Prophets

  She turned and looked at him. “Ignore it. Either Mr. Sheldon will hold it against you, or not. Worst thing that can happen, you find another job.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’m sure, if you worked at it, you could find something more important to worry about.”

  Flynn looked up at the sky. The sun had set and the stars were just coming out. “I suppose I could,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Service

  Freedom is often simple ignorance of whom you serve.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  It is easer to meet expectations than to question them.

  —SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)

  Date: 2526.04.22 (Standard) 19.8 ly from Xi Virginis

  Nickolai moved through the corridors of the Eclipse alone. The modified cargo ship was deep into its slog toward Xi Virginis. The star was nearly seventy-five light years past Helminth, whose scientific outpost marked what was supposed to be the fringes of human expansion in this direction.

  Despite having the most advanced drives Mosasa could buy, the Eclipse was still limited to making tach-jumps twenty light-years at a time. However, Mosasa had retrofitted the Eclipse so that most of its volume was power plant. It could make the round trip without needing to refuel, with two jumps to spare.

  Each jump took close to a month, despite being instantaneous as far as the ship and those aboard were concerned. It was the downtime between jumps that ate up time for the crew. For forty-eight hours the Eclipse drifted between jumps.

  The Eclipse’s engines were so large that, even with their massive damping systems, it still took four or five times as long as a normal ship for the drives to cool down from being fully active. While having drives active for four hours after a jump was technically dangerous, in those four hours it was far more likely that they’d be struck by a random asteroid than it would be for a tach-ship to suddenly appear close enough to cause so much as an oscillation in the drives’ power levels.

  After the cool-down period, when the drives were no longer active, the rest of the time was spent with maintenance checks. This trip was riding on the very edge of the performance specs for those engines. For the crew, they had been traveling for a little over a week, but the rest of the universe had aged 150 days.

  The next jump would take them to Xi Virginis.

  Mr. Antonio had explained the necessity of the downtime in the dead space between stars, about the maintenance and the observations Mosasa would wish to make. Mr. Antonio had also told him what he needed to do at this particular down period, once they had tached within twenty light-years of their target.

  Nickolai pulled himself down one of the rear corridors of the ship, a maintenance area that didn’t bother with the pseudo-gravity maintained in the crew areas, the bridge, and the one open cargo bay where the Paralian stayed.

  Nickolai floated between cargo holds that held extra power plants for the Eclipse’s long journey. He was going aft, toward the tach-drives and, more important to him right now, the tach-transmitter.

  The ship was on a nighttime cycle, so most of the others who had no job to do were sleeping. He saw no one else before he slipped into the rearmost chamber of the Eclipse. The access corridor to the tach-drives was short, less than ten meters long, and ended at an observation room, little more than a widening of the corridor in front of a massive port set into the rear bulkhead. The effect made it seem that the corridor abruptly ended in empty space.

  Several hatches lined the corridor, walls, floor, and ceiling. Several had active displays showing details of what was happening behind them, almost all the graphs and numbers low into the green.

  Few meant anything to Nickolai. He wasn’t an engineer. He glanced from panel to panel, until he found a display that was completely quiescent. Along the top, he saw the words Mr. Antonio had told him to look for: “Coherent Tachyon Emitter.”

  On the wall above him was the access panel for the business end of the ship’s tach-comm. Without it, the Eclipse was limited to light speed communications, effectively mute to the rest of the universe.

  Before he moved, he checked back toward the door. Above the door was a holo pickup that should be providing a view down this corridor. “Should be” were the operative words. Two jumps ago, Nickolai had engineered his first sabotage on Mr. Antonio’s behalf. He had taken a cartridge from his slugthrower, punctured the soft metal tip of the bullet, and allowed three drops of the clear liquid inside to spill into a junction box that served the optical cabling for the surveillance system. The chemicals in the liquid accelerated the oxidation of several key components, causing a hardware failure that was both hard to diagnose and hard to repair, and would appear perfectly natural in a ship this old.

  The camera down here was still blind as of three hours ago. Nickolai confirmed that by standing on the bridge where several monitors scanned through all the security feeds. It was unlikely that anyone had gotten around to fixing it in the past three hours.

  He just wished there was some visual indication that the camera was nonoperational.

  Nickolai reached up and tapped his artificial claw on the button to open the panel. It slid aside, revealing the coils on the meter-diameter cylinder that directed the FTL particles that would compose any transmission. The coils were cold, idle, hanging about ten centimeters above the open hatch.

  From his belt, Nickolai removed one of the devices that Mr. Antonio had given him. Like everything else, it resembled something other than what it actually was. To even a thorough examination, the small palm-sized device was nothing more than a personal Emerson field generator, designed to detect and absorb the effects of energy weapons within a specific range of frequencies, and provide the wearer a measure of protection from everything short of a plasma cannon, at least until the batteries overloaded.

  It would be completely unremarkable until someone opened up the computer and examined the source code in the small device. Then they might see some oddities, such as the frequency sensitivity, which was set to wavelengths that didn’t make sense in terms of energy weapons, or even in terms of normal massy particles. The settings only made sense when interpreted to involve the complex numbers associated with a stream of tachyons.

