S. Swann - Prophets

“Bet your ass there’s a problem.” Wahid spun around on his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo display. “We’re missing a whole star.”

“What?”

“Xi Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”

Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth. The words echoed in Mallory’s head, the transmission Cardinal Anderson had played for him, the voice quoting Revelation burning in his memory.

Mallory stood back and watched everyone react to the news that an A-spectrum main sequence dwarf star had ceased to exist. More than one member of the science team said, “A star can’t just disappear.”

Apparently that was wrong.

Bill’s synthetic Windsor monotone asked for sensor data, and told them to look for stellar remnants. Even without any affect, Mallory could sense a slight desperation just in the nature of the request. Kugara had already done a mass scan of the region and found nothing significant for one hundred AU; no dark stellar remnants, no remains of a planetary system. Just dust and some widely-spaced asteroids.

Perhaps most disturbing was Mosasa’s reaction. He seemed as shocked as everyone else, running duplicate scans at his own station, shouting orders at his trio of bridge officers.

You were looking for some sort of anomaly, Mallory thought. Here it is.

Wahid made several attempts to disprove their location. But all the other stars were right where they should be. The background showed that they couldn’t be more than a third of a light-year off in any direction; right on top of Xi Virginis in interstellar terms.

“What the hell happened?” Wahid muttered. “Did it blow up? Did it fall into a black hole?”

“No remnants of any such event are observable,” Bill’s synthetic voice answered Wahid.

“There was a colony here?” Dr. Dörner had joined the bridge crew around the holo, where data now scrolled by the star field.

Mosasa ignored her and kept shaking his head. “This can’t—”

Dörner grabbed Mosasa’s shoulder and pulled him around to face her. “You said there was a colony here?”

The emotion drained from Mosasa’s face, and he suddenly looked as flat as Bill’s voice. He reached up and removed Dörner’s hand from his shoulder. The dragon tattoo glinted in reflected light from the holo next to them. “Yes,” Mosasa said, “there was a colony here. Kugara and Tsoravitch isolated one hundred forty-seven distinct EM signals from it during our approach. The colony, or its capital city, was named Xanadu.”

Dörner stepped back, as if the enormity of the situation was just beginning to sink in. “How many people—”

“My population estimate was five hundred thousand to one point five million.”

Dörner blinked, staring at Mosasa.

Wahid and Bill were still carrying on a conversation. “We had a damn star here twenty years ago, right?”

“The light sphere from the unknown event had not reached our last position when our course was laid in. That places the unknown event no more than 19.875 standard years ago.”

Mosasa stepped back. “This is completely outside every scenario—”

“One and a half million people?” Dörner shook her head. “One and a half million people?”

Mallory stepped forward; and slowed as he realized that Fitzpatrick, his alter ego, would not have the immediate impulse to comfort someone. When Dörner turned toward him, he had an uneasy feeling reminding him that she was a potential disaster for his cover story if she remembered seeing him before as Father Mallory.

His hesitation allowed Brody to be the one to step forward. The anthropologist took Dörner away from the bridge crew, quietly talking. “We don’t know what happened, Sharon. We don’t know there was anyone here when whatever happened, happened.”

He walked her back to the other two members of the scientific team, who were watching everything in stunned fascination. Mallory looked over at Nickolai to see how the tiger was reacting. He couldn’t tell from the feline expression if Nickolai was frightened, amused, or smelled something odd.

“Kugara,” Mosasa said, his voice still oddly flat. “Power up the tach-comm unit.”

Did Nickolai’s eyes just widen? Mallory could swear something just changed.

“Yes? Transmit where?”

“Earth. We’re going to hit every diplomatic consulate in turn, broad, unencrypted.”

Kugara hesitated, “Okay? Even the Caliph—”

Mosasa turned around and snapped, “Yes! Everyone! If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it’s this. This changes everything . I can’t account for this kind—” He abruptly stopped and stood up straighter. He allowed the emotion to leak out of his voice again. “You need to burst transmit all our telemetry and recon data. Now.”

“I’m packaging the data now.”

Nickolai closed his eyes and looked almost as if he was bracing for something.

“Transmitting,” Kugara said.

Something like a large rifle shot shook the bridge.

“What was that?” Dr. Dörner asked.

“—the hell?” Wahid said, and he began tapping madly at the display. “You see that, Parvi?”

“I have depressurization in the main maintenance tunnel. Damn. Major power drains on the main tach-drive.”

“I lost all data readings on the tach-comm,” Kugara said.

“Shit,” Wahid said, “that’s because we don’t have one anymore.”

The main holo display switched to one of the external cameras, pointing down at the stern of the Eclipse . A long contrail of ice crystals and debris emerged from a small hole in the skin of the ship, as if the ship was being followed by a small comet.

Did the tach-comm just blow up?

Mallory looked around and realized that Dr. Dörner was staring at him. Did I say something? Did I give myself away?

“What happened to the tach-comm unit?” Mosasa snapped.

“The diagnostic logs show an intense power spike at the time of transmission,” Kugara replied quietly.

“It spiked across the whole system,” Parvi said. “The drives are intact, but the tach-comm is interlinked with the damping system. It drained two thirds of the power reserves before vaporizing. We only have one damping conduit left at about fifty percent capacity.”

“No!” Mosasa snapped, slamming his hands down on the console in front of him. “We cannot have the tach-comm down. That communications link is essential .”

“Sir? Did you hear what I said?” Parvi’s voice was on the verge of cracking. “We’re down two thirds of our power reserves. That’s our return trip and our margin.”

“We have to repair the tach-comm. Communication is our number one priority!”

Everyone, bridge crew and scientists, stared at Mosasa as their nominal leader stared into the holo before him, watching the ice cloud of venting gases fade as the ship sealed off the damaged section. “We need the communication link back up.”

If anything, the look of shock on Mosasa’s face was worse now than when he heard an entire star was missing.

“I’m sorry,” Wahid said. “From all the engineering data, there’s nothing left to repair. The surge completely vaporized the main transmission coils, as well as the primary power damping coils. We only got half of one secondary coil to keep the drives from overheating. We’re damn lucky we didn’t suffer a main drive failure. We don’t even have the power to spare for a transmission, even if I could pull a new coherent emitter out of my ass.”