Prophets

CHAPTER TWELVE

Portents

The Devil is in the details, and God is right there egging him on.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

—VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)

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

Mallory found Mosasa’s response to his question more unnerving than a confirmation would have been. He would have been more comfortable if Mosasa had at least given the impression he knew something of what was happening in the vicinity of Xi Virginis. Mallory looked at his fellow mercenaries and wondered if any of them, like him, had reasons for being here other than answering Mosasa’s ad.

There was the massive wall of fur and muscle named Nickolai Rajasthan. Mallory didn’t know exactly how he felt about working with someone whose ancestors were created specifically to wage war as a proxy for man. The fact that Nickolai existed was a testament to how unfit man was to play God, creating life not out of love, but solely as a tool for destruction. But according to half a millennium of Church doctrine, Nickolai was spiritually as human as Mallory was, despite his origins.

Then there was Julia Kugara who, if she wasn’t just trying to bait Wahid, was a descendant of the same genetic engineers who had created Nickolai’s kind. Even in the twenty-first century—when men thought little, if anything, of molding animals into short-lived faux-humans to kill and die in mankind’s stead—even then, men had an inkling of evil when they rebuilt human beings. Even before the secular governments placed the techniques that produced Nickolai’s kin on the list of heretical technologies, it was supposedly illegal to genetically modify human beings. Which didn’t mean it didn’t happen, and happen often enough that descendants of those shadowy experiments still existed.

Mallory knew little of Dakota, the one planet those genetically-engineered humans had made their own after their exile. It was part of the Fifteen Worlds, one of a pair of habitable planets orbiting Tau Ceti—the less inviting one. From what Mallory did know, Dakota was even more xenophobic and insular than the rest of the Fifteen Worlds.

Considering how close it was, Mallory wondered how large a population of Dakota expatriates lived on Bakunin. He also wondered if it was only her father that carried a genetic engineer’s legacy and how much of Kugara’s genome was artificial.

Finally, there was Jusuf Wahid who came from Davado Poli, a small world that was a remnant of Epsilon Indi’s aggressive expansion two hundred years ago; the wrong location and history to be a Caliphate agent. Still, Mallory couldn’t help being suspicious of him; even though logic dictated that if the Caliphate was trying to be covert here, it would do its best to use an agent who wasn’t an obvious Muslim.

But was there a reason for the Caliphate to be covert? As far as Mallory knew, they had no reason to suspect that the Church knew about the transmissions from Xi Virginis, so they would have no reason to hide their own interest.

Last, there was Mosasa himself. The man was tattooed and jeweled like a pirate from another century. And, according to Nickolai, he was as nonhuman as the tiger. Mallory didn’t know exactly what that meant. The cursory research he had been able to do on his potential employer had produced the tantalizing fact that Mosasa Salvage had existed on Bakunin almost since the founding of the anarchic colony. The salvage yard actually predated the city of Proudhon. And the images of the salvage yard’s owner from nearly three hundred years ago showed a man very similar in appearance to the Tjaele Mosasa who stood before him now.

If Mallory had deigned to risk a more aggressive investigation, tracking down associates and so on, rather than keeping a low profile in his hotel room, he suspected he might have uncovered a few interesting explanations for Mosasa’s apparent longevity.

Wahid muttered something about wanting to know who he was working with.

“Well, you know now. If you want to leave, you can be replaced.”

Wahid gave Mosasa a wide smile. “Don’t mind me. It’s all good.”

Mallory shook his head. Wahid was the kind of wiseass that annoyed him, especially in a military setting.

“Thank you.” Mosasa turned to face all of them. “If you could all take your seats, there are contracts to sign, and then a short briefing.”

After Mallory put his alias and genetic signature to a single sheet of cyberplas containing the most pithy legal document he had ever read, Mosasa stood between his seated mercenaries and the shadowed tach-ship and described the mission.

“This is primarily an intelligence gathering mission,” Mosasa told them. “There have been a number of political, economic, and scientific anomalies appearing throughout known human space for at least the past five years standard. I have traced the source to an area of space in the vicinity of Xi Virginis—”

“What do you mean ‘anomalies’?” Wahid asked.

“Has everyone read the nondisclosure clause?”

That had been one of the pithier parts of the agreement. It simply warned that if the signatory leaked any details of the job, operational or otherwise, Mosasa reserved the right to shoot whomever leaked.

When everyone confirmed they understood that particular detail, Mosasa continued.

“To explain these anomalies, I need to explain some history. I assume you are all a little familiar with the Race and the Genocide War?”

The reference to the Genocide War was a complete non sequitur to Mallory. Of course he was familiar with it. Occisis was founded during that war, a war started covertly by the amoeboid Race decades before humanity reached for the stars. When the Race was discovered manipulating human affairs on Earth, the result was an accelerated spread to the stars and the rise of the twenty-first century United Nations as one of a series of despotic Terran governments.

The founders of Occisis were the survivors, and nominal victors, in mankind’s first interstellar war, a war that ended with the near extermination of the first alien species humans had contact with. Since the war, no member of the Race had been allowed off its homeworld. As far as Mallory knew, the old United Nations battle stations still blasted anything that attempted to fly in or out of the Procyon system.

“That’s all ancient history,” Wahid said.

“A little over four hundred years,” Mosasa said, “not quite ancient.”

“But there’s a point to you going over this?” Wahid asked.

“The point is that there are several details about the Race that aren’t mentioned in popular history.”

“Like?”

Mosasa grinned. “Perhaps you know why a spacefaring race trying to contain human expansion didn’t just drop a large asteroid on Earth?”

