Prophets

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Acolyte

Everyone worships the God that promises them what they want.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

—VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)

Date: 2525.11.21 (Standard) 0.98 ly from BD+50°1725

The man Nickolai Rajasthan knew as Mr. Antonio had left the planet shortly after his last meeting with the tiger. Anyone who monitored his departure from Bakunin would have watched the small short-range craft and noted a trajectory that would take the ship toward Banlieue. Even the energy signature of the departure would have matched a small one-man craft taking the sixteen light-year journey. If the observer did the calculations based on energy expenditure and tach-drive capability, they would expect Mr. Antonio to arrive at the 355-year-old Sirius colony within about three months standard.

All of which was a carefully-engineered falsehood.

The craft Mr. Antonio piloted was a rather pedestrian scout ship, a one-hundred-year-old knockoff of a two-hundred-year-old design from the Centauri Trading Company. It had been built in one of the factories orbiting Angkor back when there was a cohesive Indi Protectorate expanding for the sake of expansion. Its construction was functional and ugly, a metallic sheath wrapping the tach-drive that comprised 80 percent of its mass and 98 percent of its volume. The whole ship formed a blocky truncated cone whose outline was defined by the construction of the scout’s drives.That outline was only broken by two protrusions; the command blister on top and the single parasitic drop ship attached to a docking ring underneath.

Thanks to the Indi Protectorate’s explosive expansion during the years of the Confederacy, and its subsequent decay in the years since, these inexpensive Indi craft were ubiquitous in human space and unlikely to attract any attention even when heavily modified.

And Mr. Antonio’s craft was heavily modified.

The original tach-drives had been bulky and inefficient and had been replaced by military-grade drives roughly the same size. Those drives were an order of magnitude more efficient than the ones they replaced and would complete the journey to Banlieue in less than twenty-four days standard, if that had been where Mr. Antonio had been headed.

If he had tached to Banlieue under full power, the hypothetical observer monitoring his departure would have seen a power spike five times what would have been expected from the cranky old ship. Instead, the smaller power surge to the military tach-drives took the scout a little over a light-year away from Bakunin. From Mr. Antonio’s perspective, the journey was instantaneous. From the perspective of the rest of the universe, the journey had taken a little over thirty-four hours.

Mr. Antonio powered down every system but life support, sat in a dark control cabin, and waited.

There was nothing remarkable about the area where the scout drifted. There was nothing of any substantial mass for light-months in any direction. Even the star Bakunin orbited was little more than a bright reddish star at this distance. The small scout and Mr. Antonio were lost in the big empty, more effectively invisible than if the scout had every ECM and counter-surveillance measure known to man.

He waited, and soon, he was not alone.

About an hour after taching in to this unremarkable volume of space, the reddish dot of Kropotkin, Bakunin’s star, vanished. Stars around the missing red dot began winking out in a growing circle. The circular hole in the star field kept growing as something large approached the scout, eclipsing the universe. In a few moments, all of the visible stars vanished.

The scout shook gently from a soft impact. The blackness withdrew from the viewport as if a cloth had been pulled back over the surface of the scout. When the black curtain withdrew, the scout was no longer floating in the void. Mr. Antonio’s ship drifted into a large, well-lit ovoid space. The walls swirled with tendrils that ranged in color and texture from matte black to chrome. Several of the chrome tendrils reached out and grabbed the scout, stopping its drift.

Mr. Antonio couldn’t see all the tendrils attach themselves, but through the viewport he could see the end of two tendrils deform to mimic mating surfaces to join the surface of his scout. He looked down at the systems monitors for his ship and saw the little fuel and oxy he had used in the one light-year journey was being replaced.

He waited until the green light lit up on the docking controls, showing that the primary air lock had mated and there was pressurization and oxy on the other side. Once it was safe to leave the confines of the scout, he released his harness and pulled himself though the command pod and over to the primary air lock.

He cycled through, and the air lock opened to a long, white, cylindrical corridor, the walls themselves the source of illumination. The shadowless white light combined with the featureless walls to give the impression of an infinite white universe surrounding him. The only visible spatial cues were the door to the scout’s air lock and a long cable floating unsupported in the center of the corridor.

Mr. Antonio pulled himself along with the cable, floating through the white. Slowly, weight returned, pulling him down, away from the scout. By the time he reached the end of the cable a slight sense of gravity gave him a definite downward direction.

The cable terminated in the floor of a small hemispherical chamber as white as the corridor that fed into its ceiling. The floor was flat, and slightly textured, which aside from the grayish cable, gave the only visual cues to the geography around him. If it weren’t for those two objects, he could have been standing in an endless white void.

