“Even though you know what I am?”
“Because I know what you are.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you know what I am?”
She looked him up and down. “You’re a robotic construct camouflaging an AI device, one that was designed by the Race during the Genocide War.”
Very deliberately, Mosasa said, “That is, of course, only part of the answer.”
Of course, Tsoravitch responded by asking, “Then what’s the rest of the answer?”
He explained to Tsoravitch that, three hundred years ago, Tjaele Mosasa had been a human being.
He had lived during the waning years of the Terran Council, before the Centauri Trading Company discovered Bill’s homeworld of Paralia, developed the first tach-drive, and upset the already crumbling balance of the human universe.
At that time, before there was such a thing as faster-than-light travel, the use of static wormholes meant there existed a traffic bottleneck, highways between the heavily guarded wormholes defined by gravity and orbital mechanics.
The Mosasa clan had been a large extended family that lived off the traffic moving on those highways in the Sirius system. It was a rich place for pirates, supporting a hundred clans like the Mosasas. Sirius sat in the heart of human space and was a major transit point in humanity’s wormhole network, having six outgoing wormholes and eight incoming. Even though the dull rocks orbiting the Sirius system were never meant to support life, the colony world Cynos was one of the richest planets aside from Earth itself.
Tjaele Mosasa was the youngest unmarried adult of the pirate clan, a third-generation inhabitant of the lawless void between the wormhole and Cynos. While his brothers and sisters would attack and board a prize, he made sure their patchwork vessel the Nomad didn’t fall apart. He spent the first six years of his adult life in a vacsuit patching holes, rerouting power around fried connections, and repairing the Frankenstein’s monster of a ship’s computer.
When the Nomad found a pair of derelicts off the main route to Cynos, that was where he was, in a narrow unpressurized maintenance tunnel, in a vacsuit making sure that the power system didn’t overheat. He was annoyed that he wasn’t able to watch the approach with the rest of his crew, his family. However, the Nomad was a cranky old ship, older than Cynos itself, and someone had to make sure they didn’t blow the thing up.
He was looking forward to the prize, though. Most of their livelihood came from raiding cargo tugs that rarely gave them anything with which to upgrade the Nomad. Food, fuel, and trade goods were well and good, but a new ship’s computer was high on his own priority list.
A derelict vessel would be a godsend for maintaining this boat. He allowed himself to daydream about finding a vessel in good enough condition that they could retire the Nomad.
He smiled at his own unjustified optimism, and tapped the finger of his gauntlet on an ancient meter. When he jostled the mechanism, the numbers slid back from the impossible down to the merely improbable.
Just an intact computer core—
His thoughts broke off as the tunnel whipped around, slamming his faceplate into the meter he had been reading. He floated away from the impact as fragments of wires and electronics drifted in front of him. In his brief contacts with the walls, his suit filled with the hideous noise of something tearing the Nomad apart.
The lights in the tunnel went out.
For several seconds after the impact, he couldn’t move. His vision was confined to a narrow cone of the work lights in his helmet. The emergency lights didn’t come on.
He knew something bad had happened. He could see that in the debris drifting through the light-cone in front of his face. He could see it in a cloud of vapor that drifted in front of his faceplate, a mist of tiny white crystals.
Something was venting into the corridor, under pressure. None of the possibilities were good; fuel, hydraulic fluid, or—worst of all—atmosphere from the pressurized part of the ship.
He grabbed a wall and turned himself to point up the corridor, back toward the main body of the Nomad. Now that the shock of the impact faded, he was preoccupied with one thought: were the crew compartments intact? That thought overrode even the basic question of what the hell happened.
He pulled himself through the debris-filled corridor, the work light on his helmet cutting silver cones out of the clouds of ice crystals that now filled the corridor. The ice stuck to the outside of his faceplate, gradually blurring his view until he had to wipe it off with one of his gauntlets, leaving long streaks across his field of vision.
If the emergency doors came down, they’ll be fine. If they were all still on the bridge, there would at least fifteen minutes of air even if the CO2 recyclers were off-line, time enough to get the emergency vacsuits to them. That’d keep everyone alive as long as he could keep the suits powered. Enough time to patch the hull and get life support together.
That’s what Mosasa told himself. That’s what gave him the strength to keep pulling down the corridor, through the near-opaque fog of venting atmosphere. He held on to the hope even when he reached the end of the corridor, where the air lock should have been.
He pulled himself though the wreckage of the air lock, still believing that there was a chance that his family survived.
Then he was through the confined space of the air lock and free of most of the crystalline fog, and realized there was no hope at all.
Mosasa floated above the floor of the Nomad’s cargo hold. The bridge and the pressurized crew area should have been above him.
They weren’t.
The ceiling of the cargo hold was a mass of twisted metal, torn cable, and hoses. Nothing remained of form or function in the midst of the wreckage. Through the rat’s nest of twisted girders, he could see the stars. No sealed compartments where he might find his brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, or cousins. The inhabited portion of the Nomad no longer existed.
Mosasa, barely breathing, lowered his gaze to the rest of the cargo hold to see something that had survived the devastation; something that was not part of the Nomad.
The lights from his helmet fell across something smooth and metallic embedded in the twisted metal wreckage. At first it made no sense. He could only see it in brief glimpses as his light shone on it through the twisted steel that filled half the cargo hold.
The surface was silvered and might have once had a mirror sheen, but it had been scarred and pitted and heavily gouged by the wreckage surrounding it, allowing glimpses of duller metal to show through the skin. Unlike the Nomad around it, the mirrored spacecraft—that was the only thing Mosasa could assume it was—showed little visible structural damage beyond the superficial tears in its skin.
He carefully pulled himself through a maze of wreckage toward the thing, telling himself he was pulling himself toward the bridge and any potential survivors even as he knew he was lying to himself.
The mirrored craft was thin and broad, like an arrowhead. And it had pierced the Nomad in the same manner. Mosasa saw no markings on the skin of the craft, just oblong apertures that could have been maneuvering jets, sensors, or weapon ports. The damn thing was also too small for an interplanetary vehicle. Even a solo craft that barely gave the pilot room to piss would carry more mass and volume just for life support. The alien design, without markings, almost looked like an unmanned torpedo.