had been touched by the same darkness that had consumed the Xi Virginis system.

Then Kugara mentioned his name.

Tetsami jumped backward, leveling the shotgun at the space between Kugara's gut and Nickolai's groin. “What was that name?” she yelled at them, finger aching against the cold metal of the shotgun's trigger.

The tall woman backed up, stopping only when she bumped into the tiger. “Mosasa, Tjaele Mosasa.” Nickolai put his arm around her in a gesture that was almost protective.

“What the hell does that bastard have to do with this?” Tetsami screamed at them. The barrel of the shotgun shook, and she concentrated on steadying her aim.

“SHUT UP!” Kugara looked at her as if Tetsami had just lost her mind.
I just said that out loud, fuck.
“Mosasa,” Tetsami said. “Tjaele Mosasa.”

“Yes.”

“Bald, lots of earrings, dragon tattoo, looks like a pirate?”

“Yes.”

“Christ on the cross with his tap-dancing apostles!” Tetsami leveled the shotgun at Kugara's head and yelled, “You
work
for that robotic bastard?”

Nickolai stepped in front of Kugara and it spooked Tetsami so much she almost shot him in the chest. “Yes,” Nickolai said. “We are members of the Bakunin Mercenaries' Union, and we were hired by Mosasa. But Kugara wasn't aware of what he was until I told her.”

“You know what that amoral Machiavellian machine actually is?”

“I did,” Nickolai said. “She didn't.”

Tetsami raised the shotgun so it was centered on Nickolai's face. The tiger didn't even flinch.

Gram, what are you doing?
She felt Flynn pushing to take control back, but she wouldn't let go. “Then why shouldn't I blow your head off for working for that thing?”

The tiger stared down the barrel of the shotgun and said, “If you wish to kill me, kill me.”

“Damn it,” Kugara's voice came from behind the tiger as she tried to push past his arm. “Thanks to Nickolai here, that amoral Machiavellian machine is probably dead.”

The barrel lowered a fraction. “What?”

Kugara managed to step around the tiger's bandaged arm. “This furry prick sabotaged the
Eclipse
. He's the reason we were on a lifeboat landing on this godforsaken world.”

Tetsami lowered the shotgun and shook her head. She still couldn't get her brain around the idea that Mosasa, of all things, had followed her nearly two hundred years and a hundred light-years from Bakunin. She had come out here, so far, just to get away from that thrice-damned planet.

But this was Mosasa they were talking about. It's quite possible that she was trapped, again, in some long-term plot created by the AI to manipulate the universe into some form that was more to its liking. The pair here might be just as trapped in the AI's web.

“Anomalies around Xi Virginis?” Tetsami whispered. “But damn vague about them, I bet.”

“You know Mosasa?” Kugara asked her. “Good lord, how?”

Tetsami laughed. “Mosasa's why I'm here, why this colony's here. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he was why Xi Virginis disappeared.”

“What?” both said in unison.

“Short version,” Tetsami told them. “I came from that pit Bakunin. I escaped the shitstorm that pretty much collapsed the Terran Confederacy. A shitstorm your friend Mosasa largely took credit for.”

“He's not our friend,” the tiger said. “He was our employer.”

“Mosasa took credit for the collapse of the Confederacy?” Kugara asked.

“Oh, come on,” Tetsami said. “You just said you knew what he was. Don't you know what those Race AIs were designed for? The kind of social engineering they're responsible for? It's how the Race waged war.” She lowered the shotgun and gestured with her free hand, taking in the whole horizon. “This planet was on a Dolbrian star map buried under the Diderot Mountains on Bakunin. A star map that one of Mosasa's AIs just happened to find while the old Confederacy was trying a military takeover of the planet. A star map that got handed over to the Seven Worlds and caused enough chaos in the Confederacy's congress that the whole shebang started collapsing under its own weight.”

The two of them stared at her as if she wasn't speaking the same language.

“It's the Fifteen Worlds now,” Tetsami said. “Go thank Mosasa for that. And the Dolbrians.”

“How do you know all this,” Kugara asked. “This planet's been out of contact since it was founded—”

“I'm older than I look,” Tetsami said. “About a hundred and seventy-five years older.”

