Prophets

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Sectarianism

Your friends gain more from your failures than your enemies.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

In every case the guilt of war is confined to a few persons, and the many are friends.

—PLATO (ca. 427 Bce-ca. 347 Bce)

Date: 2525.12.12 (Standard) Earth-Sol

Yousef Al-Hamadi walked slowly as befitted his age. He made his way through the gardens outside the Epsilon Eridani consulate, arms folded behind him. His official title was Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations, which meant he was the nominal head of the Eridani Caliphate’s intelligence operations and in charge of the Caliphate’s covert activity outside its claimed borders.

In large part, it boiled down to cleaning up the messes of other segments of the convoluted rat’s nest of agencies and organizations that made up the Caliphate’s intelligence community.

Following him at a respectful distance was the tall dark woman he knew as Ms. Columbia.

“Did you have a long journey to Earth?” Al-Hamadi asked as he stopped in front of a large fountain spilling cascades of water across a plain of mosaic tile that formed intricate interlocking patterns with a stylized Arabic script that quoted verses from the Qur’an. Six hundred years ago, in the time of the last Caliphate, the fountain would have been an extravagance. However, to a species that had made Mars habitable, the arid waste of the Rub’al Khali was almost an afterthought.

“My travel caused me little concern.”

Al-Hamadi smiled to himself. He couldn’t keep, being in the information trade, from trying over and over to pry some scrap of intelligence from the woman herself. However, Ms. Columbia did not reveal a single fact that she wasn’t ready to part with. Not that he expected much. As carefully and flawlessly crafted as Ms. Columbia’s identity was, the person playing the role would not be prone to sophomoric slips of the tongue.

In the pocket of his jacket, Al-Hamadi had a cyberplas chit with a terabyte or two of detailed information on Ms. Columbia’s persona. Data which, he was sure, would bear scrutiny from whatever assets he cared to assign—despite the fact that he was certain it all was a carefully engineered fraud.

However, it was a fraud perpetrated by someone with a historical interest in feeding him very accurate and timely information. This was why he was conversing here, and not having Ms. Columbia taken to one of the airless moonlets whipping around Khamsin where he could ask questions about her and her employer somewhat more aggressively.

“I’m glad your journey was uneventful,” Al-Hamadi responded to her non-answer. “I would find it unfortunate if you were delayed. Our meetings always seem so profitable.”

“I hope you find this one as profitable,” she said as she handed him a cyberplas chit somewhat larger than the one he had in his pocket. This one fit in his hand and had an integrated reader. He touched a finger to one corner and the surface displayed a message in Arabic confirming his identity. He scanned through the contents of the storage device and frowned.

He knew better than to ask where the information had come from.

“My payment?”

“Already done.” Al-Hamadi made a dismissive gesture, staring at the device in his hand. Her deliveries were always in person, never trusted to even an encrypted narrow-beam tach-transmission. Even so, the archive in his hand contained background info on events that only just hit his own intelligence feeds two weeks ago, and not in much detail.

The detail here, as usual, required something just short of prescience. It certainly required the efforts of an entire intelligence service with agents on multiple planets and connections with dozens of organizations. A major transplanetary corporation at the least, and more likely one of the Caliphate’s rival governments—an entity served as much as the Caliphate by the passing of the information.

Whatever the case, “payment” was almost beside the point for both sides of the transaction.

“Is there something else you wished to discuss?”

Yes. Who employs you? One of the Indi governments? The Centauri Trading Company? Maybe even Sirius?

“Are you aware of the nature of the packages you deliver?”

“On occasion.”

“This latest one?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea how troublesome this news is?”

“Would it be worth my while to bring you news that was not troublesome?”

“I suppose not.”

Al-Hamadi scanned the package and wondered what Caliphate government report detailed the actions of the Waldgrave Militia on Bakunin, and where in the Caliphate bureaucracy it was buried. He knew that the Militia wouldn’t engage in an operation without at least the appearance of Caliphate authorization. There would be a report somewhere, approved by someone’s cousin on a planetary council just far enough away from the core that the operation would be well underway before Khamsin or Al-Hamadi heard word of it.

If there were two foreign words beloved by the militant factions of the Caliphate, they would be fait accompli. This was how the Islamic Revolution on Rubai happened; just take the crumbling central government of Epsilon Indi, and a few dozen rogue militia cells, mix well.

Technically, they aren’t rogue when so many politicians support them . . .

The problem with the Militia was that they were an incredibly blunt instrument. Their idea of a covert operation was to not take credit for the aftermath. A private expedition toward Xi Virginis was troublesome, but only to persons who knew the significance of that area of space. For a dozen years standard, Al-Hamadi had managed to keep that significance a secret within the highest levels of the Caliphate, presumably far above the level of anyone directly involved with the Militia.

Now that significance had leaked. The expedition from Bakunin was bad enough, but if Al-Hamadi had intercepted that information, it could have been dealt with quietly and without drawing attention.

But the Militia had hired a small army of mercenaries to . . .

Al-Hamadi shook his head. He wasn’t even going to try to second-guess their motivation at this point. He had a much bigger problem. The Militia’s clumsy actions had done everything but tach-comm every intelligence service in human space with the message, “The Caliphate thinks the space around Xi Virginis is very important. Please allocate all your spare resources toward determining why.”

Do they even know? Al-Hamadi wondered.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked Ms. Columbia.

“I doubt the same one as you.”

“There is no God but God,” Al-Hamadi whispered in Arabic, half reading part of the mosaic underneath the rippling waters. “Sometimes I wonder if that is the case for some of us in the Caliphate. After the fall of the Confederacy, you would think we would be the strongest, most stable transplanetary government in human space. The one government founded not by some accident of history or stellar geography, but a rule based on a common faith, a common law, a common language.” He looked at Ms. Columbia, who wore the same distant expression she always did. “It seems that the more common ground we share, the more intractable the differences.”

“That seems to be human nature.”

“Or God’s will.” He turned around to start walking back to the consulate. “Please give my regards, and my thanks, to your employer.”

Whoever that is, he thought.

He and Ms. Columbia parted ways at the main consulate building. She left the grounds while he went deep into the bowels of the complex, to the secure tach-comm station. He slipped ahead of fifteen diplomats waiting for transmit time because he had the rank to do so, and because the messages he needed to send were probably the most important to ever cross this particular tach-comm array.

The Eridani Caliphate was going to have to send its ships to Xi Virginis years ahead of schedule, and Al-Hamadi needed to get ahead of events before things spun out of control.