Wahid didn’t, but Father Mallory, the xenoarchaeology professor, suddenly knew exactly what Mosasa meant. But since that wasn’t true of Fitzpatrick, Mallory remained quiet as he mentally fit all the pieces together.

Mallory knew the reason the Race didn’t bombard Earth was because the Race had evolved several cultural quirks against direct confrontation. Direct aggression was a strict taboo, so dropping a big rock on another planet was unthinkable, no matter how threatened they felt.

That didn’t mean the Race was peaceful. Far from it. The Race was ruthlessly adept at indirect violence, cultural judo where they encouraged enemies to destroy themselves, leaving their own pseudopods free of blood. By the time the Race had a unified government and reached the stars, they had developed sociology, politics, and anthropology into actual sciences, predictive sciences. With enough information, they could predict the economic, demographic, and political landscape of a city, nation, or a whole planet decades into the future.

More important, from a warfare standpoint, they knew how to change outcomes. They could see that if this political party received a large funding stream at the same time this corporation in another country was bought out and factories shut down, the end result would be a civil war in country number three.

The Race had covertly used that expertise to severely undermine the situation on Earth for nearly seventy-five years before they were discovered.

“Hold on.” Wahid interrupted Mosasa’s explanation. “Are you saying that some old Race bogeyman is telling you about ‘political, economic, and scientific anomalies’?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Mosasa answered.

“You have an AI,” Kugara said.

Of course, Mallory thought, even before Mosasa said, “In a sense, I’ve had several.”

The Race’s warfare relied on artificial intelligence. Not only was it impossible to run their cultural modeling on anything else—even if humans could duplicate the coding—the only way they could fight against the humans in direct confrontation was to have autonomous weapons that could act without direction. The implication of those weapons, which fought long past the end of the war, was one of many reasons that possession of an AI device was still a capital crime in most of human space.

Except on Bakunin, of course.

But it went deeper than that. Everything slid into unnatural clarity for Mallory. With Nickolai’s comment that Mosasa wasn’t human, and that even a cursory search for records showed Mosasa Salvage and Mosasa himself being here for over three centuries, there was only one credible explanation.

Mosasa wasn’t using a Race AI.

He was one.

The realization filled Mallory with a moral dread unlike anything he had felt before. He could feel a spiritual eclipse, where the anarchic mass of Bakunin drifted between this small gathering and the light of God, leaving them all in a darkness that was felt rather than seen.

Mallory forced himself to listen to Mosasa explain the details of his expedition. Part of him wanted to leave now, convinced that he sat in the epicenter of something terrifying and godless. Another part, the soldier, the man who was here on a mission for the Church, knew that, if anything, it was God’s providence that had taken him here.

And, in the end, Mallory knew that quitting this job was not something Fitzpatrick would do and would lead to many uncomfortable questions for someone trying to keep a low profile.

That last decision was vindicated when Mosasa introduced the woman who was going to be the military commander for this expedition. When the petite, white-haired woman walked from the shadows of Mosasa’s tach-ship, Mallory made little effort to conceal his shock. It was not an emotion that Fitzpatrick would be hiding right now.

“My name is Vijayanagara Parvi,” she introduced herself, looking at everyone assembled in front of her in turn. With the exception of Nickolai, Mallory noted. When she looked at Mallory, she said, “Some of you already know me.”

This cannot be a coincidence, Mallory thought.

Mallory waited by the exit to the hangar and watched Kugara and the tiger leave together. It only surprised him for a moment, as a moment of reflection told him that the two of them probably shared more in common than any other two members of the small mercenary squad that Mosasa had hired. They weren’t his primary concern at the moment. Not his, not Fitzpatrick’s.

Wahid left on his own. If things had gone differently during the briefing, he might have chosen to follow him. Either surreptitiously, or in a gesture of false camaraderie akin to what he supposed was happening with Kugara and Nickolai. A drunken conversation might go a long way toward assessing Wahid’s potential dual allegiances.

At the moment that wasn’t his concern either.

His concern was the short white-haired woman who walked out of the hangar about fifteen minutes later.

When Vijayanagara Parvi stepped alone into the night air, Mallory walked out in front of her. To her credit, she didn’t appear too surprised.

“I think we need to talk,” Mallory told her.

“Perhaps,” Parvi said. “Talk, then.”

“Not here,” Mallory said.

She cocked her head. “Are you worried about Mosasa hearing this? He’s paying me more than he’s paying you.”

“No,” Mallory cocked his head at the hangar. “Back inside.”

Parvi shrugged and walked back into the hangar. Mallory already assumed that anything between him and Parvi would make it back to Mosasa. Back inside Mosasa’s EM-shielded hangar, he could at least be confident that would be the extent of it.

Mosasa had gone, leaving the vast hangar space empty but for the two of them and the tach-ship. Once they were both inside, with the door shut, Mallory faced Parvi. “I was not expecting you to be part of the first job I have on Bakunin.”

Parvi shrugged. “I’ve recruited a lot of people.”

“So you don’t find it a little coincidental?”

“The universe is full of coincidences.”

“So when you recruited me, were you working for Mosasa?”

“You’re acting as if I knew you were going to apply for this particular job.”

“Did you?”

“How could I?” she asked. “Did you?”

“No.” Mallory was not about to admit that he had known the destination, if not the means to get there. But it was clear that if Mosasa had known his goal in advance, he had deftly manipulated Mallory.

“Then I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

Parvi laughed. “You’re being paranoid.”

“Wahid has a good point about professional paranoia.”

“You should go get some sleep.”

“Did Mosasa have you recruit me?”

“You aren’t anything special, Fitzpatrick.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“You chose to be here.”

“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.