S. Swann - Prophets

In large part, the reason for the existence of the Proteans was to propagate their existence as far as possible in space and time.

One of those seeds had just crashed here, on Salmagundi.

For several hours, Flynn radioed information back to Base. Despite the “seed’s” enigmatic nature, he was able to produce some information. The thing was a matte-black egg exactly 3.127 meters along its long axis. The mass readings, if they were accurate, showed it much denser than normal matter, about a kilogram per square centimeter, which meant that the thing, small as it was, massed more than most of the aircraft in Ashley combined. The thing had found its place on the planet’s surface, and Flynn doubted it was going to move.

However, he had a lot more information than the sensor data on the seed itself. For once, he had relevant ancestral information, and it was exhilarating. Flynn, the habitual singleton, actually had useful knowledge from his sole extra mind. For most of his life, he had felt as if he wasn’t quite in on the joke, that the people around him with two or three glyphs on their brow had access to a subtext he wasn’t quite aware of.

Finally he had something over everybody. It felt good. So good, in fact, that he completely missed the warning signs; the shift to encrypted protocols, the change in radio operators to people he wasn’t familiar with, the occasional and emphatic order for him not to leave the site of the impact, the repeated questions about who else might know this information, who he had discussed the Proteans with.

He couldn’t really blame Tetsami either. Normally, she was a little more paranoid than he was, but if he was caught up in the novelty of having something new to report on and having the expertise to analyze it, Tetsami was overtaken by her awe at seeing a remnant of Proteus showing up on Salmagundi. Enough so that, like Flynn, she hadn’t given herself the opportunity to think through exactly how the powers-that-be back at Ashley might react to their visitor or its history.

Ten hours after the impact, after the sun had set, the first security contragrav arrived. Flynn ran up to the craft as soon as it landed, waving his arms, still oblivious as the doors opened and two men stepped out. The name tags on their jumpsuits read Frank and Tony.

“Hey, it’s about five hundred meters that way—” Flynn pointed.

“Uh, they seem more interested in us.”

Frank stepped up to Flynn while Tony walked past him toward the flier. Flynn turned, finally realizing that something was wrong. “What are you doing—”

Frank grabbed him and, before Flynn could object, had him in handcuffs and a restraint collar.

“What the fuck?”

Frank hustled him into the back of the security contragrav and pushed him down into a seat. As the door closed, Flynn saw Tony pulling the comm unit and all the data recordings from his flier.

“Okay, that’s not good—”

“No, Gram, it isn’t.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jihad

Right and wrong are defined by what you do, not what you serve.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

—KARL von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)

Date: 2526.5.6 (Standard) 10.3 ly from Beta Comae Berenices

It had all been leading to this. Almost six months ago, Admiral Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti had taken command of a battle group that barely existed. Now, after half a year of accelerated construction and the crash training of nearly ten thousand men, the Prophet’s Voice floated in the interstellar void ten light-years from Beta Comae Berenices and the planet Falcion, preparing for its maiden voyage.

Attached to the kilometer-long vessel, over a hundred individual spacecraft docked, ranging from troop transports to fighters to heavy drop-ships—an entire fleet unto itself.

On the bridge, Admiral Hussein stood and waited for their last tach-jump. There was no technical reason for any of the command staff to be here during the jump, much less Admiral Hussein himself. However, it had been impressed upon the entire command staff of the Caliphate that this mission was as much about diplomacy as it was about military force. To that end, forms of ceremony were meticulously adhered to.

Admiral Hussein stood along with a senior officer from each of the larger vessels in the Voice ’s battle group. Each officer wore the emerald dress uniform of the Caliphate Navy, boots polished to a mirror shine. Golden braids of command outnumbered the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers doing the work maneuvering the Voice and syncing the tach-jump.

The admiral thought that his command staff would cut quite the impressive figure when they made their first broadcast down to the surface of the “lost” colony orbiting the star HD 101534, the Voice ’s destination.

Of course, the hundred warships accompanying the Voice would probably be a fair bit more impressive.

He expected that the Caliphate’s politicians were right, and they would have a victory without firing a shot. All the admiral would require of the colony would be a formal treaty of alliance, no large matter for a planet so far removed from the rest of human space.

Just enough to keep the Caliphate’s rivals at bay.

The admiral steepled his fingers as he waited for the klaxons to announce their last tach-jump. He wondered idly if any of the command staff at attention in front of and below the command dais were as happy as he about the prospect of a largely peaceful mission. The admiral was a veteran of conflicts on Rubai and Waldgrave, and he was not a timid commander, but the Prophet’s Voice was a brand new flagship. Many of its hallways still smelled faintly of new paint.

Not only a new ship, but a new ship design . The Caliphate had spent an unprecedented amount of time and treasure in the creation of the Ibrahim-class of carriers, each with its own fleet of warships, fifty tach-capable vessels and another fifty short-range fighters, all attached to the great ship like parasitic young.

In addition, the Ibrahim-class of carrier had the largest and most sophisticated tach-drive in existence. Until the Caliphate’s engineers built the antimatter-fueled monstrosities filling the guts of these new carriers, the limits of existing tach-drives peaked out at twenty light-years and 256 c —and that only effectively reachable by ships a third of the Voice ’s mass, without the attached warships.

The Voice ’s tach-drives showed a fourfold increase in speed, mass, and distance. It could clear eighty light-years in a jump that took only slightly over twenty-eight days standard. Even if the drives sucked the energy equivalent of a small sun, it placed every world in human space in tactical reach of the Caliphate. Including the far-flung colonies seventy light-years past Helminth.

The potential of the new warships was limitless.

However, the admiral was very much aware that the potential was untested. It was distressing how quickly the Voice and her sisters were promoted from an abbreviated shake-down into active duty. When the orders came for this mission nearly six months ago, the Voice was still being constructed. It had been barely three weeks since the last of the construction crew had left the ship.

The admiral was keenly aware of the rush to space-worthiness. They had not even been able to test the power-hungry tach-drives at their full capacity.

Not until this moment.

The Voice was the last of the four to dive out toward the worlds clustered around Xi Virginis. Their target was a small world eight light-years away from that star, and right at the theoretical outer limit of the Voice ’s massive drives from their current position.