Prophets

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Purgatory

Remove the fear of death and you remove the primary constraint on human action.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.

—KARL MARX (1818-1883)

Date: 2526.03.23 (Standard) 39.7 ly from Xi Virginis

Each jump the Eclipse made ate up 20 light-years and 684 hours from the universe outside the ship. They were between jumps four and five, now closer to Mosasa’s mysterious lost colonies than they were to the rest of human space, and the tiny slice of it Kugara called home. They hung in interstellar space eighty light-years from Bakunin.

“I got something,” Kugara said as the display before her showed a multicolor spike that was stark against the universal background radiation.

“Feed it to my station,” Tsoravitch told her. “I got a console free.”

The redheaded data analyst sat at the secondary comm station at the bridge, and facing her were nearly twenty virtual displays hanging in the air. All showed captured transmissions in various stages of filtering. The two of them spent the downtime between jumps doing what amounted to electromagnetic archaeology. They aimed the ship’s sensors at the cluster of stars around Xi Virginis looking for stray EM signals that they might be able to decipher.

Unfortunately, since none of the signals they picked up were intended to broadcast over interstellar distances, it was not an easy process. Picking up tach-transmissions would be easier for analysis, but actively scanning for them required nearly as much energy as transmitting them, and that kind of power was only really available for a planet-based system.

So they grabbed fragmentary forty-year-old data from a cluster of half a dozen systems—it was close to miraculous that they were able to filter anything intelligible at all—and over two thirds of it consisted of raw digital packets that were meaningless without context. Somehow, though, Tsoravitch was able to occasionally pull snippets of text, audio, and video. She had a knack for correctly guessing what kind of data was encoded in something just by looking at the raw stream.

Kugara was stuck with the much more boring job of looking for artificial signals in the broad spectrum of EM radiation the Eclipse could pick up.

One of her displays flashed at her, and Tsoravitch shook her head. “I just sent him the last dozen signals I was able to filter—”

“Mosasa’s not very patient.”

“I suppose not,” Tsoravitch shook her head, “But if he’s not even waiting for my analysis, then . . .” She stabbed a few controls, and the various displays in front of her winked out.

Kugara leaned back in her chair and turned to look at her. “Then what?”

“I was expecting something different.” Tsoravitch looked down at the control panel.

“From Mosasa?” Kugara asked, trying to keep the incredulous tone out of her voice.

“I think I need a break,” Tsoravitch said, standing up. “We’ll be making the next jump in an hour anyway.”

Kugara watched her go and wondered why she seemed so disappointed. What did she want out of Mosasa? She fingered the bio-interface at the base of her skull and wondered. Even though her own ancestors had been the result of someone exploiting heretical technologies, she felt uneasy around Mosasa. Maybe it gave her a level of perspective that Tsoravitch didn’t have, but Kugara couldn’t help thinking that the woman had wanted to work with an AI.

Mosasa sat in his cabin, staring at nothing. Only a fraction of his attention was spared for the data around his immediate physical surroundings. The signals from the maintenance robots scuttling across the skin of the Eclipse were higher priority. The small six-legged hemispheres crawled across the skin of the ship, checking seams and the integrity of the hull. Other robots crawled inside the tach-drives, insuring every mechanical system was performing optimally.

The robots, even with the bans on true AI, were largely autonomous within their limited sphere; Mosasa only had to override them occasionally. The task was simple, repetitive, and took only a small fraction of his processing capacity.

At the moment, most of his attention was focused in bathing in the stream of data Tsoravitch had sent him. It was spotty and incomplete, a trickling stream rather than an ocean he could submerge his consciousness in. But he needed it. From the Eclipse’s reference frame, it had only been out of the immersive data stream he lived in on Bakunin for a hundred and forty hours.

Already his entire being ached with the need. It took a great measure of restraint for him not to forgo all the maintenance checks and order the crew to the bridge so they could make the next jump toward Xi Virginis now.

The door to his cabin signaled him unexpectedly.

He shifted his awareness back to the physical world around him; at the same time he grabbed onto the Eclipse’s security network to look through the camera in the hall outside his cabin.

Outside his cabin door stood the data analyst from Jokul, Rebecca Tsoravitch. Oh, yes, I did expect this . . .

He only wondered briefly at his initial surprise. The same deeply ingrained software that allowed him to perceive the movements of societies allowed him to understand much smaller units. Given enough information, he could see the dynamics of a group of a dozen as easily as a million.

