Prophets

  Finally he had something over everybody. It felt good. So good, in fact, that he completely missed the warning signs; the shift to encrypted protocols, the change in radio operators to people he wasn’t familiar with, the occasional and emphatic order for him not to leave the site of the impact, the repeated questions about who else might know this information, who he had discussed the Proteans with.

  He couldn’t really blame Tetsami either. Normally, she was a little more paranoid than he was, but if he was caught up in the novelty of having something new to report on and having the expertise to analyze it, Tetsami was overtaken by her awe at seeing a remnant of Proteus showing up on Salmagundi. Enough so that, like Flynn, she hadn’t given herself the opportunity to think through exactly how the powers-that-be back at Ashley might react to their visitor or its history.

  Ten hours after the impact, after the sun had set, the first security contragrav arrived. Flynn ran up to the craft as soon as it landed, waving his arms, still oblivious as the doors opened and two men stepped out. The name tags on their jumpsuits read Frank and Tony.

  “Hey, it’s about five hundred meters that way—” Flynn pointed.

  “Uh, they seem more interested in us.”

  Frank stepped up to Flynn while Tony walked past him toward the flier. Flynn turned, finally realizing that something was wrong. “What are you doing—”

  Frank grabbed him and, before Flynn could object, had him in handcuffs and a restraint collar.

  “What the fuck?”

  Frank hustled him into the back of the security contragrav and pushed him down into a seat. As the door closed, Flynn saw Tony pulling the comm unit and all the data recordings from his flier.

  “Okay, that’s not good—”

  “No, Gram, it isn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jihad

  Right and wrong are defined by what you do, not what you serve.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

  —KARL von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)

  Date: 2526.5.6 (Standard) 10.3 ly from Beta Comae Berenices

  It had all been leading to this. Almost six months ago, Admiral Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti had taken command of a battle group that barely existed. Now, after half a year of accelerated construction and the crash training of nearly ten thousand men, the Prophet’s Voice floated in the interstellar void ten light-years from Beta Comae Berenices and the planet Falcion, preparing for its maiden voyage.

  Attached to the kilometer-long vessel, over a hundred individual spacecraft docked, ranging from troop transports to fighters to heavy drop-ships—an entire fleet unto itself.

  On the bridge, Admiral Hussein stood and waited for their last tach-jump. There was no technical reason for any of the command staff to be here during the jump, much less Admiral Hussein himself. However, it had been impressed upon the entire command staff of the Caliphate that this mission was as much about diplomacy as it was about military force. To that end, forms of ceremony were meticulously adhered to.

  Admiral Hussein stood along with a senior officer from each of the larger vessels in the Voice’s battle group. Each officer wore the emerald dress uniform of the Caliphate Navy, boots polished to a mirror shine. Golden braids of command outnumbered the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers doing the work maneuvering the Voice and syncing the tach-jump.

  The admiral thought that his command staff would cut quite the impressive figure when they made their first broadcast down to the surface of the “lost” colony orbiting the star HD 101534, the Voice’s destination.

  Of course, the hundred warships accompanying the Voice would probably be a fair bit more impressive.

  He expected that the Caliphate’s politicians were right, and they would have a victory without firing a shot. All the admiral would require of the colony would be a formal treaty of alliance, no large matter for a planet so far removed from the rest of human space.

  Just enough to keep the Caliphate’s rivals at bay.

  The admiral steepled his fingers as he waited for the klaxons to announce their last tach-jump. He wondered idly if any of the command staff at attention in front of and below the command dais were as happy as he about the prospect of a largely peaceful mission. The admiral was a veteran of conflicts on Rubai and Waldgrave, and he was not a timid commander, but the Prophet’s Voice was a brand new flagship. Many of its hallways still smelled faintly of new paint.

  Not only a new ship, but a new ship design. The Caliphate had spent an unprecedented amount of time and treasure in the creation of the Ibrahim-class of carriers, each with its own fleet of warships, fifty tach-capable vessels and another fifty short-range fighters, all attached to the great ship like parasitic young.

  In addition, the Ibrahim-class of carrier had the largest and most sophisticated tach-drive in existence. Until the Caliphate’s engineers built the antimatter-fueled monstrosities filling the guts of these new carriers, the limits of existing tach-drives peaked out at twenty light-years and 256c—and that only effectively reachable by ships a third of the Voice’s mass, without the attached warships.

  The Voice’s tach-drives showed a fourfold increase in speed, mass, and distance. It could clear eighty light-years in a jump that took only slightly over twenty-eight days standard. Even if the drives sucked the energy equivalent of a small sun, it placed every world in human space in tactical reach of the Caliphate. Including the far-flung colonies seventy light-years past Helminth.

  The potential of the new warships was limitless.

  However, the admiral was very much aware that the potential was untested. It was distressing how quickly the Voice and her sisters were promoted from an abbreviated shake-down into active duty. When the orders came for this mission nearly six months ago, the Voice was still being constructed. It had been barely three weeks since the last of the construction crew had left the ship.

