S. Swann - Prophets

“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?”