He stood and faced the door as it opened.

“Ms. Tsoravitch?” he asked.

She frowned at him. “Why am I here?”

“I required the services of a data analyst—”

“Bullshit!”

“Pardon me?”

“You’re grabbing data from me with only a cursory filtering. I’m barely looking at the data, much less processing it into anything useful. My expertise here seems more than a little redundant.”

“I find you useful.”

“Why? Why did you ask me on this expedition?”

“Why did you accept?”

She stood in the doorway staring at him. Mosasa watched expressions play across her face, allowing the flood of data about her internal state to wash over him. He could extrapolate her inner thoughts as she asked herself the same question. In some sense he knew her better than she knew herself, even though his observations of her had been remote until this expedition began.

Like all the science team, she was a personality drawn by the exotic but had been forced by circumstances into using her talents for things prosaic and mundane. In Tsoravitch’s case, she had a job in the Jokul government managing the software monitors that scrubbed the planetwide data network searching for subversive transmissions. Like many stable authoritarian regimes that managed to keep the populace fed and clothed, the vast majority of their subversives weren’t particularly interesting. Not to someone like Tsoravitch.

“I thought I would be working with you.”

“Even though you know what I am?”

“Because I know what you are.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you know what I am?”

She looked him up and down. “You’re a robotic construct camouflaging an AI device, one that was designed by the Race during the Genocide War.”

Very deliberately, Mosasa said, “That is, of course, only part of the answer.”

Of course, Tsoravitch responded by asking, “Then what’s the rest of the answer?”

He explained to Tsoravitch that, three hundred years ago, Tjaele Mosasa had been a human being.

He had lived during the waning years of the Terran Council, before the Centauri Trading Company discovered Bill’s homeworld of Paralia, developed the first tach-drive, and upset the already crumbling balance of the human universe.

At that time, before there was such a thing as faster-than-light travel, the use of static wormholes meant there existed a traffic bottleneck, highways between the heavily guarded wormholes defined by gravity and orbital mechanics.

The Mosasa clan had been a large extended family that lived off the traffic moving on those highways in the Sirius system. It was a rich place for pirates, supporting a hundred clans like the Mosasas. Sirius sat in the heart of human space and was a major transit point in humanity’s wormhole network, having six outgoing wormholes and eight incoming. Even though the dull rocks orbiting the Sirius system were never meant to support life, the colony world Cynos was one of the richest planets aside from Earth itself.

Tjaele Mosasa was the youngest unmarried adult of the pirate clan, a third-generation inhabitant of the lawless void between the wormhole and Cynos. While his brothers and sisters would attack and board a prize, he made sure their patchwork vessel the Nomad didn’t fall apart. He spent the first six years of his adult life in a vacsuit patching holes, rerouting power around fried connections, and repairing the Frankenstein’s monster of a ship’s computer.

When the Nomad found a pair of derelicts off the main route to Cynos, that was where he was, in a narrow unpressurized maintenance tunnel, in a vacsuit making sure that the power system didn’t overheat. He was annoyed that he wasn’t able to watch the approach with the rest of his crew, his family. However, the Nomad was a cranky old ship, older than Cynos itself, and someone had to make sure they didn’t blow the thing up.

He was looking forward to the prize, though. Most of their livelihood came from raiding cargo tugs that rarely gave them anything with which to upgrade the Nomad. Food, fuel, and trade goods were well and good, but a new ship’s computer was high on his own priority list.

A derelict vessel would be a godsend for maintaining this boat. He allowed himself to daydream about finding a vessel in good enough condition that they could retire the Nomad.

He smiled at his own unjustified optimism, and tapped the finger of his gauntlet on an ancient meter. When he jostled the mechanism, the numbers slid back from the impossible down to the merely improbable.

Just an intact computer core—

His thoughts broke off as the tunnel whipped around, slamming his faceplate into the meter he had been reading. He floated away from the impact as fragments of wires and electronics drifted in front of him. In his brief contacts with the walls, his suit filled with the hideous noise of something tearing the Nomad apart.

The lights in the tunnel went out.

For several seconds after the impact, he couldn’t move. His vision was confined to a narrow cone of the work lights in his helmet. The emergency lights didn’t come on.

He knew something bad had happened. He could see that in the debris drifting through the light-cone in front of his face. He could see it in a cloud of vapor that drifted in front of his faceplate, a mist of tiny white crystals.