  Nickolai slid the field generator under the emitter tube, back as close to the rear bulkhead as he could manage. According to Mr. Antonio, the generator would be completely passive and undetectable to any diagnostics. It would only switch on during a full-bore tach-transmission, and then cause a failure that would be nearly impossible to trace.

  The important part wasn’t how it worked, the important part was this act would be another step in clearing his debt to Mr. Antonio. Honorless as this sabotage was, Nickolai told himself that he owed Mosasa and his hirelings no loyalty. A demonic machine and a crew of the Fallen—honor did not apply.

  He slid the panel shut and flexed his mechanical hand.

  He wondered if he would feel the same about serving Mr. Antonio if Mosasa was simply another damned human. He wondered if Mr. Antonio had only told him Mosasa’s nature because he anticipated the bad taste of doubt that would fill Nickolai’s mouth about now.

  He stayed there, lost in thought, until he caught a faint near-human scent. He was aware of her only a few moments before he heard her voice. “Nickolai?”

  Nickolai turned at Kugara’s voice. Somehow he retained enough composure to avoid looking startled or spinning his whole body in an awkward tumble. It helped that he was in a cramped human-sized space that prevented someone his size from moving quickly.

  “Yes?” he said. She floated in the doorway of the maintenance corridor, staring at him. He couldn’t read her expression enough to see if she noticed his proximity to the tach-comm. She was in charge of the comm and the integrity of the data systems. Could she have somehow detected what he was doing?

  He almost hoped she had.

  “What are you doing back here?” she asked him. Nickolai was better at human tones of voice
than he was at expression, but the way she addressed him was puzzling. It wasn’t aggressive or accusatory—if anything, her voice was borderline submissive. Worried? Maybe even embarrassed?

  Maybe she didn’t realize what I was doing. “I came back here to look out the observation port.” He provided the explanation he had prepared. “I feel cramped in here.”

  She smiled, and Nickolai wondered if she made a point of not showing her teeth to him. “That, I understand.” She massaged the neural interface on the back of her neck and shook her head. “Even the ship’s internal network feels closed in. Which makes no sense, but there you are.”

  “Why are you down here?” Nickolai asked.

  “Same reason.” She shook her head. “But you were here first. I can go back and jack into an observatory program. Get a better view that way.”

  “Then why come down here?”

  “Oh, just something about seeing it with my own eyes. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “I understand.”

  She turned to go, and Nickolai said, “Wait.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “What?”

  “There’s room by the portal, if you want . . .” Nickolai didn’t know why he was saying the words, and he trailed off in the middle of the sentence.

  “To join you?”

  “I understand if you want to be alone,” Nickolai said. He turned to face the empty stars. In reality, staring out the observation portal was the last thing he wanted to do, but it was the only explanation he had for being here, and now that Kugara had seen him, he didn’t have much choice but to face the void.

  “Nickolai,” she said, “we’ve been alone since we boarded this ship.”

  “Longer than that,” Nickolai whispered, pulling himself into the small circular room in front of the observation port. He pressed himself against the wall so he squatted on his haunches. If the Eclipse was pointed at their destination right now, then he was probably facing all of human space. The home of his own people, the Fifteen Worlds, he could probably cover with his hand.

  To his surprise, Kugara joined him. She floated up behind him, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You know, it’s not as roomy as you think it is.”

  Nickolai edged to the side, and Kugara squeezed through the top of the doorway. She pressed against his arm, grunting. Once past him, she twisted to hold herself against the wall on the other side of the door, facing out the portal toward the stars.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She looked down at the wall behind her. “The view would be better if I killed the lights. Here . . .”

  She touched a control on the wall behind her, and the lights in the corridor dimmed until the only illumination came from the control readouts and the stars. Beyond the window, the star field erupted into painful clarity. Nickolai’s artificial eyes shifted frequencies and sensitivities, showing more and more stars, a view of the universe he had never experienced before. A vastness that was beautiful, stark, and completely disinterested in him.

  “Damn,” Kugara repeated.

  Why are we here? Nickolai thought. Staring out at the stars, the question took on an unintended depth beyond the simple self-doubt of inviting Kugara to share this view.

  After a long silence, Kugara asked, “Do you trust Mosasa?”

  “No.”

  “But you agreed to work for him.”

  “You say that as if I had a choice,” Nickolai quoted her words back at her.

  “Touché.” She pulled her legs up until her knees were drawn up in front of her. She folded her arms across her knees, and rested her chin on her arms. “He’s so cold.”

  “He’s a machine.”

  “You told me that. But the idea he knew, about the ambush—ambushes—and that he might have triggered an interplanetary invasion. Don’t you feel you’re working for the Devil?”

  Nickolai laughed for the first time in a long while. He only stopped when he realized that Kugara was staring at him.

  “My apologies,” Nickolai said. “That was amusing.”

  “What was amusing?”

  Nickolai looked out at the stars. “Of course we’re working for the Devil. Mosasa is lifeless thought, the personification of the sins of the Fallen.”

  “The Fallen?”

