Prophets

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.

By the grace of God, how did all this fall into my lap?

The medical officers who had been doing the analysis of Bitar’s transmission were still with him, observing the android’s statement for much the same reason.

“What do you make of it?” he asked them, still watching the hairless Mosasa’s passion play. The medical officers sat at a square table in the observation room while Hussein paced around the perimeter. In the center of the table was a holo projecting an image of the seated Mosasa and his interrogator on board the Jizan.

Lieutenant Deshem folded his hands, watching the confession, and shaking his head. “I don’t know what value I can provide. The medical team has done everything possible with a noninvasive scan to confirm that this—thing—is exactly what it says it is.”

“And everything else it’s saying?”

“Admiral, sir, this thing is a machine. All I can tell you is how well or poorly it is mimicking human responses. Unlike a human being, we have to assume that every response—voice, body language, pupil dilation—may be engineered for our benefit.”

“I understand your caution,” Admiral Hussein said. “We’re facing something that admits its own design was for the purpose of manipulating human responses. That said, if we take all those cues—voice, body language, pupil dilation—at face value, what is Mosasa telling us?”

“As if this was the interview of a human being?”

“Yes.”

Deshem nodded. “Mosasa shows signs of being dangerously psychopathic and potentially suicidal.”

“What?”

“I see no exhibition of empathy, and he—it—displays a narcissism bordering on megalomania. It is the center of its own universe, and it has rewritten its own personal narrative so that it is not just the hero, but it is God. A human being with those traits would be, at the very least, sociopathic. Combine this with a series of failures aboard the Eclipse and we have a situation where reality contradicts its personal worldview. Its self-image is incompatible with powerlessness, and that conflict is manifesting as signs of depression.”

Hussein stared into the holo and asked, “And you think Mosasa would want us to see that? Make that interpretation of his story?”

“No, I do not—which is precisely why I distrust the conclusion.”

Hussein stared into the holographic Mosasa’s eyes and felt a deep unease.

The Jizan had a fully operational medical unit that had shown him the scans of the creature sitting in this holographic interrogation room. Never mind how human Mosasa looked, or how human he behaved, there wasn’t a single biological component to the thing being interrogated on the Jizan. It didn’t matter if Hussein could recognize the pain and fear in Mosasa’s expression. It didn’t matter if he could see the loss in Mosasa’s holographic eyes. There was nothing behind them, no soul, only an imitation of life. A facade constructed solely for the purpose of deceit and manipulation.

If the Father of Lies was to attempt to create a man, Hussein suspected the result would resemble Mosasa.

The more Hussein stared at Mosasa’s expression, the more he thought Deshem had described a psych profile that perfectly fit an AI, and this AI in particular.

This is why we do not suffer such things to exist.

As the Voice caught up with the Jizan, Admiral Hussein watched the other surviving crew members being debriefed. Between the statements, and the data from the dead ship, he confirmed the Eclipse had been Mosasa’s scientific expedition toward Xi Virginis.

The Eclipse had accumulated a large amount of scientific data observing the site where Xi Virginis had been. If it was to be trusted, the star didn’t exist anymore.

Admiral Hussein thought of Admiral Bitar and the Sword’s fleet. He supposed that the pilot of the Eclipse could have tached out before the Sword’s arrival, but where were the technologically advanced natives of Xi Virginis that Admiral Bitar had told them about?

It would take a significant effort to completely map the Eclipse’s transit history, but a cursory review of the logs supported the crew’s story. The Eclipse had been in transit for months. Even with the fastest standard tach-drive available, it took the Eclipse as long to make its twenty light-year hops as the Voice took to make its eighty light-year leap.

Hussein found it incredible that a civilian had been able to secure such an advanced drive system. What was more incredible was the fact when the crew of the Voice was receiving its crash training on a virgin ship Mosasa’s expedition was well underway.

It seemed unlikely that such an undertaking would have gone completely unnoticed. Hussein suspected that Caliphate intelligence discovered Mosasa’s expedition and moved up the timetable for launching the new fleets. Of course, he would have liked it if his own intelligence officers had known about that beforehand.

A cursory examination of the Eclipse’s logs recovered names, biometric identification, and some history on all the crew members. Mosasa had split his people between a science team and a group of mercenaries from Bakunin. It seemed a lot of military talent for a scientific expedition, but that was probably par for the course on Bakunin.

The science team seemed fairly straightforward, including a linguist, a data analyst, an anthropologist, and a xenobiologist. Add to that a Paralian, who was an expert on theoretical physics and went by the alias Bill. The nature of the team pretty much demonstrated that Mosasa expected to encounter a human colony out here.