The walls did not remain unbroken. A few seconds after his feet touched the floor of the room, an aperture appeared in the wall facing him. The walls withdrew from a circular portal. Beyond was ill lit, nearly black.

Mr. Antonio walked through, and to every appearance found himself standing outside.An unbroken star field wrapped around him in every direction, the view intense enough to be painful. One reddish dot glowed brighter than the others, but the star Kropotkin, even at only a light-year distant, was almost lost in the glare from the Milky Way that wrapped the universe around him. Having just been outside, he knew he was seeing way more stars than were normally visible to the naked eye, even in the emptiness a light-year from Kropotkin.

The aperture closed behind him.

Another man stood nearby, visible as a ghostly silhouette in the starlight. The man faced away from him, staring up at the ruddy star Mr. Antonio had just come from.

Mr. Antonio waited to be addressed.

“ ‘What a piece of work is a man,’ ” the other man quoted, without turning around. “ ‘How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty—’ Do you know that, my friend?”

“Shakespeare?”

“Yes, it is. Hamlet. ‘In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. In apprehension how like a god!’ ” He finally turned and faced Mr. Antonio, a striking figure even in the starlight; tall, hairless, with flesh as sculpted and flawless as an ancient Greek statue. Apollo, was Mr. Antonio’s first thought, though Prometheus would probably have been a more apt comparison. “Is our mole in play now?”

“Yes, Adam.”

“You have done well. Your acts have helped ensure our success.”

“Thank you.”

Adam turned away to face the star field surrounding them. As he turned, the red dot of Kropotkin grew in size with vertigo-inducing rapidity. The stars rotated and twisted as their point of view shot around the star.

“I believe you are unsure about this,” Adam said as the planet Bakunin swelled in front of him, a white ball with a strip of blue girdling its middle. One green-gray continent cut from ice cap to ice cap dividing the single ocean. The landmass was in the process of rotating from light to dark, the half of it east of the Diderot Mountains shadowed and alive with city lights.

“I have no doubts in you,” Mr. Antonio said.

Adam chuckled. “You also know that it’s futile to try and hide your feelings from me. I see the pulse of civilizations. The workings of your mind are no mystery.”

Mr. Antonio nodded. “I am certain you know the importance of what I do. I’m afraid I do not.”

Bakunin grew quickly in front of them, mountains shooting by, and the darkened eastern desert zooming toward them. The lights around the spaceport/city of Proudhon swelled. “You wonder about the importance of Tjaele Mosasa.”

Proudhon moved off to the left and the image turned gray as it adjusted for the lack of light. It fell toward a monochrome section of desert filled with ranks of disabled spacecraft.

“If he is a threat, why not—”

“Destroy him?” Adam asked. “He will be destroyed.”

Their point of view fell toward a single hangar in the midst of the aircraft and stopped a dozen meters from the ground. The image was static, but Mr. Antonio could see a lone figure entering the hangar, the unmistakable form of Nickolai Rajasthan.

“I could have—”

“No,” Adam said. “Our actions have been precise for a reason. Mosasa would see an unsubtle attack and not only avoid it, but divine the purpose behind it. No. He has to be drawn from his lair to unfamiliar territory where he will be near blind.” The point of view shifted until they seemed to hover just over Nickolai’s right shoulder, the tiger’s massive foreshortened profile filling the universe in front of them. “Our agent will strike when the quarry is helpless.”

“I defer to your wisdom.”

“Now, though, with our pieces in place around Mosasa, we should retire our Mr. Antonio.”

“How next should I serve?”

“There are things on Earth that should be addressed as soon as my brother begins his tragic expedition.”

Mr. Antonio left Adam with a new name, a new appearance, and a new spacecraft.

Replacing the old Indi-built scout was a Paralian-designed luxury transport. Rather than the cramped one-person cabin, the Pegasus V craft had a lush suite with wood paneling, leather seats, carpeting, and solid brass controls. Instead of an ancient serial number, the side of the sleek craft bore a name, Lillium.

The person who slipped behind the controls of the Lillium bore no resemblance to Mr. Antonio, despite having been him until about fifteen minutes ago. Instead of the old wrinkled creature with wispy white hair who had hired Nickolai Rajasthan, the pilot who flew the Lillium from the bowels of Adam’s spacecraft was a middle-aged woman of African descent. Her hair was black and wrapped her head in tight braids, and her face was smooth except for the beginning of age lines around the eyes. She had the long, lithe form of someone who had grown up in slightly less than Earth gravity, and the musculature of someone who trained in gravity somewhat higher.

Her name was now Ms. Columbia, and she and Lillium were headed to Terra, in the heart of human space.