Prophets

  “Maybe there’s nothing left to protect.”

  Kugara pulled her small flechette gun and pointed it at the ground. “If you would do me the favor?” She nodded to the open gate.

  Nickolai supposed that he should be grateful that she did him the favor of at least making the pretense of asking. He walked over to the door. There was some logic to being the experimental subject here; any traps were going to be scaled for a human intruder and might not affect him as badly. Even so, he suspected that tactics was only a secondary consideration in having him take the lead.

  He pushed the gate with his artificial hand, and it swung inward. He had to crouch and step through sidewise to avoid touching the frame of the door, which could still be charged.

  No traps were sprung on him, no sudden stun fields, and no guards emerging from the trees. Nothing happened other than leaves rustling in the breeze and the door slowly creaking shut. He walked over to the guard shack. It was a small temporary structure with one-way windows, barely twice as wide as he was; just tall and deep enough for a human to stand comfortably inside.

  Around back was the entrance, which hung open like the gate. He opened it, and no one was inside.

  “Nickolai?” Kugara shouted, still on the other side of the fence.

  “No one’s here!” Nickolai shouted back from behind the guard shack.

  There wasn’t room for him inside the building, but its shallow depth put the control panel within easy reach. He touched the panel and called up a series of small views of the perimeter fence. A few more taps, and he was looking at a series of views, presumably from inside the fence. He saw a number of temporary structures, and what looked like a landing area, but no people and no vehicles.

  Also, many of the buildings showed signs of withstanding some sort of firefight. The area between the structures showed debris and shrapnel.

  He heard Kugara approach him, but he was still startled when her voice came from near his right elbow.

  “What the HELL is that?”

  It only took a moment for him to realize what she was talking about. A camera had just panned to bring into view something that didn’t belong here. Something that didn’t belong anywhere, as far as Nickolai was concerned.

  The camera panned from a series of temporary prefab buildings to something that Nickolai couldn’t classify as a building or a plant or a geological feature. It was a twisting crystalline structure that seemed to grow out of the ground and repeatedly fold into itself as it reached up into the sky. The camera kept panning over more geometric forms that seemed to have been born out of the hallucinations of a Paralian mathematician.

  Nickolai stared at the images in the small holo and couldn’t turn them into anything more than pure abstractions. If the shiny forms held a function, he couldn’t discern it.

  “What is it?” Kugara repeated.

  “It must be what they were fencing in.”

  “Is it some sort of natural formation?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no sign of anyone here. If these are the comm channels,” he tapped on a quiet part of the console removed from the security cam display, “there’s no talking going on around here.”

  “So we have some sort of firefight, and an evacuation.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “And that.” She gestured toward the holo that was panning back across the crystal enigma.

  Nickolai nodded. “And that.”

  “It would be just our luck to make landfall in the middle of a war.” She stepped back and gestured down the road with her gun. “Well we should check out exactly what kind of mess we’re facing. I’m almost glad our flare gun failed.”

  The small outpost nestled in an oblong clearing in the woods, one that had been some sort of impact site. When they walked from the woods to the clearing itself, Nickolai could see the signs in the trees. Many were blackened, and the massive hexagonal plates that passed for bark had sloughed off the trees that still stood at the perimeter, revealing a dull-red interior that seemed to be a sign the tree was dying. In front of the wounded sentinels, their broken comrades had been piled into deadfalls on the edges of the clearing.

  The clearing itself was populated by two ranks of temporary buildings that marched down toward the opposite end of the clearing, where the site turned alien and crystalline. Seeing it with his own eyes, and not through a holo camera, Nickolai could see something he hadn’t noticed through the security cameras; the buildings showed more combat damage the closer they got to the crystal. The buildings directly adjacent showed severe burning, shrapnel and blast damage. The abstract geometry of the crystals appeared untouched.

  Nickolai could smell the remnants of explosives and old fire stronger than ever. He could also smell the scent of a human being.

  “In front of us,” he whispered, “in the crystals, our one o’clock.”

  Kugara turned to face that direction, and he heard a gunshot from some sort of slugthrower. The source was impossible to pin down precisely. The crystal structures vibrated in sympathy with the sound and contributed distorted echoes.

  “Drop the weapon!” The accent was odd and distorted by the same crystal echoes, but it was understandable.

  Kugara looked at him and lowered the flechette gun. That wasn’t enough for the sniper. “I said drop it!”

  Kugara tossed the gun on the ground in front of them. “We aren’t part of what’s happening here. Our lifeboat crashed—”

  “Who are you? What is that . . . creature?”

  “I’m Julie Kugara, my companion is Nickolai Rajasthan. We are crew members from the tach-ship Eclipse. Our lifeboat landed in the woods southwest of—”

  “Are you from Xi Virginis?”

  “What?”

  “Are you from Xi Virginis?!”

  “No,” Nickolai answered, interrupting Kugara.“The Eclipse was based out of Bakunin.”

