“Pardon me, Doctor?” Wahid said, whipping around to face the blonde xenobiologist. “You might not notice from this angle, but it’s our asses in the sand out there, facing a squad of powered armor.”
She gave Wahid a cold, dismissive look. It was a look Mallory knew well. He had seen it often enough back on Occisis, usually from colleagues in the Church or the university, right after they discovered he had once served in the Occisis Marines. He tried to remember if, in her meetings with Professor Mallory, she had discovered his military background. He suspected that, if it had come out, he would have remembered her reaction.
Her words to Wahid were as icy as Mosasa’s were detached. “I was questioning the fact that staging such a confrontation was necessary. I would think, since it was ‘your asses in the sand out there,’ that you’d wonder that as well.”
Mosasa said, “It was quite necessary.”
“Why?” Dörner asked sharply.
The cargo hold of the Eclipse was quiet, everyone waiting for Mosasa to speak. The only sounds the nearly subliminal hum of the drives, a soft electronic clicking from Bill’s massive life-support apparatus, and the quiet jingle of Mosasa’s earrings as he paced in front of his display. Behind him, on the holo, the abandoned commune of Samhain silently burned.
“All of you have your own reasons for joining this expedition. And, up to now I’ve been somewhat reserved about revealing its purpose, though I have told you about ‘anomalies’ originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis. I should explain to you all exactly what these ‘anomalies’ might represent.”
The holo changed again, and Mallory saw a star map of a familiar region of human space. He wasn’t particularly surprised to see stars highlighted much as they had been in the holo that Cardinal Anderson had shown him.
“The Race developed social, economic, and political models that map flows of information, political power, trade, people—all the factors that comprise what we define as a society or a culture. The best analogy for a layman would be to picture modeling a turbulent flow of a fluid in an N-dimensional space.”
Mallory heard Wahid whisper, “That’s a layman’s description?”
“When a system is closed, such as a planet without space travel or interstellar communication, a Race AI was designed to accurately model social movements, political and technological change, migration and demographics. Over time, I have scaled up that model until I have been able to accurately map the progress and development of all of human space within an acceptable margin of error.”
An audible “harrumph” came from the science team.
Mosasa smiled. “Did you have a question, Dr. Brody?”
“No questions,” Brody responded. “No questions at all.”
“But you think the advancement of the Race’s social sciences to have been overstated?”
“I have trouble believing in the miraculous,” Brody said.
Mosasa seemed to smile even wider. Mallory wondered why Dr. Brody had agreed to accompany this mission if he didn’t believe Mosasa’s claims.
“Leaving miracles aside,” Mosasa went on, “these models are very finely tuned. Enough so that I can detect when a system stops being closed. When a new source or sink appears, be it information, people, or trade goods, the drift in actual data versus the model will suggest strongly the nature of the new interaction.”
Unlike Dr. Brody, Tsoravitch the data analyst had leaned forward and was hanging on Mosasa’s every word. She nervously brushed a strand of red hair off her face and asked, “Is that’s what’s happening by Xi Virginis?”
“The data points to Xi Virginis as the source—”
“Are there human colonies out there?” Kugara blurted out the question Mallory didn’t dare voice.
“Yes.” Mosasa said. “Several. All founded during the collapse of the Confederacy. Because of their placement and history, the Caliphate has had an ongoing interest in preventing knowledge of them propagating to the rest of human space.”
What? “The Caliphate knew about these worlds?” Mallory said, suddenly less concerned about his cover.
“High levels of the Caliphate have known of them for quite some time, thus their interest in stopping this expedition. As to Dr. Dörner’s original question; the necessity of violence was required to draw out and neutralize the Caliphate’s somewhat limited resources on Bakunin. By doing so, we’ve ensured the safety of the expedition.”
“I don’t follow,” Wahid said. “What’s to stop the Caliphate from just pouncing on us now?”
“We’re no longer their problem. Their public attacks, combined with my public advertisements for mercenaries to travel toward Xi Virginis, has alerted every intelligence agency with an asset on Bakunin that the Caliphate is hiding something in that region of space. There’s no secret for them to protect anymore. My small expedition means nothing when they need to rally whole fleets to lay claim to this sector of space before a rival does.”
Lord have mercy on us all.
A sick dread slithered into Mallory’s belly. Mosasa had just admitted to engineering the conflagration that the Church had been trying to prevent. Samhain was nothing. Mosasa was engineering an interstellar war to provide cover for his expedition.
“Damn it,” Wahid snapped. “If everyone already knew there were colonies out there, what the fuck is the anomaly you’re talking about?”
“Out here,” Mosasa gestured to the holo, “there’s also something else. Something alien that defies the Race’s modeling capabilities, that radically alters the equations at every point of contact.” He faced his audience with a grin that would not be out of place on a portrait of the Devil. “Out there is something completely unknown.”
PART TWO
Burnt Offerings
The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not
God.
—Oliver WENDELL Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sectarianism
Your friends gain more from your failures than your enemies.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
In every case the guilt of war is confined to a few persons, and the many are friends.
—PLATO (ca. 427 Bce-ca. 347 Bce)
Date: 2525.12.12 (Standard) Earth-Sol
Yousef Al-Hamadi walked slowly as befitted his age. He made his way through the gardens outside the Epsilon Eridani consulate, arms folded behind him. His official title was Minister-at-Large in Charge of External Relations, which meant he was the nominal head of the Eridani Caliphate’s intelligence operations and in charge of the Caliphate’s covert activity outside its claimed borders.
In large part, it boiled down to cleaning up the messes of other segments of the convoluted rat’s nest of agencies and organizations that made up the Caliphate’s intelligence community.
Following him at a respectful distance was the tall dark woman he knew as Ms. Columbia.
“Did you have a long journey to Earth?” Al-Hamadi asked as he stopped in front of a large fountain spilling cascades of water across a plain of mosaic tile that formed intricate interlocking patterns with a stylized Arabic script that quoted verses from the Qur’an. Six hundred years ago, in the time of the last Caliphate, the fountain would have been an extravagance. However, to a species that had made Mars habitable, the arid waste of the Rub’al Khali was almost an afterthought.