“And Xi Virginis turns out to be missing,” Brody said.
“Yes.”
“The biblical quote seems much too appropriate for the situation.”
“More so because the voice is familiar.”
“It was?”
“The same voice was transmitted a few hours ago.” Mallory quoted the part he had overheard from the radio in the troop transport that had brought them here: “I am Adam. I am the Alpha...”
“With due respect to the Vatican’s paranoia, that does not seem like the Caliphate to me.”
“No,” Mallory said. “It doesn’t.”
“Our host said he detected how many ships in orbit?”
“A hundred and fifty.”
Brody brought his fingers up to massage the bridge of his nose. “A religious conflict is the nastiest kind of war humans know how to wage.”
“The tensions between the Church and the Caliphate are primarily political, issues of human rights and self-deter—”
Brody held up his other hand, stopping him. Quietly, he said, “I’m not talking about the Caliphate. Or the Vatican. What was it that Mosasa said before the comm unit blew?”
Mallory remembered, if only because it was the closest he had seen the faux human AI display something akin to panic. ‘“If anything trumps your narcissistic human political divisions,’“ Mallory said. ‘“It’s this.’“
“Why do you think he said that?”
“A star system disappeared. I suspect it was a little disconcerting.”
“I think he saw this ‘Adam’ in the absence of Xi Virginis,” Brody said. “And I think this ‘Adam’ is the latest in a long history of missionary warriors. Just the little bit of rhetoric he’s given us: ‘I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods.’ If that isn’t a messianic message, I don’t know what is.”
Mallory nodded. Brody voiced his own fears; fears that he had felt ever since he had heard Adam’s transmission to Salmagundi.
“Judging by the absence of Xi Virginis and a missing colony of possibly one and a half million people, I am not optimistic about the fate of those people who don’t choose to follow him. And then there’s that apocalyptic quote from Revelation.”
Mallory nodded.
“I’ve had an unfortunate thought,” Brody said after a pause.
“More so than the ones you’ve just mentioned?”
“You’re present here because the Vatican intercepted a message, correct?”
“Yes.”
“A tach-comm message?”
“Of course. A normal EM intercept would have been nearly a hundred years old.”
Brody nodded. “I don’t know if you ever heard this— you were locked in your cabin at the time—but Bill did an astronomic survey when we tached in to orbit here. Xi Virginis isn’t shining in the sky here, which means it’s been gone for at least eight years.”
It took a moment for the import to sink in. “By the time we got that transmission—”
“Everything was long gone. The video was either recorded nearly a decade ago, or it was completely fabricated.”
“It was meant to be intercepted.” Mallory struggled with the idea. “But what was the point? Why plant a message to draw attention to Xi Virginis? Why not announce himself the way he did here?”
“Maybe the message wasn’t meant for you.”
“Who then?”
“Mosasa.”
“Mosasa? Why do you think—”
A new voice spoke, “Bait.”
Mallory turned to look at the door, where the bald man with the tattooed scalp stood in the doorway facing them. He looked stooped now, as if he had aged a decade in the few hours since Mallory had seen him last. Dr. Dörner stood up and started to say, “What did—”
“What did I do to Dr. Pak? The same thing I did with all of you. He will recover.”
Dr. Dörner took a step toward the man, but two armed men in black militia uniforms stepped out to flank him. Dr. Dörner stopped in her tracks and glared at their host. Mallory saw an uncomfortable echo of her expression in the old man’s face.
He heard Brody whisper, “No ...”
The old man turned to face Brody with an unpleasant turn of the lip that only very charitably could be called a smile. “Dr. Brody has an excellent grasp of our culture considering how briefly he’s been exposed to it. Down to how we honor those who contribute to our identity.” He tapped a finger to his brow, where the glyphs were tattooed.
Dörner turned toward them. “What is he talking about, Sam?”
“I told you, their Hall of Minds is a ritual space. They use it to record and pay homage to their ancestors.” He looked at the old man and said. “I’m right about the tattoos?”
Their host nodded.
“What about the tattoos?” Dörner asked.
“There’s only two ways a recording of a human mind can be useful. The first is to implant it in an AI. And since AIs are illegal, most of what I’ve read on the subject is probably apocryphal. The other—”
“Oh, no,” Dörner whispered.
“—is to download it into another living brain.”
Mallory looked at the old man’s skull and the tattoos there. Was that it? Did each of those marks represent another human being whose mind had been copied, one that had been downloaded into this man’s skull?
