S. Swann - Prophets

Flynn did something he usually avoided in conversation; he looked Sheldon in the eye. “Why did you have me locked up here?”

God, his eyes look dead.

Please, Gram, let me talk to him.

“Mr. Jorgenson, you did not have authorization—”

“That’s bullshit.” Flynn stood up, and the move was fast enough for the restraint collar in his neck to send a warning pulse that fired a nasty wave of numbness down his legs and arms. “There was an impact in my survey zone, and it turns out that I had some particular knowledge—”

“Any investigation needed to be cleared before—”

“So I broke a regulation; you don’t imprison someone for that. Sure, fire me. But what the fuck is this? ”

Sheldon reached up and clasped Flynn’s hands, lowering them. Sheldon’s hands were cold and hard, like being touched by a headstone.

“Lower your voice, son. I am here as a favor to your father.”

“My father’s dead.”

“Sit.”

“Are you going to explain—”

“Sit!” Sheldon’s voice changed, making Flynn realize that, up to this point, Sheldon’s voice had still retained a trace of human warmth and character to it; characteristics that evaporated in the single command.

Flynn sat.

“Mr. Jorgenson,” Flynn noticed this time that Sheldon seemed uncomfortable using the address.“Do you realize what would happen to you if I did not intervene on your behalf?”

“My behalf?”

“Quiet!”

Flynn shut up.

“You may know one of the Founders, but you seem to have forgotten why they came here.”

No, Bobby, Flynn remembers just fine. It’s you assholes who decided to misinterpret and take things out of context—

Gram, not now.

Sorry.

“Contact with the decadent cultures beyond this planet is a grave assault on our purpose here. A violation of the commandments of our Founders.”

“But—”

“Please listen.” Sheldon placed his hand on Flynn’s shoulder and almost sounded human. “The thing that makes us what we are, our communion with the past, that would be the first thing they take away from us.”

Inside Flynn’s head, a quiet voice whispered to itself, Christ on a crutch, I’m going to be sick.

“I told you what this is. You know it isn’t some Confederacy artifact.”

Sheldon shook his head. “You are young and haven’t known enough of our history to understand. We cannot allow this kind of disruption to our way of life. It matters little where this thing is from.”

“Disruption?” Flynn shook his head. “This thing is from a culture that’s so far beyond the Confederacy the Founders escaped that it’s nearly inconceivable. Just understanding the smallest bit of it could—”

“It could destroy everything we’ve built here.”

“What?”

“This arrival is too dangerous to be made public knowledge. By association, the Triad has decided that you are too dangerous as well. I intervened, out of respect for your father, to spare your life.”

Flynn opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

“You see the gravity of this now? The Triad was prepared to erase you, completely, without archival—”

Flynn could care less about the Hall of Minds. But the thought that the Triad considered killing him—the current, flesh-and-blood person—just to avoid some sort of “disruption,” that was worse than appalling. But, thanks to his boss, Flynn had stayed alive, under house arrest in the barracks by the fallen seed.

“Why are you here?” Flynn asked.

“I wanted you to know that this will be over soon.” He looked into Flynn’s face. “When things return to normal, I want your promise not to make any waves. Don’t make me regret helping you.”

“I—”

“Please, Flynn. Your father was my friend.”

Do you even have friends? Flynn thought.

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

Sheldon let go of Flynn’s shoulder and said, “Thank you.” As he got up to leave he glanced at the comm screen and said, “White has mate in three moves.”

Flynn heard Tetsami whisper inside his skull, What are they going to do?

Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

The next day, they had an answer.

Flynn and Tetsami watched as three tracked vehicles rolled across the clearing in the direction of the seed. The vehicles were ocher metal, squat, and carried large cylindrical power plants on their backs.

“What the hell are those?” Flynn muttered.

“Mining equipment,” Tetsami said, an invisible presence next to him. “We had dozens of the things when we founded this misbegotten planet.”

“Mining equipment? What for?”

“Those things have the highest energy gamma lasers on this rock, unless someone’s gone and started building hovertanks I don’t know about.”

“Oh.” Flynn paused. He finally said, “Fuck.”

The closed-minded bastards of the Triad were going to destroy the seed. Forget that it was the space-borne equivalent of their sacred Hall of Minds, it was disruptive .

Worse, Flynn knew that the debate that probably had raged in the Triad and the upper echelons of the Salmagundi leadership in the last month—and, good lord, how those old farts loved a debate—wouldn’t even have touched on the moral question of incinerating a million minds or the progeny of an unimaginably advanced civilization. What would have taken a month of debate would have been the logistics of how to incinerate the damn thing.

“We should do something,” Flynn said.

“Do you mean that?”

“What are you asking, Gram?”

“Do you really want to get into more trouble then you’re already in?”

Flynn stopped speaking out loud. “If you got some other option in mind, let me know.”

“I might be able to hack us out of this box—”

“Damn it, Gram! We’ve been locked up here for weeks. Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I need you to give me our body.”

“. . .”

“And stop calling me Gram.”

On some level Tetsami didn’t blame Flynn for being pissed. When she had been young and stupid, she had the same problems with people trying to do what was best for her. She knew, on some level, the kid never really understood it when she told him how lucky he was. When Tetsami was his age, she could only wish for the kind of stability Flynn had. Back in the bad old days when she was a software hacker on Bakunin, she had barely scraped by from job to job, the last one nearly killing her.

No one ever shot at Flynn Nathaniel Jorgenson. His job didn’t carry a risk of frying his brain on the wrong side of a black security program. He was able to take things like food, clothing, and shelter for granted. Until the damn Protean egg-thing showed up, all the kid ever had to worry about were the occasional stare and harsh language. Even those were low key compared to what Tetsami had gotten because of her ancestry from Dakota.

For all his angst about being the oddball, he didn’t understand that just the fact she was here meant that his society accepted him. He might not be a model citizen by the bizarre rules that had evolved on Salmagundi, but he wasn’t really an outcast.

Not yet.

She was still regretting opening her big mouth when she felt Flynn withdraw. She blinked, and it was her body that was blinking. She reached up and touched the restraint collar with Flynn’s hands.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get you more trouble than you deserve,” she said, her voice now sounding like the one in her head. “Now shut up, we don’t have a lot of time.”