Prophets

  “That doesn’t mean that Mosasa didn’t plan for me to be here.”

  “His AIs aren’t magic.”

  Mallory shook his head. “You aren’t going to answer me, are you?”

  “What’s the point? What if I told you that he had every intention of luring you here, hiring you, and taking you off toward Xi Virginis? Would that make any difference at all? Would you quit and go hire off to fight some corporation’s brushfire war?”

  Mallory got the strong feeling that Mosasa and Parvi knew quite well why he was here and were exploiting it for some reason. Unfortunately, Parvi’s assessment of the situation was accurate. Confirming that knowledge probably wouldn’t change what he was doing.

  “I still would like to know why.”

  “Asking that question would presuppose that Mosasa is in the habit of telling me the reasons he does things. I assure you, he doesn’t.” There was an edge to her voice, and it was hard to tell if the displeasure she felt was directed at him or Mosasa.

  “Perhaps I should bring this up with him,” he said.

  “Perhaps you should.” When Mallory turned to go, Parvi added, “For what it’s worth, he has me recruit a lot of people.”

  “What?” He turned around again.

  She looked off toward the tach-ship back in the hangar. The displeasure hadn’t left her face or her voice, but he began to feel that it wasn’t directed at him. “He has me recruit a lot of people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that for the past five years I’ve been paid very well to make sure certain people signed with the BMU. You’re one of many, like I said. Nothing special.”

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  She turned and glared at him. “Because the pay is damn good for negligible risk,” she snapped at him. “This conversation is over.”

  The anger was directed at him now, but Mallory got the sense that it was only because he was convenient. He thought back to how she acted around Nickolai and Kugara, and even before that, when he’d pointed out the tiger that almost had to have been Nickolai at ProMex.

  “Get used to it. If you stick around Bakunin, you’ll see more.”

  “You sound like you don’t approve.”

  If she didn’t approve, Mallory wondered how she felt about Mosasa. Working for a Race AI was several steps beyond working with Nickolai. The Church certainly placed machines outside the sphere of God’s grace.

  She walked to the door, and he asked a last question even though he didn’t expect and answer. Not here.

  “Why do you work for him?”

  She stopped and without turning around she repeated, “Because the pay is damn good for negligible risk.”

  Mosasa sat in his office lit only by the holos surrounding him. One showed the interior of the hangar and Sergeant Fitzpatrick watching Parvi leave. He barely paid attention; it was just a small drop in the ocean of information that enveloped him, part of a current caused by the mass of the Vatican trailing its massive slow-moving fingers in the human information stream. A necessary data point that would keep him connected to human space after his ship passed into the information desert between here and Xi Virginis.

  Do I have to go?

  It was a very odd question. It had been literally a century since he had doubted himself. He had built himself so many layers of decisions, so many preplanned branch-points, so many models of so many outcomes, that he never had cause to be uncertain . . .

  It is the uncertainty itself I need to eliminate.

  The void he faced, the empty in the vast space of light-years between the core of human space and the colonies clustered around Xi Virginis, would be the most isolated he had ever been since his return to Procyon.

  Do I have to go?

  More than anything else, Mosasa dreaded uncertainty. Ever since he had abandoned his fleshy body to inhabit the remains of one of five salvaged Race AIs, he had inherited the AI’s desire to perceive all of its data environment.

  There had been five of them, almost a single mind between them.

  He was the only one left.

  Two had been sacrificed long ago to help fulfill the military directive of the AI’s programming. The quintet Mosasa had been part of had managed to bring down the old Confederacy and break the human political hegemony.

  The other two Mosasa had lost on the Race homeworld itself when they had finally returned. So long after the war, after the human quarantine of the Procyon system, the Race was dead.

  All of them.

  What mankind had done, in trapping them on the surface, was to force them to revisit the racial reluctance toward direct physical violence. The taboo that rendered them so weak against mankind.

  Unfortunately, they had developed that taboo for a reason. It had been the only thing that had allowed them to survive as long as they had. As soon as enough of them had cast aside such reservations, the results were devastating. Cities in ruins, the entire ecosystem devastated, a planet that was only marginally habitable to begin with had become sterile.

  It was a devastating discovery, and possibly due to his imprinted human personality, Mosasa had been the only one mentally strong enough to survive seeing the pointlessness of their victory over the Confederacy.

  For some reason, Mosasa had now started to see the void between the stars as the desert on the Race’s homeworld—absent of data, absent of people, absent of his creators . . .

  Absent of God.

  Mosasa dismissed that line of thought and shifted data streams. He had just noticed some local information movement that seemed to flow from the direction of the Caliphate. As expected, placing the destination Xi Virginis on a public database had begun to provoke a reaction.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Communion

  It is harder to choose your friends than your enemies.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  Shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

  —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859)

  Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Mosasa’s briefing had lasted through the evening, and Nickolai walked outside into a darkened spacecraft graveyard. His new eyes saw every star and every ship with razor clarity. He looked up and allowed himself to feel his own smallness.