The mercenary team was interesting.

Not only had the Eclipse been sabotaged, it had harbored a Vatican spy. The presence of a Vatican agent gave weight to the idea that the Eclipse was actually the impetus that set the Voice and her sisters in motion early.

When the Eclipse’s crew was brought on board the Voice, Admiral Hussein made it a point to meet the most diplomatically sensitive crew member first, the Paralian.

Having one of the creatures on board the Voice was troublesome, and he intended to show the creature the respect he would any diplomatic envoy. It was also a logistic issue, since the creature’s life support resided in a machine that was nearly six meters tall and five wide. There was no way it would fit in any of the human spaces in the Voice, so at the moment their alien guest resided in an unpressurized loading bay that served one of the hundred spacecraft that formed the Voice’s battle group.

A set of engineers was scrambling to figure out what to do with Bill once the fleet had to reattach to the carrier.

It also meant that a face-to-face required an environment suit, and the only record was the low-res holo camera embedded in the chest of that suit. Out here, open to space, blocked only by a safety grille across the thirty-meter docking portal, there was none of the sophisticated monitoring equipment they had in the interrogation rooms. Not that all the physical monitoring in the world would make sense looking at Bill.

To his surprise, Bill, or, more accurately, the communications software Bill used, was as fluent in Arabic as it was in English.

Admiral Hussein questioned the creature over the comm link, watching the tentacled bullet-bodied thing for some clue to its emotional state. It was as hopeless as trying to read the mood of a jellyfish.

Even so, the history Bill provided him was congruent with the stories from the others and the Eclipse’s logs. All had been hired by Mosasa to uncover some sort of ill-defined anomaly originating from the direction of Xi Virginis.

It also confirmed the details of what they found there, or failed to find there. It provided a wealth of technical details especially on how the Eclipse ended up damaged and inbound to this system. Most of those details were completely opaque to Admiral Hussein, but they would help the engineers in going over the wreck of the Eclipse.

It was that technical discussion, opaque as it was, where Bill complicated the diplomatic issue.

“I am impressed with your ship,” Bill radioed from his electronic voice box. Even in Arabic, the words carried a Windsor accent.

“What do you mean?”

“I never would have thought human engineers would be able to build a tach-drive that worked beyond the asymptotic barrier.”

Admiral Hussein just stared at the creature in its glass globe.

“I apologize, was I unclear?”

“No, go on, please.”

“Even the highest acolytes of our universities within Paralia have failed in designing a stable generator that could manipulate a field complex enough to move the asymptotic barrier. In theory it was always possible, but the dimensions involved increase with the cube of the distance, so solving the equations for a three-dimensional reference frame—”

“Bill?”

“Yes, Admiral? Do I need to explain something?”

“Just tell me how you know the capabilities of this ship?”

“Simple observation; the data provided when the Eclipse’s own drive failed provided enough data to describe a boundary model of your drive capability. The mass/drive ratios visible on this ship speak to an unorthodox sixfold redundancy or a new drive design. Mosasa implied that his expedition would be the impetus driving the Caliphate outward, meaning you left after us, yet arrived before us, despite the necessity of supplying and outfitting a vessel this large for a hundred-light-year journey.”

“I see.” Admiral Hussein turned away from the Paralian and looked out the grate and toward the stars. The planet they were here for was a small blue-white disk, brighter than the stars behind it.

He had known that these capabilities would be known as soon as they were used, but it was discomforting to realize that even the Paralian considered them extraordinary. He was not in the habit of questioning his government, but for several moments he wondered where the expertise had come from.

“What is it you see?” asked the Paralian. It took a moment for Admiral Hussein to realize that it was in response to the last thing he had said. He turned to face his massive guest and was about to explain the figure of speech when his suit’s comm called for his attention on the command channel. He switched the comm from the closed channel he shared with the Paralian and immediately heard Captain Rasheed’s voice.

“Admiral Hussein?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We just detected an energy spike on the other side of the planet. We don’t have visual contact yet, but it’s consistent with the Sword’s tach-drive signature.”

“Are you sure?”

“It has to be an Ibrahim-class carrier. No other drives leave as large a footprint.”

Instead of an envoy, Bitar comes in person?

“I’m coming to the bridge.”

Admiral Hussein turned the comm back to the Paralian’s channel. “I have to go now,” he told it.

“Is there a problem?”

“No,” he lied.