S. Swann - Prophets

Of course, that was unlikely to happen. While another tach-ship could cause a disturbance that could affect their engines, such wakes were short-lived and propagated only a few AU. They would have to tach right on top of another ship in astronomical terms for it to be a worry, sensors or no sensors.

Much worse was the more likely prospect of more sabotage.

We’ve gone over the ship with every diagnostic we have; everything’s in working order . . .

At eleven minutes to go, Wahid came in, holstering a gamma laser and sat himself at the nav station. He started going through the checks without a word to anyone else.

Tsoravitch sat at the comm station, not that the Eclipse had much communication left. She had slipped into the seat when Mosasa had ordered Kugara and Wahid to restrain the tiger. For all the distaste Parvi had for Nickolai, she still had yet to wrap her head around that one. How the hell did Mosasa’s pissant little adventure rate two spies?

Were there people back home who knew what they’d find here?

Eight minutes. The bridge was disturbingly silent. As a precaution, Mosasa had ordered all the nonbridge crew to the cabins which doubled as escape pods, just in case.

Of course, if it came to that, the people on the bridge were screwed, along with Bill, trapped in the cargo hold by his massive environment suit.

Mosasa came in, completing the bridge crew. Just the four of them, Parvi, Tsoravitch, Wahid, Mosasa. Rotating in the central holo glowed a schematic description of their route. Eight light-years to the closest colony and a habitable planet.

If it is still there.

Six minutes and the door to the bridge slid shut with a pneumatic hiss. Parvi watched the display as her readout on the ship’s systems showed each compartment isolating itself. In a few moments each segment of the ship with people inside was on an isolated life-support system.

Just in case.

“Bill’s given the computer models the all clear,” Wahid said.

Three minutes, and Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch. “Give the bridge feed to the rest of the ship.”

Tsoravitch nodded, tapping a few controls, releasing a small snap of static across the PA system. Parvi did the final checks on the power plants to the tach-drive and heard her voice echo around her when she said, “Drive is hot. The systems are on-line and within acceptable ranges.”

Wahid tapped a few controls and the schematic on the main holo stopped its subtle rotation and began to glow slightly more solid. “Target fixed. Course window opens in one hundred seconds.”

Tsoravitch nodded and stared at her own readouts. “No problematic mass concentrations within five AU.” Sweat beaded on her forehead. Parvi wished Kugara was at her station.

Parvi asked the rote question, “Okay to fire the tach-drive?”

This time, the question didn’t seem so rote.

“Yes,” Mosasa said mechanically.

Wahid announced, “Sixty seconds to window.”

“Our tach-drive is on auto,” Parvi announced.

Wahid’s voice sounded distressingly calm. “Twenty seconds to window. Fifteen seconds to last-chance abort.”

There was little calm in Tsoravitch’s voice. There was a little vibrato in her voice when she said, “Mass sensors still clear.”

“Ten seconds. Five to commit,” Wahid said. “The drive is committed. Three . . . Two . . . One . . .”

For the first time in her life, Parvi physically felt when a ship fired its tach-drive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Relic

Nothing moves a State quicker than fear, and nothing a

State fears so much as change.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

What governs men is the fear of truth.

—Henri FrÉDÉric Amiel (1821-1881)

Date: 2526.5.29 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

In the month since the egg landed, a small village of temporary buildings had sprung up around the egg. Most of the buildings had been moved from one of Robert Sheldon’s mobile logging camps.

It wasn’t long after Frank and Tony landed and took Flynn into custody before the first of the portable outbuildings arrived. They shoved him into one of the barracks buildings shortly after it landed. The building was little more than a large modular container that could mate with the bottom of a large cargo aircraft. The skin was heavy and well-insulated enough to survive a wildfire in the dry season. The people inside would survive, too, if they didn’t run out of air.

The structure could house twenty or thirty people. But it also made a fairly good impromptu prison. Even without cuffs or a restraint collar, Flynn would have had an impossible time trying to get out of it without someone opening the armored, fireproof doors for him.

Fortunately, they removed the cuffs within the first forty-eight hours, and provided relatively decent food and clean clothing. But they wouldn’t remove the restraint collar, and the comm units were completely isolated inside the new camp’s network. He could call security, and that was about it.

At least it had something of an entertainment library, since it was designed to support a working camp, though about half was porn and 90 percent of the rest was thinly disguised work-safety tutorials. Flynn and Tetsami spent most of their time playing chess against each other, and replaying variants of the same conversation.

“I don’t believe that thing is here.” Tetsami rubbed her neck, mirroring the placement of the restraint collar. “I don’t even remember how far we are from Bakunin here—”

“One hundred and fourteen light-years,” Flynn said. “You’ve told me often enough.” He moved a rook on the small comm screen.

“Those things don’t have tach-drives. It’s been traveling for a couple of centuries at least.”

Flynn shook his head. “I find it hard to believe that such an advanced society would settle for sub-light speeds. Your move.”

“The Proteans were a little weird,” Tetsami agreed, castling. “Very much kept to themselves. But I think the word ‘seed’ covers what they’re doing, propagating themselves.”

“That slow?”

“Think of the energy a tach-drive requires for each jump. That thing is what, three meters long? They get it to speed and coast and it requires the same energy to get here as it does to get to the next galaxy. All it takes is time.”

“A lot of time.”

Tetsami shrugged. “I can see a little of their perspective. I mean, back when I first heard of them, I never expected to be in lockup with my great-to-the-seventh-power grandson one hundred and seventy-five years later, waiting for him to move something.”

“Yeah.” Flynn moved a knight behind his rook and smiled. “Check.”

“Christ on a unicycle,” she muttered at the screen.

“One hundred and seventy-five is one thing, millions is another—”

“Millions of what?” Robert Sheldon asked from the doorway to the barracks.

Flynn blinked Tetsami’s image away and looked at his boss. The man had sandy hair gone half gray. He had four glyphs on his forehead, and like most of the people with four or more, he had a somewhat flat voice and an expression that Flynn thought of as mechanical.

“Years,” Flynn said without any explanatory comment. “Are you going to explain why Ashley security has locked me up for nearly a month?”

Sheldon walked up, shaking his head. “You’re an impulsive young man.” He sat down on the bunk opposite him and next to the comm still showing the game in progress, almost precisely where Tetsami had been sitting. “And naive as well, even for knowing one of the Founders.”

Flynn squirmed a little inside at Sheldon’s language. He never liked the way people used the word “knowing” someone to refer to what Flynn had come to see as ritualized psychic cannibalism. Having Tetsami with him as a separate person made the way it was supposed to happen, the merging of personalities, seem so wrong . Who the hell was anyone to deny her her own identity, or that of any of the millions of people archived in the Hall of Minds? Everyone looked at Flynn the singleton as having no respect for the ancestors of Salmagundi, but was it more respectful to see their ancestors as little more than an undifferentiated data source? No more individuals than they were themselves?