  The admiral was keenly aware of the rush to space-worthiness. They had not even been able to test the power-hungry tach-drives at their full capacity.

  Not until this moment.

  The Voice was the last of the four to dive out toward the worlds clustered around Xi Virginis. Their target was a small world eight light-years away from that star, and right at the theoretical outer limit of the Voice’s massive drives from their current position.

  The crew functioned admirably under the gaze of so many command officers. He was proud of having his people perform so well after the bare-bones training they were forced through to fully man the Voice in such a short time frame. Checklists were completed, final broadcasts made through the ship, the last engineering details were triple-checked and the navigation team ran the final models on the massive computer cores that pondered the longest tach-jump in human history.

  The complicated electronic ballet concluded with a chorus of “Ready” cascading across the bridge, starting at navigation, through communications, environmental and weapon systems, and finally ending with Captain Gamal Rasheed, the commander of the Voice and therefore the highest ranking member of the battle group under Admiral Hussein. The captain turned to him and said, “All stations report we are prepared to jump.”

  The admiral nodded. “Give the order, Captain.”

  “Engage the tach-drive.”

  Date: 2526.5.10 (Standard) Earth-Sol

  Sydney was probably about as far as one could get from Rome and still remain on the same planet—not only geographically, but in spirit. Where the Vatican, and most of Europe, seemed to embody the roots of mankind, its ties to Earth, the Australian city seemed the reverse, aggressively tying itself to the star-flung traces of humanity. It still wore its history as the capital of the old Confederacy.

  Once the nominal seat of the last attempt at a universal human government, and more than 250 years old, the Confederacy Tower stabbed a kilometer-long finger into the Australian sky. It dominated this city the way it had once dominated all of known space.

/>   To Cardinal Anderson, the building seemed to reach beyond the bounds of Earth, a modern Tower of Babel that was still, in a sense, caught in a slow motion collapse that began 175 years ago. The power still held by the building was represented by the extensive diplomatic compounds that clustered near it. The embassy and consulates here had remained in continual operation even through the collapse of the old Confederacy. No place else would anyone find representatives from more human colonized planets. Across all of human space, there were probably only a dozen planets that didn’t have a diplomat here. And that was including the cluster of colonies around the star Xi Virginis.

  Cardinal Anderson stood on a balcony of one of those diplomatic compounds. The Vatican had had a token embassy here from the days of the Confederacy; it was a small structure on the fringes of the diplomatic hive surrounding the spire reflecting its unique status. Even before man had left the bounds of Earth, the Vatican had the strange distinction of having all the functions of a state without most of the secular trappings of that authority. It had been near a millennium since the Bishop of Rome had commanded a nonspiritual army.

  However, in some ways, the Church was more powerful now than it had been then. He certainly doubted a request from any other entity would have sufficed to gather together the people meeting here tonight.

  He stood and watched as the sun set behind the massive spire, backlighting it so that its silhouette parted the sky as if the clouds were a pair of theater curtains just beginning to open, revealing something dark behind them.

  “Your Grace?” came a voice transmitted into the office behind him.

  “Yes?” he responded without turning around.

  “Mr. Xaing from the Indi Protectorate has just arrived.”

  “Thank you. Let the representatives know I’m on my way down.”

  He turned away from the shadowed spire caught between a sense of satisfaction at bringing this meeting to fruition and a sense of foreboding over what he had to impart.

  Twelve people waited for him downstairs. He had called on representatives not just from the large states of the Indi Protectorate, the Centauri Alliance, and the Sirius Economic Community, but he also invited diplomats from the Union of Independent Worlds, and had even appealed to the nonhumans of the Fifteen Worlds.

  When he walked into the conference room in the basement of the Vatican consulate, he faced representatives from every transplanetary government outside of the Caliphate itself. As he walked up to the head of the table, a holo of the Caliphate’s newest Ibrahim-class carrier was projected above the long axis of the table. It was sobering to think this ship was as massive as the Confederacy spire itself.

  “Thank you all for coming. I know the logistics of this meeting were complex, but the willingness of your governments to meet here should illustrate the gravity of this situation.”

  A dozen pairs of eyes focused on him with emotions that ranged from support from the Vatican’s nominal allies, Centauri and Sirius, to enigmatic disinterest coming from the inhuman eyes belonging to the canid from the Fifteen Worlds, to outright hostility coming from the camp of Indi and the Independent Worlds.

  But all were here to hear him speak.

  “It is the desire of His Holiness to share what we know about the Caliphate’s capabilities and intentions, because their implications affect every government represented in this room.”

  With that, Cardinal Anderson made the same arguments that he had been making to the pope for the last decade. By the grace of God, these people would not take as long to convince.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Revelation

  The more prepared the attack, the less expected the outcome.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

  —Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891)

  Date: 2526.05.22 (Standard) Xi Virginis

  There wasn’t even a sound to mark the Eclipse’s jump, just an abrupt shift in the star field shown in the holo.