  “Bakunin?” The voice’s tone changed, becoming less confrontational. “There’s still a Bakunin out there?”

  “As far as we know.” Kugara said. “We’ve been in tachspace for over six months.”

  Nickolai saw a shadow move in the crystalline landscape. It resolved into a relatively young human male holding a shotgun. The man was shorter than Kugara and wore a pair of tan overalls. He walked with a bit of a limp.

  “You two are really from Bakunin?” He brushed some hair from in front of his face, revealing a tattoo in the middle of his forehead. He was staring at Nickolai. “You talk?”

  “Yes.” If it wasn’t for Kugara’s presence, he would have leaped and disabled this man already. He could tell this youth had no military training just by the way he held his shotgun and ignored Kugara’s discarded weapon as he walked toward them. Considering how much attention he was paying to Nickolai, Kugara could probably clear the distance between them and disarm him before he realized she had moved.

  For a moment, the man didn’t seem to be paying attention to either of them, then he said, “Moreau, right? From the Seven Worlds?”

  “It hasn’t been the Seven Worlds for a hundred and seventy-five years,” Nickolai said. “It’s the Fifteen Worlds now.”

  “Of course it is. We’ve been out of touch.” He walked around them, keeping what he must have assumed was a safe distance. “A lot of you on Bakunin now? Since it became ‘officially’ part of the Sev—Fifteen Worlds?”

  Nickolai wondered what was going on. When this man first saw them, it seemed clear he had no idea who or what Nickolai was. Now he seemed to be aware of the history of Nickolai’s people, at least up until one hundred seventy-five years ago. He wondered if he was in radio contact with someone else. He didn’t see signs of the man wearing a radio, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have anything implanted, could be in contact with anyone on the planet as far as they knew.

  “There aren’t very many; most are exiles, like me.”

  “Bakunin’s still a great place to run away from something?” He turned and looked
up at Kugara, who was a good head taller than he was. “That your story? You running away from something?”

  “I retired.”

  “From?”

  “Dakota Planetary Security.”

  The man paused and took a step back, looking at her. He whispered to himself. Nickolai heard his nearly-subvocalized words, “Oh, boy, Gram.” Then, after a pause, “Go right ahead.”

  There was a strange and abrupt shift in the man’s body language. His grip on the shotgun changed, so he was now a lot more able to bring it to bear quickly. The cock of his head, and even his facial expression seemed different.

  Most different was the voice. It suddenly seemed older, more confident. “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.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Zealots

  War does not exist when all parties have perfect knowledge.

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

  —Sir WILLIAM Osler (1849-1919)

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

  Alexander sat in his impromptu command center within the Ashley Hall of Minds, trying to improve the glacial response time of the Salmagundi government. Even in the face of his coup, and his direct control of every police department, security agency, and militia on the planet, events conspired to move faster than Salmagundi could react.

  On the screens before him, he could see the recon team securing the last lifeboat site. Three of the six lifeboats had been unoccupied, and they had secured the occupants of two others. The teams had sterilized the sites, using plasma grenades to reduce the lifeboats themselves to slag.

  It was the kind of direct action the Triad spent days debating, worrying over its effect on the general population. As if the presence of offworlders and offworld artifacts would be somehow less disruptive.

  At least that concern was moderated by the fact that they had already evacuated the civilian population from the forest east of Ashley in preparation for using their nuclear stores on Flynn Jorgenson’s alien invader. The evacuation was fortunate on many levels. It helped ensure that no civilian agency came across the lifeboats before the militia got there—even with the intolerable delay caused by the Grand Triad’s debate.

  Alexander idly wondered if they were still debating.

  The preliminary abbreviated debriefing conducted by the on-site commander with the four Eclipse crew members they had retrieved indicated that there were two lifeboat occupants who still remained at large. They were his immediate concern. He needed them in his control or confirmed deceased. His militia scouts had identified the lifeboat the missing two had landed in, and after slagging the wreck, they now engaged in a search pattern, spiraling out from the landing site. It concerned Alexander, because it placed a militia team in uncomfortable proximity to Flynn Jorgenson’s Protean anomaly. He had the nuclear strike on hold, but the other militia teams had already retreated out of the red zone. Alexander did not want one of the militia teams in harm’s way if he had to launch the attack. They weren’t an expendable resource.

  One of the militia officers with him solved the problem.

  “Sir, we have something on holo five.”

  Alexander looked up, and saw a security feed from the camp around the Protean artifact. The camp was abandoned in anticipation of the coming strike, but he saw three figures standing in the middle of a muddy track. One was Flynn Jorgenson, the unfortunate who had discovered the Protean artifact’s impact site. The other two were unquestionably the two missing invaders from the lifeboat. One wasn’t even human. It had striped fur, a tail, and looked as if it stood three meters tall.

  They were too close to the Protean site for the militia to retrieve them, even if he wanted to risk contact with something so obviously nonhuman. He would have to be satisfied with the strike.

  He ordered the last militia aircraft out of the red zone and resumed the countdown for the nuclear strike.

  Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) 650,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

  While the Jizan approached with the troublesome remains of the Eclipse and its crew, Admiral Hussein had the data from the crew interviews piped into the same meeting room where he had been reviewing the transmission from Admiral Bitar.

  He watched the debriefing of the Eclipse’s owner, Mosasa, as it was transmitted back to the Voice. He wanted to believe that it was some sort of elaborate misinformation ploy. Even while the human-shaped AI was still talking, he pulled half of the intelligence analysts on the Voice to do what fact-checking they could using the resources on the Voice against what data the Jizan could recover from the dead ship.

  By the grace of God, how did all this fall into my lap?

  The medical officers who had been doing the analysis of Bitar’s transmission were still with him, observing the android’s statement for much the same reason.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked them, still watching the hairless Mosasa’s passion play. The medical officers sat at a square table in the observation room while Hussein paced around the perimeter. In the center of the table was a holo projecting an image of the seated Mosasa and his interrogator on board the Jizan.

  Lieutenant Deshem folded his hands, watching the confession, and shaking his head. “I don’t know what value I can provide. The medical team has done everything possible with a noninvasive scan to confirm that this—thing—is exactly what it says it is.”

  “And everything else it’s saying?”

  “Admiral, sir, this thing is a machine. All I can tell you is how well or poorly it is mimicking human responses. Unlike a human being, we have to assume that every response—voice, body language, pupil dilation—may be engineered for our benefit.”

  “I understand your caution,” Admiral Hussein said. “We’re facing something that admits its own design was for the purpose of manipulating human responses. That said, if we take all those cues—voice, body language, pupil dilation—at face value, what is Mosasa telling us?”

  “As if this was the interview of a human being?”

  “Yes.”

  Deshem nodded. “Mosasa shows signs of being dangerously psychopathic and potentially suicidal.”

  “What?”

  “I see no exhibition of empathy, and he—it—displays a narcissism bordering on megalomania. It is the center of its own universe, and it has rewritten its own personal narrative so that it is not just the hero, but it is God. A human being with those traits would be, at the very least, sociopathic. Combine this with a series of failures aboard the Eclipse and we have a situation where reality contradicts its personal worldview. Its self-image is incompatible with powerlessness, and that conflict is manifesting as signs of depression.”

  Hussein stared into the holo and asked, “And you think Mosasa would want us to see that? Make that interpretation of his story?”

  “No, I do not—which is precisely why I distrust the conclusion.”

  Hussein stared into the holographic Mosasa’s eyes and felt a deep unease.

  The Jizan had a fully operational medical unit that had shown him the scans of the creature sitting in this holographic interrogation room. Never mind how human Mosasa looked, or how human he behaved, there wasn’t a single biological component to the thing being interrogated on the Jizan. It didn’t matter if Hussein could recognize the pain and fear in Mosasa’s expression. It didn’t matter if he could see the loss in Mosasa’s holographic eyes. There was nothing behind them, no soul, only an imitation of life. A facade constructed solely for the purpose of deceit and manipulation.

  If the Father of Lies was to attempt to create a man, Hussein suspected the result would resemble Mosasa.

  The more Hussein stared at Mosasa’s expression
, the more he thought Deshem had described a psych profile that perfectly fit an AI, and this AI in particular.

  This is why we do not suffer such things to exist.

  As the Voice caught up with the Jizan, Admiral Hussein watched the other surviving crew members being debriefed. Between the statements, and the data from the dead ship, he confirmed the Eclipse had been Mosasa’s scientific expedition toward Xi Virginis.

  The Eclipse had accumulated a large amount of scientific data observing the site where Xi Virginis had been. If it was to be trusted, the star didn’t exist anymore.

  Admiral Hussein thought of Admiral Bitar and the Sword’s fleet. He supposed that the pilot of the Eclipse could have tached out before the Sword’s arrival, but where were the technologically advanced natives of Xi Virginis that Admiral Bitar had told them about?

  It would take a significant effort to completely map the Eclipse’s transit history, but a cursory review of the logs supported the crew’s story. The Eclipse had been in transit for months. Even with the fastest standard tach-drive available, it took the Eclipse as long to make its twenty light-year hops as the Voice took to make its eighty light-year leap.

  Hussein found it incredible that a civilian had been able to secure such an advanced drive system. What was more incredible was the fact when the crew of the Voice was receiving its crash training on a virgin ship Mosasa’s expedition was well underway.

  It seemed unlikely that such an undertaking would have gone completely unnoticed. Hussein suspected that Caliphate intelligence discovered Mosasa’s expedition and moved up the timetable for launching the new fleets. Of course, he would have liked it if his own intelligence officers had known about that beforehand.

  A cursory examination of the Eclipse’s logs recovered names, biometric identification, and some history on all the crew members. Mosasa had split his people between a science team and a group of mercenaries from Bakunin. It seemed a lot of military talent for a scientific expedition, but that was probably par for the course on Bakunin.