Something was venting into the corridor, under pressure. None of the possibilities were good; fuel, hydraulic fluid, or—worst of all—atmosphere from the pressurized part of the ship.

He grabbed a wall and turned himself to point up the corridor, back toward the main body of the Nomad. Now that the shock of the impact faded, he was preoccupied with one thought: were the crew compartments intact? That thought overrode even the basic question of what the hell happened.

He pulled himself through the debris-filled corridor, the work light on his helmet cutting silver cones out of the clouds of ice crystals that now filled the corridor. The ice stuck to the outside of his faceplate, gradually blurring his view until he had to wipe it off with one of his gauntlets, leaving long streaks across his field of vision.

If the emergency doors came down, they’ll be fine. If they were all still on the bridge, there would at least fifteen minutes of air even if the CO₂ recyclers were off-line, time enough to get the emergency vacsuits to them. That’d keep everyone alive as long as he could keep the suits powered. Enough time to patch the hull and get life support together.

That’s what Mosasa told himself. That’s what gave him the strength to keep pulling down the corridor, through the near-opaque fog of venting atmosphere. He held on to the hope even when he reached the end of the corridor, where the air lock should have been.

He pulled himself though the wreckage of the air lock, still believing that there was a chance that his family survived.

Then he was through the confined space of the air lock and free of most of the crystalline fog, and realized there was no hope at all.

Mosasa floated above the floor of the Nomad’s cargo hold. The bridge and the pressurized crew area should have been above him.

They weren’t.

The ceiling of the cargo hold was a mass of twisted metal, torn cable, and hoses. Nothing remained of form or function in the midst of the wreckage. Through the rat’s nest of twisted girders, he could see the stars. No sealed compartments where he might find his brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, or cousins. The inhabited portion of the Nomad no longer existed.

Mosasa, barely breathing, lowered his gaze to the rest of the cargo hold to see something that had survived the devastation; something that was not part of the Nomad.

The lights from his helmet fell across something smooth and metallic embedded in the twisted metal wreckage. At first it made no sense. He could only see it in brief glimpses as his light shone on it through the twisted steel that filled half the cargo hold.

The surface was silvered and might have once had a mirror sheen, but it had been scarred and pitted and heavily gouged by the wreckage surrounding it, allowing glimpses of duller metal to show through the skin. Unlike the Nomad around it, the mirrored spacecraft—that was the only thing Mosasa could assume it was—showed little visible structural damage beyond the superficial tears in its skin.

He carefully pulled himself through a maze of wreckage toward the thing, telling himself he was pulling himself toward the bridge and any potential survivors even as he knew he was lying to himself.

The mirrored craft was thin and broad, like an arrowhead. And it had pierced the Nomad in the same manner. Mosasa saw no markings on the skin of the craft, just oblong apertures that could have been maneuvering jets, sensors, or weapon ports. The damn thing was also too small for an interplanetary vehicle. Even a solo craft that barely gave the pilot room to piss would carry more mass and volume just for life support. The alien design, without markings, almost looked like an unmanned torpedo.

When Mosasa cleared the top of the wreckage, where the bridge should have been, he floated in open space. Stunned as he was, survival training took over; he connected one of his suit’s tethers to a firmly wedged girder. Even a few cm/s velocity in the wrong direction could doom someone in open space without them even being aware of it until it was too late and they had drifted beyond reach of the ship. His suit had small vector jets, but those took power, and he knew, as soon as the unobscured stars revealed themselves above him and the Nomad, he was going to need every joule.

The space that had been the Nomad’s bridge was now dominated by the drive section of the mirrored ship. Its engines had slagged, and the metal/ceramic rear thrusters glowed in the darkness like a dying star.

Around Mosasa, shadows drifted in the blackness, eclipsing the stars. His light picked out fragments of the Nomad floating out into space; a computer console; a chair; a twisted nest of wires . . .

And bodies. He saw bodies tumbling into the void. His family. Most were already too far away for him to make out features, but his younger sister Naja was only fifteen meters away, facing him as she drifted away from the Nomad, the only home she had ever known.

She was close enough for him to see blood frozen, crusted on the gold rings in her lips, nose, and ears. Close enough that his work light reflected dully in her eyes. Her expression wasn’t of shock, or horror, but of somewhat muted surprise. Mosasa lowered his head so that the light left her face.

