Prophets (25 page)

Before the stars were in easy reach, man had tried to terraform the worlds in his home system using molecule-sized self-replicating intelligent machines. However, something had gone wrong on a distant moon, Titan. The machines took over, and the war that followed sterilized all of man's outposts in the outer part of humanity's home system. A billion people died in that war, five million in the immediate aftermath, others in subsequent efforts to sterilize the sites of banned nanotech experiments, including one long-dead planet where the Confederacy killed nearly fifty million people by dropping a hundred-kilometer asteroid through the planet's crust.

But those who dealt with such things had never been completely wiped out. A small sect of human beings—at least a sect of people who had once been human—equated spiritual transcendence with the physical and mental transformations granted by the machines. The cult of Proteus found refuge, if not a home, on Bakunin. And the entity that had spoken for the Proteans on Bakunin had called herself Eigne.

Before the Confederacy, in its death throes, used an orbital linear accelerator to vaporize the Protean outpost on Bakunin, that outpost had manufactured and launched thousands of seeds. Seeds that contained millions of minds archived from eras back as far as the catastrophe on Titan, as well as the entire collected sum of human knowledge up to that point in human history.

In large part, the reason for the existence of the Proteans was to propagate their existence as far as possible in space and time.

One of those seeds had just crashed here, on Salmagundi.

For several hours, Flynn radioed information back to Base. Despite the “seed's” enigmatic nature, he was able to produce some information. The thing was a matte-black egg exactly 3.127 meters along its long axis. The mass readings, if they were accurate, showed it much denser than normal matter, about a kilogram per square centimeter, which meant that the thing, small as it was, massed more than most of the aircraft in Ashley combined. The thing had found its place on the planet's surface, and Flynn doubted it was going to move.

However, he had a lot more information than the sensor data on the seed itself. For once, he had relevant ancestral information, and it was exhilarating. Flynn, the habitual singleton, actually had useful knowledge from his sole extra mind. For most of his life, he had felt as if he wasn't quite in on the joke, that the people around him with two or three glyphs on their brow had access to a subtext he wasn't quite aware of.

Finally he had something over everybody. It felt good. So good, in fact, that he completely missed the warning signs; the shift to encrypted protocols, the change in radio operators to people he wasn't familiar with, the occasional and emphatic order for him not to leave the site of the impact, the repeated questions about who else might know this information, who he had discussed the Proteans with.

He couldn't really blame Tetsami either. Normally, she was a little more paranoid than he was, but if he was caught up in the novelty of having something new to report on and having the expertise to analyze it, Tetsami was overtaken by her awe at seeing a remnant of Proteus showing up on Salmagundi. Enough so that, like Flynn, she hadn't given herself the opportunity to think through exactly how the powers-that-be back at Ashley might react to their visitor or its history.

Ten hours after the impact, after the sun had set, the first security contragrav arrived. Flynn ran up to the craft as soon as it landed, waving his arms, still oblivious as the doors opened and two men stepped out. The name tags on their jumpsuits read Frank and Tony.

“Hey, it's about five hundred meters that way—” Flynn pointed.

Frank stepped up to Flynn while Tony walked past him toward the flier. Flynn turned, finally realizing that something was wrong. “What are you doing—”

Frank grabbed him and, before Flynn could object, had him in handcuffs and a restraint collar.

“What the fuck?”

Frank hustled him into the back of the security contragrav and pushed him down into a seat. As the door closed, Flynn saw Tony pulling the comm unit and all the data recordings from his flier.

“No, Gram, it isn't.”

Right and wrong are defined by what you do, not what you serve.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

—KARL von CLAUSEWITZ (1780-1831)

It had all been leading to this. Almost six months ago, Admiral Muhammad Hussein al Khamsiti had taken command of a battle group that barely existed. Now, after half a year of accelerated construction and the crash training of nearly ten thousand men, the
Prophet's Voice
floated in the interstellar void ten light-years from Beta Comae Berenices and the planet Falcion, preparing for its maiden voyage.

Attached to the kilometer-long vessel, over a hundred individual spacecraft docked, ranging from troop transports to fighters to heavy drop-ships—an entire fleet unto itself.

On the bridge, Admiral Hussein stood and waited for their last tach-jump. There was no technical reason for any of the command staff to be here during the jump, much less Admiral Hussein himself. However, it had been impressed upon the entire command staff of the Caliphate that this mission was as much about diplomacy as it was about military force. To that end, forms of ceremony were meticulously adhered to.

Admiral Hussein stood along with a senior officer from each of the larger vessels in the
Voice
's battle group. Each officer wore the emerald dress uniform of the Caliphate Navy, boots polished to a mirror shine. Golden braids of command outnumbered the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers doing the work maneuvering the
Voice
and syncing the tach-jump.

The admiral thought that his command staff would cut quite the impressive figure when they made their first broadcast down to the surface of the “lost” colony orbiting the star HD 101534, the
Voice
's destination.

Of course, the hundred warships accompanying the
Voice
would probably be a fair bit more impressive.

He expected that the Caliphate's politicians were right, and they would have a victory without firing a shot. All the admiral would require of the colony would be a formal treaty of alliance, no large matter for a planet so far removed from the rest of human space.

Just enough to keep the Caliphate's rivals at bay.