Did that mean he had just done the same with the four of them?
To Mallory’s horror, the old man looked directly at him and nodded slightly, as if he knew what Mallory was thinking.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
Martyrdom
“There is no such thing as someone with nothing to lose.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“No one is more dangerous than a man convinced he is about to die.”
— August Benito Galiani
(2019-*2105)
Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard)
300,000 km from Salmagundi - HD 101534
Vijayanagara Parvi, captain of the Eclipse, had been strapped down in an interrogation room on board the Caliphate carrier the Prophet’s Voice for several hours now. Nothing marked the passage of time, the light never wavered, and except for a few perfunctory questions when they’d dragged her in from the dying Eclipse, she had been without human contact since.
She knew nothing about what was happening beyond the featureless walls of this room. She didn’t know the fates of the remaining bridge crew of the Eclipse, or Bill for that matter. Mosasa, Tsoravitch, Wahid, they had all been separated as soon as the Caliphate’s soldiers took them from the wreckage of the Eclipse. She had never even seen what happened to Bill. The Paralian had been trapped in the cargo hold in his massive six-meter environment suit. For all she knew, their “rescuers” never even bothered to remove Bill from the remains of their ship.
She took some minimal comfort from the thought that the rest of Mosasa’s expedition had made it down to the planet’s surface. But only the gods knew what the Caliphate’s intentions were—
That’s a lie. I know exactly what their intentions are.
Before she became a mercenary on Bakunin, she had been a fighter pilot for the Indi Protectorate Expeditionary Command. She had piloted a drop fighter against the separatists on Rubai, a planet that—until the Revolution—had been her home; a Revolution that not only wouldn’t have been successful, but in Parvi’s opinion, never would have happened without Caliphate assistance and recognition of the Revolutionary government.
Even as the Indi Protectorate withdrew from the debacle on Rubai, she had remained with a core resistance of ex-Federal forces about eight months past the point where it had been obvious that no relief was ever going to come to support the overthrown government. Rubai had been handed over to these bastards with only a token fight. She ended up wanted as a counterrevolutionary terrorist on her home planet, and in
the Indi Protectorate she faced a court-martial for disobeying orders and remaining to assist the doomed Federal forces.
So, she knew exactly what the Caliphate’s intentions toward this new planet were. She also knew what their intentions toward her would be. She might not be a high profile enough fugitive for them to go out of their way to hunt down, but she was important enough that if they had her in custody it was truly unlikely that they were going to let her go.
Leaving her alone like this was probably an indication of what she could expect. The psychological operations had already started. Lack of contact, mobility, food, and water, the too-bright light.
Inevitably, when the interrogator returned, she would be more likely to cooperate simply to prolong the human contact. Unfortunately, knowing what they were doing to her, and what they expected, didn’t lessen the effects. She could endure this for a while, maybe more than most, but of course it wouldn’t end here.
In the end, what would they want from her? Some testimony against Mosasa? He had probably been destroyed as soon their Caliphate rescuers understood what he was. No, they’d break her, force her to renounce her support of the Federal Government on Rubai against the foreign separatists. Possibly make a propaganda holo just before they executed her. She also knew enough about psychological operations to know that when she did renounce her actions, she would be sincere.
Each passing minute in isolation, alone in the featureless interview room, fed the growing conviction that she was not going to escape a demise at the hands of the same people who had razed her homeland. The same people who were going to take possession of this colony eighty light-years beyond what they could rationally claim as their sphere of influence.
She could hear mechanical groans, even through the soundproofed walls. The uniform lighting flickered slightly.
Her hands were fists, nails digging into her palms. She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. Just thinking about them watching her now, planning her eventual humiliation, caused her pulse to race in her neck.
I’ve gone soft.
She had spent a long time doing mental exercises to calm herself. Now that her facade was starting to crumble, and fatigue and despair were bringing her emotions to the surface, her captors should be ready to resume their interrogation. They would have her closely monitored, and there was little chance they’d miss her body finally giving in to the stress. Her discipline had worn away a lot earlier than it should have.
But then, where were her captors?
She looked up at where the door to the room was, hidden behind the omnipresent glare. The lights flickered again, enough that she could barely see the seam that formed the edge of the entry.
Beyond that door would be a station where someone would be watching the throb of her pulse, the spike in her fight-or-flight responses, the shifts in her body language. “Where are you?” she whispered to the door. Her lips cracked with the effort, the elevated temperature and lack of humidity under the lights making her mouth sandpaper-rough.