Nothing is so destructive as what we believe to be true.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

—EDMUND Burke (1729-1797)

Nickolai stared at the man with the shotgun and tried to understand what was happening. Something—Mosasa, fate, or divine will—was conspiring to draw these threads around them. If what this man said was true, Mosasa knew of these colonies long ago. He would have known when they had been founded.

All of this, everything that was happening, could be the result of a centuries-old AI attempting to manipulate events.

He admitted as much,
Nickolai thought, remembering the dialogue between Mosasa and Wahid when the
Eclipse
had just gotten underway.

At the time, Nickolai had been too preoccupied with his own ill-fated duty to Mr. Antonio to think deeply on the human politics involved. In retrospect, Mosasa had offhandedly taken credit for possibly starting a war.

It also raised the question of exactly what Mr. Antonio was trying to accomplish. At first, it was simply an internecine battle between the Fallen. Even when Mr. Antonio told him of Mosasa's artificial nature, Nickolai never thought of the implications.

Mosasa was designed to anticipate, to see the forces of society arrayed around him. See them and manipulate them. He maneuvered the Caliphate into moving entire fleets . . .

How did he not anticipate what Nickolai did? How did he not know until Nickolai made his testament to the human priest? How did he not know about Mr. Antonio or his employers?

Who was Mr. Antonio?

Nicolai forced himself to pay attention to more immediate concerns, like the man with the gun. Fortunately, he had lowered the weapon. The way the man talked, Nickolai wondered if it was because he finally trusted they weren't a threat, or because he was overcome with some sort of contagious fatalism.

The man talked of the founding of this colony, named Salmagundi, by refugees from a war on Bakunin 175 years ago. The colonists came from destroyed communes and bankrupt corporations and planets in upheaval during the Confederacy's long, slow collapse. Apparently, they were talking to one of the founders of that exodus, a woman named Kari Tetsami, who should be over a century dead. The man in front of them was also a man named Flynn Jorgenson, who was born on this planet.

He explained the Hall of Minds.

The concept was beyond appalling. It left Nickolai shaken and numb. To strip someone's mind? On some level it was worse than constructing an AI. Not only was it the arrogance of imitating life, it was imitating a
specific
life. And to accept that heretical copy into yourself—it was a sin so intimate and profound that Nickolai had trouble conceiving it.

Kugara asked what was going on here, with the scars of battle, the abandoned structures, and the crystal edifice in front of them.

Nickolai had thought the revelations could not become worse. Then he heard the man who was a 175-year-old woman answer Kugara.

They stood mere meters from the ultimate sin of the Fallen, the most dangerous and vile presumption of God's power. The geometric crystals glinting in the light hid a hive of self-replicating machines whose sole purpose was to consume matter and remake it in its own image. This was the demon that tempted man into his final fall, that spoke the seductive whispers that a man could equal God Himself, symbol of the hubris that had cost a billion souls.

It was a sin that the Fallen could never erase, even with centuries of turning away from such heresies. Even the colonists here—who gave themselves over to a hideously intimate evil—even they had seen the wisdom of trying to destroy this.

Kugara stared at the crystal forms, and Nickolai felt her shudder against his arm. “What is
that
doing here?”

“It came from Xi Virginis.”

“What?”

“It ran into something en route to the other end of the galaxy and was severely damaged,” Flynn/Tetsami said. “It can't hold much of a conversation, but it is worried that whatever damaged it is coming here.”

“What damaged it?” Kugara asked.

Flynn/Tetsami shook his head. “It isn't quite clear on what it is. It called it ‘The Other,' and it seems afraid of it—”

Nickolai found his voice. “How is it that you speak to it?” The words were almost a growl.

“It can form a—robot? cyborg?—something the size and shape of a human being. It talked to us a while, then it reabsorbed itself. I think it's trying to fix some sort of damage. It's been a while since I've seen it, or anyone else for that matter.”

“It should be destroyed,” Nickolai whispered. He spoke in a register so low that the others didn't seem to hear him.

“What did it say about this ‘Other'?” Kugara asked.

Flynn/Tetsami shook his head. “It described it as a cloud, sometimes as a virus, sometimes as a complete abstraction: ‘the change without consent.' What I could understand is that what I talked to was the remains of the autopilot for the Protean probe. The probe actually changed course to investigate some spectral anomalies happening to Xi Virginis. By the time it got within a light-year or so, the whole solar system was gone.”