The admiral steepled his fingers as he waited for the klaxons to announce their last tach-jump. He wondered idly if any of the command staff at attention in front of and below the command dais were as happy as he about the prospect of a largely peaceful mission. The admiral was a veteran of conflicts on Rubai and Waldgrave, and he was not a timid commander, but the
Prophet's Voice
was a brand new flagship. Many of its hallways still smelled faintly of new paint.

Not only a new ship, but a new ship
design
. The Caliphate had spent an unprecedented amount of time and treasure in the creation of the Ibrahim-class of carriers, each with its own fleet of warships, fifty tach-capable vessels and another fifty short-range fighters, all attached to the great ship like parasitic young.

In addition, the Ibrahim-class of carrier had the largest and most sophisticated tach-drive in existence. Until the Caliphate's engineers built the antimatter-fueled monstrosities filling the guts of these new carriers, the limits of existing tach-drives peaked out at twenty light-years and 256
c
—and that only effectively reachable by ships a third of the
Voice
's mass, without the attached warships.

The
Voice
's tach-drives showed a fourfold increase in speed, mass, and distance. It could clear eighty light-years in a jump that took only slightly over twenty-eight days standard. Even if the drives sucked the energy equivalent of a small sun, it placed every world in human space in tactical reach of the Caliphate. Including the far-flung colonies seventy light-years past Helminth.

The potential of the new warships was limitless.

However, the admiral was very much aware that the potential was untested. It was distressing how quickly the
Voice
and her sisters were promoted from an abbreviated shake-down into active duty. When the orders came for this mission nearly six months ago, the
Voice
was still being constructed. It had been barely three weeks since the last of the construction crew had left the ship.

The admiral was keenly aware of the rush to space-worthiness. They had not even been able to test the power-hungry tach-drives at their full capacity.

Not until this moment.

The
Voice
was the last of the four to dive out toward the worlds clustered around Xi Virginis. Their target was a small world eight light-years away from that star, and right at the theoretical outer limit of the
Voice
's massive drives from their current position.

The crew functioned admirably under the gaze of so many command officers. He was proud of having his people perform so well after the bare-bones training they were forced through to fully man the
Voice
in such a short time frame. Checklists were completed, final broadcasts made through the ship, the last engineering details were triple-checked and the navigation team ran the final models on the massive computer cores that pondered the longest tach-jump in human history.

The complicated electronic ballet concluded with a chorus of “Ready” cascading across the bridge, starting at navigation, through communications, environmental and weapon systems, and finally ending with Captain Gamal Rasheed, the commander of the
Voice
and therefore the highest ranking member of the battle group under Admiral Hussein. The captain turned to him and said, “All stations report we are prepared to jump.”

The admiral nodded. “Give the order, Captain.”

“Engage the tach-drive.”

Sydney was probably about as far as one could get from Rome and still remain on the same planet—not only geographically, but in spirit. Where the Vatican, and most of Europe, seemed to embody the roots of mankind, its ties to Earth, the Australian city seemed the reverse, aggressively tying itself to the star-flung traces of humanity. It still wore its history as the capital of the old Confederacy.

Once the nominal seat of the last attempt at a universal human government, and more than 250 years old, the Confederacy Tower stabbed a kilometer-long finger into the Australian sky. It dominated this city the way it had once dominated all of known space.

To Cardinal Anderson, the building seemed to reach beyond the bounds of Earth, a modern Tower of Babel that was still, in a sense, caught in a slow motion collapse that began 175 years ago. The power still held by the building was represented by the extensive diplomatic compounds that clustered near it. The embassy and consulates here had remained in continual operation even through the collapse of the old Confederacy. No place else would anyone find representatives from more human colonized planets. Across all of human space, there were probably only a dozen planets that didn't have a diplomat here. And that was including the cluster of colonies around the star Xi Virginis.

Cardinal Anderson stood on a balcony of one of those diplomatic compounds. The Vatican had had a token embassy here from the days of the Confederacy; it was a small structure on the fringes of the diplomatic hive surrounding the spire reflecting its unique status. Even before man had left the bounds of Earth, the Vatican had the strange distinction of having all the functions of a state without most of the secular trappings of that authority. It had been near a millennium since the Bishop of Rome had commanded a nonspiritual army.

However, in some ways, the Church was more powerful now than it had been then. He certainly doubted a request from any other entity would have sufficed to gather together the people meeting here tonight.

He stood and watched as the sun set behind the massive spire, backlighting it so that its silhouette parted the sky as if the clouds were a pair of theater curtains just beginning to open, revealing something dark behind them.

“Your Grace?” came a voice transmitted into the office behind him.

“Yes?” he responded without turning around.

“Mr. Xaing from the Indi Protectorate has just arrived.”

“Thank you. Let the representatives know I'm on my way down.”

He turned away from the shadowed spire caught between a sense of satisfaction at bringing this meeting to fruition and a sense of foreboding over what he had to impart.

Twelve people waited for him downstairs. He had called on representatives not just from the large states of the Indi Protectorate, the Centauri Alliance, and the Sirius Economic Community, but he also invited diplomats from the Union of Independent Worlds, and had even appealed to the nonhumans of the Fifteen Worlds.

When he walked into the conference room in the basement of the Vatican consulate, he faced representatives from every transplanetary government outside of the Caliphate itself. As he walked up to the head of the table, a holo of the Caliphate's newest Ibrahim-class carrier was projected above the long axis of the table. It was sobering to think this ship was as massive as the Confederacy spire itself.

“Thank you all for coming. I know the logistics of this meeting were complex, but the willingness of your governments to meet here should illustrate the gravity of this situation.”