S. Swann - Prophets

What, you know this person?

Shut up!

It could just be someone with the same name . . .

“SHUT UP!” Kugara looked at her as if Tetsami had just lost her mind. I just said that out loud, fuck. “Mosasa,” Tetsami said. “Tjaele Mosasa.”

“Yes.”

“Bald, lots of earrings, dragon tattoo, looks like a pirate?”

“Yes.”

“Christ on the cross with his tap-dancing apostles!” Tetsami leveled the shotgun at Kugara’s head and yelled, “You work for that robotic bastard?”

Nickolai stepped in front of Kugara and it spooked Tetsami so much she almost shot him in the chest. “Yes,” Nickolai said. “We are members of the Bakunin Mercenaries’ Union, and we were hired by Mosasa. But Kugara wasn’t aware of what he was until I told her.”

“You know what that amoral Machiavellian machine actually is?”

“I did,” Nickolai said. “She didn’t.”

Tetsami raised the shotgun so it was centered on Nickolai’s face. The tiger didn’t even flinch.

Gram, what are you doing? She felt Flynn pushing to take control back, but she wouldn’t let go. “Then why shouldn’t I blow your head off for working for that thing?”

The tiger stared down the barrel of the shotgun and said, “If you wish to kill me, kill me.”

“Damn it,” Kugara’s voice came from behind the tiger as she tried to push past his arm. “Thanks to Nickolai here, that amoral Machiavellian machine is probably dead.”

The barrel lowered a fraction. “What?”

Kugara managed to step around the tiger’s bandaged arm. “This furry prick sabotaged the Eclipse . He’s the reason we were on a lifeboat landing on this godforsaken world.”

Tetsami lowered the shotgun and shook her head. She still couldn’t get her brain around the idea that Mosasa, of all things, had followed her nearly two hundred years and a hundred light-years from Bakunin. She had come out here, so far, just to get away from that thrice-damned planet.

But this was Mosasa they were talking about. It’s quite possible that she was trapped, again, in some long-term plot created by the AI to manipulate the universe into some form that was more to its liking. The pair here might be just as trapped in the AI’s web.

“Anomalies around Xi Virginis?” Tetsami whispered. “But damn vague about them, I bet.”

“You know Mosasa?” Kugara asked her. “Good lord, how?”

Yeah, Gram, how?

Tetsami laughed. “Mosasa’s why I’m here, why this colony’s here. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was why Xi Virginis disappeared.”

“What?” both said in unison.

“Short version,” Tetsami told them. “I came from that pit Bakunin. I escaped the shitstorm that pretty much collapsed the Terran Confederacy. A shitstorm your friend Mosasa largely took credit for.”

“He’s not our friend,” the tiger said. “He was our employer.”

“Mosasa took credit for the collapse of the Confederacy?” Kugara asked.

“Oh, come on,” Tetsami said. “You just said you knew what he was. Don’t you know what those Race AIs were designed for? The kind of social engineering they’re responsible for? It’s how the Race waged war.” She lowered the shotgun and gestured with her free hand, taking in the whole horizon. “This planet was on a Dolbrian star map buried under the Diderot Mountains on Bakunin. A star map that one of Mosasa’s AIs just happened to find while the old Confederacy was trying a military takeover of the planet. A star map that got handed over to the Seven Worlds and caused enough chaos in the Confederacy’s congress that the whole shebang started collapsing under its own weight.”

The two of them stared at her as if she wasn’t speaking the same language.

“It’s the Fifteen Worlds now,” Tetsami said. “Go thank Mosasa for that. And the Dolbrians.”

“How do you know all this,” Kugara asked. “This planet’s been out of contact since it was founded—”

“I’m older than I look,” Tetsami said. “About a hundred and seventy-five years older.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Destiny

Nothing is so destructive as what we believe to be true.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

—EDMUND Burke (1729-1797)

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

Nickolai stared at the man with the shotgun and tried to understand what was happening. Something—Mosasa, fate, or divine will—was conspiring to draw these threads around them. If what this man said was true, Mosasa knew of these colonies long ago. He would have known when they had been founded.

All of this, everything that was happening, could be the result of a centuries-old AI attempting to manipulate events.

He admitted as much, Nickolai thought, remembering the dialogue between Mosasa and Wahid when the Eclipse had just gotten underway.

“High levels of the Caliphate have known of them for quite some time, thus their interest in stopping this expedition. As to Dr. Dörner’s original question; the necessity of violence was required to draw out and neutralize the Caliphate’s somewhat limited resources on Bakunin. By doing so, we’ve ensured the safety of the expedition.”

“What’s to stop the Caliphate from just pouncing on us now?”

“We’re no longer their problem.Their public attacks, combined with my public advertisements for mercenaries to travel toward Xi Virginis, has alerted every intelligence agency with an asset on Bakunin that the Caliphate is hiding something in that region of space. There’s no secret for them to protect anymore. My small expedition means nothing when they need to rally whole fleets to lay claim to this sector of space before a rival does.”

At the time, Nickolai had been too preoccupied with his own ill-fated duty to Mr. Antonio to think deeply on the human politics involved. In retrospect, Mosasa had offhandedly taken credit for possibly starting a war.

It also raised the question of exactly what Mr. Antonio was trying to accomplish. At first, it was simply an internecine battle between the Fallen. Even when Mr. Antonio told him of Mosasa’s artificial nature, Nickolai never thought of the implications.

Mosasa was designed to anticipate, to see the forces of society arrayed around him. See them and manipulate them. He maneuvered the Caliphate into moving entire fleets . . .

How did he not anticipate what Nickolai did? How did he not know until Nickolai made his testament to the human priest? How did he not know about Mr. Antonio or his employers?

Who was Mr. Antonio?

Nicolai forced himself to pay attention to more immediate concerns, like the man with the gun. Fortunately, he had lowered the weapon. The way the man talked, Nickolai wondered if it was because he finally trusted they weren’t a threat, or because he was overcome with some sort of contagious fatalism.

The man talked of the founding of this colony, named Salmagundi, by refugees from a war on Bakunin 175 years ago. The colonists came from destroyed communes and bankrupt corporations and planets in upheaval during the Confederacy’s long, slow collapse. Apparently, they were talking to one of the founders of that exodus, a woman named Kari Tetsami, who should be over a century dead. The man in front of them was also a man named Flynn Jorgenson, who was born on this planet.

He explained the Hall of Minds.

The concept was beyond appalling. It left Nickolai shaken and numb. To strip someone’s mind? On some level it was worse than constructing an AI. Not only was it the arrogance of imitating life, it was imitating a specific life. And to accept that heretical copy into yourself—it was a sin so intimate and profound that Nickolai had trouble conceiving it.