S. Swann - Prophets

The space that had been the Nomad ’s bridge was now dominated by the drive section of the mirrored ship. Its engines had slagged, and the metal/ceramic rear thrusters glowed in the darkness like a dying star.

Around Mosasa, shadows drifted in the blackness, eclipsing the stars. His light picked out fragments of the Nomad floating out into space; a computer console; a chair; a twisted nest of wires . . .

And bodies. He saw bodies tumbling into the void. His family. Most were already too far away for him to make out features, but his younger sister Naja was only fifteen meters away, facing him as she drifted away from the Nomad, the only home she had ever known.

She was close enough for him to see blood frozen, crusted on the gold rings in her lips, nose, and ears. Close enough that his work light reflected dully in her eyes. Her expression wasn’t of shock, or horror, but of somewhat muted surprise. Mosasa lowered his head so that the light left her face.

He thought briefly of trying to retrieve the bodies. But there was no point. The Mosasa clan buried their dead in space anyway. At least his family had a living relative to speak for their souls as they returned to the dark.

He spent a long time floating by the cooling drive section of the assassin spacecraft, and said prayers for twenty-four men, women, and children. When he finished, he looked up and noticed something else in the darkness beyond the Nomad . It eclipsed stars but was far enough away that his helmet light didn’t illuminate it.

He had a stronger lamp on his belt, and he had passed beyond caring about power conservation. He was dead, and had been for an hour. Everything else was delaying the inevitable.

He pulled the lamp from his belt; it had a beam as wide as his fully spread hand, and could pump out lumens an order of magnitude beyond his helmet work lights. He shone it out in the direction of the shadow, and it seemed a universe of floating debris flicked into existence. A spreading galaxy of wreckage of objects ranging in size from tiny bolts and metal shavings to a sphere encased in torn tubing about twenty meters across that must have been wrenched from the drive section.

The distant shadow was much bigger. He was able to pick it out with the lamp. Light splashed its side, dappled with shadows from the Nomad ’s wreckage. Distance was hard to judge, but it seemed it could be as far as a klick away. And if that was the case, it was twice the size of the Nomad .

To Mosasa’s eye, the derelict craft was untouched.

The side was painted and Mosasa could see the blue and white of the old United Nations flag on the side. Beyond that, in three-meter-tall letters in a half dozen languages, Mosasa saw the name of the ship.

Luxembourg .

And, after staring a long time, Mosasa realized that the Nomad was still drifting toward it.

The Luxembourg had been a ghost ship from the Genocide War. When the Nomad drifted close enough, Mosasa jumped the gap with an umbilical to anchor the two wrecks together. Even before he attached the cables, he could see that the Luxembourg was largely intact. The mirrored arrowhead that had buried itself into the Nomad and had killed his family had been an old Race-built weapon, AI driven, autonomous so none of the Race would actually be involved in a direct confrontation.

For some reason, it had been guarding the derelict.

When he entered the Luxembourg, he discovered that the attack that had killed the old United Nations ship had been very careful to do very little damage to the machine itself. Each hole in the skin managed to avoid holing vital equipment and ended in a vacuum-desiccated crew member. The Luxembourg had been neutralized in a matter of moments. He even found one corpse strapped to the ship’s toilet.

The backup battery systems still had a charge, and the secondary life support still had an oxy reserve in the tanks. None of the emergency systems had come on-line. About all that was missing was a decent ship’s computer.

It took weeks, but Mosasa revived the late twenty-first-century ship. In that time he discovered two things. The first was that the Luxembourg wasn’t strictly military. It had been run by the United Nations Intelligence Service. The second thing he discovered was deep in the belly of the ship, in the only armored compartment, flanked by incendiary devices that the crew never got the chance to fire.

Four cylindrical crystals; four Race-built artificial intelligence devices. The machines were tied into the ship’s systems, and had gone cold and dormant.

It was the first time that Mosasa had realized that human beings had co-opted the same heretical technologies the Race had used. Understanding that probably made the next thing he did easier.

After days of trying to revive them, he thought of the mirrored arrowhead that had impaled the Nomad. The Race used AI-piloted drones, so the device onboard the weapon had been operational enough to pilot the drone.

It was insane, and went against every taboo against these devices, but Mosasa was a pirate, alone, and close to the limit of his resources. If he was to survive, he needed the Luxembourg fully functional. He removed the brain from that weapon and wired it into the Luxembourg .

“I was able to jumpstart those old AIs.” Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch and said, “But three centuries is a long time, and there’s only the one left. Me.”

Tsoravitch shook her head, and Mosasa could tell the tale of his human origins had left an impression. She seemed to stare past him as she asked, “But you’re not him, you’re one of the AIs.”

“I’m both. Mosasa lived long enough to emigrate to Bakunin, shortly after we recorded his identity. We needed a human consciousness to properly interact with the human world. Those memories are as much mine as they were the human Mosasa’s.”

“What happened to the other AIs?”

“Two were destroyed in the days before the Confederacy’s collapse.”

“The other two?”

“They were lost when I tried to go home.”

“Home?”

Mosasa nodded. “But we need to go back up to the bridge. We’re due for the next jump.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Faith of Our Fathers

Truth is not monopolized by seniority.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

—John Still (1543-1608)

Date: 2526.3.27 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson hated funerals almost as much as he disliked crowds. He would have much rather been on wilderness patrol, cataloging new species, away from the small metropolis of Ashley, away from the Hall of Minds, away from the stares and the whispers.

However, since it was his father being archived for posterity, he couldn’t avoid the ceremony. Not in good conscience, anyway.

His dad rested on an old contragrav sled, floating a meter above the marble avenue. The sled was a relic of the founding of Salmagundi 150 years ago. The chassis had been rebuilt long ago, in line with its ceremonial repurposing. The bed was boxed in by ornate wood carvings, painted in lavish primary colors.

Flynn walked next to his mother, behind his father, at the head of the brightly colored procession. The pride of place held by immediate family. He had to fight the urge to look behind him, to see who might be staring at him.

“Good lord, Flynn. Who cares what they think?”

“Shut up, Grandma.”

The procession ended at the entrance to the Hall of Minds. It hadn’t changed since Flynn had last been here, on his first equinox. That was close to seventeen standard years ago. Four solstices come and gone, and four equinoxes as well, and before the next solstice he planned to be as far away from here as he could get.