S. Swann - Prophets

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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Communion

It is harder to choose your friends than your enemies.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805-1859)

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

Mosasa’s briefing had lasted through the evening, and Nickolai walked outside into a darkened spacecraft graveyard. His new eyes saw every star and every ship with razor clarity. He looked up and allowed himself to feel his own smallness.

I am a scion of House Rajasthan, direct descendant of St. Rajasthan himself. A line bred for five hundred years to fight and to rule.

I am an apostate sinner who held his own will above that of the priests, his masters, and the laws of God.

I am an unclean servant of the Fallen and of things worse than the Fallen.

He stretched his fingers out until his claws emerged, black on one hand, gunmetal gray on the other. In his real hand, he could feel the tendons stretch and the joints crack. In the artificial hand, he only felt the slight feedback as what passed for flesh wrapping it felt a slight increase in tension.

What am I, really?

“So, can I buy you a drink?”

It took a second before he realized the question was addressed to him. He turned his head away from the stars to look down and see Kugara, the Angel, looking up at him.

“You look like you could use a friend,” she told him.

Nickolai turned away. He had fallen out of the habit of looking at people during conversation. “Do I?” he asked. He wasn’t quite sure how else to respond. He owed her respect, not only because she wasn’t human, but because he would be working with her for the foreseeable future.

He snorted and shook his head, because the irony of that thought wasn’t lost on him. Personal feelings were what condemned him in the first place.

“Did I say something funny?” Kugara asked.

“No,” Nickolai told her.

When the single word faded, Nickolai realized how quiet it was out here in the desert.

“You aren’t going to elaborate on that, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind,” Kugara said. “How about that drink?”

Kugara had her own transportation, an old contragrav aircar that had the turquoise-and-black markings of a Proudhon Spaceport Security Vehicle, though the skin was now dominated by the matte gray primer color of flexseal patches. It had an open canopy, so it could handle Nickolai’s height, though when he got in, the craft briefly suffered a hard tilt to the right before the sensors encouraged the underpowered injection unit to compensate for the mass distribution.