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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Revelation
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)
Date: 2526.05.22 (Standard) Xi Virginis
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?”
“The light sphere from the unknown event had not reached our last position when our course was laid in. That places the unknown event no more than 19.875 standard years ago.”
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.