  Another twenty light-years, Nickolai thought. Here we are.

  For the drama, and the plotting, and the hushed admonitions of Mr. Antonio, the Eclipse’s arrival at the point of Mr. Mosasa’s anomaly was anticlimactic.

  “We’re still nominal on all systems,” Parvi said. “Drives are cold.”

  “Mass sensors negative for two AU.”

  Wahid didn’t say anything. After a long pause, Mosasa said, “Navigation?”

  “Hold on a minute.” Wahid shook his head, and for all the trouble Nickolai had in interpreting human expressions, even he could tell something was seriously wrong.

  “What’s the problem?” Parvi asked. “Are we off course?”

  Nickolai knew that the Eclipse was fueled for multiple jumps at this distance, but even so, the thought of taching twenty light-years in the wrong direction tightened something in his gut.

  Could what I did have affected the engines? Nickolai began to realize that there was no particular motive for Mr. Antonio to keep him alive. Mr. Antonio wasn’t like Nickolai; he was a man and had no honor to keep, even to himself.

  “No, we’re right where we’re supposed to be,” Wahid said slowly. It almost sounded as if he didn’t believe it himself. “All the landmarks check out . . .”

  “What’s wrong, then?” Parvi asked.

  “Look at the damn holo!” Wahid said, thrusting a hand at the display as if he wanted to bat it out of his face.

  “What?” Parvi looked at the holo of stars between them, and her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “No . . .”

  “Kugara?” Mosasa snapped.

  “I’m ahead of you. Mass scans out to the full range of the sensors. No sign of anything bigger than an asteroid for a hundred AU. We got background radiation consistent with interstellar media—”

  One of the scientists, the female with yellow hair, spoke up. “What happened? Is there some sort of problem?”

  “Bet your ass there’s a problem.” Wahid spun around on his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo display. “We’re missing a whole star.”

  “What?”

  “Xi Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”

  Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. The words echoed in Mallory’s head, the transmission Cardinal Anderson had played for him, the voice quoting Revelation burning in his memory.

  Mallory stood back and watched everyone react to the news that an A-spectrum main sequence dwarf star had ceased to exist. More than one member of the science team said, “A star can’t just disappear.”

  Apparently that was wrong.

  Bill’s synthetic Windsor monotone asked for sensor data, and told them to look for stellar remnants. Even without any affect, Mallory could sense a slight desperation just in the nature of the request. Kugara had already done a mass scan of the region and found nothing significant for one hundred AU; no dark stellar remnants, no remains of a planetary system. Just dust and some widely-spaced asteroids.

  Perhaps most disturbing was Mosasa’s reaction. He seemed as shocked as everyone else, running duplicate scans at his own station, shouting orders at his trio of bridge officers.

  You were looking for some sort of anomaly, Mallory thought. Here it is.

  Wahid made several attempts to disprove their location. But all the other stars were right where they should be. The background showed that they couldn’t be more than a third of a light-year off in any direction; right on top of Xi Virginis in interstellar terms.

  “What the hell happened?” Wahid muttered. “Did it blow up? Did it fall into a black hole?”

  “No remnants of any such event are observable,” Bill’s synthetic voice answered Wahid.

  “There was a colony here?” Dr. Dörner had joined the bridge crew around the holo, where data now scrolled by the star field.

  Mosasa ignored
her and kept shaking his head. “This can’t—”

  Dörner grabbed Mosasa’s shoulder and pulled him around to face her. “You said there was a colony here?”

  The emotion drained from Mosasa’s face, and he suddenly looked as flat as Bill’s voice. He reached up and removed Dörner’s hand from his shoulder. The dragon tattoo glinted in reflected light from the holo next to them. “Yes,” Mosasa said, “there was a colony here. Kugara and Tsoravitch isolated one hundred forty-seven distinct EM signals from it during our approach. The colony, or its capital city, was named Xanadu.”

  Dörner stepped back, as if the enormity of the situation was just beginning to sink in. “How many people—”

  “My population estimate was five hundred thousand to one point five million.”

  Dörner blinked, staring at Mosasa.

  Wahid and Bill were still carrying on a conversation. “We had a damn star here twenty years ago, right?”

  “The light sphere from the unknown event had not reached our last position when our course was laid in. That places the unknown event no more than 19.875 standard years ago.”

  Mosasa stepped back. “This is completely outside every scenario—”

  “One and a half million people?” Dörner shook her head. “One and a half million people?”

  Mallory stepped forward; and slowed as he realized that Fitzpatrick, his alter ego, would not have the immediate impulse to comfort someone. When Dörner turned toward him, he had an uneasy feeling reminding him that she was a potential disaster for his cover story if she remembered seeing him before as Father Mallory.

  His hesitation allowed Brody to be the one to step forward. The anthropologist took Dörner away from the bridge crew, quietly talking. “We don’t know what happened, Sharon. We don’t know there was anyone here when whatever happened, happened.”