He thought briefly of trying to retrieve the bodies. But there was no point. The Mosasa clan buried their dead in space anyway. At least his family had a living relative to speak for their souls as they returned to the dark.

He spent a long time floating by the cooling drive section of the assassin spacecraft, and said prayers for twenty-four men, women, and children. When he finished, he looked up and noticed something else in the darkness beyond the Nomad. It eclipsed stars but was far enough away that his helmet light didn’t illuminate it.

He had a stronger lamp on his belt, and he had passed beyond caring about power conservation. He was dead, and had been for an hour. Everything else was delaying the inevitable.

He pulled the lamp from his belt; it had a beam as wide as his fully spread hand, and could pump out lumens an order of magnitude beyond his helmet work lights. He shone it out in the direction of the shadow, and it seemed a universe of floating debris flicked into existence. A spreading galaxy of wreckage of objects ranging in size from tiny bolts and metal shavings to a sphere encased in torn tubing about twenty meters across that must have been wrenched from the drive section.

The distant shadow was much bigger. He was able to pick it out with the lamp. Light splashed its side, dappled with shadows from the Nomad’s wreckage. Distance was hard to judge, but it seemed it could be as far as a klick away. And if that was the case, it was twice the size of the Nomad.

To Mosasa’s eye, the derelict craft was untouched.

The side was painted and Mosasa could see the blue and white of the old United Nations flag on the side. Beyond that, in three-meter-tall letters in a half dozen languages, Mosasa saw the name of the ship.

Luxembourg.

And, after staring a long time, Mosasa realized that the Nomad was still drifting toward it.

The Luxembourg had been a ghost ship from the Genocide War. When the Nomad drifted close enough, Mosasa jumped the gap with an umbilical to anchor the two wrecks together. Even before he attached the cables, he could see that the Luxembourg was largely intact. The mirrored arrowhead that had buried itself into the Nomad and had killed his family had been an old Race-built weapon, AI driven, autonomous so none of the Race would actually be involved in a direct confrontation.

For some reason, it had been guarding the derelict.

When he entered the Luxembourg, he discovered that the attack that had killed the old United Nations ship had been very careful to do very little damage to the machine itself. Each hole in the skin managed to avoid holing vital equipment and ended in a vacuum-desiccated crew member. The Luxembourg had been neutralized in a matter of moments. He even found one corpse strapped to the ship’s toilet.

The backup battery systems still had a charge, and the secondary life support still had an oxy reserve in the tanks. None of the emergency systems had come on-line. About all that was missing was a decent ship’s computer.

It took weeks, but Mosasa revived the late twenty-first-century ship. In that time he discovered two things. The first was that the Luxembourg wasn’t strictly military. It had been run by the United Nations Intelligence Service. The second thing he discovered was deep in the belly of the ship, in the only armored compartment, flanked by incendiary devices that the crew never got the chance to fire.

Four cylindrical crystals; four Race-built artificial intelligence devices. The machines were tied into the ship’s systems, and had gone cold and dormant.

It was the first time that Mosasa had realized that human beings had co-opted the same heretical technologies the Race had used. Understanding that probably made the next thing he did easier.

After days of trying to revive them, he thought of the mirrored arrowhead that had impaled the Nomad. The Race used AI-piloted drones, so the device onboard the weapon had been operational enough to pilot the drone.

It was insane, and went against every taboo against these devices, but Mosasa was a pirate, alone, and close to the limit of his resources. If he was to survive, he needed the Luxembourg fully functional. He removed the brain from that weapon and wired it into the Luxembourg.

“I was able to jumpstart those old AIs.” Mosasa looked at Tsoravitch and said, “But three centuries is a long time, and there’s only the one left. Me.”

Tsoravitch shook her head, and Mosasa could tell the tale of his human origins had left an impression. She seemed to stare past him as she asked, “But you’re not him, you’re one of the AIs.”

“I’m both. Mosasa lived long enough to emigrate to Bakunin, shortly after we recorded his identity. We needed a human consciousness to properly interact with the human world. Those memories are as much mine as they were the human Mosasa’s.”

“What happened to the other AIs?”

“Two were destroyed in the days before the Confederacy’s collapse.”

“The other two?”

“They were lost when I tried to go home.”

“Home?”

Mosasa nodded. “But we need to go back up to the bridge. We’re due for the next jump.”