Prophets (26 page)

A dozen pairs of eyes focused on him with emotions that ranged from support from the Vatican's nominal allies, Centauri and Sirius, to enigmatic disinterest coming from the inhuman eyes belonging to the canid from the Fifteen Worlds, to outright hostility coming from the camp of Indi and the Independent Worlds.

But all were here to hear him speak.

“It is the desire of His Holiness to share what we know about the Caliphate's capabilities and intentions, because their implications affect every government represented in this room.”

With that, Cardinal Anderson made the same arguments that he had been making to the pope for the last decade. By the grace of God, these people would not take as long to convince.

The more prepared the attack, the less expected the outcome.

—
The Cynic's Book of Wisdom

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

—Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891)

There wasn't even a sound to mark the
Eclipse
's jump, just an abrupt shift in the star field shown in the holo.

Another twenty light-years,
Nickolai thought.
Here we are.

For the drama, and the plotting, and the hushed admonitions of Mr. Antonio, the
Eclipse
's arrival at the point of Mr. Mosasa's anomaly was anticlimactic.

“We're still nominal on all systems,” Parvi said. “Drives are cold.”

“Mass sensors negative for two AU.”

Wahid didn't say anything. After a long pause, Mosasa said, “Navigation?”

“Hold on a minute.” Wahid shook his head, and for all the trouble Nickolai had in interpreting human expressions, even he could tell something was seriously wrong.

“What's the problem?” Parvi asked. “Are we off course?”

Nickolai knew that the
Eclipse
was fueled for multiple jumps at this distance, but even so, the thought of taching twenty light-years in the wrong direction tightened something in his gut.

Could what I did have affected the engines?
Nickolai began to realize that there was no particular motive for Mr. Antonio to keep him alive. Mr. Antonio wasn't like Nickolai; he was a man and had no honor to keep, even to himself.

“No, we're right where we're supposed to be,” Wahid said slowly. It almost sounded as if he didn't believe it himself. “All the landmarks check out . . .”

“What's wrong, then?” Parvi asked.

“Look at the damn holo!” Wahid said, thrusting a hand at the display as if he wanted to bat it out of his face.

“What?” Parvi looked at the holo of stars between them, and her eyes widened, and she shook her head. “No . . .”

“Kugara?” Mosasa snapped.

“I'm ahead of you. Mass scans out to the full range of the sensors. No sign of anything bigger than an asteroid for a hundred AU. We got background radiation consistent with interstellar media—”

One of the scientists, the female with yellow hair, spoke up. “What happened? Is there some sort of problem?”

“Bet your ass there's a problem.” Wahid spun around on his chair and faced the spectators, pointing a finger at the holo display. “We're missing a whole star.”

“What?”

“Xi Virginis is gone, Dr. Dörner.”

Behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.
The words echoed in Mallory's head, the transmission Cardinal Anderson had played for him, the voice quoting Revelation burning in his memory.

Mallory stood back and watched everyone react to the news that an A-spectrum main sequence dwarf star had ceased to exist. More than one member of the science team said, “A star can't just disappear.”

Apparently that was wrong.

Bill's synthetic Windsor monotone asked for sensor data, and told them to look for stellar remnants. Even without any affect, Mallory could sense a slight desperation just in the nature of the request. Kugara had already done a mass scan of the region and found nothing significant for one hundred AU; no dark stellar remnants, no remains of a planetary system. Just dust and some widely-spaced asteroids.

Perhaps most disturbing was Mosasa's reaction. He seemed as shocked as everyone else, running duplicate scans at his own station, shouting orders at his trio of bridge officers.

You were looking for some sort of anomaly,
Mallory thought.
Here it is.

Wahid made several attempts to disprove their location. But all the other stars were right where they should be. The background showed that they couldn't be more than a third of a light-year off in any direction; right on top of Xi Virginis in interstellar terms.

“What the hell happened?” Wahid muttered. “Did it blow up? Did it fall into a black hole?”

“No remnants of any such event are observable,”
Bill's synthetic voice answered Wahid.

“There was a colony here?” Dr. Dörner had joined the bridge crew around the holo, where data now scrolled by the star field.

Mosasa ignored her and kept shaking his head. “This can't—”

Dörner grabbed Mosasa's shoulder and pulled him around to face her. “You said there was a colony here?”

The emotion drained from Mosasa's face, and he suddenly looked as flat as Bill's voice. He reached up and removed Dörner's hand from his shoulder. The dragon tattoo glinted in reflected light from the holo next to them. “Yes,” Mosasa said, “there was a colony here. Kugara and Tsoravitch isolated one hundred forty-seven distinct EM signals from it during our approach. The colony, or its capital city, was named Xanadu.”

Dörner stepped back, as if the enormity of the situation was just beginning to sink in. “How many people—”

“My population estimate was five hundred thousand to one point five million.”

Dörner blinked, staring at Mosasa.

Wahid and Bill were still carrying on a conversation. “We had a damn star here twenty years ago, right?”

Mosasa stepped back. “This is completely outside every scenario—”

“One and a half million people?” Dörner shook her head. “One and a half million people?”

Mallory stepped forward; and slowed as he realized that Fitzpatrick, his alter ego, would not have the immediate impulse to comfort someone. When Dörner turned toward him, he had an uneasy feeling reminding him that she was a potential disaster for his cover story if she remembered seeing him before as Father Mallory.

His hesitation allowed Brody to be the one to step forward. The anthropologist took Dörner away from the bridge crew, quietly talking. “We don't know what happened, Sharon. We don't know there was anyone here when whatever happened, happened.”