  I am a scion of House Rajasthan, direct descendant of St. Rajasthan himself. A line bred for five hundred years to fight and to rule.

  I am an apostate sinner who held his own will above that of the priests, his masters, and the laws of God.

  I am an unclean servant of the Fallen and of things worse than the Fallen.

  He stretched his fingers out until his claws emerged, black on one hand, gunmetal gray on the other. In his real hand, he could feel the tendons stretch and the joints crack. In the artificial hand, he only felt the slight feedback as what passed for flesh wrapping it felt a slight increase in tension.

  What am I, really?

  “So, can I buy you a drink?”

  It took a second before he realized the question was addressed to him. He turned his head away from the stars to look down and see Kugara, the Angel, looking up at him.

  “You look like you could use a friend,” she told him.

  Nickolai turned away. He had fallen out of the habit of looking at people during conversation. “Do I?” he asked. He wasn’t quite sure how else to respond. He owed her respect, not only because she wasn’t human, but because he would be working with her for the foreseeable future.

  He snorted and shook his head, because the irony of that thought wasn’t lost on him. Personal feelings were what condemned him in the first place.

  “Did I say something funny?” Kugara asked.

  “No,” Nickolai told her.

  When the single word faded, Nickolai realized how quiet it was out here in the desert.

  “You aren’t going to elaborate on that, are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind,” Kugara said. ??
?How about that drink?”

  Kugara had her own transportation, an old contragrav aircar that had the turquoise-and-black markings of a Proudhon Spaceport Security Vehicle, though the skin was now dominated by the matte gray primer color of flexseal patches. It had an open canopy, so it could handle Nickolai’s height, though when he got in, the craft briefly suffered a hard tilt to the right before the sensors encouraged the underpowered injection unit to compensate for the mass distribution.

  To make room for his legs, Nickolai had to push his seat all the way back, and in response the craft tilted rearward for a moment.

  “Gad.” Kugara said, watching a few red lights on the dash display in front of her. “Guess no aerobatics with you in the car.”

  She waited until the craft found its level, then she punched the vector jets, shooting the protesting vehicle across the desert and back toward the city.

  Nickolai looked at Kugara. Her hair trailed back in the wind, and her face was dominated by a clenched grin that Nickolai would normally attribute to a huntress just prior to a kill.

  “What do you want of me?” he asked.

  “We’re on the same job,” she said against the wind. “Can’t I buy a comrade a drink?”

  “I notice I’m the only one to whom you offered.”

  “We both need an ally, scion of House Rajasthan.” She turned that predatory grin toward him and said, “Despite what the maps say, you’re not in the Fifteen Worlds anymore.”

  Kugara took him to a bar in a part of Proudhon run-down enough to have been in his old neighborhood in Godwin. It was part of a mall that had taken over an old assembly building. The space was large enough that none of the shops and restaurants inhabiting the space felt the need to build ceilings. The bar was one of the few that felt the need for actual walls.

  It took a few moments for Nickolai to realize that Kugara had chosen this place with him in mind. With the ceiling of the original assembly plant a good forty meters above them, he could walk around without ducking. In addition, the bar had circular tables and stools that allowed him to sit without being crammed in a human-sized booth, or wedging his tail into a tall-backed chair.

  She let him pick a table. He took one to the rear of the place, putting as much distance between himself and the human crowd as he could. The stares from the patrons were becoming familiar, and he barely noticed the crowd edging away from him. He sat with his back to the wall and wondered what he should think about Kugara’s interest in him. He wondered if this was part of Mr. Antonio’s plan.

  A pitcher of amber liquid slid in front of Nickolai, and Kugara took a seat across the table from him. She had a mug filled with black liquid, with a head the color and texture of foam insulation.

  “Allies, you said?” Nickolai asked her.

  She raised her glass. “Have a drink,” she told him. “To a profitable mission.”

  Nickolai had worked around humans enough to understand the custom. He took the pitcher in his hand and raised it, echoing the toast. Proportionately, the pitcher fit his hand about the same way her mug fit hers. “A profitable mission,” he said. He took a swig with her and set the pitcher down. It wasn’t the spiced ale from Grimalkin, but it was more tolerable than most human beverages.

  She looked at his pitcher, then at her own mug. Nickolai’s pitcher was nearly half-empty, where the head in her mug had only lowered a couple of fingers. “I can see you’re an expensive date.”

  Nickolai pushed his chair back and said, “If you’d rather be alone—”

  “Stop it. God, you have no sense of humor.”

  “What is it you want?”

  She shook her head and took another sip from her mug. “I want someone to cover my back. I had the bad sense to go spouting off about Dakota back there . . .” She looked down into her mug. “Sometimes I am an idiot.”

  “If you don’t like working with Wahid, you can find another job.”

  “You say that as if I have a choice.” She lifted her mug and drained about half of what remained. She slammed it down on the table, and after a few moments of silence, she added, “At least you picked up on the fact Wahid seems a bit twitchy. I was beginning to think you were completely oblivious. And you can add that haughty bitch Parvi to the list.”

  “Parvi?”