No response came from beyond the glaring walls, not even an echo.
“Games,” she whispered. “They want games.”
She knew she wasn’t thinking particularly clearly any more, but she no longer cared, if she ever had. Her head filled with the self-destructive impulse to get them to acknowledge her, force them to come in. Maybe unbalance them enough for one of their interrogators to go too far and finish her off before she was truly broken.
They had strapped her into an uncomfortable, spidery chair that had articulated platforms to support her arms and legs. Tight polymer straps held her limbs down and doubled as monitoring equipment, holding metallic contacts to her skin. Her arms were held palm up against the cantilevered platforms at an uncomfortable angle from her torso.
The fit wasn’t perfect. She was smaller in stature than the chair was designed to handle. Even adjusted to her length of limb, her elbows fell short of the hollow designed to receive them, and the straps on her wrist stretched at a bit of an angle rather than holding her arms tightly to the surface. Which meant that she had the slight ability to flex her arm a few centimeters.
She bent her arms against the straps as if she was doing curls, pulling against the strap on her wrist and the whole armature holding her arm down.
They wouldn’t allow her to keep doing this; they would send someone in.
They didn’t.
She tested the straps with all the force she could muster. She flexed her arms until she felt as if she was pulling her shoulder sockets out of joint. No reaction, not even an admonishment.
Maybe it just means this is pointless.
Her muscles strained until a thin sheen of sweat coated her entire body. Blood wept from abrasions on her wrists where she pulled against the straps binding them. They burned where her own sweat blended with raw bleeding flesh in a slick, painful mess.
No movement in her restraints.
She relaxed and lay back, gasping breaths of hot, dry air that was now tainted by the ferric scent of her own blood.
She blinked the sweat-blur from her eyes and looked at her right arm. Her jumpsuit was soaked red from mid-forearm down, her skin raw to just under the meat of her upturned palm. Her palm pulled against the wrist strap that had been angled to accommodate her shorter-than-average reach.
Perhaps she had been too direct.
She flattened her right arm against the metal surface it was tied to and folded her thumb across her palm to make her hand slightly narrower. She pulled, and her hand withdrew a few centimeters under the strap.
Teeth gritted against the pain, she pulled her hand, twisting her wrist back and forth against the lubrication of sweat and blood. Her skin tore against the strap, her thumb felt as if it was being dislocated, and arching her shoulder to pull her arm back wrenched every muscle in her back.
But after several minutes of struggle, her wrist came free.
She fell back, panting, holding her right arm up, bent at the elbow, staring at the area at the base of her thumb where the skin had been nearly flayed off by her effort.
Something is very wrong.
No psychological game should have allowed her to get this far. For some reason, they had left her unattended. Just losing the contact of her skin against the strap holding her should be firing off an alarm for even the most inattentive guard.
Did that matter?
Not yet.
After a few moments to breathe, she worked on the rest of her restraints. After what seemed a very long time, she rolled out of the interrogation chair and got unsteadily to her feet.
“Now what?” she whispered to the stark white room.
It wasn’t as if they had left the exit unlocked. There wasn’t even a handle on this side. She was just as trapped now as she’d been when bound to the chair.
But at least she wasn’t helpless.
She knelt next to the interrogation chair and fumbled with the controls that positioned the articulated portions of the device; arms, legs, neck. She was able to loosen a long segment meant to cradle the heel of someone’s foot. She pulled it free and had a metal cup on the end of a meter-long steel pole. Not perfect. The pole was slick with grease and too thin for a good grip, but it was long and heavy enough to be dangerous when swung with enough motivation.
She stood on the seat of the chair and tested it against the spherical sensor array in the center of the ceiling. The array exploded in a satisfying crash of electronic shrapnel, leaving a trail of dangling optical conduits connecting to nothing.
Hopefully that left her hosts blinded.
She hefted her improvised mace and stationed herself against the wall next to the doorway.
Someone would have to come, eventually.
* * * *
The sound of the door opening startled her. She hadn’t been quite asleep, but fatigue had lulled her into a half-conscious state where hours or minutes might have passed without her being aware of it. She turned toward the doorway next to her, tighte
ning her grip on her improvised weapon. She saw a flash of khaki overalls, a green Caliphate shoulder patch with a crescent on it, and she swung her weapon.
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