He walked her back to the other two members of the scientific team, who were watching everything in stunned fascination. Mallory looked over at Nickolai to see how the tiger was reacting. He couldn't tell from the feline expression if Nickolai was frightened, amused, or smelled something odd.

“Kugara,” Mosasa said, his voice still oddly flat. “Power up the tach-comm unit.”

Did Nickolai's eyes just widen?
Mallory could swear something just changed.

“Yes? Transmit where?”

“Earth. We're going to hit every diplomatic consulate in turn, broad, unencrypted.”

Kugara hesitated, “Okay? Even the Caliph—”

Mosasa turned around and snapped, “Yes!
Everyone!
If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions, it's this. This changes
everything
. I can't account for this kind—” He abruptly stopped and stood up straighter. He allowed the emotion to leak out of his voice again. “You need to burst transmit all our telemetry and recon data. Now.”

“I'm packaging the data now.”

Nickolai closed his eyes and looked almost as if he was bracing for something.

“Transmitting,” Kugara said.

Something like a large rifle shot shook the bridge.

“What was that?” Dr. Dörner asked.

“—the hell?” Wahid said, and he began tapping madly at the display. “You see that, Parvi?”

“I have depressurization in the main maintenance tunnel. Damn. Major power drains on the main tach-drive.”

“I lost all data readings on the tach-comm,” Kugara said.

“Shit,” Wahid said, “that's because we don't have one anymore.”

The main holo display switched to one of the external cameras, pointing down at the stern of the
Eclipse
. A long contrail of ice crystals and debris emerged from a small hole in the skin of the ship, as if the ship was being followed by a small comet.

Mallory looked around and realized that Dr. Dörner was staring at him.
Did I say something? Did I give myself away?

“What happened to the tach-comm unit?” Mosasa snapped.

“The diagnostic logs show an intense power spike at the time of transmission,” Kugara replied quietly.

“It spiked across the whole system,” Parvi said. “The drives are intact, but the tach-comm is interlinked with the damping system. It drained two thirds of the power reserves before vaporizing. We only have one damping conduit left at about fifty percent capacity.”

“No!” Mosasa snapped, slamming his hands down on the console in front of him. “We cannot have the tach-comm down. That communications link is
essential
.”

“Sir? Did you hear what I said?” Parvi's voice was on the verge of cracking. “We're down two thirds of our power reserves. That's our return trip
and
our margin.”

“We have to repair the tach-comm. Communication is our number one priority!”

Everyone, bridge crew and scientists, stared at Mosasa as their nominal leader stared into the holo before him, watching the ice cloud of venting gases fade as the ship sealed off the damaged section. “We
need
the communication link back up.”

If anything, the look of shock on Mosasa's face was worse now than when he heard an entire star was missing.

“I'm sorry,” Wahid said. “From all the engineering data, there's nothing left to repair. The surge completely vaporized the main transmission coils, as well as the primary power damping coils. We only got half of one secondary coil to keep the drives from overheating. We're damn lucky we didn't suffer a main drive failure. We don't even have the power to spare for a transmission, even if I could pull a new coherent emitter out of my ass.”

Mosasa shook his head, hands clutching the console in front of him. At the moment he looked way too human.

Only one third power,
Mallory thought.
That's less than two fully-powered jumps. That can't even get us halfway back.

He could see that understanding sinking into the faces of the rest of the crew, except for Nickolai's, who appeared as enigmatic as ever. Mosasa stared at the console in front of him, whispering, “Was this planned?”

“Sir?” Parvi asked.

Mosasa pushed himself upright. “We need to conserve power and get to a colony where we might be able to repower the ship and repair the damage. Everyone on maintenance duty, I want the drives checked out. Make sure they suffered no other damage.”

“What colony?” Wahid asked.

“The closest one is HD 101534. It is eight light-years away and leaves us with an acceptable margin in our remaining power reserves.”

If it is still there,
Mallory thought.

Most of the crew had things to do, checking out the integrity of the tach-drive, doing what they could to fix the damping system, repairing the breach made by the failing tach-comm, plotting a course to the next nearest “lost” colony. Even the scientists finally had some work, trying to decipher exactly what happened to Xi Virginis.

That left Mallory alone in the common room, wondering exactly what the meaning of all of this was. Even if the tach-drives themselves were undamaged, they were effectively stranded, as isolated from the rest of humanity as these far-flung colonies themselves.

And, deep in his soul, he felt an approaching doom. It wasn't a fear of death. The doom he felt coming was far from that personal.

He was Catholic, and a Jesuit, so he had always had a pragmatic view of his own faith in the face of the observable universe. He was comfortable with a God that spoke to him in allegory and metaphor, the beauty of the natural world was enough to shore his faith in God, and the wickedness of his fellow man was enough for him to believe in Satan. He believed in the spiritual world, the presence of Christ at the Mass, and in the holiness of the saints. He believed in good and evil.

And, deep in his soul, he felt that the
Eclipse
had crossed into something whose evil was nearly beyond human comprehension. He could not objectify the feeling, give himself a rational basis for it. A missing star was strange, but across creation there were certainly things stranger. It would be the height of arrogance to presume that man had plumbed the depths of what was possible.

But, to Mallory, the absence of Xi Virginis was worse than unexplained, it was malignant. It represented something abhorrent in the universe: the snake in Eden, Satan tempting Christ in the desert, the Dragon from Revelation.