S. Swann - Prophets

“Can you clarify? Are you apologizing or expressing sympathy?”

Mallory slipped out of the common room first, not staying to hear them explain things to Bill. Before the door slid shut behind him, he heard Bill explain in great detail how he had a full holographic feed from the bridge and didn’t need to be present for the critical jump.

Fifteen minutes, Mallory thought. Fifteen minutes and we’ll be in the Xi Virginis system.

The thought was unsettling.

Nickolai was one of the last people to step onto the bridge of the Eclipse . He waited for the last minute so he would avoid the possibility of running into Kugara, who had turned from possible ally to a complete enigma. Besides, it simplified things if his only allegiance was to Mr. Antonio.

The Eclipse had a huge bridge, with a ceiling high enough to provide Nickolai the headroom to stand fully upright. It easily accommodated all of Mosasa’s crew, and could have held the Paralian and his elaborate life support, if there was a way for the huge apparatus to make it up here. The layout of the room was a sphere with the bottom flattened out. Stations ringed a large holo display intended for more redundant positions than were supplied by Mosasa’s crew.

Parvi and Wahid sat at elaborate consoles on either side of the holo display, which showed an image of the space outside. Staring into the display was like looking out the observation port in back, out at the emptiness light-years from everything. However, with his cybernetic eyes, Nickolai could tell that the holo only honored a narrowly-defined visible spectrum. With little effort, he could make out the ghost of Mosasa on the opposite side of the display from him. Kugara sat at a fourth console, opposite Mosasa, her back to Nickolai and most of the other spectators on the bridge.

“Drive is hot,” Parvi said. “All systems check okay to go.”

Wahid answered, “We have a fix on target. Current course window opens in ninety seconds.”

“Mass sensors clear,” Kugara said. “Nothing significant within two AU.”

“Are we okay to fire the tach-drives?” Parvi addressed Mosasa.

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“Sixty seconds to window.”

“Course approved,” Parvi said. “Switching the tach-drives to auto.”

The bridge was silent for a few long seconds. Nickolai idly wondered if being present here would somehow make the act of taching somewhere more impressive. It didn’t seem appropriate that leaving a gravity well—barely moving a few hundred kilometers—always felt more dramatic than the sensation of moving twenty light-years. No matter how much time supposedly passed in the interim, on the ship it never felt like anything at all. No sensation, no passing of time, not even a slight unease to let you know that something significant had happened. If you stayed locked in a cabin, you could tach halfway across the galaxy and never know you had moved.

“Twenty seconds to window.” Wahid said. “Fifteen seconds to last-chance abort.”

“All systems nominal,” Parvi said.

“Mass sensors still clear.”

“Ten seconds. Five to commit.” No one answered, and Wahid said. “Five seconds to window, drives are committed. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

There wasn’t even a sound to mark the jump to Xi Virginis.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Fallen Angel

An event is dangerous in direct proportion to how unexpected it is.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

A civilization that cannot envision its own demise has already begun to die.

—JEAN HonorÉ Cheviot (2065-2128)

Date: 2526.4.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

A month after his outburst at his father’s wake, Flynn shot his flier out over the forests of Salmagundi. Despite his worries, Robert Sheldon hadn’t seen fit to fire him, or even mention the incident. Things had since settled back into a routine, with him spending long days surveying the dense forests east of Ashley, cataloging stands of trees mature enough to be harvested. If people were slightly less likely to engage him in conversation, that was fine with him; most people didn’t have much to talk about anyway.

He flew on manual—which, technically, was a breach of regulations. Allowing a human being to pilot an aircraft was supposedly only an emergency procedure. However, not only did he feel better with the craft under his direct control, it also meant the computer couldn’t override him and turn it around if someone back at Ashley decided he should come back. It never happened, but he still didn’t like the idea that someone could make that kind of remote control decision.

As long as he did his job, no one should have reason to complain how he did it. He shot over the trees at three hundred meters, the sensor batteries underneath the craft picking up moisture and chlorophyll levels in the foliage, filling in the topographic map on his display with bands of reds, yellows, and blues, showing which areas of the forest had matured the fastest from the last dry season—

“Flynn! Look up.”

“Huh, what?”

“North, about thirty degrees above the horizon.”

Tetsami’s voice in his head drew his attention to something that was just visible out of the canopy, on the fringes of his peripheral vision. He turned his head to look at it.

Something moved, high and fast, leaving a glowing contrail. Oddly, the object itself didn’t reflect any light. It was a black smudge at the head of the turbulent atmosphere.

Flynn whispered, “A meteor?”

The object closed on the horizon in front of him, following a downward path. “The way that thing’s moving, it’s going to make one hell of a—”

The object hit the forest in front of the flier. The world outside the windscreen went white with the impact, then immediately black as the light levels caused the windows to tint themselves. Less than a second later, turbulence hit the small flier, tumbling the nose up and to the left. All the control surfaces stopped responding, and Flynn’s stomach lurched as the vector jets started throwing the craft in an uncontrolled spin.

He cut the vectors a little over three seconds after the computer would have done, allowing the flier to coast on neutral buoyancy contragravs. In a few moments air resistance and inertia brought the craft to a standstill.

The windscreen became transparent again. Outside, he saw an inverted horizon tilted at a fifteen-degree angle. The flier was about a hundred meters closer to the forest canopy and pointed about two hundred degrees off course—in addition to floating upside down.

“That’s why the regulations want the computer to fly this thing.”

“We’re fine, Gram,” Flynn muttered. “No damage.”

He gingerly opened the vectors to right the flier, waiting until it was upright before spinning the nose around to look at the impact.

“Look at that.”

They were about fifty kilometers out from Ashley, but Flynn wouldn’t be surprised if the rolling pillar of smoke might be visible from town. The edges of the burn zone formed a ragged ellipse about two or three klicks long and about half a klick wide. The trees inside the burn zone were shattered and charred black, and the ones still standing at the edges were smoldering.

Fortunately, despite the clear sky at the moment, they were in the wet season. The trees were already too saturated to burn very well. If it had been the dry season, Flynn would have already been looking at thousands of hectares of smoldering forest.

He flew down close to the site, looping it twice, recording all the data he could with the craft sensors. Then he approached for a landing in the thickest part of the burn zone.