S. Swann - Prophets

“I defer to your wisdom.”

“Now, though, with our pieces in place around Mosasa, we should retire our Mr. Antonio.”

“How next should I serve?”

“There are things on Earth that should be addressed as soon as my brother begins his tragic expedition.”

Mr. Antonio left Adam with a new name, a new appearance, and a new spacecraft.

Replacing the old Indi-built scout was a Paralian-designed luxury transport. Rather than the cramped one-person cabin, the Pegasus V craft had a lush suite with wood paneling, leather seats, carpeting, and solid brass controls. Instead of an ancient serial number, the side of the sleek craft bore a name, Lillium .

The person who slipped behind the controls of the Lillium bore no resemblance to Mr. Antonio, despite having been him until about fifteen minutes ago. Instead of the old wrinkled creature with wispy white hair who had hired Nickolai Rajasthan, the pilot who flew the Lillium from the bowels of Adam’s spacecraft was a middle-aged woman of African descent. Her hair was black and wrapped her head in tight braids, and her face was smooth except for the beginning of age lines around the eyes. She had the long, lithe form of someone who had grown up in slightly less than Earth gravity, and the musculature of someone who trained in gravity somewhat higher.

Her name was now Ms. Columbia, and she and Lillium were headed to Terra, in the heart of human space.

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.