  “Humanity. Our creators.”

  “Our creators?” She sucked in a breath. “Oh.”

  There was a long period of silence before she asked, “If Mosasa is the Devil, what does that make us?”

  “Souls untainted by the arrogance of the Fallen who have the possibility of redemption in the eyes of God. You more than I, because you are closer to His creation before the Fall.”

  “You believe this?”

  “I was raised in the faith of St. Rajasthan.”

  “Is that an answer?”

  “What I believe is not important. I’m as damned as Mosasa.”

  “Why?”

  “You never asked me about my arm.”

  He couldn’t read her expression, but he could almost feel what she was thinking. She could ask him about his past, but that would open up the opportunity for him to question her about her own.

  Kugara didn’t speak for a long time. Then she said, “You truly think I’m closer to God than you are?”

  “In my faith, you are considered an Angel.”

  He heard her make some soft rhythmic sounds, like she was gasping for breath.

  Crying? Why?

  She extended her legs, pushing against the portal to shoot out the door above him, out into the corridor. Nickolai turned, body slowly tumbling in the observation room. “Kugara?”

  “Shut up, you stupid morey bastard.”

  Nickolai drew back, the unexpected slur stinging him more than he thought possible.

  “You know nothing about me,” she shouted at him without turning her head. “Nothing! How dare you!” She disappeared out the doorway before Nickolai could pull himself out of the observation room.

  He floated alone, in the dark, with the stars.

  There was a small area forward of the crew quarters of the Eclipse that served as a common area. Mallory made a point to take meals there when there was a quorum of the scientific team in attendance. On some level he wanted to avoid Dr. Dörner, but that was not really possible on a ship this size, and going to the effort of trying to avoid her would have attracted way more attention to himself.

  In the end, his cover was only a means to an end, the end being intelligence on what was happening out toward Xi Virginis. And after Mosasa’s revelations about the Caliphate, Mallory suspected that information was more important than ever.

  He hoped the scientific team Mosasa had assembled would be the closest to knowing the answer. That was the theory, anyway.

  So, at each meal, he took a seat and eavesdropped, and if they didn’t actively engage him in their conversations, they didn’t shun him either—though Dr. Dörner’s icy stares came close.

  Fine, Mallory thought, the more you see me as a mercenary thug, the less likely you’ll see a Jesuit colleague.

  Over the past week, just by listening to their small talk, he discovered that none of them had been recruited from Bakunin itself. They came from several far-flung corners of human space. Bill—who was only ever present as a synthetic voice on a comm unit, his massive life-support system never leaving his cargo bay—was from Paralia, of course. Dr. Dörner, Mallory knew, came from Acheron, and that caused Dr. Pak to make an unsubtle comment about the planet contributing to her icy personality. Dr. Pak actually came from Terra, which usually granted him some deference beyond his relative youth but didn’t keep Dr. Dörner from making a sharp comment about people who peaked young looking forward to a “slow, sad decline.”

  Of the last two, Brody came from Bulawayo in the Trianguli Union, and Tsoravitch came from Jokul in the Sirius Economic Community. Two planets fifty light-years apart; both close to forty light-years from Acheron. Mosasa ha
d cast an extremely wide net, one that made the concentrated effort on Bakunin seem designed to catch the Caliphate’s attention.

  Which was probably the point . . .

  Mallory didn’t like to think of what would happen when the Caliphate moved toward these outlying colonies. The Vatican had no fleet, as such, but should the Bishop of Rome speak to some secular rulers, Mallory suspected that the Caliphate’s move wouldn’t be uncontested.

  The only thing preventing him from seizing the tach-comm and sending a desperate message back home was the fact he knew that the Caliphate was closely observed. Their moves would be known by other assets soon after they made a decision. It wasn’t worth blowing his cover before he had gathered information at the source.

  The source of what, that was the question. And the science team was as unenlightening on the point of this expedition as Mosasa had been.

  Tsoravitch had just made a point about Mosasa’s less than edifying briefings. She leaned back in a corner of the common room, sipping a container of what passed for coffee on the Eclipse, and shook her head at Brody. “If he didn’t give you any more information, why’d you agree to come along on this bizarre little field trip?”

  Brody sat facing away from Mallory, so he couldn’t see the doctor’s expression from his spot on the couch in the opposite corner of the common room, though the tone of voice Brody used was almost wistful. “I really could care less about Mosasa’s ‘anomaly.’ But I’ve been in a teaching chair at Sokoto University for nearly twenty years standard. I study culture, and I haven’t stepped foot outside the Trianguli Union since I finished my graduate work. Now I get the chance to see colonies that have been isolated from the rest of human space for at least a century? I jumped at the chance.”

  “Amen to that.” Pak raised his glass in a toast to the others.

  “Same reason?” Tsoravitch asked.

  Pak nodded. “A hundred years isn’t a huge time for linguistic drift, even if they are isolated. But if these colonies were founded during the collapse of the Confederacy, with a substantial mix of languages, there could be a whole class of new Creole to study. The first person to write a paper on these outliers could make a career.” He looked over at Tsoravitch. “What about you?”