Prophets

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Harbinger

Fear the new, but fear more the obsessive grasp on the old.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

There comes a point where the debate ends and you must pick up a gun.

—DATIA RAJASTHAN (?-2042)

Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

The Great Triad had been in continuous session for thirty days. Representatives from each Triad from each region across Salmagundi were here; over a hundred men and women, carrying the memories and experience of tens of thousands, representing the whole of the planet.

Alexander Shane, the oldest human being here, bore fifteen tattoos across his brow; more than anyone else living. Seven of those marks represented people who had borne at least as many when they had lived. The combined wisdom of a thousand of Salmagundi’s past citizens informed every word he spoke, every move he made. As the senior among them, he was the one to preside.

He sat, with the others at a great circular table in one of the many great rooms in the Ashley Hall of Minds. There were other halls where they could have met, in other cities, but the authority of the Great Triad came from their persons, and not their location. Ashley happened to be closest to the reason they met.

Alexander watched the debate, contributing little of his own wisdom. He felt the pervasive panic as much as anyone else here. The presence of the offworld object threatened everything that their ancestors had built here.

“We are relying on the words of this singleton Flynn Jorgenson as to the nature of this invader,” one of the younger women spoke. She only had ten tattoos across her brow and her hair still had hints of brown in the midst of the silver. “It could be prelude to an invasion.”

“We’ve seen no evidence of this,” someone countered.

“No,” she replied. “But Mr. Jorgenson’s statement is at odds with the facts. The trajectory of this object does not lead back to the old systems.”

“It had been traveling for centuries,” another woman said, “and could have maneuvered any number of times before entering our space.”

“Where it came from is irrelevant,” a man agreed from across the room.

“It is only irrelevant if it is not a harbinger of a greater threat,” she told them all. “Need I remind you where its trail points back to?”

“Coincidence,” someone muttered.

“No evidence at all—”

“You are looking for problems where there are none—”

“Once it is destroyed—”

Alexander let the dialogue shoot back and forth without enforcing any rules of order. A limited amount of chaos was necessary so that when the final consensus was reached, every member could feel their voice as having been part of coming to it.

Usually, though, consensus was quicker in arriving. Rarely did the members’ opinions diverge on anything of substance. However, this session was as anomalous as the event they debated.

What concerned the woman, and a substantive minority of the Grand Triad membership, was the fact that the review of what records existed showing the object’s entry into the system revealed a path that led from the direction not of the of Confederacy, but of a star that had vanished from Salmagundi’s sky a decade ago.

Alexander remembered the event from three different points of view: his own and two more that had been bequeathed to him from the Hall of Minds since then. It had been a subject of interest and debate in Salmagundi’s scientific community a decade ago when Xi Virginis winked out of the sky. Then, the debate in the Grand Triad had been whether to expend the resources to investigate. There had even been a half-dozen advocates for building a tach-ship to send to the Xi Virginis system.

Alexander remembered the debates. They had lasted for nearly an entire season, and in the end Salmagundi’s essentially insular nature won out. The star had not exploded, and the scientists accepted the idea that something had simply caused it to burn itself out.

The thought that the object Flynn Jorgenson described was somehow a remnant of that event was disturbing. Enough that members of the Triad who, like Alexander, had been present during that first event were dusting off the rhetoric from the earlier session as if the decade-old incident were still being debated.

The Great Triad had a memory broad and deep. No member forgot any slight, any error, any insult—to the point that every word spoken had such a ponderous history associated with it that it was wondrous that anyone spoke at all.

The debate launched into a tangent about Xi Virginis, and Alexander was about to use his authority as the chair to rein in the arguments when the comm on the table in front of him began flashing. He picked up the device and hit the receive button. The device was muted, so the caller’s voice was translated to text that silently scrolled across the screen in front of an image of the woods southeast of Ashley.

The text jerked, stuttered, and mistyped some words, and Alexander could almost hear the panicked excitement of the caller embedded in the fragmented text.

“WE LOST THE MINGLASERS. OBJECT EMITTED SOME SORT WEAPON. DESTROY TWO OUTBUILDINGS MULTIPLE MISSLE HITS.”

The text kept scrolling past an image of a ruddy translucent dome shedding the effects of multiple missiles.

“Order!” Alexander snapped at the room before him. The arguments broke off instantly, and a sea of elderly tattooed faces turned toward him.

“There has been a development,” Alexander said. He then piped the feed from his comm to the room’s main display screen and unmuted it. The flat, shaky images came from someone’s handheld comm. As the view of Mr. Sheldon’s camp filled the giant curving screen above the meeting table, another missile trail sliced the right side of the image in half, ending in the skin of the hemisphere. The hemisphere beyond the rolling explosion turned a deeper red, almost black, as smoke and flame lapped across the surface.

The voice accompanying the image was shaky. “The thing has taken hits from every missile we have. I have no idea how, but it has a mass-capable Emerson field.”

Alexander spoke to the comm in his hand, “Can you please repeat the damage?”

The speaker took a deep breath and said, “We lost the mining lasers and crew. It . . . ate . . . two of our outbuildings closest to the impact site. The shield you see there is two hundred seventy-five meters in diameter.”

“Has it grown? Moved?”

“No.”

“Then conserve your weapons. Let us consider it.”

“Did you hear me? The mining crew is gone. We don’t even have bodies.”

“Conserve your weapons.”

“Yes, sir.”

Alexander remuted the comm and looked out at the Grand Triad. “It seems,” he said, “we face a larger threat than we anticipated.”

The debate erupted again. This time Alexander waited only until the first obvious lines of argument played themselves out. When he spoke, he was the first one to mention nukes.

It was admittedly drastic, but he was protecting their whole way of life.