S. Swann - Prophets

“Who are you? What is that . . . creature?”

“I’m Julie Kugara, my companion is Nickolai Rajasthan. We are crew members from the tach-ship Eclipse . Our lifeboat landed in the woods southwest of—”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?”

“What?”

“Are you from Xi Virginis?!”

“No,” Nickolai answered, interrupting Kugara.“The Eclipse was based out of Bakunin.”

“Bakunin?” The voice’s tone changed, becoming less confrontational. “There’s still a Bakunin out there?”

“As far as we know.” Kugara said. “We’ve been in tachspace for over six months.”

Nickolai saw a shadow move in the crystalline landscape. It resolved into a relatively young human male holding a shotgun. The man was shorter than Kugara and wore a pair of tan overalls. He walked with a bit of a limp.

“You two are really from Bakunin?” He brushed some hair from in front of his face, revealing a tattoo in the middle of his forehead. He was staring at Nickolai. “You talk?”

“Yes.” If it wasn’t for Kugara’s presence, he would have leaped and disabled this man already. He could tell this youth had no military training just by the way he held his shotgun and ignored Kugara’s discarded weapon as he walked toward them. Considering how much attention he was paying to Nickolai, Kugara could probably clear the distance between them and disarm him before he realized she had moved.

For a moment, the man didn’t seem to be paying attention to either of them, then he said, “Moreau, right? From the Seven Worlds?”

“It hasn’t been the Seven Worlds for a hundred and seventy-five years,” Nickolai said. “It’s the Fifteen Worlds now.”

“Of course it is. We’ve been out of touch.” He walked around them, keeping what he must have assumed was a safe distance. “A lot of you on Bakunin now? Since it became ‘officially’ part of the Sev—Fifteen Worlds?”

Nickolai wondered what was going on. When this man first saw them, it seemed clear he had no idea who or what Nickolai was. Now he seemed to be aware of the history of Nickolai’s people, at least up until one hundred seventy-five years ago. He wondered if he was in radio contact with someone else. He didn’t see signs of the man wearing a radio, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have anything implanted, could be in contact with anyone on the planet as far as they knew.

“There aren’t very many; most are exiles, like me.”

“Bakunin’s still a great place to run away from something?” He turned and looked up at Kugara, who was a good head taller than he was. “That your story? You running away from something?”

“I retired.”

“From?”

“Dakota Planetary Security.”

The man paused and took a step back, looking at her. He whispered to himself. Nickolai heard his nearly-subvocalized words, “Oh, boy, Gram.” Then, after a pause, “Go right ahead.”

There was a strange and abrupt shift in the man’s body language. His grip on the shotgun changed, so he was now a lot more able to bring it to bear quickly. The cock of his head, and even his facial expression seemed different.

Most different was the voice. It suddenly seemed older, more confident. “Forgive me if I’m a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man’s land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you’re doing a hundred light-years from what’s left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Zealots

War does not exist when all parties have perfect knowledge.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

—Sir WILLIAM Osler (1849-1919)

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

Alexander sat in his impromptu command center within the Ashley Hall of Minds, trying to improve the glacial response time of the Salmagundi government. Even in the face of his coup, and his direct control of every police department, security agency, and militia on the planet, events conspired to move faster than Salmagundi could react.

On the screens before him, he could see the recon team securing the last lifeboat site. Three of the six lifeboats had been unoccupied, and they had secured the occupants of two others. The teams had sterilized the sites, using plasma grenades to reduce the lifeboats themselves to slag.

It was the kind of direct action the Triad spent days debating, worrying over its effect on the general population. As if the presence of offworlders and offworld artifacts would be somehow less disruptive.

At least that concern was moderated by the fact that they had already evacuated the civilian population from the forest east of Ashley in preparation for using their nuclear stores on Flynn Jorgenson’s alien invader. The evacuation was fortunate on many levels. It helped ensure that no civilian agency came across the lifeboats before the militia got there—even with the intolerable delay caused by the Grand Triad’s debate.

Alexander idly wondered if they were still debating.

The preliminary abbreviated debriefing conducted by the on-site commander with the four Eclipse crew members they had retrieved indicated that there were two lifeboat occupants who still remained at large. They were his immediate concern. He needed them in his control or confirmed deceased. His militia scouts had identified the lifeboat the missing two had landed in, and after slagging the wreck, they now engaged in a search pattern, spiraling out from the landing site. It concerned Alexander, because it placed a militia team in uncomfortable proximity to Flynn Jorgenson’s Protean anomaly. He had the nuclear strike on hold, but the other militia teams had already retreated out of the red zone. Alexander did not want one of the militia teams in harm’s way if he had to launch the attack. They weren’t an expendable resource.

One of the militia officers with him solved the problem.

“Sir, we have something on holo five.”

Alexander looked up, and saw a security feed from the camp around the Protean artifact. The camp was abandoned in anticipation of the coming strike, but he saw three figures standing in the middle of a muddy track. One was Flynn Jorgenson, the unfortunate who had discovered the Protean artifact’s impact site. The other two were unquestionably the two missing invaders from the lifeboat. One wasn’t even human. It had striped fur, a tail, and looked as if it stood three meters tall.

They were too close to the Protean site for the militia to retrieve them, even if he wanted to risk contact with something so obviously nonhuman. He would have to be satisfied with the strike.

He ordered the last militia aircraft out of the red zone and resumed the countdown for the nuclear strike.

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) 650,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

While the Jizan approached with the troublesome remains of the Eclipse and its crew, Admiral Hussein had the data from the crew interviews piped into the same meeting room where he had been reviewing the transmission from Admiral Bitar.

He watched the debriefing of the Eclipse ’s owner, Mosasa, as it was transmitted back to the Voice. He wanted to believe that it was some sort of elaborate misinformation ploy. Even while the human-shaped AI was still talking, he pulled half of the intelligence analysts on the Voice to do what fact-checking they could using the resources on the Voice against what data the Jizan could recover from the dead ship.