Prophets (42 page)

One of the militia officers with him solved the problem.

“Sir, we have something on holo five.”

Alexander looked up, and saw a security feed from the camp around the Protean artifact. The camp was abandoned in anticipation of the coming strike, but he saw three figures standing in the middle of a muddy track. One was Flynn Jorgenson, the unfortunate who had discovered the Protean artifact's impact site. The other two were unquestionably the two missing invaders from the lifeboat. One wasn't even human. It had striped fur, a tail, and looked as if it stood three meters tall.

They were too close to the Protean site for the militia to retrieve them, even if he wanted to risk contact with something so obviously nonhuman. He would have to be satisfied with the strike.

He ordered the last militia aircraft out of the red zone and resumed the countdown for the nuclear strike.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.