  “Oh, can’t you sense how overjoyed she was to have us in the team?”

  “I assume you’re trying to be humorous again.”

  She laughed. “You can say that. So, Nickolai, how do you feel working with a bunch of humans?”

  “Mosasa isn’t human.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that, didn’t you? Mind expounding on that little tidbit?”

  Nickolai pondered his options for a moment. The fact he carried a rather large secret with him made him reluctant, but Kugara was the only other member of the team he would feel comfortable having as an “ally.” He also thought she had a point that they both needed one. This mission was going to take them far outside the grip of the BMU, the only law recognized by their nominal comrades. And would he want to trust his life to humans like Wahid or Parvi, or even Fitzpatrick?

  Nickolai finished his pitcher and told Kugara what he could about Mosasa. “Our employer,” Nickolai said, “doesn’t just work with AIs. He doesn’t own them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He is them.”

  Kugara lowered her mug. The glass hit the table with a slightly liquid squeak. A similar sound seemed to come from her throat. After a moment she said, “Shit.”

  “Tjaele Mosasa is a construct controlled by a salvaged Race AI device. The ‘man’ who briefed us is no more real than my right arm.” He held the arm in front of him; fingers spread so the metallic claws were visible.

  She looked at his arm. “That’s a prosthetic?”

  Nickolai made a fist and lowered it to the table. “Yes. It is.”

  “It’s very well done, I couldn’t tell at all.” She finished off her dark beverage. She stared at the foam sliding down the edges of her glass. “Why would an AI hire a group of mercenaries?”

  “It may be exactly what he said it was.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is.” Kugara looked up from the shreds of foam in her glass and asked him, “But if you had a choice, would you be walking into this?”

  “No.”

  “Damn straight.” She looked over at the bar. “I think it’s time for a second round.”

  She never asked him why he had no choice in the matter, or why he had a prosthetic arm, or why a scion of House Rajasthan had deigned to prostitute his skills as a mercenary on Bakunin. He returned the favor.

  By the end of the third round, and his third pitcher, Nickolai finally felt a comfortable softening of the edges of his perception. Even before coming to Bakunin, he hadn’t been much of a social drinker. What little alcohol he consumed was usually ceremonial, toasting saints, fellow warriors, or the person of the sovereign. He was somewhat surprised at how he enjoyed being comfortable with another person, whoever it was.

  That might have been why it took him that long to notice their shadow. A trio of men, who had entered some time after he and Kugara had arrived, sat at a corner booth that had a good view of Nickolai’s table. They weren’t obviously watching them, but they also weren’t doing much drinking, or laughing, or talking. The trio might be in civilian clothes, but Nickolai was sensitive to motion and body language, and even out of the corner of his eye he could tell they had body armor restricting their movements under the loose overalls they wore.

  Without moving his gaze from Kugara, he cycled though his new spectral sensitivities. When he downshifted the spectrum toward the infrared, he could see square hot spots on their belts that were most likely active Emerson field generators.

  The body armor could be innocent, insofar as anything was innocent in the violent mess that was Bakunin, but an Emerson field sucked enough power that you didn’t turn one on unless you imminently expected to be targeted by some energy weapon, otherwise you’d suck the
massive power sink dry long before the field would be of any use.

  Nickolai did his best not to shift his body language. Raising his pitcher to his lips he said, “Three men behind you.” He kept his attention on the three men in his peripheral vision. Either they were very good at covering their reaction, or they didn’t have audio surveillance on them.

  “What?” Kugara said.

  “Body armor, active Emerson fields, LOS on our table.”

  “Armed?”

  “Who isn’t?” Nickolai lowered the pitcher and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he whispered, “Handguns at most, holstered.” He scanned the bar crowd and didn’t see anyone else with the telltale of an active field.

  Kugara pushed her glass toward the center of the table with both hands, and leaned forward with a smile, as if she was sharing some drunken confidence. “Corner booth, third from the front door?” she whispered.

  Nickolai nodded and glanced up at the faraway ceiling. The unusual layout of the mall here made their position unusually exposed. One spotter in the scaffolding above could have a lock on their position almost anywhere they went. The current false-color IR view with which he saw the world showed him two glowing patches up against the ceiling.

  He could focus tightly on them, two men in dark clothing. The two of them had taken partial cover near the HVAC duct that pumped cool air into the cavernous space below, and every time they exhaled they released a cloud of warm moist vapor into the cold dry air by the duct.

  One spotter, one sniper . . .

  “Brace yourself,” Nickolai said.

  He dropped the pitcher and grappled the edge of the table, throwing the edge upward between him and the watchers in the ceiling. He relied on the fact that his reaction time was quicker than that of the Fallen surrounding him. As he dove for Kugara, the large mass of the moving table had already begun a chain reaction of crashing glass, splintering wood, and human shouts. The air was suddenly filled with the sharp scent of spilled alcohol. He pushed her into a booth against the same wall as the trio of men in the corner booth. They fell on the table between two couples, Kugara landing underneath him with a grunt, spilling the occupants’ beverages.