Then there was Julia Kugara who, if she wasn’t just trying to bait Wahid, was a descendant of the same genetic engineers who had created Nickolai’s kind. Even in the twenty-first century—when men thought little, if anything, of molding animals into short-lived faux-humans to kill and die in mankind’s stead—even then, men had an inkling of evil when they rebuilt human beings. Even before the secular governments placed the techniques that produced Nickolai’s kin on the list of heretical technologies, it was supposedly illegal to genetically modify human beings. Which didn’t mean it didn’t happen, and happen often enough that descendants of those shadowy experiments still existed.
Mallory knew little of Dakota, the one planet those genetically-engineered humans had made their own after their exile. It was part of the Fifteen Worlds, one of a pair of habitable planets orbiting Tau Ceti—the less inviting one. From what Mallory did know, Dakota was even more xenophobic and insular than the rest of the Fifteen Worlds.
Considering how close it was, Mallory wondered how large a population of Dakota expatriates lived on Bakunin. He also wondered if it was only her father that carried a genetic engineer’s legacy and how much of Kugara’s genome was artificial.
Finally, there was Jusuf Wahid who came from Davado Poli, a small world that was a remnant of Epsilon Indi’s aggressive expansion two hundred years ago; the wrong location and history to be a Caliphate agent. Still, Mallory couldn’t help being suspicious of him; even though logic dictated that if the Caliphate was trying to be covert here, it would do its best to use an agent who wasn’t an obvious Muslim.
But was there a reason for the Caliphate to be covert? As far as Mallory knew, they had no reason to suspect that the Church knew about the transmissions from Xi Virginis, so they would have no reason to hide their own interest.
Last, there was Mosasa himself. The man was tattooed and jeweled like a pirate from another century. And, according to Nickolai, he was as nonhuman as the tiger. Mallory didn’t know exactly what that meant. The cursory research he had been able to do on his potential employer had produced the tantalizing fact that Mosasa Salvage had existed on Bakunin almost since the founding of the anarchic colony. The salvage yard actually predated the city of Proudhon. And the images of the salvage yard’s owner from nearly three hundred years ago showed a man very similar in appearance to the Tjaele Mosasa who stood before him now.
If Mallory had deigned to risk a more aggressive investigation, tracking down associates and so on, rather than keeping a low profile in his hotel room, he suspected he might have uncovered a few interesting explanations for Mosasa’s apparent longevity.
Wahid muttered something about wanting to know who he was working with.
“Well, you know now. If you want to leave, you can be replaced.”
Wahid gave Mosasa a wide smile. “Don’t mind me. It’s all good.”
Mallory shook his head. Wahid was the kind of wiseass that annoyed him, especially in a military setting.
“Thank you.” Mosasa turned to face all of them. “If you could all take your seats, there are contracts to sign, and then a short briefing.”
After Mallory put his alias and genetic signature to a single sheet of cyberplas containing the most pithy legal document he had ever read, Mosasa stood between his seated mercenaries and the shadowed tach-ship and described the mission.
“This is primarily an intelligence gathering mission,” Mosasa told them. “There have been a number of political, economic, and scientific anomalies appearing throughout known human space for at least the past five years standard. I have traced the source to an area of space in the vicinity of Xi Virginis—”
“What do you mean ‘anomalies’?” Wahid asked.
“Has everyone read the nondisclosure clause?”
That had been one of the pithier parts of the agreement. It simply warned that if the signatory leaked any details of the job, operational or otherwise, Mosasa reserved the right to shoot whomever leaked.
When everyone confirmed they understood that particular detail, Mosasa continued.
“To explain these anomalies, I need to explain some history. I assume you are all a little familiar with the Race and the Genocide War?”
The reference to the Genocide War was a complete non sequitur to Mallory. Of course he was familiar with it. Occisis was founded during that war, a war started covertly by the amoeboid Race decades before humanity reached for the stars. When the Race was discovered manipulating human affairs on Earth, the result was an accelerated spread to the stars and the rise of the twenty-first century United Nations as one of a series of despotic Terran governments.
The founders of Occisis were the survivors, and nominal victors, in mankind’s first interstellar war, a war that ended with the near extermination of the first alien species humans had contact with. Since the war, no member of the Race had been allowed off its homeworld. As far as Mallory knew, the old United Nations battle stations still blasted anything that attempted to fly in or out of the Procyon system.
“That’s all ancient history,” Wahid said.
“A little over four hundred years,” Mosasa said, “not quite ancient.”
“But there’s a point to you going over this?” Wahid asked.
“The point is that there are several details about the Race that aren’t mentioned in popular history.”
“Like?”
Mosasa grinned. “Perhaps you know why a spacefaring race trying to contain human expansion didn’t just drop a large asteroid on Earth?”
Wahid didn’t, but Father Mallory, the xenoarchaeology professor, suddenly knew exactly what Mosasa meant. But since that wasn’t true of Fitzpatrick, Mallory remained quiet as he mentally fit all the pieces together.
Mallory knew the reason the Race didn’t bombard Earth was because the Race had evolved several cultural quirks against direct confrontation. Direct aggression was a strict taboo, so dropping a big rock on another planet was unthinkable, no matter how threatened they felt.
That didn’t mean the Race was peaceful. Far from it. The Race was ruthlessly adept at indirect violence, cultural judo where they encouraged enemies to destroy themselves, leaving their own pseudopods free of blood. By the time the Race had a unified government and reached the stars, they had developed sociology, politics, and anthropology into actual sciences, predictive sciences. With enough information, they could predict the economic, demographic, and political landscape of a city, nation, or a whole planet decades into the future.
More important, from a warfare standpoint, they knew how to change outcomes. They could see that if this political party received a large funding stream at the same time this corporation in another country was bought out and factories shut down, the end result would be a civil war in country number three.
The Race had covertly used that expertise to severely undermine the situation on Earth for nearly seventy-five years before they were discovered.
“Hold on.” Wahid interrupted Mosasa’s explanation. “Are you saying that some old Race bogeyman is telling you about ‘political, economic, and scientific anomalies’?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Mosasa answered.
“You have an AI,” Kugara said.