Prophets

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534

In less than an hour, Alexander had confirmation that the last of the militia aircraft was safely out of the red zone. He ordered the drone aircraft bearing the nuke to head for the target. In ten minutes, the low altitude airburst would vaporize everything at the impact site. On the security footage, the two offworlders still stood with Flynn.

“Mr. Shane,” one of the militia officers said shortly after he ordered the nuke into position.

“What?”

“We have developments in orbit. I’m putting the feed on holo one.”

The main display in front of Alexander shifted to show the schematic of the space around Salmagundi. It had changed since he had left the rest of the Grand Triad to their debate. When he’d left the meeting room, there had been a dozen unidentified spacecraft, one identified as the source of the lifeboats and of the offworlders standing in the security footage showing on holo five.

The red-highlighted spacecraft was no longer shown on the schematic. Now on the fringes of the image, Alexander saw thirty or forty blue icons pushing in from the edge. As he watched, three more appeared in range.

Closer in, in orbit above them, there were suddenly dozens of vessels.

“What the hell?”

“Our observatories are picking up dozens of spacecraft just now taking up positions in orbit.”

“How many?”

“At least sixty.”

Alexander settled back into his seat, staring at the screen. He had moved, but not quickly enough. He watched the icons maneuver in discreet jumps as observations were made and fed again into the model he was watching.

The militia officer spoke again, “We have sixty-three confirmed contacts. Sixty-five. Sixty-eight.”

“Stop counting,” Alexander whispered. Salmagundi had, maybe, a dozen craft capable of orbit. All dated from the original colonization. The Confederacy was about to descend upon them, and there was nothing they could do about it.

“Mr. Shane? We need confirmation to detonate the nuke.”

Alexander looked at the security monitor. Flynn and the offworlders were looking up.

“Mr. Shane, sir?”

Tetsami faced the newcomers and said, “Forgive me if I’m a little incredulous that my long-lost sister from Dakota just walked into our little no-man’s land. You got some convincing to do, chicky, starting with what in the name of Jesus Christ on a unicycle you’re doing a hundred light-years from what’s left of the ass-end of the Confederacy.”

She looked from the tall woman to the taller moreau. Her own genes, at least the genes for the last body that had been exclusively her own, had come from Dakota. However, unlike the three-meter-tall furry tiger-man, just by looking, there was usually no way to tell someone from Dakota from a human whose genetic history didn’t include a couple of genetic engineers trying to “improve” something a few centuries ago. A century or two of mixing bloodlines and the more-or-less “normal” human morphology dominated.

One thing was clear, the presence of tiger-boy proved that this couple was as definitively from off-planet as their nameless Protean.

But from Dakota? What the hell was going on here?

It didn’t get better.

The woman, Kugara, did most of the talking. She told Tetsami and Flynn about their ship, the Eclipse, and the ill-fated expedition it made to Xi Virginis. The story uncomfortably synced with the Protean’s warnings, and Tetsami tightened the grip on her shotgun. Even more than when the nonhuman pair walked into the deserted outpost, she stared at them looking for some sign of infection, some wrongness, some symptom that these two had been touched by the same darkness that had consumed the Xi Virginis system.

Then Kugara mentioned his name.

Tetsami jumped backward, leveling the shotgun at the space between Kugara’s gut and Nickolai’s groin. “What was that name?” she yelled at them, finger aching against the cold metal of the shotgun’s trigger.

What the hell? Gram?

Shut up!

The tall woman backed up, stopping only when she bumped into the tiger. “Mosasa, Tjaele Mosasa.” Nickolai put his arm around her in a gesture that was almost protective.

“What the hell does that bastard have to do with this?” Tetsami screamed at them. The barrel of the shotgun shook, and she concentrated on steadying her aim.

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.”